Andrew: Hey there, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. I got to tell you, I invited today’s guests largely because I just find them so fascinating. I’m just curious about you trusted, ostensibly, the reason that you’re here Tristan is that you created this company that said, Hey, you know what?
There are all these empty storefronts. What if we could do something with them? What if we could create pop-up stores in them? Right. And the example that I’ve seen in the past is. Well, Apple has her Apple store. Samsung has no store. What if Samsung could create a popup store? What about the influencer?
Who you watch on YouTube or whoever they should have a store where they could do it? What about the Instagram or as a designer, they could have a store people pop in for the day they pay what I wouldn’t on your site. 250 bucks. They get a beautiful store in the hardest San Francisco for the day. Boom, bam.
The movie. It’s great. Freaking idea. You sold the company. You told me roughly that you got money from it and how much money that was impressive. You told our producer about some of the headaches involved in running the company. I thought, man, that’s forthright. That’s open. Are you going to back away? Are you going to tell Ari much more than you tell me?
Are you our
Tristan: Hopefully, hopefully I can tell you even more.
Andrew: Oh good. Yeah. Don’t hold back. I just talked to someone earlier today. I said to her, I know you had trouble at this company. She goes, no, I didn’t. That was a wonderful company. You told her producer got paragraphs of texts here. About how tough it was. I didn’t just randomly say you don’t like the company, but I guess last minute she felt she had cold feet.
Um, our producers really good at getting information from people, but, I think that it also gives people a chance to say, you know, maybe I don’t want to, so I’m glad that you’re not gonna hold that. Alright. So storefront is a company that you created, you sold it. The next thing that I want to find out about is what you’re doing today.
You’ve you’re at a company called cto.ai. Um, it’s managed Kubernetes platform. I’m going to ask you to explain what that means and why you go from running your, from founding your own company to working at this company. And then the other thing that’s fascinating to me is you’ve got this syndicate on angel list.
And I’m curious about how you’re raising money, how you’re sourcing deals, how you’re investing in companies, how that’s done for you. And then if we have any time in all this, we’ll ask, ask a little bit about all this world travel that you’ve done. All right. Anyway. The guest, Tristin polic, then the interview where we find out all that and so much more sponsored by two phenomenal companies.
The first I asked him, I said, Tristan, do you mind if I talk about seminar? She goes, we use it. So I’ll ask him to talk about how they use it@cto.ai. And the second is HostGator for hosting websites. And I’ll talk to you about how I use it. Mixergy, Kristin. Good to have you.
Tristan: Thanks for having me, Andrew. Yeah. Uh, SCM rush it. And that’s been a great tool. Uh, we, you know, obviously we, we do a lot of content, helpful technical and non-technical content for developers. At CTO and that’s, uh, that’s been one of the ways to boost
Andrew: I’m going to ask you about it. This is one of the reasons why sponsors love sponsoring mixer. G I don’t do the add the guest does it? It feels so much more authentic here. Here’s something that I want to start off with. Give me a sense of how much you got from this exit from storefront, the pop-up store place.
Tristan: yeah, yeah. For storefront, it was a, in the seven digits.
Andrew: Did you personally get over a million dollars in cash?
Tristan: No. And it was a mix of shares and cash.
Andrew: Did you get over a million dollars total for yourself or yourself?
Tristan: Not for myself.
Andrew: No, for the business as a whole.
Tristan: yeah,
Andrew: Okay. Got it. Um, so we’re not talking about life setting in for life setting amounts of money. We’re talking about reputation
Tristan: Yeah.
Andrew: The idea for, it seems to have come from you and your co-founder Eric, where you were just walking around saying, what’s our idea, am I right?
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah, we, well, we had actually worked on a company, a startup before that a social impact media company and kind of had like a full, like almost exactly three years life cycle and bootstrapping that and then selling that, um, uh, to a larger, uh, social impact, uh, Journal. And that actually led into, then we kind of, I want, I don’t want to say like take took a few months off, but then we just moved into working on storefront and we were in Minneapolis at the time.
And so,
Andrew: you were talking about social earth, what does that mean? That it’s a social tummy.
Tristan: so yeah, so, uh, social earth was a solution journalism, or like basically taking the approach. That’s kind of like opposite of a lot of mainstream media where it’s the pitches, fear, the pitches problems, but there’s no solution. And so we worked with a lot of social entrepreneurs when that was kind of becoming a term and, uh, or like for profit social enterprise where it’s like, you don’t.
You can do good and not be a nonprofit. Um, let’s say like Toms would becoming big at that time with the one for one model. And so that’s, we worked with like school foundation and Shoko we covered things like the Arab spring, um, all from a social entrepreneurs perspective. And like, how do you, you know, what sort of solutions are actually making people’s lives better?
Andrew: Was it a blog?
Tristan: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. All right. Cause, um, I, you, you called it a, um, social impact media platform. I love this whole Silicon. I know you don’t feel like you speak Silicon Valley, but you do, right. Like the blog becomes a social media it’s social impact platform. All right. The other thing that you got 200
Tristan: get just ingrained in your head. You know, it’s like, it’s like, that’s, that’s, you know, how many years ago? That was 2012. I think when we,
Andrew: The nine to 2012. Okay. All right. And so you’ve got 200 contributors to come and write articles for you. You ended up selling to what is this? Three, B L
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’d say that. Yeah, that was in like the six digits and that much smaller again, we bootstrapped it, it was a media company, media companies kind of buy each other up. That’s kind of what happened there. Um, and, uh, they kept, we were running it for, I dunno, maybe it’s just a year ago. It actually, they finally got it, uh, digested back into like their, their platform.
Andrew: Wow. All
Tristan: They did a lot. That was like, when things were called, like CSR, corporate social responsibility versus like ESG now,
Andrew: What’s ESG.
Tristan: mental social governance. It’s kind of like how P now it’s like, like, how do you rate how well target or like best buy or Amazon are doing as corporations. And like, they kind of metric Metro faded a little bit.
Andrew: All right. And so you looked out in the world and you said, look you the same thing I did, the media just loves to tear people down. I, as somebody who loves entrepreneurship, I wanted inspiration. I didn’t want to hear it all the flaws that people had don’t get me wrong. I want a full view, but. Can you, can you at least balance out all the negative stuff by giving me what a vision of what’s possible?
And I guess that’s what you want to do. You said I’m going to be the balance. I’m going to show people what’s possible in social impact by highlighting that you built up the company, you sold it, then you and your co-founder there. Eric started to look around for your next big idea together. And how did you end up with storefront?
What were you seeing?
Tristan: Yeah. Um, so we had kind of came out of a couple of friends that we had in Minneapolis, where they admit it’s a very artsy city, I think more money per capita for the arts than any other city in the U S. Um, if that still holds true. And we had a couple of friends setting up a pop up bar galleries in vacant stores, and they kind of got, they had trouble getting insurance.
They had trouble booking for the right, uh, amount of time that they wanted. They were usually pushed from like a month to like three months or like six months. So all those things made it very prohibitive. Uh, in order to do something that was just filling a vacant space that was empty, that wasn’t doing anything for the community anyways.
So we saw that and we tried to then start building this platform around it, uh, in Minneapolis first.
Andrew: I like that. What, what I see on it now and storefronts up and running right now? I can say I’m looking for a spot in San Francisco and kind of like Airbnb will show me a bunch of beautiful photos. Tell me who’s a fast responder. And let me book even a single day for 250 bucks, I can get a beautiful spot here.
I liked that it’s that type of marketplace. You intentionally wanted it to be a marketplace, right? You didn’t want to be brokers.
Tristan: Correct? Yeah. Yeah. There was definitely some like real estate tech companies that were wanting to take that like kind of brokers cut, but we wanted to re we, you know, for lack of, uh, of using another Silicon Valley cliche, democratize it a bit and, uh, and just make it accessible to people who are creators, Brandt, Brandt, you know, up and coming brands.
E-commerce going offline artists designers and help them to do it.
Andrew: Idea. It’s simple. It’s clean. And I, I would’ve thought once you had that idea and you looked around and you saw how much empty storefront, how many empty storefronts there were. That people would be dying to work with you. And still you said to our producer, I went out and I started talking to the people who had these spaces and they weren’t open to it.
Who did you talk to and why weren’t they open to letting you borrow it, letting you rent it?
Tristan: Yeah, yeah. A wide variety of people or a wide variety of reasons. Um, you know, we saw everything from, uh, let’s say commercial brokers that were, you know, they just didn’t want to deal with short term in, on short term to them as less than a year. So like that means they’re willing to sit on a space for a year plus.
And have nothing happen. And this a lot of times is becoming it’s something that’s going on in the main city squares and busy main streets of New York and San Francisco and LA, which was our first three cities that we focused on after Minneapolis. But in then we also went to a. Smaller spaces. Like there’s this little arcade in, in Minneapolis.
And I was like, this is such a cool space. Like people would love to like, you know, think about the different types of collaborations they could do here. But then the, maybe like the space is too small, you know? So there was a lot of like hesitancy to listing on the platform at first. But when you found somebody who had, who was really excited by this, uh, you know, then like just people would get it and then they would, and then
Andrew: did you find someone who was the first person to get excited about listing on your platform?
Tristan: Um, it was a lot of, uh, kind of event space slash like art galleries, because they’re used to these kind of drop pull in, pull out, like, you know, they, they can do events, they know how to set up and set and tear down.
Andrew: You know, that’s a bummer. I did see that on the platform right now that most spaces, they have couches, they have infrastructure. They’re not these empty spots that I would have expected, which tells me that it’s people who are professionally doing this. And this is just their way of finding customers instead of waiting for repeat visits and word of mouth to fill up their space.
Right.
Tristan: Yeah, I definitely changed over time where we felt we wanted to fill this one in 10 empty vacant stores. That was the average of, you know, commercial retail in the U S and. That was kind of that kind of urban, we, you know, we focused on this like kind of like, how do we have a real impact, um, you know, coming from a social impact company to this, it was like, we thought about the urban innovation side.
And that was, that was, so it was w I think eventually things transition and you kind of are in the river and get caught up in it and it transitioned. And I think. We ended up then focusing maybe more on the up and coming person that makes an amazing product, but is trying to find customers. And so we can with marketplaces, sometimes you’ll focus on one side or the other.
I think we tried to focus on the re the vacant real estate and it became more difficult and we ended up focusing more on that curve. Crater
Andrew: So then you eventually found a few spaces that were already ready to do this and doing this type of thing on a regular basis, right? Like the galleries. And you said, all right, instead of filling out our platform with more of these places, let’s just stick with the few that we have. And now let’s go to creators and show them what’s possible.
They could do their thing in person. Right.
Tristan: Yeah. Yep. And we tried to bring the cost down too. I think, along that way so that it was affordable as well.
Andrew: How much did it start off being and where did you go first?
Tristan: Yeah, well, uh, it usually ends up being around maybe a thousand dollars, uh, for like to say a cart size. So that might be it for a weekend or a week.
Andrew: A thousand dollars for what?
Tristan: It’s like renting a, renting a space for a weekend or a week.
Andrew: Okay. All right. I saw a couple of, for two 50, so I thought maybe that was more standard. All right. But that’s still fair.
Tristan: it might be for like a day or, um, and, and it varies quite widely.
Andrew: Okay. All right. And so then who’s the first person that you were able to get to book on the platform? The first creator.
Tristan: Yeah. Um, so that’s, uh, that’s a funny story because we basically got into angel pad in San Francisco. Um, after that summer working on it in Minneapolis and just kind of trying to build it out. And, uh, the first, the first people we got was at the end of the program. So that was like, when accelerators, maybe still take somebody in, uh, you know, pre traction where it doesn’t happen quite as often anymore.
And, uh, so kind of, we were like fundraising, our seed round and setting this store. We basically rented a store in Westfield, in San Francisco downtown and, uh, and filled it with 10 brands. We had, uh, yeah, all sorts of brands. Like we had a brands from like mission street, uh, in, in mission district, um, or on Valencia.
And like, they were like trying a different part of town. We had like a brand that was like military tech fashion.
Andrew: how’d you find these brands?
Tristan: Um, we, uh, a lot of them came through kind of like, you know, you think about how you hire your first few employees came through kind of our own networks. Like, uh, we had hired someone who joy, uh, who was really this amazing person.
Um, and she had, had done a bunch of pop-up stuff. She had worked for Levi’s and like helped us kind of build into this network, this retail network in San Francisco, which, you know, we were still very much outsiders. We had only been there for a couple of months.
Andrew: How’d you get into angel pad into angel pad.
Tristan: Um, uh, some, some, you know, a few very good conversations with, uh, Tomas Cortez, the kind of ex Google founder guy there. Um, w what really convinced him was showing our MVP. Cause I think he liked the idea and his wife works with them closely Kerryn, and, uh, they liked the idea. Um, they thought B2B marketplaces are very interesting.
There’s a couple of others that came in with us. And, uh, you know, basically saw this MVP and we’re like, Oh, okay. You guys could actually execute to some extent. So,
Andrew: what was the MVP? What did you build it on?
Tristan: Oh, it w it was, uh, it was like a Ruby yeah. On rails, a first draft of the marketplace and the website. And we had like some of our Minneapolis listings, but we didn’t really have any bookings yet.
And it also didn’t work that
Andrew: It didn’t work. Okay.
Tristan: really work that well.
Andrew: All right. These days you can do that with no code. Right. Just find some platform, right? There’s so many knockoffs of Airbnb that you could just take as a first version, but all right, you showed that you could code or build something. You show that you can get some listings.
You didn’t need to show traction, like you said, and get, uh, creators. Then you, it seemed like became your first one. Tenant you were the one who first found a group of, uh, creators. And then were you also responsible for bringing customers for them or did these creators have customers themselves?
Tristan: Yeah. Uh, yeah, so we, we basically dock food at our own, our own site, um, made it happen. And then, uh, because of the Westfield location, and I think that’s what eventually started to become a key indicator of where people wanted to rent space was we just need to get spaces where people are already walking.
Uh, if we get spaces in strip malls, we worked with some mall companies that didn’t add spaces outside of like city centers. It’s just not going to work. Right? Like you have to, they’re looking for customers and you, if you don’t have customers walking by, it’s just, it doesn’t really work out. And so we kind of started to, again, that was another evolution of the marketplace as time went on.
Okay.
Andrew: All right. It worked out there. Did you, did you figure out how to get more creators once they will bring in their own customers? You did.
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so then we started playing around with things we had done, you know, before, uh, as far as paid acquisition, Facebook was still, uh, like very, very hot, uh, acquisition strategy at the time. Um, you know, this was like that definitely the evolution of, of step-by-step building where. In Minneapolis, we had just like an email sign up form.
Right? A lot of people are doing the type form style sign up these days. Um, and so we had that and we had like this MVP, and then we can start moving into this marketplace, but we still did a lot of things with landing pages and like long tail SEO of having all these listings on, you know, doing brand pages.
Uh, you know, we started getting really high rankings and also I just, I’m becoming from like a, you know, a blogging, uh, company from before, just at a ton of content and like ranked really high for things like pop-up shop, which was still kind of up and coming at the time. So I think that was one of our, kind of, one of our key insights of working together for Eric and I is that we, we both, uh, we kind of hopped on this like social entrepreneurship trend that was happening and try and really like.
Build something on it. And then same with like pop-up retails. Like we saw this was something really interesting and then built off top off of some of these, these kind of trending keywords.
Andrew: I would have thought Tristin that going after Etsy store creators, who are already doing well would have worked or, or Instagrammers who had followings, but that’s not what, what ended up happening is it.
Tristan: Well, we, uh, that’s, that’s, uh, you know, uh, this was also the heyday of, of growth hacking. Um, and, uh, we did a lot, we had probably a team of, of, uh, 20 virtual assistants in the Philippines, um, helping us kind of do outreach and, and kind of clean data that was coming from. Shopify Etsy, Magento. Um, that was probably the most effective, you know, we were just reaching out to store and I was saying like, we really, you know, why don’t, we would kind of select, try to filter down to ones that had something interesting, because like you said, with Etsy, 1% of the, they kind of have like the 1% rule I feel like were most of the sales on Etsy are going to, you know, one or 10%, the top and the rest of Etsy sellers.
Maybe don’t quite have enough revenue to be able to then. Not just rent a store, but outfit it and make it look good. And so we, I think we kind of went up and focused on this kind of middle tier of, of, uh, makers that was like, you know, someone who could rent like rent a thousand dollar, um, ticket store for the week.
Andrew: And I guess this is before Instagram was what it is. Now we’re talking about 2012. I think you launched a 2015 when you sold. Yeah. The problem with Etsy was, and I think it still is, there is no way to follow a creator to watch them create. I bought my wife earrings from somebody who was right here in mill Valley.
I would have loved to have seen how she made the earrings. I would love to see how she made the rings that I bought, you know, to follow along and get to know the creator beyond the purchase. And they don’t have that. And as a result, there’s no reason for me to go back except every few years I might go back and buy from the person where, and then they don’t have a way of saying, Andrew, I know you like my stuff, come into the store.
You know,
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. W we started to try to build up brand pages like that. I think someone who actually did really well at telling that story a bit, um, and it was. Sometimes more on like the kind of consumable, consumable goods side of things, but , if you remember them, uh, they, they had a kind of a platform that you could, they would really tell.
And I think that it started to become something, but I don’t know. It just, it, it. It’s it’s, it kinda didn’t quite get there. There was definitely companies raising that were telling kind of brand stories and like make her stories. And, um, and I think it transitioned into this journey telling that’s happening with like indie hackers and, um, and I th I I’m really, I’m really excited, like building in the open and stuff, and I’m really excited by that, that movement as well.
Andrew: All right. Let me take a moment to talk about my first sponsor is HostGator for hosting websites, you know, trips. And one of the things that I like about you, and one of the reasons why I was able to say quickly, yes. When our friend Mike Del Ponti suggested you is you have your own website where frankly, you get to tell your story and indoctrinate me into the life of Triston.
I was on your site. What is it? Tristin today? Dot com.
Tristan: Uh, yeah, or, well, the one you’re probably talking about is Tristen pawlak.com.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. We’re the one where it’s just like, here’s a list of all the things that I’ve
Tristan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew: like the fact that you and your wife went on a honeymoon that was also a sabbatical, becomes a thing and a potential topic for the interview. The fact that your dude, the fact that you’re on product hunt, you’ve made it in one paragraph, feel like, Oh, damn, this guy’s good.
And all you’re doing is like your own propaganda towards people. Like, but it works. Here’s, here’s why I like it because most people, I interview hope that we’ll go out on the internet and research who they are and figure out what makes them great. Great. And that’s a lot of work. Now I will do that work.
Why put me out and why not have a hand in directing me to just a simple page? The fact that it’s on a site is helpful, that says. Here’s what I did in a meaningful way. Yes. You could have linked over to your LinkedIn profile and LinkedIn, and it’s a lot, you’re, you’re pretty active there. But to give me the story behind LinkedIn, the story behind your angel list, the story behind your trip, and the fact that I can go and see pictures of your trip there, it gives me a sense of who you are.
I think most people totally miss that because they overthink it. They think a website needs to be this big thing. When in reality, all it needs to be is a page on the internet, a simple page that says here’s who I am. Here’s how to get to know me. Right.
Tristan: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, If I, that it kind of helps me just think about some of the highlights of my own life, by being able to keep it in some sort of record like that as well. Like it’s like, you know, you end up doing so many things and, you know, forget that I don’t consider myself as necessarily a great memory.
So it’s like, here’s this, here’s some record of some of the fun stuff that I got involved with or the past decade.
Andrew: I think everyone should do that include the professional stuff and also the personal stuff. And. It makes it easier for someone who’s interviewing like me. It makes it easy for someone who’s about to meet you, frankly. It makes it easier for somebody who wants to do business with you. They have one page, you control some of that.
You can’t control everything they know about you, but you direct them and you control some of the narrows. All right. If you’re out there listening to me, I keep talking about whole skaters is a great way to host your site. I do that. Mixergy is hosted on HostGator, but I should also say. Don’t overthink it and it doesn’t have to be so big, a simple page about what you are, what you’re doing incredibly useful, put it on the internet, forget about it and let it just be there to do work for you.
All right. And if you go to hostgator.com/mixergy, you will have a simple, inexpensive plan that will just work and scale up with you. hostgator.com/mixergy. I should also say trust and you get a low price. When you do that. Really good price, hostgator.com/mixer. Do the lowest price they have. All right. So coming back here, you finally are able to get some creators.
I think you got to like 3000 stores. Is that right before you sold? Let’s now talk, we talked about the good stuff. Talk to me about some of the challenges that you had with this employee without mentioning the person’s name.
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think probably one of the biggest challenges for a lot of founders is jumping into management without tons of management experience. I mean, we were still, you know, basically kids in our twenties, you know, raising millions of dollars and then starting to try to run this business and.
Then, you know, as you raise subsequent rounds, hiring a bunch of people where you expand out of a seven people sitting around a table to, you know, 30 people in different rooms and different teams. And I think that’s the only, we started to see, like, you know, Start to you start to see how strong your culture is and how much you’re reinforcing the right culture.
And, uh, we, we, in this instance, we had someone who became very toxic to the culture, but it wasn’t always obvious because at the same time, they were also very productive and they were just constantly working, like working as almost, almost as much as the founder
Andrew: Sales position. So they were bringing in revenue to,
Tristan: product, product kind of engineering.
Andrew: okay. So there, there were, they just spending a lot of time there or also prolific really creating. Okay. So they’re spending a lot of time actually creating. And when you say toxic, what’s the problem then?
Tristan: Yeah, I think the problem then is like the collaboration between employees and people on the team. And I think what some of the things that kept. Occurring was, uh, you know, okay. This person’s really hard to work with. Um, and then not all I get, then there’s other kind of art of being a founder leader manager that is approachable, that people feel.
Trust and safety coming to you and talking to you about things are hard for them. And I think that was that, you know, generally I think I was, was kind of that person and filling that role. Um, but as the team got bigger than there were less people there, they didn’t, you know, things to come. They didn’t, you know, they weren’t looking at me and maybe as their direct manager.
And so there were like, Uh, a variety of things that kind of occurred. And then eventually people would just, there were seen, there was kind of like almost like a slow drip of people leaving the company.
Andrew: Could you give me an example? It doesn’t have to be specific if you want to hide, uh, what was going on with this person, but I want to get a sense of what the problem was. Why couldn’t people go to him?
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good, it’s a good question. Um, Yeah, I think, you know, and there was just something about, um, the vibe of this person where they seemed kind of like say they’re trying to be sincere, but really kind of felt a little bit power hungry. And then, uh, just like, I think then when that was, you know, Maybe that was kind of what we saw.
Like there was this like, Hey, you know, I’m really sincere. I’m like really trying to make this work, but then there’d be like this subtle undertone of like, but, you know, I don’t know about like, you know, what this person, you know, is doing, or like, there’ll be like these little comments and things like this that would kind of, you know, kind of be directing like Downing other people and things like that.
That. We’re we’re really in a subtle way. And then kind of became like a little bit of a back and forth between my co-founder and I, unlike, you know, what’s healthy, what’s healthy for the team and, you know, and. There’s a lot of, uh, pressure and urgency that can turn into anxiety that can say like, we’ll we need, you know, we need more people that are producing as much as this person, uh, versus like a healthy, you know, a safe space that where, where people trust each other, we can produce more.
And I think there’s lots of different ways to have culture for me. The latter is something that I want. And I think other people might create cultures, which we’ve seen a lot in Silicon Valley where it’s the former where it’s, you know, it’s all production and it’s less the soft skills
Andrew: And meanwhile, you and Eric disagreed about this person. It seems like Eric wanted that drive right?
Tristan: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I mean, that’s how we worked probably to a fault. I think. I mean, I think that’s like the one time in my life where I’ve felt like, you know, completely burnt out because just didn’t feel supported. Didn’t feel like was working nonstop. This is like our baby and. You know, just then running into all these conflicts and I’m like, this is supposed to be something we’re enjoying doing as well, as well as doing and working hard.
And it just, I think that was kind of the definition of burnout for me, was seeing people leave and be really upset with like some of the situations that they were confronted with.
Andrew: You told that producer, you hired a Googler. She eventually, which is a big win here in the city. Right. She eventually leaves because.
Tristan: She left? Uh, yeah, she left because she just couldn’t work with this said person. And, and, uh, and because of, and again, I was like at one step removed, so I didn’t really get that feedback loop. Um, and then when I did. Uh, it was, it was too late. Right. She was like, Hey, I’m, I’m leaving. I’m like, let’s take a walk, talk about it.
Okay. Here’s why I’m leaving. She’d be more candid. And, you know, I just felt like the biggest failure, to be honest, uh, that I wasn’t taking care of people on our team. I wasn’t making them feel safe and it wasn’t something funny.
Andrew: Okay. And so you left, did you cash out? You did. Did you cash out before you left? Are you
Tristan: No, I S I S yeah, I left a little bit before, but I stayed on the board and I, I S I support in the sale.
Andrew: Okay. Oh, this is just really painful. I was going to say, why didn’t you get a therapist or a coach, or a lot of people go to marriage therapy with their co-founders, but you didn’t.
Tristan: think it’s a good idea. Yeah, we, we, we, we did, uh, it was a, like, it was like a little bit too late. I think there was a lot of these issues. There’s a lot of conflict. And we actually Miko me, my co-founder and this other person, all actually we paid, you know, to have us get coaches and also have coaches like work as together.
And I feel like even the coach was like, is something that seems pretty, you know, unhealthy here, but without like, you know, um, I, you know, I think there’s a rule, right? Like your therapist is, shouldn’t be a, you know, Talk coaching you and your partner at the same time.
Andrew: Well, if it’s, if it’s joint therapy. Yes. But you’re right. When they’re seeing people individually, it does feel like I did that once with someone who I, uh, I was dating and I found myself kind of. Making my stories in expressing them the way that made me sound good and kind of like negging her so that the therapist wouldn’t would give her bad information and tell her to be better.
To me, that’s just no way to work. All right. I see. I see the problem there. You then left and it looks like you just took some time away, right?
Tristan: Well, I try at first I tried, um, I tried and then, uh, I talked to Christine Tsai at 500 startups. Who’s one of our investors. And I know I did the, this is kind of probably something that, you know, if any founder that’s left in any sort of way is, is used to, it’s like, you know, you kind of do the rounds, talk to your investors, you talk to, you know, the people closest to be involved and you say, Hey look like things are good.
Things are fine. You know? Uh we’re, you know, I’m just going to step away because it’s better for me. Um, but you know, everything’s running. Just fine. And, uh, and so I kind of was like going and having those conversations to, you know, help storefront continue on. And, uh, and then she was like, why don’t you come here and like EIR for a little while.
And I was like, ah, I’m really like, you know, I was, that was probably my, my deepest low, right. It’s like, I never wanted to give up on this. I never wanted to give up. And it just, it just wasn’t healthy. And, uh, and so. She, I kind of did some part-time work. I should, I kind of jumped into it, like maybe like a month, third month
Andrew: What type of work were you doing?
Tristan: yeah, with 500, uh, I got involved with, uh, their, uh, their, their accelerator in, in, down in mountain view. Um, and then eventually transitioned to the San Francisco one and kind of coached founders, like was able to finally like spend some time on mentorship and give back.
Andrew: you to coach?
Tristan: Yeah.
Andrew: So here’s the thing that I wonder, what is it that, what is it that you do? I’ve. I’ve noticed that some of my friends will just go and be coaches if 500 startups. And there’s some of them like Sean Percival, he’s a marketing guy, you know him.
Tristan: Oh, yeah, he’s wonderful.
Andrew: so I totally understood it, but he had that only marketing skill.
If anything else, he almost needed to be rounded out. You don’t have that specific one thing that you could say, I’m the guy who’s going to coach you on this. Meanwhile, you didn’t have a giant exit, which then would give you the credibility to say, I can coach you on everything. So what was it that you were able to go in and help with?
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. I think I pulled a lot from that experience around culture, running it, you know, managing your team. Um, 500 is very focused on the growth side of things. So I, you know, it’s definitely, it’s maybe I’m not super niche and like one type of marketing or anything, but. Um, I love like brainstorming and like thinking about growth, hacking sales hack, and trying to figure out ways to get, you know, very early companies off the
Andrew: Got it. So it’s, it’s not just, I’m a generalist, I’m an entrepreneur. I did it once. I know everything. I’ll do it for you guys and help you do it yourselves. It’s more like I could do growth hacking what’s one growth hacking thing that you did at storefront.
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. I’d probably just go back to like the most successful thing we did was, um, build this machine of, uh, crawling, you know, scraping crawling leads from some of the major e-commerce sites and then outreach in a way that was very, uh, effective. And wasn’t, uh, deemed too spammy.
Andrew: Ah, thanks to that Etsy thing that we talked about, it was all automated. And so how would you get email addresses of people on Etsy?
Tristan: Um, you can pull, uh, yeah, for Etsy. I think we pulled URLs and we cross-reference to either probably social sites. And then there was, um, there are some tools that you could, if you had certain types of data. You could run them through them. And they would say like, okay, here’s like email addresses for that, but it was kind of duct taped together a bit.
Like now there’s a lot of great tools to run things like this, like outreach or, uh, built with, or, you know, there’s a lot of there’s a lot or grow, grow bots, um, that were like built all around this sort of outreach. But, uh, now, uh, at that time we just kind of duct tape tools together and kind of co reference things quite a bit.
Andrew: Got it. I didn’t, I remember interviewing somebody around this time who at the end of the interview told me that he was doing something like this too. And he explained why he didn’t want to include it in the interview. And it was super hot and hated. And it was a real, it was just a real driver for his business.
I didn’t let him lie in the interview obviously by saying what, what, that’s something else where it’s like, we figured out, uh, Word of mouth, but I understood why he wouldn’t want to give me more details within the interview about this. And it worked, then it seems to still grow work now. And, um, I could see now why you’d end up with 500 startups.
Let’s skip ahead for just a second. For, for my sponsor. My second sponsor is, uh, SEMrush. You told me that you use it@cto.ai. That’s where you’re working right now. You’re doing growth for them, right. And beyond that growth community, et cetera, how do you SEMrush.
Tristan: Yeah, we, um, when we work with developers and so a big part of working with developers is a totally different type of marketing, um, things that are very like helpful. You can’t do these flashy ads. And so we do a lot of things where around content and part of that is just understanding certain keywords and what people are searching and, um, And understanding like how, how we rank against competitors.
And so all those
Andrew: you give me a specific what’s one specific thing that you’ve done that helped you get more, more traffic or more customers.
Tristan: Yeah, well, we, we monitor our, um, rankings and what keywords that we rank for in Google search. And, uh, let’s take Kubernetes, um, one of the major platforms that we try to simplify with the platform. And so we just, we, we basically, you know, one of the things is just con. Going in there daily watching where we’re, where we’re ranking and like, how do we, how do we build up with new keywords, new keyword strings, um, that are, we can rank and then kind of build that into our entire platform while you know, providing quality content, but it helps us focus a bit on like what’s happening in search and who we rank, who are we competing against for
Andrew: you’re typing Kubernetes into SEMrush. You’re seeing other keywords that go along with that, that you should be creating articles for.
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Basically, maybe there’s other tools that are, you know, what’s what are, what is, what’s the highest volume of like a Kubernetes and I don’t know, um, uh, like cloud native, you know, or, or like different, different kind of developer tools tied together or. Um, what, what are people doing when they’re trying to do Kubernetes?
And like a lot of developers have a problem, they Google search. And so I think that kind of surfaces some of that helpful information, um, where we know what questions maybe could help be helpful to answer. And then, you know,
Andrew: And which ones are not being answered properly or strong as you could on other sites, but still have a lot of traffic. Meaning a lot of people are searching for them. And so you will say, all right, this is what we write an article about. Do you write the article yourself? No.
Tristan: Uh, sometimes, sometimes, but, uh, we, we also are some, or like we’ll have people on the team do it. Um, and, uh, and you know, it’s nice to have a technical point of view where you’re like, okay, like, Hey look, I’m trying to figure out how to use fast defy with CTO. Dot AI. And, uh, and so like, you know, there’s like you can include code snippets or do a video.
Um, but the helpfulness is understanding that fast defy this, uh, this framework, um, is something that people are like trying to figure out. And they’re trying to figure out how to use it, to run their web application.
Andrew: There wants to get started with them. Go to SEM, rush.com or, you know what, let me see if we, if they go to mixergy.com/semrush, they will. I got a free account right now, limited time. So here it is a URL that will redirect you to the pop, the discount code and everything in it’s mixergy.com/semrush, M I X E R G y.com/s C M R U S H.
Go do it now in the past, people complained that they didn’t do it fast enough, and I’ve had to go and apologize to SEMrush and ask them to give this person an extra account. And this part just do it now. So I don’t have to deal with it really seriously. Go grab them while it’s still available.
Tristan: I’m going to go right now.
Andrew: Actually, I don’t think you qualify if you flex, you pay, um, or you know, or maybe cto.ai, he doesn’t qualify.
All right. Of all the things that you’ve done. I think what I’m most interested in is you created a syndicate, meaning other people put their money in through angel list in a pool that you then invest. Right? How much money? Yeah, go ahead.
Tristan: I’m, I’m, I’m really impressed by like, I think that’s one of the undervalued things is just like the effect angel list has had on the VC opening up the VC, um, VC opportunities for anyone to be at IPC.
Andrew: and I guess the, the advantage is for investors that. Operators like you, people who are in the tech space, you know, who’s, who’s real and who’s just faking it. You get a sense of what’s working, they’re friends of yours. So they’ll let you into an investment that they may not, uh, allow others. I’m wondering, how are you finding the, these deals?
How’d you find the investors let’s start with the investors, right? You just say I’m doing the syndicate. You’re allowed to promote it. People have to come in and invest. I think I forget how many you have. It’s like 36 people. Am I right?
Tristan: Oh, and this syndicate now actually, um, probably about 120, um, a lot of people I would say, uh, The ones that the people that have joined through angel list are probably, you know, they’re maybe they’re investing like a thousand to 10 K or something like this. Um, otherwise it’s like personal network friends that, you know, know me and there’s usually some level of trust there.
Andrew: So people who are coming in through angel list might just discover you on angel list and say, you know, this guy’s invested in a few things. Let’s just throw a few bucks because they’re just diversifying and trying a lot of different, um, uh, trying to back a lot of different investors. Am I right?
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. There’s like that. And then like the kind of the friends and family side of it.
Andrew: And then they might even see on your profile that you founded storefront, you raised $10 million and were acquired by we open, right. Has so that that’s got this sense of, well, look at this guy, he’s raised a lot of money. He was acquired. They may not realize that you were acquired for less than you raised.
Right? That’s true.
Tristan: Yeah, I think, I think there’s a, there’s a mix of like, I’ve spent time, like on the fundraising side of things. And, but really, probably more importantly is like the time I’ve spent with 500 on the other side of the table where I’ve like seen, I’ve probably, you know, through six batches in San Francisco, As, you know, helped 200 plus companies come through and, you know, there’s something about working with an accelerator where you get this, you know, you’re like making this investment decision at the beginning and then you get to see four months later, like where they’re at.
Andrew: Did you get to do that? Where you beyond helping them with, with growth hacking, you were also helping to make the decision who to back because you were working with them. You knew who to back.
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s like, I think, um, separate, separate from the syndicate side of things, um, that, you know, was, I was making like these investments decisions kind of like a traditional BC would, right. You’d have a, have a meeting like once a week and you say, okay, like we’re bringing these people into the, you know, accelerator.
Who do we think we can help? Well, what would it look like? Big opportunities, you know? And then we’ll go through this like cycle of all these interviews and, and then make, make our selections. And, uh, and then, you know, unlike a traditional VC where either they, a lot of traditional VCs, don’t get that involved.
It’s kind of like we make the investment and then maybe we hear about you and, you know, in a year, or maybe if we’re more involved, big at make a bigger investment here by you, you know, monthly or quarterly, we get to see that. And we’re with them every single day. And so we kind of. You get to, you get to learn a little bit of that kind of venture capital pattern, matching style of understanding who succeeds and who doesn’t.
Andrew: How long were you with 500?
Tristan: I was with them for kind of close to four years,
Andrew: Wow.
Tristan: as well as doing like some ad hoc stuff while we were traveling and we helped them launch a couple programs internationally.
Andrew: Okay. Yeah. It seems like a really great position. So you get a good salary. You get insight into what’s working with these companies and outright. Was it a good salary?
Tristan: Uh, I’d say 500, 500 salary is a lot. Let’s just say, this is like, when I joined, there were like, you know, we’re not paying, we’re not the biggest dollar on the block.
Andrew: More than a hundred thousand a
Tristan: really great. Yeah. Yeah, but you get really great, uh, you know, experience and you get to learn how to be an investor. And, uh, I think all that’s true and, uh, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, and they were also a very like, Hey, let’s let let’s invest in like founders, no matter where they’re from, you know, what they look like.
Like they were very early on supporting founders, you know? That were international. They were very early on just trying to find ways to, uh, support founders that weren’t as represented in Silicon Valley. And I think that was something that they just didn’t, they didn’t always do a great job of telling that story, but it was something that was kind of baked into the,
Andrew: No, they were really good about, about doing that. They would get on a plane and go to other countries to understand it. I remember Dave McClure, one of the co-founders of 500 startups telling me that he specifically was looking for people who are underrepresented moms, parents, um, uh, parents, people were older.
Because they there’s their markets now that were coming online, but weren’t being addressed. Okay. So I get how you are then building your relationships, learning to see what worked, I’m guessing. Also you raise some money from some of the entrepreneurs who went through these through 500 startups and some that invested through 500 startups that were you building those kinds of relationships.
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean the best thing about an accelerator program is like the relationships that you create through them. And that’s true. The founder to founder, as well as like the kind of investor to founder. Yeah.
Andrew: All right. And so how much, how much money is backing you on, on angel list?
Tristan: Oh, good question. Um, it’s it’s been a while since I’ve, I’ve checked, to be honest, I’ve been a little bit less, uh, active.
Andrew: Just give me a rough idea.
Tristan: I was just been a little bit less active. Oh, um, I don’t know. There might be like a couple million in like total, uh, like total, but it’s just kind of pretty rough because it’s, it’s, it’s like, I’ll say I’ll invest this much and it just adds it up. And so I think recently they took that away. That’s why I can’t, I don’t have like a quick figure without
Andrew: what do you mean? You’ll say I’ll invest as much in then take it away.
Tristan: Oh, uh, like, like, uh, each LP that you have in the syndicate. Will, uh, have, like I, on average I invest $1,000 or an average, I invest $10,000 or, um, and they used to show that on the syndicate of like the total of what people would say that they’ll invest, but you could put anything. So, uh, it was kind of a rough estimate.
Yes.
Andrew: Okay. I thought I saw that even today when I looked at it, but maybe, maybe I’m wrong. All right. Why aren’t you excited about doing more of these angel investments? It doesn’t seem like that’s what your focus is.
Tristan: Yeah. Um, I think, well, I’m doing a follow on right now for, uh, for actually a company that I worked done a syndicate on before. Um, but, uh, while we were traveling, we were kind of digital nomad for a couple of years and just kind of tuned a little bit out and focus more on, you know, what are w you know, just international, uh, startup communities and, and entrepreneurs.
And I’ll get them out there.
Andrew: Personally, not part of 500 startups.
Tristan: Yeah, we did work with 500 while we traveled, but just, that was like, we basically, my wife worked for Lyft at the time and I was working for 500 and we’d just quit on like the end of the year and decided to just travel a bit and do that, uh, you know, just get out and see the world a bit. And.
Andrew: You just wanted a year of, it seems like that’s what it was, right. It, it was like a sabbatical. What did you call it? Sabbat a moon.
Tristan: about a moon Sabbat and, well, we also got married, so I’ve been, I’ve been together with Danielle for man. I don’t even 14 years now. And so, but we, we only got married like 10 years in. And so, uh, and so like, we were like, let’s finally get married and take that one way ticket trip that we always wanted to take.
Andrew: And so you went for how many countries, how many months.
Tristan: We, uh, we we’ve planned for a year, but we, so we, we pretty much got rid of most of our stuffs, you know, assaulted, donated. It gave my parents like what was, what was ever left and just furnished one of the rooms that my sister just moved out of. And then, uh, that kind of left it open, which ended up becoming two years.
And, uh, the odd thing about the time line is that we got back and that’s why I’m in Minnesota now because we got back and we were just visiting family and then COVID started. And so, so somehow we made this magical timeline of traveling as to 60 countries in two years. And then as we were naturally finishing COVID started and we just spent all this time, Minnesota.
Andrew: That way too, that I wanted to do seven marathons on seven continents. And I finished it just a couple of couple of months before COVID hit. And I’m so glad that I didn’t put it off for another year. For another month. It just would never have happened. I could never get to Antarctica if I missed that one window that I, that
Tristan: Yeah. That’s, that’s an, that’s an incredible, so what, what marathon did you do in Antarctica?
Andrew: So actually, because of my schedule, uh, for work and family, I couldn’t get into formal marathons, and I also needed to do this fast. A friend of mine convinced me to do this all in one year, thankfully. So I said, I can’t get into any of the marathons on Antarctica. I kept pushing them to let me in. I kept trying, I would pay anything to get in and they weren’t willing to take my money because they’re long wait lists and their international laws about who can do what on Antarctica and how many people are allowed.
So finally I found this one, uh, company that watches people who do these, um, long ski trips, you know, where they’re just kind of gone to the South pole on, uh, on skis and sleds and, um, And I got on their airplane to Antarctica and I ran 26.2 miles on my own. I just went and I did it. They, have to make sure there are no crevasses that you fall into that you’re safe, that you’re not peeing somewhere.
Like, even on a run they want, they want to make sure that you’re not peeing on the snow because it’s actually a desert there, which means that it’s your pee will stay there for years if you believe it there. So they’re watching me to make sure I’m not damaging the environment and making sure I’m not getting damaged by the environment, but I go out and I do my own marathon and it was killer.
Good.
Tristan: Yeah, that’s what I was like, my, my, like, you know, ha hacker mind, like instantly thought I’m like, wait, maybe he just like, got into one small piece of Antarctica and just ran in circles until it.
Andrew: I w you know what I w you know what I did in a moment of desperation, I called this one, uh, cruise company, and I said, You’re going to be an international in Antarctic waters, right? They said, yes, can I get to Antarctica and just run back and forth? They said, actually let me check. They check. They said, no impossible.
Can’t get you to do it. Not this trip. I said, what about on your, on your boat? You’ll be in, in Antarctic waters. Can I just run around the boat? I said, let me check. I don’t think they came back. I said, that’s absolutely. You’re not going to be safe. It could be icy. We can’t have you running around. I said, all right.
If I could probably do it when they’re not paying attention, but not necessarily. I can’t. So I kept going and going
Tristan: Well, that’s amazing what a great accomplishment. That’s what I’m really
Andrew: good. Yeah, man. Um, all right. We’ve covered a lot here. Here’s the thing that I’ve learned. Number one, you can lose control of your own company, which stinks. Number two.
I think a lot of people pretend that once they sold that everything is great and that they’re, they know everything we’ve discovered that selling is not necessarily as big an exit as, as you know, the name exit would imply. Right. Weren’t you didn’t, you didn’t get yourself set for life. Make good money with all these investments or is it too early to tell?
Tristan: Yeah, a little, I was still a little bit early, um, you know, need to get a little bit closer, I think to the 10 year horizon.
Andrew: Okay. All right. And then finally, you know, we didn’t cover is cto.ai. What do you like about working there?
Tristan: Yeah. Um, well, the, I think one thing that Lee, you know, comes out of, uh, out of, uh, 500 is a lot of connections, a lot of friends and, uh, one of their, one of CTO’s investors. Um, Chris Newman actually introduced me to Kyle, the, the founder of CTO, AI. And he was like, this is the smartest person I’ve ever worked with.
And he’s awesome. You should talk to him. And I was going to just coming back, you know, starting to come back from this trip and thinking about, you know, okay. Like, um, you know, nothing. And I had nothing, I had any projects I worked on and kind of, you know, snowballed into something that I was going to work on full time.
And, uh, and so I met Kyle and I was just like, Wow, this guy’s awesome. Not only are they smart and he’s like kind of this, like, you know, mad scientist that can do everything, uh, you know, self-taught developer, um, you know, and now CEO, he, his last company sold to Zillow. Uh, but he’s also really thoughtful and I think that’s what I’ve appreciated most.
And why I’ve I’ve I’ve you know, had been so happy spending time with this company was. It’s just, it’s just run really well. And there’s some really thoughtful people in the leadership that are like, you know, they build trust. They think about all these different aspects of culture and leadership and employee self-improvement and how to help people have those foundations of safety and trust and, um, you know, transparency and things like that.
And so it’s like, I learn a lot from him and I think that’s probably. You know, my I’m one of those people. That’s probably always going to jump around to different industries and try different things. Um, you know, whatever, you know, I’ve heard the term, I guess someone told me right before I left on our trip was multipotentialite of, it’s like, uh, you know, different people get you, you get enough out of something and you move on.
It’s not, it’s not like you’re giving up. You just, you got really full on it. And he felt great. And you’re like, Oh, I’m gonna try something else. There’s so many things to try.
Andrew: I feel like there, there are a lot of people who are like that. Um, and very few who do it, especially, well, like Dave McClure, he was called the guy, what was his site? 500 hats. Right. Because he would do so many different things. Right. Um, and then he found a way to make it all work. And of course he went on to found 500 startups and that’s where the 500 I think, came from.
I could see that I could see how that would work for you. Here’s the part that I’m still sad about storefront should have been killer. It just, it hurts me that that didn’t become a huge company. Do you think that there’s potential for that to be a huge company now, do you think, like what’s wrong with that model?
It makes so much fricking sense.
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And it’s, you know, you’re looking at, you know, if you look at Airbnb, Um, and the, you know, th there’s a lot of people renting, but for much smaller, uh, you know, cart sizes, and for storefronts, like much bigger cart sizes. You know, we worked with everyone from Nike to Kanye West. Um, there’s a lot of potential and a lot of repeat customers at a scale that companies can do.
And, uh, and Mo the new CEO is, is amazing. And it’s been a very, you know, it’s obviously for a lot of companies, but definitely for storefront, a very tough year. With the way retail has been kind of, you know, open, open on and off hot, hot and cold again. But I think it’s, I think when things open up, I think it’s, there’s still a huge potential now more than
Andrew: will be bad. Yeah. I’m hoping that the pandemic actually, that they’re going to be able to help in the pandemic in the post pandemic world, because there will be stores that are open and hopefully there’ll be more open to different ideas. And I think that if we walk down the street and see the same store over and over, there’s a boredom to it.
But if you know that there’s this one spot where every week a different creator could be there and could take it over and make it into something brand new, it becomes more interesting to go there. And frankly, there are a lot of people who I see online, who I would love to see in person and experience their stuff in person to touch it, to see how it works.
When I’m thinking about is this one, uh, I forget the name of the company. It’s a company that makes camera equipment, all the tripods and the bags. And I see them when I run down, uh, uh, uh, Well, right by the Bay here in San Francisco. I see they’ve got space there, but I’m not going to go into their, into their offices.
I wish that they would just have some retail location every once in a while. So I can go in and see what it looks like. And that’s where I feel the potential for storefront is.
Tristan: Yeah, yeah. And you see it, you’ve seen it. You kind of called it out right in the beginning, right? With your like, you know, Apple store, but no Samsung store. And now you see Microsoft story, you see Casper Warby Parker. Bonobo has seen all these e-commerce traditionally eCommerce retailers have moved, um, in person.
And obviously it works because they keep expanding the number of stores that they have.
Andrew: The verge is to do that every once in a while they would create a pop-up store and people would just jump in there. Imagine if product hunt did not just a, I think they used to do these drinks, these drinks nights, but instead. Let’s do a maker night where you come in and you not just see the products that our makers created, but you buy the things to start to create more physical products or help people with creating physical products.
So, all right. I obviously love that business a lot. Um, um, I’m glad to have met you and what’s the best place of these 5 billion different sites. Where’s the best place for people. Cool. One of the things that I noticed about you is, you know, how a lot of sites will have ways to link to different people’s social media accounts.
You fill them all up, you got a dribble account, a Twitter account, a bee hands account, and this account what’s the best of all of these places. People go find you.
Tristan: Yeah, that’s that’s my multipotentialite, uh, coming out. Um, yeah, I think Tristan polic.com or I’m just, Pawlik on Twitter and that’s probably the most frequented places or, and, you know, you know, interest and polygon, clubhouse, you know, relevant, relevant, uh, shell there.
Andrew: and you know what, whatever will come out tomorrow. He’ll be on there and it’ll be listed on, on his, about me page, which he still has. All right. Thank you so much for being here. I want to say thanks to sponsors who made this interview happen? The first, if you’re hosting site, go to hostgator.com/mixergy the second, um, You heard it from Triston.
You’re not getting paid to talk about it, right? I’m definitely getting paid. You’re not you like it. You brought it
Andrew: You’re paying to talk about it. Yes. Go check out SEMrush. You can go to their website or if you want to try them out for free, for a limited time, you can go to mixergy.com/semrush. All right.
Thank you. Thanks everyone.
