Despite a lot of doom and gloom out there about the slowdown of VC investment and how start-ups need to brace for the impact, smart and well-disciplined investors are still looking for home runs, and funding opportunities are still available for the best subscription app companies.
In this episode with Eric Crowley, partner at GP Bullhound, we talk about Consumer Subscription Software Flywheel, the investment north star that defines the main attributes of a successful CSS.
Then we talk about how subscription apps can maximize investors’ attention by
- Building a paradigm-shifting Consumer Subscription Business
- Paring UX and UI with high-quality content and proprietary data
- Targeting a niche
- Thinking as a third-party
Listen to the episode to find out more about the investor’s inside scoop.
For noteworthy quotes and key takeaways from the episode, read the article -
What venture investors look for in subscription apps with Eric Crowley (GP Bullhound).
Episode Topics at a Glance
- Consumer Subscription Flywheel
- What GP Bullhound look for in a company
- UX and UK
- The role of premium content and proprietary data
- Success examples
- How to be the king of a niche
- GP Bullhound’s events
More about Eric Crowley
Eric is a Partner at GP Bullhound, focusing primarily on M&A, Capital Raises, and Advisory transactions with expertise in consumer subscription software, tech-enabled agencies and ad-tech. Over his career, he has completed transactions totaling over $3 billion in enterprise value.
Prior to GP Bullhound, Eric served as an executive at a software start-up where he focused on financial management and driving growth. In addition, Eric worked at Lazard and Antares Capital focusing on middle market transactions.
In addition to his CPA, Eric has an MBA from the University of Chicago and a B.S. degree from Xavier University.
Eric Crowley’s Links
- Eric Crowley’s LinkedIn profile
- CSS Spinning the CSS flywheel to delight consumers.
- Medium.com articles by Eric Crowley
- Techcrunch article - Taking consumer subscription software to the great outdoors
Timestamps
00:20 Introducing Eric Crowley and GP Bullhound
01:08 Consumer subscription flywheel
03:35 What GP Bullhound looks for to invest in companies
05:13 The importance of UX and UI
06:55 The role proprietary data takes in building a business mode
08:41 Transitioning from founder-backed to venture-backed companies
11:20 Post-pandemic subscription net businesses
12:59 Examples of creative ways to engage consumers
15:01 Will the Winner-Take-All trend continue?
16:56 Best success stories
18:24 The digital to analogue transition
19:28 Should funders worry about reaching specific APIs?
21:03 Consumer subscription software conference
23:10 Where to learn more about GP Bullhound
Trancript
[00:00:19.400] - Olivier Destrebecq
Welcome everybody. Today, we have Eric Crowley on the show. He's a Technology Investment Banker at GP Bullhound. That will make him the first investor we have on the show. Something that is amazing to me is that he has done over 25 transaction value at $3 billion. But the most important part is that he focuses on Consumer Subscription Software, and that's why he's invited today.
[00:00:41.410] - Olivier Destrebecq
Welcome, Eric, to the show. It's a pleasure to have you on today. Is there anything else you want to add to the intro that I just did?
[00:00:46.930] - Eric Crowley
No. Thanks, Oliver and Nicholas, for having me. Thrilled to be here. I'm really impressed by what you guys are building. Maybe just a quick note here at GP Bullhound, we're an International Investment Bank, headquarter out of London with 11 offices around the globe. We're 200 bankers and investors on the team, and we specialize in Consumer Subscription Software. I'm really excited to be here to talk about one of my favorite subjects.
[00:01:07.490] - Olivier Destrebecq
Awesome. As I was doing research on you before the interview, I came across a post on LinkedIn that you did where you mentioned the Consumer Subscription Flywheel. Can you tell us what that is?
[00:01:19.560] - Eric Crowley
Yes. This is something we developed back in 2018 as we were really just putting together our thesis around Consumer Subscription Software. As you guys know, SaaS has been around, B2B software has been around for quite some time. When we looked at Consumer Subscription Software businesses, we noticed that they had some similar characteristics, but also some very different characteristics.
[00:01:39.880] - Eric Crowley
The problem was that people—both investors, as well as GP Bullhound and entrepreneurs—they had trouble evaluating what made a good CSS business because there's so many different components. What we wanted to do was try to create a methodology for looking at CSS businesses and evaluating the potential. What we did here at GP Bullhound is we decided what would be the north star for our Consumer Subscription Businesses. If you're an entrepreneur, a builder, and investor, what's the one thing you should focus on?
[00:02:07.620] - Eric Crowley
Ultimately, we decided that recurring revenue was the easiest thing to measure. It's monetizeable. It's very different from a userbase or engagement. It's truly a measure of how much people love your product because they continue to pay for it. What we did then is decide what are the components of that recurring revenue. How do you ultimately deserve recurring revenue from a consumer? That's a key thing. You're earning that subscription every month, every year from that consumer by delivering value.
[00:02:32.240] - Eric Crowley
We then effectively created six components of recurring revenue. The first one was premium content. It's something that they can't find for free on YouTube. It's got to be something pretty unique. The second piece was proprietary data. That comes out of whole different formats and types, and we can talk about that in detail later. The third piece was, "How do you acquire users? Are you posting on Facebook? Are they coming to you organically? Are they finding you through Google, billboards?" What's your strategy there?
[00:02:56.520] - Eric Crowley
Businesses have been doing some fascinating stuff here around generating content and leveraging user-generated content to drive that customer acquisition. Second one is, how do you charge? How do you price your product? Is it $2 a year, $29.99? That's an extremely important, and in my opinion, under-discussed topic in CSS or Consumer Subscription Software.
[00:03:16.190] - Eric Crowley
The second to last one is, are you going after a niche userbase or a large gen? The final piece—and one of the most important pieces—is return and retention. How long do people stay on the platform? How quickly they turn all results in recurring revenue? That's the CSS Flywheel that we developed a few years ago, and still live by today.
[00:03:34.620] - Olivier Destrebecq
Awesome. It sounds like a very complete picture. That leads me in my next question, because you're the first investor that we have on the show. This next question is really for my own benefit. What do you guys look for when deciding whether or not to invest in a company, especially in this pandemic/pandemic time?
[00:03:50.220] - Eric Crowley
It's a really good question. People's views on the space continue to evolve. There's the pre-pandemic view, there's the during-the-pandemic view. And I hope to God we're coming to the post-pandemic view. GP Bullhound, when we look at, when we decide to invest, is we are venture investors. We are not investing in lifestyle businesses that can grow and produce 5%-10 % cash flow a year. We're looking for home runs. That is what we hope for.
[00:04:16.490] - Eric Crowley
What we're looking for is—because I almost call them paradigm-shifting Consumer Subscription Businesses—business that's producing something so unique that it creates a moat around it that's really hard to copy. A really good example is Discord. Discord, if you think about it, you step back, Discord is a marketplace. There's consumers of information and there's producers of information. And that's very similar to an eBay or an Amazon.
[00:04:38.610] - Eric Crowley
What we found, and what we really liked about that business is they had generated both buyers and sellers of information on that platform. In exchange, instead of charging people to buy and sell information, they were asking for a subscription. And that subscription gave you premium features. It was pretty clear to us what would be premium and what would be free, and we felt that that was a really good business.
[00:04:58.230] - Eric Crowley
We found some of the same characteristics in WHOOP, and Fishbrain, and then Spotify. Now, as we go through what are things look like post-pandemic, we're really looking for, once again, like businesses that we think can survive and thrive across almost any environment.
[00:05:13.070] - Olivier Destrebecq
Okay, the same question. When you are speaking about the CSS Flywheel, you mentioned a lot of things related to content, to revenue and so on. You didn't mention at all UX. Everybody is crazy about building the product, creating a strong product market feed, and so on. You didn't mention it. Does it mean that the product is not as important from an investor standpoint? Or can you elaborate in this?
[00:05:38.980] - Eric Crowley
I would say UX and UI is truly ingrained in a couple different parts of this. One is premium content. This app in the service, they have to look like they're worth money. If you put something together and it doesn't look smooth, it doesn't look high quality, why would anyone pay for it? So then, UX is extremely important. At the same time, if you think about UX, UI, the goal is to get someone to do something.
[00:06:00.760] - Eric Crowley
That could be subscribe, it could be ingest data, input data, take a photo, edit a photo, track a route, to make sure that's easily understood and make sure people could quickly say, "Hey, if I'm on X, and I want someone to go out there and just understand a hunting route, they have to make it extremely easy for someone who is not used the app before. It's a mapped that..."
[00:06:19.640] - Eric Crowley
If you're on Calimoto and you're trying to encourage people to record your motorcycle ride, it needs to be one or two clicks away from someone getting started. Otherwise, people get frustrated, they close the app, they take a phone call, they reply to a text, and you've lost that user. So UI, UX is extremely important. It's just embedded within some of these other parts of the CSS Flywheel. It's the way we think about it.
[00:06:38.480] - Olivier Destrebecq
It's almost like it's a table stake in a way.
[00:06:41.320] - Eric Crowley
I think that's right. There's thousands of apps in the app store. People have plenty of choices, but they only review the ones they truly love. So you have to make a product that is easy to understand, intuitive, and feels like a premium experience to justify a subscription.
[00:06:55.280] - Olivier Destrebecq
Interesting. You mentioned that moat that the startup should try to build in a little bit. Is the proprietary data or propriety content, is that what that feeds into building that moat, essentially?
[00:07:06.910] - Eric Crowley
Yeah, it's exactly right. I mean, all businesses need a moat. If you're McDonald's, you need a moat which could be your location, could be your product, your brand. All businesses need one. In CSS, because you're delivering a product effectively, a piece of data or a service, it's software. It's effectively infinitely scalable. You have to have something that's unique to you to justify someone paying for it.
[00:07:30.790] - Eric Crowley
Moats here in CSS could be a couple of different things. One is premium content. Netflix, for example—to use a CSS business that everyone knows—has premium content, that is, Netflix-produced shows. That keeps people coming back to the platform. AllTrails, R'Commute, Strava, they produce really fascinating routes that are only available on those platforms. And that's for people to run, hike, travel, bike across the globe. So people then leave reviews, and that's on those platforms. And that becomes proprietary data and makes that platform that much more valuable, which creates a moat.
[00:08:01.000] - Olivier Destrebecq
One thing that I run across a couple years back, was Strava—or one of those app where you keep track of where you go running and all that stuff—they were actually selling the aggregated data of where people would run to cities. So then cities could improve their infrastructure for people that are running, or biking, or whatever. And I found that fascinating.
[00:08:20.120] - Eric Crowley
Yeah. There's definitely some privacy issues in there. But overall, if consumers are saying, "Hey, my dad is being used to benefit something that I care about." People are generally okay with that. If things are very crystal clear on what that benefit is going to. If you said, "Hey, my running routes will be used to improve sidewalks in my hometown in Paris. I think that's a great benefit for me and I would have no problem with that being shared."
[00:08:41.320] - Olivier Destrebecq
When we talked a few weeks back, one of the thing you mentioned that GP Bullhound was doing was that you want to help founders transition from founder-backed to venture-backed companies. Can you tell us more about that transition and what it means for founders?
[00:08:55.490] - Eric Crowley
I think of these transitions, they could be from founder to venture-backed. They could be from bootstrap to private equity owned. There's a bunch of different graduation moments for business where it goes from one stage to the next. At GP Bullhound, we sit in a really interesting place.
[00:09:08.690] - Eric Crowley
Effectively, we have two hats that we wear. So 75% of my time, I wear a hat as an advisor. It's we're helping companies raise capital or sell themselves. And then 25% of the time, I'm sitting as an investor hat and helping GP Bullhound, invest our capital and our investors' capital into these businesses. To use the time when I'm an advisor, we'll meet a lot of founders. They are building some really fantastic stuff.
[00:09:29.830] - Eric Crowley
What we have to do is help them think about their business like a third-party will think about it. As you guys are founders and you're building a business, the business is your baby. It's the best baby of all time. It's unstoppable. It'll be fantastic. It will easily be President of the country at one point. The problem is, when you bring—it's called ten third-parties—look at that baby, they all have very different views of your business.
[00:09:49.390] - Eric Crowley
So what's important to make sure is we sit as advisors and act as that third-party to provide our view on how to the best position the business' characteristics to generate the maximum amount of attention from buyers. What that means is that a business has to be scalable. It has to have processes and procedures. Its data has to be organized. It has to be transparent and easy to be understood.
[00:10:13.990] - Eric Crowley
As a founder, a lot of times, you know where everything is. You can look at a dashboard and know exactly what's happening on every day. The problem is, if you're showing that to a third-party, that may not be true. It's our job to help prepare these businesses for graduations—we like to think about it—that usually takes us a couple months. Then generally, we get pretty good results.
[00:10:30.070] - Olivier Destrebecq
Is that a transition that's pretty tough for founders? Or is that something that goes pretty smoothly just like, it's a training and then you graduate at the end as you said, and everything's rosy?
[00:10:39.210] - Eric Crowley
Every person that graduates, it's a different experience for each business. Some founders, they are very excited to work with private equity or strategic, and turn over the day-to-day operations of their business to someone else. Others have a much harder time letting go. That's actually something we spend a lot of time with our clients is asking this question which is, "What do you want?"
[00:10:57.370] - Eric Crowley
And it can't just be a cheque. If it's just a cheque, that's relatively easy. But in most cases, this is an investment in time, of energy. So just getting cash for that at the end of the day, is usually not the optimal outcome. Most people want to see their business to go on and thrive. So we spend time thinking with these people, and thinking with our clients about what are the characteristics of a buyer or an investor that will help it thrive and not just put cash in the bank.
[00:11:20.560] - Olivier Destrebecq
The pandemic is slowing down, as we said earlier, and hopefully do us to that way. What does that mean for the subscription app business in your views?
[00:11:27.280] - Eric Crowley
It's all across the board. It really depends on what's the solution that Consumer Subscription Businesses are providing to the user. For example, you have businesses that are subscription apps that are more utility-focused, helping you do something in the real world. Having the pandemic where now you're getting out and about and doing things, this business actually becomes more useful.
[00:11:45.970] - Eric Crowley
Now, if you're business that's focused on providing a Netflix-like business—to use them again—if you guys saw their stock traded down substantially because their growth slowed down. That's because the challenge now post-pandemic is the consumer attention, or the competition for the consumer attention. There's only 24 hours a day where consumers can use a product. In reality, there's usually 16 hours a day when they're not sleeping.
[00:12:07.530] - Eric Crowley
If that's the case, the pandemics now ending, people can go back to bars, they can go to concerts, they go to sporting events. The challenge right now is that the consumer's attention is going to be shifted from just sitting at home all the time to now going back to the real world. Now you have this really fantastic opportunity to provide, to find unique ways to acquire customers.
[00:12:25.760] - Eric Crowley
During a pandemic, you have to basically go through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat to market to those consumers because that was the only way to get a hold of them. They weren't going out and doing anything. They weren't sharing information with friends, real life activities. And now, that's changing.
[00:12:38.080] - Eric Crowley
A business like RV LIFE, that's having people jump in their RVs and travel around the world. Right now, they're doing much, much better post-pandemic because people are actually out and about. They're traveling, they're interacting, they're talking about their experiences. I actually think this is a really good opportunity for Consumer Subscription Businesses to break free of the Facebook, the Instagram marketing funnels and really of creative ways to engage that consumer.
[00:12:59.270] - Olivier Destrebecq
Do you have an example of creative ways that you've seen recently?
[00:13:02.630] - Eric Crowley
A really cool one is a business called PlayON. I don't know if you guys are familiar, but here in the US, high school sports are very popular. What PlayON did is they—and there's actually another company called Baller—what they do is they provide cameras to film youth sports. If you think about it as a parent, you're quite busy. You can't always make it to your son's baseball game or your daughter's gymnastics game. What PlayON and BallerTV do is they effectively film that for you. They'll pay someone to go out there and film that game.
[00:13:28.510] - Eric Crowley
And then in exchange for a subscription—very similar to Netflix or Spotify—you can watch your son and daughter's game on your phone, on your TV, on your laptop, you can record it. All that's done for you. The way they monetize is they create these partnerships with the schools or their leagues. And the schools and the leagues effectively promote the business offerings to the parents.
[00:13:46.480] - Eric Crowley
So instead of PlayON or BallerTV having to go out there and market to parents on Facebook, which is really, really hard. Effectively, the parents can get flyer from the school. They can get an email from the coach and say, "Hey, if you can't make the game, you can watch your son and daughter on these channels." That's a really interesting way to go out there and say, "Hey, here's how you can find this service without having to do a ton of marketing." That's one of my favorites.
[00:14:08.760] - Eric Crowley
Another one that I think is really cool is Movie. Movie is a film business very similar to Netflix, but it's focused on what I would call high-end boutique films. There's not going to be a Jerry Bruckheimer film on there with explosions every five minutes. It's some of the films that will appear at Collins. They really focus on the classics.
[00:14:25.120] - Eric Crowley
The way they find users is through chatrooms and websites about films. They really target the cinephile or someone who wants to talk about films with like-minded individuals. And then they market to those people on channels that they own, which are these community boards, these messaging boards that then direct people towards Movie. It's a really holistic and synergistic offering that they've provided. Not just content, but the place to discuss that content.
[00:14:48.440] - Olivier Destrebecq
For the PlayON app, I can definitely see some grandparents that would love that subscription.
[00:14:52.440] - Eric Crowley
It's extremely popular. They just sold to KKR for a north of $800 million. We're really excited about that business. We've worked with them in the past and think the team's great.
[00:15:00.990] - Olivier Destrebecq
In a lot of technology market, we've seen a winner-take-all situation where one big player owns the market either by buying out their competitors or just outsizing them, essentially. Do you think that's a trend that's going to be continuing with Consumer Subscription Software or is that going to change?
[00:15:18.110] - Eric Crowley
It's a really great question. And a lot of people are struggling with that. I'll give two answers. Consumer Subscription Software is not different from any other industry where generally, economies of scale matter and people want to do something that others are doing or use products that others are using. So there will be what I call the champions in each space.
[00:15:36.830] - Eric Crowley
If you use a category that everyone knows, Netflix, Disney+, those are big players in the streaming, consumer subscription space. The fascinating thing though is Apple's in there, you have Crunchyroll, you have Crackle, you've got Amazon Prime, you've got Sling, you've got Twitch. All these businesses are effectively targeting a unique demographic. Either they're targeting something the individual really cares about. For example, in Twitch, maybe gaming or they're providing content that is not available somewhere else.
[00:16:06.150] - Eric Crowley
The great thing about CSS in my opinion, is consumer is so huge. We're talking literally billions of consumers across the world. A niche and a consumer may be 10 million people globally. Because of how some of the great marketing tools that are out there, and the ability for people to find each other using the internet globally in mobile phones, you can easily accumulate a passionate group of 10 million users.
[00:16:26.830] - Eric Crowley
Well, 10 million users times $30 a year is quite a good business. So that's what gets me really excited about this space is you can build phenomenal businesses for the users you're passionate about. You don't care about advertising revenue, or marketing, or views. You care about providing a great service to great users. You can have businesses that exist even in what looks like very competitive categories.
[00:16:47.380] - Olivier Destrebecq
I like this idea of having smaller niches where you can be the King of that smaller niches that you still, as you said, pretty big.
[00:16:54.700] - Eric Crowley
That's right. Yeah.
[00:16:56.620] - Olivier Destrebecq
You guys have been focusing on consumer subscription app. What are some of the best success stories that you've had in your portfolio? And what did it do be well to succeed?
[00:17:04.980] - Eric Crowley
It's a really fun space for us to be in right now. Because some of these businesses are just doing phenomenally well. A business we just had that that was both an investment banking client, as well as an investment for us was a company called Busuu. It's a language-learning business based in Spain helping individuals learn a new language using their phone. We just sold that business to Chegg. Was a phenomenal outcome for the founders as well as GP Bullhound.
[00:17:25.800] - Eric Crowley
Another one that I like that we're a big fan of is this business called AllTrails. That was a business we help sell the spectrum equities. We're not an investor there, but they've just done phenomenally well. It's been great watching that business succeed. We'll have some of the same dynamics exist with a company called Pinkbike and RealVNC. Pinkbike is a mountain biking business. RealVNC is a VPN provider.
[00:17:44.040] - Eric Crowley
And then in our portfolio, we're really excited about Discord. Revolut, which is a fintech business that also offers some subscription offerings. That'll be a very successful business long term. So we're always looking for the next thing. We absolutely have capital deploy. People are freaking out about a downturn. Here at GPB, we're very optimistic about the future.
[00:18:03.280] - Eric Crowley
In my research, I've never seen an industry that has gone more analog after going digital. Once people provide a great digital product in any sort of activity in the consumer world, it generally has a tendency to stay digital. Actively, we encourage founders, entrepreneurs, builders, to reach out to us. Because we think there'll be a lot more successes to come. That's part of this industry is still around the corner.
[00:18:24.090] - Olivier Destrebecq
You just mentioned people going from digital and then back to analog. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
[00:18:30.170] - Eric Crowley
Yeah. A lot of people question, "Some of these consumer subscription businesses, did they have a need to exist?" A perfect example is digital fitness. A lot of people during the pandemic switch to digital fitness through their phone, their TV, versus going to a gym. Effectively, fitness for the first time has digitalized. A lot of products, hardware, came along with that. Think like mirror, think peloton.
[00:18:53.700] - Eric Crowley
So the fascinating thing is now people have had a chance to experience exercising on a smart machine versus dumb machines. More and more smart machines are coming. Digital weights are coming, digital workout groups, even though people will go back to the gym. Personally, I'm going back to the gym as much as I possibly can.
[00:19:09.420] - Eric Crowley
I will absolutely continue to use digital fitness products to either track my workouts. I will use a business called FitOn which has workouts for when I'm on the road, when I'm traveling. So I can still maintain probably what I call both an analog and a digital fitness life.
[00:19:22.140] - Olivier Destrebecq
It really makes sense to marry the two sides that we've had over the last few years.
[00:19:26.450] - Eric Crowley
It just provides a better experience to the user.
[00:19:28.570] - Olivier Destrebecq
You mentioned downturn previously. I was curious to have you elaborate a little bit more on this. Is the bar to raise capital higher from your perspective? Do founders, should they worry a little bit because they need to reach specific APIs in order to go to the next level?
[00:19:46.010] - Eric Crowley
It's a very topical question right now. There's a lot of doom and gloom out there right now. If you look at the stock market, it's down 20% depending on which index you're looking at from the beginning of the year. But founders need to step back and remember that raising capital at any time is hard. Even in the best times, you're going to take 100 No's to get to one Yes.
[00:20:05.590] - Eric Crowley
What they have to remember now is, even though numbers are trending down, Q1 was down from Q4. Q1 2022, if you look at the latest Craft Ventures report, it was actually up from Q1 2021. So it feels like we're falling off a Cliff. You have to remember: if you look at venture investing and the dollars invested over the last 10 years every quarter, 2021 was an absolute peak.
[00:20:26.630] - Eric Crowley
Maybe we're not at the absolute summit of the Venture Capital mountain right now, or the absolute peak, but we're absolutely still at the top. So the question is, dollars are still going out there in the companies, but people are definitely being more discerning but they still do have dollars to invest. The way about it, if you're building a great company, great companies get founded. If you're a founder, you really have to make sure that you are building a great company. But also that you're describing your opportunity and your mission correctly.
[00:20:52.070] - Eric Crowley
That's something we're always happy to chat about. I'm still pretty bullish. Now, the world can change in the next two to three months, for sure. But if you still look at dollars being invested, it's still quite high.
[00:21:02.850] - Olivier Destrebecq
The last question I had for you is... Just as we were preparing for a meeting, I saw in your notes that you guys are hosting a conference in October 2022 around Consumer Subscription Software. Can you tell us more about... Make us want to come.
[00:21:17.210] - Eric Crowley
Great question. First off, I hope everyone is going back to in-real life, in-person events in 2022. I've definitely been doing that. And I cannot tell you how great it feels to talk to people in-person about subjects you're passionate about. GP Bullhound, we've done quite a few events in Europe, and we've done a few events here in the US but not as many. We've been just meeting phenomenal people in the CSS space.
[00:21:39.210] - Eric Crowley
We started doing some dinners a few years ago. We invite 20 CEOs to a dinner, and sit down and have great food and wine, and talk about the industry. Talk about the challenges, talk about the opportunities, talk about different ways to acquire customers. Maybe it's a very nerdy dinner, but I have a lot of [inaudible 00:21:53].
[00:21:54.810] - Eric Crowley
We've begin to request for more and more people to attend. And what we decided to do is, "Let's create a conference focused on CSS. It's going to be invite only." The plan is it for it to be here in the US in late October. We're firming up a location now, and then we'll be sending on invites. The goal is not to be a conference where there's four people in suits, and they sit up on a stage, and then 50 people are in the audience scrolling their phones on Twitter, barely listening.
[00:22:17.280] - Eric Crowley
GP Bullhound had events, we try to make these as interactive as possible. Instead of large groups listening to small numbers of people, we want it to be small groups all talking among themselves. So we'll do breakout rooms. We'll have, "Hey, if you want to talk about customer acquisition on Facebook, come to this room. I'll have a moderator, and then everyone else will be sharing their stories." "Hey, if you want to talk about expanding internationally and transitioning languages and cultures, let's come over and talk to this business that did that. That entrepreneur, that business owner will be the moderator."
[00:22:42.760] - Eric Crowley
What it's not going to be is a bunch of vendors, people holding up signs, having you come over and look at stuff. Our goal is just to be interactive, fun and educational. The goal is to keep it pretty small to start. We'll invite probably just under 100 people and hope 50-100 come. It'll be here in the US, we're targeting San Francisco or Austin. If you're interested, it should be note. I'm happy to talk about it, and then see if we can get people an invite.
[00:23:05.350] - Olivier Destrebecq
It would be awesome. It might even be a great place to do some interviews.
[00:23:08.550] - Eric Crowley
All right. It's a great idea.
[00:23:10.030] - Olivier Destrebecq
Well, thank you for all those answers. It was really nice to have our first investor on the show and get all your perspective. I really want to thank you. Those were some really awesome answers. Thanks for coming today.
[00:23:20.400] - Eric Crowley
No. Thanks, guys. Have any of your guests feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Twitter, email. I'm pretty active on all those platforms.
[00:23:26.160] - Olivier Destrebecq
Awesome. Actually, one last question, I lied. If people want to learn more about GP Bullhound, where should they go?
[00:23:31.800] - Eric Crowley
Yeah. We do have a website. We are a Technology Investment Bank. If you just go to gpbullhound.com—it's George, Paul, bullhound.com—you can actually download all our research there for free. If you search for the consumer subscription one, you'll find that we do have tons of events both in Europe as well as in the US just to get entrepreneurs and investors together. Feel free to sign up. Obviously, we're on all the other channels. We actually even have a TikTok these days, but I am not a user.
[00:23:56.670] - Olivier Destrebecq
Awesome. Well, thanks again.
[00:23:58.630] - Narrator
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