Track Zach Marshall #2: Focusing on customers, building MVPs, and creating trust as a new startup.
This week is episode two of Track Zach, a quarterly series where we follow Zach Marshall’s journey as he starts and scales his private security marketplace, Conterra.
We see what he’s learned and how he’s pivoted, and what he is looking to accomplish in the next quarter in the huge, fragmented, and heavily middle-manned $50 billion industry of private security.
(If you missed Zach’s background and founding story on episode 1, you can listen here.)
This quarter, Zach was “collecting no’s” (the second-best thing to yes’s), and from the no’s, he was able to listen to what customers want, learn from that, and alter how they go to market. He highlights that one of the main issues in the security industry is a lack of trust amongst providers/security professionals and a fear of being taken advantage of.
Zach explained his new technical roadmap as a process that starts with building a wheel, then a skateboard, then a scooter, then a bicycle, then a motorcycle, then a car. For the past quarter, he accidentally built a car wheel instead (it’s easy to do).
During the next quarter, Zach expects to be neck-deep in fundraising and finding the right partners, and he is aiming to be confident in knowing the right amount of capital he’ll need. For the next 90 to 180 days, he will be mainly focused on operations, and he hopes to learn exactly what a world-class security recruiting company looks like.
Links to Platforms:
Favorite Quotes:
“There aren't 140 tasks that are going to have a massive impact on the business today or even this week. But you could write 140 tasks out and then like try to kill yourself and do them all. And good luck making that work for the next three months.” - Zach Marshall
“What I do know is putting that on the forefront of my vision every single day means if this thing that I'm doing isn't impacting that, then I shouldn't be doing it.” - Zach Marshall
“The harder the thing in front of you, sometimes the easier it is to come up with small things to do and move. But yeah, that time to look back and find the high leverage actions, like you can spend 20 hours one week getting that one big customer closed, and it would feel like you did nothing, but you did the one huge thing that mattered.” - Eric Jorgenson
“We built a wheel. A wheel does not make you move any faster along the road. It's just a wheel. And so, to make it move you faster, you need another wheel, you need to hook them together, put a dashboard, put an engine, put it all together, now you have a car and now you drive faster.” - Zach Marshall
“You build a skateboard, then a scooter, then a bicycle, then a motorcycle, then a car. And each of those things actually makes you move faster. A skateboard is better than a wheel. We built a wheel. And that was the biggest learning of the technical project we've done so far. What these little services and like kind of an internal network first is creating is a couple of skateboards.” - Zach Marshall
“If we bring in the demand, the supply just pops into existence when we need it. And there still needs to be balance, but we know which can come first and it's easier to get demand for.” - Eric Jorgenson
Learn more about Zach Marshall:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Podcast Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome to Jorgenson Soundbox. This show is the second episode of Track Zach, where we get quarterly updates from my buddy, Zach Marshall on the company he's starting, which is a marketplace for private security called Conterra. Last episode on Track Zach, Zach was three months into founding his new company. He had raised $300,000, hired one engineer, and was really eager to onboard customers to his MVP. We talked about his background pretty in depth, his experience using this market as a private security contractor, the opportunity that existed in this huge, fragmented, heavily middle manned, $50 billion market, and his vision for solving that with a marketplace, with this Conterra that he is founding. Today, we hear everything that he's learned over the past few months, how he's evolved his work habits to kind of get into the long run of company building, and all the things that he's changed his mind on. This is exactly what I was hoping to get from this series. We get an honest accounting of hard decisions made and new information and changes in direction. And it's really interesting to see these lessons get learned in real time. If you enjoy this episode, check out my website ejorgenson.com. I've got a newsletter, a ton of essays, a course on leverage. We do all kinds of fun stuff there, and if you enjoy this, everything there will be right up your alley. But right now, please enjoy this conversation arriving at your ears in 3, 2, 1.
Welcome to Track Zach number two, three months into a quite a long journey. How are you feeling?
Zach Marshall: I’m feeling great. I’m glad to be back on.
Eric Jorgenson: That's good. What is like the one sentence like overview of the last three months from an emotional like how you're feeling perspective?
Zach Marshall: It’s probably a trope, but roller coaster is definitely the right term. Ups and downs were constant. A loop of ups and downs.
Eric Jorgenson: Loops, ups, downs, twists, turns. Cool. Well, this will be a good episode, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of good stories to take us through. I just went back and reviewed our old thing to kind of pick up where we left off and recontextualize that. We'll have done that already in the intro, but last time we talked was like right around end of September.
Zach Marshall: It had to be September 24th. I know that day.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh yeah, because your fourth kid was born later that day.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, that’s her birthday, September 24th.
Eric Jorgenson: So, you will never forget the inaugural Track Zach podcast. Zach, the place you wanted to be today as of your three months ago self was at least 10 customers who want to pay us and use Conterra, at least 300 people signed up on the supply side, and a new website up by October 1st was like your estimate, but new website up. So, if we just start with what's the snapshot today based on your past self, and then we'll kind of expand the story from there.
Zach Marshall: Yeah. So, I'll start with the website just because I think that was probably one of the biggest surprises or learning points for me because, let's see, it was like six or seven days from the podcast is when I expected to launch it. And we launched it like three days ago. So, it took another three months to launch that product or the beginning of our first version one of a platform. And there's so many things I learned about it. One was about like leading a technology product project. Even though Alex, who's like our lead engineer and he's done project management and he's built things and he's done a lot of consulting and so on, still communicating around, okay, ours is really difficult if you've never done it before and in a setting where like, no, the whole vision’s in your head, Zach, like how do you get it out in front of customers? And then also just the growing pains of building something from nothing means that if we did miss one of the stories in a sprint or whatever, like maybe that was really important to me, not important to him, it was important to him, not important to me, whatever. And so, I realized as it was going, that we weren't quite communicating around what had to get done, how fast and when. And so, we ended up kind of scrapping our technology roadmap and like redoing that from scratch. We took two days and, actually, we didn't throw away the work he'd done, but what we did was we threw away the task cards in JIRA and said, okay, we're going to rebuild this out, exactly what has to happen. And then it came out to like four or five weeks more of work just to get it so that we could start doing Q and A and start testing and so on. And then of course, in the process, we did some customer interviews and like a focus group and so on and learned a lot there. So, then we pivoted and made some changes and so on. And I think what we have now communicates a lot better of what I wanted. Ironically, I'll jump into the next piece, which is maybe it was also the wrong thing to build. So, we got it out there, it took an extra three months, and maybe it was wrong. So, so much learning there. And just to jump right into the next one, so the three things were customers, signups, and the website. So the website took a while. It's really, if you were to dumb down what it is today, it's an intake platform for special operators and like higher tier executive protection guards that allows them to upload things like their resume and so on into our database but also go back and change information and answer a bunch of questions. The idea is that we don't actually want to read your resume, we want you to come in and give us the information we need. Like if you're going to do a maritime security contract, we'd rather know you have a [ 6:31] card when it expires, rather than trying to find that line somewhere in your random resume.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. They're making the data structured and legible to you and like giving you the ability to scale this thing infinitely and not have like somebody parsing out a resume into specific line items. Super smart.
Zach Marshall: Exactly. And all of this is built around the thesis I had three months ago, which was we want to collect the supply side first because I have a supply side advantage with my background and my connection to the industry.
Eric Jorgenson: And you can't sell what you don't have supply.
Zach Marshall: Right, you can't. Yeah, it's pretty hard to be like, yeah, I'll get you that guy in two hours and you don't have a guy. Because that's ultimately the value prop is – that we can get you security on demand, like in all these different places and all these different ways. And so that was that, or that's what that is. The next piece is the- I guess what that's not compared to what we talked about last time is we are still pushing into executive protection at large. But I didn't want to change too much of what we're trying to build because it was taking so much longer than I had expected to get there. So still, what we launched this week isn't really the best intake for like 95% of the executive protection guards that we want to intake. It's only for like that 5% of the top tier, because the questions are based on that, the background's like- combat deployments are not going to be important to the majority of executive protection. So, we have a lot of pivoting we have to do if we were going to continue to move down the supply side first online platform. The next piece is sign-ups. And so, we were on track for getting 300, I mean maybe- Okay, I take that back. 300 was a lot to push into 90 days, but we were really moving and we're getting a ton of word of mouth and recommendations from people. People are signing up. I was doing a bunch of calls. But what we were really collecting was no’s, which in the whole sales side, it's like no’s are like the second best thing from a yes. But they’re still a good thing because you can then listen to the customer and see what they want. And what I learned from those no’s has really changed how I think we're going to go to market now and like what we're doing and what we've been doing in December and what we're going to be pushing into in January and February, which is they don't trust us. The supply side has zero trust for, honestly, the private security industry at large has zero trust in anybody else in the industry. Every company-
Eric Jorgenson: The individual people going in, they’re just like distrustful of the whole industry.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, so not the clients, not like the end user of security, but the providers, the other providers, the security professionals don't trust each other. They don't trust the- like even though it's a word of mouth-based industry, which is funny, and it's reputation based, everybody thinks everybody else is taking advantage of them. It's like, oh, you're recommending me that job because you're going to get a kickback. Oh, that company is getting that contract because I bet that sales guy is getting a kickback. And honestly, there's a ton of kickbacks. There's a ton of referrals on referrals on referral fees and so on. And honestly, we want to help streamline the referral fees in a way as well. Like you should get attribution for connecting a deal that wouldn't happen without you. But I mean, we had some quotes from guys, these are people, even people that I knew that had signed up were like, cool, Zach, but how do I know you're not just taking my information and bidding on a contract and you're never going to call me back? I was like, ah, because it says right in our disclaimer, we don't do contracts. He goes, yeah, sure, but like this has happened to me many times where people just take my name and then they go bid on a contract. And what they all thought was they were signing up for was a job board, like just a basic job board. And it was taking a ton of education around this whole thing.
It was almost like I had to pitch each one like an investor, like, hey, this is what we're doing, this is what we're building, this is what it's going to be. This is the vision. And I got a ton of people were excited about the vision. In fact, a lot of those people want to work for me or at the company, but they're not ready to be like the Guinea pig for some experiment. And so, I've found that a lot of the data wasn't getting filled out very well or getting cut pretty short. I'd make calls. And just we weren't collecting yeses, we were collecting a bunch of people that were kind of just checking it out. And one of the things like the moment, like the epiphany or the idea here is how can we collect the demand? Like the big mistrust is you don't have a bunch of jobs here already, like this is chicken and egg, every marketplace. But like, so if the supply side has actually been pretty easy, because word of mouth flies when there is- like out of those 30 or 40 no’s, I like two yeses, which we placed in like two seconds. And that was because we had demand ready, and that demand couldn't find those people, and we found them really quickly. Ironically, these were people who I never would've thought I would have been able to place easily. And so earlier you said you can't sell something you don't have. Well, this one customer needed- it was like they needed a certain skill set that I'd never heard of, female but had worked with specific special forces units that aren't female, spoke fluent Spanish, and like all this stuff. And I was like I don't know if that person exists, let alone if I can find them in like the next two days or whatever. And within a week, we had two people that fit the profile connected across. And the reason being is that once the demand was there, the word of mouth was like 10x.
It was like everybody was calling their friends and going down the chain of like, hey, do you know somebody? Do you know somebody? Hey, I know this girl, she was awesome. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they all want to help each other in that way and get this gig to this person, and it worked. And the demand there, which is the vendor, this security provider, got a great solution as well. They got two great candidates for one role. They got it quickly. And so, I looked at that and went, well, if the supply side is actually kind of easy when we do have demand, but the supply side doesn't trust me, and I have like the most bona fides you could have, like they'll still have a conversation with me. But they still don't believe that it's real. I mean, one, this guy, a ranger took it to his whole ranger battalion and he had somebody email him back and go this is fake. He goes this isn't real. And I was like what? I didn't get it. And the reality is a lot of people take advantage of veterans. They take advantage of people in these positions that don't see it. And you're not talking about like it's easy to get people in San Francisco to try like a subscription scooter, because everybody tries everything in San Francisco. It’s different when somebody hasn't been allowed to use like Google Meets for anything in the last 10 years, they've had to do everything on pen and paper and like use some encrypted VTC or something. And so, the customer is different in ways that I didn't expect. And so, I was looking at, well, how do I collect demand? And this is when the third prong of the marketplace kind of entered the scene, which is the end users, the end client who needs security or some security service. And we thought, well, one way to collect vendors is to partner with them and be recruiter for them, to say, hey, we want to be your outsource recruiting. You tell us the jobs you need, and we'll go find them and make that easier for you and just kind of sell it just as an agency for a little while to start like building that.
Another side, which every one of these vendors asked for, is more clients. And it's like, well, I've been having to turn down, like Zach Marshall has been having to turn down a bunch of security work because people think I'm building a security company. I'm like, well, no, I'm creating this marketplace that does blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And one of the things that I realized is, well, hold on, if I start a brokerage here, that's literally just curating a list of great service providers and then connecting them to clients, I'm locking a relationship with those service providers to me. Like now, that company knows me, trusts me, I've brought them deals. And then if I can also recruit for them and they say, hey, thanks for that, by the way, I need this job filled, I then can go fill it because so far, we're just not at a scale where I can fill it. And so that's kind of where we are today. Rather than focused on just getting people to sign up and give me their information, what I found is that the network that I have and the people in the industry and the word of mouth is strong enough that I could probably place- I mean, we would have to have a lot of fast-moving customers before we would run out of the ability to fill jobs this year, call it, for the next 12 months. At some point that runs out, like you've run out of friends and you're outside the industry and so on. But like right now, so what we're doing is trying to collect demand. And this has brought up a new service that we're looking at launching in the spring, and we've got some test websites out and so on, which is an outsourced travel security management service, where you pay a retainer subscription to say like, look, anytime you travel, we’re your manager. We manage your security. We go get the security that you need wherever you're going to be. We don't provide it. We charge a very small fee. But you can trust that you're getting the security they say they are, and you're getting the solution that you want, and you're paying a fair price because we've helped negotiate that price. And so, that service also came recommended.
The moment where that kind of came into my head was talking to corporate security managers at some really, really top tier tech companies who said like, look, what we want to do is be able to swipe a credit card instead of spending 90 days working on a contract. And so, if you can facilitate that and can like solve some of our tactical problems, like, hey, that driver has to be there because that company can’t provide whatever, like we would love that. And so that's kind of how we've pivoted. So, I guess- so where were we? The three things. The first was tech took longer than expected. The second was we kind of cut off the signups more or less. I stopped pushing at around 35 signups and started looking at the demand side. And then customers, I said 10 customers. We don't have 10 paying customers, but we have well into that of people who are working with us and we're starting to negotiate those things. So, like I just yesterday was on the phone with one, which they're trying to fill seven full-time positions across two different locations in 12 flexible positions. And so, that's a great, like, man, if I can place those 15 people in January, like we've really done- like it's a really big one. And then the same thing, we've got a company up in Seattle that is looking at moving to four or five more cities over the next two years, and in each city, they only hire veterans. And so, it's a security firm that only hires veterans. It's like, okay, well, if we can be ahead of them and be their main recruiting agency over that time horizon, we can also start to force our candidates to go through our intake on the platform. We can force them to do the user generated data structuring, so we don't have to read resumes, and we can start playing with that and learning. And ultimately this allows us to just be like a little private network while we learn which parts can we swap out and put on the internet and build a tech. So that's where we are today.
Eric Jorgenson: That's really interesting. So, each placement that you do, essentially, you're still kind of rolling this snowball of data and relationships and trust. It is just you're finding that you have to basically execute a full transaction mostly to build that, to get people over the hurdle of joining on the supply side and giving you all their data and trusting Conterra and building a full profile.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, maybe another side to that would be like opting in and not being disappointed. Like opting in and when they get there being like oh, this is something I actually wanted as opposed to opting in getting there and being like, oh great, I'm not going to tell anybody about this.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there’s nothing here for me to do. Like I did a bunch of work and-
Zach Marshall: Right. And we've thought of a lot of other ways to like- do we partner with like promote or something? So, like you get a deal sent to you. Like there's a lot of ways we can buy traffic or if you know that idea of like sure, we bought a bunch of users by giving them a bunch of things that aren't our actual value prop. But if the value prop is we can help you get set on a gig right away, like that's much better. And we can still collect people that way. Ironically, it's funny, I just thought about it, that one customer that wants those 12 flex positions, like if this platform was further along, they wouldn’t need those 12 flex positions. They would just be able to log on when they need the 12 people and use them. And maybe they favorite them or however we structure it. So, it's a really cool time to be in this industry because I'm constantly validated about the problems and things we're trying to solve, and I'm more bullish than ever, but it's also been a learning period of going, well, what do we do first? And where can we see transactions where everybody really wins like right from the beginning? Like how can we be the best at something right now that they want us to call them as opposed to it feeling like, oh, well, I guess I'll finish signing up because somebody told me to, and this is like mediocre, and I don't get a great outcome.
Eric Jorgenson: And it's interesting, I'm glad you pushed back on you can't sell what you don't have. Because this industry seems to run on that. Like there’s people bidding on contracts all the time without a specific plan for fulfillment necessarily. And if they win it, then they go hire the people that they need to in order to fulfil the contract. So, demand sounds like it comes before supply all the time.
Zach Marshall: Yeah. And the other side of that is somebody say, well, what makes you any different then? Like, how are you different? And I think it's just our focus on being the connector instead of being the provider. And that's what we think we can scale. And once we do scale that, and, again, if we're looking at like RigUp or now Workrise, like what they've done is scale the connective tissue and own the customer service. And so, because they own both, they connect everybody. And they're the customer service layer. They can just keep adding features. They're like, okay, now we do payroll, now we do insurance, now we do this, now we do that. And the whole industry runs through their platform. Mind you, if you look at their platform, for a while there, it looked like a marketplace and now it doesn't. You get on their website, and it looks like a massive staffing agency that's tech first. By the way, still extremely valuable, still pushing awesome margins because it's a tech first company.
Eric Jorgenson: What's the difference between- I mean, where is the seam between RigUp as a staffing agency, a scaled like big staffing agency, it's very tech enabled versus the marketplace? Is it just like we pay W2 versus 1099, is it-?
Zach Marshall: I'd say it's what the user can actually do. Like a user can get on RigUp and like scroll through profiles and pick somebody.
Eric Jorgenson: And they can only say like I want RigUp to fulfill this job and RigUp does it basically on their own judgment as to matching?
Zach Marshall: Yeah. And I do think there's still like a customer choice at some point, but there's just- the humans in the loop are a lot more than like an open marketplace, like Upwork or something. And going through their job, like I went through all of RigUp trying to learn their business a little bit. I went through all their open job opportunities, and they have all these people called processors. And what those processes are is recruiters that do matching. They read a requirement from a user. They try to- They, I don't know, I'm imagining that their platform spits out a bunch of people that fit the filters. And then they're the human in the loop that does some matching. I'm assuming in the best transaction, they would then say, hey client, here's your review, like review these people, is this what you want? And then they also own the relationship so that when the guy doesn't show up or doesn't do a job well or whatever, they go and replace that, and they take the responsibility for the outcome. So, that's still different than a staffing agency like Securitas, or I'll use Allied Universal because they're the largest now; they just bought G4S, so they've got 800,000 employees across the world. What they're doing is a massive amount of promising some kind of outcome and then just like sending a bunch of people, whether they're qualified or not. And the customer service layer isn't incentivized within the company at all. And I know some people that work for some of these companies that are incredibly good at their job. Most have left to go start their own company or go work for somebody else because they're not incentivized to do a good job and actually support the customer.
Eric Jorgenson: How different is the pitch to- like when you were talking to these customers, your 10 customer goal, you got to push people that you're working with, if that's really the steam engine of the whole train that's to come and you're getting excitement from them, what is it about Conterra that feels different to them versus working with whoever has been fulfilling their needs so far?
Zach Marshall: Yeah. So, the recruiting side is probably where we've gotten the most traction, and mind you, that's where we started, this labor marketplace piece of this. And I think what's really different is nobody else has come and said we're not just going to send you a bunch of resumes. Like the number one-
Eric Jorgenson: It is the vision that you're like we want to solve this in the long run and every incremental job that you give us helps us build towards that increased level of service.
Zach Marshall: And we're taking on a level of vetting before we send somebody to you. So, like one customer I talked to, they're still using Indeed. And nothing against Indeed, but like Indeed for higher qualified professional executive protection and security professionals is just not the best solution. Indeed requires a level of passiveness and resume reading and resume writing that doesn't support the industry at all. I mean, that's why LinkedIn exists, for white collar.
Eric Jorgenson: That's why all of these specialized things, I mean, we talked a lot the last time around about all of the kind of special requirements in private security contracting.
Zach Marshall: Right. And so much of it, before I think I talked about credentialing and reputation, but like even more now. Like reputation in the industry isn't just whether or not you’re good in crisis, it's also how you act around the executive you're protecting, how you talk, how you present yourself, like all those things, like those come from recommendations, referrals, and from experience, not from something that can be written on a resume. You can be like, oh, I'm a really good people person. It's like, okay cool, well, that's great, I'm glad you think so, so does everybody else.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'm going need a second opinion from other people. Has anything changed-? It sounds like a lot has changed about the short
term approach and finding the kind of spearhead. Has anything changed in like the long arc of the market size or the market need or sort of like your vision for Conterra maturity?
Zach Marshall: Not really. In fact, even at the short term, the pitch is very, very similar. It's just a little bit of go to market today and like what I learned through customer conversations over the past 90 days. And I'm hoping, and I believe that at this point, we're getting to the point where the next 90 days should look a lot- It should be a lot more just grinding out the same thing, as opposed to like shifting a lot of things. I almost, I mean, man, I felt like every three weeks I was like, oh my goodness, this isn't working. We've got to try this other thing, and I’ve got to talk to these other people, and I'm getting all these different ideas. But it's all kind of coming together where I think we can help a lot of people at once and do it in a way that looks scalable. Like we don't want to do something that's just an agency at all. But the main vision, it's still when we provide the connective tissue and reputation for the different players in this industry, we cut out massive middlemen. And by cutting out the middlemen, we bring all of that cash back into the industry, to the people who should have it, whether that's the labor, service provider, or savings, or new market on the end user side. I do think part of the vision is different. Like the new pitch deck that's going out in the spring has three sides instead of two. Like we've added the end client as part of the experience so that the client should be able to- like an end user, whether it's a corporate security manager or a private individual, should be able to come on, look for a type of service, and then get matched for that service, whether that's a direct hire from labor, whether that's a 1099 labor or whether that's a security provider. And honestly, those are the two things we're doing. We're doing recruiting, we're doing brokerage. So, like that makes sense that it's those three. But they really do work together because the client side wants different things. There's like, I mean, there’s 40 – I've actually mapped out more like 140 – but there's like 40, I guess you could say, main security services that are being pitched by like every big security agency. Like there's a lot of different things in there, everything from private investigation to risk assessments, workplace violence, training, executive protection, travel protection, home assets, like there's all these different things, and there's different people and different services that like different, better providers for each of those different things. And I think when we start to bring transparency to that and bring it all into one place, we'll find that everybody really does win. And we can shift the majority of transactions to very clear simple contracts or credit card purchases. Right there, I mean, it totally changes the market.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And opens you up to a ton more customers on that side of things. So, I've been stalking your Twitter which is an easy job for me because you tweet like twice a month.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, I have 130 followers.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. But we are loyal. I went back through and I found a few funny things that I feel like were probably tweeted in moments of, I don't know, poignant moments for you that will be easily recalled and might have stories [ 30:54]. So one was, “Finally started using the time estimate feature in our project management tool. Turns out I scheduled roughly 140 hours’ worth of tasks for this week. No wonder I'm stressed out on Friday.”
Zach Marshall: A hundred percent true. Yeah, I don’t know if I should just respond or if you have more on the list.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, I feel like that's such a classic startup founder thing is like just you passively assign yourself like three or four x the amount of work that's even remotely possible to do.
Zach Marshall: Absolutely. I mean, even remotely possible. And so that, honestly, that fits into the timeline and like shifting kind of what expectations are, and also being more clear about what are the things that are going to really impact the business today and tomorrow, and what are the things that won't and don't need my time or have to wait, and there's just a decision there. And sometimes it's not a fun one. Like you owe something to somebody or you want to support something, and you just can't because there's not enough time. I actually have a coach, I got recommended from another startup guy, this guy, Jeremiah Rogers, who is at Facebook, Flexport, Airtable. He's at a bunch of places. He's an awesome coach. He's been coaching for a couple of years now. And so, I gave up a lot of time to speak to him every other week for like two hours and it's been exceptionally impactful. And one of those things that we've talked about is like there aren't 140 tasks that are going to have a massive impact on the business today or even this week. But you could write 140 tasks out and then like try to kill yourself and do them all. And good luck making that work for the next three months. And so, every day now I've added a few different steps around like really for mental health and stability and being able to like grow and drive this thing, which is I have a few like one-liner motto things that I go through every day. One is like Conterra creates massive value in the industry and we're venture-backed and we're raising $10 million in June 2023. Like, now whether or not 10 million in 2023 makes any sense, I don't know, but what I do know is putting that on the forefront of my vision every single day means if this thing that I'm doing isn't impacting that, then I shouldn't be doing it. So, things like that have been really helpful, and it's also been helpful to just understand and have somebody else who has to listen to me talk and give me feedback. And I don't have to constantly be building rapport with them and like selling to them and everything else is just how like I can grind as hard as I want, but the outcome comes from the well allocated time on the right projects and being thoughtful about that.
Eric Jorgenson: What are some of those things that bubbled up that you just hit a home run on and were like that was absolutely the right thing to be working on at that time, and I'm really glad I did it?
Zach Marshall: So, one had been recruiting the right way. So, I know I mentioned on the last podcast bringing on like a director of operations, and like I had a ton of people follow up from listening to the podcast.
Eric Jorgenson: Listeners, thank you!
Zach Marshall: So I had a ton of people follow up and people were telling their friends or whatever to call me or whatever. And it was really exciting to have that validation, have people involved, but I also didn't really know how to vet and hire and do what I needed for that. And so, what I ended up having to do was dig a little bit more on who I needed, why I needed them, and communicate that to myself, write that down, and understand it. And that made it a lot more straightforward in actually recruiting. So, like maybe two hours of creative thought that required me to be honest with myself and so on really helped. And now it looks like, and we'll see, just like the October 1st deadline, it looks like we're in the final stages with a really top tier operations professional who will hopefully join the company in the spring and can take a huge amount of work off of my plate so that I can dig into the things I'm really good at and the pieces- mostly selling, like mostly sales. I'll say the opposite of that, which is funny because so much of this is nuance because it might feel the same way, like, oh, you took all that extra creative time to like really figure out a job and figure out why you needed that or why you think you need that, the opposite is like spending too much time figuring out company culture or figuring out how we document things and how we use Slack and what our channel should look like and things that are just not a problem today. And really, and they don't really- I mean, the entire team, if you count everybody involved at all, it is like four people. Like we don't need that stuff to be figured out. And honestly, it's a waste of time right now. And I mean, there's a thousand things I could do to make the culture more driven or like planned or thoughtful or whatever, and I could go write articles and I could go build up my Twitter profile and I could do all these things that are on the outside, on the edge, that'll have a positive impact on recruiting and they'll have a positive impact on the daily stuff, but they don't actually impact us moving at the speed we need to every week.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there's no shortage of positive impact ideas. It's so easy. And actually, the harder the thing in front of you, sometimes the easier it is to come up with small things to do and move. But yeah, that time to look back and find the high leverage actions, like you can spend 20 hours one week getting that one big customer closed, and it would feel like you did nothing, but you did the one huge thing that mattered. It's so hard to stay in that mindset all the time.
Zach Marshall: And that's why, so I guess I didn't finish my statement before, I got lost in a tangent, but so I've got the models every day. But the other thing that I've been doing is running a document that's every day I’ve got to go in right when I start the day and say what are the two most important things I can do today to move the business? And then every day I have to spend at least one hour on each of those two things. And that's had a really huge impact because, again, it compounds, this idea that you're doing that thing every day. And sometimes it's the same thing every day for 10 days in a row, but if you put one hour on that thing 10 days in a row, and you're thinking in between and you're working, it has a massive impact. In fact, I think that's how a lot of the key decisions have shifted, and I've been able to find clarity, has been on that to be like that other thing isn't helpful, this other thing really is helpful. I need to do more of this other thing, and I need to make sure that the rest of my team is also onboard with the most important things.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. So, let's talk about the team a little bit. So last time we talked, you had just hired Alex Solar to be your engineering head of products. And you were like, oh my God, go hire your dev buddies in Mexico immediately and like get on it. And then we talked about the idea of adding a director of operations, which you touched on. What else fills out the four people remotely involved that you mentioned?
Zach Marshall: So, we've used some people on Upwork. I've had some like unofficial advisory stuff coming in and like regularly to support. And then we've got an executive assistant who's joining in the spring, but not a whole lot of hours per month, but she's an absolute rock star with a 40-year career of supporting some top tier executives and came to me recommended by one of those executives, and she's looking for some using her brain. And so, I'm super excited to have her joining the team. So really that's it. And the rest has been me trying to understand where to put the resources we do have, and we can talk fundraising in a little bit, but it's not like we have an infinite amount of money.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, pretty small, pre-seed.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, very, very tight in that regard. And not every skill set we could hire today is going to have the same impact on the next quarter. And so, I was really bullish on hiring a bunch more tech in Mexico and getting this thing moving or whatever. And we ended up not really doing that. And if anything, now it's kind of the opposite. It's like the last thing I need is to build a bunch of platform stuff that we don't understand yet. And what I really need is this operations thing to grow and move quickly. And so, I've also looked at bringing on a few people as recruiters and kind of scaling like a small recruiting agency.
Eric Jorgenson: I was going to ask, so if that's the team structure, does that mean like you're doing the sales on the client side, and then if you get a contract, immediately turning around and you're the one doing the recruiting on the recruiting side?
Zach Marshall: So, today it is, which isn't in any way scalable, which is one of the reasons that we're really coming to the closing, to the finish line, I think on this next hire for operations, because that person's going to, we're both going to be doing that. I'll probably be a little bit more sales, he'll be a little bit more recruiting, but the idea is like how do we pull all that together? And the guy that I'm bringing on board, he's extremely experienced in the industry, which is really helpful. And that's all around the world, which also helps the like outsource security management piece, which I think is going to be a really fun thing to learn how to sell over the next 90 days.
Eric Jorgenson: One of those other tweets that was just like an interesting little minutia of startup life, and I think people think being a CEO is mostly like fundraising and vision setting. And it's like, especially the small scale, it is also like dealing with every ounce of bullshit that is just like an urgent, important, but annoying thing to just figure out. And you just tweeted, “What can I do wrong when hiring our startups first outsourced accounting firm? Is anything irreversible?” Like how hard do I have to think about this?
Zach Marshall: Yeah, like is this easy? Do I just like hire any company or do I have to dig in like a thousand percent and spend 10 hours trying to figure out exactly who I need to hire? I got a lot of great feedback from that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I saw [ ] and like the Capital Camp crew showed up for you on that one. Those 130 followers, like coming in strong.
Zach Marshall: Brother, you wait until I have 200. But yeah, that is the reality behind this phase. I actually feel like this phase, like this last quarter, like what we've really accomplished was clarity on the actual go to market, which I thought I knew three months ago, but I think we're like 10 times more clear on who our actual customers are and how to talk to them. And so, that means that we can move into this next piece. Even just these past few weeks has been sales that has outcomes, as opposed to like just customer discovery calls, which is really cool. And so, I kind of know where to go there. The next is we really professionalized on the admin side. And that was because I realized that the next phase is raising a series seed. It is moving a little bit faster with how we hire and what we're trying to do. And in order to do that, I really need to have my diligence package very strong. And there has to be a level of accounting and taxes and our legal stuff has to be all right. We had to change our company name in a bunch of states back to like Conterra, which is what it is today. It was a different company name on the paperwork. And so doing all that took a ton of effort. And at first, I was doing a lot of it myself and trying to figure out how to do it myself and then finally hiring some really incredible firms. We ended up going with Ativo Partners, who I'd worked with in the past. They're startup focused. They're out of San Francisco. The partners there are incredible. And honestly, I don't think I've – I'll plug them – I don't think I've worked with a firm ever, not that I've been in tech for very long, that has been as forward- leaning as they are. Like the customer support, the woman who runs my account, like she is thinking about things before I am, every time sending me what I need, sending me- It's kind of like that whole here's the email you need to send, I already wrote it for you. Like she's doing that stuff, and it was incredible. And like we set up, I'm getting ready to hire again in the spring, and so, setting up benefits was really unique to the size company we are and to the timeline and so on. There were some things, some hoops we had to jump through from 2020 when we weren't actually operating. So, I wasn't tracking the legal requirements and things that the company should have been doing because we didn't start operating until June 2021. And so having to clean all that stuff up in like a 10-day period so that we could get benefits set up and like do all this stuff was nuts and that firm just crushed it. So Attivo, totally great startup accounting firm and HR and everything else that they seem to be doing.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. It helps so much to have like true experts on that. And especially having them outsource like a firm who is an expert at this scale is super, super helpful and a huge load off like for you as CEO, you can go back to focusing on building the business.
Zach Marshall: And it's kind of like having a board of advisors or at least one board seat, which is the partner over at Attivo who gives me advice when I don't have it. And now I know later on I might need more, or I might need to build a different relationship with the Attivo, but for the decision that I'm making today, all I need is somebody to be like, hey, you need to make sure you're worried about this, don't worry about that. And it's like cool.
Eric Jorgenson: Cool. Okay, one of the other open loops, last time you had just closed a pre-seed safe at 300k. You talked about maybe doing another 200 but weren’t sure if you were going to keep it open. Did you end up doing that or just like get to work on the customer side?
Zach Marshall: So, I ended up just going to work. And one of the things was I didn't want to bring in the capital and still not know what I was doing. Like you know what I mean? I didn't want to be like, hey, great, I got another 200k, and like I don't know exactly how I'm going to use it and what I'm going to use it for. And so, I'm glad that I slowed down. I do expect that raising a full seed round is going to be like a very- It's not going to just happen. It's going to require like a lot of early founder- I mean, I'm a first time founder with a tiny team and not a ton of revenue. And so, I don't think I'm going to like go out and then January 20th, like 2 million bucks are going to show up in my account. So, what I expect to do, probably over this Christmas season here, is call, more or less call the checks that have been offered. And so, between that, we've probably got 175ish that have been offered to me across maybe seven or eight different checks and I'll call and see who's still interested in this phase of the company and bring that on just to allow me to more comfortably hire a director of operations and shake up a couple of other things too. I'd like to get a couple- especially on the recruiting side, like I do know how to outsource a little bit with some of the processes that can be kind of outsourced to a little less skill. And I'd like to have some capital to run some of those experiments, and like kind of practice scaling some of those pieces.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I think that's awesome. I mean, this- and that's an interesting like I think maybe road to go down is we were just kind of catching up before we started recording, you said I don't think Conterra can go to zero, like the BATNA or whatever is like we just build an agency, like, ideally, we can scale this thing and build a marketplace and build a really big marketplace and take a huge chunk of this $50 billion market. But there is a plateau below that, which is like we just actually build a world-class agency accidentally, like as a by-product of kind of doing what we've done here. Where- I guess how far up is that plateau? Like do you feel like that's already kind of it would not be hard to operate a profitable agency in this space kind of given what you know now and where the team is today?
Zach Marshall: Yeah, I think, I mean, if I feel like I could have a profitable comfortable agency that supports me and a small team in six months without raising any more capital than we have now. And the small team would be hired through bootstrapping. The reality is it's a networking, word of mouth business where I have all the bone fides in the world, and like all you're doing is you're winning contracts. You're doing some sales. Young upstart joins the industry, you can do a fine job. Now what we're focusing on though is making sure that we don't get distracted by that at all at the time being. So, I've been coached by many people; I've had mentors, I've had a lot of people come in from the side and be like wouldn't it be a really great way to seed one side to just do a bunch of security, just get a bunch of security gigs? And sure, it would if I could still raise venture capital and build tech around it and focus on those things, but running that business is just different. Running like security provider means that so much of my decision-making and time and effort is going to be on quality control and customer service, and like down into the deep gritty pieces and selling contracts and so on. And I've seen how really top tier operators have built incredible companies over 10 years, but it took 10 years to really build like a top tier company. And I think it's a distraction. I think it's really important that we stick to we are the connective tissue in the industry. We are bringing transparency, we're cutting out middlemen.
Eric Jorgenson: Focusing on tech from the very beginning, like the fact that your very first intake form ever was like in structured data, on the website, built by engineers that worked in house.
Zach Marshall: Exactly. Which is so different then like the lowest hanging fruit, which is in cannabis protection right now. And everything in the cannabis industry, it's like, look, if you can provide pictures of the people who are going to show up before they show up to their shift, people that show up every time to their shift, and when something goes wrong, you answer the phone, you can run a security agency to protect cannabis. Like there you go. It's not that hard to do that. And then if you've got some reason for them to trust you and like go with you upfront, for example, like me and a couple of friends, like I have no problem staffing one contract right now. If I went and got a contract for 30 people, I'd have 30 people working for me. But that's not scalable at the same way. Like we know how those companies scale. It’s through acquiring M and A. And we want to scale by owning the customer relationship across the entire industry so that everybody comes to us for their labor, for their service, and for their customers in some cases with vendors. Then we can bring in features like payroll, insurance, contracting tools, credit card purchase ability for the corporate managers. And now it's a totally different industry and we're on the top.
Eric Jorgenson: Is there anything- and so, just like the level of your personal work habits and sort of stress level, and like where's like the Zach gas tank and work habits, has anything changed for you over the last couple of months? Because this is now you're basically now six months into full time startup founder mode.
Zach Marshall: Yup. I was fortunate to start the company right at the beginning of the quarter. So, two quarters in.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, makes it easy, as long as we keep on this pace.
Zach Marshall: Q4 wrapping up. I'll say that I had to make some really big shifts around how I work, when I work, how I parent. Having the fourth kid was a bigger impact than I expected. That might be a surprise coming from maybe people from outside. For me, like they might be surprised that I was surprised, but I really was. Like adding one kid, adding two kid, and then adding a third kid didn't have a big impact on my ability to keep the train on the rails. Adding a fourth has been really tough, and really what that comes down to being a lot more deliberate on how I support each kid and my wife and how I spend my time. And so, like things that I've done that are a little bit different to keep the gas tank full is like going to the gym at 5:30 in the morning. Well, I guess it starts at 6:00. I wake up at 5:30, go to the gym, and workout with Olympic lifting, really, it keeps me kind of in the tribe that I come from, which is that kind of thing. But it also just gets my blood pumping and gets me motivated for the day, and I really like that. I’m doing the daily reminder stuff on like why I'm building the business, like one of them is I support my family by building the future. Because otherwise, you can really get into this point as a dad, I'm getting pulled in all these different directions to be like, well, the way I support my kids is by just being home as much as possible or is by turning off my phone as much as possible. It's like, well, sure you can do that, and I went through like a week or two of really doing that, and what you realize is yeah, but now you're not thinking about the business. And then you don't think about the business long enough, and like now you're just going to a daily job, and wait a second, a founder can’t just go to a daily job. You have to be processing and solving problems and finding your creative moments and so on to build the company. And so, the gym, doing the daily reminder stuff, got the coach to help out, Jeremiah Rogers, and then also I do turn my phone off from 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM. Just having the phone in the room and ringing and doing things was making it so that I could not be present with my kids. And now I've found that when I'm present with my kids for that bit, it's a whole lot easier to focus on other things when they're asleep or when I'm still at work. I don't feel like I have to get home early because the kids are having a rough day. Because I'm like, hey, I know when I get home, we'll sit down for dinner, we'll all sit around the table. And so that's been really important.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And I don't know, we talked last time about sort of, I mean, the whole Zach's life scale, you like planned to support your family over the long run, over your parent's generation and your kids' generation, like how this decision to start this company sort of fit into a very deliberate multi-generational plan. I thought that was super cool as I was kind of like going back. And I think, as you say, it's really easy to lose sight of that in the day-to-day to-do list when you just- it’s hard to look past the dashboard. You also said you got to set up an office.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, that's true. So, we have an office now. I'm in it. It could probably fit three or four desks if you really shoved them close, but we've got two desks, a little table, a couple of white boards, a screen so we can share some stuff. Our engineer, Alex, he's in Buffalo, which is an hour and a half away, so he'll come out when it makes sense. We have turned out to do a lot more remote than I expected. I thought we were going to kind of try to work a lot, but we realized that when he would drive all the way here, he just sat at the other desk, and we’d have lunch together. And it's like, well, that wasn't worth it. We'd still need rapport sometimes, go out to eat, whatever. But having an office to go to instead of working at home has had a huge impact because it means that like I know my boundaries on time, where it's nobody's fault but mine if I'm not accomplishing whatever. And when I was at home, it's just really hard not to support the people you love. When a kid needs help or when there's a to-do list or things, it's just really tough not to help.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. So, the attention shifting all over the place, and having an eminent clock on your work, on your tasks certainly helps me, I don't know, like you’ve got two hours, ready, go. So, let's do the kind of wrap up couple of things. So, look forward three months, where do we want to be? And what do we hope we accomplish?
Zach Marshall: Yeah. So, I knew you'd ask this question. It doesn't mean that I've fully accomplished building out the OKRs for Q1.
Eric Jorgenson: It's funny, actually, in the beginning of this episode, I was thinking about how it will almost certainly be a pattern where no matter what we pick for, oh, I think we should be here by three months, we'll be smart enough to have invalidated those prior goals by the three- so almost it won't be like we tried and fell short, it’ll be like, well, actually only half of
what we thought applied, applied, and like here's how we changed our mind and changed direction slightly.
Zach Marshall: Yeah. I would say that there's some things that are pretty straightforward. One is I expect to be like neck deep in fundraising, or have already completed, more likely neck deep, where I'm running a ton of pitching and conversations and bringing in and finding the right partner or partners to bring us that seed round. 90 days from now, I'd like to be at the point where I have pretty high fidelity on the right price valuation, the right amount of capital, and a few partners. The second thing would be I expect our team to look a little different, whether that's hiring the top candidate right now or just continuing the recruiting process to bring on an operations person who can help me. And really, I mean, if the listeners haven't caught on yet, what we're doing for the next 90 to 180 days is operations. This is like literally agency operations stuff. And so, I need support and help in doing that. So, I have to have somebody on the team by then, and hopefully sooner.
Eric Jorgenson: There's got to be people all over the industry who are like I am good at this thing, but I'll never not just be riding this bike every day in my current role. And the opportunity to step into Conterra, apply the skills they already have towards building sort of a new paradigm in the industry has to be really exciting I would think.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, for sure. Which I think is one of the reasons I've had a ton of traction around that recruiting process. It's just early on, it's difficult to give a job description when the jobs to be done, you could list out 140, or you could list out two and like both are true.
Eric Jorgenson: Hi, I’m Zach, I’m wearing a hundred hats, and I'd like to give you like 30 of them.
Zach Marshall: Right, and oh, by the way, like three, four weeks in, we're probably going to change the hats. We're going to give you a different set of hats, so I hope you're ready, here's our runway. There's a lot of things involved in that. A lot of fundraising traction, the team looking a little different and on kind of a better cadence. We've brought on, I did mention before, we did bring on an intern as well for a little while, and my next go around on that, on outsourcing talent and on interns, and on Upwork and everything is to just have a lot stronger cadence on how we meet, what we talk about, setting expectations, those kinds of things.
I focused too much earlier on, on like building maybe- or company processes that didn't have to exist as opposed to some that I've identified that really do. When you're working with people outside that aren't in the business every day, you really need to set expectations on how meetings run, what happens in them, what are the outcomes on a short term and long-term basis and so on. So that, and then I guess getting to the nuts and bolts, it’s customers and placements. I don't want to say a number. I disclaimed it last time. It seems even silly to say it this time. But what I do want to know is I would like to know by the end of that time what does a world-class security recruiting company look like? Like if no technology at all, what exactly does every customer who hires security look like? Who hires security in corporate? Who hires security private? Who hires security government? What are their incentives? And what's the best service agency for them look like? Hopefully along the way, we placed a bunch of people to learn that. And in fact, I don't know how we’d learn it any other way than selling and placing. But I want to know that at the end. Because ultimately, that's what we're going to try to automate. We're going to try to have that in this labor marketplace, and we're just going to have to swap one part out at a time until it's marketplace. So that's that side. And the other side is I would really like to, and this just came down to a time commitment of like what it takes, I’d really like to vet, I don't know the number, but a whole lot more service providers so that I understand what separates really top tier providers versus not so good versus really bad, I know what questions to ask those people, and I've got my entire kind of globe covered. Like right now if you need security, I've got like Latin America, Africa, and most of the United States, but a lot of that's like overlapping companies that provide maybe too much where they're really good at one thing, but they say, yeah, I'll do those other things too. I would like to make sure that every region is covered with somebody who's really good at that and so on. And so, I'd like to do that. And then the last would be I do think it's important that we have a series, again, a lot to try to fit into 90 days.
Eric Jorgenson: March already hates December Zach.
Zach Marshall: He does. Ironically, this is all customer calling, so I expect this to be a very, very customer grind 90 days. Because the third thing is understanding whether or not what we're saying is enough, or do we really have to bring in things like risk assessments and some of the other like peripheral security services earlier on in order to maintain good relationships with our customers? So, corporate security is the best example of that, where like EP agents for them is not as big of a problem as a few other things, like getting risk assessments done without massive rakes as well for like a new building they're putting in or where people are going to travel and so on. And that's a totally different security professional, but also somebody that if we're networking and we're building this thing, like why would we not have those people involved as well? And so, I kind of want to understand do we have to add that soon, or can it still wait? And if we have to add it soon, like that's a whole other thing that I’ve got to figure out with the resources that I have.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Interesting. So, all those last things are like, I don't know, learning outcomes from customer conversations it sounds like for the most part, which are, you're just like mapping the maze. You're building a mental model of like who the customers are, what they need from- what they are getting, what they're hoping for, what they need from you. [ 1:04:34] I'm trying to like reprocess what I'm hearing and be sure I'm hearing it right.
Zach Marshall: I think you summarized it well. A big shift from how I described the targets last time to this time is last time, those metrics were kind of fundraiser-centric, like number of customers and number of signups is a metric that I can put on a slide and say this is how many whatever. One of the things that I've learned is I really have to double down on what I know or what I believe is good for the business and important to be able to move things forward. And even if that means I'm going to have to fight a little bit harder to raise some capital, I don't know, it depends on the partners that I find. But the metrics that are really going to push us are identifying- I mean, this is like right out of Steve Blank’s books or whatever.
It's like we need to know what we believe and whether or not we're right. And a lot of that is like going and talking to customers and being like, hey, we provide this thing, like everybody says that they want it, but not until they've already listed a bunch of other things they want. So, it's like, okay, well, do I have to provide those things, or is this good enough? And if not, how can I solve that? Or am I just like, am I still in the wrong place, go to market? I do think we need real customers in the next 90 days no matter what, but that's not a number, it's a learning process.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And Steve Blank, I think, would say like words are not enough. Like you need the transaction to prove- to have conviction in your hypothesis, like that's the only proof positive of a hypothesis is a transaction, not just a good meeting.
Zach Marshall: Right. No, a hundred percent. And so, we've definitely been pushing for that. And one of the things that I had to professionalize in the past 12 weeks was getting the paperwork done right. One of the things that held up our website was the privacy policy and the terms of service. And the one thing that held up some customers was just making sure that our agreements were created the right way. And now they are, but they weren't.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And when you're trying to build trust with paranoid people in an untrusting industry with pretty good reason, like that stuff becomes really important.
Zach Marshall: Yeah. And no matter what, every transaction from day one has to be less friction than the alternative because we don't have 25 years and we're not a direct supplier of like the end service. And so that being the case, we have to be better than if they went out and Googled security from whatever. Like if it's a 90-day process to get Securitas to provide what they want and it takes 90 days to work with Zach Marshall, that's not going to work. They're going to be like, well, I can just go with the company that can do it then.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay so knowing- I mean, I'm even more encouraged knowing that we had people come through after the last episode and like contribute. So given this list, is there anything that we can do to be helpful to you in the next 90 days or longer? I mean, it sounds like customer connections, for sure. You've got great inbound on the operations person, but more is never bad. And then too early for fundraising, but something to keep in mind. Anything else?
Zach Marshall: I'll take one step back on fundraising, which is if we're doing it in the spring, really, it starts now, like over the Christmas break is going to be where maybe I'm not as much customer focused and I'm a little more investor-focused, and I'm rekindling all those relationships and getting them moving. So, if you want to talk about that, I'd love to. The other side is like we realized some new niches of customers that really fit kind of the outsource security management piece that we want to go into. And two of them that I hadn't really thought of, I think you mentioned Bitcoin people before, but like that's come up a bunch. So, like anybody on here, and I know this is like a podcast where there's probably a bunch of people who are into crypto and Bitcoin and so on, we'd love to get them connected to the right security providers when they travel. Pretty much anybody, and this is going to sound funny for anybody who's not in this position, but anybody who's been told by a consultant they should have kidnapping insurance, which is common, I've now talked to a bunch of people who have a bunch of Bitcoins, and like people who protect their transactions are also saying, hey, you should get kidnapping insurance. Well, sure, but you should also avoid being kidnapped. And chances are if you're pretty wealthy and you like to travel and you have kidnapping insurance, you probably should have a well-sourced security provider.
So, we'd like to do that for you. So, feel free to talk to me about that. And then the last one is actually donors who work with nonprofits in dangerous places. I've talked to quite a few people in the past really just probably six weeks who have like causes that they care about that they've traveled to many times, but at this point in the modern world, they don't feel comfortable being there anymore. And we'd like to fix that. Like there's absolutely a solution. Not for everywhere, like maybe Haiti's not the best place to travel right now. I mean, if you want to go, we'll find you a company that'll get you there, it's just a little dangerous. But like you should be able to go visit any orphanage, any cause that you have just by getting a vetted security service to come help you out. And so, we'll get you connected to that. So, there's some customers that I'd love to talk to.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's really interesting. It's interesting to hear kind of each time like greater clarity and specificity around the exact type of customer that is, and even down to the specific use case. I think that really helps people know like, oh, I actually do know one of those.
Zach Marshall: Someone gave an example, he was like, he goes, you wait, six months from now, you're going to be the security company that connects all divorced moms with security during the childcare or the custody battle. And like that's going to be your niche. And I was like, yeah, maybe, I don't know. But like, it makes sense, like the smaller the niche- I don't know if that makes sense, but the smaller the niche, the easier it is to be like, introduce me all of the people that fit in that space. I think that's where the donor- And like when you talk about like a pretty straightforward travel security problem, it's like you don't travel often, there's no reason you would know how to buy security. And honestly, like that's the biggest customer client-side problem is they don't know how to buy security.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, that's actually an interesting- leads me to a tactical concept, which is I've seen other marketplaces that really work hard to almost create different storefronts, different pages, different landing pages based on very specific use cases. So, goconterra.com/crypto is like a dedicated landing page to private individuals who travel internationally and what hiring security looks like for them versus charity work that is with somebody else or with a family. It is a very interesting thing to start to address a use case instead of a we work in this industry, like it is your responsibility to figure out how to interact with us versus like kind of meet them halfway in their space and their use case.
Zach Marshall: It's like literally the new- like my technical roadmap. I don't think I mentioned this skateboard versus- Like skateboard versus automobile thing in the last podcast. But I really- like what we've built so far is a wheel. We built a wheel. A wheel does not make you move any faster along the road. It's just a wheel. And so, to make it move you faster, you need another wheel, you need to hook them together, put a dashboard, put an engine, put it all together, now you have a car and now you drive faster. Or like I forgot who invented this idea, or you build a skateboard, then a scooter, then a bicycle, then a motorcycle, then a car. And each of those things actually makes you move faster.
A skateboard is better than a wheel. We built a wheel. And that was the biggest learning of the technical project we've done so far. What these little services and like kind of an internal network first is creating is a couple of skateboards. We're going to make it easier for you to staff your project. We're going to make it easier for you to get security overseas because we're going to take on the decision-making and the expertise. And I think landing pages connected to Go Conterra that says here's your value prop, this is the exact thing we're going to do for you. We're going to find you the security you need. We're going to manage it in customer service. And if it doesn't show up, we're going to find you better or our guys are going to fly out there and do it ourselves or whatever it is. Now, you don't have to worry about it. Now that's better than before. And then eventually it'll be some automated, awesome thing with a marketplace, but we're not there yet. So, skateboards.
Eric Jorgenson: Skateboards, skateboards is where it's at. I like that. And I think, I mean, building software's hard, and that is a good learning that reflecting on and taking it in after three months is way better than a year. And there's plenty of people that do that and learn that lesson way more expensively. I think honestly, the insight of this is- between the chicken and egg problem, this is a demand first. Like the demand drives the supply. If we bring in the demand, the supply just pops into existence when we need it. And there still needs to be balance, but we know which can come first and it's easier to get demand for. That is a huge insight that I think is really going to unlock a lot of speed and growth and clarity around everything else. I mean, that's a jewel.
Zach Marshall: An investor asked me that question 12 weeks ago, and I said the opposite. I said, well, the supply side's harder, so that's what we're going for first. Like, no, you got that wrong. But I'm so glad we did, and we learned it. Like the whole idea of sales, the second-best answer is no, like you get enough no’s and you go, wait, what? I don't get it.
Eric Jorgenson: I love the collecting no’s. Collecting no’s, yeah, that's a great phrase. And I was actually going to ask you maybe as a final thing, if there was anything in the last 12 weeks that you had changed your mind on. And I know one answer is this kind of supply first versus demand first, but I think it's a good maybe hard to inventory the whole three months. One certainly being demand first, not supply first. Actually, another is the
technical- the urgency of hiring more technical talent and kind of the order of operations there. Is there anything else that comes to mind? In a way, we've been talking about this for an hour? So maybe the well is dry.
Zach Marshall: We're just doing circles, but yeah. So, the technical roadmap certainly changed, supply versus demand and which one first changed. I mentioned it before, but to keep summarizing adding the client as a third piece of the marketplace, I think that's probably here to stay. There's just so much customer experience we can unlock there that doesn't currently exist. Like how can we not have them on as well? And then I'd say the fourth is really just clarity around fundraising. I was telling myself six months ago or nine months ago, like, hey, I'm going to go raise a seed and we're going to be venture-backed or whatever. But I had to go through, I think, the rollercoaster of so many investors and mentors being like why don't you bootstrap this part, or what if you did it this way or whatever, whatever, and I had to like go explore those a little bit and understand why and how for this model and this business to work and for us not to be just a security agency, like we have to tell ourselves we are a venture-backed company, we are growing at a speed that requires capital and the outcome is a hundred X or a thousand X, and that's why we're doing it, and it makes sense. And like just having clarity around that makes every decision easier and more straightforward. Like why we hire Ativo who's awesome, but like costs what they should versus like hiring a local tax company here in Rochester, who has no experience with a VC-backed company. Like part of that decision, I was thinking through that stuff, and I was like what am I even talking about? Like if I was building a small business, I know who to hire. I'm not building a small business. And like just kind of going through the trenches for a second and coming back on the other side with clarity, I guess you could say it's not a change, but maybe it is. I don't know.
Eric Jorgenson: I think Patrick O'Shaughnessy shared this essay, I can't remember who wrote it, it was like the Ben and Jerry's versus Amazon. And it's like the two different models of company. And like knowing which one you are as early as possible unlocks, like you're saying, all these decisions. I'll see if I can dig that up and link to it.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, I've seen that, and I think it's absolutely true. Now flip-flopping around is probably the second worst thing you can do. Getting it wrong, worse, flip-flopping is also really bad.
Eric Jorgenson: Not deciding and crashing into the tree, not good. Just pick a road.
Zach Marshall: We're on it.
Eric Jorgenson: All right. Anything else you want to wrap up with? I feel like we got a very good December report from December Zach. I'm excited to talk to March Zach and do installment number three and see where we're at by then.
Zach Marshall: Yeah, so one of the huge pieces of clarity that I had came from the idea of used car sales. And it started with realizing how little trust there was in the industry. And I hadn't quite understood that before these last 90 days, like literally nobody trusts anybody. And it reminded me of the information asymmetry in used car sales before the Carfax report and before companies like CarMax and how you used to have to just word of mouth get recommended a guy who sold you a car and you showed up to his place. You didn't know what the market value of the car was. You didn't know the condition of the car, if it's a salvage, total. You didn't know anything, you just had to trust this person. And then they sold you this thing, and hopefully it didn't break down. And even if it did break down later, like how hard could you blackball them? There wasn't even a review system back then. It's like, okay, well, people are going to keep buying used cars from that guy. And then the Carfax report comes out, which is like the first saving grace in industry, which is, well, at least I know whether or not it's a salvage title. Like I can pay for this report, and I know, so that's a big value add. But then CarMax comes out and breaks down every barrier in the used car sales information market, which is has it ever been painted? Has it ever been fixed? What's the current market rate? Oh, by the way, here's a couple of kiosks. You can go on the open internet and go find a different price somewhere else. We're going to charge more because you get a better experience here and you get what you want and you get what you pay for. And I realized that the security market is just like the used car sales market 30 years ago, where you're trusting somebody who got recommended to you – not recommended by an expert, they're recommended by a friend who has no idea, no market rate of security or cars either.
And so you go to this thing, they build up your trust through a sales process of some kind, and then you pull the trigger, you buy this thing. And then even afterwards, you have no idea if what you paid was correct. And if it's a bad outcome, there's nothing you can do. There's no recourse. And I guess that kind of idea, even though CarMax isn't really a marketplace, they’re a car sales company, but they also do, I mean, more transactions on used cars than any other company in the world. And they did that by providing information, creating a better experience. And I think this was where I realized we need to bring in the third side, we need to bring in the clients as well and get them. The car in this case might be a direct-hire person. It might be a vendor security service, but whatever they're going to get, they're going to get what they pay for. They're going to know how it works. They're going to see the industry. And we can just take all the opaqueness out of it. So that is like a driving force. Like I wrote a little kind of like white paper on that to get it out. And then once I saw it, I was like this is like the value prop. This is a huge value prop in the industry where today everybody has to deal with used car sales.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, creating trust where none existed at an incredibly high margin for everyone involved in the ecosystem.
Zach Marshall: I'll just end it with I'm super excited for March Zach. I feel like I went through like this last quarter was a battle, and we came out on the other side with so much better vision and next steps and the stuff, like I've got it written on the whiteboard, like the next steps make sense. Like I know how to do that thing, and then that thing, and then that thing. And so, I'm excited that we'll have traction through like the work we know how to do and plan. And we still have the space to get into that ambiguous discovery stuff.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It feels like you're on the rails, you’re working on adding more rails, and where there's ambiguity, you're attacking it, which is awesome. So yeah, thank you for making the time, showing up, being honest, bringing your full experience to this. I appreciate it and learned a lot from it, I think everybody does, and I remain excited for the next chapter and seeing where this whole story goes.
Zach Marshall: Thanks for having me.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. I encourage you to support Zach on his mission any way you can. If you enjoyed this episode, please take 14 seconds to leave a review. It really helps other people find the show. If you liked this episode, you will probably also love my episode with Kevin Espiritu. We talked for an hour and a half with him about how he grew his gardening business to tens of millions of dollars over the past few years by combining the media business model and the D2C business model, and it's a really great episode. The thought I'll leave you with today is that two things are true. Great companies are built by extraordinary individuals who take the bold step of trying to bring a vision into reality. It's also true that companies are built by the community around them who hears this bold vision, agrees with it, believes in it, and starts to rework the world subtly to support that vision. We're all doing that in some small way all the time. Every action falls into someone's vision for the world. And I just encourage us all to do it consciously when possible. Take a few quiet moments for yourself, breathe deep, and be well.