Funnels & Moonshots
Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. It's a beautiful Friday morning. How are we?
Brian Casel:Doing good, man. Yeah. It is beautiful. I I love this time. I love this weather.
Brian Casel:This is this is my favorite month of the year. Like September and October, you know.
Jordan Gal:Right. At this point, everyone's just hoping for good weather for the Halloween for Halloween? Yes. And then and then whatever happens happens after that.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. Yeah. Last weekend we we drove up to Upstate New York and did did a little hiking up in the mountains.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Are the are the leaves turning? Because Upstate New York when the leaves turn is spectacular.
Brian Casel:It was awesome. Yeah. We were there last weekend and yeah. It was a it was a good like little weekend trip with the girls and everything and beautiful. Just the weather was perfect.
Brian Casel:Know? Leaves awesome and we're we're back at it.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yes. Back back to work. Had a busy week. Very busy week.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Same. I'm definitely getting busier and busier by the day it feels like and it's it's becoming a problem.
Jordan Gal:So we'll talk about that. So that seems like the the thing you need to figure out is how to handle the busyness. Mhmm. And I need to figure out how to just keep making things busier and busier every week, a little more every single week. And we are lean to mean right now.
Jordan Gal:We are six people. Yeah. And we are just
Brian Casel:So like, yeah. Tell tell us about that. Why don't we start there? Like, what a
Jordan Gal:So we're feeling some differences and there are pros and cons. So the speed and the communication, the camaraderie, big positives. And we're also starting to learn new limitations. QA, for example. The whole team did QA.
Jordan Gal:We we launched our new sign up flow. So if you go to heyrosy.com and you hit get started, there used to be a URL field and then get started. So you would put your URL in, get started, and we would build like a preview of your voice agent. And you can listen to a few clips and the goal of that was to basically provide some value and some showing instead of telling before asking you to create an account. Yep.
Jordan Gal:And that was good and then what we what we learned is we wanted to have a sign up flow that had multiple paths. URL is one path. What we found with our ICP is that their Google business profile is actually more important to them than their website many times. And so now if you go to the sign up flow, you'll see the primary path is Google business profile. So you come in and you just start typing in your business name and we ping Google's API.
Jordan Gal:You identify, yes, that's the right one with the right address. You click on that or you can hit no train with my website instead or you can take the tertiary path which is I'll just give you my business information manually.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. If they're if they're really like not on the map on Google, then they can just put in their own stuff.
Jordan Gal:Right. Or sometimes they're not ready to give you their real personal information. Yeah. They just wanna see more. Yep.
Brian Casel:Yep. So It does seem like that makes sense. Like defaulting to goop what was it called?
Jordan Gal:Google Business profile.
Brian Casel:Business profile. Like that seems to make sense for these local businesses, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. That's what makes sense. It I I love coming across a competitor being a bit puzzled by how they do things and then ending up where they are anyway after, you know, a certain amount of time of learning. It's tough to know what you should copy from your competitor, what you should ignore.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So that's just sometimes it does fall into because we should have copied them from the from the
Brian Casel:interesting thing. I I You know, I'm going through that process now with instrumental.dev looking at competitors. We can we can get into that a little bit later but
Jordan Gal:You have some inspiration to look at?
Brian Casel:Well, it's it's it's an interesting space because like the because the type of product that I'm building which is a components library for Rails. This type of thing is done so many different way. Like every components library especially in the Rails space like does things differently. In terms of like how you access the components Mhmm. How you install them, how you manage them, how you customize them.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And frankly, think a lot of it is not done well. Like like it's it's the kind of thing where it's like, let me see what the competitors are doing but I don't wanna do most of what they're doing. I wanna do it differently.
Jordan Gal:Right. You're not really just like competing on design of components. It's also like the way Usability. To that workflow. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think that's even more what what it's all about.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Cool. Which I think is cool.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Alright. So so think about this sign up flow. It went from one path to now multiple paths. You have to also be able to go back. You're pinging multiple APIs.
Jordan Gal:You're confirming. Then we have a new a new scraper and crawler setup. We used to scrape and crawl the entire website in order to build the agent and then show a small piece of it as the clips. We realized that we're better off splitting that off into two and doing a quick initial scrape to have enough data for the preview clips. And then once you get into the account in the background as you're signing up for your account, then we do the full crawl of your website so we have the context for your actual agent.
Brian Casel:I like that.
Jordan Gal:So think about all those changes and all of a sudden the person that we used to look to for QA is no longer on the team. So all of a sudden, know, we set up a new Slack channel and we're like, alright everybody. Let's all bang on it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Know, we should talk about this because I I feel like I've gone through so many evolutions of of our testing and QA process. And and we've come basically full circle to today which is like it's probably as as light as it's ever been. It used to be so much heavier. Okay.
Brian Casel:And and I just removed a lot of layers.
Jordan Gal:So you get you get benefit because it's lighter weight.
Brian Casel:I mean, it's there there are definitely trade offs.
Jordan Gal:Yes.
Brian Casel:And I and I actually see them today too. So like, okay. Like, early on when I started Clarity Flow and this was like after a process kit. Like, going years ago when when I built process kit, we started off with very little or even the app before that. Was like very few like test coverage and and stuff like that.
Brian Casel:Okay. And then things broke a lot. And then and then I became like obsessed with test coverage.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:Right? And this lasted a few years from process kit into early days of Zip Message where where I Me and the team, we wrote tests for every single line of code we did.
Jordan Gal:So that was like your reactionary.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and it had the benefit of like our code base is bulletproof. When we ship something after it's tested, it's not gonna break we ship when we ship the next thing. Like, things don't break because we have test coverage. Great.
Brian Casel:But then, to like about two years into Zip Message, into Clarity Flow, our test suite just became so huge. You know? And maintaining that and making sure that all of our tests keep passing became just not only like a slowdown, it became like a we're we're a grinding halt now. Mhmm. Like we can't ship anything because we can't get our tests to pass.
Brian Casel:Like And, you know, there's a lot of lot more technicalities to this.
Jordan Gal:But the trade off is the trade off.
Brian Casel:Like The trade off is the trade off, know. And it and then it got to and then I started like breaking it out like, okay. Now we have a subset of our tests that that are like our critical tests. So we focus on those and we don't have to test everything else. And and now it's like, okay.
Brian Casel:We have our core tests in place but like now we just ship stuff. We we have a staging server and before that we do a lot of internal testing. And it's even at a point now where I just have my developer like, okay, you you build the thing, you test it, you push it to staging, you test it, you deploy it to production, you test it.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:As long as you're you're telling me it's all good, then that's good enough for me because I have so many other things to do. Like I can't be sitting here QA testing everything myself. Like I test it before the deployment stage happens. I test that the the feature came out correctly and
Jordan Gal:and
Brian Casel:we've designed it correctly. She handles all the testing and then Look, we we're back to moving fast. We're back to be being able to ship. Like we moved, we removed all those bottlenecks in in our test writing and test coverage process. But you know, we do have more bugs pop up now.
Jordan Gal:That And tends to
Brian Casel:it happens. Yep. And and but like the This is like an acceptable level of small bugs that only a couple of users run into. They report them to us. Now we have a good internal process for Kat to catch these bugs.
Brian Casel:She files the bug report, passes it on to the dev and I'm just like, yep. Go ahead. Right. Get it fixed. Like Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Part of normal software business.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We, you know, we had this is when we talked about like continuing to evolve the team and the company after our pivot. QA for us at Cardhook Checkout and Rally Checkout were robust and we made the strategic decision that the trade off had to be weighed much much more towards safety. Yep. Because bugs at a checkout is like death.
Jordan Gal:Right? You if you're costing people money, you lose trust immediately. And then what we realized was, okay. We need to shift that bounce. And and a few things happen when you shift the bounce that you you just alluded to when when you were talking a second ago.
Jordan Gal:Not only is it a trade off towards speed, it does take the responsibility and move it over to the developer's plate. And that that does have some positive impact. There's negative in terms of speed, but you are more considerate and careful as a developer because when it leaves your desk, that that's on you. Yep. So so we we actually eliminated the QA position, and then all of sudden we're like, well, now we need to figure out what QA looks like.
Jordan Gal:So a lot of it goes into the developer's plate, but at some point, they do need speed. They can't just test forever. And so it then the responsibility starts to float out onto the team. This one in particular this week was the sign up flow. So if there are bugs in the sign up flow, we're losing on accounts
Brian Casel:It's a critical path.
Jordan Gal:So it felt like this, you know, very critical moment and everyone was attacking it from a million different sides. We found a bunch of stuff, fixed it, and now we're in day two or three and everything has quieted down.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, we we did remove a lot of our, like, technical test writing and stuff like that. But we still do a lot of testing. Like, when we finish a big feature, we spend maybe a week or two just testing it internally and then on staging and then and then on production.
Brian Casel:And even like, we'll deploy it quietly to production before we announce it and test it more. Okay. But like the developer Like there's still a log of what what she's doing. Right? So like we have logs every time we deploy to stuff, staging and production.
Brian Casel:And then also like we use linear for managing the tickets. So like, she'll leave a comment to to say like, alright, I've tested. I've here's here's my checklist of what I tested and I I like I tested it on staging. Everything looks good. Now, I'm going to production.
Brian Casel:Like, all that is being logged in my comments that she's posting. So it's like I could definitely see it's not like, alright. This thing is live. Don't worry. I tested it.
Brian Casel:Like, no. We actually know when you went through and tested it, you know. Okay. Yep.
Jordan Gal:I we we might I don't know what we're we're still gonna sort out what QA looks like. Our QA on the AI product itself feels very very, I guess, unique at least compared to our previous experience because where we need the most QA, we just we just need to call the agent. We just need to find mistakes. We just need to call Rosie over the phone. Right?
Jordan Gal:Like upload information to her training from an account, call her, and see if she gets it right. Yeah. And and it's such a funny thing because
Brian Casel:I don't even know how you would technically The test form
Jordan Gal:of that is different. It's literally a phone call and audio, but you are testing software. Yeah. So it's not like it's this foreign concept and it's impossible to test. Like, no.
Jordan Gal:You can say words and then get words back and then realize, oh, this prompt didn't work. We it it's effectively a bug, but it doesn't give you the same errors in the same way. It's just a a unique new version of QA.
Brian Casel:I mean, you guys are gonna run into probably a lot of stuff that we ran into with Clarity Flow in different ways where it's like, you could test the hell out of it internally. You you could call it. You could say what you think needs to be said and and get a response, but then the customers are gonna come into all these weird edge cases like, oh, what if they word word things this way? Or what if they have this kind of accent? Or what if they do this or that?
Brian Casel:Or like, Yes. You
Jordan Gal:know. Now that we have like thousands of minutes being used, you know, of the Asia, we have a lot of recordings and sometimes you listen to the recording and you're like, we are geniuses and this is magic. And other times you listen and cringe and sweat and cannot believe you release this thing into the wild and someone actually called the business and and had that conversation.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:So we we know there's a there's a long way to go on on our life. Alright. So that that's that's my that defined the week. That sign up flow launch. We're working on onboarding next.
Jordan Gal:I can talk about that in a second. But how about you?
Brian Casel:Good stuff. Yeah. As my landscapers are just showing up right on So time for the yeah, I mean, the thing So like the consulting side of my life is heating up, I would say. I have multiple active projects happening now and even more like in proposal stage that are some I think some of them are pretty likely to come through in the next two two months or so. I mean, maybe sooner.
Brian Casel:And, you know, earlier I was like really limiting that, like I'm only taking one or maybe two projects at a time. Sorry,
Jordan Gal:this is
Brian Casel:super loud now. He's like right outside my room. Yeah. Alright. So like now I'm sort of of the mindset of like, let's just load up on the consulting pipeline and start hiring.
Brian Casel:And that's what I did. I I did I I reached out to my team manager over there and you know, we we have two new developers coming on board in the next two weeks to to work with me on the consulting projects exclusively, you know.
Jordan Gal:So you're you're hitting the gas. Not saying hold on, how do I balance this? How do I slow down this side of things? You're saying to yourself, how do I not slow down the consulting?
Brian Casel:You know, it's it's going through the growing phase now where it's like, again, I I've done this before in previous businesses. It it it's not like it gets easier every time, but I sort of know the know what the process looks like. And so most of the past year was like, mostly just me. Occasionally, I brought in a developer to assist me, but it was it's mostly just been me solo working on these projects for the clients. Right?
Brian Casel:And that's that's good. Like it got like solidified that this is a service. I I kinda dialed in onto onto that like one month app concept. Clients like that. That works for the proposal phase.
Brian Casel:Now, I'm getting into that phase where it's like, okay, what does this look like where it's me operating it with multiple developers working on multiple projects. It's I wouldn't call this like scaling just yet. This is still me very much in it. I'm talking to clients all the time. I'm designing architecting projects.
Brian Casel:I hope this audio is not terrible right now, but
Jordan Gal:I think it's fine.
Brian Casel:So, you know, I'm still directing the the projects, but I'm my hope right now in this phase is like, if I can get my time, like I'm I'm currently spending at least three or four like full days a week kind of tied up in these projects. If I can get that down to like one or two days a week, maybe spread across the week in terms of like an like an hour in the morning every day, and then I can spend the rest of the day working on my product. That would be ideal, you know. Because that that changes it from like me spending a full day building and developing features into more like me doing the beginning of the project, architecting it, designing it, building some of the core features first, and then and then writing up issues and specs to hand off to my developer. And then that person is just kind of wiring up the features based on my directions and I can just check on progress day to day and then give the client an update every week.
Brian Casel:So that's that's sort of like the phase that I'm in. I mean, the other thing that's occupying a lot of my time now is is the proposal process. Right? Like when I, like, I I do a brief call to start off. This is a live call.
Brian Casel:And then from there, everything else is async. Mhmm. And and I've I've tried to dial in the proposal process like throughout this whole year. I I use Notion and I just write up a a thing and and like anyone who's done this type of consulting before knows exactly what I'm talking about where it's like you have the call, it seems pretty straightforward in in theory, and then you start to get into the details a little bit. It's like, there's thousand questions that come up.
Jordan Gal:Like Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And these questions can really impact how long it's gonna take to do this project. So I'm trying not to spend like too much time in the proposal stage, because you don't know if this is project is even gonna happen. I know that I can move into like a paid discovery sort of idea. I haven't done that yet. But So that's that's another thing that I'm trying to figure out.
Brian Casel:It's like how can I streamline or standardize or or create like modules of things that that always go into projects? Yeah. And then and then it's the delivery. And and and then the delivery which is like building the apps, that's pretty straightforward but part of what I wanna do with instrumental. Dev which is the product that I'm working on, the components library, like I'm building that as a product that I wanna offer but it's also a thing to help our internal projects become more streamlined and easier for me to run.
Brian Casel:Like, because in theory, what I would love to do is have this components library. Like, now, it just sort of lives in my own projects and I personally use them. And I'm the front end dev designer and and then back end. But what A big bottleneck in in the process is like having the back end developer come in and wire up a feature and then I still have to go in and like fix all the design and polish and front end and makes it make it pixel perfect and everything. Hopefully, the idea with these components is that not only does it make building and deploying these these UIs easier and faster, but it makes it easier for me to hire developers to work on my projects and I'm just gonna give my developers like, here, use this component.
Brian Casel:Use that component. It's it's already made. It's it's already set up in like a generator for you. You can just put it into the app and then and then work on the back end logic for that, you know. It it like it it should hopefully remove We were talking about QA but in my case, lot of that QA is like me going in and fixing design polish on on the app.
Brian Casel:It should hopefully remove a lot of that work too. You know and make it easier for the back end dev who doesn't wanna deal with all the tail wind classes and everything. It's just there. You know. So hopefully I can It's it's like working on this product which should hopefully help my work on the consulting side as well.
Jordan Gal:From the outside, you know, without having to actually deal with like the juggling of the different hours and where to put the focus, it feels like the pain you're going through on the service and agency side is directly linked to the quality. It's almost like to the accuracy of what of what instrumental dot dev should be doing for people.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think so.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. It's cool it's cool to see because you are you are forced to figure out how do I go beyond myself. You are offering your unique perspective, but that doesn't mean the writing of code and the deployment of certain things actually needs to rely on you. You can you can maintain providing Brian's point of view.
Jordan Gal:We're doing a lot but still doing a lot less work.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, don't wanna get too in into like the technical weeds of this and I haven't even really built the delivery system for these components yet. But like, I'm thinking a lot about that because I feel like most of these components libraries either don't give you enough or they give you too much in terms of like how it gets into your actual projects. Either they try to take over your whole entire app and like you can't even use it unless you start fresh with a new app with their template Or they're like these drop in components which still require so much work to actually use and customize. And I I wanna I'm thinking a lot about like generators and rails being able to have like one command and like pop in a drop down menu or pop in a this scaffold or that scaffold.
Brian Casel:But anyway, I'm thinking a lot about that kind of stuff. But you know, it Right now, it's a it's a challenge. It's it's a it's a sort of a good problem to have to have like these projects coming through the pipeline. You know, keeping the keeping the cash flow going and and and also just being able to work on all these projects is beneficial too. Working with great clients across the board.
Brian Casel:But yeah, it's finding the time to be able to actually work on instrumental. Dev, you know. That's that's still a challenge.
Jordan Gal:I I I cannot help. Again, I'm not the one dealing with the pain of balancing it, but it feels very much to me like the pain you're going through on figuring out how to balance it is actually like the creative destructive part of Yeah. What will make Instrumentl the right product for someone else in that same
Brian Casel:I think so. It it doesn't take away the fact that like I still need to put in the hours on it. Yeah. And those hours need to come from somewhere. Yeah.
Brian Casel:That's right. That's right. But like, yeah, for sure. That's because like, I I I do think that it's in a it's in sort of a painful phase like right now, like this week, this month. But I I could start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, especially once these two new developers get on board, then then my routine is gonna change.
Brian Casel:It's gonna it's gonna go from me having to build stuff all day to to just directing stuff. And then I can start to settle into like, okay, now I have a few more hours to work with. Right.
Jordan Gal:You'll go through some management pain on communication fixing and that sort of thing but then as that gets ironed out then it's more more time freed up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But there is more like groundwork on the product of instrumentl.dev like meaning like from the marketing side like I I wanna start to put it out there and get interest and get survey responses and get early access list going. I I wanna do YouTube videos. I wanna start to build a funnel of some kind. You you know, I I try to work on that stuff first before getting too deep in the in the product.
Brian Casel:But all that stuff is time consuming. So I I I mean, we can hop back to me in a little bit but I I did update instrumental.dev, the site, just today with like a new more expanded homepage which gives more of a vision of it and then there's like an email early access that which leads to a survey. To try to just give a taste of like what what's gonna be here. Like like give you a little bit of the vision of what's coming. And then it's still many weeks and months away from actually existing but I I wanna sort of just paint the picture first, know.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Cool. So I alluded earlier to onboarding. Did okay. Correct.
Jordan Gal:Not correct me. Remind me. Did did we talk last week about going from like outside in and then inside out? That may have may have it's something that came out of my conversations earlier in the week with our team. I just don't remember if I talked
Brian Casel:about this podcast. Think so.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So what I found myself thinking about earlier in the week is it's like we started on the outsides. I'm thinking of the funnel, like general funnel. It's like all the way to one side of the funnel, we basically built a basic website and said, this is what this thing does. It will answer the phone for you.
Jordan Gal:You won't miss any phone calls. Here are these benefits and Cool. And then on all the way on the other side, we had a product that was like, well, this thing kinda works. We cobble a few services together. We put like a admin on top of it.
Jordan Gal:It's not too thought out, but this is like our guests at a feature set. And then in the middle was ugly. No onboarding, you know, sign up flow. I I guess we did a little more than the bare minimum, but it was not pretty in there. And then all of a sudden as we felt more sure about the feature set and who our people are, we found ourselves getting pushed inward where we had to adjust the sign up flow to make sense for our ICP and what they were looking for.
Jordan Gal:And it's, you know, it's as soon as you start working on something like your onboarding, you look at what you currently have and cannot believe people are using the product successfully and paying you. Because we just dump you right into the admin with no explanation, like on the wrong page, then you have to start looking around. And of course, the actual success of people launching and paying is almost entirely due to Sam on our team just getting on the phone with them and on Zoom and just showing them how to do stuff and doing stuff for them.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So now we're like It's it's such a frustrating project to work on, that that onboarding thing. And like and then seeing customers, like, not see the big buttons sitting right there, like
Jordan Gal:Oh, just just chaos.
Brian Casel:We had a customer sign up two days ago. He you know, and we don't have a trial so so they sign up and they pay right away. They're like signed up, paid. Was like, great. Awesome.
Brian Casel:I got the notification. Five minutes later, saw the cancellation come through and like his cancellation reason is like, oh, I I couldn't do this or I could or I couldn't find how to do that. And it's like you if you had clicked once, you would have found it. But instead of asking for instead of instead of answering Kat's message, he just went ahead and canceled.
Jordan Gal:Like Yeah. Yeah. It's it's the whole thing is very weird. Like the most common question we get in intercom is just cost. Literally the word cost.
Jordan Gal:Price.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Like, dude, click on the pricing thing. It's it's you know, I just
Brian Casel:was gonna say like, are you are you not showing pricing? No, you are.
Jordan Gal:Oh, it's oh, yeah. Absolutely. We are. So, yeah, a lot of it does make sense and you're like, what do I pay attention to as like a valid form of criticism that I didn't make something obvious enough? And what do I just chalk up to some people are just a little dull and you can ignore what they're saying.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Tough to know.
Brian Casel:A lot of people just don't don't want to use websites. They want to either talk to someone or have it done for them.
Jordan Gal:Is like a like a spectrum of learning styles. Some people don't wanna read. Some people don't wanna listen. Some people don't wanna watch. Some people don't wanna do anything.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It it's tough to know which form to provide this information in. Yep. It's almost like choose your own adventure or you have to just be more opinionated like, no. We do things over video.
Jordan Gal:It it's tough to tell. So what where we're finding ourselves is now we're on the inside. We just did sign up flow. We're just doing onboarding. And then what I'm telling the team is, like, as soon as we're done with those two, we're right back to the outsides.
Jordan Gal:I'm heading out to marketing land. We're expanding our advertising platforms. Right? We'll we'll probably go to YouTube next. We'll look at influencers.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. We're already on meta, TikTok. I'm not a 100% sure if it's right for us. We'll see. And then on on the other end, like, Rock and Jess are going all the way back out to, like, product, feature set, product quality.
Jordan Gal:Like so it it's it's been this very funny thing of like, well, let's just go bare bones, build the skeleton on the outside, then come inside and fix like, oh, yeah. People need to actually onboard to this product and use it without us doing everything for them. And then it's right back out and it feels like it'll just kinda rotate between those two over and over and over again.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Do you have a sense of like commonalities across your customers who are coming in? Like types of businesses? Who what they look like?
Brian Casel:What are they what are they trying to do with it?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. We are finding themes and they are less based on industry and more based on I don't know if demographic is the right word. It's not demographic. It's like business structure.
Jordan Gal:It's a small number of people in a business basically between one and ten people.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And the number one thing we hear and experience is like, sorry I couldn't make the Zoom call. Can we do this over the phone because I'm in my truck?
Brian Casel:Because I'm in my truck.
Jordan Gal:Yes. They're out the field. I am doing the work. I don't even have time to talk to you about how to make my business more efficient. That's how desperately in need of efficiency I am.
Brian Casel:And they don't have a person who's in charge of the phone.
Jordan Gal:That's what they want. They they want to get that one level up so that they're not answering the phone, doing the work, sending the bills, collecting the money, doing the customer service, asking for reviews, like, that's the spot they're in. And they're looking at our solution and saying, the phone is one of these things that is really difficult to manage because I don't know if I should pick up this phone at 08:00 at night because it's a potential customer, or if it's spam, or if it's something that I can just get to tomorrow. So that's Yep. And that is a like massage parlor owner, a painting company, a HVAC, a coffee shop.
Jordan Gal:It's like this it's a huge array of industries but it's the same type of small business entrepreneur trying to figure out how do I get beyond me doing absolutely everything.
Brian Casel:I mean we all love to love to complain about the home services who never show up for their appointments and they're they're like aggravating to deal with and all this stuff. But like the reality is like you're describing the reality for like 99% of them. They're just so busy. Yeah. Doing projects, you know.
Jordan Gal:That's right. As the consumer, we're frustrated. We're like, I'm trying to give you money. Yeah. Why don't you even answer the phone?
Jordan Gal:Makes no sense. On the other end, they're like, trust me. I would love to take your money. I'm just trying to manage what I have going on in front of
Brian Casel:me. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So so onboarding, man, it's we have found this is one of those moments where we have found it tough to have the conversations and the ideas required and to do it remotely and mostly async is a real challenge. Because we have a few people and we can't just like get in room for three or four hours and come out of it. Right? You do an hour Zoom call, hour and a half Zoom call.
Jordan Gal:At some point, you're like, I don't wanna be on Zoom anymore. You know, people run out of patience. Yeah. Then a few days go by and everyone goes off on their own, has different ideas and they come back. This process has been difficult for us to try to nail nail down a great onboarding experience.
Brian Casel:I mean, I know that you're just a few few less people than you were but like has anything else significantly changed in how you work? How you communicate with the team? No. It's not like Yeah. Like like I don't know.
Brian Casel:Like like maybe say say more about that. About about the Zoom stuff like
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:So How normally do collaborate with the team?
Jordan Gal:So this is this is how we would normally collaborate but it feels a bit more foreign to us, you know, building a self serve onboarding with very new information. Like, we just kind of figured out what the feature set is and and and we're trying to be strategic at the same time. You're trying to think about your pricing and how that's connected to the onboarding. And are we gonna have a freemium tier? Are we going to have a a trial based on minutes used as opposed to time?
Jordan Gal:Well, we have a few principles that help guide us. Right? How do we get a 100 people to be able to sign up on their own a day? It's like one of those principles. How do we not put up barriers to usage?
Jordan Gal:So how do we get them the phone number without requiring a credit card? But okay. Great. But should we ask them for a credit card at some point? Do we want them to just go through onboarding without even being asked to put in a credit card?
Jordan Gal:Or do we wanna give people the option to make sure their their service isn't interrupted? Out of all of our features, which ones are actually required for them to launch? And those kind of exist in a let's get these things done so you can launch, but then how do you show off the other features after a point that you think they can launch? Like, are those then in a recommended bucket? Is there then an advanced bucket?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Those are like
Brian Casel:all those questions, it's like there absolutely is no right. It's completely different for every single product customer
Jordan Gal:That's right. All that.
Brian Casel:That's right.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. As you were talking about your service, one of the things that I admire about being put in that position, I'm thinking right now of of Francois, the designer that we work with right now. Mhmm. We really look to the vendor to help us finalize decisions. We got a bunch of ideas, but like give us your suggestions.
Jordan Gal:Give us
Brian Casel:your recommendations. Is what I've been telling to to new people that I'm talking to about my service. I think that a lot of them come to me and decide to go with me over over hiring a developer directly or or going with some other service. I think the a lot of the reason they come to me is because they know that I'm a product person And I've built my own products. And so I I literally tell them my like my approach is like, we're gonna talk about your product and the goals for the MVP.
Brian Casel:We're gonna define a scope for what we're focusing in on on this MVP project. And then, like, I'm just gonna build it as if I'm an owner of your product. And I'm gonna give you updates every single week. We're gonna give you videos, show you what's happening, ask you questions. And but for the most part, I'm just gonna make the decisions and you just tell me what you don't like and we can change it.
Brian Casel:But like, I'm gonna use my best judgment on most things in terms of like how things look and what the UX is gonna be and the and the user interface. And yeah, a few a few times here and there, they'll be like, oh, well, it's it's missing this element and we need and we need to account for this aspect. Oh, okay. I I didn't take that into account. Let's fix it.
Brian Casel:But like, for the most part, like, that's that's the and I was actually gonna ask you in in your team structure because we're we're very different and I think a lot of it is because I'm a solo owner and a solo I'm I'm the head of product in my in all of my stuff. So all those questions that you were just describing and the meetings, that happens me solo sitting in this chair alone making all those decisions Yeah. Which is which is super hard Yep. But at the same time it's like once I decide on something like that's what we're doing folks. So we're we're going ahead.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's a tricky subject because in many ways you get put into a position as soon as if you're alone and you're making these decisions alone, you should acknowledge that it is a great muscle that you've built up in in the form of being decisive. This is what I think.
Brian Casel:A lot of lot of pain in building up that muscle, but it's Sure.
Jordan Gal:Sure. But it is an and valuable thing.
Brian Casel:That is that is definitely true. Like I've gotten to a point now where I feel like I've become pretty good at noticing when I'm taking too long to make a decision. Okay. You know? Or or I'm getting stuck down some rabbit hole.
Jordan Gal:Right. You're not being decisive.
Brian Casel:And and I'm like, man, I I should not be spending this many hours of today just figuring this thing out. Let's just go with the easier option and just go with that. Whatever it is. Like, you know
Jordan Gal:Right. It's Yeah. We can always go back on the decision make a decision.
Brian Casel:99% of these decisions that you can always undo if you need to. There's a few that you can't undo like, you know, decisions to like sell a business or something like that. Sure. Which and that and those are the things that I'll spend months you know killing myself.
Jordan Gal:Right. The dormant is fine.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But the the decisions like overhaul the onboarding and try it a different way. Yeah. I'll I'll just go ahead and make that decision you know.
Jordan Gal:Now as soon as you get into multiple people, there is an element to consensus building that is like antithetical to being decisive. So the vendor comes in, you are slightly outsourcing your courage to them. You're saying, you please make the decision? Help help us finalize. Here are all these points that we have, all these factors that we need to take into account.
Jordan Gal:But can you just help us, like, get to a decision? And many times, it's not necessarily outsourcing the decision to them. It's outsourcing the first decision. Here's what I think. Here's my recommendation.
Jordan Gal:Something you can attack. Disagree with.
Brian Casel:I was just gonna say the same thing. That is what I was describing, it's when I work with clients, it's not like I'm making all these decisions in their final. It's I'm building it and putting it in front of you, so now we have something tangible Yes. To look at and discuss and we can adjust. But it's not like what what what gets frustrating sometimes, I think for me and clients and and anyone else working in like agency land, is when you just get caught in these cycles and and you're talking in circles theoretically, like, well, what if we do this or that and what's the implication of this or that?
Brian Casel:It's like, okay, well, let's let's just build a rough version of this first and then we can carve it and and dial it in. But at least we have something on on the table that we can look at and discuss.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You have to be able to and I try to tell this to vendors especially around design early on where the fact that you took a risk and made the decision is so valuable that do not get discouraged by us, like, attacking it. You've provided the value by giving us something to look at, criticize, and point to and say, no. That doesn't make sense and here's why. And oftentimes, your work just gets scrapped away and swept away off the desk.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But we wouldn't have moved forward without that initial thing. It happened yesterday where one thing that we saw in front of us from the designer was just wrong and we got to the right place, but it was much easier, much more effective getting there after we saw what was wrong. Like, oh, we thought we wanted that? We don't want that all.
Jordan Gal:That makes no sense anymore.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, a lot of times, like, there's so many creative decisions that go into building a product. And usually there's like two or three good options on every decision. And and I I'll usually like give the client like, okay. Or I'll I'll explain to the client like, we could we could attack this one of two or three ways.
Brian Casel:My recommend, my favorite way, what I personally like is option A. So that's what I went ahead and built. But we also have option B or C if you wanna switch to those. But I'm telling them sort of in strong terms like if it were my product, I would be choosing A. That's Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:What what I
Brian Casel:you know.
Jordan Gal:When looking at things like UI and and UX is keeping in mind the larger goal. So we keep we keep bumping into this thing. I think it's because costs around AI are not zero. So getting someone in to use the product, it costs you real money. Yep.
Jordan Gal:And because of that, we keep bumping into the same like like impulse, and at least now we're trained to to identify it. But every single time we have made the trade off of being cost conscious or being a little safer, like, oh, someone can just come in and just like, you know, burn through a thousand hours excuse me, a thousand minutes. Also, that's gonna cost us hundreds of dollars or whatever. So therefore, let's do this to protect ourselves against it. Every single time we've done that, we regret it and we end up removing it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's like nobody's ever even hit that limit. Right?
Jordan Gal:Like No one's no one's come close. It it doesn't it doesn't happen. We keep protecting against these things that are wrong. And so while looking at the UI, you you can get yourself lost in like, well, this is best practice for SaaS. This is what you do next.
Jordan Gal:You do this and then you do that. But then if we back out and keep in mind, no, we want usage. We want people to come in and use the product even more so than we want to monetize.
Brian Casel:I mean, want you want users to hit up against those limits. Because then then it's like, we have real users who are running into real Yes. Edge cases that now we have to actually deal
Jordan Gal:with Right. Which is different from we want that seven day trial to run out so we could charge your card and add them to MRR.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Like not Yeah. Not necessarily the same thing, especially when you're looking at UI decisions on where should they go after this and what should they see after this other thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I think I mean, this is such an ongoing challenge for us with with in Clarity Flow is like, I I think Kat working directly with the customers has been a huge help. But like everyone everyone's a little bit different. Like we were talking about earlier with like the way that they learn a platform and start using it but also like their use case for it.
Brian Casel:We are more dialed in to coaches but even even within that realm, there's like still they care about different aspects differently, you know. Mhmm. But that's that's where we ended up like ripping out a lot of our heavy handed onboarding stuff where we were trying to push you down a path. Mhmm. And we ripped all that out and and went to more of an exploratory.
Brian Casel:Like you can Let's just just go through our menu, click on whatever interests you and once you get to that view, you're interested in in our courses feature? Cool. Go to the courses thing and here you're gonna see our guide to courses. You're not interested in courses? You're Then you're not gonna click on courses.
Brian Casel:Then you're gonna go to conversations. Here's what conversations are all about and you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That scares me because we just we just went a pretty pretty heavy handed approach on do this, then this, then this.
Brian Casel:But but I mean, I I think that that is again, it's totally different for every product.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:But I think the go to move early is is to try to go more Try guided. Down down a path, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I like it.
Jordan Gal:We got some we got some funny questions in Twitter.
Brian Casel:Okay. Let me check this out. Where are we?
Jordan Gal:So, Ian Landsman.
Brian Casel:Oh, here we go.
Jordan Gal:He made he makes mistakes all the time. Really just one mistake after another. But the other day, he made so there's there's this conversation going on between him and Aaron that I find very funny. You know, everyone knows about Trump derangement syndrome, and adjacent to that is Elon derangement syndrome. And clearly, Ian has a pretty severe case of the Elon derangement syndrome.
Jordan Gal:And he cannot get himself to admit that the things Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, and these companies are doing is is good. It's like this inability to kind of admit, hey, this is very cool. It's great for science. It's great for people. It's great for America.
Jordan Gal:Like all these different things.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And I really appreciate the objective take that the mostly tech pod Twitter handle take and called it a historically bad take about SpaceX. And so I think Ian wants me to give our take on like Mars.
Brian Casel:Let's hear it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And travel.
Brian Casel:I I'm so I'm so conflicted on Elon in in in all things Elon. But, yeah, let's let's get into it.
Jordan Gal:I I think the way to be less conflicted about Elon is to just back up a little bit and think about it from a future point of view.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The This is the part I like. This this line of thinking is what I is is the side Right.
Jordan Gal:So just get away from like I like it. He's in Pennsylvania right now campaigning for Trump. Like, it's impossible to ignore that if you don't like that. You know, and that clouds a lot of stuff around the tech. If you look back
Brian Casel:That that's the part where it's like, how does that even reconcile with the other things that he does? Like, the the just the political nonsense is like, how does that even why why are you even spending time and energy and resources on that when when you can also be responsible for launching and landing a rocket ship? Like
Jordan Gal:I think he I think it's an opinion. I think he sees them as related.
Brian Casel:That's what I don't understand. But I guess I guess there's
Jordan Gal:something Yeah. It's like think it's like the acceleration versus deceleration type of argument and concern and and everything else. What I like to think about, I like to think about the play Hamilton. I like to think about the the real experience of the founding fathers. One of them was Benjamin Franklin.
Jordan Gal:And in the time of Franklin, it was so political. Everything he did was political. He was an ambassador. He Yeah. Did all these very, very political things.
Jordan Gal:But from now, when we look back, we say, hey. Look at these advancements. Look at these contributions. We don't care nearly so much if he was a Republican or a Democrat or whatever he was in the political realm.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But politics were very different back then.
Jordan Gal:I mean, politics were radical then. They were out of control, radical, life and death Yeah. Rebellion. I mean, it was a lot more fraud. I mean, if you were wrong and you signed your name on a piece of paper and you lost the word That's you're dead.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's different than right now like oh another four years and we'll kind of do this other thing. Mhmm. And I think if you just kind of push yourself you know, twenty years from now, fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, you look back, I think it's straightforward that these things are good. Is good.
Jordan Gal:I do Basics.
Brian Casel:I I do think it's great that there is somebody in the world with his resources that's just trying to push the ball forward on on, you know, electric cars and space travel and, you know, these kinds of things. Like, I I think that like like, he clearly put like, say what you want about the Tesla car company and how it compares to other cars and stuff. But like, without Tesla, you would not have GM investing so much in their electric line and Ford and and all the rest of it. Like, it it pushed that whole industry forward by at least a decade. Just just the existence of Tesla in the market.
Brian Casel:Right? Yes. Space travel like a lot of people are like, oh, why are they wasting so much time trying to fly rockets to Mars? That that's so crazy and out there. Like Right.
Brian Casel:What's even what's even the point of these billionaires doing these space races. Right? You could say that but like, at some point, somebody's gonna gonna need to start to push on that button a little bit and it starts with ridiculous stuff like this, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. The space program their
Brian Casel:their work with NASA is not ridiculous. Like, that's a legit, like like, very positive thing happening in the world that they that they can actually like work Yeah. With these governments, you know.
Jordan Gal:Satellites are good. Starlink The
Brian Casel:satellite network, the Starlink, I mean
Jordan Gal:Rocket technology, reusable rockets are good. Like it's good that America's doing it
Brian Casel:because Like, it has to be You wanna win? The first version has to be crazy. Right?
Jordan Gal:Like Right. And it's not a surprise that the person associated with that outlandish set of achievements and risk is also not a normal average person.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and the the story again, if you take the politics out of it, this person does not need money. They don't need any more money. You cannot explain. I don't think it's logical to explain what this person is doing by pointing to the fact that they want more money.
Jordan Gal:It it doesn't kind of add up. There's more money. He has more money than you could possibly if you divided his wealth by a thousand, it's still more money than you could than anyone needs ever.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And so then hold on.
Brian Casel:Hold on.
Jordan Gal:I just wanna make this Then it starts to get to a point that I think excuse me, Ian. But people like that point of view, there's like this very dangerous kernel. If in fact it's not for money, and if in fact it's because he actually believes all the stuff he says, then you have to confront the actual words and ideas more than the person. And if you have a person saying you know, one of the things Elon's unbelievably good at, right, you kinda hear this from like the VC investor point of view, is he understands risk better than most people. He goes YOLO because he thinks YOLO is actually the right approach to risk.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And his logic when it comes to Mars, this is the actual Mars take. His logic is the human race is all good. We have one point of failure. The one point of failure is our actual planet. And if our planet gets destroyed, whether it's asteroid or nuclear or or or famine or disease or whatever else, if that point of Italy goes down before we are multiplanetary, then the whole ballgame's over.
Jordan Gal:To me right now in 2024, that sounds outlandish. That sounds ridiculous. Yeah. But maybe he understands risk better than I do, and he said, what if he actually believes, no, I think we need to get to another planet even if it doesn't happen for another fifty or a hundred years. I don't know.
Brian Casel:Again, yeah yeah, like somebody needs to start pushing that button now. And like that's that's the whole side of of that stuff that I I completely agree with. Like, I I think somebody needs to be pushing on that and
Jordan Gal:And I I don't actually believe it's true, but I am very open to the possibility that I'm wrong. Very open to
Brian Casel:it. I mean, I I I get on board with with the logic that like our planet is is like under a major threat with with climate change and all But, like but the the the part the part of it that I just I just can't comprehend, like, why not only, like, from a like, why is he even, like, wasting his time with with even, like, buying Twitter and then being so just promoting like the side of like the worst aspects of of Twitter and our social discourse. And I'm not even someone who really cares all that much about it. Like I don't get as outraged as as some people do about Yeah. This garbage on Twitter anyway.
Brian Casel:But but it's hard for me to see like how is that helpful. How can you not still push the our our global technology forward the way that you are with Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and all this without all the nonsense, without the Trump rallies, without the without the the Twitter jokes and all that crap.
Jordan Gal:You know?
Brian Casel:So so I mean like, not like, I don't even care that it's annoying. I can just tune it out. I just think a lot of it is destructive to our society and culture, and and like we could do without that.
Jordan Gal:You know? So so I I disagree. I think they are directly related, and I think Elon sees them as directly related because it is the same same battle. I don't wanna call it a war. It's the same fight that wants to it's the same fight that doesn't invite Tesla to the electrical vehicle summit in Washington DC.
Jordan Gal:It's the same fight that tries to destroy SpaceX through regulation, and it's the same fight between media controlled by one set of people and Twitter controlled by a different set of people. It's all the same fight. It is this accelerationist individual freedom free market side of things and it is a deceleration regulation government first
Brian Casel:I hear what you're saying about that.
Jordan Gal:Sees it. I Doesn't sound wrong.
Brian Casel:I I hear your logic on that. To to me, a higher priority problem is the polarization, especially in America. I think it's happening everywhere. But like but Who's doing
Jordan Gal:the polarization? Is it him? I think he's reacting to it. The guy was a I
Brian Casel:I think he's I think he's playing into it. He's helping accelerate it. Like putting putting his energy and his name on on this kind of stuff. Like
Jordan Gal:He had the president of The United States stand in front of the entire country and say, we gotta look into this guy. He's got a little too much power. I think it's time we looked into this guy. And then all of his companies started getting sued and being put under investigation from different government entities. Like, I think he's reacting.
Jordan Gal:I don't think he's leading the charge and the and government saying, oh, this guy's so bad. He's reacting.
Brian Casel:I just think in general like like he he is someone who has a massive spotlight on him and like with that does come whether you want it or claim it or or not, it it does come with some responsibility. And and with that, like, he's he is sort of like fanning the flames of of polarization, which is just not helpful in my opinion. Like I think there are ways to to go about those goals without without that, you know?
Jordan Gal:I think he's taking that responsibility seriously.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I just
Jordan Gal:yeah. And think about the stakes of a man worth $200,000,000,000 who genuine genuinely believes if things go the wrong way from his opinion in politics, he might end up in jail. That's how he sees it. Yeah. And he's acting accordingly.
Jordan Gal:I none of this is irrational if you take a step back and put yourself in in his shoes and you look at it a bit more objectively. The government wants to destroy his companies. And like it it have to be It's not like a fantasy.
Brian Casel:I I I don't know. Like I'm not in the weeds on all all the news but like I I don't think even think it's that extreme. Like, they have major contracts between NASA and and SpaceX. Like, those and and NASA like depends on SpaceX in in many ways. Like, they're they're not gonna just put this guy in jail.
Brian Casel:Like Okay. I mean, but like, go just going back in the last couple of years, like he could have approached his position in the world to to accomplish his goals without just without all the nonsense. Like he he could still push that forward and and he could be in a different position, maybe less attacked to today than you know, had he had he been a little more of a positive force in our in our world. That's that's my view on it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I It's not an unreasonable
Brian Casel:because it's not gonna take anything away from from his billions. Like he's still gonna have that kind of money and power and resource to do to do change, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. He'd Yeah. I don't I don't think he cares about the money.
Brian Casel:Right. But that that's what I'm saying is like you have the resources, you can use them in a positive way, know. And I and again, I think he is in a lot of his work but then then he's out there just doing this nonsense. I just don't get it, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I I think he sees it as, you know, inextricably linked. But we'll we'll we'll see.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. What else here on Twitter?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So I just wanna have a a quick laugh with Aaron Francis who is this Garages of America? Okay. So yeah. So he d m's me yesterday and he's like, yo, I'm on the phone with an AI.
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm calling this business that I want to buy something from and they answered with an AI and you should check this out. So of course, I'm like, bet. I call the number, and I start interrogating the AI because I wanna see how different, you know, companies handle it. Yes. So first thing I say is, are you an AI?
Jordan Gal:And the agent goes, oh, no. I'm a real person at America. How can I help you?
Brian Casel:I'm like, you're an AI.
Jordan Gal:But she wouldn't admit it. So that's a product choice. Yeah. Whether to admit it or not. So then I start getting further into it.
Jordan Gal:I'm like, well, which API are you using? And which voice and which transcriber? And she's like, you know, trying to avoid giving me the answer. So then I hang up. And about an hour later, I get a text message from the owner of Garages of America.
Jordan Gal:And I say and she goes, I heard you were having fun with my AI. Can I help you with anything? So of course, I I I take a screenshot of the conversation and send it to Aaron and I'm like, now I'm in conversation with the owner and I'm trying to convince Rosie instead.
Brian Casel:Oh, that's hilarious.
Jordan Gal:Yep. That's fun.
Brian Casel:That's awesome.
Jordan Gal:Yep. And
Brian Casel:how do you think how do you think that that product or do you know which product they're using?
Jordan Gal:No. Like, don't know. Oh, no. She told me. She told me.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. She told me.
Brian Casel:How how does it compare to Rosie? Do you think?
Jordan Gal:I think it had some things that were better and some things that were worse. Mhmm. Yeah. Their their websites not good and they're showing off of the product is not good. What do
Brian Casel:mean the experience when you called it? Like, do you think it can like do the job? Yeah. It's funny. It's like two
Jordan Gal:two different things. Right? The the perception of it based on the site and what they're showing there and the actual experience. Yep. I think the experience was better than what's on the site.
Jordan Gal:And right now, maybe we have it a bit reversed. We like have the ICP right and the messaging and the branding and all that might be like ahead of where the product is. Mhmm. What the what their agent did really well was handle like this. Okay.
Jordan Gal:You're an incoming call. We have four or five locations. I don't know who you are, what you need right now, and she fielded that really well. And I was like, you know, I started drilling into this location, this service, and and then it like went off in that direction nicely and didn't like fall apart.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep.
Jordan Gal:I wanna talk about this post here and hear what what you have to say. So Cody Schneider or someone I've kind of befriended on Twitter.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I just read that one now. Okay.
Jordan Gal:If you don't follow Cody on Twitter, you are making a mistake. My man is an idea machine. He's a volcano of ideas and oftentimes those those ideas have something valuable for you and your business. Mhmm. So I would highly recommend following.
Jordan Gal:What he wrote about what he asked was like, do you put a a hard timeline or deadline on selling? Yeah. And Cody is one of these people that launches a bunch of products. Mhmm. So the way I look at this and I think about this regularly
Brian Casel:He's talking about a business like starting a business to your timeline. Yes. Selling.
Jordan Gal:Like how deep do you go into an idea before you're like, this is not working I'm gonna stop or this is working and I should sell it or just as a matter of fact, I've done this for a year or two, it's time to sell it move on to the next thing.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And I think most of us are really bad at that and we get really emotionally attached and people will find themselves four or five years in. Yes. And I've I've done that and I thought about it this morning like, you know, should I have done things differently with Rally? Should I have left earlier? So I'm curious what your take is on this.
Jordan Gal:Like Yeah. When whole When you start something new, is there like a time frame on it? The whole
Brian Casel:Or is
Jordan Gal:it We'll see what happens.
Brian Casel:The tweet and the the question really resonates with me because I think I think that time The the time investment, meaning like number of years of my career that I am investing in any given product or any business that I work on. That number or that question of like how long has it has it been since I started this business? Like that's a question that rattles in my mind all the time. And it and it gets louder and louder the the longer the time goes on on each given business. Right.
Brian Casel:Right? I don't I don't go into things from day one saying like, alright, two years from now, mark this date. That's when I'm gonna decide whether to hold or whether to sell. Like, no. I definitely don't do that.
Brian Casel:But I do but there is some some sort of threshold. I think this varies from product to product. But like, where I, where that question gets louder and louder to a point where it's like, I I don't like the answer to to this like I don't like how long it's been on this product given where it's at or you you know, so then then it's like decision time. It's like it it goes from like this is what I'm working on to Okay. It's been In in my case, historically, it's been usually around like three to four years is when I start to get a little antsy of like, what what is this really?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Like years ago when I started it that I would be here right now, what I would what I started.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And there like, I can go back like the ones that I think about are like audience ops and then process kit and then now is it message and clarity flow. Right? In Audience Ops, I don't know that I've shared this before but like So I started it in 2015 right at the time that I sold Restaurant Engine. And I sold Restaurant Engine about three and a half years in or four years in.
Brian Casel:Okay. So I started Audience Hops 2015. 2018, I came extremely close to selling it. Like, it was the day before closing day on selling it. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And and the deal fell apart. And then I ended up holding onto it for an additional three years.
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:And then and then I sold it in 2021. So that ended up being six years. But it turned but the for me, the calculation sometimes becomes like, okay, after around three years, maybe I'm not full time on it anymore. Now now it's into side project mode.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The nature of it
Brian Casel:is different. You know, or or I have a team that's running it and it doesn't need me in the day to day. So now now they can run it and I can move on to my next thing. Like that's that's an option as well. And that's sort of where I've ended up with with Well, Clarity Flow is a different situation because it's like I I still actively work on it but just not a 100% as So literally for three full years, I was 100% with no other products.
Brian Casel:And then here in the fourth year, it's one product among other things that I do. You know. And I'm I'm happy with that balance now. Mhmm. But because it got to a point where like at the end of the three years, I was like, I was comfortable doing this full time for for three full years.
Brian Casel:But now that we're at the three year mark, I'm uncomfortable doing this a 100%. Yeah. And the and the calculus for this particular business and its scenario was like not Like selling was not one of the options that felt attractive to me. So holding it and making it a side hustle and then moving on to other things. That that's the more recent decision that I've had.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:But other other ones, I Actually one more is is process kit where I did work on that for a full three years. And after three years, I was like, it it just didn't grow to a point where I I just don't feel comfortable working on it anymore than this. And it's not even attractive to hold it. I'd rather just sell it and that's what I did. And and and it was a nice little exit or something, know.
Brian Casel:Like, it's not not the outcome that I was hoping for, but like it was still an outcome. So, you know, allowed me to move on.
Jordan Gal:And you just you just you just described the exit as less attractive than the cash flow and the growth. And I guess that depends project to project also. One of the things Cody was asking about, like, what are you shooting for? I often find myself really focused on the exit and I think that's shortsighted oftentimes. I don't think that has led me that's not been positive overall in terms of like the career.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I really think I would have been better off focusing on cash flow many times instead of just the exit because I definitely found myself in this position of basically, the only way it's gonna work out is if there's a big pop at the end.
Brian Casel:Right. I I think and and I think that's I definitely resonate with that too because I think about that as well, especially with like SaaS products. Like for Clarity Flow, the the exit is something that I think about a lot. Like that's the end game. I just don't know when that end game is going to happen and I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon.
Brian Casel:Like not close.
Jordan Gal:Here's the irony. I talked about this with my with my younger brother who's in a different situation and I think because he's in a different financial situation, he is much more focused on cash flow. And so the irony is that when you want the exit, you probably are better off not exiting. Sometimes, yes. I I guess he's in the EBITDA world with his his gym business.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. And the EBITDA world is very different from the revenue multiple world. The revenue multiple world is so crazy. Like, I had this conversation recently with the Portland crew in Slack, some of which have decent sized SaaS businesses. And multiples right now in SaaS are really strong.
Jordan Gal:10 to 15 x ARR is so strong that the cat going for the cash flow doesn't make sense. If you have a $2,000,000 AR business and you're making, I don't know, $300,000 in profit, $400,000 in profit, but someone wants to pay you 10 x, pay $20,000,000 like I mean sell. What are you doing here? Yeah. So it is a very weird game to play between different types of businesses and SaaS specifically whereas I really think almost nothing is better.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Fine. Let me rephrase. Nothing's better than a giant exit. Cool.
Jordan Gal:The problem with that is it happens so rarely that in reality, the best thing to shoot for is really strong profitable cash flow on an ongoing basis. Yeah. That's freedom. That that is a launching pad and a foundation for everything.
Brian Casel:And and also like once you have that and it's growing, it's like why sell? It'll it'll it'll keep growing. I mean, the different markets, different fate. I know, you know, they're like multiples might be good now. May who knows what they will be in the future, but still like if it's a growing profitable business, like, that's a that's a good thing.
Brian Casel:I also I I just I Like for me, personally, I've been like bootstrapped the whole way through except for a little bit of investment in in one case where it's like that like, I I I can't just focus on as much as I I think about the egg the end game exit, I can't think about it like at all costs. Like, at a certain point, at a sir after a certain number of years, it's like it's not worth my daily stress to get this to a point. Like if it's if it's just not on the right trajectory, then I'm just gonna move on to to focus on get get cash flow somewhere else, you know? Yes. Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's
Jordan Gal:funny the the little fantasies you'll come up with for like post cash flow stability. Like, or post exit. Like, I have I have absurd professional fantasies for what I would do if I sold Rosie for a bunch of money or or, you know, was in a different situation, had a bunch of cash flow or or something else.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I just like, as much as I've I've hopped around to from business to business, I still can't really get on board with the idea of like sinking multiple years into something where it's just not profitable during that time. Like I I to me, it's just I operate much more effectively and clear minded when I know that it's profitable as close to the beginning of the business as as possible and and just self fund, you know. And and then because then you have ultimate optionality. I could I could slow down.
Brian Casel:I can keep going. The other thing is like, not every business that I work on is with the exit in mind. Like, I still always want a big pop at at some point. Sure. I've had a couple base hits.
Brian Casel:I would love to have more of a home run at some point.
Jordan Gal:Amen.
Brian Casel:But not everything is set up for that and not everything serves that goal. Like audience ops, it got to a point where my The biggest win that I've had with audience ops and this goes years before I even sold it was like I I made a decision that like this business is pure cash flow. Like Yeah. Yeah. I did sell it at some point.
Brian Casel:But like the whole point of of that holding that business for an additional three, four years was like it's cash flow and I spend almost zero time touching it. So I can spend time hacking on SaaS products and those things can be the things that can lead hopefully to an exit which has not panned out. But but that's but that's the thinking. Right? Like I had the the cash flow sustainability, the optionality to do that.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. I I blew it all up in 2021. I it was a nice cash exit year for me. But like
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:Then the next three years, we're like, I'm going zero. I've talked about this ad nauseam
Jordan Gal:You but gotta build it back up.
Brian Casel:That's right. Yeah. Now twenty twenty twenty four, I'm back to that mindset of like, how can I build up the cash flow to create more operating space
Jordan Gal:Mhmm?
Brian Casel:To to be able to invest in new assets. You know, that's Yeah. That's where I'm at. I I just like the As impatient as I am, I I still operate better with the slow bootstrapped profitable op optionality approach. And that and that often means multiple products or services operating at the same time, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. We'll we'll see. I think the next year is gonna be pretty wild on the rosy front because it is such a such a different weird situation where we are really really taking advantage of the fact that we have someone else's money. Like Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Mean not doing anything
Brian Casel:That's the way you know.
Jordan Gal:Yes. That you would reasonably do them. We're like, no. We're just gonna go from 10,000 a month in ads to 25,000 a month in ads because we wanna understand this thing.
Brian Casel:I mean, it's not helpful for you to just leave the firepower sitting in a bank account.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. I've internalized that. Like, do not be careful. That is not Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Logical here. Yeah. I think if there's anything to take away from Cody's comment or question is there is no right or wrong, but generally speaking, all of us should be a little less patient, get things to go faster, be stricter with ourselves, don't spend that much time on things that don't work. I think that should be the general lean.
Brian Casel:100%. I I think if I could speak to I think a lot of people listening, especially people like newer in their careers. I I I've just seen this happen a lot with people. One of two things happens, what what you're just describing. One is like they're hacking on a product for multiple years and it's really going nowhere and they should have quit it years ago.
Brian Casel:And usually that that comes down to like you gotta just be talking to more customers and getting more feedback and figuring out if this is even viable.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Or stop.
Brian Casel:You know, but the other thing that I see and this is sort of where I'm at now with the consulting is like a lot of people latch onto the consulting or a job and it becomes so comfortable for years after years after it be to a point where their ability to take risks, like that that muscle atrophies. Right? So, you know, I've I've just seen people like grow, like like just get older into into their forties and and fifties where it's like, man, they're just so used to this level of comfort and income and security with their family and and and everything else that the idea of taking a pay cut for a couple months to a year in order to get a product off the ground is just not feasible, you know? Mhmm. You know, like that's that's where I'm at now with the consulting.
Brian Casel:Like I've I've spent almost a year doing straight consulting solo and I'm at the point now where I'm feeling that little bit of impatience where it's like, I love the cash flow. I actually like the projects. But I cannot get comfortable just doing this with my time. I I need to transform this and go through a little bit of pain to like start delegating more work and freeing myself up so that I can work on assets and not just my you know, selling my time. Like And that's a transition.
Brian Casel:You know, you just have to kinda go through it.
Jordan Gal:That's what it takes. Being willing to be comfortable and then purposely put yourself into a
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like cut cut into your own profit margin to fire yourself or to free up some space to to actually create more value and not just sell sell your time. That's that's ultimately what you gotta do. So close.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Cool. Well, let's get this thing published and sent over to Ian right away.
Brian Casel:Will do. Ian gets it first then everyone else gets the main feed.
Jordan Gal:Oh, yes.
Brian Casel:Thanks for listening, everybody. See you. Later, folks.
