Bootstrapped Web

Hello. It is Bootstrapped Web. I closed down Twitter so that we can record. And here we are.

Never close Twitter.

I'm lying. It's What's up, man? It's it you know, I'm lying. Twitter is actually still open right here. We were just saying like, before we do anything, always have to check Twitter one more time.

So yeah. Look, here we are.

What are you gonna do? You gotta admit it, admit your problems, face them head on and continue on with them like nothing ever happened. Brian, what's happening, man? It's Friday, I'm in a good mood. We had a good week.

I'm trying to go to a drive in movie tonight. Oh, yeah? Like an adult,

They're like, going making a comeback this year, the the drive ins.

Right? It's pretty cool. So my my sister-in-law and her husband and their kids moved to Portland. They got here about a week ago, well, two weeks ago now.

From New York?

From New York, they flew right into the smoke. So we came in and they quarantined and couldn't leave the house. So it was a bit of a rough introduction to Portland, but the smoke has cleared. They got their COVID tests. They're all good.

We went apple pickings. Now we get like a few months with literally one block away. So the cousins are together. So everything's awesome. It's awesome.

Nice, nice.

That's it. We're gonna try to go out with them, leave the kids with a babysitter. Just try to move towards some semblance of normal routine and life and experiences.

We just booked an Airbnb for October at a house up in Northern Vermont. Trying to, you know, we'll do some looking at the leaves and hanging out in some house up there and

looking at the leaves up there is surprisingly satisfying.

It's so beautiful. Yeah, we actually got this place like on a lake. Yeah, it should be fun. Bring the kids up there for a week.

Looking at leaves from across the lake, even better.

That's right. That's right.

Oh, what do we got today? We have we have whatever comes to mind. I have a few things written down.

Yeah. I think we've got a lot of random stuff. You know, like like always, we're we, you know, we hop onto Twitter like a minute or two before we hit record just to see if there are any topics that people can suggest. So we've got a couple of responses so far that we could walk through and talk about what's on our minds.

Like how much we flex and how organized and like professional this podcast is right when it starts.

Yep, exactly.

Thanks, everybody for sticking with us. Now we we do have some stuff on Twitter. And I have a few things from internally from Cardhook over the past week. Yeah. Some interesting new experiences for sure.

Where do you wanna start?

Yeah. Not a whole lot new on on process kits, sort of, more of the same, like, just shipping features. We just shipped, dynamic roles. So you could have like a large team and have like multiple writers or multiple managers or multiple whatevers and dynamically assign the roles. That's all out now.

And now we're working on, we're about to ship next week liquid tags. So you can do really powerful. So if you're familiar with liquid tags in like email marketing tools and stuff, could, cause we have a bunch of custom fields in ProcessKit. You could take whatever you put into fields and use liquid tags to like throw them anywhere else in the app, like dynamically pass data around to different places Cool. And

So like I used to merge Excel fields into a Word doc and think I was pretty fancy. Yeah. Just for the web.

I'm basically trying to like squeeze in all these like big features before my my main dev like leaves the agency.

That's what I was gonna ask. I was gonna ask, is there any movement on on that front?

Well, he's officially leaving them, I think, three or four weeks from now. So my new guy, I met him, and he did, one small task so far, but my original guy is still the guy. So so like, I I'm literally like, I've got this big feature and this big feature I wanna do before you get out of here. So

Yes. Well, look, if if they transition from one engineer to another, this agency is the goat, man. Like, I assume that's the hope.

Yeah. I mean, you know, had a good call with the with the managers there the other day, and and I think it'll be fine. I haven't really gone deep with the new guy yet, so it'll that remains to be seen. We'll see.

Cool. Yeah. On our side, the most interesting experience of the past few weeks has been designing and building our new app for Shopify. So right, I think we covered this. The cart hook checkout is no longer taking on new customers and we are now building a new app from scratch.

It's not like changing our existing app and morphing it to accommodate these new conditions. It's a new app from scratch. So we've been sprinting at it obviously to make sure it gets ready for launch at the October. It's been a crazy experience. Imagine having a product for roughly four years now and then someone says, Well, rebuild it.

So first it feels daunting. This app is much narrower though. It's not nearly as complex because it doesn't include the checkout and the thank you page and the payment processing and the direct integrations with all these other things. So it is simpler overall. And what it's really presented is an opportunity to fix a lot of mistakes that we made and were just really tough to go back on.

Some decisions you make and you can change, some decisions you kind of just have to sit with. And we have a bunch of those after four years That's you a identify Yes. And what we did last time was a combination of things with limited resources. So we had my ideas on what a merchant wants. We had been providing input on the product and design.

And we worked with Jane from UI breakfast to help us with the UI and the UX as well. And we kind of brought that together and came out with a product. Now we have more resources. So we hired a phenomenal product designer. And it's been interesting to see what that does to the process.

We've never had a full time in house designer, which I feel ashamed every single time I say it, but that's the truth. And this has really changed the process because it ends up the UX design ends up driving the backend development and then the front end development. And it gives everyone this clarity around functionality and what these goals are and what we want people to do and where the limitations are. So it involves engineering to identify, you know, Rock at this point is very well versed in all this stuff and understands what can and can't be done and where the limitations are on this new API with Shopify. So it's really been a much more collaborative effort as opposed to here's what we want to do.

And then engineering goes down and figures out how to do it.

And then making it look nice after the fact.

After the exactly right. This is different.

I love this approach so much more. Like that's the approach I personally take with everything is like, I think about the user experience first and then how it's gonna fit together UI wise And then what's important on that end and then and then figure out the technical backend.

Yeah, I mean, I shout out to Twitter that helped me find this product designer and product designers are not easy to find, and very difficult on availability. They're usually booked because they just go from one job to the next because they just keep getting referrals and referrals and referrals. So I just got lucky. You know who was? It was Robert Williams.

I am getting that. Yes. He runs that marketplace for freelancers. He said that he's heard great things about this designer from multiple people. And by coincidence, they were just finishing up he and his he and his business partner work together.

We're just finishing up our project. So we literally found an amazing product designer. And then they were able to start the next week with just just luck, which is very, very good to have.

So the designer, they might know you or whatever, but they don't have much familiarity with Cart Hook the product before joining you.

Didn't know me at all. Never heard of us never heard of anything, you know, not so into the e comm space, just a good designer and kind of dove into understanding what the shopper experience should be like, what the merchant is trying to accomplish. Now a few weeks in is providing feedback and ideas on their own that makes sense. So when we bring up a specific feature, they have enough context to say, well, in relation to this other thing that we just built, should we take that into account or should we not? And what about the shopper?

Are they gonna have enough clarity that this is a post purchase offer and not something else? How do we do that? And yeah, so it's, it has shown us the value of a designer in house. We already knew it, this really helps us feel it. And that's a role we will definitely be hiring for full time in the future.

Very cool. Matt Maderas is going to love this one. I think I'm going to hop on his podcast next week to talk about this more. But I decided this week to switch the process kit marketing site, processkit.com, from a static site, which which I had built with Jekyll. It was hosted on Netlify.

I swallowed my pride and I moved it on back to WordPress.

Went back to WordPress.

It's the same site. What bothers me about it is that the site is still basically a static site. All the pages on the site are they're not dynamically generated through the CMS in WordPress. The only reason is is just to have blog articles that are powered by WordPress so that I could delegate to my team to actually set up and publish blog articles. Because without that, they have to send me the Google Docs and then I put them into HTML and push them to the server and deploy them and all that.

Just to have the blog posts on WordPress, you have to have the whole site on it because of the domain.

Basically, yeah, the domain. Yeah.

You can hear people Yeah,

I could hear people tapping the tweets to me right now. Oh, did you try this CMS? Oh, but what if you just hook this up with that? If you just try Next. Js and do this headless CMS and and hook it around the back end of this and that?

It's like Oh my god. It's And and by the way, like, I think the Internet probably needs just a couple more CMSs. Please build more CMSs. I'm clearly being sarcastic about that. It's just like a ridiculous amount of like, everyone's trying to build like the next simplest CMS.

Literally all do the same things, but

Yes. In a slightly different way.

Yes, slightly different way. I was on Netlify and it was a Jekyll powered static site. So I tried like Netlify CMS thing and like, it's just still too clunky on the static side of things. It's still too clunky to be able to delegate to somebody else to log in and then preview the article and all that. So I did end up going back to WordPress and it was annoying to me because like, I didn't want to redesign the site or anything.

I just wanted to make the blog articles like dynamic through WordPress. And that literally cost me, like, probably four full days of porting that over.

That hurts.

So it it it really does hurt. Like, I because I have a lot of, like, really big product things that I'm trying to push forward that I just had to put on hold for most of this week. And that shit just really frustrates me,

you know. Sometimes you just have to let out some blood to the SEO gods. That's just what you gotta do.

Because I have some blog content that that is rolling out now. Like, now we're we're starting to finish up a whole batch of articles and case study blog posts and content hubs and stuff. Like, it's these things need to be published. And so I was like, all right, let me just spend this week getting that squared away so that the rest of the fall, I could just have the team actually publish this stuff.

Tricky, tricky. All right. Let's see. My next thing is around hiring and interviewing. So in the past, I've let the team lead, run hiring for their team, especially around engineering.

I really don't have that much to add. I think the best thing that I add in the process for engineering is to spell out this big exciting vision so that the individual engineer understands their contribution to the bigger picture. And to make that bigger picture exciting and worth working on for years. On the engineering side, I feel like that's the best thing I can do. But on the customer facing roles, I should have more to say and more to add.

We're hiring for support right now in anticipation of higher volume once we get into the App Store. And it's pretty obvious that the company has a tendency to be nice. We're all nice, like we've optimized for good nice people. Like there's no high performing jerks. There's nothing like that.

So we're working with Greg at Dynamite Jobs, which I've talked about in the past. And they did a ridiculously good job on the engineering side. We hired a whole team. We hired, you know, nine engineers within like forty five days. And we went through a lot of applicants.

We didn't just like choose anyone. So we said, let's just keep going. Let's go with support with them also. And they did a similar job. They took hundreds.

I think it was something like 400 applicants and brought us two.

And the applicants were through Dynamite Jobs or elsewhere?

So what they do part of their service is to post it onto the sites that you want it posted on.

Right, okay.

They're still posting on WeWork Remotely because we've had success there. And then they're managing the applicants that come through there. So it's really like an augmentation of your process as opposed to a completely foreign process that they're running on their own that you don't have any transparency into. It's your accounts on these individual sites that they're posting and then managing the intake. They're also posting on other sites that we normally don't because they've had good luck there.

And so why not? We're open to that.

Yeah. I just had a good conversation with Dan Andrews on my other podcast, productized podcast.

I saw you tweeted about that.

And that's probably going be like my last episode there for a while because I'm not spending time on that, but he, yeah, he was talking about how they're right now, they're sort of making that pivot into like with dynamite jobs and they're getting into this sort of like, we've talked about it here, like a productized service around helping you with that hiring process.

You'll have to ask them about this, but at some point we had a conversation. I was in need, right? I didn't want the team to do everything on hiring. And I didn't want to pay for a traditional recruiter, which is really too expensive for a startup. It's crazy expensive.

Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Like, look, if you have no choice and you raise $20,000,000, you need to hire a 100 people. You kind of have no choice. It's built into the cost because you literally can't get it done yourselves. For us, it's like we could do it ourselves. We just don't want to, but we don't want to pay 20% of someone's salary, which is just too much.

So I remember having the conversation and I was like, Greg, I will pay X amount right now for it. Not surprisingly, that's their pricing.

Good. Because that's exactly our price point.

Yes. So my bad on the negotiation there and now that's everybody's pricing. I'm sure it's just a data point.

I sort of do the same thing all the time when I'm sort of talking to a new contractor that I might work with. I end up getting to a point where I'm just like, look, can we just make the scope this and this is price that I would like to pay I for

was like, this is my no brainer price. If you give it to me at this price and do all the stuff we just talked about, I'm sold. So it's not like I feel stupid for it. It's just kind of funny. They did a great job on the support.

It was like 400 applicants and they brought us two, which means they're doing a lot of work to get to those two. And then we interview them and not surprisingly, they're both great and we want to hire two. But we then set up an interview with the team lead. And that's the interview I think that matters like most. And then that team lead is then setting up a group interview with three of us in the company and plus the applicant or candidate, whatever you want to call it.

And in that interview, I feel our tendency. We're just, we want to be nice but this decision is like a thousand decisions in one, right? It has repercussions with leverage. If the person's amazing, the resulting like Delta is huge for the company. And if they're bad, the resulting Delta is also huge on the back.

You're saying like this group interview, they didn't what grill the candidate enough or like you're not vetting enough?

Well, my concern is that the questions that we're asking, not that they don't have a point but they're not driving toward what we want to figure out.

What do you wanna figure out?

Well, that's the thing. The first thing to determine is, well, what do we wanna figure out? What type of person and why and what makes sense as opposed to just competent and nice? So we look for culture fit and our culture fit is kind of like a nice, optimistic, happy person. And that might sound like thin, but it really matters.

If you are naturally optimistic and curious, it leads to like happiness even in times of stress. And you see this big giant challenge as like, I'm going to learn a lot from this as opposed to, this is annoying. I don't want to do this. So disposition really does matter. So when we say culture fit, we're really talking about disposition.

I just feel like our tendency is like, we like them, let's make them an offer. I'm worried that we just drive toward that without It does feel like additional rigor, additional thoroughness in the hiring process. It might hurt a little bit because it's less human, but I think we need to find a bit more balance because we're really, we're like overly human where this decision is so big.

I think I sometimes suffer from the same thing, like myself, if if I'm interviewing someone and hiring them directly. I think in the past, I have made that mistake before. I think sometimes, not so much recently in in audience ops, but, like, in in a few years ago, there were like a few like really talented energetic types. I tend to like relate personally to those types of people. But when they get dropped into like a team atmosphere with a process oriented system, they don't work so well in that.

And that has broken down in the past. Are hiring right now for another manager in audience ops. And for a long time now, I've been pretty removed from the whole interviewing process. Somebody else on my team, like our longtime manager there, she goes through the applicants and interviews people, then she writes notes. And so it has worked out fine for us, but like almost like my emotion has been sort of taken out of it a little bit.

I'm basically making the final hiring decision solely off of like her bullet point notes and, and the original application and comparing like, you know, pluses and minuses of like three or four different, different applicants. And it's like, like I trust her opinion on the, on the personality fit. And then I'm just like, do all the other pieces seem to fit here then?

I think I had it wrong for a while because I was not getting involved until the last interview. So it felt like people were looking to me to make the final decision to like own the decision and I was fine with that. But by the time they got to me, they had done an interview, potentially two interviews and a group interview with their team or the people they were work most closely with. And then when it got to me, it's real hard for me to be like, actually I've decided no. I talked to this person for thirty minutes.

You've already done all these weeks of work, figured out what would make sense for them, what their situation is, salary requirements, all that stuff. And then for me to just at the very, very end of the process, be like, nah, I don't feel like it. Like isn't realistic. It's almost like they're looking to make the final call but the final call is kind of already made for me. And so the final call isn't really being made by anyone.

Not an accountable, this is a difficult decision and it's on you.

Like no one ever actually gets that. Making a brilliant hire can have such a huge positive impact Yes. On the And same the other way. One bad hire could be toxic, you know.

It's tough for them because they're quitting a job and starting something new. And that's not to be taken lightly. Know, people's livelihoods, can't just like, Oh, it didn't work out ninety days later and just boot them and not care. And then other people in the company are watching how you behave in this situation. It affects the working environment for the other people.

It is huge but there's something that bothers me when people take pride in like, I interview 60 people for every position. Like you're a dick. You know, that's like too much. So we want to find something in the middle.

Yeah, totally. I want us to talk a little bit about something that's been on my mind. It's been on my mind for many years actually. Like What am I? Like twelve years into this self employment career here.

In the last few years, there've been moments every one or two or three years or so where I just start to think really, really big picture. Right now I'm in one of these phases, you know, process kit is, is in it's sort of like a early, a very early stage, you know, a couple thousand like MRR here. And so I'm starting to think about, obviously I'm, I'm focused on, on the day to day grind of, of growing process kit, but I think Jason Fried had a really good quote a while back, or maybe a whole article about it. Like, you know, your best products that you're going to build is your company. It's not any single product.

It's a certain point. You just start to think about the type of your company as the product that you're building. And I'm really starting to think a lot more about that right now. And I'm sort of like, what I'm trying to do honestly is settle into the business that's gonna occupy the next many years of my career here. Like this is getting really big picture and deep here for a second, but like for the last twelve years, it's been, all right, let me do some consulting here.

Let me try this product idea there. And let me try this idea here and, and, this, this seems to work out. This'll, this can stairstep me from point a to point b and then point b to point c. But each of those things has been like a, anywhere from like a three to five year thing if, if it was successful, but it, but none of those things ever really felt like this is the thing that I could sink ten, fifteen plus years into. And what I'm trying to do now is just optimize.

Cause I have the space, financial space to think and breathe about. Like, don't need to be super reactionary about like, just get the thing that's gonna pay the bills this month. So the other day I've got this little business journal that I've been keeping for many years now. Whenever I have a lot of thoughts swirling around my head, I start to just try to write them down to try to make sense of what's in my head. And so I thought I would share one thing that I jotted down.

I wrote like, what kind of company do I want to build? Right. And I just made a quick bullet list here. We operate with the bootstrapped and profitable ethos. I've been a 100% bootstrapped up until now.

I think that would be it for the foreseeable future. I'm not against taking outside investment whenever that makes sense, but we all know what I'm talking about here.

Yeah. Not the VC version.

We're a small team doing big things. I'm trying to build a company that remains small. We don't just hire for the hell of it. We don't just grow a headcount for the hell of it, but we're doing really big things. We're a calm company.

I have gone through phases where things are not so calm and it sucks, but I like sinking in like thirty five, forty good hours a week. We spend the bulk of our time creating and collaborating. We build a few great products. I don't know what a few means. Maybe that's one, maybe that's three or five.

A few products that people really love. SaaS, software SaaS obviously is like the primary focus and the business model for this company. SaaS would be the business model, but the products that we make, which could be both free and paid products, they might end up taking several forms. So software tools, community, conferences, podcasts, books. That bullet might not make sense, but just, you know, I'm trying to separate the idea of products from the idea of building a company as the thing.

Think that's an important distinction.

And, and you know, the thing that makes it value really valuable, think would be the SaaS, the software products. On the marketing side, there's a lot of things that can work obviously, but just generally speaking, bigger picture, I would love to have the marketing just be driven by community, like fostering a community around the problems that we solve our views, the goals of this community and have products that support that and just bringing more people together. Then the last point that I had is

Can I just clarify that one thing on the marketing? You making a distinction there between like some companies just don't constantly market and sell. They just kind of grow through the community and word-of-mouth. And I think about what Josh from Barometrics has been talking about lately, where he's kind of like, he's addressing something as a bit prickly around just like this, just so much selling. There's so much marketing.

There's just a lot of that. Are you saying that ideally speaking, it's not like that?

Well, so I'm not for or against any particular tactics. Aside from the obvious goal of marketing, which is to grow traffic and leads and sales, I think the bigger goal should be to build community. The people who love our products should be in touch with each other. We need to connect them. And the more that you do that, the more It's like you become resilient.

It's like a force multiplier on all your marketing efforts, right?

Become resilient because you don't depend on Google. You don't depend on ads. You have less dependencies. This makes me think of Christopher Glimmer from Snappa. I think he's built a similar type of company to what you're describing.

I also think of, I think his name is Amir. He runs Todoist. Just a successful, calm, remote company that's been added for ten plus years. And if you put that type of effort in over a long period of time and you build a community and you build products that you're proud of, like a lot of times it starts to work on itself and then it starts to compound. And next thing you know,

The whole point of building any products is solve a problem and help people achieve some goal. And when all your customers have that same problem and that same goal, they want to connect with each other so that they could all get better at this thing, achieve this goal together.

Have you been watching what's happening with Notion and Roam Research? Yes. Yeah, interesting stuff, right? They are going the VC path. I feel like they got so much money thrown at them because of what they hit onto.

But those communities are wildly enthusiastic. That's such a fantasy.

Literally like people can't wait to go tell all of Twitter how much they love Notion or love Rome.

And now you start to see businesses being built on top of the platform, a new company called Super. It's like the coolest thing I've ever seen. It just makes Notion very customizable and on its own domain. So like you could see people starting to sell courses. Is that the type of the community that you have in mind?

Yes, exactly. Like consultants to help you build better things with our products.

It looks like so much fun, definitely pressure, but fun.

I would love to have a company where we do a conference or two a year and bring our customers together and when people can travel again after the pandemic. But like a lot of remote software companies do, do retreats and meetups in fun places around the world. I would love to build a company where we're doing that sort of thing. I would assume that this company would continue to be fully remote and working from everywhere, but I would like it to be the type of company where it just makes sense for the business and for us working together and building great things that we're getting together in person several times a year in really fun places, you know?

Yeah. That sounds like fun.

You know, so it's like, it's sort of just me like dreaming and writing out these things of what I want to do. But like, we are self employed building businesses for a reason. We're trying to be intentional about what we're trying to build. And that's what I'm basically doing here. Of course, the path to building all of this, I don't know how much of it would come true or can come true, but I'm just trying to think through, like, what are the things that I can do today to take me further down the path to building something like this in the next few years?

Yeah. I think the longevity piece is necessary. There's something around our age, at least for a lot of people, that you want to sink your teeth into something for a while. Like, just let me see if this works is not appealing. Like, I want to commit to something for the long term.

In my twenties, it was like, let's just throw this idea and see what happens.

If It was interesting.

And if if nothing else, I'm gonna I'm gonna learn a ton. And I did learn a ton, you know? I'm still learning, obviously. But here in my late thirties, I'm thinking about, like, what can I be working on now through my forties?

Yeah. It's almost like, this is like not your life's work, but something more meaningful.

And I feel like we're in our prime here. If I think if you think about like a, like an NBA player or whatever, who would not be in their forties, they'd be in their

Yes, for them, the prime is different.

I wouldn't wanna be hitting the stride that I'm at now when I'm like 50, 55. Yes. No offense to folks who are a little bit older listening to this.

No, absolutely not.

Of course, you could do anything. We have friends who do stuff with that. But like, I just think that like in terms of like skill set and experience where I'm at now, I feel like I'm in a really good place to do something cool here. A lot of what's on my mind too is the fact that I've been a solo founder for all of this time. And there've been moments where I talked to potential partners.

Have partnered up with people on short term stuff. You and I have partnered on this podcast, partnered with my buddy Brad on Big Snow Tiny Comp and things like that. But whatever, maybe it's luck, maybe it's this or that or lack thereof. But I never really made it work with a business partner on a long term co investment. A lot of the challenge I I don't know the answer to this, but the challenge is the timing of it for both parties.

You know?

It has to work for two people, completely different lives.

Yeah. And it's not just about finding the right match of skillset. We're all friends with plenty of people who have the perfect skillset to partner up, very, very few

line up.

But most of them are already deep into their company or they're tied up in some other thing. And it just doesn't make timing sense. And so it's like you got to find someone who's crossing that transition path right around the same time you are.

Yeah. You need things to line up or the ability to make them line up within a relatively short timeframe.

Yeah. For

me, when I think about this stuff, I think about Jason Cohen's essay on Rich or King. Have you read that?

I think I did a while back.

Yeah. It's really good. He wasn't sure what he wanted. And then when he got presented with a life changing offer for his company, he really had to think about, money is great, but all these other things that make me effectively like the king version, running a company, being a boss, having all these people around, being excited by the work and the people you work with, the office that you go into, the people that you can help and mentor, like all these things that are on the king side would go away. And so, right, he talks about like having lunch with someone and like digging into a chili relena.

I definitely read this too many times. But you know, you think you want one thing and then someone makes you an offer across the table that you really have to reconsider everything. So I think about the Richard King and going into Cardhook, I was pretty sure I was just interested in Rich. The way the experience has gone, the King side of it, the experience and working with other people and working on something you care about and doing it for the long term and wanting to see it continue completely changed. And now that sounds so much more interesting where it's like, maybe there's something between you take some money off the table here.

Like, it's almost like you don't wanna do nothing. To just have money and then do nothing right now at our age, it's literally uninteresting. You get bored immediately. And then you would immediately look for, well, what do I want to sink my teeth into? So there's a balance between those two, but it definitely feels like what you're talking about right now is, okay, what characteristics do I want this business and my life to have?

We're entrepreneurs. We're trying to build something of value and make money. But really it's more about long term value. Has always driven me now more than ever is like, I need to really love what I'm doing every single day. And I do right now, building product and really love sinking my teeth into the product and talking to customers and designing software.

That's what I'm getting the most energy out of. I really feel like for the longest time I've lacked a true collaborator on this stuff. I hire people. I could hire contractors. I could hire full time people.

And they can be great and they can be close to that level of collaboration, but it's not the same as like an equity co investor. Like a lot of it is just like the strategic decision making. When it's just all you all the time. Has a, there's a weight to it that's hard to

Yeah. It's a different experience for sure. I mean, you never know how it works out, right? My CTO, Rock, we hired him as a first engineer in Slovenia. I had no idea what that was gonna lead into.

He's like my best friend now. We talk constantly and he has a really solid piece of the company in terms of equity and we'll have more in the future. And it's turned into a collaboration co founder type relationship from an unexpected path. But you do come across certain people and you're like, I just want to work with you. Let's just figure out what we need to do here.

There are some of those people and sometimes it's worth taking that shot at trying to work with those people.

Yeah. Yeah. And so actually you and I talked offline last, the reason there wasn't a podcast was because we just kept talking

about this and hit

but last week, you know, one of the things that, that was a little bit of a change in my thinking was in the past, whenever I thought about working with a partner on a business, I always just assumed that that other partner would be the technical person and I would, I would be the non technically the non technical.

Okay.

I feel like that is flipped now.

Which is super interesting.

I honestly feel like I'm, I'm much more interested and much more valuable being the product guy. Obviously I do code and build and things. And I like working with the engineers on scoping out products. But if I were to partner with someone, would be more interested in partnering up with somebody on the marketing side. Getting back to what we were talking about, building community, just somebody to drive all that effort that's involved and not just like executing tactics.

You could you could hire contractors all day to run ads for you, to run to run content for you. I'm I'm talking about like a collaborator on on all the things, but their drive driving force is building the community and the and the branding and the and and the exposure. And my driving force is working on the product. You know, I always think of it like a like a Venn diagram. Know, always collaborating on all the things, but one person is driving and, you know, one side.

But it's Those

people are tough to find.

Exactly. They're even tougher to find than a technical co founder.

Yes, that's right. On Twitter these days, like my, like it's entertainment, sure and learning, but my radar is for talent. Like I am trying to figure out where, like where are these people? And you see glimpses of it and it's usually too late. They usually have a big enough audience because their talent has kind of broken through that you can't get them.

That's exactly right, man. You know, like, cause it's the people, especially when you're talking about quote unquote marketers, there's a million marketers out there, marketing consultants, freelancers. They're not like developers. You can't really evaluate their work. They could claim all these things about what kind of growth they brought to their previous company.

You never know exactly what the marketer actually did in that. And what's more interesting is to work with the people who've really built something significant, like you said, but at that point they're off That's and right.

Yeah. There are too many opportunities. Like there's this one woman, Emily Singer, think her name is. I think she runs a newsletter called Chips and Dips and she's perfect. And I reached out to her and she's like, nah, just too many opportunities.

I think the single biggest source of uncovering talent is Substack.

I gotta get on this. Everyone keeps talking about it. I'm in the dark on Substack. I sort of know what it is, but

Substack lowered the barrier to entry for a newsletter all the way down to zero. It was already at zero, but somehow Substack has made it sub zero. I don't really understand

how So I don't subscribe to anyone on it. I technically get what the product does. How does it help with finding talent?

So it used to be, I'm going to start a blog and that's how people are going to get to know my ideas. And now it's, I'm going to start a newsletter. And it has invigorated that version of sharing ideas through written word and building an audience through email. Because it's wild west right now, a lot of people are getting into that.

Is it all paid? Everybody's newsletter is paid or there are free ones?

No, it just gives the creator the option of having things behind a paywall. So most people who have paid Substacks have a free version and then a paid version. Some people have straight up only paid, but a lot of people you know, it's like anything else you want to show some good stuff and then hold back the very best. And some people are using it totally free and plan to monetize later. So you can decide when to turn on monetization.

So you're saying that you just subscribe to a bunch of them and that's how you get to know like what people are putting out.

I just wait to see who I ignore and who I open. Because it's really easy to subscribe and unsubscribe. Like you have a sub stack thing and you could just unsubscribe to eight people at once, tick, tick, tick, tick, and you're done. So when someone on Twitter has something and they have a sub stack, I just subscribe and then test myself and I see if I'm opening their stuff. And if I'm just not, then I've lost interest.

But if I'm going back in, then I get drawn in and I start to build a psychological relationship with them. And I'm like, if I'm building that with them and I have a very high filter because I'm busy AF, then they can do that to other people also. And if they can do that through written word over email, then like I want them on my team because I want to give them a megaphone to spread it much, much, much bigger and amplify it.

Very cool. So we just talk in theory about what this future company that I'm trying to build could maybe look like. But there's not a lot that I could just go do and make that happen tomorrow. The the one thing that that I feel like I need to, get better at is just to stay in touch with people that I know and like and respect. Because again, getting back to that timing thing, you never know when, when people might be crossing paths into a situation where it might make sense.

So I know a lot of really great people, hung out with them at conferences. We tweet at each other and all this different stuff. But like, especially with the pandemic without in person meetups, I'm trying to make a point now to just hit up friends of mine and say, Hey, let's hop on a zoom and catch up. What are you working on? And there's no agenda just and I've been doing that with more people and trying to do that like, you know, once a month to just like get back in touch with people so that, just to keep those relationships going.

It's tough. This is what everyone always wants, a personal CRM and it's literally never worked. But I hear you. Just the number of relationships you can keep going on at the same time and keep them warm. I think I have a pretty high ability to do that.

So you're

like this networker person who's like really good at this sort of thing.

I think we talked about this last week that that's what I do for work. That is what I do for work. I keep a million, not a million, not as many as I want, but I keep a bunch of relationships going all at the same time. And it is valuable.

My whole life going back to when I was younger, like I've always been a small, small group of friends type of person. Like we've got our little group here. We and, and, and we're close and we hang out, but, but I'm not the guy who has a 100 plus friends doing different things all the time. And, but on social media, in these surf in these circles, in our little industry here We

have that opportunity.

Like we do have, and we do know sort of that many people through tweets and through conferences and stuff, but you don't go deep. Know, it's very surface level. I've been DMing with other people who say the same thing where it's just awkward. Like, what are you going to do? Like, Hey, let's just have a call just for no reason.

Because these days when everything's remote, it's like, if you're gonna get on a call with somebody, all right, well, what's the agenda for this call? Why are we talking today? You know?

Yes, that's why people are surprised by how many calls I do a week and they don't all have agendas and some of them are, the agendas are tiny, but you find things. And the way I do it is I keep things, I go deep immediately. I just show vulnerability immediately. I don't say, Hey, how's it going? I go, Here's all the real shit that's happening on my side.

How are you doing? And then people are like, Oh, I don't have to keep up any facade. Like here's what's really going on with me. And because everyone's got their facade and everyone's got, here's what I'm really worried about. And I just share what I'm really worried about with a lot of people.

And then you have this like team of people rooting for you and they feel they can be vulnerable back. And it's like this podcast, it's not highlights. It is the opposite.

That's literally how I view this podcast. Like that's why I say shit like this today is it's like, I don't really have anywhere else to like spew it out into the internet except for this microphone. You know?

Yes. So I have the people that I'm close with have a more accurate and fuller picture of where I'm at as opposed to people who are just viewing from the outside and thinking, Oh, Kartak's doing really well. Jordan just must be happy all the time and rolling around in money. Like that you don't connect with that. That's not true and it's no fun.

So the people like other business owners like Glimmer that I talk to. And my Twitter DMs are very long. There's a big listener but it's just because it's just trust through vulnerability and honesty. Yeah, that works. This is real.

Cool. All

right, well, let's end it with something fun. We started doing this thing in Slack. We now have a fully distributed team. We have people from all over the world. We have 27 people.

It's kind of like, how do we get to know each other here? We started doing this thing on Fridays called like Snap Friday. You just go in and you find a picture from your camera roll and just post it and with a quick explanation of what it is.

Nice.

And it is so simple and so much fun. So right today I posted my daughters with their cousins and explained how they just moved into town. And Rock showed how they made like this crazy charcuterie spread for his girlfriend's sister and someone else, something like a new game for a game night with their friends. And so we have people from all over the world. So it's like, here's the sunset in Croatia.

Here's my daughter and I riding our bikes by the beach in Portugal. It's just like, it feels like fun. And it's so simple. There's no app. There's no, it's literally just post a picture from your camera roll with a little explanation and then all the emojis people add on and then you have the side conversations for each one in Slack.

It's cool. Everyone gets to share their personal life and it's just dead simple.

Yeah, we do that from time to time in audience out but not as consistent as we used to. We should more.

We have Shauna internally who's like our like social chair. So she like promotes this stuff and does the happy hours and it's so much fun. It's great.

Very cool.

That's it. Ian Landsman asked a good question. What is your current hobby? Yeah, what's the hobby? What do you got?

Cooking. Yeah. I got no room for, I don't have much room for anything else. And somehow in quarantine, happened was I used to go to the office and get back at about 05:30. And by then my wife had dinner started and she'd like basically lead the charge.

Then I bring it up after dinner. Somehow I now make the dinner and clean the dinner, but we didn't flip. I just kept the original roll and added the other one. But I've had so much fun with cooking dinner because when you do something repetitively, you can get better. So if you keep doing it and I just made this dish last week and I know I messed up this thing so I can tweak a little and it's so satisfying to make progress, especially with food because then people eat it and they're like, Oh, it's really good.

Yeah. So that's my hobby. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, my hobby, you know, continues to be music. I've got a home recording studio down in the basement that I've been slowly rebuilding over the last couple of years. And just a couple of months ago, picked up a new guitar, which is

which is really the guitar.

Yeah. Yeah. Gibson ES three thirty five. And it's, it's really, really nice. And so, like, just just just that, like, has been, like, really reenergized that whole thing.

And I've been like writing songs and and composing a lot of like instrumental music for for a long time, but I've been out of it for a while and I still feel like rusty with like, I feel like when I was younger, I just had better ideas for stuff. And so I'm trying to spend more time. Tend to do it a little bit more on the weekends, but of course, you're balancing that with family time and stuff like that. But it's also been fun because my kids are taking piano lessons. And so they're they're into music now too.

And they can they can like, sort of like see what I'm doing down there and play around with the synthesizers and stuff like that.

And cool.

It's been kind of fun.

Nice, man. That's great. Well, it's a good show. Thanks everyone for listening. Brian SoundCloud will be linked up in the show notes.

See you. Alright, later.