Ep220 - Adam Ewart (Co-founder & CEO - Send My Bag) on bootstrapping Send My Bag from a uni side project to global service

Speaker A: There is definitely an aspect of luck, but I believe how it works is if you are there pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, and you don't stop and get knocked down, you keep going, you keep going, you keep going if that's you. And the whole time that you're building this experience, which is allowing you to better execute when the opportunity arises, you're putting yourself in a position to execute and to take the opportunity when you have that piece of good luck, that you are in the right place at the right time.

Speaker B: Hi, everyone. My name is Rohit Bhargava and you are listening to episode 220 of the startup Playbook Podcast, a weekly series where I sit down with successful tech founders, investors and operators to unpack their journey lessons and insights to help current and future entrepreneurs. My guest for this episode is Adam Ewart, the co founder and CEO of uh, Send My Bag. Send My Bag is the international luggage shipping and relocation platform used by travelers and businesses all over the world. In this episode, we dive into how he was able to leverage PR to be one of his biggest growth drivers, why he decided to deliberately bootstrap the business despite inbound investor interest, the opportunities and challenges that come from building a large global company out of Belfast, and so much more. Without further ado, here is my interview with Adam Ewart. Hi, Adam. Welcome to the Startup Playbook podcast. And thanks so much for taking the time to be on the show today.

Speaker A: Morning, Rohit. Good to be here too.

Speaker B: Good morning to you. Good evening from Australia. But Adam, I know we've been talking for a little while about doing this podcast episode, so I'm delighted that we can finally make this happen. But for those people that may not be as familiar with you and your background, do you want to share a little bit about your story and your background and what got you here today?

Speaker A: Sure. So, I'm the founder and the CEO of, uh, sendmybag.com we're a shipping service for your personal belongings, luggage, sports equipment, boxes. If you're relocating, we primarily help people move all around the world. Most months we're seeing shipments move between about 80 different countries, but we also operate domestic services in Australia, uk, usa. We've been around for a number of years now, but we are currently scaling up our operations in Australia. And, um, that's what's led us to becoming in touch recently.

Speaker B: Yeah. Amazing. And I know you've got an incredible story with Send My Bag, which I want to get into, but maybe as a starting point, we caught up for drinks in London a little while ago. And it was great to hear a little bit more about your story and I think particularly given that your company is based and you grew up in Northern Ireland from what I understand like a town sort of outside of Belfast. What was that like growing up? Because I remember you telling me that it wasn't the most sort of entrepreneurial environment to grow up in.

Speaker A: No, it wasn't Northern Ireland. I suppose at the time we were just coming out of the end of the troubles that we had here, Good Friday agreement and the, the late 90s. So Northern Ireland didn't really have uh, a big private sector. It's very public sector heavy. There probably wasn't a lot of opportunity then for there. Of course there are entrepreneurs from Northern Ireland, but it didn't have the same ecosystem as ah, other places because of some of the circumstances that have been in place in the, in the preceding decades. So we, you had people in the country definitely at the time starting to try and encourage entrepreneurship. There was, I entered when I was I think 17 or 18 and an entrepreneur award scheme that had, that had come to the country and so on. But my background wasn't from an entrepreneurial family or anything like that. My dad's a cable jointer for electricity. My mum was a childminder and a receptionist. So there wasn't uh, a family business or other people in the family running businesses or anything like that. But for some reason it was just something that was always of interest to me whether it was trying to sell things at school or starting little businesses as I went on at school. A very similar story to many other entrepreneurs when you speak them, a lot of people have very similar experiences. So it was, it was one of those. And um, starting little ventures didn't quite catch the dot com boom. I'm not, I'm not quite that old. I kind of came along after it. So I wasn't starting a dot com but I was maybe making use of ebay and things like that. I was going to old house clearance auctions, buying records, finding rare records and then maybe selling them on ebay to collectors in the States and Asia and things like that. So that was my kind of childhood, late teens and we ended up then getting in the, in the semi bag, not, not a great deal of time later.

Speaker B: Yeah, just to go back on what you mentioned, as you said, it's a pretty common story in terms of a lot of entrepreneurs starting at a young age, almost accidentally if you had to guess where it came from. As you said, your parents weren't necessarily very entrepreneurial. Where do you remember what that initial spark was for you? Or where that interest or like first bit of interest in space sparked for you?

Speaker A: I don't really know, to be perfectly honest with you. It's like my hobby. If somebody's just really into football, somebody's really into whatever music. It was just what I wanted to do. In fact, I've just remembered something that I haven't thought about in a long time. But I remember the. I used to send ideas for board games, the board game companies. I remember getting a letter back from MB, we make Connect 4 or something like that. So, yeah, and like my dad getting me big sheets of paper that I could then, um, design new board games on and we sent them off to places. So presumably I was young in primary school doing that kind of thing. And in the UK they had this TV show, Blue Peter, that used to run these Blue Peter sales and encourage kids to have garage sales and sell things to raise money for charity. Used to do those as, as a kid. Other fits and things in school. Always wanted to buy and sell things. Yeah, it was, it was just one of those things that was, that was always there. I remember one time getting an old for sale sign and putting it in the back of my dad's car in the back of his window to see if anybody came to the house, if I could try and see if I could sell a car. I, I don't know. This was just, it's, it's just what I was interested in and it's. The whole way through secondary school was the same but obviously being that bit older I could actually start to uh, do things. It wasn't so much playing at it, it was, oh, actually I've just made 50 quid doing that or. And, and so, yeah, they're saying there was nobody else in the family. My mom did show me something a lot of months ago which was some newspaper clipping about a great, great granda that had come out of my granny's house when she was go into a home. And it, it was something about him running some pretty decent fruit and vegetable wholesaling business or something. So maybe there was something a few generations back and I think another grandparent who I never met or great grandparent I never met, had a, had a shop as well. So maybe there's just something. And my cousin is the CEO of Semi Bag, runs us day to day now and he has the same M kind of thing. So maybe there's something just back in the genes as well that makes that our, our hobby, rather Than football.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I love that. I think, you know, it was interesting because I remember when we chatted as well and you were mentioning that even when you went to uni, which I think when people follow a particular path that you go to uni to get good grades, to get a good job and go down that particular career path. Two things I remember you mentioning. One is that you've never had a job like an official job. And secondly, even when you were at uni, I think you mentioned that you wanted to use those three years to figure something out so you didn't have to get a job and work for yourself. What was that period like for those three years at uni?

Speaker A: It was good fun. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. I never had a full time job working for anybody. I have had a part time job because I got a part time job as a 16 year old as soon as somebody would employ me because I wanted to earn money, have independence. And actually I ended up then using money that I was earning for my little ventures to, to buy my stock or whatever it was I was doing at the time. And I'd been doing things like that when I was 16, 17, 18, 19. By the time I was going to university, I thought I definitely, I can 100% do this. I don't know if I can make a multi, multi, multi million pound business. I didn't know that. But I was convinced I could make a business that could pay me a wage and I wasn't going to have to work for somebody else and I was going to be able to do what I find fun. I was convinced I could do that. And um, I said to myself, right, I'll go to university now. No offense to anybody who studies arts degrees, but I said I'll do a kind of easy degree that I think I can probably blag my way through if I'm half doing something else at the same time. I wasn't going to sign up for medical school or something like that. So that'll do an arts degree. So I studied history and um, archaeology, which, which is also an interest of mine. Anyway, so again I thought if I don't make it, sure I'll have a lovely time teaching history. So I thought that that can be my backup. But an arts degree probably has more flexibility than some other ones for spare time. So I set about starting university. I decided to stay at home. Of course, then I wasn't going to go away to university and incur extra costs and so on with this plan. The plan was to stay at home, got my student loan, put that straight into, uh, whatever venture I was working on at the time. And, yeah, I started building. I'd gone through a few things over about 18 months. I had a business called Middlemen Mobiles, which was taking old people's contract phones and then turning them in. They're selling them to people on pay as you go because you couldn't get the good phones on pay as you go. At the time, they only were available to businesses. I'd had that. I then tried to create a website called philajob.com because I thought friends were applying for jobs and I thought it was weird how the recruitment process was working because my friends were all around all these different shops saying, do you have any jobs available? Or restaurants, and so on. Um, and they were all saying, no, no, we don't try again in a couple of months. I thought, oh, would it not be better maybe if all my friends uploaded their CV to a database and then when we told the local businesses that this database was there and if somebody then wanted to employ somebody, they could see who was available and call them in for interview? So I tried that. Didn't work because I didn't know what I was doing, didn't have a clue about coding anything. I then, as I started to apply for university, thought, oh, it would be good if there was some kind of portal hub of information for university students. I registered a domain name for that. But actually, as part of that, uh, around that time, I then had bought a load of music books, like sheet music books. There was a music store in London that had gone bankrupt and a conductor friend of the owner had bought about 2,000 sheet music books off and basically taken all his stock. And I don't know how I ended up in touch with this guy. I must have been buying and selling something. And, um, and I ended up buying these chic music books off him, which were. I think I gave them like £500 or something for them. But a lot of the books were maybe worth maybe 20 quid, so I could sell them for, say, a tenner. And it, um, was going to make quite a good return. And I thought, you know what? Rather than. I looked and did a little bit more as well, I thought rather than just selling these through this time, actually, music shops haven't really gone online in the way that other stores had because most retail stores are large chains and they had moved online as a chin, whereas most independent or most music stores are independent shops. So they hadn't necessarily gone online at this time. And uh, I thought, oh, this could be interesting. Maybe instead of just selling these through, I can start to sell other musical products and try and create a little music online music store. So I took the domain that I had registered for the student business, swapped it over to use for this business and started selling my music books. Then we started selling musical instrument accessories. Lots of fun stuff happened along the way there. The old distributors didn't want to sell to online businesses. I had to get the local corner shop. The owner who I knew from he had helped me in the past with different things. We pretended that his shop was a sort of a music shop on Thursdays and then we were able to get distribution for some of the products. We then went into manufacturing musical instruments or retailing musical instruments. But then some of the retailers didn't sell them to us, ended up going to China, finding their factories, making them ourselves in the factories that they use. So we became a manufacturer of musical instruments, we moved into selling the schools and so on. So that all came out of that. And it's always just what's next, what's next, what's next? Trying to build that business and any avenue we could explore. And then along the lines of that or during that time, then send my bag came about as well.

Speaker B: We're going to take a very quick break from this podcast to talk about one of our partners, Vanta. Uh, so if you're building a SaaS business and want to quickly unlock growth and build customer trust, one way to do this is by achieving compliance with SOC 2, ISO 27001, CPS 234, essential 8 or other in demand compliance frameworks. However, this process is often time intensive and very costly. VANTA automates up to 90% of compliance, making you audit ready quickly and saving you up to 85% of associated costs. And not only that, Vanta scales with your business with a market leading trust management platform to help you continuously monitor compliance, unify risk management and streamline security reviews. You can join over 8,000 global companies like Atlassian, Dovetail and Indebted that use VANTA to build trust and prove security in real time. As a listener of the show, you can get up to $1,000 US off Vanta when you head over to vanta.comdemo all right, let's get back to the episode. The thing I love about that story is I think it's especially from the outside looking in, it can be very easy to just assume that things were obvious and you just came up with said my bag. It was just A organic idea out of nowhere and that was the first thing and things just worked. But as you touched on there's a process that you have to go through almost to learn a lot of these things for yourself. I'm curious if knowing you know, going through the experience that you went through and if you were to go back in, in time, uh, what would you do differently or how would you assess different opportunities in a different way if you were to go back compared to what it was like when you were going through it at that, at that moment in time?

Speaker A: I'm not sure I, I feel very lucky with regards to how everything turned out. There was obviously lots of difficult times. Say you've just. It was a difficult business. I had no money. I only had the money that I brought in from my part time job, money from buying and selling whatever small things I was doing and um, my student loan. So I had no real money and I was establishing a stock based business which obviously is very capital intensive and it's just that that was difficult. We had a time actually there was a special loan type for small businesses, the Bicentry just. And I applied for £100,000 in order to as part of our stock purchase purchasing um, and it got rejected and I had to really fight for that. In the end I had to end up basically doing it through a PR route and getting people in touch with people senior at the bank saying there's going to be a story about you not offering loans to this little fella trying to who should be the real person who you should be trying to give these loans to. It was looking like the loans were something put out by the government almost as a facade. They weren't really following through with them and it looked like we could. There was maybe going to be a bit of a story from that and then I got that loan. But things like that were really, really difficult to get pushed through. But at the same time I just think everything leads to some, to something else with that business. I started off in a little 200 square foot unit. We then had a uh, shop. I had a warehouse. I thought oh I've got a warehouse, why waste a bit of space at the front of the shop? So we just built a stud wall and suspended ceiling little area and said well that's a shop because why not? So we had a shop open to the public. I then thought oh this shop isn't doing anything overnight. It's a bit of a waste of space. Let's make it a music school. So we then had local Music teachers every night would come in and give lessons sitting in the middle of the shop. So it was quite a nice environment surrounded by the musical instruments. We'd done that around the time of the financial crisis. We had a lot of stock at a pick and pack warehouse in England that went bankrupt. And we were told that because they couldn't really identify whose stock was who, that was all going to be locked down. So I had to just get on a plane, I don't know, something like five o' clock the next morning. Ended up in England. Ended up doing a deal on the way with another pick and pack warehouse that they would take all our stock. But the deal for them getting it was that they had to supply all the vehicles to move the stock. So they sent they trucks to go from Oxford up to Swindon moving all our stock which nearly got. If that stock had been locked down by the receivers, we would have been absolutely stuffed. So we were lucky that we got there and got it out because we would have got it back. It was our stock, it wasn't the uh, the pick and pack warehouse's stock. But if it had got locked down for two months, that would have been us sunk. So luckily we got that out before somebody arrived with the chain and padlock. So yeah, there was just. There's been so many things like that, but they all have led to something else. The learning. Like even something with semi Bag. Around the time that I'd started it, I was in America because we had containers of our musical instrument stock going into America because I was still pushing that business along in the early years of Send My Bag. But as part of a meeting there, I realized actually something else can work domestically for Send My Bag. So even though I was dealing with a problem associated with the other business that had an opportunity and so much of it has just been the failures along the way are just learning experiences. And it sounds like cliched and all, but it's absolutely true. There's so many things that you either learn not to do again or you learn how to do something. So many things I learned in that music business were applied straight away and Send My Bag even just going back to something, something like Google AdWords that had only maybe came around. It was only the early years of that. I remember buying um, adwords at 4p a keyword or something and now it's nothing like that. But it just so happens we've been involved with it for a long time now and all that experience compounds and uh, makes it easier for you to execute on the on the next thing.

Speaker B: Totally. Just going back to your point about failures being learning lessons along the way. I totally agree with that. And I would say over a long enough time horizon, it's much easier to draw those conclusions than sometimes being in the moment. Especially if you're young and you're starting a business for the first time. You're relatively early in the journey and you're going from failure to failure. And it's tough to see the light at the end of the tunnel with some of those sort of things. And I'm sure there's, there's some listeners of the podcast that are potentially in a similar position right now. Are there any. And as you said, like, this isn't just the start of the business. You have plenty of moments, even when you're growing and scaling the business, of the size of Send My Bag. Is there any advice or tips or things that you've used to help you with perspective or kind of help keep you moving forward through those really challenging times when you're probably questioning yourself and going like, why am I putting myself through this?

Speaker A: Yeah, and there has been plenty of those times. But I don't know. Uh, I think at the end of the day, I'm not clocking in to a job that I don't want to do every day. I'm doing what I want to do. And part of that are the challenges. We've had challenges in recent months that have been tough. We've had big challenges in recent years with COVID and Brexit in the UK and so on. So the challenges have never stopped. They've just changed over the last number of years. But it's just part of it. There are definitely times where I, I, I do go, I'd say I've had enough. I, I, I do want to, I don't want to do this anymore. But honestly, even those, if that's on a Friday, it's usually gone by the Monday and not even the Monday by the, by the Saturday. I'm usually going, hm, what about this? What about this? Because I then get back into the thinking about ideas or, oh, we could try this or try that. So it's just, you just have to have a certain resilience, uh, a certain ability to the bounce back. And, um, I think just an appreciation. And again, it's not a, it's not a cliche. You have to have an appreciation for it being a learning experience. You do, you are going to get knocked down, but you are learning every single time. And, um, it is, there's there's definitely an aspect of luck. I don't like it when people say, oh, there's no luck. I, I make all my own luck. But it's, there is definitely an aspect of luck. But I believe how it works is if you are there pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing and you don't stop and you get knocked down, you keep going, you keep going, you keep going if that's you. And the whole time that you're building this experience which is allowing you to better execute when the opportunity arises, you're basically uh, you're putting yourself in a position to execute and um, to take the opportunity when you have that piece of good luck that you are in the right place at the right time. With Send my bag I knew that I could build a website because I built a website previously or I knew I could ship something because I was shipping something for my other business. But semi bag only happened because I was lucky enough to have an experience one day to give me the idea if I didn't have that experience, if I didn't have that piece of luck, send my bag wouldn't exist. But at the same time the, you just have to have that, that resilience and just keep going and keep going. And I understand why, you know, for some people it may not work out but equally I wasn't saying I'm going to build a multi, multi million pound business from day one. I was hoping that I would, I was always hoping that it would, but my goal was to work for myself. So I also had that if I, if I wasn't making millions of pounds, but I was working for myself, I, I still felt that I would be winning in terms of what I'd set out to do.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think that perspective is really important. Like I love what you said about you might feel a certain way on a Friday and on Monday that kind of goes away and you're back at it and back energized and optimistic. And I think one of the best bits of advice that I got was from a former uh, partner at a business who came from a medical background. He's like, no one's died. It's not anywhere near as bad as you think it is. And oftentimes a lot of the things that we stress and worry about so much in the moment, in two weeks you're going to even forget about that. You're going to be dealing with a completely different, different problem to begin with. But you touched on this as well. I think there's such a fascinating story with how Send my bag came about as well. Do you want to, for our listeners, share how the concept initially came about?

Speaker A: Sure. So my girlfriend now she is my wife. We were, I was helping her move back from university in England. She had to clear out all her stuff at the end of every term. So I was over bringing stuff back with her, a couple of suitcases. And, um, we got charged, I think it was about 50 pounds excess baggage by EasyJet. And, um, I couldn't really believe it because we were only a couple of kilos over the bag alliance. And, um, it's just £50. Doesn't really make any sense. That's such a huge fee. And just when we were on the plane on the way home, I just kept thinking, this, this just doesn't make any sense. I send musical instruments around the country. I could probably send this bag for less than 10 quid. They've charged us 50 quid. This makes no sense. And I ended up writing down again, sounds like a cliche as well. But I ended up writing down sendmybag.com on Probably a napkin. I can't remember a bit of paper or something anyway. But sendmybag.com got back home, went to see if anybody else was doing this because I thought, well, I haven't heard of it, but maybe somebody else is doing it and we can just use them next time. But had a look, there wasn't anybody offering, uh, a good value service to ship to universities. Uh, so I thought, right, well, here we go. May as well do it. I have the ability to do it. As we were just saying there, your experience from other things allow you to execute. So I went, well, I know that I can ship that. I have the ability to do that. So we'll do that. I know how to make a really simple website. Ish. I wasn't very good at this kind of stuff, but I knocked one out. I got my, I don't know, I fired up Dreamweaver or got my book on Microsoft front page or something out and created, um, this little website. It was actually just the Contact us page that I changed to look like a booking form. So when the customer clicked to book, it would just send me an email with the details. And then instead of saying thank you for your email, it said, here's four PayPal buttons. Please choose the button that equates to however many items you're sending. So created this really simple website. And then I had become quite adept at trying to get free publicity for things. So, um, my music business had recently just made some items for the band ub40 who are quite well known. So I thought, right, I know this sounds like maybe an and finally story for the news. So I got in touch with one of the local journalists and said look, I had met them m at something else. I said look, you might have remember me, you met me at this. I was like an entrepreneurial award thing. So you might remember that I just made some stuff for the pop band UB40. I have this idea called send my bag.com that I think would be really interesting. You wouldn't fancy doing a little five minute story at the end of the news and look at this young fellow, look what he's doing. And um, she said yes, she would do it. I absolutely brilliant. So I was at my mom and dad's house at the time living. We took a couple of chairs from the kitchen, put them in the front garden and the local journalist interviewed me in my front garden talking about UB40 and send my Bag. And um, that was I think just a few weeks after having the idea. And this was during the summer so the September a few weeks later when the students were starting to go back, we ended up getting a few dozen customers using in my bag for the first time. And yeah, it just in the same way with the music business that I'd gone from selling sheet music books to selling other products to manufacture or to selling musical instruments, to selling musical instruments to schools and to selling them to other music shops and then putting them in containers and taking them to the States and just go on and going and going and doing. We were trying to do things with TV shows, we were supplying violins, the fashion shows. There was just all sorts of stuff happening with that. The same kind of then applied to Send My Bag which was we've done the uk it didn't go off like a rocket. There was a bit of time because the, the airlines and how they were starting to charge that. It was the early days of that. It wasn't that everybody was familiar with being stung by excess baggage fees in the way we. We all will have been over the last ten years or so. But. But it just started to snowball. Then I meant, oh right, okay, this is working domestically. We should really send to Europe. Oh, why don't we send to the States? So why don't we send it here and there? And then semi bag just started growing from that point. And a few years in I decided that uh, although the music business was a decent small business, had an awful lot going on in it. I was putting a lot of effort into different areas, but I just knew it was never going to be. I could sell every violin that got sold in the UK next year. And, um, it's still not a massive business. And I just felt that Send My Bag could become a global business, a solution for people all around the world. So ultimately closed down the music business. And around 2011, this was when Full Throttle was Send My Bag.

Speaker B: Was there a particular point that you realized that the business was working?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we had the domestic student shipping side of things and that was running for a couple of years. And Grant, who runs the business day to day, our CEO, he had started working for me with semi bag booking in shipments. And, um, he had started to notice that more and more people were asking about international shipping. And I think we maybe had some international services at the time or something, but he was just feeding back that we were getting more and more requests about it. So. So we started doing that, offering more services. And again, just because I was always about trying to. It was all bootstrapped, just trying to get free publicity. We ended up doing some PR and we ended up, uh, often talking about to the newspapers about baggage fees and so on. And then around that time as well, just statistics became available to say that on something like 2007, the American Airlines took in about $400 million in bag fees. But, uh, by about sort of 10 years later, that had gone up to 4 billion. So in the interim, these fees were just escalating really quickly and we were just feeling that need coming, coming back from our customers. And, um, say, like with the music business, when I just went, oh, why don't we sell the schools directly? Why don't we sell it? As soon as we see a need, we just go straight to that need. And, um, so we just pushed, push, pushed. But with Send My Bag as well, I had a real sense that it could be a global business. And I didn't want it to be the UK version of something that somebody else done in America a couple of years later. And I really wanted us doing it. So I took this approach that instead of trying to grow really, really, really quickly in the uk and um, there was another reason for that as well, because I felt that we had a lot of learning to do along the way for the service. We wanted to deliver and have a really high standard. So I didn't want it to go too fast and to break. But, uh, I felt like we should make ourselves known in other countries. So we started making sure the service was available in other areas and back in 2014, actually just a few months after our 20. Was it 2014? Yeah, 2014 is. I took myself off to the States for about six months and made sure that I got a lot of publicity there and got on TV there talking about it and so on, just to make sure that we were establishing ourselves as the, the one. It's not, it's not semi bag does the same as somebody else. It's semi bag is, is the concept and yeah, it's. We took it around the world in a small way, in a niche way, but I just wanted to make sure we were doing that. And then in the subsequent years, we've then returned to various markets and started to build them up and, and Australia is a market that we're doing a lot of building on at the moment.

Speaker B: Sender is the OG startup accounting firm, um, in Australia, catering to all stages of your business life. If you're busy running a business, you don't always have the time to do your own books and forecasts and instead you can fully outsource your finance function so that you have the time and resources back to do what you do best, which is growing your business. They have a dedicated focus on founders, funds and startups and have an experienced team that can help you with everything from managing your tax to balancing your books to even helping with your exit strategy. I trust and use them with all of my businesses and can't recommend them highly enough. To find out more or to speak to Gareth and the team head over to sennder.com. all right, let's get back to this episode. You've touched on getting free publicity a couple of times and like the impact that's had on the business as well. I think a lot of founders or companies really struggle a to get cut through or see like real return or outcomes from, from media and publicity. Do you have any advice in terms of, first of all, how to convince a radio station or a TV show or some form of media outlet to, uh, help tell your story and also how do you approach it to make sure that you're getting the outcomes that you want out of the energy and resources that you're putting in that space?

Speaker A: Yeah, back then it was. I probably relied quite a lot on being young. You have to find some kind of hook, some kind of selling point. And mine was, look, I'm still at school or I'm now at university and I'm doing this, I'm doing that. And I just tried to make that the interest story as a young entrepreneur story. I entered some awards around the time, um, and won some bits and pieces for that. And that kind of became a bit of a hook for me. So I think maybe at the time it was interesting, slightly unusual maybe for some of the journalists to be getting the outreach and being very, very enthusiastic as well. I would go in a million miles an hour. I'm trying to speak reasonably slowly here today, but I do tend to get carried away and be very fast and things. So. And I suppose if you happen to be a, an 18 year old approaching in that way, some of the journalists, whether they took pity on me or whether they just thought it was interesting or whatever the reason we ended up getting some coverage. Then beyond that, there's only so much you can do with that. There's only so many times you can do that locally. Beyond that, I suppose now what we would try to do is, is try to understand what journalists would want. So rather than pitching a story that we've got for the sake of pitching it, we'll go and do a piece of research, come up with some data that is of genuine interest to them and then give them that. So that's something that we've probably done more over the last 10 years and have just recently done. With bag fees in Australia, we got really interesting feedback from a thousand people and their feelings about bag fees and airport travel in general and so on, which is. Which got great coverage across the press. But something else that I done back in 2011, 2012, when I was just trying to get this, I was like, what is the ultimate free publicity I can get? And I went on Dragon's Den in the UK and that was. That was an interesting experience. It was a big gamble for me. It was something that at the time was a really big show. It had, I can't remember, 3 or 5 million people were watching it per episode. If you got one of the big slots, you were on for 10 minutes. I thought if I could get 10 minutes on, um, BBC. And at the time we were starting to do more and more European business, it was a lot of bike sending between the UK and Europe, France being Italy, holiday business, golfing, there was a lot of that. We have moved since then. We're more of an international relocation business now. But back then it was a lot of fight holidays around Europe. Gosh, that would be such a good audience for that. But obviously the risk is you go on and you completely bottle it or mess it up, shuffle off crying or something. You know you're going to. Everything's going to be down the tubes, but I got on it and, um, the pitch I was giving them was. It was a pitch, I think it was 3 or maybe 6% for £100,000. It was not a, an offer. That was a Dragon's Den offer. Dragon's Den, that's well done. We'll give you 50 grand for a 30 year business or 40% or something like that. That's how it works. If somebody wanted to give us 100 grand for the 6%, that would have been fine. I was happy to do that deal and, um, they would have done well out of it now. But it was known that that's not how it was going to go. And the producers were very open with me as well, saying, it's. You're going to get shouted at. Are you happy enough? And I thought, yeah, at the end of the day, if I can get on national television and just Repeat, send my bag.com a couple of times, describe what the service is and then just hunker down and take being shouted at about a ridiculous valuation as they saw it. If I had gone to a VC with that valuation, they wouldn't have seen it in the same way, but a fit for this TV show as they saw it. I hunker down and just take that shouting and get the 10 minute slot and we got it. And, um, it worked out really well. That then allowed us to. It's not that over the next couple of years we kept saying, oh, as seen on Dragons Den, where Dragon. It was done and we moved on. But it opened doors for us. It allowed us to then end up with some of the national newspapers when we were then pitching them stories about baggage fees. They would come back to us each year and ask us about bag fees. Some of the other national TV shows, the consumer experts ended up talking about Semi Bag on that whenever I went. In fact, it went so well, you wouldn't think it went so well watching it, but it went so well from the purpose of what I was seeking to get out of it that I actually went. I tried to go on Shark Tank in the United States as well then to basically rerun it the next year, but it wasn't possible to do that. So it went well. And, um, it's something that I believe definitely played a part in Semi Bag because. And the growth of Semi Bag because it took us to that national audience very quickly in a way that is very, very, very difficult to do. Obviously extremely high risk doing something like that. Because if people had just thought that the business was a joke or whatever, it could have Just gone badly. But ultimately an awful lot of people watched that and went, oh, actually that's handy. I like the idea of that. I'll use that. We got a lot of customers off the back of it and even. And that is so many years ago now, but we do still have every now and again customers referencing that that's where they remember us from or that's where they started using us from. So yeah, and then I went to the other things after that. The following year I think I thought, oh great, that was, that was a great publicity thing for last year. Let's do something this year. What can you do? What can you come up with? So we created a. There's the low cost airline Ryanair and um, it's run by a guy called Michael o'. Leary. So we created a little computer game, little iPhone game, which the idea was, it was passengers walking back and forth, back and forth through the airport, just like one of these little games that were actually quite in vogue at the time. But what you did, you had to quickly tap the passengers and when you tap them, a big arm came in and grab money out of their pocket. So you were playing the owner of the airline trying to rob all the passengers. And, um, I got this massive mascot costume made, which was a big angry leprechaun that we called Mickey o'. Greedy. And the idea was again, he's like trying to rob you and again we're just trying to be at people trying to get publicity. Trying to get. That one didn't particularly work. It was, it was a bit of fun, it got a bit of press, but, uh, it was just that, trying to get, trying to get. And then the next year, the pr. The next year was when I just took myself to the States for six months and just tried to get on things. And um, somebody we were working with got me on the CNBC Under Power launch, their big business show and that had a similar effect to Dragons Den. That wasn't so much a big consumer launch, but it got us out to a lot of people and a lot of people then knew about us in the States and a lot of VCs and so on reached out to us off the back of that in the States as well. So yeah, it's just really trying to do. It's slightly more conventional now. It is more now we have done a nice survey, here's the data. But if there's opportunities arise, we're not slow to jump on them if I think there's something fun we can do. And even now, as well, maybe not pr, because now we are doing pr, but we also have the funds to do other things. But I like to do things that are interesting and they're big and are fun. So, for example, if you land in JFK airport and you're queuing in Security for two hours at JFK1 this week, and for the whole summer, there's massive banners the whole way around it. We've got a Send My Bag takeover. It's like Send My bag. Blue skies welcoming you to JFK Airport, which again, you think some little business started in Northern Ireland, now got a takeover in jfk, or doing Qantas and flight adverts when you go to watch your entertainment in Australia and all these other things around the world. So it's maybe not so much the PR stunts now, but it's. I still try to do things that I think are quite, quite fun or eye catching and try to get really good value out of whatever it is we're doing.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's, it's a lot of bang for Buck and I like that. Trying to even repurpose something that you did as well. So it's not just about doing it for that particular thing. But what, what can you take out from something like that, like getting featured on Dragons Den and leverage that for additional ad campaigns or marketing campaigns or website copy or those sort of things as well to get you additional bang for buck. Just going back to something that you said a little bit earlier and related to Dragonstone as well, of just. You saw Send My Bag as being a global business and wanting to grow quickly and take make the most of the opportunity ahead of you. Most people kind of default to going down the VC path and raising a ton of capital to help accelerate their growth. You've been bootstrapped this whole time not from a lack of interest from VCs, because I know that you get a lot of inbound, but what was the thinking, uh, and reasoning for you behind staying bootstrapped even when you had, uh, a lot of interest?

Speaker A: Probably going back to the very early days, probably just didn't know anything about VCs, wouldn't have known how to raise money. I came back to Northern Ireland at that time. My personal background, nothing in it would have led me to probably knew what VC stood for at that time. So that meant that I was always just trying to make money to pay my rent, build the business. It was just bootstrapping was how I did it. That's just how it worked. As we got a bit bigger, say, with the music business. At first, uh, I still kept those principles. It was, I need to earn enough money to pay the bills. I had to make sure that what I was doing, if it went wrong, I wasn't gonna be able to pay my rent. So I had to have this view that I, I had to, I had to run it like a small business, but it could be a startup as well. But I had to run like a small business. And as I moved into Semi Bag, that's really been a mentor. Okay, so Send my bike. I now know what VCs are. I now know what all but this world is. Send My Bag could easily be one of these sort of big startup type companies but, but I actually really like the idea of trying to run it like uh, a more traditional business as well. I always like the idea of profitability. And Semi Bag has been profitable since year one. It's never had a year where we've lost money. And now over the years we've invested millions and millions of our own, generated revenue back into the business. And yeah, so that has just stood me in good stead. It was just something I think just from the early days that was drummed into me and then when we started, started to have the opportunities with VCs or in later days, PE companies and so on, it was just, it was something that didn't really appeal to me. I just thought I, I can do this myself. If I, if I've been able to do whatever I did with something that was a lot smaller, it's just the same but on a, on a, on a different scale, I thought I can, I can't do it. But there was advantages as well with Semi Bag. So I'm not saying that this is right for every business but Semi Bag, we were a positive cash flow where and are a positive cash flow business. So if I can bring the customer to us and we can sell them the service, well, I don't then pay for the underlying supplier of that service or for my logistics related to that service until after we have completed it. So I am positive cash flow. So I'd moved from a business where I was having to get bank loans, really, really difficulty with a lot of difficulty for stock to a business that had positive cash flow. And again I think that kind of flip allowed me to go, whoa, I know how I can leverage this. So it allowed me to leverage that positive cash flow in a way. And it. Cause it was like winning the lottery, having positive cash flow really for me. So that, that, that was a real boost. So I didn't really feel the need to go to feces and so on. But there was then another aspect of it as well, which was, well, actually he's going back just before that as well, I would say. So I wasn't raising any angel money. We were making money to the time. Send my bag was a decent small business. I was making enough money to pay my wages and so on, paying enough money to do whatever we wanted to do. I didn't need any angel money. But we did also take investment, a small amount of investment on around that time. And that was from a local investor who we didn't need the money as such. But I had met him a couple of times and we had been chatting and he just had a great wealth of experience. And as I was saying earlier, there's not a lot of entrepreneurial experience in Northern Ireland. There's not a lot of big exits made from companies started in Northern Ireland. And Danny had exited a company in a really successful way. And I just thought that the story of what he had achieved was great and that he had a lot of experience there in areas that I didn't have experience. And if somebody was offering us VC money or offering to buy the company, I didn't know. Whereas he knew, oh actually don't sell yourself short, it's probably worth this and so on. So I just thought Danny had a great wealth of experience so he came on and invested in the company. The money went into the shareholders account and actually never got spent. It's just still sitting there. Technically, because it's the positive cash flow and growth. We've had strong double digit growth in all but one year of the last many years. So it took care of itself. But Danny brought that experience. But then after that time and after Dragons Den and different things, and growing in the states, more VCs and stuff, and I just say I felt that we didn't need it. But then also, and this is quite important and maybe quite specific to send my bag as well, a really pertinent part of our growth has been delivering the service for our customers, so delivering a really good service for them. And then that leads to word of mouth. And we have grown enormously from word of mouth. At any time, about 40% of the orders moving through our network are from somebody who has used us previously. And about 80% of the orders in our network are from somebody who is saying that their initial referral came from a friend. So we've got a huge amount of that. And this is where I try to do these PR things. I try to do these. I used to always say I'm just getting another snowball rolling, so I just need to, I need to do something to get the attention. But once I've got the attention, I've got a number of customers. Those customers will go out and sell the service for us. And especially back sort of 10 years ago when people felt that the airlines really were ripping them off, they felt that using Semi bag was a real win and wanted to tell their friends. And whether you're an expat or you're relocating for corporate, you tend to end up if you're an international relocation meeting other people who have relocated as well, or international students or whatever it may be. So there's just an awful lot of word of mouth around that time. And um, I just felt like we could probably keep moving this ourselves. But in trying to deliver that really good service, I also didn't want us to get ahead of ourselves. I didn't want us to run before we could walk. And um, the phrase that I was always using at the time was I don't want the wheels to come off. I don't want us to go so fast that the mechanics of what we're doing gets a bit rickety and we let people down. So I always turn down things that I thought may ultimately result in letting somebody down rather than opening a route that I thought wasn't ready and so on. And those two things ended up working in tandem for us because setting aside VCs which would have ended up pouring in a lot of money to fuel a lot of growth, we actually had a couple of other big opportunities around that time, around maybe 2015, 16, where it looked for a time like we may have done a deal with one of the major low cost airlines to make send my bag available to you during the booking process in the same way that you would buy car rental. It was going to be send my bag to be there. And I just couldn't get on board with the idea because with semi bag it's slightly different to checking a bag at an airline. We have slightly different rules because of customs and we have slightly different rules because of aviation security. And I just felt that if at that time we had introduced ourselves to the volume of customers that that would have brought to us. Customers who had not come to us having read about the service and learned about the service but had just done it off a click. When going through a booking process like that customer is likely to leave something in the bag that is caught out by different security rules or they're not going to realize that they actually have to fill in this form for us or something where we're going to go too fast and um, we're going to end up getting negative publicity and um, we're going to end up sinking potentially. So we decided against pushing ahead with any of those opportunities and there was a few around the time and instead just keeping it that the customers booked on our platform, you can only book the service through us, you can't book it anywhere else. We also decided at the time we would never white label. We get asked all the time, like bigger brands or maybe bigger travel brands and other industries and different things that, well, we'd never white label. We're just send my bag, you come to us, you book the service, you can refer customers to it, you can be an affiliate to us, but you come to us and we then aim to deliver the best service and you hopefully then recommend us and so on. And it was just part of that sort of deciding not to go down the VC route, deciding not to take some of what looked like the big opportunities and ah, just move our way I think has stood us in really good stead with that kind of strong double digit growth over many, many years now, rather than getting something like 800% growth or something and then just the whole thing collapsing.

Speaker B: We're going to take a very quick break from this podcast to talk about something really important and meaningful and probably something that a lot of you listening can relate to. For the last few years, I've had a front row seat into how challenging and difficult it can be to build something meaningful. The late nights, the constant pressure, the feeling that no matter how well you're doing, there's always more to do and that whatever you're doing is never enough. For a long time I think thought that was just the trade off to be successful in business. Everything else, your health, your fitness, your relationships, had to take a backseat. But what if that wasn't true? As an investor, I know that the most successful and impactful businesses are built over decades, not over months. But so often we approach life at our businesses as if we're running a 100 meter sprint rather than the marathon that we're truly running. These are the questions and insights that led me to launching the Como Club, the world's first human accelerator. Earlier this year. We brought together 26 employees. Incredible people from founders, investors, professional athletes, to senior executives at some of the largest companies. It's an eight week program designed for high performers to implement systems for long term success in their business in all areas of their life, from fitness to mental health, relationships and leadership, all within a trusted and high caliber community that just gets it. So if you've been doing well but know there's another level, or if you've been running hard and want to recalibrate, I'd love for you to check it out. Cohort 2 kicks off in August and applications are now open. You can find out more details or apply at the Como Club. That's T H E K O M M O c l u b.com all right, let's get back to this episode. Yeah, I think it's, it's like keeping that context of short term growth doesn't necessarily equate to long term growth as well and can sometimes can have a counter, counterproductive effect into the growth of the business. But maybe to help our listeners, because I often feel like there is. People feel like there's a trade off between deciding to say bootstrapped and building a small company versus racing VC and building a large company. I think what you've done with Send My Bag is absolutely incredible and phenomenal. I know you can't share specific details about the company, but for, uh, our listeners, can you give us give them a sort of a context of the scale that Send My Bag is at now?

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So each month we will help people move between about 80 different countries. So we're still reasonably niche business. International relocation is really the area that we really like, helping expats, international students and so on move. But that niche group all around the world, I was surprised recently to see the number of orders that we were getting out of Mongolia, an area that we've never advertised in other than whatever may happen naturally through our digital advertising. So, yeah, we're around the world and I've been sort of. Our international growth has been recognized in a few different ways then in terms of sort of customer numbers and so on. Say we've helped over a million people on an international relocation since COVID Obviously as a travel business, Covid was a blow for us. In our UK business, Brexit was a blue for us because we built a really nice holiday business in the uk helping people move their holiday luggage back and forth. That was a blue for us. But in a few years since those have started to go into the rear view mirror, we've done about the equivalent of 200 million Australian dollars in revenue. And we're backed our, our strong growth path again. And yeah, we have very firm goals on making that an annualized number over the next few years.

Speaker B: Hmm. M. One thing that I also wanted to ask you is from what I, from what I recall you mentioning, your office is still located very close to your parents place. And in terms of like where the business is and the size of it is, I guess there is this temptation to, to move to a more central hub like London or have all those sort of things in place. What, what was your reasoning for, for keeping the business quite local to where you grew up?

Speaker A: It's, it's, it just happened naturally really. It's. And yeah, out my window here, probably a few hundred yards away is actually the house that I grew up in Northern Ireland. We are quite a small country. It's, it's a nice place to live as well. There's, it's, it's, it's a great place. I can hop in my car and, and drive and be wherever I need to be and not, and not too long. I'm not going to sit in an hour's traffic like you do in the big cities and so on. So it's a great place to uh, live. And I think naturally what's happened is that as the business grew we were hiring locally. We started off local so we started hiring locally and I just, I'm not going to then m Move the business away from, from the people that we've hired. Even when we outgrew our last office, we took the opportunity of COVID when people were working from home and so on. We acquired a site and then built uh, a new office. And um, even that one of the main considerations was its proximity to the last office because I know we have a lot of people that will walk in or come in on bikes and so on and I didn't want to suddenly give people commutes so we, we kept it quite local for that purpose. And so it is, it's, it's, it's an interesting one because everybody that is, is working here is, is from Northern Ireland. Almost like well a few people from other places but they live, they live locally really with a few remote workers but it's mostly local and yeah, but we are serving customers all around the world. We will just be taking calls all day to day emails, chats from people that are all around the world. Our American customers will mostly see us as an American business until somebody answers the phone and they hear someone with my accent or similarly our Australian customers will take us as an Australian customer business. And yeah, I mean we did start around sort of 2014. We started to build up a team in New York. And the view was that we would build up New York or maybe use the west coast and then go to Australia as well and have. These would become our kind of customer service hubs as well. But in the end it just made more sense not to have crossover between different teams, but to open here 24 hours a day. So for a number of years now we just, we open 24 hours a day. We're open across the weekends. Our customers in Los Angeles can call us at 11pm our time on a Friday night to chat to us about their morning collection. And that's just how it is. And that made more sense ultimately for us. There is challenges with night work and so on, but it made more sense overall, uh, to do that in terms of providing the best service for our customers. Rather than starting to have bases in different countries. Things may end up in different countries. We have our own vehicles on the road in Dublin and Belfast. We're, we've got stuff being trialled in London. We definitely have enough business in Melbourne and um, Sydney and New York and Los Angeles and a number of the European capitals to have our own vehicles there as well. So we'll probably start to have that localized presence. So there will be people in Send My Bag branding the work for us in other countries. So there will be people in other countries because at the minute we provide our services by working with logistics partners in other countries. So whenever we come to collect your items in Paris, say it'll be our logistics partner who's actually doing the collection. It's not a physical semi bag vehicle collecting it. But ultimately we want to improve the service that we can offer on that kind of last and first mile delivery and collection. And that's where we're dealing with our own vehicles. But all of our actual office staff are all based here in, in Northern Ireland within a, within a sort of mile of where most of us grew up.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was something that I remember speaking to James Fuller, who's the co founder and CEO of a company called Henry. It's based out of New Zealand and now in Australia about them talking about essentially when they launched in the market, they were first movers and built things up. And I guess any successful business that gets a little bit of traction starts getting, getting interest from potential competitors or people launching very similar types of businesses. How have you, how have, how's that sort of come across for you for building Send My Bag and how have you approached competition or those sort of things in the market?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I would say since Send My Bike started. We've probably had 30 or 40 competitors all around the world. Follow, follow our lead. Say sometimes we don't disclose certain numbers because I have seen the pitch decks that our numbers have showed up in the past as well. So we do have that. But it's a compliment as well, isn't it? I say to our team that we are essentially the snowplow. We're pushing through the snow, we're creating the market and obviously other people are going to come in behind us, but we simply need to make sure that, that we are doing the best job and it keeps us on our toes. A bit of competition's fun as well. It's fun to try and beat people at things too. Let's say. This is like my hobby. If you're into football, you want to win the match. If you're into this, you want to be the best at this. So we have this mantra of best service, best customer service and best price set in whatever order. There's no particular order to it, but just if we can always provide the best price and the best service and the best customer service, then why does somebody need to not choose send my bag? And that's really what we have always tried to do. That's why many years ago now, before we had expanded into other countries and I realized that, say we had a lot of student customers and um, went, oh, they don't really want to fool us it seems, but they're emailing more but let's try online chat instead because that'll give them a faster response. So we had online chat and we had live people answering online chat. A lot of years before, really you saw this as a common thing on websites. And even now it's real people. We answer, uh, like tens of thousands of online chats, but it's all real people. It's not AI or those pre AI terrible bot things that don't actually do anything. So we provide that service again. When I realized people wanted to phone us at night, we then just went, well. So I don't understand why customer service businesses are closed by 6 o' clock when everybody's been at work to 6 o'. Clock. And so we just started opening in the evenings, opened up the weekends. That then obviously actually helped us. Cause we'd done that initially because we were trying to help somebody in the UK trying to phone us at 8 o' clock at night. But then it turned out that actually now that customer, if they're sending to the States now, we're still open, they can phone us in the States and then the same happened with Australia. So we just always trying to do the best we can for our customers and yeah, just kind of deliver that service that people will want to choose. Send my back.

Speaker B: I think one of the most difficult kind of challenges when it comes to scale is I think a lot of those decisions or trade offs at the start are very easy to make in terms of the customer experience and those sort of things. I think the example that you gave a little bit earlier where there was a budget airline that you could have integrated with, that obviously would have meant tremendous growth for you guys, but those decisions can be a little bit harder to separate revenue versus core experience around the business and those sort of things. Are there particular things that you do or you like instill in terms of like company culture in terms of how you make decisions like that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I just, I don't want to let people down essentially. I still, I feel like we're still got a small business mentality and we ship a lot of stuff around the world. Things happen. We have had a vehicle stolen or something like that. Ah, no matter what you do, things can happen. And when you're sending millions and millions of things at 0.01% is still things that happen. But the goal is always to never set ourselves up to let somebody down. And if I feel like the customs rules in a particular country aren't going to allow us now, we may still offer a service to that country, but we'll have a massive warning on it saying, look, if you're familiar with the customs rules, by all means we can help you get a great rate really getting to that country. But don't use us for a holiday to that country because it's going to be in um, quarantine for a week or something, whatever it may be. So it's just really having a few that we do want to let people down. And I think over the years and just how we've been very hands on with customer service and very open and accessible to our customers, I feel like that's something that the team has taken on board and we're actually just about to roll out a whole new version of how we handle internal customer services. When we were smaller, there was very much a culture of individual ownership around orders and helping customers. And if a customer got in touch, it would often be you that then help that customer through to the end. Now being a lot bigger and open 24 hours and so on, there can be more crossover. But we got to a point where we felt like there was too many calls coming in where our answer to the customer was we'll get the person who can help you to phone you back or can you come back at another time when that person. And it felt like we didn't have enough individual ownership. And so our dev team and our customer service team have designed ah, a whole new management system for our orders that we've been trialing during the summer which is quite a, quite a busy time, slightly crazy time to decide to trial something but they wanted to push through and trial it and they've done that. And um, we're going to be rolling that out in October. And um, it's designed to just give this kind of resurgence of this individual ownership of individual customers experience. Of course 90% plus of our customers we never hear from because it's. They can and a lot of them are repeat customers. They know how it works. We've got a lot of self service tools for people as well but we just try to be there and accessible for those that do need us.

Speaker B: I think it's almost like going down to what's the core experience that you can provide to your customers that's the most important thing to them. And I think especially when I think about people traveling, the amount of negative posts that I hear about them about airlines losing their bags or those sort of things, we're just not being very responsive. I think just even the way that you think about having stuff on 24 hours to handle customer service calls and focusing on just being very dependable and not letting them down, I think just really hits the uh, value prop that people are looking for and that they're unhappy with, with other, other potential solutions. Adam, I can talk to you for hours but really appreciate you coming on the show and for sharing your experience, lessons, insights. For anyone that wants to find out more, say hello, get in touch. What's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker A: You can check out Send my Bag directly just on sendmybag.com for someone that has been building E commerce and similar businesses for a lot of years. I'm not on any social media so it's just, it's something. And you know what actually happened with that? I think the reason why is because I was always online working, trying to build it. Never really then crossed over that oh no, I'll talk to my mates online or something. So m. I'm nowhere out there. But yeah there's, yeah check out sendmybag.com and I'm sure we're always in the press with different things happening yeah, Interesting.

Speaker B: So you don't have any social media at all? Like, no LinkedIn?

Speaker A: No.

Speaker B: That's actually very impressive.

Speaker A: No, I don't. I think I have a Twitter account for a couple of years and I. I don't think I've looked at it in 10 years. And, um. Yeah, I just, um. So, yeah, if you're talking to somebody on online about selling my bag, if they're trying to sell you something on some social media platform, it ain't me. So don't be. Don't be taking the sales pitch. But, yeah, I just.

Speaker B: It just.

Speaker A: It was just something. I think it was because of always been online, Working online. Working online. It was then like, right, I'll sleep now rather than sit on Facebook. Um, and it just never. It never happened for me.

Speaker B: Yeah, Interesting. Love it. Well, I'll make sure that we add in links to sendmybag.com for any fellow lists who want to find out more. Adam, once again, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on.

Speaker A: That's a guest. Thanks a lot for your head.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening to episode 220 of the Startup Playbook podcast. As always, full show notes from this episode will be available at startupplaybook.co. i'll be back next week with another episode, but in the meantime, if you. If you enjoyed this interview, please don't forget to, like, share and subscribe. As always, thank you for tuning in and I'll see you next week.