[00:00:00] JH: Richie Ganney, Harry Riley, welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

[00:00:05] HR: Hey, Jeff. How are you doing?

[00:00:06] RG: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

[00:00:08] JH: Yes, not too bad. So, you have just launched your app on both iOS and Android, and your website's been live for a while also. You are the co-founders of a company called Continue. Tell me about Continue. What does it do?

[00:00:28] HR: Yes, thanks Jeff. So, Continue basically plugs a big gap in the market. Our main objective is to connect retail to resale. At the moment, selling online, your clothes, or whatever the product may be, is really manual process. Let's say for instance, you buy a jumper from a brand, you want to sell it on a resale platform, you've got to take photos, you've got to write descriptions, colors, sizes, categorization.

What we do is at the point of purcha1se of that new item, we actually connect with the retailer. So, when you purchase that product, we pull all of the data from the retailer, digitize the product and add it to your what we call a Continue wardrobe, because we're focusing on fashion at the moment. Then, a few months later down the line, when you want to sell that product, swipe of a finger, we use all the brand imagery, descriptions, sizes, categorizations and repopulate that. So, literally, just a swipe of a finger, choose your price, and it's on the market. We basically would take about a 12-step process into two steps. Then, the retailer also gets a nice little kickback every single time the products resold. It works well for both shareholders.

[00:01:47] JH: So, if I resell a sweater on Continue, then half of that money goes to the original makers of this sweater, is that correct?

[00:02:00] HR: That's correct. Yes. The buyer pays the transaction fee. So, you'll get 100% of the transaction fee as the seller and the buyer pays, it's around 8%. A percentage will go to the retailer, and we'll take a percentage to cover our costs.

[00:02:21] JH: Could that incentivize companies to make their products last even longer, though, if they see that, if they're being sold on more, if they last longer than many of the clothes that we see in fast fashion. If they get a cut each time they change hands, could that be a positive incentive, you think, for companies to invest more in the quality and durability of their products?

[00:02:46] HR: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Because it's such a new concept, and a company is just now it's just so used to making money wants off the new sale, whereas I’m sure, you and your users have heard of the term circular – circularity. It's exactly what we're doing, where we're making circularizing the products post sale, so they're making money every single time the product resells. Yes, we absolutely see that that could be a possibility of creating more durable products, because they're now making money, not just on the first purchase, but potentially years after. 

[00:03:21] RG: It's a trend that it’s really kind of unstoppable at the moment. It's one of the feedback that we've got, that every retailer we've spoken to, it’s something they really want to get involved in, they want to stay ahead of the curve. Hardly ever we heard retailers saying that – well, I mean, some of them might not be in a position to do something like this right now, but never have we heard that it's not something that they would want to do or something, it's not the way it's going, it seems pretty accepted that that’s the way it's going.

[00:03:49] JH: When you sell on an item, you don't only send them money, but you also give them data, which is often described as their modern currency. Isn't that right? What kind of advantages do yo1u 1think companies can obtain from having trusted information about the lifecycle of their products, once they leave their warehouses?

[00:04:12] HR: It's a really good question. So, there's a couple of things. We only provide aggregate high-level data back to the brand, so we never provide personally identifiable consumer data back to the brands. But there's lots of metrics that we can provide such as ownership, lifecycle ownership, how long they need brands for, what demographics of buying these brands, which products are doing well on the resale platform. But also, a lot of the new fashion trends that you see derived from previous trends. You see flares coming back in fashion.

So, being able to predict what the next trend is based on resale patterns is incredibly useful for brands because it means that they don't have to produce stock that isn't in season, isn't in trend. They can actually then start focusing on stock that is going to sell. There are lots of other data points, thousands of data points that we can provide to the retailer. So, as we progress over the next year, and two, we're going to get a lot of feedback from retailers what they want to see, what they don't want to see, and what's useful. So, we'll certainly be building up that dashboard that we've created over the next year or so.

[00:05:26] RG: Yes. It’ll definitely be a challenge building the retailer dashboard, because it's going to be so specific to what each retailer wants. So, some might be more interested in the monetization part of it. They might more keen on that side, and some of them might really want to see the trends to ensure that they're staying ahead of the curve. For example, if something's not being is a very good resale, they might decommission a certain product, or if one's really good, they might lose more than some – it's going to be different for each retailer and we're going to have to build that entirely driven by the feedback.

[00:05:59] JH: Yes, of course, that'll be up to each company to decide, how they want to interpret the data, and what they want to do with it, and how they want to position themselves as a brand. So, what brought the idea about? It sounds like it's – well, it sounds really obvious in hindsight, like many good ideas do. But obviously, it wasn't. What gave you the idea finally, to say, actually, this is something that is needed into the world and we could do it.

[00:06:32] HR: Yes. I think, personally, for me, my kind of intrigue and fascination of resale happened when I left college. I set up a small retail business. I did that for about six years. But I always remember looking on the eBay and Gumtree and seeing some of our homeware products selling on there. I was just, I was just intrigued as to what happened to the product after the sale and the lifecycle and who owns it. But it's very primitive thoughts back then. This is before the major resale platforms started appearing, then I went on to co-found another company called Spirit AI. It was in a completely different space, looking at toxicity and abuse in online games, communities. Last year that was acquired. So, it was during that process that I was looking at, I wanted to get back into a startup and this kind of came back around.

It was actually during COVID when my sister was looking for a bike for her daughter. She literally is not on eBay, any of the major resale platforms, and I was thinking that there must be thousands of unused children's bikes sitting in garages and sheds, but they're just not available. So, I started thinking about the digitization of products post purchase that are looking into this space again and just realize that it wasn't being done. So, decided to launch it at the beginning of last year. She was one of the first people that I talked to about it. We'd met about four years ago, Richie, and I on engineering school and we always said that we'd like to do a startup together. He’s one of the first people that I contacted, and just kind of rolled with it from there, and started doing our research and building out the products quite early on, and kind of grew from there.

[00:08:25] RG: I was just waiting, just waiting a couple of years for Harry to come up with a good idea. And I was like, “He'll come up with something. I'll just wait until” –

[00:08:33] HR: All the buzz networking, isn't it?

[00:08:36] RG: Yes. I know. Don't need to be creative about that. I reached out last year, when was it? Probably about this time last year, right?

[00:08:44] HR: Yes. April time.

[00:08:46] RG: I loved it. Always said that we're going into business together. Actually, we were saying, we will go into business together, and if we do, it will be in something sustainable, something circularity, some sort of problem around that that we want to solve, and yes, I loved it. So, packed up, moved home.

[00:09:07] HR: He was staying in in New York at the time on a very nice salary, and I decided to poach him and pay him absolutely peanuts to come back and live in London.

[00:09:19] RG: Yes. Do you want to get paid nothing and work seven days a week? That was decent.

[00:09:23] JH: Speaking of knowing all the right people, I think a nice segue now into how did you go about fundraising? Was there a lot of support from people? Was the kind of sustainability and circularity of the idea the concept, something that helped you raise funds? Or is that not really too influential when it comes to investors actually opening their wallets?

[00:09:48] HR: That’s a good question. I think it depends on which investors we were talking to. It definitely helped with a with a few of our current investors. They come from sustainability background, sustainability companies. So, that was a big benefit to them. But others, obviously, they care about our sustainability, but it's not their core focus. So, it's a real mixture, really. We started fundraising about a year ago, didn’t we Richie? It was about a nine-month process. It’s a mix really, of people that we know, networking.

So, we had a couple investors from my previous startup, invested in this – couple of Richie's contacts, couple of my other contacts. Then, just really just running a campaign using traditional spreadsheets, LinkedIn, couple of search tools that helped us just running a campaign and finding out who's interested. It's tough to raise, but it's a pre-seed round with pre-product, pre-revenue. So, you've really got to sell the vision. A lot of storytelling. There's no metrics involved. There's obviously industry wide metrics that you can use, but there's no internal metrics that you can use. It really is about storytelling, selling the problems, selling the solution, selling the team.

But it's good. You get a lot of feedback. You also expand your network doing it. We've got a lot of investors warmed up for the next raise, which will be next year. So, it’s got some advantages as well.

[00:11:28] RG: Yes. We’re obviously self-aware about the areas of expertise and areas that we're not so trained up in, and we really wanted to make sure that we leverage some experience out of this as well. So, I think we did quite well in getting smart money in, so all of our investors, they've got really good experience in different areas, in sales, and marketing, and strategy. We've managed to leverage that, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. So, that's been really helpful so far.

[00:12:02] JH: You've mentioned, sales, marketing, and so on. What about technology? Do you want to just introduce yourselves, I think, 15 minutes in, it's very not the right. But talk to your own background when it comes to tech, and did you get anyone else in, a consultant or an investor to kind of advice on which technology stack to use? 

[00:12:34] RG: I mean, my technical background really just goes back to the Makers, so that's where Harry and I met, Makers Academy. I mean, it's a software engineering course. So, you learn – it's full stack. You learn JavaScript, and Ruby. At the end, you do a project, and then you get a job after that. And most people go into the software engineering roles. I actually went into a DevOps role where we met Jeff. Although, I don't think we actually ever worked on a project together, did we?

But yes, I basically did another Makers at ECS. When I joined ECS, we did another Makers Academy, but for DevOps, so six months or three months of software engineering, three months of DevOps, and then, I really just did that for the next three years. I really kind of fell out of programming. Still Batch scripting, still Python scripting, but really, it was in a couple of projects at ECS and that was very compartmentalized. Really just managing a couple pipelines on some of my work, doing a bit of infrastructure coding, TerraForm, that kind of thing.

When I moved to New York, I really got down and dirty with DevOps. I was managing all of their production infrastructure. I was building their CI/CD pipelines, writing the TerraForm code. You're trying to automate everything, managing AWS costs, it's a big, big project on AWS cost management. So, that was really helpful. Yes, when I started on coding again with Harry, it really was a requirement that I get back into that. I couldn't just be a DevOps guy. I had to start coding again.

So, I did that last year, and it was all TypeScript. Harry, we'll talk more to that. But yes, it was all TypeScript. Kind of leverage my JavaScript. I kind of always kept up a little bit of JavaScript, and obviously, it's a superset of JavaScript. So, I already, I could kind of hit the ground running with that. I love it. Like getting back into it, it's so good. I really do. I'm not even sure which one I like more now, I don't know. I really loved programming, but I also love the –

[00:14:51] JH: Between Typescript and JavaScript?

[00:14:53] RG: No, sorry. Like doing DevOps, doing DevOps work and doing pure functional programming. Obviously, doing both now, and I love it when I do both. So, I think I'll always have to remain a jack of all trades somewhat, as opposed to kind of specializing in one.

[00:15:12] JH: When you say functional programming, you mean programming in the functionality?

[00:15:15] RG: Yes. Actually –

[00:15:20] JH: Because there's also functional programming where every single ride has a function with like languages, like Lisp. That’s not what you meant, right?

[00:15:27] RG: Yes, I mean, like that.

[00:15:29] JH: Oh, really? 

[00:15:30] RG: For microservices.

[00:15:33] JH: Okay, so you're going all functional programming then?

[00:15:37] HR: No glasses, all functions.

[00:15:39] JH: Interesting. All right, as pure as we can get them. All right, tell me more. I know very little about functional programming, had a class at UT, which somehow, I passed like all of the others, and then I haven't touched it since. So, if I can understand what it's about, then so can –

[00:16:01] HR: Yes. There's kind of two core paradigms. You've got functional programming and then you've got your OOP class base programming, which is super, super popular, and still is today. But I learned functional programming just coming out of Makers like Richie said, where we met. I went back into my startup, and was writing functional programming in TypeScript.

It's basically, yes, as you as you were saying, just using functions versus classes, and we use TypeScript. So, we have TypeScript interfaces and the models. There's obviously pure functional programming, where everything is all the data that we use is immutable. We cheat sometimes, when necessary. But it's as pure as we can get it in the state that we are, all of the data is immutable. So, I don't know if you think about a four-loop, the traditional four-loop where you've got your three variables, and you increment on the variable in your four-loop. We don't do things like that. We use higher order functions in TypeScript. So, maps and four reaches. All functions like that mean it’s immutable data.

[00:17:27] JH: I see. So, let’s say, the core concept of functional programming, then that your data is immutable. I mean, if you stick to a pure form of functional programming. Is that right?

[00:17:38] HR: Absolutely.

[00:17:39] JH: Does that mean there's a tradeoff between, I'm going to say, the issues you often get when your variables are not immutables, especially with concurrency, but also just very general logic oversights, and syntactic sugar, sometimes changing something. So, the kind of robustness tradeoff on one side where you don't have to worry about these things as much data. On the other hand, it's likely then less memory efficient, would that be fair to say?

[00:18:09] HR: Yes, it probably is a little less memory efficient, because you're obviously using memory to store new functions. Also, there probably is more lines of code because you're constantly creating new variables to house the new data that you've changed. There probably are tradeoffs. But in my view, it's well worth it. Because the amount of bugs that you come across, because you change some data in 50 lines of code above in the script, and you didn't realize you changed it in that way. It's really easy to pinpoint where a bug is within a script using good old console logs, and you could just console log each function, see which one changed, or that's the one. There are definitely pros and cons to it. But it's just the paradigm that we've decided to follow up and to be honest, I always have.

[00:19:08] RG: Yes, that's been a really super helpful one, actually, especially the debugging side of it purely because we're just writing so much code at the moment. We're not really maintaining, we're building, and slapping console logs everywhere, and it's been so helpful from that standpoint. I don't know how much time it would have added on if we didn't have that, if we didn't have that ability to do that, or that visibility within our code.

[00:19:34] JH: So, in the end, it's a tradeoff. You see some positive. You think, probably rightly, that it introduces fewer bugs, but the end of the day, I assume it's fair to say that it's mostly come down to a personal preference. And I suppose as someone who wants to create something, you also at some point, which I personally always struggle with. At some point, you have to say, I'm going to stop deliberating over this. I'm just going to pick one option and go with it and actually build value. Was that part of the decision process as well? Because I can just imagine myself doing three months of research on to which exact dialect and libraries of which programming languages would be best suited, so that I don't run into problems in the next few years. But then three years later, I wouldn’t still learn a single line of code

[00:20:28] HR: For this particular problem, no, only because I had spent the last four years writing functional programming in TypeScript. So, I was pretty confident with it. I was pretty confident that I like the paradigm. For other things, like decision making, I'm usually a lot less thorough than you. It's usually a couple of looking at a couple of blogs on medium going, “Yes, that'll do. Let's run with it.”

[00:20:56] JH: Has that ever backfired? Has there ever been a time when you thought actually, I really should have invested considerably more time into research? Or is it usually the better option to just start and then refactor, if you know what the issues are?

[00:21:13] HR: Yes. I don’t know. Richie, maybe you have a different experience to me. But I'm somewhat, being somewhat facetious reading a couple of blogs. But there's a bit more to it, because you read a couple of blogs. You look at the libraries that they're using, the packages. You go on NPM, you have a look, see how many weekly downloads they've got. See how many commits there are. When was the last commit? And then you make decisions, really, based on that. Yes, Richie. I don’t know if you have a –

[00:21:40] RG: I mean, we all know that we generally gravitate more towards the tools that we've been using in our experience, because it's way quicker, isn't it? We know how to use them. It's way quicker and we don't really have the gift of time, at the moment. Maybe, we've gravitated more towards those what we know. But at the same time, yes, I think, we definitely do our research into what packages we want to use.

To be honest, when I first joined, I'm mainly on the software development side of things, Harry had already started on it. He'd already been programming for four years. I took his lead on it, really, and trusted it, and it's worked well. He's done the same for me. I brought all of the infrastructure, all of the observability, monitoring, everything. I brought over my experience and my tools, and I've had no one – there’s no one else here that knows it. So, I've had no challenges on that. Harry, vice versa, has taken my lead on it. I don't know, maybe one day we’ll hire some people and they’re like, “What the hell are you doing?” We've generally taken each other's lead on it, and it's worked quite nicely. It allowed us to develop this thing relatively quickly.

[00:22:58] JH: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I think you said maybe someday you will hire people, and they'll say, “What on earth have you done?” But I think that's a win, because at least you have done something successful enough to hire someone to tell you that it won't scale. But you've gotten there.

[00:23:20] HR: “You've created a monster, what is this?” But I think, just touching on Richie’s point, we've been really fortunate because my background is really full stack. So, I do quite a bit of front-end work, but also quite a bit of backend work. Richie is also now, absolutely, full stack. He brings a lot of that infrastructure DevOps side. So, between us, we've been able to develop quite a sophisticated marketplace, and we can go through the tech stack, if you want us to. Just between two of us over a year. So, we've been very, very fortunate to have covered all of those bases, and not have to have hired outside help.

[00:24:01] JH: Yes, so let us go to the tech stack. The backend is TypeScript, you say? I'm so bad at the front-end stuff. You need something to run the TypeScript on the backend. Is that what this Node.js this is?

[00:24:16] RG: TypeScript, Node.js on the back end. I mean, it's TypeScript across the stack. So, we're using React Native on the front-end for the for the mobile application. And that's all TypeScript, and then we have TypeScript on the backend with Node.js as well.

[00:24:31] JH: Okay, nice. Then, in terms of all the hosting and login, that kind of stuff, give us a run through.

[00:24:41] RG: So, we're just at AWS right now. But we built in such a way where we will move to the cloud-agnostic at some point when it's necessary. But it's warehousing everything on Kubernetes. So, we're using Kubernetes. We're using managed – we've gravitated more towards managed services again, because they're pretty cost efficient, and they're quick, and they're easy, and they require low maintenance. Again, referring back, probably going to be a broken record soon. But referring back to the fact that we don't have a lot of time relative to some other companies. It's so easy. I don’t know, your DevOps guy about services on AWS, it makes it really simple.

So, we’re using Kubernetes cluster, managed Kubernetes, managed DocumentDB, for the backend, don't have to worry about getting pinged about a node going down at night and you need to get up at three in the morning and try and fix it. I compare maybe a couple of dollars extra and get AWS to handle that. What else for the sort of backend? We're using SQS for our messaging as well, for our messaging across our microservices.

[00:25:47] JH: Yes. You said you're doing microservices. You're decoupling them with SQS. Nice. 

[00:25:52] HR: Yes. It's as SQS and SNS for the microservices. But the microservices, I mean, we could probably spend a whole another podcast talking about the challenges, and building out the services. There's so much to it. But we think we made the right decision. Again, it comes back to reading a few articles. I did actually spend quite a bit of time, but did quite that course in microservices. So, I've spent about six months studying the framework. That was one thing I did do thoroughly and we're pretty happy with it.

I mean, there's so many advantages to running a microservices environment. All of the business logic rests in each service. It's completely independent from other services. There's a lot of data duplication, which we've refined over the last year. So, there are challenges. There's challenges in asynchronicity and things like that. But overall, I think we've made the right decision, because it's so scalable. Whenever we bring in some new business logic in, we can just spin up a new service relatively quickly.

[00:27:03] JH: Yes. I might take you up on that offer to have a whole another podcast just talking about the microservices stuff. Then, let's get back a bit to the kind of overall business aspect. You mentioned that this might also change the way companies handle returns, and we've talked very briefly before we hit record about returns being a problem for many retailers nowadays. Can you touch back on that again?

[00:27:39] HR: Yes. It's something that we looked into a lot last year and is something that's on our roadmap for this year is. The big problem with retailer returns, and it's kind of the medium to large retailers is, if you buy a top from high street brand X and you decide to return it, most people think that the top gets returned to the brand, and they re-warehouse it, and then sold [inaudible 00:28:03]. But actually, a lot of the time, that doesn't happen. The t-shirt gets returned. It's called reverse logistics. The t-shirt gets returned to the courier company, and the courier company will just put all of the returns from that brand onto one pallet. Then, you get who are called jobbers, traders. They'll come into the warehouses, they'll say, “Right, this pallet of return stock of brand X is worth 10,000 RRP, we're going to give you 15% of that.” So, the retailers tend to go for the option because of the cost it – because of how much of the cost it takes bringing it back into the warehouse, repackaging, putting it back actually costs more to do that. So, they sell it for about 15% of RRP on average to traders.

[00:28:51] JH: So, these jobbers who might buy it, is that companies like TK Maxx who will then sell them on? I mean, I imagine a lot of the goods on the pallet would be broken and mostly unusable without a lot of effort. What happens to the clothes? Or is it a matter of disposing of it?

[00:29:10] JH: Yes, I'm not social TK Maxx’s model is. Maybe they do something similar. But these are more very small companies. They'd come in, they'll have a look. They'll buy the pallet, they'll break it down, they'll go through it, they'll y separate the broken stock from the good stock. Then, they'll just go and sell it at auction houses. They'll sell on eBay. They'll sell on resale platforms themselves. Or they'll sell it on to then another company who then does that. These are small organizations, small companies doing this.

But that's the problem. So, where we come in is we've spoken to quite a few retailers are interested in this, is when someone purchases the product, we digitize that asset, we put it into their Continue wardrobe and they think, “Right. Okay, I don't want this product.” And up to 70% of clothing is returned due to size and fit. Not actually, because of defects. Yes, it's a massive percentage. This doesn't fit me. I don't like it. I want to return it. But instead of returning it, there could be a possibility of, we call it forward returns at Continue. You say, you actually post it on the marketplace, at let's say, for instance, a 70% of RRP. It's still significantly more than the 15% the returns are getting.

Then, there's a split between the consumer and the retailer. Perhaps, the retailer takes a 60% split, and the consumer takes a 40% split of the 70% RRP. As it goes into circularity, then the digitized assets stay within the circular economy. It's tracked. And it's just a much cleaner method. You're not dealing with the returns. You're not dealing with the large pallets and all of the wastes included with the return. So, it's definitely an angle that we see going forward, probably mid to late this year. We'll start building out that functionality.

[00:31:09] JH: So, if I want to buy a dress from what did we say, brand X, I might as well go on to Continue and see if someone is literally selling it brand new with tags, size M, runs large. And then I know, okay, well, I'm a bit larger than an M usually. So, this one might fit me and I can buy the brand of MU pretty much almost directly from the company through one intermediary piece of clothing at a huge discount and without it going to landfill or whatever happened to it?

[00:31:43] HR: Yes, absolutely. Exactly. If download the app, and you can actually see all of the product history. So, I could see that you, Jeff, you purchased that from brand X in the last 20 days. I know that you've just purchased it, because all the data integrity is there. It's all verified. So, I can be rest assured and perhaps, display some data saying this is instead of being returned, we’re selling this product. But yes, absolutely.

[00:32:10] RG: Yes. That's what really helps is that data integrity, which helps boost the RRP because can you imagine, if you're filling that 15% as versus, potentially 40%, 50% from what we’re modeling. You can imagine how much of an incentive is to process those returns through us, as opposed to sticking it in a warehouse somewhere.

[00:32:29] JH: One of the other questions that relates to the kind of higher order business as opposed to the kind of lower level tech stuff is the usual chicken and egg problem. You have a model that sounds really, really sound, to me, and probably to most people that you explain it to. But if people now have on the app, there probably won't be – all of the retailers they want on boarded yet, and there won't be a huge marketplace of users yet, which is that problem of we'll have more users once we have more users. So, how do we get more users, that kind of stuff? Was that a problem for you? How would you go about navigating that?

[00:33:18] RG: I think it's a problem for any company at our stage. But we've got to get quite creative with this kind of thing. I don't think we're going to be able to – [inaudible 00:33:28] user base significantly with just conventional methods. So, with that, that's where we get creative. I think, the people that are buying these products, a lot of feedback that we're getting, we get great feedback through social media. We actually have a feedback form in the app where you can submit feedback, and people have been great, and they're submitting their feedback. People want this, and by partnering with the retailers, in their best interest to the market this, if you will, for one of a better term to market this and to promote it to their customers as well.

So, you have that great consumer acquisition channel through the retailers as well, which is not really something you would usually get. But if it was a normal “marketplace”. I mean, I would suppose, would you say, Harry, that's probably one of the main one of the main consumer acquisition methods for us is really to promote and work with these brands to promote it as well. It is really mutually beneficial. We're seeing it more as a partnership as opposed to them being our clients. As our user base grows, we can help them as well. We can help them promote their brand internally on our side and they can do the same for us, so we can really leverage that.

[00:34:39] HR: Yes. It's one of the most efficient customer acquisition challenges from the retailers, what’s you’re saying. It’s in the retailer’s interest to promote this and market this to their consumers, because it's ultimately – it's green credentials for the retailer. Then, we’re also doing a lot with influencers. We've got someone really good who's influencing, managing and influencing on TikTok. We've already had hundreds of downloads and active users just from her posting on TikTok.

So, it's definitely a strategy through social media channels. But also, SEO, in app SEO, App Store SEO. There's lots we can be doing. We're a small team, so it's always a challenge. Where do you spend your time? Do you spend your time engineering the product? Do you spend your time marketing the product sales? It's a bit of a balance. But I think, as we go, we'll find our footing, and I think, through our brand partnerships, we'll see a lot of consumers downloading the app.

[00:35:49] RG: We're going to get Harry [inaudible 00:35:51] as well.

[00:35:55] JH: What about geographical considerations? I expect that a product like your service, your app, which has a geographical component in that one user will most likely ship something to another user where proximity matters. How do you consolidate that with the kind of marketing channels like influencers, which I assume are much more global, than possibly, I suppose brands can do localized targeted advertising? Do you have a couple of markets that you try to prioritize? Or you're doing a kind of across the world rollout? Will have anyone who's happy to jump on board? What's your thoughts on that?

[00:36:41] HR: Yes, as a startup, naturally, you want global expansion, every single vertical, and it's really hard to fight that. We had to do it in previous startup. It's a trap that a lot of startup founders fall into is being too broad. You could argue even that we're being too broad just within fashion, because we could target a sub vertical such as, I don't know, children's clothing, for instance. We could target that first. But we've decided to go a little broader with fashion.

So, in terms of our key target, it is the fashion industry. We're seeing a lot of interest from other verticals, so we will look to expand later this year. But we've got to take it slow due to – even like the categorization took us ages, just to map the categories in clothes. We've got men, we've got children, we've got women, we've got all gender brands. Even that's a task in itself. Imagine taking that and doing homewre, think of all of the things that we own in our home. So, we've got to be a little careful in terms of how you expand into other verticals, industries.

Then in terms of geographies, UK first, with a view to expanding into probably North America and Europe. The problem with Europe is localization in different languages. But also, like you said, is the shipping. What we don't want to do is have a product surfaced on Continue and someone's in Detroit and someone is in Sheffield, and they buy the product and find out you're halfway around the world. Because we're automating the packaging and shipping for users in the UK, there'll be some services that aren't available in, for instance, North America as we roll this out. But then, we'll gradually expand their services as we expand. It's a tricky one. I'm glad you asked because it is tough fighting that urge just to go global full hog, all verticals, be it be like an eBay type of business. But you've got to you've really got to be careful.

[00:39:02] JH: For my own mental wellbeing, I refuse to end forecast on a question of how Brexit affects all of this. So, let's not even go there, because I can't imagine it helps a lot. But yes, the influencer whose got hundreds of downloads already, were those localized? Do influencers on TikTok have a geographic, called skewer urge. Do they skew to certain geographies? Or is TikTok always worldwide? I'm too old to know.

[00:39:35] HR: I'm too old to know and I also don't know enough about the space. I think that their following is usually probably local-ish, I'm sure influencers do have a global audience. But the majority of them are based in the UK. It's certainly from what we've been seeing from our downloads, is they're all based in the UK. But it is something – actually, I haven't actually considered that before, so isn’t – we’ll have to look into in terms of following. But we do always post. It's available on Apple Store and Google Play in the UK only. We do say that. We have had a couple of friends and family saying, perhaps download it from Luxembourg, but it's not available yet. So, we do converse that.

[00:40:21] JH: Well, I managed to download it in Luxembourg. But I think that's because Google for some reason, despite my repeated best efforts, still thinks I'm in the UK. So, in this case, I could download the app. But sometimes I can't download my own internet banking app, which is arguably more frustrating.

[00:40:36] HR: Well, there you go. Lucky you. You could spend the day in Continue today.

[00:40:40] JH: I could. Richie Ganney and Harry Riley, thank you so much for being on the show. I'm looking forward to our second episode all about the challenges of microservices.

[00:40:52] HR: You too. Thanks so much for having us, Jeff. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:40:55] JH: My pleasure.

[END]