00:45:50 · Jim Belosic
[00:45:50] S1: You get to pick. Like, you can't really pick your brother-in-law. Like, if you go to get married, the brother in laws just come with it. And I'm lucky to have awesome brother in laws. I have I have three really cool brother in laws. But I've seen some guys who get married and, brother in law's total dick, you know, or you could say mother-in-law, whatever. Right? Everyone complains about their mother-in-law. You don't get to pick that. I see investor partners as like kind of a marriage, but you get to pick. And I was really lucky to have enough, you know, opportunity to talk to a bunch of different people where I got to figure out who's just cool. Like, who do I wanna have a beer with? If we're getting married, like, who do I wanna hang out with? And we could just like be cool. Who can I text at midnight and be like, dude, I can't sleep? Like, what do I do about this thing? I was lucky to find that in, you know, Andrew and Matt and Patrick Collison and they're just they're weapons. And I think we were... I don't know if lucky is the word. I think we were patient enough to wait until we could attract that level of of person. It's not it's not necessarily the firm. I mean, Sequoia and Paradigm, Patrick Carlson are rad for the best of the best, but it's more about the person. Like if you come from Disney company or whatever, but you're a total turd, You know, that sucks. So so focus more on the person. I'd rather have someone from, you know, a really small company that that's just easy to work with. Because we're gonna be doing this for a long time. This is this is not like a race to the exit thing. It's like cool.
00:47:38 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:47:38] S0: Have you already had moments where they were able to come in or one of them was able to come in and kind of unfuck a problem for you or help you think through some next challenge, in a better way? [00:47:48] S1: Yeah. These guys are incredibly good at what they do. And if they're not good at something, they know someone who is. And it's so crazy being connected to this like brand new network. Like we had all these nodes in manufacturing, you know, these hubs and spokes of connections and vendors and electricians like I'm good at that stuff. I know a bunch of different plumbers that can come fix toilets, at any time. I know machine techs that'll jump out of bed and do all this stuff, but then they're like, hey, how do I deal with, you know, money and banks? And how do I do like executive recruiting? How do it, that's where these guys like are worth their weight in gold. And I never put any emphasis on that internally. Because I was like, I don't know. It seems weird. But when someone loves it and they're good at it and it's it's a weapon for you, then it's a perfect match. [00:48:40] S0: I think a lot of the best companies allow certain aspects of the business, just like you were describing, you were okay delaying, you know, making something a priority saying, we're just gonna focus on how do we set up these factories? How do we delight customers? And delay on like perfect accounting and all this stuff. How do you kind of decide which areas to focus on versus which ones you can just basically completely ignore?
00:49:03 · Jim Belosic
[00:49:03] S1: It's easy to focus on the the pain first, right? So it's pain or pleasure, right? It's does the customer have pain or does the... Is the customer getting pleasure? If those are two things that you focus on, just keep throwing money at it or throw effort at it. If the customer doesn't really know, then it always goes to the back burner. So one of the things we always say is, is it our problem or their problem? And so if the customer is like, Hey, I want to upload this thing, but my file doesn't work. I'm getting all these errors. That's our problem. We should totally fix it. If they're like, Hey, I want to upload the recipe for a cake and have you send me a cake. I'm like, Well, that's your problem. I'm not gonna do that right now. So when it comes to like efficiency of the back office and how we do our accounting and how we reconcile our books and you know, all that kind of stuff, the customer doesn't care. It's not their problem. It's it's our problem. We'll we'll deal with it, you know, behind the scenes when we have time. So yeah, we've kind of kicked the can down the road on some of that stuff, and we gotta probably straighten up a little bit in some of those areas. But I think a lot of people starting out, they read books or they get the wrong advice and they try and have everything perfect in their business from day one. They're like, oh, I have to make sure that my accounting is this level of perfect and I need to set up all these SOPs and bylaws and whatever. No, have a good product first. You know, figure it out. I always, people have come to me and said like, hey Jim, will you invest? You know, I wanna do a restaurant or whatever. I was like, go start with a hotdog stand. Go do a hotdog stand really, really well. And then go to a food truck. You know, and then if the food truck is really popular or whatever, then go do a restaurant. But a lot of people like start planning their restaurant first and they haven't even done anything. So worry about the customer experience first. Everything else will kind of fall into place, especially over a longer period of time. Every year that you pay your taxes, every year that you talk to your CPA, you dial in things a little bit better. We just had a huge test with the due diligence. So that's what no one tells you.
00:51:12 · Jim Belosic, Ty Morse
This is like, you can talk to an investor all you want and they'll say like, yeah, everything looks cool. The business looks awesome. And then it goes to diligence. Holy crap. Like they go through everything. They're trying to figure out like, you know, what's going on there. They're looking at like cookies on the website. They're seeing like, oh, you know, do you have a meta pixel and cause there's these new suits that people are going after meta pixels that aren't disclosed for him. Thank God we didn't have any of But just these little wrinkles that people uncover, it would be so daunting to have to do all that in year one. It would destroy a lot of your customer experience. But like I said, if you're patient, you keep doing it. You knock some of those check boxes off every single year and then eventually you're pretty good. So when we [00:51:59] S0: were talking last night, you mentioned that you really loved Home Depot as this example of a business that kind of empowers individuals to modify their homes and make changes and improvements without needing to have a complex network of everyone that knows what's what. And I think a combination of that with YouTube is just incredibly empowering. How do you kind of think about the analogy of your business to Home Depot?
00:52:21 · Jim Belosic
[00:52:21] S1: Yeah. I... I'm hoping that we can be similar. You know, before Home Depot, if you wanted something done, you'd have to go to a lumber yard, which may or may not be open to the public. You know, if you needed a toilet, you'd have to like call a plumber and he'd be like, hey, here's my two distributors that I that I work with. You have two choices. It was very, very complex. You'd have to go through a bunch of different steps, limited choices, unknown prices, unknown timeline. I think Home Depot disrupted that not only for the homeowner and like the everyman, the DIYer, but for contractors too. Like, I know today can go and get roofing materials at Home Depot as a contractor, sometimes less than you can get it from a distributor. It's good because of that scale. So manufacturing is very similar to the pre Home Depot days right now. You can't just like walk into a place and chitchat and try and figure something out. You can't go into a manufacturer that does every service under one roof. If SendCutSend could be, you know, a fraction of that, I think it benefits everyone. It benefits people just learning about manufacturing, like all these, you know, young engineers that are graduating and maybe they have a degree in mechanical engineering, but they barely run a lathe. They need to come in and see what manufacturing is actually like. And then to all the seasoned people, they're used to dealing with a very small subset of vendors, that are telling them what's possible. It's like, well, what if you could go into this, you know, big manufacturer that has everything under the sun and learn and see what else is out there. So accessibility, you know, I keep talking about accessibility to manufacturing and Home Depot did accessibility to home improvement. I think SendCutSend could add accessibility to manufacturing.
00:54:15 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:54:15] S0: I think for a very long time, we've kinda like outsourced manufacturing, and there's a whole lot of reasons we've done that. Now this is kinda flipping, and we're bringing things back to America. We're gonna make more things in America. What is like different about today than five years ago or ten years ago that is enabling this? [00:54:30] S1: It... I don't know. It feels like vibes. I don't know how else to put it. There's there's some rah rah rah of patriotism, reindustrialization. People are a little scared of offshore now. It's like, oh, are they gonna cut off my supply chain without a new warning? Are they going to steal all my IP and make a competitor or whatever? I don't think people realized those issues, you know, in the early days and now everyone's like a little more aware. They're a little scared and US is actually a viable option now. We're in our early days for accessibility and price and speed and everything, we're getting there. So I think people are testing the waters. [00:55:11] S0: You've been basically capacity constrained for the past seven years, something like this. And you've never necessarily had the money in order to build capacity significantly ahead of demand. How are you kind of thinking to yourself how to build capacity today without a full clear picture of here's exactly where the demand is gonna materialize and just making sure that goes well?