How To Compete Against Google (And WIN) - Ep#9 with Luke Seelenbinder

It can be very daunting to go head-to-head with larger competitors. 

Luke Seelenbinder from StadiaMaps.com competes directly with Google in the mapping space.

The crazy part? He's winning...

Recently I interviewed him on the StartupSauce SaaS podcast (Episode #8) and asked him to unpack the secret sauce behind this winning strategy.

Watch the full interview here:

How startups can WIN against bigger competitors (like Google)

Pricing, niche focus and superior support are all core parts of this strategy. But Luke goes much deeper, doing things big companies won't (or can't) - offering API flexibility, open sourcing their software and more.

Luke is the co-founder of StadiaMaps.com, a tool that offers location APIs for humans. Luke loves creating beautiful, usable products to solve significant problems.

You can check it out at https://stadiamaps.com/

In this episode you can expect to learn about:

• How Stadia Maps competes with (and succeeds against) Google Maps
• How to set-up a business in Estonia
• The benefits of building in public
• How to raise capital within the Estonian E-Residency climate

Here's a short 4-minute clip from our conversation.

 

Also you might be interested in these: 

• 11 Of The World's Best SaaS Consultants & Coaches To Hire
• The 10 Laws Of Freemium
• The Million-Dollar Content Marketing + Social Media Strategy Behind Dyslexia Connect - Ep#8 - Peter Groth

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[00:00:00] Luke Seelenbinder: Big company can never provide a personalized, hands on 

[00:00:04] Ryan Wardell: experience. How do you take on a giant company like Google Maps and win? 

[00:00:09] Luke Seelenbinder: If you build a good product, you build good relationships with the customers. When there are fires, more often than not, the customers become your allies when there are problems because you were their allies when they had problems.

[00:00:20] Ryan Wardell: What is your secret sauce, Luke? I think. Luke Seelenbinder, welcome to the show. Thanks Ryan. It's great to 

[00:00:26] Luke Seelenbinder: be on. 

[00:00:27] Ryan Wardell: Let's let's kick things off with something spicy. So you're an American citizen, but you decided to set up your company in Estonia. 

[00:00:36] Luke Seelenbinder: Why? Estonia is a fun place, um, to do business. My history with Estonia actually started quite a long time ago.

[00:00:43] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, I discovered it through this eResidency, which allows you to. Sign up and create a company in Estonia. I became an e resident simply because I was fascinated with the idea of a government trying to do something one for, for people outside their borders. Cause this program's. Exclusively for people who are not Estonian.

[00:01:04] Luke Seelenbinder: And second, that a government was trying to innovate, trying to create new ways to do business, because I don't know about you, but me as an American, that's not a particularly common idea is that the government's working for me instead of kind of, I have to work kind of with the government, trying to figure out how to do things.

[00:01:21] Luke Seelenbinder: So about eight years ago. I discovered this program, I became a new resident, just to support the idea. I was living in the US, I had no real use for it. And then, six, seven years ago, I ended up relocating to Europe. Um, and when I did that, I wanted to create a separate entity. To run my business through, I was working as a consultant at the time.

[00:01:45] Luke Seelenbinder: So I had quite a few clients and I wanted them to have kind of a stable entity, regardless of where I lived physically and just make it really easy to send invoices and understand kind of that, that client relationship. So they didn't have to worry about where I was living. So I ended up. Choosing Estonia, uh, to create this company.

[00:02:02] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, and at this point I had visited a few times. I'd started going to conferences. I'd met quite a few Estonians and started to understand the actual background and the reason why it's so easy to do business in Estonia. If you look at the history of Estonia, about 30 years ago, they got their independence back from the Soviet union and they were left with a, a government they had to recreate from scratch.

[00:02:24] Luke Seelenbinder: There were no services. Um, they were basically getting to reinvent a country from scratch and they made a lot of really good decisions early on. And one of those was to create a purely digital, uh, government services idea. Um, obviously they started with little pieces and as they build up, they became bigger and bigger.

[00:02:43] Luke Seelenbinder: Everyone became more and more confident in digital first. Um, it started with an identity card that tied everything together in all the government systems. One of the rules of thumb when you work with the Estonian government, as they say, they should only ever ask you. So if the government knows this fact about you, they don't have to ask you ever again, because all the systems are interconnected.

[00:03:06] Luke Seelenbinder: For instance, if you enter your address on one form, you don't have to then reenter it on every other form. Imagine that, right? Um, wow. And what's ended up happening is because everything's online and everything's. easy to use. It's really novel for someone outside. Um, when you understand the level of bureaucracy in many European countries versus Estonia, it's just mind blowing to people that they don't have to send physical mail.

[00:03:34] Luke Seelenbinder: They don't have to go to notaries to, to change the way their business runs or, you know, Add shareholders, move shareholders, things like that. The whole process of running a business actually takes less time than it's taken me to explain why I did this. Um, most of the things I do take less than a minute, um, filing taxes often is just a very simple process.

[00:03:55] Luke Seelenbinder: Monthly accounting is the same and top it off. Um, a lot of the services are quite a bit cheaper here than for instance, in the U S like accounting, bookkeeping, things like that. Um, and so it just creates a really simple environment fast that I can use to, to run my company. 

[00:04:12] Ryan Wardell: Just diving into that a little bit.

[00:04:14] Ryan Wardell: The, cause I'm always fascinated about, um, other places in the world, like being geographically flexible. I, I did a bit of a stint as a digital nomad, so I spent a bit of time looking into this stuff. But the, um, the. In terms of, uh, banking options with an Estonian company, um, like financial services. Cause the big fear I think a lot of people have is, okay, well, let's set up a company.

[00:04:40] Ryan Wardell: I go through all the hoops and all that kind of stuff. And then I've, I can't get a bank account. What do I do now? You know, how, how does that work? 

[00:04:48] Luke Seelenbinder: Yeah, it is sometimes a problem for people. Um, essentially banking, you can think of as two broad categories of banks. You have traditional banks, which is where you probably have access to a traditional payments account.

[00:05:01] Luke Seelenbinder: You can probably get a debit card, credit card, perhaps. Uh, you can also get loans, things like that. It's kind of traditional banks, brick and mortar type setup. Um, but there's also quite a few fintechs, uh, the ability to get a bank account. Is usually quite easy at a fintech. Um, if you're physically residing in a country or you're a citizen of a country That's not on any blacklist or things like that It's quite straightforward to get a fintech whether that's wise or revolute or any number of the options um getting a traditional bank account in estonia can be a little bit more complicated it's I've never had trouble myself.

[00:05:38] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, I have a friend who basically talks about treating it like a job application because what the bank is looking at you as they're trying to reduce their risk. So anything you can do to help that bank understand you're running a legitimate business, you have a legitimate plan to do business in Estonia and perhaps even with Estonian companies, it becomes, but that is sometimes more difficult for people, but at the end of the day, most of the time.

[00:06:03] Luke Seelenbinder: A small business doesn't need that. And if you're a bigger business, you already have all those pieces in place to establish the legitimacy and, and reduce that risk for the, for the bank. So I've never had a problem with banking, um, really solving any of the problems I've had. 

[00:06:20] Ryan Wardell: That makes sense. We might, we might dive into.

[00:06:22] Ryan Wardell: Uh, the Estonian e residency program and the pros, the cons, the details, all that kind of stuff, uh, in a little bit more depth later on. But why don't we back up a little bit? Um, and maybe if you could tell us a little bit about your business Stadia Maps. Um, so what is Stadia Maps and who is it for? 

[00:06:38] Luke Seelenbinder: Stadia Maps is a maps and location API platform for developers.

[00:06:43] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, we help. Businesses, typically businesses who don't do a lot with geospatial data, um, add location to their product. Uh, this could look like a interactive map, um, kind of in their apps. Imagine like a booking platform showing you all the hotel options you have on a map as opposed to just a list. Um, or it could be some kind of back office process.

[00:07:07] Luke Seelenbinder: Something like turning addresses into coordinates. So then you can run statistics on those coordinates or turning coordinates into addresses. So, you know, where these points are on a physical map so that you can show it to the user. For instance, let's say you're a, a ride hailing company and you know where the person is.

[00:07:29] Luke Seelenbinder: And typically you start their search with kind of where they are and you show an address for that. Well, at some point you have to turn that coordinate where they are. Physically a GPS to an address. Um, and that's process called geocoding or reverse geocoding for that. Um, so. We have a lot of these different kinds of APIs put together in a package, um, on our platform.

[00:07:51] Luke Seelenbinder: So a developer doesn't have to go looking for a new provider every time, um, they just come to us. They say, I need maps. I need search, things like that. And we have it for them. 

[00:08:01] Ryan Wardell: You mentioned just when we were talking before, you mentioned a story about how you were, you were saving the grannies from the semis.

[00:08:06] Ryan Wardell: Like what, what do you mean by that? Can you unpack that a little more? 

[00:08:10] Luke Seelenbinder: So one of the services we provide is a routing API and a routing API at the core of it is finding the best way to get from point A to point B. There's lots of nuances to that, but you can choose to get from point A to point B by walking, you can choose biking, you can choose a car, you can choose a truck, any option.

[00:08:28] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, and. A few months ago, we had a really interesting inquiry come in, um, to add a little bit of context. There's communities, especially in the US, where golf carts, yes, the same thing you drive around, a golf course, um, are a primary mode of transportation. Um, and within these communities, they have specialized paths for them.

[00:08:49] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, they typically have regulation that applies to the golf carts, but not to other forms of transportation. For instance, cars and bikes don't have the same rules. Uh, speed limits are different, things like this. Um, And each of these communities had a navigation app. So they help their residents get from point A to point B inside the community.

[00:09:09] Luke Seelenbinder: And when they're driving golf carts, um, they were having a problem. Uh, people were getting routed on the worst roads for golf carts. Uh, you literally had grannies on six 55 miles per hour or more. That sounds like a problem to me. And of course, if this is a, an app provided by the local municipal government, it's a real big problem for them when they're basically telling users to break the law and put themselves in unsafe situations.

[00:09:39] Luke Seelenbinder: So what we were able to do is create a kind of a custom routing profile. It's called, uh, for golf carts so that the golf carts would drive on the right roads so that users would get accurate ETAs and so that grandma wouldn't get run over by a semi. 

[00:09:57] Ryan Wardell: I don't know about you Luke, but my grandma was an absolute hoon.

[00:10:00] Ryan Wardell: She was, she was a lead foot. She would slam the foot down on the accelerator. So maybe she was the only one able to keep up, but, uh, maybe, maybe she's a bit of an expert. Believe it or 

[00:10:09] Luke Seelenbinder: not, some of these golf carts aren't just electric. They're actually gas powered and they could go that speed. Oh, wow. So it's kind of a, it's kind of a big problem when you get that speed.

[00:10:18] Luke Seelenbinder: Where you have these golf carts that could go 50 miles an hour and they do, and they're on like pedestrian paths. So they were really having this problem both ways because people are crazy. 

[00:10:29] Ryan Wardell: Oh, geez. Well, tell me, tell me a bit about the origin story. Cause it sounds like there's, there's a lot of different applications for your product and your technology, but you mentioned Back when we were talking about the e residency program, you said you had a consulting company based in Estonia.

[00:10:45] Ryan Wardell: Like connect, connect the dots for me. What, like, how did you get started? How did that turn into stadium apps? 

[00:10:50] Luke Seelenbinder: Stadium apps kind of started for, for two reasons. One, my co founder and I were both entrepreneurial and we were looking for an idea. We wanted to do something that was our own, um, consultants don't have a lot of, um, kind of power when it comes to.

[00:11:05] Luke Seelenbinder: What they do, they kind of do what the company asks them to do. And we don't get the opportunity to build what we want to build. So we were looking for a project to do together. And at the time we were working with a company that did media streaming, uh, audio, video, things like that. And the people that would broadcast were all displayed on a map.

[00:11:23] Luke Seelenbinder: They were using Google maps. It costs nothing. Um, everything was good. And then Google maps decided to make a pretty significant pricing change. Um, Basically monetize a product that used to be free and their bill was going to go from zero to 700 a month. And this kind of discovery page was not worth 700 a month.

[00:11:44] Luke Seelenbinder: And they were just going to turn it off because there was no, no way they were going to pay 700 a month to keep it going. So my co founder and I looked at this problem and said, well, how hard could it be? Little did we know it was really hard, but, um, we went off and built the first, uh, map. Um, integration.

[00:12:05] Luke Seelenbinder: So we kind of built maps first. That was our, um, reason to exist. And then shortly thereafter we added routing. Um, and it ran as a side project, kind of a side gig. Maybe we spent 20, 40 percent of our time on it for four to five years. Um, And then we hit a kind of a stopping point. We realized that it was going really well, but not well enough.

[00:12:33] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, and if we wanted to go to the next step, we needed to go full time. And that's where we, we looked at the options and we said, Well, what if we raise a little bit? What if we jump in and go full time and go all in on this project? So we're able to raise some money and talk more about that later, but, um, ended up raising money, going full time and really taking this from.

[00:13:02] Luke Seelenbinder: A project with a couple of APIs to a full fledged platform in the last year and a half, two years, and really round it out to where we can solve 80 to 90 percent of the market's needs. Um, and we're still a three main company, so that's been pretty cool. 

[00:13:19] Ryan Wardell: Okay. So I want to, I want to ask you something, something very specific.

[00:13:22] Ryan Wardell: What, what is your secret sauce, Luke? Like, how do you take on A giant company or, you know, a giant division of a company like Google Maps and, and win. Hey, it's Ryan here. I'm glad you're enjoying the video. Listen, if you want to meet me or some of the people that I interview, you should really join the StartupSource SaaS founder community.

[00:13:40] Ryan Wardell: It's a private Slack group for SaaS founders based outside of Silicon Valley who are past the idea stage and want to focus on growth. About 30 percent of our members are doing over a million dollars a year in revenue. So So it's a pretty high caliber group. You'll get access to regular mastermind calls and workshops.

[00:13:56] Ryan Wardell: And every week we share exclusive marketing tactics and resources that you can use to grow your business faster. So if you want to give yourself an unfair advantage and learn from other SaaS founders who are one or two steps ahead of you, head over to startupsource. com and sign up. I think there's a link in the description down below as well.

[00:14:13] Ryan Wardell: Anyway, I'll see you in there. 

[00:14:15] Luke Seelenbinder: Well, there's one way that's really easy and that's you realize that a big company can never provide a personalized Packaged hands on experience. A big company can't answer their email in 24 hours because they'll never dedicate the resources to do it. And so the way we've been able to take on like a Google maps or any number of our other competitors who are all quite a bit bigger, um, is we focus on building a really good product.

[00:14:42] Luke Seelenbinder: And. Then because, because of the product works, it's really easy to provide a really good support experience. We answer email, we are available for calls, things like that. And it sounds. Counterintuitive in the sense that, well, you're a small company, so you don't have time to provide this really great support, but we actually find that because we value it so highly, we're able to do it at a better, more consistent quality than the big players.

[00:15:07] Luke Seelenbinder: Specifically in mapping, when you look at the history of map data, It's always been a really capital intensive process, gathering and making maps. When you think about how big the world is, when you think about just the history of map making going back four or five hundred years, it used to be people getting on chips, going out and sailing the coastline and, and drawing in books and, and that's where we got our maps.

[00:15:28] Luke Seelenbinder: So every single map cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars just to create a map of the world. Let's say the East coast of the U S, but today we actually have the opposite in the sense that map data, especially what you need to create what are called base maps, base maps for the things that have cities, streets, parks, basically the, the basic map data on it, the data you need to create these maps.

[00:15:53] Luke Seelenbinder: is essentially free. Um, there's projects like 

[00:15:56] Ryan Wardell: OpenStreetMap, 

[00:15:57] Luke Seelenbinder: which are kind of like Wikipedia for maps. Anyone can edit it. That exists with very lenient license terms. So you can take their data, create a commercial service on top of it. Um, and all you need to do is credit them. Um, and that's what's happened in the last, especially five years is a lot of Providers have sprung up based around OpenStreetMap.

[00:16:15] Luke Seelenbinder: And so what used to be a capital intensive process is now the data's there, figure out how to use it, figure out how to build services on top of it. So when you look at a closed provider, like a Google, um, they still have to do the capital intensive process of gathering the data themselves. Uh, that's why you see these fleet of street view cars going around.

[00:16:33] Luke Seelenbinder: Of course they have better data. Um, they have in many places, they have more data is probably the better Better way to say that than just better data. They have images, they have 3d views, but when you look at the fundamentals of mapping, that data is as good an open street map and it's free. So we can focus on delivering really high quality services as opposed to where we get the data.

[00:16:54] Ryan Wardell: And, and how do you translate that? That into a business advantage. So you mentioned like if you, if you build a really good product, you can deliver a really good support experience and sort of a bit of a paradox there where you think that even though you're a smaller company, you can still deliver better support because Google's never going to make that a priority, but you know, is, is, is there anything else that, that, that, that you'd Uh, in terms of, you know, your, your business advantage versus someone, why would someone pick you over Google maps, for example?

[00:17:20] Luke Seelenbinder: Well, of course, being more cost effective is always a, an easy win. Um, we can, because we focused on kind of what our unit costs are, we've been able to deliver really good unit costs to the customer. But when you compare it against other providers, we've kind of built data privacy into our platform from the beginning.

[00:17:37] Luke Seelenbinder: We don't build products on top of what users do. Um, you can imagine that when you have lots and lots of users using your map, using your routing APIs, using your search APIs, you could put together a pretty accurate picture of what the user, where the user is, what the user wants, and kind of where they've been.

[00:17:56] Luke Seelenbinder: There's a big privacy problem there. Uh, it's not that that data isn't valuable because it is, but because we focus on privacy, we're not doing that. And that's something we can't really say for, uh, our competitors. When data privacy is important, picking us makes a lot of sense. And then we've also focused on making our APIs as flexible as possible.

[00:18:14] Luke Seelenbinder: Like we talked about making the golf cart routing profile a few minutes ago, we were actually able to get really, really close to what we needed for that. Just using our basic. APIs with a lot of tuning, things that are accessible to our end user. So because we're willing to kind of leave the APIs open and kind of leave the knobs there for people to tune themselves, people are able to come in and.

[00:18:39] Luke Seelenbinder: Especially developers able to come in and create a custom experience on our platform without us having to do any extra work and really puts the power back in the hands of the people creating the products as opposed to the company's trying to create a platform that is locked down or you can only do what they want you to do.

[00:18:56] Ryan Wardell: And, and, and if it's Google too, like the, the bedrock of that is how do we, how do we inject more ads into this experience somehow? Um, so you can go, you've got a lot more freedom if you don't have to, 

[00:19:07] Luke Seelenbinder: Absolutely. Um, I mean, we've had conversations with customers where essentially if they use Google ads, they're putting a ad surface for the competitors in their product, whether that's their website, the worst place to put an ad for your competitor or, or right in their, in their Their app, um, I mean, imagine a company like, I don't know, like Burger King putting, uh, a map in their app and then all the McDonald's sites are highlighted.

[00:19:36] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, I, I don't think that's the end result they want. Um, that's essentially what, what you get, unless you pay quite a, quite a high figure to, to get a mega corporation to customize their product. If they'll even do it for you. 

[00:19:50] Ryan Wardell: What was the trigger point? You mentioned before that you, you raised capital because you wanted to go full time, but what, what was the actual, uh, was there a key decision that led you to?

[00:20:03] Ryan Wardell: Deciding to raise capital and go full time on the business. Was there a metric, was there a revenue figure that you wanted to hit? Was there, there's something that you looked at that said, okay, you know, we, we need to go big or go home now. 

[00:20:14] Luke Seelenbinder: I wouldn't say we looked at it so much from a metrics perspective, as much as a, we sense that there's something good.

[00:20:21] Luke Seelenbinder: We think that we can do something good. We look at the industry and it seems like there's room for us to, to create something really good here. Kind of a, an accident of life happened to, uh, both my co founder and I were consulting at the same company and that company folded, uh, laid off all their engineers, almost all their engineers all at once.

[00:20:41] Luke Seelenbinder: And we were both left with two weeks notice and nothing to do, no project that followed. And so. Then saying, well, I'm going to go raise money is probably not the best idea. I wouldn't recommend it, but it ended up working out and we were able to pretty easily jump from that 20, 40 percent commitment to a hundred percent invested.

[00:21:00] Luke Seelenbinder: And we knew kind of before we made that decision, like we'd already been talking about kind of what's the next step. And the next step initially was to raise money in the sense that we put away savings so we kind of fund ourselves to go full time. But because of the way the timing happened, we ended up having to raise money.

[00:21:16] Luke Seelenbinder: Having to raise money sounds kind of negative. And it actually turned out to be really positive because some of our biggest deals since then have come through those investors. So they've brought value to the table beyond just the money they invested. 

[00:21:28] Ryan Wardell: How did you find those investors out of, out of curiosity?

[00:21:31] Ryan Wardell: Did you like, did you have a network of investors already in place? Um, was it, Was it, you know, how did you, how did you find those investors in the first place? 

[00:21:42] Luke Seelenbinder: I think kind of that running that game is it's a, it's a definitely a numbers game. We didn't have a network in place. I knew one angel investor who is really good at it.

[00:21:51] Luke Seelenbinder: And I called him up and I said, should we do this? Um, and he was like, Yes. And I'll be your first investor. And then he made a bunch of introductions. Um, those introductions made introductions. Um, and of course we heard no a lot and it was really crazy how it ended up coming together because we got three or four angels together.

[00:22:08] Luke Seelenbinder: We were planning to focus on angel investors and we talked to mostly to angel investors and then one of the angel investors had committed, they ran it through, um, kind of a competitive check with their employer. The employer said, no, we actually have no idea why their employer said no, but They couldn't invest.

[00:22:25] Luke Seelenbinder: They actually introduced us to the VC that ended up investing in us because their employer said, no, we ended up getting the vast majority of the money from a single VC that we would have never been invested, never would have been introduced to anyways. And then the best part there was, um, I think we had the initial.

[00:22:45] Luke Seelenbinder: Kind of email conversation with the VC in October, maybe October, November. And then it just went dead. So you're like, well, I guess just like everybody else, they just didn't answer. And then three months later, right. As we were getting to the end of the angel investment, we had gotten, and we were like, what do we do now?

[00:23:02] Luke Seelenbinder: Start pulling up money out of our own bank accounts. They followed up and they were like, we're so sorry. We lost this email. And we ended up getting investment from them, I think in like two or three weeks, which put us over the line and gave us enough capital to keep going. But it's really fun to see how it's usually the random happenstance of, of life that brings these things together, which is why you need a lot of numbers.

[00:23:30] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, cause you never know who's going to be interested. 

[00:23:32] Ryan Wardell: And just giving yourself more, more opportunities. I had a, I had a, I had a mentor once who said that, um, there's, there's no such thing as a silver bullet. There's just a shitload of lead ones. That's always stuck with me. You just need to give yourself more opportunities and eventually someone will say yes.

[00:23:46] Ryan Wardell: Um, so that, that makes a lot of sense. 

[00:23:49] Luke Seelenbinder: I think someone smart put it this way where they said, uh, you want to increase your luck surface area. You want to increase the opportunities for, for luck to happen. Um, and that's what we've tried to do is always give ourselves enough room to take the opportunities as they came.

[00:24:07] Luke Seelenbinder: What 

[00:24:08] Ryan Wardell: is Ferrostar? 

[00:24:10] Luke Seelenbinder: Well, remember saving grandma from the semis? Well, when grandma's driving around with her app, that whole experience is called navigation. Um, so routing is getting, is. The, the nuts and bolts of getting you from point A to point B, but navigation is actually the user experience. It's showing you the list of directions.

[00:24:27] Luke Seelenbinder: It's showing you a pin on a map. You're here, the line for where you're needing to drive is here. Um, this is your next. Um, turn, and then as you proceed along the route does updates, you get voice instructions, et cetera, et cetera. This whole experience is called navigation. And as we were helping the company create the golf cart routing profile, we realized that the open source solutions for navigation were really, really bad.

[00:24:55] Luke Seelenbinder: They were either 10 years old and really buggy, or they were closed source and you had to go to, A company who will come back with a five, six, seven figure annual budget and say, well, how much do you actually want to do this? Because we believe our navigation SDK is the best. And that's kind of where we realized maybe there's more than just this company.

[00:25:20] Luke Seelenbinder: So my co founder started working on this project called Pharaoh star, which is. An open source nav and nav SDK is designed to be composable, so you can bring the map that you want. You can bring the navigation or the routing provider you want. For instance, you could use Stadia Maps, you could use one of our competitors, you could do it on the device, but what it provides you is the framework you need.

[00:25:44] Luke Seelenbinder: For that navigation experience. Um, it starts with a bunch of defaults. So if you just drop it in the app, you're going to have defaults. That makes sense. But then as you need to customize it, there's all the hooks you need to do that. And because most nav SDKs are designed to be used by a single provider.

[00:26:02] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, they make a lot of assumptions. They assume you're using that provider for the routing. They assume you're using that provider for the mapping. And so by the time you're done, there's none of these hooks for customization. So instead we're building something that's. Starting open source that's starting, uh, kind of vendor and, um, map provider agnostic and.

[00:26:24] Luke Seelenbinder: While it doesn't sound very smart for a location platform to create this, where it's agnostic and you can use anyone, we have consistently seen that when you build something in the open, you can do a whole lot more than you could do just with your own resources. 

[00:26:37] Ryan Wardell: Can you, can you unpack that a little bit more?

[00:26:39] Ryan Wardell: Is it because you can get other developers jumping in and building stuff on top of it, or is it, or contributing to it? Like, I think, I think a lot of companies are sort of a little bit reluctant about going down the open source route. You know, you're kind of giving away the keys to the kingdom a little bit, aren't you?

[00:26:56] Luke Seelenbinder: You have to think about what are the keys to the kingdom because software is fundamentally, um, hard to create. And we ourselves are built on a lot of open source. Um, so we understand the power of open source to create. Business value. When you look at kind of the building blocks of our platform and many, even of our competitors platforms, it's all open source and they all exist.

[00:27:19] Luke Seelenbinder: We still exist. And there's, so there's, there's, there's something there that's not the software, which is where we provide, where we think there's actually the value in creating this, the software. So when you start open source, what you mentioned is absolutely true. More developers jump on when companies have the problem.

[00:27:36] Luke Seelenbinder: That you're trying to solve and they're like, well, we can contribute a little bit. They jump on, provide resources, provide engineers and start building. But it goes deeper than that because when you've kind of been at the center focal point of building a project, you know, at the best, you get to direct how it goes.

[00:27:55] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, we're not building this right now as like an open community. Um, we're still kind of the, the benevolent dictators for life, um, of this project. Um, And when you look at successful open source projects, most of them, many of them have had kind of this benevolent dictator for life type entity, whether it's a person or whether it's a company.

[00:28:17] Luke Seelenbinder: And you can see a lot of, it provides a lot of stability, but it also does allow us to tailor it for our customer's needs. And then because we know it the best, what we'll be able to build on top of it, what we'll be able to provide as far as service. Um, because imagine that you're building a significant part of your app around this navigation SDK, you're probably going to need more support than just a bug report in, in GitHub or something like that.

[00:28:43] Luke Seelenbinder: And so there's a lot of value we can provide. That's more than just the software. I mean, you look at Linux and how many companies have sprung up around. The Linux, um, core, um, that are billion dollar companies. Um, there there's tons and tons of them. So there's certainly a model that works for open source that leaves plenty of value to, um, to be delivered as, as a business.

[00:29:10] Ryan Wardell: That makes a lot of sense. When, when you explain it like that, it's yeah, it's, it's really clear. I didn't realize you had. Much control over how much you can, you can kind of, you know, being a benevolent dictator for life. I love that. Let's switch tech a little bit. I wanted to explore that, uh, Estonian e residency program in a little bit more detail.

[00:29:28] Ryan Wardell: You're you're a spokesman for that, correct? 

[00:29:30] Luke Seelenbinder: Yeah. So last year they started, A spokesperson program, because as you know, when someone from the organization tells you how great the organization is, uh, it doesn't always ring so true. Um, they're getting paid to do that. But when you have people who aren't paid to say something, it comes a lot, a lot more real and a lot more, um, truthful.

[00:29:53] Luke Seelenbinder: And I think, I mean, I've met many of these spokespeople over the last few months and every single one of us, I think was already doing what we're doing now inside the official program, because we've had such success with the residency program, because life is so much easier having a company in Estonia versus anywhere else.

[00:30:11] Luke Seelenbinder: We've had a company, of course we talked about it. And so this is just kind of going the other direction of saying, yes, these people are actually. Saying the right things as far as they understand how it works. They're not trying to rip anyone off. They're not trying to fudge things. Um, and so they know what they're, they're talking about.

[00:30:28] Luke Seelenbinder: And that's kind of where I'm, where I'm at now is I'm, I'm part of the official program, uh, spokesperson program, because. I love to talk about it so much. I love to go to conferences and talk about it. I love to just sit down with people and say, how can you use your residency to make your life 

[00:30:43] Ryan Wardell: easier?

[00:30:44] Ryan Wardell: What are some of the common misconceptions about the residency program? 

[00:30:49] Luke Seelenbinder: I think the biggest misconception is. It is entirely electronic. It's entirely online. There's no Visa component. There's no residency permit. There's nothing as far as like the physical access to estonia It's all about the digital access to their government services You get a id card.

[00:31:08] Luke Seelenbinder: It looks like just like a credit card with a with a chip and You pick that up, you make the application, usually it takes a couple weeks, and then you actually pick that up in a embassy or consulate near you. So you never actually have to go to Estonia physically, you just have to visit one of their representations.

[00:31:25] Luke Seelenbinder: And once you have that ID card, you get, like I said, digital access to all the services. It's nothing to do with actually visiting the country or getting the right to reside in the country. Um, it's entirely free. Electronic. 

[00:31:38] Ryan Wardell: Right. So if you're not a, an EU citizen, so I'm Australian, for example, um, if I went down the residency program pathway, that wouldn't in and of itself give me the right to reside in Estonia or other European countries.

[00:31:54] Ryan Wardell: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Um, are there any other misconceptions, um, like about tax rates or about anything else to do with the program? 

[00:32:01] Luke Seelenbinder: Yeah. Um, it doesn't automatically, it doesn't affect your individual tax residency whatsoever because legally you can think of it. You're running a company in another country, which is something that Most people could already do, like before e residency was a thing, it just was a lot harder.

[00:32:17] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, you had to have a power of attorney, you had to, had to have a notary or something like that in the country where you're running the country, running the company. It wasn't so popular to do, but it's, so because you're just running a, uh, a company in another country, there's nothing with your personal taxes, um, that are affected.

[00:32:32] Luke Seelenbinder: It could even be that the company itself is not tax resident in Estonia. It is by default. But depending on how your, your business runs exactly kind of where your employees are, where your customers are, if you're shipping physical products, where those physical products are stored and shipped from, et cetera, it could be that you have an Estonian company that's tax resident in Germany or tax resident in the U S or something like that.

[00:32:55] Luke Seelenbinder: There's definitely the tax, um, complexities that come along with it. But as I tell everyone. I'm an American citizen. I have to deal with U. S. tax complexity anyways. Um, if I had a company outside the U. S., I'd have the exact same procedure with any place. So why not choose a place where it's the easiest to run the company because I still have the headache of taxes.

[00:33:20] Luke Seelenbinder: So I might as well make the company as easy to run as possible. 

[00:33:23] Ryan Wardell: That makes a lot of sense. Who, uh, who mostly takes up that program? You know, I, I don't know if you've got any official statistics or just from anecdotally, is it, is it mostly Americans? Is it other people within Europe? Is it people outside of Europe?

[00:33:37] Luke Seelenbinder: Yeah, I actually have quite a few statistics we can, we can go through if you want to. Um, The biggest by number right now is actually Ukraine because obviously doing business in Ukraine right now is very difficult. They're not part of the EU either. So when a Ukrainian wants to sell services in the EU, they typically create a entity in the EU, which Estonia is in the EU.

[00:33:56] Luke Seelenbinder: So having an Estonian company means you have a EU entity. I think it's about 30, 40, maybe 50 percent of e residents actually running a company are in the EU. Um, so they're Germans or they're in Spain or, you know, Italians, et cetera. Um, and typically the reason those people choose Estonia is the ease of doing business.

[00:34:15] Luke Seelenbinder: There's tons of examples of crazy things that you have to do to run a company in some of these countries. For instance, I learned recently that when you name your Spanish company, you don't name your Spanish company. You give the Spanish government. Four, three or four options of what you think your company should be called.

[00:34:33] Luke Seelenbinder: And then they write back to you after a certain number of weeks with what your company is named. Um, I, that kind of blew my mind. Um, well, another example is in Germany, basically anytime you want to do anything. Change anything about how your company is run, how the shareholders are structured anything.

[00:34:54] Luke Seelenbinder: You have to go to a notary Um, and of course you have to go to a notary in Germany, or you have to go through another process to make that all happen So there's lots of reasons why eu citizens end up creating a company in estonia because it's so much easier so much faster Another big problem is getting VAT numbers um So sometimes getting a VAT number in a country can take four, six, eight weeks, and you can't bill anyone until then.

[00:35:18] Luke Seelenbinder: So if you have a contract that starts today and you need to bill them today, so you can live for the next few months, people need a quick solution. And then outside of the EU. So these are people who reside somewhere else, typically, or they're from somewhere else, and they might reside in the EU. There's a lot of different reasons why people do it.

[00:35:36] Luke Seelenbinder: A lot of Americans do it for ease of doing business, um, or to get access to the EU and, uh, An easier way than with a us company, other countries, for instance, where it's difficult to get banking systems to interact with Western banking countries, such as India, or I'm trying to think of a few more examples, but sometimes it can be very difficult to actually get payments cross border between those countries.

[00:35:56] Luke Seelenbinder: Turkey is another example where there's either capital controls, or there's actually just a lot of financial crime issues. So if they're able to kind of prove that, They're legitimate and they get Estonian e residency and then they prove to the bank they're legitimate. Then they have a European bank and it's a lot easier to interact with the rest of the Western financial system from an EU entity than it is from their kind of home.

[00:36:23] Ryan Wardell: That makes a lot of sense. Don't, don't get me started on the Argentinian system. I love this country. It's great, but Oh my God, trying to get anything done in terms of the bureaucracies on another level and trying to bank with any, you know, any transactions into or out of Argentina, just a real, real pain in the butt.

[00:36:38] Ryan Wardell: So maybe that's, that's, that's the reason. Who would you say is, is best suited? Like what are the particular kinds of businesses that are, uh, Ideally suited for e residency. So for example, you know, if you're funded versus not funded, or if you're offering services versus e commerce versus, um, software versus something else, like what, what, what do you see as being like the ideal, you know, what, what's the ICP for the, uh, the ideal customer profile for, for, for the residency program, 

[00:37:09] Luke Seelenbinder: certainly a lot of them.

[00:37:11] Luke Seelenbinder: Our digital nomads. Um, it makes sense that if you have something that's entirely online, you never have to go anywhere physically to run your company, that it's an ideal fit for someone who's a digital nomad. Those digital nomads might be one person companies that might be multiple, um, coming together.

[00:37:27] Luke Seelenbinder: But typically that's a really strong use case when you want to be location independent. Another big use case is getting that EU access. So if you're, uh. A company that wants to export goods or services to the EU, having an entity in the EU makes a lot of sense. It tends to favor things that are digital as opposed to things that are physical.

[00:37:47] Luke Seelenbinder: If you're running a business, shipping goods, importing goods, things like that. And you're not explicitly trying to do that in the Estonian market. Probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense because by the time you're done, you're going to be creating entities in all the countries where you're doing that physical business.

[00:38:04] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, so that doesn't. make as much sense. Um, but if it's services, like I said, you can sell to the EU. So having an easy way to get your foot in the door, there's another spokesperson who created an AI company based in Sri Lanka that creates a lot of AI solutions for a lot of really well known companies here in Europe.

[00:38:22] Luke Seelenbinder: And kind of how he got his foot in the door is by creating a company in Estonia and using that to, to sell to. The Nordics and Germany and really all over European Union. 

[00:38:34] Ryan Wardell: And if you, if you want to raise capital, is it easy to get people to invest into an Estonian company? Or, um, is that something, are you better off having like, you know, a separate company somewhere else for rate, for the purposes of raising capital?

[00:38:50] Luke Seelenbinder: Yeah. In my case, we ended up using a, American entity to raise the capital. Um, the reason for that is all our investors were American. Um, there's a certain degree of comfort, uh, with the Delaware C Corp, things like that. However, the ecosystem here is really, really good. Um, If you do want to raise capital, I would certainly consider doing it in Estonia.

[00:39:13] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, there's lots of good VCs. Um, the narrative around Estonia is certainly really, really positive when it comes to investment. Um, there's quite a few of basically the ecosystem is another fun story about Estonia, like how the startup ecosystem got created. Uh, there was one success. Everyone's heard of it.

[00:39:33] Luke Seelenbinder: Skype. Skype. Yeah. So Skype was created, I think it was 25 years ago now, something like that. And it was the first, it was like a, a UK Estonian startup. And when they exited, they created a bunch of startup investors here in Estonia. Those investors invested in a bunch of companies. Those companies went on to become unicorns.

[00:39:54] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, it's kind of the second generation or companies like, uh, transfer wise, not wise, um, taxify now bolt, um, pipe drive is another one. Then those companies, their founders started reinvesting the money in the same ecosystem. So you kind of got this, um, founders investing in other founders. So it's not just bankers bringing money and saying, do something.

[00:40:22] Luke Seelenbinder: It's founders who know what it's like to go build something. They know what it's like to be in the trenches and need the capital. And, and know really how to spend the capital. Um, so it's a little bit different in the sense that 

[00:40:37] Ryan Wardell: smart money, a 

[00:40:38] Luke Seelenbinder: lot of, yeah, it's, it's, it's smart money. Uh, and it's also really, um, dedicated money.

[00:40:43] Luke Seelenbinder: I've heard it said that if. A company in Estonia gets funded and the founders want to see it through. They typically get the bridge rounds. They get the extra money when they need it to kind of see it through to its conclusion. Basically, if you get funded, you're not going to fail because you ran out of money, unless it was a bad idea.

[00:41:01] Luke Seelenbinder: Of course, it's a bad idea sometimes. And everyone's like, okay, we're done. Um, but. There's actually any hope and you want to see it through, then typically you're able to, if you want to be a nitty gritty, hardworking startup founder, then I think getting capital here is a little bit harder, but once you get it and once you prove kind of yourself and your own worth it, work ethic, um, at least a really good results overall.

[00:41:27] Ryan Wardell: Okay. So, so in the same way that, You had the PayPal mafia. I think they called them where, you know, PayPal was a huge success story. Lots of people got, got minted out of that. They invested in the next batch of startups. They invested in the next generation. So Stoney's got a similar thing going on now after the Skype mafia.

[00:41:45] Ryan Wardell: Okay. 

[00:41:46] Luke Seelenbinder: It's what they're called. So 

[00:41:49] Ryan Wardell: there we go. There we go. Um, Luke, what advice would you give to SaaS founders who are up against big competitors with deep pockets, you know, competing against a Google Maps, for example? 

[00:42:00] Luke Seelenbinder: I think it's really the same I would give to anyone who's going up against the big players.

[00:42:05] Luke Seelenbinder: You look for where they can't serve the market. And there's a few different ways that can happen that can happen in sale, in support. It's how willing are you to kind of get dirty and help the customer kind of solve their problems? How much time are you willing to invest? And really, how well do you know those customers?

[00:42:24] Luke Seelenbinder: Because when you think about a big corporation, it's composed of a lot of people, and those people probably are a few layers or 10, 20 layers removed from the customer. Um, and when you're a small founder, you can sit on a call with the person who's implementing your solution or using your solution and understand their challenges and work and really build a personal relationship with them and solve the problems directly.

[00:42:47] Luke Seelenbinder: So that's. Really a killer edge. You have all you always have at the beginning. But then the second thing is when you think about a big corporation, if they have a new product and they launch it and they get a hundred million in new revenue, they might kill the project. Is it super successful? Is it going to make lots of money?

[00:43:10] Luke Seelenbinder: Yes. Is it going to work for a company with a 2 trillion market cap? Probably not. It doesn't, even move anything above the bottom line. So when you're a small founder, you can find that 10 million, 15 million, a hundred million opportunity and go for it and build a really good business because you don't necessarily want to be a 2 trillion business.

[00:43:35] Ryan Wardell: I know there's, uh, I've spoken to a few founders, a few friends of mine, and they said they freaked out. They found out they were, you know, they had a competitor. The competitor got a whole pile of funding. They had all this money come in from, from VCs. Um, and they were freaking out thinking, okay, well, I'm sort of, I'm done now.

[00:43:51] Ryan Wardell: Like, how am I possibly going to compete with that? They can, you know, they can, they can, uh, outspend me on ads. They can outspend me on engineering. They can roll out new features faster. Like I'm just, I'm dead in the water. Yeah. But almost inevitably what ends up happening is that they have to take the product more and more and more, you know, further up market to justify the valuation.

[00:44:11] Ryan Wardell: So they've got to charge more money. So they've got to go after bigger customers with a more expensive product offering. And they end up vacating this, this kind of space at the bottom, which is, which is a big space and you can build a pretty significant business off that. But not if you've got VCs breathing down your neck to turn it into a billion dollar unicorn.

[00:44:29] Ryan Wardell: I don't know if, if, if that's been your experience, but certainly that's, that's conversation that I've had a few times with a few different founders where they said I was freaking out at first and then almost inevitably they have to move up market, which means that I ended up with a whole bunch of customers coming to me because they're like, well, you know, they quadrupled the pricing.

[00:44:46] Ryan Wardell: So, um, We need to find another solution. And that's, that's a big opportunity, I think, for some of the smaller players. Um, would you, would you agree with that? Would you disagree of what's your experience been? 

[00:44:56] Luke Seelenbinder: Exactly that experience. Um, we, when we started one of our biggest competitors had taken VC funding, but it hadn't taken a lot.

[00:45:04] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, Like reasonable amounts, I would say. And they were a good competitor in the sense that we felt like we could position against them. The pricing was reasonable, but a little bit more, um, and they had a really good product. Look at them today. They've taken. Hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from VCs that expect the world and nothing but the world.

[00:45:30] Luke Seelenbinder: If you exit, um, for less than, you know, 20 billion, then you're a failure type exits and that competitor has. Done exactly what you said. They've gone up market. They've niched into specific industries where they're building solutions that look completely different than what they were doing at the beginning.

[00:45:52] Luke Seelenbinder: They started as a company focused on developers, building a lot of open source tooling. Um, they. Really their product and software created in a way that the revolution of new mapping providers in the last 10 years, um, the standards they created are still being used today. I'm the, on the board, the governing board of a project.

[00:46:17] Luke Seelenbinder: That's actually a open source spin out of one of their projects because they took an open source project that was open licensed and everyone used, and they made it closed license because they needed to make money. 

[00:46:28] Ryan Wardell: Um, 

[00:46:30] Luke Seelenbinder: and so as you see that happening, um, you see developers get alienated, the people who actually build the products that use these tools and you see.

[00:46:42] Luke Seelenbinder: Decision makers get alienated because they see the bills go higher and higher and higher they build a solution and then they run it for two months and they're like, we're gonna go bankrupt if we keep running the solution. So yes, you can build a solution with those products, but it's going to bankrupt us.

[00:46:55] Luke Seelenbinder: So is that really a solution? 

[00:46:57] Ryan Wardell: Which 

[00:46:57] Luke Seelenbinder: is kind of where we can slot in and say, We'll give you the help you need. We'll build a product that's good. That's priced in a way you can actually use it. Imagine that. Hopefully building product they want you to use instead of just charge you a lot to use it a little bit and we'll still be there in, in three or four years, five years, 10 years, because we've, we've been doing this for For eight years now.

[00:47:26] Luke Seelenbinder: So we're not going away. 

[00:47:28] Ryan Wardell: Luke, do you have any, uh, tools or books or resources that you would recommend to other SaaS founders? Well, I could always plug startup sauce here. You don't have to, but I, I, I appreciate that. 

[00:47:39] Luke Seelenbinder: I have a book I like to recommend that's kind of out of left field for most people. It's actually a book about investment.

[00:47:45] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, and it's written by a fund manager. Kind of four other fund managers. Um, it's a book called the Dow of capital, uh, by Spitznagel. Um, and what he talks about is really drilling home the concept of time horizon. And understanding that when you look at investment, when you look at where you're putting your resources, because fundamentally business is resource investment, it's not money, it's time or it's money and time, I would say.

[00:48:18] Luke Seelenbinder: And at the end, you want a certain outcome. And one of the illustrations he uses is trees. Um, when you look at evergreen trees. Especially furs and these slower growing ones. Um, they tend to allocate resources in a very weird way, where at the beginning. They grow really, really slowly. Um, when you look at other trees in comparison to them, those trees spring up, they grow to 50, 60 feet tall.

[00:48:52] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, and then their growth kind of slows down. That's kind of where they max out. But when you look at fir trees, cedar trees, things like that, they put their roots down. They keep building their roots and they're maybe they're 10 feet tall, but they're still building roots. And after 50 years, after a hundred years, then they really start growing.

[00:49:11] Luke Seelenbinder: And when you look at the volume, they add every year after that really long time horizon. Um, it's crazy amount of volume compared to what they were doing at the beginning. And then when you turn that around and look at it from investment standpoint. And building a business at the beginning, you're building a foundation.

[00:49:31] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, look at it as a long time horizon. That's why we started this as a side project. And it's not that kind of get your money from a VC, start fast. Validate the product is, is a bad idea. Um, but there's more than one way to build a business. And when you look at. Some of the most successful businesses. Um, they've taken this approach where they build really deep roots.

[00:49:58] Luke Seelenbinder: They build a really great product. And then when they have the growth, it's so much easier because you're not trying to patch all the holes as you're growing it. You're taking a ship that, that runs well, and you're just selling it to more people. Um, and a fun thing about fir trees is they need forest fire.

[00:50:22] Luke Seelenbinder: To be planted. So when the cones drop, they don't open until they're kind of baked. So you imagine this natural disaster, it goes through a forest. It wipes out all the trees and these trees that grew really, really fast that have thin bark that have shallow roots. They don't have the, the substance to withstand a forest fire.

[00:50:42] Luke Seelenbinder: And then that's exactly when. The cones open up and the fir trees start growing where there's no competitors. And you can, I mean, the applications to business world are many it's find a place where things were just destroyed or there's. Full opportunity and then use all the resources there to, to grow.

[00:51:06] Luke Seelenbinder: Um, so I, I could talk for a long time about this approach to, uh, investing, to building a business. Um, I think it's really a, an interesting approach to, to how you build a life of starting slow. And then gradually once you're, you're ready, um, expanding quickly because you have the foundation to 

[00:51:27] Ryan Wardell: do that, which is kind of the, the total opposite of the, you know, the, the tech crunch advice, which is, you know, start with something, grow like crazy, spend 24 hours a day on it, and then, you know, three to five years later.

[00:51:41] Ryan Wardell: And then you can finally, you know, take a breath. Um, I, I have a friend who said something that stuck with me once. And he said, when, when you, when you building a startup, even, you know, even if you're taking a slow growth approach, anytime you're building a new company, you're always short on, you know, both, you know, people, capital time, everything is in, is in short supply.

[00:52:02] Ryan Wardell: So, um, it's not about. Just putting out fires all the time. It's about deciding, well, which, which, which fires can I leave burn? And which ones do I absolutely have to focus on and put out right now? Cause that, you know, and, and maybe, maybe, you know, your approach, I think. What I'm getting is that, um, if you put down deep enough roots and you've got enough substance in your, in your business, then you don't have to, to worry, you know, when those fires come along, you don't have to fear them.

[00:52:28] Ryan Wardell: Sometimes that can be an opportunity to grow. 

[00:52:30] Luke Seelenbinder: Absolutely. So it's either when you start it's in the time where this industry was completely. Erased because of some unknown events, for instance, starting a, a travel company in 2020 is the worst idea. Um, but I'm sure I could find examples that have travel companies that started in 2020.

[00:52:46] Luke Seelenbinder: And because they ended up surviving that crisis, they're now so much bigger than anyone who existed before that, et cetera, but it's also, like you said, it's, if you build a good product, you build good relationships with the customers when there are fires. First, they're not as big. They're not all consuming.

[00:53:04] Luke Seelenbinder: They maybe be one part of your service. And then the customers, because hopefully they've had years of experience with you listening to their problems, they're not going to run away at the first sign of, of smoke. They're going to say, well, there's a little bit of, there's a problem. How do we fix this? And I found that more often than not, the customers become your allies when there are problems.

[00:53:27] Luke Seelenbinder: Because you were their allies when they had problems. And that's how you build kind of a long term value is customers who almost care about your business more than you do, because you've solved a big problem for them and you've done it consistently over months and years. 

[00:53:43] Ryan Wardell: There's a lot of wisdom that I think, Luke, it's been a pleasure, buddy.

[00:53:46] Ryan Wardell: Um, if anyone is interested in stadium maps or in, uh, Ferrostar, the open source project you've got, um, how do they get in contact with you? 

[00:53:56] Luke Seelenbinder: They are welcome to email me website stadium, apps. com S T A D I A maps. com. And we're on pretty much everything social. Um, we're on GitHub. So if you're for LinkedIn, go there.

[00:54:09] Luke Seelenbinder: If you prefer code, go to GitHub and yeah, excited to have conversations with people who've discovered us. 

[00:54:17] Ryan Wardell: Fantastic. Thanks again, mate. This was, this was an absolute pleasure. Good to have you on the show. 

[00:54:22] Luke Seelenbinder: Thank you.