# Your First 60 Days – Patrick McKenzie (Patio11) – MicroConf Starter 2018

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtmUJye7t4c
Duration: 38 min
Language: English
Words: 7572
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/PtmUJye7t4c

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[0:00] [Music] [Applause] good morning everybody couldn't ask for a better height man than that okay so hidey-ho everybody my name is Patrick McKenzie better known as patty 11 on the Internet's for those of you who don't know me I ran depending how many you count it 5 software slash consulting slash training businesses over the course of about ooh 2006 through 2016 more recently I joined stripe I'll tell you a little bit about that later I've been at Microsoft for a very long time so in the first Microsoft back in 2011 Rico and I were engaged now we have two wonderful children sadly they couldn't make this year and I

[0:46] know we have some folks who are the plus one out in the audience thank you so much for coming the the thing that I say every year is that this is why we do it that part of the ethos of Microsoft is creating a business that allows us to lead the life we want to live and to be present in our families be present in our communities to have a better way of working and the thing that I've come to appreciate and I think that the folks who have been doing this for a few years I can also appreciate is that it's not just why we do it it's also how we do it

[1:18] the unsung hero behind every business that has a that has a founder with the family is the family and those of you who who have been in the situation know what I'm talking about so can we get a round of applause for both the family members in the audience and those who are supporting us at home

[1:38] so I always I was one slide faster than I thought it was I always I think what am I going to talk about this year and I try to be like super tactical and crunchy while being a little inspirational so I was thinking okay what is this super tactical crunchy thing that you want to do over the next 60 days and then I thought ooh maybe I've been spending a little too much time recently in Silicon Valley because this is not really a 60 day endeavor and oh I hit the big black button yeah sorry okay recoverable IRCA and the you're going to produce value in your business

[2:22] over a time scale of your career and plus or minus that's 40 years and so the next 60 days are important and want to give you some actionable advice for what to do on them but I want you to like keep an eye on the long game you're producing value in your community value for yourself producing things that will sit with you four years from now not for four years from now hulls off or four years from now to for many years from now and so you should be making decisions with that in mind when you're thinking about decision making for the long haul not every decision you have to

[2:56] make right now has to be the right one you're going to make a lot more small bets Brett much rather you make 10,000 small mistakes than one big mistake most of this at work we have this thing called like a trapdoor decision it's virtually a reversible after after you've done that very little of what you're doing business is irreversible particularly at our scales even if you make the wrong business entirely which I've done at least twice probably lie closer to three times and like that's a reversible decision you can you can kill something very early without any user facing consequence if you're already in the business you can sell the business off

[3:30] to someone and do something new so I want you to be quickly decisive with regards to things that don't matter in the long run if you're if you're wrong make more decisions make them faster rather than agonizing over is this exactly ready for launch right now and all my bug bugs done is this piece I am writing perfect the door and do things with an eye towards the long-haul there's so many incentives in culture to maximize for the short-term thing to say like oh I'm blogging I should blog about that thing that's in the news this week because that will get more attention but that does not create value for you over

[4:04] the long term you have a sharply limited amount of time and so that as a entrepreneur who's doing that doing this for yourself or with a small team do things which will matter years from now if you're going to write write about something write about something that will still be a thing five ten twenty years down a down the line write it like you're gonna own it so I was watching this bad movie recently and I won't go into the specifics of the bad movie it's your highness if you are tired after microcon fun want to watch a bad movie it's a great bad movie and at one point the

[4:40] evil wizard like flies into a kingdom and tries to kidnap the princess from a wedding and the king you know good king righteous is like how are you going to beat all of my knights and my armies to kidnap the princess and the evil wizard says magic duh he doesn't say duh he says a word that is trademarked by a samuel l.jackson which is not appropriate for my cookout and how are you going to build a business in the next sixty days grinding duh not this kind of grinding there are two easy ways to make money at micro comm from one is to charge more for your products and the other is to

[5:12] get into more poker hands with me but when I say grinding what I mean is that you do not need the long-term perfect brand strategy you do not need the systems and processes that you're going to have and your 5 of your business you do not need to feel like you are the expert on the subject you do not need to even say it with confidence I know what I'm doing you need to go out there every day do things that are repetitive that creates small amounts of value and that you can do again in the future and you need to do it a lot over time and do it

[5:46] more like more repetition than it's comfortable it's tough for me because I have a sort of like business a DD but do the grinding the number one question that I get asked from folks who are at roughly our stage is what should I build I've tried to answer that question for years I've come to the come to conclusion that it is just a tough question to answer it because it is the wrong question to ask first the right question to ask first is who should I serve who when you're talking to do you feel a real connection with do you feel calling to their community like this is

[6:16] not going to be merely my job this is not going to be a thing that I build to trade for money this is going to be a part of my life for the next several years be smarter than me I had a great idea for business once I won't go into much detail it was the longest short of it would be that I would be talking to receptionists at dental offices a lot for the next couple years of my life and Pell D who runs balsamic said Patrick I think I know you I just have to ask are you going to bounce up with enthusiasm every morning managing the schedule of

[6:47] dentist offices and I said oh god no but it's going to be a great business if the prospect of working with the community that you are choosing to serve causes you to think oh god no if you feel contempt for the customers that you are seeking out and maybe don't do that just be speaking which and the desire to serve someone is it's a tough thing to quantify like I can't tell you who to marry like what how do you answer the question who should you love the desire to serve is a little bit different than love but generally when when I got to the point in my career where I realized

[7:34] when I talk to software people I always enjoy the conversation whether there's a developer whether whether they're in business I bounce with enthusiasm I was in a business that served teachers for about eight years and after about six years of talking to teachers it's like oh god please no please no you're going to ask me to do like unpaid tech support again and I was really really tired of like getting asked how many it doesn't even matter and find the people that you don't get tired talking to doesn't necessarily have to be a group that you're a member of but one that you can empathize with and that you feel hmm yes

[8:07] if these aren't my people already I want to be like that when I grew up or at least I want to work with them find people whose problems are tractable like a lot of folks here are very mission focused and you might be mission focus to do something like I really want to make a dent in global poverty and that is an awesome mission to have that is a very difficult mission to execute on and meaningfully move the needle as a single person who is paying it out of your own pocket you it is much easier to find find a group of folks who have problems that a single person working

[8:40] really hard for the next couple of years can like materially impact and this is a controversial bit of advice when I talk to some people it's relatively uncontroversial and I could cough and honestly I think it's responsible for like the baseline level of success of microcon attendees having roughly doubled in the last three years of me just chatting around in the hallway track serve people who can afford to pay for solutions largely that means businesses sometimes it means like you know you're selling directly to customers but the customers tend to be programmers and they're using it for improving their own professional opportunities if you have charitable

[9:14] impulses it is much easier to do those terrible impulses from running a healthy business than it is to do it the to attempt to make money serving the charitable impulses I was serving teachers during my day job and having like my fun nights and weekend time talking to entrepreneurs and I was doing a poor job at both relative to I could have had my had like a day job be serving entrepreneurs and software people made a lot more money a lot easier and then subsidize the price of everything I was doing to teachers down to free and it would have been much less frustrated with talking to teachers

[9:45] every day and they probably would have been less frustrated working with me I think we have this image that when you think of the business that you want to be running when you grow up that's wow they've got it all put together there's this tapestry of Awesomeness they've got all the pieces of the puzzle figured out I work in a company and oh man we do not have it figured out everybody is making this up as they go along I think Patrick Allison had a great quote at Michael cough gross like the first time he walked into a bank office and tried to get a credit card processing for stripe

[10:20] they felt like three squirrels in a trench coat that were impersonating a business the thing that Patrick might not have mentioned is that that feeling never goes away ever don't feel like you need to have this what you want to do is have something closer to this you're building a puzzle over time you're creating you're grinding every day you're adding a little bit now puzzles aren't the greatest analogy because like puzzles there is some defined end state there is no end state for your business you're going to be snapping little pieces together every piece that you get gets you a little more there's multi-dimensions this so like a piece

[10:57] that's about marketing gets you a little more credibility with customers a few more prospects etc another topic that you know well a little bit of product development gets you even more satisfied customers snap snap snap snap snap and when you think did I accomplish something today your question is is there another piece of the puzzle that wasn't there yesterday and will still be there in years and if you can say yes to that you've had an excellent day if you can't say say yes to that do things better tomorrow grind it out the one thing that counts the puzzle piece but that doesn't produce something that's like visible

[11:28] and tangible and that you could literally point to it is talking to people it is never a bad time to talk to a customer or talk to a prospect if you're having high value high bandwidth conversations with them about their problems about their desires about what they need I'm a pretty shy guy I hate sending out email generally I hate phone calls these are not great attributes to have in an entrepreneur but some of you might be like be like me so hey you can make it work just let you know if you are capable of like sending out cold emails to people that you've never met

[11:59] that is an awesome awesome skill to have and there was once this Irish guy who liked cold email bingo card creator to get them to switch away from PayPal you never talked to me before and email went to spam filter very expensive spam filter miss guys thank you google what should be working in the next 60 days should you be immediately doing product development build a platform before you build your product if you don't already have a platform do I mean a platform like install Ruby on Rails and get the magic technical goodness together so that you can build a platform on top of it I don't I mean build a marketing

[12:34] platform you hear people say in the community audience first build the things that will allow you to engage an audience and to improve it over time you were doing the grinding build the thing that you can snap in other pieces too what does that mean can create Lee they're going to build three friend catchers a friend catcher is this word that my mom taught me when I was younger and I think my mom might be the only person who's in the world which is unfortunate more people should know it she said Patrick you should learn to cook and I said restaurants are a thing in the world I never have to learn to

[13:06] cook and my mom said no don't look don't learn to cook because you want to eat food learn to cook because if you learn to cook you will have a built-in excuse for the rest of your life to bring people over to your house no one who knows how to cook will ever lack for friends like that is a smart idea when you're building friend catchers you're going to be building something that solves problems for people because no one who solves problems for people will ever lack for people to talk to who have problems they will come with their problems to you and people coming with

[13:37] their problems to you is an excellent position to be in as an entrepreneur right five emails we'll talk a little bit about that later and then spend 45 days of grinding it out no great brand strategy no you don't have to build the systems in process yet you can figure out that later but every day wake up in the morning you email people you get on more Skype calls you write another post you get on Twitter etc etc grind it the heck out let's talk a little bit more about friend catchers what's the eye like how do you think of what you want to produce you wanted to

[14:08] be in the sweet spot of this Venn diagram and hits resonance tractable and underserved start with tractable you want your friend catcher to genuinely solve the problem then it promises to self which means that your friend catcher should probably not be how to solve global warming instead it should be something like if you were writing a written article that's in the four thousand a thousand word range which happens to be my sweet spot what's about what's something you can cover great in that topic like salary negotiation for engineers is something that you can cover and that in that amount that's the single best blog post I've ever written

[14:48] don't write blog post I'll tell you why later but like that's the last word on salary darshan negotiation for engineers you can well you can certainly learn more of it but it's like the last to last like primer that anyone needs to read on it and 500,000 people have visit that every year why because it is resonant you want something there's this wonderful word in Japanese automata which means like you've just heard of something and you're like oh yeah that thing that thing totally something I deal with everybody deals with that right you want something that when your audience sees that it exists not only did it say oh yes I knew I didn't even

[15:24] know I needed that and you might need that I know other people need that too because that will incentivize them to promote it to their friends so like if you are doing training in the community and I was talking to someone who's writing ebooks and courses for the JavaScript community so you find the things that are like pushed emotional buttons for the JavaScript community and not in the cheesy way like react versus you just light to the max but things like can I get a show of hands among JavaScript developers here okay everybody look at somebody that has their hand up right now and watch what

[15:57] happens when I say these words build pipeline yeah right about the build pipeline because everybody knows it is terrible terrible terrible stuff and then you want to do things that are underserved I like to face this as filling holes in the internet you know like the one one guide to your field of choice has probably been done 100 times the 201 guide specific to a particular industry probably never done the like you can generate an infinite number of combinations of hey how do you use technology a plus technology be together where that is something that people are doing every day and cutting their teeth on every day and crying tears over every

[16:36] day but no one has ever committed to the freaking internet yet you can be that person and own that combination really until the end of time when I was doing my last startup starfighter and nsq which is this this event based queuing technology WebSockets I want to tie nsq to the WebSockets clearly some Engineer somewhere has done that and there was nothing on the net and we looked for weeks and I had to like write it all by myself I would much prefer to have written to read the guide about that I could have read I had written by any of the there's probably at least five people in here

[17:07] who have written that code themselves great form factors for friend catchers again find things that really energize you find things that you love doing find things that you good at but if you just don't have ideas like what am I good at yet because you haven't been running this business for long no problem I happen to be pretty decent at writing was not decent at writing for teaching purposes until I started business but the thing that basically made my career is the stick a fork a minute it's done this is the like I'm planting a flag in this topic I'm just going to write a guide about it and people come to it for

[17:43] years a calculator which takes place replaces an Excel spreadsheet this is unreasonably effective because most of the world cannot program even at the level of like a silly Excel spreadsheet so there is almost no calculation too trivial for a calculator for that to be material to folks like there is a I do a be testing quite a bit and every time I do a be testing somebody internally it's like oh how do I do in a be testing has just a statistical significance calculation like oh that's really easy you just do a lot and know that Google a be testing calculator and go to one of

[18:20] the same two pages that has had that up for 10 years and I know those pages have generated tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of leads because people just don't want to do two minutes of work in Excel and calculators are wonderful thing definitive curated list of resources and I honestly don't like listicles but this isn't a listicle this isn't like ten cute cat photos that you can use while selling enterprise software that that listicle is an actual thing that was produced at a client of mine you again you're producing things that stand the test of time you're planting a flag on the Internet what is

[18:58] the definitive list of everything there's been written that is great and outstanding in this field like Josh Kaufman is probably still somewhere in the audience he writes the personal MBA Josh Kaufman has the definitive list of business books and that is this thing and that does fantastically well for him yeah he updates it every year and then chichis Amy Howie is also in the audience I am friends with Amy hoy specifically because of the Ruby on Rails cheat sheet Beckham day like if you're getting started with Ruby on Rails and there's all these magic commands that you don't don't know yet like mmm rails create something or there too to make a new

[19:34] project or how do load model objects etc she put it all in one page of downloadable PDF file which had like some nice design because Amy is a wonderful designer and I remember that it was pink and then three years later I met her in person that like oh my god that's Amy Hawaii that's a motive the Ruby on Rails cheat sheet I've had that up next to my computer for the last three years and I was literally afraid to talk to her but it turns out she's awesome and you can be the person that people are afraid to talk to you know you can put on the page that that you

[20:07] host your friend Ketron hey if you are interested in this I would like to sell send you more things you like give me your email address I would have totally been in Hawaii my email address over that one I think I did probably this does not have to be rocket science and like it's literally filled a little bit of copy give people a promise of what you're sending and this is what stripe does on the bottom of the Atlas guides and it is unreasonably effective you have the opportunity to do some things that companies can't do at scale I would abuse that opportunity one thing is that

[20:42] how many people here have like 100 or 200 or indicative Li that sort of number of people on your email list okay so if you're in that situation you might feel oh goodness I don't have enough emails other people have like 20,000 I don't know if I can get any business results out of that you have a hundred people who are who want to hear from you and you're getting more people who come in every week and you should email every single one of them individually you're grinding wake up in the morning see who signed up since yesterday open up Gmail not your email thing of

[21:13] choice open up Gmail and say hey this is me I am unreasonably interested in this topic I would love to chat with you about it or anything else that you want to chat about and grind it do it every day until it gets wet until you get sick of it everything you need to know about email for in one flight and actually wrote a course about email courses at some point I will put a link in it in the microwave to give you a free copy of it but this is the cheat sheet version every subject line that you write make a promise of the value that is in that email over

[21:48] deliver on your promises that's the one copywriting trick you need to know if you know no others your email course should have about 75% educational material 25% salesy the sales these stuff tends to work better if it's an email all by itself than sandwiched in between educational stuff it's very important that you educate folks and continue creating value before you ask for value in return it is also important that you ask for the freaking sale at some point believe me like this is my community you are my people I know some of you have the same issue I had when I was starting out like I'm embarrassed

[22:22] about charging even $20 for this thing that I have spent weeks of my life working on I get that you have to ask for the sale from the delivery of email courses because the moment at which someone signs up for your email course is the moment if they're like maximum happiness in their relationship to date and at that moment when the like iron is hot or whatever I don't speak it naturally anymore and like immediately start providing value followed up with even more value and then followed it up with a sales message you can back off a little bit like give people a little time to breathe in the relationship

[22:57] decide I really like the kind of this person jib I like their voice I like what they are teaching me or you know not for me there's a world of infinite choices out there on the internet and you want to find the people who are exactly right for you and you want to over deliver value to them over time at the end of the email course I typically do six to eight emails over the course of the month but six to eight emails was a lot to write just start with five you can write five emails in a day just establish expectation that you're going to be sending people people more things

[23:29] you like that's all specific you have to be every two weeks four weeks if you get really busy but I would tend to say mail them every two weeks rather than ever before weeks I have some prescriptive advice on checkpoints that you want to reach in your business there is something that you might consider as a research phase like it's become a little bit of a cliche talk to customers I want you to I want you to think that I'm you are going to be researching and you are going to be talking to customers for the rest of your life 40 years here but you are not

[24:06] out of the research phase into like the doing the cool stuff about my business phase until you've had at least ten great conversations with people if you're building a SAS business make that 25 conversations why do I say this because like we're developers we're designers were writers we are builders of things and that sounds fun to us typically I think many of us here are introverts like myself and it is very easy to like you know go in the code cave for it'll just be six weeks my last company it'll just be three months no problem we've got three experienced engineers on this nine months later no

[24:40] end in sight and we had to have been talking to anyone for that time so timebox like you know commit to talking to people first keep talking to people but don't start don't start like the fun expressive work until after you've talked at least as many people you're not done with grimy and out and sending out like individualized email to people and cold emailing folks etc etc until you've got 500 emails on your lists after that you can start writing you know a scalable marketing engine like figuring out okay what new guides don't want to put like optimizing my email email course etc etc don't worry

[25:17] about that until you have 500 emails just keep writing before you publish assess have 10 commits to buy it on day one if you can't get 10 commits to buy it you'll have an awfully hard time selling it you're going to want to establish a reputable cadence of doing the work I have this funny thing about me I've had years where I've worked five hours a week like when I was running bingo card grader I've had years where I worked like a 20-hour work week when I was working and doing a point reminder a 40-hour work week a 60-hour workweek 100 hour work week and it's funny no matter

[25:49] how much I work I can only get three things done in the week and I here's how I always prioritize it it's like a dinner plate I've got my main dish the one thing I want to get accomplished this that's half of my dinner plate I've got two other things that I want to do that will almost certainly get done by the end of this week and then everything else is dessert and I expected probably not to get it done and I would encourage you like one of those three like they're the 50% or one of the 25% allocations should be something that you don't like

[26:19] but you need to do and one of them should always be talking to customers you can allocate the other ones how you want but what you probably shouldn't do is to have business a deity like me and say okay this is going to be be the week where I set up the server and also do a little bit of coding on the projects and I think I want to interview some customers and maybe do a podcast or two and done it you will get to Friday and have very little to show for it every day that you work you want to show up with objective external in to see of

[26:44] progress or talking to a customer like sometimes talking to a customer does not produce an artifact on the internet but everything else you do have an artifact on the Internet have another article that you've written that you can show to people if you can only get a tweet out every day a tweet is better than nothing we saw excellent examples earlier if like astounding amounts of value that can that can be delivered in like one tweet and one screenshot you should build the actual thing at some point it should be awesome I really can't tell you much advice on how to build awesome things the good

[27:18] party is I think all of you have probably got pretty dialed in on that one raise your hand if you identify as having a little bit of impostor syndrome yeah I feel you building an awesome thing does not mean you have to have the best thing in the world building the awesome thing does not mean you have to ship everything you want ship when you want when you first start out building the awesome thing does not mean that it has to be a work of outstanding the genius that will be cited by people 200 years from now believe me once you start doing business you will realize where

[27:57] the bar is for businesses in the economy and it's like okay here's where you get sued by people and then here's the bar and you are so intent illegal for the bar right now it it is honestly a little bit disconcerting you might think oh I'm competing against all these people in the world other smart operators that Microsoft funding companies in Silicon Valley all the traditional folks that are doing this and less software oriented kind of way you have some advantages and I would like you to lean into them one of your advantages is the simple phrase this is what I - because you are going to spend the next like

[28:36] even if you just spend 60 days on this you are going to be much better than almost all of humanity about that topic you have spent 60 days on like just do the math how many people have ever done JavaScript build pipelines as a thing for 60 days like with that crazy fire in the ice very few even among people who work with JavaScript every day this is what I do build trust with customers it's like I don't really know if this is this is right for me trust me this is what I do honestly so and you're not just saying that you're representing it by your actions so I recently bought

[29:19] a house in Japan and I was applying for mortgages and the person who was selling me the house the broker for the selling company said you'll be fine and emerges and I'm like I have an issue about me it's sort of a complexion kind of issue that Japanese banks don't really love I'm a little worried he's like don't worry I got this and we got four approvals on for applications for mortgage I'm like wow I got really lucky there and he said yeah really lucky might have been me finding every underwriter for it and talking to them for two hours and like oh wow you did

[29:56] that he's like this is what I do you can be that guy you can be unreasonably good at this at the tiny details and you can show people like again externally verifiable industry of progress you you show people how good you are at it you can be irrationally responsive to customers a business that has like hundreds of thousands of people working at it has to have processes we're relatively low paid people are like you know they're cooking a book to order on what they can can do for their customers you can do so much better than that every time you can promise the moon and the silver track the moon and stars

[30:31] and silver chain you can deliver it a week later because you are not just the the head of customer support you are also doing all the engineering decisions and you are also like willing to do whatever it takes to make your first couple customers happy and then super power you can move fast and make things not like the usual formulation of this one and most companies in the world do not have a development team that is capable of doing anything they don't have a marketing team that is capable of doing anything in like less than three quarters of notice you can build things that both increase the value of the

[31:05] thing you are building but also increase your ability to market and sell that thing you're a building and I've had presentations on this before you can check the market craft for archives it would not be a Microsoft speech if I do not tell you to charge more charging more will get you better customers charging more will make you more money charging more will help you attract the kind of people who you want to serve for the next couple years of your life more than what patrick whatever your number is right now that number is too low a little bit of laughter this happens to be my true advice that i do to literally

[31:40] everyone including at work but if you just need to like you know take a photo and steal a price point these are some great price points i'll give you a few seconds to take the photo few more seconds as long as folks are taking the photo I'll talk you through a little bit of the theory behind the photo although I think it's like copy and paste these price points because they because they work partly there's some of my work partly it's just me stealing from other people feel free to steal this technology and we price things at multiple tiers because we want to give our customers the option to put my hand

[32:19] up and say I'm getting outstanding value from you because then you will be able to segment on the people who are getting outstanding value from you and say okay why did you do that and it might be because I have an unusually strong need for this like I have a team of 20 people who are blocked on this javascript build pipeline issue okay that's interesting that tells you more about what you should be building next like you should be doing training for teams it might be because they're in a segment of the industry that you might not naively have been aware of but just happens to have like a very keen key

[32:51] need for it um backups for example like every business that has the server probably should have backups but some businesses care a lot more about them than others healthcare for example I asked me why et cetera charging more it's not just to get more money it's to help people put their hands up and and help you discover who like the true audience that you're serving is a little bit about stripe Ellis so I've joined stripe I work on a product called stripe Atlas we help companies get up and running so with an incorporation of either a c-corp it's the typical kind of corporation you would find unlike the

[33:29] New York Stock Exchange or an LLC which is a thing that I used in all five of my personal businesses we give you a business bank account we give you access to a community of entrepreneurs who are roughly similar in character to the microcon community so you can ask questions all the time we do a bunch of other stuff and there are 15 people working on making it better every week so if it's interesting to you come talk to myself come talk to Alex who is in the middle here and waving his hand we would love to chat with you about it and we have a bunch of cards that give you

[33:58] free access to Alice what is that free thing I mean it's kind of like a free puppy a free puppy is a dangerous thing so we will we will pay for your like we strike will pay for your incorporation we will pay for your first year of registered agent fee but the puppy will be wagging its tail next year and saying tax compliance and so like it's a commitment so I would incur encourage you to like make the commitment was eyes open but I honestly and truly believe like I've been a member of this community before I was an employee of stripe and I will be a

[34:29] member of this community probably long after I hang up my striped jacket like it is a great option for you and we worked very hard this last year making it even better for micro folks some boring business advice get a new credit card don't get a new credit card because like okay new credit cards have like a sign up of offer associate with them 10,000 delta miles here's the sign up offer associated with a credit card that you get for a business and it can I have eight a personal card or business card get one week of your life back because if you put every expense for the

[35:02] business on this credit card then you have credit card statements next year in April or whenever your taxes are due that you can refer and find every expense for the business and it turns out in the kind of businesses we run like tracking revenue is pretty easy because it all typically comes through like a single source like you know payments providing company maybe you're using PayPal there's like a very small number of places that money is coming in there's a large number of places where it's coming out and easy to lose those sign up for for Google Apps account on your own domain name make an account at

[35:33] alias that you can use for all your staff things that you sign up for my count was forty believe it or not and at some point in the future you might want to share those counts was someone else they don't have to move them all serially from your personal name to to the new person make your receipts at alias anything you buy just forward it to the receipt set or have the provider mail it to receipts that don't directly get a password manager and both for the security benefits of having a password manager and also for being able to remember dear God where are all my

[36:03] accounts and believe me it gets complicated as you go along I mean from get an accountant accountant is the professional in your life that will make you the most amost amount of money relative to what do you pay for them find a peer group to talk with meet with them regularly if you have made friends and we're Michael cough and you can establish a regular cadence of meeting that is great for keeping your morale up it is great for being able to talk through the challenges the business that your usual organic support group will not be able to emphasize with and it's great for talking shop and bouncing ideas off each

[36:35] other d risk your family life I'm a little bit short on time so I can't talk too much about personal financial management but there's a person who like is irrationally interested in personal financial management in this room that's John Knox at John WAV Han yeah up here in the front John has forgotten more about this than that I will ever know and I know quite a bit about this stuff so please talk to him about it this is my email address both in personal life for the next 40 years and death stripe and everybody who came from stripe this year really really wants to talk to you

[37:07] there's we care about your experience of our products we care about supporting your businesses and all your endeavors both now and in the future and we really really sincerely care about it working for you there's some stuff in the industry right now that is a little that is a little bit difficult our company is growing relatively rapidly we're having our fair share of teething pains we would much rather hear that thing your feedback from you then hear about it like three years from now in the hacker news post about oh what happened to the stripe they used to be the cool people but now they've they're not representing

[37:40] the needs of small entrepreneurs and developers so please email us at any time we will put a link in the microcon slack for the email addresses to everybody including the CEO and he is totally serious he will write you back he will be very happy to get email from you he may write you back sometimes he writes me back thank you very much Patrick thanks very much [Applause]

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