Dan Holowack

Just tell a great story. So I ended up changing my positioning — the first slide of my seed deck ended up becoming 'searching for photos sucks.' It was a big decision to say I'm gonna put the word 'sucks' on the first page of a slide deck that's going to be seen by all of these highly educated, powerful people. But it got the message across.

Abby and I, looking back, felt like the core things that started was: hire people that don't have an ego, and hire people that are kind. Bringing people together that don't have much ego and are really kind gets you a really long way.

When we initially flew over to Europe and we were doing conferences and meetings, the question was: who else in Europe do you work with? We were like, oh, we work with hundreds of customers in North America — all these great names did not matter. In this kind of space it's really finding those early innovators.

people make the decisions to go traveling and it's really precious it's gonna cost money maybe it's your only two weeks of vacation you have every year and what doesn't work anymore is that like one perfect beach photo or that fully staged photo shoot that somebody did three years ago with a bunch of actors.

founders are also trained to tell these really catchy stories about how boom we were successful look at that like and it's perpetuated by the media but it was like three years of learning everything the hard way making no money and iterating piece by piece from the product to the market back to the product back to the market.

we bootstrapped to our first million in ARR that was like our first 12 to 1