Year-end takeaways & goals

[00:00:17] Speaker A: All right, we've got it in. This is Bootstrapped Web on Friday. Oh, It's Friday the 13th. How about that? [00:00:22] Speaker B: It is the 13th. [00:00:23] Speaker A: December. [00:00:23] Speaker B: There we go. [00:00:24] Speaker A: So, yeah, I think we're gonna do a little like end of the year episode here. [00:00:30] Speaker B: Yeah, this might be the last one. Right. Next week you're away probably. [00:00:33] Speaker A: I'm gonna be away next week. Then we're into, like, holiday land, so. Yeah, so. So next week, Wednesday, just Amy and I are flying out to California. We're gonna check out Joshua Tree National Park. Never been there. Gonna do some hiking without the kids. [00:00:49] Speaker B: Okay, that sounds nice. [00:00:51] Speaker A: Little short Joshua Tree. Been there. Yeah, yeah, we were. [00:00:55] Speaker B: We were. [00:00:56] Speaker A: You know, we like to do these like. We like a five day vacation. That's like a. That's like a good small trip. [00:01:03] Speaker B: Okay. [00:01:03] Speaker A: Especially when it's just. Just us. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Three days feel short. You know, two, three nights feels very. [00:01:08] Speaker A: Much in three days. Like, like seven days. Seven to ten. It's like, all right, let's. Let's get out of here. Yeah, you know, I. I like a. I like a five day or I like, like a month or more like a long thing. But yeah, so. So we're going to do that and take a fiver. Yeah. [00:01:24] Speaker B: Okay. Well, we are. We're staying here, which sounds great. Last year we traveled. You know, we go back and forth with Regan's sister family. And this year, it's our year. Our neighbor has busted out and built their ice skating rink next door. [00:01:42] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [00:01:42] Speaker B: So the cousins are pumped up. You know, we got our Christmas tree. We got a little menorah. We are ready. [00:01:48] Speaker A: There you go. [00:01:49] Speaker B: And we are working out our credit cards. What is going on in December? [00:01:56] Speaker A: Lax. [00:01:57] Speaker B: Jesus. [00:01:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:01:58] Speaker B: Anyway, it has this very strange effect on me where I spend a lot of money. It's inevitable, right. Holiday time. And then I get a little stressed, like, yo, how much money are we spending? And then I get mad at myself that I have to worry about spending money because I feel like I should be beyond worrying about spending money. This is not a very healthy cycle here. [00:02:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we just. I mean, Amazon makes it way too easy to just buy shit and then return shit and buy it again. And it's just, oh, I got wind. [00:02:28] Speaker B: Up dreidels on the way. You wind them up, they crank up and then you smack them and they spin around then like make music. Right now my wife has the kids downstairs. They're doing like an ornament exchange, but they're actually making ornaments because my wife likes to Go overboard on the crafting is good, but what I am really looking forward to is two weeks focused on the fame. We are closing shop at rosie between the 18th and the second. [00:02:55] Speaker A: Yeah, two weeks. [00:02:57] Speaker B: You know, we got some. Everyone's on support. We got some stuff going on, but no releases and feature work and that type of thing. [00:03:03] Speaker A: Very cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have before we get into all the of the year stuff, like right now, I have. So we're sort of on. On Clarity Flow. We're sort of in between features. We just shipped forms a couple weeks ago and a couple small ones after that. But we're just starting to build tasks into Clarity Flow, which is not something I would have like, it's something that I thought about early on. But like I, I was like, we're not going to get into doing, like to do tasks. But like everyone kept requesting it. I guess it's the thing with coaches, they like to assign tasks to their clients. So we're starting to build that and that just rolls along. I spent yesterday scoping it out and then give it to the team and I'll touch it again in like six weeks. Let them roll. Got the customer success going with that. That's been very good. [00:03:54] Speaker B: Is that like a simple feature, like make a task list and then assign it to someone? [00:03:58] Speaker A: It seems simple, but it's a lot more complicated than that. It hooks into everything in Clarity Flow. [00:04:03] Speaker B: So, okay, yeah, we, we just released. Excuse me, we re released appointment links and spam. So if you recall, a few weeks ago, like maybe two months ago, so we had these features out. We felt like we didn't have a great understanding of how they were used. Once we saw how they were used, we actually said, all right, you know, we should do. Let's remove these from the base plan from the app entirely. And then we started to reintroduce it, but on a case by case basis. And now this week we relaunch them, but only into the higher tiers. And then in January, what we're doing, we're taking these few weeks to get feedback and then what we're doing in January is we are revealing the premium features inside of the admin so that people can self serve into the higher tiers. It's almost like this, it's kind of been an interesting, like UX play where we want people to breeze through the setup for the base plan. Very, very simple features. And then on the last page of the setup, we want to reveal the premium features. But the messaging is tricky because we want someone to enable the premium feature. But then we also need to notify them with clarity that if they use this feature when they are done with their trial, they're going to convert to the higher plan. So it's a little bit of like a fantasy to collect. Can we, can we make it that smooth? Can we. [00:05:39] Speaker A: The way that we do it. Well, I mean like right now we don't have trials, so they just pay on day one. But, but we do show all features in the interface everywhere, including higher tier features. Okay, but if it's not on your current plan, if you try to use that feature. [00:05:56] Speaker B: Okay. [00:05:57] Speaker A: Then we kick you to the upgrade screen and ask you to upgrade. [00:06:00] Speaker B: Okay. So similar issue. How did you find it? [00:06:02] Speaker A: Back when we did have trials the way that we did it was. Okay, say you're on a 14 day trial and you're on day five and you want to use a premium feature. You click that button to try to use that premium feature. Then we kick you to the upgrade screen. Now you have to put in your credit card to choose your premium plan. You do that. So you upgrade during your trial, but we don't charge you until, until day 14. So like. [00:06:30] Speaker B: But you have to put a credit card in. But where. So you didn't. [00:06:33] Speaker A: This was, this was the previous version. Right now we don't have trials, but back when we had trials, we had no credit card upfront trial. [00:06:40] Speaker B: Okay, so you start, same as us. [00:06:42] Speaker A: Trial, no credit card. You're on the base plan, like the starter plan. Then let's say day five, you want to upgrade or you want to use a premium feature. You try to use that feature, we kick you to the upgrade screen. That's where we require you to put in your credit card and say, I'm putting in my credit card and I'm going to be on the premium plan. Okay, great. You won't get charged today, you'll get charged on day 14. [00:07:07] Speaker B: Okay. [00:07:08] Speaker A: And you'll be on the premium. [00:07:11] Speaker B: I really like that. We did not plan on requiring the credit card at that time. But it kind of makes sense. It kind of doesn't, but it kind of does. And it makes enough sense to ask for it. [00:07:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:07:26] Speaker B: What we're finding right now, it's not bad. It's maybe 60, 40, but we see people approaching their time limit, right. Their 50 minute limit and we have slack notifications come in and we'll see someone, they hit 45 minutes and they. And then we have it right there whether or not they have their credit card on file. And when it says you hit 45 minutes and you. Yes, you have it on file. We're like, all right, it's just a matter of time. You know, a day, two days, they're going to convert. But if it says no, it's almost like, well, that's. That's kind of a disaster for everyone. [00:07:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:08:00] Speaker B: You're using it. You don't have it on file. We're trying to get in touch with you. So I wonder if that upgrade is a good moment to ask for it. Cool. [00:08:07] Speaker A: Interesting. What I'm spending all my time on is instrumental products. [00:08:13] Speaker B: How's it going? [00:08:14] Speaker A: It's going good, you know, got three active projects going on with clients, and I've got three team members who are doing those projects. I'm overseeing them and managing them, and they're still new and I'm still new to them. And so there's still some, like, getting to know you in terms of, like, team workflow. Like, compared to my workflow with Clarity Flow. With the Clarity Flow team, we are dialed in, like, because I've been working with my developer for, like, two years there, and my customer success, I've been working with her for six years. She was an audience ops, too. So we are dialed in clarity for that. That's how in Clarity Flow, I'm literally able to. Yesterday I spent four hours scoping out that tasks feature, handing it off to my developer, and I'm not going to touch it for six more weeks, and they're just going to build it. [00:09:05] Speaker B: That's your role, like the product role there and then. [00:09:07] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's how I can literally give my input and then step away and then approve stuff and polish stuff, but then step away. And that's how I can only. That's how I'm able to just do 20% of my time on Clarity Flow because we are so dialed in with that team on the instrumental product side. They're like, it's at the point now where they are doing all the building in the projects and I'm directing it, but I. But one of my developers is actually doing the scoping, and that takes time off of my plate as well. So, you know, I'm just doing, like, a lot of, like, checking and messaging with them every day. And. And I'm working on the instrumental components product a lot, like, you know, preparing that as a product to ship in January, but also constantly improving it and building it so that we can use it in our projects. And I'm starting to work on the. Starting to work on the Docs site and marketing site for that. [00:10:11] Speaker B: Okay. Are you looking at the last two weeks of December as an opportunity to relax or an opportunity to do that work? [00:10:18] Speaker A: Well, I'm not taking off except for this upcoming vacation next week. I'll have my computer with me. I'm not going to completely disconnect, but we're going to be out hiking every day. The. Yeah. After that, holidays. But we're, we're pretty low key. We're going to be hanging around here and no, no big plans for Christmas and New Year's. Might try to get a ski trip in if, if it snows around here. But yeah, for the most part we are. I'm just working normally, you know. [00:10:50] Speaker B: Okay. I feel like I need a break and maybe this is a good transition to like the previous year and the year coming up. I'm a little fried. I feel good looking back at the last year. Let's do that a little bit now before we talk about how are we. [00:11:08] Speaker A: Going to format this episode. Like, because I've also been spending this past week. I wrote a blog post that I'll publish in a few days as my year end recap. So we have 2024 and then we can look ahead to 2025, some, you know, goals. [00:11:24] Speaker B: So Brian's going to have organized thoughts and mine will be on the fly and we'll see how it goes. But yeah, let's look back and then look forward. [00:11:32] Speaker A: Yeah. All right. I'll just like, the way that I have it is like a couple of big things that stand out from the past 12 months and my takeaways from them. I don't know how you think about the past year. Like, how would you. My first question for you is like, how would you characterize this year in the context of your whole career so far? Like, is because I was thinking about that, like I'm now like 19 years into my career, I think 16 years owning my own business. And there's probably like three or four of those years that stand out. Like, that was a big year for some. Either big because it was great or big because it sucked. And maybe three, you know, so that's a short list. And for me, I think 2024 is on that list. But it's weird because it's like it was half and half. Like the first half was a terrible. Like it was turning out to be a really, really tough year for me personally. And then the second half into right now, I feel like it was a. It was a major bounce back. A lot of unlocks A lot of things clicked into place. A lot of clarity and recovery and. [00:12:48] Speaker B: Feeling good about that arc. I can't. I rarely find much value in looking back at the entire career. The 20 year view. For me personally, if I'm being honest, I usually end up frustrated if I do that. [00:13:09] Speaker A: Me too. [00:13:10] Speaker B: I think about some lost opportunities, I think about some mistakes. I think, I don't know, it doesn't. [00:13:17] Speaker A: I feel you on that. But this is the time when I do think about the bigger trajectory of everything. [00:13:25] Speaker B: I always spend 10% of my. If I'm thinking that way, it's 10% on the past and 90% on how do I achieve what I want in this next span. And that span has changed. It used to be in the next year and now it's really five years. The thing for me, in my head, my oldest daughter is 12 and I have certain financial goals that I want to accomplish before she goes away to college. So it's like this six year window in my mind and I do a lot of my planning and thinking around that timeframe, which I think generally is healthier than one year at a time. I used to look at it one year at a time and now less so. But looking back at 2024, I would say pretty similar experience as your arc from darkness to light. If I look at a year ago, a lot of it was around looking at rally and saying, okay, maybe there's something here, but I don't like the way it's going and feeling. You know, you kind of get into this thing where you kind of like get depressed because you feel stuck. And then you realize, I'm not stuck. I have choices, I have agency, I can be creative. And the more you go down that path, you know, it's funny, it just kind of, it happens gradually, but there is this moment where you're like, actually I can just do whatever I want. And for me, there was pretty early on in the year where it was, you know what? I don't think I want to do another year of doing the exact same thing. I don't like where this is going. I'm going to give. [00:15:11] Speaker A: It's incredible how you are describing my exact year and mindset and we had two completely different businesses. But. But I feel like we were going through that. What you exactly just described at the same time at the beginning of this year in 2025. [00:15:26] Speaker B: Let's just, let's just up into the right. Okay, we'll do that together. Up into the right. But yeah, but this last year was like, it's almost maximum frustration and doom and gloom. And then there's the breakthrough of, actually, I'm just going to take charge. I'm actually not going to do this. And I refuse to accept that fate. And now, I guess, oh, you know what I gotta do? I gotta muster up the energy and the courage and the optimism to just decide what. What I want to do. [00:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I. So the phrase that I've been writing down in this thing here is, like, I made the decision right at the end of 23, into 24 to right size, my SaaS product, Clarity Club. Because in the three years before that, I was 100% all in, only working on that. I sold all my other businesses. I was only working on that, didn't start anything else. And. But it was not a failure. It's still not. And we have hundreds of customers who use it every single day. It's a great product. I use it 10 times every single day with my clients, with my team. [00:16:42] Speaker B: Yeah, the revenue is not insignificant. [00:16:44] Speaker A: The revenue is not insignificant. But the Runway was. So when you were describing, like, I was looking at the trajectory, and I didn't like what I. What I saw. What I saw at that time, this is a year ago, was we're not out of money, and we have customers and we have a little bit of slow growth. But if. If I change nothing, we're going to hit a wall within the next six to 10 months. At some point, like, Runway is going to run out unless I make a decision now. Now meaning like a year ago. And so that. And so, like, to me, I was like, you were just saying, like, I was faced with choices. Right. I immediately, like, sort of ruled out, like, I'm not selling this business. I'm not interested in raising more investment to just sustain, to just keep remaining all in on this like that. That was not an option in my view. Or at least not attractive. I also. And some people were telling me, like, you should do that. And I was like, no, like, I'm. That. That's not what I want to do. And the other thing was, some people were suggesting, and I consider this briefly, just starve it of resources. Like, let go of the whole team and just try to hack it myself. Continuing to go full time on this thing myself. That was not an option in my view. Or just not smart. Because, like, you can't just starve this thing of all resources. And I cannot just, like, technically, I could do all the jobs myself, but I can't do all that myself. I can't do Product and support and bugs and marketing entirely myself and try to make a scrape together a living off of that. Like, not happening. And I wasn't. I also was. I also was convinced that, like, I'm not going to magically discover hockey stick growth in the next six months. You know, I. I've only seen slow, steady growth. I've not seen hockey stick growth. And I can't expect that to happen. So what I decided to do was not starved of resources. I ended up hiring a customer success person and I kept my developer on full time. What I did was I reduced my time from 100% down to 20% and I gave the business what it needed. We did some strategic stuff. We improved the product a lot. We went deep on customer success. And actually the Business grew in 2024 as a result of that. It grew slowly, of course. Slow, steady growth, like nothing changed there. But I enabled. But that enabled me to go down to 20% and with the other 80%, I ended up being able to start a new business in instrumental products, which ended up doing way more revenue and profit than Clarity Flow did in 2024. So, like, and so like that, like, I went from literally not having an income for three years. I was just living off of Runway to. It ended up being like. It ended up surpassing my goals for cobbling together an income in 24. Like, it was much better than I expected by the end of the year because the first half was dark and scary and I burned out. I started the year with a physical burnout. I think I really burned out. I had shingles. I had like serious back pain for a couple of weeks there. [00:20:12] Speaker B: Yeah, back pain then comes out of that. [00:20:14] Speaker A: Yeah, like that. That was stress. Like, that was literally my body reacting to trying to operate a business with a sense of urgency, which was not healthy. And my big takeaway from the first half of the year was like, I can't just plow through stress. Like, it's nothing like I've always done in the past. And usually my react, my. The way that I dealt with stress before was just work more, Keep working all the time. Just work. Like build stuff or make it work. Put in extra hours, do more. And if I learned anything from that experience this year, it was like my. That was my body physically telling me, like, you gotta. [00:20:57] Speaker B: Yeah, wrong way. [00:20:58] Speaker A: Yeah. This is not. This is not correct. Listen. [00:21:01] Speaker B: It is. [00:21:01] Speaker A: Listen to it. [00:21:02] Speaker B: It is painful that in order to get the acceptance so that you can go to the next phase of actually taking action, it's got to get pretty Dark. It's frustrating. Like, you couldn't have gotten to that same level of acceptance to then lead to all the changes that you made until it gets, like, very frustrating. It needs to hit a wall. A peak. Shingles, frustration, back pain. With rally, it was. I wanted to say, about. To say it was more like an emotional, psychological wall. It wasn't like we still had money in the bank. Some people would say that we pivoted prematurely, but I'm very comfortable with it. When I read stories about people who raised the seed round of a million dollars and then just. Just ran into a wall, ran out of money that. I don't know. It's just not the way I do business. So I went relatively early. Once I made the switch, though, there was actually very little emotion. You know, I've been chasing E Commerce and checkout all this stuff, and now I buy something on Shopify and I'm like, I look at the bottom. It's like, earn $1.25 of shop points. I'm like, I know. You know, it's all around me, and I just don't have emotion attached to it anymore. Once we made the switch, and then that's. It did take a while. It's frustrating how slow some things are. You make a decision, then you got to get to this next phase, and then there's always been pain involved, I think. [00:22:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I think this is probably true for you as well, I'm curious to know. But for me, by far, the hardest part of the transition was figuring out what's next, exploring ideas, and then finally settling into the thing, because then once I'm settled or once the thing is working, then it's just building and things are actually moving very quickly. And I think that's sort of what happened with Rosie, right? Like, you were exploring different options, different things to pivot to. But once you started Rosie, like, it moved pretty quickly, right? [00:23:17] Speaker B: It's like there's. There's a lot of clarity and simplicity, and you just don't have to make as many decisions. You're like, oh, now, like, I chose this. Now we're going again, like, in the. [00:23:26] Speaker A: First six months of 24, you know, in sort of, like, the aftermath of all that burnout, I still did. Like, that was the hardest part because I was. I was scared. I was like, I don't know what my next business is going to be. It has to be something. But. And so I. You know, you probably heard me on the podcast. I was. I was exploring multiple SaaS, ideas, an education business Like a media creator business. I was doing consulting, I was doing coaching. It was like, like different, different versions of consulting I was doing. And all those were like some, some were sort of working, some were interesting. So I was learning a lot, I was exploring, I was talking to other people doing these types of businesses. But it wasn't until I launched one month app that like that thing that sort of clicked and that's, that's now becoming like instrumental products the business and like building out, building it out as a product studio. [00:24:24] Speaker B: Right. Then things start to unfold in front of you and you know, a few different paths. It's just much clearer. The hardest part for us was the transition and what it, what it meant like practically right. We went from 20 people to nine and then to six and so navigating that and I end up worrying a lot about how people feel. It feels like it's my job to make sure that anyone who is being cut that that's done the right way with like dignity and care. But most of the focus and worry and stress is about the people who remain. Because if you screw that up like you then, then you're shooting both feet like you know, you're losing good people to begin with. [00:25:21] Speaker A: That's the hard thing in your end where like, because everyone you're working with is basically like full time salary employees. Whereas like everyone I work with tends to be like contractor like retainers. [00:25:33] Speaker B: Right. [00:25:33] Speaker A: And like all, all the, all the flexibility and shifting around is mostly just me solo making these decisions. But for the really, for the most part, I didn't let anybody go. In the past year. I actually I just hired more people like I hired a person. But again I just do these retainers and it's flexible for them, flexible for me. [00:25:54] Speaker B: Right. The understanding, the assumptions are in place, the expectations are there. Yeah, yeah. For us the expectations are stay here forever until we sell when you get rich. And then popping that is tough. [00:26:07] Speaker A: You're right. Like there's, there's certainly like the emotional side of it from all different angles but at the same time it's like for anyone who is choosing to join a startup, like that's part of the deal. [00:26:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Having Rok there and Jess is very supportive and we've kind of done this long enough that you do build up your gangster skin and you're like, all right, this is not fun and I am not going to be a robot. I will be a human about it. But we're just going to do what we need to do and get through it and so Rock and I had this conversation yesterday just, you know, around family holidays, you know, what are you doing? Just like, you know, the personal side and the comment that we made to each other was, this year started off real tough and pessimistic, and we're ending it optimistic and everything is possible and let's go, like, kick ass together. So whatever happened in the year the arc, you know, we ended up in a good place, and it feels like 2025 is just full of opportunity. [00:27:14] Speaker A: Hell, yeah. [00:27:15] Speaker B: Yep. The hardest part about starting last year was feeling very stuck in that it didn't feel like I could make much of an impact. If I did an amazing job at something, then maybe next quarter we would close two enterprise deals instead of one. It just felt very disconnected from my own efforts. And now it's just such a small team. Everyone makes a difference, and it feels like if we do the right things, we will be rewarded. So there's a direct connection between the effort and the ideas, the creativity, the execution and the reward. [00:27:51] Speaker A: Yeah. All right, well, let's get into 25 in just a minute. I have one more takeaway from 24 on my end, and that is I got back to building, like, with my hands, like, code and design and shipping products. I feel like I finally got back into being a builder full time every day. What that means is it's weird because I had been working on a SaaS product for years before this, but I didn't realize until this year, like, how much my building muscles sort of like, atrophied in the last couple of years. [00:28:28] Speaker B: Okay. [00:28:31] Speaker A: In the years that where I was only doing Clarity Flow, like, yeah, I was basically the head of product, but I was mostly just delegating like I do now, like, delegating the building of features to my team and just overseeing them and designing them, polishing them. But that cadence of building is not actually helping me grow as a builder. I mean, like, for example, the early part of the AI wave completely passed me by because AI now is at least two years into it's in the mainstream of builders purview here. Right. Like, the first year of it, like, I was not touching AI at all. I mean, we weren't building features with it. I wasn't using it in my workflow as a builder. Like, it was happening around me. It was interesting and exciting, but, like, we had no need for AI in Clarity Flow. We still don't have any AI in it. So I didn't even take time to learn it. I didn't have to learn it because it wasn't what I was working on. Same thing with like, another example is like Rails. So during the years of Clarity Flow, Rails went from rails version 6 into rails 7, and now it's on rails 8. And especially if, you know, Rails, the transition from Rails six to seven was sort of a major version change. Like a lot, A lot of things changed in the framework or some major changes happened. I mostly ignored all that stuff. Like, I didn't keep relevant like Turbo and Hotwire. Like, I did not get so closely involved in that because we were like, we're not upgrading Clarity Flow right now. It's not a priority. We have other features to ship, so I don't have to learn that. And so in other words, I was not expanding as a builder and I wasn't launching new products. So all the shipping muscles of everything else, of ship of, of launching stuff was after. So in 2024, when I built Ripple FM, which, you know, didn't pan out as like a business. [00:30:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:38] Speaker A: But as a product, it was exactly what I needed. Like, I think I built it around June or July of this year, took about a month on it, and that was what I needed to do to like awaken at my, my building. Like, I got to work with the newest stuff, learn, and then from there forward into the rest of the year. Like, then I started building instrumental components, started really embracing AI in my workflow. I'm using cursor and I think it's a complete game changer. And I feel like I'm. Right now, I'm in the best shape of my building right now. The not. It's not even just the speed and not even just like the product chops. It's, it's like all of that multiplied. Like, you know, I'm. [00:31:31] Speaker B: Is it confidence? Isn't that what it is? [00:31:35] Speaker A: It's confidence. It's, it's. It's AI powered, man. It's like, I think that it's weird because I see a lot of like career developer, like full stack developers saying things like, I don't use AI because that's like not real programming. [00:31:52] Speaker B: I don't want to debug an AI. [00:31:54] Speaker A: I completely disagree with that point of view. As a product person, if you come into it with full stack building skills in the pre AI era, now with AI, it's like a multiplier. It takes the superpower to a completely new level. [00:32:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Maybe there's a curse of knowledge there of people who have been doing it a long time, very experienced, they kind of can't bend to the, To a new way of doing it. [00:32:21] Speaker A: It's not, it's not even just that it's faster to use like cursor to execute. It's like. It's, it's. It's. It's like collaborating with the AI to build features, but it. But then that also opens my mind to being more ambitious about what I want to build because I know that I can produce it much faster or I can bust through walls much quicker. Like I would. There. There were things that, like, years ago I would. I would not even try to build or not even think about building just because I know how technically involved it is. And now I. Now I know I can just push right through that, which. Which then opens my mind to other product ideas and opportunities that I. That wouldn't have been there before. [00:33:02] Speaker B: Yeah, very, very interesting. I couldn't help but find analogy with. With my experience over the last year, but it's, it's in a different format. Ripple unlocked that builder confidence for me. Rosie unlocked the idea confidence. Right. I had a lot of residual confidence from Carthook because I got that very right, what the market wanted and when and in what way and where. I just got that right and I, I had a, if you build it, they will come type of a success version. And then. And then that went away for a while. [00:33:54] Speaker A: Right. [00:33:55] Speaker B: And then Carter kind of got stamped out by Shopify and then Rally was a good idea, but it wasn't at the right time and it wasn't the right place and whatever else. So it. It didn't do it. And then basically the entire pressure of the company relying on me to come up with an idea of what to build next. I really enjoyed that. [00:34:15] Speaker A: I actually wanted to ask you about this. So, like, you know, now. Now you're in Rosie and now maybe we can start to think about 2025 here. How do you. How does Rosie as a. As a product or maybe your path to product market fit? How does. How does that feel to you right now compared to Card Hook or anything else that came before it? [00:34:36] Speaker B: You know, so one of the things that feels really good is the lack of platform risk. Yeah, it feels like. Like it's up to us. Success, succeed or fail. There aren't that many external factors other than competition, which feels like, you know, that's normal, that's what you want. It does feel there's a lot going on in the market that impacts us, which I love. Example is we want to build integrations, we want integration partners, we want to get distribution in A1 to many from a trusted partner. Okay, let's say a CRM. What we are starting to find is that some CRMs want to build their own AI voice product. And that type of thing is my favorite because that is a puzzle. It is a chess match. If one well funded, well established CRM wants to launch this feature on their own to attract people to the higher tier, that immediately means that their competitors, some of their competitors are not going to be able to build it on their own or don't want to build it on their own. And that creates partnership potential. So the general landscape in front of us just feels very, very wide open. I think you were saying you feel like a builder again and you can take destiny into your own hands. For me that means deploying resources. That's the game I got myself into by raising vc. And so looking at the landscape and saying these are the levers that I want to pull next year. That just my favorite version of business. Because the market's wide open, people are picking their spots. There's enterprise products, there's SMB products, there's all these different spots in the market and the choices that you make and then how you deploy your resources will make a very big difference. So right now we have advertising as a bucket of where we're putting our resources. And it is not, it's tough to say whether or not it's profitable, it's working, but it is linear. And so being able to look at my budget for marketing and say 75% is going to go to advertising because it's just, we're just going to steadily grow because of it because we've been doing long enough that we know what's going to happen. And then being able to take this other 25% and trying to manufacture luck, whether that's big hits, affiliates, going viral, whatever else, having that opportunity in a market that's just starting to turn and look toward this type of a solution, I feel optimistic. I know it's not going to be easy, but it feels like if you put the right moves together then you can grow like crazy. [00:37:34] Speaker A: It sounds like you have like a, like a solid start. You're in a, you're in a great space. You have the team, you have the tech, you have the product that the market is like ripe for it. Correct me if I'm wrong, it feels like it. Like if I think back to Cart Hook, which was, which was selling to like e commerce brands. So people, so, so these, these customers were already online and tech savvy and operating in that space and, and they were sort of like beating down the door for this, you know, upsell solution on the cart and everything. I, I wonder what your impression of like selling to small business, like local small business is, especially with a, with like an AI product. [00:38:22] Speaker B: The cart hook. The, the bad part that we've covered before was the, the platform didn't want us to succeed, wouldn't let us do this, wouldn't. The flip side of that was that the market was booming. So you had more people coming into the market, you had people who were getting more successful. There's an enormous amount of attention. So that overshadowed the downside and the friction with the platform. SMB has been super interesting. Shout out to Luke, a listener in the podcast, who reached out to me and said, I have learned all the SMB issues that you're talking about. I think I can help. We got on a call this week. Extremely helpful. The most helpful thing that I've been experiencing and what he emphasized is that SMB will not find the value. You need to serve them the value on a silver platter and then you need to wave in front of their face and say, click here. This is the actual value. [00:39:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:39:19] Speaker B: So that you know that there's a lot of new stuff that we're learning for sure. I think we've talked about this dynamic around AI markets that are much bigger than you expect because there's no competition, even though there's a very big problem, because the solutions weren't possible. [00:39:35] Speaker A: Right. [00:39:36] Speaker B: And that just feels so incredibly exciting. I'm a little worried about the level of competition. There's a million worries, but so far the feedback is there's a problem. People are attracted to a solution that says it's solving the problem. And we just have, we just have a ton of work, but it's not, it's not a big deal. [00:40:00] Speaker A: It does seem like the mainstream is. I feel like there is going to be a boom in small business adopting AI driven products. Like in. It's like it's going to start to happen, like, really rapidly whenever it starts to happen. I think maybe it's happening right now, but like, I feel like we're just before it, but it's going to, it's not just going to like, be a gradual adoption. Once, once it starts, it's going to, it's going to accelerate really, really quickly. Yes, yes. So that we saw that with things like, like online ordering for restaurants, you know, like forever. Like, no restaurants did that. And then it was like literally a matter of like, 12 months. [00:40:41] Speaker B: Yes. [00:40:42] Speaker A: When like every restaurant started. [00:40:43] Speaker B: That's right. [00:40:44] Speaker A: You know, that's right. [00:40:45] Speaker B: So yeah. And then. And that's, you know, that's the game we're trying to be in. It does feel stressful that the tech might get so good that replicating our product might be. Might be easier for larger customers. Excuse me, larger partners. So just think about Ringcentral. [00:41:08] Speaker A: Right. [00:41:08] Speaker B: It makes sense for them to do what we're doing. They're not doing what we're doing. So it is a bit of a game of chicken. If we can figure out how to onboard SMB and then make a name for ourselves so that there's word of mouth and we start growing quickly, then we become such a dead obvious acquisition target for those companies, especially if we're walking around attached to 25,000 SMB customers. [00:41:33] Speaker A: Y. [00:41:34] Speaker B: So there is a bit of a game of chicken, of can you get there to escape velocity before the competition overwhelms our solution Being independent. If we're big enough as an independent, when that happens and the entire market decides they need this type of a solution, then we're an amazing spot. If we don't quite reach escape velocity before the tech gets really good and widespread and it makes more sense to build as opposed to acquire, then we might be in a more challenging spot. [00:42:08] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. [00:42:10] Speaker B: How about you? 2024, 2025. What are you looking at? [00:42:14] Speaker A: All right. I am afraid to talk about this one because I don't know if I'm going to be able to pull it off. And this is a completely different goal than I've ever had. But I've been talking about it, like to my family for a couple of weeks. Okay. In 2025, I want to work four day work weeks. [00:42:32] Speaker B: Friday's off. [00:42:33] Speaker A: Friday's off. Friday's is going to be the off day. I don't. I don't know if I can pull it off, but I. But that is a very real goal. I could get into all the reasons behind it. I've been thinking about this for the last month or so. [00:42:51] Speaker B: Okay. [00:42:57] Speaker A: All right. I'll talk about the why and then I'll. [00:43:00] Speaker B: It's a great goal. Right. It's not a millionair. It's not whatever. I would like to hear what's underneath it. You can make the argument that it's counter to your desire to grow the business. It's not necessarily counter. [00:43:17] Speaker A: This is not changing any of the business goals. [00:43:20] Speaker B: Okay. [00:43:20] Speaker A: Definitely. [00:43:21] Speaker B: Okay. Help reconcile that with. What I'm most interested in is why. What is the upside of that, like, the actual personal life, what are you trying to do? [00:43:35] Speaker A: I spent the last many years now in this career feeling like I'm with, like, working with a sense of urgency to build and build and build for a future big win. [00:43:47] Speaker B: Oof. Yep. The American way. [00:43:50] Speaker A: And I've had a couple of base hits. I haven't had like a big home run in my career. Um, you know, may. Maybe I'll have one of those big, big exits in the future at some point, but it's not on the near term horizon. And especially coming, you know, we talked about, like, the burnout, the physical, the stress. But now as I end the year and I, and I. And I did achieve the goal of settling into my next business with instrumental products, and I still have clarity, flow as an asset that is growing slowly. I'm trying to embrace this mindset or transition fully to this mindset of like, I'm not building for a future win. I can get that win right now. And the payoff for doing this career, the payoff for being a bootstrapper, the payoff for being an entrepreneur, to me, like, that ROI has to start right now. I'm not building for that future exit anymore. I'm building. And that payoff means, like, I get to work in a business where I only have to work four days a week. And most people my age do still work 40 hours plus a week at least, and start. And I want to literally start this in January where Fridays I'm going to wake up and the expectation is my weekend has begun. You know, and so that's the main thinking behind it. I mean, other, like the other thing that really sort of triggered. It was a month or two ago as I started to look back on this year and thinking about, like, all the, all the stress and all the time I spend, like, just thinking about work and doing the work and building shit, it started to occur to me, like, you know, I feel like I'm missing out on other parts of life. [00:45:53] Speaker B: Yep, fair. [00:45:54] Speaker A: You know, we. I mean, we. We do stuff with the family, we take vacations, we hang out, we do sports, we do all this different stuff. But I don't really have a lot of time for my own stuff. Like, I like to make music, I like to. I like to work out and exercise. I don't know what other things I might get into, but I feel like I haven't had any space to even explore any other hobbies or any other interests. And I'm at an age now where it's like, I Can't just. My hobby cannot just be working, you know? And the original idea for this. So my wife works four days a week. She works in the school district, but she gets Wednesdays off, and she's had that for the last two years. And it's actually been really nice because we do our date lunch every Wednesday, and we both look forward to it. It's really great. But Wednesday is her. She's an entire day to do whatever because she's not working. Catches up on other stuff, does hobbies, goes shopping, does whatever. And then it's just started to occur to me, like, man, I'm so jealous of that. I wish I had a day where I just don't have any obligations, you know, and not short weekends. Like, yes, I have downtime in the weekends and plenty of that, but, like, I want a day, like, when my kids and Amy are at work and school. Like, I still. I still want a whole day to myself to do whatever I want. Now, I don't. I'm afraid of even talking about that, because if it very much remains to be seen, if I will be able to pull this off, and I don't think it'll be because there's so much work to do that I have to work. [00:47:47] Speaker B: Is it, like, mental? [00:47:49] Speaker A: It's like, I'm gonna want to work. I always want to work. I love doing the work. [00:47:55] Speaker B: Okay, I believe you. If I said that you shouldn't believe me, I would end up doing it not because I love the work, but because I felt guilty. [00:48:06] Speaker A: So a little bit of. Well, that. That is the guilt. For. To me, the version of the guilt is. Especially when I'm building a new product, which is. Most of the time, I'm building something new. I'm. I'm. I get fired up about that product, and I. And I. Then I start to develop in my mind some sort of date in the very near future when I want to ship that product. And then. And then the logic goes, like, if I want to ship by the end of January, then I have to work every waking hour on this thing. And so I need to start to get back into the mindset of, like, we're not working on urgency here. Yes, I can work on this thing for four days a week, and I can shut it down and I can pick it back up on Monday morning. And I have to start to, like, train myself to accept that reality. I don't know if I will be able to. [00:48:57] Speaker B: I don't know. It's. [00:48:58] Speaker A: That's the idea. [00:48:58] Speaker B: It's a Great goal. It's an admirable goal. It's inspiring. I. The. The irony is that when I hear you say that, I mean, I'm with you. I think it's a. It's an amazing goal. I haven't really thought about it. I don't know if I could do it or all these other things, but it's a great goal, just, you know, for life. Because. Because your life is worth. [00:49:24] Speaker A: I mean, from a business standpoint, I don't see how. If I were to actually do this and, like, actually only work four days a week, I don't really see how that would actually impact, like, the bottom line of the business, you know, like, it's not like we would earn less money. [00:49:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is a trip to think about. [00:49:49] Speaker A: The only real impact, 20% of the week. The only real impact. And it's funny because, like, my very next goal that I had on my list was, like, ship more things in 2025. [00:49:59] Speaker B: Okay. [00:50:00] Speaker A: They don't have to ship more new products, but the only impact that the first goal would have is that I'm shipping slower because I have one less day to work on. To work on building stuff. [00:50:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:12] Speaker A: You know. Yeah. [00:50:15] Speaker B: It's interesting. I'm curious how other people kind of receive it as they hear it. For me, what I find is irony because I don't love the work, and I would be perfectly happy doing nothing. You know, eventually I would do something, but my problem is not. I love the work so much. I want to do the work. I actually don't. [00:50:38] Speaker A: So what do you mean you don't love it? Like, what's the worst part about it? Not like, what's the worst part, but what feels like a grind in general. Work that you're doing a lot work. [00:50:52] Speaker B: Work. The act of trying to grow revenue with a software product, I don't find to be. I find it very interesting. I don't find it very fulfilling. So there's a big difference there. I am super interested in. I feel incredibly lucky. I'm grateful. I like the work from home. I like seeing there's so many good things that I'm not actually complaining. But if I am being very honest, if I sold the business tomorrow and made 20 million bucks, I'm not starting another software company, you know? Absolutely not. I'm doing something very different with my time. And so I think I'm still caught in the trap mentally of I want to work really, really hard so that in the future I don't have to work really hard. And what you're doing is kind of. [00:51:54] Speaker A: I have to push the other way. Like, I work too much because I want to work all the time. [00:51:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:00] Speaker A: Like, I literally like. Because my family, like, we do stuff, but we also have a lot of downtime. We're sort of home bodies a lot of the time. Wow. [00:52:09] Speaker B: Congratulations on marrying. Right? [00:52:12] Speaker A: Yeah. It's sort of like all four of our personalities. We like to go out and do stuff and that takes like half the day. And then we have another half day to relax. Right. [00:52:22] Speaker B: That's cool. [00:52:22] Speaker A: We hang. [00:52:23] Speaker B: My wife is very activity ambitious. [00:52:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:52:26] Speaker B: So. [00:52:26] Speaker A: But that's how we roll. And when we're hanging, when we're relaxing, maybe I'm watching TV or I'm out on a bike ride or something. But more than. More likely than not, I'm just cracking open the laptop and I'm going to get an extra hour or two in on building some feature that I was working on. And I'll do that on a Saturday or a Sunday. Like I don't care because I. Cause what else am I going to do? And I like doing that. You know, that's where I feel like it's going to be a Friday and I've got nothing else to do. Nobody's here. I've got a quiet house. I could just keep hacking on that feature I've been working on all week. But I'm trying to open up space in my life in general to explore other hobbies. Like, so, like, the music thing for me is a big deal. I've been a lifelong musician and producer and songwriter. And for the last couple of decades, really, I haven't been able to really do that because that's the type of hobby that I can't just dip into it for 20 minutes. I could pick up my guitar and strum for 20 minutes and I'll do that. But I can't create. I can't lay down some tracks and record and mix and master and ship. A song like that takes multiple days and weeks of work. Like creative energy. It's just as much, if not more energy draining than building a software product to do that type of creative work. And it's something that I've felt strongly about for my entire life, but I haven't really been able to create on that side of things. So that's like the one thing that I would like to insert into my life more that I haven't been able to. And so that's like my immediate thought is if I have Fridays off, then, like, I should be spending that time in the music studio and not a studio. Sounds lovely. You know, I would like to, but I would also just like to have it off to be able to say like I'm going to do like a day long bike ride today or I'm not, or it's raining and I'm. No one's around. I'm just going to watch a movie. I don't care. It's not a work day, right. [00:54:35] Speaker B: It's just your time. I think it's great I'm not there. I hope to get inspiration from your ability to accomplish it in one form or another. Maybe it's not every single Friday. Maybe it is. But whatever it is, I am definitely still in the trap of delayed gratification on that. And I want to push super hard. That's my mindset, right? I raise money, I'm pushing super hard on Rosie, go crazy for another two, three years, build this thing into a monster. Like, you know, I got the six year time horizon before the kid goes to college, so I guess I'm still in that crap. [00:55:15] Speaker A: My oldest is two years behind yours, but we have that too. But you know, but the going back to the stress and the burnout from earlier in the year, again, I had no income for three years. I was living off of Runway. And so now that I've put it back together in terms of now, I'm settling into this new business, this new reality. It is profitable. It is bootstrapped and profitable. And I have these assets that, that pay the bills and then some. It's still early, it's still super young. This is still like a toddler business in the lifespan of a business. Right. Like it's just getting off the ground right now. But that was my biggest challenge and my biggest goal that I achieved in 24 was settling into this new thing. And so now that I've done that, I have to actually feel the effects of it. Not, you know, which is the getting that, that ROI of being a, being able to self fund and bootstrap a profitable business. And that makes a good living now and for multiple years going into the future. Of course, the thing, the goal is to grow. Like I want to grow the revenue, I want to grow the product line. All of that is going to grow in 25. I'm still as ambitious on all that as I always have been. But I have to learn how to like getting to do that for a living is the payoff and whatever future exits or big wins, that should be like a nice icing on the cake if it were to ever happen. But I'm trying to really, I don't know, enjoy it more. [00:57:10] Speaker B: Yeah. I think you put yourself into a position where you can have your cake and eat it too. I don't think taking Fridays to yourself will negatively impact your revenue very much at all. In some ways it could positively impact it. I just don't think it makes this huge. [00:57:27] Speaker A: Like I was saying, because my team are the ones who execute the work. So I could still book sales and book projects and MRR can still grow on clarity, flow. Like all of that is already today decoupled from me sitting at my computer doing the work. Right. So that's why I don't think it will actually impact the bottom line. It should grow regardless. The only thing that it will impact is it's one less day to make progress on building new stuff. [00:58:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's, I think that's, that's well worth it if you can make it happen. [00:58:04] Speaker A: Yeah, but that, but I mean just like last one for me here is like build and ship more in 2025. Because, because. And that's not just random like that. That is the business model that I'm in, in instrumental products is like we are a products studio and right now all of our revenue comes from building products for clients. And that'll continue obviously, but in building instrumental components and that's, that'll be fully built out and shipped in January. Like we are set up to build out a portfolio of small like SaaS products. I'm not going all in on any of them but like the idea is because like we already have the systems in the team in place now to turn out. Yeah. Yeah. [00:58:54] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:58:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean the components product is product number one. I, I expect to be shipping many more products of our own in 2025. [00:59:04] Speaker B: I don't think I had that in in mind. I thought it was, you know, increase of agency products for other people. [00:59:13] Speaker A: Plus that too. It's, it's all of that and it's all connected because we are built. We are a app building factory. That's what instrumental products is. Even right now, the products we build for clients, they more or less look the same, they function differently. We build different features, but we use our components. We build things in the same way we use Ruby on Rails. We have a process. Yep. And we can execute that process to build out whatever small products we want to build. Now the other thing is that the way that I like my plan for growing this business, for marketing. This business is content, video content showing on video. The things that we build using our components and how we build and our opinions on designing and building products. So by building more of our own products, that's yes, they're products as their own, but it's material for the YouTube channel, for content to get us out there and shipping more, which develops the brand, which develops word of mouth and that's what drives leads for the high end offer which is our done for you service. Like that. That's how it all fits together. That's what I'm building with instrumental products. And I'm fired up about it because it's like the product studio, the portfolio model type business, especially with software. Like that's something that I've been wanting to build my entire career, frankly, and I just haven't. Maybe out of fear, maybe convincing myself that I shouldn't be doing that, that I should be going all in on one thing. I know this game works differently for different people, but for me, like this is my, my, like I'm in my element when I'm operating this way, where I have an asset over here and an asset over there and it's profitable. I put small teams in place and we can just bootstrap like that. That works for me. And I mean literally like the years where I went away from that and I went all in did not work. It was well for you. It wasn't good for me. And now that I'm back to it, like it's, it's, it's just a lot better and on all fronts. [01:01:29] Speaker B: Yeah, there's no one way to do it for me. On the other hand. Millionaire by Q2. Let's go. [01:01:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I like it. Cool. [01:01:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, do you have any like or like, like hard goals or numbers? Like is that it like in 2025? [01:01:47] Speaker B: Like, yes. And that is directly tied to Runway and Burn. So my general sense is if we can get to a million ARR in around that timeframe with some buffer, you know, Q3. [01:02:03] Speaker A: You said Q2. [01:02:04] Speaker B: Yes, well, that's the ambitious part. If it's Q3, even if it's Q4 in reality. [01:02:14] Speaker A: I mean, I don't doubt that that's possible. [01:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. [01:02:18] Speaker A: But real talk, that is hockey stick. [01:02:23] Speaker B: It's hockey stickish. Yeah, we cheat. We buy ads. It's cheating. [01:02:29] Speaker A: Of course. Like that. That's the game you're in. [01:02:31] Speaker B: Yes, yes, the game is no shame in cheating. Do whatever you can. [01:02:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean that's not cheating. [01:02:37] Speaker B: Yes. [01:02:38] Speaker A: You're playing the game. [01:02:38] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. [01:02:39] Speaker A: But yeah, I mean that's that's ambitious. [01:02:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's the right level. It's not absurd based on what we're seeing in ads and our current revenue and everything else. But if we can get there, we are sustainable. We are not profitable, but we are sustainable. Like, given how much is in the bank, what that would do to Runway access to capital in terms of lines of credit or whatever else. We are sustainable. We can get to profitability off of what's in the bank. And I like to think about that as the downside protection and then go out and talk with investors in Q1 and kind of see what's going on, because there are bets being made based on the space and the team just as much as there are on metrics. So there are a lot of VCs out there that want to make a bet in AI voice and they have not made a bet yet. And to come across a good quality team with real revenue and a product, there's a decent chance to be able to raise money. I don't know if I don't want to raise money in Q1, but it makes sense to go out there and talk to people and show them what we're doing and then we can kind of keep track. So, like, downside protection is sustainability and upside is let's make sure the market knows what we're doing, because you never know. [01:03:59] Speaker A: So you're looking like at some point in 2025, like another, like, round. [01:04:06] Speaker B: That's not my goal for 2025, but it makes sense to make the rounds and talk to people because if a round feels likely in an advantageous way, you know, there is still. [01:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Like put yourself in a position to be there. [01:04:23] Speaker B: And if talking to someone in January and then keeping them updated in February and March and then if April, you hit your inflection point and revenue pops because you spoke to them in January, you can make it happen in a much easier way than let's go put together a round and let's go do the whole thing. And it's just much easier that way. [01:04:45] Speaker A: That's the thing that I've always been terrible at. That side of, of networking is like planting these seeds that, that. Yeah, it's. [01:04:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I don't know that we want to do that. The way I think the right way to think about it is you only want to raise money from a position of strength. And to do that and to make yourself sustainable, it's just grow revenue. So it's. It is just about growing revenue. But there are some other things that I should do, given the position that we're in and raising, having raised money and all that, that we should also engage with the capital markets the same way. Not the same way, but in addition to looking to build a sustainable business. [01:05:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:05:34] Speaker B: Yep. [01:05:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I hear that. [01:05:36] Speaker B: Cool, man. Well, let's. [01:05:37] Speaker A: It's been awesome to see Rosie, like, come together, especially in the last half a year. And, like, I feel like, again, like, we're two completely different businesses, different trajectories. [01:05:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:05:49] Speaker A: But it's like, it's like the momentum is in the same kind of. Kind of gear as we head into hell. [01:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And for everyone listening out there, we hope the same for you. Big 2025 end up 2024 the right way. Enjoy. Famous Brian's got the right dream. Four days a week and more money. Hell yeah. Thanks very much, everyone, for listening. Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, everything else. [01:06:13] Speaker A: All right, later, folks. Cheer.