Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:00:09 All right. Welcome to episode two 30, three of rogue startups. Craig, how
Speaker 0 00:00:13 Are you this week?
Speaker 2 00:00:16 I'm good, man. I'm good. I am, uh, I'm, I'm busy and a good way mostly. Um, you know, it's like, you hope that every hour you spend or every minute you spend is like productive, busy, and shit that only you can do. And I am definitely not there, but I'm working my way towards it more and more all the time. So I feel like making, as long as I'm making progress there, then it's a good thing. Good, good. How about yourself?
Speaker 1 00:00:42 I am just back from, uh, a personal business retreat where I went and did some really good work and I haven't been on one in a long time and I am, I am both sad that I have not done this more often and really thrilled that I got the opportunity to do at this time. And, uh, yeah, I have some really great stuff to talk about today.
Speaker 2 00:01:07 That's awesome. Uh, so, so just like for some parameters, like how long were you gone? Uh, where did you go? Kind of what was the setup of it? Sure.
Speaker 1 00:01:17 So when you take a personal business retreat, you should definitely get away. You it's really hard to do this stuff at home. In fact, when I was talking with my wife about it, she was like, you have to get away, like, don't hang out here. You would be an idiot to hang out here. And I'm so glad that I did that. So I took like a week off from work, first of all, but I didn't use the entire week for the retreat. I just sort of used it as a, you know, detox time from my freelancing job. And I was glad I did that. So in the middle of that, I went up in the afternoon. I went up to the mountains, I'm going up to a mountain town here in Breckenridge and I stayed at a condo up there and I was up there for two nights.
Speaker 1 00:02:04 So the first night I went up there, I just kinda, you know, I drove up, I was listening to some podcasts on the way up and I basically just used it as a chill relax, kind of bring myself down kind of day. Um, and then the next day is when I spent on the actual retreat stuff. And you know, I'm, I'm glad that I did it in this format here because I feel like, you know, first of all, getting away from your home and your office and your normal way of thinking definitely makes it easier for you to, to think about stuff that's different and think about stuff that's, that's deeper because you're, you're away from distractions at that point. You're, you're out of your element. So the normal routines, the normal rules don't really apply anymore. Um, and then the second I did was I had a no more or less no device rule all day. I didn't totally follow that because I was during breaks. I would just check my email to make sure that nothing was going sideways, customer support wise with recapture. And I did have a couple of customer things, but it wasn't like I wasn't on there all day. It wasn't checking my email all day, but I did go for like maybe a half an hour,
Speaker 3 00:03:26 One or
Speaker 1 00:03:28 Half an hour in the morning and a half an hour early afternoon on email, just to make sure that the customer's requests were being handled in a timely manner. That was it. But the rest of the time, it was strictly no devices. Um, I had my phone out, but I was mostly using that as a timer. And then I also was playing some music. So I brought along a little Bluetooth speaker and I would sort of change up the music as the day went on. I had some classical plane in the morning and then I had, uh, some Latin jazz in the afternoon. And then that kind of bugged me after a while. So I went back to the classical, but just stuff to, you know, for me like having some background music kind of quiets my mind a little bit, cause it can like the noisy part of my mind can focus on the music and then I can, I can have a easier time concentrating.
Speaker 1 00:04:16 I found this when I was in college that, uh, we would often just do our study, you know, or reading or whatever and when put on some classical music and it was much easier to do that during those times. So I leveraged that and while I was doing this, I basically had laid out beforehand a schedule and this is going to sound super anal. But, um, for me it was actually really helpful. I think that, you know, if I had gone up there with a unscheduled, okay, we're just going to think about the business kind of thing. I don't think that it would have been nearly as productive. So what I used is I had just finished the traction book by Gino Wickman for the entrepreneurs operating system. And that basically was a whole series of exercises that I could go through and do for my business.
Speaker 1 00:05:09 So I went through the whole process that they describe in traction. Well, with a little caveat there, I, I did as much of that as I felt really applied to me as a single founder. And there's definitely stuff in there that it gets harder to apply it because you're not an, a team of like five executives or something like that. And you're supposed to be discussing these things and going in depth into them. So it was mostly me just brainstorming. But what I did is I broke it down. You know, there's like six different areas that you're supposed to do. So there's core values, core focus, the ten-year target marketing strategy, a one-year plan, rocks issues. And if you've read the traction book, uh, you know, what those things are and what I'm talking about. And I can talk about them in a little more detail here in a, but what I did was I set a time limit on each of these things.
Speaker 1 00:06:02 I started off the retreat with a global highs and lows for 2019 and the year to date up to this point, just so I had something to reflect on, you know, to sort of put my mind into the, you know, what's working, what's not working, what do I really hate? What do I really like? What do I want more of? What do I want less of? So I spent about an hour thinking about that stuff, brainstorming. And I did it for my personal life. I did it for my professional life. And then after that, I started doing the exercises for traction. So I would have like an hour to do core values. And then I did like an hour on core focus and then I took a break for lunch. And then it was like an a half an hour for the ten-year target and then an hour for the marketing strategy and then an hour for the three-year picture and an hour for the one-year plan and then half an hour for the rocks and half an hour for the issues.
Speaker 1 00:06:56 And that was like, if you add that all up with some breaks in there, cause I was also doing like, you know, I brought food with me and I, you know, kept it very low ceremony so that I would be like, okay, what, what's an easy thing to do for breakfast. What's an easy thing to do for lunch. And I wouldn't be taking a lot of time to prepare those meals or whatever, but I would actually go and, uh, you know, have a brief break in there and get that food and then move back into my focus. So I was more or less stain in the apartment or the condo, whatever most of the day I did take, I took a walk in the morning and I took a walk at lunch and then I took a walk in the afternoon. So I was kind of, you know, mixing it up with some exercise and getting out there and some extra thinking time and just gave me some, some good time to kind of clear my head and, and write down a bunch of stuff. And I brought it all back and I shared it with my wife and she's like, wow, you were really productive. This was really good. And I was like, yeah, it, it worked out really well. I'm very happy with how it turned out. No,
Speaker 2 00:07:56 I mean, that sounds like a really good setup, man. I mean, I, I guess I've done, uh, like a founder retreat, uh, kind of one and a half times. Um, I did, I did basically a day, uh, in Annecy, like in town earlier this year. Oh God. Maybe it was late last year. Um, but, but basically we spent the whole day down there, dropped the kids off at school, went down there and stayed until about dinner time. Uh, I took, uh, a day retreat, um, on the end of a trip to London about a year and a half ago. Um, but the time I did this, the traction stuff, actually it was on the airplane. So it was one of our trips back from here to the States, um, where like you can't do anything else. And so like I had my notebook and I had the traction book and I just worked through it, like you're saying, cause it's a lot of work to ton of workers starting from scratch to two to one. Like, and I think this is where a lot of this conversation will go is like filter out the stuff that you're not interested in, or it doesn't apply to you or you don't think will be helpful for the type of businesses that we run in the scale of businesses we run. Um, and then for the stuff that you do need to like address to, to actually do it and like those two things are, yeah. I mean they're eight hours of work. Um,
Speaker 1 00:09:15 Yeah. And I thought, you know, when I was reading the traction book, it was obviously directed at people that are making like seven to eight to nine figure businesses with a multi person, executive team. I mean, Gino Wickman's whole premise on there that he's got the, you know, he talks about bringing the team together and having these discussions. And then he, I don't know. Did you also read, get a grip, his follow on to that, which was like the whole fiction thing? I thought it was really good. A little bit contrived, but, um, it did sort of put the whole thing into place. Like what does this look like in action? And you know, it was still structured around that same notion of, you know, here, five executive people in a company that's making, you know, tens of millions of dollars a year and how are they going to grow and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 00:10:04 And so, you know, that mental mapping exercise of how do I take that large structure and bring it down to a small scale was something that I thought would be harder, but it turns out it wasn't, it really wasn't that bad. You know, when you're doing things like the core values, the exercise of the core values is so incredibly valuable and it doesn't really matter whether you're a 10 person company or a one-person company, if you don't have, you know, you should know what, what are the things that drive you in that business? And I brought, you know, a little cheat with me up of a bunch of a cheat sheet of a bunch of core values and their stuff that's listed in the book too. But, you know, I thought I would spend a lot more time spinning my wheels on that one exercise than I did.
Speaker 1 00:10:51 And it was surprising because there's definitely stuff when you're sitting down and thinking about it hard, that's going to resonate with you. Like, what are your passions? What are the things that are super important to you? What are non-negotiables? And these things are all your core values, right? But not, not having written them down for the plugins. I realized that I did myself a massive disservice all those years by just having these things in my head and thinking, Oh, I know what the core values of the business are. That's bullshit. You don't, you only know when you write them down and then start to talk about them because if you're not driving everything based on those core values, you've got nothing, you know, you're just flying by the seat of your pants and winging it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:11:35 Yeah. And I think for, for us, the, the, the, and I want to dig into kind of like how you, how you laid out, like those, those like one-year plan and three-year planning rocks and stuff like that. But, but for us, the, the value in a lot of this stuff came from actually it, and, and talking about like quarterly goals with the teams and relaying those values to the team on a regular basis and talking about all this stuff as it relates to like our work. Um, and, and we're just getting to the point where like, people refer back to like quarterly goals, um, when we're doing our regular work. And I think like for me, that's where like, okay, all this structure and value, um, and like thought actually makes sense. Cause it, it answers a lot of the questions for, for you and for the team of like, what, what are we doing here? What are we trying to do? What does success look like? Um, and it kind of codifies that if you're a solo founder for you, but, but if you're not, then it's an easy way for you to, to relay that to other people that you're working with.
Speaker 1 00:12:41 Yeah. And so if you're not familiar with the traction book, and by the way, I highly recommend this, if you're, you know, I feel like I'm probably the last person on the planet that finally got to read this book and it's possible that that is not true. But if you are one of the, you know, three other people that hasn't read this book, definitely get traction by Gino Wickman. Also get his follow up, get a grip, uh, which is a fictional account of what this looks like in practice. But with that said, the, the, the EOS is going through this notion of how can you take a very long-term vision? And then suddenly compress that down into a series of milestones that gets you to that longer term vision, and then put it into a cycle where things are being constantly revisited and revised. So that the goals that you're trying to look at and achieve are always the right goals at the right time.
Speaker 1 00:13:42 Would you say that's a fair characterization of that? Yup. Yup. Yeah. And so basically it started and I, and I found this kind of interesting that the very first thing that you do, so after you do the core values, you know, what are your core values, then you have to figure out what your core focus is. So what is your niche and what is your purpose cause or passion. Then the very next thing that you do is what is your tenure target? And that tenure target is supposed to be like this grand pie in the sky vision. What does, what do you really want to see out of this business in a decade? And it's only when you have that vision that you then start to say, all right, well, what does our market look like? How are we going to go after people in that market?
Speaker 1 00:14:31 What's unique about us that makes us the right fit for that market. And then you look at a three-year picture and then that three-year picture is like, you know, for me, I looked at it all right. If it's a three-year picture, then I should be about a third of the way to my goal, my 10 year goal. So what does that look like? And you write down all of the stuff on there. What's the date, what's the revenue, the profit, the measureables of things that you've accomplished by then, you know, and what are the specifics? You know, how many people are working for you? How many customers do you have all of that sort of stuff. And then you then break that down further. So this is all, you know, visionary stuff. And then you sort of transitioned into more tactical things. So then you go to the one-year plan, which is all right.
Speaker 1 00:15:21 Now it's something that's a little closer, still, not exactly right in front of you, but it's much closer than the three-year plan. What does that look like? And again, it's the same stuff. What's your revenue, what's your profit, what's your measureables. And I took sort of a third of what that three-year plan looked like and put that up there and, you know, was trying to say, all right, this is what I want to see in that time. And then you break that down even further by saying, all right, what am I going to do in the next 90 days to get me a quarter of the way to that year plan? And what are the things that are the most important to get me there. And then once you've identified that, and you're not supposed to put too many of those on the list, that's when you start focusing on, you know, trying to make that stuff happen. And I think this is where, you know, you and I have talked about this in our previous, uh, attempts at masterminds and all this sorts of stuff in the past about w well, what are your annual goals? And then we said, no, we're setting like semimonthly or semi-annually goals or quarterly goals. But I think without a bigger vision of where is it you want to get to those goals are harder to achieve. They're harder to resonate. And I feel like they were always harder to act on.
Speaker 2 00:16:43 Yeah. And I think that, what, what like this exercise does, is it, it kind of demystifies the end goal that you have, you know, I want to build a business and sell it for $20 million or whatever to like, all right, what do I need to do in the next six weeks or 12 weeks? Um, you know, uh, several steps down, uh, that, that you've thought through, okay. If I do this this quarter and then the next quarter, and then the next quarter, that's my kind of next year. And if I do that three more years, that's my three-year. And then if I did that three more times, that's my 10 year, and that's the outcome. It just makes it tangible and kind of like somewhat achievable, you know? Right. That's how I look at it.
Speaker 1 00:17:22 And the nice thing about this is that, so I've done this this year, and then next year, I need to go through this whole exercise again. And that's sort of the weird part, I think, because you feel like, Oh, you've done all this. Now you're done. You just start executing to it. No, that's not true. The powerful part of it is to, you know, you've, you've gone through this exercise for a year of your rocks and every 90 days you reset the rocks. Those are the goals for the quarter, and you try to get those things. And then anything that you're having trouble with, you throw it onto this issues list. And this is where some of the stuff I think breaks down because as a larger company, you have a lot of problems with communication and I'm, you know, and you know, not to say that as a small company, you don't have problems with communication, but the problems in a larger company are amplified considerably by silos, by politics, all kinds of crap. And this is where I think the part of, uh, traction kind of broke down for me is that they talked about things like having level 10 meetings. I'm like, you know,
Speaker 2 00:18:23 With yourself either
Speaker 1 00:18:25 I'm having a meeting with myself, or I have a very specific thing I want to talk about with my developer or a marketing person or whatever, and it's not going to be this, isn't going to be an hour long thing. I don't need to like, do all of these ceremonial things around the meetings. If I had five people in the meeting, I can totally see the value of this, but for me, no, it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2 00:18:46 Yep. And this is where, like, we started this when we were four people maybe. Um, and now we're seven and we'll be eight soon. And then these are, these are really important and we are having more and more structure all the time around, like, what, what is the purpose of that meeting? Cause it's easy. I think it's easy for the, the weekly meeting to be an update meeting. And that is not what it is. It is not an update meeting. And I felt guilty to this and, and you know, people from our team listened to this show and they all fall guilty to this too. And I try to ring us back in and like the point of these meetings, these weekly meetings is to talk about our progress towards the quarterly goals. And basically, you know, how am I doing towards that? And what is standing in the way?
Speaker 2 00:19:37 And like, am I on schedule? What do I need from the company or from another team? And like, as we're able to do more of that, those meetings become helpful where these meetings are not helpful is just hearing what everybody did last week, which like, I don't need to hear that, you know, like everybody's should be marching towards the same goal. And that's why we have these goals and the meetings. I think the goal of these meetings are to be highly productive in unblocking people and giving us the resources we need to, to be successful. But it's tough
Speaker 1 00:20:10 Developers. If you've been doing like the agile method, this is a scrum meeting, you know, it's very much a, what do you, you know, it's a very short summary. What am I working on? What am I going to work on today? What's blocking me and it should take 60 seconds if you're doing it right. And you know, it's true that like my current freelancing client, this tends to degenerate into a status report a lot of the time. And even, even when you tell people, tell me, what's blocking you. They don't really understand what a block means. And so they will say no blockers. And then the next day you'll find out they made no. And you're like, Oh, well this one thing I was waiting for, it's like, wait, that's a blocker. Talk about the blockers. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's definitely, there's definitely an art and a science to this. And it requires some discipline to be able to like, you gotta be a good meeting leader to really call this stuff out and say, Hey, you're just giving me a status update. I don't care about that. Is it on track? Great. Moving on. What are you doing now? What's, what's your next thing? You know, like just spare me the bullshit. Let's go straight to the meat of the problem here. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:21:22 Yeah. So, so like after, after doing the exercise and like laying out the, you know, the quarterly rocks and all this kind of stuff, like how do you see it affecting how you work going forward?
Speaker 1 00:21:38 Well, I can tell you that I had to make some major changes at recapture. So I I've already put this in place, so I I'm okay with talking about it. But, um, I looked at what my plan was and where my growth is and what's going on right now. And I realized I needed to put some major changes in place. And what that meant was I got to let one of my developers go, I got to reduce the other developers hours significantly, and I have to bring on a full-time marketing person. And we got to start working on some content marketing and some paid acquisition in a different way. And we got to do it like right now, because this is the, this is the downtime. And if I've got, you know, three months to prep, then in January when the whole holiday season kind of lightens up and merchants are starting to look at solutions again, that's a perfect time to pop and start doing acquisition campaigns.
Speaker 1 00:22:36 So basically I'm like, all right, we got to lock and load now. And we gotta work on this. So, you know, it gave me, it gave me great clarity and it gave me the focus to say, all right, well, what do I need to do in order to grow? You know, my goal was to double recaptures MRR next year, from where I'm at. And, um, in order to do that, I have to put insignificant growth and I can't just, you know, wait around for that to happen, which has kind of been, what's been going on with the coronavirus stuff. I mean, that all just kind of fell in my lap and that was great. And I got to passively act on that, but I need to be more proactive about that. And the only way I can really do that is with a marketing person who is engaged in specifically driving this piece of it. So, you know, that made it very clear. Mine, next two quarters at least of rocks are all about marketing growth and acquisition. That's it?
Speaker 2 00:23:34 Oh, I'm smiling. I'm smiling over here saying I seem to remember telling Dave or wondering about more marketing. Uh, so that's cool. I mean, the, the hard thing about marketing and the easy thing about product is like, we, we all have a million things we want to build, you know, and I think this is like a trap that everybody falls into, maybe even non-technical founders or founders that aren't coding, like you is like, you, you just always want to build more stuff and, and think that more stuff will make the product sell better. And in some very rare cases, I think that like the product sells itself. Um, but I think almost all of the time we need more marketing than we think we do. And that the product actually is, um, once it gets to a certain point, you know, like once it's past this bar of like some degree of acceptable, then marketing really is, is like, the key marketing is so hard to get your hands around. Um, if, if you don't have something that you think is working or that you know is working, um, if you have something that's working, then just keep doing that and do more of it. But like when you're just starting marketing, like to say, quote, I'm just going to do marketing is silly, you know, and, and hard and disheartening. Um, so that's cool that you like realized that, but I think it's, it's hard to put it into practice from here. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:25:05 No, it is. It is. And you know, here's what sort of drove me to that. And this is what was driving me into doing the retreat in the first place is that I had paid acquisition going on all summer, you know, spring and summer. And it was just like, it was easy. It was cheap. And suddenly it was getting a lot less cheap and I'm like, wait a minute. Which made it, as soon as it got less cheap, like I couldn't just keep raising my budget infinitely. I was already spending it pretty significant amount on this. And suddenly it's like, it's not effective anymore. And I'm like, Oh crap. Because when I had all those cheap leads, things were working well, but suddenly my leads are getting more expensive and they're slowing down. It's like, Oh, well, gosh, you know, that's not going to work longer term.
Speaker 1 00:25:56 And I, I want to say that I let it go longer than I should have, but the truth is, uh, you know, it was working up to a point and then I did some experiments and then the experiments weren't working. And I really sort of realized after I ran the experiments long enough to feel confident about the results, which was say September, that I knew I had to change. And then at that same time, I got wind that a marketing guy from another, uh, respected e-commerce company, he popped free. He became a freelancer and I'm like, Holy shit. And you know, um, I saw that he was recommended on Twitter and I jumped on it and I contacted him and I said, Hey, man, I want to engage you like, w w what does this look like? Let's talk. And, um, you know, on the plus side, he gave me a pretty significant plan that I know worked for, uh, a former competitor of mine.
Speaker 1 00:26:56 And that plan is looking pretty solid. And actually because of the feature work that we did this summer on SMS marketing, I have a significant thing to launch come one this next year. So had I not done that, I would have actually been in a more challenging place because right now, SMS marketing is kind of the hot thing. And everybody's starting to pick it up. Like all the big ones are picking it up. Now, drip just started adding it. Um, you know, Klayvio added it and, and some others I've, uh, talked about it. So the fact that we have it now is significant. And so what I need to do is act on that. So that's where I was like, all right, perfect storm. I have a feature. I know I need marketing. My paid marketing is networking. I needed somebody who's better. Let's pull this all together and make something happen out of that.
Speaker 2 00:27:51 Are you able to share who this person is?
Speaker 1 00:27:53 Um, no, because they are not going to be, um, they're not going to be working with me. Long-term on this. It turns out they got another job at a, um, at, uh, uh, another e-commerce company. So he's going to be helping me sort of structure the overall thing here and helping me find like a content person and a Facebook ads person. Cause he's got the connections and to a certain extent, I think he's gonna sort of like drive the strategy of it. But, um, yeah. So I don't know if he's comfortable with me sharing his name on here, so I'm not going to do that. I don't want to get him in trouble, but yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, he's certainly very knowledgeable about this and his execution is like bang on. So I'm excited to have found him. I'm excited to, you know, get even the small brain share of his, because I think it's gonna make a huge difference. Having somebody who knows what they're doing has seen this before has executed this kind of campaign has seen significant success out of it. Like all of these things make me a warm and fuzzy inside. <inaudible>
Speaker 2 00:28:59 <inaudible> what do you think working with them will be like, like how will you work with a marketing person? Like whether it's them or someone else down the road, like how involved will you be? How much are you kind of leaning on them or needing them to kind of ideate and execute, or like, what do you think that looks like?
Speaker 1 00:29:18 Uh, I think that there's going to be a pretty significant partnership in there. I, you know, I know that I've talked to some other founders and they were like driving the marketing all themselves, and all they really wanted was just somebody to execute to their plan. That's not totally me. And so I'm going to be looking for them to participate in the vision. And at the same time, I definitely am going to be having them execute to that. But obviously I'm going to be, you know, looking at this from a strategic perspective and say, is that really where I want to head the product? Is that the right? You know, does that resonate with the audience? Because I'm the one who knows my customers. I'm the one that knows what people are using and what they like. So that much, you know, I guess I'm looking at it as maybe a 60, 40 partnership probably where they're about 60%, nine 40%.
Speaker 2 00:30:17 Yeah. And I think that the reason I asked, like, I think that's a tough thing when it comes to like instilling your vision of what you think the company is and the brand and the product even, and who you think your customer should be, um, because you might be wrong, you know, like, uh, or there might be stuff that you haven't thought of. And I say that because it's definitely happened to me. Um, and like that balance of like, I know the customer the best, I should be the one to, to kind of drive that part of the vision. And like you're saying, like handing off ownership of the outcome of these marketing efforts to someone else to let them really own the whole process, like emotionally almost is, is like a tough balance. And I think it's something that has to be like, the trust has to be gained over time, um, that the, the type of person you bring in and the way you work with them, like a full-time employee or a contractor dictate some of that, I think. Um, yeah. Yeah. I think that that's like, when I look at stuff like EOS, that's the next level that like, we're not there, but I think we're just starting to, we're starting to think about getting there where, like, it's not all my responsibility at some point, you know, and to say like,
Speaker 1 00:31:38 It can't be, you don't have enough, there's no way you have the bandwidth to do it all.
Speaker 2 00:31:43 Yeah. Yeah. At some point I need to say, Jonathan, these are the five things we're getting done in the six week cycle, you know, call me if there's a fire otherwise, um, you know, that, that's what we need to do. And we're, we're definitely getting there on the product side. We're also very much getting there on the, on the marketing side. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's an effort. I think the biggest one is me not enabling the team to do that because it's a whole nother process. Like it's a whole nother process for me to do things, to set them up, to be successful by themselves. Um, and yeah, I have to be able to do that. Otherwise I go crazy and burnout, but that, that's something that like is I think something that I definitely am not there yet when I talked to Kevin McArdle about EOS like a year ago.
Speaker 2 00:32:34 Like he's totally totally there because he has leaders in each like division of the organization. Um, and so like he runs EOS with them and to think they should run EOS with their teams and, you know, however many layers you have, that's how it should go. And like, we are really flat organizations. And so like, we are the manager of each of those divisions. So, so in some respects, like EOS is, I dunno, a few tile a little bit, but, but like, I think the goal for me is like to, to talk the language and kind of work the process, even if I'm the one that's ultimately responsible for the outcomes in each business unit. So that the people that we have in place that are leaders, there can step into that place of, of like ownership later on, because they've seen this process being run for so long. Right. Um, but we're definitely not there. I mean, we're getting there, but it's a long, it's a long journey. Sure.
Speaker 1 00:33:33 Well, to answer your question about, you know, how, how am I going to make sure that this gets managed? One reason I wanted to engage this guy is that he's done this for a former competitor already. So he already knows the space. He knows the customers, he knows which ones are most successful. So in a sense, we kind of get a shared brain on that. And if anything, maybe it's not even a shared brain. Maybe he's bringing stuff to the table that I'm simply not even aware of yet. Like they've gone a little higher end of the market. And he probably has insights that I'm missing because my customer perspective is slightly different than his customer perspective. So in that regard, I think I address that risk because of this guy's background now with that said, and he can't be the one to drive everything about this, that now has turned into more of a risk than it was originally when I was starting out on this a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 1 00:34:32 So that's definitely something that I need to keep in mind in engaging, uh, this whole person and process because the other people that I bring into this, you know, I'm looking at like Kaylee more as a person to do my content. Um, she doesn't know that yet because I received your contact information from this guy, but he has a warm contact with her and has worked with her in the past. And I am familiar with her work and I know that other people have written, seen some really great stuff written by her. So, but like for example, she really knows e-commerce so would I be comfortable having her write about things for SMS marketing on this? Yes, I absolutely would. I'd have to hear what her perspective looks like on that. So, I mean, I'm engaging people that are knowledgeable in the space and are not new to this where I have to literally spoonfeed them everything about this, but yes, there are definitely some, there are some things I'm going to have to be very aware of and mindful of here, especially the Facebook part. Um, because I have not run a successful campaign on Facebook's in over six years at this point. So I'm sure this is going to be a Rocky ride there
Speaker 2 00:35:38 Have to get your, uh, your and acids ready for that first couple of weeks of just wasted money, uh, trying to figure it out. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:35:46 Yeah. Well, it can't be any worse than what I'm throwing away in the Shopify app store right now.
Speaker 2 00:35:53 Um, yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the bringing people in that that have like unique industry insights, um, like we're seeing that with Matt, like Matt Madeiros coming in, you know, being a podcast or having a lot of like WordPress experience. And it's been really cool too, to have somebody to, to speak with on many different levels or like about many different things, um, that has as much experience as he has. And at the same time, like he would tell you that it's tough because we can't always agree. And like, so you basically have two people that should know what they're talking about, and one of them has to be wrong. Um, and that's hard, but I, I think that you can make that healthy, but, but it still is kind of a thing.
Speaker 1 00:36:37 Right, right. Yup. Yup. Don't don't hate math though. That's a good guy.
Speaker 2 00:36:43 Oh no. It's, it's been, it's been wonderful. I mean, it really is like one plus one equals three in a lot of respects. Um, but yeah, it's, it's a learning curve to, to bring someone in who in a lot of ways is more senior than you. And like, w what is, what is that like, versus, you know, say you bring in a junior developer, like your relationship with them is very different. So, so what is a, so what is like the, the, the immediate they're like the near term outcome, uh, like in practice for this for you?
Speaker 1 00:37:15 So I've got, uh, some content that needs to be written by the end of the year. I got four pieces on my list right now. Um, obviously engaging the right marketing person and having a plan, technically those are done so I can kind of, I put them on the rocks list anyway, just so I feel productive. Uh, I need to add some tracking stuff to the website. And the big thing right now is that my website is it's in the code base of recapture. And that's a problem. Uh, anytime you want to do an update, especially if you want somebody who's not a developer to update it, cause I'm writing stuff in HTML. Let me tell you this sucks. Um, it sucks bad. So I am looking at pulling that piece of it out and putting it into a CMS. And I'll be honest, I'm not looking at WordPress at the moment either. I have a WordPress blog it's I may keep that, but I am I'm seriously considering not a WordPress solution because our site is so blazing fast right now, adding WordPress would be a detriment to it. Even in its most optimized form. I've never an optimized WordPress site that isn't like on wordpress.com with a massive CD and in front of it, like it's never as fast as mine. Yeah. So, you know, I don't want to lose that advantage because right now it's a pretty significant advantage. Um, Google definitely prioritize faster sites. So,
Speaker 2 00:38:57 So when you could have like the homepage and the pricing page and the feature pages as like static and then have the blog as a sub folder or something like that, right?
Speaker 1 00:39:05 Yeah. That's probably what I'm going to end up doing. I mean, what I really need is like the standard website stuff. So about us, you know, pricing and then like features page or whatever. And then I need some landing pages for all the various campaigns. Cause I have things that are going on right now, some affiliate landing pages. And I have some other landing pages that go on there for other various campaigns, podcasts and stuff we've done. Um, I need to keep all that stuff in tact and then I need the blog, but I don't need any of that into the source code. And right now the blog is WordPress. So that's not a problem. In fact, if anything, moving my blog over will probably give me a boost because now it's on a sub domain and I know moving to the main domain is always a boost, always a boost.
Speaker 2 00:39:51 Yeah. Yeah. What, uh, what CMS are you looking at? Like if you had to do it today, what would you do? Ah, are you not, not willing to, to say that publicly?
Speaker 1 00:40:02 Well, it's too early yet because I haven't, I mean, I just finished this last week saying I really need to do a CMS upgrade and then it was like, am I going to do WordPress? I don't think so. I want to look at alternatives first. So, um, you know, static kit, Jekyll ghost. I honestly don't know at this point. I really don't.
Speaker 2 00:40:22 Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. You should talk to Brian castle. I know that he, for a process kits started it on WordPress, maybe. No. So started on Jekyll or one of those that integrates with Ruby or is Ronald Ruby and then recently moved it back to WordPress S exactly. For the same reason that you're talking about so that he can have other people help contribute to it. Maybe it's just the blog. I don't know if it's the home page or not, but, um, yeah, I know that he was on Matt's podcast talking about, you know, going away from WordPress and then coming back because of like, you know, accessibility from a team perspective. Um, right, right. Yeah. Usability, I guess. Yeah. I mean, so our, our whole, like Castillo's dot com all the blog, all the podcast homepage feature, page pricing page, all is on WordPress all is on a single WordPress site.
Speaker 2 00:41:12 Um, and we're pretty happy with it. Um, we're putting a new theme in place soon, which will speed it up quite a bit based on what we've tested. Um, but yeah, I think the next step for us would probably be to take the homepage and the pricing page and the feature pages into and make them static and then have the blog and the podcast be WordPress. Um, because then that's, you know, really then you're kind of like distributing your exposure to, you know, it's more shit that can break, but you know, if somebody, you know, no one's going to hack a static set. Well, I don't know. I'm sure they can be very difficult to hack a static site. So interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:41:56 So interesting times ahead. And, you know, I would say that's probably my riskiest rock of, you know, despite the fact that all these other things are out there and that are going to require coordination. I think that's the hardest one, because that's what I have to do. That's one, I've got to be either directly involved with, I got to get the developer working on that or, or something. Right. But I'm, I'm going to be a bottleneck in that. And that's what concerns me the most.
Speaker 2 00:42:24 Yeah. Yeah. So let's super exciting to hear about like the marketing push, I looking forward to like hearing how that goes and comparing notes and yeah. I mean, everything from like approaches to how that process is working with w you know, working with someone on the marketing front, um, yeah, that'd be fun to talk about. Yep. Cool. And so, I mean, for folks out there who, you know, are running EOS, both like, you know, as solo founders, all the way up to, you know, teams of less than 10 would love to hear how you're doing it, what things you've run into, um, things that Dave and I aren't thinking about, um, I'm sure there's many of them, uh, shoot us a message podcast@roguestartups.com. And as always, if you're enjoying the show, please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well until next week.
Speaker 0 00:43:09 <inaudible>.
