Building the Berkshire Hathaway of Consumer Subscriptions — Eric Crowley, GP Bullhound

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat, thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.

Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard and with me today RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Eric Crowley, a tech investment banker with GP Bullhound, where he provides transaction advice and capital to top companies in the consumer subscription software space. On the podcast we talk with Eric about the B2B opportunities for B2C apps. The app store alone being bigger than most Fortune 500 companies in which current or future company will build the Berkshire Hathaway of consumer subscriptions. Hey Eric, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Eric Crowley:

Thanks David. Jacob, great to be here too.

David Barnard:

Jacob, always nice to have you joining us as well.

Jacob Eiting:

I'm great. Somebody told me I was going to have a call with a banker today and I got super excited, so it's great to have you back, Eric, for number four. Fourpeat, I think, our first ever.

Eric Crowley:

Quite the honor.

David Barnard:

Not just any banker, the consumers-

Jacob Eiting:

I said my favorite banker.

David Barnard:

Subscription software banker. My favorite banker as well. So Eric, you put out this report every year and the reason you've been on four times is because Jacob and I are continually blown away by stuff you share in the report, and we're excited to have read your very first one when we were both super bullish on subscription apps and not that many other people were, but it feels like every year you share something that still blows my mind, even though I do this day in, day out. And this year it's the fact that Apple's App Store is already, by gross revenue, bigger than 450 out of the 500 Fortune 500 companies, which I should know these things, I look at these numbers every day, but golly, it's just huge and we don't think about it in those terms.

Eric Crowley:

Yeah, I think it's something interesting, because a lot of people when they think consumer subscription software, "Oh, it's a cool niche little industry," and then you step back and say, "Okay, well what is it part of? Where's the storefront?" And so we just did some research and this is all publicly available information. You go to the Apple 10-Ks and 10-Qs read about, there's some really good research out there. So when you start stacking up the revenue, it just grows consistently year over year. I think they're talking about 95 billion this year. How do you put such a large number in comparison? Tesla, which is a phenomenal company, will do about a hundred billion this year. Procter & Gamble, which every single one of us owns something from them in our bathroom for sure, and probably our kitchen, they'll probably do 85 billion.

Jacob Eiting:

In gross, not talking about profits even.

Eric Crowley:

Yeah, top line revenue. And profit, I think this app store is phenomenally profitable. They don't break it up specifically, but rumors have 20 to 30% profit levels, and so you're talking about a 20 to 30 billion in profit and that'll rank them extremely high within the space.

Jacob Eiting:

I can't imagine shampoo is doing quite those numbers.

Eric Crowley:

It's a [inaudible 00:03:27] shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, you got a whole bunch of services. So then we, okay, that's huge dollars and what's included in there, and there's a bunch, just to be clear, it's not just consumer subscription. There's some gaming, there's movies, there's Apple TV, Apple Music, but all those things are purchased through the Apple ecosystem slash phones primarily. The key thing we like to talk about is it just shows that business was probably doing about 46 billion in 2019 and now it's close to a hundred. So that's almost a doubling of content being purchased through the App store regardless of what type it is, and it just shows that this ecosystem, there's argument around consumer fatigue. There's argument around how much more stuff could people truly buy, and the answer is a lot. We don't see that slowing down.

And then the thing we really found fascinating was that if you look at all the other businesses out there that are marketplaces within the app store, when you include both Google and Apple, there's close to 6 million applications. These are small businesses or large businesses running within that ecosystem, and so that's quite powerful and I think even within our little niche where you guys are playing, and this is why I love RevenueCat, which you guys are building, is there's close to a billion subscriptions coming through the app store today, and many people have multiple, and so that number we expect is just going to continue to grow. It's quite big when you start stacking it up compared to other big industries.

Jacob Eiting:

I was talking to somebody about this weekend, I don't believe there's a natural limit on the depth of software if that sounds a little heady, but potential combinations of software are essentially infinite, and I think one of the charts in the report also just shows iPhone penetration, like how many iPhones are there, which has over doubled in the time since we started RevenueCat in 2017, which you look at the 20% year over year, you're like, "Oh, that's numbers but not crazy," but you could compound that out for not that long. Five years is not that long, and now we've suddenly, there's two iPhones for every one that there was five years ago, and as that continues to expand, you just have this fractal creation of software within those, a niche that's too small today to support a business. Just wait five years, it'll be twice as big and then another five years, it'll be four times as big as that. So it's hard to comprehend,

David Barnard:

And I think part of why people, myself included sometimes don't think about just how big the app store is. And Apple Services is that you conflate the 95 billion with gross billings. Oh, 95 billion is what all of Candy Crush plus all the subscription apps is like gross, gross, but that 95 billion is Apple's 30% plus all the stuff that they sell, so that's not gross billings. And in the report you mentioned a number 1.1 trillion, which is an estimate of the overall gross billings of the app store, and then Apple has done reports where they talk about overall app ecosystem revenue where you take into account Airbnbs that are booked through the app that's published on the app store, rides through Uber, and it's trillions of dollars flowing through this app economy, which-

Jacob Eiting:

It's like a third of the internet. The apps are now part of the internet. I don't know if most people conceive of it that way or if Apple conceives of it that way, but they've taken a huge chunk of the internet, which is probably why they're under so much scrutiny, because it's a step back from the liberal structures of the internet. Not to jump from economics into technology too much, but it's still fascinating that this far into phones that the web experience is still not really seen as the place to do business on the phone. You would be surprised, and I guess to some degree Apple wants it that way. The more they can keep the web experience substandard to the app experience, that's a better way for them to extract licensing revenue from their platform.

But I don't think it's just Apple. I think also just technologically the web has not been able to compete from a user experience perspective with... We talking about the apps are getting regulated, websites are just unusable now. Thank you EU cookie popups. Especially on mobile, the user experience debt that that adds on mobile is two times as bad as it is on a website. It's the internet now. We're just talking about the internet, I think, when we talk about the app store in a weird way.

Eric Crowley:

And the way we've looked at it's the UI/UX is just so much better within an application versus within Safari. So even if you're on Airbnb and you go through it through your Google search and it kicks you out of Safari, or Chrome, if that's what you're using your page, it still recommends opening up the app.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's where these companies are investing, which is shocking. I don't think companies would do that unless they were forced, the technological constraints of that web platform, because there's a lot of advantages to shipping on a web, it must be that they can deliver a better, especially for the ones, like Airbnb, where payments can be done, they don't get the benefit of in-app purchases. The is the guy who calls in app purchases the benefit now. The benefit of in-app purchases for their service, they have to do direct commerce with their customers. It's not surprising, but still surprising when you take a step back.

David Barnard:

It's one of the many things I think Apple doesn't quite get enough credit for, is that, yeah, they could be building out an HTML5 app platform that is the web, but they invest a ton in making that app experience really good, and they do that not just because the web experience doesn't allow them to charge the 30% or whatever. They do it because it's a native computing platform, where they can just do more with a native computing platform, then a Safari app can do no matter how much they would invest in that.

Eric Crowley:

I think that you're thinking about it exactly right. They love keeping people within the ecosystem. You got to give them credit too. They're one of the ones who really unlocked purchasing through phones. If they didn't make it so easy, I think the ecosystem as a whole would be way down. The fact that you guys completely trust pushing two buttons or pushing one button twice on your phone as a complete secure way to pay is wild if you go back to the singular wireless days, or trying to pay with a phone and text. Think about that, we're going to be the generation that has to manage that gap.

Future generations are going to be like, "Yeah, I just kind of hold the phone up and scan the QR code or double click something and everything's secure it happens instantly." I don't even have to think about it. In two arenas too. They've done it in app purchases, but also the way for most Shopify supports it, which is half of e-comm now as well, you get that same experience with Apple Pay, which I don't know if we can measure an account for that, but I don't think is insignificant.

Jacob Eiting:

Do they have Apple Pay on macOS? I don't think it works.

Eric Crowley:

Yeah, they do.

Jacob Eiting:

They do. I must not have it set up. I'm almost more willing these days to do e-comm on my phone, even on mobile, just because I get Apple Pay. I'm probably twice as likely to convert, because it's like, "Oh, I don't have to pull my credit card out and type numbers in and all that crap."

Eric Crowley:

Exactly. We're talking about this huge sleeping giant, so I think that's why we wanted to call it out. It's one of the first pages in our report, which is just sometimes people will poo-poo consumer businesses or the application area and we're like, "This is a huge, huge, huge market with lots of dollars, so pay attention. And it's growing faster than almost anything else out there."

Jacob Eiting:

You hit on just the number of apps. Do you think the people looking down their noses are overlooking this is because of the fact that there are big winners in the app store, but there isn't venture scale or big 10 billion IPOs yet for apps within this? Do you think that's part of the reason then it gets overlooked?

Eric Crowley:

So two answers. One, I think historically if you're a 40-year-old, 50-year-old venture capitalist private equity firm, the term app just seems like a little foufou thing. Like something, maybe a calculator app or something to edit photos. You don't understand the economics behind it, but then if you start saying, "Okay, well what's on your phone?" Strava, billion dollar company, Nike Run another outdoor business, super popular, Netflix, Spotify, most people have them on their phones, okay, two public companies. Hey, are you single? Well, guess what? You probably use a dating app. Public companies, billion dollars. So you start going through this, we actually have a thesis that there will be a lot more that go public, and that'll just open up people's understanding of the app store. What's the hottest IPO that's going to happen in 2023? Instacart. How many of their purchases come through an app? Almost all of them. Now, that's not a consumer subscription business by any means, but it is a mobile first business.

Jacob Eiting:

Certainly reflects some sort of consumer trend, right?

Eric Crowley:

Completely. So our argument is that we actually think there'll be a lot more. You talk about MyFitnessPal, which Francisco Partners owns. That business is doing millions in profit. You could talk about onX, which is a hunting business, extremely big business, it's close to IPO scale. There's a bunch of them that are out there, and I think you'll see more and more coming out of education. We have a bunch of thesis around family planning, female health, that eventually there will be more and more success stories, and then that'll just get people to recycle their thinking on what would exist in this economy. And then there's a ton of what we call S&B level businesses. Businesses doing 10 to 20 million in revenue, which is big. They're doing it all digitally and they're very profitable.

Jacob Eiting:

When I think of our user base, which doesn't reflect the greater, a lot of those titans that you talked about of consumer subscription started well before RevenueCat, and we missed as a easy customer, we'll get you someday. But we do see, I was telling somebody about it recently, these tons of, and again, maybe not venture scale or maybe not IPO scale, not yet, and maybe it's not like B2B, where you can scale to a billion dollar outcome in a matter of single digit years. It might take 15 years in consumers house land, but when you look at the underlying macro trends that you're showing, it's hard to stand up and make a straight face argument like it won't happen. I can't tell you that timelines might be a little off expectations, but that these won't produce high margin, very stable, good growth businesses. I think there's a lot of evidence that that's going to be the end state.

David Barnard:

Yeah. One thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is just this increasing willingness to pay, and we've talked about this a little bit in past episodes with you, Eric, is just that over time, more and more people are pulling out the old credit card or their face when it comes to that purchase and actually paying. I think Jacob, it was the last time we talked to Eric that you mentioned your dad not wanting to pay for a subscription-

Jacob Eiting:

For a NASCAR app.

David Barnard:

For a NASCAR app. I would guess that at this point, or at some point in the next year or two-

Jacob Eiting:

He pays for the NASCAR app now.

David Barnard:

Yeah, there you go.

Jacob Eiting:

After a conversation, I had to sit him down and be like, "Dad, do you know how I make money?"

David Barnard:

I don't even think it takes that. A lot of these people who were like, "Oh, apps are free. I should never pay for an app," they're running into a NASCAR app and like, "Okay, I'm going to pay. This is super valuable to me." And so there's multiple layers of the growth that is happening in this space is that not only have iPhones doubled in the last five years, but the number of people who find something valuable enough to pay via subscription is growing. And then-

Jacob Eiting:

There's an interesting causality thing there is just like, "Well, are people sentiments changing or are the incentives there that are causing companies to find the product market fit to expand the market?" Which I don't think there's really a way to untangle that. Is it NASCAR that got my dad to subscribe, or my dad that made the... Now we're going to have to interrogate free will. But yeah, like you said, both. When we go back to this fractal concept of the app store growing and these niches getting created, and we'll probably always have our standard fitness and whatever. These pillars of categories, but I don't see any reason why on some timescale, most of these niches can't create meaningful businesses. Is every niche going to produce a unicorn? No, but enough are going to create enough of these SMBs for it to be a space like worth entering for a lot of software creators.

David Barnard:

All this growth and in-app purchases has brought the attention of regulators worldwide. And this is something you call out in the report, Eric, that there is increasing pressure on Apple and Google to open up payments, to reduce fees, to relax requirements. What's your thinking around that in 2023?

Eric Crowley:

This is always the literally billion dollar question that people are asking us, and I don't think we have any crystal ball here in one, or if Apple makes a change, you are seeing Google start to make some shifts. I'll call it pressure from both the EU and a few other regulators, both in state and federal here in the US is starting to increase. They won the lawsuit against Epic. But listen, a lot of stuff got disclosed and people are starting to dig into it right now. There's a pretty good lawsuit coming out of the UK, so.

Jacob Eiting:

I believe there's a second case too with Google and Epic as well that isn't resolved.

Eric Crowley:

Yeah, so the question is at some point do they just say, "Hey, we're making enough money here, let's ratchet it back." I think every app developer can agree that it's worth something, to be able to sell globally on day one is worth something. And so the question is that 15%, is it 20%? I ultimately think at some point there will be a crack and then that is just straight cashflow for the app developer ecosystem and Apple will find a way to make it back, because then those individuals will either lower their prices, so get more people to subscribe, or they generally increase price over time by adding a lot more features, because their just so much more profitable.

So now they can continue to invest more and more in their businesses because they're generating that much more cashflow. So I guarantee there's an analysis being done in Apple that, "Hey, let's figure this out at some point and just try to shift some of these lawsuits off," because you just don't want to be the target of regulators today. Facebook had it, Microsoft has had it, at some point that, I call it the ISR run of the global regulators will aim at every major tech company, and you just want to stay under that limelight as long as possible.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's a bit of tactics at this point, but I almost wonder if even a rate cut is going to be enough. It's like once a regulator gets the bee in their bonnet that they want to crack down on this. I don't think it becomes, because it never really was a question of economics. I think it's a question of power and making sure that Apple doesn't become bigger and more powerful than these fiat governments. The DMA right now, is happening, Digital Markets Act in Europe. Did you see the ridiculous Cyberpunk press release from the European regulators on this? Oh my god, it's so good. It's really good in the show notes. But they tweeted out who their gatekeepers were, and for some reason it's on a Tron background. It's like, "Technology." Anyway, we're living in a very strange timeline, but they're already doing it and Apple could cut rates tomorrow, it's over. It doesn't matter. They're going to fall under these regulations.

David Barnard:

But it's not over, because if Apple does cut rates to compete, they're going to win back a lot of those payments. I think part of what works in your thesis, Eric, is that if Apple lowers rate, they're going to pull back in payments that aren't currently happening on the app store. Like this weekend I was downloading YouTube TV so I could watch a football game and they're one of the few quote, "Reader apps," that does let you click a link to go outside the app store, and I jumped through all the hurdles and I had to pull out my credit card to get the three digit code-

Jacob Eiting:

The surgeon general's warning against outside apps store purchases.

David Barnard:

I had to jump through all the hoops. But something like YouTube TV, if it were 10% or something in that ballpark, that Apple's charging less, do they want those consumers to be jumping through all these hoops? If there are alternate app stores in Europe, but developers know that they can make more money on Apple's App Store if Apple reduces a fee. I hope that's an analysis being done inside Apple too, is how much of these payments will we win back if it is 10%, 12%, whatever those numbers are.

Jacob Eiting:

I don't think there's enough McKinsey consultants in the world to get that answer. It's just too complicated. There's the pricing pressure and this developer behavior, then there's consumer behavior, then there's conversion rates and throughputs on the app store stuff. It's like trying to change pricing at a SaaS company, not ask me how I know. It's like there's just too many levers. It's impossible to predict and at some point you just got to aim and shoot. I don't know. It depends on what side of the demand curve they're on. If they cut rates, is that really going to bring people back? It's a lot of effort to set up those outside systems.

So I guess in theory it all equilibrializes in the long game, but the thing that's got me a little melancholy about it all is it's already a mess. We've already created a mess. The fact that DMA exists and it will exist forever, it's like another one of these cookie things. Maybe we're going to get rid of the cookie thing at some point and the internet will be fixed, but I just worry that this same regulation without fully understanding the consequences that has led to the web being somewhat unusable these days is going to come to apps and it's impossible to predict the consequences, but I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see. I just feel like the cat's out of the bag already

Eric Crowley:

That's on Apple to take initiative to instead of letting seven different jurisdictions create their own laws and then every [inaudible 00:19:35] has to jump through it, just take the lead, make a big splash, solve the problem, and I think that's my thesis is that they're smart enough, they will make that decision, I think, when the trade-off becomes very apparent.

Jacob Eiting:

If they can solve, it's already complex against seven different jurisdictions, and maybe that was their intent with the first year 15% they were trying to take off some of the heat, but it's hard to evaporate $20 billion in EBITDA or whatever that is.

Eric Crowley:

It's not free money, but it's about as good of free money-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's about as close as you're going to get, right?

David Barnard:

From a regulator standpoint, I do find it really interesting that I don't think Apple and Google get enough credit for just how consumer friendly their payments are. You can get to one place to unsubscribe, they have fraud protection, they have all these kinds of layers built in and the regulators better regulating Apple and Google payments directly versus now anybody.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh yeah, I didn't even think about that.

David Barnard:

There's laws in the US now that are coming up, because you have people like the New York Times, of all people, making you make a phone call to cancel your subscription, and so there is, from a regulatory standpoint-

Jacob Eiting:

It's going to be a net consumer loss, right?

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Net when it's all done. Even if the price cuts and whatever, that's always been my stance. Again, it's hard to give up $20 billion in profit, so maybe Apple overplayed their hand by not giving some. To me, it feels like the market has constructed itself in such a way that it's oligopolized. There's only a handful of players and there's no real way to break that monopoly up. So now I don't know, they're trying to create some sort of market pressure, but there's really no way, you cannot replicate a free market. If it's like IE versus Netscape, at the end of the day, it's an icon you click on. They're sort of like comparable alternatives, but in-app purchases and not in-app purchases are not the same technology. They're not the same thing, but the regulators are trying to act as if that's going to create sufficiently real market pressure. Again, so we've just half solved. Anyway, complaining about European regulations, it's my second favorite activity.

Eric Crowley:

We can sum it all up with just stay tuned, pressures go.

Jacob Eiting:

But I feel like it's been two years of staying tuned and nobody still knows what's going on, but I think we will see when the DMA rolls out, we'll get some hint.

David Barnard:

Something will happen in 2024.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, for sure.

David Barnard:

One of the other things you mentioned in the report that I thought was really interesting was you proposed a question, who will be the Berkshire Hathaway of app stores? So who will be Eric, you post a question, but give me the answer.

Jacob Eiting:

And maybe for the finance nerds explain what that means or the non-finance nerds.

Eric Crowley:

For everyone who has a social life, I'll explain this. Berkshire Hathaway is Warren Buffett's company. And he started up just cash flowing businesses. If you look at his portfolio, he's got stuff from oil and gas pipelines. See's Candies, which is chocolate candy. He used to own textiles.

Jacob Eiting:

Berkshire Hathaway, that was the textile company or something?

Eric Crowley:

Exactly. That was the original name. So that was the founding. So basically Buffett, his thesis was like he just buys good businesses, period. It doesn't matter what industry. And so you've seen roll-ups happen in other industries, car wash industries, you've seen them happen in doctor's clinics, where people get economies of scale and bring them together, and you're starting to see that in the Apple Store. But the interesting thing is we haven't seen it to the extent we would've expect given the amount of dollars that are here and the fragmentation of ownership. And if you think about it, the ability to streamline backend services is quite powerful here. Once again it's a digital product. So there's companies like Maple Media in LA, Bending Spoons out of Italy, Mosaic, which is like an IAC company in New York. They're all doing it and getting some pretty good scale, lots of profitability, but it isn't where we expect it'll be at three to five years.

So I'm sure you guys have all seen some roll-ups that have happened with Amazon. They raised billions and they did it within about a span of six months, absolutely wild. Now that sector was probably well oversold and it got really competitive. And then I think a lot of those businesses are now starting to trend backwards. They rode the e-commerce boom, so that's probably a bad example, but it's an example of the investors tossing money after a roll of strategy, and we haven't seen that in the consumer subscription space yet. And so we've seen plenty of people do SaaS investing. We definitely have some rock stars that do CSS investing, but I think people are going to wake up to the dollars that are here and how profitable these businesses can be. So I listed a couple of the names that I think have a really big chance and there's plenty more. There's Reflectly out of Europe that's coming in, Apex out of Boston. There's a lot of names that are starting to pick up to come after the sector.

Jacob Eiting:

Do you think part of that, is it on the banking side not being able to price the risk for debt to buy these things? What's the difference between an app and a carwash? Well, there's quite a few. Is that the reason? Is it a microeconomic thing where sellers don't want to sell or buyers don't want to buy? Or is it a macroeconomic thing where it's just like the current state of interest rates and compressions and whatnot don't support it?

Eric Crowley:

And probably breaking into a couple categories. I think debt is a little more challenging here. Their debt has now started to come for SaaS, like B2B SaaS software. You're seeing private equity get pretty decent debt lines to do this. I think you'll be able to see that with CSS, but you need to have a decent scale for you to formulate profitability, to get a lender to take a look at it. We've definitely seen some lenders that will back transactions that we've done.

Jacob Eiting:

Are they getting as favorable leverages as they would in a SaaS business?

Eric Crowley:

You aren't, but you also shouldn't take as much leverage. Favorable leverage here, I would actually change the definition and SaaS getting four to five times SaaS EBITDA isn't bad. I would recommend getting two to three here in consumers so you have a little more leeway. You don't want to get in trouble on the debt side here.

Jacob Eiting:

That sounds like just admitting to the unknowns that CSS is a little bit still an open question.

Eric Crowley:

Well, I wouldn't say it's an open question. It just has different characteristics. B2B SaaS you can consistently say you'll have, with really good B2B SaaS, 90% gross retention. People look for much higher rates. And CSS you look at 70%, is a really good first year annual retention rate. So then mathematically you should take on that much debt, because you don't have that much cashflow guarantee. It's a math equation.

Jacob Eiting:

You're much more exposed to the acquisition environment, which tends to be more volatile.

Eric Crowley:

Yeah, and I think the idea is apps have been priced all over the board in the last two or three years. There's enough data points out there now that I think people will be able to price it much more accurately. And listen, my job is to ruin that pricing by selling my clients for the highest price. There'll be an average and the average is where people will look at and try to decide if there's purchase to be made. And so there's a lot of streamlining you can do in the back office around marketing, content creation, finance, and then you can also start doing bundling, so it actually makes sense to partner a few of these apps together. And you can't do that unless you truly own it. There's companies like Alta that's doing some really cool stuff in health and fitness. They're bundling about the health and fitness offerings together.

If you look at Match, publicly traded company, they just bundle dating. And they don't care who you are, or who you want to date, or who you want to fall in love with. They've got a product for you. So you could cover everything in that space. You could say they're also Berkshire Hathaway updating in the app store these days. So I do think there'll be a lot more, there'll be stuff that happens in fitness, there'll be stuff that happens in health. There'll definitely be stuff that happens in education. Chegg is a really good example of that, when they bought Mathway, they'll definitely do some more stuff on that front. So I say stay tuned to this one, we think there'll be some really big outcomes here.

David Barnard:

And there have been a lot of M&A in this space. Any particular ones you wanted to call out of interesting deals that have happened recently?

Eric Crowley:

The biggest one that I would point to is Bending Spoon, it's just a really big deal with some Italian banks. They bought out about 600 million of debt. So back to our debt question, Jacob, that's a big check. And then they went out and bought Evernote, which is a really famous US app. It was a good business, and maybe have been left by the wayside, but rumor has that they bought that won't disclose anything, but well north of a hundred million dollars. It's a big business to buy. So I think that's one. I think there'll be a few more that start coming out. If you look at what Francisco Partners just did with the Weather Channel, people don't understand that, but there's a paid subscription feature in the Weather Channel that's wildly profitable and Francisco Partners did the same thing with MyFitnessPal, which is once again wildly profitable and it's a free app. So I think you just need more people to start to think through that and understand the economics and then the cash flows and I think you'll see some more and more big outcomes here.

David Barnard:

You said a lot of people don't understand it. I don't understand it. So IBM bought the Weather Channel, it was like a subsidiary of IBM and then that just got spun out of IBM to a private equity. Why? And do you know any more about why and how all that happened?

Eric Crowley:

Their goal I think is to take the Weather Channel and take it from being a legacy brand that was on TV 24/7 in a lot of households. Move it off cable, turn it into, if you look at Apple Weather, it's okay. I don't think anyone's blown away by it. A lot of people use a third party weather app, but it is something that you look at every single day. And so there's a lot of ways to monetize an app or service that you use every day.

Jacob Eiting:

It's a good example of dipping their toe, starting to understand this and maybe they're like, "Okay, now we can see some replicability here." It'd be interesting to know what their exit strategies are for those, because I don't think they're going to hold them indefinitely-

Eric Crowley:

There's buyers for everything.

Jacob Eiting:

I guess the question would be do they think of it as an IPO or do they think of it as flip to one of these holding companies potentially-

David Barnard:

Or they do their own roll up in IPO. A bundle between Weather Channel, MyFitnessPal, a couple of other big businesses spins out as its own IPO.

Eric Crowley:

Should be like another IAC. Yeah, I think all of the above is on their board.

David Barnard:

Well, one of the things I think the Weather Channel, Evernote, and others all have in common too, is this push into B2B from B2C apps, Weather Channel, and maybe this is part of what Francisco Partners is headed toward, is that the B2B weather data space is huge. And there's so many examples. Notion going from more B2B to more B2C. There's just this real blending of the use cases between B2B and B2C these days. And you highlight that in this report. What are some of the interesting things you're seeing in that blending of B2B and B2C?

Eric Crowley:

So coming at it from the B2C side, a lot of businesses ramped up during COVID on B2C. People were needing new solutions to new problems they never had before. Pelotons a great example, Headspace, Calm all it did very well, because people were stressed, they didn't go to church, they're looking for something different, they couldn't go see their therapist. So those companies took off. Now I think some of the errors come out of their sales, and so people are looking for new avenues of growth and B2B is a huge untapped market. And if you sit back and say, "Okay, does everything a consumer need, is that readily applicable for business?" The answer is no, of course not. But there are definitely a few that make a ton of sense for businesses to offer their employees as either benefits or ways to make them more productive or to make their workforce more efficient.

So Slack, if you think about it that way, it started as B2C, they're just selling to small individuals that could create teams and then they started selling to B2Bs and Enterprises, Dropbox, exact same solution. They started offering file sharing to one person and then organizations were like, "Hey, I could just use this to replace what I'm using on a server. Let me just go with that." And so the thesis we've had, and we've seen this played out with companies like [inaudible 00:30:14], Headspace when they merge with Ginger, is that if you're designing a product that consumers love, not just love because they have to use it, like your healthcare app, but love it because like, "Hey, I will pay money for it. It's that good. It's that efficient, it makes my life that much better." There's probably a strong rationale that businesses will want to use this.

And so you've seen this happen in an education. Like lynda.com, they sold to LinkedIn and they're selling courses to individuals. And now they take LinkedIn Salesforce, that's selling recruiting services and they sell them courses to businesses, help your employees get better, help your employees get smarter. It's the same use case, you're just using a different Salesforce. So what we think is the magic that builders have around designing a best in class service for consumers, something once in the individual, you, me, Jacob will pay for, you can sell that to B2B pretty easily, if there's a strong benefit you could show up to either their workforce or their productivity. And so it's a really nice growth avenue for a lot of companies if it makes the right fit. So we're seeing a lot of companies do that. I wouldn't call it a pivot, I would call it a growth extension.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's a new channel which follows the trends of consumer verification of SaaS in the workplace as well, bring your own device, all those buzzwords of five years ago or six years ago. I always like to shout out PhotoRoom, one of our customers and friend of mine's app, because I would call them B2B in a lot of ways because they sell to Shopify sellers. It's purchased on the app store. But I think so much about their success has been the stickiness of selling to somebody who's using their app for a business use case, even if it's in this prosumer independent business runner persona. But then you've also seen them pivot to opening up their tooling and selling an API now, which they are selling in a fully B2B motion, which is I guess talking about going that route of understanding who else you can sell this technology. It's all useful technology, it's just bundling in channels.

Eric Crowley:

Canva is another really good example. We started off making software for yearbooks for schools. What I think about is SMBs you can get selling into the Australian school market and then individuals use it, bands use it, wedding planners use it. So all of a sudden that crowd expands and then all of a sudden it's competing head to toe with Adobe. That's really fascinating to me that you've managed to move that quickly, but it's because the app is so well-designed for a consumer that it just takes off and the B2B use case is readily apparent.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's easy to sell when people want your software.

David Barnard:

And I wonder if some of this B2B, B2C play won't even fully cannibalize each other. I was actually just thinking the other day. I use YouTube for work now Jacob, my boss's boss, Jacob, we can have the conversation here.

Jacob Eiting:

Do you have YouTube Premium?

David Barnard:

I don't. So I was actually just thinking the other day-

Jacob Eiting:

We should get it on the revenue account. I open it sometimes and I get real annoyed.

David Barnard:

Right, exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

Then I go open my personal YouTube account, which I have premium. All right, it's officially approved. We can get premium for the company YouTube account.

David Barnard:

But this is a perfect example and it's not cannibalization, because I'm not going to log into my RevenueCat email on my TV to get YouTube ad free or whatever, but it's really annoying and I'm not going to log into my personal Gmail on my company computer.

Jacob Eiting:

God, I have a second browser window that's in my personal stuff on my work computer, which you're not supposed to do. Don't call IT, we don't have an IT department. But yeah, it's interesting though. It's massively under priced if you think about that. So we'll pay 9.99 a month for our whole company to have YouTube Premium and when really the value we derive out of consuming content from YouTube, but then also creating content on YouTube and all that stuff is much, much higher than that. That's always the hard part.

It's like sometimes you're selling something to a consumer and to a business and even on a per seat basis, you need to charge 10x in the business context for exactly the same thing. That's hard. We experience it at RevenueCat, some of our long tail looks very much like consumers. They're like small indies. And then we're also trying to sell the same product for a much higher price point at the other end of the market. And it does take a little bit of value capture arguments and making sure we tell the story in the right way. So it's not easy on the pricing side at least.

Eric Crowley:

Yeah, totally agree. But I think you'll see it happen more and more.

David Barnard:

And that's a fascinating example. I didn't realize YouTube was so cheap to enable on the company side.

Jacob Eiting:

No, I don't know. I just made that up. I just assumed we have a shared thing. I assume we need to turn it on, but maybe not. I don't know.

David Barnard:

I would hope it would be cheaper on a per seat basis on enterprise than it is consumer, but I'm not going to stop subscribing to YouTube because RevenueCat enables it. Anyhow, moving on, another thing you mentioned is the three Cs, content, commerce and community. And this is one of the big focuses of the report this year. Tell me about that.

Eric Crowley:

So it's a thesis we've been kicking around. We call it the Three Cs, but it's as you exactly called out it's content, commerce, community. And so the way we've thought about this is any category, regardless of what type of industry you're in, if you're a consumer brand, the hardest things you have is acquiring new customers, getting them to do a purchase and then keeping them up, their LTV. That applies to everything from selling Coke or Pepsi, to selling a consumer subscription app. And so if you looked at a lot of the D2C brands that have taken off in luggage, in female health, in nutrition, in almost any category, their biggest challenge is finding users.

And so what we've seen happen, and we've done this in a few deals, I won't name which ones, but if you create really high quality content that's SEO searchable or eventually will be AI searchable, the consumer will find you, but you have to produce that best in class content that provides a solution to whatever questioning they're typing into that browser, which is like, "How do I lose weight? How do I need a friend? How do I find someone to date?"

All these questions that consumers ask every day, if you provide top level answers to that, consumers will find you one way, shape or form. So that's the content. And then you have to convince them to do a purchase. And then that purchase can take a variety of features and that could be an e-commerce purchase, or maybe try order of vitamins, or maybe you do a trial which is, "Hey, I'm subscribing to an app but I'm not really in there yet and I just want to test it." But it's getting someone to finally trust you with a purchase. And then ultimately sometimes those are one-time purchases and you don't fall in love with the product, but the most passionate ones will want something more with you. They'll want to engage with you, they'll want to feel part of the brand. And that's the community.

And what we've seen is people that monetize those communities with subscriptions. And then the whole thing is wrapped up by user generated content, and that flows right up into the top of the funnel, which is acquiring new users. And so we've seen companies start to do this, like MeatEater, which is a TCG portfolio company. You'll see a lot of others where the passion that people have for certain brands goes beyond just a purchase history. They wear T-shirts of the company. And you think about that and that's just a weird way to be a walking billboard for certain companies, but I see tons of people with Discord T-shirts and it's just part of their persona. They like to be part of that, they like to be part of that group.

And so what we've seen is we're helping a couple of companies. Now you should have all three of those stacks and if you don't, you might want to look at buying one of them. And then you can really expand the LTV of your user, or you can make it much easier to acquire a customer for free. So your marketing budgets go way, way down. And that's an area we're spending a lot of time in focusing on. That's our thesis.

David Barnard:

That's fascinating. And with all these things, that's not going to work for every business. Different businesses are going to have to find different ways to solve that top of funnel. We actually talked about this on the most recent podcast with Reid DeRamus. He was at Crunchyroll, and at Crunchyroll they had that T-shirt test. So it's funny you brought up the T-shirt, is that you're going to have apps that people aren't going to wear your T-shirt and that's okay, but the magic of those three together is part of what's going to build these massive, massive companies. And I think you're right, that community piece I think is overlooked in the app space. It's like are you just another app or are you something people really deeply care about? And then how do you position yourself more in that direction?

Jacob Eiting:

It maps to the three challenges I think of when we're thinking about product strategy for RevenueCat and stuff like that, that all apps have. It's acquisition, conversion and retention. So it's like content for acquisition, commerce and conversion, same thing. And then community is a huge lever for retention. It's continual creation of content, or user generated content. And affinity content can be a very broad definition. Something has to entice somebody to try your app out. Even just your app store page, it's content, that's a form of storytelling and discovery that you need to nail. It's probably not sufficient to lead to some of the margins that you've been talking about Eric today. You need to have a lower cost channel of acquisition than that. There's no consumer subscription business that doesn't have to solve acquisition, conversion and retention. That's it. Those are the three problems.

Eric Crowley:

A perfect analogy. So I just had a daughter, well, I didn't have one, my wife had one. I was around for the-

Jacob Eiting:

I now have a daughter.

Eric Crowley:

I now have a daughter. I was digging into this space and we talk about this report, we think of big unicorns in female health. And a perfect example, if you think about just the, I know you guys have kids, but for some of your listeners that don't, if you're thinking about getting pregnant, there's a ton of apps and solutions you have for women that can think about it and they'll find those and there's free and there's paid. But that is the start of that journey and that journey ends hopefully with pregnancy and then there's a bunch of stuff you could buy once you're either pregnant or just had the baby. Everything from medical services, to vitamins, to cameras, to different tools for measurement, tons of stuff. It's literally an unlimited e-commerce offering.

Jacob Eiting:

I noticed my spend went up when I entered that phase in my life a little bit.

Eric Crowley:

Yeah, I ended up taking unexplained hits over the last 13 months.

David Barnard:

And I've got four, so multiply all those by four, thank you very much.

Jacob Eiting:

Nobody can complain as much as David.

Eric Crowley:

All right David, were not [inaudible 00:39:37] as cool as you. I'm just at one, give me a break. But anyway, and then you have the baby and then there's tons of baby toys you can buy. Along each one of those value chains. If you're in the female health space, you can acquire the customers with content and a nice service, but then you lose them once they have the baby. There's a natural churn point. And then if you're selling baby goods, you're competing with everyone on Amazon, on Google for key search terms like baby blanket, for baby monitor, for baby clothes. That is a crazy competitive category. And then ultimately you lose that customer at some point. And so if you put those three categories together like pre-pregnancy, pregnancy and baby, that LTV, that consumer, goes from one purchase to effectively three years, that's a huge shift in LTV.

And if you can acquire those customers at the very beginning of that point and then monetizing them across that entire next 36 months, it changes the entire CAC of those businesses. So it's a big thesis for people and we're actively having conversations about it. So there is a solution there. And the question I ask myself on female health, not to keep spending time on this topic, but who's the Apple of female health? What is the brand you go to that is by far the best? And you don't question it, you just buy it, and there isn't one, there should be one. For something that happens millions of times a year, why isn't there an Apple female health?

David Barnard:

Yeah. Well and FemTech is one of the six opportunities you highlight in the report as quote category killers, is categories where you see the potential to build massive businesses to become the Apple of FemTech, to become the Apple of X. So talk me through the other category killer potentials.

Eric Crowley:

So category killer, our thesis is in consumer subscription. It generally ends up being a duopoly of two to four major players in each category and then a bunch of smaller businesses that are still good but won't hit unicorn billion dollar exit strategies. You see this in dating, you see this in fitness, you see this in entertainment both on video and music. There's only a few winners.

David Barnard:

Duolingo and Babbel.

Eric Crowley:

Great. Yeah, perfect example on education, put Chegg in there with Busuu, which is a [inaudible 00:41:36] deal, #advertising. So then we looked at what are the categories that don't have those natural winners? Where are the names that you don't see the automatic answer for when you're looking to do something? And so FemTech was one. We think family management is a huge category. Everyone uses Outlook for their personal life, but what's the product for the chief household officer who's in charge of scheduling, activities? People are trying to act together like, Calendly and merging a couple calendars and doing some budgeting tools.

Jacob Eiting:

I've seen some D2C hardware stuff for this, but I'm also, I see that stuff and I'm like, "That's not the problem. It's putting on the wall is not the problem. This is a data merger issue."

David Barnard:

I go through this constantly. My wife's been out of town a lot and our shared calendars are a disaster and she actually bought a physical calendar like, "Oh, I'm going to do it all physical this year," and then she has to be out of town and now I have to run all the playbook and it's not on my calendar.

Jacob Eiting:

We're on the physical calendar. We just got a piece of paper that we put on the fridge and we write dates down on it, which again, when you travel is bad.

Eric Crowley:

I got embarrassed where I was like I had to call the doctor for my daughter. I have no idea who my daughter's doctor was. Not a clue. I couldn't find it. My wife knew we were on a first name basis, they knew each other well. I had no idea. That should easily be able for me to find up there and all that information could easily be synced. We have it all. It sits somewhere within the future.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, we've solved this problem in the enterprise, if you will.

Eric Crowley:

Exactly.

David Barnard:

And there are players already in this space. What do you think it's going to take for one of these to break out? Man, I've looked at them and it's like I've tried and it's hard to use or whatever. What's it going to take?

Eric Crowley:

I think it's got to be the API intersection. You got to have someone come in with a bunch of money and start spending money on paying people to get their data. The API is connecting from mint.com. You got to be able to access calendar dates, school dates, but a lot of that you can start to solve that with AI. If you're able to read emails and you say, "All right, any email I'll get from St. Andrew's preschool, that immediately goes into our family calendar as an activity." If you start saying, "Hey, my personal AI that sits on my phone, read the text messages that come in and mention Jimmy's soccer practice, pull that in." So I think, not to spin off in an AI, but it's just data and it's structuring that data into an output or a dashboard. I don't think it's that challenging at the end of the day.

Jacob Eiting:

It makes me think of Flighty, our friend Ryan Jones and his app, which is not an app that hadn't been tackled before, but sometimes these categories, I feel like they just need a bit of an ature approach. Somebody who's going to come in and really build, I think about this calendar app I use on desktop called Cron that got bought by Notion. I think in these basic apps, there's still opportunities for really discerning and caring user experience people to come in and that's my feeling with David. You didn't use it because the product market fit wasn't there, the user experience wasn't there. If they had designed the user experience right, and designing the user experience right for product market fit means making that onboarding so sticky that you wouldn't have got frustrated and confused and it would've just been easy to use.

Eric Crowley:

It requires a ton of setup. It may even have to have require a service angle to onboard everything.

Jacob Eiting:

Buy some McKinsey consultants to come in and set up, hired Accenture to do my family calendar.

David Barnard:

Sleeper to win the family management. I recently ramped up with Greenlight and it was a huge onboarding and everything else, but now my kids all have credit cards. We can give them allowance right to their credit card. It's actually a phenomenal service. And back to some of the topics in the report. We originally used Greenlight like five years ago and it just wasn't there yet. It was a lot of hassles. My kids were young, and then recently it's sitting at the pool with a fellow dad, and the dad was like, "Oh yeah, my kids are doing all these chores." I'm like, "How are you doing that?" He said, "Oh yeah, we've got this Greenlight card and we put bounties on the chores, and then they go do them, and they get paid, and it's this great one layer of family management." Then I went and signed back up five years later, I've been reacquired as a user.

Jacob Eiting:

It takes that long, it takes that long to build really great software. Five years to make a really great app. There are plenty of examples out there of apps that really, it just takes a long time to iterate and back to investment, Eric, the amount of money you need to front load that development time. Maybe isn't always that easy, but honestly can get an app for profitability, Slopes may be a good example of an app that has been around for a long time and certainly wasn't as functional and featureful when it started to where it is today. It's a powerhouse today. It wasn't like that on versions one and two.

Eric Crowley:

You need the ability to structure the data and then it's going to be some sort of a modular thing where you pull in the school functionality, you maybe pay a little bit more to upgrade to that, and then you pull in the college planning, or the financial tool, or the chores tool, maybe pull in the grocery purchase. Every kid can select something for the grocery order. That's a huge category I think in the word of mouth of that category will be massive. We think sports is another big one, and this ties into family management, but it's very separate, which is like David, if you ask yourself how much do you spend on youth sports a year between fees, registration, driving, uniforms, gear, I'm guessing it's started to approach five figures.

Jacob Eiting:

I don't know. David's kids just do OpenAI all day. That's what his big bills are.

Eric Crowley:

Include Roblox into that whatever. [inaudible 00:46:37].

David Barnard:

My daughter's playing volleyball now. I feel you. It's not five figures yet, but we're trying to get my two youngest into soccer, so we're headed that direction. And you're right, driving them all around for games. And then I was actually just talking to a colleague about the apps in this space and just how challenging they are to use, and they're full screen ads, and it's just not a great space right now, but huge opportunity. Like you said, there's ton of spending, ton of coordination. There's a lot going on in that space.

Eric Crowley:

Opportunity. Where there's an opportunity, somebody will create the Uber app that will take it over-

David Barnard:

[inaudible 00:47:09] in the air, or something like that called $12 a month, easy math, and it just streamlines everything.

Jacob Eiting:

Look at ClassDojo. They did for in the classroom. It wasn't through some fuddy sales channel through schools. They went around it with the B2C motion. You can probably replicate that in a lot of these categories.

Eric Crowley:

So I think that's another one. And then the last one I'll mention is private wealth and a tax advisor. And I think a lot of this, not to harp on OpenAI, or AI tools, but a lot of this data is out there. Your tax code is very publicly written every day. It's just impossible to read and it's impossible to customize it to you. How does this apply to me and my situation? And so if you look at what Intuit's doing and there's a bunch of other products that are coming up to solve what's the level between Wealthfront and Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, people with 50, that's called a hundred thousand in assets to a million.

That's a huge chunk of America and they all deserve something that's customized and probably tech enabled and makes their life super simple and removes a lot of the complaints, and the concerns, and the friction, and just provides these suggestions on what should you do to manage your money. "Hey, it's sitting in your checking account, you should move over to the savings account," takes nothing and it gives you 5% interest. That is a really valuable tool that I think people are going to go for it.

Jacob Eiting:

And you mentioned AI and Intuits plan and to using more of AI to enhance their tools. It creates an interesting shift in how these tools can be monetized. Apple's been pretty clear that if it's software driven and high margin like an AI helper would be, that's got to go through IAP and I don't think Apple's going to seed that ground. I think that's going to be a huge, if you think of the marginal growth in the app store in the next five years, it's going to come from these AI tools. Your previous wealth manager app might've circumvented app store policies or app store payments because it could have gone through what you're paying an actual human being. Now if it's AI, sorry, Apple's going to get their big on that for sure.

Eric Crowley:

But you could probably easily do it as a subscription and then they just make suggestions and then you log into your app and make the changes, or there's ways to make connections so it actually doesn't flow through the app, if that makes sense. Log into my Chase account, do something for me and move it around.

Jacob Eiting:

Some of these FinTechs, get around that. That's one way to get around IAP though is to have account management, which I honestly think at some point Apple's going to look at, because there's some of these companies providing purely software services, but because they have an attached bank account, they're just drafting and it's like, "That's not going to last forever." Apple's going to start cracking down.

Eric Crowley:

Great question.

David Barnard:

Apple's got to get their money. Yeah. Well, hey, I wanted to wrap up on a really fascinating stat and that's the fact that nearly 80% of companies featured in the annual CSS report that you've done have either raised or sold and had a great exit. Any special picks this year that you're highlighting?

Eric Crowley:

I've got a lot of picks. The stat is, and this is a little bit of a humblebrag, but every year in our report starting in 2019, we profile three builders. Three companies that are building stuff that are doing some cool things. I think we've been really good at picking, so we profiled AllTrails, which raised a big round from Permira, Blinkist, which sold to Go1, Prodigy Math. I think we profiled RevenueCat back in the day. I don't know if you guys remember that. PlayOn, got sold to KKR in a huge deal, close to 800 million. There's a bunch of success stories there. This year, I think every one of our picks is great. We've got OpenSnow, which is doing something in the weather space. We have SpotGamma, which is in the financial newsletter space, a huge sleeping giant. I think that's a big space. Talking Parents who, I think David was on your podcast and this is the family management business for divorced parents who have a very specific use case.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's like a certain niche of that category.

Eric Crowley:

50% of marriages end in divorce, which is awful, but even if you go to 10%, it's a huge, huge TAM.

Jacob Eiting:

Making lemonade out of lemons over here.

Eric Crowley:

And I wish I can tell you, I hope it goes to zero, but all those are real strong winners.

Jacob Eiting:

I love OpenSnow, by the way. I'm glad you mentioned I've been on and off it. When I lived in California as a subscriber, it was the best snow prediction.

Eric Crowley:

It got better every year. They hire great people to produce content. You're like, that's totally-

Jacob Eiting:

Meteorologists on staff talking and stuff. I've always thought they were awesome-

Eric Crowley:

Using the fraction of your epic ski pass, you save money, everything.

David Barnard:

All right, Eric, well, it was so fun chatting. We're going to share a link to the report, which will be out before this podcast airs, so you'll be able to go right to the show notes and download the report. Anything else you wanted to share, Eric, as we're wrapping up.

Eric Crowley:

We love getting inbounds from your guest, David, so if anyone has anything to ask, reach out. Eric.crowley@gpbullhound.com. We're active on LinkedIn and Twitter and then our report's free, so jump on the website when it's published, download it. Tell us what we get wrong. I don't care if I got something right. Tell me what I got wrong. Come out, challenge our assumptions, so we'd love to hear from everyone.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, you guys help people sell app businesses, right? That's the short of it, right? If you've got an app business and you're interested in no longer owning that app business in exchange for a pile of money, maybe talk to Eric.

Eric Crowley:

We brought into subscription businesses, that's our specialty. If you're selling to consumers and you're selling a subscription, we think we are one of one bank you should call.

Jacob Eiting:

If anybody who's a founder who goes to try to get a loan for a mortgage, don't talk to a bank that doesn't understand your situation because it ends poorly.

Eric Crowley:

We speak your language. We'll be able to log in your RevenueCat dashboard and tell you everything that's going on.

David Barnard:

And just so our listeners are aware, you've told me, I think the figure is somewhere around like a $10 million exit is where it starts to make sense to engage GP Bullhound. So we're not talking sell you out for a hundred thousand and call, Eric. You got to have a fairly large business-

Jacob Eiting:

When the transactions get that big, you want partners, you don't want to do this yourself because little mistakes start to be six figure differences.

Eric Crowley:

We are not cheap and I'm very proud of that. We pay for quality, but I think, and we'll be transparent with everyone like, "Hey, don't use a banker," or "use a banker, but not us." We're always happy to give free guidance too. It's part of what we give back to the ecosystem.

David Barnard:

Awesome. Thanks so much, Eric. It was great chatting with you today.

Eric Crowley:

Thanks guys, it's always a pleasure to be on. I really appreciate it.

David Barnard:

Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat. sub.club.com to join our private community.