Bootstrapped Web

BlueScrap Web. We are back for another one. It's been a couple weeks.

Look, man. How's it going, buddy?

I'm coming at you from the new home office. Hallelujah. The moving saga is coming to a close. We finally got into the house this week. So if you recall, we left the Portland house, I think something around July 15, somewhere around there, and have been wandering since and now we finally this week got in and I'm sitting at the home office the first day.

Hallelujah.

You listeners can't see but I could see your office here looks looking good. It's good to see you're settled in. I mean, it's been I was surprised at how what was like two months you were sort of in the limbo there?

Yeah, I mean, was August, September. It's like almost three months. And you know, you kind of like, oh, I can work from anywhere and it's okay. But like you get thrown off the routine. So I am really really happy to be back.

Like the co working space was fine, but all the stuff that around it drove me nuts. The driving there and the parking and like the gross elevator. It was just like, I was done.

Well, that's good. That's good stuff.

How you been? Did you get fired today? Did you get the personal email or the Twitter email? Yeah. Oh, Don't mean to laugh.

Don't mean to laugh.

No. Of course.

Of course not.

I mean, I'm sure you and all of our listeners have been, like, totally consumed in Twitter news for the past week. I mean, unbelievable.

It is. You know, it is like an abstract thing that we're laughing at. Like, we're not actually being heartless. It's just so abstracted from real life. It is so entertainment and media at this point that you're like, just really the whole thing's absurd

and entertaining.

Just such

a it is such an like an entertaining thing. I don't know about you, should we just give some takes here on I third takes. Got takes.

Give me two I

can't help but feel like the whole world is sort of piling on the negativity on this whole thing. I'm not going to sit here and defend all the weird shit that's going down. There's a lot of weird stuff obviously coming from Elon. We don't know really what's true, what's actual reality. But for the most part, I'm just like, maybe not everything here is terrible because Twitter before Elon was not great either.

That's number one. They had plenty of problems before that. Number two, the main thing that just gets me about our culture and especially our Twitter feeds, how people communicate and share stuff on Twitter, it just seems like I can't help but think it's just a pile on. Every negative thing just gets amplified.

It's like it's crossed over and touched the world of politics, which is a world of deceit, you know, taking advantage of situations, twisting things towards your own benefit. I mean, is so it's messy in that way, right? It's not about business. It's like all eyes are on it. And so AOC's on there.

Everyone's trying to get their piece of the attention. She's insufferable by the way.

Oh, I completely agree. Yes. Yeah, like the armchair quarterbacking of the Twitter business and like, oh, like you can't do $8 a month, can't do $20 a month, this or that. It's like

Can I get my little hot take please? Okay, the amount of joy that I get from watching someone who is verified complaining about the verification process is very high. There's a lot of joy coming out of it it is so transparent yet they are unaware, right? Like there's something like, Oh, you think I'm gonna pay $8 for my verification? Like the idea that you were special, you thought of yourself as special.

You bought into that concept and idea of yourself as much more special than other people. And then someone comes along and it's like, it's actually just a feature that costs $8 a month and everyone can have it. And then the intellectual twists and turns to come up with a reason that why you don't like it other than you're not special anymore is beautiful.

It's beautiful. And now now, of course, all these celebrities on Twitter are gonna have to like not get the check mark. Otherwise, they're gonna be total hypocrites, right? I mean, is that is that what's gonna happen?

I will say the one thing I loved, I saw someone tweet the Doctor. Seuss poem about the machine that puts the stars upon ours. And I was like, that's it. That is the perfect analogy.

Wow. Yeah. I'm always most interested in thinking about Twitter, the product, because we use the product every day, right? Like that's And the most I always think that there are I've thought for a long time, are so many frustrating things about Twitter as a product and their inability to ship, you know? So for me, it's sort of like a breath of fresh air to see at least the message of like, we need to ship fast.

Of course, seven days to ship this new Twitter Blue thing seems a bit extreme, but this is part of my point is that like, first of all, we don't even know if that's actually the reality of what happened inside. Maybe it is. Right. Or maybe that is By way too

the end of the year.

Okay. You know, but like a lot of it is like, well, is going crazy over the over stuff that hasn't even actually happened yet. You know, whether it's the Twitter Blue stuff or allowing people back onto Twitter or this or that, like, why don't we just sort of, like, let this thing play out before you go cancel your Twitter account? Like, I mean, it just seems a little extreme for

So so you tell me right now, you cannot hear the insane rain happening around?

I'm starting to hear it now.

Okay. Yeah. It's okay. I'm up on the 3rd Floor here in this. Yeah.

That's fine. Okay. So there is there is an interesting set of things to learn from the product point of view.

Yeah. I mean, alright. So like like, first of all, the verification thing, I I did think it was a bit weird to have such a focus on that. To me, that's like the most meaningless benefit of this whole thing.

Right. Because you're not convinced that you're more special than everyone else.

Yeah. It's just like, and then even if you make it like a paid thing where anyone can buy it, why would somebody want it? I don't get what the benefit is.

Oh, So I disagree and I look forward to paying $8 a month.

I already pay for Twitter Blue. I pay for the ability to undo. I pay for longer videos. Like I pay for the actual benefits as a user.

Interesting. It's the product I use the most, but I don't pay for it. I've never even really, I looked at Twitter Blue when it came out and was like, I don't get it. I don't think it's for me. It's more like business focus.

So at least that's my understanding of it.

The main thing that made me buy it was the ability to post longer videos. When I share feature videos, I think I forgot what the limit is for non Blue. Is one it minute or something? So occasionally I like to post like a two or three minute video.

Okay. So you wanted that removed.

Yeah. But I also find myself using their their undo button a lot.

Maybe I'm looking at the verification thing from a different angle. Of the conversation around the verification is like, it's the are you special thing. It's like, are you a celebrity? Are you an influencer? Do you have enough audience?

Is it important for people to know that it's your account? All this other stuff.

But by selling it to everyone, then it removes all of that, right?

It does. Okay. Removes the social status of it. What it doesn't remove, and I think what it injects into Twitter, is the authenticity of the user. Like the anonymity, the mess of trolls and garbage, I think is what it actually attacks.

It's like, no, like for Facebook, you have to prove who you are. Like leave that you I think you have to put like your

driver's license. Well, that's other thing that I'm confused about. Like the whole thing about trolls and spam, like I know it's a huge problem on Twitter, but like, is that a problem that actually affects everyday Twitter users or does it only affect celebrities with millions of followers?

No. I think it affects a lot. I know my notifications, which used to be the most important part of Twitter for me. Like, okay, timeline fun. That's 99% of the time.

But when I got a notification, meaning like I was mentioned, I was like, oh, a conversation. Someone talking about me, replying to me and like, oh, now I'm like engaged beyond just consumption. So that was like the most important thing. Right now, my notifications are 100% NFT scams and garbage.

Oh, wow. You're seeing a lot more of that stuff than I am. I'm just not I don't

get the I crypto accounts. And so all of my notifications, 100% of my notifications and and what do I have? 5,000 followers? Imagine if you had 500,000 followers, your notifications would just be unusable completely.

I I could see if you have a ton of followers that that must be a major issue for anyone with like, whatever, over twenty, thirty thousand followers, 50,000. But like, I don't know. I think I think I'm at something like eight k and like all my mentions are you know, occasionally I'll get some bots that sort of just I don't know.

Yeah. Maybe you're not

encrypting It's probably like 10% of my mentions. It's just random bot stuff. The rest is like, you know, follows or mentions.

Yep. I think it affects the most important Twitter users more than anyone else. Right? The people with the big audiences that look to Twitter as like a communications channel and a media platform, and they have the worst experience with the trolls and the notifications and

Yeah. And look, again, like just moving past like the the speed of of implementing these changes, which obviously seems unrealistic to do it in a week, but setting the priority from day one, like we are moving to subscriptions. We are emphasizing a revenue model that is subscriptions. And I mean, it's a first step away from the advertising model, which if anyone wants to complain about the hellscape that is Twitter and the algorithm that has all these weird incentives to I mean, at the root of all that is that it's an advertising based business. A step away from that is a good thing in my view.

I'm with you 100% on that. I've been looking at it also from like a founder point of view. It is literally an example of like a private equity deal where someone comes in and says, I think I could run the business better. So I'll pay x for it because I think I can make it worth x times, you know, some multiple. So it is fun to kind of see it in that light where you're like, okay.

I mean, Elon's playing out this very strange billionaire fantasy of like, if I could take over this business, here's what I would do. It's just that he can actually do it because he has enough money to just do whatever. So it is interesting in that way and I've been looking at my own business in that way. And next week we are going to Berlin as a team. So getting together for the first time, our first all hands off-site.

Just beyond excited. And one of the things we're doing at these breakout sessions and we have prompts. And the prompts are like to be creative. One of those prompts is, what would you do if you took over a CEO tomorrow? Right?

And that came directly out of watching Elon like, what would I do if I were coming from the outside? And you know, the mistakes

How you made were

you handling?

All right. So how does that work? How does that play out your group? Is it gonna be like anonymous or do people

Okay. So I I do one on one.

Or is the whole team tasked with like second guessing the CEO is what I'm wondering.

I hope so. So I do one on ones. I did one right before this podcast. I have several people reporting directly to me now, right on the go to market team. So I do one on ones regularly every month.

One of the questions is what am I missing? What am I doing wrong? What can I be doing better? Right? Good.

Then what I have to always do is I have to preface that question. I have to say, here's the deal. I am A, the CEO and B, like I'm from Israel and I still have some of that culture with me and that culture in the house that I grew up on and the version of business that I learned was like, you do not hold back to be polite. You say the things that's on your mind and it makes everything better because it forces the justification, the decision process, all that. And what I have found is that American employees that are more junior when they're talking to the CEO just don't tell you their opinion the same way.

So I have to be like, and it happened today. So today, I'm talking to a salesperson and I was like, here's the deal. He made a comment about like my camera and the microphone setup. And I was like, do you want the same thing? And he was like, yes, I've been working on the laptop and I would love another screen.

And I'm like, you say it. So it's things like that where I would love to build a culture where anyone in the company can be like, I think we're focusing on this when we shouldn't be or I think we're missing this entirely. So that prompt is an optimistic attempt at prodding people. Like, tell me your ideas, man. Tell me your ideas.

I love it. I could probably do a better job of that to sort of you know, every message that I send to my teammates, I always say like, hit me back with your questions or feedback or ideas or suggestions on this thing. But it's always like followed by me sort of brain dumping how I think this project should be done and the instructions for it. Again, I'm the solo founder in a super small team. Everything that we do basically comes from me.

The devs do have technical pushback and they poke holes and stuff. Marketing, we bat things around a little bit. I probably need to do a better job of just like somehow surfacing bigger picture, like strategic, like what are we missing here?

Yeah. We try to do it a lot and it sometimes make me feel like, it's good. I'm being humble. Sometimes it makes me a little worried about like, am I not showing enough confidence? But overall, I it can help.

Yeah, you like it.

That should be cool. I wanna hear how how the trip goes.

Oh my god. So so excited. All the conversations internally is everyone's excited about it. And we have Krista on board as our business admin. She took over for a lot of the tasks that Claire was running and that has been a tremendous help.

And so I I actually feel like it's like an organized trip. Nice.

I was gonna ask like how do you even put that whole thing together? Yeah.

Yes, we helped her, but she really ran it and I feel much better because you know, my fear going to this was it would just be like feel messy. Because if it were up to me, it would be messier.

I'm sure I'll have a bunch of questions about that, but we could wait until

Yeah, I can talk Yeah, about it we're really approaching it as like, there's very little work that's actually being done.

Yeah, I mean, to me that seems like the purpose of these team retreats is to not work. It's just to hang out in person and build

relationships, Yes, that's right. That's right. Then you can bring that and those relationships and that new trust back in to the business and the DMs and the coordination working together.

I love it. Anything else on Twitter? I'm trying to think if there it's just been like a jumble of thoughts. Like every day it's like, I see all these takes and I either agree with them or I don't agree with them. I thought Patrick Campbell had a killer thread just breaking down.

Did you see that?

Mhmm. I did see that. That was kind of like Patrick's ideal role to play. Yeah, of It's like, here's how I would approach pricing.

Yeah, thought it was a pretty smart take overall. Definitely demonstrated what I was just saying how like verification just doesn't seem as important or, you know, he had a graph on like willingness to pay for certain benefits over others, and it was a really interesting breakdown.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, hear that. Generally speaking, I'm rooting for both Twitter and Elon. Like I'm pro Twitter and pro Elon getting it right, making it successful. I don't have any of the negativity and I don't really understand where all the negativity comes from.

It feels like it's like half political and half armchair.

Yeah. Exactly. That that's the thing with me. I mean, of course, I don't agree with everything he says or tweets, and maybe there's some questionable things about his style and and and whatever this or that. But, like, you know, I I do hate that it has to be, like, oh, if it now if you so of course, everything becomes so political.

Like, now if you defend anything about Elon and Twitter, you're suddenly associated with, like, the right wing in The United States politics.

It's like billionaires and you know? Right. It's Which is which is, you know, I I guess we shouldn't even give that much credence because we know

that's bullshit. It's just political. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I just see all these, like, takes on like, oh, like, Elon is not as not as smart as he as he's made out to be and and it's sort of like a show that he puts on. It's like, come on dude. The guy is brilliant. Get out of here.

Look past the actual products of Tesla and SpaceX and everything else that he's worked on. Just look at him in an interview Watch him in a Lex Fridman interview where he sits down for three hours and he talks about the technical inner workings of a Tesla car and the SpaceX rocket ship You start to realize holy shit, this guy is in the weeds on the tech. He's operating on another level. I'm not saying he actually is making all the right decisions, but he's not an idiot. There there has to be some some strategic moves to what he's doing here.

You know?

Yeah. I like the element of chaos and, like, fun and, like, that the YOLO element of, like, you live once, who cares? Just go for it has kind of always been his thing.

And I love the move to take it private too. It's like you could take private, do do what you want with it. It's not a public traded company anymore or it won't be.

And do it publicly and do ridiculous things to get media attention and bajillions of dollars in earned media that everyone talks about. It's on the news constantly. It's all interesting and smart and it shouldn't be hard to admit that someone is brilliant. It's like, oh, what? Great.

You know, there's a lot of great smart people out there. Someone said something in the tweet around like, this is basically what happens in every private like startup, but this is just happening publicly. Like this chaotic back and forth around decision making process. It's actually, that's what happens everywhere.

Dude, and building in public, love it, man. It's so entertaining to watch. Mean, the guy tweets a survey like, should we bring back Vine? And now it's reported today they're bringing back Vine. It's like, know, it's like, mean, Yes.

You gotta love following this stuff. Don't know. Yeah. And I actually think that's a good move. To me, product wise, Vine, it's their take on TikTok.

Actually Vine existed before TikTok, I believe, right? It was just too early. It was just too early for its time, but it is it's a it's a limited time frame. So it's got that limitation, like February like two eighty characters. It's a limited video.

It's asynchronous. Like it's a way of posting tweets. So like that to me product wise makes sense. Like Twitter spaces to me is a complete like I wish they would just kill that that part of the product. It makes no sense.

Reaction because Clubhouse was threatening. Like if Clubhouse worked the way people thought it might work, it would really have gobbled up a of

But think if about what Twitter is, Spaces makes no sense. It's completely live and synchronous. Whereas like Twitter was like one of the first async social network ideas out there, you know? Yeah.

Also made me think, so if you look back far enough, right, what you'll see in Elon's history is x.com. And x.com that then became Confinity and that turns into PayPal and then it was like, you know, when they joined forces, the two companies to make PayPal and then that's like what brought a lot of success to those that original group of founders and team. He's always wanted to do x.com. That was always like, no, we want to be the financial

Yeah, he's been talking about this like X, like do everything Yes. App,

So it will be very interesting to see how hard he pushes on that, because that will immediately bump into Apple's policies. Because if you wanna do payments over Twitter and it happens on an app inside of Apple, then immediately Apple's gonna basically inject themselves into taking a 30% cut. And there aren't many people and companies in the world that can say, I don't want to, and then create like an issue. And I would love at this point, I am very pro Apple hardware and very anti everything that company does. I think they've screwed up so many things on the web between that 30% tax and the privacy quote privacy issues and what it's done to ecommerce.

So I would love to see a battle over that in the future.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I think that that battle happens as long as Twitter remains and actually grows in size and usage. Like like the more Twitter is in everyone's everyday lives, the more leverage Twitter and Elon have to start taking market share in these parts of of life. Right?

Yeah. It's it's super interesting to watch. Yeah.

All right. Well, got plenty more. We're on fire today. I don't know if you got anything else. To me, I got on my list over here, I got three things.

I got Stripe layoffs. I got the first board meeting I had this week. And then yeah, I got this Coinbase card that I can talk about.

Yeah, that looks super interesting. So I'm gonna talk about pushing back into product and having a hard time with context switching.

Why don't we start there? Because I feel like I had an espresso and just talked a lot.

No, I guess this is sort of a quick one because I've been talking about how like here in Q4, what the business needs is a big push on product. And I know exactly what we are building. I did a ton of research. I've already designed mock ups of all the features. I've showed those mock ups to our best customers, got a lot of good feedback.

I prioritize them. I know what the most important thing to build first, second, third. It's actually a list of like eight or nine pretty big features that we are going to be shipping between now and the end of the year and probably into early Q1.

So more marketing wouldn't have the same benefit for the company until

marketing is not stopping. Okay. That's important. Very important. And I'll talk about marketing in a minute because a lot of shit is shaking up there too.

But I had this plan in place since September of like, I know what we need to do in Q4. And now I've gone and and I just sent my October investor update out to investors and and advisers where I said October was the first month, and I think in memory on ZipMessage, where we did not ship anything for customers. We didn't ship anything user facing. We did a lot of work on the product. We had to do a lot of infrastructure under the hood updates.

I definitely personally got too distracted and we didn't we didn't, like, get off to a fast enough start on this product push in October. We did start working on some big new features that are gonna be shipping here in November. So I'm trying to really kick it into gear and just get myself personally focused, like, number of hours in a day where I'm actually in the code or I'm in GitHub issues working with the developers and pushing these things forward. Because I did get distracted on marketing projects in October, even though product was supposed to be the priority. I got distracted on internal ops with project management tools.

You didn't put the emphasis in the weight. Didn't put I the product you

didn't ignore product. I was still in stuff, but I just didn't have the level of urgency and speed that I'm used to when it comes to shipping product. I feel like that's been one of my stronger points and the company is like we move really fast on shipping features and I feel like we've slowed down and that's mostly me being the bottleneck. Anyway, we are pushing back into product mode and the first of this long string of new features is gonna be this contacts management system where you'll see all of your contacts, the people who you frequently message with in Zip Message. You can get right to a person, see all your conversations with them.

They'll have like custom contact fields, that kind of stuff. So that's, it's actually like 90% done. We're gonna be shipping it next week.

I heard you say on Twitter that that's more complex than expected. It is. Yeah. Or more complex than like a mailing list. Right?

Because you're almost broken the CRM.

Well, yeah. Like when you think about just the word like contacts, it's not just like your users It's like in the the whole app starts with users. We've had the users database since day one, but contacts is like, you could be my contact. You could be the contact of someone else. You can be the contact of so there's a contact record that's separate from your user record.

But multiple accounts might have the same contact with the same person. So there's all these associations. Right? And then there's also syncing information. Right?

So if you change your name or your email address in your user profile, we need to go and sync that information to all the contacts that exist in other accounts that are contacts with you. So there's that sort of stuff. Yeah. And then and then we're doing like custom attributes. So like my contact record for you, when I look at you and my contacts list, I might have some special custom attributes that I wanna put on you like, oh, Jordan, that that's my he's a podcaster or he's he's in e commerce.

And that's only relevant to me. That's not a pro that's not an attribute on you. Right? So having this contact system and the ability to easily search contacts and pull them up really quickly, This is like the underpinning for a lot of the upcoming features that we're gonna be building. We had to build This this

is like foundational to be able to accomplish what you want there.

Yeah. Yep. Another one that's coming probably very shortly after that, also here in November, is gonna be message types. So, like, right now, we're mostly built around the ability to record your own messages and and write text messages, and you can upload your own videos. But we're gonna be adding additional types of messages.

The first one being embeds. So you can like embed a Loom video or YouTube video or something else as the video instead of recording your own in Zit message.

That's an interesting, I don't know if departure is the right word, but it's a tweak on the value that you're providing. It's more like the connection between the main user and their contacts more so than like here's the tech to be able to take a video and send it.

This one is like just expanding the use cases for zip message threads. You might already have some content in Loom or YouTube that needs to be in a back and forth asynchronous layout. So you could just pop it in. But we're gonna build on that interface by adding the ability to create and insert forms into your zip messages, pull from your library and pull and pull them into your zip message conversations. So, like, stuff like that is gonna be built around this new message types interface.

So that's coming in November as well.

So it sounds like you're starting to get deeper into the product side. How do you feel about like ensuring that marketing continues to roll on while you're about to basically get better for the next month or so?

My hope, and this is part of what distracted me in the last two weeks still through today is my hope was, okay, I did a lot of work on marketing over the summer. I hired some new people. We I I spent a ton of time on processes with those new people. And I thought they would be off and running. Claire has been doing awesome in the in the marketing coordinator.

She's running Coach Club, our our community for coaches. That's off to a great start. She's gonna be doing some more stuff coming up. The SEO side of things, I had some people in place. I had an SEO person, like a strategist, and his role was was supposed to be, like, keyword research and and coming up with strategy on where those targets should be and then creating briefs that we hand to the writer Unfortunately, I had to let him go this week It didn't work because he couldn't deliver what was sort of agreed to in the scope.

Meaning, like, he actually is pretty talented and really has some good chops and creativity and strong analysis when it comes to SEO and SEO content and writing briefs and analyzing search results and things like that. But when you can't deliver x number of briefs or x number of articles by the deadline in a month, and now we're waiting two, three, four weeks past the deadline, it's clearly a bottleneck and it's slowing us down on production. And that's that's a delay in results that we can potentially get from search. I've run into that in like audience ops and stuff where it's like a person is is personally great to deal with, really talented and skilled at what they do, but they just can't reliably deliver. They can't ship on time.

Like, after, like, two or three months of that, it's it's just not sustainable, you know. There was that that was sort of frustrating, but there is a a shift in strategy that I that I started to identify with SEO that I wanted to implement and it became apparent we need new people in place to do this.

So between the two, stopped making sense.

Yeah. And I could talk a bit about the new strategy. This isn't so different from what we've been doing starting to dial in. I'm just starting to learn more and more about where things are going right now search, at least as it relates to what we're doing. I feel like mentally, I've been moving in this direction, but now I'm like fully decoupling the idea of SEO content from quote unquote, like, content marketing or brand or audience marketing.

I I think for years, so many companies and I was certainly falling victim to this where it's like, you start to conflate, like if we are publishing articles on our blog, we start to think of ourselves like we're a publication where we need to be promoting our content on on social media and email newsletters and trying to grow an audience. Whereas that's not the goal of of SEO content. The the goal of SEO content is to show up on page one of Google search results when a person has a specific search intent and they're trying and we're trying to solve that problem for them and bring them into our orbit, get them onto our website. Like, you should really start to think about SEO content as, like, you're placing essentially search ads without paying Google directly, you know. That's how I'm starting to think about SEO content.

Just being much more targeted, much more strategic about every single article. And what that means for us is the bulk of the investment and the time and the effort needs to be on the strategy side. And so that means keyword research, writing really detailed briefs based on a lot of competitive research and search intent research. That's where all the effort and analysis and dollars should be spent, frankly. And then taking that and building a a content roadmap, just like a product roadmap.

Like, we know exactly what we need to ship on the product side. Now we think about it like we have a literally a list of articles that we need to ship. These pages need to be built and exist on our website so that they can be found in search engines. So that's just a matter of speed, to to be honest. Like, we need to produce these articles that follow these briefs as many as we can possibly do in the fastest amount of time.

It doesn't publishing schedule doesn't matter. Making sure articles come out on Mondays doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they come out on a Sunday morning. We just need to get them up. In terms of quality, you know, obviously, everything we publish needs to needs to meet a certain base level of writing quality.

But since we have such highly detailed briefs, the investment dollars wise in a really expensive writer doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The new SEO person that I just hired, he put it in a really good way where where he was like, I like to publish articles at 80%. You know, publish articles at 80% level of quality or completeness because ultimately, it's just about getting them up, getting getting a volume up and and strategically building out these clusters of content, these topical clusters, and getting Google to recognize your domain as as an authority in these in these topic areas. Get them up and then monitor really closely the rankings, the traffic and circle back. So that's the new process is heavy on the strategy upfront, push through the content roadmap as fast and efficiently as possible.

And then number three, have somebody on the team, like this new person that I hired to replace the previous person, just looking at the rankings, the analytics, tracking our progress, and then identifying opportunities to circle back and complete the articles that are ranking, spend on some link building to boost something up in the results. That's the new strategy. I ended up hiring this guy who I really liked how he presented his approach, but also how he sells his service. So I'm such a fan of productized services, I'm a fan of buying them, especially when they're really packaged really well. So many productized services try to fit their service into a subscription box so that you get that SaaS revenue, recurring revenue thing.

But this guy sort of gets it because he sells it in sprints. So we are buying sprints. We're buying a research and analysis sprint, and a growth sprint. And and so we're getting like a he's basically giving us a to do list and and a bunch of briefs, and then our team and our writer will execute those over a couple of weeks, and then we'll buy another sprint, and we'll and we'll keep doing it. That's the new game plan on the SEO front.

So basically I spent the last two or three weeks figuring all that out, searching for the right person to replace the SEO person. I also went deep on like AI writing tools. I was like, maybe we can start to get super efficient on the article writing. I went down that rabbit hole. I that's not quite workable for us, at least not yet.

That's where we're at. But I I would I'm happy to say that, like, as of today, like, I just paid this new guy's invoice. We're we're off and running and I'm back to back to the product.

Okay. So Very nice. I have been hearing similar things around SEO but not that deep. Our director of marketing, Elizabeth is is now looking pretty hard at SEO and what the next year looks like. And she's same thing, looking at quantity, speed, looking at the AI tools, just trying to figure out how to publish and then go back to the ones that are having an impact and finish those all the way, and add images, and add, like, all the stuff, and lead magnets, and all all this other stuff.

Yeah. Like the one thing that that started to get to me a little bit when I started to analyze, like, what we've been doing the last few months is like, Man, it just feels like we're putting a lot of literally, a lot of hours and a lot of dollars into every single article. When really And we're not publishing fast enough. We're only publishing maybe three or four every month. When really, we don't know which of these articles are actually gonna be ranking soon.

So we just need to publish double or triple that amount and focus on the ones that will rank and actively circle back and improve them. And look, there are so many other ways to be successful with SEO, like have popular free tool and run a lot of links to that, run a big survey, or if you've already published hundreds or thousands of articles, then maybe you're in a phase of your business where you should be focusing on optimizing and pruning your content and stuff. But we're still in the startup mode where we don't actually have that many URLs on our website and we sort of just need to like build it up as fast as possible. Just like building a product, you know?

Cool. Well, excited to like see what the results of that are and how things change. Yeah. So I had a first board meeting this week and that was a new experience for me. The companies that I've operated in the past, didn't have a board, or I was the sole board member.

Right? When you go out and you create a company and you go to, I don't know, LegalZoom or whatever you can do with your LLC or your C Corp, There is a board. You just happen to be both the treasurer, secretary and president. So you're you're effectively the sole board member and the minutes that you're supposed to submit, you just don't submit them because you don't care because it's your company and it's your board and whatever else.

Mhmm. What happens in actual real world board meeting sounds

Yes.

That's kind of scary.

Well, look, you know, I knew going in that this is not like an adversarial environment. This is a very supportive environment, but because of the unknown, I had a lot of anxiety, man. I was stressed out. I didn't know what to expect. I was, you know, I like it was right after Halloween.

I was not going out. I wasn't drinking. I was working late at night doing that. So what it took really was to create a deck and that deck was comprised of what happened in the last quarter, what's going to happen in the next quarter. That was basically the presentation.

Q3 review, Q4 priorities and roadmap.

Got it. So who's in the board meeting?

So it was myself and Rock and our lead investor from March Capital. So it was the three of us that are actually on the board. Right? Three people on the board right now, and it's those three. So it's Rock and myself, so the two co founders and one investor.

So like, if you just look at the makeup of the board, you understand, oh, it's early stage and the founders control the board. But you're now layering in this this accountability and formality and professionalism, And from one point of view, you can look at that as annoying and friction. The other point of view on that is like, well, let's use it to make ourselves better.

What are the logistics of this? Like what needs to be recorded? What needs to be documented? So

I learned a lot in the process. It was the first time I've done it. So our lawyer from our side also joined and Jessica was supposed to join, but she got a stomach bug and couldn't join, Right? So like VP of product who's not on the board but is in leadership and has a lot of good things to say and has a lot of knowledge on what's happening in the product and where things are going. So we wanted her to be there but she got sick.

Couldn't make Cool. The the truth is we also wanted our director of marketing to talk about marketing and that's a slightly more junior person. She's not on the leadership team, but it would be great to hear from her because she's running the marketing. So like there like the formality starts to break down pretty quickly, right? You have like the people on the board and then also some other people because how do you make it more valuable, more useful, more informative.

And now there is like an element where, I don't know how

to say

this, not cynical, realistic or smart about like legally speaking. Legally speaking, everything that happens inside of board meetings is discoverable. Meaning like later on, If there's a big

dispute over something, go back and see what was said in the previous board meetings.

That's right. And so what tends to happen in these meetings that I was kind of unaware of is if you wanna have a really honest discussion, which is where the value really comes from, like not just saying, hey, everything's amazing. Then you wanna be careful about how you keep records

and Basically how it's it's not on the record unless it's said in a board meeting or

That's something along the right. And it's and what you say in the board meetings, and I've had this experience, you know, in previous companies where like something will come up and you want to be very transparent and honest about something difficult that's happening. And unfortunately, sometimes that can get you in trouble later on. So there there was an element to how can we be transparent so that it's most useful and valuable. And also how do we think through potential issues in the future based on what we're doing, saying, showing, talking about right now.

So that part of it's a little tricky because you, you know, what tends to happen is like there's there's a certain amount of information there and maybe there are conversations that happen outside of that that are not part of the board meeting, but you can have a more straightforward discussion. I'm just dancing around all these words, but you know what I'm saying. Yep. So what that meant was that I reached out to individual people on the team and asked for help, right? Sam, can you get me, how many demos did we do in Q3?

How many emails did we send out? How many demos were booked? How many demos were actually completed? How many turned into trials? How many turned into onboarding?

How many turned into lots? So like I had to gather a bunch of information, which was a very useful process to go through. So we did that for marketing, we did that for product, we did that for sales, kind of do all over the company. And it helps those people understand like what the company needs to see. And they know it's for the board meeting, so they kind of take it seriously.

So it was really, it had like this little impact on the company of like, okay, like we're accountable. Like it's not just us. We are operating in public in some way.

Are there any like decisions that have to come up? So

I asked around a bunch of peers that have done board meetings before with investors. And I got some interesting points of view. Generally speaking, the advice that I really liked was that to figure out a way to make sure that your board understands that they can't rescue you. No one's coming to save you. No one knows the business and the market and the customers the way you do.

And so those really critical decisions on what to do shouldn't really be brought up for like this debate and opinion inside of the board meeting. It's more about here is what we're dealing with, here's the good, here's the bad, here are set of options, here's why we're thinking about this way. And then it can be like, well, have you thought about this? Or can we make an introduction here? Or so it becomes more helpful but you're not really asking, hey, what should we do?

Because that feels like it can set a bad precedent because in the future, you know, if are, if things are not going well, then other people's opinions on what you should do might play a larger role than you want them to. Yeah, it was a cool experience and I felt fantastic when it was done. I had a lot of relief. And I think going into it, I had some fear that the general takeaway would be more negative than it really is. Like I was worried that the picture that came out of the meeting was like more negative than it really should be.

And what happened was that at the end of the meeting, looking back on it, it felt very obvious that things are going in the right direction and we should stick with the plan and things are, you know, so it felt very positive. And I was like, oh wow. When we gave the whole picture that way, it was actually more positive than I was like worried that it would come off as. So it was it was just a cool kind of new type of experience. And I think as long as things go well, those are good.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it just sounds like a a really good exercise overall and like, it sort of reminds me of like, a lot less formal, but the way that I prepare a slide deck for my big snow tiny comp trips. It also sounds like a version of an investor update email.

I only started doing those again recently, and that feels like a good exercise. I mean, it's probably a little bit faster and easier to get one of those out than preparing your deck, but like it's just a good exercise.

Very similar concept, right? It's quarterly, so it's bigger than like a monthly update, but the deck or presentation or notes that you prepare for a tiny snow is a very, very similar feeling, right? You kind of get nervous. You are introspective. You have a little shame and a little pride.

It, it, it like creates this

It's interesting. The longer we do this, the higher level of importance that I place and in terms of like focus and energy and worry and things about how I'm going to present something I put so much more of that into these little presentations that I'm only going to give to a handful of close friends and advisors Not many people are going see this and it's not going to live for very long, it's just here but it's like so important and it's so helpful to give it that level of importance, you know, from an accountability and just, and, and like being able to tell a story, you know, obviously not making things up, but like you have to step back and reflect and be like the last quarter or the last year, what is the story here? And when you put it together into a narrative, you start to draw all these conclusions that are not visible to you when you're just in the day to day, you know?

Yeah. Overall, it was good and I think it was good for myself, for the company, for the other people involved and and now it feels like we're, you know, on on that new path. And one of the things we'll do by the end of this year is a budgeting process. So to get a budget approved by the board for the following year, and sometimes in the past I've looked at that and been like, who the hell knows what's gonna happen in a year? But I think it'll be the similar thing.

Well, you'll go through the exercise and it will be helpful. And it doesn't mean you have to stick to everything to a T, but the exercise will still be helpful.

Yeah, interesting. Do you or will you be setting like targets, like growth targets?

Yeah, yeah, growth targets, spend targets, burn, revenue, what happens if revenue doesn't hit here by then, like the you know, all these like different scenarios and that's that's always helpful, especially when managing a larger amount of money. In the past, it's just kind of like, you know, it's just easier to manage a smaller amount and to look toward profitability and not think about you're just thinking about like the health of the business and profitability and not running out of money. Right? And now it's like just some new variables that I'm not used to like how do you hit a target and make sure you have this amount of money left in the bank so that you can raise money which will take six months and when does that happen? What does the market look like?

So just some new layers to all of the budgeting process and I like to work with my gut, but it feels like there's too much money. There's too much at stake to just go by my gut and hope it works out. So it's gotta be gut plus. Let's go through the exercise.

I mean, know that you and I are both pretty impatient when it comes to growth and just trying to move fast. But like, how do you think about when it comes to growth targets, do you have the same mindset here in Rally as you had in previous businesses, given the new structure of the company and everything?

A very similar version of that question is one that the board asked me directly. So I'll tell you my answer. My answer is to have two paths happening at the same time. A slow and steady hit the target path and a what's that saying? Like what can you do that makes all your other problems irrelevant type of a thing.

So it's like where do we need to get to to raise series B in this environment eighteen to twenty four months from now? Right? So that's like the work backwards, like just round number, just call it 5,000,000 ARR. How do you get to 5,000,000 ARR in two years? Like, so that path, how many do you need to onboard this month and the next month and the month after?

And how do you need to monetize and how do you to convert and retain? Like, okay, that to me is the normal path. And then what I end up doing is I want to work on the alternative path that makes all of that like irrelevant. And for me personally, my interests and strengths are about how to make the product so unbelievably compelling that it changes from, well, we're gonna add 10 this month and 12 next month to we cannot handle the people knocking down our door. That's how I like answered that question.

And that's what explains my last slide was like innovation. Like here's the things that we're doing that are new, that are not even factored in to what the product is and what the market sees out of it right now.

Yeah. I mean, this is something that I've struggled with for years across all the businesses. With ZipMessage, obviously I'm taking a bigger swing with ZipMessage than anything I've done before. And obviously from business to business, you want to do much better, much faster than the previous business, always But the reality is, we've talked about on other episodes, every business is just as challenging, if not even harder the next time, probably because you're taking a bigger swing. I struggle with this idea of growth targets by a certain timeframe.

It's constantly eating at my mindset and focus, just staring at the MRR graph. Why are we only here in this number of months, we should have been here already. And so, I'm trying to train myself out of that mentally and I'm trying to push back and say, Look, I am running a slow and steady business. I did take a bit of funding and we do have a bit of a runway calculation play into it, but we've got plenty of cash. We're actually doing fine on that front.

And so it's like, I have to keep reminding myself just pull back and forget about the timeframe. We are growing and it might be a lot slower than I want, but just focus on the things that will accelerate. You know, this pivot into coaches and all the customer research, just focus on the current thing at hand, the product market fit, achieving that and it will happen when it will happen. The only thing that I can control is the strategic moves and the execution. I can't control the speed, you know?

And that second part of what you're talking about is like, what can I change or fix or ship that will make all the other problems go away, meaning make the speed problem go away? Then, you know, right now that's that's that's market fit to be honest.

That's right.

That's the

same thing.

I mean

Getting there and changing the dynamic from going out and showing people what you do to people coming to you because they heard of what you have type of a thing. Like it just finds that pocket of demand. Hitting that is more important than getting to six, seven, eight, nine, whatever like specific number by specific date. Because if you get that within a specific timeframe, if you get that within the next six months, like it's really not going to matter exactly how fast the first X number of months went.

Yeah, feel like the growth rate, month to month, year to year matters a lot more once you're already established, you're past hitting product market fit. You're probably growing at a certain rate one year to the next. If that slows down, then that's an issue. But when you're still in these early Ks in the MRR graph, it's like who knows what the rate is gonna be? It's just about product market fit.

That's the only thing that matters, you know?

Yep. Amen to that.

Yeah, man.

Alright, brother. Good way to end. Good stuff. Podcast from the new home office in the book. Internet was mostly okay until I get fully wired in.

Alright. Be back on on another one. Later, bro. Cool. Thanks for listening.