Building a Tech-Enabled Pool Service Company

Welcome to another episode of Pool People. Today, I am talking with two of the founders of Poolify, Ravi, the COO, and Rahul, the CEO. Thank you guys for coming on today. Thanks a ton for having us, Parker. Yeah, I'm excited to try. Thanks for having us. Yeah, it's great to have you guys. I'm curious, first, what is Poolify and how did you get started with it? Ravi? Yeah, I can go ahead and take this one.

So, Poolify is basically a pool service company. It's probably the easiest way to explain it. We operate in California. We're down primarily in the desert in Southern California, and then we're also opening up a geo in Northern California as well, just kind of east of San Francisco and the Pleasanton Walnut Creek area. Poolify is a little different because we actually run the pool service as a, like you can think of it almost as like a tech product because both Rahul, Partin and I, our third co-founder,

think about things from a product perspective because Rahul comes primarily from fintech in his previous world. My background is in mechanical engineering and I have an MBA, and Partin, our third co-founder actually owns a software company in Europe. And so the way that we like to look at things is like, we want to take a look at everything within the actual pool service and figure out exactly what are our techs doing, what makes their lives easier, how do we provide a better service. At the end of the day, we're servicing people's pools. So how do we make sure that the experience for the actual end customer

is as clean as possible? And then more importantly, the business itself is actually an engine. So how do you actually look at the business internally? And look at the products that we're using internally to our business to make sure that we ourselves are actually humming like a really well-oiled engine as well. And so that's the long and short of what Poolify is. And just to put a cherry on top the way I like to frame it is, end of the day, Poolify is a tech company wrapped as a pool service company. Wonderful, wonderful. And how did you get started? Why don't you take that one, Rahul?

I feel like your founding story is really interesting. Yeah, yeah. So as Ravi mentioned, I come from a tech background. I've spent my entire career post-college in product management, building products for SMB. And I had been between jobs. And I was exploring what the next opportunity looked like. And I went down this rabbit hole of looking at home services and looking at lawn care. And I settled in on pool services. And I looked at Skimmer and Pool Brain and all these folks.

And I was like, wow, this is a really exciting space. I feel like there's a lot of opportunities to digitize this space that's generally been offline. And so I have a buddy who has a pool service in Arizona. I was talking to him, getting more familiar with the space. And got really excited. And along the way, I ended up meeting Ravi. And Ravi was like, hey, man, we're acquiring pool routes in SoCal. Sounds like our visions and our goals align. Let's go and do this thing. And Ravi comes from...

Ravi and his father actually also come from this space and they're kind of icons, as I call them. And I was like, let's do it. And so we went and acquired our first couple of routes and then SoCal and we've been growing since. Okay, wonderful, wonderful. And could you walk me through a little bit about that process of how you went about acquiring, say, your first route? Yeah, I think one thing I can say about how we acquire routes is there's a lot of private equity activity in the space right now.

And I feel like many of them focus on the larger platform place. And I say that to actually differentiate the way that we actually purchase and want to work within the industry. As Rahul mentioned, I was born in the industry. My dad had a chain of pool and spa supply stores in Southern California. So from literally being a crib in the back of the pool store to being in a stroller to eventually working the cash register to being a pool boy myself and installing pumps and doing acid washes all the way to having my own store that I manage one part of Magnolia pool supplies in Huntington Beach, I grew up in this industry, right?

And so as much as like, it's kind of funny, as much as I've tried to like leave it, I have a very strong and soft spot for the folks that I grew up with. And because of that, I think the way that I initially started looking at the space and then kind of I met Rahul, we wanted to help the smaller folks in the industry that otherwise have too much overhead, right? They're like sitting here answering phone calls. They're having to be on QuickBooks. They're having to do all these things. And it's like, hey, look, we come from tech. We understand how to build processes that scale.

We've built eight figure companies that have exited. How do we bring that same thinking to folks that otherwise have a hundred pools or 200 pools and how do we help them be better at their business so we can actually all kind of grow this together? And so a big part of our philosophy is actually figuring out how can we help the smaller guys? How can we work with them not to just buy them out and slash costs and figure out how to just increase margin by cutting things, but more importantly, it creatively growing the business so we can actually make the entire industry and the people that work in it better. And that's kind of how we approach the problem.

Okay, interesting, interesting. And Ravi, I'd love for you to share more about first, maybe a little bit about your getting started in the industry and then Sutro, which was your big entrepreneurial sort of involvement in the industry. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So like I said, I grew up in the industry, right? I was in the sunny streets of Southern California. Dad actually backtracking. My family came from India in the 80s and dad actually had a master's in chemistry. Couldn't find a job and ended up basically servicing pools.

And as he kind of was servicing pools, you obviously step into pool stores. And as the folks stepped out for lunch, he obviously was the best water tester there ever was because the guy's a chemist, right? And so as he started doing that, he just got really familiar with the customers. Some of the customers were like, hey, you really know how to test water. And long story short is how he basically moved into owning his first retail store. So fast forwarding, I obviously grew up in the industry. He grew that to over 30 brick and mortar stores in Southern California. We were doing everything from online to distribution. And then kind of fast forwarding

after I got an engineering degree, I was actually at a venture fund in India. And the first origin story of Sutro was actually from seeing a lot of water problems in India, right? There was a lot of... Diary and dysentery is actually the largest killer in the world and the majority of it's done from dirty water. And what we got on our desk from a venture standpoint was a lot of like filtration deals. Everybody was trying to fix water, but you can't fix water if you don't know what's wrong with it, right? The same with your swimming pool. If you have to test the water to actually put some pH up or soda ash or chlorine in there,

you just can't treat your pool without actually knowing what's wrong with it. And so what we set out to build was actually the first affordable water tester for the Indian market. Probably stupidest idea for me to do at that point in time as an entrepreneur. It's really tough selling to the Indian government when you're that young. And I came back and pivoted the business model to swimming pools, right? I was like, the water's water, pH is pH. Let's start in swimming pools first, and then we have this long tail into going into other different types of water. I ended up selling the company to a large chemical company in 2018 and stayed with them for a good part

of the next five to six years. And about a year and a half ago or so, year and a half to two years ago, kind of when I met Rahul and we started on this journey of acquiring our first pool route because I had all this technological experience, but how do you actually work with businesses down that touch water is kind of what we wanted to get into next. And so that's the long story of how I got here. That'd be great. I appreciate you sharing. And then Rahul, if I understand correctly, you have a bit of a background in fintech? Product management, study computer science,

come from a tech background. Just naturally just enjoyed building products. And so that's what I spent my early career doing. Okay, great. And so you've acquired pool routes, it sounds like, I'm curious. What is your orientation in terms of poolify as a company? Are you wanting to grow to be like a large sort of pool business? Are you guys looking to explore the more technological angle? And like Ravi said, have like really work closely with single poolers.

How do you guys think? In terms of your long-term goals at poolify? Yeah, I think it's a combination, right? I think we're definitely looking to grow the platform, continue acquiring more pools and different geos. And then from a technical standpoint, I think we're constantly, constantly, constantly looking at ways to improve operations, right? Whether that's using software or even hardware. Definitely bringing, I think a lot of our technology backgrounds to kind of find ways to improve the business overall. All right, cool. What is the sort of structure of poolify at the moment?

How many people do you have working on it? And sort of how many pools are you managing? How many techs do you have? Yeah, so there's three of us co-founders, there's myself, Ravi, and then Partin Imeri. We have three technicians today in Southern California. We have an ops lead down there. He oversees two additional technicians and we manage approximately 115 pools today. All right, cool. And so I'm just getting involved in the industry as of like the past eight to nine months. I just ran my first route last week.

Ravi, it sounds like you've done a lot of pool routes before. Rahul, have you started doing a route every so often? Yes. And I'm curious what your experience has been. I'm curious as someone who just did their first day last week. Yeah, it is quite an enlightening experience, is it not? Yeah, I'm lucky it was shady. It was shady and not rainy, but even Arizona and otherwise it would have been like 105 here and I'm not sure I would have made it through the day. Yeah, yeah. So actually one of the first things I did when we went on this venture is I got CPO-certified. I got certified.

I wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into and I was able to also talk the language, right? And so I've initially last summer and then kind of throughout the year I go down. I'm in the Bay Area. I go down and do the route every so often. And now that we're above 100 pools, I did that at scale very recently and I thought it was a very, very eye-opening experience. We start very early in the morning around 6 a.m. We're done around 3.30 depending on the load for the day,

but it is definitely something I actually oddly enough really enjoy. I thought it was really, really therapeutic going in and cleaning pools. And so, yeah, it's something I definitely take pride in doing quite often because I think it just allows you to also see how things are going from an operations perspective. What are the sort of things you maybe wish you would have known on your first few weeks and what are the kind of things you've learned doing that? Yeah, so I think the speed in which the team operates, we go every week to each home

and so the level of detail and the way the team is just in and out of a house. I mean, we try to be at a customer's house anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes. There's three guys that are doing a combination of things from skimming to brushing to recording data on the app. So there's a myriad of things and so each person has a role and there's really no time for... There's no margin for error, right? Because you're just going so fast, you're making sure you get everything done. And so just seeing how fast the team operates, I thought was really, really enlightening.

And then also just how long they can feel it just goes so fast. Yeah, I think I did something like 10 pools and he had said he did 17 or 18 the day before. And when I was standing up after doing a chemical test, I was lightheaded and I was so genuinely worried I was going to pass out or something. And I was an athlete growing up and I thought I could handle this. It's an endurance game. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm curious. So, Poolify has a big focus

on technology. I'm curious in terms of the back office of your pool company, what are the sort of interesting things you found in terms of where technology helps you guys in interesting ways? I think the first thing we noticed in, especially as we've been integrating more and more routes and we're kind of in LOI with a few others right now and we're kind of, which will really jump up our pool count. The number one thing that permeates through all of them is QuickBooks, right?

Is like how do you collect and receive and dole out payments, like send out invoices. It's an extremely manual process and the funny thing is, is the act of doing it is actually not that like, it shouldn't be that special because you're either in the recurring part of your business, either you're servicing and Parker, the homeowner, needs to pay us monthly for the four times that we show up and or we're replacing your pump or we're doing a filter clean and those are like

these one-time things but also they're generally templated and so many times the QuickBooks will have that but it's a very manual process to kind of trigger and send this out and so we're trying to just become a lot more efficient and smarter basically about building workflows, right? I think workflows is the proper way to think about it is how do you use software today to actually make sure that payment collection is the most efficient because at the end of the day, payments are the lifeblood of the business, right? It's what goes in the bank accounts, what pays people. It's how we pay our trucks and how we pay our mortgages and the quicker we get that,

the more efficient we are getting that, the better it will be. So that's kind of the first thing that I've noticed. The second thing is around how inefficient it is to have a phone in the backyard, right? We've tried Skimmer, we've tried Pool Brain and I don't think it's anything against the app, right? I think it's just the actual form factor of the way that a phone is, right? It's the problem is the phone, it's not the app. As you notice, you're testing the pool, your hands are in the water, they're wet, your screen has capacitive touch and you're slipping through things. The question is-

Sometimes I like to wear gloves. And now you can't even touch the screen, right? So the problem is when you're out in the backyard, it's physical work. You're using both, you need both your hands and to have one of them taken up by a phone is problematic, right? I don't know what the solution is, right? We're not going to carry around Alexa bots, we're not going to sit here and talk to Siri. I think there's a way to solve that. I don't quite know what it is yet, but it's one of the bigger problems that we've noticed that is affecting our text from an operations perspective that's down on the ground.

So those are the two things that I've kind of noticed that I can bullet point from an operations and efficiency standpoint. Okay, interesting, interesting. Rahul, is there anything you've noticed in terms of operations and how technology helps improve those? Yeah, I think QuickBooks is one of the most important tools we use today. I think 90% of our customers are on autopay. And that's been a huge, huge value add for us as a business in terms of collecting payments. I think outside of that, I would say operationally, this isn't technology focused, but more so just having a human

answer the phone or being able to pick up a call is really powerful. I know there are a lot of tools coming out today that do call handling and things like that. But a lot of customers that call in, they like talking to a human. And I think that's really, really powerful. And I think that is something that we've been trying to be very good about, which is just picking up the phone and answering when someone calls. Yeah, totally. Even at pull dial, I see that people really value picking up the phone themselves. And I think that where the AI sort of phone answering technology

is really good at the moment is maybe for the 24 seven sort of phone answering in after hours. I don't think it's quite there yet to really match like what it's like to pick up the phone with a human who really, like if you're having a problem with sort of your pump, like the human ideally who owns the business has been there. They've troubleshooted pumps before and they can help you with those things. And at the same time, it does seem like the technology is getting closer and closer to the point where it can handle those things. So I'm curious, how have you guys got about scaling?

You said you're, if I'm remembering correctly, just over 100 pools right now. Has it mainly been acquisition? Have you done any sort of marketing? Yeah, so we've done two acquisitions to date and we have essentially a marketing focus that we do from across some digital services from organic to paid are two from drivers. Okay, cool, cool. All right, so I'm curious how you guys think about you talk about there being a priority of really picking

up the phone for customers. How do you think about onboarding new customers onto your route? Yes, it's a great question. Customer service is an integral part of our business. It's probably the most important piece from when we get a new customer, you have to build that trust. And then when you've gone through an acquisition, you have to ensure, you have to make the customer know that they're in good hands. They've been in business with this guy who's you've been doing their pool for 10 plus years. You're this new company. They don't know you.

So you have to build trust. You have to be able to show them that you're going to do everything that this guy did before and then 10X that, right? And I think that's where the service reports come in handy. That's where the answering of the call is and being responsive. Because when you're a single poller and you're busy cleaning pools, you probably can't answer the phone as frequently as you want to. You can't get back to new customers. And so just making sure customer service is constantly in real time just getting back to customers efficiently and getting them, you know, just closing that loop. I think it's really, really important.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. And so as you think about sort of the difference between marketing and acquiring pool companies back back to acquiring a little bit, what are the sort of things there might be listeners who are nearby you guys or something who may be considering selling a route at some point. What do you look for in people who are looking to acquire or looking to sell the pool route? What sort of routes are you guys looking to acquire? Do you want to take that one? Yeah, I think the folks that we're looking for are one that have built

great businesses. And I think they fall into two categories, right? Either they've been doing this for a long time. You know, sometimes we've looked at we're actively looking at a route that's over 40 years old. And they've just built an extremely stable business. They just want to retire. You know, they're kind of ready to to kind of not be doing the work of running a pool route anymore and want to hand it to somebody that it'll stay within the locality of people that actually live and work there, right? We have all of our technicians and everybody that we have in that particular area. Rahul's local. I was born in Southern California.

That's kind of one demographic of seller that we look at. And the other is actually somebody who's just younger, who's like getting into the industry. They themselves like want to create a career into this. They're a lot earlier than this person wants to retire. But they have a vision and a mold for how to make something that's going to scale and they want to work with somebody that's going to scale with them. And what we basically help them do is we help them off board a lot of their operations, right? A lot of this inbound QuickBooks work. So they can focus on the work that they do best, which is repairs, which is going out and cleaning pools.

Because at the end of the day, we want them to do the job that they do the best. And we want to be their partner that helps them scale. So that's kind of the I guess the two categories of people that we're looking for. Okay, great. And in terms of when you're talking to someone, say there's someone who wants to sell their route. How long and what would the process look like for someone who maybe is in SoCal or NorCal who wants to sell? We can move pretty quick. I think our diligence in general is anywhere between, I don't know,

a month to six weeks at the longest. Generally speaking, from a sales perspective, you want to get to know the person. We don't want to just move quickly and spend a bunch of money and buy routes without really like diligenceing them. There's a lot of weirdness on both sides. There's a lot of people throwing around a lot of cash. And there's also a lot of people that are just trying to build up routes and sell them very quickly. We're not in the business of doing either of those things because we want to build a scalable company and grow the region. And so, I guess, to directly answer your question between four weeks to six weeks. And on general,

we're looking at about three months before everything's kind of completed from end to end. Okay, cool, cool. So that's the acquisitions perspective. Back to operations. Some just like very down-to-earth tactical questions about how you run the business. One thing that I've seen, and you guys are both NorCal and SoCal, is people have different ways of managing their routes in a given day. Do you have any sort of strategy for do you like have a specific sort of set of neighborhoods you go to on Monday, a different neighborhood you go to on Tuesday. How do you guys manage your route optimization?

Yeah, so we today, we essentially bulk a lot of our pools on a couple of given days. So Mondays and Fridays are for repairs, filter cleans, things like that. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the bulk of our pool cleaning days. So we do about anywhere between 40 to 50 pools on Tuesday and Thursday, and then the rest on Wednesday. And we generally look at, we look to optimize drive time, making sure we're doing certain areas all in one kind of one loop.

But I think definitely we look to have customers. We show up to customers houses on the days that generally that they prefer. So if we've acquired a route and we've been going on Tuesday, then we're going to continue to go on Tuesday. We want to make sure as we go through this transition phase, nothing changes for the customer, right? So if you've been being serviced for 10 years on every Tuesday, we're going to show up on Tuesday and we're going to make that work. And it's going to work within our route that we have. Okay. What is your guys' current split of service versus repair? Is it mostly service at the moment? You mentioned doing filter cleans.

Yeah, so it goes up during obviously summertime that split goes about 60-40. But we have a good split. So I would say off-season is about 70-30 and then peak season from about May to September is about 60-40 between cleaning and repairs. I think the interesting way to also think about that, Parker, is that repairs are obviously a higher margin part of the business, right? They're just from a pure dollars perspective, they're higher in revenue. And then from a margin perspective, they're just more. Like a regular service. And so the way that we look

at the service versus repairs business is the service from a marketing standpoint is more of a top of funnel, right? If we can make sure they're providing the best service to customers, then we're more likely to get the repair contract for that particular customer when it comes about than just doing a repair contract stale or like super cold. And so that's kind of the way that we also stack the business where there is ebbing and flowing in terms of when people want things. But obviously, as you begin to grow the portfolio, we want to make sure that we're actually focusing more on utilizing service as top of funnel and then building out great

repair, great kind of warranty and we're going to start working with a lot of the manufacturers and reps to make sure that we can and will provide the same service that my dad used to do 20, 30 years ago at the pull store. And so we're trying to recreate that but just for the new world. Okay, yeah, love it. And yeah, repairs are high margin and one sort of question that I've been asking a bunch of pool guys. We have a site pool rates dot FYI sort of you guys are a little bit in tech. It's sort of a parody of levels dot FYI. Exactly. And I've been serving pool guys on their pool rates and people have different ways of thinking about it.

Some people price weekly, some people price monthly, some do service plus chem, some just do service. How are you guys thinking about how you guys charge for service? Yeah, so we have a few service tiers kind of a very similar to a SaaS model in a way if you don't think about it. So we have different pricing tiers. We standardize pricing. We want to make sure there's kind of options for different types of pools because we know each pool is unique. And then from standardized pricing, repairs come in shortly after that.

Okay, cool, cool. In terms of the three techs that are working with you guys, are those one question I've had for people is how they hire techs. Did those come from an acquisition or did you have to run some Indeed ads or something like this to hire any of the techs you have? They came from an acquisition. So the business we acquired, he had these two folks that were working with him and then we did a little trial period. We loved what they were doing and so we brought them on full time. Okay, cool, cool. And so sometimes they ask how guys like have trained their techs

but it sounds like you might have had get some training yourself. I'm not sure how you relate to this dynamic Rahul but Ravi, I'm not sure he's needed training whatsoever but as someone who's new to the industry and this is something that I've been experiencing is I'm almost looking to my customers to teach me a little bit about the industry and this sort of thing. How have you related to training employees or being trained by them? Yeah, it's a great question. So the person we acquired

or the business we acquired down there, I did my initial training through him. So I got CPO-certified and then I went down and I did a full week of doing the route and I was just observing. And I wanted to see things were working and what you do. And I would just watch this business owner and I call him the Terminator because this guy is an absolute tank. He has these two technicians that work for him. He comes in and out of these houses. He's super efficient. Everyone has a role. He's five minutes

and he's like, Hey guys, five more minutes. He's just always he's coaching the guys. And so I was able to learn from him and take a lot of those, take that experience and apply it to the text we did put on board. Okay, a question I have. There's like a really interesting book also called Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. I think it's from the Eleven Madison Park. They're like a Michelin star restaurant in New York City. There's a lot of places that you see hospitality in its greatest form. At the highest level,

you can go to a five-star resort. You can go to like an Amman or like a Ritz Carlton. You can eat at a Michelin star restaurant. I think talking and like kind of zoning yourself in the pool industry is fine. But I think if you start stepping yourself out and figuring out where else, if you just ask the question of where else is hospitality great? Where else do people provide amazing service? And you're right. You know, a five-star dinner that's 500 bucks is very different than cleaning your pool. But in also many ways that it's not. And there's elements that are similar in a restaurant, in a bar, in a hotel that you can bring to the pool service.

And part of what we're going to start doing as we actually start rolling in more acquisitions is taking parts of these playbooks that exist outside of the pool industry and actually beginning to implement them inside as well. So I definitely recommend anybody in the pool industry to read this book because I think it really begins to change your kind of vision of the way that you start to see how treating a pool is different. Okay, yeah, I love that. I love that. And going back to the day-to-day Rahul, I did one day of running a pool route. I'm curious about your experience when you feel like you really got it, like what the, I don't know, 80-20 was for you.

Because I did one day, I feel like I got a decent bit, but maybe I'm kidding myself and I just don't want to do two more weeks in the Arizona summer. What was the learning curve for you like and when did you feel like you got a swing of things if you feel like you've gotten it yet? Yeah, I think again, I think it's a constant learning process, something that you continue to refine. But I would say I probably hit my stride this past May when I went down and I did all 100 pools in a week with the technicians. Our lead ops guy went on vacation and our replacement was at a graduation.

So he couldn't do it and so I was like, hey, I'll step in. I'll do it. I'll come down. So I went down to SoCal, ran the route with the guys and it was great. I think it was, that was kind of taking the training wheels off. I was kind of running and that was my first like, okay, you know what? I feel good about this. I can do this over and over again. This is good. Yeah, cool. I love it. I love it. So some of these, some of the people listening to the business might have been in the pool industry for a while. Some people might be new to it. I relatively am like Rahul. You kind of are.

Rahul, I'm curious as you've been learning about the industry and I'd be curious. Ravi as well, though you might have a sort of different kind of answer because you've been in the industry your whole life. Are there any like resources that have been particularly useful? Any trade shows that you attended that were illuminating or would you just recommend guys run a route getting involved in the industry? So I think I'll speak for me because I came to this completely blind, right? And so I think for me, what was helpful was to fully immerse yourself in this space and what I mean by that is, you know, going and actually cleaning a pool, knowing what all of that entails.

Like there is a process there, right? And then also then doing that at scale. It's fine to do one pool, two pools, three pools, right? But then try doing like 30 in a day, right? Like put yourself in the shoes of what an actual technician who's doing a route for the entire week or for however long the schedule is is going to actually do it. And so I think doing that one step multiple times is really powerful. And then the other thing is like there are so many people who've been doing this their entire lives or they've been doing for 30, you know, 20, 30, 40 years. Talk to them, right?

Use them as resources. You'll find out that a lot of these guys would gladly help you, you know? One of the things Ravi was telling me to do was join IPSSA. So I fortunately joined our IPSSA chapter here in the in the Tri-Valley and our president is David Hawes. Shout out to David Hawes, H&H Pools. He has been so awesome to work side by side with. We have monthly chapter meetings. I actually am in charge of the Tri-Valley chapter newsletter. So that has been really,

really cool to meet other folks in the industry. Again, just being where the pool guys are, right? Just being able to rub shoulders with them. We are acquiring pools or pool businesses and we are building this platform. But, you know, we're much more than that, right? And so we want and sort of pool guys and pool business owners. And so being able to relate to them, being able to really understand the ins and outs of the business and really just immersing yourself into the world on the ground floor has been really, really exciting and fun. Wonderful, wonderful. And briefly, I just learned

of David and I think he also recently exited. But he has a wonderful podcast on, I guess, a friend of the show. There's a really great pool podcast of a guy who's just starting to acquire pools in Tennessee, I think, Grant, who interviewed David and it was a wonderful episode. If anyone's listening to this and enjoys my podcast, I think it's the pool pros podcast by Grant over there is really excellent. Ravi, to sort of end this episode, I'm curious what sort of advice you would have for folks getting involved in the pool industry. Yeah, I think,

just like entering any industry, you kind of want to get your feet wet, right? No pun intended. So kind of riffing off of what Rahul just said, I built my previous startup in Silicon Valley and there's a lot of this sort of like ivory tower sort of thinking like people can kind of just sit in their rooms and you're going to code up some app all day long. Like, if you haven't used the existing apps out there, if you haven't cleaned a swimming pool, if you haven't like done the job that your customer is going to do, then in a sense, you kind of have like no business in designing that, right? Like go because you don't know what the you don't know

what the problems are. And so I always start anything from like a product perspective or even like entrepreneurship of understanding like, what is the problem? What is the problem that your customers have? And if you can live a day in the life, a week in the life, a month in the life in their shoes, then you're just going to be much better at actually developing products to help them. And if you just want to get in the industry and you're developing a new chemical, if you want to get in the industry and you're designing a new piece of hardware or a sensor, you know, you want to get in and like own pool routes, like do that job, right? If you're going to make a new chemical,

maybe understand how chlorine works. Like if you're going to make a sensor, understand how a test kit works or like how the flow of water works. Like it just getting the shoes of the customer, right, is kind of the main thing. And I think the way that you do that is exactly what Rahul said, right? Get to an IPSSA meeting. Go to a pool conference. Call up a pool tech. Go on Yelp and Google and find a phone number and like talk to the guy. Go to your local distribution parking lot, park your car there and like catch people at the door. You're going to get rejected a million times, but the one person you talk to is probably going to change your outlook

in like 180 degrees of that first conversation you have. And so that would be like my parting words. All right, wonderful. So if someone's looking to maybe sell their route or learn more about Poolify, where do they find more about you guys? Yeah, you can go to poolify.us or you can just email us at [email protected] and we'll reply to your email. You can also find us on LinkedIn at Ravi Kurani or Rahul Mangalore. Shoot us a DM. We're happy to chat and would love to chat with you if you guys are selling routes in California or if you just want to chat

and you're looking to get into the industry. Happy to share notes. We always are. All right. Well, thank you so much for chatting today, Ravi and Rahul and best of luck with Poolify. Thank you, Parker.