Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. What's happening, Brian? We have another episode of Bootstrapped Web. What's going down? It's Friday.

Yeah. Yeah. Jordan, we're we're back at it. We took a little bit of a like a week break there. Obviously, the the world is still kinda turning upside down and it's scary times out there and I think our hearts go out to everyone.

We talked a lot about it last week but we ended up not publishing. I thought we'd try to get back on the mics and do just another Bootstrap web episode

Yeah. That's right. There's a lot going on out there. I went to a rally yesterday organized by middle schoolers. Did you?

A lot parents with their kids, everyone holding signs. It felt, you know, it's kind of emotional, but it felt good to get out there. Yeah. We wish everyone else well out there. We're gonna try to bring you some boring business stuff in this podcast.

Yeah. This morning we we went to my daughter's kindergarten graduation parade where we drove around in our cars around the and waved

to the teachers. Yes. Yeah. That's different. It's a whole

new world.

It's a whole it's a whole new thing, man. But we're we're getting through What's happening, man? We got updates? Yeah. I'll tell you what I'm doing.

I'm getting into a bad habit. I have a bad habit I gotta figure out. I get busy during the day and I do calls and meetings during the day and so my to do list doesn't really get addressed. A few things that can kind of be banged down fifteen, twenty minutes here, but my big strategic tasks don't get tackled. What I do is I say to myself, Okay, I'm going to do these calls because this is what makes sense for me to do and then tonight I'm going to work on this strategic thing.

And then so at night I don't have the energy mentally to do that and then I feel guilty.

Yeah.

And I feel bad about myself and I just do the exact same thing the next day.

I'm at an age now where I cannot work at okay. Shouldn't say that. There there are certain nights where I'm so active on developing a feature or something in the app that like I will come back online like late night and work into the late night hours on on code. But generally, like that's 10% of the time. Generally, I'm just incapable of working after dinner now.

I used to when I was younger, but now it's not happening. I'm so much more focused and productive in the morning hours, you know. Yeah. And even now, we're we're talking in the afternoon. I'm on my afternoon coffee here, is becoming a requirement for me too.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I I feel like I'm chasing that dragon of that evening session where you just are so happy and in it and making progress because it happens maybe once a week for me. But then every other night doesn't happen, I'm just wracked with guilt.

And then I just do the same thing the next day. And I I kinda I need I need to figure it out. I need to block out larger chunks of time, whatever.

Yeah. I've been, biking in the morning now that the weather's nice. So I I really do try to prioritize that. That's always hard for me because I I wake up so energized, ready to get to work because I wanna take advantage of those early morning hours. But if I don't exercise in the morning, I'm not gonna do it at all the rest of the day, you know.

So I'm trying to do that. Good for you.

What about the business my friend? What kind of what kind of updates we got today?

I've got a bunch of updates. I think they're kind of small so maybe we can combine some of them but I would say they're all sort of related to onboarding on process kit. Everything is process kit related today. That's basically most of my hours these days. It's a big focus on onboarding so that I can really dive into marketing and spending and doing outbound stuff hopefully by early July.

But I don't feel ready to do that until I really feel like the onboarding is all buttoned up and like from all angles.

Right. There's two ways to go on it. You can start the marketing and then you're forced into laying that next railroad track down in front of you for the onboarding. Or you can say, I don't want to put all that effort in if it doesn't make sense and there's no system there to really shuffle people through the process the right way. You're going that way.

You're saying, let's get the onboarding ready before I can focus on marketing.

Here's how I'm thinking about it. I'm starting to think about the whole concept of onboarding to a SaaS as there's four types of users. Right? There's type one which is like, figure it out myself. These are like the power users, the majority of the early customers in ProcessKit and I would I would probably think that any SaaS app where where it's sort of like you're building features and you're onboarding customers, The the early folks, they are technical enough, they are savvy enough, they're understanding enough and motivated enough to make it through a a complete lack of onboarding experience.

They'll just figure it out with whatever you give them. Level two is users who need more self serve guidance. So they're still self serve, they don't really want to talk to anyone, they don't need too much, but they do need some pointers and like, okay, how do things work? I I I wanna follow some cues, like show show me the way a little bit inside the app. And then there's the third type of user, which is like, I need that guidance, but I also need to be educated.

I also need to like, give me a whole system and framework that I wanna learn the the best strategy Yes. And and then how to implement the software with that strategy. That's the third type of user. And then the fourth level is like, I want somebody to work with me personally one on one, like a consultant to to help me do this really well and to guide the whole process, hold my hand. And so with process kit, feel like the level one users have to figure it out myself.

That's been the status quo since since I've been onboarding customers. And the fourth level, the the consulting, I've I've done that with some customers as well. Some have paid for that. Some have done a lighter version of that where where I'm just, you know, actively getting on calls with people. The third level that like I need education plus some guidance.

I just launched that this week with the course. I've been talking about that. That that finally went live a few days ago. I'm happy with that, how it came out. That's at processkit.com/processautomation.

It's called process automation for service companies. And so the idea there is that it's, it's a video course, 12 videos. I'm like at the desk teaching lessons, teaching these strategy concepts and then the the video cuts to me setting up process kit to do what I'm teaching in the lessons. Right? So it's like some education and and set up.

That's not for everyone, know, because then we get down to that level two onboarding which is like, there are people who already have a pretty solid idea on what their processes and systems need to be and need to look like. They know the specific pains in their business and they have a good business sense of how to solve them with processes, but they still need some guidance on like how does process kit work? How can I get this set up and up and running? And what is a board compared to a process and a project and a task list? What are the difference between those things and how do I set up these automations?

I know I wanna do these automations, but how do I set them up? That is where I'm at right now. So that's where I feel like there's a gap right now with ProcessKit is that like, I've got this welcome video, but then after that there's nothing. It's like you're figuring out everything. So what I started to work on this week now, I think it'll be launched by next week is like a pop up widget, which is a checklist for new users.

There's like four steps in it, four or five steps that I figured out that like for for the people who have converted, you at least need to create a process and then create a project and run that process on the project. You need to customize a board and understand the purpose of automating through a board. And then sort of an optional step is to invite a teammate. And then on the checklist I have like now, activate your subscription and then like the last step is like get your free process kit t shirt. I'm setting up this widget that like slides up like a little toaster on the bottom left corner and it automatically detects if you've done each thing and it'll check them off.

Each thing has a little link, can watch a quick video, like a thirty second video on how to do that thing. There's definitely a way to click to minimize this or click I to hide it don't want to do your stupid checklist. I'm probably one of those users in other SaaS apps, but I do think that there's a segment of users, maybe even large majority who are like, just, I don't want to click around and guess, just show

me

It's

the step by step,

you not like a wizard that like points around the screen. It's just a little tool tip. Not tool tip. It's just in the corner and it kind of gives you a list of things to do.

Yeah. All right. So you're thinking about it from these various types of users. What does each one need in order to be successful?

Yeah. This is really an experiment like with the onboarding widget thing. I don't know if it's going to be like, this is annoying, get it out of my face but if it helps people get educated then

It's fine. Whatever you need to do.

I mean

we definitely come across that first category of people who just want to get going and they feel comfortable and they want to figure it out on their own and our process forces them to stop and talk to us and some don't like it. It's just true. What we've done is admitted defeat on that first type and said our product isn't at a place right now where it can successfully handle them and so we're just not going to allow you to do that. We're just going to have to force you into this version two and version three and version four because that's what's necessary for us right now. Yeah.

I done that

still get a fair number of demos. Do now I'm doing a little bit more, maybe five a week. There's links in the widget, there's links over email and everything to like, hey, book your book your call. Wanna talk to me? Like, let's book a demo.

Like, there's a bunch of call to actions for that and and so I get a bunch of those calls. I think the nature of my app compared to something like Cardhook Mhmm. That you could sort of Cardhook, would think you could sort of like get it set up and get value pretty quickly and start paying. Whereas with ProcessKit, even when I talk to them, they have to go back and play with it themselves after the call. Right.

Right. You know?

For us it's danger. That's what it is for us. It's it's a lot of scar tissue on people getting set up on their own and getting it 98 right, but they missed 2% and that can cost them lot of money and then turns into a lot of frustration. That's almost what we've had to eliminate. We don't have the buffer in place, the bumpers along the road to really keep everyone from making mistakes.

We have to address these issues. There's so many little things. For us, if you leave one setting in your Shopify store that is just called rest of the world, if you have your shipping settings and you have rest of the world checked out, it's not relevant for a lot of businesses, but even if it is checked out, our product will have a problem with it and people will go through and they won't be charged shipping and you won't know it for a while. And the next thing you know, Oh my God, I just, I just blew through $5,000 worth of shipping that I can't get back. And now, now I hate you.

So you'll learn these things too on what you can and can't do. Hopefully you can start off with that wider range and accommodate these different types of use cases and different types of users.

There's still a very common use case and that's I think what this little checklist is aimed at giving you this

guide me some. Like, don't make me go through a course, but give me some.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Like, you could literally burn through this checklist in twenty minutes. It's super simple and and like like first create a process and then you hover over it.

It just gives you like a step one, step two, step three. Just like go to processes, create one, create a step. Okay. You're good. Then and then it's like create a project.

Go to projects, apply the process, done. And so the idea is that like this won't completely set up the processes in your business, but if you go through these four steps, you will understand how the models in process can Yeah. The logic. Like the logic of taking a process template and copying it into a task list, like an instance in a project. I I still see see users like not make that jump.

There are customers who've converted and they've figured that out but there's still users who who's like, I I like how do I use the process? It's like, go make it a task list. Like

Yes. Yes. Alright, cool. On my side, a lot of the focus and excitement is around recruiting and hiring. So we made an offer and it was accepted to our first fully remote hire.

I guess not first, but first in a very long time, in like three years. And so the employees in Los Angeles, it exposed a few shortcomings on our side on both the recruiting and the hiring and I split those two out. So if we just go further up the funnel and we talk about recruiting, I've had difficulty in finding the type of service and help that we need. So what happened was we put Rock in charge of hiring engineers and we put Emily in charge of hiring for success and support. And what happened was that just obliterated their task list.

It just took over because it's a lot of work. Yeah. And so I saw that and I kind of saw my job to double click on that and say, Hey, should we take this away? Should we remove this from your desk entirely? Should we hire a recruiter?

And they both said, you know, very much, yes, we cannot do this again. So let's finish this process. But the next time we hire someone, we can't do this because it's, it's a full time job.

Well, guess you're on the recruiting side. Guess once you get to the whatever like

Hiring or onboarding

like, I'm curious about it. What do you how do you evaluate developers? Like, you doing test projects and things like that?

Yeah. They they are doing tests. Okay. So let's take one step back. Our biggest issue wasn't what I think of as recruiting.

I think of recruiting as going out and finding great people. That hasn't been the issue. There's a lot of talent out there, a lot of people looking for remote work. There's a lot of avenues to look whether it's WeWork remotely or these other places. We happen to find a lot of success with WeWork remotely, so that's our go

Yeah. To Us too.

We don't have trouble finding candidates, but once we have 200 resumes in an inbox, that's where the issue is for us because sorting through and making sure that the candidates get the experience that we believe they deserve. Whether you get rejected or not, you do deserve a good process. At least that's how we want to approach it. That is when it becomes overwhelming. When I talk to recruiting agencies, they're like, We're going to find you the best candidates and then we're going to charge you a percentage of their salary because we help find them.

My point of view is we don't need help finding them. We just need help running the process. And so what's that? That's not a recruiting agency. Now I'm looking for that person.

I think it's a freelancer, someone who's worked in recruiting before that just understands, here, let's get your company set up with a process Good

point, Matt. Ideas for a productized service, this is a good one. I see a lot of ideas for productized services. I have not seen this one but when I think about audience ops, this is one of those processes that we have really figured out a system and I put a person in charge of and she's running that funnel of of recruit when we're hiring writers and it's a whole It's a funnel. It's work.

And and it took a lot of work for us to figure out how to get that set up and that's the kind of thing that you that can plug in as a as a service.

Absolutely. And and we want both. We want the advice on how to run the process so that candidates get a good experience and we get a good outcome. We also don't want to do it, but this is definitely something you can plug into a business where, yes, you need to understand the culture of the business and the product, but not that deeply. Right?

Like we'll still do the interviews, maybe the first interview the service can do, but we're still going to get deep into the process and meet with them. I mean, I would pay thousands of dollars for this thing

because I mean there are things like, what's the big developer one? Toptal.

Yes. I've use Toptal all the time.

Yeah. And I've I've used for for virtual assistants, I've I've used virtual staff finder which is specific to The Philippines they it's it's like $500 and they give you three pre vetted candidates and they give you their whole resume, they give you a little voice recording from each of them and all this stuff. Like, I've done that multiple times through that service and out of the three I would end up maybe hiring two. And that's good but I still think like what you're talking about like something a little bit higher level. Toptal seems more like we're going to just set you up with one engineer.

We've done both. We use Toptal continuously. I see it on my credit card statement every single month, they're using it all the time. But we'll use it for very targeted things like we moved to Amazon QuickSight for our internal analytics. No one has experience with QuickSight, so you just go to Toptal, you find someone with QuickSight background, and then you can just hire them.

It's much more expensive than if you just hired a freelancer, but the risk is a lot lower because you know they're pretty good and it's targeted. So I'll, I'll spend $2,500 a week for three weeks, but then no one has on the team has to learn it and it gets done and you move on.

So you use TopTal for like hired guns, like freelancers.

Exactly right. Yeah. We, we

Not hiring full time salary employers.

No. I believe they do have a program where you can hire that person full time if both sides agree. Then I think you pay them some type of recruiting fee because we've had that before. We have people on Toptal that we absolutely love and we just don't have that much work for them to do for full time, but I could see how situation where we would love to hire someone full time. This is outside of that process.

I don't know if anyone's listening, thinking about a product like service like this, but there's definitely an audience for it. When I talk to the lowest, cheapest recruiting agency that I've come across is $2,500 a month per role plus 8% of salary. Let's just say it's a $75,000 salary times 8%. That's $6,000 Let's say it takes two months to find them, so now you're talking about 11,000 to find a candidate and that is as cheap as you can find it. Yeah.

So a product I service that comes to me and said, We will run this for $5,000 per candidate, will, boom, I will write that check.

Yeah. For audience ops, when we need to hire a new writer, it's like we have sort of a template now but we have a we have to write the job ad. That's a whole project in itself.

That's right.

Figure out where to post it then go post it. Then that leads to our own form on our website. That feeds into a Trello board that Kat on my team has to go through and and filter out like just get rid of all the all the definitely no go candidates. That's that's a whole day at least of work. And then it's like making a short list and writing notes about these five or 10 candidates.

Then it's like kind of reviewing the short list with me and I'll say like, okay, maybe these four are worth interviewing. Then she goes ahead and does those first interviews. Then she gives me more notes after the interview. And then she sort of makes a recommendation on who she thinks is the top one or two and then I'll make a final call and occasionally I'll do an interview with them but lately I'll just say, yeah, go with the one that you think. And that's like a month of back and forths of work.

Yes. So that is difficult and now we're looking at the prospect of hiring like another four people. So it's no longer an option. We cannot do that internally. If it's one person, it's kind of like making a bargain with that team leader of, all right, I'm going to spend a bunch of time, but I'm going to hire someone on my team and it's going to be good.

All of a sudden you look at the prospect of doing that for the next three months and it's no longer a possibility. And the engineering side of it is also very different. I almost feel guilty, almost like when I was an older member of my fraternity and I saw these freshmen and what they were going to go through, I was not okay with that. I was like, This is ridiculous. Why are we torturing these people?

I almost feel that way about engineering. The tests are hard and then you have in person interviews where you're coding live and then you're like, it's almost not sneaky, but you are making it challenging. Yeah. The guys on the team, they will put out a problem that they know there's something wrong with the problem and they're look, they're almost looking for the person to challenge the problem itself. And then they'll, they'll actually bring them issues that we're in the middle of.

Like here's something we're trying to figure out. Let's spend an hour together trying to figure it out.

Right.

And to me that's it's almost like harsh. I think I'm soft on it because we require softer skills on the support, success, marketing side of things and math don't care. So it's a different thing on the engineering side.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. After they've they've made it through the technical evaluations, like any personality fit kind of stuff that you do with, especially with with developers or

We don't.

I guess anyone, but

We don't do personality tests or anything like that. But

we Like what are you looking for? Like And like how how involved are you in the like interviewing?

I'm not very involved at all. I get involved at the very end, which I have seen the problem with that. So so we look for personality at every interaction. How do they email? How do they talk?

How do they talk about themselves? How comfortable are they? On the engineering side, it is a challenge because the personality set there is generally less personable. How do you judge based on that? That's actually pretty tricky.

When it comes to the process, I usually do the last interview. We are in the middle. We're just about to make an offer. When we finish this podcast, I'm sending out an offer letter to a new engineer. This was a lead role for a new project, so a lot of pressure on this role.

I met him and then there was still another meeting or two afterward. But normally speaking, let's say a new support engineer, the person we just hired, I'm the last interview. Which feels it's tricky because what am I supposed to do at that point? Like, is no an option? Right.

It would have to be extreme for me to say everyone did all this work. They went through all these different layers. They met with the team lead. They met with the rest of the team. They met with everybody.

And then it comes to me and then I'm going to say no. So that's generally a bad thing because that's not, it's not a real interview. It's just a get to know you. What I try to talk about is the company history and the culture and what we're trying to do and where we're going. For me it's almost like, are you interested in this?

Because we want people who are really excited about what we're doing. And so when I spoke with the engineer, what am I going to ask them about? Actual engineering? No, I can't. So we just talked about the future and we talked about ideas and what we see with the ecosystem and the evolution of platforms and all this other stuff and

Do you look for people who have done the thing or a similar type of task that you're basically hiring them to do? I know you're not hiring them for one task, but like like you said that this this engineer is is being hired to lead a a big project. Do you look for, like, finding someone who has led something similar to this type of thing in the past?

We do it's not a requirement, but we do look for indicators that make us believe that there's higher likelihood of success. Amazing experience, obviously good. Amazing Laravel experience in e commerce, that's a bonus because now we're able to talk about the same language and we're talking about conversion rates and load speed. It's not seen from the admin point of view on, Oh, let's make a fast app. It's, No, this is required because the shopper's on it.

So there are things we look for. The support engineer we just hired, not as much. So she needed technical ability and communication skills and that not specifically you have been a support engineer in the past with a SaaS and this is what you did.

Right.

Yeah. We try not to have that many of those requirements. I don't see us as like a lot of times people take pride in where people have worked. Like our team is made up of former Airbnb and Uber employees and like that's so impressive. I think that's complete bullshit.

Yeah, I agree.

So we're like anti that. We're like, we don't care what you did in the past. We're happy to be like a band of misfits in some way that doesn't have credentials and we're doing just fine without it. So we take some pride in ignoring the companies you've worked for in the past and how awesome your resume is or anything like that. We ignore that.

It's still so hard, man. Like it's so hard to uncover what you're gonna learn after you've already hired people. I've seen this time and time again. Like Scary. I I mean, I think me and especially Kat, who's mostly in charge of of hiring at at Audience Ops, like, we really know maybe it's hard it's even probably difficult for us to document these sorts of things, but we know the personality characteristics and the types of things that someone says and the recent experience of where that indicate they're the type of long term multi year teammate material here.

And I've had other conversations where they're super talented, but I could just tell from the way that they're approaching everything that they're going to be in and out within a couple months. But then the hardest thing is that even when I see people are just really good at interviewing sometimes. Mhmm. It's unfortunate but it's true. Some people have a unique ability to adapt to an interview process and understand what the company is looking for, right?

And things are different once they're inside. And it's, I've been surprised time and time again.

Yeah. And it's everything and the mistakes in hiring are more costly than any monetary mistake. Yeah. Buying the wrong thing, using the wrong software, hiring the wrong consultant, those are like I see them as like monetary mistakes. When you make a hiring mistake, it hurts so much more.

We are so hesitant on it. As my role has gotten further away from the work itself and it really is how are these teams operating and how are the processes going and who do we need and what's next and what hurts. I take all that responsibility on and it's two sided because at the beginning of the process you're trying to show this dream of where this thing can go and how interesting and exciting and how big the potential is and then the pressure is on to show that. Yeah. When we've gone through long stretches of flat periods, we've had a few stretches.

We've had two specific six month long stretches where revenue just got stuck. It was once at 80 and it was once at 150 and it just stuck for months. And I get so stressed about how people are perceiving their experience because the clock's ticking. There's other opportunities out there. I don't want to stay at something that isn't growing for very long.

It's not about the money. It's not about like, well, this is moving toward an exit, so I want to get out of here because I'm not going to get a big payday. That's not it. It's just something about stagnation that becomes frustrating in a way that when there's growth, even though it's frustrating, it's still fun and exciting and you feel like, okay, it's going get better, it's going to get better, it's going to get better.

Yeah, and people who are contributing, it's like, oh, I'm part of what's happening here with the graphs.

Yes, and it hurts but isn't isn't this awesome? And when the growth isn't there that isn't this awesome part starts to fade in and then it then I get scared.

So it's definitely a tough thing. What

else you got going on?

I got three things, but maybe it's two combined. So one of them is this thing that that came up. I wasn't expecting to do this, but I think it's going to work out really well. About two weeks ago, had a lead for process kit. I'm trying to remember exactly.

Yeah, I think he came in and he requested a demo for process kit. I got on a call with him and he's a copywriter based down in, in, Buenos Aires. And I think it's just him and he's and he just recently hired an assistant. And he's starting that process of of just early early growth into a into a small marketing shop. And and that growth switch is usually the the indicator that brings somebody to process kit.

So so we got the demo, he's he's really excited about process kit, had a bunch of questions about it. I always ask them about their business and tell me about the kind of work that you do and the work that he's doing is is he writes copy for SaaS, B to B SaaS businesses and he's starting to productize around writing those alternative to pages. So product, like alternative to your top competitor.

Yes.

And we see a lot of these

Really powerful.

Yeah, think you probably have them. Was on my to do list to do sometime soon but I have not gotten around to creating those pages yet.

Did you get sold on your own demo? Is that what happened?

Yes. He did. Well, turned the tables on me and we bartered. He's basically technically paying customer of Process Kit and I basically gave him, you know, a pretty big process kit plan in exchange for him writing three of these pages for process kit.

That is awesome. In a competitive space, those pages are huge. We see marketing that that helps very competitive spaces.

We're we're in the very early stage of of this process. I think they'll probably come out maybe in a month or two, but I'm really excited and this guy is is doing just an awesome job just based on my early conversations and the research that I'm seeing him do. And we're doing it in a really interesting way that I had, I hadn't even considered this angle on it before. I have more than three competitors, but we agreed to just do three pages. So so I just chose like the the top three that I wanna focus on.

One of them is like a, I would say a very direct competitor. And so that that page is going to be positioned as like alternative to direct competitor or direct competitor versus blank. Then hopefully they land on process kit. And then a whole bunch of copy around all the benefits and differences and he's pulling real quotes off of like review sites about the competitor and stuff like that.

I like the service.

But the other two that we're gonna do are so we're gonna compare against Trello and compare against Asana. And so those are project For management SEO? Well, we get a lot of users who are who are coming to Processkit because Trello does a really poor job of like recurring tasks in Trello or recurring tasks in Asana. And so we're actually gonna we're not really gonna optimize these pages for alternative to Trello. We're gonna optimize these pages for recurring tasks in Trello.

And then and then like optimize a page for like recurring projects and recurring tasks in in Asana or like processes in Asana. Like these are things that those tools are really poor at and that's usually what drives people to process kit. And I've already done a lot of customer user research a couple months back with literally numbers of the number of users who said they're trying to switch from Asana and Trello. It's a large group. You know, people coming from like Basecamp and other things, but like, and he's starting to do the keyword research and there's a ton of search traffic for that kind of stuff.

And so I think that these are going to be really, really good pages. Know, like, again, like not trying to position it as like the catchall be all alternative trip to Trello. But if you are, if you have a very repeatable process and you're trying to do that in Trello and it's not working because it's not great at that, then look at this.

Yes. Here's an alternative that you probably didn't know existed.

Yeah. So I'm excited to see how those come together. It's nice because, you know, he's doing a lot of the work and I will design the pages once once the copy is done but that'll come together in a few weeks. So

Wow. That's that's very interesting. The the ability to draft off of existing traffic from much larger platforms and have that indirectly compared with your product. I like that. Talked to someone yesterday.

It's a bit tricky to know what to do with b2b marketing these days. B2b SaaS marketing, talked about this a few weeks ago. You kind of don't know what to do. Nobody attends webinars anymore. Ads are tough to make work and they're expensive.

A lot of people are kind of like, I don't really know what to do next. And I feel that. We just launched this ad campaign finally. It took longer. Most of the delay was on our fault, but it's like a calculator and that's our approach to, well, let's not do the straightforward lead magnet thing.

Let's give people this ability to calculate how much they can make with our product. Then if that sounds good to them, fill out a form to get a demo. Like that's our attempt at like, well, let's try something else. What you're talking about right now, I love because a lot of people in our space, meaning like Bootstrap, SaaS, they don't have the big budgets, but they often have very large competitors. Yeah.

And I got into Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma recently, One of the things about it is that ability to really identify something pretty small and do that better. There was a tweet by Austin Allred, the guy from Lambda School. He wrote, The way to disrupt something isn't to replace 100% of what it provides. It's to unbundle and do a tiny piece of it better for people who really care about that one tiny piece and let everyone else scoff at you because you don't do the rest. Yeah.

Right. Where it's like, you're not going to do what Asana does. You're not competing with that for years.

Exactly. Yeah.

You can crush this repetitive task thing that there's a subset of people that really care about that and that's why they're using Asana.

Honestly, is that thing that like, you know, the mental weight of of you you called it like like kind of searching through the desert with a with an early sass. Like, I'm going like day to day on like, I I I'm trying to I'm trying to compete in a in a space that's just way too competitive, can't do it. Or the concept that I'm trying to get across is too complicated processes, templates turning into task lists, that's too weird. But then I get customers who this happened twice this week, two different customers. They were Googling and they're like, I'm using Basecamp for my client services, for small agency and it's just like I'm trying to, it's fitting like a round peg in a square hole or whatever the metaphor is there.

But they don't know who else to use and they heard Basecamp is great so they're forcing themselves

into They're like, look, we have this process, it repeats, but then I've got to redo all these different dates and I've got to make a client a project, but that doesn't sound right. I've got to have this template card that I duplicate, but then it's a little bit different each time. And when they come to me and they talk about process kit, they're like, this is the tool that I've been looking for. I'm not kidding. Like they they say things like that, but it's the people who it's a small subset of of of the of the larger ocean that is project management tools.

There's a small subset of people who are super process oriented and it still feels like a battle trying to get those big PM tools to work in this process driven way. And the other thing I'm excited about with this alternative to pages is that the guy, he came to process kit and he wanted to become a cut. Like he pitched me on the whole barter thing. So he is a user of process kit. He feels the pain himself.

So he really articulated.

Really articulates it and he's writing about it and like, you know, and all this stuff.

That's cool. I I I love that. I think a lot of people listening, myself included, have that same dilemma. You just don't have the resources of these monster competitors. You don't know how you could ever compete with them.

It's really hard to see from your perspective inside the company what it looks like when there's this large pool of people and then there's a subset that will be fanatical about what you do if you don't try to compete with the big ones, if you do your thing. Whole company is this very, very narrow unbundling of an e commerce platform because e commerce platforms have so much to do that they can't innovate on the checkout nearly the same way a company that's obsessed with the checkout can. Yeah. That tendency of, Well, maybe we should build an e commerce platform. All these things, they're mental.

They're like, But we're not good enough and we'll never get big enough. And really the best thing to do is just go so hard at what you're good at.

But that's also like, that's also one the things that I, I stress out about is that I feel like maybe I'm, maybe prosecutor is not narrow enough.

Oh, interesting.

But then I had these conversations where it's like people do feel this pain and we do have customers who convert. It's just I need to find more of them, know? And there's still a lot of noise in in the in the pool of of people who start trials and they don't quite get it or whatever, but they're you know, like the other day I had a a a churn and and that then it's like, shit, this whole thing is not gonna work.

Yes, I feel that.

Then the next day a guy had a demo, I had a demo with him three or four months ago again he was looking, know, small marketing shop, he was looking for a process oriented PM tool. Excited about process kit, we had a call three months ago and then he's asking for like these specific features that I'm like, Ah, that's like the next thing on our roadmap. Oh, that's coming soon. It's like, Okay, I love it, I love where you're going but I can't use it yet until it has like dynamic dates and things like that. So he just came back this week and he brought his, his like manager on onto the call with him.

And he's like, I saw some of the updates. It looks like process kit is ready now. And now they're like super excited. Yes. So it's like, but it's like, you know, little anecdotal things that it's like, okay, it didn't work for them three or four months ago, but their alternatives still are not working for them and they still kept tabs and actually came back.

And I'm seeing that happen multiple times now. It's like, it's like I've seen some hope, but I, but I have not seen the, you know, it's, I'm still waiting for, I haven't started working on the growth part of it yet.

Yes. And it requires long term faith. It took us, I would say three years before we were at the point where I would see a big customer request a demo or start a trial and have the confidence that chances are we'll keep them. Right? In the beginning it was, we're just not going to have the features that they want.

And then it was, but we're not going to be able to do X, Y, and Z. And then, oh, this is going to be a blocker. And then just years of work on those blockers. Now when I see someone come in, I'm like, we're probably going to get them. It's probably going to work out now.

But took a long time to get there. But those anecdotes along the way are what keep the flame going of optimism. Like, yes, I'm in the going the right direction. Going the right direction.

For sure.

Cool, man. That might be a good place for us to stop. I don't really have anything else on my side. I can talk about hiring next week and onboarding remote employees and that sort of thing. But

yeah, I could I could be talking all day.

But yes,

I think this was good.

Sounds good, man.

Great to

see you. Thanks everybody for listening.

All right. Stay safe out there later.