The following interview is a conversation we had with Beck Besecker, CEO and founder of 3D Cloud, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $44 Million Raised to Power the Future of 3D Product

Beck Besecker
Oh, thank you for your time, Bret. 

Brett
Super excited for our conversation. Now, to kick things off, could we maybe just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Beck Besecker
Sure. My background is very tightly intertwined with my brother Barry, who’s kind of my lifelong CTO. And this is our third or fourth company together. Losing track. We’re lifelong entrepreneurs. We sort of grew up, kind of started in business in the late 90s, early 2000s when the first sort of round of Internet enabled businesses. At that time it was like ASP, but we’ve always been in around sort of the hosted cloud based content management space and sort of have moved from different industries that were in need of sort of moving from traditional sort of desktop experiences into a sort of a modern cloud based customer experience. 

Brett
Now looking at your LinkedIn, I see that first company, it looks like that was copient in 1999 and then you ended up selling that in 2006. So that must have been a pretty interesting time to be in tech. When did the bubble burst? Was that 20 00 20 01 20. 

Beck Besecker
01 yeah, we started that. So that was originally, I went to Purdue for a long time. I think I was in school ten years or something like that. But I got a job in the fundraising office there, helping them with sort of like a big data project too. The goal was to figure out if it was going to go raise a billion dollars in a funding campaign. Who should they target amongst their alumni population, if you will? Which is pretty cool because Neil Armstrong is actually like the chair of the campaign. It’s like a big billion dollar campaign to grow the university. So I was a graduate student in finance and that got me into big data and segmentation and targeting and lookalike models to try to understand prospects. 

Beck Besecker
And so what that got me into was this idea of differentiated marketing and email was only a few years old at the time. So thesis of our first business was, geez, if you can send out a marketing message at no variable cost, you could be a lot more efficient with your advertising dollars. Which is kind of funny to say now, right? Because that’s what we all. So our thesis for the first business was, hey, all these emerging online companies, Amazon, Pets.com at the time, are all going to need a targeted marketing platform that. Where you could differentiate messaging and do like, sequences and all the stuff people call today. So the good news is were sort of right about where this space would go. But the bad news was you just hit it on the head. 

Beck Besecker
All my clients were dot coms that couldn’t pay anything at the end of the day. But we got kind of lucky in that what were doing was also useful in the physical retail world. So when you scan a loyalty card and you get offers on your receipt tape based on your current and previous purchase history, we’re the guys that invented that. And so what we did is we took that differentiated marketing platform in the cloud and then connected it to the checkout in the store. So we would look at your purchase history and then instead of having like a hard coded buy one, get one free, we could send that up to the cloud. And Bret would like an offer on baby formula because we saw him previously buy diapers. And that’s where we got bought by NCR. 

Beck Besecker
Eventually became part of the backbone of NCR’s loyalty marketing platform that’s used in thousands and thousands of retailers around the world. But yeah, it was a great experience. We probably raised a million eight for that company. We were 30 people or so when it sold. The moral of that story is things got tight on fundraising in 2001, right after 911. We really were in a position where it was going to be hard to grow the business without additional financing. And things were pretty tight during that time, but ended up good. We sold the NCR and I stayed there for three years, worked for Mark. Heard it couldn’t have been better. It’s a great first B to B SaaS experience, if you will. 

Brett
Were you tempted to move to Silicon Valley at any point? Because it looks like that company was indiana. 

Beck Besecker
So not to offend any of your listeners in California, but you all got enough entrepreneurs. You don’t need me. Part of our company ethos. Both companies, actually, all three companies. We kind of don’t hire anybody from California because you guys got plenty of opportunity out there. We’re part of our mission, know, really to help build these kind of businesses in the Midwest and Florida and other places. 

Brett
Amazing. Love that. Who inspires you when it comes to founders? Are there any founders that you’ve personally interacted with or worked with or partnered with in some way that just really inspired the way that you approach work? 

Beck Besecker
Yeah. Our dad was an entrepreneur. He had a sporting goods store. That’s where we caught the bug. It was funny. Barry and I were talking about, we used to do inventory when were like seven and eight years old, and he’d have us counting like golf tees. It wasn’t until I was like in my realized that was unnecessary, just keeping us busy. But my dad was really cool. He was always introducing us to business ideas. I got my first copyright when I was seven, which I was so excited, but I had no idea what a copyright was. It’s like a drawing he did for me and helped me. And so first and foremost, dad. And then I’m a big biography guy. I love biographies. Particularly know I’ve read all the Rockefeller and Carnegie and JP Morgan, all this. It’s just so interesting to me. 

Beck Besecker
And I’d say practically the people that have been really meaningful in my life. Dan Gilbert, who started Rocket mortgage, who’s one of the largest vestors in our company, and that guy’s a force of nature. He’s just an amazing entrepreneur, a great culture builder. We’ve patterned our entire culture, which I hope we get a chance to talk about today, off of Rocket mortgage. And then I got another guy. It’s a major investment company. Arnie Bellini, who started Connectwise, sold tomo Bravo for a billion plus a couple of years ago. I got a long list, actually. I’ve been inordinately blessed with founders who’ve been successful and been able to sort of put them in our circle of influence. 

Brett
You mentioned biographies there. I’m a big biography reader. About three or four years ago, I just got burnt out and exhausted of reading business books. Seems like they all kind of said the same thing. So I’ve been very deep into biographies. 

Beck Besecker
I don’t care for the five steps to happiness type stuff and the formula. That stuff just doesn’t stick with me. But biographies and stories, the lessons embedded in those kind of stay with you and I hate the pop culture, simple frameworks. Tony Robbins of business books for me. 

Brett
Have you heard of the podcast the founders? 

Beck Besecker
I have, yeah, I have. I’ve listened a few times. Yeah. 

Brett
I figured if you’re into biographies, that’s like a dream. I stumbled across that a few weeks ago. I was like wow, this is going to take up a lot of content or a lot of time to get through all this. If you could meet any person from any of the biographies that you’ve read, obviously it doesn’t matter if they’re alive. Like, who would that person be? 

Beck Besecker
Let’s see. I’m a Neil Armstrong fanatic. He grew up in Ohio and not too far away from where my Barry and I grew. Know the Wright brothers are like a big deal in Dayton. And we always considered ourselves, were pretty thick as thieves. Barry and I so kind of thought of ourselves as the Wright brothers of whatever, inventors. But Neil Armstrong was the guy grew up. I was born in 70. You still had a lot of the space race stuff going on in the. Don’t know if you’re probably old enough to know the member of the show, bionic man, Steve Austin. And it’s kind of after Neil Armstrong. Yes. So Neil Armstrong would be the guy. I’d love to. So he’s a purdue grad, and a lot of people don’t know that. There’s like 23 astronauts that went into space, that went to Purdue. 

Beck Besecker
Very well known program there. And so anyway, I of course knew of him. I had read his books, learned about him in school. And so I’m working on this fundraising campaign, and I didn’t know he was going to be the chair of this campaign. And I’m sitting inside the office of this vice president of advancement, and there’s this older guy sitting next to me, and he starts asking me all these questions. He’s probably in his seventy s and he’s like, what are you studying? And how do you like school? Just like overly interested in what I was doing or who I was. And I was kind of bothered because I was thinking about my interview, and then the receptionist says, Dr. Armstrong, you can go in now. I was like, you got to be shitting me. I couldn’t believe that. 

Beck Besecker
I use that story a lot about listening and asking questions because, I mean, maybe the dumbest moment of my life, but it was pretty cool. 

Brett
That’s awesome. And yeah, that’s what this podcast is all about, is hearing these types of stories. They’re always fun. So appreciate you sharing that one. Now, I’d love to switch gears here and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company and how we like to begin. This part of the interview is really talking about the problem. So at a high level, what problem is marksent solving? 

Beck Besecker
Okay, so if you’re going to buy a high consideration product like in the home category, which is where we’re focused. So think kitchen, Bath, a decking project, right? They’re expensive. They have a lot of configurable parts that have to be put together in a shared scene. It’s a complex data model. And if you’re just an average Joe and you own your first home, and you’re going to build your first kitchen, and it’s going to cost you 1015 20,000, there are just not any really good tools, or weren’t any really good tools out there that allowed the average homeowner or a typical store associate or a local contractor to build out these projects in such a way that it was fast and easy and intuitive. And so what we do as a company, we are a 3d content management system for the home category. 

Beck Besecker
And so I mentioned we’re in kitchen, bath, decking, furniture, office, and storage. And they all have the same thing in common, which is you got to take a bunch of individual skus, get them into a shared scene, make it an inspiring experience that people want to buy and help them check out. And so historically, if you were going to build one of these projects, you would go find a professional. You’d sit in a store, they’d have like an old off white beige desktop monitor, and they’d be flipping through a catalog and ticking away, and you’d be sitting there for 2 hours sort of just wanting to pull your hair out, right. And then you’d finally get something. It’s not what you wanted. They’d have to do it again. Two weeks go by, three weeks go by, four weeks go by. 

Beck Besecker
It’s just not a great experience. So what we’ve done is we’ve built a solution where we can allow you. So imagine that our experience is you scan your space with your cell phone, create a floor plan, select a photo of an inspirational kitchen that you like from a library that people think of like Pinterest kind of experience. And then our software automatically builds a kitchen in your space based on that design, in that photo, in about 2 seconds. And so then you can flip through design after design after design. You can go through 50 designs in a few minutes to find what you like. And it’s all rules based, data driven, using AI. So it’s like super simple to go through an experience. And as a homeowner, you don’t have to learn the catalog, you don’t have to design. 

Beck Besecker
You can make some changes if you want to, and then you could submit that to a pro to get your project finished. So we’re all about basically automating big ticket purchases. 

Brett
Take us back to 2011. When you first founded the company. How did you discover this problem? And what was it about this problem that made you and your brother say, yes, that’s it, company number three, let’s go build. 

Beck Besecker
So it actually generated, whenever we’re going to do anything, we knew it was going to be a content management system, right? So we knew there was going to be like workflow and data metadata and application set up, communications integrations, analytics, white label applications, like any content management system, right? And so we’ve been always looking, in our first business, the problem was efficient marketing. And so were looking kind of actively like, what’s the next medium that is going to need a content management system? And so my brother’s background, he’s a math computer science game guy, love three D. And so he’s like, I really think we should get into three D. And I’m not that guy. My background has always been retail and data. And so I’m like, well, what’s the application in retail? 

Beck Besecker
The thesis was, man, if you could view a product in 3d, how much better? This is 2011, right? So augmented reality was not even a word yet. We actually wrote the very first AR app for the App Store back then. And so our vision was, what if you could view a product in 3D? It’d be such a better customer experience. I don’t have to depend on what images people share with me. I can look at it from any angle. I can share it, I can combine it with other things. I can change its color or finish. And so our thesis was, which still is, eventually, three D will eat the Internet. Every single product on the Internet will be in 3d because it’s easier to maintain, it’s transportable. 

Beck Besecker
And so whether it’s dog toys or shoes or whatever, eventually there will be no photos on product pages. It’ll only be 3d experiences, especially as the cost of creating 3D gets less expensive. So that was thesis. And then we started working backwards from that to go, okay, which categories are likely to make that move today? And we found an eleven. And we probably spent four years trying to find it. We did fashion and shoes and luxury items and cars and industrial equipment and healthcare equipment. And then we finally got an opportunity with a decking company and did our first web based three D experience. And it was like, boom. And it was this confluence of like, okay, once I create those 3d models, if they’re going to stay the shelf life is going to be a decent time, right? 

Beck Besecker
So think kitchens, decking, they don’t change out that much, maybe once every couple of years. And then there’s a configuration problem to solve and a visualization problem to solve. And so that was like, okay, this is the place we want to play. And then we said, let’s focus on the home. And so we’ve kind of gradually moved into more and more categories in the home. But our ambition is still to be the 3d content management system for all of Ecom, but the product market fit for some of the other categories is still not quite there yet. I mean, do you really need to see a shoe in your hand before you buy it? 

Beck Besecker
Plus the cost of creating that content, the turnover of that content doesn’t quite make the economics work, but eventually it will, right when it’s basically free to create 3d, but it’s not there yet. So in the home right now, we’ll expand beyond in time. 

Brett
In the early days, when you started sharing that thesis, were there any people that just doubted that and said, this isn’t going to be relevant for the Internet, people aren’t going to need this because like you said, that was still very early in. 

Beck Besecker
Right? 

Brett
Like the iPhone was released maybe a year before. So it was like very early on in this whole shift, I think, right? 

Beck Besecker
Yeah. So our fundraising maybe pepper in a little bit of our fundraising approach. So we’ve always raised money from high net wealth, former founders and entrepreneurs. We’ve never really raised monies from financial entities like a VC. I do have some folks in, but they’re folks that I know and also we’re former operators. And part of that was just because that’s kind of the world I knew and the people I knew. And part of it was I just didn’t really know. We weren’t VC guys, right. I wasn’t in Silicon Valley, right, where it was very popular. And so it’s funny when you get investment from those kinds of people, it’s not to say that they don’t care about what you’re going to do. They definitely are people who bet on founders versus ideas. 

Beck Besecker
And I think they’re realistic about the fact that were wrong for five or six years about which category to go into before we found our hook. So I encourage a lot of people, if you can do it, find a family fund that is financed by a former entrepreneur who understands operations and is patient, especially unless your business model is fully baked out and you’re ready to go. You’re going to need somebody who can mentor you and be patient. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Five years is a long time to really find that product market fit and find that category that would work in. How did you stay so patient to see that through for five years? 

Brett
A lot of the founders I talk to, the timescale, they’re looking at like months, maybe even quarters, but not five years until it really seems to grab hold there. So what did you do to see that process through for such a long period of time? 

Beck Besecker
Yeah, I mean, it’s not what you really want, but I would argue that in most cases, that’s what’s real. We tend to hear the quick hit stories, and that’s not. When you take a product to market, you’re basically like my brother used to say. It talks about, like, you’re making a proposition to the market, right. And the real work is like listening for what comes back to you. And it takes time. People got to tell you their deep, dark problems and usually they’re nuanced and hidden and you got to suss all that out, right? So it probably took three or four years in our first company. So I just expected to some degree it wasn’t going to be right away. We were very frugal with our cash. We didn’t overhire before. We felt like we had product market fit. 

Beck Besecker
We also started a whole nother company at the same time that helped finance this company that was a little bit more of a consulting web mobile agency that was a little more like a cash business. So, yeah, I wish it had gone faster and we probably wouldn’t have had to raise the money. We have raised as much anyway. But I don’t know, you better be like, to me, I just think that’s the reality of the grind. To really create something, you’re going to have to do that. If you get lucky, great. But I don’t know very many guys that I know been lucky out of the box like that. 

Brett
What are some things that really come from Silicon Valley when it comes to company building that you just read in the news or see online that you really strongly disagree with. 

Beck Besecker
I know a lot of great venture capital growth equity, private equity folks, the issue for me is, and I mean, this is kind of, people talk about this all the time, so it’s not like a new topic, but you take investments and these things aren’t always going to turn out a ten times winner, right? Some are going to be three, four, five times. But unfortunately, I think those companies end up getting shuttered before they can be meaningful businesses. I just think it has to be, by definition, based on their business model, kind of a winner take all strategy, which I get, but that’s a really stressful way to run a business. If I were a founder of a completely venture backed company, just feeling like the clock is ticking all the time. It just doesn’t feel comfortable to me. 

Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about your market category? Is it 3d product experience? 3d product visualization? What’s that actual product category just got. 

Beck Besecker
Named, which is funny that it’s now called 3d commerce is our space. So buying things through a 3d enabled experience that just got coined a couple of years ago, was that a gardener term? I don’t know where it came from. I like it. It’s kind of cool. Like Ecom, right? But yeah, we just started the 3d commerce summit last year, February. So that’s the first industry event for our space. So it’s pretty fun. Yeah, it’s cool. It’s like we’re right there where all the terms are starting to be created around this category. But it’s still pretty new in that conference. 

 

Brett
Is that something that you organized and you put did. 

Beck Besecker
We did. There were some events like there’s the VRA virtual reality augments reality, but that was like, which is a great show, but it’s too broad. And then they had some stuff at CES, they did some stuff at NRF and the retail show in New York. But there really wasn’t like a, we started hearing from our retail partners, which are like Macy’s and Lazy Boy Bob’s furniture, Miller Knoll, that they started hiring people with roles that were like head of visualization. And there was no, even that title is just sort of becoming a thing now. But they would say, oh, I don’t know anybody else who has my job. And I go, oh, I actually can introduce you to somebody. So the idea was, and some of these times these roles are in marketing and digital and sometimes they’re in it. 

Beck Besecker
So it’s really starting. Their formation is still happening. So we built it as a way to introduce people who had the one person in these companies who had the same job and turned out to be a great experience. So we’re going to keep doing it. 

Brett
One of my favorite examples of category creation and category design is gainsight. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them, but they created the customer success category. And what their founder says is that he observed in the market that there were more and more organizations where people had a job title that was customer success manager, but there was no purpose built software, there was no community, there were no events, there was nothing for these folks. So that’s what they set out to build, and they served this up and coming job title. So it sounds like you’re in a very similar position where this job title and this whole profession almost didn’t even exist until a couple of years ago. And now you can position yourself as that go to platform for this profession. Is that right? 

Beck Besecker
Yeah. And very much like that, customer success. We have had a customer success on our team, but it’s very much a cross functional role. Right. Where almost like a product manager in the sense that you’re touching lots of different parts of the organization trying to help them have a very customer centric health, we call it the health report view if you’re the CEO of our client. But how would you talk about us? 

Brett
Right. 

Beck Besecker
That has to be the brain of the success manager. And these 3d commerce roles have kind of similar because they work with merchandising, marketing, digital stores. They have this function that’s kind of floating around the company it. And so they have to have that same kind of product management influence a. 

Brett
Lot of different functions when it comes to that conference. Two questions. One, were competitors invited there? 

Beck Besecker
No. It’s funny, we just had that conversation. There’s not a ton of people in this space. We compete against traditional desktop software in many cases like a cad software. Right. And we’d invite those people, but they wouldn’t understand what we’re talking about. I’m just kidding. That’s just a little. There are some earlier stage companies that are coming out that I’ve been pretty impressed by. So we’re thinking about that. Does that make sense to start being a little bit more generous? So we’ll see what we do there. 

Brett
Yeah. The reason I asked that, I have another podcast called behind the category that’s all about category creation. And we had one founder on there from Terminus, and they created the account based marketing category. And that was a big part of their strategy, was they did conferences, they did events, and they were bringing their competitors, and they invited competitors to participate. And then I did another interview with the CEO and founder of g two just talking about how categories are created, and I asked him for his number one piece of advice, and that was his number one piece of advice was, go partner with your competitors, do events together, and then use that to drive categories forward. So was curious where you felt that, because I’ve heard from other founders where they don’t want to be anywhere close to their competitors. 

Beck Besecker
Yeah, actually, there’s this guy, Josh Linkner. He’s a New York Times bestseller. He started eprise. That’s a big promotion management company, like interactive promotions online. He did the same thing. He started it and then invited the competition and tried to help build the industry. It’s a pretty large perspective on building a space. Pretty cool. 

Brett
Yeah. It’s one of those things that sounds nice on paper, and it makes sense on paper, but I’m sure when you’re sitting there getting ready to send that email to a competitor, I guess it depends to how competitive it is. If you’re in a life and death fight against them, then it’s probably a bit harder. 

Beck Besecker
But either way, right now we got two or three competitors. We’re probably still kind of all trying to eat each other’s lunch. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Second question, there was, you don’t have to give me exact numbers, but roughly what was the cost to put on an event like that? And how did you measure RoI? I talk with a lot of founders who want to do events, but they get scared from the cost and they get scared from measuring ROI. So how did you approach that? 

Beck Besecker
The first thing we did is we faked it, which I think is a great strategy for all entrepreneurs, which is that whenever you’re trying to test the market for something, just fake it and see how much interest there is. Right. Like, don’t build the product. Build a video of the product. Right. So the first thing we did is we dropped a website and said, we’re running this event, and said it was invitation only. Kind of like you had to sign up. And then we just were trying to see how many people showed genuine interest and then use that. And were like, okay, well, that’s enough to know that we could probably invest. And then we said, okay, if we get a deal out of this, it’ll pay for the event. Right. 

Beck Besecker
And that’s enough to make the justification and then try to be break even on your first one and then get some confidence and go to the next one. But that’s how we did it. 

Brett
When it comes to growth, are there any numbers and metrics that you can share? 

Beck Besecker
Yeah, we’re doing so. First of all, the most important metric I care about is retention, which I’m sure every other B2B SaaS guy is nodding their head thinking, yeah, of course. And the worst thing you can do is take a client where the value proposition isn’t very strong and you’re constantly trying to fill the holes. Right. To keep it’s energy sapping. Right. And sometimes, if it’s not a good fit, you got to move on. So we spend a lot of time up front with our customer success team, with our delivery team, with our head of strategy, making sure it’s a good value proposition. They have the ability to pay. They’re at a scale that’s going to work for them, and of course, that drives retention. So that’s what I care about the most. So we’ve got. 

Beck Besecker
Our net retention is 110 or something like that. We’ve got really good retention. And it’s somewhat the nature of the model, too. Like, imagine I onboarded your entire kitchen catalog. Like, all the business rules and integrations. It’s kind of a hybrid between an enterprise software and a SaaS. It’s like the first four months are integrations and content, but that buys you a lot of stickiness. And so we break even in the first four months, but then it’s highly profitable and high retention after. Yeah, but we’ve been growing. Historical growth rate 25% for the last five, six years. That was just about the right pace. We’re not a hockey stick business. Right. We’re kind of keep building the foundation business. 

Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 44 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

Beck Besecker
I think that first thing, you have to have a lot of respect for the money you’re raising. Right? I mean, this is people’s hard earned money, and you’ve got to understand that you’ve got a real obligation, and you got to treat it like that. At the same time, I think that, like I mentioned, working with the family, former entrepreneurs, I think they have that same perspective, and then it’s not always going to be perfect. I think you’ve heard that term, like radical transparency. We talk a lot on our team. Like, if all I hear from good news from you, I can’t believe anything you say. You’ve got to be balanced, and you got to do the same thing with your investors. Like, the moment I have bad news, my brother and I call each other up, like, what are we going to do? 

Beck Besecker
What are we going to do? And the answer is always the same thing, which is be fast and transparent. And the nice thing, too is if you work with people on your board that you show that kind of respect for, they get it. It’s not always easy conversations, but they understand you’re going to have wins and you’re going to have losses and challenges. To me, of course we care about the money. We need the money to grow and all that kind of stuff. But the person or people that come along with it are so freaking important. They’ve got to be in your corner. They can’t be infighting. They’ve got to challenge you. I’ve got this one guy, Ed Wodashek, who’s on our board, and he’s like the person in my life I can’t possibly lie to. 

Beck Besecker
Like, I try sometimes I’ll try to paint the picture and he’s that guy you’re full of like, I don’t see it that way. And you’re like, God damn it, you’re right. It’s probably not that way. And it’s like you need somebody in your circle that is kind of like the bullshit caller, because you always do want to. Entrepreneurs are optimistic and want to believe everything, so you’re not fooling anybody, right? That’s what I’d say. You’re not going to raise money and be more clever than people who made billions of dollars. It’s not going to happen. So be transparent, ask for help, be humble. And you got to have a really respectful mindset around it because those guys will smell if you’re not doing the right things or you’re hiding information. 

Brett
Let’s imagine that you were starting the company again today from scratch. Based on everything learned so far, what would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give to yourself? 

Beck Besecker
I love this space we’re in. I think it’s a great space. The best thing to happen in our space. There’s a lot of investment in. When AI came out, everybody shifted focus to that, which is great because it kind of left my space alone. We haven’t seen very much money going into our space lately, so that helps us, right? I wish we’d gotten to kind of where were going to focus faster and didn’t have to spend as much money to get there. But I don’t know how I would have changed that. Right? Sometimes it’s just happenstance and circumstance and timing. So it took a while for things to mature. You should have seen me trying to tell people what AR was. We called it holograms, product holograms. They’re like, what? And it’s like people didn’t know how to use it. 

Beck Besecker
It was clunky and it was slow. We were early, that is for sure. 

Brett
Final question. Now, since we’re almost up on time, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building here? 

Beck Besecker
So our current decision that we have to make is, do we want to stay focused vertically in the home category and kind of move out in concentric circles, go to maybe real estate or new home builders, or do we want to go sideways and start looking at other categories? And so there are pros and cons to each. If the market goes horizontal and 3d catches in other categories, that’s a big tam like almost immeasurable Tam, right? If it goes to all categories. But there’s a huge risk variable there, right, where the home stuff is probably not as big a tam, but much less risk. And so that’s the thing we talk about a lot, which know, are we going to go deep or are we going to go wide? And what data is telling us what we should do. 

Brett
Amazing, Beck. This has been a lot of fun, but we’ll have to wrap here. Before we do wrap, if there’s any founders that are listening in and just want to follow along from a company building perspective, where should they go? 

Beck Besecker
Well, so there’s not self promotion. Honest comment, though. I wrote a book recently. It got published. It’s on Amazon and Barnes and Noble called your good work habits toolbox. And I basically documented the last ten years of the business and my entire philosophy around team building and culture and dealing with challenging problems, communications, personal organization. And it was really kind of written as I’ve got twin 18 year old boys that are now in college. They want to be entrepreneurs. So I kind of wrote it as kind of a passing on what my dad did to me. And so, yeah, if you want to follow my story, it’s all in there. And hopefully it’s interesting to you. 

Brett
Amazing. We’ll make sure to link to that in the show notes. Beck, thanks so much for taking the time. 

Beck Besecker
Thanks, Bret. Appreciate it. Take care. 

Brett
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