Bootstrapped Web

Welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, it's Friday. It's late Friday. You're in the dark over there.

Week's almost over. How's it going?

Yeah. How's it going, man? We're, good to be back on on the mic here. Yeah. We're recording a couple hours later in the day than we usually do and and this time of year, it it just gets so dark, so early.

And like in my in my office, the lighting is super weird. So like whenever I hop on a call like this, they think I work in a cave. I mean, kinda do.

Like like any good self respecting influencer. Come on.

I I guess I should do that. You know what? Cause like earlier in the day, right behind this, I I have a window. So like, everything is just super bright. Oh, that

is beautiful. That's when we normally talk. Yeah. Now I have this Elgato ring light thing that I got a while back when I, you know, really focused on my Zoom setup.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well,

I just got out of a haircut, which effectively for me is a one hour nap while someone cuts my hair. That's kind of that's how old I am currently.

Every time I go to a haircut, the hair is grayer and I see it falling off my face. So it's like, it's just a reminder of how old I'm getting.

And the the person cutting your hair is like a stud with like tattoos on their arms and like Oh, all

this like hip hop and like stuff. I'm like, yeah. I I know nothing about that. I know I know Paw Patrol and Mickey Mouse and yeah, all that.

And SaaS metrics.

Yep. Well, are we talking about?

I'm just happy to be ending the week on like the upswing of the roller coaster because the beginning of the week, I was stressed. I was I was waking up stressed. And what we can get into why we had an all hands meeting on Wednesday. I'll talk about like the stressful part of that. And about a week ago, the leadership team and I got into a very difficult conversation.

So that was stressful. And yeah, there's just a lot going on and really ending the week on like a positive momentum note. So yeah, few things to talk about. We hired a marketing agency and then I can get into, that difficult conversation at the leadership level, as well as, what made all hands stressful around the end of year goals.

Yeah. Also, by the way, I just got back from a quick trip to Florida. I spoke at a conference, the art like recurring revenue conference or recurring revenue retreat kind of thing, and I was invited to it like two two years ago. Supposed to be at Disney and ended up being at this other resort, You know, they invite me to talk about productized services and like now I'm sort of done talking about productized

Two years ago.

But you know, I went down there and it was fun, hung out with like Chris Lemma and Corey Miller and a bunch of other people. Dave Rodenbaugh, my wife and kids came, we went to Disney for a day, that was a good little time there.

I was just gonna say, you introduced me to Corey Miller. Thank you for that. We had a great conversation the other day. He's one of those people that I like have admired for a long time, never, never got to know.

Corey is such a cool guy if you don't know him. And and of course, if you're in the WordPress space, by the way, I know there's there's a segment of our audience who who is. I mean, you gotta be on post status. That that's the thing. And that's Corey's

I just joined.

Newsletter.

Yeah. That's right.

Cool. I've got a all new website for Zip Message. I just launched that a couple days ago. Finally, that was a big project on my end that was just sucking up literally all of my time. Finally got that out the door.

I think it was pretty good. Freemium, I talked about I think last time has has been live for almost a month now. Yeah that that's been fun to watch a little little, nerve wracking. Podcast tour influencer outreach, Terms I'm I'm not really a fan of, but things I need to be doing and I'm doing them. And then hiring generalists versus specialists.

Something that's on on my mind lately. So yeah. Okay.

Let's get into it. We we got a lot to go over. Okay. So I feel like maybe maybe I'll start off by confronting, like, the most difficult. Maybe I have two difficult things.

So I had this really challenging conversation with the leadership team. It was a bit tough to sort through a lot of the assumptions and so on. So here's like what it came down to. I can be difficult to work with at the leadership level, not in terms of like getting along. That's easy and I'm very, very rarely like willing to pull out the CEO card to override anything.

So I'm like very much a middle sibling when it comes to like management at the leadership level. It's very collaborative. But where I can be a pain is around my need for like experimentation, like idea exploration. I get a little bit distracted and I need that because that's kind of my way of finding product market fit. So the company gets set in a direction and everyone knows what they need to do and everything feels nice and stable.

And that's the rest of the company. But up at the leadership level, I need a little bit of freedom for chaos. And so what we've learned over time, this is like from Cardhook, where that chaos used to leave the leadership team and go to the rest of the company. And we realized, okay, that's bad. Let's not let Jordans like ideas and exploration impact developers and other people who are kind of on a set path.

So it gets confined to the leadership level. And what that really means in practice is that every once in a while you have to deal with me getting really excited about something and wanting to explore it and meeting three or four people in the space and sending a tweet about it and getting into conversations and then asking the other people at the leadership level, like, let's say, Rock as the CTO to get, like, more information. Like, I had this idea. If we put this together and this together, we could accomplish this thing, and that would give us this thing in the market. And I think that's what the market wants right now.

Can you go talk to them? See if it's possible. See if this thing can we connect it with this other thing? And I need that because I feel like these little pockets of product market fit exist out in the world. Like, right, we went out to build an e commerce checkout, and that is a big, giant, hairy goal and there's a whole bunch of stuff to do with it and we built it over a span of a year.

And now that we have it, I don't want to just assume this is the same exact situation as Cardhook, copy and paste, And we're going to get product market fit as soon as we walk out the door. Like, don't want to assume that. So I have a good sense of this is the property built and I know that there's demand for that. So in our demos with people like it's clear that there's demand and we're starting get sign ups and starting to onboard people. Good.

But then there's a lot of other things that happen in the market that are more current and I want to explore them. And we got into this dynamic where I started to feel guilty about that because I felt like I was introducing chaos into the lead show, but but I don't wanna feel guilty about

it. Because from day one, you sort of like committed to like, this is the product we're building. Let's do that. And you're in year one. So this is the time to where the product market fit can shift pretty rapidly, right?

That's right. That's right. And the difficulty is we set goals. We want X number of merchants by the end of the year processing revenue. Right.

And so sometimes what it can feel like is, well, that's the goal. But you're kind of off exploring this other idea when we haven't achieved those goals. Why are you doing that? And to me, I have two choices. I'm not gonna change who I am.

I have no interest in that. So it's either I can keep it to myself or keep it confined to just Rock and I, just my co founder who kinda gets me because we've been doing this long enough.

I'm curious, like how does that actually play out? Like, the way that I tend to think about it in your case, which is much different than mine because I'm out talking to people and building at the same time. But in your case, it seems more like you are out talking to the market and whatever you're exploring and thinking about doing like that, that's, that comes first and the team follows in a phase that comes behind it. Right? Like, like it's not like you have a Twitter DM conversation this morning and by the afternoon you're going to have the developers pulled off and doing some you're not gonna do that.

That's right. That's right. It really does not impact people until, like, things have been explored, research has been done, things have been documented, and only then does it make its way onto the road map. So I feel okay because I have a different vantage point than I did at the beginning of Pardhook.

Have world sense, like, the pipeline is working as it's supposed to. You know? You're you're at the tip of of the ship and and everything falls behind. Right?

Yes. So that's kinda how I see it. I I look at it like a chessboard where I'm like, alright. This stuff is moving forward. Like, I'm not stopping that.

And momentum is continuing in that direction now that we've kinda set that up. So I feel okay exploring. I always end up in this Lord of the Rings analogy where there's like the main battle and then I'm trying to drop the ring into the Mount Doom. You know, where it's like, if if I can succeed in this, then it can make everything else much, much easier or irrelevant because we kind of, like, hit on to something that doesn't require the same level of pushing on our on our part. Right?

The the thing that happened at Cardhook was when we got it right, we didn't have to push. We just jumped into an existing river of demand and then caught a bunch of it because we were kind of in the right place. So I want to wiggle our way over there. And so that can create some tension at the leadership level. So we kind of like had that out.

I'm a little bit still unclear on what the discussion was. I don't know how much you can share here, but like, what's the problem with you going out and talking to different segments of the market? Is it like that it impacts roadmap in an unexpected way?

It's asking a lot of the other people on the team. Let's say, for example, the VP of product. It's asking a lot of her to keep the ship steady, keep everything going in the direction that we've already set. And then to kind of hear a bunch of chaos for me the same time. And the truth is that a lot of it was like my underlying tension and stress and me bringing a bunch of assumptions to it.

And so it really just required a lot of communication and hammering out like she's not trying to stop me from having those ideas. It was a lot of it was me coming into it, maybe with like a little tiny sense of shame that I'm doing it and then making assumptions almost like, hey, you're you're making me feel ashamed. You know, when in reality, she's like, what are you talking about? I just want I just like documenting stuff. So if you if you go off on an adventure, let's just document it.

Whatever it was like playing out over there in in a rally world, same thing plays out for me too, except it's like me versus me. Like I'm I'm constantly like

It's a challenge.

Yeah. Working on this. No, you should be working on that. I'm Alright, now I'm working on that, but now that's falling behind and now I'm getting these requests and like, do I do about that? But I got to get back to this and like, oh man, every day.

Every day.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. It is a bright resource management, Whether it's time or money or effort or ideas, you have to kind of sacrifice something.

I keep analyzing the first year of a startup because I've been in too many first years of startups, unfortunately. And I'm in it again. I'm coming up to the end of the first year of ZipMessage and it does seem like so if you think about those twelve those first twelve months, it actually gets more and more chaotic as you get later in that first year. So first six months, first quarter, second quarter, it's a little bit about like market validation. It's also really exciting and fun.

You're building V1 of the product, getting very first customers, like that's exciting and it's super obvious in in those earliest days what you need to build first, second, third, because it's like you just build the biggest things first, you know, like the most obvious ones. Then you get some customers, some MRR, and then it's like, now everything has to start to click into place all at the same time. And that's right now I feel so much chaos. And that's not necessarily in a good, like it's definitely good that we have customers coming in. Like we're getting pretty regular conversions, you know, on a almost daily basis.

I feel like it's more chaotic now than any other business that I had before. Like, audience ops wasn't really like this. Not from what I remember. Know, I feel like it's almost like I'm rusty and I forgot how to operate when things are so unformed.

It might feel bad, but I don't think it's actually bad. Like, the the chaos feels like a like, it's unavoidable. If you're succeeding at all, it's going to be it's going to be a chaotic mess. I don't know anyone that turned the corner from, Okay, here's what we build the basic stuff that's obvious to build to first customers. Anyone who has things like nice and quiet means it's not catching on yet.

But as soon as it starts to catch on at all, it feels like a bunch of chaos. But there's a saying that I held on to a card hook in the days when it was like full blown, just insane chaos and sign ups and churn and complaints and like, oh my God, we messed this up and just cost someone $10,000 in three minutes. And then someone else was like, this is the best product I've ever seen in my life. I can't believe you in those moments. What we talked about internally was going just fast enough that things feel out of control.

If it if it feels like it's in control, then you're not going fast enough And complete insanity, chaos, you don't know what you're doing is probably kind of like around where you should be feeling. This related to a a saying that Rob Walling kind of hammered into my head as like a mentor when I was asking for advice in those times. He was like, the mistake a lot of people make is as soon as things start working, they wanna get away from the chaos, so they slow down. And in truth, you just gotta lean in just further. Just just take the chaos on and just admit that that chaos is because you put something out into the market that people find interesting and they care.

So that's good.

That is a that's that's a really, really good advice. I mean and and you know, actually, like looking at my last couple of months, like two, three months, launched freemium about a month ago and right around there, maybe just before and just after, like I did see a slowdown in signups and conversions and it really started to freak me out a little bit. And then I started to realize like, well, that was also around the time when announcements slowed down, new features were slowing down, publicity was slowing down. And so like, there are all these things that were just gradually slowing down from what they were in the then kind of looking back on it, it's like obvious that like, you know, metrics were sort of down for like two, two, three weeks there. And it started to freak me out mentally, but then it was like, then, then in the last two weeks launched the new website, not that that necessarily triggered it, but it definitely helped like a whole string of new conversions came in.

And then it's like, you know, back to the same emotional roller coaster of, of trying to figure out like, like there's the chaos of the actual work, but there's also the mental chaos of like, is this working? Is this not working? Is this working? Is it, you know, But yeah, finally did get the new website out and I should talk more about one of the big reasons why I decided to do a website redesign, which by the way, I tend to believe that in, again, in this first year, first year or two years, I think startups should be redesigning or reworking their websites probably more than most are. There's plenty of stuff that I need needed to be working on on the product and marketing and other marketing stuff, but like I felt like the website really needed a change.

Is that because it starts to separate from what you're actually doing, where the product is going, the way you think of it. And then you go to the website and you're like, that's actually not where my head is at. That's not where I want the position to be.

And maybe also like different from other products that I've done in the past. This one, the core pain and solution really changed in terms of what I learned from the customers in the first year. So like the kernel of the idea for Zip Message originally was basically a customer support context, right? Like I want to be able to send a link to a customer and ask them to to record a message back to me And that was the kernel of the idea to make that easy. Right?

And of course it does that. But the way that I ended up designing it and building it was, yes, it does that. I could share a link with anyone, but then they sent to me. I can respond back to them or I could just send to them and they could respond back to me. And then it became a back and forth all on one page.

And that's what the product looked like from day one. And that's the thing that caught on. It wasn't necessarily the inbound support, messages, although that's a key feature that we have. It's sort of a secondary or third key feature. The main idea that really caught on is asynchronous conversations back and forth collaboration.

And what I learned from the customers in the first year was that there have been a bunch of customers who signed up for the customer support context and then I heard a bunch of churns and feedback saying like, I love the product but actually my customers don't reply that much when I send them a link. But then I looked at all the customers who are using it a lot and it's remote teams communicating with each other. It's teams communicating with their freelancers. It's a freelancer communicating with their clients. It's an agency communicating with clients.

It's hiring is another big one that comes up. Like I want to have these asynchronous conversations with people I might hire, you know? So like it's all about the asynchronous communication. So, and so the original website did not really promote that. The original website had something like the h one was something along the lines of like, I forgot what it was.

It was like zero friction, send, send a link to someone, you know, get, get a response back. Now the the h one is better async conversations. So the whole website is geared towards that now.

So that that sounds necessary.

Yeah. You know, the pricing page now shows the the free plan and everything at all all new pricing table and promoting the use cases and everything. So I think it came together pretty well. I spent a lot of time on it, which was sort of nice to work on at first, but then it just became a grind. Like, man, I just want to finish this I can work on on on the next things.

But yeah, think it came together pretty well.

It looks good. And I'm seeing your activity on Twitter start to result in like this little army of people that know what the message does and where it fits. And then they respond to other people's tweets and like basically give a suggestion of, oh, zip message does that for you. And that feels like a good product of what you are saying over and over and showing what you're doing. And then it just implants into people's heads and then they they think of it.

I am seeing that. I'm seeing more of that people recommending it and that's the result that I want to see. And I'm trying to figure out ways to make that happen more. You know, that's that's the big marketing challenge. I had a really good conversation with Justin Jackson on the build your SaaS podcast, which I think should be out this week, same week as as this episode.

So we were talking yesterday about this, about like, how do you market a product like this, which I believe that there is a lot of demand in the market for this type of thing because people are the whole world is remote, first of all, but but then obviously tools like Loom and and people are are sending messages asynchronously more than they have ever. And there's a hodgepodge of different tools that aren't quite ideal for that. You've got like Slack, you've got email, you've got Loom, you've you've got, you know, a bunch of different things.

I use Snagit for that a lot. I do screenshots a lot. People just are coming up with ways to communicate in that way.

Yep. Yeah. And I use clean shot, which is basically snag it, you know, but there's definitely a space for face to face asynchronous. So video, audio screen share. And so what we're talking about is like, that's not necessarily the type of tool that I could just optimize for SEO.

Although I am doing some stuff with content and SEO right now. In his case, we were talking about like podcast hosting. Like that's just a category that is well established. Every single day people are searching for a podcast hosting solution. If if you can get in the mix, you're in.

What I'm trying to do with the new website and everything is like I'm trying to win the term async communication, async conversations. If if if you're talking about that, then I want someone to say, oh, you're, you're going async, you're doing async, you guys are remote and you're async. Are you using zip message? Cause that, that's what you should be looking at if, if you're doing that, you know, I'm trying to make that the conversation. So one of the other things that I'm really starting to step on the gas here a little bit is, you know, podcast tour, influencer outreach, just trying to get it out there, trying to get it into more conversations.

And so, know, I, I have a few connections that I could reach out to to try to get on podcasts and I'm doing some of that right now. You know, you and I were talking about this. You're, you're much better at this sort of thing than I am, but I'm trying to actually run a process for outreach and, relationship building and, and, you know, integrations is going to play into this too. I'm talking to a few random companies about, you know, doing integrations. We're we're going to launch an API pretty soon.

So we launched a Zapier integration, so that that's already out. I'm trying to work through that process and and that that's where a whole bucket of chaos is is

Like what you should do, where you should put your effort.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could talk a little bit about that. Like like this week, Monday, it's like, okay, I need to have more influencers talking about ZipMessage. How do I do that?

And then I sat here and looked at the screen for three hours and then finally after that I was like, okay, I think I I think I know what needs to happen. I need to be on as many podcasts as I possibly can. Especially there's a ton of niche podcasts that I don't know personally, but, but if I can get a 100 of them on a list and reach out to them, that, that process needs to happen. And then similar thing, but with Twitter, you know, cause Twitter is where our industry is talking about ZipMessage and I'm and and so if I could reach out to more people on Twitter, do do some DM outreach, show them ZipMessage, give give out free accounts, ask what they think. So I was like okay, those are the two things that I want to do.

How do I actually execute that task, that project? This is the kind of work that I'm like terrible at. I start doing it, I find like three names, I put them on a list, I'm like alright I'm done. I need to go work on something. This is where I feel rusty but like I need to just make a process, figure out exactly what needs to be done and then hire somebody to do this work.

You know, like I I'll do the vision and the goal and the strategy. And then I hired, I did hire a VA on Upwork to help execute the sort of like the grunt work of, of, of doing this. I signed up for a SparkToro account. I finally, got around to, you know, getting a premium account on that. There's another tool and you know what?

This, this came about because this guy reached out to me and offered a free account for me to try out. It's called podseeker.co. I don't know if you're listening to this man, but, it is a really great tool. I'm using it and it's basically an, director it's like a search engine for podcasts and it's really well done. You go in there and you could search by keyword, but then you've got all sorts of filters for like, you know, number of episodes when the most recent episode was, how many iTunes reviews do they have, you know, search by category, like all these different filters.

And, and then it finds like, I think some of it has like contact info and like, it's, it's really, really great. So, so I'm using that podseeker.co I'm using that for the podcasting search. And then I'm using SparkToro to find Twitter influencers on a bunch of, criteria. So

then And what does SparkToro do? It's like audience intelligence?

SparkToro kind of does a bunch of things, but it's, I think it's best for finding, basically finding influential people and influential websites in a certain category or, or search term. So I could, I could type in a competitor or I can type in a topic or I can type in like a big name influencer and then it will it will come back to me with, well, here are 50 other Twitter people on Twitter who are talking about that person or engaging with that person. And those people have large audiences, so you should be reaching out to them. Same with websites and all this other stuff. So, so then I started using air table for the first time.

I'm finding a use for that now. So I'm, I'm like gathering contacts and, and I'm like taking a very manual approach to like vetting out each of these people. And again, I only did this for like a few of them and I put that into a process, recorded a video and zip message on how to, how I'm doing this. And then I sent that off to, a VA that I hired on Upwork to work through this process and come back to me with like a list of a, of a 100 podcasts and then a 100 like Twitter DMs.

Look at you. Some, some growth hacking.

I'm trying to work it, you know? And so like the thing that clicked in my mind this week was like, I can't do the hunting. Like I just don't have the time or energy to hunt and build large lists, but I'm fine with doing the hustle of reaching out and building those relationships. That's, that's what I need to be doing. I just need to have a list that I can go into every single day and pick off 20 people and strike up conversations with them.

You know, like that that'll be like my task, but I need to build out that, that a database or CRM and that that's what this guy's going to help me do. Again, I just feel rusty with like building a process from scratch and hiring someone new to, to do that sort of thing, but you know, getting back into it.

Yeah. Makes sense. I call that T ball. I need someone to set the ball up and then I'll just show up and do the podcast. I think you and I share an issue there, and this will be a good transition to talk about marketing where we also don't have a category with a bunch of existing search and a bunch of existing demand and people just looking for solutions all day.

We have two big competitors, one bolt and one fast. And that has been really helpful for us because a lot of people on big commerce and WooCommerce and so on are aware of them. And so they now are more aware that they can replace their checkout or add something to their checkout. And that's good. But the biggest problem is still awareness.

It's just waving your hands and saying, Hey, this exists. This is an option for you now. Do you want to take a look at it?

And actually just a minute ago, I just heard, from my wife, she was reading an email from our school, our kid's school that said, and they were talking about, remote learning in case some people need to quarantine and they said, and this is from my, a public school district that is not super tech savvy, they were like, in some cases we're going to communicate with these children asynchronously. Like they're, they're starting to use the word, you know?

And I'm like, Oh, all right.

Yeah. That's, that's cool. Yeah. You need some articles, you need some press. You need to be mentioned alongside the idea.

Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a tricky thing. And so let's transition into marketing. We just hired a marketing agency that we have worked with in the past. So powered by search, funny enough, a segment on our podcast last time, like a year and a half or two years ago, whenever we started working with powered by search at Cardhook, they use a clip in their marketing and in their advertising.

When I explained why I chose Yes. To go with Yes.

Oh, wow. Yeah. I mean, they're they're awesome. Dev and and the team over there at Powered by Search, they are a a awesome, awesome, agency. They do have like some Twitter ads that they do, and and I think they run like one of your case studies on that.

I see that.

That's right.

Yeah. And if you if you click on it, you'll hear a segment from this podcast, which is

Oh, really? I didn't know that. That's cool.

Yep. I'm aware of them because we worked with them and they did a good job for us. But I wanted to kind of run a full process instead of just being like, hey, let's just go with what we know. So we talked to a bunch of agencies, looked around at our options and still came all the way back around to working with them again. So I feel like we made the decision like the right way and are just signing with them.

And the reason we signed with them, and I think this is like where it starts to cross over with what you're dealing with, is because they are specifically generalists. So we spoke with a bunch of agencies that were specialists in running ads. And we need more than that. And so some of the people we spoke with are great at what they do, but it didn't feel holistic. It didn't feel like comprehensive in a way where we could really set out these larger goals.

And that's why we signed a one year agreement with dev and powered by search because this is not like a campaign. This is like.

Mhmm, this is they can shift strategies throughout the year.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's a bigger challenge. It's a different challenge now than it will be six months ago. And you have the awareness thing, then you have the landing page thing and you have the funnel, like all these different things.

So that's kind of our approach is we want help from a holistic point of view on who's the audience, what's the right positioning, what's the right messaging, what should be on the website, what's the customer journey. So that's how we're looking at it. And I know you mentioned earlier that you're thinking about general generalists for specialists and what's on your plate there?

Well, so, you know, I'm definitely starting to try to execute a bunch of marketing related work, and there's been a bunch of things that I've been wanting to get up and running. So the the influencer outreach stuff that I just talked about, like that's a me project. Me plus a plus a VA is is working on that. But outside of that, I also need to get up and running with some content. There is some SEO play that we're trying to go after.

We don't necessarily have a lot of search demand for the tool directly, but there, there, there are some SEO content opportunities that we should be capitalizing on. I started building out some pages myself, you know, competitor alternative to pages and stuff, but, you know, there's, there's a couple of guides that we need to be building out. But then on another track, I talked about this earlier. I haven't really started this, but I would like to get some sort of like brand building audience, building podcast kind of content up and running. That is a much more long term strategy.

I haven't really done anything on that front yet, but it's just something in my mind, something I've been playing with and trying to plan out. And so there's that, there's the content, there's writing involved. I want to get into newsletters. There's always work to be done on our email marketing and social media. I mean, Twitter is sort of the place where it's getting shared around a lot.

So I want to, and there's plenty of other blind spots like LinkedIn and all this other stuff. So marketing stuff needs to be happening. And my thought a few months ago was, okay, you know, I don't have the type of budget to do a big agency. That's sort of just not really in the cards. So my thought was to try to find a talented marketing person.

I guess it would end up being a generalist. I also don't have the budget right now to just find like a head of marketing to offer a big full time salary to. Like, that's also not an option. So I still basically operate on the bootstrapper mentality, which is I would love to find a really talented marketing person to work on a part time retainer, you know, a couple of days a week. At first we would probably define a project scope, do a couple of those and then roll into like a retainer.

That was my first approach. And I, I, at first I had a hard time finding the person, but then ultimately I did, I did start working with someone. We're still working together right now, but as we get into it, what I'm finding is as I start to reassess the types of things that we'll be publishing and the different things that I want to be doing, I think it's a little bit better to go with specialists. That we're a few weeks into this strategy of working with, I would say, a generalist who is talented in certain areas, but you know, I think it's a little bit better. Like, like for example, like for, for content pieces to, we do some strategy.

Like we've, we've done some really good strategy already around like keyword research and like these are some opportunities that we should be publishing on. So, know, like like for content pieces, like now that we have the strategy and and the and the targets and and the and the goals, like I probably need to go out and and hire like a a really talented writer. Just just a specialist writer who can, who can write something really, really strong on this, on this one piece. And then maybe we'll do a couple of those. Whenever I come up to doing a podcast or media content, you know, maybe I'll hire someone who's a little bit more specialized in that.

That's sort of where I'm at now. I'm starting to think about it more like, you know what, at the end of the day, I kind of need to be that head of marketing. I was hoping that I could find someone who can sort of be like a part time head of marketing and grow into that. But ultimately at this stage, this, this early stage, I think I just need to sort of take that on and run the strategy, run the goals, collaborate on the direction and then figure out this is who I need to hire for this month long project or a three month long project. And maybe we'll come back and work together again a couple times a year, but I'm not committing to a salary quite yet.

I'm not committing to an agency long term quite yet. It's just, you know, let's, let's kind of tackle a bunch of marketing work that just needs to get done, you know?

Yeah. It's a, it's like strategy and project management.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you can, you can do certain things at certain times and I hear you on the on the challenge and I I think I will really play that role also. I don't I don't really see any other way to do it because you do want someone responsible for the overall strategy and like the direction that it's going. And then there's so much execution that needs to happen. And that's the part where you can, you kind of start to lose.

You can't do all of that. You have to let go there.

You know, the part that is really challenging me right now is the fact that I am the head of product. Like, that is my real number one like, alright. I'm the founder. I'm responsible for everything. But in terms of, like, where my energy don't wanna say, like, best spent, but, like, I I'm the one who is driving the product roadmap.

I work with my developer every day. I'm talking to customers. I I feel the feature request. I I decide on the priorities on what we're building. Once the developer's building stuff, I build parts of it and then I ultimately ship it.

I get it shipped. I get it announced, rolled out. So that's my role. And lately as I'm getting much more involved in marketing, you know, it's like literally things on the product roadmap are going slower because my hours are much more spent on marketing right now. And, and I am the head of product who is, who happens to be taking a week off of product to work on marketing stuff.

It's again, it's getting back to that chaos. It's like we're getting customers. I'm getting a lot of requests. There's nothing I wanna do more than get into the code and ship these requests. But back to what what Rob is saying about, like, this is the time to push.

I mean, is the time to push if if, you know, I'm trying to get on as many podcasts as I as I can get on. I'm trying to strike up with these relationships, trying to execute on some SEO content. This stuff has to happen and and I and I can't delay it, you know? So

I think that's like a huge challenge for smaller teams because let's just say the podcasting works and you start to get a bunch of signups, then you might be very, very tempted to say, oh, let me focus on the signups and let me focus on making sure that they have a good experience, that they convert. And really, maybe not what you should be doing, but what the business wants is for someone to continue pushing on the podcasts and keep going on it. We talked about internally as punishment for success. We never want to punish success in marketing and sales. So if you're doing a great job at sales, we don't want you to be punished by having to go service your success.

Like you brought on five people. Great. You did a great job at selling. Now, if you are if you are also tasked with servicing and onboarding and the success of those five people and the support, you're being punished for this sales success. Because now if number six comes in, you have more work to do.

If number seven comes in, you have more work to do. And we want to split those two and we want to reward your success. You can keep going to get number 10 and then 20 and then 30. And then it's almost like a boat with a wake behind it. Like you go forward, we will figure out how to handle the wake.

We'll plug things up, we'll hire, we'll step up, but we don't want you to slow down because you're creating a larger wake. And when you're doing it, when you're responsible for multiple parts of that funnel, it's impossible to just keep going on and pushing and pushing when you're creating more. This is the feast and famine of a freelancer dilemma.

I think it's also a little bit more chaotic right now than it will be in a few months. If everything goes well, I mean, it'll remain chaotic as, as, as growth happens, I think, but it would be nice if I can get to a point where, okay, these marketing activities have have worked. I've already seen some things that work, especially with like getting influencers to share it. That that has definitely driven customers. Starting to see a little bit of of organic search traffic coming in.

I'm working on the viral stuff. And a lot of the virality is product work, like making the product more viral. That's a big part of what I need to be working on, like on the product side. But like with the content stuff and the outreach stuff, like if I could do a few months of that and figure out, like, these things are working, then then it's a process that I know how to how to hire for and delegate. And and it's just something that we're doing repeatedly.

And then it's taking less and less of my hours of sitting here trying to figure out what to do. Ultimately, know, I'm not trying to delegate away the product work. Like that is where I I live. Know, that's my thing is is

So that's the part you don't compromise on?

That I don't compromise on it. I I do need to be in it. Like, yes, I have a developer, but he's not like a head of product. He's a developer kind of under my direction on the product side. Right.

So, and that's where I want to be. That's where I feel I add a lot of the value, especially the fact that I could talk to customers and work on the product. So and have that cycle. That's that's where I need to be. So I I'm I'm trying to figure out the processes of how to do a marketing project and delegate the work, do a marketing project and dele so do the strategy, the keyword research, hire a writer, need to do some influencer outreach, hire someone to do the work, then I'll go do the outreach.

You know, like I'm I'm getting these things kind of dialed in and and it's, it's difficult, but it's, I think it's finally starting to come together.

Well, I think that's, that's the big challenge of the next like six months. Like, okay, great. You can get a few customers. How do you get a lot more customers and how do you handle them without slowing down on trying to get more customers? Something you said there reminded me of a book that I'm really, really excited.

It's coming out in a few days next week from Andrew Chen.

Dude, I I just listened to him on on Tim Ferriss. Yeah.

I'm gonna doing podcast rounds. Yeah. He's one of the real deal kind of growth people in SF. This kind of seen it all between Uber and investing at a 16 z and everything else. He wrote a book called Cold Start around the network effects, the initial cold start problem of network effects.

And even even the interview with Tim Ferriss gave a lot of info, even just the concept of an atomic network that you don't need this massive thing for network effects. You really just need the self sustaining initial atomic network. If you could do you can create one of those. You can create others. Like even so I'm just so excited.

This is one of those things where I order the paperback and I'm like, I can't wait to read this.

Me too, man. I was listening to that Tim Ferriss this morning. I'm actually not even that familiar with with Chen, but like

Yeah. His content is ridiculously good. He's one of these people who studies the landscape and then is like, I'm just gonna write the definitive version of this.

I mean, but that concept that they were talking about, like the atomic networks and kind of going like small and then go out and- Your product. Exactly.

That's the challenge.

That's That's perfect timing, you know? I'm definitely going to queue that up on auto.

I feel the same way. So I'm sure we'll maybe we'll have a little review of that after a a few weeks. Totally. Alright, Brian. We made it through.

We had, power outages. We had microphone outages, whatever else. Yeah. But it's Friday. Thanks for listening, everyone.

Have a great weekend.

Alright. Later, folks. See you.