Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrap Web. Mister Brian Castle, how are we on this Friday afternoon?

Doing good. I am officially fully vaccinated. My second shot yesterday.

I'm unnaturally excited for Memorial Day weekend.

Yeah. The Knicks are in the playoffs. I mean, 2021 is turning out to be a pretty good year compared to last year.

Yeah. There we go. There we go. Yeah. Don't watch sports anymore but I do see old tweets about the next.

That's kinda cool. I'm just excited to get out and be social. You know? We have like a pool thing and a strawberry picking thing and a block party and at someone's house in the evening. It's like, my god, a whole weekend of social activity.

I'm just very excited. Yeah.

Yeah. So you know, we've got some things. I think it's been a couple of weeks since we since we recorded.

I don't know what the excuses, but we're sorry. What do we got? I am in execution mode, right? There was a lot of planning and all this other stuff. Now it's really about, okay, we made the announcement.

The product is out there and really use that to kickstart some momentum. At this stage, the product isn't ready for people to sign up for and use what that really means is an enormous number of conversations. And I'm not surprised at all that this is, this is like me at my happiest. Doing three calls a day somehow makes me really happy and excited. Maybe other people don't like doing calls.

Completely opposite for me,

but yes. And maybe for most people, but that's kind of how, know, I'm an extrovert. It just makes me so excited. And for a long time with Rally, it was a lot of idea formulation in isolation, not that many conversations with external parties, friends and people that I keep in touch within the industry and certain merchants and other people I'm became friends with through partnerships and that sort of thing. But generally speaking, it was in isolation.

Then to take all that and make it public and then start to have these conversations and really start to map our internal assumptions with what people are really saying and feeling. And it's like, it's a relief that it feels like we're right. You know, it would be not as exciting.

The early conversations are exciting to have. The thing that that bums me out is when I have like just a lot of repetitive like sales calls. I used to be doing sales calls for audience ops and I'm no longer doing those. Have a salesperson in place now so that has opened up so much space in my calendar. So then the only calls that I ever have are usually customer research calls for zip message or talking to somebody that I might be working with soon, hiring soon or something like that.

But even then, since it's zip message, a lot of this, a lot of the interaction that I'm having with customers is through zip message and we're having these asynchronous conversations using Zip Message and on video and everything and going back and forth and it's I don't mean to be the guy who's just promoting his own shit on his Dog podcast but

food.

But like really dog fooding it and like and I'm talking to people who are currently in their trial for ZipMessage, right? Like that's one of the things is I go through the list of people trialing and I send them a message into their ZipMessage account and then we start back and forth. And I've been doing a lot of those and actually the more I do those, it's sort of addicting to really embrace the asynchronous nature because then every now and then I have a live zoom call on my calendar and that's like a little bit more painful than, you know, knowing that I'm still having all these other interactions, but like, Oh, I have to actually like show up this afternoon for this thing

at a certain time. My proximity does it message. It hasn't planted it in my head. And now that it's there, it just, I keep bumping into it because I like a zoom call, but that is to meet someone maybe for the first time. And it's like a email back and forth.

You set a time and then you meet, you meet there. With the team, I recently and I can actually talk about this as one of the topics. I laid out my go to market strategy around integration partnerships and I didn't know how to do that other than Slack. So I went to Slack and I wrote almost like a blog post inside of Slack so that the engineering and product teams could really see what the plan is. So they can map that back to the features they're building and the priority that they're looking at and why we're going about it a certain way because this is the plan.

You are building and making this strategy possible then we're going to go execute it in this way. And I thought to myself, I should be doing that much more regularly. Slack is very limited. And so I bump into it again. I'm like, well, okay, then we need something Zip Message where I can make the message go out without having to call a meeting and telling people let's all show up cause they're in Europe.

It's not cool. It has to be really critical to ask people to gather around at 6PM so that I can talk to them about something. It's really not necessary almost all the time.

Yeah. And next week we're coming out with our direct Slack integration for for ZipMessage. That's what I've been working on this week.

Can you just talk about how that works real quick?

Yeah. One second.

Okay, cool.

Because the other cool thing about it is like you said to have to sort of combine a live Zoom call with the asynchronous follow-up or preparation before the call. So I'm talking to someone who I might hire and work with soon for a long term position. I could talk more about that later in this episode but so it was the first time I met him. So we had a live call and had a really good conversation but then there's a lot of follow-up questions and things to hash out about us working together so we did all that over zip message for the past few days and like we really moved the ball forward like quite a bit without having to do like a second call and a third. Like we'll probably have another zoom call at some point, but it covers so much more ground and we're in different time zones too.

And so it helps. But on, on the product front, the last week, I've been focused on building this Slack integration. It's been a really popular request. We have so many features that we need to do. A lot of them are like kind of small but like there's just a lot of little things that a lot of them are requests, A lot of them are obvious improvements that we need to make.

And I started to like kind of prioritize in the roadmap board and GitHub, started to like sort of tag them like this feature would help with converting new customers whereas this feature would help with making current customers happier, a better experience. This feature is small, should take like half a day to ship. This feature is still shaping and we need time on it. So mostly I'm prioritizing the ones that would convert customers because that's probably the most important thing right now. But at the same time there's some that like if you're trialing and there's certain parts of the experience that are not that are a little rough or don't need to be as frustrating or missing certain things that are sort of obvious, you know, we need to build that stuff too, to help them convert from trialing to paid, right?

So it's just a constant battle of picking which features to work on today versus four days from now or you know, and then of course mix into that a thousand bugs that come up and like which ones of those are like showstoppers, which ones of those we could tackle later.

Do you have a sprint cadence you've established? One week, two week, four week?

It's not super organized. It's just me and my one developer. Basically it's all me deciding what to do when and then I have a, I give him a queue of issues to tackle.

Just takes them in the order that I set. The order is important.

Yeah. And I'm constantly shifting things around like on the board like, like before you work on that, work on this and I'm basically the head of product on this. So I, I spend a lot of time every single day hashing out, you know, the plan for how we're implementing features, reviewing his work, going back and testing and and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. That that matrix you were talking about between how difficult it is to finish and what does it accomplish, know, attracting new customers, keeping existing customers, keeping people from leaving, converting more, that sort of thing. Mean that's

because it is at the point now where the core concept for ZipMessage is built. Like you can have a full conversation, video, audio screen, text, all that is in there And now it's about like really taking it to the next level and filling in the gaps. And this Slack integration is, is one of those things where it's like, there's a little bit of friction if you're, if you're having a conversation in zip message and you're also communicating in Slack, how do you keep those in sync? And so, so he's, he's working on some stuff with the recorder side of it and I've been my, just myself working on the Slack integration which has been fun for the last week. And so it's kind of cool because it'll be a two way sync, right?

So if you post something in zip message, it shows up in Slack. If you post something in Slack, it shows up in zip message, but it, but it uses the threading in Slack. So when you start a conversation in zip message, it becomes a thread

in in Slack also. So it doesn't doesn't need to be like its own Slack channel? Like a Zip

Message No, can choose which channel to

And just drop it in. That starts a combo.

Yeah. Starts a threaded conversation in Slack.

So here's a question for you. When I hear that, I immediately think, okay, how do I get the ideal is how do I get Slack to tell all their customers about us? Right? That's like the ideal that I would shoot for. And then oftentimes that might a not happen.

Sometimes the company's just too big. They're not going to pay attention to you. Or b, it might take six months of a relationship building before that happens. And so slightly less ideal is how do I go the other way? How do I go bottom up?

How do I tell existing Slack users about it? Maybe they have an app store and then how do I identify people who are succeeding with it and then use that to not pressure, but convince the larger company that yes, this does deserve your attention. That is basically what I wrote to the team that I just talked about in, in the go to market strategy that it's basically that. Here's why we are integrating with four different front ends and four different back ends because this is what we do. We integrate, then we shoot for the ideal, then we go from bottom up and then hopefully the bottoms up helps achieve the ideal.

And that is that's your marketing of one to many without an existing audience.

So you know Slack does have an app store and Zip Message will have an app on like I'm building that app right now through this integration. One of the cool things, I did not realize this until I got into building it, I haven't really seen any other platforms do this, Slack gives you a meta tag that I can put in the code base for zip message. So if you're ever in a Slack and you've probably seen this in Slack,

Yes, Zoom. Is that what you mean? Like a shortcut?

Well, yeah. We will have that like zip message. But before you ever even install the zip message app in your Slack, if you mention zip message in your Slack, it prompts you to say, hey, there's an app for that. Oh, I didn't know that. Think you can I think it might be if anyone ever shares a zip message link, like a zipmessage.com URL link and

Yes? Okay.

In a Slack channel, the little Slack bot will pop up and say, hey, there's a zip message app for Slack.

Do you

want to install it?

Bot is it can be a little intrusive, right? A little bit. The only time I really find it intrusive is when it's repetitive. Like, I know don't give me the same warning message again or like, no I don't want to like, can I just say I don't want Google docs integration forever? Please stop asking me.

That, yeah and I don't use the Slack desktop app. I use it in the browser. How many times? Yeah I know. I'm weird like that.

Why? Like in the browser. I don't know. I use the iOS app but I don't use the desktop.

Oh interesting. I kind of use as many desktop apps.

So I have to say like no to the desktop app like 20 times. He really doesn't want the desktop.

Yeah. But when it's helpful, it's kind of fascinating because it's really, it's like surfacing their docs inside of the product. I very rarely go to slack.com and look around their app store but I will go from the desktop app into slack.com into my admin to approve, let's say zoom and then come back out. And it's shockingly good how the bot just allows that entry and then you come right back into the app.

Yeah. Like the way that I think about integrations generally is it's more about does it solve sort of a customer problem but also a customer conversion prop like I see it as like this converts more customers because they need that integration in order for this to be a tool that they will adopt.

Right, like you have to check that box in the sales process in their heads of will they work with my existing flow?

Yeah. Like I don't necessarily take it from like a marketing first approach as in terms of like a reason to build an integration. There might be exceptions to that, but like the way that I'm thinking of in terms of integrations right now, Slack is the first one that we're releasing. Probably Zapier will be the second one. Cause that opens the door to a lot of like possibilities.

And then a lot of people have been asking for help scout integration.

Which,

Yeah. Which, which I would use too. And so I could see that happening like a direct help scout integration. The only other one that's sort of an integration would be like doing a browser extension so that you can fire up a zip message from anywhere.

Yeah. That sounds like a feature that would help keep existing customers to make them happier.

Yeah. Yeah. So that like on the integrations front, like those four, like the Slack, Zapier, Help Scout and browser extension, That's all I have on the list for now of like probably will build in the next few weeks and months. Anything else, it's gotta be a really good reason to build it.

Like Jira, something else.

Cause there's plenty of other big features that we're going to build like, transcriptions and a bunch of other stuff that people are asking for. So, you know, it's about where, where do I put the dev hours on this, you know? And, and, you know, it's, we're dealing with video. So while I was working on the Slack integration, my developer is working on how do we speed up the video upload time? How do we make that more reliable?

How do we make it work in all the browsers in all situations? Like there's a lot of little things like that to put dev hours on.

Is there a lot of tech to build there or is it really choosing the right services and vendors and that type of thing and at least being efficient with the video that

you use.

A lot of it is like there's new abilities in the browser that we're able to take advantage of now that probably weren't there like one or two years ago. It is harder to make work consistently reliable all the time and have you know like Safari is the one that gives us the most problems right now and there are some edge cases where we have to have a good fallback option like if you're on this older version of Safari then we need to tweak the experience in this way so that you're not completely lost. You know, there's little things like that that we need to sort of smooth out.

We have an issue with the Brave browser but because it's only an issue in the admin, we can just say don't use Brave for the admin. Right. But you can't say don't use Safari for the admin because you're a user's user.

Might be It's customer facing. Yeah. It's not unusable in really all browsers including mobile. Like it works on mobile too. It's just not quite as smooth as the newest version of all

the browsers, you know?

But you know, there's, there's stuff like that. And then there's, you're also dealing with video and the person's current internet connection and if that drops out while they're recording you know we've got to have fallback situations for that you know. Oh yes. Cool.

And and when you look ahead at the roadmap does it start to tell you where the limits are of what you and the one engineer can do and like who you would hire or do you think about hiring on the on the marketing side before engineering?

I do plan to hire on the marketing side first before I double up the engineer but I'm sure we will grow the engineering

team at some point too.

Yeah. But but I would say the the more of the the need in the company is would be marketing stuff and I could talk more about that here but that's where I plan to put more resources.

Cool. I mean, yeah, why don't we take the conversation there because the, if it feels like both of us are thinking that we just had a lot of need on the engineering product side that was unavoidable for our type of a product. So we have 12 people on product and engineering before any marketers which is a weird thing and you know, very different just from raising money.

I'm just curious about that actually because I've never worked with that many or leading a tech team of that many people. The most I've worked at with any given time on my own stuff is like three developers max. Right? So I mean I know you have like Rock is like the CTO. What is that in terms of like organizing who's working on what and the sprints and everything?

Yeah. There's a VP of product and then a product manager. So two people on product. And then you have a back end team. And the back end team consists of three back end right now.

Then we have a front end team and that's another three and one of them is is experienced and so she's really in the lead role there which is really really helpful. And then we have DevOps and that's just one person with another person helping. Yes, I think I have that right. And then we have QA. In QA we just have one and so he's kind of you know, setting up all the systems for deployments and security and all that stuff and automated testing.

And it already has different requirements in terms of leadership. So really the thing we've been working on is getting deployments right. So we worked on our development servers for a while and just pushed things out to production. So now that we're playing in production, the process is now paramount. We have to get the process right because what we're doing is we're telling, you know, we're thinking a little bit into the future from our experience with the cart hook checkout.

We know once you have merchants processing tens of millions of dollars in revenue every week, then all of sudden your deployment process is fraught with danger and you cannot mess it up. And so we're, we are prematurely imposing a very high level of discipline in that process now in anticipation. So now we already have these things coming up around well, which roles do we need? You know, we don't want Rock to do everything. Well, one of the things it's not that he did everything, but he was a very critical element in the whole thing and the deployment process.

Somebody for the middle of the night call.

Yes, yes. We're trying to lower that a little bit. So that's what it looks like now. And these teams are working on their own projects and they're working with products to identify what they should be working on. And the product people along with Rock are making sure that the coordination between front end and back end people are working in the same direction.

But it is, it gets weird because if you have one feature that requires both back end and front end work, maybe the front end work is a day and the back end work is six days. Then you're pulling and pushing and then asking people to stop what they're doing so you can get this feature deployed. And that side of things, that magic on how people take code and coordinate together on a single feature, I have no idea how people are able to do that and it is just magic to me. That's like where my respect for the engineering side is because I just do not, If you tell me one person with a computer working on stuff, deploying, testing, I can wrap my mind around that. When you start to talk about a bunch of people on coordination, all in different time zones, all in different things and then how that works with GitHub like and everyone pushing things and pull requests, that stuff is just, it's just magic.

I do not understand. It's amazing.

Yeah. I mean, just the technology of Git is still completely blows my mind.

Right. The branches, like how does it work? How actually does work?

Yeah. And just the fact that I have two different Macs that I work from and then there's my developer's machine and we can check-in and check out code and different branches and then merge it and push, which is amazing. But it's still just us. I love being in the product. That's my sweet spot in terms of where I work best.

I like day in, out, knowing because we go wrote this on Twitter the other day that a really good developer, at least for the way that I work, they have to be a really great writer because we are hashing out technical details in writing. That's what we're doing every day.

Yeah. Much more critical than verbal on that side of things. It's gotta be

Yeah, think so because it's a, it leaves no room for miscommunication. We literally choose every word really carefully so that we are both 100% on the same page about how this interaction is going to work from, from the whole flow front to back.

Yeah. The precision required in the language, especially when you have a team of people who speak different languages as their native tongues gets, gets a little hairy, but it is better when it's written because it levels the playing ground just because you're not comfortable speaking in English because you never do it. That doesn't really matter nearly as much as being able to write out your thoughts precisely.

Yeah. Mean, think part of the reason we we've been able to ship things so quickly over the last couple of years between process kit and zip message is, I really can't think of a time at all when we built the wrong thing because there was a miscommunication. I like I know that a lot of teams sort of have that issue sometimes.

That's rare.

The times when things take longer it's because we ran into technical complexity that it just turned out to be a little bit more tricky than, than we had, than our original research showed. But you know, most of the time it's like, okay, we do this analysis. We completely understand each other. We know this is going to take four days to build. We build it.

There's some bugs. We fix them. We ship it.

I would say not only was that not the case for us at Cardhook, that was one of the biggest obstacles because we had a team, right called, just say 25 people. It varied between like nineteen and twenty seven depending on the time and so on. But one of our biggest challenges was the communication between the marketing, customer support, customer success, and then giving the requirements over to engineering. Then what came out of engineering, if it was just a few degrees off that that was a regular problem for us. We created buffer zones between when things were ready and when things were actually deployed so that the customer facing teams were able to see it and give feedback.

And we, we really try to do that. It's not, it's not easy. The, as soon as the team grows and that's like one example of how things slow down as soon as you start to hire, you're like, Oh, we need more muscle. We're going hire people. We're going to go faster.

And that's just, it's just not the way it works.

Yeah. But you can't give everybody the rights to push to staging or production. And that's where I don't even know what it's like to have a team like that. The one thing that, that like we're really fast right now with ZipMessage but like ProcessKit since day one we're writing full test coverage for every single feature. I think that was a huge process kit that we're taking to ZipMessage but we're not getting up to like continuous deployment things quite yet with Zip Message.

So if the hire is gonna be in marketing, do you have a good feel for what that person is going to be responsible for? Or is it hire someone and let them lead?

Yeah. So I mean, I'm doing a lot of thinking right now about what this company that I'm building is going to shape up to be in terms of what our focus as a company and product and our strategy around marketing. I've had a bit of a evolution on this just in the last few weeks, I guess. Put out a tweet that, you know, sort of made the rounds two weeks ago. It started with, you know, a general frustration with b to b SaaS marketing in general.

It just feels harder in 2021 and murkier and there's a lot of little things that obviously still need to be done from an SEO standpoint, from from an optimist, from a conversion rate optimization, from onboarding to your copy, to your understanding of the customer and all that kind of stuff. That stuff is, you know, we're, we've got plenty of work to do on all those fronts. We'll be working on that. I've come to the conclusion that like really the way to build a really strong product company is to build a really strong brand and that that term brand gets thrown around a lot like oh whatever it's just a logo doesn't matter or what do you think your Pepsi you're gonna put up billboards and Yankee Stadium or something like that like like no, that's not really what I'm getting at. I think that just in general, the things that you are known for on the internet, whether it's you personally, whether it's the personalities on your team, whether it's just the general output from your company, you are known for something whether you want to be known for something or not.

Yes. You define it or they define it. What are another?

Either they define it or you define it and there's a lot of I I would say the majority of SaaS companies who don't care to define themselves in any way and and they also fall into they don't get defined because they're just doing everything that everyone else is doing. The same type of blog posts, same type of PPC funnels, the same type of SEO plays and stuff and like some of that stuff is is still good to do especially when there's a good opportunity to to tackle. But I just want to put out better stuff. Raise the quality bar. Make it more interesting for our people and make it different.

It has to be different. It has to be better than anything you've seen before and it has to be like memorable and worth talking about. You don't talk about even if something executed really well, you don't talk about it unless it was different and better and so that got me thinking to like, alright, the types of things that we should be investing in when it comes to brand and creating really awesome stuff on the internet these days in 2021 tends to look like podcasts, tends to look like video content and then repurposing a lot of that stuff in different ways. And even doing that, doing podcasts and video content in new and interesting and different ways. And the idea of like lean into your strengths, right?

Like for you know, business development, integrations, relationships, networking. For me, looking back through all of my products ever, a lot of them on the form, it has like, how did you hear about audience ops? How did you hear about process kit? 90% plus say, heard you on a podcast. Either your podcast or you were on somebody else's podcast, right?

And so this idea of audience, so I'm not really trying to build a personal brand in this new company but I want the company to run with that, to lean into we build audiences by putting out really awesome shit. And I heard, Natalie from Postmark.

Oh, Nagali? Is that right?

Yeah. Okay. She she had this great quote on on a a podcast where she was talking about like, let's just not pollute the Internet. You know, like if it's not great, like we just don't want to put it out. That's sort of how my thinking on all this.

Right. And so anyway, that's a long winded way to come around to say the way that I'm thinking about marketing in this new thing is like Patrick Campbell put it really well the other day. Actually this is a tweet from last year but I pulled it up the other day. This was part of a larger thread but this one tweet he wrote, media companies are the best in the world at driving traffic and audience but they're the worst at monetizing that traffic. So copy the former and do something else for the latter, meaning build software.

So the way that I'm thinking about it is basically to like build like media content, build a media brand but the way that we monetize it is with our SaaS product.

Yes. We Ah man. Ah man. Preach So

the first hire is somebody that I'm talking to about being like a media creator. So somebody to drive the podcast stuff, to drive the video, really taking it from more of a film production angle, a creative director, a storyteller, somebody to co host podcast to bring in other people and interview them. We'll incorporate a lot of async interviews using Zip Message and stuff like that. The first person is going to be in that sort of like creative role, I'm calling it like a media creator. But then to pair that up probably soon after that hire would be what I'm thinking of more like a technical marketer.

So this is probably more of a part time role, somebody to like as we're creating and putting out stuff into the world whether it's a new show, a new thing, somebody to work on how do we just drive traffic to that, how do we optimize SEO plays on the site, how do we

Where do those things live, where do they get promoted, what are the right channels.

Yeah, tracking everything in analytics like making sure everything is dialed in, email writing, social media stuff. So like somebody to kind of handle all those little things and then the media creator is sort of driving the the creative side of that. I'm giving my input, I'll be involved in some of the podcast stuff but I'm the head of product. I'm on product every day. I'll be giving my input on that stuff.

That's sort of like the direction of where how this early team at least in my mind right now is shaping up. Still sort of a question of funding it all and and and the timing of certain hires and making it all work but, I'm pretty excited about it and I'm sort of, not not waiting around and and we're we're gonna try to move on this thing because I I feel like Zip Messages is is moving.

That's really exciting. I I am impressed. I think that is it. If you looked at our Slack right now in the leadership team, what I just wrote to the team was Barstool Sports. That is marketing.

Audience building through media, right? That's why Penn Gambling acquired them. It's why HubSpot acquired the hustle. It's why Stripe has Stripe Press. The most powerful thing is media.

That's what drives the most attention and SaaS. There's never been a better business model for monetizing than SaaS. If you also

It's factor in more defensible than anything else. Right. And you know, I think a lot of people look at that sort of stuff as, oh, well that's what big, that's what Stripe can do. That's what the big companies can do. Yes, but let's let's see what

we can do.

I think that it's something that we should be investing in as early as possible.

Yeah, I agree.

Especially if you need if you're a new entry into a market, you need to be noticed. You need to be you need to differentiate.

Yes. Here's the thing that I use my like mental cycles when it comes to marketing is the talent. How do you find the talent because that is in limited supply. And the people who have already been discovered and understand their talent, they're unlikely to come work for you. They have a sub stack and they're making $30,000 a month writing a newsletter, you know?

So, so it's almost like young unidentified talent. I think what churn buster did with Kristen LaFrance in identifying her talent and then just giving her this pedestal to operate out of you. They just gave her a stage and it was like, you know, immediate bang. Soon as she got a stage, all this light went on to her and it drove an enormous amount of interest. And then Shopify very wisely basically acquired her as an asset, basically made her an offer she couldn't refuse.

And now she works at Shopify. So that's, that's the right there. A smart forward thinking startup identifies talent and then the value of that talent is undeniable in the market and then the highest bidder gets to get, you know, gets to go after.

That is absolutely the hardest thing. Again with this frustration that I put out on Twitter with just marketing in general, a lot of that frustration is like how to hire a marketer because there are so many professional marketers who do a good job at the typical common things that you see in marketing.

Right,

executing. Just executing. It's still eightytwenty. The top 20% are awesome but it's not as rare.

And there's still opportunities that if you're great at that's great. Again, I'm not saying like that stuff shouldn't be done but to me as I'm thinking about investing in marketing, I see it as a two person role. One is that creative side and then the other person are those technical marketing skills to tie it all together and make it click.

Yes. Love it. I love it. I have my eye out. I am searching.

I don't want to use the word desperate because then they'll know how much I'm willing to pay. But the talent is the thing.

You know, a bunch of folks probably have heard of this before but I just discovered it about a week ago. Jay Acunzo.

Yeah, I got introduced to him recently. Really impressive stuff he does.

Really, really impressive stuff.

He basically takes individual like creators and shows them how to like basically go to the next level. Do I have that right? Am I remembering?

His podcast that I'm into now is called Unthinkable. He's basically on this thing like, look, we just got to create better shit and whether that's video, podcasting content, whatever you're doing like, but it's just about the creative process and then he, he's sort of all about like tying it back into business and representing your brand and, and, and you can literally hear it in his podcast like every episode. It's like, I can't even imagine how many hours went into editing this one episode. It's crazy. But that's the kind of commitment and creativity and thought that has to go into this sort of thing if it's really going to stand out.

And I don't think that it's just about production value. Has to also be about the ideas and the story and Yeah.

And what people are interested in. For me, that's the part where I'm like, we're just going to write blog posts like everyone else. That's not going to work. It's not going to work. So I just looked up Jay, found him on Twitter, looked at our DMS.

And the last thing I wrote to Jay was quote, I think it's the best thing software companies can do. Just build the media team in house. Then he did give a little heart next to it.

Oh yeah. Yeah, that's it. So I'm drinking that Kool Aid lately and,

man, I like it.

But it's, but you know what, it sort of speaks right to my general frustration with marketing and it's sort of like turning on its head, make, make marketing like something that you get excited about. And I think that's generally what works, you know?

Cool. I'm excited to see that happen. We are going for a biz dev partnerships role first because I can't do all of it. But the next job description that we have is like, okay, who is this person? How do we find them?

Is it really a job listing? Is where we're going to find them? Or is it identifying on Twitter and then a DM for me and then basically the full hard sell of here is why you need to come work with us. That's what it feels like it's

going to take. I just think that like, again, like SaaS in general, it's still evolving in the way that it's sold and marketed. Know, it's super crowded in all the categories these days, right? Like SAS itself is not new, but the way that we market SAS products, think is still, always changing but I feel like it's been pretty stagnant terms of how things work on the marketing side.

Yeah and it's been stratified. Companies that have limited resources just don't invest in brand the same way because it's disconnected from ROI and that makes it hard to focus on. It's just a fact. Cool man. Well, I'm gonna go grab some lunch with a friend.

Getting I don't know if you saw the TikTok that came out this morning where it's like, stop working. It's time

to drink. Yeah.

That's how I

feel right now. Nice.

Great to

see you, Brian. Thanks for listening everyone.

Alright. Thanks, folks.

See you.