A Conversation With Darin Dawson of BombBomb

When something new, exciting and insanely cool make it to public awareness, it's a pretty fair bet that a bunch of people somewhere worked on it for years before anyone knew. So it is with BombBomb, a Colorado-based company who pioneered video-centric email more than 10 years before the pandemic pushed everyone on-screen.

This relaxed, fun conversation with BombBomb co-founder Darin Dawson gives a glimpse of the passion that keeps companies going in the tough years pre-cool, and after.

BombBomb has a terrific goal: Humanize the Planet. As Darin shares, face-to-face video changes the 'EQ' and relationship-building of channels like email and text. It took (literally) servers in his closet to deliver that early on, but the vision has stayed consistent. As video use has picked up, BombBomb has found a fit in the many niches of "trusted advisors" — people whose personal credibility and expertise is key to their business.

The nice thing is, the world has more-or-less moved in BombBomb's direction. People worry less about looking like newscasters, and more about being authentically themselves. BombBomb just released their 2nd book on this core philosophy - Human Centered Communications. Check out the book and the platform at BombBomb.com.

TRANSCRIPT

A Conversation With Darin Dawson of BombBomb

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[00:00:00]

[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email. My guest today, we've not met, this will be our first conversation, but I know his company, Darren Dawson, uh, co-founder and president at Bomb Bomb,

[00:00:24] Darin Dawson: correct? Yes, sir. Hey, thanks for, um, it's great to meet you and thanks for having me.

[00:00:29] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Uh, I was telling Darren before we, before we started, just in the, in the brief intro chat that I'm a, a longtime.

Of bomb bomb. Can you give people like the top line view about the company?

[00:00:41] Darin Dawson: Yeah. Well, so we are an email service provider, uh, but we enable video messaging from anywhere you're currently sending a text message. So if that's an email space, we make it easy for you to add a video to that. If it's a text message, if it's in Facebook, uh, Messenger, if it's in, uh, LinkedIn, uh, [00:01:00] anywhere that you're currently sending a text message, we enable you send a video message.

[00:01:04] Matthew Dunn: Now let me test a theory with you. Um, again saying long time, long time fan. Um, bomb bomb, bomb bomb. Put made video work in email. easily and early, like you guys were doing this when, when it, I, I had

[00:01:22] Darin Dawson: a, I had a server and a closet hosting video. Right. I, we started this before the iPhone had a camera and YouTube was a public company.

Right. Okay. I remember when YouTube was begun in like, That's interesting. This really helps our case, you know, like thinking like this is happening and yeah, it was 2006 when Connor and I had this idea that it would be cool if we could send ourselves an emails. Yeah. And so we worked on that and we put a server in his closet, put a video on it.

Cause we didn't have like, and then pointed. To that server and you play this video [00:02:00] back on a server, then, then we worked hard in those early days to think about, you know, play in the mobile devices and, and, uh, easy, easy insertion of video. Cause you know, if you think even today it's still the case, I mean, Often you're making a giant video that is not compatible to the internet service providers that you have.

And even then, it was even worse today, it still is cuz his phone of mine makes beautiful, huge videos, right? So we, we cracked on that problem first, just, you know, um, and capitalizing those videos, making them smaller, coding them, and then serving them out. And more importantly, we, we've always been really focused since the beginning on the recipient experience more even than my customer's experience.

when you send something to someone, what is their experience like? And so we would sniff out on their end and still do this to this day, what device they're on, what service are they on? And we deliver experience that they can handle, which made video fast. We want to have, our core companies are still the same.

They have [00:03:00] been forever speed the video and guidance to success. So we wanna make it easy and fast for you to send a video and, and two, we wanna help you think about why you should be doing video and why it's important.

[00:03:11] Matthew Dunn: So, um, one of the things that seemed to happen to your company, and I use that word intentionally, I'm, I'm curious your opinion about this.

Y you seem to get captured by a couple of markets relatively early on. My read on it is that real estate, mortgage, maybe insurance, and I seem to remember maybe voiceover artists as well, but you. It's like there was this capture effect. I ran into bomb Bomb first at a real estate tech conference. Okay. Um, great booth, nice people.

All that stuff.

[00:03:49] Darin Dawson: Put my, probably me, depending how long ago it was. ,

[00:03:52] Matthew Dunn: what interested me is that it's like, it's such an, it, it's a solution that's applicable to so many different businesses. And at, [00:04:00] at the same time, you've got these, this enthusiastic set of audiences that are like, that's my solution. And I know that there are other companies in the real estate tech space that have specifically like, No, no, no.

We can work with bomb bomb. Like you've really. Velocity.

[00:04:14] Darin Dawson: Yeah. It's interesting. So, you know, early on as an entrepreneur I was trying to figure out where are we gonna get traction? Sure. Because you're right. I mean it was a hard, it's actually a good problem to have and a hard problem to solve. Yes. The addressable market for this product is, is huge, right?

Yes. Ex. But, um, you have to focus cuz we have limited resources. We are still self-funded, we have never taken venture capital and we're just congrats doing it. Right. And so we were trying to figure that out early. and, uh, we found, and still find today, we, we categorize the people you just mentioned as the trusted advisor.

Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Right? So if you're a trusted advisor, and that means trusted advisors, people like real estate agents, mortgage professionals, insurance agents, financial advisors mm-hmm. , um, these are people who [00:05:00] know something about a thing. It's usually an advanced level of information that they.

And that you need to hire them to do that thing. And so, um, we found three things in a trusted advisor that we, we think really video helps. One is that a human being is necessary in the transaction, so you need their expertise to execute the transaction. Okay? Yeah. Uh, number two. Um, it's a repeat and referral type business, right?

Mm-hmm. , like they depend on you recommending them to other people, and then three, it's always something. It's, it's usually a complex thing that, you know, you and I might understand. How mortgages work, but I don't know the ins and outs of what's going on when I need one. Right? So I need to get someone with expertise and usually that expertise is comple complex.

Video does a great job of helping people understand complex things, right? We're we're human beings. We communicate face to face, we communicate relationally, and so those things come across. We learn things better when we have all the aspects available to us of how. [00:06:00] As humans take in information. So we think video helps that quite a bit.

So the, we started zeroing in on that and, and then you're right, real estate was a huge and still is, I mean, still is the bigger portion of our, of our market. And mortgage is quickly right now. Quickly eclipsing that. Interestingly enough. Interesting. Um, insurance, you know, we have some very big insurance providers that use bomb.

And financial advisors. So those are our key categories in our trusted advisor space. We have, you know, SAS companies, we have large company, large, uh, accounting firms. Like there's a, but they're a trusted advisor too, in a way. Right. So it's, it's interesting, I think when it's complex for repeat and referral and a human being necessary, we do really well in those spaces.

Gotcha,

[00:06:44] Matthew Dunn: gotcha. And, and I would assume that the, um, recipient appetite and. Just, uh, familiarity with the experience of, Oh, I got a video from, you know, trusted advisor, [00:07:00] Jim. Um, like that seems to have changed a bunch in the timeframe you've been operating, right?

[00:07:04] Darin Dawson: I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting when you think about this.

We spend a lot of time thinking about it that okay, you, I don't know how often you see your real estate agent, but, or your mortgage provider, but those two specifically have an issue. You interacted a ton when you were doing the transaction Narrow window. Yeah. Very tight. You were best friends, God, you thought you're, you were gonna be friends forever, but inevitably.

Haven't talked to 'em in a while and they don't do a great job usually making sure that relationship stays intact. And so what we help them with is ways that they can interject themselves back into your life. Remind you that, Yeah, I really like Stephanie. She was great. You know she's Fanta and it reminds you maybe to refer her right now.

Hmm. I see. Then it keeps them top of mind when you have a need in the future. So now I need to do a re. You know, I bought a house with this person. Why I, why I don't I use the same mortgage lender again? I often don't. Right. Like [00:08:00] Right, right. But it's part of the issue cuz they're dealing with volume sometimes and mm-hmm and that's hard for them to keep on top of that.

So we've integrated, like you mentioned, with a lot of real estate tech providers and prop tech. So in the mortgage space, title space, I mean, all of that to make that seamless for them to use our services in an automated way sometimes, but, Also in a one off very personal way as well. So, yeah. But you hit the nail on the head there.

I mean, like those, those folks really have gravitated towards us over the years and still are the, by far, in a way, the lion's share of the communities we

[00:08:30] Matthew Dunn: serve. So as a pioneer in this space, um, cuz I, I, I think the mobile and texting has been added to the platform after email, Right? It was email.

[00:08:43] Darin Dawson: Um, yeah, email was first.

Yeah, absolutely. I was,

[00:08:46] Matthew Dunn: I was just on a, I was just on a, on a call with someone from an agency this morning. Uh, she was looking for help, understanding what she could do with video, in email for one of her clients. And I was explaining [00:09:00] some of the practical technical constraints. Look, email can do this, it can't do that, right?

There's no, there's no language, there's no scripting in email. You are not gonna get full motion play. Stop. Et cetera in email, you're, you're probably never going to get that as long as email remains dumb. So there's this hybrid email,

[00:09:19] Darin Dawson: like within the context of the email,

[00:09:21] Matthew Dunn: in the context of the email. So there's this hybrid experience, which we're mostly used to.

Oh, I see that in email. I click and I play it in a browser. It looks, it feels invisible, but they're two, they are two different environments. Form, Yeah. Yeah. You're getting, you're getting people to straddle, like, I know, I know Bomb. Bomb did this elegant job of. Making that seamless. You hit record, you hit send.

And the fact that the vid, the video itself is streaming on a web page somewhere. Yep. And the thumbnail automatically inserted in the email. Like you wrapped all of that stuff up. Yeah, we, we

[00:09:57] Darin Dawson: really thought about that a lot. And we still do, I mean, in a [00:10:00] campaign format. So if you're doing an email campaign with Baba Yep.

We have to replicate the entirety of the. Interesting. Right? So we want that. I think in other spaces what happens. is that that video loses the contextualization of the communication you have. So if you're a marketer Yeah. And you have a specific call to action and you have a link in there that you want to, you know, drive towards, Cause video does a great job of doing that.

I can go on a video on the, in the, in the email piece and I can say, Click on this link below, or, Right, fill out the form or do whatever. It's fantastic at driving call to action. That call to action is then removed from the context, I think of the marketing piece that loses. Zest, Are you with me? Like that's the problem.

And so very early we replicate that environment so that you still have your call to action in place. And of course now we've added things like you can embed that call to action in the video itself, so it carries with you Nice. In our one to one interactions, we do replicate. We go to a video, both are what we call video [00:11:00] page, but in a campaign we keep the context of the campaign.

If it's a one to one video and I'll send it to you, and I said, Matt, what's going on? How you doing? Like, thanks for having me. That kind of thing. That's also played in a video page and there is a transcription of what is said. Mm-hmm. , you can have calls to action inside the video. You can. There's a like button and things.

We give you multiple, you can comment on it. There's lots of ways to interact with that. That all roots right back into your inbox. Mm-hmm. . So you have, again, it's all in that same workspace. We wanna, we wanna work where you work in that. And so we've really worked hard, again, in that recipient experience to make sure you're not losing what you're trying to drive, which is some sort of outcome, marketing, sales,

[00:11:39] Matthew Dunn: whatever it might be.

Right, right, right. Um, what's, uh, what's shifted substantially in, say the last five six?

[00:11:48] Darin Dawson: What I think is really interesting is that when we first started, everyone thought you had to be like the 10 o'clock news. . Right. So they thought you had to look a certain way. They wanna be highly produced. They, [00:12:00] they struggled with it being not shiny enough is word I'll use.

Yeah. So we, we were preaching transparency. Be authentic. Yeah. This is about you broadcasting yourself to your people. The same problem exists for a different reason. And it is that social media has taught us that we don. Well, like we don't like how we . Right? Yeah.

[00:12:22] Matthew Dunn: It's the same problem,

[00:12:24] Darin Dawson: right? Same problem, Yes.

I don't look like the newscaster was the problem seven years ago. Now the problem is I don't look perfect. I don't look like an influencer that. So all these things on social media give me things that look. Polish my face. Yeah. . And so there's a demand for that stuff. Yeah. We're, you know, we're relenting a bit and giving them like blurred backgrounds like you and I are both using right now.

Right, right, right. Our virtual backgrounds, you know, Look, we, we started this company with this belief that humans are intrinsically valuable and that we want to help them better communicate, and [00:13:00] so we get a little altruistic, or a little fundamentalist is a better word. Yeah. That we think that, Yeah, you shouldn't do that because it typically, who's using us is some sort of sales role.

I mean, you're selling something to someone. Even if you're a trusted advisor or whatever. So we want you to be authentically you, show up with yourself and be that person to your best ability. We're not marketing, video marketing. We are video for humans to, to communicate better is how we think about it.

So we're relationships through video. Yep. Versus marketing through video. So we were No, we're all about professional marketing videos and you can deliver those through bomb bomb. But the biggest use case for what we do is sending personal. One to one videos. We help you create a personalized approach at scale.

So we work in Salesforce, we work in these big environments to deliver it. Let's, let's come,

[00:13:51] Matthew Dunn: let's come back to that one because I suspect it'll consume a bunch of times. So, big pin in the virtual board here. I wanted to [00:14:00] talk about. The s p side Yeah. Of what you do, because that, that, that's not trivial either.

I have to tell you, in, in the, in the email marketing space, like capital E. Capital M, Yeah. Um, Baba's, not as well known as I expected. As I, as I've started, started learning that space, I go, blah, blah, blah, Baba. Man, I'd have people really know what I'm like, Whoa, you don't know about them. Let me tell you, let me tell you a secret.

Like some of the stuff you're. Blowing your brains out trying to do in your existing platform is push a button there. So, um, at the same time, you had to build a legit p

[00:14:40] Darin Dawson: right? Right.

[00:14:41] Matthew Dunn: Undergird everything. You'd esp and I would argue close to a CRM level of functionality. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Tough load. So

[00:14:48] Darin Dawson: you wanna know about Yeah.

That was not, you know, we, we kinda got into this thing like, Oh dang, we're gonna have to do that, you know, and Yeah. Yeah. And like I was telling you earlier, I've been doing email marketing since they're around 98. I mean, [00:15:00] early I was a constant contact user and then a MailChimp user, right? Early, early, early.

So it was always, I worked for a marketing agency. I worked for a TV station where I ran, um, you know, the websites and the content development ran the email, all the stuff. And so, Um, and that's really what evolved in this, this idea for Babo was working there like, Well, why do I need to pay them $500 to broadcast a 32nd A where I can broadcast myself to my fans?

Right. Seth? I'm still in Big Seth Golden fan. But yeah, building Thes P and we were going to all the HubSpot conferences, the ESP conferences, learning about this early on. Some of our very first customers ended up being churches and non-profits. That's. Fascinating. Which really helped us build our s p bones because churches and nonprofits send highly desirable mail.

Right? Yeah. So their open rates are clean. Yeah. They don't hit no one's hitting a spam button on 'em. Right. It [00:16:00] really helped the, this crazy dichotomy where the church churches cleaned up our real estate traffic. Right. Like , Oh God. It was like the cleaned it up, the church cleaned up. The somewhat, our realtor friends out there love y'all.

Yeah. But you don't do very good list hygiene. Yeah. And that did deliverability. Right. And you're like, my emails weren't getting through. Well, it's because you're spamming everyone. That's the problem. Right, right. So, but early on we kinda leg up, fortunately. Yeah. Because we had so many customers that were in that space, and so we had.

Beautiful email servers. Right. For, you know, and then we learned that warmed up. We still do, we still run a ton of traffic. Nothing to the tune of what, you know, some of their bigger

[00:16:46] Matthew Dunn: ASPs, It's not data or whatever.

[00:16:48] Darin Dawson: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, and we run all our own traffic, which is we own that core competency of the business.

Wow. We have resources dedicated to that right now, monitoring all of those things. So it [00:17:00] became very valuable. Piece of tech once it was done.

[00:17:05] Matthew Dunn: But that, uh, at church, church, you know, church of non-profit, they, I, you know, asked the risk, Hey, p running friends out there, you know, giving churches and non-profits a break is in your self interest.

Oh, absolutely. Right. And now

[00:17:20] Darin Dawson: they're, now, now you're, If you wanna bomb on Macau and you're a non-profit, we give it to you free. Oh. It's that reason. But we just became more altruistic in that. Right. We wanna support, That's our whole thing. We wrote a book while back called Rehumanize Your Business, but our, our premise and bomb bonds, we wanna rehumanize the planet.

Something we're doing behind the scenes is helping nonprofits. So just. Things away. We, we support some communities across the globe in our backyard. So that's a big part of who we are as a culture. Mm-hmm. . And, you know, not only do I wanna help you better communicate as a person in your business, but we're doing some other stuff behind the scenes that's fun too.

[00:17:56] Matthew Dunn: Nice. So that was all part of that. Yeah. Nice, Nice. I I, [00:18:00] I love the fact that you're still so enthused too. Cuz it That's a long, it's a long road you've been walking. It

[00:18:06] Darin Dawson: is, it is. Luckily I've been doing it with my best buddy. And we just, you know, we've been in businesses a long time together and, uh, we, it, I think you can burn out easy, but we were able to lighten each other's load along the way.

Mm. Gotcha. Gotcha. Really that was my first marriage. Right. Is to him and to our, our business together. But

[00:18:26] Matthew Dunn: it's, it's still been fun. So you mentioned the servers in the closet and, uh, I have enough gray hair to remember the, remember that era as well, which was not that long ago. No. It, we run this fast shift to, uh, to cloud capabilities.

Um, have you. Had, have you done substantial re-engineering, like grown own data center or colo, like what's the tech super technical side?

[00:18:50] Darin Dawson: I think we've been through all of those , but now we're, we're hosted in, uh, Amazon services and we have backups with Rackspace. You know, [00:19:00] everything's very redundant, but the cloud computing technology, it's all there now.

It's become so robust that, yeah, everything. Typical SaaS company. You know, it's funny, when we started this SaaS was just not even something people knew. Like, no, uh, the venture capital team is not what it is today. Like you could not go to college for entrepreneurship or university for entrepreneurship,

So we learned very much in the, in the, hard not, it's one of the reasons I think we're still self-funded is because when we would've taken money, they wouldn't have given it to us. Cuz there wasn't. Ecosystem for it. Yeah. Like there is today and now whatever we've gotten, we've grown. We don't, there's other pitfalls to take.

So it's interesting. I always think about that. But yeah, we've gone through all these different

[00:19:46] Matthew Dunn: iterations. Campaign genius is bootstrapped self-funded as well. And I mean, I know, I know it's cooled off. We're having this, you know, conversation late 2022. I know it's cooled off. E even when it was [00:20:00] at the peak where it, we seemed to be doing.com 2.0 and people were getting cocktail napkins funded, and I would chat with friends and colleagues and they'd be like, Well, why don't you go raise funds?

I'm like, A, I've, I've been around that. It's, I don't actually like it. Um, and b, It's still a six month pain in the butt. I'd rather work on the what do the customers need? What, you know, what's the, how's the product need to evolve? And trying to stop it all to, to go chasing an ambulance load of dollars struck me as, strikes me as a huge

[00:20:30] Darin Dawson: bore.

I think, um, we were fortunate that we didn't have the luxury right. I think, I really think that in the past that we had to solve customer issues. We just had to listen to the customer and we still have to, Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's, it's hard to do that. It's. Stick to it. We don't always do that well, but we've always, I, I know I'm an entrepreneur again, so like solving customer problems is the only thing that I'm probably okay

[00:20:54] Matthew Dunn: at.

That's what, yeah. That's what we're actually supposed to do. Right. Um, and I have watched with some amusement [00:21:00] sounds like you have as well as, as entrepreneurship has become like the new rock star, um, like 19 year olds saying, I wanna be an entrepreneur. You don't even know what you just said, but Okie dokey.

Go give it a shot. Right. You . It's not as, It's not

[00:21:16] Darin Dawson: as glamorous. I think it's like, it's like anything, when you read about all the stuff that looked like it was just easy. And I think the lore of easy is, is often

[00:21:25] Matthew Dunn: yes. Who good to be true. Well put, well put. Yeah,

[00:21:29] Darin Dawson: it's tough building a business, owning it.

Look, if you, if you made a hundred thousand dollars in a business that you started yourself, I would hug you and, and sincerely congratulate you on that job. Well done. And, and that could be in our real estate partners or same thing. And they're consultants who run their own better contractors, whatever.

That's hard. Yeah, it's hard to stay focused

[00:21:48] Matthew Dunn: on that. Yeah. It's hard to, it's hard to stay focused on that and as the world does this fast shift around us in, you know, new channels vying for attention and stuff. I don't know why I'm thinking of him, but I had a, I, I [00:22:00] had a Jan who helped me with a roof problem yet, relatively young guy, and he was telling me like, he's just chaa block busy.

And I listened to him. Describe the cycle. It's like you're, you're, you're expert up on the roof, but. Taking the call, getting back to people, giving 'em an estimate, all that side of stuff. It's like, it's, it's not, it's not the toughest list of stuff to do. I'm thinking you're your own bottleneck, but I can't really.

I can't really tell you that straight out because you're justifiably proud that he's, he's made it, you know, his own two hands made a business and it's working. Yeah. Well, scale

[00:22:37] Darin Dawson: is the, is the dilemma always, always, always. Yeah. Once you, Yeah. And, and it starts right there where I've, I've created something that people know that I do good work.

Yeah. But being able to know that it's more value to me to hire someone. To take that call and get back to people in a timely fashion In the trade industry. Yeah. Could double my [00:23:00] business and then, you know, and then, but do I need to hire people? How do I hire people? Well, like all that stuff, that next level is so tough and it doesn't get easier as it as you grow and grow and grow.

And that was us. You know, it was like Connor and I, now it's 150 people. Wow. Yeah, it's like wow. A real thing and you're like, I gotta get smart people around me. That's

[00:23:21] Matthew Dunn: cool. Figure that out, you know? You know that's a magic threshold, right? Is it? Well, good. I'm glad you heard a Dunbar's number. I have. Okay.

Yes, I know I should report. So you guys are tipping really close to Dunbar's number. I

[00:23:33] Darin Dawson: like it. I think, um, my prediction though, for the coming years for us is profitability is gonna be sexy again. That's why I've been saying everybody like, giddy up. Hey, let's be profitable. Who's into that? Right? Listen into that profitability.

I am, I'm,

[00:23:47] Matthew Dunn: I've always thought it was a really good idea for a,

[00:23:49] Darin Dawson: I did do, I think idea like recency of the free money in the economy. I think that, that, that kind of went away for a few years now. My prediction is profitability is sexy [00:24:00] again. So I don't know if I'll, We'll grow a ton Is numbers. We just gonna see what's going on here a little bit.

Did

[00:24:05] Matthew Dunn: the, did the pandemic? Uh, yeah. And gave

[00:24:08] Darin Dawson: us a boost because, Gave you boost. I figured. I'll give you my pandemic story. So we've been solidly in these trusted advisor categories. Yeah. Like really just, um, you know, uh, that vertical strategy worked. Really has been working very well. Pandemic. Boom in, in that second quarter of 2020, we didn't know if we were gonna have to, you know, I had business leaders calling me like, Are you shutting down?

What are you doing? You're laying off hack team. Like, Well, I'm not doing that yet. They're like, I don't know. But we got inundated and we had a huge lift. Right. And we had sas, like a lot software companies, everybody was moving to remote. Yep. And we're like finally, finally video. Right. So it really made us think like we should go horizontal more.

Hmm. And uh, leave the vertical strategy. And we did that. But then there's this reread now kind of back and we've seen some people leave because it was a [00:25:00] covid solution now. Oh wow. Back face to face. Fascinating. Yeah. So we positioned it. Wrong there. Maybe in our sales approach in that moment. So that's just transparency to that.

Like I've never led a business through a pandemic. If I get the opportunity again, I might learn something.

[00:25:16] Matthew Dunn: Let's not do that. Let's not, I

[00:25:17] Darin Dawson: don't want you guys rather not. But just being vulnerable. I don't think we do the same more as business leaders. We just like, it was amazing. I made a bunch of money.

It was, and I did, but then there's another, it sucked too. A2 A 20 and we saw it kind of. Yeah, beginning of this year, right? And so it's been an interesting year now, this economic, uh, flutterings, but we found ourselves again, down right back into our oldest customers who have been with us forever. And now we're moving more in the enterprise space in those verticals.

And so I think we have the top 80 mortgage banks in the country as our customers, as an example. Nice and some nice, large, large, uh, financial advising companies. Proud to have people like, uh, Rocket Mortgages [00:26:00] customers, and Wow, that's really cool. United Wholesale Mortgage is a large, large user of ours.

They, they underwrite a lot of, uh, the, you know, mortgage brokers in the country. So Great companies there.

[00:26:11] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Wow. Wow. Now you, I seem recall from my conversations, I talked with your partner, manager or a couple of 'em who were in that role over the years. Um, you were at physical offices. Did you have to, you yourselves had to do the adjust work from home thing on the fly?

Yeah, we, we,

[00:26:29] Darin Dawson: we have done all of that as well. We could have a whole podcast on what I think about this. So , we did, you know, March 2nd week of March, I told everybody. Sent the, uh, video saying, Hey everyone, we're gonna go home for two weeks. I want you to come in. I want, We were uniquely prepared for this.

We're in Colorado. Yeah. And we had developed a wildfire preparedness plan because we had been, we had to evacuate. Yeah. Once before. I remember. So part of our SOC two, uh, compli procedure was to develop a, a, a, uh, wildfire compliance plan, which, I mean, everyone has [00:27:00] laptops. There's no desktops, so you could just pick up and be.

Very quickly and secure all at the same time. Yeah. So we flip to remote overnight. Nice. We're going home for two weeks and it was two years. Right, right, right. Over. And then we did, we had three floors of space. Yep. And one we had just renovated, spent a bunch of money making it amazing. Yeah. Downtown Carl Springs, Pikes Peak views.

And, and, um, I mean, long story short, we, we tried the remote with a hub after the pandemic. Wayne tried to get everybody to come back. It just didn't. And then we had hired differently. The competition in the market became different. We also had the great recession during this. I'm sorry. The great, not recession, the great

[00:27:43] Matthew Dunn: resignation, uh, resignation.

[00:27:44] Darin Dawson: Yes. Right. The great. So people, we did have some of that as well. So then you're competing differently now. People can, I can work from anywhere. Is was the mantra. So you're competing against Silicon Valley? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. For finance, For income. [00:28:00] Yeah. And we're competing on East coast, West coast, everywhere.

Yeah. So we're paying Denver. So it's, it was interesting learning. Plus, on top of that, you're going remote

[00:28:09] Matthew Dunn: Plus Colorado was the first state to do the required salary, salary, transparency thing on postings, which probably,

[00:28:17] Darin Dawson: I love that you brought that up because that was another hill for us to climb during this Yeah, yeah.

Turmoil, right. The, the, that, and I mean the pandemic, I mean, that. The kick in the bud, I think on businesses was this transition remote work, great resignation. On top of that, now in Colorado, we're posting what we pay so everybody knows and that, and then there's a bunch of free money in the market that the government's handing out.

Okay? And so, so now everybody's just spending that on competition for labor. It's just a fascinating, and now we're seeing that pendulum swift again. Switch again, I think a bit. Yeah. So I digress. Yeah, no, goodbye. Goodbye. [00:29:00] 2020 through 2022. I, Yeah, it was, uh, rollercoaster. Did you turn loose? Black. My hair was black in 20.

[00:29:08] Matthew Dunn: Did you turn loose

[00:29:09] Darin Dawson: of some of that office space? I'm sorry. Yes, we did. So now we're down to 7,000 square feet. Okay. And then we have roughly, I'd say 15 people showing up. Right, Right. We had some people that were die hard. Yes. That love it. Want it. Yes. We had a great culture. I mean, every Friday we had lunch together, all the whole company.

Yeah. I mean we, So I am lamenting that. I think it's tough. I, and I think in sales roles too, Look, when I, I was a salesperson. I learned from hearing what other people around me were saying. I think Yes, yes. Gosh, we're gonna have some sort of reckoning there. Yes. And so I've just said, You can be in. So most of the people that are in the office are salespeople in the office.

Interesting. Cause and then they're, and a lot of them are newer salespeople. Interestingly, our top three enterprise reps, they never wanted to go, They always went to the office. They go [00:30:00] into that place, through the pandemic, and there's like just the two of 'em in 30,000 square feet. They're like literal.

They, they, um, soran wrapped my office, you know, stuff hooligans, shenanigans all the time, . But, um, that drew the younger reps back into the office cuz they were there and they wanted to learn from them and hear what they were saying and how, how they were doing things. So it

[00:30:22] Matthew Dunn: was, it was really great. I do, I think you hit on a, on a, on a key thing that, and I think you said it when you said reckoning that, uh, work from home.

But you, you are missing learning. You are missing inspiration. You're missing,

[00:30:40] Darin Dawson: uh, I I love it. I'm home right now. I, I love it. I don't know even personally if it's best for me. I love chocolate chip cookies. I love 'em. I'll eat 'em all the time. If I could, like, I'd eat as many as I could, eat the whole tray, that's not good for me.

Right, right. And I, it's something like that, I think. What's what we like is [00:31:00] humans not as is usually not always best. What's convenient isn't best usually what's easy all the time. So I do struggle with that. Yeah. And there's

[00:31:09] Matthew Dunn: also what, what, what may be better for the individual human may net. Net be not better for the.

Business or the enterprise. Um, and, and for the moment at least balance of that. We're trying to figure out the balance right of that. And, and, and I don't think we'll ever go back to the same shape we had agreed before, but I think you'll get companies, there are companies who've really mastered the remote thing.

Mm-hmm. , and they'll, they'll keep accelerating. You'll get companies that'll master. Collaborative local. I can't wait to go to the office thing, I suspect. Um, and they'll, they'll, they'll probably rock it in a different direction. I can't imagine like a design or creative firm trying to do everything remote.

Like I, I've done it. I ran one. It, it, it, it's hard.

[00:31:58] Darin Dawson: To get, and, and [00:32:00] maybe I'm just too, you know, I, I just remember, I, I liked knowing everybody there. I knew everybody's name. I liked meeting 'em on their first day. I like nice seeing people casually and having those bump in conversations. So I just, we just kind of find something.

And maybe that's just, and I think it is about your business leadership and the culture that they wanna build. And I think it's okay. I think it's okay to say, I want everybody to come. I think it's okay to say we're gonna be completely remote forever, and that's great for us. But I think it's, it's finding the fit for who you are as an entity and deciding that's who we're gonna be and the people that wanna do that with us.

Come on in. Yeah. The people that don't wanna do that, that's okay too. Yeah. That's probably not the best fit for you here. I think that's the best approach. I, as I talk to my peers about this, I'm like, Yeah, we gotta gotta do less than this. Right? Like what we feel is the best culture for our companies.

Yeah.

[00:32:51] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And I suspect there's. I suspect there, I suspect there are some, um, job functions that will [00:33:00] be handled differently than others.

[00:33:02] Darin Dawson: I agree. I mean, developers Yeah. I didn't know where they were anyway.

they, they always checked in crazy hours that did every, Yeah. Yeah. They kind of created a cool environment for them to come and go as they wanted, but some of 'em did and some like whatever. Right. Like, but I think product has. Times where they'd like to be together more to collaborate, feel the room.

Right. And, but in sales and customer success, I feel like those areas, we learn so much from the environment around us and we can get better at it, I think. I think customers satisfaction scores will go higher if, if people, That's true point. Thought about being back

[00:33:42] Matthew Dunn: together again. Interesting point. I rem I mean ear.

Early, early, early in my career in the tech space, I was, uh, In tech support when that was a phone function, um, and being able to go, Hang on one second. Hey Mike, how the heck does [00:34:00] offset in Excel work again? Right, right.

[00:34:02] Darin Dawson: Yeah. Right. Or, or like you're the manager and you got five people and like now it's just a sales or cs.

Cause we still have some phone in, in, in, in support and we have, you know, phone sales and it's like, do I need to listen to every individual call? But a human. Can sit in the huddle with everybody and go, Whoa, man, Jim, Or, Hey, hey, hey, hey. Like, yeah, yeah. Wait a minute, i's going around there. Hey, next time, Next time.

Try it this way. And we can do that simultaneously. We do have that ability. Yeah, but there's no tech. If you listen to five calls on a. Zoom playback or using actually really good, that's you're not gonna be able to do. Right. Like, But a human can sit there. Yes, yes. And pick up on the, There's something about the sales floor and if you've been in sales ever in your life, you've been a part of that, where you're all just trying to make a number together.

There's something about that I think that happens in customer success as well. It's unique marketers. Our marketers have always been remote, almost, [00:35:00] you know? Yeah. Our CMO lives in Philadelphia. He's great. He's always been remote, so, but I agree. There's some roles. We'll be remote in some that I think could be back

[00:35:10] Matthew Dunn: again.

Cool. Um, switch gears. What, uh, you mentioned HubSpot and I'll, I'll, I'll just pick on them. Are, do you find yourself saying, Uhoh, someone's going to take what we've done and sort of jump on it and take a whole market away from it? Like what, what keeps you up a little bit?

[00:35:30] Darin Dawson: I don't, I think, um, I don't, you know, someone recently asked me that.

I'm like, If you would've told me that in 2006, I guess I would've been, I was more concerned about then. I think what we do is unique. There's a lot of competitors in the space when there weren't before. I think it's in a way, validated the market. Hmm. Um, I remember, and HubSpot was small too, like, and so I don't know, or Google's gonna do this.

Right. I think we've just gotten. Niche and expertise, I think in these [00:36:00] verticals as well. And our core value of guidance, I think is more over the key to this because it's not about the technology in video. It's not, it's not. I mean, you can do that, right, Of course. Um, but it's about how to help people get over their fear of ca of the.

Because for ever reason it, when that light turns on, I freak out a little bit, get, get over about how I look or how I sound, how I sound in my head right now and you're hearing me. Yeah. It's two different things, right? And so when you're, when you play the video back, We go, I don't like that your brain literally has this visceral reaction that says, I don't like that.

I don't like how I look. I don't like how I sound like it's just this negative reinforcement. But when you receive feedback, when you send people a video and they respond back to you like, I loved it, it's the opposite. You're, you're actually are getting an endorphin. To your brain. Cause people like it in compliments, people like hearing their name.

We are human [00:37:00] beings. This is how we interact. So helping people give her that initial hump is the job. It is not necessarily the video technology, it is the adoption of this is a new calic mechanism for communication that can transform your business. But you, it's kind of like if I unload my screen, you see a peloton back here.

If I get on that thing, I, I meet my. Okay. I a hundred percent believe if you adopt video as a part of your communication strategy, you will. It will help you meet your goals faster. Right. But you have to adopt it. And you have to do it, and you have to be dedicated to it. Just like I have to be dedicated to the bike behind me, so, Right, right.

Yeah. I think that's a part of it. Right. And so, . I think that's our defensible position as well. It's an obstacle for us. But we've done well. We've written two books. We like to think we're the authority on this. And then the first one is Rehumanize Your Business, Straightforward Framework and Tactics. The next one is called Human Centered Communication.

The Case against Digital [00:38:00] Pollution, because the Pandemic did another thing. We just assaulted everyone. It was like the spam apocalypse and it's like, and now we have artificial intelligence. Now if okay, 10 years ago, if I sent you an email, you actually thought I made it for you. Yes,

[00:38:16] Matthew Dunn: yes, yes. You, you were going on the same path.

Keep going. Right

[00:38:19] Darin Dawson: now, I, I do this all the time on a podcast. I'll say, Matt, do you believe. . If you got an email from me, do you believe I sent it, right? Yeah. No, I don't. No, I don't. Yeah. And what does that do? So there's no reciprocity. So it used to be I would, So this is what we teach, right? So this reciprocity.

So if I sent you that, there's this reciprocity, like at least I'd respond to you. Now I have no reciprocity. I just go click shift. I don't care. That's not a real person anymore. Gina bdr, XYZ Company has no idea who I am. That is a part of a sequence, but it's automated to get [00:39:00] my attention and hope I respond.

Yeah. So our premise is that send a video whenever possible. Say Matt. Hey, it's Darren. Yeah. From BA Bomb. I've been following your company, Big fan. Listen, what we do is help people like you do X, Y, and Z. Yeah. If you like to have a conversation about that, I'd love to have it. You can click on the link below and schedule the time with me anytime you want.

Here's something else for you that shows you how we worked with five other companies just like you. Yeah. Hope to talk to you soon. Hope you're having a great day. Bye. That's the thing.

[00:39:35] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Well, me, I, I, I, I, I could tell we got close to the heart there. That's wonderful. No, seriously, that is, that is awesome.

I, I was in a conversation with a bunch of long time email marketers, as I said, of getting beginning to know that world the other day, and we, we ended up talking about video and. And I was blown away. 95% of the people on the call said, I don't think I've ever [00:40:00] gotten a video in email. I'm like, It's it's still novel.

What? No,

[00:40:04] Darin Dawson: it's, it's still novel. It is.

[00:40:05] Matthew Dunn: It's still novel. And like I said, call this morning,

[00:40:09] Darin Dawson: uh, if you bought or sold a home, you're far more likely to have experienced that . Yeah, Yeah,

[00:40:14] Matthew Dunn: yeah, yeah. That, that's, yeah. That's one of the, It's interesting, right? Right. One of the has adopted it and, and it's trusted advisor.

It's, it's also a, it's just, it's a set of professionals. The, the person is the, the, the person is sort of the, the brand or the point on the business, if you will. Um, I, you know, if I got a video from Acmecorp, that doesn't make any sense, a video from Fred at Acmecorp. , Right? It's

[00:40:46] Darin Dawson: different. So I have this other theory, if you'll indulge me.

Yeah. It goes back to VC conversation bit. Yes. I really believe that venture capital private equity has a roadmap of how you go to market and it involves a [00:41:00] lot of just velocity marketing. Right? So it's email call, LinkedIn strategy that it, it works. It can, but it's a numbers game. Right? Numbers. Blowing through the numbers, and I think what we're doing is dangerous.

You're commoditizing a bit sales professionals when you do that. Yes, yes. Right. That's what I believe. So I was recently in two Tucson, Arizona last week, in fact, with the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals. A lot of conversation about this like. The relationship you described shouldn't be reserved only to the trusted advisor.

In fact, it should be to the salesperson's relationship to their customers. And we're, we're commoditizing that. We're making it, I think, cheapened in a way by assaulting so many people, what we call digital pollution. Just all this stuff coming at me and so, , you're not people anymore. It's just like a robot.

It's how I assimilate to that and I think about that. So I think we gotta get back to that a bit, but we gotta be able to scale that too. I get it. Like, so we've been working hard on thinking about how we scale. Yeah. Personal. Yes. We believe that we [00:42:00] can do that. That's hard. How do we scale personal in sequencing?

Um, we're helping people. Sequences in outreach. We're helping people write email campaigns now in that, that they send to their past customers. How do we make their experience the thing that we care about the most, not about our company, cuz they don't care anymore. They already bought the house or already already did the mortgage.

How do I care more? Yeah. About the recipient that I'm sending to than I do about my own outcomes. I, We believe you'll reach your own outcomes by caring more about. Yeah,

[00:42:34] Matthew Dunn: that's what that it, that scale thing at, at the root of that scale thing is it's inherent to digital that making a perfect copy is essentially cost free.

It's easy, so someone goes, Oh, well scraped link and I'll get, you know, a thousand names and addresses and I'll send them all the same thing. And like, uh, I actually switched. [00:43:00] Ooh, video blur. I switched my, uh, first name field on LinkedIn from Matthew to Dr. Matthew, mainly because it gives me a sure fire flag that some pain in the butts.

Is doing this grape outreach. They add the doctor. Yeah, they, they do the, you know what would be high? Matthew is high. Doctor Matthew. I'm like, Yep. Bullshit. Dead. Right, Done. .

[00:43:24] Darin Dawson: Right. We have a lot of examples of this that we use in presentations. One is like, Hey Matthew, uh, I love Bellingham too. It's the best.

Oh, by the way, here's the, We can really help you like. Fake. It's fake. We know it. It's everyone's fake. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows it. But we're, and we're accepting marginal results. Used to be gonna email conference since like what are acceptable open rates That is not ever has is never gone up.

[00:43:52] Matthew Dunn: No.

No. It's only going down.

[00:43:54] Darin Dawson: Only going down. Okay. You don't have, I don't care how big of a company you are, you do [00:44:00] not have an infinite addressable market. You don't. So have you ever thought about the, in. Of a crappy open rate. Yeah. You got 70%, 80%, 90, not liking you so much. Yes, yes. But we don't, All we do is ramp it up.

Oh, just gimme another fresh a thousand leads. Yeah. . Yes, Yes. And just cringing them through and then do it again. And it's like,

[00:44:27] Matthew Dunn: from a human, from a human perspective, your 20% open rate is an 80% fail.

[00:44:33] Darin Dawson: Fail and I fail often. I don't think we think about the diminishing returns that you could be exhausting your addressable market and we need to treat these a bit better or qualify them better for the love of God.

Like, like qualify who we're talking to better at, get more specific about our best, you know, customer

[00:44:54] Matthew Dunn: profile. Yeah. Yeah. And, and the, the blast we keep, you know, the blast filters are, [00:45:00] insane because of that flood. I, my, my morning habit and my inbox. Disgusting but true. I know the key strokes that do show me all the unreads, select all the unreads, and then I go shift clicking through the ones I'm going to keep.

And all I look at is the, from.

[00:45:22] Darin Dawson: Right. So, and you go, Do I know this person? Do I

[00:45:25] Matthew Dunn: know this person? Does it even look like a person?

[00:45:29] Darin Dawson: Or did I buy something from them and might wanna buy something again? Yeah. But my, but it's like five companies. For me,

[00:45:36] Matthew Dunn: the go-to default behavior is p like dead.

[00:45:40] Darin Dawson: It's interesting cause we've, we've, uh, made it hard for ourselves, right?

Yes. Sales and marketing, because yes, we have how we could go to this device. How many of these do you answer if you don't know the number? I'm not answering it. Cuz now all the inbounds coming on my personal cell phone. Oh yeah. Just, and so I'm like, Nope, nope. So, so now, and [00:46:00] now an email's diminished. So what do we do?

What's our answer to that? We just do more. Yeah, we just do more. And I think, listen, I just think. if we settled down a little bit, got more keyed in on who our ideal customer profile is, and we spoke to the problems. Back to what we talked about in the first part of this, we spoke to the problems that we solve for people in the kind of an old fashioned approach to sales that can be scalable.

It can be maybe not to the velocity that you're experiencing today, but I would argue that, that that's a false narrative that that will be successful long term.

[00:46:32] Matthew Dunn: It's, it's daunt. To, uh, to bootstrap now my perception, right? Daunting to bootstrap now, because even if I had the magic widget that would slot perfectly into the, you know, crushing need, that company X has getting 10 seconds for them to go.

Getting through it, you could solve this problem. It's like, no, I gotta [00:47:00] send another wasted, you know, 5,000 bogus emails to get one person to ac read it. And it's like, oh, that's frustrating, .

Like,

[00:47:07] Darin Dawson: I think, I think events are gonna come back strong because, Right, like in person events and expos and the conferences, because the, the pandemic is this reverse reaction to that.

People wanna be back in person. But I think, yeah, that's one of the best ways we've been able to develop relationships over the years that are, Im pennet. is that we built those and face to face at real estate conferences, actual people, Inman or at these different, you know, these different markets that we've been successful in the past.

Yeah, yeah. We know them. They know us. They know we care about their business. They can call me. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's how we've done it. So,

[00:47:41] Matthew Dunn: I know what I wanted to ask you. When you, you, when you were talking about the humanizing thing, um, particularly with bigger enterprises that are customers, , As I said, I've been around real estate mortgage space a bit.

Um, this difficult negotiation they have between wanting to arm people to [00:48:00] be direct and personal and still maintaining brand control. . Right. How do you help 'em with that? Yep.

[00:48:08] Darin Dawson: Or even compliant

[00:48:09] Matthew Dunn: or compliance as well. Yeah, that's a big

[00:48:11] Darin Dawson: one. Yeah. Yeah. That we, So what we do in most of those cases is we begin with evergreen personal personal videos.

So they might not say your name in that. Okay. But they are personal in nature. So, you know, we, we create a set defined group of message. that might be included in some sort of sequence or email campaign or journey. And then we say, um, we actually coach on this and here's email one. Then we're gonna put it, we want a 50% kind of penetration in the overall email campaign of video.

So 50% of our emails, we wanna contain a video, not everyone, but then that, that you can't just kind of slap a video in there, you gotta write the, the email in a little bit different way. And so we coach found that and we help implement that. And then we have the set group of video. [00:49:00] Then we roll out to the greater community.

We worked with a huge financial advising company. We're talking, you know, 500 person rollout to go into 2000. And so you have these set nine videos that you want them to do. We have a little coaching script for each one of 'em. We have a kind of a, our Ethan, our chief evangelist saying This is how you wanna deliver this, you know?

Yeah, he's great. He's been with me for 12 and worked with me at the TV station. Again, guidance. So it's almost like a LMS learning management system environment. Yeah. You have a to-do list, you gotta do nine of 'em, and that gets you going. Right? So now, and those instantly are transferred into Salesforce or whatever journey mechanism using, um, and then the email campaigns, and now we have videos in those pieces, but are kind of like, those are all automated, right?

They're evergreen videos. So, and I'll give you an example of one I think we'd like to use a lot. If you're introducing your someone to a new lead, [00:50:00] or it could be someone that you wanna work with, I think the one that comes to mind is of a mortgage loan officer is meeting a new agent for the first time.

Often that's automated in their crm. So the email sitting there in a crm, right? Hmm. So we have this email that we coach and trained to says, Hey, I just wanna introduce myself. My name's Darren. Hey, I got three kids. Uh, we play soccer all weekend. I am up in Castle Rock and we're doing Tell 'em about a bit about yourself.

Yeah. Cause this is how people introduce each other. If I just met you for the first time, it's like, where do you live? Yeah. Yeah. What do I know about the place you live? It's, this is how we, this. Give me an example. When you first meet someone, why do we change that? Like we change that instead it. XYZ mortgage company is the best in the world.

World, world. It's like no one cares. No one cares. What we care about is relationships with human beings. So creating how to do that, We give you these nine videos, but I didn't say your name so I can use that again and again and again. So it's personal evergreen. Yep, yep. [00:51:00] It's built into the journey. Then we do, you know, our QBR are, how do we need to update that?

How is it performing? What else do we need to do here, and we help them market better. We feel in a human centered way. That's kind of what Bomb Bomb does with our enterprise clients now. Right. And that's how we scale it so we can roll that out to 2000 users.

[00:51:22] Matthew Dunn: Nice. Just like that. Yeah. Nice. Wow. I suspect the um, I suspect the wheel's gonna turn in

[00:51:31] Darin Dawson: your favor.

Well, I hope so. I've been waiting a long time.

[00:51:35] Matthew Dunn: as we get, I mean the, the, the, the flow

[00:51:38] Darin Dawson: and I'm doing okay. Don't worry about me, everything's fine, But No,

[00:51:42] Matthew Dunn: I know, but you're, you clearly gotta, you clearly got a, a mission. It's not just about business growth. You, you know, right now you, you would really like to see, uh, les crap more actual interaction, more relationship, and you're doing a lot of work to enable that.

Um, I, I, I worry that we're. [00:52:00] Y you know, crazy breaking point in our, in in our attention, in our engagement. I'm like, What, what, what's gonna give? Like, you ever have the tempt temptation to do select all delete cuz I certainly do. Oh, I do all the

[00:52:13] Darin Dawson: time. I that all the time. I don't. Okay. If I don't know you, I just am not gonna do anymore.

Yeah. I just, I don't have enough time.

[00:52:23] Matthew Dunn: And companies. Companies that go, Wait a minute, like your customers. I'm thinking like, Wait a minute, Time out. We need to invest in.

[00:52:31] Darin Dawson: Yep. And I wanna work with the people that wanna do that. Yeah. If you don't, then don't hire me and you're not good on anyway. And that's okay.

That's okay with me. But I'm self funded, like, you know what I mean? Like I get to still choose that a little bit, I think. And so we can still grow our business without. You know, killing ourselves, but have growth in, in profitables the new sexy profitables coming back. Like, be profitable. Yeah. So I think that's what we should do and that's what we're doing.

So we're just gonna keep doing that, you [00:53:00] know, and I, I'm not gonna, I don't want to relent on that. I think, I think people wanna do business with people they know, like, and trust. I've always thought that my entire life I was, you know, I grew up around sales people. I'm, I like to say I'm classically trained in sales and.

How do people, when you get to the essence of it, how do people decide if they know, like, and trust somebody. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a feeling more than anything. And like if you have two roofers come to your house and, And how do you decide if they both have basically the same service? Yeah, for the same price?

Well, how do you decide? You decide? Because either a referral. Yeah. Somebody I know told me that is inferred. No, like in trust, They built that. Or you decide, You know what? I just, I'm gonna go with option A. I got a feeling about it. Yeah. It's

[00:53:45] Matthew Dunn: the handshake. Get back to that. It's the handshake in the chit chat and it makes all the difference, right?

[00:53:50] Darin Dawson: I think so, but I'm obviously

[00:53:52] Matthew Dunn: biased. That's o That's okay. Well, we should wrap. I wanna respect your time, but boy, I, I figured this would be a fascinating [00:54:00] conversation, but I love where we went with it. I too, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm very enthused by what Bomb Bomb has done, and I suspect all sorts of continued like this.

I. just for the questions I get about, you know, different kinds of content in email. I'm thinking people are kind of groping around for, I guess I can't just keep robo writing, I hope. I

[00:54:21] Darin Dawson: hope so. . I hope so. Right.

[00:54:24] Matthew Dunn: I hope

[00:54:26] Darin Dawson: that must be somebody's job, but it can be so much better. Last

[00:54:29] Matthew Dunn: question. Yeah. Why? Where'd the name come?

[00:54:33] Darin Dawson: Sure it's easy. I'll give you both answers. It's the slang term. We've been around so long. It's like you're the bomb, you know? That was it. But, but it was a young woman who told my business partner Connor, that he was the bomb.com. This is back in like 2003. And so we used to collect URLs. Right. Okay. Like you'd buy in to think, Oh, this is gonna be worth something day, remember?

Yep. And so Connor had instantly tried to buy bomb.com. It was [00:55:00] unavailable. Okay. He bought bomb bomb.com and it is, it is. Treated us very well. I was in Tucson as I mentioned last week. I was getting a car. A rental car and the woman's like, What is bomb? Bomb? And if I had just a nickel for every time I got that question served as well.

Right. You know, So I like to have some answers that maybe a little bit more fictitious, like, you know, it's super clandestine. We are, you know, it's a secret government agency. I can't really tell you about, Can't tell you. You know, or at one time I was in the airport and with the, the huge police conference was mostly going on in DC and I was kidding.

They literally like, Oh, bomb squad. Right? And I'm like, Absolutely not. Wow.

[00:55:40] Matthew Dunn: Love it. It's been fun though. It's Love it. Well, we'll send people to bomb bomb.com. B om b B om b.com. And Darren Dawson, co-founder, President, it's been fun as heck talking with you. You too, man.

[00:55:52] Darin Dawson: Appreciate you.

[00:56:00]