Ben Huffman On Raising $44 Million To Give Users The Freedom And Ability To Work Independently

In the world of startups, every success story is often underlined by a journey filled with trials, learning curves, and pivotal moments. Ben Huffman, the founder of Contra, graciously shared his entrepreneurial story, from his upbringing in South Carolina to the founding and growth of his ventures.

Ben’s venture, Contra, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Alex Chung, Madrona Venture Group, Mayfield, and Pau Sabria.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Childhood exposure to his parents’ entrepreneurial endeavors instilled in Ben a foundational understanding of business dynamics and ignited his passion for entrepreneurship.
• Transitioning from his small-town upbringing to the bustling innovation hub of New York City provided Ben with the fertile ground to cultivate his technological skills and embrace the entrepreneurial spirit that would drive his future endeavors.
• Weathering the challenges of Ripe, Ben learned invaluable lessons in resilience and adaptability, navigating competitive markets and refining his business acumen along the way.
• Contra’s inception stemmed from Ben’s own frustrations as a freelancer, recognizing the need for a platform that could streamline and enhance work relationships, ultimately revolutionizing the freelance landscape.
• The journey of securing funding for Contra underscored the importance of persistence and strategic alliances, highlighting the pivotal role of resilience in overcoming obstacles on the path to success.
• Armed with newfound insights, Ben emphasizes the significance of financial literacy and patience as essential pillars of entrepreneurial growth, advocating for continuous learning and adaptation in the ever-evolving business landscape.
• Contra’s visionary approach embodies the future of work, championing innovation and collaboration as catalysts for driving meaningful change in how individuals and companies interact and thrive in the digital age.

 

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About Ben Huffman:

Ben Huffman is the co-founder and CEO of Contra, a startup that helps people get food delivered from their favorite restaurants. Ben previously co-founded Ripe, which was acquired by Hungry in 2020.

Connect with Ben Huffman:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg
• F6S

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the dealmakerr show. So today. We have ah an exciting founder. You know a founder that he’s a building something really interesting I mean a founder that is repeated a founder that hasel so been through the. You know, full cycle of building scaling you know and also exiting and now he’s had it again. So we’re going to be learning quite a bit on what it looks like you know raising your first round of financing the seed getting ultimately their domain you know that was quite the ah. Experience their first users and then also meeting his co-founder who ended up becoming his cto with his company now. So without farther ado let’s welcome our guests today Ben Ofman welcome to the show.

Ben Huffman: Thanks so much for having me Alejandra is super excited to to dive into everything.

Alejandro Cremades: So born and raised in Lexington south carolina so give us a walkthrough memory lane. How was life growing up.

Ben Huffman: Yeah.

Ben Huffman: It’s crazy. So ah, my father’s american and my mother is an immigrant from Krackus Venezuela and so I grew up in a super small town in South Carolina and I always felt like you know I didn’t quite fit in my mom’s from a huge city and my dad was you know local to to the area from Columbia which is the capital. Ah, and you know my parents were entrepreneurs as well. So I grew up in their business I grew up every day after coming home from school I would go to their office and I would watch them run a small business where they were selling factory parts that they would buy from Canada and then ultimately sell to manufacturers. Ah, like steel and ce submit manufacturers in Latin America and so I learned a lot of my initial lessons in entrepreneurship from them and funny enough they had remote employees in the 90 s and this is when they were still using like typewriters copy machines, fax machines, landlines and so it was very interesting to kind of grow up in that environment. But I always knew because of that that I wanted to start my own businesses.

Alejandro Cremades: So how was it like you know to to experience your your parents going through a 2 I mean through the ups and downs because I mean indirectly you had that exposure. So. What kind of insights you got and and at what point were you like I think I think I like this I think eventually I see myself doing this one day as well.

Ben Huffman: You know as a kid it was mostly if not all a positive experience I loved seeing my dad ah you know selling on the phones. My mom running the back office like balancing the books and things like that. So. It was a really really positive experience and then they would always have different types of um guests at our house who are either the sons of their customers who are doing an exchange program via university or just friends of the business that would come in so I had this very kind of interesting worldview where I thought you know everyone ran businesses and this is just how. Ah, people operated and seeing my parents work together was really was really really interesting and it was really really helpful because they had to spend a lot of time with my parents growing up and so some of the first some of my first memories are like you know learning how to use wideout for like a typewriter or like learning how to use a copy machine. And things like that and so it was a really really fun way to grow up and I would always pitch these different ideas I would see a business that I thought was really great and I was like hey like mom and dad. Maybe we should think about ah like taking this franchise or this concept and making it a little bit different and I’m sure eventually I got annoying to my parents. But. Those are some of my first memories and it was really really interesting and I think it shaped my worldview on what it meant to actually do something professionally I never knew kind of any other way from from my earliest memories.

Alejandro Cremades: So in your case I mean you got the access to that problem solving. Obviously you know being exposed to that. Ah, and even at 8 at 13 you know you’re already building. The first thing you know, kind of like they putting the components of computers together. You know how is that. So.

Ben Huffman: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Huffman: Yeah, so ah, my dad had 1 of the first laptops I think we were a windows family so you know I never really even knew what macs were until I moved to New York but my dad had a friend who ah built computers and so he introduced me to his friend was like hey like you should ah build. Build your own pc because I was using the family computer and I was like hey I’m tired of going into my parents’ room to use the computer I want you know my own my own device and you know obviously every kid back in the day wanted their own computer and so he taught me how to build ah computers from components and I remember just being blown away by having access to the internet. Almost like unsupervised as an adolescent. So ah, you know there’s ah, there’s a couple of different ways you can go as a kid who gets access to the internet for the first time one of those ways is you know if if if everyone remembers like torrenting and downloading music and like Napster and limewire. Ah, you could download everything from music to videos to like software. The other side is just like learning new skills. Ah when I discovered like forums and like Youtube it was it was crazy like all of a sudden you could learn anything on the internet and that was really really empowering and so I kind of went somewhere down the middle. Ah between like you know the light path and the dark path and so I would. Hack a lot of software. But then I would learn how to use that software things like photoshop or learn how to build websites and learn how to edit videos make music do graphic design and things like that.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s talk about the dark path too. You know the path of dropping out of school I’m sure it was a tough conversation with your parents as well. So what happened there.

Ben Huffman: Yeah, yeah, so you know I was never that good as a student I was always really good with computers I always get really good. Get really good grades on my tests but I would never want to do homework I would never really I was never really interested. And ah, kind of the traditional route I think this had to do something with my parents and seeing how they operated ah but I always knew that I wanted to do something with technology with computers and ah you know early in my ah like journey on the internet I learned how to produce music. And so I dropped out of school when I was twenty years old and I moved up to New York and you can imagine like how much of a difference that is coming from like a small town in South Carolina ah coming to a big city like New York and you live in New York right now. Ah, so you can you can imagine like it’s just ah, it’s like the most vibrant city in the world. Probably the best city in the world I still believe that even though I’m in San Francisco now ah but yeah dropping out of school was scary. My parents weren’t super happy. Ah, but they always trusted me. They always knew that like I had ah the potential to do something and I’d always prove it with like. These kind of random adventures I would go on whether that was like producing music eventually I started working with Sony Uk producing radio music and that was a skill that I learned from the internet and so they saw that and they’re like okay we trust Ben and we we think he’s going to do the right thing but my parents my grandfather they were always.

Ben Huffman: Trying to get me to move back to South Carolina and I was like there’s no way I landed in New York and I was obsessed I was like this is the this is the greatest place I’ve ever been to I’m never leaving and so that was definitely um, one of the more impactful things that happened along my journey and I’m glad I did it because it really forced me to grow up. And it forced me to figure out like how to start my first business.

Alejandro Cremades: So so let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about ripe. You know how did the ripe. You know the idea come together and what was that the process like you know when you finally you know like pulled the trigger and said okay, let’s let’s go with this one.

Ben Huffman: Yeah.

Ben Huffman: Totally so it’s funny like the story of me founding ripe in the in the story of founding contra are very intertwined. Ah, but you’ve lived in New York for a long time and I’m sure you know it’s a rite of passage to live in a really really ah bad apartment like you have to do it at least once. Everyone who has lived in New York has this experience so I was living in this 4 our-story walkup in Williamsburg brooklyn it was a 4 our-story walkup. It might have been ah eight hundred Square feet total it was a fourbedroom 2 bath that we converted into a fiveb Bedroomroom. So it was a really really you know tight living quarters paper thin walls. The heat barely worked. The walls were barely insulated. Ah you know the air conditioning barely worked and so really cold winters really hot summers and at the time I was producing music professionally and um.

Alejandro Cremades: No.

Ben Huffman: You know I was barely making I think I was making like two Thousand British pounds per month. So like you know in New York that’s poverty right? So like even at the time the exchange rate wasn’t that wasn’t that great and so we would rent out one of the rooms on airbnb and this was back when airbnb had this really cool community. Like founders and creators and designers and engineers that would go back and forth between San Francisco and New York and so we would rent out this room to make extra extra money and so one of ah the people that I met through this process of Airbnb was also a creative engineer. And he had worked. Um I think for Apple he had worked on ah Google plus and Google maps then I think he worked for this one product called airtime which was Sean Parker’s kind of startup back in the day. The the guy from Facebook. And he introduced me to this Api called orderx which basically allowed you to connect to points of sales at different restaurants and I know you you know New York like they’re very health conscious being from the south. Everyone’s into like fried food and like there’s a very unhealthy lifestyle. So one of the things that really resonated with me when I moved to New York was the fact that everyone was obsessed with fitness. Everyone was obsessed with wellness and eating well and so my first business was this idea it was like a mobile app similar to uber ah sorry uber eats or like Grubhub or seamless or like doordash but you can only order healthy food.

Ben Huffman: I was using this. Ah this api called odox long story short it gets shut down. It was a Google ventures funded company. But anyway they they couldn’t make it work out so I had built this mobile app launched we had users we were like you know selling food through this api then all of a sudden it gets shut down and we were forced to like. So like hey like how are we going to? um, like how are we going to like build a company and so we so we slowly pivoted into making ah like bulk orders for companies and so we would like ride our bikes around New York and go into different startups offices and say like hey like does your ah. Does your office and need like lunch and so one of our first customers was this um company called I think it was called spring it was like an e-commerce store and they gave us a $10000 order. We’re like whoa this is crazy. That’s more revenue that we’ve ever made. Um, you know with this mobile app. And we just scaled that up and so it was bootstrapped I think our first year we did a million dollars in sales and then we doubled and then doubled again over the next couple of years and then ultimately scaled that business but along the way we never had any money to hire full-time designers or full-time engineers but we built a lot of software so we were always. Hire freelancers and so that that was that was an interesting business that kind of led me to contra. Ultimately.

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about you know, also getting that visibility into the full cycle of of obviously of companies. So in this case, you know it was a around 2019 or so you guys were at about 6000000 run rate. And then all of a sudden the idea of going through an acquisition. You know we say Hungary you know actually came about so what walk us through you know what was that process like what was your takeaway and what kind of disability did that give you to the full cycle of building scaling financing and exiting.

Ben Huffman: Um, yeah.

Ben Huffman: It was. It was really interesting because we had this business that was profitable. Ah it was like you know we had built it on like blood sweat and tears. Um, it was it was an absolutely brutal business to run if you think about it like you know when when you hear but startups talking about putting out fires. Ah, you know we ultimately built a nine Thousand Square Foot kitchen on the lower east side of Manhattan and we would literally put out fires like there was actual fires that we had to put out in our kitchen. There was actual issues with our gas with the way the waterlines would work into the building. So I learned a lot about just like construction. Funny enough. Ah, but also I learned a lot about like business finance because we would have a lot of these companies. We got our first acquisition offer in 182 it was from a company that was on the west coast and they did the exact same thing that we did ah but they basically positioned their product as ah, they had like a machine learning model. That would um, recommend the best dishes for different teams and they had raised $20000000 and I think at the time we had raised like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars total so we were always very cash poor like you know we had small margins but we make ah we would make a lot of revenue and it was crazy like this business was valued at a 10 x. Of their revenue and we were valued on an e bit a multiple and so we would get these acquisition offers for a business that was doing similar amount of revenue to us but they had just so much more cash and that taught me a lot so that’s the first time I went out to Silicon Valley but then ultimately we worked with an m and a advisor ah to try to find like you know, ah a more ah suitable acquirer.

Ben Huffman: Um, and so that was really at the end of 2019 and then Twenty Twenty hit and then covid happened and you can imagine. Ah, the market for um, you know in-person office food or office catering went to zero overnight so we went from doing you know 6 $ 700000 in revenue. Per month to almost nothing literally overnight our final like you know net 30 invoices were coming in were like oh wow this business just changed fundamentally and so we ultimately found a home with Hungary Jeff grasses Ceo over there was like hey we really are interested in your contracts. We know that you’re going through a hard time and you really helped us. Ah, kind of get the acquisition across across the line but it was a crazy learning experience because we were you know flying high you know, really tight margins running a profitable company supported by freelancers and then ultimately getting acquired was a huge. It was a huge lesson but it was also a lesson in like the power of venture capital. And what you can do when you have a bigger war chest when you have more options and so ultimately, um, you know I would say our our first company. So sorry, my first company was a success only in the way that I learned a lot from it. It definitely wasn’t a life-changing acquisition by any means.

Alejandro Cremades: So then so then I guess what was the biggest takeaway from that rodeo with ripe.

Ben Huffman: I mean definitely running a pnl running a profitable pnl understanding operations, understanding sales understanding what it actually means to keep and retain customers. Um, some of our customers we had for over three years and so I think that um. You know there’s just so many lessons. It’s kind of like my trial by fire mba as you could say because I didn’t graduate from school but I really learned how to operate and build a brand and I think that that was definitely super super valuable but along the way we were supported by freelancers I was using sites like elance and odesk. And ultimately this platform called crew dot code which inspired ah the creation of contra.

Alejandro Cremades: So Then talk us about the creation of Contra. You know how did the whole idea you know, get incubated and what did it look like you know to. To Really you know, bring it to life because I mean at this point you know you guys already had you know some good Experience. You know you know how to do things and and I guess what for what did you do differently here.

Ben Huffman: Totally so I’m gonna go back to my really really ah shitty apartment in Brooklyn New York to kind of talk about the other side of of the story and so when I found out about o x I also found out about. Concept of freelancing. So my my my same friend who showed me ah this api also was freelancing himself and I remember 1 time I asked him hey like um like what do you do for work I knew he was an engineer but I wasn’t sure like how he was making money he was like in between jobs. He’s like oh I’m just building sites for different startups I think ah one one of the months I asked them I was like you know how much like how much are you making doing this and I know somewhere between like 20 and $30000 that month and I was like what that’s crazy I was like I had no idea that you could make that much money just building websites I’ve been building websites since I was a kid. Ah, can you teach me how to do this and so he actually got me my first referral client building a wordpress website at the time I told her I was making like two thousand ah pounds or british pounds per month which was like nothing in New York and then all of a sudden this project. Was like a $2000 project but I could complete the work in a couple of days and this blew my mind I was like this is crazy I was like I have this skillset that’s actually worth something. Um and I just need to find more clients and like at that moment like a light bulb clicked I was like this is amazing. This is how I’m going to fund my first business and this is an entirely new way of working.

Ben Huffman: Remember coming home for the holidays and showing my parents of like look I’m like working with this person in South America I’m working with this person in India like and we’re friends and we’re talking on Skype and they thought I was crazy. They’re like this this kid has absolutely lost his mind. He’s like going to totally just like fail here but I was so obsessed with the idea that you could work with anyone. Ah, from around the world and like that’s really what elance and odesk which ultimately turned into upwork enabled but along the way I saw there was all these flaws like there was ah you know there’s this commission fee that made everyone want to take it off platform every time I found someone they’re like hey can you pay me via Paypal instead. And I was always like I don’t really know this person that well but they really are insisting that you know we take this off platform and that’s when I saw the fundamental flaw with this business model and so I don’t know. Are you familiar with um the company taubout. It’s a subsidiary of alibaba.

Alejandro Cremades: Sounds familiar. Yeah, but I guess for the people that are listening to to maybe like if you could give some some more insight there that would be awesome. So.

Ben Huffman: Yes, so.

Ben Huffman: Yeah, so it’s like this ah buyer seller marketplace based in Asia it’s a subsid subsidiary of alibaba I think it’s one of their main revenue drivers and it’s completely commission free or at least it was at the time I remember looking at this business model is like wow this is really really interesting I’m sure that there’s a way to apply this. To the labor marketplace model. There has to be a better way to kind of facilitate these transactions because the biggest problem was you know both like both sides and like if you think about working with a knowledge worker. There’s a lot of trust that needs to get built right? like there’s like multiple conversations you’re exchanging contact information. And it’s just so easy to take things off platform. But when you take things off- platform. There’s a couple of problems like you’re you’re hurting the ecosystem because there’s not that like feedback loop of like hey how did each person behave in this transaction and then there’s also like a security risk because like you no longer have a contract you no longer have protection if things go south. And so like how do you incentivize people to actually keep things on platform and build into an ecosystem and so that’s where the idea of of contra came from so originally contra started ah the the initial idea for contra was a 0 commissionsion freelance platform and that’s how you know we initially kind of like pitched this idea but it was inspired by my own. Experience using all these different marketplaces and constantly getting the request of like hey like we’ll save money I’ll give you a discount or it’ll be faster. It’ll be better if we take this off platform everyone would ask and I was like this is crazy there just has to be a better way and I knew that this style of working was going to go mainstream and it was going to become big I just didn’t know.

Ben Huffman: When that was going to happen.

Alejandro Cremades: So then so then how would you say that the business model has evolved to what contractes today I mean how are you guys making money today and how would you explain the business model for the folks listening.

Ben Huffman: Yeah, yeah, so contra is a platform for skills. So if you think about the way people used to work. Ah, typically you would create a resume and you would list the different experiences that you had at different companies. So like. Maybe I worked at Facebook and then before that I was at another company and before that I was in another company today. The landscape is shifted a lot like now people what they actually care about when you’re hiring someone you want someone who has skills you might want a video editor you might want someone who works in a certain technology. You might want someone who’s a product designer you want a very specific skill. And so contrasts evolved to be this platform for skills and so it’s almost like a professional network like Linkedin mixed with like a marketplace like upwork but we’re completely commission free and so on the independent side or the freelancer side. We give people the tools they need to run their business There’s kind of like three core jobs to be done. 1 is managing your identity and building credibility. The second one is managing your business things like invoices contracts proposals and the final one is like managing ah your demand. So like whether that’s inbound or outbound how do I get more business. How do I get more work. And so with contra you can do all of those things and so we have a tool called contrapro that you can subscribe to it’s freemium. So it’s free to use contra. But if you want better access to identity tools if you want better business tools if you want better access to the network you can pay us a flat fee of $29 per month and we’re completely commission. Free. So we don’t take.

Ben Huffman: Any of the money that you earn on the platform then on the flipside companies when they’re working with independent. They typically want to know that this person is verified. They want to know who this person has worked with they want to know like is this person trustworthy so we help companies create networks private networks of verified independents and freelancers that they can tap into as a team. So. It’s a true workforce management tool for this new flexible way of working and so that has a price range between one hundred and nine nine to four hundred and nine nine dollars a month and we have companies like framer and webflow and a bunch of creative agencies using this product to manage their flexible teams.

Alejandro Cremades: So how much capital have you guys raised too late for contra.

Ben Huffman: Yeah, so today we’ve raised around $44000000 so we’ve gone from c to series b.

Alejandro Cremades: And what has been the experience like going from C to Series B How have you seen the expectation shifting and you know all of that.

Ben Huffman: Yeah I would say like the hardest ah the hardest part of the fundraise was our seed round and I say that because you know when we first started contra. It was a side project. So I started in 182 thinking like hey there has to be a better way. Ah, to to work with independence there has to be a better way. A better ecosystem for this for this use case. But at the time like there was no remote working everyone thought like the freelance industry was kind of like oh yeah, it might be a thing maybe not and so everyone actually thought that contra was a really bad idea in the early days so when I was trying to raise capital in New York in like 2019 it was really really hard. We got a lot of knows a lot of people were very skeptical of the idea that anyone was going to work remotely a lot of people were very skeptical about the idea that like anyone was going to work in a freelance or a contract capacity and so. Probably made like 3 to 400 versions of our seed deck over the course of a year um and just continued to pitch and pitch and pitch and I was also building a product at the same time. Um, so you know. It took us from 2018 all the way till the summer of 2020 to actually get our seed round done and like I said we probably had you know a hundred nos along the way and then finally after covid happened and everyone was forced to work remote almost overnight. Everyone started.

Ben Huffman: Like you know connecting the dots they’re like okay if everyone’s working remote then the way that we’re we’re working the the average relationship is going to change. So maybe there’s something here and at the same time we started seeing a lot of growth on our product. A lot of our growth experiments that we were testing out at the end of nineteen early Twenty Twenty started really paying off. And so we started seeing an inflection in our version 0 product at the same time that the fundraising market ah that the fundraising markets were coming back because I don’t know if you remember like pretty much between like February all the way until June the world was like over like everyone was like yeah the world’s ending. There’s never going to be anymore capital. Ah, raised for startups like you know the Vc world is completely shut down and everyone was in a massive panic. But then all of a sudden in June cracks started to show and people started to see the light they’re like okay, this actually might be the best time to invest in new startups especially startups are connecting this new global workforce. And so that’s how we actually got our seed round done by cowboy ventures. Um, it was really awesome to finally get validation that like all this hard work. We had been putting in for the years before was actually being seen by other people.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously with with investments. You know there’s also um, you know our responsibility and and and they’re banking ultimately on the vision. Um, so if we’re thinking about the vision here. You know the vision that is getting investors customers employees. You know, enrolled really into the future that you’re living into. If you were to go to sleep tonight Ben and you were to wake up in a world where the vision of contra was fully realized what would that world look like.

Ben Huffman: I think it would look a lot like the world. We’re living in today if you think about what’s happening with remote work if you think about what’s happening with ai. We’re starting to see the default relationship or the way that people work together is fundamentally changing. Um, teams are starting to become smaller and the skills you actually need to run a team are becoming larger and larger and so we’re in this world now where the skills needs for companies are wider than ever before. Ah, but the actual constraints you have in terms of the the size of the team. You can build. Are probably tired than they’ve ever been and so we’re seeing a lot lot of people build these networks of people who are highly talented, highly skilled and they’re developing these relationships where you might work together for three months you might work together for six months because there’s not a need on either side. Ah, the company doesn’t need this skill long-term they actually just need someone with expertise right now and then the the actual employee can make more money taking that skill and working with more companies and so we’re seeing a lot of different. Um, interesting. Um. Kind of outcomes from this from this trend but I’d say like it’s never been a better time to ah work independently and it’s also never been a better time for ah as a company to really think about your your team from like a flexible like kind of skills based perspective because like the the.

Ben Huffman: There’s like a global talent network now in a way that there’s never been before and so you really can find the best person with that skill that you’re looking for um and it’s It’s never been easier. Thanks to tools like contra and so we’re seeing a lot of like early stage startups adopt this we’re seeing a lot of creative agencies adopt this we’re seeing growth stage startups adopt this. And so all the way up into the enterprise and so I think it’s only going to become more apparent as like this like this way of work really takes takes hold.

Alejandro Cremades: So imagine if I was to put you into a time machine Ben and I was to bring you back in time maybe to 2014 when you were thinking about starting something of your own and you ah you were able to have a sit down with that younger Ben. Um, being able to give that younger Ben one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why given what you know now.

Ben Huffman: Okay, that’s a great that’s a great question. It’s very hard I would definitely say it’s okay, not to know I think I was very hard on myself in the early days um because I didn’t know. The basics like imagine being like a 22 year old and saying like oh you have to set up payroll like what does that mean, right? or like you have to think about x y z ah business operation. You have to think about ah accounting or you have to think about your pnl your. All these different things that you kind of learn along the way I definitely would have ah maybe told my younger self like invest in financial literacy ah earlier because I kind of you know like I said I learned in a very like kind of trial by fire way which was which was helpful but definitely stressful. Um, and then.

Ben Huffman: I don’t know I don’t know if I would if I would change anything because you know the the lessons that I’ve got along the way have been extremely valuable into like getting me to where I am today and then the lessons I’m learning today I’m sure will be applicable to whoever I am in 10 years and so definitely I would say like you know, be patient. Ah, definitely continue to upscale invest in financial literacy. Ah but I don’t know if I would I probably would have pushed younger Ben away from the idea of creating a mobile app and I would have gotten him faster into the more scalable business model. Ah, but you know. It’s hard to say it’s hard to say because if you go back and change something you never know it would be different today.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s right that’s right so Ben for the people that are listening that will love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so.

Ben Huffman: Yeah, so you can email me at [email protected] and that’s just contrradotcom or you can just follow me on Twitter it’s just at underscore Ben Hq and you can shoot me a message there as well. Ah, but if you’re looking for. Um. Really any skill you can find that on contra. So definitely check us out. It’s just contra.com and yeah, hope hope you hope you reach out.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing, well easy enough. Well Ben thank you so much for being on the deal maker show today. It has been an honor to have you with us today.

Ben Huffman: Thanks so much for having me.

*****

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