Founder Chats - Max Denevich

0:00Today's episode is brought to you by Dot Tech Domains, and this one hits close to home. Back in 2016 I was building my startup and went hunting for that perfect.com and found next to nothing. So I did what every founder does, settled. Here's what I wish someone had told me. You're building a tech startup, just get a Dot Tech Domain. It instantly tells investors and customers what you're about. Don't overthink it. Secure your Dot Tech Domain today from any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, slack, and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand. So they make better plans. Write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops. If you're running Clawed Code cursor or any agentic workflow, unblocked is worth a look. Learn more at getunblocked.com slash code story.

1:00This episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If your team is collecting large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, but still struggling to get timely answers, Mesmo can help. Mesmo is an active telemetry platform that processes and enriches observability data in real time, before it's stored or analyzed. That means lower data volume, lower cost, and faster root cause analysis across your existing observability tools. To see how it works, get a demo at mesmo.com slash code story. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. If you are building with AI coding tools, but your features keep breaking, you need to check out BrainGrid. It is the product management agent for AI builders. BrainGrid turns messy ideas into clear specs, tasks, and prompts that coding agents like cursor and Clawed can actually build the right way. Real software, not fragile prototypes. Start free at braingrid.ai.

2:04Hello listeners. Today we are dropping another episode in our Chats series, but expanding the audience set to include more folks. This episode is Founder Chats, hearing from those scaling the companies themselves. In this episode, we are talking with Max Dinovich, co-founder and CRO of Loyalty Plant. Max is going to share with us the road he traveled, entering into this industry, his go-to-market strategies, scaling across geographic regions, and much, much more. Well Max, thanks for being on the show today, thanks for being on code story, before we talk about products and scale and all the things we are going to get into with your journey, tell us a bit about your path to this point. What experiences shaped the way you think about business and leadership before Loyalty Plant? Honestly, I believe it all started with video games. I was a serious gamer as a kid, and that's what pulled me into computers, into logic, into math. The curiosity eventually turned me into the IT, but somewhere in my first or second year

3:09of university, I wasn't wired to just code, I wanted to create things, come up with ideas, teach them, talk about them with people, so I needed the product side. So I started to find some opportunities for me, could I find that combination in the just a regular job, traditional roles, but to narrow for me, you're either a marketer or a developer or a salesperson, but I wanted to touch all sides of the product at once. So I started looking at startups, figured that was like the only place for me, like a student that no experience could actually do that. So it landed me in my first story, my first startup, it was like Android TV connectors. It was early days before Google Chromecast, before Smart TV, all this stuff, and it was some kind of device that turned your regular TV into Android machine. I did marketing, I did B2B sales, B2C sales, and we sold actually thousands of units, I believe, something like that, landed one big retail deal, but the company's margins

4:11were really bad. Money ran out, and it was my first real lesson that enthusiasm doesn't pay salaries, you need revenue, real regular revenue, or you just bring time. Yeah, and the second thing was like, the technology, it was, I became a little slow end of G, this was the hyper-local marketing, proximity marketing, they, early Internet of things, types, so the idea was to connect brands, advertisers, with the audices of different mobile apps by detecting them, and those users won't pass the store or stuff like that, pushing them relevant offers in real time. It was very ambitious, very complex, it was like three different audios to surf at once, it was like brands, app developers, physical retail locations, we had some pilots, pilots had zero commercial sales again, three years, seeing money burn out again, so the pattern across both, regular thinking broke and go to market, learned other that, did the ground

5:13technology instead of around the problem is almost always a wrong selling point. So the actually, the bigger startup is actually how I met us, our funders here at Loyal Spland, the time he was running like early versions of Loyal Spland, it was some kind of multi brand, Loyal Spland startup, and they were using QR code scanning for customers chicken in the restaurants, I went to pitch him while making customers scan QR code, just put the night beaten in the store, and customers just stepped their phone down, much to move the experience. He said, nah, interesting idea, wrong moment, blah, blah, but that conversation stuck a couple of years later than us looking at what to do next, and noticed that mobile apps were really becoming a real thing, was like to have 14, 15, 16, 17, the rest of the loyalty, digital engagement, the full space was like exploding, and I just remember was, and that's how I ended up at Loyal Spland. Excellent, I appreciate that overview, I'd love to dive into, you know, your entrance into

6:17this industry, at what point did you realize that you wanted to work with complex traditional industries, rather than consumer apps, or quote unquote, easy tech, and really alongside that, why food tech and QSR, you know, which stands for quick service restaurants, what made you believe this industry had deep structural problems, were solving with technology? I don't think it was like the little bit of choice, honestly, I just keep noticing that the biggest problems in the places that nobody was really using technology yet, when these traditional industries, like restaurants, for example, and where was the gap, real gap. And I just started searching, can you place for me, was like consumer apps were exciting, but also incredible crowd, everyone was building the next social thing, the next consumer product, competition was brutal, and just we take all traditional industries, like restaurants, for example retail chains, full of the opposite problem, massive scale, real money, moving through the system, but technology adoption like 10 years behind, and they keep between

7:21what was possible and what was actually being used was enormous. And there's also something about the sales complexity that appeals to me, in consumer tech, you're chasing viality, because it's good to be as well, but then to be for traditional industry, you're solving like operational problems for real people, and you can see like they clearly. And the rest of the industry is a while old plant, the rest of the industry touch billions of people every day, around some incredible thin margins and the relationship between the restaurant and the guests, like fundamentally personal, the massive scale, thin margins, human relationships at the core, once I saw that I just couldn't look away. It was some kind of personal frustration around like this food tech market and all this restaurants, because as a consumer, I kept losing those punch cards, these punch cards, the ones that you get stamped every time you buy a coffee, and after 10 stamps you get

8:22the free one, and I'd lose them constantly. And I thought, this is the entire loyalty strategy of most restaurant, a piece of cardboard. Yeah, and that was really interesting for me, then the digital loyalty starts at the building, apps, digital cards, point system, and that was exciting, but the loyalty programs like the logic before them, the terrible coffee chain offers you like free sounds. So from the ice cream cone, after your, after your, I don't know, 10th visit, and because of the loyalty, so how does that change my behavior, how does it make me feel anything about the brand? And most loyalty programs were just discounted machine by the ones, so no personalization, no journey, no reason for a customer to actually care. And on top of that, it was about delivery problem, because all these aggregators, like the leaders of the tech market were absolutely sure, but again, like customer ordering through

9:26delivery on the berets, and restaurants like paying a huge amount of commissions, like 30% to these aggregators, and they had no idea who just bought from them, the loyalty happened, and just happened, the ordering experience, most of the time, lived in like completely different worlds. So you just collect points in store, but order delivery through a third-party aggregator, and the whole, just guess Jordan was broken. So that's why I really love to start, for example, because it's like the most competitive business in the world, and you are fighting for like few extra visit pairs of miles, a few extra dollars per order. And at that scale, even small improvements in how you keep customers engaged, and come and back, translate the millions, that's what made it real for me, every technology decision actually matters for them. Sure, you saw some problems that needed to be solved, and you saw some optimization opportunities

10:27in this industry, and you went for this, that's great. Today's episode is brought to you by .techdomains, and this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, when I was building my own tech startup, I went on the hunt for that elusive.com. Looked high, looked low, and guess what I found? Nothing. What I did find cost me an arm and a leg. So I did what every founder does under pressure, through an extra letters settled for the less than optimal name. And here's what I wish someone had said to me back then. Noah, you're building a tech startup. Just get a .techdomain. Techstartup.techdomain. It could not be more obvious. It tells investors, customers, and anyone who looks at your website really, that tech is at the core of your build, and I've kicked myself plenty since. Especially when I see the clean and sharp names tech companies have landed on .tech. So take it from someone who learned it the hard way.

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12:32BrainGrid.ai. What made you choose loyalty plant then? I believe the first thing that got me was the Core HD behind the product. It was a bit of a sass. It sounded really cool back then, and it also had this bit of a layer, a consumer-facing app that real people actually used. I was one of those people. I tried our clients' apps as a customer and I could feel the potential. The product was very different from what we have today, for example, no online order in its hall, none of the marketing, gamification mechanics that are now our core. But the foundation was there, the idea was right, and that's rare indeed to be. Then you can feel the value from the user sites as well, and that tells something. The foundation was real, coming from two startups, the product itself was the problem, this was different, that it was something we were building on.

13:36It needed a lot of work. The product went through May's transformation after that, but the starting point was solid. And what wasn't really working was like to go to market, specifically like partnerships and international sales. Nobody had cracked it yet, and that was exactly the kind of challenge I'm drawn to. The team had mostly given up on partnership. To be honest, I remember like salespeople joking. Another guy who is going to try partnerships, good luck. Yeah, and that's kind of stupid, this doesn't scare me at all, and it motivates me. Then there was a big picture, the company had raised investment, but was still searching for a repeatable growth model. That's a pretty normal stage for a startup, you're not sure yet, but that uncertainty is also there, you learn the fastest. I also read a new verse from this big startup I mentioned, and I knew how he thought what he was building towards.

14:37And that really mattered. Joining the company is also joining the person leading it. So I just believe the timing was right. My bio-lapse also, these are the loyalty restaurants, the restaurant tech. It was all accelerating. The window was open, but I wasn't joining a success story. I was joining really a problem of that needed solving, and that actually the more interesting structure. So with loyalty plant, you're often referred to as a co-founder today. How did the transition happen from an executive role to shaping the company's future at that level? Not typical co-founder story. I didn't start the company in a garage, and I joined it was already a team that were investors, that was a product, but he doesn't think the company that exists today is a fundamentally different company from the one I joined. And it helped to almost die for transformation to happen. And the co-founder part came from being the person who would just to stay and help rebuild something here.

15:38So in time I joined, it was a company. It was a big player on the local market, but we also raised a couple of millions of investment to spread abroad, to become a real international, big international player. But it was a tough way. Yeah, and it was actually a situation that many startups and growth stage companies face, especially the raised investment that haven't reached break even yet. You just hit a wall, and that wall forces a decision from everyone in the room. So our investment was running out. What was very transparent with the team, it was like a couple of months after I joined the team. Roughly six months of runway left, and it was like two options. Close enough big deals, passed with a bronze front payments to keep going or get additional funding from existing investors. Neither was granted. And then the growth team, the real started and the growth team, the people who could have actually driven sales

16:40and pulled us through almost entirely left to competitor. Then the people who are supposed to save the company leave because they don't believe it can be safe. That's a very specific feeling. And I also had an offer from that same competitor, significantly more money than I was making. But the stories I turned down, they were fair and state, not because it was like the smart financial move, definitely was not. My girlfriend at the time actually broke up with me, all of this decision. She could not understand why I choose a company that might not exist in the six months, but a salary and stability. I get it. It was not rational by any normal measure. But I believe something to the people living did not, that there was a real company inside one waiting to come out. It's like a real MVP. The product needed transformation. The go-to-market needed completely building.

17:40The whole approach to the market had to change, but the partner model with being testing could actually work. I could feel it. And I went back to the partners with being building relationships with a lot of them, try to and push them hard. We brought a couple of strong clients that moment of crisis with real upfront payments. I went back to partners with the building relationship and brought in a couple of strong clients, the real upfronts. And it wasn't the rescue, but it was enough of a signal, enough to show investors that the new model had legs. But if they gave us one more tranche, we could reach break even and grow from there. And we did. And that's really when the old company ended and the new MVP company began. Everything that came after the global expansion, the enterprise clients, the product we have today, that's a total different company.

18:41And I found that version of the company. And the decision to stay and rebuild rather than walk away is what it makes or find. Not a title or a piece of paper. So sometimes the company has to almost die for the right version of it to be born and being there for that moment and choosing it is what makes someone founder. Cool. So then, a lot of the plant was close to running out of investment. What were the first decisions that fundamentally changed the company's trajectory? Oh, that's a good one. I think what made it real for me was looking at the numbers. The company had gone through like millions of dollars in investment. And the result was a couple of dozen clients outside the home market spread across a handful of countries. So that's not struggling company. That's a model that simply doesn't work. And first decision was don't panic. Insert the wrong move. No emergency. You fundraise at terrible terms.

19:43No slashing the product team. No pivoting to something completely different. The core idea had potential. It's seen it like resonated with clients. The product's focus and positioning needed to shift. And it did over time, but the immediate problem was how we were selling and distribution what we had. So the shift was like instead of hiring more sales people to knock on more doors and investing like a lot of money in marketing upfront, we went to other direction entirely. We stopped treating partners like a site channel and made them a primary engine. So all these like post-providers, integration platforms, technology operators, marketing agency, the people already embedded inside the restaurant chains. But more than that, we did, we didn't just integrate with them technically. We turned them into like real advocates of our solution. So they don't just passing leads. We were recommending us because our product made

20:45the offering stronger. And we cut costs part, but strategically protected what was working, cut what was not. And the story here is how we landed our first enterprise customer outside our home country. And it was like 2018 or 2019. And it was like Papa John's. And the proof came with it. Papa John's UAE, they closed this deal together with our post-partner in the region. And Papa John's is a like huge brand, multi-culture franchise. So 10 global QSAR brand, 5,500 locations worldwide. And we had never worked with the company at that scale. And we did not sell to them directly. Our part did the introduction. We brought the product and the expertise and we just closed the deal together. And the deal became like the template for us. It expanded to Papa John's in other countries, like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, eventually like 10 plus regional variation, one relationship, one model, multiple markets.

21:48So we just, the turnaround was that we just stopped asking how to raise some money and started asking how do we build something that we did. And that shift is what changed like the trajectory. Good stuff. Okay. So then what were the key milestones that turned out loyalty plant from a struggling company into a global enterprise business? From the first major client, scaling across 30 countries, he mentioned Papa John's being a big one. There's a spectrum there of it, what you went through. Tell me about those milestones. If I had to pick one milestone, I believe all the people in the company would expect me to say Papa John's. And yes, that was really huge. It was like the opening, like the door opening deal for us. But the rail shift started before that deal. It was like the decision to build the model itself. Like Papa John's was just the first big proof point but the changes that made it possible were already happening. So it was not at least a milestone. It was like one model is like partnership in the price model.

22:49And then the serious of proof points that kept building on each other. So it started with like this pivot in 2018, shift from direct sales to partner, go to market externally, almost nothing to show internally like foundations being laid. Then this Papa John's first real proof point in the price brand partnership channel, it was give us confidence in the template. After that, go with an expected accelerator and say restaurant desperately needed direct digital channels. Now aggregators, now if it's valid, it was like real work between the restaurant and aggregators. And we already built the infrastructure for the regional engagement. So just new clients came to us. After that, like in what it feels, what it felt, growth kicks in, the partner model just starts working region after region. MENA, Europe, CIS countries, like it was like 25 new markets in five years.

23:50There's a lean team, very lean team, and no use external investment. And after that, like enterprise validation happened, the proof under a microscope, you know, this getting through this QC subway, Wendy's, Duncan's, RFP, and compliance audits, like these processes are very intense. Security reviews, legal, IT integration, pilot evaluations, I don't know, like I think them isn't just a sale. It's like proof your product and organization of world class. And today we serve like thousands of restaurants in more than 35 countries, working with some of the biggest brands in QSR, brands I personally eat at. That still feels real for me. So the real milestone wasn't any single deal. It was like the moment we realized the model was repeatable that what work in UI evil working in the UK, in the US, in MENA, in Europe, did a different part here, but did the same logic.

24:50Excellent, I appreciate you sharing that. Okay, this episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Your coding agents have access to your code base. Maybe you even connected other tools via MCPs, but access doesn't mean context. Agents can't reason across MCPs. They don't know your architectural decisions. Your team's patterns or why the API was shaped the way it is. So agents look in the wrong place and deliver bad outputs. Then you spend time correcting. More loops, more tokens. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, slack, and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand. So they make better plans. Write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops. If you're running cloud code, cursor, or any agentic workflow, Unblocked is worth a look. Learn more at getunblocked.com. Slash code story. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo.

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26:52So this will be interesting because you've worked a lot across different regions, right? US, UK, MENA, Europe, and CIS. What did you learn about scaling the same type of product across very different markets and very different markets? What doesn't translate between all of them? To be honest, geography has its own challenges, and every market is different, but the harder lesson for us was about segments. Specifically, what happens to the new project evolves beyond the entire customer's time. Let me explain. For years, the low supply growth came from SLVs. Lots of clients, smaller tickets, simple mechanics, like loads of cards, cash back, punch cards, basic discounts, it worked. Clients ordered an app they could afford one on the SaaS model. The product felt innovative, like everything was good. But enterprise changes completely. Enterprise marketers are smart and demanding.

27:53They want control groups. They want smart marketing. AI-driven campaigns, giveifications, a right-tracking, like all this stuff. And they are not just buying software. They buying expertise, customer success, a partner who understands their business. So that's a much higher price point. So the challenge for us was actually, as the product evolved for enterprise, SLV clients started getting less attention literally. Not because we stopped caring, because the clients still get value. We love them. But the product grew beyond what many of them really needs. Enterprise is now the majority of our new sales. And SLV has become less than half-framing, I believe. That's not abandonment. It's a natural shift, but it's worth naming it honestly. Then you can need to enterprise as a market. You make a choice even if you don't make it

28:54consciously, I don't know. But on actual geographies, I think what differs is like a partner ecosystem, because there's some local players, some international players who are working on markets, the regulatory environment, discretization rules, stuff like that, some legal, like conserved policies, like we adopted product a lot. But local integrations, for example, payment providers, we need them for our e-commerce engine to do a timeline payment, for example, delivery partners, stuff like that. And also the pace of decision making. For example, Mina moves fast when the right person says yes. But Europe has more process. The core product travels well, I'd say. But the sales motion and the integration layer have to adapt every time. The market for us, the market that doesn't translate is not a geography. It's a segment. So we learn that the learn of the hard way

29:55and we're still navigating the consequences. Sure, that's challenging, for sure. Okay, let's flip into some more go-to-market. You built new go-to-market strategies that now generate over 90% of new sales. What did you change compared to a classic SaaS sales playbook? And why did it work in enterprise QSR? The classic SaaS playbook assumes that your buyer is actually looking for a solution. In enterprise QSR, they're not. They're being approached, but 50 vendors who all say the same thing. You don't be... And you don't be by being louder. You've been by being already trusted. So in enterprise restaurant chains, there's no single decision maker, marketing, IT, operation, regional directors. Sometimes the franchisee, everyone has a say. The standard inbound, outbound, them contract-close cycle does not map to that reality.

30:56And what we changed, what we changed, instead of showing up as a vendor, mocking on doors, we positioned as an extensive of technology partners already embedded in those restaurants. For example, when a post provider say you should talk to oil to plant, that conversation starts at a completely different trust level. So that's the first thing. The second shift, consultative selling, not them are driven selling. In the price market, it is a smart. They've seen every PGDec. What works is like speaking their language. How do you prove ROI? How do you measure real input on a customer behavior? What does the data actually show? So you come in like a doctor who has already studied the symptoms, not the sales person with a brochure. And that combination like partner distribution plus consultative selling, is what drives like 80% or 90% of our new sales now.

31:57And in the price B2B distribution beats product. You definitely need the right product, but if you are not inside the right relationships, nobody will ever see it. Okay, let's go ahead. It's a market reality today, right? margins are shrinking, aggregators dominate, and costs are rising. That's just the sort of the playing field you're in right now. What's actually happening on the ground? Right now in QSR and FoodTech, and how should companies adapt? Here's what I see when I talk to QSR leaders today. Almost every established chain already has an app. A loyalty program, a CRM platform, analytics, dashboards, everything. The digital infrastructure is there, but 6 to 12 months after launch, the pattern is the same. Active users level off, aggregators steal a huge share of digital orders, and really revenue impact is hard to prove. They have activity, but they don't have impact and result. Market today, first of all, it's like the aggregator trap.

32:58The aggregators get personal digital distribution, but took the customer relationship. The restaurant paid like 30% of order to no commission per order and ended up like zero data on who just bought from them. Now brands are trying to get that relationship back, but they are doing it from a position of dependency, and most of them are going about it like in a wrong way. So the first mistake, like launching an app just to help one, we have an app becomes the goal. Nobody asks what does this app actually change about customer behavior? What journey does it create? Without a design customer journey, and boarding, head information, reactivation, the app is just branded ordering screen, like they did machine wave your logo on it. The second mistake, confusing discounts with loyalty. Most brands still build their loyalty programs around cashback, promo codes, must discount.

33:59What that actually teaches customers is to come back only when the price is right. So you are not building loyalty, you are building price sensitivity. So the brands leaning on loyalty have moved to experience late mechanics, so like gamification, status progressions, surprise moments, personalized rewards, and everything like should feel earned rather than bold. And the third mistake is obsessing over features instead of outcomes. I see a lot of brands, fans seeks, models negotiating, which specific feature platform must have. Features they will probably never fully use. So while completely ignoring whether the customer journey makes any sense, technology is only useful as a strategy behind it. And what actually works in QSAR specifically is like, design the customer journey first, invest in your people on the ground,

35:01train and motivate your staff at every location to be part of this digital experience, communicate value clearly to users. So they actually want to engage with your loyalty program. And again, human interaction still matters enormously. And then yes, use data, use AI to personalize and automated scale, but let it surface strategy, not replace it. So and also don't put money in the online. It's if your installed team can't explain why they have methods. I believe on the market, most QSAR brands don't have a technology problem right now. They have a strategy problem, dressed up as a technology problem. So once you understand that, you know exactly what to fix. Awesome. Okay, so tell me about a decision that you got wrong, right? As entrepreneurs, builders, we make mistakes all the time, right? But tell me about when you got wrong, and when it cost the business, and what did it teach you as a leader?

36:02Oh, the biggest lesson wasn't about a strategy or a market. I still believe it. It was about people specifically about what matters most than you're putting it together. And different points in our journey, especially when we had budget and felt pressure to grow fast, we had for experience. We brought in people with impressive trackups, senior titles, years in the industry. On paper, it was perfect. But what we kept learning over and over is that experience without ownership is a problem. In a growth stage company, you need people who take things personally, see a gap and feel it without being asked. So who sell, not because they have the perfect feature set, but because they believe in what they're building and can transfer the belief in the customer. That's a soft skill, but it's the hardest one to hire for. And we had cases where their experience sales people spent their time

37:07asking for product changes instead of sailing. Like they wanted like the perfect deck, the perfect feature list, the perfect setup. Meanwhile, Vas, for example, I was seeing, was closing deals with like the same product, because he approached every conversation as a product selling session, like a doctor, not a future demo. So also the world is changing faster right now. The skills that might have five years ago aren't the same today. AI is helping as a draft proposal, a response to RFPs faster, handles parts of the sales process that used to take days. Traditional HDR roles are shrinking. So that says, can stand this ownership. The state constant is ownership, curiosity, and adaptability. So the things you can't automate. So the cost of getting this wrong isn't just money. It's time, it's the energy, your team spends,

38:07managing people who don't feed. It's the trust you listen internally than the senior hire doesn't deliver. So it's all about the values. So values are not a soft HR thing. They're a real business risk. Then someone doesn't share your values, values, every interaction costs more than it should. Then we do everything most faster. We just stop chasing resumes and started hiring for ownership and feed. And the business got better after that. Gotcha. Okay. Next last question. So what advice would you give founders building B2B products for traditional industries today, right? Especially around scale, partnership, and staying relevant? The most dangerous thing you can do in the traditional industry is assume that being right about the problem is enough. It's not. Find one segment first and make it happy. Don't try to serve everyone. They learn this the hard way.

39:09SAP and Enterprise look like the same market from the outside but they are completely different games, different rules, different expectations, different economics. Pick one, go deep, prove it works. If you try to fetch across segments too early, you'll end up building a product that's too complex for smaller customers and not focused enough for the bigger ones. So they're ready to let go of a segment if that's the business needs. Also build with your partners, not around them in traditional industries. The real bottleneck is almost never your product. It's trust and access. The people who already have trust on site, your target customers are your most valuable asset. So don't treat them as a federal channel. It's too simple. Make them a part of your go-to-market from day one. And hire for ownership, especially early on, a person with a founder, mindset,

40:10and three years of experience will outperform a polished enterprise trap with 15 years at your stage almost every time. Skills change fast. AI is a writing that sells people need to know what marketers need to do. What doesn't change is whether someone takes their possibility and figures things out. And about the enterprise, maybe. Enterprise takes longer than you think. But it's more durable than anything else. Once you're an inside, a global brand, tech stock, you've passed the compliance process. You have a position that's very hard to this place. So the patience to get there is a real test. Don't build for everyone. Build for something specific. Make them successful and let that success pull you forward. That's how companies that last actually get built. That's fantastic advice. Max, thanks for being on the show today. It was a pleasure chatting with you and learning about all the things you've gone through as a

41:10startup founder and most recently with loyalty plant. And you go to market strategies and all the successes you've had, the things you've learned and what your advice would be to founders think is super valuable information. So thanks for sharing it. Thanks for being on the show today. Yeah, that's what it meant. Max has run the gamut on startup lessons to share from go-to-market plans to mistakes to enterprise growth and the differences between regions. My big takeaway is this. If you keep your head down like Max, he will find your way through the difficult decisions and past in taking on an industry. If you'd like to connect with Max, check the show notes for all the appropriate links. And thanks again for listening.