Communicating What's Next
Bootstrap web. Oh my god. It's three weeks in a row. Jordan, what's up, buddy?
Jordan Gal:You know, snowy Chicago.
Brian Casel:Is it? Oh, yeah. It looks like I just got back from snowy Vermont.
Jordan Gal:Looks like a snow globe. I don't know if you can see that though. Window, it's just Yeah. Yeah, we got away with it. Nice easy winter up until now.
Jordan Gal:But now it's turning. But it's okay. I'm just in the house working my way through a bad haircut, eating some creatine gummies, you know.
Brian Casel:No. Looking sharp, dude. Looking sharp.
Jordan Gal:Alright. I'll I'll take that. I appreciate that, the support.
Brian Casel:I just got back yesterday from a week at the first of two big snow tiny comps for me. The one up in Vermont. That was a lot of fun. Really good group. That one, unlike the other one, this one is we usually mix it up with a few different people mixed with returning folks.
Brian Casel:So it was a was a fun mix. Really good trip. It's always good to, like, get away and and dig into other people's businesses for a week and, of course, get some feedback on on mine. And and I got three days of snowboarding in, so it was a good time.
Jordan Gal:Nice. You got your workout routine ironed out after after talking to everybody?
Brian Casel:Yes. This year, I don't know if it's like our age. We're all sort of getting a little bit older. So we're all like super health focused now, like a lot more than before. So like, it's turning into like half, at least half the trip, just talking about workout routines and how much protein we're eating and what apps we're using to track our health and all this different shit.
Brian Casel:And then and then we find the time to maybe talk about our businesses a little bit.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's good. You gotta mix it in. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't kidding about the creatine gummies.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I've been eating them for about a month and feel amazing actually, if I'm gonna be entirely honest. I feel like so energetic. I'm I'm never tired. And I haven't been sick in, I don't even know, months.
Brian Casel:I gotta look into this. I gotta there's so many things on my on my list of health to dos to go along with actual work to dos this week. But that that's the thing is like now I'm home today and then next week. And then I go away again to Colorado for for big snow number two. And so I'm just in crunch time, man.
Brian Casel:I'm I've been in crunch time this whole this whole quarter cause we're we're building so much and we're trying to launch so much in the next few months. And, man, it it just feels like a crunch, and I'm just trying to ship and it it's not just features. We are shipping some major features. Hope Hopefully one of them this week before I go away again. But in addition to that, there's like three other big things going on and I gotta make sure that the people I'm working with have stuff to do and it's just a lot going on.
Jordan Gal:Okay. I'm sure the weeks feel short when you're traveling.
Brian Casel:Yeah. They literally are short.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Mhmm. You know? Yeah. I'm heading to LA next week for like an e commerce event that we're sponsoring.
Jordan Gal:We found this group called Retail Summits. And they just do a really good job with these relatively small events, like 150, 200 people. It's much better environment for actual business and networking than like a, you know, 5,000 person thing. They have found a way to curate the ecommerce world outside of Shopify, which is tough for us to find. So we just kinda gel with them.
Jordan Gal:We
Brian Casel:sponsor Yeah. Is that do you find that? Like, every ecommerce conference or whatever it is, like, community, it's just so Shopify focused? Yes. They're either Or like there's a sort of high percentage of Shopify people in there.
Jordan Gal:It's either that it's really Shopify focused or it's super enterprise. And then it's like, you know, it's cool that the director of e commerce from some Fortune 500 company is sitting on the stage talking, but who cares, you know, beyond it just being interesting. So yeah, heading to LA with Sam and Jessica, so two other people from the team. And yeah, we'll see what we can do. Over there we had a really successful event in Nashville with this group.
Jordan Gal:So now LA is the first one that we're sponsoring and then we're doing four others throughout the year. Like one in England, another one
Brian Casel:in Chicago. You're a sponsor on this?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's like a reasonable cost on sponsorship and gets us into, like, live events. So this is like our this is our bet, our investment in live events other than, like, attending, you know, a a few of them throughout the year.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So what do you get
Jordan Gal:as a sponsor? What happens? So you get I personally think the lanyard sponsorship of any event is the best bang for your buck.
Brian Casel:So logo on the lanyard?
Jordan Gal:Well, yes. And then everyone walks around with your logo all day. For some reason, these events don't make that expensive. And it always ends up being like pretty cheap. And I just identify that as like a great ratio of cost to value.
Brian Casel:Do you get on stage at all as a sponsor?
Jordan Gal:You can. I am getting on stage through a bit of a coincidence where one of their moderators on a panel had to drop out. So I'm moderating a panel. But you know, stage time is good.
Brian Casel:That's even better to get on stage not as a sponsor.
Jordan Gal:Yes, exactly. Yeah. And then you get a lot of information about the people going. So you get a lot of information about who's going ahead of time. So you can reach out to them and say, hey, can we you want to meet the day before?
Jordan Gal:Can we take you to lunch type of thing? And then you get basically any information you want after. To say, hey, met someone at this company and they'll give you all the information so you can reach out to them. That's pretty good overall. I had a killer week, man.
Jordan Gal:I feel amazing. It was one of those weeks that like so my general sense, maybe I talked about this last week, I'm not sure. Just feels like things are just like go time right now. It's intense. It feels like, you know, it's January and it's not the first week where everything's disorganized.
Jordan Gal:It really feels like we're settling into like q one. And I don't have to think about fundraising anymore. So I'm not spending my time on investor convos and I feel like I'm back, like I can focus. And that feels really good. And and there were just some things that like needed to get sorted and and like one thing after another just kind of worked out in our favor.
Jordan Gal:So we launched our biggest merchant ever this week, which was phenomenal and just like bumped up the GMV significantly. So everyone kind of like feels buoyed by that. And we had this, I would say relatively tense negotiation with one of our biggest partners. And we wanted some things to change and they want some things to change and we just kind of needed to like get through that and hammer it out. And that got finished this morning.
Jordan Gal:And it got finished in a what I think is very fair and like we're happy about it, helps us move forward and helps the business grow like with the partnership. So that's great. And then one of our hypotheses that we've been working on, we tested this week and it's coming back very positive. So the competition bolted fast. Over the last year, they set the expectation in people's minds in the market that checkout and fraud and chargeback protection all go together.
Jordan Gal:You know, from card hook days, we just approached it as a separate thing and we assumed, yeah, sure, if you have fraud protection, we'll just integrate with them and no big deal and you can continue to use them. But people start to think about it like, no, just wanna pay you and just get both done and not think about it. So we looked around for a partner on the fraud front and got into an agreement with one of them and then went out to our customer base and said, hey, do you wanna buy this as a bundle? And a bunch of people came back and said yes. So now we're looking at that and as we're redoing our site and looking at our pricing page, we're thinking through how do we use that bundle, not just to make sure people know that we offer it, but ideally allow it to pull our overall pricing upward.
Brian Casel:Actually, wanted to ask you about that, like just pricing in general. We've talked about it so many times in the past, but how are you thinking about it today? I mean, it sounds like you're rethinking pricing at least a little bit around the edges, right? Like what are you I'm curious to know, like how do you think about landing on an actual price point? Like, literally how much to charge for the different tiers or whatever transaction fee.
Brian Casel:Like, what like, just deciding on that number, you know. Because like I think I mentioned before, like, we're we're planning a pricing change this year, like a a significant one. Different structure and everything. And the structure has been more or less set in terms of what's changing, but the actual dollar amount has been in flux in my mind in the last
Jordan Gal:It's few really hard to settle on, right? As we all know. And we all know going into it, oh, you should experiment with it regularly. It's also not easy to experiment with it regularly. So you you do like wanna get it right.
Jordan Gal:I think the first thing is to just look at your like limitations and parameters kind of thing. At least for us on the low end, we have our revenue share. So one of the things we're doing differently at Rally that we did at Cardhook is with Chop we had no relationship with Shopify. We hated each other. You know, it was like a negative relationship.
Jordan Gal:It wasn't even like the absence of a relationship. It was it was like actively negative. But we also didn't have any revenue share relationship because we weren't allowed in the app store. And so what that meant was we had no floor. There is no pricing beyond which we're losing money because of the rev share.
Jordan Gal:At Rally, we're trying to form strong relationships with the platforms that we work with. And so the rev share that we kick back to the platform is our floor. Right? If we go below that, lose money and you don't want negative margins. So that's like an easy limit on that side.
Jordan Gal:And then we look at our more mature competitor in Bolt and we see their pricing as a bit of a ceiling. I I definitely have no problem being higher priced, but we hear a lot from merchants that they are egregiously priced. And when I look at that and then I look at our financial model, right, then that that extra factor in the calculations, if I look at our projections and I look at their pricing, it's like, it's not even necessary for us to price that way and us to still do really, really well.
Brian Casel:That is where I I look to first when I start to think about pricing is like, first of all, who exactly am I defining as direct competitors? That changes as we're repositioning and looking at a different space now. We think about different competitors and what they're charging. But more important than that, I think it's talking to customers and I always ask, like always, always ask, a, like, which tools are you currently using and what exactly are you paying for those tools right now? But it's, like, not just, like, what's the answer to that?
Brian Casel:It's, like, what's your feeling on how much you're paying for the those tool? You know, like, because, like, what you're saying is with Bolt, like, yeah, your your customers and your potential customers might be Bolt customers or were Bolt customers, but, like, just because they paid it or considered it doesn't mean like they're okay. Like, you're, you know, you're sensing they're actually pushing it on price. And that feels But like my sense from talking to customers and what they're paying for our handful of competitors, they just kind of rattled it off like, we're on their middle tier or their upper tier. And like, that's kind of what I expect in this space.
Brian Casel:And so like that gives me a sense of like, all right, as long as we're right in the same ballpark.
Jordan Gal:Right, right. Like, they don't seem to have much issue with paying, call it a $100 a month. And they're like, yeah, that's an important part of my business and I'm okay paying a $100, a $150 a month, $80, whatever that is. So I also look at like the value metric and the pricing mechanism. So one of the most important things we did at Cardhook was introduce a transaction fee.
Jordan Gal:Right? It started off at a $100 a month and then it was pretty obvious that we should bring that up and then it went up to $300 a month. And that was great and that that meant every new customer added $300 a month and that was good. But we started to realize that we're in a GMV game. We're in a transaction payments game.
Jordan Gal:We shouldn't be looking at it as subscription. And at some point we added a transaction fee of 50 basis points. And that was like on existing customers. So it was a very large price increase. We went through this process and I've talked about this on podcasts.
Jordan Gal:I talking to Rob Wong about this recently because I think we watched someone else go through a pricing exercise that wasn't successful. And then he kind of like sent me an email that he he talked with the tiny seed companies as like listen to this podcast and Jordan explains how they did the price increase because we were honestly, were so scared to screw it up. So I think that's part of why we did such a good job because we were we were really worried about getting it wrong. So we we did this thing where we announced the price change and increase and then announced it six months ahead of time. And in e commerce you make all your money in Q4.
Jordan Gal:So we announced it in like June or July and said it's going into effect in January. So like we're not going to mess with your holidays because that feels like pig ish. And that really worked. And then we also promised here are the features that we're going to add between now and then to justify this increase. And then in January when we did it, we were able to say, here's what we promised.
Jordan Gal:Here's what we delivered. You did great over the holidays. Now let's do great together. That changed the company.
Brian Casel:Planning the rollout and how it affects existing customers and the timing of their pricing and then new customers and all that. But like that's being worked out too. But the actually getting back to the transaction fee, because that's another interesting piece of pricing for some products. And we're gonna be introducing that this year when we launch. We are building payments as a thing in our product.
Brian Casel:You know, like what can we learn from the gumroad fiasco a few weeks ago. Right? Tell me what you think about this. Because I'm starting to get the sense that like products that have a payments piece and charge some form of a transaction fee, would it be wrong to to think about it like you shouldn't think about making your money on the transaction fee. You will make money on the transaction fee, but the payments and transactions are like a feature in in a product.
Brian Casel:Make your money on the on the product fee because it's just a a race to the bottom on price. Like, you can't just like add transaction fee points without getting pricing pushback as we saw with Gumroad and like, the standard in everybody's mind is 3%. That's like the traditional credit card processing costs 3%. Like, world knows that. Yes.
Brian Casel:Right? So, so then it's like, what are you gonna charge on top of that without without it coming off? Like you're just, you're just pulling profit off
Jordan Gal:of it.
Brian Casel:Yes.
Jordan Gal:It's, it's, it's a big problem. I cannot agree with you that the case is you shouldn't look to transactions to make your money. The number one company to look at is Shopify. They started off as a software product making their money on subscriptions and then they started their partnership with Stripe and Shopify Payments and pretty quickly their transaction revenue overtook their subscription revenue. And now they are like, I don't even know, it's like 60 or 65% transaction fees and they are no longer a SaaS company in the traditional sense.
Jordan Gal:They're a payments company who takes a percentage of transactions.
Brian Casel:Well, I don't even know what Shopify's prices are, but what I mean is, yes, transaction fees will make up the bulk of your revenue, but the assumption is you're in high volume land, high volume of transactions, high volume of customers. If you're in a low to medium volume of customers, if you're a bootstrapped company kinda starting up, like you can't expect to get profitable just by adding transaction fee points to your pricing page. Like that think that's good. Like the transaction fee still needs to still needs to be low or read low to customers when they're looking at your pricing page.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:I don't know. Like 10% transaction fee seems insane.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's too
Brian Casel:high. It's
Jordan Gal:too high. Yeah. Ours is literally in the tens of basis points, right? Fraction of a percent because e commerce physical product, don't have much margin, all this other stuff.
Brian Casel:Can So do I mean the game there is volume, right? But like
Jordan Gal:Our game is volume because we have to be able to flex up, Right? The the way we got into a position of Kartik where we were adding $40,000 a month in MRR was because our customers were flying and they were doing great and there was no friction to our revenue growth along with them. The difficulty in the digital product space is that because it's so crowded, you cannot have a transaction fee that stands out too much because that you have so many other competitors saying, hey, we won't charge transaction fee. Yeah. It's just pay for
Brian Casel:a convert kit and and you get payments for nothing like or something like that.
Jordan Gal:Right? Here's the thing. What you should keep in mind, if you're going into the payments game, what you should keep in mind is the money you're making off transaction fees right now is not static. It improves over time.
Brian Casel:Right. Exactly. Like volume grows over time. Right? Like that's the
Jordan Gal:Yes. And and and a key factor that I didn't learn for a while is that you can make money without your customers paying for it. And and that's that really really helps the equation because let's just say you decide to to just charge $50 a month, $100 a month, $200 a month. Right? Only subscriptions.
Jordan Gal:And then you get your 2.9% that you pay for Stripe and you are telling the market, I'm not adding any transaction fee to that. At some point when your volume gets big enough into the millions of dollars per month, you then go to Stripe, you go to these other payment processors and say, all right, I'm looking to sign exclusively with a payment processor. What can you do for me? And that's when you can start to get into ten, fifteen basis points from the payment processor that they'll pay you and so it remains 2.9% but now you're carving out 15 basis points out of that and you're getting revenue and then you do have the ability for your revenue to flex upward as your merchants make more money while still claiming honestly that you only charge a flat subscription fee.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. I like it. It makes me even more stressed about how slow we are to build our current features because I wanna build all this shit.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, payments, man. The payment flow is wild.
Pippin Williamson:That's one of
Brian Casel:the big ones on our very, not very near, but this year roadmap because it keeps coming up in every, every request, every conversation I have about the product. That's, that's the next thing they want.
Jordan Gal:Can I ask you your, your thinking on how to build that? Do you default to Stripe Checkout, Stripe Elements?
Brian Casel:I default to it, but I haven't dug into it yet. I I have started to hear about and talk to some folks about alternatives to that. There is some friction in Stripe Checkout because it sort of requires, I think, them to create their own Stripe account as they get set up.
Jordan Gal:You can do different models. You can do different models. You can be the Stripe account and everyone uses your connect, or you can use Stripe Connect to allow people to connect their own accounts.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I'm only gathering feedback and a little bit of light research at this stage. We haven't started launching payments yet, but that's coming this year. I'm listening and I'm looking around. And what I'm what I'm doing when I'm listening is I'm hearing it's first of all, it's just the number one request from everyone who's looking at what we're building.
Brian Casel:Like, okay, this is all great. And then I'm gonna need the ability to sell all that stuff. That's Cool. That's a constant.
Jordan Gal:That's exciting. That's exciting.
Brian Casel:But then there's a mix of, like, I want to be able to plug in my own Stripe or my own PayPal or my own whatever. And then there's another group who who just wants it to be totally seamless built in. I'm sort of open to the idea of offering I'm looking at options. I'm like, how do we offer both? Or how do we offer a completely white labeled payment solution?
Brian Casel:So, like, they don't need to go register their own. But generally I start out by defaulting to Stripe Connect. That would be my first choice. And then I figure out like what are the limitations or the gaps that we can't fill with that, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yep. You gotta do your research because right, you have the technical implications. You probably shouldn't build everything at once. You should launch with one version of it, one way to do it, right? Sign up and you have an account and you're done or use Stripe Connect and connect your existing Stripe account if you don't have one.
Jordan Gal:But there are lot of factors like everybody loves net new. Right? If you're sending Stripe net new customers that don't have a Stripe account yet, they will love you and pay you. Braintree for example is super aggressive. Right?
Jordan Gal:They they have daddy. They have PayPal as their holding company that owns them. They're not into losing the strike over the last few years. And so they are very aggressive on partnerships and pricing and rev share. So yeah.
Jordan Gal:But I'm I'm sure we'll talk.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I'm I'm almost I mean, I've already talked about it here, but I I don't wanna talk too much about it because it is several months away for us.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Cool.
Brian Casel:I feel like I keep talking about the same thing, but the the thing is all of our features now that we're building just in general are slower to to ship because of the the code base has grown. Our our testing process is much more complex now. Every feature we build is intertwined with all the other features we've already built. So like, there's just a it's slower to get new features out the door than it was a few months ago. And we're building, like, really big like, so we just shipped threads, which is a big one.
Brian Casel:Ever everyone was waiting for that and getting some good feedback on that. I'm trying to ship workflows this week before my next trip. It's this added stress of things take longer and we're currently in this state of flux between I know exactly what we need to build, the roadmap, the priority order. There's gonna be a bigger launch later this year in terms of, like, the new version of the product. And we're not there yet, and we need to and, like, there there are things that need to be shipped in order to get there.
Brian Casel:And it's just frustrating, like and so I I am looking at the list of things like what can we trim out, What can we reorder in terms of priority order to get there faster? And there are things that I can do, but then there then it's also frustrating like, yeah, let's just ship this coming up next because everyone's asking for it, but technically in the product, we can't ship it until we ship these other two things because they're intertwined, you know.
Jordan Gal:So you're you're in a more complex situation right now around product development. The features you're building aren't so incremental. There's there's some big new stuff. We were in that similar position for a long time and are now getting the dividends for that focus. So one of the things that's happened over the last few months at the leadership level between myself and Rock and Jessica is six months ago, I would come to them with an idea and they would say, it's a great idea.
Jordan Gal:Please don't make me do that right now. We're trying to get x y z done because we have customers that want it and the team needs it and you said you wanted it, so please don't do that right now. It gets frustrating because I then I start to feel like helpless. I'm like, well, well, you know, this is what I can do. I can come up with good ideas that I think address the market needs.
Jordan Gal:And we just focused on that for a very long time. And now the foundation feels much more stable. What that has created is a scenario where I'm going to Rock and Jessica and say, here's my idea for an experiment. I want to integrate ACH. And they're like, we got 20% of the sprint ready for you.
Jordan Gal:It's now all of a sudden things feel faster but it was legit like a year of just like, we got no room, we got no time. If you want that, you'll push this other thing. You've identified that other thing as higher priority. Are you sure you wanna do it? No.
Jordan Gal:Didn't think so. And that's, you know, it's kinda lame. It feels like you're in a few months of that unlike, well, it just has to go slower than I want it to and I can't move fast on ideas and just how software works.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'm trying to like retrain my the sense of estimating when when we're gonna ship this. Like whenever I start a big new feature, like right now we're shaping another big feature. It's in like step one of the long process of of starting to build and then and then ship. So So whenever I'm in this, like, just starting it off, starting to shape it, I always have a rough idea in my mind, like, yeah, I think this should ship by mid February, right?
Brian Casel:But like the last two or three things, we blew past that by at least a month. Maybe
Jordan Gal:two months. So you have to recalibrate.
Brian Casel:I just have to recalibrate, like, my expectations on everything. Like, It used to be, like, default to between two and four weeks. Now it's like default to like six to eight weeks. And maybe we'll be a little bit faster than that. Maybe we'll be a bit slower.
Brian Casel:Like it's just everything is more intertwined plus a lot more testing now, you know? Mhmm. So, fun stuff.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, I sympathize. Another thing that happened this week, I can't get into too many details because we have like plans with it, but I'm gonna ask you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I got another thing that I wanna talk about that like I could of talk vaguely about it without talking about the thing. I feel like that's gonna be the theme for us for Yeah, a lot
Jordan Gal:of sorry. Stuff this Sorry. But I can get specific enough where it's kind of valuable to other people. Okay. We have more time on our hands and we have more budget on our hands right now.
Jordan Gal:We stopped spending money on ads and we determined that we should spend that money on content. And when we think about what type of content, because we want to go harder in the headless direction this year, we're thinking content is like technical content Where the result is like teaching people, here's a template, here's code, here's a snippet, here's a starter theme, so like these tangible things that help. So we had this idea. I said, okay, let's build a store in this new way. On Twitter, like I had this great argument with someone about what headless means.
Jordan Gal:So right, someone just wrote, is headless worth it for a Shopify store? And then of course the the reactions are like 95% absolutely not. I've heard horrible things. It's not worth the complexity. Right?
Jordan Gal:So I kind of feed off that. I'm like, here's the thing. If you're trying to go headless, don't do it on Shopify. It's just not meant for it. Now saying that is real close to worthless.
Jordan Gal:I think the only thing that's valuable is showing people how to do it. Right? Telling people cool, showing people much cooler. So that's our thinking. Alright.
Jordan Gal:We're gonna go do this. We're gonna go build a store with a front end like next.js or packdigital or builder.io or something. We're gonna connect it to the Rally Checkout, and we're gonna connect it to Swell on the back end or BigCommerce. One of these other platforms that we integrate with.
Brian Casel:YouTube at every step. Exactly right. Your developers or whoever, like, screencasts on every step of building it.
Jordan Gal:Exactly right. So I I look at that and I'm like, that's actually the perfect content marketing force. Like, here's how we did it. Here's a video. Here's the starter theme.
Jordan Gal:Here's the deploy code that on Vercel. Like just all the stuff that so you can do it yourself. So that was my thinking, which I like. I'm I'm happy about that. What what happened this week is that we came across someone that we worked with these UX consultants, but we've worked with them for like two years.
Jordan Gal:They're like part of the team. Like they have equity, like they're like really part of the team, but they're not full time employees. So we have a very close relationship with them and they kept getting requests for marketing design. Right? Not just UX design, but marketing design from us and other clients.
Jordan Gal:So they they went out and found a marketing designer.
Brian Casel:So marketing design, you mean like marketing sites, like like landing pages, like Yes.
Jordan Gal:Designing ads. Exactly right. Yes. More stuff like that. Like a quick video, a like blog post image, like just stuff like that.
Jordan Gal:So they go out and find someone and I reach out to him and I'm like very excited that you're kinda, you know, joining the effort. We'll look forward to working with you. This guy just starts coming up with ideas, man. Like like amazing ideas. The guy's an idea machine.
Jordan Gal:What he introduced into our thinking is is more creativity overall in marketing, but to to look at an idea like, hey, we're gonna build this site and tell people how to do it, show people how to do it. He kind of injected the thinking around pulling references from pop culture. Like things that are happening in the news right now and that people are searching for and talking about and pulling that in. And instead of building a website that shows people how to build an e commerce store headlist, give it a theme with something from pop culture happening right now and then use that to get attention and that umbrella of attention because it can go much bigger, faster
Brian Casel:if And the it thing has is something you can you can reach a higher volume faster
Jordan Gal:that That's right. And that, like, buys you the attention that you can then show people what you actually wanna show them.
Brian Casel:I mean, I could see how the volume play would work, but like, how does that actually connect a lead for the product?
Jordan Gal:There is a challenge in connecting it, right? You do need to connect it, but attention is valuable in and of itself.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and also what does it look like? Like, how how how would you connect news or pop culture to building a headless e commerce store?
Jordan Gal:That's that's what you're gonna have to wait on.
Brian Casel:Okay. That that's the thing that we're not talking about. Okay.
Jordan Gal:Yes. But so what what I what I did with that is first I got excited and then we started riffing and then we have like 10 different ideas. Like, okay. So we're just gonna grab an idea. So what I did was I put together like this like squad, almost like this like special projects squad.
Jordan Gal:So we have one developer that we love and he loves what we're doing that we've known and talked to for months. He's in our Slack. He's like a friend now. So he's a developer. And so the designer is gonna create stuff.
Jordan Gal:Chris is gonna build it. And then our marketing team is gonna amplify it and hand it off to our PR team to try to push it out as as as stories. So we have like this like four person squad and I'm like, this feels like a better use of our budget than ads.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But but just getting back to the core thing that you were just saying a second ago about building a full headless e commerce store experience. That can, like, continue to go deep. Like, it it can become a complex store like, do all the things that a that a high that that a full e commerce store would want to be doing. Like, literally build one.
Brian Casel:And that's a whole library of content that you can create
Jordan Gal:Endless. That's right. Hey, we wanna build a landing page. What does that look like? Hey, we wanna connect it to directly to an email.
Jordan Gal:What does that look like? We wanna do subscriptions. What is it's just, it's endless.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it's content that you can inject into those Twitter debates. Like anytime Threadless comes up, you have the definitive guide. Right.
Jordan Gal:To how to build it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But what about this piece? Well, we've got, video number six on that.
Jordan Gal:Right, or here you go. $250 and we're like, well, we did it for, you know, dollars 400. So I'm really excited about just the next six months of doing this. And I am pretty interested in that like more creative approach to it around borrowing from pop culture and trying to inject that story as long as we can connect it properly and it's not just like ridiculous.
Brian Casel:But it also still needs to be evergreen. Maybe use the pop culture stuff to market it and get popularity for it. But the core content that lives on YouTube or whatever should, you know, because I feel like a lot of these businesses that sell to technical people, developers and stuff, like their best marketing is this evergreen content because technical people Google for solutions.
Jordan Gal:They Google for solutions. That's right.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That is like the top top of funnel lead lead source for most of those businesses, I feel like. This is another one of those vague things, but it's sorta on my mind lately as I'm so I'm like in the call it the shaping process on a couple of or like one or two really big features or changes in the product. That's one thing. And then also like planning a new website redesign and kicking off that process.
Brian Casel:I'm starting to sense that I'm not doing a good job of communicating how significant of a change we are about to embark on in terms of the product and our positioning and what we are and how our stuff works and the use cases and stuff. I have a super clear sense of all that. You know, I've talked to customers. I've got it all I've talked about it here. I talked about it to my advisors.
Brian Casel:This level, talking to you about it, talking to my mastermind group, we all have a know where this ship is headed and how significant of a change it is. But my actual developers who are working on the product every day with me or a designer who's collaborating with me on the website, like, I think I sort of like didn't spend enough time really communicating upfront like, look, a lot of stuff that we've built before, we're we're gonna kinda refactor or change or undo or think about this completely differently because we are a different product now going forward. And I haven't fully messaged that internally. And so what that's resulting in is like, I'm finding that when I explain or scope out a new feature that we're planning, there are more rounds than usual for me to clarify. Like, can't work that way because we have to think completely differently about how our customers use this feature.
Brian Casel:Then we're not just that, but that that we were before. This feature is gonna be used in a completely different way now. So it's like a a different design approach. Like like today, like I had to like really like just re clarify why why we need to refactor the database structure in this way. And it's my fault because I didn't I've spent so many hours clarifying this new direction with customers, but like I have not matched those hours with my internal team.
Brian Casel:You know, I'm sort of just like made the decision and here's what we're doing. Let's go. And like, You have
Jordan Gal:all the background. So you don't need the clarification. It's a funny thing, right? It's like, at first I thought you were worried about like the marketing side and the changes publicly, like, they going to communicate that strongly enough? That's not really what you're worried about.
Brian Casel:Well, that's, that is like what I want to end up with. And I wanna make sure that we end up there by we all know what what we're building toward.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. Sympathize with that. That comes out as a problem for me in disparate conversations. So I'm like, this person I told, they got it.
Jordan Gal:And then I don't realize that well, that was like four people in a meeting, but not not everyone. The way we try to solve that is a, in the product specs and in like the feature docs in Jira, like it's pretty damn clear what the point is and why. So the developer building it when they're looking over the spec, like they're reading, hey, remember, this is what this feature does. Here's how people use it and here's why they're interested in it. So at that level, it does need to be clear.
Jordan Gal:But like directionally, like looking up at like basically the leader of the company and looking to them as like, well, which direction are you pointing us at? We do monthly stand ups, excuse me, all hands. And one of the things we do at all hands at the very beginning of the meeting, you know, I say welcome to Rally's all hands for January 2023. Here's the agenda, just like normal, we're gonna talk about company updates, then team updates, then we're going to do some highlights and we'll look at engineering and then we'll finish up with some fun stuff. And then the next slide is, as a reminder, this is what our mission is.
Jordan Gal:This is what we're This
Brian Casel:is the North Star.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Exactly right. And then the next slide, we came up with this visual analogy for what we do. Because we found people were confused just like our investors are confused. Right?
Jordan Gal:A really big story broke this week in the Wall Street Journal about a bunch of banks like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital, these big banks. They are all coming together to build a digital wallet to compete with like Apple Pay and PayPal. I mean, big of news as it gets in the payments world, because those banks can still use Visa, MasterCard rails, meaning the existing credit cards people have in their wallets right now can be used in this wallet and payment processing would be less than the two normal 2.9%. So like, you know, I tweeted about it. I called it like the war on interchange intensified type of a thing.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Our investors see that and they email me like, what are we gonna do about this? I'm like, guys, that's something we need to integrate with. That's not a competitor. And so we found that to be a difficult concept for our team also.
Jordan Gal:We made like this corny little graphic of Rally as a train station and the different payment rails are not our competitors. As long as the rail's going through our train station, we're happy. You know? And it was like it's like this corny, ugly graphic, but I'm like, remember, we're the train station. We happily build rails.
Jordan Gal:We're happy.
Brian Casel:People want Yes. To their
Jordan Gal:people want to get to where they're going, we're cool with it. We'll build it for them. So that plus ad nauseam repetition is like the only thing. And I'm sure people are sick of me repeating myself on why we're doing certain things and what my thinking is, but I don't
Brian Casel:I did a brief internal update to the folks that I work with just a couple weeks ago around the turn of the year, like just to give you a quick high level update on like all the changes that are coming and I did that, but I feel like that wasn't enough. The other thing that I changed or improved in our product dev cycle now is we started doing this a few months ago. We use GitHub issues and like GitHub's issues board view, like a Kanban. That's how we manage the queues for each of my developers. Right?
Brian Casel:All the details for the for the feature that we're building go into there. And then we have a really long comment thread as we build the feature. But I added a shaping phase at the front of that, which happens in Notion. So it's like, I'll basically draft the requirements for the feature in Notion, and then my developer and I have like a really detailed poking holes in the tech or like asking like, why are we building it this way? And like, and I'm giving a lot of example use cases, like literally, like coming up with real user examples of like how they're gonna be using this.
Brian Casel:And my developers have been doing a much better job at like asking for that. Like a lot of times they'll look at the requirements and say like, I think I see what you're saying technically, but like, can you give me a real world use case example for like, why is it designed that way? And that really helps them. So I've been writing those more. Then we just like, we cross things out, we rearrange things in Notion, then we like kind of lock in the requirements and then I transfer it into GitHub and we go.
Brian Casel:That's been the process.
Jordan Gal:Do you do sprint kickoffs?
Brian Casel:We're so small like that we don't have like one of those like rigid, like six week cycles or two week cycles or anything like that. The kickoff for us is like, if it's a big new feature, I, again, I put it in Notion first and we'll spend a week or week and a half just shaping in there. And then, like today, we just locked in from that. So so today I copied and pasted into GitHub. And then it's super simple.
Brian Casel:We just have a queue. Like, I have two developers and me, and each of my developer has their own queue. And I just order it and they pick off the issue at the top. And a lot of times that issue lasts eight weeks, you know, because it's a big feature, but Yeah. They like drag it over to the in progress list.
Jordan Gal:Right. That, I think, right. The benefit of that is speed, like flexibility, clarity, and so on. What it doesn't afford you is the opportunity for like a little bit of like
Brian Casel:Why does this matter? Drama.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We do pretty formal sprints. We have some fun with it. So we'll do like eighties movie sprint. And we're like, all right, the Top Gun sprint, you know, and, and like, we'll do
Brian Casel:fun But do you have concurrent sprints? Because you have a much larger tech team than I do. Are you developing more than one feature at a time?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. But
Brian Casel:But all you're saying fits all those in fit within the sprint?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes.
Brian Casel:See, that's where I could see how that might work later, but like right now we are working on two different features right now. But one will ship in six weeks, the other will ship in ten weeks. I don't know how to organize that without just having it on two separate tracks.
Jordan Gal:That that's Jessica's domain. Yeah. But what it does afford us is that opportunity to say, we are kicking off the eighties movie sprint. This is the theme. This is what we're trying to do.
Jordan Gal:This is what we're hearing from our merchants. So that gives you like an opportunity to reiterate things. You know, drama works. Calling a time out and saying, I want everyone to get together on Tuesday. Let's find a time and having, hey, I want to make sure we're all on the same page.
Jordan Gal:I'm sensing a little bit of us being off and let's just take this thirty minutes and talk about what we're trying to do. I'll say what we should be focused on and then everyone can ask questions. Like that like time out works because it kind of shakes people out of their day to day and allows them to ask some of those questions that maybe they're like, oh, it's not that important. I'll just keep going.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, because I, as I talked about, like we're basically a 100% asynchronous. That could be like the one spot where maybe we just add in a synchronous, like live call, you know, just to kick off a sprint. Like even though we've hashed out all the technical details in the requirements, like we already know what we're gonna build. Maybe we just do a quick call just to like sort of lock it all in, get some live FaceTime.
Brian Casel:And then you never know like what new questions might pop up that wouldn't show up in a written comment in GitHub, Yes. You
Jordan Gal:I I feel like one of the most important things that I've developed over the last few years is to spot out any chance of not being on the same page. One word that's a little off and I and I my radar goes up and I don't know if people get sick of it or what, but I will ask the question like a three year old And I will reiterate, just so we're a 100% clear, you're saying that the trade off for this feature on this platform means that we can't do this like we do it on this other platform. Is that right? And then they'll correct me a few degrees one way or another.
Brian Casel:Yep. And that I usually do the same thing, but in like written text form.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. But it's like
Brian Casel:But precision. But yeah, you never know. Yeah. Precision. Yes.
Brian Casel:Even today, like, again, I had to go through like an extra round of clarification. I did the text thing, like, twice, and then and then I recorded a Zip message to, like, really hone in on, like, this is this is what we're doing.
Jordan Gal:And it's a challenge as a native English speaking American to almost force precision in language on non native
Brian Casel:I mean, we run into that too, my team. Yes. And it's like But that's also why we lean heavily on written because they're like fluent in English written. True.
Jordan Gal:You know? That's right. Which is good. And it's like not being rude. I'm not asking you to correct your grammar.
Jordan Gal:I'm asking you to be more precise in how you're describing something because any room that we mess up between us means you could, you know, bad things are gonna happen. You're gonna have to go back and rewrite something. You're gonna have to do this. It's gonna be a little off from what it should be.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. But the main thing that is just entering my mind now is that like, I'm starting to notice in multiple places in both product dev and even in, like, the design process for the new it's like other the people that I'm working with still retain some, like, assumptions of the old world view that we had as a product. Like, Zip Message for the last two years, these things mattered. And in my mind, like, there are certain things where, like, going forward, like, that doesn't matter anymore.
Brian Casel:We're this is a whole new world we live in. Know? Like, I'm already there, but, like, the people that I'm working with aren't quite
Jordan Gal:Yeah, you almost need to be on the lookout for like old thinking. Like if you're thinking about that type of customer in this context, like we need to call a little time out because that's not what we're doing anymore or we're not looking in that direction. I love this stuff because it's it's adding value through like communication.
Brian Casel:We found enough to ramble about for
Jordan Gal:Yeah, put another pod in the
Brian Casel:Let's call it out to our audience. It seems like we are able to record more episodes weekly now. That means we don't have as much new shit to talk about. So, whatever you got, hit us up on Twitter and tell us what you want us to talk about so that we actually have some material to work with.
Jordan Gal:And whatever people come up with, I'm game. I'm game. I think it's fun right now to be more aggressive, take more risks, care less what other people think. Like we're we're going after our competitor hard, man. It's just we sense vulnerability.
Jordan Gal:We heard they were doing a price increase. So we're reaching out to all their customers. It's like, you know, a year ago, it felt like the pie was infinite and growing. And now things feel much more zero sum and it's a little nasty, but every once in a while that's what's called for.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, I'm psyched to see the developer content get fired up. Know, I think that's a really, really good direction for what you're doing. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. What I'm hoping is that that has its own track. That's basically my like special projects. And that way it minimally impacts our development team, but we can keep rolling things out every week, every month, just on an ongoing basis. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That's that's the plan.
Brian Casel:Love it. Alright. Alright, man. Till next time.
Jordan Gal:Have a great weekend. Later.
