Bootstrapped Web

Welcome back everybody to the last Bootstrap Web of 2022. Brian, we are on the cusp. We're on the edge. It's December 30. It's the last Friday of the year.

Yeah. We squeezed it in right before the end of the year.

Squeezed it in. You see my my background's got, like, little kids clothing and stuffed animals and guest arrow beds, and we got the house full of people.

We're gonna have like a kid's like, I don't know, like play date sleepover in the middle of this episode or something.

They might just come home at at at any minute.

I feel like I'm coming back from the dead here. I'm still not a 100%. My my voice and my throat is messed up. I've never experienced something like this. I've been sick for the last like three weeks and I don't get sick very often and never for this long.

I don't know if it was like flu or it wasn't COVID, but it was worse than my experience with COVID. I don't know what is going around, but it is nasty.

No fun. No fun. I think everyone's dealing with these different flavors of viruses, especially people with kids. It's good to hear you're starting to feel better, and we'll gather your brain cells for this conversation as I am trying to do, because I haven't worked in a long time. Drink or two, you know, at night, we throw down a gummy.

Next thing you know, my brain's at like 50% capacity. I had like call with like a VC yesterday. I was like, look, I'm I'm rusty. I hear you just got our holiday card.

I did. Yeah. The the the golf family. The the golf on top of things. Yeah.

You guys are you guys are right on top of it, right on time. I mean, we we used to do the card thing and between a combination of, like, laziness, a little bit of, like, antisocial, like, we're just like, oh, screw it. We'll just look at everybody else's card.

Well, it is Maybe post

a photo or two on Facebook.

Yeah. That's, yeah, it's it's pretty close to religion when it comes to my wife's habits. So you'll you'll keep getting that card. But one thing you'll notice in

that card, the funny thing is all the kids are a real real squinty. You know?

I know. Yeah. I I I was saying to you, you know, I I don't think I I met your family before, but I but I see them on the card every year.

Yes. Yes.

I think that your three girls look exactly the same. Just slightly different sizes.

Yes, they are different sizes. The the middle one is is a little different. Anyway because

my two girls are very, very different.

Is that right?

Physically and and personality, like like they're really two very different.

Yeah.

Our oldest Just looking at yours. It's like it's like three clones.

Yes. Our oldest youngest are similar and the middle ones are a little a little different, which actually a bit similar to my family. But they're real squinty because my wife didn't realize that she set up an eye doctor appointment and they all got their iris, you know, the drops. So it was a sunny day and none of the pictures you can't see any eyeballs in any of the pictures with a photographer and we didn't have time to redo it. So it's it's a squinty year.

Just looked like you mixed up the gummies a little bit.

Okay, so, as usual, we are not going to do a traditional, resolutions type podcast. We're just gonna talk about the year.

Yeah. I mean, it's that time of year again. And I think you and I both, we've we've we've kind of given up on

on 22

goals and targets and all It that kind of fun

was

I I do. So I did jot down some things that I and I've been, you know, mulling this over this time of year. I don't know if we wanna get into, like, personal goals or not. I got a couple of those. And then I've got business, what I'm calling themes.

I don't like goals because they just depress me at this time of year because I never hit the the whatever targets that I set out twelve months ago. So actually think it's much more productive, at least for me, to think in terms of themes. And these are really around like my mindset of, you know, I'm gonna be working on many different projects throughout the year in Zip Message, but these three things like sort of define how I approach everything over the next year.

I don't even think I wanna look back. I wanna look forward. '22 was was a tough year. We we sold a house, bought a house, moved cities, we lost someone close to us, we started new schools. It was pretty damn chaotic on the personal front.

And it feels good to finally be settled here. But woah.

You guys have had a whirlwind year in your family. Know. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yeah. I mean, I think that this past year, it was kind of typical for us. Like we did a couple of really great trips like we normally do. The girls are getting older. My younger one moved into the next school.

And so that was pretty cool. You know, business wise, I feel like, I mean, you know, the graph looks generally actually pretty good. There are definitely some things that are not so good over the past year. '22 in Zip Message was certainly a lot harder than 2021 was for us. The first year was sort of like a dream, and then the second year was more bumpy and challenging and gotta really dig in.

And as a result, I learned a ton. I've I've talked about it on the podcast. I really I think in 2022, if I had to put one theme looking back on this year, it's customer research, like at a deeper, more intensive level than I've ever done in any business before. You know, like I've always done some sort of customer interviewing and surveys and research in all my previous businesses, but this one was much more methodical and really deep. And I've talked about it before and it led to all the changes and the things that we're building right now to go toward coaches.

The length of that cycle in software is pretty painful. Even though you now feel like you know exactly what you need to build, you still can't get it to market.

Oh, that's the toughest

It's yeah. Yeah.

For us. And tweeted it, I mean

Yeah, tweeted this morning exactly how I was feeling thinking about this podcast episode.

Yeah. So what was what was the wording in that?

The tweet was everything before product market fit is a form of suffering. It's a bit torturous. For, you know, for us 20

A 20 bit to say the least. I mean

A bit is right. It's like a I'm I'm almost softening it verbally because I don't even wanna face how gnarly the experience actually is.

You nailed it because it's like and I feel like it's even harder for us because it's not our first rodeo. And having felt product market fit in previous businesses and not quite there in this one makes lack of product market fit even more painful.

Yeah. Would say.

I agree, and I think constantly about what it felt like to have product market fit. It alters your thinking. It's almost like this I can't shake the memory of that feeling, and it informs like it informs my mood and informs my thinking about the current business. Because like 2022 was categorized like like for us, the biggest theme of the year was just going to market. We we built a product in '21, and then sometime in '22, we got the first early customers to use the product, and then made it better, and then started really adding more customers.

And now by the end of the year, we have like our first customer base. It's not nearly as big as I want to be. And if you look at that objectively, you see growth. Okay, you're adding customers, but it doesn't feel right. It feels like it's too much work.

It gets too hard. And I remember what it felt like a card hook where it was like this downhill momentum, and it was hard to keep everything together, but it just kept flying downhill, and customers just kept coming and kept asking for more and wanting it and restarting and telling their friends, it was like this, like energy that is still missing, And throughout that experience as the founder, you're like, you're just going through emotional acrobatics. You're like, I'm I made a huge mistake all the way to I know exactly what I'm doing is just gonna take time, like, constantly back and forth.

Yeah, totally. And because I really dealt with exactly what you tweeted, like, and it always hits me now this this time of year in December, because we're thinking about, you know, looking back on the year, looking to the next year, right?

So because you can't avoid it. Can't avoid It's one year. Yes, you can't help but look in the mirror.

And one thing that I've sort of come to mentally, and this is how I'm trying to deal with it, and most most of the time unsuccessfully, but this is this is how I try to deal with it, which is, you know, I I sort of map out two paths for the next twelve months. There's the path that I am working to achieve is like path A is I have a strategy and I'm trying to execute this strategy. And I've done a lot of research and I'm doing all this work and I'm executing and I'm shipping every day to achieve this strategy, which I believe will bring the results that I want, but it might not. And looking back at every year in the last several years, you know, most of the time I end up at this point in time saying, you know what? My plans for the year just did not pan out how I hoped they would.

So there's this path that like I'm working to have the best results possible, but that just might not happen. And that might be out of my control because I can only decide to do one strategy, not the other. So there's a path B. Like what happens if the things that I'm working on do not pan out or do not bring the results that I hope they will or not fast enough? You know, and most of the time, most of that suffering that you talk about is not having a clear vision for what path B looks like.

If you think about it, it's like, I'm working on all this stuff. I've got this strategy. I'm trying to execute it. If I don't get the results that I want, then it's just failure. Then it's just like that didn't work and it's just failure and that's something to fear and I don't want that to happen and it'll be a nightmare scenario and all this.

And that's where the mental tailspin happens, right?

Yes. Yeah. Because you're looking over the edge saying, I really don't want to fall down into that pit. So what do I need to do?

And I tried to like analyze that in the last week and I came to like, but what actually happens if those results don't pan out?

Okay. This is like the Tim Ferriss, what's the worst that actually happens?

This is the worst case scenario. Right? Like, and you and you just map it out. And and I just started going like step by step like, well, okay. Like, then this would probably happen.

And then I would I'd probably have to resort to doing this. And then this would that's this is what what that would look like. And and then we would sort of deal with it that way. And then once I start to really describe it in detail, I mean, like financial numbers, like literally what my what I'm working on every day, what that looks like in my life. I started to think like, you know what?

That's not terrible. It's not that bad. It's not what I want, but it's not that bad. And ultimately it could still lead to what I ultimately want. It just might be on a different timeline.

And so like once I started to like really describe it in detail, was like, you know what? Path B is not the end of the world. It's not even something to be that fearful of. It's not like I'm trying to go that way, but if it comes to that, then it'll come to that. And that's sort of out of my control.

And at the end of the day, the only thing that I can control is the strategy and executing. And that's it. And, you know?

So on the day to day, you can push to the positive and to the goals. And it's helpful to acknowledge that the downside is, you know, it's not the end of the world. You're still gonna have a nice family and a nice house, and you have to do you have to basically generate income in a slightly different way than you expected. You still get to sit in front of a in front of a computer and do interesting work.

But like when like for me, like when I before I went through that exercise of describing that, I look at path B like everything is done, like exploded, gone forever, never going to achieve any anything.

So you were you were misdefining it. It it was

I was completely misdefining it. I I was like, the dream is dead. Like, everything Right.

I'm a failure. I feel horrible. I'm gonna be in this forever.

Like, you know, but once you once you get into it, it's like, no. It's just gonna be on a different timeline. And that's it. That still sucks. But at least it's like, okay.

Just like acknowledging both ways.

It's also it's also temporary. It's temporary. All of it. All the bad stuff. The good stuff too.

Yeah, I've been so, so obsessive about the like, positive potential, like like like the, you know, the goal, the winning scenario for so long, you know, for years and years and years. That's where my focus is much more on the potential of not getting that, is much more than like the downside. I think maybe maybe I came to peace with the downside of like, okay, so really what's the worst that happens? Company doesn't work out, you shut down the company and you do something else. Right?

You either do some form of product consulting, work with people that you really wanna work with or start a new company and you know, either bootstrap or raise money a different way. Like that's it's you know what it is? It's kind of like the fear of starting over because that's really the worst that happens is, okay, do something else. And it starts from zero, but so on.

And that was more my fear of like, not like, that's sort of what I thought it would look like. But then I was like, you know, like, I'm not looking to start something new anytime soon. And and I don't I I don't have to start something new anytime soon. It just might you know, ZipMessage is is still doing fine. It's just not where I want it to be by now.

And and it it might not be where I want it to be by twelve months from now. It it but it's it's still gonna continue. It's not not going anywhere. You know?

I almost turned into, like, a little kid about it because my real problem is that I don't wanna do anything else. I like this.

Me too. I want

this to succeed. I want to do this for ten years. Exactly. And and and that's almost like this funny transition toward the positive. Unlike, well, okay, cool.

We have determined that the downside is really not that bad. Something to fear like the end of the world, and therefore it allows you to focus on the goal. And then the stress begins anew around, well, it's not as far along as I want it to be. Right? For us, for Rally, the first year didn't go the way I wish it would have gone.

Could have been worse and we ended well. So the fact that Q4 went well was I think a real savior for me psychologically. Because if Q4 went badly, I would have been like, this was a bad first year and I'm not happy. The fact that it ended well, I think gave me more room to be bounced. And maybe the expectations had were really high.

So again, you were talking about like, you know, setting goals and if you don't hit those goals, feeling bad about it, it's not really a good thing to do.

Well, you know, you mentioned like the ten year business and that's been the phrase that's been in my mind ever since I started Zip Message, which was like, this is the thing that I'm trying to take that swing to really sink in like the bulk of my career, the rest of my career into. I don't know if literally how many years I would hold onto it, but like all my previous businesses, Audience Ops, Restaurant Engine, all of them were, I really viewed them as temporary even at the time I was running them. You know, like even Audience Ops, I'm surprised at how many years I ended up holding it. Because I never expected it to be a ten year business for me. It was always a stepping stone.

Yeah, but you set it up to be passive enough that you could hold onto it and

Yeah, that's not why I ended up holding it longer than I expected to, was because it became pretty passive. But like, but I knew at the time that like I was really aiming toward getting to a SaaS that I can settle into, that I really enjoy for ten plus years. And that's what makes this product market fit thing so mentally challenging because it's like, it's not just a little side project that like might or might not work. This is this is the swing, you know? So this thing kinda has to work.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is the right the right way to look at it. It's one way or another, gonna make this work. It's definitely a very different experience, but like at Cardhook, it really felt like, oh, I I have to make this work or it's a lot more painful.

My personal financial situation now compared to then is better, and so I don't even know how to describe it. It's it's a very different experience, but very similar at the same time because the, like, the downside isn't nearly as great as it was then, but it still feels the same way. It's not like I care less at all. In in some ways, it's even more extreme.

I'm curious, like, tactically, anything that that's on your mind day to day, project wise, business wise, like that you're heading into '23, like, these things are gonna be different or you're you're gonna approach the work a little bit differently. Anything like that?

Let's start thinking and talking about, like, what that plan ahead looks like. I have my, like, very personal game plan in my head. I'm not even that comfortable sharing it because it involves people's jobs. You know what I mean? We have 28 people.

So the levers to pull in the runway, it like affects people's livelihoods. So, it almost needs to be like this, you know, very personal set of like, okay, here's my trigger for this, and here's my trigger for that, and here's how much I can push there, and here's how much we can do this, and you know, if if we get here by then, then good. If not, then this other version of things. So there's that constant calculation in my head, and I try to do it unemotionally, because in the abstract, you can do it unemotionally. When you do it with math, it's unemotional.

And then when you jump into Slack and you talk to people you really enjoy working with, you start to realize, oh, that those plans, I will carry them out unemotionally, but I will still feel the emotional, you know, pros and cons of it. Like, it's still my job to do whatever I think needs to be done according to the plan that I think makes sense that I wrote out on a piece of paper and decided on, but I don't want any of the downside scenarios to come true. So then I I look at that and then the emotion of it is actually important because it helps motivate me to work really hard to make sure that the downsides don't improve.

If I could read between the lines there, it sounds like you're maybe getting at is like, you look at the year ahead, maybe hiring is going to be less aggressive, you know, in in certain scenarios.

Yes. I think that's the nice way to say it, right? The other way to say that is hiring is going to be almost zero and you're going to try to hang on to your team as much as possible. But in order to justify that business That's right. It's not guaranteed.

So it depends on business performance. And I think that's almost like that's the theme of 2023. Reality is back across the board.

That's exactly the thing that I've had in mind. I think one of the mistakes that I've made in this business is thinking in terms of like, I have a team, teammates, like team culture, all of that.

You see that as a mistake, why?

I see that as a mistake because again, we have not fully achieved product market fit. We have not achieved the MRR growth or the profitability levels to financially support a team. And so what I should have been much more focused on, not that I wasn't focused on product market fit, I am every single day, but I think that there was a level of distraction for me in the way that I hired and I'd made multiple bad hiring decisions. And it's not like those people were bad or did any did a bad job. It was always really my mistake in in misallocating resources and time and activities.

And what I've come to is like, look, I am a solo founder. And right now in this early phase of the business, I have to treat it like I am solo. Like day to day, this is my project. Now I have two developers that work with me that they would continue to work with me. I still am gonna be hiring people for like marketing projects and whatever, but I have to approach it like project based contract hiring.

Like, I feel like for years now, I've been chasing after this idea hiring someone on a retainer, part time retainer, maybe close to a full time retainer to be like a general person in some role that sort of mixes and mashes up like multiple responsibilities. And this is usually on the marketing side of the business. Developers are a little bit of an exception to that because they're, you know, day to day we're just shipping product and they're gonna be on these retainers. I do consider the developers team members. They're sort of the exception to what I'm saying here.

Like literally everyone else that I work with is a project based contractor. And that has to be my mental approach to executing our work for the foreseeable future. This not gonna be forever, but for the foreseeable future. So, I mean, like if we're doing SEO, I hire an SEO specialist to deliver the SEO deliverables, whether that's keyword research or briefs. And then I have other writer specialists.

They deliver written work for me. If I'm doing PPC, I'm hiring a PPC specialist for x number of months to run our PPC experiment with this budget. And there's this, there's a start and a finish to that. And we're gonna assume that it's going to finish after X number of months. And if it's successful, then maybe maybe we'll continue it.

You know, we're gonna do a website redesign in '23. I'll hire a designer to work, to collaborate with for two or three months. And then it's done. And then we move on. I'm not hiring employees or team members or or employee like contractors who are just on indefinitely.

And and like, you know, because I I got excited about the idea of building a company. Like, I I can't wait to get to a point where I have a small tight knit team day to day. We've got a great work culture. We do our stand ups. We do team retreats.

We do all of it. Like I, that's what I want. That's what I'm going for. But I don't have that business yet. That's not my business today.

And I don't know when our trajectory is going to get us to a point where, where it's like, yeah, we could support something like that, but it's, that's just not today. So I have to like, get that thought out of my mind and just focus on product and our customers and executing, you know. When it comes to like getting to the point of like building a team culture and salary employees and everything, in terms of my trajectory like funding structure and all that, it has to be like, we are profitable and then it becomes painful not to have a full time this or a full time that, you know, but until then, it's just me. And I love working on this business. I love working on the product.

It's me, my developers, and I bring in a couple of specialist contractors for whatever marketing projects we're currently running. And that's it, you know.

So I have like so many things to say. When you started talking about this, my initial instinct was to like disagree, or I was almost planning, oh, here's how I'm gonna push back. As you kept going, what what I started to realize was that I bet the majority of the people listening agree with you. It sounds like what you're what you're trying to do, right, the concept around the team, the culture, and all that, a lot of that is like out in the cultural air. That's out there on what you're supposed to do.

I didn't write very much in terms of notes for this this. I I wrote product market fit, exercise, one of the things I wanna do, and and then I I wrote the word based. So I am 42. I am not down with the lexicon, you know, that's happening on the internet. But in all of my travels through crypto land and in like the crypto group that that helped me like learn all all all the stuff around crypto, The concept of staying based was one of the one of these concepts in like internet slang that I fell in love with.

I'm old enough that I have no idea where you're talking.

Okay. Okay. So so being based or staying based is like being true to yourself and not letting other people's opinions of you determine who you are, what you say, what you think, and what you do. And so it sounds to me like what you're doing there is you're looking at, okay, it was nice to shoot for like this ideal of a cool startup with a team and a culture and everyone loves each other. You do cool shit on Slack.

And that's nice, but 2023 is is reality time. And and and if you strip all that away, it sounds like the place you've come to is, I want that. I'm excited to get there. The way I'm gonna get there is by being ruthless is the wrong word. It's straightforward.

This is what I need. I to pay for results in this area, and that's what I'm going do. I'm not just going to hire someone and definitely let them hang out because I want to be around a team. No, this is my problem. No one cares what happens.

It gets to a point where, like, if I don't have the well defined project and deliverable that I'm hiring a person to do, and instead I have someone on the team who is, you're gonna help me do lots of projects throughout the whole year, Then it gets to a point where like they deliver a bunch of value, but then there are areas or there are periods of time where it's like I'm scrambling to try to come up with something productive for this person to be doing. Then I feel like I'm, you know, like I'm just not utilizing them and their talents to their full potential because I don't have business needs lined up for them to execute on. And that's where actually hiring contractors on a project basis is strategically more effective too, because it's like, I'm literally defining a budget for this. Like I have this appetite to execute this marketing project, this budget, I'm willing to bet on this experiment. I just need to hire someone to execute it.

Someone really good who's much better than me at doing it. That's that. Then I can literally see like, was that a good investment or bad investment? And I don't need to scramble to keep them busy for twelve more months after that, you know?

Yeah, I, I, look, there's just, there's no one way to do it, right? So the way I'm doing it is very, very different. Does not mean it's right or wrong.

It fits the business structure and the funding structure and everything. And a lot of my looking back to the last few years, it's been a huge mental adjustment for me just to even have the tiny bit of outside funding that we have, you know, and dealing with a runway and, you know, transitioning out of exiting those businesses and into the next one. Like this is a totally different situation. Every other business before this has been self funded profitably from day one out of customer revenues. I struggled a bit to mentally adjust, you know, what it looks like operationally

to run a business that's not profitable. To some degree, yep, that's right.

But I think the reality is what I'm coming to is like, I have to operate it just like I always have, bootstrapped, profitable, lean, efficient, and smart. And that's actually how I did it in the first, in the very first year of Zip Message in the first months. And I somehow came to the conclusion that like I was not being aggressive enough.

Do you want to go back?

And now I'm sort of correcting back, you know, as we head into '23.

Yeah, man, I don't know.

I mean, I'm not saying that I'm pulling back on investing. Like I very much am spending the same, if not more going forward on marketing projects. They're just more targeted and project based.

I mean, I think the most important thing is that you stay based. Like, you literally do what you think is right for your situation and fuck all the other pressure that comes from people who don't know what your situation is. It's not even people are pressuring you. You end up pressuring yourself. That's like the actual danger.

The actual danger is that this stuff that's just out in the atmosphere impacts you and takes you off of the path that you know is better for you.

One other big tactical or theme, if you will, that I have on my mind here for '23 is I wrote down relaunch Zip Message. We've been talking about product market fit and everything. Again, I'm not gonna rehash, but like all the customer research deciding to go coaches and really focus on them as the customer, build the product for them. That's the strategy. But I still feel myself hesitant to, like I was just interviewed on two podcasts this week and they asked me like, how should we introduce you in the beginning of the podcast?

Like how should we introduce Zip Message? You know? And I still feel this hesitancy to say like, Zip Message is a tool for coaches.

Okay. Okay. The burn the boats position.

Burn the boats. Yeah. Like literally yesterday, had this I was on this podcast. Like, yeah, Zip Message is a tool for coaches. And also some consultants like it too sometimes.

And remote teams. Yes, yes. And like I hear

that. I hear that.

But this is not just a little verbal thing. I have to start to really mentally embrace the idea of like, because logistically we really are relaunching. We're gonna have all new pricing. The product is more than doubling in size, if you will, however you want to define that, but the feature set and the utility of the product is really changing. We're about to launch workflows, which is gonna be a major, you know, value add and a couple other big things coming in the next two or three months.

The product is changing. The pricing is changing. Our strategy is changing. We're gonna be launching a new website in 2023.

Will that be the moment?

I think so. Yeah, I consider it like the pricing change will be a big sort of moment, which I'm hoping will happen sometime by the '23. It's pending shipping these big features. I have to like really think about it. Like these are not just tweaks on the marketing site.

These are not just changing numbers on the pricing page. I have to embrace it like this is a new business. This is a new product. Even though like we're not rebuilding the product, but for all intents and purposes, I think we actually might do like another product launch and really make it different because that's what we have to do to get to product market fit and not just like-

Not just add a feature and not say very much about it.

I'm not saying like just change some headlines and calling it relaunching. Like I said, like we're really building a lot of new product here.

Have you considered like different name, different domain? Because that

obviously I've been talking privately with a bunch of friends and advisors about this for the last several months and that came up a lot is maybe changing the name. I've sort of landed on, no, I don't think we're gonna change the name. First, I actually think that zipMessage in a way still fits. I mean, messaging is still the core of what zipMessage is. But also, I decided that there's just a lot more risk in changing the name than reward for coming up with a better name, if you will.

At least that's where I've landed for now. I don't know if that'll change in the future, but like, I feel like a a a big name change could screw things up.

It might be a big distraction. I I don't write many blog posts, but the one blog post I really remember was like two paragraphs, and it was like this whole thing feels like a Rubik's cube, but you only have a limited number of moves that are determined by how much money you have in the bank.

And that's the thing. Have so many so many big things to ship in '23. A name change is not something that I want to add to that list.

Yeah, I feel that. We are going to be making an adjustment in in our positioning. It's tricky. E commerce is it's very enticing to go across the landscape of merchants. It's very tempting to say yes to a merchant doing $2,000,000 a year, and then do a demo later in the week with a merchant doing a $100,000,000 a year.

And it's very, very hard to say no to one or the other. Because if you go only toward enterprise, then you're banking on your company growing through deals that take a long time with merchants that are unreliable, and you don't have that many of them to deal with. And then if you go toward the smaller, you're just dealing with lot higher quantity of customers, and they add an incremental amount of GMV and revenue compared to a much larger merchant that adds, you know, what 20 of those merchants add. So, it's really tempting to have a strategy that straddles them, and says, we're gonna go for the enterprise merchants, kinda like as it comes up, and as our sales are effective toward them, but we have to keep acquiring smaller merchants to keep the momentum and keep the growth going. I mean, that's currently what we're doing.

Right? We're we're having those conversations with the really big ones, and we are onboarding the smaller ones on a day to day basis. It's multidimensional. It's not just how big, how much revenue do you process. It's also which platform are you built on.

And then it goes three d when it comes to this new this new headless ecosystem approach.

Yeah. We were talking offline a little bit about this. I don't know how much you want get into, but like the, I think in your case, like for me, it's like get to profitability and relaunch Zip Message all that. But I feel like in your case, again, like it's a different structure, different trajectory. And I feel like you do have more of a runway to be more ambitious and more risk taking.

Yes. It's the it's the risk profile that really determines it because the the funding and the time that

it

buys is to take a bigger risk. And for us, the the bigger risk is is to go toward

the That's what I mean is I go go toward the

Yeah. The space that's opening in the future that's not fully developed right now. That is what I am determined to do in 2023. Because 2022 was get the product out there, and we did not go for where the puck is going. We didn't go for that because it felt too risky to go for that because the merchants were just sitting on these platforms to go get.

And that's what we did in '22.

Maybe you're already sort of doing this or something, but like, I hear you sort of like straddling between the future vision, the headless ecosystem and really leading that being on the bleeding edge. Yes. And hustling to get the smaller merchants today, get that revenue up.

Right where the money already is.

But what I'm thinking if I'm in your shoes and I know it's a sidebar, I love like saying to my friends like a big snow and everything. It's like, it's so much easier to strategize about somebody else's business because my own, have no idea what the hell I'm doing. But anyway, if I could strategize about yours for a second.

Please do because it often is more clarifying because you don't know all the models.

Again, like you could be more, you have the runway to focus on the bigger vision, the longer term, more ambitious vision. And revenue generating, it can be something different than selling to smaller merchants. It doesn't have to be Rally even. It could just be a consulting arm of Rally, right? Like you look at like ProfitWell, like they funded through price intelligently for all those years before the product overtook what they are, right?

I mean, Rally the product is what you're building and, you know, you can do whatever, like e commerce conversion consulting or I don't know, like whatever else it is. Like, I mean you personally, mean the company.

No, of course. Yeah, I hear you. That's outside of my normal set of options that I look at. Right? It is possible, and it is something that we can potentially do in the future if we felt like, hey, we need to, you know, fill the hole and reduce burn, but it's so hard to just build the product that it feels, it feels like it wouldn't work out well.

I think part of that is for the benefit of the product.

To a degree, but it's where people's minds are, literally where you spend your time thinking and acting. When I I fundraise, the whole company, the whole go to market function of the company just starts to like, like airs starts to go out of the tire. Just like it decreases, it just loses that forward momentum. That's where the company currently is. It doesn't have like its own, not that Without Me it doesn't have any momentum on the go to market.

It's just better when I'm focused there along with everyone else.

It's like one thing that I noticed in my case, I really feel like my work, my job is head of product, right? And I feel like I've become a much more effective product manager now that I know who we are focused on and who we're building for. Because looking back at the first year and a half of Zip Message, yeah, we were really good at shipping features pretty quickly. And I think we built a pretty strong messaging product during that time. But I just didn't have the North Star because we had all these different customer avatars.

So what that resulted in was just I I really didn't have a clear sense of like what we should be building next. So that so that meant we are just building more improvements to our messaging feature. Keep making the messaging a little bit better, refactor the messaging to make it more reliable, make it faster. But like, I wasn't really adding a lot of other beneficial features because I didn't know who would benefit from those other feature ideas until until I settled on coaches. And now I really have a prioritized one, two, three, four, five roadmap of like, we're gonna build this.

And once we ship that, we're moving right into this, and then that, and that's gonna change this product in a significant way. And it's like, I've gained a lot more clarity on like the sequence of what we're building. And just opening up doors to like, oh, we actually can and we should build that because now I know who we're building for. Before like looking back on it, I was really like, it was sort of like a random grab bag of like, all right, just pick an issue off the GitHub board and let's just build that next, who cares? And ultimately for me, what that resulted in was like, after a year and a half, I really felt like we ended up with like a one feature product, just a really good messaging tool, but not much else.

And that's and I think that that's what led to a lot of the challenges for from the product side in '22, you know. That's what I'm trying to correct.

In some ways, I think you're further along the arc that everyone's on, you know, and I mean further along than than we are, because you are now building things very specifically for a very specific audience. And we have like a general product, the way yours was more generalized, and then you you almost need to pay attention to who wants it most and who's who it's resonating with most, and then you start to move in that direction, and if that feels right to you and to those customers, then you start to, you know, get closer to a conclusion on yes, this this is the right set of people to listen to in in what they want. I definitely feel that we are we're chewing on more risk because we are we're kind of building for the type of customer that we think is going to exist more so than a specific set of customers that already exist, and we know that that's just riskier. You're you're really it's much low risk to build for demand that currently exists. That may be one of the, like defining things that I took out of the Kartik experience, and it may or may not work out for us that that's one of the biggest lessons that I took out, because the the big lesson that I took out of Cardhook is that if you build it before people actually want it and you get it right, you can win the market.

And that's what we're doing again. Right? I'm not trying to build a Bolt competitor. I'm trying to build something that BOLT hasn't even thought of and doesn't even realize exists. And so what if they're ahead of us, if we build the right thing, we'll win we'll win the market.

So that's just like inherently, you know, gnarlier on on the risk spectrum and The on the mistake, if I look back at 2022, I think the mistake I made is in identifying where I think the market is going, and what we should build to get there first, and become that product first to win that part of the market. We identified that, and then didn't build for it. We then took a phased approach to get there. Phase one, go to the existing platforms where GMV is already being processed, offer them a better checkout. So we took the less risky route, and it didn't really work out that well.

So I took less risk and did not get the reward for it. So I'm kind of determined, okay, not not doing that again.

Now there's always that delay of like the insight and then delivering on the insight. And I'm still like, I have the insights and the research, but we are not, it's literally taking a lot longer than I hoped it would to ship these these

things And that we need to that's that's the danger because there's so many there's so many ambitious, bright people on the Internet. And so that that's why I have a fire under my ass to go after the insight and the vision or I will I will regret it forever. It's almost like I I raised all this money to take the swing and then went safer and didn't take the real swing like that that's

That's Yes,

exactly. So 2023, gonna be tough economically, reality, gotta go toward profitability, all of this like real stuff, but I'm gonna take the swing first. I don't know if there's anything else that that makes sense.

I think that that does make sense. I think it resonates with folks. And here we go. Another year.

Yes. Another year. So look, this is all business, on the personal front. It's been a great year with you, my friend. Let's have another one.

Let's keep it rolling. Thanks. Take everyone's has

it been now?

I don't even know, man. No.

More than that.

Seven? Jeez. I don't know.

Close to ten.

No way.

Jeez. I think we started around thirteen or fourteen. I I gotta look back. Alright. But

Don't even know what to say though. I don't know. Yeah.

Alright.

Thank you everyone for listening. Have a great New Year. So hope you had a good Let's crush. Alright. Later.