Patrick Campbell

Well, the market is crowded now.

Analytics products are notoriously difficult.

We had known this from our pricing customers.

Analytics was a really hard thing to monetize.

We did our own little pricing research and customer development and basically discovered we really have to go up market or

give this away for free or stop building it altogether.

An upmarket meant we had to raise money.

We weren't really ready to do that at that point in our minds.

Shutting it down didn't seem right because we knew there was this future with the data that we could get.

And so that's where the free product came to be.

And honestly, that's where we should have raised money, right there.

And the reason is because...

It all worked out, but distribution on a free product is really difficult because you have to support that free product.

And a free product, what a lot of people don't realize, it has to be better than the paid competition.

If it's worse than the paid competition, what ends up happening is people just don't use it because it's not worth it, like their time most of the time.

And the other thing is if it's a financial product, it has to be accurate.

And accuracy for a financial product, people will not appreciate, but they won't use your product if it's inaccurate.

And so it's one of those things that was really important.

We should have raised money right there, at least a small seed fund or seed round or something like that in order to accelerate that probably by a year.

We probably lost a year by not raising a small round for that.