Buy a hardware company when building your own hardware gets too hard

Nathan LatkaI mean, you are a triple threat integrating all these things into one. Did you start off into hardware, or software, or payments, or was it all from day one?

Alex Jekowsky… a point of sale, it's not you- like we have to be the all-in-one. And the beauty of vertical SaaS, right? It's a smaller market, but you should have higher penetra- higher penetration, higher retention, and higher attach rates to all the products you deploy going forward, right? So, we started with the point of sale, because software easier than hardware. Uh from an iteration perspective, from a deployment perspective, from a hiring perspective, from a cost perspective. Uh so, we started a core product with the point of sale as we were building the hardware. Then we commercialized the hardware in kind of late 2022, early 2023, uh and then realized, damn, this hardware thing really hard. Uh and while we made, you know, a couple million dollars of sales, and we were pouring a lot of money into the effort, realized best way to derisk and accelerate uh that execution was potentially through M&A. And that's what led us to kind of buying a business in 2024 that accelerated a lot of our hardware growth.

Nathan LatkaAlex, take us back to day one. When'd you guys write the first line of code for the business?