 The hardest part, though, was, you know, GoDaddy's a public company, so you have to keep it very quiet, even from our employees. So our employees did not know until the day of the week over. And we were coached very well to say, you know, the first thing you need to make sure you say after that is, don't worry, you all have new jobs, no one's getting fired, because that's what people are waiting for, and they're not going to hear anything else until they hear that. What's tomorrow look like? This is Startup to Storefront, the podcast where we talk to business owners and entrepreneurs about the untold challenges of scaling a business. All right, welcome to the podcast. We're here with Brian Nolan. Brian Nolan's a successful tech entrepreneur. So this company celebrate to GoDaddy. People who don't know GoDaddy is probably the largest web hosting company in the world, or one of them. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So let's start with the startup. What was the idea like? So were you doing something related to celebrate, and then you decided to go out on your own, or how did the idea come about? Let me tell you what celebrate does first, in a lot more sense. Yeah. Celebrate is software, web-based software that helps small brands and retailers sell their products on the online marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and so forth. So my co-founder and I worked together in Pasadena, the online retailer. I was in charge of selling our products in the marketplaces. So through our own pain points, basically an experience of how do we get our products listed on Amazon and eBay and everywhere? How do we fulfill the orders? How do we make sure the inventory is in sync? So if we sell something here, it doesn't oversell again. We looked at the software that was available at the time, and it was expensive and old, a lot of desktop solutions. And we just felt like there was a need for a smaller, easier to use solution for small businesses. Now, at the same time, on the side, I had my own little side hustle on top bargains with a couple other friends, actually, where we were buying excess and overstock inventory and selling it online. Specifically on eBay and Amazon? Just on the marketplaces. We didn't even have a website. Okay. So for example, the first thing we bought was 1,100 pairs of baseball cleats that we got from a guy who bought them from Dick's Sporting Goods when they had over-purchase for the season. Wow. So you're flipping these things? Yeah. So he gets them from Dick's for like $2 a pair. We get them for like $4 a pair. And we're talking about Nike, A-Rod, Adidas, Reebok, whatever. What are you listing them for? 40 bucks. They retail for 120 MSRP or more, sometimes with A-Rod ones, and we're listing them for 40, 50 bucks. So massive margins. Yeah. And flying through and selling. Then we got some other apparel. We got really anything that we could get our hands on where it's almost like real estate where you're making money on the buy and buying it for super cheap. And just as long as it was small enough and a brand name that people were going to be searching for and looking for, we would buy it and resell it. And I was doing it as a site hustle. So I'd come home from my job during the day where I was also selling on the marketplaces and then trying to manage this business and trying to figure out how do we get my sales into QuickBooks? How do we start using fulfillment by Amazon to sell, to fulfill these orders? Because Amazon offers that even, or non-Amazon orders, you can have any order. Yeah. And couldn't find any software that automated any of this. So people don't know. I kind of have a little bit of experience with this. We had a company and the whole thing is you, so if someone comes to your website and they order it, you obviously probably, let's just make it easy. You have a closet full of this black item. You grab it, you mail it yourself. Now your company's maybe in year two and you're thinking, let me go to Amazon. When you go to Amazon, you have to fill out this super complicated Excel sheet with a certain SKU, item description, price, and then a photo that's a super specific size for Amazon. It's a pain. If you're really good, you get it done. If you're like me, you're on the phone with an Amazon specialist figuring this out. And that's just one marketplace. But now you have two areas of inventory to manage. You have your online store and also Amazon. And so you guys are sort of figuring this out, but with eBay and everybody else. Yeah, we're figuring out first how to automate some of the basic tasks and we launched sort of precursor product to sell right back in 2012. So this was like 2011, Mike, my co-founder and I were talking about this. We put in some money together, built this precursor product that just automated the fulfillment by Amazon piece. So we could manually list our products on eBay or whatever and have them fulfilled automatically. What was Amazon like in 2011? They were growing really fast. They had about, only about eBay was still the player, right? eBay? Surprisingly, eBay is still a player now. Okay. I mean, Amazon, of course, is much, much larger. But worldwide, eBay is still a very good player in this space. But Amazon, you know, maybe they were right around 30%, maybe a little less of the sales on Amazon work from third parties. Now it's well over 50%. So it's just a little bit different. This is right when fulfillment by Amazon was getting going. So they were begging people to kind of put some inventory in there and try it out. Prices were really cheap. So we automated some of these features and we get some feedback from our customers. And again, this is still all side hustle. Sure. Getting feedback from our customers of, this is great that I can automate the fulfillment. But how do I get my products on eBay? Or how do I get them on Etsy or whatever? And so we started thinking, okay, we need to build a full, sweet end-to-end solution of list your products, same thing with inventory. Then fulfill them when you get orders and everything. Yeah, that's where it started. So in 2013, we raised some money from Incubator and Pasadena called Idealab. Idealab is one of the very first incubators in the world. They started in 1996. They created the concept of pay-per-click advertising or paid search, which is essentially what they Google. Sure, that's amazing. You know, a bunch of other companies that come out of there. So we got some money from them. How much did they give you? So they initially invested $250,000. In exchange for equity? Like 6% or is it less than? It was higher because they came in pretty early. It was more like an idea stage. So we had this other product first that just did this one piece of functionality and we were only charging like $29 or $49. But we went to Idealab and said, hey, we think if we build this full suite, people are going to want to pay $250,000 a month for this. And they said, wow, prove it. We didn't have that proof. We needed people to pay this. So what they did, as I said, we'll give you $50,000 now. You take six weeks to go find a way to prove that this model works. And then you can spend money on Google advertising and so forth and drive traffic. And we'll give you the other $200,000. So we did the full-on lean startup methodology and set up a website for selling, explaining what our vision was and what everything was but made it look like it was real in life. Had our pricing page up there that had three different plans. And when you click on it to sign up, we would tell you it's coming soon and you could sign up for the beta and get a started building a waiting list basically. We would track which price plan they clicked on and should we follow this data? So you have like the LOI set and so you go, that's amazing. Yeah. So you're like, this is the interest. You send a little $50,000 on Google ads to go drive traffic to it. So we proved two things. By the way, we've got 100 people signed up in a very short amount of time by the end of it before we launched the product. We had about 2,000 people on our waiting list. Wow. That's significant. That's amazing. Yeah, we proved that we could scale it with cost effectively with Google advertising and other means. And also prove that people are willing to pay $250 a month. Nowadays, our pricing starts way lower by $49 a month because we're able to do it at scale. And we want to, we're really targeting smaller businesses. How long were you in the accelerator program? So we worked out of there, it's not, yeah, it's like an incubator, like YCOM or any of those where it's a set timeframe. It's an incubator where you kind of go in there and they provide all the HR and finance and accounting and all the things like all the operational departments and you just focus on your products and marketing and getting them out there. And they give you the office space and everything. So we actually stayed there for a couple of years. We were in the space until we were at about 10 employees or so. And then we moved out and got around. Oh, wow. So you went from just you two plus employees in this space. That's amazing. And you're working on it the whole time, 18 hours a day. Yeah, by that point, once they invested the money, we quit our day jobs. And what did this and a funny story on that too is that so I was working at that point, I had left the online retailer was actually working at a different company. And I just kind of felt like the IDLAB money was going to come in. We hadn't gotten the commitment yet. So I gave three weeks notice. And on the last day is when IDLAB committed the money. Wow. And I kind of feel like I was one of the things where you kind of feel like it wouldn't have happened if I didn't. Yeah, if I didn't put it all on the line. This is how I feel. I tell everyone to quit their jobs because when you have when that happens and you focus on something, I think serendipity and or, you know, willing things into existence, which I'm not that way. I'm not that kind of guy. But it always happens. You'll figure it out. Right. And were you living with your co-founder or were you guys? No, we were we lived near each other. Okay, buddies. And we would go part of the time and hang out all the time. You're familiar with the studio city area. We did a lot of our early pitch deck and things like that. Or on my dining room table. That's awesome. So we would go both do our day jobs and come home and work basically after dinner until 10 or midnight or something like that. See, you have 10 employees in this at the incubator and now it's time to get your own space. Or are you raising? Are you raising money a second round? Your seed round? Yeah, so we're trying to. We made several attempts. We actually never raised VC money. Oh, interesting company. We've raised money from ideal app and some angel investors. And that was it. Not or lack of trying. We actually did try. What was the biggest pushback you guys had? The biggest pushback was I think just we were pretty early in the whole marketplace, Amazon boom. So early on, you know, ideal apps and build rows, they're really good at seeing the future and like seeing the vision of ideas. That's why they're successful. When we went to be sees a lot of them thought this is a niche of a niche and it's like tiny and it's never going to be anything because who sells on Amazon or eBay and you know, it's like, they didn't get it. They didn't get it. And what were you trying to raise everywhere? San Francisco. We're going to talk to every VC here in LA and many of them up in San Francisco as well. And all couldn't see it. Yeah, we have pretty close with a few. We actually went out two different times. I think the first time, I think one of the problems too was our timing was a little off. So the first time we went out, we were still a little too small in terms of our monthly recurring revenue. Yeah. And they say, well, come back when you're at it. I think we're at maybe like 30k. They say, come back when you're at 50k. Yeah. But that was always a moving target because when we got to 50, they're like, come back when you're at 80. So that was I think their way of just sort of keeping their foot in the door and not saying no, but not saying yes, either. And saying, well, let's see how this goes. Right. They're trying to reduce risk to the job. Right. So the more traction you control and grow, the better. Well, we were pretty close though with a couple of rooms from LA where, you know, we've gone through several rounds, met the entire partner team and everybody and just couldn't get them over the edge. Ended up being a blessing for us. Totally. Retaining much of the equity in the company. There's no board. You're not, you're right. Yeah. Well, we had two members from IDL have on the board. Okay. I mean, they were super easy to work with and really had our back and, you know, there wasn't like we were answering to them or had to get approval or anything really from them. Yeah. They really were there to support us, which was great. And what year was it when you were raising? Let's see. So IDL had funded in 2013, we probably went back down 2014. Okay. And then again, in like 2016 or so. So the metrics today are kind of like, if you have 1.2, right, million in annual recurring revenue, that's kind of good for your series A. Was it the same then or was it? Is that what they were looking for? Yeah. Well, and it's funny because it differs here in LA than it does in San Francisco. San Francisco, the checks are usually bigger. They want to see a little more traction. Okay. A series C, a seed series or a series A even might be, you know, two or $3 million in LA where it's really about $5 million in San Francisco, which it was at the time. So kind of depends like they're smaller firms here, right? They don't have as big of funds and so they're writing smaller checks. Interesting. So that's where we were getting caught up to because at one point, I think the second time we went out, we were trying to raise like $3.5 million. So for seed investors, they're like, that's too much. We invest $1 million to $2 million. Here in LA. Even here in LA. Yeah. And then in series A, we're like, that's too little. We were only like, you need to be raising $5 million or more, $5 or $6 million. So, right. We're kind of, that was our mistake. I mean, we tried to, our timing was off. I think we, you know, we just didn't try to raise at the right time in the company. And your valuation, did they help you out internally? Yeah. I mean, that wasn't really a sticking point. Okay. I think we did pretty good there. There's so many people, investors did really well because they got in. That's great. Yeah. We had some investors that were in before ideal lab, even as angel investors. And they did really well with the acquisition. And even our most current investors, angel investors did well. Yeah. The valuation, we messed up on the valuation piece. And so we were like overinflated at the beginning, which means when you go to raise a series A, you either face with the down round, or you have to, the revenue has to justify that number. And we were caught in that. And so it's kind of one of these things where you, in San Francisco at least, everybody wants to be the next Airbnb. And that's great. And very few firms end up doing that. But you, as a startup, your face with the challenge, do I go ahead and give myself a valuation of an Airbnb? So if I do blow up, I retain my company, or do I do a realistic, let's say, valuation? But then if you turn out being an Airbnb, you've given out a substantial amount of your company for a really low price. And it also, you know, it does depend on the times, right? We've seen a lot of people are saying a bubble again, right? We've seen some inflated valuations, both in the private investment and also in IPOs and public side. We work is getting destroyed right now. And it does feel like it's settling down a little bit. So I think we are seeing it settle a little bit. And I think that'll apply to private investment as well. Yeah. Unless you have pocket-stick growth. Then you're good. Did you ever think about going public? Or was that ever a goal of yours or your co-founder? Not really. I think we were realistic in thinking early on that, at least as the products stood there, that it probably wasn't the type of company that would be big enough to go public. Maybe we had grand visions of like, if this thing really blows up here, we could get into lending, you know, to buy inventory and things like that. We could do all kinds of stuff. And in that case, yeah, that could be a big company to take public. But now our strategy was really, we thought this would be super valuable to another strategic, larger company. Did you ever have rounds of funding? Or did you just get the investment as needed? You said you basically had angel investors. Yeah, it was kind of weird. We kind of fudged it and like did what we had to do. Sure. Our rounds, our tranches really would come in at like, you know, two or 300k at a time. Okay. So we would got 250 from ideal lab plus some angels. And then we'd go, that would last us for a little while. Yeah. And then when we're getting close to running out of money, we'd go talk to some angels again and kind of put together around ideal lab and put another 50. And that's so awesome. We did another like 250 and 300 or something. So we call it series seed round two. And we had a couple of those. So and then we had a couple of our existing angels decided they liked what we're doing because I would send our investors updates every month or every quarter. And we had pretty good growth. I mean, it wasn't hockey stick growth, but it was like steady, steady. Yeah. That's all you can add. That's that's good growth. Yeah. No down months at all. Directionally correct. Yeah. And so some of our angel investors opened it up, opened up a syndicate on Angel list. Okay. So we did two Angel list rounds. And what year? So Angel list launched 2008, I think something like that. Yeah. And this was way like this was we did one sort of a blur now. We did one in 2016 and 2017. Okay. So fairly recently. Yeah. Got it. Okay. And it worked out. It worked out. Yeah. We raised a couple hundred bucks, a couple hundred thousand. I mean, I think for it to be successful, you need to have somebody leading it that has a reputation. Yes. Delivering, you know, very much the case. Yeah. Yeah. We had fortunately, we had two of those already as angel investors. And so they, they helped us out. And so then you got you're at 10 people. When do you decide to get your own office space? Yeah. So right around then we started feeling like in idea lab, while it was great, the way I describe it is we went from dining room table, which is kind of like living with mom to idea lab, which is kind of like having roommates to getting our own house, like where we can paint the walls black if we wanted to. Yeah. That's what it felt like is that it was an awesome, fun place to be, but we really couldn't have our own culture style. One of the things that why Combinator emphasizes is you giving your own office because of the culture component. And so there's different models or theories out there. But the hardest thing about a shared space is the culture piece, right? You can't sort of, to your point, you can't, if you want a basketball hoop, you can't do it. If you want a ping pong table, maybe it's there, but it's shared. Yeah. If you want kombucha or an espresso machine, and it's not available, you're taking the walk to a local coffee shop. Right. Yeah. And we're having tons of fun, right? So young team, and we're doing things like airborne pranks where you take the airborne number of chair, right? And they sit on it. And so the day I knew it was time to leave is when we did an airborne prank to one of our employees. And it was like 8.30 in the morning, and he sat on it and it blasted inside of ideal. I'm so loud. And we got yelled at by one of the other founders, CEOs, because he was on a call. Guys, come on. I'm like, okay, it's time to go. We gotta get our own space to have fun. That's funny. It sounds like your culture was coming through at that time. Totally. Yeah. And I mean, we're not all, you know, we're working. But we just want to have fun. But we looked for a long time. We knew we wanted to stay in Pasadena. Actually, first we looked downtown. And we decided now we want to stay in Pasadena. By that point, we had, forgot what it was, it was like 10 or 12 people. But, you know, they're all kind of lived in that area. So we didn't want to move to the west side and probably lose most of people. We wanted to stay there. And so we were looking for a good year probably, until we found a place. And again, because we hadn't raised a lot of money, we didn't have a ton of money to put down as a deposit. You know, most of the landlords wanted a five-year term. It was a lot of raw space. So they were going to do a build-out. But they balanced five years and six months in deposit and personal guarantees. And we're like, we can't do that. We don't have the money. We don't know what's going to happen the next couple of years. But we had a broker that was helping us out. And he found this really awesome move-in ready place behind a bar. That's like 4,600 square feet. Totally built out. And multi-leveled with conference rooms. And it was just cool. And right in Old Town Pasadena. And they only wanted one month deposit. And the rent was like 40% below market. Because they had a tenant in there that moved out. And they just wanted to fill it. To fill it. Same rate. Like somebody's super easy that would come in. Not giving them a lot of trouble. Because their bar, we're sublacing actually from the bar. So they're bar owners. They don't want to deal with tenants. They just want to make some money on the back of this building that they're leased out. So this is why WeWork exists. Like if you're a startup and you're signing a five-year lease and there's 10 employees, if you're a successful startup, you probably have 40 people, 50 people, 100 people in year five. And so then you end up sublacing it. But for some reason, the market still wants you to sign this five-year lease. It doesn't make any sense. And so then WeWork figured it out. And we see why their model has been successful because of the flexibility. But so you move in and there's 10 of you in a 4,600 square foot spot. Yeah, it's in 10 or 12. I can't remember exactly. But yeah. That's pretty big. Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of it was two conference rooms, actually three, like three conference rooms. We had one space in there that couldn't really do anything but make it like either a closet or like a phone booth room. Which is a quiet space. We can get a meditation room. Okay. So it didn't have any windows or anything. It's just this like little space. And I had like a glass door window to the inside, but nothing to the outside. And I'd always wanted to have like a quiet space or meditation space. So we got that. And then we hired a meditation coach as well. From the beginning. From the beginning is one of the first things we did. Wow. We still have them. Do all your employees get, let's talk about meditation. All right. What is your, so it sounds like you've been on a journey, right? It was a journey, for sure. I had an old roommate that I lived with that would meditate and loved it. And I was always super interested and wanted to learn what it was about and how to do it. How do you know you're doing it right? Yeah. It wasn't good at teaching me that. He would bring me to like root meditations and stuff. And I would kind of sit there. But I just never knew if I was doing it right. Like what am I supposed to be doing? What am I supposed to be feeling? Right? Did something click for you? Or you just, you started to absorb the stillness, I guess. No, it didn't. Or the, the, the muting of your thoughts. Still, we got the coach. Actually. So. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I tried a few times and I just, for some reason really knew that I wanted to learn it and like wanted to be part of my life. I saw the results and other people, but I just did not know what to do. And this is before like headspace or any of the column or any of those apps were right. And randomly I met an event. I met a woman who asked if we wanted like leadership coaching because that's what she did. And I said, no, but I'm looking for meditation coaching. You know anybody. She's like, actually, I have a country. So this guy, Nick Stein, who's awesome. Used to be a film producer. I think he wants to meet me. He produced the show border boards on that, one of their top grossing shows. And found meditation because he was really struggling with what he saw on the board. The trauma, like what he experienced for four years. And it was basically ruining his life. And so he threw a therapist found meditation and loved it and quit being a producer. And now mostly teaches meditation, mindfulness practices to law enforcement. That's pretty important. Does some corporate stuff. We're the first company you did it for. And does he has a group sessions or is it one on one group session? Okay. Once ago, I only required everybody to go to the first one to learn about it. Yeah, like just show up. If you don't like it, you never have to come back. What a great city. Yeah, probably half the company does it depending on who's busy. In the morning, or is there a preferred time 11 o'clock he comes. Okay. That's kind of what we found was like morning people want to get their emails checked and stuff. Right. This is kind of like after that first wave. Of catch up and catch up and it's on a Friday. So it's already a little bit slower. Yeah. What are your quick highlights on meditation? How have you been able to, I guess, let's talk about how you figured it out. And then the quick benefits that you've seen. So I figured out that mindfulness meditation in particular, which is what we practice is about awareness of your awareness. It's really what the best way to describe it. Being aware of your thoughts. It's not about trying to smash all your thoughts down and have an empty mind. It's about sitting still and being present with your what's happening now. So it doesn't even need to be a super quiet place because you can use sounds around you or things that are happening around you to sort of draw you into the present moment. But it's really just, you know, people focus on like breathing. And then inevitably your mind is going to wander. Yeah. And it's about recognizing what you're thinking about and recognizing those thoughts and then just kind of gently bringing it back to focusing on your breath or those different techniques. But for me, it really helps sort of ground me. And in particular, when I'm feeling like overwhelmed with a lot of stuff to do and don't know where to start. Right. That's when I'll go sit and it sort of just is a reset for me. It really helps with focus reduce stress. That's great. I've been doing it in the morning sometimes. So if I have, so the subconscious lives in my dreams, it turns out. And so I have conversations with it. But when I wake up, so the normal tendency I used to have is I wake up and I go right to my phone and I just start going into action. Right. And that's how you fix your bad dream of your stress. And so what I've been, you know, this, yeah. And so what I've been doing is I'll like sit and think about the dream and I'll sort of talk to it. Talk to that, that energy that was in the dream. And I don't touch my phone and I never wear an Apple watch whenever I sleep because of this. Because then your notifications just start crushing you in the morning. And so then I just think about it. And then I sort of have the meditation time. And then I sort of quiet that voice. Then the next voice wants to enter the room right of like, all right, we got to get all this done. Let's go. And then I just live in that space for as long as I can. I don't really put a time limit, obviously the longer the better for me, but usually it's a quick five, 10 minute thing. Yeah. And then I get up and I'm like, all right, that was good. And then I'll grab my cell phone. I don't always do it, but sometimes when things are very stressful, it's hard to be disciplined. It's just like, you know, go to the gym. Yeah. It's hard to keep that discipline. Let's talk about the acquisition. So are there many people coming to you? Is it, are you thinking of selling or are people approaching you about buying your company? What was that like? Yeah. So got to the point in like, I mean, late 2017, 2018, when my co-founder and I were thinking about, you know, okay, what was the future look like for us? You're six, seven years in, the seven year rich is here. Yeah. Actually, you know, from ideal lab point, when we started full time, we're about five years in at that point. Okay. Yeah, about five years in at that point. And we were thinking, okay, so this space is getting more competitive. We have, you know, the landscape looks way different than when we started. We have more competitors doing this. We are either going to need to raise money, seriously raise money. To stay competitive, to become a player or to plant your flag. Yeah. Yeah. To really scale and take this to the next level. Yeah. Or join a strategic partner that we can add more value and like as one would be even more valuable. Right. So we're kind of looking at both of those. This is why people say one plus one equals three sometimes. This is exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. So we were thinking about what to do and right around that time, we did have some inbound interest. Okay. All that was kind of. And were your investors helping with this? Or is it? Not the investor so much as the board. Okay. Although we did, so we did have one, let's see, when did Armando come on? We had Armando is one of our angel investors who was also a successful entrepreneur. He sold his company at Espresso to Hootsuite. Okay. Awesome. When he was looking at my monthly or quarterly investor updates, he saw very similar trend to where at Espresso was, his company was like two years prior. Kudos to Armando for actually looking at investor updates. Yeah. That's so appreciated. So many people don't familiar. And I think I can help these guys because he was basically in charge of their growth engine. Okay. And so he reached out and we started talking about side note here, but we started talking about, you know, him coming on as an advisor, almost like a super advisor, almost a part-time COO that level. Not just. Setting you up for the advisors and they never hear from him again. This was like, we're going to meet twice a week. He lives in San Francisco. So we're going to jump on a, you know, a Google hangout or something, twice a week, go through our financials, go through our strategy and like, it's going to work with us to help us grow. So that actually happened. That's was one of the English syndicates too. So he did a syndicate, he raised some money, he came on as an advisor and he helped us out a ton. Now he's kind of packaged this up and it's helping some other companies too. Yeah. Really cool. So he helped a ton in sort of with this strategy as well as our board. And Mike and I realized and thought about it and said, okay, well, if we raise VC money now, we're basically committing to at least another five years, right? To grow the company to the size that the return would be good enough for the VC. The VC is, yeah. Probably five years, maybe at least three, right? Yeah. So do we want to do that? We're starting to see more and more competition. We're seeing companies that we partner with, you know, traditionally have partnered with Shopify, now launched their own Amazon and eBay integration. So they become friend of being almost like, are they competing? Are they not? We still do very well and have a great partnership with Shopify. That's fascinating. So we're starting to see more and more of that, like other consolidations in the market. This is becoming not a nice to have anymore. It's becoming a must have. Right. For the big players to stay competitive. Yeah. And so it makes perfect sense. It felt like, okay, joining forces with a bigger company makes more sense than trying to go at this alone. And so rather than pursuing investment, we looked at that. And it's right at that same time, we had GoDaddy reach out to us and say, hey, most people know us for domains and hosting because that's what we've done. Yeah. But we are now in a position where we're launching tools to help everyday entrepreneurs be successful online. And we launched this website builder and it has online store products. So you can launch and set up your online stores super quickly. We have all these other tools too, like scheduling of your hairdressers or something like that, or we can sell digital goods. We can sell, not even just sell, but you can spin up a website really quickly. You can do bookkeeping. Like we have all these tools for entrepreneurs. And we see that the major gap is this marketplace integration and you guys do it better than anybody else for small businesses. And so we would love to have you build a white label solution for us where you are powering it. Oh, interesting. Okay. Online store. So we said, okay. And we've never done that before, but we started going down that path and working on the deal with them. And is this taking away all your tech resources? Not all of them, no. But we get to be tabled some of the priorities that we had. We thought this was going to be big. We thought this could, I mean, we're, at that point, we weren't necessarily even taking our position where you're just like a massive growth engine for us where we can just have a huge lead funnel of many customers. But pretty quickly, their corp dev team came forward and said, hey, we see these kinds of heavy technical partnerships work better for one company. How far into the integration did they ask? We didn't have any start building it. Okay. So it's pretty early on. The negotiation part is still working through some of the contract stuff. And what we weren't ready to sell yet, Mike and I in this 2017. So we said, we held them off and said, no, you know what? Let's just focus on the partnership for now. They said, great. Well, if you ever want to have the discussion again, let us know. So the partnership, we signed the deal. That took months to get legal. Absolutely, yeah. Signed the deal, started working on the actual technical integration in early 2018. And it took us about six months. So late 2018, we were ready to launch. And at that point, we started getting some other interest and found interest coming in. And so we reached out to go to Addie again and said, hey, we're interested in having that conversation again. Took that, you know, that went on for a while. In the meantime, we had launched the white label integration. And it did really well. We got thousands of go to Addie sellers. But you knew, right? You knew that you had to make it pop. You had to get it right. They're interested. Of course. And of course, you know, they want to, when we came back, they're like, well, let's see how the integration does first. Yeah. And you're like, no problem. And meanwhile, you're getting other inbound hits. What a perfect, that's amazing. It wasn't like super aggressive at the time, but we had some interest. And but when it started heating up, we had the discussions with go to Addie and a few others. And ultimately, And were you pretty candid with them? We were. We didn't, you know, be an NDA. Sure. You wouldn't say the name. Totally. With the amounts for anything, but we were getting other poppers. Yeah. But ultimately, you know, for us, Mike and I, the culture of who we were going to join was super important. How they were going to treat our employees was super important. The great thing is that we had just got to spend a year plus working with go to Addie, both on the dev side, people who would be end up being my boss, the technical side. And we love our engineers said, of all the partners we've worked with, this is him the best. And we just really love the opportunity on go to Addie because they have this 19 million customers already from the domains and hosting side. Yeah. And it's huge. You know, there's still one of the biggest domain providers in the world. And so most people, when they, when you're an entrepreneur, and you come up with an idea, the first thing you do is name it and go by a domain name. Most people couldn't go to Addie. That's true. So it's a huge lead gen for them. Huge, massive competitive advantage over their competitors. Yeah. And this, you know, their whole, what was called go central at the time, which is now this website's post marketing suite that they have with email marketing and all kinds of other stuff. It was really exciting to me and Mike to be a part of that growth, kind of felt start-upy at the point. They were really scrappy getting this thing going. So when you signed the paperwork to throw a big party, tell your whole team what was the... Yeah, that was fun. That was super stressful, actually, because, you know... Taking care of your employees is actually very difficult in an acquisition. And I think a lot of people don't. There's been, there's a lot of horror stories that don't get told enough, but sometimes the employees are put on, I would say like a four-year golden handcuff or sometimes a three-year golden handcuff. But then they're fired in year two. And so they never get the payout. And this is never told to anybody. But this happens all the time. And then what ends up happening is it goes, an HR from the buying company will pay these people, not what they were supposed to get, but a percentage of it, just to keep quiet and not effectively get negative press. But it sounds like it's not the case for you, which is wonderful. And that will not happen here. GoDad acquires a lot of companies. We were the 24th company in the last five years, I think, that they've acquired. Wow. And we were able to speak to a lot of founders from prior acquisitions before signing with them and all heard great things. And it's kind of like for them, that's great. So the reputation is important, right? It's almost like a VC. VCs don't sign NDAs, famously don't sign NDAs. And people are worried that VCs are going to steal their idea. And it's like, that's not going to happen because they'll never do another deal ever. Right. If they know if their integrity is large. I've seen VCs defend the worst of CEOs to my face because they, that's their party. It's almost like talking to a politician and they'll just say, we stand behind all of our founders. We believe they're always doing the right thing and we'll always do that. And if any stock becomes available in the company, we'll gobble it up because we're, you know, we believe big time these people will succeed. And I'm always like, wow, that is not true at all. But I love the commitment to the cause because they know the reputation. Yeah. It's so huge. Yeah. And then in Godet's case, they want to continue to acquire companies. And so they know if they Growth by Acquisition or a bunch of former founders, that word is going to get out and we'll never acquire a company again. Right. So you have a big party? They want it. I mean, they're good people. Yeah, I know. They won't do that anyway. But it's nice to hear. But there is, you know, there is a incentive for them not to do that as well because we're in their business. Yeah. So we retain all of our employees, everybody did well. You know, every employee had stock options. I know. And CEO of the year. That's so nice. No, I'm serious. Like, you know, most importantly, we retained everybody. That was very big for us. This is a very uncommon story. You're not going to lay off anybody. Yeah. So if you need to have that. Including the meditation. Including the meditation coach. The hardest part though was, you know, Godet is a public company. So you have to keep it very quiet during the due diligence period leading up to it. Even from our employees. So our employees did not know until the day of the week over. Did they send a team in to do any IT type of network security stuff? Yes. A little bit. Like a training. We'll call it. I mean, they came in, fortunately we had the partnership. So they were coming in for the part, like the business leaders were coming in for the partnership side of things and even the tech leaders. But during due diligence, which was six or seven weeks before closing for that full time, which was one of the most stressful things I've ever gone through in my life. We did have one point where we had to tell a couple of our technical leads about the acquisition because they had to do a technical due diligence. Yes. And Mike and I could not go through the code. So Mike and Mike, you and Mike are not technical. You know, I started my career as a software engineer. So I consider myself technical. I'm like a product guy, but I am no longer writing code. I cannot walk you through our code and tell you what's going on. So we needed somebody very technical to do that. So we did have to near the end let a few people know, but most of the team did not know and we had planned a big party. It was actually really fun because I believe they're super stressful. So we closed it on a Wednesday, I believe in April 10th. It was a Wednesday. And even up until like that last weekend, we were negotiating little fine points of the deal. And, but we still needed to leave enough time for all of our investors to sign off on this. Right. I mean, it's a massive packet of paper. How many signatures did you need? In total. He did in about 15 or so. Yeah. Maybe more, something like that. So we had to give our investors a heads up of like, hey, this is coming. So be ready. And then we send it out on Sunday. It has to be back by Tuesday. So we could close on Wednesday. I mean, it was just like tracking down everybody. They're all across the country in the world. Like somewhere on vacation, it was gnarly. And we planned a big party. So we had the whole, this whole event space. We had like 20 people from GoDaddy come down in secret hiding throughout the day because we made the announcement to the team after the markets closed because GoDaddy spoke. Totally. Which is nice to be on the West Coast. Yeah. Yeah. And, but we did a little, even a little bit later, we did like at three o'clock because we just wanted to give the rest of the day to go to the parking. Do you make the announcement early? You're on the microphone? Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. We were secretly recorded it. So we had swag, GoDaddy swag. We had all kinds of stuff set up, a whole like party with Champagne at a bar nearby with Champagne and food and a bunch of... Not your landlord's, but a different bar. Totally. Yeah. The landlord's bar is a sports bar. Sure. But you went to like a nicer place. But working with the PR team at GoDaddy was really cool because they had like, they call it a TikTok right down to the minute of... We are going to tell the team at three o'clock at three o'clock five. The press release is going to go out at three 10. This is going to happen at three 11. This is going to happen. And it's like, boom, we rehearsed it. Like it was fun. And is your phone going nuts at some point? It did after that, yeah. But it was fun telling the team because we have a monthly... That's so cool. All hands meetings were town halls, we call them, right? Where we just sort of like review what's going on with the company. And so we set it up like that. Mike and I set it up like monthly town hall for April and we started going through some of the metrics and celebrating. We had hit revenue milestone actually just before that. So we're kind of celebrating that. It's pretty amazing all of this coming together. Yeah. And talking through how we got to that revenue milestone. And then we kind of said, well, you know, we got to that and that everybody already knew about the partnership that we had at GoDaddy. So we said, we got to that revenue milestone without even considering the revenue that's going to come from the partnership. And this is how cool that partnership is. These are some of the commercials that GoDaddy has been doing for this online store and we played some really cool video spots that GoDaddy produced and getting everybody kind of hyped up as like fast paced music on these videos and everything. And then said, wouldn't it be really cool if we all were working? Because I forgot exactly. So something to the effect of like if we're all if we join this company and we're all working. If you were one. And it was like quiet. And then we announced that we've been acquired. And it was people were like, it took a moment. People were shocked, super happy. A couple of people were crying like in happiness. Of course. And we were coached very well to say, you know, the first thing you need to make sure you say after that is, don't worry, you all have new jobs. Yeah. It's getting fired. Yeah. Because that's what people are waiting for. Right. And they're not going to hear anything else until they hear that. What's tomorrow look like. Yeah. Yeah. And so we said that and reiterated that. Same office. Everything's good. Higher pay. And by the way, we have 20 go daddy people waiting the party with you. So let's go pack up. We're going. Really? Yeah. That's so amazing. It was fun. It was really. I feel inspired after that story. Good for you. It's cool. Yeah. Is it addicting? Do you want to do it again? I actually do. I actually do. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. And what's it like? I'll be there for a couple of all of us, you know, we're all staying on. I'll be there at least for a couple of years. We're all, we all have two years worth of product milestones that we still are working on. Okay. So you're, you have to fulfill your obligations on the roadmap for two years? For two years is the, is the minimum sort of the minimum with the golden handcuff period, I guess. It's not really. I mean, nobody's locked down. Everybody would still do it. Okay. I got you. You know, you can leave and still be fine. Yeah. But there is some incentive this day. So, and, and we like working together. The stuff we're working on is really cool. We have way more opportunity and more resources now as part of bigger companies. We expected the whole reason we did this. Right. So we have some really exciting things coming out. What are the accounting challenges that go with this, switching everything over? That's the big thing. One really cool thing they did was have our payroll and benefits and everything done. We helped them get it all in loaded up. So as of the day of the acquisition, the very next day. It just turned on. Wow. Go ahead and payroll with their, they had their, all their benefits people there. But they were there for like three days after. Of course. All their benefits people were there helping us elect and just sharing all the cool benefits we get and things like that. So immediately we were in their system on that. Accounting is just now rolling over. So it's like, you're in due diligence all over again. Kind of. Yeah. I mean, going through every single vendor and supplier contract and how we pay everybody. Are they on credit card, auto bill, are we paying invoices and all that stuff and getting it moved over. What's the plan for that? Is it like a three to six month like sunset period, I guess, or? For the financials? Yeah. And even the brand, but for the financials specifically. So for the financials, yeah. It's, yeah, we had a goal of getting it done within a certain timeframe. That's the longest. Yeah. That's complicated. We should be all good to cut over on October 1st, which is a few days away. That's amazing. And in terms of the brand, yeah. So the intention for now is to leave the brand as is and continue. So we have our standalone sell right product, which is continuing to run and grow and operate just like it always has. We have all those customers still. And we still also have the GoDaddy online store version of our product, which is built into their online store. So we support both of these. So the cool thing is that GoDaddy is not forcing anybody to use their online store product. You still want to use Shopify. You're most likely a GoDaddy customer anyway, because you bought your domain from GoDaddy. Correct, yeah. But you can still go use Shopify and they're perfectly happy selling you the for us selling, you know, selling you the standalone sell right branded product. So we really like that too, that we didn't have to get rid of our brand. Now, you know, in the future, they may decide to change that into a branded product, which I'm fine with. But we do have brand equity in the space and we're known. How has it helped or even maybe hurt with some of the like Amazon? Or does it strengthen the brand now? Are they like, oh, wow, they've been acquired. This was great. Or is it how do they view that? Yeah. Okay. Obviously a lot more cloud, if you will, to, you know, to have a GoDaddy business person reach out to Amazon and sell right person. Yeah. We already had pretty good partnerships. Actually, in some cases, we had better partnerships and GoDaddy were like eBay, for instance. Oh, amazing. We were already a strategic partner with eBay. And so we brought that to the table and we just renewed that as part of GoDaddy now. But yeah, they've definitely opened doors for us. Amazon in particular is hard to get into. Any other pitfalls or any other hard parts of the acquisition? For me personally, it's different because I'm now pulled into other meetings and I have a boss and I have, so, you know, I have reporting to do and I don't not like it, but it's just different. It's a different thing. It's different than what I've been doing for six years. So it's a little bit of an adjustment there. I think for most people on the team, it's business as usual. Just remember really more for the leadership now. We have to navigate, you know, there's 9,000 people at GoDaddy, one on the world. By the way, 7,000 of those are their help. They're a care team, they call them. The support. Wow. We're helping customer care. So it's navigating the work structure and who to go to for different things. But they're super helpful. What's next for your, so two years from now, 24 months, 36 months from now? Yeah. What do you want to get into? Same space? The e-commerce space? I've been super interested in the D2C direct-to-consumer side of things with you know, companies like Warby Parker is one of the originals. But now like Airbird, Allbirds, and there's so many, but yeah. Yeah, there's so many. I mean, it's kind of a cool space. And there's something about working with technology and a physical product that I think is interesting to me. Yeah. And I've had a few people come, of course, reach out and ask for investments. And they are asking, you know, to show me some decks. So I'm starting to see some cool stuff. I don't have any crazy, like super exciting idea that I haven't come up with yet. But we'll see. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast, Brian. Yeah, this is great. Where can people find you? Selbright, Godaddy. All of the above, yeah. We still have, you know, we're still at selbright.com. I'm Brian at selbright.com. It's my email. Or B. Nolan at godaddy.com. We're here in the Pasadena, California area. Yeah. Oh, grab coffee or a drink. Well, thank you very much for being on. I appreciate it, Brian. Thanks. Yeah. We here at Start Up The Storefront would love to hear feedback from you. Reach out and let us know what you think about the show. Make sure to give us a rating on iTunes. Anything over five stars is the only way to go. Our music is composed by DoubleTouch. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Start Up The Storefront. For more information on the products and businesses featured on the show, check out the links in the show notes. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.