435th 1Mby1M Roundtable March 14, 2019: With David Lambert, Right Side Capital Management

Good morning everybody, welcome to today's 1 Million by 1 Million Strategy Roundtable for Entrepreneurs. 1M by 1M is the first and only global virtual accelerator in the world. Our mission is to help a million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars and beyond in annual revenue. In support of that mission, we do these free mentoring roundtables week after week. We started in the fall of 2008 with small baby step experiments, and now this is our 435th session. Over 100,000 people have participated. The event is being recorded, and this and all previous sessions are available on our 1M by 1M Roundtable channel on YouTube. It's a great body of learning material. We believe in case study-based learning. If you are live tweeting, please use hashtag 1M1M. Our Twitter channels are @1Mby1M and @ramana. We'll open the lines for call-ins after the scheduled program. Meanwhile, use the public chat to network. We're going to start the conversation with David Lambert, Managing Director of Right Side Capital. David, welcome to the show.

So tell us about you, tell us about Right Side Capital. Let's get acquainted.

And what about sectors? Any B2B preference? What kind of companies do you like?

Got it. So did you read my recent series of bootstrapping to exit articles? I have written several.

So let's talk about a few field companies. Walk us through a few examples of what you have invested in, and in particular, give us some insight into what was the state of the company when they came to you, who were they, how did you find them, and what attracted you enough to write the check?

What kind of fund size are you working with to be able to do that many investments?

Have you seen exits?

Good. Hello, audience, if you haven't read the article 'Bootstrapping to a Good Exit,' Maureen will share it in the public chat. You definitely should read it. Most exits happen in the sub-$50 million range as strategic exits. So you have to manage your capital in the company to be able to make money for everybody at the sub-$20 million range. I'm happy to hear the range you gave, $20-200 million, is good.

Can you talk about a couple of examples of these companies that nobody has heard of that have found good exits?

Here's a question: you've mentioned pivots several times. Pivot is a very tricky thing to manage, especially from a cap table point of view, because if you need to raise more capital to support a pivot, your early investors didn't really get a lot of valuation. Nonetheless, that happens regularly. Here's a more subtle question: I was coaching one of our premium members yesterday. It's a fast company, B2B SaaS, with a couple of paying customers and three POCs going right now. But their paying customers or POCs are not in the vertical where they think they'll build the bulk of their business. They've decided there's a vertical they want to go after, but the initial traction isn't there yet. These days, seed investors want everything checked out. Would this be the kind of company—they have some recurring revenue, about $4,000 or $5,000 a month—that would fit your investment thesis from a B2B SaaS point of view?

I got a couple of customers around. I'm actually just using this to see how you think about deals. These guys have real revenue from a couple of customers. One point you made is how much capital has gone into a company. Can you elaborate? For a company to have gotten to $5,000 MRR, what is comfortable from how much capital has gone into that process?

Excellent, very helpful. If you wanted to talk about pivots a little more, we've got data across almost a thousand different companies we've seen evolve over time. What we've noticed is the most important thing at these early stages, and one of the things we care the most about, is cash burn. If we invest in a company that has, let's say, $10,000 MRR right now and they go out of the gate burning $40,000 or $50,000 a month, they've probably raised enough for 10 months of runway. Just a few months in, the company starts stressing about the cash wall they'll hit later that year. Subconsciously, those founders are going to have blinders on, thinking, 'We've got to make this business model work or our company goes out of business soon.' If you take that exact same profile of company and instead of $40,000 or $50,000 a month cash burn, they're burning $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month, that entrepreneurial team is not going to have those blinders on. They're naturally going to have their heads up, looking for opportunities greater than what they're currently doing. Even if they get from $10,000 to $20,000 MRR, talking with their customers, they might discover a need much greater than the one they're addressing. They might feel comfortable throwing out their entire business model and pivoting to that new product. They'll be okay doing that because when you're burning that small amount, you still might be running out of capital in six or eight months, but it's not as stressful. You know, at worst, I can raise $150,000 or $200,000 and have another year. That's what we look for the most. I can walk you through an example from just this year. We invested in a company in May of last year. They had somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 MRR, around $8,000. It's a B2B SaaS product for the SMB market. By the end of this year, they were up to around $30,000 MRR, which is pretty impressive. They had raised less than $100,000 to date before we invested. Interestingly, along the way, multiple customers asked for a specific product that was substantially different than the product they made. In November, they decided, 'We've had enough people ask for this, let's try building a prototype and take it to market in January and see what happens.' They built this new product, pitched it to about 50 different customers, and incredibly, 18 out of 20, 90% of them, signed up and said they would buy it. That's a close ratio you just never get. So here's a company that just went from $8,000 to $30,000 MRR, and they came to us and said, 'We're going to toss our old product out the window. We'll make that a light version as a free plugin, and this new product is where we're going.' They've just signed up about $70,000 worth of MRR in two months for this new product. The only reason they were able to do that is because they had low cash burn. If they were burning a lot, their answer to those companies would have just been, 'No, we can't build that. That's not what we do.'

Cool. So how many deals do you see a year?

Alright, so I guess the question I was trying to ask you—you gave a very good and interesting answer to a different question—but the question I was trying to ask is: the deals that you see, let's say if you look at the last 12 months or 18 months, what trends have you seen?

I have a slightly different analysis of this trend. I think it's not just that it's become cheaper to build the product—it has become cheaper, of course—but I think it's because entrepreneurs have become a bit more serious about bootstrapping. I'll try to take some credit for pushing this message heavily. I think people realize it's a much better deal to bootstrap first, get to a level of validation including paying customers, before going out and beating on VCs' doors. People are starting to understand that entrepreneurship doesn't equal financing. You don't wake up in the morning and go stop beating on VCs' doors and expect anything to happen. I think people are realizing they have to put in 12 to 18 months, sometimes 24 to 36 months, of bootstrapping before they should go out to raise financing. They're just not wasting time going to VCs doing that.

Yeah, great. Well, that was a fascinating conversation, exactly what we need to have. Our audience here today, right here, you're going to say a little bit for the an obsession?

Okay, so folks, we're going to switch. I just want to set a little bit of expectations here. This is a working session. You can bring anything you want to discuss—whatever you're stuck with, confused about, or need clarity on. We'll work on that. It is a safe place. You don't need to be nervous or defensive, but you do need to be able to hear and process candid, authentic feedback. We're not going to sugarcoat our feedback. We're going to tell you what we see and what we think you ought to be paying attention to. It's okay if you disagree with the feedback you get here—it's your adventure, you're going to do whatever you want with it. But know that the people giving you feedback have seen a lot and are giving it based on patterns we have seen in the ecosystem of what works and what doesn't. We're going to start with Praveen from Hyderabad. Robin, please unmute your line and tell us what you're working on. Robin, are you on the call?

Maureen, what's going on with Robin's situation? Does he not know how?

Probably. Are you speaking? We can't hear you. Okay, I'm going to move on. We can't waste time waiting for people.

Yes ma'am, I'm here. Go ahead with your presentation.

Yep, thank you. Hi everybody, my name is R.J. and I'm from Frisco, Texas. I'm going to present my company called MobStar today. A little bit about me: I grew up in building management and data centers, working with Schneider Electric from 2012 until 2017, and then broke off to do consulting on my own in a very specific field called data center infrastructure management. As we go through changes in normal operations activities in mission-critical facilities, operational procedures and maintenance checklists are critical. Any change that can impact critical equipment in a data center or airport operations has to go through proper change control and documentation process. Part of that documentation and change control is what we call MOPs (Method of Procedures), SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), and EOPs (Emergency Operating Procedures). The way the industry operates right now, MOPs and recipes are created in Word documents or spreadsheets and get exchanged, forwarded, downloaded via email. All the actions and triggers are manual. If I need approval for a MOP, I have to send an email to four people, and one of them will have to forward it to someone else who is a subject matter expert. Everybody would just reply all saying 'approved' and you can come in on March 17 to do the install. A lot of time is wasted, and people just show up on site with no preparedness because no proper planning was done. The generic tools that use email, Excel, SharePoint, some wiki pages make the whole process very cumbersome and error-prone. It's very difficult to find information out of these manual documentations. What I'm trying to do is help mission-critical facilities—data centers, hospitals, airports—better manage their operational procedures and maintenance checklists. Not just the document piece, but the entire workflow. MobStar is a comprehensive, one-stop shop solution. Users that use MobStar don't need to use any other tool, as opposed to previously using five or six different applications to manage the entire process.

Data centers is my primary target right now because this is the industry I grew up in and where I have most of my networks. This will give you a brief idea about driving forces: cloud computing, 5G, social media, smart cities, autonomous cars—all of these things need data processing at some level. Various studies show that more than 90% of the data that exists today was generated within the last two years. We're growing at a crazy rate. The CAGR anticipated from 2018 to 2025 is 10.2%. The data center construction market in 2017 was $43.7 billion, and I believe 2018 was $47 something. So that's my primary target industry. Where is the company today? The idea and concept came to my mind in December 2017. We had a working prototype in May 2017. I started working with my close network since I've been working in the data center industry. I had a couple of field friends who managed facilities. I kept showing the software to them on a monthly basis and kept getting feedback. My first purchase order came in last month, and I have two more coming this month. Right now, I have product market validation. I'm going to a contest next week to present this and have meetings with six different customers of various sizes. The next plan is to grow, sustain, and get to cash flow positive. How do we make money? The business model is a yearly licensing fee based on lab count. For a small enterprise, for example, they'll do 500 to 1,000 MOPs, and I can charge them $2,000 per year. As opposed to a service provider such as CBRE or JLL, through the thousands. The pricing model varies. How we sold or go to market: in 2018, it was direct sales because it was my first degree network—people I work with. In 2019, I've started recruiting channel partners and resellers because I realized I cannot do everything on my own. I have a lot of support on the software development side—three, four, five team members supporting me—but not on sales. I tried doing this and it's okay.

What is the price point? You said the price point for MobStar starts at $3,600 for a year for a 400-500 node license, and goes all the way to enterprise at $15,000 to $20,000 depending on the size. So if you're talking about large data centers, what would be an average deal size?

It depends. For enterprise, it would probably be $10,000 to $12,000 just in licenses because enterprise again has different requirements for MOPs. Just to give you an example, a UPS battery replacement can lead to a MOP or not—there's no standardization across the industry. My anticipation is that the average deal size would be somewhere between $7,000 and $9,000 in licenses. Then we have professional services that we do to identify where the process is broken, identify what all MOPs and SOPs you need, go to the manufacturers, get operational manuals from them, and prepare MOPs. In late 2019, I'm also planning to launch a managed version of MobStar where we take care of everything and all you do is log in. Right now, it's an on-prem install—the customer owns and manages the install, we just configure it. But late 2019, once I have the architecture sorted, the plan is to have 100% cloud-hosted instances.

And these channel partners you're talking about—have you identified channel partners who have access to local data center customers who can support you?

Yes, yes. By channel partners, I mean real sales partners. These are not exclusive to me. I've worked in the DCIM data center industry, and there are a lot of people selling UPSs, generators, switch gears, PDUs, and software to end customers. I met with a lot of these guys at networking events. If there's no conflict of interest, they're actually happy to help me make connections and take a cut off of it. I found this model. I have two sales partners by the way right now. I did identify them, but one of the deals I'm waiting on is coming through this channel.

Do you have any metrics that you've put together that show if a company, one of these data centers, is paying you $1,000 a month, what's the economic benefit they're getting? How much are they saving in either labor or parts?

Yes sir. On average, a facilities team member spends 47 minutes just finding information and data they need to make decisions. That's my first value proposition. 47 minutes per day per team member. If it's a data center with a team of four people, let's say 30 minutes per day, I can save them two hours per day of manpower. Multiply that by a hundred, so that's the basic dollar value. On top of that, the amount of time saved, the efficiencies gained, and the way MOPs can avoid human errors—which is huge. In February, both Fargo had a smoke condition and their ATMs and online banking went blank. That happened because of a maintenance routine activity that shouldn't have happened. The same thing with American Airlines being grounded—all because of human errors.

Yep, I agree 100%.

Yes sir. But the good thing is you are going about it in the right way. The domain that you understand well and you already have paying customers. That's a very good start. The rest you can figure out from there. It sounds to me like you're solving a problem that's actually much bigger than just time savings. You're giving them peace of mind that things are less likely to happen that cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Therefore your product is really a lot more than you're thinking.

Yes sir. All right, I reckon. Thank you. We have to move to the next presenter today. We can come back together again, and if you want a challenge, you're welcome. Okay, Gina, you were up late?

Gina Milani, can you hear me okay?

Yes, thank you. Good, well thank you. I just want to start off by thanking you for the opportunity. It's pretty exciting to me to be here, and I thank you for all the resources that have gotten me here. My project is very, very much in play, but I believe it has a much broader opportunity to scale. So let's dive in and go to the next slide. I guess I should back up. My background is using enterprise software, but I am a PR professional, so all of these presentations, Dave, were very interesting to me as well. I think a person's storytelling takes on many forms and often requires a variety of tools to do your job well, now more than ever. If you're trying to make a buy decision on PR infrastructure tools, it's important to feel like you've relieved on your home because you're going to spread that cost around your clients. So you have to find them, then see what you can afford at your stage of business, and only then can you start your in-depth evaluation. Having firsthand experience with this, I added up all the hours each individual might be spending doing the same research, and the result is an obscene amount of valuable time wasted. Before I go further about market validation, I want to say that some years back my original idea was much bigger. It was called Peer Service Bureau. At that time I conducted market research and a survey through my PR professional colleagues to assess what might help them the most. I added a question: if there was a database of PR tools to help you easily find tools, would this be beneficial to you? 100 percent of respondents said yes. That's what I decided to focus on. Over time, I've been working on PR Tool Finder, largely on my own, self-funding along the way. It went live in 2016 with effort into SEO and some marketing but not a lot. At this stage, what I'm seeking is maybe not a funding partner, maybe it's more a mentor. I believe I have taken this as far as I can on my own with the personal investments I've made unless I have a funding partner or mentor who can provide guidance in digital advertising best practices. At this point, I know what I don't know. These are a few of the main categories on PR Tool Finder. It might surprise you to learn there are like 20 categories. If you're trying to make them easy to find and understand how to use them, even if all you're looking for is a media contact database, one of the most basic tools in PR, there are still 12 options. Prices and functionalities vary widely. These options won't all show up in a Google search of media databases. I actually hired someone years back to evaluate media databases because I didn't have time with my client load, and it took 15 hours. That's a lot of time.

Do you know what you're currently doing? Are you monetizing any of this or not?

I know I will get to that. That is the next step. The target market, as you can see, is PR professionals and agencies. I'm a solo practitioner, very active in the Public Relations Society of America independent practitioners group. But you don't have to be a PR pro to want to find some of these tools. People who blog or create podcast businesses want to know how to measure their social media sentiment.

Now you're going off in different tangents. Your positioning to begin with was very crisp, and now you're going off in various tangents. If you're creating a tool that specifically caters to PR professionals to do their job, that's a positioning and it's reasonably crisp. If you allow search engines or helping bloggers more to measure their effectiveness, that's going in directions that are not going to show me how to monetize. I would like you to let me speak. If you keep speaking over me, I will not be able to communicate what I'm trying to say to you. There are blueprints of these kinds of businesses. Yelp-like businesses have been built. Is the Yelp-like strategy right for you? Yes, there are certain monetization spots you can look into and try to replicate. But there are other parts you could also consider, which are more subscription-like models. I haven't looked at it closely enough to decide the right monetization model for you. Let's listen today. What do you think, Dave?

Gina, on your question about mentoring, obviously you've come to a place where that's what we do, our reason for existence. If you just hold on for a bit, let me go through the other two pitches and then we'll explain how to use the program for mentoring and acceleration.

I was hoping to finish my slide deck, but if that's not something you want me to do, then I don't have to.

Well go ahead. There's more information here. Go ahead.

There is quite a bit, and I'd like to go through it very quickly. The point of this slide is there is an educational component for my target advertisers. Higher ed is not unreasonable to expect that they would use the database in their coursework and communications, giving tool vendors early exposure to tomorrow's customers. That's high praise coming from enterprise software. This slide is the market size. PR is a modest size. I was hoping to say earlier that I'd like you to look at this as a case study of how this can scale to the general small business population, which in 2008 there were 30.2 million small businesses in the US. Next slide: from a competitive standpoint, there are four competitors I've identified, three of which have been acquired by Gartner. Those three Gartner properties see 4 million unique visitors a month. They offer targeting by country, have an in-house team to help customers acquire qualified leads for free, and they use a PPC model. That's interesting and I have to leverage that in the future. Compared to a dedicated marketing advisor, I'm alive and well.

Well, it is a comment and a concern, and I appreciate that. In my view, PR Tool Finder not only offers more complete listings of both paid and free tools, which users would appreciate, but it has a higher degree of tool segmentation. I was not able to find evaluation on the Gartner properties, but G2 Crowd was founded in 2012 and is now valued at $300 million, raising an additional $55 million eight months ago. Advertising opportunities: additional products could be developed like sponsored case studies, custom research, or micro newsletters focusing on high-change categories, much like the Washington Post has been doing.

I don't think we should go over revenue potential numbers because you have to first figure out what the right business model is. This is putting the cart before the horse.

Okay. Let's just quickly run through these. These are some of the potential tool advertisers in PR. With enough site traffic, we can attract horizontal business and higher ed. That just shows we do have traffic, but not a lot because we haven't done much marketing. That is the next step. I want to get feedback first. It's been good, and I appreciate it. These are some likely industry partners.

What you have at the moment is not a comfortable situation. What you have at the moment is not a fundable business. We have to figure out how to put in place something that you can build block by block, one step before the other, without assuming you can raise financing at the moment.

Very good. That's the feedback I was looking for.

All right. Do you know if we can do more Q&A in a bit? Let me finish the other two presentations. Welcome back to you. Thanks again. You're very welcome. William Chao, you're up next.

Hello. Okay, hurry, yeah. First off, I apologize for the quality of the slides, just kind of put them together. What we're all trying to do is make reward loyalty points more attractive and have a more engaging way for people to burn loyalty points. Our mission statement is we want to make it a lifestyle. If you go to McDonald's, they always have a survey where you get a dollar off your next meal, and probably 99.9% of people never take that survey. We're trying to see if we can engage people more. In summary, everyone knows this problem. Loyalty coins are not transferable, they're difficult to use, centralized, and customers don't value them. There's about a 2% penetration for people actually burning points. It's difficult to develop logistics and financial processes for loyalty points, and there's a lot of burnout. There might be high initial usage but it drops quickly. What we're trying to do is offer loyalty software as a service. We engage people by offering short surveys, and through surveys we gather data and analytics. We have an iPhone and Android app. We want to be industry compliant and have a place to exchange points. Our tech stack: we partner with VeriFone and POS. Our application works seamlessly with POS sales. It's a simple architecture: users download the app, it integrates with the point of sale via NFC and secure code. We store loyalty points on a blockchain so they're easily transferable between merchants. We send vendor-specific surveys to people. If you go to McDonald's, you get a McDonald's survey. If you go to Costco to change tires, you get a survey about that. People will take the survey if they are rewarded. The points themselves will hopefully be more valuable if they can be easily exchanged, which we facilitate through a blockchain exchange. So you can exchange points from different merchants.

This is amazing. You're going to create a transferable loyalty point exchange where loyalty points are earned in exchange for taking surveys?

Yes, exactly right. Hopefully that came through.

Okay, it missed it. It took you quite a while to make that point. That should be your positioning, and that positioning should be very early in the presentation. That should be your opening slide. You're making transferable loyalty points on the blockchain. I know it's a buzzword, but your value proposition has nothing to do with blockchain. I'm a little confused why you need a blockchain implementation. Couldn't you do this with a database?

The reason we're using blockchain is because we're distributing these points on an exchange, and we want them to have potential for being ERC-20 compliant so they can be transferred to cryptocurrencies. People can use the points, and if they become valuable, then we can partner and make changes.

Yes. How we make money is up for debate. This is very early. We have the technology and we're trying to find our first beta customers. We're self-funded and not looking for major seed capital. We just want to see if this can be a product. How we monetize is up in the air.

What bothers me, William, is that you don't have a hypothesis for monetization. You're building a product with a value proposition but no business model hypothesis. That needs to change. You may change the hypothesis as you learn, but you have to have a viable hypothesis before going down this path. You need to talk to enough people before you build a bunch of stuff.

That's what I'm trying to establish here: to get one or two test customers for product feedback to see if it's valuable. This is very early stage. We don't have a recurring revenue stream.

We're going to stop there with William's presentation because we still need to give Praveen a chance to pitch. I just want to say: please don't build a lot of software without understanding what business you're going into, because software alone is useless unless you know what you're building and why. Gavin, are you able to call in?

Mm-hmm, yes, we can hear you. It's a little chaotic off camera, but go ahead.

Sorry, I have a poor connection on my side, but we can hear you fine now. Good morning. I am Praveen Surya from Hyderabad, India. I started a company called Dizzy Beings in Jan 2019 with a few friends in Hyderabad. We are chatbot developers aiming to develop photorealistic digital humans with emotional intelligence that can do face-to-face conversations. Chatbots and voice interfaces are three to four years old, and they have applications in digital interfaces, replacing apps and websites. But the fundamental problem is they are completely verbal, while human communication is mostly nonverbal. Most companies work on emotional intelligence through text and voice analysis, but the fundamental problem is that what humans say or write doesn't always reflect their true feelings. Facial analysis is important to accurately detect emotions. Our digital humans can do face-to-face conversations by asking the user's permission to turn on the camera, and they use gestures and hand movements for high emotional intelligence. We are targeting large enterprises and startups in customer support, looking for new customer experiences in banking, healthcare, retail, education, proptech, telecom, hospitality, and entertainment. We did customer discovery with banks. We visited HDFC Bank in India, ING in London, and N26 in Germany. We found they are looking for new experiences to humanize digital banking and hold deeper conversations than chatbots. They believe recognizing client frustration early is important, and that emotion recognition can increase customer loyalty. They want technology that is friendly to disabled and technology-challenged people. HDFC Bank wants to look at our MVP and make it a paid project. We have a B2B revenue model: a fixed cost of $200,000 to $300,000 to develop conversations. Unlike competitors, we don't charge a per-user fee for digital humans. We also have a variable cost based on API calls. On the premium side, we work with companies wanting proprietary faces for their brand. We plan to develop a platform for VR/AR developers to use our ready-to-use 3D assets and digital humans. We also want to manage digital copies of celebrities for use in VR. My question is about bootstrapping. Earlier I agreed with a previous speaker on bootstrapping, but this company requires a lot of technical and artistic talent with over 10 departments. If we bootstrap, it will take more time to build the MVP, and we might end up with a non-commercial MVP and no full-time team. We might need to onboard more co-founders. Should we bootstrap or seek pre-seed funding?

Okay, I understand. I think the real question is not whether you want to raise money, but whether you can. It's not clear to me that you can. As a pre-seed investor, I would think about what guarantee there is that you can build this product. The level of complexity means the founder must have strong technical ability. Otherwise, my investment could be a complete loss. It's not clear you will be able to raise money without showing something with validation.

The answer is you should do bootstrapping using services. Structure some of your pilots as services projects where people pay you. You keep intellectual property, but they pay you to do it almost as contract software development. Otherwise, you will neither build what you need nor raise money. We have a definitive track in 1M by 1M where we support bootstrapping with services. We have lots of methodology. I think trying to raise money at this stage is almost impossible.

That will also give validation that there is need and market demand.

Alright, that concludes our scheduled presentations. I'll give you three minutes on how to use the program. First, I have an ask: if you like what we're doing here with direct feedback, and not everyone has the stomach for it, we are on your side. We want you to succeed and work with serious entrepreneurs with the stamina to bring a product to market. Please refer them to 1M by 1M. Resources are at 1Mby1M.com. There's a blog with many free resources. Over the last 14 years, hundreds of thousands of people have read it. The Unflinching book series is a good start for learning bootstrapping using services. Each book has 12-16 case studies. All are available on Amazon. Roundtables happen every week, attended by over 100,000 people. Reserve your slot to pitch and discuss your strategy. The full acceleration program is 1M by 1M premium, offering extensive methodology, an online curriculum with video lectures and case studies, and business development help. We have a rolodex for premium members, including investor introductions, customers, channel partners, media, and analysts. We provide strategy consulting and closed-door sessions, and help with financing. We mentioned earlier that 800 companies out of which get funded. If you're one of the others, figure out why and what you need to do. We introduce you to our network of hundreds of investors. They look at our curated deals. We can help get media coverage. Go to the 1Mby1M self-assessment on the blog. It's a free strategic planning questionnaire based on years of strategy consulting. If you get stuck, use the curriculum. 1Mby1M basic is online-only, $99 a month, and companies have made excellent progress with it. Use the resources on our site. The curriculum is case-study based, with over 1,000 successful entrepreneur case studies: over 100 unicorns, 400+ venture-funded companies, and 400+ bootstrapped companies. Our methodology is lean, capital-efficient bootstrapping. Our philosophy: bootstrap first, raise money later or not at all. We have two more free roundtables this month, then weekly sessions in April and May. We also meet at Cafe Borone in Menlo Park on Wednesdays. Now back to Q&A. Let me introduce Irina Patterson on our team. Questions welcome. I have to drop off in two minutes. Dave, thank you for staying.

Are you in the valley or the city?

Let's get together sometime.

If there are no questions, let's adjourn. Oh, David, you seem to have a question.

I have no problem. We have many solopreneur case studies. One favorite is FindAProAmerica.com, a solopreneur who bootstrapped to $5 million and then to $25 million with a small team. Accelerators may not like solopreneurs, but I'm fine with them. Virtual companies are trending, scaling with remote teams. You can be a solopreneur with a virtual company and 140 people working for you worldwide.

David, thanks for coming. Your question about the freemium model: premium conversion from free is less than 1%. If you get 2-4% conversion, that's extraordinary. Keep that in mind for your financial model. We are past 9:30, so let's adjourn. Come back and continue the conversation. If interested in the program, sign up and we'll start working with you. Thank you all for coming, and I hope you enjoyed the session.