How to create a winning proposal with Dylan Baskind from Qwilr

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of small indie creative agencies, giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. Our aim is to provide some useful advice and inspiration to others, as well as learn from each other and others we get to come talk on the show. This is our 15th episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction and today we have Dylan Baskin, who is the co-founder of Quilla, all the way from Australia.

00:25 Hello, Dylan. Hello, John. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. How are you doing? Really well, very well. How's the winter? You know what? Just to make you tell us in the UK, we just probably had like a 25 degree day. I hate you guys.

00:43 It's not always like that, but we've just basically had a very, very temperate day. Nice. That sounds like our summer. Yeah, something like that.

00:54 Which city are you in? We're in Sydney, Australia. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I've never been, but I've got friends who live there and I'd love to visit it. It is a wonderful city. Sydney is not the best at anything, I think, but it's the best at being a lot of things at once, if that's a useful description.

01:14 You've got a bit of a background in design engineering yourself, haven't you? That's right. I spent about eight years or so as a consultant, designer and software engineer. I did that really across the full gamut. I did brand and identity design. I also did interaction design, interface design. Then I did front-end builds and all the way to backend server-only type work. I got to experience this full circle of product development. Were you doing that on a freelancer basis or were you in agencies working directly for clients? Yeah, I've probably been about six months or so working for someone else in my life.

02:04 The rest of the time, I've always been working for myself. I think the reason is, and this is just pro-tip for anyone trying to hire into an agency, when I tried my hand at agencies, I would get hired as a designer. I'd be like, "Okay, but just caveat, I'm also an engineer and would like to be involved." They were like, "Yeah, no worries." Then they'd sit me over in the design team and I'd never see an engineer. Then conversely, I'd get hired as an engineer and I'd be like, "By the way, I'm a passionate designer and want to be involved." Yeah, yeah. They'd sit me in the engineering team and I'd never see design. That became very dissatisfying very quickly. That was, I guess, a large part of the reason why I left agency world. Yeah, agencies do tend to, at least they used to, separate those disciplines out quite distinctly. It's understandable. I know it's a hard thing to hire for as in a generalist, all the things person. Yeah, it's something I actually keep my eye out for when I'm hiring engineers, or designers, or whomever. Yeah, I think that's a really good philosophy. I think getting employees who have skills across disciplines can really lead to not only a much more talented team, but a lot more collaboration across the team. I'm assuming while you're at these agencies, probably working for them and also for yourself, that you're obviously writing a lot of proposals.

03:31 You must have been hitting some sort of frustrations with the process of creating them, and that led you on to what you did next. Sure. I guess the sort of proposal came. For me, I was at one man's shop, but in the latter half of my career, I was working for giant multinationals, working for government, doing big contracts. That was cool, but to get the proposals out the door on a contract without value was very challenging because I knew for a fact that my competition was a 50 man agency or a 20 man agency. It had to be a really compelling proposition for why they should choose me as this sole operator versus these other guys. You put so much effort and time in trying to improve the caliber of client and get to that next run. One of the few things in business that you get this crappy trade off of, huge amount of energy, huge amount of investment, potentially no gold at the end of the rainbow because maybe someone doesn't say a great proposal, but look, we're not going to go with you. You've just wasted four days of your life. For me, that was a big frustration. As my caliber of client got better and I kept wanting to get bigger and better and bigger and better, more and more time got sunk into these proposals and trying to make them world class. But then I only landed one out of eight, one out of 10 of them. That for me, with a major frustration, was like, how do I produce this stellar collateral really, really fast without having to sacrifice that time cost? I imagine everyone listening now can sympathize with that. Yeah. The other thing for me was one of my hacks to try and jump ponds, go from a little pond to a slightly bigger one to a slightly bigger one in terms of clientele. Because I was both designer and engineer, I used to make these tailored pitch websites. I'd certainly probably actually credit that with actually getting me out of my first little pond. My little pond of friends and like, oh, I'm doing some web stuff. Instead of jumping out of that little group of clients, yeah, it was building these custom pitch websites that encapsulated what I was offering.

05:40 It was designed and it was engineered by me for their express purpose of landing this job. That was pretty powerful in getting bigger and better clients, but then it was even a huge time cost to executing. These were things you were building and coding by hands.

05:56 Correct. Basically, there was no other option. I could have made 100 Squarespaces. But if you know anything about anything, you're like, that's a Squarespace site. I can do that. Also, a rather expensive strategy. Yeah. That was sort of frustration I felt in the proposal space.

06:15 Great. Then that was obviously the genesis for Quilla. Quite right. Yeah, Quilla came entirely out of just a natural need for me to basically try and get these high, great looking websites produced quickly and not sort of yet incur that time cost tension between not landing a proposal and getting it across the line. It started life as a totally internal, horrible tool that produced one website, which was my pitchy website. It could only be controlled through a series of command line terminal arguments. It was very much not a product.

06:53 Well, that's perfect. That's a true MVP, right? It was the most minimal of minimal products. The more of these I produced and the more sophisticated that internal tool became, the more I started getting people, the companies who I was pitching out being like, "Hey, this is awesome. How did you do that? You turned it around so quickly. Could we do that?" I'd actually done a business when I was 19. That business went pretty far, but not far enough.

07:22 It was a hard experience. I discovered doing product was a really, really hard thing to do. For a long time, I was quite hesitant. I was like, "Hmm, I know you guys are all giving me this positive feedback, but I'm not quite ready to jump ship just yet." It was probably like a year, probably, of people just being like, "This is awesome. This is awesome. Can we do this? Can we have it? Can we have it?" before I sort of ticked over and decided, "All right, let's productize this command line creation I've got." Fantastic. How did you get it from there to being something that you could ship and that other people use? Elbow grease and a lot of late nights. One of the nice things about being a designer and developer is that you can just build things.

08:05 You're not too dependent on co-founders or employees or anything like that. There was probably about three months where I minimized any incoming work and just concentrated on building an actual MVP for Quilla. How did you go about getting your first customers?

08:26 Were they the people you'd already spoken to and had seen your proposals in the past? Well, the funny thing is that the people who had said they'd love to hear that were gigantic multinational design organizations that reported to some global head office.

08:42 At the time, it was like, "Look, I don't think this is really going to... It's not going to integrate with your SAP Oracle database." No, we actually started much, much more. We said, "I was coming out from a small business perspective. The nice thing about the product was I was able to design it entirely for my needs and challenges." I was like, "That's the right place to start because that way to mapping between what I know intimately in terms of challenge can map to what these other people are probably experiencing." It was a bit of madness. I think anyone who's tried to decide anything can relate. You go on Facebook, you hit your email list, your phone list, call up the friend friend that runs an agency or whatever. For that first 10 people, you just need to get it in there. I always say to anyone who asks me about product building, whatever you've built, and no matter how much careful and precise forethought you've given it, you've built the wrong thing and there's a bunch of holes that you don't even know about yet.

09:52 To me, I think that's what that first customer group was about, was just about discovering where those gaping holes were in terms of functionality and feature. What did we not anticipate? There were so many things we discovered early on that what was the requirement to make Quilla work.

10:14 I guess that must have been one of the major challenges, right? That everybody has their own way of doing proposals and they've got pretty locked in processes that they've been following for a long time that just haven't changed. Then giving them a tool that obviously doesn't have infinite flexibility, they've got to adapt that process to fit it into the box that you designed for them to an extent and see the benefits of doing so at the same time. It's a bit of a shift in process for them to make the jump. That's the word, I think, process. The interesting thing is the value to be derived. If you just look at a Quilla page and you compare it to the vast majority of proposals that are produced today, it's very evident what they get. Where the actual challenge was around process was around all the other tools that fit into proposals because people are like, "Well, we use FreshBooks for our accounting and we use PipeDrive as our CRM and we've got some user data thing that we store." Most of the pushback we got in our first year, everyone said, "These proposals look amazing, so much better than what I do now, so much faster." But I needed to integrate with my CRM and I needed to integrate with my accounting and I want to pay now with Stripe or whatever. That's where actually the majority of the challenge was for us in terms of pushback. It was the edges of the process, if that makes sense. People were willing to replace the apple pie of their process. It was just all the edges that they wanted.

11:57 Keep the same ingredients. Yeah, that's right. Integrations can always be a bit tricky. Along this path, where would you say that the sort of tipping point is that you were convinced that you had a business here and then when you thought that, "Yeah, we have a fully fledged product that we can put some weight behind and start marketing this seriously." That's an interesting question.

12:26 First of all, I would say I was fundamentally convinced and am still that it was a good...

12:38 There was serious value to be delivered. I knew that for a fact, I guess, having come from experiencing the challenge myself. Now, whether I have a caveat, there was still a significant gap between this is valuable and this is a product that serves that value to will it work as a business. One of the major challenges that we faced, and I think in many respects still face, is that it's a paradigm shift what we're offering. Now, if I imagine for you, John, and Fred, for the listeners of this podcast, it's probably not a paradigm shift. You're probably like, "Yeah, websites is a proposal that makes total sense to me." But there's like 99% of other people that are like, "Oh, so I'm not going to use a PDF now." You're like, "No, no, no PDF. You need a website instead." They're like, "A website, but a PDF, and how does it come together?" There was a real challenge for us about helping people to understand that Quilla did map to their business and it did map to their needs and their sort of concerns. In the initial phase when I was trying to work out, will this be a business instead of, "Do I know that this is a good idea?" Yeah, there was a sort of funny period of the difficulty of trying to educate people that this was relevant to their business. There was an interesting shift for us because we initially marketed Quilla as documents for the future, I think, with our first tagline. Now, that's a great ambition for a company. To be honest, it still is part of the core of our mission is this idea of taking documents forward, but it is not a good marketing message. It's very unclear what that means.

14:25 More specifically, it's very unclear how that's relevant to a business. It sounds more like Google Docs than creating proposals. Well, the thing is though, if you sell bricks, you see on a billboard documents of the future, you're not going to be like, "That is in no way relevant." If you're like, "Brick selling proposals of the future," or whatever it is, or better brick proposals, then people are like, "Oh, okay. This is relevant. I should read this," which in retrospect is such an obvious thing.

15:02 But at the time, perhaps because we were still grappling with both what is the big vision and how we should be communicating that vision specifically, yeah, there was a real challenging series of months where it was hard to get people on board because we were having a hard time explaining why they should care. How many different industry verticals do you think this is applicable to? Because obviously, you're from the digital agency world. That's where we live and where I assume most of our audience are also from as well. I can imagine the applications of something like this go pretty far in mind. If you look at our vertical, we've got it all in a spreadsheet. It's ridiculous. Every kind of business you can possibly imagine that in some way has proposals out there or sales material. We've got space and defense and manufacturers and architects and lawyers and accountants and agencies and all kinds of things.

15:59 I guess you could even take it all the way down to the other end of the spectrum and go like builders and plumbers and anyone who needs to provide a cost to present to a client or customer.

16:09 100%. I think the essential fundamental use case for us is if you have something that is partially repetitive but also actually customized each time, i.e. for many people, proposals and sales material, then Quiller is the system that lets you present it in an amazing, modern, integrated way but also get all the efficiency of systematizing your process. The long-term application is very, very broad. We've obviously used it as well and it's a very nice product.

16:46 Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And to us, I'd say the biggest problem to us with writing proposals in the first place is time.

16:56 Like you say before, you can spend four days. You could spend, I'd say, we never spend less than a couple of days putting a proposal together in all seriousness. Sometimes, if it's a really worthwhile opportunity, sometimes you might put a lot, a lot more weeks worth of effort into those proposals depending on the type of client and the opportunity that's there. It is that massive time sink, writing, rewriting, doing the project planning, price estimating, communicating the value that you're offering. I guess getting the content together in the first place is the task number one. And then traditionally, what we've done is to take all that and put it into InDesign and lay it all out in a nice, neat and tidy way and do the traditional export PDF and off that goes to the client. Sure. Funnily enough, I was an illustrator man. No disney design or anything.

17:52 But something I think, not when I consciously decided I needed to do something, but one of the things that frustrated me to no end was I do all my pricing, I'd lay out this nice PDF and I do my pricing in Illustrator, I send it off and the client would say, "Oh, can we add 10 hours here?

18:09 Can we change this?" And I'd have to copy paste a bajillion cells into Illustrator again and change everything. And it was so manual and so time consuming. And it just felt like a medieval monk, transcribing an illuminated text. It was so small and medium and wasteful. Yeah, in regards to the InDesign thing, I think that's when my brain started saying the frustration has reached a point where I'm going to soon have to act or just give it up altogether. I think as we were using Quiddo for the first time, I was quite surprised how much it actually affected us in terms of writing the proposal. So we're trying to do as much of it in the tool as possible. Sure. To try and understand, because it's the first time we were using it, trying to understand how it really fits in and how we use it. And yeah, as a result, I think it actually affected the way that we wrote the proposal. Because when you've got no constraints, when you've just got InDesign in front of you and you can stick as many pages into it as you want and as much copy, make the font size super, super small. I think whatever you need to cram as much stuff as possible in there. You don't think about how much you're writing and then suddenly you've created a 50 page document with 10,000 words or something insane. And it's an absolute burden for the client to then read and you end up having to stick executive summaries at the beginning in order to try and condense everything into a single page summary, which means they probably will never even read the stuff that's in detail later on in the back. They'll just read the executive summary, skip to the pricing and then... Sure. Yeah. But working with Inquilla, I found that having this single page application where everything has to fit in a single page and there are elements that can be compressed like your T's and C's and everything else. But it made me really think about the content and the experience of reading the proposal. And that made me think my brain switched into web design mode, basically into like, well, what's the user experience of this now? Because this is what I do every day. And I'm using a tool that is in this medium that makes these triggers in my brain go off that think, "Ah, I can't just dump all this texting because who's going to read it?" I think it being on the web, it made me think.

20:41 I really need to be more direct with what I'm saying here and be more concise and hopefully, therefore, make the proposal of reading a better experience for the client. And that's the thing, I think a big part of cool, I think it's just a great benefit is that not only are there lots and lots of great reasons for you as an agency to use it, but maybe the best reason that you as an agency is that the receiver, they just have such a better time with a web pack. Like as in, if they open up your beautifully designed PDF that you produced on InDesign, they open up on their mobile phone, what are they even going to see? Like unless they do that annoying zoom and twist and zoom and twist game, they're probably not really going to have a very satisfactory sales experience, certainly. Absolutely not. And if you're linking to stuff and they keep getting lost on their phone, like it's not great. But then if you take the sort of web centric sort of notion, yeah, the actual read, the actual consumption experience and experiences are totally the right word for it.

21:55 It's just on another level. I mean, it's like PDF versus surfing the web. They're just not comparable as user experiences. And it wasn't just a direct translation, like an analogy I was thinking of is magazines that publishers used to make when magazines started to go digital. They just took the print version and stuck it on into a digital form in exactly the same structure and published that to iPads or whatever. And in doing so, created a pretty poor experience. And what's worn out over that in the end, those have pretty much died off because they're no different to the print version, except you don't have to carry around one thing. It seems like the web has worn out over the printed material or even the magazine format in general, because they write things slightly differently for the web to make them more web friendly. And the whole experience is just better. Sure. And it's funny because my instinct was not how I'm going to go build an entire document of the future platform. That wasn't like my original impetus. And I searched around and I was like, where is something that lets me work document like without the frustrating constraint of the history of documents, i.e. it comes in a little A4 size and it's not responsive.

23:20 All the other strange constraints of document tools of today that are more about design legacy. That's one of the really interesting things I think about exploring Quilla as a designer was, if you look at the tool set of today, it's so informed by the things that came from before it in terms of the typewriter gave way to the word processor, but the link between the typewriter and the word processor is so intimate in many ways. And in word processes, you've got that A4 piece of paper sitting there in the screen. And so many of the document tools are still mired in that paper physical world notion. I know the word got into massive popularity, but skeuomorphism, if you'll excuse my French. Yeah, you open up a new Google Doc and you see a sheet of paper, right? The assumption is you're still going to print this stuff and I never do.

24:20 Exactly. And it's like, well, why? But I mean, the funny thing is that, I mean, even beyond the superficial, the border looks like an A4, the things that it does and what the value of it that it can provide is still so tied to the idea of something that you could maybe print out and letter mail to someone. Whereas, yeah, again, if you sort of take maybe this sort of a more sort of web centric view, there's no reason why your document can't do everything that the web can do and all the powerful things that the web can do. Yeah. And yeah, it's exactly like you say, that is that legacy. That's what one thing when we first started using Quilla, it's just all that legacy just dropped away. And it felt like we had this new interface to start playing with and start putting our content into. And it felt much more akin to using CMS or something like Squarespace or some interface that's user friendly and easy to use. And it just made perfect sense to us.

25:22 Sure. But funnily enough, as I said, they're in the challenge because people who spend their lives in tech and design, they get it so naturally and so quickly, the idea of it rather. But there is still if you're, you know, if you run a traditional business and you've come, you've grown up in a paper based world, you know, for you, the Word processor is a step away, but still familiar.

25:46 But having to sort of get into the idea of like, it's a website, but it works like a document, yeah, has been, it can be challenging to get users over that sort of little bump.

25:58 Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. The feedback we had from our clients was really great. I mean, from their end, the experience was superb. They absolutely loved the fact that they could view it on any device. In fact, that's where they all read it first. They were all saying, oh, we could just see it straight away on our phone, because that's where they were, you know, they're out and about a lot. And that's where they get their email first. And in fact, it was responsive. And all in one place, they said it was very cool. That's good to hear. And that's, you know, and that's, as I said, that's a big part of it is like, it depends what sort of how competitive your, your, you know, proposal environment is in terms of how many other people are pitching. But first impressions count and being compelling that first, you know, when your sales pitch first arrives, and it had been a really fluid, responsive, and it looks great, ideally, and that's something we really push for with Quilla is if they like what you've done, if they're like, oh, John's is every attractions is a great proposal, you want them to be able to accept then and there and maybe even put a deposit down to actually sort of concretize your relationship. You know, while they've got the impetus of like, this looks great, and it's working on my iPad. You know, that's so newfangled. Yeah, as opposed to like, this is a great looking PDF, I just got to wait to get back to my desk. And maybe I'll forget about it and I forget to call and then the deal goes sort of stale. And yeah, like you mentioned, you've extended the functionality there, haven't you? So you can you provide a quote, you can get people to pay for invoices directly inside the tool, they can sign the documents and...

27:40 Yep. There's, there's, you know, where our intention is that you can get a full deal flow through the dock. And again, this is sort of half-spectre, guess what I was saying earlier is that we want the document to be a more powerful thing. Because if you just try and if you make documents anonymous with website or web page, it can be so powerful. And specifically, it can be like an organ of your business, it can be a, you can actually do business through the document.

28:09 There's no reason why the document needs to be like a pamphlet that you leave behind, then they have to call you John and be like, okay, I'm ready to now do business with you.

28:20 Every document you put out into the world should be a medium to which people can interact with your business and make real business commitments, like e-signing and paying and what have you.

28:36 Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's how in the past, we've always just done the PDFs and then we stick them through an online service to sign them once people have agreed that it's what they want to do. And then they'll sign it through a separate service, but it's still quite clunky and it isn't integrated in any way. And they're still, then we've got to raise an invoice and then send that to them.

28:59 And that's in a different system. Well, it's retrofitting. I think that's what we see when we see documents is like, there are all these services to try and add features to the document, but as designers, I think the right insight is maybe the document is broken. Or maybe it's the document that needs to change, not all these sort of bolt on things to try and like, wrap a PDF in a service that gives you analytics and wrap a PowerPoint in a service that lets you e-sign because it's actually the PDF and the PowerPoint themselves that are lacking the feature.

29:46 Another thing I found that is because our existing process was so much of a time sink. Obviously, you get jobs in quotes come in a varying scale. And there are ones at one end of the scale that are enormous and require a very lengthy response. And there are some things in the middle and then some things at the bottom end of the scale that are always a little bit smaller. And for those projects, because of the amount of effort involved in getting a proposal together, we generally in the past haven't done that for the smaller clients. They've had a worse experience.

30:24 And what we've done is we've just informally agreed over the phone in writing then via email just to confirm what we agreed, then just send them a single page contract referring to that email to them. That's not a great experience. Just getting an email and trying to sign off on a few tens of thousands of bands worth of business that it seems a little rough, I guess, from their perspective. Whereas if you could give them a similar experience that you could give to everybody else because the time that it takes to do so is comparable to almost writing an email, then that's also fantastic for everyone who's using it.

31:08 And that's very much like right now with Quilla, I hope you've experienced these games. You can just clone a template. So you're already like 90% of the way there, change a few things, and then you're sort of ready to send. We've already implemented something called the Blueprint API, which is basically like merge fields, basic merge tags and email, which is, you know, take a template and here is either something from a CRM or a spreadsheet that can automatically go and dump in the fields. But where we're actually looking to go in terms of time saving in terms of getting these things out as quickly as humanly possible is more about encoding business process.

31:54 So I think one of the frustrating things about running an agency and running a sort of service based business is that your business processes are pretty clear. Like, you know, you guys, you probably get a small, you know, medium sized proposal, you go like, okay, well, when we get those, we normally do a BMC, we'll use this type of content and we'll, as a starting point, we'll price it around here. But all of that lives inside human heads. And there's no it's very hard to actually encode that into a system to actually, you know, to actually automate that. And a big focus with Quilla now that we've sort of got this really nice document producing website super tool is to help people start encoding their process so that they don't have to keep repeating themselves as in things that they know mechanically, okay, well, this is a small project. And so I'll, you know, arrange it like this and use that template and start trying to leverage the fact that people have this in their brains. So that ideally, of course, ideally, it's a button click, which gets you 98% of the way you customize the few things that really do require customization and thought and all the rest of that stuff that can be mechanically replaced is automated. And we're hoping to bring out some cool features in that respect, probably early next year. Fantastic. So having seen as many proposals as a man like yourself has seen any pointers for our listeners on how to make a winning proposal and create that great experience for the client? Well, I think the audience for this podcast is probably ideal as in preaching to the choir in some respects, but it has to look fantastic. I think it should look fantastic.

33:53 And obviously, if you're a designer graphic designer, anything like that, it needs to look fantastic. But it should look fantastic. No matter what, I think there's so much subliminal power, so much subliminal messaging that happens with a well designed nicely gritted document versus a total hodgepodge and like terrible line height and everything's a mess. In fact, there is a study and I'm not going to be able to see if I can look it up for you about people, you know, people were flashed a website for an image, I think for some number of microseconds. And they immediately form this sense of how professional, how well-resourced, how trustworthy the site or the information is.

34:37 So I think good design is like a must. Now, of course, I'm sure everyone who's on this podcast already agrees with that. Something I do think though is valuable, I will often say this, and certainly works with me was about data driven success stories. You know, so if you did a job and they were looking to improve, you know, some particular aspect of their company, it's great to be like, okay, what's the baseline data like right now? Yeah, and let's say it's, they sell towels, they're a towel sailing factory. It's a good business. Yeah, it's great. Everyone needs towels, towels never go to fashion. You know, and they say, okay, for every, you know, every hundred people that pitch up at our towel factory website, you know, we convert 20 of them. And you're like, okay, great, that's your baseline. You do this project, you implement it, and then, you know, you record the data out. Let's say, you know, it goes up to 40 towels. And now you've got this like concrete improvement in their towels sales. But once you can tie your walk to a really concrete number and a really concrete improvement, it helps you to justify the cost that you're giving to this new client. Because you can say, hey, look, you're doing half a million dollars in typewriter sales.

36:00 Actually, no typewriters, they're gone. Covers, you sell covers. Here's what we provided with these other guys. And here's like a backed up concrete data story of how we improved it. You know, imagine what that's worth to you if we can improve by 20% or 10% or what have you. So I think that's really important. The other thing I think is valuable in a proposal is kind of a collaborative sort of story. I don't know if you remember, there was a great design agency called T.Hann and Lacks.

36:30 Joined Facebook. That's right. They had a wonderful way of doing their sort of projects we've worked on, which was a kind of what's an all rundown of the project. It gave some reality to what it's like to work with them. And they always ended, of course, with their successes, but it made it clear and evident what the reality of working with them would really be like. And it's kind of story driven, wasn't it to an extent? Very much so. But it was very business orientated. But it sort of revealed like, you know, having this challenge, we thought about this experiment, we went to the extent of even doing building it. But then we realized that so and so and blah, blah, blah. But it really it showed you how insightful they were. And it showed you how they drew out the insights from the challenges and their proposed solutions. And then finally got to this wonderful success metric at the end. I just certainly found that very compelling. And it's something I try to incorporate into all my proposals when I was writing them was here's the case studies I've done before. Here's the big data driven, like look, I raised the thing by 30%. And then there's actually a discussion of what the project was like, how we uncovered the critical point we needed to change. And yeah, I think that got a lot of people across the line that otherwise might not have. Yeah, that's really great advice.

36:44 Good to hear as well, because that's exactly what we're doing. We're doing our website right now. And we already do this sort of success metrics thing. But yeah, we're trying to take a more story story driven approach to explain something the process and what happened along the way rather than rather than just simply showing the results. Well, I think and I think it can be not disingenuous, I think it can feel disingenuous when there's a sort of, you know, they gave us some money, x happened success metric, I think this gives it gives people more confidence, maybe, and more perhaps empathy is the right word. Yeah, it also helps explain and your process and you know, like I said before, what working with you is going to be like, and that's what you've got to instill in people's minds, you've got to get them an impression of what what it's going to be like, if they hire you. And if that's just shrouded in mystery, and they don't find out until you're, you know, midway through a project, and then maybe they find out they don't like that, then you're in trouble. Sure, sure. Fantastic. Thanks for that advice. And I think if our listeners choose to follow that advice, I think they're going to all end up with with better proposals and case studies as a result. I hope so. Yeah, where can people find out more about Kula? Sure, they can head to Kula.com. And that's q w i l r.com and sign up and have a play around. And feel free to hit us we got our little live chat messenger bot. So if they got any questions, they want to talk to someone to send us a message and we try to be very, very responsive. Good stuff. I recommend everybody go there and try it out. It's, it really does save you a lot of time. And yeah, it comes with our recommendation as well. Cool. Thank you, John. Excellent. And where can people find you Dylan, if they want to reach out? Probably through my website, I guess caveat hasn't been updated in a few years, as everyone says about their personal websites, but Dylan Baskin.com. D Y L A N B A S K I N D.com. And there should be like a little hollow link down there. Good stuff. We'll put all that in the show notes. Cool. Thanks for coming on. It's been great having you. Thanks for having me. Cheers. And thanks to everyone for listening. If you'd like to conduct us about this episode or find any of our past episodes, you can do so on our website at perspective.fm. We're on Twitter @_perspectiffm. You can find us on iTunes. And as always, we appreciate any ratings and reviews. You might leave us there. Also, please tweet about the show, share it on Facebook, tell your friends, it all helps. We're easy to find in your podcast app of choice. Just search for perspective FM in Overcast, Pocket Casts, or whatever you prefer to use. The kind folks over at Pocket Casts have given us a very special short URL. So you can find that at pca.st/perspective. All the links are on our website along with the show notes for this episode. Thanks everybody. And we'll see you next time.