Cheap and Easy Customer Support – Sarah Hatter – MicroConf 2012

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0:07[Music] so yeah hi everybody this is gonna be super fun because I've weaseled my way into getting my Q&A stuff built into my time so we're gonna do three things in my talk we're gonna talk about Who I am why I'm here we're gonna do some real world examples of how you guys can be doing support faster better easier cheaper smarter funnier all that stuff and then if you want I thought that we could also do sort of some life lessons about so sorry starting a business because I've only been in this business myself for a year I've been in the web scene for years and years and years and

0:44we'll talk about that in a second do you guys want to hear about that kind of [ __ ] or do you not want to hear about that [ __ ] you wanna hear about it okay cool so okay so let's start real quick with me Who I am what I am doing here and all that kind of stuff yeah so I'm super passionate about customer support for apps I think that we are in a really great place where we're finally at this awesome plateau of having customer support that's awesome and accessible and educational for people is as important as fast code and great slick design and all of you guys in the room

1:20know it and I love that so many of you guys are doing this yourselves for your own apps and that you're taking that on from the very beginning because it sets a tone for the customer support the rest of the app life I started Co support last year so we've been in business for um I don't know over a year which I can say hey and literally I have been doing customer support for 16 years my very first job was working at a call center for [ __ ] you buy on TV like shamwows and stuff when I was fifteen and yeah it was horrible one of the ones that we sold

1:53was a radio ad for you could you could call in and get a spiral bound notebook that lists all the brothels in Nevada and so it was all truckers that would call and I was like fifteen years old and sure where are you going sir so I started doing that oh and then uh I don't have any kids either I'm not married but I didn't want to leave out like a kid photo but I so I thought I'd just show you a picture of me with a mullet in fourth grade I'm right there in the middle if you couldn't tell and the great thing about this photo is because like I obviously

2:31know what I'm doing right I've been doing it for a long time and yes you've probably heard of my last job blah blah blah it was a really great place to work I learned a lot being there and they're really good wonderful people and I like everything about them and they're really wonderful and you should all like them as friends and be friends with them so anyway I don't work there anymore and one of the reasons I don't work there anymore is because I think that since you're really great smart wonderful people they did a lot of really smart things and so I wanted to talk about

3:07some of the smart things that happened when I worked there one of those being that they launched a product with zero customer support they didn't think it was important whatsoever they didn't have a support staff for their product for almost three years until I begged them to let me take over support because I was actually embarrassed working there the products the customer support from the product was just really bad and then on top of that they really never ever thought that customer support was as important as design and so it never got the resources of anything else it was the least it was most underpaid and the

3:36least sort of focused on part of the whole company so very smart really smart stuff again good people and the other thing too is that support was always kind of an afterthought they'd build these products they'd build these products and then they'd bring me in and say so we built this product and here's what it does and I'd say well you can't do that that's gonna just cause support people are just gonna have to write support for that and they say yeah so so anyway I think that the problem with these smart things that happened at this great company was that they learned from those mistakes too late and they ended

4:13up sort of building up around this whole philosophy of say no to customers and say no to feature requests and don't listen to them just build your app and you build it how you like it which is great if you're you know you want to do that but at the end of the day we're now in a place where we need to build apps based on what people want and what people need and what people are asking for and so we've all sort of learned that's the better way to go so how many of you guys are doing support for your app by yourself you do it yes I love all you

4:41people how many of you guys are using a help desk like a user voice who's a really super awesome or desk or Zendesk or awesome awesome awesome so you don't need to do that by the way all of you guys are micro founders you're micro entrepreneurs I don't know how many of you guys are profitable but you shouldn't be spending even $49 a month to do any of that [ __ ] not until you make like 10,000 $12,000 a month you should not be paying for a helpdesk solution right now so we're gonna talk a little bit about what you can do instead that's literally like

5:12super cheap super easy we're gonna start with emails forms and inboxes I'm sort of rushing through this but I want I can see everybody and all the way in the back of the room so if you have questions please raise your hand and we'll we'll take the question during the talk instead of waiting to the end so how many of you guys have heard of turbo scan turbo scans you guys use it it's an awesome app it's one of the top paid apps in the iTunes App Store it's an app for your phone I think for your iPad too you can take a picture of anything and

5:44turn it into a PDF it's amazing I use it for contracts all the time and it's crazy crazy crazy wonderful and very popular so what happens if you don't understand how to use this app this top paid iPad app that's all over the place that Apple advertises if you go to turbo scan calm this is what you get please email us we answer most support emails within a few hours thank you so that's it this is a URL I think it's turbo scan app calm that's it there's nothing else on the page and the funny thing about this is besides the fact that it's totally [ __ ] up to do this

6:19to your customers they don't write you back I've written them 17 times since December and I've never gotten an email response right so the second thing that's wrong with doing a page like this is you're giving the customer and out number one because the customers gonna see this and like no thanks forget it I'm not even but - you're not gathering any data from them whatsoever you're not getting a subject you aren't getting any way to triage emails you're not getting any way to run analytics on emails that come through based on time zone or device or any of this stuff and what ends up happening is you get an inbox that I'm

6:52going to show you this is one of our customers that we just started doing support for you get this name and the URL this is horrible this is horrible for any sort of support and if you did looked at this all day long you wouldn't want to do support either so instead the best thing that you could be doing just to start is to build a contact page a contact form that gathers information and allows the customer to set the tone of the email set any tags gathers information about their device and all that stuff this is another one of our customers readability we built this form

7:25for them and we give the customer the opportunity to say I have an issue with this specific thing I have an issue with the iOS app the Android app the mobile website I have a feature request down at the bottom I'm even a developer and I want to API key really specific things so this does all the work for you which means when you get to your inbox the next day you're seeing everything right there in front of you it's tagged all this is all these tags are then you can run analytics on the tags you can scan through this first thing in the morning and pick out every single thing that's I

7:56can't login or I have a problem where this thing sucks you can leave all the other stuff for later and it kind of gives you a way to control visually how you go into your support does anybody do this right now yeah you're you're an organ organizational kind of person right so do you have Jesus for your clients or do you have your customers that do it or for your own apps that you're doing that for your own apps perfect I think that everybody should be doing this even for their own personal email you should have personal email folders that you're putting stuff into reply later reply later I don't want to

8:32do this reply now so another inbox I want to show you - this is from desk which is a paid app like I said you don't really need to use pay to apps I got this great screenshot from heatin this is their Gmail inbox actually for KISSmetrics and what you can see is they have multiple people using one Gmail inbox and multiple email addresses going right into one inbox and they're able to prioritize using the little superstars function that you can enable under your Gmail settings and all of their emails come in and are tagged with people's names meaning that person's gonna go answer it or this is a bug this is a bug

9:10in ie this is crazy smart stuff and they're like a billion something to our company I think right maybe I think I'm just flattering him at this point but this is like the super smart thing to do the other really smart thing to do again you can shift all this stuff out of your inbox so you're not seeing it so Cindy can have her own folder and only Cindy goes into their emails that are about ie go into one folder you can send them to a developer to do so the other thing that Kissin exercise and they're also a co support customer so maybe that's what

9:41I'm talking about them so much is that they offer the selected issue tell us about the issue but way up at the top we see how can we help you the first thing that they say is have you checked out our support site meaning that they've actually are making the self-service for people you don't have to email me go find information like right here and this can link to a Help section it can link to a customer forum it can link to get satisfaction it can link to any sort of historical data that you have online that's documentation based so this is another screenshot of what we did for

10:10readability this is also in desc but you can see that we have categories about all this stuff and each one of these how to use it apps for iOS all of these have multiple multiple articles and each article is maybe two three sentences with a screenshot that's it super super easy it'll take you a Saturday to do it all you could probably get a hundred of them up and the great part is right at the top it's searchable so your customers can just type in anything and search it anyone doing this yet for your app well you don't count Tilly if you haven't thought about doing

10:43this think about doing it right now just be the very first thing that you do even before you start on support hiring and all that kind of jazz get a searchable yes this is desk comm formerly a Cicely comm now Salesforce pretty much any help desk solution will offer this bill they call it a knowledge base and it's wonderful you can also build this yourself in HTML but it's a little bit easier using a service because it's kind of like old-timey like type pad or blogger interface with the selector picture so if you want to use something like this it'll cost you it's free for two users

11:19so again a really great free option if you want to add more users it's $49 a month so any questions on that stuff I know I'm Gavin through these so we can get to question time yeah totally well you can do both it's all about presentation I think that when you're in a state of developing an app a customer forum is really really important because you're getting customers to talk about stuff you're seeing stuff in public and it's a historical record of what people are questioning you about asking for information for and how it's also helping when you have someone post on a forum this doesn't work how does it work

12:04I don't like this they're identifying design flaws for you so that kind of stuff is really great when you have a searchable index like this you can track what people are searching for you can track what the top hits are on your help section so you get a better sense of what's confusing people what do they not know what am I not presenting well enough in the App Store what's not in my description that people are asking me I think that it's wonderful to be completely transparent and open and let people email you all day long but I think that most customers just want to get the answer online so like when we

12:35state we see the the app for turbo scan it's just an email address that's not very educational for me right there's no other option whatsoever it's kind of like you want to find a nice middle ground where people have accessibility to you but they also have accessibility to education anyone else more questions okay this is super super super easy one prioritising does anybody have a really good trick for prioritizing email so that they get it done quick and they don't kill themselves at the end of the day what oh what's this

13:13reschedule things later on that's amazing so I love that idea I used folders for it personally in Gmail I used labels and like I said move it out of the inbox and then the great thing about Gmail or folders is that you see an unread count so you can go to at your whenever you want yes query yeah perfect yeah that stuff is great all that kind of stuff follow up get to it later get to it later is great what I like to do especially if I am the only person there doing support which many of you are is to figure out what I'm gonna do first

14:02what matters to me now what matters for later which what's the stuff that I can push on for later so easily the very first thing is scanning the Inbox like we did with the subjects and the tags for anyone saying I can't log in something is broken these are indications that you need to stop what you're doing and look at the email and you can you can look at an email for someone saying can't log in and read it in two seconds and know whether they're just an idiot or something's broken so that's important the next thing obviously this isn't working I need help i need billing issues the reason that

14:32these two are like top of mind priority for support and should always always be answered every single day is because they're paying customers not only they're paying customers but if they're paying customers means they have a login for your your whole website it means that they also have access to rating you online so what we find with customers and when we find when we do brand Salvage of companies that have had a really bad support run and they're trying to figure out what they can do better is that overwhelmingly people that write iTunes reviews or App Store reviews are saying no one ever got back to me from support and we go and check

15:07because we can track those people we can look them up and see did we reply to them usually they posted their review a day after setting their support request so this kind of stuff is really important and all of the app stores now require that you have accessible support information in your app store just scription if you go through if you're in the App Store if you're in like even a Chrome App Store you're anywhere you're even on Twitter like start googling and searching for what people are saying about your support your accessibility and you know use that as a way to prioritize what you should be doing the

15:37next thing the next two things I think kind of go hand-in-hand their sales emails how does this work does it do X do you have this feature and then of course feature requests we all love feature requests is there anybody in the room who does not reply to feature requests awesome yes he's on track already everyone should refine a feature request I don't care if you do it today or tomorrow or next week but you need to reply to them and the other great thing that you should think about using as a tool is text expander text expander is your friend is anyone used it yeah so

16:09write your scripts write them with little blanks that you fill in say thanks so much for your vote on this we don't have plans to offer X right now we love hearing from you send us more ideas that kind of stuff use tools that help you get through this stuff easier because if you're letting stuff back up or you're late putting things in folders where you're gonna follow up on it later it's gonna be a slug to kind of get through okay any questions on that that stuff's easy next thing I hate Twitter I hate Twitter so much that I ran a script recently to block people on

16:42Twitter because I it doesn't work for my username since it's like Sh I get anything that anyone ever types into Twitter with @sh anything on it I get the responses to I'll give anybody in this room a thousand dollars or they can fix it for me but I want to talk about Twitter because Twitter is a great free cheap easy useful way to do support and it's indexed by Google it is a historical record of conversations that you have with your customer it's a historical record of like accessibility that you are have as a brand to you tweeting out updates to you tweeting - you know favorite users and all that

17:18stuff can anybody guess what my very favorite Twitter account for customer support is like the the best Twitter account out there who's doing great customer support on Twitter anyone not Zappos anyone else Cory George Eric Taco Bell at Taco Bell everybody go and look at it right now it's amazing let's read through some of their awesome Twitter's right now ok check this one out is it possible for me to have intercourse with your food well technically but we prefer you just eat it like a civil human being right let's have another way this is great it only gets better check this one out I love you that's all best tweet ever

18:01they're so wonderful the next one I think the Dorito taco sucks that makes you and nobody else [Applause] it's incredible yeah these are just from a couple days ago like I just do this a couple days ago cuz I wanted them to be new and relevant the next one do you guys sell hot dogs let me check no yeah he's awesome [ __ ] this is awesome [ __ ] and so it's one guy it's one guy he was hot he was initially hired as a social media intern and now he's taking it over completely so it's pretty it's pretty awesome and this kind of freedom that you have with customers

18:44is going to elicit raving loyal fans because there's no [ __ ] here there's no I'm sorry you don't like our Doritos taco locos maybe you'll like our bla bla bla they it's like you know you that makes you a nobody else awesome and it's Taco Bell it works with their brand you know do have a voice in a tone that works with your brand that's fun and engaging this is another really cool like a whole conversation that my friends and I were in about Taco Bell and they actually were like pacing yourself as over Eider overrated let's do this because my friend said I'm going

19:16to eat Doritos all weekend long like this is the kind of conversation you want people having about your app and your service and your company having it in the fun way last one Cory who's in the room misses no tweet leaves no talk related tweet unturned I love it their responses we're trying believe that like they're just into it you know this kind of stuff is really inspiring for anybody who wants like a free easy resource to engaging with your customers do you guys think that you should reply to every single person on Twitter I think you do you think that you should reply to every single person who

19:48like mentions you on Twitter not everybody tell me your answer why would they use my name if they want me to know well that's a little bit different I mean if someone is actually writing to you specifically at Pell D absolutely you should respond to everybody you should respond to everybody and just be fun and friendly because what we learn from looking at the Taco Bell is language is important but so is having fun and not being super button-down and corporate about your app and your company and being professional I hate professionalism so much okay so that's that that's the Twitter stuff does anyone have any questions about

20:31that kind of stuff yes right that happens to me too

20:52mm-hm

21:01yeah I think you should use whichever one has had it has a sort of built up audience of fans using it and if you want to have a private account create a personal private account where that's that's never gonna happen again but if you and your brand or if you were known for your brand like I'm known for my brand um whatever and people I think already know that I don't get at replies so a lot of people will reply to my cut my company account which we never use because I'm the brand right so if you want to separate the two I would certainly suggest now if you guys

21:30haven't done this already have a private personal account you can still use your face as the brand and still use that other account for customers anything else about Twitter yes yeah very cool so yeah he said if you guys didn't hear him he's seeing that he leaves the messaging on his mobile is it like your email app or whatever the signature that just says sent from my iphone or set well mobile and it's a really great indication to his customers that he is always available and accessible I think that's great you shouldn't be doing that during dinner though right yeah okay so we're gonna move into the last little segment

22:16about real-life customer support stuff some of you guys saw me talk about this a few times before this year language that's used in support that I think a lot of us are guilty of or have been guilty of in the past and I'm trying to eliminate from the support vernacular and those are what I call these empty words so I'm just gonna kind of put them up there we can discuss like what they feel like as they come up feedback hate that word worst word ever written ever by anyone content probably worse inconvenience I can't even spell this word right most times which means it's evil to me just to even see it is

22:53just terrible that isn't this isn't we don't we won't we can't anyone who's familiar with my former career life have probably heard a lot of these words a lot from that great company is anyone no I don't like these words no okay so good no one's heard this talk with feedback is a sound that a microphone makes what a guitar gets too close to it you don't want to ever tell your customers thank you for your feedback because that's just completely brushing them off and saying get out of my face content is sort of a way of being very derogatory about somebody's words that they've written to you in earnest so

23:31it's not content inconvenience we've all know this whole like the old adage if I spill hot coffee on you and not going to tell you sorry for the inconvenience I'm gonna say I'm so sorry I'm so sorry that happened I'm so sorry that's the kind of focus that you want to have with your customer so that they know that you really care about what they're saying to you whether it's in email or in Twitter or wherever so the opposite of this then would be full words here might some of my favorite things to say to customers I encourage you all to give it a try thank you I'm sorry that's a hard one

24:05this sucks I know it's frustrating that's a bug you're right great idea thanks for the vote and the last one I don't know I have a lot of customers who have a lot have a hard time with this I know ad told me that after a year of me training his team he's still having a hard time not saying unfortunately which is another one of the words I hate it's hard to get out of the habit of saying these words because we're so used to hearing them so we get really used to saying them and one of the worst ones is saying I don't know and saying I'm sorry

24:32I have customers who refuse to say I'm sorry and I think why not what's the big deal what's the big deal it doesn't matter you saying I'm sorry doesn't mean you're taking responsibility for anything it just means that you're really sorry that someone's pissed off at you and you're gonna try to do your best to fix it for them right they would disagree with that no you guys don't want to say that you disagree but I would say try to get these into your vernacular and one really easy way to do that is if you're gonna use shortcuts keyword shortcuts autocompletes or something like TextExpander start

25:06putting these into your scripts and don't take them out even if they don't sound like you even if they sound uncomfortable trust me this is what your customers want to hear they don't want to hear the professional crappy feedback content speak so that's it for that side of things are just summary on this support isn't as important in this code and design you should invest in it as much as you do anything else in development of your app and when I say in the best I mean money I mean time and I mean hiring the right people to do it and not just finding someone to do it because you don't want

25:40to do it and they're not really even qualified to do it that's not gonna help you keep it friendly keep it fast educational and fun be like Taco Bell I can't believe I'm even saying that I don't even eat Taco Bell and I think their Twitter is just so incredible and amazing secondly go make money that's what we're all here to do that's what I've been trying to do this year and it's from working great and I think that you guys are if you kind of think about like the customers the people who are going to actually be handing you money to do these things you remember that we

26:07need to be great and kind and awesome to them as well as educational and offer them accessibility and all that stuff so that's the end of that part any other questions yes yes wait yes I'm gonna start walking the microphone thank you rob my support team is really friendly yeah and a lot of times go in and tell them to cut it out yeah to fire some customers that just overrun so maybe you could speak to that for just a moment so do you yeah so he's question well you heard his question do you have problems with people just asking taking up too much time of your support people yeah so

26:49when I worked for this really great company that I used to work for and I was the only person doing support I was answering maybe 200 emails a day on average and every single day from March of 2009 until probably April of 2010 I got one or two emails from the same guy over and over and over and over and it was really weird because every time he wrote me an email it would be like please advise like I've never we never talked before like we're not friends like come on rich I know you so what I ended up doing was seeing like what the [ __ ] is this guy does he have no does he

27:21do nothing else than write me support emails and I went through his account and I found out that he was paying the most money he could pay us for four apps every single month and he'd been doing that consistently for a year so to answer your question I ended up being all of his accounts because I think that's amazing amazing loyalty and when you look at it that way it's far less annoying that's the one thing I would do but if there's customers are not making you money and they're really just being a time suck you just need to tell them you're being a time suck and

27:50you can do that kindly what I found but you're being a time suck this is the thing if you if you wear it an educational setting I'm gonna be honest with you and be like dude you know what I gotta go write me an email with all your questions and I'll answer them when I can but this one and back and forth and back and forth kind of thing is not working for either of us so some things that we advise people to do when they have these times lucky customers is to tell them save all your questions for one big email and send it to me at the

28:20end of the week that works for a lot of people they end up getting emails that have ten or twelve questions in them on a Friday but it happens say to the customer you know it sounds like you have a lot of questions about this you know do you want to have a quick phone call we can go over some of these things and trust me as much as I hate phone support a quick phone call with someone alleviates a lot of the stress and stress and anxiety they have about using your app so when you see people coming back and forth with does it do this how

28:46does it do this does it do this that's also an anxious person that just needs to be reassured that everything's gonna be cool with you guys so if none of those things apply just stop replying don't know I'm kidding don't ever do that don't ever do that please okay I get I'd comped their account for free for life no their whole all of their accounts they were paying us yeah so really differed from the philosophy of the cool company that I worked for but I think it was really wonderful for the customer and they ended up just loving it and that's what counts that's what matters yes so I have a

29:26question about outsourcing support yeah you know single founder Sherriff you know every hour I spend in the support is an hour I'm not working on a bug it's not fixing features or anything totally how suggestions do you have on outsourcing support good sources you know technique strip tips training so how do you know about how many support emails you get per day well I try to shove everybody over to my support form instead yeah so I've been doing that now like if they give me an email I'm like hey I'm a single guy here go to the support forum there's stuff over there you know cuz most of the

29:59questions probably the vast majority of them 90% or more are all questions that are either answered in my FAQ or the things that they can search on in the forum clearly so okay so let's say you get less than 25 emails a day on support it's that's an opportune time for you to raise up a great support person who can be with you for a number of years but who's starting out sort of in this support role with you at the beginning of things we do outsource support very minimally we like to do it for people that have one to two people on their team so it's mostly people like this in

30:34the room and there are people like you who just they need to spend time on dev they can't be doing support for them so there's resources out there one of the other really great resources out there that I hesitate to tell you guys because it'll put me out of business it's find really loyal customers that like you and that are really excited about you and give them super star status in your forums to answer your customer questions on your behalf it works especially on stuff like on get satisfaction you can take someone who comments on a lot of stuff or who points people to there's an answer over here

31:06you can actually make them a representative of your company on a forum like that and if you really trust them pay them you know 15 bucks an hour to answer the 25 emails and in two hours or something like that so yeah okay other questions we're gonna move into the lightning round real quick here do you have a live the last question okay

31:32so the product that I sell is is very technical and very complex very kind of computer science II like everyone says and well good point that everyone is reinventing the Guggenheim machine or whatever it's called the groove in the groove in scene so the problem my question is and it's it's pretty good and it works pretty well most of the time but when I do get get bug reports they're really deep and really hard and it's like yeah I can I can look at this and it's gonna take me like the next six months to solve this problem what's what's the best way or would you speak

32:06to basically saying you're right you have a point you found a bug I'm sorry I'm not gonna get it fixed tomorrow or maybe ever that's it that's it you did it yeah so great I'm out of a job thanks a lot so I do that with people all the time and especially when you when you know hey this is a deep-seated bug that is where we're putting a lot of resources and figuring how to fix it and it's not a tomorrow fix or when it's a feature request that we know is not coming for years and years and years be honest because the problem is if you tell a

32:40person anything else he's gonna write you in a week did you get that bug fixed is an update coming and you don't ever want to string people along again honesty as Jason said endears people to you they want to be loyal to people who are honest to them so yeah be honest and if it's something that a lot of people are reporting you need to put it in a public place like on a forum or in your Twitter or whatever we know about this bug known issue we're working on it hard hard issue that's it okay we're gonna do a quick lightning round of my business advice can you hold it in

33:10just to the end anyone else who's got their hand up I do want to hear your questions but I want to run through these slides really quick so I started this business a year ago and I was at a very very lucky place because I had amazing advisors my last my former boss I had knew a lot of people in the industry and I got really great advice from them and it wouldn't do me any good to not share it with you some of the stuff is my own and some of it is not and I'm not giving attribution to anyone so you can give me credit for all the

33:40really good stuff so this is the first thing never earlene deep into business advice given to you by someone who doesn't have a fulfilling and healthy personal life I know we joke about the kid pictures but the kid pictures are important because it shows that these people up here have lives outside of coding all day long it shows that they have families to invest in and hobbies and other things that they're doing besides just sitting in their cave until 3:00 in the morning if I'm ever going to ask someone advice about anything I want to know that they have great relationships they have hobbies they're doing stuff outside of

34:11coding on top of that you want to surround yourself with people who don't give a [ __ ] about what you're building but love who you are and not the opposite we love conferences like this because it kind of gives us a sense of camaraderie with everyone but these are not the people that we need to surround ourselves with these are not the people that we need to be talking with or texting with all day long we need to find people who kind of give our egos a little bit of a slam because it helps us remember there's humility in what I do I'm not this great God building the next

34:38whatever I called it Guggenheim machine so anyway the next one is really really important I will take credit for this it's okay to give away your ideas you shouldn't keep your ideas you should just talk about your ideas because we don't live in an age anymore people here to steal your ideas you're gonna make money by executing the most elegant and harmless an interesting version of any idea not by being the only person to try it so it doesn't matter if there's competitors it doesn't matter if there's other people in the app store doing the same thing it matters whether you're doing it better and you're doing it more

35:09efficiently and you're a little bit kinder about it the next one

35:20absolutely same sentiment absolutely the next one go to therapy if you need to told me started a company they'll know what to do next trust me therapists are really great at this kind of stuff because they'll get you to talk about stuff you never gonna talk about but always think about you're paying the money so they can't walk away from you okay and they have experience of people transitioning from careers to career especially people who are over 30 thats one of the one of the biggest reasons that people go to therapy is because they're transitioning from career to career so they're trained in how to do

35:55the stuff they're trying to how you walk you through it it's very very very important next thing don't be a dick swagger is not something you need to be successful whatsoever in fact it will repel people from you and you want to be bringing people towards you and bringing people in to help you more and to be around you and to like you the next thing this is a piece of advice I got from a friend of mine Gary Vaynerchuk totally name-dropped right there if you want a matter find someone who's amazing and asked to buy them dinner and take them out and do this until they offer to do the same for you

36:25when they start offering next time it shows that there is engaged in your development as you are engaged in learning from them and that's a solid solid relationship that you can have with someone I know that there's a lot of controversy about the whole like sending entrepreneurs and famous people email us and let me buy you drinks let me buy you dinner trust me it's it's worth putting yourself out there because someone's gonna bite on it the next thing remember that unkind people are maniacally unkind to themselves first and foremost this includes your competitors who are gonna be saying crappy things about you this includes bad App Store reviews includes

37:01customers who are mean this includes anybody who's gonna tear you down on TechCrunch or hacker news or whatever remember that there there it makes their unkindness towards others more sad than annoying and keep that in perspective and also keep a perspective that you don't ever want to react in kind to anyone who's saying negative or poorly worded things to you next thing asked for advice from everyone including your customers ask for like people to write you feature requests if you know that there's stuff that you want to add to your I ask people what they think about it ask for advice from every single person that you meet because you're gonna get a

37:36lot of it and that's gonna be how you grow as a business leader as an entrepreneur as a CEO or whatever on top of that find a spiritual center that's bigger than you and spend time thinking about it and I don't mean religion at all I don't mean like yeah I don't need a religion anything that's bigger than you that you can dwell on and spend time thinking about and know that there's something that grounds you out there and again this gets back to having a healthy personal life and a healthy life outside of your work next one I'm totally calling out Dan on this because he

38:08talked about it yesterday and I think he was wrong be good to your body donate at your desk get enough sleep we are so grow party about powering through these like you know work and work times we we brag about not eating and not getting asleep and I think that's a detriment to your mind I think it's a detriment to the work that you do I think when you're well rested you make better decisions and when you eat your brain is fueled and those things should never be compromised just because you have the will to win you can have both at the same time okay so that's it that's my

38:37advice that's all I have at Taco Bell don't forget that and there's a couple other questions you guys want to ask him real quick kind of both whatever works for you whatever you think is most productive for you mostly for me it's at home like none of my friends have any idea what I do all day long I've tried to explain it to em and they don't get it I think most of them think I'm unemployed I think I know my UPS guy thinks I'm unemployed because I see him more than pretty much anyone else they think I don't know what they think I do when I'm gone all the time maybe I'm

39:13just on vacations three days a week but yeah so whatever works for you you know I'm not sure if you answered this already but do you have a fire customers yeah and what what point do you decide I can't gonna fire that customer whenever they're addicted me yeah and and the second that it's gone over that line of I'm trying to be as helpful as I can and they're just not being responsive and and sometimes like I said you know in that side people that are unkind are kind for a reason and sometimes I need to vent and usually that ends up being like on the lowest denominator there and

39:50that's always a support person so there's a difference between needing to vent and me being telling a person I know you're frustrated I'm so sorry about this and then coming back and coming back and coming back it's just it's just being vicious I don't need to deal with that anymore that takes away from my time developing a great app for that person and for the other people who are really excited to use it we're gonna wrap up and head to lunch thank you sir thank you guys [Applause] you