[102] Updates: Remote Company Culture & Bandwidth for Big Customers
Hey. This is Bootstrapped Web episode one zero two. We're back at it today. We'll we'll do, kind of a quick updates episode. Jordan, how's it going?
Jordan Gal:It's good, man. Nice to speak with you. Yeah. This is gonna be one of our free form episodes. Just just talk about whatever comes to mind.
Jordan Gal:Just jump on in between one call and another and hash it out. But we've got a lot going on. I'm sure once we start rolling, you know, things will come up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Totally. So
Jordan Gal:Brian, your your loop of the great United States is complete.
Brian Casel:Yes. We did we did a big loop East Coast to West Coast and back, and it feels good. It feels good to be back. Now I'm in Connecticut. It still doesn't quite feel like home because, well, we're not home.
Brian Casel:We're still in an Airbnb. But we are back in Connecticut. We're right now, we're, we're kinda shopping around for for a house around here and that's got all, you know, some stressful and exciting things all at the same time. But, you know, we'll still be kinda renting and and looking around for the next couple of months. But yeah, it's good to be back, you know, close to the family and everything and back to our old stomping grounds here in in Connecticut.
Jordan Gal:Nice man. Must feel good. I miss Connecticut.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, I I I did miss it too. Although today it's like cold and rainy, which I definitely don't miss. But Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Nobody misses that. Yeah. Well, it's good to have you back, on the East Coast. I saw that map that you posted on Facebook.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah.
Jordan Gal:Of your journey. That thing is scary looking.
Brian Casel:I know. So that was something my wife was doing. She has she has some iPhone app that, like, tracks our locations or, like, she, you know, she inputs our locations, puts a big Right. You know, tracks our progress over the map and it kinda makes that that cool map image.
Jordan Gal:That was a legit road trip right there.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Basically, it went from from up here down to Virginia, then North Carolina, then New Orleans, Austin, Texas, across the Southwest, Grand Canyon, up through California to San Francisco, and then back down the Pacific Coast, then across Utah, which is amazing, by the way, and then into Colorado where we stayed for a little while, and then across all the cornfields back to Connecticut.
Jordan Gal:Very nice. Yeah. Utah, I don't even know if it's underrated. Anyone who's been there knows how amazing it is. It's a great state.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful.
Jordan Gal:Nice, dude. Well, things in Portland are good. Getting, you know, on the personal front, things getting a little hairy. Got my third daughter due in less than a month. You know, as we get closer, that, like, starts to eclipse all the other business pressure because it's like, it just helps put in perspective that that's fun and important and like that's like the point of everything.
Jordan Gal:So it's been good to have that perspective because shit is real on the business front.
Brian Casel:Nothing nothing like having kids to really make you start focusing in on what matters in the business.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, it's true. And I find myself the most stressed and unhappy when things are quiet and happiest and most at ease when things are a little bit insane. So I kinda like that. It just feels like there's a lot of activity, but I would categorize the past week as high stakes.
Brian Casel:Well, actually, have a question for you, not to get off on a whole sidetrack here today, So, you know, yours yours is expected in the next, three, four weeks. I'm actually expecting my second daughter now, about two months from now, late April. And so just looking back on when our first daughter was born two years ago now, I just remember that week, you know, it's exciting everything when she arrives, but I was still so consumed in my work, there were actually a lot of things going on in my business, like changes and things going on. So, I had a little bit of regret that I didn't block off that time of the year to try to step back from work and really be completely focused in on family. And this time around, I I'm I'm planning on trying to spend, you know, May around the time that she's expected to be, like, not planning too many big projects that month.
Brian Casel:But I I'm curious about you. Like, do do you think about that at all? Like, what what's going on?
Jordan Gal:I think about it a lot. In previous two, kids, I had a good amount of time. I think the first one, I might have even I'm not sure if I was in between things or just doing like my own thing before Carthook started, right? It's four years ago. So I was just doing my own thing and I I definitely had plenty of time.
Jordan Gal:The second one, slightly less so. It's not that you become desensitized, but look, the first kid, I went to, like, every OB appointment with my wife.
Brian Casel:Oh, man.
Jordan Gal:And on this one, I don't know the OB. You know? I met them once.
Brian Casel:We have nothing. Like, we're we're two months away, and, you know, the first one we had cribs. We had the whole room picked out.
Jordan Gal:It's the natural.
Brian Casel:This time around, like, we've been traveling around the country. We have not bought one piece of, new baby equipment or anything. Like, there's no baby shower or whatever. It's just
Jordan Gal:Yes.
Brian Casel:This is happening.
Jordan Gal:And I think that's just that's just normal. It is something I have been trying to not think about this time around because unfortunately, this is one of those kind of adult situations where I don't really have a choice. We are launching the biggest thing the company's ever done, the same week that the kid is expected. So I'm going to have to juggle and my attention is going to be split and I don't like that. It's just the way it is right now.
Jordan Gal:So it sucks and I wish I had more control over that. This is just one of those situations where I don't have control. So I can either be upset about it or I could just kind of, you know, deal with it.
Brian Casel:Yeah, but you've got a good team now, so. Yes.
Jordan Gal:So that side of it, it's not like I'm gonna be working all day. It's just that my attention inevitably will be split because as we get closer to that, I will give more detail about what we've been working on. It's a new product. Think it might be the first time I've said it on the podcast, but we have something big coming up in a
Brian Casel:few You and I talked about this.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You and I have talked about it, but I've been keeping it quiet. And as it starts to get closer, I can talk more freely about it, but it's it's all happening right on the same week that that that the dude is there. So that will
Brian Casel:And that
Jordan Gal:will be
Brian Casel:I mean, not to give away too much about the product, but it this is something coming from CartHook. Like, it's a CartHook product.
Jordan Gal:It is a CartHook product. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. It's a CartHook product, and there's a specific launch event.
Jordan Gal:And so I know exactly when the launch event is, and that is exactly one day after the due date. And so that's when it's going to happen. So I'm doing as much as I can in anticipation of not wanting to be focused on work that week, but having responsibility to do a lot of things. So yes, thinking about it, and kind of maneuvering around it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So, so you're heading out to microconf as am I.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Very exciting. That's what? Two months? Less than two months away.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. April. That's six weeks or so.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Cool. Excited. Should be fun.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I'm I'm excited and, you know, I think one interesting thing to talk about is the attendee talk. Right? We we both did attendee talks last time and I I I mean, it makes you nervous and sweaty. It makes the conference a slightly different experience until you actually get it done with, and then you have a more relaxing experience.
Jordan Gal:It's similar to what we've talked about in starting a podcast. Just just putting stuff out there and separating yourself from average is good for you. And so I'm really tempted to just not even apply for an attendee talk, but I think I have to take my own advice. You know, if somebody asked me what I would do if I were them, I would say any time you can possibly do anything to set yourself apart, then you you gotta do it. So I'm I'm gonna apply for an attendee talk.
Jordan Gal:I think I have another, like, six hours to
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think is it due today or tomorrow or something like that?
Jordan Gal:It's today at 7PM Pacific. I know because I haven't put anything in. Have you put something in?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I put something in a couple days ago.
Jordan Gal:And Do you put in one? I'm tempted to put in two.
Brian Casel:Oh, I didn't even
Jordan Gal:Politically, that's stupid. I would split whatever whatever vote anyone would actually. No. For me, Split it.
Brian Casel:I put one in. I actually didn't realize that you could put more than one in. But, no. Yeah. I don't think that would really make sense even.
Brian Casel:It like like you said, to have two.
Jordan Gal:Right. If someone wants to give you some love, don't don't make them split it up. Yep.
Brian Casel:Yeah. What I what I have seen a few people do is, you know, go to go to whatever groups you're in and and pitch two or three different topics, like which one do you think I should submit?
Jordan Gal:Well, I did that, and the one I didn't want to win won.
Brian Casel:Cool. You know, the thing with with the micro comp attendee talks, and somebody asked me for for feedback on on their, like, draft topic before they submitted it. And I think a lot of people try to get overly creative with these things. And I and I think the the attendee talks are different than full than full speaker talks. You know, don't don't think of it like a Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, first of all, the time limit. But don't think of it like like it's a talk at a conference, even though technically it is. It's it's more about a success story. Try to talk about a success story, and this audience likes likes metrics and something that they can learn from, but it also has to be something that that people are gonna upvote and and get you into that top 12.
Jordan Gal:And because it's gonna be valuable to them, not just because you wanna hear yourself speak.
Brian Casel:Exactly. Yeah. And and so I I forgot the one like Anders was it Anders Peterson? He was talking about at at MicroConf Europe, how he he put, like, clickbait in the headline of his talk because he had a a legit lesson that he wanted to share. And we talked about this on on the show, you know, back when we did the recap.
Brian Casel:I forgot what it was now, but yeah, like something about how he like I'm I'm butcher this. I'm not even gonna say it.
Jordan Gal:Jordan talks about growth through integrations, but when he starts talking, watch what happens. Right? That's the the clickbait person.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, I I like the one that I put in is is gonna be something about audience ops and the the fast growth that that I've seen in the first eight eight, nine months of launching it and how we went to from zero to, you know, whatever in in nine months and and so, like like, five lessons learned during that time. Like, like, something like that. But, you know, I I think something actionable, something like a success story, I think that's what people wanna hear.
Jordan Gal:Well, unfortunately, I think this episode will come out after the voting. So if you voted, thanks. Yep. Cool, man. What is happening on the AO front?
Jordan Gal:What you up to this week?
Brian Casel:Yeah. So we've got some some updates here. Should I get into mine here first?
Jordan Gal:Sure. Unless you want me to go.
Brian Casel:Alright. So I I've got one thing that's just kind of been on my mind for a while, and I haven't I haven't done a whole lot about this quite yet, but just a few ideas kicking around. So and that's company culture. Right? So now, you know, Audience Hops, the team is growing.
Brian Casel:We've got about 12 people on the team now. And and, you know, we've got a really really active Slack chat room just like every other team in in the online world does these days. But I I feel like that alone is not company culture. Right? I think it has to go beyond that.
Brian Casel:And Like, could chat and we can do emails and and it's kind of work related or And we do have a lot of activity around like, hey, what's going on? How was your weekend? Kinda, you know, or or like funny stuff like that. But I just feel like there's not enough of the teammates getting to know one another and and and hear where each other are coming from, especially since we all live in different places. It's it's a fully remote team.
Brian Casel:So I'm just trying to think of different ideas to get the team more integrated and and kinda get to know each other better.
Jordan Gal:Do you do video calls?
Brian Casel:You know, we've done them, on and off, like like team meetings and things, but they've just never been productive. Like, they they always end up just, you know, they're they're It just seems it just seems like a waste of time and either I'm the one talking the whole time. They work really well with groups of like two or three, and we do those quite a bit, especially with with clients. What what I do sometimes is when I need to announce, like, some kind of new update like, actually, just yesterday, I I released internally a whole new round of updates to our, procedures that our assistants follow to do the setups of blog posts and social media updates and things. Just to reduce mistakes, make sure that we're we're getting everything in on time.
Brian Casel:You know, some deadlines have been missed lately, so I wanted to fix a few things in our process. And so I just recorded like a twenty minute video, kinda walking through these are the changes. And actually, I'm gonna get into this a little bit in in my next update. But, you know, I'll I'll just share a video with the team. But basically, some ideas around company culture.
Brian Casel:So one idea is this thing called briefs.fm. And this comes from from Ben Orenstein, who who joined us on, on the Colorado trip, Big Snow Tiny Conf. And this is a really cool idea. So I think it's briefs. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Briefs.fm. And this is the whole idea is like it's three minute podcasting. So it's a super super easy way to create a podcast, but the episodes are limited to three minutes max. And it's got this mechanism where you can just email to it. You can like email your episodes to it.
Brian Casel:And you can give that email address to like a group of people and the group can all contribute to the podcast, if that makes
Jordan Gal:sense. Sort of. So So so okay. So the the the culture thing is is very hard to put your finger on. Like, what what do you think what's the benefit you you're going for?
Jordan Gal:For people to just be happier in general, for everyone to be on the same page more, for there to be more, like, camaraderie?
Pippin Williamson:Like, what
Jordan Gal:what is all this supposed to accomplish?
Brian Casel:I think all of the above. And also just I I think that work gets done better when when people feel accountable to one another.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And they know each other and
Brian Casel:care about each know, you know, they're they're not screwing each other over when they're turning stuff in late or they're not committed to the work at Audience Ops or committed to the company. I think it adds an element of loyalty to the company and to your position at Audience Ops. Just you know, I think it just makes you, you know, enjoy the work when when you feel like you're actually part of a team, and it's not just yourself plugging into some system, which, you know, it's a productized service, and we have a ton of systems processes, and SOPs, and stuff. And I and that stuff is really important for everything to run, but there also needs to be an element of, you know, we're we're all kind of, like, in this as a team, and and working toward larger goals. And now that we have, you know, some full time employees, whereas before, it was, almost everybody was was part time.
Brian Casel:We still have a mix of part time and full time now, but, you know, so that's just something that I'm thinking about. So like this idea of a podcast And and so the idea would be an internal podcast. So there are a couple different ideas that I've been kicking around. One is this internal podcast where maybe I'll get on a three minute call with somebody on the team and just interview them for three minutes. Say like, hey, what's what's new?
Brian Casel:What's going on in your world? Maybe share some some tip or some, you you've done a really great job of this lately, tell us about that. And just share that with the team and try to do one or two of those every week internally and just share it on Slack. And maybe have, you know, the the teammates kind of, you know, talk with each other on on those episodes, and then it's something that everybody else can kinda tune into. So that And and it's And it doesn't require the whole team to get on a call together at the same time.
Brian Casel:It's just like a little three minute update that everyone can kinda consume, you know, on their own time. You know, another idea that I would love to get to at some point, is is to fly the team out to a retreat, at least once or twice a year. I I
Jordan Gal:We're want dying to do that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Totally agree. Yeah. I'd like, you know, maybe do like a trip to like Chicago or something, you know, like something central, you know, and
Jordan Gal:That, like three days of that would do more than anything else online.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Totally. Of course, that's really expensive to fly everybody to one place, but but I think it would it would be totally worth it and it's something that, you know, maybe maybe we'll plan it this year, maybe maybe it'll happen next year, something like that.
Jordan Gal:We're trying to reward ourselves with that when we hit MRR goals.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I like it. Yep. What was the other thing on on company culture? Oh, just I guess this is kind of a small thing, and this is really not really so much culture, but it's more like getting things done.
Brian Casel:I'm experimenting right now with a tool called Status Hero, which is, you know, similar to like I done this. It's it's one of those tools where you where you, you set it up and then it it sends everybody on the team an email. And you can set it up to be daily. I set it up to be Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Everybody gets an email in the morning that says, What did you get done in the last two days?
Brian Casel:What are you workin' what are your goals for the next two days? And and what's what's kinda standing in your way? Anything impeding your progress? And and Status Hero is really cool because it integrates really really nicely with Slack. And so everybody submits their answers, and then those answers get posted to a Slack channel.
Brian Casel:And, So so I'm kind of experimenting with that, starting with just a segment of the team. So just the assistants are doing it. And and I'm doing it my myself as well. I'm putting in my updates. And I think that that obviously helps us get a feel for what everybody's working on and and and making sure that nothing's holding us up.
Brian Casel:But I think it's also an opportunity for people to give a quick personal update like, hey, this is what's going on today. Like, I'm I'm kinda feeling sick today, or I've been kinda preoccupied with this other thing going on, and and just so people are aware, you know, rather than, like, just waiting around, like, why is this thing late from this person? Like, you don't really know what's going on in their world unless they have a way to give an update like that. So, so I I I like I actually like it just personally because I'm I'm submitting my answers too, and and it's also a way of, like, personal accountability. Like, this is these are my goals for the next two days.
Brian Casel:I've published these goals. Now I need to report on them two days from now. And,
Jordan Gal:It's easier for us because we have three people. So it's just a smaller group. We do a daily stand up over video. So that's kind of like the central piece of the culture. When we see each other, we kind of goof off and just talk unseriously for the first five minutes before getting into the actual stand up.
Jordan Gal:What are you working on? What's your biggest priority of the day? What do you want to have done by the end of the day sort of thing? So, and then that that's when we can see each other, see how we're feeling. I know Rock right now has the flu, and I know where he's at because of that.
Jordan Gal:I know what Ben is dealing with with a few technical headaches and where his, you know, frustration level is and his mood. And so that carries over into Slack where we're talking and joking. We have one Slack channel that's just for casual conversation. That's just kind of this rolling comedy show. We have, like, some inside jokes.
Jordan Gal:I mean, the the name of the company is Carhook, so obviously we're hookers. And so there's, like, comedy wrapped around everything and, you know, then it gets serious, and I talk about my kids, and we post, like, pictures of my kid's birthday party. So so it tends to be like this talk in person, and then everything gets carried over into Slack, and then then you feel better about sharing things in your personal life and
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's a very strange thing. It's very hard to create, but it's very Yeah.
Brian Casel:The daily, like the daily stand up thing or even like a I I tried weekly meetings, video calls, at one point. For us, as a productized service or as like the nature of of our particular service, it's just it's not the same as a SaaS where I think you guys are probably talking every day. Like, these are the features that we're building. These are this is the progress that we're making. You know, you you guys are
Jordan Gal:This is why we hate technology. Is why we hate Shopify.
Brian Casel:Well, but
Jordan Gal:I'm This is why But what
Brian Casel:I mean, like, is is, like, from week to week in building a SaaS, it's very different. Like, the projects that you're working on are very different. Because you're you're building feature after feature after feature, you know, and and it's and it's kinda different from week to week. Whereas with us, I mean, we are improving things, but it's more about, like, just running a production line. And it's pretty repetitive, to be honest.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:And you need to figure out a way for people to still be able to be creative within that system, or they'll get bored.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But I just wonder if we had daily updates, what would we say other than, like, you know, submit another article today, did this, did that, and and it's kind of the same update every week. But, yeah, I mean, you know, that that could be an idea too to to try to work it out into some maybe it's, like, smaller groups or something. But, But, yeah, that's that's basically It's just something that's on my mind, the company culture thing, especially as a Oh, the other thing Just to go along with that is, you know, I've been working on our new new teammate, onboarding. And, like, now we have, like, a list of of everybody on the team, pinned right there in Slack so that, like, new people know exactly who's who and and and who's doing what.
Brian Casel:And, you know, I just gotta keep in mind, like, that people need to get to know each other, especially when they're new. And I need to have ways for people to get embedded into the team.
Jordan Gal:Right. Not to like force it, but you do need to create the opportunities for people to talk like like friends, like humans.
Nathan Barry:Right.
Brian Casel:Right. But yeah. Cool, man. So
Jordan Gal:Very, very interesting stuff that is oftentimes ignored and like kind of below the surface, but it we I think I take it for granted a little bit because we are we're in a good place on that because we're and a lot of it is because we were dealing with things and we know the, like, the fire gets directed at one person and then the other and then the other person. So you have, like, this natural sympathy for the other person. Like, a few days ago, I knew Ben was drowning and then it shifted over to Rock being sick with the flu, coding for twelve hours straight to get a big customer up and running and fixing a bunch of stuff. And then it fell to me to do this other stuff. So you start to sympathize and appreciate and kind of admire the other people, what they're good at.
Jordan Gal:And yeah, it's a three, three also makes it very easy.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And just a quick final note on that status hero thing. Another reason why I wanted to put it in there is for me to put in my answers because sometimes I feel like the rest of the team doesn't know what I'm working on. Everybody knows what everybody's working on because they're all either writers or they're assistants or they're a designer and they kind of have their roles in our system. But with me, like, it's especially when I was traveling, like, it's easy for me to just kinda disappear for a few hours at a time, and and it kinda seems like I'm not doing much work when in fact I'm I'm working my ass off every day.
Jordan Gal:It's not public.
Brian Casel:Not But I'm doing things that that aren't exactly public, like, in our production line. So in my in my, like, status update, I'll say, you know, I'm working on a new process here, or I took three sales calls yesterday, or, you know, just to like, I'm I'm working here too, guys. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And it's not not to take credit. It's just to show momentum and commitment.
Brian Casel:I just don't yeah. Like, I I I just don't wanna feel I don't want anybody to feel like I'm, like, abandoning the the company or anything like that because I you know, I'm just constantly building and and improving things on on my end. So
Jordan Gal:Cool, man. Well, on on my side of things, it's been a very it's been very high pressure. It has been a week of dealing with bigger customers and trying to convert them into paying customers. And at the same time, dealing with kind of a big We had a big tech headache over the weekend. It was a giant pain in the ass.
Jordan Gal:And oftentimes it comes at the worst possible time. And it's not so much coincidental, at least not in this case. It's as a result of taking on a big new customer and then they just stretch your resources and then shit starts to break. And so of course, right when a big customer comes on board, that's when you're dealing with it so it's even more frustrating.
Brian Casel:Was it literally like the technical bandwidth of their store or was it No,
Jordan Gal:it's of our system. And look, if you put in two requests per second out of the API, that's one thing. Then if you put 50 per second, then that's when the faults get exposed. That's when things start tripping on themselves and the queue doesn't work and the timestamps start getting mixed up because it's just so much more volume that it can't it can't handle it. So we had we had a really well known, like, hip hop star.
Jordan Gal:Basically, their their site signed up.
Brian Casel:Like their sign merchandise or something?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Their merchandise said, I'm like, oh my god. That's fucking awesome. You know? I listed on that guy.
Jordan Gal:That's amazing. So you get all excited. You get the high. They sign up. I get them on the phone.
Jordan Gal:Great relationship. Everything's perfect. Awesome. So exciting. Big new prospect.
Jordan Gal:One we can talk about amazing logo to have. And then they they sign up. We start tracking. They do like, I don't even know, $50 in revenue in like twelve hours and everything explodes. That's on Friday and our lead developer, the rock man is on vacation in Austria with his girlfriend, which is fantastic because it's the weekend, go do your thing, enjoy.
Jordan Gal:That's when everything broke. So then we got to take everything offline and then we got So it's that mixed in with the pressure of we had three big prospects and their trial and I needed to convert them. That's my role. So it was, you have to maintain the confidence to ask someone for $500 a month or more while you know in the back of your mind that half of your app is like exploding and on fire, and we didn't want to lose the big hip hop prospect, obviously. So it just felt like a lot of pressure.
Jordan Gal:It has an effect on forward progress, right? How much motivation do I have to like get a new set of Facebook ads going when I know that our developers are being creamed and they can't do no bandwidth for anything and support tickets are starting to pile up. So it kinda like everything comes to a halt.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But you know that, like, yeah, you're work you're doing all this work just to get this one big customer on board, but you know that all this work is still gonna pay off because you're gonna make your your app that much more bulletproof and can handle bigger capacity going forward and it'll be Right. For it.
Jordan Gal:Right. There's always there's always that byproduct. You just wanna you just wanna hold on to the prospect that forced you into that situation also. Right? So to to have them walk away would be understandable because they sign up twelve hours later, they had a tech problem.
Jordan Gal:But and then our app would be better for it. Sure. But we also wanna keep them too. So there's there's the the juggling and that to go back to the culture thing that puts a lot of pressure on three people and then that's when you really see their relationship and the quality of it. So I was very, very happy with how we handled it and how everyone treated each other throughout the whole thing.
Jordan Gal:And it's good because I know there's definitely like an all for one, one for all group feeling that it's not like, oh, this is annoying. I have to deal with it. It's, this is what I'm responsible for and something's wrong. Like, I wanna fix it because I don't wanna let these other two people down for something that I'm responsible for.
Brian Casel:Right. Right. Yep. Cool. Yeah.
Brian Casel:So my other little update here is I wrote down incentivizing the team. And this is something that I've been making different shifts over over time, especially as some of the team is going to full time. And the idea is to just make sure that the incentives are are aligned. And I mean, most of the time that that has to do with with their pay structure. Right?
Brian Casel:And so, like, one thing that that we're doing now is quarterly bonuses, which is something that I'd I had when I was an employee at at a web agency, when I was younger, which I just really liked. You know, every quarter you get a little bit of a bonus. Not nothing huge, but it kinda builds up as you get near the end of the year and that, you know, supposed to reflect your performance as well as the performance of the company. But they're in these, like, three month, time periods. So it's it's it's kinda cool.
Brian Casel:And so I just implemented that for all the full time employees and audience ops, including the assistants. And lately, we've been dealing as our volume of of work has increased, we've been dealing with the assistants kind of falling behind on on some setups and, like, setting up blog posts and and social media posts. And occasionally, they'll they'll make a mistake in a tweet or something. And so I did a whole reworking of our process to make sure that those mistakes are reduced and to kind of streamline things in new ways. And we've brought on a fourth assistant now.
Brian Casel:And so I made those process tweaks, but at the same time, I also implemented the the bonus system for them. And and we also have a tracking system where we're like, we're tracking the performance of of each individual assistant. You know, like the number of latenesses or the number of mistakes that they make. And, I mean, it sounds kinda, you know, kinda strict or whatever, but I I mean, obviously, I expect every everybody makes mistakes and nobody will be perfect. And I've made that completely clear.
Brian Casel:But I implemented the quarterly bonus at the same time to kinda give them that incentive to like, this is how you're gonna be evaluated on a quarterly basis. And and that'll be reflected in in bonuses. Know, I I think it's important to to to put the the right incentives in place. And and I'm also thinking about this in terms of the salesperson. This week, I'm in the process of of starting to train a salesperson to to replace myself from the sales process.
Brian Casel:And and I've worked out, you know, what the commission structure would be for that. And, I think it'll be a combination of of a commission on the sale, but also just a flat fee per consultation that he does. So again, just to incentivize the activity that we that we wanna happen most often. And then same thing with the writers. Although some writers have gone to full time salary now, a lot of them are still kind of on a freelance model where, you know, we're not paying by the hour, we're paying per article.
Brian Casel:And it's just a flat rate. So just to kind of like structure it based on the output that we expect. And and so, yeah, it's just something that that I've been working on and and keeping everything structured, but also keeping it like pretty standardized across the whole team. So
Jordan Gal:I like it. Gotta give incentive. Yep. Cool, man. So I got to go in a few minutes.
Jordan Gal:And that reminds me of one piece of advice that I wish I would have taken a long time ago. And that would be to get a demo page up on your site. If you run software, it would be demo. If you run a service, it would be consultation, whatever it is. But ever since we put up a demo page, just sign up or request a demo, we have started speaking to much bigger companies.
Jordan Gal:We just every once in a while, every few days or so, we just get that notification, hey, someone submitted the demo page form and almost always it's a bigger company and that's how they think it works. So in exactly fourteen minutes, I'm speaking to a big company, that's a big opportunity and they came in through the demo page. So I wish we had done that a lot sooner. I think a lot of people from bigger companies that looked at our pricing page didn't get in touch and they didn't want to sign up and that demo is just like the in between that they're used to starting the sales process off with. So we always had the kind of like enterprise priced here that was like talk to us if you're big volume.
Jordan Gal:What we didn't have along with that is
Brian Casel:Which most people
Jordan Gal:ignore. Everyone ignores. You want everyone to ignore it except the people that it refers to, but we should not have expected them to sign up and then talk to us. We should have said talk to us before signing up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I like that. In in Restaurant Engine, I had switched. I had both for a while, and then I made it only request a consultation, and you can't even sign up, and then I kind of brought the sign up back. And now, with Audience Hours, I kinda have the opposite thing where it's always been just request a consultation and that's how our sales process starts.
Brian Casel:But what I need to do is after they request a consultation, need to have some auto auto response, which, like, here's a video that answers the most common questions, and here's a button to get started right now if you're ready to go today, if you know, instead of waiting for a week before we actually get on the phone.
Jordan Gal:Right. Then the consultation isn't a sales consultation. It's a strategy call.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. That so yeah. Exactly. Because I've had a couple calls where people were just kinda waiting just to for the ability to sign up.
Brian Casel:And so I need to put that in place too.
Jordan Gal:Cool. I like it.
Brian Casel:Very cool. Well, well, good luck on the sales call, and I'll let you go.
Jordan Gal:Thanks, man. Brian, good good to catch up.
Brian Casel:Talk to you Alright. Later, guys.
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