Find your Niche and Focus

In this episode, James is joined by Chris Federspiel, CEO and Founder of Blackthorn.io.  Chris shares his journey in the Salesforce ecosystem and the challenges he faced as a bootstrapped startup. He discusses the focus on events and payments, the process of killing unsuccessful products, and the importance of finding product-market fit. Chris also talks about creating accountability without a board, effective marketing strategies, and the role of system integrators in their business. He shares insights on release management, customer support, and the future of the Salesforce AppExchange. His advice for startup founders is to persevere through the challenges and stay focused on their goals.

Chapters

00:00
Introduction and Origin Story

01:19
Focus on Events and Payments

04:22
Challenges of Bootstrapping

06:22
Creating Accountability without a Board

09:41
Marketing Strategies and Targeting SIs

11:27
Finding Product-Market Fit

14:16
Training and Enablement for SIs

16:07
Unexpected Hurdles and Lessons Learned

23:14
The Future of the Salesforce AppExchange

27:26
Advice for Startup Founders

If you are a Salesforce ISV founder with an interesting story to tell, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to podcast@unaric.com and we'll be in touch.

Transcript

James Gasteen (00:01.11)
Hello and welcome to today's Scale to Sale podcast. I'm joined by Chris Federspiel from Blackthorn. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Federspiel (00:10.41)
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, James.

James Gasteen (00:13.247)
Great. Now, Chris, obviously, you are guest of many podcasts. I always like to kind of ask people just to start off with like, you know, how do they get into the Salesforce world? And what was the kind of origin story of your of your product? Maybe your first product because I know Blackthorn have got a few.

Chris Federspiel (00:29.142)
man, I guess everybody's always got some funky origin story. No one's ever born the same way. I got started in the ecosystem in early 2011, doing a lot of implementations and sales. And then I started a consulting company, which is now Playtiv. I ran that for a year and a half with Nishad, sold my interest to him. And along the way we implemented payments and events apps. And I, for sake of ego or being an admin, I don't really know which one. Thought I could do it better.

James Gasteen (00:30.35)
Thank you.

James Gasteen (00:34.379)
Exactly.

Chris Federspiel (00:58.746)
But at the same time, no one also integrated with Stripe. So we went for that with the Payments app. And then with Events, there were some other players who were going after different spaces and we wanted to make it easier. And that became Events and Payments. And then we also then launched seven apps, which all seven of them didn't work. And we killed all of those and went back to Events and Payments. So here we are.

James Gasteen (01:19.906)
So are you payments? Are you events? Are you the kind of the Venn diagram bit in the middle?

Chris Federspiel (01:25.899)
Um, publicly, yes. Uh, internally, the slight majority of our revenue is events and then follows with payments, maybe a third, and then it's sprinkled with like a mixture of other apps and some like backend stuff we have.

James Gasteen (01:42.414)
Brilliant. And like in terms of finding some of those niches, because I know that all niches rather in the US, I know that you're big in certain sectors like education, how did you kind of come across those? Was it kind of stumbling? Or was there, you know, an intent or a little bit of both?

Chris Federspiel (01:57.334)
Uh, I think the secret to our success has nothing to do with brilliance. Uh, all we've done is launched lots of stuff that hasn't worked and then we've just killed all the things that didn't work. Um, but to figure out higher ed nonprofit, we do a fair bit of, um, hospital chain, healthcare systems. We didn't have any of those as our thesis. We launched as a technical gap.

James Gasteen (02:14.542)
here. We.

Chris Federspiel (02:21.25)
products and we waited to see what leads came in. And then we flipped it around and went after those. Because the issue without having a dedicated go-to-market is it's really hard to focus on feature requests. So even though our app can be used across different verticals, we can't really deliver a massive for-profit conference. We don't have thorough sponsor management, for example. But we do have really thorough.

a recurring event functionality with unique hidden controls for tickets, which is how we end up beating out companies like Cvent pretty often. Cause we do like unique Salesforce stuff that people look for. And we've only been able to do that because we focused on higher ed and nonprofit. So when all those things come in, that ends up being our focuses. And that just happened organically. We just didn't set out to do that.

James Gasteen (03:09.774)
Well, I suppose some of your brilliance is probably killing things where as you know, I've met many founders and probably myself where certain things should have been killed a lot a lot sooner.

Chris Federspiel (03:18.77)
Yeah, I mean, you know, some things reach some state of pure stability and they cost nothing on the engineering side other than fixing a bug or two and we keep them going. Like our compliance app is bulletproof. The thing just works. So we sell it, it hits use cases, but from an engineering perspective, it doesn't need like continued pretty much anything. So we keep that one going because there's no strain on go to market engineering, nothing like that. But the other ones that people had consistent feature requests.

We had to measure what the assumptive TAM is, which is not like global market TAM. It's more of what we could actually achieve given a few go to market people and the amount of time it would take to do the feature requests. And some of these would, would be like company defining features. Like we had this, uh, giant portal thing we were trying to create, and that would have been the thesis of our company. We ended up killing that thing. So things that didn't become.

company theses we were able to kill off. Otherwise we would have had to redirect the whole company.

James Gasteen (04:22.446)
And I understand your business, especially in the early days, was more or less bootstraps. How did you kind of like, you know, what were some of those initial challenges was obviously trying to get a SaaS business off the ground, developing a product, trying to get some revenues in, like what were some of those challenges and how did you overcome them?

Chris Federspiel (04:33.11)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Federspiel (04:38.098)
It was a nightmare. Uh, the first like three and a half years, we did a lot of services agreements. So I had a lot of connections from the prior business where we were able to win customers from like 50 to 300 K deals, which is kind of rare to have like a seven or eight person company win deals that size, but it helped us a lot with being able to maintain our own IP. But it also took us in a lot of directions because if you're bootstrapped and a customer says, I'll give you a hundred K, if you do this thing that has nothing to do with what you're doing, it's kind of hard to say no.

But then when we hit around like 4 million ish ARR, we got revenue based financing from Capchase. And then I ended up buying the compliance app and the messaging app. Um, they're single person dev companies. Uh, neither of the founders, Matt and Clint were like, I don't want to keep doing this. We're like, okay. So they just stayed on and help us to, um, transfer the products. And then, uh, I wanted to do, um, I wanted us to go a lot faster.

And we had like 55 VCs that reached out that wanted to cut us like a 25, 30 million check, but they all wanted to put a board into place, the valuation, when it had us dilute too much. And frankly, I've never really cared about the money too much after it looked like it could already be enough money. So I'm like, okay, I don't want to like have to do this. So we turned to do a debt facility and they just diluted a few warrant points. And then at exit, we'll have a few, you know, I don't know, a bunch of millions that somebody will pay off, but it allowed us to stay like.

bootstrapped ish because we still don't have a board. Um, I still have a lot of freedom of direction. There's some controls they have where we can't like willy nilly sell off an asset because where we have some underwriting in place and some covenants of minimum cash and whatnot, but, um, it's, it's allowed like a nice degree of hybrid freedom.

James Gasteen (06:22.542)
Cool. And just on that, like, you know, if there's no board, and I understand, you know, the sole fan, like, how do you create that sense of accountability? Because, you know, it's often very difficult if you're, you know, the sole founder, like my first company for a while, and having that sense of accountability, like, how do you think about that in a Blackthorn? Well, just like, you know, making sure that, you know, targets are being hit, the behaviors are correct, the cultures or certain things like that are in place, that there's a structure there to

Chris Federspiel (06:39.306)
Well, what do you mean by accountability?

James Gasteen (06:51.99)
Create that accountability from the top and drive it down.

Chris Federspiel (06:56.546)
So I think about things a little bit differently. I personally have never really had targets for anything. Not for sales, not for leads, not for like really anything. Because there's some things you really can't control. You could say, oh, you know, this year we want 50 leads versus a hundred. So, okay, maybe you put more money into how you're doing outbound or event spend or something like that, but the reality is you can't like force, create like a lead. So.

It maybe it helps to steer stuff. Um, our COO Stuart, he's a hundred percent different mentality. So he comes up with a lot of targets that then actually now, because we have lots of people in the company, it creates systems by which people can go after these targets to create pipeline, to create some expectation of budget. And the balance we find is generally somewhere in the middle. And I think it helps to produce like, um, a nice way to be able to scale us. So.

If we never have any targets, it's really hard to figure out what we're trying to systematize. But if we're like hell bent on the targets, it doesn't really allow for enough freedom. And I, I found that, um, I'm in a founders group of like 300 founders in New York city, I talked to a lot of founders and I have never once talked to a founder that's enjoyed having a board. They all tout that they want to have more governance. And in my experience, governance has

It's been rare that I've met anyone from a board that understands tech behind things. Now, granted, once tech gets to a point that you're fully scalable, you're largely bug free, then yeah, you can go after the spend, especially if a VC comes in and they throw like 10 million on the balance sheet and they say like, okay, here's the things that we want you to do. It's a little bit of a different story. And I know some founders that have worked with like Vista, for example, and I've heard that they're

really tremendous at their go-to-market cadence and how they're able to scale companies. And I think that's awesome. But we've just never really been ready for that. I'm like a tech product focused founder, so I've really focused on how we've been able to structure the product. And I think after this year, we'll be to a point where our product is really ready for that. So whenever we get ready to run a process and do some majority thing, which is not this year, but whenever that happens then, we'll be much better geared up.

Chris Federspiel (09:13.706)
than we were in the past. So in terms of governance, the number one thing I always tried to make sure of was that we weren't going to run out of money. As long as we were building what customers wanted and we weren't going to run out of money, then in theory, we should be able to get where we wanted to go. And it worked out to an extent until we had enough people that they needed to be guided by something other than just like, oh, we have enough money. So it was nice to bring on someone like Stuart who had that experience, who can help like guide us to where we're going.

James Gasteen (09:41.646)
Brilliant. And then when you think about that kind of growth there, and we mentioned a bit about the kind of inputs, outputs, like, when you think about like, you know, Salesforce is an ecosystem, it's all around kind of marketing and visibility, like, what marketing strategies have you found most effective? What's going to work for you last year? What are you doubling down on? What are you playing around with this year?

Chris Federspiel (10:00.334)
Uh, there's been no magic bullet. I think everything works a little bit. We get about 75% of our leads from system integrators. Now that's a luxury we have based upon the product we have. Sometimes the SIs will get into a project and they'll never need your product ever. So this ended up being our go-to-market because a lot of SIs, when they work with customers, they'll want to have an events app and to build an events app that we have will take multiple years and many millions of dollars. So it's more of like a no brainer to bring in a product.

That's where we come in. And then to educate the marketplace, to build brand awareness, it's helped a lot to do these co-sponsored events. We've tried to do all of like the app exchange AMP programs and zero of them have really worked. It hasn't really worked to do anything with Salesforce that's been paid. The things that have helped with Salesforce have been working with the smaller niche teams. So for example, like the EDU or nonprofit teams.

We'll go and help to educate the SEs and the AEs about what our app does and when to bring us in. And that's been the most valuable, not necessarily spending money on the programs there. So I would say it's helped a lot to educate the SIs to do sponsorships at the smaller events, like all of the community dreaming type things and things that are unique to our niche.

And then getting into Salesforce, you can't just like go after the core AEs, it'll never work, there's like thousands. But if you can find a niche that has like 100 AEs or something, that's worked pretty well.

James Gasteen (11:27.054)
Okay, cool. And then when you think about like, you know, obviously 75% of the leads coming in from like the SIs, one of the things that I think, you know, here are the fan of struggle is to answer, you know, what's in it for me, like, when you think about the proposition for your SIs, are you guys, is there a service wrapper that you're offering them? Is there a proposition? Like, have you managed to get the SIs on the hook? Because obviously, there's got to be something in it for them.

Chris Federspiel (11:50.11)
Yeah, I mean, we offer them 10% of the first years, like that was like a commission and almost all of them decline it because they wanna remain without bias when they recommend something to the customer. They actually don't care. If you have an SI that's doing 30 million a year and they're gonna make like 20K off your deal, 10K off your deal, 5K off your deal, a thousand, they don't care. What they care more about is that your app doesn't have bugs, the customers are happy.

James Gasteen (12:00.628)
much man.

Chris Federspiel (12:18.282)
They have help with implementation in terms of like figuring out architecture. When you go through the onboarding, a very big thing that I never really understood is change management. If you try to have 500 users of your application, like suddenly use it, it is not going to happen. Like somebody else has to help to onboard them. So we do a lot of onboarding help. We do a lot of like go to market togetherness. So.

they'll send us an RFP where there's a hundred questions on events and we'll fill out the whole thing and they don't have to deal with anything. Like we'll, we'll help tremendously with that. So we try to just make their lives easier, however we can. And that's been probably the thing that they've enjoyed the most, I guess.

James Gasteen (12:55.886)
That's interesting. And then when you said that change management piece, is that like, is there like a services wrapper for them around like, you know, project management, rollout, training, enablement is they may be making fees that way.

Chris Federspiel (13:06.046)
Yeah, sort of, sort of, sort of not. So we have a hundred people. We can't do like a, you know, 5,000 person onboarding of an organization. We have a four or five person onboarding team that also has office hours. So we'll have a structured onboarding where we train on a whole bunch of things with our app because our app is not like using Eventbrite. You can't just like start using it and never get help from anything. This is why Salesforce has Trailhead, right? Like you can't just like start using Salesforce and know what the heck you're doing. It just doesn't happen.

So if you want to get into advanced security and permissions, if you want to get into how to figure out what filter criteria to do on flows, if you want to integrate us with something, if you want to hook automations of our app to something, you need guidance on where to filter. If anyone's ever implemented like Steelbrook, like Salesforce CPQ, there's always like hidden fields with like little check boxes and you don't really know what they are unless someone helps to kind of walk you through the use cases that you can read help text to your blue in the face, but like you don't really know what it's going to do. So.

It helps a lot when we do that and we'll work with teams of 10 to 15 people. And they usually then will be power users for their departments. And then they'll help spread the word. And then the SIs will work with them to do some of the bigger rollouts.

James Gasteen (14:16.43)
Okay, like kind of train the trainer then.

Chris Federspiel (14:18.978)
Sort of, yeah. I mean, with our events app, for example, you might have up to 50 event organizers in an organization. So if we train 15 of them to be like the admin gurus, they might make a training guide for their other 35. And then those 50 might be building events for 10,000, for example, something like this.

James Gasteen (14:40.974)
And if you think about like, you know, starting off, what were some of those kind of unexpected hurdles, you know, at the start of your journey, and what did you kind of learn from them?

Chris Federspiel (14:51.874)
I didn't expect things to not work out with my co-founders. I think no one really expects that. But it actually is quite common. I've worked with a lot of founders where things just don't work out with their co-founders and they have to find a way to separate with that. I guess it's like any kind of relationship, but it's a little different because you tend to work with your co-founders more than seeing like your significant other. And some other things that were difficult were figuring out

product market fit, I thought a go-to-market cadence was like a fake thing. Uh, until we started to add a lot of people. And if you have people work on like 10 go-to-markets, like it doesn't happen. Like you need like, you know, one first and then you add another one and you add another, those were two things that were very hard to be able to do. And then early on with our events customers, this might sound insane, but we had to get around like a hundred either very serious prospects or customers in order to finally see.

congruence of feature requests. The feature requests were just all over, and we just had no idea where to focus, even in events alone. So those were like three different things that I didn't foresee. Oh, and also, I guess, like the incredible stress of running out of money constantly.

James Gasteen (16:07.382)
Oh yeah, yeah. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and just down there. Like what are your thoughts on like, you know, part of the beauty of Salesforce and part of the pitch is that it's infinitely scalable and configurable. Right. I think that's also probably the downside for ISV founders is that you've got a product that customers can kind of tweak, configure, you know, what's your thoughts about kind of product markets fit in the Salesforce ecosystem given, you know, you can't really just completely ring fence your product and customers can, can tweak with it, play around with it.

Chris Federspiel (16:25.345)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (16:36.274)
integrate it whichever way they want. How do you think about product market fit that way?

Chris Federspiel (16:41.602)
Uh, you can't block customers from doing whatever they want to do. So they invariably end up creating some insane thing sometimes and they'll write in and, you know, oftentimes we'll have a bug, but oftentimes it's from some crazy thing that they connected where they have like daisy chain flows connected to triggers and it looks like something we're doing and something's timing out. Or they deployed a new field on a filter condition and now there's no permission on the field and it puts a lot of strain on our support team to dig into these because.

James Gasteen (16:47.406)
Thanks for watching!

Chris Federspiel (17:09.898)
We have tier one, two, and three. So we have like tier three where we like sort through people's queries to see what's going on. But I made a decision once we were able to have enough revenue to not like do whatever people wanted to do. I said, we're no longer doing services ever. And for an app company to scale, you just can't do services. You can't, um, build some custom thing for one customer, which then becomes.

200 custom things for 200 customers, it just massively bogs you down because you'll go to do a new release, it will break the custom thing that you have. They don't then wanna pay for more services because you broke their thing. And some organizations they'll do services, but these are not around building custom automations. Maybe these are around training or like some reporting thing you've done that's just like a little bit different. So we work with these SI partners to also do not only implementations, but in case people wanna have like second wave based stuff.

So the two things are, we do zero services. So even in our onboardings, we'll like tell people what filter criteria to use, but like, we won't be like hands-on doing something. And the other one is having this tier two, tier three to weed through people's crazy stuff they make. And sometimes they make stuff that's like amazing. And sometimes it's kind of crazy. But we have to try to figure out what's going on. Otherwise they'll treat like, you don't want someone to a treat if it's like a 50K customer, because they made some custom thing that we couldn't figure out how it was working and they ended up blaming us.

So it's just what it is.

James Gasteen (18:38.346)
And how do you think about things like release management for your customers? Do you, are you part of the kind of school thought that says, look, we provide the service, we provide the support, so everyone needs to be on the latest package or do you kind of have you got customers on different kind of, you know, legacy products and therefore you're juggling support across current minus one, minus two.

Chris Federspiel (18:57.57)
I presume you're asking the question because it's a nightmare for everyone. Uh, so...

James Gasteen (19:02.37)
I've seen some people being very dogmatic and saying, you know, almost like point blank, you know, this might be Salesforce and we know it's enterprise, but you have to take the latest release and we'll give you advanced warning. We have a process, but we'll only support you on the latest package, which is.

Chris Federspiel (19:16.242)
Yeah, with enterprise, it doesn't work. So it provides, it creates unbelievable strain on them. So they don't just have a sandbox. They'll have like four chains sandboxes where they'll put something in, they'll test it, they'll promote it. So we won't support someone three major releases back. So it gives them nine months to come forward. And we do releases every month, but we only do a major release every three to four months, something like this.

And the minor ones tend to be for bug fix or if someone needs some imminent change to something, we'll do something there. But the feedback we got, we always thought we were like amazing because we were doing these releases so often until we started to get bigger customers and said, we hate working with you because it's too much strain on us to do these constant upgrades. Like we hate it. So we've been contemplating doing push upgrades now to do pushes for the nine months backwards.

Once we know that we have a major release that doesn't have any bugs that would need to push someone onto the next release. So if we have a fully stable release, that's many months back, we're now contemplating doing a push that we know nothing will break and then you can't just do that, you need to have like an opt out strategy, even Salesforce has, has this opt out for their push, uh, upgrades, excuse me, for these like really big customers that they have. So it's, there's no like no brainer approach for this.

James Gasteen (20:42.91)
Who manages that? Is that CS? Is it support? Who helps customers maybe, you know, go through those? Let's suppose they're nine months back. Is it just a simple switch to say, great, okay, you've got the latest package or do they need some hand holding?

Chris Federspiel (20:58.482)
Uh, it's a mess, uh, only because every customer's like, I mean, once you have enough customers, there's, there's buckets, you can put them in, but they're, they're really pretty different. So we have a whole release management team that manages like just the releases. This is it's connected to QA, but it's not the same. And we're now getting into like trial for source orgs so we can do like daily package creation and things that are accelerating us.

But in order to get there, it usually starts with support. Because if someone writes in with some ticket, they'll say like, oh, we're having this bug and we'll look at them. We'll say, yeah, your 12 releases back. Like we can't help you until you upgrade because we fixed this thing like, you know, six releases ago. Or say yes, we'll get it where they'll say like, we're super pissed off at your product. We're really upset because we're running into this bug. And we'll say, yeah, like we've, we've sent upgrade notices every single month and your team hasn't done anything. They'll say, well,

Well, we never got it. We'll say, okay, well, let's check your spam or you signed up for this stuff. And, you know, maybe we have evidence that they've gotten two of them. And, you know, you're not, you don't just say like, oh, like, no, no. We sent you this thing and you didn't do anything because that's not gonna make anybody happy. So we'll say like, hey, you know, you, you got this thing and how can we help you to, to upgrade and let's get you there together. We can even do it on a call together just so you feel like the love. We created this thing called Candy Shop, which is not really something we created.

the Salesforce.org team before they kind of got disbanded. They made this thing so you could do like these like, oh, my wife just shut my door. I get kind of excited, I guess. We create this scripted upgradeer. So we have like a base package or we have share components and then like our events app uses our payments app for checkouts. So that thing does like scripted upgrades. So it makes things super easy. It's like a three or four click upgrade path. Like you, you off and then you click a button to agree. And then the thing just drops the whole thing in. So it's...

James Gasteen (22:31.651)
Yeah.

Chris Federspiel (22:52.286)
It's become very easy to do the upgrade, but organizations won't do it unless they test it against all the custom stuff they have once they get to a certain size.

James Gasteen (22:58.294)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then what's your kind of like, how do you envision the future of the kind of Salesforce app exchange marketplace? And then I think, you know, against that, how are you, how are you thinking or preparing some of those changes?

Chris Federspiel (23:14.41)
Uh, you know, it's, uh, every two to three years, we see a change. There happens to be a lot of apps in the space now, like kind of like what you guys are doing with the consolidation and the rollups. So I think they'll continue, continue to be rollups. These organizations that are at like one to 10 million, something like this, where they might have like shared concepts where they can become one entity that simplifies stuff a bit, um,

It's really hard to get any kind of visibility in the App Exchange now. I feel like it's the old days of Yahoo, where you had to go through seven directories to find something in there. And it just doesn't work. We used to have the number 7 and 12 most popular apps on the App Exchange when you filter by not free and you see them. And now we're ranked numbers 250 and 350 or something like that. But of our.

like our partner account managers, overall patch we're in like the, I don't know, top five or 10 out of like 100 or something like that. So I know by revenue, we're still growing pretty nicely. I think by customer count, we're over 600 customers now. So I think we're not that small, but for whatever reason with their algorithm, we're not in this like popular bucket. So I don't really know what popular means. So the app exchanges.

It provides value for us in terms of being credible. If someone looks for us, they'll see the reviews and the AEs know that we exist on there. We give our PNR, our partnered net revenue share thing, back to the AEs. But in terms of app exchange as a thing, it's more of become like a concept now for apps that are on there, but not necessarily how you can win deals or do releases or whatnot.

James Gasteen (24:55.058)
Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's got too messy. Right? Like I remember eight years ago, my first business I would get, I was just making all our income was coming in from inbound app exchange. It was great. Didn't have to do anything else. And then, and then it started getting messier and then maybe volumes went up. They changed the algorithm and maybe they switched the tech. Then the quality went down. So it's kind of been this journey of like, okay, it went from being very dependable, reliable source of, you know, leads that are very high quality to being this kind of like, okay.

Chris Federspiel (25:03.762)
Mm-hmm. Same here.

James Gasteen (25:23.414)
It's now become too messy. You can't find anything. I think Kongra got about 30 listings. So they seem to be on every single category. Um, things are mis-categorized. There's companies there who've gone bust. There's companies there who aren't Salesforce anymore, for example. So there's all these noise there. Um, but I think makes it harder to cut in. And also I've heard internally that, you know, Salesforce A's and SES have got their own version of the app exchange, but much more curated, which is what you really want to get on. Right. Because fundamentally.

That app exchange isn't that sort of recommendation anymore because it's so unwieldy.

Chris Federspiel (25:56.83)
Yeah, I didn't even know they had that. I'm going to have to ask you about that after this thing. Uh, we used to get over a hundred leads a month from the app exchange. And now we get 10. I don't know. So even as the ecosystem has grown to be so big, the amount of leads we're getting for this thing have gone so low that it's, it's utterly useless to us other than showing credibility to people that we exist. The thing that's helped the most has been word of mouth through the SIs, the AEs and sponsoring at the events. It's gone from like tech enabled to back to old school.

James Gasteen (26:27.294)
Yeah, well, I think you're quite prominent as a brand, right? You seem to be visible everywhere. You're a lot of these kind of community events. Um, you seem to be very visible as well. So I think that's the kind of old school brand marketing that seems to be working very well for yourself.

Chris Federspiel (26:38.906)
It is, but only for niche. Uh, like we don't, we don't sponsor the world tours or a dream force because there's just, it's far too much noise and our buyers aren't concentrated there. You know, if we're going after higher ed and nonprofit and we're getting more into, to government and healthcare, like that becomes where we're spending our time. It doesn't make sense for us to sponsor one of these, uh, generic or core based, uh, events, even though they have lots of people and it looks like amazing and sexy or now you're doing one of these things that actually like doesn't.

James Gasteen (27:09.918)
Yeah, and it's a lot of work as well.

Chris Federspiel (27:12.162)
It's a lot of work, it's a lot of money. It's a big strain on the team.

James Gasteen (27:16.942)
Exactly. And then lastly, what's one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were starting out Blackthorn back in the day?

Chris Federspiel (27:26.178)
It's gonna suck, don't give up.

James Gasteen (27:28.662)
Yeah, that's a good one. I think that's a good one. Normally a very popular one is Focus where, you know, founders have got one idea, then another, then another product idea, then this concept, this segment, this geography, someone in the U S reached out and all of a sudden you've got 16 customers and no one's the same.

Chris Federspiel (27:47.766)
Focus is nearly impossible with bootstrapping. Unless you have a full-time job and you have money coming in from somewhere else, if you focused, we would have died if we focused. We would not have been able to take on other customers.

James Gasteen (28:03.658)
Yeah, I suppose you've got to start wide and figure out what worked.

Chris Federspiel (28:08.33)
Right, exactly.

James Gasteen (28:09.748)
Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for dropping by and look forward to catching up in the flesh at one of the next events.

Chris Federspiel (28:17.386)
Same here. Thanks for having me on, James.

James Gasteen (28:19.17)
Cheers.