Ryan Holmes

And it was a self-serve SaaS product, and it was for managing projects.

And I wanted to build Basecamp for social media.

So I wanted the ability for groups to go in, set up multiple brands, to be able to manage those brands and team members.

And so our initial prototyping, the MVP, it heavily leveraged that.

uh, base camps, uh, you know, design and, and, and, uh, usability.

So, so we were, we were in the 2 million range.

We had 30 employees.

Uh, I started the year with, um, with,

three people working on Hootsuite and they worked for a year.

By the end, we had seven, actually, sorry, we were at 30 at a peak.

We actually downsized a little bit.

We were about 21 people at the time we did Hootsuite.

We had a different product that kind of blew up and then collapsed, and so therefore we were at 30 and then down to 21.

And so we had started with three.

We ended the year with seven, seven people on a 21-person team working on a zero-revenue product.

So you know how that looks.

It doesn't look very good.

And so six months in, we started looking for some financing to help keep the lights on for this hungry baby.

And we could see the usage and the growth was fantastic when you were really onto something.

And so we continued to invest into it, bankrolling it off the credit cards.