Bootstrapped Web

Hello. It is Bootstrapped Web back at it. Jordan, what's up, buddy?

Not much. Just had a donut. You know, it'll hurt, but it's worth it.

Throw one over here, would you?

I I would love to, but they're all gone.

Alright. It's also a cross country flight too.

Yes. Yes, that. Yep. When there are no flights. Anyway, it's Friday.

What's happening?

Weather is, finally coming back around here. I've got the window open. I'm itching to get myself outside. So we'll, we'll we'll see what happens. See if I can make that happen today.

Nice.

Yeah. Cool,

man. Well, I'm excited for this week. I'm in I'm in a better mood on Friday than I was on Monday, so that feels good.

That sounds like a productive week.

Yes. Yes. It's more mindset than productive is the truth. I feel like at the beginning of the week, was very susceptible to getting into a funk. So one little thing would trigger me and then I'd be kind of off and mad for an hour.

And that that felt very unproductive. So I've kinda turned my head around on certain things.

Similar thing on my end, I I feel like, it was productive and I have more clarity on things today, but you know, as always, things are just not moving fast enough. In terms of my own, like, I want all this all these things to get done. I I don't expect everything to get done in a week, but I just want them to anyway. And that's the that's how that's how it goes.

Are you able to to stick with your plans?

Yes, I think so. I feel like right now plans are not changed. Things feel like, you know, when I step back and I'm always planning like the next month or the next ninety days of where I wanna go and things I wanna accomplish in the next ninety days, I actually feel very, very much on track in terms of my to dos, you know?

Right. So it's the day to day progress that just always wants to go faster.

Yeah, is on pace with, and I'm working on the things here in May that I was planning on working on in May all along. I just want things to move faster, know, every everything. This is actually a pretty good month. I mean, it's turning out to be on process kit, like, think the best month yet in terms of in terms of new customer sign ups, new customer conversions. Like, we're right now is the fifteenth of the month and halfway into the month, are I think it's already set a record for number of conversions.

So that's that's pretty good.

That's what we like to see. Record record months. That's that's the good stuff. Our focus is is hiring. That's been interesting because these are the first remote hires that we'll make in a long time.

We made a remote hire maybe four years ago. It didn't actually work out. I don't know if that taught us a bad lesson or what we really were pretty bad at being remote back then. We're a lot better now and we're going back into it. It feels like very obvious that that's what we should do.

We were going to hire two support people and then had a few conversations this week. I think part of my good mood today is is just making those decisions and not lingering and hesitating and not being sure. You know, ever since the crisis hit, we have been very conservative on spending. But business has gone well, and now it feels like, okay. We can loosen up a little bit.

And that just letting that water start to flow instead of be dammed up and waiting and waiting and waiting. Yeah. So in addition to the two support hires, one support specialist and one support engineer, we're also gonna hire two back end engineers also. And that's just that's just very exciting. You can make progress, like a lot of progress with with two new engineers.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Where where are they based?

We don't know yet. We're just putting the job at jobs that up.

Oh, I thought you hired them.

Nope. Nope. Not yet. We haven't hired anyone. We've posted the support specialist and support engineer roles, and the reactions to those are as expected.

Support engineer is just a relatively small pool. It's an engineering skill Yeah. Closer to Communications and talking to customers and helping out with demos and onboarding and support. It's it's customer success and customer support. The pool for that isn't that big.

It's people who have been like sales engineers in the past and so on. And then of course, the support specialist role, just a very large quantity. And it's awesome because the the quality is there also. So we are super excited to to find the right person. A lot of people with ecommerce experience, so that's just exciting.

And the engineering side is unknown. But, you know, we we have these conversations internally around programming languages. You know, we are predominantly Laravel. PHP is great and, you know, not great in other ways. And, you know, the new hotness, the the React, the Django, Python, the hotter languages, they do tend to attract younger, more energetic, sometimes smarter people.

There's something there that attracts really talented people to the new stuff. It's I know it's debatable.

They they have a way of convincing us of that.

Yes. Yes. That's that's right. That's right. It's part of it on the recruiting side.

So we had some conversations internally around, do we stick with Laravel? Do we go towards some of these new languages to, you know, to attract talent? And and, really, what we realized was that the missing part, the missing element in our conversation was just admitting that thus far, we have looked for Laravel talent within driving distance of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Pretty small pool. It's it's not saying anything bad about the engineers.

It's just that the pool is real small. And so before even thinking about changing languages or anything like that, because that involves a lot of risk, we are very curious to see the talent we can attract when we open things up. Now it's not global. We still want European time zones.

I was

just gonna ask, like, is there in terms of engineers, is there a certain region of the of the world that you're focused on?

For right now, yes. I might be seeing a different tune in three weeks. But for right now, our assumptions are around that time zones are the limitation. So, basically, from, you know, anything in Europe. Well, you know, from from Spain to Russia.

I mean, when when you're talking about engineers, we're also talking about salaries. I guess in general, when it comes to hiring at at Cardhook, do you think about like region of the world and salaries and

Yeah. I think this is a great topic of conversation. It's actually one of the things I thought about this morning. I don't want it to be different based on geography. In theory, it shouldn't matter if you live in the middle of Iowa or in Chicago or in San Francisco.

The company is asking you to provide something and should pay you for it. So that's that's the ideal I wanna go toward. I wanna pay our engineers, whether they're in Slovenia or London or Kentucky, the same thing. I think we're gonna have to work our way toward that ideal and not be able to accomplish it right away. And I think there will be some element factored in of geography.

I I don't like that, but I think that's the reality. And Basecamp looks at San Francisco. That's one of things that triggered me on it. Jason Fried talked about I don't know. It was a tweet about salary about basically looking at San Francisco and the top 10% of salaries for that position and just paying that regardless of where you are.

If that means you are absolutely banking because you live somewhere cheaper than good for you. It shouldn't matter to the company that you're saving a lot of money just because they're paying you a lot. Like, right. It's kind of not the company's business, how much you're saving. That's a good ideal.

I think buffer has an element, like some multiple, whether it's, like, 1.1 or point nine or point eight or 1.2 type of thing. There's a factor mathematically in in the formula.

With Basecamp, there there are so many things about, like, companies like like Basecamp and and, like, all these big these companies who have who have like hit hit the home runs that they have a lot of extra freedom and and and cash and profit to be able to to like most most companies funded or not, you know, bootstrapped or or, you know, seed funded or whatever, like, you got to start to deal with realities. I mean, that's why I primarily, when it comes to developers, like US based is sort of not even an option. Like I have to look elsewhere. And I'm having really good success with someone in India. It's like that's still a reality of the world, like region you know, regional salaries for engineers.

You know?

I think all of us can look at a situation like Basecamp and acknowledge that that is the right ideal to work toward, but then not feel bad that we're horrible people that we're not able to achieve that ideal. You can hold those two thoughts in your head at the same time, and that's that that's fine. You kinda have a a good guide and inspiration toward what you wanna do as the right thing, and then you you can you only do it when it when it's possible. We're gonna have to see how that goes. Because if we find someone, let's say, in London, they are just going to require to be paid a lot more.

That their expectations, their previous role, their previous salary, all that is gonna factor in. But I I hope we can get closer to it, and I I hope with it, we can start to unlock the Slovenian team's salaries from their geography. And for them, that would mean going up. So that's that that's the hope.

Very nice. Yeah. On the product front and and and ProcessKit, it's like, I have now made the turn to focusing on on onboarding, like sales and onboarding on on ProcessKit. In my mind, it's kind of this like seesaw effect where, you know, we shipped like the conditional logic feature last week. And I think that that was part of some of the influx of new customers and conversions.

And there's a couple more, like, really big features that that I'll need to spend a lot of time on, like like intake forms and and like a calendar view and things like that. I can't spend a lot of hours. Those are gonna require a lot of extra hours on designing the interfaces and and specking out those features. And right now I'm not in big feature development mode anymore. Like May is when I've made this turn to focus on improving that trial to paid conversion rate, improving onboarding.

So the seesaw effect is like now I have my developer working on just tightening up some nagging little bugs or inefficiencies in the interface. This week he's working on the Zapier integration to like, Zapier is always like a step behind where the product is. Like we added a bunch of new features and new capabilities, new field types and things like that. And so now we need to make all those little additions now accessible via the Zapier integration. And that's so that's always like a version or two behind.

And and so right now, this week, he's working on a lot of improvements to that. I can throw those kinds of things to him. And and I'm reviewing his his work every every morning for me, and I'll give him some feedback and I'll make a few, you know, like UI fixes and things here and there on the app and I'm doing a lot of customer support now. But my hours, my focus, my energy is going towards like this onboarding work. And I've got a lot of updates and things that I'm working through there.

But it's it's like this when I talk about like the like the feeling of like things are not moving fast enough, a lot of that is like pressure on on features. Because I'm like doing a lot more customer support now especially with the recent conversions because if you've recently converted, that means you're fully committed to setting up your process kit account which means you're also in the mode of requesting a lot of features like while while you're most products you spent like the first month of using it, you're heavily using it. You know, you're set you're setting things up, you're figuring out exactly what it what what it's capable of and what it's not yet capable of. And and so that's where a lot of these little requests come up. Man, I would love And a lot of them are like small enough that like, oh, I could

You wanna just react.

And some of them I am. Like last week, you know, like somebody request something on Monday. Like by Wednesday, I'm I'm replying back to them. Hey, just so you know, like, that that point that you asked for, yeah, now it's in the app.

Oh, enjoy that. You'll never be able to do that. I know. It's in the future.

And and that's been really fun to be able to get back to to a bunch of customers super fast with like, yep, we actually just shipped that thing. There's still other usually they're sending me these emails with like five or six requests. And like two of them I can knock off with this week. And four of them are like, yep, that is on the to do list for next month. So, you know, a lot of that now is like, have to mentally be okay with pushing the bigger stuff off and I'm I need to keep pushing on the progress on the onboarding stuff.

And I'm making some progress there, but it's that's different that's a different kind of work.

So you you said this month is is record conversion so far. Is that because of your efforts pointed at conversion or just a matter of the previous few months have been good on on trials?

I don't think it's as a result of my onboarding efforts just yet, because the only thing that I actually shipped so far is the is the brand new welcome video. The update video. Yeah. I talked about last week how that was really badly out of date. Earlier this week, I did finish the new version of that and that is in the app now.

But most of the people who converted, they were in the app before that even came in. So So

it's really record conversions, but not record conversion rate?

I mean, the conversion rate is is up from what it was last month. I think probably the biggest driver of it is the release of the conditional logic feature. You know, I I announced that. What happens is with a lot of these conversions now, it's mostly people who started trials weeks or months ago and now they're coming back. Most conversions are like people who have come back to take a second look or sometimes even like a third look.

And it's like, oh, now up to speed of where I need it to be. There's a few people who are brand new and they converted. But yeah, it's still like a mess of older people coming back to convert and new people.

So remind me what the mechanism is for converting. Is it just an amount of time, or is it they specifically proactively say, I'm ready to use the paid features.

It's a, you know, it's a pretty standard fourteen day free trial. I'm not requiring the credit card upfront. So if you sign up and then you go through the trial, if you don't convert within fourteen days, then then it'll just lock your your account. And then and then what happens is, let's say you're weeks past your trial expired, and like I send out an email, hey, this is brand new feature. Click here to log back into your account.

If they log back in, the first screen is like, you gotta You're prompted. Yeah, you're prompted. And then in the past, some people have just replied to my email and say like, hey, can you just extend my trial? I want to see this new feature. And I do.

And sometimes that leads to another call or things like that. But some people just click the link and they've already seen ProcessKit before. They've seen my video of the new feature. They'll just come back and and start paying now. You know?

That would tell me that your focus and bet toward that logic piece and that works. People want that. Because you've been talking about it for the past few weeks. I've I've been seeing your emails about it and, like, why it's important. Yeah.

Maybe that's really driving the the the conversions.

Yeah. I think I think that definitely brought in a few. I think there were a few people that converted just before I released that feature too though. So there there were still some some close to conversions like in the queue earlier this month. Since we're talking about this, let me there's this other thing that I sort of just uncovered this morning.

That trial to paid conversion rate is still lower than I would like it to be. It's higher this month than it was last month. Last month, I feel like it was terrible. The specific problem I'm trying to solve this month is that, hey, we're getting more trials, but fewer of them are converting. Or like the rate of conversion is still low.

I had this hunch and I confirmed that it's true today that if you go back months on this podcast, I was talking about how I released a bunch of process templates. And so the idea was, hey, process kit, there's a lot to set up. So why don't we offer ready made templates and we call them kits. So I made one for like podcasting and I made one for blog content. I made one for new client onboarding.

I made one for sales and a couple other things. And I made it like a content play so that it's on the website, like content on the website. It it ended up being like these like five or six really big articles on the website. And they're optimized for terms like podcast production process template, blog content process template, things like that. But the the problem is that I'm not actually offering these templates, like, free freely downloadable.

It's not like they're PDFs. It's not like they're documents that you can come to the website and content upgrade and and download this document. They're only in the app. They're only inside the app. Okay.

Because because they're functional

Yes.

Yes. Dynamic app features in ProcessKit. Right? Like, what I ended up doing last year when I when I launched this content play, this this marketing play, is I would have these long articles that basically talk, this is all about a podcast production process template and what you would wanna put into your template and how you would wanna use it. Now to go use ours, go sign up for a trial for ProcessKit and get it inside your ProcessKit account.

Okay. And I

thought I was being kind of clever, but I think what I was I think it was it actually ended up being pretty stupid to do that. Pissing everybody off? Not pissing every I I didn't get any pissy emails, but 0% of those people converted to customers, You know? And it's and a lot of them converted into trials because the call to action is go get your trial to get your template. Okay.

Okay. So it really should

be so what are you gonna do? Are gonna change it up to to provide a PDF?

That that was my hunch was that maybe a big contributing factor to this low trial to paid conversion rate is that a whole big chunk of these trials are coming Disaster. Are coming from these template blog posts that I've had up. And and I confirmed that, like, roughly about, like, 30% of the trials that I've been getting are coming from those template pages. And, like, close to 0% of them turned into customers. And and all the customers that that did turn into customers, they didn't come from the templates.

So You know? The the intent is is

The intent is is exactly right. The the intent is is not aligned. As of today, I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do about about them because they they are driving traffic to my site, but clearly it's not

the right intent. Maybe you're just skipping a step. Maybe maybe someone who is interested in that process could be a good prospect, but you are not filtering them through a process to take them from one stage of the of their decision making process to to the next. You you really need to reduce the number of people that sign up for a trial because you only want the people who are actually interested in software. Yeah, I I would consider just putting it into a PDF that's helpful and then educating them about your product and then seeing who who wants to start a trial after they know a little more.

I know it's optimistic.

Well, that that's one thought. Like, see, I'm I'm still torn on this today. I don't know. Like, probably by next week, I'll have some idea of what I'm gonna do. But the yeah.

Like, that's one thought is to actually just start to deliver on the promise that these blog posts actually promise.

Right. Deliver, then filter.

Yeah. But that would then mean like, okay, I gotta spend some time creating some static downloadable version of these processes, which is like

that's For people not that don't turn it to customers. Yeah.

For for people that are not gonna use process kit. And sort of the whole benefit of using process kit is that it's dynamic. I guess I could put a big call to action in the PDF itself and like whatever. But like the There's that idea. But then on this other track of what I'm working on this month is that I'm working on trying to just better educate and better guide the people who are trialing, better guide them to these are the steps you need to take to become a customer.

And I wanna speed up the process, make it easier for you to not only learn how process kit works, but like, let me just give you a roadmap on like, you should here's my teachings on how to how you should think about setting up your first process, how you should start to automate one one process with your team in process kit, create one board, start running your projects this way. And at first, I was like I was thinking like, alright. Well, I'll just kinda update like a like a quick series of videos to show in the app and guide people through. And then as I started to create this video series, was like, man, this is turning into like a really kind of valuable course. It's more than just knowledge base articles, more than just knowledge base videos.

Like I already have those, which are just documentation on how the features work. This is more like a course. Like I'm teaching you. This is how you should think about making your service more predictable, more process oriented, more scalable. And I'm thinking in terms of like, if you're familiar with like Ahrefs and they have like these like Ahrefs courses and like HubSpot has a lot of like courses

So and

good. Yeah. Like I literally just went through Ahrefs thing like, last month because I was working on SEO. Was like, I actually need to learn some best practices from Yeah.

Have, Ahrefs University or something like that. Right?

SEO for bloggers or something like that. And I was like, I just need to know the strategy, and I also wanna use Ahrefs. So the so the course taught me the strategy and it showed me how to use their tool. And and I wanted to create something like that for ProcessKit, you know.

Okay. Okay. So so it is very focused on process kit the same way. Ahrefs course is not just an SEO course. You are learning SEO principles, but it is really geared toward here's how you do that in this product.

So so now my thinking is like at first it was like, okay, I'll just add a little bit more guidance within the app. But as I started to create it, I was like, this this can become a really good asset. Like content, educational asset. Like, this should really live on the marketing site and it's in its own set of guides, pages that can be found, that can be like people can benefit from learning best practices. And yeah, every video is definitely highlighting how you can do this stuff in ProcessKit.

Basically, two birds with one stone is like, I will be promoting it within the app to new users to help them onboard, but I think it can also be an asset that is educational on the site, like a marketing asset. And then tying it back to those other templates that are not the right intent. I don't know, this is still fuzzy, but like maybe this course sort of like branches off into like, alright, if you want some more specific stuff, like go look at our podcast process over here and our blogging process over here. I think the educational content that that I wanna put on the site is gonna be more around like how to strategically design your processes and make your business more efficient and and, you know, work more predictably. I don't know.

It's I this is probably sounding kinda mixed up, but

it's No. No. Not at all. No. I I I think everyone can kinda get where what it can do.

You still need to decide how to use it. But if if I look at Ahrefs University, right, that's what it's called, it's a legit course. Yeah. Right? It is

But but that that's, like, the model that I have in mind kinda.

Yeah. I mean, we have always wanted to do it internally where when you sign up for Cardhook, you get a course on using Cardhook, and we we planned on putting it into course software. Like, so it's really like and and then what we wanted to do was put a sticker price on it. That this thing is $500. Right?

And when you sign up, you get something worth $500. And it lives on the Internet that you can buy it for $500, and basically no one will ever buy for $500, but you are pointing at it and saying, no, it's worth $500. It's valuable. What Ahrefs does really well is we write with software these days, there is a very large contingent of people that really want to use your product, but don't want constant guidance from a human. Right?

We have success people, and they are amazing, and the customers love them, but not all of the customers want to learn that way. It's just it's just truth. Right now, it makes sense for us to kind of filter everyone through that. But but to open it up and become more scalable and to attract those people that don't wanna learn that way, a lot of people are like, fine. They're reluctant.

Fine. Alright. Well, I'll I'll use the human basically is they're saying.

Exactly, man. That's exact I've been talking about how like, I do this implementation service, done with you service, and I'm happy to do that, even charge for it. Sometimes I don't, sometimes I do. But this audience are more technical. A lot of them are running like web design shops and web dev shops and

Yeah.

They're marketers and they're

They learn on their own.

They they like to get their hands dirty. They they a lot of them like the demos. Like, let me just show you and and I'll and and answer your questions, talk about the value and all that. But then then it's like, Let me go get my hands dirty and and see if I can get this set up. But then they still have, up until now, have have been getting a little bit, like, hung up on, well, what what is the best way to organize my processes and my boards?

And that's where a course really kinda guides them through. You know?

Right. And putting it on the marketing site before you signed up, people get the confidence of, okay. When I sign up, I'm gonna have the resources I need right there. If you can put together and, you know, you you know how to do that sort of thing. If you can create a course, I think you could definitely use it as an asset.

Call it a course, separate it out, use it on the marketing site, use it as part of onboarding.

And and literally, like, for me, I started paying for Ahrefs. I've paid for it off and on over the years, but like I paid for it again two months ago. But I literally made the decision to take out my credit card and start paying for it in the same month that I went through their course. What you just said, that was my intent was like, I'm going to follow their lessons and pay for their software and start optimizing for SEO by following their guides. Like that was my game plan to get set up.

And and I am a technical person who doesn't like to be handheld by a person. I just wanna go do it myself, you know. And that I think it's a good model to It'll be like one track. There there will be like the do it myself track and then you I do it with me track and I'll present that on demo calls. But it's, you know, that those are kind of the options that I'm trying to get all the all this stuff put together this month.

That that's the goal of this month is like make making sure like whichever path the customer wants to go down, it's as optimal as possible to to optimize for conversion.

Yeah. I I love the course idea because it will do both things for you at the same time. It'll help with conversion, and it'll also help with the step that you're gonna focus on after that, which is one step further up the funnel. Exactly. More more trials.

So it's perfect. Nice, man. Well, that's that that's very interesting. Look forward to hearing more about that. On my side of things, you know, I had a pretty humbling experience with the people coach.

She had a call with the entire leadership team one on one. So each individual person on the leadership team, myself included, did a call, and then she asked all of us a very similar set of questions. And then she came back to me with, alright, here's my diagnosis. It was not that pretty. It's not bad, but it was still humbling.

And so many of our problems are actually caused by us caring and trying to do the right thing. Like, for example, I can talk about myself and the mistakes that I make. You know, we talked over the past few weeks about how I'm I'm worried about people. I I I wanna know how they're doing because I don't see them and I don't interact with different levels of the company as much. And so I can go a few weeks without talking to someone, and it makes me worried.

I I wanna see how they are. And that that's a good instinct, but that can lead you down a wrong path like like I have gone. So here's an example. Two weeks ago, someone resigns. Okay?

They end their time at Cardhook, and then the next week, we don't have that person. We don't have that resource, that brain, that area being focused on the same way. And so I get worried about how that's going to affect the other people around them that are now have to take on more work or don't have the resource to go do. And so what do I do? I reach out to them.

I say, how are you? I'm worried about you. I want to make sure you're okay. I want to let you know that we're posting job ads right away, that we're getting good responses to it, that we're to move quickly on it. You know, I'm I'm trying to like take care of my people in in my mind.

What am I really doing though? I'm taking authority away from their manager. I am not allowing their manager to be that person and resource and that trust and that bond. I'm messing with that. And it's not it's not helpful.

And it's almost like I need to just decide whether I'm going to trust my leadership team or not.

By you being more directly in touch with the two levels below you

Yes.

You don't intend it this way, but it's sort of like undermining the the one level below you,

the manager. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And it's not just like this political thing.

Oh, you're undermining me. That's that's not it at all.

Yeah. But it's just like you wanna be in touch with everyone, but really it's almost like you shouldn't be talking to the

Not about that. Yeah. You you know? See how they are. How was your weekend?

I hope you're doing well. I miss seeing you in the office. You know? I look forward to seeing you at the happy hour on Thursday. That's human interaction.

But when it comes to the work side of things, it's sending the wrong signal to everybody. It's sending the wrong signal to the individual contributor. That's that's two levels away. It's sending the wrong signal to the lead. When that's brought up to me, I realize that that's why the leadership team is coming to me and asking me for permission for things that I don't think they need to be asking me for permission for.

I want them to be empowered in that way, but guess what? If I want them to be empowered, stop going around them. It really feels like I need to get comfortable with the discomfort of being out of touch with people for longer periods of time. And just putting more trust in individual leadership people, and just kind of rewire myself that way, and and relearn it, and I think it will lead to better management overall.

What do you get from your managers? Like in terms of reports or like what are they reporting, what are they bringing to you?

Well, this is like where the work begins. Like, the reason I'm doing that and feel the need to do that is because we don't have good enough systems in place so that I get the information I need. The reason I don't know how people are doing is because we're not filtering the information properly and regularly enough in a structured way. And so it's been very much like through feel, and we've talked about it. I like I like working through feel as opposed to through numbers.

But it it is definitely there that it's starting to hurt the organization, and the process that we're gonna go through with this coach is really, okay. Right? First step, let's just define our roles. Write out your job description. Let's make sure we're on the same page first.

And then start to put in place the I think we'll have to do our leadership meeting more often. Right now we have it every other week. Right? We've really tried not to do too many meetings. It ends up being a lot of meetings no matter what.

So what why add to them? So whenever we can take them away, we used to do it every week, and then we found, hey, we're not really talking about anything new. Let's do it every other week. Now it feels like we actually need shorter check ins more regularly. So either weekly or even two times a week, but like a stand up, like a leadership stand up, fifteen minutes, just get the information that we need to each other.

I need to do one on ones more regularly and we just need a more structured every month. These are the numbers I need. This is the information I need. These are the notes from the one on ones that I need. And then I can get the information that I need to be calm and

stop The managers would do one on ones with other people, and then they bring you like a report on all of them.

Yes. Yes. So that they can really own their team and be the person on their team that people reach out to for guidance, help management, accountability. And then that filters up to me and I just need to be okay with effectively just looking at my leadership and saying, these are the people that I interact with on a regular basis. When it comes to work and everyone else in the company, want relationships with, but it's not helpful if I'm in the mix on the day to day.

It doesn't help anybody.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that sounds right. Yeah. Yeah.

Were talking about this a few months ago. I don't know what the current state of of your team, your org chart looks like today, but I think head of product stepped out, and and now it's that you sort of took on that hat at one point recently? Temporarily. Okay.

But Jessica is very firmly in in leading product.

Got it. Like I was wondering like where do you how much input these days are you on the product and the features that are currently in design and development?

That I am very close with. So it's like the success and support have one lead. So Emily runs both success and support. So with her, I'm very closely in touch with how are the customers doing? How is the team doing?

Is everyone anyone overloaded on how many demos they're doing? How much support they're doing? Should we hire a support person? Should we hire support engineers? Should we hire both?

Like, that's very, very close. And then there's the the product side. It really ends up being myself and Jess who's running the product, and then Rock who is CTO. And and the three of us are really in close and touch a lot around where where's the development cycle, when's the next release, how are people doing, do people need days off, is someone performing well or not well. And so I really feel like I have these two sides where Emily makes sure that I'm in touch with how people are doing, how people are happy, how are negotiations, any big deals that we're trying to close.

And then Rock and Jess are about what's happening, what's coming up next, where should we be heading? And I filter a lot of the stuff that I come across daily, through them in terms of where's the market going? What do merchants need? What about these new platforms? What should we be doing next?

What should we prioritize? And then they go off and effectively run those teams on day to day.

Got it. And then what about like the the stuff that is in development? The user experience. Your customer's experience of like using the checkout. Like Like I know like you're not designing it.

But you know what the end product or the end goal of the product needs to be. And I know you're not in like building a brand new product mode right now. But like there have been times in the past when when it's like, oh, this didn't get implemented the way that I would want it as if I if I were a customer. Like, do you do you have input on that kind of stuff?

I I do, but it is a few steps removed. So so when there's something specific or there's something big or there's a feature that I believe really should be addressed before other things, I have a say, but it it's a lot slower. Know, that's what I made the comment earlier of enjoy it while you can. The the ability to be so responsive to people. I really have had to train myself to not react in that way because when I have it really scrambles people up and the people are like, they know.

It's not like they're unaware that this customer is unhappy about this thing. Me adding pressure to it really doesn't help. And so I just have, you know, we have a walk us channel that what our customers are saying, we used to have it as a meeting that we have it as a Slack channel. And that channel is not all good. It's half half.

Sometimes it's you guys are amazing. Thank you so much. I couldn't do this without you. And other times it's why did you change that and remove the percentages? Now your analytics are worthless.

Right? There's there's just always gonna be both. And I have had to train myself to just read that and just move on. I'm just, okay. Now I'm a little bit more aware of that, but I'm not gonna act on it.

I'm not gonna start pinging people and say, are we doing about this? And that's just not it's just not helpful.

Yeah. Yeah. Am acting fast on a lot of the smaller requests. I only do it when I've heard it two or three times from different customers. So usually and hopefully, I'm I'm shipping something fast and notifying multiple customers that, hey, we just shipped that thing.

But there's also a part of me that's like, okay. I know that I could ship this thing for the like, he literally asked about it like an hour ago, and I kinda have a free hour this afternoon. I and it's super small and I could just push it out to production. And sometimes I do, but sometimes I'm like, does that give the signal that like, process kit isn't isn't big enough or isn't like isn't for real enough. And and and even though I'm making a customer happy and I'm giving them what they literally asked for, does that put less trust in the company?

I I personally don't think so. I think everyone has to decide how they want to behave. There is no right or wrong. Like you must respond right away as soon because you can, and that's how people start to love the product. Like that's one version of the philosophy.

It's not necessarily right. Think you just need you should do what you wanna do, and the chances of that being viewed negatively, I think, are real low. The the the type of person that says, oh, this isn't a legit company because they replied too quickly, That's not really the right type of customer for right now anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that I'm having a really good time with right now is I'm extremely responsive on these customer support emails. Like within fifteen minutes, I'm usually getting back to people. Because literally any requests about ProcessKit are instant my top priority.

Like, I have emails about audience ops and and product ties and other things. And like, I get back to those within a couple hours or a business day. But if it's a support request for process kit, that's the thing that I care about the most right now. Okay. That's great.

So I care so much about talking to customers, especially if they've recently converted or or I think they're going to convert soon. Like we had a good demo. So I'm gonna like, I'm super eager to get on calls with customers. And I'm in this phase of the business. And I and I hope it stays this way for as long as it can, I'm just really happy to hop on a call and dig into somebody's Zapier account with them to to get it working for them.

I'm I'm not getting I'm not being paid for for this stuff. And like, I'm like, I don't care if it's a customer's call. I'm I'm happy to take it for process kit. You know? And like I'm much more protective of my time when people are like, oh, can I just have like a free coaching session about productized services or or this or that?

Or like even in audience ops, it's all all the all the in the weed stuff gets handled by my team. I just had a conversation with Ward Sandler, founder of MemberSpace. He was on my other podcast. To this day, they're a successful SaaS company. He's got big team and everything.

But he's taking like customer calls three times a day just to be available. I think that's really awesome. And it's just a I don't know. It's just a good feeling to be able to like I don't feel like I have to be protective of my time. It's worth so much to the product and to the business for me to be talking to these people right now.

Yeah. I I agree. It's super valuable. And there's no right way to do it. I I always think of an article I read in Inc Magazine.

This must have been fifteen years ago. It was a long time ago, possibly twenty years ago. But it was about how the CEO of Applegate, Applegate Farms, Applewood Farms, the the the company that has packaged like bacon and sausages

Yeah.

Yeah. Meats. It was the first time I've read an article. Right? I was used to CEOs are leading from the front and they're the, you know, the the man or woman in charge and everyone's visible and leading and all that.

And this guy worked for a few hours a day just looking at spreadsheets from his cabin in the woods with his family and would just email his management team. Why is this number different from last week? Like, that that was the extent of his management. And he'd go into the office every month or two and say hi. And I was that opened my eyes to like, woah.

That's that is so different, and you admire people who write their own rules. And I've always kept that article in mind because I don't wanna feel guilty about my style. It turns out I'm actually okay with not talking to customers. Maybe I've kinda had enough of it or maybe I'm maybe I like the management part without the sales part. I I don't know what it is.

I mean, whenever I get on the phone with a customer, it's exciting. And we we had it happen a few last week or two weeks ago, whatever it was. Big customer insists. I want CEO. Alright.

Fine. You know, let's let's do it. And of course, it ends up being fun and interesting and energizing, but I'm okay not doing it. I'm okay not talking to a customer for a month. I don't know.

It's bad, but I don't feel guilty, but maybe it's not bad. And maybe it's helping the rest of the team learn in a different way. I don't know. I just don't wanna feel guilty. I don't think people should feel guilty about their style because part of the reason we went into entrepreneurship is because we don't like rules, and we get to make them our own.

To to go into it and then follow someone else's rules feels a little ridiculous. Alright, man. Well, I have Rob Walling and his tweet just in my head of, like, nobody wants forty five minute podcasts. So that's what you did, Rob. That's what you did, Rob.

You put you put pressure on us during this podcast.

I feel no pressure. I I like I right now I'm looking at the timer, we're at like forty eight minutes or something. This for me is the sweet spot. This is like the length that I like in a podcast.

Look, just two X the speed, man. Rob, For you don't have

Rob, this one will be like twenty four minutes. We're perfect.

Yes. See? Well, look. I honestly after we hung up last week, I thought I just didn't do a very good job on the podcast, and I was bummed about it. And I feel like this one went a lot better, so now I feel better.

Every every episode is a gem. Come on now. Yes. Good stuff. Good stuff, man.

Cool, man. It was great to catch up. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Alright.