Behind The Revenue

Chad Kodary (00:01.123)
What's going on everybody? Uh, today we have Mr. Mikael Dia from Funnelytics himself on with us. Um, Mikael, uh, just, uh, you know, for some context, if you could take like a minute or two, uh, tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what is it that Funnelytics does.

Mikael Dia (00:08.366)
Sup.

Mikael Dia (00:17.742)
Yeah, yeah, no problem. First of all, thanks for having me, man. I'm looking forward to our chat. We've been friends for a long time, so it'll be fun to catch up and talk a lot of stuff. I'm a digital marketer at heart. I've been kind of doing digital marketing for a long time. Really, I'm an entrepreneur at the end of the day, but my core skill set is digital marketing. And one of the things that I always kind of struggled with was how do I...

Chad Kodary (00:25.355)
Yeah.

Mikael Dia (00:42.794)
visualize my marketing funnels and then actually understand performance of those. So we built a tool called Funnelytics that allows you to visualize your marketing strategies, your marketing funnels, and then overlay all of your data on top so that you can see what's working, what's not, where are the bottlenecks, and then you can optimize those and make more money from your existing marketing spend. So, um, yeah.

Chad Kodary (01:04.387)
So from, from marketer to software CEO, right. And I've literally taken the same path, which is funny. So I'm in the same boat. Um, it's, it's quite an interesting journey. You know what my first question that I have for you kind of liaising on into that is what was that like for you? Um, like going from like being a full blown marketer. Cause you came from a marketing agency, right? That was like where you originally started. You had. Yeah.

Mikael Dia (01:08.782)
Yeah.

Mikael Dia (01:12.942)
It's an interesting journey, for sure.

Mikael Dia (01:29.742)
Yeah, I used to run a marketing agency and.

Chad Kodary (01:32.067)
Same thing. I had a marketing agency in 2009. You had a marketing agency and then you started a software like.

Mikael Dia (01:37.966)
Software. You know what? A lot of people want that switch, right? A lot of marketers and marketing agencies think about starting a software company because they think it's more productized and more scalable and all of these things.

And truthfully, I knew nothing. Um, and now I had started a software, uh, company before it wasn't fully software. It was more of an app, a mobile app. Uh, so I understood a little bit about the kind of development process and the development cycle and stuff, but it wasn't anything kind of crazy. Um, you know, versus what I'm building now, which is an analytics software, which is on another level. Yeah. Uh,

Chad Kodary (02:17.827)
Really crazy.

Mikael Dia (02:21.454)
I was naive, man. I'll be very honest. I didn't know anything about what it would take to build a software. I didn't know how much money it would cost. I didn't realize how difficult it would be to really build the software. I didn't realize, you know, one of the things that you do in a marketing agency is you always think about retention and, and, you know, we stack monthly retainers and all that stuff, but it's,

You know, when you're stacking 3000, $5 ,000 monthly retainers, yes, it hurts when you lose a client, but then getting another one, you're still making three grand when it comes to software and you're stacking a hundred dollars a month or $200 a month, or maybe up to 500 bucks a month, whatever it is, you don't realize how important churn is and how hard it is to get somebody to adopt a tool. You like it's so freaking hard.

man. It's it's really challenging. It's it is. It's it's tough, man. It's it's it's tough.

Chad Kodary (03:18.199)
It's fucking crazy is what it is. That's what it is. Cause I have the, I'm in the same boat, man. Um, it's, it's.

So you went from marketing agency to software CEO. Talk to me about your first year as a software company. Obviously, it took you how long did it take you to develop Funnellytics, I guess, until you launched maybe an MVP version.

Mikael Dia (03:44.718)
Until we launched the MVP was probably about a year of a part -time engineer, kind of building some things. And, um, and then it kind of started becoming a little bit more full -time for half of a year. Uh, and then we launched. So one of the things that I did at the very beginning was I sold a lifetime license to our software. And the way I decided to do that was basically I knew the software wasn't ready. Like it wasn't anywhere near.

at a stage where it made sense to kind of start charging on a monthly fee. And I kind of just did some mental calculations. I was like, okay, if I'm going to sell this for $99 a month at the stage at that, no one is sticking more than two months because it doesn't even work. So let me sell a lifetime license for $700. I think it was like $600. So let me buy basically six months upfront, get a whole bunch of users, get them bought in, bring in some money.

And it worked really, really well. We built a community, we launched it. I think we made just over $200 ,000 in about 48 hours when we did our first launch and 48 hours. Yeah.

Chad Kodary (04:49.219)
in 48 hours. Can you let's take a pause right there really quick. How did you, how did you generate 200 K in 48 hours? Go into the details really quick.

Mikael Dia (04:58.058)
Okay, let's, let's, let's break it down. So let's take a step back. So in December of 2017, uh, I, I had a first prototype of my tool and the way that funnel, it works is basically you have this canvas where you can map out your customer journeys or your funnels. You have little icons to represent a page or traffic source, et cetera. You can connect them together and it kind of creates this nice visual of your, your marketing funnels and.

That was live and kind of ready to go. Uh, but my vision was always, okay, how do I overlay data on top of, of this? Hence the name funnel? Lytics. Uh, I wasn't very clever. I literally took the word funnel and analytics and smash them together. And that was it. Uh, so I showed a friend of mine, uh, the mapping tool and I kind of just showed him, okay, like, here's what it does. And it's really cool, really easy to map stuff, but like,

I'm starting to work on this analytics part and it's not really working yet, but it's getting there. And he kind of said, Hey, this mapping tool is really cool. Like I understand you're building this analytics thing and that's really awesome, but the mapping tool is really cool. Like you should give away that for free. So I was like, okay, well, it's not a bad idea. It's a nice, you know, lead magnet in a sense, and it's going to build some goodwill and hopefully those people will want to buy. You know, analytics, it kind of makes sense. Right. Uh, so I started.

advertising the free mapping tool. I spent about $10 ,000 and running ads straight to the mapping tool. And when people would create their account, uh, the first thing that I did on the thank you page was send them to a Facebook group. So I put everybody into a Facebook group and basically between, I think the date was December 7th, 2017, um, all the way up until February 7th.

Chad Kodary (06:28.163)
running ads ok face book on face book

Mikael Dia (06:53.442)
2018 two months, literally to the day. All I did was run ads about $10 ,000 worth of ads, get people into this free mapping tool on the thank you page, put them into, into the, um, into the Facebook group. I think if I remember correctly, it was about 6 ,000 people who signed up to the mapping tool and about 3000 people who actually joined the Facebook group from that.

Chad Kodary (07:05.987)
Facebook group.

Chad Kodary (07:14.443)
Wow.

Chad Kodary (07:18.659)
You had 6 ,000 people sign up from 10k nadsman.

Mikael Dia (07:21.774)
from 10K. That's the nice thing about having a free tool that is very easy to use and people just started talking about it. So our cost was like $2 to get people to actually sign up to the mapping tool. Overall the cost. So.

Chad Kodary (07:25.283)
Holy shit.

Chad Kodary (07:33.923)
That's insane. Yeah.

Chad Kodary (07:40.003)
Who are you targeting? This is a side note. Who are you targeting? Who is the audience? Marketers?

Mikael Dia (07:42.67)
Marketers, uh, marketing, like mostly marketing agencies. These were like freelance marketers, small marketing agencies. Um, the Russell Brunson click funnels crowd, basically, like I would target Russell Brunson and you know, Russell's talking on about click funnels over here and how it's important to have a funnel. And then here's this tool that makes it super easy to draw funnels. And this again, around 2017 peak kind of click funnels time and, and it timed, it timed really well.

Chad Kodary (07:48.129)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (07:53.525)
Yep. Yep.

Mikael Dia (08:12.814)
And there was no other way to map your funnels other than like a PowerPoint presentation or a piece of paper, basically. So.

Chad Kodary (08:20.323)
So 6 ,000 people inside of a Facebook group or 3000, excuse me. Wow.

Mikael Dia (08:23.758)
No, 3000 people in the Facebook group, 6 ,000 people into the mapping tool. But here's what I did over the course of those two, two months. Every day I would record videos, I would make posts and I would create content and build a ton of goodwill. And every little once in a while, I would sprinkle in some like snippets of the vision of funnel. This ability to overlay data, right? But because I didn't have it yet, I didn't have anything to sell them. All I did was give them.

value. I would record some trainings on how I grew my agency. I took a lot of my stuff from my agency and started templatizing it and giving it away as like, uh, PDFs and, and, and proposals and stuff like that. I would host webinars, I would do interviews. So I just kind of kept going and I would do a ton of Facebook lives. Exactly. I just kind of kept going with the momentum and, uh, and as I was kind of teasing like this vision of funnel, Lytics and what you could do with this tool,

Chad Kodary (09:11.811)
momentum.

Mikael Dia (09:22.606)
people kept getting more and more excited. So on February 7th, which was exactly two days, two months to the day from when I started advertising, I said, hey, I've got a hundred spots open for this beta group for Funnellytics. It's going to be a lifetime license. You get access to Funnellytics Pro and you get unlimited tracking, unlimited whatever. And I thought it would take me, yeah, I thought it would take me like,

Chad Kodary (09:47.267)
1997.

Mikael Dia (09:51.246)
I don't know a month to get a hundred people. Like I had built goodwill. There was a lot of like momentum in the group. People were commenting a lot and stuff. I thought it would take me maybe a month to get a hundred people, right? It took me 48 hours to get 300 people and each of them paid us $700 and basically it just created this massive momentum. Like I didn't, I didn't expect it. I was, I posted in the group. I said, it's open.

Chad Kodary (10:09.443)
Crazy dude.

Mikael Dia (10:20.942)
And then like...

Chad Kodary (10:21.987)
How old were you at the time?

Mikael Dia (10:23.95)
Uh, I was 2018. So 32, 31. I'm old, man. I look young, but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not young. You're 35? Yeah. So I'm older than you. I'm, uh, I'm 37. So, um,

Chad Kodary (10:30.083)
31 years old. Oh, so that's young dude. I'm 35. Uh, I'm 35. Yeah. All right. Okay. But, but how does it feel being, you know, at 31 years old and this is brand new. Cause now you're, you, you're in the process of transitioning right between like agency and software. And it's like 200 K and 40. Most people would like,

That's that's life changing, dude. That's crazy. 200K 48 hours. Yeah, it's like a holy crap moment. Like, wow, this is it's not even like this is working. It's like this is fucking working.

Mikael Dia (11:00.622)
It was. It was like, holy crap, right? It was holy crap. Like, it was...

Mikael Dia (11:10.094)
Yeah, yeah, this, this is working. Like people clearly want this. Um, now let's, we'll, we'll get to the pain. And, uh, that was, that was a really, it was a nice moment. And we ended up doing like about $1 .5 million in that those first 12 months. So like from a just selling, just continuing that same engine of people, Facebook group, et cetera. I found a way to kind of.

Chad Kodary (11:20.609)
Yeah, oh yeah, we're gonna get this in pain. We all got pain.

Chad Kodary (11:33.987)
Where you did you continue the lifetimes to get to that 1 .5? Okay. Wow. Lucky users.

Mikael Dia (11:36.366)
I continued the lifetime for almost a year and a half before. Yeah, I know. Like they, you know, it's funny. A lot of them still are kind of like upset when things change because the, you anyways, let's, we'll, we'll dive into that. It's crazy. It's crazy. Lifetime buyers are an interesting breed. Some people are extremely grateful and others are like, wait, what do you mean you're changing this? Or what do you mean? Like, you know, it's, it's.

Chad Kodary (11:43.991)
I guess.

Chad Kodary (11:52.515)
We'll get into it.

Mikael Dia (12:06.19)
It's like you paid $500 one time for something that people are paying $500 a month right now for, right? So it's like, give me a break. But anyways, um, it was, it was life changing for sure. It made me realize what was possible when you build a community, when you build some momentum, you build goodwill. Uh, but it certainly didn't give me a proper understanding of whether or not people cared about my software. It.

Chad Kodary (12:34.595)
Cause it was a one time hit. One time. Yep.

Mikael Dia (12:35.854)
because it was a one -time payment, right? And that one -time payment was a nice kind of, but it was, a lot of them was a lot more FOMO than it was anything else. I don't want to lose out on this potential game -changing thing. I actually.

Chad Kodary (12:51.875)
Well, because you also stem from being a marketer too. You're a marketer and a salesperson. Right.

Mikael Dia (12:54.702)
Okay. Yeah. Well, I was pretty good. Like I was pretty good. Like the pitch was really good. It was dialed in and we definitely did a great job, uh, making that happen. But like even, I think it was like last week or two weeks ago, I got an email in our support of like a founding member who paid back in 2018 still hasn't used the platform. Right. And like, it shows you that like, you know, it's false positives.

money was nice and it allowed me to build an engineering team and start building a company. But it wasn't a true business. It was just one time payments and

Chad Kodary (13:37.571)
It gave you the money that you needed to start your business, to really start.

Mikael Dia (13:41.134)
It gave me the money I needed to feel a confident to stop my agency and stop relying on kind of, uh, the service side. And it gave me the money to really hire some developers and to really kind of build a company. But, but it didn't give me true understanding of what am I building really? What is this and who is it for? And what is the real value that people are going to pay for?

Chad Kodary (13:46.915)
Also true.

Mikael Dia (14:10.894)
on an ongoing long -term basis. A lot of the value was this incredible offer that I had crafted, including a lifetime deal to my license, including these courses, including this. And it was just an irresistible deal where people were like, well, I'd be stupid not to pay this, this money. Right. And it worked, but it didn't help me better understand. So those first two years of funnel. Lytics was very much a.

We made a lot of money. We also, we learned a lot, but we also had no idea what we really truly had. It wasn't until I switched over to an actual SAS model where now we started realizing, Oh, fuck. Like this, this isn't really what I thought it was. Yeah. And all these fun little metrics of it's crazy. And you start realizing, okay, maybe.

Chad Kodary (14:56.053)
LTV, MRR, churn, all these fun little metrics that you learn about along the way.

Mikael Dia (15:09.454)
people don't care about it as much as I thought they did, or maybe people aren't actually buying or adopting this tool as much as I thought they did. And I learned so much about, you know, when you're dealing with customers versus clients, difference being a client is somebody you service and a customer is somebody who just buys and uses.

Mikael Dia (15:33.678)
You with clients, you speak to them, you, and I still spoke to my customers. I would get on, but they're also different, right? They, none of them are exactly the same versus when you're working directly with client, you can kind of learn as you, you adopt the difference too, is when you're building a software, all of your feedback takes time to actually start to implement, right? I got to go build this shit now and.

Chad Kodary (15:57.859)
Yep, 100%.

Mikael Dia (16:01.102)
It's gonna take three months and then three months later you release it and all that time has passed and you've learned some other crap and it never, it never fucking changes, right? And never, it's tough.

Chad Kodary (16:09.251)
It never changes. Yeah. It's always it's iterating and it's the, it's the, the software cycle, dude, there's a, it's funny because we were cleaning up our JIRA board like three weeks ago. And for those of you guys who don't know what JIRA is, it's just a project management system for developers. Think about it like that. So we're cleaning up our JIRA board and dude, we had tasks in there that were like over a year old.

that we put in there that we're just still in the pipeline. Right. And it's like, it's like, and that's why I'm saying I'm resonating with what you're saying, because you want to create these features and push them out into the market, but you're restricted by the amount of developers you have the, you know, the speed of development, things like that. There's, there's a lot of things that can hold you back, but, but yeah, anyways, go ahead and continue. So, so 17. Yeah, go ahead.

Mikael Dia (16:55.31)
You know, you know what, what's really, um, I think the biggest challenge that I faced in the last, uh, few years is bringing my own ego out of the equation. When I built Phonoledix, it was centered around my idea and my idea had all of these features and these features were for me and my own ego and what I wanted. And.

Then I started realizing, man, what I want and how I think is not necessarily how the market is thinking or what the market wants. And, and, and that's been a big kind of mental shift. So looking at that product backlog, you're like, I want this, I want that, I want this, I want this tool to do all of these things. Yeah, exactly. Totally. And then you realize, Oh man,

Chad Kodary (17:42.595)
Yep. It's like a kid in a candy store. You just grab shit and throw it into the cart.

Mikael Dia (17:51.244)
First of all, none of this works and like every one of these features is built half ass because we're trying to build too many of them simultaneously. Every one of these features speaks to a slightly different person who has a slightly different job to be done. So therefore it doesn't speak to anybody and it just creates this kind of crazy mess. And that was our first version of Phonolytics. V1.

Chad Kodary (18:16.419)
V1, the craziness. That was 2017, 2017, and 2018, right? Two years.

Mikael Dia (18:22.19)
Yeah, 2018 was the launch of like the and then to 28 19. So 2018 2019.

Chad Kodary (18:27.107)
2019. Okay. Okay. Got it. And then going in and I've, I've known you now for, I know, probably over five years, I think, because I remember like the beginning of dash likes is when we first met you've been on podcasts. We've you've been on webinars of ours in the past. Um, I know. So, all right. So what happens after that? So at one point, I know you also went through a round of funding, right? You went through around a funding. That's that's such a, I, we, I remember one day I called you cause I wanted to learn more about it. I wanted to.

Mikael Dia (18:34.606)
Yeah, around that time is when we started.

Yep.

Chad Kodary (18:56.643)
See what the process was like. I was so, I was so fat. I was fascinated by the process of funding, like what makes an owner go through the process of one? Why do you want to fund? Cause a lot of owners are greedy and you want to keep all the revenue and you don't want to, you know, give percentages or equity to, you know, VCs. Right. So it's like a lot of owners will try to do it themselves. Like what in your mind made you want to go through the funding? And if you can also talk about, I really want to talk about the.

the process. I remember you telling me it takes a long time. Like people underestimate the amount of work and time it takes to actually raise capital, right?

Mikael Dia (19:34.286)
takes a really long time. It's a lot of effort. It's a lot of a think of raising funding as selling somebody on a $2 million offer. Like how long is it going to take you to convince somebody for to buy something for $2 million? That's really what's happening, right? Think of an investor as a customer, a prospect as an example. And what they're paying for is a piece of this business for

Chad Kodary (19:46.913)
Mmm.

Chad Kodary (19:58.531)
I didn't think about it like that.

Mikael Dia (20:03.662)
2 million bucks. So I raised 1 .5. I raised a total of 3 .3 million. Yeah. So, but that's the, that's the mentality that you have to have. Right. So, okay. How long is it going to take you to, from the initial conversation to getting somebody to actually write you that check and put it into your bank account? Well, they're not going to give it to you without doing a whole bunch of due diligence.

Chad Kodary (20:05.507)
That's what you raised, right? You raised two.

Mikael Dia (20:30.926)
They want to understand the story. They want to understand where it's going. They want to understand how this money is going to help you grow. And, and they're, you know, at the end of the day, they're a customer in a sense, they're an investor, but, you know, think of them as a customer. So what is their reward here? Why are they paying for this? Well, they're paying for the upside. So you've got to craft that entire narrative. You have to have those conversations. You have to have those pitches. You have to have the rejections. And it's the same thing. It's like running a completely different business.

simultaneously, right? It's just this customer is now worth $2 million versus these customers are worth whatever. And it's not really a customer because they don't care about your product. They just care about the business metrics and the outcome. So I'll tell you why I started.

Chad Kodary (21:01.123)
It's crazy.

Chad Kodary (21:12.067)
And the outcome yeah the metrics what what made you want before you go through like yeah, what was the reason what was your why why?

Mikael Dia (21:20.59)
Yeah, let me tell you the why. So it was actually, here, let me show you this actually. I have it right here. So.

I was in I had just written this book. Okay, so this is a basically a my Year of launch at funnel it excels funnel electronicals and and everything I was doing was basically bootstrapped like I had Documented a lot of it. It was all centered around me and the reason I was able to Make so much in those first two years was because I was posting all the time and everything was centered around me as the founder

right? So everything was founder led. Um, and with some of the money and all of that stuff, we were kind of still, even though we were growing, we were, we are still very much reinvesting all of the money. I was hiring more developers and things are really expensive. Software is not cheap. Like, you know, you, you keep going, you're like frig, man, how much money? Like, I can't keep selling these lifetime deals. Like it's not generating enough cash. So we need to move faster.

I went to St. Lucia with my wife. It was our five year anniversary. And in St. Lucia, I brought one book. Okay. This book was called Blitz Scaling by Reid Hoffman, who is the founder of LinkedIn. Okay. Now, and now he's one of the top VCs in Silicon Valley. And in hindsight,

you know, knowing that he's a VC, this book makes sense. But as I'm reading this book, basically the, it's called blitz scaling. And the idea is that when you're a technology company that is revolutionary, and that is basically doing something quite disruptive, if you don't blitz scale, your competitors are going to come and eat you. That's basically the thought process. So you should raise money and you should scale as fast as you can.

Mikael Dia (23:24.494)
because if you're not scaling or in his words, blitz scaling, you run the risk of losing, right? Now, again, he's a VC. So it makes sense. Cause he's basically saying, come to us with your best ideas and we'll invest in them. And at the time I had this duality in my head, I was like, okay, this is really expensive trying to build this company, trying to scale this. I'm selling these lifetime licenses. We're making money, but.

Fuck me, it's a lot of work kind of doing these pitches all the time and doing these promos and these launches and all that stuff. These engineers aren't cheaper. In fact, I need more of them. So what should I do? Should I keep going with the idea of I own 100 % of this and it stays as kind of a lifestyle business? Or do I take the advice from this book called Blitz Scaling and find a way to Blitz Scale?

Sounds good in theory. Um, but that's what sparked my thought around, okay, you know what? I'm going to go in and I'm going to actually go and try to raise, raise money.

Chad Kodary (24:32.195)
Well, how did you do it? What was like the way, let's say, let's say in your mind, you got the check mark. You're like, all right, I'm doing this blitz scaling thing. Right. Where did you go? Who did you speak to? What are you like? What do you even do from there?

Mikael Dia (24:43.598)
Yeah, that's good. It's a good question. Uh, in the same thought process that you have where if my goal is to get my first few customers, how do you go and get your first few customers? You're not going to build a funnel. You're not going to, you're just going to go to your network and you're going to ask, who do I know that knows VCs? That's what I did. So I started there and I, a friend of mine, uh, knew a, a VC here in the, in the city. Uh, I started.

I met with them. Then I started setting up some meetings with other VCs in the city, just kind of cold emailing them and just seeing if they were interested. And I kind of got some feedback. Full force, right? This is 2019. Yeah. I went to St. Lucia in 2019 in summer 2019. And I started as soon as I came back from there, I started, okay, you know what, let's go for it. Let's try to raise some money and see if I can take this to.

Chad Kodary (25:23.619)
at this point you were full force into finding somebody yeah okay you check you got the check mark going

Chad Kodary (25:42.979)
And did you know, did you know what the amount that you were looking for and the percentage that you wanted to give away? You knew that off, you knew that in your mind. Okay.

Mikael Dia (25:47.15)
Uh, 1 .5. I didn't know the percentage. Nope. I didn't know the percentage. Um, I, it didn't work in the same way, like, uh, as like a shark tank in a sense, like I, I didn't know that I wanted, and it doesn't work that way anyways, but, um, I knew I kind of was like, I'm going to raise about 1 .5 million. That was kind of the thought process in hindsight. I actually probably wrote a raised a little too little.

Chad Kodary (26:09.443)
Okay.

Mikael Dia (26:16.782)
And, um, there's a bunch of stuff I can dive into there, but that's what I started with. So I was like, okay, the first intro was from a friend to one of the VCs that he knows. And he was kind of partners and friends with, so that was kind of my first meeting because I had this warm intro. Then I started having a few other discussions, um, and I started getting feedback. Uh, we had, I had to build a pitch deck and I spent time building a pitch deck and trying to learn as to.

Chad Kodary (26:38.723)
Did you have a pitch deck?

Mikael Dia (26:45.934)
Okay, what's the best way?

Chad Kodary (26:45.955)
And by the way, building, just building the pitch deck itself, they, you need not, you need all the unit economics of your company. And a lot of the times you don't have those things. Unless you have funnel. I'm kidding.

Mikael Dia (26:49.806)
is a pain.

You need all the metrics. Now you don't. Now there's, well, a funnel will only tell you units about your funnel. Nothing else. Now here's the thing though. When you're raising a seed round, which is basically your first round of funding as a startup, it is 80 % about the founder and the story.

and 20 % about the product and the actual unit economics.

Chad Kodary (27:24.163)
Yeah, cause they want to see that you're, you're legitimately in it for the long run. Yeah.

Mikael Dia (27:26.062)
because it's a, it's a big bet, right? When you're at a seed round stage, like there's no proof really, like a lot of seed rounds are, are pre revenue. A lot of seed rounds are in my case, all of my money was lifetime. So they saw a that I know how to market B that there's clearly a founder problem fit there. Not necessarily a product market fit, but at least as a founder, I understand why I'm building this tool. Um,

And there's some high level traction here, right? So, but it's still a major bet. Like, is this going to work? Is it going to be sticky? Are we going to, is this going to grow fast, et cetera, unknowns, right? When you get to a series a round, which is kind of the next one, those numbers kind of go 50 50. I need to see 50 % of the numbers work. Maybe even closer, like 70 30, uh, 60 40 70.

Chad Kodary (28:21.027)
By the way, just real quick for context for the people that are listening, because I know they're going to have this question. Um, what's the major difference between seed and series a, right? Is it like monetary? Like what do you, it's usually the amount that you're looking for.

Mikael Dia (28:29.934)
Okay, so.

Mikael Dia (28:34.734)
Uh, it's the amount that you're looking for and it's where you're at in your journey as a, as a company. So typically, uh, a seed round, your pre -revenue, very low revenue, your pre -product market fit. So you're still trying to figure out where's your market and how to take it there. Um, series a you're at market product market fit. You've proven that you know exactly your ideal customer and you know how to get them.

Right. Those are the two key aspects of it. And typically you're going to be sitting at around 200, 250 ,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And there's proof in the motion. So we're growing, we're moving in the right direction. We know we have a channel that's driving these, these ICPs. Um, and we understand who is our user and their stickiness to it. Right. And then you're usually raising a kind of $10 million check. And then you get to series B and C and all that stuff. And that's.

That's when you're raising even more. Um, so that process basically, yeah, me speaking to a whole bunch of investors and eventually, uh, I started right after summer. So in the summer of, uh, 2019 and I closed the round in April of 2020.

Chad Kodary (29:56.867)
Is that like eight months? Seven, eight months?

Mikael Dia (29:58.706)
Yeah, about about eight months. No, not even maybe nine. Right. So like,

Chad Kodary (30:02.827)
Nine months. So from you looking to actually getting money in your bank.

Mikael Dia (30:07.086)
Probably about, yeah, six to nine months, somewhere around there. I don't remember exactly when I came back from San Luis.

Chad Kodary (30:10.499)
Okay. And how many people do you think you spoke to that you did the pitch for?

Mikael Dia (30:14.03)
I pitched to...

Mikael Dia (30:19.438)
So it doesn't work in a, it's interesting how it works. So what you'll do is you'll get a lead investor. So let's say you're trying to raise $1 .5 million. An investor is not gonna come in and give you a check for 1 .5. That's very rare. It might, but it's rare that it happens. What they'll usually happen is basically I'll come in as the lead investor and I'll set the terms. So I'm gonna give you a check of 750.

And I want, let's say at a $4 million valuation. So I want whatever 20 % or whatever it is, 10%, et cetera. Um, and, uh, you're going to now need to go and find the other 750. Now we will activate our check. If you find a minimum of $1 but we're allowing you to raise up to 1 .5, let's say, right? Exactly. They set all the terms, right?

Chad Kodary (31:10.115)
Gotcha. So they said all the terms basically for you to go out. Got it.

Mikael Dia (31:14.766)
And then you have to go and pitch a few more times and find and be like, I already got this lead over here. We're just looking to fill up the rest of this round. And that's basically the process. So I found that one lead. They gave the first check, they set the terms, and then I went and kept pitching to different, uh, VCs to raise the remaining, the remaining balance.

Chad Kodary (31:24.547)
So that's what you did. You found that one person who threw in the big, the big, the big portion, and then you had to fill.

Chad Kodary (31:39.363)
Now I hear stories and I hear people that have literally pitched hundreds of times to, to close their, like how many, how many people have you pitched it to close that first seed round in total?

Mikael Dia (31:45.934)
told me.

Mikael Dia (31:49.614)
Um, so I was, I was pretty fortunate that that first intro that I had with, from my friend to that VC, they were quite interested from the beginning. That was our lead VC. So it worked out quite well. I still had to pitch like, um, you know, they didn't say yes right away. It wasn't, it took, it took a while. It took a couple of months for them to, well, let's see how your numbers go. We want to kind of see you shift over to monthly recurring and.

Chad Kodary (32:00.931)
Was that the person that closed the first? Oh wow. There's your network for you.

Mikael Dia (32:19.566)
and stuff like that. And, oh, I had, of course you got to keep operating. So not only are you doing this, but you've got to go and keep building your business and do things. Right. And, um, and what was interesting is I actually made the switch to monthly recurring. Um,

Chad Kodary (32:20.867)
So you have to make changes along the way.

Chad Kodary (32:27.459)
Yeah.

Mikael Dia (32:38.926)
during that process. So we went from lifetime to recurring revenue. Now, huh? I stopped lifetime. I basically said this was the end of the lifetime. And then we switched it to over, uh, annual recurring and then, um, and then monthly recurring and all of that momentum of like people who are waiting for monthly got in. So here's what happened. Basically.

Chad Kodary (32:44.771)
He stopped lifetime. You stopped the lifetime completely and went straight.

Mikael Dia (33:10.03)
right before like I was already in talks with these VCs and we were kind of on the fence and they were kind of sitting there like, yeah, you know, there's really no proof here. Like this pretty risky, like, yeah, you sold a lot of lifetime licenses, but none of that money's coming back to you. So like, we don't know. And then because I had built this community over two years, built this group, built this momentum, all of these people who were kind of sitting on the fence who like didn't want to pay the $700 for lifetime.

but we're kind of waiting for it to kind of be a monthly thing.

Chad Kodary (33:42.691)
Closing the doors, they're closed out.

Mikael Dia (33:44.558)
Yeah, but as soon as I opened up the monthly, we got a massive influx of people coming in. And this was like literally exactly. They just wanted to try it without committing $700. Right now. $99 a month is what I start.

Chad Kodary (33:50.563)
Wow. Cause they wanted to try it probably without paying the yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. What was the monthly? What'd you, what was the plan? 99 bucks. Yeah. You see like that. So instead of paying seven times the amount, right? So they just, they jumped in for a hundred bucks and they wanted to try it for a month or two.

Mikael Dia (34:06.166)
precisely. They jumped in for 100 bucks. Here's what happened. So we make we make the switch. This is about November ish 2019. And when we made that switch, our MRR started going up really quickly because all these people were just sitting there waiting. And so it started to buy, buy, buy. And then

I get to about, um, January, February with the VCs. Now it's set terms are in everything signed. We're just waiting for the legal documents. Right? So they've done their due diligence. Now it's just about a matter of lawyers back and forth waiting. And that takes another six weeks before all that. Hence why the money came in in April, but already things were set. And because I had built two years worth of, of basically like pressure,

our monthly recurring kept happening. Then March hits, which is COVID 2020. And then churn goes like this. It starts to go down, right? People are starting to cancel fast. I'm like, Oh, fuck. And then as I'm seeing this, I'm not hiding it from the VCs, but they, they don't yet have, the deal isn't closed because it was closing in April. So,

Chad Kodary (35:07.235)
Oh god.

Mikael Dia (35:30.542)
We close in April and like my revenue is going like this, like it's going straight down. Basically, eventually it starts to flatline a little bit near near the bottom. Um, but the money's already in the account at this stage. So it's kind of like one of those situations where it's like, sorry, like I didn't, I didn't fucking know, right? Uh, I didn't know that this was going to happen. Um, but that made me fucking realize a whole lot of stuff like,

Chad Kodary (35:52.161)
Yeah, nobody knew that was gonna happen.

Mikael Dia (36:00.238)
A, our product is clearly a nice to have and not a necessity at this stage because COVID hit and it's first thing that they're canceling. Uh, and, and it just became this crazy, crazy, like loop of now, okay, how the fuck do we figure out churn? How do we create retention? How do we solve these problems? What features do we build? At least we've got all this money in the bank account now so we can actually start.

building and thinking.

Chad Kodary (36:29.955)
What did you do with that by the way money hit the bank account? What was like the first thing you did? Did you go pop a bottle at one of the clubs? I'm just.

Mikael Dia (36:36.014)
We I did I did celebrate with friends. I was like, look, this is amazing. It's a great achievement, but it's actually a really weird feeling to go from bootstrapped where every month you're like, oh fuck, I got to do another promo. And it changed my entire mentality, man. They changed everything in my, in my mindset, because now I looked at, I opened up my bank account and I'm like, man, there's $1 .5 million in here.

Chad Kodary (36:51.491)
I know how that feels.

Mikael Dia (37:03.342)
I don't have to go and do this launch. I don't have to record this video over here that I don't want to record and I...

Chad Kodary (37:08.259)
Do you think that, do you think that it was bad? Okay. Cause I see where you're getting with this. Yeah. You got, you got more comfortable, which is not good sometimes in.

Mikael Dia (37:11.246)
It was very bad. I think it, yeah.

Um, I wouldn't say comfortable. I would say that, cause it's, it's not like I slowed down working. Um, I just worked a whole lot more behind the scenes as opposed to on the front end, et cetera. Right. So it forced me, what it did is, is made me kind of focus a lot more on the product on, on the customers and a lot less on the marketing, which is a good thing. Cause I was basically marketing something that was just a leaky bucket at the end of the day.

But I had to because if I didn't, then we weren't making enough money and I would have to let people go. However, what it did do is basically, I don't know, it made me start to realize that, okay, when you have that kind of money in a bank account and the people behind that money are saying, okay, spend it now.

Chad Kodary (37:48.035)
Yep. Yep.

Chad Kodary (38:07.075)
They want you to spend, what was the, if I'm not mistaken, they give you, I think it's like an 18 month run rate or they give you like some type of run rate and they want you to spend all the money with them at time.

Mikael Dia (38:15.918)
basically, right? So they want you to raise your next round in about 18 months. So basically, your goal is to grow fast enough to hit the right metrics so that you can raise your next round in 18 ish months, 18 to 24 months, right? So now you've got to take this 1 .5 million, you divide that by, I don't know, whatever 18 months is. So 123456 divided by 18 is

Chad Kodary (38:18.435)
start burning money.

Mikael Dia (38:45.134)
you know, 83 K or a little bit more or whatever it is. So now you're basically increasing your burn to make that happen. So you're investing in, in, in product you're investing in and you've got to kind of decide, well, where do I want to invest? Where do I think it's going to make the biggest impact so I can grow and I can take it to the next level? No, every month we were burning every month. Cause you're.

Chad Kodary (39:07.971)
And were you burning every month or were you profitable every month you're burning right yeah I mean as normal. You're literally an extra hundred K a month to just burn every month. Wow.

Mikael Dia (39:13.87)
It's normal. You're, you're taking that money and you're putting it up upfront. Just burn basically just use that money, hire people, hire more engineers, use it on marketing. If you think that's the right move. Uh, and nobody's giving you a playbook, right? There's no like one size fits all it's use your discretion. Here's this money, figure it out. Right? How.

Chad Kodary (39:37.059)
So they didn't, I know there's certain types of VCs that are like, they, they also like instill employees, like leadership teams in your organization or, or they're literally like working with you, doing calls with you, like figuring out stuff was your VCs doing that, or there was just like, here's 1 .5 figure it out.

Mikael Dia (39:52.462)
No, there's very few VCs that will do that. Very few VCs, like they will, they'll have a board seat. So now I have to start board meetings, right? Every single quarter. So as soon as the money comes in every quarter, I have to report back. So it keeps you accountable in the sense of like, I have to reflect back every quarter on like, what do we do? What are the metrics we're hitting? Where are we going? Et cetera. But it also kind of puts this weird,

this weird mindset because it's not as though, cause you don't want to go back to your board and be like, this quarter was shit. Right? So you're trying to figure out how do I position this in a way that it was bad, but it was also good. And these are the, you know, even though, cause you're just sitting here reporting back to people. Right? So it's like, it's like reporting back to your boss. Like if you imagine you have a boss, you're not going to go back to your boss and be like,

Chad Kodary (40:31.393)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (40:43.299)
Yeah, it's tricky man.

Mikael Dia (40:51.534)
Yeah, so clearly I suck at my job and this quarter was shit and my earn up. It's like, no, no, no. We did all these things. These things didn't work over here, but I can see some momentum over here. And you know, you're trying to figure out how do I tell this story in a way that makes, you know, makes sense. So go ahead. Yep.

Chad Kodary (41:10.307)
So eight, let, let, so 18 months go by, right? You, I'm sure hired, you know, spent money on marketing. I'm sure probably what like big majority went to payroll.

Mikael Dia (41:20.55)
vast majority went to engineering.

Chad Kodary (41:21.923)
Okay. Yeah. Engineering makes sense. Um, 18 months go by. What happens next?

Mikael Dia (41:27.566)
So 18 months go by first, um, in March, about March of 2020, no, no, no, sorry. March of 2021. I lose my, my principal engineer, the person who built the foundation of funnel. He decides to leave and I have no one to replace him. So now I just have a handful of engineers who are kind of free flowing like.

They're there. They've got no leadership. I'm not an engineer. I don't know what, what to do here. Uh, so it took us from basically March until August of 2021 to find a replacement. So for about six ish months, we were stagnant. Like we had engineers, we hired an engineering, an agency, burned a whole lot of money and it was useless. It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done that, but I was like,

freaking out and figuring out like what the fuck do I do?

Chad Kodary (42:24.195)
Yeah. Yeah. And at the same time, by the way, just for the audience, so they understand at the same time you have users using the platform, you have tickets being open, there's bugs being reported. They're like, this is the business doesn't stop. I just want to make sure everybody's on the same page here. Cause I know what you're talking about. Yeah.

Mikael Dia (42:32.302)
100%.

There's gonna be lots.

Yeah, it doesn't stop. The churn is still happening. We're still acquiring customers. They're still churning. We got to fix these things. And, and for about six months we have no leadership and no real engineering team. Right? So now things are like, Oh fuck. Okay. So that took us six months. Then are we finally find a VP of engineering and take it for another three months for that person to ramp up and to start rebuilding the team that takes us to about.

Chad Kodary (42:45.173)
Yep, yep.

Mikael Dia (43:08.45)
October ish. Now, yeah, almost a year. Now, here's the problem. When I raised the first round of funding, I made the decision to rebuild Funnelytics. So I went and built a hat, I went and built Funnelytics 2 .0. So while people are still signing up to 1 .0, and there's all these bugs in these issues, we decided we're not going to keep building 1 .0, we'll fix bugs here and there and stuff.

Chad Kodary (43:10.627)
almost a year.

Chad Kodary (43:22.883)
I've been there. Been there.

Mikael Dia (43:37.902)
but we're really gonna spend all of our time building 2 .0. And now there's a gap in time right here of like, okay, well, we can't build 2 .0 because nobody's leading this. But we're still learning from 1 .0 and building 2 .0 in the way that we feel will have a stickier product and all that stuff.

Chad Kodary (43:56.547)
How long did it take to build 2 .0? Two years. Same here, by the way. We went from DashX 1 .0 to 2 .0. There was a two -year gap, about a two -year gap.

Mikael Dia (43:59.054)
It took us two years. Yeah.

Mikael Dia (44:04.462)
Yeah, yeah, there you go. So.

So now I'm still burning money. We're growing, but not fast. And while we decided to transition from 1 .0 to 2 .0 from a product standpoint, I also decided to transition my business model. So instead of going after small users at $99 a month, I figured, okay, well, can we figure out how to get bigger companies at a much higher price point who really care about performance and all that stuff. So.

We started building a kind of a sales team and a sales led approach and all of that and experimenting and testing there. And we were starting to see some traction there, but we were still onboarding people in 1 .0 and using a flawed and broken product to some degree. And.

Chad Kodary (44:51.115)
Yep.

How would you say the overall, this would be fast forward, the overall of the slight call it enterprise or whatever you want to call it, right? That approach was that better or worse for the business.

Mikael Dia (45:05.422)
Um, I think overall it was the, it's the right type of customers. It didn't work for our model. We had the free mapping tool that was driving all of our leads, but there weren't enough big clients coming into the mapping tool. So it didn't work for how we were generating traffic and what was driving our core. Um,

Chad Kodary (45:24.215)
Gotcha.

Chad Kodary (45:30.531)
It's almost like you had a lead magnet that wasn't pulling the right leads in for you in a way. Yeah. Cool.

Mikael Dia (45:34.008)
Precisely. 100%. We had a lead magnet that wasn't pulling in the right leads. So we needed to figure out how do we get better leads, but we still had this massive pool, like with 7 ,000 -ish people signing up every month to our mapping tool organically, not spending any dollars.

Chad Kodary (45:48.887)
That's by the way, that's fucking insane. I remember you told me that a couple of weeks ago when we were talking. It's, I still find that insane. You need to find a way to like heavily monetize that.

Mikael Dia (45:55.086)
I know it was insane and it's still, it's still like a lot of traffic, but it's not the, it wasn't the right type of customer for us to sell on these high tickets. So we were only closing 10 to 15 per month at like 500 to a thousand dollars on monthly. Right? So it wasn't, it was growing, but it wasn't growing fast enough, especially from a VC style type of business. So now come.

comes December, 2021. And I'm basically out of cash. I have no money left. We've burned through it. It was from April, 2020 all the way to December, 2021. So I go back to my VCs. I'm like, okay, like obviously I'm having board meetings this whole time and, and, and so they're, they're up to date. So they decide that they're going to put in more money because a, we haven't had a chance to launch funnel X 2 .0.

Chad Kodary (46:44.769)
Yeah, yeah, they know what's going on.

Chad Kodary (46:53.923)
and they're invested.

Mikael Dia (46:54.094)
And, and they're invested now and like, okay, there's, you know, there's clearly some traction happening here. Um, so they put in more money in final in final analytics and we raise kind of another set of, uh, funding and, uh, we launched funnel. Licks 2 .0 in May of tw - they put in another just chive 2 million. Yeah. And about, uh, one.

Chad Kodary (47:13.699)
That was another 2 million.

Mikael Dia (47:21.038)
0 .8 or something like that. So basically, uh -huh.

Chad Kodary (47:23.107)
How'd you feel after that? How'd you feel after that?

Mikael Dia (47:28.694)
Less excited, more like, yeah, more pressure and more, um, more of like a feeling of.

Chad Kodary (47:30.595)
Hmm. More pressure, maybe?

Mikael Dia (47:42.03)
I'm doing this to stay alive and not, you know, kill the whole, everything we've built for the last year, but the numbers weren't anywhere near ready for a series A, right? Like we, we wouldn't have raised a series A cause we were basically restarting with this bigger segment.

Chad Kodary (47:47.075)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (47:58.307)
Yeah. And when you raise, by the way, when you, when you raise with the same VC, you're not going through a nine month process again, are you? Right. That's like a quick thing.

Mikael Dia (48:06.222)
No, it's much faster, right? All it comes down to is, okay, well, what terms? So like at first they have to, you still have to do the pitch. You still have to go through that. You still have to go through the legal aspect of things. Um, you still have to speak to the board and all that stuff. And then they're going to come back and say, all right, look, we're going to put in more, but it's going to be at this valuation or whatever it may be. Right. And.

We, we, so overall, you know, we increased the valuation and because we did build a whole lot of stuff and, and we're just kind of getting ready to launch funnel X 2 .0. Um, so we launched funnel X 2 .0 in May of 2022. And we've raised another $1 .8 million. We're still burning. And now it's, it's like, okay, go time, right? We've got to take this 1 .8 and get it to a stage where.

It's growing fast enough for us to basically, um, for us to raise our series a, right? So we start accelerating kind of our operations. We start spending some money on marketing, uh, and testing different experiments. All of the meanwhile, yes, we launched funnel X 2 .0, but as you know, when you launch something, it doesn't go according to plan. It doesn't work the way that you thought it would work.

Chad Kodary (49:26.947)
Never. Never at all.

Mikael Dia (49:30.382)
So there's still bugs. People aren't adopting it the way we expected them to. Some power users are giving us some feedback and saying like they love it more than 1 .0, but overall this is missing and this from 1 .0 is missing and this and that. And it just creates a new backlog of issues all the way through to the point where basically in 2023 we've run through all this cash where we're basically burning.

And now we've gotten to a stage where we're not, we can't raise, we can't raise the next round. So I had to make a whole lot of cuts, take it all the way back. Uh, and even though we've grown, even though the numbers are still moving in the right direction, it just wasn't fast enough for venture level scale because our churn was still too high. Huh?

Chad Kodary (50:18.979)
Yep. So now you're back in it though. How does, how does it feel to go from starting something to going through like that whole funding burning money and like, and now back at like, okay, like we're going to do this again, but the right way. And I'm asking that out of all respect is that it's I've been there. I've been up and down in our business and dashbacks. So I'm just curious to see me. Obviously I didn't, we didn't do any funding yet. So minus the funding part, but like,

Mikael Dia (50:47.534)
Um...

Chad Kodary (50:49.165)
Where are you at right now mentally is like, are you like ready to

Mikael Dia (50:50.67)
think, I think it makes, I think it makes you, it makes you doubt yourself a lot. It makes you sit back and say, man, what am I fucking doing wrong, especially because of social media and you look at, you know, you see everybody sharing their wins of like, from zero to 20 million in ARR in five years, and you're like, what the fuck did this person do? And how did they do it? And what, what worked and why isn't

thing, why aren't things working on our end? And, um, you read all the books, you, you do what you think is going to make the, is the right moves. And so I think it makes you, it made me doubt myself a lot. It made me doubt my vision for this product, uh, and for this business for sure. Um, it took me a good year. So from basically early 2023 to now to reset.

Funnel lytics to kind of get back to a stage of like why am I doing this? What am I trying to prove with this high fast growth? Who is this for like a lot of these questions? I had to kind of come back to to really truly understand

What is the purpose in a sense? What is my why behind all of this?

Chad Kodary (52:11.137)
What is it?

Mikael Dia (52:14.414)
Truthfully, it's this product. I genuinely believe and love what we've built and the tool that we have. And I genuinely believe that marketers need a tool like ours to be data -driven, to better understand why things are working or not working. And I'm very, very attached to my product. What I've come to realize though, is that isn't good enough or that's...

That doesn't mean that you have a business. It just means that you have a product that you love and doesn't mean that people are going to use it. Doesn't mean that they're going to stick to it. Um, and it's also made me realize what my strengths are and what I truly love to do versus what I've kind of been forced to do by being the founder and CEO of this company. Right.

Chad Kodary (53:08.131)
Yeah, I can resonate with that. What do you like doing? What's your thing? If you could product, huh?

Mikael Dia (53:12.43)
100%. 100%. Like for me, I love product. I love to look at my product. I love to work with my engineering team. I love to design the product. I love to speak to customers to figure out what's next in the product. I hate, well, I very much dislike, yeah. I hate, I hate hiring. I hate hiring. I hate managing people. I hate building culture.

Chad Kodary (53:16.195)
I would say the same for me too.

Chad Kodary (53:26.849)
Yep.

Chad Kodary (53:31.011)
Well, you could say it, say it. You hate. I hate it too. I know what you're going to say. Yep.

Mikael Dia (53:40.142)
I very much dislike the fundraising process. I -

Chad Kodary (53:45.091)
Dude, most, most founders are like that. We're more of like creative product driven.

Mikael Dia (53:48.078)
Yeah. And we're exactly to it. And it's gone to the stage where I actually very much dislike the marketing aspect of things. Right. I,

Chad Kodary (53:56.515)
Yeah, I, I agree. I was, I just, I literally just did an interview with Kevin Hansen. Um, and I don't know if you know who he is, but he does like all the videos for like, he does like videos of video marketing agency does all the video and ads and stuff. He works with ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson and like all those guys. And I was telling him, I was like, dude, like I had to sit like the last like two weeks and I had this, who's going to shoot the ads. Somebody has to shoot the ads, right? I had to shoot like fucking 30 videos and I shot it too. I did it.

shot like 30 videos in like three days. And I was like, who the hell on earth would, would enjoy doing that? That's not fun. I don't want to do that.

Mikael Dia (54:32.226)
But some people do, right? And that's the key. There are some people who love exactly, right? I'm not me either. And that's the thing you end up.

Chad Kodary (54:35.233)
Not me. Not me.

I like to whiteboard. I just hit my whiteboard and just hang out in my office and just whiteboard product all day.

Mikael Dia (54:43.982)
Totally me too. Whiteboard product. I don't mind. I love whiteboarding strategies and all that stuff when it comes to marketing strategies and all that. But truthfully, like, um, in an ideal world, you, you understand where your zone of genius is and you basically sit back and say, okay, let me find people who are better than me at these other things and who love it, who are, that's their zone of genius. And they, that is the secret. And I think,

Chad Kodary (55:08.995)
That's the secret to business. That's the secret sauce, dude.

Mikael Dia (55:12.686)
The challenge with being solo founder, you're a solo founder. Okay. You have partners. I'm a solo founder. Um, the challenge is you end up being the jack of all trades for, for things, right? Um, and then when you do raise money, you're trying to use that money to hire these other people, but sometimes you've got to do it in the right order. So what, one of the mistakes we made when we raised, especially the second round,

Chad Kodary (55:16.323)
I have three partners, co -founders.

Mikael Dia (55:41.006)
was we tried to build the operations and the team faster than the product was before we really had. So it's like, okay, we raised the round in January of 2022. We launched FunnelX 2 .0 in May of 2022. So what do we do between January and May? We built the team to be ready for the launch of anticipating that things would really go well, right? So.

Chad Kodary (56:06.133)
Got you.

Mikael Dia (56:09.294)
We built the operator, we built the marketing team, we started building this team.

Chad Kodary (56:12.419)
You built the machine and you weren't the machine didn't need to be used yet. Yeah.

Mikael Dia (56:16.59)
Exactly. Right. So I use that money in anticipation. That was the biggest mistake. I should have just said, okay, we're going to sit on this cash a little bit. We're going to build following two point to launch it. Get it. Like if I built the team today, now that we have two point, Oh, where it's really sticky and it's working really well for the right types of customers. Uh, now building the machine would make a lot of sense, right. Uh, and building the team and finding the head of marketing or whatever.

Chad Kodary (56:38.179)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (56:43.779)
Hey, look, dude, we all, I know we're running out of time, but we all, we all learn stuff in business. Your journey's definitely been inspiring. I've been watching it for a year for years. Now the ups and downs, it comes with every business. I think that's a beautiful thing about this podcast is like, I get to speak to business owners, just like you every single day. And people think like they think business is beautiful. It's perfect. You make a lot of money. It's like, they don't, that's the whole, that this podcast is called behind the revenue.

Mikael Dia (56:50.286)
That's a lot of fun.

Mikael Dia (57:05.708)
I'll have it works.

Mikael Dia (57:09.59)
Exactly.

Chad Kodary (57:09.635)
Right. And people just look at, they look at the money dollar, the, the money symbols are like, Oh, this dude's making a lot of money. It's like, okay, why don't you take a look behind the scenes and see what it's really like. Right. So thank you, Mikael for coming on, by the way, guys, for those of you guys, uh, especially, I know we're, we're our audiences, a lot of marketers on here. So guys go check out funnel. It is a great tool. I've used it. It's awesome. Especially if you're looking to map your data and get some real time analytics going, check them out. They're awesome.

Mikael Dia (57:18.414)
Totally.

Chad Kodary (57:37.539)
I know you guys opened up some new plans and you're playing around with pricing a little bit. So it's super affordable. Jump on in. Mikael, if they, if they want to reach out to you, where's the best spot.

Mikael Dia (57:46.376)
LinkedIn. Come connect with me on LinkedIn is kind of the best place for you to see some stuff that I post and reach out to me.

Chad Kodary (57:55.107)
Awesome. All right. Thank you, brother. And I'm sure we'll have you on again in the near future. Have a good one. Bye.

Mikael Dia (57:59.182)
Cheers, thank you, man. Bye.