Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

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1:19 Welcome back to another episode of the Welling Gas Startups Podcast.

1:28 I'm here with my buddy, Rud and Giles from BitOut. What's up, man? Hey, man, how's everything going? It's going good, man. We've been just shooting the shit before we started the podcast,

1:35 and so I was like, let's just start this thing. I don't know. We should have recorded about half of it. But maybe the other half probably would have been so many cool stuff. I mean, one of the

1:42 coolest things you just said to me, it was like you got to go and

1:46 Teaboon Pickens when he was still alive. That was one of the things I wish I could have got to do. Yeah, absolutely. Like 10 years ago, I had the opportunity to meet him through a friend of mine

1:52 and was explaining to me how the Saudis are never gonna let oil go below 92 a barrel. So 10 years or so ago, I was driving back home from Dallas to Houston and I was thinking over and over and over

2:03 about he was talking about, you're never gonna see oil below 92 and thought maybe it's time to buy some oil and gas, royalties and properties and so forth and couldn't have been worse on the timing

2:12 But I blame it on Boone and fortunately, I've never sold any of those royalties, so things kind of worked themselves in that long term. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Dude, okay, outside of that, he

2:23 gave you some bad advice on timing, right? But it all worked out. What was like your number one takeaway from just getting to sit down and have dinner with this guy? Well, it wasn't fully dinner,

2:32 but it was hard of hearing and just absolute legend and just the way he took control of the room and it was just phenomenal. great opportunity and I think he was somebody that really champion oil and

2:46 gas and somebody that we really need today to kind of help this industry out as well. We need more. We need more of that. You know, back in the day we had him, we had Aubrey going about

2:56 absolutely our champion for natural gas. You know, I think we've got a couple of good figures who've really stepped up. You know I, think that Toby Rice, everything QT is doing a phenomenal job.

3:06 I think Chris right over at Liberty Energy is doing a great job as well, had the pleasure of meeting him a few weeks back whenever we were in a Midland in Denver for energy tech night. And me

3:17 calling out to have breakfast with him. This guy is just, I mean, just assault of the earth, a genuine person you ever met in your life, who goes and backpacks to place of high poverty so that he

3:28 can understand it and understand its relation to a lack of energy and the lack of resources. It's like, it's mind blowing, Like, it's like when I grow up, like, that's the kind of person that I

3:39 want to be, you know? And I think anybody with that type of track record and longevity in the industry is great to be around and great to hear from. Absolutely, absolutely, man. So tell me a

3:48 little bit more about what has been out, what are you guys working on? We're a procurement platform. So we help operators connect with suppliers, easily get pricing, handle all the communication,

3:57 automate the communication, automate the award phase, and then really we stop there. We want to just make the simplest process, mostly designed around the suppliers. It's got to be really easy

4:07 for the suppliers because there's big breakdowns when suppliers are trying to use systems like Oracle or SAP. They don't have great experiences. There's way too complicated for these suppliers. And

4:19 quite frankly, they just fail. So we built a really simple, really powerful application for the suppliers, for the operators, and really just connect them and be a conduit. We replace text

4:30 message, email spreadsheets, things like that, and really give our operators uniform pricing that's consistent across the board.

4:39 When we started early on, we met with an operator and maybe the top five operators in the country just to get some initial feedback early on. And they were explaining that they were doing a

4:48 multi-million dollar water hauling job, I think in West Texas. And one of their water haulers had screenshot at Excel. He didn't even print Excel. It was like a screenshot, including the toolbar

4:58 and everything printed it out, filled out the pricing with Sharpie marker and texted it back in. And he was the winning bid. And they said, you know, we have to put up with this because these are

5:07 our suppliers and so forth And it's just quite frankly, these guys just technically don't get some of the concepts around that. So we wanted to build something incredibly simple for them. And it

5:17 turns out to be really powerful for the operators at the same time. So on the procurement side, is it mostly around jobs that are actually happening in the field? Like, hey, you're getting

5:26 certain crews to come in, whether it's drilling, completing, workovers, whatever. And you're having multiple suppliers that are all going to come in. Is it, is it including the bidding process?

5:36 Or is it where we post bid and we're just, you're kind of going through and just managing that relationship, managing data? No, it's really just a bidding process. So we're not a project

5:43 execution platform. We're not a project management platform. We're really a sourcing platform. And we help operators also discover more suppliers. We've got a direct directory of, about 500 3

5:54 suppliers that they can browse through by different categories and different regions. And, you know, quite frankly, we have some very large operators that call us and say, you know, we just

6:02 don't know who else to go reach out to for generators or for, you know, facilities, our electrical services, et cetera. Can you open this up to your network and we'll help them find more

6:12 providers and so forth as well. But it's all part of the process there. But going back to your original question, so we're doing bids for anything as commodities, pipes, chemicals, up to

6:24 services like wire line, flow back,

6:28 pressure pumping, directional drilling, you know, all the way we've done like, um. uniform contracts, like the FRs and clothes, all the laundry around that and so forth. So it really varies

6:41 across the board, but I would say anything in the oil and gas purchasing process is kind of what we had. So I think what's really interesting about this, and I'm not sure if you know this, and I'm

6:50 not sure most people know this, but this is the exact concept that workerized back when it was called rig up, when it raised 700 million of the 3 billion valuation for, and then they've since

7:01 pivoted away from that. They don't do any of the bidding for jobs anymore, and now they're more of a,

7:08 it's more focus on the individuals, right, in recruiting consultants. Yeah, consultants, it's like getting actual contractors in. So they moved from the work to the people, but I always thought

7:17 that their original thesis was correct. I was like, I think there were 10, 10 years too early, and I didn't know much about them back at the time, but I think from what I hear and gather and so

7:29 forth. Maybe just a little too early. So I think it's absolutely I mean, like you said, how, how else are you going to do this? It's all just, most of our buyers are, you know, in their

7:39 thirties and their forties, they want to order their food on their phone. They don't want to call people. Um, they're, you know, they like to do things digitally and, uh, you know, they want

7:47 to, they want to make that process real easy. So, um, that's what we built it around. So, so do you, is there any kind of struggle with, it sounds like almost like you're kind of creating this

7:55 marketplace, right? There's two sides. Yeah, there's a service, uh, server side Is there any struggles with, with getting all of these service companies kind of to, to adopt, uh, the tool?

8:07 No, I mean, we make it free for them. So, um, there are premium options for the suppliers to get, um, invited to more work that fits their categories and things like that. But it's not, it's

8:17 not required. Um, really, we don't have any struggles with the supplier on board. We have like a one page, um, terms and service agreement that they just click and agree to, um, there's really

8:26 no suppliers that are not on board with us It's growing every day and we've got I think or so north of there now, and that's really what we focus on. Subtle flex there. 3500 is a lot. Yeah, yeah,

8:38 yeah. Now we don't have that many operators, but those are growing too, so. But yeah, that's what we do. We started the company about three years ago, during COVID, and probably took us a year

8:50 until we even did our first bid, and took a while to build the product, maybe even a little bit longer than that. That's the name of it, it looks good though. I think we had to get out there

8:58 pretty quickly and start getting feedback. We got a lot of feedback, and a lot of it didn't fit what people wanted, and we had to adapt and talk to me about that process a little bit, because

9:07 that's something that I think that we've done and, I think I've seen other really successful startup founders, particularly in this space, do, it's go to the market, and it's go to those

9:18 customers, and in your first wave, your initial outreach to them is not like, Hey, let me sell you something. It's like, Hey, I built a tool, and I think it's gonna be really, really helpful

9:28 for you, but I'd love to get some feedback. Yeah, no absolutely and that's I just read Tony Fidel's book build. He was the guy that invented the iPhone essentially with Steve Jobs and then left to

9:38 start Nest the smart thermostat company and he talks heavily about how you got to get in front of clients quickly and for us we knew that it wasn't a surprise to us but we had to build some stuff

9:49 first and we knew probably 80 of what we needed to build and our pilot client that we were working with to really launch the product with they went out of contract to sell probably four weeks before

10:01 we were ready and so our contact there who was excited to work with us basically came back and said hey look we're too busy we're about to be sold I'm losing my job we can't help you so we had to go

10:11 back to the only board and find another client pretty quickly to start giving us feedback and all that feedback was incredibly valuable

10:20 and then we had to adapt and kind of go from there we took kind of all that feedback over the first probably two years and put that into a a really heavy development cycle and released really our new

10:32 version that we call our procurement platform suite about four to five months ago and since then you know sales have just taken off because we're meeting all the feature requests that people need and

10:42 you know I think we have everything now that's needed you know we're always going to be growing and evolving but the platform works incredibly well now. So I'm trying to see the other day and it

10:52 looks great. Yeah. Nice, simple, slick, super easy to use, looks really great Yeah, we like to say if you can't build an RFP in 60 seconds, we're doing it wrong. Yeah. You're doing it wrong.

11:03 And if you can't respond to something that quick as well, we hear from suppliers all the time that they're responding to pricing on the golf cart now on their phone. And before, you know, they

11:12 would have to sit down and figure all the stuff out, maybe print out some PDFs or figure out how to edit PDFs and you don't get stuff back that way. But no more. I need to spend more time on the

11:22 golf course It's the salespeople that do the suppliers. I know, man. So I want to know, you kind of alluded to it a little bit before we started recording just some of your backstory, man. Like,

11:35 how do we, how do you get here? Yeah, well, I'll tell you first that going back to the very original, me and my co-founder, a bit out Tyler Cherry, who was supposed to be here, but we were

11:45 crazy busy on some other things. I didn't want to skip our obligation, but we went to junior high and high school together. So we went each other way back a long time ago I'm losing my hair by now,

11:55 so it's a while. But we both started the company and he's been very instrumental in that success. But when I was in high school, 17, 18 years old, I started a cloud company from scratch. I had

12:06 no money growing up, but I grew up in an entrepreneurial house. My father had his own oil and gas company. Skipped school one day without my parents knowing to go meet an attorney here in the

12:17 energy corridor area to go incorporate. And one of the starting moment business. And, you know, 10 years later. So we had 150, 000 subscribers to our company. employees and three continents,

12:29 offices and three continents sold the business to a competitor slash private equity. What were you guys doing? We got 100 employees. We had, we were a cloud company. Back then it was called web

12:39 hosting. Okay. And we hosted 150, 000 WordPress websites. And, you know, five, six, eight, 10 bucks a month, whatever the costs were back then. But we started the company, I started the

12:50 company from scratch with a co-founder several years in, I acquired him out. And for maybe the final six years, I grew the company organically. And we, I like to say to a few people, we probably

13:01 operated somewhat like you guys earlier on. I found out when I was 18, 19, it was cheaper to go buy an apartment, like a three-bedroom apartment as an office, instead of an office. Because you

13:13 have the balcony, you have the swimming pool, you have the kitchen. So we would stuff, you know, desk and so forth in an apartment and kind of operate 247 like that and run it like a business,

13:24 so. like I learned everything kind of going through there. I learned how to hire fire, you know, manage people. To the 100 employees. Yeah, absolutely. So we after selling that are really kind

13:37 of before us sold that. I started buying oil and gas minerals. So my my father grew up as an operator and got to see him do a lot of that and started as I started making some money, which wasn't

13:48 till the very end of the companies when it was, yeah, finally producing a lot of cash because we were always investing back into servers and capital expenditures and so forth. I started buying

13:57 minerals and liked the mailbox money. So decided I'm going to go ahead and sell the business and went on and bought a ton of oil and gas. We're all to using minerals. Probably still in about 10

14:08 states, maybe a thousand wells. I probably get checks from 150 operators. Do you do it the energy net way? Someone energy net, some through groups of people that I knew that would buy and some

14:19 through back in the old days, the oil and gas clearing house kind of before their new resurrection Mm-hmm.

14:26 And so I've always been doing some of that and played around in real estate a little bit. I attempted a kind of after meeting Boone Pickens too. I attempted a hostile takeover of a NYSE-listed oil

14:40 company called TenGasko. Okay. They're now merged in with Riley Exploration, but they had some issues with their board and some personal dealings with the board that I decided to highlight and kind

14:55 of get a little aggressive on. And it was a fun experience, but a cadet went well, kind of right before oil dropped and realized I'm really good at the technology side of the business and probably

15:06 not so good at finding oil. So I went out and started a day. I really came in and acquired part of a cloud business and data center business and grew that over the next maybe four or five years.

15:19 And really at the end of that, Tyler and I started connecting my co-founder and really started forming the ideals of Mid-Out. and getting that really off the ground. Thanks, you did the whole

15:31 cloud hosting thing twice. Yeah, twice, absolutely. Oh, wow. So what do you, what do you think it'll be? That'll be the last time. I don't think we'll do

15:37 it again. What do you, what are your thoughts on this, I mean, a slight little caveat, but just you and I were talking about chat GPT and mid-journey and just like, it seems like AI has gone

15:47 from zero to 100 in the last six months, you know, and just thinking about like the computational needs Like, I would imagine that anybody's in the cloud-hosting space is like very strategically

15:58 positioned to like totally read the benefit to that. Well, it's all about power. So, I mean, power is such a big factor of things. And like the amount of power consumption that's in Northern

16:08 Virginia, where Amazon and many others have their data centers, is just astronomical. And so maybe this needs to be an oil and gas conversation where they need to be building these data centers

16:17 where they're firing gas. And I know some companies like Crusoe are doing that on a small kind of micro level Energy X is doing it for high-porn's compute. Okay But I mean, and maybe they're doing

16:28 this and I don't know, but you know, most of these data centers that I'm familiar with are million square foot. And it's, I think when you do all this AI at the amount of power consumption that's

16:37 going to be needed to increase that, it's going to just be astronomical. And somebody's got to figure that out. It's not too green either. So, you know, so the amount of power that's used unless

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17:49 the EnergyX guys, nice little plug for them 'cause they sponsor the podcast, but they do modular high-performance compute data center. So it looks like a Bitcoin mining container, right? And then

17:58 they do full immersion, they do redundancy on the communication on the power, but they're power agnostic. So they have some facilities that are on natural gas, they've got some that are in the

18:07 grid, they're still modular, but they're not doing any of the mega. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think you're going to need the mega size to get, I think you probably saw in the news article a few

18:14 weeks ago, Elon bought what 10, 000 GPUs? Oh, he did, I didn't hear that. Apparently, yeah, apparently he bought 10, 000 kind of

18:21 a personal project. And then. I don't think he was too happy with the way OpenAI's turned out. Oh, he's doing his own truth. Truth, GPT, yeah, what he's been talking about. So, it's such an

18:32 interesting turn of the events because he essentially co-founded and invested very heavily into OpenAI. Yeah, he got screwed up, right? Yeah, and then something happened to where he wanted to

18:43 take over and they were like, no, you're not gonna take this thing over and then kind of sour the relationship. And then very quickly, he's gone on to say, I wanna go create something that

18:53 doesn't have. Well, it's interesting too, like they created a, I think a nonprofit, like a 501 is the way - They reverted back to being a for-profit. Yeah, absolutely. And Elon's, I think,

19:02 upset about his original donation, maybe. Yeah, he thought it was supposed to be completely open source, which is what he's doing with Twitter, right? Right, right, right. And if you saw he

19:11 opened source the algorithm, he was like, here's exactly how we wait likes versus retweeds versus engagement to see how things actually play into the algorithm No, I think it's great to have that

19:21 transparency. That's interesting, yeah. I think the whole open AI is gonna really revolutionize a lot of industries, it'll be interesting how it all plays out. I'm gonna, you and I, we're

19:31 talking about the law, about the legal side of things. It's just so integral, already, it's so integral to my daily workflow. Yeah. With like everything, from writing emails to coming up with

19:42 ideas to, there's certain things that I'm just significantly better at than open AI, but most things, it's better at them. Oh, of course. You know? Yeah, I regularly paste emails and then they

19:53 polish this up and it spits me back a lot nicer emails. Or if you're like, Oh man, I've had too much to drink on a Saturday. And you're like, I need to send this out. And you're like, Touch it

20:02 with D. Bright something professional, please. Exactly. So, all right, so getting back to bit out. So you alluded to you and Tyler kind of coming up with this concept. How did that come about?

20:12 Was that through just kind of your oil and gas exposure of you like realizing that or did he come? Yeah, it was more so Tyler that probably came to me with the idea. It was definitely Tyler that

20:20 came to me with the idea. And just, you know, he was running a division of Swift Water, Water Transfer Company. That's now owned by Tetra. And, you know, he was explaining to me that, you

20:30 know, he gets all these different bid formats from different operators all the time and they're very, you know, time consuming for him. And it's, there's gotta be a better process. And so we

20:40 looked at the markets There's, you know, a couple of large players and like Oracle and SAP and so forth, but I think they do it very bad. And it's not easy to use on either side of the equation.

20:50 And we wanted to build something that was really more like the industry standard going forward and really looked at it as a network effect. And we knew early on building a true platform network,

21:01 connecting suppliers and operators can be really hard. And, you know, it's almost like you're building two companies and it makes it, it makes the job so much harder but we also look at it as,

21:11 you know. It's difficult, you know, that's something that we want to do. We also looked at the industry as, I knew a lot about oil and gas, I know a lot about oil and gas, but I don't think

21:21 people are graduating Stanford and say, graduating Stanford University is saying, let's go build a oil and gas software company. It's got to come from us. And so it's got to come from within, I

21:30 mean, we are incredibly focused on just the oil and gas industry. We get asked all the time, you know, can y'all do this for our business that is on the general contracting side or on the

21:39 renewable side? Yes, no, we built a whole platform around oil and gas, all the vernacular and everything within the platform. The marketplace itself is, yes. So we don't have any interest in

21:49 swaying from that and I think the operators appreciate that because it's so familiar to their users and so easy to use. Well, what's in your feedback process, you would do this a little bit earlier,

22:00 what's some of the key functionality that is absolutely crucial to making this whole thing work? It's really letting them create a very standardized format.

22:11 Part of the process is somebody will create, let's say, a 30-line item bid, and some suppliers will respond to 22 of the line items. Some of them will manipulate the spreadsheet and remove half

22:21 the line items and are changed to skews to different products that are similar.

22:28 At the end of the day, some of our operators who own very common commodity are sending these bids out to 30 suppliers. So they're taking these 30 different bid submissions, and they're all in

22:38 different formats. They've all been heavily chopped and modified around, and it's really hard for them to analyze across the board, yield true apples to apples comparison. So because it's doing a

22:48 very standardized process, they're able to evaluate the bids faster. A lot of our very high transactional operators, some of the buyers are sending 15 to 20 bids out a day, and different services,

23:01 different products. And so when the bids come back in different formats, they can't really manage that The other thing we do is, I think we really automate. communications, the reminders, we

23:13 have a chat functionality that's tied to each individual bid. So all the communication contained for that bid, whether it be a questions or clarification, is siloed within the bid. So if a year

23:24 from now, a county needs to go look, see what went on here, changes, they've got all the communication there. It also creates a lot of transparency for the organization. You know, there's a lot

23:34 of operators are concerned about certain groups, whether it be engineering or so forth, um, sending the bids to their preferred friends, not allowing submissions from certain people, maybe not

23:47 including those submissions from other people because they, they who go to church with, he played exactly who took them on the hunting trip a few weeks ago and so forth. So it creates a lot of

23:56 transparency in the organization. We think transparency is key, but it also really speeds things up. So if they need to send out, um, You know, standard, you know, let's say it's a you know,

24:07 a compressors or so forth. They can do it in 60 seconds. They can do it from a template that we have on the platform. They can do it on a template that they have created on the platform that's

24:17 tailored for their company. So really, and then all the communication that takes place from the bid start to the bid end is all managed by us, it's all centralized by us. You know, most of these

24:27 buyers are getting questions immediately, they're getting, you know, we handle all that process and so forth. So that's really it Well, let's just say that I'm quarterly services, right? And I

24:39 offer a variety of different things. And I kind of got brought in because I'm one of the vendors who services, let's say Pioneer, right? So I service Pioneer from my standpoint, outside of just

24:51 bidding on Pioneer's stuff, do I have the ability to like explore other things and say like, can I see other things that are happening and say, hey, I'd love to, I've got something that would be

25:00 great or do you need to be invited? Yeah, so all of our bids are closed bids. Okay. So you have to be invited to the bids. However, it's the operators or the buyers have a functionality to

25:10 enable for us to add additional suppliers that meets within that category. We've got about maybe 60 of our buyers who are open to having other suppliers been on them. And so for us, we have premium

25:25 suppliers. It's free for all of our suppliers to sign up, but we have premium suppliers starts about a thousand bucks a year. And what we essentially do is we invite them to work that they're

25:34 allowed to be invited to. And so we've had directional drilling companies who have won, you know, 20 million worth of work from just being invited to bid so they would not have had access to

25:44 outside of us. And, you know, we had an operator who invited three companies and we asked them if we could add several more to the bid, we did. And they ended up winning about half the work for

25:55 that. So as most bids, like, Hey, this is, you got to but get a timeline associated with our deadline saying, hey, you should. You got two, three weeks, so whatever. Here's the deadline,

26:05 here's exactly what we're looking for, here's who's invited, and then they may let you know or you guys are able to identify, hey, there's more companies that we think that you guys should be

26:13 interested in. Yeah, so first thing we do, we have logic that takes place once the bid's created, and so we're actually tracking if the bid's been viewed by each service company, if it has, then

26:23 we'll lay off them for a little while from a notification's perspective. If they haven't viewed the bid yet, we're contacting them more, we eventually text them and so forth. What we find is the

26:34 turnover so fast of the supplier side of the equation, that contacts change quite frequently. So they might invite somebody from supplier A, that person no longer works there and therefore the bid

26:46 doesn't get responded to. So we're handling all that on the backside to make sure that it's being responded to. The first thing we ask for is just a real simple yes or no, are you gonna intend to

26:56 bid or not? We wanna know if you're gonna respond If you're not going to respond, that's great, but we don't want a buyer to wait a week and they get no bids, which which happens right now with

27:07 how exhausted a lot of these suppliers are. We're dealing with several bids right now on the generation side of things. We've got a company looking for generators, I think natural gas generators,

27:19 specifically.

27:21 Essentially, we can't find them. And everybody's maxed out. Everybody's got them fully utilized right now because of all the ESG side of things. So we want to know that quickly We don't want an

27:31 operator waiting a week and they don't get a response. So, you know, it's all part of the process there. I love the fact that you guys are rolling up your sleeves and just identifying those

27:41 problems and trying to get ahead of them, particularly with things like the turnover. Yeah, and we don't do that manually. You know, we have logic built around that that handles a lot of them.

27:48 Now finding out who's going to respond to it. Sometimes our team has to reach out to the supplier and say, Who's the right point of contact here? We onboarded a operator recently. And I think they

27:59 had about, about 40 of their approved vendor list had incorrect contact information. I mean, it was that large. So it was a while to get that reconciled and get that accurate and so forth. Are

28:10 there certain kinds of jobs or certain things that are being bidding up? Bit on that you've noticed a trend. These are kind of like the top things that we're doing. I mean, we do really, really

28:19 well with commodities, pipe, chemicals, you know, materials. We do a lot with services. I'd say a year ago it was really hard to work on services with the whole supply chain kind of crisis

28:31 crunch at the time. What kind of services are you guys? I mean, we do anything, like I said, from directional drilling to wire line to flow back to water transfers, just really across the board.

28:41 Anything related to drilling and completions, we're on it. So we've got the suppliers on our platform. We've got buyers who do bids very consistently in most products and services. So I got to ask

28:53 because obviously we have our, we were in power event that we do early in the year. at the intersection of energy and Bitcoin mining, and then I also co-host our energizing Bitcoin podcast. So are

29:02 you guys doing anything on the Bitcoin mining side in terms of like a service for these guys? I know that we have sourced generators for folks that are doing Bitcoin mining. That's why I thought

29:13 about it. But I don't know that we've done containers. We definitely have not done the A6 that I'm aware of, but I don't see every bit anymore. Six months ago, I probably did, but I don't follow

29:24 them that close. Yeah, you mentioned that's guest generators, and I was thinking about my buddies over at Giga down in Beaumont, and they refurbished these old caterpillar. Absolutely. Natural

29:32 gas generators, and that's like a big part of their business. You know, it's selling though. So I had to ask there, give them a plug in for those guys. Oh God, I'm

29:42 not asking, I just wanted to ask you something. I

29:46 just totally blanked.

29:50 That's all right, man. Totally forget. I had another one lined up, I don't know what it was. Yeah, we need to get your buddies and bone mom on the Beno platform. Yeah, we do, we absolutely,

29:58 absolutely have to. What's the business model for you guys? Is it a flat fee for EMPs? Is it a percentage of transaction costs? Like, what we do that a little bit? You know, we would love to do

30:10 a percentage of transaction. And I think we thought about that early on, but executing it really, really difficult creates a lot of friction. We sell enterprise license to our, to the operators.

30:20 And at the end of the day, they pay us an annual subscription fee for the license. Saves them in a measurable amount of time, allows - I think a lot of our operators, some operators, have come to

30:33 us and said that in the past, procurement would handle jobs, maybe a quarter million or north. They've been able to lower that threshold, let's say, to 100, 000 and be able to do two, three

30:43 times the amount of sourcing events with bid out as they were to in the past So time savings is incredible,

30:52 and then it's free for our service. to sign up, but we also have a premium model for the service providers that really just gives them access to leads that fits their category. It's difficult.

31:02 We've got a full-time department that's just handling verifying companies because, you know, we don't want Jim Bob's roused about that has a polling unit and three employees to claim they do all 200

31:15 categories of services that we offer. And that unfortunately happens with a lot of our suppliers. So we're having to verify exactly what services they do We're now showing service companies that

31:25 have actually won and bid on jobs that fit that category. So you can kind of have a verified supplier that matches that. So if you're looking for like a flow back company, these are the companies

31:35 who actually bid on her work, who flow back, or maybe have one jobs associated with them as well. So as opposed to, you know, inviting somebody that doesn't really do that work. I'm having some

31:45 damn flashbacks to us operating our walls up in Tulsa And we were actually way outside. We were in the middle of nowhere. I say Tulsa because. closest biggest thing. But I'm thinking back to when

31:55 we had to get a, a new pump, it was like, it was asking one person asking another person, they were like, Oh, you need to go into Larry's oil field supply. And you walk into this little shack

32:06 and like got exactly what you need. Or you're looking for a raspile crew. And it was just like all through recommendations, right? And the, our pumper at the time was pretty instrumental in that.

32:14 Thankfully, he lived there his whole life. So he knew a lot of people without that who would have been flying blind for, you know, we even have some larger kind of majors that tell us that they

32:23 feel embarrassed sometimes that they're getting on Google and looking for us. You're going to go find shit on the next part. So it's a, especially in some of those really remote regions, kind of

32:33 Wyoming or California. Yeah. It's tough to find them, right? Do you ever use a Don's directory? I'm familiar with what they are, but absolutely. I don't know if they're still around anymore.

32:41 They were for a long time. I think they still are. So, but yeah, and hats off to those guys for crushing it for years and years. That was like a staple that everybody had on their desk Right.

32:52 Do you think you ever get into more kind of like Yelp like features in terms of reviews or things like that? Yeah, we get asked about it a lot. And we've got our own view around it. I think if

33:05 somebody gave Halliburton a one-star review, we don't want to get in the middle

33:10 of litigation between two other parties. So it's very difficult, I think, to do B2B reviews as opposed to B2C. We feel the same way. It's like you could have one competitor come in and

33:21 anonymously give a competitor a one star. And then you're caught in the middle and you're trying to be a Switzerland and provide everybody with a platform. And yeah, it kind of opens up a can of

33:30 worms. I don't know what the solution in there is 'cause it would be obviously valuable if you could go and say, oh, yeah, Jim Bob's

33:39 pulling company over here is crushing it. Like these guys are, and I would put my name behind it and all that kind of stuff. That would be great, but it's just the inverse of that. which just

33:50 kind of opens up. Yeah, and we're working on that with more bids being awarded to them that show kind of activity on the platform and support to have Spotify. So there's other metrics to kind of

33:60 showcase kind of like key indicators of success probably. Absolutely, absolutely. Interesting. Oh man, this makes me want to get back in the oil game. So I'm glad You know, it's

34:13 not a complicated problem to solve technology-wise, but it's a very complicated problem to solve like in actuality Because you're dealing with just so many people on both sides of the equation. And

34:24 so for us, it's not technology's easy for us. Sometimes I say that. But it's really getting those three, 4, 000 service companies with clean data and making sure that we get that data from them

34:37 is very important as part of the success of the platform. What? What's nice for you guys? Anything that's still either a concept or maybe your beta testing or - Yeah, so we're focused on all

34:51 things procurement. We're not trying to get outside of the procurement spectrum. And so we like to just say all things procurement. And right now, we've got a long roadmap mapped out. Our clients

35:01 give us features at times that we're focused on. For us, it's just continuing to grow the team. We've got to just shy of 20 people here in Houston. Oh, wow. We probably have hired, I think,

35:11 for this week It's getting a little wild. The last few days have been kind of probably our craziest days in company history. Hence, Tyler's not being here. But for us, I mean, it's just

35:22 continuing to grow. We're continuing to hire. And it was just evolving our org. And we've got a long ways to go. Any positions in particular looking at Phil's still? We're looking for developers.

35:33 We're looking for sales reps. We're looking for customer success manager right now. And that's really it. but we're really looking to make a few key hires on the VPSL's role here soon. I'm kind of

35:49 moonlighting as the CEO and CTO. I think we'd like to eventually bring on a CTO that can handle a lot of the product and take some of that off my plate as we continue to grow and evolve the

35:59 organization. But yeah, that's really it, so. That's exciting, man. This has been a great conversation. Like I said, I wish that we would have recorded half the stuff we talked about before we

36:10 got on the mic No, I appreciate y'all having us on. We office right next door to y'all and see y'all quite a bit, but I've been wanting to do this for a while, but I'm glad we were going to sit

36:19 down and actually get it done. No, absolutely. And you're one of the first people to hop on a DW. insight, which I don't think we've ever talked about on the show before. So I'll leave it a

36:29 little bit mysterious for now. We'll do a big coming out party with what that's going to be, but really excited about what you guys are working on. And so thanks again for coming in and making this

36:37 happen. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. If you guys liked the episode, take two seconds, leave a rating review, share with all your friends, and we'll catch you guys on the next episode.