Tyler Tringas

I was there.

I was like $60,000 in credit card debt, basically, essentially broke.

I couldn't afford to live in New York anymore.

I just told my

investors and my co-founders said, hey, look, I can't do this anymore.

We're going to have to wrap this up and left New York and reduced my cost of living, focused on StoreMapper, which was working as well as the freelance work I was doing as well still.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

My investors, I mean, they were very clean tech focused.

They were professional investors for the most part.

And they totally understood like, hey, we're shutting down this business.

And yeah, nobody really wanted to even mention like, hey, give us a taste of this little side project.

Because to be clear, it was not at all clear it was even a viable business, anything more than a little hobby widget thing, essentially.

It was only a little bit later that I kind of discovered that

you know, there was enough meat on the bone there for it to be a real, um, a real business.

So no, it was totally clean.

Well, part of it was just the full-time focus, right?

So this is, you know, we can foreshadow a little bit and come to it.

But one of the things that we really try to focus on with Ernest is the value of being able to switch from the nights and weekends to, hey, I'm giving my full energy, the majority of my productive working hours towards this versus the leftover, you know, remainder, you know, when you're half exhausted and you already worked, you know, 10 hours that day.