Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible> welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where to start a founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:22 All right, welcome to rogue startups. Episode one 84. We're closing in on the big 200. Aren't we here, Craig? We are, man. I know. We, uh, we had to kind of a big throw down for episode 100. I wonder what we'll have to, uh, come up with for 200 here in a couple months. Yeah, well we've got a few weeks to pull something out of our assets for that one. So, you know, I kind of set the standard on 100 and now it's like, ah, damn, what are we going to do for 200? That's better than that. I hate it when I have the <inaudible> time. A podcast planning is, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, man, things, things are good here. Uh, it is to where it's like the middle of August, first part of August, and uh, pretty much the whole continent of Europe is on vacation right now, including us. Uh, which is cool.
Speaker 1 01:12 We're in Italy for like two and a half weeks. Uh, very much like go workcation like my team is like, you know, you're in slack a lot for being on vacation. I'm like, well, I'm not really on vacation. I'm kind of like minimal minimized workload for the next couple of weeks. Um, as we have like a, a fair number of things going on. Uh, but it's cool to be able to take some time away and like, especially during the day, be able to really unplug. So I'm doing like email and catch up in the morning and then like calls and more stuff in the afternoon once like the u s gets online and then pretty good evening and then some wine and cheese. Yeah. Throughout the day. Yeah. So, but I mean, this definitely ties into to what we're talking about today, which is like, you know, mental health and burnout avoidance and things like that of like how, how we all deal with doing this for a long time at a high level.
Speaker 1 02:06 Um, so I'll, I'll save some more of my thoughts around this, but, uh, it's, it's a very timely topic to be talking about this as, you know, navigating time away and making time away and making it work with the things you have to do for, for your, your job and your business. Uh, is, is sometimes challenging but have been enjoying the hell out of Italy. We were in Tuscany for five days and now we're in the north of it, northern part of the country, like in the lake country in Verona for about a week. And then we go to Venice next, the end of next week for a couple days. So. Nice. Nice. Yeah. You and a every other European that's decided to go on vacation this month. Yep, Yep. For sure. For sure. Everything's super crowded. It's not terrible so far. Um, yeah, I mean it's, it's just average, I would say.
Speaker 1 02:58 I Dunno, we've done this before, so it's not like a total surprise, but yeah, it's a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of native Americans here too, which is kind of funny, but you're in a lot of English. But it's cool. Yeah, it's cool. There's your Italian. Yeah. Uh, it's pretty terrible. Yeah, it's pretty terrible. You know, Italian, it's like, uh, whatever, you know, related to French and Spanish, both of which I speak pretty decently, but, but you know, so I understand a lot of it, but I have a hard time speaking it cause like, you know, those words are all a little different. But yes, I can get around. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2 03:32 Very cool. Very cool. How about you? Well, you know, um, things are okay here. So I've been spending a lot of time, um, on AWP ECP follow up here. We've had sort of a support spike, I guess you could call it and post for dot o release. And so there's been lots of little issues. And then we're also switching over. My senior developer will be leaving here at the end of August and the guy that's been training for the last four months is now kind of shepherding everything out the door. So we're finding cracks and procedures and things that he's supposed to be taking over. And, you know, we're kind of letting him run the show, but we're there to support him, which I think is a nice transition. Like you're forced to do this, but you've got people to help you do it. Um, I won't say it's going perfectly smooth, but it's not going poorly either.
Speaker 2 04:26 So that's good. It's good to have these things come out now, not six months from now. Uh, but yes, there's, there's a little bit of that to deal with and, um, yeah, EDD is my new thorn in my side. There's lots of little stuff that, uh, my support person Bobby is a unhappy about and the way that they handle stuff for renewals and things like that. And I keep hearing lots of stuff from her about it. And you know, I'm, I'm the only guy that has the support contract with EDD, so I'm submitting all the issues and waiting to hear back from them and get stuff done. But, you know, not all of it seems like it's a priority, which is kind of frustrating. So that Kinda sucks. And, uh, as far as recapture goes, I have been actively trying to manage trials here to figure out ways to make stuff smoother.
Speaker 2 05:17 So I'm like trying to solicit reviews right now to increase, you know, more people go into the app store and downloading us where our, it's funny cause they must be doing something on their Shopify algorithm to change stuff because I see, I have a rank tracker on the Shopify app store and if anybody's interested, you have a Shopify app, I can point you to where to find this thing here. It's a, um, a site in the UK that actually tracks all the apps in the store and you can just sign up for subscriptions on which ones you want to look at. So you can look at yours, you can look at your competitors, all of that stuff. Uh, anyway, so I've got mine and they send me emails on it every day and every day, like one day, all of a sudden I jumped like this insane number of spots, like 500 or something overall.
Speaker 2 06:07 And I'm like, what? And since then I've like seen and they, you know, they break it down by which categories you're in and stuff like that and your overall ranking in the app store. And I'm seeing like lots and lots of movements. So they must be doing something to tweak the algorithm cause you know, one day it'll be like you're down five, the next day you're up 40. It's like what, why am I moving so much? Like I haven't, I've zero updates. I put zero updates to my page in Shopify, but I'm bumping around and various things there and I'm definitely towards the top of the category that I really want to be in, which is good. And I'm on the first page now for several other categories, which is also, uh, beneficial in. Nice. Um, did they give you, does the rank tracker give you a like breakdown by category or like search?
Speaker 2 06:57 Probably not a search term, but like by categories or anything or they do it by category? Yes. So each one of them, like, yeah, Shopify decided two years ago that they wanted to have this super complicated taxonomy system, which I think was a major mistake. Right? And you know, there's like a million categories at this point and you can be in any number of them you want. Like they'll only let you submit to two. But if you go ask and you point, hey look, my competitors are at seven, I want to be on seven too. They're like, okay, sure. You know, as long as you can demonstrate, you know, you're reasonably, your app fits into that category, they'll totally let you do it. You just have to ask the support. Um, yeah. But anyway, so once you get into a category, you know that then you have to wait for it or rank and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 07:39 But they show you like all of the individual ranks on those. But if you want the search data, that's a separate thing. And then somebody actually figured it out that there's the Shopify app store feed that you can subscribe to and you go into Google analytics and you set the stuff up and you create a thing in Google sheets. It'll like magically generate a report for a date range, which is super cool. So you can actually see when things are they searching on in the app store to get to me. So then you can start optimizing on some of those keywords, which I've done. But with all of that said, you know, just because somebody lands on your page doesn't mean that they stick with it. So you know, there's definitely some major holes in what Shopify allows for. Like, you know, when you leave something that you can give a cancel reason, Shopify has that built in automatically, but you don't really get a choice as to what those reasons are.
Speaker 2 08:35 Like if it was me with those options or if it was me, I would give some very specific things because I know what you know, I would think I have a hypothesis. This is why they would quit. But you know, they have generic ones like app is not performing well, does not meet my needs. Um, I'm like thanks a or other and then they can type in something. And sometimes, sometimes in a rare case they type in other, I actually get a real reason that comes out that I'm like, oh that's something useful but like does not meet my needs app is not performing well. This is my favorite one. Cause I'll see somebody will install it and literally six minutes later they're uninstalling and say app is not performing well. I'm like, oh we haven't even sent a goddamn email for you yet. How would you know?
Speaker 2 09:24 So it's just like, that data is so misleading. It's so terrible. And a lot of the times, you know, it's just apt does not meet my needs. Well what are your needs? Tell me what your needs were or maybe, you know, I have found like somebody at on installed and picked up one of my competitors and I was in contact with her. She got my trial into the email and she actually responded to it. And so I got to have a conversation which were with, with her, which was great, but when I had the conversation, she's like, oh, well I went to this other competitor because they have this email feature that I didn't find in recapture. And I'm like,
Speaker 3 09:57 uh,
Speaker 2 09:58 Shit. Uh, we do have that and here's all the documentation on it and you know, if it doesn't work out, come on back. Cause we definitely have that. But as soon as I found that out, I'm like, oh, I shouldn't change an onboarding email. I should make sure that people are more aware of these things and you know, how can I surface this better? So, you know, I'm trying to optimize that experience through very limited and limited feedback and poor data at this point. Uh, and I'm also trying to like, you know, I can see when I'm looking at the, the dashboard of customers that are on here, you know, there are customers that just have zero revenue and you know, either that's a staging store or it's a brand new store. But I, you know, I can't really help them. But there are a lot of stores where they're like, oh yeah, you know, you look at their MRR and it's like, yeah, they have 7,000 a month. I can do something with 7,000 a month. But then they do things like they didn't activate recapture at all and it just sat there for two weeks and I'm like,
Speaker 3 10:52 uh Huh.
Speaker 2 10:53 Why? So I, you know, it's not, I don't have the trial ending like fine tuned in such a way that it can say, oh well I can see that you have this much revenue and you didn't send any activation. Like send this custom email here. And it doesn't happen quite enough for me to want to do that. So I'm going through manually and I'm sending emails to these people trying to get a response and find out, you know, like I sent eight or 10 of them and I got somebody to come back as a paid customer. I'm like, oh, okay. But they never, they never responded to me. I just said, hey, here's what we did for you. Why didn't you sign up? And then all of a sudden they're like signing up. I'm like, okay, all right, great. So that's great, but that's also not helpful, right?
Speaker 2 11:37 Cause you want to know like the why or the the hell. And I want to know where we like, did they not know that we got this? Did they miss that email? Did I, do I need to send more than one of those? Like I, I'm not sure what it is that I missed. So yeah, I'm trying to figure that out. Since we're getting more customers, I want to make sure that our top of the funnel, you know, that we're not just leaking people out cause I'm doing a poor job onboarding them or they're missing something key that they really need. But figuring out what that is is proving a little tricky. So
Speaker 4 12:09 yeah, this rings home. Uh, so we're, we are opening the top of our funnel up quite a bit for <inaudible> and which is great. Uh, it's having really positive impacts, but part of it is we're getting like different type of customer in using the product. And so what we're seeing is we're having a lot of people asking questions that like people haven't asked before cause they were like further down in the funnel when they signed up and more knowledgeable about podcasting in general and wordpress and things like that. And so we have customers coming in now who, who need more kind of like basic education on things and we have, we have a ton of it, but our onboarding emails have been really like feature and benefit driven. Um, instead of like how to start a podcast driven. Um, so yeah, so it's so similar to what you're saying.
Speaker 4 12:55 Um, so you know, Denise, our marketer is starting the middle of the month and that is going to be her charge is to go through all of our onboarding emails from her perspective, like her personal perspective as like she knows a fair amount about podcasting, but it's all pretty recent. So kind of like, what are we saying that doesn't make sense. So I don't know. It might be worth like getting a second set of eyes from somebody who's not super ingrained in US Shopify e-commerce, you know, abandoned cart recovery world too to say, yeah Dave, this is great email but I barely get what you're talking about because this is like all over my head. Cause cause I think we, we definitely write some of those emails, uh, that assume people that are kind of wordpress pretty savvy I guess I would say, uh, or podcast pretty savvy and that's not always going to be the case.
Speaker 2 13:46 Yeah. I mean this is one of those things that like write message was designed for it. Right? So you have, you're trying to figure out where they're at in their journey so that you can give them the right experience and aim the content or the CTH or just the upgrades or whatever it is you're trying to send them to that point in the journey. And that's great. But the problem I'm finding is making people like answer those questions because I have right message on the site and my, my click through rate on those things is like 28% on the first question. Uh, no, no, no, it's 36% on the first question and then it like drops down to 28 and then I think we have a third question and that one's like 11 so like it drops off real fast. Like if you, they just don't know like how many questions are you going to bombard me with?
Speaker 2 14:42 And after one they're already annoyed so you don't get a ton of information to enrich them. And I kinda need like I need something that's enough to point out what I could do for them, but I can't, I can't do that in just two questions. And so, you know, I haven't, I haven't had time to expand on that, but I was just looking at my write message data the other day and I'm like, oh, okay, well that's good that my Shopify, you know, thing has grown. However, if you're not telling me you're a store owner or an agency. Oh, that was the other thing I did notice. It used to be, I thought I had, when I was doing Magento, I had about a 50 50 split between store owners and agencies and now with Shopify that is skewing very heavy to store owners. Yeah. It's a more do it yourself tool.
Speaker 2 15:33 Yeah, yeah. It's like 72% now of store owners versus agencies, which kind of surprised me because when I was, you know, starting out with Magento, everybody was like, Oh yeah, you should do partnerships with agencies because that's where you're going to get a good portion of your business. And you know, based on what I saw early on and right message that was fairly accurate, but that's not, it's not turning out to be the case in Shopify. So, you know, I'm definitely picking up the more self service folks and that's okay. That's great. You know, if I'm the, if I'm the self service tool and Klaviyo is the agency tool, that's fine. That's a perfect split. I have no problem with that split. So, but you gotta be, you gotta be talking that language. I got it. Talking to those people at that point in their journey and stuff.
Speaker 2 16:20 So I got to find them. I gotta speak to them with the concerns that they have at that point in the journey. And I think I'm, I'm getting a better idea of that based on just conversations I'm having and you know, people would do like a trial and, and I send an email at the trial end saying, hey, you know, do you want some help with your emails? Because that's the most common problem that people have. And so originally I had kicked around the idea of doing like a, you know, a, a concierge onboarding for a price. And I never, I never followed through with that because I wasn't really sure that that was what the demand had there. Uh, and I've had a few people that have responded to that email and what I've gone and done because usually it doesn't take very long.
Speaker 2 17:01 The hard part is getting into answered like seven questions and if I can get them to answer the seven questions, I can go in and edit their emails in like 30 minutes and have the whole thing set up with, you know, a pretty decent converting thing that they can try. Cause a lot of times they'll just stick with my standard content, which is okay, but you know, everybody else is using the standard content too. And the standard content is, it's very basic and doesn't, you know, it doesn't specifically talk to their customers and their needs. So I, you know, I ask, you know, voice of the customer kind of questions, what's your audience like, what are their biggest concerns? What do they, you know, what's their demographic? And then I try to like spice up stuff. You know, I'll maybe use imagery or puns or jokes that specifically talked to that demographic.
Speaker 2 17:49 Like I just did one recently for a moms. Uh, it's a mom boutique and they have like some very specific customer things. So I made up a whole thing that was talking about like, you know, postpartum baby, toddler stuff. You know, I could talk about that from a parent's perspective and then drew in some jokes that I found in there about new moms and stuff like that that kind of all tied it together. And you know, she was really excited with this content. It seemed like it was doing a lot better than the basic stuff for her audience there. So, you know, it's all about finding that connection and making that happen. Uh, but you know, it doesn't seem like people are like dying to have me. Right. That I get maybe one or two of those requests a month. Maybe if I pushed it harder I'd see more of it.
Speaker 2 18:33 But yeah, I mean getting, you know, finding that educational thing there. Cause I'm not really sure. Some of you know, some of the people I get on my platform, they're very sophisticated. They come in here and they're like, I wanted to find these segments and I want to do this custom html and I want to send these kinds of emails at this kind of timing. Can I do all of that? And I'm like, yeah, hell yeah you can. And they're like, good here you go, sign me up. And then they turn out to be a pretty decent sized store. So they obviously have a lot of experience with that, but I can't, you can't see what that looks like. You know, at the very beginning of a trial or even a week into the trial, cause I f I'm finding a lot of these stores, the big stores, they'll bring in like a little teeny tiny store and test me out.
Speaker 2 19:15 And then only after that little teeny tiny store is doing something that they think is okay, then they'll like smack in all these stores. Like I had one store that said, yeah we, we've got all these brands that we're going to do, but you know, we're just going to try you out in this one thing here. I was like, okay. And they are bringing in, you know, almost four figures of revenue a month, uh, now because of all the stores that they brought in and that they, you know, they're on the new charge based pricing. So they're scaling based on the stuff that I'm sending out. They're an awesome expansion customer. But you know, it took me having to win them over incrementally to get all of their brands on here because they needed that trust. They know they're bringing a lot to the table.
Speaker 2 19:54 So yeah. I wonder if for the, for the, like the customer onboarding stuff like d, could you send them that email? Say, Hey, you know, we'll, we'll write your emails for you or we'll revise the ones you already have answered these, you know, few questions in a type form and just link to the type form right in that email. Is that what you do or do you say, you know, do you need some help with emails? What I do right now is I let them go through the whole onboarding process. I don't really let them know about this. It's only when they get to trial and, and they haven't recovered enough that I basically offer would you like us to write your emails? So I haven't done that upfront as a suggestion. I could. Um, yeah that definitely puts me on the spot to do more work and I've been a little more hesitant to go that route because here's one thing I found.
Speaker 2 20:43 So there's a split on the trial end emails where get two sets of stores coming to me. One of them, they have revenue and then I'll do that email suggestion. The other ones have nothing and they're like, yeah, I want help with my emails. And then I'm like, you know why email is not the source of your woes here. Let me tell you what is. And so I actually have a saved snippet in text expander where I just, I'm like no revenue. And I go through this whole thing about, we had all this stuff set up on here and it looks like you did all of this, but your cart feed is showing crickets and you know, your emails are basically a ghost town of conversions. And I would focus on traffic and pushing people to your store first. Once you're at this level of revenue, we can really start to do good for you and at beyond this level of revenue. It's a no brainer, but at zero you got to focus on this first. You know, so that I don't, that's why I don't want to offer the emails up front because I get more of those emails with the no revenue. Then I get of the other ones where they do, so I want to be very cautious in how I offer that because that's a lot of time out for me.
Speaker 4 21:54 Yeah, that's a bummer. That's about Ryoma. Yeah. I wonder if you could almost just send it to people that have a lot of revenue because you definitely get some like false negatives, right? Or like those, those staging stores or whatever, but if you have someone doing a decent amount of volume, I wonder if you could send it just to those people.
Speaker 2 22:10 Yeah. Yeah. I mean there probably is a way I could segment in the middle of the trial, say a weekend of the trial. I can look to say, all right, do you have more than this in MRR and have you recovered less than this in your emails? Or was your recovery rate below this? And if it is, then send the thing to offer him with the help with the emails and then do an extension on the trial while they're still active. That might actually be more effective cause trying to bring them, you know, I found two things. Bringing them back after the trial is over is hard. Bringing them back after they've uninstalled it, you might as well try to move a mountain or have an act of Congress to do this cause it's fucking impossible. Like when they have this, we'll try to enact gun control or something.
Speaker 2 22:54 So. Exactly, exactly. Gun Control in the United States would be easier than bringing back some of these customers after they install uninstalled a week. Oh my God. I know we, I won't even, cause I've done it before, I won't even, but just amazing. Yeah. Every, everyone just, you know, cuts me to the core at this point. Political side sidebar there. Yeah. Fucking gun control. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so speaking of mental health, that seems to be a core debate point of gun control. Let's talk about a founder mental health because that was a, the topic that I really wanted to cover this week. And uh, so I will reveal why I actually want to talk about that. So my freelancing client, I've been at them now for nine years, five months in some number of days, long, long time. Um, I've never worked for any client other than myself for that length of period of time.
Speaker 2 23:58 And certainly in the last two years I've ended up on a team where things have turned kind of toxic to a point where at first, you know, I was asked to join this team to help remedy this toxicity and then introduce things that would help alleviate this, make everybody more functional. You know, as a senior guy, sometimes you get asked to do that as a consultant. That's a role that I've played on several occasions. And a lot of times it's, it's been pretty successful. Sometimes there's resistance and it's not always fun. You know, it's, it's very janitorial, but you know, when you can get people working together and they're more effective on software and the output is better, you know, there's a sense of accomplishment and a sense of pride to it. However, in the last 12 months that, you know, being dropped into this team and trying to affect that kind of change has turned out to be equivalent to pounding my head on the Berlin Wall expecting it to come down.
Speaker 2 24:59 Yeah. So, uh, I'm walking away with a headache and in the last two to three to four months, his situation politically internally has changed quite a bit to where that toxicity has like, you know, 10 axed. So we have 10 x toxic engineers, not just NX engineers and yeah. And so I'm still on this team and this toxicity is there and it's, it's affecting me. Um, burnout, burnout is imminent. Um, I am actively looking to change freelancing jobs at this point cause I'm still not at a point where I could support myself on everything else. Um, but like last night my wife was like, you seem really disconnected. And, you know, I didn't really feel like we had any emotional bonding time today and you know, I just kinda let it all out. Last night I had been holding the did and trying to process it and eat it, but it was just, you know, I to, I'm, I'm at a point where I have to fucking psych myself up to go to work every morning for half an hour.
Speaker 2 26:02 So I'm sitting outside with my coffee, sipping it going, all right, you can do this another day. You can, you can pull this at, you know, you've got this thing to work on today, whatever. And it's not sustainable. Um, you know, it's, it's killing me at this point. It's totally killing me in the conversation I had with my wife was last night. It was, you know, you have to change and I'm like, I, yeah, I know I've got to change this. And so, you know, we could go, I started actively looking for a new position and uh, you know, put the resume together after nine years and five months of not ever touching it, which is hilarious. Also kind of sad because then you go back and look at your stuff and you're like, ah, nine years have passed and that's all I've done. Huh. Shit. So yeah. Um, had to, you know, put that together and send that out. And so there are the you, yeah, that's where I'm at. I'm in, I'm in kind of burnout mode right now. Hmm. Which really sucks. Do, are all other stuff.
Speaker 4 27:05 Yeah. I no right. I mean exactly. Cause I'm sure it affects your ability to perform at a high level with the plugins and with recapture when your day job is kind of sucking the, the emotional life out of you or you know, whatever as it pertains to work. Um, so, so the ability to move those businesses forward is really hampered, uh, with what the day job is doing. And I totally, I mean totally relate. And when I was de jobbing, it was really, really, really stressful and it was just, it was all I could do to, to keep my head above water a lot of times. And I think that the, the, the times when it seems like people are able to balance the day job or the consulting with the, the side project is when pretty much everything is low stress, right? Like the side projects have to be low stressed at business that the day job we're, the consulting has to be low stress.
Speaker 4 27:59 Family has to be low stress and supportive. Yeah. And so I wonder if like as you're looking at these other opportunities for like another consulting client, like could you take something that's less prestigious or less money or something but, but also is less stress and less involvement, maybe no travel to, to give you the little bit of money you need, but more time and mental energy to focus on like recapture. Uh, cause that's the ultimate goal, right? It's like you'd rather not consult at all. So maybe like try to take up half a step away from consulting as, as like a, an exit path. I don't know.
Speaker 2 28:39 Yeah, no, I, I hear what you're saying and, and you know, um, so I'm consulting in financial services and for those of you in the audience that are not familiar, so there are several sectors in software that pay significantly more than other sectors within it, which is already pretty highly paid to start with. But if you're in, you know, certain areas such as insurance, investment, financial services, banking, they just have more money to throw around. And the way that they attract people to these traditionally a, I'll just call it what it is bluntly boring industries where people are like, do I really want to sit there and basically do software for accounting all day? You know, they, that's, that was the mentality that kind of went into this. They offer more money and so you know, I've been consulting in financial services so wherever I go at this point, if it is outside of this sector it will definitely be a pay cut.
Speaker 2 29:36 And my wife and I have had that discussion. So the, the stress level would definitely go down because there is definitely a lot of high pressure stuff that goes along with financial services in any financial services job. This is not the first one I've had. And so there are definitely lower pressure sectors that you can work for and I would absolutely positively welcome that. Um, I'm already a hundred percent remote, so, you know, lower travel. I, I don't, you know, I travel 25% of the time out to, uh, their site in California, but you know, if I could travel not at all or once a quarter or whatever, that would certainly be a okay as well. And you know, a lot of the a hundred percent remotes, they maybe have like a once a year for a get together twice a year or something like that. Um, but yeah, it's, it's a question of what's available, what fits my skills, what the consulting company that I work through, what they have available, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 30:35 Um, so I mean, the good news is I'm not, I'm not being forced out of the company at this point. That is, that is not an issue. So I do have some time to look and pick something that is a good step. So I'm not forced to jump. I can choose to go in a direction that I want to as opposed to take the first thing that comes up. Otherwise I'm screwed kind of a situation. Uh, so that's good. That's good. Um, but you know, that also means I don't know when something's going to be up and available and you know, we've, my wife and I have had the discussion about finances and, and stuff like that. Like if, if it, if I did get kicked out, what would that look like and would we be okay? And the answer is yes, cause, uh, you know, we've saved that money so we have that.
Speaker 2 31:20 But we would obviously prefer not to use that because if I did go somewhere else and we needed that there, we would have less of it opportunity to replenish that if we needed to use it now and then had to use it again later. Um, so yeah, I mean, I definitely want to reduce that stress and I, you know, I think just a change of scenery at this point, after nine years and five months, uh, is, is do, but, you know, I was looking at it, so you shared a link with me before we started this podcast from Sherry walling and she has a list here. It says, seek help if you begin to experience the three hallmarks of burnout, physical and emotional exhaustion. Yup. That's me. Uh, at the end of the day, you know, I've got maybe a couple of hours where I can sort of keep it together for the kids and the family stuff and dinner and all of that.
Speaker 2 32:17 But after about eight 30, I'm like, I need downtime. It's not a, it's not a, I want downtime. It's, I need downtime. Like I can't, I can't unwind and go to bed if I don't have something. I'm just ready to shut down at that point. Cynicism and detachment. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, no, that's been going on for awhile. Yeah, that's that. You know, I've always been a little bit cynical, but you know, this, this cynicism is definitely going up and I, I find myself having to be detached a lot of the times mentally from work because of that toxicity there to just preserve my psyche. And then the last one is like feeling a lack of accomplishment and ineffectiveness and I'm absolutely feeling that as well. So yeah, it's, it's time man. It's time.
Speaker 1 33:04 Yeah man, I I feel for you for sure. I mean I, I have my own, we all have our own set of stresses to deal with, but, but to hear that this one is particularly affecting you and, and you're kind of at that point a is a bummer. It's a bummer to hear. Cause I had totally been there and I, I don't have a ton of great advice about like things to do to avoid it cause I think that like, I don't know, it's kind of like inevitable. Like when your body decides physiologically that it can't handle what you're putting it through, then you have to take yourself out of this situation. I think that you're going down the right path to say like this job in the situation that I'm in and the people that I'm working with or the culture or whatever is not conducive in the longterm to to me being happy and so I'm going to go seek something else.
Speaker 1 33:54 I think that like your body is putting up a really good kind of early warning system there to say like, Dave, this is not happening. Let's go, let's go do something else before I really decide to fuck you over. Yes. And physically know. And so like you're able to, you're able to say what you just said like, okay, well have, you know a couple of months to go figure this out and I'm not happy, but I know that I'm looking and that gives me some solace and, and I can kind of look forward to, to something a little different. You know, I, I think that it would be interesting to have Sherry on to talk more about like dealing with stress. We did a, she came to our retreat a couple of weeks ago. We did a breathing exercise <inaudible> that was super interesting. Um, so I'm sure we'll try to link up like a, uh, an article about this in the show notes, but it was just a really kind of like meditative breathing exercise that was really helpful just for like, you know, acknowledging what's going on in your mind and finding some peace and stuff like that. So I don't know if that might be helpful, like for all, like from a practical perspective to, to kind of manage some of the things that are going on from a day to day basis because yeah. You gotta you gotta make the best of the situation while you're still in it, even if you're trying to kind of get out of, out of it into something else.
Speaker 2 35:15 Yeah. If you could link to something like that in the show notes, I'm sure that, uh, others in the audience would benefit from that, not just me. That would be excellent.
Speaker 1 35:25 Yeah. Yeah. We should have her on to talk more about this. I think it's, it's legit a thing that, that folks go through. Um, you know, I, we've been, uh, you know, it's funny, I, um, I put myself under more pressure I think as being part of tiny seed to, to kind of perform. And I found myself like being more healthy lately, which is bizarre because, uh, it's funny, I'm not like a healthy person. Like I'm not, I'm not, I'm not like a health nut, you know? Uh, but, but I've found that I'm able to perform better. I'm able to work better and longer and concentrate more if I'm healthy. Uh, so like getting some exercise, sleeping a decent amount, not drinking as much. Do you do all these things? You can't not have the wine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's, yeah. Uh, so like I think that's where, that's where I've landed a little bit.
Speaker 1 36:20 It's like being a healthier as a means to an end a little bit. And that's a terrible thing to admit out loud. But like, if I'm able to deal with work better and work more and more effectively by being a little healthier, then that's, that's a huge win all around it. One I'm more healthy, but two, I am reducing the, some of the external stress that's brought on by work. So I don't know. I don't know. How are you able and wanting to, you know, do things like exercise and do yoga and stuff like that? Or is that not on the, on the map these days?
Speaker 2 36:54 I actually do a regular exercise already, so I, uh, I do, um, an Israeli martial arts called Krav Maga and I do that usually two days a week. Uh, and one of those days there's yoga that goes on right afterwards. So I've, um, the past two weekends I've missed because we were doing some remodeling for our new trailer and that was an all day sort of thing. So I was, but there was plenty of exercise to be had there, so I didn't really feel all that guilty about it. But, um, yeah, no, I do regular exercise and you know, my wife and I have always eaten pretty well, you know, pretty healthy. We don't have a lot of junk food around here. Desert happens maybe once a week. Um, most of the time it's like fruit stuff and you know, we're not doing a lot of junk food or anything like that.
Speaker 2 37:42 So I mean, those hacks went in a long time ago just for general health. And I totally agree that, you know, it makes a huge difference. Like I get regular sleep, I sleep really well. So that's not, that's not an issue. I know that's a big deal for a lot of people. I'm thankfully not, I'm not affected by that. So I'm very happy. It's easy for me to get, you know, eight hours sleep pretty quickly and, or easily I should say quickly who gets what? I can get eight hours of sleep and for, no, I don't think so. That was an idiotic comment. Um, so yeah, I mean, I get plenty of sleep. We eat pretty well around here. You know, sometimes we drink wine or have stuff after dinner or whatever, like whiskey, but you know, it's not, it's not excessive. It's rarely more than one, two drinks tops a couple, three times a week. So, I mean, even that's not super excessive. You. Yeah, I probably could do more exercise because two times a week is not really enough. Um, but there's also the balance of the schedule, which is what I was trying to come up with. So yeah, I could probably do that. We could probably add back in meditation. We used to do that. We haven't been doing that for a long time, so that would probably help as well.
Speaker 1 38:53 Yeah man. I think some of these things like if you put the this number on, you know I have to exercise four times a week and a half to meditate, 30 minutes every day and a half to have to have to have to do all this stuff, then it becomes more stressful. Can do all that stuff can, yeah. Then to say like I'm just going to be more healthy and I'm just going to be conscious of the fact that I'm more healthy and it's not going to take up any more time on my day or whatever. Like, and this is, this is like a little bit of like the living in Europe for three years kind of thing. Like there is much less like going to the gym here than in the u s I think like people are just healthier. Like they walk and they eat healthy food and they don't have to then like compensate by going to the gym and lifting a bunch of heavyweights and stuff. And this is a huge tangent, but um, I'm very much in the like efficient the health thing these days, like just live better
Speaker 2 39:50 and the health takes care of itself. Yeah. I think you can optimize things in a very different way by just asking yourself when you're about to do something, whether it's eat a meal, have a drink, um, go for a walk, sit down and rest. You know, is this a healthy choice right now? It's a simple yes or no question. It can happen every single time that you have one, but you, you ask yourself, is this a healthy choice? And once you start doing that on a regular basis, you can take a mindful look at your habits and your choices, right? Yup.
Speaker 1 40:25 Yeah. Th th the thing I I have to throw out is, and I don't know if it would be productive or more stressful, is to think about like what the path to not consulting anymore looks like. Yeah. I think like we talked about it a little bit offline of like, you know, what, what could like taking recapture to, to fulltime role look like and whatever that looks like. But like kind of putting it on paper and say like, okay, we're at this revenue now. We needed to get this revenue and, or I need to have saved up this much money, uh, to feel comfortable, you know, bridging that gap and stuff like that. It might help like detach a little bit from some of the stuff that's going on at work to say like this sucks right now but th this will not suck forever because I have the plan and the plan says that in you know, three weeks or three months or three years or whatever it is I'm going to be done because I'm, I, you know, I got the numbers right here and they say that we'll have enough money or revenue or savings or whatever to be able to, to not mess around with these jokers consulting customers anymore.
Speaker 1 41:32 It might be, it might be something to think about just from like it, it might not happen today. It might happen tomorrow but, but just knowing that you think you know when it will happen might be helpful. It surely got me through like that last six months or a year of, of the day job when it was really pretty hardcore stress and traveling and stuff. Just cause I like freaking knew like how many days until I was going to quit. And it just lets you just kind of give, give them the finger, like in your mind, you know, and you're just like, hey, that's cool. Yup, I'll do that. No problem because I'm going to be gone and
Speaker 2 42:04 two weeks or two months or whatever, uh, you know, I've had that in my head but I've never committed it to like, you know, I won't say to paper for me it would be a spreadsheet, but you know, I haven't, I've never committed that to a spreadsheet in. I think I did one time just to run some numbers, but then the numbers were so ridiculously huge that I said, all right, well fuck it, I don't need to come back to this. Um, but that was way before recapture. I think that was when I was doing support vine. Like how big does support vine have to get before I do that? And then, you know, you got depressed cause I wasn't seeing any growth and I couldn't get users and product market fit, all that stuff. But yeah, I think that's, I think that's an excellent exercise cause I mean this is something that, you know, my wife and I would be looking at a pretty radical spending change.
Speaker 2 42:52 I, you know, I, I, I could say, look, yeah we can get there, I can quit this now, but here's what has to happen to do that. And Are you okay with that for this length of period of time? Cause you know, there's definitely uncertainty and I don't know how far you, how long it's gonna take to get above that and grow past a certain point. But yeah, I haven't done that. I haven't done that. In fact, we were having conversations about a why now being wildly out of date, cause I subscribed to it earlier this year and then probably about three, four months ago I stopped updating it like an idiot. So now it's just like this myriad, you know, talk about more stress and work, right? I've got all this pending updates in wine ad that I have to catch up with so that we can figure out where we're at before we can decide to move forward there. So there's something else, right? So if you think you have it together out there, if you think Craig and I have it together, you're wrong. You're dead wrong. Reminds me of something that I saw on Twitter lately. Like if you think it's all sunshine and roses for somebody particular circumstance, go talk to them. And then after a while you'll be like, oh, that's not as fun as I thought it was. Yeah. So here you go. The raw stuff coming out on rogue startups.
Speaker 1 44:08 No, I mean it's good. I, you know, we, I think we do a good job of like sharing kind of what's going on personally with us, with, with like some actual tactical stuff that folks can learn from and not just feel sorry for us. Um, but, but both are important because if you don't talk about the bad stuff, then someone who's listening that is just getting into this thing state. It's all sunshine and roses and, uh, it's definitely not. No. Hell No. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So for, for those who are listening, if you have any kind of thoughts or suggestions for, for all of us, uh, on kind of maintaining mental health as a, as a startup founder, uh, shoot us a message podcast@roguestartups.com or leave a comment in the post for this episode, rogue startups.com. Uh, yeah, we'd love to hear from you cause I think something that all of us definitely, uh, have to Kinda deal with and manage on a, on a longterm basis.
Speaker 1 45:01 I don't think there's anybody that's immune from the self doubt and the struggles and the, the, the inner talk that goes on in your head. So yeah, folks out there that, that have kind of gone through this and come out the other side feeling, feeling better and have a, have a way to deal with it. Please let us know and we'll share it with everyone on the next episode except for Tequila shots. I won't share those with you on the next step. I won't share my Tequila shots. Uh, yeah. And if you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who you think would find it helpful as well, and we'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 0 45:35 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes for each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more. <inaudible>.
