Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of bootstrapped web. Mister Brian Castle, what's happening?

Hello, Mr. Jordan, two weeks in a row.

Two weeks And in a you know, look, everything has been upgraded on this podcast. I now have a boom for my mic. And I'm a professional. If you look at the zoom window, I look like a real podcaster.

That's right.

That's you right. Take it much more seriously, everything's gonna get a lot better.

Yeah, this turning into like a real podcast only like five years later. Awesome man. Has it been? I was I was thinking about that. I was talk I was on someone somebody else's podcast, and we were talking about, like, how long I've been podcasting.

I think it was it 2013 or 2014 when this started? I I forgot.

Was it before or after I launched Cardhook? Because what in the world did I talk about before? I do

not I've know what known you from before Cardhook. I forgot when we actually started the podcast though.

I don't know, 2014 or '15. Either way, it's 2020 now. It's I know ending. There's smoke outside my window. Kids can't go outside.

I was gonna ask you about that. Is that close to Portland?

So I would say that I'm not in danger of burning in a fire and dying, but there is smoke everywhere and it is insane outside and the light is crazy. And, you know, San Francisco, a lot of people, know, the pictures are crazy. Did you see that Blade Runner cut from drone video?

I saw people tweeting about that. Yeah.

Oh, you should watch it.

It's Yeah. The pictures, I mean, from San Francisco, then I saw some from from like, I think they were like thirty minutes out of Portland.

Yeah. We we looked at at those pictures and we're like, that looks terrible. And then it hit here, not from those California fires but from Oregon fires actually. And people are pretty close by. One of our friends actually is evacuated.

He went off to an Airbnb. No shit.

I've always lived on the East Coast here. So like, what happens when are are you just, not going outside? Like, what?

Yesterday, Portland had the worst air quality of any city in the world, which is so hardcore. It's just not good for you. You're not gonna like go outside and choke and you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger eyes bug out on Mars type of thing, but it's really bad for you. So all the windows are closed, kids can't play outside, like all that stuff. Just another week in 2020 baby.

That's all. Just another week.

It's like just in case 2020 wasn't crazy enough. Now now we've got this. Of course, that's like an every year thing at this point.

Yeah. Yep. But here we are on the podcast ready to talk about things of an intellectual and business nature.

Yes. Okay.

I a little agenda. You have no agenda or at least you thought, but then we talked before this and now we have things to talk about.

Yeah, I've got a couple of things, but yeah, sounds like you've got a packed show here. Why don't you kick it off?

Okay, okay. So we are done with hiring on the engineering front. Right? The way we look at it, I think it makes sense. We got to hire up the engineering, build stuff.

And then all of a sudden we need to then have the customer side of the team catch up, right? The additional support people and so on. And so I let the cat out of the bag on the last episode. What we're doing is launching an app into the Shopify app store for post purchase offers that work with the Shopify checkout. So that's the thing we're on and negotiations with them.

They concluded pretty recently in August. And so launch is set for late October. And so think about this. We need to launch an app into the Shopify app store that's going to get very large amount of exposure basically within two months.

You and I were talking about it way before you announced it on the pod, like how how long ago did you did your team start building the new Shopify app?

We didn't have anything to work with for a while. So we were waiting on Shopify to get us API docs. So we were mapping things out and thinking things through and identifying parts of our app that are no longer relevant. And what does that mean? And what does that mean for onboarding?

So we were planning, but didn't really start building until late August. And so we hired a full team. And the challenge was we have an existing product that requires a decent amount of work. I saw the debate you had on Twitter around technical debt. We're in year three.

And we did not do everything perfectly. And that's why I added that tweet around, you make a lot of decisions because you're like, just get this to work because there's so many other things that might kill us as a company that are more important to deal with that you just, you are willingly taking on that technical debt. And we're in year three of that with this product. And so we have a lot of maintenance work to do.

I mean, I'm I'm like one point five years into the code base on process kit and there is a ton of tech technical debt already, you know? And it's it's kind of scary because like, I know where all the things are and my, well, I'll get into it in my next update, but.

Yeah, it really does feel like in these products that are, they're gonna get complex no matter what you do. And it so much is determined by the initial burst of energy and the initial building in that first year or two that sets you up on this trajectory of you're just gonna be a slow product or you're gonna maintain speed. It's

tough

to do. So now what we've done, we didn't want to scramble the team. People who are focused on the current product, we didn't want to just derail them completely and take them off of that and then not be able to satisfy customer needs and so on. So we built a separate team and we used like a silo strategy. How do we keep things in silos until the point where we should unsilo?

And so right now we are unsiloing. What do you

mean by silos?

So we have a new team and we are not scrambling channels in Slack.

Oh yeah, like just these team members are just focused on this one product or one part of the product.

Yes. And same with the customer side of the team. And so the success and support teams, for us to just stress them out with all of these different issues that we're trying to figure out for a brand new product just didn't make sense for a while. And now all of a sudden it makes sense. Now it's well, we need to start communicating.

Now that we've let customers know that this is happening, now we need more detail. So now we're in the process of unsiloing. So we kind of kept it together for a month. And now we're starting to open things up and trying to figure out what to do around that. And we have a lot of concerns.

I have a lot of concerns around, I keep trying to put myself in someone's shoes that is working on the existing product, right? If you are a success person, support person, support engineer, that's working on CardHook Classic, let's call it. How are you feeling? You're seeing the company put all this energy and excitement towards something new that you're not working on. You're worried about your future.

And so I'm trying to communicate around those things around what we're gonna do in the transition and bring people over as appropriate. And a lot of it is ambiguous because we don't know how long we could continue running Cardo Classic for the next two years for all I know. We have a lot of merchants there that can't go back to the Shopify checkout, whether through strategic reasons, payment processor reasons, whatever else. So we might be running that product for a while. And so I think it's my job to really empathize with each individual person's feelings about all of it.

I'm not like a office culture kind of I haven't been in an office culture in forever. So I wonder what it's like to to be members of the team working on Carto Classic, say six months from now, when really the main focus and growth area of the company is on the Shopify app store and you're just kind of supporting existing customers.

That's right. Have to think about that. If you're in that position and you're 28 years old and you're thinking about your career, you want to be able to look to your company for answers on, Okay, well, what's next for me? Where is this going? That's our responsibility.

I have a hard time with this with everybody on my team. And any anybody that I ever hire, putting myself in their shoes, they are not founders. And they're not trying to be, at least not in this company, know? Like, may maybe they're not as concerned with that as you as as we might be as founders.

Very possible. Very possible.

Like, you're you're focused on growth. You're focused on markets and everything on that front.

Yeah. Value creation and Value creation, what,

you know, the customer needs and the positioning and all this different stuff. But the customer rep, like they're showing up for work and they're just being an awesome customer support person. And how much does that matter?

Don't know. And I try not to make too many assumptions and project onto them, but it is worth being concerned about and then exploring. Yes. So I think that's really it. I think you're right to point that out to say, well, don't just assume they have the same mindset as you do.

And they're like looking at the clock like, well, what's going on? What's next for me? But I don't think you can assume otherwise, right? You don't want to assume the opposite. So this dialogue and a lot of the challenge comes in.

Could it also be like a structural thing in the org chart, if you will? Right? Like, I don't know if you already have systems like this where

We do. We do have an org chart.

Yeah. I mean like systems for promotions. I've heard of companies doing that where it's like, look, you join the company in this position, in this role, here's the roadmap that if you want, you could progress over the next three years to, to upgrade to promote to this position and then potentially into this position. The current position, like CarHook Classic requires eight support reps. So these are filled.

There are openings in the other department. And if your career progresses to that point, you could raise your hand that you want that opening when it's available, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. So we're not as formalized as that in terms of like, this is this is the steps that that that you take. There's pros and cons to that, right? Like consulting companies like McKinsey, it's pretty straightforward.

It's like after two years, you either go to the next step or you're out. And that's straightforward. Everyone kind of understands what to expect. For us, we're not that formalized. It's gonna be tricky.

There's no question about it. It's gonna be tricky and I'm just gonna do my best to make sure that people who helped us get to where we are have the opportunity to continue on with us. That there's something very wrong about you helped us get here and then you get left behind. That's not okay. So gotta figure it out one thing at a time.

Yep, yep. What's up on your side, my man?

Well, I just got an email this morning from, you know, I talked a lot about how I've been working with a developer. They're they're actually an agency in India. I think the agency has something like close to a 100 employees. And so they're they're pretty big, but they had assigned me one guy. And I think that that he probably delegates some tasks to other members of their team, but but my guy is is the person that I talk to every day.

He's like the lead developer, one of one of the lead, more experienced, like Ruby on Rails devs over there. And I got an email from, one of the agency heads telling me that he's on his way out. He's he's leaving that agency and there's enough lead time. I mean, I think he's actually not leaving until the October. And so they, so I have a call with them next week.

I just learned this today. So I'm going to be having a call with, with, you know, like they're a couple of like the head head people over there in the agency talk and they've already identified who his replacement is going to be for me, for my account. And it'll be, you know, like a month or month and a half transition period of my guy kind of training up the new guy.

It's nice that it's not sudden.

Yeah. And like, I don't know anything about the new person and how, what his experience level is, but I know for a fact it's going to be a, it's going to be a lot of work just to get up to speed on process kit. And, and it worries me because like me and my guy have been cranking. And I literally just tweeted about this yesterday, you know, about how fast we ship features.

That's right. That's right. Is there any thing to approaching him directly?

I of, I

sort of Immediate thought as soon as you got the email.

I literally DM'd him on Slack, like more than an hour. Well, so I, you know, I just wanted to feel it out. Was like, where are you going? Are you going to another agency? You going

to product company? Said

he's going to a product company, not, so not another agency. Then the thought was also like, and I, it's not like I gave him any sort of offer or anything like that. Like, I don't even know if it's, if it would be a good idea to do that because it's like, he's great. I'm like, skillset is awesome. His communication is perfect.

Part of me, don't actually know how much of the consistency of their delivery has been just solely him or the fact that they have a team behind and and some systems behind him.

Right. The results have been good.

The results have been, I mean, like I think his coding skills are, are, are totally solid, but like the way that they like, like every new feature they do in an analysis and they give me like an hours estimate and it's super standardized and it's like really, really helpful and all that kind of stuff.

Like Very impressive. Not an easy thing to maintain as an agency.

Yeah. I could, I could tell they really have their shit together like behind the scenes. Like the stuff that I don't see, I could, I could see how solid they are.

Yeah. We used to work with an agency in Slovenia that did excellent work. And then as they grew, just all came apart. It just wasn't organized.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think it even shows in this transition. I haven't even had to call them next week, but they've they've just emailed me. They're like, already know who who the new person's gonna be.

We're just gonna we wanna have a call with you to just discuss what the next month is gonna look like.

Are you comfortable saying who they are because they might get some business from from this, you know, this level

of business. Mean, multiple people have have asked me from listening to the podcast and I've given the name out. It's Mallowtech. Yeah. Mallowtech.com.

They're in India. I've I've already sent them like a ton of business. What you asked was my immediate thought was like, maybe I could just get them directly. But like then, then it's sort of a question of like, well, it might be a little bit more risky just to have him on a freelance solo basis. Maybe it's just better to ride this out and see how it goes with the, with the new person.

I just hope that it's not a big setback because I also right now have a totally full roadmap of features where and the and these are not simple features anymore. We're we're building we're now up to the roadmap where every feature we build is pretty complex. Cause it's like, we've already built the simple stuff. Now we're building the power stuff.

Well, look, I assume the agency does not want to lose your business and therefore will be accommodating in giving you a shot at rejecting someone if it doesn't work out, if it's not the right person, not the right skill level, whatever it is, you can say, I need someone else. I'm always dumbfounded mostly due to ignorance that an engineer can jump on board and just jump into a code base start doing things. I don't understand it, but it happens all the time. We just built a whole bunch of stuff and we needed to fill the gaps. We hired some people that aren't available full time for a month.

We filled the gap with two people from an agency and they're doing unbelievably well. And in my mind, I have so worried about it. Cause I said, how do you, without context, how do you jump in? And especially around the front end, you can do that. The backend, more complicated, need more context.

You need more visibility into what's happening behind other things. The front end is here's the UI, here are the end points and go.

Yes. And, and if, if this were just a brand new dev that I, I set out to go hire, like I would bring them on board and I would just give them very small tasks. Let's start with you fixing this this bug and that bug and and here's a very simple feature for you to build and now let's do a slightly more complex feature.

Now now a little that's that.

And that's literally how I went with this guy. But now we're at the point where it's like, I could just, I could just spend twenty minutes and write some specs for a pretty complex new feature and let them run for a week with it.

All right. You have to build it back up to that.

Yeah. And like, but like it's, I wasn't planning on doing this right now. But you know, I, you know, really thinking about it, it's like today is a September 11. I think he's still going to be, you know, with me through the October. So that's like more than a month and a half.

I think it'll be plenty of time for them to kind of work together for six weeks. And then, and then my first guy, you know, phases out. So hopefully that's hopefully it's not as much of a setback as I, as I worry.

Right. It could, could be better. So keep us updated on it. It's tough thing to deal with.

Yep. Yep. All

right, let's see what's next on my agenda. I have some finance stuff to talk about. I can do it quickly. Is that okay? I just want to mention that this week something exciting happened on the finance front.

Eric Reiss and his team launched the LTSE, the long term stock exchange, which is building itself as a NASDAQ and NYSE competitor, a new exchange for public stocks. And their whole approach in the name long term stock exchange is to avoid what happens in the public markets now where everything is aimed at the next quarter's earnings and beating expectations and pumping price and CEOs, you know, and executives compensation directly tied to the stock performance instead of customer and employee performance, all these things that they identify as unhealthy. And they are looking and working with companies that have a longer term mindset. It's a bit of the tiny seed in DVC ethos at the highest end in the public markets. So it is something I think we should be rooting for and will be interesting to see.

My understanding was that they were talking to some very large customers to try to get like, namesake like Stripe and Airbnb and those types. I don't know how that's working out for them.

I'm like a finance industry complete idiot. Like I know you come from this whole world. Like, how does it how how do you even launch something like that? Like how like like structurally or or like, you know, between like government regulations and they must have to launch with with some license to be an Absolutely.

That's right. That's right. You have to go through all that process on the legal front. I mean, I am not a player in the finance world. I am a spectator.

And so I don't understand all those details either. But like anything else that seems opaque at first, there are people in there that are just like you and I, they're not super geniuses. There's just a way to do it. There's way to get And then

for the companies like an Airbnb or whatever, like when you talk about like doing an IPO, how does Eric Reese's thing suddenly become an option for a company to go public? Like how do these pieces fit together?

Yeah. What you're really doing is making your stock available for people to purchase. And there are a lot of different channels to purchase stock through whether it's direct with things like Scottrade, right? Go in there, you sign in or Robinhood, you go in and when you go into Robinhood and you type in a ticker symbol and you hit buy, that order is flowing through. It used to flow through an exchange floor with a bunch of dudes on vests doing hand signals.

Now it's done electronically and it goes into a central pool. And then you go find the buyer that wants to sell at the price that you want to buy at. And it's still done that way. It's just electronic now. If you're listing on any exchange, right, the same way that you can buy something on NASDAQ or NYSE, and you don't really care which one it's on, because it's going to that same pool that the public has access to.

And I mean, there are definitely people listening to this being like, Jordan, you have no idea what you're talking about, which is true, but I'm just talking in generals here.

But I, and I guess like the thing is like, like when, when these big companies have these big IPOs, they're just going to the most they're going to the New York Stock Exchange because that's where the masses are, the investors.

That's right. You want the biggest access to capital, you go to the biggest exchanges. That's why the big dogs list on NASDAQ and not the Toronto Stock Exchange. But there's different ways to do it. The penny stocks have their own exchange and the Deutsche market in Germany and London Stock Exchange.

These are all avenues for the public to buy stock in public companies. Yeah. So it's it'll be interesting. Interesting.

Should I

just move on to the next thing?

What you got something? Well, yeah. Like one thing I'm working on right now is is on process kit. I've been working on this for over a week now, probably like a week and a half. And that is well, I'm basically working on like design tweaks, user interface, user experience improvements around the app.

So some of it is like visual. I I wouldn't call it a redesign, but it's like a a refactoring of of the design. Part of the goal is to keep it still pretty in line and familiar to what it has been up until now, especially the key pieces like looking at a process and steps. I talked about it last week, how I'm really focused on like just make this easier to adopt. Make it easier for new users to understand.

There's a number of different user interface related feedback and requests that I get from existing users. Like, oh, I wish these cards or these steps in a process didn't take up much space. They don't have to be so big. I wish I could have a more compact list view and things like that. Those seem very simple requests, from a design standpoint, everything is connected.

And so I started like refactoring the design. At first it was like, all right, let me just make these very tiny little, little improvements. And then like one thing leads to another. And now these are becoming bigger improvements and like every day I'm like, all right, well I just refactored that. Now I got to go through and change all these different views to be in line with that.

And then I do three or four different rounds of that over a few days. And so now, and I think, I think it's gotten to a pretty good place. I still have a lot of work to do on it, but it's the kind of project that, you know, with with new features, I I have a very tight deadline in my mind of like, okay, we're gonna start this today. I know exactly what I need to do to hand it off to my developer. I'm giving him a bunch of tasks and I expect we could probably ship this thing by Friday, maybe Monday next week.

You know, it's a very, very defined list of to dos to build.

Okay. And you view this differently?

Yeah. It's a little fuzzier. So like at first it was like I kept tweaking and I kept tweaking. So every time I tweaked it would just add more time to the project. Now I'm a little bit further along.

It's it's my my my direction for it is solid. So now I just sort of have to finish the updates throughout the whole app before it's ready to to launch. It sort of feels good to work on something where I don't have this like urgent pace. I'm just, I'm just kind of doing my thing. I've got my developer cranking on some other big features right now.

Got my marketer working on a bunch of content and some outreach stuff. I've got the cold email outreach running that's automatic. So it feels good that I don't have to like stop progress on those other fronts. You know, people listening might disagree with this, but I feel that it's important to make sure the experience part of it is to get users to adopt it easier. Part of it is to set up the app.

From a design standpoint, I think you were just talking about this a minute ago, like in the first year of an app, so many things change in terms of the feature set and the scope. I initially designed ProcessKit for the scope that was a year ago, And we've added a lot more features since then and users have have started using it in different ways. And and I didn't design for for all these things specifically. And so now now I'm trying to update the design to be more in line with with where the product is now and where it's going with the upcoming features.

So yeah, I like the idea of not having absolutely everything mapped out to the hour. Look, because when you first started talking, it sounded to me like, Oh, you just don't have the same process for front end as you do for backend, right? Because our front end engineers have very similar process. Here's how many hours I expect it to work. And it's kind of like, it's very similar to backend.

But I like the idea of not having absolutely everything mapped out to the hour and Like

the front end for me is is designing it and coding. Like I'm I'm designing it in the browser, in the code. If I know exactly what needs to happen on the page, sure. Two hours, I'll get it done. But like it's it's half a day of going in one direction and be like, oh, you know what?

It's better if I flip it to the other side. Now I gotta spend another half a day refactoring that.

There's there's some creative license there which which isn't a bad thing. What what I'm surprised by though is the visual nature of the feedback that you're describing. You know, I wish this looked smaller on the screen. To me that's surprising as opposed to, I wish I could see these things at the same time. Or I wish when I could hide this or I wish I could do this with this part of the app.

So it's a it's a little surprising.

Well, there's there's always that feedback too. There's like functional, you know, like feature requests that that come up too. And and we're hammering through that roadmap, you know. Honestly, I I wish it wasn't this type of product. And and and hindsight, if I were in the mode of like, let me figure out what product to launch, one of the things that I didn't spend as much time inventing the the process kit idea as I maybe should have, you know, two year, two, three years ago is how dependent it it is on everyday usage, or activation.

It's the type of product that like the teams that are using it are using it day to day. It's not an automatic I mean, obviously everybody wishes they had like the automatic product that you pay a $100 a month for and it runs in the background, but like

Yeah. I don't know about that. I don't know about that.

But like it's it's part of the set it's part of the sales proposition. It's like they're comparing it up against all the other tools and if it doesn't feel right and they can't feel fast and productive in using it day to day, they just can't have these like user experience frustrations. And and it's more for the brand new users in their trial to get them like, oh yeah, this this is legit. I could I could picture my team using this for years, you know?

I think a lot of that has to do with where you are right now in the journey, where right now you're bumping up against the hard part of having a product that gets used constantly. The other side of that is that a product that gets used constantly very rarely gets removed, but you to get there, right? The products that you pay a $100 a month for and never look at, they're always in danger. It does sound like the dream, but you're always in danger.

Yeah. People are converting, but a lot of people are not converting. And what bothers me, and maybe it shouldn't bother me as much as it does, is that a lot of the people who are not converting, feel like should convert.

So that that that should bother you. And and I I I hung out there for two years and wanted I almost lost my mind. I lost my co founder. I lost a lot of money. It was so hard to get to the other side of that.

Like actually we had a couple of churns recently. Like I hate to see churn happen, but in a way I'm like, okay, I knew that that customer probably wasn't a great fit.

Yeah. It doesn't hurt as much

as someone like I expected that they would probably churn at some point, but we have other really happy customers who are using it every single day. Their teams totally depend on it. Ten, twelve, 15 team members using it every day. Then I have, I don't know, whatever, 90% of other trial users who look just like those customers. They have all the same characteristics.

And I have conversations with them and they're super impressed with the demo. They pulled in their managers onto the demo. They want to make it work. And then it's like, they just sort of drift away. And I do follow ups and sometimes they even do a follow-up, and and it's like, man.

It's tough that's the siren song, man. It pulls you toward the rocks. If if it was like, oh, I'm not interested in this. This is all wrong for me. It's almost easier.

Yeah. Yep. I know that like just giving it a new fresh coat of paint is not just the answer to that. Working on a lot of different things like getting better leads in the top of the funnel and I'm working on a lot of big functional features that are rolling out. One is, this will be out by the time this airs next week.

We're releasing dynamic roles. So the larger teams that come in, they have multiple people in each role. Like in audience ops, we have multiple writers and we have multiple managers and we have multiple editors. As you build out a process and process kit up until now, you could say like, Oh, the writing step in the article process, we always want to assign that to our writer. But what if you're a team like audience ops and you have 10 writers?

And a lot of people ask about this sort of thing. You to have a system to automatically assign different people within the same role. And so there'll be different rules of who in the role can be assigned and so that's all done now. And it's a, that'll be rolling out on Monday.

Getting deeper in. I don't know. I'll go back to our friend Winston Churchill. If you're going through hell, keep going. Not much else to do.

Alright. So I'm gonna talk very quickly about competition and then I want us to talk about audiences. Cool?

Alright. Yep.

So on the competition front, I need to get myself into a different state of mind. I have had a very unique situation with competition because the universe of competitors was very small. People kind of brave and stupid enough to do what we did with Shopify. It was really just a handful. And we were used to being like the big dog in a small pond.

And that was great. And it allowed me to really ignore my competition completely and just price wherever we want. We just did whatever we wanted, whatever we thought was right. And now we're going into the app store into a scenario where we are going to be swimming in an ocean of of of competition.

And it's not it's not just being in a competitive space. Like I'm in a competitive space that you know, different types of competitors.

It's listed.

But it's like literally listing. There's Carhook and like 10 pixels to the right is the next competitor.

Exactly right. And you could bid on each other's names for the advertising inside the Shopify app store and it is, and it's cutthroat. And I hear some shady stuff that happens and like the whole deal. And so I'm just trying to get myself there because I've also, I hear rumors about what other people are doing and I get DMs and screenshots on, Hey, just wanted to let you know that your competitors emailed me with this. And there's just a lot more of that noise and I'm trying to get Zen about it.

And just, you know, when I talked to Rock about it and whenever we find ourselves getting a little stressed about it, we kind of like center ourselves. Like there's literally no one that has more experience in this than we do. We just crushed whatever competition we were with. No one knows the space better than us. Like we like, we have to like inject these objective truths and some opinion in there to be confident.

Like what should we do on pricing? Like, you know, we're what we think is right because we did really well when we did that before.

Can you remind me what is a, I don't know what you can get into here. The deal with you guys going into Shopify. It's like kind of a head start

a little bit? A little bit of a head start because we are working with them on a brand new API, but it will be released to the public as soon as it's stable.

When they release the API, you show up with the app in the app store whereas the competition has to start building.

That's right. But we're not the only ones. So there are other competitors that are early like us working with Shopify in this early access period. So we will not be alone. It'll be a handful.

It won't be 20 but probably, you know, three or four or five. I actually don't know, but we won't be alone. And then when the floodgates open, it'll be very crowded. So I'm just starting to get myself into that mindset. I don't wanna be driven by competition.

I don't wanna be my emotions to be driven by it. I don't want my decisions to be driven by it. So I'm starting to like fortify my psyche around it and just kind of having fun with it almost seems to be the answer for me.

I know you're trying to be all zen and disconnected from the competition right now. But do you have any insight intelligence into what the other, what that small batch is planning in terms of pricing or anything else like features or whatever?

No, it a prisoner's dilemma of pricing specifically, right?

No one knows

what anyone else is doing. And you have some indicator based on what the current pricing is but that's not that good of an indicator because the situation is so different. So it the full on prisoner's dilemma on what to do on pricing. The interesting thing is more about the UX challenges because we want to get people excited and we want to do that not by talking, we want to do that by showing, but showing how we are solving UX challenges where I'm fine saying that we are the best at that for this category in this space. And so for us to show how we're solving these UX challenges does not seem very smart.

Right. Don't want to Yes. Give away the secret

because then if you're a competitor, you're like, oh, that's so much smarter on how they solved for X. Why would we do that? So it's really like, how do we get people excited and not just make it all talk and then show it at the right time? Right. Once the app is out and it's public, you know, everyone can sign up for it and then it's a free for all.

Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting. I do not know anything about that world. I know like a lot of WordPress folks have dealt with, you know, competition in the WordPress space.

Yeah, it's a big positioning challenge. The way I see it is positioning. It's pricing plus brand plus what you focus on, what you say, what features you launch or don't launch like everything combined. That's I think you said

last week, this is like the most friendly situation with Shopify that Cardhook has been. Yes, absolutely. So like in the future, when we're not in pandemic times, like Shopify's conference and stuff, like can you get like speaking spots? Like how prominent can can CartHook be in the Shopify world, right?

Don't know. I think it's one of these things where Shopify has a really big challenge on their hands because whenever they play favorites, other people get mad. So there's always, look, there's a lot of very competitive categories from email marketing to pop ups to, I mean, there's a lot of categories that are extremely competitive with multiple app developers having five to 10,000 merchants. So you have a lot of companies that are legit and they're all battling for Shopify's favor and Shopify has to kind of play that right and it's not an easy thing.

And the sales process, I mean, you talked months ago about how you guys went to a close like demo only sort of sales process, right? All gonna change?

It's all gonna change.

Because like people, they're already in their Shopify dashboard, they're installing plugins, they're choosing from the app store. I guess that you could still get people to a call and some with some user experience around that, but

it's hard. But it defeats the purpose of the distribution channel to put up too many barriers. So we'll have to adjust, and I'm happy to describe that after we launch, not what we're planning.

Yeah.

Yep. Alright. So Brian, you and I have talked about audiences and building an audience and the value of it. And I want I want you to talk about that because I want us to have a debate.

Okay. I don't know quite what we're gonna be debating in here, but, I I will say that this has been, just in recent weeks, I've started to I hope people don't take this the wrong the wrong way. I've started to like just in in terms of my focus and my time and energy and creativity, I'm I'm not as invested anymore in in the whole idea of of maintaining and growing and nurturing a personal audience, like an email list. And, so things so like things that I've had in like properties that I've owned, continue to own, would be like the Productize course. I have another podcast called the Productize Podcast.

I've sent out an email newsletter for many years, Twitter, and then I've got this Bootstrap Web Podcast. Especially over the last couple of years with the email newsletter, I've seen like open rates decline and it got very fragmented, especially when I started really shifting away from talking about productized services all the time to, Hey, I'm building some software products and, I'm doing all these different things that I'm talking about. I think that had an impact on readers not engaging with my newsletter as much as they used to. So there's that, you know, but like people still buy the Productize course and people still listen to the Productize podcast. I still get new comments of people interested in in, you know, enjoying that show.

Personally, I don't get as much value and satisfaction and enjoyment out of spending my energy in in in those channels anymore as as as much as I used to. And, you know, yes, there there there are members of my audience who make their way into process kit as customers or leads, both. And that's been good. And it's been not as good because there have been leads that came directly from that audience who they're interested in process kit, but they're solo or two people and they're maybe not quite the ideal fit.

Right. It's not actually a fit. It's more like an affinity fit. Like, I want to support you. I'm interested in what you're doing.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think that people would really take all the time or maybe potentially pay for it if they didn't think that they could actually use it. And there have been folks who have used it for a few months, but then drift away, but still like the best customers on process kit, I can point, I know who they are and I know that they did not come from my audience. You know, they found it another way. Then you just layer on top of all that, that like the thing that I truly enjoy doing the most is just working on software and doing this podcast, you know, to be honest.

Like these are the two things. And I mean, audience ops continues to run like really nothing to report there. No changes there. It's, you know, it's a great business. It's funding all of my time.

It's given me a ton of free time to focus on on process kit.

Nothing wrong with that. You, you are not a business. You know,

I've got amazingly awesome team over there and we're actually hiring, right now, hiring another project manager at audience ops for the last like two, one to two years there. It started to feel like, like an obligation, like, Oh man, I haven't sent the newsletter to my list in three or four weeks now. Better write something up and send it out. I'm getting a little tired of that to be honest. And the same thing with the other podcasts, the product has podcasts.

I think I'm going to be winding that down at least temporarily. I've got a couple more episodes in the queue, but you know, just preparing for a podcast interview with someone and continuously finding guests. I have a guy who's been helping me with that, but it's not the same and just getting a little bit burned out on that. I'd rather spend my time working on process kit. So yeah,

I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't see that as, as, as, as big of a shift as I thought maybe we would be talking about in terms of like not focusing on audience building. I think you just focusing, You narrowing the number of obligations. And I think it's a good thing to listen to your gut when you don't wanna do something. I found myself, I mean, literally reply to people.

I'm like, you know what? I just don't think I wanna do this. I'm just honest with them because it's good to be honest in that way.

The one more quick thing that I'll mention on this is that like months ago in March when the pandemic really hit here in The US, that was the month that everyone's business was like, was gonna happen? What's happening here? And audience ops definitely, saw a hit that month. Luckily it recovered in April and May and it's basically back to normal and growing now. But in March it really freaked me out mentally.

Because I was seeing a much higher cancellation rate than we usually have because everybody in the world is freaking out. Tightening everything. And so when that happened back in March, I was like, okay, what if audience ops completely goes away? Which it wasn't even close to that, but in my It mind makes you think about it. Sure.

It makes you think about that. So I was like, I better get back on the horse with the audience ops. Sorry, with the audience building.

And heart wasn't in it?

Well, I did a lot of work on it back in March and April. You know, did a big redesign of the Productize site, relaunched the Productize podcast, developed a lot of new content over there, did a whole bunch of new YouTube videos over there. And it helped like, you know, Productize continues to sell and stuff. It's a nice little passive income side hustle sort of thing. I like all those people and I like to answer questions.

I no longer, I did cut out the coaching. I used to do coaching sessions. I no longer do that. I can't spend the time on that. So I, I it's, it's like weird that like I put in a bunch of energy into this like six months ago and now it's like, okay, well, like in a way it's like, okay, it's good that that stuff is done.

It'll sit out there on the internet, but I'm just going like, kind of let it, let it be for awhile. And that'll, that's going to be like a thing from my recent past that I'm just not actively working on anymore.

Yeah. Like the idea of seasons these days also where if you commit to doing something, it does not mean you have to do it forever. And as soon as you stop doing it, you've like failed at it or quit in something horrible. It's okay to do something for a while and then just back away and then see if you want to come back to that or not. So where I was itching for a debate was around the value of audience building.

I don't really think you're backing away from that at all. The reason for it is because Nathan Barry wrote a blog post, maybe this week or last week called the billion dollar blog. And in it, he articulated what a lot of us are seeing in a lot of places around the internet where I guess I would describe it as the individual can now accrue the value that used to be exclusively the territory of large companies. So I think of e commerce because that's the space I live in. There's a YouTube star called Jeffree Star and he does makeup tutorials and a bunch of other stuff.

And he launched his product line. I believe they did $50,000,000 in the first day. And that is not that strange in the world. Yeah, like off of

like what kind of audience on YouTube? Like millions.

Millions, but think about this. That's not that strange. When MAC Cosmetics launches a new line and they do, you know, dollars 300,000,000 with it in the first year, everyone's like, cool, successful product launch. That can now be done by one person. And of course they have a team behind them.

There's a lot of work that goes into it, but the pyramid is so incredibly flat now. It's not this big pair. I don't even know what I'm talking about, flatter or not, you know what I'm saying? The point gets to one or two people. It's very, very different.

So what Nathan

It's like talked a celebrity based business. Yes,

but the internet changes the way you get celebrity. You don't have to be blessed by Hollywood to You be a kind of raise your hand and say, well, I'm just awesome and I'm gonna work hard at it. How about that? So, you know, what Nathan talked about was Emily Weiss, who's the founder of Glossier, right? She started off with a blog called Into the Gloss.

I think that was the name of it. And she talked about her life as this fabulous New York PR person talking about what's happening in fashion, all these parties. And she parlayed that into an audience and then parlayed that into a billion dollar company. So in many ways, I feel like an idiot. I know that and I can identify that.

And I see people, you know, talking bad about these tick tock stars like no, these people are doing the exact right thing right now for the internet. This is a moment time that individual people can create unbelievable opportunity and wealth through an audience. And if that comes from dancing in front of a camera, like,

go mean, for like Sarah Cooper, you know, blow up on TikTok, you know, doing like the Trump impressions and stuff like Yes. And then she was like hosting, the Jimmy Kimmel show. Instant, it's just kind of fun to watch that rocket ship happen over

Yes. Three Nathan's in the middle of it. He did design ebooks, but was really good and prolific and stuck with it. Then partly that

Nathan's whole whole story and the fact that he built ConvertKit off like, it it it makes total sense in that trajectory for like, he he personally had, you know, a lot of success from, from blogging and teaching and then build a product around that. You know, this, this is also a good week to talk about this. I, I was listening to Justin Jackson talk, was it on his podcast or someone else's about audience? I think Justin is talking now about how he's sort of like changing his thinking on this. I tend to agree with this direction now that like it used to be for many years and in some ways it still is.

You look at Nathan Barry's blog, but the general advice is build an audience, then sell something to that audience. And I saw success with that, with the productized course. When I started talking about productized services, that's what resonated with my audience. Productized courses done several 100 K in sales over the years. I think in some ways it was good and it still is good to have the network effects of it to get something brand new off off the ground going from zero to to one or zero to 10 if you will.

But certain types of products, you think about like a card hook or or what I'm seeing now in a SAS like like process kit, having the personal audience driving it is much less important. And in some ways actually a distraction brings a lot of noise into the equation. I think the convert kit is really an exception to that.

Yeah. Don't know. I don't know. I can't help but feel like in the future, the right thing to do is to marry those two. And it doesn't even necessarily need to be personal.

It doesn't need to be me building an audience to sell to. Even operating a business that takes people and helps them build an audience and then helps them sell things like that is acknowledging that same power and harnessing it.

Like beauty and celebrity, courses, teaching, you have to build trust in the person who's teaching the course in order to buy the course.

Right. I'm just trying to abstract it away from it being you as the required celebrity. Sure, that's cool and everyone, but not everyone's right for that.

Yeah. But as a brand new product getting off the ground, like, you know, like there are a lot of brands that we have a lot of trust in over time, you know, like, yeah, like Apple, right? Like it's not, it's not like we buy Mac computers because of necessarily because of Steve jobs or Tim Cook or whoever like Johnny Ive.

Musk, good example. You know, you kind of root. He can do things. His business can do things that most people can't. That's obviously the largest scale version of it.

But Yeah. Same exact supply. You know, and I and I know that, you know, Justin has been on this this this theme for for a while now talking about it like, you've gotta find where the demand is. And the demand doesn't require you to have a personal audience in that space yet. If you just identify that opportunity, you know?

And I think there are parts of that I completely agree with and parts of it that it can just work in different ways at different, you know, growing at different paces. I think everybody wishes that they found the wave that's taking a rocket ship and some people do find that wave, but, I think there's a lot of very slow growing SaaS out there too.

Yes. I just like the leverage of it. The multiplier of an audience, the cheat code, the unfair advantage, whatever you want to call

But I have personally seen, and maybe this is just like shortcomings on my end from misreading feedback from an audience at times where it's like you're hearing things from your audience and you think that they should be good products and they're not. Or you're just getting a lot of extra positive feedback when it shouldn't be as positive as it really is. It's actually really difficult to sift through that sometimes. At times it can also result in just customers who shouldn't be customers. It's just not a perfect fit can take a toll on the whole business and the direction and all that.

But that's not to downplay like there are definitely advantages. Like when you have zero email list and zero followers and no network to test out ideas and see is there a pulse here or hire someone if you need to hire someone like it's, it's definitely harder starting from zero, but I feel like, you know, so going from zero to zero to 10 is, is, is easier when you have a network and an audience going from 10 to a 100. I think the audience is much less important in certain types of products like like SaaS and stuff.

So you still need to do the work.

That's

Alright, a well look, as long as you're not resigning from this podcast, we're gonna we're gonna figure things out.

No way, man. I love this.

Let's let's call it my dog. Looks like he's about to pee on my foot. I've been seeing

your dog like walking circles behind you this whole

this whole time. That's what he does. He's like, my phone needs to go out and he's like, dude, it's time. Yep. Brian, great to catch up.

Man, thanks everybody for listening. Have a great weekend.

Alright. Later, folks.