Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible> welcome to the rogue startups podcast where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:22 All right, welcome to episode two 17 of rogue startups. Craig, how are you today?
Speaker 2 00:27 I'm doing well, man. Doing well. It's a spring has sprung here and everybody's enjoying being outside and now to confinement and all these things we used to take for granted. So yeah, things are going pretty well. How about yourself?
Speaker 1 00:39 Yeah, same on this side. Uh, got an entire weekend of no computer time, which felt really good just to stay the hell away from it. Yeah, it made one of my customers mad cause she had sent like three requests on Sunday and then first thing on Monday morning. You haven't replied. I'm like, I know, I haven't replied. It's Sunday. Yeah. Sorry. It says that on our hours by the way. Uh, it's okay though. Yeah. Anyway, that was just good to kind of unplug and get out into the real world for a little bit. So
Speaker 2 01:14 How are things, uh, in the Denver area with, with COBIT and the confinement?
Speaker 1 01:18 You know, the, the lockdown orders, the stay at home stuff, they're starting to lift that now. And they are, you know, the County that I live in, Douglas County was the first one to say fuck this. Um, we're just gonna let people do what they want. But then they had that one person that tried to open up their restaurant early saying, you know, America freedom. And the governor came and slapped him hard. Yeah. So I think everybody's taken a little more cautious approach since then. And yeah, they, they're talking about a phased approach to restaurants over the summer. They're talking about in the local area with the local businesses, you're allowed to go, but you have to wear masks. And for the most part in our area, people seem to be doing that. We were out on Sunday, we were shopping for plants and things like that.
Speaker 1 02:04 We went to several different stores and all of them, you know, people were mostly wearing mass, at least 80% so that's good. And yeah, I think in general, you know, there's definitely a sense of fatigue about the whole thing. Like, Ugh, can't we just be done? But at the same time there's like, Oh my God, what the hell? You know, we could get slapped by this any second. You know, there's, so there's like these two competing things that are going on. And I would say that people that are more moderate and uh, more level headed are all just like, all right, we'll follow the goddamn rules, don't like them, but following the goddamn rules and you know, in the hopes that it just calms things down and we can be done with this. But yeah, the ones that are on either extreme, I think those, those are the ones struggling the most with it. Yeah. How about in Annecy?
Speaker 2 02:54 Yeah, I mean, you know, we're a week and a half into like the unrolling of, of the confinement here and it's been really nice just to get out more and feel like you can get out more, uh, kind of emotionally. That's, that's been really nice. Um, it is weird. Some places we've been to see like the number of people both like good and bad. Like there's a ton of people, some places, and there's no people, other places, like a lot of stores are just still totally empty, which is weird. Um, but I think generally for me it feels like the worst is behind us in the short term. Um, you know, that there's the possibility that second wave or third wave for fourth wave, but, but in the near term, I feel like the worst is behind us. We're out of the house, everyone's healthy.
Speaker 2 03:39 Um, I do worry about getting sick now that I never worried about it before, but you know, like we're out almost every day now doing something. And so just the exposure so much higher. Um, so that's been the thing that weighs on me the most, I guess is like we're out. My kids are out for the first time, you know, they spent two months at home basically in our neighborhood, um, and now they're going to stores and out to parks and stuff like that. Um, and so that's just different. But yeah, it's, it's really nice to have some of the freedom back.
Speaker 1 04:08 Yeah. And school is over this week for my kids. They're, they're done by Friday. Oh wow. Okay. But you know, we're on a very early schedule, so like we're going to go back at the beginning of August again too, which I think is just insane anyway. Maybe not. But yeah, I mean it's kind of weird because it's like, I feel like we've had this extended summer vacation with just these weird rules on top of it. Yeah. Because I'm sleeping later. I don't have to take them to school. I don't have to go pick them up in the afternoon. We don't have to go to all these activities. You know, it just feels like a longer version of summer vacation, which is okay. So first my favorite time of the year. But yeah, it just sort of distorts the sense of what's going on and what day it is and all these other weird things. But yeah.
Speaker 2 04:56 Yeah, yeah. Our kids, uh, could have gone back to school this week. Um, but we are, it's optional. And so we're choosing to not send them back to school and continue homeschooling through the end of the school year, which is the first week in July. So yeah, idea is just that exposure and risk thing is like the risk of them getting a poor education in the next five weeks or six weeks is pretty low. You know, like they've already gotten two months of whatever education they're going to get, so they're going to get another six weeks of it. Um, and I think actually we've, we've done a really good job and they're happy, so that's cool. If they were really unhappy, we would send them back just so they could see their friends and stuff, but they're seeing them outside of school, which is neat. Um, so yeah, I feel like we're all amazingly resilient, which is really cool and shouldn't be surprising, but, but it, it kind of is. Um, so it's neat to see. We're stronger than we think we are. Yep. Yep. And we have another, uh, company to highlight in the help founders program this week. Uh, again, put on by Jane and Benedict from user list and the company this week is remake. Dave, you want to give us your kind of take on remake?
Speaker 1 06:04 Yeah, so a remake is remake the web.com. If you want to check this out and they basically have a tagline that says build web apps fast and it looks like that they are a web app framework that makes it possible to ship products faster than ever. So when we were looking over the site, the one thing I noticed was that this is basically if you're an HTML person and you're trying to visualize a web app or create a prototype or maybe an MVP where you can sort of test out hypotheses, then remake is going to make it super easy for you to create something that doesn't have like a lot of complicated business logic, a lot of complicated backend. If you can write it in HTML and layer in some of their attributes on top, you can get what amounts to a more or less fully functioning web app in a very short amount of time.
Speaker 1 07:00 And that's really powerful, especially when you're not sure whether your product meets your audience's needs. So if you've identified a problem and you've identified an audience and you've got a connection between those, your third step is validating all those assumptions that you've been making or the promises that you've been promising to them. And the best way to do that is through something like a quick MVP. But the problem with a lot of MVPs is that it just takes a long time to build them. You've got to put a front end, you gotta put a back end, you got to connect them together. There's a lot of work to that and that can slow you down. It can slow down the validation, it can make it too long. And if you're an engineer, you can get way lost in all the details in the code and forget the fact that you're trying to validate a market in the first place. So remake makes all of that very simple by just saying, here's some HTML, we're going to throw in some additional attributes and we give you what ends up being a fully functioning web app.
Speaker 2 07:58 Yeah, I like it a lot. I think that this is one that, that we kind of look at and say, this is interesting. Like, this is cool. I don't know what I would do with this right now, but, but it is something like I would keep in mind, right? Like I can see needing this down the road, I can see mocking something up with it. Um, and so I think this is one that folks might just keep in mind, like you said, to be able to move past some of the technical parts and process of, of getting started and onto what arguably are, are maybe more important like customer validation and marketing and things like that, that, that we all procrastinate on to some extent because we want to go build cool and better tools, but there's a point where that's not the most important thing. And so I think this could be an interesting tool for folks to, uh, to kind of focus on that. So really neat concept here, I think, and probably a lot of different implementations and use cases for, for different folks. So yeah, remake the web.com. Uh, check it out. I think it's really interesting.
Speaker 1 08:58 Yup. And, uh, thanks again to Jane and Benedict for giving us this opportunity to highlight these growing businesses here on the podcast. So please check them out. Remake the web.com
Speaker 2 09:10 And I think Dave, this week we're going to be talking about a, a mega Twitter thread from David Parell. I'm talking about a bunch and we're not going to talk about all of them kind of ideas that have shaped his worldview. So David <inaudible> is a really prolific, uh, kind of writer, startup guy, uh, and has this really big thread that we'll link to in the show notes. Um, and we're going to talk about just a couple of these and maybe our impressions or reactions to them, uh, and, and kind of how we interpret a few of these. So there's 50 here, but Dave, I think we'll maybe run through 10 or 12, uh, to kind of riff on.
Speaker 1 09:48 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not all of them I felt were very interesting and some of them I think that they were more applicable to like personal stuff as opposed to business stuff. But I dug out, you know, seven of them that I thought were more applicable to the things that I've seen in my businesses over the years and things that you know are that you're struggling with right now that we're struggling with right now. So interestingly, the first one on the list was, I mean he was pretty strong right out of the gate. It was a problem that he called inversion where it's easier to avoid stupidity than it is to try to be brilliant. And it's interesting that he pointed this one out because I always felt like for a very long time that I was a lesser entrepreneur because I didn't have all these brilliant unicorn world changing ideas.
Speaker 1 10:41 And you know, when it came to new and different things or amazing stuff I should be working on, I always felt like I lacked in that department. And instead I, I did have this ability to look at things and go, you know, I can, I can make that better. I can look at that and I can make that less stupid. But that's exactly what he's talking about is looking at things and being able to say, Hey, that's kinda dumb. I need to improve that and make it less dumb. And that's actually the easier of those things. So the question that he posed was instead of saying, how can I help my company, you should ask, what is it that's hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it? So points of obvious failure and then find ways to steer clear of them. And I thought this was a very apt and appropriate thing. So if you're running a business right now and you've got one thing that's like your major bottleneck right there, how can you, how can you figure that out and fix it so that it stops hurting you?
Speaker 2 11:43 Yeah. So the first one that really stuck out at me, he says, competition is for losers. Don't copy others. If you work for a nonprofit or for a for profit company, work on that would not otherwise be solved. If you're at a nonprofit fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don't compete. And I don't agree with this is the reason I wanted to talk about this is, and maybe this is where he's coming from, I guess he lives in San Francisco, you know, venture backed kind of mentality. I think this is really risky, uh, for us as bootstrappers. And I think if you didn't have competition in some way and right, like competition is Xcel for a lot of us. Right? Um, but, but if you don't have competition, it means that the, the market and the problem is not validated and you as a bootstrap founder, even if it's not your first rodeo, don't want to be going through that process and building a product and marketing and finding customers and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 12:42 Um, so, so I think, and this is kind of common knowledge I think, but I think, I think it's a, a spectrum of kind of how much competition is there. I probably wouldn't go start another CRM or another time tracking tool. Um, but, but I do always look for what is already out there that's doing a good job for one aspect of the market or in some way their problem or their, their solution solves a problem for the people that have this pain and, and what's the gap that is still left. Um, so, so maybe that's just a different kind of competition or gap in the market. Um, but, but I definitely think that going into a space where there's no other players is just too risky for my appetite.
Speaker 1 13:25 Yup. Yeah, I can see that. So kind of riffing on that same thing. Uh, another one that David brought up was the memetic theory of desire. And this one, this one's kind of harsh, uh, basically it says that all humans are like sheep and we don't know what we want. So because we don't know that we just imitate each other. So we just end up desiring the same things as everybody else instead of creating our own desires. And the example that he raised was that the entire advertising industry was based on this entire idea. You basically figure out what one person wants and then you just try to sell that to everybody else because if one person wants it, then probably everybody wants it. Because we behave like sheep in a lot of ways. And I think this is why we actually have a lot of competition because we don't, you know, there's so many developer tools, there's a lot of developer tools.
Speaker 1 14:22 I think everybody wants to say I'm going to be unique, but I'm going to create exactly what you did. But with my spin on it, and that's not really, it's sort of being creative in my opinion, but it's not totally creative. Uh, and there's nothing wrong with that, by the way. I don't want to make it sound like I'm all judgy and, and you know, peering down my nose at this because I've done that exact same thing. I mean I'm, I'm in an abandoned cart email thing. I am not the first abandoned cart email app ever. And I'm certainly not the biggest. And there's just, you know, a lot of reasons to be in that thing, but because you want the things that other people want, you are going to see that the things that you create are going to tend to be the same.
Speaker 1 15:06 So I would say that this is something to be aware of and know that this is something that you do other people do. And as a result, try to not just copy things directly or want the same things that everybody else wants. Maybe take a moment and say, is this the best place I should be spending my time and, and money, you know, is this, is this a desire that really serves me well? And if it doesn't, just because everybody else wants it, maybe you can skip it. And just by choosing that desire that makes you different.
Speaker 2 15:40 Yup, yup. Yeah. Uh, he has one in here on Parkinson's law talking about, uh, work expands to fill the time available. Uh, and things like setting deadlines and limiting scope on, on projects. You know, Casos we have come a long, long way towards scoping features, doing project management and developer management. And I, I'm sure we still have a long way to go, but, but I think that this is just something that anybody that gets past working, you know, by or for themselves has to deal with at some point. And for me as a nontechnical founder has been just a huge learning experience. Um, we have set very few really hard deadlines, um, releasing Castillo's productions. We, we set a pretty hard deadline, but like a week out. So it wasn't like it was pretty much done. And I said, okay, we're gonna launch this next Thursday.
Speaker 2 16:29 Um, but, but when you do that, I think it changes people's attitudes a lot. And, and I will try harder to say, okay, we're going to do this thing for the next six weeks, but it has to be done in six weeks and whatever the scope needs to be to get us there, that's, that's what we need to do because, you know, we have expectations from our customers and investors and things like that. Um, so I think that, and I'm projecting here, probably, I, I don't set deadlines very often at all. Um, but, but think it's healthy for a lot of people, not just for, for motivating people. Cause I don't need to do that. All of the people on our team are fantastic and don't need to be motivated. But, but to maybe restrict me getting in and adding just one more thing every week to, to a feature. So it's maybe it's healthy just for me more than anything.
Speaker 1 17:20 Yeah. I've seen over 25 years of development. There's a, there's definitely a mental shift when a deadline gets slapped onto something. But the fallacy that I think most people do is that they take the deadline and then they don't manage the scope at the same time. Yeah. Cause you can't have both. Right. You can, what, what is it? You can pick three cheap, good and fast. Pick any two. Right, right, right. Yeah. So the problem is if you that you want it fast, then you're not going to have it cheap and good. So you can pick one of those other two. But if you pick it good, then it's going to take, you know, it's going to be very, very expensive. And if you want it cheap, then it's gonna take a very long time, uh, to get it all done if you want it fast.
Speaker 1 18:06 Is that right? No, it's going to be terrible. It's going to be better with this visual thing here. Anyway. The point being that, you know, when you set those deadlines and manage the scope appropriately, I think it changes, changes the way that you look at that project and suddenly are like very focused, hyper focused on getting something out. Uh, one thing that I've seen at my freelance client is that they won't manage the scope, but they try to manage the deadline and they try to have both. And you know, those of us on the team that are experienced constantly remind them, okay, you're giving us this deadline, but you're saying we have to do this, which isn't going to be, you don't get both. And they still insist on trying to get both and you're like, okay, well here's what it's going to take to do.
Speaker 1 18:51 You try to explain it in a different way. All right. You're asking for these five things. If I add all these five things up in terms of how we've done it in the past, it's going to take this much longer than the deadline you gave me. So which is going to be, do I chop out one of the five things or do we get a longer deadline? You know, you give them the tradeoffs, but yeah, that's, that's software for you. Um, the next one, and this one I've heard this said a lot of different ways. So David poral called this one the law of shitty click throughs. And I don't think he's the first one to say that. I don't remember the first person who said that, but I also heard Andrew Chen, who's another VC, he came up with the law of shitty cohorts, which was a corollary to the law of shitty click-throughs.
Speaker 1 19:35 And that basically is most marketing strategies have a window of success and it's not that long. So click through rates decrease as the tactics get mature and people get sort of immune to them. And I didn't remember this, but the original banner ads had click through rates of like 70% back in the day. So this was like a long fucking time ago, right? Because now we all just avoid banner ads like the plague. But the same is true of cohorts. So if you have a bunch of cohorts of customers and your, you know, your early customers, maybe you've really scratched an itch in a particular niche and the first set of customers comes through, they love you. And then the second set of customers, they still love you, but then you get to the 10th set of customers and they like you a lot, but they don't love you anymore.
Speaker 1 20:20 And then you need to get to the 30th set of customers and you know, they like you some and you get to the 50th set of customers and they're like, yeah, I know I should have this. And you're a provider of it. So I guess I'll do you. Yep. Yep. So that's the law of shitty cohorts. Everything gets slightly worse over time as a tactic matures. And I've heard that Rob walling has stated this as all marketing tactics have a half life. And I would say that's absolutely true in my own where you know, I was doing content marketing for a very long time with business directory plugin and at first it seemed to be really effective and then the longer and longer I ran it, I was still paying the same amount, but I wasn't seeing the same kind of conversions. I wasn't seeing the same kind of engagement, but I was still paying a shit ton for it.
Speaker 1 21:06 And I was like, Oh God, yeah, this is okay if it's not being effective, I can't, I can't keep dumping money into this. And all marketing tactics are like this. Unfortunately it doesn't matter whether it's paid acquisition or content marketing or email marketing has a half-life, although I think that's longer than a lot. Um, and certain tactics within email marketing all have half lives. So yeah, you have to change and be fresh and take new approaches and don't just use the same tire tactics. If you see an article and that article is date is like 2012 and it's talking about this awesome marketing technique, assume that sucker is out of date because it probably is, I think isn't
Speaker 2 21:46 No of like refreshing. And I think email marketing is a perfect example of that is like the things people were doing for email marketing or cold email. Maybe it's even a more extreme example of that, uh, are not working now, but a lot of different and new things are working and maybe working really well. Uh, and so yeah, I would say I would take it more of all these things need to be reexamined at some point in the kind of always reexamined, I guess to make sure that they're still applicable in your approach them the right way.
Speaker 1 22:14 Yeah. Yeah. I mean if anything, I would say it's, I'm not saying don't study the old techniques because there's value in understanding what's gone before. If you don't understand history, you're doomed to repeat it. Right? So understand what's there and then learn the landscape of that and then find something that might be along the same lines. But nobody else has tried or maybe it was under utilized or something like that. That's a way to get refreshing without necessarily having to reinvent the wheel, right? Because we are sheep and we're going to imitate. And if people were doing something before and it was effective, it can probably be effective again, if you put a twist on it.
Speaker 2 22:50 Did I just, when he talks about his eye, he says creativity begins at the edge. Um, change starts away from the spotlight and moves towards the center. That's why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. Uh, and I mean, we all have seen this at conferences. We've been at that the hallway track or the bar or the blackjack table or whatever are always where, or the chairlift, right? Uh, for big snows, Hanekom is always where the best things come out. And I think that the thing that I take away from this is that, like, this isn't about conferences really, but this is about business and team and your own kind of personal perspective on stuff where like, I think we all could do better at getting that, that mental space so that we can have those insights and those breakthroughs and thinks things, think about things differently. Uh, so, so that we can kind of get more out of all this time we're spending. Um, yeah, I think that that little bit of head space and kind of mental energy is, is super important. Um, to get away from the day to day stuff.
Speaker 1 24:03 I had a slightly different take on that one. I thought it was interesting that they said creativity happens at the edge and that you move towards the spotlight. Well, if you're in the spotlight, that's where, you know, the crowd is focused, right? Yeah. So I saw that as there's a lot of people in the spotlight or there's a lot of attention in the spotlight and if you're on the edges, you're having smaller, more intimate conversations. It's, um, it, you know, it's exactly what you just said with like being on the chairlift and having those business conversations that are life changing or you're doing the hallway track at Microcom or you're sitting around at the blackjack table or the bar, having conversations with friends of yours at a conference. And those conversations generate things, you know, those are the ones where startups are built or problems are solved or stuff like that. So I saw it as like, instead of a crowd like you, you're less likely to get life-changing stuff from a conference talk, watching somebody up there in a spotlight as you are talking to somebody individually.
Speaker 2 25:08 Yup. Yup. No, for sure. Very interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1 25:11 Um, and speaking of Vegas analogies, although I think this is a, a terrible one, but it's a, it's table selection. So the idea comes from poker. If you're looking to go and play poker and you have some skill, don't go and find the table where all the world series of poker elite people are all throwing down right there. Because competing against the best means that you have to be better than the best. And maybe you are better than the best, but it's going to be really hard, right? So if you're building a business, you should choose your opponents or your competition very carefully and you know the point that David was trying to make was that you don't need to get good at doing difficult things if you get good at avoiding the difficult things. I don't know that I totally agree with that. I think that there's, that you really want to work on difficult things.
Speaker 1 26:02 I think you want to do it without a lot of pressure and with some space to learn and make mistakes. But anyway, that the point that he was trying to get at was if you want to win at poker, pick an easy table and nail your execution and that I totally agree with. That's something if you're looking for a business, don't go into like the highest competition, the biggest competitors, the most well-funded niche that you can find where there's a hundred other people and they're all executing really well. You're going to find that very hard. That's the world series of business right there. But if you can go into a small niche where there are one or two competitors and there's still a problem to be solved, that's an easier table to play at. Right. And that, I totally agree.
Speaker 2 26:47 Yeah. And I think that you have to align where you land on that spectrum with your kind of ambitions and what you're wanting to get out of this. Uh, some people want to be the cause and brothers and some people want to be you, Dave, who is the best, uh, the best example we have of like a lifestyle business. Uh, I don't know. I can't think of who it is, but you know, the guy who works 10 hours a week and is making a hundred grand and is perfectly happy, uh, and, and everything in between. So
Speaker 1 27:12 Yeah, I've known people that are like that and they run a business and they're not trying to grow to be the biggest, you know, I don't want to call them out cause that was their choice to have the lifestyle. But you know, there's some people I know in the WordPress space that do exactly that and they're totally happy with executing and running their little thing and making some money doing it. And then they can go to their kid's softball games and they can pick their kids up from school and that is totally legit. Yep. No problem there. No problem. Yep,
Speaker 2 27:40 No problem. The next one I pulled out is he says the invisible hand markets aggregate knowledge, rising prices, signal falling supplier increasing demand. Uh, the opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive. And I guess this struck a chord with me because at podcast motor we are not the most expensive but Azalea, we're on the expensive side of the market. And I think as a result, especially as we went from being kind of lower priced all the way to being higher priced, we started getting better customers. I think anybody who has done this sees the same thing. Uh, and that, yeah, price is a signal to your customers of value on top of everything else on top of the marketing site and top of the, the language and the copy and everything is prices is part of how your customers perceive you. Uh, and that can be good or bad.
Speaker 1 28:34 Yup. Uh, another one that I really liked was building a personal monopoly and I am terrible at this, which is why I like this one so much because I've seen it be very successful with a lot of other people. Um, basically the internet is rewarding people who are unique and if you're working in a creative field, be the person that does that. You're the only one who does what you do is find a style and run with it. Create intellectual real estate for yourself. And there are just tons of examples of people who've created success for themselves because they basically, you know, fly their weird flag out there and they are making bank because they aren't afraid to speak their minds. They have some creative ideas, they have a new take on things and often, you know, they're the first ones to go out and do that.
Speaker 1 29:22 And podcasting, you've probably seen this a ton in podcasting where people are putting their stuff out in a brand. I mean this is like the Joe Rogan's of the world, right? Joe Rogan was a okay actor, but he's a really successful podcaster. You know, he has this connection with other people. Um, lots of other personal monopolies that are out there. Heaton friend of ours, right? Yep. He, he's built this whole thing around startups and his own experience. And then being able to talk with Steli about it. Uh, same with Steli. He's another one that has built some personal real estate around that. Um, and not just around startups there. So I can think of examples in copywriting. Joanna Wiebe, uh, Lianna patch, both of them have very specific styles and very specific niches that they're working in, in copywriting. And both of them have carved out a nice chunk of interstate internet real estate talking about their brands, talking about what they do.
Speaker 1 30:19 They have, um, you know, they basically created themselves to be experts on the internet with their personality. And that's awesome. There's other ones in e-commerce too, like Kurt Elster, he's, uh, runs the unofficial Shopify podcast and if you've seen him at conferences, he wears a camouflage suit jacket and it's easy to pick them out of a crowd. Let me tell you. And Shopify features them on their website because he's like a Shopify guru. He does this podcast, he wears this unique jacket, like he's got this whole branding thing going on and it's totally amazing. It's very awesome. And you know, there's other ones like Kristin the France, uh, works for churn Buster and is now like a DTC guru. She's, you know, becoming highly respected because she's creating all these different things here as a new site about um, direct to consumer products and services and news and things that's going on.
Speaker 1 31:14 And um, she's also doing a general website, email marketing tear downs, speaking at conferences, carving out a little niche. This is not a hard thing to do in this day and age. And if you are, if you have something to say and you have a different way to say it or the thing that you are an expert in, there aren't a lot of people out there. The internet will let you build that personal monopoly and that personal monopoly becomes a self reinforcing thing as time goes on. And I have not been good at any of this. I mean, I think rogue startups is probably the best of my attempts to date. I try to blog. I tried, um, what else did I try? I tried writing a book. Um, it was trying to get active in certain kinds of forums. I was on hacker news for awhile. I mean, none of these things really stuck because my voice wasn't unique enough. I didn't have enough personality to get in here. But now that I'm cursing here online talking like that, prestige, I guess I finally found my jam here. I found my place. Yeah. So build your personal monopoly wherever that is. You
Speaker 2 32:20 Know, I do and I don't agree with this. I, I think that, um, this is really good, uh, especially to get your foot in the door and, and to start making a difference. But I think at a point, and probably if you asked Steli or uh, any of these people that you've mentioned that they would say that that their personal brand may be a liability at some point, uh, to the business because the business becomes reliant on that person and that person's brand to be successful. And we probably can both think of many other people in this world that, you know, the business is the person and the person that is the business. And if they ever decide they want to go do something different or sell the business or pivot in a different direction, those that alignment would break. Um, and so I think that this is a fair thing. Um, but you got to be careful how far you take it, I think.
Speaker 1 33:15 Well, or just be aware of the fact that if you build that personal monopoly and you want to monetize that brand and you want to run with that, you are the money at that point. So if you did want to get out of it, you did want to sell it. I have a friend and a friend and his wife, they run a business and the business was built around her personality and it became very difficult to sell like impossible. And that's, it's sad. It's true. Um, but you know, for a long time there was success to be had there. So I'm not going to say don't do it, but be aware of what the end point of that line looks like. And that is definitely a consequence. I think that's a good point.
Speaker 2 33:59 Yep. Um, the, the last one for me, he calls the resource curse. Uh, and he just liked the example is the countries with abundant natural resources have less economic growth than, uh, you know, poor, poorly developed countries with fewer natural resources. And I kind of think of this as like hustle in our world is that people that are hungry and are hustling maybe are starting from nothing or from less, are usually super successful. And, and you look at like the number of, you know, millionaires that are, uh, first generation immigrants to the U S all, I mean, there's a million different kind of angles you can take on this. Um, and I think that the downside of all this comes when you have some success. A lot of people get complacent, whether that's within a lifetime or within a couple of generations in a family or something. Uh, this, this is, is a very clear path that, you know, when people have success, they, they kind of rest on their laurels and, and that success or that growth slows down or stops. And so I think for me, this is like something to be aware of. Like, I think I'm always hungry for more and I'm never kind of satisfied with what I'm doing with work. Um, and so I don't think I'm at risk of this, but this is definitely like in my mind all the time.
Speaker 1 35:17 Right, right. The success creates complacency. Thing I think is an important point. And this is something, we had a conversation about this before on the podcast here where we talked about what were the personality traits that made various entrepreneurs successful. And I thought that a lot of the ones that I saw that were better in were the ones that came from disadvantaged backgrounds. Maybe, you know, they had a single parent, maybe they didn't have a lot of money. Like I didn't, you know, my parents, one of my parents was unemployed for a number of years while I was growing up, not at his uh, request. And it was difficult for him to find a job because of his age and you know, that changed a lot of decisions our family could make and therefore it changed my perception of what it is I wanted to do.
Speaker 1 36:06 When I went to college, I was very focused on getting a job that could make a lot of money because we struggled during those key years when some of my friends, they had access to resources that I didn't and I was very envious of that. So it motivated me to be more entrepreneurial I guess. So I would say that, yeah, scarcity. Scarcity creates hustle. Yeah. Yup, yup. I agree. I'd agree. Uh, the last one on my list here is the penny problem gap. This is a thing that comes from economics and they assume that sort of demand is linear, but I have had significant experience that when you go from free to not free and it doesn't really matter what not free looks like, it can be Uber cheap, like nine bucks or it could be 49, 200, whatever. It doesn't really matter. That is a step function.
Speaker 1 37:02 If you want to talk about mathematical terms, it's basically like a steep wall and that wall is a hard thing to climb and you have to make people want to climb that. The example that he gave was if the inventors of the internet had known about spam, um, then they probably would've said, all right, we're going to send an email and it's going to cost you a 10th of a penny. And suddenly, you know, spammers would not be incentive to send out millions of emails to try to get back, you know, a one, a one hit response if they had to spend a 10th of a penny per email because then it becomes real costs out of their pocket and your behavior very much changes. And I've noticed that this is true of the plugins where people are like, they're super excited about the free plugins.
Speaker 1 37:54 And then when I tell them that, you know, there's a feature that they want and Oh by the way, here it is in this $39 module and my classifieds plug in. Some people just lose their shit and they blow up and they're like, why? How can you do this? I mean, you're taking food out of my children's mouths and I'm like, wait a minute. No I'm not. I built you something. It costs you nothing. You really like it and you just, you don't feel that it had, there's enough value in there to take that next step. And that's the, that's the gap you have to, to bridge, right? You have to bridge the value gap to make somebody say, all right, free is good. Paid is still good because I'm getting a lot out of it. And that's a hard lesson to learn. And I think, I think people
Speaker 2 38:36 Think that they found that value, but you don't know that you have that value captured until you get people to pay you money for your product. Yup, yup. Yeah. So I think these are really interesting things to think about. We'll link to this a Twitter thread, uh, in the show notes for the message here. Uh, if anybody checks us out and has interesting thoughts or opinions or kind of reactions to this or you strongly disagree with what Dave and I said, shoot us a message podcast@roguestartups.com. Uh, and yeah, thanks for, thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. <inaudible>
Speaker 0 39:13 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>.
