Bootstrapped Web

Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Boot Straps Web. Brian, it's a big day over here for us at Rally. Now that I can share the name.

Start naming names with your new company here.

Yes.

Exciting. Today's Hopefully, the

people listening find me more interesting now that I can actually talk more openly. Suppose all this veiled stuff. But yes.

So the name is?

The name is Rally.

The domain is?

Rallyon.com. And yeah, the name is not accidental. The name is part of the general feeling of what we're trying to accomplish in the e commerce market overall.

Yeah. I really like that name. When you told me a little while back, it's just such a cool kind of sounding brand name and yeah, it totally fits what you're trying to do, the big sort of like mission behind this thing. Really like it. And of course the landing page that you've been talking about, know, taking weeks longer than expected, I think it shows, you know, because it really looks pretty impressive to me for sure.

Especially the animations and the copy and all of it. Yeah.

Thank you. I appreciate that. About two hours ago, I posted a Twitter thread announcing the new company, new product, and a little bit of our thinking behind it. And so that's the first time that the landing page went live and, you know, I'm in the middle of that thing that that happens if you if you post a Twitter thread kind of at the right time and all that. It's fun.

You know, you got to remember, enjoy the fun days. This is one of those fun days where it's exciting. And we have the early access signup list getting piped into Slack so the entire team can see it and feel it. There's like that mood inside is just so exciting. The development team has been building quietly for months.

And then the pressure went to me. I'm like, all right, well, let's see what you can do. Let's see what we can do in terms of bringing people who are actually interested. And then to see that channel just like light up all over the place, definitely is a relief for me and also just really exciting for the team. There's a lot of congratulations and all right, here we go.

Here's the beginning. And so the mood right now is great.

Very cool. Very cool. All right. So, you know, I hate this term, but give us like, let's start with like the elevator pitch. What what is Rally like?

What's your first sentence as as you explained it? I'm sure you're still figuring that out.

Still working on it. Yes. So the the the quick one sense is, that Rally is a headless checkout for modern brands. That's kind of like the, you know, quick motto.

I wanna unpack that Yeah. Because the headline is so important. Again, I hate the term, elevator pitch, but it but it that headline, that h one is such an important aspect and it's something that I've continuously struggled with with process kit, even with zip message now. Sorry, say it again. Headless checkout for modern brands.

Yes. Yes. So there's, you know, each word in there is carefully selected. The truth is I don't, I don't think it's it. I don't think we're done with the headline, but it was what I wanted to go out with.

I sort of technically understand what you mean by it, by headless checkout. We'll get into that. I'm kind of curious actually about the modern brands. Like how, what was the decision around using that term in terms of your target customer?

So, so the word brands is the way that our target merchant thinks of themselves. And so when you say a brand instead of merchant or instead of store or instead of business, you're calling out direct to D2C companies that think of themselves as brands. That's not an accident.

Okay. So like when I think of a modern brand and you're in this world much more than I am, like, it's like one of these like new products that hasn't been around forever. And it's like an it's a unique, noteworthy, like interesting product, right? That that would share around and not just sort of like something that you would like pick off of like Amazon or, or like

Well, really what is it's a unique take on a category. And so like Casper mattress is just a mattress, but it's a, it's a new modern take on it. So that's, and that's what's happening in the direct to consumer space. People are identifying these old stale categories, whether it's toothpaste, haircare, makeup, and they're modernizing.

Looking at those shoes the other day, were they all birds?

All birds. Yeah, it's like I have them on right now.

Okay, cool. So like, that's what you would sort of consider like a modern brand kind of like?

Yes. And the target customers, the brands are the ones that think about brand value. They think about brand longevity. They're not just in it to arbitrage ads and make money and not really care about the product. They think about the company and the enterprise value and maybe they raised money.

They just think about it differently. So that's not a mistake. The headless part is also on purpose. That's probably my least favorite of the whole thing, but it also is the most necessary.

Alright. So let's get into that. But I think it's important and good to have to to call it out like we are the headless option, right?

Because that's that's the

big, that's the big unique differentiator of what you're doing here, right?

And it again calls out the type of customer we want and they're the ones that are thinking about quote going headless.

Yeah. What does that mean?

So traditionally speaking, ecommerce platforms were built as monoliths that handled the full range of services for an ecommerce company. The front end where the storefront lives and where people click around and add products to the site, Then the checkout where the payments happen. And then that bridges over to the backend, the product database, the customer database, pricing discounts, all that stuff on the backend. So front end checkout backend. And what headless is doing, I see it as a pretty classic unbundling, right?

In the internet, this stuff happens, things get bundled and they get unbundled and they get rebundled. So over the past decade or so, there's been a great bundling in e commerce. I mean, even as far back as like Yahoo stores, which is what Paul Graham started as, I forget the Vioware, Vioweb, I think Vioweb that turned into Yahoo stores when it got acquired by Yahoo. And that was like the first monolithic e commerce platform. From there, there have been others that there was Magento that went open source and there was BigCommerce, it was WooCommerce.

And then of course Shopify has been dominating because they did such a good job at bundling and saying, don't worry about the tech. Just build on Shopify and then you'll be able to get everything you need. You get the storefront, you get the payments, you get the backend. And I think now what's starting to happen is an unbundling. And that's what headless is.

So the term headless refers to the head, the storefront, the front end of the site being detached from the backend. And what that does, and it makes things API driven instead of monolithic, it gives more creativity on the front end. You get better performance, you could use the technology that you want. So there are new solutions that are coming out, whether it's Next. Js from Vercel or builder.io or Shogun or Vue Storefront.

There's a lot going on on the front end. So that's what headless refers to. It's taking the head, the front end off and detaching it, gives more freedom to the merchant.

Correct me if I'm wrong, when whenever I think of of what you've been doing with Rally, you're you're essentially built the checkout that can attach to any ecom or Yes. Any any e commerce website. You know, so so you're not providing that that, like you said, like the front end, the the categories, the product pages, the all that. It's just the the most important views in in the site, the most important pages, the the checkout experience, the post checkout, like that's that's what Rally provides and it and it gives you complete control over that.

Yes. That that's right. So so what's been happening at headless is new front end solutions are coming online and raising money and starting to develop. At the same time, there are a few backend solutions, Swell, Commerce JS, Sailor, Commerce Tools. Are things that people haven't really heard of yet, but they're starting.

And again, they're raising money, they're getting built up, they're looking for traction and so on. It's our take on it that there's a third category in headless. It's not just front end and back end. The checkout is a category in and of itself. And that's where we want to position ourselves as the default checkout when building headless.

What we want to do is operate like a Zapier for ecommerce, wire up whatever front end you want, wire up whatever back end you want, and we'll we'll bridge. And what that allows us to do is focus on the checkout and the features and innovation around the checkout. Because these back end platforms, they're just getting started. They they got a they got a lot to build.

It's like a back end platform would would be like where you would store all of your product information, your your your inventory, all all the records of all the which elements of the front end and the back end does Rally cover in term is is it sort of just like the front end user experience through the checkout, but then you send the data onto the back end provider and and you're sucking it in from the front end as the user enters the checkout. Is that?

Yeah, that's, that's about right. So we communicate with the cart object from the front. So we don't really care where it comes from as long as it's structured the way we need it. So it can be a big commerce front end, and then we get it through the checkout and send it off to a BigCommerce backend. Or it could be a builder.

Front end. We do the processing and then we send it off to Swell and then, oh, maybe you also want NetSuite so we can connect with that on the backend. The point is to be interoperable And we think that is missing in the headless ecosystem. And we think that actually accelerates the adoption of headless because right now when merchants think about headless, they think about a big technical lift. We're going have to do a lot on our own.

We're going to need an agency. And we actually don't think that's where it ends up. We think it ends up with a constellation of services, hosted services that merchants can pick and choose and say, well, I want for me, for my business, I want builder. Because it gives me a good mixture between WYSIWYG and access to the code. Another business can say, I want to use Shogun because I just want my marketing team not to have to worry about code at all.

Or another team can say, well, we have a development team in house, we want to use Next. Js. So that increases the freedom in the e commerce market. And we think when that happens, it increases creativity, it increases success.

And and sort of like the reason why you exist here and and why why you believe that that the checkout is like a third category in and of itself is is basically conversions. Like that's the most important place where you can optimize for conversions. And if these other parts of the chain, the front end or the back end provider or the the the closed platform, the open platform, whatever it might be, if those are off in in many cases they offer like too many hurdles or or friction to to customize your your checkout experience exactly the way you want it, that's that's ultimately the problem that that Rally is solving. It's like it it gives you full control to optimize those checkout conversions as to your heart's content. Is that Yes.

As you as you see fit based on what your needs are. And so the only way we succeed is by providing an amazing, like high converting checkout that converts shoppers and makes that buying process easy. It makes it more profitable for the merchant makes it a better experience for the shopper. But an important element to why we exist is because we think that detaching the checkout and the payments from the underlying platform is one of the keys to a more open ecosystem around headless. Right now, those checkouts are assumed to be owned by the backend platform, the backend platform inevitably ends up doing things that are good for the platform.

And that's primary to what's good for the merchants and good for the shoppers. Sometimes they're the same, sometimes they're not the same. But if you separate the two, then all of a sudden incentives get aligned differently. Our incentives are not to keep you locked into a backend platform. Our incentives are for you to process as much revenue as you possibly can and giving you all the tools to do that.

And so generally the shift we want to see is the power moving from monolithic traditional platforms that can tell merchants and app developers and agencies what they can and can't do on their platform and moving that out to a more decentralized e commerce ecosystem where the power resides with the merchants, the app developers and the agencies, not the underlying platforms. So that's what we want to see. That's what we want to be true in the world. And so that's like the mission that goes alongside of the actual product features. And we're in a fortunate position where those two are very tightly coupled.

What we want to be true and what we want to see is good for us. It's good for our business. It's good for merchants. It's good for shoppers. We think it's good for everybody.

So, so give us like a quick rundown of like just some of the features right now. So you can see them that you you've got these pretty cool, like animations on, on the landing page. I saw the screens a couple of weeks ago that you were showing me, in terms of a roadmap, what what's built today and like, and how would you describe the the most important, like, bullet points that the features that that people can can start using? What's sort of in the roadmap?

Yeah. There's the roadmap is forever. And then and then another forever after that. But the the I look at the features in three buckets. So the first one is Rally Pay.

And what Rally Pay does is it recognizes shoppers to allow them to purchase with one click throughout the network. So the first time you go through a Rally checkout, your information is saved. And the next time you go through a Rally checkout on any store using Rally, you can buy with one click. So you did not have to set up a wallet account in order to get an incredibly easy purchase experience. And the important thing is that it works across platforms and across payment processors.

So if you went to a WooCommerce store that processes with Braintree and went through the Rally Checkout, and then a week later, you go to a B commerce store that processes with Stripe, you'll have the same one click experience. And so what that does is it creates a shared secure vault that runs across platforms and across processors, right? That's in the same vein of, well, let's just unlock this from an underlying platform and an underlying processor and just give access to everybody regardless of where you live as a merchant and regardless of where you shop as a shopper.

It's really cool. I mean, like Stripe does that, right? Like when we get somebody who's signing up for audience ops and they enter their email address and they've obviously used Stripe somewhere else on the Internet, like, their information is already there. They they can try. And this is the same sort of idea in into the ecommerce world.

That's right. But the key difference is that Stripe is motivated to only keep it within Stripe.

Right.

And our network goes across processor. So we don't, we are not incentivized to push merchants in one direction or another.

Yep. Cool. Does that What's the, maybe we're getting a little bit into the weeds here, but like for for from a customer, what's the experience of this? So they come to a site for the very first time they're seeing a Rally Pay checkout for the very first time. What are their options in terms of like, you know, sign like, do does the user have to, like, opt in sign up for for a Rally Pay account?

Or how does that work? They do, but they don't have to do very much for it. So we'll have express payment options, PayPal, Apple Pay, and so on. So you could choose that. So what's happening right now in e commerce is you're in the New York area, so you'll get this, I think of it as easy pass,

easy pass

back in the Yeah, back in the day use across the Frog's Neck Bridge, there were 10 lanes of cash, and everyone's just sitting there like idiots. Then there was two lanes of easy pass and eight lanes of cash. And then you got an easy pass. And then you were one of the smart people. Eventually, it's like nine lanes of easy pass and one lane of cash.

Eventually it'll just be all easy pass. So that's happening in e commerce but slower than you'd expect. So there's still a majority of shoppers going through the fields of a checkout, first name, last name, address, city, state, zip, payment, credit card information and so on. And so what we want to do is put a basket underneath that. And so as a shopper, when you go through the checkout once with the fields, with your first name and last name and city and state zip and all that, there's just a little opt in box at the very end that says save my information for next time.

And if you have that checked out, then the next time you come back, as soon as you get to the checkout, you can either click the Rallypay button you see, or you can start typing your email address in. As soon as you type your email address in, if we recognize you from our database, we'll then cross it with your phone number, send you an SMS. And if you authenticate, then we know it's you and then we'll pull up all your payment information. You go to the third step, you don't have to do anything, you just click once. So it's just that across the web is really what we're trying to do.

So that's the first big feature category. The second one is innovations around payments. You know, for us, post purchase offers are one of those things that we innovated on and allowed merchants to make offers in between the checkout page and thank you page, which resulted in $200,000,000 of post purchase revenue. There are other things like checkout links that allow merchant to link directly from a landing page to a checkout that's unique to that landing page. So you can have hundreds and hundreds of checkouts instead of just one.

That's our hub and spoke approach that we call it. And there's other things you can do when you focus on the checkout and innovate there as opposed to worry about all the other stuff you need to build for your platform. Yeah, interesting. And then the last category for features is just that open ecosystem. So an open API everyone can build on, right?

We're building this for e commerce with like taxes and shipping and fulfillment and so on, but there's no reason you can't just wire this up to your, I don't know, digital product. So we just want to unleash and just let people do whatever they come up with, which is one of the great things about the web, right? You have an intention for your product and then people kind of do with it what you want. So we will work with headless platforms like Swell and builder. Those are our two, our first two partners.

And we'll also work with traditional platforms, that will have us like WooCommerce and B commerce and Salesforce and so on.

Very nice. Very nice. So, you know, you talked about this in previous episodes a little bit about how you're starting to talk to first customers, but also talking to agencies, also talking to platforms, integration partners. And even just now, introduced a few other players in that, like app developers, end users, customers who would sign up for Rallypay. So far I'm counting like five different target customers.

And I was afraid of a two sided marketplace, but I'm hearing like a five sided beast here. So how how are you navigating this? Like what what would be like the first priority? Do you need to get a lot of agencies on board with building this out for their clients or do you need to go straight to the brands themselves and and get them on board first? Like where do you start in terms of, like getting the first customers?

Yes. You're right that there are multiple parties involved and and there's really no avoiding that in e commerce. It's not just talk to the developers, and then it'll go bottom up from there. And it's not just talk to the marketing team, and then it just happens. There are multiple constituencies, the platforms you work with, the app developers that you need to integrate with, the agencies that build stuff for merchants and then the merchants themselves, and then among other things.

So the what to do first is really the question I've been wrestling with for months. I saw a tweet two days ago from David Sachs that like hit it right on the money for me. And what he talked about was founder go to market fit.

I saw that one. Yeah.

Okay. And, and that really, really helped me. I already knew what I wanted to do, but that really helped me have the confidence around like, yes, there's a reason I'm going about it this way because this is what fits for me. And the thing that fits for me is relationship building and building an alliance. And so it's this, it's this social coordination of people who are true believers and identifying who's going to go first, who is going to take this risk with us and start to build.

And so there are a few straightforward things, right? Talk to the big commerce team, integrate with the commerce. There's already a pool of customers there. Work with the big commerce success teams and show this to their merchants and then they jump on board. That's kind of like the most straightforward path.

And then there's the more complicated, which is I met the founder at Builder. Which is an amazing front end tool. I met the founder at swell.is, which is an amazing back end tool. I said, gents, we have the makings of a new stack. We have builder on the front end rally for the checkout and Swell for the backend.

And if you believe in me, I will bring you hundreds of millions of dollars in GMV. And so they were like, yeah, all right, sure. Well, let's let's see it. And now all of a sudden I'm driving leads to them and they're like, oh, maybe we should like have a conversation about making a deal together type of thing. So what should we do first?

The thing that's most likely to succeed, which is what fits for me. Not build a sales team, not do inbound marketing, not do content, the thing that fits best for me right now.

And that's like the, these like sort of like integration partners. I don't know if you'd call it like, would you call it like a direct integration or like sort of like a like a co marketing play? Like what would that sort of relationship I don't want to speak to any like specific things that you have actually happening, but like how do you approach that sort of thing? Like what do you look to actually get into place here? So there's like the traditional like integration marketing that I think of like, okay, your team builds something, their team builds something, they work well together, you feature each other's apps on your websites or in your in app marketplace, whatever it might be.

There's that. I think of like co marketing opportunities, like, like marketing to their list, your marketing to your list, cross selling, like how do you think about like what, what, what's your ideal outcome when you go into these sort of conversations?

You know, we're, we're trying not to get ahead of ourselves and trying to focus on the next hurdle. And the next hurdle is, proving that the checkout converts really well and drives additional revenue. And in order to prove that we don't need hundreds of merchants, we need a handful. And so we've kind of trimmed it down to, the goal isn't to get to 10,000,000 ARR. The goal is to just find five to 10 merchants that can process real revenue through the checkout.

And then what do we need to do in order to accomplish that? So the bottom line for us is we're not an e commerce platform. And so we need to partner with them. So we are partnering with BigCommerce as our first traditional platform and with Swell as our first headless platform. And those two give us the ability to say yes to merchants.

Other than that, it's just conversation. It's just, yeah, sounds great. You're on Salesforce. Amazing. We'll talk to you in six months.

But we need those first few merchants.

So your product is completely like BigCommerce ready and Swell ready. Whenever So you talk to a Swell customer or a BigCommerce customer, Rally

Exactly right. And that the other conversations aren't dependent on technology, right? You talk to an agency, you don't need to build a direct integration. So what we're about to experience is the severe pain of people wanting the product, but us not being able to say yes. And that that's going to be a few months of, okay, great.

You want to join? You need it ready before Q4. Tell us the list of third party apps that you need to use, whether it's Klaviyo and Postscript or whatever else. And then we're going to have to sprint to get those integrations done so that we can finally say yes. So, you know, we expect an exciting and frustrating few months.

Yeah. So

I mean, you know, now that it's out there, other than, you know, being able to talk publicly about it, like what what's actually changing? Where where are you exactly in your roadmap or path to shipping to first users? Like what what's that looking like for you right now?

I think it's time to spread the gospel and time to make sure as many people know about what we're doing as possible, ideally, the right people, not just many people. And on the product side, it's time to talk to real merchants and listen to what they actually need in order to be able to use the product and then start to prioritize the roadmap based on that. So, you know, we have an endless list of things that we should integrate with, but it would really be a lot healthier for us to integrate with these six things that this merchant right now that's doing $50,000,000 a year wants us to integrate with and is then committed to try it. So the roadmap is about to change toward reality. And I'm about to put more effort and more investment toward making sure that people know what we're doing.

And my goal with this in terms of launching is to lead with product and with ideas. So if you look at the Twitter thread, it's like, I did not talk about raising money. I didn't talk about, you know, being boastful about previous stuff. Like we really want to lead with product and ideas and attract people who are attracted to that. And so, know, that's like, that's my favorite stuff.

So I'm going go on podcasts and write blog posts. I have a few blog posts planned that like, will lay out our general thinking and vision for it. And then could go out and basically repeat myself hundreds of times in as many venues as will have me.

Awesome, man. Well, I am super excited for you. I can't wait to actually, like now we could actually talk about it on the show going forward. Know, we don't have to tiptoe around it.

Yes, well, thank you for kind of giving me the microphone there for a bit to talk about it. I'm obviously very, very excited. Thanks to everybody out there who's liking the tweet and all that and retweeting it and saying congrats. I appreciate it very much.

Yeah, very cool.

Exciting time. Alright. Well, let's let's turn it over to you, my friend. What's happening?

Well, you know, that message is still I'm I'm still seeing the positive signs week to week, still getting new customer conversions a couple every week now. And that's moving in the right direction and it and it's making me much more serious about like, not that I wasn't serious before Mhmm. But I'm starting to think a lot longer term now about Yeah.

How's the mentality changing? Like, from this is an experiment, we'll see what happens to, like

Okay. Like, I still I still have the the usual entrepreneur doubts about every little detail that could possibly go wrong, but I I just feel more optimistic about it now. How would I explain it? I I I guess I'm just starting to think much more long term. Right?

And I thought one of the things that I would start to maybe talk about today because it's completely on my mind in the last, like, two or three days is starting to think about my team with, with building zip message. Because I'm, I'm inching toward the phase here where, where it's like, like I'm already all in in terms of my hours. Like I already spend full time focus on on Zip Message, for the last few months and for the foreseeable future. But but to really go quote unquote all in, I need a team with me because there's just too much to do with just myself and frankly, it's it's not fun to to do everything myself. I my dream scenario, this has been the case for for years now, even before working on this particular product is is to get to a point where I where where I'm I'm basically starting a new company.

It's a software product company and I want it to be a small team. To start, me plus two, three, four people over the first few months into the first year, I'm sure it would naturally grow after that. But in the foreseeable future, I just envision like a small, high caliber, really good team of, you know, an engineer or two, a marketer or two, a designer here or there, and I sort of do all those things and fill in the gaps and and collaborate with with this team.

Can I just ask to go into that for a sec? Because my assumption is that the goal isn't numeric. It's not, you know, under 10 people. What are you trying to get? What's the vision for a company that makes you like, you know, put it together with a small team?

Is it just more manageable? Is it more enjoyable? Is it like, what is it?

I think it's, it's honestly, it's like the typical, I think it's pretty typical in our circles to want a profitable, growing, valuable asset in a SaaS business while keeping the headcount as low as possible. My goal is not to be like a solo, like solo forever. Right? I I do want to have a team of some kind, but I want that team to be small, like, you know, a a smaller headcount than than these large companies. In certain aspects I want, I want things to be a little bit different in this new venture than they've been for me with, with audience ops.

Okay. Audience ops is pretty unconventional on its own in structure.

And there are some things about audience ops that, that I feel pretty comfortable about. Actually, that's what I want to get into here because I've I've seen a lot of these tweets from from Josh Pickford and I've been reading, the writing from from Sahil from Gumroad. Both of them have been talking about this sort of newer approach to building a company and building a team. In a nutshell, know, the idea is there are no full time employees. Everybody is a part time contractor.

And I guess the thinking is pay a little bit higher hourly rate, but they have full autonomy over how many hours they want to work week to week, they could take vacation whenever they want because it's it's their they they own their own time. Mhmm.

So some trade offs there.

So you're you're decoupling like you're you're basically removing all the complexity and and lock in that a, that a w two employee employee salary thing thing comes about. And you know, frankly, is, this has been how I've built audience ops for the last six years. It, there was a short period in there early on when I did convert a couple of people to w two salaries. And within a few months I actually converted them back to ten ninety nines and they were on board for that and they, and they've continued. And the entire team has, has continued to be contractor status for years with audience ops.

And I'm gonna be completely honest, I've I've always felt a little bit like I shouldn't talk much about that.

Like it's, would be looked down on or isn't like a

Looked nice down on a little maybe operating in a gray area. It's not what most companies do. It's not what companies traditionally do, which is they hire full time salaries, right?

W-two, link up your health insurance to your employment and all the trade offs that go with that, pro and con.

Yeah and the idea of a lot of people think about hiring contractors as hiring freelancers, which the team on Audience Ops are freelancers. They are contractors. But a lot of people think about that like, I'm going to hire a freelancer to do a project, start to finish and then we're basically done. Maybe I'll work with them again in the future, but not a long term team member with me. But at audience ops, they are team members.

These are contractors who do work multiple days per week for multiple years on end. Like, they don't they don't go away for periods of time. They're there every day almost. And and they're they're putting in anywhere from five to ten hours up to twenty five, thirty hours a week for audience ops, you know? And it sort of varies by person and workload and their availability.

And they've got other things going on, either they're stay at home parents or they've got other freelance gigs,

the reasons are.

Or whatever it might be. That has worked incredibly well, think, for audience ops because it gives everybody sort of this freedom and a lack of overhead. I don't just mean financially. I mean like, dude, there

there was Structurally, your life, your business, all the legal all these implications. It's such an interesting thing.

The administration in The United States

Oh my god.

There was a period there back in 2016 when I had four different employees in four different states.

I know Of

course, are other people listening to this who probably have fifteen, twenty people in different states. And it's it's insane to to try to manage that stuff. At my small size, I don't have like an outsourced HR person or company. Yeah.

We, we couldn't do it without office engine.

But I did, but I did have to handle that and it, and it threw weeks of headaches out, like out the window of productivity just for me dealing with stupid and admin BS. Oh yeah.

State of Wisconsin. They just, they just keep sending me letters saying you owe $0 and zero. So just keep sending the letter over

and over and over Yeah.

So it's interesting that the stigma, the like slight embarrassment around doing that really should be flipped toward this is extremely voluntary.

Well, is what gets me excited about what Josh and Sahil have been publishing lately and as I read everything that they're writing and they're taking a little bit different approaches but I'm reading them and I'm just nodding my head like yes this has been the direction that has felt natural to me for the last few years. Finally they're talking more publicly about this and making it a bit of a movement in the way that these startup companies, just like, you know, just like funding is, is, is there's a ton of new options on the table now. I feel like the way that you grow a small team and work with a small team and in what capacity, there are all new ways of looking at that. And, you know, and I just think that there are a lot of highly skilled, talented, experienced professionals who, maybe not everyone would be this way, but there is some segment of them who prefer to have this sort of work arrangement where they you know, because I think part of the deal as Josh explains it is like the best high caliber people, they're just way too expensive to hire full time.

Yeah, and sometimes they they put a premium on their freedom. You know, we have these two UI designers at Rally. So comforting to finally be able to say the name. And I have tried to hire them, and they are not interested and they really value their freedom. And now we have this very healthy, like voluntary relationship.

Like you're not forced to be here. I'm not forcing you. Like there's no coercion of any type in the relationship. It is truly voluntary and we keep working together because we enjoy it.

Right. Yeah. And you know, the other, the other point of like friction, whenever I think about the prospect of like, okay, I want to form a small team to work with me on unzip message. But then there's, there are all these little points of friction like, well, what would it mean to hire somebody as a full time w two employee? A lot of that is like just the sheer number of hours, right?

Like it's a little bit daunting to me to think about like, well, if I hire somebody for, for a marketing role, which is one of the small group of people that I'm thinking about, at least one of them would be in some sort of marketing capacity. Do I have actual forty hours per week to give to this person? And the answer is no, you know, because Maybe

not this week, maybe next week, but not the week after. And the week after will be different. Yeah. There's gonna be

different projects month to month. There's gonna be different things to do. And and definitely what I've found, this has absolutely been the case in audience ops and it's been with my other work, high caliber people can get a ton of really, really good work done in twenty hours a week. And if you read the job descriptions that Josh Pickford is putting out for Maybe and Gumroad and these other companies, they're stating in the thing, this is a twenty hour a week position. You could work up to thirty five hours if you want.

There will be that, that flex and, and we can get into like the, you know, there's a lower rate if you yeah. Want more than But, but like I have seen that where I work with people on a retainer. They, they do amazing work for me in a part time capacity,

two, three days a week. Yeah. And they don't need the 40.

They don't need the 40 and, and I don't need to feel the pressure of like, oh, I gotta, I gotta fill this person up with work to do to keep them productive and pay and and utilize their salary or all that, you know? And that, and that was one of the reasons I went back in, in audience ops years ago, went back to October is because people's workloads fluctuate as, as their availability and as our needs as a business fluctuate. That's, that's part of the beauty of, of this flexibility, you know?

This is why it's a, it's great when people kind of learn and work in public and it gives other people almost permission to be okay with the thoughts that they're having and the way they're going about it. Yeah, it's interesting that those two people in particular, I see both of them as they don't really have to do anything. They're not forced into anything, right? Josh just had a nice exit. Sahil has been doing well for a long time with Gumroad.

And that gives you the ability to choose. It's not like, okay, you don't have a business yet, you've raised $5,000,000, and now you have like build go. These are people who can choose how to go about it. And they've done some things in the past that inform what they're doing now. And it also feels like they have the confidence to say, well, I'm going to ignore what I'm supposed to do.

I'm going to do what I actually think I should do. And they're going about it differently. But generally speaking, the approach is the same in that not just following the default. Well, everyone's got to be w two. And then contractors are like second class citizens compared to the w two employees.

They're throwing that out. They're not dealing with that guilt and those weird assumptions and all, you know, whatever society has built up in our heads around how things should work in a company.

Yeah. I mean, think, I think as, as the years go on in this industry, lot, a lot of the stuff that, that has always felt like it made a little bit more sense, but but goes untalked about is is just becoming out in the open. I mean, there was the time years ago when working remotely was a little bit weird, you know? Like, oh, you're supposed to get an office. But no.

We're we like, but but why why do I have to get an office again? Because this And works really then and then there was the whole thing of like outsourcing or overseas. Right? Working with working with people overseas. Right?

People did it. People hired people in India and Europe and Asia and everywhere for many years before they started really talking openly about it, at least in this industry. Now it's a completely accepted thing. My developer is in India and we ship, I believe really good product every single day. And it's been fantastic.

And maybe people associate it with like, I don't know. I don't even want to give credence to that version because the criticism is like criticism on behalf of someone else. Like, oh, you're not paying them the right way. Like, first of all, you don't speak for them. So a lot of these assumptions are, yeah, don't know if we should really pay attention to them anymore because so many of them have been proven And to be

really what I'm describing is like really more and more like years ago, like now it's just become a normal thing, right?

So why not just go the whole way is really what you're saying? Why not just build a company?

I think this is maybe not a huge movement but this idea of like companies forming a team, I do call them a team, not just like hired guns here and there, but like actual team members who are working with you on a regular basis long term for hopefully many years, but in a contractor capacity and their hours can can go up and down based on their needs, based on our needs as the business. And and that just sorts like that has sort of always made a little bit more sense to me and, and the alternatives felt like there's a ton of extra friction that I just didn't want. It just has me thinking because like, since, since ZipMessage is at the very beginning of this journey, hopefully it will continue to, to grow and I'm, and I'm trying to make plans and mapping out the course for, well, how would I fund something like that? And how would I, who, who exactly would I need to hire and when and in which capacity and to do what? I'm starting to think think through those things and, and and, you know, I don't have any, like, firm decisions on anything yet, but it's but the product is going well enough that that I'm starting to think a little bit about, like, what what are the next big pieces that I needed to start putting into place here?

Also assume that six months from today, things will be different. And so whether you're hiring contractors or w two employees or will change the way you do that, it really feels like the most important thing is the company culture, and how you treat people. And if you decide from the beginning to treat everyone the same, whether they're a w two or a contractor, they're domestic or international, then that's really the core of it. If if you go about it with a philosophy that that people should have side projects or the only one, certain amount, I feel like you can work toward like really how you want things to look. But if you're going to go about it open ended, it really feels like the company culture is the center of the whole thing and how you treat people.

And then from there flexibility.

You know, that's something that, that is also on my mind. And I feel like it's something that I could, I could just do better as, as the leader, this time around than, than I did or continue to do with audience ops. I I wouldn't say we have a bad culture. I I would just say that in some ways we we just lack a culture. It's it's it's a it's team of 25 people in a Slack chat.

You know, we do some fun things. We share photos of our kids and stuff like that, but it's doesn't really go far beyond that, you know? And we all just do really good work. We're all really good professionals and, and, and that's and, and people like the, the deal that, that audience ops offers, which is steady quality retainer for years on end to help you balance out the freelance ups and downs. With this next thing, since it is a SAS product company, I'm viewing it differently and I would like it to be different.

I want it to be a smaller head count

Mhmm.

And we are interacting much more

Stronger culture.

Stronger culture. It it will still be remote, but I would love the type of thing where we're all traveling to a location three or four times a year to do some work together, some fun together, different locations. That would be really cool. Like that that's sort of a dream of mine is is to we're we're building a great product together. We're we're talking.

Know, I I I'm still totally of the asynchronous mindset of like most meetings don't need to be meetings. They could be async. We would still carry most of that through, but we should be interacting much more. And so then that also gets into like, well, where should people be based? North America makes it easier to,

Yeah, time zones.

Well, time zones. I actually think about it a little bit more in terms of like traveling. Really? I mean, I could just go

with time zones and culture. It's difficult to build culture when time zones are,

I could sort of deal with, you know, Europe to America time zones on when it's, when we're talking about calls, other time zones, makes it much more difficult. Like, you know, is very difficult or parts of Asia and things like that. But if we were to travel and get together a couple of times a year, you know, the shorter distance people are flying, easier that is to pull off. There's still just a lot of open questions about this model that Josh and Sahil are talking about. Mean, Sahil actually had in one of his writing, he's like, one of the drawbacks of this is that we don't socialize all that much.

We sort of just do our do our work together and we'll link to some of the things that that they've posted. But I would like to find a way to make that sort of model work, but we do socialize somehow. Like there there is an element of company culture.

You want people to identify that they're part of the company and part of the team. They might also be part of something else and other things, but you do want them. And I think that's the company culture is at the heart of it. And then what you, I think a requirement is that the person understands and that the expectations are aligned. Because if you get someone that really wants to work with you and is saying, I'll be a contractor with the hope that they really want a full time job, that's when things will come out of line.

Yeah, exactly. Like I've been reading, you know, Josh has been making his company handbook public for Notion, for maybe, right? Man, he really takes working in public to a whole level. Seriously, seriously.

It's so impressive.

It's just like it's right there in the job ad. It's right there in the handbook Like this is this is how we compensate. Here's why we do it. Here's the here's the thinking behind it. We're still figuring out these parts like work in progress, but you know, if you're if if this is if this speaks to you, that's what we're about here.

And it does speak to me in terms of a a business owner. That that's what's on my mind, but at the end of the day, I I still need I we're we're I need to ship features every single day. Oh my god. Like that's that's the tough thing right now. I tweeted this the other day.

Once you have users, you know, there's the the the a new SaaS product goes through these phases. A few months, you're just building it pre pre users. Right? You you know which things you wanna build in the MVP to get you to, okay, now it's time to invite users. Once you start inviting users, which I have for about three or four weeks now, then I'm just barraged with feature requests and bug reports and

Now you're ready.

And and goals on our roadmap that we know we wanna ship. And literally every single day, I'm shifting around the priorities because it's like, oh, three more people asked for that, so now we gotta bump that to the top of the list. And oh, that person ran into this bug that's probably gonna affect almost everybody else, so now we have to fix that.

Like Yeah. You you've been cooking in the kitchen in isolation, and now all of sudden you have people at tables asking for, for their meals and it's much harder to come up with new stuff. It's much harder to sell. It's much harder to do anything when you're engaged with real people trying to get them what they need. So you're in it.

And we've got, know, in our GitHub board, like my developer has a queue, I have a queue of features and issues to tackle in the product and those queues have been just piling up. I just keep throwing stuff into his stuff, throwing stuff into my own queue And I mean, yesterday and today I was able to clean out a whole bunch of those cards, but you know, but we, but I did manage to ship, some really good stuff yesterday and today. So now like now you can get notified when somebody has viewed your, your message. You know, people have been asking for like, how can I set different defaults for screen versus camera and stuff like that? So now that's all in there.

The other thing that I'm really excited about with zip message, Again, part of the reason why I I'm starting to feel a lot more optimistic about this is, you know, I've been talking about async communication and what I'm starting to notice is that I do feel the hunger and the demand in the market for people who want, who are already wanting to do asynchronous communication. But in some ways, in some of these use cases, they haven't quite yet because the tools aren't quite right for it, but they, but when they see zip message and they're talking to me about zip message or they're giving me feature requests because they're already using zip message, It, it brings out, it brings this out

of them.

Like it brings out these, these reaction. Well, it like brings out this hunger for more ways to do asynchronous communication, you know, like, Oh, we have a 100 applicants for this job I'm trying to fill, but instead of doing interviews with them, it would be great if I can get some pre interviews asynchronously and then commit to the stuff like that.

That's a good use case,

you know? Or, or I've got this podcast. I would love to take questions from the audience or I've got a membership and like, so, so I'm hearing all these different things and there've also been some, some feature requests that are really interesting that I had not even thought of in the original vision for the product. And they're real differentiators. They're not like requests like, Oh, Loom does that thing.

Can you also do that thing? It's there are things that differentiate it even more from a Loom and they're asking about it because it doesn't exist in other products.

Right. Loom's not going to listen to them.

And I've heard five to seven people all request the same thing that doesn't exist. And I'm like, wow, that's like, yeah. There, there are things like that that, that I'm like, and it's an obvious, like really great idea for a feature that I, you know, I hadn't even thought of. So there's, just something brewing that like it's drawing this out of people, you know? Yeah.

I'm really excited about that.

The best advice I was given on fundraising before going into fundraising was that you are not trying to convince anyone. You are simply looking for people who already agree. And that feels like it's a good analogy for when you're first launching a product. You don't really want to have to convince people. You do want to find those early people who just see it and say, that's what I've been looking for.

That's what I had in mind also. I can't believe you finally built it. That reaction is the core and better focus on them than trying to convince the larger market. But this goes back to the classic, like, just find a small pool of people who are crazy about your product and focus on them. And that is a better path than trying to convince the larger market that feels like a bigger opportunity.

Yeah, I guess just to sort of loop back to something that I talked about in previous episodes, I've been getting some feedback. Thank you folks for some people have been posting to zipmessage.com/bootstrappedweb which, which you can, you know, still do and, and, and we're getting those messages. But, a few people have been responding to a few weeks back, a few episodes back I was talking about like maybe niching down to, maybe just coaches and, and, and, or maybe finding one of those tight niche verticals to focus zip message. I have since come around that like at least right now it is horizontal. I sort of have to just embrace that.

It's, it's a horizontal product solves several different problems all related to asynchronous communication, but there's a lot of common use cases that I'm hearing from people. And I mean, there there's a lot of repeated ones too. I would I would probably boil it down to five or six, but they're different. And and most users are using them for multiple use cases.

So it doesn't doesn't feel right to

It does it doesn't feel right to to really lean to have, like, change up marketing copy or or or or start building features that are super specific to one vertical. Like that that doesn't make sense right now. Yeah. I think you'll end

up with sub pages that address individual the most popular use cases. If you think about a CRM, you know, then it's the CRM for X and Y and Z and you can show a specific use cases and testimonials that are applicable to that. Yeah, don't think you need to

worry I about that do want to get into, and this is one of those like marketing things that I want to be doing, but there's only one of me and I don't have a marketing person to be doing this, but like I want to be start, I want to start running targeted niche vertical marketing campaigns to landing pages and that sort of thing just to start to see what's like an outbound engine. Cause right now I'm so focused on the inbound interest and the early access list and product and features that, it's hard to balance that, but that's, that's where it's headed. You know, it's just like so many different things to get going and put together all at the same time. And it's, it, that is, it is rough being a, being a solo founder sometimes.

Well, that's exciting. If you are a freelancer listening and think you can help, I think this might be a good opportunity.

Yes. Like real quick on the people thing before we finish up here. I, so I expect at some point there will be an engineer role, like a full stack engineer, that I would look to bring in to, to help guide the tech on this. But on the marketing side, that's harder to pin down into one person. And I'm I'm starting to think of it a lot more like at least two different people.

And one in my mind, and this is super raw, so I'm figuring this out, but one of those roles is what I'm thinking of as like a media producer. So like somebody who could do podcasts, who could do videos, who could be on camera, be on microphone, produce that stuff, go out and find and interview people and really make great original media content. I feel like that's going to be an important part. Like run public AMAs with people, you know, there's a community aspect to that as well and social media. That's that's one type of talent, right?

There's another marketing talent that is knows every in and out of Google Analytics and SEO optimization and HREFs and finding where the opportunities are for and and and conversion rate optimization on every step in the funnel. Super analytical, super technical and sort of just guiding that whole side of the marketing. Right? There's like the creative, which I'm thinking of like a media producer and a technical marketer in my mind. And I think those are two different people.

I don't think that either of them is a full time person. I think both of them could be part time regular long term people. But I'm giving a lot of thought to what those roles might look like. And I might start to look around in the next few weeks.

So yeah, I hear you. We are, you know, we haven't done anything on the sales and marketing side up until now. So we're in the same boat thinking about, okay, well, what do we need? What do we need now? Not what are we going need six months from now or twelve months from now?

It's really about what do we need right now to get to that next step? Roles are very specific to what you think makes sense for your business right now. Is, it is it is there. It's not just a generalist to come in and do quote marketing. It's it's pretty specific.

And that's, you know, again, it gets me back to one of those friction points of the idea of investing in funding like a full time w two role. Well, I'm going to hire one marketer, that it makes you lean towards wanting to find a generalist who can who you can pack in all these different skill sets under one salary. Right? But that's not realistic and it's not optimal. It it it would be better to have two or three marketing people each with different specialties.

Right? But then you can't fund a full time w two salary for all three of those people. Right? So then it's like that that's where it gets back to like, wow, this this model just makes a lot more sense. So, you know.

I like it. Good, man.

Yeah. So this is a good episode. Rallyon.com. We we know what it is. We can

Yes. Yes. I'm relieved. I feel like I can be myself again. Yeah.

So that's it's it's a big relief and very exciting and good to hear progress on your side. A lot of interesting stuff coming up over the next few weeks. Thanks everybody for listening so much. Later, folks.

See you.