 Alright, good afternoon. We have our next speaker here, Jason Nill, and he's going to be talking about using finance to create a new department. He's a partner at co-founder of GiveWQ.com, a WordPress donation plugin powering more than 40k plus active installs. He works on managing the business growth, buys it as, and does resales for kids to grow up in Jefferson Park too. And though he lives in San Diego, now he's a Black Sox. Go Black Sox! Go Black Sox. They didn't do the play-offs, so, yeah. Hockey's over. Those people we're welcome to, Jason. Thanks everybody for coming to my talk today, using finance to create a new department. So, it's actually really nice that Dre spoke this word, did everybody see Dre? Everybody in the room, wow, incredible. I think that, I was like, well, how am I going to tie my talk to Dre? You know, he's done so much success, he's had so many life experiences, he's had so much in his journey. You know, his whole thing was talking about change, and it was like, yes! Yes! Yes! Because this conversation's all about change too. A couple things about me. My name's Jason Camille. I work at Gibb. Currently I'm the head of finance. As Ben mentioned, I also work on some presales tickets. I buy some ads, and we work together as a team on lots of things. A couple of disclosures before we start talking about finance. I went to the great University of Buffalo University out of Indianapolis. I worked really hard for four and a half years to get a political size and history degree. I think Ben said earlier to talk to maybe figure it out once I got out to San Diego. But here today we're here to talk about finance, and I think maybe there's some CPAs in the room, but maybe there's not too many. So we're kind of on the same page here. And hopefully today my goal is to help level up your understanding of finance. And also, most importantly, help you consider that maybe I can do finances well. So go through this little talk. Talk a little bit about how we built a new department at Gibb. You know, I'm so inspired by WordPress. I remember meeting Devin and talking about WordPress and thinking about the plugins. I remember going to read about Matt and talk about how he set this goal. Well, I think about changing the world, right? To democratize publishing, to give a voice to the voiceless. And it's always a good level set before we step back and talking about growing huge companies and taking over the world and taking out sass, that we remember why we're all here. We're all here to democratize publishing. We're all here to give a voice to the voiceless, and we're all here to improve the world, which is, I'm really excited because we're here to work too. Before I get into talking about working backwards and what finance means, I wanted to talk a little bit about business. And I'm really excited to talk about business because when I first joined WordPress about four years ago, I had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Orange County and listen to Steve Zangit and a couple of other folks talk about business. And they were trying to communicate the importance of education around business and finance. This is a report. So there's this gentleman that came into WordPress last year. His name is John Mehta. He's the head of Design and Automatic. Like, whoa, we got a rock star into the WordPress community. He comes out with these Design and Tech reports every year. This is from 2017 in which he noted that the number one thing that folks want to learn about is finance. Yes, that's me, right? 2018 recently came out. I encourage you to look at it. He's got an interactive map. He's got digital stuff. So if you take anything away from this presentation, go look at this website, designandtechreport.wordpress.com. And he's got 2017 and 2018 there. Guess what, folks? In 2018, it came back and the top ten skills needed for designers and start-up business. That's why I'm here. So who's the designer in the room? We got some designers in the room. I can design this presentation. You're all, I'm not a good designer. I got kicked out of our class. Swabia did. She's on my team. So thanks, Swabia, for putting this presentation together. One of the really important things about our business and how we go for a company with finance is that everyone's involved with working backwards and everyone has a voice in building what we're building. Real quick picture, that's my team. All right, action items that you're going to take away. We're going to talk a little bit about what working backwards is and how we use that to build a customer success department. We're going to talk about this customer success manager in the lab. People are like, geez, it isn't finance. So boring. Well, that's like the CPA stuff. In finance, we have lots of freedom to make things up. We're going to talk about futures and ratios. We're going to talk about getting a buy-in from my teammates. I'm not the only one on the planet that works at my company. So certainly we're going to make big decisions and create new departments and make big investments. Everyone needs to be in. I'm going to talk about failure success. And I'm going to talk about my rap song again, again, and again. All right, so what is working backwards? I said before, you know, I was never a CPA and I didn't come when I got into the WordPress place from a I'm going to manage the accounting and doing the forecast. I came from a place of, gosh, we need to figure this stuff out because we got to build this thing. And that was the place that I came from. And one of the things that I've always really done in life is try to visualize things. I think that was taught from, like, I love bowling. I love golfing. I love fishing. And all those things, you have to kind of visualize what's going to happen, whether the fish is going to hit the hook or that ball is going to kind of come around the tree right above it and move on the right side of the ferry. All these visualization things. I think that in many ways, helping out for finance because I created this little concept called working backwards and, like, everything in life, I don't think I created it. I just, like, identified it and was like, yeah, this is going to work for us because at one point, when you're trying to create new things and get buying it, people are like, so, like, what is this going to do? Well, if I look into the future and think about it, well, then maybe it would do that. Or maybe it would do this. And that's really kind of like my view of finance and working backwards. And I think finance, in terms of working backwards, it has a lot of, I used to say, well, finance has no rules. If you want to be in finance, that's great because you've got to make things up. You can change that thinking and, you know, iterate it a little bit. And I think finance has open rules. Certainly, if we're involved in tax or we're dealing with complex issues, you certainly would want to have a CPA involved and have an attorney involved and get those advice. But if we're just talking about building stuff that doesn't exist, well, frankly, we don't need them, right? We put that aside and say, you can do the tax stuff. We're going to be playful, have our open rules and figure this thing out. That's kind of how I've always approached finance. There's a big dilemma. And there's an elephant in the room, I think, and there was an elephant in the room. When I started at WordPress and working on WordPress and working on the WordPress project and working on the GIF plugin, having all these customers come in and looking at all the thousands of active installs that we have, and it was like, hold on. We don't talk to people. We don't call them. But there are customers and they pass and they love us and they give us five-star reviews, and occasionally we meet them at WordCamps, but we only talk to them if they're upset and they're knocking down our door with a support problem. And I said, maybe that's not the way that we want to do it. So I began to think about what we call customer success dilemma, and I said, well, team, what we want to do is we want to create an apartment to start calling people after they bought our products. I'm like, okay, well, let's talk to our mentors about that. And as we talk to our mentors about it, we continue to hear that what you really need to do in the marketplace is you need to go get a rockstar salesperson because he's going to call your customers, he's going to create all this loyalty and it's going to be amazing. And we thought to ourselves and we considered the things that we know and it became this really important dilemma and decision that we had to make about change. So this is like, well, gosh, it's like five months ago. So sitting around in November and I'm like, yeah, we just broke 8,000 premium customers. Everyone loves us, we're renewing it 75%, but we don't even know who they are, but we kind of do a thing, need a support problem, and they're kind of located, but we need someone to call them. We think it should be a salesperson. It's like utter confusion, right? There's like no answers, we couldn't make a decision. And I was like, I was like, that was just like what you were talking about, indecision. So what we did, or what I did more specifically is I did this thought about this little chart and I said, well, based on my experience in WordPress, you're going to have a lot of sales experience where we're finding this person for customer success or you're going to have a lot of WordPress now. It's like, not everyone's math problem, not everyone can do everything in the world. So I said, well, what do we really need? Do we need someone that has a lot of sales experience or do we need someone that has a lot of WordPress experience? And I like to have fun with finance and forecasting. So I created these two little names, WPGood Vox versus the sales slayer. And what we're going to do is we're going to go through the financial straw man forecasting that we did to determine if we should go with WPGood Vox to build this new department in methodology or if we should go with sales slayer. Does that make sense to everybody? I hope it does. I hope it does. So first thing we do is build a straw man. So that's like just making stuff up. So we're sitting around, all right, good vibes are sales slayer. Here we go. So let's think about the things that we might want to measure, right, because like finance is about math, I think. We haven't talked about math. An important thing in finance is not always about math. We started making things up. We said, well, what about calls to renewal? If a sales slayer makes a call or a good vibes person, what might happen? Well, what about like calls to audience segments? If the sales slayer knows lots about education because he worked in the education sector, well, that WordPress person, they may not know about this, right? We start quantifying these things with actual numbers. WP, good vibes to renewals, good vibes to upgrades, upgrades to calls. We started creating all these things. So I work with my teammate, Michelle, and creating all these different things. Who are you going to bring aboard? Who are you going to bring aboard? Are you going to bring aboard that good vibes person? Or are you going to bring aboard this sales slayer person? So these are things that we create in our mind that don't want a spreadsheet or that may go on a spreadsheet that may not just to begin thinking about the process of how do we build? What kind of investments do we want to make to build to find that right person? So those are the things that we thought of. In the end, we came up with a couple of different things to measure. I'm going to talk about measuring them. We came up with sales training. We wanted to measure that. We wanted to measure WP WordPress and team training. Maybe we'd call that culture fit in some big organizations. We wanted to measure effectiveness at WordCamps. Imagine that at WordCamps. Here we are today. Who loves WordCamp? WordCamp too. I mean, why don't you go to another business conference and be like, who loves coming to dream for? Everyone's like, God, I feel terrible. I want to spend $1,500 and I learned nothing. We learned about phone calls. Is it good vibes that we all make phone calls? Well, the sales slayer is going to do way better. We'll talk about that. Emails. Who can write more emails and send them faster? Right? Who's going to actually connect with people? Like, I'm a great sales person but no one ever talks to me. That's no way. How many people contacted? How many people do demos? How many people take care of force-level support? So we got these different things. Oh, yeah, revenue. That's important in this thing. Right? The purpose of this department is to increase customer loyalty and increase revenue. That's an important thing to democratizing generosity for us, to democratizing publishing for WordPress and frankly to create those really high-paying jobs to allow us to have careers for decades in this industry. So this is my WP Good Vibes spreadsheet. And for the sake of time, this is a little shorter presentation than the last time in Phoenix. I put all the numbers up for you so you can look through them and get super confused. Alright, so someone asked a question in Dray's speech like, do you forecast five years in the future? Well, for this position, we just forecasted four months and I think that was pretty easy for us because you can kind of see into the future four months, like five years. I think that's a little bit harder when people ask me that question. I'm like, do a year and think with that and do budgets and actuals every month. So we did four months, January, February, March, April and you can see all these different things that come down and I quantified each one of these things based on numbers. Where do these numbers come from? I made them up. They didn't come from anywhere but my experience and some basic math. And I think that's really important when you're thinking about finance and building a company is that you can do it. You can make the numbers up and see what they look like and work against them and then iterate, iterate, iterate, right? Again and again and again and keep doing it. So a couple things on the Good Vibes side that we thought that were really important in making this decision. Well, first and foremost, like coming in, Good Vibes isn't going to know much about sales. So there's lots of sales training. We've got sales training going on but I've got Good Vibes in month two attending a work camp and most importantly, because Good Vibes knows WordPress, day one, they're on the phone call with the customers, right? That's super important, right? You come in and immediately, even though they can only make 84 contacts and generate a little bit amount of revenue at $2,400, in the first month they're already talking to our customers. Make a little note that's really important in the math based on looking at the futures of how math works, right? Get a few months ahead. You're going to be a much better physician based on this forecast. So another really important thing about this sheet that you want to look at is the demo ring. 50% of Good Vibes, again, this is all made up data. I'm making this up. 50% of Good Vibes is going to talk to the 84 people. They're going to talk to a lot of people, 50%. I'm like, well, why do they talk to more people? Well, because they don't sound like a salesperson on the phone because they're not, right? We're in WordPress because we're in WordPress. We're not a salesperson because we're not, right? So you get to talk to 50 people and you can see the math running, right? And we run the math right through the sheets and they're just made up numbers, folks. All right, Sales Slayer. Keep that in your head. Sales Slayer doesn't really need one month of training. He just needs to hang out with me for 15 days and we can figure out this product thing. He can read a bunch of product spreadsheets and those product spreadsheets, he's got them, right? Because he sold sales scores. He sold classy. He worked for some agency and sold paperclip. He knows what he's doing. Well, here's the problem. That guy, he's not calling my WordPress customers for several months, in my opinion, until he really understands WordCamp. So what happens? So Sales Slayer comes in and he's like, yo, I need to get on the phone. I can make 100 calls today. Well, in my mind is I'm forecasting this using finance, financier. I'm like, well, stop. I don't want to put you on the phone. You don't even know the difference between a theme and a plugin. Well, you can train me. Well, can you? Like I literally learned in the last talk that the most important thing about support is the other plugins that are impacting support. Right? Like, I worked for David and didn't know that. Right? How about this Sales Slayer that came in? Right? So super important. We don't put him on the phone for two months. No revenue in month one. No revenue in month two. But you can see in month four, once he actually starts making phone calls, he's two times faster in generating that revenue. He's like, they hit 5,000 here. He hit 5,000 here, but he's twice as fast. So if you put in another variable, like you remove training, the math would totally change. Right? So when you're doing with this, I always say, like, be super playful. Like, well, what if the sales guy could like watch every video about community on WordPress TV and all the great things, and he's like, I got it. I understand WordPress. Those are all the different variables that you can create as you're creating these spreadsheets and frankly playing with the numbers. Like they're playing, like developers are playing with blocks, right? Jason's playing with sheets. All right. So here's the annual revenue. Good vibes versus sales. Slayer, boom! Good vibes wins. This is great. He turned us to more than $40,000 of income. And in finance, we made decisions based on numbers, not based on feelings. So that's really important. I feel strongly about WordPress. I feel strongly about democratizing publishing. I made this decision because of that number at the bottom of the sheet, because that's my job to lead the company in that role. So I think that's a really important thing is that if after the end of this journey and my decisions in my math, though I may change them a little bit, if this was the $101,000, hopefully I'd be honest enough to make that decision. But guess what? When we put this all together and we thought about, now I wanted good vibes to win, so maybe there's some bias there. But at the end of the day, before casting, we made that decision. We said, you know what? As we're going to build this customer success department, because the elephant in the room is that none of the WordPress plugins or theme shops ever talked to anybody, then we need to do that. And that's what we did with WP Good vibes. I think one of the really important things is that there's this radar. I call it the bees radar. And I think when people think about getting on the phone, people, like, freak out. Like, I don't know if you guys do, but, you know, sometimes I do them. Well, this person wants to have a call. They have a 714 area code. They're in rural Pennsylvania. Like, whoa, they're like really different than me. I don't know if I want to call. Maybe I'll just email them. I bet they'll get my email. You know, they probably like email because like me, they don't like to talk on the phone either. Well, that was a big thing about hiring WP Good vibes is that we didn't want to bring that rough shop bull and trying to shop person into our company. And I think it was really about getting those teammates and creating that buy-in. So as I projected this stuff and thought about this, what we did in our company was we met up. And I continued to push with feasibility documents and continue to share my thoughts around how we would build this department based on finance. I actually never showed any of that other stuff to my team because those are things that I was internalizing to make my own decisions. I think it's really important when you're working on teams to work alone to create big ideas and then to present them to your team. So that's really important for making really good, strong, really good, strong decisions. So I always like to start with questions like I said and get curious and make it up. I'm a fisherman and this is probably one of the best ways to fish. You can actually do this right in San Diego where the grunnies run. You guys know about the grunning run? Well, if you don't take anything other than that Tony made or John made a thing, Google Grunning Run. That's pretty neat. You can take one of these maps out and catch a bunch of grunnies so long form feasibility baby. Does anybody know what feasibility is? Alright, so feasibility is a document that I put together to show my partners that we should then hire WP Good Vibes versus Sales Slayer. So we went through this straw man. I made a bunch of stuff up. I created a spreadsheet that had a bunch of more made up stuff up numbers and then I made a decision that's really going to impact our organization. I can't go to my team and be like hey, I just made a bunch of stuff up. Let's do that. You have to create another document. So this requires work which is another thing to bring up is that as you think about building your company the folks at Ninja Forms, they did a talk last year about partners and you want to think about bringing in people that compliment your talents because we all have different unique talents that can benefit our goal of democratizing publishing and giving a voice to the voices. So long form feasibility baby. How to make a feasibility doc No math here. Four things to do. Credit curiosity. You know one of the really important things is asking Pierce for key insights. So I called my friend Eric Hayes. He worked over at SIPOWS and I said hey Eric, we want to build this department just like you. How did you guys do it? And he said we got 80 sales people pounding the phones and if people threatened a quick we threatened a lawsuit. I said, oh good advice. We should definitely hire the sales person. You know we asked our mentor and he said hey you know who's in the sales department who should we focus on? He said well you probably want to hire sales people. So we did some key peers. We talked outside WordPress and we did it a lot and we did this for a long period of time as we were thinking about building this new thing what's the new thing? It was calling folks on the phone right? That was the new thing that we're doing. We're picking up the phone and calling our customers. You know when we think about failure success doesn't even matter. You know someone told me like it doesn't matter we're just going to keep going and I think that was a really important point about what Dre said in the talk. He talked about iteration, iteration, iteration. Like does it really matter that it was 101,000 versus 40,000? Like does it really matter that I created that strongman? Does it matter that my strongman might be different than your strongman? It doesn't matter for anything. You know what matters is I was able to convince my partners to create an apartment based on this feasibility doc. So that's super important as you are creating that feasibility doc. It doesn't matter today if you fail or succeed because you're going to do it again and again and again. When we do our financing with our budgets and with our actuals we do it every month and we might spend a little bit this month or spend a little bit less next month but we're constantly doing it over and over and over again. One of the really, really neat things about the organization that I work in and the teammates that I work with is that well none of us are CPAs or financial experts but all of us are using finance in our departments. All of us. We all work backwards in every way. And I think that's really important as you're thinking about building a business is that you may not want to have a finance person do the finance because maybe the perspective of how we build this community is maybe a little bit different than how some other industries and communities have built their business. We work backwards everywhere and I think that's really, really, really important to share working backwards. Here's an example I stole this from you Matt of a spreadsheet that is created in one of our systems and this looks at an entire year of support. So we're jumping out of finance we're still thinking about working backwards we're still thinking about running ratios we're still thinking about doing all the things that you learn and manage your accounting but we're doing it in support. Imagine that. You can't read these three things so I'll read them to you I gotta get really close to read them too but you can see you've got capacity that's the red line I gotta look here I can't even read them there the red line here is capacity the blue line is the ticket and sales ratio and then the orange line which is my most favorite maybe it's a little bit yellow to you it's like a Puma yellow is the resolve ratio so you have three different ratios that the sport team and Matt and his team are leading that allows Matt to determine guess what folks how to build how to hire how to create jobs and how to grow the WordPress community so by utilizing working backwards even though Matt doesn't call it working backwards that's what Matt's doing and utilizing these ratios we can make some really, really key decisions I think when I'm looking at this when I'm looking at this from a finance perspective you can really see in month 11th and 12th our capacity going through the roof but you know what's really exciting about that as you work backwards that resolve rate basically stays right on par so what does that mean that means as our customers are asking for more things we continue to get more efficient so maybe in the future when we do our ratios that can impact something it's not only happening not only happening in finance it's also happening in support in many ways it's happening in development not only does it happen on a yearly basis for our company to be successful for our company to grow that has to happen on an ongoing basis so people are all asking Jason so like you go into PayPal you do those transactions you look up QuickBooks that's like 25 minutes I'm like yeah that's about 25 minutes I can do that in 25 minutes I'm like I gotta stare at the spreadsheets I'm gonna delete a bunch of things and make things up I'm gonna make our grow rate 7% rather than 3% and it's very important that you spend a lot of time doing it so we spend maybe let's call 18 hours a week doing finance maybe that's probably what I do maybe 22 on support side I think basically your whole job is finance because you're looking at numbers constantly and look at the detail that's coming out from a financial perspective finance, being math, not being tax making this stuff up these are real numbers for every 50 sales customers create 68 tickets our reply to resolve is 2.6 so we need 68 tickets we'd send 177 replies handle time is 9.33 minutes that's 1,650 minutes to handle 50 sales that's about 2 days of premium sales each tech has about 1,650 minutes a week to do priority support if that's not creating a feasibility doc I don't know what is this is a feasibility doc right here that was created in support and math doesn't even know it so I challenge all of you because I said well how many people are in finance and I was like what the hell is finance I'm not a fan of taxes this is finance and this is forecasting and this is happening and I encourage you to think about that in your role and think about finance maybe a little bit differently think about it as open rules think about it as less rules not more rules now I think if there was like a financial lecture here at C college I might not get a very good grade but I gotta tell you it worked it really worked like it did like last year we had I don't know a half dozen employees now we have almost 20 right I mean it really worked before our customer our renewal rate was like 69% now it's 77% right before we used to sell only 10% of our pro bundles that's agency licenses now it's 16% so like regardless of what you think about anything else like it worked and I think I think in many ways like that's the WordPress way like we just figured out how to make it work based on the resources that we have based on the customers' needs that we had based on the timelines and things that we were getting right we're all a little bit different right like we came into the business and we didn't have a big investment so we didn't have a lot of cash we had a lot of different decisions we said you know we don't want to bring on investors so our burn rates are going to have to be a lot lower than other SaaS companies right so these are all the things that we did based on what on what we did I wanted to provide you a couple different things in addition to working backwards and doing financial forecasting because people say well what are the tips that you can give me Jason to better run to better run my business so couple things here that I think are really important I've got three key spreadsheets that I'm looking at on a pretty regular basis in my role in finance and they're on the left 18 month role budget in actuals FY 2017 forecast and that's a mistake it should say FY 2018 budget and that's a much bigger mistake than you might think so I'm going to talk about why that is so those are three sheets that I wrote most on the day today so explain them a little bit the 18 month forecast literally looks at every 18 months and it's constantly moving every month and most of those numbers in there probably aren't that on they're made up and they're always changing like if we're like we're going to come out with a new product I change that number if we say hey we're going to hire more support staff the number changes the 2017 forecast previous year is I can go back and be like well what you do dude like did you get within 5% did you totally miss the software licensing cost like how did you how did how did max ratios around 9.33 tickets and 1650 minutes worked to those sales so we can go back and look at what we did I love the 2018 budget the most so when I talk about forecast and budgetings again this says budget here not to confuse anybody but when you do a forecast you're like playful and curious and you make stuff up when you do a budget you're like in the military buttoned up and very serious because you gotta meet your budgets because what we're doing is we're having courage and we're taking big risks big risks we're not taking little risks here we're taking big risks so with that budget no risk taken on your budget be conservative on your budget on your forecast be playful be curious those are different sheets they work in different ways and they serve different purposes this renewal churn thing is a really big thing these days like if you go onto these big websites and download their sheets which are really great you'll see a lot of people talking about renewal and churn like thank you Pippin Williamson and all the people that decided to go to auto renewals for plugins from my perspective it has a profound impact on our ability to continue to democratize generosity and create jobs why it's a simple answer folks because we have more revenue more revenue begins more investment because y'all are paying every year automatically we don't have to be like can you please just give us your credit card for the folks keeping score we were at like 15% renewals now we're about 70 and the really interesting thing about that too is that when we look at math our refund rate after installing the customer success you can actually drop which is like all the assumptions that I made in my straw man that like people are gonna renew less cost more and not like us like the result was the exact opposite gosh that's really interesting it was the exact opposite of what we thought I think you might find that a lot in life especially when you start thinking about how finance might play into your business I do a financial health snapshot hopefully I can do that more but that's a snapshot that I provide to my teammates and managers at the company for how the companies are doing just like all departments we make sure we report on a weekly basis so that we really know what's going on what's going on in the business I think craving curiosity and being playful is probably not something you might hear in a traditional finance talk but I would encourage you that for us that's what made it work like it might not work for other people but that's what worked for us that's what worked for us and frankly if it worked for us well then we're just gonna continue doing that we're not gonna change course because it works and finally again and again and again I think it's really important to learn from others I think listening is a skill it will all benefit on I think going to meet up some work can't certainly do scrubs and having tests and you should do it again and again and again I'm Jayce Kinnil I'm from GWP I really love WordPress and thanks for coming to my talk if there's any questions I'm happy to answer them So you're relying your forecast to adjust your budget for the next quarter quite a bit you know I think like one of the really important things is that we're in this big build and investment mode so the forecast really is constantly changing I think one of the big challenges is that when you're in build mode and you're constantly investing it's very important that you are a little bit more lenient on how you would manage your budgets because there are always things that you aren't gonna know that are gonna come up when you're taking big risks like the more risks you take the more opportunities you're gonna have which could impact the budget so I really like trying to be pretty strong and be like this is the budget this is the revenue that we're working against but I think you do have to run the forecast when you're like hold on like everything changed what is this mean for the business because you still gotta keep doing everything that you are doing over here while you're trying to figure out that change so trying to keep them separate I think is a super important thing I think it's really hard and frankly I think the best way to do is just use Excel because that can allow you to create those pivot tables and then different tabs so that you can say hey we're gonna grow at 1.6 rather than 1.3 or something like that so I would say yes if your forecast changes aggressively you probably should change your budget and maybe just on a quarterly basis but we're a small team and we don't have like huge we have no debt so there's no like we don't have this nut that we have to meet other than expenses so there's not like this little man it's like we gotta pay our bills and we have to find that $80,000 to pay for that investment so that's another thing is if you keep that out then the rules change a lot if you've got expenses and you've gotta pay someone like I might suggest not doing this way at all because it may not be as buttoned up as if you had that going on any other questions? I was in software I'm gonna jump to my career and a bit of debt one of the things that I did was brought in licensing and I always encouraged people to do the customer contact so the missing part in there that I didn't hear was did you contact people that didn't buy that demo didn't buy, downloaded didn't buy and then the second part is I've always been a believer that everybody in the organization is a salesperson and especially the small organization everybody should be capable of making two, three, five calls to a client I'm the CEO, I'm the this, I'm the that and making those calls personally especially during the startup phase because at a certain point everybody becomes so wrapped up in their roles that they forget about who the customer actually is why they're buying their product and that relationship between them kind of dissolves So two questions there I think the second question does everyone get involved in sales I would say that based on the nature of our team it isn't like everyone is believes in the mission of democratizing generosity and everyone that touches a customer because frankly customers are really smart and they can go online and figure it out for themselves like no one even really needs to sell we just need to provide the ability for a customer to have a great understanding to make a decision so everyone is naturally in sales because that's just how we baked in the brand now sales in the WordPress ecosystem does not exist today like go find a plugin shop or a theme shop that has someone that's a business development person like it doesn't exist right there's partnership people like big big companies but maybe if the host is where you start to see the sales folks within WordPress so baked into the brand and no one's really doing sales because our customers are smart enough to make their own decisions that second question is more the first question I think is a little bit more profound in that how do you handle the growth of people that don't buy into our freemium model and just use our free product that's a WordPress problem that that's a challenge we all got to solve right we don't know that much about our free customers that are downloading our products and certainly if we knew more about them we not only could sell them but we could help continue to accomplish our goal of democratizing publishing and bringing a voice to the voices so we had 2019 or later 2018 we bring a sales team and really think about going out to new people and I think at that point it really begins about the conversation of WordPress more than it begins about my products because what we need to do to build my product is to build up WordPress it's not really to build my product because once you discover WordPress you're going to get using WordPress products and then we're kind of there so that would be more my perspective but I definitely think that having people making outbound calls to people that didn't purchase would be great I don't think that it's like a it's like a bug in WordPress I don't think we can really do that because we don't know who our free customers are and I think that's also important because that's what open source is like it's okay we don't know who our free customers are but it's all good so that's just one of the parameters that we have to work around and the questions yes sir how much transparency do you provide with the entirety of your team around budgets actuals financial goals etc yeah really good question so I'd like to say as we share as much as we possibly can so average job size total revenues renewal rates all that's shared with the team on a regular basis and I think the team would be defined as everybody within the organization that touches give that's a full-time employee so for the most part everybody would know what's happening certainly if we're making decisions about investment future products we try to keep those at hands arms because we never want to like where you make a decision and then back step it we want to be very purposeful in our decisions and when we make a decision that's what we're going to do so try to keep those things in our pockets until we really know what's going on I guess that's all thank you so much for coming to my talk