Company: Rubix Agency
Owners: Alex Realmuto
Year Started: 2019
Employees: 11 – 25
“An Agency Story” is a captivating podcast that delves into the vibrant and often turbulent lives of marketing agency owners. Hosted by Russel Dubree, a seasoned agency owner turned business coach, this series provides a platform for entrepreneurs to share their personal journeys and insights. In the episode “Robust,” we meet Alex Realmuto, the innovative founder and CEO of Rubix Agency, a growth marketing firm that specializes in helping companies scale in the competitive e-commerce space.
Alex shares his transformative journey from working at Target to founding Rubix Agency after a pivotal career shift. This episode unpacks the strategies behind successful acquisition marketing and the integration of performance PR. Listeners will gain unique insights into navigating high-stakes environments, like the notorious mattress wars where Alex played a significant role at Leesa, demonstrating the power of holistic marketing approaches across various platforms including Facebook and affiliate channels.
Alex’s path is filled with intriguing shifts—from launching a quirky subscription sock club to his impactful stint at Leesa, and eventually starting his own agency after a sudden career disruption. His story is a testament to resilience and adaptability, essential traits for any entrepreneur. A humorous anecdote about his early days, breaking into WeWork for office space, and his description of using colorful socks as a personal trademark at Target add a personal touch that resonates with listeners.
This episode of “An Agency Story” not only shares a tale of professional growth and the complexities of digital marketing but also leaves listeners contemplating the resilience needed to pivot and thrive in disruptive scenarios. Alex’s journey encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to think creatively and adaptively, ensuring that the story of Rubix Agency is both educational and inspirational. Tune in to discover how challenges can lead to innovative solutions in the marketing world.
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Show Transcript
0:02 Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel: 0:41 Welcome to An Agency Story podcast. I’m your host Russel. On this week’s episode, we have Alex Realmuto Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rubix Agency, a growth marketing firm based out of the big apple, New York city. Alex sharpened his marketing chops in the highly competitive market known as the mattress wars as the VP of growth for Leesa the well-known mattress brand. An unfortunate changing of guard occurred in 2018, after spending some time in south America, Alex decided to use his vast marketing knowledge to start his own agency. A true puzzle solver, hence the name, Alex has solved the algorithm for helping companies scale at a massive level. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today everyone. I have Alex Realmuto with Rubix Agency. Thank you so much for joining us today, Alex.
Alex: 1:24 Thank you so much for having me, a big fan of the show and excited to share a little bit about Rubix.
Russel: 1:28 Awesome. Can’t wait to dive into it, but if you don’t mind, start us off with a quick overview. What does Rubix Agency do and who do you do it for?
Alex: 1:35 Rubix Agency is a growth marketing firm that works predominantly in the e-commerce space, but our focus is around acquisition marketing for a number of different partners, be they e-comm, B2B, FinTech. Our kind of core competencies around the paid digital scope of work as well as performance pr. What we do is we oftentimes work with companies and brands to understand what their user acquisition targets and goals look like, and then build a bespoke program based on our specializations on the paid side of things and on the performance pr.
Russel: 2:10 I’m guessing as you were coming up in the world, high school and then starting your career was this what you had on the mind? What was the path before owning an agency?
Alex: 2:18 Yeah, I definitely didn’t anticipate owning an agency. Starting it was a bit happenstance. To give you a bit of a background, I actually started my career at Target Corporation on the merchandising side of things. Phenomenal opportunity to learn about working at a big organization, continued development, and the sheer volume that an organization like Target at, a Fortune 50 level can accomplish. Found myself eager to try and do things a little bit more quickly and so I transitioned from Target to joining a digital marketing agency in New York City that centered around social, it was called conversation. From there I actually started a subscription sock club. Each month you would get a pair of wacky, colorful dress socks. That’s I feel like when I started to address that entrepreneurial itch.
Russel: 3:05 Always known I’ve needed to come up with a subscription site of some site. How’d you decide on socks? Are you a sock fan?
Alex: 3:11 Yeah, when I was at Target, I had to wear a suit every day, as I date myself. I found that wearing wacky, colorful dress socks was a nice reminder of, life can be fun. I was pretty well known within the Target walls with someone who was wearing colorful dress socks and saw the appeal and value of it. You can probably see my license plate, it’s sock guy. This was in 2012, so 2013. Subscription businesses were still pretty new. We loved the idea of delivering something once a month. It was a great gift, and then on the business side of things, it was also a little bit easy to plan from an inventory standpoint because socks are pretty much one size fits all. My experience at Target taught me that you can get into trouble pretty quickly if you sit heavy on specific inventory. From a launching of a business standpoint we completely bootstrapped it and we’re able to do that because producing socks isn’t all that expensive.
Russel: 4:02 Very nice. Sorry, you were on, you’re leaving Target. You were starting at an agency. Had to figure out the sock game and please continue.
Alex: 4:08 From Soul Socks, I actually had an opportunity to join my first venture backed startup. It was a company called Hamptons Lane. It was like a Birchbox for artisanal foods. Different than a Blue Apron or Plated, but a curated box of thematic artisanal ingredients and kitchen gadgets. Our first box was Southwestern Fiesta, and so it was this cool lava rock molcajete, along with these cool spices that we discovered, a squeezer thing for limes so that you could make homemade guacamole. That’s where I got my first foray into what growth and acquisition marketing could look like, and is where I started to learn about the power of paid digital, predominantly Facebook ’cause we were doing a lot of advertising there. Interestingly also the first place I learned about affiliate marketing, which is a big part of what we do here at Rubix, we call it performance pr. The value that can exist in building those relationships. Phenomenal experience and enjoyed it. From there I had an opportunity to co-found and join a company called Leesa which was a direct consumer mattress company, competed with Casper, Tuft Needle, Purple. I took all of the experience that I had at Hamptons Lane and I got an opportunity to 100 exit because we were fortunate enough to be able to grow quickly. Taking that holistic marketing approach of, how we’re thinking about what a blended CPA or cost per acquisition might look like and spread it across a number of different channels. That’s very much what we do at Rubix and kind of the ethos of how we work with partners. Basically all of that was learned when I was at Leesa, specifically because selling a mattress online can be tricky.
Russel: 5:48 I remember, you said you were part of this famed mattress wars and so I imagine you were in the trenches in terms of marketing. Tell us about that.
Alex: 5:55 It’s often there are some good articles about the mattress wars. In reality selling a mattress online can be a little tricky because channels like Facebook and Instagram, it was very difficult to demonstrate one mattress versus another without having it undressed. You might have this well appointed pretty room with a mattress with no sheets on it, but otherwise, how could you tell one mattress versus another? We actually found that deploying a much more holistic marketing strategy that we advertised on Facebook, of course, leveraging channels like sponsored content and affiliate was a huge component of our business and marketing mix, and we were focused on that. I attribute a lot of our early success to those relationships that we were able to forge both on the pure play affiliate relationship, but also on the sponsored content and even like podcast advertising realm, we were actually one of the first ever Barstool Sports advertisers and the success that we saw there in terms of our ability to build the brand and have people recall, when they wanted to buy a mattress, to go to Leesa. Effective channel for us.
Russel: 7:05 Was Leesa the most comfortable mattress, or are you allowed to say?
Alex: 7:08 I sleep on the Leesa Hybrid, and I do personally think it’s one of the best mattresses out there. We did put an Eight Sleep topper on top of our Leesa mattress, and I am enjoying the heating and cooling that it offers. I think that Eight Sleep was innovative in what they did. Interestingly, they were struggling in the early days of these mattress wars that we’re talking about, and I actually commend those guys quite a bit. But I do still to this day recommend the Leesa Hybrid Mattress. If I recall, I think Wirecutter, which is a pretty well respected publication owned by the New York Times, also has it as their top pick. It’s nice to see.
Russel: 7:41 Agency stories and mattress advice. Listeners today are getting a double win. That’s a lot of fast and heavy learning curve there. As I understand it, eventually an unfortunate event caused that journey to end, but would get to a new one to begin, if you don’t mind sharing what happened there.
Alex: 7:58 When you go through a super high growth period and you raise money, there can at times be a little bit of a changing of the guard when it comes to the key areas of focus and the team members that are working on it. There was a significant change at the end of 2018 where pretty much the entire C-suite of Leesa, myself included, we were all let go and a new guard came in. It was definitely a bit of a humbling experience, no doubt, but also provided me the catalyst to start Rubix, very happy of that happening, even though at the time, as you can imagine, it was rather disappointing and difficult. I didn’t know what was gonna happen next. I moved to Columbia with another buddy of mine from Leesa, who also was let go. We spent the next three months in Bogotá, Medellín.
Russel: 8:46 I was hoping you’re gonna reference that. We had to make sure, ’cause I think every state has a Columbia, but just so we all know that this was Columbia, the country. Wow, what a fascinating experience and I can’t even imagine the confidence blow and just where’s my life going that might’ve occurred. But this is the good part of the story, we know where it leads to. What actually led to you deciding and starting an agency and what did that process look like?
Alex: 9:06 I had some time on my hands as I was no longer working at Leesa and I was enjoying the time in Columbia. Given kind of the fact that we were a part of this high growth machine we had a lot of connections in the New York City direct consumer network and world. I actually had a number of people reach out and say, hey Alex, I’ve got this Facebook campaign or this Facebook strategy, what do you think about it? Or, we’re doing this TV buy, what are your thoughts? Rubix started as a one man consultancy where I would basically sit down with either CMOs or even founders and ideate on what the different marketing challenges they may be faced with and what I would do. Leesa went from zero to almost$150 million in sales in three years. That third year I was spending$45 million in media, and you get your sea legs fast. I was young and I was able to learn a number of different channels quickly. That kind of holistic growth marketing experience that I was able to live through gave me this unique ability to sit down with all sorts of different founders and CMOs and try to understand their specific business. It started as a consultancy, and then those people would be like, can you actually just manage this for us? I started doing it, pulling those levers
Russel: 10:19 That was my next question, how’d you get from glorified freelancer to full-blown agency and what that path looked like?
Alex: 10:25 Just closed my eyes and no, I’m just kidding.
Russel: 10:27 A lot of good things happen when you close your eyes.
Alex: 10:28 With the kind of growth that I was experiencing, we weren’t even Rubix yet. I had an opportunity to bring people that I’d already worked with in the past, some of whom actually worked with me at Leesa, and we basically started to support in a more day-to-day managerial kind of sense of the word. We started focusing on paid media management, search and social, and performance pr. Those were like the two core pillars that we built Rubix on. We’ve since expanded into things like email design and development, some website design and development, and direct mail, but predominantly it’s performance PR and paid digital and how they can compliment one another.
Russel: 11:06 How’d you come up with the name Rubix? I can make assumptions, but how’d you come up with the name?
Alex: 11:10 It’s pretty straightforward. We look at every business problem that we’re dealing with as a unique one, and so we like to say that we’re problem solvers or puzzle solvers. We basically came up with that idea of, we like to solve the Rubix cube. We like to think that every project that we’re working on is bespoke, and while we’ve got specific ways we do things, trying to understand each respective business and put together a solution that makes the most sense and be that problem solver is what we try and work towards and achieve.
Russel: 11:39 Let me ask the golden question. Can you solve a Rubix cube?
Alex: 11:41 I can’t, but I had one on my desk recently and I just came back and someone solved it and I still don’t know who did it. It’s crazy.
Russel: 11:49 My son went through a Rubix cube phase probably six or seven years ago, and they started making all, I think this was like a global fad. They started making all kinds of crazy Rubix cubes. I remember the first time we were standing out in public and he solved one in a minute, which I mean, kids can solve these things in five seconds. I think it’s like the records. But an older person was standing next to him and saw that and they’re like amazed.
Alex: 12:08 I’m amazed still to this day.
Russel: 12:09 That’s what I told ’em. I was like, son, I never saw a solved Rubix cube in my entire youth growing up. I didn’t know it was actually possible, and here you are. I think he was probably like 10 at the time, just fiddling around, did it in a few seconds and now you see people solve them while juggling three at a time. It’s pretty crazy what people could do. Power of the internet. I attribute it to the power of the internet. What stands out as a big challenge in your mind you felt you had to overcome to get to, let’s just say, a more successful or even less stressful place from the early days?
Alex: 12:34 Some of the early challenges that we were faced with were around developing processes to ensure that the caliber of work would maintain as we continue to grow and scale, as well as understanding how to best manage as a CEO or as an agency owner versus being that one man consultant. It definitely took us a little bit of time to calibrate that. Quite frankly, a lot of the lessons that we learned at Leesa in terms of the checks and balances that our approach to thinking about things from a blended cost per acquisition standpoint or return on ad spend standpoint, trying not to get too into the weeds of attribution but instead understanding and working with businesses that are bought into understanding. Should we be able to continue to grow in an accretive fashion, we recognize that it’s gonna be very difficult to have a total 100% certainty of what each channel is driving from a cost standpoint. But collectively should that work back out, then we can continue to scale.
Russel: 13:32 Process, going back keyword there. I think that’s what a lot of agencies struggle with especially as they grow, knowledge transfer and as you said, quality bar. What was the dos and do nots that as a pro tip standpoint you learned during that time period?
Alex: 13:45 We’re still learning. There’s no doubt about that. What I would say is that we do our best to root everything in the numbers and the data. Having that be your real gauge of, are we hitting our KPIs? Are we achieving the goals that we set out to do? Doing so that way is a nice baseline to understand, Is this working? Yes or no? And then setting up alerts, quite frankly, if we’re seeing wildly disparate changes, whether it’s in how much we’re spending, what the performance looks like. Having those set up early to flag it and try and diagnose what’s happening is something that we’re big believers in and something that we set up and have refined over time. Those triggers give me the peace of mind to sleep a little bit better at night knowing that there are checks and balances there, should something go wrong. The agency version of Canaries. I like it. Obviously you’ve grown in some success. What’s been your secret sauce in getting clients over the time and maybe even how that’s evolved from how you first started to where you’re at today? We have been fortunate enough where the vast majority, if not all of the business that we’ve been able to win has come in from from inbound, which has been awesome. I’m fortunate in the experiences that I’ve had prior to starting Rubix, where I’ve met a lot of great people. I’m passionate about marketing and this game that we’re playing. I recently heard the term solution selling which I just realized I’ve been doing for all of my life, probably. I just didn’t know that there was a term for that. I think our approach has been sitting down with different business owners and saying, let’s just talk about what you’re doing and how we might be able to help. Everything from the passion that we as all Rubix team members have, those are the types of folks that thrive within our environment, are those that are entrepreneurial in nature that are excited about innovating and pushing things forward and have a conviction in some of the different marketing tactics, but are also willing to take chances so long as they’re backed by a thoughtfulness. We definitely encourage that level of testing and exploration because otherwise, as we saw at Leesa, if you sit static you can see the business start to falter.
Russel: 15:53 It’s funny, one of the things you mentioned is these things that you’re doing that you don’t know that they have a name. I think that’s what a lot of entrepreneurs encounter. You solved a problem, you didn’t know this was a thing out there, and then come to find out down the road, oh yeah, this is this, they taught this in business school that I never got to take those classes. You’ve grown your team and it sounds like you’re at that size where up until a certain point you can make it all work, but you’re on the verge of having to start to get new leaders in the business. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of a team and how you’ve had to manage that.
Alex: 16:19 We’ve been conscious about our approach to hiring, as I mentioned in terms of the core ethos of the people that we try and seek out and recruit. That coupled with a lot of the process that we’ve been able to build out has set team members up for success. When it was early days, everyone was just doing everything. Now I’ve been fortunate enough to find a number of different team members who are helping manage specific elements of the business, and with that my job is a little bit easier. I’m successful in the fact that I’ve got a number of strong lieutenants who I trust intrinsically and are making a lot of great decisions on behalf of both the Rubix business and the clients that we represent.
Russel: 17:00 What’s your big focus as an agency right now? What is keeping you up at night or what are you most excited about?
Alex: 17:05 It’s a little bit of both, honestly. For 2023, the thing that we’re excited to continue to scale is our performance pr affiliate arm. We’re doing it in some kind of interesting and innovative ways. It’s undeniable that spend levels are not what they were two years ago, especially for many of the direct to consumer e-commerce businesses. With some of the waning efficacy that is going on with Meta and potentially Google to a degree, we’re bullish on the fact that this affiliate performance pr channel is something that’s pretty untapped. As we’re seeing this shift from the publisher side into where all of these, what we would call high impact media publishers, Business Insider or Refinery29, USA Today, New York Times with the Wirecutter. All of them are leaning and flexing into generating revenue through commerce. The reason that we are intentional in using the term performance pr and not affiliate is that I think marketers of old might say that there’s a bit of a stigma associated with affiliate because it’s like there are weird ClickBanks and you don’t know where your product or service is being advertised. But when managed properly and leveraging those high impact media publications, it can be one of the strongest marketing channels from a return on ad spend standpoint. I think we’ve got a real special sauce into everything, how we do our outreach strategies, how we think about our commissioning and tiering structures. I’m excited about that because I think more and more brands are starting to become aware of this as even a channel or as a marketing tactic. There are a number of agencies out there, and I think we’ve been able to cut out a niche in this space and even compliment it with the skills and knowledge that we’ve got on the paid digital side. We also own and run a publication called Finders and Keep, and so we’ve taken all of what we know from this performance pr side of things as well as what we know from a paid digital side, leverage that from a white listing standpoint. You might see an ad on Instagram that’s a comparison or a review of a specific product. Being very thoughtful in providing quality content that allows the perspective customer to understand what the business is all about, what they do. We’re seeing that work well. On the more technical side, we see click-through rates for this type of content and these types of assets skyrocket compared to what we see for some of the more direct response static ads. Having a wide swath or suite of creative, and quite frankly landing pages that could be driving back to our website that will then drive to the prospective brand or just driving directly there. We’re seeing both tactics work well. That, in summary is what we’re excited about for this year.
Russel: 19:44 I have to ask the key buzzword question right now. How are you and your agency viewing AI and how that fits into the work you do, and or the the landscape of what your agency focuses on?
Alex: 19:55 It’s a super exciting time in what is capable with ChatGPT. We are leveraging it in a number of different ways. From the publishing side, we are using it to help produce some of the articles that we’re writing for that blog that I mentioned. We also leverage it from a copywriting standpoint. What I would say, I know there’s people that are very nervous about this, I don’t think it’s going to replace jobs in reality. What I find personally is that it’s a great way to combat writer’s block in some ways, right? If a team member is working on an ad words copy strategy, it’s a great way to build out 50 different variants of what you wanna talk about. And then, leveraging that to edit versus to start something from complete scratch, we’re obviously using it there. We also work with partners on the Facebook meta side of things that have some interesting AI technology, both in terms of creative development as well as in their ability to do some impressive first party targeting. Those are more tactical things that we’re also incorporating. Generally the team is excited about what we can continue to push the envelope on. I think the next thing that we’re probably thinking about is can we use AI for business development? I’m seeing a lot of people who are starting to experiment with that in this space. While we’ve been fortunate in only focusing on an inbound marketing strategy for growing Rubix, I think that as we’ve scaled, as we’ve operationalized some of our processes, we’re excited to continue to grow. With that, I think an outbound marketing strategy is something that we’re gonna definitely layer on this year.
Russel: 21:26 Robot salespeople. Terminators of sales.
Alex: 21:29 I know, it is basically Skynet.
Russel: 21:30 Yes. We shall see. Truth be told, I’m not the most tech guy in the world but I honestly very much liken AI to what you said, writer’s block, idea generation, maybe cut through the noise of what you’re trying to say faster, but you still have to give it inputs. The questions you ask become just as important, if not more important to the technology. What does the future look like for maybe you and Rubix, together or not together? What does the future hold?
Alex: 21:52 Right now, I think still very much together, enjoying what we’re doing. We wanna continue to be that growth partner for businesses. We’re excited about starting to work with some even bigger brands, some more mature brands that haven’t always innovated the same way. Continuing to grow out the team, we’re hiring pretty actively. Thinking through how we can take this, our lens for growth, and apply it to a number of different categories or businesses. I think there is a bit of an imposter syndrome no matter what you’re doing. Before starting Rubix, honestly I was like, was I just a factor of the mattress wars that existed? With rising tides, all boats rise. Starting Rubix, there was a bit of a, I want to prove it to myself that the same strategies or tactics can apply to a number of different categories and businesses. Proud to say that has backed out and that worked. Now I want to continue to scale and grow it, see what we can do from the performance pr affiliate side of things because I do see a interesting white space opportunity there. There’s a nice trajectory of growth there, ’cause I think it applies to a myriad of different businesses.
Russel: 22:56 I love what you mentioned there of imposter syndrome. I think most everyone I talk to speaks to it, and if they’re not speaking to it, maybe they’re not being a hundred percent truthful, but going back to that notion, I think it is so common in entrepreneurship. Was there a kind of a defining moment where you no longer felt like the imposter anymore?
Alex: 23:12 No. I definitely still have it or feel it, but I would say that what I’m proud of with Rubix is our retention of the brands that we’ve been able to work with. As I mentioned, we launched this business in April of 2019, and to this day we still have three clients that we’re working with that we worked with. While I am still very humbled and honored to be in the growth that we’ve been able to experience, we’ve only just begun and I’m excited to see what we can do and scale now that we’ve got some of the nice foundation and structure to be able to put some fuel to the fire.
Russel: 23:45 Awesome. Looking forward to that. And as you said, 2019, I was like, Alex, that’s not very long ago. But then I realized that’s four years ago now.
Alex: 23:54 Isn’t it wild?
Russel: 23:54 Blows my mind sometimes. Last big question for you, Alex. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Alex: 23:59 I don’t know that it’s necessarily binary but I would lean much towards the side of made. I think that it’s definitely a nurture component far more than it is, nature vs nurture. I think at the core of being an entrepreneur, it’s being innovative and willing to identify or have a lens to identify opportunities. I think that there are certain components of interpersonal, how you operate that make being an entrepreneur, maybe a little bit more palatable, there are a lot of nos and you have to be confident and willing to keep up a positive attitude and dust yourself off and try it again. I think that there’s a passion or excitement for trying to do something differently or more efficiently or better. But at the end of the day, in order to figure that out, you have to have a knowledge base, right? To build that knowledge base, it takes time. That’s why I think in reality, they are made. Instilling that level of confidence to be able to speak up. Anyone can be an entrepreneur and I think that it’s about taking something that you understand and enjoy and figuring out if there’s potentially a different way to do it that’s maybe a bit more efficient.
Russel: 25:08 I love what that boils down to in essence. I think most entrepreneurs I talk to, for any number of reasons, just ask themselves a question, I think there might be a better way or is there a better way? And then set down that path to find it. I don’t know if that’s nature or nurtured when you when someone just have that natural curiosity. We’ll have to do some brain science to compliment the answers to these questions. If people wanna know more about Rubix Agency, where can they go?
Alex: 25:30 Rubix Agency is our domain. You can give us a Google. You can also probably follow me on Twitter. I’m realmuto on Twitter. Feel free to reach out to me personally, Twitter, LinkedIn. For the listeners, you guys want to talk shop, talk about some growth marketing strategies, do some of that solution selling, seriously, I enjoy taking the calls and learning more about respective businesses.
Russel: 25:51 Folks, give Alex a look up on Rubix Agency, talk shop, all the good things he said. So many cool parts of your story and great experience, imagine so many people can identify with. Appreciate your time and joining us on the show today, Alex.
Alex: 26:02 Thank you so much for having me. It was a real honor and I’m a big fan of what you’re doing.
26:09 We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Alex: 26:45 Early days of Rubix and in today’s world it’s not as relevant, but we didn’t have an office at first, and so I had access to WeWork guest pass, as did one of our team members, so we had five people at this time. We had a big internship cohort. We found ourselves breaking into WeWork because that was basically the office that we decided we were all gonna have. In reality, we didn’t actually even have that office. We were working out of the Williamsburg New York WeWork, which like, honestly, if you ever have a chance to see it this is obviously pre Covid. It was like a zoo, it was so busy. For a good two months, we were able to get by with the vast majority of our team not having WeWork passes or whatever. I actually was at a pitch and so I wasn’t there, someone on my team was managing everyone, calls me and goes, Alex, we’ve got a bit of a situation here. WeWork has found out what we’ve been up to and we’ve now been banned from WeWork. Early days we were in fact, kicked out of WeWork. After the WeWork, we actually got an office, but gives you an idea of the humble beginnings and also all of the different potential phone calls that you get in a workday. Some might be about talking marketing strategy. Some might be getting yelled at by the general manager of WeWork Williamsburg for using the place for the last two months.
Russel: 27:59 Ah, yes. The rollercoasters of entrepreneurship. Stealing office space. Didn’t know if that was even a possibility.
Alex: 28:05 We’re a fully remote organization now, so we don’t have to worry about it.
Russel: 28:08 There’s just certain things you gotta do to get started.
