Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrapped Web. Mister Brian Castle, how are you?

Doing good. Doing good. It's Friday. Finishing up, I think a pretty productive week now. Yeah, ready to head into the weekend.

Memorial Day weekend. I didn't even Is it? Didn't register for a while. It's one

of those holidays that just kind of sneaks up on you. It's like when is that again? Oh it's this Okay.

Know things like that don't really sneak up on my wife. She's like real on top of it But this year was the first time we're just like, Oh yeah, we don't have any plans. We're not going anywhere. I'm like, I have barbecue plans. That's basically it.

Eating plans.

Yeah. Same here. Before we start talking business, how have you been dealing with socializing, hanging out with friends and things like that through all this? Have you been doing much like Zoom calls with friends and family, stuff like that?

No. We have been doing more FaceTime with family. So you know, like my mom is in New York in an apartment. So, and she's just, that's a long time to just hang up by yourself basically. So we're in really regular contact.

My brother We've had a lot more calls with the grandparents.

Yeah, I mean, right? That's good. And my dad and yes, so we've been doing more family but you know, have that Portland crew of microconfers, you know, good friends with them now and we're in a Slack group together. So we talk all the time and that activity has gone up just in Slack. Just just talking about more personal and how are you handling things and PPP and there's just a lot of conversation there.

I think everyone's kind of hungry for it.

It's funny like, so I'm in a Slack just like that with probably a lot of people that we both know and I I've got to think that like the conversations happening in the Slack that I'm in probably are just total like mirror of what's Like happening over we we've had weeks of of PPP discussions and

Oh yes. Who got it? Who didn't get it? Did you go with? Did you go with Blue Vine?

Did you go to Bank of America? Should I apply a second time or should I wait? Totally.

That has definitely increased in activity for us. We do, we do calls. We have like a private podcast feed that we all post to sometimes. And then we do a lot of slack and we've been doing often on like Friday happy hour. So maybe we'll do that tonight.

Yeah. So we've done a few of those with the Portland crew and we've been trying to do them more with the company also. What's happened at the company level is that there's just more room made for personal talk and personal issues. So when we start stand up, right? We do have, we have a weekly stand up for just the Portland team.

We just don't dive right into work. We laugh a little bit with some funny commentary and make fun of people's hair. Like we just kind of let that go a little longer because I think that's what everyone wants and needs and it's helpful as opposed to just, here's the interaction, we're going to talk about work and the interaction is going to end. People want more than that.

Yeah. Yeah. My longtime friends who I grew up with, this COVID thing has sort of been an excuse to get back in touch and so we've been playing poker on Thursday nights on PokerStars we would just fire up a Zoom call alongside it and so that's been pretty fun to kind of be back in touch. By the way, if anyone plays online poker with PokerStars, you if wanna see an example of an absolutely atrocious piece of software, PokerStars is like beyond mind boggling bet, like just so bad. I'm a software person and I could not it's been weeks of I couldn't figure out how to like get into the right room and

It's it's super app. It's supposed to

be for people. It's It's so bad.

And is that like the leader in the space?

I think so. Like maybe two or three of them but that's the one that we've been using.

Wow. That sounds wild. You would think there's so much money there that the competition would be enough to improve the

the And level of it's like a desktop software app that connects it's crazy. I don't know.

That's funny. I had a frenzy the first few weeks of the crisis just reaching out to people from high school and just checking up and all the people that you care about but you don't really talk to because your lives don't intersect. There was a big resurgence of that. One of my good friends from high school was a police officer in New York so that was like, Woah, are Some you people are doctors. Now we're starting to get into this stretch where this might just be a while, like a year.

Settle in folks.

Yeah, it's really, it's pretty strange. Pretty strange. Lot of interesting conversations with the therapist. Yeah. Oh yes.

The most frustrating thing about it is that question. How long is this going to last? Because it's like, we don't know. Like, so officially here in Connecticut, things have opened up. I think May 20 was the official reopening date and people are starting to go out to businesses and things and, but a lot are still closed and so what's the summer gonna look like?

That's the first question. And then the second question is what is the fall? Like is there gonna the big resurgence that everyone's talking about? Like probably. And then like, what does 2021 look like?

You know, like cause we're going to be nowhere near a vaccine. So,

right.

So it's like how risk

are you going to accept?

How much risk is it even if businesses reopen? How much, how much are consumers going to even go out? Know, like, like I had tickets with my friends to go see rage against the machine in August. I

don't really feel like I have much trouble accepting those things. The travel and not seeing family for an extended time, that bums me out.

Well I think it's like I have no problem accepting it especially our lifestyle, we're homebodies anyway And I work at home. It's not being able to plan the rest of the year like I don't know if we're gonna have like big snow tiny comp or plan traveling or like just give me when a things are gonna go back to normal and nobody can do that.

Yeah, can't do it. And it's interesting what's happening now in the tech space and the frenzy of excitement about remote work and the base camp guys must be in heaven. All of their dreams are finally coming true and Facebook doing its Facebook thing. Yeah, we'll go remote but as soon as we know where you live, we are lowering your goddamn pay. Yeah, I saw That's Facebook.

Especially after our episode last week talking about that. Like goes out of their way to be like, yeah. Just

so you know, can have the rest of the year but we will find out where you live.

Because because we're Facebook and we really need to tighten our belts around here.

Yes. I love it. I love it. That impacts everybody. You know, we are excited and confused at the same time.

I mean, I should cancel my office, right? I know I should cancel my office but I just don't want to. But it's $5,000 a month. It's it's a lot of money. Yeah.

So and it's $5,000 a month in two locations. One in Portland, one Slovenia. $10,000 a month. That's significant.

You doing anything about that? Like like talking to your landlord at all?

In Portland, we have a thirty day out clause. So it is, you know, pull the trigger, boom, move out and done. In Slovenia, we have six months. Now Slovenia is opening up. They did a good job of tightening as soon as because Bergamo in Italy, that region is right on the border with Slovenia.

They did not. They took it very seriously. So we have some people in the Slovenian side that they want to go to the office a few days a week. They're kind of studying, okay, what if we wear a mask? What do we do?

How many people per day? They're getting into that. We talk about that in Portland but we're just nowhere near it. We have a pregnant employee. We have It's just unrealistic.

I just can't wrap my mind around accepting sitting in my bedroom where I am right now for the next like two years or foreseeable future.

Yeah. It's so crazy.

I I fully went down the rabbit hole of one of those prefab like eight foot by eight foot office things that they can just drop in Yeah. Your Dude,

like I don't need one because I have my home office here, but I just want one.

Yes. Yes. I totally agree. And I looked at it, I'm like the price, it's kind of doable. We compared to you know, being in this bedroom for two years.

I'm Right. I don't have you have a nice office over there. I can see it. We're on video right now. No one can see it.

Yeah. That's a nice office.

But it's

I I have a standing desk lodged up against like so. Well that that's true. Yeah. But you've kind of you know, you're you're set up for it. This is not cool.

I'm in a stand up desk that's lodged in front of the fireplace that was once a nice fireplace in my bedroom. No longer.

That's pretty cool. You got a fireplace in there?

I do. This is a really old house and there are fireplaces everywhere because that was the only heat. We have three fireplaces. But we only use one.

So what's going on in business here?

Okay. What's going on in business? I had an interesting experience. I had my most popular tweet ever last week. Oh.

Such a lame thing That's fun. To it was fun. What was it? I'll read it to you. Here's what I wrote.

I can say with 100% certainty that if you raised an a right now when I was able to take a million off the table that the likelihood of a big outcome becomes much much more likely. This was in response to the freak out over the news that Clubhouse yet to be released, raised $10,000,000 from Andreessen Horowitz at a $100,000,000 valuation. So that's a big deal. But the fact that the founders took $2,000,000 off the table, that was like pointed out as absurdity. Yeah.

And I very strongly disagree. First of all, you don't know people's particular situation. You don't know if someone put all their life savings in and went into debt for the last company and this just helps them get out of that and so they can focus on building the big business. The truth is we found out a little more in the whole response to it as people freaked out. Someone posted a picture of a tweet that one of the founders turns out has a child with a very severe condition.

Well, it's like, why are you jumping to conclusions on that? Right? To have have a kid, a very young child with a serious condition is mentally, emotionally and financially devastating. Yeah. So what's wrong with them taking some money off the table?

And the way I put it was, you know, us raising a series a is not out of the realm of possibility. I think it's more likely than not to be honest. And it is scary right now because the business is worth tens of millions of dollars on paper, right? Like in theory, it's not worth anything until someone pays for it. But if you look at multiples and all that, it's worth tens of millions of dollars, which means for me personally, if I sold it now, it was definitely life changing money.

So to raise money is a huge risk.

Yeah.

So taking money off the table when raising is a very reasonable agreement to make with investors. I will risk life changing money for a lot less if you let me take some money off the table so I'm not in a crunch and I'm not stressed. And that's why I said the likelihood of a big outcome, not a 20 or $30,000,000 look, which is a lot of money, but it's not a big outcome in the tech world. A big outcome of a 100 plus becomes much more likely

if I'm I think you made a really good point there. I actually had never thought about it that way but I think you're totally right. It's the point of you're taking money off the table but you're also taking off the table the desire to sell when the first semi big offer comes along and instead you know, go super big. Yes. Because that's what VC wants.

So it's like if you want me to go for that, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, well, well help me not eat all of that risk because you're not taking any risk yourself. Even if you have some of your own money in your fund, it's probably because you already have enough money to put into a fund And more likely than not, it's mostly LP money, which is a different thing. It's not an individual taking risk the same way. So if you want me to take the risk, help me.

What did you see in the responses to this? I'm trying to scroll through them. What was the consensus or did you get any pushback, any disagreement?

Only some pushback but mostly it felt like I had said something that people agreed with but don't normally hear and so it was a lot of that. It was a lot of people saying, My guess is that people complaining about it don't have kids. That's one way to look at it. Like people who are saying, Hey, you should take one off the table. Have a few kids on a mortgage and tell me how that feels when you're trying to start a business and how different it would feel if you could just shore that up.

Like a million bucks is a lot of money but after taxes, it's not actually that much money. It's just enough that you are calm. Yes. Other people talking about like people who against it most likely came from some background of privilege or haven't been close to the metal, let's call it in their past. I thought an interesting point that Austin Reef, one of the founders of Morning Brew made was that he asked, does the likelihood of going to zero also go up?

That I think is the right question because yes, you have to admit that taking on money makes it more likely to go zero also. Like if you're swinging for the fences, it's also more likely that it's not going to work out, which is the other side of that.

It's not like you're at this point going to be starting a brand new idea that might be a total failure. You already have some traction so it's going to grow and now you have all these extra resources to grow it. So I don't know that it increases the likelihood of zero.

I think it does though. Overall, yes, you have more fuel in the tank, but you are you're going to drive a touch more recklessly. Like that is the point. You are increasing the variance on both sides, likely to more to fail, more likely to have a big outcome. Right?

Whereas bootstrapping, you're trying to keep that variance pretty tight because it's either it's broke, right? Or pretty successful is so valuable.

I guess by growing super fast and hiring a massive team very quickly and not thinking about profitability, know, that's where a thing like a global pandemic that you can't expect

can nuke you.

Can nuke you, you know? And whereas a bootstrapper might have a little bit more Yeah. I think it's safe and can weather the storm maybe a little bit more.

People assume that you can cut expenses and they view that in the abstract. And so if let's say we pushed a lot harder and we got to 10,000,000 in ARR but not profitable, people look at that and they say, well, you know what? At any point in time you can just cut expenses and become profitable. What they don't take into account is the ability to just break the company culture and break the confidence and break the team spirit and it can die out from that alone. So you can be a 10,000,000 ARR and spending 15,000,000 a year and say, okay, we are we're burning $5,000,000 a year, but we have 20 in the bank.

And so that's fine. If it gets too hairy and too close, then we can just cut expenses and cut staff and get back down to call it 10,000,000 in expenses. We'll be breakeven with a few million bucks and the bank will be okay. What you're not realizing is a layoff of call it 30 or 40 or 50% of the company. Your best people could just start leaving and just they don't see a future there and the promises that you've made and that they have made on their own in their heads is that this thing's going to be a billion dollar company and that's why I'm here.

Yeah. By the way, what is clubhouse? I've never heard of it until this news. At first I thought it was that developer project app project management app. Like, I was like, what?

How big are they?

It's not that. And it's not that I think I think you and I are really gonna like Clubhouse. What I'm confused by is that people on Twitter are are, like, talking bad about it. Like if you're into Twitter, this is this is moving toward an audio version. Okay, so here's what it is.

So it's like audio, Twitter, of.

So it's audio Twitter, but you if you think about that, think about everyone just shouting like that's exhausting and that doesn't work. So there there there have to be tears and this is the part where it gets a little iffy on the execution of it. Right now, it's in beta. So it's tiny and it's everyone's hand selected and there is an enormous reputational risk for for acting badly. Right?

If you're if you're in there with 3,000 people and you know who those people are, a lot of them are very famous VCs and all this other stuff. So having a behaving in a certain way.

I have not seen it or downloaded it or or had access So to right. It's it's closed. So my understanding is it I'm just picturing Twitter except instead of text, people are just posting audio snippets and you can just like click and listen to anybody's public audio clip?

No. No. No. Think about a podcast. Think about you and I talking right now and there are 50 people listening and someone raises their hand electronically and says, have a comment to make and we click and then all of a sudden they're in the conversation with us.

So it's live?

It's live.

It's a platform for running like live audio events.

That's my understanding of what it's like now, which is, you know, and that's why what's happening is a lot of the people who are in there are super into it because imagine tonight at 08:00, you knew that some of the, you know what? I think it actually has more serendipity than that. It's people like, let's just say are on Twitter at night and then they can form a conversation. So I think the other day it was like Toby, the CEO of Shopify, a famous VC, someone who's like a chef and then like some thinker. And all of sudden these four people come together and start talking and you could just listen to those people talk.

That's kind of exciting. And then you can ask to participate and there So you could see that it's really hard to do right. Otherwise it turns into a mess. Yeah. It has the potential.

Think, and you can take this clip right now and replay it five years from now and show how

How right I was. How

wrong I was about what I'm gonna say. But I How right you are, maybe how wrong I am right now. But I just It's hard for me to see, First of all, there are those things now. You can do live streams with people. You could do like live YouTubes and stuff like that.

The other thing about Twitter conversations is that it's passive or it's quick and efficient. Like to get on an audio call or a video call, you gotta go into But you gotta go get into a quiet space. You can't be around, maybe you can't do it in a public place or you can't do it if your kids are around or something like that. But with Twitter, you could be sort of on the go and just give a quick reply to something or give a quick like or you know. Obviously it's not Twitter, it's something else.

But it's Yes. Like the serendipity part of it is still like something that I'm like, how would how does that really play out?

Look, there's there's a flip side to not being asynchronous, right? Twitter is you check it when you want. If this is, if you don't check it, you missed something. It requires a different level of attention, which is more valuable.

Interesting thing that to me is it's the connection to podcasting. Like the one, I don't know, call it a pain point or something when it comes to like doing this podcast, you and me, is that A) this comes out a week after we've actually had this conversation so there's always that delay And then it's always hard to get feedback from people. We do get feedback like on Twitter and stuff, but it's out of context. It's weeks later, know, if there's some solution for making this more of a conversation, especially for bootstrapper podcast like ours, know, and we listen to the other ones too, making that more of a conversation. And then the other thing is private podcasts, which seems to really be getting some traction all around.

All the different podcasting companies are doing it. We've hacked together our own private podcast, my buddies in that Slack group There and so

will be a solution though.

Yeah, yeah. And that is a very engaging, I think interesting, it's completely different content.

It's not podcast content. It's private. It does need to, yes. It doesn't need to replace podcasting. Just like Clubhouse doesn't need to replace Twitter.

Just like Clubhouse doesn't need to replace podcasting.

Maybe it does this, if Clubhouse is asynchronous, right? So it's like, Hey, me and Jordan are going have this conversation. We're in two different time zones. We're going to talk about yay or nay on funding or whatever. Like, I'll post my thing.

Then two hours later you post your reply. Then three hours later I post my reply to that. Four hours later somebody else chimes in and then, and then it merges together into this like conversation that anybody can play back.

I could see how that is interesting overall. I think the magic that clubhouse is going for is if you weren't there, you missed it. I think that's what they're going But it hasn't gone public yet, so it'll be interesting to watch. I I think about Substack a lot lately.

I I hate hearing that.

I I'm not on that. Is it? It's very, very interesting. It is a I feel like old man today. Cranky.

What is this new technology?

Yeah. Like I'm just like out of the What loop it? Like

We got Mailchimp. I don't need email. Now Substack is interesting because it reduced the barrier to publishing and at the same time, handed over direct connection with the audience for your own audience. But if you're not on the email list, you didn't necessarily miss out because it's then turned into a webpage. Mhmm.

So then I can write a newsletter to my list but then tweet it out. And then if you like it, then you easily subscribe to my list. It's like it like removes the need for a blog without the cost of not having things on the web and then you can charge for it.

It's got a payments piece.

If you want.

Yes. Okay.

Yes. So you can charge $5 a month for subscribers.

Yeah. I know with Mailchimp forever you could have a publishable web version of every newsletter but

Yes. Yeah, I like all the stuff that's happening. Yeah. That's it.

I don't have time anymore to like actually like investigate new tools and stuff unless it's like something I actually need for my business right now.

I feel like I always have my radar up for what is this thing and then that next step of, well, how's it going to be used? Who's going to use it? How do you make money off of it? Why is it valuable that people don't realize yet? Like, you know, I can't help but go there as soon as I see something new.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's do some updates. So right now I'm like knee deep in creating this course. I think I talked about it last week.

Well last week it was more like in a, in an idea phase where the idea is to try to create a legit course, but it's definitely aimed at helping people learn about process kit, get onboarded into process kit and understand like the best way to set things up for your business, especially if you're in client services. Here are my best advice on how to organize things. And through this course, you know, we're going through how to set up your new client onboarding process, which I've found has definitely been the most common kind of first go to process that companies are trying to set up and process kit. So last week it was a little bit more theoretical. We were talking about like, the Ahrefs course that they've done and how that's like a pretty good model for what I'm going for here, which is definitely the case.

So this past week was get to work, get this thing rolling. And so I feel like now the most grueling part of it is finally just done now. So I, I, I spent the whole week writing, like I created like a written version of this course, which is a lot of text, but it's, it's mostly images really. It's mostly like screenshots, like tutorial based lessons. I wrote that.

I've just been in Google docs writing these lessons for the past week. It turned out to be like 12 lessons. Really it's nine lessons, but there's three of them that are just Zapier tutorials. And so I wrote those out, got screenshots on them. That was like the hardest, like creative part of it.

And now I'm going back and basically creating video versions, like kind of reading off of the script that I already wrote. But doing a lot of editing and flipping between me sitting on camera to on the screen, you know, using process kit. So I just began that video piece today. So hopefully like over the next week I'll be doing the video piece. I put up an ad on Upwork to get somebody to just convert these Google docs into nice clean HTML because at some point I'm going to create like a whole section of the website to present this course.

And since it turned out to be like 12 different pretty long Google Docs and like over a 100 different images and stuff like that'll just be a slog to get the HTML knocked out for that. So I'm just gonna have somebody to do that.

You wouldn't use some like pre, like off the shelf course software? No. You want to put it into the site the way you want?

Yeah, because it's going to live on processkit.com. It's not going to be like It's course.processkit. Going to be on the main domain and that is a static site and it'll be integrated into the design. But just the content of the course, it's going to need to be put from Google Docs into P tags and list tags and H1 tags and image tags. At first I was just going to do that but it turned out to be a lot of pages.

Now I'm not going to be doing that. And then the video stuff. And then at some point I probably won't get to this until two weeks from now or so, but I'm going to need to integrate it into process kits onboarding somehow.

Yeah, was like, what are you gonna do with it? Are you gonna like, like amp it up like a new release? Are you gonna like a

Well, I'm definitely gonna, I'm definitely amping it up like to try, I'm gonna definitely try to get as much exposure for the course, like marketing wise, like maybe I'll release it on the product hunt and maybe I'll really promote it. But ultimately it's going be an asset that is aimed at onboarding customers. So I'll put it into the email sequence for new users. I want to figure out exactly what I want to do in the app. Like should I have just one pop up at the beginning?

Should I have like a step by step onboarding guide kind of thing?

Right. Or link to it based on the page that they're that they're on linked to the list.

Yeah. Like how fancy do I want to get with it? Know, but

it's Is it going to live on the other side of the paywall? Like publicly, people will be able to access it or

Yeah, it's gonna be free and public. Cool. It'll live on the marketing site, but I will either link over to it from the app or take the videos from it and embed those in the app. So that it sort of lives in both places.

Yeah. You could also link the individual lessons from onboarding emails. You could, the truth is you could mimic the structure of the course closely with the onboarding emails.

Well, yeah. And that's how I created the course and the lesson list was like, these are the things that you should probably get a handle on if you're going to turn into a paying customer. It doesn't cover everything. Tried to focus it only on like do enough to get the minimum level of value from process kit while seeing the power that you could ultimately get if you really dig in. But do enough and you get to the point where people have converted to paid.

There's a lot you can do with ProcessKit, but most people convert to paid once they've set up like maybe 20 or 25% of their operation in ProcessKit. Know? Like once you get to that point, it's like go from like zero to 10 or 20% set up. Now you'll feel confident with it.

Yeah and then you have a long way to go.

Yeah.

Nice man. I'm very interested. We've

talked But it is about built around this.

I've never done it.

Well and it does follow along a single example throughout the whole course like setting up your new client onboarding process. And so by the end of this course, you'll have a pretty good handle on that important process and that should be enough to be like, okay, I'm seeing value from this now. You know, we want to continue using process good. Hopefully.

Nice man. Let's see. We're a little short on time. Have few minutes before a call. The big thing for us right now is hiring.

There's definitely an element to profitable confidence. You know, I like that saying, you know, I fell out of that for a while when we weren't profitable and now that we're back to profitable, there's, it's a big deal. Like psychologically, What it does, at least for me, is it just makes me more willing to take on risk. And hiring is one of the biggest risks. Full time w two employee health insurance benefits, all that.

It's just a very big risk. The last thing you want to do is hire someone. Going back to what we said again, it's not so easy to just change expenses. Hiring someone full time and then just being like, Hey, you know what? I've decided not to spend the 10 or $12 a month.

So I'm just going to fire this person every three months.

It's kind of You can't do it like firing can't

do that.

It's not like canceling a sass. It's Exactly. Like This person probably left another job to come work at Cardhook.

Exactly right. And then everyone's watching, you know, not in like a nefarious way, but people watch how you treat people and then they put themselves in those shoes. That's why we've always emphasized that when someone leaves, when someone resigns or if someone's terminated, like people are watching how that happens and how you behave in that situation because they will put themselves in that person's shoes. When I resign and I decide, okay, I'm kind of done with this version, this part of my career, how am I going to be treated and thought of and talked about after I leave? It's like all those things matter.

So we went from hiring two people, a support specialist and a support engineer to now hiring four people. The support positions and now two back end Laravel engineers at a senior level but I think that's that's what we need right now.

And those are and and all four of them are remote? Different places? Yes.

Yes. So we're going to go from 18 people into offices to 22 people with those four being fully remote. Very cool. Yeah. So that's really exciting and we were, I think I talked about this last time but it's worth reiterating.

We were concerned about our ability to attract talent on the development side. Slovenia is not very big. There aren't that many people in the Laravel community there

and worldwide. It's like

Right. That's so that's what we're hoping for. Other factor in Slovenia is that some of the big European companies have figured out over the past ten years that there's good talent there that isn't as expensive as let's say London or Paris or even Berlin. And so a lot of good Slovenian engineers make an amazing living working for these international companies. And once they get on that, unless they're super gung ho for startups and wanting to like kind of have a bigger impact, it's tough to compete with the $200,000 salary anywhere.

Yeah. Now we put job ads up and I kind of reached out to people in the Laravel community to kind of help me out and retweet and that sort of thing and the response is phenomenal. I think we have a 150 or so That's great. Applicants and that I think that really pumped up rock, you know, as the CTO where he was concerned about how do we attract talent. Now it's like, my god, if if if we look at the top 10%, we have way too many.

We still have to cut you know 13 people.

Yeah.

So that really has us pumped up and Yeah. Then you

and and you also build up that database that you can go back to.

Yeah. Talent. And we love Laravel and we we don't want to leave it. So it's just really encouraging to be able to go worldwide and then get that level of response. Awesome.

Yeah. So that's exciting. Hopefully, you know, the the development hiring process is tough. Yeah. I'm thinking of the applicant.

It's like you apply.

Oh yeah.

You hear a little bit and here's like a four hour task that we are judging everything on this task. Yeah. It's pretty hardcore. I've been trying to take a step back and not just assume whatever process we have is right. I mean, it's almost certainly not exactly right.

So I've thought more and more about how it feels to be an applicant for all the roles. How quickly do we respond to them? What are we saying? What are we talking about? Right?

Do we talk about them? Do we talk about the company? Do we talk about what we need? Do we talk about who we're looking for? Like all these things matter.

There's an amazing job ad put up by YNAB and that really helped inspire us. You know, they're really selling more than the salary and the employment.

Yeah.

And I think that's what you need to do.

I feel like for engineers you have to.

Yeah. You need true believers. You know, they can be.

And I feel like probably more than any other role, engineers need to know what are they going to be working with in terms of tech stacks, in terms of what their team is going to be, what the development process is like, right? Like this stuff really matters, you know, cause it's literally like, am I engaged in my work or do I want to, you know, it's terrible every day.

Yes. Am I rewriting something for the third time and I'm going be working on that for a year or am I going be pushing things forward? Very big difference.

Yeah. Yep. In talking about the onboarding stuff, but I've been also doing just as much work on the sales demos that I'm doing with process. I still do a handful of those every week. I talked earlier about how I felt like the demos have been haphazard and like, I just kind of feel out, feel them out and we talk about whatever and I show them process kit.

Then it's like, okay, good luck. You know, let me know if you have any questions. I've got a lot of good feedback and advice from my friends in that group and everything and from you and from other folks. So I feel like I have gotten better at doing the sales demos for process kit and they, and I feel like I'm, and still just the beginning of this. I know it's going to get much better over time.

I do feel like I have a very clear step by step how I'm guiding these calls. And so, so basically the first part of the call, so it's basically like three parts, right? The first part is, not super different from what I've been doing historically. It's, it's kind of like get to know you. It's very similar to audience ops in that I like to talk to most of these people about, cause it's just fun conversations like talk and shop business owner to business owner.

What do you do?

What do do? Tell me about your business. But then I always get right to like, what are the tools that you're currently using? And maybe I already know that from a form that they filled out, but what are you using? And then I'm, and then I'm really digging into tell me exactly what it is that broke down for you in that tool or what, where's the pain point and why are you even talking to me?

Because I'm not forcing demo calls right now. I talked about maybe doing that, but I'm not. You could just come to the site and sign up for a trial and not talk to me.

So this is someone who wants to talk.

But people do want to talk, like there's still three to five of these a week of people who've reached out. Something has taken them to a slightly extra level of like, okay, I'm going to sit down. Some of the calls, and sometimes these are surprises to me, one person books the call, I get on the call and they've invited six coworkers onto this call. All of a sudden I'm doing like a presentation like, Oh shit. So I'm really understanding the pain.

And then I go into the, call it a demo, but really I'm, I'm only going to show the one or two features in process kit that relate to the pain that they talked about, you know, like, Oh, our team, like they're not following the, there are everybody kind of like doing their own thing. They're not really following a process. Okay. I'll show you how we copy a process into task lists every time, you know? Or like, Oh, we've got our stuff.

Like it's hard to do video or whatever. Like, okay, let me show you how you can embed a video. Like, and now I'm always going to my pre made demo account. I'm not like helping them. I used to be like helping them set up their own process kit trial account that takes too long to like do with them on a sales call.

I need to show them like straight to the magic. Like, look, I'm just going to click this button and I just fired up an onboarding project that just pulled in all these tasks and these automations. That's pretty cool. Like, you know, I'm not going to show them how I set all that up. I'm just going to show them like, this is the final result.

This is what happened. Know?

Yeah. How to do it, that's next.

Yeah. Yeah. And then the last piece, the third part of the call is next steps. And inevitably they're going to want to play around with it themselves. There's no getting around that.

I can't like in this product, this market, I'm not going to get them to buy on the spot before they start using it or getting their team to adopt it. So what I've been doing is, okay, so you can proceed with your free trial. You have a, you have a two week trial. Definitely, you know, let me know if you have any questions. But what I recommend is that we always schedule a call a week from now.

So like one week into your trial. Let's get that on the books and then I'll do a check-in call with you and see how things are going. And so I started pitching that about a week ago and now three demos have, the three times that I've pitched it, they've all agreed to it and they booked the follow-up call. And I think that's a good sign because it's not like, it shows that they are committed and sometimes they've even said this to me. They're like, okay, actually that's really good because it'll really force me to actually try it out and I won't get busy.

I know that we'll have this call on Tuesday at 03:00 to check-in. I think next week I have those check-in calls for the first time and so that'll be like, okay, they'll have more specific questions about how to set things up. That's where I'm going to really dig into what are your objections to converting at this point? Or if they really need help, that's where I could pitch the implementation service. And I mentioned that on the first call, but like, okay, me try it out first and maybe I'll come back to that.

Paying you for it, you know.

I like that. I think you're going to learn a lot on that second call. My guess is you'll be able to spot out someone who's going to convert immediately on that second call.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I think so. That's the that's the goal.

I just feel like I I definitely just feel more confident with these demos. Like I know how to handle them now, you know. And and now it's just a matter of like getting better at them, making them even more consistent.

Nice man. And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing I already saw some progress from you on the course on Twitter. So looking forward to seeing that come together.

Yeah. Trying to bang that out.

Cool man. Well, I got a boogie. I got a I got a jammed Friday.

There you go.

Don't know why I did that to myself. That's how it goes.

Alright.

Good catching up. Thanks for listening.