Michael Lawson of Couchdrop

[00:00:01] Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to a February 6 edition of the MSP Initiative, MSP Talk. It is February, February, February everywhere. That means that the year is definitely underway. I don't know if you've been sleeping under a rock since the holidays, but one month down, 11 to go.

[00:00:21] And if you haven't been watching your calendars, you know, current events, right? You know, I don't care if our guest for today's podcast is from New Zealand. The Super Bowl, which I think is a worldwide phenomenon, is this upcoming weekend, February 9th. So that's why I got my Eagles gear on for today. We'll talk a little bit about that. We'll even get a prediction from our friend, even though he's probably not following it.

[00:00:44] And then, of course, this upcoming Friday, maybe a, you know, marketed, created, artificial holiday, February 14th, Valentine's Day. So we'll talk about those Valentine's Day gifts, ideas, I guess, for all of our tech people out there. That being said, it is again, February 6th, 2022 of five. Welcome to the MSP Initiative.

[00:01:08] MSP Initiative.com. This is where you'll find everything that we do, including recordings of this very podcast, which we then post onto YouTube and different audio podcatchers, et cetera. So you can like, subscribe, download forward from there. We also have what we believe to be our upcoming events for this year. There's a industry calendar all the way in the upper right hand corner of MSP Initiative.com.

[00:01:30] And then you'll see some of our intended upcoming block parties around some of the larger conferences in our industry coming up this year, as well as we are still looking to move forward with one MSP Community Live or MSP Community Minds. I mean, later on this year, which is our educational event that we do as well, usually here in the States.

[00:01:55] So I'm not going to take you to the website because you can go figure out how to spell initiative, put MSP in front of it and .com behind it. And you get MSPinitiative.com and there you are. That's all we need to say about that. Welcome to the show, Michael Lawson from hopefully sunny and warm New Zealand and our friends from Couch Drop. Welcome to the show today. Yeah, thanks for having me. And no, I didn't know Super Bowl was on.

[00:02:24] Yeah, it's a thing. It's a thing. They usually get almost 150 million viewers every time they put this thing on is definitely the television event, at least for our part of the world every year. What's that? We do watch the ends. Okay, well, I mean, I'll tell you this. It's more than most things.

[00:02:48] If you actually Google top television shows every year, the Super Bowl, I believe, is usually number one every year. Again, usually from the U.S., North American perspective. That's more than any other televised thing, right? Could be what have we had recently? The Queen of England died and a new monarch came in, right? That was heavily televised. We had the Olympics, right? That's pretty heavily televised, although there's usually a time delay.

[00:03:18] Even Taylor Swift doesn't bring 150 million viewers at any one point in time. I know Jen will probably spit out her soda, as I was saying that behind the screen, but it's true. So it is definitely the preeminent television televised event of the year. Of course, some people aren't even football fans. They watch in for the commercials. I was just watching an episode last night of, like, best Super Bowl commercial of all time.

[00:03:46] If you were interested in what the going rate for a Super Bowl commercial was this year, it was $8 million USD. So that'll give, you know, 30-ish seconds per commercial, $8 million. That's the going rate. That sounds like for 100 million viewers. For $8 million for 30 seconds? That's the going rate. Would you pay that? Oh, it's a bit steep for us, but it depends who you are.

[00:04:12] I mean, if you've got 100, 140 million viewers, that's, you know, that's a big audience. Yes, and they definitely get that $8 million per 30 seconds. So just count it up. Fox, who's at Televisan's Super Bowl this year. And then, so it'll be interesting. I'll be headed down to see my Eagles play the Kansas City Chiefs in New Orleans. Hopefully all of that goes well, and we don't have any travel stories,

[00:04:42] although they always tend to pop up at the most inconvenient times. So if you follow me on social, know, you know, for the last, I don't know, since September till now, it's been very Eagles-focused, but that's pretty much my jam. But now it'll be Eagles and Super Bowl-focused for whatever it's worth. And then, of course, we have the Super Bowl halftime show. So we'll see what everybody thinks and rates that. That's one of the big draws for those non-football fans that watch Super Bowl this year. But I digress. Valentine's Day, Michael. What did you have in mind?

[00:05:11] Have you already purchased your Valentine's Day gifts for that special somebody? No. Hmm. It's a short answer. Sounds like I gave you a reminder. Yeah, you did give me a reminder. We actually have a, speaking of public holidays, we had a public holiday here yesterday for what we call Waitangi Day,

[00:05:35] which is effectively where we signed a treaty with the British in the 1800s. And that actually seems to trump Valentine's Day, because I've forgotten about it completely. Definitely an artificially created holiday here, you know, by the marketing flower and candy companies, I feel like, back in the day here in the States. But unfortunately, it's taken hold. It's circled. I'm sure. I'm sure Jen has heard it circled on her calendar.

[00:06:07] See, I keep on poking on her, but she's back there saying, what's going on? So, yeah. You're going to race out for coming up to this. Yeah. For the techie people in your lives that follow this holiday, I wonder what the going gift is from, you know, usually not, you don't think about technology on Valentine's Day. You think about all the other stuff, right? The stuff that you see once and it disappears, you know, the flowers that go into the vase and then die.

[00:06:36] Although one of the things, one of the jewelry companies here in Philadelphia area, where I'm at, they do the gold dipped flower that lasts forever. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, there's an idea for you. Jen pops in. Actually not a fan of Valentine's Day. Wow. I wouldn't have called that, Jen. That's good to know. I learned something new today. She says that until the other person forgets to throw something out there. Then she'll be like offended that, that he forgot. Right.

[00:07:06] It's not actually a fan until the morning. Right. Right. As long as if the, if the diet Coke box didn't show up on Valentine's Day morning, she might be upset. Just saying. Anyway, Michael, lots going on here in technology land, even like, let's even get more specific MSP land. You know, at the, at the not, I think just about 30 days ago, we saw the long 10 year,

[00:07:35] 10 year run CEO of Kaseya Datto Autotask and the other 37 other companies under the umbrella. Kaseya. Step down. And they're on a search to put a new person into the chair. Not too long before that, we had the CEO of connect wise change hands about what was it? Right before like September, October, November timeframe, somewhere in there. And.

[00:08:03] A lot of the companies that were kind of in the chair waiting to go. Either into an IPO or to maybe announce a new funding round kind of were put on hold, right. As the market was fluctuating there for the last couple of years. Seems like that is rebubbling up to the top. And we're hearing about that now. Of course, some people already at the food chain are already publicly traded like enable, for example. So. I mean, just right. There's a lot of change.

[00:08:33] What, what are your opinion on any of that? To be honest, I think change is always good, right? Like if, and for a CEO, you know, most of the time it's probably only effective for them to be in a particular role for, for five years, if even that, in some cases. So. Okay. Unless you're kind of the founding, founding CEO of a company. I think there's always sort of a, a timeframe,

[00:09:00] which you can actually be effective and change is, has to be good for, for these businesses. Right. And I think the knock on effect into MSPs will be positive. Okay. I mean, every time. And maybe, maybe, maybe a different thing. Sometimes it can, can go really well and can be good for an organization. Other times it can really push them to, to sort of worry too much about the quarters and, and not look at the longer picture.

[00:09:29] I would personally probably never look to, to sort of IPO. One of my companies, just because I think it forces you to, you know, to lose focus on the longterm. But again, and there's a lot of examples where it actually works out really well. And certainly like fresh blood is always good. I'm sure it's a, it's a change, but. You know, someone coming in and looking at the business and the market with a fresh set of eyes. I, I can't complain about that. Like, I think it's,

[00:09:58] that's a positive thing. Um, and if it's not, then, you know, hopefully they, they don't last very long and. Give somebody else another chance. Yeah, no, that's, that's fair. I don't disagree with anything you just said. You know, different look usually brings new ideas, new ideas, brings different, you know, different things that can be implemented. Now, if they work, they don't, you find out, but, um, if you don't do something different than, and expect the same results, then.

[00:10:25] I think they said that's the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. Exactly. Yeah. Um, that being said, every time the top changes, we also find companies like yours and many others from the industry come out of the sandbox where you're like, you know, we found the problem. We didn't find that it was handled or there was a good answer for it. Or if it wasn't, you know, the market had an,

[00:10:54] an unserved need. Uh, and so, you know, a lot of the great companies in our part of the technology realm, I call it the MSP sandbox comes from people who are sitting in the chair doing the work, you know, you know, the, the, the, the, I call it the trench work, right. Resetting the passwords and climbing underneath decks and plugging in the cables when somebody knocked that, uh, you know, that power adapter out of the, out of the power outlet and didn't realize it, you know, and actually we're like, you know, it would be really good if,

[00:11:23] if somebody had an answer for this and they find out this didn't have a good answer and then they build something and that's something turns out into a startup and a company. So, you know, not sure of how that maybe fits your story at couch drop, but we'd love to hear why couch drop. What was the idea behind it? What was the epiphany that started it all? And how do we get to today? Well, there is a bit of a story there. Yeah. So I, I started another company. Um, now it's going back, uh,

[00:11:52] I think probably 10, 10 years. So I started another company, which was building a network firewalls for schools, actually. Okay. Um, and when we, when we exited from that company, um, um, I saw another problem, uh, and it was a really stupid problem. It was probably the most ridiculous problem I've ever decided to fix. And that was simply that, you know, while you're sitting in a network devices or in servers, um,

[00:12:20] often you have a need to get files out and those servers are sitting, you know, behind firewalls, behind sort of comprehensive security structures, and they don't have any, any pinhole access most of the time. Um, and we had a need to pull logs and to pull config files back out to basically to the desktop, to something like Dropbox. So we built, I built couch drop to do that. And it was basically an SFTP server, um,

[00:12:49] back out into Dropbox or Google drive. And it's probably, you know, there's, I have a few side projects play around with a lot of things in my time, uh, just for fun. And this was one which kind of just sort of stuck. Um, and when we, when we exited from line wise, I decided, Hey, let's, let's have a look. Let's give this a go and see whether there's actually a real product, uh, here. Um, and in the process of doing that,

[00:13:16] we discovered that people were actually using couch drop to perform data migrations. Um, which, you know, when you've got SFTP and you've got it going into the cloud, I can understand how people would, would sort of hack that together to perform migrations, but it was really, really stupid. Um, and, you know, generally when you see a product being kind of retrofitted for something else, it, it indicates that there's something wrong in the market, right? That,

[00:13:45] that there is actually a gap there. And so we, we, we quickly kind of spun off and, and built move bot, um, which, you know, uses a lot of the sort of underlying technology behind, uh, behind couch drop as well, especially in the case of, uh, connecting to cloud storage, but it's very, very different in, in how it actually operates. And it deals with, you know, all the, all the nuances, um, that go in, but behind a migration, uh,

[00:14:15] or behind transferring data between two platforms that really are not the same. So, yeah, we, we did that. It was really in this case, like we kind of just fell into it. Um, you know, you, you look at one particular problem and then all of a sudden notice another. And, uh, and away you go. And it's, it is nothing, nothing deliberate, deliberate about that. Um, or planned about that. It just sort of kind of happened. Uh, and, you know,

[00:14:45] there's a lot of weird nuances behind the, the kind of underlying cloud platforms like SharePoint and, and Google drive and ignite and some of the other, other odd ones that, um, make it pretty interesting. And frustrating at times because these companies don't build very good APIs. Um, but, but that's kind of, uh, what we specialize in dealing with now. So. No, it was a very good point to be honest. I mean,

[00:15:14] and here's the thing, these migrations happen all the time. I mean, common use case, you know, Michael, that comes right to the top of my head is, Hey, one account decides to leave MSPA, go to MSPB. Hey, they both have different standards and what technologies they're using. They need to move that stuff from A to B. Your example could be, Hey, one's on SharePoint, one drive, Microsoft, other MSPs running Amazon or Google or one of the other platforms. And now like they don't necessarily talk natively. Right. You got to figure out how to move that.

[00:15:44] And let's face it. They probably do it the hard way by hand and sit there and watch the, you know, the transfer go and it fails and you got to start again. And then, you know, can imagine the frustration when something gets missed. Cause you're, you know, you found out after the fact that the customer raised their hand later on and they're like, Hey, we're missing this folder. Like, Oh, did it make it? Yeah. They, they don't notice for months often. So it's a, it is actually a real risk for, for MSPs and, or, or any company doing that kind of move and not using a tool. Um,

[00:16:14] because most of the time, you know, you, you spot check files and whatnot, you'll have a look. Oh yeah, it looks good. You'll ask some, some people internally. What, um, what it looks like in the new destination and they're busy, right? They don't have time to check everything. And, and it's not until sort of six months down the track where you realize, wow, okay, we're, we're missing a few folders. And, or, or there's files here, which are actually corrupted. So, um, doing it, doing it yourself. Well, it might,

[00:16:44] you know, it might seem like the, the easy solution in some cases, um, it's a real risk, risk for your customers. So we, well, we're biased, right? So obviously I'm not going to recommend you do that. Um, but, but there, there are a lot of tricks, uh, that we employ and, and, and sort of normalization and, and the data structures that, that make it reliable, right? We, we won't lose data. We won't corrupt data. Um, and these systems,

[00:17:13] none of them play together, right? Like, uh, there's, they have no, they have no motivation or no incentive to play together. Um, and they also don't, you know, or you think about companies, uh, being sort of centered around, around one, like hypothetically SharePoint. Um, as an organization grows, there's a lot of stuff in SharePoint, which doesn't work for certain departments.

[00:17:40] And so having either multiple systems or, or realizing as an organization that, um, SharePoint is not, not really suitable for, for 90% of our, our team who are all graphic designers, um, Dropbox would be a better choice. And then doing that move is, it's quite good for the business, right? It, um, it's good for us as well, obviously, but normally it really helps increase productivity, uh, in the, in the company that's,

[00:18:09] that's doing the move. Um, so MSPs are in a good position to actually be able to help those organizations go through that, that transition, uh, and pick the right tool. Uh, and while Microsoft and Google pretty much own the market, there are some really good other tools out there like Ignite, which is sort of, you know, just been bubbling away for a while. And now is,

[00:18:37] is kind of creeping up and doing some really neat stuff in terms of security. Um, and in terms of how they actually model the data, uh, it's very close to a file system as opposed to, you know, when you go into SharePoint from, from a file server and kind of go, well, what, what is this? Like, or you go into Google and, and it's, again, it's, it's quite different, but they, they're taking a different tack there and it's, you know, really quite, quite neat. And then of course you've got, you know,

[00:19:06] box and Dropbox as well. And there are some other contenders, um, that are bubbling away there too. So I think, yeah, there's this, this need to kind of look at, okay, how are we using our data and, and then figure out what the best system is, is a good thing. This is, and of course it's great for us. No, no, I totally, totally get it. So, so move bot and couch, so move bot as a product underneath of couch drop, right? I mean, that's. Couch drop is actually a product as well. This is,

[00:19:35] this is one of the pains of, uh, starting a company, building a product and then, and then discovering that there's another gap and building another product. Um, we, yeah, we, we have two products and, and one is called couch drop and one is called move bond, but they, um, we're actually going to rebrand the, the sort of parent company to, to couch labs, uh, very shortly. We just need to load the other things, um, because the distinction is quite hard and,

[00:20:05] you know, people, we, we want to sort of talk, be able to talk about both products, uh, at the same time. Um, but if you have come, to us move, but you kind of look at cash and we go, what, and it's also a product. What's all this SFTP stuff. And, and, you know, it becomes a bit confusing, but all right. So just to make it clear for the people who are watching this episode, what would they, why would they look at move bot? Why would they look at couch drop? What are the use cases for the separate products? Um,

[00:20:34] move bots are really straightforward. It's basically move bot is, or we're trying to build the best cross platform migration tool. So if you, if you have a migration project, it doesn't matter how large it is or how small it is. move bot is the tool for that. It, it does files, data structures, and does emails and, and calendars and whatnot as well. Um, really simple sort of pricing, right? It's, it's just usage based. There's, there's no,

[00:21:04] no long-term contract or agreement. You just, you know, use it and then away you go. Um, couch drop on the other hand, pause you real quick. You know, would it be with somebody who has used something like sky kick or my, or migration with like any, any, does it compete with those products or not quite? It's we, yeah, we do compete with both of those products. Uh, so the both, both sky kick and, um,

[00:21:34] and cloud M and the Titans, uh, product. They, they have a pretty heavy focus on email and sort of workspace migrations. We actually came in it from the other direction, which was we, we kind of nailed storage first and then got drawn into, into, into doing mail and calendars and whatnot. Um, but primarily we, we came at it from that, you know, that storage problem because that was where the most pain was. Uh,

[00:22:02] it was incredibly difficult to move, you know, 50 to a hundred terabytes really quickly. Uh, that's, that's what we really nailed. Um, so with, with move bot, you can, you can move data incredibly fast. Um, we had kind of the record was, or so far at least was 1.2 petabytes coming, um, out of Google drive. And that was an expensive Google drive account.

[00:22:32] It was, you'd, you'd be surprised, uh, how much data some companies, well, it's mostly universities and whatnot that have the, the sort of big volumes of data, but, um, when Google did the, the, the pricing switch on, on the, for education, it, it created a lot of movement there. Suddenly, uh, some of the big institutions realized, holy moly, we have massive amounts of data sitting in the system, uh, that we have to get out. So, um, yeah, that's,

[00:23:02] that's move bot. If you're doing migrations, it's kind of your number one tool. The big, big differentiator for us is that we, we support everything. So it doesn't really matter where you're coming to or from, um, we support it. We haven't focused on one particular platform. Got it. So, so, so if I say Microsoft and of course that means one drive, SharePoint, if, if I AWS, Google, um, what's the other one that, uh, is kind of, well,

[00:23:32] there's, you know, there's sub platforms underneath of that. Right. But you said box dropbox, you said, um, and also like S3 storage, Azure files, Azure blob, GCS, um, actually we'll do file server to file server migrations as well. Hmm. Pretty much. Awesome. You know, any, any pathway there, we, we cover it. Um, and we try and treat them, you know, with the same sort of weight, uh, which. Yeah. Is,

[00:24:01] is normally why people come to us, right. Is that they've, they've found that the existing tool they're using is, is pretty good. Um, maybe in the higher end of the spectrum in terms of data, data storage, uh, requirements that it's lagging a bit, but they want a tool that can actually do all of the platforms. And that's, that's a key, key differentiator for us in that space. Uh, and it's something, you know, we've kind of built into the system. It's very easy for us to add new players, um,

[00:24:31] when they come up and, you know, we, we're doing that pretty frequently. Um, so, yeah. So, so I assume like this data has to transit to somewhere and then go from somewhere to this end destination, right? Like, so where are your servers located? You get to choose, like if, you know, some people have some sort of, I don't know, compliance based requirement or, or data sovereignty based thing where they got to keep the data within a certain region. How does that work? Yep.

[00:25:01] Yeah. So you've got, um, basically you can choose where you want your data to reside. Uh, so if you, it's a really big thing in the EU, uh, in particular, most of our company, most of our customers there have a, have a mandate to keep the data, um, in the EU. So we, so we, when you set up a project and move bot, you actually just choose where you want the data to reside. And it's, it's as simple as that. And then should you have a humongous amount of data, like, you know,

[00:25:30] upwards of sort of 500 terabytes and you want, you know, that data to not actually leave your own infrastructure. We can accommodate that as well, but most of the time, um, uh, our customers are just using our sort of our infrastructure because it's basically point click, right? You don't, don't actually have to do anything and we don't hold onto the data, um, at all. So it's, it's effectively transit through us and, and that's it.

[00:26:00] And then the, it disappears. It, you know, stays in memory for, for a couple of seconds, if even that, and then away we go, you know, and it's of course encrypted along the way. Yeah, that's important. Uh, all right. So, and then you said it's usage base. Is it based on total data, you know, transited or, or how do you, how does the math work there? It's a bit controversial. Um, it's quite different, right?

[00:26:28] Because most of the time migration tools are centered around user licenses. Oh, I keep losing the video. I'm not sure. George, that's on my end or you're in. Um, it's, it's typically, you know, most migration tools are based on user licenses. We've gone the complete opposite way and it's effectively per gig. Okay. So if you have the one, if you have the two point X petabytes that, you know, you just divide that by how many gigs is that? Yeah. Well, if you've got exactly,

[00:26:58] if you've got that much data, you should really come and talk to us because the, might work out a deal. Yeah, there'll be a, there'll be a pretty good deal. Uh, pretty good deal there. Um, but it's, yeah, it's effectively that you pay paper per gig. Um, MSPs get a, get a significant discount of their own partner program, which you can just sign up for. Uh, and then of course, surprising does scale. So if you, if you know,

[00:27:24] you're going to be doing a few projects over the course of a year and you have a rough idea as to what that looks like, then, um, you can actually pre-purchase at the, at the higher tiers. Uh, and the, the obvious problem with this model is in email migrations where companies want sort of a bit more predictability. Um, so we actually cap the email migration price at, uh, at 10 gig.

[00:27:51] So you won't for a particular user doing a mail migration, you won't pay more than, for more than 10 gig. Um, I don't know. I've seen some hundred gig mailboxes out there, especially in exchange. Yeah, there are, there are, but for us, a hundred gig is not a huge amount of data. Fair enough. Fair enough. So, so what about the, what if, you know, like some of the other tools that we mentioned earlier, like they let you do a couple of passes, right.

[00:28:20] To like get the Delta. If there's like, Hey, when I started it, there was this much, but then there was some change in between the time you started. Like, so how do you handle that? Um, we have, we have what you call a Delta, a Delta run. So generally, typically in a migration, you will set it up, run some tests, do a scan across the entire data set, configure everything, configure transfers, and then press play. Um, and that will move the vast majority of the data,

[00:28:50] but then you, you run into that sort of cutover problem, right? Especially with emails. So what you can do in move bot is just configure, uh, constant delters. And all that's doing is it's scanning the source, scanning the destination, looking for changes and then remedying them. Um, and that's it. It's, it's nothing terribly fancy, but that means that you can, can quite acutely control your, your cutover and you can actually schedule it in advance as well. So if you're,

[00:29:19] if you've done the vast majority of the, the transfers, you can come in and say, okay, at, you know, 5 PM on Friday, um, I want you to run a Delta and then it, you know, we'll take over over the weekend. Um, only pulling across the changes and then you're good to go on Monday. Uh, and you can do this as many times as you want. Like it's, it's really quite, uh, quite robust in that regard. You're not going to, you know, if something goes wrong, you're not going to lose everything. You're not going to lose state. It,

[00:29:49] it can really just be resumed or you can run a Delta and it will pick up, um, the rest of the changes. And then you can also to facilitate that cutover, be quiet, some precise and what you're targeting. So you can really choose to bring over data in different stages. Um, because ultimately most organizations are only using a small portion of the data set. And so there's sort of,

[00:30:16] sort of a more important block or, um, set of users or a set of folders under those users. So you can actually quite easily target as well. So. No, that's fair. No, these are all questions that I would just come to the top of my mind when you're talking about this topic. All right. So move bot. I like that. It's like ubiquitous. You can go on-prem. You can go cloud. You can go S3 blob, all that jazz. Sounds like it's like a Swiss army knife of data movement. Includes email. It's great.

[00:30:46] So you can like, you know, cover both sides of the conversation. Cause usually it's somewhere in the mix. There's going to be actual raw data files, videos, folders. And then there's email, which I don't think is ever going to go away. I know some people are like, Oh, that's an email. I'm like, yeah. Okay. Maybe not. Maybe we resisted the urge for so long to build email migrations. It's like, come on. There's so many email migration tools. Why, why do you guys keep asking for that? Like, you know, okay. Well, unfortunately they keep getting acquired by other people.

[00:31:15] That's the problem. I think for some people. All right. So that's move bot. Let's talk about couch drop, which I think came before move bot. Why, what does that do? And why is it different? Yeah. So couch drop is primarily, it's a couple of different ways to think about it, but it is at its barest form and SFTP server for the cloud. Um, um,

[00:31:38] the difference there being with a sort of traditional FTP or SFTP server is that it's fully cloud hosted and it works on top of cloud storage. So if you've got share points, everyone typically has, you can hook share point into couch drop and then upload and download files to share point via SFTP, which sounds very boring and, and kind of antiquated. Um,

[00:32:07] but SFTP as a protocol is used quite extensively in business to business automated file transfers. So no one is sitting there with files that are uploading and downloading files. Um, well, yeah, there's, there's always edge cases, but, um, most of the time what, what we typically see with couch drop is, uh, customers using it to automate the exchange of data, um,

[00:32:36] between partners or, or in some cases, the, the sort of end user as well. And so take, for example, um, Salesforce. Yeah. Salesforce will allow you to export reports to an SFTP server. Um, that's pretty useless on its own, I would say, but getting those reports into SharePoint or getting them into Dropbox or Google drive is pretty useful. Um,

[00:33:05] and so couch drop kind of provides in a lot of cases, the, the conduit between, you know, a system which supports SFTP as a way to transfer files and saying modern, like, uh, Dropbox or box or SharePoint. Um, and so that's interesting. Cause you're, you're right. I mean, I'm thinking about all the different use cases could be surveillance systems that need to move their files or archiving data from your primary system to a secondary system. Or,

[00:33:35] I mean, I'm just thinking about like, FTP, SFTP, it's been around forever. Yeah. Yeah, it has. It's, and I don't think it's going anywhere. Um, um, because it's kind of a, almost a ubiquitous protocol. Uh, and it's, it's secure, right? It's going, you know, over, it's basically SSL, uh, encrypted, uses the same sort of underlying encryption technology that SSH uses, which is incredibly robust. Um,

[00:34:04] and it's super simple to implement against from a client perspective. So, you know, compared to if you're hypothetically Salesforce or, you know, three CX or one of these companies that has a, has an outbound integration with SFTP, um, integrating with all the different cloud providers just doesn't make a huge amount of sense. Um, it's, it's an incredibly costly thing to actually go and do that.

[00:34:32] Whereas SFTP is a pretty straightforward protocol to work with, um, and very robust. So, yeah. So, it makes sense. So I think part of the other challenge is like when I think about like my journey, right? The first time I thought about TFTP, SFTP, just FTP, I would just think of a generic web hosting like scenario, right? Where I had to take my file Zilla,

[00:35:00] transfer the files in to upload the web pages, yada, yada, yada. But like, and I know that stuff's still around, right? It's really honest. Honestly, it's still around in that world. Here's a problem. It's not very sophisticated. I think part of the benefit of taking this conversation and overlapping it on top of the more modern storage availability, especially in the cloud, is you get a lot of number one cost savings, right?

[00:35:25] Because sometimes the gate price is pretty cheap when you go to things like Wasabi and other S3 enabled technologies, right? But then two, they're able to give you a bunch of other things that a generic SFTP tech, you know, you know, hosting website doesn't give you, right? Like one thing that comes to mind is like versioning, right? It's like, hey, this file was this, it changed to this. And like, if you go log into the destination, like, you know, you know, storage provider, they're like, oh yeah, here's your dates and versioning. Well, that's not usually available on most,

[00:35:53] on a standard FTP server. You're not, no, you're not going to get that on a, on a standard FTP server. And you don't, I think the, the bigger advantage with those platforms is the scalability though. Like Wasabi is not going to lose your data. I would hope not. Right? Like it's, but they've been around for a little bit of time now. So I think now they're not going to lose your data. They,

[00:36:23] they, it's, it's a hyperscale platform. They, they can consume petabytes of data. Under, under a single bucket. It's, it's going to work. Um, whereas a single service sitting somewhere, sure. It's backed up and whatnot, but realistically there's very little resilience there. Comparatively. Right? Like, you know, with, with Wasabi or with SharePoint or any one of these platforms, your data is replicated.

[00:36:54] Potentially hundreds of times in different sort of forms and different fragments. So there's very little possibility that you're going to lose it. And of course you have versions, um, on top, which, you know, it gives that added flexibility. So, so, okay. So how does, so, so where I can see move bot is kind of like, you use it when you need it, right? Might not be doing a migration project every day where couch drop a little bit more. I'm going to need to use this on a consistency. Probably. That's what I'm,

[00:37:23] I'm sure there's a lot of use cases for sure. So how do you, how's that structured from my cost base? Um, that's so couch drop is a subscription as a subscription model. Um, it's, it's basically a monthly, monthly subscription fee, just like any other, any other SAS platform. Um, um, it's lower than the cost of a server and in 99% of the cases, and we don't typically charge for data transfer,

[00:37:53] uh, unless you're kind of, you know, really getting up there and we're noticing it's, it is, you know, purely that, that sort of monthly, uh, subscription generally no lock in or anything like that either. Um, and the, a, an interesting thing with couch drop in terms of, as a business, uh, and a product, actually most of our customers set it up and then almost forget about it because it's just sort of working in the background. It's,

[00:38:22] it's sort of providing a link between two, two systems. Um, and so, you know, after you've done that initial setup and config, you're, you just forget about it. And so I can imagine I'm thinking where, you know, from the MSP standpoint, right? Like in both of these cases, both products, I'm going to probably have more than one customer. Is the system already multi-tenanted by design or how does that work? Couch drop is not, um,

[00:38:52] but we're getting a bit of pull from, for that. So it's, it's on our radar. Um, move bot is, is absolutely multi-tenanted. Um, and you can, as an MSP kind of set it up how you would want in that regard. So you can have multiple accounts. Otherwise, uh, most of the time we have, you know, new MSP will have one account and they can have multiple projects underneath that. Um, which, which normally go to, you know, different companies or service different organizations.

[00:39:23] Um, move bot typically is quite transient in that, you know, if you connect to SharePoint in, uh, for one particular customer, once a migration project is completed and there's been no activity on that customer, we delete, um, everything basically to, to sort of ensure that there's, you know, no, no possibility of, uh, a security incident there,

[00:39:53] which, you know, so you're not going to end up with move bot being connected to all of your clients permanently. That's, I think not something that anybody, you want, um, but it is set up to be multi-tenanted and, and it's pretty straightforward. So cool. I totally get it. Um, I, I agree with you. I mean, I know that there's a lot of, uh, like if you go into the Amazon marketplace or the Azure marketplace, I guess you could deploy their version of an FTP server, but the reality is,

[00:40:21] is that now you're stuck to just that one solution where I can imagine, you know, the, you know, pointing multiple technologies to different platforms, providers, right? Like I can imagine an M I'm thinking again, MSP hat, right? Like there, there might be a need. And let me tell me if catch drop does this, where, Hey, I want this data to end up on this provider, but I have this other system that I'd rather park somewhere out. Like that data would, maybe it's not as important to me. Maybe I would rather take the cheaper route just for long-term archival purposes.

[00:40:51] It may not be the same provider underneath the hood. Yeah. This is actually a key, key differentiator with, with catch drop. Um, so we have, we have this notion called a virtual file system, which doesn't exist, right? And so, so you, it's, it's totally fabricated. Um, you can have one folder, which is called, you know, SharePoint a, and that's pointed at one particular site and document library and, and a tenant over here.

[00:41:21] And then you can have another folder, um, in the same hierarchy at the same level, which is going into S3. And there's no, um, there's no limitation there that we don't store any of your data. And so, and a sort of a key, key point with, um, with couch drop. We, we're not actually storing anything. It's kind of, we're almost just like a platform layer on top of, of existing, um, data systems. And that,

[00:41:49] that allows you to transfer data between organizations really quite easily, um, as well. And we have, we have some automations in inside couch drop. We call them transfer automations, um, which fall into this kind of weird MFT space as far as the market goes, uh, alongside products like, um, go anywhere and progress move it. Um,

[00:42:14] where you're effectively exchanging data on a schedule. So you could configure couch drop to every five minutes, look for a new file over here and this SharePoint folder and move that, encrypt it, and then send it to an S3 bucket or send it via email, uh, to someone's inbox. Um, or you could,

[00:42:42] you could drop it in another SharePoint tenant. So you're, you're, it's kind of sounds a bit like a move bot, but it's, it's not, it's more, okay, we're doing this constant, uh, constant polling, looking for new files somewhere and then doing something with them and, and shifting them off somewhere else. Um, that's, I mean, I, again, really powerful because of the flexibility of it. Number one, I'm not stuck to any one provider.

[00:43:12] I can plug all my different storage accounts in on one side and create my STP accounts on the other, and then decide where, where things land. But the cool part that you're saying is, Hey, like I can do, you know, it looks like it's all part of one, but I actually have different parts plugged into different store. It's actually pretty neat the way that you're talking, you're talking through it because it's like the extreme flexibility, especially if back to your education scenario, kind of, it's like, Hey, if I decide, Hey,

[00:43:40] I've been pointing my systems to this SFTP, this, you know, moving it around. And I decide, Hey, the price just, you know, overnight quadrupled over here. Right. I can decide to relocate it and not have to really do much at all. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then from a nuts and bolts standpoint, right. You know, you laughed earlier, like nobody's sitting there with the file Zilla anymore. No, that's not true. I seen that way too often. Unfortunately, it's still a thing,

[00:44:10] but, um, the time burn that goes into doing that manually is it's like a, it's a project, right? Like you, you effectively have, you know, subscribe to the answer for that. And I'm sure some MSPs, you know, who listen to this are going to be like, well, you know, this is not an everyday thing. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. You don't understand if I'm connecting these various systems that they know FTP or SFTP, and I'm just sending it there.

[00:44:37] Now I don't have to go back and reprogram every single one of those systems, right. To go and point somewhere else. It takes time. And number one, if you're not organized and you miss one, it just stops working. And then as most things in MSP land go, the day that you really need it, you found out that it wasn't working and that was already too late. Yeah, exactly. I think MSPs can sometimes be really bad at judging the sort of time sync

[00:45:05] that goes into certain projects. And that's kind of why we, we build platforms as, as vendors, right. It's we want to, you know, MSP should be focused on doing what they do really well. And we can take a bit of that pain away and make it really easy. It's also, you know, if you think, if you're standing up SFTP or FTP servers for, for customers, for various reasons,

[00:45:33] there's a big security risk implied with that. Those servers often get forgotten about because they're, they're not a critical piece in a lot of cases, right. They're, they're kind of there for one or two particularly use cases. And, and so they become a, a pretty decent attack vector. Um, which, you know, is something that you can kind of just move, move to us, uh, and,

[00:46:02] and remove that risk. Uh, I would say entirely. Yeah. That's awesome. And again, you decide where your, your storage provider, right? So it's like, you're not just trying to be your own Amazon, right? You're like, no, no, no. You, you tell me where you want the destination to be. I'm the guy just facilitating the connectivity between the two. Yeah. We, we, we're just a conduit. So again, we don't store anything, which is, can be a weird concept for people. Um, when they initially, you know, come, come to us and, and set it up,

[00:46:32] but it's so much better. Like from, from my side, I don't really want to be storing anybody's data. Like the risks with that are, are, are huge. Um, and, and there's a lot of other companies doing it and doing it really well. So, you know, we are just effectively connecting the two blocks. You've got this, this SDP and FTP block, and then you've got everything else, um, around it. And we just join them together and, and give you an easy fast way to, to do that.

[00:47:01] So now it is a Swiss army knife, man. I love what you did. It makes it actually, I think this session right here, like I've run into your team and saw the robot, you know, a couple of different events. Like, but I think this was the like clearest presentation of exactly what is happening. And, um, hope I please use this by the way, because it paints a very good picture. So let me ask a couple of. MSP questions as we get towards the final edge of this.

[00:47:30] So it sounds like so far I got that. Everything is as you go, no long-term contracts. It sounds like if you get into very large opportunities, there's discounting available. So definitely, you know, raise your hand or else, you know, don't be surprised by the bill kind of thing. Um, and then, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, definitely, definitely come and talk to us. And like, I think one of the, one of my pet peeves in the,

[00:47:58] in the vendor worlds is this sort of lock-in that you get. Um, and sometimes it happens before you've actually even had the opportunity to, to see your product. 100%. We get it as well, right? Like we're an avid user of, of SAS products. I think. SAS is, is one of our highest expenses as an organization. Um, uh, in general. And often you end up, you know, you,

[00:48:28] you sort of want to try, I'm losing my voices to it in the morning. You, you've seen the software. It looks good. You want to give it a go, but you can't give it a go until you've gone through their sales process. And then you end up being locked in for three years, um, to, to a product that potentially doesn't, doesn't do the job. Um, so we, we've gone totally against that mold. And are trying to make sure that, you know, it's something that you can just use.

[00:48:55] You can set it up in both cases and you're only going to pay for it. As long as you're actually getting value from that product. Um, and if you're, if you're an MSP and you have a lot, you know, you're doing a lot of data transfers and migrations, um, absolutely come and talk to us because we do offer pretty aggressive discounts and, uh, you know, with, with no commitment effectively. Um, so. I think everybody in the MSP land wishes all their vendors still work that way. Unfortunately,

[00:49:25] that tends not to be the case anymore, uh, for, for a large, vast majority, unfortunately. Um, how does support work? Right? Like sounds like your products work, you know, pretty easily. I love the clicking go, you know, comment from earlier in this, but if they need help, how does it work? Where do they get it? When's it available? All that jazz. Yeah. You email us, um, or so in both, both products, you can actually chat with us directly. Uh, so we have, we have intercom,

[00:49:54] which is quite a nice little chat tool there. You can email us as well. And, and then if, if things get really hairy, we have escalation paths available for MSPs, um, where we sort of guarantee a 30 minute response 24 seven. Right? So we are, we are a New Zealand company, which is a little bit odd. Um, we do actually have stuff in the U S, uh, as well. And, and we have not 24 seven coverage, um,

[00:50:22] completely unless it's urgent and you, you sort of ring the bell. Um, but we're pretty close to that. So it's, it's relatively easy to get in touch with us. You, we have a discord, we have Slack as well. Um, you can, you can chat with us and then the, um, if, if you sign up for our MSP partner program, um, which again, there's no, um, no commitment involved in that it's, it's, you can just sign up. We, we try and train you on the product.

[00:50:50] So we take you through an onboarding session and, and can, can help your team get, get up and running and whatnot. And we'll help you through the first migration. Um, and the second, of course, uh, but we, we try and try and sort of hold your hand through that first migration if, if you need it, uh, so that you'll come back and use us for the second one. Um, makes, makes sense. And then everything is, you know,

[00:51:19] throw a credit card on auto, you know, pay it the first of the month kind of thing. If it's a subscription or if you're pre-purchasing transfer stuff, you just pay as you go. Yeah, exactly. Uh, so, so put a credit card number and it's, uh, it's the easiest way to go. Um, if, if that doesn't work for your, for your business, which is frequently the case, right. Um, then, then we can do bank transfers and whatnot as well. Um, that's, that's all fine. It's, it's, it's all pretty easy.

[00:51:48] So there's, there's no, um, there are no hoops to jump through when working with us as an organization. Um, that's something that I'm really super aggressive on because for me personally, being on the receiving end of vendors who, who do this to customers, it's, it's a pain. It sucks. Uh, I don't know why they do it. Why? Yeah. It, it shouldn't be hard to do business with an organization. Um, when you want their product, it should be really easy. Uh,

[00:52:18] and then there isn't a normally, uh, especially with the bigger MSPs and the bigger clients, there's often a compliance aspect to it. Um, so in that regard, we, we are HIPAA, um, you know, we're audited for HIPAA compliance. We, we're audited for SOC2 and GDPR and whatnot as well. And we have a public trust center. So you can actually go on and, and have a look at, you know, how we deal with your data and,

[00:52:47] and what we're audited on and et cetera, et cetera. Um, if, you know, compliance is, uh, is important. Oh, it's starting like, it's definitely important, but it's definitely becoming more noticeable. I think as everything goes, right. You start off small, as you grow, you get bigger customers, then your bigger customers raise their hand. And then you're like, oh, I guess I need to go look into that. And that's usually where that conversation comes up, but I digress. Um, where do people find out more information about either of these products? Want to learn more? Maybe you want to talk to someone,

[00:53:17] check it out. What's the best place? Um, movebot.io or just, just search for, for movebot or couch drop. Uh, there's a lot of information on our website and, and that's, that's generally the best place to start. Um, honestly, I, if you're having a look around, just sign up and have a play. Um, we actually preload with movebot 50 gig of data. Um, if you know, want more to play with, send us an email and, and we'll hook you up.

[00:53:46] Um, and the same, same with couch drop. So you get a 14 day trial and then a 14 days, it's not long enough. Send us a message and we'll give you, we'll give you a longer trial. Uh, it's, it's really, really easy. And you can see, um, you know, there's a few videos on YouTube and whatnot. Of, of how the platforms work. Um, and I think, uh, for movebot in particular, our marketing team has done a pretty good job of, you know, pumping out. There's a lot of white papers and,

[00:54:13] and whatnot that are actually pretty high in terms of quality. Like they really go into, into stuff in detail. So if you're just generally interested in how we, we would recommend you run migration projects, I would, I'd highly recommend having a look, um, at some of that content on the website. That's awesome. Uh, how long have you been in business and how many MSPs do you think that you service so far? Um, um, I think now we've been,

[00:54:41] now we've been in business for almost six years. So we're, yeah, starting to get a bit scary in that regard. Like they say, if you can make it past four, you're already, you're past 80% of the people who don't like, they don't make it to that point. Yeah. I think that the two year hump is a pretty, is a pretty serious one as well. Um, as far as MSPs on the platform, uh, I think we're sitting around 3000 at the moment. So worldwide, um,

[00:55:09] of varying sizes, right? Like we have, we have MSPs that are just one or two people and then right up to some of the bigger ones. Um, some of the bigger ones in the world. Yeah. That's awesome. Wow. I was going to say you built, yeah, I mean, six years in 3000, plus MSPs. I think there's, we've, we've proven the idea here, right? And it sounds like if I had to guess, if you're changing the name to couch labs,

[00:55:38] probably have a couple of other ideas coming down the pipe. You didn't say it just guessing. Yeah. Yeah. There's, uh, there's a few things kicking around and that's the, as you figured out, um, that's one of the reasons why we are changing, changing the name because we, I enjoy building product. I love it. It's, it's what gets me up in the morning. Uh, and we have an amazing team in that regard. Um, so yeah, you'll be seeing more from us. Uh, we,

[00:56:07] we know you like to drink your Coke in the morning, so we'll, uh, we'll definitely make, keep, keep an eyeball on where that takes you. Absolutely. Michael. Thanks for jumping on. This was a pretty cool session. I, I'm, I hope rewind this session guys to really cool. You know, like I understand there's some bigger names that we've all seen from a marketing standpoint, but I mean, just the ease of use and how these guys do business. Like, I don't think anyone would disagree. They wish everybody did it this way.

[00:56:36] And it sounds like they're willing to work with you, which is other than does the product work? Is it priced? Well, you know, do I have support access? Then it's how easy is it to do, do business with these guys? Sounds pretty, pretty darn easy. So for that reason alone, it's worth a look, um, to go to move bot.io or search for a move bot or couch drop. And it sounds like it'll get you the same place. These guys have done a couple of our, our block parties. I love the robot costume that they have. It was pretty cool.

[00:57:06] So, uh, they came out with a pretty good mascot. That's not an animal, right? It seems to be like the trend. Everybody has like some sort of different animal. Nope. We went to robot. I like that. Uh, something different. Uh, so we got a couple of photos. I was going through some of the, uh, the libraries as I was in this and I was like, Oh, there they are. I found that robot screen. It's lit up. It's pretty cool. Uh, cool marketing. You guys do a great job. Um, so this session was absolutely recorded. Uh, we'll post it on mspinitiative.com under sessions. Uh, real quick, Michael,

[00:57:33] any events on the top of your head that people will stumble into this year? Um, we'll definitely be at it nation. We are going to be at Google next as well, walking around. Um, and we'll probably, yeah, we'll, we'll be around, um, this year. We're sort of still working out, uh, all our conferences, but probably MSP geek as well. Awesome. Well, looking forward to seeing you guys in person. Thanks for jumping on. Sorry for getting you up early. At least it was seven and not four. So I'll, at least there's a win there.

[00:58:02] Don't forget to buy that Valentine's day gift. You still have a little bit of time. Uh, you're welcome for that one. Talk soon guys. Thanks for watching.