Subscribe
Details
You’ve got this idea. Every day you show up to your job, do your work, and do it well. But in the back of your mind, you can’t stop thinking about that thing that you want to do.
That thing that you know will change the world. But in today’s world, up and quitting a job is scary. You’ve got responsibilities. You’ve got bills. How do you de-risk the decision when it comes to setting out on your own as an entrepreneur?
The Ivey Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Connie Clerici, QS ’08, and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Inc.
Transcript
You're listening to the Ivey entrepreneur podcast from the Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School. In this series Ivey entrepreneur, and Ivey faculty member Eric Janssen will anchor the session.
Eric Janssen
Craig Follett is one of the most genuine people that I know. He went on to start universe before the company was ultimately acquired by Ticketmaster in 2015. In this wide ranging conversation, Craig shares with us his calculated founding story of universe, how he de risked the decision, and ultimately he left his prestigious job at BCG to start the company. Since the acquisition, Craig has remained at the helm as universe's CEO, and despite the fact that he's achieved financial freedom, he very much remains the same person today as he was when he founded the company almost a decade ago. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed having this very candid conversation with the universe founder and CEO, Craig Follett. Today, I wanted to get into your story, your entrepreneurial journey. But I'd like to rewind back if you can tell me, maybe you and 90 seconds a little bit of you could summarize your own bio.
Craig Follett
Sure. So I grew up in Ontario. I studied engineering in business at Western and Ivey I always knew I wanted to start a company. My, my one grandfather was an entrepreneur, and my other grandfather was an engineer. And so maybe I'm a little bit of a blend of both of them. And yeah, so I studied engineering, went to Ivey, loved it, and then thought that I wanted to become an investment banker. So I did an internship at Credit Suisse, did well learn a bit, but I always knew I wanted to start a company. So I felt that what I was learning was not necessarily entirely applicable. So I wanted to change gears a bit, switched over worked for BCG for three years doing strategy consulting. And then from there left BCG to launch a universe, which we started as a sharing economy business grew and pivoted into an event and ticketing business, and then sold to Live Nation Ticketmaster.
Eric Janssen
And that was you sold in 2015. So rewind a little bit entrepreneurial Inklings then came from you're probably grandparents, your parents at all raise you entrepreneurially?
Craig Follett
I don't know how does an entrepreneur raised right like my so my dad's a lawyer, and my mom is a is a great school teacher. And they always raised me to be very well rounded. So I did like a million extracurriculars like played violin, played hockey, just like but like across a wide spectrum of things. So they kept me very, very busy. And maybe that well, roundedness was something that's related to entrepreneurship in a way.
Eric Janssen
And definitely keeping busy is?
Eric Janssen
Keeping busy juggling multiple priorities. Competitive sports is one that seems to be coming up a lot people that play competitive sports, what did you play growing up? I
Craig Follett
Played hockey, skiing, delivered a soccer but kind of gravitated more towards hockey.
Eric Janssen
Okay, yeah. Summer jobs were you deliver and serious catalogs? Are you starting your lawn care business? What were you doing?
Craig Follett
I was a lifeguard. Yeah,
Eric Janssen
Great gig. As a young, great gig as a young adult to be outside. So lifeguard and swimming instructor, so did a bit of that. Nice. Okay, so your path out of school was not to start the company right away. But you knew that you wanted to? Why didn't you start it right away?
Craig Follett
I think that I knew that I wanted to build experience, build connections, and save a bit of money. I don't come from a lot of family money or anything. So built a little bit of a nest egg or a safety net, and then from there, was able to launch in kind of a more formidable way, just like wholeheartedly.
Eric Janssen
And for you, would you do it differently, or that was the right path for you?
Craig Follett
I think it was the right path. For me, it's probably different for each person. And for me, and this one of my mentors described BCG this way, BCG for me was like an extension of school in a way. So I didn't do it right out of school, but I did it out of the School of consulting.
Eric Janssen
So what did you learn in consulting that you think? Or do you think consulting directly, or indirectly attributed to the success that you've had with universe?
Craig Follett
I think that it definitely helped. I don't think it's the only thing because I think consulting is obviously very different from entrepreneurship. But I think consulting is a great learning environment, right? So you rotate through a variety of different cases, in a rapid pace. And what I personally would do is at the end of each case, I would reflect like, okay, based on this experience with a client, is there a business I would start, I know something new but an industry or an inefficiency in a business, what are some entrepreneurial solutions that would resolve those, so I kind of tried to keep that hat on. And then as I progress through BCG, and was able to prove myself as a strong performer, I was able to choose a little bit more closely the projects I wanted to be on and so I've got to Choose projects that were more in the tech sector doing, like do diligences, and M&A of tech startups for other companies. And then I was more directly looking at startups and kind of interviewing the entrepreneurs to create strategies based on startup landscapes. So eventually it did directly kind of help. And then there's all sorts of skills that you built, like writing decks, or, you know, presence in clients or what have you.
Eric Janssen
When it came time to raise capital, or do a pitch deck.
Craig Follett
Yeah, I could whip up a pitch deck and raise capital pretty well,
Eric Janssen
You were you were well trained. Sometimes, at least in my own experience, it's hard to, if you're in it to learn, did you feel like you were doing the learning so that you could then eventually apply this to the company one day? Or were you just trying to soak up all the learning for learning sake? At that point? Did you know what the learning was for? Or were you just happy to be in it?
Craig Follett
I think I was a little bit of both, but more, so just happy to be in it. Like, I knew that I was learning all sorts of things that would be applicable, and I wouldn't know what they are at the time, you know, I might be learning something in one project, or from one manager that would be relevant later on, and I wouldn't realize it. So there was some deliberate like, okay, reflection, I want to start a company at some point. Is this helping that or what have I learned, but there was more of an osmosis. And one of the things I realized, from my time at Credit Suisse, when I was at Credit Suisse, in the internship, I sort of felt like, you know, what, I don't really think like, I'm learning anything here. And then I got back to school. And I was working on projects. And I realized that that point only, only at that point, Wow, I've actually learned a lot here. Like I'm an Excel wizard now like, and I didn't really realize it's like boiling a frog, put a frog in some cold water, turn up, the temperature slowly in the frog never jumps out. And I didn't really realize that at Credit Suisse until after I'd left. And so that was a realization that, you know, has helped me since then, I realized that even now, I'm still learning stuff. It may not feel like it every day, but I know that I am. And, you know, when you change context, then you might realize it.
Eric Janssen
Right. There's a saying something to the effect of, and I'm paraphrasing entirely. But when you're in school, you forget what you're you don't really realize how much you're learning. But you'll realize it when you go home at Thanksgiving or home at Christmas. And you sort of re insert yourself into the environment where people aren't doing it every day. You're like, wow, okay, I've actually I realized now when I see the baseline of people who aren't in this intense learning environment, actually how much I have learned
Craig Follett
Exactly.
Eric Janssen
So fast forward a little bit. Then when you didn't BCG for three years, not an atypical inflection point, there's usually like, do I want to continue down the consulting path? Do I want to do my MBA? Do I want to reset somewhere else? So you chose at a certain certain point to leave BCG and start your own company? Did you there's two different ways that we've had guests on talk about this. They say, I have an inkling I quit. Now I'm going to go work on the inkling. Or I have an inkling I'm going to explore it, I'm going to test I'm going to validate some things. And then when the time is right, once I've got enough validation, I'm going to leave so was it one of those or something different entirely?
Craig Follett
I think it's something different, maybe a little bit of a hybrid, but maybe it's kind of unique perspective, let's see. So up on three years, have an inkling know that I'm interested in it. But basically, what I did is I set a set of hurdles for myself. So I said, Okay, first, I need an idea, check. Okay, now I need a co founding team, check. In that co founding team, I need a technical co founder and CTO for my particular business, I needed that, check. All right, now we need an agreement, a shareholder agreement that make sure that we're all in it to win it, we're in it for the long term, we're all vested ,check, we have kind of a safety net there. And then we've all put money into bank checking, basically a set of these hurdles. And to be honest, I define the hurdles kind of at the beginning. And I didn't really expect that we would go through them all, I thought that it was going to drop off after you know, hurdle three, or four or whatever. And so that approach, let me kind of go through and validate that this is something to launch into, with that being said, you know, use the word validation. In retrospect, we did very little validation of the idea before we launched into it, we just launched into it so and from a customer's helmet standpoint, or product standpoint, we just took a big leap of faith but I really looked to de risk things on the team front and on the sort of structure front and I think that that created a stability and tenacity that allowed the idea to eventually validate itself after a lot after leaving.
Eric Janssen
Got it. So it's an interesting hybrid. I was gonna I was gonna point that out that you, you want to make sure that the team was right everybody was in it, but did not get out there and talk to customers. and sell product and validate it that way at all.
Craig Follett
Yeah. Interesting. And that's a learning right. I think that that's not necessarily the most advisable way. But to launch into it is there's something to be said about just launching into it. Yeah. But I didn't want to launch into the team dynamic. I knew that one of the main reasons that business fail is, you know, team stability and things like that.
Eric Janssen
Yeah. Okay. So you had the core team, you would set up the bunch of these validation checkpoints that you wanted to be sure of the internal validation checkpoints? Maybe we're in creating a new term here. I like it.
Craig Follett
Yeah.
Eric Janssen
So then you at a certain point, gave your notice to BCG and said, I've got this thing. Good to go. And that they have to be encouraging of that. I know a lot of friends that have been at BCG and have gone on to start successful companies. So they were encouraging.
Craig Follett
They were very encouraging it
Eric Janssen
Nice. They'd like to put the BCG logo next to successful
Craig Follett
That's right. They start putting me in all the recruiting decks. And yeah, you know, hey, you should come work BCG. Come work here. You'll you know, you can become an entrepreneur.
Eric Janssen
Yeah. Okay. So what was the original idea then that you ended up leaving BCG for?
Craig Follett
So the original idea was a sharing economy marketplace. So think of Airbnb. But if we rewind to 2011, there were a whole series of fragmented sharing economy businesses. So you know, a marketplace for dog walkers and a marketplace for handyman and a marketplace for tools and a marketplace for vacation rentals, Airbnb. And our vision was, we want to create a marketplace that spans all these verticals, because there's a lot of smaller ones that will only survive and thrive if we can create trust from other verticals, to pollinate them. Because really, the barrier to inviting someone into your home to you know, cook a meal or to walk your dog is you need to trust them. And some of these verticals are a little less frequent. So we launched this horizontal division of which was that the world is becoming a little too virtual. And we wanted to increase human connections in real world, and do so in kind of an organic way where you know, your people that you're living within your condo building, and you're interacting with them over, sort of sharing time and space and activities, and, and so forth.
Eric Janssen
So when you say launched horizontal, you didn't say, we are going to be a sharing economy, the the new dog walking app or website you said, generally, this peer to peer marketplace is lacking trust, we can be the place where all of these things live, because we're going to have trust amongst the peers. Is that
Craig Follett
Exactly, yeah. So we didn't we didn't launch like the dog walking marketplace, we thought, okay, the product is maybe a little similar. If you're hiring a dog walker, or babysitter or etc. The flow, the user experience, the payment processing, everything is kind of shared. So let's leverage that across verticals. And so we launched this extremely broad marketplace. At the beginning.
Eric Janssen
Yeah. Oh, my gosh, so where did you even start with that? Not like marketplace and unproven period, not maybe not unproven peer to peer, but like, not peer to peer of where it is today. So where'd Where did you even go? you've quit your job. You've got a business plan, presumably, did you write a business plan,
Craig Follett
We had yet wrote a business plan and good BCG fashion, embrace it fashion, and kind of, you know, quit our jobs, and then started building a prototype. And then started, I guess, threefold building a prototype, so product, building leads, so very stealth mode, generating leads of potential sharing economy, supply side leads, so dog walkers, babysitters, people who might share items, people who might offer cooking classes, and then also raising a round of capital. So we looked in that sort of idea, phase team and idea phase to raise this seed round that would last us and, you know, get us to a phase of traction.
Eric Janssen
How many people originally on the team?
Craig Follett
There were three of us
Eric Janssen
Three full time?
Craig Follett
All full time.
Eric Janssen
Nice.
Craig Follett
Yeah, that's key.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, getting people to jump jump in full time. Okay, so you've got your business plan? Did you have a revenue model? An idea of a revenue model in the beginning?
Craig Follett
Yeah, we we definitely did. We thought we're going to be processing payments, and we'll take a cut of that will, you know, have a sort of a commission model. And then we thought maybe there will be other revenue streams in the future around sort of data, and so forth. And advertising and other things don't know yet. We don't know yet. But our primary revenue model was going to be this commission revenue model.
Eric Janssen
Got it, and you you were the destination or you'd be the over the top sort of layer on other people's peer to peer marketplaces or you were the destination?
Craig Follett
We were vertically integrated. We were the destination. We interestingly, we had some vertical sharing economy companies come to us and say, Hey, you know, can you be a layer on top of these other verticals? But no, we were we were sort of vertically integrated. We were processing the payments and the destination to discover the sharing economy listings and to share them.
Eric Janssen
Okay. Yeah. And I mean, we know the answer universe ended up pivoting. But was it did it work?
Craig Follett
Some things work, some things didn't. So we launched in January of 2012. And we had built up all these leads, and we, you know, define this pretty fully baked product, like it was not a typical, like MVP, minimum viable product, as you would say. So we launched, and we built up a mass of supply side leads, so just a ton of items and babysitters and dog walkers and activities, cooking classes, yoga sessions, you know, tens of thousands of these supply side listings. But what we saw then is that there were some crickets on the demand side. So we had all these listings, and no one was, relatively speaking, no one was booking them. So we had kind of a liquidity problem or, or demand side problem.
Eric Janssen
Okay, so interest from the people running these peer to peer marketplaces, some sort of partnership or something where they were listing them on your site. Yep. And everything was launched and working, but no pun is actually buying. What what next, did you raise? How do you raise money at that point?
Craig Follett
At this point, we'd raised $750,000.
Eric Janssen
Okay, so you raise some significant? Seed funding based on the idea initial concept.
Craig Follett
Yeah.
Eric Janssen
dig into that for a second. Because without market validation. And this is a challenge that a lot of my students or other entrepreneurs come to me with how much? How much validation Do I need to have in order to start executing or to raise capital? And so you add, because had a pretty good pedigree, Ivey grad investment banker, consultants leaving to start this thing, but didn't have market validation? So how did those pitches go?
Craig Follett
Yeah, it was an interesting phase, right. And so I reflect on this, it's a different style of pitch, when you're pre revenue and your idea phase, and so people were very much so investing in the team, and the idea and the business plan, and the vision and the excitement. And that's what they were they were interested in. So I think, you know, the pedigree, you know, the experience that, investment banking, and BCG, engineering, and IV and all these things, as well as the others on my team as well, that was really compelling for people.
Eric Janssen
So how did you? When did you decide to go raise money? How soon after you quit? left your other job? Did you go raise money?
Craig Follett
Not immediately, the three of us we, you know, well, first of all, we didn't take a salary for like a year and a half. So that was kind of investment in of itself. But we each put in call it 10 grand. And we kind of focused on building the prototype first. And we did that for a couple months. And then at that point, we went and set out to raise that that round.
Eric Janssen
Got it? And how did you find those contacts?
Craig Follett
So a lot through the through our personal networks. So people we've worked with friends of family, kind of just branching out, and then it, it kind of just had a bit of a ripple effect, you know, we bring in someone and then they go one degree removed. And then the next thing you know, we have the former CEO of Ferrari, who's investing. And that was not a direct connection that was a friend of a friend of a friend.
Eric Janssen
Pretty cool, though, if you can get someone, at least from what I've seen, if you can get an anchor in early enough like that, that gives you some sort of sexy cred in the beginning. So that's cool.
Craig Follett
Yeah. And he was he was one of the later ones to come in that round, but helped in future rounds. That's for sure.
Eric Janssen
So this was from how many people this?
Craig Follett
It was a it was a lot of people in retrospect. So we had about 30 people in that round. So and one of the ways that we did that is we we raised what's known as a convertible note. So with that, it sort of simplified the paperwork and simplified the discussions because we didn't need to really deliberate with each person, what is the valuation of this thing? Because we have no traction, literally, we basically deferred the valuation to the next round, and we said, we're going to give you a discount on the next round of funding. And so that was a pretty simple in a straightforward conversation.
Eric Janssen
And that was the convertible note, so is in the form of a loan that they could convert to equity on the future round?
Craig Follett
Correct! Yeah.
Eric Janssen
Okay. so you've got money in the bank. You've got a prototype more than prototype. You launch you live. You built it. They did not come. What next?
Craig Follett
Yeah. So what next? I mean, half of the audience came, right. We had the suppliers, but not the buyers. And so what came next is we had a lot of stick to itiveness, a lot of tenacity. And we said, we're going to make this work. And so we focused on twofold we looked at some marketing approaches and we looked at some product approaches. On the marketing side, we started to create campaigns around what we call theme weeks, which would engage people on different themes. So we had a food with And we had a caffeine week and we had a sports week and we would engage in, we're in Toronto, so we focused on the Toronto Community and bring them into activities on the on the sort of marketing side of things. And then on the product side, we started to kind of growth hack things. So we focused on building product that would give tools to our supply side organizers. So the dog walker, the babysitter, the personal chef, to invite people to their listing, or to bring their network in. And so we built a lot of social network integrations with Facebook and Twitter, and Google, and then we provided those tools to the event organizers so that they would bring their, you know, a couple 1000 people in their network onto the platform. And that really started to pick up. So we that was kind of the next phase. And we're like, oh, this is something.
Eric Janssen
Things are happening. So get into the details here. When when the first when the site goes live, and people aren't showing up. Who called the meeting?
Craig Follett
Well, there were no one really called a meeting. It was kind of we were meeting all the time, we were just in the office all the time, around a ping pong table. I should mention. So that was our desk. Yeah. And, you know, we had stand up meetings every morning. And you know, we were just meeting all the time.
Eric Janssen
So asking, Is it working? Is it working? Is it working?
Craig Follett
And it was, I mean, was half of it was yes. But the user side wasn't growing your per your plan?
Eric Janssen
I would assume,did you have an I guess at how quickly you had hoped it was going to grow?
Craig Follett
Yes, certainly we did. We had, you know, a lot of projections that we really had hoped it would be a lot bigger, a lot faster. We really had a lot of tenacity. And we almost didn't really ask that question right away. We just sort of stuck to it and had faith that we were going to make it work and, you know, kept plugging away. And we started to develop some traction that we thought was looking good. We'd go out and pitch investors for our next round. At this point, we're, you know, maybe six months into this, this phase. And then we started getting feedback that this traction is not enough, come back. And so we we had a lot of stick to itiveness, we just sort of stuck through it until we started to find our footing a little bit. Got it.
Eric Janssen
So if it wasn't one meeting, then it was a series of meetings over a series of days, weeks, months, whatever. But how did you decide what to do to grow?
Craig Follett
I think listening at this point, we're in a validation phase. So listening to the customers was big at this point. And so how did we decide what to do? We, as mentioned, we were working on these theme weeks, and we were working on the product. And the theme weeks were focused a little bit more on activities, basically small events. So cooking classes, yoga sessions.
Craig Follett
How did you start to get nitty gritty here on the specifics, but so theme weeks came from somebody? So at a certain point, these had the I don't know, you came up with it, or you guys were texting each other late at night or like, morning stand up, someone says theme weeks? Like how did you either have the discipline or the creativity to throw those ideas up on a board? And then how did you pick the one ultimately to focus on?
Craig Follett
To be honest, we could have had a lot more focus. So we had, how did we pick? I'd say, we had a process where we would look at this sort of wheel of marketing channels and activities. And we would do something in every single spoke of the wheel. And one of them would stick and we'd You know, this particular one was the theme weeks, but we had all the of like 100 other ones that probably we could have vetted in advance, maybe screened out. But that was our process.
Eric Janssen
So you were just throwing a bunch of stuff out there
Craig Follett
Throwing some spaghetti at the wall and seeing what stuck
Eric Janssen
Trying them all at once.
Craig Follett
Theme week seems to be doing something. Let's just do more of what seems to be working. That's right.
Eric Janssen
Cool. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, right? It's not always these big teams, strategic off site meetings, where you lock yourself in a room for two days and come up with the ideas. It's like, in the early days, you're just trying anything and everything and doesn't have to be rigor, necessarily, or process around it could could it have been helpful? Maybe?
Craig Follett
Yeah, I think especially as a first time entrepreneur, right. So you've you kind of learned by doing and then maybe next time around, I think we'd be we'd be able to use some intuition and be more decisive and know a little bit more in advance. What kind of spaghetti sticks to the wall and which doesn't.
Eric Janssen
Got it. Okay. So back to where we were. So you're doing theme weeks, you're getting things going, users are starting to come you've got some traction you started, went to raise some money, but they said need more traction. So keep going.
Craig Follett
Yeah, so we found that the theme weeks were effective, because we could go get one activity organizer or what we now would call an event organizer. And they would bring, you know tens or maybe eventually 100 attendees and that was a lot more demand side generation than bringing on one dog walker. Maybe bring zero customers or one customer and you need to generate all their demand. So we found that that worked really well. We then found that we were having a lot of traction in kind of the food space. So we had a lot of food events on universe food, food event organizers. And then we got a celebrity chef, from Top Chef Canada. He threw his birthday party on universe, it was five bucks a ticket 300 people and they were all foodies, because it was it was literally his birthday party. And so he had all this other chefs and food community people. And now we had we're like, this is great. We have this basic food event organizers. From there, we went to the stops night market, which was a very popular food festival and honest Ed's alleyway, and got that event. And then that that was kind of a turning point. Because in that one event, we eclipsed all of our sales from all of these other efforts by bringing on this one little food festival with maybe 2000 people.
Eric Janssen
Can you elaborate on what was the pivot from sharing economy to events? So you you had some traction on to that peer to peer side. But then what was the what was the moment where you made the switch?
Craig Follett
Like the the full switch?
Eric Janssen
Or even the beginning? So you're talking about your first food event, but at the time you were talking about? You were trying to invite dog walkers? Yeah. Where did you get? When did the first event opportunity come up?
Craig Follett
It was a little bit of a gradual thing. So that, you know, it's, it's hard to say what was the first, you could define the first as the first cooking class? Right? Maybe that was when it switched. When we had, you know, 10 or 15, or 20, people learning to make new neoci. Actually, in our office, we offered our office as a venue. And maybe that's the switch or maybe it was when we started to get into these larger events where they needed, you know, QR codes that could be scanned on site and so forth. Maybe that was the switch product wise. But it was only until later that we focused exclusively on events and cut out the more purist sharing economy things like items and skills.
Eric Janssen
Right, when I think peer to peer, I often think one to one, like you've got something I want it I'll give you dollars, if you trust we trust each other, right? But then to go to a cooking class, I see how it would happen. I've got skills, I'm a chef, I want people to come, pay me and I will share you the skills. But now it's not one to one, it's one to many. Yeah. And to your point, the chef brought 10 people with him, it was like, This is more interesting than just one person at a time.
Craig Follett
Yeah, we've had that. I guess you could describe it maybe as peer to peers. Right, we would have, we had the peer to peer one to one dog walker to dog or dog owner. But then we also viewed the sharing economy or part of it as maybe instead of going to a restaurant, maybe you want to go attend a dinner party in your condo building, and maybe it's with strangers, but maybe it's with strangers that you can trust because they are, you know, a couple degrees removed. And you have you can see that they've done other things within the sharing economy that are proof points, that they're a trustworthy person. So we viewed that as part of the fabric of, of the sharing economy, which is maybe beyond the typical definition, which is more one to one.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, got it. So now you find yourself almost as a like... When would you define yourself as a ticketing company, then when was that switch?
Craig Follett
We still try to not define ourselves as ticketing company, we still talk about it as a marketplace, okay, still try to maintain some of that ethos and but the switch away more fully from the sharing economy wasn't until maybe a year or two after that. So at this point, we're facilitating this marketplace for activities, which are now becoming events, as well as these one to one interactions. And our philosophy and hope was that we would have these people run these activities and events, it would generate demand, they would come into the system and we would cross sell them into other categories, they would start, you know, hiring that dog walker or lending out their ladder into their their network. So that was the the grand vision was we would use this as a way of generating demand that would unlock this massive sharing economy vision,
Eric Janssen
Got it. And that started to play out.
Craig Follett
We started to generate a lot of demand. It didn't all convert into the supply side or the or the sharing economy side. And we were resource constrained, you know, we we had raised at the end of the day, over the course of time, we ended up raising two and a half million. But that's not a ton in terms of trying to build out the eBay for sharing economy or the Amazon for sharing economy. That's you know, we were sort of looking to build 64 airbnbs. We had eight categories, and eight sub categories below each category. So we had 64 of these subcategories. And in order to really do justice to that, I think we needed probably some more capitalization. We didn't have that so you know, the lack of resources. Created focus and forced us to focus on what was really, really working really well. And that for us was this new approach to facilitating events and helping events, event organizers market their event.
Eric Janssen
So was there ever was a moment where you kind of drew a line in the sand and said, this is a this is a pivot were pivoting? Or was this just the natural?
Craig Follett
Well, it was definitely a bit of a gradual approach as as described. But there was a moment, which was we listening to our customer feedback, had a feature request, people want it to be able to embed their ticket sales, so in their own websites. And so we had two ways of doing it, we had kind of a quick way, where we had a more advanced way where the person would stay on that external website after the purchase. And we thought, you know, let's, let's go out on a limb. And let's try to build the more advanced one, because it'll be a differentiator. So we did that. And in doing so, we built it for one half of the marketplace. To make it quicker to get to market, we built it for the activities only, and not the services. And so we we built that we launched it, people loved it. And then the next step was, okay, now we need to build this for services. Because that's that was our approach with all products, we had to have it apply to all verticals. So that was sort of the natural next step. And at that point, we took a step back and said, You know what, this feels like we're building two companies here. This is slowing us down. And that point, we had a lot of sushi lunches are my co founders and I, we always kind of met over sushi lunches, or sushi dinners. And we took a step back and had to basically rally the co-founder team. And then later the investors and other stakeholders around Okay, we are focusing on this, and we are shutting down the rest. And that was a that was a one of the best decisions we ever made. Because it sped everything up and made it much simpler to describe. It's not this sharing economy sort of conceptual thing anymore. It's a very tangible, we are an event marketplace, you can embed your ticket sales, it is much more crystal clear. And from there, we saw a really big inflection point.
Eric Janssen
So What year was that? When did you make that change?
Craig Follett
That would have been, try to remember, I think it was it was 2013 or 2014.
Eric Janssen
So how many years? And that was three years in?
Craig Follett
Yeah, that was it was probably two and a half years in.
Eric Janssen
Yes. And selling a long time. That's a long time. Two and a half years or three years on the same idea with like, same original business model. that's a that's a long time.
Craig Follett
Yeah, it was, yeah.
Eric Janssen
Okay, so then you then you switch over to becoming a, I don't want to I'm not gonna call you ticketing company, but you were effectively selling. People were running events and selling tickets to people on their own websites.
Craig Follett
That's right.
Eric Janssen
So did you face any backlash or have any fears yourself about then competing with some of the big boys? Because if you are, if you were not a ticketing company, but could be perceived as a competitor to the big players? You're in a whole different world, having been in the live event business, it's not a business. Generally, people can just jump into there's a whole shark pool that you've got to learn?
Craig Follett
Yeah, it's a very competitive space.
Eric Janssen
So how did you found yourself suddenly swimming with sharks? Yeah. Tell me how that went.
Craig Follett
Definitely. Yes. So you know, that was one of the that was some of the feedback, you know, from co founders and from investors is like but should we really do this? This is such a competitive space? And, you know, it was the answer was like, Well, yes, we're listening to our customers, this is what they love our product for this. We're listening to our employees, to our team, just like listening to all the stakeholders. And it was a pretty natural thing we'd already kind of moved into it almost by accident. We started out with these activities, which graduated into larger and larger activities, which became events. And then next thing you know, we're we're in the world of ticketing and and events, kind of, by accident.
Eric Janssen
Okay, so this is now you said 2013 or 2014. So what next? You focused on you, you found your calling niche within the sharing economy that was working? Did you pick a niche within events that you wanted to focus on?
Craig Follett
We, you know, we felt we had strength in the food sector, food events, so we kind of focused on that. We're definitely general mission like we didn't have any reserved seating functionality. So we were really focused on these small, indie events ranging from that cooking class or letterpress, you know, class up to a food festival. And that's kind of the, the content that we focused on initially, but then that shifted because we found that our product was applicable for different types of content. It was applicable for technology conferences. And, you know, that may sound different than a food festival. But the underlying sort of technology was pretty similar. And then our main focus of differentiation at this time was the embed ability, we realized that no one else had this. This is something that's super unique. People really want this and that that made it easy to sell.
Eric Janssen
That was the unique functionality at that time?
Craig Follett
That was Yeah.
Eric Janssen
Because typically, if someone goes to purchase a ticket, you'd advertise it on your website. But when it comes time to actually purchasing the ticket, you click the link, it's going to put you over to Ticketmaster or Eventbrite or somebody else.
Craig Follett
Exactly.
Eric Janssen
And you could keep the experience within their own. Interesting. So did you find yourself at a certain point taking business from those other companies?
Craig Follett
Yeah, definitely. We weren't competing with Ticketmaster. Totally different scale. But we found that our largest source of kind of lead gen, or, or customers that we could get were from coming from Eventbrite.
Eric Janssen
Interesting. So people that just exclusively, the main reason they would come to you is just for that embed ability. We want to do the same thing, but we want to keep it in our own experience. And your sales team hammered that.
Craig Follett
We just hammered that. Yep, we found, you know, why did people like this and bendability, and just really hammer that home and kept enhancing it and improving it.
Eric Janssen
Cool. So if we peel back some of the layers here, I want to get under the hood, to business model unit economics things, because when you changed when you reposition what you were as a company and what you're moving into, did that require that you change your business model? Did the unit economics change? Did you have to hire more people, fire people open offices? What what changes did that force on you
Craig Follett
Didn't really create personnel changes. But yeah, I mean, we and the business there, the revenue model was relatively similar. So it was still taking a commission of the sales. But we then crystallized that, and when looked, we now knew more directly, okay, these are our competitors. There's these various event competitors out there. And let's align our pricing to reflect our differentiation and ability to compete and make it easy for the customer to choose between these different offerings. So we just did our pricing. But the revenue model remained pretty similar.
Eric Janssen
On the pricing side, did you how did you figure out what to price it that you were ex investment banker consultant? Was this a ridiculous insane Excel model? or How did you figure out what you should price?
Craig Follett
We wanted to keep it really simple. So we basically looked at the landscape and said, Okay, we're gonna price relative to this, and, and kind of go from there. And we knew that we were smaller, we had some differentiators, but we had a lot less features, right? So we, you know, would price similar to our competitors. Now we're, you know, we're able to kind of have a little bit more room and add more value and, and capture some of the value, but then it was sort of like, let's price competitively compared to these, these other offerings
Eric Janssen
Can often be as simple as that. We talked about pricing recently. And it's look at what people are pricing at today. So who are your what you consider your competition? How are they pricing? What value do they bring? And where do you want to position yourself relative to them? What perception do you want to give? So are you a higher quality person or high quality company or service relative to what's already out there? So maybe you put a premium on it, but then also making that jive with your overall business? So if we price it at this, can we make that work with our overall revenue model? cover our overhead, those sorts of things? Were you guys worried about that? Or were you one of those venture funded companies that investors said, like just get show usage show the people are using this, like worry about that and worry less about the unit economics and whether this is a profitable company.
Craig Follett
So we were worried about the unit economics, but less so you know, we were worried about runway and our unit economics. And we knew that if we had unit economics that are favorable, we'll just need to scale it to a certain point in order to become profitable. So we were more focused at that phase on the unit economics like are we bringing are we able to generate, you know, leads, convert those leads into event organizers, have them sell tickets, and take our fee on those tickets, and make more money on that than it costs us to bring in the event organizer in the first place. So we kind of focused on that on that engine. And once we knew we had an engine for that, that was that was what we were into.
Eric Janssen
How did you think about building out the early stage sales team, because this is something that a lot of early companies struggle with. And I know the folks on your team that were in charge of that having interacted with them before and I think I may have even met with them in San Francisco was a really nice running machine, at least from an external perspective. So how did you how did you build that?
Craig Follett
I mean, there's a lot of dimensions we could talk about, right? Like there's the structure of the team. How do you structure a sales team, there is the sales process, I think that our focus at first was, let's get that sales process going. So the way that we define it is we, and then we applied this approach beyond sales to anything where as a co founder, we would take on something ourselves, we'd get our hands dirty, we would, in this case, be emailing potential prospective event organizers, one by one, and then we'd find ways to automate this. And then we'd find ways to hand that off to people in the team. So that was kind of our approach with everything. But in this case, we're talking about sales. So yeah, we just start cold emailing people, and then following up with them manually, you know, from our, you know, Google Apps, Gmail accounts, and just, you know, repeatedly doing that, and then learning that we can do this a little bit more systematically, and more and more systematically, and kind of take it from there. And then we started to grow the sales team and brought in some people who had some of whom, Sebastian, whom I met, he, I met as a client, so I was pitching a client, and he was running a St. Patrick's Day event. And I said, this guy, he's an Ivey grad. And he was in a family,and Ivey grad, he is a promoter, , he's running events. And he's working for a telecom company in the tech sector, I, you know, I think he'd make a really great salesperson. So we brought him in, managed to sell him and he came aboard. And so we brought on some people of that nature. And then we started to enable them with these tools and automation to drive that pipeline.
Eric Janssen
Nice. So then fast forward to ultimately when do you get the call? Or when do you pursue ticket Master?
Craig Follett
Yeah, so fast forward to that. There's some interesting junctures and steps in there. So along the way, we're, we're raising VC, so we're pitching VCs, we've got some interest. And in parallel, we decide at this time, just to recap, or universe with two eyes at this point.
Eric Janssen
Oh, right.
Craig Follett
You remember that? Universal, two eyes.com. And initially, that was to represent the eyes were two people, two little heads and bodies, meeting real life one to one kind of, , it real person interaction. But this, it was kind of a, you're telling someone, where do you work or what's the name of the product, he always had to say universe with two eyes. And it didn't always look the most trustworthy. So we decided, Okay, let's, let's find a way to see if we can buy universe.com. I can tell you this, because this is part of the, the juncture in raising capital and everything that that was a bit of a catalyst. So we found a really clever way to buy universe com by doing a lease with a right to buy. So we contacted anonymously, the prior owner of universe with one eyed com and expressed an interest by this, negotiated a price and negotiated a structure where we could pay them a monthly payment, but we had a contr act where we could pay them, you know, a bigger chunk, and then own it outright. And in the meantime, the domain was parked at an escrow agent. So an escrow agent hold it. And if we defaulted on our contract, it would go back to the seller. And if we exercised our contract, it would go to us the buyer. And so this allowed us being a little bit capital constrained to not throw a whole chunk of capital at this random domain name, but to have the usage of it for, you know, a nominal monthly fee.
Eric Janssen
So you did actually actively start to use it. I mean, because you had it in the escrow account, you negotiated this deal. Even now,you rebranded it.
Craig Follett
we rebranded as universe one eye.com. And that was another inflection point, because now, it was easy word of mouth, for our customers describe, for us to describe, it was more trustworthy, it kind of made a splash in the industry. industry is going wow, you know, there must be something here. How are these guys buying this expensive, top tier domain name? And so that kind of reinvigorated some of these VC conversations. In parallel to the VC conversations, we had a ticketing company reach out to us, who we started to speak with, they were interested in buying us. And so we had these conversations, and they were interesting, then we thought, maybe we should let's broaden this out a little bit. Let's see, what would this look like if we were to, you know, bring in some of the bigger players, and we reactivated some of our partnership conversations that we previously had. So earlier in the journey of universe, we had actively began partnership conversations with some of the larger event players and even Google and eBay and stuff to genuinely structure partnerships. You know, maybe they could refer event organizers to us, maybe we could be a do it yourself event marketplace that would compensate their businesses. And so we reactivated those conversations and dot dot dot sold to Live Nation. And there's you know, that's an interesting story in of itself that that negotiation that process that was very exciting.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, so can you just rewinding for a second to the domain? Give me a feel for like, what what is the top tier domain self for even range wise, just so that people have an idea?
Craig Follett
Range wise? You know, we're talking six figures plus six figures.
Eric Janssen
Okay. Yeah. To the extent that you're willing to share those negotiations, or conversations with Live Nation might be interesting. I always say that businesses don't generally get bought, they get sold. Not all the time that someone may just tap you on the shoulder out of the blue that you've never had a conversation with before and say I'm going to buy you for x, y, Zed multiple revenue. It's usually some conversation that had built over time. And guess what, what we said we were going to do we did it, we've got traction, we service a need that you don't currently serve as being self serve ticketing. So is there anything that you can share about those conversations?
Craig Follett
Yeah, there's I can't share everything. But there are certainly some interesting insights that I can share. We did have inbound interest. And so that's what sparked it. And that inbound interest helped us in the negotiations to demonstrate that there's multiple parties who are interested in this and why have we started these conversations. But then we did broaden it out. And we were actively involved in selling it right. And one of the pivotal moments was, we discovered that Live Nation was very interested in this thing called distributed commerce. So they wanted to be able to sell, let's say, a Drake ticket on Spotify, or to be able to sell a Blue Jays ticket on espn.com. And that was an aha moment because our key differentiator is embeddable tickets and embeddable ticketing. And so that was a synergy we were able to pitch. So it was sort of that was something that really resonated. And to make this repeatable for other entrepreneurs, the process I would recommend is if you look at, you know, Investor Relations documents, you can look at the strategy documents of prospective acquirers. See what their top level strategies are. And if you have something that can align to it, then that is something that you can work on. And so that made the conversation just very interesting for Michael Rapinoe. And it was that paired up with a best in class. You know, do it yourself self serve ticketing company, which complemented very well, Ticketmaster, which does much, much larger stuff. So you kind of have this dovetail of this longer tail ticketing company. Plus, this technology synergy of embeddable ticketing, instant distributed commerce,
Eric Janssen
Call you on it, because you just call yourself a ticketing company. So when you were when you were meeting,
Craig Follett
At this point we're ticketing
Eric Janssen
When you were meeting with Live Nation or with Ticketmaster, were you actually calling yourself a ticketing company for those conversations?
Craig Follett
We were Yeah, yeah.
Eric Janssen
Okay. Yeah. All right. So today, then your post acquisition, you are still act very actively involved? What's going on today at universe?
Craig Follett
Yeah. Today, it's super exciting. You know, one of the reasons that I've remained is it's remained highly entrepreneurial. So a lot of autonomy. And micro Pino is very good at having his acquisitions run that way. That's kind of a philosophy that he has. And so what's new is we've been expanding internationally quite dramatically. So we've been opening up offices in London and Australia, and now Hong Kong. And we've internationalized the product into many, many currencies, and alternative payment methods. So non credit card payment methods, and languages. And we're really excited to see events all around the world using universe.
Eric Janssen
Nice. So I've been you and I knew each other from the event business, we knew each other maybe before that, but we like, started to interact more earlier. Yeah, in the event business. There's a lot of travel for both of us. Yep. I think you do a really good job of embracing it. And maybe it's not the we don't see each other all the time. So I'm living vicariously through your Instagram. Yeah. But I think you do a good job of enjoying the journey, because you could view it as I have to do all this travel for work, or I have the opportunity to see the world through work that is that matters. So just an observation, you do a really good job of that. So you still travel a lot for work?
Craig Follett
Yeah, you know, a good amount and I enjoy the travel. We get to travel to great cities, great events, and with great people, and so I think that that that makes a difference. It's different than the consulting travel where you're headed Every week to someplace that you may not be as excited about. So yeah, it's I think it's some of those dimensions
Eric Janssen
Nice. Has anything personally changed for you since the acquisition, because that is the dream of so many, right, you start this thing, this thing is working, you get tapped on the shoulder out of the blue from this giant company, and they buy your company, and then you sail off into the sunset. So what is what has changed, if anything from the acquisition for you personally?
Craig Follett
I mean, the business is a lot different. And so that makes it a different personal sort of setup. We're now almost 70 people. And at the time of the acquisition, we were, you know, about 25. And so that's a very different business. And it's, it's a different sort of management style, and we're much more international now. And so that has changed sort of my day to day, it's definitely more around leading these these people and setting up structures and enabling this organization. So that's a bit different. I mean, personally, enjoying the travel, it's a different environment, you know, you know, not, I guess the key difference is, I, I'm not spending my time out, raising money from VCs anymore, that before selling, you know, we were always looking to extend our runway and accelerate that next phase of growth. And so a big part of my role was going out and building relationships with potential VCs and partners and raising that capital. Now, we are as part of Live Nation, the largest live entertainment company in the world, we have access to that larger balance sheet. And so it's less so around, going out and pitching for that it's demonstrating success more continuously, and kind of being enabled by that. And so that frees up time to focus on on other things within kind of running the business.
Eric Janssen
Can you comment on your relative level of contentment, or happiness or anything like that? Because I think that some, it's easy to get caught up in the idea that more, it's going to lead to more. But now being at a point where you're not sailing into the sunset for all of time, but you're in a good position? Has it changed your baseline level of happiness or passion or drive? Or, you know, are there weeks where you just say, I don't want to do it this week, as it changed anything like that?
Craig Follett
Yeah. No, that's, that's a good question. And I think, starting a company, and then selling a company, that was something that was on, literally my bucket list. When I graduated, I created this bucket list. And I've been taking some things off on it. And so it was certainly it was this great accomplishment, but in terms of levels of happiness, just answer your question. I think that I was happy before starting universe, I was very happy after starting at during kind of the building out of universe, including when we were taking no salary. And I think I'm, like a similar level of happy now. So I think that the success and the wealth creation isn't, isn't something that necessarily generates the happiness, I think it's something that comes kind of from within. With that being said, and this is something more after starting in reverse. So, you know, working in consulting, I would make decent money and then maybe go out for a meal. And obviously, the food tasted good, but I always tell people that after starting universe, you know, each dollar that I made, and when I if I made food or went out for dinner, food just tasted better, because I you know, I created it, it felt more fulfilling. So there was kind of a difference there. But I was I you know, I'm happy after selling the company. I'm happy. I was happy before as well.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, you honestly seem like the same. You haven't changed really at all at you have not?
Craig Follett
I hope.
Eric Janssen
Same guy from before, during after. Yeah. So that's great. I think it's a testament to your character, you have a good sense of what's important to you. And I think your least my perception of your Instagram life is like that actually is your life. You know, you're generally you are a happy person. Yeah, seemed fulfilled. And you're doing it right. You're doing it.
Craig Follett
Thank you.
Eric Janssen
I have some quick ones. As we wrap up here. Is there anything if you could think back to 20 year old Creg, is there any advice that you'd give to yourself back in the day?
Craig Follett
I would say do do what you love, do more of what you love. double down on that a little bit more. I think if there's something that you don't like doing then stop doing it and maybe travel more, I think certainly traveling, you know, a good chunk now I traveled back then as well. But I think I would say travel even more. That's a piece of advice that I would give.
Eric Janssen
Is just something that you loved back then that you were like, I wish I would have done this that thing that I wish I would have done more like there's something special
Craig Follett
I think travel a little bit, that's one piece, I had some opportunities to go to some countries and as a god, I don't know, I gotta work on this, or I got this going on and kind of deferred it. And it's just like no looking back, it's like, should just go for it. So generally I did go for it, but I would say go for it even more. Yeah, and you know, I love rock climbing, I love staying active and do even more of that would be advice to my corny old self?
Eric Janssen
Should people start businesses right out of school?
Craig Follett
If they want to do it, then they should I think that it's different per person. And I think, yeah, I'd say you know, you've got to go for it. If you know, it's it's the right time to start something, then then go for it. Maybe create that checklist of of hurdles for yourself. And if you're passing through those hurdles, go for it. Yeah, maybe that's for you, maybe that's right out of school, or maybe you want some more experience, or you want to build up some more network or, you know, a little bit of savings that you can invest into that company before so that you can get through those hurdles, that's my approach at least,
Eric Janssen
is there a place that you do your best thinking,
Craig Follett
I did a lot of my best thinking rock climbing. So, you know, I think there's things that people do, where it just sort of totally clears your mind. If you're rock climbing, or maybe you're playing a sport, or maybe something else, there's this sort of state of flow, where you're not thinking about anything else, and it clears your mind. And then when you emerge from that activity, you're then have a very clear head, and you're sort of in a very creative state. And so I think that that really creates like some of the best thinking
Craig Follett
tThat dovetails into my next one, which is what do you do to keep your self physically and mentally right. rock climbing still?
Craig Follett
I wish I rock climbing more, I should get back into it at a more regular pace. But yeah, I think you know, staying active working out these days, a lot of you know, cooking, cook for yourself, for myself a lot. Eating out as well. It's both. With that much travel, you have to eat out. But I think that maybe I get a little bit of a state of flow from just cooking. And you know, it's a creative outlet.
Eric Janssen
Do you journal at all?
Craig Follett
I don't. Do you journal?
Eric Janssen
Not in the traditional sense. So I do I use a five minute journal, if you've heard of that before.
Craig Follett
No.
Eric Janssen
So it's in the morning, it's originally supposed to get into I'm guilty of not doing it every day, I probably do it 50% of the time. So in the morning, it takes two and a half minutes you write down three things that you're grateful for what you're looking forward to that day. And it can be as small as I am able to stand up out of my own bed, I have a bed that I get to go to bed to and my kids are healthy. An example. And three things that I'm looking forward to today would be getting to catch up with you. I have the opportunity to teach a class tonight. And we just bought a new house.
Craig Follett
So congrats.
Eric Janssen
Thank you. I can sleep in my new house tonight. Yes, on an air bed. But I still get to sleep there. At the end of the day, you just reflect on what are what were the three best parts of your day? And is there one thing that would have made the day better. And it's just training your mind to look for being appreciating some of the smaller things, and then looking forward to things throughout the day. So it's just the practice of gratefulness and thankfulness. I also journal on call it screw ups things that I've done well not done well learnings throughout the years. So these are smatterings all over the place. So I'm not like the guy that sits down every single day religiously journals. But I jot things down.
Craig Follett
That's cool. I like that.
Eric Janssen
I'll buy you a gratefulness journal.
Craig Follett
Great.
Eric Janssen
Last one, is there anything you wish you would have learned earlier, or a skill that you think if you would have had it buttoned up or on locked heading in the universe that it would have helped you in starting growing universe?
Craig Follett
I think if I could, whisper into my ear, when I started, the company would say, pull the trigger on that focus a little more quickly. I think I knew that we would need to focus the business at some point. It's just a matter of where we cast this really wide net. And you know, but I think it's skill around, focus, focus, focus, both in terms of the types of customers are going after, but the different, you know, marketing channels and all these things. I think focus is really key.
Eric Janssen
It's hard, right? Because people don't want to say no to things. An example that I give often is when you think about Starbucks, we're drinking our delicious Christmas cup Starbucks coffees here, so I'm looking at the logo. But Starbucks is, at least if they if they wrote down who their target market is, it's for us. It's for a certain type of person. But it doesn't mean that all the other people won't buy it. Right?
Craig Follett
Exactly.
Eric Janssen
Not. The Starbucks isn't building their brand with my mom in mind, but you better believe that every year that Christmas drinks come out. She's the first one in line spending eight bucks on a latte. So I think people have a fear of if you focus, you have to say no to some people. But that's actually a good thing. And the side effect is that even though you're saying it's not for those, it's not for everybody. There are people in those. Not for everybody circles that will still buy your product. Exactly.But it's hard.
Craig Follett
Yeah, that's definitely a lesson. And I, I tell people, it's interesting that we've grown universe a lot, and we're still growing very rapidly. And ironically, we continue to focus. As we get bigger and bigger, at least at this stage. It's like, let's focus further and further on specific category specific types of events. And yeah, it doesn't mean that these other types of events won't work with us, it just means that we're thinking about some focal areas a little bit more closely.
Eric Janssen
Good. I am going to wrap up, but I want to give one more chance to talk about I'm rewinding here. So unit economics. Yeah. And the importance of having an idea of how you are going to make money, how you're going to price how you're going to charge how you tracked whether you were hitting those metrics on a weekly, monthly basis? How did you approach that in the business planning process? Or in the pivot process? Was there a master excel sheet that you kept revisiting? Did your investors hold you accountable to those things and just give people a fear of feel for at the stage that you guys were at? What rigor did you have around?
Craig Follett
You? Yeah, we were always thinking about it. And there were different levels of rigor, and approaches at different stages. So prior to launch, we were thinking about it, and it was part of the business plan, you know, we were pre revenue. So there was a dynamic of raising pre revenue, where there, if you don't have revenue, they're focusing on the other things, team, product or prototype, and then business plan, but a key part of that business plan is how are you going to monetize this? How is this going to scale? How is this going to pan out? And so there was definitely some really good thinking in there sort of conceptually at that stage. And then if you fast forward, there was some a lot of rigor that we put together around measuring on a cohort basis. And so the cohort defined as users who signed up in month x, what revenue did they generate for us in the month that they signed up? And then the next month, and then the next month? and etc. And as you project that, what is the lifetime value of that cohort? And then we tracked that month over month, and we'd say, okay, the cohort that signed up after that one, maybe the cohort was a little bit bigger, maybe the cohort itself was a little bit smaller in terms of quantity of customers, but what was the value that we're creating month after month from them? And what's the new lifetime value for that one, and what we were able to track as kind of month over month, as we progress through time, we're able to make the product better for them more valuable for them, and sell into larger and larger customers that created more and more valuable cohorts. So that was a key sort of unit economic analysis that we looked at. And then the counterpart to that is the cost. So that's the top line. And then the other side of the unit economics is what does it cost to generate those customers?
Craig Follett
And who ran that for you? Who ran that process for you? The tracking process.
Craig Follett
It was yours truly, it was looking at a lot of Excel crunching, crunching, you know, just raw export data at this time from our databases. Now we've systemized into tools that do it on an automated basis and allows us to step back and the data is too big to do it in Excel now. But yeah, on that side, and then the other side is tracking the the cost of acquisition.
Eric Janssen
And did you Where did you learn to do that? I the the actual, like unit economics tracking?
Eric Janssen
Well, not necessarily No, I mean, the the Excel skills and the analytics, I think, you know, school, so even engineering school, as well as, as business school, and then, you know, consulting and investment banking after but then this specific cohort analysis, it was less so around. How did I learn to do that more so around? How did I know that was the right question to answer the right output, and one of the biggest learnings for me was going out and pitching hundreds of VCs, and hundreds, hundreds, I've pitched hundreds of VCs and you know, obviously, you only take investment from one or two, you get a lot of declines need a lot of tenacity. But some of those VC conversations, even if we got declined were extremely valuable. They were just illuminating. They would ask really hard questions and really pointed questions. And I found some VCs that were just really smart and really on point. And it was those VCs that I'm thinking of that I started to prepare answers for them and do analyses for them but then would help us ourselves as well as of course other VC pitches, but more importantly, help the business itself.
Eric Janssen
Yeah. That's a good learning actually, because that's how we that's how we started to implement some of that rigor as well at intellidex. It was have conversations with VCs, maybe, maybe a little too early. But that's okay. That's okay. See what see what their feedback is? See what they tear down? Yep. Take some of it, make it better so that by the time you're actually ready to do the raise, you've been tracking your unit economics and chord analysis and the metrics that there was actually building a relationship along the way. Yep. So Good, good. Where can people find you now? Either through universe or online or any words to the listeners of the podcast?
Craig Follett
So you can find me on universe calm? Of course, with one eye now. And then on Twitter, I'm at Craig Follett, and same on Instagram. So awesome. Connect with me.
Eric Janssen
Great to have you. I think this is a great topic for the class. I think people are gonna find a lot of value in this and we will definitely get a case on the books for universe. I think there's a lot of cool teachable points for for your story that we should bottle up for all the time.
Craig Follett
Yeah, I look forward to it. Thanks for having me. Thank you.
Craig Follett
You've been listening to the Ivey entrepreneur podcast. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player or visit ivey.ca forward slash entrepreneurship. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,