Adapting: Mystery - How to Grow When Your Original Business Goes to Zero (with cofounders Shane Kovalsky & Vince Coppola)
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All right, acquired LPs. Welcome to a show that's been a long time in the making with friends of the show from Mystery. We will dive into a true adapting LP episode here in a minute. I think a lot of smiling faces because we were just really excited about this story. But a couple pieces of admin before we dive in. So we had our first LP call last week that we think was really, really fun. I think, David, we probably had about 100 people cycle through over the course of the couple hours.

Talking in the Slack is one thing, but it's so much higher fidelity to get to really talk on Zoom with more of you. And so we're going to be doing that approximately once a month. Keep checking this feed for when we announce the next LP call. Yeah. And if you have ideas for topics or things you want to cover, send them to us in advance and we'll add it to the schedule and make sure we cover it.

Yep. The other thing is we have started uploading transcripts of the LP shows for LPs only. That is in a folder on Google Drive, which you can find a link to in the show notes here. In that Google Drive folder, we are also going to upload the video from the Zoom calls. So if you are likely in a European time zone, and this is at the worst possible time at like 5 or 6 p.m. Pacific,

You can check out the recording there. If you missed this last one, we uploaded it. And we'll also try and be a little bit more time zone sensitive in the future. All right, David, will you take us into mystery? This is also a special occurrence on Acquired. I think this is the first time on either show that we have a co-founding duo that we're going to have on together at the same time. So we've got Shane and Vince.

from Mystery. We'll get into their story and how they met at Convoy and went on to start Mystery together, but we're super excited to have you guys. Mystery, for those of you who don't know, during normal times is this really amazing service that Ben and I actually used for our acquired holiday celebration where you

tell mystery what you broadly like and what you want to do on an evening uh what your broad preferences are and then mystery creates a magical night of mystery for you uh going out on the town it's awesome super exciting like kind of nothing either ben or i have ever experienced but obviously we don't live in normal times right now so we're going to talk about what mystery is doing today but welcome guys and thanks for joining us yeah thanks for having us on guys

You've created, in normal times, sort of the perfect cure for my lack of creativity in trying to plan an evening or an activity, be it date night or be it great time with David Rosenthal where we find out well in a lift that we are going fencing. Tons of fun. And I think Ben might have been maybe the sixth or seventh mystery ever. Yeah.

uh you signed up for it like right after we started that on it when it was just a text service yeah you were up there i think it was it was the url was mystery.date then because it was i think a little bit more tailored we don't we don't talk about that we don't that may or may not go to our old sites ancient history that's great love it to tease a little bit we're gonna tell the whole story of how we got here but um

You guys launched two weeks ago, Mystery Night In. Super excited to talk about that. You actually, I think if I'm right, had your best month ever with this new pivot, right? Yeah, just coming in on the final day, we broke our revenue record in a single month.

Sorry, I missed that. In the outline, I thought that that was referring to February as your best month ever because you had Valentine's Day. Yeah. So February was our best month ever by about 40%. And then we broke that this month just with night in. Ironically. With a completely different product. You're like a restaurant and events company that somehow just had your best month ever in a global pandemic. Yeah.

We're not trying to brag. I also think it's worth calling out this. This is a first for acquired. I don't think we've ever had like a seed stage company on the show before. So this is like the earliest, grittiest stage of company to join us. Yeah. Well, I hope our scrappiness doesn't show too much. No, we want to show the scrappiness. All right.

All right. Well, so to dive into, um, history and facts, which we haven't been doing on normal adapting episodes, but this is the LP show. So we're going to go for, go for the whole hog here. Your stories are amazing. Just like your personal stories. Can you guys start each of you? What were you doing before convoy and how did you get into this crazy world? Yeah. Vince, you want to kick it off? Yeah, sure. Um, so before convoy, I was actually an EMT. I worked on an ambulance for five or six years. Um,

And I coded a bunch of my free time and I made this app for other first responders so that they could see a real time feed of 911 calls as they were going out and actually still support it. It's called 911 feed. And I think that's kind of that was my first project and it really got me into coding. And I remember the feeling I had was like this feeling of power. Like I can sit down in a day or two days and make something that impacts people's lives and people find useful and doesn't exist anymore.

you know, before. And that was just the coolest feeling ever. And so I knew I wanted to become a software engineer. The most casual representation of what it actually was. Like he's like on the side decrypting radio waves. It's like a real time feed. They're not encrypted. They're encoded, but yeah. Okay.

Yeah, it was a fun project. So before this, you were not an engineer. No. You were an EMT. Yeah. How did you get interested and decide to pick up software development? I mean, that's kind of it. We had some software in our ambulances that we use for patient reporting and for navigation and stuff like that. And there's...

they, I found them to be very inefficient. So I would hack on those. I disassemble them into assembly or intermediate code and then assembly, um, and just like hack them as they were running. And I kind of like learned to do a lot of stuff through that. I made some macros to, to do the repetitive parts for me and stuff like that. And kind of sent that out to everybody else. And now all the crews were using it. And that was, you know, when I started realizing that I can make useful things for people. And so, um,

I made 911 feed and then I realized that this is what I want to do for a living. And I think I had a knack for it. I was definitely very scrappy, very hacky. I would not even call myself an engineer at that point. Maybe a coder. I think there's a difference between a coder and an engineer. Okay, you're hacking...

Literally in ambulances. It's so cool that what you did is now being used, especially as ambulances are always critical, but even especially critical in this moment in time. How did you end up jumping over to Convoy? Yeah, so I knew I wanted to become an engineer. And I had a friend from just after high school, Jonathan Stanton, who was one of the founding engineers at Convoy.

And I reached out to him. I knew he was working on a secret thing and Convoy had just come out. I think this was like October where they came out with the press and they came out of stealth mode. This is 2016? 2015. 2015.

Yeah. And so that was right around the area. He was actually helping me a couple months before that. I was like, you know, I want to become an engineer. Didn't go to school for this. Might not have gone to school at all. And he was very similar. And he, you know, he made that transition. And so he kind of mentored me a little bit, gave me some advice. And when Convoy came out and, you know, they were hiring engineers, I was like, throw my hat in the race, you know. So I sent in a resume and I didn't hear anything for months.

two months and then randomly they got back to me in December of 2015 and said, you know, here's a homework problem. And it was making this dispatch thing. It was a, yeah, it was, it was very simple. Um, but I, I, I worked really hard on it and it was the first tests I had ever written in my life because, uh, I figured, uh, production stuff should have tests. And so, yeah. And then, uh, they brought me in for an interview and it was just a crazy experience. Shane.

Let's hear your backstory. Yeah, backstory. Grew up in the Seattle area. Went to school out in TCU for a little bit and then over at Gonzaga. I had worked at a couple different tech startups in Seattle and done all sorts of stuff in school. Worked at Porch for a little while, which kind of got me super interested in tech in the first place. But then in school did all sorts of random things like building shitty websites for law firms and bakeries, you know, that classic one. Basically just WordPress themes ripped off.

You could have started Webflow. I could have started Webflow. Yeah, really. But I also did a bunch of I think the wackiest one is either selling blenders online or street selling a bunch of plastic toys, little flare copters that you see go up in the air and come down real slow. I street sold thousands and thousands of those. What is street selling?

That means I was on the street, like literally slanging up little toys and asking people walking by if they wanted to buy one. Wait, wait. Okay, we can't let this go. Did you... Was that like of your own volition and accord because you thought this would be a good way to make money? Or did some... Was that part of your job? Like how did you find yourself street slanging? Oddly, I was visiting my sister when she was studying abroad and I might have been a little...

Yeah.

and uh i think i bought like five thousand then and then over the next two years i think i bought and sold well over thirty thousand of them um which was just yeah that helped pay for school helped me get through a little bit make some cash and i don't know if listeners remember our episode with nolan bushnell on atari where um he sold was it strawberries ben that he sold uh in the neighborhood yeah yeah yeah i thought you were gonna call him a carny

Well, that's also appropriate. It's making me think this is the 21st century version of selling strawberries to your neighbors. You're raking in serious cash here. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a good business. You can make two grand in one night on 4th of July. It was a great business. My dad would come help me sometimes. It was a whole family affair. That's awesome. All right, catch us up. So how'd you get to Convoy?

Yeah, I got to Convoy. I had been leaving school, finishing up. I had interviewed at a couple of consulting firms and looked at that. But Convoy, it's actually a pretty funny story. I wanted to work at a startup really bad and I was looking at the Seattle scene post porch and it was pretty much just enterprise SaaS or real estate.

and none of those really jumped the interest too much. So it was a funny story when I looked and I saw the TIDA announcement that I think Vince is talking about. And I still have a text message to my sister that I sent that hopefully I can swear on the show. It said, how fucking hilarious would it be if I worked at a trucking startup? And then my sister responded and

Long story short, I emailed Dan at like 9 p.m. on a Wednesday. And to his credit, he got back within two minutes. I had an interview at 7 a.m. the next morning. And once you kind of heard what Convoy was and what they were doing, it was a no-brainer. So I started the day after I graduated. Yeah. Convoy was what, like 20-ish people then when you guys joined? Yeah. Yeah. We were, I think Vince was probably like the 14th or so employee and I was like a month later. So both in the first 20 employees there.

And it grows to, what, 700, 800 over the next couple of years before you guys start to strike out? Yeah, when we started, it was really a product in the market, but absolutely the wrong product in the market. Very, very few customers, like 15, 20 people. And when we left, a multi-billion dollar business, I think just over 800 people, two offices, yeah, eight roles for me later, different.

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I started as a software engineer at 65. And yeah, I started right around $40,000 after negotiating for months, after a three-month contract period. And for folks who are listening in the Bay Area, which is sort of where our largest constituency is, I mean, this is Seattle, so it's some amount lower, but probably on average, maybe 20%, 30% tops lower. These are not Seattle salaries you're hearing. A starting salary for a new grad at Facebook or...

Google or Microsoft is what probably pushing, you know, in the technical disciplines over 200 now, right? Yeah. I mean, I turned down an offer two and a half times more than what I took at Convoy.

Let's fast forward to Mystery. So how did you guys decide on each other for starting this business? How did you decide what to start? What's the origin story? Well, so how we decided on each other is a great story. I'd actually like to take you way back to when we first met. Shane was a scrappy kid that got hired that was hacking together things using Zapier. And I had just gotten a taste of actual architecture and structured engineering. And so I hated Shane. Yeah.

I just, no, I did not. I did not like him. Classic startup dichotomy here. Yeah. He was just like running around making things himself without putting in requests, without anything like that. And I'm just like, who does this guy think he is? And then, yeah, we became really good friends. We, I think we won every hackathon together. We worked together on a lot of different projects.

side hustles to be honest yeah basically i'd have all these random ideas and then try to get them product uh prioritized at which it would never happen and then vince and i would hack and you know it's 6 p.m to 1 1 a.m 2 a.m every night yeah and uh ended up just shipping some really cool stuff at convoy and uh yeah we worked together a bunch even though we were never directly on the same team even even as i was a product manager or even anything else

You guys were both pretty entrepreneurial, obviously, in your DNA. Was the goal for both of you always to start a company? How did that idea kind of take shape in your heads?

I always knew I wanted to start a company. It was a question of kind of when. For me, Convoy was about getting that toolkit around like what does it actually take to grow a company and what are all the different facets and components. I think I ran up every learning curve I could at Convoy in eight different roles. I guess at a certain point, you know, Convoy went from a zero to one company to a one to ten company to now it was kind of in the, hey, let's go scale this thing. And, you know, Scope, while we were working with far more customers and had far more technical impact,

The scope personally went from, hey, figure out how to onboard supply to, hey, figure out how to order the recommendations below a search bar in the app. And that was the big kicker for me that was like, all right, yeah, I got to find something else.

And I think Vince, I mean, I more or less, we just started kind of hacking on weekends on a bunch of different ideas. Some a little more embarrassing than others. We were taking a crypto gift card to market at one point. Everything from that to putting billboards on the side of trucks. Which I mean, it's a great idea. It's still a great idea. Yeah. Convoy should really work on that. Yeah.

To, yeah, Mystery started, it was probably our third or fourth one that we essentially were just building MVPs for and launching and seeing what the market had. Yeah, because again, we knew we were ready for something beyond Convoy. We were ready to leave. You know, we were in a stable place at Convoy, but yeah, we were just spending our free time figuring out what was next. And so what was that MVP and what was the initial insight that you were trying to prove with Mystery? Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I hate to say that we stumbled into a lot of it, but we really kind of did. Mystery actually started as a slightly different idea.

This was, geez, two summers ago now. I was taking a bunch of weekend trips where it sounds a little cheesy or corny, but I go to the airport and take a first flight out and just kind of go wherever the ticket went. And you get a great deal on the way out and then you get ripped off on the way back because it's a last minute ticket. Kind of equals out to like a normal trip. But I went on some really bad ones. Went on one really like incredible trip to Austin where it happened to be ACL. And like just everything about the trip was like magical and perfect.

And that was actually the original idea. We had the domain name firstflightout.app because .app domain names are really big at the time. And the experience was going to be like a packing list that you got the week before with some red herrings in there. You get a ride to the airport, you geofence in, you get a mobile boarding pass. Like, how cool would that be? And then we'd have your whole weekend planned for like this amazing, magical weekend. And then I told Vince that idea and he told me that that would be impossible. Nope.

Yeah, Vito. I mean, nothing's impossible. Nothing's impossible. But that one was just like the principal agency of the flights and just like the amount of just coordination and market size of surprise travel even of that was a little bit, was a little high. But then essentially took that idea of like this magical weekend, shrunk it down to magical night out. I ripped the first flight out idea of not knowing where you're going and threw that into the Uber ride because I thought that was the really exciting feature. It was like not knowing where you're going to go next. Yeah.

And then I just started doing it. Vince was actually the first one I ever did it with because he hadn't agreed to the idea yet. And I knew I wouldn't have a company unless he was going to start it because I needed at least somebody to actually build the entire company while I sat around and pretended to work. Yeah, there's definitely a couple months. So you took Vince on a date? No, my girlfriend at the time and I, we went on the first mystery. And Shane told me like a little bit ahead of time. He said, you know, Friday night, 6 p.m.,

I lived a block away from convoy at the time. And so I was like, yeah, you walk home. There's going to be an Uber that's going to pick you up at 630. You're not going to know where you're going. I'm going to send you a couple different places and...

have fun. And I was like, okay. And so, so the whole time behind the scenes, Shane is here, like at a bar doing all the like Google voice, sending me text messages, coordinating Ubers, everything like that. I changed my name in the Uber app to your name. So it worked out thoughtful, very thoughtful. Uh, so I get a text message, you know, your Uber's arriving, blah, blah, blah. There's a license plate. And so we hopped in and, um,

And so I knew ahead of time that I wasn't going to know where I was going. I always say this. It's conceptually simple. You don't know where you're going. It's a surprise. That's fun. But it wasn't until we were on the freeway in the back of an Uber. I realized it's the only time I had ever been in an Uber and had not known where I was going. And there was something about you're on the freeway and there's like endless possibilities. I was like, OK, where are we going? OK, which exit is taking? OK, which place is around here?

And it was just, I don't know, the anticipation was palpable. And yeah, we went to this really cool Italian restaurant. The owner came out and greeted us, told us the history of the restaurant. He knew our names. It was just this

Awesome experience that you couldn't have gotten anywhere else. And in this case, couldn't have gotten if Shane hadn't arranged all of this ahead of time. This is a great descriptor of sort of the user experience of this version of mystery. Let's ignore this delivery world that we live in for the moment. So let's go back.

six weeks and give me the investor side pitch now because there's a lot of folks in the audience that probably want to know like why is this an interesting business like why should I be sort of compelled by by this I'm sure it's fun I'm sure it's cool but like give me give me the pitch

Yeah, absolutely. So I think when I mentioned stumbled into the business opportunity, I think that might be a little bit of it. You know, I thought when we launched it, I thought the really cool feature was not knowing where we were going to go and that was going to be really cool. And, you know, it wasn't the beginning. I think that's why people come to Mystery, but people stay with Mystery because it's a nice night out that you don't have to plan. And that's the big value prop. And in reality, we're building a marketplace where

We have complete control over where people go. Nobody's signing up for a specific night out where I want to go to this Italian restaurant or this specific activity. They're signing up for a mystery. So we get to pick when, where and how people spend their money and physically move bodies throughout the city, which for us means we're like Yelp with load balancing. We're able to maximize yield management for an activity provider at the transaction level.

and provide this incredible experience while literally funneling demand to our providers in the right and most efficient and effective way.

Yeah. And to back that up from an experience I had, you know, my first mystery, I think I did drinks to open the night and then a cocktail making class that was sort of the activity and then dinner later on at like a jazz show. And in the cocktail making class, it was full. Like a lot of times I think you go to these things that this woman was on Airbnb experiences before and she was like, oh yeah, no, it's really hard because like I'll have one or two people show up. But like

the fixed cost is my time and renting this space and all this. But like now that I'm working with mystery, like they just fill it with eight people every time. So it's always sort of like guaranteed. The first time you told me about that concept, like it hadn't clicked when I was on the experience of like, wow, of course this class is full and that's going to be unusual for these off the beaten path sort of activities that you could do. But the first time that you were pitching me on that, we're like, no, no, we control the,

where demand meets to supply it's not up to the user and not only are they not upset by that like that's why they're paying us yeah yeah so i just i thought that was really clever

Yeah, absolutely. And even as we've kept growing, I mean, we've found different ways of optimizing all across the chain. I mean, for a restaurant, we get to say, hey, you know, even if a restaurant that doesn't do reservations, they'll give us two to three tables a night because we can guarantee a table turn. We can guarantee a spend. We can make sure that we're passing the right information, that the restaurant can provide an incredible hospitality experience. Right.

the level of just like impact we can have for that customer bringing not only are we going to bring you a customer, but it's a customer that we think will love you. And we're going to help make sure that they're going to come back. I think that's that's the part that's just really and spend. I mean, we know ahead of time people's budgets. And so if certain restaurants like we know basically which price bracket they're looking to spend for for food for the night, we can target in that way as well. Yeah.

Yeah, well, spend and time too, I would imagine, right? Because on a mystery, you're controlling when they get dropped off and picked up. So for a restaurant, say you're Canlis, right? Well, Canlis is a bad example because they want you to spend as much time there as you want. But you're really hot restaurant that's hard to get a table at. Their worst nightmare is a group comes in and they sit at a table for three hours, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And for those of the listeners that are in the restaurant industry will know like that the restaurants will strive for a three turn table in a night. Almost always they're going to hit two because the reservations will be 15 minutes apart. One person will spend a little bit too long. The other person won't. They won't fill that table. For us, we're all about getting three turns in the night because we're going to drop you off and I'm going to pick you up in an hour and 15. Be ready to leave then.

And the user really doesn't have too much other option. Obviously, there's some wiggle room on both sides just in case. But we also eliminate things like dealing with the check. So they don't have to send for the check and come back. There's all these micro iterations that we can do to improve the experience and increase efficiency. And it does kind of feel crazy when no check comes and they're like, yeah, you're good to go. And you feel so specially. It's almost like, wow, someone's paying for me. But like, no, no, no, I'm still paying. Yeah.

Well, you guys also do, I don't know if this is on purpose or not, but you do a really nice thing where you don't actually see the bill until like a few days or even a week later. So like you get this kind of glow of like... Totally intentional. I intentionally didn't build. Our operations team would love that one. It's a feature of the marketplace.

So one last thing before we kind of move to the adapting section here. So you guys, you have this really nice event where you have your one year anniversary party. I don't know if it's end of January, sometime in February. You know, it's super fun to be there, see lots of familiar faces. And you guys debut this video. And this is video that I think we bonded in this sort of like nerd moment way of me actually having heard of your video production company.

Yes, I took a lot of shit later from people being like, you were way too into that video because of the person who made it. And I'm like, yeah, but that's why Vince and Shane are into it too. That's literally exactly why. We had all followed Adam and Sandwich before the last, I don't know how many years. So I guess to reveal the producer there, it's a Sandwich video down in California. Yeah.

I had been like an obsessive viewer of all of their videos ever since the coin card. He was a fanboy. Back in the day, like my sister and I used to like wait for these videos to drop and we'd like binge watch all of these videos, which sounds weird because they're commercials. But they're like just so magically perfect. For me, it was like three months after we started Mystery-ish. It must have been like May of 2020.

19. 19. Yeah. Math is hard. Um, May of 2019, I reached out to, uh, Adam and Caroline over at sandwich, basically just like this long pitch at why they should work with us and why they should do it really cheap. Cause we didn't have any money, all these different things. And this is just for listeners who don't know, like some of the videos that explainer videos that these guys have, they did the original square video. They did the original jam box video. Um,

Yeah, they don't really work with small stage underfunded startups too often anymore. I mean, they're working with like Uber and Groupon at this point. But they really like the idea right off the very bat. And I definitely like handcrafted every word in that email and respective emails post. But yeah, we more or less courted them for months.

trying to get them to find room and somebody to take it. And essentially they, they were able to do this video for us. I won't explicitly say the exact number, but it was very, very reasonable. Um, and, they were able to work with us in a really good way where, you know, we're obviously going to work with them in the future when we can. Um, but they were super supportive and that was just one of the most, most like incredible experiences. Vincent actually flew down to LA for filming, um,

which was, I mean, a learning experience because we, it's funny, we thought, we have all these partners in Seattle and they were like, well, one way to cut costs is you can get them to let us film there for free. And we were like, oh, perfect. Like,

Activity providers love us. Like we're going to be able to go film anywhere. Cause I had talked to like a couple of our partners here in Seattle and they were like, Oh yeah, we'd let you film. But then they're like, go to Hollywood, go to LA. And so we like reached out. We're like, we're going to be launching there soon. Like we'd love to just stop by and maybe film. And they're like, yeah, our shoot fee is $5,000. Like, Oh, you have a shoot fee. Things are different in LA. Yeah.

so that was a little bit more of a hustle. We were able to get all of our venues to do it free of charge, which was, uh, definitely a lot of work and scrappiness and me selling people a massive dream over the phone of future potential working, working together. But, uh, going down and filming, I mean, I think we expected like two guys in a camera crew. Yeah, it was an incredible production, incredible effort. Um,

I mean, we have a ton of like behind the scenes videos and stuff, and there's just like 20 people in this room. But all you ever see on the screen is just like one or two people. And it's just insane to watch these things all come together. And there's always fog. They always there's fog in every scene. No, I never knew that. Yeah. I missed it once we left. I'm like, why is my life not in fog right now? Well,

So let me frame this up for folks. So this was like end of February. You're starting to really feel like a company that's hitting their stride. If I can share, I think you did close to a hundred dates on Valentine's day, just in that one night where I say a hundred mysteries in that one night, you,

you know, launch this new website, you launch this new video. Everyone should go check it out. It's still on the website. We'll link it in the show notes. And like, it really is humming. Like you're this cool thing that can send people on these mysteries to, to in-person places. And then like three weeks later, the state of Washington declares a national emergency, which is of course the only place you're operating right now. A few days after that, the NBA, you know, cancels the rest of their season. And here you are,

you're putting people in lifts and sending them to physical places to do something novel with other people.

Yeah, and our unit economics are based off of batching and an ability for people to not know where they're going. Yeah, no, that's a pretty apt description. I mean, we literally in February, it felt like we finally just like everything was working. We finally were like, all right, this is actually going to work. All the automation was taking place. We were just literally about to launch new cities in April and May and June. And like we were, I mean, everything was like finally not perfect, but like damn near. Yeah.

And then Seattle is the epicenter of coronavirus. Of course it is. Of course it is. We're like, yeah, sure. What was the moment when you guys realized that your world was about to change? Do you remember where you were when you were like, oh, shit. I just remember a trickle of cancellations coming in and that trickle turned into a stream. And then eventually we, you know,

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it, you know, very similar to other people. Like at first it was, okay, this is going to be here for, this is just like the like played up. This is the media, you know, this is just like the flu, whatever it is. And so then we're doing some contingency planning. We're saying like, okay, well like what if this happens? We have all these city launches that we're prepping for. Like we have operations employees that day to day plan mysteries and execute mysteries. So we're like, okay, well we can move them over to city planning. Um,

We don't want to disrupt the roadmap at all from engineering because that's like the only part of our business that can still run. And then it starts getting a little bit worse. And I mean, then the reality for us was like,

you know, as far as like companies that should adapt, like we were at the very far end of the spectrum of like, no one will use our product. There was a moment we had like an all hands right at the very beginning when this was starting to be a problem. And I ended the all hands with like, hey, if this does become a problem, like what ideas do we have? And I think it was actually funny because it was Troy on our team. It was his very first day that day. And Troy was like, well, what about like boxes? You can do boxes.

We're like, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. Sure, Troy. Kind of brushed it off. Brushed it off. Like, yeah, we're never going to do that. And then here I am like three, maybe three or four days later, pulling Vince in a room saying like, dude, we got to do boxes. Like, we got to start moving. We got to start creating option value. Like, we are going to do this. Like, we need to move very, very fast.

For us, like conviction, you know, once you, you can, you know, waft and kind of play your option value game for a while, but at a certain point you just have to have conviction and you have to see that like, yeah, you don't know what's going to happen. And, you know, I think a lot of people actually misinterpret unknown risk pretty often, but yeah.

certain point, conviction is going to let you perform. And as long as you have one thing to bet on, and for us, that was betting on our team, you can just start moving forward and moving forward means progress in one way or another and not being stable. And one hand, it was scary. But on the other hand, I mean, this is what we signed up for in the very, very beginning. Grassroots, being scrappy, trying a thing out, testing and experimenting in production kind of a thing. And

I love that. Shane loves that. Our team loves that. And so it was a really cool experience to do that temporary pivot that we're still temporarily pivoting in. Yeah, so I think we went from nothing to launch in six days. Yeah, so tell us, what is the product when you say a box? Yeah.

We actually had a few different options that we were considering. Everything from what the current product is, which is a mystery night in. So that's an activity at home and a meal delivered to doorstep. Kind of kin to a traditional mystery, which is two to four stops. We're going to give you all the components of you can have a nice dessert, a nice good warm meal and an activity that you can actually interact with your significant other, whoever it is. Like a board game. Something a little more active. Yeah.

Like a board game-ish crafting type activities. Like a mystery, Ben. Stop asking questions. Yeah, that's the key. We don't have to tell you what's in the box. That way it could be literally anything in the back end. Everything from like a mystery night in to we thought about like doing a global gift card. We thought about doing... What was the...

What was the other ideas? I mean, we thought about sending dance instructors to your home. Yeah, sending experience providers to people's homes. Because that might be fun. No holds barred, we were down to consider any ideas. Yeah. And I think like all ideas sound crazy when you're in that kind of stage, especially like for us, like everything was literally just working and everything sounded insane. And I think it's so easy to get caught up and say like, okay, well, like a mystery box, like,

you can run into all those roadblocks. You can say like, okay, well like, what are we going to put in the box? And like, you can spend hours saying like, oh, this is that you get so tied up in these small little problems that you're like, no, we shouldn't do that. But I think for us, it's like the 80, 20 of like, what are we going to put in the box? Well, we have a bunch of providers that should answer that question. We'll figure that out. How are we going to deliver the boxes? Well, there's a bunch of people that are going to be out of work. We can figure that out. That'll be fine. Well, how are we going to get meals? Well, there's a bunch of restaurants that are probably going to love to do the meals. Like that should work fine.

And the solutions we had were really around like converting existing suppliers. We're storing boxes at restaurants on the tables because there's no one at the tables. So for us, like it's pretty easy where like all of our boxes are actually literally in restaurants around the city right now. So the delivery could be a lot more seamless. And, you know, we went from that where I've been literally in my whole team to

out being a delivery driver every single day. Yeah, literally. Oh, so you're not using the lifts that you call for people when they're... No, we're not using lifts. Yeah, in the beginning, we hired some people from the industry. And the idea was like, we were going to hire these people from the industry who'd been out of work and they were going to deliver U-Haul vans. And we did that. We had two U-Haul vans and that was going to be great.

except we had more than 100 orders in the first day. And we had to deliver, I think, 60 boxes night one and two U-Hauls only fit 30. So that meant the entire team was out delivering boxes.

So, yeah, we delivered. I think that's a good lesson for every LP on the show, especially for the next few months. People talk about how everyone should wait tables or bus tables at some point in their life to get an appreciation for restaurant work. Everybody should do delivery food at one point in their life. Do not ask them to come to your apartment. It is so annoying. Go out and meet them. Be nice. They are real people, too. Like, it is definitely something that, like, you have to do to really appreciate. Like, I will never...

ever not tip my delivery driver the rest of my life although i have been attempted to be tipped like a dollar myself and i'm like i don't need your dollar i'm good we're gonna do playbook here in a minute and you know my theme i think for you guys knowing you for a while going way back but this is just kind of takes to another level is like you you just learn by shipping right like when you're talking about doing something new whether it's a product a startup or whatever like you

You can sit and game plan in your head all you want. And like you said, think of blockers or reasons it won't work or what might happen. You know, you have no idea until you like put it out there in the world and then that's how you learn. But to jump back in, you've made the decision as a company, you're going to do mystery night in, you're going to do the boxes. Troy is, Troy is carrying the day here. Um, yeah, Troy pivots the whole company on day one. Yeah.

What had to happen? Did you try and adapt your existing technology and operations infrastructure? What were the key things that got you out that first night delivering boxes? Shane already mentioned that he was pretty adamant about not pivoting engineering and keeping them focused. And to his credit, he built everything himself.

I'm going to just now hand it over to you. Talk about that. So the idea, like I think for us now, you know, hindsight 2020, I think it would have involved engineering a little bit earlier. Oh, okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. But at the time it's like, oh, we don't know how long this is going to be. Like what's the most lightweight thing? And like, I'm looking at our burn, I'm looking at everything else. I'm like, okay, product and engineering is the only thing that is going to continue to work and be productive. Let's let that sit. So of course, like I built everything in Webflow in like a night, right?

Like it's not connected to our system at all. There's no manual. There's no like real processing. We downloaded like a route optimizer online. Like, I mean, like everything was just complete hacked together. There's no other way of putting it. Like I drove down to Lacey to buy boxes and I pulled and he was like, oh, you want to pull the truck up? And I'm like, I have a Jeep. And it's like, that's not going to fit. I mean, like literally we didn't know how to do any of this.

At a certain point, you just have to trust that you have smart people working for you. You can believe in yourself. Nothing's really that hard at the end of the day. But yeah, now it is nice to have someone like Vince who can build an entire product in a week because I think on Monday, he started building our MVP yesterday. You built the MVP. I'm building the VP. Yeah.

He's building the valuable product, not viable. There's enough off-the-shelf tools. You can build anything, hack it together. What about translating the business model? So at least my understanding, and it's been a while since I looked at a receipt, but my understanding is you basically charge, I think, $20 planning fee for the mystery. And then there might be some negotiated charges where you get an advantageous rate on whatever I order at

the restaurant or something like that is it the same business model in the mystery boxes

No, not even close. Completely different. From the mystery, it's a $20 planning fee. And then our unit economics are really based around on the activity providers that we work with. We'll charge MSRP. And then our ability to fill out that class and do that effectively is kind of the model where the customer will never pay more than they would booking it themselves. But for the activity providers making extra money, that's kind of our pin unit economics. For the box, it was really about like, hey,

what do we think a good price point for the box would be? How many price points should we have? And, you know, you mentioned that we just kind of launch things and learn. The first price points we launched were drastically off. We needed to do some really quick iterations. I think we're already on version three of the boxes. A little both actually. Too high in some of the price points and too low in others. We wanted to make, I think our goal was 30 bucks a box.

And we thought we could combine enough interesting things into one box with different suppliers. Into margin? Like 30 bucks in margin? Into margin. Yeah. Yeah, correct. So I think we're doing that roughly. It's still like, I mean, we hot launched the product in six days. Looking back, I think we made about 30 bucks a box. And then some boxes we might have made a little bit too much money. And we definitely needed to like fix a little bit of the back end.

But yeah, I mean, we learned so much on the first night. We learned more the second night. We probably made 40 or 50 changes to the first product we shipped already. And we're already planning out version two, version three, I think, before we're ready to start scaling this to new cities. And what it's been like 15, 16 days. Is that right? Since since you launched? Yeah, we launched it two weeks. Yeah, about two weeks ago.

I'm not surprised at all how much you learned on the product and broadly speaking, the supply side and the operations side.

But the demand side, talk to us about that. I mean, you had a hundred orders your first night, right? Like clearly there is demand for this. And, you know, speaking as someone who Jenny and I decided at the outset of this, that we needed to institute date night once a week at home. Like I want you guys to be in San Francisco to be able to use this. How did you think about that? Did you just think like, Hey, this is something people would want and we might fit a need or something?

Did you do testing? How did you get the word out? I think, yeah, that was for us. It was about when we were first picking the idea, if we were going to do gift cards or we were going to do boxes, it was about, Hey, how do we like really de-risk every portion of this idea? So one of the first things we did was take all those ideas and pitch them to press and

We said like, hey, we're thinking about doing this, this or this. Like, is any of this interesting? Is this something you could help us spread the word about? So we had press commitments from five different local vendors before we even started working on the project. You use press to gauge which could be more consumer resonant. That and talking to our suppliers and talking to all of our restaurant partners and talking to the activity providers, like who really needed it.

And trying to figure out where we could have the maximum value creation, both from the supply side, but also like what made the most sense on demand, right?

You know, like I think it's an easy bet for us to say like we could have done gift cards. And the big reason we didn't was like, yeah, it would have helped our restaurant providers, our activity providers, not really because they don't have that kind of infrastructure set up. And it wasn't going to do anything for our users at home. Like we're going to have a gift card and like that's awesome. They get to feel like they're supporting local businesses. But this one just created the most value on all ends of our marketplace. Yeah.

And to be fair, we actually talked about doing a delivery box kind of thing like a year ago, right around the beginning. We didn't want to randomize ourselves, but it was a thing that we would keep coming back to every so often. And it just kind of fit here. We knew that people, I think in other parts of the country, there are similar kind of services and they seem to have sufficient demand. And so

I don't think we were actually, were you ever concerned about demand on this? Yeah. I mean, the real concern was like, can't we get the word out quickly? But once it's about like from press. Yeah. It's about looking at the resources that you have and quickly figuring out what makes the most sense.

Yeah. Do you know of those, of those hundred orders or whatever number you want to take, maybe of your total number of mystery night in orders? Like I got email marketing about it, presumably because I've, I've been an existing customer. Or actually, I don't think you did. We haven't even actually told our customers that we have the product yet. It's, it's all been through new, they're all new customers or they heard about it on social maybe.

Oh, I was going to ask you what percentage of the Mystery Night Inn customers are from your existing customer base. We don't know yet. No, I ran. I didn't. Because we're...

Did somebody not use the master customer database? Is that what I'm hearing? Well, he's not allowed to touch my database. No, so yeah, it's all in Webflow. So it's not connected to... I mean, I think it's connected through Zapier to Customer.io through Segment. We have CSV exports, so Shane did a lookup. So I did a lookup. It's 90% new customers right now. And we're literally going to do the email blast. I think probably, hopefully... Well, I don't know if we did it tonight or not, but...

The idea was like, hey, let's just get this out there. We knew we'd get some word resonance behind it. But now we've been in six different local media outlets. We still have five or six more to go.

Uh, and like now that we're going to be in this thing for a while, we were like, well, we can probably wait to tell people about it a little bit. Uh, yeah. I was going to compare this to launching a new startup, which the blanket answer is like, yes, this is absolutely launching a new startup and we can all laugh about that. But like the things you brought with you are your supplier base and your brand. Cause their brand got you some relationships with these press to begin with. But then like the operations and the demand side are completely new for this business. So like,

had to go and acquire a bunch of customers as if you were a brand new startup, even though you had these backend advantages. You didn't have that customer relationship. Yeah, 80% of the boxes have been new customers. But given the pandemic, we really did start this to help support local businesses, and it

And it was an easy sell there. For us, it was so obvious that our product was not going to fit the need. It's almost like, okay, well now we have all the room in the world to fit the perfect need. There were a few very obvious cases. And it's pretty easy when you're in a pandemic to say, what is going to be the highest picked up, highest demand product right off the bat? And then it was just about being first and doing it really quickly. Okay. So mystery night out or mystery night in, what's a better business?

You know, I will hope to say Mystery Night Out long term. I think it's a much more interesting and the longevity and automation scale and true impact we can have for suppliers is going to be a lot better Mystery Night Out. But I think the question remains if we're going to continue this product in the future. And we're seeing a lot of ways that it does fit as a different use case for our customers. It does add a huge amount of value to our suppliers in a very different way.

to the point where there's a lot of stuff we'll need to iron out, but I could definitely see this being integrated into our product set in the near future. To me, at least as a user and friend to you guys for a while, the core problem that Mystery solves for consumers is...

is just removing the decision-making, not just effort, but especially like by definition for mystery, you're doing something with someone else, the group decision-making effort, you know, whether that's you and your spouse at one extreme or you and a group of friends, like that's just so shitty. We're on the LP show and painful, like that applies to both going out.

and staying in, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I think our value props are pretty well aligned. I mean, for us, we think about our value props. The most important one after surveys and surveys is the fact that there's just no planning. I don't have to put in any work and click a button and I have a nice night out. And I think no option paralysis is a huge portion of that. You know, we're in a world where there's, well, oh gosh, this is a sad metric because this is going to go down. There's 1800 restaurants in Seattle that are 4.2 stars or above.

How are you going to go through and fill that lid? And it's sad because there's a lot of hurting restaurants now. How are you going to pick which restaurant you want to go to? And there's a power curve to review systems. And there's so many problems there where people generally say like, what do you want to do? I don't know. What do you want to do? And you end up at the same place you always go. There's an idea around personalization and having it hyper-personalized to people. For us, it's about just like getting, taking away all of those options to the point where you can actually spend quality time with people or a person that you're with.

I want to take us on a little bit of a different track here before we get into tech themes. You know, if you're willing to share, we talked a little bit about you being sort of this nice grown-up company, sort of end of February, that was really coming into your own, and that includes doing a fundraise. And so...

there you were on the fundraising trail and this thing hit. Can you take us through some kind of timeline of what that was like for you and what you realized when? Yeah, so the plan for the longest time was like, hey, we're going to get through February. Valentine's Day is there. We can always rile up a decent amount of press on Valentine's Day and get a big push from all of our existing users.

And the idea was like, hey, we're going to raise in March. Those are going to be our best numbers and we'll go out and raise a bigger round. And we ended up getting preempted by a firm to basically start kind of in January. And then that was kind of moving a little bit and we had some options. But then we're like, no, let's just wait until March. Definitely the prudent thing to do, right? Definitely the prudent thing to do. Perfect decisions there. All the right decisions made.

And then we got through to the, you know, March now. And the idea was we were going to go raise this larger round. And I think the funnier thing is we actually had a pitch with Sequoia 10 minutes after that Black Swan article came out, which we talked about. No way. Wow. Yeah, that was definitely fun. How did that meeting go? I won't say specifically well.

You know, I think for a night out company pitching in the midst of coronavirus, it's not going to look pretty no matter what way you spin it. I don't care how good the numbers look or whatever it was. I just remember you telling me that you had to pitch a night out in like the classic pitch right after that came out. And I was just like, fly on the wall. Oh, man. Yeah.

Yeah, needless to say, I wasn't super excited. We had no aspect of a night in or anything there. But even now... I'm hurting for you over here. Yeah, even now, it's definitely hard. We have really, really great existing investors that are absurdly, absurdly supportive. And we do have a quality business, but I think we're also proving right now how adaptable this team is and how nimble we are. Yeah.

You know, our revenue is literally going to be higher in March than it was in February. So, yeah, we're trying to close up around right now. We've got a couple options. We're lucky enough to be one of the startups that is not going to be horribly impacted by Corona, in part because the actions we took, I think, would be actually a lot more difficult if we hadn't taken the actions we did. Absolutely. I just want to highlight here, and this is one of the reasons why we wanted to do this episode with you, besides it being a great story, is like,

your business not just would have been impacted, like it would have been zero. Like you literally would have gone to zero if you hadn't adapted like this. It would have been illegal to operate. Yeah. Yeah. And next month we're actually going to launch in new cities with the night in product. We're going to continue to grow after that. You know, I think we've had these city launches planned. We had press ready. We're just going to keep going. And, you know, as we convert over to the classic product, whatever that looks like,

you know, we can keep moving and even faster than we might have before. Yeah, no, it's easier to scale by far. And it's a, it's an incredible way to like dip our toe into new markets. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we lucked out again. All luck here. No, consistent luck. Consistent luck. That's all it is. We're well into sort of tech themes here, but I will say like, it's, we've only done a handful of these episodes so far, but it's becoming clear to me that like,

The common playbook seems to be adapt for the moment. So do the thing, ship, change very frequently based on the data you're getting back from shipping your adaptation. I mean, Canlis already closed two of their three restaurants that they launched, their restaurant concepts, and then launched a fourth. So they're now only running the third and fourth and have shut down the bagel shed and the lunch takeout thing. And...

so there's this element of like, okay, be rapid and get out there and then, you know, change something pretty quick. There's this other element of, I think what both of you have said is no, no, no, this isn't the longterm business, but like maybe there's some, some part of this that is part of the longterm product offering. And like you,

You're doing something that forces you to survive now, or you were forced to do something that allowed you to survive now and keep your employees and keep your partners in business and keep a presence with your customers and sort of have a brand and an importance and solve a problem in their life. And even though that's not necessarily the long-term business going forward, it does actually change the long-term roadmap and probably opens up new total addressable market for you guys than you otherwise would have been able to serve. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it just proves that, you know, even more than anything, like our team can do anything. Yeah. Like we can start any business we want. We can expand our TAM in any way we want in a matter of days.

And that's just like it was something we knew and, you know, we did it in the beginning, but it was super awesome to see. I mean, the entire team in a matter of four days, just like running with their heads off everywhere and everyone had being having to be an autonomous decision maker. Yeah, it was just it was super cool. You think you hire a person to do one thing or another thing? And I apologize for borrowing like a medical analogy, but it's like what?

watching and realizing that our employees are stem cells. They can really do anything they need to do for the company to survive and to test new products. It was really, really cool to see that and to have that realization.

How do you codify that? Do you guys have like cultural values or like what do you think? Obviously, your team is is small right now. So you can have this like intense communication, really intense vetting of anybody that you bring on sort of hive mind. Although since you're now separated, not an office together, I'm sure the hive mind thing is harder. But like what attributes make mystery a special place to work?

We started in the very beginning around like super thoughtful around like, do we want to define a culture, let a culture define itself? And I think the end of the spectrum that you get advice around is like, hey, if you don't define it, it's going to define itself and you're not going to like it versus like, hey, if you're over prescriptive, it's going to become a joke and you're never going to be able to live with it. I think for us, you know, we're at 13 people now and very recently 13. It was more about like, hey, like, let's make sure that whoever we bring in

is a unique and different opinion matter, opinion thinker in this company and like can get to a place where now I do feel like we're at a place where we do need to start defining values. And we we've had a lot of those discussions, both with the leadership team and with the team as a whole and hustle and being an autonomous decision maker and being able to flip on a dime, I think is a very important part of our culture. We don't have the exact language put together yet.

Got a lot of dogs. Yeah, got a lot of dogs. But we do know that that's just a value that the entire company thrives on. You know, I think as part of, you know, luckily as part of what Mystery is, you know, one of the things that we talk about is,

We have this picture in our office that says it's like two circles. And one circle says everything in life that's worth doing. And the other circle says your comfort zone. And the idea being that mystery is all about getting out of your comfort zone and doing that. So I think the people that opt in to join a company that's literally about getting out of your comfort zone are probably naturally very adaptable people. Yeah. And we learned that we're trying to hire culture fit people.

If you don't think about it for too long, culture fit seems like attack of the clones, like you're just looking for another person that's like all the existing people. But we're obviously trying to diversify, but maintain something that's true to the culture at the same time. I think it's more like harmony in that it has to harmonize, but it's a completely different tone. And that's what we're looking to do with each new person.

That's the best analogy I've heard on that yet. I've heard. Beautiful. Never said that before. You heard it here first. Yeah. Like I've heard, you know, brilliant people like Brad Feld talk about not culture fit, but culture add. But I love the harmony analogy because it's like there is something you're looking for, but it's not necessarily something you already have.

Yeah, that was beautiful. Yeah. On, you know, playbook tech themes here. The main one that I, again, I was already thinking about has been what you said about like, you just, you just gotta get outside your comfort zone and ship and learn that way. Um, but I think there are two others that your story kind of illustrates too, especially for this moment in time. The first one is that like you got a ship and you got to put something out there and learn and iterate. Um,

But we have this unique opportunity, all of us right now, to say in a way that didn't exist in the last 12-year bull run, to say the world has changed. Thus, what is it that people need? You guys could have done gift cards. That would have been an obvious thing to do. But I think as a consumer, you guys didn't say this directly, but like

That's not really what I need. Like I can do that. I can go to my favorite restaurants directly and buy those. Like, you know, it's a great thing. People should do it, but it doesn't solve my need. Whereas like you guys can sit down and say like, no, no, what, like what does a consumer really need right now? I'm actually curious how many of your night in customers are clients.

versus families. But I think especially for a family, like you got kids running around bouncing off the walls at home. Like you need something to like, uh, organize and keep everybody entertained right now and fed and, you know, do something new and different. Like, uh,

Yeah. And that's one of the quick learnings for us was in the beginning, it's a night in and, you know, many of it was date nights, but a lot of the customers were families. A lot of the customers were like, Oh, like this is a nice activity for two. And like my kids could kind of join. But V2, which launches hopefully this week, maybe next week is a family box and a date night box and a friend's box. Oh, that's next week. Yeah. And yeah, that's next week. But yeah, very, very on point. Like,

It was really like, hey, people need something to do. They want to support local businesses. And I mean, that was the obvious highest value creation we could have for our customers. Yeah. Well, you said customers needs. We've always had two customers, our supply and our demand. And we're looking at both of their needs in this time. It's obviously like very acutely different situation, but their needs are still the same. And you can almost work backwards from that and pretty obviously land at something like a delivery box, right?

Yeah. And then the other theme I wanted to bring up that I think also just kind of reminds me a little bit of the famous Steve Jobs, you know, Stanford graduation speech, like,

What can kind of enable you to start thinking this way is not falling into a trap of thinking that you have something to lose, right? Like it would have been really easy for you guys to think like, oh, hey, we've spent a year. We've built up this thing. It's starting to work. We're in a great spot. Like, I don't want to lose that. Like you want to like protect, you know, and like.

The reality is like you were going to lose that anyway right now. So like you don't have anything to lose. Like you were back at, you know, your ability to kind of switch quickly to be like, no, we're back at square one. Great. Let's go. You know, I think both of those together with shipping and learning, like I think that's what so many people like we're doing this acquired right now need to be doing. That fear of losses. It's obviously a fear based mentality. And Shane of all the people I know has always been the one to find an

an opportunity in a downturn. Like, and you know, we, we did that as a team this time. Um, but I think we, we just tried to do that every time. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the big misconception people have is like there's known and there's unknown and people always have this insane mis-evaluation of risk for the unknown. Um,

Where like, in my mind, like, I'm not going to like, what I know now was once unknown to me. And that's like, I trust in me, I trust in our team, that the unknown shouldn't theoretically be that much riskier than the known. And from that end, like that,

between what others view as risk and what we can view as risk is like arbitrage opportunity, more or less. And like, that's the, you know, talk about asymmetric risk. Like that's it. Yeah. It was a big opportunity for us to be first too. Yeah. Well, with that guys, I want to, I want to bring it home. So you're in Seattle. Where are you going to be launching soon? Uh, yeah, we're going to be launching very soon in, uh, uh,

Do we want to talk? Yeah, sure. Why not? We're just the random city generator, right? You can tell us no to. Yeah, no, no, I think it's fine. We'll be we'll be in Austin here pretty soon, as well as a few other choice West Coast cities. That one, I think if I did talk, would I get some shit from the team pretty quickly? Yeah.

That's great. And if folks are in Seattle, how can they book their first one? Yeah, head to trymystery.com. And then I think there's a big old button that says Mystery Night In. That's going to take you to our Webflow site. Please also sign up at trymystery.com because we'd love your user information in our actual database. Or wait to sign up until Friday. Yes.

We probably won't ship this before Friday, so you can stand up that. Sign up now. Get started. That's great. Well, I'm excited to try it out myself. This is an LP episode. How can our LPs and listeners interact with you guys directly? I know Shane, at least, you're in the Acquired Slack group.

Vince is about to be in the acquired Slack. So that's perfect. Yeah. Feel free to DM me directly. I've already actually chatted with some people. It's awesome. The community is super cool. Uh, feel free to reach out there. Um, our Instagrams are at trimistry, uh, trimistry.com, not mystery.com. That's a crazy person in Detroit that won't give us their domain name. Um, but, uh, yeah, Shane at trimistry.com at email, LinkedIn or with a Slack group, whatever works.

Given your guys' whole history and scrappiness, I think in the event, you know, which I don't think is likely, but if Mystery Night In doesn't work, I think you should, the next pivot should be to domain name negotiation acquisition for people. Yeah.

Yeah, we've gotten pretty, I'd say where we've really found our strategies, actually both Vince and I managed to get the Convoy app name. I had to raggle that from a Princeton professor. And then the app name for Mystery, Vince like really worked hard to get. So we got the app name. Domain names, you know, not exactly our forte. There's, yeah, we'd have to be billionaires according to Mystery.com. Yeah, there you go, perfectly. The biggest opportunity, DomainSquatting.com. Okay.

Love it. Well, thanks so much for joining us, guys. LPs, thanks for going on the journey with us. Yeah. Cool. Thanks, guys. Thank you.