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Here’s your program.
Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. How do you build a business with a recurring, dependable revenue? Joining me is David Graff, founder and CEO of Hudl, an online coaching software that over 2,000 schools pay for and use to improve their games. David, welcome to Mixergy.
David: Hey, Andrew. Thanks a lot of having us on.
Andrew: You bet. So I said over 2,000. Can you sharpen that for me by maybe saying how many schools are paying for your software?
David: Yeah. In 2010, we had about 2,300 teams pay us.
Andrew: 2,300 teams pay you. I’m on your website now. I see that it’s a minimum of $800 a year. So if I do back of the envelope math here, let me see, $800 a year times 2,300 schools, that’s over $1.8 million in revenue. How does that sound?
David: Yeah. It’s a little bit more than that. We get a little more per school because we have the three packages. It’s a little north of $2 million.
Andrew: Okay. What’s the highest? I gave the lowest price per month. What’s the highest average?
David: So $3,000 is our Platinum Package, which is kind of the [inaudible 02:33]. It’s colleges. It’s Texas high school football teams. And then they can also add — that’s a single sport — the multi-sport package which could double that to $6,000 a year.
Andrew: Wow, so $3,000, $6,000 a year is what schools are paying you. That’s incredible. Let’s help my audience understand what Hudl is. Do you have an example of a school that uses Hudl? I’d like to hear how they use it and how it improves their game.
David: Yeah. We can take a high school here in Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln was one of our pilot partners, one of the first schools to use Hudl, and one of our support people is actually currently a coach over at that school now. So what they do is before . . . so I’ll paint a picture of what is was before.
These teams would put together, every game day they would record their video from one angle or multiple angles, from the press box it could be a really wide shot and a tight shot on just the offensive line, for example — football is the case I’m using – and there could be an end zone shot. They take those three different cameras and they burn DVDs of them and show those to the coaches for them to break down with paper and pencil or to break down in Excel. And they’d show DVDs to their players and try to do all their [inaudible 03:43] by hand, all their recording.
Other solutions existed. There was some software in the space and some companies that had quite a bit of market share. But they were all focused on a single software. So you’d buy a laptop from them. You’d pay $3,000 to $4,000 upfront. You had one seat to use it where you coaches could take turns breaking it down and they just couldn’t really go in-depth with it.
Andrew: And so, first of all, I didn’t realize that colleges and high schools even do this kind of work on their teams. I didn’t realize that they had multiple cameras on their teams, that they were then analyzing it afterwards. That they would even pull up a spreadsheet to me seems a lot more sophisticated than I expected. But that’s what they were doing before you. Now that they have Hudl, what does Hudl do for them with all this video that they’re collecting?
David: Exactly. So during a game now, they can have that camera plugged in right there live as the event’s going on, a computer and be capturing it right there and starting to break down the data or afterwards, if it’s a hard drive camera, they just plug it in [inaudible 04:41] the files straight over, take a DVD and rip it in and they publish it on to our site, Hudl.com. And instead of the coaches on Saturday morning, coming in early, sitting down in front of a computer and waiting their turn to do their breakdown or taking those DVDs and starting to chart things out by hand and recognize tendencies, instead it’s all done online.
The coaches go on, they hit “Publish,” Friday night after the game and it goes to our site Hudl.com. The coaches all log in from home either that night or the next morning. At the same time, they can be breaking down those games, so one guy can be doing down distance, offense, defense, kick, first down, whatever it may be, however deep he wants to go. Another guy could be doing front coverage blitz. They’re all doing it at the same time and getting that video done so much faster. Our guys said it used to take an entire Saturday. They can now get down to, dividing it up between their entire staff, 30 minutes breakdown time for one game.
Andrew: And so, they can annotate the video and they could say, “Pay attention to this player’s knee in this shot and what the other player’s doing in this shot.” And then all the other people on the team can see that and can analyze and understand it?
David: Yeah, you’re spot on. So once that film is online and they’ve done all that breakdown, the coaches can go in and make those kind of playlists, we call them. Where if you’re my quarterback and I’ve got 10 plays I really want you to focus on. It would be 10 things you did well this previous game that I know I’m going to use next week. Or it could be 10 plays where you did not too good of a job that I really want you to pay attention to and see where your mistakes were.
We’ve got those . . . [inaudible 06:08] for a lot of coaches is we call them John Madden-style telestration tools. So you’ve got the ink telestrator. You’ve got the spot shadows. You’ve got your text notes. Or a coach can even record his voice right on top of it and point out to you exactly where your mistake happened and what you need to do better for next time.
Andrew: You know, I usually focus on the story of the business behind the technology, not on the technology itself, but I’m so amazed as I go through your site and I get to see that this is done. I can’t believe that this is possible outside of the NFL or the NBA, first of all. And second, I can’t believe that it’s brought down to the level of a local school, that they can just go in and see this. I don’t think I could do justice for it in this interview.
Especially, speaking of technology, we’ve got some Skype issues here and anyone who’s watching the video can see that it still isn’t coming in perfect. The audio’s fine. So I don’t think I could do you technology justice in this interview. Anyone who really wants to get a sense of it has got to go to Hudl.com and see. You’ve got a sample of a game and the annotation and the analysis that’s layered on top of it. They’ll really get a sense of what could be done there. True?
David: True. And we’ve got youth teams using it too, so it’s not just high schools, but it’s some of our youth teams, where it’s kids who are in the 5th grade whose parents will go in there and do all this breakdown and add these notes and allow kids to make highlights. So the kids, instead of before they pay $2,000 a year to have a professional video editor come out, capture their games and make a highlight tape, instead through Hudl, they’re doing it all just by clicking the stars and watching the game. It’s making it interactive and fun for them and encouraging them to want to be in there watching video and learning to become better players.
Andrew: That’s unreal.
David: It’s impressive, yeah.
Andrew: Unreal. Okay. I want to find out about the business behind Hudl, how you got here, and then we’ll go through your story and then we’ll go through some advice that you have for other entrepreneurs because I know you had a lot of setbacks that you overcame. I oversimplified things by doing the quick, back-of-the-envelope math and saying ta-da, he’s got all this revenue overnight. We have to go through and understand how you got here and then what you learned along the way. So why don’t I start this way. What was the original idea for the business that eventually became what we just described?
David: Actually [inaudible 08:16] for Coach Bill Callahan when he was at Nebraska. He was head coach of the Huskers at the time, a really technology-forward guy. He had previously been the head coach of the Oakland Raiders, and so he saw firsthand all kinds of companies coming up there from the Valley with questions about would you guys use this? Would this make you a better team? He never had seen one that would push their team to the next level, he said, until he saw Hudl.
And what it was, was just similar to our other teams, where I gave that example of [inaudible 08:42]. It’s not that dissimilar in the NFL and at college. They have really heavy networks that they pay $500,000 to $1 million for that are awesome for in-house use. So the coaches can all be sitting there in their office. The players can be in the locker room or anywhere they’ve got computers and watching video. But the minute they want to take that off-site, they’re burning DVDs, and so they’re losing all that additional breakdown. They’re losing the ability that [inaudible 09:07] gives them to scrub through it and really analyze frame-by-frame, if they want to look at an offensive lineman’s footwork or whatever, maybe.
So the first challenge we saw was with online video now, there’s got to be . . . it’s so much simpler just to put this stuff online. The key being it has to be secure. You want it to have that data and you still want it feel like that fluid scrubbing experience when you’re . . . it’s just like you’re interacting with reel-to-reel tape, because that’s what a lot of these guys are coming from. That’s what a lot of coaches are used to.
So we sat down with Coach Callahan and his staff and presented a prototype that me and my two co-founders, John Wirtz and Brian Kaiser, put together. John being our COO, a lot more focused on the sales front for us right now, and Brian’s our technology guy. He’s the guy who made that prototype be magic. He made it awesome for us. We just sat down in that first meeting. It was in February 2006, showed our first prototype with a lot of Photoshop mockups, a lot of smoke and mirrors for those guys, and Coach Callahan’s first comment was, “This is awesome. I’ve seen tons of things float through my desk, technology-wise, and this is the first one that actually would make my team better. I want it for Spring ball.”
Andrew: But the vision was what we’re seeing here today? You imagined that schools, that players’ families, that they could take all this video that they’re already collecting and instead of burning it on DVDs, they would put it on this website that you were going to launch? And you imagined that you would let them scrub and annotate and do some other cool things?
David: That’s where the focus was. But just like you said earlier, we thought it was the NFL and major Division I programs.
Andrew: Oh, I see. The idea was there, but you thought the market would be the NFL, the guys with the money and the attention and the serious need.
David: And we thought it was a tool that set on top of their existing systems, so those $500,000 systems I mentioned where they were capturing, doing all the [inaudible 11:00] to that video. We were just coming and being an online component, so really just replacing the DVDs for them.
Andrew: Gotcha.
David: That’s what we thought it was. That’s where we thought the core was, was right there.
Andrew: Okay. And so you show it off. You get feedback that’s very positive. Is there any adjustment that you need to make before you launch?
David: Yeah, there was. Quite a few. So when we first [inaudible 11:20] Nebraska, our thought was always around this big upfront fee. So we thought it would be . . . at the first time we did it, we thought it would be a three quarter million dollar type solution, that teams would pay that upfront and then pay us the standard 20% in support every single year after that because you come to that mindset of that market, the NFL and major college football. You think big dollars. You think they’ll spend tons of money because you see the player salaries that are rolling through. But they aren’t. They’ll pay that for personnel, and in college football, they’ll pay that for recruiting, to go out there and you recruit the guys that’ll make the travel if necessary. But they just won’t do it. They won’t spend that kind of money on the operation side of things.
Andrew: I see. Now beyond thinking that a quarter of million dollars isn’t that much in comparison to their other expenses, was there another reason for charging a quarter million dollars? Was it that you thought that it would cost you around there? Was it connected to your costs at all?
David: We thought that just building up the software [inaudible 12:20]. We thought that the servers that were going to be required were going to be a lot more robust so there was going to be a bigger hardware expense.
Andrew: Okay.
David: And we thought that was what the market was going to bear. The first time we thought it, that was just what was going to make sense. We were going to make these big — $750,000 is what we first thought. It eventually whittled its way down to $250,000 up front. We thought that was what our model was. Get 117 teams at $250,000 and that’s your business and then collect support after that.
Andrew: Okay. So that was the original idea. You said that you had to adjust. At what point did you realize that you needed to adjust the market that you were going after?
David: Unfortunately, it was a little bit into it. So we started that, that was in February. We got that feedback of, “I’d love to have it next month for my team to use for spring football.” That wasn’t going to be possible for us. Period. There was just so much going on behind the scenes. There was so much smoke and mirrors. And so we sat down with Coach Callahan and with their athletic director, Steve Pederson, at that time and said, “[inaudible 13:16] financial model make this make sense for us. Be our paying beta partner and we’ll spend the next year working closely with your staff. if they’ll give us the time, and we’ll develop the tool for [inaudible 13:28] you guys have and then we’ll help you guys win it.” So that was our real focus.
Andrew: And so he was going to pay you to build this software for him first, but later on for anyone else that you decide that you can sell it to.
David: Yup. You’re spot on.
Andrew: How did you swing that kind of deal? That’s pretty impressive.
David: Yeah, so we were asking for just a software license deal, so not to pay for our expenses to build out the software, but just what we thought was, at the time, a $250,000 type of deal. We ended up doing a $50,000 deal with Nebraska for that one-time upfront and that was key for us was to have a paying beta in place. And so then we held off on all other things, all the financing, every other aspect of it, until we had the paying beta in place and it seemed like there was at least a market there.
Andrew: Wow. So what are the advantages of having a paid first customer instead of first building out the software for multiple potential customers in the future? Beyond the fact that you have $50,000 in your pocket or $50,000 for your expenses. What else do you get?
David: I should take it back. The payment was actually tied to us delivering the software, so it wouldn’t have happened until we delivered it the next spring. But the fact that we had a client on the hook for $50,000, it was [inaudible 14:38] that a major university would pay for was crucial for us just from a [inaudible 14:43] standpoint. We could go out and justify [inaudible 14:45] what we were building out. It just added legitimacy to who we were and to what we wanted to deliver.
Andrew: I see. So if you’re going out to . . . I guess in June of ’07 you got angel investment in the business. When you were talking to angels, you weren’t just saying we’re going to build this and we’re going to get customers. You said, “We’re building it now for a paying customer, and we believe, based on this experience, that there will be other customers like them.” And that’s a much more compelling case to make.
David: Yup, you’re spot on.
Andrew: Can you describe what that first version looked like as it evolved for Nebraska?
David: Yeah. It was a .Net 3.0 application. So it was Windows-only. It could run a desktop application where it would download all the video. They could add notes on top of it. So the same spot shadows, the same annotations, some of the core stuff that you see right now as a big part of Hudl.com was in that first application, which we then, we ultimately renamed it Hudl Pro to distinguish it. Until this year, that was the standalone product that was done in Net 3.0 and eventually 3.5. It had a quick launch application on the Web, so it would launch just like your desktop application, but it was running just straight up online, a straight streaming version of it. But it was totally focused on video.
Andrew: Why did you decide to use Microsoft’s .Net instead of another platform, another software language or instead of going web only?
David: So that was where our core competency was. Brian had worked for Microsoft as an intern. That was his stack that he knew. He knew the Microsoft technologies and we knew the kind of cool stuff we could deliver with some of the new things they had rolling out with WPF and WCF.
Andrew: I see.
David: So that’s what we focused around.
Andrew: All right. So you built this out. What did you learn in that first buildout that you didn’t expect?
David: The challenges of having a Microsoft-only solution [inaudible 16:35] solution. So that’s why when we ended up building Hudl.com, it was built so that it was cross-platform, cross-browser. Just because we saw so much, especially in education, there were just a lot of Apple products, like a lot of products running Apple. It was becoming a big challenge with us getting Boot Camp loaded up. We just saw those number increase, so that was one of the things for us. Having it just be in-browser as opposed to a heavy desktop application and the benefits that provides were another one. Not having the servers onsite, so with Nebraska, we installed three servers, three big Dell boxes to help power everything. They did the encoding of the video and the storage of the video. We had to backup and make sure it was available for them all the time. Moving that all to the cloud, which was one of the benefits we got with Hudl.com, was another one of those. It was just a series of things we learned through building Hudl Pro for Nebraska that really helped us shape what Hudl.com became.
Andrew: Can you help me understand when you decided that going web would make sense? How does a customer let you know that web-only is the right way or that not .Net, not desktop client for windows is the right way.
David: It comes through a lot with support, just when we were doing a lot of those Boot Camp installations like I mentioned, to get people transitioned over so they were using it.
Andrew: How were you doing support?
David: We have a full support team. You can probably see in the background from me right now. We have a staff of . . . it’s seven full-time support-only focused folks right now.
Andrew: At the time did you have that?
David: At the time, we just had one guy.
Andrew: You had one guy who was dedicated to support.
David: Exactly.
Andrew: And how was he fielding support?
David: He was taking it on his cell phone.
Andrew: Okay. So you’d give your one client your phone number and, I guess, the support guy’s phone number. If they needed anything, they were supposed to just call him and you as a backup, I’m imagining.
David: You’re spot on. Yes.
Andrew: And he just kept getting phone calls from people who said, what that then made you think, “We went in the wrong direction.”
David: They were, “All right, I’ve got my Mac and I’m ready to go. What can I do to get it going?” Or, “I’m ready to watch a video. What do I have to do?” And then it’s a five or ten minute installation process as opposed to right now on Hudl.com, it’s seconds.
Andrew: I see. And the five or ten minute installation process would be on Windows, so ideally they would have to go through that. Worst case situation, your guy’s on the phone saying either, “No, you can’t use this, go find a PC” or “Let me walk you through how to use Boot Camp on the Mac to install Windows that then would allow you install our software.”
David: Yup, exactly.
Andrew: Gotcha. So you had enough of those phone calls and you start to realize this is not the right direction.
David: And a lot of them were [inaudible 19:16] just like you said. So it’s 6:00 a.m. call from Chad Pennington saying, “All right, I’m ready to Hudl, what’s going on?”
Andrew: Oh, wow.
David: We learned a lesson. And what really drove us to the web model, that was part of it, but at the same time, we kept hearing as we were marketing this product to major colleges and the NFL, which is obviously just numbers-wise a very limited market, we kept hearing from high schools and smaller colleges that didn’t have these type of solutions. They didn’t have the $500,000 setup that they would leverage off of. They needed a capture tool that we hadn’t built out yet. And so that’s when we [inaudible 19:49].
Andrew: Okay. How were you making sales at the time? While you were working with your one client, how were you reaching out to other potential clients?
David: We were leveraging our connection through Nebraska, so guys who Coach Callahan and his staff knew well who they could put us on the phone with or thorough our investors. In 2007, you mentioned that we took an investment round. One of our leading investors was a guy named Jeff Raikes, who’s the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At the time, he was working for Microsoft out in Seattle, so he was very well connected in the Seattle sports community. He’s a part-owner of the Seattle Mariners and he’s a Stanford alumni. So in February of 2007, he connected us for a few high-power meetings up in Seattle, one with the Seahawks, one with the Mariners, and one with the Stanford Cardinal with their new coach Jim Harbaugh at the time. And so these were how we were making our pitches was using our connections, using our network to get meetings and to go in there and pitch what was at the time had whittled its way down to a $75,000 upfront solution.
Andrew: Can you describe to me one of the experiences that you had with one of the NFL teams that made you think, we’re not right for these guys, or they’re not right for us.
David: Yeah. It was hearing the price point be such a concern time and time again.
Andrew: So give me an example of whose door you walked in and experienced that.
David: The Seattle Seahawks is a great example. We sat down with their coaches. They fell in love with it. “This is exactly the right solution for us. We want video online.”
Jim Mora Jr. was one of their assistant coaches at the time. He’s [inaudible 21:25] on board. He was like, “This is unbelievable. This is exactly what I was looking for, for 10 years to connect with my guys. This is how I can get them the video that they need to focus on. This is how I can make it so that they’re not taking home a DVD and not watching it because it’s a painful process because it’s a whole game when I really only care about them seeing 10 clips.”
But the price point, it wasn’t where they wanted to spend money. It had to be budgeted in the year before into the operational budget, and even then that $75,000 was just too much for them. And so that prevented us from closing deals like the Seahawks at the time, like Stanford at the time who then ultimately [inaudible 22:00] last year.
Andrew: I see. By the way, let me pause the story here for a minute and say, are you a sports fan yourself?
David: Yeah, I am. Kind of the whole company is all sports fans.
Andrew: So then what’s it like for you to walk into the stadium to have a meeting with the top guys that you’re watching on TV, that you’re reading about online?
David: I had the benefit of, when I was in Nebraska, I started my junior year in sports information, so I got to work with Coach Solich and his staff, which were the guys that I grew up idolizing. I love Nebraska football. I’m a Nebraska native, so college football’s just in the blood here. I was always a diehard fan, but you learn very quickly when your job’s tied to it that you can really separate that out. It’s cool the first time, but then you kind of get used to it just being part of work.
So through that I got to meet a lot of other coaches, where they’d come in and we’d do interviews and we’d just sit in with them — the head coaches from other major programs, Bob Stoops would come in, when Mack Brown would come in. So it kind of separated that a little bit for us and really [inaudible 23:03] when you’ve got to go in and meet with the Seahawks and you’re sitting down with Mike Holmgren and Jim Mora Jr. or sitting down with Jim Harbaugh, a quarterback who I remember playing, when he played in the NFL, sitting down with him across the table from you in a boardroom in Seattle. [inaudible 23:19] and just discussing how we can make this team better.
Andrew: So, all right, I can understand that it would be fun, but at the same time, you’ve got business. And these guys then are telling you your business isn’t priced right for us. How do you start to adjust your model? Before you make the complete shift, how do you initially react to that feedback that, “Hey, we’ve got tons of money, but you’re not getting any of it.”
David: So the first thing was cutting that $250,000 price point down to $75,000 and seeing it as an annual, making it a subscription model instead of that big upfront.
Andrew: Okay. So $75,000 instead of $250,000, but they still were saying no to that, right?
David: Exactly. And so we just keeping banging our heads against the wall. What is the price point that makes sense? We hear from all of our advisors. Everybody thinks that the NFL has all this money, but they don’t and so it just doesn’t make sense for us to keep pitching that price point. And we got it down to where it was a $25,000 a year subscription model before we started seeing people bite onto that and get excited about.
So 2007, didn’t really bear a lot for us. Nebraska, we launched it in May, had those guys start using it all throughout the season. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out great. The Nebraska staff and Coach Callahan ended up getting fired after that season. And so he took Hudl with him when he did interviews and so he started looking back at [inaudible 24:38]. He went up to the New York Jets and had Hudl and showed them this is how I taught my team last year. This is what I am as a coach. Here’s my playbook. Here’s a video that I have. Here’s how I represent this to my team.
Eric Mangini was the head coach of the Jets at the time, called in their GM, Mike Tannenbaum, he sat down. They called in the team president, Terry Bradway. And they were all just enamored with the product. And so it’s January, I go down to the Senior Bowl that year, which is in Alabama. It’s a place where assistant coaches, head coaches, all the NFL folks kind of congregate to start scouting the players for the next year’s draft.
We got a sit down with Eric Mangini, with Mike Tannenbaum and [inaudible 25:15]. And the first thing was, I sit down with my laptop, definitely feel a bit nervous playing for an NFL head coach. It’s not so much the stardom was striking you, it’s just a little bit of nerves you got one opportunity with the guy. Eric Mangini has a good reputation for being pretty intense, and his first thing was make sure you [inaudible 25:32]. So I’ve got him going through the demo and walking through. It was very built for a demo, so it wasn’t live on the Huskers server, although we were [inaudible 25:46] there and felt pretty good about it. This was a purely demo version. So I’m just nervously kind of sweating, hoping he doesn’t click something that’s going to break. But he ended up really liking it.
Coach Callahan ended up taking a coaching job with the Jets. He’s still there now. So the Jets, Mangini fell in love with it, had us come out, let their players try it, and they ended up buying it in March of 2008. They became kind of our first non-Nebraskan beta partner and got us into the NFL.
Andrew: You know, I was getting chills as you were describing it. I can’t imagine what it must be like for an entrepreneur like you to have a customer look at your software like that and be so amazed by it that they can’t wait to touch it, to experience it. You know, you hope for that kind of experience from your customers. So now you get it and they’re willing to shell out, you’ve now reduced your price from $250,000 to $75,000 down to $25,000 a year, and the Jets say, “OK, we’ll do it.”
David: Yeah.
Andrew: And so that seems like a model that you can duplicate and then maybe add on services later on. Is that what you decided to do?
David: Yes, and so that’s what we were saying. We thought that was the way it was going to be, a few more colleges and a few more NFL teams, but it just still wasn’t [inaudible 26:55] where we wanted. The teams were just slower to adopt. They wanted to hear more case studies about how teams were using it. And so it just, at that point it became somewhat of a timing thing, and let’s just see somebody else using it and put it in. Nobody else wanted to dive in and be the first one. But at the same time, we kept hearing from small colleges and high schools that did want to be the first one, that did want to dive in and start going on it. But we didn’t have a capture tool. We didn’t have, like I said, that [inaudible 27:20]. So we had to figure out what they were going to do to get that video from their camera onto our site and then how we can make that scalable. Because it was one thing for us to be doing that manual support, for me to be getting phone calls from Chad Pennington, from Eric Mangini, from Nebraska’s coaches at the time. It was another thing for us to have to have a bunch of high schools just following our one support guy, me and my partners. So, we made a decision in March of that year to start building out that software and to make a solution that would work for smaller colleges and for high schools and to do it totally online. It was hosted [inaudible 28:01] right above a bar in downtown Lincoln, right above a college bar. But [inaudible 28:05] here in town. We signed up 12 beta partners.
Andrew: How many beta partners?
David: Twelve beta partners to do that.
Andrew: Before you continue with that, how did these schools, you said all along and I’ve scribbled a note here to come back and ask you about it. You said you kept hearing from local high schools that they wanted to use Hudl, that they wanted to have this available for their athletes. How did they even find out about you?
David: We got some good press following the Nebraska [inaudible 28:33]. So a lot of local articles about us. We were out at trade shows. The American Football Coaches Association, the AFCA does a big show at various locations around the country and we were around every year. So there were high school coaches [inaudible 28:46]. They would see the product, like it. We’d be like, “Well, here’s what it’s going to cost.” “Do you have a solution we can [inaudible 28:53]?
Andrew: So you went to exhibit the software even knowing back when your target audience was just a small number of college and high professional teams?
David: Yeah, that’ where they go. Most every coaching staff is down there at the AFCA convention.
Andrew: I see. Okay. So it’s not just the cold calls, the networking that leads you into a sales meeting with a professional team. You’re also out there exhibiting this and high schools and colleges are at these shows too. They want every advantage that they could get. They see your software. They say this is wonderful. How much is it. You say, “$25,000 a year. And they go, “What?” And then you have to start thinking, okay, all these guys want it from us. We need to find a way to make it accessible to them and that’s when you decide that the best way to do it is to put it online so you don’t have any tech support issues and reduce the costs a little bit.
David: Yup, you’re spot on. And it was really one, there was one convention that we did that at, at that point in time. Now it’s merge into we’ll probably be at 125 different conventions this year for high school football, but there’s really just that one that colleges go to. Because again we thought that was our market and we were just trying to hit those guys.
Andrew: How many conventions do you go to now?
David: About 125 a year.
Andrew: 125 a year. Okay. So this isn’t the situation where you could just buy some Google ads and then have all your customers come in. No, you need to exhibit it. You need to go and shake hands and show it off and let people grab the mouse away from you.
David: Yup, exactly.
Andrew: I see. Okay. So you realized this. How much did you anticipate you’d be able to shave off the $25,000 a year price?
David: So we knew it had to be below $1,000. That was our sweet spot.
Andrew: Below $1,000 would be the sweet spot?
David: Yeah, to get these high schools on board. And so we started just looking at what our costs would be, our incremental costs for each school we added, in terms of hosting and in terms of support. And we knew that we could deliver some of this at $1,000 and still make a good chunk of money on it when you look at the size of the market. There are 32 NFL teams and 119 Division I college football teams. There’s 18,000 high schools. And so the numbers just made sense once we started building the model out.
Andrew: Okay. Now, I keep hearing in my interviews that when you embrace constraints, you start to create a better, tighter, easier to use product. Now that you had this constraint, you had to cut your costs to 1/25 of what they were at their lowest. That means you have to make some sacrifices. What are some of the things that you sacrificed that made you say, “Oh, this makes for a better product.”
David: The fact that it couldn’t be servers on site was one of the first things to go. We couldn’t have that big upfront installation. Period. It just wasn’t going to work. And so that pushed us onto the Web and pushed us onto cloud computing.
Andrew: Okay. And that makes for a better product for everyone, the fact that you have to do it that way. What else?
David: The support costs. We couldn’t be [inaudible 31:52]. It had to be something where they would call us if they had a problem or they could call us and know that they have somebody they could talk to who could make it better for them and help them use the software better, but it couldn’t be us holding their hands with every user as they went through the software. It couldn’t be painful. It had to just work. One of the mantras we live by right now is, “Just give me my damn video.” That’s what coaches and players want. They don’t care about anything else. When they’re ready to watch video, they just want to get in there and start watching their video and start getting better as a player.
Andrew: I see. So how do you simplify it so that you reduce your support requests?
David: We focused on . . . we had built our product when we started in 2006 and focused on the Division I and NFL market. So we would be sitting down and it would be a team of, at the time, we had seven full-timers. We’d sit down in a conference room. Before [inaudible 32:47] was a month to two months, and we would just theorize based on what we’d heard from Nebraska and heard from a few other coaches we knew what would make the product better.
We built a lot of things without any real good backing. We built a really awesome testing tool that fit the use case of one coach in Nebraska who wanted to test his players on video. Although a lot of coaches do it, it has to be faster than paper and pen. If it’s not, they’re just not going to do it. Coaches are so strapped for time, just like everybody else and especially high school coaches, where not only are they coaching players, but they’re educators a lot of times, they have a classroom to teach. They’re fundraisers because they’re in charge of the booster program for that school. And they’re dealing with players. They’re serving a parental figure role a lot of times for their guys.
And so, we knew right away that that’s kind of where the core had to be. So we shaved off everything else. We got rid of the e-mail system. We got rid of the playbook system. We got rid of the presentation system. It was just all about video and delivering video in the cleanest way possible as fast as possible for these teams.
Andrew: What was the e-mail system?
David: So we had all kinds of notification systems, where we thought . . . when we first built Hudl, we spelled it Huddle, that was our first product, the first time we took it for a ride when Nebraska and the Jets were [inaudible 34:09].
And the first [inaudible 34:11] we first started building it out, we thought it was going to be a tablet solution, so we really focused on some of Microsoft’s tablet stuff, and Nebraska ended up buying a lot of Motion Computing slates that were $2,500 and probably less powerful than the iPad you have now, but we thought it was going to be – it was a great platform for coaching. They wanted something lightweight that they could carry around and just watch video. We thought at first that we would take over the OS and you just launch into Hudl and you have your [inaudible 34:35], you have your video, you have playbook. Everything you could possibly need as a coach or as a player was going to be living right there, right there on that one little slate device that you had.
Andrew: I see. And so that didn’t pan out and so you could get rid of it. But do you mean also for e-mail system that you were reproducing Hotmail or Gmail on your platform?
David: Yes, we were. So that was what the messaging system was.
Andrew: I see.
David: An internal notification system that was just around [inaudible 35:04]. We thought that device was going to be [inaudible 35:05] and you needed nothing else. It could just handle all their messaging, everything through there.
Andrew: And now if somebody wants to message a student or if an athlete wants to message a coach, they just use their regular e-mail?
David: We pop a message dialogue in Hudl and then send it to their regular e-mail address or to their cell phone.
Andrew: I see. So you do the basics and then you send it out using . . .
David: Exactly. We’re not [inaudible 35:27]. We know they have other systems. It’s going to be e-mail or it’s going to be their cell phones. We just enable that communication to happen.
Andrew: Gotcha. Okay. Kind of like Craigslist does. That one URL pre-populates most of the stuff that you need, and then you just add whatever you want in addition.
David: Exactly. And that’s the way our sharing system works exactly. So when you want to share a playlist or share an individual clip to a guy, to one of your players, we pre-populate everything and you can add a little tiny note to it if you want to and it pings him on his cell phone or his e-mail
Andrew: All right. I don’t want to . . . right now, I’m hearing about all the technology that helped you make more sales. I don’t want to perpetuate the myth that the best technology and the best user experience is all it takes in order to make sales. You guys do do some sales. You have people who are talking to potential customers. You have a website that’s talking to potential customers. What have you learned about making both those channels more persuasive so that you can increase your sales?
David: Yeah, so really getting hands on with the users and listening to their problems was one of the core things we found. With Nebraska, we were creating the problem. We were thinking about what it could be, what the challenges those coaches were facing, and we were coming to them with solutions. And we were selling it that way when we went to a team. So when we sat down with the Seahawks, we were selling them, “Here’s what understand the problems that NFL teams face are. Here’s how our product solves them for you.” Whereas instead now with Hudl, we sit back and listen.
If you were a high school coach and we were meeting for a sales pitch and I ask you what are you biggest pain points right now. They’re video. How are you making your players better? How are you daily improving your chances of winning? And then just listen to the answers they have, listen to where their pain points lie, and then showing them what parts of Hudl really cater to that. We have a really robust solution, but it’s finding that one feature that’s really going to make sense for you and that you’re just going to latch onto and love.
Andrew: So you and I are sitting and talking. The first thing you do is you say, “Andrew, what’s your team like? What are your issues? How are you using video?” You want to understand where my pain point is and then you say, “Ah, we’re not going to tell you about all the features that we have. We’re going to give you that one feature that addresses this big pain that you came to us with, and the rest is an add-on that you’re going to discover throughout this conversation and your use of Hudl.”
David: Yup.
Andrew: But how does the Web do that? I can see how in-person you can make that sale, but not all of the 2,300 sales that came to you happened with a conversation like that. What happens online?
David: Word of mouth is huge for us.
Andrew: Okay.
David: We have a referral program online where our coaches can go on there, sign up, and they can put in their coaches at other schools who they think might use it. They can talk about what features they fell in love with and bam, get that delivered to them. For us it was about the upfront price scheme. Coaches are kind of a no-BS attitude, so we make sure that all our information is online. They can dig into whatever they want to. They can watch as many videos as they want to. They can sign up for a 30-day trial and actually put the software in their hands.
And although this is all stuff that’s normal in other industries, this is kind of where software as a whole is going towards, it was really unique in ours. Everything in ours was very closed, written quotes. Prices were different for this school versus this school, depending on who they were and what they thought the budget could bear. For us it was just give them that upfront stuff. So that alone, having that online, having the ability to sign up online was pretty unique for our industry.
Andrew: And now I, as a coach customer would be able to tell all my friends who are coaches at other schools to sign up and I would get a cut of the sale that you made?
David: Yes. So our referral program, you would get a discount. If I’m the coach that referred you, you’re going to receive a discount of 10%.
Andrew: Got it. If you give me an affiliate payment, that’s a kickback, but if you give me a discount, then that’s a responsible . . .
David: Yup. You receive a discount. BaseCamp does a similar thing with their referral program, so that I, as the person who’s referring you, can get a small amount of money that can go back to my school, but the real key is you’re going to, as the purchasing guy, you’re going to get the discount that will incentivize you.
Andrew: I see. All right. I don’t want to spend too much time on angel investing, but I’m curious about how you got your investment.
David: Yup. So we presented, during that year in 2006, kind of as we were building out for Nebraska, Brian Kaiser, our CTO, was getting his MBA from the University, and so through them we got introduced to a lot of business plan competitions. We participated in one in Nebraska and won it and won $1,000 and we were like, well, that’s pretty nice to have an additional $1,000 in addition to the money that each of us had put into the kitty just to kind of get an office space to get our one intern involved and to just really pay the bills associated with that [inaudible 40:02]. Like a grand is a [inaudible 40:04].
We found out that there was another competition that would pay $15,000 if we won it. So we entered that, naturally, also. It was in February of that year and we won that also. It was an international competition that was based here in Lincoln with teams from Canada and I think a team from Sweden even came in. But our product, because we had . . . we were actually building it. It wasn’t just theoretical. We had a customer. Just like we discussed before, we had a customer that was prepared to pay us. We had the product. We had the use case down. We won that competition.
We ended up [inaudible 40:36], and we won about $75,000 in winnings just from that. That really helped us [inaudible 40:41] at the time to go from our startup in May of 2006 when we graduated up until June of 2007 when we took that first round. Through those pitches, other people would hear about us and become interested in investing.
One of those groups was a group of guys here in town, a group of ten guys in all [inaudible 41:00]. One of them had heard about us through that. We made a quick pitch and they fell in love with the product and what it could be, and so the ten of them pooled their funds together and put in $1,000,000 and then Jeff Raikes, the guy from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and one of his friends out in Seattle put in another chunk of money. And so that was our angel round in 2007. That was what allowed us to theorize what would be the right product for our coaches.
Andrew: Are you profitable now?
David: We are profitable now, yeah. We had our first profitable year last year.
Andrew: And did you say that you got, was it a total of $75,000 from business plan competitions?
David: Yes, we did.
Andrew: Wow. That’s incredible. So, what I’ve seen . . . I’ve judged a few business plan competitions. What I see is that most people who enter them are completely unprepared. They’re doing it, either because they feel they have to or because they . . . I don’t know. Maybe they thought they’d be prepared, but they really are half-assing it. But then there’s always one group of people who are taking it so seriously that they don’t even care what you think. They’re doing this business. They’re just in there for the exercise. And it sounds like that’s what you guys were.
David: Yup. You’re right on.
Andrew: We don’t need your permission in order to do this. We’re not doing it for a grade. We’re not doing it because some professor or father asked us to do it. We’re here because, actually, for what? Beyond the money, why enter this competition?
David: Because you’re going to be picked apart. A lot of times, just like you said, the judges of those competitions are very knowledgeable people, and they’re guys and girls who have gone through this before, who have built businesses. And so hearing them pepper us with questions about what would work and what wouldn’t work, pushed us to just keep advancing that model and understanding from the core. The main question we’d get asked is, “Okay, I understand the use case. I see why this would [inaudible 42:39], but how are you going to sell it?” And so that really pushed us into realizing that it sounds easy, but sales have got to be at the core right from the start if you want to build a sustainable business.
Andrew: I see. And that’s one thing that when you hear it over and over again, it starts to sink in, especially when you’re hearing it from all kinds of angles, from your customers, from the business plan competition instructors.
David: Potential investors.
Andrew: Potential investors. What about the idea that when you’re in so many business plan competitions, lots of people are getting a sense of what your business idea is and they could jump in and steal it.
David: We didn’t worry as much about that because we felt really confident on the delivery side of things that we could build a better product, that we, between the start we had with Nebraska, our knowledge and investment base, we could just build what was a better solution than anybody else could deliver.
Andrew: I see.
David: And so it wasn’t as big a concern. It still isn’t a big concern to us, from that standpoint, on the competition side. It’s not about [inaudible 43:39] worried about showing something and someone else might recreate it. For us it’s about get it out there and keep pushing ourselves forward.
Andrew: Okay. We kept talking about your annual prices and what I didn’t get to ask earlier was, why annual? Why not monthly in order to make that price look smaller?
David: So we want to do that on the youth front and we might. For the high school market, a lot of times they cannot pay with credit cards and so it’s usually the PO process, where the school has to go through it and it has to get approved by the AD or by the school board, and so for them, having that onetime payment is just easier. It’s both easier for them and easier for us to have that all come together once so we’re not chasing those payments down or filling out paperwork every single month. [inaudible 44:20] so that’s why we do it annually.
Andrew: You mentioned BaseCamp and I think we might have mentioned other business tools here. I understand when business tools can charge because they’re charging businesses and it’s a no-brainer. If you’re saving them money or helping them make money, they’re willing to pay up until that amount that you’re making or saving for them. But for schools that don’t have much money and they don’t have a direct connection between their expenses and revenues or expenses and anything else, how do you help them justify something that seems like a luxury, not a necessity?
David: So a lot of schools already have a solution in place where they’re going to be paying an annual support fee anyway. So we just make it make sense that instead of paying a support fee for that one laptop and having it be so much more painful, with Hudl, you’re going to do better. A lot of schools have booster clubs where they’re very committed to making their teams better, to making their kids better and their team win, so we can play off that a lot. A lot of times booster clubs will end up footing the bill for Hudl because they see the value it can provide and it’s a perfect place for a booster club to plug in.
Andrew: I see.
David: In the end, all these schools want to be successful.
Andrew: Do you have a separate plan that allows boosters to pay and then give the schools access to Hudl?
David: So we can take a check from a booster club. That’s usually where we’ll go. A lot of times, they process through the schools and just booster funds are used to pay for it.
Andrew: Okay. Now you and I did a pre-interview where I asked you what advice would you give other entrepreneurs who are building their companies and you have a list here. Why don’t I ask you first for what you think is the most important piece of advice, and then we’ll go down the rest of it.
David: I would say get customers early is the most important thing. [inaudible 46:00] We listened to them, and we let ourselves think about what would be better. With Hudl.com when we built it out, we had 12 partners, 12 schools that were giving us a lot of different takes on it and we put the product in their hands right away and just let them use it and keep pushing it forward for us. The next year we had 225 teams that pushed us every single month to make our product better. And last season, we ended up around 350 by the end of the year. So it was 12 in 2008, 350 in 2009, and then the 2,300 in 2010. [inaudible 46:34] getting our product into the customers hands and built from there.
Andrew: David, wouldn’t you have been able to get more users if you offered it for free at first and then charged later on in the future? Why is paid customers, paid users, why are they better than free users?
David: With free users, we would always be . . . it’s just not building a sustainable business in our minds. Advertising is not [inaudible 46:59] for us yet. It is down the road very interesting to us. We know right now we’re leaving money on the table by not having an advertising solution in place, but that’s money we can get later on as we get more teams signing on. It’s a legitimate solution that teams are paying for that other teams are prepared to pay for. It allows us to grow our company and build support infrastructure and build up the site infrastructure. Through Amazon as we [inaudible 47:24] we pay a hefty bill every month because we have to know that our servers are going to be where we need them to be on a Saturday morning for these teams, for football or basketball or whatever it may be.
Andrew: Okay. That makes sense for maybe the users after 50. The first 50 users, it’s not so much about their revenue because they’re not going to build your business. But if I understand you right, your thinking was a user who’s on our site for free needs different things, has different expectations than one who’s on our site and paying, and if we learn to please the person who’s free, we’re not necessarily gaining all the knowledge that we need in order to satisfy the future paying customers.
David: Exactly. So those 12 free ones that gave us the knowledge we needed on what the product was and then start charging and start feeling the pain of having a paying customer, just like we did on the Hudl Pro product.
Andrew: All right. What else? What other advice would you give other entrepreneurs?
David: Get good advisors. We have an awesome team of advisors in place. The guy who ultimately ended up chairing our board of directors is the guy who we met with from day one, from February of 2006, when we first started building this. Jim McClure is the guy. He’s a member of the Board of Regents for the University of Nebraska. The guy used to run a business here in town. Just awesome sage advice about what we should do and continually pushing us down the road to just becoming more sophisticated and being a real business. And so get an advisor you can trust and you can sit down with once a week, once a month, once a day, whatever it may be, whatever that rhythm is that makes sense to you. But they’re guys that you can go to and you can trust. That’s key for us.
Andrew: So if you’re building a business right now and maybe you’re doing well, maybe you’re just trying to get the first few customers and you don’t have any advisors, what do you, David, what would you . . . how does someone in that position get an advisor? What’s the value prop? What’s the way that you get an advisor?
David: [inaudible 49:22]
Andrew: It’s what? I’m sorry.
David: What we found was that there’s enough people who are just interested in seeing your hometown or seeing businesses succeed and seeing young kids from the university build a company. And so for us, when you’re young, that’s a great way to play off and get free advice. When you have no money, it’s easy to pay nothing.
Andrew: Did you have to give them a share in the business or options? No.
David: We didn’t. We were able to get a lot of really good free advice, but then down the road we may have converted into a position on the board, like we did with Jim, but there were no guarantees from the start.
Andrew: Was there a promise that maybe this . . . was the situation, look, we need your help, would you be willing to sit down with us on a regular basis to give us feedback and who knows, maybe down the road you’ll get a share of the business? No.
David: There were no promises right from the start. It was just, if you’re interested, we’d love to sit down with you and just pick your mind. And if we start picking their mind and it’s something that interest them, which we really played up the sports angle and played off the young guys angle a lot and we found that very successful. A lot of people are very interested in sports and so they were willing to take the time to sit down and listen to you and to give you advice.
Andrew: I see. Okay. Why? I understand the sports. People, when it comes to sports, they’ll be passionate and they’ll be willing to volunteer just like boosters are willing to give money to schools because they’re into the schools and they’re into the sport. But beyond that, what do they get? What do your advisors get out of being involved in this?
David: I guess we were playing off the good nature of a lot of them which is great. If you’re respectful of their time and respectful of their advice, people are willing to do a lot for you. Just like we’re willing to find the time, not that we’re even close to being those seasoned good advisors yet, we’re willing to spend the time with a new company if they want to come in and just hear our experiences or bounce some ideas off of us. As long as there’s that respectful time, where you’re not pushing them for more or asking for something further than they can deliver on, I think people just are willing to do it.
Andrew: Okay. That makes sense. I’ve also talked to advisors here on Mixergy who have said that they do it because it helps them to think about other people’s problems. It helps make them sharper because, when you’re dealing with your own issues, you’re a little too close to it, when you’re dealing with someone else’s issues, you can take more of an analytical distance from it, and by sharpening your thinking process, when you help other people, you sharpen it and have it ready for yourself when you need it.
Actually, I won’t even lead you through this list. What else? What other advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?
David: Those are a couple of the key ones. For us, building an awesome culture where you can grow is big for us. So for us right from the start it was about building a fun environment that we can have for everybody here. Just like a sports team and just like most startup companies, it’s not an 8:00 to 5:00 job.
We have very busy seasons, which come when the football season kicks up in August. Our team is going to be here a lot because they’re going to be providing the support for these teams that on Friday night when they’re trying to publish their video there’s some issue they have. They need it fixed. If it’s Saturday when they’re trying to break down their game and share it with their players, they need it fixed right then. And so just building up a that.
Right now is a little bit of a slower time for us in terms of support calls, but a huge time for us on sales. This is when the teams are making decisions. It’s year round, but there’s somewhat of a cyclical nature, and so making sure that people are ready for the busy times, ready for the game days. For us, it’s no different than an NFL or college team. We have a game day, and it’s Saturday and it’s our time to deliver, it’s our time to shine. So making sure we’re ready to shine when that time comes is the key.
Andrew: You know, that’s tough to get somebody to come in on a weekend, to get someone to care on a Saturday. Beyond the salary and the fact that the job happens on that day, what can you do to get people excited about showing up on a day that most people and most of their friends are off.
David: We get them tight with our customers really closely. So we’re tracking, with our NFL teams and our college teams, we encourage our folks, we’ll pay for them to fly out and get them game tickets to one game every single year. So if somebody wants to go to a New York Jets game, we get them seats on the 50 yard line through the Jets, they work with us to make it all happen. Get them passes to their club right there behind the sideline where they can just see and interact and hopefully go out to the facility and hear the coaches talk about how they use Hudl, how it makes them a better team.
The same thing with Oregon. Special benefit, I got to go with them to the National Championship this year because they use Hudl so much. They wanted us to come down there and install it for them at their team hotel while they were playing in the national championship game. So I went down there with our support manager who handles the Ducks account. Got to go out there and do the team meal before the game. Got to ride the buses over to the National Championship. Got to sit front row and unfortunately ride back after they lost. We were disappointed to see that.
But just really connecting them with the customer and making them feel desire to help that customer is what’s made us so successful in getting people to work those kind of hours.
Andrew: The other thing that you mentioned earlier was about having the product in hands. What do you mean by that?
David: It’s just getting it in front of people. It’s not thinking about what’s going to make them better, but hearing from them, having them envision it and seeing what’s actually going to be successful for us. That was what was so different for us between Hudl Pro and Hudl. Hudl Pro was so much of us sitting around thinking about what Nebraska could use and what could be good for Stanford, what could be good for Oregon, and not enough of getting it in Oregon’s hands, even if it’s free, which is what we did with those 12 beta partners. Putting it in their hands for free so you can actually see how it’s used and start understanding where it breaks, and then quickly after that making a paying solution where you get actual customers, you’re on the hook for support.
It’s easy for a free solution to not want to come in on Saturday. If your customer’s not paying you, you don’t feel that level of obligation, just like you were saying earlier. Once they’re paying you 50 bucks or once they’re paying you the $3,000, there’s just an implied responsibility that we wanted to [inaudible 55:23]. And that’s what it got for us.
Andrew: Okay. How about one last piece of advice?
David: That’s a good question. Product in hands. [inaudible 55:37] Build a culture that’s awesome. And just drive towards profitability and sales. In our minds it was not about . . . having users is nice.
Andrew: What about owning your success? I’ve got that as a note from the first conversation we had a few weeks ago.
David: So that’s where we’re kind of going with this is once you have it in people’s hands and they’re using it, you’re selling it, you’re selling an actual product. You cannot be relying on somebody else to be controlling your destiny on the programming front for us or on the sales front. Programming is our core competency. We’re going to build software that’s awesome. We couldn’t on our sales front have somebody else controlling that destiny for us. We wanted to keep that in-house.
We’re building our sales team right now around a regional sales [inaudible 56:19] and we can grow that and scale that with our business however we want to, as opposed to outsourcing that to another company or to a partner like we’d done in the past. It was all about having that all wrapped up inside and building a team that was going to deliver on that, so building those sales folks, getting the software [inaudible 56:36]. So we’re hiring another interaction designer who can help us just keep making the product easier to use and better. That’s it.
Andrew: I get that. Right. So you’re saying that if you want to focus on the technology and have somebody else get good at sales, you’d never be able to improve your technology because every time the salesman shows off the product to a potential customer and hears a “No, but . . .” they’re learning how to improve the software too. And ditto for development. You can’t say we’re going to outsource the development and then say we’re going to file a ticket every time we need something fixed. You want to have someone in the company ready to fix whatever the sales people come back with, whatever the customer support issues come up.
David: And to control your own growth. [inaudible 57:16] scale this up and scale this down.
Andrew: All right. That’s a great place to leave it. David, the website, I’m going tell everyone is Hudl. We keep saying Hudl – I know the transcribers are great at this, but people who are listening on mp3 might not remember. It’s Hudl.com.
Hey, finally, one more question, actually. I met you through Silicon Prairie News. Why are you in Silicon Prairie instead of Silicon Valley? What’s the advantage of being there?
David: Nebraska’s awesome for us. It’s been an awesome source of workers for us, so as we built out our team. It’s a good atmosphere to be in. It’s a hard working atmosphere. It’s a very cost-effective atmosphere, and it’s one where people are just driven to see other people succeed and [inaudible 58:02]. It’s also the heart of football country, so it’s not bad to be here in the Midwest where there’s a lot of good football played. We love being here in Nebraska. I would never see us leaving for those reasons, because it is the kind of culture that we want to build and the kind of folks we can attract to the company.
We haven’t had a problem bringing . . . a lot of our classmates, we were in the Raikes School of Computer Science, which was a program that’s devoted to kind of merging business and computer science together. It’s a really competitive program. A lot of the graduates from there will go off to work for Microsoft or go off to work for IBM or go down to Texas to work for a company. They’ll head to one of the coasts or head south. We’ve had great success bringing folks back because they want to build a family here in the Midwest and want to really be here long term.
Andrew: All right. So again, the website is Hudl.com. This is a great success story. If anyone out there has a similar success story or has heard of one, the way Silicon Prairie News heard of Hudl and referred me to them, let me know about them. I’m always looking for interesting stories like this that are off the beaten path, that aren’t another Silicon Valley success story, but one that’s a little bit different. And I want to find out how they did it and bring those stories to you in my audience. So help me do that, and David, thanks for the interview.
David: Thanks a lot, Andrew. It was great meeting you.
Andrew: Bye.
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