S4E12 – Len Dugow – Real Estate SaaS with 1,200 Customers in 3 months

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Key Timecodes

• (01:05) – Show intro and background history
• (05:39) – Deeper into his business model
• (07:15) – Understanding his real estate business model
• (11:28) – Deeper into his business strategies
• (17:51) – How many customers does he have on the platform
• (20:48) – How many employees does his company have
• (28:28) – A bit about his copywriting background and business model
• (33:47) – An advice for anyone looking to start a SaaS
• (40:14) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Intro

Hey, this is Sean Tepper, the host of Payback Time, an approachable and transparent podcast in building businesses, increasing wealth and achieving financial freedom. I’d like to bring on guests to hear authentic stories while giving you actionable takeaways you can use today. Let’s go.

[00:00:18.220] – Sean

My next guest is building a B2B SaaS business in the real estate industry. What it does is it helps real estate agents find information about properties a lot faster. The big issue a lot of agents have today is they’re searching in different locations, different sites. Based on what he’s talking about, you can take, we’re talking 5 to 10 hours a week, if not more, and compress that down to 30 to 45 minutes. And that’s on the long end. In this episode, he talks about really his journey to creating the business, getting feedback from customers, and how he’s scaling this business today. And get this, within just three months, which is how long the company’s been live, they’ve already brought in about 1200 customers. So I ask, how was that achieved? All right, this is a good one. I’m building a B2B SaaS business. Please welcome Len Dugo. Len, welcome to the show.

[00:01:06.850] – Len

Thanks, Sean. Appreciate being here.

[00:01:08.900] – Sean

Thanks for joining me. So why don’t you kick us off and tell us about your background?

[00:01:12.660] – Len

So originally I come from the creative side. I was a copywriter early on in my career. Shortly thereafter, I opened my own boutique agency, and over the next 25, 30 years, built a boutique agency that specialized in marketing, residential real estate, hospitality. We did that initially in Manhattan, and then moved further to South Florida, where I live now. But through the course of the career, did projects in Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco, DC, Atlanta, on and on and on. These were with remarkable brands like Ritz Carlton, Residencies and Four Seasons and Baccarat and on and on. It’s been an interesting career. My background came from marketing and branding in the residential space. What transitioned and what I’m very much involved in now is the creation of a digital dual-sas platform, dash, dash-to-dash. Com. What’s interesting about the evolution of dash is that it literally came out of a reoccurring theme in working with developers, national brokerage firms, and agents whereupon this reoccurring theme was that you would imagine that each of these stakeholders, developers, brokerage, and agents would all be working hand in glove. Developers creating residential real estate that would be welcomed in the marketplace.

[00:02:43.150] – Len

Brokerage firms would be teeing up the content and then serving it up to the agents. That sounds like it should be a rather seamless process. But in fact, what wound up happening over the last five, six, seven years is that each of these stakeholders work in opposition to each other. The most remedial a question that an agent would be looking for in terms of pre and new construction would be inventory availability, pricing, and lots of marketing material that would be accompanied. Yet they find it remarkably challenging to get access to that information. What Dash does is that it receives content from developers. It puts all that content in the Dash mixer. It then produces for agents access to unbranded materials, which basically for an agent is sending out content that does not have the on-site brokerages’ information. They’re concerned about leads being stolen from them. And the other really significant component that we provide agents is that we reformat and make market ready, all of this content, so it’s ready to be put on all social media channels, and it can go out and be deployed over their own name on their own channels. That is rather a heavy lift because agents, really good ones that have been in the business a long time are specialists in selling, not necessarily in technology.

[00:04:09.830] – Len

And so what we’ve been able to do for them is to shorten the process of getting access to current information that’s accurate, that’s verified by the developer. We don’t publish anything without the developer approval first, and then making it available to these agents. We just launched three months ago. It’s been very, very exciting. The concept came about three years ago. I’ve been working on this for three years. And what started out is just basic conversations with national developers, people we had worked with. I’ve worked with many, many years in brokerage, firms, and agents just starting posing questions as to if they would provide a wish list, what challenges, what headwinds are they discovering? And so Dash was a culmination of listening to all these people, documenting it. And then about a year and a half ago, after plenty of information, we started building out the platform and we shared the each of the iterations of the platform with developers and brokerage firms and on and on and continue to poke them for information. What else would you like to see? How can we modify this? It took us just over a year to build a platform.

[00:05:18.290] – Len

We launched three months ago in South Florida, tri-county area. We’re filling out the balance of the state in the next 45 days. We will feature over 250-300 new construction, new development projects within the next two weeks or so. It’s pretty exciting stuff.

[00:05:39.540] – Sean

That is pretty cool. I want to dive into the model a little bit more. Do you have two audiences on one platform? Is it for developers and real estate agents? Nope.

[00:05:49.660] – Len

No? No, we serve the pleasure of the agents. Obviously, the projects, the new developments are the product. But our interest is making available all of this information for a very, very low entry fee for agents. There are many statistics about this content and the average agent spends in the United States anywhere from $500 to $800 a month on marketing stuff to help their careers, for $79 a month for our pro version really is insignificant and very, very helpful. We also have a freemium, which is a Dash basic, which all you have to do is provide your active license and you have access to the platform. You get to preview all the content, but you cannot download it or share it. We believe, and it’s beginning to be proven that when agents spend time on the platform and they can see all the content but cannot download it and deploy it to prospects, they’re beginning to move over to the version. So again, we’re brand new. It’s very, very exciting. We’ve gotten some considerable traction in a really short period of time, which is music to my ears, having worked on this for three years now.

[00:07:10.870] – Len

So it’s like giving birth over 36 months. Exciting stuff.

[00:07:15.910] – Sean

With the real estate agents that are jumping on, you’re essentially just saving them a lot of time so they don’t have to research new development properties, right?

[00:07:25.270] – Len

Yeah, exactly. If you talk to agents, they will tell you that they spend on an average work week anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours a day just searching out content. The challenge for them is that developers provide for all brokerage firms, all the content. You could look for a project, let’s say in South Florida, Ritz-Carlton, Miami Beach. You will see 12, 15 websites that are not the official website, but are all other brokerage firms looking to capture those leads. The problem with that is that the official website from the developer himself is really going to be the accurate information, but it will take agents enormous amount of time to find what’s really available to sell and at what price. Dash really takes away all of that mind numbing experience for them, which they will tell you is beyond frustrating. And the problem is that developers put the content on Dropbox for file sharing. Dropbox is a wonderful tool, but it was not created for residential real estate sales. It is a clunky medieval looking backward platform for this category of business. Dash was created for residential real estate agents, and so its intent and execution is really for them.

[00:08:57.700] – Len

And what we are finding in terms of our feedback from agents is if someone spent 10 hours a week, let’s say, on research and discovery, that would be on Dash, maybe 45 minutes, and that’s a lot of time. I mean, that’s a… Over the course of the year, that might be three or four weeks of 30 days of work days. If I said to an agent, How much would you pay me? Over the course of if I gave you 30 days back of your life, I think it would be a lot of money. It would be an enormous amount of money. But that’s what is going on today, and that’s the function that the desk serves for these agents.

[00:09:40.070] – Sean

Got it. So they can log in. Like me, as a real estate agent, I can log in. I can have a laser-focused path to understand what is available with this property, what’s for sale, what are the specs who are all the right context, all on one clean location.

[00:09:54.710] – Len

Exactly. And we have over 125 filters. So if you’re searching by zip code, you’re searching by community, you’re searching in relationship to the beach, in terms of the bay, whatever it is, it’s all there. So it makes it remarkably easy for agents. And again, this didn’t come out of just thin air. This came out of 150, 200 interviews over and over again. And we continue to ask questions. We are hopeful that in the next handful of months we’ll have more and more features, which will be a direct relationship to what agents have told us they’d love to see on the platform.

[00:10:33.830] – Sean

Right on. That’s awesome. And your pro, you mentioned you arrived at 79 a month, right? Yeah. Do you give any incentive or discount if they pay by year? Is that even an option?

[00:10:46.260] – Len

No, not yet. If it reveals itself, if that’s important, we’ll certainly do that. The data that we give. So if you go from basic, which is a freemium, to Pro, we give you 10-day free trial, go play with it and take your journey through it and see how wonderful it is. And then we asked for a credit card at that point too. Well, we asked for a credit card when you decide to go from basic to pro, but we don’t charge you for 10 days and we’ll prompt you. There’s three days left and one day left. And so agents are totally aware of that. And by the way, they want to opt out at any point. No harm, no foul.

[00:11:25.710] – Sean

No penalty. Right. Of course. I know there’s just that… I’ll do this with audience. I’ll take a step back. There’s opt in models and opt out models. The difference is an opt out model is what you do with a lower touch SaaS is people have their credit card first. They use the free trial. And then if they don’t cancel, they’re already in it. So they have to opt out. And the statistics there is there can be more conversions at that trial ending, like the conversion because there’s less friction, but there’s less people entering the free trial. So it’s give or take situation. What we do our model is it’s opt in. So we let people into the platform without the credit card, but then they have to after 14 days, they got to add their credit card. So the conversion ratio will be less, but we just get more people into our ecosystem.

[00:12:23.680] – Len

I get it. That’s a good point, Sean. So this is what we discovered in the first couple of months. We launched with a premium of $39 and then a pro $79. 85 plus went directly to the pro. It then occurred to us, You know what? We don’t want any barriers, and we are looking for as much of data as we possibly can. The idea of profitability and sustainability, all is a function of, I guess, your financial resources, how long you can take it. That’s not my game plan for this platform. My game plan is to get as much content, and that’s why I made it a freemium. We transitioned after, I don’t know, 45 days because I was looking at the numbers and it said to me, You know what? I want thousands, tens of thousands of agents. They will provide for us such valuable data that we do our job right, we will not have any qualms about the conversions that we get to the pro-version. And again, because the $79 a month is such a low barrier for people who do this for a living. But that we think we’ll have a tremendous over a period of time conversion at a very reasonable-.

[00:13:37.040] – Sean

I forgot to ask this question before we got to the numbers. The content from the commercial real estate side, because they assume it’s all realist commercial or is.

[00:13:46.890] – Len

It residential? Residential. No, all residential. Okay. Only residential. We do not work in the commercial world.

[00:13:54.110] – Sean

Got you.

[00:13:54.760] – Len

And who’s- Maybe one day, but not now. In fact, it’s funny that I have lots of friends in the business, obviously, after 25, 30 years in it, many of them have done both commercial and residential, and some transition to commercial and say, Gee, Dash would be just brilliant for commercial. One step at a time, we’ll see if we.

[00:14:16.230] – Sean

Get there. Keep your options open. When the demand is there, then serve the demand. But who provides the content or enters the content into your platform?

[00:14:27.770] – Len

So we have a team of engineers, and this is the way that it works. We figured this out a long time ago, actually. I don’t want to say three years is a long time, but we figured this out in the last six months plus ago. So content comes in. So any agent could go to any new development and say, I possibly have clients, Mr. Developer, that would be interested in buying your project, so please send me a link to all of your content, which includes inventory and pricing and on and on and on. So the ask for developers is nothing more or less than what they already do. They send us those links and then our team takes all the content, makes sure… I mean, if you go to the website, you see it’s all very professional looking and there’s a degree of equality. All projects are treated the same way because agents deal with concepts all the time. And if you look at the St. Regis or the Paragon or the this or that, they all present their content differently. What we were trying and what we’ve accomplished is if you can provide for an agent a common ground whereby all of the data is different, obviously given to us by the different developers, but there’s a similarity between the format.

[00:15:45.670] – Len

They can really evaluate for their prospects, for their clients, answering questions that buyers are interested in, whether it’s a lifestyle, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, access to the hospitals or places of worship, restaurants, beaches, whatever, it’s all there. And so by giving them this information in a way where they can easily digest it and more importantly, easily communicate that, at the end of the day, agents wind up being effective and very, very successful when they become masters of intel, when they really get it and they understand it. And what Dash has accomplished is really being able to serve up to these agents the content in a way where they come off being really, really smart. And we talk to a lot of agents who’ll say that the business is littered with really ill-informed agents who do not know what they’re talking about and continue to provide, let’s just call it the not best reputation as a profession for agents. And we hope, and one of our objectives is, dash to become almost a Wikipedia of the category whereby it becomes self policing. Agents know and discover when content is not accurate, when either the onsite brokerage firm or developer is playing fast and loose and it’s infuriating to them because it winds up making them look stupid and/or ill-informed.

[00:17:27.150] – Len

And if you cannot through… I know so many conversations and so many years, if you cannot bridge the gap with your prospect of them recognizing that you know what you’re talking about, that you do have the accurate enough to date information, if you don’t have that, you’re really not going to do very well. When you do have it, you go to a place of confidence and success. You just do.

[00:17:50.780] – Sean

Right on. How many customers on the platform right now?

[00:17:55.190] – Len

We have 1,200 basic users right now. We’ve converted, again, we’re brand new, we’ve converted approximately 35, 36, I check every day to pro version. We have approximately 30 developers. They get all that. And we also have another 45 that are in their 30-day trial. So we are dealing with the data and the numbers. We have a crew that answers questions and comments, and data gathering right now is the most critical thing for us. Sure.

[00:18:28.590] – Sean

For just being around for or live for three months, that’s pretty good to get 1,200 basic, 35 paying customers and climbing. That’s solid.

[00:18:37.780] – Len

Give yourself some credit. Yeah, I’m really proud of my crew. Listen, like Steve Jobs said, this stuff doesn’t come from any one individual. This is a real team effort. We’ve got a really great young crew working on this who are believers as well. I really get it. And we’re here to enhance the sales process for agent.

[00:19:03.460] – Sean

Are you guys venture-backed versus bootstrap?

[00:19:06.480] – Len

Yeah. Well, I have over a million dollars of my own money in this thing already after three years. Okay. Where… I was a man, right? Hey, life.

[00:19:16.130] – Sean

Of a founder, right?

[00:19:18.590] – Len

Yeah. We’ve raised 500,000 of a $1 million angel round. And it’s interesting because what I like about it, all the people that have come on board are all in the business, agents, developers, business associations. I found in terms of my own fundraising, I learned the hard way, of course. I never really had a business that I didn’t sell fund. When you go out chasing money, it’s a different world, a very interesting world, but challenging, especially in this economic times. It’s a heavy lift. So 40 % of my day, every day is talking to investor types. We’ll get there. I think we’re 60 days from closing the round. It was a lot harder in the earlier days because you’re talking about a concept, and now investors don’t look at the product and ask questions. And we’re going to see where we’re going. So that’s the exciting part of it. I was hoping to be resourceful, which we wound up being to get to this point today. I mean, that’s the biggest challenge, right? I mean, you really have to… You got to grind it out. You just have to grind it out. You have to just can’t lose focus, can’t lose heart.

[00:20:33.280] – Len

You have to have this tenacity about it. You have to be single-minded, which I am about it. I’m drinking my own cuckoo blood every day.

[00:20:42.550] – Sean

I can tell.

[00:20:44.050] – Len

No, it’s- Make it. I’m drinking it.

[00:20:46.600] – Sean

I see the need of the product for sure. You mentioned your team. You got to sell a team. How many employees?

[00:20:53.540] – Len

So we have six full-time. However, we’ve outsourced all of our engineering to date. We went from a much… We started with a bigger crew, actually, in Ukraine. We had 10 people working on building the platform in Ukraine. And then we recently transitioned to a really tight boutique of four guys that work on the platform every day.

[00:21:20.370] – Sean

Are they in the States?

[00:21:22.120] – Len

Yes, they’re local in the United States. And what’s interesting about it is that we recognize that, listen, every dollar is precious. That’s for sure. Our objective is to when it’s the right time, when the resources are there, we’ll bring it all in-house.

[00:21:37.410] – Sean

Yeah. A lot of startups do what you do, which is a smart play, is try to leverage contractors, talent outside, keep your cost slow. You’re not paying healthcare expenses or benefits on, right?

[00:21:51.640] – Len

Yeah, exactly right. It just doesn’t make sense as a startup. And even from your investor dollars, investors want to know where you’re spending the money, and you’ve got to be leading me to get to the other side.

[00:22:06.930] – Sean

Yeah. And something that you just alluded to a few minutes back. You as a founder, you can be spending a lot of time looking for money, or you can just get after it and build your business. I see a lot of younger entrepreneurs, the first thing they do is come up with a business idea, and then they immediately go try to raise funds. No, you want to be out there executing what you were doing and how can you get some product market fit, how can you get feedback, maybe even make some money with something that could be a really garbage-looking product, but you want to prove the concept and then raise money.

[00:22:42.290] – Len

That’s absolutely right. Yeah. So if II want to unpack what you just said because I think what was interesting about my journey through this is that, as I said earlier, when I was able to identify this theme from market to market, all this disconnect between people who should be working together. Look, I come from a marketing and branding background. The idea behind that is really to do some qualitative research, look at human behavior, and with that, recognize where the hole is in the process. This was in a hole. This was the Grand Canyon, as far as I was concerned, as opportunity. The opportunity was to create this platform, and I had a vision for it. My vision was really shared by all these people who are working the business, all the stakeholders. Everybody said the same exact, Gee, it would really be great if. In Dropbox, we’re probably good for lots of other businesses. It’s torture for us. People refer to Dropbox and residential sales as a necessary evil. Well, to me, that spells and smells like opportunity. Yeah.

[00:23:50.230] – Sean

No, that’s a great approach too, is there’s people that come up with an idea. It’s their idea. But where you really find product market fit a lot faster is if you got a group of people and you’re having the conversation, you’re peeling back the onion, if you will. Okay, so tell me more about that problem, and why does that keep you up at night? And the list goes on, and then you create a product against that problem.

[00:24:12.840] – Len

You know what we found? I found in all my interviews with all these people in the business, residential real estate sales, whether it’s robust or whether it’s challenged like we’re in now, these men and women want to talk about the issues, the problems, and problem-solving. I didn’t need more than one or two leading questions and off to the races. I could be on the phone for hours listening to all the different issues that these folks deal with. I was really receptive to it, aside from having been around it for decades. Original idea, when it coalesces, it’s really invigorating in a lot of ways because when it started, it was like, I can’t believe this doesn’t exist. So at the time, three years ago, I asked a handful of my buddies, associates, employees, spend a couple of hours a day for the next few weeks and tell me what looks and smells like this idea I have. Then after a week, nothing, nothing really, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I said, This is impossible. And so I just thought it just seemed remarkable that a dash did not exist. I don’t know what to say.

[00:25:28.130] – Len

Nevertheless, it didn’t… I didn’t exist. And then I was really hell bent on the mission. Bring it to life.

[00:25:33.750] – Sean

Yeah, bring it to life. No, that’s a great first step, too, is you hear the pain. Then some people go and execute right away, and it’s like, no, you want to pump the brakes for a moment and do a deep dive search over weeks and make a list in Excel of all the companies that are competitors, try to find out everything about them from the pricing, the copy. We’re going to get into copy here in a second because you’re a copywriter. But everything related, and if you create a very small list of competitors or even find no competitors, you got yourself a potential product.

[00:26:07.190] – Len

Absolutely. One of the things I have one of my sons, I have two sons and three other stepchildren and a whole bunch of grandkids. But my son, who happens to be a real estate agent, got very excited in the early days and I was chatting with him about it and he said, Here’s the thing, dad. Do not lose focus. Try to become, and the way that it sounded to him was you want to become the MLS of new development sales. That really helped because again, dash showcases all developer inventory. But if I say developer inventory to you, you may not immediately know that that means that it’s not a resale product. Developer inventory means nobody’s lived in the apartment or the residence before. What my son said to me, he said, just leave it as newdevelopment, new development, new construction. People will not be confused by that. I think that he was right. The reason why I’m just mentioning this is that when you do land on this idea or any idea, the idea is to really peel away the onion, as you reference, and try to get down to the core, the absolute core.

[00:27:18.410] – Len

What is the problem and how are you going to solve it? And that’s what we kept going back to and back to and back to. And what it turned out is that we were solving a whole laundry list of problems that folks just threw up at us over and over again, and so many, no matter whether it was Florida or New York or California, Chicago, that we talked to people and interviewed people. Same, same, same, same, same, from market to market.

[00:27:45.630] – Sean

Right on. Let’s take a quick commercial break. Hey, this is Sean. I’d like to say thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for taking the time to listen to this one. I have a quick request. If you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five star review? The reason is the more ratings we get and the higher those ratings are, the more Apple will share this with the world. Thanks in advance for doing that. Then I have a quick comment. If there are any questions you want me to ask the guests, please head over to our tykr Facebook group. You can drop a question right there. I’ll go ahead and make a note and I’ll do my best to ask that question on the podcast. All right, back to the show. Let’s get into your specialty among many things, but copywriting. You were a copywriter for decades. What is working from a copywriting and marketing standpoint? I asked that question is you’ve got 1,200 customers. These are basic in the platform within three months.

[00:28:48.370] – Sean

That’s pretty fast. So how did you do that?

[00:28:50.880] – Len

This is exactly what happened. I kept asking I. When I say I, please mean that as we. My crew kept asking over and over and over again, the same questions to different people. What are the challenges? When this happens, why does that happen? On and on and on. So from a copy standpoint, it was very simple. What dash is, is exactly what we were told the marketplace was missing in this area. This wasn’t me wordsmithing. This wasn’t being, Chia or any of the famous, a Chao or any of the famous copywriters of my era, my generation. This was about just stating it in a simple and uncomplicated language. I’ll also tell you the other thing about simple. I have some very dear friends who run some very big national brokerage firms, and I will not name names, but I will tell you what the message was. The message was, Len, what do you think at the end of the day it’s worth to have the most robust website platform for residential real estate if no one can figure out how to work it? Real estate agents are specialists in selling. You do need to have a certain degree of technology.

[00:30:01.700] – Len

But if you force them to get to the next step in terms of understanding where technology is and how it’s applicable to them, more times than not, we were told next, they will move on and sell something else. So the advice that was given to me by some very, very successful heads of brokerage firms it was make the platform as easy as you possibly can. And so my mission to my crew was that if you could do a Facebook page, you can do dash, and that’s what we did. And that’s hard. Making stuff real simple, real easy, real intuitive, that’s a challenge. We figured it out.

[00:30:44.230] – Sean

I’ve seen that a lot with tech, that’s where I spend most of my career, people over engineering software, making it more difficult than it needs to be. So it sounds like one way that you’re getting this viral base is that maybe people using it, they find it easy, and then are they talking to other realtors like, Hey, have you used this platform? Yes.

[00:31:03.940] – Len

Here’s part of what the… Yes, for sure. Real estate in any marketplace is really an exercise of networking. If you’ve been in the business in any market for 5, 10 years, you have a network of people, everybody co-brokes, so everybody’s in the same ball game. Everybody talks to everybody. Yeah, this has been a real word of mouth. We really only started doing paid social media very, very recently. I’ve done some podcasts. Thank you. I have a wonderful public relations firm, Tag, and I’ve done most of the traction we originally got was actually just from press releases. Again, I’ve been in the business for a long time, and I’ve held forums in residential real estate in different parts of the country. I’m not world famous by a long shot. I’m not even locally famous. But people in the business who I am and what I’ve done for a living for a while. So it wasn’t a nobody talking to this topic. It was somebody who had been around for 25 plus years. So some of them wanted to listen a little bit. And so that’s really how it started as a real ground as well. But one of the significant things about Dash, and I heard this through all the many, many interviews we did, if you’re a relatively new real estate agent today, you are working at such a disadvantage.

[00:32:30.090] – Len

As I said, if you’ve been in the business five or 10 years, you have a network of people. But if you start the business today, there’s no mentoring anymore. There’s no hand-holding anymore. You want to, it’s an old expression, the barrier of to get into the residential real estate business is a very, very low barrier. To be successful at it is very high. So these young people who are interested in pursuing this career, what Dash provides for them is we’re leveling them up. We’re providing them content that is easily accessible so they can get very smart, very fast about any community that they’re interested in doing business in. And that is a huge step up from what’s available now. They will spend tens and tens of hours and hours and hours looking for something that that will provide for them in less than minutes in many cases. So I have found that it’s not about dumbing down the content, it’s just making it so remedial, so easily understood, as far as I’m concerned, is the most successful way of proceeding.

[00:33:36.580] – Sean

For Dash. Yeah. Keep it simple. I’m on your site now, right up top, right in the fold that says save time and sell more with Dash. I don’t think it gets more simplified than that. Good for you. All right. Before we jump to the rapid fire round, one more question here, which is if somebody wants to start some SaaS business, I’d say you’re more of a B2B SaaS. You’re serving the realtors. What advice would you give?

[00:34:02.350] – Len

I will tell you that this experience for me has been eye-opening, like I said, and life-changing in a manner of speaking. My enthusiasm for what I’m doing today is reminiscent of what I did and started my first agency 28 years ago. That doesn’t really answer your question about what advice I would give, but I want to tell you something. The worst advice that I got, which I know is one of your rapid-fire questions, so I’m going to jump to it, follow your passion, which in my generation was the follow your passion. What a BS bit of advice. It’s not about, listen, I was passionate. I was a hell of a high school basketball player, and I remember as a walker in college, I was playing against guys as a guard that were five, six, seven inches taller than me and could hit the top of the back, not just dunk. So even as passionate I was about being a professional athlete, it was an avenue. So here’s the other side of that statement. It’s not about following your passion. Get good at something. Get really good at something and lean into it and you will be successful.

[00:35:14.480] – Len

Do lean until you’ll be successful, which of course then opens up a whole universe of other opportunity. But do something well and really lean into it. And I think that that’s where the benefit on so many levels exists.

[00:35:31.760] – Sean

I love it. Great advice. We knocked out two of the rapid-fire round questions here. I love it. No, this is good. Let’s just transition right into it. Next question would be, what is your favorite podcast?

[00:35:46.430] – Len

I love, don’t know you like, I love Scott Galloway. He does Prophecy, and he does something with Karen Swisher as well. I’m a recent devotee of Scott Galloway in the last year or so, plus a little bit. I just think that he is so interesting and eclectic. He can be full of himself as he can be, but so interesting. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I think he’s really special.

[00:36:16.090] – Sean

A good book out there, Algebra of Happiness. You probably.

[00:36:18.790] – Len

Read it. I was about to tell you. I just finished it about a month ago. I read all of his stuff, but that was really… That was wonderful.

[00:36:26.790] – Sean

Yeah, it’s good stuff. Aside from that book, is there another book you recently read and would recommend?

[00:36:33.560] – Len

Simon Schinick, I’ve been reading him. Am I pronouncing his last name right? He’s about the why. He talks about-.

[00:36:41.220] – Sean

Start with why.

[00:36:43.230] – Len

Yeah, start with why. What I find really interesting about this is that I would have loved to have been reading and listening to guys like this 30 years ago. Everybody, as they get older, develops all kinds of knowledge along the way. But there’s something I was reading recently that really resonated with me. Knowledge is finite, imagination is endless. So if you talk about what would you prefer, if you had a choice between having knowledge or having imagination, imagination feeds the world, and I think that I prefer to have that. Yet I will also tell you, in 30 years ago plus or so, I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in old rep, put myself in college and all that stuff. But I find that today that some of the folks that I follow are fascinating and are really enriching in terms of their thought leadership on these kinds of topics about who you are, why you’re doing stuff, which opens up all kinds of possibilities.

[00:37:54.610] – Sean

Yeah, I love that. That’s great. All right, the movie question. What is your favorite movie?

[00:37:59.150] – Len

I was actually an English major, but I also study lots of film, and I wanted to be a director. I try to write some scripts that were just terrible. Listen, I’m not going to say Citizen Cain because everybody says that, but listen, I can go on all the Chinatown. I go back with a great deal of frequency from town and Nicholson in a way. Rowan Polanski in his time was just a wonderful movie.

[00:38:32.200] – Sean

The classic. So going back to the movies that inspired hundreds, if not thousands of other films.

[00:38:39.490] – Len

Yeah. There’s nothing not brilliant about that movie, in my opinion. You can’t… I mean, from obviously dialect and performances, script, music, interior design, Silver, I think, did it. I mean, it was just love that movie.

[00:39:01.990] – Sean

Awesome.

[00:39:02.780] – Len

I could be there in three or four years.

[00:39:05.770] – Sean

All right, last question here is the time-machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

[00:39:13.390] – Len

Well, I was a fiercely competitive guy as a young man, and I don’t think that I stopped to think enough about what was going on in the moment instead of what was happening as a response to what was going on around me. The advice would be, and it’s hard, I work on it every day to try to be in the moment as much as you possibly can because it’s fleeting, obviously. Everybody has an exploration date. They say the worst thing when you get older is to live with regret. I would say to a 30-year-old Len Dugas, try to stop for a moment and take in what’s going on, because it seems to have flown by, as it will, and as people will share the same sentiment, I’m sure it goes by fast.

[00:40:12.940] – Sean

Right on. Great advice. And where can the audience reach you?

[00:40:17.610] – Len

Please visit dash-to-dash. Com. I’m Len Dugum, I’m the founder and CEO of the company, and we are still searching for the last $500,000 plug. By the way, the post money valuation is a $4 million. We think that when we close this round and we finish this and we’re going to take off, I think that with a handful of years, it’s going to be many, many, many times that evaluation.

[00:40:48.640] – Sean

Right on. Awesome. Well, Len, thank you so much for your time.

[00:40:52.170] – Len

Shawn, thank you. I appreciate it. Good set. Enjoy the time.

[00:40:56.770] – Sean

Yeah. All right. We’ll talk to you soon. See you.

[00:40:59.590] – Len

Thanks.

[00:41:00.500] – Sean

Hey, I’d like to say thank you for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts out there you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. And if you have a moment, please head over to Apple Podcast and leave a five-star review. The more reviews we get, especially five-star reviews, the higher this podcast will rank in Apple. So thanks for doing that. And remember, this show is for entertainment purposes only. If you heard any stocks mentioned on this podcast, please do not buy or sell those stocks based solely on what you hear. All right, thanks for your time. We’ll see you.