had a very nontraditional career path. I started off wanting to be an adventure and climbing photographer. Ah, that morphed into being Ah Photoshopped trainer and lecturer, author and conferences around the world that had it's funny, skips and hops to joining the Utah Office of Tourism, which is most relevant to today. Um, in seven years there, I went from being the content social media manager to becoming associate managing director. And there the seeds were planted for this business idea in seeing the need for destination marketing organizations. These are governmental or semi governmental organizations responsible for tourism marketing for community, so that the Utah Office of Tourism is responsible for promoting the state of Utah out of state visitors. Every city, county country on state province, pretty much in the world has one of these organizations, and yet they have lagged behind the private sector in their use of data and technology to dry a strategic and operational decision making. So from out of my experience at the Utah Office of Tourism came this business opportunity to help to provide ah data infrastructure, data training and data strategy for these organizations

uh, the first few weeks and a new startup endeavor is a really fascinating time. Um, you are starting with a proverbial blank slate, and that is exhilarating and that you can create the world, and at the same time, it's terrifying because you have no boundaries to what you can create. And so it's a lot of federation. It's a lot of listening to what customers needs. Trying, experimenting, failing and continuing to persevere, to get through to something that becomes a minimum viable product.

relatively small team where six total one of the keys for starting the business. I've been percolating him on this idea for some time, and, um, my hesitation moving forward was, I don't have a strong sales background. I'm not the kind of person that likes to go knock on doors and sell the product. And I knew that if I didn't have that as a compliment to my technical skills and my product skills, the business wouldn't be successful. And so, uh, through industry connections, um, I I was able to join forces with my business partner where that is his core skill on core competency. So together the two of us complement each other really well. Our next higher was a software engineer, though I've sort of defaulted to be the technical product lead for this company. I've never had any formal training and software engineering. It's been all self taught, Um, and that is good for some things. But it's also good to bring in an expert who really knows after engineering at a deep level, he was the next higher. We then, uh, added a CEO third business partner. She has experienced growing and operational izing companies and getting them to scale. And so she rounded out the core ownership and leadership team in a really remarkable way that she has operational excellence. So among our founding team, we have the product knowledge and ah, technical route, technical basis, sales and marketing and operations. And the three of us complement each other really well. The positions that we've begun hiring out our advisory team, which is a hybrid technical and strategy, and we're now hiring for two new technical positions, with two new advisory positions coming shortly thereafter.