Bootstrapped Web

Hey. It's Bootstrap Web. We're back. Hey, about a two week break there. Jordan, how's it going buddy?

Little break, little camping break. Little Oregon coast with a family camping break. It's great.

Yeah. That's that's awesome. We were just talking about that. I I also took a couple days out with the family. We finally, broke out of this house here and drove up to Niagara Falls, took the kids there.

It was fun.

Nice man. I remember our trip, it was one of the first trips like as an immigrant kid, we went to Niagara Falls. We had one of those station wagons where the kids like, we can sleep in the back. And the the one the one thing I remember was we were so dramatic about, we were so thirsty. Oh my god.

We have to stop. My dad was like, fine. We'll stop. We get we go to seven Eleven to get Slurpees. Right?

Is that what it's called? Slurpees?

Sure.

Yeah. We're we're like, we get the big ones, you know? And he was like, if you get the big one, you have to finish the whole thing. We're like, alright, we'll do it. We'll get the big ones.

Obviously, didn't make a dent in it.

Sugar for hours.

Yep. Cool. Well, it's good to be back on the pod with you. We can catch up a little bit.

We were talking off air and like, we took two nights at this hotel for Niagara, but really I feel like I took that whole week off mentally. You know, here and there I did a few work tasks, but like, if it wasn't for COVID, like this definitely would have been the time that we would have taken a much longer vacation because I needed one.

What does that feel like when you say you need one? I mean, know what it's like for me but how do you know when it's like, you know, it's time?

Normally, we already have a trip that is booked and can anticipate it like weeks in advance.

Which helps so much.

Which really helps, you know? My wife and I did a really awesome trip to Galapagos Islands in February and then COVID hit. So, you know, we try to do some sort of trip usually every June with the whole family. So like normally we would have had something big booked. I could work, do my full on execute mode, but knowing like, alright, I've got this thing that I'm looking forward to.

We're going take a break later on. But without that in the calendar, I guess it's like, I don't know, I just started feeling like, alright, it's another day, just got to get back to the grind. Another day, nothing big in the calendar that I'm looking forward to. I'm starting to, I don't know, get a little, I don't want to say burnt out on my work because I'm still very energized and excited about a lot of things. You know, mostly I'm process guy.

Right, yeah. I think of burnout as like, as kind of being done with what you're currently doing or maybe a more severe case of like, know what? I I could just use some time.

Yeah. I it's just like I I want to keep pushing on process kit, but I could just mentally feel like like I'm winded, you know? That's what happened about two weeks ago. And and actually now, like I feel much more energized. So with the vacation, the other thing is I think I talked about on the podcast about like maybe buying a guitar.

I did go ahead and and drop the cash on on the new guitar so

Oh, we we needed we need videos on Twitter, man. Come on.

Yeah. Someday. So, you know, spent a bunch of days just just kinda writing and making music down in the basement studio here, and and that's been nice and refreshing because I I like having, a creative hobby that I'm I'm working on projects there too but it's just for fun. That was kind of refreshing too.

Yeah, I know how that feels. Normally, we're in Michigan this time of year. Can't do that. I haven't booked. I haven't put on the calendar a week or so to take off.

We don't really know. I don't really know what to do with that. What do I take a week off and stay home? That's going to feel pretty strange. We have this great inspiration in the company because more than half the company is European and they take it more seriously than we do.

They're like, no, no, no, I'm, I'm out, I'm out for two weeks. Do not call me. That's a good inspiration for everyone to be like, yeah, I should take some time off. So we're going to go camping again next weekend and then we'll see. I'm going to find a week to take off.

I don't know if that means really stay here or you know, get Airbnb and Bend or like something like that, but have to figure it out. You know, what we talked about with other adults in similar situation is we're fine. The way I heard it said the other day was was I'm COVID good. Like, I'm not all the way good, but nobody's Yes. All the way Yes.

But it feels like like you're actively just carrying a backpack that weighs 50 pounds and you rarely get to just put it down. And so vacation like means so much more. It really like lifts you up like, woah, I didn't realize I was just hanging out with that stress all the time.

Yeah. And I mean, unfortunately The United States, unlike the rest of the world is a complete shit show right now. But luckily, know, I live in the Northeast where it's kind of like the one area where it has been on the downturn and we felt comfortable enough to actually go into a hotel for two nights and it's not like we eat out, but restaurants are open around here and stuff like that. I guess in the Northwest, it's not as bad as like the South right now, but

Not nearly as bad, But everyone's looking at the plans put out by the school system here and saying that's a nice plan that has no chance of actually going into effect.

Yeah. They just told us it'll be full time open for the kids in September.

Really? Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll see. I I hope so.

Exactly. We'll see. Yeah. Alright.

Cool. Alright. Well, I guess this is a business podcast.

Yes. Talk

some biz. For me, the topics today are my brief adventure into venture capital and then I want to talk about annual reviews that we just did, the format we used, what I learned from it, that sort of

thing. I like it. For the most part, I wanna talk marketing because that is where my head is at, that is where my hours are at for marketing for ProcessKit. I guess an update, I was talking a few weeks ago about should I do this forms feature, which is a very significant, big feature to build in ProcessKit. I did go ahead with that and I spent a good week of my time on it.

This was like maybe three weeks ago, Designing the UI and the how it would work. And then I handed it off to my developer and so he's been on it for the last two weeks. Today, I'm doing like the very final testing on it. I think it'll be pushed live on Monday or Tuesday, so before this podcast goes out. And again, this is like customizable forms.

We're calling them blocks that you can rearrange within an individual task or within a step within a process. So you've got steps and now within each of those you could have input forms or sub check boxes or selection fields and things like that. It's common request. So now we're about to ship that ability and right after that we're going to follow on with all this stuff that builds on top of this new block system. Conditional logic rules based on input data, dynamically pulling in values into those fields and all this cool stuff.

I'm curious how you plan to market that and how you plan to promote it because it does feel like you're in this phase of maybe it's not one feature that makes this big difference, but it's a few features added over time that work together in a certain way that just opens up the number of potential customers that now can say that that is what I'm looking for. We've had a few of those along the way like our integration with Recharge was like this boom. We went from the ability to take on, let's say, x percent of the market and then that just opened it up. It just doubled the number of people that would potentially consider our solution.

I feel that to a certain extent on an individual customer by customer basis, but I feel like with ProcessKit there's a different feature. Pick between three or four big features or big capabilities that is like that big unlocking mechanism. When I think about about Drip, you know, obviously the big turning point was the visual workflows. Like for me, certainly, that was when I was like, oh, this is a real tool that I could use. With this, I think conditional logic which we already launched several weeks ago, that was significant for a lot of customers.

This forms feature has been requested a lot. I think this will be a good one. And then another big one that will come up very soon is recurring like schedule, like automatically regenerate new projects on a recurring schedule, which you can do now with Zapier but we'll have it built in soon. The other weird thing that I'm sort of dealing with, I forgot if I talked about this on the podcast yet or not, but like just the way that I get customers talking to me sometimes. I had another one of these last week and it's probably the fourth or fifth time this has happened now where it's an unusually active and highly engaged new, brand new customer.

Not somebody who knows me or follows the podcast or anything. They stumbled into process kit somehow, heard about it on some Facebook group or they Google searched or found it. You know, he's sending in feature requests every single day for fourteen days straight and the emails are multiple paragraphs long every single day, bullet lists of questions and requests. And I'm hungry for this stuff. I

love it. Right. It's tough to tell sometimes if that's a good thing or if that's a bit overwhelming.

Right. But he's using it and I'm looking at his account and he's active in it. Really migrating his processes and I'm asking a lot of questions about him. He runs a 16 person agency in Australia. So there's always like a time difference of it's like every morning for two weeks I wake up to an email from him you know?

And then finally we got on a call, know, my dinner time, his early morning time and we made it work and we talked for like an hour and he's super into it. And so, you know, there's a lot of like small requests in there. Some of them we already had or some of them were going to ship later. Some of them are bigger, every request that I get now really confirms something that was already in the plans that was already being requested from other people. So it's like

That you're on the right path.

But like the, it's almost like weird to me. I'm trying to understand the type of person who discovers a SaaS product and starts emailing their support every single day for fourteen days with multiple paragraphs. Like, I would never do that to to any SaaS. And I've seen it multiple times from paying customers now who have converted and they're just getting set up and so they have a lot of technical like, how does this work? Oh, noticed this little quirk here and like So I think what it is, and I got some feedback from folks about this where it's like there is a pain in this market.

They're not satisfied with the big generalist project management tools. They don't love all the Like if you're highly process oriented, then when you discover a process kit, it's like, oh, it's like almost right, you know? And it's just missing a few It's like they want it to work so well and it's just missing a few things, but for each individual customer, those few things are slightly different, You know, so it's

I've read recently somewhere about just the concept of building for your power users. Right. And and looking I at think I read them them.

Yeah.

Yeah. Looking at them as the core and it feels a bit scary to me to build for those people because you're not sure how many of those there are and if they're going lead you in the wrong direction. But it is, it's very flattering though. It really should be seen as something like you built something that people clearly care about. They're spending their time on it.

For most of these types of people that I'm talking about, like they did convert to paying customers. So like even though it's only 80 or 90% of what they want, they're like, okay, it's enough for me to pay.

Right. Right. Like, they could see it.

But it took weeks and many emails for them to understand and for me to reassure them, like, don't worry. It's in the roadmap in order for them to convert. That still indicates to me like we do need to build all these things so that the conversion happens faster, easier, you know.

Right. More of their requirements are satisfied off the bat even if they're not exactly the way they want them to or they could potentially adjust. It's a tricky thing, fidelity on software on how you can have a feature that does X but it can be done in slightly different ways and some people are satisfied with it and some aren't. It's very finicky. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know. Still think it's a good sign. It's just, you know, and then it's always like the urgency of like, oh, want to satisfy all these requests but my developer and I can only work on one thing at a time.

Yeah. Everything takes longer than you want it to. Yeah. So speaking a bit more on the marketing, if you don't mind kind of going deeper into it, I read an article recently that resonated with me. We are now building for the future.

We're building for additional platform integrations. And so we're really thinking about what that looks like and we can't just assume that the same thing that happened in Shopify will happen in other platforms. It's just a different dynamic. Right? This stuff didn't exist at all in Shopify.

We got into a situation where there's a lot of inbound. It's like you you can't just assume that you're gonna launch and everyone's gonna come to you again. Like this is not gonna happen. So I've been thinking a lot about positioning. I've read an article titled To Build a Own an Opinion, Not a Marketing Budget.

It's by Ali Meese, it's on Medium and he's talking about DHH. You you and I have spoken a little bit about what works in marketing these days. B2B SaaS marketing is in a pretty weird spot. I don't hear people talk about, this is how much I spent marketing. This is webinars.

This is what we're doing. It's kind of like really your product, word-of-mouth, your brand content to a degree, it's a bit tough to wrap your hands around. I liked this article's point of view. Really being known for something, being known for a specific opinion. Like people know DHH, that's the guy that believes X.

And then when you launch products that have a similar opinion, like you have a built in audience, yes, but like a certain set of people that agree with that opinion that are much more easily persuaded to look at the product that you're offering. You definitely have detractors and I think most of us don't have the muscle built up to be very comfortable with a lot of detractors.

Yeah. I mean, I completely agree with this concept of like, build your marketing position message, if you will, out of a opinion. I don't want to go so far as to say it's controversial. It's more like your opinion has to resonate with the opinions of a specific market, but there has to be a market there. People who have this opinion, but maybe they don't fully realize this opinion until you message it, know, it resonates, until they're faced with it and they're like, oh yes, that.

You

know? I did launch that course for Process Kit called Process Automation and I think that starts to get at that a little bit. I'm basically making the argument that processes shouldn't just be processes, they should actually run as automations and that they should be adaptable, like automatically adapt. I'm making a lot of arguments and teaching how to do this in ProcessKit and that launched a little bit more than a month ago and some of these newest customers see that on the website and they're like, that really resonated with me and helped me wrap my head around it. I think that's doing its job but under marketing I'm not getting the exposure.

Had this opinion and this message but that only works if you reach the people who have it.

Yeah. Think what this article convinced me of or helped convince me was that in order to get the attention, have to be willing to disagree with someone else's opinion. Right? Like you are espousing a specific opinion around processes and how businesses should think of them. But what you're not doing is pointing at the way it's currently done or the way other people do it and saying, here's why it's so wrong.

And the stronger you do it, the more attention you get. And I guess that's what I was. That's what I meant by being comfortable with detractors. The detractors are a byproduct of having an opinion not just on the way to do things but also on the way not to do things.

That's why things are so polarized. It's because polarization works.

Yeah. Works. Works. But most of us don't use it though. We have opinions internally but we don't draw the contrast with the opposing opinion because it feels not controversial, like difficult or argumentative or unnecessary.

Yeah. From a business standpoint, you might feel like you're leaving money or you're leaving customers on the table because if you stake out this opinion, what if they don't agree? Then they won't be Yes, my customers you

which we all know is wrong. We all know Yeah. It's Yeah. Cool. I'm gonna I'm gonna see what we can do on that front as we go into these other platforms and you know, I think some of the difficulty we have is that the opposing opinion is coming from the platforms that we're integrating with And so that creates a bit of a tricky dynamic.

And so we we have to figure that out on how to thread the needle.

And I've I've run into that a little bit when I'm talking to people like on a demo or trying to convince them to convert or whatever. Like the friction, I think, is that with some people, not all users, but some of them are trying to migrate or switch away from the Basecamps or the Asanas into ProcessKit. So I believe that ProcessKit has clear advantages over those and that's why they are looking at it. But it also sort of requires you to start to think a little bit differently about how you actually organize your projects but they're still trying to make Process Kit work the way that they think about things in their Asana account or in their Basecamp account. That's where the opinion comes in.

Right? Like it's like I I still need to sort of educate like, if you're going to switch, here's an here's a new mindset shift for you to make things easier. But you gotta kind of embrace this new mindset, you know?

I agree and I like seeing how Basecamp did it specifically for email. It's not just better email, it is a different way to think about it and here's why we think it's the right way to think about it. And they have a really good way of kind of tunneling into what people either believe, already believe, or think of themselves as believing and then aligning with that. Yep. Alright, cool.

So looks, speaking of Basecamp, could be a good segue into my adventure into VC.

Let's hear it. What's going on?

I'm going to be careful around how I talk about this just for legal stuff, but I have been having a lot of conversations with VCs and the conclusion that I came to after those conversations like 25 of them is that we a pretty strange system on our hands right now when it comes to startup financing and it starts off at like the end game and the end game being IPO. So what we think of an IPO is really just the ability for a company to raise capital in a different way. Right? That's all it is. It's not like this weird thing.

It's no, it's just creating access to the capital markets at a bigger scale. The public markets, the non accredited, everybody can invest, everyone sees, everyone gets the information, the public literally public. The issue is that the IPO is completely completely broken in The US. Think about if Airbnb can barely make it, if Uber can barely get it there, like what are the chances our companies it's like it's effectively zero. So it's effectively locked out to 99.999% of companies.

Yeah. And so the only other most common outcome

Yes.

Is is a huge exit.

Is an acquisition. Okay. So so that's that's exactly it. If the IPO doesn't exist as a liquidity event for your investors, then an acquisition is the only one that exists.

And if 99% then then then that's what they want you to optimize for. They're designing products Yes. For Google to

And it's not like anyone is like a bad person along the way. It's just the these are the dynamics, these are the incentives, this is this is the actions that you get from it. But the and so what happens is in these conversations is what's not being said is that this is all we're doing here. We're putting money in, you're taking money on, you're asking for money so that you can get acquired. And the strange thing about it is, right, it's a few things.

First, the size of the acquisition is an issue because even if you're talking to a relatively small fund, relatively small being like 50,000,000, or anything under 50 is considered like micro. I think I have that right. It might be 30, but 50 is still a pretty small fund. The dynamics, the math on their end of the table is I kind of need you to be able to return my funds on your own. And then I need to take a bunch of those bets and most of them are going to go to zero.

And so I need everyone to at least have the DNA, the potential to return the fund. And so even the smaller funds, you're looking at a situation where your company getting acquired for $50,000,000 is not a success. Most of them, at least what they say is that they wouldn't block a sale like that. I mean they have the right to block a sale like that but they wouldn't because if that's what you want to do as the founder, they're not going like force you into a situation usually. And that's 50,000,000.

A 100,000,000 still looks the same thing. If you're talking to a $100,000,000 fund, your company gets acquired for a 100,000,000 that's not a success. A lot of these firms have, you know, a few partners and they're making they're not making that many investments per year. And then they stick with you for years and years and years. So in the life of a someone of a partner, let's say they're making two investments, call it three investments per year and the fund, you know, invests for a few years and then it has the return ten years later.

So they're making like 15 investments. Most of them are going to go to zero and they need a few of them to go really big if they're going to be considered a success to themselves, their peers, finances and so on. So now you're talking about not an acquisition like let me list it with Effie International, sell it for $4,000,000 and I did amazing. This is great because that is a success. We're talking about outcomes, these acquisitions that one, rarely happen.

Two, are not in your control. You don't get to decide that Square acquires your company. Square decides. Right? So now you have something that's very rare and it's out of your control.

And then the third part is the kicker. The third part's really the thing that I've really thought a lot about over the past few weeks. And that third piece is when your company gets acquired, you lose your company. You're done. So everything you worked for, everything you built together, at least I can speak for myself, I really like it.

I like what I'm doing. I like the company and I feel like we're just getting started. So if it got acquired, it would be financially a great outcome but that's not to be discounted that what you just worked on for five, ten years, it goes poof, man. It goes away. So that is a very strange thing to aim for, Something that's rare, not in your control and also has the added outcome, the added element of like you're done.

Your venture's over.

And got to move on.

Sometimes that's a good thing.

Or like not move on, but then you know, you're just working for that larger company.

Right. Which could be a year, could be two years. Whatever it is, it's not really what you wanna be doing day to day if you really enjoy the company.

Yeah. So like what you just described, it's nothing new to us, right?

It's nothing new, but when you come up against it

Well, that's my question, is like, what did you, in these 25 conversations, what was it for you that like crystallized or made you think even differently from what you were maybe hoping Maybe you were going into these conversations like, prove me wrong, like maybe this could be a good thing. What kind of crystallized it for you?

So this goes back to a line from a movie that I always think about in business. Always. It's from the movie Blow which is about, you know, cocaine. Phenomenal movie. And when the main character goes to jail for the first time, he goes to jail on marijuana charges and he gets in a cell with a cocaine dealer.

And when they talk, the cocaine dealer, the line he says to them is, George, you had the wrong dream, George. You're selling pot when you should be selling Coke. You want real doughs? Don't sell one, not the other. And so I always have in mind that you got to have the right dream.

And what that means to me is if you win, make sure that you want that outcome. As I went through all these conversations, it was, alright, let's run the good case scenario. Let's assume it all works out nicely. Do I actually want that and what are the chances of that actually happening? And so what happens is I thought that the stage that we're at, you can still take on investment and not lock out all other options besides a big acquisition and and I was wrong in that assumption.

Even very early stage investors, it gets locked into the system. It is this is what you're doing with then we will help you raise the series a either we have our own money to to in reserve or we'll introduce you to the other funds and then you are on your way. And then you go to a, you go to b, you go to c and you go onward.

This is what gets discussed in these meetings. Like for for folks like me and probably many listeners like who who haven't talked to VCs, like what does that actually look like?

So here's the strange thing is that none of this gets talked about. None of it actually gets talked about. It's all under the surface and I am not that type of person. I just throw things out on the table and some of the investors were really cool about that and others were a bit like, Oh, you're breaking protocol. Right?

So what gets talked about is the business. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Why does it make sense? Why does it make sense now?

Where does it go in the future? What have you learned? How are the metrics? How big is the team? Like all the stuff that you think you would talk about.

But like underneath the surface, the stuff that matters to you as the founder, like that you you need to know this stuff, you kind of can't talk about it.

I mean, know that these are just very early discussions or whatever, but, like, do they talk about, like, strategy or, like, what is the game plan? Like, not on the finances and and and and the and the growth and everything, but, like, are they talking about like, okay, we invest, what does that look like? What's going be the hiring cadence and all this? Like how are going to scale up quickly?

Yes, yes absolutely. Just talk

about like logistics.

That's the fun part of the conversation because these are smart people and it's fun to talk shop with them and they see a lot of different businesses and you talk through things, you talk about competition, talk about what other people do in the market, why you would do it this way or that way and that part is fun. A lot of the conversations are fun. It's a good smart people, 99%. There is an element under the surface that you can address but you want to address. At least maybe my situation is relatively unique because I didn't do the VC thing off the bat.

That's kind of a different thing. If you're like, here's an idea. We have three people on the founding team. One's a designer, one's a developer, one's a marketer, and let's take on a million bucks seed to try to build this product.

We have like no revenue.

Yeah. Everyone knows what they're getting into. It's all straightforward. I think me coming into it at like several million in ARR, I'm like this thing's fragile. I don't want to mess with this thing.

I don't want to break it. And so maybe that's part of it but that couldn't help but the conclusion I came to was we need a small cap IPO market in this country. It exists elsewhere. It exists in Australia, the ASX, and in Canada, the TSX, the Toronto Stock Exchange. And what those markets do is they open up the option of a smaller technology company going public way earlier.

And so these companies at 10,000,000, 15,000,000 in ARR are going public, They're raising $20.30, $40,000,000. They're getting access to the capital markets and then they can okay. So first they can get money that the company needs, like the capital needs of the company.

Yeah. They can continue to grow profitably.

That's right. So so now and and you're in the public domain. So now you're reporting and you are accountable and you have to all that. So you gotta be you gotta make sure people don't get ripped ripped off. But this is this this is legit.

So they get capital for the company. They get liquidity for their shareholders. So investors, founders, employees have access to liquidity if they want to sell. Right? There's also a natural check on that.

If you're the founder, you sell all your stock that's showing the market you have no confidence in your company and you'll kill your company doing that. So there's a natural check on it. And then the third part that relates to the third part of the VC situation is you get to keep running your company. You get to keep growing it, especially if you believe this is early on in the next ten years, you can get something much bigger than what it is now. Nine times out of 10, when your company gets acquired for $100,000,000 it's because that company can make it worth $500,000,000.

It's not because it's worth a 100. That's they're just using their access to capital, where for you, it's a life changing thing. For them, it makes sense.

I wonder how it got to this point. Because like there there have been like small cap in the in Yes.

Right now there's there's like the penny stock over the counter stuff which is, you know, I don't really honestly don't know that much about it but what my understanding of it is is a hot hot mess. And then you have Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange. And then what you have is Sarbanes Oxley that was put into place around Enron when companies were the public felt endangered by very large companies doing very bad things with their accounting and their financing. And so that set the bar really, really high for going public. And that's why private companies started going, staying private much, much longer.

And that's why you see these like mega rounds of raising a $100,000,000 where normally that would just be an IPO. Now that's private. And so you have the additional element of all these private investors making a lot of money that public investors should have access to because they're investing in a $500,000,000 and a billion dollar valuation for companies that normally at a billion dollars, you'd be public. But you don't want to in this situation. So it's strange and you better believe I looked all the way into like the ASX and TSX and all that and it feels like one of these things that I feel like I could work on that for ten years like after Cardhook Cause this one of these things like I don't, I'm not generally that passionate about business overall or at least specific business ideas.

But this is your thing. That thing drives me nuts. It's like a, it's like a feels like I'm like a mission I could go on. So I don't know. I should write a blog post.

That's what I should do.

Yeah. You know, post it to Medium and leave it there and that'll be that. So so then, you know, what are you doing instead? Just gonna grow it, stay profitable?

Yeah. I I have been extremely stressed out by the whole thing because I've been trying to think through what is the right thing to do. And you know, a few days ago, actually what happened was camping. I went camping and my brain was clear and I'm looking out at the ocean and my kids running around and it kind of helps put things in perspective on what you're trying to do and why. And I came back after that and just concluded, alright, I'm writing everybody back and I'm saying I'm sorry but I changed my mind.

We're not going this path. And I feel so much lighter and happier and like freer. We're reorienting and saying, Okay, no. Don't assume you'll have $3,000,000 in the bank after selling off you know a chunk of the company. Just run on your own and we're profitable now and I'm so you know what it is, it's a give and take.

You don't forego that and it costs you nothing because having $3,000,000 in the bank is kind of a big deal. So now if you're not gonna have that, then you do you do take on additional risk. But from what I saw and what my gut said is I would rather take on that additional risk as opposed to change the entire trajectory and nature of the company. That like that's, that was basically my conclusion and now I'm looking at debt options and I'm looking at, there are other financing options.

Yeah. And I know, I know you, you talk about it like financially as risk, to me it feels actually a lot more risky to go the VC route. In my mind, like you're just committing to to this path, you know? Yes. And and you and you can't back out of it.

And and like financially, yeah, you might theoretically be taking more more risk by not raising that much money right now but you're retaining what I think is one of the the most valuable things and that's optionality to do whatever So you

I'm I'm I'm with you a 100% and and you know, a few, a handful of the people I talked to said it specifically. They said, Jordan, I just want to have to ask, why are you doing this? Why are you taking a swing like this when you have something pretty nice over here? So a few of them, think specifically the people who were previously founders and understood like where I sat right now and what we could potentially be getting into. They like clicked on that.

They were like, can I just ask you why you're doing this? And that was very helpful to hear. I had a few very candid conversations which basically ended the process with those VCs but it was an honest conversation. And Yep.

Good stuff man. I'm excited by this decision.

Me too. It feels very much like you know, in my head I floated toward like a bit of the you know, the big leagues and the glamour of like, oh, we're gonna raise money, we can do all this. Like our competitor just announced a $50,000,000 series c.

That's the yesterday. Sort of like what I was thinking about as you were describing the whole concept of of what it what it means to to go the VC route. I I feel like the founders who decide to sign those papers and go that route, they're not in it for the money. They're they're in it to to be

In in the game, man. It's it's a different

To be in the game, to be known for fucking changing the world and all that bullshit and

to and be and, like,

may maybe they're in the in it for the money in in terms of, I wanna be a billionaire someday. But if you wanna actually make a lot of money, there there are other ways to build businesses. Yes. You know?

That that that is literally what one of the VCs I spoke to said. So look, there is a way to also make a lot of money in the VC route even if you don't get the exit that we've talked about. Like my guess is that the founder of the company that that we compete with that just raised 50,000,000 in a series c, my guess is he took $10,000,000 off the table, which which is pretty cool that you can just have your cake and eat it too. But it felt it feels so out of your control. And yeah, I'm very excited and I'm energized because now when I see that it was like a funny coincidence that like on Monday this week, I was like, alright, I'm done with this process.

And a few days later, they announced the series C. I feel like if I was still engaged in like, want to get this done, I would have looked at that and it would have affected me emotionally, like negatively. And now when I see that I feel like almost like empowered, like I decided not to do that. And because of that, I don't care. And the truth is, you know, when I think cynically and I think about, I think selfishly, I look at that and I say, okay, so their valuation is going to be over 1,000,000,000 and we're just going be number two in the market for a while.

We're going to cruise and keep growing and we'll be a very affordable acquisition compared to them. And that's like alright, just more optionality or just not do that. So anyway, it did feel like at some point I was like, okay I have a blog post in my head. I know what I need to say.

I think you do, you know, and I and I think you've you've taken a journey on this. I know you've been sort of noodling on this whole concept for years now, you know, so I think it's good.

Amen. Go bootstrap web.

I wanna talk about marketing. You know what it is? I'm in this like, I feel like it's like a hurricane of ideas. Whenever I make a shift like this, like I was focused on product for a few months and now I I need to do marketing, I'm diving head first into it. Everyone knows there's 20 different marketing strategies that you could do, maybe 10 of them you decide are really good ideas to do.

Each one involves 10 major steps of things to do to get them up and running and then, and you can't do everything at once and which one should I try first and if I try this then maybe I should do that next or maybe flip them or do I hire someone for this or try to bootstrap it myself instead or do I hire specialists or or a full time marketer or or this or that? And it's like, it's just like hurricane of of like trying to figure out the game plan. Like I'm not even act there are some things that are in progress but mostly I'm just planning. I'm still a little bit in that but now now today I'm starting to like lock in to a set of priorities and an order of of things that I'm doing. I'm starting to organize this in process kit and like, so I guess I'll just kind of rattle off a bunch Well, of these so there's a bunch of things as I started to organize it, like visually in, in, in process kit and everything like, So one thing that I felt was probably the easiest, quickest thing that, like a quick win that I could just do and be done with, and that's launch an affiliate program.

So I did, you know, got set up. I'm using Rewardful for it. Really good and easy product to get it up and running. I was actually able to finally because I've had some requests for people wanting to promote it with an affiliate. Did it in like three hours.

Got it launched on the site. It's up.

So that sounds to me like you either consciously or unconsciously went through a bit of a matrix around potential upside compared to effort required. Yeah.

Yeah. And I actually don't see a huge upside in the affiliate but it it was was the easiest lowest bar to just get done and shift. Momentum, something. Yeah, something. Quick win.

So another one is case studies, customer case studies. I have begun interviewing my customers. Did one interview the other day. I've got two more interviews today after this call and I've got a couple next week. And so I'm basically doing these myself, interviewing them and turning them into testimonials and stories and stuff.

Doing a bunch of work on the website or right now it's just sort of planning but I, yeah.

Well, on the case studies, what's the plan to promote it? You got to have both sides of that. I think case studies are, of all the marketing tactics that we like don't know what works and no one knows what to do, I think case studies are one of the straightforward ones that work.

They don't work on their own. They work in conjunction with other things. So there'll be assets that I have on the website that I can run ads to, that I can use in my onboarding sequences, that I can use for SEO, that I can use for nurturing. So I just needed to get these assets done.

Yeah. You know, one thing that I would add, because we've done a lot of case studies, we work with Case Study Buddy and Joel over there, team is phenomenal. We end up taking a case study and tailoring it to a specific feature. And it doesn't have

to be

unnatural. It just so happens that in the conversation you're having, it turns out that they use one thing over another and then you could kind of highlight that and use that in the bold and in the headlines and you can start to address because if people are looking at your website and you have three or four main big features that you want people to know about, a case study that relates to each one is very helpful.

Because what a lot of people do is they just email their customers and ask, hey, can you give me a testimonial? And then they just get one quote from them. What I love about the case study approach is I'm doing a thirty minute video interview with people and I've got 20 something questions that I'm asking them and out of this interview, and they get it too, they they're running product companies too so they they know like they they want to provide me with lots of useful quotes that I could use. And so out of just out of the first interview that I did the other day, I've got at least four or five different quotes that I could pull from that that highlight different features and benefits that I that I will use in different Right.

On the pricing page, if it's about ROI and on, you know, the how easy it is to onboard if it's on the sign up page, all these different things. And those sound like real quotes. There's a problem when you ask someone for a quote, over email. They write it the way they think a testimonial is supposed to sound and it never sounds natural.

Exactly.

If you're taking quotes from an actual conversation in person.

Yeah. And I and I think it's perfectly fine and and most people expect this is that is if you transcribe the conversation, then you edit it. You just rewrite the testimony. Obviously, be true to what they were saying.

Right. Nobody really minds if you massage as long as it's not misrepresented.

Yeah, of course. And these are video interviews so I could also use them as video testimonials too. So that's one thing that's underway now. I started doing a lot of keyword research, just general keyword research for the marketing site, but then also some SEO keyword research for potential blog content that we can cover. And this is not my strong suit, like, you know, scrolling through h reps and like analyzing stuff.

Like I sort of know the process and the mechanics, but I'm just not good at it. I find it really boring and I'm not So this is where I start to think about like, how should I think about outsourcing some of this? I have a hard time outsourcing the zero to one phase, but that's still on my mind. I might hire audience ops to write a lot of the blog content, but I was also kicking it around like, well, I hire a little bit more of a, yes, they could write, but they're also like a generalist who could work with me on lots of different marketing projects. I would love to think about marketing in much the same way I think about development and my workflow with my developer.

I would I would love to find a marketer, like a part time but high caliber marketer and we just work on marketing projects together. And so I'm not at the stage and I don't and I don't want to fully hand off to a CMO, you run the show on marketing.

Like Right.

I I need to be hands on with this. Yes. I I wanna work directly one on one, week to week.

So so what does that look like? Is that

And I don't know yet, but I I think because what I love about working with my developer is that I am designing features, I'm coding parts of the features, but then all the heavy lifting, all the legwork, all the back end wiring up, all the testing, I hand that off to him. It's like I do the most important 20% and then I let him take care of the 80% so that I can work on the next most important thing.

Yeah. I sitting would at all between UX design and the actual pixel perfect. Two different things. It's different, different stage of your career in development.

Yeah. And I would like to, sort of do the same thing with marketing. Like when it comes to blog content, I'll help with the topic stage how this aligns with the buyer intent. But then let a content writer maybe slash SEO expert really dial in the the optimization for that. Another big one that I'm deep into the weeds on now, I don't know if this will work or not, is cold email outreach because I feel like and I haven't started this yet, but I'm figuring out the game plan for it because obviously we're we're bombarded with cold email.

We all ignore it. But my thinking is, my optimism on this is that, okay, I'm gonna get these SEO projects up and running but that's gonna be a long game of growing organic traffic. Ongoing for a long time, organic traffic should increase but it won't be overnight. To accelerate this, the fact is I do have a much better clear idea of who the best ideal customers are. Like I was describing the guy emailing me every day, I've had multiple of those.

I know what they look like, I know where they work. I could very easily build lists of these people. I mean, very easily. LinkedIn, there are plenty of sites that list creative, you know, agencies that that could use process kit, all these different things. Hire a VA to build, you know, clean the list, use the tools for email outreach.

And I'm trying to think of like ways to differentiate it and cut through the noise. Like maybe I'll go with a very low volume approach, and I'll do a personalized Loom video for each one, you know, just to see if that works. Like not maybe not do it forever, but like I'm thinking through what that process might be. Some type of outreach. Yeah.

And that, that basically rounds it out. I mean, at, at some point, like ads would play into all of this and I, in the short term, I might just get retargeting ads up and running, but I don't think it's at the stage yet to really start to think seriously about spending on ads.

Retargeting for sure, but I agree with you. Don't, don't go spending $2,000 a month on, on trying to bring new people in and try to optimize that. Not yet.

So I think what I have dialed in in terms of my plan is at least try cold outreach to try to manually go pull the best ideal customers and see if I can convert some people that way. That's that's that's the short term play while the SEO content ramps up over the rest of the year, you know?

Yeah. And and the assets like case studies start to come into play, then you can start to use use those in your retargeting. Yeah, I mean cold outreach these days in in my head, the cold outreach that works is very targeted and authentic. I think it's better off sending two good emails a day that took you thirty minutes each to write.

That's what

I'm thinking. Then sending 50 emails a day and kind of you know, use doing it a numbers game.

Yeah. I mean I'm thinking about doing that thing where it's like you record a Loom video, the thumbnail shows their website and me talking about it and hey, it looks like you do this, from a look on your pricing page, looks like you do a lot of repeatable projects. I really dial in the message to speak to the common pain and all that.

Cool man.

Good idea.

Well we're excited to see it unfold.

We'll see. But to to be honest though, all I wanna do and really my strength is in is on the product.

You're into it.

I'm into it and I feel like I'm not very good at the marketing stuff. I could think strategically about it, but there are better people in the world who do this sort of thing. I can't afford them full time, but I can maybe afford specialists. And I'm trying to think like, who are the specialists that I hire on a project basis that I could just Here's the idea, here's the strategy I want to do, Now you go execute it while I go back to the product.

Yeah. It it is it is a challenge to build up from like the specialist then then the almost like the group leader for the marketing side and then the strategist. It's like it's just just gonna take a really long time. Cool, man. Well, love to hear it.

I think my VC rant went long enough that I should not dive into annual reviews right now. Let's save for next time. But we have not done a great job at that like formal side of of people management. And every time we do it, it is it is so good. And then when I like check-in with the people on the team, how they feel about it, it's so obvious that they're hungry for more and I'm not giving it to them.

So I do not see investment in like people ops and like management training and that whole side of things. I no longer see that as optional. I now see that as if I don't invest in that, my best people are going to leave. I'm thinking through what that means if it's a full time people ops person because it does feel a bit premature for that. But if like an outsourced service, is that like a thing?

So I to look into a lot of that. I work with someone now who is phenomenal. They're kind of like a few steps above our pay grade to be entirely honest. And she's she's just extremely busy and so she can't run the programs anymore for us on like management training. So I got to find someone else.

She's going to help. But I will definitely report back on what ends up making sense for us on that side.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll definitely, I've got a ton of questions.

We'll dive into that next week. Cool, man. Alright, everybody. Have a great weekend.

Alright. Later, folks.