Dan Daugherty interviews Josh Dorkin who founded BiggerPockets in his living room with $12 bucks. Josh tells his story of wanting to quit, having 3 nervous breakdowns, and eventually selling to a private equity company. Josh talks about what he did to get to a place of happiness and how big changes in his life became catalysts that helped him, his family, and the business grow.
Welcome to the Big Exit, where we discuss startup acquisitions with the founders who lived it. Here’s your host, Dan Daugherty.
JOSH DORKIN: But it gave me the time to really think about life. And in that time, I realized that I wasn’t as happy as I wanted to be running the business, that I went to my wife, year eight of the company, and I was in tears. And I realized that I was unhappy. So the operating manual was how do I go from unhappy to happy. And I had spent so long not taking vacations, not taking days off, I worked eight years without a single day off, which is incredibly stupid. I mean, nights, weekends, you name it, seven days a week. I realized that like, that’s not healthy. I didn’t do a lot of that, you know, I didn’t want to share my feelings necessarily, in those early years, because I thought it was a sign of weakness. Today I think it’s a sign of necessity and strength. You know, if you’re not spending significant time every day learning, you’re not going to grow, you’re not going to get better, you’re not going to be competitive with other people across your area of expertise. And the platform itself, your business, whatever it is, is not going to be able to blossom. You know, from a sheer depression, man in the year before my exit, in the year and a half before my exit I had… I’d never had this before, but I had three like full on panic attacks. Right? I thought I was having a heart attack. Life’s too short, man. Like, don’t do, keep doing things that make you miserable. You know, don’t keep doing things that keep you super stressed out. If that’s the case, figure out what you need to do to change.
Dan Daugherty: Welcome to this episode of The Big exit. I’m your host, Dan Daugherty and today I have a good friend, Josh Dorkin, who is the founder and former CEO of Bigger Pockets. Josh, thank you for coming on the show.
Josh Dorkin: Excited to be here, man.
Dan Daugherty: You know, I’ve got a lot of feedback from the listeners that said, Hey, big exits are great, but I noticed that a lot of the founders that you have interviewed have raised significant amount of money. And I immediately thought of you, because you’ve bootstrapped Bigger Pockets from I remember your Washington Park house where we met to really a multi-million dollar organization. And I’m excited to have you on board to really tell the story of how you went from zero to an exit without ever raising a single dime of outside capital.
Josh Dorkin: Well, if you put it that way, it sounds pretty good. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, you want me to just take it from the beginning or?
Dan Daugherty: Yeah, I mean, let’s start from the very beginning. I remember you and I met, it must have been like, what, when did you found bigger pockets? Was it 2009?
Josh Dorkin: It was 4, ’04.
Dan Daugherty: Yeah.
Josh Dorkin: So it must have been ’07 maybe that that we connected and you and I were talking about, you know, you were thinking about buying different companies, and we were just chatting about that, and that didn’t go well for me. But, yeah, no, it’s been a very, very long journey. You know, like any entrepreneurial story, lots of ups, lots of downs. And inevitably, you know, I really struggled through those difficult times. But, you know, I think the key was just persevering through those in order to come out at the end. But I look at the cycle as a multi stage cycle. When I started Bigger Pockets it was, I was teaching special ed. I was teaching high school in Los Angeles. The company, by the way, is the largest real estate investing media company and community out there. We were all about trying to help people build wealth, learn how to build wealth through real estate investing. And so, back in ’04 I was living in Los Angeles, I was teaching special ED high school. I bought a bunch of property as a result of my brother encouraging me to do so, and you know, I thought I was a smart guy. I was, I went to college, you know, all these things, and bought property thousands of miles away, which would normally be a challenge, but I didn’t really do my homework. And so what happened was little by little, I found myself running into some problems and I didn’t quite know how to deal with those problems. There were books, but like, you know, the books were pretty general, they didn’t really say, what do you do when your tenant is stealing electricity from the building next door? What do you do when somebody is ripping the copper piping out of your vacant unit? Like you can’t find that and all that was out there were communities, forums, but they were all kind of tied to or in cahoots with I call them the gurus, the get rich quick crowd. And, you know, the issue I had with those, which led me to founding Bigger Pockets was I, you know, I didn’t like the idea of getting caught up in this funnel where, you know, it’s like, hey, come to our free course, and the free course is just an ad for a free boot camp, you know, some kind of boot camp, which is an ad for a course, which is an ad for, you know, training, and, you know, by the time you’re done, and you look up, you’ve just spent $50, $75,000, to train with some, you know, self-anointed guru and, you know, you’ve got nothing to show for it a lot, you know, high failure rates and things like that.
So, I thought there had to be a better way. And so I, you know, on the side, nights and weekends, while teaching, for the first two years, just started building this platform. I taught myself how to code a number of years before back in college, and just started to run with it. And after about two years, I quit my job teaching and I went full time. I was already working 40 hours a week at least on Bigger Pockets in those first two years. But then I, you know, just went balls to the wall, so to speak, and, you know, was doing 80 to 100 hours, trying to build this thing out. So first phase, I call it like that hobby phase. Second phase was when I took it serious, quit my job and really spent all my time on it. And in that stage, I moved to
Colorado, working ridiculous hours in my basement, I ended up meeting you, of course, and just kept going and going for six more years, until I was ready to throw in the towel. There had been ups, there had been downs. But I got to this point where I’d just run myself ragged, really, you know, stupidly worked way, way, way, way too hard. But I just got caught up in the details, I got caught up in every little detail. And instead of working on the business, I was working in the business exclusively. Came to be ready to quit and like told my wife, hey, I’m ready to sell the business. I was in tears, I was just miserable. Or just shut it down. I was making money, but I was still ready, you know, that desperate to just get out.
So I hired a consultant and he came in and we looked over the business. And, you know, my goal was to figure out how do I get myself, how do I change things? You know, how do I make it so I could either scale this, get to an exit or just, you know, sell it and quit and be done and find something else. And so we spent weeks going through the business, realize that we had, you know, created a product that was a little overly bloated, there was you know, we’d built too much, too many features. It wasn’t simple enough, and we, you know, we realized that I was doing everything, which I was, I was doing the job of, you know, 17 different people. And that had to stop too. So, you know, the decision was, do I raise money? Do I hire? How do I hire? What do I do? And the company was profitable. I was making money. I mean, I literally started this company with the, you know, like 12 bucks a month that it cost me to host and the whatever four or five bucks it cost to register the domain name back then, and that was it. I had never, I hadn’t invested another penny in. But you know, we were living off the business and it was very scary to go and take on debt because I’m very conservative financially, fiscally. And I didn’t want, I just didn’t want to do that. So we made the decision that we would start and hire one person who could lighten the load for me. And in order to do that, we were going to have to penny pinch at home because my wife was not working. We had kids at that point. You know, we were living pretty tight on what we were making, where we were, as you know, Denver’s not inexpensive. So hired a guy named Brandon Turner, he, some of you listening may know him, he’s still the co-host of the Bigger Pockets podcast. But he came in and was instrumental to advancing the business. So that hire, I really believe the business went from hobby to kind of this you know, call it Mom and Pop, you know, sole operator business and then it became a company and very quickly I had to learn how to deal with employees, how to scale and spent the next number of years doing that with Brandon as kind of my copilot.
We launched amazing products like the podcast, which today is still one of the top 10 business shows in the world. I think it’s one of the top hundred podcasts in the world, give or take. We’d launched the publishing business, I mean, you know, the company grew and grew, he will allowed me to think about the business from a holistic standpoint, strategic, and over time, we grew, we scaled, we hired dozens of people. And come 2007, I went through this very difficult personal time, one of my kids had a medical trauma that led to some really scary stuff, a paralysis in a nine year old. And I had to step away, I had to step away from the company, in order to take care of my family. And, you know, between Brandon and Scott Trench, who was my second in command at the business at the time, and my management team, you know, I tasked those guys and gals to run the business and I had to focus on my family. And I had a lot of time and in that time realized that, you know, after 14 years of building this company, man I love, I love, love, love Bigger Pockets, but I was kind of burnt out. I was kind of tired, I was kind of ready for the next thing. You know, I felt like, something needed to change for me personally. And so as we were going through this situation with my daughter, little by little she was getting better. She went through something called conversion disorder, which basically the brain kind of shuts the body down. And I’m
very much oversimplifying it. But, fast forward to where we are today and she’s fully physically functional. Like, I mean, you wouldn’t know the difference between her and any other kid. Horrifying, scary. I don’t wish it on anyone to go through what we all went through, but it gave me the time to really think about life. And in that time, I realized that I wasn’t as happy as I wanted to be running the business.
So we went and we hired an investment bank, I mean, cutting a long story short, I’m sure you’re going to have a ton of questions and sorry for ranting, but we hired a bank, went through a process, and, you know, six, eight months later, I had an exit to a private equity company, still own a significant piece of the business. I’m on the board. And you know, continue to love Bigger Pockets and love how it’s impacting people’s lives. And let’s dive in.
Dan Daugherty: And well, first off, I’m so happy that your daughter is healthy now.
Josh Dorkin: Thank you.
Dan Daugherty: That is, as you know, I have two little ones of my own and that is, that changes everything, and I’m glad that you priorities that over anything else. You are also, obviously Bigger Pockets continues to grow, still the top everything, the community, the podcast. I still get a lot of my great information from the community and the network. It sounds like you said okay, what am I going to do next? And you are in Hawaii now, right?
Josh Dorkin: Yeah.
Dan Daugherty: How long have you been in Hawaii with the family?
Josh Dorkin: So you know, we’ve always wanted to come to Hawaii. I always wanted to kind of be here, be oh, I used to call bi-coastal, would be like New York and Cali. We always wanted to be, you know, in Hawaii and Colorado. But COVID hit, and we got sick in March and it was, you know, it was tough and I was very, very, very sick. It was a very unpleasant experience, very scary again, you know, I was fairly uncertain I would get through it. I got through it, thank goodness, and, again, it was another one of those moments for us where we’re like, you know, what are we doing? There’s a lot of, you know, Colorado just, you know, still a lot of chaos. You know, there’s just the, I mean, it’s everywhere, right? The political upheaval, the COVID chaos. We just wanted to find a place where we can go, where we could just normalize our lives, where my kids could, you know, get up and not be all stressed out where, you know, we knew that the government was doing a lot to mitigate the situation. And so we said, hey,
why not? Let’s just do it. We came to Hawaii, we’ve been here since July. It’s fabulous. You know, we are not residents yet, you know, we’re doing our trial balloon now so to speak. But it’s fantastic. And look, we get to go and you know, go out on the beach and not be near people. And you know, the kids can go out and do physical stuff. I mean, we were able to do that in Colorado, but you know, you’re on a trail you’re, you know, running across people without masks, you know, it’s just the, you know, the whole debate, we’re not going to get into it, but either way, it you know, it presented an opportunity for us to find some kind of, to find some peace and to find a place where everybody just could feel good. Because, man 2020, nobody feels good anymore, man, we don’t feel good anymore. And everybody’s at each other’s throats and stressed and tense. And it’s not healthy for any of us, it really is not. And, you know, we’re in a position where we have an opportunity to do something like this, like, do it. Let’s do it. You know, you can work remote, you can do everything remote these days. A lot of people can at least. And yeah, so we’re here. And I’m, you know, I’m trying to figure out what’s next, you know, looking at ideas. And, you know, I’ve been investing, you know, since my exit, in different things, looking for, you know, startups to get involved with, looking for boards to become a part of, looking to advise, I’ve been advising some small companies kind of off the books. But you know, looking to make that a little more official. And but yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. But yeah, what else you got? Where else can we dive into this?
Dan Daugherty: You know, this is, as you were talking, all of the significant life changing moments that occurred not just in your life, but just in our own individual lives, tends to be even if it’s really, really bad, or really, really good, it tends to be a catalyst for something even bigger, and not all the time, but even from listening to you, it sounds like different things that happened within your life, almost had a purpose or a reason that got you to where you are today. And I ran across a blog, and they talked about they called it serendipitous mindset, where you leave your mind open and as you see these different things that happen to you serendipitously, whether it’s the people that you have met five years ago, just like how you and I met many, many years back. Some people don’t see that, it’s almost like when you get a new car, and then you start seeing other similar cars that are the same color that you never saw before. Have you had additional clarity from just taking a step back? And I mean, even when Brandon was hired, it sounds like you were able to take a step back, look at a much bigger strategic view from a business perspective that accelerated growth. From a life experience, it sounds like you’re doing the same thing. You’re operationalizing your life and that has allowed you to kind of be more open. Is that true? Is that a good statement to say?
Josh Dorkin: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I you know, I think another way of saying is, you know, putting yourself in a position to dot dot dot. And so I think for a very long time I ran my life, you know, moment to moment and it’s through conversations with folks like Brandon, you know, lots of, I’ve got some good friends who think real deeply, to reading a lot, reading a lot, listening to some, you know, thought leaders in various spaces, you know, my transformation really, I think began from the moment of that I went to my wife, year eight of the company, and I was in tears. And I realized that I was unhappy. So, the operating manual was, how do I go from unhappy to happy, and that was, it became not just like a
question, but it became a significant force within my life, whether it’s about you know, journaling about it, contemplating it, talking about it out loud, and making decisions around it. And so, for example, one of the core values of Bigger Pockets is family above all else. For me, I realized that if I’m going to run this company, I’ve got these kids that I love and my wife and I had spent so long not taking vacations, not taking days off, I worked eight years without a single day off, which is incredibly stupid. I mean, nights, weekends, you name it, seven days a week. I realized that like, that’s not healthy, you know, it’s healthy to be balanced, it’s healthy to spend time with downtime and so, you know, tried to create operating manuals around that, you know, eventually that became like, my Wednesdays, you know, in the year, call it year and a half leading to the exit, my Wednesday’s, I didn’t go into work. Wednesday was about thinking, networking and not doing. That was all I was allowed to do on Wednesday. I didn’t take calls. I didn’t, you know, if there was emergencies, you’d deal with it, but like, that was it, that was what that day was about. And so thinking about the things you go through, look, we all go through good stuff and we all go through bad stuff. And I’ve given two examples of bad things I’ve been through, I’ve been through a lot, you know, some pretty bad things on top of that. And I think the way you live your life, and your happiness is going to be determined by your outlook on that. And for me, the outlook is I’m not going to let these things dominate me, they’re not going to define me, I’m going to allow them to, like you say, to become some kind of catalyst. And so within the business itself, you know, hey, I mean, you used to work at Google, you know, as a media company, Google would change your, Google changes their algorithms all the time, as an example, right? You know, we’ll be doing great getting, you know, x million views per month on, you know, through search, and all of a sudden, Google will make an algorithm change, and that’ll drop 20% or 30%. And so you can freak out and flip out, or you can say, all right, you know, what, they made this tweak, what could we do better? How do we do this better than everybody else? You know, we can’t ignore SEO, we can’t ignore these things. How do we make a change, change the way we operate the business so that we, so that Google’s algorithm changes become less of a significant impact on who we are and what we do? And so that ultimately led to diversification of the business. You know, we started producing video, we created podcasts, we created books, you know, we wanted to be where the listeners and viewers were versus thinking, hey, they’re going to come to us. So, you know, being willing and open to change and being dynamic, I think is one of the most important things. And, you know, so I take those moments when they come to me and I try and take bold steps when they come.
Dan Daugherty: Yeah, there’s no shortage of chaos in the startup world and those that cannot adapt to change will inevitably fail and close shop. This happens so often where and you mentioned it, it’s at the SEO algorithm, is it, it’s almost like you’re manic because one day you just closed a really large client, you’re all celebrating, and then the next day, all of your servers crash.
Josh Dorkin: Oh right.
Dan Daugherty: And you have that almost daily and you have to have that type of growth mindset,
serendipitous mindset, but you also need to understand who you are. And really, quite frankly, I did not do a good job of understanding when I’m depressed, or who to call, if I’m depressed. I kind of just glazed over it and just put my head down into work, so I didn’t feel depressed anymore. And that ended up it was probably like eight years of grind, that is not healthy at all. Did you feel, I mean, I’m sure you had lots of times where you just wanted to quit or push through. But did you, were you ever really depressed at all?
Josh Dorkin: Absolutely. I mean, you know, would somebody have diagnosed me with clinical depression? I doubt it. It’s unlikely. But yeah, I mean, there were down periods, dark periods. I mean, you know, super, super stressful periods. Yeah. I mean, the very first early years, you know, I had very little support outside of my wife, you know. This was not like, something that everybody’s like, Oh, this is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. No. I mean, I went up against tremendous opposition. You know, I was in an industry where there were entrenched interests that wanted me destroyed from the get go. And my idea, you know, was one where, you know, VCs and angels thought it didn’t have a chance. And I had just swarms of competitors coming out of the woodwork trying to take me down and so there was threat everywhere, right, there’s threat everywhere. And so yeah, that becomes stressful. And particularly, I think the most stressful part was, I was by myself, to your point. I didn’t have a co-founder, I didn’t have any partners. And most people, I didn’t know really anyone who, I had very few friends, you, Scott Yates, and some other guys who, you know, were creating companies locally that I knew that I could talk to. But, you know, I didn’t do a lot of that, you know, I didn’t want to share my feelings necessarily in those early years, because I thought it was a sign of weakness. Today, I think it’s a sign of necessity and strength, to be self-aware enough to know. But I think from a mindset perspective, you really, I think, if you have a learning mindset, a mindset where Hey, I always want to learn, I always want to get better. Whether it’s in business, you know, I want to be a better CEO, I want to learn how to become a CEO, so I went and read lots of books on it. You know, I want to learn how to be happy. So I read about happiness, right? I want to, I listened to experts on it. You know, part of my job and one of the things that I pressed upon my staff was, you know, if you’re not spending significant time every day learning, you’re not going to grow, you’re not going to get better, you’re not going to be competitive with other people across your area of expertise. And the platform itself, your business, whatever it is, is not going to be able to blossom. And so I think that mindset is exceptionally important. But you know, from a sheer depression, man in the year before my exit, in the year and a half before my exit I had, I’d never had this before, but I had three like full on panic attacks.
Dan Daugherty: Right.
Josh Dorkin: I thought I was having a heart attack. Horrifyingly scary, where I was in my, in the office and I broke down and just I was in tears. You know, I couldn’t breathe. You know, I didn’t know if I needed to take an ambulance to the hospital. In all three cases, my wife was able to kind of talk me down and calm me and you know, but it was like, you know, stress, right, stress and I think we humans just internalize so
many things and create so many threats, and there’s got to be a better way. And so what I tell my friends and just people that you know if I ever am speaking is, you know, you got to take care of your first, yourself first. Life is short, you know, you don’t know what can happen tomorrow. COVID you know, your kid gets sick. I mean, whatever it is. And life’s too short, man. Like don’t keep doing things that make you miserable. You know, don’t keep doing things that keep you super stressed out. If that’s the case, figure out what you need to do to change and the big challenge I think most people have is that’s so big and tenuous, like, what do I do? I don’t know. And my quick advice on that is this, this has absolutely worked for me over and again, it may not work for you, but it’s definitely worked for me. I make a list of everything that’s stressing me out, all the stressors, from big to small, and then I start to knock them off. And it’s interesting, you know, as you and a stressor might be, I come in every day, and I look at emails for three or four hours, and I’m stuck in email. Well, then you need to figure out a system how to stop being responsive to your email and be proactive, because you’re not running your business, your email is running you, right? So you know, whether it’s that or, hey, I’m stressed about money, well, you know, you got to then go and break down your budget, and you got to figure out why you’re stressed about money. Where are you spending all of your money? You know, what are you doing and deal with that situation. But it’s so easy for us to try and ignore things and hopefully it’ll go away. But the problem is, none of this goes away. Problems don’t go away. You got to deal with them. And so once you start tackling them, it’s amazing how your load gets lighter and lighter and lighter. So there you go.
Dan Daugherty: That’s right. No, very few people do exactly what you just said and that’s actually something that I do as well, I break it out. And that goes into to do lists. And anything that’s stressing me out, you absolutely have to dissect it, and then figure out what the root cause is and that opens up everything else because then you figure out ways, again, I’ll use the term operationalize it, is because then it allows you to leverage different tools, maybe you have to delegate more, maybe you don’t have to respond within an hour of every single email that comes in, whatever it might be. I’ve used that technique, and that has helped me dramatically.
Josh Dorkin: Yeah, yeah, I think for me, the book, “The One Thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, was one of the most impactful in just, you know, helping me kind of break things down. It’s fantastic. I recommend it to everyone. But yeah, just finding different ways to tweak the way you’re doing things, right, if what you’re doing personally with your family, and I’ve also done that. So I’ve got a book journal where I’ve literally broken my life down into segments, physical fitness, health, I separate them, physical fitness and health, business and work, wife and love, my kids and you know, some people may put faith in there, whatever it is. And then I go through and I’m like, all right, where am I crappy in each one of these things? Where am I good in each of these things? What are the things that I need to do to be better within all these personal domains? And then I start knocking them out, hey, I got to get, you know, I’ve been eating like crap, I’m, you know, 20 pounds overweight, cool. Well, what do you need to do to change it? You need to change your diet, you need to do some exercise. But, you know, if anybody who tries to grasp these things, they’re so big and scary, well then break it down into little steps. And so that’s what I do in my book, and I literally will break all these mega tasks into little micro steps. You know, with
the health, for example, instead of like, hey, I need to lose weight. It’s, instead of drinking soda and orange juice, and, you know, coffees and energy drinks, I’m just going to drink water, because water is healthy, water cleanses you, water does this, you know, that’s not that big a step. But cool, you know, and you move from drinks to water, you start losing weight. I need to move more, cool. You know what, I’m going to get a fitness watch, and I’m going to walk 10,000 steps a day. You know, that’s, surprisingly a significant boost to your health. Right? And not difficult. And for me in that period, you know, when I realized I wanted to be healthier for example, and by the way, I didn’t have to lose weight. As you know, I’m like a scrawny dude. So I want the opposite. But I wanted to be healthier. So what I started doing, I was spending hours and hours on the phone every day, constantly and that’s part of my job, right? But instead of sitting in my office talking on the phone, every phone call that I had was a walking call. I put on my headset and I’d walk around the neighborhood and I easily got my 10,000 steps. I easily felt better. You know, I got a standing desk instead of a sitting desk, you know, then I started to add one on one meetings, you know, when I had one on one meetings, instead of doing it at a restaurant or coffee, or sitting down in the office, they would be walking meetings. You know, these little things allowed me to continue to work, do my job and stay healthy at the exact same time. Cool. Not a magic formula. But I’ve broken kind of everything in my life down in these terms. And it’s made it so I’m a hell of a lot happier. You know, I’m not without stress, and headaches. But, you know, I now have a formula on how do I get rid of them.
Dan Daugherty: Ah, I love that. One final question. Is this going to be, is this the prelude to a book?
Josh Dorkin: Man, so I’ve started and stopped the book probably 50 times. I don’t know, maybe, if I get some encouragement from my friends I’ll do it. But I, you know, there’s so many books out there. There’s so much. I don’t know, you know, I certainly have my own unique and distinct perspective, like anyone else. And I suppose if I had enough people saying, Yeah, Josh, you should do it, for sure, I might jump at it. But I’m not currently on it. But I’ve definitely drafted an outline. And, you know, I’ve, you know, when I get back into it, you know, occasionally I give it a kick start. But, you know, I’ve written a book before with Brandon on real estate. So I know how to do it, I just, I don’t know, I’m torn. So give me give me the motivation and I’ll get out there and do it.
Dan Daugherty: I just might, well, offline, let’s catch up, because maybe there’s something we can do together. But this was awesome Josh, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the stories and the insights and the tips. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Josh Dorkin: No, thanks, man, I appreciate it. And hopefully, you know, hopefully, somebody listening takes something away from it, I, you know, entrepreneurship is challenging, it’s really, it’s really, really tough. But just know that there’s guys out there like me and Dan and, you know, countless other people who’ve tried it, who’ve been through it. And, you know, I think there’s a lot of people who are willing to
be helpful, you know, seek out advisors in your field and you know, work towards it. And I guess, you know, if you don’t mind me throwing this in there, you know, if you raised money, or if you bootstrap, you know, it’s fighting for exit is, I think, one way to run a business, I think the other way to run a business is fighting to create an amazing business. And I think far too many people get caught up in that, well, you know, I’m going to build a business to get to an exit. And what happens inevitably, and I think you and I’ve seen this countless times, you know, you raise the money, and now you have bosses and those bosses are telling you how to run the business and now you don’t get to run the business the way that you actually thought you were going to run the business, because you have bosses and you’re not working for yourself anymore. And so, you know, it’s a serious decision to raise money or not to raise money. And it can be significantly helpful, but I want to press upon anybody who’s thinking about it to just recognize that it’s not something to take lightly. You know, not only are you raising money from people who now, you know, you don’t want to lose anyone’s money, but also just in terms of mindset, you know, that there’s the freedom that you think you’re going to have may not necessarily be there. And from a bootstrap perspective, you know, bootstrapping, you have a lot less support than you do when you raise money. But, you know, getting to exit, getting close to the finish line, so to speak is an absolutely incredible feeling and I wish it upon, you know, all the entrepreneurs out there. Just work, keep working, be dynamic, pivot and you know, a lot of luck out there.
Dan Daugherty: Well said. Thank you so much, Josh, I want to have you on again.
Josh Dorkin: Absolutely. unit you let me know we’ll do it whenever.
Dan Daugherty: All right. Thanks, Josh. Bye.