Startup Reality Check: Why Cool Products Don’t Always Sell with Martin Miller of FastCTO, M-Vision and Unriveted Media Podcast

In this episode, Martin Miller, CTO of FastCTO and M-Vision, Inc., and Host of Unriveted Media Podcast, joins us to break down what it really takes to go from a startup idea on a napkin to a real product people will pay for. He shares why founders need to validate demand early, understand the buying cycle of their target market and avoid relying on hope as a strategy.

Key Takeaways:

00:00 Introduction.

03:15 Validate your idea early by asking customers if it solves a problem they’d pay to fix.

04:34 Experiential learning shows solving your own problem is a start; traction comes when others pay.

10:28 Building rarely guarantees demand; people need to know you exist.

14:58 Vibe coding feels like magic but it’s built on design patterns.

20:19 Entry-level roles are shrinking but experienced builders benefit most.

25:45 Five great builders beat fifty low-cost developers.

30:18 Don’t obsess over tech, focus on whether customers will pay.

32:15 Talk to prospects early, turn them into paying customers and focus on sales, not just code.

‍

Martin: [00:00:00] because it's cool doesn't mean people will buy it. It could be really cool. It can be the best engineered but if people don't buy it, how are you gonna move forward?

Anthony: welcome back to Data Masters. Typically on this show, we talk about data, its value and the challenges associated with it. but today, we're gonna do something a little different. We're gonna zoom in on the zero to one journey for startups in general. I wanted to explore what it takes to bring a product from concept [00:01:00] on a napkin all the way to working MVP and eventually establishing that.

Ever elusive product market fit? How do you get started? How do you avoid fatal missteps that kill startups early? And what does it really mean to have a builder's mindset? Joining me to dissect this is Martin Miller. Martin is a true veteran of the software industry who has seen this lifecycle from many and every angle.

He's currently the CTO of M Vision and the CTO of Fast CTO, and the host of UN Riveted podcast. His background is incredibly diverse. He's served as the global director of AI and machine learning at Levi Strauss. He's founded companies like Go Beam and Cashion, and he is acted as a fractional CTO for many different startups.

To give you a sense for his range, Martin didn't [00:02:00] just write code for SaaS platforms. He actually built bicycle computers used by riders in the Tour de France, and I might add used by me. Yes, exactly. When I was a, a bike rider or still am a bike rider, he understands the grit required to get a product out the door.

Martin, welcome to the show.

‍

Martin: Wow. I'm humbled by the introduction, Anthony. thank you for having me here to, uh, embarrass myself.

‍

Anthony: We will, we will see what we can do. So, you know, as I mentioned in the introduction, you do have a, a very varied background, but fundamentally at its core, your. To use your words, a builder, whether that's as you showed the hardware for, a bike computer, or modern AI software. so I want to, again, I wanted to dig into this question of zero to one.

when, you know, when you start with just an idea. Hopefully written on a napkin. so when you've seen, people, and [00:03:00] maybe they're not even a company yet, but when you've seen people with just an idea, what's the very first thing you should do? when you have like, that, that idea, the, when you're really at the, like, very much the idea stage.

‍

Martin: great question. And I'm, so, I am an advisor to, several startups. I mean, question zero. It it for, for. Or somebody wants to go off and try to figure out how they're gonna make the next, company that blows up, answer your answer. A few simple questions to yourself. Have you asked else, is this a problem they need to have solved? Is this something they would spend money on? Kind of a key question. does this bring value to other people's lives? Really simple, simple questions. And did you reflect it outside of your own mirror? Because it's easy to say yes to yourself.

‍

Anthony: Yeah, so. Just to, challenge you a little bit. There, there is this belief, and I've heard this before, it's like, scratch your own itch. Like find something that's a pain for [00:04:00] you, something that's upsetting for yourself, and you know, if you build something that you think is cool, then other people will, will find it to be cool and interesting.

and to make matters worse. and I think this is a common. Delusion in VC investing and other places is there's a bit of survivor bias, right? There are lots of examples of startups where when interviewed later, the founder was like, well, I had this problem and I thought, you know, for me, this would be really cool.

So I built this thing and, and now it's the next, you know, the next big thing. H how do you think about that?

‍

Martin: well, I, I reflect back on experiential learning and also, I, I agree with like, if there's a problem I have and I can see I wanna solve it. But does anybody else wanna solve this? And do other people agree that there could be a monetary gain in solving it? let me step back a little bit. I, I'm gonna reflect back.

I'm gonna go back in the dinosaur years. try to see if I get the reg, the right company names involved. [00:05:00] we all know of Apple going from maybe, maybe you don't recall because your lineage in, in, in your, your, your age of, sorry, I had to use the A word. but apple to apple, apple two, and then we got, what was the Lisa?

Then the Mac and the operating system changes between those. So I had the fortune of working on some early operating systems with visual interfaces, and being a recipient of using and developing for them, including, the Lisa, something called, from a company called Digital Research. I, I'm forgetting what the OS was called, but it was way cooler than, than the OS on the apple at the time. That one failed, but it was really much better at the time. It's hard to believe that there was another, Interesting company, not too far after that. That, kind of goes in nautical terms, as in think of Commodore Omega and think about what do we think of the Commodore Omega today? And look at the operating [00:06:00] system and the visual interface. They were really superior to anything Apple had at the time. But look who the winner ended up being even today. That's an interesting way to think about it. And so now step, step out and go. because it's cool doesn't mean people will buy it. It could be really cool. It can be the best engineered but if people don't buy it, how are you gonna move forward?

Anthony: I think this is a, a really important point, something that I, often say both to myself and then to, to my, to our earlier conversation to people who are starting something. and it gets to a point you made at the beginning, which was go ask somebody else whether this is a pain and a problem they have.

And I think that's, that's obviously very good advice. But the, the follow up question should be, and are you willing to give me, not just like theoretical money, but actually your money for this thing? Like, are you willing to in fact, pay for it and. Then obviously like how much are [00:07:00] you willing to pay for it?

Is this a problem that costs you a dollar? Is this a problem that costs you a hundred thousand dollars? what's the power in this, in, in this question

in your view? 

‍

Martin: well, first of all, it's, it's the ultimate question if you really want to think about it. let me give you a couple, couple quick stories of,

‍

Anthony: wind back, early.com era, all kinds of solutions. People building, and shovels for the.com era, you know, the tooling and et cetera. Those people still are around for the most part today in various forms. Acquired or not. and they were building something that was solving a problem that helped solve other problems, which was infrastructural and leads us to where we are in modern software development today. and so will people buy it if they can monetize, make money on it, optimize and make it into a cash register machine for themselves, then there's a clear equation. If they cannot. Make it into a cash registered, you know, ringing machine. [00:08:00] It's difficult to spend, and the number of advising roles I had for VCs that talked about companies. Were really cool and we, we went in to do due diligence and, oh, we've got 25 customers, or 50. What inflate any Zero after

‍

Martin: that number and then you dig in two steps, literally. we talk to some of your customers? Oh, sure. Here's, here's Bill. Oh, Bill's your brother-in-law. Great. Perfect. So we, you get to Bill. Hey Bill. we, we see John as, Marked you as a, a customer. You wanna talk to us about, your journey into using the solution, et cetera. Oh, it's great. It's the best thing since sliced bread.

I, we really love it. We we're, we're built to roll with this. And then the next question is, how much are you paying for this? And then the response, total dead silence. We're not paying for this. He gave it to us. Key point. So a lot of referential customers turned out [00:09:00] to be non-paying, users or potential testers of software or solutions.

So if no one's paying for it, a clue. That's a huge clue that maybe you're solving a problem that doesn't yet have a market.

‍

Anthony: Yeah, no, agreed. And, and I think there's also, the, the tendency when you ask people for perspective and advice is to give shocker perspective and advice. They, they wanna be helpful. there's a big difference. So if you give, if you ask me my opinion on anything, I will give it to you. If you ask me for money.

That was a whole different conversation. Right now we're, we're, we're really gonna get into it and I'm very comfortable saying no to spending money, whereas I'm very comfortable giving free advice. But look, Martin selling stuff is hard. It's really hard asking people for money. So my dream as a founder is to.

Just build cool technology and then people will just show up at my website and, and then download the product and [00:10:00] buy it using their credit card, and I will then not have to talk to anybody. so. This, I, I joke, but like, this is the dream, right? I, I feel like every technical founder I've ever engaged with has this dream of if you build it, they will come.

Like, we're just gonna create cool technology. It's gonna be so cool in fact that people will just buy it. They're gonna show up and buy it. So talk to me about this delusion. 'cause I clearly need some,

‍

Martin: So, so there is a case where that does work, but it's in a fraction of the cases of people attempting to make that work. And what, what makes one stand out while the others fail? well there's several elements. Yes, you may be all selling the same cup of water or bottled water, except one has a following and a social media presence and, a little promotional capability. don't. If they don't rely on just you find it, maybe they'll, they'll come and buy it, [00:11:00] right? That, that approach doesn't work very well. People have to know you're there. Why do they know you're there? Well, maybe people are talking about your product or service. If no one's talking about it, how are you gonna find out about it?

Are you gonna randomly do a you a i I'll say it. A Google search for it. Good luck. You're gonna get a bunch of sponsor results plus the AI prompt. You want us to dig deeper? Oh, sure. Please dig deeper, but that's, that's not the right answer. Definitely not the right answer. So you can hope to get money that way, but hope is not a great strategy.

And there's a book on that too.

‍

Anthony: A book on.

‍

Martin: On, on selling. Sorry. There's a book on talking about building up, building up a sales structure and team, but you, it's not a, it's not a hope strategy.

‍

Anthony: Yeah. It's gotta be built with intention. No, couldn't agree more. I think The challenge of the, if you build it, they will come. type strategy is, I think to your point, it is [00:12:00] a vanishingly small percentage. In fact, I might even argue zero if we're being sort of brutally honest. So, and betting on being the one in a hundred or one in a thousand that ends up in, in this virtuous cycle where people just show up and buy your stuff.

Great. Like if, if you win the lottery, you could also bet on winning the lottery. It turns out not to be a great way to build a startup.

‍

Martin: I have a great segue on, on winning the lottery. You know, I invested in, uh, couple, uh, mini Bitcoin mining devices that, you know, basically the size of a credit card, and they cost about $2 a year to run, and they're running in the next room just for entertainment value alone. And I, I tell my kids, this is my lottery ticket.

‍

Anthony: You're hoping to, to be the, the, the one who minced one of the, one of the blockchain and get the, the big prize. Got it.

‍

Martin: Absolutely with no competitional power whatsoever to do it. It's, it's more the humor of doing it.

‍

Anthony: Fair enough, fair enough. Good. so it does also feel a bit like the barriers to entry on doing a startup [00:13:00] have fallen a bit. you know, anyone can fire up cursor or even put Claude code into VS code and. Vibe code anything these days. and, you know, I'm, I'm curious in your both experience with this, and again, as A-A-C-T-O, you know, maybe we're at the end of our, our, you know, at the end of the road, like soon we're not gonna need any people.

We're just gonna sort of vibe code every possible startup. But talk to me a little bit about, What, what vibe coding means in in your world, and have we moved to a point of zero marginal cost for the next startup? Because anyone can just vibe code themselves as a startup.

‍

Martin: I'm not here to naysay vibe coding, but I'll, I'll say the following, it could be a great kickstart for generating an interface so you can, you can test it and see, hey, this is interesting, and keep going you can modify it a [00:14:00] little bit and then share it and have people check it out. I think the magic isn't so much that, which is kind of cool, that has lowered the bar for maybe some simple. I don't wanna say ux, but also some simple UI generation for people. and, and you, you lower the bar for needing to have any specific, like information on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, understanding to do it, which is probably one of the interesting pieces that you cut out. The middleman or middle person, excuse me, in the process of doing something just for testing visually. But those skills I just mentioned, even though they're, they're not in the rocket science category, they builded up to rocket science. When you get to things that are user experience, that work like magic and in the world of let's just, let's just take computer science, there's many patterns of working design patterns.

There's literally books on [00:15:00] design patterns or in software engineering, there's software algorithm books, Teaching, a large language model. All these methods, and and procedural ways of operating is cookie cutter. And that what feeds into what could be now your vibe coding. That is straightforward.

That is magic and great, and I, and I'll fall for that. What that does do is allow somebody that is a subject matter expert in some area. maybe take something a little further than they expected and maybe get to that handoff point. So I'm for vibe coating. where it falls off is in maintenance mode and, future proofing and structural refactoring. That's where we break it up a little bit. So it's not like a, one one vibe coding method works for all things, but you can get puzzle pieces done really well. If you know what you're doing,

[00:16:00] 

‍

Anthony: Yeah, so, I have, I haven't heard this distinction between by, by coding or maybe by creating to, to frame it slightly differently. And, vibe maintaining. So, sh share with me a little bit what you, what you see as that distinction and is it in your view that vibe maintaining is a non-starter?

Is that we get that right.

‍

Martin: I wouldn't call it a non-starter, but what I like to do is frame it up a little bit when you create [00:17:00] You want to have a way of recreating that solution and redeploying that solution. That solution is running on some somewhere, whether it's a cloud system or a physical system in your home or in a, in a rack somewhere in, in the universe. and you want to be able to deploy it one time only or a thousand times only. Is it scaling, so you need to commit it to. Effectively to the library, which is the software repo. And that software repo is holding all the code that builds up that software and service that you, that you just vibed in there you can, that's the creation side.

That's great. Now you wanna maintain it. Now you, you're getting into the world of real software engineering, software development, and the core. Of where expertise actually does matter. So you can use what's behind vibe coating the large language model piece, and you pull that into your IDE as a plugin [00:18:00] Also.

It's the same, it's the same deal, however you, you're giving it more referential information to work with. a structure of a project. It has directories. I have assets, image files, et cetera. I'm not looking to throw away how my interface looks. I'm just looking to fix how it flows from point A to point B, or maybe just change the text, which is a simple typographical thing, or maybe a global search and replace operation. I don't think I want. LLM to global search and replace all my text fields, without some check and balance, or you, you'll get a lot of confidently wrong, replacements. I mean, that's, know, that's the one thing about prompting is you get a lot of confidence coming back, but it, it can be confidently incorrect in places, and that's where the human in the loop matters.

‍

Anthony: Yeah, and maybe to, I, I'll add, my own perspective here. I think this confidence thing is actually exactly right. Especially when it's paired with a lack of understanding and [00:19:00] expertise on the part of the, of the developer. So if, if, if the only person who wrote the code is the LLM and you don't actually understand the code.

Then when it says it did X, Y, and Z, you know, you have no way of knowing that that's true or false other than to just assume that it must have been right. And I, there, I think you probably had these experiences as well. There are plenty of cases where it says, absolutely, I, you know, I did whatever you asked it to do, and in fact it didn't, or did half of it, or did a third of it, or did all of it, but the last step was the most important one or whatever.

Anthony: so yeah, I think that's a, it's a, it's a good point, but so. I just wanna connect these two ideas for a minute. 'cause we talked, at the beginning about, what it takes to get that idea, get some feedback on that idea. But I, I guess you would agree with the, the idea that we've lowered the bar for, getting feedback on idea to your point code, some user interface, [00:20:00] maybe some basic flows of an application and getting feedback like that's easier.

but that doesn't excuse you from the hard work of then in our prior conversation asking for money to the extent that someone actually wants to buy it. But let, I just wanna make sure, check in that I You would agree with that? Yeah.

‍

Martin: I'll give you some street creds here, for a little bit. And then segue what I think the impact to humans, that due to development today has been from this phenomenon is, The world of entry level has, kind of been squeezed, but the role of senior level and very experienced people that leverage this have magically come back to life. And that experiential piece is where this, the subject matter expertise lives. been working in medical instruments, you know, for decades, and I know a lot of the, the nomenclature inherently the pros and cons of things about that and, or I've been working in some [00:21:00] area, other area. I'm a financial analyst and I study these type of funds.

And, having that those time in the chair, understanding of the market and what you're doing is huge. So I, with that segue, I mean. People in the middle actually benefit from this automation more than the people in the early phase. 'cause they don't have the subject matter expertise. It's almost like, you in a writer's workshop and ask you to write something and you have the option of using a piece of paper. Google search or, you know, choose your favorite GPT engine or that you'd like, or LIM engine to write it for you. And you, you have five minutes. Write everything you can with your hand, and, and the other two methods, and you're gonna, you're gonna come up with three interesting cases. Now take that same writing and the assignment's the same for all three, and talk to those people two weeks later. This is, this is actually scientifically proven with, some studies at MIT where they [00:22:00] actually go back and they, they do all the, the case studies and execution here. But the people that use the LOM remember what they wrote, because remember, they didn't write it.

‍

Anthony: They didn't write it exactly.

‍

Martin: The next down the chain is the, the Google search, and then they transcribed it into a, you know, a document.

They, they, they had some recollection of it and the, but the person that wrote it with their hand. They totally understood what they wrote and they could recite it and talk about it. So huge point about the subject matter expertise. So use your, use your power tool where it makes sense, but if you don't understand your power tool, it's not gonna help you when you don't have it available.

‍

Anthony: Sure. Exactly. And, and again, we've seen this in vibe coating all the time. we, you know, I, I've had personal experience with this where, you know, the, the engine gets caught on the, it's, it's a little, I always think of it like the Roomba, right? The room gets caught in the corner and then you have to go save it.

‍

Martin: I shouldn't pick on Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner. which you can't buy anymore. If I, if I look correctly in the [00:23:00] new market, I don't think they're producing them.

‍

Anthony: That's right. It's been taken over. but any case, so it gets caught in the corner and we see this with, the LLMs as well. And, and then if you don't understand the code base. Then your, what's interesting, at least in my experience, has been that the kinds of mistakes it makes, the kinds of corners that get caught in are not ones that are easy to navigate out of.

If they were, then, the LLM probably would figure it out. They're, they're caught in some, edge case and the actual bug in the code can be, you know, in a completely different spot. And if you don't understand the code base, you're almost certainly never. Gonna get them out of that corner. So, I wanna shift a little bit here in the conversation.

The other thing I hear from startups, and admittedly this is a little bit of an antiquated perspective, but, but I want to get your perspective on it, is this idea of we're gonna outsource the development effort. And let's just say they've agreed that outsourcing it to an [00:24:00] LLM is not gonna get them there.

But what we're gonna do is we're gonna outsource it to Eastern Europe, or we're gonna outsource it to Latin America, or pick your favorite, job shop, low cheap in, you know, inexpensive development team. And, and that's our strategy. Like we have the expertise as the founders. What we need is a job shop of, you know, a large group of 50 or whatever developers at very low cost.

do you believe in this strategy? Does this make sense or what's the alternative?

‍

Martin: Is this where I out myself in saying I'm working with multiple outsourced entities, and pick a country and, and probably I have an intersection into that country with, you know, pretty good technical resources. I think the, the strategy isn't necessarily flawed. I think we're. People need to step back is what are you gonna do when the project is double air quoted complete? And how are you gonna maintain it, take ownership of it, keep your intellectual property from crossing up with someone else's. and you know, it's how does life go on [00:25:00] when you wanna enhance it? when's okay to do that? And I do it today, so I, I'm not here to criticize. I don't replace subject matter expertise very easily, or lightly, I should say, in that just because you threw it over the wall to an outsource company doesn't mean they have se senior experienced people. So do your due diligence and understand, what they've done, how they've done it. Maybe even chat with their primary people, talk about their experience and, get a customer reference that paid.

‍

Anthony: Got it. And but if, and if you had to pick between five experienced people and 50 low cost people, what would you pick?

‍

Martin: Well,

‍

Anthony: Presuming they're

‍

Martin: yeah, no, I'm all, I'm all for the army of five. I can do more damage with five really good people than 50 50 cost people. 'cause that low cost, it doesn't tell me anything about their experience and what they bring to the table and how you coordinate 'em and their time zones and all [00:26:00] that. That fun stuff.

‍

Anthony: got it. Cool. So let, loop back a little bit to the original problem, the zero to, to from idea to something moment. My sense of the early phases of startups is it's not that there. All a disaster, or for that matter, all a success. It's that you don't have any idea whether you're in a success loop or a failure loop, meaning it's just very hard to understand if you're making progress or spinning your wheels.

So, how do you know, like how do you know if this is working, not working? yeah, what's your view on that?

‍

Martin: It's really simple when the money comes outta my back pocket. do, do I see any of my return on investment coming anytime in the near future or never? I mean. Know, if I think of my own portfolio today without outing every company name. I have three with revenue. I have two without [00:27:00] revenue.

One I've been with for over two years. got its first revenue this year, one I've been with for oh boy, about a year. And they have significant revenue. And then I have, you know, a minor revenue case and, The first problem is who's gonna pay you and evidence that they're gonna pay you? And if no one pays you, did you even ask for compensation?

Did you even ask for the value of this? the, the first fear factor I have of one of my advisee companies is they're afraid to put it out there. 'cause they're, and, and, and this is the huge mistake, but I think they're afraid of failure. I'm going, you learn from failure. You built something and you're, and you don't wanna put it out there to be judged, you're taking the hearsay that you feel it's not ready for that market, but you haven't gone to that market now you, you enter another market trying to then repeat the same problem and you gonna build something [00:28:00] for that market, but you haven't even tested it.

They'll want be able to pay for it, have the ability to pay for it. I mean, let's take, let's, let's take an example market. If you're gonna jump into the educational market, and this is gonna hit home, and I hope the right people hear this, but have to understand the educational market. If you're selling into,you know, public schools, private schools, you know, K through 12, Vocational training or, you know, collegial training and who has discretionary funds to buy a software solution? They've never tried. Think about that question. much none of them, none of 'em have discretionary money just sitting around waiting for some, somebody to walk up and say, Hey, this is a cool thing.

None, zero. I'm just, I'm putting it out there. unless you ask for money today, you cannot expect them to budget it until the next school year. And that's how long you have to weather it. So does that make sense? So you have a sales cycle problem. And, and, and that's a real, a real, a real epiphany if you enter a certain marketplace and they do seasonal buying, [00:29:00] budgeting.

‍

Anthony: Yeah, so your cycle time at best, and you know, under no circumstances is less than 12 months.

‍

Martin: Well, in some cases. Yeah. And so, you know, I, I did hold up this box earlier,

‍

Anthony: Sure.

‍

Martin: and, let me speak to this industry, how it was in that timeframe. Financing was up, pretty much 90 to 365 days for this stuff. So this, this is bought by the company that builds it shipped. It's in the, it's in the bike store. And no revenue. Maybe 90 days, 180 days, maybe 365 days. that's kind of crazy financing if you think about it. That's a cost of funds loans, and who can do that? So know the cost of money before you get into something.

‍

Anthony: Yeah. Well, what I love about that is, in nowhere in that answer, in that conversation was, your development cycle time, the test failure rate, [00:30:00] the, whether you're using the coolest, innovative technology, but you connect it straight to the most important metric, which is. Is there an economic engine behind this that you can, that you can lean into and I think, you know.

Not to typecast you as a CTO, but you are twice over. The typical CTO is thinking about the technology. Does the technology work? Is it, you know, do you, have you built a high quality product? Is it using the coolest, new, innovative UI framework, whatever? and as opposed to. Are people willing to pay for it?

And is there an economic engine to your point about financing, that sits behind it? So are there, the, so flipping it around for a moment, so those are the positive look for cases where you're actually getting revenue traction. Are there red flags, like when you bump into a founder or a, or a, you're looking at a company, what, what, what are the biggest red flags?

‍

Martin: well, I, I think I may have indicated one of the [00:31:00] biggest red flags is not recognizing the market you're entering in its finance cycle. Right? So that's probably the first. if you understand that, then you know when to approach. That's huge. And then, then the next problem is what are you approaching them with? You know, how do you test that? That there is a need or an ability to build a solution for it? And you can get people to finance you to build something that you don't have, or you can try selling something that you have, but you're not sure there's a market. So you can come from both angles. 

‍

Anthony: Yeah.

‍

Martin: red flag for me is not acknowledging you understand the finance cycle of that market and its customer.

‍

Anthony: Got it. Yep. I think that's very, very true. And, and again, like, maybe to flip that around a little bit, it's, if you're. If you're not talking about the finance cycle in the market and the customer, then you're probably talking about the technology, the infrastructure, the, heaven [00:32:00] forbid, the patents, or, you know, whatever it is, the technology, the, the core innovation.

and that's, that's I think, a big, a big, big red flag. well, look, this has been, hopefully for, for listeners. Super helpful. you know, if you're thinking about a startup, I think the key lesson to take away from this is, you know, talk to prospects. In fact, try to turn those prospects into. Paying customers, try to, turn the conversation from, is this interesting into, would you pay for this?

and then not overly relying on vibe coding or outsourcing, but rather getting a dedicated team that is smart and thoughtful on the business problem, empathy with the customer. Probably tightly close, you know, tightly tied rather to the sales process, and focus energy on building that, muscle memory around, the economic, cycle of the business.

Is that a fair way to summarize the approach?

‍

Martin: I'll, I'll, [00:33:00] I'll give. A 9.5 out of 10 for that.

‍

Anthony: Excellent. What's the point? Five.

‍

Martin: Well, that's, that's to be left for the readers and listeners to sort out with me.

‍

Anthony: Brilliant. All right.

‍

Martin: how I make the big bucks.

‍

Anthony: Fair enough. All right, well thanks for the time and yeah, thanks.

‍

Martin: I'm honored and thank you so much for having me.

‍