20 VC 092: The Repeatable Playbook of SaaS with Ed Sim, Founding Partner @ BoldStart Ventures

Ed Sim, Founding Partner @ Boldstart Ventures, Ed truly has had the most astonishing career in early stage SaaS having led first round investments in todays market leaders, LivePerson (now on Nasdaq) and GoToMeeting (acquired by Citrix). Over the 19 years in early stage SaaS he has also helped a number of entrepreneurs scale from seed to market leader with his portfolio companies being acquired by the likes of Google, Linkedin and Salesforce, and I would like to say that all the data and information presented in today's show is provided by the kind folks at Mattermark, check then out at www.mattermark.com In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ed made his way into the wonderful world of venture? 2.) Why did Ed start a seed stage SaaS fund? Where did he see the market opportunity? How was the fundraising process for Ed? Were there any surprises? 3.) How does Ed view the current seed stage funding environment, is there too much money chasing too few deals? 4.) Ed backed cloud companies in 2000. What is different from then vs today’s saas companies? 5.) How do you value early stage SaaS startups, when there are often very few clear metrics at this stage? 6.) What makes a great enterprise founder at seed stage? 7.) How has the seed stage SaaS environment changed over the 19 years of Ed's career? Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Ed's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Jason Calacanis: LaunchTicker Ed's Fave iPhone App: Slack As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ed on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! Have you ever wanted to know who someone is simply from an email address? With Loyalty Bay's Super Users product now you can. Simply input an email address and it will go off and find publicly available profile information i.e. Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc for that email address. This is incredibly powerful in building a richer data profile on your users for marketers and business development people alike. Free 30 day Trial. Check out www.loyaltybay.co.uk

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is the 20 Minute VC and I am your host, Harry Stebbings. And I wanted to say a special thank you to you today because the show has grown enormously and I just wanted to thank you all for listening. It really is fantastic to hear such great feedback and I'm just so thrilled that you're loving the show. And this week, we will be doubling down on all things seed funding. So who better to kick off the week than the king of SaaS seed funding, Ed Sim, founding partner at Bold Start Ventures? Now, Ed truly has had the most astonishing career in early-stage SaaS, having led first round investments in today's market leader's live person, now on NASDAQ, and go-to-meeting, acquired by Citrix.

• 0:42Harry Stebbings?

  And over the 19 years in early-stage SaaS, he's also helped a number of entrepreneurs scale from seed to market leader, with his portfolio companies being acquired by the likes of Google, LinkedIn and Salesforce. And I'd like to say that all the data and information presented in today's show is provided by the kind folks at Matamark and you can check them out at www.mattermark.com. And if you just want to read amazing articles on the startup and VC industry, follow @thinker on Twitter. But before we jump into today's interview with Ed, have you ever wanted to know who someone is simply from an email address? Well, with LoyaltyBay's Super Users product, now you can.

• 1:23Harry Stebbings?

  Simply input an email address and it will go off and find publicly available profile information, i.e. from LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, for that email address. And you can get a free 30-day trial for this product and you can check them out at www.loyaltybay.co.uk That's .co.uk. Or you can follow them on Twitter @loyaltybayltd. But enough from me, it's now time to introduce the man of the moment. It is Ed Sim, founding partner at Bold Start Ventures.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:04Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Ed, it's a huge pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot. I enjoy your show, so it's a pleasure to be here.

• 2:12Harry Stebbings?

  And now I'd love to kick off the show today by hearing a little backstory about you and when you started Bold Start and how it all came about.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. So I've been a VC, believe it or not, since 1996.

• 2:25Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, doing enterprise, mostly enterprise investing, but first round investing, and I've seen a lot of cycles. Um, before I started Bold Start, I started another fund called Dawn Treader Ventures, uh, back in 1998. And I was there from 1998 to 2010. Um, and it was interesting. I mean, the idea for us was to bring a Silicon Valley style of investing into New York, uh, which means back in the mid 90s, a lot of the VCs would look at financial models when they invested, right? Coming back from the, the banking days. And our approach was looking at people and product and understanding market opportunity. Uh, and actually getting in very early and rolling up our sleeves and helping, uh, companies kind of develop from there. So

• 3:10Speaker 02

  we, we had a $20 million fund and then 230 million dollar fund. And since most of our investors are corporate investors and the market kind of cratered, uh, we didn't have that institutional base to go back to. And when I was thinking about my next thing, um, I launched Bold Start in, uh, 2010.

• 3:27Harry Stebbings?

  And you decided on an enterprise seed fund because it's what you'd specialized in before, or did you see a lot more room for consumerization in the enterprise space?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  It was, it was two-pronged. It's kind of stick with what you know.

• 3:40Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  But more importantly, I just saw a massive, massive shift. Up until that time, in 2006, 2007, people were talking about open source and the cloud and how you could scale companies very quickly, but most of that was focused on the consumer. And I started having, you know, the first couple entrepreneurs that came to me were the founders of GoToMeeting.

• 4:01Harry Stebbings?

  Hmm.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  And one of the, yeah, one of the founders, Klaus Schausser, started a new company called Appfolio. And he wanted to SaaSify vertical markets. And another GoToMeeting founder started a company called RightScale, which was kind of a management software cloud layer for AWS and other platforms. And both of them were only trying to raise about a million, million and a half dollars. So, so basically I saw, I saw a trend and saw more repeat entrepreneurs from the enterprise coming to me and saying, hey, you know what? Just like the consumers, I think I can get started and prove that there's a market here for a million to a million and a half dollars. And, and basically from there, I said, all right, let's, let's give this a shot.

• 4:41Harry Stebbings?

  And how was it then, uh, building you and, you know, raising your own fund in two thousand and ten? Obviously we'd had the financial crisis two years earlier. How did you find the experience?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  I hated it. Fundraising, fundraising sucks and I tell entrepreneurs the same thing. But, but, but all kidding aside, uh, the way that we approached it, uh, was that, you know, I figured I'd build my fund like a startup. And I had a hypothesis, which was, uh, you could find and invest in great enterprise kind of tech entrepreneurs and you can do it at the seed stage. And so basically I just took a million dollars in and made ten investments of about a hundred thousand a pop. And back then the valuations were pretty low from two to four million dollar pre-money. I think in Fund One, I don't think we paid higher than a five million dollar pre-money for any of our investments, five or six.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  So, so we built that portfolio up in two thousand and ten and by two thousand and twelve, we had sold, uh, I think four of our companies.

• 5:42Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  It wasn't that we're trying to sell the businesses, you know, the companies basically had option value. They could either, either raise their A round, um, or, you know, sometimes these strategic companies would, would bang on their door and, and we'd have to evaluate it. And in all those cases, the entrepreneurs wanted to sell. Um, so that kind of proved that there was a there there for the model.

• 6:02Harry Stebbings?

  And why do you think there is this misconception that enterprise companies needed a lot more money earlier on to get them off the ground and to really assess product market fit? Why, why, why do we think that over consumer startups up, do you think?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Um, it, it because the traditional uh way of building an enterprise startup would usually require at least four or five million dollars in an A round. Uh, up and up until the point that the newer entrepreneurs took advantage of the cloud and open source. And uh, that's number one. Number two is just the SaaSification of the world, right? I mean, if you look back at history. Um, I was investing in SaaS before it was called SaaS and the ASP model, which for folks who are listening and haven't been around, it's the application service provider model. And back then, everyone had to build their own cloud infrastructure. I mean, a company like LivePerson, we probably raised, you know, over thirty million dollars in about twelve months. And twenty of that went to build our infrastructure because we wanted to build for success.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  And you needed to build a platform that could scale. And, and so if you eliminate that cost, if you can take a great engineer who understands market pain, um, they, they can leverage kind of that AWS infrastructure, they can get to market very fast and efficiently.

• 7:15Harry Stebbings?

  And you said about bringing the West Coast style uh of investing to the East Coast. What do you think the West Coast style really is then? And do you think it has been brought to the East Coast now? I mean, obviously, New York's a blossoming tech hub. And, you know, arguably it's not fully blossomed, but incredibly brilliant. So do you think the West Coast style has been brought to the East Coast?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I, I think it definitely uh has. Um, and I, I think the West Coast style of investing is really focused on the people, the entrepreneurs. And you start with the entrepreneur, you know, what makes a great founder. Um, and from there, you know, the idea that you can actually fund companies, maybe even before they've even built their product. Um, was not here on the East Coast, you know, ten, fifteen years ago. And I think now that, now that kind of feeling is uh that people are willing to back kind of entrepreneurs, uh whether they be first or second generation entrepreneurs uh from the very beginning.

• 8:10Harry Stebbings?

  And do you have a preference then for first or second generation entrepreneurs or single or co-founded companies? What are your thoughts on that?

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Well, I I ne- we never like single co-founder, co-founded companies or single founders, uh, number one. Number two is it runs the gamut for us. Uh, we are typically the first check into a business or at least the first institutional round and sometimes uh, it varies, right? We funded, I think the last five or six companies we funded, uh, five of them were repeat entrepreneurs who have built, you know, and scaled companies before. And those rounds tended to be a little bigger at the seed round, but we're the first institutional check in those opportunities. And then for first time founders, the the rounds are typically, you know, a little smaller. And the key thing for us is making sure that these founders have deep domain expertise. They understand the pain.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  A lot of the companies that we see, the founders really kind of had a huge problem. Um, and and they they saw market opportunities to go automate that problem or fix that problem with technology. And so that's very important for us. Secondly, they have to be engineers, um, engineers building product. That's really important.

• 9:19Harry Stebbings?

  And going in at such an early stage, often there's no really discernible metrics that you can rely on. Is that not a problem in the enterprise space when you really hone in on kind of ARR, MRR, uh, to determine the value of a company?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know what? Enterprise can be fucking hard. You can't just wake up and say, I'm gonna be an enterprise investor. Um, you know, I've been doing this for, you know, almost twenty years. Um, uh, my partner Elliot's been doing it for ten. And we actually just brought a venture partner on, a guy named Jeff Leventhal, who's built five companies before this. The most recent being Workmarket, uh, where he's raised about thirty five million from uh, folks like Union Square and Spark.

• 10:01Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  And and so so that makes it really hard. But on the flip side, enterprise can be easy in a way. And I I don't, I won't say it's easy, but. It's the same problems being recycled over the last twenty years. I mean, you can either provide better customer service, right? You can create a better way to market to new customers, you can create a better way to sell to new customers, or you can create a more efficient IT infrastructure, and then layer across all of that is security. So if you take that same problem set, and you've built a network over twenty years of buyers and partners that you can call and understand, hey, you know, I've got a new company trying to start this, you know, in this market segment, can you give me an idea of would you buy this? Do you have

• 10:44Speaker 02

  this pain point? And so I think from that perspective, those are the metrics that we look for is understanding, you know, what the problem is, talking to the buyers and partners, and figuring out if that entrepreneur can build this new solution and scale it. So that's why it's, you know, hard and easy at the same time.

• 11:03Harry Stebbings?

  And you said there that enterprise can be fucking hard, as you, to lightly put it. So why did you choose enterprise when you were starting out your career in VC? Why did you not go for the probably not much easier, but the much more obvious kind of choices of, you know, consumer?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I just, I started out back in the day before I became a VC. I was at JP Morgan, helping build quantitative trading models. And I was kind of like the liaison. I sat in between the developers and the portfolio managers. I was like the business QA. And when I was there, we were turning our derivatives model into a real-time pricing model. So we take feeds in from Reuters and, and, you know, all this other, all these other sources like risk metrics, and plop it in, and then kind of crack out these models. And I just felt like I could understand the pain point better with enterprise. I mean, it may be freaking boring to some, but I find it super exciting. And I also think that enterprise is interesting.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  You can take an enterprise founder, let's say, we just funded these two founders, that one was a former CTO of Assistly, and the other was the former chief architect of Assistly. They sold it to Salesforce and became desk.com. But before that, they founded a company called EShares, which was once again in the customer support space. So I feel like you can actually have repeated success in the industry just by, you know, re-architecting things, rebuilding things, and doing things, you know, better and faster and cheaper. And a consumer, I think it's harder to be a repeat consumer entrepreneur, right? Because you typically start an app. You know, let's say, and launch that thing, and then you try to start another one, but you can't bring that same customer base over. You've got to reinvent the wheel and re-get the same, you know, re-get new customers.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  In the enterprise space, you can go back to your old Rolodex and hit those customers up once again.

• 12:50Harry Stebbings?

  With regards to, say, your deal sourcing for these companies, yeah, you spoke about the entrepreneurs there and you just invested in those guys. So, how do you approach deal sourcing? Is it mainly through your referral network? Is it through your domain expertise? What is it for you?

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Uh, I would say that it's a combination of the two. So by being very focused on the enterprise and having done it for twenty years, and my other partner having done it for twenty years, and my other partner for ten. Uh, we have a pretty, uh, pretty focused network. And when people are thinking about building their enterprise startups, we want to be the first call. We don't want you to come to us when you've already started your company. We want, we want to kind of help you formulate your thoughts around it and get your feedback and even introduce you to potential customers. So, most of our leads come from founders. I mean, I think we've tracked that about seventy-five percent of our flow comes from founders, whether they be founders that we funded before. You know, their VPs, the engineers that worked there, or even, you know, from founders in our existing portfolio who are referring their friends to us.

• 13:52Harry Stebbings?

  And for you, uh, investing at the kind of seed stage of the enterprise market. What, we always hear that VCs are looking for a billion dollar market, a billion dollar market. How big does the market have to be for you when you invest so early?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  I like to think it's going to be a billion dollar market, but look, you never really know.

• 14:09Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Um, I, I do know that seed is just like, you know, any other, you know, investing, series A, B, or C. But the point is that we want to build a portfolio and have twenty-five swings to the plate. And every swing that we take, we want it to be an opportunity to return the whole fund over. So if you look at that way of thinking, then, you know, we need to believe that it's going to be a huge market opportunity. The funny thing is, I'm not going to sit there with the founder and just try to, you know, pull out these analyst reports. And many times, you know, if you have an analyst report to kind of show us, then it's probably not worth investing in, you know, at the seed stage. We want to sometimes look for greenfield opportunities or reinvent the way that. That other industries are doing things today um and go from there. So a lot of it might be intuitive kind of market

• 14:53Speaker 02

  um opportunity versus having any real numbers behind it.

• 14:58Harry Stebbings?

  And how do you view then the seed funding environment? I mean, there's a lot of the huge proliferation in the the sector itself of seed funding. Do you do you get concerned that there's too much capital chasing too few deals?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny. When I started this in two thousand and ten, I think one of the only micro VCs was Jeff Clavier Softec.

• 15:16Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Um and and he's a good friend of mine, so.

• 15:19Harry Stebbings?

  Jeff on the show.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I I I heard that. That that sounded like a great interview. I've known Jeff. Jeff and I were on a board of a company way back when. Um and we've done a few co-investments together. But the point is, is since that time, I think there's three hundred fifty or four hundred now, quote unquote, micro VCs.

• 15:34Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  And and so there's a lot of noise in the market, which, once again, I think is very important for us just to stay focused and not try to be all things to all people. So, you know, just like any other business, if you want to be a winner, you've got to be number one. Uh and if you're not number one, then at least number two. So by staying nimble on enterprise and seed, by, you know, looking at our track record and I try, you know, bringing on new talent, I think that's kind of how you have to evolve uh and stay focused.

• 16:03Harry Stebbings?

  So would you say your main value add then is your domain expertise and lengthy record of creating successful enterprise companies from the seed stage?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the bottom line is, you know, we we understand the cadence of of a startup from from the time that it's a single, you know, two founders in a in a room coding to kind of exiting uh either, you know, through an IPO or even through selling your business. So we've kind of seen the pattern in movie. We think there's a same kind of playbook that you can repeat in the enterprise. That playbook has changed over the last twenty years. For example, instead of building a huge regional direct sales force, you know, today you may bring on a marketing person to to be a lead generation machine, right? And then you have building inside sales force to kind of you know, follow up on those leads. And then you bring kind of a direct salesperson. So we believe that there's a similar playbook.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Uh you need to stay on top of it, but that you can apply to many of your, you know, existing portfolio companies. So I think it's kind of the know-how and the experience together um and the understanding of the technology itself.

• 17:08Harry Stebbings?

  And what other major developments have you seen over the last twenty years, experiencing the venture industry from firsthand?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  I almost feel like there's a stratification of VC in the sense that the very successful ones have gotten so large that they can't write smaller checks efficiently. And therefore, I believe that you've seen all these micro VCs pop up because, you know, we can write smaller checks efficiently. And the flip side, entrepreneurs don't need five to 10 million dollars out of the gate. They don't want the dilution, they don't want the pressure, they don't want that much money to get started. So I think if you look at that kind of mismatch, that's kind of why you've seen a lot of these smaller funds kind of get started.

• 17:50Harry Stebbings?

  And a lot of people in the seed stage of the funding cycle are getting concerned by the rise of crowdfunding and angel list. So do you see deal flow going to these crowdfunding sites and is it something that you're potentially concerned about in the future?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  I'm not worried about it at all, in the least bit. I mean, if you look at a lot of the seasoned entrepreneurs, yeah, I think there's, people keep talking about the automation of the world. I do think that VC is still a relationship driven business. You know, will there be portions of a $2 million round? You know, for many times, we'll lead a seed round and then we'll say, okay, let's say if 250 open for angels, we can put it on angel list after we've gotten everything else together to see if we can drum up some other interesting relationships. But, you know, I'm not really overly concerned about that. I think the great entrepreneurs are still going to go back to the folks they've done business with over the years, if they've done it successfully and still raise that way.

• 18:47Harry Stebbings?

  What if then the newer generation of entrepreneurs start raising on angel list and that becomes the norm?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  You know, honestly, I think that if you look at angel list, a big portion of the money being raised is still kind of private, private syndications. So, you know, I think as much as you want it to be an efficient market, I think those that don't want to have the public scrutiny will just go and raise it privately and quietly.

• 19:14Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think there's still a long way to go in the consumerization of enterprise?

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, I do. I believe that, you know, consumer enterprise is kind of one angle. The other angle is the developer driven enterprise. I think developers increasingly wielding more and more power in the enterprise these days. And it's it's one of those things where they're they're, you know, coding or develop or using a new technology, they've downloaded it or they'll they'll try a free version. Then they'll go to their CTO and be like, hey, ten of us are using this right now. Let's kind of um let's purchase a license here or or buy kind of a monthly subscription. So we're seeing more and more of that of the rise of the developer and there's more and more developer platforms that are building. So. Um I think that emergence, those guys are great. Um they're actually a co-investor with us and in one of our companies.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Um but I just think we're still in the second inning right now. I think the whole monolithic uh. IT infrastructure is getting turned upside down. I like to think of the world as becoming, you know, I I almost call it the micro enterprise, right? Yeah, instead of kind of buying these monolithic five million dollar, ten million dollar systems. Enterprise, you know, and focusing on long release cycles, enterprise is want to build and release technology as quickly as Google does. Yeah, and and so I think if you look at that whole uh model, then you you can see that the next five, ten, fifteen years is ripe for opportunity.

• 20:38Harry Stebbings?

  And then if it's okay with you, we're gonna move into a quickfire round now.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 20:43Harry Stebbings?

  So the New York versus the West Coast uh investing kind of ethos and valuations. What's the what's the difference?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Reminds me of the whole uh East Coast, West Coast rap scene, right?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think the the New York valuations tend to be a little lower than the Valley. I mean, and I'll give you an example. Um, you know, I'm getting seed stage startups in the Valley where people are talking about a twelve cap. And here, yeah, yeah, here in New York.

• 21:13Harry Stebbings?

  That's bold.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  That is pretty bold, but here in New York.

• 21:16Harry Stebbings?

  You're all called bold stars, so come on, Ed, take it on.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I love bold bold start being bold founders, but not bold valuations.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  So I would say that we're not at the twelve kind of cap stage here and so that that kind of stuff worries me for sure.

• 21:31Harry Stebbings?

  What do you what do you guys go for, kind of five, six?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  It it depends, right? It depends on entrepreneur. We'll just say sub ten. And it it could range from much lower to, you know, upper up on the upper range. It depends on who the founders are, what their background is and, you know, and how much they're raising.

• 21:47Harry Stebbings?

  And then what's your favorite blog or newsletter?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  You know what I love? I love Jason Calacanis's launch ticker. Um, it it's just a summary of, you know, eight to ten. I get a little email snippet twice a day. I actually pay for it. Um, and just tells me kind of what's happening out there, what's important, where I should track. So I think he does a really, really good job with that.

• 22:07Harry Stebbings?

  And then what trends in enterprise are getting you excited at the moment?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Um, I well, I mentioned one is I think the the rise of the of developers, um, kind of buying and downloading software and and kind of reaching those folks in the enterprise. Um, I think I'm seeing a lot of kind of AI, not AI platforms, but AI being infiltrated across every segment of enterprise software. Um, and I'm also seeing a lot of stuff where messaging uh is going from consumers to to the enterprise as well. Messaging meaning, um, you know, almost as a front end to launching certain applications and services. So I think these are all interesting trends to kind of look at over the next, uh, you know, five years.

• 22:49Harry Stebbings?

  What's the most used app on your phone then?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  It is Slack on messaging. Um, so we use it internally just to, you know, have a few channels just to kind of stay in touch with uh myself, my partners. But more importantly, we use a pretty awesome service called Slackline. Uh, some folks in London had started. One of our founders told us about it, but it allows us to create private external channels with our our founders. So we've got, uh, you know, twenty plus channels where we're constantly communicating with our founders. And it's much easier than email and phone calls and obviously everything's searchable. So that's been our number one way to stay in touch um uh with our founders.

• 23:28Harry Stebbings?

  Would you say Slack is kind of the poster child for the consumer as a consumerization of uh more traditional uh enterprise software?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 23:38Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:39Harry Stebbings?

  And then finally, your most recent investment and why you said yes?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Well, it's a stealth investment like every VC likes to say. But it's a repeat founder. We had funded his company in the past and he sold his company to Akamai.

• 23:54Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  And he's starting a new company which is security focused on the developer. And I think this goes back to a couple of things I mentioned earlier, which is kind of selling into developers, but also security as well. So it's an interesting new opportunity. Some people don't think it can be done, right? You know, there's a tension between developing rapidly and then having security folks jump on board and slow things down.

• 24:19Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  So the question is, can you automate some of that? And we're super excited just about the founder, the team, and even some of the beta customers that have already signed up to use the product. And hopefully, this will get announced in the next couple of weeks.

• 24:34Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Ed, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure having you and great fun chatting to you, so thank you.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Harry.

• 24:41Harry Stebbings?

  What an amazing episode that was with Ed, and I'd like to give a huge hand to him for giving up his time today to be on the show. And if you can't get enough of the 20 Minute VC, you can follow us on Twitter @20MinuteVC or head over to the site at www.thetwintiminetc.com and sign up to the newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest episodes. But before we leave you today, if you are a business owner or entrepreneur, I do not need to state the importance of knowing your customer. And with LoyaltyBay's Superuser, you can identify your most important users and influencers. Simply input the user's email address and they'll tell you all about their social media activity, where they work, what their interests are.

• 25:25Harry Stebbings?

  And this allows you to really build up a profile on who your superusers are and how you can engage with them most effectively. And you can check them out at www.loyaltybay.co.uk, that's .co.uk, or you can follow them on Twitter @loyaltybayltd. Thank you so much, as always, for listening to today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it and we look so forward to seeing you in the next episode.