Push marketing spend on a new calendar product before the product was good

David BarnardSo, how do you think about getting that message across? I wanted to talk about growth next. And I think that was the perfect segue is from influencers to paid marketing, to how you show up in retail, how do you position yourself as that best product? And what are the levers you're currently pulling on growth?

Michael SegalSo, I'm going to cheat and say that before any of that, you actually have to be the best product. We learned this the hard way. Back when we were developing... Calendar was born, it was a glint in my eye and Jake, my CTO's eye ,in July, 2018. We're like easy, let's launch it. We launched it in November. I think that's when we shipped, November, 2018, our first units. It took until fall '22 to take off. And the macro mistake that we made is we starved it from a... It turned out it was really hard to build. It was not digital picture frames. It was really hard to figure out what people wanted and build a deep software experience that could run people's lives. And we gunned marketing in '21 and '22, revved the engine and it just sucked. It didn't work. And we thought about killing the product.

Michael SegalWe're like, this is depressing, this business isn't working and we're ignoring the other business that is working. But the root of it was our product sucked. So, to any entrepreneurs out there debating whether to allocate resources to product and marketing, if your product isn't like a solid 40 NPS, I think marketing effort and dollars are a waste of time, because you're going to get a false negative. People aren't going to want it. You're not going to know if it's because your marketing sucks or your product sucks. Now, flash forward, our product rocks. We're very proud and it's getting so much better every single month. It's amazing, but you're still building a new technology.

Michael SegalTechnology adoption curves are rough, especially after you get past the early adopters. So, sure, paid growth is great. And in a business like digital picture frames, that's all you needed, because it was like everybody understood your idea. Come Christmas or Mother's Day, all it took was two ads and people just bought it. This calendar, people have to commit almost spiritually to change the way they're running their family. They're like, I need …