Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, this looks like it's gonna be the last one of the year.

Yep. Another year of Bootstrap Web. Another year.

We've been doing this a while, bro. This is three years now.

Is it almost three years? Wow.

I I really have no idea, but it feels like that.

I know that like, we don't really count episodes, I I don't think anymore on the website, but on in our files here, I think we're up to, one sixty five, something like that.

Okay. Okay. So What were we talking about back then? Who knows? Who knows?

Who knows?

I don't I don't even wanna know. We should have pulled up last year's episode. I I didn't even do that. I I don't even know what we were talking about for the the goals for for this year, but I know that they are way different twelve months later than than what actually happened. So

Yes. That that would be interesting to go back. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm gonna do that on my own time. Anyway, I hope everyone listening is, you know, getting ready for December, for the holidays, get some family time, some downtime.

You know? I I don't know. There's two different approaches that I hear to December. It's, oh, it's quiet. Let me let me recharge, or, oh, everyone's being quiet.

Let me go crazy and make progress. I just I

think I'm in the I'm in the latter camp. We we've got, like, some family stuff going on this weekend, which will be a fun kind of change of pace, but you know what, actually audience ops tends to be pretty busy in December. I know a lot of companies like have a slowdown because of the holidays. For us almost every December, I think, we've had a really big surge in new sign ups and and all this stuff, and and that definitely happened, this week.

Oh, that's good. That's good. We've gotten quieter. We're we're at about half our regular volume of, like, sign ups and trials and all that. So it's just kinda a a chilling out overall.

Black Black Friday was, you know, bonkers. There was some stuff going on, but, generally, everything's slowing down. So, you know, we've made the analogy before of pulling back the string on the crossbow, and that's what December feels like. All geared and aimed toward an assault the January. How do we just amass all the forces to just boom all at once?

I'm focusing all of this month right now on building the new productized course. A lot of the craziness that kind of happens with audience ops and team changes and client emails and that kind of stuff, that does tend to calm down, although we we did have a bunch of new sign ups, but that really doesn't take a lot of my time except for just sending them onto the team and they they kind of take care of it. But so I I do like to use this slowdown to to get a lot of work done on stuff, and I'm working on on product highs right now. That that's coming along.

Nice. Yeah. We have a lot of lot of shame embarrassment happening in the company right now. We have a bunch of new people. When there's someone new, like, you increase the capacity.

So what happened like, let's just say customer success. Like, we just hired a second person. So the first person was, like, totally overwhelmed. He's doing sales. He's doing demos.

He's doing everything. He's doing so you you can't do everything. So when someone new comes in and then we look at something and we're like, well, that's just just an embarrassment, what we have in this in this particular thing, that this is really what we what we have. And then you look around at each other and we're like, I guess we can fix that now. I guess I guess we should fix it because we have enough

time That's why you're here.

You know? So we we keep finding, like, looking into, like, these dark corners that have been ignored and being like, Jesus, that's really how we're doing that. And then all of a sudden addressing it because now there are multiple people. So it's been kind of a funny process.

That's great. And, you know, I'm just kind of rolling along with the software stuff. I'm doing a really bad job of tracking this, but we're getting a bunch of signups for Ops Calendar. I know that some are coming from my audience, and I also know that some are not. They're just randomly coming to it, like Googling it and stuff organically, and we're getting signups.

I actually took your advice from the last episode. I was doing this manually before, but I just now put an automated drip email that I think it goes out two hours after the trial sign up happens. It's a drip email, but it's a personal email from me that says, Hey, thanks for signing up. I'd love to get on a call and do a free demo with you or at least just send me something. I don't know.

I forgot exactly what I wrote in that email, but I'm asking them for feedback. I think we had something like five or six trial signups in the last week. I think four of them actually replied to that email, you know, and and a lot of them are like really long, you know, detailed requests and stuff, so it's been pretty cool.

Very nice. Very nice. Yeah. We just keep doubling down on that. We we had a a nice drip disaster this this week.

We we screwed one thing up and then realized that our new sign ups were going through the wrong workflow. So, like, congratulations. Thanks for signing up for a $300 a month product. We're just not gonna send you a welcome email. And then, like, three days later, we'll send you, like, email number four in the onboarding sequence.

And then on day nine, we'll be like, you need any help with anything?

And you're and then you're, like, trying to, like, market them some other product. Yes. Yes.

Yep. So that's what was happening from the past, like, two weeks. And we're like, Jesus, guys.

Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, right now, I don't have any other onboarding except for the I have like, in the app, we have the some videos, some KB docs, but, like, I just I just have the one email after they sign up, and that's Okay.

That's a start.

You know? It's it's a start. So yeah.

Yeah. A lot of a lot of humble, humbling activity over the past few months. The experience in the past few months has been funny because you know how people talk about, like, the growth is great, but it will it will mask problems. What we we had a tidal wave of growth and then it just all left. And the beach is scattered with bodies, my friend.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So it's it definitely exposed a lot of a lot of weaknesses. The good thing is it's it feels like, okay.

We still have a lot to improve, which means there's a lot more to get better, Then there's a lot more growth after that. Okay, let's do it.

Right. All right. Well, let's get into our year end episode. I think what we'll try to do is we'll look back on 2017. I listed out a few kind of lessons learned if I had to boil it down to just a few things.

Then I guess we'll call them 2018 goals, but I don't really like that word for it anymore because goals never stay in place very What

are they?

Are they predictions?

Are they general sense of a direction that's going to go? Or I mean, I can appreciate people who who say, you know, specific goals are very helpful. I can see that. It does feel trivial to just guess what, you know, what's exactly gonna happen.

That's that's the conclusion I'm coming to. I'm thinking about it more like 2018 themes or like Okay. Like new approaches that I want to take in 2018, but I'm not like, I think last year, a year ago, I was like, I'm going to launch this, this, and this, and this is what we're going to do in quarter one, and then by quarter three, we'll be launching this. Quarter four, we're going to be doing that. Those plans totally changed within just a matter of months.

Right. I remember being scared by your goals last

year. I know. I scared myself. Like three months in, was like, oh, screw it all.

That's good. Now I have a few key numbers that I am fixated on. I'm saying I wanna add, you know, an average of x amount in MRR per month over the year. That means by the end of the year, I wanna be at a particular MRR. Like so I have a few key numbers, but but not, like, by the end of this month, this thing, and this other thing, and it's it's more more general on the way there.

Just thinking about numbers, I don't have exactly, like, specific numbers, like revenue numbers, but I and I'm thinking about it more, like, for for this coming year, 2018, different allocation. I want revenue to be allocated in different places in 2018 than it is now, so yeah, we'll get into it. Why don't we start with 2017? I've got about four things listed, so like boiling down to different lessons. You want I mean, do you have stuff for 2017?

For '20 yeah. Yeah. 2017, you know, it it it's it is always healthy to look back in the aggregate for the year because I don't know about you, but it's very rare that right now I just feel fantastic and I'm skipping around saying, isn't everything amazing? That that's rare. But looking back and and really what this is, this is like a preview of my end of year investor update.

Right? It's one of the good things about having investors is that you feel compelled to, like, summarize and tell people what's been going on. So that the the end of year investor update is a a very split personality, which which is exactly where the company is right now. If you look in the aggregate, 2017 was spectacular. Gangbusters can't really ask for that much more.

The the vanity metrics are let's see what the vanity metrics. We went from four people to 14 people. We went from processing $5,000 a day to processing a million dollars a day. MRR has gone up by 350%. Those are the okay.

You had an amazing year. Right? Everybody, let me let the applause die down. But in in reality, it is it was very humbling to basically be exposed for just not being nearly as awesome as you think you are. Going from four to 14 people means you have to start managing people and then you realize, Oh, I have no idea how manage people.

Okay. I'm a newbie on that. And then the growth is awesome, then all of a sudden, I ramped up expenses along with that, so now the pressure is way up. Also, all these things have a counterpoint. All those vanity metrics that sound great have a mirror image of each other that's darker.

That's okay. Well, now you need to learn a whole new set of things. For example, we've been really focused on our tech and QA process because we want to do bigger releases, go faster, but not introduce issues into the system. Because of the nature of our product, when you introduce problems, it shakes people's confidence. Confidence.

It's dangerous, and we've done a little too much over the past few months. We wanna eliminate it. I have been learning about the function of a CTO and tech process and the difference between quality control and QA and all these things that I just I've been running a software company for three years. I had no idea about this stuff. So the my 2017 looking back is, okay, have to be happy with the overall performance, but it's very clear that there's a huge amount of pressure on the skill set needing to go up.

So like remember we talked about, I haven't really been into blog posts, I haven't really been into advice, I kind of know what I need to do, And now that's changing. 2,018 looks like it needs to be like, I got to read books. I need to go to conferences. I need to really learn and get better, a lot better. Otherwise, it's it's not gonna work out the way the way it should.

Yeah. I mean, just talking to you every week, it has been pretty exciting to see the growth and just the, really, like transformation of Cardhook in the last year. I mean, you guys are, like you said, like four to 12 people and the MRR growth, I mean, pretty it's impressive stuff. Obviously, for most people listening, it's never I mean, I think for everyone, there's always a tough side that it's not always visible on the surface. As exciting as growing a startup is, in many ways it does not get easier it only gets harder.

2017 for me was just a really rollercoaster year. A lot of really tough, bad lows then some pretty good recoveries, I'll say. Getting away from the numbers for a second, I did know that back in January 2017, December, was expecting 2017 to be not a big growth year because I was definitely diving into a big investment year into, I want to reshape the whole product line and expand into SaaS and do all these different products all that. I think in that sense it was kind of a success Looking back overall, it was a long, slow period, but now a year later, the products that I wanted to have in place actually are in place. We're still working on them, but heading into January 2018, I'm ready to step on the gas marketing wise OpsCalendar, the SaaS product.

Productize is going to relaunch with a whole new marketing strategy for that, all new product there, and I actually have another software product in the works that I haven't talked about yet. Uh-huh.

Kind of a

shiny object thing that popped up this year. I could maybe, talk a bit more about that in minute, but without saying what it is. In that sense, product wise, I accomplished that goal of growing beyond the productized service, getting into more software, and really thinking strategically and working towards building a better line of different products that I can go into 2018 and and build a a more cohesive multi product marketing strategy around, if

you will. Right. The value letter that we talked about and and different entry points and different price points. So it does sound like 2017, you expanded, and it's really hard to grow everything as you're expanding. Right?

It's almost like

Yeah. Yes. But I think there a there was another layer of pain to go that was also happening in 2017, which was basically going back to the 2016 when I made the decision to pull the trigger and start investing in building the SaaS. I did a whole validation process. I had presales and all this, and I had a bunch of profits saved up in a business savings account.

Audience Ops was growing like crazy. In the first two years of Audience Ops, it was on this trajectory to really grow big. That was the 2016. Into the 2016, I'm like, alright, I'm ready to go ahead with this. Then starting at the 2016, probably like November 2016, lasting until I'd say March into April 2017, it was just a slow kind of string of cancellations with Audience Ops.

And that was after I started investing big big time into the developers for Ops Calendar.

Right. So right as you're investing, the revenue doesn't go where it's expected to go.

Yeah. And, I mean, we were still signing up new clients, so it wasn't like a cliff. It was just a slow drip downwards. We still had a lineup of really solid clients that haven't gone anywhere. But we had some newer clients who had signed up in 2016 who didn't last very long into 2017 combined with a slowdown in sales.

We had some sales, that slowed down as well. So that was like a six month process of it kind of slowing down. So it took me like three months to realize that it was not just a holiday slowdown and not just this and that, it was actually like a real trend. And so then that kind of shook me off my game a little bit. I pause had some of the development on Ops calendar.

I had to reshake some of my marketing strategy for Audience Ops. One of my big lessons learned in audience ops was to improve our onboarding process, which almost overnight fixed all of those churn problems. Out of that painful period, that also resulted in, I think right now we probably have the lowest churn rate that we've had yet. It's amazing how important onboarding is, specifically for a productized service. It's important for SaaS too, but I think it's even more for a service because if you make the first month a total knock it out of the ballpark and just really overcommunicate and set expectations This even goes into the sales process before they even sign up.

Really set crystal clear expectations and just nail down your processes with the team. If you can just hit a home run after the first month, the client is so much more likely to work with you to make this thing work for the long term. And it sets everyone up for success, helps us help the client better, and I think we made some improvements internally that really helped. Part of the other painful thing early in the year was that I had a bunch of the team and a lot of the costs were really eating away while I was investing in OpsCalendar and while the revenue was kind of stagnating. So that was just really painful.

Then, you know, by April, I think April is when sales started to pick up again. I improved some things on the sales front. I did some marketing things that helped and we improved churn. And so now, like the summer into the rest of the year, audience ops has been growing again, which is nice. That allowed me to kind of restart ops calendar and do a big new push into that these past few months.

So that's just been like a rollercoaster ride, like on both sides of my business, and just mentally it's been taking a toll, I think, all year long. Like you know, the the toughest thing I think of this past year was, like, after 2015 and 2016 of just steady, crazy growth in audience ops, that that did not last. Like, it's it's back to growing now, but it's not as fast as it as it was then. And, like, that mentally, that fucks with you. You know?

Yeah. And and and it's really hard to be in that situation where things are growing quickly and and just convince yourself, I will not assume that this is gonna continue because it feels like, oh, this is now how it is now because I'm awesome. So clearly, it's just gonna keep going like this. This is something I learned from my from my working with my dad because he was you know, when you come here with a family and you can't mess around, there is no support system. There's nobody else.

If you screw up, don't have a house, so it's unacceptable to screw up. He would always just take, okay, here's what we think is going happen. Here's what would be nice if it happened, here's the downside, and here's the disaster version. What happens if we just assume that the disaster is going happen? Let's just make sure that everything is fine even if the disaster happens and then you start to plan, okay, how do we make the best possible thing happen?

But my math tells me that even if the disaster happens, still good. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think that's really smart. And I think, I made a lot of investment decisions, like investing in the in the product at a time when things were growing so fast. Then I was kind of I didn't want to abandon that because that had a lot of momentum. I was a little bit too slow to to to fix some of the cost issues in in audience ops, but those have been now fixed. So so the whole business is a little bit more scalable up and down.

So as things kinda got better in in the summer, that's when I started to or like late summer is when I started to to reinvest in in software development. And that's when I I hired a couple new developers, and one one I had to let go pretty quickly. I talked about that, but then one stuck with. So right now I have two kind of almost full time developers and one part time developer working on ops calendar, and I did a whole big push with them. I think through that process, really through the whole past year of building OpsCalendar, I really developed just a whole software development process internally for myself.

I've been involved in web projects before and I've worked on software projects, but now I have so much more confidence for myself just the experience now to go in and build a SaaS product. Obviously, this is not a successful SaaS product by any means, but just the mechanics of it, like working with Laravel and hiring developers a whole development process and a GitHub workflow and all this kind of stuff. My strengths, where I can add a lot of value on the design and the user experience and the front end and then how I work with developers. Now I'm just really excited that that's a new kind of competency in my business that I can just continue on into 2018. One of the frustrating things that happened in 2017 was I talked about how I had to pause the developers because of cash flow issues, but then I was ready to restart again, but they were not ready.

They had other projects. It was like another two I had to wait, like, another two months to get them back on board, and that's that's what started me to to hire new people. And so now I'm like, I don't wanna let my developers go anywhere. I need to keep feeding them my work. Know?

There's danger in that because it could throw throw everything off.

And so what happened was I had this other SaaS product idea. This came about in well, it actually came about several years ago and then I I held off on it and never did it. It's kind of like a scratch your own itch kind of, you know, produce a byproduct out of out of something that you're using anywhere way type of tool kind of thing.

Okay. Okay. That's interesting.

And so I'll talk more about it in the next few months. But what happened was I had a bit of shiny object syndrome, a bit of mental craziness with the business going everywhere back in the summer. I started designing and started specking out this second SaaS product. It's a simpler, not as complex as OpsCalendar, but anyway, I specked it out, but then decided to wait, I'm going to pause on that, I've got to stay focused on OpsCalendar.

Yes, you do.

And then I did the whole sprint that we've just kind of wrapped up now over the past two or three months with the guys, and we made a lot of progress on it. And now we're in December, And I think we hit a goal in terms of the product where I don't want to continue to build out new features in Ops Calendar until we get more users in it and getting more feedback and stuff like that and more marketing going. So I don't want to just let my developer go or reduce all of his hours and let him get tied up with other projects. So I was like, how can I keep him busy? I had this shiny object idea from like months ago that was actually like, but I had already done all the work of like designing it and writing out all the specs and like getting it started.

I just had to I did spend a few hours with him this past week, like, getting it rolling, but it like, that that's his project now for the next month or two while ops calendar is in this. So now I have, like, one developer who's who's still working on ops calendar and one who who's now working on this other product.

Oh, so excited. I'm I'm a little worried. I'm worried, but I'm excited.

You know, but but it's like we're we're reusing all of our same workflows. You know, I I have a a rapport with this guy now. Like, it's it's like kind of up and running, you know, and we're using a lot of the same systems, same like, you know, so it's, Not

to over engineer it and get it launched.

Yeah. And, and we're even improving things like, like, a lot of the, I think mistakes that, that I made early on with OpsCalendar, we're doing even more efficiently with this, with the second thing. But again, like it, I still think OpsCalendar will be the focus going forward. And this is really just more of like a, like a smaller side tool that I'm gonna be using it anyway, and then we're gonna kind of release it for other people to use. I know we're just kind of jumping all over the place.

This this episode has no structure, but Whatever.

Yeah. It's just what we're thinking about at the end of the year. You look back, and then you look forward.

Yeah. I got a couple other things, but why don't we bounce it back over to you?

2018, I think, is gonna be you know what it is? Regardless of what issues are currently happening right now, we just still have a very high level of confidence that we can can tackle them. The biggest challenge of 2017 was was tech. Technology was that was our our weakness. The market we knew that we were building something that the market wanted, and we had to make these constant trade offs.

We had two engineers for for a really long time up until, I think, July or August. And we had to keep making trade offs between speed and stability. We we kept going back and forth, and then, okay, now we're in the speed phase. Now we're the stability phase. Now we're in speed.

That was just really challenging for two engineers to deal with and then for Ben to run the product side. Was a challenge. It feels very much like we are just scratching the surface on the potential of the business and revenue growth, but it will not happen without the tech, which is why we kinda talked about our growth went very quickly through q three, and then in q four, it's been leveling off. So with that leveling off, we've just kind of said, well, now is the time. Now is the time to set ourselves up to be able to have a much more stable tech process and platform so that we can add the other features and functionality that the market wants while being very confident in marketing it and growing the user base that the platform is not gonna break and bugs aren't gonna slow things down and support won't be bogged down and all that.

So that's 2018. My thoughts for 2018 are all about how do we make sure that we don't have that same back and forth and back and forth between speed, stability, speed, stability, and it's much more about consistency. And then the business side is what we've kind of built up the most and where we've invested the most in the past few months. So we are overgunned, You know, the surfing terminology in terms of, like, a big wave and little wave, sometimes you you I like saying this like like I've surfed since, since I was in college. But it it's a good analogy.

Sometimes on little waves, if your board's too big, it's no fun, and you're overgunned. You're like, alright. Cool. Hopefully, the waves get bigger. In our situation, that that's that's where we are.

We are over we have a head of content. We have two people in success. We have two people in support. We have a marketer. We're kind of overbuilt on that side, but it's all in anticipation.

It's a gamble that I really, really want to make sure that it looks like a good gamble. Somewhere right around September 1, which very much like your situation, actually. September 1, I said, okay. I have two choices. I can go slow on hiring and spending and get revenue further along and take the safer route.

And then once revenue is further along, then start hiring. And the upside of that is just a safer financial path. And the downside of that is that's gonna be too late because it takes time to hire people and get them onboard and up to speed. And so we'll be two to three months behind on our marketing success support functions, and that will that will deter or retard the the ability to grow. The other option is, okay, start spending now, increase expenses with the anticipation that the tech will get better.

And when it does get better, everyone's up to speed, everyone's fully staffed, and then it's boom, and they will get the full effect of having a team that's up to speed. That was the gamble, September 1. Of course, it coincided exactly with things stopping to go straight up into the right, and so now I'm stressed. But I still think it was the right thing because now we are we're locked and loaded, baby. We're we're ready to roll on the marketing side.

And I have full confidence in the tech while it's not you know, while it's been a bit painful the past few months that they'll get it, and they'll get it to a point that it's consistent and stable enough that the marketing side can be unleashed without without being slowed down by, by tech issues.

Yeah. It's amazing, like, when these, like, investments happen, like, right right after a whole big wave of growth, and then the growth stops after you've kind of pulled the trigger. That exactly happened to me in 2016. Then in 2017, I did make the same calculation again in the 2017, to hire a bunch of new developers and hustle on do a sprint of all these new features in Ops Calendar rather than just kind of bootstrap along with my hello, I'm still bootstrapping, but with one developer or two developers kind of chugging along and do a feature a week for a long stretch of time. I want to get the product to where it needs to be in two months, and I think we actually did that.

Now marketing has to catch up. I sent this email to the Ops Calendar early access list, which is not really very big at this point, but sent it last week, and I was like, Alright. Here's a list of 10 new features that that I should have been telling you about for the for for the past ten weeks, but I don't know. Here they are. Just so you know, we we launched all this stuff.

Just trying to catch up, you know, and and there's all these, like, marketing things that I'm gonna kinda get rolling in in early twenty eighteen. You know, like, 2018, I think, me is gonna be much more about marketing. So, like, 2017 was about get the product line reshaped and get things in order to get new products in place to start marketing, and then 2018 will be to do that big marketing push. What I would like to do is because right now, audience ops is on is is finally in a really good place. We've gone through the fast growth phase, but during that phase I was still building a lot of the systems and optimizing the systems.

Then we went through kind of a little rough patch there, and so then I had to work again on reducing churn and refining our systems to reduce churn and really optimize every step of the experience for clients. I did that over the summer. Now it's growing again. I've got a solid team in place again, and so now I can be much more hands off with audience ops, and that's kind of funding everything that I do. So now it's really all about how can I diversify the product line and grow the revenue and and profit on the other parts of the business other than audience ops?

That's really the big goal for for 2018.

You have any, like, ideas on specifics on I I know what we're doing. We're doing a webinar next week on Tuesday, and what we've done is we've just marketed to our existing list. It's basically practice. It's, okay, let's go through this process. We're doing it fully legit, so we didn't just send an email, but we also are running Facebook ads to a custom audience of our existing list.

We're doing everything and then we're seeing, okay, what are we going to learn from this so that in January we can start doing webinars once a week or once every two weeks?

I'm going to have some more specific marketing stuff for ops calendar in 2018, but really the big picture is I decided that I'm gonna kind of embrace the fact that like, if I focus on my personal stuff, everything else kind of trickles down from there. Cause like for a long time I was like, know, I'm going put my personal stuff to the side. I need to get funnels working for audience ops specifically and ops calendar specifically. Eventually I'll have those things built out as well, but at the end of the day, found that 90% of the customers and clients that have come in come from my personal audience.

Yeah, you can go with it or try to find it.

And I have the productized product, which is still a very significant revenue and profit center in my business. It's it's significant. So I'm so that's like a a top of funnel product, if you will. Not that every member of Productize would necessarily be a fit for my for Audience Ops or for Ops Calendar, but people who who find those products tend to also find my other stuff or or maybe one before the other. You know, I'm launching the new productized course in in January 2018, and I'm going to have some marketing funnels built around that, paid traffic to get people to my personal list and to webinars for Productize.

And then on the back end of that, there's more marketing that ties into this is what audience ops is and this is what ops calendar is, and these are how these products came about and why they exist and who they're for. That's kind of how I'm going to tie them all together. But then, you know, again, I'm gonna I'm also going to build out specific paid traffic webinars, cold email outreach, things specifically for ops calendar. One, one of the things like I, I need to get better, better at maybe mentally is just that like, I need to stop. I know that in the past I've, I've not let marketing experiments run for long enough.

I feel like if I, I tend to just like turn them off if I don't see results right away.

As opposed to tweaking them and changing them and kind of sticking to them.

Yeah. And, and really just like traffic wise, like I, I've been okay with, with generating like organic traffic and, and a lot of like kind of, loyalty in my list. And I get really high open rates and really good engagement on my content and stuff like that. But, when I'm doing like paid traffic and trying to like double or triple our traffic and leads, like I need to be more aggressive with that stuff and stay aggressive for a longer period of time. And so I think now, now that like between the recent black Friday sale and audience ops has, has really picked up in the last month, like I've actually have a lot of firepower to play with going into 2018 now.

So, you know, I I wanna set like a a real marketing budget that no matter what, I'm gonna spend this budget every month and figure out what's gonna what's gonna be the right mix of of channels to work.

Right. Search search for the the holy channel.

Yeah. I wanna kinda send this question to you, but, like, like, what about you personally in terms of your role and the things that you spend your time on day to day? Like, has that changed in 2017? Do you see that changing in 2018? Like, I I I have some thoughts, for myself.

In in my in my what? Like, my what I do day to day?

Yeah. Like, in the business.

It's hard to even say. It's it's very weird what I do during the day. It's not that I've hired myself out of the job. It's not that I've hired people to do what I used to do. It's that I was genuinely bad at doing it, and now we hire people who are actually doing it.

Like, if I if I'm honest with myself, I'm just not that good at executing on tasks and focusing on them and getting it launched and, you know, I I talk about it because I know what I want to get done and then I'm not good at doing it. That's just be be very honest.

I really, I think the role that that you're in is is the strategic direction and

Right. Which is which is now finally looking like a reasonable thing. When it was just a few of us, it was it was not good. That that's kind of what I'm learning about myself, at least, that I'm not good at a very, very small team situation because I'm not I'm a great talker and motivator and strategy on what the market wants and what we should do and what the ideal thing is and what the ideal partnership is, but I'm not really actually good at executing stuff day to day. The one thing that I am genuinely good at is partnerships, how we've grown the business.

I would push back on that because I think you're really good at making strategic directional decisions. Maybe the day to day management and the execution, but that stuff should be delegated to a better manager. Right? Right.

It was weird, though, when it was four of us and I was the only person in marketing, I really wasn't generating that much marketing activity. We've kind of made it through on those strategic decisions of the Shopify market is enormous and on fire right now and they want this thing that doesn't exist. Let's put all our chips on building that thing. Yes. But that's not a day to day task and activity.

That that part's good. We've hired not for what I used to do, and we've hired for what I should have been doing the whole time. I'm in a better place for my skill set and personality, is leading people, motivating people, making strategic decisions, and forming partnerships. I think I will be better at this job than I was at the previous job.

Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, think looking back on 2017, definitely the days, like the hours of the days that I enjoyed doing what I'm doing the most and I actually felt the most productive and making the most progress was working on the software products, like designing, doing front end code, working through the product iterations with the developers.

I was spending most of my morning hours for this year, but especially the last few months, on that. I love that. Like, that's that's what I love to do, and I think I think these products are actually turning out really, really solid, and we've got a really good workflow in in place. And it's been fun to for me to, like, be, like, one person working with, like, two developers, like this small little team atmosphere from across the world over Slack, basically. I'm looking forward to just being able to do more of that and and actually having a budget to play with there now and and and just continue to to make progress on these products.

Because, like, It's not just playing around. These are actually real assets that will grow and expand the business, I think. On the marketing front, think I don't delegate enough and I should. Like what you were just saying, I don't execute really well. I have some really good ideas.

Can make, I can make a good marketing plan. I can map out a good funnel. I could, I'm pretty good when it comes to like the backend email automation kind of stuff. I like to set that up, but the, especially when it comes to paid traffic and optimizing that and really monitoring it day to day, week to week, usually don't follow through as much as I'd like to. So I might look to, to hire help with, with that as we go into 2018.

I want to be spending my mornings working on product and my afternoons driving marketing. That's that's kind of the plan. And and, I mean, I'm in between that, I still do sales calls for for audience ops. I don't have an immediate plan to hire salespeople for that. I still enjoy doing sales calls for audience ops.

I love

to it's a high enough it's a high enough price ticket. It's it's fine. If you were doing it for a a month at a time, it would be it'd be hard.

So I do a few of those a week and the sales system is so dialed in at this point. They see the whole demo recorded before they even talk to me. It's like, once I talk to them, it's of just like it's teed up and I'm just talking to another founder, just kind of answering a few questions. And like, I enjoy that. And then, and then when they sign up, I just pass them on to the team.

So, you know, I'm totally cool with, with, with that role in audience ops, but other than that, and I, I'll coach the team a little bit, but we've got a really great team manager who helps out with that. I'm really not spending a ton of hours in the audience ops business. And then I, you know, with product ties and just my personal brand stuff, I, I, I haven't been writing as much on the blog, on my personal blog. I have been sending to the email list. I've been doing the Friday notes fairly regularly, not every Friday, but and then I'm doing the Productize podcast, which has gone really well.

I think that started to pick up in, in listenership in the last few weeks.

Why don't you put that email content online?

Well, my thinking there was that like, the articles that I'm doing on the, on the blog, I want them to be evergreen And

Okay. Like like business topics.

Yeah. The stuff that I send to my email list is real time. This is what happened. Here's what's happening behind the scenes in my business this month. A little a little bit of of what we talk about in the here in the podcast, but, like, there's other stuff that I try to it it follows a structure.

Like, this is the problem that I solved this week. This is how I solved it, and here here are my goals for next week and and a few links that you might find helpful. So I'm gonna try to continue that. I've been really enjoying the Productize podcast. I've got an awesome editor who's been helping with that, and he's gonna start to, I I already talked to him about ramping up his role a bit to to do some outbound guest research and inviting guests and try to try to produce the show a bit more.

So that I'm I'm excited about that. I'd like to do some more video stuff. I started to do some of that this year. I wanna I'm not very good at it. I wanna get better at it, but I I think that can be a good addition.

And then with the productized course, it's definitely gonna follow the closed model. It's only gonna open up a few times per year. I'm not exactly sure what the cadence will be, but I think that'll probably depend on my other stuff, the ops calendar stuff and and whatever else I'm I'm busy with. Like, if I could fit in a launch in a month, then I'll do it. If I can't fit it in, I'm just not gonna do it.

But I'll have some live webinar funnels happening for that and just kind of continuous, you know, traffic coming into the list for that.

Yeah. I'm I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to that because in my head, my my hope for you is that you find a repeatable process that works to market that course. It's just it's just more reliable and consistent. And then it's like, okay. That that part is handled.

I know about what it's gonna do in revenue. I know what I need to do. It's not like a big mystery. And then it's just on repeat because then it's then it sounds like it's doable over a long period of time.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the goal. And, I'm actually really excited about the new version of the course. It's like, it's it's pretty long, but it's like, it's so much better because it's so it gets so much more advanced than what the first version was.

That's good. It keeps coming up. When I talk to just, you know, business people in general, I'm here at WeWork in Portland. I I just get it regularly. People are like, man, just the the inconsistency of this consulting thing.

It's rough. I'm like, dude, I know this guy.

Yeah. That was me. That was my life. And and there and there are so many freelancers and consultants who just go by the hour and it's up and down and it's like feast and famine and then Yep. It's painful.

It's painful. I know one of them who's an excellent consultant, but because it's so inconsistent, she's considering taking a job at another consulting firm just because she has a family. It's tough. Yeah. Alright, man.

Well, look. I gotta go downstairs. My wife is is coming down and bringing our baby, so we're just gonna blow people's minds with cuteness. Yep. Oh,

I I you'll my card in the mail pretty soon, but I got your Did you

get mine?

Yeah. That's a good looking family over there, Gus.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it. That's my wife's doing right there. Only the good looking part, but also the, the card and all. Yeah.

Don't plan on any any new kids in 2018. No more kids.

Nope. I think we're we're closing up shop over there. Yep.

That's that's all done. Yep. Cool, man. Well Good stuff, man.

Well Merry Christmas.

Happy Hanukkah. Happy New Year. Happy Kwanzaa. Well, what else is there? Whatever else there is.

I think you got them all. Happy New everyone. Be good.

Talk to you soon, bud.