Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web with Brian and Jordan. I am Jordan. And you?

I would be Brian. You you are Brian.

How's it going?

I'm good, man. I'm in I'm in my hometown in Long Island. I'm at my dad's house in the basement office that I kinda, like, grew up in in business with. It it's, you know, it's always a trip to be back home and all these, like, crazy memories, so it feels good.

That's cool. You know, we were just talking before the recording. It it's such a small world. I'm and so you're in East Meadow, Long Island, the the town. And I am going to East Meadow, Long Island tomorrow with my family, which is where my father lives as well.

I'm not from East Meadow originally, Rockville Center, but but he's in East Meadow now. We're going down there to do some fog this day. But we're gonna just miss each other by a couple hours.

Yeah. By, like, an hour. Yeah. Yep. So we're we're we're officially, you know, on our New York tour for two weeks.

We're going to be here seeing family, seeing friends. My sister-in-law is having a baby, so we're here for a good reason. We're kind of having fun and, you know, just trying to manage working along the way in a way that gets things done but doesn't take away too much from family time. So definitely a tricky balance. Like, feel like I should be working, like, fifteen hours a day, but I never want to do that.

So I kind of, you know, like other people who work on their own, you kind of force yourself. Like, no, I'm not going to say no to this thing, this travel, this opportunity, this family thing, but just figure it out.

Yeah. Exactly. Like, is it just the weekend, or are you are you there for, like, a full week or what?

So we got here two days ago, and got here yesterday. I'm already lost track of time. Got here yesterday morning, and then we're here for a few days, then the city for a few days, then Connecticut for a few days, then that.

So it's a legit, like it definitely cuts into a whole, like, work week or two.

Yeah. So, you know, my my wife is cool, she understands. So we do our maneuvering, like going from, let's say, the city to Connecticut. We do that stuff at non working times. So either at night or on the weekend, or we kind of let the workday finish, and then have dinner with friends, and then hit the road to go back to Brooklyn, that that type of thing.

So it's, it requires a little bit of, you know, time management.

Yeah. Jumping around, and you got the the little kids. So

Yeah. But it this funny thing that happens when you go from West Coast to East Coast time is, like, you you at least in my head, you, like, buy yourself time. Yeah. So I didn't I didn't have to wait for super early. Yeah.

I'm like, oh, it's it's 11:30. Basically, thirty AM right now. I'm way ahead of schedule. Yeah.

Exactly. How

about you? What's going on your phone? We can jump in. Shoot. You wanna do that thing where we talk about what we're gonna

talk

about? Sure. So so I've got about four things on my list today. The first is KPI dashboard. I've been building out a really just a whole, like, upgraded KPI dashboard for me to look at for my audience ops business.

I've spent way way longer than I expected to spend on it. It took me, like, two weeks to get it to a point where I wanted it. But that's basically done now and I'll talk about that. And then a little bit of ops calendar notes or updates. Anyway, just some some things that are going on with that.

And then some audience ops team stuff, which seems to just be a never ending thing, you know, hiring more people and getting them trained and and the implications of all that on my time and and feeling backed up and all that. And then just an article by by Josh Pickford I I caught last night about being a solo founder. I thought he he really nailed it, and good to bring that one up and maybe talk about it for a sec.

Nice. I I haven't had a chance to to read that. I used to be a solo, and now I'm no longer solo. So I'm very interested to hear on that. Cool.

How about you? Cool. What's your list? My big theme is that I am just wrong just continuously. I just kids keep being wrong and learning from it though.

Yeah. The first big thing that I was wrong about is is where where to focus in terms of, like, should we push on marketing or should we take care of things at home first? The next thing is hiring. That kind of goes along with where to focus. But hiring is hard in in such a small company where each role wears many hats.

I've had a hard time just even describing what this role is. Okay, you do some sales and then you do some documentation and then you do a little support and then you so it's very hard to identify someone with those skills. So hiring, and then support. Customer support has been a big challenge for us. It's been a big challenge for me personally, and I've kind of done a lot of things the wrong way on that front, and I'm trying to correct them.

So I can kind of talk about what what I learned along the way there. Alright.

Yeah. Let's start it off. Yeah. So KPI dashboard, key performance indicators. Right?

Audience Ops, and I'm talking about the service side of Audience Ops here. It's gotten to a point now, we're like close to two and a half years into the business here, and I'm now in this mindset with this business of like, it is all about growth. I I don't expect it to be a super fast growing thing, not not going for hockey stick growth type of stuff, but I am trying to double it or triple it in the next six to twelve months. Right? That means I'm not so much focused on crafting our product or productized service, like that's set now and it's been doing well.

We've got a really good system, really good people, we've got well defined roles, we've got really good processes, we've got plenty of clients who've been with us, many of them for this entire two years or or a year or longer. So they're happy. I I think our retention and is is really good too. Our closing rate is is pretty good. I think it's really just about driving more leads and and traffic and and optimizing those funnels.

And in in order for me to really know what's working, know which levers I need to push and pull, I need to have a clear and easy visual into what are our key numbers at any given moment, but also what did the past three months look like, and how can I project the next three months and make smarter data driven decisions? Right? Because I and I'm actually writing a whole big article about this right now. I'm hoping to send it out to the list on Monday. But for me personally, like, I come from a background as like a designer kind of creative person, visual thinker, you know.

So spreadsheets, numbers, data crunching, that has never been my strength, you know, and every time I I've just always felt more comfortable operating on like gut feel instinct, I can get by with that, but I'm also very blind.

Yeah. There's there's there's a limit.

There there is a limit,

you know.

And and looking back on really the the last eight months or so, I could definitely point to times when, you know, the business suffered because I made poor big picture decisions because I didn't have the data right in front of me.

Right.

You know?

So your KPI dashboard effectively, is it focused mostly on a, the lead side of things, and b, you made it visual also?

So it is I broke it down into four big sections. The top section is customer metrics, so how many active customers do we have, what's our MRR, how many cancellations, how many new sign ups per month, how many cancellations, churn rate, that that sort of stuff. And then the next section down is what I call our sales pipeline. So how many new leads we got in this month? What is our close rate?

Oh, sorry. It's still at the top, the customer section. So I I mentioned active clients, MRR, new client sign ups this month, cancellations this month, and then I have graphs showing that the trend lines of those. I also have average customer lifetime in months, customer lifetime value, average customer MRR, and the customer churn rate. And I've got a graph of that.

Then moving down, I've got the sales pipeline section. And so in here, it's just how many new leads we got this month. And by lead, I I mean, for for this business, it's people who filled out the form to request a consultation, and and they eventually get a sales call with me. So how many new leads? What is the close rate on on those leads?

How many convert to clients? The average number of days to close. And to be honest, that number is like a lot better than I had just assumed that it was. I figured clients take like thirty days or more to close. In fact, like, they're closing in less than eight days from the time they become a lead.

The the surprising pieces of data are less.

I know. It's amazing. And then I have a number of, like, unclosed leads from the past ninety days.

Right. So you have, like, potential.

Yeah. Like, kind of how yeah. How many people are are currently in the pipeline? And ninety days might be a little bit too long of that window, but anyway.

I think you you should put some some Google AdSense on this page considering how many times you're gonna refresh it every day. Right.

And then my next big section down is traffic. And so I've I'm looking at total visitors in the past thirty days and just a graph of of traffic over time, how many visitors to the home page. And for for this site, our home page is our sales page.

That's Right. It's like

Home page, pricing page, sign up page, it's all the same.

Yep. I like that.

So so that's why I care about visits to that page. And then I have new visitors, so like, for first time visitors to the site, how many are returning visitors, and and then I've got a list of our top performing pages, a list of our top traffic sources. So like organic, referral, email, cost per click, social. And then I've got a graph of search traffic and a graph of paid traffic. So those are my traffic numbers I'm looking at.

And then moving down, I got a big section for email list. So I'm looking at total number of email subscribers, how many new subscribers we got this month, how many unsubscribes we've had this month. So within the the email list, I wanna know how many people requested our free samples. That's kind of a very much like a sales focused lead magnet, if you will. And then I've got our primary lead magnet that I call it.

That's our our video workshop, how many people opted into that. And then our kind of a second secondary magnet, our email course, how many people opted into that. So you've

got it you've got it connected all the way back into into the emails and and trying to figure out what's generating the the leads.

Yeah. I mean, those are these are just the KPIs. Like, I wanna know, you know, like, I I I think there was a period of about six months ago or so where our traffic was pretty high, but, like, our email list was stagnant. So it's like that tells me, like, well, not many people were converting and like not and that led to fewer leads in the funnel. So you you can start to make connections between these these these big pieces.

But, you know, building this thing out was before I had this dashboard, I had a different thing, which was just a Google spreadsheet. Basically, since day since the early months of audience ops, I had a basic spreadsheet that I updated manually. Like, it it was kinda ridiculous where, like, every new client that signed up or canceled Audience Ops, I would go in there and manually add their information to a to a row in the spreadsheet, and then just keep like a tally of of how many customers we have and how many how much MRR we we add at any given time and like

Look. At least you were keeping track of it. That's like better than 90% of people.

Yeah. You know, and I could I could get some basic numbers off of that, but it was far from complete. It was totally error prone and and all that. So and like all these other numbers like traffic and email numbers and and leads, those were all in separate places. Like, I could go into drip or I can go into Google Analytics or I can look at this and look at that, but having them in their separate silos made it impossible to like draw any real conclusions and connections.

Right? So, like, I started thinking about that, and I was like, you know, I think it's time for me to actually get something like this up and running. And I and I figured that I would spend maybe a day or two on like, on hooking all this up. I ended up spending literally like two weeks on this and then hiring a guy in India to custom program some stuff for me and like.

Yes. Perfect.

So so what I'm using to for the dashboard itself is Gecko Board, which is a pretty cool app. It's been around for a while to create a nice looking dashboard with some pretty graphs. Right? So, I mean, Gecko Board has a bunch of integrations for it, but the problem that I found was that, they're all pretty basic. Like, even, like, stuff like the Stripe integration, it'll just show you the number of active customers.

You can't really slice and dice the data from there. Same thing with, like, Google Analytics. You know, it doesn't give you everything. And Drip, like, it doesn't even have an integration for us. So I so what I had to do was get I heavily used Zapier to get all the data from those apps into Google Spreadsheets.

And then I did some really heavy calculations within the Google Spreadsheets, formulas, and some custom scripts to to to keep a a monthly historic tally of these. What the

Look. As long as we get an update in, like, six months where you're like, that dashboard changed the whole business. It was worth whatever time I put into it. That that's what we're gonna, like, put a little pin on this.

I know. I know. It's it's amazing. Part of the challenge for me is that I am not a programmer. Right?

If if I could write custom JavaScript functions, like, this would have taken me maybe two days instead of two weeks. And of course, like I

Should you have hired someone in the first place instead of trying to do it yourself?

Well, yeah. Like, I wasted three days trying to Google for scripts that I can copy and paste from Stack Overflow into Google apps and yet that and then I got frustrated with that and I was like, screw it. I'm just gonna spend $30 and hire two developers in India, but give them both the task and and twenty four hours later, they they did what I was trying to do myself. Yeah. You know?

That's another little lesson. Look, dashboards one of these things that it's almost certainly gonna end up custom.

Yes. And and just to be specific, and if in case anybody's wondering about what I'm talking about here, it's somewhat easy or easy for me to at least hook it up myself to get data from places like Drip and Stripe and Google Analytics, hook it up through Zapier and then grab those numbers and and put them in a Google spreadsheet. Like that's easy enough to hook up in real time. But the hard part is getting the monthly history. I can hook up and see the customer count today, but I I didn't have an easy way inside Google Spreadsheets to say, okay, what was the the customer count every month for the past twenty four months?

And like, and and record that. And and for that, like, you can't just use a formula in a cell. You have to actually have a script that runs on a monthly basis, grabs the current value, and then record and then, like, records that snapshot. And so I I didn't have the I thought that would be a simple thing to do, and I spent three or four days googling it. And it turns out it requires a somewhat complex, at least for me, like, JavaScript function script to to run.

So I I got that and then I I'm taking that data from the spreadsheet, putting it into a nice graph into Gecko board. And then it's it's nice because I could just open up the Gecko board. It's got a mobile app. I could check it out on on the go. No more like manually inputting customer data.

It's just every time a customer is added in Stripe, it's updating. Every time a customer is canceled, it's updating. Leads are updated, traffic, it's all it's all automated. So yeah, that's it.

Alright. Well, at least now you're you're flying with the more more lights on.

Yep. Exactly. Cool.

Well, I guess the first thing for me to talk about is kind of I want to be where you are in looking around saying, okay, the system is delivering the promise and the value, customers are happy, and now it's time for marketing. And I really want to be there, I just have had to admit that we're not there yet. I have been really stressed and really kind of down on myself on the fact that we are not doing more marketing. And so for the past, I'd say month or so, as we've grown, we keep growing quickly, and I just get more stressed. And it's it's unhealthy.

A, it's not good for me. It's also not good for the team to be like working for a year to get here, and now it's finally here, and mister boss man is like all emotional and like pissed off, you know, instead of being like, guys, you're doing an amazing job, which which I need to be doing more. And so I started asking around because I felt a little lost on it. I started asking, mentors, investors, people in the Starbucks office, the accelerator that were in Portland, just kind of talking to people like, Yo, what am I supposed to be doing here? And the response back from people that I respect has been universally the same.

And it's been, relax. If you don't do any marketing for the next thirty days, there's nothing wrong with that. Basically, response was, you are growing faster than most, and you should be really happy about your growth. And what happens is that growth is the best concealer of problems.

Yeah, and you have all this organic interest and demand for what you're doing. There Right. It like, obviously, you you can't rely on that forever, but while you're getting the product to where it needs to be, you still have that that organic inbound lead flow that's just keeping it moving.

When I saw that and I see it, the the inbound, I say to myself, think about how much bigger it could be if we actually were pushing also. So I I I wanna double it, you know, and and and because I'm most responsible for that side of things, the marketing side of things, then I want to do a good job. And and I'm looking at that, I'm almost saying like, I'm not really doing that much for the inbound, so I shouldn't be giving myself that much credit for what's happening. If I could push and then double it, then I could kinda like feel like I'm doing the right thing.

And you're and you're saying you're frustrated because you can't be working on the marketing stuff because the the product and your systems aren't aren't ready to handle that capacity or is in that case, shouldn't your job today be on improving the systems?

Yes, it should.

You know?

That's it it should, but I wasn't feeling that way. But I kept getting the same response from from other people and from just basically, if you the growth is concealing any issues we have because we're just adding in a lot of MRR, and yeah, we're losing a decent amount, but we keep adding more than we're losing. So if you just look at it that way, in in my head, I was like, alright, let's just keep growing. But in in reality, the the internal systems are being strained. The support system, the onboarding systems, the how we, basically, how we satisfy people.

I keep saying the word verse basically, so basically I'm gonna stop saying basically, and we're gonna basically move on. Okay. What I have decided after being hit over the head with it, you know, 10 times from people that I really respect. And then going back and looking with a different perspective at our current situation is I've had to say, okay, chill with the marketing, we got to get things on the home front in order. So I had put a job post up for like a salesperson, someone who's going to be focused on sales and marketing with me, and I took that down and put up a new job posting.

It was like a declaration. It was like an admittance, Right? Actually, no. We don't want to work on that. We want to work on this other thing first.

It's been a a

Where did you post?

I posted in Portland. So there's a switch

Oh, okay.

A site called Switchboard. There's a site called Silicon Forest. I posted on Craigslist because that's very active. I posted on Indeed. So a bunch of job sites basically, I'll stop saying basically.

It was like a buzzer. So, yeah, that's been the biggest shift over the past week, and now I feel happier. I feel less stressed. I'm more able to convey to my team how happy I am with them. We've we've kind of we have gone 60 x in the amount of revenue that we're processing on behalf of our merchants.

So, yes, 60 x in in like sixty days. So the system is working, the product is working. What we need to do is work harder and smarter on making sure that our existing customers and our existing sign up flow are satisfied and happy, instead of just masking over it with just doubling the trials.

Wait. So I I wanted to ask more about the hiring piece. Like, what what what is the problem that this person is gonna be solving right now?

So this is I I let me go to the job posting right now, and I'll I'll show you how confused this this is. First, I didn't even know what to call it, like the title itself. Right? So profile, let's look at this. We're gonna have a nice laughter.

You know, I have found that that, like, just changing the wording or the or the job title just really changes up the whole crop of applicants that you get because people because people identify themselves in a certain way.

You're right. And that's been one of the biggest challenges. No one thinks of themselves the way I described. Right. So when I when I hired for customer success last time, I had like 30 applicants.

This, I haven't had nearly the same response. It's starting to pick up more. Okay. So this is called hiring for inbound sales. So inbound sales.

Right? So I'm trying to convey that you're not out there prospecting. You're just dealing with the inbound flow. So inbound sales slash success role at fast growing SaaS company. Okay?

So the you'll be responsible for, one, helping new customers get set up and comfortable with the product, so basically onboarding. Number two, answering questions from prospects, so presales. Creating product documentation, so identifying when you get the same question 10 times, and how do I do this? You know, creating a document. Writing new feature announcements through email and blog posts, because that right now I do.

Whenever we have a new deployment every week or two weeks, now we're on two week schedules instead of one week schedules, we let everyone know. Our current trialing and active users, we let them know what's new in the product. And if a feature is important enough, we can write a blog post for it and send it out to the email list. Then managing social media accounts because we have no presence whatsoever. We're not we're not like projecting out into the world all the stuff we're doing, and then hosting product demos for when someone requests it and they say, hey, can I get a demo?

I want I want to say yes, but I personally have run out of time to do demos. So so that is a very confused list of responsibilities.

I think some of those things should be broken out and not the same person doing them.

I I think so too, but right now, we we can afford to hire one person. We're we're hiring two more on the on the dev side. And on on the marketing sales side, right now, can afford to hire one.

I would say most of those things that you listed can be the one person. Right.

Everything but the sales is is my guess.

Well, first of all, I would yeah. I mean, I guess it is sales because they're they're like presales questions they have to answer. But the thing that I question is managing social media. I don't think that person should be doing that. And and maybe even writing the big feature release blog posts, I think that should maybe be you.

The the feature blog posts, I agree. The quick little blurbs on intercom. What what ends up happening is, hey, guys, we have a new release, here are the three new things that that are new. And oftentimes, all three of those require a document in our docs to be written out on how to use it.

Well, I think that this person should should write documentation based on the most common questions that they're hearing, and that per that same person can do the product demos, and that same person is familiar enough through the demos and the writing documentation that they can certainly answer question presales questions on Intercom. Right? So I think all of that should be the same person.

Right. What can you do you have any feel for what that role is called? Is that customer success?

You know what? I feel like I feel like just including the word sales in the title might be misleading even though technically they are responsible for closing sales. Right. You know?

I didn't want I didn't wanna not mention that.

You know, because and I think that that might attract salespeople and that might not be who you need.

Well, I've gotten a mix, and what I've told people is it depends on which direction we go. I I put that job post out two weeks ago, and over the past week, we have come to the conclusion, like, okay, conclusion. We need more help on the support side. So so the salespeople, I've spoken to some great salespeople, but they're not gonna be happy in that role. They've been doing sales for the past five years and with a quota and demos and leads and and a funnel and and, right, they're not gonna be happy.

Yeah. I would I would keep sales out of the title for the job post, but but you could certainly say like one of the bullet points is like answering pre sales questions and doing demos with leads in our pipeline. When you say demos, do are you talking about, like, workshops or, like, one on one?

One on one, but it is not sales. It is just a literal demonstration of the product. It is here's how it work. It it either sells itself or not. There's no there's not much convincing and selling happening.

Right.

Right. Yeah. I would do I I don't see, I always question this this whole job title of customer success. I just feel like that's getting thrown around way too much these days. I I don't even really know what the what the fuck it means, but like and I think because it gets thrown around so much, it's it's making everybody unclear as to what type of person is a customer success person?

What love level are they? And when does a company actually need a customer success? So I mean but at the same time, I guess that's kind of what you need.

We we are getting into the muck of of the difficulty in hiring for something that you're gonna wear a bunch of hats, you're not just gonna do one thing, you can't be too experienced because then it's too expensive, you can't be that inexperienced because I have to teach you how

it Maybe call it like a customer support lead, something like that.

We have a customer support lead, and he's amazing. Okay. I know. I know. So okay.

So this is this is what I mean. It's been it's been a challenge. So all the different things around this from the job post, but the much more important thing and the larger lesson is the is the take care of home base first before marketing. That's that's really the conclusion of all these different things. And now, sure, it's hard to figure who to hire, and how to hire them, and what to call, and all that.

But the much more important decision was made, you know, just being hit in the forehead repeatedly by other people saying, I really think you should consider taking care of home base before marketing, and me dismissing it dismissing it, and then eventually, okay, I get the point. I'm wrong.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, in terms of like your job, like, that's your job now. It's not it's not to push on marketing. It's to it's to get your systems now down and the right people in the right places to to get the company feeling confident enough to, okay, we we can and we should triple our size by by next week.

Right. It's a change in role. I'm I'm sure very similar to way you experience from building audience ops with your hands, and then all of a sudden backing out, backing out, and then continuing to back out. It's it's it's a change in role.

Yeah. Yeah. So just, I guess, the brief update, which is pretty similar to what you were just talking about on my end. About a week and a half ago, we we brought on two new project managers at the same time. I decided to hire two instead of one because, well, a, we we just need two.

But being in the past, I found that with project managers especially, it's a really hard job to learn and get up to speed. It takes, like, literally months for a PM to get up to speed, and we found that our PMs tend to churn out. So figured I I I'd hire two. But both actually are off to a really great start. I'm I'm pretty confident that they'll both stick with us for a while.

And so that's good, but it has clearly just pulled hours of my time in in in the past week of just answering question after question after question and trying to train them. And we have training. We have a whole internal training course for them. I've got our internal team manager who's helping with training, got our other project managers helping with training, but at the end of the day, a lot of these questions get to me and I wanna be really like our project managers are some of the most important people, they're client facing. So I need to make sure that I'm I'm I'm giving them the best practices and giving them the the right training, you know, straight from me.

So it I care about spending the time with them, but it's it it has caused my inbox to pile up and my other projects to get backed up and You start to

see feel the worth of Yeah. A great employee.

And it's also very hectic. Like, they have so many questions that come up. It's just pull it's just pulling me. Like, suddenly, get a Slack message that I gotta stop what I was doing, break out of that, give them an answer, and then, you know, repeatedly throughout the week. And it's but I I think it it's still productive, though.

And and we're moving along and and now like

There's gonna be a period of of knowledge transfer.

Yeah. And I and I knew this going in, but I I think we'll be better for it, and we'll have more capacity to take on more clients. But then the other thing that's that's popping up now is we we've been signing up a bunch of clients and we are running out of capacity with writers. So now I need to hire another writer, which is, you know, every time I hire someone new, I know that it takes a a good two or three weeks to just get them onboarded before they're even able to work on any client work. And so

I always have to hire before the revenue gets there.

I know. It's like a lesson that I have to keep learning the hard way. And we have a huge Trello board filled with applications from writers, like hundreds of them. But and and so basically, whenever this happens, I first go back to that pile and look at the people who I saved last time around, which was like three like three or four months ago. But then the problem is, okay, let's invite those those guys and gals to interviews, but now they're now they've already taken a full time job somewhere or like

So rude of them to not just wait for us.

I know. Right? They should just be sitting around waiting for my call. Yeah. So that's that's been going on, but I think we're just it it's getting better now and and those new PMs are gonna be taking over, you know, managing some clients starting next week.

And so that's that's pretty good. I guess the only last thing I wanted to mention was Josh Pickford's article on being a solo founder over on the Bear Metrics blog. I thought I thought he really, you know, nailed it. Just talking about the challenges of being a solo founder. Obviously, I'm a solo founder, and I completely resonated with everything he was saying.

We're just gonna link it up in the show notes for you guys to to check it out.

What's it about, though? Is it just challenge the

Yeah. So I think he actually had some pros and cons. Like, are some pros. You get to, like, move faster, and there's less drama, there's you have a clearer direction because it's coming from one person. But frankly, the cons outnumber the pros, and I'm and I totally agree.

I mean, a big one is like you get he he wrote, you you get tired of making so many decisions. So like decision fatigue, like even like little decisions, big decisions, it it is super super tiring. Everything comes back to you. You don't brainstorming ideas, that's a big one. Like, you don't have like for you, you have Ben, you guys can go back and forth and even push back on each other on on ideas and I don't have someone like that.

That

can be exhausting too.

Yeah, but you know what, like

Different thing, different thing.

Different thing because got a team that I could throw ideas around with, but at the end of the day, we go with whatever I wanted to do, you know, because they're not partners. They're not on the same level. Yeah. You know, just loneliness and like it's easy to make bad decisions, you know, and he has some tips like you should be in communities of other founders, mastermind groups, you know, it it give more autonomy to your to your team to to have ownership over certain decisions so you can delegate those. I've been trying to get better at that.

Prioritize mental and physical health, which I'm always trying to get better at and kinda struggling with. Yeah. And, you know, I guess just two tips of my own having been, you know, solo founder and struggling with it, but I think getting more and more comfortable with it over the years. Two quick things is one, I've just become like a relentless notetaker. So literally every day, multiple times a day, I am in my notepad.

I use the Bear app for this bullet point list after bullet point list.

Really? Do you ever go back and read it? Or it's just Yeah. For the act of doing it helps also?

Both. Because it helps me make decisions. Because again, that decision fatigue thing, it's like, there are so many big decisions to make, and I don't have somebody who's truly on my level. I can go to my mastermind group and friends like you and other people like but like, you're not in my business day to day. And so I use my notes to literally just get it out of my head and onto paper, and when I have to write it down, I feel like even though nobody else is gonna read this, I feel like I have to like make the case.

Because, like, if I'm writing it down, like, what I'm writing has to make some level of sense, you know? You know, so I have to kinda, write out my arguments for deciding one way or the other. Or or usually, I write out both arguments, and then I read it and I'm like, okay, one is more obvious than the other at this point. So I'm constantly doing that. And and also I I'll I'll like write and rewrite the same note multiple times as as my thinking changes.

Just my other tip is is to same same deal with the decisions just like, make more decisions faster. That's that's my big thing is like, I used to just stew on decisions. If I don't know, then I would just wait and maybe I'll get more information. And if I just give it more time, and that just makes it harder and harder and and it kind of drives me crazy. And so what I've what I've learned is like, it's better to just decide fast.

And it doesn't matter if you're obviously, it matters if you're right or wrong, but you're much better off making more decisions as fast as you can because the more decisions you make, the better you get at making decisions and the faster that you get, and it's a cycle that just helps and and it keeps growing. So

I buy that, but I have a hard time I don't stew around decisions for so long. What I do is is the half measure. Well, let's do this because that satisfies one part of the decision, but it still leaves the other decision open for later. And and that's just just just as bad.

I got that to a point now where it it like really really bugs me when I've already made a decision, and then something comes back into my plate like, wait, no, like I already decided that. I don't wanna have to think about it again. Like Yeah. Just don't bother me with the same decision again.

Right. But the reality intrudes. We we have made the decision to not do custom work for this period, but then this morning, I got off I didn't even notice who I was having a demo with, and then I looked at their email and was like, oh, shit. Like, I woah. Let me get my my serious game on.

And then all a sudden, you're you're talking to a big potential customer, and it's hard not to say, Yeah, we can do that for you. No problem, because I want your money and your credibility. It's tricky.

Yeah. Yeah. It's tricky balance, but

Alright, man. We got to call it a day. What I want to say is basically basically thanks thanks for for listening. Listening. Yep.

Thanks

for thanks for listening to our ranting. And, yeah, we'll be back at it another one.

Cool. Talk to you soon. Alright. See you.