Episode 27: How GiveKit Rebranded from Nonprofits HQ in Just 14 Days

00:08

Welcome back to the Marketing Boost. My name’s Leon. Today we have a returning guest. is the first episode of the year. is Zac Brown from GiveKit, formerly nonprofits HQ. yeah, awesome. Thank you so much for having me back on the show, Leon. It’s always a great time chatting with you and talking about all things marketing. And we talk a lot. We’ve, I’ve helped you kind of go through some of this transition. So the first question I want to ask is,

00:34

Why the rebrand you guys went from an objectively good name in many ways, especially for SEO and for marketing to something that I think  is a good name, but also has a little bit more push on having to describe it. So you went from nonprofits HQ  to give kit. Like what, was the impetus and thought around that for, especially in marketing perspective? Yeah, definitely. Um, and you know, we’ve talked about like various different aspects of this, um, off the show and like throughout, right. You’re one of our trusted advisors,  but.

01:04

You know, we knew from the beginning, from day one when we came up with Nonprofits HQ, we were gonna have to change it, right?  We knew that it was a brand that, while it  logically described what we’re doing, the headquarters of your nonprofit, Nonprofits HQ,

01:18

um What we realized was it’s one really hard to say like just simply putting it. It’s really hard to say non-profits HQ Right all these really hard letters that are complex in the brain complex to say verbally  And then when you go to search it, right? You can’t remember what it is. A lot of our customers were like how’s nonprofit?

01:37

Like, oh, I think they mean nonprofits HQ, right? And then so if that’s how they’re remembering what our brand is, what our name is, if they were to search for us or if they were to  tell  somebody what they’re using, word of mouth is a big, big uh way that we spread and spread awareness in our industry. uh One organization, that’s how we launched in Little Rock, right? One little organization started using us. They told others, they signed on, they signed on, and that’s how it worked.

02:02

But the challenge was they’d be like, oh yeah, I’m using nonprofit HQ. And then they would go and Google nonprofit, right, HQ. And they wouldn’t find anything or they would end up on a competitor’s website, right, the complete opposite of what you want with a brand. So we knew from the beginning we were going to have to change it. But we didn’t know, one, early on we didn’t want to put the time and energy into a branding, right? We needed to build something. We needed to prove we even had a market before we spent all of this time and effort into that.

02:31

But as we started growing, as we started scaling the product,  getting steady growth, significant revenue in, we realized it’s time to be a little bit more mature about what we’re doing, about how we’re talking about it. And uh when we were brainstorming different names and thinking through that process,  one of the things that is kind of the lead into our platform,  GiveKit does  everything.

02:54

mostly everything that you need for your organization, right? And it does it damn well. And I’m a little biased in that, right? But  it does it damn well.  But one of the lead-ins, our customers are never looking for a thing to do all of this stuff for their organization.  The one thing that organizations look for, from the very beginning, I just started a nonprofit, to  I’m a $50 million, $100 million a year organization,  funding. How do I pay for all my stuff?

03:20

How do I raise money to support my mission to cover these costs? That’s always been the lead in for all of the customers that we have on the platform. They’re looking for fundraising. That was easy. And then there’s all this other stuff that integrates that they use as well.  And I want to interrupt you a little bit and back up to one part that I thought was really interesting because  founders and business owners often get caught up in the name, the branding, and you often see that as a like serial problem for.

03:48

Yeah, folks, they cannot choose a name. don’t they don’t really lean into one branding. They don’t do that. Like,  why was it such a get to maturity for you guys get a product like  what did you have experience in that background? Did you see the failures of other  was it a mentor that told you to like

04:08

launch and then figure it out. is where you’re fishing for a plug, a nice little compliment to your marketing services. a little.  But yeah, I would say it was kind of a combination of things like that. You know, well,  and the first thing was neither of us were creatives, right? Alberto is pretty creative  in that area. is your co-founder, CTO. COO. COO, sorry. And  one of those COO letters. um But  neither of us were graphic designers, neither of us were marketers, right? And so we didn’t care.

04:36

about that at the time, right? We needed to build a product. We were both very technical.  We wanted to build the product. But also like  you said, know, people get hung up on those little details. And the problem is  we could get stuck on something we don’t know and try to perfect it and spend a bunch of energy and time and money  on something to get it perfected. That’s going to block us from moving forward. Or we can just start building, right? Start talking to our ideal customers, start building in an area that we do know well. And then we can move forward there and fill in the gaps later.

05:05

That was logical for us. That’s what made sense.  And then talking to different mentors like yourself and know, like Franklin and other folks around, you know, what we have to do. We knew that branding was going to be important,  but we also knew that it wasn’t as important right now. You know, we can come up with this brand, we can get our first 200 customers, first 500 customers,  and it’s still very inexpensive to rebrand, right? It’s still, you’re not going to destroy a bunch of

05:33

You’re not going to lose you’ll have some churn with any rebrand right? But it’s not going to be as dangerous or expensive to rebrand now than say if we were a Samsung and we’re like we want to change our name from Samsung right? Very fair, and I think a lot of people to your point get caught up in it’s going to cost me a lot of money It’s going to cost me loss and SEO and anything about that

05:55

when it does cost you a lot of money and SEO, it’s because you’ve built this brand that is generating significant revenue and you can pay for it. Like it’s okay.  It is fair. And I think  that  the story that I love to hear from you is  build something,  get people marketed and actually marketing is not just branding. Like branding is important and I can hear it through the through line, but  it’s also not like the key part. Like I think,  and obviously this is my bias is

06:23

get the customers and the marketing might be unscalable things. Talking to folks, I know that  you went to conferences, you  actually went to organizations donating time.  We were so, the things that we were doing initially were so not sustainable.  When an organization that I wanted to work with didn’t answer me,  I went to their office and spent a day  bugging the hell out of them, understanding their processes and seeing what they were doing. That is that gorilla marketing though, and I think people get

06:52

Marketing confused with  ads and pretty creative and all of that but marketing especially early on for any startup for any company that’s getting started  is those unscalable  like like  Actions there and the and the point there is  yeah I spent an entire day at this one organization right learned a lot about their pain points how they operate uh They ended up becoming one of our beta testers We ended up building with them and then they’re a  paid customer on the platform, right?  But  that got us a lot further

07:22

than sitting in Canva and figuring out what a logo would be or what a sexier color scheme would be. Yeah, 100%. And I think that’s also why you have success now. The rebrand wasn’t scary to you. What was the timeline from that? I know we’ve talked about it for a long time, and I always call it like six to eight months. But what was that? And what was the first catalyst to really get you going? Yeah, so one of, well, so.

07:52

You can do, I would argue there’s no proper way to do a rebrand, right? And that’s probably because the way we did it would probably be considered very improper, right? We, know, one of the things that I’m very biased towards action. You I want to get things done. I want to get things done quickly. I don’t want to spend time on all of these long processes and all of these buy-ins and decisions and things like that, right?

08:15

um If we were a much larger brand, we would absolutely have to, right? If we’re talking about, you know, billions of dollars worth of  brand recognition, I’m not going to just change that on the fly, but we’re not. And so our timeline  from seriously considering it to getting our new logo to rolling out the new brand was about two weeks.  That’s about… That is lightning, lightning fast. Absolutely.  And because it’s not just…

08:39

Putting in your logo. Well, because you’re a marketer, right? You’ve done these brand transitions before. You know kind of the intricate details that go into these processes. So two weeks, we killed ourselves for two weeks, right?  But we got it done.  And  it’s not just  changing out a logo.  We  had it easier because we used our same brand colors. We just introduced one shade of blue, right? We used the same brand colors, so a lot of the stuff wasn’t working. um

09:04

You guys had been working on our marketing website ahead of that, right? So as part of that launch, we relaunched the new marketing website, but that wasn’t done in two weeks, right? Took a little longer, but the logo put in there. The pieces that I’m thinking too is like, what were all the pieces there for you guys? And so it’s more than just the visual stuff, copy on websites, it’s logos across dashboards. It’s making our logos that scale correctly on desktop, scale correctly on mobile, right?

09:32

ah It’s DNS, lots of infrastructure changes. So anything that’s on customer.nonprofitshq.org needs to now be customer.givekit.org, but it also still needs to work  right previously. So you don’t have lot of broken links to donation pages, logins, shift assignments, all these different functionalities. So a lot of DNS configuration, a lot of infrastructure changes there.

09:54

We also needed to care about our mobile apps, right? You can’t just push a button and then all your mobile app has changed. There’s a review process.  And if you use a word like we’re the best toolkit for nonprofits, they reject it because we can’t claim we’re the best without their uh performance data. And you know, all these different things had to kind of go into that. And  when I first was talking to Alberto,  and you know,  we work really well together because  I will just…

10:22

let’s get shit done. Let’s move quickly. We’ll break stuff along the way. If we break something important, we can fix it later. Right.  And Alberto’s more like,  well, shouldn’t we think about this a little bit more? Shouldn’t we be a little more intentional, put a little more thought into what we’re doing. And so it balances well.  So when I told him that I want this done, he’s like, yeah, we can put together a plan. And then I want this done in two weeks. He was like, Whoa, ah is this something that  one we can pull off in two weeks and two.

10:48

we should pull off in two weeks, right? It’s a crazy fast timeline, lots of moving pieces.  100 % and most  rebrands are,  they’re either softer, they’re not total name changes. You guys went from one name to another name. I heard copy changes. Was there a significant amount of  like copy that actually changed messaging or was it  more soft messaging around what you already did?  It was more soft messaging and it was like changing the tone to this new GiveKit brand.

11:17

Give Kit voice, right?  So it was like the meat of the copy was still there,  the core of what it was saying, and it was just softening and changing that message in places  was most of that. Was  like some AI writing, like what’s your take on that part? Like did you guys have Claude do it, Gemini, like  how did you go through those copy changes or was it you writing it? If you’re,  I  mean you’ve read my text messages, I didn’t write that  copy.

11:46

If you are writing copy by yourself, physically writing from nothing to something, you’re insane today. I don’t like no way.  AI is an amazing assistant, right? An amazing tool to help you get the base of it,  add your human touch, edit it for flavor, tone, consistency, take those M dashes out of your content, right?  And put it together. you know, we’re able to, with a tool like Claude is what we use.

12:12

um We’re able to rewrite and clean up the copy across the website, across the dashboard, all of the places where we had copy that’s presented to customers, donation pages, emails. We’re able to do all of that in  that two week span, right? Because we’re not sitting there and we’re starting with a clean slate and we’re like, okay, this is our brand voice, right? You basically develop what your brand voice is, provide samples of that, provide that to your AI and then say, hey,

12:40

fix this to match our new brand voice, our new direction, the new messaging that we care about. And then you do some edits, right? So you do it once and then you repeat it throughout the rest of that process.  I like that and I also think you have that experience too with those nonprofits. You know what they want to hear, you went and talked to them. I think that’s a key part of the marketing that you guys did and realized that one, people mispronounce your name, people misspell it.  I think you had a common  name.

13:07

So we had an email, I got an email from a Nigerian prince that loved our product and he wanted to invest. It was like $50 billion  and he didn’t want any equity in return. He just really supported what we were doing.  And he wanted to invest in nonprofit, capital N, capital P, H-Q. So even when the scammers can’t get your name right, you know that you’re too complex.

13:33

Did you go and do any focus groups or anything with the new name?  How did you  make that transition? Right now I see on the website it says, GiveKit, formerly non-profits HQ.  Was there a big messaging push?  How did you handle it with customers, especially  in an industry that I suspect skews a little bit older, skews a little less technologically advanced? How do you handle those  transitions and those?

13:59

pushbacks. the first thing I’ll touch on that is this idea that it does still skew older and skew less technologically advanced, uh As the generations are transitioning and people are kind of moving on to retirement or  wherever,

14:17

um You are getting younger people in those roles. You are getting people that kind of grew up more with technology or have more exposure to that. But it’s still not something that, you know, it’s an industry that’s still very adverse to change, right? Especially complete change very rapidly. And so we knew we had to address that and we knew we had to account for that. So  our customers knew about the rebrand ahead of time. We were like, this is what we’re doing. This is why we’re doing it, right? It’s the complete fundraising toolkit for nonprofits, GiveKit.

14:47

This is why we’re doing it. This is what our logos look like. This is what the domains will change to. No, you don’t have to worry about broken links. We’ll handle the transition. You don’t have to do anything. Functionality, pricing, your account data, it all stays the same. We’re the same team. We’re the same people. It’s the same product. It’s just a cleaner, more focused brand and cleaner, more focused name.  And so we  sent out messaging to our customers.

15:09

Some of our customers I also texted directly. I’m like, hey, this is what we’re thinking about. This is what are your initial thoughts, right? I want to know three things that you like about it and three things that you don’t like about I really I really like that the forcing function of  hey Tell me what you don’t like because you can get especially from friends mentors  and customers  a more positive tinge to everything  and when you ask them for the negative then it’s like an okay to just kind of

15:34

like nitpick.  One of the things I hate the most  and  it like uh internally on our team as well. Right. And I’m sure my team hates this about me.  But one of the things I hate the most is when we’re asking for feedback or looking at something and the answer is it looks great. It never just looks great. There’s always something that

15:55

rubs you wrong visually or that feels off or that, know, what they’re, nothing ever just looks great. And that’s why I forced that. I want three things that you like because people,  people are  often hesitant to just jump into things that they hate.  You put something in front of me, you’re going to get my very unfiltered, very honest opinion, right? That’s a rare thing. oh

16:16

And so, but if you soften that with three things they like, they feel a safe environment, they feel it’s more comfortable, and then you get more honest dislikes, things that they don’t like. Is it colors? One of our advisors hates our new logo. She loves the new color, like the layout, she loves the new name, she hates the new logo,  right?  And  we need to hear that information  because  everything that we do needs to contribute to one of three things, one or more of three things, right?  It needs to be contribute to forward progress of our people, our products,

16:46

or our company. If it doesn’t contribute to one of those, then we don’t need to be doing it. And we sure as hell don’t need to be doing something that does the opposite of forward progress in those areas.  the question there is essentially around everybody and their dog, and I love to say this, everyone and their dog has an opinion. Absolutely. Just constantly. But how did you filter that  mentor’s  advice on I hate your logo? Like  it could come at a moment where you go, man, maybe this isn’t the right decision.

17:15

How did you navigate that? So  what I’m going to tell you is every decision that we make  as a startup, every decision that I’ve made as a CEO has been, this is either going to be the right decision and move us forward, or we’re going to fall on our asses here.  Right?  Those are the options. And so heard about the, the Amazon uh leadership method, the one way door, two way door  thing. So essentially if you have a,

17:40

one way door.  Once you close that door, it’s never being opened again. Essentially, oh you know, like the AI commercial during the Super Bowl, that’s a one way door. Now everyone thinks ring is surveillance state. There’s no going back from that. But then there’s a two way door where  they integrate a new technology and they go, Oh, it’s just not really working out. Let’s, roll back that, you know, that feature. So  in kind of that method, sounds like you’re thinking of  most of your decisions as

18:08

almost like non-destructive editing, can  backtrack and figure out. You can always fix something if you break it, mostly.  Like if you open a SQL terminal on production and you destroy, I mean you can actually restore that data too, it’s just a big pain.  And opens like so many security and procedural questions,  But yeah, no, essentially it’s that everything that we do, we’re either going to break it and fix it, or it’s gonna be amazing and we’re gonna keep going with it, right? But we also have to be open to that,  right?

18:35

We have an idea, sounds great. If it flops, it flops. We need to recognize that. We need to own that we created something that flops and pivot. Did you have that expectation?  I’m sorry, you have that expectation of like, hey, if this flopped, we were going to go back to the previous branding or what was And so that’s the challenge, right? And there’s a couple of decisions.  There’s a couple of decisions around like the way the organization or the way the company works in terms of how we process transactions and things like that. There’s a couple  things that  don’t.

19:02

ah Once you go there,  you don’t come back. That is the one way That is the one way door, no matter how you look at it. And so you  just try to de-risk that ahead of time. You make sure that you’re 100 % committed to it, um as 100 % as you can be in startup land, right?  Because you can’t go back from that.  If we were to change our brand,  I really am happy with our brand. Our team is really happy with our branding now.  But if we were to change that and then say, oops, nevermind, and go back to it.

19:29

Very few times does that work. That seems to work with HBO,  but very few times does that actually work because what that signals is  one, you probably don’t know what the hell you’re doing. And while most startups, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, we’re figuring it out as we go,  but it signals that you’re not putting a lot of thought into things. And what that does is degrade trust between your customers, between  your team, between your partners.  And so  like a brand change like that, in my opinion, once you go for it, you need to go for it. The conviction. The conviction. You’ve got to be convicted in what you’re doing.

19:59

um And and there are a few things I would say  very few things though where that is a one-way door once you do it You are done. It’s either gonna kill you or it’s not um There are a few other things that kind of fall in that that  that bucket too But mostly like I said if we break something we can fix it, right? We have systems we have if we break something tech wise for example We have systems that scream at us when something doesn’t look right when data comes through that

20:25

is shaped wrong or when even amounts that we’re processing seem abnormal, our systems scream at our teams, right? um As we onboard customers and it goes to the diligence process, if we break any of that, we have things that scream at us. The harder part to gauge  is when we break something  in terms of customer trust or something that a customer was expecting. We have really amazing customers  and  we  have a very close relationship with all of them. And so  they’re open to telling us when something didn’t.

20:54

didn’t make sense to them,  you know,  and that’s good for now. But as we scale, that’s not going to be the case. It’s going to be like, they did this, this is stupid, I’m done. Close my account, I’m going to a competitor. Right. And so that’s much harder to gauge. And so you have to be a little bit more careful. And as we scale, I’ll have to be more careful and bring in more people that can check me and kind of keep me, know, I have a huge risk tolerance. And as the business gets bigger, we need to have a smaller risk tolerance. A hundred percent. And, you know, talking about scaling growth, like

21:23

Now your gift kit  now you have a slightly different, you know starting position essentially. It’s a donor  donor focused Tool that has all the kit kit around it  How do you go and market that is it’s still the unscalable stuff? Are you looking at doing some scalable things, you know in terms of ads maybe some SEO email marketing SMS all of that  One of the first times you and I spoke I believe what I told you was marketing is not real

21:53

marketing is something to that effect, right? And I still believe there’s a lot of marketing that is just bullshit. 100%. However, as you scale and what I’ve learned is what marketing is changes depending on where you are and where you’re going as a company, right? Are you super, super early where maybe marketing is fake and it is a distraction.

22:15

Are you at that point where we are now where you’re scaling and you’re like, wait, I can’t talk to every single person that’s going to buy from us, right? I can’t be president in every single room. We need to start thinking about other things.  And as we start doing that, you know, social ads come up.  Part of preparing for um less fake marketing um is was cleaning up our message, right? Because, you know, we, when I would talk to customers before we would talk to people, what’s nonprofits HQ? Oh, it’s this unified management platform.  Oh.

22:45

Okay, what is that? What is that? Yeah. Well, it does this, this, this, it does all of that. Oh, that’s interesting. Right. And you get those kinds of responses. What is the pitch now? Can you give me the elevator pitch? Yeah. So give kit is the complete fundraising toolkit for modern nonprofits.  It includes all the tools you need to raise more, raise more fit effectively and manage your organization all in one spot.  Right. It’s a single point of entry.

23:08

Most of our customers came from us, came for us looking for fundraising anyway.  It cleans up the messaging. Everybody knows what fundraising is in the nonprofit space. Everybody knows  what a CRM is. Everybody knows what all this other stuff is. But instead of trying to  position our messaging around everything the platform does,  we focus on the one thing our customers are looking for, right? And the other stuff is added in there.  Question to that is how did you deal with like competitors? And did you go look at  what the competitors were doing and then

23:38

bringing that like as a counter messaging or were you really just listening to your customers  and integrating that message?  So, I mean, it’s kind of, it’s kind of a combination, right?  Uh, we, we have to, we do various market intelligence things now. We didn’t earlier, but we do that now to keep an eye on, know, what’s happening with our competitors, what they’re doing, stuff that we need to care about  and reacting to that. But it’s so like  the market is very saturated now. Right.  And most

24:06

people in our space do kind of the same thing, right? In terms of messaging, in terms of  whatever. Only so many ways to sell  fundraising in a CRM, just like HubSpot, Salesforce, they’re all one and the same. Exactly.  But what you end up doing, finding people,  how companies are trying to differentiate themselves and stand out in the market, right?  You have this  concept of fee-free fundraising, right? Where the donor  tips pay. um

24:35

for the transaction fees. um Organizations love that model,  but the challenge with that is  the donors are paying way more  in fees to donate to your organization  because they’re not just paying for your transaction fees, they’re paying for the next five people who don’t cover transaction fees or don’t tip, right? And so you might get a 15 to 20 % increase on top of your donation that your donor pays for. There’s ways you can do that.

25:00

um and changes like that are coming to GiveKit here pretty soon. There’s ways you can do that without overextending or asking too much from your donors, without creating friction there, but also covering transaction fees for your customers.  There’s ways that you can do that where everybody wins. But so you find these differentiators where these companies are trying to stand out. One might buy a podcast network um and  host a conference and do a bunch of stuff in there.

25:28

Another one might host webinars to teach you how to do different stuff.  Others like us might host workshops in various different with different partners in different parts of the country to teach organizations how to adopt new technology, how to  clean up their processes, how to raise funds, you know, things like that. We’re partnering on a Google ad grants workshop  soon. Right. So like there’s all these differentiators, but if you  zoom out and look, they’re roughly the same, just in a different niche of the market. It sounds like this seems like the play for

25:57

Most B2B SaaS is education. It is webinars. It is blogs. It is events. Everything is there. Do you see there’s a skew to, especially in the industry, towards events just because of the AI slop out there? Or do you see any kind of trends even in the nonprofit space addressing that? Towards events like, what do you mean? Like as in.

26:21

Are there more real life events where people are talking because that like blog post that everyone used to publish that was like the top 10 features, you know, is no longer worth it anymore.  Is that  skewing? Cause I’m seeing a lot of industries.  The  trend is private dinners, uh in-person hands-on workshops and a lot of other spaces. Is that making it to the nonprofit space or has that been  a staple of the nonprofit space?

26:46

No, I think it definitely  is. um There’s a lot more in person, a lot more like  things like that,  a lot more things around education and bringing people in for this added value, right? Beyond just the tech. um But  I think, I don’t know.  know, GiveKit includes like a full eventing, very robust eventing product,  ticket tiers, sponsorship packages, like all of this stuff in there. And you know, we actually added that, that wasn’t originally part of the plan to even be part of the platform.

27:15

Events were like, know,  maybe some customer, one customer said, yeah, we want to sell tickets. Can you give us a little form where we can sell tickets? We’re like, okay, yeah, so we’ll do that. Right. And now it’s blossomed in this entire,  almost big enough to be a standalone product, right. Around events, a friend jokes that we’re the event bride of nonprofits.  But like  as,  as different things,  as different trends happen, as different things occur, you know, everything went heavily online during the pandemic in the whole world.

27:43

A lot of things have slowly come back and started coming back into these in-person things, but donors especially are looking for more ways to engage with the organization. If I go to your website and I give you $20, okay fine, I might give you $20, I might give you $50, but as…

28:01

As donors want to engage more with your mission, what you’re doing, I want to physically see what it is that you’re working on, right? I want to be involved in things that you’re doing, especially if, you know, I’m a large benefactor of your organization. But this works because organizations are also looking for more ways to generate recurring revenue, predictable revenue. You know, as grants have ended up in their  interesting state.

28:24

as politics change, uh as donors, like individual contributors are maybe less likely to donate or donate less, know, organizations need to figure out ways to  fund what they’re doing through all of these dry spells, more sustainable revenue. And so those,  that usually results in a gala, in  a uh 5K, like in these physical events that bring people together because it brings people together, it brings revenue and it brings attention.

28:49

It’s really interesting and I’m seeing shifts all over the industries, even on the consumer side, I’m seeing a lot more in-person stuff happening. The event business is back, like even more post-COVID. So just to kind of start to wrap, like what I keep hearing is, know, build a product, do unscalable fake marketing, quote unquote, and then start to think about what that customer feedback doesn’t mean. A name change doesn’t mean, you know, pivoting some…

29:19

capacity. um What would you tell anybody right now building a business  on advice through the whole journey?  you’ve done it once, so I’m kind of interested to even kind of compare to that first one. I’m going to go put them side to side.  Yeah. So  my advice would be  one, you probably don’t need to raise,  especially if you’re super early and just starting out.  We are bootstrapped. That’s very counter. We’re going to stay bootstrapped. Okay. um

29:47

you, nine out of 10 times you don’t need to raise. But if you have like hard tech or like greenfield stuff, maybe there’s some high capital intensive things in the beginning, like, you know, space tech and you know, things like that. But no, like you’re going to get feedback is amazing. Advice is amazing. Mentors are amazing. People have already made mistakes and you should be able to take advantage of those and not make those go out and make your own mistakes, right? Learn from other people’s mistakes and save those costly lessons. But

30:15

You’re going to get a lot of conflicting opinions. You’re going to get a lot of people  that are experts in what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and everything about what you’re doing.  And ultimately what you have to do is one, don’t close that off.  Have conversations, accept that input, right. um But to filter the hell out of it,  right. Take only what makes sense for you, how you’re executing and where you want to go and let the rest of the shit hit the floor.

30:39

Otherwise you’re gonna be running, and we see this constantly with founders, they’re trying to, one mentor or one advisor told them that they need to do this,  so they’re doing that. Another one told them that they need to do it this way, so they’re like, oh, well I’ll also do it this way, right? And you end up back and forth going everywhere not getting anything done.  You  are responsible for the successes or failures of your company. That is it. There is nobody else, you are responsible for those outcomes. And so your responsibility is to build that company in a sustainable way.

31:07

to understand you don’t know everything, you probably never will know everything in what you’re doing,  and to surround yourself with people that compliment your weaknesses.  Talking to customers  on  group levels, high levels, I’m great at. Demoing our product, I am so bad at it. I am just so bad at it.  Scheduling, if people know, show on me, and I know things happen, I don’t reschedule people.

31:32

I, whether I’m mentoring them, whether- still push back on that, but I like that there is a component of you understand who you are.  And also you have  a co-founder that  also understands who you are.  And essentially you guys know the strengths and weaknesses.  I love the  idea of like,  it’s a high agency bias to doing  and essentially  filtering whatever you think it is and essentially  collecting all the facts and making a decision, whether it’s right or wrong.

32:02

with so much conviction that it almost is forced to be right. Absolutely. And  if it is wrong, change it. Right? Like I said, you’re going to break stuff. You know how many things we messed up building this company? A lot.  Right? You’re going to break stuff. But one, don’t be set in that way. We’re doing this. I decided this. We’re going. No. Oh, we tried it. It didn’t work. Change it. Right? Be open to that. Learn quickly.

32:25

And that’s what matters right if you  sit around and try to plan and create the perfect plan You’re never gonna get anything done. Also. Nothing ever goes according to plan. It never does uh Final part where can they find you? I know it’s give kit.org  But anywhere else like yeah, so LinkedIn  the Twitter’s YouTube  Facebook

32:48

um All give kit you can find us there give kit org and then you can reach out directly to me on LinkedIn or Zac at give kit org as well I really appreciate you joining the show and hopefully we’ll have you on  soon when you’ve scaled a little bit and we can talk more about that marketing Let’s talk about let’s talk again at 15 million AR.  It’s all right