Value of a Coach / Hiring Spree / Launching in Public
Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, how are you? Nice to see you.
Brian Casel:Doing good, buddy. How's it going?
Jordan Gal:It's good. It's good. It's Friday. It was a good week. The weather has turned.
Jordan Gal:It's 65 and sunny in Portland. Things are positive. It started off as a bad week but we'll get into that going from bad to good thing.
Brian Casel:The weather this time of year here in the Northeast is a rollercoaster ride. Today it's nice and sunny but it's been raining all week and it looks beautiful outside and then you step outside and it's still freaking cold.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. Yep. We've got MicroConf coming up in less than two weeks. We try to get a bunch done before that happens.
Jordan Gal:We've got some interesting updates. We're gonna talk about Derek Riemer's business level as our breakdown.
Brian Casel:We're gonna continue our March to to try and run everybody else's businesses from afar.
Jordan Gal:I like this. We we we are completely unaccountable. We get to have fun with it and we there is there are no consequences whatsoever for being wrong. This is this is how we like it.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. I don't even really know what Derek is building, but it sounds kinda interesting. And I think you and I both spoke to him about his research process. So
Jordan Gal:I did not talk to him in, like, in, like, his interview process, but I'm I'm fascinated about what he's doing.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, besides that, I wanna talk about something more personal. It's still business but it's personal outside of Cardhook so that could be interesting to some people. How about you? What do you have going on?
Brian Casel:As we were talking offline just before this, I am in like full on frantic, hectic mode, and I I usually don't like this sort of thing.
Jordan Gal:Not your MO.
Brian Casel:It's not me. I, you know, but I'm putting things in place. Like, all this work I know will pay off. It's not just like one off project work that'll never happen again. I know that I'm I am frantically putting things in place that will eventually form a system that I could step back from and the system will keep running.
Brian Casel:That's that's what
Jordan Gal:I'm working And you have that initial demand to fuel you through whatever you need to get done.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I'm talking about the Audience Ops podcasting service. As of today, there are seven paying clients on that and a few more who are ready to sign up. Part of the stress here is that MicroComp is coming up in ten days from now, so I'll only be away for three days, but that's three days where I will not even really be on email. At MicroComp, I'm totally occupied all day long and all night, so it's like I won't be able to do anything the trip.
Brian Casel:Before then, I need to get we have four podcast producers who I've just hired this past week. Next week, I need to hire at least one or two audio editors. I need to hire a designer. Kat and I are deciding on two writers to bring on the team. We need to get all those new people starting to get trained and onboarded.
Brian Casel:On the podcasting side, we're also just starting to kick off the first few clients next week. Some are still in a waiting list period, but two or three will be actually kicking off next week.
Jordan Gal:And we're recording podcasts next week?
Brian Casel:Like a planning call.
Jordan Gal:This has been pretty fast. Think when we look back at it, if you record next week
Brian Casel:We're not recording podcasts next week, we're just doing their planning call next week and then probably record the following week.
Jordan Gal:When are you collecting money? Have you already collected money?
Brian Casel:So like those seven clients have all paid for their first month, pay for that upfront. Normally, it'll be just like our writing service where they pay upfront for the first month and then about thirty days later they begin the monthly service. For these early pilot clients, they just paid the first month and then we're waiting until they have first episodes ready to publish. Because things are coming together, that'll probably be like a six to eight week period before we actually get to that second month onward,
Jordan Gal:This is adding a new line of business, a new line of revenue to an existing agency or an existing service. Really interesting to look back on it from, okay, idea, outreach, validation, and then go.
Brian Casel:I'm not super transparent about numbers generally, but this early on, I don't mind. We've added 10 k MRR to the business in the last thirty days just with this.
Jordan Gal:I love these situations. We'll we'll talk about it when when I I wanna talk about like the when one door gets closed, another gets open sort of thing. When you get put into a spot of like, damn, I need I need to figure something out, and the stuff you come up with are it's always been there. Right? You you could have done this a year ago, but but if what is it about these situations that like put you into this corner and then you get creative?
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, a lot of it is like it's it's low hanging fruit. It's also like a logical next step. I talked about this before with audience ops, but the reason why I'm able to go so fast right now, and I just wrote this to the newsletter, we can reuse so much. We have infrastructure in place, processes in place, I can duplicate and tweak.
Brian Casel:What I found is harder than I expected is getting the people on board.
Jordan Gal:Oh, so the people is the hard part. What do you know?
Brian Casel:I know. Well, to be honest though, in all of the other roles that I've hired for, so writers, even project managers, virtual assistants, copy editors, audio editors for my other podcast. All of those roles are actually pretty easy to hire for if you've done them before because we literally have hundreds of applicants, of writers, all the time, and we've got a really great process of vetting them and hiring them and onboarding them. But the podcast producer What is role
Jordan Gal:that affecting that supply? Is because you can work from home and that's just very attractive?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, there are just so many writers in the world. But the other thing just generally is that there are not enough people talk about this, but there are so many really talented, really smart, really motivated people. They just want to work remotely. They want to have flexible schedules.
Brian Casel:They don't even necessarily want a full time job. They just want a part time retainer, ongoing, steady, but fifteen, twenty hours a week because they're a stay at home mom or dad or because they they are a freelancer and they do other stuff or they travel full time. Like, there are so many they're they're super, super talented people, and so many companies still operate in this more traditional mindset of like, oh, we're a company. We have to offer all these benefits and full time salaries and everything. It's like
Jordan Gal:The value people put on that freedom. I mean, I'm gonna talk about it again when I talk about that personal business side. That's one of the big factors I'm getting into it is because for my wife that's really the only option. For her to go to a nine to five job right now with a two year old is just a mess. And the take home income is like negligible because you have to pay for childcare.
Jordan Gal:You you would really be a lot better off with twenty hours a week writing. Yeah. Much better.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, you can make the argument like, oh, they're not fully committed to your company and and this and that, but, like, I I haven't seen that. I mean
Jordan Gal:You can also make the argument that they're appreciative of the opportunity and how flexible they have their situation. It's great.
Brian Casel:Dude, we we have 24 people on the team at Audience Ops. Over half of them have been on the team for more than two years.
Jordan Gal:Which is not normal.
Brian Casel:Some of as long as three years.
Jordan Gal:If they were unhappy, they would stop.
Brian Casel:They wouldn't be there. It's steady, reliable, and it's good work. It's not like they get to do really creative work and we've got awesome systems and processes so that it removes all the crap.
Jordan Gal:They don't have to The do fact that they don't even deal with clients directly so much is phenomenal because that's what you assume. My wife used to do PR. For her to do freelance PR and start working with clients, it's not that fun to work with clients that way. It's just a lot. It's draining.
Jordan Gal:It's a lot of energy. It's a lot of tests. Anyway, okay, so let's get back on track here.
Brian Casel:So anyway, that's basically occupying all of my time between now and the time I fly to Vegas.
Jordan Gal:I'm looking forward to, you know, when it turns. And it already sounds like it's already turning with the service starting 10 ks MRR, such a short period of time. It's very impressive. It's awesome.
Brian Casel:Yeah, cool. What's up on your end?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So I I don't wanna beat her in the bush. I'm gonna get right into it. And what I wanna do is talk through some of the logic. So what I'm doing is I'm getting into a little bit of coaching.
Jordan Gal:It's something I haven't really thought about. And then all of a sudden, the past few, like, weeks and months, it started popping up in my head. Right? So let's let's let's think about some some of this logic.
Brian Casel:Take us through why the thought to go into coaching and and what what do you plan to do with it?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So so we have two coaches in the business right now in Carthook. We have a CTO coach named Ram, and he and I do a one hour call every week along with Rock, our our VP of engineering. And he just kinda works with us on that tech process and helping Rock transition from developer to manager and helping me as a CEO understand what I need to look for in that role, what I need to provide for that person to give them the best chance of success. So he just kinda helps us very focused on that specific piece.
Jordan Gal:And then we have another coach on the marketing side. This guy, Sid Barath, he's done marketing with a bunch of other companies, has a bunch of ecommerce experience. He and I worked together like three years ago on some content stuff. And what he does, he and I meet for an hour a week along with Ed, who's our senior marketer, and he helps us with that marketing process. Right?
Jordan Gal:We've talked about it before, like having a bunch of experiments loaded up and what's coming up this week and then looking back and eliminating experiments that aren't working and doubling down on the ones that so just formalizing that process. So we do a one hour call every week with them and the amount of value we get is incredible. And it's and it's interesting and it's fun and so so what I did is I spoke to both of them and told them that I was thinking about it, and they kinda gave me the pros and cons of, like, it's very rewarding. It's more than one hour a week. It's not an hour a week.
Jordan Gal:You think about it, and as you're reading blog posts, you're saying, oh, I wonder if Jordan would find this valuable. So it it occupies, like
Brian Casel:I I think that's just a really smart move just to have these two coaches who are, like, focused on on those departments in your business. It makes your your existing people more more productive and efficient. So I I think that's awesome.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We we felt the need, and then it didn't make sense to hire someone full time. Just needed some help and guidance. And I knew when I hired Ed that I was gonna be super busy and so I wouldn't have the time to focus on marketing and helping Ed be as effective as he could be. So both of these are kind of they're not really for me.
Jordan Gal:They're for Rock on the engineering side and they're for Ed on the marketing side, but it also has helped me tremendously in the business overall.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I mean, like, you know, just knowing you obviously and for those listening to this podcast, there's no doubt, that you can absolutely add a lot of value as a coach to other founders. We we could definitely talk about that in a minute. I think the question that probably most people are are thinking about, that I'm thinking about too, is like, what are your thoughts around the time commitment and and just the energy and and mind share commitment to this? Like, if you think about what those coaches are doing, they kinda do this maybe not full time,
Nathan Barry:but they have
Brian Casel:a bunch of coaching clients.
Jordan Gal:No. Both of them actually do the same thing, just a small handful of clients. This is not their full time job. What they tell me is that it keeps them super sharp. It keeps them engaged.
Jordan Gal:It's interesting. And so one of the factors is that I am interested in advising and investing in the future. And this starts to build up that skill set of looking at someone else's business and not just my own and learning from it and learning how to give advice and that relationship with the founder and kind of sympathizing with how stressed they are and, you know, just being forced to give realistic advice. So I do it all the time, all day. I'm in this incubator here in Portland, we talk constantly.
Jordan Gal:People come up to me and ask, you know, I'm seen as some type of authority given, right, there's a new cohort of companies. So they look up. It's almost like the freshman looking up at the seniors who live in the fraternity house. I'm literally in the Starbucks office. You know, we've like hit a million dollars in ARR as a SaaS.
Jordan Gal:So people like look up look up and ask questions, and I like doing it. So I have no doubt that I can provide a lot of value. And then the x factor, right, and there's no beating around the bush, the money in a startup, right, we have investors. So the second you take investment, one of the biggest issues with taking on investment, first bootstrapping entirely, is that your salary is set in such a way that if you have a great month, you can't just take more money that month because you had a good month. If you're bootstrapping your own business and you have a gangbusters month, you just take an extra $10 out because you had a good month.
Jordan Gal:In this environment with investors, you can't do that. I mean, I guess I could ask them if I could take out some, but whatever. But it doesn't Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's maybe that would be fine and maybe it wouldn't be, but you also have a team who also need like, it's not just what you need to pay this month to the team, gotta have that, you know, a couple months runway to, you
Jordan Gal:know Right. And the business is the priority. So me taking an extra $5 a month might be good for me, but it's not we should probably hire someone with that money if if if that's what we have. So anyway, it's one of these things where salary is not tied to your revenue, not in the same way. And so as we've gotten more successful and past that million ARR mark and starting to grow beyond it and so on, I I don't think it's smart given where we what our needs are for me to jack up my salary.
Jordan Gal:But I've got three kids and and now it's now now the option is what we talked about before, do you want your wife to go back to work?
Brian Casel:Right. And your and your wife doesn't work?
Jordan Gal:She doesn't work right now. She's been she's been juggling three kids and our youngest is two years old. So my wife wants to go back to work to like have her own thing which is important and the income obviously is good too. But it's still a little too early.
Brian Casel:Yeah and my wife is in the same boat. She worked up until we had our first kid and now she's home with them, you know, full time and, like, once they both get into school, she'll go back to to, you know, doing what she's done. But until then, it's whatever I can bring home that's supporting everything.
Jordan Gal:Exactly right. Yeah. So so so I think this coaching thing is as efficient a way to add personal income as possible. Right? If I go off and like, I don't know, like we're in the Shopify ecommerce world.
Jordan Gal:If I went off and started my own ecommerce company, that's something I know how to do. That just takes a lot more time. I don't have a lot of time. I gotta stay focused. So I'm I'm gonna give it a try.
Jordan Gal:I'm gonna reach out to my network. I'm gonna talk to people at MicroConf. I'm confident I can give founders that value. And so, you know, it'll be really interesting to see the experience on acquiring customers and then working with them, and I can kinda report back here. Obviously, I'll keep things confidential with with the client, but I I think it's gonna be really interesting.
Brian Casel:What type of coaching? What would be the focus of the coaching? Who would this be for? Are you looking to work with SaaS founders, SaaS startups, or ecommerce businesses, or who would you work with?
Jordan Gal:So I could work with ecommerce because I have experience there, but my comfort zone would be with a SaaS founder, he or she. Yeah, because
Brian Casel:I I feel like in the past few years you've been more in the SaaS world than Yeah. Actually growing an e commerce store. You're you're selling to e commerce but you're not.
Jordan Gal:Right. And and if if I had an e commerce business up and running right now and a lot of that knowledge is transferable, right, but it's not like that. But right now I have a SaaS that's up and running and a lot of that knowledge is transferable. From tech process to how we do stand ups to how we do marketing, all of this stuff can be really valuable along with the advice and the sounding board and the strategy and all that. So,
Brian Casel:Yeah. If you heard us talking with Ben and Rock, I think it was two episodes back, we talked all about the process inside Cardhook, but I think there was probably this if you listen to what we were talking about, you could tell that there's a lot of underlying knowledge and experience and trial and error that you guys have clearly gone through and you've learned a ton. We didn't really get into all of the details on that episode, but you could tell there have been years of learning just underneath that conversation, which would be hugely valuable for anyone who's who's building up.
Jordan Gal:So I think that's that's the comfort zone. You know, SaaS founders who have gotten something off the ground and are now looking to take it to to that next level, whether it's from 10 k to 20 k, 50 to a 100, a 100 to 200, but whatever that, okay, what got me here is good and now to get to the next level, I mean, that's the same thing that we did with our coaches. We said, we have things up and running, we've got trials coming in, now how do we go from that to a more formal marketing process that's more repeatable? Same thing with the okay, we used to be four people on a call, everything was communicated, nothing was lost in translation. Now all of a sudden we have 14 people, how do we get our tech process working in such a way that actually keeps 14 people in the loop and and so on.
Jordan Gal:So it's just like a leveling up friction that I think I can be helpful.
Brian Casel:If you're a long time listener of this podcast, obviously you know Jordan pretty well and me. But I mean just these conversations that we have, I get so much value both on air and we talk a lot off air too, getting your clear cut honest opinion break it down. There have been multiple times I can literally look back on in the past few years where I made key business decisions based off of some of the advice that you gave me. Mean, I'm not just saying that, but
Jordan Gal:it's And vice versa also.
Brian Casel:Yep. And so, you know, listeners to this, I I think there's pretty much no question as to the type of value that somebody like Jordan can bring. So I guess my next question would be like, obviously you're running Cart Hook, so what is your goal with this coaching thing? Like how many clients? What type of commitment time wise?
Brian Casel:Like what are you thinking in terms of that?
Jordan Gal:What we've done with with our coaches has worked really nicely and it's just one hour a week call, then you can email anytime and then it turns into almost like this, like, friendship of you know, it's almost like a like a personal mastermind with two people. And so that's what it turns into. I think I can do up to three people, work with up to three founders, and then, yeah, those weekly calls and like
Brian Casel:So are are you thinking like weekly or monthly or yeah.
Jordan Gal:No. Weekly. Weekly really works for us. Every once in a while, gets to be like, oh, we're just busy and we just we just don't do it that week. Then it turns into every two weeks and then it gets busy again.
Jordan Gal:But yeah, yesterday, I I came to our CTO coach and we were trying to figure out QA. Do we need a QA lead? What does a QA lead mean? And I just brought all these questions to him and and it helped me understand, you know, like a few big takeaways. So it's like an hour conversation that then orients me toward the next week of, okay, now we're gonna have talks internally in the team.
Jordan Gal:Who should we hire as a QA? Where should they be? Does it matter? So it's like a starting point of like, okay, I kinda have some thoughts. Help me solidify.
Jordan Gal:And then all of sudden, I have more confidence to go into the team and say, here's what we're looking for. Here's why a QA lead should really be more focused on the customer and not the engineers. It's not just about what yes, it passed the test. It should be, yes, it passed the test, but it's not quite doing what I want it to do. It's like these little tidbits of information are are great.
Jordan Gal:They're one hour calls, it goes by fast, and then you just take that knowledge from it and move into the the next week.
Brian Casel:I will say though probably what your what your coaches were saying about coaching. I mean, I've, you know, I've done a bunch of coaching through the Productize program, and I've done it in a few different ways. And I have found it to be, I mean, really enjoyable. There's no like, you're right. It does it does keep you sharp.
Brian Casel:I I feel much sharper and much more connected, and it's refreshing in a lot of ways to be able to dive into somebody else's business, do it like a deep dive on a coaching call, or I'd also hop into our Slack, like the members Slack almost every day, and answer some questions there. And that's fun to be able to break out of my own business and get in there, but I have found that the coaching sessions can be really draining energy wise as the coach. Feel like it's more draining on the coach than it is the person because
Jordan Gal:like Look, a lot of times, you know, I I do it. I come to them with emotions and I'm like, I'm frustrated. I don't know what to do here and they need to kinda take that on and and just ingest it
Brian Casel:and help. Mean, the person is like depending on you, right? Like it's a lot to take on. I mean, like it, but it's the model that I've chosen to do is to be able to do coaching but keep it at arm's length so that if I ever get too busy or too overwhelmed, I could pause it or whatever. Basically, what I offer is only one off coaching sessions as an optional upgrade on the Productize package.
Brian Casel:You could buy the course and the community, or you can buy the course and the community plus an hour coaching with me. A bunch of people do the coaching. I've done a couple 100 of those over the past few years. It's nice because I get to kind of do one deep dive for an hour with someone. We record the call.
Brian Casel:They keep it. And occasionally they'll come back and we'll do like a second or third coaching call, but it's kind of like as needed, you know? It's not like an ongoing thing, I like that. I usually do a few of those a month. So last year in 2017, for the first time, I tried a different model, which I called Productize Mastermind.
Brian Casel:And I wanted to kind of try it out to see. It was also like, yeah, could use a cash spike. I was really investing heavily into software and everything. What I did was I sold two group coaching programs. I mean, one program, but it was two groups.
Brian Casel:Idea was that each of these two groups would have five members in it. They would pay one time for a six month program. We meet monthly. They get six calls. It's me plus the five of them.
Brian Casel:It's like a ninety minute call, and we get a private Slack channel just for that group.
Jordan Gal:It was a defined amount of time for six months.
Brian Casel:Yeah, six months. I think I sold it back in August or September, and then it lasted through January or February. Again, it was that give and take for me personally. At the end of the six months, I mean, you know, it sold out and it was it was a nice cash injection, and it was it was good to to prove to myself that I could do like, sell something like that and actually run it.
Jordan Gal:Were you happy that it was that it was over after six months?
Brian Casel:Yes, was happy that it was over. And I'm really not sure that I would do it again, to be honest. I probably won't, at least not soon. Maybe a couple of things I might have done differently. I might have squeezed it into three months instead of six, But then you kind of have to do two calls in a month instead of one.
Brian Casel:I just found the calls to be very, very draining, and I had two groups, so I had two of those calls to do every month. And so, yeah, it's like the hour and a half that I'm on the call, but it also kills the rest of the afternoon or the morning because I'm just shot after that. I need to give so much mental attention and dig into each individual person's stuff. It was just really tiring, you know? That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it.
Brian Casel:I and I still talk to those people, you know, through through the community and stuff, but it's
Jordan Gal:Look. If you're gonna provide value, it's not just talking. It's it's work. I'm trying to go into it with with an open mind and being realistic about it, which is why, you know, it's gotta be clearly defined, limited number of people, and then it's it's an experiment. Right?
Jordan Gal:It doesn't lock me in. It doesn't lock the other person in. After three months, if it's like, okay, we got a lot of value and it's good and we'll kind of need a break, that's fine.
Brian Casel:A lot of the value is just having somebody to be like a sounding board and just give you an honest feedback on decision and gut feels. Not yeah, people want to see results and everything and results will happen but as the coach, you're not doing the work for them. You're advising them. It's interesting.
Jordan Gal:It has to a good match in that way. Anyway, you're hearing this and you're interested in just talking about it with no commitment, just talking and seeing if it is a good fit, reach out to me. I'll have something set up at jordangal.com. In the interest of efficiency, I'm just going to have a very easy way to just get in touch with me and talk. Can reach me at jordancarthook dot com or just hit me up on Twitter or something.
Jordan Gal:We'll see where it goes. I'll report back.
Brian Casel:We got any other updates to talk about or no?
Jordan Gal:No. I think the only the only other update I don't I read Twitter way too often. I don't actually tweet out very often, but I had an experience that I thought was interesting. It's just part of entrepreneurship. I think Tuesday morning, I woke up, I did that stupid thing where you check your phone at 05:30AM right when you wake up and I got bad news.
Jordan Gal:Bad news, been working on something for a few months, did not happen, got the official no, bummed me out. I feel like over the, you know, past few years, there's so many ups and downs that the first thing in my mind was, okay, that door just shut, let's see how long it takes for a new door to open. And I just kinda sat there, let's just see how long it takes. And then I get into the office and one or two good things happen and then two days later, a brand new door just swings wide open. And I was like, that's it man.
Jordan Gal:You just have to take the bad news and just not let it get to you and take a deep breath and just say, all right, what's on the horizon? Because something good's on the horizon.
Brian Casel:That's good advice, good way to think about it. I feel like probably a lot of us like you, we have so many balls in the air that those doors, you probably have five or six doors that you're waiting on answers from and maybe three out of five come through, two don't come through but it's like that's that's how it goes, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. So and so I just wrote that in a tweet basically. You know, one lesson I learned over and over is that when one door gets closed, another gets opened. And that just got like a whole bunch of likes and retweets.
Jordan Gal:So I feel like other people feel the exact same thing happening in their business. They get everyone gets bad news. It's just normal. It's just not everything you want works out. Brian, are we gonna are we gonna put on our our genius Let's
Brian Casel:do it.
Jordan Gal:Hats of of knowing exactly what to do with other people's businesses?
Brian Casel:So does he have a website for that? Let me see. He might have like a coming soon.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Let's give an orientation here. Derek Riemer is Rob Walling's previous co founder from Drip. Derek is now off on his own. He is building a new product that how would you describe it?
Jordan Gal:Slack with less interruption or what is really
Brian Casel:trying I to mean, at this point, we just don't really know exactly what what his product will end up being but it's it's clearly he's he's gunning for Slack. It's something to be an alternative to Slack. I think he's focused on development teams. I don't think he's necessarily trying to replace or kill Slack, but I think for those using Slack in a use case around software development, premise that he has put out there, he's got a really great introductory blog post about this, or a mission or whatever he put it, about how the interruptions from Slack for developers are really annoying, and he's trying to solve that problem. He could probably describe it better than than we could,
Jordan Gal:but Well, if you if you look at his Twitter profile, you'll see the pinned tweet at the top is a blog post talking about the problem. He's not even talking about the solution yet. He's just saying Slack is killing developer productivity and I'm on a mission to fix it. And then here's a blog post. So you could see, I don't know if it's on purpose or not, what he's really doing is saying, here's this hugely popular platform.
Jordan Gal:Right? And the word platform in my world is constant conversation. So what a lot of people in our situation have built on top of Shopify or built on top of Facebook, so there are issues with building on a platform. You you get to draft behind it and get that accelerated distribution through the platform, but you're on someone else's platform, you're not in control of your own destiny. So when I look at this, I see Derek, he could have built on top of Slack.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like a modifier for for Slack to make it more productive for developers or something like
Jordan Gal:Sometimes I wanna put something in Slack, but I don't I don't want it to notify anyone. I just want it there for later. Like, don't don't interrupt what you're doing but I just wanna get it out there so I get it out of my mind in in in the public sphere. So there are still there are little things, little apps that you can build on top of Slack and he's deciding not to do that. He's saying, no, I'm gonna build my own platform, which is more difficult but has a bigger payoff if you can pull it off.
Brian Casel:When I first heard about him doing it, it's pretty impressive that he's going after, isn't Slack like the fastest growing startup like in in world history or something like that?
Jordan Gal:It's the fastest to a billion dollar valuation, so key difference, but they are growing ridiculously fast. But I also I wanna challenge one thing though. It's not going after Slack, at least in my eyes.
Brian Casel:Right. Right. It's it's good to have
Jordan Gal:like an enemy and it's good to have someone
Brian Casel:Well, think part part of the problem that he's identified here is that Slack is like too global. That like Slack is being used for too many use cases and if you niche it down, you can really make it a good solution to something. We use Slack but there are frustrations with it. I also use it for my community for product ties. There are issues, it's not perfect for that but a lot of communities use it.
Jordan Gal:So one of the one of the most interesting parts about what Derek is doing is the building in public. That approach, he literally put screencasts of him developing. What do you think about that? Because I I have never been able to do it, to to be that public. It it seems to work, but does it attract, like
Brian Casel:This seems to be targeting developers, so I think there's some connection there. Like, get get developers watching, get developers using. I mean, that that sounds good to me. Derek is, not inexperienced when it comes to software development, so, putting his his chops out there for the world to see, I I think there's there's nothing wrong with that. Like, it would be really cool to see somebody like Derek.
Brian Casel:I actually bookmarked some of his videos because like I said, I wanna learn to code. I wanna watch this guy. I don't know what the
Brennan Dunn:hell he's talking about, but I like to watch it.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. Pick up a few things. The building in public before something is even launched feels, it feels ballsy. It's one thing, now, oh, I'm so brave now, I'm more public with what we're doing in our revenue, that sort of thing, but I didn't for a long time because I was either insecure or didn't wanna attract competitors before I felt established enough.
Jordan Gal:Here, you're attracting competitors and being in public before you even have a product, but it always feels like the positives outweigh the negatives and people still don't do it. I still don't do it.
Brian Casel:Well, you know, I didn't really read his most recent updates, but he either doesn't know exactly what he's building yet or he's being he's he's holding it really close to the vest.
Jordan Gal:On on the actual features and solutions.
Brian Casel:I I mean, I I have a sense that he knows what he wants to build. He's doing research calls. Like I, I responded to his email. I got on a call with him because I, I use Slack heavily and I use it with developers. So I had a bunch of feedback form and he had a bunch of good research, open ended questions, like not trying to dictate the That's the mistake that I've seen a lot of people do is they try to go through the motions of the validation and they get on these calls and they're like, Would you like this type of to do list that does this, this, and this in this exact way?
Brian Casel:Yes or no? Leaves leading questions, and I think Derek did a really good job of asking smart, open ended questions. That certainly got me talking. I'm guessing that those calls probably informed how he prioritizes, myself included with this, whenever I have an idea, I have a pretty good idea of what I want to build from the outset. And then I do go through those motions of interviewing people.
Brian Casel:And through those interviews and through getting feedback and then doing pre sales and things like that, that's when I start to whittle down what my original vision was to, Okay, it sounds like these are the priorities and maybe should scrap those ideas. That's probably what Derek I'm guessing that's the sort of process that Derek has been going through.
Jordan Gal:Right. Not not pure idea validation where you're just going in without an idea.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, don't think he's idea hunting. I think he has an idea and he's trying to get it focused and prioritized. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And this is this is closely related not to mix of different businesses and different conversations, but hey, it's our podcast. We do whatever the hell we want, Brian. But this is similar to Right Message that Brennan and Shai are working on, and they're they're working in public a lot. And watching it is very, very interesting. I I know it has affected me watching both Derek and Brennan and Shai and how they're doing things.
Jordan Gal:We are just about to open up a Facebook group, something that we probably should've done a year ago because that's where all of our customers are, but we didn't have the capacity to manage it. You can't just throw it out there and do nothing with it. You do have to manage it. So as we are opening up a Facebook group, a lot of the questions are, how do we wanna do this? What is our tone?
Jordan Gal:What is the aim? Are we just creating this? Do we do support there or do we not? Are we just gonna try to encourage people to run this on their own and back off? And one of the things is how transparent do we wanna be?
Jordan Gal:How public do we wanna be about what we're building, what's coming up, what's in what's in staging, what's in development?
Brian Casel:What Brennan has been doing with Right Message has been taking that, like, building in public thing even further than what Derek has been doing. Like, I I think Derek was getting some feedback through his email list and maybe through some of these videos that he's posting and through his his blog, but, like, Brennan has this Facebook group that is extremely active. I don't know if you're in there.
Jordan Gal:Is it around Rightmessage or is it around Brennan or
Brian Casel:Brennan, like, has, like, multiple Facebook groups. He he has one for Drip around Drip Pro Tools personalization, and then I don't know if he merged that or if he has a separate group for Right Message, but then he's also had Facebook groups for his courses for freelancers, and he's super active on them. He's got a lot of members, so the members are very active in those groups as well. He's just done a really good job of keeping that stuff active and really fostering it, then actually just posting stuff, like posting like, hey, here's here's a new tool we're working on, and here's new like, he's been showing, like, rough diagrams of concepts that they're working on and, like, you know, mock ups and things like that. And it's been pretty impressive.
Brian Casel:I mean, in the early days of ops calendar, I guess it's still in the early days because of that. But the early days I was trying to do something like that. Like I had a Slack group for the prepaid members and I just kind of lost steam with it. I was in touch with them for a couple months there, but then we had to kinda hunker down and build stuff and I got out of touch with them and then when I tried to get back in touch, they were onto other stuff and it was so that's it's tough, but yeah, these guys are doing a pretty good job of it.
Jordan Gal:I think the only way for us to do it is to go into it with an idea of how we wanna do it and then start to explore what's right for us and how comfortable because I see sharing revenue screenshots is is past my comfort zone. And I came across a great tweet by a buddy of mine here in Portland named Derek Wyatt. So he's a marketer here. He wrote or quoted something a tweet that said, Never let modesty get in the way of good marketing. And it's like, alright, I definitely let modesty get in the way of good marketing all the time.
Brian Casel:Me too, all the time.
Jordan Gal:I feel weird about bragging. It's partly this American mentality. It's partly
Brian Casel:mean, just this morning, I sent an email to my whole list and I rewrote the subject line four times because the first one was like To be more was totally like, you know, here's some crazy revenue number or whatever and then I was like, I'm gonna back off of that a little bit.
Jordan Gal:Yes. So so that I think we're wrong. I think we're wrong. But but I don't exactly understand how. So when I see Shai, right, that works with Brandon on RightMessage post hit 150 k in ARR, what is the point of that?
Jordan Gal:I don't understand what the point of it is, but but it does something inside me that might be the point of it. Where it's like credibility, envy, confidence. It's this you you start to root them on. It's a strange mix. I I don't get it.
Jordan Gal:I don't understand it.
Brian Casel:There there's no doubt that people are really attracted to the revenue based headlines. We see that all the time in in blog posts and especially in these circles, especially in startups and bootstrappers and and, like, people. Everybody's trying to go from zero to something in some short amount of time, and that's always going to attract people. It's like human nature. Nobody's immune from that.
Jordan Gal:Right. Most people don't share, so the people that do, especially if they're successful, it's very Right? Part of the open startups initiative with BearMetrix is, are you serious? You just gonna let me look at all of your revenue? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And and it's it's fast.
Brian Casel:I should I but my take on it though is that like, and part of the reason why I'm not extremely transparent about stuff, every single revenue milestone is that like, I think it's just more valuable in the early days than it I know that people love to see the big numbers after a couple of years, but I think it's more valuable to know, Oh, this company went from zero to 10 in this amount of time. That at least opens eyes in terms of, oh, that's a thing. Like, that that thing is not gonna just go away. It looks like he's gonna continue on with that. Whereas, okay, it went from, like, a 100 k to 500 k.
Brian Casel:Like, okay. Yeah. I mean, I I figured I figured you would do that.
Jordan Gal:Think about Mixergy. Right? When someone says, yes, you know, I make $400,000 a month, it gives this credence to it of like, woah, woah, woah. Hold on a second. That's that's pretty serious.
Jordan Gal:I wanna learn more.
Brian Casel:Right. See, that's the thing. I do like asking the questions, especially when I do interviews on my other podcast. I don't hammer in like Andrew Warner does, but I do try to get a sense of like, alright, tell me what revenue is or what level is your business at so that we have a frame of reference for everything else that we're going to talk about in this interview. We're not talking to somebody who's just done $1,000 We're talking to somebody who runs a certain level of business, and that should inform why we can maybe trust that they've been through the experiences that we're talking about.
Brian Casel:Posting revenue just for the sake of revenue without any learning behind it lesson about what changed since the last update. I'm not saying it's wrong to do, I'm just saying that to me doesn't add a lot of value. Then the question is like, does that actually help you get customers for your business?
Jordan Gal:That's the right question.
Brian Casel:I mean, don't see how that really plays into it, to be honest.
Jordan Gal:I don't know. I think depending on the situation, it might I mean, we have this thing
Brian Casel:I mean, I'm fan of Brennan's and I'm interested to to hear about his revenue numbers, but I'm not paying for RightMessage right now, you know, just me personally. Like, I don't know. Like, it's not
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So I I I see I see what what Brennan's doing with it where a lot of his focus is not on their revenue, it's on the improvements in revenue and conversion rate and so on of his customers. And I and I think that's where you know, when I hear him say, we're just working with this customer and they had a 32% lift in leads, that's what I send my marketer. Right? That's what I send to Ed.
Jordan Gal:I don't I don't send yeah. I don't send Ed their revenue. It's like, whatever, it's kind of interesting. But I sent like, oh. That's kind of where we've ended up in our Facebook group thinking is let's highlight our merchants.
Jordan Gal:Let's say, oh, we we had $750,000 today run through the network. Awesome job everybody. Right? Because that's like braggy but not on our own behalf. So it's like kinda more helpful.
Jordan Gal:Anyway.
Brian Casel:Maybe getting back to Derek's thing. Yeah. I think he's calling it Is it Level? Powered by Level.
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:What .com or?
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's just the the Twitter handle so I assume it's Level. All
Brian Casel:right, so we'll get it all linked up. You know, what do you think about whatever it is that he's building in terms of our product, need? Because you, I mean, I know that you're not technical, but you've worked, you have a tech team. Do you guys use Slack pretty heavily on the day to day stuff?
Jordan Gal:We are very reliant on Slack. It is the hub of the entire company. What we've had to do is just adjust and acknowledge that it's not the best place for a lot of things. One of our sayings is if it's not Jira, it doesn't exist. If it's not in Jira, it doesn't exist.
Jordan Gal:So it's like, oh, cool, you have a complaint. This customer has an issue. That's nice. If it's not Jira, do not complain that it didn't get fixed. So Slack has a place, but there are issues with it.
Jordan Gal:And and the truth is I don't it would be interesting to hear the perspective of our engineers and how it affects their life because that's very different from the way it affects my life. My context switching is not that big of a deal.
Brian Casel:That's probably because we're the founders and it's our job to pay attention to everything. That's something that I actually struggle with with almost all members of my team, developers and writers and managers and especially new people who are being onboarded like I am onboarding new people this week, it's like I know that people are getting notifications from Slack. They're getting notifications from Trello. We're sending emails sometimes. My developers are getting GitHub notifications.
Brian Casel:I'm always struggling to know, alright, which notifications are people actually paying attention to and which ones are they just filtering out? Because everybody filters out something. Right? And then the other the other challenge that I see is that some of my team are not full time employees. Some of them kind of are almost all of them, especially the long time people kind of know how important it is to, to see Slack at least once or twice a day and catch up on, on any pings.
Brian Casel:But especially for new people, I'm like, Do they totally get that you have to kind of check to see if somebody's trying to message you in Slack? We struggle with that. Same thing with developers. I hire developers usually on a project basis, So maybe I'm working with someone for two weeks straight, but then the project ends and they go off and do their thing, then a week or two later I just need them to come back and fix one bug. If I Slack them, have they shut down this Slack since we haven't worked together for two weeks?
Brian Casel:That's where I think my frustration has been like, I don't know when somebody's actually going to see this Slack. And then I resort to email and it's like, all right, well, when should I do which one? It's tricky.
Jordan Gal:So if I were Derek, the approach I would take, there's the product and then there's the marketing. In the marketing, I think the at least the obvious way to go is to just point to the enemy. It's just one of these things where if you if you can be loud enough almost to the point where they notice you and are annoyed by you, that's a good way to get attention.
Brian Casel:I mean, that's how Slack started too. They were like, oh, we're the email killer.
Jordan Gal:Right. Email email's the worst, email's the enemy sort of thing. They didn't have an enemy to name, which makes it more powerful. They didn't say Gmail's the enemy. So this is a situation where you can say Slack is bad for you.
Jordan Gal:So that is kind of like a ballsy abrasive thing, but I I think that could really, really work because you you are drafting off their attention, and you can go back to a lot of you can get pressed that way.
Brian Casel:I also think that it's smart of Derek that he's meeting his target customers where they already are. They're already on Slack. Like, he's he's acknowledging that from the from the start. Know, not
Jordan Gal:Slack's great, but
Brian Casel:It doesn't sound like he's he's creating a new product category. May maybe he kinda is, but it's a spin off of off of whatever Slack is.
Jordan Gal:Right, Slack's great for a lot of people but for your team, if you have a bunch of engineers and you keep distracting each other, it's actually not good for you and that's why. So on the product side, my approach to these types of things is parody plus. So blatant, ruthless copying to the point of parody. And then once you get to parody, then add, then change, then look to see what's different. At least that's that's my gut approach because there are so many micro decisions in building things.
Jordan Gal:And at least the way we've done it, a lot of times we say, oh, that doesn't make sense the way they built it. We'll build it our way. And then we learn the exact same lesson that they learned, which is the reason they ended up at at doing things a certain way.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because, like, customers need to switch over and and and have a seamless transition, but then still get the benefit of your unique Right. And there's a lot
Jordan Gal:of learned on the way there that to as a smaller team, to skip those lessons and just climb right on top of the competitor's shoulders, I think that's the right move. That's the.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's it's tough. I mean, I feel like, you know, you still have to figure out, alright, which features are we not gonna build?
Jordan Gal:Right. But as you're building toward parity, that's when you're talking to your actual customers to say, are the what are the small changes? What are the two or three big features that we're gonna stand on such as the ability to send a message but have it only go at a certain time? Or market as not time sensitive and therefore don't notify people?
Brian Casel:I feel like every great product that's in a competitive space has done a really good job of or some products have done a really good job of they have one feature, even if it's a super simple feature, that defines the reason why most of their customers use them. I mean, I think about HelpScout. It's a super competitive space. There's how many help desk softwares out there. Most of them do more or less the same thing, like ticketing and shared inbox and all this stuff.
Brian Casel:Now they all kind of do this, but at the time that I first discovered HelpScout, which was years ago, the idea that your customers just see a regular email address and the whole help desk is invisible to them, and then on the backside you have a real help desk, that was the magical thing. It's like, oh, that's why I use HelpScout. Yeah, they've got notes and tags and automations and reports and all this stuff, but yeah, that's expected. It's a help desk software. It should have that.
Brian Casel:The reason I I found out about HelpScout and the reason why I used it at first and I still use it today is is because of that. It's it seem it's invisible to the customer. Like, I remember Drip, I ended up becoming a paying customer of Drip. I guess it was before Workflows came along, but I knew that they were going in that direction. They started doing rule automation and stuff like that.
Brian Casel:That was it. That was the difference between Drip and Mailchimp. And find that one differentiator, you can still build the rest of the features that customers are gonna need to have in order to fit this into their workflow, but there's one thing that people are gonna know you for.
Jordan Gal:Right. So in that case, it's like just build Slack, but build it with the ability to do x. So, like, it's Slack, but you get to choose who do you interrupt.
Brian Casel:I mean, I'm curious to see where he goes with it and and what the pricing model will be, especially since Slack is, you know, using freemium and and all that kind of stuff.
Jordan Gal:They use freemium and they are definitely not an easy company to compete with. They do so many things that are that are indistinguishable from magic. Right, like that literally, I think they call it a magic link.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Right.
Jordan Gal:You'll be to add multiple Slacks. Just the email that you get from Slack billing that's like, hey, turns out that one person wasn't active so we gave you a 3.46 credit back to your account. You're like, really? You guys do that? Because nobody does that.
Jordan Gal:So there are a lot of little things that Slack does that are really tough to to replicate. So it's gonna have to be it's gonna have to be good.
Brian Casel:There's no doubt though. There there are definitely frustrations with Slack and I'm I'm sure I'm sure Derek knows that pretty well better than anyone at this point. So what what else do we got? Anything?
Jordan Gal:I think the only thing we have is that I have a ramen lunch waiting for me with my buddy Jared who runs Appointlet here in Portland and that's the only thing I can think about right now, Brian.
Brian Casel:Oh, very cool. I've been a customer of theirs for a while.
Jordan Gal:Oh, very cool. Yep. Jared's a good dude. Appointment's an interesting business. It's like a Calendly competitor.
Jordan Gal:They do some things differently, same kind of thing, right? Calendly define a category and Appointment does a few things differently that make them stand out.
Brian Casel:I'm a paying customer of both Calendly and Appointlet. I use Calendly for my personal scheduling when I email the link out to people. The only reason I use Appointlet is because they this is like a a weird technical feature, but it's the reason I pay with them every month for years, is they give you the option to redirect after a person has booked the appointment. It's actually surprising that not all of these tools do that, but they were one of the only ones because I I have it in my audience ops consultation flow. They they request the consultation, they book it in in a pointlet, and then I automatically redirect them to my page on my site.
Brian Casel:Some of the other ones just don't do that. And, like, that that that was it. Killer feature, you know.
Jordan Gal:Very cool. Nice, man. Alright. That was fun, Brad. Brian, I just called you Brad.
Jordan Gal:Brian.
Brian Casel:Alright. I'll work with that.
Jordan Gal:Put that ramen on my brain, baby. Alright, dude. Have a great weekend. Thanks for listening, everybody. Alright.
Jordan Gal:See you. Bye.
