Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer

Yeah, so it's a great question.

One of the things that we did when we were coming up with our vision initially was we were looking at challenges in a variety of different spaces.

And PR was one of the ones that didn't have a lot of technology in the first place.

The big challenge that entrepreneurs and CEOs would face is they couldn't find great PR people in their minds.

And when they found them, they didn't know the effort that they were generating, how much it affected their business.

So there's a host of challenges.

And so the first thing we built as part of the vision was a marketplace.

And the more and more people we talk to would say, hey, this marketplace is really interesting, but I don't always need to hire a new person.

But what I always need is from spending any amount of money on this, I need a way to figure out what's working, what's not, so I could be more effective.

And so when we built the second part of the model, the analytics piece, we realized there was a huge opportunity there.

And so it was actually all the way back to when we raised our seed round.

I ended up raising it off of showing them a PowerPoint deck, showing them the working product in the marketplace.

But I actually drew up on a whiteboard how we were going to measure the impact of PR and said, if you're going to invest in the company, bet that we're going to be doing and building this product.

And this is what's going to be the focus of why we're raising capital and not the marketplace.

It was just a tough decision to sell the marketplace in 2015 because it was doing really well in scaling and generating revenue.

And the analytics product was so new still.

It wasn't pre-revenue, but it was pretty close.

It wasn't pre-revenue, but it was pretty close to it.

Yeah, it was not big.

Let's put it that way.