Episode Transcript
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. It's a beautiful Friday morning.
How are we doing?
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Good, man. Yeah, it is beautiful. I love this time. I love this weather. This is. This is my favorite month of the year. Like, September and October, you know?
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Right at this point, everyone's just hoping for good weather for the Halloween. For Halloween, yes. And then. And then whatever happens, happens after that.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Yep, yep. Yeah. Last weekend, we. We drove up to upstate New York and did. Did a little hiking up in the mountains.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Okay. Are the. Are the leaves turning? Because upstate New York, when the leaves turn, is spectacular.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: It was awesome. Yeah, we were there last weekend, and, yeah, it was a good, like, little weekend trip with the girls and everything, and beautiful. Just the weather was perfect, you know, leaves. Awesome. And we're back at it. Yep. Yes.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Back to work.
Had a busy week. Very busy week.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah, same.
I'm definitely getting busier and busier by the day. It feels like. And it's becoming a problem.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: That seems like the. The thing you need to figure out is how to handle the busyness.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Mm hmm.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: And I need to figure out how to just keep making things busier and busier every week, a little more every single week.
And we are lean to mean right now. We are six people.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And we are just like, yeah, tell. Tell us about that. Why don't we start there? Like, what a.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: So we're feeling some differences, and there are pros and cons. So the speed and the communication, the camaraderie, big positives. And we're also starting to learn new limitations.
Qa, for example, the whole team did Qa. We launched our new signup flow. So if you go to heyrosie.com and you hit get started, there used to be a URL field. And then get started. So you would put your URL in get started, and we would build, like, a preview of your voice agent, and you could listen to a few clips. And the goal of that was to basically provide some value in some showing instead of telling before asking you to create an account.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: And that was good. And then what we. What we learned is we wanted to have a signup flow that had multiple paths. URL is one path. What we found with RICP is that their Google business profile is actually more important to them than their website many times. And so now if you go to the signup flow, you'll see the primary path is Google Business profile. So you come in and you just start typing in your business name, and we ping Google's API. You identify. Yes. That's the right one with the right address. You click on that or you can hit no train with my website instead. Or you can take the tertiary path, which is. I'll just give you my business information manually.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. If they're, if they're really like not on the map on Google, then they can just put in their own stuff.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: Right. Or sometimes they're not ready to give you their real personal information and they just want to see more. Yep, yep. So it does seem like that makes.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: It, like, defaulting to Google. What's it called? Google Business profile. Business profile. Like that seems to make sense for these local businesses, you know?
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Yep, yep. That's what makes sense.
I love coming across a competitor being a bit puzzled by how they do things and then ending up where they are anyway. After, you know, a certain amount of time of learning, it's tough to know what you should copy from your competitor and what you should ignore.
So that's just sometimes it does fall into. Huh. Guess we should have copied them from the.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: That's an interesting thing. You know, I'm going through that process now with instrumental dev looking at competitors. We can, we can get into that a little bit later, but you have.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Some inspiration to look at.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Well, it's an interesting space because the type of product that I'm building, which is a components library for rails, this type of thing is done so many different ways. Every components library, especially in the rail space, does things differently in terms of how you access the components, how you install them, how you manage them, how you customize them.
Frankly, I think a lot of it is not done well. It's the kind of thing where it's like, let me see what the competitors are doing.
But I don't want to do most of what they're doing. I want to do it differently.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: You're not really just competing on design of components. It's also like the way usability.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's even more what it's all about, which I think is cool.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: All right, so think about this signup flow. It went from one path to now multiple paths. You have to also be able to go back. You're pinging multiple APIs. You're confirming. Then we have a new, a new scraper and crawler setup. We used to scrape and crawl the entire website in order to build the agent and then show a small piece of it as the clips. We realized that we're better off splitting that off into two and doing a quick initial scrape to have enough data for the preview clips. And then once you get into the account in the background, as you're signing up for your account, then we do the full crawl of your website so we have the context for your actual agent.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: I like that.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: So think about all those changes. And all of a sudden, the person that we used to look to for QA is no longer on the team. So all of a sudden, we set up a new slack channel, and we're like, all right, everybody, let's all bang on it.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: We should talk about this, because I feel like I've gone through so many evolutions of our testing and QA process, and we've come basically full circle to today, which is like, it's probably as. As light as it's ever been. It used to be so much heavier, and I just removed a lot of.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: Layers, so you get benefit because it's lighter weight.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: I mean, they're definitely trade offs, and I actually see them today, too. So, like, okay, like, early on, when I started clarity flow, and this was, like, after a process kit, like, going years ago, when I built process kit, we started off with very little or even the app. Before that, it was very few test coverage and stuff like that.
And then things broke a lot, and then I became obsessed with test coverage.
This lasted a few years from process kit into early days of zip message, where me and the team, we wrote tests for every single line of code we did.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: That was your reactionary?
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah, and it had the benefit of, like, our code base is bulletproof. When we ship something after it's tested, it's not going to break.
When we ship the next thing. Like, things don't break because we have test coverage. Great. But then, like, about two years into zip message, into clarity flow, our test suite just became so huge.
And maintaining that and making sure that all of our tests keep passing became just not only, like, a slowdown, it became like a. We're a grinding halt now. Like, we can't ship anything because we can't get our tests to pass. Like, and, you know, there's a lot of more technicalities to this.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: But the trade off is the trade off.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Like, the trade off is the trade off, you know, and then it got to. And then I started, like, breaking it out. Like, okay, now we have a subset of our tests that are, like, our critical tests, so we focus on those and we don't have to test everything else.
And now it's like, okay, we have our core tests in place, but now we just ship stuff. We have a staging server, and before that, we do a lot of internal testing, and it's even at a point now where I just have my developer, like, okay, you build the thing, you test it, you push it to staging, you test it, you deploy it to production, you test it. As long as you're telling me it's all good, then that's good enough for me because I have so many other things to do. Like, I can't be sitting here QA testing everything myself. Like, I test it before the deployment stage happens. I test that the feature came out correctly and we've designed it correctly.
She handles all the testing. And then, look, we're back to moving fast. We're back to being able to shift. Like, we removed all those bottlenecks in our test writing and test coverage process.
But we do have more bugs pop up now.
And it happens. But this is an acceptable level of small bugs that only a couple of users run into. They report them to us. Now we have a good internal process for Kat to catch these bugs. She files the bug report, passes it onto the dev, and I'm just like, yep, go ahead, right?
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Get it fixed. It's just part of normal software business. Yeah, yeah, we, you know, we had, this is when we talked about, like, continuing to evolve the team and the company. After our pivot, QA for us at card hook checkout and rally checkout were robust, and we made the strategic decision that the trade off had to be weighed much, much more towards safety because bugs at a checkout is like death, right? If you're costing people money, you lose trust immediately. And then what we realized was, okay, we need to shift that bounce. And a few things happen when you shift the bounce that you just alluded to when you were talking a second ago, not only is it a trade off towards speed, it does take the responsibility and move it over to the developer's plate.
And that does have some positive impact. There's negative in terms of speed, but you are more considerate and careful as a developer, because when it leaves your desk, that's on you.
So we actually eliminated the QA position, and then all of a sudden we're like, well, now we need to figure out what QA looks like. So a lot of it goes into the developer's plate. But at some point, they do need speed. They can't just test forever. And so then the responsibility starts to float out onto the team. This one in particular this week was the signup flow. So if there are bugs in the signup flow, we're losing on accounts.
So it felt like this very critical moment, and everyone was attacking at it from a million different sides. We found a bunch of stuff, fixed it, and now we're in day two or three, and everything is quieted down.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you know, we did remove a lot of our technical test writing and stuff like that.
We still do a lot of testing. When we finish a big feature, we spend maybe a week or two just testing it internally and then on staging and then on production. And even we'll deploy it quietly to production before we announce it and test it more.
But the developer, there's still a log of what she's doing.
We have logs every time we deploy staging and production, and then also we use linear for managing the tickets. So she'll leave a comment to say, all right, I've tested.
Here's my checklist of what I tested, and I tested it on staging. Everything looks good. Now I'm going to production. All that is being logged in comments that she's posting, I could definitely see. It's not like, all right, this thing is live. Don't worry, I tested it. No, we actually know when you went through and tested it.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, we might. I don't know. We're still gonna sort out what QA looks like. Our QA on the AI product itself feels very, very, I guess, unique, at least compared to our previous experience, because where we need the most QA, we just need to call the agent. We just need to find mistakes. We just need to call Rosie over the phone, right? Upload information to her training from an account, call her and see if she gets it right.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: And it is such a funny thing.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: I don't even know how you technically test that.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: The form of that is different. It's literally a phone call and audio. But you are testing software.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: So it's not like it's this foreign concept and it's impossible to test. Like, no, you can say words and then get words back and then realize, oh, this prompt didn't work. It's effectively a bug, but it doesn't give you the same errors in the same way. It's just a unique new version of QA.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: I mean, you guys are gonna run into probably a lot of stuff that we ran into with clarity flow in different ways, where it's like, you could test the hell out of it internally. You could call it, you could say what you think needs to be said and get a response, but then the customers are gonna come into all these weird edge cases, like, oh, what if they word word things this way? Or what if they have this kind of accent? Or what if they do this or that? Or, like, you know, now that we.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Have, like, thousands of minutes being used, you know, of the agent. We have a lot of recordings, and sometimes you listen to the recording and you're like, we are geniuses, and this is magic. And other times you listen and cringe and sweat and cannot believe you released this thing into the wild and someone actually called the business and had that conversation.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: So we. We know there's a. There's a long way to go on reliability. All right, so that defined the week that signup flow launch. We're working on onboarding next. I can talk about that in a second, but how about you?
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Good stuff.
Yeah. As my landscapers are just showing up right on time for the podcast.
So. Yeah, I mean, the thing. So, like, the consulting side of my life is heating up, I would say.
I have multiple active projects happening now and even more, like in proposal stage, that are some. I think some of them are pretty likely to come through in the next two months or so. I mean, maybe sooner.
And, you know, earlier I was, like, really limiting that. Like, I'm only taking one or maybe two projects at a time.
Sorry, this is super loud now. He's like, right outside my window.
All right, so now I'm sort of of the mindset of like, let's just load up on the consulting pipeline and start hiring. And that's what I did.
I reached out to my team manager over there, and, you know, we have two new developers coming on board in the next two weeks to work with me on the consulting projects exclusively.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: You're hitting the gas. Not saying, hold on, how do I balance this? How do I slow down this side of things? You're saying to yourself, how do I not slow down the consulting?
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's going through the growing phase now where it's like, again, I've done this before in previous businesses. It's not like it gets easier every time, but I sort of know what the process looks like. And so most of the past year was like, mostly just me. Occasionally I brought in a developer to assist me, but it's mostly just been me solo working on these projects for the clients. Right. And that's good. It got solidified that this is a service. I kind of dialed in onto that one month app concept. Clients seem to like that. That works for the proposal phase. Now I'm getting into that phase where it's like, okay, what does this look like? Wherever it's me operating, it with multiple developers working on multiple projects, I wouldn't call this, like scaling just yet. This is still me very much in it.
I'm talking to clients all the time. I'm designing and architecting projects. I hope this audio is not terrible right now, but I think it's fine. So, you know, I'm still directing the, the projects. But my hope right now in this phase is like, if I can get my time, like, I'm currently spending at least three or four, like full days a week kind of tied up in these projects. If I can get that down to like one or two days a week, maybe spread across the week in terms of like an hour in the morning every day, and then I can spend the rest of the day working on my product.
That would be ideal because that changes it from me spending a full day building and developing features into more me doing the beginning of the project, architecting it, designing it, building some of the core features first, and then writing up issues and specs to hand off to my developer.
And then that person is just wiring up the features based on my directions and I can just check on progress day to day and then give the client an update every week. So that's sort of like the phase that I'm in. I mean, the other thing that's occupying a lot of my time now is the proposal process. Right? Like when I, like, I do a brief call to start off, this is a live call, and then from there, everything else is async.
And I've tried to dial in the proposal process, like, throughout this whole year. I use notion and I just write up a thing and, like, anyone who's done this type of consulting before knows exactly what I'm talking about, where it's like, you have the call. It seems pretty straightforward in theory, and then you start to get into the details a little bit. It's like, oh, there's a thousand questions that come up, and these questions can really impact how long it's going to take to do this project.
So I'm trying not to spend, like, too much time in the proposal stage because you don't know if this project is even going to happen. I know that I can move into like a paid discovery sort of idea. I haven't done that yet, but so that's, that's another thing that I'm trying to figure out is, like, how can I streamline or standardize or, or create, like, modules of things that always go into projects.
Yeah. And then, and then it's the delivery. And then the delivery, which is like building the apps.
That's pretty straightforward. But part of what I want to do with instrumental dot de V, which is the product that I'm working on, the components library, I'm building that as a product that I want to offer, but it's also a thing to help our internal projects become more streamlined and easier for me to run. Because in theory what I would love to do is have this components library. Like right now, it just sort of lives in my own projects and I personally use them and I'm the front end dev designer and then back end. But a big bottleneck in the process is like having the backend developer come in and wire up a feature and then I still have to go in and fix all the design and polish and front end and make it pixel perfect and everything. Hopefully, the idea with these components is that not only does it make building and deploying these uis easier and faster, but it makes it easier for me to hire developers to work on my projects. And I'm just going to give my developers like here, use this component, use that component. It's already made, it's already set up in a generator for you. You can just put it into the app and then work on the backend logic for that.
It should hopefully remove.
We were talking about QA, but in my case, a lot of that QA is like me going in and fixing design polish on the app. It should hopefully remove a lot of that work too, and make it easier for the backend dev, who doesn't want to deal with all the tailwind classes and everything. It's just there.
So hopefully I can.
It's like working on this product, which should hopefully help my work on the consulting side as well, from the outside.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: And without having to actually deal with the juggling of the different hours and where to put the focus.
It feels like the pain you're going through on the service and agency side is directly linked to the quality, it's almost like to the accuracy of what instrumental dot de V should be doing for people.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: It's cool to see because you are forced to figure out how do I go beyond myself. You are offering your unique perspective, but that doesn't mean the writing of code and the deployment of certain things actually needs to rely on you. You can maintain providing Brian's point of view, but still doing a lot less work.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to get too into the technical weeds of this, and I haven't even really built the delivery system for these components yet. But I'm thinking a lot about that because I feel like most of these components libraries either don't give you enough or they give you too much in terms of how it gets into your actual projects. Either they try to take over your whole entire app and you can't even use it unless you start fresh with a new app with their template, or they're these drop in components which still require so much work to actually use and customize.
I'm thinking a lot about generators and rails, being able to have one command and pop in a dropdown menu or pop in this scaffold or that scaffold.
Anyway, I'm thinking a lot about that stuff, but right now it's a challenge. It's a good problem to have to have these projects coming through the pipeline, keeping the cash flow going and also just being able to work on all these projects is beneficial, too, working with great clients across the board.
But yeah, it's finding the time to be able to actually work on instrumental dot de v dot.
That's still a challenge.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: I cannot help. Again, I'm not the one dealing with the pain of balancing it, but it feels very much to me like the pain you're going through on figuring out how to balance it is actually the creative, destructive part of what will make instrumental the right product for someone else in that same situation, I think.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: So it doesn't take away the fact that, like, I still need to put in the hours on it. Yeah. And those hours need to come from somewhere. Yeah, that's right. But like, yeah, for sure. That's because, like, I do think that it's in a. It's in sort of a painful phase, like right now, like this week, this month. But I could start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, especially once these two new developers get on board. Then my routine is going to change. It's going to go from me having to build stuff all day to just directing stuff, and then I can start to settle into, okay, now I have a few more hours to work with.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: Right. You'll go through some management pain on communication and fixing and that sort of thing. But then as that gets ironed out, then it's more time freed up.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Yeah, but there is more like groundwork on the product of instrumental, like, meaning, like from the marketing side. Like, I want to start to put it out there and get interest and get survey responses and get early access list going. I want to do YouTube videos. I want to start to build a funnel of some kind. I try to work on that stuff first before getting too deep in the product.
But all that stuff is time consuming. So, I mean, we can hop back to me in a little bit. But I did update instrumental dot de v the site, but just today with a new, more expanded homepage, which gives more of a vision of it. And then there's an email, early access, which leads to a survey to try to just give a taste of what's going to be here, give you a little bit of the vision of what's coming, and then it's still many weeks and months away from actually existing, but I want to just paint the picture first.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
So I alluded earlier to onboarding. Did okay, correct. Not correct me. Remind me, did we talk last week about going from, like, outside in and then inside out?
Maybe it's something that came out of my conversations earlier in the week with our team. I just don't remember if I talked about the podcast.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: I don't think so.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: Okay. So what I found myself thinking about earlier in the week is it's like we started on the outsides. I'm thinking of the funnel, like general funnel. It's like all the way to one side of the funnel. We basically built a basic website and said, this is what this thing does. It will answer the phone for you. You won't miss any phone calls. Here are these benefits and features. Cool. And then all the way on the other side, we had a product that was like, well, this thing kind of works. We cobbled a few services together. We put like a admin on top of it. It's not too thought out, but this is like our guests at a feature set. And then in the middle was ugly. No, onboarding, you know, sign up flow. I guess we did a little more than the bare minimum, but it was not pretty in there. And then all of a sudden, as we felt more sure about the feature set and who our people are, we found ourselves getting pushed inward, where we had to adjust the signup flow to make sense for our ICP and what they were looking for. And it's, you know, it's as soon as you start working on something like you're onboarding, you look at what you currently have and cannot believe people are using the product successfully and paying you because we just dump you right into the admin with no explanation, like on the wrong page. Then you have to start looking around. And of course, the actual success of people launching and paying is almost entirely due to Sam on our team just getting on the phone with them and on Zoom and just showing them how to do stuff and doing stuff for them.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So now we're like, it's such a frustrating project to work on that onboarding thing and, like, and then seeing customers, like, not see the big buttons sitting right there. Like, oh, just chaos. We had a customer sign up two days ago.
He, you know, and we don't have a trial, so they sign up and they pay right away. Like, signed up, paid. It was like, great, awesome. Got the notification five minutes later, saw the cancellation come through. And, like, his cancellation reason is like, oh, I couldn't do this, or I could, or I couldn't find how to do that. And it's like you, if you had clicked once, you would have found it. But instead of asking for something, instead of answering cats message, he just went ahead and canceled.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: Like, yeah, the whole thing is very weird. Like, the most common question we get in intercom is just cost, literally the word cost price.
Like, dude, click on the pricing thing. It's, you know, I just want to hear.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: I was going to say, like, are you, are you not showing pricing? No, you are.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Oh, it's. Oh, yeah, absolutely, we are.
So a lot of it does make sense if you're like, what do I pay attention to as, like, a valid form of criticism that I didn't make something obvious enough, and what do I just chalk up to? Some people are just a little dull and you can ignore what they're saying. Yeah, tough to know.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: A lot of people just don't want to use websites. They want to either talk to someone or have it done for them.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: It is like a spectrum of learning styles. Some people don't want to read, some people don't want to listen. Some people don't want to watch. Some people don't want to do anything. It's tough to know which form to provide this information in. It's almost like, choose your own adventure, or you have to just be more opinionated. Like, no, we do things over video. It's tough to tell.
So where we're finding ourselves is now we're on the inside. We just did sign up flow. We're just doing onboarding. And then what I'm telling the team is like, as soon as we're done with those two, we're right back to the outsides. I'm heading out to marketing land. We're expanding our advertising platforms. Right. We'll probably go to YouTube next. We'll look at influencers. We're already on meta TikTok. I'm not 100% sure if it's right for us. We'll see. And then on the other end, like, rock and Jess are going all the way back out to product feature set, product quality.
So it's been this very funny thing of like, well, let's just go bare bones, build a skeleton on the outside, then come inside and fix, like, oh, yeah. People need to actually onboard to this product and use it without us doing everything for them, and then it's right back out and it feels like it'll just kind of rotate between those two over and over and over again.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you have a sense of, like, commonalities across your customers who are coming in, like, types of businesses who, what they look like? What are they, what are they trying to do with it?
[00:29:16] Speaker A: Yes. Yes. We are finding themes and they are less based on industry and more based on. I don't know if demographic is the right word. It's not demographic. It's like business structure. It's a small number of people in a business, basically between one and ten people. And the number one thing we hear and experience is like, sorry, I couldn't make the Zoom call. Can we do this over the phone? Because I'm in my truck?
[00:29:47] Speaker B: Because I'm in my truck.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: They're out in the field.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: I am doing the work. I don't even have time to talk to you about how to make my business more efficient. That's how desperately in need of efficiency I am.
[00:29:58] Speaker B: And they don't have a person who's in charge of the phone.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: That's what they want. They want to get that one level up so that they're not answering the phone, doing the work, sending the bills, collecting the money, doing the customer service, asking for reviews. Like, that's the spot they're in. And they're looking at our solution and saying the phone is one of these things that is really difficult to manage because I don't know if I should pick up this phone at 08:00 at night because it's a potential customer or if it's spam or if it's something that I can just get to tomorrow. So that's.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: And that is a, like, massage parlor owner, a painting company, a h vac, a coffee shop. It's like this. It's a huge array of industries, but it's the same type of small business entrepreneur trying to figure out how do I get beyond me doing absolutely everything.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: I mean, we all love to, love to complain about the home services who never show up for their appointments and they're like, aggravating to deal with and all this stuff. But the reality is, you're describing the reality for 99% of them. They're just so busy doing virtual projects.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: That's right. As the consumer, we're frustrated. We're like, I'm trying to give you money. Why don't you even answer the phone? Makes no sense. On the other end, they're like, trust me, I would love to take your money. I'm just trying to manage what I have going on in front of me.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah.
[00:31:24] Speaker A: So, onboarding, man, it's. We have found this is one of those moments where we have found it tough to have the conversations and the ideas required and to do it remotely. And mostly async is a real challenge because we have a few people, and we can't just, like, get in room for three or 4 hours and come out of it right. You do an hour zoom call, hour and a half zoom call. At some point, you're like, I don't want to be on Zoom anymore. You know, people run out of patience. Then a few days go by, and everyone goes off on their own, has different ideas, and they come back. This process has been difficult for us to try to nail down a great onboarding experience.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: I mean, I know that you're just a few less people than you were, but, like, has anything else significantly changed in how you work, how you communicate with the team?
No, it's not like, yeah, like, I don't know. Like. Like, maybe say more about that, about the zoom stuff. Like, okay, so, how do you normally collaborate with the team?
[00:32:27] Speaker A: So, this is. This is how we would normally collaborate, but it feels a bit more foreign to us, you know, building a self serve onboarding with very new information. Like, we just kind of figured out what the feature set is, and we're trying to be strategic. At the same time, you're trying to think about your pricing and how that's connected to the onboarding. And are we gonna have a freemium tier? Are we going to have a trial based on minutes used as opposed to time?
We have a few principles that help guide us.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: How do we get 100 people to be able to sign up on their own a day? It's like, one of those principles.
How do we not put up barriers to usage? So, how do we get them the phone number without requiring a credit card? But. Okay, great. But should we ask them for a credit card at some point? Do we want them to just go through onboarding without even being asked to put in a credit card or do we want to give people the option to make sure their service isn't interrupted? Out of all of our features, which ones are actually required for them to launch? And those kind of exist in a let's get these things done so you can launch, but then how do you show off the other features after a point that you think they can launch? Like, are those then in a recommended bucket? Is there then an advanced bucket?
[00:33:48] Speaker B: These things are like all those questions. It's like there absolutely is no right. It's completely different for every single product customer.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. As you were talking about your I service, one of the things that I admire about being put in that position, I'm thinking right now of Francois, the designer that we work with right now. We really look to the vendor to help us finalize decisions. We got a bunch of ideas, but like, give us your suggestions.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Give us your suggestions. This is literally what I've been telling to new people that I'm talking to about my service.
I think that a lot of them come to me and decide to go with me over hiring a developer directly or going with some other service. I think a lot of the reason they come to me is because they know that I'm a product person and I've built my own products. And so I literally tell them my approach is we're going to talk about your product and the goals for the MVP. We're going to define a scope for what we're focusing in on this MVP project.
And then like, I'm just going to build it as if I'm an owner of your product and I'm going to give you updates every single week. We're going to give you videos, show you what's happening, ask you questions.
But for the most part, I'm just going to make the decisions and you just tell me what you don't like and we can change it. But like, I'm going to use my best judgment on most things in terms of like how things look and what the ux is going to be in the user interface. And yeah, a few times here and there they'll be like, oh, well, it's missing this element and we need to account for this aspect. Okay, I didn't take that into account. Let's fix it. But for the most part, that's the, and I was actually going to ask you in your team structure because we're very different and I think a lot of it is because I'm a solo owner and a solo, I'm the head of product in all of my stuff. So all those questions that you were just describing and the meetings that happens, me solo, sitting in this chair alone, making all those decisions, which is super hard, but at the same time, it's like once I decide on something, like, that's what we're doing, folks, so we're going ahead.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
It's a tricky subject because in many ways you get put into a position as soon as if you're alone and you're making these decisions alone, you should acknowledge that it is a great muscle that you've built up in the form of being decisive.
This is what I think.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: A lot, a lot of pain in building up that muscle, but it's, but.
[00:36:30] Speaker A: It is an admirable and valuable thing.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: That is definitely true. I've gotten to a point now where I feel like I've become pretty good at noticing when I'm taking too long to make a decision.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: You know, or I'm getting stuck down some rabbit hole.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: Right. Not being decisive.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: And I'm like, oh, man, I should not be spending this many hours of today just figuring this thing out. Let's just go with the easier option and just go with that, whatever it is, like, you know?
Right.
[00:37:00] Speaker A: It's, we can always go back on the decision, so let's make a decision.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: 99% of these decisions you can always undo if you need to. There's a few that you can't undo, like, you know, decisions to, like, sell a business or something like that.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Which. And those are the things that I'll spend months, you know, killing myself over. Right.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: The torment is fine.
[00:37:18] Speaker B: Yeah. But the decision to, like, overhaul the onboarding and try it a different way. Yeah, I'll just go ahead and make that decision, you know.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: Now, as soon as you get into multiple people, there is an element to consensus building that is, like, antithetical to being decisive. So the vendor comes in, you are slightly outsourcing your courage to them. You're saying, can you please make the decision? Help us finalize? Here are all these points that we have, all these factors that we need to take into account, but can you just help us, like, get to a decision? And many times it's not necessarily outsourcing the decision to them, it's outsourcing the first decision. Here's what I think. Here's my recommendation. Now you have something you can attack, you can disagree with.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: I was just going to say the same thing. That is what I was describing. It's, when I work with clients, it's not like I'm making all these decisions and they're final. It's, I'm building it and putting it in front of you. So now we have something tangible to look at and discuss, and we can adjust. But it's not like what gets frustrating sometimes. I think for me and clients and anyone else working in agency land is when you just get caught in these cycles and you're talking in circles, theoretically, like, well, what if we do this or that? And what's the implication of this or that? It's like, okay, well, let's just build a rough version of this first, and then we can carve it and dial it in. But at least we have something on the table that we can look at and discuss.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: Yes, you have to be able to, and I try to tell this to vendors, especially around design early on, where the fact that you took risk and made the decision is so valuable, that do not get discouraged by us attacking it. You've provided the value by giving us something to look at, criticize, and point to and say, no, that doesn't make sense, and here's why. And oftentimes your work just gets scrapped away and swept away off the desk. But we wouldn't have moved forward without that initial thing. It happened yesterday where one thing that we saw in front of us from the designer was just wrong and we got to the right place, but it was much easier, much more effective getting there after we saw what was wrong, like, oh, we thought we wanted that. We don't want that. All that makes no sense anymore.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, a lot of times, like, there's so many creative decisions that go into building a product, and usually there's like two or three good options on every decision.
I'll usually give the client, or I'll explain to the client, we could attack this one of two or three ways. My favorite way. What I personally like is option a. That's what I went ahead and built. But we also have option B or C if you want to switch to those.
But I'm telling them sort of in strong terms, like, if it were my product, I would be choosing a.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: What I find the difficult when looking at things like UI and Ux is keeping in mind the larger goal.
So we keep bumping into this thing.
I think it's because costs around AI are not zero. So getting someone in to use the product, it costs you real money. And because of that, we keep bumping into the same, like, impulse. And at least now we're trained to identify it. But every single time we have made the trade off of being cost conscious or being a little safer. Like, oh, someone can just come in and just like burn through a thousand hours, excuse me, a thousand minutes, all of a sudden it's going to cost us hundreds of dollars or whatever. So therefore let's do this to protect ourselves against it. Every single time we've done that, we regret it and we end up removing it.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like nobody's ever even hit that limit, right?
[00:41:19] Speaker A: No one's, no one's come close. It doesn't, it doesn't happen. We keep protecting against these things that are wrong. And so while looking at the UI you can get yourself lost in like, well, this is best practice for SAS. This is what you do next. You do this and then you do that. But then if we back out and keep in mind, no, we want usage, we want people to come in and use the product even more so than we want to monetize.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: I mean, you want users to hit up against those limits because then it's like, oh, we have real users who are running into real edge cases that now we have to actually deal with them.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Right. Which is different from we want that seven day trial to run out so we can charge your card and add them to MRr.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: Not, not necessarily the same thing. Especially when you're looking at UI decisions on where should they go after this and what should they see after this other thing.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean, this is such an ongoing challenge for us in clarity. Flow is like, I think cat working directly with the customers has been a huge help.
But like everyone, everyone's a little bit different. Like we were talking about earlier with like the way that they learn a platform and start using it, but also like their use case for it. We are more dialed in to coaches, but even, even within that realm there's like still they care about different aspects differently, you know, but that's where we ended up like ripping out a lot of our heavy handed onboarding stuff where we were trying to push you down a path and we ripped all that out and went to more of an exploratory. Like, you can just go through our menu, click on whatever interests you. And once you get to that view, you're interested in our courses feature. Cool. Go to the courses thing. And here you're going to see our guide to courses. You're not interested in courses, then you're not going to click on courses, then you're going to go to conversations. Here's what conversations are all about.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: And you know, yeah, that scares me, because we just went a pretty. Pretty heavy handed approach on do this, then this, then this.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: I mean, I think that that is, again, it's totally different for every product. Yeah. But I think the go to move early is. Is to try to go more, try guided down a path, you know? Yeah, yeah, I like it.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: We got some. We got some funny questions on Twitter.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Okay, let me check this out. Where are we?
[00:43:37] Speaker A: So Ian Landsman, a year ago, he makes mistakes all the time. Really just one mistake after another. But the other day, he made.
So there's this conversation going on between him and Aaron that I find very funny.
You know, everyone knows about Trump Derangement syndrome, and adjacent to that is Elon Derangement syndrome. And clearly, Ian has a pretty severe case of the Elon Derangement syndrome, and he cannot get himself to admit that the things Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, and these companies are doing is good. It's like this inability to kind of admit, hey, this is very cool.
It's great for science. It's great for people. It's great for America. Like, all these different things.
[00:44:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:31] Speaker A: And I really appreciate the objective take that. The mostly tech pod Twitter handle take and called it a historically bad take about SpaceX. And so I think Ian wants me to give our take on Mars.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Let's hear it. And travel. I'm so conflicted on Elon in all things Elon, but, yeah, let's get into it.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: I think the way to be less conflicted about Elon is to just back up a little bit and think about it from a future point of view.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: Yeah, this is the part I like. This line of thinking is the side.
[00:45:10] Speaker A: Right. To just get away from. He's in Pennsylvania right now campaigning for Trump. It's impossible to ignore that if you don't like that.
And that clouds a lot of stuff around the tech.
[00:45:22] Speaker B: If you look back, that's the part where it's like, how does that even reconcile with the other things that he does? Like, just the political nonsense is like, how does that even. Why are you even spending time and energy and resources on that when you can also be responsible for launching and landing a rocket ship?
[00:45:43] Speaker A: Like, I think he. I think it's an opinion. I think he sees them as related.
[00:45:49] Speaker B: That's what I don't understand. But I guess. I guess there's some.
[00:45:52] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like. I think it's like the acceleration versus deceleration type of a argument and concern and everything else.
What I like to think about, I like to think about the play Hamilton. I like to think about the real experience of the founding fathers. One of them was Benjamin Franklin.
And in the time of Franklin, it was so political. Everything he did was political. He was an ambassador. He did all these very, very political things. But from now, when we look back, we say, hey, look at these advancements, look at these contributions. We don't care nearly so much if he was a Republican or a Democrat or whatever he was in the political realm.
[00:46:35] Speaker B: Yeah, politics were very different back then.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: I mean, politics were radical then. They were out of control. Radical life and death, monarchy, rebellion. I mean, it was a lot more fraught. I mean, if you were wrong and you signed your name on a piece of paper and you lost the war, you're dead.
[00:46:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:46:54] Speaker A: It's different than right now. Like, oh, another four years, and we'll kind of do this other thing.
And I think if you just kind of push yourself, you know, 20 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and you look back, I think it's straightforward that these things are good.
What Kepler's doing is good.
[00:47:15] Speaker B: I do think it's great that there is somebody in the world with his resources that's just trying to push the ball forward on electric cars and space travel and these kinds of things. I think that he clearly put, say what you want about the Tesla car company and how it compares to other cars and stuff, but without Tesla, you would not have GM investing so much in their electric line and Ford and all the rest of them. It pushed that whole industry forward. Bye. At least a decade. Just the existence of Tesla in the market, right? Yes. And then, I mean, space travel, like, a lot of people are like, oh, why are they wasting so much time trying to fly rockets to Mars? That's so crazy. And out there, what's even the point of these billionaires doing these space races, right? You could say that. But, like, at some point, somebody's gonna need to start to push on that button a little bit. And it starts with ridiculous stuff like this, you know?
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:48:14] Speaker B: The space program, their work with NASA is not ridiculous. Like, that's a legit, like, very positive thing happening in the world that they. They can actually work. These governments, you know, satellites are good. Starlink, satellite network, the Starlink.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: I mean, rocket technology, reusable rockets are good. Like, it's good that America's doing it.
[00:48:36] Speaker B: Because, like, it has to be.
[00:48:38] Speaker A: We want to win.
[00:48:38] Speaker B: The first version has to be crazy. Right? Like, right.
[00:48:42] Speaker A: And it's not a surprise that the person associated with that outcome, landish, set of achievements. And risk is also not a normal, average person. Yeah, yeah. And the story, the story, again, if you take the politics out of it, this person does not need money. They don't need any more money. You cannot explain, I don't think it's logical to explain what this person is doing by pointing to the fact that they want more money. It doesn't kind of add up. There's more money. He has more money than you could possibly. If you divided his wealth by a thousand, it's still more money than you could, than anyone needs ever.
[00:49:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:23] Speaker A: And so then. Hold on, hold on. I just want to make this point. Then it starts to get to a point that I think, excuse me, Ian, but people like that point of view.
There's like this very dangerous kernel. If in fact it's not for money, and if in fact it's because he actually believes all the stuff he says, then you have to confront the actual words and ideas more than the person. And if you have a person saying one of the things elon's unbelievably good at, right. You kind of hear this from, like, the VC investor point of view is he understands risk better than most people. He goes Yolo. Because he thinks Yolo is actually the right approach to risk. And his logic, when it comes to Mars, this is the actual Mars take. His logic is the human race is all good. We have one point of failure. The one point of failure is our actual planet. And if our planet gets destroyed, whether it's asteroid or nuclear or famine or disease or whatever else, if that point of failure goes down before we are multiplanetary, then the whole ballgame is over. To me right now, in 2024, that sounds outlandish. That sounds ridiculous, but maybe he understands risk better than I do. And he said, what if he actually believes, no, I think we need to get to another planet, even if it doesn't happen for another 50 or 100 years. I don't know.
[00:50:50] Speaker B: Again, like, somebody, what if he wants to start pushing that button now? And that's the whole side of that stuff that I completely agree with. I think somebody needs to be pushing on that.
[00:51:01] Speaker A: And, yes, and I don't actually believe it's true, but I am very open to the possibility that I'm wrong. Very open to it.
[00:51:07] Speaker B: I mean, I get on board with the logic that our planet is under a major threat with climate change and all that, but the part of it that I just can't comprehend, why not only why is he even wasting his time with even buying Twitter and then being so just promoting the worst aspects of Twitter and our social discourse. And I'm not even someone who really cares all that much about it. I don't get as outraged as some people do about this garbage on Twitter anyway.
But it's hard for me to see how is that helpful? How can you not still push our, our global technology forward the way that you are with Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and all this, without all the nonsense, without the Trump rallies, without the Twitter jokes and all that crap?
But, I mean, I don't even care that it's annoying. I can just tune it out. I just think a lot of it is destructive to our society and culture, and we could do without that.
[00:52:20] Speaker A: I disagree. I think they are directly related, and I think Elon sees them as directly related because it is the same battle. I don't want to call it a war. It's the same fight that wants to.
It's the same fight that doesn't invite Tesla to the electrical vehicle summit in Washington, DC. It's the same fight that tries to destroy SpaceX through regulation.
And it's the same fight between media controlled by one set of people and Twitter controlled by a different set of people. It's all the same fight. It is this accelerationist, individual freedom, free market side of things, and it is a deceleration regulation. Government first.
[00:53:12] Speaker B: I hear what you're saying about that.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: He sees it. That doesn't sound wrong.
[00:53:16] Speaker B: I hear your logic on that. To me, a higher priority problem is the polarization, especially in America. I think it's happening everywhere. But, like, but who's doing the polarization?
[00:53:26] Speaker A: Is it him? I think he's reacting to it.
[00:53:29] Speaker B: The guy was the Democrat. I think he's playing into it. He's helping accelerate it, like, putting his energy and his name on this kind of stuff.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: Like, he had the president of the United States stand in front of the entire country and say, we got to look into this guy. He's got a little too much power. I think it's time we looked into this guy. And then all of his companies started getting sued and being put under investigation from different government entities. Like, I think he's reacting. I don't think he's leading the charge and the polarization and the government saying, oh, this guy's so bad. He's reacting.
[00:54:01] Speaker B: I just think in general, he is someone who has a massive spotlight on him. And with that does come whether you want it or claim it or not, it does come with some responsibility.
And with that, he is sort of, like, fanning the flames of polarization, which is just not helpful in my opinion.
There are ways to go about those goals without that.
[00:54:25] Speaker A: I think he's taking that responsibility seriously.
[00:54:30] Speaker B: Yeah. I just don't see it.
Yeah.
[00:54:33] Speaker A: And think about the stakes of a man worth $200 billion who genuinely, genuinely believes if things go the wrong way from his opinion in politics, he might end up in jail.
That's how he sees it. And he's acting accordingly. None of this is irrational. If you take a step back and put yourself in his shoes and you look at it a bit more objectively, the government wants to destroy his companies.
[00:55:02] Speaker B: It doesn't have to be.
[00:55:03] Speaker A: It's not like a fantasy.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: I don't know. Like, I'm not in the weeds on all the news, but, like, I, I don't think even think it's that extreme. Like, they have major contracts between NASA and SpaceX like those. And NASA, like, depends on SpaceX in many ways. Like that. They're not going to just put this guy in jail.
I mean, but, like, just going back in the last couple of years, like, he could have approached his position in the world to accomplish his goals without just, without all the nonsense. Like, he could still push that forward and he could be in a different position, maybe less attacked today than had he been a little more of a positive force in our world. That's my view on it.
[00:55:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:49] Speaker B: It's not going to take anything away from his billions. He's still going to have that kind of money and power and resource to do change.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: I don't think he cares about the money.
[00:55:59] Speaker B: Right. But that's what I'm saying is, like, you have the resources. You can use them in a positive way, you know? And again, I think he is in a lot of his work, but then he's out there just doing this nonsense. I just don't get it.
[00:56:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I think he sees it as inextricably linked, but we'll see.
[00:56:17] Speaker B: Yeah. What else here on Twitter. Yeah.
[00:56:20] Speaker A: So I just want to have a quick laugh with Aaron Francis, who.
[00:56:24] Speaker B: What is this, garages of America?
[00:56:26] Speaker A: Okay. So, yeah, so he DM's me yesterday, and he's like, yo, I'm on the phone with an AI.
I'm calling this business that I want to buy something from. And they answered with an AI. And you should check this out. So, of course, I'm like, bet. I call the number and I start interrogating the AI because I want to see how different, you know, companies handle it. Yes. So first thing I say is, are you an AI? And the agent goes, oh, no, I'm a real person at Garage America. How can I help you? I'm like, you're an AI? But she wouldn't admit it. So that's a product choice whether to admit it or not. So I start getting further into it. I'm like, well, which API are you using? And which voice and which transcriber? And she's like, you know, trying to avoid giving me the answer. So then I hang up, and about an hour later, I get a text message from the owner of Garages of America. And I say. And she goes, I heard you were having fun with my AI. Can I help you with anything?
So, of course, I take a screenshot of the conversation and I send it to Aaron. And I'm like, now I'm in conversation with the owner. I'm trying to convince her to use Rosie instead.
[00:57:33] Speaker B: Oh, that's hilarious. Yep.
[00:57:34] Speaker A: That's fun.
[00:57:36] Speaker B: That's awesome.
How do you think that that product, or do you know which product they're using?
[00:57:43] Speaker A: No, I don't know. Oh, no, she told me. She told me. Yeah, she told me.
[00:57:47] Speaker B: How does it compare to Rosie, do you think?
[00:57:50] Speaker A: I think it had some things that were better and some things that were worse.
Yeah. Their websites not good. And they're showing off of the product is not good. What do you mean?
[00:58:02] Speaker B: The experience, when you called it, like, do you think it can do the job?
[00:58:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny. It's like two different things, right? The perception of it based on the site and what they're showing there, and the actual experience. I think the experience was better than what's on the site. And right now, maybe we have it a bit reversed. We, like, have the ICP. Right. And the messaging and the branding and all that might be, like, ahead of where the product is, what the. What their agent did really well was handle like this. Okay, you're an incoming call. We have four or five locations. I don't know who you are, what you need right now. And she fielded that really well. And I was like, you know, I started drilling into this location, this service, and then it, like, went off in that direction nicely and didn't, like, fall apart.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Yep.
[00:58:48] Speaker A: I want to talk about this post here and hear what you have to say. So, Cody Schneider, someone I've kind of befriended on Twitter.
[00:58:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I just read that one now.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: Okay, if you don't follow Cody on Twitter, you are making a mistake. My man is an idea machine. He's a volcano of ideas. And oftentimes those, those ideas have something valuable for you and your business.
So I would highly recommend following what he wrote about. What he asked was like, do you put a hard timeline or deadline on selling?
[00:59:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:59:22] Speaker A: And Cody's one of these people that launches a bunch of products.
So the way I look at this, and I think about this regularly.
[00:59:29] Speaker B: Yeah. He's talking about a business. Like starting a business to your timeline. Yes.
[00:59:32] Speaker A: Like, how deep do you go into an idea before you're like, this is not working, I'm going to stop, or, this is working and I should sell it. Or just, as a matter of fact, I've done this for a year or two. It's time to sell it, move on to the next thing. And I think most of us are really bad at that. And we get really emotionally attached and people will find themselves four or five years in. Yes, and I've done that. And I thought about it this morning, like, you know, should I have done things differently with rally? Should I have left earlier? I'm curious what your take is on this.
Like, when you start something new, is there like a timeframe on the whole? We'll see what happens.
[01:00:14] Speaker B: The tweet. And the question really resonates with me because I think.
I think that time, the time investment, meaning, like, number of years of my career that I am investing in any given product or any business that I work on, that number or that question of, like, how long has it been since I started this business? Like, that's a question that rattles in my mind all the time. And it gets louder and louder the longer the time goes on on each given business. Right.
I don't go into things from day one saying, like, all right, two years from now, mark this date, that's when I'm going to decide whether to hold or whether to sell. Like, no, I definitely don't do that.
But I do. But there is some sort of threshold. I think this varies from product to product. But where that question gets louder and louder to a point where it's like, I don't like the answer to this. I don't like how long it's been on this product, given where it's at.
So then it's decision time. It goes from, this is what I'm working on to, okay, it's been, in my case, historically, it's been usually around like three to four years is when I start to get a little antsy of, like, what is this? Really? Yeah, like, what am I new years.
[01:01:34] Speaker A: Ago when I started it, that I would be here right now, what I would. I started.
[01:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And they're like, I can go back. Like, the ones that I think about are, like, audience ops, and then process kit, and then now zip message and clarity flow. Right.
And audience ops. I don't know that I've shared this before, but, like, so I started it in 2015. Right. At the time that I sold restaurant engine, and I sold restaurant engine about three and a half years in, or four years in. Okay. So I started audience ops 2015 2018, I came extremely close to selling it like it was the day before closing day on selling it, and the deal fell apart. And then I ended up holding onto it for an additional three years.
[01:02:16] Speaker A: Yup.
[01:02:19] Speaker B: And then I sold it in 2021. So that ended up being six years. But for me, the calculation sometimes becomes like, okay, after around three years, maybe I'm not full time on it anymore. Now it's into side project mode. Yeah.
[01:02:35] Speaker A: The nature of it is different.
[01:02:37] Speaker B: Or I have a team that's running it and it doesn't need me in the day to day, so now they can run it and I can move on to my next thing.
That's an option as well. And that's sort of where I've ended up with.
Well, clarity flow is a different situation because it's like I still actively work on it, but just not 100%.
So literally, for three full years, I was 100% with no other products.
And then here in the fourth year, it's one product, among other things that I do. And I'm happy with that balance now because it got to a point where, like, at the end of the three years, I was like, I was comfortable doing this full time for three full years. But now that we're at the three year mark, I'm uncomfortable doing this 100%.
And the calculus for this particular business and its scenario was selling was not one of the options that felt attractive to me. So holding it and making it a side hustle and then moving on to other things, that's the more recent decision that I've had. Yeah, but other ones. Actually, one more is process kit, where I did work on that for a full three years, and after three years, I was like, it just didn't grow to a point where I just don't feel comfortable working on it any more than this. And it's not even attractive to hold it. I'd rather just sell it. And that's what I did. And it was a nice little exit for something. It's not the outcome that I was hoping for, but it was still an outcome so to move on.
[01:04:12] Speaker A: And you just described the exit as less attractive than the cash flow and the growth. And I guess that depends project to project. Also, one of the things Cody was asking about, what are you shooting for?
I often find myself really focused on the exit, and I think that's short sighted. Oftentimes.
I don't think that has led me that's not been positive overall in terms of, like, the career.
I really think I would have been better off focusing on cash flow many times instead of just the exit. Cause I definitely found myself in this position of basically, the only way it's gonna work out is if there's a big pop at the end.
[01:05:06] Speaker B: Right. I think. And I think that's. I definitely resonate with that, too, because I think about that as well, especially with, like, SaaS products.
Like, for clarity flow. The exit is something that I think about a lot. Like, that's the end game. I just don't know when that endgame is going to happen, and I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon. Like, not even close.
[01:05:28] Speaker A: Here's the irony. I talk about this with my younger brother, who's in a different situation, and I think because he's in a different financial situation, he is much more focused on cash flow. And so the irony is that when you want the exit, you probably are better off not exiting. Sometimes, yes. I guess he's in the EBITda world with his gym business. And the EBITDA world is very different from the revenue multiple world. The revenue multiple world is so crazy. Like, I had this conversation recently with the Portland crew in Slack, some of which have decent sized SaaS businesses. And multiples right now in SaaS are really strong. Ten to 15 x ARR is so strong that the cat going for the cash flow doesn't make sense. If you have a $2 million ar business and you're making, I don't know, $300,000 in profit, $400,000 in profit, but someone wants to pay you ten x. Pay $20 million. Like, I mean, sell. What are you doing here? Yeah, so it is a very weird game to play between different types of businesses and SaaS specifically, whereas I really think almost nothing is better. Okay, fine. Let me rephrase. Nothing's better than a giant exit. Cool. The problem with that is it happens so rarely that in reality, the best thing to shoot for is really strong, profitable cash flow on an ongoing basis. That's freedom. That is a launching pad and a foundation for everything.
[01:07:01] Speaker B: And also, once you have that and it's growing. It's like, why sell? It'll keep growing. I mean, different markets, different fate. I know multiples might be good now. Who knows what they will be in the future? But still, if it's a growing, profitable business, that's a good thing.
For me personally, I've been bootstrapped the whole way through, except for a little bit of investment in one case where it's like I can't just focus on as much as I think about the end game exit, I can't think about it at all costs.
At a certain point, after a certain number of years, it's like it's not worth my daily stress to get this to a point. Like, if it's just not on the right trajectory, then I'm just going to move on to focus on get cash flow somewhere else, you know? Yes.
Yeah.
[01:07:56] Speaker A: It's funny the little fantasies you'll come up with for like, post cash flow stability, like, or post exit.
I have absurd professional fantasies for what I would do if I sold Rosie for a bunch of money or was in a different situation, had a bunch of cash flow or something else.
[01:08:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
As much as I've hopped around from business to business, I still can't really get on board with the idea of sinking multiple years into something where it's just not profitable during that time, to me, it's just I operate much more effectively and clear minded when I know that it's profitable as close to the beginning of the business as possible and just self fund, because then you have ultimate optionality. I could slow down, I can keep going. The other thing is, not every business that I work on is with the exit in mind. Like, I still always want a big pop at some point. I've had a couple base hits. I would love to have more of a home run at some point, but not everything is set up for that, and not everything serves that goal. Like audience ops, it got to a point where the biggest win that I've had with audience ops, and this goes years before I even sold it, was like I made a decision that, like, this business is pure cash flow. Like, yeah, I might sell it, and I did sell it at some point, but, like, the whole point of holding that business for an additional three, four years was like, it's cash flow and I spend almost zero time touching it. So I can spend time hacking on SaaS products, and those things can be the things that can lead hopefully to an exit which has not panned out.
But that's the thinking I had the cash flow sustainability the optionality to do that, I blew it all up in 2021. It was a nice cash exit year for me, but then the next three years were like, I'm going zero. I've talked about this ad nauseam, but.
[01:10:00] Speaker A: I got to build it back up.
[01:10:01] Speaker B: That's right now, 2024, I'm back to that mindset of, how can I build up the cash flow to create more operating space to be able to invest in new assets. That's where I'm at. I just like the. As impatient as I am, I still operate better with a slow, bootstrapped, profitable optionality approach, and that often means multiple products or services operating at the same time.
[01:10:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the next year is going to be pretty wild on the rosy front because it is such a different, weird situation where we are really, really taking advantage of the fact that we have someone else's money. Like, I mean, we are not doing anything.
[01:10:50] Speaker B: That's the play, you know?
[01:10:51] Speaker A: Yes. That you would reasonably do them. We're like, no, we're just gonna go from 10,000 a month in ads to 25,000 a month in ads because we want to understand this thing.
[01:10:59] Speaker B: I mean, it's not helpful for you to just leave the firepower sitting in a bank account.
[01:11:03] Speaker A: Yes, yes. I've internalized that. Like, do not be careful. That is not logical here. Yeah. I think if there's anything to take away from Cody's comment or question is, there is no right or wrong. But generally speaking, all of us should be a little less patient.
Get things to go faster, be stricter with ourselves, don't spend that much time on things that don't work. I think that should be the general lean, 100%.
[01:11:35] Speaker B: I think if I could speak to. I think a lot of people listening, especially people, like, newer in their careers, I've just seen this happen a lot with people. One of two things happens. What you're just describing. One is like, they're hacking on a product for multiple years and it's really going nowhere, and they should have quit it years ago. And usually that comes down to, like, you got to just be talking to more customers and getting more feedback and figuring out if this is even viable or stop. But the other thing that I see, and this is sort of where I'm at now with the consulting, is like, a lot of people latch onto the consulting or a job, and it becomes so comfortable for years after years to a point where their ability to take risks like that muscle atrophies.
I've just seen people just get older into their forties and fifties where it's like, man, they're just so used to this level of comfort and income and security with their family and everything else, that the idea of taking a pay cut for a couple months to a year in order to get a product off the ground is just not feasible.
That's where I'm at now with the consulting. I've spent almost a year doing straight consulting solo, and I'm at the point now where I'm feeling that little bit of impatience, where it's like, I love the cash flow. I actually like the projects, but I cannot get comfortable just doing this with my time. I need to transform this and go through a little bit of pain to start delegating more work and freeing myself up so that I can work on assets and not just selling my time. And that's a transition, you know, you just have to kind of go through it.
[01:13:30] Speaker A: That's what it takes. Being willing to be comfortable and then purposely put yourself into a. Yeah, like, cut.
[01:13:37] Speaker B: Cut into your own profit margin to fire yourself or to free up some space to. To actually create more value and not just sell, sell your time. That's. That's ultimately what you gotta do.
[01:13:47] Speaker A: So close.
All right, cool. Well, let's get this thing published and sent over to Ian right away.
[01:13:53] Speaker B: Will do. Ian gets it first, and then everyone else gets the main feed.
[01:13:57] Speaker A: Oh, yes. Thanks for listening, everybody.
[01:14:00] Speaker B: See you later, folks.
