Bootstrapped Web

Bootstrapped Web. We're back. Jordan, how's going, buddy?

Going pretty well. It's Friday. Beautiful day here. Finishing off a pretty good week. I had a bad day yesterday.

But besides that, it's a good week. Yeah, yeah. It's getting kind of hectic over here, but today it's pretty nice. We're going to start packing up the car tonight and we're driving down to Asheville, North Carolina tomorrow.

Oh, very nice. For the week. Very nice. I got my vaccine appointment coming up and a trip trip to New York right after that.

When are you getting the jab?

April 2420. You got a lit vaccine appointment.

I'm getting, I'm getting my first jab on April 29.

Okay. It's happening. It's happening.

Yes. Yes. Although I did just find out that my tickets to see Raging as the Machine at Madison Square Garden are another year now. Were supposed to go in August 2020, postponed to August 2021, now it's pushed to '22. So

Yeah, mean the vaccines are definitely happening but the it's not over. This thing is not over.

You can't go to a concert in an arena.

Nah, nah. And some states are having more difficulty than others. But we don't control that. Brian, what we do control is launching Zip Message, launching a new company. What do you got going on?

Yeah. So, you know, this week I'm trying to inch closer and closer to really starting the process of onboarding first users. After that would be first customers. And so this past week and into next week while while I'm hanging out in in this Airbnb is to just squash as many bugs as possible in Zip Message. And, you know, we did our own internal testing while we were building stuff, but at this point now I need to get it into the hands of just a small number of users.

I would say I invited so far about six or so people I'm friends with who had also expressed interest in using Zip Message and I invited them to start using it. I've been using Zip Message myself like with a couple of customer support issues on process kit. I would send those customers a Zip Message video and I've been sending some videos to my mastermind buddies and stuff and going back and forth. But now I started inviting people to actually create their own accounts and start using it with their teams and their customers. I'm thinking of it like as like pre invites before the official invites start going out.

Even just having six users on it, just glaring bugs left and right coming in every single day and I'm fixing them like crazy. My my developers half the time building new features, the time fixing all these bugs. It's kind of exciting, kind of fun, kind of chaotic, you know. It's a brand new code base and I'm trying to move as fast as humanly possible to get this stuff pushed out and it's kind of fun.

While the stakes are low on mistakes and you know, changes and sorry about that. I'll fix it in an hour type of thing. Might as well go as fast as you can. But that's

I had a really fun, experience this morning with our buddy Peter Soom. He's starting up a new app called reform. It's like a form builder app And he DM'd me, asked me if I want to try it out. I was like, sure, definitely want to take a look. So he sent me the link to reform.

And I was like, you know what, before I even look at it, I should record a video of myself doing this. Right? So I fired up zip message. I recorded myself going to his app and ran into an error on, on reform. I couldn't, I couldn't register.

Something went wrong. I got that on video, sent him the video for for zip message. He clicks on the link to zip message. The zip message page is broken.

That's great.

We're all sending it back to you for it. Like our, like, alpha products that are both broken and

I love it. That's fantastic. So hopefully, you know, you you can both get it and talk about it through a a Zip message page. Do you have the terminology set for what that is? Is it is it a post?

In the database they're called conversations. You know you have a page that represents a conversation back and forth and he tried posting into it and 500 error and then I fixed that and I pushed it out and so we got that working and then I got into reform as well that's looking pretty slick as well. Pretty Well that's,

that's cool. I'm happy about this timing. You know, we're, we're launching stuff at the same time and just the, that initial wheel turning a few times is such a trip. The first signups, the first users, the first like revenue, like I haven't had that in a long time. You know, totally new Stripe account, new revenue that piping it into Slack.

I remember the inbox when I set up the inbox for Cardhook years ago. I just remember looking at just a dead inbox. There's nothing going on there and just saying, all right, one day this is going to be a mess of activity and I'll look forward to that. And now my new inbox is busy, you know, but the Stripe account is not busy yet. That's a good thing to cross over.

Technically I actually did get the first credit card conversion on Zip Message this week. I'm excited about it but I'm also like okay he's a friend but he did put in the credit card info and so that's technically he would be customer number one. You know we're working through all the bugs there and so I sent an email blast to the email, the early access list and my larger list this week, just as like publicly announced like April, what is it gonna be the next Monday, like twenty first or something like that is gonna be the, the, the week that I begin the official invites. I wanted to like announce that to the list and then also just give more info about where is it messages that I tweeted some new videos with that conversation view. And so this week I'm fielding a lot of replies to those, to those emails saying like, would use it for this.

I would use it for that. I would use it. And, and, when can I get my invite? And I'm getting a lot of good feedback from people. So it's kind of exciting, it's, it's also like, all right, I'm feeling good about some feedback here, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Like it's,

it's Okay. So you're, you're, you're approaching it pretty carefully, skeptically almost. You're not going to let the optimism get you carried away until there's like cause for it. Can I ask you about the early sign up list? You know, we have the landing page mostly designed and finalizing copy next week.

And then the plan is to launch the landing page the week of April 19. So it's really just next week to finalize copy and the first blog post that goes with it and that sort of thing. But one of the things that I'm not a 100% set on is how to handle an early list. So we do, we do want people to leave their email to be basically notified when it fully launches. But is that it just an email address or do we want people to also be able to schedule a demo?

We're trying to think through it.

Well, the way that I always do that early access user experience or user flow, and I and I did this again on Zip Message. I've done it for all the recent products. Homepage is the is the landing page with information. Click the button to enter your email to join the early access list. That's just an email field.

Once they do that, they're on my list and I'm using customer IO for that.

I just signed up for them too.

Yeah, they're great. The next page is, so it's like thanks for joining the early access, now here's a survey. And I always have a survey on the back end, Depends on the product, but I think I have about five or six questions on there.

So as little as friction as possible to get on the email list. And then if you are kind of done right there, you can just close it out. We just want to have a way to identify the thing we're doing is going to most people that read it are going to say, Oh, that's cool. Let's see where it goes. Other people are going to see that's exactly what I've been thinking about.

And that's the purpose of the survey. I actually worded on the page there like, okay, you just entered your email address, now if you want to be bumped up the list, answer these questions. And then based on the responses, I read every single one and then I can see the ones who are writing lot and they're really resonating with it. You know, the questions are like, how have you, have you solved this problem in the past? What tools are you using for it currently?

And things like that. And, and if it just indicates that they're really, really good fit, then I will in all likelihood reply to them, get into a conversation either over email or a call or something like that. And I've noticed that I'd say about 60% of the people do the survey. You know, they,

of

all the people who enter their email address, probably about 60 end up, It's not super clear that like you're already on the list until after you I think a lot of people fill it out and just to make sure that they're fully on the list, they answer all the questions. But yeah, it's definitely good to get that, get that data.

Yeah. That makes sense that, that so many, it sounds like a really high number of 50% plus, but it makes sense if the next thing you see is the form that as long as it's not onerous, then your nature is to fill up form. So you don't expose your calendar or anything like that with a link that lets them sign up.

I mean, for zip message, I haven't done that. I I've, I have done that at various times for process kit. I mean, if that's the goal, if the goal is to get on calls and yeah, absolutely. But, but yeah, yeah.

I might, I might do that. It's fun. I'm excited. I'm excited for that. I've been having a few of those types of conversations and I forget how much I like it.

You know, some people like get tired of it and like, man, I love it.

It depends on how how public you're being with the landing page, but I wouldn't want every single person to be able to book a call. The way that I usually approach it is email first and then the survey questions and then I read their survey response and then I invite the best survey responses to a call over email.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. That that sounds that sounds right.

So it goes from the landing page to the email list and then the survey response goes into your inbox and you can reply directly from there. And then you're in a conversation.

It's in my inbox and it also gets into a spreadsheet.

Okay, cool. I think ours will look something like it. We're just trying to figure out if we want the form on the page or really just, it feels like putting the form on the page because a I'm, I can't design it myself and B it's, it's relatively like complicated the design. So if we do a form, I know the designer is going to make the form awesome. And then it's going be rigid.

Do you mean the email form or the survey form?

If we do anything other than just the email field on the landing page and start putting survey questions on the landing page, then it's not going be flexible. So I want to be able to just be able to go right in and change the questions on the fly as I see fit without having to change anything on the design.

I I tend to go with capture the email first and then do this the the questions second. And I do that even currently on process kit. So like to start a trial of process kit, you're on the homepage, you click start trial, it's an email form, now you're on the list in customer IO and then step two, actually I still have a survey in between that and starting the trial. So currently on process kit, it's email first captured, then it's answer four quick questions, Then you, then you move on to starting your trial in the app.

Okay. So those questions feel like part of the onboarding.

They sort of feel like part of the onboarding and I'm getting a sense of like, who's signing up and for what reason. Okay.

I like that. Yeah. We are not going to have public signup for a while. So everything we do is going to end up through this type of a process around conversations first. And so, yeah, it makes sense that we should start that right away in the landing page, but also build the list as much as possible because when we do launch publicly, obviously we'd rather have more people on the list.

Yeah. The other funny thing that happened this week with zip messages, you know, again, I only sent it out to like, like six friends who are, who are using it, but Zip Message is a viral product, know, so they start using it with other people and I got a few extra trial signups from people I don't know. And messages like, like, Hey, is this product ready? Like I want to, I want to like deploy it in this, in this weird case. And like they totally were unaware that like it's a completely brand new, even like pre beta product right now.

So

That is such an interesting part of it. I mean the virality, yes, but the psychology around being

Well I am asking people to like use it for real. Don't just test it.

Yes. Well that's ideal, yes. But the person who receives it, they don't even care what's behind it. They just see the product. Like I want that.

I don't know when, how new it is, who made it. Like it's like irrelevant. And so in many ways that's the marketing. That's the initial contact.

That's the goal. Yeah. That's part of the idea, you know? Cool.

I like it.

What's up on your end?

So, you know, getting the nerves, man. Getting excited, nervous, worried. The imposter syndrome stuff, the is no one going to care. Is it going to fall flat? Is anyone going to sign up?

You know, there's a lot of added pressure being a like marketing and sales focused founder and the rest of the team is products and engineering. And they're kind of just counting on you and, and expecting you to just generate sales and people and customers just magically cause they don't know how to do it. So they're like, okay, so, so that's a lot of pressure. And so I'm starting to feel that pressure as the date comes nearer to actually releasing it. And I think the best way to squash that fear is just to talk to potential customers and not, not take a passive approach and not sit back and hope for marketing this and that.

And like one to many, like, Nope, just like ground and pound, just use the network. And so that's what we're doing now. We have, we have a list, we have a list of our investors. We have a list of investors that we spoke to, but didn't take money from. We have a list of merchants.

We have a list of agencies. We just have these different types and we're just breaking it out into tier one. Okay. Tier one, let me write them an email and then send them a separate email that's very easily forwardable. So we do the work for them and then that contains our sales deck.

And so we're just pushing it out and arming as many people as possible with the ability to very easily share what we're doing. And that's phase one.

How much of it is actually semi public or like totally secret? So if you're talking to prospects, is there anything about like, like, let me show you this thing, but please don't share it out yet. Or is it like,

yeah, I'm done with that. That's over. So for a while we purposely wanted to just stay quiet and now it's okay, it's out. The, you know, the page is going to be published in less than two weeks. And so it's over.

No reason to be secretive. There's no reason to do anything anymore. Yeah. It's kind of just go time.

Do you have a game plan for like, okay, page is now published. Then what? Like,

so the landing page, what we decided to do was do more than just a simple landing page. And the reason for that was we had a little bit of time and we really want to lean on this page for awhile and not build a full website until we get a lot more feedback and ideally have a few great customers that we can then use their logos and their products and their pages as part of the marketing. So it felt like, okay, if we want to lean on this page for two, three months, then let's take the opportunity to make it good and then we're just feel fine being proud of it and not really feeling much of an itch to build out a full website. So that's my general thinking is we do want people to see the product, get a good first impression and then really just use the site as like this channel into these conversations. So we just don't need to do that much work on the web.

We don't need to convince and show the docs and show the features and show all this stuff. That's like later. And I'd rather do that after a lot of feedback because I'm sure we'll tweak the positioning, we'll tweak the language. The headline I have right now, I'm not happy with all that stuff will be better after having a 100 conversations over the next two months.

Yeah. Even after the landing page is public, it'll still be the spread of it from there will still be based on your networking and talking to people. It's not like you're planning out quite yet like this is how it's going to get shared around Twitter throughout the month of May. It's not like that.

Nope, nope. I think it's going to be spread peer to peer. And so the website is just a necessary pillar of the overall thing. But really where the magic is going to happen is me talking to an agency owner, showing them a demo and then sometime over the next few weeks when they talk to one of their customers that's thinking about this area, they'll say, Hey, I heard about this new product. You should talk to Jordan.

My assumption is that that is what's going to drive things for the next few months.

Cool. I know it's not out yet. Can you talk about the interplay between agency and customer or are you going to save that for later?

Sure. No, I can talk about that. So our product is aimed at the headless e commerce market and that is being driven right now by developers and agencies. It's not a self serve ballgame right now. And so those partnerships and integrations and they matter a lot.

That's my favorite place to play where I can see an opportunity for like win win situations with integration partners and we can bring them customers and they can bring us customers. And so I'm, I'm happy with that arrangement because that's what I'm best at. And so leaning into that doesn't feel like a waste. It doesn't feel like I'm avoiding doing sales or marketing or anything like that. Like that, that is the right thing to do.

Talk to all of these players that are in the headless space and, and figure out where the alliances are and where the common goals are, who we can get aligned with, who we can form great relationships with that we can make their agency look good and they can send us customers. The relationship stuff, that's what worked at Cardhook because Cardhook was never allowed in the app store. And so we had to do all this work in the background. It happened to be that that is my favorite thing to do anyway. So we just went with it.

And so I'm, I want to do a lot more than just that with the new company, but that's a great place to start. Yes. So hopefully by the time we record next week, I can talk more freely about it because by the time it gets published, Oh, you're not going be around next week.

Yeah. We'll skip next week. So Oh yeah.

That makes it easy. Yeah.

Well, I've got a bit of a, it was not the news I wanted to hear with Audience Ops this week. The person who's been more or less, you know, running the show, Kat, our our team manager, you know, informed me that she's gonna be moving on from from Audience Ops. She was one of the very first people there. It's been, I think almost six years, five or six years. And we've got several other other team members on the team who've been here that long as well.

But you know, she's going to step back. She's kind of a new mom and she's got other things going on in her freelance business. And so I'm really happy for her. But of course I was completely freaked out like, oh man, what's going to happen? But you know, we have a plan in place now for Sarah, the person who had also taken over sales.

She's been doing sales and pretty successful at it so far for the last month and a half. Know, we've on new clients with her doing sales. And so she'll now become the team manager. She too has been with audience ops for a long time, like four or five years. She's like the obvious choice to step right into that.

It was so smooth for so long and kind of a key piece of the puzzle is moving on. Not that I'm so worried about, you know, Sarah coming in and doing that. She's going to do great in that. She already knows the role really well anyway. More about like, you know, just the overall structure of audience ops.

I never like it being too dependent on one particular person. It's been so smooth and so steady for so long and I just don't want to disrupt that. After, you know, calming my nerves a little bit and talking to some people, got, I got some good feedback that, you know, I have to have a structure in place that there's always going to be. Yeah. Just someone else who's like semi around to help handle issues if somebody else were to leave, right?

Yeah.

I mean, if Sarah wasn't there, it would be a lot more stressful.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I developed a new role on the team. So Sarah is becoming what we call the team manager. Now we're going to introduce a new role called assistant team manager, which we've we've never had before.

So now one of our other account managers is going to also become this new assistant team manager. And essentially Kat, who's who's leaving, is gonna basically be replaced with two people instead of one. Sarah will will be the lead team manager, but then this other person will handle a little bit more of like the administrative tasks, overseeing, like coordinating, you know, getting coverage for this writer who's taking a vacation or doing this or that. So yeah, I think that'll be good. I think it was a good opportunity to basically spot a week, a week point in, in the structure of audience ops and, and resolve it.

It's like sudden, like necessity of like, like an Oh shit moment to

be like, Oh, we gotta,

we gotta plug that hole right there.

Yeah, some of those things kind of drive me crazy because you realize the answer was right in front of you for so long. And for whatever reason, it just didn't reach the level of action or right. Even if, even if you saw it. So it's great that that Sarah's there and that'll make the transition not as scary. And then, and all of a sudden you take action.

Yeah. It was also a good opportunity because now we're spending the rest of April while Kat is still here to, to do this transition. She like, we'll have calls weekly through April for this like knowledge transfer from, from Kat to Sarah and also starting to train, train up Lauren who's taken over the assistant, team manager. And it's my opportunity to, like, I'm not spending a ton of time on it, but, but I did want to kind of step in and kind of reiterate some of my larger goals and priorities to the team on audience ops about what makes audience ops great, you know, and Kat really knew that well and I, and I want to make sure that the team really knows this is what, why things work so well here. Let's keep this going.

So I sent a message to the whole team today, you know, just informing them that that Kat's moving on, but also that I've always thought of audience ops like, yes, we're selling this service to clients, but I believe more so we're selling this to freelancers that the people who work at audience ops.

You kind of, you set up a system that really provides freelancers good, dependable, interesting work.

That's the thing.

It's like a collective.

Yeah, it really is. I mean, I have been a freelance web designer before all this and, and I know how up it ups and downs, like the vast majority of freelance work, can get paid well, but it's project to project. You have a good month, you have a bad month, you got to do lead flow, you got to do proposals, all this different stuff. And audience ops gives you that steady retainer, Good quality work, good team environment. You could spend as little or as much of your time working in audience ops as you want, but it's just steady.

It's a it's a it's like a rock in your in your income stack that can while while the other stuff is variable or while you're a stay at home parent or whatever it may be. And like also that like we've built our processes in such a way that like we are anti urgency. Most agencies have all these like hair on fire situations where like we got to get this out by the deadline and the client is angry so we got to do this and that. And of course we have deadlines too and everything we've got to deliver but we design things in a way that it's stress free, it's remote, it's flexible, it's asynchronous. We've built time into our processes.

We don't accept rush jobs, we don't offer an expedited service package. We get asked about it, but the answer is no. It's designed to be stress free. I wanted to get that across to the team so everyone knows like this is the value prop for

just to reiterate. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense why people stay a long time. It makes me think of an experience we had internally recently.

I think it was two weeks ago, Monday of last week, not this week. And so the leadership team and I do a Monday morning call. Jess and Rock talk to the engineering team. They do their weekly standup Monday morning at 8AM. And then at 9AM Pacific, we get on and they basically give me an update.

All right, how's the engineering team going? How's the product going? How's the process? How's the, know, where are we? And two weeks ago, I didn't have anything planned.

I didn't have anything in mind. Didn't come in there with like, this is the message I'm going to get across. But I got triggered like immediately within the first thirty seconds of the conversation because I asked how it was going and I heard the exact same thing that I had heard like the two weeks prior. And something like didn't feel right. It felt like, I don't know if I'm being honest, it felt like an excuse.

So like excuses.

And what you mean by that is like the, the, the thing that you had expected them to be working on a week or two ago, why are they still working on that same thing? Why is that not?

Yes, exactly. Right. Like the progress wasn't where we want it to be. And what I heard, I heard the same thing. And that just kind of triggered like an emotional response of like, like hold on time out, out, time out, out, out.

Like what, what, what's going on here? And then I, it was a little tricky because usually before Claire joined as chief of staff, it was just the three of us. It was rock and Jess and I. And so now Claire is in on those. So now there's four people.

So it felt a tiny, tiny bit like performative on my part. Like I'm like showing emotion and being critical. Like it almost felt like there was more of an audience there because now all of a sudden there's three other people. So I really had to try to keep the emotions in check because you don't want to, you don't want to berate anyone. You don't want to overly criticize in front of people and whatever else.

So I tried to just have this very honest conversation and it turned into a full hour long, very honest conversations. We've been working together for a long time, Rock and Jess and I, so there's a lot of trust there. And so that any criticism is backed by a relationship. So you're not just being a jerk, you know, you're, you're being honest, you're saying what's going on here? How can I help?

And so on.

Are the engineers and designers like other than rock Jess, are they, are they new or are they Cart Hook people too?

They're, they're new. Okay. Yes. There's one person that came over from Cart Hook, but everyone else is new. You know, after a conversation like that, everyone kind of goes their separate ways and I couldn't help but be remorseful.

At some point I come back around to, Oh, I was too harsh. I shouldn't have done that in front of other people. I should have done it privately, all that. And so I, you know, I wake up in the morning and I go to write some apologetic type of a message and they had written me messages saying thank you for yesterday. So, which was an interesting response.

Then we get into like this little love fest. They're like, no, but I'm sorry. And but you're sorry. And I didn't mean this. And you know, we're kind of on the same page, but what came out of it was that my tendency, I would rather not add pressure to people.

I would rather leave them alone. At Cardhook doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue and being profitable. Look, you can kind of chill back a little bit. You know, it's not the same thing as when you're first starting. And now this requires a different mentality because we're back to zero.

And so I need to get my head on straight that this is a different scenario. And that I, if I The leadership team is basically representative of their teams. And so they're not talking about the progress that they made that week on the things that they're working on. They're reporting on the progress that other people worked on. And so if I am going to insist on accountability from the team to their leaders and then to me, guess what?

I have to enforce some accountability on the leadership team also. Same way that Claire helps bring accountability into my world. I need to step up the management and the accountability that I'm putting on the leadership team. They needed that in order to then show their teams that they need to be more accountable. It kind of needed to flow down all the way.

And it was really on me that I wasn't enforcing it as much on them. And then they weren't enforcing as much on, on their people.

Yeah. It's like a question of like, how do you get across to the team? The importance of, of how this is a completely different phase, different situation than, than you were say ten months ago in, in CartHook, you know, very different stage of the company, stage of the product. This is a brand new thing. And so I think everyone probably would understand that, but it, but it's also like, I guess it's getting more into the specifics of the product.

I know you have a great team around you now, but like how involved are you in the actual product now? Like in terms of like, like we know that this week we're going to take care of this component in the product and this should be shipped by by Friday. And when I say shipped, I know it like internally, but like we're going to move on to the next sprint next week.

Yeah, I'm involved in the strategic decisions on should we or should we not have a mobile version and a desktop version or should we unify them? Right? And what are the strategic decisions and pros and cons around that? And then as it gets broken out into tasks, that's where I'm not involved. So there's, you know, there's different layers

Do guys do any sort of, and I'm I'm not really big on any like rigid frameworks for development, but like the shape up mentality where it's like, you know, for the next four weeks or six weeks, this is this is the thing that we're focused on or or whatever it may be. In the new company. Have you, do you have any sort of structure like that?

We do, we have, we have enough structures that everyone knows what they need to do and, and, and now by when it needs to happen and why, But it's not as crisp of a process as it needs to be, but it's, we need to be a little loose because we've got to go faster. But what you said though, what you said is the key thing. You need to understand why. You can't just hear from management that this needs to be done by this date or else like that. That doesn't work.

And so after that conversation, it helped all of us realize, okay, we want more accountability. We want more of a deadline oriented approach right now. But the only way to do that is to explain why. So it's not just this dictated thing by your leadership on all right now I'm going to be stressed for three weeks for what? So the next week was all hands.

And so our all hands meeting was focused on the why. And it was like a rallying cry around, okay, we're setting this deadline. We're working backwards from there. We're trimming scope where it makes sense. We're pushing certain things until after that date because they're really not critical to get the first customers.

And the reason we're doing that is X, Y, Z, right? We want to get it out by Q3 so that merchants can run it for the full Q3 because the best merchants aren't going to make big changes in Q4. And we want to make sure that we're set up to raise money on our terms. We don't want to get to a place where we're in January 2022 and we're, we don't have the traction that we want. Therefore we get into a bad place.

So it really like open that up and now everyone's on board and they understand why. Okay, these next six weeks are going to be pretty stressful for us, more stressful than we'd like, but everyone understands why. So we're all on board. And it was, yeah, it was very helpful for me to kind of understand what I was doing wrong, what I was missing.

Yeah. I always have a hard time and I hear the same thing from so many founders who are not tech. I know you're more, more than non technical now you've become more technical obviously, but like, you know, I always have a hard time relating to the, I can understand how it happens where it goes a lot slower than you want. It's always slower than you want it to be. Right.

But I'm in the product every day, like directly with my developer. He and I are both committing code and shipping to staging into production and stuff like that. And so I think for that reason, and we're so small, it's just two of us, you know, on both process kit and and zip message. We just were able to move so fast because it's so small. And as the founder, I can make those strategic decisions around exactly which parts of this feature that we're building are important and which ones we don't need to do and when I should ship this or or wait until next week or whatever it might be.

But it is interesting that right now in ZipMessage, it's so new with so few users that we're in like hyper speed mode because I'm like super anxious to get it to the very first users, right? So I can be even looser with I mean, I'm shipping like half broken code to to production.

Look it, whatever advantages exist, you have to use. So when you're small and you can do that, you should take advantage of it.

Yeah, I mean, are things like process kit, know, we're doing as close to a 100% test coverage on, on everything from day one. I think that's a really important strategic decision to, to have that, mentality in place. My developer is, is completely on board with that, which has been good. But they're definitely fun and chaotic and scary to have such a brand new code base and then starting to get first users using it and seeing, seeing this shit that is so broken. Like how did I not even have time in my own testing?

It's a tough balance because we definitely could have gone a lot faster, but because we have experience in what we're doing, we are using a lot of the lessons to say, well, we know, we know this is going to break, so we can't do it the dirty and quick way. We have to go through this process and it's going to take another few weeks to do it. But if we don't do it, then we're going have to do it live while people are processing revenue. And that just hurts. So it's a, it's a balance because you do want to hurry up and get it out there and use the advantage of being a small team.

Yeah. Even like with, with process kit, has grown to a point where we're slower now that we can still build stuff very fast, but to deploy, it's it's a it's a slower process. We we have like a, you know, continuous integration now that it literally takes us like like an hour to get through the test suites to actually push even a small bug fix live and stuff like that. So like, yeah, you get to a point where you have all these and and also with ZipMessage, it's kind of fun right now to to have the freedom to rearrange stuff. The other day, I got some feedback from some folks.

Makes more sense to have the conversation flow downward instead of upward. It's like, okay, I just flipped that. Switch

it completely.

No. Turn it upside down. No.

Support messages about, hey, can I go back to the way it used to work? Cool. Well look, we're starting to run out of time. We didn't get

a chance to cover Josh

from Bear Metrics. You, my friend, you are a pioneer. The lack of hesitation is an inspiring thing. I have an idea. I like this space.

It really, it really went from how come I can't find a good product for this. Right? Everyone knows Josh's story. Just sold BearMetrix. You assume just came into a little bit of money.

Hallelujah. Congratulations. Well deserved. So now homies looking for like a personal finance app. Yes.

Perfect. And he immediately goes to Twitter because he's a Twitter native and it's like, why can't I find a good personal finance app? And then a day later, here's my concept. A day after that, here's my design. A day after that, here's my landing page.

Know, and he's just going.

I'm continually impressed with how Josh, how public, I mean, he takes working in public to a whole new extreme. Like

It's an extreme. It's awesome. And

I mean, Andy has a larger audience. Honestly,

like, don't

know how he sort of deals with that. Like like all he he he posts like like strategic questions or like getting creative feedback on stuff on Twitter. And I do a lot of that kind of stuff in private Slack groups, but

but publicly.

I work in public a little bit on on Twitter, but like asking for opinions from people on Twitter, it's like that's not useful. You're not gonna get any use, at least in my experience. Like it's Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know. I put so much value on strategic decision making that watching him do it blows my mind. And this isn't someone who's doing it ignorantly. It's not like he doesn't know what the consequences are.

He just dealt with the consequences and doing it anyway because that's the way he wants to do it. I love it. I love it.

And you know, it's it's just funny to see like when you're a business builder, you're a business builder. You're gonna keep building them.

That's that's what you do.

You know, right after bear even before he sold barometrics, know, he's doing all these other projects, you know, creative like

Laser tweets.

Laser tweets. Yes. Making beats, doing all this different stuff. I was like, oh, that looks like so much fun. But at the end of the day, like when you're not building a business, it's like you get that itch and you can't go very long without thinking about, you know, a bigger thing to sink your teeth into.

Yeah, which is great. Mean, you know, I didn't even take a break between companies then.

I always dream of like taking a break and I knew that I would never take one.

I do. I do want a break at some point. Would be,

I mean, like, you know, like a break, like in between companies,

not like, yes, like a year, like, I really fantasize about that in the future. Like when my kids are old enough that we could like go travel for a year, that's it. My wife and I've been talking about that since before we had kids. So I hope we can make that happen at some point, but that's

really no reason that you can't do that while you're doing, you know, running the business though.

Yeah, it depends. But I think you can much more these days, obviously. What will be interesting to see over the next few weeks with Josh is what he does about financing.

Yeah. Because he's into that a little bit now.

There's a new type of product from AngelList that looks so good. Roll bar roll up. I can't remember the name of the product, but it really just makes angel investing like dead easy. So right now if you raise an angel round or from angels, so we did in our seed round, a good chunk of it is from angels and you still have to deal on individual basis with each angel and the paperwork and everything else. And then someone can come along and run an angel, a syndicate for you, and that can bundle people up.

That, that allows people to invest a lot less, right? Cause it's, it's difficult to take on thousand or $5,000 checks when you're doing it individually.

It's really incredible to see the rapid pace of everything around funding and business transactions getting easier and more streamlined and removing middlemen and and opening it up to more more access to more people, you know, whether it's yeah. That that new thing or, or the thing we were talking about with Sahil doing like the public.

Rolling funds, then regs Rolling

funds and then even like, you know, you see like micro acquire with like, it's so easy to like buy and sell SaaS businesses and it's like, it's just becoming a, it's a whole new economy.

Yeah. No, Josh working in public so much likes to heal working in public so much. Maybe that reg CF really becomes a thing for people with audiences. If you have an audience and you want to start a company at this point, you can just ask for money. You can legally publicly just ask for money.

I'm working on this thing. I want $2,000,000 Here's how you get involved. Straightforward. No accreditation, nothing. No, the friction doesn't exist anymore.

Not the same way, which is awesome.

Yeah. Exciting.

Alright, Let's call it a day. I'm about to take my oldest daughter to lunch. Sounds like it's beautiful.

Thank you. Alright, folks. Well, yeah, we'll talk

in two weeks. See you later.