A Discussion with Analisa Goodin, CEO & Founder of Catch+Release

Pamela Rucker: Hi, I'm Pamela Rucker, an instructor for Harvard Professional Development. I focus on coaching executives in the areas of leadership, strategy and innovation.

Welcome to Leading With Passion, a series honoring innovative small business leaders using their unique capabilities to improve people's lives. Today, I'm joined by Analisa Goodin, founder and CEO of Catch+Release, a venture-backed startup that enables brands to safely license authentic content from anywhere on the internet. Last year, she earned a spot on the 40 over 40 List for her career in content curation, pioneering the found content category. Analisa, welcome to the program.

Analisa Goodin: Thank you, it's so nice to be here.

Pamela: I love the fact that you said that there is an everyday person out there creating content every day, all around you. One of the things that I love to talk about is this idea of value. One author says that it's hidden. It's everywhere around you, but it's hidden. It's like gold and our idea is to go and try to find it. It's this human-to-human emotion. And the idea would be, where do I find those little pockets of value all over the place? And for a marketer, that value comes in how I can tell a story and connect with you. And so, I see you guys as being able to demystify this art and science of actually getting out and telling stories in a way that people can actually receive them and hear them because you're helping me curate things that tell that story. Do you see it that way?

Analisa: I do see it that way. I think when we talk about these moments or this human connection, we're really talking about authenticity. And authenticity, we're really talking about trust. Brands today have, especially the best ones, really know how to create a sense of trust and connection with their audience. It's not just advertising. It's more than that. It's, how do you bring your customer or your user or your people into your story, and how do you know where they're at in their life and how do you meet them where they are? And so, I think really utilizing content shot by everybody in this newly democratized world of content creation, I mean, I have my phone here in my pocket, and I'm now carrying with me a device that can shoot in high resolution. That wasn't the case 10 years ago. What does that mean now for the medium of storytelling? It means that it's democratized. There are billions of people who now can express something, tell a story. And brands, the smart ones, know that they need to leverage that.

Pamela: I was gonna say, you make a great point about this idea of there being content out there and the phone being able to help you create that. I came into the marketplace as a developer when the internet was magazineware, and there wasn't that much to harvest. But my goodness, the amount of data and the amount of stories and the amount of content that's out there to leverage. And you never really know what's going to move someone. To your point, it's the small things. I love the app because I feel like it's a marketplace for moments and this idea that you capture moments that go beyond to the unknown creator and creates opportunities for them really excites me because I feel like it's allowing people to come into the marketplace who weren't there before.

First, it could be companies who really would love to do a wonderful campaign like that, but they just may not have the resources to do it and they wanna know how to leverage content. "How do I do that? "They have great ideas, but how do I use it?" You can help them do that. But the second is, there's this whole group of people out there that have become a creator and don't even know it, that they can monetize their lived life and they don't even know it. They have previously been locked out of the idea of being a content creator because maybe they don't have the skills, maybe they don't have the background, maybe they don't have the education. But to your point, they can take their phone and they can do that. Did you intend that, or is that something that you guys stumbled upon?

Analisa: In the process of founding the company, I was very intimate with the problem on the buyer's side, working with brands and advertising agencies and production teams and really understanding the pains that they were under with regards to getting and launching really great campaigns with amazing imagery. I was very intimate with their problems and pain points. And what I saw around me was the internet starting to really blossom. I saw the invention of new social media platforms where creators were starting to post new, exciting kinds of imagery. I saw the internet as increasingly a place where culture was happening, or at least the documentation of culture was happening. And I knew that this gap needed to be bridged. I knew that my clients, my customers who were really on the production side and really understood the pains of having to ship something fast that was high quality needed access to this. But the thing standing in their way was, how do we get clearance quickly? How do we predictably license? Who's managing the payments and the paperwork? And all of that minutia was really, it's not the sexiest part of the process by any stretch, but what it does is it opens up the floodgates of creativity. And that's why I decided to focus on the licensing, 'cause I wanted to create a way for storytellers and creators to just flourish.

Pamela: Well, I mean, I think the level of authenticity is extremely high. And it's so high that I don't think a brand could do that on their own. Even if they tried to do a whole campaign and put actors in, my brain would recognize somewhere that you're trying to make me have a moment. The level of authenticity I see instantly connects with me as I see people telling their own stories. So, it's incredibly great when I experience it, but it's gotta be incredibly complex because now you have, what, four, five, six people in a video, lots of people you have to get licensing from. How do you go about managing that process?

Analisa: Well, when I first got started in this industry, I was really motivated by solving the creative need. If one of my clients wanted to use something that they'd found on the internet, that was the most important thing to solve for. How do you say yes to them as fast as possible? How do you deliver that good news to a creative director, "That shot you love? "You can have it." So, I was very motivated to make those stories work and make my creative customer really happy. And so, I started to figure out and tool together the licensing process, which involves sometimes 80 different steps. It's incredibly challenging and very unpredictable.

You could reach out to somebody on the internet and not know if they're gonna respond back. And I waded through all of that for the first few years of the business, learning the intricacies of that space, finding efficiencies, building my own hacked-together tools. There was no tool, what I wanted was a licensing button. I wanted what Catch+Release is today. I wanted PayPal for commercial licensing where I could just click a button, tons of stuff happens behind the scenes, I get my shot, I tell my team that they can have it, creator gets paid, everybody feels good. But the truth was, that didn't exist, and I had to go build it. And the only way to build it was to go through the process.

I mean, I probably cleared 10,000 pieces of content myself before we wrote any code. And there was just, there's tons of intricacies in that process that now, looking back, I'm so grateful I got to go through myself, because how you communicate with a person on the web to get them to trust that you're legit, to get them to trust you in this process. We're trying to clear content from, in the case of the spot that you saw, mothers, children, they're having to sign parental releases for those kids. You can't be spammy. You have to be, we have to show up authentically to them. And we want them to have a good experience because we want them to feel good about the brand they just participated in, also. Those creators, we want them to feel good about Teleflora and the connection that they made by being a part of this commercial. It really kind of, we try and pay it forward.

Pamela: It's interesting to me that you talk about the 80 different steps. I was sitting here thinking, what could the 80 different steps possibly...

Analisa: It’s painful.

Pamela: What are some of the things involved in that?

Analisa: I'll give you an example. A shot's posted to the internet someplace. How do we know if the person who posted it is the real owner of it? Are they the ones who shot the image or the video? Are they the copyright owner? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they reposted something from a friend. That's one rabbit hole you have to go down. Another is, how many people appear in the image? Are there other faces, other levels of intellectual property we have to deal with? What's the likelihood that the person who shot the video knows the people in the film so that we can get in contact with them to get their permission? Who are they? Are some of them minors? Are there logos that appear on their clothing? Is there any intellectual property behind them in the background that needs to be dealt with? Those are some examples. Then it's, will they license? Can I get in touch with them? Are they out of the country? Have they recently been through something in their life where they're not able to respond to a message if we post it? It becomes exponentially complex.

So, what Catch+Release has done, and over the years, I learned how to start to predict that process. I could look at an image, gather data around it with the available information on the shot, and guess with a certain degree of success whether or not it was gonna be a licensable shot. We've now turned that into an algorithm that can automatically assess the licensability of anything on the web. It's taking, again, that process of having gone through it over and over and over and over again, and then turning it into an automated process that now anybody can use, not just our own team.

Pamela: Do you find yourself having to tell brands, "No, you can't use that because," and if so, how do they respond? What do you do?

Analisa: It does happen. Sometimes somebody might not wanna license, and that's entirely in their right to say, "Thank you very much for the offer, but I decline." And it's always disappointing, but I think the internet's a big place. And so, we always try and support our brands with alternate shots and other things that we think are sometimes even more interesting or help the story even more, yeah.

Pamela: I feel like, Analisa, when people capture these moments, they're trying to be truly genuine when it comes out. And what you've done is now created this marketplace of all these beautiful, genuine experiences that people can deposit things into, and then brands can somehow leverage as they try to curate the things that they need to create their campaigns. How in the world did you ever get started in this? It's such a unique thing to wanna do.

Analisa: It's one of those things that I, so I was an artist by trade. I went to art school and got my, I did a master's in art theory, and I came out of school with a really robust network in the arts, curators, museum directors, gallerists. And while I deeply connected to my own practice, I was really hungry for something bigger than that for me that involved building something with other people, not just me by myself in the studio. And so, that's what started me on the process of side hustling. I had a ton of side hustles out of school. I worked in Michelin star restaurants. I worked as a photo researcher in the production industry. That's what led me toward starting Catch+Release. I think I was just gravitated toward hard problems. I really liked a challenge. And to me, the mission or the vision of making the internet licensable and making the clearance and licensing of content scalable was something I could barely wrap my head around, but knew it had to exist.

I knew that the future of the internet couldn't just be a place where everyone in the world with access to the web can post authentic moments of their life, and that it can't be transacted, that it can't be used in a storytelling industry. To me, that doesn't make sense. You can't have like this ballooning supply without the ability to actually create transactions. That was my vision, and it was really, it was born out of being really close to the pain. I was really close to the pain. I was in the editing suites with my customers, helping them figure out which shots they were gonna use and which ones were working. And it was like, "Okay, that one's not working anymore. "Let's go find a replacement, okay." It was just, it was grueling, but I was really close to the pain. And I think it's, when you really understand a problem and you see a clear opportunity, you wanna help. You wanna build something to help. And I saw licensing as this thing nobody else really wanted to do. I was like, "God, if we could do that, "what have we done for the world?"

Pamela: I'm laughing because you're giving me the classic verbiage that people give me for disruption. "There were jobs to be done!"

Analisa: I read it in a book right before this interview.

Pamela: Because, what is the job that the person is trying to get done? And one of the things they tell you to look at is the things people don't wanna do. Places, things people don't wanna have to get done, but they really want it anyway.

Analisa: Of course, of course.

Pamela: And I love when I see these classic examples of things we know are true in management theory actually playing themselves out. I talked earlier about the idea of disruption playing itself out either in the low end or in market in this as well. But all of it is borne out of the fact that you were trying to help someone. And to actually find these brands the things that they were looking for, but at the same time, offer value to the customers who are shooting content as well. So, I see how you as an artist decide that, oh, these images are great, and you're trying to license the property, the intellectual property, and you see how that's great. How do you get the technology involved? How did you get that bit of backing?

Analisa: I think there's a really great path to startups that can start in the form of doing everything by hand and almost starting in the form of a service, because you can learn so much and get paid to learn. So, it was really a matter of knowing that my vision was to ultimately build a piece of technology that could make anything on the internet licensable. But I needed to really understand the process well. I was okay doing the process by hand thousands and thousands of times 'cause I knew that what I was doing was gathering learnings.

So, by the time we hired our first engineer, I was able to say: Here's how do we reach out to creators. Here's the tone of voice that we use. Here are their common objections. Here's their common fears. Here's how we build trust quickly. Here's what the buy-side cares about. Here's what a creative director cares about, what a business affairs person cares about, what an editor cares about, what a producer cares about. Well, here's what a CMO cares about. Here's what a brand manager cares about. Here's what a marketing intern cares about. I knew all of that. So, by the time we went out and raised our first round of funding, our Series A, one of the reasons that was a really attractive investment was that we knew exactly what to build. We just had to go keep building it.

Pamela: You had to keep building it. That's interesting to me, too, that you actually talk about multiple capabilities, different sides of the brain working together. Where does that come from in you? Is this something that you always felt like you had?

Analisa: There is, you're right. You talked about the art and science. There is a left and right brain component, here. There's the finding of imagery, which we help our customers do, but they do on their own as well. They're all using the internet as a source of inspiration. That's a very right-brained activity. It's a very intuitive, you're looking for something. A shot feels right or is right. You can't maybe pin it down exactly, but it is a very intuitive process. And then there's licensing, which is an extremely binary, you either have it or you don't. And how you get to that point does require science. I've always been somebody who can nurture and needs both sides of my brain nurtured very much like a, very much an artist, but also can think logically. Very much a creative and founder, but also can move into business mode, also. And I get that, I think, from my parents. My dad is a neurologist, my mom's a photographer. He's also a poet and she's also an architect, so he has it, she has it, they both have it. It's sort of interesting.

Pamela: That's interesting. So, both of your parents have it, you have it as well. And it seems like a natural thing that flows out of you, to be able to use both of those sides.

Analisa: I think it's critical because I didn't go through the path of, I didn't go get a business degree. I've never went, I didn't get an MBA. When I started the company, I didn't know anybody in tech. I didn't know any other CEOs. I knew nothing about how to actually functionally start a business. And so, I think, but my perspective and the legitimacy I was able to bring to the idea was because of my creative background. And so, it was just, I came at it from a slightly different perspective which I think benefited me. But I had to do a lot of catching up, too, because learning how to build a business and evolve to become a CEO is its own path, it's its own journey. So, I've always leveraged both.

Pamela: Walk me through the process, 'cause I wanna ask you about the CEO and your talent, too. But before I do, talk me through how this works. If someone contacts you and they wanna start a new campaign, how does that work?

Analisa: Yeah, so let's use Teleflora as an example. In the ad that we saw, their team had been looking on the internet for content. They saw tons of amazing gems that they wanted to use. And a customer that's not using Catch+Release is just saving those links, those URLs on spreadsheets, circulating them around the team, getting approval from the creative team on which shots are good, but they've got no programmatic way to get the rights. By the time they've figured out what they wanna use, then they're roping in somebody in legal who can come help out. It's not their full-time job, but they're saying, "Hey, can you do me a favor "and try and get clearances on these 25 different shots? "And good luck." With Catch+Release, they have the ability now to just give us the URLs. When you find something on the internet, you give it to us. We will assess the viability that it can be licensed, and then we'll send it through the process.

Pamela: And so, what you've taken is the knowledge that you've gained over your years of experience in your path in life, turned that into an algorithm that other people who work with you can use…

Analisa: Exactly.

Pamela: …to help solve that problem.

Analisa: And then, on the other side, every time we license something from someone on the web, whether they're, they could be a professional or they could be a regular citizen of the internet, we invite them to join our creator community. We actually give them the ability to connect other content they have on the internet, whether it's on Instagram or Vimeo or TikTok or YouTube, to become part of our database so we can manage the rights of that for them moving forward.

Pamela: So, you say, "Bus Mom, do you have anything else?"

Analisa: Yeah, "Bus Mom, if anybody ever sees your content again, we'd love to be your licensing, the way you do licensing." The same way PayPal is the way you transact.

Pamela: We all have moments like that. That small phone allows us to carry our life around in our pocket, and we all have moments that will probably be what bus mom has. We just don't think about it as something that we can capitalize on or monetize.

Analisa: There's a reason why this idea wouldn't have worked 10 years ago. The quality of the camera, the democratization of the supply chain on the creator side has to be where it is in order for this to be viable. This would not have worked before. I mean, when I first got started, it was the Canon 5D Mark II was the best prosumer camera out there, GoPro, and other than that, it was really expensive camera rentals for the day. Now, the world has changed and the tools have to change.

Pamela: And one of the reasons I love it as a market disruption is it takes advantage of what a person already has, their phone, their family, their friends. Those three things. I automatically reach for my phone when I'm with my family, when I'm with my friends that are cute, and it's creating the moment that you can then harvest later on. And so, for people who are genuinely locked out of a creator economy, they're going to have a phone, they're going to have family, they're going to have friends, they're going to have moments. And so, the bar is so low that they might not even think about themselves as a creator, but because of this tool, they now see that, "Wait, I can do this. "I can capture the moment."

Analisa: And so, our mission is to license the internet, but our purpose statement is, "To connect, protect, and celebrate "the world's creators and storytellers." And I think about that. Connection is important. We've talked a lot about connection. There's a lot of ways to think about connection, human connection, the connection between a brand and a creator. Also, the just physical connection between in a moment of transaction. Protection's critical. We need to make sure the brand doesn't get sued for misusing something. We need to make sure that the creator feels completely safe in making that transaction and taking a leap of faith to license. Maybe they've never done it before, so they need to trust and feel like someone's got their back. And the celebration piece is also so important because we're reaching out to people all the time. Some of them are artists in their own right who know the value of their work.

And so many people, but so many people we reach out to are like: Mine, you want my photo? But I'm not an artist. You can't, you must have the wrong person. You must not. How can you want, how can Nike want my video? We have to celebrate that everyone has the capacity to create something meaningful. And these standards of production value, or this is what makes something good or bad, are really irrelevant. It's, do I feel something when I see it? And if I do, that already is success. That's already doing something important. And we wanna recognize people for that all across the board.

Pamela: I love the fact that you said that the way you did, because when you said, "We want to connect, protect and celebrate "the world's storytellers and creators," parenthetically, I'm saying, "Even if they don't know that they are one."

Analisa: 100% and I see that as a form of protection. We have to, I love being the one saying to somebody, "Congratulations!" I mean, we've had people who have changed their career as a result of being recognized and licensing. We had a woman who was, she was 17 at the time that an image that she'd shot was licensed by Google for a campaign. And we checked in, I checked in on her family 'cause we had to work with her mom to get her release signed and all of that. And I checked in with them when the ad went live and showed it to them, and they were so, so happy. And I asked how the daughter was doing and her mom said, "She's doing great. "She's applying to colleges "and she's decided to minor in photography." She got a confidence boost from this experience that caused her to rethink where she wanted to go. To me, that's just amazing.

Pamela: I love that, because in the way that YouTube exposed the hidden producer in all of us, this exposes the hidden content creator in all of us. I wanna ask you a question about what we see happening in the marketplace right now with AI. We see AI being used in a lot of creation of art right now. Talk to me about how you feel about the AI revolution and how you think this might be able to help or hurt the things that people wanna do.

Analisa: I think we're in such an interesting time. I mean, every day, it evolves even further. At a high level, I see AI as something that, really, anybody and everybody is gonna be able to leverage in their product or their service. Where we focus in the commercial world is where it has some challenges, legally. A lot of brands are hesitant to lean into generative AI for public work because of the underlying legal challenges with training data. A lot of artists have come forward and said, "Hey, you trained your AI on my content, and now the stuff it's generating looks like my style. That's copyright infringement." So, that's a space that brands are thoughtful not to mess with. They don't wanna come out and be seen as entities that are ripping people off or stealing their identities. So, we are thinking about that as another medium for licensing. We believe that having the trust of creators from all over the world, that we can participate in making training data licensable so that actually, creators can consent to that usage, rather than it just being taken from them.

Pamela: I imagine the management of all of that, though, is pretty tricky and it takes highly intelligent people to do that. And so, you talked about your left brain, right brain background. How do you find people to work with you that can help you?

Analisa: Yes, I won’t be coding that.

Pamela: You don't wanna create a copy of yourself. What you want is a culture of people who are thinking and acting in the way that you feel like they deliver value in the way that you wanna deliver it.

Analisa: AI is a good example of that where I constantly, when I look at my senior leadership team and I look at the diversity of people I have in the room, I'm looking for people who can challenge my perspective, absolutely. And I wanna create a culture of healthy debate, which means you have to create a culture of trust, because people have to feel like it's a safe enough space to speak their mind. And that's really important to me. That's how we make really intelligent decisions quickly, is by making sure there's an environment where people feel safe enough and confident enough to speak their mind.

Pamela: It's interesting, though, that you say safe enough to speak their mind, 'cause people who've been in the industry for a while might feel pretty comfortable speaking their mind. People who are new might feel like someone has to enable their voice, they have to…

Analisa: Or the other way around. I mean, people who've been in the industry a long time sometimes are coming from decades of being in cultures where environments are highly politicized and it's not that easy to speak up. So, it can go both ways.

Pamela: How do you create that environment where everyone feels like their voice is heard, especially around, I mean, highly emotional content that people are trying to leverage?

Analisa: By modeling.

Pamela: Yeah?

Analisa: Yeah, by modeling behavior. So, by showing the team that I can be vulnerable and that I don't know the answer to every single question and that I'm willing to be challenged. By modeling that behavior as the first step, and then I see myself as sort of the coach of the team, so then, I also bring in tools and routine exercises that I do with the team. Like improv, we do improv together. We work with an improv coach every few weeks to really foster a sense of play, which is ultimately a sense of vulnerability, which ultimately builds trust. There's a bunch of layers to it.

Pamela: Do you find that people welcome the idea of doing the improv, or are they intimidated by it?

Analisa: I think there's a whole spectrum. I think where it shows up really beautifully, though, is even for the people that are intimidated by it, if it's something the whole group wants to do, they're like, "Okay, I'm in." And that's what you wanna see. You wanna see people, ultimately, improv is about batting for the whole team, not just for yourself. And so, I actually love to see people who are intimidated, because when they open up to the opportunity of doing it, it really reinforces what the group needs from everyone.

Pamela: And you get so much hidden value there, too.

Analisa: A hundred, and it's low stakes. It's a low-stakes environment for us to just explore. And sometimes we use our improv time to actually dissect or process real business challenges or opportunities that we see, which is fun, too. But sometimes, we just play.

Pamela: I would imagine if you're hiring people, you might ask everything from, "What do you think is beautiful," to, "Why do you think it's really important "to democratize this idea of having content on the web?" And doing that gives you a very diverse set of people.

**Analisa:**Yes, it does.

Pamela: That might work for you. How does that help you create that collective genius you're trying to have?

Analisa: Well, and also, yes. It helps also 'cause we also need domain experts. We need, actually, a mix of, we need a mix of people who know this very well, who've spent 40 years of their career just in clearances and licensing and know intimately that process. And we also need people who've never done that before who can challenge, "Hey, I see that's 80 steps, "but I think I can do that in five." A domain expert's never gonna, somebody who really understands the space, they know too much. So, we need that mix of new perspectives and very seeded perspectives constantly. And I have to check my own bias, too. As the founder and having spent so much time in the space, often, I need to open myself up to new ways this product can work that I never even imagined was possible. It's really an interesting blend of perspective and insight.

Pamela: Well, I imagine as a leader, sometimes you get pushback and you have to give pushback and you have to figure out when to do both of them, but still allow people to have enough voice that they feel like they're respected.

Analisa: That's right, that's a constant work for the coach or the leader to work on.

Pamela: I mean, along those lines, though, as you grow, what kind of things do you feel like you should be doing and what kind of things are you letting go of? I mean, because I know if you think about turning what you saw into an algorithm, it might be hard to let that baby go. How do you do that?

Analisa: Well, I think when you start to see things failing around you, you're very motivated to figure out what you can do differently. In the early stages of the journey of building a company, I think about, there's the founder chapter where it was really just up to me. I didn't have a huge team. I was doing everything. And then becoming the CEO was a path, and I had to let go of a lot. When I didn't let go, I saw the business suffer. And so, that's when you have to, you gotta learn through making those mistakes. And I also saw that I was starting to be able to attract some really good talent, some people who were coming in with real perspective and skill. And I wanted to be pulled by them, also. I didn't wanna just do all the pulling. And as the leader and founder, sometimes you hold on so tight that you're responsible, really, for dragging everyone along with you, versus if you could let some people come in with new perspectives that have, that might wanna go in a slightly different direction, but you can now learn from them, it takes the load off of it. You're ultimately responsible for the outcome. You're responsible for, are we on the right path? Do we have the right mission, does our strategy makes sense? Do we have the right people? Those are all things I'm accountable to. But how we get there is really up to how my team wants to execute. And so, I have to create an environment where they are free to do that.

Pamela: I'm curious, I mean, what was the tipping point for you where you realized, "Look, Analisa, I can't be involved in everything." Where did you start to see that really happen?

**Analisa:**I would say somewhere after we raised our first round of funding, our seed round, and the trajectory of the business was starting to change and the expectations on me were starting to change. When you start, when you raise outside capital, the trajectory of the business changes fundamentally. Everything is different. All of a sudden, your goals need to be much more audacious, your sights much higher, the growth expectations much steeper. And so, looking around, I thought, "Okay, this isn't a lift I can do on my own." I'm gonna have to figure out what kind of talent I really have around me and delegate more of this to them.

Pamela: And go beyond what you could do to be individually successful.

Analisa: 100%, absolutely.

Pamela: Speaking of which, I mean, you had to raise funds during the pandemic. I mean, how did that work for you? What kind of lessons did you learn?

Analisa: I didn't have to, but had the opportunity to. Yeah, that was a tricky time. I mean, a lot of founders were wondering how fundraising was going to work. This was a new era for virtual communication. Zoom was not a household name at the beginning of the pandemic. Before Zoom, when I raised my first round, I was driving all around Northern California to meet with people in their offices and have them come to my office. And that was just the way it worked. That was the status quo. I think people were wondering about a lot of different things at that time, whether can you raise money on Zoom? Does it require an in-person interaction? Yeah, a lot of that. Yeah, I think it becomes just incredibly important for your human skills of identifying really good partners that you really wanna work with. Like, who do we really wanna invite into this sacred space of building a company and who's gonna be a great partner to us in that? That's criteria one. And then, criteria two is, how much money do we wanna raise and are we comfortable raising? And criteria three is, do we feel like we have enough roadmap and company plans to spend this money well over the next two years? And when those three boxes were checked for me, that's when I knew we were ready to raise our round.

Pamela: Awesome. You have an incredible journey. I'm really excited about the app and not only for what it can do for you and your customers, but what it can really do for the unsung creator in society, too. Thank you for joining us.

Analisa: Thank you so much, Pamela. It was such a pleasure.

Pamela: You're welcome.