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Hey, everyone. It's been so inspiring to hear all these great stories from founders who grew from zero to 100 million in, you know, two years, five years, ten years.

I'm going to share a story that's a little bit different than maybe some other ones that

we heard because I'm going to be very raw and vulnerable and share a lot of my fuck-ups.

And hopefully, if you're pre-8 million revenue, you can avoid some of these pitfalls.

And I think some of these can still happen even when you're a little bit further along.

So to kind of set it off, I want to start with a story about two years ago. It was the fall of 2022. I was in a state now for a couple of years where I was really checked out in my business. I was really bored. I was frustrated. Things weren't going terribly well. Our rate of growth had been declining year after year.

And when the SaaS market changed around 2022,

is when we actually started to decline for the first time,

really since we found product market fit.

And I had been going through this M&A process

where we hired an M&A banker and had strategics

and P.E firms lined up to sell the company, because I was just trying to offload it. I was trying to hit the escape hatch and get out while the getting was good. But everything kind of happened around the same time. The SaaS market kind of crashed in 2022. Investors and acquires started getting nervous. And suddenly I had this, you know, what was this

big list of potential acquirers all pull out, not get a single LOI from anyone.

And it was at that moment where I really didn't know what to do.

And I was in front of my board when they asked me, like, Kyle, you have the stomach to keep

going. I shed

a tear for the first time in front of them and said I don't you know I think so I

don't know but how did I get here and that's really what I want to share with

people today is some mistakes you can recover from pretty quickly and other ones

...