I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:And I'm Gavin Ty, co founder of, Six Sides.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Excellent. And we're building SixSides.co an events platform that helps you build a stronger community through events. This is our B2B SaaS journey.
Gavin Tye:How's it going, Gab? Good, mate. Good. Excellent. We've got a special guest today.
Gavin Tye:He's known around the traps in the bus community, regional bus community of Australia. Welcome, Heroly Chour. How's it going, mate?
Heroly Chour:Hey, good morning gentlemen. I'm very good. Thanks. Thanks for having me on.
Gavin Tye:You're welcome. You were just saying before, when we, just before we started that you wish this is a podcast that you had access to a couple of years ago. What, give us some context around that.
Heroly Chour:Like Well, yeah. Like, when I started this SaaS business about three years ago, at the same time, I also had a a little daughter, you know, just being born. So I don't know. Going into into the unknown for two things I've never done before was, you know, something that I wish if other founders were in the same situation would have just thrown some few little nuggets to give and tell me about, okay. You know, you're you're you're gonna be consumed by, you know, a biological baby and a digital baby.
Heroly Chour:So here are some things and mistakes of not what to do, what not to do. So, yeah, I think I went in pretty blind. I'm feeling a bit blind these days.
Gavin Tye:For both for both side for both sides of it. Right? I'm I'm a Yeah. Dad of around the same age as your daughter. And, yeah, the things I was telling Mitchell last night, because we live in different towns.
Gavin Tye:Right? Mitchell's down in New South Wales. I'm in Queensland and we don't know each other's partners. So last night we had a video meeting dinner with our kids and Mel, wife and Mitchell and his partner, Nicole. And we sat there and just got to know each other.
Gavin Tye:It was actually really fun.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Had a blast. We got a photo. Maybe we can put that in the show notes. But yeah, it was really, really fun and nice to meet your whole family.
Mitchell Davis:And yeah, Nicole and I came away from that. We weren't quite sure what to expect going into it of like, is this, you know, is it is it gonna be awkward or whatever? Came away from it like, feels like we've known these guys forever. So, yeah, that was awesome.
Heroly Chour:I'm a lonely man, so I do that with my AI agents.
Gavin Tye:They're always agreeable and they call you hero.
Heroly Chour:That's it. That's it.
Gavin Tye:Best news hero. Well, so the point of bringing that up is like, I was really idealistic before I had kids. When I have kids, I'm going to be this way. And then I was telling Mitch, I said that slowly gets eroded. Because the reality of raising children and also building a business is, is very different once you're in the weeds, I think, anyway, in my opinion, and that's what we're trying to capture in this podcast.
Gavin Tye:So mate, tell us about, tell us about yourself. Who, who, who are you? What, what your business is? How long you've been going? Yeah.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. Well, who am I? Well, I'm I'm an engineer at heart. So from a very young age, you know, maybe when I was, like, in year four, I was very adamant that I'm gonna grow up to be one day an inventor and build stuff and tinker and all that. It's always stuck to me ever since.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. So for me, I just love tinkering and building and just trying new things, learning new things. That's me personally. Also, I'm an avid snowboarder and whiskey lover. So happy for you to send me a few bottles of your top shelf one day.
Gavin Tye:Mate, if I help you with some of your clients, then you send me a bottle of your top shelf. Yes.
Heroly Chour:Yes. I'll I'll have to show you
Gavin Tye:I'll have
Heroly Chour:to show you my my library of of stuff. Not books, but yeah, whiskey bottles. But yeah. So that's me in a nutshell. Very family oriented.
Heroly Chour:You know? Yep. Come from a big family. My parents were refugees fleeing the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. So a lot of the values they've instilled from that experience has passed on down to me.
Heroly Chour:So everything that I've learned about persistence and just just being generally a good person to other people to try and avoid the atrocities of the past. So for me, it's very deep ingrained that what I'm doing with my business right now is to help society, to give back to Australians, to give back to Australia, and hopefully to give back to the world. So that's a very key value that I have. So how did Bussable all start, which is the software business that I currently run with my co founder? Well, about three years ago when I was working at Transport for New South Wales, that time I was about to have Emily, my little daughter.
Heroly Chour:So I told, you know, my manager, look, I'm just gonna cancel my quit my job and become a full time dad. That that was the intention. But as people found out that I was leaving the government, some of the bus operators at the time that I was working with, they sort of just hit me up, you know, on the side and said, hey, Rolly. We need some software. Can you help us build this and build that?
Heroly Chour:So I just, you know, in my spare time, started building and tinkering for them, and they just really loved what I built and the process of getting it built. It was very collaborative and I was really just there with them on the journey, taking all the feedback and basically being their advocate in the technology space. And then in return, they'll have been the advocate as a potential customer in the business space. So that's how it all started. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:So so you didn't have a set plan to build Bustable? You kind of fell into it over time? Is that is that
Heroly Chour:Fell into it.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's kind of interesting how Six Sides started the same same kind of thing. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:We did touch on something really. I just want to go back a little bit. You said, obviously I know a little bit about your story or your dad's story coming, fleeing from the Khmer Rouge. But what other values did that instill in you as the son of your parents going through that? And how, how does that permeate into your everyday life?
Heroly Chour:Well, look, I think it's just it's just a few key things. So like from what I witnessed from the stories that mom and dad told me, all those atrocities that they went through, like it was very hard. Like, you know, some of these stories, like if you watch some of the movies out there, you know, the Killing Tails and what's that one that Angelina Jolie made? I forget what that movie was called on Netflix. But I've watched them and I go, this is nothing compared to what mom and dad went through.
Heroly Chour:So it gave me this perspective that I think no other person who has not had this experience from their parents or have been in the experience themselves would have. So this perspective that I've had is key to driving almost everything that I do these days. So one of the key items is just forgiveness. If you go back to Cambodia, did you know that, like, the average age of Cambodia right now is, like, 34 or 32 years old? Like, it's a very young nation because Oh.
Heroly Chour:During the war, all the elders were either put to the death sentence or they've just fled the country. So for a country that has gone through so much, but when you go visit the people, there is nothing but happiness, joy, and wishing the best for everyone in the world. You know, they've forgiven the past and forgotten about the past and just moved on. I mean, maybe not forgotten. That's a bad word.
Heroly Chour:They've, you know, they've forgot the museums. They've got the history that they retain, but they've just forgiven. Feel Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:That movie's called First They Killed My Father.
Heroly Chour:That's the one. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Could you do something sorry, Mitch. I've just hijacked the conversation. No.
Mitchell Davis:It's great. I'm I'm enjoying it.
Gavin Tye:You do something interesting I've never heard anyone else do. Right? Up until Bussable, you've been working three years and have a sabbatical for a year. Right? And you go and do some great stuff with your wife.
Gavin Tye:Tell us about that.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. I just feel like, you know, everyone's on this earth for a very limited amount of time. You know? Why should you enjoy your years when you're 60 and you can't do stuff and your knees are falling apart and all the health issues that come with old age. And as I mentioned, I'm an avid snowboarder and traveler.
Heroly Chour:So what I like to do is spend my late year retirements and bring them up earlier. So I work for two to three years, take a year off, and just go do what I wanna do with life at that particular time of my life. And yeah, just bank my retirement years earlier rather than later. That's the theory there.
Gavin Tye:What's some of the cool stuff you've done on a couple of those years off?
Heroly Chour:Oh, jeez. I could go on and on and on. But, yeah. Travel so we traveled for six months snowboarding globally. So we we bought that Epic Pass, which is like, what, $800 and you get, like, unlimited ski ski lifts around the world.
Heroly Chour:So we ended up going to Whistler, Japan, France, and just essentially going, trying to visit as many snowfields as possible. So after all that, we counted that we ended up at 21 snowfields and our daily ski lift pass costs ended up being about only $19 a day, which comparatively now, like at Perisher, that's like 200 a day. So You got
Mitchell Davis:your money's worth out of that.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. We went up to Northern Lapland. So, you know, tried to go chase the Northern Lights. And then other years, I've just taken off just to tinker, you know, take a year off, go learn a new coding language, build some apps, and yeah. So I spent six months building a snowboarding app, which is an interesting story because the app that I pivoted to actually start Bustable with, which I don't think I've told you yet, Gav.
Gavin Tye:No. No. Interesting. It's amazing how everything leads into something else. So you mentioned, I'm going to pause, Mitch jump in here because I've just hijacked the whole conversation.
Mitchell Davis:This is great because you obviously know Rowley, right? You've got this history there. So I'm kind of just getting to listen in. So no, it's yeah, keep going. It's good.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Well, so you mentioned before, Roly, that you wish you had, so like you're a couple, how many years you into bus? Well, a couple of years, two, three years?
Heroly Chour:Three and a half approaching '4 in October.
Gavin Tye:What do you wish you knew back in the early days for someone who's just thinking about starting a business or like within the first year? What do you yeah. What do you wish you knew that you know now?
Heroly Chour:Well, I was quite naive and ignorant when I came into the business starting it up with my cofounder because I was just adamant. Okay. We just gotta build the best product, you know, make the best experience UI, UI, UX, best features, and let's just go product led growth. Right? So we pushed that for two and a half years and pushed and pushed and pushed and we're like, something's not working here.
Heroly Chour:We've got an amazing product. Our customers say that it's really good. But where's the sales? Where's where's the revenue? So then I was like, okay.
Heroly Chour:We definitely have a problem here. This product like growth for an early stage down start up isn't the best approach. So it wasn't until I started learning more about sales and the whole psychology that goes around this buyer journey and how you you may have the best product, but your customers, if they're going this journey of discovering and understanding and then knowing that your product is gonna be the most suitable product for their business, then you're not gonna get very far. So I wish I knew that earlier on so that I didn't throw all my effort and power and energy and sleepless nights into trying to build the best product and perfecting that. Because I think we wasted a lot of time and money there.
Gavin Tye:That sounds very similar to yourself, Mitchell, hey, with RecruitKit.
Mitchell Davis:It sure does, mate. Yeah, absolutely. So I still have another business called RecruitKit, and it's it's automated onboarding software for recruitment agencies and large employers that need to do a lot of onboarding, like, on mass. And very similar story. Like, I'm a developer, very product minded and not sales minded at all.
Mitchell Davis:And so that's actually how Gavin and I met was through RecruitKit with some other things he was doing at the time around police checks and stuff. And so, Gav, you pretty quickly identified, I guess, me early on as you were looking to pivot out and do your own thing with, with sales market fit. Yeah. It sounds like the exact same type of story. So yeah, it's, it's interesting hearing someone else go through that.
Gavin Tye:It's not uncommon though. Like when you, if you start a business and you go look at any marketers, right. They put out that material, Hey, it should be marketing, like product led growth. It's how you scale. You don't need a sales team, but the reality is if you're somewhat of a complex problem, a product or solution, people just aren't going to naturally buy this.
Gavin Tye:Isn't the movie, the field of dreams, you can't naturally build it and they will come. You've got to go find it. And, and, and hopefully you make that realization before the kind of market passes you past. Otherwise it's very hard to catch up, which, but then all with yourself, Roly, because yeah, I help you with my other businesses. It's just chiseling some of the stuff away and just having a different perspective and it just unblocks it.
Gavin Tye:Right? It's just unblocking your drain. And that seemed to be working.
Heroly Chour:A %. That perspective is so important, you know, the buyer's mindset journey. Yeah, that's been gold so far for my business. Like what we used to do in the first couple of years, two years, we probably had, what, six sign ups in those two years, which is not not a good good good innings. But then as soon as we started doing sales market fit with Gav, what, December, oh, it's just been on the terror.
Heroly Chour:You know, we've been booking demos and signing up almost like a a new customer once one a month or maybe one every 1.5 months, something like that, which is a much better run rate.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Amazing. All we're doing all you're doing is positioning the right piece of information at the right time so people see value or or wanna forward. And that's all it is really. And yeah, and that's what we're trying to do with six sites is document those lessons that we learned.
Gavin Tye:So I guess beyond the sales beyond the sales lesson that you've learned, what what are some of the other key things that you've learned or in the last couple of years that if anyone's listening to this and they're just on an early journey, they could take away from it?
Heroly Chour:Well, one of the good things that I've actually learned so this isn't my first, I guess, startup. Well, this is my first, like, sort of tech SaaS startup, but back in the what? My three sabbatical years ago, sabbatical sessions ago. So what, ten years ago, roughly, I had another business that I started up with. And it was the key lesson from these two startups was making sure that your co founder is the right fit too.
Heroly Chour:So the second time around, my cofounder Graham, he is just a gun in terms of getting shit done. Oops. Sorry about the friendship. We we speak
Mitchell Davis:to you. That's fine.
Heroly Chour:I don't like to sorry. The word we use is is magic. We we make you know, we like to find people that make magic happen, and Graham's definitely one of them. He's equivalent to, like, five developers. But essentially, yeah, like, whenever we have this idea or this hypothesis that I've tinkered in my head and I need to quickly get something out to test it in the market, what in my head I think would have taken a month to build, he'll build it in like a week.
Heroly Chour:So having that sort of power or finding someone that has that superpower is amazing. So I reckon when you're starting out any business, if you're gonna cofound, which I recommend you do because it's a lonely journey doing it by yourself, really spend a lot of time making sure that your co founders are a perfect fit for what your vision and values are in the business. So, yeah, as Graham and I, we're like a married couple. Know, ups and downs. You know, we have our conflicts, but, you know, with transparency and communication, it's been a really, really good fit.
Heroly Chour:So that that's one thing I I I think I've learned over the decade.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Yeah. Amazing. That really resonates for me because you're right. With RecruitKit and with Atlas software, which is my normal day job, my business where we do development consulting.
Mitchell Davis:The loneliness aspect of being like a single founder really resonates for me because it is lonely. And when everything is on your shoulders, it can be really overwhelming. I found it's like, my god, okay, I've got to not only have I got to, you know, in this case of like Atlas, the software consulting, it's like not only have I got to build the stuff for clients, right? But then got to do marketing and got to do outreach and supporting your clients and like and thinking ahead and forecast. There's like so much to do when it's all on your shoulders.
Mitchell Davis:And so then now with six sides working with Gavin, and it's just like, it's amazing. I feel like I've got that same, like, oh, this is the perfect fit for what I need. And we have those complimentary skills. Right? So Gavin just knows us intrinsically.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Knows all this stuff that, like, I don't know. And now I don't have to know, you know, because I've got Gavin, and he can help me with all of that stuff. He can move the business forward and is and it's amazing. So, yeah, I totally I'm hearing you on finding a good fit for a co founder.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. I'm gonna
Gavin Tye:So Rolly sounds like it didn't go that well before ten years ago. Can you give some examples of how it didn't go that well for you?
Heroly Chour:Look, I think we were just over the place. We didn't have structure. So for me at the time, I was sort of the visionary and we were just coming up with all sorts of products only because we just needed to survive and make some money. So one, there wasn't much structure in place. Like, it was just me with my biohose of ideas and just throwing it out there and seeing what sticks.
Heroly Chour:And there wasn't really that sounding board. My initial cofounder was, you know, I'll just do what you want me to do. That was the initial first my first start up. And then the second time around, there's a lot more structure now because I'm in like, so myself and Graham, my co founder, we both come from the same industry. Transportation, we both work together in government.
Heroly Chour:So when I go to Graham with an idea, he'll really rein me back and go, woah, woah, woah, woah. You know, we've got 10 ideas. You gotta pick two or three of these because I can't build everything. So he brings me back down to reality. And then he goes, look, I'm only gonna build stuff if you can actually secure some revenue funds because, you know, why why are we building stuff where we may not be able to make any revenue from?
Heroly Chour:So a lot of that has been now deeply ingrained into our business where we would only build stuff or do stuff where we can sort of prove that there's gonna be a market or customers that will pay for it. So we sometimes even get them to pay for something first as a prototype and and then build from that point on. So so that's just just one of the many examples, I would I would say, that's a key from my learnings. Another thing is as simple as, for example, just the technical finesse, you know. This Graham as a co founder, he's just next level, you know.
Heroly Chour:So just I'm just so grateful and lucky to have someone that can just create magic, as we say, impossible.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Look, I feel the same too with, I've seen lots of startups who don't have complimentary founders and they kind of get stuck into this. It's definitely not productive. It's not one plus one equals four.
Gavin Tye:It's definitely, it's not good for either people. But even in the short time, well, Mitch and I've known each other for coming up on three years now. And, but the short time we've been working together, one of us will get stuck on something. The other one I go, I can do that or vice versa, or Mitch is super detail orientated, but like, and he can stress over certain things, but we don't have the time for that. So my skill is trying to pull him out of that and go, Hey, that, and we meet in the middle and go, that's okay.
Gavin Tye:And, and I'm happy with certain things. He's like, not chance in hell. I
Mitchell Davis:have to rein you in a bit as well sometimes.
Gavin Tye:It's the same thing. So yeah, that definitely resonates. Right. So I guess the real, the, one of the reasons we had you here today, mate, is we've been doing stuff about building customer advocacy, right? And you just touched on it before is getting a client to, like pay your work, your design with your clients.
Gavin Tye:How instrumental has that been in the development of Bussable and, you know, ultimately growing revenue, winning clients, being more entrenched in the market? How has that, how important has that been to you guys?
Heroly Chour:Oh, look, to be honest, I don't think there's any other way we could have pulled this off if we didn't work very closely with customers to get their feedback and ideas and get them to advocate for us. So when I first started, it was just it actually came from a problem from customer that they wanted to be solved. So from day one, it was all about listening to the customer and understanding what their needs were. And so that's sort of the spark that started it. So to give some context, essentially, I work with a lot of regional bus operators.
Heroly Chour:And as you know, most of the world, information about bus services is just nonexistent. It's just on pieces of paper. Right? So in the new digital age, you want everything online so you can see bus services and routes and, you know, vehicles tracking in real time on Google Maps and Apple Maps and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, how do you get that data in the first place?
Heroly Chour:So this is where the customer bus operators approached me and said, hey, Roland. We need something to try and capture all our routes on on on a map somewhere. Right now, we're doing it by hand on a piece of paper. So I was like, guess what? I think I've got something.
Heroly Chour:I built something about a couple of years ago for snowboarding. So I built this app on an iPhone where, you know, you can do your snow run and it tracks your route path, and then you can plot little points on the map where the ski lift chairs are. So I built that, but I never sent it to the market. Like, it was never on App Store. It's just a a hobby.
Heroly Chour:So I thought, okay. Let let me pivot that idea and see if I can get it to work for the buses. Two weeks later, got it working. Bus operators use it. They're like, oh, man.
Heroly Chour:This is amazing. I I love this. And then from that, they're like, okay. Can you do the next step now? Can you get this into this specific data format so I can send it to the government?
Heroly Chour:So yeah. Anyway, that's how it all started. So it's always been this listening to the customer, understanding their needs, what the problems they have are, quickly trying to build and prototype something, prove that it works or doesn't work, and then keep on iterating there. And the idea is that we just do that real fast and close the feedback loop as tightly as possible because you don't wanna spend months and months building something that ultimately just doesn't work. So that's where our superpowers come in in the business.
Heroly Chour:We're very good at building in these rapid prototypes and then just getting it out there and then iterating on it. So that's how our business model works in terms of product development. It's it's just so key. And you'll probably ask questions in the future, but how does that impact the business's bottom line? So I can talk through that a bit later.
Heroly Chour:But yeah. Does that answer your question, Gav?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It does. So give us an example of that quick feedback loop. Like, how are you talking about, like, weeks, days, like or because Grain would have to be part of that. Would imagine being a the lead developer.
Gavin Tye:Right?
Heroly Chour:We work in the span of days. So normally, we would sometimes before even hitting the code, sometimes we would just jump onto a rapid prototyping tool like Figma and build like a fully interactive system or idea out, put that into the hands of the customers just to have a play around with just to see if it feels right for them and they they think it's gonna be useful for for the business. And if if we get good feedback we get heaps of good feedback from that, they'll say, oh, yeah. That doesn't really work or, you know, whatnot. And we iterate that because that's quick.
Heroly Chour:Because my my UX engineer, he can build a rapid prototype in hours, and then he'll give it to me. I get into a Teams meeting with my customers and just go through it. So once we've sort of laid out the initial wireframing and got that right, it then gets into the actual development. So rapid prototyping. And now we're we're we're, like, falling in love with, like, AI development.
Heroly Chour:So like my guys, my my engineers, they have, you know, twenty like, Ram's twenty five plus years developer and Avi Malva developers, you know, ten plus years. So they know development inside out. But now they use AI where it really, I reckon, has 20 x l productivity on on some cases. So we can get a rapid prototype out, which used to take two weeks until, like, a day now. And we're currently doing that right now.
Heroly Chour:I've got a meeting with a customer tomorrow to show them something they asked about a week ago, and we've just sort of built it in a day. And I've told Chris, the customer, hey. Can I show you what we've just built? I think this is what you were asking for. And he's like, woah, Broly.
Heroly Chour:What? You've already done it? And I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Heroly Chour:So Yeah. So it's just really built this it it's just in addition to getting the feedback for us to build product, it's fed this it's a reciprocal benefit back to the customer because now the customer's like, wow. This bussable guys, they are just on the ball. They they are flying. They're fast.
Heroly Chour:They listen to me, and they can deliver. Yep. And for them, they'll be like, well, why would we go with any other company when these guys can deliver exactly what we say we need? But
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yep. Interesting. So how does that go with the discipline of, you know, when Graham before said, hey, you've got 10 ideas, Rolly. I'm only gonna build a couple.
Gavin Tye:Right. Until you can show that it's revenue generating. How does that, the ease of being able to build something so fast, how do you stay disciplined on that and not go, Hey, we can do it in one a day now. Let's build 10 in 10 opposed to one in 10. How do you stay disciplined on that?
Gavin Tye:Or are you, was that a bit more flexibility?
Heroly Chour:That's a really good question because that's the problem that I'm struggling with right now because that fire hose has just been turned full notch on my end going, oh, man. I've got all these ideas. Let's get them out there because we can build them so fast. But the problem that we're we're seeing that we have right now is, okay. Fine.
Heroly Chour:You can get all these products out there. Right? But, you know, you gotta remember that you're a SaaS company, so software as a service. So there's two parts of that. You got the software, which is the product and all the ideas that you wanna get out there, and the service.
Heroly Chour:So the service is also very important in in our business. So so we so we've done this before, and and we're trying to really nail it down tone it down a bit where we don't try to put as many products out there as possible because we just can't service it well enough. There's just too many bugs and issues that come in from all different contexts of our business. And it puts a massive pressure on me on support and my team on support, so it distracts us more than anything. So when we send products out to the market, we now basically look at the product, where does it fit within within our support model, and can the team support it?
Heroly Chour:Because if it's a brand new product, let's say, something that we've never done before, we've got to realize that, okay, we're gonna have to spend more time and support on this and and get the teams called up to support it. So all that decision making around the support model comes into play to help me figure out what we need to deploy to the customers for them to use. So that's one. And then second one is the revenue. We we do this we we we call it like a have you heard of Wizshift?
Heroly Chour:So wait at shortest job first. It's a prioritization method that we use in agile delivery where you look at the product that you need to build, how much effort and complexity does it take versus the business benefit that you'll get. And our business benefit could be either a brand uplift or revenue uplift. So if those two are fairly high, but the work to do that's fairly low, then, yeah, they get prioritized into the into our bank to be developed and shipped out to customers. I love the ones where the development effort is low because we've got these new products that can generate revenue, but they leverage off existing infrastructure and technology that we've already built.
Heroly Chour:So a lot of those sort of product add ons get out into the market also before some of the bigger chunkier stuff. That's like new field greenfield for us.
Gavin Tye:Okay. Yep. Interesting. Yeah. I've got I'm looking at the WishJif, yeah, info.
Gavin Tye:One might send you a link
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Mitch, to put
Heroly Chour:it in
Gavin Tye:the notes. So Yep. How does that sit with you? What what's the I know how I think in the sales mentality here, Mitch, but how does that what do you think as a developer on this side of, like, hearing this stuff?
Mitchell Davis:It's really cool to hear how you go about it. Can I ask how big is the team? You mentioned you got a few different people there. How how large is the even the dev team? It's just
Heroly Chour:Oh, the dev team is just myself, Graham, a UX engineer, a senior another senior full stack engineer, and a QA engineer. So what's that? Five five of us?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Well, good on you because that's not cheap. So, you know, you must be doing something. Right?
Heroly Chour:It
Mitchell Davis:is really interesting to hear how you're going about prioritizing different features, functionality, ideas, because totally, we're still, you know, in our infancy. We've got a lot of stuff yet to build. Right? Gavin and I have tons of ideas. So maybe implementing something like this could really help us figure out, okay, what's the right next step?
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Might be a little harder because we're still like we've kind of talked about on some of our earlier episodes, like the the cycle to get a sale basically can be like up to twelve months, right? Three events, we've got to be at the right time and for that event organizing stuff. So it's a bit of a cycle that we've got to factor around to then be able to prove out like, okay, this is going to generate revenue for us. It could be a little trickier because it's not an instant Just
Gavin Tye:on that, Mitch, we've got our first verbal confirmation of first revenue this week too, by the way.
Mitchell Davis:Yes.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. First, congrats. Thanks.
Gavin Tye:Just not a big one, but it's the data that we'll get from it is amazing. So, yeah. That's it. Yeah. That's yeah.
Gavin Tye:Okay. So it's interesting how you're you're bringing the whole team together on on and everyone's aligning to this role. Like, we're we're thinking about with us. We've got some things that stick in my mind with us is at the moment we're sales team led growth, and that's very difficult to scale. I think we we the problem we need to figure out how to solve is how to make this a little bit product led growth, but be able to replicate itself in other areas, whether it's a freemium version or a or something so we can actually start trying to scale beyond like an automated somewhat sales process.
Gavin Tye:And, eventually I hope, I think that you might get there though with regional bus operators, I think partnerships is really important for you, which you're investigating now. Right?
Heroly Chour:Correct. Yeah. So, we've got global partners who have been in the industry for ten plus years, and I think they seem to like what we really do. And the gap that we provide, we solve some of the issues, the gaps that they have. So we're working closely with a few partners right now.
Heroly Chour:So to answer your point there, or really reinforce that point, Gav, is that we are looking at other besides just hardcore sales and email cold emails and cold calling and all that stuff, we're looking for strategic partnerships and strategic platforming. So as an example of a strategic platform, so we work with suppliers out there and bring them onto our marketplace and really build this ecosystem where ultimately for Bustable, we want to be like this, if you can imagine, almost like this operating system, like Windows or Mac OS or whatever, where it's this operating system, but you can plug in all these different apps to achieve all the amazing magical outcomes as a end user. Can create videos, create podcasts or whatever. So we wanna do the same thing in the transportation industry where we build this this what I like to call the fabric of transportation. This platform bring on all the supply experts in the transportation industry out there, all their ideas and technologies, and plug that into our platform.
Heroly Chour:And, hopefully you know, we're years and years away, but by the way, you know, getting to this point, but that's the vision. And if if we can do that and build this ecosystem, then I think it just sells itself, you know, because you've got all these advocates out there. It's like, you know, if you use Atlassian or Salesforce and all that and they have their own little eco ecosystem, it's just a self perpetuating engine of bringing in customers.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. You see those other businesses that can connect with this system you're talking about or whatever. Yeah. All these different apps, everything talking together, and that's like a really compelling offer. Right?
Heroly Chour:It's a hard job to build. That's for sure. But yeah, it's our vision is well, I mean, I don't know if I spoke too much about possible, but, you know, my personal vision is to try and make anywhere possible for anyone. So coming into Australia as a family of refugees, being able to get to your place of work, to your place of study, to go buy your groceries without a car is impossible. So we relied heavily on the transportation system, I.
Heroly Chour:E, the buses because we lived in South West Sydney and there's no trains. So the buses were key. It was sort of like our lifeline to, you know, build a family and living here in Australia. That's never going to change anywhere around the world. So there's always going to be the people that rely on these systems.
Heroly Chour:That's our job here in Bustables, to make that system as efficient, as equitable as possible, and as accessible as possible, and as safe as possible. That's our true vision there. My whole team's sort of bought in on that vision after I've told them my story. That really fuels the business and the team to really push as hard as we can to get to that end state vision.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Your parents must be proud, mate.
Heroly Chour:Oh, I think so. They don't say it, but, you know, I like to think so. My dad dad's hardcore. You know, he's a military type man, so he's he's never cried for anyone except for two people. Grandma, because grandma loved dad, and Bob Hawk.
Heroly Chour:When Bob Hawk passed away, yeah, dad dad was in tears because he was the the sitting prime minister at the time that brought, you know, allowed the refugees in. Yeah. Okay.
Gavin Tye:Interesting. So when it comes to this, because this is a massive vision, right? Your mission is huge. How do you choose what strategic clients to take their advice on. Right?
Gavin Tye:Because as time goes on, you're gonna get more and more clients. You can't have everyone on your strategic advisory council. Alright. How yeah. How do you what's your thought process around that and what have you learned?
Heroly Chour:Well, I found what I've learned, it's actually quite easy to identify these strategic customers or advocates. And it's really the comes out to one thing, passion. So, you know, I go talk to them. I hopefully try to get my passion about transportation and my backstory out to as many people as possible because what I wanna do is see who resonates with that because they're gonna be the driving force to push what we believe is disruptive technology. They are gonna help disrupt, so from the business side.
Heroly Chour:So when I talk to a lot of these customers, we've got a few who basically go, wow. Love your story. It's amazing. But in addition to that, they've been working in the transportation industry for forty years ever since they were 19. They're like, I don't know, sixteen hours something.
Heroly Chour:So you can see the passions there. And when you prove to these customers that you can deliver on some of the ideas that they have, they go, oh, holy molys, man. They I feel like you know, as a customer, I feel like I've got this missing arm that I've never knew I needed, which is this technology arm, this technology powerhouse that can just help deliver some of their visions. Yeah. So so we've got a few of those customers as advocates.
Heroly Chour:Like, you know, we've got dozens of customers, but I can only I I suppose, based on those criterias I mentioned, there's only about about three, I I would say, that fit into my category of disruptive thinkers who are just passionate about what they do, and they are aligned with my vision for what Basil is trying to achieve.
Gavin Tye:Sure.
Heroly Chour:And it comes with, I guess, lot of gut feel too. So it's all the soft skills, not anything else besides just being on the ground with firm. And it's almost like how you're quoting for a wife, I suppose. Know? Sure.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. It's saying if the values are there that aligns with your values and going with the gut feel at the end. It's probably the best way I can put it.
Gavin Tye:So trust is a cornerstone of that, and that that would take time to build right on both sides. Right? So
Heroly Chour:Exactly. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. At least I've been two years, three years in the making.
Heroly Chour:So and I hit up these customers with advocates almost, you know, not daily, but, you know, three every three or four days. That's how closely aligned we are with, you know, getting customer advocacy feedback.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Wow. That's more often than I would have thought. Do you ever get the sense that they're like, oh, okay, Rollie's back again. He's got, you know, there's another idea or anything?
Mitchell Davis:Or are they always, like, open to wanting to chat with you about this stuff?
Heroly Chour:That's a good question because going up and just asking them for their time to ask for feedback, it's a bit intrusive because they're very busy themselves. So what I do is it's become habitual now. And I tell my entire team this, Obviously, they would call us up first for a support issue or a bug or or something or help in training. Right? But we always use that opportunity.
Heroly Chour:Now that we've got their time on the phone or something, we always use that opportunity to end the call with a feedback session. So that that's why I'm saying they call every two or three days, and we always end up with a, oh, sorry. You know, Jeff, so we just released this feature for you. What do you think? You know?
Heroly Chour:Is it working, and are you using it? And tell us how we can improve on it. So, you know, two or three minutes after each one of these support calls goes a long way.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Gotcha. That makes total sense. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:We Cool. We've transitioned mostly online now and and you work from your your house seemingly. How important is it getting in front of these people face to face to build these relationships and to build trust?
Heroly Chour:Well, it's a for me, it's a superpower. It's a competitive advantage. And the customers tell us. They go, you know, we work with other companies, but, you know, we rarely hear for them hear from them, and they're not on the ground with us. And the reason why they stick with possible is because myself, I, for one, love traveling.
Heroly Chour:I I love driving. That's where I find my peace and I'm sort of meditative state, just doing these long drives down to Woop Woop. So one, I I enjoy doing it, but then yeah. Two, the customers really appreciate that. Just you being making the time to come out and see them and and go on the journey with them and actually see how they operate because there's a lot of things that you weren't about to pick up virtually on a meeting.
Heroly Chour:You have to go spend two or three hours seeing them use the system or seeing them operate their business to actually pick deep insights and go, oh, you know, this customer haven't thought about a potential automation piece here, I reckon with my techno technology, you know, mindset, I can automate this problem that they have that they didn't even know they had a problem in the first place. So it's just being able to see all that. It's essentially getting like front row seats to the operations and businesses that they run, which is a competitive advantage to other companies that don't do that.
Gavin Tye:Yeah, for sure. When I was at
Mitchell Davis:You go, go. You go.
Gavin Tye:Oh, when I was at this startup years ago, 2015, it was an engineering drawing management platform and it was buggy, right? Cause it was a startup and it was solving an enterprise problem. Our competitive advantage was meeting face to face because Autodesk wasn't necessarily doing it and filling up that cup of trust or gave us a long, like, give us the ability to fix bugs and issues like that. And, yeah, it's, I think that's all part of the service, right? You can't really, of software as a service, you can't really say, Hey, we're innovative.
Gavin Tye:We only do this brand of your offer off online. I think, yeah, really getting in front of as many people, at least in the beginning, is, really important.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. I mean, like, we're really scrappy. Like, this doesn't scale, obviously. But, you know, it like you said, Gab, it builds that trust and yeah. To the point where it's gone beyond just a customer or client, you know, relationship now.
Heroly Chour:Like, I've gone up to the Tamworth with family, Emily and parents and staff. And we'll go have a barbecue with our customers. They invite us to their home. My little daughter will play with their grandkids. It almost becomes like this, I don't know, family event now.
Gavin Tye:So,
Heroly Chour:you know, they appreciate that. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it's definitely one of those things where, you know, it feels like we've got the customer for life, you know? Like they're not gonna churn, they're not gonna move away. And these are big customers that we have.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. So you do that, Mitch. You've got some good strong relationships in your other businesses, right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I've been working one client in particular, I think for about nine years now. And it's kind of funny because it started around the same time as my relationship with my now fiance. So I can kind of use that as a bit of a metric of like, okay, started dating Nicole and then started working with this client, and I can that's how I keep the two in track.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It's really important. What I was gonna say before was being able to observe, like, as a developer and thinking about automation and improving, like, business procedures, which sounds really nerdy and not fun, but it's, like, it's very interesting. And I guess, you know, drives a huge amount of value to a business if you can automate away this manual process that they're doing, and it's something that takes them two days each week or whatever, and you can turn that into a button that downloads a report or whatever, like, being able to see that stuff with your technology mindset, as you said, see where some of those, like, inefficient processes are happening and then being able to present that to the customer and say, hey, that problem that you're having that maybe you didn't even really know about, like, I've got a solution for it. And and here you go.
Mitchell Davis:You know? So And that's really cool to see that you're or to hear that you're doing that sometimes in person while, you know, going and shaking hands with these customers and resolving problems for them. That's awesome.
Heroly Chour:And the and the thing with that, Mitch, is also, like, I have this litmus test that when I sort of identify these inefficiencies and you build something to solve that problem, like, via a click of a button or something, sometimes I don't tell them about it because what I wanna do is I wanna maximize Gavin calls it the oh shit moments. I call them the magical moments. Holy magical moments. Yeah. So we just go back and say, hey, you know, hey, Jeff.
Heroly Chour:Look. We've just built this. I think this will help you. You know, he'll play with it or look at it, and you'll see their eyes just go, Oh my god. You know?
Heroly Chour:So those experiences that they have in their business working with Bustable, I think it it becomes deeply ingrained in their emotional state. You know? They they just feel like there's magic happening with Bustable, and we don't need anyone else. So we've had competitors try to approach our current customers to try and turn them over to their business instead of the competitor. And they just flat out right say to the competitor, look, we're working with Rollie already from Basketball.
Heroly Chour:We've got no interest. Leave us alone. So it gives you that competitive advantage. We do this a lot with the big, big players, the big customers we have.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I think it's sales and winning clients is people think once they win them a lot, that's it, they've won. And they don't often maintain that relationship. And if you're not courting someone or maintaining that relationship, someone else will. And eventually that value equation will turn and then it opens up an opportunity for someone.
Gavin Tye:And it's a defensive strategy, but it's an offensive strategy. It does so many things and, it's very hard to, you can't defend it. You can't, you can't fight against it. And I think at the end of the day, we're in a competitive market and it's, often, with our competitors, a zero sum game, if they don't, they'll either win or not, or will win. So, yeah, it's really interesting.
Gavin Tye:Another thing that sparked my thinking in this conversation is, using AI for certain parts to enable Graham and the team, their role is it makes me wonder if we can build, you can build a multi multimillion dollar business with less than 15 people. Right? We're using automation and things like this. Right? Agents now.
Gavin Tye:Because I remember at Redeye, we had the founding team of Redeye, like the first twenty, I think I was like, might have been 10 or something. A lot of them were developers, but we had a really strong core team and then they put a layer in and then that started to, the culture got affected. And, and then you found that the core team who were there for each other started leaving because the it just got diluted and didn't work as much. And I'm guessing that's a natural transition of a business, but I wonder if using stuff like that can help maintain a core team for us, Mitch. We go, well, how do we build this business so we don't need any more than 10 people?
Gavin Tye:Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. The smaller team, kick the kick the same the culture. Right? You know? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. Yeah.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. It's interesting. Could you raise that, Gav? Because that's actually one of our strategic aims is to make sure that our team, we don't bloat it because like, I've worked in big corporates and govern governments before, and I've noticed when you get beyond eight people and Jeff Bezos says, make sure your teams, you can feed them with two pizzas. Right?
Heroly Chour:So because as you grow beyond eight in a team, it becomes just insanely hard to communicate. There's just too many lines of communication now, and you get more miscommunications and just more problems in general. So so what I like to see, like, as as we grow, like, I like to think we're building, like, these very specialized, very almost like hardcore Navy SEAL teams, right, like, of six to eight people. You give them a mission, and they just pound away and and and really smash it out of the ballpark. And using AI is becoming insanely powerful because we thought that we probably need about 10 people to deliver everything we need, but right now, we're on, like, five.
Heroly Chour:And I reckon easily we can do that with some of these new technologies coming out. So for example, just yesterday, I was in one of my daily stand ups with the team, and we're going through one of these features, right, building this operational dashboard for our customers. And I gave one of my developers just some feedback on the call. He's like, oh, you know, would be great if we can actually get the two maps showing and blah blah blah blah. And he's like, okay.
Heroly Chour:So literally three minutes later, did some stuff in AI, and he goes, hey, Rolly. Is this what you And he showed me on the screen, and I'm like, holy f. Did you just do that with AI? And he goes, yeah. It took me, like, two minutes.
Heroly Chour:So in terms of just that speed and and now the speed of rapid prototyping and getting stuff out to customers that actually work, you can actually get quantitative and qualitative data back. Yeah. It's insane. It's just insane. It's almost like a secret power that I don't wanna mention in podcasts only because I don't want competitors that I deal with knowing about what we're doing.
Heroly Chour:But, yeah, look, I'm happy. Send it away.
Gavin Tye:It's kinda like human assisted AI, not human replacing AI. Right? Because that that he still put his frame and his thoughts over it and and disseminated, I think that's the right word, what you said and said, okay, now I know. And, yeah, interesting. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I think that's something that we should consider, Mitch, is like, how do we build this to I think having a small group and a core group of people is a massive culture advantage and a massive, there's so many advantages to it as long as you don't sacrifice on the service or or something on the other side. Right? Yeah. Interesting.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. We we do already use some AI tools. Maybe we can talk offline, Rolly, about what your team are using. But, yeah, certainly on, like, the development side of things, we are using some AI tools, but I don't feel like it it's not a core part of, like, my workflow in particular, I guess. It's like, okay.
Mitchell Davis:If hey. I'm having, you know, ChatGPT or whatever or any of these other tools, developer specific tools. It's like, hey. I'm having trouble with this thing, or can you write me a function that write me some code that's gonna do this, you know, and whatever. I'm I do that every now and then.
Mitchell Davis:Maybe, like, once a day or once every two days or so. I'm getting, some development help with something. But in general, it's not a core part of what I'm doing yet. So I'd be interested to hear if we chat offline because you don't want to give away too much of the secret sauce. But yeah, interested to hear a bit more about what more more we could be doing and maybe I can take some of those learnings.
Mitchell Davis:And if we look to move forward with any of that, I can talk about some of that in later episodes, Gab. So
Gavin Tye:yeah, that's interesting I'd love to learn as well. So yeah. Okay. Well, we've been going for nearly an hour already. Mick, what wins have you had?
Gavin Tye:Maybe let's talk about the wins that we've had. Rolly, what wins have you had in your business this week?
Heroly Chour:Well well, yeah. So we've had our well, some of our biggest customers come back to us with more features, requests, all that kind of stuff saying that, like I said, like, disability so they came to us again with a problem. They weren't happy with another supplier they were using. They were just overpriced. And they approached us and said, hey, Rolly, can you sort of figure out how we can build this platform that they needed quickly because, you know, the contract with the current customer ends at the March.
Heroly Chour:And, again, with the help of some AI and my teams who are augmented my engineers are augmented with AI, you know, looked at the current platform that they had, assessed it using AI, and then quickly prototype something in with AI. We went back to them and said, hey. Look. Here's something we've done. Is this suiting your need?
Heroly Chour:And, again, they were like, holy shamole. Did you just do that in, like, less than a week? This normally takes us months. And I'm like, yeah. So, anyway, so we've managed now now to win a business via an existing customer by, you know, funneling, you know, revenue from a competitor to us.
Heroly Chour:So that's just a simple win. Amazing. And then we've had yeah. Thank you. It's things like that we're seeing using some of this technology.
Heroly Chour:It's just insane just to create that magic moment to the customer to really give them the confidence that they're making the right move. I mean, they're already using Bussable for other things, but this is a totally different component or module of the business that we have that we're just starting out that they've just started to learn that we're doing. So now they're like, Yeah, Rolly, we just want to bring everything onto your platform now. You've proven to us you guys can deliver pretty quickly. Yeah.
Heroly Chour:And and when you deliver quickly, you can deliver more cheaply. There's less man hours involved. So double, you know, double win there for the customer. And then we've just had other wins like one of our sales guys. You know, he's been doing a few cold callings and, yeah, just got a few more demos booked to give.
Heroly Chour:So we've got one next Thursday with a fairly large bus operator.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. That's great. Yeah. It's awesome. So are you don't have to answer this you don't want, mate.
Gavin Tye:Are you cash flow positive or net net neutral? Where are you close to that?
Heroly Chour:Yeah. We're net negative because every time we make more money, we hire more people, but I think that should be changing soon because I don't think we need more people. So I reckon give give six months will be neutral to positive. But, yeah, all the money we make gets reinvested back into the business because we're in it for the long game.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Yep. That's yeah. Mate mate, thanks. Was, yeah, interesting to yeah.
Gavin Tye:It's coming up with, I think, some something to maybe think about is plotting the journey of once they sign as a client and what's the they everyone goes through a valley of despair. Right? When do they turn in delight of customers? When do you start talking about other products in if it's a land and expand opportunity? And that getting that account growth is will be key for you guys.
Gavin Tye:Right? Because it's the long tail revenue, which is already happening. Right? So
Heroly Chour:Yep. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:That's
Heroly Chour:that's right. Yeah. But, yeah, it's still a massive learning experience. Like, I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing.
Gavin Tye:You're you're faking it well enough.
Mitchell Davis:I'm fan right, mate. I can tell you now. So keep it up.
Heroly Chour:I've got massive impostor syndrome. So funny story. I get these nightmares recurring nightmares every six months, I reckon, where I'm I'm back at university. Also, I get a call from the university saying, I haven't actually graduated. I need to finish a mathematics course and an exam.
Heroly Chour:I pick up the textbook, flick through it, and go, holy crap. This is all gibberish. What is this? So, anyway, I did some research on this recurring nightmare, and I reckon, yeah, a lot of psychologists think that it's an imposter syndrome symptom. I
Gavin Tye:honestly think the secret to all this stuff is everyone feels the same. Right? I don't know if anyone and if they say they're not, they're lying. And that's the different people just start regardless of that and, yeah, make their way. And when you start doing it, you realize that people don't know what they're doing a lot of the time and they don't have a plan.
Gavin Tye:You clearly have a plan. You have a plan with customer advocacy. You have a plan with building the business. You're and it ties heavily into your mission, which seemingly your values come from your mom and dad of the turmoil they went through. And that's how that what a great story to turn something so negative into something so positive, and that would emanate generations after, you know, after them.
Gavin Tye:So, yeah, that's amazing.
Heroly Chour:Well, I hope I hope this podcast becomes my legacy because that's a key message there, right there, Gab.
Gavin Tye:Would honestly love to have you back on every couple of months or something just to get an update and see what the journey is and see that gray hair in your beard just move a little further up ahead.
Heroly Chour:Lose all my hair like Mitch? Yeah, that's it. Hey.
Mitchell Davis:Then we could just we'll have to get Gav in a couple of years time, maybe. I don't know. We'll see.
Gavin Tye:We used that story last night to get my daughter to eat veggies. That's what happens when you don't. And that was Mitch lost his hair. So Mitch
Heroly Chour:I love love to come on again. Yeah. Love it. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And and and anytime you're up in Brisbane, mate, you've we've got a place here to come and visit. Same same with you, Mitch, of course. Yeah. Mitch, what wins have we had this week or what wins have you had this week?
Mitchell Davis:Well, it was a a big deal. We prob we won't say exactly what it was yet, but, yeah, getting that verbal yes for an event that's happening later this year, that was a big win in the business. So that's been really exciting. It was great meeting your whole family last night, Gav. That was awesome.
Mitchell Davis:That was a big win. And and, yeah, just helping this business feel more real, you know, feel like a long term, we're gonna be I'm gonna be seeing a lot of you and a lot of your family. And, yeah, that was that was great. What else? We had a really productive meeting yesterday with someone who will hopefully provide us an intro to an event that we're looking at for later this year, which will be potentially a really big opportunity.
Mitchell Davis:And the meeting went really well. So this we kind of mentioned, I think, right at the start of this recording, but we worked a little on this overview doc that we've got. And this person that we spoke with yesterday was kind of the we met them maybe a month or so ago, we kind of went to them with something that was very text heavy, just like a list of features. And they kind of rightfully pushed back and were like, guys, this it. You've got to come up with something that's got a bit more interest in it.
Mitchell Davis:And we did. And the feedback that we got was great. So that gave me some confidence. We spent a lot of time getting that right and to get that instant feedback of, guys, this is awesome. Well done.
Mitchell Davis:That felt really good. So that's a huge win in the business.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Yeah, that's good. All right. Anything, I think that's probably a good place to wrap up. Really thanks, Rolly, for sharing how you're, the customer advocacy and how important it is to building Fostable.
Gavin Tye:And, you know, I've got a chance to look under the hood and you may, you, where you're chasing some really massive global opportunities at the moment that is too soon to talk about here, but it would, yeah, I, someone in particular that it will change your business, completely and change your world. And it's too soon to say we don't want to jinx it. But yeah, we'd love to, have you back and, Mitch, fantastic to talk to you as always. And yeah, if anyone has any topics or anything that they want us to cover, all of our three listeners at the moment.
Mitchell Davis:More than that.
Gavin Tye:Let us know in the comments of whatever you're listening to and we'll make sure we address it. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. We've got that. We've got an email address that's in the show notes so you can email Gavin and I. And, Roli, before we go, is there any links you'd like to send people to your LinkedIn or Twitter or to Bustle's website? We'll put all of that in the in the notes.
Mitchell Davis:But, yeah, is there anything that you wanna shout out now before we wrap up?
Heroly Chour:Yeah. Look, the best way to get in touch with me is on LinkedIn. I'm fairly active on there. And, look, happy just to chat to other founders out there. And, you know, it would be really good.
Heroly Chour:Like, I think what you guys are doing is great because I hope it builds this sort of support group for founders, in particular in Australia because, I guess, overseas, like Silicon Valley, there's massive industries around startups there. But in Australia, it's a bit bit more subdued. There's, you know, fish burners and all them. But I think for me personally, just connecting to a few of few founders who are going through the same journey would be amazing. So like yourself, Mitch, and Gav, you guys are going through the journey and a full stock I'm going on this journey together with you guys now.
Heroly Chour:So, you know, throwing ideas and wins and losses at each other, you know, sharing that, it's just really relieving. It it it's a like, it the the power of just communicating either a win or a loss or a problem is just like almost therapeutic, you know, like for for your mental health. And it's just amazing to have that. So the first two years, was just myself and Graham. So, you know, there's only so much we can throw at each other before we sort of create permanent head damage to each other because we're just complaining a lot now.
Gavin Tye:Maybe maybe we can create maybe not now. Well, maybe we can do it now is well, fuck it. Let's do it now. Then maybe do once a month. We can do a, like a Friday afternoon whiskey or beer thing online for an hour, and we can just share, with other founders who people wanna join their lessons and and stuff like that.
Gavin Tye:Well, maybe we can build a group like that, and we can
Heroly Chour:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Something like that for an hour or so.
Mitchell Davis:That could be fun because, yeah, having a, like, a sense of community. I'm totally with you on like, I I listen to a lot of other podcasts where it's the same type of thing of, like, follow along with the journey, you know, of of hearing what are other people doing and, like, trying to be as transparent as they can. That's what we're trying to do without, you know, giving absolutely everything away and putting yourself in a bad position. Right? Like, be able to have that with other people in a group would be amazing that we can talk to and not just listen to other people's podcasts.
Gavin Tye:So can we put a wait list on or something like a spreadsheet that people can register their interest or or fill it out? And then we will, we can put them on a calendar invite or something on a maybe a month from now, we can go something from now. I don't know. Is that would you be part of that role? Will you be our first honorary
Heroly Chour:member? A hundred percent. I'll I'll I'll do my I'll I'll take the first virtual shout of whiskey's too, but there you go.
Gavin Tye:You can do it in your library, right? You can give us a tour.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. That's right.
Mitchell Davis:Fireplace going or something.
Gavin Tye:Stories with Rollie. Yeah. Magic
Mitchell Davis:moments. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Magic moments.
Heroly Chour:Yeah. Alright.
Gavin Tye:We'll call it magic moments. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. In in honor of you.
Gavin Tye:Alright. Awesome. Well, I just put that on on everyone without even consulting, so hopefully that's okay. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That's alright. We'll make it work. Excellent. Rolly, it was great to meet you and thank you so much for sharing your story. And absolutely, like I've said, love to have you on as a recurring character on the show and we can help follow your journey as well as you follow ours.
Heroly Chour:Well, you
Mitchell Davis:so It's great to meet
Heroly Chour:you, and
Mitchell Davis:we'll catch you next time.
Gavin Tye:See you, mate.
Heroly Chour:All right. Thank you.
Mitchell Davis:Thanks, everyone.
Heroly Chour:See you. Bye.
