What to Do When You Outgrow Piecemeal Solutions

Seth Gordon: You guys understanding technology so well and having started up your own businesses and even taking them public, you're clearly familiar with the different technologies out there. And ultimately you landed on WealthBlock to help you with your operation. And I do want to get to WealthBlock in a second, but I would be curious if you recall any other technologies that you did explore before coming to us or what you used as you were growing, you know, as angel investors were approaching you and, and then maybe you had to scale your enterprise up a little bit more. I'd be very curious about that. Maybe you were piecemealing a CRM together with, you know, a data room and email marketing tools or, or not.

KP Reddy: Yeah, I mean, so we're a little weird, our first inclination is to build it ourselves.

Seth Gordon: Yeah, I've heard that before too.

KP Reddy: I mean, that's just, we can, so we do, you know, it's not like we have to hire people, we just do it ourselves. And so like our internal CRM is actually proprietary and we built it ourselves because we really did, we thought our CRM is actually a big differentiator for our firm and we needed, and we had things that we were doing that other CRMs cannot do. And in a way shouldn't do, because it's kind of a niche market, right? So you talk about big private equity or, or whatnot. And you talk about big VC, you know, nobody's targeting small VC and in a way, nor should they it's a small market, why would you ever build a company around it? So we had very specific needs that we were, that we built our CRM around. So our first move you know, we started with some data room software and the data room software was okay. In terms of just sharing offerings and knowing what the user behavior was and things like that. It was, you know, it was interesting. But after that, it's like, oh, let's set up a DocuSign. Let's do this. Let's do that. Let's manage wires. Oh, they want to invest via their IRA. So it quickly, I would say that the data rooms were just a notch above like a DocuSend. Right. It was just that little bit of workflow there. And so we found ourselves outgrowing that and our, and our option was, oh, well, let's just, you know Matt on our team, you know, Matt was like, "Let's just, why don't we just build something?" And I was like, I was like, maybe, I mean like, yes, you can. Yes we can. But then we have to support it. We have to think about features. We have to think about the net new features. And I said like, let's go with WealthBlock. Hopefully they keep up. Right? Like they're constantly adding new features that we feel like we don't have, you know, cause one of the challenges you get, you go with a software partner. And if they're not innovating at the pace that your firm is innovating, then you're like, okay, well we'll just do it ourselves. Cause these guys aren't keeping up with us. And I will say like, Matt's been super excited because we've asked you guys for features and either it's been like, yep. Actually we're planning on that. Get it to you in four weeks or no, but that's a good idea. We're gonna go ahead and build it. So I tell you like that's part of it is, you know, working with a software partner, that's going to listen to you and say, no, I think that's a great idea. We'll go ahead and do it because if you guys didn't say, yeah, we'll go ahead and do it. If that happens often enough, then you're like, man, like we're, we're dead end here. We'll just go build it ourselves. So I think for us, it's been to your point, like we talked to you guys a lot because we're always like thinking about something new.