Why raise $123M after bootstrapping to $10M?

Jason Kirby (00:00.386) Welcome to episode 18 of Fundraising Demystified, the podcast where we uncover the untold stories of startup founders who have gone out to raise capital to bring their visions to life. Join me, Jason Kirby, as I interview these founders and dive into the hidden truths of how they got funded. If you haven't already subscribed, be sure to visit join.thunder.bc to get our weekly newsletter that covers valuable tips and insights for those raising and deploying venture capital. Today we have Lloyd Lobo, founder of Boast AI, a fintech platform that provides funding based on research and development tax credits. We talk about how he raised $123 million in equity and debt and actually selling a portion of his company and position his company after bootstrapping the company to $10 million in annual revenue. He shares his career journey, why they bootstrapped and how he structured his capital raise. Just released a book, From Grassroots to Greatness, that you can find on Kindle for free. But let's go ahead and jump right into Lloyd's story. Welcome to the show, Lloyd. Lloyed (00:11.006) Excited to be here, Jason. Thank you for hosting me. Jason Kirby (00:14.336) Now we're excited to share your story. You've had a lot of success raising a substantial amount of capital, $23 million Series A and $100 million debt warehouse to go along with it. It would just be great for you to give the audience a little bit of background on your entrepreneurial journey, your story, and kind of what ultimately led you to starting BOST. Lloyed (00:32.13) Definitely. So. My co-founder and I had been best friends since university. Okay? And we were partners in every project. We studied engineering together. Fast forward today, what, 20 plus years? He's my daughter's godfather. I'm his daughter's godfather. Anyway, after engineering, we studied engineering in Canada. He got into Johnson & Johnson's engineering leadership program. They picked two per country. And I moved right away into startups. I had asked an entrepreneur, hey, what's the best skill I could have? if I wanted to do a company someday and this person said sales. So I started applying for sales jobs. Nobody gave me a sales job so I took an entry-level cold calling job in a small startup. And my parents, they're from India and as you know with our cultures, like it's an engineer or a doctor, maybe a lawyer, and they were losing it. You have a degree in software engineering and you're cold calling? What the hell? Like this guy's son and this guy's daughter is like at Fast forward today, it's the skill that served me the most because everything from figuring out what to build to getting early customers to convincing investors to evangelizing the media to employees is everything is selling, right? That's the key core skill. Anyway, so I went on to do that and then only worked at startups after startup after startup. And I was at a startup in Philly and running GTM there and the CEO was like, felt like everyone had to be on all the time. You know, the whole hustle porn culture, work 80 hours a week, yada yada. And I used to be in the office till nine, 10. My wife was in residency at Drexel at the time. So she was always working 100 hours. So I got a call, I started going home one week at like 6 p.m. Lloyed (02:22.038) And I got an email saying, hey, I used to like it when you're in the office till 9, 10, your wife's a resident working 100 hours a week. What's causing you to go home? My parents were visiting me and I hadn't seen them in a year. And I go home and I'm like, man. And then when Alex called me and he's like, listen, I think we should do this. And what had happened, his journey was he was at Johnson and Johnson's engineering leadership program. Then he did a startup. It failed. he felt he lacked the accounting and finance skills. So he studied accounting and finance and that unique combo of accounting and finance took him into the world of tax credits because applying for these R&D tax credits is part finance and part engineering. And he started working at big four accounting firms, writing these applications for tax credits and then figuring out, talking to the CTOs of companies to figure out what work they did in R&D and mulling through their documentation, writing reports, and then if the government audits them, defending in the audit. And he called me and he's like, man, this process is so broken. Let's just build something for the space and I'm like bro... care what we build. If I can build a company I want to work for, I'm in. And through that journey, Alex and I worked on a number of things together. We worked on BOST, of course. We worked on another product called Automatically, which was 2013. It was a chatbot built on top of Zendesk. And it didn't work, and that's when people didn't even know what chatbots were. Intercom wasn't prevalent, and that failed. Then I was on founding team of a company that was incubated by Bessemer Ventures, and it was an AI sales assistant, I was... Lloyed (03:54.154) pretty much getting early customers, validating the market, figuring out what to build, doing everything. And six million bucks had been raised in the company on an idea and that also failed. And we had BOST also going. So BOST was a consulting firm, that's how we started, right? And so a big believer in bootstrapping, like the best, absolute best way, in my view, to bootstrap a company to millions in revenue is this, sell a service. And people got shocked, what, sell a service? Especially in the VC world, right? Oh, low gross margins, a labor intensive, unscalable. But you know what, UiPath, one of the largest IPOs in the last couple years, started as a services company. Basecamp, right, like tens of millions in profits with no VC funding, right? Their competitors have thousands of employees and hundreds of millions in funding, and Basecamp has what, 80 employees working 40 hours a week and have more profits. services right so this is this is like super underrated but what services does is it helps you one get really good at acquiring customers because customers want an outcome they don't want software no customer no outcome no customer kind of thing it makes you good at customer success because you can't hide between buttons and widgets And you'll know exactly what to build, right? And then over time, you'll automate it once you understand the process, and you'll have maximum control of your company with minimal dilution, right? So that was the journey. That's how we started. And so after those two failures, we're like, listen, we're looking for all these sexy things in AI and this and that, but here we're seeing a massive industry with hundreds of billions of dollars given in government incentives. to fund businesses, broken application process. Lloyed (05:56.206) Prone to frustrating audits, takes a long time to get the money, why don't we just automate this? We have clients who've been doing it manually for, we know exactly what to build because we know the process. Then we built like that first MVP using, stitching together Zapier with Zoho Creator, and then we moved to actual building software, but that's like literally, we got to 10 million in revenue doing those things, and in parallel, we built a large community, that our ICP is CEOs of tech companies and we're like CEOs, why do they want these tax incentives to fund their business? Why do they want to fund their business? To grow their company. So why don't we bring them growth knowledge? And this was a time where podcasts weren't very prevalent, LinkedIn content wasn't very prevalent, things like Saster wasn't exploding at the seams. And so we started building a community around our ICP, hosting small meetups and pizza nights. And just say, hey, we're gonna bring a founder, CEO, head of sales from XYZ company who's gone from like zero to 100 million and they're gonna tactically talk about how to get your first X and Y, right? First X, first 100 customers, and first build your first sales team, build your first marketing, oh, very, very tactical and. So our outreach jumped from saying, hey, buy my stuff. And imagine this, you're asking people for their research and development data. When you cold email and say, buy my stuff, they're gonna be like, who the hell are you? Why don't I work with Big Four accounting firms? And you say, get lost, right? And so we started then shifted gears to saying, hey, we're hosting an event where we're inviting the CEO of X successful company who's gonna talk about these Y topics. We only have 10 spots. And people started showing up to those meetups, like 10 people started showing up, We did it with cadence and eventually one day 200 people showed up to the co-working space and they're like folks guys This is not a pizza night. This is a full-blown conference that evolved into our community, which is called traction And it's today it has about 120,000 subscribers. We have a podcast We have a big conference every major CEO from uber to the president of Atlassian has come spoken our events But you know, it's funny is we had this chart before the 23 million round Lloyed (08:16.496) the journey towards 10 and the number of events we did directly correlated. We had no marketing team en route to 10, marketing team of zero. Jason Kirby (08:28.672) Wow. That is quite the journey that you went on. And I want to kind of unpack a couple of pieces of it and specifically the choice to bootstrap as we're in a market where there's just so much, well, we're coming out of a market that was all about, you know, growth at all costs, burn, raise as much money as possible. If you can't raise money, you're not successful and so on. But you bring out some good examples of massive companies that are bootstrapped and you give some great advice. Basically build a profitable business to allow you to then fund the infrastructure or the development of a product. that's given you this place to, you know, kind of then eventually choose who you want to raise capital from. So let's talk a little bit about the series A raise. And in this case, your series A raise is not traditional. And, you know, you already got to $10 million in ARR by that time. You know, what was your strategy when you guys decided to go out for capital? What were your goals and what ended up happening? Lloyed (09:26.402) You know, it's funny, I wrote a post the other day which got a lot of love. I think it had like almost a thousand likes and hundreds of thousands of views on it, which said this is the absolute best way to raise money. And I literally talk about our journey bootstrapping while building a community. So we weren't thinking of raising, seriously. My co-founder, Alex, he has been very anti-raise given past background. And what we've seen right you give up a lot of control and you do somebody else's zero-sum game you feed into Somebody's somebody else's definition of success and he was against that now. I'm Alex is based in Vancouver, Canada I'm based in San Francisco My view is very different But nonetheless I've only worked at failed startups or been a part of failed startups and my wife's a physician and When I talked to her about raising she's like if you're gonna raise money now that the company's bootstrapped and doing well and you build somebody else's zero sum game, and you fail, I cannot keep supporting the family. You're gonna have to get a job at like Salesforce or Oracle or Google, and like this is it. This is like 10 plus years of only either working as an executive startups or like being on founding teams and like nothing's ever worked out. And like the thing is you don't even get a proper salary. That's even worse. So I gotta pay the bills. So that fear was there, right? And then what had happened was we hosted an event when there was a window of opening during the pandemic. So we were to do the big conference, traction conference in 2020 and the pandemic hit obviously and we had to cancel. Now I can't sit through. hours and hours of content, so I didn't have the heart to produce a two-day virtual summit. So I reached out to all the speakers and I'm like, listen, could you, would you be willing to hop on a one-hour AMA with our audience? So these were like these podcast recordings, but live with an audience. And so we started doing them weekly, gave us like two live webinars a week, which we turned the video into YouTube with the audio in a podcast. Lloyed (11:37.458) And it started doing well. On average, we get like 8,000 to 10,000 views on YouTube. But anyway, it started doing well, and then there was a window. Our audience started growing, and we funneled, used that window of opening to host an event. Now, one of the investors from our VC, one of the partners, came to this event. And they reached out saying, wanted to know who runs this event, because they were very impressed with the quality of founders and everything there. And so I got on the phone and they're like, hey, would you be willing to join our venture partner network and we'll give you carry and this and that. I'm like, guys, I don't have the time for this. I'm just like doing these events because it's funnels like leads to the business and drives our brand. But I really don't have to have time to be a scout for a venture capital fund. And they're like, oh, what does your business do? So I explained and they're like, what? You're selling $100 bills for $20? You're literally saying, we'll get you, give me your data, we'll give you money from the government and when you get the money, And they're like, oh, what are your gross margins? And what are you? What is the growth rate? And you how are you funded? How is it acceptable? They're like we'd love to invest in the company and I'm like listen, we don't want investor money We're good and they're like we're not traditional investors I'm like then what are you like debt lenders and they're like listen, we're growth equity I'm like, what is that and they explain like, you know, so there's the VC which is invest and Put everything in growth and you're either boom bust. There's boom or bust, but there's also an in between which is happening right now, right? A lot of founders with small growths or like just they experienced huge growth only because of the pandemic artificial digital transformation time zone, but they couldn't sustain that growth and now they're zombies. So like VCs who fund companies that end up being like slow growth or bust, they either force them to shut down or they don't give them attention. So there's that VC which is like, triple double and there is the P or an exit which is a buyer company right they're like we're in between if you're like five million plus in revenue at 80% gross margin seeing decent growth and clean capital profitable we'll invest in the company but it's more like we'll invest from 30% Lloyed (14:05.252) will liquidate the founders. So you de-risk yourself, you can take money off the table, and you can also play the long game by being involved in the company. And that like perked up my ears. I'm like, what, seriously? I'm like, my jaws are up. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, this is an asset class, this is what people do? They're like, yeah. So then I started back channeling it, I brought it up to Alex. I had another meeting with the guys because it was open. One of the partners was in San Francisco. Jason Kirby (14:18.068) Ha! Lloyed (14:36.252) The guys are radiant capital out of New York, really good guys. And one of the partners happened to be in San Francisco, so I met with him, seemed really good, backchanneled a few conversations. Alex also looked them up and they're like, hey, it's good. So that was honestly the re-decision was during the middle of a pandemic, you can feel it, although the VC world didn't want you to feel it, that this growth that is happening, that this boom, is a function of everyone needing to transact online and it's not gonna last forever. And that's exactly what happened, right? All the VCs knew it was a gamble. If you needed to be, if you can't transact in person, you need to go online. If you go online, you need Zoom, Shopify, Snowflake, Twilio, maybe a whole bunch of different tools, right? And that's the reality of the situation. And so everybody needed to transact online. And the growth you experience in 2020 and 2021, you can't sustain, obviously. And so at the turn of 2022, interest rates went up because they couldn't keep the interest rates low forever. And a market falling always follows an interest rate hike. A recession always follows an interest rate hike. You can look at every recession. And this was a one-two punch because the markets, the companies couldn't sustain the growth they had in 2020 and 2021. So started missing projections in 2022 coupled with hey, interest rates are up. So now what happened? Valuations, markdowns, customers are not buying, missing projections, not growing. A lot of zombie companies. The unicorn porn that was proliferated in 2021. Lloyed (16:26.726) is like shattered, right? And so I think it was a good bet that we played for us personally, and also good for the company because you're on a path to grow sustainably, right? And if you look at it, especially in SaaS, especially when you have recurring customers, recurring revenue, Lloyed (16:53.658) Even if you're going slow, after 10 million, you're gonna have to shoot somebody in the face to take it to zero. Right, and so why try to build some zero sum game and try to aim for like, go from 10 to 30 million in one year and hire more people, like more die of indigestion than starvation. Why try to choke the system and ruin something good? And so I think we made the right decision because had we raised a lot of money and put it just on the balance sheet and tried to gone from 10 to 30, I don't know if it would have played out like that. destroyed the company and uh... It would have been a gamble basically, right? Yes, we had a repeatable scalable channel. It was community that we built that had been growing coupled with sales team. And our sales team had great social proof because there was a lot of going to events, going to our events, hosting our events, partnered events, and shaking hands, kissing babies, like a lot of that. And so when you called email or call, there's social proof there associated. But now if you like, that, right? Oh, you got 10 salespeople, let's add 50 and, you know, five extra revenue. It never works like that, right? Cause you got to add like SDRs, you got to add SDR managers, you got to operations, you got, there's a lot of in between stuff that goes on like piping and tooling and process. And it breaks. I mean, like, I've seen this with a lot of friends. So I think we made the right decision for like sustainable growth and de-risk the founders who had been burning their soul. Lloyed (18:33.975) for the last several years. Jason Kirby (18:36.64) Well, being able to have the option to find a capital partner, well, I guess you didn't find, they found you more serendipitously, but what you had done to lead up to something that does, you built a great business, an attractive business that was profitable, that served you and your partner, but to be presented an opportunity and be in the position to accept that opportunity is basically what you built up to that point. And to take a little bit of money off the top. and allow the company to kind of grow more organically. And also, like you said, it would have been a gamble because the 3X of the company, which would be the expectation in 2020 and 2021, those channels might break and or you'd have to add new channels that are unproven and throw a bunch of money at them and you'd be expected to grow at all costs and potentially, you know. Like you said, losing the company or losing more control or taking more dilution in future rounds. And, you know, this created a very positive outcome for you. And I think, um, more founders need to listen to stories like this of focusing on building a great business that gives you options and not being solely dependent on raising venture capital and ironically enough, like more venture capital, more venture capital comes your way. If you build a business like you did, uh, you know, they, you get sought out and create more opportunities that way. Lloyed (19:54.246) And you know that was a thing, right? So like the four steps we did to Bootstrap, like I said, hone in on the ICP, talk to your customers, offer a service manually, figure out the manual workflow, and then you know exactly what do I automate, eliminate, delegate, meaning if you're manually collecting data, there's APIs, pull it automatically, then normalize that data, then apply workflow. But in parallel to doing those things, build a community around your audience. Like you know, you may have a very niche ICP, or whatever your ICP is. in on that and bring them together. When people are buying your product or listening to what you have to say, you have an audience, right? When you bring that audience together, it becomes a community. When that community comes together to create some impact, like Basecamp did with Ruby on Rails, or like GitLab does, or even Harley Davidson's community, look at every major community, when they come together to do social good or to create some impact, it becomes a movement. movement has undying faith in its purpose, it becomes a cult or a religion, right? From Christianity to CrossFit, that is the journey of going from obscure to iconic. But the point I'm trying to make there is if you don't bring, build a community around your ICP in parallel, then you are relying on I guess HAPN stands for people to hear about you. You gotta engineer your own network, right? And so when you do that, people will hear and see you, word of mouth will spread, and that becomes a very low cost effective channel. Like VCs will come to your events, VCs will engage with your community and so on. Jason Kirby (21:35.788) Yeah, and being able to do that is something that I feel stands out as unique and credible to what you guys have done and creates this opportunity for you. And kind of something that we didn't get a chance to dive into just yet, because you raised that round. It's presented as like a traditional Series A, but it's kind of like a secondary for you guys. You guys get some money off the table, come in and get some balance sheet capital to go grow and do what it's got to do. But you also raised a substantial debt warehouse of $100 million. You know, what was the strategy behind that? Was it the same investors kind of walk us through how that came about as an opportunity and, you know, how did you go about getting it? Lloyed (22:17.85) Incidentally, we met the debt provider also through our community. Right, see this is the thing, this is the value. When you, and this is a framework I wanna talk about and maybe there is some learning here. When you figure out an underserved niche and identify their pain points, you figure out where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep, what are their aspirations and goals. When you understand the problem, right, they always say, fall in love with the problem, not the solution you're offering. If you keep falling in love, if you fall in love with the problem of your customer, your vision becomes a lot bigger. automate tax flutters. Our vision was to enable innovators to change the world. Why? Because every dollar spent in innovation returns 20 to the universe. Vaccines, robots, clean drinking water is a function of innovation. Yet in the last 20 years more than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies have evaporated because they can't innovate. And so our goal was bring you the funding and the know-how to innovate faster. R&D innovation right funding the R&D starts with R&D credits, but it takes a long time to get that money So how do I front load you the cash so you're not waiting for that money? And then the next product we're like we're collecting your interesting R&D data And we also have your financial data because we're lending you money Now I can pull interesting insights and tell you what projects you should invest in who you should hire etc So basically AI driven engineering productivity and engineering investments, right? the journey of the customer. Lloyed (23:51.45) Outcome right customers want an outcome. They don't want software They're looking for R&D money to drive some business outcome if you follow that problem that outcome they're looking for I Think you can come up with good product solutions So that's what it was is like customers like taking a long time to get the money from the government How can we give you the money now through our processes and the technology? Customers like the applications were putting on putting in were like 99% accuracy. So it's like basically a government-backed security so getting money to lend against that was an easy thing. And then we met a friend through this traction community, became good friends, and she's like, hey, we'll put together a warehouse facility and lend to these, help you lend to these companies. So it became a win-win because a good outcome for the customer. They're not waiting long, and it's a good outcome for us because it gives us a little more spread, right? Improves our NRR. And now overall though, it's good for us customer because before we were collecting R&D data and payroll data and some bookkeeping data because whatever we need To learn about the business's R&D money spent on contractors supplies and payroll, but now we're like hey, I got to underwrite you So I also need to know if you're financially stable So I have your banking data and I have all your books not just what you spend on R&D. So now I know What financial outcome your R&D? is driving, right? Traditionally, R&D has been considered a black box. Like sales does something, you know the outcome. So now how do you tie R&D to outcomes? Is a conversation in board meetings that we can break with the next set of products that BOST will build. Hey, by the way, I'm at like 5%. If I switch my mic, is that okay? Or is it like so horrible, the echo? Jason Kirby (25:26.924) Thanks for watching! Jason Kirby (25:43.857) It was pretty noticeable and it'll obviously be pretty noticeable in this switch cutting out. Is it... I guess yeah take it out because you know we got a we only have maybe 10 more minutes left. Lloyed (25:53.522) Yeah, I think we will roll, it's fine. Yeah, I will roll. Jason Kirby (25:59.037) Okay, that's all right. I can always, I guess, call back in for a quick wrap up. So, coming back in now. So when looking at this credit, for businesses, I guess, for businesses listening, how do they take advantage of this credit? What should they look for? And is this cash in their pocket if they're not profitable? Is the government giving them basically free money for investing into R&D? Lloyed (26:23.742) Yeah, definitely. R&D is a broad term. It's basically product development. Are you developing new products or improving existing products? In the United States, you can get up to 20% of your product development dollars as a cashback. If you are less than five years of revenue, right, in the business, it's a cashback. If you're not, then it's a tax credit, basically. And in Canada, it's 64% of your R&D spend as a cashback. So anywhere from like, you know, every country officer like UK, Australia, France, New Zealand, every like Commonwealth country, US, Canada aside, and Canada is as high as 64% of your R&D spend as a cashback. You know how insane that is? You don't need to raise venture dollars. That's insane. Jason Kirby (26:50.282) Nice. Jason Kirby (27:13.281) That is absolutely absurd. It's for every dollar you're basically doubling your, not fully doubling, but you spend a dollar and get 64 cents back. You can spend a lot more on R and D. Well, we'll definitely leave that in the show notes for people to learn and reach out to you to see if they qualify and how they can take advantage of that. So once you raise the hundred million dollar debt facility, which came shortly after raising the A. Lloyed (27:23.613) Exactly. Jason Kirby (27:40.169) What has it done for the growth of the business and the opportunity for the business? What were some of the key learnings from that experience? Lloyed (27:47.618) Definitely, I think one of the key things is... Startups are built in phases, right? Phase one is validation. Get 10 customers to pay you to try it out. Phase two is product market fit. What are you optimizing for? Increase your customer base to fit me from 10 to 50. You're optimizing for high retention. If you have like 100% NRR, your product market fit in my view. But what is the leading indicator of retention? It's engagement. If people are not using your product, they're not gonna retain even if they bought annual contracts. Then the next phase is product channel fit. You figure out a scalable, repeatable channel customers. This is a journey of mostly bootstrap companies by the way. You can't, you don't have the energy to do 10 things at once. And then you get to a point of scale where you know you may be like five, six million in revenue, like four to five, six million in revenue. You have one customer coming through one channel getting one value and then you put 75% of your energy on stoking the fire, like you put fuel on the fire and you spend 25% of your energy on trying new And so that's what we effectively did like, you know added new products, right and the already analytics one which we have coming out we Expanded the R&D lending like we could invest heavily in that as well. We went into some new markets and exploring new markets and New channels, I think that's how we look to spend the money it gave us basically wings, right? but we didn't ignore the 75% fuel on fire because the 25% is a test phase. And provided you've gone through validation, product market fit, product channel fit with that 25%, then you can throw fuel on fire as well. So it gave us more stability and credibility to go longer and faster kind of thing. Jason Kirby (29:40.712) That's great. Yeah, as we kind of wrap up here, this has been a great story for you to share and communicate with everyone. Something that I want to kind of tap into a little bit is, once you've kind of left, you took some money off the table, you still have some upside in the business, but what are you doing now? Like what's something that you're working on now? What are you focused on now? Lloyed (30:10.242) Yeah, definitely. So I'm working on a book right now on community-led growth, basically. Definitely. So as I looked back and reflected on my journey after leaving the day-to-day operations of the company, I was president and co-founder and basically head of community. Jason Kirby (30:17.44) Sounds appropriate for your experience. Lloyed (30:30.022) And as I reflected on my journey from bootstrapping boast to being a refugee of the Gulf War where the country was evacuated, I was like eight or nine years old, community helped the country to safety, to everything I am in my life. Even the investors came to the community as a function of that. And we sit in 2023 here, right, where marketing has literally taken a bloodbath. You see, CPMs are up. It costs twice as much to generate the same ROI from the same channels. Generative AI has made it worse, I feel, because you're seeing the same kind of content. Like you know now somebody is like chat GPT, copy, pasting, even in your LinkedIn comments, right? And consumers are tired, man. Click baits, spam, pop-ups, giving personal data to access crappy white papers. And as you look at it, it's gonna get worse and worse. The old marketing is build your company's brand. The new marketing is rise of micro-influencers and personal brands, like people buy from people. And actually, if you look at some of the most iconic companies, nothing really has changed. The most iconic companies were built on communities. Like if you look at Harley Davidson, almost bankrupt in the 80s, rebuilt on the ethos of community. Community wasn't a marketing strategy, it was a company strategy. Employees went out and started writers clubs. Writers became employees, employees became writers, oversight from the president. It's an iconic company today. Or Apple, Apple sells the outcome, not the feature. Huge communities become a better creative. HubSpot. Perfect example, IP ordered a billion, today it's worth 20 billion. HubSpot had a inbound community before they even had a product. As an engineer, everything I learned about marketing was from HubSpot's inbound community before they even had software. So I truly believe that yesterday's innovation always becomes today's option and tomorrow's commodity. Look at the GPS. It was a... Lloyed (32:36.866) It was hard to get a hold of, then it became an option in the car. Today it's a commodity, it's a car play. But if you build a community, you won't become a commodity because you're constantly focused on the customer and that community is giving you the feedback and the voice to keep reinventing yourself. And so this book is about that, journeys from Harley Davidson to HubSpot, Nike and Red Bull, Atlassian, as well as startup communities like Saster. and startup grind and communities big and small really on how to leverage the power of people to accelerate your growth in the most cost efficient way possible. And so that's the book I talked to thousands of people, hundreds of businesses, asked the same questions over and over again, compared notes with our own journey bootstrapping boasts and came up with distilled it to 13 rules to build and scale. community-led businesses. Jason Kirby (33:36.394) Oh, well that sounds like an amazing book that I'm sure our audience would be interested in learning more about. Where can they learn more about you, the book, and Bose.ai? Lloyed (33:44.026) Definitely, so I'm on LinkedIn, Lloyd Lobo, that's the place I'm most active. My name has an E in it, double L-O-Y-E-D, Lobo. And I was bullied as a kid because there was an E in Lloyd. And I asked my mom, why did you do this to me? Why did you butcher my name like this? And she would always say, I always envisioned that you'd be an entrepreneur someday and you'd wanna, if you wanted to ever. brand name or like, you know, trademark your name, you wouldn't be able to with a generic name like Lloyd. So I threw an E in there. That's so funny. Sometimes you will it into, I kid you not, I asked this every time to her as a kid growing up, like why, why? And she said, sometimes you will it into existence. I love attraction. And the book will be on Fromgrassrootstogreatness.com. It's Fromgrassrootstogreatness, 13 rules to build iconic brands with community led growth. Jason Lemkin of Saster did the Ford on that book Jason Kirby (34:15.296) Wow. Lloyed (34:39.232) Very grateful he's been a longstanding mentor, giving us free boots when we started Boast, and always there with his advice, so eternally grateful to him. And Boast is boast.ai, and if you wanna tune into our Traction community, just go to tractionconf.io or search Traction Podcast on YouTube or on Spotify. Jason Kirby (34:39.584) Nice. Jason Kirby (35:02.06) Awesome. Oh, Lloyd with an E. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today, uh, and sharing your story and sharing an alternative journey that I think most founders are not aware of. And as we go into this new market where things are not as clear as they once were or not as, you know, hot or kind of, as you said, the unicorn porn, uh, it's, it's wise for entrepreneurs to consider their options and see what's out there. Uh, and, and kind of play, but primarily focus on building a great company that built, you know, generates profits. And, uh, I think that's ultimately what you did. and windows for new choices for you to choose. But really appreciate you being on the show today, Lloyd. Look forward for our audience getting to dive into this and take advantage of your book and other opportunities. Lloyed (35:42.446) Definitely, you know, as I close out, I want to share that a special thing told to me by an entrepreneur, you know, don't build somebody else's definition of success. Focus on building your own definition of success. And there were three questions he gave me, very crucial. His name is Jafar Awanadi, founder of Lupio, which also had a big growth equity exit, and now Barley. And he said, what is your personal definition of success? How much money do you want in your bank account? Is there a version of the company you don't want to work for? How long do you see yourself running the company? And what is the argument for raising versus not now? And those things are very important because as founders we don't write this down, right? But if you think about it, when a founder and VC goes into the first conversation, mentally we're always misaligned anyway. A VC is looking to make X return in Y years. A founder is not thinking that way, especially at the seed round. They think they're gonna run the company. And founders should be very deliberate. Ultimately, you're doing this for personal financial freedom. Yes, you wanna create impact. But if you don't care to take care of yourself and your family, you'll never be able to create impact in the world. So you gotta ask, what is my personal definition of success and how much money do I want in the bank account? And play that. And if raising VC money is not gonna optimize that for you, then find the right route for you. Or like, your definition of personal definition of success. Maybe it is you wanna not work 100 hours a week or you wanna work from somewhere, you don't wanna be answerable. If your values are not aligned, don't go in that relationship because it's always gonna be pain. That's my closing advice. Thank you so much, Jason. Love this, absolutely love your questions. Thank you so much. Jason Kirby (37:28.876) Well, thanks for being on the show though, I appreciate it. Alright, we made it through! I was so worried that we weren't gonna get it- uh, get- you said 5% Lloyed (37:31.675) Awesome.