All the Things
Bootstrap web. Here we go, Jordan. Back on it. How are doing?
Jordan Gal:Doing well. I'm excited for the daddy daughter dance tonight. Taking my three girls.
Brian Casel:Oh, you have that? Yeah. My you know, my kid my older one is not into that. It's just not into the girly girl stuff. My younger one will definitely be into that once it's her years.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Yeah. I'm going. All three girls putting on a suit and tie. They love when I get dressed because I never get dressed.
Brian Casel:Oh, that's great. So
Jordan Gal:that's that's the highlight of my day. The other highlight of my day is that it's a nice normal day after yesterday was so intense that by the end of the day, I did a Zoom call with someone internally at the end of the day and my eyes looked shot. It's like the stress and pressure had just made its way to my face. And I was like, I think I gotta just hang up and go have a beer and cook and put on some music or something.
Brian Casel:Yeah, that's definitely been me at the end of every single day this week and I'm pretty excited to finish this week because this weekend we have a long weekend with the kids and we're gonna do another ski weekend. Although the conditions are horrible, but that's doesn't matter. All we need is the bunny hill, so.
Jordan Gal:We're Nice. Nice. Well, I got I got my birthday on Sunday.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah.
Jordan Gal:And, of course, I so it's a little bit of a joke inside the family right now. Of course, what are we doing? For my birthday, we're going skiing when everyone anyone who listens to this podcast.
Brian Casel:To do.
Jordan Gal:I'm like, honey, I just wanna state for the record that this would never happen if it was reversed.
Brian Casel:This is what's Basically gonna be like the worst birthday ever. So
Jordan Gal:Well, look, I what I found out is that the family that we're going with, the husband in that family also hates skiing. So he and I, we got a beer date.
Brian Casel:This is gonna get fun.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, exactly. It's like, all right, hon, you asked for it. And it's my birthday, so you can't say anything. So let me ask you, how does that pressure, the long day stress, how does that like manifest itself? Is that anxiety?
Jordan Gal:Is it anger? Is it impatience? Or is it all of the above?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yes to all of the above. And what I feel bad about is that, well, okay, because it spills over into my home life and it happens around dinner time because that's my cutoff. We talked a couple weeks back our episode on like our daily routines. You kinda have a nighttime working session, like I don't do that generally unless it's like super late night.
Brian Casel:But my thing is like dinner time is cut off time. And the thing that is almost always the thing that triggers me and puts me in a horrible mood is when I'm like right in the middle of something or like I'm on the 10 yard line and it's close to being shipped but I need another twenty minutes to really finish it up but I don't have twenty minutes so I have to just end it here that just some wire in my brain just goes haywire when when that happens. Like when I have to finish the day and I just did not ship the thing that I intended to ship. Is
Jordan Gal:that real or is that perceived? Like, is it just like, is it really about that task right then that you would have finished it in twenty more minutes? Or is it just like some dissatisfaction? Like, oh, didn't want, didn't get done today what I want to get done and now I'm like Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, it's all of that because it probably costs an extra day in terms of shipping whatever we needed to ship. And and when I say shipping, sometimes that means a feature, sometimes that means getting back to a contractor that I'm working with and now they're waiting for me or or my teammate is waiting for me or or some marketing thing is gonna have to wait like it's stuff like that. And and you know, it's never like the thing I was working on in the moment took longer. It's always because of something earlier in the day like delayed me, right? So like this past week what is really putting me in a bad mood is that like I started every day, like every morning with unexpected distractions in my inbox.
Brian Casel:And I hate that.
Jordan Gal:So it threw off your plans.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, because I'm all about the morning and that's when I, you know, after my workout, after the kids are off to school, I'm like really psyched up to like get into whatever the big important project is and really get it going like in the morning and Yeah, in my best
Jordan Gal:you're an eat the frog
Brian Casel:guy.
Jordan Gal:You do the big thing first.
Brian Casel:I'm all about it. But this week, like literally every single day this week, like five days in a row, every morning, it was like, we've got these bugs that we have to fix. And now I'm getting like into the weeds and I'm spending hours in the morning just fixing bugs that I was not planning on fixing.
Jordan Gal:And that moves aside whatever your priority is.
Brian Casel:Yeah, that or, you know, a couple of customers had some issues that I had. Like I'm the customer support person. You know, sometimes customer emails and stuff, like I can push into the afternoon, that's usually not a big deal, but some of these were like related to bugs that we shipped the day before, so it's like hot fixes that we have to get out. And then, you know, a couple like home stuff, like, you know, we had to like cancel the landscaping company and like I have to call them up and wait on hold like during business hours, like just crap like that, but it's like
Jordan Gal:That's also worst. So now when when you're done and you're in that place, I'm like, okay, I'm not satisfied with the day and I gotta go tomorrow, whatever. Do you just get up from that chair and like walk into the kitchen? And then you're in family mode? Like there's no
Brian Casel:Yeah, it's super unhealthy, but that's essentially what happens.
Jordan Gal:So, yeah, no no passport check, no line, no no in between.
Brian Casel:No. I I wish I had the discipline to have a decompression time, like half an hour, an hour, get a beer, you know, really disconnect and then settle into dinner. The reality is I'm just pushing. You know, I put in the hours to, you know, just get as much done during the day before dinner as as I can. Because once once I get into dinner, like, I don't wanna work the rest of the night at all.
Brian Casel:I wanna Netflix and hang out with the kids and
Jordan Gal:Yes. That's it, you know. Now, I'm not like trying to be like overly personal here. When I do that, I have a cooking phase in between.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. You cook. I I
Jordan Gal:really That's my that is my decompression. I have a like a very girly drink. I have like a high noon because I don't want I don't want a beer because it makes me tired. I have like, you know, some like small ranch water or something that's low alcohol.
Brian Casel:I actually stopped getting beer at home, that and that's been pretty good health.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Good for you. But I don't listen to a podcast. I put music on, and and that for me is my transition. I can't imagine going from where I am in the office at the end of the day, and then sitting down at a table.
Jordan Gal:That I really couldn't do. I couldn't do because then, you know, I'm in the wrong place.
Brian Casel:It's not that bad for me most days. Like, I think honestly, like most days, I'm pretty good at like timing the project that I'm working on so that like I'm done with it shortly before dinner. And I can just wind it up, close it down, and I'm good. But you know, some some days it's just like these distractions come up and I couldn't get it done. I've been playing tennis one night a week and also taking my daughter to her basketball practice one night a week.
Brian Casel:So like, those are things that like
Jordan Gal:Getting out.
Brian Casel:I have to get in the car and go and Yeah, that's At a certain time. So like that's gonna force me out, you know. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I even find myself in the car. I have to remember to concentrate. If I go from work to that, it's the same thing. You know, when if I sit down at a table and have a a meal, have dinner with the fam, it's just what's going on in my head. It's purely psychological, and I don't like the feeling of feeling split between here I am physically, but in my head, I'm in a totally different place, and it's and it's still running.
Jordan Gal:You know, the engine's still spinning at high RPMs.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That Yeah. I mean, I I get into that too. And and my wife totally knows it. Like
Jordan Gal:Yes. Like, they look
Brian Casel:She'll be like, yeah. Well, you're you might be here physically. You are not here mentally. Right?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Right. Then you feel guilty, and then immediately that guilt is like resent resentment toward your partner. Yes. But you know,
Brian Casel:actually one of the things I wanted to talk about here sort of related to all this is like, as I said, like earlier in the day, especially this week, I've been getting these distractions, like small bugs cropping up or customer requests, you know, stuff like that where it's like, right now, we are in the middle of really, really big important pushes on the product, on marketing and positioning. And, like, I'm doing everything I possibly can to, like, get us to certain milestones in rolling out some pretty big announcements that are coming up. But it takes a lot of work internally to prepare this stuff and we're in the middle of it. And frankly, the thing that the business needs most is that. It's like getting to those milestones.
Brian Casel:You know, like, the hardest thing in business is prioritizing, I think. And it's pretty clear what the priorities are, but at the same time, these daily things come up where it's like, those kind of are important too. I don't know if I have the solution, but like it's real a real big challenge to like stay focused on the goal while also dealing with customer issues, bugs. Like, these are like show stopping, but like, we have to put put out a fix and I have to work with my developers on it. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:That that's like the superhuman part of it. Where you're like, oh, so you don't really have a choice. You just have to do both and find a way and push hard enough.
Brian Casel:I look at the customer's inbound requests and I try to mentally bucket them like, especially on like who the customer is. Like obviously I wanna do my best to serve every single customer and provide a great service, but I know exactly which customers are our best ideal customer in terms of like what they do and the use case for our product. And then there's other customers who, you know, they might run into small bugs and I can tell it's like not the end of the world for them.
Jordan Gal:Right, they're just letting you know.
Brian Casel:Yeah, they're just letting me know. But there are some, especially coaches, who we're literally working on making the best possible solution for them. So when they come in with, oh, there's a gap here or how do I achieve this result for my coaching customers with the product or my coaching client had this complaint about their experience. Like these are all things that are directly related to exactly like I I do wanna hear that sort of feedback as as painful as it is and maybe as distracting as it is, like it's still really important for me to be in that loop.
Jordan Gal:So it's that sort of thing that jumps the line.
Brian Casel:Yeah, jumps right to the to the top of the line. Sometimes it sort of impacts like shifting the order of what we build next. There's like bigger items that are still kind of set in the in the roadmap, but it's like an emotional cycle, circular thing where it's like, it might be painful to hear about a a bug or a customer's failing use case, but at the same time, that's really helpful for us. Or it might be painful to see a churn come in, but at the same time, like, helps confirm that the the use case was wrong for that customer. So it's like data that's like good and bad at the same time, and it's just it's such a mental game trying to stay focused on like, okay, that kinda sucks for the graph right now, but there's useful information to take out of this and put it to work, know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So a lot of fun. Yes. The the other night I like, you know, do the whole thing, work, dinner, put the kids to bed, this some sports and some arguing in there. And then finally, like get in bed.
Jordan Gal:We've been getting in bed earlier. We used to like go watch TV somewhere. We put a TV in our bedroom and just get in bed earlier and my wife falls asleep like immediately.
Brian Casel:Which is good. Can't do the the TV in the bedroom. We we
Jordan Gal:We've never done it. We haven't done it in in a decade, and we're just trying to kind of experimenting with it. It's good to force you to go to bed earlier.
Brian Casel:I actually like when we're in a hotel, like, I'm like, Oh, is a trip. No TV in here.
Jordan Gal:So I got in bed and I just, I take deep breaths. It's one of my things. It's like it helps like regulate stress I guess because I do it regularly. So my wife was like, Are you okay?
Brian Casel:You know? And
Jordan Gal:I was like, I think what this next phase is going to require is just a very high level of energy sustained for a long period of time. That's just what this is going to require. There is no chill back, there's no, well this team is doing this and they got this and I'm like, no. It is just full on intensity for a sustained period of time. It feels like the, that it's just the only way it's gonna happen.
Jordan Gal:Right? Because in some ways it's really just two options. It's either intensity or more time. And I'm not giving up my weekends with my family to work. And so while at work, just the intensity has gone up.
Brian Casel:Do you mean intensity for you personally or for like you and the team?
Jordan Gal:There is a direct correlation between the intensity and focus that I personally bring to work every day, and the speed at which things happen and unfold. That's just a fact. Maybe it's partly like psychological that it feels that way, but it is just true. When I'm just really engaged, things things unfold faster because, you know, I get the privilege of like this few steps removed perspective. And so I can kind of watch and be like, okay, so this was supposed to happen, we planned on this happening, it hasn't happened yet, I'm gonna basically like push.
Jordan Gal:Right? An example is, and this is not me taking credit for it happening. It's me assisting people and getting some stuff out of their way. And I'm doing that by saying, hey, this is the most important thing to me. That means you have permission to put other stuff aside.
Jordan Gal:That's really all it's really all it's doing. It's not like, oh, I'm making it happen. That's actually not the case at all in terms of the the work that unfolds. So I'll give you an example.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'm I'm curious to hear about this because I've been I've been literally struggling with this this week about communicating with my team. So like, yeah, how do you what's your example?
Jordan Gal:Let's look at an example. An example is this board meeting I keep talking about. Right? One of the things is like this renewed energy and focus on go to market. Basically, an emphasis on that more so than than product and engineering right now.
Jordan Gal:Like the product is there. It is working. It's processing millions of dollars. No issues. People aren't churning out.
Jordan Gal:Like, cool. That basically tells you, just go get more customers. Stop complaining. Stop, know, just go get more customers. And that's basically what the board meeting, like, conclusion was.
Jordan Gal:Like, great. Nice job. Everything awesome. Go get more customers. So we are challenging ourselves to be faster on experiments.
Jordan Gal:We are relatively slow on product and engineering because the nature of a checkout product needs you to be careful. So that's like, you know, we give a lot of room for Jessica to basically be like, you are not touching my sprint. You get right in the back of the line and I'm not messing things up with the engineers because this is how I run my team and we're like, respect because whatever works. So who's gonna argue with that? On the marketing side, we have to be able to challenge ourselves to be faster.
Jordan Gal:So one of the experiments that we wanna run is what happens when we lower the hurdle to seeing the product. Right now, if you go to our site, it's request a demo. Request a demo isn't just a button in a process. It is communicating a particular, like, mindset. Like if you wanna talk to us, you're gonna have to jump into our sales process, talk to us, then get pricing, then see the product, then Yeah.
Jordan Gal:No, it's like it's
Brian Casel:It's like it's like you better really want it.
Jordan Gal:That's right. And that's what our biggest competitor does also. So we're thinking to ourselves, alright, let's run a free trial experiment. What happens when we change the CTA to get started? You know, start a free trial.
Jordan Gal:And then we're and then
Brian Casel:So you just opened up free trials for like self serve?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So here's the thing. We don't wanna open up self serve. Self serve requires a lot of decisions to be made and a lot of engineering and a lot of design, a lot of UI, the stuff. So when I bring that to the exec team, right, Rock and Jess, I think rightfully challenged me and say, cool story, bro.
Jordan Gal:Give us some proof on why we should do that over the other 18 things that you told us over the last week are very important. So I say, okay, cool. I totally understand. What experiment do we need to run so that we get the information on whether or not we should build out self serve? Like, we're never gonna do self serve that people just launch on their own.
Jordan Gal:I mean, maybe in the future, but that's no time soon because we learned our lesson with Cardhook, when people just run through it and launch, they get into trouble and then they get upset. Not smart. But we can do a free trial all the way to the point where you're fully set up and then we check things to make sure everything's cool before you launch. So great. That's our that's our version of a free trial and self serve.
Jordan Gal:So that requires some work.
Brian Casel:It So you wanna like show them like clicks and like Yes. Where are these leads like waiting at the door, you know? Yes,
Jordan Gal:exactly. It's basically what happens when you open up that part of the funnel, right? It's not the very top of the funnel. It's a middle part of the funnel and people are on the site and they're interested. It also matters in sales when you call someone and say, hey, that email I sent you a few days ago, I saw that you opened it.
Jordan Gal:Are you interested in this thing? If you want, I can get you a free trial, is an easier sell than would you like to jump on a thirty minute demo with me next week? It's just an easy okay. So is it right? It has impact all over the place.
Jordan Gal:So that still requires work. It requires changes on the site. That's relatively easy. But then it also you need to respect the user. You can't just be like, click a free trial.
Jordan Gal:Here's a username password, and then like, you don't go anywhere. You have to do something. You have to either get account creation, you know, email and password.
Brian Casel:How do they create their account now? Right now, we created for them. So they're on a call with someone on your team, and your team
Jordan Gal:goes they into the system and say this looks good, I'm interested, let's do it.
Brian Casel:They're like, you guys don't have like an account sign up form that is not public to users, but like your team uses it, but like you could just make that page semi public? You can't do that?
Jordan Gal:We can. It's just it's just a question of should we? Yeah. Right. So I mean, look, this stuff is this is a solved problem.
Jordan Gal:It's not difficult to to do account creation. But once someone gets into the account, cool. You let them in on their own. What are they seeing?
Brian Casel:Right. Yeah. It's like the onboarding flow and
Jordan Gal:all that. Yes. Right now, our onboarding flow is great for a guided onboarding on a call. And that's how that's how we've done it with this first, you know, cohort of merchants. Great.
Jordan Gal:All right. So there's still some stuff to do and like, can we put an in app message? Can we send a video? Like, so there's stuff to do. Everyone's busy and everyone that we've already asked to work on a 100 other things.
Jordan Gal:And so this week was like, let's do this free trial thing. And then it was like pull in the people that are required and then start making all those decisions. Okay, who's gonna do this? Who's gonna do that? And then, you know, early next week we're gonna be able to release that and then start to measure.
Jordan Gal:That's an experiment that if I push on it every day, it'll happen faster because it gives the person permission. Oh, yes, of course, I can push aside my think because Jordan wants to talk on a Zoom call for thirty and that's my priority. If boss wants to jump on a Zoom call to move something forward, cool. I don't care what I have going on as long as it's not like a customer facing call, then I can do it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it well, maybe not definitely, but eventually you would get to some sort of like self serve funnel or at least like an option for it, right? Like, it's a It question just depends. When I don't know.
Brian Casel:I get yeah. I guess it sort of depends, like who your target customer's gonna be.
Jordan Gal:One of the things we talk about all the time is the lessons we learned from Cardhook and how difficult it is to tell which lessons we should listen to and which lessons we should specifically go against what we learned.
Brian Casel:Feel like it's the kind of thing that like could, as you just said, like it could trigger a bunch of other big projects. And this is exactly happening in my world too right now where it's like, it's like, because we're actually planning on ending our free plan and going to just a free trial. And a lot of other changes coming that are also going to require a complete overhaul to our onboarding flow. And we're just sort of going in the opposite direction where we're gonna start introducing a a sales demo and Okay. Hand holding and stuff Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like
Jordan Gal:Nothing wrong with that.
Brian Casel:But you know, in in your case, it's like you switched to a self serve. I know you're not doing it right now, but like, then you do need to work on an on a new onboarding flow and and you do need to work on emails that go out and what the team has to do for these users and like it it's just like snowballs into all these new priorities that start to push off other other things, right? And like that that's what I'm dealing with too. It's like I'm working through like literally like 10 different projects and each one has like a dependency on another one and it's just like, ugh, it's just a chain Right, reaction, you
Jordan Gal:so to open up a new project you know is dangerous and you know it's gonna cost you and therefore, you know, it's right for the engineering and product teams to come back and say, convince us that that makes sense because you're gonna push something aside. And everything that's already there has been established and labeled as important.
Brian Casel:So of all the common advice that we hear in our world here, it's like, you know, raise your prices, open up self serve, put on this sign up form on your website. That advice just comes like, like it's so quick and easy to, oh, how, how hard is it to just change a price in your Stripe plans? Like it is hard. It snowballs into multiple other decisions and projects. You know, it's one thing if it's like you're, it's the same model, you're just tweaking the dollar amount.
Brian Casel:It's another thing if you're changing models from like a sales driven onboarding approach to a self serve or mix or, you know, a lot of big decisions that and it's also like which strategy are you going to commit to? Again, like these are things that cannot just be tested in a week. Maybe you can test like how many people click a button, but you still haven't tested like, well, what's the effectiveness of a salesperson nurturing that person for weeks on end? Or the effectiveness of this email campaign that goes to these self serve people, like, you can't test that stuff overnight, you know? Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:I hope people in the company are as comfortable with like the chaos and schizophrenia that that goes with it. Because I'm 100% fine with running this experiment and having a conversation the next minute with a potential salesperson to come on board as a new hire and know that that person's gonna do a better job and be better off if we force a demo. And I have no I have no problem with just holding both
Brian Casel:You mean the person on your on your team would be better off?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. Like, But it's like, it's almost like a lot of the stuff internally, we get caught up with ideas and assumptions and a lot of it a lot of it doesn't matter nearly as much and no one has a clue what the actual truth is out in the market. Our company right now, like it's so much of it is dictated by the lessons from Cardhook. Right?
Jordan Gal:One of the lessons of Cardhook was open up the free trial and then that was overwhelming. And then we raised the price and then forced, you know, we allowed the free trial, but then you couldn't launch. And then it got to such a point where we had such strong product market fit that we shut that down entirely and forced the demo. Cool. So what do we do at Rally?
Jordan Gal:First, first we flip it. The reason we shut down food trials to begin with is because the product wasn't good enough at CartHook. It couldn't handle what the merchant's needs were for the first year. So what do we do at Rally? We spent a lot of time on making the product amazing.
Jordan Gal:So we had an amazing product, but we didn't have customers. And then of course, where do we start with Rally? We start with, you gotta have a demo. But that's how that's where we ended up after a bunch of lessons. That's not necessarily right.
Jordan Gal:It's like a perfectly understandable set of decisions that you cannot assume are actually right just because they were right when you, you know, when you were over there.
Brian Casel:That's been the story of my last two years for sure. Everything has been completely opposite of of what I've done before, and now I'm I'm sort of moving back to what worked before.
Jordan Gal:Oh my god. Know? My god.
Brian Casel:Different pricing, more, you know, a slower sales process, just, you know, get to it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. What what feels dangerous though, like, of the very few, like, like advice y type blog posts that I've ever written was comparing startup life to a Rubik's cube. But the problem is you only have a certain number of moves and that's like how many months of money do you have in the bank. You can't just keep wasting moves.
Brian Casel:Can't This is what I wanna ask you about, because this is what I was I dealing feel like I'm dealing with it all the time, but especially it came into focus for me this week. I talked about how I was distracted and a lot of it was like tech related, like getting pulled into the weeds. Like how do you communicate to your team, like the priorities for the business right now? Right? And it's so hard because like there are things that like I just can't expect my engineers to have the decision making capacity that I have when it comes to what exactly is important to spend, like stuff that like costs us time and costs us shipping speed.
Brian Casel:Right? We do a lot of testing. We we are really thorough with that. We do a lot of scoping and shaping of features before we get into them. But still, I find that there are things, especially as we near the end of of a big feature build, like we're coming near the end, that's when I start to get restless.
Brian Casel:Like, okay, like we we've basically built it. We just got a policy up and get it out there and and because I've already planned the next two big projects and I don't wanna delay the the start of those because those are the most important for the business. We haven't even started them yet. This one, we're basically done, so I can't spend this extra week or two polishing up every nook and cranny of you know, especially, like, little things where it's like I know from a user experience standpoint or like our customers' most frequent pathways through our app that like not many people are gonna touch this button over here. You know?
Brian Casel:This one that that involves like creating and sending a message, like that's super important. That has to be polished up. This one over there, you know, it's 5% of users are gonna be using that on day one. You know, we don't need to spend two extra days making that absolutely perfect. So like little things like that, it's like I don't wanna like tell my team like, hey, go ahead and cut corners, you know?
Jordan Gal:Right. This isn't that important.
Brian Casel:Right. But there are things where it's like if it's me building the feature, like I know exactly where not to cut the corners or how to reshape the scope a little bit to serve the business better. But also like a higher level vision, understanding where we are from a business. Like again, we're we're like in that in that phase of trying to capture product market fit and it and it involves like hitting a bunch of these milestones. I don't know that my engineers are really on board on the same page with my understanding of all that and all the all the data that I have in front of me.
Brian Casel:They're just, you know, they're they're really great developers. They're they're great to work with in our in our workflow, but like I don't do a good job of like communicating the higher level of of what phase are we in, what are the priorities right now, let's use this to inform our day to day decisions, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I don't know how necessary it is for everyone to have the same, you know, grasp of the vision in the market and where wants to be and the positioning and where the product's going. I think everyone has their own style on that. I tend to over explain it. In some ways, it helps me explain it and helps me just feel a little calmer that, you know, if I just say this every month at All Hands and kinda take the time, then at least I feel better that they have a better understanding, even though I don't necessarily know that they have a better understanding.
Jordan Gal:It's tricky. I don't think anyone ever really gets it quite the same way as the founder does. Where I struggle with that is, at some point, the next feature does not feel like it's gonna make a big difference. And at some point, you know, you have to get out and get attention for what you're doing becomes more important than another feature. At least, I mean, I'm definitely speaking for myself in in this situation.
Jordan Gal:I've just come to terms with, okay, it is really important to get the product right. And I think we got the product right. You know, every once in while you have like these conversations with whether it's a potential customer or a partner or someone in the industry or something, and you come away from that conversation like, okay, we're on the right path. This is the right product to build. Let's keep going.
Jordan Gal:Where I've gotten to recently is that seems to not matter nearly as much as making sure more people know about your product. That's a tough one because it takes a lot of the control out of your hands in some ways. You know what it does? It doesn't take the control. It changes the nature of that control because if it's about the product and it's about the features, you look inward and you have an impact on what's being built and how it's being built.
Jordan Gal:That's like real direct control. This is starting to tell us pretty clearly that that's really cool that you're gonna build this amazing thing, that exactly what the market wants, blah blah blah. But you you gotta go get distribution and you gotta go get attention and you gotta get out and run experiments in that direction, not inward facing. I think for a long time, I I really wanted it to feel like it did a cart hook where we got the product right, the market got it, and told each other, and they all came running. That was cool.
Jordan Gal:My conclusion is that's not the nature of this experience at this time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. What are you doing on the marketing side now? I mean, how how is that changing week to week and how do you manage that? Like, we sort of have a good sense of like what a product sprint and a product roadmap push looks like, but like, what are we pushing on on marketing side? Like, how are you tracking what's going on?
Brian Casel:How are you planning what the focus is and which projects you're taking on and which ones you're not right now? Like, how do you think about all that?
Jordan Gal:So so a lot of it I see as very necessary to empower other people, and then other parts of it, I should really be pushing on. So like Elizabeth, our Director of Marketing, like I just check-in with her. We have one once a week on Monday. Right? It's almost like very important to me to make sure that she knows that Monday morning she and I meet for a while as like this is literally the most important thing to me.
Jordan Gal:That's why we talk on Monday morning. And then she knows she just like kind of, you know, we talk we talk every day, but that Monday morning is what are we doing? And then I have confidence in her ability to execute on it. So that is someone talented and smart focused on it, and that's just not directly related to me. And then every once in a while it comes back and touches me.
Jordan Gal:So she went out and hired an SEO company and reports back. And now I know SEO is happening. Mhmm. She went out
Brian Casel:And you're not getting in the weeds at all in terms of SEO.
Jordan Gal:I don't even know. I've never talked the SEO agency. I got I got the recommendation from a listener, Ruben. Shout out. Thank you.
Jordan Gal:She hired a PR agency and then they'll come back to me and say, Jordan, we got you an article in Nasdaq. Tell us your thoughts on AI and e commerce and we'll write up the article. We'll get it published in Nasdaq. And I'm hell yes. So right, I didn't do that.
Jordan Gal:I didn't my energy did not do that. It's really just resources and someone else's energy. So that's great, but that is not everything. So right commerce tools are next like our enterprise. That's like the engineering team and I try to unblock stuff for them by like reaching on making sure we get sandbox accounts and whatever else.
Jordan Gal:And then it is hire a biz dev person that hopefully is starting in a few weeks and he goes out and makes friends with all the e commerce tools, SIs and agencies and everything else. So I'm like, okay, cool. That's gonna unfold over a few months but that's gonna start to roll.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it's like it's like you bring them on and it's like, okay, like here's here's the goal. Here's your function in the company. Can you give me like your game plan, your roadmap and, and then go do
Jordan Gal:it. Right.
Brian Casel:Like in his mind. He's coming up with, with all the strategies and all the execution. Yeah. And that's,
Jordan Gal:yeah, and that's like a living thing, right? It comes back and hey, this isn't working. Hey, this is working. Right now we have someone doing sales and their first few experiments didn't work. And so we kept adjusting and adjusting and then this morning he pinged me, alright, got two demos, right?
Jordan Gal:And that's two days after starting the newest campaign that we had changed a bunch of stuff. Like, okay. Now hopefully that that means this will start to work better. And then where I'm putting my personal attention is, I I wrote about this on Twitter. The best word for it is marketing activation.
Jordan Gal:Now, I personally think that term is, you know, a synonym for bullshit. You know, I don't talk that way, but it is the best way to describe what we're doing, where we're looking at these miniature campaigns and right. So that's what an activation is, right. It's like a focused campaign. It's not forever.
Jordan Gal:It's not like it's not like your paid ads. It's like one thing that you focus on, you launch, you get out there, and and then you keep going. So that is what I'm focused on because I think that has a lot of potential to impact everything else in the company.
Brian Casel:So I'm I'm not totally clear on what you mean by activation. Sure. You mean like marketing leads? Like, they they become act or the project itself is active?
Jordan Gal:No. Activation as in like a like a campaign. And what I mean by that is we are building a site with Next. Js on the front end.
Brian Casel:Oh, okay. So you're building like an example. Exactly right.
Jordan Gal:This is Next. Js on the front end and then Rally as the checkout and then Swell on the back end. It's got some cool design. And then building that requires it doesn't require my attention. It is just helped along significantly if I'm like, Chris, I wanna hire you.
Jordan Gal:Send me an invoice for x amount of money and you're gonna you're gonna take the design and build it. Zach, you go do the design, let's get it done by the end of the week. And that's what I mean by like that focus, sitting at the desk and being like ping here, ping her, ping this person, ping that person and move it forward. And then Rock, we need a new Swell account. Rock, we need a new Rally account.
Jordan Gal:Give it to this person. Create a Rally email for them so that they can sign up for stuff on their own. So that, you know, is a few weeks and then it'll launch and then we can turn it into content. And then we can send that out as examples and we can reach out to Next. Next.
Jordan Gal:Js agencies and say, hey, come check out how we built this site, while everything else needs to go on with the PR and the SEO and the marketing and the and the sales. So you could really see how if you make a bad hire, one of those things just falls apart entirely and then your whole chessboard starts to collapse.
Brian Casel:One of the things that's on my mind marketing wise right now and what you're describing here of having these amazing people on your team that you can just go to and and bring on board and they just own a whole arm of your marketing engine. You know, I don't have that. Right? Like, I have a couple of contractors, SEO writers, a VA, and and a designer that I work with on projects. So, like, things happen and I'm and I'm working on them.
Brian Casel:But, like, as I talked about, like, my focus is constantly broken apart in different places. I'm on the product and then I jump into this SEO keyword research spreadsheet and then I'm back on the product and then this and that. But like one of the big challenges is that like, I almost find it impossible, to bring someone on board to take that level of full ownership of something. And impossible is the wrong word because it totally is possible. I just haven't figured it out yet.
Brian Casel:But, you know, I do have resource constraints in terms of cash and team, you know, availability and all that. But what I do want to get better at and there's an assistant that I've been working with for, a little bit for like the past year and she's really great and I I need to develop her to a to a higher level, I think. Because like every marketing project that we do, I am absolutely the bottleneck on it's as you said, like it's activation. It doesn't happen unless I drive it and manage it and put my input on the strategy and the messaging and the focus and how does this tie into our funnel and how does this tie into our product and this special thing that you can do with our product and oh, we have this feature over here that we wanna sorta highlight and work that into this piece of content or or we're doing customer case studies and interviews. Let's go interview these 10 people that I that I have been talking to.
Brian Casel:So, I'm, like, the lead dependent person. Like, stuff just does not happen unless I am putting active creative energy into the marketing projects even when I hire people. Like, yeah, I'm I'm probably not gonna be the one writing our articles or spending hours in hrefs and and doing spreadsheets. I I usually outsource that stuff, but it still comes back to me and I still need to go through the sheet and say like, these 10 topics are make the most sense and we need to angle them in this or that way. Like, it still requires my my effort.
Brian Casel:So I need to develop someone else to have that sort of just familiarity with our product and our best use cases and like the customer stories, you know. And so I'm really trying to like rebuild from the ground up this role for this person, which involves like, all right, there are always these tasks. There's like social media tasks and podcast interviewing tasks and stuff like that where you're just embedded with our customers. But how do we take that so that that over time you can sort of, like, elevate and, like, really remove me from this, like, creative decision making. And I just know that, like, somebody who really knows our product and our positioning and our use cases can give that, like, input, and it doesn't have to be me all the time, you know.
Brian Casel:But, like, the caveat is, like, without going and hiring a head of marketing, you know, like, how do you how do you develop processes for this, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You probably try to do fewer things, right? And instead of trying to get spread too thin. And what we call that T ball. I end up talking about that a lot because the absolute ideal is that everything gets done.
Jordan Gal:The ball gets placed on the tee, you walk up, hit the ball, and walk away. So meaning meaning you give your input only on the part that's absolutely necessary, that only you can give your input, and everything else before it and after it is taken care of in one way or another by someone else, the less capable, the less trust, the less knowledge the people around you have, the more involved you are in the process leading up to the, you know, here's
Brian Casel:the I think it's like operationally. Operations and processes have usually been my strong point in most of my previous businesses, but like in a SaaS, I find it much more difficult. That would be the ideal, like you say, like the t ball concept where it's like, I'm just, you know, yeah, I'll hop on a call or I'll send a zip message async, like, to give you the key nuggets of insight here. Then you and that's generally how I work with people is is, you know, I I do send them a a ten minute video to give you the most important knowledge. Go off and work on that and come back to me.
Brian Casel:Right? But like, but I don't have it like operationalized where it's like, it's just happening all the time and I still need to like spearhead every new project.
Jordan Gal:Are you being too precious and you wanna control and make everything perfect? Or is it just a matter of like, no, I don't have someone that does that. I I need to do it real quick or I need to do it.
Brian Casel:You know, if I'm honest, I'm sure there's some of that. But if I'm also honest, like, there's results that we have not seen yet. And I think part of it is not that I haven't worked with really talented people, but I haven't figured out the processes where I can let these really talented people do their thing, but we still end up with results that have the right messaging, that still reach the right people. That puzzle has not come together yet. You know, we have some marketing wins that that happened throughout the year, but it's like right now, you know, we're in this phase where we're designing a whole new website, which is going to have a whole new content strategy and starting to ramp up into a whole new sales process.
Brian Casel:So like a lot of pieces that need to get built out. A lot of new operations that need to be figured out, know. So too much to work on all the time.
Jordan Gal:No, uh-huh, I feel you. And really just just want the results. Just want people signing Totally.
Brian Casel:Totally. Yeah. And I'm still in this phase right now where it's like, we're in this holding pattern until we launch x, y, and z.
Jordan Gal:You're in hell. You should kind of acknowledge that you're in a very frustrating, the nature of where you are right now is frustrating because you kind of have to just wait and software takes forever. So that waiting period is extended torture.
Brian Casel:It really is. Like, it really feels like that because it's like I I'm not working as calmly as I normally do right now. In in these in these current months, I am in, a hustle mode, and it does not feel great. I love the actual work. I love working on the product.
Brian Casel:Love talking to customers. There's an extra level of pressure right now that I don't love and and it's like a time and output pressure that's like we're not moving fast enough. We have we have stuff on the horizon that's coming out, but and and it's like the business metrics and the sales and and all that, like, I feel like they're gonna hit a restart button pretty soon and we just gotta get there, you know. And it's like 10 different projects that that's depending on.
Jordan Gal:Don't know what to tell you.
Brian Casel:Wish I could put put that through the AI machine and just have
Jordan Gal:Totally good. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Oh, man. Well, there's nothing to do but but keep going.
Brian Casel:That's right. Well, we're going to get into this weekend and I'll try to take a little breather and happy birthday to you, buddy.
Jordan Gal:Thank you very much.
Brian Casel:On the slopes. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.
Jordan Gal:That'll be good. Taking Monday off. Everyone has a a good long weekend. Yeah. Alright.
Jordan Gal:Thanks for listening.
Brian Casel:We did it. Later.
