Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're two start up. Founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now, here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:23 All right, we'll come back to episode one 97 of rogue startups. This is our special, a Thanksgiving recording. Dave and I are recording the day before Thanksgiving. So Dave, a happy Turkey day and happy Turkey day to you. I don't even know how to say that in French. Uh, I don't know. I say a joyous, uh, syncs giving I guess, but I don't know. I don't know. Uh, it doesn't really exist here, so, yeah. How do you say Turkey and French? A domed doAnd. Yeah. D I N D don't.
Speaker 2 00:54 So if I wanted to say happy Turkey day, it would be like Jude, um, Judah domed Judah dome. Yup. Yeah, my friend sucks. So, you know, that's beautiful, man.
Speaker 1 01:07 Uh, yeah, so it's cool. You know, it's nice to be rolling into the holidays. I know for you it's a really special day, like for business, like black Friday and all this craziness that's getting ready to happen. Uh, for us it's, uh, it's kind of a nice, like it's kind of a cheat day for us. Like I will be working tomorrow and have like a half a day on Friday. We're having a bunch of people over on Friday for like a Friendsgiving thing. Uh, so we'll be cooking and getting food ready Friday all afternoon probably. But it's cool to be able to work, you know, kind of however much I want. Thursday and half a day, Friday. Um, that's kind of like bonus cause no one else expects us to be working. So it's cool.
Speaker 2 01:43 I think this is the point where you could make a joke about, do you ever work in France? I mean, you know, there you go. Yeah, I'm kidding. I know you work all the time. You're a, you're like me just, you can't really turn it off. You're constantly thinking about it when you're not working. So, yeah. Yeah. You
Speaker 1 02:00 know, this is, um, I know this is kind of like along the lines of what we're talking about today. Um, you know, I have been looking off and on for an office outside of the house. And, um, like in one respect, I think it would be really, really, really healthy to get an office, you know, down the street or the next town over or something like that. Just a 10 minute drive, something like that. So I could go to work, quote, work my six or eight hours and then come home. And then sometimes I think I love working like 90% of the time. I love what I do 95% of the time. I love what I do and I love just being able to come upstairs, close the door, work for 20 minutes or work for an hour, work at night, whatever it is. Um, and like I, I don't know that I would want to feel like I had to give that up if I had an office. Cause I think that's the assumption is like if you have an office then a lot or almost all the work happens at the office and when you're home there's no computer. You put phone in the drawer, that
Speaker 2 03:00 kind of thing. Um, because yeah, I like working and being able to work whenever I want. It has its advantage. It does certainly has its disadvantages, but it has its advantages too. It does in fact. So today, my daughter just turned 15 and we went to the department of motor vehicles to get her permit. Wow. And I just pulled my laptop with me, had my phone. So I had a hotspot and I was answering emails while we were sitting there. It turned out that in a shocking, uh, turn of events that the DMV was unbelievably efficient today and we were out of there and a half an hour, which just blew me away. Uh, so, you know, props to the Colorado DMV, you guys are awesome at, uh, at eight 30 in the morning. And if anybody else is out there trying to get to the DMV, that's the time to go.
Speaker 2 03:53 Uh, cause nobody else's, there are very few people are there. But yeah, I mean the ability to do that or like you know, it, it's, it has its pluses and minuses, right? So there are times that, you know, it'll be like nine 30 and my wife and I are sitting upstairs in our bed and we're watching something and then I see a little notification on my phone where somebody pings me on Intercom and I'm like, I'm always conflicted. Like is this something that can wait until tomorrow? Is this like a critical setup question? And if it is, you know, I wanna I wanna provide that moment of Oh wow, you know, here we are in the middle of the night and they still get customer service. But on the other hand, you know, I don't want it to like bleed over into every aspect of my life where I'm just neglecting everything.
Speaker 2 04:40 So I try to find a balance somewhere in between those. And if I see somebody struggling with an easy question that I can just sort of like throw him a a quick thing, I'll do that. If it's something that's going to take longer, you know, I might reply and say, Hey, I need a little time to look into this. I'll get back with you tomorrow morning, maybe forwarded onto my developer Mike to do more research on it or something like that. But the ability to just pick that up and do it anytime, anywhere is really powerful. If you don't let it overwhelm your life, then that's the last part is the key, right? Is overwhelm your life. Yeah. Yeah. I think if you have trouble drawing boundaries and you're like, and you can just spiral into this, I am now in work mode and you know, six hours later you're like, where the hell did that time go?
Speaker 2 05:28 Then you gotta be, you gotta be really mindful about that. I can move in and out of it pretty easily depending on what's going on. And sometimes like I had to, I had to cancel a date night because of this. Did we talk about that? Yeah. Cause you were having like downtime issues and stuff. Right? Right. Yeah. This is when the Shopify, I forgot we did talk about this. Yeah. So yeah, the Shopify web hooks were being overwhelmed because there were spam carts showing up on, we've added stuff in the infrastructure now to deal with all this. But the first night that it happened, it was like we're in the middle of finishing up our dinner and getting ready to think about dessert and then moving on to a movie. All of a sudden, you know, my phone is just lighting up and lighting up and lighting up, and I'm like, uh, sweetie, I hate to do this to you, but we got to go.
Speaker 2 06:21 If you want another date night where I can pay the bills, we got to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, we didn't have the makeup date night. We just did it this last Sunday. We went to the Monet exhibition at the Denver art museum. So nice. That was totally uninterrupted. It was great. Had a excellent time. Everything went swimmingly. No calls. So all good. But yeah, I mean, the balance there is you definitely get, you can get calls on date night, do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What a, so I mean, I think the thing we're, we're taught, we wanted to talk about today is as you phrased it, like the emotional toll of being a founder. Um, and I think the work life balance is a, it's just like a fallacy, right? It's like different degrees to which we attempt to draw this line and have a balance. But, but I think it's, it's even more fair to just say like there's, there's no balance.
Speaker 2 07:14 The two kind of live together and you just have to be happy with it. Maybe that's what balance means, but, but, but I think that people that try to draw these really clear lines of like, I work from eight to five and I don't work after five and I don't work before eight and I never work on Saturdays. Um, are kind of kidding themselves in these early stages. Like until you get a team of 10 people or something to where you really have kinda removed yourself from all of the really day to day business stuff. The, the idea that you can call the shots in terms of your schedule is I think you're fooling yourself. Yeah. And especially if somebody is coming from a nine to five regular job where they get to, you know, turn on and turn off and when you leave you're done. You know, maybe some jobs in it where they're like calling you late at night or on the weekends, that's still kind of bleeds over, but maybe you're getting overtime for it.
Speaker 2 08:09 I mean, it's just, it's a very different mentality. Right. And you just sort of have to decide what is going to work for you or not in that. But I mean, the, so, you know, we're kind of rambling a little bit here, but the, the things that I was thinking about when we were brainstorming topics for shows here is that I was just looking at sort of this laundry list of things that we as founders are constantly dealing with and how each one of them take sort of a separate emotional toll on you. And when they talk about things like founder depression or you know, uh, the difficulty of being a first time entrepreneur or stuff like that, that all of these things kind of point into that one, I don't know what to call it. Um, like neg negative, uh, stress on you, right?
Speaker 2 09:02 Like, is that what you mean? Sort of, you know, here are a list of some things that, that I was looking at that when I am stressed about how things are going, then it's usually one of these things here that are kind of affected me or I can see it affecting other founders. Um, and you know, the, the number one one on the list for me was negative customer support. And what I mean by this is, you know, somebody just comes in and unloads on you where they're like, you suck. Your product sucks, your kids suck. Anybody who's ever used this product sucks. You know, I hope your whole infrastructure goes up in flames, you know, that kind of, uh, that kind of a thing. And you know, thankfully unrecaptured I don't get those. Um, but on the plugins, my God, I mean, people on the internet just are brutal with their reviews and every single time, and I've been getting these things for years.
Speaker 2 09:59 Every time I get one, I have a very specific way that I reply. If they are raising issues, I say, I'd like to help you with those. Or if they're, say, here's problems with the thing, if they're factually incorrect, I'll point out what the, the truth of the matter is and say we'd be happy to help fix this or whatever. Um, and if sometimes they're just unloading, I'll say, you know, look, I don't feel like this is a very fair thing here and here's why. Uh, but just mentally I take that shit super personally and unfortunately because I take it so personally, if I get a negative review, it's like 24 hours before I can get that shit out of my head. I'm just, I'm ruminating over it. I'm rolling it over in my head. Even after I've replied to it, I still do it.
Speaker 2 10:49 Like it's worse if I don't reply to it. So what I find is if I discover a negative review, the first thing I have to do is like draft a response right then and there. I won't necessarily post it because I want time to review it and make sure that I'm not being a jerk, but I need to get that out because there's like that emotional response and that's how I help process it. And if I can't get that out, like it just, it eats at me. Like I, a couple of times I've sat and just didn't respond for 24 hours, I slept like crap that night. I had a hard time falling asleep when I woke up. I mean it was just like thoughts of anger and frustration. It was, it was terrible. It just, it eats away at you that way. So, you know, negative customer support really has a huge effect.
Speaker 2 11:38 And so like when I'm, when I see that Bobby who's does the plugin support, when, when she's going through stuff and is having a really hard day because the customers are unloading on her, you know, I'll, I'll jump right in and say, look, I can take one right now. I know you're having a rough day here. This is tough. I'll respond cause they're crossing boundaries and it's time for you to be done with this that you don't have to deal with this abuse anymore. I'll take, I'll take that and then just, you know, draw the line and say this is inappropriate. You can't do that. But the reason I can do that is because I'm not constantly hitting that negative customer support stuff all the time. You know? Have you guys had tons of experience with that, with a podcast motor and seriously simple podcasting?
Speaker 1 12:22 No, we have no negative support requests. It's great. No, I'm joking. Yeah,
Speaker 2 12:27 I mean I was about to hit you. It was about to hit you.
Speaker 1 12:31 No, I mean it's, it's insane. I mean we have on both sides really. I mean, podcast, motor, the volume of, of tickets and messages is much lower. But, but on that side, we have particularly new customers come in and they, you know, they've recorded a podcast while they're like in the car on speaker phone or something with someone else who's also like equally shitty audio quality and they expect the world out of us and they expect us to defy, you know, physics and, and we're just like, look, this is as good as we can do. We spent a shit ton of time on this and our best editors did it and this is as good as it can sound. And they say, you know, your service sucks. You guys aren't responsive. Well, why? I would just say, okay, cool. You know, I'm sorry this is not a good fit.
Speaker 1 13:14 Here's your money back. We eat that cost of the audio editor, which can be, you know, 50 bucks on my end or more. Um, and we just go on our way. We just, we cut, we cut the, we cut things off very quickly there. If it's not a good fit, um, on the castoffs and seriously simple podcasting side if feel like we've, we've kind of like heard enough at this point, like almost three years into it that like, we know the major issues, we talk about them with customers really quickly and openly. A lot of it's in like the message boards already in the wordpress.org repository. Um, and so we have people coming in and say, like, your shit sucks and I can't believe it doesn't do this or that it does this. It doesn't give me the option for that. And we just say, yeah, you know, I'm sorry, like, this is what it is.
Speaker 1 14:04 We're working as hard as we can to do everything we can. Um, but if you're not happy, you know, that's cool. Um, there's other tools out there. Um, so we try to, but yeah, we try, but it is hard to, I take it super personally to, um, Eileen on our team that does support, takes it personally. And sometimes she just throws her hands up and it's like, look, I just canceled kind of like you're talking about. And that's cool. I, I think you gotta respect the emotional burden that, um, that you take, whether it's there's the founder or someone on your team, uh, cause it's not, it's not, uh, an eternally renewable resource. Right. You have so much you can take in a day or a week or a month.
Speaker 2 14:42 Oh yeah. And that, that threshold drops the more often you have to do it. And you know, unfortunately as a founder, if you've put somebody else in the customer support role, the only customer support that ever rolls up to you are you there like really weird requests because they just have no idea how to handle them or really pissed off. People either is like a massive mental backlog that you now have to take on and figure out because they were not able to do that at the customer support portal or whatever. Yeah. And that's, that's, that can be
Speaker 1 15:18 burdensome. Yeah. You know, one of the other things that, um, that I think about in terms of the emotional toll is like the, the longterm strain of this all. Um, and like Dave, you and I talked before we started recording is like, I think we tried to kind of like walk this line on the show of like being honest and representing what things are really like doing this. Um, but, but kind of being optimistic too. Cause I think as a founder you have to be optimistic and I think we all just forget about some of the shit that happens sometimes. And I think that's healthy. Like we have to, otherwise we would just be depressed all the time. Um, but, but I think that as I look back, like I forget a lot of the bad times, I probably minimize some of the good times.
Speaker 1 16:07 Um, but, but, but I have to say that like with the pressure that we put on ourselves and like for me there is some pressure, like being a part of tiny seed to really like perform and grow, um, is like this long term, like never ending feeling of like, I have to do more, I want to do better. It's never good enough. And like that, that's me. Right. So that's, that's cool. And I, it, it never is good enough and I, we're never going fast enough. Um, the product's never good enough or marketing's never tight enough, you know, all this stuff. Like it's nothing is ever good enough. But at the same time kind of saying like, we're doing everything we can, we can't ask more of myself or our team. And so at some point you kind of have to accept whatever, whatever good enough is. Um, but like that longterm toll of, of like that tension between like as good as you can do and accepting that, but also like knowing that you really want more. Um, I think that that's probably like the biggest stress in my life.
Speaker 2 17:15 Yeah. Yeah. I hear you on that one. That acceptance is tough, right? To be able to say, yeah, we're doing everything that we can. I mean, this is, this is where we can get into like the hustle porn territory, right? Where people are like, yeah, you should be sleeping four hours a night and drinking Bulletproof crack coffee. Like, no, no. I mean it has to be sustainable, right? It's a marathon. It's not a sprint and you can't run a marathon if you haven't trained properly. If you don't have a longterm vision and you're not pacing and making sure that you're taking decent care of yourself along the way, you gotta be putting food and energy into your body and you gotta be, you know, doing weird stuff sometimes. Like putting Vaseline on your nipples. I don't actually run marathons, but this is what I'm told is not Vaseline, but, well, yeah, this is the old way to do it. Apparently. I've, I've heard this from, from marathon runners both ways and you know, either way it's still disturbing that, you know, you have to think about things like bandaids on your nipples, right? It's just not something I would normally think about.
Speaker 2 18:21 But I mean still it's a, it's about taking care of yourself and making it so that you can cross the finish line and not be dead. And, and finding that balance and staying within that window is really hard because sometimes you feel like you want to push yourself, but at the same time, you know, that's not sustainable. So how long do you push yourself and then you start worrying, am I pushing myself too hard if I push myself too long? So, you know, that's another part of that emotional toll, right? Cause you're, you're adding to that worry factor that's going on, on top of all this. But yeah, I mean it's a, it's interesting that you had described that that way about, you know, being real versus, uh, being positive. I think it's one of the tools that I personally struggle with is trying to put on a good face when those who are counting on you, your family, um, want to know what's going on.
Speaker 2 19:19 But at the same time, you don't want to give them the daily report to say, Oh, you know, we had $500 churn out today. Um, and you know, we're contracting a little bit for the month and, uh, I had three negative tickets on customer support and you know, you might just hit it on a bad day and then you don't want to unload on them and say, here, I'll all these shitty things that are going on with the business right now. Because then they're like, Oh my God, what is the business crashing? You know, is everything okay? Are you doing all right? And that like, it turns it into a, a freak out moment that now you have to emotionally manage that. I mean, maybe it's different than you can handle the truth day.
Speaker 2 20:01 I can. Sometimes it's true, but I mean, you know, my, my wife and I have honest conversations about this stuff. I don't want to make it sound like I'm hiding stuff from my wife, but I can't like every single time that that is asked, I have to balance the overall picture to say, here's all the good stuff that's going on. Here's some of the bad stuff that's going on. Here's the reality of all of that. I think it's still okay. Like I'll, I'll put my own opinion on it to say, look, these things happen, these all other things happen. I think the net is this and we're okay or we're not okay. And most of the time it's okay. Sometimes it's not okay. And I think that is hard to present all the time, especially if you're, you know, trying to keep your partner updated about this stuff.
Speaker 2 20:54 Um, because if you're having a really bad day in the business and then they turn around and ask you about the business, the temptation is to, to unload all of that emotional burden that you've been given. Like, if you got some negative customer support or you're having growth problems and share that with somebody else, but then that turns into another emotional burden later because now they're freaking out about it and you've got to manage that. So I don't know what you have conversations with your wife, but when I'm having those conversations, I try to make sure that I give a realistic picture. But at the same time, I don't create a situation where she starts freaking out and worrying about problems in the business that a, she can't really control. And B, she doesn't really have any way to help me with them. Uh, but still let her feel informed. I mean, what do you, what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1 21:49 Yeah, I don't tell her anything.
Speaker 2 21:54 Oh, dude, no, I mean like,
Speaker 1 21:58 well that's, that's, that's a joke, right? Um, but, but so I am thinking about two things. One I'm thinking that, um, it's almost more isolating this feeling that we have, that we have this like, you know, our best friend in our life and our spouse and our partner that we can't be a hundred percent honest with because it would just be worse overall. Right. That that's like a bummer. Um, and I, and I feel like to an extent I feel that way because like the best thing for our relationship and our family and my mental health is to, um, is to give a version of what's going on that is kind of palatable. Right? And that like, that we can all cope with and that's realistic, right? It's like this balance of like, it's realistic that everybody in our family needs to know the truth of what's going on with the success and finance and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 22:51 But they don't need to hear the, the play by play because it can really suck and it can change every minute. So I do filter it a decent amount to say like, you know, whatever, we can pay the bills. Like that's, you know, that's the basics. Like, can we pay the bills? We can still pay the bills. Okay, great. Um, is it a good day or bad day? You know, is everything's going the right way? Do we hire somebody that's, that's good or do we have a problem with this? Like, you know, all these things kind of come and go. But I think like the basics of it is like getting, you know, can, can we still pay the bills? Yep. Okay. Everything else is pretty insignificant compared to that. Um, but, but I do try to, because it is like, like you said, it is a lot more emotional strain if you then have like your own emotions of dealing with the business and the actual work of dealing with the business and then like the emotions of, you know, kind of managing your family's to
Speaker 2 23:46 like the daily news, that business, that's just like more work rather than like, if I can just take the load myself, um, and kind of manage it internally then, then in a way that's easier. And that sounds really shitty. But, but it is, and I think that's, um, maybe that's why like mastermind groups and stuff like that are so popular because like, I feel like I can be perfectly honest with like you and the people in my mastermind groups and I don't have to go like to the dinner table afterwards or anything like that. You know, like I can just leave it and that's cool and I'll have to manage it later. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely, and you know, it's, it's reciprocated, right? As soon as you unload and, and everybody's like, Oh yeah. You know, I mean it feels, it's, it's more like therapy than anything in many ways, right.
Speaker 2 24:35 Cause you're basically unloading all the crap that you're, you're dealing with here and everybody around you is usually nodding very sympathetically. Like, Oh my God, yeah, I've been there, I've done that. I felt that. Or, yeah, that's, that's something that, you know, we can help you with or, or, you know, they're, they're like, you can see them on the edge of their seat where they're ready to chime in with a response because they, they know how to help you get through that or fix it or make it better. Right. So masterminds are awesome for that. In many ways. It does feel like founder therapy to me, cause you can just completely unburdened yourself. And if you're being an idiot, you get told that you're an idiot. If you need help, they'll give you that help. So yeah, shout out for masterminds. Go masterminds. Yup. Yup.
Speaker 2 25:19 Um, but you know, but there's still definitely a burden to the whole, you know, you have to do the filtering, right. So that's just another part of the emotional toll because now you've got to, you've got to provide a reasonable picture of things and that just kind of adds to the strain, right? Yup. Yup. Yeah. Yeah. Another one that I personally struggled with until, well, I mean, I'm not going to say until I, I, it depends on what product you're talking about. This happens all the time trying to stay positive in the face of flat or negative growth with your product. Right? And this can be a one-month phenomena or it can be a multi-month phenomenon for recapture. There was a long period of time where the growth was just dog slow and I had great ideas and it seemed like I could push things forward and things to try, but things weren't moving the needle very fast and trying to remain positive month over month over month while you're not seeing that double digit growth is really hard.
Speaker 2 26:30 It's unbelievably hard because as soon as things started growing like my, I felt like this emotional burden had been lifted off of me. I felt more joyful and I mean that's stupid, right? Because stupid. No, I mean I think it's a little stupid though. Like it's just, it's a small change to some numbers on a spreadsheet. I mean it definitely makes things more viable as a business. But now all of a sudden I'm watching these numbers and I'm like, my emotional status is 180 degrees from where it was before. You know, and as long as it stays there, it's all good. But as soon as it's like slows down, then you're like back in that same state again. Right. And yeah, but I think that's
Speaker 1 27:15 more like the, the value that we get or that we put on ourselves as a reflection of the success of our business. Right? Like when, when business is going well, I feel like the work I've been doing is worth it. And the sacrifices that I make and the risk we're taking and all this stuff is worth it. When I do all of that and we don't have growth, I'm like, what the fuck am I doing here? Why did I quit my job before I could be going back and making, you know, a couple of hundred grand a year? Like what is this all about? Um, and like we're very fortunate. We have not, knock on wood, we've not had a down month in Castillo's. Um, and we've had slower months than others. And those down, you know, months where we don't grow as fast as previous months. Yeah. It's, it's like I feel like, you know, can I actually do this?
Speaker 1 28:10 Can I get us to the place I need to go? Uh, it's a lot more of those longterm things of like, Oh, is, are we just going to be stuck at 5% growth forever? Cause we can never get where we want to go at that rate. Like we need to be growing at 30% a month and that's super, super, super hard to do. Um, especially as you get bigger, I mean that, that number is not a huge absolute number at the beginning. And then when you get bigger it gets to be a harder number to achieve. Um, but yeah, I think, I think it ends up being back to like, Oh, it's not pride. Maybe like self-worth or something as like a reflection of the success of your business.
Speaker 2 28:47 Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it right there. And I was struggling to put a name on it and that, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You, we derive our, our self-worth from how the business is doing. And obviously that can be deeply toxic. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I mean, you can't, you can't decide whether you're a worthy person based on your MRR. I mean, but I, I still find myself looking at that number, feeling that way about it. So, you know, that's just another, another burden that you're taking on and you have to manage that one mentally to say, look, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough. And people like me. Right. It has nothing to do with my MRR in very Stuart Smalley ask ways. Right. You know, I think
Speaker 1 29:33 like a, uh, uh, a tangent to this is like, some of the happiest people that I kind of know and hear of this world are people that have hobbies outside of work. It's where even if work sucks, they can go and play softball or go climbing or whatever it is. Um, any think personally I don't, I don't do enough of that. Like in the winter we do a fair amount of skiing and cross country and stuff like that. Um, in the summer we travel. So, so like I guess I have some of that, but like, um, if I'm honest with myself, I, I put too much pressure on myself because I don't have other things that I do often outside of work.
Speaker 2 30:15 That's an interesting observation and yeah, I mean I, I definitely am able to find some sanity by getting away from the house cause I, you know, I don't really end up leaving the house very much aside from taking the kids to school every day cause I come back here, I mean in my office I work, I go to the kitchen to eat, I come back into my office to work and at the end of the day I'm still back in the house. Right. And if you're not getting out and doing stuff, you kind of go crazy on that. And so like I have to, I do Krav Maga and so I do that a couple of nights a week, uh, gardening in the summer, skiing in the winter, travel with the kids. Now we have the campers. So we added that to the list. Um, yeah. I mean, the times that I'm happiest are the times that I'm keeping a balance or a rotation of those things through.
Speaker 2 31:08 So I'm not just mired in my work head all the time, I guess. Yeah. Getting out of that work head is, is very important for your overall sanity and happiness. No doubt. All right, so another one that I find myself really struggling with overall is, you know, I have a product roadmap and I'm constantly talking to customers, refining that roadmap, making sure I stay focused on that. But then at the same time, you know, I'm tapped into various competitors, I'm on their email lists, I listen to stuff on Twitter, and all of a sudden they might announce something that's really fucking cool and I'm like, damn it, why didn't I think of that? And that can be completely distracting. Right. So, you know, how do you sit there and maintain your focus when your competitors are doing something that looks like it might be interesting for your clients as well? You know, that's another, I'm constantly worrying about stuff like that. And I know you shouldn't be as focused on your competitors as you are on your customers. But there's always something in the back of my mind that's kinda like nagging me. Like,
Speaker 3 32:18 because there's something more you should be doing, Dave, are you forgetting something here? Did they discover something that you didn't,
Speaker 2 32:25 you know, that, I mean, and my voice talks in exactly that voice too. You know, it kind of has that, that school teachers sort of, uh, uh, grading quality on it. But I mean, that's, that's, that's what I'm thinking about. You know, I can't, I can't not think about that stuff. And so, you know, it ends up adding to the emotional toll, right?
Speaker 1 32:49 Yeah. I mean, so kind of generally in podcasting, uh, you know, for like, the core of what we do is relatively straight forward. And the same thing as a lot of other people do, right? Podcast hosting, you have files, they're all in S3, all of the companies host their files and us three and then you deliver them to, uh, to the listeners via a CDN or something. Right? So like the technology of it is almost exactly the same for all of us. And so now I think all of the, all of the companies are kind of saying like, okay, if the base of it is the same, where do we differentiate ourselves? And so like you try to say, Oh, you know, anchor is like free, right? Cause they have this like a advertising ad on for all the free accounts. And then there's others that are saying like, Oh, we're trying to be like the BTB angle of this.
Speaker 1 33:36 And I'm not sure what that means. Like if you're not adding some kind of value added service on top of that, I'm not sure I can go B2B and podcasting. Um, or like we, we try to say like, we're the best solution for people that want to have a podcast and have a WordPress site. Like I think honestly, like that's where we really shine right now. Um, and so I think like when you're looking at your competitors, you have to say like, okay, there's other abandoned cart recovery tools for Shopify. But then like, what's our unique angle? And I think the more, and this is, this is for me looking at our competitors a lot, cause I look at our competitors a lot and I, um, I don't always feel good when I look at our competitors because a lot of do a lot of things better than we do.
Speaker 1 34:26 Um, and I get solace from the fact that we do at least some or several things much better than they do. And I think that from like a longterm positioning slash mental health standpoint, you have to say that and really be cool with it. Like really grok it like internally to say like, yep, this other tool does this thing that we don't do. And it would take us six months to build and, and we probably could never get there because in six months they're going to be that much further ahead. But we do this thing and we have this angle on the market and people know us because of this thing and it's really valuable and differentiatable and defensible. Um, and that's kinda who we are. And so, like when I look at our competitors and say, shit, I can't believe that they're kicking our ass there. I kind of have to say like, yeah, but we're kicking their ass over here and, um, it, this is where we live then I'm, I'm kinda content with that. I don't know. And you know, I might be fooling myself with that, but I don't think that's all bad. Like I think part, we're talking about mental health and like, I feel pretty good about kind of coming to terms with things that way.
Speaker 2 35:46 Yeah. I mean there's, at the end of the day, there's only so much you can do about that. Right? So, yeah. You, you, I guess in a, one of the things that, uh, my Buddhist teacher used to say quite a bit was, you know, you gotta be kind to yourself. You are where you are in your journey and you know, this has to do with meditation and mindfulness, but the truth is it affects everything in your life. You are where you are. If you're trying to improve, then you're headed in the right direction. You're going to do that at a certain speed, you can't, you can't force it. Like the improvement is going to happen at a certain rate. You can try to make it happen faster, but it might not happen faster and you have to be okay with the speed of improvement as it happens. You're not okay with it. Then that just adds to your own stress and makes it worse because you feel bad about improving things or you feel bad about going in the right direction and that doesn't really help you want to stay on that path. Right. Yeah. So, you know, it's very much, it's very much about acceptance. It's very much about acceptance.
Speaker 1 36:54 Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny, I get this mostly from a product perspective. Like I've come to terms and like gotten better at acceptance from a product perspective, say like, our thing doesn't do this, but it does this other thing and that's cool. Um, you know, we don't do this as well as other people and that's okay. Like I think there's very few marketing things that someone could say like, wow, you're, you know, whatever X marketing thing. Totally sucks. I'm like, I think we're, we're very much like good enough across the board there. From product perspective, I think we do great on almost all accounts. Um, but I think that's the place where you can more tangibly say it. Like you have a widget that is square and the other one's round. Now like the round ones better and like that's, that's more black and white on a, do you agree? Like do you find yourself comparing yourself to competitors from a product perspective? More than like a marketing and positioning?
Speaker 2 37:55 Oh, I'm always about product perspectives with competitors. I mean I have no choice mostly because I'm looking at, you know, recapture being a lot younger than some of the other competitors or you know, kind of further behind the curve because it started out as an abandoned cart tool. Now we've added on general email marketing, which means that if you're comparing us to other solutions in the space, they are light years ahead of us in many regards, not just because they've been doing it longer, but because they have larger engineering teams and they can add on five different types of emails in six months. I can't do that. I just can't get them in there fast enough. I can't write them, test them, and deploy them as fast as they can. And I can't afford to do it either. Like, you know, I, I need tens of thousands of dollars in engineering funds to be able to ramp that up.
Speaker 2 38:45 And even if I had all of that, I'm still not going to deliver it as fast as they can. So I have to, I have to be okay with that. But that's still, you know, something that when somebody comes to me and says, Hey, you know, you don't have XYZ, and Klaviyo does. I'm like, yeah, you're right. Yeah, I don't. Yeah. And you know, and here's why we're a smaller team. We're a little bit younger than Klayvio. Oh. And by the way, we have better customer service than Klaviyo. Try contacting them and see if you get actual results. Trying to get some help and our pricing's better than Klayvio. Like you know, they're going to slowly increase over time no matter if you're still recovering the same amount. And if recapture is growing your business and actually doing better for you, then our pricing will grow too.
Speaker 2 39:30 But if we're helping you maintain, then our price isn't going to change. And in that sense, it's uh, you know, it's an advantage, but they either like that or they don't, and they have enough other choices that if they don't like me, they can go somewhere else. And they often do. Yeah. But I can't, I can't change what I can't change. So I have to accept those limitations and move forward as best I can. But at the same time, if it's not a fit, it's not a fit and I can't let that bother me otherwise it's just going to like drag me into the pit of despair. I think, you know, I think some of the most successful companies in these like relatively competitive niches, which you know, I've never thought about it Dave, but we both are in pretty competitive niches. Um, I think the most successful companies kind of like embrace the weird of, of their solution, right?
Speaker 2 40:23 Like they get really opinionated, they become very firm and kind of who they are and what they stand for and that's a competitive advantage relative to the other people that are trying to kind of do the same thing. Um, maybe I'm trying to give myself advice here but, but, but I do think that's like th you think about some of these, these brands and that that really is like they stand out because they are opinion like base camp is a really good example. Like they are in a crowded space, they're super opinionated and people know them because of that. I'm opinionated from like a product end up, like whatever branding, positioning perspective too. Yeah. I mean it's the, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. Right? So if people know exactly who you are and what you mean and who you're a good fit for, they can immediately qualify you as, yep, you're right, the right one for me or Nope, I'm going to find something else.
Speaker 2 41:22 So in that sense it does save some time, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So with all of that, I'd love to hear from everybody. And by the way, thank you to everybody that's been sending us DMS and emails, uh, asking us questions about various episodes, loved talking with folks about things that we've mentioned on the show. If you've got something that you think is taking an emotional toll on you as a founder and we completely forgot to mention it, I'd love to hear about it. Send us an email podcast@roguestartups.com. Hit us up on Twitter via RDMS, uh, any of that works and of course our one ask in this time of the year. If you are thankful for rogue startups and it has been helpful to you, please share us with somebody you think it might be beneficial.
Speaker 4 42:12 Four until next week,
Speaker 0 42:15 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 from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more <inaudible>.
