[DECODED] Frictionless Falsehoods

Phillip: [00:00:11] Welcome to Decoded, a podcast by Future Commerce, presented this season by FERMÀT. Welcome back to Decoded. This is the 5th episode in our 3rd season pairing with FERMÀT, and we're really glad to be back with you. You've heard a lot this season already about these polymathic thinkers, these notable folks who have created shifts in their industries, but they did so by having deep generalist knowledge and dissatisfaction with specializing in one particular area. And so we come to today to this last episode, and I thought why not bring on the newest member of the FERMÀT Commerce team to come help wrap his head around what is FERMÀT, what does it do, and what is the end cap here to this 5th episode that kind of puts a bow on everything. Aaron, Mr Orendorf, welcome to the FERMÀT team and welcome to this last episode of the season.

Aaron: [00:01:05] Always a freaking pleasure. You called it way early on. You even acronymified it. So delightful on you, sir. Thanks for having me here today. And yeah. I'm here to answer the question WTF FERMÀT. What is FERMÀT? Which is what everybody asked me as soon as I made the big announcement.

Phillip: [00:01:22] That's true. And I know we tend to over spiritualize things. Have we over spiritualized it? Do we actually make the messaging more confusing this season by taking it on a journey around here are all these polymathic prolific thinkers that have changed their industries. Have we helped or harmed in the messaging of what is FERMÀT?

Aaron: [00:01:43] I don't know if it's helped or harmed. There's not a negative or positive to it. It fundamentally comes down to, can I explain what FERMÀT does in a way that attaches itself to a mental model and makes people go, "Oh? Oh, that's it? Okay." So I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out with you right now. Are you ready?

Phillip: [00:02:02] Yeah. Let's do that.

Aaron: [00:02:02] What is FERMÀT? Alright? FERMÀT lets you create funnels the same way you create ads. There it is. FERMÀT lets you create funnels, landing pages, embedded PDPs, custom cards, funnels. The same way you create ads. An ad is made up of three things: offer, creative, audience. You put that into the ad accounts a la Meta. We're looking for experimentation to find out what the winner is. We need volume and speed, and we also need to be targeted. Those elements all come together. And what we say is, wouldn't it be magical if the same way you made ads, you could create funnels? Guess what? You can. That's FERMÀT.

Phillip: [00:02:51] Okay. And so taking the long way around in true Future Commerce fashion and thinking about what is a predictor of a world to come, it's that a lot of these other, you know, as the sky is blue, common experiences, the way we see the world all being the same, the funnels can change in the same way that ad creative is more personalized and targeted, and it's really hard to reproduce what ad creative looks like for you and for me because we are fundamentally different people. What if the funnel was also something that was truly dynamic and related more to who the person is or what the ad creative was that brought you there? That's what FERMÀT Commerce does.

Aaron: [00:03:33] And especially on the ad creative front because we're built as an acquisition machine. And no thing in the history of human existence has been able to turn demand into money the way Meta has.

Phillip: [00:03:47] Mhmm.

Aaron: [00:03:48] And the key to that, back behind having a product people actually want, that there's a value exchange that makes sense in their mind between the thing that I have, which is my money, and the thing that you have, which is your product, what unites those two behind the product is the ad itself, the ad unit, which is why I think about that and, like, okay. You've got your offer, what's the product and price. You've got your creative, whether it's a still, there's a different type for it, it's a GIF, it's a video, it's an explainer, it's UGC, it's influencer. Right? You got your creative or your content, and you got your audiences and those three come together to form an ad. That's an ad. And the key now is how can I get enough volume into my ad accounts with the right targets in place to then let it do its magic and scale from there. And there's this choke point from that. This is how media buyers, growth marketers, performance marketers, that's how they relate to growing a business behind the product through paid media, and there is a gulf between what happens in the ad account and what happens after somebody clicks the ad and makes the purchase. That's FERMÀT right there in the middle, and it's a funnel. It's an abbreviated funnel. It's a micro funnel. It's a standalone isolated independent funnel. So you can do all the testing. You don't have to adhere to the same rules and CSS and apps as your Shopify site, but guess what? It connects the back end to that system of record, your Shopify site for now so that you can do all of the amazing fun things that make ad accounts work inside the funnel, lander, PDP, custom cart, send them a checkout.

Phillip: [00:05:26] Okay. And so when we get into the meat of this episode, which in this episode, we're actually sitting down live with Rishabh and with Rabah at South by Southwest. And this is, you know, the day of the Series A announcement from FERMÀT Commerce, Greylock sort of helping lead the charge on a $17,000,000 Series A. Incredible piece of news there, but what I don't want to be lost in the process, what I don't want to get lost in the message is that we do talk about FERMÀT as a scientist and why the company is named FERMÀT, and it's this concept of path of least resistance or path of least time. And this is really the concept here is that what if every person has a path of least time that's unique and common only to them and to no one else? And that sounds like the abstract, more spiritualized way of saying we need greater control, especially in the media buyers' hands of being able to control these things that are it's not brand. It's not SEO. It's something else. It's for the purchase and that only. Right?

Aaron: [00:06:32] Yes. Which isn't to say you can't dress it up and make the funnel get really close to... But I mean, the amount of I mean, you've got politics and red tape to try to create something new. And sometimes all the way up to the executive level of people that are approving, not so much the creative, but any changes to the masthead, the website, the mothership. Oh my goodness. So there's politics and red tape. There's just that fundamental, people are strapped for development and design resources. So these two conspire, and it means that you have to move a lot slower at the place that you sell your things than the place you're trying to sell them through. Alright. The website versus the ad account. And I keep going back to Meta, but it's across the board for us. TikTok, YouTube, getting into Google search now, all of those places to match that experience.

Phillip: [00:07:27] Okay. It's so succinct, and I think it makes so much sense. And it's a world that I've been anticipating for a little while. I'm so glad to be partnered with you guys for this season. Thank you for making this a success, and hope to drive some more interest into FERMÀT. Remember, we have this guide. Love for you to go check it out. Go to futurecommerce.com/decoded and get our guide. Hey, there's all of this content. It's your companion for this whole season. And also go check out FERMÀT at FERMÀTcommerce.com. Aaron, any last words before we jump in? Your new boss is on this podcast.

Aaron: [00:08:05] Always pleasure, sir. Thanks for putting me in the hot seat.

Phillip: [00:08:07] Yeah.

Aaron: [00:08:08] Yes.

Phillip: [00:08:08] Appreciate you. Alright. We go live now to South by Southwest, where Rashabh and Rabah are sitting down talking about decoding what is FERMÀT and what is our multiplayer future. This is my opportunity to be nerdy a little bit, but also to talk a little bit about a platform that you guys are building because something we've been talking about for a few years now is this ability to have hyper-personalization, understanding what the customer wants, allowing them to have whatever it is they want. We talked earlier about customers manifesting their own context of a brand. So when I first met you, you told me what you're building, and I said this is literally the thing that I have been talking about for years. So with that, explain a little bit about what you are attempting to solve at FERMÀT, and tell me what you've built to date.

Rishabh: [00:09:07] Yeah. I guess what I'm attempting to solve is make Phillips' wildest dreams come true.

Phillip: [00:09:11] There we go.

Rishabh: [00:09:12] So that's... We are the multiplayer brand. So what I guess, what we're actually doing is we're helping DTC brands build store experiences that are native to the ad, email, SMS, basically the piece of content that they see. So one of our customers is a company called Nude. I don't know if Brian is here. It's an Austin-based company.

Rabah: [00:09:35] He's not, but there is a Nude representative here. There she is.

Rishabh: [00:09:37] Nice. Okay. Let's go. So what they do with us, for example, is on average, it is a product for women. And so when you go to the website, you see women on the page, but they run a number of campaigns that are oriented towards men. And so the way that they speak to the men whom they are trying to interact with is they have the campaign go to a store experience that is curated entirely to men. So everything from the landing page, to the collection page, to the images in the PDP, to the language in the actual PDP, all the way through to checkout, it is all curated to a male buyer. And so it is this idea that the consumer that is coming to you based on the campaign that you are running actually has a certain expectation of what they're going to interact with, not just in your content and the copy, but all the way through to checkout. And so we help you do that all the way through to checkout.

Phillip: [00:10:29] The issue at the forefront of what you can do is, I'm a man, why am I looking at products that aren't for me? Right? I get this all the time. Lululemon continues to send me emails that are about their women's collection. I've only ever bought men's products from them.

Rishabh: [00:10:47] That's because of your slumped physique.

Phillip: [00:10:49] There is that. The other issue is, just like this morning, this is a really great example of how these things are actually really difficult, and the systems that govern them don't always have the greatest data in them. For instance, this morning, I sent out an email to all of my Austin best friends, and I said, "Hey, we're doing an event tonight. Would you like to come?" And it went to a guy in Charleston, South Carolina, Ben Marks, who got on a plane and came here this morning.

Rabah: [00:11:22] Let's go, Ben.

Phillip: [00:11:24] Sorry. This afternoon. When you see the times when data hygiene creates these really weird things that create behaviors that we're not intending, what's the next level? Okay, I want it right for me, but what if I want the tone of voice to be a little bit cheekier? What if I want the thing I see on TikTok to be the kind of tone I want on the site?

Rishabh: [00:11:47] Totally. Totally. I think it actually is even more sophisticated than that. So you were talking about, I guess, sometimes what people will call an immutable characteristic. I mean, where you live is nominally mutable, but [00:11:59] a lot of times what we think about when we think about data associated with the person, we think about things that are immutable. [00:12:04] So a lot of things that you associate with person based data. [00:12:09] But candidly, you and I, we have different expectations, and we want different things depending on the context that we're in. [00:12:15] So when I'm coming in through search, my expectation is different than when I'm coming in through Instagram, than when I'm coming in through TikTok, than when I'm coming in through an email campaign. And so not only is that data going to be important as to who you are, but it's going to be important to understand the context and the sort of expectations of that person in that moment in time and meeting that person in that moment in time based on their expectations. [00:12:36] And so you're going to have to have the data on all of that context and actually meet the person in that context. [00:12:42]

Phillip: [00:12:42] The real opportunity, though, is that all of this today goes to a website. What else could it possibly go to? We spend a lot of time making a website like it's a garden, like we're gardening. We're designing it. Could it be something else?

Rabah: [00:12:59] Well, I think the too long didn't read is you should. Your website should be amazing. But the thing about your website is it's going to be in the middle, because you can't have on the extremes, because the whole point of the website is to convert as many people as possible. And by doing that, you're going to want to live in the averages. But the problem with living in the averages is you lose people on the extremes, and losing people on the extremes specifically in acquisition is a killer. And so I would push back on the need for a ton of data because I actually think of the world in a different framework of jobs to be done, where jobs to be done isn't a function of attributes. It doesn't like, you're not buying the Wall Street Journal because you're white, you're making over 500k, and you live in SoHo or something. You're buying the Wall Street Journal to hire it to get the best knowledge about the market or something like that. And so abstracting that and understanding the job to be done and then being able to have this coherent journey. So if you're selling a collagen supplement, for example, and that collagen supplement is on the ad promoting, "Hey, there's a bunch of hair loss, and it can help with you not losing hair," and then you go to the website. It's talking all about how it's going to stop your menopause. That's jolting to the user. And so understanding the job to be done and making that more coherent, and that consumer journey more cohesive, I think is the show. It's not necessarily... But you can't do that with a website because a website, if you think of it as Earth, Earth has these constraints, these physics of Earth, whereas now you can make all these constellation sites around Earth that have zero constraints to Earth, and they don't have any impact on your brand equity, and they don't have any impact on your returning customer revenue. So I think that's where you're going to see the website get abstracted to almost like a system of record, and you're going to see I mean, we look at it now. People buy through content, and people used to buy through a website because it was the aggregation of things. But now if I'm buying on TikTok or a FERMÀT experience on social or things like that, again, you're not going to get rid of your Shopify site, but people that aren't in B2B won't get this analogy, but our VP of Sales back there, Josh, runs all of our pipeline calls from Gong now, not Salesforce. We still pay for Salesforce, but Gong is a way better representative of that. And so that's analogous to where I think things are going, where you're going to have a bunch of these constellation sites that I can actually make to my liking for smaller and smaller people, but in the aggregate, they'll make more money than my website. Or that's my thesis, anyway.

Phillip: [00:15:19] So when you're talking about the role of the website is really to encourage the transaction, it's kind of some friction because the website is really just your ability to get the thing that the ad or the email or the SMS that brought you there inspired you to buy.

Rabah: [00:15:35] I would push back and say the role of the website is to please everybody. But if you're pleasing everybody, you're not pleasing anybody. And so that's why having this ability... Because you can't. You can't have this crazy website because you're going to off put a lot of people. The website is the way you act at your significant other's parents' house. That's not who you are, but you have this little you know, I have to be nice and be fun in front of them and like, "Yeah. That's a good joke. hahaha..."

Phillip: [00:16:00] That's a bar. I don't know. That's really good. That's a TikTok right there. Someone write that down. I don't know.

Rabah: [00:16:06] Exactly. But people have much more depth than them. There are different jobs to be done. And being able to explore all those and have these journeys agnostic of the cash cow is the show. That's the whole thesis.

Rishabh: [00:16:20] I'm going to call back really quickly to what Paul said earlier in the last session. He was sharing that he was allowing the creators to actually tell their own stories and then sort of sing what stories resonated with those specific audiences. And then TikTok Shops has done a really good job of bringing the store experience into that narrative. And that's precisely what it's going to look like. Right? That's why it's so effective is because different people are resonating with different narratives, and then they're actually being able to transact in the context of that narrative.

Phillip: [00:16:48] Okay. We've had a lot of Meta talk. It's all been good. What specifically does FERMÀT do to make that work?

Rabah: [00:16:57] Okay. This has taken a long time, so be gentle. So ultimately, the biggest thing what we do, so if you think of the funnel in five stages: you have your ad, your content, what have you. You have your post-click experience or landing page. You have your product page, and then you have your cart, and then you have your checkout. What FERMÀT does is we allow you a bunch of landing page experiences so you can spin these up super cheap, super easy, that they're awesome, and beautiful. But the real show is we actually build custom PDPs for you. So what that allows you to do is, again, that constellation site, you're not constrained by the physics of your actual website. So when you test an offer, if you have a website and you don't have any way to have custom PDPs, you're literally just changing your offer because you're not testing it on anybody. Whereas with our custom PDPs, landing pages, etcetera, you can try different offers, all these things, but it's outside of Earth. And that way, you don't have any impact again on the brand equity, on the return to revenue, and it gives you a much more robust place to experiment, to try different things, to unleash your acquisition team where you might have an incredible ad that has an awesome top of funnel metrics, but you're landing on a PDP or a collection page. That just does nothing for people where there's just so much more that the post-click experience can support. If you spend real money on creative, most people front-load their budget on creative and not landing pages, and so they're going to spend all this money on creative but not actually on the landing page. Well, when you think about it, is the hit line actually important, and then you suck on the date? No. You actually want the whole thing. You want to be awesome on the date as well. And so that's exactly what's happening is you have this incredible creative, which is an incredible pick-up line, but then you get to the website, you're like, "Oh, man. This guy's boring. The jokes suck and he smells."

Phillip: [00:18:37] What I really love about the opportunity here is you haven't said frictionless yet, and it's a pet peeve of mine about our idea that we were removing friction. I think [00:19:57] we need the right friction in the right place so that people actually use their brains. When people don't use their brains, then all kinds of weird things happen, like chargebacks or nasty reviews. We have buyer's remorse. There are things that happen when it's too slippery. Need a little bit of friction. The right kind. [00:20:17] The problem is testing that at scale is really tough because most people who work on the web property have no idea what creative is out in the world that are driving people to the site. They have no clue. It's a totally different department. And so my question here is, what's your take on that idea of friction or path of least resistance that gets people to the thing they really want?

Rishabh: [00:20:43] Yeah. So I actually agree with you. I think saying that we need to just remove all friction is not really the most effective path. So for example, one minor nuance that we learned for a lot of beauty brands, especially makeup, there's a large category of people who want to know the ingredients. And so if you make it too easy or you try to remove steps and you say like, "Hey, how do I just get the checkout button to be as like close to the ad as possible?" But you don't allow the person to easily see the ingredient list in order to make the decision and opt in to the yes, then you're actually going to lose the person entirely. And so the fastest path is actually not always obvious. And so when we think about what is the right path, we think about the fastest path to get from point a to point b, and that can often mean steps that people who are just simply trying to reduce friction will just say, like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah. Of course, you should just remove stuff." Removing is not always the right move. It's just being cognizant again of what the consumer is expecting from you.

Rabah: [00:21:46] Yeah. To add on to that, so how many people have redesigned their website and then seen a drop in conversion rate? Almost always. And so what happens is we call it the connoisseur explorer paradox. So when you have returning revenue, get out of their way. So if you think about it like you know if you think about it almost like going your favorite pub, you know the jukebox, where the jukebox is, you know the song you want to play, you know the bartender, you know the drink you want, you know where you want to sit, friction in that place is bad. Get out of their way. Let them give you money. There's like, for me, there's nothing more annoying than when I want to give you money, you make it hard. Get out of their way. Return your revenue. Get out of their way, take their money, be happy. So that's connoisseur. Right? But when you're in explorer mode, you're just out putzing the streets in Prague and stuff like that, that's when you're hot and bothered, where you're just like, "Oh, look at this cool place," or "There's a beer I want to try..." You're pulled into these places where you don't have any expectations set that you need to actually fulfill, and you can kind of play around more with that. And so that's where I think you can get a lot more, and in that time, friction isn't necessarily a bug as much as it's a feature because it gives you a way to educate and tell people why they're so smart or so cool or so awesome for buying your product. And so that's how I think of it in that connoisseur kind of explorer paradox, because I've been part of tons of redesigns, and I've never seen a redesign actually increase conversion rate because the people that knew what they want, especially the bigger the brand, their return in conversion rate breaks because there's always going to be something. It's going to degrade. So I think there's a there there when you're saying friction bug. It depends on the situation.

Phillip: [00:23:23] Yeah. To add on to that, you can't get to these overcorrection, you know, new paradigm-defining experiences, the Aztec, the Pontiac Aztec, the Verge site redesign, these are massive investments in experimentation and throwing out the playbook. How do you get there? Because I don't think you get there through iteration. You would have to... Iterating your way there would be really tough. So how does the moonshot factor into this path of least resistance, and can we pull together all of this conversation here today, intuition, and where do we still get the role of the marketer has to have some sort of sense of taking some risks, hedging their bets, testing, and learning.

Rabah: [00:24:13] Yeah. I mean, I would just build off kind of the previous thoughts of I would not like, how many times has Amazon redesigned their site? And they do so much testing, like maybe add buttons are in and there, and so I think there are a few things here. If you're driving the boat, it's your job. You get to choose. It's fine if you need to reset the brand to get down a different pathway where, hey, we're riding a bike now, but we're getting really awesome and we want to put railroad tracks. That's awesome, but guess what? Those railroad tracks are going to start to restrict your movement. You can get a lot of stuff there faster, which is awesome, but on a bicycle, you can go anywhere. When you're walking you can literally go anywhere. And, so, I think you need to understand what the goals of your brand are and what pain you want to feel for that because I do agree there's times and places where it's like, hey, we've gotten to the ceiling of where we're at now, and we need to pivot, and to pivot, there's going to be some pain before we can like, darkest before the dawn kind of stuff. But other than that, [00:25:08] if you're really happy with your brand, where you are, what you're doing, yeah, don't play around in the main house. Go party again with these constellation sites and don't mess around with returning customer revenue, with your brand equity. Go explore in these other ways that are really value-generative, but really derisk the things that you want to because again, a redesign is almost always going to lower your conversion rate. [00:25:30]

Rishabh: [00:25:30] I actually think the restaurant industry does this super well. So restaurants or, like, Taco Bell in specific, considering we talked about Taco Bell earlier today, and Doja Cat, thank you for the shout back out to Doja. I think people forget that they're very good. They test things in Ohio. They test things in certain geographies, and they take massive risk when they test those things. Taco Bell actually literally had a hotel that they concepted that they put up in Palm Springs. And so that, I think, is the analogy to exactly what Rabah was saying earlier, which is the way you do it is you take big risk and you do it in places where you get a good enough understanding of how people are going to react to it. And then if it works, then you just keep going.

Phillip: [00:26:15] And it seems like it's working. What you're building, you've had a lot of momentum in such a short period of time. It seems like you've struck a chord, especially at a time where a lot of your target market at the moment in direct to consumer feels like they need something new to combat all of these challenges that are happening on the platforms that are bringing them their business. So if you don't trust that you have the manpower to build all of these things that would build a business outside of Meta, you still have to be dependent on Meta, what is the next, the new new? What are you doing next in order to sort of, you know, be more experimental or find this path of least resistance? How are you going to get to the next phase of the business for FERMÀT?

Rishabh: [00:27:04] I mean, I think for us, for anybody here who knows Rabah previously, I mean, we think about it as marketers ourselves. Right? And for us, I think the really big thing that we're trying to do is, first of all, I think it's important for us to educate and to push this idea of what are the things you can do when you don't have to rely on a single website? I think that that's super important. But even more important than that is I think that our success actually does depend on the success of ecommerce. It does. And so the single most important thing that we are doing is we're going to try our very best to contribute as much as possible to the ecomm community over the next year in tons of different ways. And I think that that's what you should expect out of us, and that is, like, as marketers ourselves, that's what we're thinking about is how do we push a lot of value out into the community, and then whatever comes back comes back. Right? But that's sort of our principal driving force over the next year.

Rabah: [00:28:05] Yeah. No notes. I mean, I think at the end of the day, we really want to build a company that generates value for you that you don't have to give us any money. You can come, you can read our content, you can interact with our podcasts, you can come to stuff like this, get a free hat. People, please take the damn hats. I don't want to take them home. And just, you know, I don't know. I think there's a weird karma in a way, like just paying it forward. When I was a little young gun, you know, there were so many people that helped me out, and so now that I'm kind of, I mean, you know, I'm not on kind of thing, but I've had I'm old now, so I have a lot more experience. And so being able to just give back in ways that I can, I think, I know it sounds super cheesy and cliche, but I don't know? Do good, feel good kind of shit.

Phillip: [00:28:50] So you had an announcement this morning. I was trying to tee you up to go to... It was a very great segue that I teed up for you.

Rishabh: [00:28:59] Yeah. And we raised $17,000,000. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:29:01] Yeah. Congrats.

Rishabh: [00:29:04] There you go.

Phillip: [00:29:06] That's great. I was really just blown away this morning knowing that we had this event coming up, and then opening my email, I see Axios had a piece on you. Series A, 17,000,000. Tell us a little bit about, it's early stage, but you've raised a good amount of capital to date, I think $30,000,000 to date, to build this next generation technology that's going to build this thing that I've been thinking about for years, which is what if websites but whatever the customer wanted it to be in the first place. And that to me seems like that's a moonshot to build something that's technology because it doesn't have to just exist alongside the existing behemoths like the Shopifys of the world, but it has to, in some ways, shim in between it. But you have to be friends with them too, so let's talk about how you build into that ecosystem and how you support it at the same time while creating this new tech that people have to adopt because they have to future proof?

Rishabh: [00:30:09] Yeah. Totally. I mean, I think the way we thought about it was we're quite fortunate that Shopify is not a front-end company, fundamentally. It's like a back-end company, and so that's why they're so invested into headless and the payment system and all these other things. And so when we thought about how do we create an ecosystem, we thought about who's on the front end. So that's Meta, that's sending email, that's sending SMS, that's organic content, all of those different front ends where we need to plug into, and then all of the various back ends. So that's Shopify, that's BigCommerce, that's Salesforce Commerce. And our role is we want to make it more effective on every other platform that you use. So make it more effective for Meta, make it more effective for Shopify, and let us all win together. So the way we think about when you have this middle role and you're neither the front or the back, it's super important that you send value out to every part of the ecosystem. And that is fundamentally how you have to think about company building is you cannot think about it in the context of when you're meta, for example, it's like, I am now competing for time. I'm competing for eyeball time relative to TikTok. Right? That's sort of what you're competing with. And then when you're on the back end, it's like, okay. I'm competing for the payment process. Or [00:31:31] when you're in the middle, you have to be able to send value to everybody in the ecosystem. And that's how, as a company, you end up growing. And that's also sort of like I mean, it's a more fun way to build business also, just to be totally candid. [00:31:42]

Phillip: [00:31:43] There's a lot of work ahead of you too. Tell us a little bit about the fundraise, what is immediately in the future for you, what the job is to be done, to Rabah's point. What is the job to be done right now? Because the dreamy future feels like there's a lot of tech to build still.

Rishabh: [00:32:03] Yeah. Totally. I mean, so for us, the actual why for why we did the fundraise was this year, Google is turning off the 3rd party cookie. So it wasn't actually out of we're quite fortunate it wasn't out of necessity to raise, but it was rather out of seeing this opportunity that the 3rd party cookie is going away. And so then the question presented to us is if you want to build tools that make it possible for brands to be effective when you can no longer track people, you really better be able to serve all of the customers who are going to need help once the cookie goes away and they truly cannot track people anymore. And so that was what we went out to raise on behalf of is being able to be able to support what we think is going to be a pretty big need. I think, unfortunately, in 2021, when Apple made the switch saying that you have to opt in in order to track, there wasn't actually anywhere else people could go. And so the impact was actually quite bad. I mean, CPAs went really high. People had a lot of difficulty actually trying to get their marketing to be efficient again. For a while, people were experimenting with TikTok. Now we have success stories with TikTok Shops, but at the time, TikTok ads was the thing that people were experimenting with, and it was really difficult. And so this time, we want to be prepared, and we want to make sure that there are tools for people to use to be effective.

Phillip: [00:33:30] That's amazing. I appreciate that you helped to make this event possible, but I appreciate that you have had, you've been so open and accessible for the last year and a half, two years while you've been building, even when you were sort of like just coming out of stealth. Just having met you and having met your team and the team you're building, you seem like people who, you really get it, and you're really trying to deliver something that's next generation, and I'm rooting for you with every fiber in my being. Thank you so much.