Jacob Eiting - CEO of RevenueCat: Extreme dogfooding

It's a $150,000,000,000 a year market right now just for in app purchases. And you might also be thinking hey like you know like purchases like sounds like Stripe is it just like Stripe of mobile development? It's not really like Stripe. The biggest difference from mobile that I remember is that it's like you just have many types of subscriptions. You're constantly experimenting.

You might let people pay weekly, pay monthly, pay annually, pay like every three months. We did all of these things. We tested them all out and you have to like maintain that and make sure like people have the right access after all these years. You might do trials where it's like free first seven days are free, first month is free or you might do like discounts and like special offers. You might just change the pricing completely and you've got to keep all these things in sync.

You get a lot of protections against, like, credit card fraud and things like this. They take a good cut. They take, like, 30%. And, like, that's not even the hard part, the worst part. The worst part is just the APIs are kinda clunky.

They always have been. The you know, Apple and Google have made progress, but, you know, they're they're they're Google may be slightly better as an API company, but I don't think Apple would have ever set you know, outside of their, you know, the the the the mobile SDKs themselves, I think, are still pretty good. That's, like, their legacy from acquiring Next step and that whole origin story for for most of mobile, at Apple, but their APIs has never been their strong suit. So they're just they're just kinda hard to use. They don't really match what's, I think, considered industry good.

And, you know, that's kinda where we step in is we put this layer on top and make it easier and and and let developers focus on the actual interesting parts of commercialization, which you were just mentioning is, like, what how much should I charge? And, like, all of these things. You know? Because the faster, you know, the faster you can make changes, experiment, run your business, you know, the more successful you'll be. So that's kind of that's why we're that's that's why our mission is, is to help developers make more money by making all, like, the hard stuff easy.

So

Yeah. So WorkOS isn't paying me any money for this. I I pay WorkOS money for this, but WorkOS is, like, one of the best developer tools I've, like, ever used. It's it's the documentation and the experience with building with them is so, so good. Like, I initially was almost like, okay.

This seems expensive, but then I built an integration with them in about twenty minutes. So I had spent two days banging my head off the wall trying to build it directly with Okta. And then with Workhorse, I then have, like, many, many SSO providers, like, supported instead of just one. So, yeah. Like, for me, WorkOS is one of the nicest developer experiences I've encountered in the last, like, five years probably.

And it's so surprising because a bunch of the developer team are at GitHub and therefore are very good at the job. Go to workos.com to learn more. Yeah. And I think, like, in in mobile, unless people have worked in mobile, it might be hard also to imagine how important this is because I think, like, in SaaS, like, typically, you might, like, review your pricing, like, once a year or, like, just, like, you know, have an offer, like, Black Friday at most, and that's very rare probably.

So usually less than a hundred dollars in annual contract value ACV. Relatively high churn. So consumers are a it's a churn challenge business. There's a lot of turnover, and relatively high gross margins, though. So, like, basic you know, you're selling digital goods, which are generally infinitely replicable.

So you almost have zero gross margins, or zero which are our marginal cost. Sorry. And, and so that creates just kind of, like, an interesting difference from what most of SaaS is, which is generally high ACV, generally reasonable churn or low churn, and and also good gross margins. So they're just they're different businesses. And and for consumer, so you you really wanna optimize your price point, your conversions.

You know, you're getting you're getting hundreds of that batch a day for customers. You can do, programmatic price experimentation and stuff because you have so many customers coming in all the time. Customer support is a different thing than in in b two b SaaS because, you know, you have, again, thousands and thousands of customers, which, like, a a big SaaS company might only have thousands or tens of thousands of customers is very, it's not very uncommon for a subscription app to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. And that just dictates an entirely different type of business. And I guess it's you know, we serve that vertical.

It requires a different set of tooling, a sort of different set of, skills and and and and stuff, and, you know, that's been that's been our niche. But, yeah, you're right. Like, nobody not nobody, but it's it's rare for people having worked in this space to really understand it. I had this funny anecdote, from the early days where I was always able to sell revenue cat much, much, much more easily to somebody who actually knew how to build RevenueCat. So, like, somebody who had done it before was always, like, 10 times easier a sale.

And we have this, like, internal sort of this internal motto. They always come back. We'll get the, we'll get the tire kicker come by who's, like, entering in app subscriptions for the first time, and they're, you know, the developers I'm one too, like, always overconfident. Right? You're a good computer person. That's how you got here. But you're like, how hard can it be? It's just JSON. Right? And then you're like, it's it's not that hard.

It's just gonna be time consuming and annoying. And then you get it wrong, your company's gonna lose money, and it's fine. And then, you know, they don't always always come back, but very often, they come back, like, six months later. And they're like, yeah. Actually, this sucks.

And so, you know, which kinda also plays into our our patience as a as a marketing or go to market tactic is not be too aggressive. I guess we we know a bit we know the complexity of the problem is is is enough that eventually they will they will have a need for us. So

We had product people. We had game designers. We had all kinds of folks, and I'm like, these are all developers in my mind. Like, we're we're all working on Yeah. Software product. Right? The only people that you might not put in that category is, like, maybe somebody in ops or finance or something like this. But, like, who cares? Like, throw them in the bucket, and we can think about people who make software as, you know, humans that make software for other humans. That's a developer to me.

That's also just cope for me not wanting to redo a whole bunch of swag and change our mission statement. But I've tried to expand it, but you're right. Like, and this is, I think, maybe there's a lesson in here for other DevTools founders, which is, like, I think the more like like, obviously, there's good benefits to a DevTool that's just, like, in the engine room and the engineers love it and they plug it in and never gets thought about again. But there's been a lot of advantages to us even if it's been somewhat difficult that, the developers love us. That's a must.

You gotta have that. But then it's great that the customer support team uses RevenueCat too. And the founders of the company are often on RevenueCat looking at their stuff on a daily basis and the data teams and often the product teams. And, like, as the company scales, more and more stakeholders use RevenueCat. Now that's really hard because the magic of RevenueCat was this developer experience that we really focused on, and that doesn't necessarily translate.

So, like, we're a great product for developers and maybe a mediocre product for, you know, the some of those other personas. I think you have to be great for one of those personas first.

It was, like, it was all free. And then suddenly, we were doing this, and it was just this massive project. So he was, like, just taking way too long on that. And then discovered RevenueCat, and then, you know, it was, like, he did it. He loved it. Shout out, Jesse. Legendary guy.

It never will be. But, like, when you can relieve a ton of effort for a developer and take what could be you know, I think part of the part of the sell and I think this is, like, for people ideating on, like, new dev tools projects. I think any problem in computer science or computers or whatever that seems that the outside, it should be simple, but it's not. It's a really good opportunity. More so than there are complex problems that are obviously complex problems, and those are good to work on too.

But I think there's a special thing in this one. It it's harder than you think it should be. Because and the reason it's a psychological reason, I think, is that it actually brings kind of a lot of shame when a developer can't do it. Right? And they have to, like, explain to nontechnical people, like, I they're like, why Apple gives you a notice, you know, some nontechnical CEO person who's like, I just go there's there's a website for it.

It's easy. And and and so I think we get a lot of developer love just by, you know, avoiding that experience for developers and being like, okay. Rather than you know, they've heard the horror stories, and they know, like, okay. We can just click and bring this tool in. And instead of looking

Like, it's always gonna suck to build it. Like, it seems like it's a actually quite a complex, product. Even though, you know, saying it's maybe seems simple, but it's

But, like, we we built this app called Elevate in, like, 2013 or '14 right when the App Store was, like, allowing in app purchases, subscriptions. They had them for a couple years, but they were only allowed for, like, news apps, and Apple is very restrictive. And And at some point in twenty thirteen, fourteen, they were like, hey. You can now anybody who has any sort of, like, recurring content basically, SaaS. They were like, you can do subscriptions for apps now, which was a big change.

It was just an app store, you know, review policy change. And so we very quickly switched our product over to being subscription based, not really knowing a whole lot about it. And then sort of two things happened. We did that. And then right after app we got featured just back when Apple did, like, an app of the year, big push.

They would pick one app and make it app of the year. It was literally, like, four weeks after we push subscriptions into production. We got made app of the year. And we learned all the reasons our in app subscription system was not very good. Right? Very, very quickly.

We were doing, like Yeah. And you can see that in RevenueCat's products. It very much, like, maps to kinda how we were thinking as a, you know, medium sized app company at the time and kind of like the Yeah. You know, what makes it hard is the confluence of all these problems. It's like growth, and it's, you know, the infrastructure, and it's the data problems and Mhmm.

And so the commerce stuff. And, so, yeah, I didn't you know? And I think that actually is what made it very difficult initially to pitch revenue cap, especially to investors because, like, they did not really understand you know, like you said, if you didn't know the problem, you didn't know the problem. A few investors who I talked to who had worked in subscriptions were like, yes. All of my subscription companies have garbage data because it's really hard.

There are big startups, but most startups are small, which means most people need tools that can kinda do a lot of different things. They can't buy, like, a point solution for everything at the beginning. And so I think that's one also one of our superpowers is, like, we just give you a lot of pretty good stuff out of the box for this kind you know, for this one vertical specific kind of business.

Like, that is just what's gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was, like, my last hurrah.

And there was there was, you know again, going back to, like, we had built a b price a b testing in the past, and, like, I knew what things worked and what things bit us and, like, the specifics on mobile, you know, because you're not drawing for a website. The the the you know, you're not loading pages from a website. The environment's a little less controlled and has some, like, like, there's weird things that can happen in an AB test on mobile because of, like, connectivity issues that don't exist on you know? So sometimes some of the other, like, a b testing tools I'm sure they have a address now, but would create, like, weird systematic errors and stuff like this. And then I was super obsessed, and I still am super obsessed with, like, Bayesian modeling.

So, you know, joint analysis because basically, everybody in experimental analysis basically just uses frequentist style, as a binomial binomial calculations. You know, did did a convert basically, did did did more events happen on the a branch or the b branch? But that doesn't work for pricing because, like, pricing.

Yeah. And so but, yeah, it was an interesting one because we launched that beta, and then it kinda, like, hobbled for a long time because we didn't have the team built up to really address it well. And then, in the last year like, last year, we finally were able to start to really invest in it, and we've got big plans to you know? And we didn't end up we're we're no longer using my beautiful Bayesian model. That's gonna be something I regret the rest of my life.

But, but but yeah. I mean, I think something you hit on there is, like, just content marketing too and just how even if I have to sit here and explain, like, yeah, actually, that all did not work out and blah blah blah. Probably, I should do a follow-up blog post, but, it's always worked really well for us to overshare with our customers a little bit. Right? Like, I think it's it's always helped more than it has harmed, and that's probably a good example.

There's such an allergic reaction to a lot of, like, sales techniques and and sort of, like, mid marketing out there where it's, like, just not all that creative and all that interesting. I just think it aggregates kind of a crappy customer base, which which then just doesn't scale that well, or at least not as efficiently as I think just, like, you know, being very, being very honest with your customers. And, yeah, just that trust and authority. Right? And understanding.

Like, the more the empathy is, like, two ways. Right? So, like, if I can be empathetic to my customers, which we try to do every day, but then the more I communicate and share, my customers also gain a lot of empathy for us as a as a as a vendor. And, you know, when things don't always go right, it helps a lot that they know who I am. They've seen my writing.

They've seen other people on our team. Right? And they know we're humans and that we care, you know, and that we're fallible, right, as well. And so I think that's that's, you know, that's a poor excuse for, you know, screwing things up. I prefer not to screw up ever, but, like, when we when there is when there is an issue, it's really helpful to have kinda built that trust with our customers.

And when you wanna sell them something. The next time I wanna sell you something, it's so much easier if you, like, trust me already. Right? Like, I don't have to, like, convince you that, a, this product is good, and b, like, I'm not a I'm not a weirdo. Like, I've already convinced you that I'm not a weirdo.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've we've kind

Like, if that's what we did. We we basically explained how to build revenue cap. That was our first couple years of content. It was like, here are all the I I when we when we started, like, when very, very beginning, like, we pushed out a beta under Reddit at the end of twenty seventeen. And we're just, like, you know, trickling in one sign up a week or something like this.

There really have much to do because, like, I didn't know what to build. I don't have users. So so I spent half my time vlogging. I literally would, like, two or two and a half days a week. I was, like, writing long form blog posts, that at the time went up on a medium blog.

And I just wrote down, like, every interesting sort of technical aspect of what, you know, I thought was wrong with StoreKit, what were some of the technical challenges? And then I guess sort of intentionally, unintentionally just thought about, like, okay. Like, how are these gonna SEO? And there was a lack of content on this stuff, and it was so niche. That I think ended up being our first, you know you're always just, like, trying to grab the next rope.

Like, what's the next thing that we're gonna get? And that was, like, probably our first real piece of traction was, like, okay. Started those that that content started to rank really highly, like, right underneath or sometimes above some of the the Apple content. And so that was, like that was a huge thing. So, I mean, first mover advantage, obviously, but, like, that was huge for us.

And, I mean, look. If you're building something net new, that solves a problem that exists. Like, there better be a search term you can outrank. You know what I mean? Or or or the idea is probably not not it's gonna be too hard to get to get going. You're not differentiated enough. If you don't think you can bring some content to the table that's gonna that's gonna outrank, you know, for some at least a couple, like, important keywords.

There's you know, if you live in this if you survive long enough, there's just, like, these random things you get right, and then they just, like, run forever and and just continue to work. But the T shirt the T shirt can it's called Tshirt.js was the script, my digital t shirt cannon. And then and then eventually, we had, you know, we got a little bit bigger. We hired more engineers. Now it's tshirt.py.

Got got converted to Python. You know? Gotta be, you know, standardized. But, but this was in 2019. No. Maybe '18. And, yeah, I met this vendor, Printfaction, that does like, they'll print T shirts and and do fulfillment, and they have, like, a decent little API. And it was, like, 15 or $20 to have one of these sent out. So, basically, I just, like, with Intercom Jesse, by the way. Oh, yeah.

No. That was definitely I wrote that note by hand. Yeah. And, like, yeah, I was just able with our, you know, basic Intercom integration and some syncing scripts. You know, I just wrote a little job that, you know, once you hit your tenth subscriber so I didn't send it to everybody.

So you had to, like, prove that you were a real human building actual something that got some amount of subscribers, but it was only, like, 10. Yeah. It would just automatically fire off a fulfillment link. It'd send it to you, let you pick a size. And to this day, I think we've sent we've sent thousands of T shirts, and, like, I think it's been our most popular product.

Free stuff is always, like, the most popular product you can make. But, yeah, it's crazy. You see people you know, now when at dev events, a lot of times, I'll see people in the shirts. Shirts. The red.

The yeah. I mean, the red becomes, like is become sort of iconic because I think of that that that red that I happen to get for that shirt. But, yeah, that was, like, one of these, you know, really interesting set set and forget marketing things that's so cheap to do. Like, once you reach a certain, you know, scale and, kind of like especially, again, it's like it's it's it if you have good pricing aligned with customer growth, you can spend a lot of money kinda making them feel good even if it's a loss in the early days because, you know, there'll be a couple winners in there that will help pay for everybody's T shirts, basically. Yeah.

And and and it all works out. Yeah. And then the tone, the tone is, hey. I don't know. I just I I write weird, and I talk weird.

And, it's hard to replicate. Like, I've had many attempts many attempts internally for people to, like, write in Jacob voice, and it always comes off like, uncanny valley of Jacob voice. Yeah. So I end up most of the time having to just write I just, like, I just tell people don't even just send me what you want, and I will write it. And I should do a Jacob g p t, but, like, Yeah.

I don't even think it's not even it can't even do it. I don't know why I'm so I'm just so unique. I can't be I'm the only one that's unreplaceable by AI. But, but AI, all these elements will have, like, the dorkiest corporate voice you could possibly get by default. Maybe Grok is, like, the most, like, casual kind of, but even that, it's, like, super kinda I don't know. You could just tell I'm talking to, you know, a a computer. So we'll see if that ever gets fixed and I can finally retire.

I had great jobs, and I just I hated them all, and I was just like a total total rake to all of them. Yeah. I mean, I I don't think it's bad to well, this comes down to maybe founding team composition. If you're a dev who wants to start a technical company, and you don't if you don't like being on stage, if you can't make people laugh, if you're, like, not, quote, unquote, charismatic, I mean, it's gonna be a little bit more challenging. And, like, there's different forms of charisma.

Like, I've I don't know if you've ever talked to or seen Miguel, my my cofounder talk. Like, you're very different. He's very charismatic as well in a very different way. I think as a founder, if you get any sort of scale like, there there are occasionally, like, founders who are who you know, one member of the founding team who stays very quiet is, you know, maybe fits an architect role. But, like, if you're gonna scale anything, you're gonna become an exec, and execs kinda have to have, like, you know, Shooter McGavin gun fingers and, like, all that stuff.

Like, if you wanna be successful

And then I say charismatic, like, it's it's, you know, maybe sort of a bad thing, but you just gotta be comfortable with people. Mhmm. And it helps if you can if you're, you know, verbally quick on your feet. And, you know, but if you're smart enough to do computers, you're probably smart enough to to to write quickly and think quickly as well. But, yeah, I did a lot of theater and stuff as a kid.

Like, I've done you know, been making jokes on the Internet in one form or another for, like, twenty five years. So, like, I'm just applying it to a unique sort of, form, at this point. But, yeah, hire a I have a theater kid in your, your founding team this night. My advice maybe.

Yeah. Like well, and we could talk about any of it. I mean, one is that, you know, we we acquired essentially with a customer of ours, and there was a couple of driving reasons for that. And then, of course, like, the the subject matter itself is kind of interesting and sort of unexpected for a dev tools company to to start, you know, getting into the spicy audiobook space. I'll say that that was more serendipity than it was intentional.

She'd given us a ton of feedback over the years, and, we developed sort of, like, a a good a good relationship just on on on RevenueCat and how it can help them and and learning from her product and her team and and all this stuff. And so, yeah, last year when it kinda it kinda a bunch of things aligned is that I I really need somebody like Faye on my team, to help us, you know, grow and scale revenue cash. She had a bunch of really she's a bunch of really great ideas about what we're gonna do to expand sort of what RevenueCat does and is. And then, also, you know, we kinda had this need that I I hadn't been shopping, but, like, we have this need. I think I'm sure a lot of companies in dev tools space run into this.

It's like, you can ask customers to test stuff. You can test stuff yourself, but, like, there's a lot of changes that have very little benefit to the customer. And there you know, they might be just, like, efficiency updates, like, big they can be big risky changes that happen in the back end and maybe don't provide any, like, immediate benefit. How do you get a customer to test that? You either just throw them in a test pool without asking, which is, like, maybe fine, but, like, has risk.

Or but but but then then there's also stuff that's, like, maybe it's user facing or maybe it's, like you know? And and we've constantly struggled with, like, okay. We've rewritten some aspect of some subsystem of in app subscription somewhere, and And it's like, okay. Can we go find a user a customer that will let us, like, turn this feature flag on? And it's like, if you don't bring them something, like, hey.

We're gonna make you more money in some way. They're just like, why would I, like, you know, risk my Yeah. You know? And so I was like, well, it might actually be helpful. You know, we have a bunch of a lot of revenue cap employees, team members have apps of their own,

Right? So it's gonna be, like, tens or hundreds of subscribers. And and you there's just certain things that happen at the scale of thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers that you don't see at 10 or a hundred, and cross platform. So Dipsy fit all those needs. It was like it's a big app with, like, you know, hundreds of thousand subscribers, over a hundred thousand subscribers, and, like, and use revenue cap for the beginning, had,

Like, they can serve many, many you know, their customers are probably more varied than ours in in what they look like. Our customers all are there's a variance, but, like, probably look more similar than most vertical SaaS do, which is is advantage.

And so having an app that's at scale, is is certainly been helpful, and insightful. And, like, we have a first you know, in Dipsy the Dipsy team operates sort of as an independent subsidiary, and, you know, we we we have a Slack bridge with them. And, like, we can ask questions that we would normally feel maybe uncomfortable asking a customer, and and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's been overall it's been overall pretty interesting, pretty good. And, yeah, I was just glad, glad to have a good you gotta have something funny and good.

We we we did a small fundraise this year. I was like, oh, we should probably do an acquisition too. It's kinda how I plan my years. I'm just like, what is the funny stuff I can stuff into the, like, end of year update,

Like, Apple and Google are always adding new offer whatever things at the at the margins, and we build for it. But often, there's a chicken and egg problem where a lot of our customers won't try that stuff until we make it easy, but we can't really make it easy until, like, we've really tested it. You know, and it doesn't have it often a lot of pull from customers anyway because, you know, it's on the Google. Apple built too good of stuff on this. This that that I don't know.

But, but so so having that ability to just go and, like, flip things on Yeah. Has been has been really helpful. And sort of anomalies too has been nice. Like, there's always anomalies. Like, app like like, Google will subtly change things.

And, like, we can you know, we have limited visibility. This is like a mobile dev challenge. This is challenging probably for anybody building a dev tool that isn't purely an API. So if you're like an APM company, anybody who's, like, deploying bits into somebody else's environment, which is, like, you know, revenue guys in the SDK. So that goes into the other app.

There's, like, a limit in visibility that you can get. Like, Like, what's going on in that runtime, exactly? And so now having our own first party, like, we can actually introspect into that runtime if we need to and and get logs and, you know, and and do that much faster than we than we do in, like, a customer you know, the wait for a customer to report it, and then we have to ask for logs, and then now we can jump in at a code level, without without having to, like, you know, go back and forth and do a screen share and all that stuff. And it it sped sped a lot of things up. But but definitely an interesting bet.

Like, I I had to there's a lot of, like, trust me's, that Yeah. Had to go on for for this to go through, but, but, overall, six months in or so or I guess only four months in, yeah, there's been a lot of, quote, unquote, synergies. Even even even quite a few I didn't expect, so that's been good. That's cool.

And but they for different reasons, I think they're actually, like, operating using their, like, advantage as, like, a market maker in ads and stuff to actually make money. And it it it it they've they've, like, I assume use leverage to buy, like, fairly large apps. That was never the case for us with Dipsea. And, like, I even went out to some of our, like, competitive companies that use revenue as well and kinda reassured them, like, hey. Like, we're doing this.

I want you to know that, like, we're not gonna, like, use any sort of insight information. It's not our goal to, like, crush you. We're gonna let the, like, Dibs team keep plugging away. You know, we're gonna try stuff and experiment, but, like, I fully expect it. I don't expect it to be, like, you know, a a a a substantial line item for us more than it is, like, a strategic asset for us to, like, grow the core business.

And it's just really hard to, like, also stay close to your product every day. So you have to kind of force it. And, like and and there's a lot of, like, well intentioned terrible advice out there for from a lot of, like, people in the venture class and whatever. They'll be like, oh, you need to factor yourself out and, like, you need to delegate. It's like, to a degree, yes, but, like, your product and who you're selling to is, like, the only thing that matters, really.

Everything else is, like, efficiencies and scaling and, like, bits and bop. Like, the every other team at Remedy kinda care about everybody. Right? But, like, some of these things some of these things, like, product and delivery to who consumes it, like, and what you're building, that's the core. Without that, everything else collapsed.

So so, yeah, I think every dev tool, you need some you know, if if you know, I think James was talking about it. Like, Posthog uses Posthog. Right? Like, that's great. Like, if you can use your product on your product, that's ideal.

And and seeing Dipsy's data in our mobile app has just brought brought me a lot closer to the product. Mhmm. And I think, like, another and this is just, like, more internal stuff. But, like, we also, this past year, started doing internal shipping reviews where, like, Miguel and I are sitting with, you know, the the the heads of the little, like, teamlets that we have around the company that are working on different projects, and we're just meeting with them on a monthly basis just to be like, hey. What are you building?

Can we help? What are we building next? Like, how's it going? And and just spending more time, like, doing product rather than, like, building company stuff, like, company logistics. And I think you have to be intentional because I think that stuff just gets squeezed out if you're not if you're not intentional about making time for it. So that's I'm very I'm very happy with where I'm at the end of this year. So I'm spending a lot more time with

There's often, like, this activation energy for problems that, like, little problems that are annoying, but they're not, like, existential. It takes, like, the CEO or somebody or, like, your biggest it takes somebody, quote, unquote, with clout or important to, like, make it a thing, or these little things just don't get fixed. I don't know. It's really interesting. And I actually think the the the when you add all those things up, that's how products get really crappy is it's like this you know?

It's never one bad decision. It's like a collection of, like, neglect, small neglects around the entire business and product. So yeah. So figuring out how to get that into the into the DNA of the company is an interesting challenge. Like, how do you make everybody, you you know, pick up the trash or fix the broken windows all the time, I think is a challenge.

And, of course, it's good to get in writing, and it's good to, like, spread that out and, and stuff like that. But just kind of assume, you know, like, anything you delegate is gonna come back to you at some point. Right? And so you have to stay sharp, on all these things. So Yeah.

And, you know, that's eight years in. I expect to do that for another eight years. So, like, you know, to some level, there's always gonna be a thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, you know, or, you know, gets not gets you out of bed in the morning, gets you out of bed at 1AM. Right? And so, so so yeah. And those are the moments where you're like, is this making me happy? It's like, not really, but do I wanna win? Yeah. Winning does make me happy. So, like, let's let's remember that.

And so, yeah, I mean, just just, maybe the meta advice there is is just figure out what your, like, meta motivational thing is. Like, figure out why you're doing it. Right? And make sure you have a good reason, especially once you get past that, like, early killing zone and you get something that's kind of working. Because then I really think the thing that causes people not to go long is just burning out, getting bored, you know, falling out of love with the product.

So, like, it it it is it is in your investors, customers, employees' best interest that you would do a little bit of engineering to prevent that from happening. And you can do that a ton of different ways. But but you shouldn't you shouldn't you shouldn't ignore that because it it will like, I don't know if anybody's done a study on this, but, you know, when founders leave companies, it's generally not a bullish signal. Right? It's generally a bearish signal.

And so, like, if you can prevent that from happening, I think I think that's a I think that's a good thing.

It's in here. It's whatever. It's on Twitter. And, really, just as this really great tool, like, you you type slash new incident, creates an incident, it notifies a bunch of people. You you know, it's very configurable.

Oh, but the the you know, I don't think we've we make fewer mistakes now. I don't think there's less stuff. I I actually one thing we looked at how many incidents we've been declaring, and it's been going up every month. And it's actually a good thing. It's like we're just using incidents as this, like, mindset of, like, okay. Something is happening. And I think in dev tools, like, incident response and infrastructure is, like, probably one of the biggest behind the scenes challenges.

So, like, hit me up or, you know, look at our site. And if there's nothing on there that looks obvious, just ping me. Like, we probably have stuff coming over the horizon. And then, you know, also, like, if you're a founder type person, I'm always, like, looking for people who are, you know, maybe maybe one to, you know, join the navy a little relative navy a little bit. So, hit me up too because I think, like, you know, the the the more I can make RevenueCat like a collection of entrepreneurial mind entrepreneurial minds and and technical builders and stuff like this, I think, I think that will scale quite well as we get bigger.

So, yeah, let me know.