Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:20 All right, welcome to the road startups podcast. I'm Dave Roden, rotunda here with Craig Hewitt and we are two single founders looking to help you level up your business and learn a little bit and laugh along with Craig and I as we make mistakes. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 2 00:36 Good man. I'm good. Yeah, I think that uh, I think you nailed it on the head. You know, so we dropped the, the stock intro from the podcast for that reason. Squad gets, it's been around for a hundred episodes or something. And I also think that it didn't do a great job of kind of explaining who we are, but I think that that you nailed it on the head, David. It's like to, to share kind of what we're learning along the way, um, to, to make everybody's life in business better, uh, is kinda what we're trying to go for here. So I hope we're over doing a decent enough job of that for everybody. And I appreciate everybody listening
Speaker 1 01:04 and hopefully this is a cheaper than therapy both for us and for everybody listening very much so. Yeah. Yeah. Although that's not to say you shouldn't go to therapy. I know, I see a lot of people talking about therapy in 2020 on Twitter and uh, I think that therapy has a definite role in people's lives. So, you know, don't, I don't want to be poo-pooing therapy for anybody who's listening. I have definitely benefited from that in the past. But anyway. All right, that's a little tangent there.
Speaker 2 01:34 Yeah, yeah. Well, I, it's actually not so far of a tangent of what we're going to talk about later, but uh, yeah, that we could give a couple updates on kind of what, what's up with us since our last episode and through the holidays. You want to give a, an update on kinda how things are going.
Speaker 1 01:47 Yeah, sure. So I'm just coming off a five day vacation. I took with the family down to Santa Fe and it was really good to just kinda, I wouldn't say I was totally unplugged, but I was mostly unplugged. I mean, I checked email once a day and just made sure that shit wasn't going sideways with recapture. And we hired a new developer back in early December, so I needed to have some semi-regular check-ins with him. But that is going amazingly well. So he has worked out excellent so far and we are now moving to the next phase of, you know, transitioning the keys to the kingdom to him so he can, you know, do production deployments and look into the production database and all that other stuff. So yeah, that's really, really exciting. Uh, you know, we're starting to get some serious traction in our new development that's going on here and you know, Michael be rolling off at the end of January and I think we're kind of on track for all of that. So I'm happy to report all of those things there.
Speaker 2 02:53 That's, that's no small feat, man, to replace a lead developer and really your only developer, like that's a thing. I mean, that's, that's huge kudos.
Speaker 1 03:02 Yeah. And not just that, but like replacing with somebody of a similar caliber, like, yeah. You know, it's one thing to replace them and maybe get somebody up to speed, but maybe they're not as good. But I think Omar is on par with Mike. So that's, that's really amazing. You know, it's not easy to do first time out of the Gates. So, you know, props to, uh, perhaps to Omar. And then the other thing that I've been doing here, aside from just, you know, general end of the year accounting crap, which all of us have to do right now. You know, my business tax CPA has already sent me things and said, okay, have everything done by January 17th. I'm like, hell no. That ain't happening dude. End of March or something that gives you two weeks to do your thing. Oh no, I don't have til the end of the March.
Speaker 1 03:51 I a business taxes have to be filed March 15th I made that mistake in the past. Okay. But you know, usually he like hits me up and says sometime in February and I'm like, okay, I can do that. And that's great because that means I get all my numbers together before big snow. And I, you know, sometimes talk about what's going on in the P and L in big snow. And so that, that usually helps. But this year he came to me and said, January 17th, I'm like, yeah, fuck that. That's not happening. That's not happening. And he said, okay, well don't worry about it. Just get it done as soon as you can. I said, okay, cool. Yeah, cause that I can do. But yeah, so, you know, just doing the end of the year stuff. But on top of all that, I have been busting my hump talking to customers, trying to get a bunch of input on what to do for 2020, like what are their priorities?
Speaker 1 04:40 What do they, what do they want to see in recapture? What is missing right now that would make their life better? You know, that kind of stuff. And so far I've gotten some good responses. I had an hour and a half phone call with one of my customers. Uh, I'm trying to get on phone calls with some others, just having some scheduling issues on that. But, um, you know, I picked a bunch of customers that are in sort of the top tiers, the ones that are really using the tool pretty heavily. And so far I've found some really good stuff. Yeah. I mean, I had, uh, one guy churn out in December who was on one of my top tiers and he left because we weren't able to add features fast enough. And you know, you went over to one of our big competitors and I'm like, yeah, I totally understand. I mean, this sucks and I don't want you to leave, but you know, I what you need and what you're asking for are things that I don't have yet and you know, I'm not going to get them fast enough for you. So I wish you luck, man. So, you know, but that motivates you when you're seeing people leave for this and you know, certain set of features that you're like, okay, I got to get on those. I got to do them now.
Speaker 2 05:42 Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. I mean, there, there's never enough time and money though. I mean, it's just, it's, it kills me sometimes to look at the backlog of stuff that we want to build. And you're just like, no, it's five developers full time to build, to build all this stuff in the next quarter. Like it's just, yeah.
Speaker 1 06:00 Right, right. And you know, you can totally see where the, the lure of funding comes from, right. Because then if you get funding, then you can hire a big engineering team and then you're like, we can build this shit fast. And you know, I just, I can't, I can't do that. So you are gate limited by your resources that are available. You know, even like the transition between Mike and Omar, I can't have both of them going full bore right now. I just don't have enough money for that. Like that, you know, it's not sustainable. And then I have to not pay somebody and then I'd be like, well that sucks. You know, I'm not going to do that. Or I have to like personally go into debt for that and I can't do that either. So, yeah, this is like a, it's a big deal to kind of balance all of that on a high wire there.
Speaker 1 06:43 But yeah, I mean, the, the features that I'm getting here, there's some, there's some big stuff that they want in 2020 and you know, Omar is very excited to move forward and I think he can help move the needle on a lot of these things. So I'm excited to start putting those things in front of him and prioritize it. But you know, I mean, in, you know, to Mike's credit here in December, I got one person with a couple of stores that said, Hey, we need integration with OneClickUpsell OCU and I'm like, okay. But I had heard like the previous month, Oh, you don't have support for OneClickUpsell, we're not gonna sign up for your stuff. And then somebody else signed up and then said, yeah, we don't have OneClickUpsell so we can't stay with the service. So I'm like, okay, that's three customers I've lost with OCU.
Speaker 1 07:31 And one of them was ready to leave. And I said, all right, we're just gonna go for it. So put Mike on it and he had it done in like a week and a half and pushed it out there. And then I managed to retain one of them with two stores. So that's great. So now I'm reaching out to the other two to see if they will come back. Cause one of them said as soon as you get this let me know, I'll come back. So you know, sometimes it's easy to prioritize features when you know that pain customers are like I need this to be with your app. If you have this I will come back. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff is no, no brainer at all. But unfortunately not every, not every features like that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2 08:08 yeah. Yeah. That's interesting man. I mean I think we're at the point of like we don't have a lot of people not signing up cause we don't have things. We have a feature that we're going to be building this quarter. It realistically would be out like by the end of the first quarter that a lot of people are excited about. But they know we're working on it. But that's the, I mean that's a trip to, to have these things that, you know, we'll, we'll move the needle and you're just like, I just, I can't do it. I mean even even more complicated, well it's not more complicated but, but it's just a decision. It's like we can, you know, not go into debt but spend the money that we took. Right. We took funding or a little bit of funding and that decision of like, where to spend that money cause that's, that you only get that money once I maybe would go raise more money maybe, but like it's not like, okay I have 10 grand in recurring revenue.
Speaker 2 08:54 I can spend all 10 grand every month. But you're like, I got a hundred grand. How am I going to spend this money? I'm like to, for me to prioritize that and like think about when we should spend that money has been really interesting and I don't know that I've done a great job. I think I'd done an okay job, but, but it's definitely like the first time I've ever had to do this where like, yeah. Before it was just like, okay, how much money do I have in the bank? I've got to make payroll for the people on the team. I can spend the rest of, and now it's like, okay, I could spend 30 grand this month. That's crazy. It's crazy to think about like 30 grand on top of what we spend normally. Right. That's a trip. And I think,
Speaker 1 09:32 but you don't get it all at once, right. You get it out in monthly increments. Um, you get most of it upfront. Oh, interesting. I okay. Yeah. So I don't know how the payment structure works in tiny seeds, so that's fascinating. Yeah. I can send all of it. You could spend all of it in the first half, I'll say. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's, I thought it was like a, we're going to Dole it out to you. Kind of like a paycheck. You know, you get this stuff.
Speaker 2 09:59 So too when I, when I, when I signed up and enrolled. But no, you, I mean they give you all the money up front and, but just so you can do more things for that, you know, um, they don't give all the all the money up front, but they, they, whatever.
Speaker 1 10:10 Yeah. Well I mean if they give you a political chunk, right? Yeah. I mean I guess that makes sense. Cause if you're going to make a big investment in something, if you're only getting a 10th of it or a 12th of it at the time, that's going to be harder to make that big investment. All right. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't really expect that. I kind of thought it would be different, but yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a, it's a
Speaker 2 10:29 drip and it's funny talking to the other tiny seed companies about like, you know, how's your, how's your bank account? Like should, should we, you know, essentially start breaking even at the end of the 12th month. Like, I don't know. I think so. Like, sometimes they think I want to keep, you know, a bunch of it. And sometimes I think if there's any leftover and then I shouldn't have taken funding and I know we're, we're somewhere in between then right now I've definitely spent some of the money, but it's a, it's a new skill for sure.
Speaker 1 10:54 Yeah. We haven't really talked about like what kind of experiments or things that you ended up doing with the tiny seed funding. Have we? No. No. Uh, would that be something you'd want to talk about in an episode?
Speaker 2 11:05 Uh, sure. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. I mean I, yeah, I think generally, and I was talking to <inaudible> like with the batch two group that just came in for tiny seed applications and I talked to six or seven different companies that were applying, just, you know, they wanted to hear my experience and all this kind of stuff. And the, the general part of it, and I happy to talk about it more is like, it moves the timeline of the business forward by a year or more, you know, so like we're doing things that to your point, like I couldn't have afforded to do before and because we're burning our money to get there ahead of time. Right. That's the, that's the general thing. But, but yeah, we can talk about the details for sure. And a lot of it has worked out in a lot of, it hasn't worked out, so it's been interesting there.
Speaker 1 11:45 Interesting. Okay. Yeah, we can talk about that in a future episode that not something we were going to talk about today. So I was just curious. Yeah, yeah. Our things. Otherwise,
Speaker 2 11:54 yeah, man, things are good. You know. Uh, th like also had a pretty quiet time over the holidays. We were in London with some family over the week of Christmas, which was cool. I worked, you know, a little bit every day. Uh, the week of new year's I worked more or the, you know, the week of new year's I worked more. Um, and then back at it. Now here, this is the first real week of, of the new year. And the thing like the big picture thing is like, it's funny, like it's funny, I don't know sometimes if I come up with these ideas or if it's just that I'm in like the, the tiny seed Slack and talking to all these people all the time. But like I heard the startups for the rest of us episode today for this week and Rob was talking about how like he's able to run the podcast and MicroComp and tiny seed because he's got like higher level team members working on things.
Speaker 2 12:44 Not just like a bunch of VA's running processes, which there's nothing wrong with but, but for, for that to run your business, you have to be really strict about like, okay, open the spreadsheet and filled in these cells and then send this email and dah, dah, dah. Whereas like the next step up is like a, a a project person. So you can have somebody and say, I need you to run support for Castillo's or Becky for podcast motor. I need you to be the connection between our customers and our production team to make sure that everything flows there. And that's in both my businesses. That's where I've gotten is I've gotten to this point of saying like I am not in mission critical for most all of both of the businesses, but I haven't gone the next step, which I would say is like as of on a project basis, but I haven't gone the next step to say like I have a product manager and this is what like sure.
Speaker 2 13:35 Swift capital calls. They're people that are like in charge of a business unit is a product person to say like, you know something like if it doesn't cost more than $5,000 you make all the decisions, you know, like hire this person and get a freelancer or decide to invest in ads, build this feature, whatever. Like I haven't gotten there and I think if I want size thing, I mean, you know those, those kinds of decisions like the $5,000 threshold. I mean are you and I big enough for stuff like that? I don't think we are. No, it's, and it's not that, it's not that it's, it's a mindset thing. It's not the, it's not the amount of money. It's like what I am starting to like formulate in my mind and haven't really talked and talk to our teams about it and I will before this episode goes out, is like, you know, Kaizen, right?
Speaker 2 14:23 Like the Toyota or is a Honda or whatever thing of like people on the production line making continuous improvements. And that's what I haven't enabled our teams to do is to say like, Chris, our sales guy for for podcast motor. If you think there's a better way to sell this or a better package and you think we can fulfill it, then go sell it. You know, like, and that's what like that you have to box it somehow. And so like if it's a marketing person, then you know, any marketing experiment you want to run, that's under $1,000, go run it. If you think you're responsible ultimately for like the performance of this part, you know, you're a part of the business, but to enable these people that are really high performers and they're really like the senior people in the businesses. You know, it's Denise from marketing and Castillo's, it's Becky and production and, and like ops really for podcast motor and Chris and sales to say like if there's something that you think we should be doing, I don't need to be the bottleneck and I don't, I think I don't want to be like consumed by all these decisions because it's too much sometimes, you know, to be like the person making the decisions for both businesses all the time.
Speaker 2 15:31 I feel like I'm holding people back, you know, because they're smart people and they can make these decisions and a lot of times they have better decisions and ideas than I do. But, but the big thing is, and this is where I, I absolutely haven't gotten, and it's really scary, is like if I do that, then I have to go operate at an even higher level. You know? And that's the scary thing is you can like make yourself so important that you have to make these decisions and, and that's where I am. I think in that, that's a shitty thing to admit is like I've, I've made, you know, boosted myself to be so important that I'm the only one they can make these strategic marketing decisions or sales packages or whatever. But what I've really done is held the business back.
Speaker 1 16:14 Right. Right. Now it's funny that you say that, and I, and I won't name specific names, but on multiple big snows, we have had discussions where people feel like they are, they're bottle-necking things. They are the limiting factor of the business, that they're not enabling people to make decisions. But at the same time, you know, a, that's really scary for us as single founders to do that because you know, in some ways the business is tied up in our identity, you know, in a very unhealthy way. I'd like to say where we feel like if somebody else is making decisions that somehow reflects on us and if they screw up, then we, we are less because of it. You know, and there's also the risk factor, right? So you're looking at somebody else controlling your baby. It's like, it's like somebody else raising your child.
Speaker 1 17:13 Right? And that's, you know, as a parent that's really scary, right? You know, some people are like, Oh yeah, the nanny can do this or whatever. I've never felt comfortable about that. And you know, one of the early decisions that my wife and I made about parenting in general was made zero sense for her to keep working after our oldest daughter was born. Because what we would have paid in childcare was a PSI effectively pretty close to what she was making in her salary. And it was very, you know, infant childcare is unbelievably expensive. So this was not a small amount of money and it was like, well, if that's the case, why are we somebody else to raise our child? So like, why would you pay somebody else to run your business if you feel that invested in it? And I think early on you have to be that invested in it.
Speaker 1 18:00 Like you really do have to drive those decisions every day, all the time. But at some point, if you're, if you're hiring smart and you bring on really good people that are independent, entrepreneurial, very intelligent driven, you can't continue this because it will be not just self-limiting, but it's just plain stupid. I mean, it really will. It will hold you back tremendously. And you know, I have felt very similarly about things with recapture. Like sometimes I have been just incredibly relieved that Mike, who is also an entrepreneur doing his own things and businesses understands where I'm at and what decisions I'm trying to make. And so either consciously or unconsciously, I don't know if this is just something that he naturally does or if it's something that he, you know, knows how to do and does it anyway, he, he knows exactly how to communicate to make things easier for me.
Speaker 1 19:06 Like he, he boils everything down to a, here's what's going on. Here are the options. Here's what I think. What do you, what do you want to do? Like he's basically laid everything out and all I have to do is just read it and go, yep, I agree. Or, no, I don't think that's quite right. Or you know, I mean he's basically made it incredibly easy for me. Now by contrast, my WordPress developers don't do that and it's not a failing on them. I think this is a very specific skillset that you've either cultivated or you sort of gravitate to naturally and some people have it haven't. Some people don't. Right? Like I'm not a long distance runner. I, you know, I can't, I can't do that naturally. And some people will just like get onto a trail and head out for miles and they love it. That's a skill, right? You can try to cultivate it, but there's some natural talent involved as well. I think it's somewhat similar for this and having somebody to share that cognitive load makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference.
Speaker 2 20:07 Yeah. And I think like for me the scary part of it is, is not so much like, you know, giving up, you know, someone else raising your child, right, of like it's maybe more like a, this person's going to teach them how to play tennis or you know, there, this is the, this is the show for, for my kids or something. Like it's a part of the business. Like certainly no one is running the whole business. But the hard thing mentally for me is what else am I going to do? And I think that's, that's the really scary part because then you, you're basically saying, I'm going to pay this person $5,000 a month or whatever it is to go do this thing, or they're an incentive plan and that's money out of my pocket essentially. Cause I could go do that job and then I would have a job, you know, in my business.
Speaker 2 20:54 But if I'm gonna pay this other person to do that, then I have to go and do something that's worth much more than $5,000 a month to the business. And that's, that's an emotionally big step. And I feel like I've done decent with it. They have, part of it is just like running the whole business, right. Because any one of those people don't know all of the other things that are going on and what all goes into managing that. So part of it is that, but then another part of a bigger part probably is like I have to be doing the one and only thing that I can do, which is whatever strategic partnerships or product vision or you know, maybe it's sales if you haven't gotten somebody to do sales for your business yet, you know, so like I dunno for a developer, this is probably the point where they hire a developer. Right? Yeah. Cause that's been a super high value thing they've done.
Speaker 1 21:43 Right. Right. And the whole raising your child, having somebody else raise your child, we can file that under, you know, Dave shitty analogies number <inaudible>. Yeah. No, I mean it's not that great, but I mean I hear what you're saying and that you know, I, I think we should all get forced into that direction because I mean, I don't know about you. For me, I feel like especially when I was doing the WordPress plugins, there was a spot where I was like comfortable and you know, I was doing the support and I felt like if I took myself out of that, what's my value to this business? Like somehow I wasn't questioning the value that I was already adding to the business and if that was the most valuable thing, but by saying, all right, I'm going to hire somebody to do support that that forced me to go another level and say, all right, well what is it that I'm going to do to drive business to the plugins at this point?
Speaker 1 22:36 And in the end it was very valuable. But at the time that I did it, it was, I wouldn't say that it was scary. It was disconcerting. Like it was very much a, what am I going to do with this time and this energy now that is still valuable and that's a hard question to answer. For me it was to go out and find recapture at that point because I basically turned the business into a self running thing and that turned out to be a great decision. But you know, I'm kind of at a similar spot with recapture again where I'm not, I'm not the developer and I haven't had the time to dedicate to it the way that I would have liked to. And there are lots of things that need work at this point. More partnership stuff. I'm spending more time trying to, you know, revamp the, the onboarding here, which isn't finished yet, even though it's been in process for a long time, it just, it requires a pretty substantial time investment and the website needs a redo.
Speaker 1 23:37 The marketing website is kind of a, I want to say it's a mass, it's just out of date at this point and I need to add stuff to it and it's, you know, static HTML that's in the code base. I have to go in there and hand modify everything and write, you know, header and body tags and all this other crap. So it's a lot of copy paste shit and spending time trying to figure that all out. So you know, I'd love to put a a builder on top of that so I could do that piece of it in the builder and make you know, better landing pages so that I can run better campaigns and yeah, stuff like that. So there's a lot of things that I'm not doing, cause I'm focused on other stuff right now and you kind of have to decide, all right, where, where does my energy go? Can I focus on something more valuable here? And if what you're doing is not the most valuable thing to the business, and that's a hard thing to admit to yourself. By the way, if you're in that spot, then you, you know, how do you get out of it? What are you going to do instead of that?
Speaker 2 24:38 Right? Yeah. And it's, I mean first of all, it's a, it's a thing that not everybody has the luxury to decide, right? Because when you're starting, you have to do whatever you have to do to, to put bread on the table and pay rent and stuff. And so that's, that's totally like this is not an option at that point. Once you get to 10 or 20 grand in revenue, then you say, okay, I can hire somebody for support. I can hire a developer, can maybe hire somebody to do this marketing, I can pay myself. You can't pay all those people. But you know, like you knew some of those things, then you can decide, okay, what do I want to do in the business and what can I only do or what can only I do? And I think that's, if you can figure that out and you can actually do that, then that's, that's really powerful.
Speaker 2 25:20 I, I talked to, um, David Hensel, he had him on the podcast a while ago. He had built, um, max CDN and then sold it. And he is just magic at this man. He runs four or five companies and he has a call with each of them once a week. And that's his involvement in those businesses. And he has people in place and each of those businesses in each of kind of the critical levels, you know, sales and marketing and support and product and they report to him, they talk about things, he resolves whatever questions or issues and then those people own that part of that business, not whatever, maybe now with equity, but that's their job is to be responsible for that part of the business in making the day to day decisions and owning the outcome of those decisions. And I think the closer that we get to doing that, the more the business is able to grow without us because otherwise it's kinda like, yeah, you have a job and you're not, you don't have a business if you're responsible for all of these things on a day to day basis. And like if we can enable our team members to make the decisions and own the outcome, then they'll feel better about it too, I think. Right. Because nobody wants a fucking job. Right. Everyone wants like a little part of the business. That's their project.
Speaker 1 26:30 Yeah. I mean, this goes back to the three things that really motivate people from Daniel pink, right? Autonomy, mastery and purpose. So everybody wants to be able to be the master of their own destiny. They to have a reason why they're actually doing that, you know, the purpose side of it. So the autonomy and then they want to be getting better at things all the time. They want to be leveling up their skills. I mean, I don't know of a single developer out there that's like, you know, I'm really content with just being the C plus plus guy doing this stuff forever. And you know, they want to, they want to learn new languages, they want to get better at new frameworks, they want to go talk at conferences, they want to do new stuff. Like that's, that's a natural thing to do. So if you're getting those three things out of your job, then it's not really, it doesn't feel like a job anymore. It feels like, I dunno, you know, I don't want to get too philosophical about that, but it definitely feels better. Feels like you're in a place of growth. And a place of happiness.
Speaker 2 27:29 <inaudible> <inaudible> yeah, yeah. Cause that's other part. It's like it's what are you best at and also what energizes you. And that's different for everybody. Thank God. Right. Otherwise, you know, no one would want to do accounting, but some people just get a kick out of it.
Speaker 1 27:45 And I just want to say that I love people that want to do accounting because you are the drivers of my business. Thank you.
Speaker 2 27:52 Yeah. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 27:55 God, I hate accounting. I, you know, I just,
Speaker 2 27:57 yeah, I know. Anyway. Through it right now. Yeah, I know. But Dave, we got off on a big tangent. Um, but I think this is a good discussion. We, we wanted to talk about, um, co-founders and I think this is kind of a similar thing. You know, I think this has come up in the tiny seed batch that I'm in now. I would imagine there'll be more cofounder businesses in the second batch. I know that like Y Combinator is a heavy proponent of multiple founder companies.
Speaker 1 28:25 I would go so far as to say Paul Graham is actually prejudiced in that direction and I have been, you know, deeply critical of that from him for a long time because I, you know, as a single founder, the notion of that is very offensive to me to say you have to have a cofounder in a business and you know, I think for certain kinds of businesses that's fine. But, uh, as time has gone on, I would have to say that my position on this is evolving.
Speaker 2 28:54 Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. Yeah. I've always been a single founder myself. I say always. It's not been that long. It's five years they've been doing podcast motor. I had a business partner in a totally unrelated business like 10 years ago, 12 years ago. And it was great. We were really complimentary and I can see it being really nice. Um, I think now, like if I was starting over today, I would either try to look for a cofounder. For me it would be a technical person. Actually. I would probably want three people. I would want a really top notch marketing person. I would want and I would want a technical person and I would kind of play product and sales probably if a good enough three I would just get a technical person and I would do marketing and sales or I would raise money Brennan and Shai did to where I can hire really good people for that right out of the gate before you have that revenue. Um, and that would be a fair amount of money. That would be, you would need to raise AF a million dollars at least for for that kind of thing because the whole like do it by yourself, do everything is just so fucking hard. Like I just, I couldn't do it again then. I don't know that I would have to. So that's nice.
Speaker 1 30:06 Yeah, it, it is hard. It is like, so I mentioned, I used the phrase earlier in the episode, sharing the cognitive load and that's what it is, right? You have only so much bandwidth and to be a single founder you are, you have to be the expert at marketing. You have to be the expert at sales, you have to be the expert at product, you have to be the expert at engineering and as anybody who has worn, all of those hats will tell you number one, switching between those roles on any given day is a real pain in the ass because you're in the Headspace for one and going to another one. Unless they're like kind of adjacent, you know the technical and the product. Maybe those are kind of adjacent. Maybe the marketing and the sales. Those are kind of adjacent. Maybe you can switch between those a little easier, but you know if you're jumping from sales to technical, wow.
Speaker 1 30:56 I mean that's not an easy switch to make. Having made that myself, it, it, it is hard for me to switch between those just in terms of how I'm thinking about things and what I'm supposed to be thinking about and getting deep into that either way. So that's number one. But number two, just being an expert in all of those things is really fucking hard to even be competent in, in all of those things is really hard. There are definitely roles that I am stronger in and ones that I've gotten better at and being weaker at. Certain things like marketing and sales has incentivized me to try to learn more about those aspects. But even so, I haven't spent anywhere near the time on those as I have on technical and product. So I'm still naturally better at those sides of things than the other. And so they, you know, the siren song of those two roles always kind of pulls me over compared to the others and having somebody else that you can bounce ideas off of and that you can have a complimentary skillset with and to work on things, you know, I think that there is a size of business or a level of business where that is super important. And I didn't use to believe that probably because I hadn't gotten a business big enough to really realize where that breaks it down and falls apart.
Speaker 2 32:26 But yeah, and it's not that big, right? I mean it's not, it's not as big as hens of employees. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 32:32 No, I thought you had to be like some big venture back thing that was going for unicorn size revenues of you know, hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. No, no, it doesn't have to get that big at all. In fact, I've seen other successful businesses where there's two people working on sides of the business. Harry and Ted more aware they go to big snow and you know, without sharing too much, I mean I know these guys have very split roles in their business and they're very good friends and they have complimentary skill sets and they've worked together for a very long time and it's that kind of a relationship that helps keep their business strong and without it, I don't think they would have grown to as big as they are now. Yeah, I don't think it would have been, I mean, both of them, ours are incredibly smart guys and I think individually they could have built the business on their own, but I don't think they would have taken it to where they are now if they weren't together.
Speaker 1 33:29 Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. And same. Yeah. Same thing with Robin. Derrick and drip, like there was a point where Rob was like, I need a technical cofounder. I mean I could keep doing this, but it's not going to work. So he made Derek the technical cofounder and he was the owner of product and that if you look at the, the revenue growth, you know things, I'm not saying that things you know, magically took off, but at that point it really freed up Rob to do more of the things that then helped drip double down on growth later and Derek was able to manage the product side exclusively. So you know, that made a huge difference, right?
Speaker 2 34:04 Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. It's a big decision to make because I think a lot of us, yeah, I'd, like you said, do put a lot of our identity and our worth in our businesses and think that we're the only people that can do this. But if you're able to let some of that go, I think you can see pretty quickly, wow, there's other really talented people out there. Even if, say there are only 80% as good as you are, but you have those talented people in each of the five or six aspects of the business and then you can go be additional, you know, support and amplification on top of that, then that's I think where the magic starts happening. But you know, just just saying, I want to hire Bobby, you do support so I don't have to do the support anymore is not what we're talking about. I think it's, no, it's a layer on top of that, which is hard and scary.
Speaker 1 34:50 Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, you know, I think one of the reasons I haven't had a cofounder is, you know, just plain and simple greed. And I hate to admit that, especially publicly, but you know, one of my main stated goals for building a business when I was starting out was to be able to support my family. And if you bring in a cofounder in that everything gets split down the middle or pretty close to it. You know, if you're bringing somebody on who's got a 50 50 skill set and they're going to contribute to the business equally, now you have to be twice as big to get the same amount for you in the end. And you know, honestly that's been a hard mental hurdle for me to overcome and that's my personal shit. Right? Um, other people are willing to go in early on and just and Duke it out and, and take care of that right away or maybe money's not as big of an issue for them.
Speaker 1 35:45 For me, you know, my background, how I grew up, that was where I wanted to go with it. And also, you know, there's the, there's the nasty side of co-founder relationships where shit doesn't work out and then there's like the ugly divorce part of it. Right. And that that's the other part of it you don't want is to have your business suddenly go sideways and then you're like, wait a minute, I have to buy out this other person for half of the business if I want to keep doing this, which would sock. So, I mean, there's a trust aspect to it. You, you know, you, you don't wanna you know, everybody talks about co-founders being a marriage. You don't want to marry the wrong person. You don't want to get into a cofounder relationship with the wrong person either. So there's that too. And you know, my wife, who was part of a family business for a long time had very similar feelings when she and I talked about it and you know, I had mentioned, Oh, maybe I want to bring on so-and-so is a cofounder just in casual conversation. And she's like, no, no, you don't want to do that.
Speaker 2 36:47 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 36:49 and it's not because she didn't like the other person or trust the other person or think that, that it's just she didn't want that aspect of it. Having been in a family business where things didn't work out very well at later stages and that, you know, definitely complicated everything. Absolutely everything. So there's that too. But man, sharing the cognitive load, if you get somebody, you know, it's like if you get a good partner in a marriage, it's, it's the same thing as having a good cofounder in a business. You know, it, it's a multiplier on the business that's greater than what they bring to the table.
Speaker 2 37:23 Yeah. And that's, that's I think the prospect of finding a cofounder for both of us. It sounds like for both of us is, is daunting and I don't think it's something that you would try to go out and do. I think those kind of fall in your lap boots, the, the people you know, in the industry and stuff like that. But uh, yeah, it's, it's an interesting thing. I think if folks out there haven't gotten started and are looking to getting started and you have the opportunity to join a team or become a co founder, it's the way I would go. Like for the first time being part of a cofounder. Yeah, you only get 30% or 30% or 10% of the company, but you're able to see so much and experience if you're a founder of any, if you have any equity, you're an experience the whole ride but, but it's not all on you. And I think that's the, that's the burden sometime for, for those of us that are single founders, like it's all on us at the end of the day. Um, you know, we have communities and all this kind of stuff, but ultimately we got to pay the bills and stuff. So, and if
Speaker 1 38:24 there are some thoughts that you have on the topic and would love to share them with us or questions that you'd like us to delve into for a future show, send us an email podcast at rogue startups. Com. We'd love to hear from you and as always our one ask if this episode or other episodes you found valuable, please share them with somebody you think would benefit as well. Until next week,
Speaker 0 38:49 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>.
