Andrew: Hey, they’re freedom fighters. Are you nervous?
Aleksandr: Um, no, no, no. You made me call him. That’s
Andrew: seem, you seem okay. But also I feel like at times I’d make you a little nervous too.
Aleksandr: That’s okay. And as we speak, I’ll be, I’ll be, I’ll be more calm
Andrew: I feel like at some point you, you discovered your, uh, your swagger recently, is that fair to say
Aleksandr: swagger.
Andrew: swagger? Like you’ve got confidence. You’ve got this sense of self. Now you’re out there talking on the internet about how people need to build a reputation for on paper, but in person you don’t.
Aleksandr: No in person too, but like on the hair, um, I’ve almost never done it. I did like, uh, one, one other podcasts. It’s like, it’s like, I’m talking in the room with like 200 people or something. Yeah.
Andrew: I think better be more than 200 people, I think, uh, in order to get your team to feel comfortable with this, I had to tell them that we have a producer that will talk to you before you’ll you’ll get
Aleksandr: Actually shake up the line. So I, I talked through my story a little bit, so it was very, very helpful.
Andrew: Yeah. I love it. I love that you did that. The voice that you’re all listening to is Alexander . He is the founder of lemon.io. It’s it’s a managed marketplace of vetted off shore developers. Basically, if you’re looking to hire a developer, you go to them, they help you find the right match for your company to make sure the person’s not some kind of a jerk who’s going to run away with your code or not follow up with, uh, the work that they said that they’re going to do.
That’s his business. The thing that I think is interesting about Alexandra is, um, He’s building in public, he’s getting a little bit mouthy and social media opinionated. He’s becoming this interesting person to pay attention to. It’s gotta be working for his, uh, for his business and it’s starting to send traffic over to him.
He’s publicly telling everybody what his goal is for revenue. What’s the, what’s the revenue Alexander
Aleksandr: Um, our revenue goal for 2021 is, um, 10 million in NGV. So last year
Andrew: does that mean? G
Aleksandr: GMV is that gross marginal value. It’s something that you collect from, from clients.
Andrew: before you pass it onto your developers, it’s not your share of that.
Aleksandr: we would collect all the payments from clients and send the majority to the, to the developer. And revenue is a fee that we are burning.
Andrew: And you’ve got this graph on your Twitter profile that shows us the bar chart that shows us how close you are to it. How, how close are you right now? We’re recording at the end of
Aleksandr: So we just hit 1 million. Um, we just hit 1 million something today, um, in 83 days last year with its first million in 116, four days or something like that. So we are much faster than less, less here, less here in, in, in the whole year we did a 2.7 million. So we’re trying almost four acts this year.
Andrew: You get customers from all these tweets where you get opinionated about the importance of building a reputation, where you talk openly about your revenue, or is this just a fun thing that you do?
Aleksandr: Uh, first of all, it’s a lot of fun. Uh, but uh, I get a lot of inbound from, from building public, both email. I do also a newsletter and Twitter. And, um, funny thing that we, I don’t, I don’t want to build more supply right now because we, uh, we have more problems with, uh, I’m sorry, I don’t want to build more than demand right now because we have more problems with supply.
Uh, we’re trying to scale. Those are, you know, build a, a larger team and do a little more marketing on the supply side, but still we get a lot of inbound. Uh, I do intros, like I just, before this injury, I did three interests to myself, team people who reach out through Twitter or LinkedIn and, uh, Everyday, like some investor, you know, someone who wants to build partnerships or a person who was looking for an engineer, which sounds from, um, from Twitter.
And that’s amazing. I like, I have very, very little following side. I can only imagine, you know, people have had like dozens of thousands of followers and, you know, um,
Andrew: What do you have? Like 10,000 people who are following you? I think on Twitter. Am I right? Somewhere around there?
Aleksandr: uh, me, I think, no, it’s a five, a hundred,
Andrew: Oh, 3,500. Not even 10,000.
Aleksandr: not, not even 5,000.
Andrew: Wow. But man, for the level of like attention that you’re getting, it’s impressive.
Aleksandr: It’s a brand. I can only imagine what happens. Like when I 10 X my following,
Andrew: For every million dollars in gross sales that you get on the marketplace, how much goes to your company to lemon IO?
Aleksandr: um, I would take great is, uh, Um, is around like 20 to 25%. And my co-founder were going to kill me that I thought it, uh, set it on there, but we were kind of a little bit, we’re trying to be very transparent with our clients, but it’s very hard to be transparent in this way because, um, the majority of our competitors, they take from 60, but from 40 to 60% of take rate.
And if they are not transparent about this, but we, um, take less. But if we start talking that we take 25%, because the rest of the market is not transparent and no one knows, like, what is the rest of the market taking? It can actually bite us.
Andrew: It’s actually not that much money to run your business on at this scale. Right? Because out of every million dollars you get what, 20 $200,000 that you need to pay yourself, pay your team. Right.
Aleksandr: Yes, yes. And sellers is more expensive, uh, is, is, is, is, is the biggest expense. And we’re not being ourselves even that much. But, um, vetting engineers is very expensive, especially at scale. It’s very expensive.
Andrew: All right. I want to
Aleksandr: example, another company, another company was competitor. They have been in market like just a year and a half or something or two years.
So they’ve raised around $15 million, um, to do that.
Andrew: $58 million just for the bedding
Aleksandr: they know, I think something under 50 million to do that.
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, no secret. I had top towel as a sponsor. They’re vetting. I don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about. Their vetting was insane. They wouldn’t let me talk about it. I had them record something with me about their vetting process. They said before they said we don’t want to do it. I said, I promise let’s just record something.
If you don’t want it, I won’t publish it. They, it was insane. It was impressive. And then they said, you told us that if we didn’t want to republish it, we won’t, we’d rather not publish it. So I didn’t publish it. It was, it wasn’t an interview. It was, but I, I get the, I get the level of difficulty. Here’s what I, here’s what I’m interested in in this
Aleksandr: Yep. I, I wouldn’t say that I didn’t talk about top talent, but what’s interesting about top that what they did is, is actually amazing. Um, um, talk to us has actually been on the market for many years. So, um, the, the company I talked to is a new, new competitor is, um, they, um, and I might be, I might be butchering it out a little bit, but what they did is they have a vetting process, several steps, several levels of, of vetting, and they have their engineers to build the supply.
So they have freelancers will bring more, more freelancers and they have freelancers who actually test other freelancers. So they’re like kind of an unstoppable machine or this and that. It is amazing.
Andrew: Uh, where with you, you have to do a lot of the testing to make sure that the developers who are on your platform are as strong as you need them to be. Is that right?
Aleksandr: Um, we talked, getting a little bit different type of developers. Um, and, um, we also, you know, we also, uh, delegate some of the vetting to, uh, to, to our freelancers and our network, just, they were pioneers in this and I think this is pretty amazing.
Andrew: okay. I want to find out how you want to find out about the businesses you started before the failed and understand why they failed. I want to find out how you launched this and made it work. Um, especially considering that there had been other people in this market, and here you come in and say, I’ll help you find developers.
I’ll manage the relationship. And then I’m also curious about whether this can be transported into other areas. Like can somebody who’s listening to say. I like what Alexander has done. I want to do the no code developer manage marketplace, or I want to do the, um, uh, a marketplace like yours for professionals, but different types of professionals.
And I’m curious about what you think would apply from what you’ve done to other types of marketplaces. And if you think there are other topics that are worth, uh, pursuing, but this whole idea came to you because you went to a meet up and somebody said, you’re from the Ukraine. You must know developer. Am I right?
Aleksandr: Right.
Andrew: And so what was, what was it that you did tell me about that.
Aleksandr: That’s a funny thing that you said that you’re from Ukraine and, uh, uh, do you know developers? I was once in, uh, in someone’s home and, uh, there was an American who came to me and said, Oh, you from you from Ukraine, do you know Alex from Belarus? It’s like, well, Alex is over here.
Yeah. Uh, that’s true. Uh, someone came to me and they said, can it kind of help them find a developer? And they struggled with engineers before there were hiring of Upwork. And they were like all of a sudden reliable, always available. And they took a lot of time for them to find. So I found them a developer because I had someone in that work within one or two days.
And there were so amazed for the work they’ve done. They refer everyone to me. Yeah, I’ve been, um, I’ve been in outsourcing for a little bit. Um, and, uh, I’ve been in marketing outsourcing before, but I knew a few developers from my network. This is how we actually have built my network. I’m I was not a technical founder. I’m not, it was not tech founder and I didn’t, I’m not an engineer, so I, I didn’t know how it’s actually impact them.
So my betting process at the beginning was, you know, fake it until we make it. So I had people I trusted, I worked before and then I had them to bring me more people and I had them to bring you more people. So until I had someone to help me to that developers, I relied on my network
Andrew: But it was, was it a favor that you were doing for this woman who you met at the meetup?
Aleksandr: screaming.
Andrew: She paid you? She said, if you can find me a developer, I’ll pay you. You said, all right, I’ll go figure out how to do it because you didn’t have a job at the time and you thought I get this matchmaking thing. I could do it.
Aleksandr: Yeah, I did have a job, but he’s really so expensive. So
Andrew: Uh, what was the job that you had in Israel at the time
Aleksandr: I was, I was doing sales for an outsourcing company.
Andrew: and that they were doing? Um, what was it that they were outsourcing?
Aleksandr: They, they were doing the, they were doing engineering outsourcing, but, um, they didn’t do like freelancing, you know, one, one, one, one time jobs thing. They had like larger contracts. So I help them find, um, find more, um, bigger contracts here in Israel.
Andrew: got it. So you’re there in Israel. So you were in Israel, you said it’s expensive here. I make a little money on the side helping her out. And then your eyes open up to the possibility of doing this on a bigger scale. How do you get your next customer
Aleksandr: So she brought me in, I think like 10 next customers who brought me another few customers.
Andrew: that it was because there’s such a big demand for developers. And especially then the fact that you knew how to find one in Ukraine where it’s less expensive than in the U S or an Israel may do somebody that was worth referring new business to.
Aleksandr: Yes. And, um, they, they, they were all, um, small agencies, like one, one, one person agencies. And because they had to report to their clients, they need someone really reliable and all of them had bad experiences before. And like, you know, whenever they work without my, my engineers, um, and they were just shocked that it’s so fast, reliable, and in time.
Andrew: All right. So Alexander, the hardest part then is finding more developers. You found one. How did you find the others for the people who she referred to you?
Aleksandr: Yes. So is it totally I, then you couple that I made them to bring in more people.
Andrew: You said, I need you to go find more people like you
Aleksandr: Yes, I need, I
Andrew: Obviously. No other
Aleksandr: score or reliable engineers, so you can, uh, you can rely on. And they brought me more and they brought me more. And then I asked other engineers to vet engineers for me.
Andrew: Okay. And since you didn’t know him, you started asking other engineers, go sit down with these people. Do you, do they make sense? You started referring over one of the hardest parts of a business like that is people want to cut you out, right? Where you making money just for the introduction or making money on an ongoing basis
Aleksandr: I was making money on an unknown basis, but for them, first of all, I, uh, my, um, for them, the value at that time was so big that they didn’t think about it.
Andrew: that they weren’t trying to cut you out because they just needed a developer
Aleksandr: Right. But at that time, like lemon day is, is, is, um, is a little bit different business that I’m running at the beginning. At the beginning, it was even more managed. Because they were the, the, the, the people are coming to me for me to do like very small projects. Like, I don’t know, 20 hours project or one even one hour project.
So they needed some support, um, to, to, to help, to help them manage those developers. Like, because they need someone to do the task overnight, or like in two days, send it into some, lay, some, some layer of support from us. That’s why for them, at the moment, there was no need to cut us out. There were a couple of, you know, couple of clients who did it.
Um, but it was still there, like two or three years of, uh, of, uh, of our business. So yeah, not a lot of people tried to cut us out at that point.
Andrew: how long were you able to make it to keep going like this before the money became significant?
Aleksandr: Yeah, I, I didn’t, I didn’t think of this as a business, um, is just a side hustle and it was not significant. I think I made, um, um, like a couple of thousands of dollars, um, for months, but when it started growing, I, I, first of all, I decided to bring in, uh, the co-founder the friend of mine, who I knew already for like eight years and I wanted a co-founder, I didn’t want to do myself.
So I thought like, I, I made really bad mistakes co-founders before. So I think like, who’s the smartest person I trust out there. And I found him facility. He became my co-founder a few months after that. We, we started working like on a project basis. Like he even helped me pro bono at the beginning. Um, but yeah, I running a couple fodder and then I quit my job to, to do this.
Full-time.
Andrew: What was his part? What was his responsibility in the business?
Aleksandr: Operations. He’s very good at with operations and finance and it’s still, I hate finances. I hate like legal stuff, operations. And he he’s, he’s really amazing at that.
Andrew: The operations, meaning like systemize the way that you interact with your developers or what
Aleksandr: Um,
Andrew: sales process.
Aleksandr: no sales marketing is mine and I’m, as he said, like I’m more, um, um, like I, I dunno, tank, that just goes, and he’s like more like, okay, let’s step, step, step, step back. And like, think like, if we did the right thing, so we’re like balanced each other out. Um, but he was more working mostly with finances, you know, payouts, uh, figuring out like the legal stuff and like how to incorporate and pay taxes and all the things I, I don’t want to touch.
Andrew: You guys incorporated in the U S
Aleksandr: Yes. Yes.
Andrew: what’d you use for that?
Aleksandr: tribe. We were one of the first companies we use tried about less. Um, and it was amazing. I thought it was product shock because they’re like, okay, there’s a program. Uh, it’s actually $500, but we’re going to do this the first day that it’s free. And it took them, I think, like one week to do that, that was like, I think something is off over here.
And I mean, I knew there was tribe. I knew that it’s a big company and I didn’t know, like what’s X, maybe they’re gonna, you know, at the end, they’re going to show us the contract that would have to use them forever. And did, they didn’t even have to mention that we have to use them. And there was also one guy who was like, you know, and knocking in my emails, like how can we help or what else can we do for you? We, it says I was like, what’s going on?
Andrew: Cause their whole idea is they, they will incorporate companies that are outside the U S in Delaware, 500 bucks all done. Right. And then don’t.
Aleksandr: legal stuff, bank account, you know, has to be, um, you know, incorporation, everything, and a lot of help.
Andrew: That’s phenomenal. That’s phenomenal. Okay.
Aleksandr: That’s been, um, I mean, we’ve used them already for, I think four years and I think we pay like maybe a hundred X and fees, but, um, you know, at
Andrew: next in fees,
Aleksandr: w you know, they make these from,
Andrew: credit card processing.
Aleksandr: card processing.
So from,
Andrew: Do you use credit card processing for the people that you, that you, that you place?
Aleksandr: yeah.
Andrew: I don’t know. You know what? We cut that out. We saved so much fricking money. Like you said, it costs a lot of money. What I decided to do is just go into the invoicing software and disabled credit cards and nobody gives a rat’s ass.
They all use ACH anyway.
Aleksandr: Yeah, but for us, um, actual credit card is better. I know it’s more expensive, but because we have so many ongoing projects and we don’t want to scale, head count. So for us, it’s much easier to pay a three something percent for their fees and just not worry about recurring, you know, reminding people to pay debatably all the time,
Andrew: I don’t think you have to, I could be wrong. But when I was working with inDinero to have them do my books, they had me sign something and then they would just take the money out of my account, which was shocking, but also shockingly pleasant.
Aleksandr: I didn’t know about that. That’s
Andrew: Yeah. No, you can, you can do ongoing payments. I wonder if you could do it in an automated way, but I wouldn’t have cared, but it turned out that it was like tens of thousands of dollars on credit card processing.
And I said, wherever, we can cut it. Let’s cut it out. Right.
Aleksandr: Yeah, not at the moment. It’s very comfortable for us. Uh, we want clients to be able to pay, you know, whatever’s comfortable for them. And this is like part of a added value. We just cut everything, you know, all this, like paying overseas and like making, dealing with like local laws and everything. We just cut it out from them.
They don’t have to do deal with that. So if someone wants to pay me a credit card, I think I can look it up. But I think like at least,
Andrew: in a 2.3% or something.
Aleksandr: no, it’s, it’s, it’s more because there are some sessional payments and, uh, it’s more, I think it’s a 2.9, but it’s more for like, for some other stuff.
Andrew: Yeah, I think with the problem that we had was invoice software charged even more like FreshBooks would charge more and then they’d have caps and it was, yeah, we,
Aleksandr: At some point, if we are large enough, I think we can bill out on processing. But at this time try has been great. And it was like really easy to deal with, like with disputes or something. They were amazing.
Andrew: All right. And so
Aleksandr: And to be honest, like until, until even now, like we were going to change where it’s changing, like rebuilding on software, but a lot of, a lot of like our billing features more actually it’s tribe’s billing feature. So we don’t even, we didn’t even build much. So we use their software.
Andrew: them so much, I, I didn’t want to switch over to them. And then Patrick and an interview here, uh, said, why not? I told him why. And then after the interview was done, he hooked me up with someone on his team. He said, we could, we could help you out. I said, the founder of Stripe cares that much about helping me switch over.
I paid attention. And I was glad that I
Aleksandr: Yeah, amazing to the company is so amazing. I mean like the, you know, the, the they’re, um, very developer centric. Um, the thing that, that, that you’ve, uh, you’ve seen the, the, the board, um, in hackers, I don’t, I don’t know where the tribal logo is on indie hackers,
Andrew: Right, right. Um,
Aleksandr: and Stripe eyeglass. They never ask us to use the Stripe Atlas.
Andrew: they are such a great, phenomenal company. Unreal. Um, all right. So now you had a business partner, you had a business up and running together. You knew what you needed to do, and it’s time to start bringing in some real customers on an ongoing basis. Right? What’s the first bit of marketing that you did beyond reaching out to people.
Aleksandr: So, um, some point we build so many referrals that we actually stop worrying about demand, and we just started stagnating looking to figure out, we didn’t really think much about sales, but we started bringing some clients. I was in a few communities and we got sales from there, but I didn’t do real marketing until, uh, until two years ago.
And we were very stricken, eating. We didn’t grow much. Um, it was pretty sad.
Andrew: What do you mean by stagnating stagnating, as in you? We weren’t doing much to bring in new customers.
Aleksandr: Yeah. Well, we’re not doing, we were worrying about something else. I think we’re just stupid.
Andrew: Like what, what were we worried about?
Aleksandr: I don’t know we were doing some trips, uh, going to some, um, um, conferences, uh, you know, we, we didn’t think like real growth. We were like, well, very relaxed because we had our salaries and, uh, um, I don’t, I don’t think we were happy where we were, but we didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t have, have this growth mindset as we have right now.
Andrew: Where did this come from? Because you do seem like somebody who’s just really anxious to make it.
Aleksandr: Yeah. Uh, at that time I was not, I don’t know why. I don’t know, to be honest. I don’t know. We even, uh, we raised some very little angel money that we gave up, like a big chunk of the company that we give up 17% for 60 K. Um, and like, I dunno, I’m looking for just Richards. It’s respect to what happened. It’s really hard to say, like you, sometimes you just get into this operations stuff and like, um, very, um, you don’t see that you’re not growing.
Like we thought we were growing, but in reality, we didn’t do anything to actually grow it. We didn’t hire people. We didn’t. Um, yeah, we didn’t done the marketing.
Andrew: are we talking about my first sponsor? It’s rippling for paying people. I have had a, it’s been a pain in the butt to pay people, both employees and contractors. I’ve dealt with just about every agency out there. I feel like actually they’re not that many, but I work with them. I switched to rippling. I’m going to tell you why Alexander.
I don’t know if it makes sense for you as a company. That’s not how you are based in the U S what do you guys use? Even if it’s a competitor, you can talk about it to pay
Aleksandr: We, um, the majority of, of, um, of our people are in Ukraine. So they are contractors and we just say directly to them, to their accounts.
Andrew: Oh, wow. You could just do that. All right. Here. We have to, if we’re, if we’re working with contractors, of course, you want to have an agreement and then you meet means agreement and software, which means you need to remember what folder in Google drive. You saved the agreement and everyone’s in a different place.
That was a pain. Then you pay people. Do they want checks? Some people want checks who the hell wants to freaking check. They want checks. And I have to manage where the checks go. Don’t tell me, tell software, but you know, it was on me at times. And then they have bank account. Then they need to switch the bank account and all this stuff has to happen.
Then you hire somebody and they’re all these questions about what’s legal. What’s not, how do you do this? How do you, the thing I like about rippling, they handle it all. Have somebody sign an agreement, great. It’s in the, it’s in the software. Soon as you onboard them, they sign the agreement right there.
You want to get their bank information. Cause just goes right into rebelling. You decide when you hire them, are they W2? Are they 10 99? You just tell the system, the system handles the fricking thing. And then you say what software they want. You just check off all these boxes. And then as soon as they sign up to work with you, they sign the contract in rippling.
It’s available to me forever. And anyone else on the team who needs it in rippling, they get to decide where the money goes and they get to adjust it without telling me they get to see all the software that we have access to. And with one click, they could log into the software that we have access to.
They get their email address all done by rippling, not me. And then throughout, they get to see how much money they were paid. They get to see when they get paid. It’s a frickin dream. They get to see the apps we have. So they’re not double buying apps. That alone is probably going to save us more money than we’re saving on rippling.
I got to believe rippling is losing money on customers like me and its investors who are making it us like so fricking cheap to use them. It’s phenomenal. If we want to send them a computer, I could send them a computer. Alexander. You’re getting lit up by this aren’t you
Aleksandr: Yeah. Interesting. I mean, I would thinking like, we’re, we’re thinking like doing higher and eating grass and just thought about like all this pain, you have to go through all the payroll and if you’re in one state and we’ve been pleased in another state, I think it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s amazing. If someone just can check the box for you,
Andrew: uh, truthfully, if you just want rippling to hire your employees and then you use them through rippling, let them deal with all the legal issues. They’ll do that too. All
Aleksandr: you mean like you hire them as contractors
Andrew: What is it called? I forget, is it, uh, I don’t have the exact, uh, this is where I should have it actually in my notes. So, you know, where they, they used to call it employee leasing, where a company will hire your team for you.
That way they deal with all the legal issues and all the payroll, you just paid them. They pay your people, right? But your people work for useful. Somebody screaming at their earphones right now saying, Andrew, here’s the answer. I forget what it’s called, but who cares if they do it for you? Here’s the deal.
Don’t look to me to give you answers on how to do this. Don’t even trust me. When I tell you go use rippling. I’m telling you, I love rippling. What I’m going to suggest to you, Alexander and everyone else. Who’s listening. Go talk to rippling, have a list of all the things you imagine that you need in this payroll have the list of all the issues you’ve ever had before.
And then if you go to rippling.com/mixergy, they’ll have a person just walk you through their software, do a demo for you. You see how it works and you go, why wasn’t this invented before? Or maybe say. What I said, which is how the hell did they get this disorganized? This is a really tough process. We’re talking about States all, all over the world, all over the country.
I have one person works internationally. I couldn’t pay him. It was so embarrassing. I had to pay him by PayPal because there’s no way to pay people internationally. Rippling lets me pay people internationally. No headache. PayPal is like a, it’s a sad way to pay somebody who works for you.
Aleksandr: And a lot of countries don’t don’t accept PayPal.
Andrew: I didn’t even think of that.
And then the sad thing about PayPal is there’s the, um, and this is a minor issue, but I don’t want to embarrass myself when I pay somebody internationally a contractor, because that’s the only way they could get paid. Let, let it be. Rippling is headache. Headache. They’ll make it easy. But with them, it was, I had to convert the money into his currency.
PayPal didn’t have a really good currency exchange. And so I would pay a little bit extra and then PayPal took a fee from him and he said, would you do it as friends and family go? No, can I just do it regular, but I’ll pay the extra. So I figured out what the fees are and I paid it. And then, and this is by the way, a whacked out situation, 10 90 nines every year, not whacked out.
That is a headache I had to deal with. Anyway, rippling, listen to me, people rippling.com/mixergy. Alexander stopped paying attention to me. He’s going right. Are you right now on rippling?
Aleksandr: Yeah,
Andrew: You are right? Yeah. Go, go. Do yourself a favor. You’re going to love this. Go look at the news on rippling and you’re going to see who they are. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn’t. I just yelled into the freaking microphone. Um, now to be honest, that some of the things that I talked about are additional features. It’s still super fricking cheap. It costs me, I think, more for just about every software that we hire per seat than it does for rippling rippling.com/mixergy.
Um, you, you, um, you and I were talking about how you had a couple of businesses before. One of the things I imagine that you wanted out of this was to not repeat the failure that you had before. One of the, one of the failures that you had before is you had an, you were, what was it? It was a search engine Mark.
No, what was it?
Aleksandr: I don’t know. I, I,
Andrew: that you had?
Aleksandr: I had, uh, first time I tried to build a glossy party
Andrew: Uh, right, right, right.
Aleksandr: Yeah, it was a time like everyone was building classified and I was, um, I was just, um, not very attentive to details and, uh, actually I spent a bunch of money on out as it non-technical co-founder I got screwed twice. So the first time when I tried to build classify, like I spent a lot of money, I think it’s been like, uh, 20 grand on engineering that was in Ukraine in 2011.
It was like a fortune. You could buy an apartment for that money. Uh,
Andrew: by department? Seriously.
Aleksandr: you could buy an apartment at
Andrew: your idea there? What was your idea for a classified site? What type of classified site?
Aleksandr: Um, yeah, I want to do something basic and I want it to bring, I wa I was more, um, I had more focus on products and companies, um, but I had an idea, but it wasn’t, it was, it was not really good and I never launched it chilly. So I spent all this money in engineering. There’s so many. Well, we’ll do this mistake.
And I got a co-founder who had to do a lot of marketing, but that he just didn’t do much. And the second time, when I tried to a few years after I tried to build a second company that had to be in advertising on images, um, contextual, depending on the images. And I found a cool photo of the person who I was, I gave them actually a 50% of stake and also I paid them salary and still I get screwed up because, um, um, they just didn’t, didn’t do their job.
Like I did massive business development. I, I went to all those meetings with major, um, uh, at companies who agreed to use our technology. We ever do this, um, to, to run, uh, contextual advertising images. But at the end she just never delivered and never said that there was a problem delivering this. He was just making a lot of freelance projects on the side.
But, um, at that time I decided I’m not gonna do any more GoFundMe thing until I’m sure what, what I’m doing first. And then like, I spend an enormous amount of time with, with a, with a person I want to be partnered with. So
Andrew: is your current co-founder right.
Aleksandr: yes. So I knew him already for eight years. I used to work with him in two different companies already.
And I knew this person. He actually, uh, lend me money from a first attempt to build a company. And he was just this amazing person about trusted a lot. We’ve been friends forever and he was one of the smartest people I knew. So it was a good fit for us.
Andrew: Him to feel comfortable with being a co-founder without paying them a salary. And so on the way that you did with your first one, because you had traction. And so there was something there, you partnering up with him on.
Aleksandr: Yeah. At the beginning, he did a lot of help pro bono. And then we, he, we worked, um, I gave him a little bit salary and he worked as an employee. And then I said, look, we are doing this already for three months. And this sounds like a very pertinent for both of us. And we’re a great fit. We can handle each other in even critical situations and let’s do this.
And he agreed. And you know, I couldn’t.
Andrew: Do you guys, um, did you have a vesting period with him or was it all in
Aleksandr: Yes, yes we
Andrew: you did. Wow. All right. And so then you started to stagnate and in that stagnation period, you were doing personally, a lot of the matchmaking, right. Emails would come to you, you would connect clients with developers, you’re working with, you were doing, I guess he was doing the, the invoicing, right.
But it was you who was doing a lot of the matchmaking
Aleksandr: Um,
Andrew: and sales via email.
Aleksandr: In kind of, um, in, in a way. So at the beginning, when I started, I, I didn’t build anything. So I, one of the things that I took from the other company, I’m not going to invest anything until I make money. So when, when all those people came to me and looking for developers said, this is my email, I can connect you via email and keeping in the copy.
So I did this, I think until maybe few Southern dollars in GMV. When I saw some revenue, I said, okay, I can invest this $500 in this, a WordPress plugin. Um, that actually leads for few years. We used it for years. Um, and, uh, I spend just another couple of hundred dollars to modify it. So we had a ticketing system.
On WordPress, where we connected engineers and developers. We had this pool of engineers who were available. We knew their availability, and I had like few people who did matching. So the, because we wanted to build a, um, Uber fro for web development projects. So the customer comes to our website, submits a project, a driver slash engineer, picks it up and does it and delivers it.
Um, this is what we did.
Andrew: What’s the plugin.
Aleksandr: plugin. Is this prebuilt feature or set of features that you just press a button
Andrew: no, no. I know what a plugin is. Do what’s the name of this plugin that was able to help you do this? So fricking well, for 300 bucks,
Aleksandr: I don’t remember. I just found it on the internet and I used it. It was so good. Uh,
Andrew: I love when I find the right tool like that, that does way more than it’s. Then you’d expect any software to do, you know, like you want, you want to code something for yourself and it turns out somebody created it and it’s just perfect for you. And because it’s WordPress, you can upgrade it and you can change it and all that.
Aleksandr: I love it. I love it. Yeah. And I, I found few things in my life that were so, you know, under underrated and, uh, it’s, it’s amazing.
Andrew: Yeah. All right. And so you’re doing all this, uh, building up your business at some point you will discovered Cora for marketing. How did you get into Cora?
Aleksandr: so it was looking to, you know, at some point I woke up and like, we’re not going, we’d have to do something. And, um, I wasn’t this marketing group on Facebook called, um, bam by just Josh stretcher or something. I don’t remember his name actually, but, um, and he spoke about different growth and growth hacking and one of the things was born.
So I got into quorum. I went into Cora and I did everything. He said. I did it myself. I didn’t have it like any content team from, at that time. And if that year we grew four, four times.
Andrew: What did he tell you to do on Cora? The question and answer site?
Aleksandr: So he, he said that go and find those questions where people are curious, what are, you know, places to find engineers. And they did it.
Andrew: look at this. You, uh, you still have it. You still have your profile on Cora. First of all, you, you look like a nice, uh, nice boy here. And then it says CEO of coding, ninjas.co.
Aleksandr: It does. So,
Andrew: That’s. What the company was called at the time.
Aleksandr: yeah, we didn’t, we, since then we didn’t touch much Quora, um, for longer, at the time it was, it was, uh, one of, you know, I think it, it brought us, I might be mistaken, but something around like 80% of you knew you were Ave. Um, so we started to work on the other channels and at some point it just became significant for us.
Andrew: your second, most popular one. Uh, the second most popular question there is who are top towels, competitors. Yeah. And, um, and you start out by saying how impressive they are and how good they are. And then you talk about how to find the, uh, the right person, the right company. And at some point you bring yourself into the conversation and you say,
Aleksandr: one of the effects that would lessen for like early stage founders, uh, when you’re trying to do marketing at the beginning, you don’t have large budgets. Um, targeting people who are looking for alternatives to competitors is a really great way because those people are already on the stage of awareness that they know that the problem they have, they know types of solutions.
They know they have, they’re not actually companies who are good in this, and they’re just looking for alternatives. For some reason, you know, maybe looking for someone cheaper or some faster or someone, I don’t know, like something they need to change one thing. And if you fit in to the thing they want to change, like your cheaper or your fester or your, I dunno, brighter or more reliable, um, you’re going to win.
Um, and, uh, it’s a good tactic for like early stage startups to bring leads.
Andrew: And this was you writing it because these were pretty detailed answers that you offering a lot of charts and screenshots. Was it you writing?
Aleksandr: yeah. I’m sorry. You broke it down for
Andrew: Was it you writing all this?
Aleksandr: Yeah. At the beginning I was writing on this.
Andrew: Just sitting down, writing, cranking it out and you’re a good writer. All right.
Aleksandr: So I started writing this and it brought us a lot of, a lot of new clients and, uh, and we’ve got enough money to hire more people. I hired a really good copywriter that she right now at CMR company. And, um, yeah, it was really good here.
Andrew: Why’d you change the name from coding ninjas to, uh, to lemon IO.
Aleksandr: So because, um, because, um, Cora in other channels have helped us bring more clients. We figure out that, um, if according to me, this model was not scalable and we couldn’t do it in scale because, because of all the projects were so small and a lot of websites were actually broken and sometimes like engineers would do something. Uh, and they will break something else. Not because they’re bad engineers, just because, you know, companies will come or people come with the ulcer websites, you know, with a bunch of plugins and the, the quality of the flux, I would not, would not be good. Uh, so to do it on scale would have to have a, a lot of people in support.
Then we didn’t want to do this. It’s not, it’s scalable, but it’s not, it’s not as interesting. So at the same time, we had more projects that came from, uh, startups. We’re looking for part-time or full-time developers. Uh, and, um, I tried to actually fight the divots, but at the same, uh, at some point, and we saw that like 90% of revenue comes from those spines.
So we decided to change. Um, according ninjas was not a great name or brand for that. So we decided to, to do every brand new.
Andrew: Yeah, I like lemon IO too. Um, I’d be a little concerned though. Naming my company, lemon lemon is something that doesn’t work.
Aleksandr: Yeah for a car. Yeah. Yeah. We had this concern, but I think our brand is much stronger than that associate association.
Andrew: Let me take a moment to talk about my second sponsor. Then I’m gonna come back and talk about one of the challenges which has churned. The nice thing about your business is you get a, you get a customer and they they’re with you month after month unless they cancel. And so you’re dealing with a lot of turn issues.
Why are you looking at me like that? It was not an issue at one point.
Aleksandr: it is an issue. And we are like in the middle of figuring out the chart.
Andrew: Okay. All right, good. So it’s a pain that I saw on your face. I thought you were like, what are you talking about, Andrew? All right. My second sponsors, HostGator. I want to riff with you Alexander about this. If somebody is listening to us and says, you know what, I want to create a marketplace like this.
First of all, do you have like a, a type of professional that you’d recommend that we consider creating a marketplace for the way that you created one for engineers on lemon?
Aleksandr: Um, I would have, no, I don’t, I don’t work with engineers as much, but we have a lot of developers, cats, you know, some niche experience like, um, health, health insurance, for example, or marketplace.
Andrew: I wasn’t even thinking, I would say. What would, I would say maybe even like personal trainers who’d work with you via zoom is kind of interesting. Maybe I don’t know a natural, next one is to do no code developers. You know, there’s some no code platforms that are just really good. I could understand it enough to build it, but it would take me 80 hours, 40 hours of creating say a good CRM out of Coda or something.
Right. Probably more than 80 hours to do that. But then once I had it, it would be perfect for my team. I don’t want to do it. I’d rather just find someone who’s in love with Coda and love with notion and love with bubble, whatever the tool is, who just create it for me and then make it easier for someone else to take on.
To find those developers, instead of going into each one of these platforms, I want one platform where I can go and find these no code developers where they, where someone could help understand my needs. And then maybe I come in saying it needs to be notion. And they say, actually, we think code is going to do better job of what you’re looking for.
Here’s an engineer that will do that for you. And you can have an ongoing maintenance relationship without hiring them. Full-time what do you think of that? Is that, is that the business that somebody should, should be copying and creating? Does it exist?
Aleksandr: No, it exists. The, the marketplace for a no-code developers success.
Andrew: Who who’s got that?
Aleksandr: I don’t remember the name, but
Andrew: All right, there you go. What they need to do is copy your profit, your way of getting the, um, attention. You are not the first person in this space. They could do that. Now, whether it’s this idea or something else, let me say to S Alexander, it doesn’t matter. What I’m trying to do is get people to think about new ideas and go to hostgator.com/mixergy to launch them.
If you see that this exists, great, whatever the next thing is, it will need a marketplace of people to hire. And this approach that you’ve got, I think is a good one to copy. What do you think?
Aleksandr: yeah, it’s a great, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a growing trend and, uh, it, it will grow more. And I think it’s, it’s a great business. And even though they’re competitors people, you know, the companies like that exist, you know, people still should do that if they have network and they have knowledge.
Andrew: Basically, what we need to think about is for every remote and I think this works especially well for remote, but it would work for local also, but for every remote new skill, there should be a managed marketplace like yours, that, um, that just basically copies your model. Right,
Aleksandr: Yeah. And they’re very, a lot of like niche marketplaces, like marketplace for Shopify developers. So what brings developers or no-code developers?
Andrew: Right, right, right. I did notice that too, that whenever there’s new software, that just grows, especially with enterprise, there’s a marketplace of developers who build on that. Right. Salesforce is a good example. People don’t install Salesforce without hiring somebody to
Aleksandr: Salesforce, but even smaller, like when notion became popular, there is all those lunches on product cons of notion, templates, or notion this notion that so.
Andrew: But I don’t see a lot of notion marketplaces to hire somebody to just build this thing for me, a notion. Right. And truthfully, I think as we stand today, The problem with, with it, with that idea as we stand today, it’s March 20, 21 is there’s no easy way to get data in and out of notion. And so businesses aren’t going to invest money in creating something for notion, but that’s coming soon.
I’ve seen that. They’re getting close to that. And I think somebody should copy that. Create the notion marketplace of professionals. All right. Listen to me people, if you want to take that idea or any other idea, and you need a website to host your business, a website, to promote your business, a website, to interact with your customers, a website to find some $300 WordPress plugin.
The way that Alexander did that will basically run your business. If you need all that, just go to hostgator.com/mixergy. When you use that URL, they give you their lowest possible price. They take great care of you because you come from Mixergy. And frankly, you give me credit for sending you over. And I appreciate it.
hostgator.com/mixergy,
Aleksandr: And to have a fun brand.
Andrew: They do have a good brand, right?
Aleksandr: Yeah, it’s fun. I love when, when, when companies do fund brand, because you know, when you’re coding ninjas, it’s, it’s so sad, but when you become, become something fun, like HostGator, I dunno, like MailChimp, MailChimp is a lot of fun. Um, or lemon is
Andrew: guys nailed it. You know what I like about you? You guys use the word bullshit on your site and your copy. There’s a nice design on there. I think the cartoon that represents you has got a yamaka on it and like neon green, right?
Aleksandr: yeah, we did a lot. We do wood. We do a lot about branding and we’re going to do more right now. Uh, we, we even have a fairy tale about our brand persona. If you go to about page, it has a real fairy tale about the person.
Andrew: I’m on your about page right now. It’s Oh, no, it was a moment ago. It seems ridiculous when I say it, but I think once people see the page, right, right away, they get a sense of it. It looks really cool. Um, let’s talk about churn.
Aleksandr: very important and, uh, I’m even creating a small free mini course. So I hope we’re going to get it. Maybe half of it today that we’ll talk about Brandon, because for early stage startups, you have to spend, like, you have to spend some time on branding and it will play a large, large.
Andrew: you get to this branding? I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s but it’s got a really good fun vibe to it. How do you get to it?
Aleksandr: So we spent, um, we spent with a framework of brainstorming and brainstorming and we just said, all right, then we just, we imagined how we see our brand persona and our audience persona. And, uh, we just imagined, like, what kind of people want to work with? What kind of people who want to communicate with them and in very little detail, like, what is their, uh, how do they get to work?
What do they talk about whether the girlfriend’s name and what kind of dog vocab they have and where do we even have fake interviews with those people? We have a
Andrew: And, and it’s, it’s you, based on your experience talking to real customers doing that, or it’s an imagination of the type of person you’d like to find.
Aleksandr: 50 15. So there’s some real info, some real understanding of the existing, you know, existing audience, but also like th the, the brand is fun because imagine like, how do we want to address them? And you know, what kind of relationship would I have with them? And this is how so, you know, you see, like, on the, on the, on the design, you see like the Sculpey theme that, you know, we’re kind of cult.
And this is how we want to talk to our car. This is how we imagine our relationship between us and the customer and also between us and the engineers. So this relationship is kind of called, and this is what it comes from.
Andrew: All right. And so what’s tell me a little bit about your customer. What’s the, how would you describe them?
Aleksandr: Oh, we could, we could talk hours about this, but in general we’re um, um, our customer is, um, a, um, um, early stage entrepreneur. Um, usually it’s a technical person, um, who is, uh, building a startup, a tech startup.
Andrew: And so because they’re building a tech startup, they would, for example, care about how you’re on the road to $10 million in sales, where for other industries, it would be off putting to do that in your
Aleksandr: They are the same. They, they, they are looking to they’re very early stage. Uh, so some in most cases they are trying to delegate some work they already do. For example, he’s a backend developer and he hates do the front end. So they were looking for developers to delegate front, to work. And also at the same time, them and their co-founder is trying to find the ways to grow or figure out, you know, hiring or figure out marketing.
Uh, and because we share so much, it resonates with so many people. Um, and they, they love it because they right now actually figure out the first hires. And I talk a lot about hiring or they figure out how to make first marketing, where I don’t know, like to work with agency or not. I shared a lot about our experience working with agencies.
Andrew: Talk to me about, um, about churn that’s big issue.
Aleksandr: But the big issue is not, uh, turning is a big issue, but the biggest, biggest issue that we didn’t figure out our, um, our metrics like churn. So we don’t know churn. We don’t know the numbers,
Andrew: Oh, you don’t know what, even now.
Aleksandr: Yes. We don’t know. Uh, and, uh, we’ve ignored, uh, like, um, uh, LTV metrics. So we’re trying to make this course so much time that right now we’re trying to figure this out as soon as possible, because right now we have to actually make the economics work because we invest investing a lot in, uh, in growth and, uh, in teams.
So we need to understand those,
Andrew: Yeah,
Aleksandr: at the moment of figuring this out, we have to pull a lot of data to, to figure this out. But right now I would say it’s probably.
Andrew: ordinarily, I’d say you could just go to bare metrics or profit. Well, just connect your Stripe account and they’d get you data, but you’re, your business is different because people aren’t paying the same amount month to month. Right. They’re
Aleksandr: Yes. And it’s because it’s a marketplace, it’s a little more complex. And because we are a marketplace as Stripe, that data doesn’t say much because clients can pay right now, but the actual gender, you would be different. Um, GMV is something that people have used, um, for us, GMV is an amount of time, um, that developers contributed to clients’ projects multiplied by the, the rate of development, the cost of development.
Uh, so the customer could pay us. I don’t know, uh, 10 K, but this 10 K could go for a few months of work, right. Or the state 10 K could cover last month, a negative balance. So it’s more complicated for us. Plus some clients pause their development and we have to figure out a lot of, lot of, um, a lot of stuff over here.
Andrew: And so you you’re now at a place where you’ve got this marketplace for the most part, working churn is going to be something you need to figure out based on what’s worked for you. If somebody wants to get into this type of space, what advice do you have for creating one of these managed markets?
Aleksandr: Yeah. Go niche, go, go. we went to early-stage startups. Like we don’t work with companies for bigger. We don’t work with enterprise. Usually when an enterprise comes to us with, so I’m sorry. We cannot do that. There was only one company that is a small part of enterprise and they actually begged us to work with them.
So they help us to go through all the processes of, you know, enterprise hiring. That is actually a nightmare. But, uh, you know, we usually work with small companies, so we went leashing this, but you could go niche by technology or for example, notebook tools, or even more niche the morning should go, uh, the better chances you have to win,
Andrew: And so how did you pick this niche? This niche just came to you because that’s who you started working with and who you
Aleksandr: because we love this type of customers. We wanted, uh, we have this desire and this brand and you know, all this language just because we want to talk to those customers that we want to talk to them and work with them. We’ll love them. We have so much, you know, when Joel working with them and delivering to them, and also they get so much value from us, much more value than Microsoft would come to us.
Um, w w we more fond of delivering to those clients?
Andrew: Yeah, I do love the startup customer base. And I feel like a lot of us are going after the startup customer base because we’re startups because we love them because we get fired up by them. They get fired up by us. And I wonder what we’re missing out on because we’re so focused on our own, you know, our own universe. When I used to be in the online greeting card business, what I loved about it was I could always leave my business at the end of the day. I didn’t have a lot of friends who sent online greeting cards or any greeting cards at all. Right. So I could deal with the online greeting card people’s problems during the day.
And then at night, just go, who cares? There’s no, there’s no judgment. There’s no connection. I could totally, totally move on with my life. And here it’s really hard. Everybody’s what I know is an entrepreneur. Everyone I work with as an entrepreneur, everyone in my neighborhood is an entrepreneur at sometimes it feels like it’s a little it’s a little much.
Aleksandr: Well, look, I have my personal life. I have a wife and two kids there. They don’t care about entrepreneurship. They don’t care about startups, but at work, I actually enjoy one of the reasons I’m a little bit sick. I’m not succeeding yet on, on Twitter or on personal brand. But one of the reasons that I’m actually getting some attention, because I actually care about everything.
I care about their pains. Like every, almost every person who tweets at me or in a sense of DM on email, gets an answer from me because I really care about the problems I really want to help because I was struggling about this persona, you know, for so long. And I figured some things out. So the things that we’re ready to figure out, I want to help.
Andrew: W you just mentioned Twitter before we started, you said that I told you about a couple of tweets that I liked of yours, that I saved. And you said I’m getting help from like, or I talk to Sean paries mastermind. What is your in his mastermind? I didn’t even know he had a mastermind. Yeah,
Aleksandr: For, uh, for three months. Um, and, um,
Andrew: he’s the investor who launched a, I forget what it was. It was one of these video, um, uh, chat services that eventually sold to Twitch. Now he does a bunch of investments on his own rolling fund just to give
Aleksandr: great guy. He was, uh, I, you know, I love to split cut, um, called my first million and he had a group for this bot and like he just posted that he is, he’s trying to do create a mastermind group and I, you know, I didn’t even know what he wants to do. I just said, I want to do this. Uh, so I got into this group amazing group, uh, except Charlie was, you know, uh, six amazing different nurse who I learned a lot from.
And, uh, you know, at, at mastermind group, you come and, you know, with your problems and that’s, uh, at that time I was trying to figure out the month and that was like crying. Like, you know, we’re going to do like help me brainstorm. And they said, do the, do the, do the building public, do the, do the newsletter or Twitter? I didn’t listen about Twitter at that time. I started a newsletter, but, um, you know, in a few months I started doing Twitter and it’s just mentioned, especially for this type of customers for this type of audience, like check Twitter is huge. And everyone who is trying to target, um, tech worlds, they have to be on Twitter.
Andrew: And so the building in public that you’d now do on your sub stack newsletter and in Twitter. And I guess you do it on LinkedIn too, but I’m not on there much. That is that’s all because of this Sean mastermind.
Aleksandr: Yeah, he advised. And, um, there was another guy, um, uh, Ben levy who advised and, uh, yeah, I did it.
Andrew: We are though that everyone knows your numbers and then no, it’s not right. It probably is weird for a few minutes. And then you, you like it
Aleksandr: I mean, there are probably waste, um, you know, that this can hurt you, but, um, I think the upside is, is much bigger. And to be honest, if I shut up tomorrow and stop talking about this, people will just forget about this. You’re not that important that people remember my numbers, you know, within like 10 minutes after they read it.
So once I was in the meeting, um, with, um, With the partner from fire to sign-ups. And I was like, look, I don’t know what to do. If we go, we have to go with transactional business or like this, you know, pivot to work in startups. And it’s like, you know, try either. If you’re going to fail, just try another thing.
Like no one gives a shit about you. And this is like, it’s sprays. You know that no one gives a shit about you. It’s like, in my mind all the time, I don’t think you can do anything that, and unless you’re, you’re, you’re making fraud on her, you know, you’re a bad actor doing something really stupid, like killing people.
People would forget about you. Um, you know, next day there are so many topics that race and fallen Twitter like today, everyone is talking about clubhouse. Uh, tomorrow is everyone talking about the, the game stop? And like the next day, no one cares about gang stuff anymore. Like, and you are, you know, one felon time, less important.
So people forget people don’t care.
Andrew: All right. The website is lemon.io. How about this? If anyone’s listening and they want to work with you, um, how about we just connect them to you? Is there a way for them to talk to you and have you even introduced them to somebody?
Aleksandr: Yeah, you can, you can do me DM me on Twitter at Bulla Derrick. Um, and also my email is a@lemon.io and, uh,
Andrew: I like that.
Aleksandr: as the first person and also the first name of my, my, my name, uh, yeah, email me, um, and forget about hiring engineers. Like if you have any questions about like startups or, uh, if you have any problems with, uh, you know, doing something in your company, uh, and something that I can help with, uh, any advice if I, if I, if I don’t know, I will just say, I’m sorry.
I’m sorry. I don’t know, but if I I’ll be happy to help.
Andrew: And even if they have a question about hiring engineers from somewhere else, you’re cool with getting the quotes.
Aleksandr: Yeah. Yeah. Anything.
Andrew: All right. It’s a@lemon.io and I want to thank the two sponsors who made this interview happen. The first, if you’re paying people, you need good software to make it easier for you and for them.
That’s why I like rippling. I signed up for rippling. I’m very happy with them. Frankly. I don’t really spend much time thinking about them. It just fricking works. It’s rippling.com/mixergy. And if you need a website built, maybe you’re going to copy Alexander’s idea, bring it to a different industry, go to different niche.
I don’t know what it is, but whatever your business is, when you need a website, go to hostgator.com/mixer geo get great service from a company you can count on, been there. And frankly, if you use my URL, I’ll be there to make sure that you get great service from the company. That gives me great service.
I’m happy to be a customer of theirs, and I’m happy to stand by all of my listeners. Thank you. HostGator, hostgator.com/mixergy Alexander. Congratulations. You’re going to go to bed now, right? What time is it where you
Aleksandr: I’m going to work now. It’s uh, almost two, 2:00 AM. But I have to, I have committed to do the chemo femur things. So I have to do that
Andrew: damn dude, what hours do you keep?
Aleksandr: now. I don’t work that late usually, but today I need to finish. This
Andrew: All right, thanks for spending the hour with me. Thank you all for listening and I,
everyone.
