Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hello, it's Open Threads. It's my podcast. I'm Brian Casel welcome. Today I'm talking to Laura Roeder. She is the founder of Paperbell. com. It's a SaaS. It's kind of a suite for coaches with everything that they would need to run their business. Really interesting new product. And she also recently, uh, sold and exited from Edgar, the social media tool.

And she's been very public about the whole exit process. I'll share the link to the article that she wrote all about it. But what I wanted to get into today with Laura is that transition. I'm always so fascinated in the transition, like these like major career chapters, you know, going from one thing to the next thing, especially for founders.

And it was kind of funny cause I went through a similar transition selling Audience Ops and then starting ZipMessage or really [00:01:00] one started before the other as did Paperbell with Laura she started it you know well before she even exited from Edgar so i wanted to sort of talk to her about that and understand what was going on behind the scenes and maybe you know compare some notes in terms of like what things look like in the decision to sell an exit and then the decision to choose what the next business will be i think that's always really interesting it thinking through like okay i've learned a lot in my previous runs at this. Now I want to take those learnings and optimize the business and the checklist of criteria that I look for in my next big chapter. So I always think that there's a lot of really good insight to learn in kind of like moments like this in an entrepreneur's journey. So for now. Let's talk to Laura. Here we go.

Laura Roeder. Great to connect with you here. Welcome.

Laura Roeder: Hello. Thank you. I was [00:02:00] just telling you before that I listened to your other podcasts. The one you do with Jordan, I'm a very loyal listener, especially when you guys both started once you both started new businesses and you were bootstrapped and he wasn't.

And I love that, that contrast. So I'm a fan. So I'm excited to be, to be podcasting with you today.

Brian Casel: That's awesome, Laura. I appreciate it. I always feel like the people who listen to that show tend to be pretty loyal, but it's like there's not many of them. It's just, there's like a small group of people on the internet who tune in and that's all we're ever going to get.

And that's fine.

Laura Roeder: I heard the joke you made about Microcomps, you're like. All of our listeners are here.

Brian Casel: Exactly. Cool. But you know, I mean, I've been following your stuff forever and it's great to finally connect and you recently exited and then transitioned to a new business Paperbell, which is really interesting.

I mean, I went through a similar transition more or less around the same time over the last year. Obviously a lot of differences there, but I would really like to dig into that. I'm always fascinated with this. When people are transitioning from one big chapter of their career into the next one, especially [00:03:00] entrepreneurs.

So I wanted to unpack that a little bit and you covered, and you've been public about the exit and all the details there. I'm not going to get into all of that, but what I'm interested in is like your decision process to even begin to think about exiting Edgar. When about did that like enter your mind is like, maybe it's time to move on.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I mean, for me, it was a little different than I think it is for a lot of people because I had a process of moving myself out of the business over several years. At first, I did the classic, um, like a visionary integrator type of relationship where I was still quite active in the business, but I had someone else that was that operations integrator role that definitely took a lot off my plate.

And then after that, I moved to having her become what we call the president of the business, where I would just talk to her usually once a week, and that was literally it. So I was in, could call it a board seat type of role, although it was a bootstrap business and didn't have a real board. So. For me, it wasn't that like black and [00:04:00] white going from hustling in the business every day to all of a sudden selling it and then being totally out of it or maybe transitioning to a job or something like that.

For me, it was a very gradual process of moving myself out of the business over the years. So it was still a huge change to go from owning a business to not owning a business. And really the thing that was the deciding factor for me is our growth have been flat for a few years. And I just, I just really wanted to make a big change.

And I actually tried a few different versions of big changes for the business. And through that process, I ended up saying, okay, I think I'm just ready to sell this business entirely.

Brian Casel: Yeah, I had a similar thing with audience ops, where I did remove myself from the day to day. And that happened probably back around 2017 or 18.

And then it continued to run for a bunch of years after that. And I had considered selling it a few times, but it wasn't until like 2021 when I was finally like, okay, I could have just kept holding onto it. I'm sure that was the same with you. Was that part of the [00:05:00] decision process of like, well, Yes, you might move on to a new business, but like, maybe you could just hold on and the president can run Edgar rather than.

Laura Roeder: And I had already started Paperbell. So I sold Edgar in 2021. 2020, so I didn't wait, you know, to sell Edgar to start my next thing. So. I definitely thought I could hold on to this business. I thought that would be my plan, but as the owner of a business, you're always responsible for it. Even if you have a team running it, like both from the level of, of course, if somebody quits, especially the people that are running the business, I mean, you still have to dive in and replace them.

If something goes wrong, even if no one's ever calling you for like the day to day fires, like the responsibility of the business ultimately lands on you. And that is just like a low level. Thing in your life, obviously the returns of making great money and other good things from owning a business can be well worth it, but there's always, always, always a mental load when you're the owner of the business, especially of course, [00:06:00] when you're the sole owner of a business.

And I kind of did the math of keep the business or sell the business because it was a very profitable business, but like I said, we were flat at the end. We had it in a maintenance mode run by a freelance team, and the business was going to atrophy over time, although we ended up, I mean, it was so random, like, it ended up actually having small increases month over month in the last year of the business.

Of course, which was good for selling it. So whatever, you know, it seems so random, but obviously if you're not putting a ton of attention on a business, it's going to atrophy over time. So it's like, you have to build in that expectation. Another thing that I never saw talked about anywhere is taxes.

There's a huge tax difference. I mean, this will depend on your personal situation, but for most people, it's much more beneficial to sell a business than to receive ongoing. Income from a business tax wise for me, selling a business as a long term capital gains tax. I didn't have that zero tax thing. It wasn't a C corp, so I didn't get that thing.

And then some people get, that's amazing, [00:07:00] but it's still long term capital gains where you're usually, again, depends a lot on how you have things structured. But for me, that was not the setup for receiving the ongoing income. It was significantly higher taxes. So I just looked at all the different factors of keep versus sell.

Brian Casel: Yeah. I mean, totally. And outsider looking in, it's always like, well, we can calculate the financial picture of like holding it versus selling it. But you're right. It's much more like a low level, but ongoing mental load that is there. I used to joke around when I was running audience ops for those last few years when I was out of the day to day.

If something came to my inbox, it was almost always bad. So like, I literally felt this every time I got an email from our manager, it was like, ah, like what went wrong? So that just added some stress, just like seeing anything. And I'm curious if you ran into this at all either, because part of my reason to sell was like.

I'm focused on a new business now, so I'm not giving any resources or attention or money or energy to growth in the one that I'm [00:08:00] no longer working in. And I, I felt like there's like a lack of opportunity there or like a missed opportunity, but also like for the team, like they wanted to grow, but I'm not giving it that resource.

So like at a certain point, it's better for everyone to let it go. Right.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, absolutely. And also for me, the other business played a factor in, I felt like once that business had got to, I feel like once a SaaS business is at like 10, 000 a month MRR, that's pretty good. Like, okay, we have some level of product market fit.

I don't think you can tell for sure how big beyond that it's going to be, but it's like, okay, even if it stayed there, that would be like fine as far as a, you know, bootstrap business. And probably if you can get to 10, you can keep. So once we got to that level of Paperbell, I was like, okay, Paperbell works.

We have like a base level product market fit. This business is working. And that definitely made me feel more free to like go about it.

Brian Casel: Yeah. So that's what I want to get into here. So it was 2020, like. Around late COVID year, they're

Laura Roeder: kind of right in the middle. We launched in like June, [00:09:00] 2020 COVID started in like March.

So

Brian Casel: yeah, cool. So with Paperbell, it's aimed at coaches. It seems like it's like the full suite of everything that a coach would need to kind of run their business.

Laura Roeder: Right. And that's life coaches, not like football coaches, just to clarify.

Brian Casel: Or is there like a type of coach that tends to fit really well there?

Laura Roeder: Yeah. I mean, our core market is. a type of life coach. They might not call themselves that, but personal coach who's really focused on the one on one side of their business. There's already a lot of great tools out there if you want to have a course business or a membership business. And some of our coaches have some element of that, but I saw that there was really a huge hole in the market for businesses that are focused on.

A chunk of their time being the deliverable. So for a coach, it's different from a designer. Like they're not billing by the hour. They're not saying this is the project. They're really usually what they're selling is like, you get an hour of my time for this much money, usually selling it in some package.

Uh, I discovered there was a huge hole in the market for that, that model. And it's a great [00:10:00] model for a business. So that's our core audience.

Brian Casel: How did you discover that opportunity? I mean, I know that you've had like an audience who probably had a lot of overlap into this. I mean, really like, where did the initial.

Idea for this should be a business that you will do as your next focus.

Laura Roeder: So I was actively looking for ideas because also in between this, I had had a business that I shut down that was actually in the DevOps space. And a big thing I learned from that is I know nothing about the DevOps space. So I mean, I'm not a developer.

I knew of course, going into the business that I wasn't going to be the person on stage giving talks about how to have. The best set up in that area, but I really underestimated the value that I bring as a thought leader, like public face of the business. I just thought, okay, well, I'll just have someone else do that.

But like who it doesn't make sense. So after that business was shut down, I did have a clear criteria of like, okay, the next business. [00:11:00] Needs to serve entrepreneurs, very small businesses, solo businesses, because that's the audience that I love. I would give talks to entrepreneurs all day long. I love talking about it.

I love the people. And I always knew with Edgar, people are like, Oh, you should do a business. That could have the same customers. And I was like, yeah, I just don't have a good idea. You have to have a good idea for a business. I just didn't. For a long time. So I was like, okay, I want to start another SaaS. It needs to be able to be bootstrapped.

It needs to be able to be self serve marketing. So that's what I know how to do self serve marketing, not sales. And it needs to serve that entrepreneur market. And I stumbled across the idea because I was doing business coaching again, then this time in between stepping back from Edgar and kind of looking for my next thing.

I was doing business coaching and I'm like, okay, so what tool am I going to use? To like give someone a link where they can buy an hour of my time and pay. And actually at the time, now the scheduling tools, most of them do have some payment integration. Then they didn't. And even still, it sounds so simple, but like [00:12:00] with calendly or acuity, I can't sell three sessions.

If I want to talk to you three times, you have to go to the same link three different times and schedule and pay over and over and over again. Doesn't sound like that big a deal, but when it's your whole business model, it's like, no, I want to give you a link where you can sign up for six sessions and you can do a payment plan and you can schedule all six sessions.

So the idea for Paperbell, I just assumed that Paperbell already existed. You go looking for something. You're like, okay, I need a tool that does this and this and this. And I'm like, there's no tool. Oh, okay. So it was an obvious, I guess that's what I should build.

Brian Casel: Wow. Yeah. I hadn't even really thought about how selling coaching services is actually pretty unique.

And it's like a combination of recurring payments and time scheduling, right?

Laura Roeder: Right. But it's also very different because there's a ton of tools for like a salon or a fitness studio. And it's also very different from that. Like when you're selling coaching, you're not giving people a dropdown menu of it's like, okay, do you want the haircut?

And then do you want to add the highlights? And then which person do you want to book with? It's a very different booking experience from that. So yeah, there are some pretty unique [00:13:00] aspects to that business model.

Brian Casel: And I also didn't realize that you were doing coaching. So like, because when I see what you've been doing with Paperbell, I sort of assumed that you were observing this market and you were probably connected to many coaches through your audience.

I didn't realize that you were actually doing coaching yourself. So this did come from like a scratch your own itch thing.

Laura Roeder: Yeah. And my coaching was like consulted, like real coaching is where you like, let the people discover their own ideas. Mine was like business consulting where I'm like, I'll give you some advice, which is not, I'm calling it coaching sort of vaguely.

I'm not an accredited coach or anything like that, but it's all again, the same model where it's like, give me some money. I'll give you an hour of my time. Yeah.

Brian Casel: Just like a tangent here. Like that's what always want a really good coach for myself in our space, especially entrepreneur coaches or marketing coaches.

Everyone's calling themselves a coach and it's like, are you really a coach or I don't know. Are you just selling something on your website? I can't tell.

Laura Roeder: Well, it's a totally unregulated industry. And yeah, what people mean by the word coaching is everything from, I'm going to just tell you about my personal experience to like, I've helped a hundred [00:14:00] people like you to like, I'm not going to give you any advice.

I'm just going to reflect back what you're telling me and try to help you. I'm going to just. The accountability for your own goals and milestones, like all these things can mean coaching. So yeah, it's still an industry that's figuring out its way I think.

Brian Casel: Totally. All right. So you started Paperbell while still running Edgar.

I'm also curious like to get back into like the criteria for what you were looking for. So obviously you experienced the pain, you saw the opportunity for Paperbell as a SaaS product. What else were you looking for, like specifically within a SaaS? Like, were you thinking about things like, okay, this could reach average revenue per customer level that's optimal, or there's opportunity for expansion revenue, or you said like the marketing approaches would fit what you're going for or anything like that?

Laura Roeder: Yeah. So for me, I thought, okay, the business needs to be able to get to like a few million ARR doesn't necessarily, I feel like it can't get bigger than that. That's not a deal breaker, but I feel like if it can't even reach that, that is a deal breaker. I [00:15:00] also. Needed it to be something that could be purchased self serve because I don't feel like I'm totally clear on what I'm best at, but I know one thing that I'm good at is doing like inbound content based marketing.

That's how we got all of our business for Edgar. Your own stuff you always take for granted and you think just everybody knows how to do it. But then I talked to other people and I've never done a demo for any of my products. Like I've literally never done one. I never did for Edgar. I've never done one for Paperbell.

Just the way I look at marketing. It's like, no, it's not going to involve my time. We're going to set up systems so that people can find us on the internet. And I have no idea how to do one on one sales. Some people are really great at that. So I'm like, okay, what I know how to do is like. Get us basically discoverable on the internet.

Get that inbound lead flow for us. Again, it's all self serve. So leads just means free account, free trial, whatever. The business has to work in that model, at least partially, like if later it's going to go bigger and add on a [00:16:00] sales team, that can't be the launch model.

Brian Casel: Yeah, for sure. When I sold and threw in the towel on Process Kit, that was one of the things that drove me there was that in order to make this business work, it's going to probably require like a consulting piece. To get customers to like really adopt it and implement it. And like, I was okay doing demos and some self serve stuff, but like getting into like multi thousand dollar consulting engagements just to use the software.

Like that's not what I was going for here. So, and that became a deal breaker.

Laura Roeder: Yeah. It's something I learned when I sold Edgar is Edgar was just the most clean, simple business. All of our revenue came through Stripe. Nobody mailed any checks. Nobody was on any custom plans. It's like, here's our Stripe subscriptions.

That's where a hundred percent, there's like three of them. That's where a hundred percent of revenue comes from. We didn't have any clients that we're doing custom work for. Nobody's on their own weird enterprise plans. So I love that simplicity in a business.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And you're going from one [00:17:00] successful SaaS business, multiple years running that to a second SaaS.

I've been really struggling because my previous business was a product high service and I'm still kind of growing a SaaS. So like for you going into Paperbell from a marketing perspective or like first customers and traction, were there things that you were able to execute more like just quick, quicker or more efficiently that you knew clicked in the previous business and you can get to those faster this time around?

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I mean, we had paying customers on day one. Well, we actually had a few thousand in MRR from day one because we launched to the Edgar list. And that's something that I learned that I had done wrong with Edgar because I had, when I launched Edgar, I had a list from my online course business about social media courses.

But at the time I didn't do one big launch. I'm like, Ooh, I'm going to segment it 20 different ways. I am not a believer in segmenting by the way. I'm like, Nope, you send everybody the best email. Do not do 10 different emails. Do not personalize. Like it's hard enough just sending [00:18:00] everybody one.

Brian Casel: I just get lazy with it.

I always like think I'm going to do that. And then I do like two versions and I'm like, all right, I'm not doing it.

Laura Roeder: And then you always regret it down the road. You're like, Ooh, I'm going to set up a different autoresponder for people who come in via the blog. And then you're like, Oh wait, I forgot I had that thing.

It's super out of date. Now I have to like, wait, what happens if people opt in for both of them? It's like, no.

Brian Casel: Another like tangent. I saw you tweet about that this week. And it was funny because that day I was speaking to Jane Portman on this podcast and we were talking exactly about that. I haven't even looked at my email responders in like, I don't know, months.

They're probably way out of date at this point.

Laura Roeder: Oh yeah. The more you have, the more of a mess it is. So yeah, so With Edgar, I'm like, Oh, I'm going to get all clever and I'm going to send different offers to the different people. So with Paperbell, it's like, okay, no, I want to scoop up as many people as possible from Edgar lists.

And what I ended up doing, which I would recommend if anyone's in a situation where they can do something similar is we just did a giveaway of 10 free lifetime Paperbell accounts. The great thing about that is. You're only going to enter if you're Interested in coaching software. It's not like you're giving [00:19:00] away like free Mac book.

It's like, okay, well you can get a lot of email addresses, but are any of them interested in coaching software? You only enter to win the software if you have some sort of interest in it. So it wasn't super complicated. We did a launch where it was like 10 free lifetime accounts, by the way, only two people out of the 10 people actually.

Set up the account. So if you're worried about giving away too much, like don't be, people don't bother to respond to the email or check your email or whatever. I don't know. We only had two or maybe they didn't actually even want the coaching software. I don't know.

Brian Casel: I've seen that happen with pre sales too on different products over the years where it's like.

Even they pay maybe a couple of hundred bucks for a pre sale. But if the product doesn't get in their hands until months later, they moved on or they lost interest.

Laura Roeder: Yeah. So we did the giveaway and then we did a special founding member price, which was half price of what we launched at. And that was great.

You know, we got to a few thousand MRR. What sucked about that is because we were brand new, it only went down from there. Because it was like literally a new website, we're [00:20:00] obviously not adding on, or maybe not obviously, but we weren't adding on thousands of new MRR every month. So for the first six months it was just like, because we had kind of gotten everyone in that first month, so like people are leaving, but very few new people are coming.

But yeah, as far as what, what I learned to do differently the second time, I'm like, it has to be all about content, all about SEO. So from day one, we're being very serious about our SEO focused blogging strategy. And now I just look last month, we were at 20, 000 search visitors, not. site visitors, but just specifically from search, which is a lot for us.

We're ranking top three for a lot of our core keywords. Like it can be done if you have that focus.

Brian Casel: Yeah. That's awesome. Just getting into that right now, getting some people up and running on content. Was that also part of your analysis of like, this is a business that I can do because I see SEO and content opportunity to grow traffic in this space?

Laura Roeder: I don't know what business wouldn't have that [00:21:00] opportunity. I mean, I guess maybe the only business that would be a business where it was mega competitive, like if you're trying to do credit card offers, obviously there is big opportunity for SEO. It's just a lot more competitive. But I think SEO is hugely overlooked by SaaS.

It's so crazy to me how many SaaS companies don't do SEO, don't have a blog. Because SEO is magical. Like, it gets better over time for less money. Like, what? That's amazing! If you do ads, the second you stop paying for them, you get nothing. There's no, like, residual effects. It's just like, you turn them off, they're gone.

I mean, to me, if you have any shot of making SEO work, any business should start from there. Unless again, it's like an enterprise, like, okay, I'm just going to find my four perfect customers and then I'm going to woo them for a year. Or maybe in that case, you don't need SEO, but anything where you need to be like, every business needs to be found.

Even them. I'm like, you want people to search for you and you want to come up.

Brian Casel: Yeah, totally. I'm wondering about the product. Like we said, it's like a suite of [00:22:00] tools to run your coaching business. So. You were talking about like the payments and the scheduling, but like, it looks like there's a lot of stuff built into it.

It does make sense that a coach would need all these things. I'm wondering, like, did that evolve in the early days of the product? Was it simpler early on and it just grew? Like, how did you think about the product and then like really navigating product market fit and the key use case and activation and all that kind of stuff?

Laura Roeder: It did start more simple and we always try to build like whatever the most people are asking for. It's just extremely customer led. It's not the type of business where we're like, you're riding the horse, but we've got a car. We're out innovating you. We're just like, whatever they ask for, just build that.

I mean, there can be things that people ask for that don't fit in your product vision, but I would say if a lot of people are asking for those things. Maybe you missed the mark on your product vision. You know what I mean? Like, exactly. If like, if you're getting a whole lot of that. So like one of the first big features we added was contract signing because our whole thing [00:23:00] is that you do your whole onboarding workflow in one place.

So your clients go to a link, they schedule, they pay, they do your intake survey. So people said, okay, well, another thing I have people do is sign a contract. So that should go in. And then there was little details. Like I want to be able to do coupon codes. I want to be able to have a setup fee. Some coaches do like an initial fee that's larger in the beginning.

And then sessions are monthly. After that, a lot of people wanted to be able to have their clients choose whether they wanted a payment plan where you got a little discount or, I mean, a one time fee where you get a discount or payment plan. So, yeah, we just along the way. What people ask for is what we build.

Brian Casel: How do you handle that? Like feature requests and prioritizing. I constantly struggle with ZipMessage now. I mean, I probably do a terrible job of this, but I'll get a multiple requests. And then only if I like hear something again, I throw it into the roadmap for like this month, because somebody reminded me that that's something that somebody asked about it's a mess.

Like, how do you actually [00:24:00] prioritize the requests?

Laura Roeder: We don't have any system for it, which I think works fine. I think if something is top of mind, it's there for a reason. Especially if you're looking for the things that come up a lot, like one that we haven't built yet, but we will is SMS. People want their clients to have like an SMS notification for a calendar event.

We can't forget about it because people ask for it all the time. It hasn't made it to the top yet. Edgar, we wasted a lot of time categorizing and tagging. I personally am not a fan of anything like public that lets people submit things and then vote on them. Like, I find it frustrating as a customer because I'm like, you do the work of like categorize.

I just want to tell you what I want. Like you can categorize it however you want. Don't make me find it within your weird system. I don't like it as a customer and it creates. Like, I think it creates frustration for your customers to like see this public website where it's like SMS and they're like, you've had that up there for nine months.

Why haven't you done SMS yet? I really want it. So we don't [00:25:00] do any system. We just like, we're pretty small. I don't personally do customer service emails, but it's not hard to have my eye on the inbox. My husband, Chris is the person who builds. The software, so we just like when he's ready to build the next thing, we just chat about like, okay, what seems to be the next big thing.

Sometimes it's back end. It's not always something customer facing. Obviously sometimes you need to do something, refactoring something, or right now we're changing the functionality of how something works in the backend so that we can do some other things we want to do. So sometimes it's those things, but.

I mean, that's something I've learned from Edgar is it doesn't have to be that systematic or hard. Sometimes it's okay if it's messy, if you feel like you're getting the outcomes that you want.

Brian Casel: Yeah, that's cool. Anything else that's like, really different in how you're approaching this business than did with Edgar?

Laura Roeder: Yes. With Edgar, we were all about the W2 team. So when I launched Edgar, I was in a space where everyone I knew didn't have full time employees, [00:26:00] especially coming from online courses, info products, like those types of businesses. Then nobody had full time employees. It was always like freelancers. And I was like, okay, I think the better way to do it is to have everybody be a full time employee.

They're devoting all their thinking space and their energy just to your business. So that was always what we did with Edgar. I'm doing total opposite with Paperbell. It's all freelancers, all project based. Whenever we can. Now I'm like, I would only hire a full time employee if it just like became ridiculous from a freelance perspective.

But I saw a real downside for a fast moving but small business is like, you have a lot of specialists. Projects that you need, especially from the marketing perspective, which is my side. Like we have a freelancer create SEO focused blog briefs. Oh, you just reached out to her. Actually. She told me Sophie from let me write that down for you to give a little plug to her.

Yeah. I think I'm going to hire her. Yeah. Yeah. So she creates blog briefs [00:27:00] for us. If she were a part time or full time employee. She would be doing a lot of like twiddling her thumbs. Instead, we do it usually once a quarter. She goes in, she batches 20 of them, she's excellent at it, but we don't need her in between.

And when you have employees, you often need to find people that can do a hundred things okay. Instead of someone like Sophie who can do a few things really, really well.

Brian Casel: I've heard you talk about that before with growing the team and using freelancers, and that always resonated with me from when I was doing audience ops, that whole team was freelancers.

But it's also interesting now working in SaaS, cause I'm seeing that, like, I'm finally coming around now that like, it really is about specialists. And much more project based stuff in the SaaS business. But even in audience ops, we had a team of like 25 people who were like, basically every day, but part time contractors, freelancers, even the high level, like team manager was only spending like 20 hours a [00:28:00] week managing audience ops and then doing other gigs, stay at home, parents, traveling, whatever it might be.

So that always made so much more sense to me and the ability to ramp up and ramp down as needed. But now with a SaaS. I think early in the SaaSs I was like Maybe I need to find someone like that who can be a 20 hour a week, but long term, but they're sort of a generalist. Now I'm finding like, it's much more about projects because every month we're building something different, whether it's a product or a model.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I mean, you end up trying so many different things. I mean, even on the development side, I mean, every software company needs at least one full stack developer. But then it's like, maybe you need someone who's especially good at UX or maybe like you're working on a mobile app, but you just kind of need to launch the thing.

And after that, you can just get a freelancer to do a little maintenance. Even on the development side, your needs can change a lot. And we have someone working with us right now. That's doing a really in depth customer research project. We don't need that [00:29:00] all the time.

Brian Casel: Well, again, it's been like so impressive to watch your career and it's been really exciting this last year to see you transition and exit from Paperbell, super exciting.

We'll definitely keep following along. So yeah, Laura, thanks for joining here today. Yeah. Talk to you next time.

Laura Roeder: Thank you.