Bootstrapped Web

Alright. It's Bootstrapped Web. We are back to back to back weeks. And Jordan, how's it going, man?

It's going pretty well. Summertime. I got the kids on my own today. I'm sore from getting hit by a shot in my lacrosse game right in the heel.

Oh, another one.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

But that's it. It's beautiful here in Portland. I got the kids on my own today. I'm gonna go take them out somewhere. Maybe the pool, maybe the like science museum here.

Nice, nice. It has been absolutely beautiful here in the Northeast. We gotta take these weather days while we can get them because this is like that perfect window where it's like Right before. Beautiful weather and then it just becomes insanely hot for the summer and then you know, you're in the depressing, snowy, dark winter for like six months and

Yes. So these few weeks and then like September.

That's Exactly. September is great too. So I'm actually, most of my time is spent working on the back deck. Got like a nice backyard office set up back there and then I just come in here to record podcasts basically.

Oh wow, good for you. I have, I got a porch, I got a porch swing, I have a table in the back, I just don't use it. I just hang out in my room. I did get up at the office back this week and that was very useful. So that's been fun.

Went out and met someone there, had like a whiteboard type session, that was fun. And yeah, and I liked our episode from last week other than the ability to hear me like breathing through my nose all the time. I'll try to I'll try to eliminate that.

Do you listen back usually?

No. Matt Maderos, he wrote a great thread about it. So I listened to some of the clips there in kind

That's right. Yeah. Matt put a really great thread together, you know, because we were talking about the media creator role, last week, which I'm talking to some people about it right now, but it is still an open position that and also, so that again is like a podcasting, mostly focused, like somebody to be a show runner for a bunch of new podcasts and some video stuff. So if that's you reach out, but I'm also looking for a technical marketer and those two positions are still open. I'll, I'll put the links in the show notes again.

But Matt is great because he has that role, working with Craig at Castos. And so he knows the ins and outs of what's involved, really well. And so he he did like a nice recap kind of breaking down our conversation and and kind of inserting on Twitter like this is what it's really like to to be in that role, you know?

Yeah. It was great to hear real world experience for someone who is in that role a bit ahead of the curve. It's it's not really well defined in a software company just yet but everyone kind of knows about it, thinks about it and yeah, so he's one of those few people that's doing it right now.

Yeah and by the way, Matt is a long time friend of both of ours and friend of the show here and if you haven't heard of Matt Maderos, if you are at all connected to the WordPress world, I mean, you know, obviously Matt is heading up all the media content stuff at Castos, but he, for many years, he's become like the source of quality information and podcasts in the WordPress space. The Matt Report, I think he's got like five other podcasts. So, yeah, really, really good stuff. I've been a guest on his show like, I don't know, six times or something and, it's kind of like our annual, like update on his show where where I talk about my failed products and it's a good time.

Well, yeah, I agree and endorse. Brian, what's going on this week?

So, know, this is one of those things where we we only recorded like seven days ago, so not a whole lot has changed. I thought I would talk a little bit more technical today, you know, because zip message is, is moving right along. It's been really nice to see the adoption and the ease that people have with starting a trial and a few days later converting. And the conversions are happening every week and that's nice to see. It's still invite only.

So I still have that limitation, like at the top of the funnel and that's for a few reasons, but I want to open that up pretty soon. That's the goal for the next like thirty days or so. And the early signs continue to be good on these conversions with that. So now it's about two months into having real users and customers in it. And so I needed to sort of play catch up on figuring out what my metrics are.

Know, I had a rough sense and you could always look at Stripe and see the metrics that that has, but you know, I didn't want to go too far along without logging metrics and building a history and everything.

So what, what kind of metrics like signups conversion?

All the typical SAS metrics that you need, right? Trials, trial to pay conversion, MRR, churn rate, ARPU, all the important things, expansion and all that kind of stuff. And so

are you using anything out of the box of profit?

Well, I wanted to just, know, this is the kind of thing where I need it set up. I need it done right. But I don't want to spend a ton of hours on it. You would think that using a bare metrics or a profit well would, would get you there in one click. I, and I tried those.

The problem is when you do a trial with no credit card upfront, which is what I do, those are very difficult to track your trials and then trial to paid conversion.

Because it's not in that system yet because it has a

contract. The way that I set it up, which sort of makes sense to me from a building standpoint is to not have new trial people enter my Stripe account until they enter their credit card details. When they do that, it creates the customer record for them in Stripe, but not on the day that they sign up for the trial And most people, so it's a fourteen day trial, pretty standard. Some people put their credit card in like on day 10, but most people do it on like day 14. Right?

And so I guess the way that a lot of people do it and I reached out to support on ProfitWell and Bear Metrics and this seems weird to me, but everybody who has no credit card upfront, they do put them into Stripe on day one and they basically subscribe them to a $0 a month subscription plan.

And you can do that without a card information?

I guess so. Yeah.

Right. Cause you do, you do free trial and no credit card required.

Yeah. No, I'm not doing it this way but this seems to be the only way if you want to use a ProfitWell or a BearMetrix, you have to get all of your trial users into Stripe and put them, put them all on this zero, this like fake plan that doesn't really exist. And then

But then you're changing the nature of the free trial by asking for a card versus not asking for a card.

Well, I'm not necessarily asking for a card, but you do have to use the Stripe API to put them into Stripe, even though whatever 80% of them might not ever convert to paying customers. Then you're going to have this long list of customers in your Stripe account. And that just seems, I don't know, a little difficult to manage. So I ended up using Chartmogul instead. I got that up and running because of those three Chartmogul, ProfitWell, and BearMetrix, Chartmogul was the only one that I could hack together a system that accounts for free trialers and, and then it gets the converted people and then it merges them.

So you can pixel them upfront when they create a trial and then what are you using? The email as the identifier?

Yeah. They're basically using the email and I had to, you know, I ended up using Zapier for this but you could custom code this in your app. I wanted to keep the app clean. So I just did this through Zapier, but basically through Zapier when they sign up for a trial, it zaps their customer record into chart mogul. And then later if they convert and they become in Stripe, they become a customer in Stripe, then Stripe will zap them into chart mogul as well.

And then what happens there? Now you have a duplicate record. You've got, you've got two people, same name in chart mogul, which is not correct. So then I have another Zap that hits chart mogul's API to merge those two. Chart mogul's the only one that has that merge function.

And so it's, you know, and you got to wait like a half an hour for the thing to register itself. And it's like, it's a mess, but it, it sort of works.

Yeah. It's frustrating.

And it's surprising to me how difficult that is given how standard of a setup I have. I have a fourteen day trial, no credit card upfront. That's, this is not, reinventing the wheel here, you know?

Right. That's almost default. Yeah. It's strange. And char mogul looks good, not cheap.

No, it's not. It's free for up to 10 ks MRR. And I mean, I'm not at 10 ks MRR right now, but it, and that's a bummer too. Yeah. Cause it's like

10 ks MRR, it's $350 a month. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot.

Yeah. It's not it's not ideal, but it but it works. I guess the other thing is you could use ProfitWell to track everything except for your trials, and then you can do your trials in a separate window. Like, it's like, what what are we doing?

Your life is trial and conversion to pay. That's, that's the most important part of it.

Yeah. Like it's just really surprising to me that ProfitWell and BearMetrix don't have an easy way to API a person into their system, which they do, but they don't have an easy way to say, Oh, that person in Stripe now has the same email address. That's the same person. They don't have that ability. I, that's surprising to me.

Yeah, that, I hear that. That's, that's tricky. I guess they're basing everything off of the underlying data provided to them by the processor. And that's how their data model works and

Yeah, they expect everyone to put a whole lot of $0 subscribers into their Stripe system, which seems weird to me.

We're pretty deep into SaaS here. We're twenty years in too. This should be figured out. This reminds me a lot of e commerce where you have what feels like a very typical use case and then you try to accomplish it and there are all these tools available and you can't do what you actually want to do. And you're forced to alter your strategy to accommodate for the shortcomings of the underlying tools.

It's really frustrating. Mean, that's what we try to do with a very open checkout is reduce the number of sacrifices people make. And the number of times people have to alter their strategy to in order to accommodate because sometimes it's shortcomings. Sometimes it's, it's against the underlying tools interests for you to do certain things. So they don't

let you do it. Yeah. Totally. But I mean that promise of remember when when Josh launched Baremetrics like the promise of one click Stripe metrics. It's beautiful but it leaves out this most important piece which is the trial to pay it if you if you don't require credit card upfront and it's just so weird to me.

Anyway.

Well, it's good you're thinking about this.

I

I'm still still dreaming of of users in my funnel.

Yeah. Yep. Well, other thing that I that I built this, two or three weeks ago was I also needed to get a handle on how much people are using the app. Like it's one thing to see trial signups. It's another thing.

Are they actually creating conversations, making recordings, sending back?

Right. So what do you have in place for that?

So I did build, build stuff into the backend of the app. I spent probably two or three days on this building my myself, like a private dashboard to see things like, you know, number of conversations, conversations per account, average length of each recording. How many minutes are people, are people, because this also factors into our costs for processing video, which is, important to keep an eye on, but probably more importantly, it's the activation to see how many people are activating and using it. So that's been good to see. I don't check it very often, but when I do, I've been pleasantly surprised like, Oh, people actually are sending messages, you know?

Yeah. I love that. I love like ignoring Google analytics for awhile and then you look at it and you actually, you actually learn a lot from looking, once you have some data to look at in aggregate and also individual.

This is the case with, with like a podcast, but it's also the case with, with SAS in many cases is like people get value from it and they don't come and tell you that they're getting value from it. That's just happening and you don't see it right in front of you. You got to see the stats, you know, because it's like, I'm getting customer support requests, but it's mostly like reporting bugs and stuff like that and some feature requests and that's like a minority but there's a lot of accounts that are just using it and they're not having issues so I'm not hearing from them.

Yeah, so let me ask you this is one of those things I've wrestled with in the past. When you have individual users or a user base and you don't hear from them and they're using the tool and it's working for them and they're not complaining but they're not reaching out and telling you how much they love you, what do you do? Do you let it lie or do you poke it for a response?

Generally the goal, right, is to get thousands of those types of customers. Yeah. Right? To a point where like the product, the product market fit is is there. The product itself is so intuitive that it doesn't overwhelm your support.

I guess in the early days, I would like to be more in touch.

Yeah. Yeah. The earlier stages. I mean, look, yes, you should be consistently talking to people but at the early stage it definitely feels like you do want the responses.

You know what I'm doing right now is every week I send a batch of invites, like about 30 or so new invites for free trials. And and then also every week, I spend usually an afternoon doing this. I go through the people who who are currently midway through their trial and I can sort that list by the people who have been recording messages. Could see in the database who has recorded messages and and how many minutes have they recorded. So then I go one by one to their zip message mailbox and I send them a message.

Say, hey, hey, Brian here from zip message. I wanted to check-in, see how it's going so far and and, see if you have any questions. Wanted to let you know we just launched a Slack integration. So if not using that, can check that out.

Are you reusing a relevant, timely obviously but are you using the same video for the like five or 10 people that

you I'm have reached I'm doing it personal, personalized but it's interesting you say that because that's been a feature request. People want like a canned response template video to send to many people and that that we will be building that as well.

Very interesting. I saw a zip message pop up in my Slack the other day.

Oh yeah? Cool.

Yeah. I I I like seeing it just organically kind of be used because that's the tool that fit.

Yeah. Yeah. And we did a lot of work on making sure the thumbnail shows up in Slack and stuff like that. So that's what I do and I can sort it by the people who are using it. So what, what has been interesting is that the people who use it the most are a lot of times like the least likely to actually reply to, like a lot of the, a lot of people don't actually reply to my outreach, but I could see they're using the tool, you know?

But, but they're thinking of you as a tool in a company and aren't that interested to get all entangled. They're just happy. Great.

Know, a few people a few people do reply and and we get into a sometimes like 10 plus back and forths about the product which is fantastic. I love that And it's super insightful. That's where I'm hearing all the feature requests. But I think in general, it's been helping doing that outreach. Cause sometimes I just see people convert like in the day or two after I send those messages.

So sort of helps, but that's, that's what I do right now. And I mean, we have the automated, email onboarding email sequence, which is not great. It's sort of just a V1 of that. One of the other things that's holding me back from opening up the trials to everyone is that we had no onboarding experience inside the app. You got to figure it out.

And some things are super confusing.

So Do you have something in mind on that front? Do you want to use like a tool tip type thing or?

I don't know. See, I did build that thing in process kit and it helped a lot. Like we see customers convert on process kit now without ever contacting. Definitely thanks to the, we have basically tool tips that walk them through.

You built that yourself or did intercom or one of

those built myself. I haven't given a lot of thought yet with zip message, but there's a big difference in that with process kit. The goal was to get a brand new user to build something. Hey, welcome to process kit. Here's how it works.

Now let's build your first process. Let's walk through it. But in zip message, it's, it's like, let's create your first conversation, but you got to find somebody to have a conversation with and, and you got to like record and then send it. And it's like, with zip message, you're not building anything. It's just like, welcome to zip message.

Now here's, here's how it works. Now please start using it.

Yeah. I mean, you're surfacing features and I wouldn't be surprised if that initial creation is a big step.

Right now it's like I send them a message on whatever day three or day five of their trial, but maybe they could send me a message. And actually one of the things that's confusing in onboarding and I'm building this right now hopefully for next week is, with zip message you get your own public mailbox, which is like your own URL. So you could have like zipmessage.com/jordan. That's usually actually the first line of business that somebody had, like when they sign up for their account, they want to make sure they get their name or their company name as their they want to reserve that so that nobody else can grab it. There's been some confusion on where in the interface to find that setting and that kind of thing so that could be part of the onboarding too.

What do got on your end? What's going on?

I got nothing. No, I've been in a, I don't even know what to call it. A little bit of a funk this week. You know, when you get into that mode where you're kind of staring at your computer, you're like, I don't want to do anything. I've hit that a few times this week and that always causes me to take a step back and evaluate like, am I not happy with what I'm doing right now?

Is it just a little burnout and I just need a little break? Is it like some tension from, from something else or you know, so I've just been exploring that. So I've been fine, but it's been a little bit more of a roller coaster of a week then.

How does that manifest like, like on day to day? So you're at your computer, you're doing calls, you're doing emails, you're working on stuff and then what happens? Like, it's like just not feeling productive.

For me, I love the calls. I get so energized and so excited. Even on Thursday, I looked at my calendar and I had six calls in a row, which is very rare. And I looked at that and was like, Oh my God, that's going to be miserable. And then I went through it and was so energized and happy.

So the calls

I'm like stressed out just thinking about that.

Yes. So that's just fine. That's me, right? I like that. And that's fine.

Where it manifests for me on like the negative side is when I say to myself, this is really important. This one task, I got a list of 15 tasks, but this task is what I want to get done by the end of today. And then I'll do the calls and I'll be happy about that. And then I'll look and I'll see a two hour window in my day that's clear. And I say, okay, this two hours, this is my opportunity.

I'm going to get this task done. And then for whatever combination of reasons, I'll get to those two hours and I will have like a block on accomplishing the task. And then I'll start to hate myself and then I'll go on Tik Tok and then I'll be like, I'm gonna shake it off and go get something to eat real quick and then I'll come back and be fresh. And then I'll get sucked into something on Slack. And then next thing I know, the two hours goes by and I didn't accomplish the task and I hate myself.

And then I say, you know what I'm going to do tonight before going to bed, I'm going to, I'm going to finish it tonight. And then, you know, the kids are, you know, time to put them to bed and it's summer. So they get to bed at 09:30 instead of their normal, like 8PM. And then I plop down on the couch at like 10:15 and I'm like, I'm done. I'm toast.

Yeah, even if you, at least for me like working at night, occasionally I'll work on features but it's not good, good work for me.

Yeah, I like it sometimes and last night I did good work in the evening but other times I just don't. And then I'll get into a conversation with myself and say, okay, you want to accomplish this task, but you didn't. It doesn't make sense to try to do it tonight. You're too tired. Tomorrow you're to get it done.

And then if that'll happens for like two, three days in a row, I'm in a spiral of self hatred. That's like what puts me there. So I try to play around with the different factors. That's why I went to the office a few times this week to change up the venue. I stood up on my desk instead of sat down just to change up the way things feel.

Listened to music instead of podcasts to change it. So I like tweak these different factors to try to get out of it and back into the right groove. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. And this week is just was not that successful. If I look back at the week, there are certain things that were important that I accomplished these conversations.

I moved hiring conversations forward. I have a few like the agency approach is working. Of the agencies in one of the headless platforms that I met with two weeks ago and like befriended, got back to me with a prospect. Hey, I think I have someone in mind. Like that's working and that's energizing.

And I still don't feel good overall about the week because I know deep down that I just wasn't able to overcome these strange obstacles. And then it's Friday and at least last night, Thursday night, I'm like, I have to get this test done by the end of the week or I'm really going to hate myself. So last night at 08:00 at night, do a shot of espresso and I stay up at least at least. Yeah, no, it's not good, At least I got there so I can like live with myself and like that's not where I want to be.

And here I am in the afternoon drinking my second espresso right now but kind of pushing it on like the max hour of the day where I should have espresso. Anything later than now, I'm not going to sleep tonight, it's just not going to happen. I totally relate to that like on the days that I have, every day there's always a big thing or two that I want to get done And usually I think about it more on the week, like this week we've got to ship this and this and I also have these big boulders that I'm trying to push as well. When there's a day that I just feel like we were on the 20 yard line and we're still on the 20 yard line, How did that happen? I mean usually for me it's because I had too many calls on the calendar you know and that's why I get stressed out about that because it's like it's much less today.

I have like almost no calls today but when I was doing a lot of sales calls I could look at a calendar day and see if there's two or more, like if there's three calls on it, all those goals, I know like, I'm like, okay, I'm not, I'm not gonna make any progress today. I just got to do these calls. I'll try to work here and there but calls, if I'm on a podcast are so energy draining that I'm not going to have any energy left to do any quality work. But the thing that really gets to me

Yeah.

I want to ask about that. Go ahead.

Well, the thing that really bothers me, I do work my ass off when it comes to shipping and I love getting in the zone and not only building features but also just moving everything forward. Like I feel like I generally work pretty efficiently and I make the when I'm in here in my office, I make the hours count and I feel good about that. What kills me is when things get out of my control. Like big goals, big things that I want to put a big check mark on, they're pending something that I needed to just wait until it comes through. Know, there's some blocker and I can't unblock it myself.

I'm waiting on someone else or, or it's just something that by its nature takes time. I've got to wait and let it, let it do its thing. That kind of stuff just drives me up the wall And like, just like little things, you know, I'm talking to some people, this is sort of something else unrelated, but you know, talking to some people about working together in some form and we had good conversations, but then it's like, they sort of like just drop off for like two or three days at a time. And, and I'm just waiting on, cause it's, we're going in the right direction. We're, we're gonna, we're gonna get toward the thing that we're trying to do, but now I'm not hearing from them for three days and now this whole thing is stalled.

It could just be as simple as like for me mentally, if you could just have the professional respect to say, Hey, I got it. I've got a thing going on the rest of my week. Just letting you know, I'm not going to get back to you until Monday. That's all I need to hear. It's fine if it's going to take a little longer, but don't make me wait and wonder, Oh, am I going to hear from them today or tomorrow or the next day?

Like when are we going to make this happen? Know?

I'm the bad guy on the other side of that trade, my friends. Yep. I try to set expectations, but Hey,

it's something that we stress with the team at audience ops. Like we don't, we, we don't do like rush jobs or, or turnaround times or like, like a expedited deliveries or anything like that. But if we get a message from a client, I try to have the management team always say like, Hey, we got your message. We're working on it. We'll be back to you later in the week.

You know? Don't just get their message and not tell them that you received it. It's just little things like that that just drive me crazy.

Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. Maybe sometimes I have an unrealistic expectation around what I can accomplish in a certain amount of time because I will have several calls every day and then I'll look at those one hour windows and it's not like I expect to work for sixty minutes straight, but I do expect to be able to find a twenty, thirty minute stretch in that hour to focus on something and finish it. But it appears to be difficult to do.

Yeah. Twenty or thirty minutes for me is like, I take ten minutes just to get into it and ten minutes to get out of it. You know, like I need that just to get in and out. And then I need like a four hour stretch of working on it, you know?

Yeah, I'm not that surprised by it because I know myself by now and I'm also not surprised that at Cardhook, I had gotten to a point where I really didn't need to do anything, not really. And so I helped people accomplish things or I would have conversations to move things forward or if there was something, even if there was something to do that resulted in like a something tangible, a document, a video, something, I would have that verbal conversation because everyone knew that's how I like to work. And that would help set them on the right path. And maybe we would record it and they would have notes from the conversation. They would go off and be able to get it done.

And now being back in the role of like, no, you need to write that document. I'm not my happiest because I'm this is not what I'm I'm best at, which is a very strange thing to be an entrepreneur and founder and be like, yeah, I'm not good at doing things. What can I tell you?

Yeah. It's funny like that this stage of the career where when I was younger, was always about like, all right, well I'm going to, I'm going to learn how to do all the things and try to, try to hustle and bootstrap it all myself. And now I spend so much more of my time as you and I talk about all the time now. It's like hiring and finding the right people to work with in the right roles. And it's like all my other entrepreneur friends.

It's like the longer we do this, the higher percentage of conversations and effort is consumed by hiring. And I've heard a lot of founders say this, as the company grows or as your, as your career goes, it's the job of finding people. And I still work a lot, especially on the product and the positioning and talking to customers, but everything else, especially on the marketing side, I've been, and I have not figured this out yet. I haven't been successful in this yet, figuring out the right workflow and the right people to execute on, on all the different things that need to happen on marketing. That's been really hard.

I find that it's not the kind of thing that you can just hire for a process and plug them into the process and let them do it repeatedly. I sort of tried it that way and it is more collaborative and there, and you need creative, you need technical and I can't be the person driving it every single day. Although, you know, a lot of times I end up being that person cause, cause the work needs to get done. But now it's like I'm so focused on like who do I need to bring in and how do we need to work together to make sure we're executing? And it's, it's really hard.

And in short, it gets a life of its own and moves forward. If I try to provide something of value in this podcast besides whining. The hiring thing has turned into a bigger focus in different way over the past week. I had a conversation with Greg and Ian from Dynamite Jobs, which we've talked about. We work with them as our recruiters and we've been having trouble finding a backend engineer for the team.

And someone on the team basically came to me and said, they're not doing a good enough job. It's not working. What should we do? So I wanted to dig into that. And that's one of those things that when I hear that, I look directly in the mirror.

That hiring my responsibility. So it's not like, well, here are a few ideas for you to go look into. No, this is directly on my desk. The Portland founder crew from MicroConf that I'm friends with was actually like incredibly helpful on this. Thank you, Ruben.

Thank you, John. Thank you, Jared. Thank you, Adam. So I came to them and was like, okay, let's like help me brainstorm. And what I did was I got on a call with Greg and Ian and they were prepared for me to come to them and tell them how unhappy I was.

And here's why I'm unhappy.

I have a quick question. Like is that back end person new? Like how long is it? Has he or she been working with you?

Oh, no, we have an open role that we've been trying to fill for about two months or so. And we haven't been able to find someone. When we, our initial hiring spree, it was a combination of where the market was and we just got lucky and we found great people and it was relatively fast. And so that was where our expectations were. And now this role has been much harder to fill.

And so the initial reaction is, Oh, the recruiters aren't doing a good enough job because whatever they were doing worked and now it's not working. So what should we do? So my sense was that that was not the case that there were other things going on. So when we got on this call, we just opened up the conversation and really what we identified was we have multiple things to improve. So when we talked about it and you know, they have a pretty sophisticated view on recruiting.

And so hearing them talk what it sounded to me like they were describing was a funnel similar to an e commerce funnel, which is what I'm used to, where you need to have everything aligned and everything working. You need the audience and the advertising, you need the page and the copy and the price point and the cart and the checkout process. You all of it to Absolutely

as a funnel for sure.

Yep, it's a funnel. So we started looking at the different parts of the funnel and the different things that we can tweak. And when we looked at it, there's, there's some pretty clear ones that that we can address. So the most glaring and obvious one is compensation. But even compensation right now we don't show the compensation number on the job ad.

So we just basically said it depends on experience. And then you find out the compensation level when you contact us, when you have that initial conversation.

Do you identify that as compensation being the issue because you have really good candidates entering the top of the funnel, but then they they leave the funnel because the compensation is is misaligned?

Well, it's a number of things and compensation is just one of the factors that we identify that we can improve on. So so a, we can pay more and b, we can also surface it at a different time, potentially on the page itself, on the job ad itself. The real issue that's happening, I think that's even like more detrimental than the compensation issue is our funnel hurts. For this job, we've had 400 applicants and about 30 of them made it into the next step. So we do a lot of screening.

The recruiters get into a conversation with them on zoom and then if it feels like a cultural fit, then they move on to the next step, which is like the technical step. And what we're doing for the technical is we're saying great to meet you. Congrats on getting to like this next step. Here is a four hour assignment to do by yourself. And that's when everyone drops off.

Like they don't do it or they don't, they don't do They

it. And don't so what I think is happening is that that hurdle is just way too high to begin with. To ask me to do three to four hours of unpaid work on the weekend before I even know that much about your company, before I've convinced myself that this is the job I want, that's really tough at any time. Right now the market is amazing for developers, including in Europe. And so if they have other things going and they feel confident that there's another offer coming, then why you didn't spend time?

Exactly. Here's the worst part. I think the worst part is that the best developers that are the most confident that they're going to get offers are the least likely to do the work. So we're almost like shooting ourselves in the foot in the process. So we've identified three main things that we need to do.

The first is do a better job of selling the opportunity. We need to increase the desire for the end product before we ask people to go through the funnel. So the job ad is actually pretty good. We feel good about that. But we need to tell people about the company.

Like the job ad is you know, how much can you really put into a job ad? You basically get a paragraph or two about the company itself and then you talk about the position and the requirements and so on.

Do you have any, anyone technical on your team involved in the hiring process? Like reviewing applications, reviewing code?

We do. Rock, you know, the co founder and CTO is the one looking at the technical test and he is a technical snob, rightfully

That's only if they even do the test. That's like, I wonder if there's someone who can just be pulled in for like one day a month or someone something to just look, hey, look at the current crop of applicants. Are there any rock stars in here who who we wanna stay in touch with and maybe we don't wanna bog them down with a four hour test or

That's right.

Maybe we wanna pay them for a test or something like that.

That's right. So pain for the time is one thing and and Ruben Gomez talked about how he does that. I spoke with Johnny Walt also from Portland here, a good friend of mine and what he does is a pair programming like hour, instead of a three or four hours by yourself. The sixty to ninety minute pair program not only tells you about their technical ability, but how they think and how they communicate.

I like

that idea. Do you like this person and how you feel with them? And is it laughter? Is it like, you know, how is it to actually work together?

I feel like for a developer and I don't have much experience hiring this way, but yeah, hop on a tuple with a developer, you get a high fidelity hour of, you could check their, their tech skills, their communication skills, the, the chemistry.

Their Google skills, how they find solutions, how creative they are about it, all of it. And then what Ruben also suggested is he takes something much smaller and technical and puts it upfront in the process. So it's just a little mini hurdle to just make sure we're even in the same ballpark here.

Yeah. I remember, actually I remember that back in the day, this is what fifteen years ago now, I was a hired at a web agency and part of that hiring process before they even invited me to come into person on the phone, they, they pulled in one of their engineers and they asked me like two very basic like CSS questions.

Right. Just make sure

you do you even know what, what you're talking about? Like, okay, pass those. And then I went in and I actually ended up like failing the, the test in inside. And then they still ended up hiring me, which was, I don't know why. Speaking of, of this funnel, cause we're actually currently in audience ops, we're currently hiring a writer and we're running our, our sort of playbook on, on hiring another writer.

It is very much a funnel and it's very different because the market for writers is different than obviously hiring developers, but it's actually similar in the, in the steps. What we do is we put out job ads on a bunch of different boards and we try to collect as many applicants as possible. I spent a lot of time over the years like rewriting the job ad for writers so that, that sort of gets them attractive. Also what I added to that about two years ago was I got testimonials from our team and I, and I put those on the, on the page. So it's, mean, you're selling the role.

So you need

testimonials related to the

company. Yeah.

Okay. That's, that's, that is, I think, I think we have to do more of that. I should make a, I should make a video talking about the opportunity and why we're doing it and what it means to us and who we are. Maybe bring in some other people testimonials is a great idea.

So we did that and then we, we, we get them into a board with, with all their application info. I actually do ask them to fill out a pretty long application form. So that's one sort of hurdle, but it, you know, takes them ten minutes and then, and then my manager is the one who goes through and filters them and makes a shortlist. They still have not seen our rates yet. And what we do is sheet shortlists down to maybe eight or 10 candidates.

Writes a few notes about them. I review that and then I give her the go ahead on say five or six of those to say, okay, let's invite these six people. And then when, when she sends the invite, the, that email says like, hey, here's a link to a page. It goes over our rates and everything else that you need to know about what it's like to work at audience ops. If that all sounds good to you, then go ahead and book your interview with me.

And we do see a drop off there. So like, you know, out of the six, maybe, maybe two of them will say, ah, the rates are lower than what I go for and that's totally fine. Great. And then the other four is like, this sounds amazing. So then we go forward with them.

We do the interview or, you know, my manager interviews them. Then she writes a lot more notes and I go, I review those and then we usually narrow it down to one or two top candidates. And then those two candidates we invite to write a test article for us, which we pay them for.

And that that's the bigger hurdle and paid.

It's it's paid. It's a full article that that we hope we will publish on our audience ops blog.

Oh cool.

It's a real thing and we ask them to come up with ideas to write about. We evaluate their ideas. Then we have them write the draft. We give them edits to make and they make the edits. It's a whole, it's, it's a normal article process for us.

So that's a real reflection of what it's like to work at the company, who you're working with.

Yeah. Yeah. We start to actually see what it's like for them to process edits and things like that. And then we usually hire one or both of them. That's, that's, that's the process, you know?

And, but then frankly, there's always still a small percentage who don't make it past two months of working at audience ops, you know, but then if they do, then they're probably here for four or five years, you know?

Right. Cause it's yeah, that's that's cool. It's good. It's good to hear a role specific set of adjustments to your funnel.

Yeah. I mean, it took five years to get to that point. Right.

Right. We got lucky with where the market was and the recruiting and whatever combination of factors. And we love the team. And we're just like, how do we find more? And it's proving, proving much more difficult now than it was a few months ago.

And so it's time to adjust. But this is one of those things that I'm very motivated to do. Why? Because it allows me to do less and and build the right team and let them do their thing. And then it also feels great.

Like it feels like when when I focus on recruiting, feels like I'm doing the job I'm supposed to be doing. I'm spending my time the right way.

Yeah. It's interesting. Right now I'm reading I'm listening to the book Creativity Inc. The Story of Pixar which is really great. I'm about halfway through it.

I'm I'm I'm really into it and it's kind of like part like startup story. I I never really knew the full story with like with like Steve Jobs involvement early on and everything but it's more about, it's called creativity inc. It's like building a creative company and the trials and tribulations that they've had in fostering creative talent to build things like toy story, you know, like, and what goes into that. It seems really difficult to get exceptionally talented, creative people to work together effectively at a massive scale and ship things without, without there being politics, without there being like burnout on the team. That was actually like a big issue for, for Pixar.

Yeah, it's a pretty fascinating read and I'm learning a lot because I'm trying to build like a, like a creative with this new thing with zip message and the, and this creative brand around it. I'm trying to, this company I'm, I'm, I'm building is I want it to be the most creatively focused thing that I've done. Especially in terms of the team that I'm building around it. And I feel like I have a lot to learn on that because like audience ops was always so process oriented and systems and just repeatability. This one is much more about creativity on, on our marketing and, and the product and I'm just trying to figure out like how to get people to work together on that, know?

Yeah, that's interesting because it's, it's often people who are very creative do worst in an environment that that a lot of companies end up in. So yeah, that that sounds like an interesting book. Might check that out. I'm reading I don't know what I'm reading. Some sci fi thing.

Cool. Alright. Well, turned it around. We we went from Jordan's psychotherapy session to at least some value on hiring. You're welcome everybody.

Yeah, there we go. We found a way to fill a what do we got? Like forty minutes of more content for the internet here. Not bad. Not bad.

All right. Enjoy the start of summer folks. We, I I think we might be taking a couple of weeks off depending on our travel vacation schedules, but we're gonna try to sneak in some episodes where we can over the next few weeks.

Sounds good. Thanks for listening.

Alright.