# MicroConf Remote 2020

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1WNvRoSays
Duration: 3 hr 50 min
Language: English
Words: 44697
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/q1WNvRoSays

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[0:08] [Music]

[0:18] [Music]

[0:29] let's get the show started welcome to microconf remote the must-see tv experience of the year for the next five hours we're going to take you on a binge-worthy journey that will showcase a story arc that every bootstrap founder aspires to create microconf has been the meeting place for thousands of founders over the last decade for years we've talked about hosting microconf remote but if there was ever a year to take the show online 2020 is it when we launched microconf back in 2011 terms like stair stepping value metric and the long slow sas ramp of death didn't even exist and the idea of building a bootstrap

[1:05] startup to a transformational level of success seemed out of the question for years this movement has blown expectations out of the water and has created an entire economy of sas products with the sole goal of helping others reach scalable sustainable levels of success we've had conversations with thousands of founders who have started life-changing businesses generate thousands tens of thousands or more in revenue each month we've seen folks take back their sense of freedom by having the chance to work for themselves on their own time we've seen groundbreaking products that have changed the way we work all while avoiding the rat race chasing after venture capital and we believe that you can do the same

[1:45] that's why we're here today to show you that no matter the stage of your founder journey you have all of the resources you need to build something that can change your life you're going to hear from an all-star lineup who have reached some of the most celebrated milestones in a business's growth from launch to the grind towards your first 10k of mrr then onto a pair of co-founders who have found a clear strategic path to help them blow past 100k of mrr and finally we'll leave you with one of the most successful stories of a tech company that has endured the dot-com bubble economic downturns and was able to launch another business

[2:18] in the midst of a pandemic to viral levels of success hi my name is patrick i'm based in the dallas texas area and i am in the midst of starting my very first productized service business in the healthcare space never been to a microconf before but found this community tangentially through some other podcasts and have really been inspired nearly 500 of you are brand new to the microcomp community we want to welcome you these are your people and we know because there are people too hi folks my name is anna mast and i'm the cto of boondocker's welcome which is an online driveway surfing community for our

[2:57] viewers i went to my first microcomp last spring as a lucky scholarship recipient and i was feeling a bit stuck in my business and i had a decent offer to sell on the table so i arrived thinking i would learn how to run a real internet business and plan to start fresh the very first night at the mixer i had a conversation with a fellow attendee who suggested i read before the exit by dan andrew of tropical nba fame that piece of advice alone was worth the trip the cost of my flight through all the hallway track conversations i had i came to realize that the business i had was a

[3:25] real business and i started breaking free of some of my imposter syndrome for those of you returning to microconf thank you you're the reason we've been grinding away at this event for nearly a decade and why when we couldn't come together in april we knew we needed to make some magic happen so grab a snack a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and welcome to the microconf remote studio uh it's time to start the founder journey of getting to your first fail so corinne pope is a long time microconf attendee i've had many conversations with her and i'm stoked that she's here to share the stage with me today she's

[3:59] the founder of speckled a tool that helps product managers build the right thing at the right time after stair stepping her away from a corporate gig through an info product business and then to a product apprenticeship she recently made the leap into building sas products and in the quest for product market fit she enjoys talking to customers designing and developing new features and of course plusing over conversion rates as we all do failing from austin texas she fuels her enjoyment of running stupid long distances her words not mine with tex-mex and toppo chico so corrine pope welcome to the show thanks for joining me on microcom

[4:33] thanks rob all right good morning everyone i'm really excited to be here and talk to you about the story of how i inadvertently launched speckled now from my story i hope that you can learn from some of my mistakes and take away some new tactics to apply to your own ideas i'll start with the origin of the idea and how it got off to an admit at least slow start talk about the groundwork that was laid way before this ever became a thing and finally move into how i managed to build up the momentum that i needed to launch my product so let's get into it

[5:13] how many of you have had this happen to you you get an idea you're super excited about it so you run to your journal or your note-taking app you write it down the more you start thinking about it the more convinced you are that this is the one like this is the idea that you need to work on right now so you spend probably a little bit too much time picking up just the perfect domain and then you dig into the fun parts now this happens to me a bit more frequently than i'd like to admit but you know the beginnings part is just so much fun

[5:50] however fast forward a couple of months sometimes even a few weeks and something happens somehow you've lost a bit of momentum and your great idea has migrated over to your project graveyard now my project graveyard is a pretty expensive place the amount of money i spend on domain renewal fees is straight up embarrassing but you know this isn't a place where we really want our projects to land we want to launch them put them out into the world get people on board and make a tool that provides value to the people that we serve right now quite honestly this whole cycle is how speckled got started off

[6:41] it was a sunday in june in the middle of a hot texas summer i was sitting outside writing in my journal brainstorming some ideas i had a job at the time and we were getting all of this work piled onto our plate but no new resources to handle it so we had to prioritize pretty ruthlessly so i was like okay i have this issue and i get the feeling that other people may too so i'm gonna register a domain and get to work so i design the website write the copy start drawing up some user flows and wireframes but then life gets in the way now as i mentioned i was working a job

[7:22] my team members were everywhere from eastern europe to the u.s to the philippines and it felt like i was in meetings from sun up to sun down on some days and to be honest at this point my job was the top priority and you know the time needed to get this idea really really kicked off just wasn't quite there but still you know this idea kept bugging me it elizabeth gilbert has this concept in her book big magic that ideas are going to constantly come visit you they're going to wake you up in the middle of the night distract you and not leave you alone until they have your fullest attention

[8:05] and then in a quiet moment they're going to ask do you want to work with me and at this point you can say no you know that's okay maybe you're not the right idea for me you know why don't you go and meander over to my project graveyard or you can say yes and so this idea had been really bugging me and for so long i wanted to work on it so i said yes at the end of 2019 i had made the decision to leave my job quite honestly i was a bit burnt out at the time i needed some time to recover and get

[8:44] all those creative juices back so i took some time to relax hang out with my family over the holidays follow some curiosities and then once i was ready start working on this idea and about seven later seven months later i inadvertently launched my product and today i want to talk to you about the time between committing to the idea and actually launching like what was the difference between this project that landed up launching and all the other ones that had landed in my side project graveyard now in prep for this talk i did a lot of looking back to try to figure out what it was that made this one different

[9:27] and i realized it came back to this concept of momentum now previously i do the whole get super excited about something lose momentum kind of think but this idea it managed to achieve a sort of escape velocity and avoid the graveyard and there were two things i realized that helped me achieve this escape velocity and that was to have a strong base from which to launch and the other one was the tactics that i implemented to get enough momentum to get this thing out into the world so let's first talk about building your base now to get this started you're going to need a strong launch pad that you can

[10:09] push off of and the great thing about this part is it's something that you can work on way before you ever start building a single thing and for me the first part of this base is made out of confidence and skills and and this component took a good ten years for me to build and you know i'll just put it out there i'm not the most confident person in the world you know many days on this journey i've woken up and been like oh my god what did i get myself into can i really do this and you know other days it's like okay this is great i can't believe i get to

[10:44] do this on a day-to-day basis this is awesome so you know while i'm not 100 confident i am about 80 of the way there and i realized before starting that this that if if i could get to 80 confident and build the skills that i knew that i would need i could manage to pick up the rest along the way so i started working on more and more ambitious projects now rob calls this the stair-step approach and it's an approach that took that i took that worked for me all right so i started off in a corporate gig i was doing project management for government i.t infrastructure projects let me tell

[11:27] you it was a complete snooze fest i could only push papers around and follow arbitrary processes for so long before i began to ask is this really something i want to do the rest of my life so a couple years into this role i decided to start a little info products business on this side there i learned the basics of running a little internet business how to build and distribute a product and how to make a little bit of money on the web however i also learned that you should pick a niche you like and you should pick a market that is going to be able to

[12:03] support you financially now i didn't either i picked a niche that could not support me and i quickly began bumping up against the wall now the goal was always to build a product but i didn't feel like i was quite there yet i was missing some skills and i realized that so i swallowed my pride and i went and i got a job working for someone else now i was managing someone else's product but i was working on developing my product sense learning how to manage a development team do onboarding calls conduct customer interviews and all other things that come along with running a sas product

[12:42] and after a few years i was a bit tired this darn idea was still knocking down my door i was ready for a change my confidence was almost there and i had developed the skills that i need to get started but confidence and skills aren't the only thing that you need to construct your launch pad you you need a community now i'd always thought of myself as a bit of a lone wolf like i don't need anyone i could do this on my own it's going to be fine but over time i started working out finding a community and now that i have one i realized just

[13:22] how critical it has been along the way and there are some really great communities out there micro conf connect is a great example there's also indie hackers maker pad women make i'm in the go rails community and i love that so go find a community contribute and give more than you take really dig in and find your tribe next up join a mastermind they're going to give you the accountability that you need to push through from week to week and they're going to be the sounding board that you need on this often lonely path my mastermind group members are on the call supporting me right now so

[13:57] hey guys also consider getting a mentor now if you're going to go straight up ask someone that has never heard from you will you be my mentor you're probably not going to have a good time you know the people you want to be your mentor are often really busy in demand people so that being said if you get stuck on something and you want them to weigh in maybe type it up in an email add a little context shoot it over to them and if they respond then that's great you know you take their advice and you work on closing that feedback loop let them know how their

[14:36] you know their advice went and you know start building that relationship and if they don't respond no worries okay um and then finally this is this kind of this kind of thing is something that i wish i had known before i had gotten started so i just wanted to make sure to include it realize that not everyone is going to understand this path you know it's not a role at some famous corporation complete with a matching 401k plan and three weeks vacation it's a little different some family and friends may not get it at first and heck even my parents have no idea what it is that i do on a day-to-day basis

[15:17] now when xander called me about speaking to all of you i was so excited one of the first things i did when i got off the phone was to call my parents and let let them know so you know they said hey hey mom and dad like i'm gonna be speaking speaking at microcontrol and they're like oh oh that's nice corinne congratulations you know that'll be a great thing for you to put on your resume for when it's time to get a real job it's like ouch but you know i think they'll get it maybe eventually at least i'm secretly hoping that they do but the funny thing that i realized from

[15:52] this is that you don't need permission to go get started on the path like you you can just go get start get go get started so go start build your confidence build your skills and then get ready for the next phase get something out there and start building your momentum all right so let's start with the most logical place to start the idea now people say there's no such thing as a bad idea but i would say that a really good idea can help you get a lot more momentum than say just an okay idea now even though i had this idea for speckled i still spent some time making sure it

[16:34] was a good one and making sure it was a valid problem so i went and i made sure people were talking about this problem online that people were complaining about it in forums and websites and you know all those places online so you know that that was there i made sure people understood this category and were buying things like it i was not quite ready to start a whole product in a category that no one understood so i wanted to make sure that this was a category that existed and i wanted to make sure that i enjoy being around the kind of people who have this

[17:14] problem now i'm a product manager i love product people so i was like okay i think i'm good with that one i can hold my own and this was kind of the basic criteria that i made sure to suss out and make sure that this was a decent idea now there may be more questions out there you want to consider but these were the ones that worked for me okay so you want to start off with a decent idea and then it's time to do some dun dun dun marketing yep if that makes you if that makes you squirm then i am right there with you

[17:52] now i feel like this is an obligatory microcomp slide i feel like it's advice that is commonly dished out and it's commonly ignored and i think i know why it's just that building is just so much fun like who doesn't love going into this flow state and doing all the stuff that they love to do and talking about yourself and hyping up your product is super super uncomfortable most introverts like us don't really like to toot our own horn it's awkward and quite honestly it sucks but you know what sucks more going into a flow state for a couple of months surfacing for air with something that's ready for the

[18:35] market and realizing you haven't told anyone about it yet so we're going to try to avoid that and this is the technique i use to avoid that and it's um by building a reverse press release this is kind of something that amazon does for their new products so before anything is ever built you write a press release hyping up your new product talking about its features the value that users are going to get from it and heck maybe even throw some fake customer testimonials in there for good measure now once you've shaped up a product that you'd be happy to see hit the market then it's time to take some of that

[19:14] language add it to a landing page and make sure you add an email capture now spend a little plan time promoting that around a bit and you'll start seeing new emails trickle onto your list now then and only then do you actually go and build the darn thing now as you may have picked up i am not an engineer by training i only started teaching myself how to code last year end of last year really and still have a bit of a way to go still though i was very optimistic on how much i could get done and how quickly i could do it you know i

[19:55] remember writing in my journal in january be like ah i could totally launch this by march in march i wrote oh yeah it'll be done by april maybe in april it was like okay i think i could get it down down by uh down by may and you know things just kept getting getting pushed back and it was late february i was on a call with one of my code mentors and i was walking him through this problem that i was having and he basically told me that i was making this entirely too complicated for myself i had all these tables in my application and a very academic understanding of

[20:31] what a database should look like so already a couple months in i was tearing everything apart starting all over again and it was a bummer but from this i learned to keep it simple instead of adding features cut them now this is what my initial mock-up for my product look like okay nothing too crazy but here is what i actually launched with just this part in this pink box just this little prioritization feature and had i tried to get everything on here done i probably would have lost any momentum and sent this project to join the many others in my project graveyard now it did feel super underwhelming to

[21:20] launch with this i'm not going to lie but the thing is i got it out there and even getting this out there was a bit of a struggle to be honest that last 10 of the work was taking the same amount of time as the first 90 it was like wtf i kept hearing myself say oh i'll just build this one more thing this one more feature i just need to make this one more bug fix i just need to fix up the ui ux it needs a little bit of tweaking it's not quite there yet still need to add notifications so on and so forth

[21:54] now fortunately i realized that i was killing my own momentum so one day after fixing some issues uh i i realized it was it was good it was good enough you know it wasn't perfect but it wasn't you know absolutely terrible so one morning i pushed everything to production i let that marketing list that i had so conveniently built up a few months ago know that you know hey it's live it's ready to try out and i watched as some users rolled into my production database you know there was no splashy product hunt launch there was no launch party heck i don't think i even popped open a bottle of

[22:42] wine or cracked open a beer but and what i did have was a product that was in motion it was out in the world it's picking up momentum users are starting to use it and now i'm trying to figure out how to build and maintain my momentum and to be honest this is a work in progress from what i've learned so far you know feedback has been critical in this part and learning how to take it how to take it not personally has been a challenge and it's been a really good learning lesson now i'm definitely not good at it by any means i remember i got my first piece of negative

[23:22] feedback i was out camping i checked my phone because i'm apparently the kind of person who brings their phone camping i know shame on me and i saw this piece of negative feedback come in and i was like oh man like this sucks so i sit there wallowing myself pity for about 15-20 minutes stare into the campfire and realize that you know this feedback is a gift and you can use the feedback that you get after you launched to work on iterating your product and building a better product so you could do a lot of positive with the feedback that you get and also combined with using your own

[24:00] product you'll quickly figure out what it is that you need to work on improving so in review we talked about building your base and how building a community your confidence and your skills is going to set you up on the path for success down the road how a good idea is going to help carry your momentum a bit more than say an okay idea and of course then you could go you know by the domain and start thinking about some of the fun parts but before you do that spend a couple of days setting up a very basic marketing system so that when you do come up from air for

[24:42] air after building this you know you're not starting from a dead stop you do have some momentum and some some place to go from here and to be honest i'm not sure what happens after this part i'm really looking forward to hearing some of the other speakers that are going to be coming later today to see maybe what's in store for me down the road but in the meantime i hope you learned a bit from the story about how i launched speckled and how it got started off pretty slow how i managed to build up some momentum with a decent idea a very simple marketing system and a

[25:18] paired down product and how i inadvertently launched to make sure that i could keep my momentum going now if you're thinking about taking this path and launching your own product hopefully with a bit of a more deliberate launch than i did i'd highly recommend it it is incredibly rewarding and i think you're going to enjoy the ride you got it well corinne again audience questions are gonna start coming in i'm gonna kick us off with a couple questions um that i had for you great talk i really enjoyed it and loved hearing your story um i think the the first thing i wanted to ask is about the stair-step approach

[25:54] that you mentioned um what i've noticed is i personally traveled the stair step approach but i didn't realize i was doing it as i was doing it that wasn't my goal from the start necessarily i was just so risk-averse i didn't want to build the big sas app quit the day job i had a wife and a kid and a mortgage and all that i'm curious with you did you from the start think i'm going to build the small one and then the next and next and next level up or was it more of an inadvertent walk down that path it was probably a combo of the two i

[26:21] think that i probably got to the info products business and i was like okay like this is cool like this is a path that i i could take in the future but i'm not sure i would like to do a product in the future and i'm not quite there so i think i'm gonna need to take a couple stair steps so i kind of got there halfway there organically and then the rest of it was a little bit more planned yeah yeah i think that's a pretty common story actually i think some people start doing it because they want to keep the day job or they don't want to leap

[26:50] from one island to the next they want to have you know a foot on both of them and then once they hear about it it's like a theory that matches up with what they wanted to do anyways you know and it kind of gives them permission to do it i think another thing i want to touch on is about you talked about asking for permission um which is something i've harped on quite a bit because i've spoken at events where it's just tech founders but i've spoken at events where there were like filmmakers and and writers and i've noticed that there's a very similar um i don't know mentality that a lot of

[27:21] us are scared to ship and and with writers i say are authors you know i say don't ask for permission from a publisher or agent go write like you look at andy weir who wrote the martian he started writing and publishing it on his blog and it was really good and people started liking it and then he eventually published it into a book he just wrote um filmmakers you can say i need money from a studio you can say i need permission to get distribution or you can do what kevin smith or robert rodriguez did and you can go out and just shoot a film for 20 grand you know and it's not going

[27:48] to be the best film ever but it's at least something that you're making and putting into the world the same thing with startup founders i feel like a lot of founders are waiting for permission i mean in the silicon valley narrative it's waiting for permission from people to write you a big check to do it like i can't do it without 10 million bucks and it's like no you can a bunch of people have already done that um but in your case you know you really talked about almost asking for permission from uh i don't know it's like from it wasn't you weren't waiting for funding but you were like waiting for

[28:16] uh was it permission from yourself or talk about that a little more about what your particular you know predicament was there yeah i mean i definitely always had a little bit of imposter syndrome and i was like okay well maybe if someone else tells me that i can go and do this then i can go and do this um but you know i think you know i i just like having this knowing that i have the support of people but eventually it got to the point where you know eventually you just don't care as much and you're just like i'm just gonna do it screw it so um yeah so i just uh

[28:48] i just went i just learned to get over that uh that feeling of um needing permission to go do it and just do it and it definitely was a little bit of a learned skill like and i remember the first time i told my parents i was even starting like an info products business and they're like why don't you just stay with your job and you know have that 401k plan and the benefits and everything that comes along with it but you know that's not what i wanted to do right and that's the part you touched on where family and friends aren't going to understand i ran through the same thing

[29:17] um no one in my family was or friends were entrepreneurs and so i got questioned a lot as well as even like yeah it's always gonna be a struggle um i have some questions coming in for you first question says i love the press release idea how do you push it meaning how do you promote it organic seo ads how do you build buzz how did you build buzz around it and that's from deep okay um yeah actually in terms of the press release that wasn't something that i actually released into the world it was more of a thought exercise on how i wanted to shape this product up

[29:54] and get it to the point where it was something that was exciting to people so it was a good way to me for me to try to figure out some of the messaging that i could then put in my landing page so i didn't necessarily publish this or promote this anywhere it was just a document that lived in you know in my notion and you know i just would eventually and sometimes go back to it just to make sure that i was on the right path and building the thing that was exciting to build as i was building it yep yeah it's something i've actually done myself um

[30:28] to write to write the i didn't just call it a press release i would call it the landing page so i would start with the landing page before i would build a product or write the book or launch like before we launched the very first microconf mike tabor and i sat down and built a landing page with all the marketing copy and some headshots of people we thought we wanted to be in and we didn't we didn't release that before we invited the people but then that was really the launch you know before we booked a hotel that's how that's how we did it so i like that piece of advice um for our

[30:56] next question we actually have a brave soul who is going to come on and ask it via video for producer xander we'll bring them on

[31:08] hello my question is you had people sign up on your landing page because they were curious about the product how much did you interact or did you interact with those people at all during your building process i i did email them a couple points throughout the process um and another thing that was also helpful was after i sent them to that email capture i also sent them to a thank you page that had you know what brought you here to you know why were you interested in this product today and that helped me get a lot of good information but yeah i would email people occasionally

[31:47] on the list but i probably should have done it more than i did to be honest but you know hindsight is 20 20. yeah your your first one is always hard i'll tell you what i so just a quick piece on that um when we launched drip which was 2013 now wow so long ago um we started building up a pretty good list and i had learned enough by then that i knew that we i should be in contact every few months so i was sending some screenshot updates but more importantly i started sending light surveys and saying hey what's your role what are you looking for from drip what do you

[32:22] hope it does you know all these questions and then i was able to segment that audience and then i had some one-on-one conversations i most via email actually i didn't do a lot of kind of zoom stuff um but that did help us shape the direction of the product from the start and so that's a pretty loose framework i think i went pretty in-depth on startups for the rest of us which is my podcast i haven't mentioned yet today but um there's an episode there where i talk about doing a survey of a pre-launch list and that really walks through the questions i asked and kind of the um

[32:49] help it gave me but it just goes to show you corinne didn't do that and still had a you know it had a decent launch so it's like you don't have to do these things they just add they add a little bit they maybe help you a little bit more with vision or they help you land a few more folks all right another question all right there's another one where someone's coming on camera producer xander please roll it hey corinne thanks so much for your talk really appreciated it um so i've also come from a non-technical background i'm in sales and business development uh where did you learn coding and which

[33:20] programming language did you start with cool yeah so i in the beginning i just took a whole bunch of tutorials and did all the basic tutorials for a whole bunch of languages i ended up going through the ruby on rails tutorial and that was the one that made the most sense to me so that's what i started off with so i started off with going through the tutorials finding some things online and then i eventually joined the go rails community and they have a really great a bunch of videos to learn there so if you're interested in rails as the language i would definitely recommend them and

[34:01] yeah ruby and rails just made the most sense to me so that's what i ended up going with wasn't super anything super exciting wasn't this cool new javascript framework du jour it was just just rails i still say that those old proven tools are like the way to go um if i were to build an app today i would i would go with something very proven and also well i don't know i'm just uh at this point i'm not going to be said about using boring technology i know i know so much of an ecosystem so we have quite a few questions and maybe let's try to lightning round them i

[34:36] believe we have six minutes left and we have 12 questions so let's see how many we get through um the audience was obviously you know engaged and interested in what you're saying first question when your first users started trickling in do you know where they came from was it from your email list social or something else yeah it was pretty much all for my email list uh i hadn't done too much social promotion but yeah it was it was my email list that was that was the main source email list for the win i'm such a big proponent i'm glad you touched on that all right a question from arthur clef

[35:09] kliptukov he says how else do you keep your scope focused and constrained for your first launch i don't always know when i'm in a rabbit hole thanks arthur yeah that's that's a tough question um you know i do try to keep uh my list of all the things that i'm working on i use my own tool for that i keep everything prioritized and i you know it's just if i landed up taking way more time than i thought it was going to take i kind of have to step back and be like okay why is this taking so long uh if i get really stuck i'll um i'll

[35:45] call up like a code mentor and be like hey can you help me through this problem and that'll help me get through it but yeah you know it sounds silly but meditating every morning and having kind of like a high level overview of what's going on at the moment and making sure every week um writing down you know what went poorly last week what was going to happen this week and you know what can i learn from last week and apply to this week so you know making sure that sometimes you know you get into the rabbit hole and you're like doing your work sometimes you just need to remember to

[36:23] zoom out a little bit and you know take a high level overview of what the work that you're doing is yeah and that's a really nice way to sanity check it um two other things that i've done because it's a really hard question it's there's no one-size-fits-all but one thing is when i had a co-founder that was super helpful um when i didn't it was my mastermind group so there were two other three two or three other folks that i would get together with every couple weeks and typically i would say man i'm really struggling with something i would email one of them and just set up an impromptu

[36:51] like i need to bounce this off the wall you know i need to bounce this off someone else for a sanity check all right we have a text question from janet a carr she says corrine could you go into a bit of detail on how and where you distributed your press release and landing page so again you didn't distribute the press release but how did you promote the landing page i think is probably the best way to ask that so since i was part of the audience that i was selling to i knew where they were hanging out there were a bunch of slack groups online where

[37:19] people were hanging out so i started getting involved there and occasionally you know if they had a self-promotion channel i would post it there um there's a whole bunch of facebook groups you know you just need to find the watering holes that your audience is at and go and participate in them and uh and you'll start to you know get some involvement from that audience and you know it can just pick up from there so that's that's what i did personally awesome from david mcneil how important was it for this project that you were doing it full time whereas with previous projects you were also juggling a full-time job

[38:00] well to be honest doing it full-time has definitely helped it definitely gives me a lot more focus and you know instead of you know approaching it in two-hour chunks i can sit down for a good amount of time and really really get some of the harder parts and get into that flow state so i think that having it doing it full time was definitely beneficial however you know there's something to be said about building something on the side and you know spending a little bit of time chipping away at it here and there i don't i don't think there's a right answer for you know it really depends on what your

[38:33] personality is and what your priorities and what's going on in your life at the moment yep i would agree all right our next question is coming to you live from zachary kessin welcome zachary bruce xander is going to wire him up here we go

[38:56] uh-oh no audio yet no we don't have audio on zach if we have the text and the question be a text i could read it or producer xander you can send me the next one all right what is a good way to get people into a mailing list if you have no traffic hmm i think you kind of have to produce some traffic yeah i think you do have to produce some kind of traffic so like i mentioned before getting involved in the places where my community where the audience was hanging out was a good source of traffic for me it was probably the best source of traffic that

[39:37] i had so go and get involved in your your audiences communities and you know you know give more than you take in those communities you know answer questions you don't have to be the one always promoting what it is that you're working on make sure that you're providing value to the people there and you know then maybe organically they'll check out your little you know profile link and be like okay what is this person looking at so yeah all right 26 seconds left corinne last question from georgia nikolev he says did you find your product market fit first or did you have the audience first and

[40:14] you built a product they needed i think i went with the audience first approach like i i knew that i really wanted to serve project product managers i knew that our lives were pretty chaotic at times and that they could use all the help that we could get so i i definitely concentrated on product managers first figured out what problems that they were having that i was also having and you know went from there so i definitely went audience first for my project corinne pope thank you so much again for joining me on microcomfyremode today it's great to be here it began as an idea eager to escape his unnecessarily

[40:53] complicated dealings with domain hosting anthony eden a mild-mannered web dev with a penchant for surfing thought this should be simple and dn simple was born i want to make domain name management super simple for everyone to use sounds impossible i'm in there would be no venture capital or giant corporations pulling the strings just a tightly knit remote team of normal folks building the most streamlined domain name management automation the internet no the world has ever seen ten years sixteen thousand amazing customers and four hundred thousand domains later begs the question what's next the team worked tirelessly day and night searching for an answer to this baffling conundrum

[41:39] among the proposals a magical domain connecting button congratulations you're connected voice controls connect my domain i'm sorry did you say croquet championship they even thought of enlisting a soothsayer to connect domains before they were even thought of i can see the future but as the team toiled on one idea soared above the rest people should be able to connect domains to the services they use without even thinking once about dns sounds impossible we're in journey with us through the next 10 years of dn simple anthony is the founder of dnsimple he's been a huge supporter of the microcomp community for years and with a decade of success under his

[42:20] belt he's got some exciting new things coming up so we're excited to share a few screen minutes with him to chat about what's happening over the next 10 years mr eden welcome to remote hey thanks hopefully you can hear me been having a heck of problems with audio today absolutely no i can hear you loud and clear my first question is is for you is surfing long board or short short board for sure indeed a better better man than i i was a longboarder and not that good at it so i want to ask you a couple questions over the next couple minutes um you bootstrapped d and simple a decade

[42:53] ago now you're at about 15 employees what made you think 10 years ago i guess i'll start with the pain what pain were you solving when you started d and simple it's a pretty ambitious idea yeah so the the domain industry at the time was pretty stagnant and i was using one of the big players and i just got fed up with using their i was like i know how all of this works i've been working in the domain industry for years how is it possible that i am using this terrible interface there's no api this is just awful and i think that was the initial start of it i just said i

[43:26] got to be able to do something that's better than this that's designed for developers and for entrepreneurs rather than for uh for somebody who it doesn't need that type of experience so yeah that's how it started and i mean you went into a very crowded space obviously competing against hundreds and hundreds of other domain registrars including big big gorillas you know like godaddy or namecheaper or these others what kind of what made you think that you could pull that off i think a lot of it just came down to knowing that there was still a gap there there was there was definitely an underserved market of developers like me who were

[44:03] looking for something with a better experience um and and they weren't getting that from these other providers and those other providers really had no incentive to move forward in any way the the the battle had been to the bottom for prices and and so i i wanted to give it a chance and and i took my experience and started trying to work on something really that that i thought people would want to use and plus we gave good support at the same time and there were a lot of problems at the time with how do you get somebody who's intelligent who knows how domains work and again this comes from just i was in

[44:32] the business for a long time before giving it a try as starting a business and it felt like the right time even even with all the big players who were there now and or were there before and even more who have come in now yeah that's the thing i think a lot of founders are scared away by these big markets these competitive spaces but if you can find a massive space there's always all almost always room to niche yourself in especially if you're part of that market you've done it with diane simple i did it with drip you know it was a nightmare trying to launch an esp but

[45:03] you do it and you find that angle but you just you can't go head-to-head with them right it's like you didn't go and try to be godaddy you tried to be the not-go daddy you know or the not-name cheap or to figure out where the the gaps were and where the opportunities were all right final final question for you today what is the thing you're most excited about that you guys are launching in the next you know whatever in the next year or two six to 12 months whatever we've been working really hard on trying to make it an addition a new api into our system where people

[45:32] can integrate better and push data back into d and simple so you can actually for example wire up external services and see how they're operating for any given domain and that's the one i keep pushing to try to get to get us to go to because i feel like that's going to be something that's going to be exceptional is essentially not just querying into our system but actually pushing back metadata about services and domains in real time essentially yep amazing thank you so much sir for all your support of microconf and uh for coming on the show today it's been great having you thanks rob have a good

[46:04] one this is a 2017 volvo xc90 the xc90 is a midsize luxury suv manufactured and marketed by volvo cars since 2002 and now in its second generation both generations of the xc90 have won motor trends suv of the year award in their debuts this particular vehicle is rarely washed and comes fully loaded with cups books papers and other items long since abandoned by my children the xc90 has three rows of seats perfect for carrying a lot of gear a lot of kids or both the tachometer goes to 8000 rpm and the in-dash computer never fails to play the best crunch tunes of the 90s welcome to our remote edition of

[46:44] microcomp remote we're not live on set but we're actually driving around it's startup founders and cars getting coffee we're truly remote am i going to get coffee out of this no it was just an expression such false advertising i thought you were actually just inviting me for coffee so i rented this maserati here this is your volvo so we could drive around paris yeah no this is great thanks so much for for joining me for a few minutes to chat about founder origin stories can i get like a rain check on the coffee rain check on the coffee rain check on driving around paris in a maserati

[47:18] you've made big promises this is amazing and the entire microcomp community now has my back on this i hope can we add an editor can we cut that part out so this is my lovely wife dr sherry walling and she is the founder of zen founder she's host of the zen founder podcast and she and i co-founded our family and co-wrote a book called the entrepreneur's guide to keeping your together and what we're going to talk about today is actually a piece about founder origin stories that made it into it really is the second chapter of the book understanding where you come from to optimize where you're going and i

[47:57] think to set the stage um you know as a clinical psychologist someone who who works with founders high performing executives ceos how does someone's story or their origin impact how they operate day to day and how they run companies and and i think the real question is like why should a founder listening to this care about how they were brought up about how they were raised about their family system yeah i have a lot of conversations about this actually and i think because most of us who are entrepreneurs are so um either future oriented or very present oriented we kind of live in the moment we're planning for the future

[48:34] we're building something working towards something it can be easy for us to overlook the importance of reflecting back on our past but a lot of the science that's coming out really in the last 10 or 15 years really speaks to the importance of understanding how your early life narrative might shape things as simple as your relationships your capacity for trust or even the way that your body responds to stress the adverse childhood experiences study is was a really really large sales scale study conducted in the us that looked at like health data for something like 17 000 people and found really really strong relationships between early life

[49:13] adversity and things like depression suicidality things that you would expect but also things like heart disease um number of times and types of cancer diabetes obesity things like that so i guess maybe a long-winded way of saying it is that your past matters a tremendous amount to your relationship to your body and to the way that you solve problems the way that you manage stress the way that you really respond to the life that you're living right now yeah and i think that holds certainly holds true for me i know that the way i was brought up in the way that i was taught to deal with

[49:44] conflict or adversity or manage anger or all that is or anxiety is something that i have to manage on a day-to-day basis right as a founder yeah and it's even it's even more maybe nuanced than what you were taught or what you observed it's really what got encoded into your body and the way that your dna responded to the kinds of environment that you were exposed to as a kiddo right and so as part of zenfat the zen founder podcast which is what on episode is it 250 or something at this point like yeah more than that 254 255 something like that you know you did a series of interviews for that

[50:21] where you talked to actually multiple rounds of interviews over the course of a couple years it was kind of my summer project yeah so over the course of the year we would put out new episodes during the year and then over the summer i would sort of do a bunch of interviews at once and then have them ready to release throughout the summer that they were all founder origin stories so i did a really deep dive into lots of microcomp speakers actually sally fd patrick mckenzie jason cohen lots of folks that we know well in the community and um shaw reuben yeah yeah yeah they became really interesting

[50:52] conversations to just say hey tell me how you grew up like what were your first experiences of entrepreneurship what shaped you and what made it hard for you to get to where you are now yeah and and as part of that you pulled out four patterns or four kind of commonalities that a lot of the founders shared these ambitious high achieving founders who had achieved success and i'd love to run through those now and in addition i think one of the perhaps even the more interesting part is you then pulled out these four archetypes these founder archetypes um or would you call them founder archetypes sure yeah and it's

[51:25] it's they're pretty cool like to tease them it's like the golden child the loner the pleaser the survivor and so i'd love to dig into those in just a second because you have some kind of risks or like pros and cons and how to if you fi if you find that you resonate with this like this is probably how you operate and and ways to kind of optimize you know who you are and how to how to get the most out of things right yeah i think one of the things that i really wanted to drive home in the course of doing these interviews and i didn't have to make the point the

[51:54] interviews made the point themselves is there are lots of ways to become an entrepreneur it's not like you have to have a certain kind of background or a certain type of life experience that makes you successful or not successful and so by by looking at the interviews um kind of thematically and pulling out different archetypes it i think it really helped me to see how people can be successful and then also have you know have shadow sides or have risk factors have downsides to really whatever kind of upbringing they experienced cool so what were the before we get into the architects what were those four um patterns or commonalities that you

[52:28] found across a lot of the successful founders that you interviewed for this founder origin series yeah i found that um of the folks that i interviewed almost all of them had some kind of early life adversity um the death of a parent a big transition a big move maybe right when they're going into junior high some really big shift a parent with cancer um the loss of a sibling you know mental illness mental illness a parent with substance abuse so these are the things that might show up in that adverse childhood experiences study that i mentioned earlier things that really disrupt the trajectory of your childhood but in the

[53:02] case of these founders the key thing that we know really from the field of psychological research which really bore out in my conversations with entrepreneurs is that that high adversity was accompanied by a high level of support so there was someone in that kid's life who maybe it was a teacher maybe it was a parent an uncle an aunt someone who saw something and just encouraged and supported and helped make kind of a safe place for that young person to continue to develop so high adversity you know we tend to be okay we can tend to be resilient if we have a helpful supportive adult around so

[53:43] that's what i found in a lot of the interviews was that trend um so high adversity but high support right that combination had to exist together and i definitely found totally true to the entrepreneurial story is that people just had an inherent need to blaze a trail like these were kids who these founders were children who weren't necessarily super content to just roll with the rules as they were presented to them they were people who were either trying to break the rules in sometimes like a pretty problematic way um you know dan martel tells some stories about breaking rules that got him in big trouble um but they were just people who weren't

[54:22] super content with the status quo and wanted to you know go off trail a little bit yeah and that pattern persisted even once or really began when they were young children the third is that these were folks who were self-taught and self-led like patrick mckenzie i love the story about him he really was interested in coding he loved video games he wanted to write video games and make video games but he didn't have a computer so he went to the library and checked out library books about coding and started writing out code by hand so he learned to code from books and then would just do the mental exercise

[55:00] of coding of compiling i'm writing it despite longhand right so that's that's a unique trade and that's kind of the entrepreneurial secret sauce is somebody who can get themselves going is self-motivated and is going to teach themselves yeah i actually did that as well although i had a computer but when my brother was coding i would write it out on binder paper i know it's it's like when it's my turn what's my turn time sharing you know when i didn't know what that meant so that was the third what's the fourth the last one in this one oh man was so important for me to reflect on as a

[55:30] parent um the last one is time all of the entrepreneurs that i talked to or the vast majority of them had extended periods of time to tinker um so one my favorite example of this is heath and shaw his dad would take him out as a physician he'd take him to the hospital in the evenings when he was doing paperwork or whatever and he'd basically had him a screwdriver and let him loose in the in the like it room like with all of the machines and just be like hey entertain yourself essentially so heathen had all of this time to just i mean frankly like probably take apart

[56:10] computers and look at circuits and just problem solve and and i think the thing that um you know is so dangerous for us maybe in our era of parenting is that a lot of kids that i know are really really structured their days are really full and they don't have this expansive time to just kind of mess around in the basement and tinker and write code by hand or or listen to their own imaginations so i thought that was a really important take home about that that road to entrepreneurship involves time to just sort of mess around in anchor the first is the golden child second is

[56:40] the loner and then there's the pleaser and the survivor you want to maybe talk through the the golden child being mindful of time as our time is is running short but talk through that and like i don't know what you have advantages disadvantages things to watch out for whatever it is you want to add context to just what you know what the golden child kind of archetype is yeah so archetypes take a little bit more time to explain but i'll do my best um so as you're hearing this realize you're hearing this very sort of redacted version of this so forgive me if it feels over general there's a full

[57:08] book chapter too it's like four dollars on kindle the entrepreneur's guide to keeping your together chapter two is basically the expanded version of this if you want to dig in deeper so um in the course of these interviews i realize that a lot of people come to entrepreneurship and in different ways so one way is is this sort of golden child upbringing experience and this is like probably what all of us strive to provide our kids as parents lots of support lots of stability lots of um capacity to go deep in your own interests like these are the parents that are out on the soccer field

[57:43] like just cheering you on bringing the snacks like all invested in you and i think um this again highly supportive very enthusiastic lots of resources and this is great for people in their entrepreneurial journey because they really i think develop this deep sense of confidence this deep sense that what they think how they see the world that that matters and that it's something that's worth sharing or that people will generally be responsive to when they share it so that's one of the best um you know aspects if you're going into this sort of life of entrepreneurship which can be pretty hard is that you know you have this great

[58:20] foundation of support and belief in yourself um the downside of this is that sometimes people just have very limited experience with failure i mean you think of the the it kid the student council president or the high school quarterback or the head of the cheerleading squad these are these are kids who really have a lot of support maybe a lot of coddling even and they just haven't had to fight super hard which can be a downside when you're an entrepreneur and you you know you have you have things that don't work well that you have to sort through all right how about second that is the

[58:51] loner yeah the loner is you know is maybe the kid who's in the library handwriting code this is someone whose way of seeing the world or their interests didn't necessarily align with an obvious peer group maybe when they're teenagers and so much of the development of who they became and what they cared about happened within their own you know their own autonomous time okay there's someone in the middle of the road taking a picture of a baldy eagle in a tree so that's that's minnesota moment for you right now so if the camera catches it there is a bald eagle yeah okay so the loner i mean in some

[59:28] ways this is a great advantage because you're used to hearing your own voice you're used to cultivating your own ideas you spend a lot of time in your own head in a way that i think can really yield a lot of ingenuity and again a sense of confidence and a way of just knowing yourself well and trusting your own creative process but of course this is a downside because as much as we like to think that we can be successful in a vacuum networking and our relationships and our connections are incredibly important no matter what we're doing as entrepreneurs so the downside potentially of the loner

[1:00:04] is that those early life skills in terms of how to really connect with other people how to really build a network and as that's a sort of a bunch of different relationships may not be as intact or as well practiced it could be helpful and this is the one that resonates the most with me with my upbringing because we lived out in the middle of nowhere we had books and computers and with no internet because it was the 80s when i was growing up and um i thought that my whole deal when i first started doing software right doing products was like i'm going to do it all i don't have to

[1:00:35] answer to anyone micro solo it was all about being a software no network i didn't build that and then eventually areas i realized oh i was just never taught that skill and i have learned that over the past 15 years but it was it was a detriment to me at the start sure how about the third yeah the third um i call the pleaser and this is um this is the kiddo who's growing up in a context where maybe they have a pretty hard driving parent a parent that wants them you know to be that high school star athlete but they're really more of a chess playing

[1:01:04] kind of kid this is where you know you think of like the person who's kind of trying to overcompensate for that parent who pushed them really hard who maybe they felt like they were just never successful enough and i think this is in some ways it's a tough upbringing but in some ways it really helps you develop these skills of learning to read what people need like this is a great customer skill right you're learning what your customers need and how to respond in ways that um really fit their needs this is the kind of entrepreneur who will over deliver who's somebody who really um kind of

[1:01:38] understands the emotional context of what people will pay for and what they want and what they need um but this is not necessarily someone who is able to set good boundaries for themselves for their family or for their business this might be the person who's always like yes yes yes but that drives themselves into the ground because they're not actually thinking about what's most important for them or for the growth and well-being of their business they're other oriented in a way that's both helpful and problematic the survivor is the last archetype that i came across and this is the kiddo who really dealt with a lot of

[1:02:12] maybe aggression violence instability chaos in their early life experience and this is somebody who has potentially lots of street smarts who really knows how to get what they need and provide for themselves even in really really sort of difficult situations um so great entrepreneurial skill and like this is the person who doesn't get up give up rather this is they don't give up they're a fighter they're a strong strong sort of mental game um but this can be problematic in the sense that um this kind of upgrading tends to either lead to a path where people are pretty shut down emotionally like they're just kind of machines

[1:02:53] or they're pretty reactive emotionally they may experience a lot of anger or not necessarily have had calming experiences that help their body regulate well when they're under a lot of stress or distress so again really hard driving forceful powerful but maybe not always know how to wield that power in helpful positive productive ways uh the bottom line is that no matter what upbringing you have um there are strengths and there are liabilities in that so it's worth the time to just do a little bit of exploration around what you're coming to this point in your life with what are the lessons that your upbringing taught you what are the

[1:03:38] things that it maybe didn't teach you so well that you might need to supplement um and i give some more we give some more tips and tricks and strategies in the book if you're needing to just fill out your early life experience with some counter balance and growth yeah i mean one of the biggest pivot points or changing points for me as an entrepreneur or when i started realizing my weaknesses and really honed in on on my upbringing but it was both my strengths and my weaknesses and how i handle stress and how i handle certain situations that was a big point of growth again probably about 15 years ago was when

[1:04:15] that started you know and really culminated maybe five years ago i'm sorry about 10 years ago where i was like okay you just finished growing at that point no but i finished i i knew a lot more about myself like it was a dramatic you know increase so thank you i'm giving you a hard time but i do think it's helpful to realize that this kind of growth process is ongoing like you do some of the growth you do some early childhood stuff and then there are times when you have to revisit it because your perspective on it changes as you grow as your kids grow as

[1:04:43] different factors around your change sure thank you so much dr walling for joining us today you owe me a coffee oh you a coffee and a maserati it sounds and you host the zen founder podcast if folks want to uh to keep up with you all right have a great microconf y'all thanks so much for joining us founders in cars not getting coffee i enjoyed that if you're interested in the book we kept mentioning it's called the entrepreneur's guide to keeping your together in chapter two of this book is in essence an expanded version of the conversation that you just heard howdy i'm rand fishkin co-founder and

[1:05:23] ceo of sparktoro uh previously the founder of moz and author of lost and founder and i want to help you folks at microcomp remote uh with one thing that you can do today that can potentially have a transformative impact on your business tomorrow and in the future so i'll show you something that's been working really well for us here at sparktoro which is uh so we have this this free tool well we have a free version and then a paid version it's a software as a subscription like like probably a lot of you with at microconf and um one of the things that we do that

[1:05:54] works really well is when someone starts running their free search right so they say like oh well my audience whatever uses these words in their profile uh software engineer right and they they run that first search they're asked to um sign up and put in their email i'm i'm logged into my account but you get the idea they they lo they have to create an account with us and give us their email and uh that email address and that registration process means that we can shoot them a quick message and i send them a message from my email account right rand sparktaro.com like it comes from me

[1:06:35] that says can i help you with your spartoro account and it's just a super short uh email message in fact it literally says um can i can i help with your spark tour account is the title this we found works really well high open rate uh and it says you know hi first name saw your spector sign up wanted to offer these suggestions for your free searches we give people 10 free searches this is my personal email so if you have questions or a minute to tell me what you'd like to accomplish with the tool i'm happy to help that's trent fishkin so it looks and feels like a real email

[1:07:08] because it really is if they send a reply it comes right to me i get a dozen two dozen sometimes three dozen of these replies uh every day it's it's pretty awesome it's a fantastic way to connect with the customers and potential customers of our product and people are using it get a sense for who's struggling how what they're trying to do and accomplish i love this when when you're at a small scale right when you have um a few dozen to a few hundred people signing up every month for your product offering something for free and then getting in touch with those folks and building those relationships

[1:07:45] just incredibly powerful if you can find a way to do this in your software business i think you can really move the needle on getting a deep understanding of who your potential buyers are and then taking the messaging that works that that's helping people uh at a at a one-to-one level and translating that into what you put on pages like you know your homepage which we've done with sparktoro right this instantly discover what your audience reads watches listens to and falls that comes from those conversations the whole how it works page the the video uh the the graphics and explanation it all comes from these conversations

[1:08:21] and i i find that uh incredibly helpful so i encourage you to do it with your software business as well all right thanks everyone take care good luck um we're gonna dive into our second keynote of the day and if you recall our first keynote was from corinne pope and that was on that first stage of getting to launch and having that first sale the second keynote that we're about to roll into talks about the next milestone that many of you in uh in the crowd are trying to achieve it's 10k mrr it's the point at where a lot of us can go full time we're going to hear from colleen johnson

[1:08:56] she's an enterprise agile coach a speaker a trainer an entrepreneur she's the co-founder and the ceo of scatterspoke colleen thank you so much for joining me on microconf remote today thanks for having me here rob excellent i'll let you take it from here from here all right thank you well i do want to disagree with you rob and we can settle this in the in the q a but i do think mall rats was probably one of the best movies ever made so i disagree with the twenty thousand dollar budget okay well let's dig in here so what is scatter spoke scatter spoke is a tool

[1:09:28] for um for online retrospectives and it's it's built to help agile teams have um continuous feedback about how they're working so that they can have honest conversations about what things are working and what needs to improve and and make adjustments to their process along the way so when we think about retrospectives they typically look something like this what didn't go well what what went well what didn't go well what can we improve they're usually done in a room where everybody's together with stickies on the wall and often done on a regular cadence and not for a lot of teams that are running scrum practices this is an every two week

[1:10:12] occurrence or at the end of each sprint you're reflecting back on the sprint and saying how did this work what can we change um for teams that are running um kanban or maybe longer running intervals they might do this monthly but it's a chance for the team to all come together and really have an honest conversation with each other so you might be thinking that's cool this is all cool why the hell would someone pay for this um which is a valid question um you know i think when from my experience and i've been in in the agile world for 10 years a little over 10 years in the

[1:10:46] software industry for over 20. it sounds really straightforward get everybody together and get everybody talking but when you think about teams especially teams of software developers it can be very hard to get great honest feedback from people it can be even harder when you think about that interval of time between when something happens and when we get together to talk about it people forget we want to sweep those emotions under the rug and not really have a you know have an honest conversation about what's going on um so it can be hard to feel like these are having any you know any actual impact on how we're

[1:11:24] working i think the other piece of this that that's really important when you think about the tool that we're providing to teams is that you can have the same conversation at every retrospective it can feel a little bit like groundhog's day probably dating myself with this movie reference too so you can end up having this same exact conversation where you're maybe talking about your you know issues with your ci cd pipeline or you're talking about issues with um with your qa efforts and wanting to move to automation but if you're doing this every two weeks and you're having the same conversation it's it's hard to feel like this is a

[1:12:00] productive use of anyone's time and what's worse is for a lot of organizations these these conversations are probably happening in with multiple small teams all at the same time everybody's talking about the same similar problems and we don't have a great way to connect the dots to see how we can improve those you know those pain points for the organization so like rob said this story isn't about the tool it's about the journey and how we got there um you are not mistaken that that first image on our timeline here of our road to 10k as a coors light can so in 2015 my husband and i were hanging out one afternoon

[1:12:42] drinking coors light in the backyard and he said i really want um to learn more about how to build a real-time app so i want to learn node.js and angular and play around with web sockets and at the time i was moving into a consulting position and i was working with a lot of teams on how to build out a portfolio portfolio kanban system that would help them track things like um how to do exploratory testing on problems and solutions with users before building things and i said you know this sounds this sounds fun let's try let's try to build something um and it felt like a great way for him

[1:13:22] to get his hands dirty with the technology he was interested in and for me to really put my money where my where my mouth was i was teaching other teams how to do these things but had never built something on my own so it was really started with an opportunity to learn i knew the agile space really well and so i knew that there was this need for a way to have a retrospective where people could provide feedback anonymously and not be tied to the comments they were putting up on the stickies and then the other problem i kept seeing was that in clients i was working with

[1:13:55] they would constantly reschedule their their retrospectives especially if they were on a friday and people were out or they were down to the wire on a sprint deadline it was the first meeting to always get pushed off so i wanted to figure out how could we um how could we build something and test out you know these new technologies how could we build something i could use so it was very selfish that i could use with my clients to help make these retrospectives a better experience for for the teams um so sat around drank a bunch of coors light um did exactly what corinne said and hopped

[1:14:27] on and tried to buy a domain um and then we did the very important next step of um purchasing a shitload of stickers and then nothing happened so i got really focused on consulting um and used you know i continued to use the tool from a coaching perspective my husband john continued to tinker with it and play around with different technologies but we really didn't do a whole lot with the tool for about a year um it was really cool because it was an opportunity for me to keep using it with people in here real-time feedback and i would come home with that and say you know people want to be able to vote

[1:15:05] or want to be able to group on items or create an action item and so we were slowly adding new things but never still never really had the intent of turning this into an actual business it was still just something that was for both of us both of us to learn how to how to put all of this into practice so the next step for us um around 2017 um was actually we started to see that using our google analytics that we had a fair amount of people coming to the site we that was all we could track we didn't have the concept of a user so we said why

[1:15:44] don't we go ahead and create a simple way to register before you can access the boards still everything was completely free there was you know no charges or credit cards or subscriptions or anything at that point it was just a way to collect email addresses um and i was the one that was very reluctant to have any kind of user registration for the longest time i wanted to make sure that this was simple to use i was very scared that if we made it harder to you know if we made it harder to get in and use the tool quickly that people would just stop using it and what we found was

[1:16:20] quite the opposite we just saw the the number of registered users going up and up and up in 2017. um we closed 2017 out with about 12 000 users and um what was really funny when curran was talking about feedback was that year we also installed drift so that we could look so we could start to communicate with people if they were having issues if they had feedback like curran said um we had some really rough feedback there for a while probably one of the funniest moments i think was like her campfire story we were sitting around and had somebody pop on and say um your ui looks like

[1:17:01] it looks like it was built by a drunk intern we had some fun moments that that were a little painful but um that combination in 2017 of creating a user account and being able to communicate with users and track users and then also have drift on the site so we were getting feedback and understanding what problems they were running into kind of changed everything for us the funny part about having drift on there was towards the end of 2017 we had somebody pop on drift and um it was kind of creepy at first they were looking for me specifically and invited me to come speak at a big

[1:17:41] agile conference in brussels belgium in 2018 so we got super excited and we saw this as a way um to launch a new version of the site that would start to charge and we used that experience of keynoting and being on stage in brussels is kind of this kicking off point so that was in february of 2018 so we spent really like the entire holiday season leading up to that trying to get a complete redesign of the site up with new logos new just a completely brand new um interface that we ended up launching um alongside that agile conference in belgium so we started charging and we kept the

[1:18:20] free version but we always we made it we made some of the other features basically subscription only and um when we when we launched all of this we were pretty close to 20 000 registered users and we started to see some small conversions i think at that time you know it was like just as many people that would subscribe would cancel a month later so we were still missing something and we were continuing to communicate with people through drift get feedback about the tool um and really start to understand what things were missing i would say around the same time in 2018 we saw a ton of other retrospectives

[1:18:58] tools start to enter the market and charge so it was kind of validating for us that this was this was something that could become an actual business because we were starting to see some competition we were also pretty excited around you know the competition that was coming into the space took a very different approach to retrospectives than what we were doing and so it gave us kind of a unique a uniqueness in the industry so in 2018 we kind of we saw a lot of use uh usage go up new accounts coming in um started to see some of those convert but it wasn't like we were going to quit our day jobs

[1:19:34] anytime soon it was still very slow growth

[1:19:42] and then um in 2019 i think we were both starting to feel like um we were i think we were both just distracted to be honest um i was leaving my consulting career and starting my own consulting business my husband was working for um a big uh cryptocurrency exchange and so we were both kind of getting focused in very different places and i think feeling a little bit like this just wasn't going to work especially not on nights and weekends and all of the sudden we got a request from a huge company that wanted to buy 2000 licenses um and we were like oh my god

[1:20:20] what's happening where is this coming from um this is never you know we didn't really even know how to do enterprise pricing we were googling for enterprise contracts we didn't have a lawyer we didn't have you know we just really were not ready to do any of this but super it like reinvigorated all of our energy around trying to make this into an amazing business um so we went down the path of contract negotiation with this big company to get them set up with 2000 licenses and a big part of that was we just didn't have a lot of infrastructure in place to support a large

[1:20:54] organization yet so we had to build out like an admin portal to manage teams and accounts we had to build out single sign-on we had all of these things that this company wanted us to build as part of this contract that was actually in a lot of ways forcing us to an actual product market fit that we just didn't have before i think it was it was a cool way for us to learn and experiment um in both of our areas of expertise but for up until this point in time a lot of what we were doing was was playing i would get ideas and want

[1:21:27] to try something john would get ideas i want to try something different and so until we have this big enterprise deal staring staring us down with all these custom requests it really helped us see what do we need to sell into these large organizations going forward so i think we didn't really find our product market fit until just last year so going in to this year so we are part of the 2020 um tiny seed cohort and um we've had a bunch of of great things happen this year so we've been able to focus on on this business full time now we have been able to

[1:22:10] invest in marketing which we had never spent any money on in the past we've gone down the road of getting a lot of security things shored up that we hadn't done in the past and we're on track to close two more large enterprise deals this year we've closed three smaller enterprise deals um since coming on um or since the beginning of 2020 so we're on track to hit a 10k mrr hopefully next month and expect to close those two enterprise deals before the year is over and that will pretty much double where we're at in terms of mrr so we're super excited this path has been kind of a crazy road

[1:22:49] for us of um a lot of ups and downs and it was interesting to hear sherry talk because i was thinking about some of that emotional rollercoaster that you feel of being super excited and having a ton of wind in your sails and having that totally knocked out of you um you know a couple days later it is a lot of ups and downs but we feel like now we're really on this great trajectory and a lot of that came from landing that big enterprise deal that helped us sort out um what do big companies want and what do they need and for our particular sas model um that's that's

[1:23:22] the bus that's the um sale that we want to go after we want to really target these large enterprises there's a lot of easy ways and and other free tools available that are in our space for small teams um but there's not a lot available that helps big organizations connect these problems across the organization the way that scattersbook does so we're super excited that's everything i've got oh one more um and that's what's what's next for us so going into 2021 we're continuing to focus on these large enterprises and really trying to find alignment with some different agile frameworks things like scale dagil there's a couple new players in the

[1:24:05] market around different frameworks for large organizations going through transformation efforts another big focus for us going into 2021 is integration so we're we've already got thing we've got integrations with slack and with jira um we're gonna focus heavily on adding a lot more um integrations to that list going into next year and continuing to target these these big enterprise contracts that's everything i've got that's our road to 10k mrr we'll go ahead and kick it back to you rob all right thank you so much colleen we are gonna have um some audience questions coming through and before we do that uh i have a couple for you so

[1:24:51] i appreciate your thoughts on mall rats however so kevin smith's first film was clerks and it was a black and white film that he made for like 25k of credit card debt yeah and so i i own i'm like the the comic book nerds who i own i think they called the unholy trilogy right like my rats chasing amy and uh and dogma um and he's another one that like didn't ask for permission you know and he went off and started his own podcast network because he got tired of cow towing to uh to hollywood so all rats were good what was the budget for mall rats

[1:25:23] i think it was a quarter million dollars oh yeah it was pretty small no no that's actually incorrect maul rats was like five or six million and he didn't like having so much money because he had to blow it and then he when he came back to make chasing amy he made it for a quarter million dollars and that was again it was like he preferred to be that scrappy bootstrapper to not be on the hook for that huge budget and feel all the pressure it's kind of like raising venture capital right you raise 1 million versus yeah you know your bootstrap or you raise 100k it's

[1:25:47] like such a different such a different game have you seen clerks yes definitely i've seen them all what are doing what do you like all rats are clerks i like mama rats better than clerks but dogma is definitely my favorite yeah yeah i think mine too uh producer xander can i get a little more of colleen in my monitor i'm having trouble hearing a little bit all right so i'm curious um oh we have a awesome i was going to start asking you my questions but i'd love to get live questions from the audience so first question from james mcbrien he says what were the key

[1:26:17] changes that opened up the enterprise pipeline for you you know i'm i don't know if i have a really solid answer here we um i think starting to so i started really doing a lot of public speaking in 2017 and speaking at conferences we had still until this year haven't spent any money on advertising that includes even just google adwords um so all of our users and all of our traffic came from um presenting at conferences word of mouth people seeing reviews on different networks or hearing other you know other coaches or scrum masters talking about what do you use for retros um so i think

[1:26:54] a lot of what opened up that opportunity for us enterprise-wise has been um these tight-knit communities and karen talked about this too of like finding your audience finding who are the people that are the ones going to search for a tool so that they that you can really target having a presence in that in that space and so for us that's a lot of things linkedin is like facebook fragile coaches it's kind of funny um and then there's a lot of different forums that are very specific to agile practices and how to run great retros where we've made sure that we are our voices heard in those forums too so

[1:27:28] people just have found us through things like that very cool and i'm curious um you talked about the competition that started springing up and charging in uh well i can't see your slide but i forget if it was 20 17 or 18 time frame was that you mentioned it was motivating um was it also intimidating a bit or was it only positive for you oh my god it's still intimidating that that hasn't gone away and i think i you know it's been it's been interesting because we came out with like 39 a month plan and then we dropped it to 29 and then we dropped it to 25

[1:28:02] and at one point you know before we signed that big contract we were like let's just make it 19 a month we've been all over the place in terms of what took a charge and what does that include um and even just pushed out some new changes in april around our pricing i think that's been a good lesson and part of the tiny seed mentor program is that that's okay and that's a normal kind of journey for a startup to take is to continue to play around with that pricing but we spent a lot of time initially looking at our competitors and saying what do we have that they have or what

[1:28:32] do they have that we don't have and how do we price according to to what they've got um i think not until this year would i say that we've gotten to the point where we don't care we don't care what they have or what they're charging i think we have a pretty good understanding of what we offer and what the value there is especially knowing that it's an enterprise that's paying for it right it's not it's not often somebody pulling out their own credit card um to pay for our tool so knowing that we're yeah keep going keep going with that yeah so knowing that it's like a big

[1:29:03] enterprise that's writing a check for an entire year of service or license seats it's kind of changed our approach to what we charge and i think that that's given us a little bit more confidence in where we're at now and i think more flexibility and continuing to change it going forward yeah and that's such a big i mean part of the key part of what you just said is you used to be really concerned about what your competitors were pricing and how they were arranging that and now you're kind of confident that you're doing the right thing based on your customers that's such a part of product market fit

[1:29:32] that people don't realize or don't talk about is once you have the confidence in um in what you're doing and what the feedback you're getting and it's just working and you're signing these big deals that is again a component of you know what i would i would call product market fit because until you're starting to feel decent about your pricing i don't i don't think that you have that yeah yeah and it's hard to i think it's hard you know we even had a huge company come to us at one point and ask for a quote for an enterprise contract when we provided them a number

[1:30:00] um the person on the on the phone was like i don't understand how you can charge that much it's just a whiteboard tool like it's just sticky notes and so we you know we got defensive i think initially and we were like oh no but here's all the other things that could do and here's how it's useful and then it was like you know what um thank you for your feedback and you know explore other options and if you change your mind come back to us um so it's it's hard the pricing game is a hard one to i think find find that groove and feel confident

[1:30:26] like you said that what you're offering matches up with what you're charging yep yeah so easy to be so fragile it's like um yeah it's like your feelings or your ego are tied up in it i mean every time i've launched a new product or service or conference or accelerator or anything it's just the first like five conversations you have when people don't like it you're like oh no this is never gonna work we can't possibly make this work but you know obviously obviously you do because you're on the road to 10k here uh we have a question from dominic taylor and he says how do you know when

[1:30:55] to leave the day job how do you think about that weighing that you know that because we all have responsibilities and everything yeah it's super hard i mean um actually joining tinyseed was the catalyst for us to be able to make that happen um i had i had branched off and started doing consulting you know under my own business about two years ago and that really helped me make the jump into making scatter spoke our full-time you know our full-time business so we started to tiptoe into other ways i think to supplement income to get us there and now my husband's full-time on this as well but it's it's hard i mean i think

[1:31:30] that there's there's all these things right of understanding what your threshold is um feeling like you have enough sucked away in case things don't work out for a couple months i mean for i would say up until 2019 we were spending more just on like hosting and emailing services than we were ever making on the tool so it's been pretty new to be um even marginally profitable let alone to the point where we could thinking about supporting our family this way so taking the tiny seed investment definitely helped us get there even though we've been spending that on other things as well but i think there's a lot of personal

[1:32:02] factors that go into that around what your threshold is for for risk and what does your day job look like right i mean that was a big factor for me of um you know at any time i can jump back into coaching and teaching and helping helping agile teams and so i think you also have to weigh what the climate looks like for the industry that you're in so that if you need to if you need to go back that option's on the table yeah i think that's a good way to think about it i mean i think the there's probably three or four cases where i think of people leaving

[1:32:32] or the road to leaving the day job one is and i know i have friends and colleagues who've done exactly these one is you save up enough money that you don't need to work for 18 months and then you try to do it and that's a little scary and most people can't do it but that's one way another is to raise a small amount of funding to cover yourself for the 12 to 18 months another is to spare step your way up and either use products other products or use consulting to kind of transition that and the fourth one really is to have a partner you know a supportive partner

[1:33:00] who's kind of willing to support you doing that so it's figuring out other streams of revenue um to do it and then knowing your own you know some people are willing the story of like customer.io they had almost no revenue and they like both quit their day jobs and that would freak me the hell out like i didn't do i mean i had eight grand a month coming in before i quit my day job and it was enough to cover the mortgage and all the stuff and that i think it just depends on maybe risk tolerance you know yeah and i think that's compounded right when it's a husband and

[1:33:25] wife um founder situation because it's like if this fails we're both out of a job so there's some interesting pressure added but absolutely all right another question from george i nikolev he says what was this is a tough one actually i'm curious to hear you take what was the key to nailing down product market fit for you um honestly listening you know i think this is i think one of the things that's been kind of challenging in in building this product is i am super close to the users and super i am the demographic right that we're sewing to so i get excited and i get all these ideas about things

[1:34:02] that i want to build and that i want to do and that i want to see um and i think when we go down that path often especially you know i get excited about the features my husband gets excited about the technology and starts building all these things and you know it takes us then we end up with like a six month release which is not really very agile when you think about it it's not what we coach other people to do um we build these huge releases that take forever to get out the door and we're doing you know a hail mary once we put those out to find out if

[1:34:29] it's stuff that people like um and honestly like production is the most expensive place you can test out an idea so one of the things that i think has really helped us is not building so much stuff until people ask for it and that that enterprise deal that we got at the beginning of 2019 really set us up for that we had to shelve a bunch of stuff that we were excited to build and listen to what they wanted us to add to the tool in order to support a 2000 person organization and that you know it kind of changed things for us and also helped us going forward with other

[1:35:01] contracts so now when we go to the table and start to work with these large enterprises one of the first things we ask is are there things that aren't in the tool that you're interested in having added to the tool and even if it's you know we've had we have a recent one that was a laundry list of stuff and when we came to them with a price to add it all they said just add this one thing um but now we have a you know we have a whole backlog of other things they'd like to see added that are probably things other organizations want added to

[1:35:26] so a big part of it i think has just been listening like finding who who's our optimal customer and listening to their needs yep very nice all right a reminder to folks in uh in remote um click the question button and submit your own question if you have any questions for colleen we have uh almost another five minutes to go i have another question um this one from jack dempsey how have you navigated the challenges of being married to your co-founder any tactic strategies or principle to help principals to help make this work well lots more coors light clearly we're in colorado so that helps um no

[1:36:07] in all honesty i think some of the things that we've really figured out help us are things that i think would help any co-found like co-founders we try to um we use jira for our work we have a kanban board where we track priorities we use that with our contractors whether it's marketing folks now or dev folks um we try to communicate in slack a lot even though we're sitting usually two feet apart from each other so we use slack for everything so that we can see what each other's communicating especially when it's like third-party contractors so that i know if he's told the developer you

[1:36:40] don't have to build this thing um that way i don't yell at them later and then we also block off times we block off different times during the week where we either look at the backlog together we look at our metrics together um because i think it can be like we both get like i said we both get excited about the things that we're passionate about and kind of go down different paths and we've we've had that bite us in the ass before where we're both going so far away from what each other's working on because we assume we're go you know we assume because we're in

[1:37:08] the same house we're going down the same road and and we're not and so we try to um going into this year set up some more regular check-ins where we're making sure that we're working together on the same things and our priorities are lining up um and that the kids aren't there we have three kids so it's it's chaos here right now with kids being home from school and daycare's being closed so um it's i think that makes it even more important to carve out specific time to take care of those tasks on a regular basis sounds like lots of communication yeah we have a question from hector de

[1:37:42] pereira and he says how do you decide to target small business small and medium-sized businesses versus big corporations as a bootstrapped company in your experience which are the pros and cons of each um so for us i think we still target those small small to medium businesses and we we have a lot of them using the tool now and i would say a lot of those kind of tend to sit in the like 100 user seat type of bucket um the organization might be bigger but it tends to be like 100 licenses that they're looking for um and they're awesome to work with we get a ton of

[1:38:17] feedback from them i think you know we're getting to the point now where we've got a few small small medium sized businesses where we can kind of experiment with them so like we're we're pushing out a beta version of a canvas board that's more like a whiteboard um where you can post things and they're not in columns and it'll still pull all that you know pull all of that back into our analytics and um we can push that now out to some of these smaller businesses and and test it with them and get feedback from them and that's a cool relationship to have that i think

[1:38:46] would be a little harder to do when there's two that you know 2000 users um but for us you know a lot of uh and and they tend to onboard quicker i would say that's the other piece with small to medium business businesses is it's pretty self-service they can kick that off there's not a long contract so we love that part of it it's kind of instant revenue enterprises tend to take a long time i mean these can be like up to six months of back and forth legal security reviews um but once we do finally close those i mean it like like i said it'll two enterprise deals

[1:39:19] doubles our mmr where we're at right now so um i think that's the other part that's kind of you know from a from a focused perspective we want to keep focusing on these enterprise deals because they're they're a lot more lucrative and then they're usually a year-long contract if not three so that tends to be another piece that these big companies want to buy a tool for for like a three year minimum um so once we go through the long road to get there we're really locked into that revenue for a decent amount of time yeah i think that's good perspective i mean the sales cycles are really long with

[1:39:51] enterprise but man the churn is just they don't want to change unless there's a real problem they sign these long contracts and there's this other thing i'll say versus going after small medium versus enterprise is if you can build a business that actually has a i call it a dual funnel where you have people coming in paying a low price and high volume and you can build it like a nice brand but then you also have the enterprises coming in that's an amazing business those are the ones i see growing the fastest so drip was like that where we had a 50 starter plan but we had people coming

[1:40:20] and paying us a thousand dollars a month when they had a huge list uh squad cast who we'll hear from a little later you know it's podcast recording and they of course have the fly fisherman who's paying them 15 a month and then you might have a huge you know uh you can imagine like a podcast network coming in and paying them thousands a month those funnels are really quite amazing so all right colleen thank you so much we're at time i really appreciate you coming on to microcomp remote today yeah thanks for having me this was great hey everyone i am meryl johnston and here today to talk about business

[1:40:57] finances and specifically how to become a financially savvy sas founder i always like to ask why should i listen to someone on a particular topic and here's a little bit about me i come at business finances from both an accounting perspective i'm a trained accountant a child accountant which is like a cpa in the us but i'm also a founder and i've scaled my business binges up to a team of 15 people over the last five years i realized this is a virtual event i i add a couple of extra things about me particularly when it's an in-person event and then we can connect and chat

[1:41:40] over something that might not be accounting related and maybe it's surfing or parenting or something different so feel free to connect with me afterwards and to have a chat about either this topic or something else that about this that is that you're interested in the way that i thought we'd frame this is to look at four different stages of business of particularly related to sas and look at what the financial challenges are related to these millionaire mary we're going to leave for today the financial challenges that i would normally talk about there are related to preparing business for exit and instead we're going to focus on ceo carl who is building a leadership

[1:42:28] team and really in the process of scaling and he's ready to be adopting best practices when it comes to the finance function in his business but we're also going to have a look at hustling hector and stressed out susie who are a bit earlier stage and look at what are some things that they could implement or take action on today that are going to help them build out this best practice finance function and also have a look at why would you even care about business finances in your business so senior carl he's been in business for a while now and he's he's got a team and

[1:43:08] really trying to build out a leadership team so that you can take a bit more time away from business you can take a day off here and there but it's still quite difficult for him to to take a week or two weeks or a month off and so he knows that he needs to get his financial house in order there's three main things that he needs to do in order to assist with that the first is making sure that there's a clear set of deliverables and a timeline so what actually needs to happen what are the deliverables or the results that we're aiming for and this would be

[1:43:44] similar that would be a marketing and sales function in the business as well and again it'd be a clear set of deliverables might be writing a blog post or whatever it is the next component of that is having documented sops so that it's really clear about how these things need to be done and that they can be done consistently and you've got backups in place if something's happened to different team members and then the last is looking at well what financial reports should you be looking at as a founder and how can you use dashboards right let's start off with the bookkeeping timetable and really here

[1:44:23] i'm interested in who needs to do what by when and the deliverable is typically month end reports that would include a profit and loss of income statement and a balance sheet and there's probably some other more specific reports that are customized to your business as well and in order to do that there's a number of steps that need to be completed before we can get to the reports so we need to know what are the steps who needs to do them and and when they need to be completed by and the way i like to break it down is to look at well what are some of the

[1:44:56] monthly tasks okay in order to finalize in a month then there's a number of steps that we need to do you might pay your suppliers and your team fortnightly right so that's in the fortnightly category there might be some weekly tasks and then daily this is just a template you would adapt this to your business as i said what's really important here is getting clear on what the deliverable is and then who needs to do what by when in order to achieve it the next part of that is the how which is the standard operating procedures and due to time constraints i won't go into examples of standard operating

[1:45:34] procedures but the finance function is very similar to other areas of your business in that you would have a defined way of doing things whether it was a defined way of paying your suppliers a defined way of preparing your end-of-month reports to find way of chasing out customers if you're doing something like enterprise sales rather than having customers on direct debit or they're paying for implementations the next thing i wanted to talk about is having as a founder having access to metrics and some kind of weekly dashboard that really helps you keep a finger on the pulse typically even though we're aiming for monthly reports typically many founders that i

[1:46:16] speak with and not actually getting reports on a timely basis which is making it hard for them to make decisions so on the one hand i encourage you to get your your bookkeeper or your accountant to get reports to you quickly within 10 business days after the end of each month but the other component of that is what metrics can you track on a regular basis to get a feel for what might lie ahead and these are metrics that i track this report i get this report on a weekly basis and that goes to my management team and this really helps us from a sales and marketing perspective we have an

[1:46:52] idea of the pipeline from a delivery perspective we can track how we're going and then also looking at onboarding and cash flow too so the metrics and the key drivers of your business will be different for example if you're offering free trials and then you've got an idea around conversion rate there you might be tracking how many new people signed up for a free trial or if you're doing enterprise sales then you might have a sales section that looks a bit like this where you know that typically 10 calls results in two customers or a certain dollar value of revenue and so this really gives you an idea of

[1:47:33] how you're tracking these dashboards can be they can be tracked in excel in google sheets i think that that's fine it's a good way to start out and there's also dashboarding tools where you can bring in data sources from multiple different platforms i think brian who's also in this community has i hope i'm getting the name right here i think it's called sunrise kpi where you can track kpis as well so that's another option for you too the key steps in in this being meaningful or giving you meaningful information uh one actually figure out what metrics uh the drivers of your business and it may be different and then

[1:48:12] what's an effective way to track them and then three carving out time to look at the numbers coming to you now i wanted to go back a step so we've looked at carl and really what a best practice finance function would look like where there's a really clear set of deliverables everyone's clear on who needs to do what by when the how is documented in sops and then there's financial reports coming in within 10 days after the end of each month and there's a dashboard that's being looked at on a weekly basis with the king metrics of the business that's where we're aiming for but if

[1:48:51] you're just starting out you're probably not at that point yet and actually you probably should be focused on other things like making sales and trying to increase mrr monthly recurring revenue but there definitely are some simple things that you can do today to help with the financial side of your business if you're hustling hectares just starting out don't have any employees yet you've got some freelancers that are helping to build your product some of the things that you can do uh to implement client accounting software i use xero then there's other tools like quickbooks out there what's important here is that it connects to your bank account

[1:49:32] and also has the ability to connect to other apps or add-ons too so that you're reducing the amount of data entry required and eliminating risk of errors so having xero setup really helps but also being disciplined with firstly setting up business bank accounts and then using them only for business purposes personal bank accounts for personal business bank accounts for business and it sounds quite simple but i often this is often where i see a bit of a mess when people are just getting started with building their finance function and then the third receipt management again it sounds simple and it should be simple but again something that typically isn't done well

[1:50:16] particularly by founders in their first couple of years just pick a receipt management process and stick to it you might pick dropbox or google drive it might be an email but something all of your receipts should be going to one location typically travel costs are handled poorly we're doing less of that at the moment so if you've got physical receipts from buying meals out hotels things like that take photographs and then save them to whatever system that you're using and that will save you a lot of headache at tax time trust not susie sorry stressed out sofia is she's a little bit further along than hector she's

[1:51:00] starting to transition her team of freelancers into a team of employees she's scaling up the businesses growing she's got more customers and really for her the main issue is around cash flow there's more pressure on her to make sure that there's enough money to pay her employees some of the things that she can do assuming that she's already put in place the the three points that we talked about with hector which we're getting zero or other cloud accounting software using business bank accounts and receipt management so she's got all of that happening really she should then be able to review a set of reports the profit and loss and

[1:51:37] balance sheet at a minimum every month and she should be able to have those reports come out of something like xero and either work with a bookkeeper or an accountant or someone in-house or maybe it's as her to to check those numbers and make sure that they're accurate the last thing you want to do is make decisions based on what you saw in your financial statements and for them to have not been accurate and there's checks and balances that you can do and my second dot point here around financial literacy skills also really helps and i think every founder should have a baseline level of finance skills some knowledge of

[1:52:17] accounting and bookkeeping and some knowledge of taxes as it applies to the country and the location that you're in and there's books you can read courses that you can do and i think every founder should invest in building some of these skills and enough to know that when you are hiring an accountant or bookkeeper you can ask the right questions and you can know that they're doing a good job and also it gives you confidence in when you're reviewing financial reports that you can use that information to make good decisions not rely on other advices so if we do a little bit of a recap we

[1:52:53] spent most of today talking about ceo kyle and what a best practice finance function looks like and the reason i wanted to do that was to paint the picture of as your business where when your business scales up what it can and should look like so something painful but i also wanted to talk about some earlier stages of business and we talked about hustling hector and stressed out sofia who were at the early stages of their entrepreneurial journey and some of the things more simple things that they could implement today to really help them on that path to where ceo carl is that's it from me

[1:53:34] i'd love to connect i'm definitely more active on linkedin than i am on twitter but here are the the options if you would like to connect mr martin how you doing sir very well happy to be here this is andy martin he has over 10 years of technical and management experience in building designing and constructing control systems and project management most of that was a mouthful most of which were with mission critical facilities like data centers and hospitals he holds a masters of science in software engineering from the university of st thomas in st paul which of course is why he could join me here today because he's

[1:54:22] local to the cities and you will know that we are properly socially distancing even though it looks like we're far away um he has had full responsibility for tons of scopes of work including p l on many multi-million dollar complex contracts like data centers hospitals and even an nfl stadium and i can guess which one that is i think take a wild guess you'll probably be playing you can't tell anyone but you know we live here at uh where the vikings play so andy is the president founder of blue rhythm which is sas focused on streamlining mission critical and commercial commissioning efforts and so people who

[1:54:58] have no idea what that is i'm going to talk a little bit so i was a an electrician for just like the blink of an eye before i decided i wanted to go write code for a living and i remember on one of these things so we were installing pipe and running wire and i remember we built a big data center in the and i say we i was like an apprentice right but we built a big data center in the bay area and i had to carry around this clipboard and had to follow an engineer around and it was a big checklist of all this stuff as they

[1:55:24] would turn on the the uninterruptable power supplies the ups's and then they would turn the generator on they'd make sure that the failsafe tripped and there was an automatic switch breaker and blah blah blah and you had to test all this crap because once it's live and you have a thousand servers in there it can't break right and so that's commissioning and that's what blue rhythm does is it takes that clipboard or the five clipboards that we used to carry around and all the paper we then had to fax to people right that's how old i am and it puts it into sas exactly that's the idea exactly yeah

[1:55:49] it's just a it's a project management tool for that specific situation so you know if you're the person building the data center you might hire somebody who's one of our customers and our customers will take our software and they'll go through their checklist it'll create the reports for them and just really kind of automate everything right and i love it because it's such a niche right there's there's so much value and not you know you're not competing against whatever mailchimp is an esp or you know these other big players google like you've picked such a small slice that really you know microsoft's not going to come

[1:56:20] build commissioning software right you know or google or facebook like right you are in a place obviously you have big bigger competitors than you but um it's not something that they're going to come and attack and you i asked you about mrr um you're in your five-figure mrr which for folks who are counting it's that means 10 000 or more in mrr just to give you an idea of you know of where he lands um your yeah your minneapolis based i think we already mentioned that which is why we can hang out and really my first furious question for you is longboard or shortboard sir actually wakeboard wakeboard western kid

[1:56:51] that's uh that's kind of what i've grown up doing and actually did around this past weekend which i'm still feeling the effects though from yeah so a wakeboard you pull on the back of a boat right and you stand up on it so it's it's as close as you can kind of get to surfing on this yeah exactly that's how you start from the midwest i guess 10 000 lakes you don't have much tide for a long board so obviously this was a pain point you know to build blue rhythm like the origin story since you were involved in this commissioning this was a pain point that

[1:57:16] you were experiencing but you weren't a developer i know you had toyed around with some stuff but like what made you think that you could build the prototype of blue rhythm not having ever built you know really built production code yeah so i guess i didn't know for sure that i could but i also didn't know that i couldn't so i really just wanted to try um so that's what i did i just kind of started tinkering at first and just kind of testing the waters i tested the mark a little bit i did some outreach um just put some feelers out and it just kept building and building and

[1:57:46] i got good response from people and decided to just keep at it yeah and so when you started building blue rhythm was there existing software already doing this and if so why did you think you know what edge did you think you had what did you think you could do better sure so yeah there were some existing solutions out there so that gave me just a little bit of confidence that there was a market you know there was people paying money for a solution like this um but the the existing options were either real old legacy platforms that were kind of on the downslope of their their life

[1:58:20] cycle or there's a there's a couple newer real modern sas you know web web-based platforms that are out there and they just have real clunky pricing models they're not as easy to do business with so i felt like there was an opportunity to to get in it's not a saturated market over half of this industry is not using a sas solution right now they're using a combination of home-grown tools access databases maybe some cloud file storage so lots of opportunity for them to streamline and really come on board with a you know modern web platform to manage their projects yeah that makes sense and so how in an industry like this

[1:58:57] obviously you're not going to be able to run um i shouldn't say not but i would guess i'm guessing facebook ads is not going to work in your space you know and even like google adwords and linkedin are going to be a tough they're going to be tough traffic channels so you know are there a couple kind of lead gen avenues that have really worked for you yeah it's it's been tricky it's still it still is tricky so whatever we do it just has to be very very targeted so yes facebook ads are difficult um we're trying some different things with just promoting uh blog posts to a

[1:59:28] retargeted audience or lookalike audiences so still very very narrow um same thing with with google ads so any paid paid acquisition we're we're keeping it very small very focused and the things that have really i think moved the needle are kind of the in-person events so we go to industry conferences it's such a small community that if you're not at those events you're really kind of not part of the industry and in the community so you know last year once we once we started showing up to those events it really just gets our name out there people see that we're serious and we're here to stay and make a

[2:00:01] long-term push in the market so the in-person events at conferences you know setting up a booth talking to people face-to-face and cold outreach has been a good channel for us too which is difficult and there's some good bad ways to do that but um had some success there just some people just you know aren't aren't aware or um just aren't currently you know in the mindset where they're looking so they just need that little extra prompt to get them interested yep yeah and that's the thing is you know i'll hear people say that let's say cold email is dead or that um you know trade shows and

[2:00:33] events aren't worth it but in these small niches where there are only thousands of potential customers you know or maybe tens of thousands but there aren't that many that oftentimes that still works you know if you're trying to cold email um i'm trying to say you know if you're trying to cold email startup founders today or startup executives or whatever that's a it's pretty saturated it's still possible you can but it takes a lot of time but in a space like that that maybe isn't inundated uh you know i think there's a lot of room there yep so you started working on blue river then part time about four years ago it was

[2:01:05] 2016 um you toiled part-time for two years and you you know you told me offline before we chatted you had a bunch of beta users coming really early they would come in they'd use it and they would churn out what was going on there what was the issue because i'm sure there are folks listening right now who are in exactly the same position that you were two years ago yeah so for better or worse i took the path of getting something put together getting a usable product i don't know if you call an mvp or not but getting something there where people could come in and use it

[2:01:35] so i was i was just testing the product testing to see what what people would respond to and i got a huge amount of feedback so it's not a approach that would work or i would advise in all situations but for me never having started a business before let alone a software company getting that getting all that feedback early on really drove the direction that we ended up taking the company and i think without that feedback we would have toiled a lot longer and and had a lot more difficulty reaching the point where we finally feel like we have product market fit um where we've figured out these different marketing

[2:02:11] channels and stuff so just lots of experimentation and some of those early adopters that are willing to give us a try they're also willing to you know tell you how bad it sucks or give you some some feedback that'll get you going in the right direction so um that's that's really what it was it just was a product that that wasn't quite ready yet and you know so many developers that i know go in their basement for two years and just code and they don't have anybody use the app whereas you went counter to that it sounds like intuitively your natural instinct was to let people use it early

[2:02:45] again that's even back in the day that was not my instinct because i was scared and i it was never good enough and it was never there why do you think you did that why do you think you did the opposite of what most people do um partly for the reasons i said and partly just out of ignorance um honestly there were a couple times where i i thought we had got it to a point where it was going to work and it was good enough so to speak but it wasn't and those were the just in terms of rejection and uh just the emotional response that i had those were some of

[2:03:16] the the toughest times but um you know i just stuck with it and i was like you know there's there's a response people want this if i keep at it eventually we'll get this figured out and eventually they'll you know the the feedback will shift to more positive versus more negative right yeah that's what i was going to ask you about you spent two years part-time obviously you were probably working a day job right and you had nights and weekends working on blue rhythm two years is a long time you're getting rejection people are churning out why didn't you quit i think there was always enough momentum

[2:03:50] for me to keep pushing forward and and i just had a strong desire to make it work i'd always wanted to have something that i that i own that i created i just liked the the process of creating and getting the feedback even though it's not always good and and taking that adding it into the product and then getting the feedback that says hey that's great thanks for thanks for doing that um so just the just the desire to see it to see it through and to to see it work and just knowing that the market was there you know it wasn't like i was trying to

[2:04:21] convince people to to do something that they had never thought of or seen before right yeah and then it was just about a year ago it was mid-2019 that you you kind of call your soft launch right where you actually feel like you kind of went all in you said this is when things started growing for you and i'm sure is that when you went full-time it is yeah may last year may of last year and did you have enough revenue to cover your you know expenses or did you have savings or did you just jump off the diving um yeah i didn't wasn't quite at a point where

[2:04:53] the the business alone would have um kept me going so i had a fallback plan which was some savings which i did use some of um but yeah i just had confidence that we were close enough to product market fit that it was going to work um just because of our who our customers are and how our pricing model works it makes sense most of the time for people to pay annually so even though our mrr you know was maybe in four figures the actual amount of money coming in the door was you know in five figures potentially or higher four figures so um i just i just had confidence that it

[2:05:29] was going to work out one way or another and you know worst case i like i told you i end up living in my parents basement for a little bit but that happens it's sacrifices we make right yeah yeah so pull the trigger i figured if if i'm going to make it work i got a i got to be all in and that's the that's when i jumped off yep and i was so that he he just said a pretty cool hack that i've heard many people mention i've actually done it myself jason cohen talked about it um in in one of the best talks about

[2:05:57] bootstrapping uh ever called backing what is it yeah building the ideal bootstrap business i believe but it's the annual prepay and if you're in a space where as a bootstrapper you can get your customers to annually prepay you typically give them two months off is how you know i would often work it so you give them about a 16 and 23 discount um then your cash flow is way more than your mrr but that can allow you to either hire someone or allows you to quit your day job or whatever it is i'm curious so you have this two years of just two or three years of kind of

[2:06:25] toiling part-time and struggling people are churning out then you s you had enough traction that you're like i think we're almost at product market fit and and then you did you have achieved it at this point um what changed between that early height those early high churn days and the past 12 months of kind of as your growth has accelerated like what's what's different yeah i can't point to one specific thing but it's definitely just a you know a combination of um getting the getting the messaging and the marketing the positioning figured out uh you know so we're we're talking to the right people we're having the right people coming to talk

[2:07:04] to us about signing up um so they know what they're getting into we know who we're talking to and and what the you know ideal customer is looking for and then just having that much time to to work on the product and get it ready and and get you know as closer i can't say that we're 100 there but getting much much closer to product market fit yeah that makes sense such an evolving process and it's not binary right it's a continuum it's like you notch it up from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 60 70 and then oftentimes you'll find a new audience and i don't know

[2:07:36] in your tight niche if it'll do that but then you find a new audience that finds out about you and then your aggregate part of market fit actually goes down again and then you have to work because the new audience you don't quite have it right you don't have all the features yep um as as we kind of wrap up i you know you're you're in tiny seed batch two yep and um i'm curious why like what made you decide to well first i'm curious how you heard about tiny seed and second what made you decide to apply because the application you know you went um middle of of 2019

[2:08:05] you went full time you would have applied probably four or five months later it would have been november of 2019 and then you would have been accepted i think you know about six seven months ago so first you know where'd you hear about it in a second what made you decide to apply so i had been a listener of startups for the rest of us for a long time so i that's probably where i heard about it or just something related to that that channel and the idea was to it wasn't so much a safety net so to speak but it was originally planned to be kind of an

[2:08:36] accelerant so there were some other parts of the the platform that we really needed to to reach to really get our platform built out and get to parity and exceed parity with the other options out there and the plan was to take that and really just kind of throw the fuel on the fire i feel like i felt like we had a really good idea of what we needed to do at that point and i just wanted to do it faster really and has it accelerated for you yeah definitely awesome yep well sir we're at time thank you so much for joining us today yeah absolutely happy to be here all right

[2:09:05] great having you

[2:09:12] hello and welcome to your five minute seo hack in this hack we want to be using free google tools to find opportunities within existing content and then i'll show you some tweaks that you can be making to rank for more keywords for pages that you already have my name is viola eva and i run a company called flow seo where we help digital businesses to rank on google and increase their organic traffic here i've jumped into google search console google search on console is our opportunity to communicate with google it is not google analytics google analytics is something where you've probably in and before which allows you to look how many

[2:09:52] people visit your website and what do they do on your website google search console is more of your control center in which you communicate with google it allows you to see how many pages are indexed if there are any errors and it also gives you a brief keyword report it's probably not the best keyword report to be found that's what seo tools are for but once you set it up it's free so this is what's making it interesting i'm here in the performance report and i've chosen to look at the last text month now i'm clicking here for average ctr and average position and i'm scrolling down to pages

[2:10:30] what i'm looking for are pages where i'm stuck on page two or three or four of google these are the pages where google is showing some interest we are ranking right we made it to page two but we're not getting the organic traffic that we deserve because google thinks we're not quite relevant so i'm looking here at the position column to kind of like find opportunities and i basically want to see where i may be getting some impressions and some clicks but not a whole lot so this one here stands out to me and it stands out to me because it's a good important keyword seo agency berlin but

[2:11:08] it's really not getting any good like clicks that make it worthwhile i can now click and see more details about that specific page and i'm typing here to look at the queries so here i can see all the keywords that i'm currently ranking for and that google search console is tracking and showing to me so this gives me an idea on where i'm doing well so seo agency berlin i can see okay i'm almost on page on the bottom of page 1 position 10 that's quite good but then for example there's seo company in berlin where i'm in position 19 so i could be doing much better here

[2:11:44] and this is also a keyword that has a lot better click-through rate so it might be interesting for me so what i'm curious to understand is if i'm leaving any money on the table here with this keyword seo company compared to my focus keyword seo agency so i'm jumping into the article and it basically allows me to have a look on what i have here and then use another free seo tool called seo minion and i can basically click on analyze on page seo and in can i'm trying to understand if i did my seo basics right the seo basics include adding my keyword into the url

[2:12:23] adding my keyword into the page title and then adding it into my headline one and possibly a few sub-headlines i can see that i've done a really good job here the keyword boutique seo agency berlin it appears in some of the most important ranking factors what i can never see here is the keyword seo company it doesn't appear in the sub headlines it doesn't appear in the page shuttle meta description or url now one word of advice about urls you don't want to change and redirect your urls in this case this is really rolling the dice if you create a new page always make sure to keep it

[2:12:56] optimize your urls but if you're already on page two i wouldn't dare to roll the dice and i just leave it it is so i'm jumping into the actual page and i'm typing the word company to see if i'm even using the word company and i can see that i'm using it several times but i'm always using it in the context of talking about my clients basically seo enables your company or your company's goal um and then what else do you have here again as you ordered for your company we will sleep and breathe your company so what i can see is in this entire page

[2:13:30] the word seo company berlin actually never appeared so this is actually a really really good opportunity because i'm already in position 19 and i didn't even use that keyword so if i can now start adding that keyword my chance of improving is a lot better same here is like search engine optimization berlin i'm in position 22 and that probably doesn't even appear on the page so by adding in those keywords that are that are doing somewhat well but not super well but not even appearing in the text that can dramatically improve my chance of ranking i have an seo checklist that you can download here at floyd.com content slice checklist no

[2:14:10] opt-in no sign up no nothing you just jump right into my content calendar template and the parts that are interesting for you is the seo checklist that starts here at column h and it basically tells tells you what you should be looking at first it asks you have you done a good job with the main keyword which is the most important keyword for the page but then it also asks you did i use my supporting keywords in the sub-headline in the body of text and here i can see for the two keywords that were my opportunities i didn't even do that so now my job would be basically taking that page and

[2:14:43] making sure that i can confidently say yes for all these important on-page seo factors and this is how you can find seo opportunities just by using the free google search console and the seo minion plugin and a free spreadsheet that i offered you here i hope you're going to have fun with this and happy ranking our next keynote is from the co-founders of squadcast squadcast.fm is podcast it's remote podcast recording software so you log into a web browser you send a link to a guest up to three guests and you can all uh just get in and instantly record local audio super high quality it's what i

[2:15:24] use to record all three of my podcasts so zach moreno and rock felder they've been friends for most of their lives and they're lucky to have maintained that friendship as they built squad cast into a company that has blown past 100k mrr they've blown past that mark in the past year and with that let's welcome rock and zach to the show thank you gentlemen so much hi thanks rob thank can you hear us guys yep all right well hello to our friends of microconf thank you all for your time today we're super excited maybe even a little nervous about sharing our story with you on how we blew past 100k mrr just a

[2:16:04] warning uh it happened a little bit different than we expected and we think it can for you too uh before we do get started with uh the presentation though we would like to introduce ourselves so zach say hi and tell him a little something about what you do at squad cast yeah hey everyone i'm the co-founder and ceo of squad cast with my good friend rock yeah and i'm rock and i'm the co-founder and cfo so kind of handle uh more of the business sales side of things okay so a little bit about our backstory we're uh longtime friends as we shared and we are avid podcast listeners rock

[2:16:39] actually introduced me to podcasts and i've always loved listening because we have uh we have a love for for learning new things and podcasts are a fantastic way to go really deep into a niche topic uh very quickly and from there we decided to make the the transition over the course of a couple years later decided to make the jump from being a passive listener to a lot of podcasts and really make the jump into being an active creator and participate in making our own show we wanted to do a science fiction audio drama so um that's a relatively new category within podcasting and uh just fell in love with that right

[2:17:20] away so uh once we started that journey we had a we had a constraint of being a remote team and um you know like like we are today so uh we we didn't want to sacrifice the the audio quality of our production uh with uh with that constraint of having a remote producer and voice actors and authors and all of those things we we needed to have high quality production while having a distributed team to have any kind of regular cadence which is super important to podcast audience growth so we we found that problem of of audio quality wasn't really there with the state of the art

[2:17:59] in in the industry and really saw that as a as a challenge kind of accepted that challenge and pivoted then from doing this sci-fi audio drama podcast to uh to a sas startup which which is a first for us so what we do like rob shared we help professional podcasters record remote interviews in studio quality so we help with recording thousands of hours each month in over 120 countries around the world and in the graphic you can see there on the right the ah there we go sorry about that cool there we go that's the graphic all right so um we help podcasters we do it a lot and

[2:18:49] um and that ux is uh very similar to other video apps and conferencing apps that you may have used except that we record studio quality audio and we have two patents pending on our technology solutions for how we empower that style of recording and we've been bootstrapped and working on this for around four years now

[2:19:18] all right and uh on this next slide you'll see some of the companies that we're honored to work with but we also get to work with a lot of amazing podcasters like pat flynn kara swisher people at the spotify gimlet teams and so many of those other companies that you see oh excuse me and the great rob walling too like he mentioned so it's truly an honor yeah it's truly an honor to help that and so many other podcasters in various uh places in their journey whether they're just starting off or they're uh you know a pro working for a big corporation and these creatives really define the

[2:19:50] standards for audio quality in our industry and will really help them to achieve it at scale all right but because we have such deep respect for the work that you all are doing we need to be real with our fellow bootstrappers it honestly felt like it took forever for us to reach 10 kmrr and um that wasn't very long ago yeah so um we've never done any of this before and uh like rock said we respect all of you for going on on a similar journey and uh our founding team have all had day jobs for for years into this experience together and uh and when we finally did reach 10k

[2:20:36] mrr um 100k just seemed like light years in the future from that and uh rock and i finally started paying ourselves in january of this year so still 2020 even though it has been kind of a dumpster fire in lots of ways uh that was a big milestone for us so we suspect that uh this may sound familiar to the to the journey that you're on all right so we're gonna go back about a year when we did finally reach that 10k mrr um milestone and you remember how good that felt man like how i mean we felt like we made it we felt like we were balling and we weren't

[2:21:16] paying ourselves we were still operating on pretty minimal resources but it was a big moment yeah it felt like it it took forever uh to get there and then lots of tweaks and listening and conversations uh to even have a shot at doing that and yeah that that was a huge milestone for us so and it started to feel validating because like more uh other companies entrepreneurs fellow founders that we talked to like it was like oh okay 10k like you know good job boys finally yeah yeah later i felt like we were clawing our ways there calling our way there so uh fast forward to uh about a year

[2:21:56] so a year later may 2020 we hit 100k mrr and uh so much has changed and continues to evolve and i think that's what's really fun about the journey is is how things have changed and evolved and we're going to walk you through some of the main reasons why we think we reach this point and yeah just go over how it

[2:22:20] happened all right so after lots of reflection and kind of soul searching and really trying to unpack that that journey uh which we do as a practice kind of ongoing but but this opportunity uh to speak with you today really uh was it was a great forcing function to look at this more deeply and that's really where we we realized that our story of this rapid growth really arcs across these three chapters of focus reputation and the final chapter the final chapter we're going to keep as a surprise so we'll keep you in suspense temporarily on that but uh stick with us it'll be it'll be worth your while

[2:23:09] yeah hopefully our marketing folks out there can appreciate the uh mystique tactic so the first one uh focus so to be quite candid the original vision for squad cast was more or less pretty similar to to what it is today however it was a bit inflated we were kind of trying to do a little too much to be honest thankfully we're really fortunate to get great advice from our advisors our customers and really what they told us was we don't need you to be good at everything we need you to focus on this one thing and that is being experts at remote recording and really helping

[2:23:48] the industry and and the creators in the space really understand what that is like whether they're using squad cast or not there's a lot of opportunities for us to help and of course you know we think once we can build up that reputation that um you know that they'll come to us because we are the the experts when it comes to recording their content remotely um so really what they guided us to understanding was that was our role uh it wasn't intuitive to us at first but it was really about us really uh putting our flag in the ground as as establishing ourselves as experts so one

[2:24:18] of the state the sayings that's really stuck with me over the years is one that dan martell says which is startups typically died not from indigestion but due to starvation or not from starvation but due to indigestion so it's too much ideas too much going on um not a lack of ideas which is kind of funny because at least at first when we were trying to you know start off squad cast or i know you and me separately were each trying to do something more entrepreneurial and independent it's like what's going to be that idea and it turns out that's not the hard part um yeah so

[2:24:54] in addition to that though we we also learned that we needed to focus not just on being experts in this particular niche of podcasting but also that we're we're sas founders we're bootstrap sas founders so really focusing on becoming professionals at being sas founders specifically bootstrap uh sas founders so we did that by learning from the greats and really not just taking in that knowledge but like applying that knowledge like almost immediately one of the things that i don't know if you could call it a mantra or just a saying that we say a lot it's not ours so we're not trying to take it from anybody but it's called

[2:25:29] just in time learning that as things kind of come up during the founder entrepreneur journey you can't know everything but we got to get comfortable with at least learning on the fly and so like understanding key topics like our unit economics like pricing i mean we wouldn't be in this position today if we hadn't really taken it upon ourselves to really learn about those things because pricing was one of those things that guys like rob wallin are always telling you it's a big deal it's one of those levers that you can pull and and truly transform uh transform the business and and it it did like our revenue went up as you can

[2:26:04] imagine but our churn went down it's it's exactly what they say another one is like kind of figuring out our customer support especially relative to the type of business model you have so our our business model is a little bit on the lower price side but we were delivering high-touch customer support which can't scale and that it was never designed to scale it was designed to build relationships but just understanding the whys and um and learning from it and again like learning from it is one thing but actually implementing it is way harder i mean how how difficult was it to not just figure out what our pricing was

[2:26:37] but actually put it into place but boy was it worth it right difficult yeah one word and uh now as part of tiny seed uh we're seeing that have an impact uh again on the next iteration of our pricing but uh but with our peer companies uh that inspire us by uh by making these these uh improvements as well so uh so as founders like uh like all of you and us we're a finite and valuable resource so please don't waste any of your time working on stuff something that doesn't matter but zach you might be saying how do we know what matters right that's over

[2:27:17] simplistic um so much has been said about founders having extreme passion for the work that they're doing but um i i would challenge you there or submit that what what about your customers like do they have passion for the problem that you're working to solve for them if that's not the case then it probably doesn't matter that's probably a good indicator so uh the base camp team who we're big fans of uh coined the term jomo and uh we love that so as a result of intense focus one result i should say of intense focus is that you will for sure miss out on other opportunities

[2:28:02] and that's okay just accept that now or we have anyway what's joe mommy uh the joy of missing out excuse me yeah so kind of the kind of a different take on fomo um so we have had plenty of huge opportunities and potential game-changing ideas pitches from vcs on pivot to this and we'll fund you or do this other thing at the same time in squad cast um so we've we've had those those ideas uh for for other sas companies um but we've not pursued any of them with intention um and i should say yet because we're focused because we're focused on realizing our potential within squad cast that's

[2:28:44] that's the opportunity at hand so one thing about focus is uh that is a constant struggle to maintain focus so i would recommend that you stay mindful check in with yourself and just keep saying no to stuff that doesn't matter using that same approach that we shared before yeah one of the things we said is like the bootstrappers way is just inevitably to get good at saying no yeah yeah so uh so we have reputation um so if the problems you are solving they do matter to customers then there's likely going to be a community of people who that matters to and we're all here because

[2:29:28] we're bootstrapping which also means that we're investors in ourselves so invest the resources that you have not just in your business keep doing that but also into the community that you're in service of and you can do that by hosting meetups by sponsoring conferences like this one and uh and just generally fostering conversations and we're a bit biased but we think that podcasting is a great way to have an ongoing dialogue with on uh within the topic that you're an expert in and you're helping serve customers in so um if your customers are more involved in in this community than your company is then you're probably not that's probably

[2:30:15] an indicator that you're not investing enough so you want to invest more than them and uh and that'll also help position you within the the their minds as being you know part of this industry part of this this new category that you're working to create so it's important to speak with your community but it is more important it's paramount in fact that you you listen when you're having these these conversations i think our friend colleen uh mentioned listening is is critical to their business it's been critical to ours we often say that uh in an industry full of people who speak for a living our superpower needs to be

[2:30:51] listening to them so we practice that and while you're investing in the community it's it's a good idea to listen more than you speak like help catalyze these conversations but then listen the community will then invest feedback and ideas into your product and uh don't don't stop there don't stop with listening uh put it into practice actually do what they are telling you to do and then and this is kind of magical then you get to tell this story to other people and you get to give those customers those community members credit for that idea and you can keep going through this cycle and you keep doing that until you

[2:31:36] stop counting and your product will have improved dramatically and the community will love you because of the roi they got on their investment of ideas and feedback yeah i think another big part of how we developed our reputation within the space was uh really how what our approach to managing what was in our control and that's what i mean by what we mean rather by show up every day uh it sounds kind of cliche and just like not specific but like we've just experienced so many magical things just by showing up every day and also the fact that like our competition just does not so we just saw it as a way of

[2:32:21] like showing our passion about the problems we're solving and how we solve customers like taking that opportunity any way that we can because it's really easy to show up when customers are happy but when showing up actually matters the most we've found is is when they're unhappy so kind of like what zack was talking about was that we found that those are the opportunities to build the most positive reputation by figuring out to make it uh right and excuse me those people that were our biggest critics we've time and time again turned them into uh our biggest fans and so we kind of almost seen it as like

[2:32:58] somewhat of a repeatable process but over time we believe this mindset of showing up uh over time yields similar benefits as like compound interest and that investment over time money and going wherever necessary built up a significant amount of social equity that we believe really contribute contributed to our final chapter and what's that final chapter yeah so a bit of a bit of a drum roll here please all right and there we go all right it's luck so to be honest there's in our opinion no getting around the fact that our growth was significantly impacted by some strange fortune uh several people in our network whether

[2:33:45] they were advisors or customers or just like other founders investors they would always talk about startups having some sort of inflection point or moment when you know they just had it just things change for them uh and so we would just always wonder when's our time coming it seems like things are going good we're hitting 10k mrr continuing to grow it's going good but it's it's not like we're not nothing's gone viral yet if you will um and so we're just one of those many stories of a crazy opportunity and shelter in place was ours so suddenly content creators across the world were in desperate need

[2:34:23] of a high quality remote solution to keep their production on schedule and thankfully squad cast had already built up this reputation as being really focused on uh recording quality content remotely um so i don't know if you remember man but like back in march uh getting on the phone and just being like holy f word is this is this happening is this is this it and then what were you saying this is it yeah i think it is so uh a little crazy and and not lost on us that like we are fortunate and and but uh i don't think our story is necessarily that exceptional because

[2:35:00] there's other people that are benefiting and having success in this as well but anthony bourdain who we're a big fan of and i know he's not a startup founder so i have no idea what the context of this quote was in but he uh was quoted of saying luck is not a business model and we agree with him so but we believe our luck was only realized uh because we were so focused on being the best at something that mattered and had built up a reputation uh for when our time come came yeah and uh about luck you know as far as we know uh in inflections

[2:35:35] inflection points they can't really be designed or engineered sidenote if you feel otherwise we're happy to explore that but what you can design and engineer is in preparation for those inflection points to come so why did we sponsor the largest conference in our industry before we even had a stable product or any customers why did we need to build a global cloud infrastructure with microservices built to scale when we only had like 50 customers so much of the work that we did before shelter in place felt like extreme overkill but in reality it wasn't um because we were ready for when luck found us so look at where you are

[2:36:26] each day and ask yourself what would break if we were to 10x tomorrow like i was just talking with my wife over the weekend and it's like are you ready to explode you know that's that's a strange question but that's essentially another way to say it so make those improvements now uh ask yourself that question make a list do those improvements keep repeating that and take your startup seriously i know you all do but take it more seriously and have intentions to grow it be ready to explode so what are you doing all of this hard work for if you're not expecting that growth is even

[2:37:07] another way to put it

[2:37:13] all right so the big question is is what now well i mean we're certainly not done yet as as proud as we are of our accomplishments in many ways we still feel like we're just getting started and there's so many things left to accomplish which i guess is the beauty and the beast of of this whole game that we're in uh but we have learned that what got us to 10k is not what got us to to 100k i mean you know think about how different our jobs day to day are from just a couple months ago it's it's continuing to evolve and change and something i think we're learning to

[2:37:44] embrace and really uh get excited about even though uh you know change isn't always the easiest thing to deal with but we do feel like the same is going to be true for when we hit that 1 million mrr amount or beyond yeah and we have some really good ideas we built up and are continuing to build a really great team uh to prepare for that tomorrow today and um if if we if we if we would not be able to get there without focus reputation and luck to this next milestone beyond where we're headed so thank you all so much for for listening to us today and making

[2:38:29] this event really great uh we we've had a great time learning from everybody and we hope the same is true for you gentlemen thank you so much just a reminder to folks in shindig feel free to ask your questions in the chat it looks like it looks like we have quite a few questions already pouring in um i'm going to kick us off with first question did you guys ever launch that sci-fi audio drama tell you have uh we do have a podcast though called between two mics where we explore the and have conversations with people that are helping to advance podcasting forward in different ways uh

[2:39:09] audio dramas science fiction are are a big part of that but we also talk about the technology and just a general momentum podcasting being a relatively new medium has all sorts of opportunities for for innovation and some of that science fiction is is becoming science facts so we're proud to play a small part in that very cool if you ever launch it i want to check it out so first question we got one subscriber yeah and we have uh we've made more connections and friends who are actually turns out podcasts like that are a tremendous amount of work i mean you know rob with uh with your media

[2:39:43] production uh an interview podcast is uh is a lot of work but uh scripted drama with voice actors all over the world yeah but thankfully our technology solution is there to uh to keep the quality up indeed so first question from the audience deep asks zack without any previous references of success how did you stay on a path to solid growth did you put your eyes on 100k mrr or was it more wing it more a wing it playful approach to see how far you got and then he has a separate question for rock but i feel like either of you could answer that yeah these you know yeah yeah it's good um

[2:40:21] i i would not say it was wing it i would say that it's uh you know milestone uh reassess you know reach a milestone reassess what's next what's what do we think it's gonna take to get us there what are kind of the bottlenecks to that today what's our path to remove those and also then um like what are the resources we have now because that's another thing that's evolving it's not just a new set of challenges it's a new set of opportunities that come from your new mrr having reached that you can use those resources to add invest further into your business further into the community

[2:40:56] and just continue uh continuing that cycle i think is more so how we look at it it's just that there's more zeros now uh it's it's it's kind of a trip but that that's our process and if i could just add it's kind of similar to the advice we give to podcasters that have interview shows where they ask like should i have like a script of all these detailed questions i want or is it better to wing it what do you think is best what we found is somewhere in the middle having an outline of where you want to go some type of road map if you will

[2:41:24] but leaving yourself freedom for things to come up some creativity like you never know what's what's going to happen like we didn't know shelter in place would just put us in a position where we had to handle just a surge of new podcasters or experienced podcasters that need to record their shows remotely yeah i like to think of it because when i record a podcast interview i do have an outline of questions i'm going to ask but i almost never stick to that outline i'll also i'll either skip them or i'll insert additional ones uh you know based on what someone says i like to think of it as if i'm going to

[2:41:55] drive from la to new york i know that i'm going east i don't know if i'm going the south route or the north route there's all these different places i could go through but in general i know where i'm going and then you just don't know how fast you're going to go and exactly what roads you're going to take right i think that's a decent metaphor for it totally um next question from deep um he addressed it to rock but again i feel like either you could ask it he said rock you mentioned learning from the greats plus just in time learning can you elaborate on that what

[2:42:21] specifically worked really well for you with regards to learning with regard to learnings yeah so when we first started squad cast we didn't really know what we were becoming a part of in the sense of a community we didn't know like bootstrapping was this whole thing and we didn't know any podcasters well that too yeah so we just would go to wherever those people were that were either you know experienced sas founders like like you rob dan martell or you know some of the more specific stuff like uh patrick campbell from profitwell they do a bunch of stuff on pricing so when we needed to learn pricing

[2:42:59] just in time we went to the people who were seen as experts and again the easy part is is learning the hard part is implementing um and but we just are we i feel like we're a testament of it's worth that effort because it did transform our business it it's also a bit meta we use i mentioned in the very beginning that we love learning from podcasts because it's a very efficient way to go deep on a very niche topic so you want to learn about sas pricing right you can find you know three podcast episodes 10 podcast episodes on that and be from zero to 60 by like later today

[2:43:36] listening to those and like rock said the trick really is having the levers being able to implement that right away so um i can't uh there's so many examples of oh i just read this book or i just read this chapter or the section of this book and you know it's it's part of our business and strategy the next day um that's something that we repeat over and over and over again yep it's that advantage of being a startup founder and being able to implement really quickly right versus working at a fortune 500 or a thousand and you're it might take you three months to get everyone on board and like

[2:44:08] if you don't get a pilot project going or whatever i'm not saying it's bad to work at fortune 1000 it's just the different trade-offs we have right absolutely yeah and tinyseed is some extreme version of that so uh so we've picked up uh we've picked up so much and implemented it very quickly and we're seeing that same uh same approach from our pure company so that's a great way to kind of throw some gasoline on the fire with advice and all the great things that come from the work that they're doing yeah and that that brings us to our next question it's a good segue so justin

[2:44:37] jackson asked why take funding from tiny seed if you were at 100k mrr well that's a great question justin uh so we were not at 100k by the time we started talking to tinyseed uh it just kind of happened but we were already uh looking for ways to um just grow our network and become more professional founder after talking with so many different investors angels accelerators tiny c just felt like the right fit for uh many reasons but yeah shortly after that relationship became formalized we did hit 100k so the money was not something we really necessarily needed but the advice and the the support is something

[2:45:20] that we truly value especially as we're navigating these waters for the first time that's something we've always tried to um try to remain mindful of is uh when you're not going out and actively raising venture capital we tend to think of it exactly like that where it's it's it's capital um but you're also kind of uh potentially sacrificing opportunities to get advice from people who have done this before and so we've always been very intentional about our advisory board and the the skills within um so that we can we can learn from people who have done this before as first time founders and then tiny seed

[2:45:58] again was just a crazy crazy degree of that same approach that um has already been having a really great impact uh beyond kind of our core advisory board yeah i think that's an important point in tiny seat aside it's like a mistake i made early on i think a lot of bootstrappers make is that they feel like they should be able to do it all on their own and they don't set up an advisory board or they don't have a mastermind group or they don't have other people who have true kind of insight and impact on into their business and and you guys have done a good job there's some people

[2:46:29] that i know like ruben game is another example of someone who has really always sought out mentors and is just willing to be teachable you know is willing to to not have the attitude again the attitude i had 10 years ago of like well i'm going to figure it out and i'm going to do it all on my own it just it took me a lot longer to get there because of that so i think advice network and and the bat you know being in a community and having a mastermind i think all that's like so so important so uh eric tompkins asks can you talk more about how you invest

[2:46:57] in the podcast community where and how can this be done yeah so uh just the most recent example we uh we funded or we provide this we provided the seed funding for the we are diverse creators summit which is um was a remote event for by uh founded by one of our advisors adriana flores regard co-founded this new event that was an underserved conversation in community within podcasting and i'm very grateful that we could help bring that to life through some through some investment and also participation so it's not all dollars and you know capital it's also rock spoke at that event um and we we helped kind of provide uh

[2:47:45] our network for getting speakers to that event and there's all sorts of ways that you can leverage the resources that you have that may not always be capital uh to invest it's social equity it's your network it's it's these um these additional elements that you can bring to uh to the community so we speak at events all the time that's another great way of course we we sponsor events and continue continue on that path i mean of course shelter in place has kind of turned that on its head as we're all experiencing right now so i i respect what you're doing uh with with the team rob of of finding

[2:48:23] a way to make this engaging and stay stay the course even though uh 2020 has been so strange so uh so there are all sorts of ways another is just um talking to our customers talking to the community and not having kind of a sales agenda just listening right through meetups and and in our case we uh have we have the ability to go on and be guests on people's podcasts and learn from them about what they're doing um how they're interviewing other people what they're learning from their guests so there's there's all sorts of ways um i would just even it's probably helpful to just even not

[2:49:01] even worry about the money as an investment find other resources that you have and uh and put those to work in the community very cool so we have we're gonna have the lightning round here we have about three and a half minutes and i think i have like another six questions or something so a question from andrew comfort he says you have pending patents and perhaps more in the works how do you balance your intellectual property secrecy nda needs with your openness and communication and acceptance of ideas from users ooh i thought that was going to take a different turn i thought he was going to talk about

[2:49:32] when you file patents the public and competitors can copy them so but he's saying user global you only filed patents in the u.s so that's a whole different uh you know consideration but um you're absolutely right we are open with our customers uh it's just the level of detail that we provide and um one of those patents anyway is how we upload and um progressively upload our audio so that it's uh reliable as well as high quality and that idea came from one of our from our founding advisor harry duran who uh you want to listen to our podcast the episode just dropped today with a conversation with him that's

[2:50:08] called between two mics so uh harry gets full credit for that idea of progressive upload well not full credit well yeah how we actually built it very very different thing it took us 10 attempts right to build this out so um there's uh it's just a level of transparency that that you provide you we can talk about how things work without getting into the nitty gritty nitty gritty of how this particular micro service sends this request and routes you know how we render that audio or there's all sorts of details there that that actually inform the patent of being novel that uh you don't need to put in your marketing

[2:50:44] material it's just more so communicating the benefits of it question from james mcbrian since you grew a lot during shelter in place do you expect do you expect the post shelter in place world to impact your company how are you preparing for that yes i'll answer this as best i can with lightning round response uh of course we definitely anticipate some sort of change however our main focus is to just make sure that the relationships we're building now continue to stay intact and sticky what we're learning uh because we're so intimately involved with all of our customers whether it's solo podcasters or vox espn the folks over there that we're

[2:51:22] talking to it does sound like there's going to be a place for remote recording in their production that they see the benefits of it a lot of these companies or people uh aren't all in the same room so they're still gonna we think that we're confident that there's still going to be a place for for squad cast in these production schedules uh for for the near future right not near future long time espn is a great example they're a distributed company because of their scale so there's absolutely there was a place before there's a place after now it's just more so like hey we don't have to sacrifice quality to uh to

[2:51:52] record remotely we're trying to do that i'm trying to do lighter come on man so last question for the day from justin jackson how big is the squad cast team yeah so we're uh we're up to seven as of last week so we just added a new a new uh software engineer and product manager grace thank you and uh and she's already crushing it um up and running and then as of last week a voice very strong voice within our community we hired as a community manager and her name is arielle nisenblatt so we're very excited with the growth of the team uh the the five uh in addition to that

[2:52:31] were kind of rock and i and our founding team so uh you know that's that's where we're at right now gentlemen thank you so much again rock and zach appreciate your time today on micro conference everyone hello hello okay my name is asia and i am the ceo and founder of demand maven and the question is what's a quick fix that you can implement now in order to make your business way easier to run in the future and hands down i have to say it's paying off your analytics debt today right now if you possibly can what is analytics debt well it's actually based off of a term

[2:53:06] that you might actually already know especially if you're a technical founder or co-founder you might have heard of technical debt or code debt which basically just means as you implement certain parts of your product there's going to be certain parts of the code base and even just certain investments technology-wise that over time prevent you from growing in some kind of way it could also just be impacting overall operations the code base isn't as efficient especially as the product and the business grows and matures especially so as you start making certain decisions about how certain features are implemented how certain things are coded and also how certain parts of the platform again

[2:53:43] are implemented you over time just naturally incur this technical debt you'll have to naturally start making decisions about if you tackle rebuilding certain parts of your product or even uh replacing certain technologies and also what's just kind of okay to kind of turn a blind eye to for now but knowing that you'll get to it and fix it or replace it in the next six months could even be up to several years and not all technical debt is necessarily bad debt you naturally incur it it's really up to you the founders the engineering team and then of course the product team to decide what makes more sense to tackle

[2:54:18] now versus later but as long as you are aware of the choices that you make and also the choices that you don't make that's that's what uh that's what technical debt is all about and analytics debt is the same exact concept except it's applied specifically to your analytics it might sound really shocking but there's actually businesses out there right now today who have reached 20k number r or 50k number r and they have no idea what the top channels are that contribute to overall marketing growth or just overall acquisition they have no idea what the top features are that someone needs to execute in order to

[2:54:54] most likely become a paying customer there's there's so much from acquisition to activation to retention that is relatively unknown and part of this is because there's no overall analytics strategy or plan in order to really figure out how to measure the ultimate things that you need to measure in order to make good decisions and on top of that the interesting part about analytics debt is that it really starts from day one it really starts from day one building the product and then of course launching it going to market with a product and deciding what are the features and just customer segments that we need to be

[2:55:30] able to measure and what how do certain cohorts over time perform and analytics that is it's extremely common and i work with early stage sas companies on reaching those very first growth milestones and i've got to say it's an extremely common thing it's very normal if you are experiencing analytics debt in any kind of way right now let me just say that it's absolutely normal but i will also encourage you to pay it off now if you can you don't want to get to 15k mrr or even 30k number r honestly even 10k number are and have zero idea about where those customers came from how they

[2:56:07] found you and the cool part about analytics debt is that you can technically start now with really simple really simple tools even free tools so google analytics is probably one of the most common analytics tools that you can use to measure overall marketing performance so how does the website perform how does certain channels perform what what what is the overall behavior just from traffic it could also just be demos if you're more of a demo model versus a free trial model how does overall marketing perform and then you can also get into much more complex platforms over time like full story or amplitude or mixed panel

[2:56:41] heap and start looking more at product specific analytics so how do certain cohorts behave in the product how do certain customer segments convert in the product based off of where you've acquired them from and also what are just the most important behaviors to become a paying customer these are questions that you don't want to go too long not knowing the answer to it's so critical to pay it off now if you can because the interest can actually set you back entire years especially if you get to a certain growth point growth gets stagnant and again you have no idea how to troubleshoot it you have no idea where

[2:57:15] everything comes from there's really three kinds of analytics that i've identified uh and and there's i'm sure there's certainly more but the most common ones hands down are uh product analytics marketing analytics and of course business analytics product analytics i mentioned a few platforms already but you can look at things like uh even uh user list there's also mixed panel amplitude and then of course there's marketing analytics some of the most common platforms have to do more with attribution and then of course just overall website performance google analytics i would say is extremely common to start with and then layering on complexity over time using tools like maybe a hubspot

[2:57:52] or it really just depends of course on your business from there and then lastly there's business analytics just very simple metrics and kpis like lifetime value or average revenue per user uh how long does a particular cohort stay with you of customers and what is the overall retention after six months 12 months being able to answer those questions with like a subscription metrics platform something like profit well or bear metrics or chart mogul and again like this this tackles more maybe more of the subscription side and then at the end of the day especially if you are technical you can of course leverage your own database of information

[2:58:30] to pull whatever number of reports you need to pull but just make sure that you actually can and make sure also that you have a plan for thinking about what are some of the unknowns in your business today and then start figuring out like what are the tasks that we need to uh define defines that we can start tackling that this is my quick fix i really hope that was helpful pay off your analytics debt now if you can you again you just you don't want to get too long or too far into your growth process not knowing certain answers so if you can tackle them now

[2:59:00] do it if you have the means to do it and you don't have to become super complex from day one like i said you can use something simple like google analytics and then layer on complexity over time but you really want to be able to answer some of those fundamental questions thanks again have a good one now here in the studio once again socially distancing it feels like you're so far away i have nate groshak he is a uh st paul local yes so it's amazing to have you join me here in person even during these non-travel uh covid times so nate actually is the the

[2:59:34] focus of the most downloaded startups for the rest of us episode ever and i believe i mean it's probably 200 episodes ago but it's how a non-technical founder built a seven-figure sas app if i recall something right so nate is uh the founder of sticky albums and he founded that in 2012. he's a former portrait photographer and a corporate trainer and he loves anything radio controlled not like cars and airplanes it is yeah that's cool so he and i are going to dive into a topic that i think inspires both fear and perhaps some aspiration and many bootstrap founders it's the ability to delegate responsibilities to your team

[3:00:08] so that they can get the job done without you hovering over them so i think you have some email rules or tips for empowering your team thanks for having me man just driving in hey that's weird yeah reflecting on the last nine years of running my business listening to story of squad cast just really brought me back to how grateful i am for this community you've created so it's an honor to be here to give back and even a little bit uh thinking back i grew to a million in arr in two years so that really relating to that all of a sudden where's my life what kind of balance

[3:00:43] semblance i had two new kids and i learned these lessons haphazardly so uh i think the first thing i learned is the right type of communication has to happen in the right channels so right now let's just talk about email and i think that for for as much love as slack gets i still think there's some good things about email even internally instead of just interrupting each other all the time so number one i set these rules with my team you want to get a quick response from me it has to pass the yes test what i mean by that is and for any of you if you want to send this

[3:01:24] try to get attention to somebody a vip or just to give these rules to your new team or new and growing team make sure that when they send an email it passes a yes test meaning we can all use our imagination how great is it in gmail i think this is a labs feature where it gives you those three suggestion buttons i've got to love those i love hitting yep that's perfect yeah and it's done guess what those emails get replied to first so i want walk through these three rules number one give me a good useful subject line uh don't use the word urgent because if

[3:02:00] it's urgent uh it shouldn't be an email number two give me what you recommend and even though we typically will give the whole context give the story of the issue uh what's happening and then we'll wrap up with a recommendation i tell my team to put that at the top so i can just glance it i know what is you're going to try to do or what you recommend and then if i need to i can scan down to the recommend the needed context and that's the third element and so i say give me screenshots don't don't assume that i'm on my phone i'm on vacation maybe i don't have time

[3:02:41] to log into which facebook group something's happening in or which system just take a screenshot and put it in the email and it's there if i need it and then i can respond with yep that's awesome i'll also walk them through [Music] give me so make sure you don't put in too many to do's this is a big one for a while uh my team thought they were being helpful by giving me like the summary but for a lot of us still for better or worse our inbox is our to-do list in some ways and so what was happening is if i had an email with

[3:03:16] five things i had to do they'd have to sit there until i got all five of them done instead if you just break it up into five emails i can knock those out really quickly so for those of you watching the tricky part here is how do we deliver this message how do i get my team to follow these rules right um so i think the biggest one is just to be to use some some humor some humility and apologize when um having a one-on-one and going you know what look i'm really sorry i owed you these emails or uh i should have got back to you sooner

[3:03:51] this is what uh if we follow this this set of rules it'll help me empower you to continue to do the work and i think that's the that's probably the bigger point here is like just really learning how to delegate right um i think that it's fun for a while when you're in the weeds you get to do everything but the more i would if i let's just take an example of a bad email hey nate uh so and so said something on facebook what should i do about it i don't know which which where on facebook who like what's the history what's the context that then i would just go do it because

[3:04:27] it was it felt urgent to me and i'd want to go just solve it but i was conditioning my team to just give me alerts they weren't actually doing and solving it themselves so when i switched to this this system it really empowered them to do the work and it feels so good to be there's i think uh you you and sherry talk a lot about the value of vacation and taking a breather and it's such a good stress test for your business and for your team to step away and i personally take such pride in being able to see the team handle it and me just say you got it

[3:05:05] and it empowers them the next time they know what to do and it just starts to snowball in the right direction right very cool it reminds me of um you know the kind of the managerial adage of of bring problems not solution yeah and that's in essence what you're saying is you're trying to level people up look i remember being i was right out of college i was 21 years old i think and i got a job as a project manager and i would i was in project i was a project coordinator or something which is like below and i go to the project managers and i'd say

[3:05:33] oh my gosh i there's something wrong you know what i mean because i didn't know what to do and and so it took me a few years to learn oh start thinking i started learning from what these project managers would tell me and i was realizing oh here's they're thinking about it in a systematic way and they're and they would give me a few you know solutions and i would go back and implement one and i realized why can't i start doing that i'm a smart person right and so that's what you're doing you're like leveling up your own team with this yep and it's it's really it's i

[3:06:02] think it's a double-edged sword you have to really trust and be okay that your team can do it at least 80 to 90 as good as you can it's always going to be different but being able to see their thought process the other thing is think about and this is a message you can deliver to your team too when implementing this say look um let's just pretend i'm your your diving coach i can only help you so much talking about it or me showing me doing the dive and showing you what to do but where the real growth comes is when you just get up and start jumping off

[3:06:35] the diving board then so that's the connection here is when your team starts giving you their recommendation that's the big risk right when they say i recommend we should do this yep at first they're going to be insecure about it so you have to be gentle about what critiques you give and say look this is you did great here here's a slight thing to add make sure you copy this person or let's do this too but awesome recommendation so that conditions them to continue wanting to do it and empowering them to to really do their job without you yeah it's at the end of the day what we

[3:07:10] really want so so what were the rules again number one you need a useful subject line okay number two add and make sure they include what they recommend number three any retired required context with screenshots instead of links to things got it um why not links what do links do what how do links make things more complicated for you um it breaks the yes test so i tell people there's here's the the tricky part to walk is uh i want people to know i want them to pretend like i'm on vacation almost right and you have to be delicate delivering that message but you bring it back to what they want

[3:07:51] they want growth they want to stay productive they want to show you that they can handle it and so you focus on those things that's why i don't want links is because i am on my phone and i don't i don't have a password or it look it's not mobile friendly if there are any of those still a mobile it's like a really bad interface that i don't want to go digging in just give me the screenshot because i don't really need to know all of it i can just scan and see it with a screenshot right and that's the thing i mean this may sound crazy if if you're a team of

[3:08:22] two people or a team of three people but you get to where you're managing six eight ten people and suddenly this is a big issue because even if you're not on your phone you just can't respond you can't solve everyone's problems all the time right exactly you should be getting yourself as a manager or ceo or founder into a position where only the fi the real bad fires are coming up to you and it's that can be tough because then all your whole day is just fighting really bad fires and i've been there but um but if you know the better you make your team the more they can

[3:08:49] they can handle these so okay so you talked a little bit about like the beauty of doing it so you can go on vacation and kind of have more freedom or or get more done are there any other like in your experience why did you need to make these rules any other reasons beyond that yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna add like a bonus concept in here because it's one of my favorite analogies i think that i have so we had a very agile team of like three people in product and two or three people in support and we were all on a two week on hands

[3:09:18] dev call that was our best two-week call and i'm i wanted to eliminate all of the direct interruptions i really think it's so important to protect people's uninterrupted time and i said we need to pretend like the developers are on a ship with no communication they're coming into port one for one one meeting we get to load them up with everything we need them to do because for the first couple years i was constantly changing my mind i was the biggest offender right these rules were for me too yeah and i said nope we're gonna define these objectives for these two weeks we're not going to ship course because

[3:10:00] that's where we lose so much not just productivity but mental health and people just don't they get burned out when you're constantly redirecting them so i said we can't add to do's to them during that the sprint once they're gone they go out to port guess what their phones will work back to us for emergencies for like hey wait what's the clarification on this thing and then we can connect and really quick solve it but we're not gonna change to do's we're not going to change priorities and what they're building this for this sprint and that was really helpful also yep very cool so i'm curious you have you know what they

[3:10:35] should always make a recommendation what about an issue that is is perhaps so complex or so challenging or someone's like i think there's like one of four things maybe it's almost kind of needs a white board of brainstorming sessions what about those issues what should they do with them yeah i think that comes down to this one extra rule is making coaching your team to use communicate the right message in the right channel and i made this mistake as an employee too where in a one-on-one it's i i love doing them i love being you finally get the boss's attention i really enjoyed the one-on-one time i

[3:11:13] would dread it leading up to it because it meant i have to stop what i was doing but like i really did enjoy developing my team um so but what they're there there's that connection that i think a lot of rookie employees will take that same energy and tone of the meeting and they'll try to keep talking to me that way over slack and it's like what no that's not going to work like i think naming it you just got to name it like look this is our time to do this so i would on our we would use trello where they could keep kind of a

[3:11:46] an inbox for themselves of things that they wanted to talk to me about during their one-on-one yep that way they weren't just hey nate i have this idea yeah that's a and that's a real danger of slack um i kind of the rules that i've made with my teams over the years since slack came around is if you need something if something is truly urgent and is blocking you and you need an answer in the next 20 minutes then slack me yep but if you can wait uh i don't know two to four hours then email me and frankly i'm faster than that if they give me email like this i'm way faster

[3:12:18] right and then um i don't remember what overnight is i don't know carrier pigeon or something but okay cool so as we wrap up we have a couple minutes left um obviously this can be a big change for folks and you can coach him into it but are there other ways to implement this how would you advise that you know a founder listening to this role this out yeah so i put together this morning because i was like huh this is good for you guys to know you want but i put together a quick training literally like before i came in this morning and i'm going to share it in the

[3:12:46] slack group i'll give it to xander he'll post a quick 10 minute training and i delivered this same content but direct as if it's a training for your team to watch so you could just hear the link and say hey guys i what do you think about this new strategy to help us to help me uh give you answers faster um but i think the bigger thing is just having humility apologizing i think some of the best things i did as leaders apologize when i made a mistake like look guys i'm new at this i'm sorry i'm sorry this i i dropped the ball here um

[3:13:19] i i was i i tried to get too much in the weeds and i cuz i like it but you know what i hired you for a reason you're super talented at what you do you should just go do it uh and so these rules are as much for me getting out of your way as they are for you to be productive and really enjoy your job i think that's a really important way to think about it too so we will get those into shindig we'll get it to producer xander as well as the microconf connect slack awesome nate graham thank you so much sir good honor to be here

[3:13:50] man thank you so much thanks for all of the investment and the time and energy to this community i know this is weirdly remote but man what this is such an honor to be here and it's so cool to see you still making an effort to bring what can be like lonely as entrepreneurs i think this is really important that we're doing this so thanks a lot thanks sir so our our next guest um is the co-founder of hey hey.com and so um hey is a a headline sponsor headline partner of microconf and startups for the rest of us in 2020 and they've been a great

[3:14:26] supporter of ours for the past several years and you know our next guest jason free joined me on stage last year at microcomp growth we had a really good q a session and conversation where he answered questions about the early days of base camp he took questions from the audience and was just very gracious with his time and and we really appreciated it and uh you know hey has launched this year this is the new product coming out of base camp um and hey has been as i said you know a sponsor and they've come alongside to to try to help this bootstrap indie funded community and and help

[3:14:58] us be able to provide events like this to you because these types of events we'd have to charge a lot more for them if we didn't have sponsors like hey um so i'd love it if you'd give a shout out to hey on twitter and just thank them for supporting this bootstrapped community and with that i'd love to welcome jason fried the co-founder of base camp to the show um you know obviously he's one of the original badass bootstrappers that has consistently provided guidance and good advice to founders for going on two decades now several books written with his co-founder dhh and obviously an outlier that's you know

[3:15:33] taking a stair-step approach to the very top started building mean prep to take their companies to new heights it's like he he added many zeros to the to the formula that i think most of us uh ascribe to so this is an ama and ask him anything this is here to answer all your questions about what it was like to build hay how the successes of base camp served as a basis for the launch of hay and really anything you'd like to ask them about that i also have a few questions um to kick us off but you can just use the question button in shindig

[3:16:02] and it's it's down below you and we'll try to get to as many of them as possible my guess is based on how these things normally go with jason there will be more questions that we can possibly answer but we have about um well just under 30 minutes now to roll in so jason sir thank you so much for sharing the stage with me again oh it's great to be here thanks for having me back yeah it's awesome awesome to see you again are you uh are you in chicago or california i'm currently in california yeah but primarily living in chicago oh yeah it's nice and

[3:16:31] sunny outside there so i was thinking you might be on on a coast there somewhere so for for folks who don't know so anyone can email me rob walling hey.com if you want to hit my hey inbox um but hey is an email service that doesn't you know so i wanna i wanna set the stage right there's gmail and then superhuman launched a few years ago and superhuman is built on top of gmail so you need a gmail or google apps account to use it hey is not that hey is is next to gmail like you have bare bones servers smtp top three all that stuff right it's it you have

[3:17:04] you have the entire infrastructure in place yeah hey is an email service so just like when you sign up for gmail you get a gmail.com address if you sign up for hey you get it hey.comhey.com so we are a provider you don't need to use google you don't need to use outlook you don't need to use apple icloud you don't need to use any other email provider and the reason we did that is because we wanted to innovate we wanted to make new something new and if you're riding on top of someone else's platform like most email clients sit on top of gmail or whatever smtp

[3:17:34] provider you there's not a lot you can really do because you're beholden to how they do things so if you want to do something new you've got to start from the ground up um you've got to be vertically integrated in that way and that's where you can really make some changes and you know so obviously i mean base camp is an amazing success story but you know compared let's compare your revenue to google microsoft apple these other companies you're competing with it's there's there's a lot of zeros difference there so a lot yeah i mean yeah yeah what i guess you know what is in your dna

[3:18:10] you know the dna base camp that that convinced you guys that hey we can take on these these bigger players well for one i mean yeah technically we're taking them on because a lot of our customers have switched over um from from gmail for primarily from gmail over to hey so technically yes we're competing but not really and what i mean by that is i think gmail has 1.5 billion email accounts on gmail we're not going to have that we're not looking for that we're not even in that realm and we don't want to be you know we're a paid service so we're not giving email away for free

[3:18:48] and just like with base camp you know if we get a hundred thousand paid customers we're in a pretty good position so that's kind of what we're looking for we're looking for people who really care about email who are frustrated to no end with it looking for something new looking for something that's private looking for something that's not going to mind your data and looking at something that has built-in workflows and not workarounds and so if we get 100 000 200 000 of those kinds of people we're we're in a good place so we don't need to match google or outlook or or or yahoo different game although

[3:19:19] we're playing the same by some of the same rules and that we're a service provider like they are but but our approach is very different so yeah i mean it's the stupidest thing we've ever done and i mean that in the most you know appealing way um but we're also not really trying we're like for us we're not going to look and go like we didn't we didn't get you know we didn't beat gmail so we lost like that's just not how we look at things in general yeah that makes sense here's the other thing i want to say about this is that companies have their own economics

[3:19:48] and this is something you don't hear enough about in my opinion which is that people are like well how do you compete with them and how do you compete with them and well one of the first questions i would ask is like what are your costs because if your costs are a lot less than everyone else's costs then you can afford to compete in a different level like if we had to get a billion signups to make this thing viable for us well then we're probably not going to be gmail but we don't need that we need tens of thousands or a hundred thousand or a couple hundred thousand like over a

[3:20:15] number of years because our cost structure is is set up completely differently we don't need that much to cover our cost compared to what google does of course when they have you know tens of thousands of employees so you got to start with that and then then you can sort of figure out what makes sense for you it doesn't you don't have to do what someone else does you got to do what works for you and that's really an important thing i think for entrepreneurs yeah no i think that's really important thanks for calling that out you mentioned a couple differentiators you know you said you're

[3:20:44] very privacy focused uh workflows not workarounds um do you want to dive into those two and maybe if there are any others that are you know common talking points about how you are different why you're different than these other providers yeah for sure let's start with privacy um one of the big problems with email and i'm going to hit it from a couple different angles but one of the big problems with email of course is that you're not in control of who can contact you it used to be that you'd give out your email address to someone and only that person would have it and you that was how you kept control over

[3:21:12] who can get touch with you but these days your email address has been bought and sold and traded and posted online it's everywhere so we've stopped being in control of who can get in touch with us which is a problem if someone calls your cell phone and you don't recognize the number you just don't pick it up it's very there's very little effort just to go ah no with email anyone who emails you basically lands in your inbox this is a problem it's a fundamental problem with email today so with hey you get to decide who can email you the first time somebody emails you you

[3:21:41] give them a thumbs up or a thumbs down and if they're thumbs down you'll never hear from them again so that's one version of privacy which is that you are in control who can get in touch with you you're in control who can communicate with you the other side of course is that we um we don't sell ads so we're not mining your data we're not looking at your data we're not pulling anything out of your data not interesting to us don't want to do that ever and also we um we block trackers so what a lot of people don't know is these days by simply opening an email

[3:22:08] with no indication this is the case if you just open an email the sender the person who sent it to you can receive all sorts of personal information about you how long you read the email if you opened it how often you opened it what kind of phone you have what brand computer you have what time it was your ip address which they can give you you know basically get you down to some local information that way as well we block all that so if someone tries to include a tracker an email and you're a hey.com customer they will not know anything about you so we're protecting

[3:22:36] your privacy on that side too so one number one is control number two is on the back end we're making sure that nobody learns anything about you about your behavior no one tracks you simply by opening an email now that's some of the privacy stuff there's a bunch of other things as well but the the bigger thing though to me is is the workflow situation what's amazing to me about email is that email has not evolved for about 16 years 16 years ago gmail came out and it felt different it had new ideas in it the thing is is that we're still stuck doing the same things we've always done

[3:23:07] and no one's really come up with better workflows for example simple one someone sends you an email and you need to get back to someone later comment this happens all the time it's like yeah i gotta get back to that person later so what do you do you hack you hack it you like mark it on red again maybe you star it or flag it maybe you maybe you make a folder or a label and put some stuff in there maybe you snooze it none of those things have anything to do with the mental understanding that i need to get back to someone later so you're hacking around with

[3:23:39] workarounds to try to remember that you need to do something later and you're using all these different things that aren't quite right so with hey which of a button on every email that says reply later and when you say reply later it goes into a nice pile along with all the other emails that you said reply later to then you can go into a mode called focus and reply you click that it opens up all those emails it stacks them one on top of the other and lets you simply reply to those one after another without being interrupted or distracted by anything else that's happening and it's an entirely different way

[3:24:11] to work on email and it saves you it saves me hours a week which is significant um and it saves me a lot of hassle and it allows me to say okay i've got like 30 minutes now i'm going to knock out all my emails at the end of the day i know exactly where they are nothing else is going to get my way so we've got a dozen or so of those kinds of workflows built into hay versus workarounds where you're trying to make one thing do something else so we thought about all that stuff and we were so frustrated by the fact that like

[3:24:38] email just hasn't changed in so long it's time to do something new and that's what hay's all about awesome we have a we have questions pouring in from the listeners as you would expect um i want to jump down to one producer zander from brian yiddo because it ties into something i was going to ask you about anyways jason this question is how is hayes pushback on apple's app store terms of service going and if you wouldn't mind just giving a you know a couple sentences or one minute description of what happened there with apple uh to catch people up and then talk about you know has there been a

[3:25:08] resolution and what that's been yeah of course um so when we launched hey we put 1.0 version 1.0 in the app store apple app store and android store both were approved which was wonderful and then we were we we put a 1.0.2 bug release version or update into the app store in the apple app store a few days later and apple rejected it and they rejected it even though nothing materially changed they rejected on the ground that we weren't giving them 30 percent of our revenue because we were selling a subscription service and somehow that slipped by the reviewers in the first place is what apple claimed um and so we got in

[3:25:46] this battle with apple basically apple said you have to give us 30 of your revenues and we said we're not giving you 30 of our revenues um and they gave us some other things and this basically kind of blew up in the press we went to the press over because it was a strong arm tactic by apple to extract 30 percent of our business which they are not entitled to um the problem is that on ios of course everybody knows you don't have choice so we can't sell we can't even mention that we can sell our product some other way we can't mention billing we can't

[3:26:15] mention credit cards we can't mention sign up can't mention all these things and we didn't mention any of those things long story short is um we got into a big public uh battle with apple over this um it was all over the press for about a week and um we we didn't give in on terms of the 30 we're not paying them 30 percent but what we did eventually come to terms with with them over was um we introduced a slightly well free version uh of hey that's available on ios which is a slightly different version from our main product and if you still want to buy hey

[3:26:46] the full version you still go to hey.com and you buy it there but at least when you load the app up there's something that you can sign up for that doesn't require visiting our website so it turned out that apple was comfortable with that we're still not giving them 30 of our revenue um but they were comfortable with at least the app doing something on on launch um but the the bigger thing here is not there's a few things going on so there's the 30 which of course i think is just you know uh usury it's it's it's unfair it's too it's too much first of all but it's deeper than that

[3:27:19] and this is i think will resonate with with people who are who are watching this who are entrepreneurs which is that i do not believe that a company any company should be able to tell me how i can service and treat my customers one of the big unknown things about the app store is that when if you use the in-app payment system that apple requires you to use if you sell products through apple is that you cannot provide your customers a certain level of customer service if you have a billing issue you have to defer them to apple if you want to give them a discount you

[3:27:48] can't if you want to give them half off you can't if you want to give them a hardship discount you can't for example when covid first hit a lot of our customers on base camp wrote us saying hey we're small businesses this is really going to get take a big hit this is really hard for us we said we'll give you a couple months free don't worry about it like we'll help you out we're here to help you you can't do that once you've given your customer to apple because you're not in control of the billing system so now i have two tiers of customers i

[3:28:11] have the customers i can really help the way i want to help them and i have the customers have to say well you got to go talk to apple and by the way apple's not going to be able to help you because that's not what the business apple's in it's not apple's right to be able to do that to me they're a one trillion dollar company why should they tell me how i can provide service to my customers it's completely abhorrent to me and i'm not going to give in to that so that was another big big angle that we pushed all this forward and out there and a lot of

[3:28:35] people started to pay attention and saw people came out of the woodwork saying apple's been doing this to us for years apple's been pushing us and bullying us for years and i think it created a groundswell of of um of interest and excitement and then you know apple changed the rules at wwc the following week um hopefully influenced a little bit by what we did and hopefully over time they'll change them more and more and more and give developers choice i can go into more detail but i want to take over all the time but that's kind of how that happened yeah bravo yeah thank you sir

[3:29:06] good explanation um completely another direction we have a question from wang von and he says is hey using ruby on the back end oh yes all of our products are built on on rails um so yep hey base camp high rise campfire backpack everything from this point back forward or four or backwards and forwards is built on rails there's other technologies we're using as well but rails rails is the predominant uh language behind everything yep or framework um ah i'm trying to figure out if i understand this question it's from adrian fletcher and it says what features were basecamp slash hey employees really upset to ignore or miss out on

[3:29:50] in order to launch the service so i think what he's asking is what did you leave out of hay that maybe team members really wanted to be in there but you you just many things here's the thing about a 1.0 version 1.0 of anything is not all your ideas it's not the best version it's not everything you've ever wanted to do it's simply what made the cut and there are so many things that didn't make the cut that will add in subsequent releases we've already added some we'll be adding more and more down the road we're currently working on hey for work which will allow companies to use hay

[3:30:28] and all the employees to use hey together um and host your your company's email on that so we're working on that right now um there are so many things um one of the features that didn't make it that i really liked was simply a feature called waiting on sometimes you send an email to somebody and you're waiting on a reply from them and so we had this feature we built the feature early on where you'd you'd mark something waiting on and it would put it into a separate pile so you can keep track of the things that you really know you need to hear back from someone about

[3:30:56] so you can see you can go to that list later and go oh yeah these are the six things that i really need to get answers back from and then the system could potentially send out a nag or something to the other person saying hey jason really needs to hear about this or whatever as we started using it we didn't build the whole feature we just built basically the way to flag something is waiting on and it didn't have enough bite there wasn't enough value in it without kind of completing the whole idea which is like the the additional system going out and helping you out by

[3:31:27] reminding the other person that you need something by a certain time so since we didn't build the whole thing we decided to hold it back so we didn't build sort of a half-assed piece of software so we held that back there's a lot of things like that that we that we held back that weren't fully formed but the idea is right and it's there and we'll get to it later when we can complete the whole thing and put the whole thing out um but there's a number of little things like that but waiting on is one of those like the first thing that comes to mind is something i still

[3:31:54] want today but we didn't really make it useful enough to put it out there and i'd rather kind of make a splash with it when it's actually really fully ready but there's literally hundreds of things we didn't do that we're going to do in 2021 specifically is going to be pretty exciting for hey we've got a lot of things planned this will be pretty fun awesome did i read somewhere and correct me if i'm wrong but i think it was posted in a tiny seed slack by just a founder who's commenting that did you guys release numbers either like mrr that you launched to or number of customers or number of users

[3:32:26] was it like a hundred thousand users a month already or something yeah so when when hay first launched we signed up about 200 000 people in the first few weeks so the the interest was off the charts we didn't exp we we knew we had something really good here um we didn't know that it was really going to strike a nerve like it did and how it's continued to strike a nerve um so we're really excited about that we had about 200 000 in the first couple weeks a lot of this was driven by the apple news and the publicity we got there but a lot of it was driven by pure

[3:32:57] excitement over the product as well like people were so hungry finally to do something new with email and see email in a new light and like when they when they watch my demo i'd give this 37 minute demo which you can find on on youtube or if you google like jason freed hey demo or hey walkthrough you'll find it um when people watch that i think it got a lot of people really excited um about the product because i shared the philosophy behind the features and then walk people through the features at the same time and i think a lot of product people really appreciated that type of work

[3:33:28] walkthrough um and that got people fired up and people signed up about it and told about it and told everyone and we had an invite process the whole thing so there's a lot of that it's of course tapered off as as you'd expect i mean it's like boom launch tapered off um but you know we have tens of thousands of paying customers um already um conversion rate's been been pretty wonderful we're pretty happy with that um it's been more than basic higher than basecamp which has been great um and there's some things that a lot of people really really want like for example custom domains which has been

[3:34:00] something that a lot of people been asking for which we don't offer yet everyone gets an at hay.com email address once we launch custom domains later this year i think a lot more people are going to jump back in and check it out again for a second time so we're very comfortable with how things are going and it feels really great all right awesome congratulations on that um thank you so deep asks he says i love your contrarian way of thinking how do you suggest a new founder who wants to build a company with solid values and a solid culture that sticks i think he's asking just that like base

[3:34:32] camp has such strong culture and values and you've obviously been deliberate about that like how can how can another founder do that in their company first off um it's a mindset right so you have to believe that that that's what you want so don't follow us you can't follow us or follow anyone because that's not you're not being true to yourself if we if you believe what we believe then you're being true to yourself but don't don't look to us i want to be like them figure out what matters to you um and it's all about actions so for example like it's not about what you write down it's

[3:35:06] not about you know your handbook it's really about the way i like to think about culture is it's a 50-day moving average what have you been doing as a company over the last 50 days how do you treat people what do you do when people are stressed out how do you help people what kind of criticism or critique do you get what kind of feedback do you give how do you share how do you help people who are stuck like those the things that make the culture and those things can change which is good and bad but what how the last 50 days been that's kind of

[3:35:35] how i look at it because there's always these spikes or these moments for example we launched hey two weeks of incredible stress terrible stress i hated it it was wonderful but i hated it but it's unsustainable and so we're past that now so now we're settling back into how we want to be um because we don't want to be working late at night working on the weekends and being stressed out so i think it's a matter of how you act it's a matter of the last 50 days or so of how you act and understanding what's important to you now real quick about this um a lot of people like look at our our

[3:36:07] benefits and they look at our handbook and they read that and go i want to be like that it took us 20 years to get to that i mean we didn't offer most of these i mean we've been layering in things that we've been learning we've been layering in benefits we've been layering in the ability to give people more vacation time or to give people more sabbatical time like we couldn't afford to do some of these things many many many years ago and i for people were just starting out a lot of people in your audience this is probably the beginning is probably not the right time to be

[3:36:34] extremely generous on time off and you know like wait till you have some some some cushion some room in the bank and you can layer things in as you go so figure out what the most important things are and in my opinion the most important thing to begin with is free which is make sure you give people more time to themselves during the day longer stretches of uninterrupted time to get their work done that is the best benefit any company can give any employee um and and let them go home at the end of the day fulfilled satisfied get a good night's sleep come back refresh the next morning

[3:37:07] that's a wonderful benefit and that doesn't cost you anything bravo sir all right so question from justin jackson whom you know he says as hate takes over the world um oh no i'm sorry i was reading wrong questions you joked saying building hay was the dumbest thing we've done on a serious note do you regret it at all all the drama with apple the scale of the app etc i don't regret any of it um i'm thrilled that we built hay hay's going to make base camp better hay's going to make hay better base camp's going to make hay better i like this thing where we can go back

[3:37:42] and forth now one of the things we've learned about launching something new is that you launch something new and that's the only time you can really explore really new ideas and those new ideas in you know of course affect the new product you're building but they also affect the other things that you have so we're we've already begun work on base camp four which is going to be out next year and a lot of those ideas came from the things we developed when we built hay so hey is going to benefit everything um i don't regret the the apple uh fight at all i think it was absolutely

[3:38:10] the right thing to do and we're continuing to do so um we're supporting a whole wide variety of um of of efforts and initiatives to to to you know bring this to to the government's you know awareness and and you know both in in the in the us and the eu um standing with other companies that are fighting and other developers that are fighting because this is not something you just do and walk away from like apple's going to be relentless about this and you've got to continue to stand up for for what you believe to be right so no i don't regret it that said

[3:38:40] it was a horrible it was the most stressful time we've ever had in 20 years those two weeks were terrible um again like exciting and hugely rewarding but terrible mentally physically we aged we aged we didn't feel good people were sick it wasn't it wasn't a good time so what i would regret is if we stayed at that pace past the first couple weeks of launch that would have been a that would not be worth that would not have been worth it but the fact that we've been able to to kind of settle back into our normal cadence we hired like five customer service people um really quickly that really helped a

[3:39:21] lot to bring the we're getting about 2 000 emails a day um when we launched hey so like it we just weren't ready for any of those things so that was a mess but we we remedied that and now we're comfortable again but if we were not comfortable and had to live at that pace i would have regretted it yes yep all right this is an interesting question i actually get this one now and again and i sometimes struggle to answer it so i'm uh i'm curious how you take it so the question is from tom biscuit and he says if you didn't have your brand and your

[3:39:49] resources how would you start a company today would addressing something as big as email be possible without that kind of leverage um it's a great question i would launch the company the same way we launched base camp when we had no branding and no awareness which is slowly carefully with no expectations um we were a web design firm when we when we started we launched this base camp thing we built it for ourselves we did it on the side we put it out there and we waited a while to see if it was going to work it turns out it worked really well and then we were able to

[3:40:25] stop doing the other thing that we were doing um so i so so they're like i would do the same thing i would always try to have i wouldn't i don't like putting myself at risk i like taking a risk but i don't like putting myself at risk so um in the case of when we launched base camp no one really knew who we were we had a little bit of a following but like you know a thousand people reading our blog it was not very big compared to today a lot of people have a lot larger followings today when they launched than we did when we

[3:40:50] launched um it's much harder to reach people back than everything but we had we had a functional business of some sort that was going that could fund our endeavors into something else and only when that something else did better than the other thing that we stopped doing the other thing and start focusing 100 on base camp so i would do it the same way and keep your cost again cost low small team no rent one or two or three people to start struggle through that um before you you make it hard on yourself by it seems like you'd make it easier on yourself by raising money or hiring more

[3:41:22] people but you're actually in some ways making a lot harder on yourself so i'd start as small as you can and and um and and keep that you know maybe a little bit of money here and there right but not a big amount of money which forces all sorts of unreasonable expectations on you as far as tackling email um no we couldn't we could not have other people might be able to we could not have tackled email in the way that we chose to do it um had we not had um probably a big brand behind us to launch um it was it took us two years to build

[3:41:52] hay and the expertise that we needed we didn't we would not have had had we just started today it took us 20 years to understand how to do this how to deal with the loads we were gonna we were gonna have how to deal with the technology that we needed to build um all the infrastructure email is incredibly complicated it would not be the first thing i would ever choose to pick off um so we could not have done it but that wasn't about the brand necessarily although it helped to launch but it was more about the understanding and the learning and the just the skills

[3:42:21] and experience that we needed to build over the last 20 years to be able to feel confident enough to even take this challenge on yep excellent so i think we have time for one or maybe two more questions uh and we have several pouring in so some really good i'm picking the best off the top this is a really interesting one and it's actually one that i've thought about and i was going to ask you on my own so so i like it it's from tim van dyk castile and he says you meaning base camp decided for a while to only have one product because you you know used to

[3:42:50] have several products as you said uh yeah i won't name them but whatever it was campfire and we all had our list and all this stuff you actually said it for a while to only have one product stopping actively developing the other products and selling them off what made you to decide that you still wanted or you want to go back to being a multi-product company so this is sort of an interesting one and i'll try to make it fairly brief because i know we don't have a lot of time we didn't set out to build another product actually when we built hay we set out to build a new version of

[3:43:16] high-rise so we set out to build rise two like we built base camp two and now we're in base camp three and we're building basically four but we're gonna go back and build high-rise two as we were building high-rise two we recognized that um there was something else going on here that we were building that we wanted this thing that we were making for all of our communication not just business communication but personal family all these things and so eventually it split it off into its own thing but i think we've what we learned about what's good about having two things versus one thing is again

[3:43:50] that you get to start from scratch again more frequently um so we're building you know we just built hey now we're doing hey for work next year we're gonna do base camp four we're gonna learn some stuff we're gonna pull some stuff from hay into base for when we build base camp four we'll learn some new things that we'll bring into hay so i think this idea what we're calling it is like tick-tock development back and forth back and forth between two products is actually a really fresh and healthy thing to do i think though it wouldn't work for us if we had three or four or five

[3:44:17] so i think two is what we feel right now is probably going to be our sweet spot it's going to be different for every company if you have hundreds of employees you can do more things we have 56 57 58 employees in our skies at our scale we feel like two is right and here's one other reason why we think two is right basecamp's product cycle so we do basically do a new version of base camp every four to five years whole new version from scratch essentially and the when we launched that new version we're all in on it but then over the next number of years

[3:44:51] we're basically just making marginal improvements around the edges that's like technically what happens to mature products you're not like reinventing the product every year like you just kind of can't reinvent it every year so what ends up happening is you built up this all these skills and all these people who are really wonderful at making products and we're putting all those skills and just making marginal improvements around the edges and it's not a really efficient way to run a company actually with all that talent just tweaking which is what ends up happening with mature products so by jumping into a new thing we get to use all that energy and all that talent

[3:45:24] on something brand new from scratch work on that for a while and then jump back on the other thing and make a whole new version of that so we're going to be making new versions of things more frequently in a staggered way i think which is going to just be a healthier perspective for us so that's that's i mean in a nutshell that's why we decided to do it it kind of was an accident then we kind of leaned into it and now we think it's kind of probably going to be the right thing to do awesome i'm glad to hear it yes sir if you're over time but do you

[3:45:51] have quest time for one more question of course yeah cause i've gone long on these answers no no this is great this is perfect um there's a i like this question uh so it's from johnny tong and he says how does base camp manage employee career progression when it favors a low head count flat structure because you know a lot of people want to progress and move up the chain and in a larger org right that's easier to do so i'd love to hear your take on that yeah it's a really wonderful question um and we've struggled with this over the years um what we basically do is we don't

[3:46:20] really have a managerial track so people in most companies people move up right at base camp you you move sideways by expanding your your ability so for example a lot of our designers get better by learning programming as well so they're not just designers but they they do all their css themselves they do all the visual design they do a lot of rails now they do a lot of javascript now so so they sort of expand outward and that's typically how most people progress and then they move up in the organization on our pay scale because they have more skills and they take more responsibility we do have team leads so there are some

[3:46:57] team leads but they're pretty well established people who've been here for a long time so it's not a very it's not like a high churn position so those positions pretty much sit there um but but people sort of expand their skill set and then move up in our pay tier so that's something that's that's kind of unusual actually at companies because most people actually they get narrower narrower in a sense they move into a managerial track where they actually lose a lot of the skills that they had and they atrophy like me i've atrophied like i i'm i'm not as good anymore getting in the html and css like i used to like i i'm

[3:47:29] not just not that good at that anymore because i've been focusing on other things and this happens to a lot of people as they move up through management but at base camp we want people to get better at their craft and so you know if you could think of a someone who's good with woodworking loves woodworking they might also expand into other materials they might explore you know metal they might explore ceramics they might explore other things they're still using the same skills but in different mediums and i think that's the idea here at base camp is that you might be a great designer but you might want

[3:47:59] to pick up some programming or you might want to be a better writer and that's how people expand and that's how people get paid more and move up the scale at our company and then there are some people always some people who just simply do want to run teams or manage people and if there's not a position here it's totally fair for them to say you know base camp doesn't have what what what what i want um and i'm gonna move on to go find a place that does that and we would gladly help them we'd hate to lose them but we understand that like it's no it's not

[3:48:28] good for us to keep anyone who would want to do something else so we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna help them find something somewhere else that would satisfy that we've had a number of people who either left to manage bigger teams or left to start their own businesses um and uh that's great we're you know happy for them and want to support them as well sure and i bet they're set up well to do it because with base camp on your resume you can get hired by most of the people that i know so yeah it's helpful such a such a gentleman thank you for taking your time to

[3:48:58] you know to give back to founders um i've been i mean this is the kind of stuff where if i say it one-on-one it sounds awkward but like i've been an admirer of yours for at least 14 years i've read all your books and and i just love i love having conversations with you because you're you're always just dropping knowledge and giving back founder so thanks so much for you know sharing the stage with me again well thanks rob this is great and i'm happy to by the way answer additional questions that people have them um you can email me at jason hey.com h-e-y or on twitter jasonfreedfied

[3:49:28] and i'll try to answer there as well thanks again jason catch you next thank you [Music]

[3:49:49] you

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