Bootstrapped Web

Bootstrap web, we're back. It's been a couple weeks. But, yeah, Jordan, how you doing buddy?

We are back. We're in q four. It's getting serious. It's almost November.

It's q four already. We're almost out of 2020.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Election next week.

Oh man.

What a what a weird time.

Yeah. By by the time by by the time this episode airs, at least here here in The US, the the things might be on fire.

No. It's gonna work out. It's gonna work

out.

It'll be fine.

It's gonna work

out.

It'll be fine. Yes. And by the time this airs next week, Cardhook will have a new product in the market inside the Shopify app store.

Yeah. So I definitely want to get into that today. Let's hear the story because so as we sit here today, it has not launched yet, but as you said, by the time we we publish. So I guess we could talk about it as if it has. And if it hasn't, then we won't publish it.

Yes. And and we we had to stay quiet on timing per Shopify's request, which is understandable. It's actually been an interesting experience seeing how established company like Shopify handles this type of thing and how you try to orchestrate a launch among multiple partners and how to make sure the word doesn't go out because it's happened to everybody. Every software company has done the you can expect this on this date and then it gets pushed and then that's disappointing. At the public company level, really want to avoid that.

So it's been interesting both sides, both ways, where seeing how Shopify is polished and has process and manages expectations and manage multiple partners. And that's been impressive. On the other hand, it's also been cool to see Shopify is just another software company like everybody else and nothing's perfect and they're not superhuman and it's just people. And in that way, it's good to see behind the curtain and it's just people like us, right? These companies that became very successful, sometimes we put on too high of a pedestal and the expectations are unrealistic.

And to see them operate like real people has been cool.

Are are there like all sorts of like new team members at Shopify that your that your team is in touch with and that you're in touch with throughout this process? And like, what do you mean by seeing more of the inside of Shopify by becoming an app on the app store versus what you had before?

Yeah. So before when we were unsupported and we're a private app outside of the app store and before we had a formal partnership with them, we didn't really talk to anybody. I had one point of contact and if we had questions, we basically went to their support channels. We really didn't have any access. And this has been very much the opposite, not only because we're now an official partner, but much more importantly, because this is new territory for them and they're looking to learn from us also as much as we're looking to learn from them.

And so because of that, we have a shared Slack channel and are directly talking to a group of it's somewhere in the area, right? It's usually three or four people who were in more contact with, but there are probably ten, fifteen people in the Slack channel from their side. So depending on if it's a marketing question or communications thing or a development thing or front end or react or something. There's always someone there and there's a lot of conversation. So I don't think that's, that's not like a normal experience for an app developer.

It just, we're getting the very polar sides.

Yeah. And this is such a new segment or thing that's happening in their app store that it sounds like Shopify wants to be more hands on with this whole rollout too.

Yes, exactly right. And so I assume they're doing that with other partners that are working with these new checkout extensions also to try to get it as right as possible. If we think we have a lot of pressure around Black Friday, they are used to an extreme level of pressure on things going wrong or not going wrong. Right? You see it on Twitter.

If there's ever anything wrong with Shopify, you see it immediately on Twitter. People are complaining immediately. So it's, yeah, so it's been, it's been cool to just experience it.

So I don't know how much you're able to talk about here, here on the podcast, but I'm, I'm interested in the competition aspect of this and, and the whole, how you think about positioning and I mean, because this is such a different game that you're in now from all the years that you've been building Cardhook, right? Because now you're literally in the app store listed right alongside all your direct competitor. So I'm curious, like, my understanding is you're one of the first officially supported post purchase upsell app, right? Do you know who the other competitors are and how many there are? No.

You don't even know any of that?

I know a few because that's who we competed with outside of the store and we know they got into similar arrangements with Shopify to get supported and use their new API. So we have some sense of the number of competitors and a few of them we know who they are. At least one of them I have a good relationship with that we communicate regularly.

And so you're expecting that like next week when you launch, they will be launching?

Next week too. That's right. That's right. And so and because the API is new, the creative space on what you can and can't do with it is relatively limited. And so everyone's gonna have a similar feature set.

It has been really interesting to think through the competitive side and obviously that also leads into pricing. And so one of the things you'll see is our new website is an over investment in branding. So everyone can go to kartook.com when this launches, you just took a sneak peek. I just

looked at it. Yeah. So it's amazing. Yeah.

It's another level up from from what we're used to because I think that is important. If feature set is similar, then what can you differentiate on? And a lot of that is around brand and that is who else uses it and how you talk about it. So we overinvested in that. Our App Store listing page, Every image is beautiful and overly designed because we're trying to stand out now in an app store setting.

We now have to think about reviews as a huge part of the business.

With reviews, is there anything you can do on that to to have some out right out of the gate or it's like starting next week, that's when you start to get your first reviews?

We have a few from our beta users, which is helpful so that when when people first go to the app store and they see it for the first time that it's not totally empty, Those are friendly people because it's all beta. And so we're about to enter the market and that's it's scary because there are some limitations that are very hard to communicate. For example, Shopify Plus stores that have customized their checkout, it won't work. And so it's inevitable that these merchants are gonna sign up, it's not gonna work for them, they're not gonna read the notification we send them and they're gonna leave a better view because it doesn't work.

Yeah. But the just my guess not even being in this industry would be Shopify Plus or they're higher end customers, right? So they're they would be less likely to be on reviews.

Yes and bombastic and and and so on. But that's that's one example and and there are a few of those minds laying around that we're trying to communicate but it people don't read stuff. So whatever it is, reviews did not really exist in our universe as one of the things to worry about and it shot up all the way close to the top of things to worry about. That's why we're looking at what to do around that, what the process looks like, how we respond to good reviews, how we respond to bad reviews. We can talk after this segment about a new tool that we're looking at that I showed you that looks very, very interesting.

So generally, what we're doing right now is we're starting to dive into the details around one tiny microscopic part, just reviews and how to handle it. But if you back out, we had to do that from scratch for an entirely new product in like sixty days. Crazy. It has been

Not to mention build the product.

Well, that's right. That's one area. So we went from engineering product, UX and UI, then marketing site, then App Store listing page, then support process. We switched back over to Intercom for this from HubSpot. There was so much to do in so many different areas that it's been a trip, but it's been very, very impressive.

Really is impressive.

It really has. And it's not me. I'm not saying I'm impressive. I'm saying the team, the individual people.

That's what's impressive to me about it. Yes. That like you have the team in place. Well, one of my questions on that is all the people involved in working on all those moving parts in this confined period of time to get this thing launched, are those generally the longest term employees that you've had? You already have the work relationship dialed in or do you have new team members who've come in?

What does that look like?

The crazy part is that on the product and the engineering team, it's all new. It's people who were hired ninety days ago. Now we had one very critical secret weapon in Rock, the CTO, who has been working in this field and on this type of a product for years. He had an enormous amount of stored up knowledge so that when the gates were open and we got access to this new API, he was almost able to unleash like if I finally had a chance to rebuild this and I finally had a chance to start from scratch, what would I do? And it was much more confined because you don't have to worry about payment processing and tracking and these integrations.

We had that going for us, but that still required, you know, eighty hour weeks from him for four weeks in a row, which was was rough to see him kind of go through that. But the engineers that then started to take over on the front and back end, those are brand new engineers that joined within ninety days. So they got up to speed quickly. And then another very key component was the product manager that Jessica, who's our director of product, went on maternity leave in August. And the last thing she did was find Chelsea, the new product manager to handle this app.

And they they just nailed that. So Jessica did a great job finding Chelsea and then Chelsea has taken the baton and just done a better job that you could possibly expect from someone being completely new to the space, completely new to the company, and then just jumping in and orchestrating the whole thing. I think the biggest assist that she got was these these great UX designers, Rory and Will. And and that was that was like that was lucky, basically. That was that was a lot of luck.

Very cool. You know that there will be competitors. You don't know who they are or how many there will be out of the gate. And you and you know nothing in terms of pricing. Like you know what what your margins are and and Shopify's take is so you know the same math that they're facing but you have no idea how they're gonna price it.

So there's that and then there there's also the product. You both know what your API limitations are but but you don't know how creative your team has been versus what they're able to do and and all that. Yes.

And so I I I had to keep poking on, is that an actual limitation of the API or are we not being creative enough? Right? It was always that and I kept talking about coming up with clever solutions, given the same constraints is is the differentiator.

It really is because it like one one different way of thinking about it that they didn't tackle like could could be the reason why customers choose Evening.

Right. And the so generally speaking, five plus percent of the credit goes to my team. The 5% that I really had to do was figure out the positioning and the pricing and the strategy and what to do and why and should we launch with AB testing? Should we hold that off? Should we just what is the product gonna do and and how is the market gonna receive it based on how we present it?

Well, so what I'm curious about right right now as we sit here, it's Friday and we're looking at next week is when this all the curtains come off for for everyone. So have you thought through scenarios? Like what if it opens up and oh shit, CardHook is the most expensive or oh shit, we're the cheapest or I assume you're immediately gonna check out how they did their product and oh, they've they've got this thing and

what the pricing is. That's the number one thing I wanna check. I put together a spreadsheet and put a dozen scenarios in place. Different prices, different price points, different x, y, z, good case, bad case, number of customers after ninety days, after a year, just and then laid it out. What I tried to do with that is not keep it to myself, but communicate with the leadership team and around here are the levers.

Here's what happens if we get a thousand customers instead of 500. Here's what happens if our price is a $100 a month versus $50 a month and how much fewer customers we need to get to the same place. So I just wanted them to get an understanding of these different levers.

Also are you set up in a way to move quickly in those first few days or weeks?

Yes and no. Yes, we can change things on the fly. We can do whatever we want. We're using Stripe and billing isn't a big deal, but I don't want to give that feeling to the company or to the market that we just see someone's pricing and then we just change it immediately.

No. Yeah.

Right. And so I ran the scenarios both practically with the math, but also emotionally. And one of the funny things I concluded around the pricing was that I will be upset if someone's more expensive. I want to be the most expensive. If we launch and I saw that our competitor was higher priced, I would be upset.

It is a what's not Prisoner's Dilemma. You're stuck. You don't have the information. What you do has a big impact on them, what they do has a big impact on you, but you're not colluding. I would love a Slack channel and be like, alright, you take

this position, I take this position, we'll work

it out, but but that's not happening.

I think in this scenario, aside from the fact that generally I think you and I probably agree, to not compete on price and be one of the higher playing in the higher end anyway, that's generally a good strategy. But in this scenario, as you're heading into next week, price is going to be one of the very first things that people look at. Being the top priced product is, I think, just from a marketing perspective, it's smart because people will immediately be like, alright, well what's the top and why are they so expensive? Like it will get them to click on you maybe first or at least make sure that you're in the conversation of the, you know. It would be worse to be in the middle, I think.

Yeah. And and and it's obviously it's risky also. Let's just say the market is 1,000 merchants that are signing up for one of these solutions in the first week. And so you look at that and it is pretty safe to assume that the majority will go toward the lower price. In the Shopify context with the long tail that they have and so on.

So you are deciding to give up the bottom of the market which is But

when people are shopping for the solution, they're gonna just look at the top priced one just to see what's there.

Right. And I think that word look is actually the operative word. They're going to look at it, which is why we overinvested in brand because you need to look the best if you're going to be the most expensive.

Yeah. If you're in the middle, there's more likelihood that you're not even in the mix. Yeah.

Right. So what we did on the pricing, I think I can talk about it now because it'll you know, at worst we'll edit this out. So what I wanted to do on the pricing, right? What we learned from the past few years is that the way that this business grows very quickly is by participating in the upside. And a merchant comes on board and they test you out and then when they do well, they grow really fast and your revenue should grow really quickly with it.

And so we had to figure out a way to participate in the upside alongside our customers for a range of issues, for the business model, for the revenue, for the incentive, for being aligned, all that stuff. But we couldn't have the entry point be such a huge blocker, right? $500 a month the way we used to have it was just a huge hurdle and it was on purpose. It was we can't work with 5,000 customers. We would rather work with 500.

And so that that was like a alignment between the pricing and the actual product and what it required for onboarding and so on. And this is different. So we wanted to bring that entry point all the way down, but still participate. And I came up with this pricing, I think I'm remembering correctly, quickly, like, you know, two months ago. And then I got scared and then I got hesitant and then I basically went on an

And the idea is it's a low flat fee, but it's a higher per transaction fee or whatever.

Exactly right. So the pricing is $50 a month plus 1% of post purchase revenue. So it's not $9 a month, which I'm sure some of the competitors will do and they'll take the bottom of the market and there's nothing we can do about that and that's fine. It's not too high of an entry point. So $50 a month is not cheap, but it is not expensive.

So it is a threshold that I think psychologically a lot of smaller merchants will not get over and that's okay, but larger merchants won't have a problem with. And then at the same time that 1% allows us to participate in the upside and then there's like a ceiling on that on if you make over x, then let's have a conversation and come up with some custom pricing for you. Right? Because you can't do 1%. We know we've had merchants before that have done $2,000,000 in upsell revenue and that's $20 a month and that's too much.

And so there needs to be the message sent out to the higher end that says, don't worry about the 1% if you are very, very large because we'll figure it out. It's two pricing tiers, $50 a month plus 1% and then custom if you're big. So that that that we came up with like two months ago and then had this walkabout like emotionally and intellectually for two months, came up with a bunch of different things and then settled right back on where we were. But it felt good because we had kind of gone through the motions on all the other ones.

Isn't that funny? Like in most things I found in life, your first gut instinct is almost always the right one.

Yeah, but this isn't an SAT course, right? Exactly. You don't have 500 questions answered. This is one question with one answer. So it felt okay to take that big walkabout.

And I warned the people on my team like this is where you're going to see me at my shakiest, at my most doubt as my pinging and scratching and asking for help. What do you think about this? What about this? What about this crazy thing? And it's just necessary to go through that entire process to get settled on.

You know what? We've looked at all the other things and this is right for us. Interesting. Have you seen Patrick Campbell's guest post, I guess it's called in someone's Substack? I think it's Paki.

No. Or Lenny Son.

I didn't catch that.

Substacks are a big thing now. So Patrick wrote a great guest post for that newsletter. We should post it in the show notes. It's excellent. And I send it to my team because it is an argument for dynamic pricing.

Right? It's literally a demand curve, a demand line. And then this is what happens if you only have one price. This is what happens if you have three prices. And this is what happens if you have infinite prices.

What do

you mean by dynamic pricing? Like just offering options or do you mean actually dynamically like changing the price?

Based on usage, based on transaction, a percentage, something that moves along based on the value that the user gets from your software. It's literally a curve and it's one box and that's what you get if you have one price and everything else that's not in that box is lost value that you're not capturing. If you have three price points and you have three overlapping boxes that take up more space, but if you have dynamic pricing that moves along like a percentage, you're basically capturing the entire curve, the maximum amount of value possible.

Is he talking about the just the concept of the value of doing that or is there some technology that does that?

He's talking about the concept around pricing tiers.

How would you go about doing that? Like would you need to build

that customer? Look No, look at Look what we're doing with the 1%, that's what that is. It is capturing every bit of value that we are providing.

I get that. It's basically like expansion revenue or per transaction revenue, but from what I understand, I didn't read the Substack thing, but with dynamic pricing, are you saying over time, let's say over a three month period, your system notices trends in the number of trials, the number of users and it can dynamically adjust the pricing of your app?

No. I mean the price adjusts dynamically for the individual user based on the value that they're getting from users.

Oh, okay. Got it.

Got it.

Right. Now it's a value basis. Exactly. Yeah. Yes.

Got it. That makes sense.

Yeah. So we will see and we'll hold tough. It's just one of those things that you put your cards down and you got to live with it for a little We're not going to change pricing anytime soon. It's going to go out and that first impression, you only get one chance at that and Shopify is going send an email to a million merchants.

It's also interesting it's happening next week with the election too.

It's really it's just getting it out in time for Black Friday. That's the main goal. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

So yes, it's the election, but you know, Friday for e commerce is more important than the election. So got to get it out. Yep.

Cool man.

Yeah. So I'm sure I'll be talking a lot more about how the I

can't wait to hear the next episode of this, know, like the post launch recap.

It is the trip though, the scenarios, you have nothing to base it on. This is so different, right? Our entire customer base after four years was like 500 people. And now we're trying to get 500 people in the first week. So it's just, it just feels like a very different business that we're in.

We have to adjust to that.

Yeah. Should we

switch it over here?

Absolutely. We shall.

Let's see. So I launched a little bit of a redesign refresh of the process kit app couple days ago?

The admin itself.

Yeah. Like the, you know, the the app interface. Every every screen, every every view has been just refined. It's it's more like if you think about it, the shell of the app is is what has mostly changed, but the inner working interface, the little form fields and stuff, that's all the same. So the functionality is all the same, but I wanted to go through and refine a bunch of things.

And there were some new features that came along with this, like we added a new global search field, we added a whole new home dashboard view, a new compact view versus the default view on processes and tasks. Overall, I'm just really happy that this is done and shipped because I started working on it, I don't know, four or five weeks ago. And it was one of those things that mostly it was just me working on the visual front end stuff because that's what I do. Meanwhile, over the past month, we had other features being worked on and shipped to the master branch while I was working on this like in parallel until it can come to a good point, which happened this week where it's like, okay, now everything is like, it's a good moment to shift the new design into the master branch.

Where did this come from? Was it your desire to do it? Was it your realization that certain things weren't scalable into the next phase? Was it useless? I

made the decision to do this two months ago when I started working on it. As always with these sorts of things, it's like, oh, I'll just spend like two weeks on this and then I'll be done. And it lasted two months. The idea was, at the time, and I still am, you know, thinking a lot about user experience and especially first time user experience and making it easier to understand the app. Now, this visual update does not directly attack that problem.

I have a lot more work that needs to be done there, but this was one of the first steps in that. Also, the design and layout in ProcessKit has mostly been the same since the early days. There were some changes that I made very early on, but a lot of it, as we started to add more and more features, the overall structure and experience, and I'm talking about very detailed things just hasn't kept up. So I wanted to sort of like solve for all these little frustrations in the app that have accumulated. And I think I did that.

It makes for a little bit better first run experience and there are little things like people were getting confused on where the project settings tab was versus the task list settings tab. So a lot of little clarifications like that. And I mean the other big thing is the search, basically added a big search box at the top which is like a big new element on the screen on every view of the app. So I had to sort of like shift things around to make a place for it and and then you shift one thing around. Oh, now I gotta shift that around.

Now I gotta shift that around. Now I gotta move this here and it's like a chain reaction.

And is is search something that people were using and should be more central or was it not part of No. The

We never built it until now. Which that's one of the one of those features that I always surprised me in process kit that it's been this long, like almost two years in and we had no search functionality whatsoever.

That's that's funny. That makes me think of, Ben Orenstein's tweet recently about the fact that they they they didn't have a way to stop people from using the app after they canceled. Oh, yeah. So I love that stuff. It's like that's clearly something you need for MVP.

When someone stops paying you, you need to boot them out of the app. Actually, really.

And we still have plenty of things like that that, know, but yeah, we finally got around to that one. And it made me nervous to ship this one because it's a visual, it's not drastic, it's not a completely new app, but it's a little bit different and I was definitely afraid that there'd be some backlash like, Oh, everything's different next time they log in. But within twenty four hours, I got a handful of positive messages back from customers. So that sounded pretty good.

People love momentum in software products because it's rare. Right? People love responsiveness, they like talking to the founder, they like good support and they like momentum on the product. New stuff. We struggled with that for so long.

I think momentum were really good because me and the developers can move super fast. It's frustrating because it's not enough customers but it's also super fun because it's so few customers that I'm basically personally working with all of the new customers. I've talked about this before how it takes a new customer several weeks to use it every single day for a month straight and run into problems and email me every single day. There's always a couple to a handful of people who are doing that at any time

that are in that initial phase of

Yeah.

Getting up to speed?

Like at any given time, like right now, I could name three customers that I talk to every single day.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so much fun.

For like three or four weeks. And then and then they get on board and they and they convert. And then you know, two or three more pop up and then I'm working with them for the next month. It's like, they're asking for support but a lot of it is like, still feature requests

Right. It would be cool if Yeah. I could do

it'd be cool if I could do this and that and before they convert, I'm super motivated to be like, sure, we could ship that in '24 Yes.

Hell yes. I don't know if you have a good sense of it yet, of the longevity. I think people are generally surprised by the longevity of customers that are happy and how long they just stick around for. It's wild. We just shut down completely our cart abandonment app.

Right? We we removed it publicly about a year ago, and then some people just stayed. There was no website for it. They just used it and paid. And so we we we finally fully shut it down.

And so we had that one day of all those cancellations in Stripe go through billing. I'm reading these email addresses from five years ago that I spoke to on the phone when we first started and they just stuck with it for five years because it worked. So the hope is that ProcessKit can do something similar. You do that work for three, four people a month, doesn't feel like a lot. You give it a year, all a sudden you have this base of people that just stay.

You know, I've been talking about how challenging it's been for me to onboard new customers, but like I said, there's a small percentage of the people who trial who get so excited about the promise of what Processkit can do for what they wanna do with it and they're literally devoting their days to setting it up. And I could tell in these cases, they're halfway through their trial, they have not converted yet and I'm 90% sure they are going to convert. They've already spent enough time with me on conversations and for them testing it out with their teammates involved in this process as well. Like I could tell right away when someone is on their path to convert. It's sort of just a matter of time of when they get there.

I do feel good about the future of that because it's like these people, they invested so much time in getting it set up. It'll have that stickiness their organization, you know?

So can I ask what you're thinking now on how to find more of those people?

Right? That's the That's a million

dollar I know that's the thing. That's the multimillion dollar question.

Yeah. So my my personal challenge right now is that I'm doing a lot of thinking and strategizing about marketing and top of funnel, and I'm and I'm working with someone on that. And we're and we're starting to roll out some some content and some SEO, and we've been doing, guest article writing, which is starting to to pick up and and getting a little bit of traction with that. So the things that we've been working on the last couple of weeks are just now, I think, beginning to show signs of of light in terms of a little bit of increased traffic, a slight uptick in trials just this week, you know. And we're just at the tip, like like, beginning of of of this stuff.

And and

we've been talking is it?

The first strategy is a is like a content hub.

Okay. Because that really what I'm trying to ask is is that a short is it a short term tactic or something that can build over time?

It's it's like an SEO play.

So long term.

So longer term, but it's a short term project to get it built and launched. The the short term project is basically we wrote five big articles a content cluster. This is about how to do project management for your agency. We're targeting agency owners. Then she's gone out and pitched guest articles on on a bunch of other sites, kind of spin off spin off of these articles.

We're writing unique content for them, but they will link back to us. We've been doing a a, like, a

good

promotional, community based promotion, people to give quotes for articles and then they end up sharing it in their newsletters and social media. That's been working pretty well. So we're doing things like that.

This is all content published on your properties, like on your site?

The first part of it, the the content hub is ours. And then we're basically doing link building strategies, which is primarily writing guest articles on other sites that within within the article link back to our hub.

But you're already seeing a bit of an uptick just from your own content written on on your site that I would say that's a good sign.

Yeah. So so I think some of the SEO ranking is it's not like we're on page one for anything major right now, but but that's starting to improve a little bit. We've had some other SEO, some other organics like traffic coming in just from publishing other like we published case studies, published the the homepage has has some organic traffic to it. Other things that we are doing, I'm still running the the cold email outreach stuff. I haven't changed anything on that.

I I have noticed a decrease in engagement, and it might be deliverability issues. The the challenge that I have right now, though, with the whole marketing effort is I I'm still finding it difficult to just say, here, you take this over and run with it and own it and and, like, do whatever you wanna do. Go. I feel like I still need to be involved. And may maybe this is right, maybe this is wrong, but I I still feel like I need to be involved in the strategy and in the messaging and in the the branding of it, the presentation, the mechanics of how we roll things out, but more so in the content and the strategy and the positioning.

I still need to give a lot of input when it comes to content. But then we start talking about all these other tactics like building up our community. We we have, like, a private Slack and a private, Facebook group of, like, process get users, which they mostly use that as, a customer support channel with me. But but we're talking about making that, like, a a marketing channel. I've talked about it in the past, like have a really strong community of agency owners who are looking to scale and automate and share their processes.

And another idea is to build a whole partner program, partner platform. So there are all these big initiatives that, like, I I want to do. They they totally make sense. I think they are big opportunities to reach this market. You know?

But for whatever reason, I I it's more like a mental block. Like, I feel like I need to devote, like, a full time focus and effort to that, but I'm so focused on the product. There's still so much that needs to be done there.

If I'm being honest, I would say it's it's that's mental. Yeah. And it's not that it's not legitimate to worry about how the product is being portrayed, the words that are being used, the design that's being used. The mental block comes in in the balance between the two. If you if you want it perfect and you do it yourself, then the balance is skewed toward that and the speed goes down.

If you don't care at all, this right, then the speed goes way up. But the quality in theory can can can go down. Mhmm. I I remember this exact point on the marketing side when we hired Ed, the first marketer in the company. And right when it happened, I had gotten to the point of such extreme frustration with myself because I wasn't moving on the on the marketing.

I thought of myself as a marketer and marketing in the company wasn't moving. We had no ads running. It just wasn't happening. And I was doing what I what I'd like to do, which is talk to people and build relationships and do the co marketing thing and the integration thing and other types of partnerships and webinars and whatever else. But the actual marketing of the company just wasn't moving at all.

And so I I got to the point where I said, I I this can't go on. We have to hire our first marketer. And then Ed came in and inevitably, it could have been anyone, but they would and anyone walks into the company as a different set of ideas, different type of taste, different type of everything, different way they write, different image that they think looks great on the ad versus what you think. And I had to just just swallow down and just be just I would peek over at the ad copy and I would just I would just look away. If it goes by through me, it will never happen.

And all I know is that it's happening now and it wasn't happening then. And we'll work on finding closer alignment so that Ed knows what I want more in the future. But right now, the difference between it is happening and not happening. And it was tough, man. It was tough because, know, like you, I felt like Cardhook was a representation of me and what went out there, whether it was ad copy or an image or a blog post was a reflection of me.

And I had to like detach those two.

I don't necessarily think of process kit as me.

But you're treating it that way?

Probably true. But I think of it about like, I really know the target customer. Process Kit is sort of a very complex need. If you're one of these customers that emails me every single day and I know that they're going to convert

Yeah, nuance

in They're not just an agency owner. They're a certain type of agency owner. They're like a subset within the agency world of somebody who is super dialed in and just is obsessed with automations. They're obsessed with scaling and processes and systems, and they are scaling. So I am the target customer.

I run audience ops. So it's like, I know I've I've been in in their shoes. I know what they're thinking and feeling.

And and no one's gonna have that the way you do at this time until they come in and marinated it for a year and then soak it in. Yeah. Yeah. It's tricky.

But you're right. I think a lot of it is mental.

It's it's feeling so emotionally connected to everything that's published by the company.

You know, part of it also is like, see see, I am letting go a lot of this, like a lot of that, all that stuff, like it it is not me actually executing it. Part of the challenge, I think, is that we're we're starting from zero on on a lot of these things. This is the very first blog guide that we're ever publishing. We're gonna do more, but this is the very first one. So so not only are we doing the content, but I had to like design the way that our articles look on the site.

There's a lot of work to be done before the tracks are laid down and then it's easier

to And thinking about the community stuff, I'm thinking about now, like how do we launch a community and get people to actually care about it without it just being a customer support channel? Like and it's just a larger strategy, you know, that that needs to be sort of, like, thought through and build a whole road map around it. And but, again, it's I don't have to be the one doing that. I I could just sort of hear hear someone's plan on that and give feedback and approval on it and you know?

It's it's tough. I think I didn't have that much experience with it, with people reporting it to me and doing stuff almost like on my behalf or in their role separate from me. So I felt pretty limited in my vocabulary on how to handle it. For me, what was in my vocabulary was my experience at the investment bank. And the way managers worked with individual contributors was like this hybrid of trust and verifying.

So it was here's the assignment. You can look at the database of previous years to see how this sell sheet was created and what information you need, but take a stab at it first. And then what what that did is it set up a situation where the manager was extremely efficient. They didn't do any work on behalf of this project until one version of it came to their desk and they would just criticize and send back. It was extremely, extremely right.

So think about that, like, go do a blog post. That's it. That's right. That's enough direction. Go look at how we do blog posts.

Look at the size of the image. Look at what kind of image. Look at the point of view, what the tone is. Do all of that. Then bring me a version and then in ten minutes I can tell you where it's off and then you go back and do another version.

That's a really good way of thinking about it. It's so much easier to provide useful input and good direction when you already have a version to look at, you know, rather than try to think about it theoretically before anything exists.

Right. Yeah. And and the what what that should do, right, and and I remember at the bank, the thing that was known was don't make the same mistake twice. So when you get that feedback, you just don't mess that up again. And then pretty quickly, you know exactly how things are done.

You know, a month or two later when they say do a sell sheet for this next deal, you not only is there database to look at, you have your own database and you know who this manager is and how they like things. And then they put the guardrails in place and then all of sudden it's very little feedback on, you know, it's one or two turns as opposed to 10 turns when you're a noob. So at least that, I don't know if that's the best thing to do. That's just what I had in my vocabulary. And so I said to myself, that's how I'm going to let go.

I'm still going ask people to run things by me and I'm just going to give feedback. And then pretty quickly it was, well, you don't really need that much feedback anymore. Now you just kind of, hey, this is what we're doing and here's what it looks like. Cool.

We just had a call about this this week. I think part of it is also just like building some better structure in our workflow of how we work. Because like with my developer, it's like an everyday thing. Like, every single day, he's showing me work. I'm giving, know, review, and then twenty four hours later, we do it again.

Like, that's that's the cycle. And I think with the marketing, it we haven't had that. Or, you know, she's sending me a lot of stuff on a daily basis, both in Slack and on and on not every single day, but a a couple times a week, which is great, but I always feel guilty because I'm like, it takes me several days to to respond because it's not the top thing in my inbox. You know? So now we're starting to do, like, okay.

We're gonna have these, like, regular standing meetings. And and also we have a weekly report with metrics that that I and and a a report of just to like, you know, wrap up what what's been done this week. And that's a good, like, touch point for me to say, okay. I could I could look at this once a week or we could have a conversation once a week and I can see the direction and then I can sort of like go back to doing other stuff.

Yeah. It's easier to gloss over, but you should give yourself credit. Like you've done this on the development side. Like you're no longer doing it all yourself. And to me that sounds a lot more complicated than the marketing side.

But you are Yeah,

but I I'm very involved in the development and I, and I want to be, but that's to me, I see that as my job in process kit right now is like, I'm day to day, like I have, I'm either designing the next feature or I'm reviewing his work on the current feature.

You know, I think we're supposed to stop just because it's been long enough, but I did want to bring up this, this product that I'm in love with right now.

You showed me this just before today and holy, this is awesome.

It's very impressive. It's really like

It's impressive.

It's rare that you find something on the internet and you're like, wow, I don't know how they're doing that, but that looks incredible. The company is called Cohere, c o h e r e dot s o. Cohere dot s o. And if that's like some clever word that I missed, my bad. But what it does Yeah.

Like, love everything about this product except for the name and the domain.

The name and domain. Don't know what they're talking about. This is definitely engineering heavy. But what the product does is it's it's like a what was the name of that remote control? Not GoToMeeting, ControlMyPC, or like one of those old school things, but made for the modern web browser.

And it's for It web

looks like made for apps. Yeah.

Yes. It's it's for web apps to allow support people or whoever's doing the support to remotely control the cursor on the user side without any downloads. So it's just a quick little permission thing. Yes. Do you grant access?

Yes. Then instead of saying, we'll go to this screen and on this screen, if you look halfway down on the left side, you're going see a button that says notifications. Is that red or blue? That's how a normal support communication happens inside with web apps. This allows you to just say, do you get permission?

Yes. And then you're controlling the cursor and you can just show them. Okay. So what I'm do, I'm going to go to this page, I'm going to click here. And the reason it's not showing is because you just haven't published your funnel.

So once I hit publish, then I can go test. We might use this thing. Going back to that conversation earlier, App Store reviews are huge, and the way you get good App Store reviews is good support. That's really the key.

I can see it working in own case because he have because it's Shopify. So so yeah. Because you you don't necessarily control the their app experience anymore because it's, like, in their Shopify

app. Yeah. That's right. It's it's inside, like, a panel inside of their Shopify admin.

Because I experience the same thing with process kit. If it's an issue inside their own ProcessKit account, you know, I do have the ability to to impersonate users, and and hop in and see what they're seeing. But I do a lot of customer support for their Zapier integrations. And and and it's for whatever reason people are it's it's difficult for them to actually even ask the question. All the all those things like my Zap broke or, like, I'm seeing an error on Zapier.

And Zapier doesn't give you any info with their errors. Right. So, I'm like, alright, well, I need to see more. So can you can you and and even just a screenshot is usually not not enough. Like, can you video yourself walking through your Zap and send it to me?

And and dude, this is this is one of those shiny object software ideas that that I've been thinking about in the last couple of weeks that I'm not doing, but, you know, have thought about it. It is the idea of, like, like a reverse loom. You know? Like

Like, easily record video and then send to me.

Yeah. Like, click this link, re record your screen, and then it sends back, and and we can have a conversation off that.

Yeah. I like that. I wouldn't be surprised if if if that they add that to this because it's it's all around the same concept. But they're

Yeah. So they're signing reminded me this reminded me of, like, that meets tuple. You know? Because Tuple is, sharing screen, two cursors. This is, like, literally that.

Like, you're it's you could see their cursor. They could see your cursor, I think. Right? That that's how the demo sort of works. Right.

And you

can click. Yeah. So cohere.so is the site, but cohere.so/demo, that's the page that'll blow your mind because it allows you to actually give it a try with the left side and right side. So do it on desktop, but just extremely impressive. If if we give it a try, I'll I'll let you guys know.

Yeah, I might give it a try. Pretty cool. Yeah.

Alright, man. It's Friday. It's before the election. Best of luck to everybody. Have a great weekend.

Thanks for listening everybody.

Alright, later, bro.