Bootstrapped Web

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Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. This is the Slovenian, still have a bit of a cold, deep voice edition. We've got our yeah.

We've got our good buddy, Justin McGill from Leafhughes on with us. And fellas, it's good to good to be back.

Yeah. Good to be back, Justin. Good to have you on. And you guys obviously, you may know Justin from the Zero to Scale podcast, and he's been running Leadviews. I think, Justin, you've you've been on this podcast sometime in the past.

Right? This is my first time with with Jordan here though. He's Oh,

that's right.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes me feel special now. Yeah. Very cool.

Well, you know, as we were talking before the show, I'm sure a lot of our audience kinda overlaps with Zero to Scale. If if you don't, then you probably should. It's a it's a really good podcast with Justin and Greg Hickman. So,

you know,

I thought today we'll we'll just do our typical updates episode, and we'll include Justin in that as well. But but, you know, Jordan, why don't we start off with you? You talked a little bit about traveling last week, but where are you at, and and what's the general update on your end?

Yeah. So it's been a very it's been a very interesting few weeks. I'd say about a month ago I was at, I don't know, it's not a low point, but at a high stress point. I was stressed. We had been working on the new funnel product for a while.

It still wasn't quite where I wanted it to be, where I felt comfortable pushing on the marketing. If I go too long without trying to sell something to a stranger, I just get awkward and uncomfortable. It had just been too long, and it started to get to the point where I was like, so where is this gonna happen? Is it gonna be another week, or is it gonna be another four weeks? Because for my stress management, need to know.

The truth is, sometimes we talk about straight business, and in this case, there was a lot of personal business overlap. So I experienced a family hardship. I don't want to get too personal about it, but we had a pretty traumatic event happen in the personal life, and that kind of veered me off course for a while, and then that definitely had a very big impact in bringing that stress into the business. So it's just a lot to kind of manage and handle. So that was a few weeks ago.

And not to mention, you know, again, not to go too much on the personal side, but that that also caused you to travel, like across the country too.

It caused a whole a whole bunch of travel and a whole bunch of disruption and, you know, it just, you know, and and then family comes first. But as a as a business owner, you you don't get to be like, dear boss, I'll see you in two weeks. You you just don't get to do that. You you can't do it. And then you have to manage that with the family and expectations, so it was it was a lot it was a lot to deal with.

That was a few weeks ago, and then right around the same time, Ben, my my co founder and CTO, had a planned trip to go to Slovenia where our dev team is. Right? Our lead developer, Rock, I'm I'm sitting on the balcony of his apartment right now in in Ljubljana, and we just hired a second full time developer in Jan. Ben was gonna come out here for three weeks with them and just kinda get our process straight. Right?

I think I've said the word process 500 times over the past few weeks because it's just been a really big focus. So he came out here and I was in my stress hole. At some point my wife, God bless her, basically said to me, Look dude, go there. Just freaking go there. I'll be fine.

Get away from me.

Yeah. Right. You pokes me.

I don't wanna hear about it anymore. Get the hell

out of here. Right.

You don't actually help very much. And so she basically said she gave me like the green light, you know. She gave me like the idea of the green light and I I thought that was the right move. I've

What been trooper. I mean, you've got kids, little ones. I mean, that's, you know, that's a that's a handful and for her to, you know, even recommend that is pretty amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. So so supportive.

That sounds

so It makes you feel good. Having a supportive spouse makes things about a 100 times easier than a non supportive spouse. So I've been in Slovenia, in Ljubljana, for about a week. The truth is we were only here for two days and we got an Airbnb in Croatia on the coast to basically just hole up in a hacker house for five days and just do nothing but work. We managed to get to the ocean here and there and eat some calamari, but we basically just lived together and worked all day.

Now at the end of this week, it's Friday now, I'm in a completely different place. Just optimistic, huge progress, fun, the team cohesion is is back where where we want it to be. So sometimes, you know, we have remote businesses, but sometimes being a person, it's a big deal.

Yeah. Todd, I

know we're we're knee deep in office negotiations right now just to house everybody under under one roof. So it's interesting because so you just brought on a new developer that's also there?

He's Slovenian and and that was that was our goal, was to make sure that Rock and Jan could be together in the same office working next to each other. We thought to go from one developer to two is gonna be hard enough to add in the geography issue was just gonna be too destructive.

I'm curious about like what where are you at exactly on on the product now, and like what what actually changed? What shipped this week after you guys worked together?

Yeah. It was it was interesting to kind of a lot a lot of the work was a it was prioritizing. The first thing we had to do was, okay, we have too many things to do. You can't we can't just leave them hanging out there like, oh, this all has to get done. Because it's not all in the same level of priority.

One thing needs to get done and then the next thing and then figuring that out was our first task. So our first day was, okay, we have these hairy projects, and then we have a million tasks. So let's take these tasks and lump them into these projects, and then look from a business strategy point of view which projects are most important. And then once you identify those, you know which tasks to do, because those tasks contribute to that project being successfully finished. Right?

That way that way the individual tasks are serving the larger business strategic goal. That was like the first day there was laying that down. Okay. What's what do we need to do first?

What what do you use to manage that? Like, are are you using GitHub and and some other tools for for managing that? Because like, we're we're just working this out now with with the new developer on on the SaaS. We're using ZenHub with GitHub.

We were using Spritly, and then that no longer made sense for us. So they have they they use GitHub and they have a whole GitHub process that I'm just not involved in. But for task management, we do everything in Trello, and it's split up between two boards. It's split up between planning and current sprint. And then you look at our the current sprint Trello board, and it is, like, currently this sprint, and then there's a backlog, and then there's bugs, and then we have different colors for do this right away or don't do this right away, and then it kind of extends out from there.

So what we do is, well, basically half the challenge is making sure that I don't fuck up our sprints.

Right? I would actually recommend This isn't a big deal. Right? I would recommend ZenHub. I I know Brian just mentioned it.

I know that's what we're doing. You know, it sits inside of GitHub and it's basically like Trello.

Yeah. It is basically Trello inside GitHub.

It's fully integrated and so, you know, I mean, you can even make a a commit and then that automatically will close out that issue inside of GitHub, you know. It's

just Yeah. That's what I like about it. It's like, is having like, ZenHub is the get the GitHub issues. Whereas if you have, like, Trello or, like, Asana or something else, you gotta constantly, like, keep them in sync or, you know, copy progress and stuff. It's not not fun.

All in one place. Yeah. It's it's pretty sweet. I I would recommend Ben take a look at that.

Yeah, I pinged it to them, and then I let them do Look, it's their life. Organizing The their truth is once they got organized in a certain way, I now have marketing mirrored. So my my marketing Trello board is very, very similar to theirs. So they can look they can quickly look and say, what's Jordan doing? What's next week?

What's a backlog? What's a what's where's my inbox? All these so that's

So that's that's my other question for you is, alright. So the product is is moving along. Sounds good. What's going on on the marketing site or or or side? And, like, what have you been doing up up until now with the new product, and what what's changed going going forward?

Okay. So one of the more interesting things over the past few weeks was is like this, what's the dynamic between marketing and product? So at some point, product was like lagging behind and stagnating a little bit. It wasn't stagnating, was just slow because it was just it was just a big hairy product. And so that was torturing marketing.

Marketing had nothing to do. You know, like what what what do we do now? What get this done so I can move so. That was like a very negative dynamic. And then the progress this week on the product, it like energized the marketing side.

It's like, my god, now I feel more confident in being able to push this. Because the big thing is we were having performance issues, man. We were having speed. Like this is a checkout page, you can't be slow, and we're serving big file sizes because we're using JSON to make everything super flexible instead of HTML, so it's just like complicated. And one of the biggest things we tackled this week was we have to destroy that performance issue.

And we spent twenty four hours straight on it and and and improved it by 95%. So that's a product issue, and then that immediately lights a fire under the marketing side's ass. Like, oh my god, now I feel better about this, and now I can start running ads, and now I start so the dynamic has been super interesting. And then and then right back, as soon as I got the confidence to say, okay, let me send out an email to our email list introducing this new product, and I wrote a blog post about it, all of a sudden this all this energy comes in for marketing. We've got new trials, we've people asking questions on intercom, and all a sudden the tech guys are like, oh, this is awesome.

So now they get energized by that. So it's like this interplay between the two where one can't lag behind the other. Right? It's like two people running makes each other run faster as opposed to the other way around.

Neither side of it can run away. Right? Like, So even though LeadFuse, so we just surpassed 30 k MRR, we're still in that dynamic, right? Like we got to a point where, okay, now we have a couple of big bugs that are causing some major issues and we're trying to go through this whole hiring process with developers and everything right now. But what it does and you touched on it is it doesn't give you the confidence.

You're missing that, right? And so you're kinda like, well, let's not publish this piece or let's not go full on with sales just yet. We gotta get the product back right. And then that happens and yeah, like you said and then eventually all these new customers and all these new intercom ticket, that turns into more problems, right, that you didn't even realize you had and so now you're like, okay, hold on a second, let's go back. Yeah, just goes back and forth, man.

Yeah. You you look forward to the ideal, but you never you never get to a point where, okay, product is perfect, let me just run with marketing. Right. So there is a point in time where you have to say, screw it, I'm just gonna start marketing. So what we did internally was like, Jordan, tell us your list of things that when they're done, you have no more excuses to market.

Nice.

And then, you know, so like, look, there are issues that aren't as important. So once we got those done, I was like, cool. I got no more excuses. I'm running.

Yeah. Well, I'm curious what are you doing on the onboarding front for for the new checkout product? Like, is it is there a lot of like manual kind of one to one onboarding involved at this point? Or

Yes. So so you asked basically what we're doing on the marketing side. Up until now it's been like ground game. It's just people who come in we had for a really long time, we had nothing on the marketing side about the new product. We had a page for it, we had a graphic showing a funnel, and then we had sign up underneath.

So we had people signing up just from that. So that's clearly people who are looking at it being like, that looks interesting enough for me to sign up with my credit card in without knowing anything else. So those people we'd latched onto were like, yo, what are you trying to do? Let's get on Skype. So we probably had like 20 ish sign ups like that.

So I have like good relationships with like six to eight people like that. So that's what helped us identify these issues. You're like, oh, I need a custom sub domain, and oh, I have this stuff. It just forced us to iron out these bugs because it was a real person saying, hey, I want to use this. We just launched a new website last week.

That was like a big kicker in the the energy for for everyone. Beautiful, by the way. Thanks. It looks awesome. I'm really really really proud of it.

It was hard.

So so now, like, going forward, like, what's in place if somebody comes to the site and signs signs up?

So the way we're looking at it is like, if there's like a row of dominoes, or row of hurdles, let's say there are five hurdles between someone signing up and someone becoming a paying customer, We are trying to to make each hurdle fall in the right order. So the marketing site was the first hurdle. Now onboarding is like the second hurdle, so that's what we're working on now. Then we have performance issues are the next hurdle because that assumes someone is using it and driving people. And then it's little features that make it better are further hurtful.

Like retention.

Right. Retention is like late. So we're trying to go in the right order. I like it. So marketing site done, and now promotion's gonna start to happen, and now onboarding, we just are looking at our UX like, okay.

It's improved a lot, but it's difficult. So what we have is we have a very Ben probably spent a week on UX wireframes, and what came out was was really good. So we have an unbelievably simple onboarding process that we always try to do three steps. Connect to your Shopify store, build your first funnel, connect the payment processor. You can get through it in less than ten minutes and have your first funnel built.

Do you provide like an example funnel in there?

We that is right now a list in my Trello. Yeah. Stuff to create that will help, and it's just like a list of 25 things. Yep. But right now, it's kind of like you're a little bit in the dark.

You know what you're supposed to do, you don't have any examples. So that's like next.

Yep. Yeah, that helps, right, with new users. I know we're we're looking at, you know, building out like an example sequence, you know, for people. I mean, we we provided some templates, but you know, just having an actual sequence in place I think would would help people kind of understand, okay this is this is how long I should wait, this is what it you know the email should look like, these are some subject lines you know. It just gives people a good idea on on just how to get started.

I mean that's typically a roadblock is you know, okay, well, now I don't know what to say.

Yeah. I I totally agree. If we we look at some someone that's adjacent to us, a competitor ish, is ClickFunnels. When you create an account, they include six funnels in your account. Yep.

The webinar funnel, the consulting funnel, the this funnel, it's just you're already you're you're you're on the you're on your way.

Yeah. That I'm kinda thinking along the same lines for for this audience ops calendar product because like, I I talked a few few weeks earlier about how I'm designing it starting with the onboarding and but now that I've redesigned it a couple times and talked to more customers, I'm realizing that the onboarding screens are probably gonna be held off until later. And now we're building the MVP, so let's just get the core product built and and I will tackle onboarding a little bit later. But the

Your onboarding is gonna be it's it's you say you have your MVP and so if you built your onboarding around your MVP, well now when you start to add new features, your whole onboarding is is outdated, you know? Yeah. Mean keep it up.

Do. Well, it's part of it is through talking to people and redesigning some of the features a little bit. I'm trying to figure out first what are the most important features to build and then that'll also dictate the onboarding. But one one thing like, no matter how we work it out with the with the onboarding UX, we will have built in templates. Like, a big part of it is is building like a standard checklist template for how you produce a blog article.

And we could just have users, you know, create your own template from day one or we can just give them our template to start with. And it's all optimized based on literally what we've been using in audience ops. And then they can just tweak that or create a new one if they want. Yeah.

Yeah. Makes sense.

That's the plan. Good stuff. So any other updates there, mister Gao?

No. I'm I'll I'll give another update. You know, basically, we're launching Facebook ads on Monday and starting to make a push into the Facebook groups, which is a lot of where the energy around this type of product is. And then we're releasing our distribution strategy to start off is is basically similar to to the recovery product where we do integrations. In this situation, we don't do any integrations, but it's not real, it's not a technical integration.

Our product requires a landing page that we don't offer, so you need to use another landing page platform. So in order to encourage use, instead of just saying go create a landing page, we are giving away landing page templates. But we're not just giving away templates, we're we are building the template in ClickFunnels and Leadpages, and then sharing it with other other users. So it's already in their editor. It's as close to them being able to just swap it out and use our product as possible.

Yep. Yeah. That's it. How about you, Brian? Talk to us.

What's new? You got your life is splitting in half too. You're you're you're two timing it these days.

Yeah. Well, yeah. I guess my my updates are now and really my my whole life during the week is like split between the service side of audience ops are done for you and the software side, which is, you know, the new SaaS product that we're just getting off the ground. On the service side, I I did dip back into that a little bit in the past week and a couple of updates there. I mean, first, I, you know, I I don't usually talk too many numbers on this podcast or anything, but I thought, you know, this week we hit a a pretty good milestone.

So we we passed 50 k m r MRR in the done for you service side of audience this week. And, you know, I'm happy to see that right now because it's September, and that was actually the goal for 2016. And we we hit that, you know, a few months early.

That was awesome, man.

And Really? Congratulations. Of course, the very next day we had one cancellation, which brought us back to $49.05, but you know?

So Ain't that ain't that a microcosm?

I know.

It's it's always always happens that way. But that's pretty good because we we did start to slow down about three or four months ago. We had a bit of a churn issue and just a a slowdown in in leads. May maybe it was like the summertime. I don't know if that impacted it at all, but it definitely picked up in the last two or three months and both leads and and churn reduced a lot.

And I think that's due to a bunch of changes in in our onboarding for the service that I'd put in place about three months ago. So so that's good. Another thing that that's happening this week is we're hiring another writer. And this is like the I don't know, like the twentieth or so writer that we've hired since the beginning. You know, hiring in general is one of those things that just takes up so much of my time.

Like sit just sifting through applications and then do you know, holding interviews and then having a short list and then and then getting them on board. So so for the writing position, since we've hired for this so many different times and we really have figured out now that, alright, this is exactly who works works out well in the long term at Audience Ops. That was like the first hiring role that I can now delegate. So we have a team manager, Kat, on the team, and she's been on with us for over a year now. And so now it's I I basically delegated this entire process to her.

So she's the one reviewing our incoming candidates. She's holding first interviews. She's she's making a short list. And then basically, by the end of probably next week, I'll have a list of about three top candidates that I'll review and maybe I'll do like a final interview with with one or two of them and and then bring them on board. So so that's that's nice because that's like a key part of the team that that just continues to grow and and that's like a two week process that I don't really need to handle anymore.

I'm forever impressed by your ability to just back out of your business. Just slowly creep out of it.

I just keep one

further in.

One one piece at a time,

you know. Especially, you know, now

that I'm trying to focus almost all my time on the software side, I'm I'm really honing in on like the final few pieces of the service that that really eat up a lot of my time. And the other piece of that are sales calls. And I mean, I talked earlier this year about bringing on a salesperson and and that was working fairly well for a couple months, but I eventually backed off of that and I took took sales back over myself. It it just made more sense that way. And and I optimized the sales process to a point where we have this live demo, like a slide presentation that I show every lead and that has definitely helped conversions and and it also helps set the right expectations as people join the service.

But now that I've done it, like, I don't know, in the last two months, like 50 or 60 of these calls, I'm doing the same presentation over and over and over again. And, a bunch of these a week, not only is it time consuming, but I'm like having like nightmares over this like slide presentation. Just like the the script is like drilled into my head at this point.

So But that makes it repeatable, which makes it something that you can train somebody else to do, you know. So that's

Well definitely

what helps. I'm doing I'm

a few of what of them that you're doing.

Well, so that's what I

That's training materials.

Well, that's what I'm doing. Actually, the sales guy was doing this sales presentation. But for now, you know, I'm still kind of like the sole salesperson, and and that's that's working out fine. But the what I'm doing today into next week is I made a recorded version of of the sales demo. And now that I've done it so many times, it's like I refined it, it's optimized, made a recorded version.

So now when somebody well, this will be in place next week. When somebody fills out the consultation form on our homepage, the very next page is gonna be just showing the sales demo, you know, the video. And then they can just watch the demo there. It's like ten or ten or twelve minutes. Below that, there'll be basically two buttons.

One is, you could sign up right now, which I don't know how many people will actually sign up without talking to someone. The other option is is to just directly to my Calendly schedule a consultation. I I still expect to do high touch, you know, one to one sales to bring people on, but at least once they get on the call with me, they'll they'll most likely have have already seen the the sales demo and and have most of their questions answered. So it should make those calls a little bit faster and easier. And the other thing that I wanna put in place with that is is some better, like, automated email sequences.

Like, right now, we have nothing. After somebody requests a consultation, they just get manual follow ups from from me. I Oh,

like indoctrination ahead of ahead of the conversation?

Yeah. It's something that that I've just been meaning to do for months and and it's been on the back burner. So lately we've developed a number of these like case study pieces on our on our audience ops blog with like highlighting, like, five or six of our clients. And they're actually, like, long stories. Actually, Jordan, you're you're one of them.

And and so I wanna line those up in, an email sequence. So after you see the demo and request a consultation for the next, like, two weeks or so, you'll get, you know, emails with, check out these case studies and check out these, like, lesser known benefits of audience ops and and all all this kind of stuff.

You know what also might be interesting is putting together kind of a monthly newsletter of sorts for your list and actually highlighting some of the content that your team wrote that month. You know? It's like

I mean, we do that every week. Like, do we do the audience app service for ourselves too. Like, know, we're No.

I I actually just mean for the content that your team has created for your customers. Right. Right. Know, testimonial almost of, you know, look at all of our great customers and all the content we do, you know?

Because that that's big concern. Right? Is the content gonna be up to my standards? Mhmm. Am I gonna be okay outsourcing this?

We have a samples. We have a PDF that contains like eight or nine articles that we've done for for other clients.

I don't think that's as good as links

to live That's your handpicked. These are the best examples. Know, this this what I was talking about was just I mean, this is what we do. Right? This is this month's content, you know?

Yeah. Just an idea.

I I do like that idea. I'll probably have to, you know, ask for permission because not not all clients would wanna have their stuff promoted in that way. But

You can't have any of my shit.

Alright. Well, scratch them off the list. No. That's that's awesome.

But yeah, that's basically the update on the service side of it. I've got a couple updates on the software side, but but I don't know. I mean, should we bounce over to someone else first?

Justin? Mean, waiting patiently.

Yeah. What so what's up with you? Like, for for those who I I think a lot of people, you know, know about Lead Fuse, maybe have followed you on the podcast. Like, what's new right now as we get into, like, you know, 2016?

Yeah. I'll tell you what I'm what I'm kinda going through. It's it's certainly a stressful time period with LeadFuse because, you know, we we basically lost our CTO in August and we've tried to patchwork a development team together but they're all part time. Like this is nobody's full time thing. And when that happens, you're just not the priority, right?

So you know, kind of been dealing with this for the past few weeks and just coming to this realization that I have to find someone that can just dominate and take over the product, make it theirs and run with it and they need to be local because we're gonna be opening an office space at, you know, the beginning of the year. And so business partner Damian Thompson, he's actually moving out here at the beginning of the year, you know, uplift uprooting his family and and coming out here. So

At some point, gotta get a update with with both of you guys on on the show and and hear about that whole story.

Yeah. It's going well, but we're talking about earlier the confidence factor too, right? Knowing that we have a couple of these major bugs that are sort of preventing us from delivering on our promise, right? You know, in particular, like we automatically detect replies and we take them out of, you know, those needs out of follow ups and that's not happening to a level that it needs to right now. And so we're actually at a point where we're about to fix that.

But to tell your users, oh well, you're gonna have to manually at the end of the day go in and change the status. It sucks, right? That's not a good thing when you're talking your whole value prop is on automated lead gen but you have to do all of these things manually because, you know, we're not holding up our end of the bargain. And so, you know, it's been a stressful, you know, month or so But, you know, I think we're we're kind of coming out of that now, which which feels good. But, know, it doesn't give you that confidence to go out and and, you know, market the shit out of it.

Right? And and build your sales team around it. We're in the process of not only fixing some things but we have a major update coming towards the end of this year, beginning of next year that's really going to transform the whole product. And so we're we're also kind of timing that up with the office and then we're also timing that up with trying to recruit and build the sales team. Right?

So all of that will be kind of more at the beginning of the year.

I'm curious about the office. I mean, you know, what what led to the decision to build this as an in house team in in one place? Like, did you did you consider or go back and forth with Damian or anyone else on your team about, what if we just built this as a remote team?

So we've we've been fully remote up to this point. So I have an agency background. I mean, I I built up and and scaled out an agency, prior to this and we were fully in office. And I was attracted to the idea of working remote so I was spending more and more time actually working from home which I'm very productive in that environment. However, the agency, I stepped away a couple of years ago, stepped down and the agency has slowly started to just kind of wither away almost to a certain degree.

You know, key people have left and and you know, it's key customers have left, know, because there's there's not that well, they made the decision to to go remote. I actually made that decision before I had left and you you lose the the camaraderie, right? You you lose the culture. But I felt like with Leadfees, if I started it as a remote environment, that, you know, things would be different. When our CTO left, our customer success manager felt a little overwhelmed and we had this big AppSumo deal go live and so we were getting pounded.

Well, so she was stressed out. She decided to leave. And so part of this was, you know, if we were all together, you would feel like you had someone to talk to as you were going through this. And I I just don't think there's that that full commitment to the business. And and this is just my, you know, my belief.

This is not necessarily the way I view remote. I think remote can work, but having said that, I don't think it can work when you're trying to build a sales team. And having your sales people working from home, it's bad news. And sales people like to talk, they don't do well in isolation, right? So just from a personality standpoint too, let alone from a performance standpoint.

So we knew without a doubt we were going to be opening up an office but original thought was we were going to do it just for the sales team. So as all of this started to happen, was like, you know what? I mean, we have big aspirations here with this, you know, with lead fuse and and where we want it to go. And I just feel like for us to get there, we need everybody together. And so

It is interesting about the what you said about when these, like, stress points happen in the business. If you're in the same room, you kinda feel it together, you could deal with it together. And that's you know, Audience Hops is fully remote. Over over 20 people across The US and and in other continents and and everything. But one thing and I think it works well for us, except I I definitely see how that's a pitfall.

And it hap like, just yesterday, I was on a call with with our managers, which I do every two weeks. And and on these calls, I basically just get updates on on what's happening and all the little fires that are go that are going on. That's one thing being remote. There's there's a lot that I just don't see. And even other team members don't necessarily see that that one writer is particularly overloaded with work or or one assistant is just really stressed out and something's going on with this client and and it's it's everything can be a little bit in its own silos and we're trying to build systems within Slack and having certain team member meetings to keep everybody on the same page.

But yeah, that's definitely a challenge.

And you miss the camaraderie. Right? Like, I know at my agency, we had this whole, like, office currency called units. And basically you were allowed to wager units against somebody else. I mean it could just be any stupid little bet, it could be over a foosball game, it could be whose receipt had the lowest dollar value, whatever, right?

And so you would make a wager with someone else in the office and then once you reached a certain number, you could cash those in for the other person to do something embarrassing, right? So we had a guy literally in an Ernie mask and he had to walk around street corners and down the sidewalk with a sign that was like honk if you're horny. And you know, had to get like five people to honk their horn and you had to keep doing it until you got those people, right? And so these little things just build relationships that I feel is sorely lacking in a remote environment and you can do everything you can try and make it happen. And Jordan's doing it now.

Jordan's building his team in Slovenia and he's there now. Right? Like why? Because it helps build the team, build the culture and without those things, think you just don't have that therefore it's not as fun. People aren't, in my opinion, as committed.

They're worried about themselves and working from home and they're not necessarily looking at it from the business' perspective and feeling like they're a part of, truly a part of a team. It's one thing to be able to communicate through Slack, but there's something to be said I think for in person relationships. And so I've kind of done a 180 and went from, oh man, remote's the dream to, you know what, it's necessarily all it's cracked up to be. And again, I think for us to go where we wanna go, the office is gonna play an important role.

Yeah. Sometimes I feel weird having those same thoughts. Like, I just old school? Am I wrong on it? Am I not looking at the right way?

Am I just being a bitch about it? You know, whatever it is. But it's just the truth.

Well, look at our community too, right? At least

for us.

Yeah. Our our community is is a lot of people that that wanna work work remote, they wanna travel, they wanna, you know, kinda have that, like, maybe lifestyle type business, and not that that's a, you know, a bad thing at all. But you know, so I guess those feelings are a little contrarian to I think what we're supposed to think. And so I actually have this whole article on this coming out. I'm not sure yet where, but it's basically, you know, diving into this.

It'll probably be like, Inc. Or Forbes or something, is where I'm I'm trying to get that placed. So, yeah. It's a it's a little contrarian, you know, for for this audience at least, I think.

Yeah. I mean, I've I've always been remote and and I also enjoyed being in like an in person office environment. I really enjoyed the the office I used to work at years ago. But I I mean, for me, it it it a lot of it just comes down to simple finances. When you're bootstrapping and self funded and you're hiring a lot of part time people, just, I mean, just finding talent is so hard and to limit it to just my zip code is like, I don't really even see how that would have worked.

And especially like where where we live, you know, it's it's not the cheapest part of the country and it's culture definitely suffers to a certain extent. You know, we do a lot of we try to do things on on Slack, We're, like, we're sharing pictures of where we live and what we're doing and and things like that. But, it's definitely not the same.

Cool. Yeah. It helps to you know, we we raised we raised a little money here recently. So that that certainly helps you kinda get over the hump and and make that more of a reality for sure. We we won't be raising more.

It'll just kind of a, you know, a seed round and that's it essentially.

Part I mean, part of it for me though is it's a little bit selfish too because I I wanna be working from home and I wanna have a completely flexible schedule as well. And not that I wouldn't if if we didn't have an office, but I I I would probably feel more of an obligation to show up every day and be there in the morning and and show the team that that hey, I'm here too. Whereas now, I I am working full time, more than full time.

You don't get the nagging feeling working from home that if you got up every morning and went to an office that you would be more productive and be more successful?

I definitely would be more productive. I had an office in Norwalk before we moved to this house. We looked for a house that specifically we could make an office, which I did.

So is it there's a conscious trade off?

It's definitely there there's definitely a challenge for me at home for sure right now. I mean, we've we've got two little kids running around, and we've got pretty thin glass doors in my office, and it's, you know, it it gets loud, and and it there's I don't have like my wife put it the other day that I don't have that decompression time that I used to have when I drove home from the office. It's now it's like literally I I open the door after dealing with with a stressful email and now I'm home. And I need to have like twenty minutes to go have a beer before I, you know, get into, you know, home life. And it there's that's definitely a challenge.

And, you know, I again, like my you know, my wife has been like super supportive about what I do and our situation where I work from home. And they know that like, during the hours of typically around 08:30 and around 04:30PM, like I'm basically working and that's kind of the priority. Yeah.

There is something to be said about that decompressing too. I know for me, I'll get up, I go into the next room and my wife's like, all right, here's the baby. Give me a couple of minutes. And it's a good time to like listen, either listen to music or podcast and just kind of, you know, think about the day. So, you know, I think that's but that's also something you can do even working remote too, right?

Like you can go for a walk at the end of the day or, you know, something like that just to kinda decompress a little bit. But yeah, there's you know, listen, there's I'm not you know, saying the office is you know, all pros, right? There's definitely cons to it. You know, it can be a distraction you know, especially when when you're you know, the founder, right? People, hey, got a minute?

Know, these hey, got a minute meetings all the time. You know, there's there's knocks on the door. You you hear things and you're just like

I even tell my I even tell my team on Slack almost every day, like, because they you know, they'll shoot quick questions to me over Slack. Like, hey. What do I do about this? I I gotta do this thing. What what's happening with that?

And I'm always like, just send it to me an email. Email to me. Email to me so that I can, like, deal with tomorrow. You know? Yeah.

On on yeah. On your time. Because I I the Slack too is it's a good interesting point because I asked that for periodically, I'll ask them to email it to me because to me sometimes it's a slack of if I see a little red number there that there's a task for me to do, right? And it's like if I go into that and I'm not able to accomplish it right then and there, I'll forget about it, you know? Like I wanna be storing these things in my head and so yeah, like if I go there and then they ask me something for me to do, it's like okay, well yeah, shoot me an email because I'll forget it or I'll send myself an email just saying check check, you know, so and so Slack message, you know, just to remind myself.

Yeah. And more times than not, I'm like out. I'm I'm like with the family or I'm not at home and I'm getting Slack on on mobile and I'm always just like, just email to me. I I literally, I'm not able to deal with it here. So Right.

Yeah. It's it's tricky.

You know? I don't know. We'll we'll see how it goes, I guess. You know? It's tough when you know, it's tough too.

So it was tough for in office to then go full remote, but now it'll be interesting to see, you know, kind of remote going into an office, you know. Luckily or unluckily, we've kind of thinned out the team pretty dramatically and and so, know, right now gonna be Damian and I and then, you know, a developer by then as well. But, you know, and then obviously going forward, everyone will just be, you know, they'll have had office experience. It's not like they're they're coming from a remote environment. So we'll see how it goes.

I think it'll be, you know, fairly smooth though. Yeah. Very cool. Good for you.

I'm excited to hear, you know, updates from you guys going forward. It sounds like you're at a a pretty big turning point. So that's cool. You know, just to round out some of the updates we were talking earlier about developers. I think all three of us are involved in in hiring developers at one stage or another.

And I'm on the software side of things at Audience Ops, we so I I mentioned we we have the 14 prepaid customers all all signed up. So that was that basically gave me the go ahead to, okay, we're pushing this thing forward. I'm gonna go ahead and hire a developer. So last week, I gave a test project to three different developers, and they all came in pretty close. They're all really pretty good, but one just kinda inched out the other ones.

And so I I officially hired them. They're they are a three person team in Montenegro. This week, they're just kinda putting together the the basic architecture. And then next week on Monday, we literally start coding the first the first lines of code. So I'm excited to to see that move forward.

And it's I'll be interested to see, like, how what's the pace gonna be like and how are the estimates gonna kinda shake out in terms of like, this is how much we could actually accomplish in a two week span. But that's all that's all moving ahead next week.

Yeah. Our our situations are, you know, we're we're all like, okay, we need developers, and then we're all doing it a little different, you know. So it's interesting.

Yeah. Well, you two are

In different stages.

Opposite because right, Justin? You went from service to software and left the service behind.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Now we're now we're a product and we don't have a lead engineer, you know. It's it's an interesting time period for sure.

You're you're sexy enough. Your company, of course, not you at all. Your company is sexy enough to attract the right person.

So Yeah. Makes sense too.

Yep. Yeah. I mean, our software is basically coming out of our service, the productized service. And the software is is designed and built around what we've been doing manually. And but we're gonna continue doing both sides, you know, software and service for, you know, the foreseeable future.

We've we've been talking about services internally ourselves. You you can't help it sometimes when people just people just ask you, could you just do this for me? You know?

A lot a lot of value to be to to be bought and sold there for sure.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. So I mean, we went from service the same thing, Brian, you know, like, just build build the product that allows you to to do, you know, perform the service. And then we went basically cold turkey and just stopped you know accepting sign ups on the done for you service but what we're going to end up doing is is we'll be raising prices with this new version of the product and what we're gonna be doing though is actually like getting a little more involved on helping them craft email sequences and whatnot.

So we're gonna kind of bring a little bit of a service element back into it that I think can also be a differentiator for us too.

I love that. I love that. We deal with it all the time. Whenever someone signs up for like, you know, 250, $500 a month, I'm like, I just this is the only type of client I want.

This is it. Right.

Just to be able to really get into the conversation with them and help them succeed is like, it's worth it, man. Grand a year for one customer. Don't need that many of those. You need a few 100 of those and you've a really nice business. But you can only do it if the price is right.

No. Cool. Just to show you guys how much I care, I think I've gotten 40 mosquito bites during the course of this podcast.

Oh, it's

Just you keep seeing me like look around. Yeah. It's

I'm I'm the guy that sits out back and just gets attacked by these things too. I know. Me too. Yeah. That's brutal.

Yep. I

don't know. Alright, ladies.

Alright. Good good stuff, fellas. Justin, good to have you on the show.

Yeah. Thanks for coming.

Thanks for having me.

Maybe we'll have you back on another I think you're probably in in the books for another time soon.

Yeah. Think so.

And, yeah. We'll we'll be back at it next week. Cheers.

Later. Later.