Why Your Teams App Store Launch Fails Without This Simple TRICK

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build podcast. Microsoft Teams saw massive growth because of the pandemic and acceleration of the remote work trend. Whether you're an end user of Microsoft Teams or thinking about developing apps for the Microsoft Teams marketplace. This episode will help you better understand the pros, cons, and process of what it's like to develop, submit, and launch a teams app.

Sean Weisbrot: Our guest is Hilton Giesenow, the founder and CEO of ChitChattr, which develops a family of products on Microsoft Teams, including quick links, reminders, short links, and teammate. He's also the founder of Experts Inside, which provides a wide range of SharePoint Office 365 and Yammer services, including strategic consulting, architecture, infrastructure development, and implementation. In this podcast, you'll hear about some background on Teams growth in the store, why Hilton decided to build apps on Microsoft Teams. The good and bad of building an app for the Microsoft Teams store. What was the hardest thing about launching their first app? What does it cost to launch and maintain an app? What is the process of launching an app? How to get an MVP into the Microsoft Team Store, and more. So, thank you to Hilton. I hope you enjoy the show.

Sean Weisbrot: Thank you for taking the time to sit down with me and talk about Microsoft Teams. I have to say, even though I consider Microsoft Teams to be a competitor of my startup for the purposes of the podcast, I think it's a really interesting thing that people should hear about. So, I'd love to talk with you more about it. Thank you for joining us.

Hilton Giesenow: Sure. Thank you for inviting me on. It's a great honor to be part of the show. I've, I'm a recently joined listener, shall we say, and enjoying the episodes and enjoying catching up. So, thank you for this fantastic show and the chance to be on it.

Sean Weisbrot: So why don't we have you tell everyone what it is you're doing right now that makes you the right person to talk about Microsoft Teams and building apps on the teams marketplace?

Hilton Giesenow: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, maybe I'll even take a step back if I can and give a little bit about my background and where I come from, I guess, and sort of how I got into this. My professional background is pretty much all in the Microsoft space, so I've got 20 plus years of experience in the software development and web space, primarily in the Microsoft space, and as a result, primarily in the enterprise. So, building solutions for employees, you know, to use, like, let's say, expense claim kind of forms and workflow kind of solutions, intranets, really the main focus, I guess, has been call it information management solutions, collaboration kind of solutions, and then productivity kind of solutions focused at users in the, in the enterprise.

Hilton Giesenow: So that started off with the product. Many, many of the listeners might have heard of something called SharePoint or as many people have referred to it over the years, ScarePoint. It's had some elements of a dark past. So, you say, but really primarily around kind of development and consulting clients in that space. And the SharePoint market has moved from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint online. And ultimately, you know, office 365 and what Microsoft today called Microsoft 365. So, my background really has been helping employees leverage those tools in kind of information tools in the Microsoft family and moving into the cloud, kind of broadening outside of SharePoint into what people might have heard of or what Microsoft calls a power family. Things like PowerApps and Power Automate and things like that, and Yammer and Stream and other sort of 20, 30 odd products in the in the Microsoft space.

Hilton Giesenow: Most recent and most exciting, I guess, are teams. So, I'm pretty sure especially in the last year, everybody's at least heard of teams and is aware of its ability to do voice and video. But it's way more than that. And it's and it's tremendous collaboration and productivity. On a platform as well as just simply for communication. So, they may have seen videos, for example, of things like the tabs and bots and things like that that you can build into the tool. And really that's where we focus. So, I still run a team doing consulting and development work, but my main focus is really looking to tap into the massive and continually growing Teams ecosystem and seeing if if we can get some traction, putting some exciting products into that, into that store. So, the company name is Chikara. That's what we release our apps under, and we've got a couple of apps already in the store and a couple more on the way as well.

Sean Weisbrot: So, you just said that you're trying to capture on the growth of teams. Is that why you decided to build apps for the Teams marketplace?

Hilton Giesenow: That's why I decided to build apps for the Teams marketplace. Yeah. I mean, obviously on a personal side, you know, there's a decision to kind of go into this crazy startup kind of world. I mean, I've run a SharePoint consulting firm for, gosh, a little over a decade now, you know. So, I guess in some ways, being a business owner in that way. But it's very different in the bespoke custom development slash consulting world to kind of the SaaS, B2B, you know, building a product kind of space altogether. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I dabbled in a couple of things, but just sort of personal life and coming to be in the right place at the right time. And then teams obviously being what it is and seeing the tremendous growth it was, and our experience in the Microsoft enterprise kind of marketplace was just a perfect storm, I guess, of everything coming together.

Sean Weisbrot: So, with the growth of users on the platform and the growth and the number of apps available in the marketplace, what has been your experience having launched several apps, are you seeing large and fast growth in the users adopting your applications on the marketplace, or is it slow going? What does it look like?

Hilton Giesenow: I'm not a lawyer, but you know, it's probably always worth adding in a caveat up front. Um, everything that I share is obviously my experience, you know, or our experience from a church perspective. We've got a couple of different apps. I'd love to actually just take you through 2 or 3 of the apps on the show, maybe just explain to people what they do to get an idea of kind of what perspective we're coming from. But essentially, you know, everything that we're coming from is our perspective. You know, your mileage may vary. I guess. Um, it's also very different coming to an app marketplace like this. If you have an existing brand and you're kind of just creating your teams projection of that, I mean, people will know, like let's say Trello and GitHub and things like that. You know, a lot of those kind of companies now have a Teams app as well. But that's really just, you know, the face of their brand or their app into teams versus what we're doing is building things that are from the ground up created for teams, specifically.

Hilton Giesenow: All of my answers, I guess, just bear in mind for the listeners of obviously effectively going to be from our perspective on that. But yeah, you know, some of our apps have done better than others, I guess had more interest in others and things like that. I think it depends what people are looking for and whether we're sort of fulfilling the pain point as best as possible. But we've certainly had a lot of interest, a lot of installations, pretty good uptake from that perspective. Lower conversions, I think, than we expected. I mean, maybe that's something we can unpack a little bit as well, just understanding what an enterprise or B2B store looks like compared to, you know, B2C and App Store on a mobile device, for example. Um, but yeah, we can we can unpack that a little bit more as well.

Sean Weisbrot: Go for it. Why do you think the conversions are lower?

Hilton Giesenow: What I mentioned before is just understanding the implications, shall we say, of a B2B versus a B2C marketplace. In the B2B marketplace, a business-to-business store marketplace, the dynamics are surprisingly different. You know, there might be an app that I kind of like on, on, let's say the, you know, my fruity device. And I'm happy, happy to pay the $10 a month for it. But there might be an app that's great in the team's store that really suits my team and really helps us with productivity, but because it's something that I kind of perceive as for work, in my mind, the economics and the purchasing decision becomes quite different. So it might be that let's say, you know, I'd happily pay $10 to do something in my personal capacity, but there's no way I'm going to pay money, albeit, let's say, $5 as an example. You know, there's no way I'm going to pay money for something that I perceive as a work tool, for instance. So, that's the mental dynamics, I guess, of trying to trying to deal with that challenge.

Hilton Giesenow: But, you know, if it is a more expensive app and, you know, it's not something that would make sense for you to pay personally, it's also important to understand that in the B2C space, you know, if I want something and it's for me, I'll simply pay for it. But if there's something in the corporate space, it's not me who's making that decision. You know, I'm somewhere in the food chain, so to speak, even, even potentially high up in that food chain. But purchasing is a different story. You know, there's purchase orders that need to be raised and justifications and business cases and etc., etc.. So it's a very, very different kind of purchasing process, purchasing decision, etc.. So yeah, it's important for people to be aware of if they want to get into the space.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I know, like I've been working towards moving my team from GitLab to JIRA because of the project management functionality that GitLab lacks, and I spent hours looking through Jira and Bitbucket and all of the different Pricings. And if you pay annually or monthly, and if you can find a way to make pricing and all of that less of a headache with the apps that you do, it will probably make it a lot easier because like with Bitbucket, it's straightforward if you have under five people, it's free, but after that it's $3 per user per month, no matter how many people you have using it.

Sean Weisbrot: But like if you get to 5100, it starts to get like $2 and 97. So it starts to go very slightly lower than $3 as you scale. But with Jira it's like ten users for free, but then 11 to 15 is $7 per month if you pay per month at $7 per month. If you pay annually, it's like $700. So, if you have 11 people, you're still going to be paying the price that you'd be paying if you had 15. So, it's like, well, if I if I'm under that top number, then it makes sense to pay a monthly fee, not an annual fee, but the monthly fee over the year is actually much, much more. So, it's like a huge, huge headache just thinking about how much it's going to cost so you can budget. I'm annoyed with business-to-business software as a service platforms because they really pissed me off with that pricing stuff.

Hilton Giesenow: Yeah, I mean, it is it is a challenge. I mean, I think back to, you know, studying marketing at university many, many, many years ago, more gray hairs ago than I'd like to think. I remember that, you know, pricing is on the one hand, obviously, it's a you know, there's an economic side to it, but there's a big marketing angle. That as well, you know, just in terms of the perceptions and so on. So that is something that that we're learning as well. I mean, I should mention, you know, I guess I touched on it, you know, my background is not in products and, you know, not in this space as well. So, we're learning a great deal ourselves. And having a, I mean, I should say having a great time as well. But yeah, it's a steep learning curve in terms of just working out, you know, all aspects of the business and pricing being one of them, sort of trying to find the sweet spot of, you know, as a business owner, I guess you want to, on the one hand, maximize what people pay but maximize the potential market at that point, you know, so finding pricing or the right pricing point is, is, yeah, it's a challenge. It's an interesting challenge.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, that's why we're looking at doing dynamic pricing.

Hilton Giesenow: Yeah, absolutely. And that's you know we've ourselves kind of swung through different pricing models and we're constantly exploring them as the feature sets change as well. Whether we should look at, you know, adjusting the pricing based on what's available in the product as well and offering per feature pricing versus kind of freemium is all the kind of things one faces.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's talk about the process of building an app for Microsoft Teams.

Hilton Giesenow: So, I guess there's a kind of a good and a bad to it, if you want to say it that way. Um, maybe we can start with the good. There's a ton of support and there's a ton of material to get up and running in a Microsoft. I'm sure many people remember the there's an old famous video of Steve Ballmer from gosh, and this is probably ten, 15 years ago, jumping around on-stage shouting “developers, developers, developers” and old famous video. You know, Microsoft's history and their philosophy, you know, to a large extent has been around enabling developers. So, the team store has a lot of capability to get development teams up and running. So, there's a ton of documentation, samples, webcasts, monthly community calls, a ton of open-source projects, for example. You know, there's a lot of support and material to get teams up and running. Incidentally, personally, I mean, maybe just worth mentioning. I'm very personally passionate about the development community.

Hilton Giesenow: So, if anybody wants to get into the space, they'll almost certainly see me somewhere very active on the forums. And I produce a number of, um, open-source samples and document updates for the actual Microsoft Teams docs and so on. And so, you know, my philosophy is kind of making the marketplace bigger and better for everybody by trying to help out on that perspective. But there's a lot of that kind of support for getting teams up and running teams with a small team, shall we say, and lots of extensibility points in the product as well. There are a lot of ways that you can build things for teams. So, you know, whether it's something for, let's say, you know, collaboration or there's new extensibility points.

Hilton Giesenow: Now for inside of a meeting, you can actually build an app that will join, you know, the actual meeting experience as opposed to, let's say, the post-meeting experience, all of those kind of things. In addition, also worth knowing. And again, it's obviously different from different kinds of stores. You know, let's say B2B, B2C store versus let's say, you know, some other product that you're using, etc.. On the Microsoft side, there's no charging model, there's no fee model at all. On the one hand, that's kind of a little bit of a negative. There's no charging model built in, so there's no model natively in the platform to charge customers. The positive of that is that you don't pay any fees to Microsoft. So, you know Apple, I think that's like 30% of the price goes to them. For example, teams, if you if you get a converted customer, you're taking 90% of that revenue home. So that's great. And it's, you know, still with 140 million people, something like that. So that's so that's tremendous. And Microsoft's obviously effectively doing marketing for you by, you know, having that store and so on.

Hilton Giesenow: Looking back over my experience, one of the things that I would suggest and advise to people, I'm not sure how applicable this will be going forward, but just a personal story and this is me sharing my pain. Don't submit anything to the teams app store, sort of roughly around February or March of 2020, right at the outbreak of a major global pandemic. You know, in a in a tool that significantly empowers work from home because that that will challenge your store acceptance process. I-we had rejections from Microsoft because portions of our app weren't working. And when I went to go and see what was going on, basically Microsoft Teams wasn't functional. You know, the team's team was obviously scrambling to try and scale this thing to the order of magnitude required. So, to just take the marketplace in the timing, I guess, is a bit of a lesson for me. But aside from that, some of the perceptions that you're going to encounter in terms of things like users and some of the messaging around that is where you're going to face a bit of a challenge.

Hilton Giesenow: One of the things we've found, for example, is that users are quite surprised that there's a pricing involved for the purchase of our apps. We've had a number of customers or a number of feedback items, shall we say, from users who've been quite surprised that, you know, that they're having to pay for whatever this thing is. And some of them have been quite, quite surprising in terms of, you know, just doing like a LinkedIn search and seeing sort of who that's coming from. It's been interesting to see, you know, maybe even senior in the software field, for example, is surprised to be paying for an item. I suspect what happens is that somebody in the team installs it, and then somebody else is trying to use it, and maybe hitting the freemium limits, for example, and not sure how it got there.

Hilton Giesenow: But yeah, effectively just having users understand that your app has come from a third-party marketplace and that it's not native to teams and that, yes, you know, they need to pay because this is something that's been bolted on and isn't part of the native Microsoft cloud licensing been has been a challenge. And then likewise, because Microsoft doesn't have a charging model, I guess sort of hand in hand with that, they don't present. Well, the fact that your app will have a charging model and don't necessarily indicate upfront that there is pricing or a way to sort of access that pricing, you know, you've got to kind of funnel the users through to your website and funnel them through to a pricing page, etc..

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, that definitely sounds like a huge screw up from Microsoft in that regard. What would you say was the hardest thing about launching your first app?

Hilton Giesenow: We had a lot of logistical issues, just the nature of kind of getting into the store. I mean, the Microsoft Store is effectively sort of two stores on top of each other if you want to see it that way. There's the overall Microsoft App Store, of which teams is just considered one piece of that. So, when you submit this sort of the overall App Store process is, is running and the teams verification and app submission team is, is a sub team in that you're kind of almost fighting Microsoft's bureaucracy in that way.

Hilton Giesenow: Like there's challenges we've had dealing with Microsoft internally, I guess, you know, we had, for example, portions of our app get rejected because of requirements that were coming through from the main teams engineering team to the store validation team that were like literally just in conflict with one another, we were told to add things into our app that we didn't want to add in something to satisfy certain requirements, and when we added them in, we were getting rejections that pieces of our app were broken because we added in this functionality that they'd requested, but they weren't clear on what it was supposed to do. We just were meant to add it in because of something that had changed in some requirements somewhere.

Hilton Giesenow: Another big part of it has been the learning curve as well. Something I didn't touch on, but I mentioned Microsoft Teams. There's a lot of extensibility points. For example. I mean, one of those, for instance, is building a bot. You might want to put a bot into the store and there are probably 7 or 8 separate technologies you kind of need to get yourself or your team skilled up on in order to build a, you know, natural language understanding and responding kind of capability. You know, if you've got a lot of bot experience, for example, that would have been fine. But if you don't and you have the idea to build a bot, there's quite a steep learning curve.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm curious if Microsoft charges you anything, whether it's a one-time fee or a monthly fee or a yearly fee to be a developer for the team store.

Hilton Giesenow: There's no cost to the submission process. There's no account for you. Anything like that.

Sean Weisbrot: Your app is done and you go to submit it to the store. Walk me through how it gets from submission to in the hands of users.

Hilton Giesenow: In order to do a store submission, you have to have obviously develop the app. I mean, that probably goes without saying. But you know, there's obviously development and there's obviously testing internally. Your app has to kind of be ready, you know, for users to use it. But aside from that, there's quite a detailed list of requirements that you need to have in order to even go through the submission process. Things like appears to have certain icons to appear in the store, for example. But also, Microsoft mandates that you have to have a website for your app or for your company. And that's not from a marketing perspective. That's specifically because you have to be able to redirect users to a terms and conditions document. You have to have data, policies and things like that. So, you have to be able to have something that you can point users to in order to be able to put things in the store.

Hilton Giesenow: And again, none of this is business. You know, once you've got an app, how you choose to market it in terms of things like a website and you know, etc., etc. but this is just purely the store submission process. You have to have screenshots, you have to be registered as a Microsoft partner, which itself can be a challenge. You know, we started using a particular business model and that gave us some complexities as well, just in terms of the physical entity model. So, there's a lot of pre-work, I guess, if you like, before the actual store submission process itself, then in terms of the submission, you're uploading the app and you're capturing a lot of details. The tool to use that is something called the partner center or the partner Dashboard. And I'm sure it won't be a surprise to a lot of people. But, you know, the sort of idea of the cobbler's children having the worst shoes and the software that Microsoft has that are facing partners as opposed to facing customers is, you know, not necessarily the same level of usability or consistency or bug freeness or anything like that.

Hilton Giesenow: So, the partner center itself is a bit of a challenge. But anyway, you're going through that submission process. And as I said, that's kind of like the primary Microsoft Store. They will take that submission and pass it on to the teams' validation team, who will then do the actual testing of your product and effectively come back to you with a pass-fail. And if there's a fail, which, you know, typically they is, you can expect to have some sort failure, don't have to be necessarily serious things, but, you know, you can expect some sort of queries or things like that. Usually, you'll follow that up with a meeting with the actual testing team to kind of explain your app and help them understand what it's doing and what it might be aiming to do. Incidentally, one of the other things as well that you need is help docs. So, you have to have help documentation available for the users and other kind of requirements. Often it's just taking them through that and explaining how the app works and so on, and then effectively just working through the issues. We've got several apps in the store now, so we've been through that a couple of times, and we know what they're looking for, and we know what to avoid and how to sort of check the checkboxes, you know, more effectively to give you an idea of that. Our first app, which was probably about a month or so of verification backwards and forwards, the last app was on the order of like two days. I think there were two minor things that came back with. We fixed them and resubmitted and we went through them. So, you know, there's kind of an experience of just understanding the store process as well, which obviously helps.

Hilton Giesenow: Once that's done, there's a final submission. You basically just resubmit your app to kind of trigger the process from the beginning. Again, they'll approve it and then you're in the store. Incidentally, we've noticed and this is again our observation. And it's very point in time I guess February 2021. We've noticed that durations have changed as things have gone through. You know, you can imagine when there were a hundred apps in the store and occasionally one of them has, let's say, a feature update. The verification team was less busy when there are 800 and something apps, each of those potentially submitting new versions and obviously a ton of other apps going through as well. So, they've slowed down quite a bit in terms of the responsiveness, shall we say. You kind of at there women, you know, when they get to you they'll get to you. There's obviously nothing you can do to accelerate or bypass that in any way.

Sean Weisbrot: It's funny because the entire time you were explaining this insane process, it just reminds me of the patent process and how ridiculous that process is of going back and forth with the patent employee or the patent office employee and trying to explain how things work and getting them to basically accept your proposal and how it can take months, if not years. So, it seems like Microsoft is heading in that direction, taking years to agree on something.

Hilton Giesenow: I hope it doesn't get to the point of view. As you know, it's gone from days to weeks. I hope we hope we don't even get two months. Certainly not. Certainly not years. I mean, you know, as I said, our first app, we were in the order of, let's say, you know, around about a month. But a lot of that was really just us, you know, learning what they were looking for and so on. Microsoft do document a lot of this. There's quite detailed docs on what you need to have and what needs to be in your app and so on. So, if you follow those, you've obviously got a much better chance of process going more smoothly. If you don't follow those, you know, more guaranteed to have issues. And if you don't have the icon of the right size, like you can't even go through the submissions, some of those are pretty low, you know, kind of go no go kind of things.

Hilton Giesenow: But yeah, you know, there is a process. You'll appreciate this from the company's perspective. There are a lot of things in terms of putting a business together that one does need to go through. And, you know, we spoke about B2B versus B2C. One of the things that you'll need to consider when putting an app in the store is, you know, what is your app to what are your customer look like and what kind of customer base or you're focusing. I mean, we work. With customers on the consulting side who are two, three, or four-man businesses right up to companies who are in the tens of thousands. You can imagine the dynamics in a company like that are vastly different if you're dealing with a smaller business. One of some of our products, for example, are more SMB-focused than others.

Hilton Giesenow: The hoops you have to jump through from a customer perspective are quite different. Whereas when you're dealing with larger enterprises, irrespective of what your app does or even how well it does it, the considerations become different there. I think if I kind of sum it up in a nutshell, probably the biggest thing you'll need to think about is if you're targeting large enterprise is things like your Soc2 compliance, for example, you as a company, what is your compliance stance in terms of what customers might be looking for? You know, if you're dealing with companies of a certain size or a certain industry or a certain, uh, let's say defense versus non-defense, but even, you know, even, let's say finance or health versus another kind of industry, for example, the compliance regulations on you as a vendor or as a supplier, obviously very different as well. You can imagine something like SOC two compliance is a difficult and onerous process that you might need to go through. If that's the audience that you're targeting with your store app. Much worse than the team store, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Sean Weisbrot: What is an alternative to working with Microsoft Teams? I guess in this regard.

Hilton Giesenow: You know, this was a question we faced as well, is, is in terms of trying to get, I guess, the equivalent of an MVP, you know, minimum viable product. How do we get something into market to test its viability as easily, as quickly and as cheaply as possible? In fact, I mean, this is maybe a good time to tell a story. We've got a few apps that we've built, and one of them never made it to the actual store itself. We went through the entire process, the verifications.

Hilton Giesenow: There were a few bugs that were raised. We addressed all of those things, etc., etc. and at the end of it, Microsoft decided like literally the last stage in the verification process, they decided that even though it was now technically working to what they expected, they decided that they didn't feel there was enough business value in the app for them to list it in the store, which I found quite a strange thing. I mean, they didn't know what purpose we had in terms of building and releasing that app. You know, it was it was intended to be part of a suite and so on. It wasn't necessarily meant to be a standalone product, but it was interesting that we got, you know, rejected for that reason. It was almost like Microsoft are trying to make sure that there are no Ford apps in the teams to kind of be the equivalent of that, I guess, is a way to say it. So, we could have maybe approached that differently or something like that.

Hilton Giesenow: In terms of the process of an MVP, I think I think that's the key lesson, is that if you're trying to test the validity of a product, which is worth doing anyway, the equivalent concept of an MVP understand that the store process is going to put requirements on you that don't necessarily make sense in terms of trying to get something to market quickly. There are ways to kind of get in the store without necessarily going through the store. So, I guess the most classic is, I'm sure many of the listeners will know about in terms of something called a fake door or averted referred to us as a front door, things like that. But basically, just trying to build a website to gauge interest, you know, doing the marketing work to see if people might effectively buy your product.

Hilton Giesenow: And that's different for a pure kind of SaaS website, if you like, versus something like a teams app, because people are expecting you to be in the in the team store. So maybe how you approach customers or something like that, you know, if. To go and search for you. They'll find your website, but they won't find you in the store in that moderation flag. So, it's possible, but it's something to be aware of. The other alternative is to look at the sideloading process that Microsoft provides. All the stores do this. You know, if you're building your own app, let's say for your Android device, you can sideload the app onto your own device in order to do testing and verifications. But there is an option to do that through the teams' product as well.

Hilton Giesenow: So, if you had customers that you're working with, we had this with beta customers, for example, where they could sideload our app during the beta process and the back end, the database was the same, and so on. So, when we ultimately went to the store, there was virtually no notice from the end users. It simply flipped from kind of from mode A to mode B, the data was intact, the experience was intact, the conversation history is all of that kind of thing was intact. So yeah, that's probably the best bet is to try and work with customers, your potential customers, your potential beta customers, things like that. And look at the sideloading option as the best you can kind of get your effectively getting it into an internal company store specific for those businesses.

Sean Weisbrot: What's something I haven't asked yet that you wished I would ask?

Hilton Giesenow: You know, we've discussed the process, we've discussed the team store and how you could actually go ahead and get started with all of that. Incidentally, if you're interested in finding more of the details of actually doing the development, I've got an episode coming up on a development podcast in a couple of weeks, but I think one thing we haven't touched on is whether this is a good idea at all. You know, if you've got an app or you've got an idea, you know, should you go into the team store, you know, the marketplace is growing. We've spoken about some of the kind of the addressable market in some ways. But I think other things to be aware of are, you know, is your idea really going to gain the traction you expected? You know, some of the things we spoke about B2B versus B2C, you know, it might be something that we've learned this lesson as well. It might be something that appeals to end users, but not necessarily something that a corporate purchasing process is going to allow.

Hilton Giesenow: So just consider it from that perspective. And then something else that we also really haven't spoken about is understanding that Microsoft is both a facilitator in terms of providing a store, but they're also the vendor and the owner of teams and a related teams ecosystem. So, you need to be very careful that you're not necessarily out innovated not just by competitors, but by Microsoft themselves. We had an incident about a week ago or so when Microsoft had launched a free app, a portion of which competes with an element of our application. You know, they're building stuff continually in the box and out of the box and so on. What I mean by that is certain things are built natively into teams and others, or let's say, free apps that you can download and configure and host yourselves in that kind of company store. So, they're not natively in teams, but, you know, they're effectively free or close to free for users. So yeah, it's something you need to be aware of just to keep an eye on the Microsoft landscape, keep an ear to the ground and make sure that what you're thinking of building isn't something that that Microsoft themselves are building. I guess it's something to be aware of.

Sean Weisbrot: That sounds like what Amazon and Apple have been accused of doing. Basically, like someone made an app for iOS, and it was so good that Apple just happened to sneakily launch their own. And then, you know, just like prevent the other company from staying on the store. I mean, Amazon's been known to monitor the growth of certain products. Or industries on the platform, and then come out with their own lower-cost version that can manufacture at scale, basically destroy those, these tiny companies because we've got better toilet paper or we've got better sunglasses or whatever it is. So definitely one of the problems I would say with building on top of somebody else's platform is they could always destroy your business with the stroke of a key.

Hilton Giesenow: I think maybe the one way to compete against that is, you know, Warren Buffett talks about the moat in a company, for example. I think what one needs to do in considering whether the product makes sense is not just whether it's, you know, fulfills a business need, but whether it's the kind of product that you can build significant IP into to make sure that your moats big enough. If it's something that is so easy to compete with that the likes of the store owner could come up with something pretty quickly and easily. You know, it might not be a great idea to even embark on the product versus something that, you know, has some quite complicated, proprietary kind of IP built into it.