Learning to do business (over and over)
Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrapped Web. Brian, it's great to be back.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Good to be back on. We're nearing the end of the summer here. Still got a few more weeks, but you're you're back from vacation. How are feeling, dude?
Jordan Gal:I feel good. It feels nice to be back. I was in Michigan for two weeks, which was nice and also one week too long. And I got back on Sunday and had a board meeting on Monday. So that that second week of work was wasn't full of work.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But my mind was thinking through slides and deck and numbers and narrative and, you know, wrangling people, making sure everyone's set for the meeting. And Yeah. It's, you know, it's still not that big in terms of, like, number of people, but it's a it's a stressful thing.
Brian Casel:Deal. Right? Yep. Yep. I mean, I know we go through this sort of routine whenever we do our vacation.
Brian Casel:So like, yeah, like, how how did that vacation go? You said it's it was like one week too long. We we we've had that happen to us quite a bit where we'll go on a trip and it's like, this could have been four days instead of seven or something like that. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Right. The issue with the two week vacation is that I'm not about to take off two weeks.
Brian Casel:Exactly.
Jordan Gal:Right. If it's one week, maybe I I'll take off. If But it's two weeks, I'm not taking off two weeks, which means I'm not really off, which means I'm kinda working the entire time. Mhmm. And right now where we are in the business, I am playing the role of salesperson on certain deals.
Jordan Gal:And we had some really great prospects and demos and second calls while I was away. So
Brian Casel:Oh, so you're doing, like, actual sales calls while you're out there?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. I I really minimized all the things other than, like, calls with outside people. Right? Not internal calls, but but calls with important partners and potential customers.
Jordan Gal:And that just meant I just had a little bit in the back of my mind on, okay. Tomorrow morning at nine, I got this call or it's 01:00 right now and we're having ice cream, but I got a 02:00 call. So do I need to leave before everyone else is ready? And should I take a different car? So it's just, you know, part of the deal.
Brian Casel:But Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Wifey's cool. She understands where we are right now in the biz, and that's what's necessary. And it's also fun. I I I had a great time on vacation itself, and those calls are you know, they're that's the fun stuff, the those opportunities.
Brian Casel:It reminds me of, like, the very first few months of launching AudienceOps. I mean, this is literally in month four or month five of that business when it was just all sales calls. We were just lining up our first, I don't know, ten, twenty clients in in in the first couple of months there. My family and I were driving around the country, going between Airbnbs. And I literally remember doing sales calls in the car with my one year old in the back and the dog in the back.
Brian Casel:And, like, I'd be like, look. Hey, family. Just, like, for, like, twenty minutes, I I just gotta do this. Just sorry. Like and we're, like, in between states.
Brian Casel:You know? That's right.
Jordan Gal:This is how we pay for vacation, so it's justified.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and Michigan's beautiful. You know, we we had a house on the lake facing west, so it got these amazing sunsets. I posted a picture on on Twitter. And, yeah, if you're not familiar with Michigan,
Brian Casel:I can get, like at at some point, I gotta, like, pick your brain about Michigan so you can, like, plan our vacation there because that's, like, one one region in the country we haven't really been.
Jordan Gal:So Okay. I'm I'm about to write an email to my best friend from high school who's going up there, So I'll just keep that and be able to to forward to you.
Brian Casel:Nice. Nice.
Jordan Gal:That's it. But now the board meeting feels like it was weeks ago, even though it was on Monday. And, yeah, I'm pumped up, man. I feel I feel great. We are in sales mode.
Jordan Gal:We have our pipeline full. Yeah. I'm excited to talk about the learning curve we're going up, and I'm going up personally. How about you? Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, you know, I think as always, we have a little bit of overlap there. Like, I've been doing some some learning on the sales side as well. And so we can get into that. I've been you know, I think it's funny. I think on the last podcast, I I probably talked about folks in our circles, like, you know, doing, like, the personal audience thing and, like, investing time and and doing videos or newsletters and daily updates and stuff like that.
Brian Casel:And I was sort of saying, like, you know, I don't understand the point, and and it's not for me anymore. Well, I'm I guess I'm sort of, like, challenging myself on that. And I and I and in the last two weeks, I have been trying to do, you know, building in public by sharing usually in the morning, like, what I worked on yesterday, what I'm working on today, and maybe something that's on my plate, and and I'm trying to show the work as much as possible. I'm doing that on on x or Twitter or whatever. X.
Brian Casel:That's right. And you
Jordan Gal:you're you're doing it in an interesting way. It's long form video. Are you just
Brian Casel:You know?
Pippin Williamson:Just talking
Jordan Gal:through what you're working on?
Brian Casel:I think it's evolving. I'm trying to figure out the right the right way to do it for for me. My main goals with it are, you know, really number one is just to you know, because I I've been going a pretty long time now, a couple years where I I'm doing almost nothing in terms of being public other than this podcast. And a little bit of tweeting here and there, but mostly just I'm not, like, trying to build an audience really. And even now, I'm not necessarily trying to grow an audience, but I am trying to be a little bit more intentional about being public and sharing my work.
Brian Casel:So here's why. Right? Like, one would be, like, for self accountability. I think that I I'm actually finding it's not that I ever have any issues with, like, motivation or even focus. I think I'm pretty good overall with, like, setting priorities and executing in general.
Brian Casel:But I have found that there is an ex there's a new level, like a new gear of that self accountability and execution when you when you state publicly, like, this week or or today, I am working on this, and tomorrow, I'm gonna need to publicly report back on that. And if I don't do it, like, there there were several days in the last two weeks where I did not do what I intended to do that day. Whatever got got distracted, got went on the sidetrack, whatever it was. And it felt like shit. And even some of those days, decided not to record a video.
Brian Casel:I don't know. Like, maybe yeah. It it just adds a little bit of extra pressure, and I think that's sort of helpful, at least for me. The other the other thing is to just share the work. I mean, the the whole build in public hashtag, if you will, like, it's gotten to a point where it's just sharing MRR graphs, and I think that's the least interesting way to do it.
Brian Casel:And I just wanna show
Jordan Gal:See how we grew to 5,000,000 ARR in this many months is, like, the lamest, least valuable thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I and I really strongly believe that, like, it's it's actually interesting to see how people work. Show me the work. Don't show me the final outcome. That's interesting too sometimes.
Brian Casel:But, like Mhmm. How do you do the work? So so in these videos, I'm I'm sharing my screen, and I'm trying to just literally show I'm going through, like, the list of what I'm doing that day, but I'm but for each thing, I'm I'm showing this is what it looks like in Notion. This was my email with that person and and what that exchange sort of looks like. Here's how we're planning this.
Brian Casel:Here's how I'm managing my my dev team and and working through these issues. And I'm learning some stuff. I'm getting some feedback from folks like, oh, like, you organize linear that way. That's that's different from how I do it.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay.
Brian Casel:And then and then there's like the network effects too. It's like, alright, well, why is this actually worth my time? Well, it it does help to not necessarily grow a large audience, but like a small connected audience who actually is tuned into what I'm working on is definitely helpful, like, when it comes to partnerships, word-of-mouth, hiring, asking for feedback, ask asking to learn. I mean, that that's another thing that we'll we'll cover here. Like, I've been asking people to show me how they do sales, and listeners of this podcast or people who connect with me on Twitter, like, they are available because I put myself out there.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It is presence has a value in and of itself, just being there as opposed to being quiet. And even if it doesn't feel like there's like there's a direct connection to showing how you set up a project leading directly into coaches signing up for your product, like it still makes a difference. Yeah. I got a little taste of it this week when Andrew Warner posted our Mixergy podcast.
Jordan Gal:And thank you to everyone who commented some really nice stuff and, you know, made me feel great about about it. And at the same time, it also made me one of the comments was the algorithm, it hasn't been showing me Jordan's post.
Brian Casel:Dude, multiple people commented or tweeted to me about that too. Right? Like, they they went to my profile, tweeted like like, told me that, like, hey, all these videos that you've been posting for the last two weeks, I did
Jordan Gal:I not know. It's it's very it's very frustrating
Brian Casel:because the It is pinned to my to my Twitter now, if you wanna see it.
Jordan Gal:Good. Good. Yeah.
Brian Casel:The But, dude, your your Mixergy interview, I told you and I and I told Andrew, that really your that was, like, one of my favorite MixerG interviews in in a long time. Like, it was one of those, like, standout, didn't really follow the formula on MixerG. It was just telling a really compelling story, like, talk about about your story with Kartik. I mean, really awesome. I definitely recommend people listen to it.
Jordan Gal:Thank you so much. I I appreciate that. What it it made me want to figure out, like, you're figuring out now how to how to post more authentically. Because I I also get a little jammed up on, like, what what do I wanna say here instead of just, like, blathering. I've almost, like, been warming up with, like, pictures from Michigan.
Jordan Gal:You know, just like like, what comes to mind almost from an innocent point of view. Like, this has no this is just Twitter, and this is just a way to publish to the Internet. I have there is no motive.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, there's no
Jordan Gal:there's nothing behind it. There's no plan. There's nothing. It's just interaction with a publishing platform. I've tried to strip away all the expectations and the things that I think about Twitter and what people are on there doing and all that.
Jordan Gal:I'm just like, no. This is this is I don't go to the office. There is no office. There's no group of people that I interact with. And like it or not, Twitter is actually the closest thing to those interactions.
Jordan Gal:And so make it what you want it to be.
Brian Casel:Make it what you want and just be authentic. And really that's what I'm trying to do in these videos. And also a big part of it for me now is like and I'm still questioning on on, like, how long I can actually sustain doing this on a regular I'll probably do it in spurts, go on and off. But, like but the thing is, like, this cannot take up too much of my time. You know?
Brian Casel:If if I were doing, like, the well produced YouTube channel thing, or Yeah. Or the or the in-depth newsletter writing thing, where I where I'm where I'm writing an essay on my blog every day or every week. Like, I I do not have the time to do that sort of stuff.
Jordan Gal:Like, that would Unless that's your business. Yeah.
Brian Casel:That would take multiple hours. Yeah. Unless I was actually doing a content business, I can't do that. I'm working on a SaaS. So the best thing and the thing that makes sense to me is like, well, every day I'm thinking about what I'm working on, and I'm and I'm reviewing work from yesterday.
Brian Casel:Why don't I just record I record it right into Clarity Flow, and then I export the video, and I put it up on Twitter, And and I write a tweet along with it. Like, here's here's the list, and here's the topic of what I talked about today. And it doesn't you know, I'm I'm I'm trying to get more efficient with it, like record for roughly ten minutes. And it it'll take me twenty, twenty five minutes overall to bullet point the list, record the video, export it, write the tweet, get it out. And then it's twenty, twenty five minutes in the morning.
Brian Casel:I could deal with that. Yeah. I have taken days off where it's just like, I just can't fit it in today. I just want to get right into work. But it has to be efficient and it also has to be like, I'm just sharing my byproducts here.
Brian Casel:I'm not taking a lot of extra time to ideate a whole new theory that I wanna write an essay about. I'm just like, here's literally what's on my plate today. Here's what I think is interesting about it. And if you're working on a SaaS, here's what I'm seeing in my SaaS. Like, this this is probably interesting bother for for what you're working on.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. There's an element to craft. Is that is that the right term maybe? That that that remains interesting in in what we do and how we do it. You know, it's it's it's like, you can get a little bored of the actual subject matter for your customers.
Jordan Gal:You know what I mean? Like, so yeah. There's so there's there's something to, like, how we work that
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, how how we make decisions and how we plan out big projects. Because all we ever see is the end product, what gets published, what gets shipped. Like, how did that actually come together? What were the open questions?
Brian Casel:What were the challenges? You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I like I like when so I I'm having two opposite experiences at the same time these days where on one end, I'm going through the learning curve on enterprise sales, and it's opening me up to this whole new world. And it feels great to learn something new and acknowledge that you're a beginner Yeah. And see this path of like, oh, there's this is kinda cool because it's a whole art form and a discipline that I didn't
Brian Casel:What I not
Jordan Gal:that familiar with. And at the same time, I'm kind of enjoying our unique approach to work and software and how we want to take it and the version what parts of orthodoxy in SaaS and B2B are we rejecting and how we do things our way. And I was thinking about this in the context of compensation recently because we are hiring our first account executive, so full on professional salesperson. I'm always questioning how compensation works there because it remains odd to me that one person on the team can make double, sometimes triple the amount of money that everyone else is making, but they're they're all doing the same thing. No.
Jordan Gal:They're not doing the same thing. They're trying to accomplish the same thing. They're trying to succeed in finding
Brian Casel:You're saying between, like, the like, a sales rep and, like, a lead developer. Or Or
Jordan Gal:even on the go to market team. Right? But but but you're right. Like, product manager, like, because when we're on these calls, sometimes I it's like right in my face when we're on a call with a potential customer. This is let's say it's the first call.
Jordan Gal:It's like this discovery thirty to forty five minute call. And we have myself. I guess in that situation, I'm the account executive. I'm the salesperson. And then we have the SDR who booked the demo, who did the outbound, and is the same person that we want on the call to introduce everyone.
Jordan Gal:Right? That keep that familiarity because that SDR probably talked to them on the phone to really close the the demo and schedule the call. And so it makes sense to have that person on the call. And then you have someone else from the team, and then maybe we have someone from product management. And and then this but the salesperson's gonna get this big commission check if the deal closes and everyone else doesn't.
Jordan Gal:It's like the strange thing. So I try to look at that. That's something where I try to challenge some orthodoxy, but also acknowledge I I don't have the scars that everyone else does that that has established things the way they are.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. It's always a question of like, well, do I do the thing that, like the formula, the tried and true formula, or maybe question that and do it a little bit differently? I don't know.
Jordan Gal:Yes. It's almost like you you need either confidence or ignorance or both to reject Orthodox.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, let's get into this because that is a thing that in the last couple of weeks here, outbound sales has become a top priority for me. I have several top priorities, unfortunately, and that's one of them. True. And, you know, because we're doing we're doing things on I I I'm really separating out marketing from sales.
Brian Casel:I really view these as completely separate channels. Completely agree. Yep. We're doing we have marketing activity happening, but I I really believe now that, literally all marketing, everything that falls under that big umbrella is is slow. There is no fast marketing.
Brian Casel:There you know, SEO is slow. Content is slow. Even influencers and integrations, yeah, you can have one big event that can send you stuff, but developing that stuff over time, making it strong, that's still a slow burn to get to where it needs to be. Sales, it so we're doing those things. We're running some ads now.
Brian Casel:We're doing SEO. We're we're doing that. But the we still don't yet have like a like a consistent because I know exactly who our best customers are. I know where to find them. I know what they look like.
Brian Casel:I know what they're doing, what where they're hanging out. We need to a way to knock on their door and say, hello. We have this product. This is this is the thing that that I that I know you guys really well. So this is like, what do you think about this?
Brian Casel:Yep. You know, outbound develop sales. Like, just like literally one by one hand to hand combat. Just get in there and do it. Right?
Brian Casel:So Yeah. That's what I'm trying to learn how to piece together. And I've I've done, you know, a bit of, like, cold outreach before, but I haven't done it in the new Clarity Flow positioning and Mhmm. Name and product and value proposition. You know?
Jordan Gal:So Yeah. So you you don't really know if it works, if it doesn't work, what it takes to make it work, and so on.
Brian Casel:Right. Right. I've I've I've dabbled in it under Zip Message. I've done it before in other businesses, but there's a lot I haven't really gotten it to work. And I think a large part of that comes down to, like, the target customer and the and the value proposition and Yeah.
Brian Casel:The pitch, really. Because tactics are just tactics. But there are a lot of, like, new new approaches to this stuff that I've been learning, so it's been really cool.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and well, I was gonna say contract value matters a lot, but not not necessarily.
Brian Casel:It does, but but I'm also learning see, this is where you and I will probably approach this differently because of the contract value. Like, I'm I'm looking at, like, automated ways to do outreach to generate demos, demo requests. Okay. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. Right. For us, the contract value.
Brian Casel:Automated, like, you know, like cold email outreach and stuff like that, but but also, like, hiring a VA and and doing lists and and research, but, like, a system and a process where it's not exactly, like, one to
Jordan Gal:one upfront
Brian Casel:until until it becomes one to one. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Okay. So, yeah, it it might be more of a hybrid, whereas because our contract value is high, we we have to do that one on one work. So for us, outbound first, outbound has worked and is leading the company. We are a sales led software company right now.
Jordan Gal:Not marketing, not product, but sales. On marketing, our head of marketing is on maternity leave, and I did not do a good enough job of setting things up in a way where they would continue to run without her. And so our marketing has slowed down dramatically. We still get inbound, but it's mostly from SEO and organic and some comparison pages with our competitors. But the majority of opportunities are coming in from outbound, and those are multi touch.
Jordan Gal:So it's email and then LinkedIn and then phone call. Yeah. We just heard about someone having success in our market with Instagram DMs for for brands. So it is it is one to one work. We do get the lists.
Jordan Gal:We buy the lists. And then from there, there's a lot of work that goes into it. And we do have one person that on it full time. We've cycled through a few people, but the person we have on right now, Drake, is excellent and been with us for a while, and he's kinda set the bar for anyone else that comes into the company to that that they have
Brian Casel:to What was, like, the difference between the the folks who you cycled through until until you found Drake? Like, what was different
Jordan Gal:about I think Drake is very creative and communicates well, both written and verbal. So he does a really good job at using his head for the situation. So if he gets a response back to a cold email and he sees that there's some daylight, it wasn't a screw off. It was a, yeah, it looks interesting, but I doubt you can handle our complexity. Right?
Jordan Gal:Typical kind of like quick like, that's not a no. That's not a no answer. That's some it's daylight basically.
Brian Casel:That's an engagement. That's like
Jordan Gal:Yes. Is that an example? Right. Yeah. Yes.
Jordan Gal:So he is very good at turning that into an opportunity. So he will do something like take a screenshot of their existing checkout, go to our demo account and upload their logo, and then send them a screenshot of the Rally checkout with their logo and and then send that over and say, this is what your checkout looks like right now. Here are a few bullet points on the things that we don't think you're doing well. Here's what your checkout would look like with us, and here are the things the features that match the things that I don't see right now.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Right. So he's using that. He's using his head along with some hustle, and he's saying, when I go to your checkout, I don't see express payment methods at the top, and that's gotta hurt your conversions because people not everyone wants to fill things out. They wanna use Apple Pay or PayPal. We can do that for you really easily.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So it's it's that it's it's work. It is full time work. For us, we have to do it because the contract value is high and the sales are complex and the merchants are very guarded. Hopefully, you're able to do less work per opportunity, and it all works together. The fact that contract value is lower, but the work is lower, the numbers are greater, that type of
Brian Casel:thing. I mean, the way that I look at it is well, number one, like, we're running ads right now too, and I see this as, like, competing with ads in terms of a channel. Like like, we're you know, I'm I'm gonna be spending, like, several thousand a month on ads, but I could put together the tools and some people in place for the sales outbound for roughly the same amount, if not less.
Jordan Gal:Competing really a little for budget. Budget, yes. Right? Not competing against each other so much because they can work hand in hand, but
Brian Casel:like, what are the budget? Which one is going to be more effective and more profitable? Yep. And more effective at just driving more sales demos. And I also think about it like, obviously, I wanna just drive more sales demos overall, but I do and and one of the things I'm I'm learning from from by the way, like, Nick Taylor, listener of this podcast, I I got to meet him, and and he runs a really fantastic SaaS business with the Juvo leads.
Brian Casel:So he was one of the folks who who I connected with. And he just showed me the whole stack of of how they do like outbound and, you know, all all the tools, but also some strategy and and what it actually looks like long term. And one of the one of the takeaways from that is outbound is fundamentally different than inbound marketing. Because marketing, they are they are in the in the mode of searching for a tool or they have a need right now. They're they're looking for solutions.
Brian Casel:But outbound, you're interrupting them. You you know? So they're just not in a buying mode yet. So I'm so really, see outbound as as sort of just like planting the seed. You know?
Brian Casel:Like, here's hey. We exist. Knock it on your door. Just check this out. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:If you have this problem that I know other coaches have been dealing with, I just wanna make you aware we're here. And I, you know, I I don't know what the exact messaging is. We're we're putting that together and and the different touch points and things. But it's not like a hard sell. It it's it's not it's it's just like, yeah, it'll be repeated touches, but it's not like, get in get in here by by the August, you know, to get this deal.
Brian Casel:It's you know, because that's the other thing about Clarity Flow now is that, like, it's a larger product. It's a most coaches who sign up and convert, it's because they happen to be launching a a new program soon. Okay. You know? Or or they finished their previous one.
Brian Casel:Now they're doing their fall cohort, and they're thinking about retooling up for that. So it's so now is a good time for them to think about that.
Jordan Gal:And So some shifts in the business?
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and that's pretty common with coaches. Like, they'll go seasonal, like, throughout the year. Like, they they might do a spring big course and coaching program, and then the summer's quiet, and then they're they gear up for, a fall thing or, you know, whatever. It's, like, different for every coach.
Brian Casel:So but just, like, letting them know that we're there, but it it's still gonna be a lot of work for them to like migrate in and we can help with that and and all that kind of stuff. So Yeah. Yeah. It's just a lot of good good learning, you know? And what I like to the way that I I'm I'm curious to know how how do you actually go about learning this stuff?
Brian Casel:Because my thing is I'm not looking for just use this tool or just use this step by step process, and it will work for everyone. I'm much more interested in, show me exactly everything how how it works in your business. And there's gonna be pieces of this that probably just don't apply in my case, but pieces of it that are just like, oh, that's awesome. I hadn't thought of that.
Jordan Gal:And Mhmm.
Brian Casel:That's that's really cool. And I I've seen, like, a lot of both of those things, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. I think we're doing it the right way. And what I mean by that is if we have resources in the bank given to us by investors to go fast, then the right thing to do is to use the resources. And and what that means is just being very okay with not trying to learn it myself. And we brought in a consultant that we got introduced to by one of our VCs, and she has been showing us the way.
Jordan Gal:Like very straightforward, right? That we are basically buying the expertise that we didn't have in house. And then there's always some luck in that. She's amazing and she clicks with our company and she and I get along really well. And it's perfect timing for her.
Jordan Gal:She just left one company and is in between things, so this suits her perfectly. And, right, that's that's kind of what it takes, a little bit of luck and and then the right person. And then
Brian Casel:like, helps you, like, hire and and figure out what the roles are and what their and what their work processes should look like?
Jordan Gal:She's just you know what she's doing? It's a combination of showing us what the best practices are and then applying her what she would call scars or scar tissue. So she's been on a sales team that's really good that ends up hating their marketing team and there's constant infighting in the company because everyone's trying to claim who brought the lead in and who's responsible for the sale. And then she'll go to a different company and that works, but then the engineering doesn't work. So she's just trying to prevent things from going wrong that she has seen go wrong over and over again.
Jordan Gal:And I think she's really enjoying that aspect of our being our go to market function being relatively immature so she can help shape it. I'm always a little bit aware of what scar tissue can do in that way. So she's maybe made a bit rigid from all of her experience. I'm layering in our unique personality. But for the most part, I'm following her lead and a lot of it becomes very obvious.
Jordan Gal:Here's an example. Land and expand. Right? Familiar term. I never really understood what the hell that meant until we talked to a merchant that was big enough that if we applied our normal pricing parameters, like if we charge the same number of basis points on GMV that we do for other merchants, the deal would be like a million dollars a year, which sounds pretty cool, but you know who's gonna let you walk in the door to a million dollars a year for a startup that they've never met before?
Jordan Gal:Absolutely nobody. Nobody. Mhmm. And so how do you get in to an opportunity that should be a million dollars a year, but how do you land? How do you get in under that threshold of about 250 k a year that doesn't need to go to like super committee?
Jordan Gal:And how do you not just make your product cheaper and give away too much value? So it's like pricing and packaging with land and expand in mind working for larger merchants, you start to say, oh, maybe what we should be doing is breaking apart our feature set and have a core offering that's cheaper and that can slide underneath that 250 k threshold and get us in the door. And then When
Brian Casel:they have this budget and you wanna be kinda operating in that realm and then, like because then because then when they're when they when they are looking to expand their tools, their vendors, they would first go to the people that they're already working with before they go to new people. So if you're already working with them
Jordan Gal:You've already you're in. You've got approval. You've got a contract in place. The invoices are being paid. And from there, customer success comes in and identifies the potential for up selling that merchant into the higher tiers with these new features by teaching them how to use them.
Jordan Gal:Yep. So so like it's that type of thing where I like hit myself on the forehead like, oh, you know, how do I not know this? But it's it's I'm just not as aware of it as someone who's lived in that world before because I've never confronted that situation before.
Brian Casel:This is I mean, love that. Because it's like you know, I'm I'm really just thinking a lot about, like, how do I, like, learn and and put and execute on on the things that I'm learning. And I like, I'm much more hands on and, you know, much smaller team. Like, I'm the one actually, like, doing and putting a lot of these projects in place. Eventually, hiring someone to run the process, but I wired all up.
Brian Casel:Right? So when I get on a call with another founder, and I'm just asking them, hey, just show me your whole sales stack and your process. And they share their screen, and I can see the nitty gritty. And and then I get to and then I there's little, like, nuggets of real talk in there that are just, like, gold. You know?
Brian Casel:That, like you know, because if if you're just talking to someone in the hallway at a conference or you hear them on a podcast and it's like, oh, yeah. Just just run this, sales process or or or, I don't know, like, do the land and expand strategy or or, like, or or, I don't know. Like, that's You need more. You need more the end result. Like like, me and my small team, we still need to figure out how to actually do this without making a thousand mistakes.
Brian Casel:So, like, when when I'm looking at at this guy's screen, it's like, oh, they they they integrate email with LinkedIn touches in this way. I hadn't thought about that. And then and then I'll hear them say like, yeah, we tried it like these ways and that didn't really work. And then and then this got a little bit tricky, but this is this is what we've been doing for a while. So, and then we needed, like, a custom hookup over here because of this or that.
Brian Casel:And it's like, oh, alright. I see I see how it all all the dots connect now. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. There are definitely some, like, one of the things that she's taught me and us that's universal is to be customer centric. And that, again, is like this random term that you just hear. But we make we made many mistakes that were not customer centric even if we like to think of ourselves.
Jordan Gal:Oh, we love the customer. We're customer centric. So we would do one mistake. I have two two examples. One mistake we would make is in that initial thirty to forty five minute demo running through the demo, we would show what the product was capable of.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. So a perfect example is we have multiple options on how to use the checkout. You can use our hosted checkout. You can have it customized. You can host it yourself.
Jordan Gal:You can use our elements and build your own page, or we can build a page for you and then hand it over to your IT team and they can own the page itself and our plumbing will run through it. So your team feels okay that they have control over it. And we would just be talking about, like, this huge range of options. And that's not customer centric. That's like talking about what you're capable of.
Brian Casel:That's like, what would you like to buy today?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. And looking back, I feel like such an idiot because that's how I would talk. Like, oh, isn't that amazing? You have all these options.
Jordan Gal:They don't care about the options. They have their own problems. And now we do a lot more discovery. And then we make a recommendation on how to use our product based on what they're actually trying to do. So it's like a perfect example of like this universal rule.
Jordan Gal:Be customer centric in the process. Instead of thinking about what you want to accomplish, think about how your customer needs to think to I
Brian Casel:fundamentally believe that most people who are being sold on a they opt in to come on a sales demo, they come into the call with a picture in their mind of like, this is what I hope this thing is. Right? Or these are the check boxes that I hope it checks because that's what I'm looking for, and I'm waiting until I see those things. So that's that's what the discovery is. Right?
Brian Casel:It's like, tell me, like, get give me a sense of what you're looking for so I really understand it. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. For for you, it's you know, you don't wanna show every single feature. You wanna understand. I've been
Brian Casel:doing some sales demos lately. I did one two days ago, and I the vast majority of the time on the call, I am not sharing my screen. I'm not showing the product. That's at the very end. Sometimes if we even get to it at all, I'm spending the whole call just asking them questions and understanding, what are you looking for?
Brian Casel:And the really exciting thing now is that it's it's still I'm still seeing the confirmations of of the product that that we've built for this market. Like, the same confirmations that I've had in the last year of doing a lot of these calls where it's like, it's a it's a lineup of things. Like, well, I do these like one on one coaching, but I wanna move more into the group coaching. And I really wanna get into more asynchronous. But I but I need a I need to run my community over here, and I have this course material over here.
Brian Casel:I need to integrate all these things under one coaching experience for my clients. And and they and and, you know, I just said that really quickly, but they they'll take like twenty minutes to sort of like explain that those are the pieces that they're trying to glue together, which is exactly what what we've built with Clarity Flow. And and and so it's really cool to hear them describe the needs for the things that that we've been building. And it just given me that confirmation that I get giddy when I'm on the call and I have to sort of hold myself back from trying to sell. Right?
Brian Casel:You know, because the like, the guy was saying, you know, well, I have these, like, course courses that I wanna sell, but they're but they're really I just, like, break them up piecemeal, like, different for each client. I sort of personalize it, which is exactly how we've designed our programs feature. And we just launched that this week. So I'm like, oh, I just wanna, like, be like, oh, we we got this feature and here's how it works and you can do this or that. But it's like, if I just, like, keep asking a few more questions, like, tell me more about that.
Brian Casel:Tell like, why is that important? Then near the end of the call, then I can just get then I know, like, there are just a few little touch points and, like, keywords that I can that I can touch on when I show the product. Like, you know, your your client can go through your course material, but then ask you a coaching question right right in line. And, like, then it's like, oh, that's that's different. That's that's for me.
Brian Casel:You know? Like Mhmm. Because it's something that I picked up earlier. You know? Yeah.
Brian Casel:So I just need more of those to happen. I need more of those on my calendar. That's that's the thing.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That I I hear you. I during the board meeting, one of the questions that I found difficult to answer was which one is more important, generating new opportunities or getting better at closing the opportunities that are coming our way?
Brian Casel:That is a problem for me right now. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay. Like, right. It I don't know if chicken and egg is quite right, but but you you you want both. Right?
Jordan Gal:You wanna get better at closing and you need more opportunities, but maybe at every at any given point in time, one is actually more important than the other.
Brian Casel:This this actually gets into my last thing a little bit. And it's the age old thing. We're gonna keep talking about it forever, It's that product versus marketing and sales. Right? And I'm a solo founder.
Brian Casel:But actually getting back to that, what we're just saying, like, the challenge is, like, converting the you know, I I had a sales call with someone. They are super excited. Like, I could definitely hear, they are really excited about what they're seeing with Clarity Flow. And I get emails all the time like, Oh, this looks perfect. Okay.
Brian Casel:And I also ask them on the call on all calls, I'll say like, So what other tools are you looking at right now? And they'll tell me a few others, but they will verbally tell me like, Yeah, but those not so great. This is the one that sort of checks all the boxes that I'm looking for. It's like, Awesome. Amazing.
Brian Casel:Okay. Yeah. Don't yet have like, some of them do go on to convert, but, like, we don't have a consistent, like, alright. Like, if they're that excited on on the call, like, this needs to be, like, an 80% plus likelihood that they are gonna be updating.
Jordan Gal:It turns into. Okay.
Brian Casel:And it's not that number right now at all. It's we have have disjointed onboarding flows. There should be additional calls where I'm helping them get set up and and checking in. There should you know, we need more of that going on. You know, we need just done with you guidance on going from the call to setting up, to inviting your clients, to really getting the value and and put and, like, putting it live in your business and and publishing it.
Brian Casel:That's all sort of disjointed right now because of the product. Right? Like, there are things in the product that, again, I keep saying like, we're like 90%. We just shipped the programs feature. We shipped some custom branding stuff.
Brian Casel:We need to get to the payments feature. That's the other big one. And I I did this in one of my build in public videos this week where it's like, okay. Today on Tuesday, I had a sales demo, and I got this other email from this other person that says like, Hey, when are you launching that payments feature? That's the email that I get every single week from people.
Brian Casel:Hey. But So I would love to spend all of my hours every day just hammering on sales, getting the outreach programs going, doing whatever, other influencer partnerships, stuff like that. But really all of my hours still are going on the product. I'm managing the team, I'm building stuff myself, I'm shipping stuff, I'm getting rid of those coming soon labels so that I can be on a call and say, We have all the things that you've just asked for. Right now we have four out of the five things that you've asked for.
Brian Casel:And some people buy it and we have a great product today. That's why we're revving up the sales stuff and I wanna be doing that. If I'm full time on that, then everything else gets paused on the product. And that's where I'm frustrated right now because it's my team I never want to be the person who's If there's a team issue, it's my issue. I'm not managing I'm not managing them well.
Brian Casel:I'm not either giving them enough leeway to do their thing, or I'm micromanaging too much, or or I'm not micromanaging enough, or I have hired the wrong people. I have some open questions right now in terms of, do I have the right team in place, the right structure? Because if the fundamental problem that I face right now is I, as the head of product and the head of marketing, I'm a solo founder, so I don't have another head of of either of those.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:If if I have a painful time trying to allocate enough resources to both of those things, then like, how do I fix that problem? I I you know, hiring a separate head of product is not the answer in my situation. Hiring a head of marketing is not the answer. I've tried that multiple times. So I've also tried being more efficient with my team, like different workflows, like managing queues a little bit better, managing my inbox, which is kind of chaos every single morning.
Brian Casel:Know, I'm now like, after trying a bunch of things, I'm I'm now up to the point where I'm like, well, I think maybe the makeup of my team is maybe not right. And, you know, one thing that I'll speak to here, I'm curious to hear your thoughts because I think this is a little counterintuitive. Okay. For me, solo founder, product person, and I'm technical too. Right?
Brian Casel:I work directly with the devs and I build stuff myself. I find that I am just way more efficient with junior engineers than I am with senior engineers, which seems weird. Right? Like, we wanna ship more. We want done faster.
Brian Casel:Hire a senior and not a junior. Right? I Right. In my experience, I think it's the opposite. And literally looking back like two or three years when I only had one or two juniors, we were moving way faster.
Jordan Gal:Okay. You got to break that down. Why do you think that is? What's what's happening there?
Brian Casel:I think that-
Jordan Gal:You don't wanna delegate?
Brian Casel:No. I I think I I just I just have found that, like, the more senior devs that I have worked with, I you know, there now, but also in the past, they're really experienced and they do really, really great work. But their ability to ship like like, the fit for an early stage bootstrap startup is a little bit difficult for a senior dev to get on board with. Because I I do find that the more industry experience that a developer has, the more of a fit they are for for a larger, more established product. Because they're more conservative, more process.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And especially back end engineers where it's like they're just a little bit more concerned with scale scalability issues and, they're just, like, kind of fixing every bug tracking every single bug and Future
Jordan Gal:proofing things.
Brian Casel:Over testing things and refactoring things. And and I and I do find myself, like and I I've I've just tried to communicate to my team over and over again, like, we are early stage. The thing that the business needs is to ship. We need to ship. We need speed.
Brian Casel:Like, speed, speed, speed. Right? And so the thing with junior developers is that, I don't know, roughly 50 call it fifty fifty. Half the time, you can get a really talented junior developer. It it this this only works if they are talented.
Brian Casel:If if they you know, because there's a lot of juniors that just don't have the skill set yet, and that's that's totally fine. They just need time
Jordan Gal:to learn. You need the talent without without the scar tissue of
Brian Casel:But there are there are some younger devs in the world who just are talented. They can and they and I have some junior devs on my team who every issue that I give them, they are knocking it out of the park with almost no fixes or redo this or, oh, you missed this detail. They're just detail oriented. They can communicate great. They like, I'll I'll put a queue in my junior developer's list, maybe five tickets, and I think that each one might take, like, a half a day.
Brian Casel:And she knocks, like, four out of the five out in, like, one one day. And I'm like, what?
Jordan Gal:Like Okay.
Brian Casel:Whereas the other one, it's like we have we have tickets that I'm like, this should be a one or two day project, and it's sitting there for three weeks because you got sidetracked with all these other issues and raising all these other scaling concerns when I'm like, I don't I don't care about
Jordan Gal:that right now. We need
Brian Casel:to ship this big feature. You know? So I I'm sort of talking in circles, but I think that the
Jordan Gal:No.
Brian Casel:That that is the thing for me now. It's like, I'm starting to question, I don't know, the
Jordan Gal:How you have things set up? Yeah. Alright. So let's let's take a step back for a sec. It sounds to me like you are when if we go back and keep it simple and we say, is the problem more opportunities or is the problem doing a better job at closing those opportunities?
Jordan Gal:It sounds to me like when you think about product and we talk about product, that's really the function that closes opportunities and turns them into customers. Right? So it's a little different
Brian Casel:We do need more opportunities. We do need more outbound.
Jordan Gal:Yes. But but what's it what what's that gonna do for you, though? It's gonna create opportunities that don't get closed?
Brian Casel:I mean, that's the that's the problem. Like, I that's why I I firmly believe that we have both problems, and they're both number one. It's not it's not one and two.
Jordan Gal:I don't know, man. That's that's pretty tough. My gut says that you gotta put more emphasis on getting the product to a point where it will close those opportunities more often.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean and and that's what the reality is on the ground. Right.
Jordan Gal:That seems like the right. That's
Brian Casel:your nature. All my hours today, this podcast, I've been in the code shipping a feature and getting it out for Monday. Yeah. And that's been most of my week too. Right?
Brian Casel:A little bit of work on sales, 90% on the product this week. And that's probably gonna be next week too. So it's like, I I I do like, I don't wanna let August go by and we haven't shipped what I intend to ship this month. And that means more hours on the product than sales and marketing. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But but there's there's the other reality, which is we have an MRR graph, we have a runway, and we do have customers who buy today. Mhmm. We get
Jordan Gal:we get customers reality of people paying. That's right.
Brian Casel:So it's not like we have a product that is unusable. We we have very, very happy customers who
Jordan Gal:are Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Super excited about what we have today. But I also get the emails like, do you have the payments piece? Do you have the programs piece? Do you have the spaces piece? I mean, now we have two of those two of those three things, but, like, we don't have it all yet.
Brian Casel:And it's Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Help me help me figure something out here. I wanna I wanna understand the differences between our two situations where it feels to me like we have an additional step where for us closing the opportunity is separate from the product. There really is a separation. We have a let's generate opportunities in the go to market function.
Jordan Gal:And then in the sales function, we have let's take that opportunity and get them into a contract and sign. And then it goes over to the product.
Brian Casel:Yes. Right? We I do have right. I think you're right about that difference because I I would imagine that in your case, much larger companies, so the people that you're selling to are not probably not technical. They're probably not on the No.
Jordan Gal:The engineering team, they get involved, but it's almost like nobody expects I mean, they're not even creating an account. They'll sign a contract
Brian Casel:for $7,000
Jordan Gal:and they've never Well, been in the
Brian Casel:okay. So one of the interesting things I've noticed about a lot of the leads that I've been speaking to this month and last month is that a lot of them are coming in with a lot of questions before they even open up a trial account. And they'll literally say, I just wanna get all these questions answered about the product before I even sign up because I don't have time to try things Right.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So But here is
Brian Casel:the conversation is still very much about the product. Not about like aspirational. The other thing about it is so this might be different. I'm not sure in your case. But in my case, I'm fitting into a process and workflow and job to be done that they're already doing in some in some form with some tool.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:They're they're looking at replacing that with Clarity Flow. So, like I see.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Ours are usually using the checkout provided to them by the platform, but some of them are switching over from one of our competitors. And some of them are considering building versus buying, or they're considering a few different competitors at the same time and going through a process of making a decision. But but here's here's the dynamic that's happening on our end is when we are in the sales process and the and the prospect says, can you do x, y, z, one, two, three? And we say we can do x and y, we can do two and three, we can't do z and one or whatever the hell I just said.
Jordan Gal:And what we the dynamic ends up being, we don't have that feature yet, but we also have paying customers, which means we don't necessarily need that in order to have a business. However, you want that, we want you as a customer. If you sign this contract, we will build you that feature. Right. And since our go to market ramped up, our roadmap of features and feature work has gone from a 100% or close to it of what we want to build next.
Jordan Gal:And it has been squeezed out by what merchants want based on them signing a contract. And that creates an interesting dynamic because you are being paid to build the features that are most important to merchants. Yeah. It does create it does create tension and it creates pressure. I think that's the You're you're basically selling the product without the features that they need.
Jordan Gal:But if they commit, then you can commit.
Brian Casel:The thing that I'm seeing on on that is is that all the feature requests are it's crazy how simple they They're all the same. And it that's exciting to me because it's like, alright. Good. Because we're that's exactly what we're building. So Right.
Brian Casel:So Wouldn't that tell
Jordan Gal:you to focus a lot more on that than on sales and marketing? Yes. And and stop stop feeling guilty about about the sales and marketing because you have been told by the market, not by yourself.
Brian Casel:The the MRR graph has a way of making you feel guilty.
Jordan Gal:Fuck. I hear you. Yeah. For me, it's the damn bank account.
Brian Casel:That's shit. I mean, that that too. You know? But it's like it it's but what you're saying about, like, it's I when are you gonna have this feature? Or or they they just a lot of them just assume that we do have it.
Brian Casel:So I'll be on a demo call and say, like, how do I deploy like some course content along with my coaching here? And before this week, we didn't have a good answer to that. So it would be a lot of like, like I can't say to a lead, hey, you're real special. We're gonna build that feature. I could maybe like sort of lie about that and say it's for you, but we are building that and we've actually shipped it this week.
Brian Casel:But that's the conversation that I'm constantly having on these calls. That's where you're right, where it's like, I need to get to a point where I no longer have to say like that, we're working on that. It's coming next month. I need to eliminate those from the website. I need to eliminate those from the sales calls.
Jordan Gal:Right. Doing things that requires
Brian Casel:product. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Doing thing doing things the way we do them in that way of, like, pre selling features is not the right thing. Right? The bar for your software is higher than ours in some ways.
Brian Casel:I think that that discovery of features happened for me, like, a year ago. Almost, like, a little less than a year ago when I started really researching and doing jobs to be done, interviews with coaches. Like, that's when it started to really click in terms of, like, these are the features that they're all looking to that they're using to existing tools and duct taping them together, and and they're looking for this. And that continues to be the case today. Like, what I'm excited about now is that, like, back then, it was sort of theoretical, like, a year ago.
Brian Casel:See seeing what we had with the Zip Message, and they're telling me what how they're using these tools. Now today, we have a website where we are selling the full solution on Clarity Flow. You could see it all there. We we don't have everything there yet
Pippin Williamson:Yep.
Brian Casel:In the product, but it's being sold on on our homepage. So so now I'm getting the reactions off of that, and they a lot of them just assume that we have all that stuff. And then when they go to the pricing page, they see the little the little coming soon piece. But Yep. Yep.
Brian Casel:Yep. But that's that's where it's like it's it's still like hearing those requests and saying like, we're working on that. That's coming next. A couple times, it'll it'll be a little bit of an edge feature where I'm just like, I haven't heard that one that much. It is something that has come up.
Brian Casel:Probably getting into it, like, later in the year. But but those are, like, those are usually less important to them. Right. They're not
Jordan Gal:That's not the core. Yeah. Yeah, man. Oh, yes. Well, nothing to do but keep going.
Brian Casel:Yep. Just keep grinding. Mhmm. Keeping our heads straight. That's that's that's the hard thing is, like, all this stuff.
Brian Casel:Like, product marketing and mental focus. That's that's another
Jordan Gal:Yes. That's right.
Brian Casel:Keeping it all together.
Jordan Gal:Well, the good thing is that it's Friday, and we can go get some mental focus recharging done. Hopefully, it's nice out. You got some plans for the weekend.
Brian Casel:It is beautiful. We're we're sending the kids to the grandparents this weekend, and my wife and I are gonna relax. And I don't know what we're gonna do.
Jordan Gal:Have a real weekend.
Brian Casel:That sounds great.
Jordan Gal:Nice. Well, we got I'm not around next Friday because I'm going to a wedding. And so we'll catch back up in two weeks, but thank you for listening everybody.
Brian Casel:Alright. Later, folks.
Jordan Gal:See you.
