Bootstrapped Web

Welcome back everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Mister Bryant Castle, how are you this fine Friday?

Doing good. Doing good. Just finishing up a whole bunch of work and I'm glad we got this one in because I'm gonna be out for the next two weeks on vacation two back to back vacations. I'm super psyched.

It doesn't sound bad at all.

Yeah.

And you're going you're going good places. You're going happy places.

Yeah, man. On Sunday morning, my just my wife and I are going to Hawaii for the week. I've never been to Hawaii. So, you know, we've been wanting to go for a while. What island again?

We're going to Kauai on the South Shore there. So we got like an Airbnb on on the water down there. Just gonna do hiking, beaching, and do a helicopter ride, which which would be kind of crazy. And then we come home, and it's a far flight for us, you know. So we so we come home.

I'm home for like twenty four hours and I get back on a plane to go back to Colorado for Big Snow Tiny Conf West. So I'm gonna have like time zone whiplash a little bit.

Personal vacation and then a work vacation.

Yeah, little work cation. But it feels good because the next two weeks, these two trips, I'm gonna I'm gonna really try not to work. It's gonna take more trying on the Hawaii trip because it's gonna be mostly like lounging around and like no kids around, so there's gonna be some time where I could work.

Oh, you need a good book or two. That's what you need. What are talking about? You're in Hawaii. Don't don't work, man.

Don't work. I thought I thought it's because like of a feature release or something coinciding.

No. Definitely not doing any feature release. You're just

talking about self control.

I I mean, like, stay stay away from the computer, you know?

Oh, yeah.

I don't mean like doing real work sessions. I mean, like, just don't touch the computer.

Don't don't get pulled in. Don't get pulled in. I think you'll be able to do it. It feels so silly in those environments to look at your computer screen and then look up at, like, nature in front of you and be like, yeah, I should stay here at this desk and hang out on Twitter for a while. Well, I hope I hope you succeed in that.

Good. The coincidence is I'm heading to Hawaii in a few weeks, and I have the same issue as you do. I I go to Hawaii with the fam, get back on Sunday morning, and then Sunday night fly up to Las Vegas for shop talk, a big, like, ecommerce conference. So very similar whiplash. At least we'll be 10.

Should be fun.

I'm doing a panel about checkouts and payments at Chop Talk, which will be interesting. And preceding the panel right before is the CEO of Bolt. Oh, wow. Who's our, like, direct competitor who has been, like, all over Twitter recently. So I'm like, I'm looking forward to seeing where where this goes.

Yeah. That should be fun.

Right now, I'm at this, like, place where we I just like wrapped up a whole bunch of stuff. So it it feels like a perfect time, like a clean break to to take basically two weeks off, you know. So yeah, what do we got today?

I don't know how much I have, man. I have extremely busy. Most of the things I've been busy with, I can't really talk about on the podcast yet. I have been more distracted than I want. I've been doing things other than what I want to be focusing on, which is like, okay, I can do that for a limited amount of time before I get frustrated.

So I'm almost done and that'll be good to kind of come back all the way. Yeah. We've just been focusing on go to market and sales and just getting that ball rolling. Yeah. And then, you know, I I'd like to talk about a tweet thread from Moise Ali about Shopify that I responded to and then shout out to all the people responding to my tweet about moving to Chicago.

Makes me really excited to go there and meet, you know, jump into a new community.

Yeah. I mean, I want to hear about both those things.

Well, tell us about what you are concluding that leads into a clean break to go on vacation.

Yeah. I mean several things. One thing I just announced yesterday, I, and this was really unexpected. I sold my Productize course and community and website brand thing. I sold that to Sam Shepler.

You are such an acquisition magnet that you are accidentally bumping into acquisitions at this point.

Oops, I sold another thing. That's actually exactly how this happened. You know, I I sold audience ops and then I sold process kit recently. I wasn't as public about this but I also sold off, Sunrise KPI and I sold off this tiny little SaaS idea called Thready, little micro acquisitions. When I announced ProcessKit and I announced AudienceOps, I started to get some DMs from a few people saying like, would you ever sell product ties?

And and I had never really thought about selling Productize because it's sort of like tied in with my personal brand, it's my content like me on video and stuff like that. But it is on its own website, it's on productizeandscale.com. And then I was talking to Sam Shepler late last year. He he was a member of of the Productize course and stuff and and he's built a a super successful Productize service business, with Testimonial Hero. They do like video testimonial production as a service.

He's really like killing it with that business. And so then he he's been like tweeting more about like productized services and he wants to sort of in in his next chapter get get more into teaching and community building and stuff like that. And I'm trying to, like I'm not interested in doing that kind of stuff anymore. So, it just really synced up perfectly. And so actually multiple people did reach out to me about it.

I had sort of multiple offers on it and all three people it sort of made sense like strategically for them to take it but Sam was definitely the best fit and I'm glad we made it happen. Was pretty quick, know. We casually talked about it a few months ago, but then we brought it back up this past week and

made it happen. That is really interesting because going in, right, a lot of people pursue software with an exit in mind. They want recurring revenue, and they know that the enterprise value on software, the multiples are just great. Most people that go into, like, information product type businesses that are directly connected to them and their personal, like brand and knowledge, I think most people assume that that's not gonna be acquired. That's not gonna be sold.

Yeah. That that was sort of my assumption with it too. I basically initially launched it because I I did think it had value, but it was also sort of a nice passive income cash flow side business for me for several years. I was actually running that for, for almost seven years, believe it or not. And you know, that was also a little bit difficult to, how do you value something like that?

Right. Cause it's really existing assets, existing revenue, and then the list and then the site and the SEO, right? So it's not like a multiple on recurring revenue, but there's still, there's value there.

Yeah, exactly. Like it doesn't really have recurring revenue. It's just basically like course sales, which you know, it does still sell, every year. And so it's like the course, the website with some content, the productized podcast, which has like a 100 episodes. I mean, that's basically it.

And the email list. So you know that that feels good to get that off my plate.

Now your your problem is you don't have anything left to sell.

Exactly. I I just tweeted today. I I, I did a little thread on this thing where it's like I I literally have sold off five businesses in the last six months. It's just Zip Message and podcasting. That's all I've got, know.

And it feels it does feel good.

Yeah, I'm sure. That sounds great.

I mean, you know, those exits like some of them were bigger, some of them were super small, but to me they were all like base hits, you know, not home runs.

Yeah, but put all together.

Yeah, yeah. I think more than anything, it just feels good to get closure on a lot of that stuff. The one thing that I want to sort of share with the audience here, you know, because I've been known for a while I think, because I get asked about this all the time when I go on other podcasts. It's like, oh you have so many products. You're this like portfolio of products type of person and you've got all this stuff.

And And I always get the question like, well how do you work on so many different things and how do you jump around between different products and businesses and stuff like that? And of course the answer was always like, I really only focus on one at a time. I just happen to have built up a bunch and left them hanging around my portfolio. But the thing that I I wanted to share, and I did a Twitter thread about this today, I I do think that it worked to my benefit to have multiple products in the early part of my career. And now I'm really sort of committing to one and focusing on just one.

Like I'm not interested in starting any other businesses and that feels good to me now. Like having done ten plus years of other business, of doing a lot of exploration of businesses, it feels better to me now to, and I'm not saying anyone else should follow my path or not, I'm just saying in my experience it helped to be more of an explorer in the early part of my career and then later like feel ready to sort of commit to one thing. Especially you know once I saw Zip Message sort of clicking in ways that other things didn't click, not just financially but like in a number of different ways. I think it was good you know. Especially like product ties was something that really helped open up a lot of doors for me and grow my audience and network and I got to meet a lot of really great people through that which helped my career a lot.

You know for anyone listening who is younger and you know earlier on in their career, I think you'll probably hear that advice of like you know you got to focus on one thing and nothing else and avoid shiny object syndrome and everything and you know I think generally that that's pretty good advice and I would say focus on one thing at a time but it's not, in my experience, it's not the end of the world to sort of have a few different things going and learn and hone different types of chops and skill sets and meet different people, you know, that that sort of worked for me, I think.

Yeah. I've I've been thinking about something related. I feel it sometimes where right. We have a team, right? So I have I have a group of people that work for us, work for me.

And it often happens that we need something done and the answer is, oh, Jordan knows the person there. So let's let's just go through there. That feels like it took a while to build up. And it wasn't so much from doing one thing. It was just kind of pointing in one direction almost.

Right? It really started off with running my own e commerce business and then Cardhook and then the Cardhook checkout and then rally. And it's it's if you look at the whole thing, it's about ten years from the time I really started in e commerce. And when I thought back on myself in my twenties and the mistake I made was just not building up my network. I I kind of retreated from that.

I didn't like the Wall Street thing and I was like, this game is not for me. I don't want to put on a suit and play this game. And so I kind of retreated back toward the family business and basically just making money in anonymity, which was cool, but it didn't help me build the network. And now that the network is developed, everything is so much easier and from working a certain way for a long time, that network comes along with a reputation. So people know, hey, this is a good honest person that's hardworking and smart.

And that that's paying off now. And that if there's anything that I think back in terms of being younger, it's it's the network development that I wish I had gotten started on much, much, much sooner. It really started for me with you, with the Mixergy Mastermind. That's how it all start. That was literally me consciously saying, I gotta get out from the family business and I gotta go into the bigger world.

Yeah. For those that don't know, like you and I, we met in a mastermind group that was organized through Mixergy and this was like two or three years before we started Bootstrap Web. I mean

That's how we got to know each other.

That's right. Yeah. Yep. So you and I like sort of network in different ways, but that's totally true for me too, was the growth of the network over years had a major impact on my career and my businesses and for me it has always been really podcasting through this podcast, but also going on other podcasts, especially larger ones, you know, and sort of making the rounds many times through the years. That's what brought people into my orbit, But it's not just podcasting alone because if I was only doing like one business that entire time or not even starting a business that entire time and say just podcasting, I wouldn't have been able to podcast or get that much traction because there's nothing to talk about.

You know, so that that's where I think Yes.

That's the cold start problem of a career.

Exactly. Like in in my in my experience, again, everyone's path is completely different. But for me, it is about building and sharing in public. And for me in the early part, was all about doing a lot of businesses because A, I was learning on those businesses, but B, it gave me a lot of material to talk about. Also just a reason for people to pay attention to what I'm doing because I'm doing something and and I'm talk and and I have something to share with the world so that's a reason why I would get booked on on Mixergy or or Pat Flynn's podcast or Tropical MBA or something like that, know like Which

leads to the building the network which leads Yeah. To

Yeah and then I, exactly. Then I met so many friends and just audience but then influential people who've opened up doors for me and then you know still to this day I look back on literally all of the products that I've ever had and where do you get your customers from? You know, 90% plus podcasting is the source of customers. Either they say it in their onboarding form or they heard me on someone else's podcast or Bootstrap Web or somebody listens and then they recommend it.

Mhmm.

Know, so

Yeah. That's that's a pretty okay. So let let's And

I'm actually doubling down on that now. I'm starting up a new podcast, will launch in a few months, which will be more of like a conversation show with many people, you know.

Okay. Which is really one of the best things you can do for network building.

Exactly. Yeah. I just wanted like an excuse to talk to more people, might as well do it on air, you know.

To dig into that a little bit more from like a marketing point of view, my take on why that works is because the relationship built over audio is so much more powerful. It's really, really hard to do that with copywriting, with a website, with ads. It's just much harder to do. If you're selling physical products, it's more straightforward. You need imagery, testimonials, you need videos, you need to make sure people understand the benefits that they're getting when they buy this product.

And then ideally you can wrap it up into like community and meaning and that sort of thing. But if you're selling software or courses or things that require more of a relationship, it's video is the absolute best and then audio and then everything else. A distant, distant beyond.

I think it's a, I think there's a trade off, right? So with like text, like blog content, you can get the benefit of like SEO. So, so it's easier to like sort of capture an audience faster but it's a it's more surface level. Like they they they're not necessarily gonna connect with you as a person and and the brand and all that. Whereas with podcasting, it's it's a much harder hill to climb to get somebody to listen to you for the very first time and, and even to get someone to listen like a second time for them to like sort of get hooked.

But then once they're hooked, really as, as most listeners of this show would, would probably know, I'm guessing most listeners listen to us like every, every episode, right? Or most of them.

Right. Either they don't care or or you're in for the ride and

it's fine.

I've I've always I've always thought of this show as like it's it's not super popular in the world. It's it's super tiny, but like our people pretty committed to it. Just like I am with so many other shows like this. Mhmm. You know.

We love you. Thank you.

Love you all.

Hell yeah.

But that's that's the trade off, right? It's like building up that that loyalty and and and really just sharing stories over time.

So, but it is a, it is a challenge when you think about your business and how to market it. It is an interesting challenge. Speaking of Bolt, right? Our big competitor, they keep raising crazy amounts of money. But when I see their ads, I don't feel worried because it doesn't feel like an emotional connection with the company and the brand and the product.

It's just muscle. It's just, okay, we are going to hire a bunch of salespeople and here's this ad that like visually looks good. But you know, when I see that, I do not want to compete on those terms. I don't want to say, well, we're going to have nicer ads and spend more money on ads and hire more salespeople. That doesn't feel like a smart thing to do.

Well your Twitter thread, I mean let's talk about that because that Yeah. Because when I when I read that this week, I was like, this is awesome because like Jordan's like pulling out the guns and it seemed it seemed like it was like you really just talking like honestly, like Yeah. That's what what people connect with and it's and it's about the industry. So, yeah, tell us about it.

Okay. So so what happened was Moiz Ali, who's the founder of Native Deodorant, a very, very successful direct to consumer company that was acquired by Procter and Gamble. Right? They're one one of Shopify's success stories. The truth about what happened with Native Deodorant is that they were built on WooCommerce or a customs custom site, but I think it was WooCommerce.

And they were doing post purchase upsells on WooCommerce or on their own site. And when when they talk to Shopify about coming over, it was a requirement for native deodorant to be able to use Cart Hook before they came over to Shopify because we had this great checkout with post purchase upsells. So we, in many very direct ways, helped bring native deodorant over to Shopify. And that was a huge moment for us at Cardhook because it cracked the door open to other direct to consumer companies. Up until then, we had been working with the marketers, the ClickFunnels crowd, and like the freaking mercenaries, man.

They're so good. They were so good at ads and great at making money. And we were pretty successful, but we knew that the goal of the business was to make post purchase upsells a best practice. And the way to do that is to start getting the best brands to do it. And then everyone else follows the best brands.

That's how e commerce like work these days. And every agency knows that there's like, there are like seasons. They're like, everyone asks for the Doctor. Axe site and then everyone asks for the Dollar Shave Club site. It's like these seasons, like all driven by FOMO on who you think is doing well.

And Moise was very smart and very well respected. And he would go on to the conference circuit and talk about how he was doing things and people listened to him. So when he started talking about Cardhook, that really opened the door for the large merchant. So I am forever grateful to Moise. I can still remember the conversation I had with him on speakerphone at the Kartuk office here negotiating the price.

He drives a very hard bargain. And I had to kind of sweat that out in front of, like, my teammates, which was very fun, you know, but we were like, we're gonna close native children. We're gonna do it. Moise is very willing to speak his mind, and he's insightful. So it's kinda like, maybe you don't like what he's saying, but you kinda have to listen to it.

So he wrote a thread about Shopify, and he put it something like, you're arming the rebels with muskets when we need machine guns. And he he wrote a very insightful product critique. Not like thrown grenades, not like you guys suck. Nothing like that. Like number one, subscriptions.

Why is everyone stuck using recharge when it should really have native subscriptions and everyone needs it. Why haven't you built it yet? Number two, analytics. Why can't we do any cohort analysis? Number three.

So it was it was a detailed product critique and in some ways a helpful critique. So it wasn't positioned as like, you're so horrible. It was you have to get this done. The merchants need this like this has to get done. And that was very, very popular.

It drew a lot of attention because it's him and it's at that level. You know, Toby from Shopify replied and said, thank you for the critique. Appreciate it type of thing. And so I saw that as an opportunity for me to add my 2¢. I have I have many cents that I have not been able to share because for a long time I was in a position where it was dangerous for me and for other people's livelihoods to share my opinions.

And that is changing now. And I look forward to being able to share more of my opinions. And this was one of those opportunities because Moyes had a product critique. And I saw the opportunity to say that is a problem and merchants are frustrated. But what you also have is you have another side of the problem.

And that is the app ecosystem. The developers in the Shopify app ecosystem are the other side of the equation. They are the other side of the network effects. Merchants come on board because app developers build them solutions that Shopify hasn't built yet. And then when merchants come on board, agencies come on board to help them.

And there is a beautiful, virtuous cycle of one generating new economic opportunity for the other. So more apps, we get more merchants, we get more agencies, we get more merchants, we get more apps. It's like this very powerful network effect that they have going. And they're the platform in the middle. And so my tweet thread was about the dynamic on the app developer side where they have a lot of problems.

So maybe the merchants are frustrated, but the app developers are scared because there is an enormous amount of politics, favoritism, all types of difficulty inside the app store. And, know, the reason I left that ecosystem is because I have no interest in basically working for a platform.

When you say app developers are scared on you're saying like they're they're scared to kinda pursue certain features to to build or certain products for fear of of like Shopify eating their business? What does that look like?

Yeah. So what I pointed out was something that most people don't know about, especially if you're not in the Shopify ecosystem, don't think about. The root of the relationship between Shopify and its app developers. It tells you everything you need to know that the relationship is based on the Shopify billing API. The Shopify billing API forces app developers to use Shopify's billing in order to collect their money.

So if I'm an app in the Shopify ecosystem that charges $100 a month for my service, you do not get that $100 a month from your customer. Shopify takes that $100 a month and adds it to the Shopify bill. The merchant then pays Shopify, which allows Shopify to report it to Wall Street as their own revenue. So your revenue becomes their revenue very literally. They then keep their portion of the rev share, the 20% that everyone has to pay, and then they send you a PayPal for the $80.

They literally send you a PayPal transaction. That is how the entire Shopify app ecosystem runs, which means if you build on the Shopify ecosystem, daddy Shopify controls your money. Okay.

That's incredible. Especially if they're paying out on PayPal.

Who knows? There's not that much transparency. There is some transparency you go into your partner login, but like you don't really control that. So the entire ecosystem runs in such a way that Shopify controls all your money. To me, that is nuts.

Absolutely. Even Apple, you know, like all these different things are, every platform has its own issues. That kind of tells you everything you need to know about how things work in Shopify, because when someone else controls your money, you you're at their mercy. And so the things that you do, maybe you do something that they don't like. Guess what?

The threat always exists. They have your money. And then they also started investing in other apps. So now they're investing maybe in your company, but maybe in your competitor's company. And maybe they start to build.

So now they're large enough in the app ecosystem, right? Shopify started by doing something very smart, whether on purpose or accidentally. They built a platform very thin. It didn't actually have that many features. It just had the core functionality, which allowed people to get started and then it allowed apps to see opportunity and fill in the feature gaps.

But now that it's mature, everything that Shopify does destroys opportunity for apps. Right? So Shopify comes out with their own email system and all the emails are pissed off. It comes out with its own, I mean, new name feature. And there are a dozen or so apps that are in that same category.

So right now it feels very zero sum. It feels like if Shopify makes an improvement, it kills off opportunity for apps. It's not a healthy ecosystem. And that's what I pointed out by saying you have this problem with merchants, you have this problem with app developers and there is nowhere better merchants to go. And my opinion is that the only ecosystem that will make a compelling pitch to merchants is the headless ecosystem because that one is based on the freedom of the merchant to choose what they want.

And that's why we're building the checkout for that ecosystem. So it was kind of like this perfect opportunity to put what we're doing in that context.

Yeah, it's super interesting. I mean, feel like the thought of platform risk is becoming more prevalent in our SaaS circles, new SaaS startups. I think that's becoming the canonical example platform risk, basically the Shopify ecosystem.

Yeah. Apple and Shopify.

You still have it with Apple and, I think to a far lesser extent with WordPress, you know, doing like a plug in business or something because it's a little bit, you know, it's open source and everything, but there's still some risks there too. It's interesting like in our startup circles, like I'm just hearing more newer entrepreneurs being a little bit more aware of the platform risk issue. It's definitely a thing.

It's a problem because smaller, younger companies, it makes so much sense to build on an existing platform.

Yeah, especially if you're selling into e commerce. It's like, can't ignore Shopify. Absolutely,

absolutely. Right. This is my mission for the next ten years is to help develop an alternative ecosystem. And that's not going to be an easy thing, but I think this happens throughout technology. Whether you're building on Salesforce, you are factoring in how do I feel about the future behavior of my dependency, whether it's Google, Microsoft, Apple, Roblox.

I mean, whatever you're doing. If you can do it independently, it's harder to get off the ground. But this is what I talked to Colin at customer.io, and he's put in whatever, whatever it is ten years, but they are independent. They have customers all over the place, but their dependencies, you know, AWS or whatever the hell they use for hosting. And that is a healthier business.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Got me going there.

Yeah. But dude, I like it. Know, like that's that's what it's all about is is just really like speaking your mind and planting a flag and and taking a stand on on something. Like that's what people really connect with, you know, when you when you see whatever, like Twitter threads or That's why marketing is so hard today is because the real personal energy is where most of the marketing happens even, even from big brands I think.

Right. It's, it's really tough to do that from like a company point of view.

Yeah. Yeah. You can't just sort of, like, hire someone to outsource that. That's, you know

That's that's right. You kinda need, an origin story, and then you need a point of view that's very strong, and you it can go wrong. Right? The What I laughed about earlier in terms of the the Bolt CEO has overall done a really good job of getting attention on Twitter, but he has played it pretty hard. And and for some people, it goes too far.

Right? He he called Stripe and YC like the mafia bosses of Silicon Valley. And a lot of people were like, yes, finally, someone's speaking up against them and other people like, what are talking about? Stripe and YC like and you've raised $800,000,000. So I don't know why you're complaining that you're getting shut out of Silicon Valley.

So even even when you go out there and put out your opinion, you get backlash. So it's it's it's a tricky thing these days.

Yeah, man. I finally shipped a a couple days ago, like, some big features that were intertwined with each other, so it took a long time to get them fully tested and vetted before we shipped them to the code base, to production. And I'm glad that that stuff got out about five or six days ago. So, you know, no issues before I head out on on vacation. Yeah.

Was about to say, that's great.

So like one of them is this email composer. And I mean, it it was sort of like a refactor of this whole big part of the interface with sharing zip messages with some So the the idea is we're freemium now, so it's all about getting users to to use it and then share it. Like that's the main flywheel that I'm that I'm working on from both a product and marketing standpoint is getting users to in there, make it super frictionless for them to get in and sign up and start using it, and then the next step is getting them to share it with someone else. And that's been happening naturally, I'm just trying to increase that even more. Now we have this Basically, it's like an email composer where you can customize an email message.

It shows the the thumbnail that we generate right in into the email. It's got like a call to action button. You can customize that. You can send that off straight from Zip Message, or a couple of users have have asked for this. Just the ability to copy all of that content with the image and everything and then paste it into Gmail or whatever email tool you're using.

So we got that shipped and a couple of other updates around that interface with like sharing with, with other users and making it frictionless for sharing with clients and stuff like that. So now that I'm, I'm going away in two days, I, so again, I'm away for the next two weeks, but I have like lined up. So we shipped that stuff to the app, it's live, but I haven't done the announcement yet. So I queued up some email newsletters going out from customer.io both Mondays of next week. One feature, another is another feature.

And then I've got some, like, Twitter threads with with, like, videos going out next week. It's all, like, scheduled to Oh, look

at you. Bad.

Jeez. That's when you make me

feel bad about my work habits.

You know? And and I I just want like, because I I have noticed a bit of a slowdown in the in, the sign ups and conversions on on Zip Message. They're they're still sort of regular, it wasn't what it was in January and February. Well, we we had a few things hit in January and February, like Product Hunt, and I was on some podcasts, but but I also did not ship any new big features in in several weeks. And and I know that that does contribute to, conversions.

It's just people seeing, oh, and then the other one that we just shipped that I that I did announce this week is search. So now now you can like search for all of your through all of your conversations.

Oh, you can search audio?

Yes. You can search because we transcribe your messages. So you can literally search for a term that like was, that was said in one of your conversations.

Assume that was a buy decision and not a build. Right. You didn't, you didn't build that yourself. But like libraries for

it. Yeah. We use some, some libraries for the search stuff.

I thought maybe that was like a service.

No, no. It's, it's built into our app. And it searches our database. Yeah. We've, we used to

use something called chorus AI at cart hook that did that. And now there's another one. I don't know if it's called glow or something like it, but it's very similar.

Yeah. I'm not going to get into the, the weeds on this one because my developer mostly built it. I built like the interface around it. It's pretty cool. It's got a keyboard shortcut and you can get through it pretty quickly.

Can I ask you about the order of events there? Is that generally your approach on launching something into production and then announcing or do you like to

tease Yeah, ahead of this was a trickier one because usually I just have one thing that I'm launching this week and so I launch it and then I announce it. I might announce it like a few days later because it takes some time to to make a video about it and write the email and all that stuff. In in this case, all these features were so intertwined with each other in in the code base and and in the interface that I I couldn't launch one without finishing the others. So basically there are like three announceable features that all pushed to production at the same time. It went through several weeks like of a lot of testing, which was kind of annoying because it was taking much longer than usual to get all that stuff tested and ironed out.

But got it all live, but I can't announce three separate features all at once. Know, like it it it would just sort of like dilute the impact of each

That's right. Totally agree.

So so I announced the search first, then next week is gonna be the email composer. The week after that, we we have this new thing called subscribers where you could like subscribe any any person's email address to a conversation. Makes it really frictionless for sharing with with clients and stuff, or like customer support issues and stuff. So so that'll come out the the next week. So so I like queued up these announcements and, yeah, see how it you know, and now it's sort of like back to the literally today what I'm doing is I'm staring at the GitHub board looking at all the tickets of like basically feature requests that have been just building up over the last few months and just trying to figure out where is the next priority.

I feel like that problem gets so much harder as time goes on, like figuring out what to build next.

Yeah, the matrix, the decision matrix around that. Right? I remember at Cardhook when we had that problem, there were just just too many requests. We either would focus on one type of a feature or we would try to get a mix. So what I mean by that is there are things that are like broken.

There are things that are broken that people will leave over. There are things that are broken that people don't actually care about. There are features that are for making existing customers happy. And then there are features that are for attracting new people. We would try to put those into like a spreadsheet and just make sure that we had a mix because I always wanted it's like the success team, the support team want features to make people happy, whether something's broken or people want a feature and they're already paying and they want it.

And it's really easy to get completely pulled in that direction because you're dealing with real people paying you real money that are asking for things. And you cannot forget that feature development should equal more growth also. And for that, you need to build new features that people who are not currently using it will be attracted to. So it's like, can't go too long without those features.

Exactly. Like announceable features. Right? Like the these that I just described that are coming out over this this three week period, these were like all like, announceable. Like, I could send a video to the email list for about this.

Yes. We've also been shipping small stuff and we always are working on, like, under the hood improvements to, you know, work out bugs and stuff like that. Looking at the roadmap now, like, there's a lot in there. There's a lot of different things that we can and will build at some point. But I feel like all of these features are smaller than they used to be.

Because we've we've already built all the big stuff. And so there's just a lot of little stuff. And some of them are like, will be announceable features. Some of them are I like to focus now on the things that help that flow of the flywheel of making it super easy to get in and use. I've already shipped a bunch of new features there and trying to do more on the sharing side of it.

Yeah, then there are a lot of power user features that people just want, you know, but it's it's not gonna necessary I could maybe talk about it in an email, but it's not necessarily going to, drive new customers. We do get some churn like and and that's actually ticked up a little bit this month, which I don't feel great about. And you know, we've got like a form and ask them for feedback when they when they churn. That's been a little frustrating for me because I'm not getting super actionable insights from from the cancellation reasons. It's mostly like, oh, we just weren't using it as as much as we thought we would.

So, like, really all the feature requests or, oh, it's missing this or that, it comes from active users who are not churning, you know? And there's always the concern of like, well, what are customers just not telling me or not reporting that that where where are the gaps that are going unreported?

Right. And can you do anything about it or it's just part of the natural process and that's just like, you know, you you can't worry yourself about too much.

Yeah. Yep. Cool. But

Well, Wayne, I I think we got through it, my friend.

Yes, sir. Good one.

So we're out for two weeks. Yes. You are out out. I'll just be here working. Cool.

Well, we'll look forward to recording again. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Alright. Later, folks. Have a good weekend.