Enough Time

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Dude. Strapped. Web Jordan 2024 is now rolling along. How are we doing, budy? [00:00:23] Speaker B: We are good. We close. Used a nice big two year deal yesterday. [00:00:28] Speaker A: Oh, two years? [00:00:29] Speaker B: Yes, two years. 24 month deal. A little under six figures, but damn, I really wanted to get out of the gate the right way in January. So we're celebrating here. We're psyched. Twelve days between first contact and closed deal. [00:00:48] Speaker A: Oh, wow. That's the dream. Yeah. [00:00:50] Speaker B: I think it's our fastest ever. [00:00:52] Speaker A: Nice. [00:00:52] Speaker B: And it was like cold email outreach into a demo, into pricing conversation, and then sign deal. And I could talk about some pitfalls that we're going to deal with because of the speed of that process, but hell yeah. Feels great. [00:01:08] Speaker A: That's awesome. I'm two days away from heading up to Montreal for the first of two big snow tiny comps. For me, going to do some snowboarding, some hanging out with some founder friends, should be a really good time. I'm pretty psyched. [00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds nice. Speaking of skiing, I really enjoyed Ian and Aaron, their podcast. [00:01:34] Speaker A: I got to hear this. [00:01:35] Speaker B: Cracked me up. [00:01:36] Speaker A: I got to hear this one. It's funny. Two days ago, I took my younger daughter on a quick ski trip up to Massachusetts, and it snowed a bit, but it was so cold that it turned everything into ice. We had a good time together doing the trip, but, yeah, she did not have a great time on that mountain. [00:01:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:58] Speaker A: And I didn't have a great time putting those boots on and all the schlep. [00:02:03] Speaker B: Yes, Aaron, I'm with you. Too much schlepping. I think the way Aaron put it was, if he could be just gently dropped at the top of the mountain and able to ski down, then he would like skiing, which is how I feel. It's all the stuff getting up there. [00:02:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, that's why the adult trips that we do, like the big snows, we've got these super nice condos. Ski on, ski off, private chef, walk out the back door, you're going down the mountain. It's pretty great. [00:02:32] Speaker B: Unfortunately, money makes even skiing better. So it goes. [00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, let's get into it. [00:02:41] Speaker B: Speaking of money. [00:02:45] Speaker A: I'm struggling with the time, with the pie chart. That is my week. That is my time. And I feel like I see some paths and I'm working, and I have some things that I'm putting in place to deal with this problem, but it is definitely a problem. I'm not finishing the work that I intend to finish every week. And, yeah, it doesn't feel great. [00:03:10] Speaker B: Is it actually not great, or does it just feel not great, like you falling behind. Are you able to at least. [00:03:17] Speaker A: I mean, clarity flow is running with the team. Like, the team executes the things that we're executing, so there's nothing really falling behind. Well, I mentioned last week that I'm hiring a customer success person at clarity flow, and I feel like I got really lucky. Somebody that I worked with for a long time in a previous business reached out after my tweet, and she's going to be coming on board in February to be the first customer success person. So that's one thing. And I want to talk more about investing in customer success as a strategy for clarity flow. That's a big strategic thing we can get into. But in terms of the time form the time equation here, that's one area that I feel like does take a bunch of my time that I would love to, that I'm excited to get off my plate. The customer support, it's like writing emails, but it's also like sending a lot of video messages to customers. And frankly, a lot of customers need to have a call, and I don't want to do all these extra calls, even though I still do them. And then that's just really disruptive to my week. So it'll be really nice to. It'll take a while to kind of ramp her up into that role, but that's part of the equation with bringing her on. There's more to it than that, though. [00:04:35] Speaker B: It is amazing. I often discount how disruptive a 30 minutes call can actually be. [00:04:42] Speaker A: Oh, it's way more than 30. [00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty tough. The last two weeks, I have had fewer calls and larger stretches in my calendar without a call. And not only there's a practical element in terms of the work you can do in that time, and also when I wake up. So the way I operate is the night before when I'm going to bed, I open my phone and I open the alarm window and the calendar window, and I then set alarms ahead of my meetings for the next day. So I set alarm to wake up. Either it's 530 for a workout day. [00:05:20] Speaker A: I noticed you're a big alarm guy. Every time we're on a call or hanging out like you've got alarms going on every 30 minutes. [00:05:26] Speaker B: That sucks. First of all, whoever at Apple redesigned that window. What are you doing? It was perfect the way it was. [00:05:34] Speaker A: I'm anti alarm. I got to say. I naturally wake up early, and if I stay up late, then I'm just going to sleep late. I don't care. I don't want to wake up to an alarm. [00:05:45] Speaker B: Okay, good for you. I just go to sleep late, and then I need an alarm no matter what. Also a 530 wake up for a workout. I don't know about you. I need an alarm for that. The other alarm, my kids will wake me up. That's fine. But then I will go through my day and I'll set an alarm either five or 15 minutes before each call so that I don't miss the call. I don't want to rely on the notification from the app on my computer. I might be eating lunch or whatever it is. So the days that I just have fewer things, I'm more motivated to get worked on. And the days that are full of calls, I'm like, I'm just not going to get worked on today. I'm just going to do a good job on my calls. Yeah, I give up. But I'm like, I'll check some email and blah, blah, blah. Maybe I'll knock out this one or two tasks, but it's tough to get work done. [00:06:33] Speaker A: I definitely have way less calls than you at the most. Two in one day at the most on those days. I know, like, oh, this is an afternoon where I have a call versus don't have a call. [00:06:51] Speaker B: Today's a call day, literally, because half. [00:06:54] Speaker A: Of my days are absolutely no calls. And that's the dream. And then it's like, I know that I have one call at three. So I'm basically structuring my whole day around that. Like, when am I getting my workout in? When am I doing this project? I got to do it before that because I've got this thing at three. And then. [00:07:15] Speaker B: That'S funny. I'm like, it's Friday and it is 02:00 and I'm happy I don't have any calls later today. [00:07:23] Speaker A: Yeah, no, this is definitely my last call for the day. [00:07:26] Speaker B: I saw you send out a tweet with, like, a screenshot of someone's calendar and you're like, if it ever looks. [00:07:31] Speaker A: Like that was the new notion calendar I was in notion just normal day to day, and they're promoting their new calendar product. Okay. And that was a screenshot of the thing that's in their own product marketing. And I'm like, why is this a benefit? This looks terrible. [00:07:47] Speaker B: I don't know. Maybe they're not talking to you or they want to go. [00:07:50] Speaker A: I don't know. They're talking, I guess, to like, the salesperson or the project manager or something. [00:07:56] Speaker B: Or it looks better with more events on it. [00:07:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:02] Speaker B: Notion is still at it. I don't use that product anymore, but I like their vibe. [00:08:07] Speaker A: There's some things I don't love about it, but I have moved all my stuff into, or at least the team project management stuff is all in there for sure. Cool. [00:08:17] Speaker B: It makes me think of the other stuff that we've seen on Twitter the last few days. Is the base camp launching the first once product for $299. [00:08:28] Speaker A: What I found. [00:08:30] Speaker B: They've had that product for ten years. [00:08:33] Speaker A: Right? [00:08:34] Speaker B: What's it called? Campfire. [00:08:35] Speaker A: Campfire, yeah. [00:08:37] Speaker B: I've used that in the past. [00:08:38] Speaker A: It was super selling the byproducts. I love it. [00:08:41] Speaker B: Yes. What are they doing? If my company was kicking off, like, $20 million a year in profits, you know what I was going to say, maybe I wouldn't be launching stuff, but maybe I would just be doing whatever the hell I want. And that turns out to be what they want to do. [00:08:56] Speaker A: I think that seems to me like what they're doing. And they're just like, let's just do some stuff that we want to do. It doesn't seem like I was surprised that it's like, 299, I think, is the price point. That seems pretty low for. I don't know, why would that make a meaningful business for them? I don't understand that math. But again, maybe it's like. I don't know, maybe it's sort of just for fun. [00:09:22] Speaker B: I think it's a bit ideological, which I like. If you're trying to screw up the system a little bit and just roll a grenade out into the SAS living room and just see what happens and see what it. See what that does. Yeah, I like that. [00:09:39] Speaker A: Yeah, man. [00:09:40] Speaker B: Cool. [00:09:43] Speaker A: Yeah. What do you got? [00:09:45] Speaker B: Okay, we talked last week about this new product line. We've got a name for it. It's called rally offers. I might have said that last week, but I'm not sure. But now it's kind of in stone, and we're doing this a little, like, dirty the right way. I think we are working on a new website, and instead of waiting to launch that, we're just building the solutions page for rally offers. And then we're just going to publish that next week and it will not look like the rest of the site. [00:10:18] Speaker A: And who can do it. [00:10:20] Speaker B: Yes. And we're just going to be able to share it with people and then turn basically the elements of that page into a PDF so we can send it out to people. And our team put together a few assets. Like, here's what it looks like on a Magento store. Here's looks like on a Salesforce store commerce tool. Right. So we're basically just arming the sales and marketing side with stuff to talk about. Because if you send someone an email or ping someone on LinkedIn with two sentences, it doesn't work nearly as well as two sentences plus a screenshot. [00:10:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:48] Speaker B: So we want to give them that. So that will get published, I think, Tuesday of next week. And what we are lining up is just a lot of things all at the same time. Because my goal on this is to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. So we have landing page launching, then all those assets being used by people in one on one conversations along with some one to many type social posts. But then we're also launching. We launched today, LinkedIn ads. So this will be the first time we spend a few thousand bucks a month, at least the first time in a long time where we will be running ads. And those ads are a little bit more provocative than what they were in the past. I'm laughing because I pushed the agent. [00:11:41] Speaker A: I feel like ads need to be provocative. [00:11:43] Speaker B: They need to be. [00:11:44] Speaker A: Ads are so much more expensive and people tune them out now. So they got to be different. [00:11:49] Speaker B: Right? Like introducing this cool looking thing. Maybe it works if you have brand recognition and you're just getting in front of people. But if you actually want to get someone to stop scrolling and be like, what? So I pushed the marketing agency. They came back first with like, a vanilla set of ads. Rally offers. Now you can do XYZ. And I was like, no, I want emotional response. I have to give them credit. They found the line, and then they went past it, and they came back to me. [00:12:20] Speaker A: They tipped their toe past it. [00:12:22] Speaker B: Dude, I think their copy was something. Rally, checkout. The only time she'll brag about you finishing fast. All right, guys, I think that's too far. I think checkout with, like, finishing might be a little not right, but I. [00:12:43] Speaker A: Was proud of them. [00:12:43] Speaker B: I was like, you listen, but it's. [00:12:45] Speaker A: Worth an A B test. [00:12:47] Speaker B: Yeah, we dialed it back just a touch, and now it's basically like, your checkout sucks. Learn more about rally is basically what it says in so many words. Then what we're doing on the underside, I guess. So that's the ads that's like external, right? That lives in LinkedIn. Then once someone clicks and goes there, we have three things in place that we just put in place. We have a product called $0.06. So we looked at Clearbit we looked at a bunch of other options that detect IP addresses and then give our sales team notifications on who's visiting the site. And we ended up going with $0.06 over Clearbit and others because it just had the stuff that we were looking for, including intent markers. So when we launch a pricing page, like how long are they on the site? Basically send me an email with anyone who's been on the site for x amount of time or has visited the pricing page more than once, or whatever those intent things are that can be useful for us. [00:13:52] Speaker A: So someone clicks a LinkedIn ad, they come to your site and that tracks. It gives you identifying information of the organization, of where they're from or who they are. [00:14:04] Speaker B: Yes. It's like this IP address belongs to Toys r us. So it gives you who they are and then some contact info. It doesn't give you that much info on the individual visitor. That's what retention.com does. They're going to get sued, oblivion. And then we are layering in gong on top of HubSpot and that is just giving us a better way to manage our HubSpot pipeline. And then very simple tech, we are adding a chat to the page. So if we're going to spend a few thousand bucks a month to get people there, we should be tonking people. Whoever goes through that chat, it pains. [00:14:44] Speaker A: Me to think about how many I spent so many hours in. I guess this was 2021, 2022. On wiring up tracking on it was zip message. Then on mapping first visitor where they came from, getting that data into Mixpanel and chart mogul and stripe and analytics and just mapping that funnel. I really stressed out about it at that time because then and continuing all these years has been like, I've been running these experiments and trying to analyze kind customer segments and all this stuff. And I stressed out over having all this period of time where we're running blind without that kind of data. But it's such a pain to wire that stuff up and it's so not plug and play. You got to get deep into your own code base set cookies. You got to track this and that, build out custom dashboards. It's such a mess. [00:15:47] Speaker B: It's a mess. It's not the way it should be. And maybe someone on Twitter tagged us and asked like, hey, how are you tracking your marketing? And everyone's like, tracking what you can track some marketing but not the way you want. We are using framer for this new site and that thing's amazing. We've been on Webflow and we're moving off of Webflow to framer. [00:16:15] Speaker A: This is like the new hotness that I'm starting to hear the name Framer more and more, and I haven't checked it out myself, but I'm clearly seeing that name come up a lot more. [00:16:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I am not the one designing or building, but we've worked with these designers for years and love them and trust them. And when I came to them and said, hey, we want to do this site with you, we were going to hire an agency and all that stuff, we ended up just doing it well with these guys that we've been working with for years that do our product design. And he was like, can we please use Framer instead of webflow? So when I asked why, he said it's basically allows us to design directly into the browser, into the tool. And there just isn't that much separation between going into Figma and then trying to get what you have in Figma into Webflow is a very difficult process and it appears that they're able to do it much more. [00:17:13] Speaker A: Same again, I don't know Framer much, but I chose static and I used static on the clarity flow marketing site and now I just used it again on the new Fullstack founder co site that I launched last week. So staticmic now for me is like my go to CMS and it's for that same. Like, to me, it's the closest thing to a pure static site where I can get my hands dirty as much as I want with designing Tailwind CSS, organizing the templates and the markup exactly how I want it. And it gives me really like a really solid user interface, CMS that I can give to my assistant, my writer, my Va, whoever needs to log in and manage know, because most static sites don't have a solid actual CMS, you got to actually use code and static is like the best of both worlds. [00:18:14] Speaker B: Cool. Well, I'm hoping, so far so good. We're about to launch just one page and they're excited about it and the speed is there in terms of how quickly they're working. [00:18:24] Speaker A: Sweet. Love it. I'm going to talk about something that I have not talked about in many years at this point. Okay. And that is consulting. [00:18:35] Speaker B: Okay. [00:18:36] Speaker A: I have started to do a bit of product strategy consulting with some SaaS companies for the first time in like, I literally don't remember how many years it's been since I worked with a paying client that was not like one of my customers of a product. [00:18:55] Speaker B: Okay. [00:18:55] Speaker A: And I'm excluding like audience ops clients because those are like customers of that service. That wasn't like me personally consulting with my time. Right, right. [00:19:04] Speaker B: And your expertise and your how is it? [00:19:09] Speaker A: It's interesting. I'm not trying to build a big consultancy here. This is really just like a step one in getting some early revenue for my new full stack founder brand. The quickest way to revenue is to offer my time while I start to build up the audience with the YouTube channel and stuff like that. And I'll get into more products later in the year. But for right now I have a services page on full stack founder and it's been interesting to sort of iterate a little bit on how I'm offering these services. So I started actually back in November, December. I first launched it as like a coaching service where I actually took on a few coaching clients. It was sort of like an ongoing monthly subscription where they get async access to me and I'm using clarity flow to do it. But I actually didn't love that model. For me, the clients themselves were cool, but I just didn't love the idea of constantly getting questions sent to me and I'm sort of obligated to respond within a day or two on an ongoing basis. So I tabled that version of the offer and now I'm offering, well, there's that, where you can just purchase like a one time Q and a with me, like ask one question and we'll go back and forth for one week. But what's interesting now is I'm working with SaaS companies in what I'm calling like a planning sprint, right? And I only book one of these a month. I'm working on with one SaaS company. Now I've got another one booked for February, and then March is open. But the idea is I work with you, the founder, or you and your product team, and if you're planning a big new feature, or if you're planning a new product, like an MVP. But in these cases, these are like established SaaS companies that are planning a big extension of their product or a big new feature. We'll spend two weeks and I'll work with you on scoping it out, shaping it up, technical architecture, technical decision making, sketching out some UI workflows, some wireframes, debating with you in a constructive way between like, all right, we can try this approach or we can implement it that way, or maybe we'll use this off the shelf solution, or we'll build it custom, or we'll do this and then as we wrap up this two week sprint, you end up at a point where, okay, we have the roadmap, we have the issues all technically scoped out and specked out, ready to hand off to our developers and they can run with it. And it's like a time boxed. In one case it's a two week sprint, in another one we're doing a three week sprint. And it's interesting. I like this version of it. It's still time consuming because this week, like two of my mornings this week, I basically went deep on this other SaaS businesses endeavor here that they're building out. And I spent a lot of time researching and writing docs in notion and planning it out. But it's interesting. I've never really offered my consulting service in this way. My role is just to be like, look, if this were my company and my product, here's how I would be thinking about these product decisions. [00:22:45] Speaker B: I'm curious, what's the core value? Is it advice? Is it comfort that they're on the right track? Is it a combination of design and watch out for these things that might pop up? [00:23:01] Speaker A: I think that these particular SaaS companies, while they're very successful on their own, they're well established, they've got a great customer base. I think that they identified that. All right, we know that we need to build this big new thing, like this big feature. It's important for our product, for our customers, for our market position. But I think that they identified that even though they have developers on the team, they're missing some aspects of the product stack. And I think what they see in me is someone who brings some design, user interface, user experience, chops some product strategy, meaning choosing the best, scoping down, paring down the scope so that we can ship this efficiently and fast without shipping something that's garbage, but actually solving the real underlying customer problem, that kind of thought process, in some teams, that's sort of a hole for them, even though they have people who actually work in code and they've got some designers. But I think that they see in me that I am a fellow founder and I've worked on my own products for years and I've made these kinds of product strategy decisions. I know what goes into them and I know the priorities in terms of like, we need to ship, we need to solve customers problems. So I try to bring clarity to that. And it's just been interesting for me because it's like this is sort of the first time where I'm consulting in a type of role where it's like, look, I'm just going to sort of tell you how it is, whether it's news that you want to hear or not, this is how I would be thinking about this. [00:24:53] Speaker B: Right. You're bringing an outside perspective. [00:24:55] Speaker A: I'm here to bring in the outsider's perspective. Whereas years ago, when I was doing consulting or web design, freelance web design services essentially, or working for web design agencies, the game is you just kind of make the client happy, you deliver what they want, you make your recommendations, but at the end of the day, you're going to ship what they want. This is truly consulting, where it's like, I'm going to give you my best creative, analytical thinking on this and put it together for you. And it's also been interesting for me to deliver these things to them. Like, I usually deliver it in the form of a clarity flow message or we're on a call or something, and I'm like, here's my thinking on this, but please poke holes in this and tell me where you disagree so that I can then think through that as the next step. Right. I think it's constructive. It's just been interesting and kind of a fun, interesting exercise. It's probably not something that I want to do for years and years, but for this year, I'm actually kind of into it. I don't know. [00:26:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Sometimes I feel like we all get stuck in individual businesses for a long time. [00:26:20] Speaker A: You know what? I think you're right. I think that's sort of what has me a little bit excited about this. It's like when I go to big snow or when I'm in my mastermind group. I had a call this morning with them. It's fun to dig into other people's businesses, and it's refreshing. It's a break from dealing with my own crap. [00:26:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And also allows you to use your expertise and experience in more than one context. Context is one of the things that drives me nuts about experience, expertise, product, business model. If you just applied it into a slightly different context, it can be worth so much more. I think about that in private equity. That's what I think about. And what I mean by private equity is, I remember it's a long time ago, 15 years ago in Connecticut, in Westport. And I had a friend come over and his sister lived in town. So we go over to her house and I'm like, damn, it was gorgeous. It wasn't even like a mansion, like a big house. It was just so well done. [00:27:34] Speaker A: Just a beautiful Westport's a nice area. [00:27:37] Speaker B: Down, you know, it was one of those houses. It was really modern, gorgeous house. So my capitalist juices are like, what is going on? How did you do this? So we meet her husband and we get into a conversation, and it was one of the first times I saw private equity in a different context. So this guy, I don't know, he made a few bucks, like, just doing normal work, like being finance something. And then he bought a cybersecurity company and just changed, went in there and fixed it, basically improved it using the expertise that he had from finance, working with these more established, more buttoned up, more professional companies. He just bought a company for a few million bucks and applied his expertise on how to actually run this type of a company who to hire, what type of people to bring in and. [00:28:36] Speaker A: Probably add a ton of value to sell it. Right. [00:28:40] Speaker B: It was just in one context, he was making a salary and maybe he was making a lot of money. He was making half a million bucks a year. Good for him. But he just moved that same thing into a different context where he owned the equity of the company and he made millions from it. And that type of thing always kind of drives me nuts. I'm like, I've been in business in one form or another and understood the entrepreneurial world for, like, 30 years, since I was a teenager. And if that expertise could be applied in different contexts, I think about it all the time because of the cart hook versus rally context. I'm like, totally. These different contexts make a big difference. [00:29:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And kind of along those same lines. This year, in 2024, I've been talking about this for the last several months. Here is that. Hey, there's one of your alarms. [00:29:31] Speaker B: Dude, that was a phone call. It wasn't alarm, it was fan. I'm sorry, David. David. [00:29:40] Speaker A: I am finding some, I think, some new mental peace by thinking differently about success as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, I'm redefining it now. I've gone through many years and multiple businesses aiming for one version of success as a software entrepreneur. [00:30:04] Speaker B: Right. [00:30:04] Speaker A: And in 2024 and going forward, I'm of the mindset of, like, there are other ways to be successful in this industry, and they don't have to be making one SaaS product work for me. That's my bottom line at this point. [00:30:18] Speaker B: Okay? [00:30:19] Speaker A: That's why this year is I'm cobbling together. I do have one SaaS product. I'm doing a bit of this product consulting, and I'm doing the audience thing with the YouTube channel. And later in the year, I'll probably do some courses or community or something else that I can leverage off of that. I'm still working in products, I'm still working in software. In fact, I'm going even deeper into it because I'm teaching it now and I'm consulting on it now. And to me, in some ways, it's even more enjoyable. I'm basically acting as an investor at this point in clarity flow. It's one thing in my portfolio, and I can learn and build and cobble together revenue streams from different places going forward. That's the plan. It's not easy. I wish I had a lot more success by this point in my age and career, but I think there's still a lot of good stuff to come. At least that's my mindset. Yeah, that's the rosy side of the mindset. [00:31:24] Speaker B: No, look, it's pretty sober. One thing that we all fall victim to is projecting onto versions of success that we see, that we literally come across. And it's such a limited worldview, and it's often incorrect. So I don't see, across the street from me is a family friend. Her father crushed it in real estate. He's not on Twitter. He's not writing blog posts. You don't see it. And because of that, it's not as present in your mindset of your version of a success or what's possible or what you should be doing. And what we all see, like on Twitter and among peers and all that. It's such a tiny, tiny, tiny worldview. And often the things that we're seeing are either untrue or incomplete or incorrect or whatever assumptions. And avoiding that as your North Star and what success should be to you is so hard, you have to trick yourself. [00:32:35] Speaker A: I still deal with it, of course, but it took me a long time to get my mental headspace to this point. And a lot of hard work, I think, because it's not just, oh, that person on Twitter from afar, or that Internet celebrity on stage. It's people that I'm close friends with that I go snowboarding with, that, you know, that I know we see people. I see again and again, the model or the pathway of this person started a SaaS business and it grew. It nailed product market fit and insanely profitable, or they sold it for an insane amount. And I've seen that again and again and again with people that I, and I've seen the behind the scenes story of that again and again. It's hard to look at that and say, I've been at this game for over a decade, how come I haven't had the same outcome? But it's just like, yeah, of course there are things that I can point back to and think like, well, maybe this or that decision could have been done differently. Maybe that didn't serve me well. But at the end of the day, this is where we're at, and I think that there are still ways to stay positive and actually have a great time building a business that doesn't have to look like that version of success. There really are so many different ways to win. It doesn't have to be a single SaaS product. [00:34:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree 100%. I even challenge you on seeing it again and again because I don't think I could name ten people that I actually know, as opposed to heard about on Twitter type of thing, or read an article about some founder that sold their company for 500 lumbar. Good for them. But the people that I actually know and interact with, I don't know if I could name you ten people that have had a straightforward, successful outcome. [00:34:40] Speaker A: Oh, 100%. [00:34:41] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a handful. Almost everyone else, but even them, even. [00:34:45] Speaker A: The most successful ones, especially if you know them behind the scenes, you know they are not always happy, and the path is not always rosy or easy, even if the numbers are large. In many cases, that brings all sorts of challenges that most people don't see. [00:35:03] Speaker B: Sure. And pre outcome is full of bullshit. This was one of my biggest problems with the Shopify ecosystem and part of why I'm so happy that I'm not there anymore. And I just look at it from the outside being like, oh, my God, no thanks. It was so full of this hype of everything's going amazing and everything's going well, and then when you actually know about it, you're like, you have from the outside, an amazing business. And then it is so rare when the actual outcome arrives and the people that worked on it for five, six, eight years actually get an awesome financial reward. It is rare. I'm in touch with a guy now. My man grinded for five years, just layoffs, then cobbling together a few more bucks than layoffs, then trying, then repivoting, then trying something else. And over the last two years, this thing hit hell. [00:36:08] Speaker A: Yes. [00:36:09] Speaker B: And he's like, I hope we can sell it over the next two years so that it works out. And he's adding like, mrR every month for the past, like two years straight. Just spectacular success. And it still doesn't. So that shit means nothing. The only thing that means is what's in front of your desk and what your priorities are. [00:36:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's always, like, weighing how many years am I willing to spend on this one idea before it's like, okay, that might have an outcome, but there are other things that I could be spending my time on. [00:36:46] Speaker B: Yes. [00:36:49] Speaker A: Speaking of time, getting back down to the ground level. So this new business that I'm doing called full stack founder, the business model or the strategy is very much built around YouTube as like the tip of the spear, the top of the funnel. And in my mind, this is how bad I am at estimating how much time and effort it is to get something off the ground. But my thought is like, I'm going to bootstrap and do everything myself on YouTube, from scripting to recording to the editing, designing the thumbnail, putting out YouTube videos. I want to do a new one every single week. And I got up to my third video and I'm like, I absolutely need to outsource the video editing a lot sooner than I thought I would because that is such a bottleneck. I've recorded five videos and I've only published two of them. Because the editing is such a bottleneck. I've gone down the rabbit hole learning like Davinci resolve, and it's fun and creative to get into that. And I've gotten pretty fast keyboard shortcuts and all these different stuff. Even with that, video editing is such a different beast, especially for YouTube, than just podcast editing. Like this podcast we're going to finish and I'm going to publish it in like ten minutes. We basically do no editing, right? [00:38:15] Speaker B: We're at that end of the spectrum. [00:38:17] Speaker A: Yeah, but most podcast, not most podcasts, but the tooling for podcast editing now is so good that you could get away with a lot of minimal automated. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Stuff and you come across greatly produced broadcasts. And there is a difference, sure. [00:38:34] Speaker A: But with video, no matter how great the tools are, you still got to have the cuts be right, have the lighting and the color and the titles and the transitions and the mastering and all this different stuff. So it's like an eight minute video is like four, five, 6 hours of work, not to mention the research and the prep and the scripting and all that and the recording. So I have this bootstrappers mentality where it's like, oh, this is a new business. I can't invest in hiring someone until I've got revenue coming in. But I very quickly came to that conclusion where it's like, can't do it if I want this business to work. And if that requires publishing YouTube's on a regular basis, and that is the distribution strategy, then I have to hire this out. That's the only way I'm actually able to execute that strategy, and it's worth the investment. So I'm going to be doing that. I'm just going to continue working with the same assistant who's been working with me on clarity flow. She's coming over to my personal stuff and yeah, she's been doing podcast and video editing, and I've got my templates and workflow that I can give to her, but it's definitely worth like x dollars to cover her cost for the year in terms of investing that into growing my audience this way. And if that allows me to publish on a regular schedule, that's going to be the plan. [00:40:07] Speaker B: Okay, cool. What it makes me think of is the difference between that pain that you're encountering and what I see my daughter do with Capcut. [00:40:21] Speaker A: That's another one I keep hearing about. [00:40:26] Speaker B: It's mobile. I don't know if they have a desktop. We don't allow her to have TikTok, not yet. So her way around that was, I just need this cap cut. It's just like for making videos and editing. And of course it has a feed, so it's like TikTok light. Yeah, she got us on that one. But she likes to do the type of format videos that these kids like to do. They do get ready with me, right? She's of that age where she's close with friends, so now they are doing facetime when they're doing their nighttime skin routines. Okay. But sometimes she'll do a video on her own and she uses cap cut. And what she does, no one taught her. I didn't teach her anything. Maybe she has some friends or something, but it's very intuitive enough. And then she'll show me the video that she made about us arriving at the hotel in Hawaii or something. They understand this language. [00:41:22] Speaker A: It's incredible. I got my one daughter on. I introduced her to canva, the graphics, and she loves it. And she goes in there and, I mean, I barely use canva, but she's like, creating. And Canva has all these AI tools now. She's not only creating graphics, she creates stories, like animated stories in there. Now, both my daughters are not only playing Roblox, they're using Roblox studio to create Roblox games. And they publish stuff in Roblox world. It's just incredible. And a lot of it is like story based. They're creating many movies, many comic strips kind of stuff. It's just incredible, man. Literally the other day my seven year old showed me like, little shortcuts on the iPad that I never knew existed. Like on the keyboard. I don't know. You hold a button and then you get to the number and it's like, wait, what? I've been using this since iPads came out before you were born and you're showing me shortcuts like these kids, man. [00:42:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's cool. So if I were you, I would look at Capcut. I also can't help but think the pain you're encountering. I think that's the first idea for a business that you're encountering as you are becoming a creator. [00:42:44] Speaker A: What, like video editing stuff? Yeah, I don't know about that. Maybe. I don't know. [00:42:51] Speaker B: I've heard it in the ecommerce context in terms of creators who are on TikTok and want to do stuff. [00:42:58] Speaker A: Oh, there's definitely a huge business for someone to do in terms of offering video editing services. Yeah. I look at it much more as like a means to an end. And the content that I'm putting out is more in software development and software product strategy. And I have thought through what would it look like to build out like a software dev shop as a mini agency model? That's interesting, but that's not going to happen, or I'm not intending that to happen. I don't know. There's all sorts of random shiny object ideas that comes out. I'll just say the idea is software development services for creators who have large audiences and they want to sell software of their own, but they don't have the product development muscle. That's an interesting, like a little partnership model. [00:44:00] Speaker B: They bring distribution to the table because. [00:44:03] Speaker A: They have that advantage through this consulting work and through getting into the YouTube stuff. I actually have had some discussions with people in that realm and that sort of opened my eyes to some opportunity in that sort of service lane. But I don't know if or when that might come about. [00:44:27] Speaker B: I think you're going to come across more and more the deeper you go. [00:44:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:32] Speaker B: I, on the other hand, will be selling shit to ecommerce merchants. [00:44:35] Speaker A: There you go. [00:44:36] Speaker B: For a while. [00:44:36] Speaker A: There you go. [00:44:38] Speaker B: Friday. [00:44:39] Speaker A: Yeah, man. Again, I have so much shit that I hoped that I would have done and shipped by now, but the reality is the weekend is here and I'm getting on a flight on Sunday to go to big snow and that's that. Some stuff is just going to have. [00:44:55] Speaker B: To wait in that situation. I like to map out one or two things and say, I just want to get these done by the time I leave. And then usually that gives me enough motivation to. At night, while we're watching tv in bed, I'm like, this only takes half an hour. And then I get it done and I go to sleep feeling good. [00:45:15] Speaker A: Yeah, my thing is like, I've got two unedited YouTube videos and that's not a half an hour at night. Need. I need a full day and I don't have another full. Yeah, true. [00:45:28] Speaker B: All right, man. [00:45:29] Speaker A: All right. Happy weekend. [00:45:31] Speaker B: Talk to you soon. I will not be around next week. I'm in Vienna with my brother. Is my dad a boys trip to Austria? [00:45:38] Speaker A: Hell, yeah. Damn, dude. [00:45:39] Speaker B: Especially schnitzel and cake. [00:45:41] Speaker A: That's the whole beautiful. All right. All right, dude. [00:45:45] Speaker B: Be good. [00:45:46] Speaker A: Later, bro. It.