Knowing what we know now...
Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Mister Brian Castle, did you or did you not put an ETH into Pepe coin? And are you now a millionaire? No?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about, unfortunately.
Jordan Gal:The the Pepe is like the latest meme coin that made people, like, a thousand to a million dollar kind of return over the last few days?
Brian Casel:You know, I I'm such a set it and forget it investor. Mhmm. And and I have a Coinbase account and everything, and and I got a notice about, like, my password being changed or something, which I did not, you know, which I did not initiate. Oh, shit. What's what's going on?
Brian Casel:So I actually, like, logged in to my Coinbase account, like, for the first time in a while. Like, I literally said it, and I literally forget it. I don't log in very much. It's been months. And and I was like, oh, shit.
Brian Casel:There's a lot more in here than I thought there that I left in here. There you go.
Jordan Gal:That's nice. At some point, I got myself I
Brian Casel:like, I guess that market didn't completely crash. No.
Jordan Gal:No. Especially not like the Bitcoin and and and ETH. At some point, I got myself a Coinbase credit card, and I use that for fun expenses. Because I, you know, I I basically only put money into crypto that I don't care to lose.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And so if you put that money on a credit card, it becomes real. And then and then all of a sudden, you have this piggy bank where you're like, should I really buy this second pair of shoes of the same shoes I already have with a slightly different color? Use the Coinbase credit card for it. Of
Brian Casel:course. Yep. Yep. Yeah,
Jordan Gal:man. Alright. So no no Pepe coin.
Brian Casel:How No. But you know you know what I did do last weekend? And I and I hope I'm gonna do it again today, this weekend. On Friday, at the end of my workday, I shut off my computers. My I've I have two work computers, iMac, MacBook.
Brian Casel:Powered them down. I usually just leave them on every day and I you know? Okay. It's like Saturday? Yes.
Brian Casel:Okay. And Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I, you know, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, I did not work.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:Okay. And, you know, I again, like, I always try to, like, slip in an hour or two of of work here and there, but, like, it just felt so good to, like, plan for, like, a whole weekend where I'm I'm I'm really trying to physically pull myself away.
Jordan Gal:Some separation.
Brian Casel:I closed the door to this office. I did not walk in it for, you know, a good over forty eight hours.
Jordan Gal:Right. I'll be back in the office on Monday. Am now Monday.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Yes.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:I I like that. I like that. I'm gonna really try to do it. Like, you know, I I I again, we talked about this. Like, I like to to work even putting downtime, like, even on weekends and stuff sometimes.
Brian Casel:But, I have noticed, and I and you've probably heard it on the podcast, like, I've I've started to inch a little bit too close to the to what people might think of as burnout. Mhmm. Again, I still really like working and and and hustling, frankly. And and I still feel like I'm in, like, an urgent phase of this business. Things are things are going pretty well right now, but also there's a lot of pressure.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And this will allow me to go.
Brian Casel:But I definitely felt myself, like like, just mentally and actually physically feeling like I'm I'm I'm getting close to kinda going crazy here. So I hear that.
Jordan Gal:I hear that.
Brian Casel:And I and it and it has to be, like, more intentional about, like, the weekends and making sure I'm getting my exercise in and and just trying to, like like, really physically dial it down. Get back to some normalcy.
Jordan Gal:I think it's good the we're we're not kids anymore. And, like, the maniacal focus, it gets a bit exhausting. It's counterproductive after a while. Like, if you have to you know, almost all of us have to acknowledge that this thing takes a while. It just takes a while.
Jordan Gal:I've I've an investor, Ron, at Rainfall, and he he's always very calming for me. And his point of view is always, Jordan, good things take time.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And that he kinda harpoons on that, like like, just keep you guys are doing all the right things. It's gonna take time. And it helps me because the impatience is the default. The come on, the hurry. Like, what is taking so long?
Jordan Gal:Why am I so slow at this? Why can't it go faster? Why is the revenue not growing the way I it's it's always very impatient. It's like the American way with the startup steroids.
Brian Casel:Story of my life, man.
Jordan Gal:Yes. So I hear you. I think that's good to have a little bit more separation. I find myself in the evenings. Sometimes I'm online, and I might be doing something, like, personal, you know, where I'm like, I'm booking travel for the summer.
Jordan Gal:I don't even gotta find flights. You know, stuff takes time. But when I'm on the computer, I don't know where to go. You know, I'm like, I don't wanna go to Twitter. I definitely don't wanna go to LinkedIn.
Jordan Gal:I don't really wanna go to Slack. No one else wants me there at Slack in Slack. And I'm, like, looking for, like, well, have I become so boring that I can't find interesting things on the Internet? That's not good.
Brian Casel:So I'm You mean in terms of where you don't know where to go in terms of work? Like, what what can you do right now?
Jordan Gal:That's No. I I wanna be I wanna be into something interesting that isn't work related.
Brian Casel:Oh, I see. Like like to break away.
Jordan Gal:Yes. So I might I might be digital still, but I still want some separation the way you're you're creating.
Brian Casel:I mean, you know, actually, like, I actually have a third Mac in in the other room Okay. Which is just for music. Like, it's it's it's a Mac mini, like, just for just for recording and producing stuff. And I and I actually, like and I haven't touched that one in months because I've been so busy on
Jordan Gal:on Maybe it's time. Maybe it's time.
Brian Casel:And I did last weekend. I I got in there and played a little bit, so that was the thing.
Jordan Gal:It's good. It's good because this thing this this thing can be exhausting. Yeah. We we are right now in a moment of there's just pressure. Like, we're we're putting the pressure on ourselves.
Jordan Gal:Right? We don't get pressure from investors. Investors are cool. We have a board meeting next week, so we're preparing, And that it's just added work.
Brian Casel:How often is that? Is it that's quarterly?
Jordan Gal:Quarterly. Quarterly. Yeah. It was so helpful last quarter, so I think all of us are really excited for it. Like, the first we did the first one last quarter, and we were a bit, you know, we were a little nervous around how what is this gonna feel like?
Jordan Gal:We shouldn't have been nervous. We know who's gonna be there. We know their personalities and and so on.
Brian Casel:But it
Jordan Gal:was so valuable last time that now we're kind of excited for it, and we're we're getting that feedback of the more we prepare, the more valuable it's going to be. So now we've started, like, two weeks ahead of time and and have just been doing more work for it, but it is work on top of your regular work.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And right now, we are starting to sell into platforms that we're not a 100% ready to support. Yep. Because, you know, you should start marketing and selling before everything's fully, fully ready because what's the point of spending all the time and then starting the go to market engine only then, but it creates a situation where it's a lot of pressure on the tech team. And it's great that Rock and Jess and I have been working together so long because we don't feel like one person is putting pressure on the other. It feels like, well, we agree that you have the product and I have to go to market and you have the tech.
Jordan Gal:And so we trust each other that will put the pressure on ourselves, and we'll meet, you know, at the end. We'll meet six weeks from now and have everything done, and we're not gonna question each other along the way, but you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself because you wanna perform for the others.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So it's like I I mean Stressful.
Brian Casel:That I I'm in so the same situation right now. Not not so much about, like, big integrations, but just the the big features that we need to ship. Yeah. And I was saying offline, and I'm I wanna actually know how you deal with this with Rock and Jess because I I talk to customers every single day, and I am constantly this has been for many months now answering questions by saying, like, you can do this for now, but it'll be so much better in a couple of weeks or a couple of months when we ship this or when we ship that. Or or just or just add, like, people asking for the same features over and over again.
Brian Casel:Like, yep, we're on it. It's coming. Don't worry. And I'm what I'm trying to do here when I communicate with with clients and custom you know, customers is saying, here's why our product is valuable today and and why people are buying it today. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And I'm also trying to defend against, like, we have competitors. And I know that they are considering us against two, three, four other tools.
Jordan Gal:Right. You can't say go away for three months. It it's
Brian Casel:I can't I I can't tell them what's happening. And and this is true. Like, I'm not I'm not lying to to people when I say, like, we're literally a month away from shipping that or Right. Or two months away from shipping that.
Jordan Gal:Right. I have it up in Jira right now.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, I'm looking at it. Yes. You know, but I'm saying it all the time. And the reason why I and I I not only tell them that we're building this, I tell I give them my ETA on when I think we're going to be shipping it to to literally tell them in words saying, like, really keep us in the mix because this is actually it's this is not the the can't you know, when you email these these huge software companies and and you do a feature request, they say, like, oh, what what are your feedback?
Brian Casel:I'm thanks for your feedback. I'm gonna I'm gonna add your vote to the list of the thousand other votes for this feature that we might never get to. You know, I'm I'm trying to really communicate that no, this is
Jordan Gal:Right.
Brian Casel:It's in an active development right
Brennan Dunn:now.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yeah. And that's
Brian Casel:And it's just pain it's painful to keep saying that over and over again every day. That's the when you talk about pressure, what I'm hearing and what I'm feeling every day is that. It's like, ugh. Like, I people keep asking for the same things. I know exactly what we need to build.
Brian Casel:People are buying what we have, but they're but they keep asking for more. It's not more new stuff. It's stuff that I've heard. And we've been working on it, but we've also been sidetracked with this domain change and with all the all the other stuff. So it's like, ugh, it's just that's the pressure.
Jordan Gal:I I imagine that is one of those scenarios where you are feeling that pressure much more than the individual potential customer because you keep saying it every day over and over. They heard they heard it once.
Brian Casel:Yes. A lot of times, it's the same it's the same customer coming back, but it's but it's a lot of them. And and I was actually reminded of that today. Like, I I know I keep saying this, but, like, they probably only heard that from me once or
Jordan Gal:Right. You are full of coming soons Yeah. Constantly. But they're like, oh, I asked the question. They said it's on the way.
Jordan Gal:Okay. It's like a
Brian Casel:Yeah. But I'm what I'm curious to know from you, and this is an area where I is how do you deal with that internally with your team, with with Rock and Jess and anyone else involved in making getting this stuff out there? Because if you're talking to if you have leads and and your sales team has leads, but things are not you don't have a product in hand yet, You know, like because I I'm I'm working on the product myself. I work directly with my developers on and and, like, whenever they hit any sort of even a minor roadblock, like, my job is to unblock them. Like, let's just keep moving.
Brian Casel:We we can't lose a day for for this or that. Like, we have to keep moving.
Jordan Gal:Right. Yeah. Relentlessness is also, you know, part of what's a bit exhausting and and causing you to need some separation because it's, yeah. It's a you you can't keep that up forever, or you become unhappy.
Brian Casel:And then you get resentful of
Jordan Gal:your own work, and that's, like, the opposite of what we all want.
Brian Casel:I think what I actually sort of struggle with a little bit is communicating to my team or really helping them understand my thinking around pri prioritizing things. And I mean, like, little things. Big road map things, obviously, I'm I'm directing all that. But the shipping a feature. Right?
Brian Casel:Understanding, like, these aspects are the most important things. Mhmm. And these aspects we can deal with later. You know? And, like, I don't know how you navigate that with your team.
Jordan Gal:But So so I I think the the most honest version of that answer is that I I don't personally deal with that very much. We have we bring the expected point of view from each of our roles. Right? My role is saying, just tell them that we have it. It's all good.
Jordan Gal:Jessica's role is hold on. Do not promise anything until I 100% know with certainty exactly when it's coming out, and rock is somewhere in the middle. Mhmm. And right and that, like, push and pull tension feels appropriate from the product person and the marketer and so on. We try to tell our go to market team to acknowledge that we have paying customers right now that are processing millions of dollars, and therefore we don't actually need anything.
Jordan Gal:We don't need anything new for them to jump on board. Mhmm. That is different when it comes to an integration with a platform that we aren't ready to work with yet. And then it's kind of, you know, that you have to just be honest and straightforward. Like, yes, you can get into this, but you can't do much because of x, and z.
Jordan Gal:Or if you need you know, we're working on an Adyen integration. And if you use Adyen as your payment processor, you just can't do it yet. Mhmm. And oftentimes you'll get the feedback from the customer on their actual prioritization of that feature or functionality compared to what they say. Because we've told people, we don't have Adyen, and they go, well, we have a Stripe account.
Jordan Gal:Let's just get started. We say, oh, it turns out you didn't need Adyen to get started.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So we're pretty straightforward about it. We don't want to over promise, but we we toe the line just like you on honestly saying that that's in the sprint. That's two sprints away. That's expected at the end of the quarter. And Yep.
Jordan Gal:We try not to overpromise because that always ends up biting you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well, this week, a few days ago, we finally turned a corner, which I I think is pretty significant. And I feel like it's so we we launched the redirects of our domains. Okay. From from Zip Message.
Brian Casel:If you try to go to zipmessage.com now, it will redirect to Clarity Flow. Okay. It's efficient. It I mean, it it was complicated to get that up and running because if you've been using zipmessage.com for, like, shared conversation links and stuff, those still work. You know, intake pages, those still work.
Jordan Gal:Right. You can't just break all of them.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And if you're, like, logged in on zipmessage.com, you that still works. But the public site and most of the account stuff, we're directing you now into your account name .clarityflow.com. But I think just also just like momentum wise and mentally and and, like, really embracing this new name and brand, like, I I feel like it was a really important step to because, like, now when you go to clarityflow.com, like, it doesn't say coming soon. It doesn't say sign up for early access.
Brian Casel:It says sign up here. And you're and new people discovering it today, they see a a little article that says we used to be named ZipMessage. But other than that, they're not seeing ZipMessage anymore. So you,
Jordan Gal:like, turn the corner on that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. It just feels good to, like, really embrace it. And then all the other things too, like like, our my email account, like our team's email inbox, it's all at clarityflow dot com now. I changed our team Slack from Zip Messages to Clarity Flow, like our GitHub repo, our Notion, like all the internal stuff is moving over to Clarity Flow now.
Brian Casel:And it's just like, okay. Like, really? Okay. Zip message was what we were before. Now we are Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:Right? It it just feels good.
Jordan Gal:Good. Hopefully, that frees up more of your development time to focus on all those kinds of features that you wanna knock out.
Brian Casel:My god. Yes.
Jordan Gal:Oh, yes. You put out a tweet earlier today.
Brian Casel:You know Yes. I put out I put out this tweet, like, once a month or so when when we're when we're doing a Bootstrap web episode, and it almost always gets, like, no responses. Today, we actually got a few good responses to it, you know, asking some folks, like, what what they wanna hear us talk about.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. See. Einar asked about AI and LLMs and what that does to, like, bootstrap SaaS.
Brian Casel:Yes. We talked about some thoughts on that. We can we can get into it.
Jordan Gal:Yep. I think it's a dream come true, man. I think it's an absolute dream come true.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Let let's try to hit that. And then also, Pascal asked a really good question about Scared of this. Yeah. Like, the the decision to moving so so that one's about, like, getting into, like, doing sales demos.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:What's the one I'm scared of? Though? What would you do if you started over?
Brian Casel:Yeah. So, yeah, Sam asked, what would you have done differently when starting this business knowing knowing what you know now? So I think that's a good one for both of us.
Jordan Gal:Scare that one. That's that's too real. That's too real. We we all would do things differently. Yep.
Jordan Gal:But it's really dangerous to dwell on that.
Brian Casel:Where should we start? Which which one of those? I don't know. Start on that one? Sure.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Why not?
Brian Casel:You wanna do it first?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So
Brian Casel:So, like, let let's, like, define what we're we're talking about, like, Rally and Clarity Flow. Right? Like, this this business, like, let's rewind about two years or so, you know, just starting it up. Mhmm. What what our outlook was then and what what maybe we would have done differently?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think generally speaking, two things that I would change is that we we overbuilt the product and should have gotten it out to market sooner to get feedback sooner, and we should have gone enterprise from the start. I think those, like, tactically or however you wanna talk about that, like, what we did with the business, I'm very happy. I would keep everything the same in terms of the team and starting with the same people. I would raise money, and I'm happy with the investors.
Jordan Gal:All that stuff, would keep the same. But what we actually did with our time and with our resources, we shouldn't have built as much for as long as we did. And we should have gone upmarket right away instead of being like an in between reasonable. Like, hey, let's start at BigCommerce because it's a hosted platform and we know the people there and that's like a reasonable thing instead of going all the way up to Salesforce and that kind of complexity. And then we'll work our way up.
Jordan Gal:Like, should have just skipped that step entirely and went for, like, the biggest merchants in the world. And that was I think that was mostly a psychological limitation on my part.
Brian Casel:I know
Jordan Gal:Other team members too, but but psychological.
Brian Casel:I know that's that's what you're getting into now with the enterprise sales. But, like, just thinking back to what you knew then when you were starting out, was there a certain aversion to to that, or was it just more like there there's more of a market on the nonenterprise
Jordan Gal:side here? Mostly familiarity with the, you know, small business market because of our our time on Shopify and Right. Being a small business ourselves. And when I ran an ecommerce business, it was in that same world of, you know, 1 to $10,000,000 in revenue and small team that you can just talk to and they speak the same language as you and no one's looking for demos and RFPs and just that enterprise language is foreign. Yep.
Jordan Gal:And, you know, out shopping excuse me. Out Shopifying Shopify is is a bad idea. Like, they're amazing at what they do. It's you know, this week notwithstanding, they actually, I think, did what they needed to do on the layoffs, which sucks, but it happens. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And so that well, that was like a psychological limitation on, well, we know these people. We know who they are. We know what their problems are. We know how to add value for them. Let's go do it outside of the Shopify world.
Jordan Gal:We should have, like, stopped the logic right there on if you're leaving the Shopify world, don't look to service merchants that are right for Shopify. Mhmm. You know? Whereas it's almost Go
Brian Casel:to a go to an entirely different OG.
Jordan Gal:That's that's right. And I we have a partner. I don't want to mention their name because I don't want to talk about their strategy. But when I spoke to their CEO, I've adopted some of his language. And his language is go toward the pain.
Jordan Gal:Basically, these platforms that you look at and you just kind of cringe like Magento. Oh my god. This old behemoth with huge merchants on it and everyone's fleeing and Adobe bought them for too much money and they're losing market share. Like, that's the right place to go.
Brian Casel:Yes. I like that.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Because no one's building modern amazing software for them.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And they don't know what to do and replatforming is really difficult. So going out and saying, you are in a tough spot, but we can help you modernize the most important pages on your website where the checkout happens. Like, we didn't I didn't connect that. I said, oh, everyone in Magento is kind of sad, and no one wants to be there. So we don't wanna be there either.
Jordan Gal:So let's find this magical spot in the market that's adjacent to Shopify, but frustrated Shopify merchants will wanna leave there. I think there's still an opportunity there in that that gocomposable.co page, which is live now.
Brian Casel:Oh, sweet.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So we still are interested in that spot, but it's more and more apparent to us that the psychological limitation around knowing how to talk to a Salesforce Commerce Cloud merchant that does $500,000,000 a year, that that was a limitation in our heads. Mhmm. And we know that for sure because we just hired someone who comes from that world, and now all a sudden we're talking to those merchants. And it was just like this barrier of confidence to just walk right through.
Jordan Gal:It was an invisible wall. I mean I mean, excuse me. It it felt real. Yeah. It was it was a figment of our imagination.
Brian Casel:I I do like that, just as, a mental model of of thinking about, like, especially when you're exploring new business ideas. I used to think about this a lot when I was, you know, thinking and talking about productized services a lot. And and the whole idea used to be like, you know, should go into some sort of, like, service business that nobody wants to do and just figure out a process a a way to put a process and a team around it because nobody else wants to do that hard or difficult or complex or Right.
Jordan Gal:Or they shy of leasing.
Brian Casel:Boring or type of work. But but if you if you can build a product or productized service around it, like, that could be a great business because of how
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Painful it is.
Jordan Gal:Right? It's it's it's the zigging when everyone's zagging. We were forced to zag. Right? We were told you can't build this product in the Shopify world.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And now looking from the outside in, I see people launching Shopify apps, and I have sympathy for them. Yeah. The the level of competition brutality and the zero sum nature. It's just like, oh, wow.
Jordan Gal:It we they did us a favor, but now let's follow through on that logic and go elsewhere. Right? We have a merchant right now on SAP. You you haven't you just can imagine what a mess it is to run on SAP. Right.
Jordan Gal:But that merchant is is like, oh my god. An API that our developers can just like grab and do stuff with? Like, they're they're ecstatic.
Brian Casel:It's like they're discovering the Internet again.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. They're ecstatic.
Brian Casel:Yep. Nice. Nice. So When I think about this question I mean I I kinda struggle with it in general because, like, there you know, look. We're all dealing with whatever information or biases that we have at the time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So it's always hard to say, like, hindsight, you know, hindsight is fifty fifty and all that. But I I would say the the major things looking back, I definitely don't regret, you know, the decision to just work on this product in general, the decision to take a little bit of funding from Comfund. That's all been great. The decision to sell the previous business when I did and do this the way that I've been doing it.
Brian Casel:So all good. Obviously, I've I've gone through this major pivot and then a rebrand. I I wish it didn't take me, like, two years to get to where I am now, and we're still working through or we're still trying to ship that that full new vision. You know? But, again, like, this is one of those things where it's like it took a lot of customer research and customer development for me to really understand what I understand now when it comes to Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:One one thing that I sort of regret is not fully following my gut from day one because I did see the I started to see a little bit of the pattern with with coaches Mhmm. From the very, very beginning. Like, the very first customer, some of them were were coaches on ZipMessage. But I was I've talked about this before, but I I was seeing positive signals from a from a wide range of of customers. And also, like, that wasn't my use case.
Brian Casel:Like, the the the original idea for Zip Message came from my own pain point, which was around customer support and asking for videos back from customers. And that turned out to be really one of the worst use cases for us. And so the whole product and premise for the product changed. So it took me a really long time to, first of all, just navigate that. And second of all, like fully discover and fully consume and and really learn and understand who that customer is and exactly what they're doing.
Brian Casel:It took hundreds of calls and many months. But I also don't believe that you could do that level of customer discovery and pain point discovery without a product. I I just don't believe that. I know a lot of people talk about, oh, you gotta validate the idea. You gotta you gotta prove that there's a market and there's a need.
Brian Casel:You do jobs to be done and all this before you write a line of code. I just don't in in my experience, I know it's different for everyone, but in my experience, I I have not ever come to the level of clarity that I have now
Pippin Williamson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Without some initial product in hand. Yep. So, like, the fact that I did build and ship Zip Message to paying customers for several months, over a year, really, of being in the market and then using that as the as the jumping off point for customer research and discovery. Like, understanding, like, how people are, like, taking that first version of the product and what are the problems around it and then digging into those. Like and when I when I mean problems, I mean problems with customers activating or problems with customers churning or problems with the acquisition.
Brian Casel:Like, having a product in the market and then seeing those problems and then digging into them and then learning and and then course correcting, that's what led to where I am now, which feels and I and I'm and I'm literally starting to see the results in the graph and and all and all that now. But yeah. It took over two years. So, like, I I wonder if I I if looking back on it, I think that I I did have some of the gut direction, like like, I should niche down to something. I sort of see coaches.
Brian Casel:I saw that early on, and I and I didn't run with my gut fast enough on that. I could have started the at least started the process of that customer discovery maybe six to twelve months sooner than I did. The other thing that I looked because you talked about overbuilding. I I do feel some of that too. It's weird.
Brian Casel:It's like it's two sides of the coin. One one is that, like, we didn't build enough in in that, like, we didn't make the product big and and valuable enough. Like, we didn't bite off enough of a painful problem to solve, to to your point about, like, going after the pain. Mhmm. The original thing for ZipMessage was just it's it's sort of just a Loom replacement.
Brian Casel:What I
Jordan Gal:Messaging tool. Yeah.
Brian Casel:What I what I eventually learned was that, like, yeah, it there there it does solve some problems that Loom doesn't solve, but it's still just a tool that's way too easily replaced or easy easy to put down. And we need to go to a tool, a solution that is more essential and core to to a coach's business. Right? So which means a bigger tool, more you know, we're more aspirational in in what we're building and what we're solving now.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But also without you know, by wrongly not niching down soon sooner, that looking back on it, I definitely look see that, like, I did I really lacked direction on the product road map for for way too long. So we built a bunch of features in the first twelve to fifteen months or so that some of them are core to the product and they're great, and some of them were not only not only big time sucks just to build and ship them, but they they still to this day cause maintenance Mhmm. Hours and test coverage.
Jordan Gal:Yes. It's, like, impossible. It's impossible.
Brian Casel:Like like, you know, heard I heard a few requests for some integrations that we built early on, and now we gotta maintain those integrations. Mhmm. Or these Chrome extensions or or this or that, or or this weird feature that only a few it turns out only a few people were asking about that, and I thought it was bigger, and we built it. And and that's and that's just a result of not dialing in and niching down and really understanding the customer. And and when I think about the features and the roadmap that that we have on our plates today, it's it's like it literally feels like a 100 times more confidence in what we're building and the result of what we're building.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Whereas I actually remember in the first year of Zip Message, like, I just didn't have all that much confidence. And there were times where I was like, I don't know. What what what do we wanna build next?
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's funny.
Brian Casel:We we had a bunch of feature requests, so I just sort of, like, randomly picked them when we started building And and I just looking back on it, like, I just didn't have enough customer development behind every one of those features. Mhmm. So I could've just got the ball rolling faster on that, I guess.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I I think it's also important to look at the flip side. So the flip side for us is that we have a product that when those larger merchants start using it, we have a lot of confidence in the product and the reliability, that will
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Work in our favor. Right? Same thing for you. It's like, it might be that the messaging at the core of your product ends up being a differentiator for a coaching platform which has amazing messaging. So all this stuff is like, all right, I would definitely do the things differently, but now that we are where we are, like how do we make the right decisions from here going forward?
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. I mean, flip side of it, actually, John Dougherty, his question was, like, what's easier and what's harder now? What having having made this change?
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:And I and I think the flip side is that most decisions now are easier because I know exactly who the customer is. And this is like a this is one of those age old business marketing lessons that I just feel like I I keep having to relearn over and over again. But it's so true. Like, once you know exactly who your target, like, niched down, cut like, if you could describe the person who is absolutely obsessed with with using your solution because it solves a really painful problem for them, everything else becomes easy and obvious in terms That's of right. Choosing what to build next, in terms of which marketing channels or where to where to go to to reach more of those people.
Brian Casel:When you before before, in the first year, I was literally just taking guesses because I did not know who I was going after. I was what was difficult was that I was getting some positive signals from from different different channels.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The in between is hard. If you got
Brian Casel:But it but it's it's it didn't all add up to product market fit, which
Jordan Gal:is ultimately
Brian Casel:the problem. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's tricky. We're we're a bit of a cliche in that because we had the money and resources to build a bunch. We did. Yep.
Jordan Gal:And if we didn't have those resources, we would have gone a lot leaner and gotten to market faster and gotten the feedback faster. And I don't know. Maybe he'd be better off, maybe not. So I don't
Brian Casel:know. Yep.
Jordan Gal:I think that's why I said this question scares me because I don't I don't think it's that productive. It's kind of an interesting how I feel about it too. You know, mental exercise and all that, but it's
Brian Casel:it I I spend way much more energy and stress thinking about the future months than the previous months.
Jordan Gal:Yes. The dwelling on the negative is actually right. The one of the superpowers required for our roles is to ignore all that shit and move forward and and remain optimistic through it and not
Brian Casel:dwell on it. When people say like, oh, I just discovered Bootstrap web. I'm starting from episode one, and I'm going through the story now. And I'm like, why? Why would you do that?
Jordan Gal:How about you start on last week's episode?
Brian Casel:I almost wanna, like, unpublish everything up until, like, two weeks ago, like, at all times.
Jordan Gal:Just rolling. I like the archive for my kids at some point.
Brian Casel:Yeah. True. Are you
Jordan Gal:interested? But not. Heaven forbid, like, for our listening.
Brian Casel:Yeah. No.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, yes.
Brian Casel:Else? Do should we get into Einar's question about a little AI? Yeah. Alright. So he the way he he asked was best case and worst case scenarios for bootstrapped SaaS given large language models over the next three years.
Jordan Gal:Okay. It's very specific. Clearly,
Brian Casel:are we are total experts on this.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. So I'll start by identifying what happens in our Slack between myself as a non developer and the engineering team. And maybe again, we're playing our natural roles. And I challenge both sides on that.
Jordan Gal:So I think engineers can be a bit defensive around this. Because when you come out and say, hey, ChatGPT is doing code now and look what you can do and you can just go into this thing and ask it for a UI for a, you know, pet grooming business with a calendar and all of sudden it gives you a UI, isn't this unbelievable? It's understandable that engineers will look at that and say, cool story, bro, but that's not gonna do what you think it's gonna do with the precision that you needed to do. Right? Right.
Jordan Gal:So I I always challenge them because it's not healthy to take the skeptical approach
Brian Casel:Yes.
Jordan Gal:Entirely. It is it it's good to add some realism. Like, no. That's not gonna replace engineers anytime soon. However, what we should do is we should ask our engineering team who wants a ChatGPT premium account.
Jordan Gal:And guess who said they want it? Every single one.
Pippin Williamson:And
Jordan Gal:then we start to buy copilot for them and we start to encourage them. And all of a sudden they it's important that on their own, they're coming back around and saying, oh, damn. I didn't expect it to have this answer. And I started using it and I'm starting to do this stuff with it. And it's not me pushing it because when I push it, it turns a little bit more defensive.
Brian Casel:Well, that's exactly my take on it too is that like so I'm more optimistic about the next three, five, ten years here. And the main thing is it's just such a it it what actually, you replied to him. What did I say? I think that most of the impact is actually gonna gonna be it's it's it'll make it faster and easier to build more interesting products with the help of AI than than without it. Right?
Brian Casel:So
Jordan Gal:With less engineering.
Brian Casel:Which Exactly. Like like, less engineering. Same thing on the marketing side. Like, it it helps us be more productive. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:We do have a premium account for the company now, like, separate from my own that my marketing assistant just uses for SEO research and stuff. I have a Copilot account, and I and I I'm I'm actually gonna be talking to my dev team next week about, like, how can we or do you know, should we start to incorporate it more into our workflows for, you know, whatever, like, stubbing out tests or helping us to, you know, build code faster. Right? Yeah. Sure.
Brian Casel:So, like, just think just literal literally workflow things that we can start implementing today and we are starting, like, that's definitely speeding us up. And and it's also speeding me up too. Like, even for whatever, like like, founder projects. The other day, I I had two spreadsheets of, like, customer lists that I needed to sort of, like, merge and deduplicate and and, like, ChatGPT just helped me out and, like, get it get it done, you know. And, I mean, like, next three, five year like, the the whole idea of AI, like, eliminating entire products or categories or segments, I don't fully buy that.
Brian Casel:And it it certainly not in the next three years. I mean, I think it will definitely evolve every almost every category. Mhmm. We talked about, like, how, like, any anything involving, like, text, there's gonna be AI components and features built in. Like, there's gonna be AI stuff built for clarity flow at some point.
Brian Casel:Like, it's it there it's just gonna be elements that people expect to see in products. Right? Yeah. And but, like, I also think that it's just gonna open up new possibilities for for products that you couldn't even think about offering before AI existed. Right?
Brian Casel:We're already seeing them with the thousands of AI focused startups right now. Mhmm. I don't know. I just I and especially for for Bootstrapters. Like, I I think that actually Bootstrapters are are in a in a more of an advantage in this type of tech, know, tech explosion when when one of these things happens because the big the big money players have to be one of one of the few dominant players.
Jordan Gal:They're they're trying to be They have
Brian Casel:to be they have to be the the language model.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right. Whereas
Brian Casel:bootstrappers bootstrappers can build a down. Yep. And we we can build a very interesting business just leveraging their language model. Like, we don't we don't have to beat it.
Jordan Gal:I I know Justin McGill, our friend, is building a a really solid company using using AI tools for content creation.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:Right? So that's a perfect example of you don't need to be OpenAI to add value. Yeah. You can use the tools to add value and offer a compelling service in the market that is better both better and cheaper than the alternative. Right?
Jordan Gal:And that's like a dangerous combo. And Mhmm. That's why companies like that are doing well.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I I also don't fully buy the thing that you hear all the time like, oh, why would you build a a new startup that leverages these these OpenAI APIs today when I mean, talk about platform risk and that, like, your your business could disappear in the next two or three years. I just don't buy that, especially if you're a small Bootstrapper and you and you do niche down. It's not like they're gonna come out with, a content marketing, you know, tool or like
Jordan Gal:Why would you host your app on AWS? It's like, I
Brian Casel:don't know. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Just it doesn't matter because AWS not that
Brian Casel:it's Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So interchangeable, but there's gonna be the big companies that offer these services. And then you'll have a set of options as a as an indie bootstrapper or small software company to choose from, whatever whichever one is right for you based on your criteria.
Brian Casel:And then and then still just to break us out of our of our little tech startup bubble here Mhmm. The real world is so far away from adopting any of this.
Jordan Gal:Yes. So I I think that's the go ahead. Go ahead.
Brian Casel:They're so far away. And and, like, I am annoying the hell out of my family and non tech friends, like, when I because I'm I'm trying to tell them, like, how exciting what's happening in AI is right now.
Jordan Gal:Like, cool.
Brian Casel:And and it's all just like, yeah. That's cute. Like but I'm not gonna be talking Yeah. Like, it's it's so far away from making any real impact in the world.
Jordan Gal:That that okay. So the I think that's
Brian Casel:It's going to make an impact, but it but we're not there yet.
Jordan Gal:Yes. I and in the in the interim of full adoption into the non tech world, that feels like an ideal opportunity for Bootstrap and indie software companies to take the tech and bring it into the world that doesn't know or care about the tech, just wants the outcome, and you can offer the outcome better, cheaper, faster using the tech. That to me feels like the ideal way to to leverage it.
Brian Casel:100%.
Jordan Gal:If you keep focused on what's happening on Twitter with the biggest, most well funded, smartest people in the world, you can get convinced that it's all over. Like, there's so much competition. There's no opportunity. There's no point because everything that you do is open source and therefore copyable. Like, that I think that's the wrong approach to it.
Jordan Gal:Yep. But bringing it down into the rest of the economy. I I also don't buy the Jason Kallikanis. It's it's gonna, you know, destroy 30% of jobs in the next twelve months.
Brian Casel:Like No way.
Jordan Gal:Hyperbole thing. No.
Brian Casel:No way. Yeah. And and I think it'll it'll create new jobs. It will evolve what it means to be a marketer or what it means to be a developer. You know?
Brian Casel:Like, it's again, like, fundamentally, I still see AI as an assistant to humans, not a replacement of humans.
Jordan Gal:A a bicycle. Doesn't replace the human. It makes the human more powerful faster. Yeah. I I on a scale of one to 10, how worried are you on, like, you know, the the paranoid end of things?
Jordan Gal:The this thing runs wild and figures out that, hey. You know what the right thing to do is? Let's figure out how to crack into the nukes and launch nukes because that's how we can accomplish our goal that someone told us to accomplish. Like, I'm I'm in, like, a seven out of 10 on that.
Brian Casel:I'm a little I'm a
Jordan Gal:little worried about that just because there's so much so many unknowns and everything is connected to the grid. I'm a little little worried about that.
Brian Casel:I don't I I I don't know what I what I feel about this because I when I think about it theoretically and logically, and I and I'm really fascinated with the with this question of of, like, how dangerous can this get. Mhmm. You know, watching, like, Lex Friedman podcast all about it and and all this stuff like it.
Jordan Gal:I can't watch Lex Friedman podcast. No? He talks too much. He he asks the question in 300 words that could be asked in 10 words.
Brian Casel:Are we talking about the same one?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I I like him, and I like the content, but it drives me nuts listening to him.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I I don't know. I I I catch some of them when he has a good guess on. But I think that, theoretically, you could see where the dangers are.
Brian Casel:But in reality, I've I don't know. I don't know. Like, there there have been so many things in the last four, six years that really scared the hell out of me, whether it's, like, you know, the the world and Yeah. Politics and
Jordan Gal:crazy things. United States
Brian Casel:and and the polarization and and all this different stuff. Like Thank you. But and I'm not saying, like, there there have been no problems. Obviously, there there have been. But, like, I think the I think the worst fears have not been have not come.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I think that that's I tend to think that that's gonna be the same thing with AI.
Jordan Gal:For for me, the the crossover you know, I'm I'm Israeli, and I keep up on what's happening in Israel. And at some point over the last decade, Israeli intelligence figured out how to use code to impact very real things in the physical world. Right? And you send a a virus into a nuclear facility to melt down a reactor, like, is code impacting the real world in a very real way. And if you apply the power of these new models and new tech to that type of thing at the global actor level, that that's the stuff that kind of freaks me out.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And, yeah, there's a great not to get too into politics, but there's a great podcast with, oh my god. I'm blanking on this guy's name. Niall Ferguson. He talks about the the Cold War two, basically, what's happening now between The US and China.
Jordan Gal:And all all of it not all of it, but a lot of it is happening electronically
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Around IP and all that. And or if you saw over the last oh, a a Google memo was leaked that said we I think the the title of the memo is we have no moat. And the sub headline was and neither does OpenAI because our friends at Meta open sourced their model. Right? Because they make money differently.
Jordan Gal:So they don't mind open sourcing. What the open source community has done with that open source model is showing Google that what the open source community can do is going to overtake whatever they can do privately very, very quickly. And so if if no one has a moat, like, does this thing go? What what happens? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:What's the point of investment? What's the point of keeping closed? What's the point of keeping secrets? If as soon as it gets released into the open source world, people and their ingenuity come up with things that an individual company can never do.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The the one, like the thing that that does probably scare me I don't know if it scares me the most or not, but it's the thing that leads that leads down the path of, like, impersonation and changing what what reality is and and what Yeah. Yeah. Like, there there have been, like, deep fake videos. That stuff is just gonna get better and better and just impersonating, like, real people and recordings of stuff, and then what impact that will have on society when people I mean, we already have issues with, you know, disinformation and all that.
Brian Casel:I I think that all that's gonna be amplified. But I also think that it's like, these are problems that have been around. They're gonna continue to be around. They're just gonna yeah. It's a it's a problem in the world, but it's like, it's not gonna be like an overnight everything is going going crazy.
Brian Casel:No. Yeah. What else? What are
Jordan Gal:you working on next week?
Brian Casel:So we've we're just finishing up this domain change. It's now live. We're we're sort of, letting the dust settle. Actually, I, like, I haven't even officially announced it except for, like, this podcast, but I I have not, like, sent an email to the users yet to tell them about about the domain change. That's okay.
Brian Casel:I don't
Jordan Gal:think users care that much about it. Right? It's like a It's informational thing.
Brian Casel:It's been an an interesting observation of of my user base. Right? Like, I was was a little worried with not having an email ready to go on the day that we launched the domain. And then I just sort of pulled back on that. Was like, let me just wait a few days to see if And yeah, a few customers emailed in and everything was fine.
Brian Casel:They're like, oh, I noticed that the domain is changing. Good. Like, congratulations. Like, that that's pretty I just have a quick question of like where where I should access this or that. But like and it was fine.
Brian Casel:And and and it all it was also a reminder of like, oh, there are users in here every day and they're actually using it. Like so that that was good. But I I do need to get that out. I'm waiting to have a few so, okay, like, next week, we're gonna be shipping a a small new feature to allow people to schedule messages, like, compose it now, schedule it to to publish later. Oh.
Brian Casel:That's all done. So it'll be kinda good to, like, announce that end end the new the new domain. I would say one of the big priorities for me Well, okay. Actually, another another one. I wanted to talk about this because this gets back into product stuff.
Brian Casel:Our internal workflow for developing features, like me and my developers, I'm trying to intentionally take some time to improve that. We talked a little bit about AI. That's a little bit of it, but it's mainly about the tools. So, I just started to adopt, linear.app.
Jordan Gal:Okay. I've heard a lot about that.
Brian Casel:So, you know, a lot of developers are are aware of it now, but it's a really good it's not even a replacement of GitHub. It just has a really strong integration with GitHub.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:It it's like a layer on top of it. So what we've been doing up until now is basically just GitHub issues and a GitHub board, and we do all of our communication and commenting on issues, checklists, you know, throughout the dev cycles, all
Jordan Gal:that Everything's in GitHub.
Brian Casel:In in GitHub comments. Okay. You know, that's that's how we've been for a really long time. That's that's where we manage my developers queues and and the issues and everything. And and that got that started to get not great because each individual issue like, we have, a new a new feature, we'd have, like, one big issue on that.
Brian Casel:And, like, literally, our issues would would grow to hundreds of comments. Like and and GitHub does not have threaded comments. So it's just a singular and and so every issue, there's, like, a thousand questions.
Nathan Barry:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Sub questions.
Pippin Williamson:Little
Jordan Gal:Not not ideal.
Brian Casel:So we're constantly, like, quoting each other and responding to this piece and quoting that, but then linking back like 10 comments ago and it's just
Jordan Gal:Manage that.
Brian Casel:Just Yeah. And so so then I the last couple of months, I started to move that into Notion. I was like, let's try Notion to sort of replace GitHub.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And
Brian Casel:and because it's a little bit more free form. We can have a lot more checklist. And the nice thing is we can, like, highlight specific items and have comments on those items. That was in theory, but still, now now we have, like, lots and lots of comments sort of, like, flying around everywhere, and it's hard to see, like, how how much progress we're making on on the actual feature. So talk about, like, adopting products and waiting for new features to launch.
Brian Casel:I tried linear about a year ago.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:And I and I didn't see a whole lot of benefit over just continuing to use GitHub at the time. And they have since shipped threaded comments. So so they have the the same sort of layout with, like, the comment thread, except now you can, like, reply to you know, as a thread, like, threaded comments. Right? So that was sort of the trigger for me to give it a second look because it's a little it's it's, like, not the chaos of Notion.
Brian Casel:It's still sort of linear, for lack of better better word. Okay. But it's a it's just a little bit more you can collaborate easier with with lots of, like, questions and answers through the dev cycle that happen. And then as I got into it, I started to see, like, all these other really cool benefits of it. This is gonna be like a commercial for it.
Brian Casel:But they it, you know, they they do a really cool integration with, like, GitHub pull requests and and stuff like that. So next week like, I spent a couple days this week, like, setting it up and experimenting with it and learning it and getting getting organized. Next week, I'm gonna sort of, like, show it to the team and a couple videos on, like, how things are organized. Let's start start to move our communications into here, and and we'll see how that goes.
Jordan Gal:And then the adoption process. Yeah. Just look looking them up. Pretty pretty hot start up. $17,000,000.
Jordan Gal:Both around some Sequoia, Dick Costello, a bunch of well known people investing. It's like, alright. You know? Hot hot shit.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Really, really nice product design interface experience. They're the product of
Jordan Gal:the moment where everyone's copying their marketing site.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. They've been they've been in the market for a couple of years now, I think. But but yeah. Definite especially for, like, dev tools, they've they've been really solid.
Brian Casel:I definitely took some cues from, like, their layout, like, settings, layouts, and stuff. It's it's how it's the direction I took in Clarity Flow. So
Jordan Gal:Nice. Well, for me next week, the board meeting is the big one. And then, you know, funny enough, on Wednesday of next week, I'm doing a Mixergy interview.
Brian Casel:Oh, nice.
Jordan Gal:Old school. I'm so I'm so excited to
Brian Casel:Hell, yeah. Yeah. You're in the second one? Second or third one?
Jordan Gal:I think it's the third.
Brian Casel:Nice.
Jordan Gal:Maybe second. I don't I think it's either second or third. And Andrew and I have have grown friendly, and he's he's an investor in Rally.
Brian Casel:Oh, is he? Yes. Andrew's the man.
Jordan Gal:He's awesome. So I I can't wait to get back on and, like, go through things. I'm sure he's gonna bring me down all, like, the memories around, like, what happened. He's a great interviewer.
Brian Casel:So I I really think he's, like, the best in our in our industry. Yeah. Like, the gold standard of of interview podcasts. Yep. That's right.
Brian Casel:Tune in to I don't, you know, I don't tune, like, every episode like I used to, but, like, I still tune in to just to get that, like it's it's always like an energy boost listening to a a Mixergy interview, you know, hearing a good story. So Yep. Good stuff.
Jordan Gal:And that's it. I'm excited for a nice weekend. Got a bunch of soccer tryouts. It's finally 70 degrees and and sunny.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. Sun's out. I'm gonna shut these computers off and have a good, good weekend and watch some NBA playoffs and, yeah, try to try to get back at it on Monday. Good stuff.
Jordan Gal:Thanks for listening, everyone.
Brian Casel:Alright. Later, folks.
