[96] Our 2015 Recap and 2016 Goals
Hey now. It's Bootstrap Web episode number 96. Brian, good talking with you again.
Brian Casel:Hey, Jordan. How's it going?
Jordan Gal:It's it's going well. This is this is a big episode. The year back and the year ahead. End of 2015, we'll do a review of how we did on our stated goals from last year. We'll take a look at what our goals are for this upcoming year.
Jordan Gal:I'm going to be harsh on myself. Don't know about you.
Brian Casel:Yeah, That's me
Jordan Gal:the only way to do it?
Brian Casel:I'm a little it's it's it's kinda hard looking back in the last year, but I don't know. It was pretty good. Pretty pretty good and bad and and different. So
Jordan Gal:Exactly. And I think we'll we'll we'll learn from that. We'll talk about what happened in 2015. We'll talk about what we're trying to do and what that means for business, for personal lives. And yeah, how it makes us feel.
Jordan Gal:That's what we're really gonna talk about.
Brian Casel:That's right. We're we're all about feelings here. That's that's what the
Jordan Gal:Nothing but feelings.
Brian Casel:Feelings here on Bootstrap Web. You
Jordan Gal:wanna start? Or
Brian Casel:Alright. So so 2015. I mean, actually, looking back on it as a whole, I'm I'm pretty happy with how 2015 turned out. I I think it was a pretty good year overall. I mean, for me, a clear improvement over previous years.
Brian Casel:I can definitely say that. I I feel pretty good about it. In terms of my goals that I had set in January 2015, I mean, the way that plans change so quickly, it made me rethink how to even make goals for 2016, which I'll get into in a bit.
Jordan Gal:I think that's what you have to learn from it.
Brian Casel:But yeah, as most of you know, I exited my restaurant engine business earlier in the year. I mean, in January 2015, I had no idea that that was even gonna happen. Like, I didn't even decide to start seeking an exit until, I think, maybe February or March. And then that closed in in June. So that that definitely changed the whole outlook on the entire year.
Brian Casel:And it also, brought about the launch of a of a whole new business, Audience House, which again, I had not expected to even start a new business in 2015. So yeah, mean, that's kind of the big overall highlight of the year. And then on the family life, you look back and We sold our condo in Connecticut. We packed everything up into a car, we hit the road, and we started this long term travel thing. So that was a kind of a fun end to the year as we get up to the present today.
Brian Casel:But, So we kinda dug up the the post. This was episode what is it? Episode 54. So this is one year ago. About one year ago Did dig that when we did our twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen goals.
Brian Casel:So I'm just gonna run down the goals that I had set. Again, this was in January 2015. I think we might have even recorded it in December. But, I had wrote, build a new marketing funnel for for Restaurant Engine that is both profitable and measurable. I think I kinda did that, but right before I, I got up to the point of selling it.
Brian Casel:But I I don't know. I I don't know how we're grading these things. I I guess I'll I'll put like a point five on that. But, I I think it it just didn't reach the the level of volume and and predictability that I was actually hoping for. So the next one that I had here was record some success stories from the first students of Productize, which, better late than never, but I'm just doing it right in the last week of 2015.
Brian Casel:That's something that I'm actually working on this week. To be fair, I wrote in the goal that this stuff has to be launched in 2015. It's actually not gonna launch until January 2016. So I'm a little bit late on that one. I got a little bit caught up in other things.
Brian Casel:But, so that. And then, build a repeatable marketing funnel for product highs. I had wrote, I want an automated automated marketing, such as a free crash course, which should bring in around 2 k a month in revenue. And then repeatable marketing like webinars should bring at least 5 k a month in revenue. So so that's what I wrote a year ago.
Brian Casel:Looking back on the year, there there have been months when I did over 5 k, in the month, and and usually that's when I did some sort of big promotion with with somebody. But the months that I don't do that, I'm now averaging around 3 to 4 k a month in revenue from Productize. And that that is from from, like, automated sales systems that I have in place. So we have an email course, and then that leads into a free workshop. And now that I'm working on prioritizing for twenty sixteen, I'm I'm redoing that email course.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm adding a few additional recorded workshops. I'm even thinking about doing, like, a productized podcast to also, you know, help highlight some case studies and whatnot. As so I think it it again, like, five on this one. I I think it the automated stuff has exceeded the goal there. But, I still I'm still looking to kind of, you know, increase that.
Brian Casel:The last one that I had was transition 75% of my time over to CastJam and product and productize and building that audience. That's definitely a you know, that didn't happen because I ultimately decided to start the new business, Audience Ops, and that's really become my full time job this year and and it will be next year. I kinda thought that I was going to just focus completely on content creation on on my personal blog and and that's really actually taken a step down. Like, I'm posting less frequently. I'm just, you know, way too busy working on audience apps.
Brian Casel:So so that's that's it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Alright. That's that's a look look back.
Brian Casel:Yep. Do you want to go over your twenty fifteen goals, then and then we'll go back and do twenty fifteen?
Jordan Gal:I think that makes sense.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:First of all, I think that's, you know, that's medium shameful from you, which I think is all you can ask for. You know, No one's going look back at the twenty fifteen list, Yep, got that one and that one, nailed that thing and marked that one off.
Brian Casel:Yeah, exactly.
Jordan Gal:I think that's not the nature of it. Cool, all right. I'm going look back. I haven't looked at this. I just read this right now as you were talking for the first time, so let's take a look.
Jordan Gal:The first goal was to focus on one thing and that's card hook. So I get two thumbs up on that. I did nothing but card hook in all my waking hours in 2015. So that was good and I attribute that to a bunch of factors. I think the biggest factor there is raising money.
Jordan Gal:You raise money, that has a way of focusing. You're taking on other people's money, you're not going to be like, Well, I'm getting a little bored of this so let me do something else for a month that doesn't work that way. The first one, good. The next one, bring Cart Hook to profitability, hire first full time employee. Got the employee part and the guy is the best developer I've ever worked with, so thumbs up on that, big thumbs down on the profitability.
Jordan Gal:Not there yet and that I'll talk about as the 2016 goal. So not there in profitability, so while while revenue has gone up, it hasn't gone up fast enough to catch up with expenses increasing as well. So thumbs down on out. What's next? This is the one I think I'm I'm most ashamed of, and that was to build a marketing engine.
Jordan Gal:So to so part one was to nail down a repeatable outbound sales process, and part two was to begin content marketing backed up by automation and funnels and webinars and all that. So the repeatable outbound sales process, we had going for a while and that's that's kind of what got us off the ground. So I'm I'm proud of what we were able to accomplish on that front, but on the other side, the content marketing and automation, webinars, the stuff that I love to talk about, read about, I have not succeeded in incorporating that deeply into the business. We've done a few webinars, but the content backed up by automation, I have to give myself a giant fail for that. It's been surprisingly challenging to accomplish that because it oftentimes feels like things are moving so fast and there hasn't come a point in time to really focus on that side of things, which sounds crazy.
Jordan Gal:It sounds like how would you have this business that's growing if you haven't really built out marketing? And I have reasons for that, almost like excuses. I don't think there's any excuse to not building it. Right? That's a mistake and we would be further along if we had done that, but at the same time I I give myself a bit of a break on like, it's not like I'm not working on customer acquisition, It's just that things are shifting around and you you do an integration and then you get trials and then all of a sudden there are technical issues with that integration and you address that and then you do sales consultations and you get introduction.
Jordan Gal:So it's it's like you're acquiring customers but but for 2016, it it has to turn the corner. It's it's very strange. You you you're increasing. The business is moving faster but you haven't established these systems that you know would make it go a lot faster and would be better off for the future. So I think in general on this one, gave myself a fail, especially as a marketer, as the person in charge of marketing.
Jordan Gal:It's almost like running the company and trying to acquire customers has sabotaged my ability, willingness, whatever it is to actually accomplish that that I know is what's necessary. So it's a failure with a bunch of excuses but those excuses don't amount to enough to justify not accomplishing it. How's how's that?
Brian Casel:Alright. Well, you know, you're you're moving fast. A lot of things are changing, and it's it's it's it's tough. But
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We said we're gonna be a little hard on ourselves on on the goals because that's one of them. That's like, those are excuses you're saying. And they might be valid, but they don't add up enough to actually not accomplishing it.
Brian Casel:Sure.
Jordan Gal:The thing that makes me optimistic about it is if we can accomplish it and we will accomplish it, how much better and faster would the business be running with that in place? It's like we're growing it on a certain trajectory now and it can be improved significantly. So that that part of it at least is Yeah. You know, us driving.
Brian Casel:When when it comes to content, I I look back on the year, many years, and there there are always things that I put in place in terms of content that I wanna redo, You know, because my knowledge has changed or things have changed and I wanna, you know, incorporate some updates to this. And I know how to make this thing more effective, but it's so hard to just fit it into my to do list. And I mean, there are so many things just sitting on my CastJam site that I've been meaning to update and improve, especially when it comes to product the the productized, you know, funnels and whatnot. And, yeah. Just one of those things that just kinda sits there, you know.
Jordan Gal:So I have a funny take on that thought because I have it all the time. So my take on that is I convince myself that it's better to just get it out there, whatever it is. This display ad, it's not perfect. This thing, this blog post, this ebook, whatever it is, it's better to just get it out. So I convince myself of that.
Jordan Gal:Then at the same time, I convinced myself that I'll improve it later while knowing full well with 100% certainty I'm not going back there. I would trick myself into just fucking push it out there and improve it later, knowing I'm not improving it later.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well, that's what I'm working on now in December, where it's like I I I've I've started to learn the same thing about myself, where I I know, like, if I just promise myself, like, later in the year, I'm gonna I'm gonna do this, this, and this. No. No. No.
Brian Casel:No. Now now it's like, I know there's a whole bunch of things that I wanna build into Productize, but I need to do them in this two week period at the December and set them up so that they're just running all year long next year and I don't have to come back to them. Like, as much as I can get done and set it and forget it, that's the name of the game. But of course, then sales calls come up and team stuff comes up and travel and so
Jordan Gal:Alright. So what's next? Double down on the personal brand side of things. I would say that's a big fail, but that was a choice. I I just wanted to focus on Cardhook.
Jordan Gal:I wasn't gonna be looking to monetize the personal side of things with courses and anything like that. I think it was kind of like a get to work year, so I'm okay with that being a failure.
Brian Casel:I would not put that as a failure for you. I would say at least a point five or a one because, I mean, to be honest, not to plug our own podcast here, but I think Bootstrap Web has been doing awesome this year. If we look at our downloads, that's continuously growing every month. We're getting more and more tweets and comments from people, people mentioning you by name. Everyone I speak to who's been listening a long time says bringing Jordan on as co host was a great move, and I couldn't agree more.
Brian Casel:And recently, how you and I have tweaked our schedule so that we're much more consistent with publishing every week, I think that gets your name out there even more.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Agree with you and I appreciate the flattery. I will always take flattery. And same back to you also. Actually speak with a lot of people.
Jordan Gal:I actually speak with a lot of people related to Cart Hook and their ideas are the people who have different business ideas and wanna talk, they always mention you because they listen to the duo. But I didn't double down on Some people
Brian Casel:ask me about ecommerce stuff. I'm like, think you're thinking of Jordan.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. No no no. Not that guy. But I didn't like double down on it to like grow it. I think it was just like shut up and get to work and then talk about it on this podcast and that was kind of the right approach to it anyway.
Jordan Gal:But I am interested to see, you know, MicroConf last year was an eye opening experience for me. You and I used to have this like personal brand argument all the time and I was like fuck that, just use paid advertising, nobody needs to know who you are. And then MicroConf was like, oh, so it's really nice to go to a conference and people come up to you and say hey, listen to your podcast. Like that's good for networking. So I'm interested to see this year if it's any different, if it's better, if people are just fucking sick of me complaining and cursing and talking about money.
Jordan Gal:I guess that's the personal brand side. The other part, the last piece of my 2015 was grow and learn as entrepreneur to arm myself with the MO to get to the next level. I don't even know what that means, but I think that just means more experience. I will say this past year, I have to give myself a thumbs up on on succeeding on that one. The past year has been filled with a lot of new experiences and some I did well at, some I did not, but but a lot of different experiences.
Jordan Gal:Raising money from investors, closing a round of money, attracting a co founder, hiring developer, just all the stuff on the product side, and I I can talk much more technically now than I I I could a year ago. So just in general, the the level of the amount of experience I've had in the past year, I'd say is more than the preceding three, four, five years before.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Definitely. And I I would definitely echo that for myself in 2015. I did know, growing and learning as an entrepreneur, I mean, the whole process of going through the sale of the business was so huge for me. And not the exit itself, but the process of due diligence and working with a couple different buyers and ultimately working with one and all of that.
Brian Casel:Due diligence. Legal. Due diligence and seeing what is valuable in a business that makes it you know, attractive for someone else to take on. And all of that learning has has been folded into what I'm building in in Audience Ops. Not that I'm not that I necessarily intend to ever sell Audience Ops.
Brian Casel:I I definitely look at this as a long term thing. But just fundamental structuring of of the business, and and and strategies, and the way that I'm building things out. It's like, oh, man. If I had only if if I had built I had done this in a certain way a couple years ago, it it would have been so much easier later. I mean, like, for example, in 2015, in the middle of the year, I I hired a bookkeeper for the first time in in my biz in in my entrepreneurial career, which looking back on it, it's like, oh my god, I can't believe I spent all those hours every month just combing through my bank statements.
Brian Casel:And now I've got a fantastic bookkeeper who handles it. You know, little things like that and just the way that, I mean I can go on and on about it but yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah but it changes you. My line on it when I talk to people about selling the e commerce business was that it was not so much life changing in terms of an influx of capital, but it was career changing in the experience of going from start to grow to a transaction, a legal transaction of a sale of a business. It's like you only have to go through that once for it to be your first time and then the next time it comes up, the way you think about it, everything everything changes in in your career. Awesome, man. Alright.
Jordan Gal:So what do think? 2016, the year ahead.
Brian Casel:2016, yeah. I'm
Jordan Gal:interested Here we see what your take on it, like what approach you're taking. Now you look back, you see what goals were possible, what goals you succeeded, what goals were totally off.
Brian Casel:To be honest, and this has happened year after year after year, and I feel like I'm starting to finally learn this lesson about setting annual goals, and that is don't let these annual goals be all about making specific plans, specific actionable plans. Because the truth of the matter is plans change. And really, plans should change. Like, as new information reveals itself or new situations arise, you should be willing to change course. And I think that if you just look at my goals for 2015, I had no idea that I was going to start a new business in 2015.
Brian Casel:I had no idea that I was gonna exit a business, you know? But that kind of came up, and and that's what happened. And then so so I think this year, going into 2016, I'm not necessarily going to list out, you know, four, five, six things that I want to ship in 2016. I have an I have an idea of a couple things that I do wanna start working on and and hopefully ship in 2016. But I'm also acknowledging that, you know, it's very possible that these ideas can change, and I might not even do them if if other circumstances change.
Brian Casel:So with that in mind, this year, I want to focus more on on making improvements, both in myself personally and in my business. And I wanna do that in in a systematic way, you know, better than I have in in years past. So I was writing this down the other day. Every month, you know, on the first of the month, I like to always look back on the last month and I always like to, you know, map out, alright, what are the things that I'm gonna work on and and ship this month. But what I also wanna work on on the first going forward is pick one thing one one thing to improve in my business life and one thing to improve in my personal life, that I want to be focused on just for the next thirty days.
Brian Casel:And to go along with that I want to I want to write down what is the thing that I'll be measuring say and what will success look like. You know, for example, in December, I just started a running routine. Every morning I'm running now. You know, a couple miles, I'm trying to, you know, increase distance and work on my form and whatnot. So so like a small goal that I just set for myself is don't allow two days in a row to go by that I that I don't run.
Jordan Gal:Which So for for thirty days, no no two consecutive days in a row.
Brian Casel:Of not running. Yeah. So I mean, I've I've been running on average about four or five days a week, and I'm trying to, you know, get up to, six. So that's an example of something that I'm going to work on improving. Or it could be, maybe change something in the way that I speak to new leads on sales calls.
Brian Casel:Try to find some measurable metric to to look at over a thirty day period. That so so really, I'm I'm just gonna take it kind of like month by month. I'm still gonna have bigger targets, you know, long term targets that I'm that I'm working toward. But to be honest, I haven't completely thought those out yet right now, based on where we're at. And actually, to be honest, we've already busted through whatever target that I had initially set for audience ops.
Brian Casel:So I'm still trying to figure out
Jordan Gal:Right. What's the right target for that?
Brian Casel:What's the right target to shoot for there. And I'm also dealing with with figuring out what the team is gonna look like and and all that. So, again, like, things things are changing. Things are very fluid. So, I'm I'm trying to to to acknowledge that and and then and just kind of try to continue to make progress.
Brian Casel:Maybe this all sounds like a cop out, like I'm not setting any goals for 2016.
Jordan Gal:It's also facing reality. Look at what happened last year. What could you have predicted? If you tried to predict, you would been all wrong. You were all wrong in the predictions because that's just nature of the current situation.
Brian Casel:What I can say is I guess I can list a couple of things that I'm thinking about launching. I don't I can't say for certain if they will launch. But, on the productized course, as I said, I've been focused on that in December. January, I'll be launching the the the new updates to that. I'm thinking about I probably will launch a productized podcast in the near future.
Brian Casel:That that'll be a that'll be more like a season based podcast, kind of a
Jordan Gal:I meant for the season based thing because I'm I'm fucking tired of the Kartik podcast right now. The scheduling, it requires a lot and I go through spurts, so I feel great about knowing that that approach is becoming more common. It's like, I'm just gonna take a month off. That's fine.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. That and then the other thing is I'm thinking about writing a book. Either a book or a course. I'm I'm I'm going back and forth on whether it should so something for audience ops, a book about, like, our playbook when it comes to content marketing and building that into into your your software business.
Jordan Gal:This seems to be a a more common goal these days, the the book thing. Is it I mean, five, ten years ago writing a book almost sounds ridiculous. You can't just write a book. It takes forever and the publishing because there were all these gates, but now you can write a book. I'm in a mastermind with Ryan Battles.
Nathan Barry:He he was like, I'm gonna write a book. And and he wrote a book, and then it
Jordan Gal:got on Amazon, and it's it's a book.
Brian Casel:And it's I've done, you know, my own, like, self published ebook style before. I've done the course with Productize before, And I haven't fully thought out exactly what this is gonna be yet, but I I think that we should this would come from the Audience Ops brand. I mean, written by me, but
Jordan Gal:I love it for for credibility and establishing yourself.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And also something to serve so that's why what I'm back and forth on. It's like, should it be a legitimate product for people who are more do it yourself, and they don't want to become a client of Audience Ops? Or should it be a a very low priced, like Amazon style ebook, to to really be more like a lead gen for Audience
Jordan Gal:how I would go, but I know what I'm talking about. That that's that's the first thing that comes to mind is that.
Brian Casel:We can give away even more through, like, videos and and actual templates and guidelines and and, like, literally everything that we that we've built, in in in, like, a legit, you know, like, course kind of training. But I don't know. I'm that's that's what I'm thinking about. And then, you know, we're continuing to develop some plugins from Audience Ops. That'll be coming around in 2016.
Brian Casel:So that's kinda what we're working on. But again, that's that's how things are going. You know?
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. I like it. Think that's the approach that a lot of people are going to be taking to this new year. Things have just shifted, man. We are not lawyers trying to make a partner at the firm.
Jordan Gal:It's not a straight line.
Brian Casel:It's moving so fast.
Jordan Gal:You to acknowledge it. I mean, sitting in this chair a year from today is really impossible to predict what we will be talking about. We might be in different businesses. Cardhook might have gone under, it might have gone bought for millions. It's like the divergence in possibilities is so unbelievably big.
Jordan Gal:Do you have more to add to to 2016 side of things before before I go?
Brian Casel:No. Just a couple real quick personal family life stuff. We're expecting our our second child in April. Really excited about that. Another
Jordan Gal:girl What's the due date?
Brian Casel:April April 28 is the due date. Alright. Alright. Yeah. So I'm gonna be outnumbered with with girls here in in the household, but that's okay.
Jordan Gal:Don't worry. I'm I'm having my third girl in March. Wow. Vastly outnumbered. All I have is my dog.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Me too.
Jordan Gal:Me and Alex. Yep. Same with you.
Brian Casel:And so we're we're we're still traveling through February. We'll be in Colorado, and then we we do plan we we kind of cut our travel plans short a little bit. We'll be heading back to Connecticut in in March, so looking forward to settling back there. I will be heading back to MicroConf in Vegas in early April, so looking forward to catching up with folks there. And just looking ahead, my wife and I are thinking about planning an Asia trip in late twenty sixteen.
Brian Casel:So again, who knows if that's gonna happen, but I'd I'd love to see it happen. So that's kind of what we're looking looking ahead to.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. More more travel. Always always good.
Brian Casel:Yep. How about you, sir? 2016.
Jordan Gal:Alright. So I have one concrete goal that I feel confident enough saying like that's measurable and that's my goal and that's kind of what I think about all day and there are a million different micro decisions that go into it every day and every week and every month but getting CardHook profitability is that's the goal. Falling short of that does not mean death and despair and destruction, but that is my goal. Right? There are different options especially once you start raising money, then raising more money is kind of another option, but getting profitable in the situation that we are gives us the right option set.
Jordan Gal:It allows us to raise more, not raise more, raise a little bit more, raise go really big, I want those options. I don't want to come at the business with a limited option set because we are losing money every month and therefore need more money from outside sources other than revenue. So that's basically what I've communicated with Ben and with Rock and just kind of whatever it takes for us to get profitable, let's do that as opposed to aiming to just grow quickly and raise more money. So I don't know if that means basically everything's short of firing people. We need to keep the trio together.
Jordan Gal:But other than that, there's consulting, there's productized services, there's a whole bunch of other options. But profitability, that's the goal. And the first goal obviously is to just keep things exactly purely software but a little bit a little bit shameless in just get to profitability.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's that's what I was thinking too is is adding some kind of high priced consulting package for for a small subset of your customers.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We have a lot of expertise and we see a lot of things and we have credibility because of it and some people just have a lot more money to spend in their budgets than others. So either that option is kind of always there and we don't know what to do with it yet, so we kind of have our preferred path and then our path B and then path C and then path D, but as long as it gets us to that promised land. And the way we've been thinking about it lately, think is at least interesting to share, is in two phases. So I don't want to get to call it 30 ks a month.
Jordan Gal:That's not my goal in life. I want to make 300 ks a month. I want to make $3,000,000 a month, but I see phase one as profitability and then phase two, the actual, the real ambitions. And this might be a wrong approach, right? You can argue both ways.
Jordan Gal:You can argue if you don't aim really high into that bigger ambition, you might fail in getting to profitability or look, there's everyone can make the argument from all different sides, but in our in our situation right now, that's the path we've taken is to separate into two phases, and what that leads into is making some decisions to get to phase one that maybe you wouldn't make if you were only aiming for phase two. Right? If we were if we were trying to get to 300,000 a month, we wouldn't be doing an integration with a small ecommerce platform because that would what's that gonna add? Two k MRR? Three k MRR?
Jordan Gal:It's not going add a 100 k MRR, but it's what makes sense for phase one. So we just want to yeah, so that's kind of what we're looking at on that side of things. So that's the one concrete goal is profitability and all the stuff that goes around that will change. It just I mean it changes every day and every week. So there's like a general direction but then there's there are things that come up every day.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. New product ideas, consulting, all that other stuff.
Brian Casel:Interesting.
Jordan Gal:Yep. That's really the one goal for business wise for the year. The other goal is to think bigger. So that's more ambiguous. But it's very easy to just look at what you do all day and maybe what your competitors do or what's happening and what your current growth rate is and then you it's hard to think big given what you think about all day.
Jordan Gal:But I want to keep challenging myself to think bigger in that way.
Brian Casel:When you say think bigger, are you thinking specifically CardHook and how that can become bigger or even something else?
Jordan Gal:Business wise, it's CardHook and how CardHook can be a lot bigger and how to think bigger when considering the options for card hook. Yep. Because I think a lot of what happens to people in our situation is we get limited by reality. You know, we look at our current reality and doubling, two x ing sounds ambitious and 10 x ing sounds crazy, but a 100 x ing is so unrealistic that we almost don't look at it as an option and you should be considering all of those things. That's kind of what I want to challenge myself to think.
Jordan Gal:So always, I love the examples. Ben just shared with me on Slack today. There's a company in New York that does handwritten cards. You go on your iPhone and you write out and then they have robots that print it. The company is doing like $500,000 a month.
Jordan Gal:That sounds like a small idea, but the people executing that idea, they thought big. They said, you know what, we're gonna go to giant fortune 500 companies and offer them the same thing instead of just launching it as a little landing page and seeing what happened. So I like the only difference between those two is in executing on a much bigger vision, a bigger idea.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And so that's something that's very I've seen
Brian Casel:But again, to to execute something on such a large scale requires taking almost unlimited funds, means forget about the profitability. I
Jordan Gal:think it first requires imagination and thinking. Yeah. That's where it starts. Yep. Anyway, that's it on the business side of things.
Jordan Gal:On the personal side of things, it's just my belly, It's not what it used to be. Me too. In my 20s, I used to have this cockiness of like, Whatever I do, I can't gain weight. The six pack, it just stays here. I don't do anything.
Jordan Gal:It just stays. It's not really there the same way anymore. Got to get healthier, got to exercise more. I eat well, but I need more regular exercise and stop making excuses of being so busy, and I'll do it when I'm fucking rich on the beach. So I need to stop the excuses on that side of things.
Brian Casel:I got to admit, that's a huge fail for me in 2015. I think it was also a fail in 2014, is getting healthy. I always talk about it, but I never live up to it. I mean, I'm now getting into running, which I'm actually really enjoying because I figured out this new form which doesn't hurt my legs like it used to. But the eating for me, you you eat healthy, but I'm I go on and off, you know.
Brian Casel:I've got weeks where I'm eating great and then weeks when I when I'm eating like shit. And that obviously Hard load. It comes out in my belly, but I think what I really care about is my work. And it's so hard to focus and stay productive when I'm you know, eating stuff. And yeah, the traveling thing is not done so well for for the belly.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Makes it hard. I would like to travel a little more, like, in, you know, I don't know what to call it, more reasonable travel than than what you're doing. And then just more important, by the way. What?
Jordan Gal:What's that? The Traveling. From home?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like
Jordan Gal:Or just traveling, JL.
Brian Casel:Being on the road all the time is horrible for the the waistline as well as the credit card bill. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yep. I hear that. And then just more moments of happiness. I think that's a reasonable thing to go after. I got kids.
Jordan Gal:I got the third one on the way. I find myself sometimes I get too busy, and sometimes I I am I am capable of just putting the phone away and just getting on the floor and playing like Slinko for half an hour and just acknowledging how unbelievably good it feels. So just more more of that.
Brian Casel:Yeah, man. I couldn't agree more with that one. And, you know, if I look back on 2014, so like two years ago when my when my first daughter was born, I gotta be honest, I was I have a little I I mean, it was fantastic that the experience of, you know, welcoming her into the world and everything. But but honestly, at that week, a whole lot of shit was going down in my business that week. And and I was I was kinda sidetracked.
Jordan Gal:Fogs up the memories.
Brian Casel:You know? And obviously, I was I was where I needed to be in in all the important moments and whatnot, but but it's, you know, it's something that I kinda regret. And That's part
Jordan Gal:of being an adult. Don't be too hard on yourself. Your dad had the same experience. And my dad got me out of the hospital cool and went back to the army base the next day. So it's less pure than you imagine it to be, but I hear you.
Brian Casel:Yeah, looking ahead into 2016, you and I both are expecting again around the same time. Yours is in April, right?
Jordan Gal:No, late March, March 20 Late
Brian Casel:March, okay.
Jordan Gal:Weeks before MicroConf. This is our third one. So my wife was like, I don't fucking need you anyway. Here you go.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So that's that's definitely something that I'm thinking about. I was trying to actually, I wrote down the other day, I I wanna try to work less. And I've I've said that before, but just I I need to get to a point, especially, when we get back to Connecticut and settle down again. I I wanna get to a point where I'm enjoying other things aside from work.
Brian Casel:I mean, I love that I love what I do for a living. I love working. But I gotta get back into playing music. I gotta get back into spending more time with with with my family. And and just taking on, like, hobbies again.
Brian Casel:Like, I I feel like I lost hobbies. And you know, I'm trying to read other books that are not about It's business and you
Jordan Gal:really not not a good thing to do to yourself and I'm in the same boat as you are. I think that's a really good thing to kind of bring up and mark down. And I hope we can look back at this year's blog post a year from today and say that's one of the things that we succeeded in. Because if I look back over the past ten years that I've shed some of the things like you, that made you, contributed to your personality and your enjoyment in life and the things you're interested in outside of the professional life. It's a terrible thing that we sacrifice.
Jordan Gal:I see a lot of my friends who have more stable jobs. They're still playing kickball in Central Park. My buddy down here in Miami is a lawyer. He just got a boat. It's a very steep price that we pay with the uncertainty of entrepreneurship that those are the first things to go, especially once you have a family.
Jordan Gal:You just shed those things. Hallelujah to people who are able to do that. I have not been able to keep keep those things up.
Brian Casel:That's well, it's still worth it to me. So Yeah. With with that, why don't we leave it at that one and we'll we'll we'll see you guys back here this time next year.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Big challenges, bigger opportunities. Absolutely. 2016. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Good stuff, my man. Alright. Later. Happy New Year, everybody.
Brian Casel:Happy New Year.
![[96] Our 2015 Recap and 2016 Goals](https://img.transistorcdn.com/LDB_Cv9bHAA2vtoSPkZCpkdHPF6fAqfl7PL-PG7_c-M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:800/h:800/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9jMjkw/MDYxZDQ0MWIxYTUw/NTMzMGI2NTExZWMx/MWQ1Yi5qcGc.webp)