Building in public… More.
Alright. Bootstrap web, we are back,
Jordan Gal:for the first episode of 2023. Here we go, Jordan. Here we go. 2023 new year. Could make it last week because I was busy.
Jordan Gal:I was away. I was on vacation. For some reason, the suburbs here in Chicago, kids have off the first week in January.
Brian Casel:Oh, that's weird.
Jordan Gal:Yes. So they didn't go back to school until January 9.
Brian Casel:Oh, wow.
Jordan Gal:And so what that meant was we set up a vacation the first week in January. And I was riddled with guilt and anxiety because everyone's getting back to work and I'm trying to lead, and I'm trying to, you know, make a push and get momentum, and I'm like, everyone get back to work. I'll be in Disneyland if you need me.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's actually really cool that your school district does that because
Jordan Gal:It kinda
Brian Casel:worked It worked out. You you can like skip all the crowds during the Christmas week, and then, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yes. It allowed for being home for the holidays and New Year, and then just bailing, which was really nice because you you have a bunch of family over, and then by the end of like that whole thing, you're kinda done. And then we then we had an opportunity to go just the family. We went to Disney for a few days, and then went to Santa Monica for a few days. And the kids are like old enough now where it's it's fun.
Jordan Gal:We had a good time.
Brian Casel:Hell yeah. Yeah, last year I think we did Disney officially for the last time for us.
Jordan Gal:Isn't that right?
Brian Casel:Well, you know, we, like, we're like, they're, they're young enough to enjoy it. I think we've been twice now with our kids. So last year, we're like, okay. We got we got our Disney day in. I think that'll be it on the Disney's.
Brian Casel:So yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We we're we're good for a while. That that's how we feel. It was a lot of fun. It was Yeah.
Jordan Gal:The place is good.
Brian Casel:Cool. We actually were able to squeeze in a quick ski trip last weekend. Got my girls up on the mountain for the first time this season. It's really fun now because they are, they're really getting into it. And both of them are, even my little one is, they're getting on the chairlifts, we're doing greens, and they're, they just get really excited, so.
Jordan Gal:Woah. We are going skiing this weekend, but it, I am prepared for it to be painful. I see. We're going to a wedding in Traverse City, Michigan. Our best friends from college live up there, the restaurateurs, and their oldest daughter's having a bat mitzvah.
Jordan Gal:So we're taking the whole gang. We're driving up there later today, is why we're doing the podcast a little earlier. Thanks for accommodating. There's like a I don't know. There's a hill over there that I guess they threw some ski lifts on and called the ski mountain.
Jordan Gal:So we're just gonna we're gonna have a good time.
Brian Casel:That's fun. Brad Tunar and I are right now in our final preparations for big snow tiny comp Vermont, which is happening next week. And then I'm home for a week, and then I go to Big Snow Tiny Conf Colorado. This is my annual routine going to both of those trips in January and February, and it's I am so psyched. Like I, and this is like, I think we're coming up on our like ninth or tenth year of doing this.
Jordan Gal:I was gonna say, you've been doing it for a while. It's good to see.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We've got, you know, a private chef lined up. We've got the ski resort all lined up and a couple of Airbnbs. We plan out like a whole schedule. Pretty fun.
Brian Casel:It's interesting because like Colorado is like basically the same group. It's much more of a long time mastermind group of like 10 or 12 of us. And we hang out multiple times in the year. Vermont is like half returning people every year. And then we usually mix in a couple of new faces.
Brian Casel:So this year we've got a couple new folks joining us. I'm pretty excited.
Jordan Gal:Nice. Are you the only one that goes to both?
Brian Casel:Brad and I both go to usually go to both. And there's a yeah, like Robert Hartline sometimes goes to both, and Charles sometimes goes to both, but yeah, that's it.
Jordan Gal:Very cool. Well, good time for it. It's January, Brian.
Brian Casel:Yeah, man.
Jordan Gal:It's it is go time. I feel energized. Those two weeks off, like, did it. I think by the end of the year, I was crispy, man. I was I didn't have a high degree of tolerance for focused work.
Jordan Gal:Everything felt painful. Everything felt insurmountable. Every big task I was like, oh man, I don't wanna
Brian Casel:do that today, but I
Jordan Gal:guess I have to do it. I just like wasn't in a good place on the on the work front mentally, and like the two weeks off like did it. I came back fired up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I did not take a break from work. People get sick and then they don't work, but I get sick and I work.
Jordan Gal:You just wore my throat. Jeez.
Brian Casel:We didn't do family get togethers this year for Christmas because my whole family was sick. So there was no travel or anything like that. But yeah, I got sick throughout. Like I said, I was sick through December. January I'm better, except I still have an issue with my throat right now, which is, it is like physically painful.
Brian Casel:I'm just working through it and I've been super focused, but there is so much work to do right now. Like I feel behind on, you know, and we talked about this last episode, like
Jordan Gal:Isn't that tough though? First, you know, January, like, and then feeling behind already. I mean
Brian Casel:There's there's just so much things I wanted to, like, I just have such a long roadmap ahead and I wanted to I had these like check marks in my head of like these need to ship in December and now they are pushed into January and they're gonna probably be be pushed into February mostly because of these two trips coming up for me. So
Jordan Gal:It drives me crazy because right up, I came back and one of the first things I did was I got organized. And what that meant was I just I just took everything and I put it into a list. Just made me feel better. Handwritten list. It's 75 things.
Jordan Gal:75 tasks, you know. Some of them are important, some are not, some are nonsense, some are just to remember, some are like you know, and then and then I create another list called priority. The things that like, I really need to get done.
Brian Casel:That's like 72 things.
Jordan Gal:No. No. It's three things. I I I like force myself to like, no. If you're gonna make a list, great.
Jordan Gal:Put it down on paper. And then what I've done is I have like my priority list, which is like three things, and then I have blocked out like hour and a half chunks throughout the week, where it's just for those priorities. So because for me, the guilt comes from not doing the things that I know are important and get lost in the shuffle because I've got too many things.
Brian Casel:I think you and I, we talk about this, but like you and I have very different work day to day routines. Like I'm much more about big long projects. Like,
Nathan Barry:so you have this list of a
Brian Casel:lot of individual tasks that need to get done. For me, I think in terms of like big projects that I'm working on. And right now I have like probably three or four huge projects happening simultaneously, which is about three projects more than I like to have. I like to be doing one big thing at a time and focus. But, you know, and what that means is like, so, you know, we've got like two big features that have been dragging on through December into January because they are two major features that are very, very complex.
Brian Casel:And both of them are near the finish line, which means they're both pulling me in. Like, my my two developers are each working on each of them is working on one, and I'm now pulled in to finalize and get get both of these things, like, ship ready. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So you're carrying around the pressure, guilt, and task list of a founder and a product manager.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Product manager is my main job in this business.
Jordan Gal:That's a lot. Because I, yeah, that I I respect on that because I I feel
Brian Casel:That's where I always wanna be is on the product. That's that's my main thing as a as a as a person, as a founder.
Jordan Gal:Okay. That that's what you like. Yeah. What what I'd like to be, it's almost like writing down the list of 75 actually helped me not focus on the 75. And I have just those few priorities, and then the last few days, what I've actually enjoyed doing is thinking.
Jordan Gal:I had an idea over the last three days simply because I cleared my mind enough to give it space to have that idea, and then and then I shared that idea in public, which which is I think a topic that
Brian Casel:we should talk about at some point. Yeah. I wanna get right into that. Yeah, but like the other thing that like adds on to my mental space, because like the main thing that we need right now is to push through our product roadmap and that's where I am needed the most every day.
Jordan Gal:Okay, so you focus on the right thing.
Brian Casel:Well, yeah, but I am still working on marketing and branding and just plans as we push into this repositioning stuff. I'll talk about this later in the episode, but I'm starting the work on a new website, redesign, reposition, and working with a contractor on that. So that's like another project.
Nathan Barry:Right. That requires my
Brian Casel:That requires me to dedicate like two of my five days this week to writing out copy ideas and positioning plans and talking to contractors, you know, so.
Jordan Gal:My guess is the majority of people listening are are having an experience more similar to yours and it is it is some heroic shit. It is a lot. Mhmm. It's a lot.
Nathan Barry:It's a lot.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Alright. Dude, working in public. I I'm liking what I'm seeing on Jordan's Twitter feed this week.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So so it's been fun. I would say, I wanna say a year ago, but I think longer. When when Cardhook was kind of flying, I had a really good time on Twitter, and in public, and thinking and talking in public, and kind of working in public, and sharing what we were learning internally, and around the cataclysm of the Shopify issues, and then moving out of Cardhook, and raising money for route, like I kinda just went quiet for a while. I like didn't even know what I was okay talking about.
Jordan Gal:I didn't know what was legally okay. I just didn't know what to do and I just kinda climbed up. And then at some point, I got a bit turned off from Twitter and LinkedIn. The whole fast thing, the bulk, everything just kinda went crazy, and I was like, I don't even like this anymore. And now, Brian, what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to be the Twitter that I wanna be in the world.
Jordan Gal:Okay? I I I want Twitter to be what it used to be, full of honesty, transparency, like this like like coordination. It's like this public square thing where you can be you can ask questions, you can be humble, you can I don't know? It's just an open conversation.
Brian Casel:On that note, I I about two weeks ago, two or three weeks ago, I finally set up my handle on Mastodon. Okay. I don't even know how how do you even say it on a
Jordan Gal:Mastodon. I I don't like
Brian Casel:bring social at briancastle the other way around.
Jordan Gal:Don't know.
Brian Casel:But Flash at. And so, you know, and and that's exactly what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be like Twitter from the early days when it was not very large and my feed was not noisy. It was a bunch of crap. And people are just open and honest and asking and giving feedback on what they're working on.
Brian Casel:And that's what I've tried to do, but I log in to Mastodon and it's just not active enough yet. Like there's not enough people there yet, and I and I still go to Twitter. So
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And I like some of the concepts around Mastodon, but I don't like the implementation of like one person it's just a little weird. I don't I don't think it quite got it right yet. We'll we'll see where it goes. So I I had a lot of the same feelings, and what I the conclusion I came to was I'm just gonna behave on Twitter the way that I would want Twitter to be.
Jordan Gal:And I have been blocking and muting like crazy. Anyone that comes out and basically says, look at how awesome I am, mute. Just just zero hesitation. Just mute. I see you talking about yourself in that way, like two times, I'm out.
Jordan Gal:No thanks. That's not the Twitter I want.
Brian Casel:I I don't want be angry. And I'm also the same, I've had that same attitude for a while on Twitter in terms of like what I choose to tweet. You know, the main thing for me has just been like, just keep it positive. You know, cause there's just so much negativity. People like just whatever, like calling out things that they don't like or
Jordan Gal:Yeah, like this criticism thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah, criticizing or like Criticism, bragging. Humble bragging in the form of like, you're doing it wrong I'm doing it right.
Jordan Gal:That version of advice
Brian Casel:is like, I'm just like, get
Jordan Gal:the tongue out of my teeth. Don't don't tell people what to do. So over the holidays, I I basically came to the conclusion like, alright, it's time. I remember how useful it was. It is powerful.
Jordan Gal:Right? It is a powerful thing for feedback and attention. And so what I'm trying to do on Twitter and on LinkedIn, thanks to my director of marketing kicking me in the shin long enough to basically be like, you
Brian Casel:cannot You gotta finally get on LinkedIn after twenty years.
Jordan Gal:It's extremely active. I I'll say that much. It is really, really active.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But what I liked about what I'm seeing from you on Twitter this week is legit work in public, build in public stuff.
Jordan Gal:That's what I'm trying to do.
Brian Casel:I mean, I think you guys launched a, like a major feature this week, right? Like
Jordan Gal:We launched Coinbase. Yeah. And so that's our first crypto payment integration.
Brian Casel:But then what I saw was you followed up with like, okay, like here's an actual product question that I need feedback on, on what we should build and why and the design and the, and the interface. I saw a couple of those from you this
Jordan Gal:week. Yes.
Brian Casel:Really cool.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So that's like, I tried to figure out how am I gonna be okay with myself? How am I not gonna feel like a hypocrite and go out and talk about, hey, we crossed x number of millions of like, don't wanna I don't wanna do that. How do I do it authentically? And that that that's my attempt.
Jordan Gal:This week to come out and basically say, if you're focused on the product, thumbs up. If you're if you're asking questions and engaging authentically, right, thumbs up. And then it almost
Brian Casel:asking questions is big. It's it's bigger than people realize because it gets responses. People are not gonna respond. Even if people like seeing the the the brag posts or the whatever, you know, the vague platitudes and and all that bullshit. Like, people don't People might like that tweet, but they won't reply to it, or they won't debate it, or they won't this or that.
Brian Casel:But if you ask a question, it's like, I need feedback, I need help, Here's a challenging thing. And get people to like stop and dig into it and think about it. Like, you asked the thing about like, we've got this layout on our checkout. We've got a bunch of
Jordan Gal:like Yeah, what do we do?
Brian Casel:You know, like I think you were deciding between like buy now, some buttons are like one click to to purchase, a couple require a couple of clicks and like what how should we label these? How should we separate them? You know?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So so the way that came about is the way I describe internally is is building up the muscle. Basically, these like pathways in your brain to incorporate working in public alongside what you're doing privately. I lost that muscle. Those pathways don't exist the same way they used to.
Jordan Gal:I used to do something cool internally at Cardhook and think that's valuable because here's what I learned. And I go out to Twitter and be like, hey, we didn't feel like we were talking to our customers enough when we were missing it, so we created a meeting called what our customers are saying. And Ryan brought it in, and it was his suggestion, and here's like a picture of us doing it, and here's why we find it valuable. Like, that muscle to basically work privately and extract value from it for the public is what I'm trying to do. So what happened was we released Coinbase Commerce, and then I go in and I test it out in in our one of our demo stores, and as I went through it, I always try to have like a a shopper's mind.
Jordan Gal:Like, don't know what this product is. Let me go through this checkout as if I'm a shopper, and what I noticed was, oh, that's cool that you have Coinbase Commerce, but I don't know that you have it as a payment option until I get to the third step. Is there a way to telegraph that from the first? And what I'm trying to do is then take that and say that is a valuable difficult question. Let me go be public with it instead of keeping it private.
Brian Casel:I like it, man, because it's like, when you think about building in public, especially on Twitter, first of all, there's this whole thing that gets completely conflated, which I don't think is correct. People think that like sharing your MRR graph is building in public. To me, that's just bragging and it's not very helpful. But building in public to me is about product and design and asking questions and actively seeking feedback. In my case, a lot of it, it's just like, look, I I worked really hard on this thing for the last three weeks.
Brian Casel:I'm pretty proud of it. I wanna share it. I just like, just look at look at this thing I built. I wanna see what you've built. Like like, I love digging into interfaces of something that you just spent the last three weeks thinking deeply about and making a lot of creative decisions.
Brian Casel:Like, I just wanna see the output. Like, that's why I loved the website dribble.com, where it was like just design I I still go on there, like like designers just sharing their work. Right? That's helpful from a like, yes, you you can get some benefits of from building in public, building an audience and getting engagement and people follow your story. I mean that's why people listen to this podcast because they like to follow our stories and that, there's no getting around it.
Brian Casel:That has definitely brought business benefits I think to both of
Jordan Gal:That's right. Can we just take a pause and say thank you to, I think it was Justin Jackson that said something that meant a lot. Thank you
Brian Casel:for I several people commented on last week's episode, which Thank you. Pretty well.
Jordan Gal:Thank
Brian Casel:you. Thank you everyone over the years. It's been amazing. I love doing this. There definitely are, like, benefits.
Brian Casel:Another random benefit is hiring. You know, like I'm talking to a guy about potentially working with him on a website design project. I never knew him before, and he reached out because he follows us.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Let's let's talk about
Brian Casel:the But another thing about building in public though, like to me it's also customer research. It's like authentic marketing
Jordan Gal:with all these ancillary benefits along with it.
Brian Casel:But it's a way to know what really resonates in a prod. Like, there there might be a major feature to you. It might be major. Maybe it's requiring a ton of dev hours. Maybe you just think it's important in your in your But I've seen so many times when, like, major features didn't end up being that major, but the tiny features end up being like, oh shit, that's amazing.
Brian Casel:You know? And people talking about it. Like we we released this thing called, you know, a little warning on your on the recorder in Zip Message. If you don't have your mic turned on, like after three seconds, if you start a recording and it's and you're not getting any audio, we'll detect that and warn you. And it took us like two days to to ship that.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. But it's very thoughtful. And I just posted a static screenshot of the warning and users love it. It was like a tiny thing, you know. I heard Adam Wathen talk about this before, like long term, whether you're launching businesses, just being public about stuff.
Brian Casel:A lot of times, like, all have our own ideas of what we think is important to put out in the world. And so that's what we choose to work on. But you will never know what is actually going to resonate with everyone else. So by sharing as much as possible in public, that's how you start to get a feel for like, oh, that resonated. Like, you know, going back years ago when I started the the Productize stuff, productize course and teaching about that, it was because I had like one blog post about it, and that resonated.
Brian Casel:And then and then and then it just sort of kept snowballing from there, you know? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I think it's important to acknowledge that there is benefit. It's okay to actually seek the benefit. Like, one of the most important things, maybe the most important part of the decision to, yes, let let I should be on social media more on Twitter and LinkedIn specifically, that was for business benefit. I think I can help the business if I get out there more. The the reason it then went through like a challenging, like, well, how do I do that authentically is because I didn't wanna feel crappy about myself just like seeking just the benefit in a way that I don't like.
Jordan Gal:Because really, I won't keep up with it then.
Brian Casel:That's the thing with LinkedIn for me. I just haven't found it like, I can build in public on Twitter and I can build in public on this podcast because these are the two places where I actually enjoy to hang
Jordan Gal:out. Right.
Brian Casel:I enjoy hanging out.
Jordan Gal:Yep. That's right. You can be
Brian Casel:consistent LinkedIn, have no personal interest in hanging out there. But I do have a personal interest in growing the business and I see that as an opportunity. I just I just wish I could somehow fit it into my personal routine. I don't know how
Jordan Gal:I'm with you. It took me a while and I told I pinged Elizabeth yesterday and I was like, you won because I moved LinkedIn to my home screen on my iPhone. So I'm What do you actually
Brian Casel:do on LinkedIn? Like literally, what's your routine there?
Jordan Gal:My brain thinks Twitter first. When I had the idea yesterday about these fast features and how close I feel that we are to to nailing their value prop, I had that idea like two nights ago. I brought it to Rock and Jess, and I'm like, so I'm just thinking out loud here, this was Fast's core value proposition. I think we're like two features away from it. Should we build it?
Jordan Gal:How do we find out if it's worth building? You know, that whole thing. So when I think about that and I say to myself, I'm gonna take that public instead of keeping it private, I think Twitter. And then I think about, well, how do I translate this for LinkedIn? And there's there's a few things happening on LinkedIn.
Jordan Gal:Some people are LinkedIn native and they will write a a long post. What I did
Brian Casel:That's like LinkedIn's like sort of like article writer
Jordan Gal:Their post, could just you could write long posts in in their post. There's no limitation in in that way. What I did this time is I actually let me correct myself. Elizabeth took my tweets, made them into images, and then I posted a bit of commentary, and then posted four images so it would turn into a carousel, and evidently You mean a
Brian Casel:screenshot of your tweets?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Four screenshots of of the four tweet thread. So what Elizabeth's trying to, like, get me to understand is you don't actually have to translate that tweet thread into a post. You can keep it as a tweet thread, put it into a carousel, and carousels actually get priority on the timeline. So you can add a look.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's like, alright. I don't know. I'm learning.
Brian Casel:I I I never thought of that method. That's really interesting.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And it feels weird when you're just on LinkedIn and someone just like post a screenshot of their tweet. That feels a little lame. So I added some
Brian Casel:Yeah. But it's almost like I I could totally see how that's because what even on Twitter, when you see people screenshot something from somewhere else, it's like, that must be important that they took the time to to screenshot it. You know? Like Well,
Jordan Gal:I did it. One of my tweets this week was a screenshot from LinkedIn saying, hey, look at this conversation happening on LinkedIn. So I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm trying to learn both on what works and what doesn't, what I enjoy doing.
Brian Casel:Yeah, man. I like it. I probably have like 10,000 like LinkedIn requests that that have just built up over like the last eight years of me never logging in, you know.
Jordan Gal:Same. Same. Alright. What's going on, man? What what what's happening?
Brian Casel:One thing that that, you know, people have been giving us some feedback from last episode is this idea of company of one building with contractors that I was talking about. This is nothing new, certainly not new for me. And I know many other founders who use this approach in their companies. But I think it's one of those things that just doesn't get talked about enough. We can maybe, you know, chat about that for a second.
Brian Casel:So like, what I was talking about last week was that, you know, going forward in 2023, again, this isn't really a major shift. I think what what sort of resonated was I was describing how I do want to build a team culture. I I would love to build the business to a point where we have a great small tight knit team culture, but we're not there yet as a business. And until we get there, I am a solo founder. I'm a I'm essentially a cup a company of one, but I have contractors who help execute the projects that we need to execute.
Brian Casel:And looking back, I've that's how I've built all of my businesses
Jordan Gal:Alright.
Brian Casel:So over the years. So
Jordan Gal:so a, feels smart and very relevant and I think an approach a lot of people take, even if they don't kind of like call it that. Now, when when you do that, how are you team building? How are you turning it into like this fun project that people work on? Instead of just like you, mercenary style, like do this screen, you do this screen, and and and I'll do everything in the middle.
Brian Casel:This is where a little bit of the tension comes in for me personally, because I wanted to build a culture of team, you know, camaraderie and fun and being part of a mission and we're all in this together sort of thing. And we were sort of doing that a little bit last year. I had contractors, but I was looking to hire people who were on these like long term retainers and they act as if they are employees, but they're it's just long term retainers. And going back to audience ops, I built a really successful team atmosphere there, even though everyone was on these like long term contractor roles, technically, they were still in our Slack day to day, many of them for many years, but they're still technically part time contractors. And I was trying to do the same thing with in audience ops, in in Zip Message.
Brian Casel:And now I'm, I've sort of scaled back even more to, to a point where I have my two developers long term every day, but I've got a handful of other, like maybe three, four other contractors working on other projects with a defined start and end as needed. In terms of projects. And the tension, what I meant is like, as we head into '23, I've pulled back on the idea of like, okay, everyone on the team, we're all gonna post a weekly standup update. And everyone on the team, let's post photos of what we what we did over the weekend with our families. Like You pulled back
Jordan Gal:on that a little.
Brian Casel:Pulled on that stuff. And I wanna be doing that stuff Mhmm. But we're smaller than that right now. These project based contractors, they're not even in in our Slack because they're just projects.
Jordan Gal:So so you're you're setting up, like, the atmosphere and environment that you want, and it's it is sending a specific message to those people. It sounds like that's the message that you want to send. You don't right. You're purposely moving away from the team building, team culture.
Brian Casel:It's just that that's not the reality of what we have today.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Let me let me
Brian Casel:But it's not like I don't want that. Like I could, I could go hire people and have them on an every week retainer or a full time salary. And then we will have our weekly standups and it'll be fun and we can post photos. But we don't have the budget for that and the business need for that right now. So that's just not the reality.
Brian Casel:The reality is we have contractors who I'm gonna collaborate closely on. Like we're right now kicking off a big website redesign, repositioning thing that, you know, a lot of work. So I'm talking to a designer about working together for a period of two to three months. And we're gonna work closely together. We're gonna have a lot of zip message conversations back and forth.
Brian Casel:You know, we're gonna be in Figma together. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna be doing stuff together, but it's either redundant or not helpful or just a waste of time to have that person posting weekly stand up meetings and culture They're
Jordan Gal:not they're not full time?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because they're not full time. Like, they're they're working with me for three months. They probably have other clients that they're working with. And after this project is over, we're gonna be over for now.
Jordan Gal:You don't wanna pretend like you're making a commitment that you're not making. So it's like it's like it's an honest approach.
Brian Casel:There are other contractors who are on longer term stuff. So I I have an SEO team. Like, they're they're a small shop that I just started up with. The intention is to work with them on a monthly basis for a long period of time. But I know that like I'm just one of their clients in their roster.
Brian Casel:They are not employees of my company. It's just a contractor relationship. They're not in my Slack. They're not in our Notion except for a couple of specific pages. That's the relationship.
Brian Casel:The only ones that are closer to quote unquote team members are my developers, two developers, and a virtual assistant. And technically the difference is those three people and myself are in our Slack and have like more of a team member view in Notion. Like, they see And all the
Jordan Gal:it's more it's more consistent. It feels like like the commitment is long term and full time.
Brian Casel:Yes. And their roles are, the developers just develop product, but the VA is more miscellaneous kind of stuff. Even with them, I pulled back, like we were doing these weekly standups, asynchronously using Zip Message, which was really great for a while. We were doing that all year long. And I would still, like once we have a larger team with more regular team members, we will get back to that.
Brian Casel:And this is not like advocating for like, don't do async stand ups because I fully believe they they were valuable. We just don't have that team and workflow right now, but we will in the future again. So because right now it doesn't make sense for my developers to to spend time on a Friday, post an update on the stuff that they've been working on, when me and my developers talk about the stuff they're working on every day of the week. Like there's no point. Right.
Jordan Gal:It would just be like this formality to kind of get used to be more formal as you get bigger type of a thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. No no point in it's like just we're working lean here. We don't we don't need any extra crap.
Jordan Gal:There's semantics around full time employment contractor and so on. If if you look at our company from a legal point of view, it's, I think it's six people that are W-two full time employees, and then it's all contractors. But they're in Europe, and so because of that, they can't be W-two. But we very consciously make it feel full time, and we our policies around everything are everything gets treated equally. Everyone gets equity in the same way.
Jordan Gal:Everyone gets time off in the same way. Everyone gets the same, I don't know, home office budget allowance. So very very early on, we made this decision of like, we are gonna be the type of company that when you are a contractor, you feel the same exact experience as a W-two American employee. That has been really important for us in terms of loyalty because a lot of people have not been treated that same way by American companies and they come into ours like, woah, this is how it should feel.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but those people are essentially working full time for Rally.
Jordan Gal:I I think that's the thing. It's the full time commitment. Like, I mean, in
Brian Casel:terms of hours. Right? And and like they they don't have other maybe they do have other like side hustles.
Jordan Gal:Maybe side projects. But they
Brian Casel:but those are side. Like the Yes. It's not like it's not like you are equal with like three or three or four other clients for them.
Jordan Gal:No. No. And I think it's that and the open ended nature. It's not a project. Like we have a contractor that we work with right now that's helping on enterprise sales and it is a six month contract.
Jordan Gal:So there, we get confused. We don't know which Slack channels to let them in. We don't we don't it's weird and it's not as good as when it's full time where everything's clear. So we're, I guess we we we are learning on on that side and it is murky. It's not clear.
Brian Casel:Yeah, man. What else we got on our list here?
Jordan Gal:We So did
Brian Casel:ask Twitter for some things.
Jordan Gal:I don't know if anyone came up with stuff.
Brian Casel:One Yeah, go thing ahead.
Jordan Gal:One thing that I can talk about, there's definitely a big focus for us on momentum in January. We had this experience where in December, we had a lot of go to market activity in October, November. And we grew nicely, and then December, everything went real quiet. And we were afraid, like we were like, you know, basically, she's not calling us back. She must not be interested was the feeling.
Jordan Gal:But we knew it was December and everyone's busy in this holidays and all this other stuff. So we knew logically that it was that, but emotionally we were like, are they gonna call us back in January?
Brian Casel:I felt the same way. I I saw our our numbers slow down the last week of December. Was like, what's going on? And then and then they checked that again in January,
Jordan Gal:you know? Right. You know what's going on. You don't even have to ask, but you still cannot help yourself. But I
Brian Casel:I hope I'm sitting there. I'm like new I'm like new year's eve. I'm like, why aren't people starting trials of my product right now?
Jordan Gal:How come no one's as obsessed with my MRR as I So so fortunately, it it happened as expected. January hits and then everything just ramps back up and everyone's like, hey, I'm ready to talk now and can we get things started and sorry I didn't call you back type of a feeling. So that's been great. And for us, that has coincided with something, a very positive experience in in my eyes, and that is sensing a change in the air around e commerce and headless commerce and all this stuff. And and that is characterized by open criticism of Shopify.
Jordan Gal:For a very long time, it felt like open criticism was bad for your career. It was bad for your agency. It was bad for your brand. It was not healthy, and playing along and playing nice nice and telling Toby and Harley how brilliant they are on Twitter was like an annoying thing that I had to just deal with, even though privately I would talk to people and they were really frustrated. And that frustration seems to have spilled out and is now openly being aired on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Brian Casel:So you're much more in e commerce Twitter than I am. Yes. So like, what are you, like
Nathan Barry:what are you seeing? Like what's, what does this look like?
Jordan Gal:So so Shopify did something very smart. The very first thing, think January 3, right, like the first twenty four hours that people are back at work, huge announcement from the Shopify PR machine accompanied by articles and PR and all these things about Shopify components, and that is their staking out a position in headless. And what Shopify is very good at is is recycling existing features and adding a large layer of marketing to it so that it sounds like something new. And then when you look underneath, it's actually not very new, but it it does what they need. It gets the attention, it gets the press, but the important thing is those two happening at the same time.
Jordan Gal:This spilling out of frustration and Shopify staking like a specific position around headless, those two tell me that there's there's stuff happening in the air. That means those one to 10,000,000 a year Shopify merchants that were like the bread and butter, the base, those people are struggling. And my assumption is the percentage of those merchants that are moving up to Shopify Plus has fallen by what 90%, if not more. And so they're starting to look at that segment of the market, and that is not going it's not going up anytime soon. And so where they are staking out territory is in the enterprise, and trying to wave their hands and say, hey, one, you don't need to leave Shopify if you wanna go headless, And two, if you're an enterprise considering going headless, you can come to Shopify.
Jordan Gal:Those two things are very good. I I like seeing all of that
Brian Casel:stuff. Yeah. It's just like bringing energy into the into this side of the market.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. From a big from
Brian Casel:from the big elephant.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Exactly right. So that that is very motivating because it feels like, okay, this this is the six months stretch. A year ago, if we had made this big push around, we you gotta go headless. Here's how.
Jordan Gal:I don't think it would, the market would have been so open to it. And right now it feels like ripe.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So are you also thinking about the product like, okay, what is our answer to shop? Like, so they made this big splash in January. A couple months from now on sales calls, people will be a little bit more aware of that existing in the market. So how do we answer the question of like, well, how is this different from Shopify components?
Brian Casel:Like, you think through that?
Jordan Gal:To a degree, it would be more accurate to say that the way we think about it is we can now go after Shopify merchants much more. That's at least the angle that I look at it because a year ago when we first started going to market and had like, you know, the first few people starting to use the product, I think it was really about a year ago. I think we onboarded the very very first early customers in like February or March. So when we did that, we basically said to ourselves, it's pointless to go after Shopify merchants. We can't win them.
Jordan Gal:None of them wanna go to BigCommerce or Swell, the the platforms that we integrated with. So let's just focus on these other merchants.
Brian Casel:So now, like like technically, does this mean like Rally can be plugged into Shopify No.
Jordan Gal:Nope. Nope. Nope. In many ways, what Shopify is doing, they're actually moving closer to where our product is. And they're saying you can use our checkout without using our front end.
Jordan Gal:And you can also
Brian Casel:I see. So so you're saying that you can go after the customers who are considering using Shopify's checkout without That's right.
Jordan Gal:All of this unhappiness and the way
Brian Casel:The battle is over like, okay, you're now that you're looking at Shopify as as just a checkout component, look, there's an even better we we've been headless since day one. Right.
Jordan Gal:There's like a real checkout option.
Brian Casel:We're designed for we're Right. A real headless option. We're like a legit player in headless if that's what you want to do.
Jordan Gal:Yes, because Shopify is bullshit. The whole components is bullshit. There's no flexibility the way they claim there is. They're actually locking their checkout down even further, but they're allowing developers to do certain other things. In reality, if you're an enterprise merchant, you look at Shopify, I think you will quickly conclude that it does not give you the flexibility that people are actually after for headless.
Jordan Gal:So it just feels
Brian Casel:And then much just like Shopify, like take take their normal percentage on on their their headless components? Like, it's like, would you even I don't know. Who
Jordan Gal:knows? Yes. Yes. So it just feels like much more open season and now a lot of our marketing, whereas we didn't feel the confidence to wave over Shopify merchants and say this is a better option. Now now it feels like those merchants will be much more open to alternatives, And and you see it in the open criticism and you see it in the response.
Jordan Gal:Right? Shopify comes out. Shopify components, headless, enterprise. A year ago, everyone's fawning over how brilliant they are. And now the commentary is like, oh, another feature you're not going to follow through with.
Jordan Gal:What about this other thing and this other thing and this other thing that you promised over the last years that you didn't do? Which that wasn't a part of the public conversation. So I just like feel like, oh, oh, the market the market's moving around and and now is the time to come out there and say, here's this new way to build. And I think over the next few weeks, you and I will talk about how we're trying to create content in order to capitalize on that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. More of what we were talking about. Shipping stuff and sharing it publicly. And, you know, I love it. And like, just like a rapid succession of like feature, feature improvement, like more headless, like more, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It is an interesting thing. Product momentum. Yeah. And the perception of product momentum.
Brian Casel:I still see that in my graph too. And like, it's like part of what's frustrating me about the last two months with us being so slow to ship these two big features, it means I haven't announced the new feature in like almost two months, you know. And and I see that in the graph. Like, we we have more customer activity in the months where we send new feature announcements.
Jordan Gal:Right. What what I what I found over the last like week of of doing this was the announcements are obviously the big things. Here's this new thing that feels amazing to push out there. But when you share publicly along the way, it gives much more of the perception of progress than if you just were quiet for a month and then announced.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I know. And I've been wanting to share more of what we're building right now because it's awesome, like the workflows and the sub threads, but, and I've just been like too busy to like do the screenshots and share it, but I gotta get on that as we sort of like lead up to shipping these in a few weeks.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. One of the comments I got was from someone I know and respect, Chathri. She was like, Woah, Rally team's been busy. And I was like, we're always this busy, but we just Just don't
Nathan Barry:didn't know about it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yes. Yes. And that kinda caught me like, you know, with the perception is reality thing or in our case, it's, you know, reality is reality, but you you you gotta make sure you show it. Otherwise, the perception's actually well, there is no opposite perception.
Jordan Gal:It's just they don't think of you. There's there's nothing there. The absence of any perception.
Brian Casel:Totally. Can we squeeze in a quick update on chat GPT? Sure. I'm not gonna throw a curveball here.
Jordan Gal:I actually have it on my on my list, but
Nathan Barry:go ahead.
Brian Casel:Oh, awesome. Alright. Because this came from Twitter today. We we did our thing where we asked for topic ideas for Bootstrap Wave, like, minutes before we hit record. So the one or two people who could squeeze in a request actually get on the show.
Brian Casel:So Christian Ganko, thank you for the, for the question you you asked about. You you were like, talk about ChatGPT, and then ask ChatGPT what we should talk about. I tried that, but they it doesn't know what Bootstrap Web is. All right, well I do wanna give an update since the last time we
Nathan Barry:talked about it about
Brian Casel:a month ago. It's in my life now.
Jordan Gal:Is that right?
Brian Casel:I mean, yeah, big time. In what ways?
Jordan Gal:Have you have you signed up for any products? Are you paying for AI based software?
Brian Casel:Okay. So two thing. This is in my workflow during during work. Coding. I use ChatGPT.
Brian Casel:I ask it code questions at least three to five times a day now.
Jordan Gal:Is it your first place you go to to ask a question?
Brian Casel:I do go to it more now than Googling and going on Stack Overflow.
Jordan Gal:Woah. Woah.
Brian Casel:It has replaced, I would say 90% of Stack Overflow for me is now in I mean, I I'm also using it frequently enough to notice that sometimes it gives me the wrong information. You know, I've I've seen that happen several times. So, you're
Jordan Gal:ready for chat g p d four. You ready?
Brian Casel:Yes. And I'm definitely aware of that. And I'm talking about very specific questions like this line of code, what does it mean? Or I need to write a line or two of code that accomplish es this. What's the best way to do that?
Brian Casel:And it will help with that. I actually downloaded what's the name of this little Mac app? Mac GPT? Okay. It's some some free thing that that puts it up in the menu bar on Mac.
Brian Casel:I can just keyboard shortcut, ask it a question.
Nathan Barry:It's
Jordan Gal:really Oh my goodness. It's like, it's exciting, isn't it? Yeah. I know it's a lot of hype and the VCs are jumping on it and talking about how you whatever they're talking about.
Brian Casel:The other the other one that I just finally got on is GitHub Copilot.
Jordan Gal:Okay. That I've heard a lot about.
Brian Casel:And it was funny because I sort of knew that it was out there but I had never played around with it. I never really researched it. I was like, that's a lot of work. I don't wanna get into it.
Jordan Gal:Right, right.
Brian Casel:And then in my day to day usage of ChatGPT of just asking it code questions, I was like, man, and I tweeted this, I was like, man, it would be so much better if I could sort of plug in my code, my entire code base, my repo for zip message into ChatGPT so that anytime I ask it a question, it has the full context of my project. And I can know, when I ask it something, can say like, well, you you have this configuration in your environment or you you've already built this controller over there for that. So you can so, you know, you can't do that with ChatGPT.
Jordan Gal:Maybe Copilot does that?
Brian Casel:But Copilot is built in into GitHub. Our repo is on GitHub. Right.
Jordan Gal:So you realize you had it there the whole time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But it it's a product that you have to subscribe to. So I actually did start a trial of Copilot. I think based on my usage so far so far, I'll I'll intend to pay for it when the trial is up. It's like a ninety day trial or something like that.
Brian Casel:It's crazy. The only thing with it is that I use Sublime Text, and that's not an officially supported text editor for Copilot, but somebody made a third party plugin that that does pull in Copilot into Sublime. A little bit janky, but it it works. And the difference between and this is for the technical folks listening. The the the difference between because now I use them equally.
Brian Casel:ChatGPT and Copilot. Right? Copilot completes my sentences when I'm typing code into Sublime. So it knows what I'm about to type. So if I have to write a whole function that's gonna be maybe three to five to 20 lines long, something like that, Once I write two to three first words of that function
Jordan Gal:It just goes.
Brian Casel:It's gonna guess what I'm what I'm about to write and it's gonna suggest what I'm about to write. And and it has that knowledge based on my entire repo. Like, it'll auto complete with like, you know, function named, method names that I've defined elsewhere in the project. Like, it knows all that stuff. And it also gets smarter the more and more I use it.
Brian Casel:And I think there's some recency stuff. So like if I've if I've used like these 10 files recently, it'll it'll pull more info from those. So it's like it's like Copilot is for auto completing what I'm already about to write. Chat GPT is for like, I don't know what to write, so I need help in figuring out strategically what what the best way to implement this is.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. So on a scale of one to 10, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product?
Brian Casel:I tweeted this as well about the pricing. I intend to pay for ChatGPT, whatever. Whatever. I'm not gonna say like whatever they're gonna charge for it, believe believe that it's gonna be extremely low priced, like way below what I would be willing to pay for it.
Jordan Gal:That's right.
Brian Casel:And that's they are huge. They're gonna they're going for the the the huge thing. They're they're taking on Google here.
Jordan Gal:The the Microsoft deal is is Yeah.
Brian Casel:The Microsoft is is super interesting.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Super interesting. It's like a nonprofit, but like the whole thing is pretty wild.
Brian Casel:It's like It is pretty wild. First of all, like I didn't even know there are multiple things that I'm just hearing bits and pieces of podcasts and Twitter. First of all, the Microsoft thing, they are they're they're working OpenAI stuff into Bing. This is this is Microsoft's play.
Jordan Gal:Sell the whole Office Suite.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So this is their their their play at, like, making a run at Google finally.
Jordan Gal:Right. Like, did is it like, we know Google got fat and slow, like, because they built the greatest money machine of all time. But is it now is it happening now? Are are they are they gonna pay the price? They're definitely not gonna go gently into that good night, not with their war chest.
Jordan Gal:But damn, it's exciting again. Microsoft's like in the game. The the the $10,000,000,000, the 49%, the reversion after the loan, and Exactly.
Brian Casel:That that's the other interesting thing about it. I mean, Tyler Tringus was was tweeting about this because it's very similar
Jordan Gal:to the like something that your LLC and my LLC would come up with, like, to do to do a deal together. You know, not
Brian Casel:He shared this thing about, like, it's it's essentially company. It's it's, like, literally, it's very similar to the to the model on on the comm company terms except that, like, that one is, like, $92,000,000,000 gets you know, that that's when it sort of flips back.
Jordan Gal:It's pretty And it goes back, what, 49% to to Microsoft? Then 49% to the investors?
Brian Casel:I I didn't get into the details of the foundation. But doesn't doesn't OpenAI sort of, like, retain, like, back to their like, I think most of their equity after they pay back like 92,000,000,000 in profits or something, something like that?
Jordan Gal:No, goes to like a nonprofit foundation.
Brian Casel:Oh wow, okay.
Jordan Gal:Yes, it's like this is so, it's so potentially impactful on so many things that it is it's almost really good and important that the founders of it seem to be one, like already rich as shit, right? So Sam Altman's kind of all good anyway, And I feel like that helps. And at least it appears to not have the same type of an egotistical drive to dominate the world like a Bezos, Elon, you know, Salesforce, Benioff type of a thing because this thing this thing's gnarly, man. You don't know
Brian Casel:where it's gonna go. I really don't know anything about it, but when you talk about like the reverting to a nonprofit, it sort of reminds me of like the WordPress situation where like automatic sort of controls the WordPress nonprofit organization. So
Jordan Gal:Whatever technically WordPress did, I think it didn't quite work out the way it was supposed to. I think that's one of the weirdest situations I've ever heard in business on the Internet. Was a crazy situation.
Brian Casel:It'll be interesting to see in the future how the relationship between OpenAI, the company, and that whatever nonprofit runs this thing.
Jordan Gal:Right. But you could see like that type of a company with a founder that has a, you know, quote, like standard mindset, like that that person could be like the first trillionaire. Because this stuff can go so far in so many different places and you own the underlying layer that everyone uses and builds on applications on top of.
Brian Casel:They've been shipping features too, ChatGPT. One of the ones that I love is that they now have this sidebar that keeps track of all your recent queries. And like whenever you do one, like it auto type it uses GPT to like title your query for you.
Jordan Gal:Let me guess what you're gonna ask me.
Brian Casel:No. Like like this sidebar thing lists all the things, but it like it creates like summarized versions of what I asked on each thing. Okay. Like automatically.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Let me rephrase that for you a bit more articulately. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Look, speaking of working in public, anyone out there who's really into ChatGPT, one of the, like, quote, like, ideas on my list is a ChatGPT integration. Like, how do we use ChatGPT as a front end integration to a checkout? Where is that going? What is a valuable application of being able to buy in a nontraditional checkout? Right?
Jordan Gal:Like how do you just take a URL and say buy this product in medium in blue with my Amex to my regular address? Enter and then buy it.
Brian Casel:Right? Because it's Like a like a like a natural speech.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Exactly right. Like an a natural conversational checkout experience.
Brian Casel:I hear what you're saying. I don't I don't quite see that. Like and and and the connection I draw there is with Amazon Alexa. And and I think the news recently is that they're they're basically, like, winding that down.
Jordan Gal:No one does that.
Brian Casel:Yes. Because no one does that. And they they had originally launched Alexa because they their hope was people would be standing in their kitchen, and they say, hey, Alexa, order me some more milk, whatever. You know, and just people don't buy that way,
Jordan Gal:you know. No. I just don't don't think it's
Brian Casel:the right context. They wanna see what's in their cart. They wanna know what they're about to buy without just hoping that the AI understood what I said, right?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. I'm not sure. Look, it will 100% have an impact on e commerce period. Like no question.
Brian Casel:I could see it happening more in the, in the shopping experience and less on the actual checkout. Don't know. Like the, like you're looking at a, at a product, here's some information about that product. You might wanna look at these other ones. I know that that already exists, but I, I think AI will definitely be integrated in almost every product where you're creating content.
Brian Casel:I would assume at some point in the future we'll have some AI content generation in messaging tool. It's already in Notion.
Jordan Gal:Right. We just feed it our historical podcast transcripts.
Brian Casel:Friend Breck just shared the other day what his workflow for his podcast and his and his business, Breck Palumbo, for some of you might remember his podcast, Bootstrapped with Kids from back in the day. He was telling me the other day about his podcast workflow is he records a podcast with a guest, gets it transcribed using Descript, feeds the transcription into Notion. The AI in Notion automatically summarizes like the the forty five minute conversation into three paragraphs, and that's the show notes for the episode. Done. And he was like, it's it's crazy accurate too.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Very, very
Brian Casel:That's the future.
Jordan Gal:Well, we can go on for, you know, I I got all day, but I guess we should call it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We should probably get back to work.
Jordan Gal:It's been like an hour. Alright. Well, we're back on it. I'm heading up to Traverse City. We'll have a nice weekend.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We'll probably have a couple of couple weeks off on the feed because I'm going to big snows, but
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's right.
Brian Casel:That's back on it as soon as we can. Alright. Actually, probably next week, we we might be able to get one in. So
Jordan Gal:Okay. Cool. I I wanna keep it going. Be more consistent this year for sure. Nathaniel, thanks for the question on blockchain and crypto.
Jordan Gal:We'll try to get to that next week. Thanks for listening, bro.
Brian Casel:Alright. Later, bro. See you.
