Building out of a job

[00:00:17] Speaker A: Hey, it is bootscraft web Friday, November 8th. We are. We're back. We're gonna. We're gonna keep our eyes and ears off of the news, and we're gonna focus on some work and some business. [00:00:27] Speaker B: The election is behind us. We are moving forward, baby. [00:00:32] Speaker A: That's right, Forward. That's right. News, news, detox. Time to get back to works. [00:00:37] Speaker B: Would. Would really help. [00:00:39] Speaker A: You know, it. And that's always been my. My theme after elections, like, for the last. As long as I can remember, heavily tuning into it and then really tuning out for a long period of time afterward. And I feel like that's especially the case for me now. [00:00:53] Speaker B: It does feel like a. It's like a New Year's, you know, like, oh, you get to, like, turn over a new leaf. [00:00:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:00:58] Speaker B: When I was super into politics back in the day, the Obama Romney election, I was able to do the same thing. Okay, it's over. Out. I didn't really get re. Interested and fully engaged until October 7th, and I'm hoping this one allows me to also say, okay, I'm actually not participating. I can't make a difference. I want to be aware, but there's no sense in spending hours a day reading stuff. It's. [00:01:25] Speaker A: It's too much. Yeah, man. And we just have so many more important things to focus on. Family and life and business and work, and that's the most important thing. [00:01:38] Speaker B: Raising kids, being part of the community, keeping your marriage strong, the whole deal. [00:01:43] Speaker A: That's right. [00:01:44] Speaker B: And today on this podcast, we're talking business, baby. So, Brian, you and I got into a pretty serious conversation right before we started recording. Why don't I just set the stage a bit by reading the tweet that sparked the conversation and then we can get into it. [00:02:03] Speaker A: Yeah, actually, I'm just catching up on the Twitter tweets right now as well, but go ahead. [00:02:08] Speaker B: I wrote a tweet right before coming on, 15 minutes or so before that. We do every once in a while, and we say, hey, what should we talk about? On the pod today, our friend Rob Walling responded and said, Brian talked last episode about being pulled into too many directions. Sounded stressed, and I'm curious if he thinks it's something that he just has to deal with or, you know, if he thinks it's going to improve. And we have been talking about this over the last few weeks. And, you know, that that tweet, I think, comes from a good place, but it, you know, what does it spark? [00:02:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's a good question. I appreciate raising It. So, yeah, I mean, I think he's right that I'm stressed the past couple of weeks, but really the past year, more than a year, a couple of years, the stress has been really, really growing. And it's been interesting as I observe the stress, how it's changed from being stressed about different things. Yeah. [00:03:17] Speaker B: Different forms of stress. Can you get into where it started off and what. [00:03:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, just to really, to try to step back, big picture. About six to 12 months ago, the stress was around, you know, and I talked at length on the podcast about it. Like, where is my business going? Like, you know, and, and having to make tough decisions about where to, where to focus and what types of businesses to get into. But then, you know, as the past year went on, then it just really became about like, where is my actual income coming from? You know, because I was work, I took a, I deviated from the bootstrapped path, went the investment route and. [00:04:00] Speaker B: You. [00:04:00] Speaker A: Know, like a little bit of investment and then, and then just like having to like spin back up the consulting work. Right. [00:04:08] Speaker B: Yeah. The SaaS was starting to, you know, look like it was going to take. [00:04:12] Speaker A: Longer and then a lot longer to grow the SaaS. Right. So. Yep. So I had to like reestablish the income and, you know, evaluating different ways to do that, launching different attempts to do that, different forms of consulting and the one month app service is the thing that seemed to eventually click after a bunch of months. So the main problem, the main stressor for me six to 12 months ago was where is my income for the next couple of years going to be coming from? Right. Because the single SaaS bootstrap thing is not going to cut it. And so now the stress is actually opposite because I'm overbooked with consulting projects at the moment, just having to be more selective about which, which projects I actually take on. I'm definitely going to be raising the prices on the consulting in the next month or two here. The stress right now at the current moment in November is okay, I have multiple active MVP projects going for clients. I've got multiple booked to start in December. And I have other leads in the pipeline that are, I would say, fairly likely to come through. And I just brought on two developers who started this past week to help me out on those projects. I still have a developer working on Clarity Flow. I just reached out to my person at, at the, at the staffing agency to hire a third person to help on the consulting stuff. So the stress right now is my time, unfortunately. I wish it Were as easy as just hire people and we can just go. As we all know, it's not that easy because it really actually feels like a plane is taking off. But. But I'm still kind of standing on top of the plane trying to hammer on the wings while it's already getting into the air. [00:06:25] Speaker B: Okay. Is that a feeling of like, well, it's starting to go faster, but it's not really built to go as fast as it's. [00:06:31] Speaker A: It's just not built to go fast yet. But I hate the feeling of like turning pretty good projects away because we can't deliver on them. Right. [00:06:41] Speaker B: You don't want to slow down. The slightly out of control feeling is actually. [00:06:44] Speaker A: And the waiting list can only go so far out. I have a waiting list, like clients who have actually booked. Like I'm already pushing them out at least a month. Right. [00:06:54] Speaker B: Can you push? [00:06:54] Speaker A: But you can't like I can't say to someone like just wait six months because I. What I. Instead I would just recommend that they go somewhere else. [00:07:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:07:03] Speaker A: Okay. So there's that stress of like just how do we. How do we set up the systems and the process? And that's what I've been working on this past week is like how do I go from. Okay, so actually let me step back and try to answer the question more directly. [00:07:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I was going to say the easier. [00:07:19] Speaker A: Thing to do the juggling. Yeah. The easier thing to do actually would be to not hire and just do all these projects myself and be. And just be a hundred percent full time consultant. [00:07:31] Speaker B: Right. Good money solves your income. Question mark. [00:07:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:36] Speaker B: Okay. Now why not just do that though? [00:07:40] Speaker A: Because I don't want to do that. I'm trying to build a business here. And so the way that I see it is consulting. To me, I think people have different views of what consulting is. I view it as a real business. It's not just a thing that you do on the side to earn some cash. And so I treat it like if I'm consulting, I'm building a consultancy, a small studio, like a small agency you might think of it. Okay, I'm not trying to build a large agency here, but I do have a pipeline of leads and we're doing good software product work, which is what I want to be doing in general. So my task right now is to figure out how can we figure out the system and process to continuously and streamline the development of simple MVP software products for clients and for myself in a very streamlined, process oriented way. That's what I'VE done with services, with productized services, we should be able to do the same thing with software products. And it's a really, really difficult task. And I'm. That's what I'm in the weeds of working on right now, like, figuring out how to. Like I talk about building this components library for Rails and I'm actively coding and building that. Yes, A. It's a product in itself, but I think even more importantly, it's a tool for myself to use with my team to rapidly streamline the scaffolding and building out of MVP applications for clients, because that's. And I feel pretty justified in building that system and building these components because I've got revenue coming in, like a pretty good level of revenue coming in for this. And so the question is this revenue coming in, like, either I service it myself, and that's what I've been doing for the first half of the year. And now I'm in that transition phase of like, this has to work without just me doing all the work. And so now I'm trying to figure out the systems, the tooling, the processes. Can I ask that's where all the time. And it is stressful right now because I'm spending well above 40 hours a week here in the office. Like, I did a late night last night. It's also stressful because I do have these client projects that are actively happening, which means they're deadline oriented. Not just like, we can just take our time just like any other product. This is. Clients are waiting and they're paying for that. So I have to deliver. And. And it's like my team is waiting for me to give them tasks to do. And it's always the question of like, well, it would be faster for me to just go ahead and build it instead of delegate it. But no, this needs to work with. With me being able to delegate and then work on the next thing, you know. [00:10:46] Speaker B: Okay, well, I was going to ask in the form of a question, but maybe I'll just comment and then you can respond. It partly sounds like an entrepreneur building a system to go beyond themselves. Like, hey, this is, you know, when success starts to come in the door, you need. You have a choice. You could just do all the work yourself, or you can expand your capacity and have less reliance on you as the individual. And that's like building up the systems of a business. It partly sounds like that. It also partly sounds like the classic inability to enjoy success and then just be like, well, okay, let's go to the next step then. Well, okay, so I had a problem six months ago. I solved that problem. I'm not really going to give myself any credit. I'm not going to dwell on the fact that I, you know, I'm bringing all this income that I wanted to bring and now it's happening and I'm just immediately diving right into the stress of, well, that's not even, it's very little satisfaction solving the problem and immediately going to, well, what other problem do I have? I got to go beyond this. [00:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:53] Speaker B: So, you know, is it both altogether? Is it one more than the other? [00:11:57] Speaker A: That's a really good question. So that's actually something that I've been actively thinking about this month as I'm, as I'm feeling the extra level of stress because usually I love working. [00:12:12] Speaker B: Can you be happy? Are you enjoying it at the same time? There's something there, right? It's not just stress or does it just wash over everything? [00:12:19] Speaker A: The thing that I'm not happy with right now is just the sheer number of hours that I feel like I'm forced to be in here. [00:12:30] Speaker B: Fair. That's a motivator. [00:12:32] Speaker A: That's a good motivator, you know, because like there are. And I, and I often now feel like I'm missing out on other parts of life. Hobbies, family time. I still feel like we, I make pretty good time with the family and we still take trips and stuff. And I don't work from home. Like, like I, like all the consulting stuff is always on pause when I'm on trips and stuff like that. But the reality is this week I did multiple late nights of work. That's, these are, these are like 10 hour plus days, you know, and that's not normal for me anymore. Not, not like I'm not like in my 20s, you know. [00:13:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. Well, it's an energy and commitment to other things, but it's also maturity on like, hey, I know that's not necessary. So I'm gonna find a way to make that. [00:13:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And like, I don't want to be doing those kind of days anymore. I, I feel like I shouldn't have to do those kind of days. And so I, and, and I definitely like to speak to Rob's thing here. Like, I definitely don't see this as this is just the new normal and I have to deal with it for the foreseeable future. [00:13:34] Speaker B: You don't sound like you're pain forever. [00:13:36] Speaker A: Literally. The reason why I'm putting in these hours is like I'm trying to build my Way out of that problem. I'm building the way out of like. Because the truth is the vision for what I'm building here is I should be able to, I could even outsource the sales. But let's say I'm just doing the sales, right? So leads for new MVP projects are coming in from clients. I talk to them, brief conversation, we do a little bit of consulting and that's the most fun part for me because I'm talking about like new ideas and the client's new idea and what's possible. I'll give my input on how this product should be executed and what's the most efficient path to getting into customers hands. And then I can hand that off to a teammate who handles wireframing and UX and planning out the game plan and then writing up the issues and then delegating them to the team and then the team is building out the features and maybe a project manager is keeping the client informed week to week. And these projects are just getting built and I'm, and I'm still involved. I'm not completely hands off and off somewhere else but I'm involved in terms of like strategic, like product direction, product design decisions. But ultimately the team is building the features. A team is project managing and running a whole project from start to finish. And I'm sort of just there to make sure that things are being done well and executing efficiently. And I think that we can, and we should be doing it in a much more efficient way than like a high priced agency and, and, or just hiring a large team in house to build your products. That's, that's been, that's sort of the vision for this thing. And if that's the core business and cash flow generating and profit generating center of what I do, I should be able to build my way out of all the jobs that I'm doing in that business to get back to where I was in the audience ops days when I had a business sort of like that and I had all this other free time to develop new products and, and the really cool thing about it that I'm working on right now is that the product that I'm developing is directly related to the same problem. It's not like split, I don't see it as a split focus to be working on the Rails components, product and scaling, the rails SaaS delivery as a service like those are one and the same thing. You know, it is all related in my view. I don't know, I'm sort of just rambling at this point. [00:16:36] Speaker B: No, no. When you talk about audience ops. Right. There's kind of an extreme case in terms of the. Basically, your personal revenue per hour worked at audience ops was astronomical. [00:16:49] Speaker A: Yes. [00:16:49] Speaker B: Right. And right now, and that is an. [00:16:51] Speaker A: Extreme that I'm not exactly aiming for, but something in to get back to that level of comfort that was at. [00:17:01] Speaker B: The extreme end of the curve. Right now you're climbing up that curve of how much of each revenue dollar from the consulting business are you keeping personally? You're moving up the curve on increasing that. So hiring people, raising prices, managing demand, and really only doing the key strategic work that really only you can do at this stage. It's like per project, maybe right now you're spending 40 hours per project just throwing out a number v a hundred hours. It really should shrink down as the revenue per hour expands. [00:17:40] Speaker A: That's absolutely true. Let me speak to that couple points there. So you're totally right that the number of. I really feel like the hours that I'm putting in right now, but we're going slower to go faster. We're putting in more work to do less work in the future. But going back six to 12 months ago, when I was taking on the first of these consulting projects, it was like, let me just get some good consulting projects in the door and I'm going to be solo working on them and I'm going to take in the revenue myself because that's the number one problem that needs to be solved. I'm not looking to hire anyone, just do that myself and earn some cash. Now I have multiple consulting projects, so I'm covered. So now it's like, okay, I've got some revenue to work with, some cash flow to work with, so I should be hiring. And the hard thing right now is, is the system and process for putting the team in place. And this is one of the hardest hiring problems that I've really dealt with, I think, because. Okay, so for example, the thing that I worked on this week is I dove into figma like big time. Because the phase of working in Figma and designing and wireframing and mocking up a new application is something that I for the most part, skip in almost all of my projects. So when it's just me, just go. [00:19:18] Speaker B: In there and do it. [00:19:19] Speaker A: I just go in there and. Because I design and build simultaneously in the browser while I build the thing. And so if I'm just building an app either for myself or even if it's just me working for a client, then I'll just talk to the client about what the goals are, and then I'm going to go ahead and build it and then show them. And if we need to make tweaks, we'll make tweaks. But now I need to figure out a way to talk to the client and understand what we're building and then be able to put the idea in a visual format that can be both used to show back to the client to confirm the direction, but also used to show to my team so that they're on board and they can see and know what we're all building. And so the process of wireframing out a new application and all the views and the user flows, that's something that I usually just don't spend time on because I don't need it myself. But when there are multiple other stakeholders, team members and clients, we do need this visual source of truth that we can all look at and have discussions around and build a quote and proposal around and all that. So now I'm trying to figure out how do I use figma in the most efficient way, using templates, and they have a feature called components and auto layouts and all this stuff in Figma to make using that very efficient. But even that is something that I don't want to be doing. So right now I'm trying to hire someone to be that person who can basically set up a new project for our client. So maybe, maybe it looks something like they listen to my initial sales call or they get the notes from an AI summarizer or something like that, and I have a discussion with my project manager person, designer, developer person, and they will then spend a week and work on wireframing it out and specking out the whole project and queuing up all these issues for the developer. If I can find someone else to do all that, which is really where I spend a lot of time. That is a big unlock. That's really the unlock. Because if a linear issue, a GitHub issue, is already written out with a checklist of what to do, I know how to hand that off to a developer and have the developer do it and send me back a pr. I've been doing that for years. But it's that setup work, it's the design work, it's the ux, it's the. And also writing up those issues takes a lot of time, like being a product lead or a project lead. That's the thing that I'm trying to figure out, like how to fire myself from. Yeah, and that, that's so that, that's the thing that I'm currently focused on. [00:22:12] Speaker B: I think whether in Figma, hiring, pricing, the extent to which that you are going faster. Excuse me, going slower in order to go faster is like this dip. It's like you get the thing off the ground, you're making money, you're doing the work yourself, straightforward. As soon as you want to go beyond that and do less of the work yourself, expand scale in a different way more efficiently, you kind of have to go into the negative and just set up all the systems in order to go faster. Now here, so here's the right look, this tweet from Rob, it's a little bit like while someone is in that negative space, going slower to go faster, basically investing in the systems of the business in order for it to make like more sense in the future to catch criticism at that moment. It's kind of pretty tough, you know, and it's natural in that someone from the outside actually wants the best for you, but they cannot understand. And Rob, if anyone can understand, Rob understands. [00:23:26] Speaker A: Oh, I know this is how this works. I know Rob and I know Rob totally means well. And I know he's been here. [00:23:32] Speaker B: What is, what is Tiny Seed if not a buoy, a life preserver for people in that dip so that they don't need to suffer through it. That's what Tiny Seed is. Tiny Seed is. Let us just help you through that awful period of going into the negative to come back out into the positive. But it's not an easy thing to take criticism that moment, a lot of people. Now here's. I just want to make this point. A lot of us have been in that negative moment. In some ways I am to some extent the ability to, in that moment, just not only keep investing in yourself and in the systems and in the people and in the hiring and keep doing the work and the 60 hour weeks and so on, but also to have the unquenchable ambition to also create the components library and the planning to sell that as its own product in the future. I have to tell you, I really admire that. [00:24:40] Speaker A: Thanks, buddy. I appreciate that. It's my natural way of working. To be honest, I've been out of consulting for a long time. Like I. This year, this past year was the first time I went back to having direct consulting clients like over 10 years. I think to me, this is the natural way of building a business. And I think I overstated and I maybe overused the word stress earlier in this episode. Yeah, I'm stressed in terms of I'm spending a lot of hours and I'm, I'm more tired right now than I would like to be. But man, I'm. The stress that I was feeling six to 12 months ago over money is, was so much worse than this because that was like staring into the unknown. That, that was hacking on idea after idea after idea and throwing ideas at the wall and savings. [00:25:40] Speaker B: You got your family, you got your kids, you got camp coming up. [00:25:42] Speaker A: It's like that, that's why, that's why I was like kind of throwing a lot of stuff around and building some ideas and saying I was going to build ideas and then not and second guessing and like what am I going to do? Like, what's the, what's the best path on, like what's the most efficient way to get back to a comfortable cash flow financial state? Like that stress sucked because that was just unknown. [00:26:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:04] Speaker A: But now it's. I'm actually kind of psyched. As tired as I am, I'm pretty psyched because I know exactly what I'm building here. [00:26:12] Speaker B: It's like success stress. [00:26:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Because I really feel like right now is there, there definitely is an excitement level around. Look, I've got really good clients and more on the way I've got. And that's been the other really great thing about this is like every single client has been awesome. Just great people, great projects. And this is not because there are a lot of developers who are consultants and contractors. But what I'm doing is different. I'm not getting hired by some company to just be a button, a seat, you know, taking off issues and submitting PRs. Like I'm building brand new MVP products with that excitement of startups for every single client. And that's. I'm so psyched about that. And so that's what makes all this really exciting is like instrumental.dev is the company that I'm building here. And it's ultimately the vision is MVPs as a service components to build MVPs rapidly and that's it. And then using those things to do that ourselves with our own products. Yeah. I mean, and sharing content and building publicly and doing video to show how we build stuff rapidly and that you don't need to spend years building software, you know. So like it's exciting that it's coming together, but yeah, putting the pieces on while the plane is already up in the air is kind of hard. Yeah. [00:27:56] Speaker B: No joke. Yeah. I think this is our version of it online. But this is business. It makes me think about my dad's business when I grew up and success brought a lot more stress. Different stress. You know, at first it was like, how do I send my kid to college? And then it was, how do I. How do I do all this work? How. How could I possibly do? We doubled from this year to last year, and now how the. How the hell do we actually do all of it? [00:28:27] Speaker A: Right? [00:28:27] Speaker B: I think that happens in restaurants, that happens in law firms. It's just like, you do get this success thing. The hard part is working your way out of it in a smart way so that six months from today, you're working a lot less and you're making a lot more, but you're still excited and engaged with all the best parts of the business and the clients and the work. [00:28:50] Speaker A: And I think also to speak to what you were saying a minute ago, the thing that. What was I going to say? I like that what I'm building now is all integrated, because the alternative is to just take on a couple of consulting projects here and there to pay the bills. But that's off to the side while I bootstrap some other new idea. [00:29:21] Speaker B: I think that's more common. [00:29:22] Speaker A: That's probably more common, but I think that that's a lot harder. And that's where the split focus thing starts to break down. I think that, like, when you're just. When you're just doing consulting or a job over there and trying to launch, let's say, a SaaS product for some niche industry over here. Sure. That is quite literally split focus. And I've been there, and it's huge. [00:29:51] Speaker B: Context switches. Yes. [00:29:53] Speaker A: It's not just context switches either. It's also like, from a marketing perspective, like putting that energy, like, if you want to, if you're trying to get a new thing off the ground, like you're building Rosie, and you are going all in on small businesses. Right. Everything you can do right now is trying to reach small businesses. [00:30:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:12] Speaker A: You know, but if at the same time, you also need to. You need to reach potential clients for some other unrelated consulting thing, like now you have to market yourself in two completely separate ways at the same time. You know, whereas this is like, I'm building MVPs for clients, I'm building products for people who build MVPs. Building. I'm building MVPs myself. It's all rails, it's all integrated. And that's why 612 months ago, I was way more stressed because I was like, I don't know, should I try this niche idea or that niche idea or do SaaS or not do SaaS or what am I doing here? It was up. All up in the air, you know. [00:30:53] Speaker B: Yeah. It's tricky. What I see, I think about, you know, I have one person in mind in particular, and their freelance, their consulting came out of what they're really good at from their previous jobs. [00:31:08] Speaker A: Right. [00:31:09] Speaker B: But it's also what they want to get away from. But it does make the most sense to go out and do consulting on that because they're very good at setting that up and running it for other companies, and it's very valuable. So you can charge for it, but you're really trying to build a piece of software over here for a different industry, and I think that's very common and very difficult. [00:31:29] Speaker A: Yeah, dude, what's happening in Rosie? [00:31:33] Speaker B: Okay. I don't know if you saw I made my debut. [00:31:37] Speaker A: I did, yes. [00:31:38] Speaker B: I made a demo video, put my face on it. [00:31:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So I saw you tweet about it. So where does that video. Is that on the homepage or in the onboarding or where is that? [00:31:47] Speaker B: It is on the homepage. And so. And so what happened was the onboarding was released. So with the new onboarding being released, we wanted to make sure that we showed it, you know, upfront. Our ICP appreciates a pretty straightforward approach. Don't give me the slick, overproduced thing. Like, just show, like, you could, like, their support questions are very straightforward. Can you just show me how this works? Right. Everyone's like, cool. I got impressed by your name and your website. Cool. How does this thing going to work for me? And what we keep hearing back is this. This week was like a turning point in feedback. Like, we started getting feedback, and I got on two sales calls yesterday, and I was buzzing, man. I was high all day. My wife was like, what's going on with you, buddy? You know, I went to lunch. I'm, like, skipping around, listening to music. And, you know, when you get. You get this feedback, this little glimpse of product, market fit, where you're like, you know, these people are so appreciative. They're like, thank you for building this product. I tried everything else. It's all too complicated. It's too complex. The voice doesn't sound like. It's almost like we're. It was a vote that we were putting attention in the places that matter to them, because you could put attention in a whole bunch of different places. But how slick your marketing, how amazing your social media is, how beautiful your product is, whatever that range is. But to put the emphasis on the things that they Care about feels like that's how you win. So the marketing all of a sudden felt like it was behind the product. But we wanted to make sure that was for a day or two at most. So we got everything tested. We released on Tuesday. Yes, Tuesday. And so the next day we launched a new version of the website. We started sending ad traffic to the homepage. Instead of a landing page, we basically just updated. And if you go to hey rosie.com right now, what you will find is a smaller product, a smaller feature set, more focused, and the messaging and the positioning is really, really clear. This thing will take your messages better than voicemail and cheaper than an answering service. [00:34:09] Speaker A: Right. [00:34:09] Speaker B: So we shrunk down the feature set and all of a sudden the video on the homepage didn't make sense because the video was the original hypothesis. People want appointment setting automated through an AI and we adjusted away from that in both the product and the positioning. And so I had to update the video and that's what I did. But I thought, okay, I can do a very straightforward demo video, I can hire someone to do a slick video or I can do something that I thought made sense, which is basically take the first 90 seconds of the video and connect directly with what we've heard from customers. So in that 90 seconds of the video, the first 90 seconds, I am reciting back existence, exactly what we heard from customers. Like, you know, there's a few points in there that I'm making. Like those are words coming out of our intercom chats. [00:35:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:06] Speaker B: So I wanted to. [00:35:06] Speaker A: That's what I noticed about it. Like the intro is like just really speaking to like these are the problems that you are probably experiencing. [00:35:14] Speaker B: Yes. And I think I start the video, I say, tell me if this sounds familiar. Yeah, right. You do X. You're a small business, you get phone calls, you can't always be. So I'm really, I want to basically stretch out the problem and identify that first and then I just jump right into the onboarding. We'll see if maybe we experiment with just jumping onto the onboarding eventually in a, in a different version of it. But I think we can be really, really proud. You can go from the homepage to a built out AI voice agent for your business. It's like 90 seconds and it's good. So that was our goal, remember, Our goal was 100 self serve signups a day. How do we get there? And this onboarding is built for that. [00:36:04] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that these videos, onboarding videos or demo videos, I think it's Better to just think of them as something you're going to redo again and again, especially early on in the first year or two. Just rapidly. Right. Like, don't over invest in like the shiniest, most edited, most perfected thing too early on because you're going to need to redo it based on what you learn from customers, you know. [00:36:32] Speaker B: Yes. [00:36:33] Speaker A: And the product's going to keep evolving. I mean, on my to do list on clarity flow is to redo the demo video again. It's going to be like version number five, you know. [00:36:40] Speaker B: Yes. We started laughing about it internally because right when we released, we start talking about, well, what are we doing next week? And then it immediately is like, well, I'll have to redo the video because of what we released next week. [00:36:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:36:52] Speaker B: So what I did actually with this one is I wrote a script and that that feels like it makes it really easy to just redo. I don't have to remember or have to perform. You know, it's always weird that it takes two hours to make a three minute video, but it does. [00:37:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:07] Speaker B: But now I feel like I can just kind of, you know, tweak the script and then do it again. I realized after the fact that I forgot a few things I should have asked Rosie while I was on the call, like what time you open tomorrow. Some simple interaction thing. That's the part that's missing. But here we are. We upped our budgets for advertising. We had our first day of 25 signups. Oh, yeah. So like that, you know that 100 goal is attainable. [00:37:35] Speaker A: Yeah. You're a quarter way there. Yeah. [00:37:38] Speaker B: Our SEO started kicking in and we're starting to get more traffic from there. We now rank number one for things like AI answering service. So yeah, the SEO is kind of paying off sooner than expected. I feel like the SEO companies that we work with set good expectations where they're like, don't expect much until like 6, 9, 12 months, but they're starting to happen. [00:38:01] Speaker A: Hell yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Actually, speaking of the demo video, this is something I have no time or bandwidth to do right now, but it's on my to do list for sure. For Clarity Flow. And my thought on the next iteration of this, it's not on the homepage like you have it, it's going to be one click away. Currently on our homepage, you click, see a demo and then you see our current version of the video, which I did probably only like six months ago. And we're already have to redo it again. My thought on the next one is going to be a shorter, like, main video. If you picture the new demo page is going to be like one big video near the top, and that's like the main one to try to speak to every single new lead who's coming through our website to say, like, this is Clarity Flow. You're a coach. You really care about Async. Here's what we're all about. Here's what the signup process is going to look like. Let me show you how to purchase this and then talk to Kat, our customer success. It's going to be great. You're going to, you know, and here and. And at a high level. Like, these are the big selling points for Clarity Flow, but not get into the weeds. Probably around five minutes, but then, then below that is going to be sort of a grid of, let's say, five to six additional videos. Think like big thumbnails of like, commerce. I want to sell coaching things. Click this, it's going to pop up the video that I already have about our commerce feature. You know, coaching, appointment booking. Click this, it's going to show the video about our appointment booking feature. And so we already have the individual videos for those big feature launches. So that's going to be the. It's going to be a more modular demo, right? Like the first big one to try to convince them to go ahead and sign up. But if they really want a deep dive on the specific features that they're interested in, they can get to those videos. And I think that's good for the user standpoint because they can click to what they're actually interested in instead of, like, see it. Because if I get like too deep into commerce in minute three and they're not actually into that, then we might lose them for good. But also it's more modular, right. So if commerce changes, then we could just swap out that video and not have to redo all of them. [00:40:25] Speaker B: Okay, very interesting. I just pinged our designer last night and said now that it's out next week, I want to get the feature videos. I'm thinking just right onto the homepage. We kind of have a very homepage centric mindset. A lot of that came from you. We keep getting questions in Intercom about pricing. Like there's literally a pricing page, but I think we're just going to put the pricing right on the homepage in that same type of effort. [00:40:53] Speaker A: But yes, it's like, yeah, you see the link at the top, it says pricing. [00:40:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm so tempted. You can click it to just send them the URL. So tempted. But I don't. Except last night. [00:41:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Here, let me send you this URL. Heyrosie.com pricing. [00:41:06] Speaker B: Yes. That's actually where you can find it. Yeah. So if you go to the pricing page now, what you'll also notice is new pricing plans. [00:41:16] Speaker A: What do we got here? 49, 99, 199. [00:41:19] Speaker B: Yes. [00:41:20] Speaker A: Custom pricing. [00:41:21] Speaker B: Yes. Did not put too much thought into those. Just kind of people just kept coming to the chat and saying, well, what about 500 minutes and what about. [00:41:31] Speaker A: Yeah, so. So the. The value metric there is minutes included. So 250, 500, 1,000. [00:41:38] Speaker B: Yes. [00:41:38] Speaker A: And then custom is. It's interesting that you say unlimited minutes on custom. [00:41:45] Speaker B: It's just like, just. Okay. So a lot of this came from. What happened this week was we started to interact with customers. Those two sales calls I had yesterday, one person said, how many? How much is it for unlimited? Okay. And then when we dug into it, unlimited was like 5, 600 minutes a month. So not unlimited, just more than what we were showing. So it was starting to experience the. [00:42:07] Speaker A: Same exact thing with clarity, flow. And I've had the question come up a lot, like, where they're like, what if I go over a thousand minutes of recordings in a month? And so here's. Nobody even comes close. [00:42:18] Speaker B: Right? Here's the issue. The other sales call I had yesterday was 30,000 minutes, but he used the same phrase, how much for unlimited? So the same word unlimited was used for 600 minutes a month and 30,000 minutes a month, which told me it's time to just put more clarity onto the pricing page because people don't know. And I also think that we were unwillingly or unwittingly turning away larger customers because they were like, they only have one plan. And then it kind of didn't make sense. So everyone on the team is a little. They're not mad at me. They're just like, oh, great, now we gotta do a bunch of work to kind of catch up. Because it's really easy to change pricing on the marketing site. It's a lot trickier to put it into the UI and put it into the logic and all this other stuff. But that's fine. We're just kind of going fast in that way. We'll catch up to it. [00:43:08] Speaker A: Yeah. The whole site is looking super nice, super clean. [00:43:11] Speaker B: Thanks, man. One of the most interesting, right, we made a trade off, very straightforward trade off in this switch in onboarding before people were creating an account and then in order to get your Rosie phone number. You had to put your credit card in. And so everyone that had a Rosie phone number, maybe 40% of the people who had created an account had the credit card on file. And if seven days went by, whether or not you had fully adopted, either way you're getting charged and you're going on to our profit. Well, woohoo. Number. [00:43:45] Speaker A: Yep. [00:43:46] Speaker B: Now we've made the switch where 100% of people that create an account get a phone number, but 0% of those have to put their credit card number in. So what we're really keeping an eye on is number one, what percentage of people put in their credit card on their own? Right. We have like year 50% through your minutes, we give 50 minutes before you convert. So we have that thing where it's like make sure not so your service isn't interrupted, otherwise that 50 minutes it'll stop working. Yeah, but you need to put your credit card in proactively. Now of course, at the end of the onboarding we have a nice little highlight like recommended, put your credit card in to avoid interruption. [00:44:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:44:29] Speaker B: So now we are going to see what percentage of people put in their credit card on their own and what percentage of people do we need to entice or what happens. [00:44:39] Speaker A: So they, so they're at minute 51 and they haven't put, put in their credit card and they're getting a phone call. What's, what's happening? [00:44:45] Speaker B: I don't know. [00:44:48] Speaker A: Like, I guess their call just goes directly to their business. [00:44:51] Speaker B: Well, okay, so here it's, it's, it's actually a problem that we need to figure out because we don't want to screw up anyone's business. [00:44:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:00] Speaker B: So if you call and you're still forwarding to the Rosie number and the Rosie number doesn't work, what are we supposed to do, just give the service away for free? No. So someone's gonna stop working. [00:45:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Now I don't know the technicalities on this. I feel like it should just forward back to their. And maybe there's some sort of loop there. [00:45:18] Speaker B: But like that's the thing. If you forward back to their business number, guess what's gonna happen? It gets forwarded to the Rosie number. [00:45:25] Speaker A: Do you handle the, I guess they handle the forwarding how? [00:45:28] Speaker B: They do. [00:45:29] Speaker A: They do. [00:45:29] Speaker B: Okay, they do, they do. That's right. So if anyone is like a Twilio expert and knows this the problem, the solution to this circular problem we're having, please ping me. [00:45:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say if you control the forwarding, then you can just turn it off. But it's on. It's just like their domain name. Like, if that's. If you're cutting off access to their website and their DNS is already pointed to you. Yeah, yeah. [00:45:49] Speaker B: What are you going to do? Like, it's your fault. So, so we, we, we feel comfortable in the fact that you sign up for the service, you're using the service. If you don't pay for it, like, it'll stop working. But we also would like to come up with a way to both be nicer about it and at the same time be more conversion focused on it. Like, yeah, I would want this. [00:46:09] Speaker A: I mean, first of all, it's sort of hard to even think about somebody who would go through the trouble of forwarding their phone number and then like, and not put in their credit card at around the same time. [00:46:19] Speaker B: That is what we're hoping. But we also should make sure to do the right thing in terms of messaging. Like, you've received your first phone call, put in your credit card to make sure that scenario doesn't happen. Yeah, we have a few levers, a few likes. [00:46:35] Speaker A: I would push the credit card at the moment that they are forwarding their phone number. [00:46:39] Speaker B: That is not in our system. [00:46:41] Speaker A: I know it's not in your system, but like, okay, next step is to forward your phone number and while you're at it, make sure that you have a credit card on file so that you don't lose any phone calls. [00:46:50] Speaker B: Potentially. That's exactly what we do. Yes, yes. What we should do now that I think of it, is we have a little celebration, like a celebratory button, like, I've done this and then some confetti pops out type of thing. Instead of the confetti popping out, a credit card modal should pop out a. [00:47:07] Speaker A: Little bit more useful than the confetti. [00:47:08] Speaker B: Hold on, let me just go to Slack real quick. [00:47:13] Speaker A: We got there. That's good stuff. [00:47:17] Speaker B: Cool. We will see. I think we'll go through a dip over the next two weeks where conversions will actually go down or are likely to go down because we don't have that seven days. Hey, it's up and you're converting one way or the other. But I think it will be much better and we will face reality one way or another because people paying will have adopted and they'll be using it. [00:47:35] Speaker A: Right. [00:47:36] Speaker B: The good news is it's coming right at right when the product is really maturing into like a full, like phase one of maturity where people are like, this is awesome. I like it. I tested it. I'm going with it. So at least we have, like, this some level of comfort now that we're facing reality. If we. If we did this a month ago, it would have been scarier. [00:47:57] Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep, yep. Good stuff, man. Psychedelic. I want to circle back to the stuff I was talking about earlier on, about. About the stuff that I'm working on. And I feel like there's also a pretty bright side of the work that I'm doing right now, as much as. As much as it's like putting in a lot of hours and sometimes, you know, being more stressed than I. Than I would like. [00:48:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:48:20] Speaker A: At the same time, I have to say the work that I'm doing right now is probably the most challenging, like, the most technically challenging work that I've ever done. And I feel like I'm growing the most professionally and in my craft that. Than I ever have in my career to date. Like, I'm. I'm not trying to exaggerate that. I really feel like that right now. And I think what I'm actually noticing is that the three to five years prior to this, to what I'm working on right now, I was stagnating in terms of skills. [00:48:56] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. [00:48:59] Speaker A: And so what I mean by that is, and this goes on a number of different fronts, like, especially on the technical front and the design work, but also on the process building and the business building part. But on the technical side, like, when I was working on clarity flow, and I still am, but, like, all the work on clarity flow, in terms of what I am putting my hands on, it's stuff that I know how to do. It's stuff that I just do again and again. It's designing and shipping a feature in Rails. It's speccing out a feature and giving it to my developer. And I know how it should be architected. I give it to her to build out and then we ship it. And that's great. It solves problems for our customers. But what that also means is that I don't actually have an incentive to increase my. My or deepen my understanding of Ruby on Rails, of design patterns, of architecture, of how things actually work under the hood. What's the history of this or that? Like, I don't have any incentive to even care about all those details. Sure. [00:50:12] Speaker B: Building it. [00:50:13] Speaker A: Because we're just building features and shipping them for our customers. And that's. That's been the. And. And so, yeah, like, when I learned, when I transitioned to full stack, like, I was learning a lot because I. Cause I want to learn how to build stuff now. Then I learned how to build stuff and now it's like I only need to know enough to be able to build stuff and ship. But now that I'm building components or generating Rails applications, that in itself is a much more technically deeper thing that like I'm learning about Rails generators and Rails engines and just using Ruby in different ways. And then so there's that. But then also like I'm crafting it in a way that it has to be robust and not only for us to use, but for other people to use. So it has to stand up to some, you know, some technical stress. And so just learning a lot about like. And like. And I'm making a lot of opinionated decisions about how I want my components to be designed and architected. And so I'm questioning like, is that actually the best way to do it? Are there other ways that I just haven't had the opportunity to familiarize and learn about? So I'm going down these different rabbit holes and learning like that's been super fun. And then I was talking about like this week with figma. Figma as an application, as a tool is something that I always only very. Had a very light. I use it a lot, but I use it like a total noob. Like not using components, not using auto layout, not setting styles and design systems. I don't care about any of that stuff because I just need to whip up a wireframe for my own internal use and then build something. But now that I'm using it with, now I'm trying to figure out how do I structure a Figma document in a professional way and use all the power features for what they are intended for, which is collaborating with team members and with clients and making design systems that can scale and can be used repeatedly and be able to churn out wireframes much faster than what I would normally do. Like actually deepening my understanding of all that's actually possible. When you really learn figma, that's been. And so like learn. So I'm going down the rabbit hole and increasing my skills on that so that I can hire someone to work with it and I can still collaborate, you know. [00:52:48] Speaker B: Yeah, it makes me think of the. Those. The two levels that we often have to switch back and forth from like this management strategy owner, mature in your 40s experience and then right down to the individual contributor level. And one informs the other. Very often and sometimes at least over the last year or two, I felt Myself stagnating on the individual contribution and my management strategy suffered for it. And now that I'm like writing email flows on like, you know, and looking at this onboarding and the copy in the onboarding and what should happen next and making the demo video, I actually feel like I improve at the management level also. [00:53:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it's fun. [00:53:35] Speaker A: Yeah, man. I think that there are really two different styles of like, of building and managing a business, I think in our, in our industry. And I think one probably the more common style is like, even if you're technical, but definitely if you're non technical, you're going to build a team and hire experts to fully own all the technical individual contributor roles. Right. And that's the more common, maybe more traditional way of building a business. But then you see shops like Tailwind Labs. Right. And Adam has talked about. I love this analogy that he said on his podcast a while back, maybe a year ago, about he treats his business like a band. He's in a band. [00:54:23] Speaker B: Okay. I mean, he's a band musician. [00:54:26] Speaker A: He is a musician, but like, but he treats Tailwind Labs like it's just a crew of super talented people building awesome stuff. And everyone's technical, everyone's shipping really great products that lots and lots of people use. That analogy really resonates because I think that from like, I love that model of a. It's not a solo person, it's a. It's still a team. It's not huge. It's not a huge team, but everyone is contributing at a high level, including the founder, the CEO, like getting their hands dirty in the areas where they want to be getting their hands dirty while the business still is able to scale out to lots of customers and revenue. That's like 37 signals is another. Another one in this vein where it's like, yeah, they're a little bit bigger with more people. Still not huge, but the founders are like, Jason and DHH are in the weeds on every product, you know? [00:55:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Which. Which is cool. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't think of what we do in that same way. Maybe that's what happens. Everyone contributes in their own way. And it's almost like a. I don't know if it's like a show or, you know, like a TV show. Like the consumer of it just sees like the end product. Yeah, right. As opposed to the Tailwind Band analogy. That's cool. [00:55:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, man. [00:55:55] Speaker B: All right, homie. It's Friday. Let's go get it. It's nice and sunny out soccer season's over. Actually get to see my kids this week without standing on the sidelines cheering for them. [00:56:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. [00:56:05] Speaker B: Enjoy that. [00:56:06] Speaker A: We are. Yeah. My kids are starting up their basketball season soon, but, yeah, we're gonna get outside. We've been hiking a lot. Like, almost every weekend, we go out and find a hike somewhere around Connecticut. I love this time of year for that. [00:56:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And, I mean, Thanksgiving's coming. It's crazy. Things are flying at this point. [00:56:21] Speaker A: Yep. [00:56:22] Speaker B: Thanks, everyone, for listening. Another episode of Bootstrap. Web, baby. Talk to you soon. [00:56:27] Speaker A: Yes, sir. Later, folks.