Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're to startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig. All right. Welcome to episode two 50, one of rogue startups. Craig, how are you doing this week?
Speaker 1 00:00:26 I'm good, man. I, uh, I don't know if I talked about it last week, but we got fiber internet here recently. I think it was oh, jealous. Yeah, it is. It is amazing. I was sitting here like I usually sweat a little bit as we start recording thinking like, okay, zoom is going to die. My computer's going to die. And now I'm like, I got fiber. Like what could possibly go wrong? And of course in jinxing us, but like, it's great, man. It's cool to be able to do like video and like, I just don't worry. Like I do video all the time now and I don't worry about like, you know, my computer exploding, whatever, because of my shitty internet. So you can have this Netflix over there, man. It is pretty nice, man. I have to say. Yeah, so, and it's cheap. It's like 20 bucks a month more than we were paying before if shitty DSL. Oh
Speaker 2 00:01:14 God. I'm so jealous. I mean, I would, I would have paid any amount of money for fiber years ago around here, but fiber doesn't come to my neighborhood. So I have two options. I've got cable and I've got DSL and we're just an old enough neighborhood that it doesn't, you know, we're old enough and we're kind of like, I don't want to say fringe, but where we are in the city is like kind of on the very edge of the city. And like, if you throw a rock in one direction of where I live, you hit ranch land. So, uh, you know, we are very much on the border of what is economically feasible for them to run fiber to. So, you know, there are many other places in the city of Denver that have fiber run to them. My house is not one of them and I am so very sad about that.
Speaker 2 00:02:01 Uh, but yeah, I'm happy to hear that you got it. Yeah. My, uh, my friend that I used to freelance with he's had, um, uh, what was it, a one gigabyte connection or one gigabit, two gigabits, 10 gigabits. He had something really insanely large. He lives out in salt lake and they were like an early adopter of it. And, and he, when they were looking at this house, he specifically got excited about this house when he found that they were connected to the utopia network, which was their fiber provider out there. And they got like some insanely large thing. Cause they had legacy pricing on the, one of the original plans because they were the, some of the founding members that joined it or whatever. So it was just like, you got this insane amount of bandwidth and it was for like this dirt cheap price and uh, yeah, I've wanted fiber ever since.
Speaker 1 00:02:54 Yeah. I'm just, uh, I'm just doing a speed test now. Uh, live on the, so yeah, it's 300 megabytes down and like 170 up is what I'm getting right now. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, for a long time it had like five down and a half up. Uh, so it was like, that's just, it's just like you can't, you literally can't work like that. So it's um, it's nice to be part of the 21st century. DSL
Speaker 2 00:03:21 Was my primary means around here because it was so much more reliable. And then when COVID hit, I said, fuck it. I gotta do cable. I have no choice. I have five people. We cannot live in a five megabit connection. That's not going to happen. Right. We had already many struggles with it as it was. So I just I'd bit the bullet and I've actually been surprisingly, I've just been surprised by the whole thing. Surprisingly content I've been surprisingly content. It, you know, we got a a hundred, um, a hundred down and whatever they promise up 20 up or something. Oh, that's reasonable. Yeah. But we don't get that. Of course. Um, but what we get is so much more than what we had before. It doesn't matter. We can, we can run two 4k streams to TVs here. I can be working and somebody can be listening to Spotify and we're all good.
Speaker 3 00:04:11 Nice. Yeah. That's so neat in the world, man. You know, it,
Speaker 2 00:04:15 It works quite well. I can't complain. And it's been incredibly stable. I had heard my neighbors talk about how flaky it was, which was my main reason for hesitating on it for so long, but it has not been flaky for me at all. The only times has been flakier when I've accidentally kicked the cable out of the
Speaker 1 00:04:31 Wall, that'll do it. That'll do it. That'll do it.
Speaker 2 00:04:34 Don't do that. Yeah. Pro tip there's your pro tip today from rogue startups. Don't kick the cable out of them. Well,
Speaker 1 00:04:41 So, so Dave last episode was all about, uh, you kinda, you know, telling the man to stick it and going full time and you know, it's been a couple of weeks. So like how, how are things like, how are things mentally? How is your kind of schedule and like work set up? Like how are you settling into being full-time with recapture? Well,
Speaker 2 00:05:06 I'll get into that in just a second, but I do want to say thank you to everybody who has reached out and you know, said something about me going full time and the congratulations and the kudos. I can't tell you how much I really appreciate all of that. That has felt really good. It's been an amazing feeling to be able to get to that point. And you know, if you're out there and you're doing your own thing, whether it's a productized service or a SAS or whatever, I truly hope that you make it to that point as well because the feeling of being in control of your own destiny is a feeling that is you can't replicate that anywhere else. And that is just so awesome. So yes, I wanted to say thank you first and foremost, I just said this to my wife last night and I think the sums up exactly how it's gone.
Speaker 2 00:05:58 I just, before we went to bed last night, I said to my wife that it was an amazing feeling for the first time in God knows when like I, I honestly could not go back in my recent ten-year history and tell you when I felt like this, I said it was really great to say I had a great day for two fucking weeks in a row every single day. There wasn't a single day that I was like, yeah, that wasn't so great. But every single day was like, that was a great fucking day. Today was another great fucking day. Hey, look at that. I had another great day. Oh my God. Look at that. I've had an entire great week and it wasn't just the weekends. Like it was everything. It was all of it. So, um, I cannot describe how much more mentally light I feel.
Speaker 2 00:06:54 I am still kind of deprogramming myself a little bit from the whole routine of freelancing, but I've specifically made myself not being in the office for more than a two hour stretch at a time. So where I'm at right now, I have not re vamped my desk yet. Uh, that is in my goals here before the end of June is to basically do something with my desk to make it different so that I don't feel like I'm coming back to the same old job, but I am making a concerted effort to do things like I've been taking calls outside on the patio, or I grabbed my laptop last night and the kids wanted to go swimming. And I said, all right, let's go to the pool, grab my laptop. And I was working for an hour and a half on somebody who made an cart series in their wind backs per a discussion that we had and the kids were swimming and I was as happy as a clam.
Speaker 2 00:07:49 I'm just, yeah. Chillin out there on the lounger, uh, getting my eyes burned by all the chlorine. That part wasn't so great. But you know, Stella was a great day. It was still a great day. Even getting my eyes burned out by a caustic chemical. It was still a great day. Yeah. So I think that, that, that sums it up. Yeah. I think the most is that I've just been able to string together a long series of great days. You know, we had a vacation and that five days off, we went out to Moab. That was fantastic. That was some great decompression time. We had a fantastic time as a family. There was a little bit of stress because our trailer, the brakes were not good. We blew the tire, almost blew out the car that we had was struggling to get out there. Despite all of that. It was still a great day. They were all great days. Yeah. So, you know, that's, it's a weird feeling like to have all of these things that come up and it's still a great day, like everything is still going great. So, uh, maybe I'm just in some overwhelming honeymoon, but I don't feel like that's the case. I feel like this is a new normal and I'm adjusting to it and I'm okay with that.
Speaker 1 00:08:59 That's awesome. I, uh, I I'm, I'm listening to this and I'm thinking back. Yeah. I remember like going full time. We kind of fucked it up. I mean, cause we like did that. Moved, came to Europe, all that crap and like a month. And so like I never, I kind of never got that time to just like be in a place that everything is comfortable and normal and enjoy that. We, we did like a really awesome thing, which was cool too, but it I'm kicking myself a little bit because I do have a lot of bad days now and I am really stressed a lot of times. And so like hearing you say that, like you had two good weeks, I was like, oh man, that's, that's really nice. I can't imagine.
Speaker 3 00:09:41 Well, it's, you know, you definitely
Speaker 2 00:09:43 Shifted, you shifted a lot all at the same time. So it was, you know, shifting countries is a big deal. Like that is a whole lot of stuff. Cause it's, you gotta figure out your transportation, you got to figure out your housing, you don't necessarily speak the language. So you've got that adjustment and then you have to worry about like, how are we going to be eating on a regular basis? And what about the kids? And now I gotta, you know, you shifted massive amount of time zones. So it's like now we've got to shift our sleeping schedule. Like that's a lot of change to absorb all at once. Yeah. And obviously, you know, you did and you know, but it just, it felt different because you just move so much at the same time. So for me it was just all right, fuck the job. And you know, and then we're going on vacation that was about it. And everything else was more or less the same. So.
Speaker 1 00:10:32 Nice, nice. That's awesome. That's awesome. But uh, so I mean, work stuff is going well, I assume. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:10:40 So again, because I'm shifting my schedule a little bit, uh, you know, Tracy and I are trying to figure out what w you know, who's doing what with the kids here this summer. Cause we've got like this week, my kids are at camp. And so I took on the, you know, I have to pick them up in the afternoons because she's doing her dyslexia tutoring in the afternoons and that's just, that was going to happen either way. But you know, I have to work my schedule around that. And then some of the mornings she's doing physical therapy and some other stuff, she was in a car accident, nothing serious, but her neck and back are messed up. So she has to go do that in the morning. So sometimes I'm taking them and picking them up. And so, you know, I'm it, it's a new world for me to sort of have to organize my day a little more dynamically than saying, all right, it's eight o'clock, I'm starting work.
Speaker 2 00:11:29 Oh, it's five o'clock, I'm done. You know, it's not like that now. It's okay. Now I've got from eight to 12 or now I've got from eight to nine and then I had to go take the kids. And then I come back at 10 and I've got that until one, and then I've got to help with lunch and you know, so I'm getting these blocks. And so we're trying to figure out what that looks like in terms of things. But, you know, mostly I've been trying to, like, I had this huge pile of sticky notes on my desk. I mean, it would probably cause anxiety in, on almost anybody, especially if you're like super OCD about your organization. My desk already causes anxiety for most people. Cause it's just piled with shit. But yeah, so I had this huge pile of notes on here. I've been working through that and I cleared off most of them now, which is great, uh, before they were just constantly piling up.
Speaker 2 00:12:17 I wasn't getting rid of anything and now I've cleared most of that out. So that, that has felt good. And I've been running like a bunch of personal errands to try to clear just that stuff out of our, um, mental space. And now I'm, I'm getting down to actually the big stuff. So we've got, um, an SMS launch that I need to do the full prep for. Um, I've hired writers on recapture. Now I have two of them at this point and I am doing them both as a trial. So I'm going to have them each write an article and see how it goes. And then at the end of that, then I'll decide, all right, I'm going to keep you or not keep you, but we've gotten through all of that process, which is great. I've gotten some keyword analysis. So we're going to do some content marketing.
Speaker 2 00:13:00 I've got that full report and that's really awesome. Um, there's a great guy that I worked with his name's Andy Chadwick. Uh, so anybody out there, if you're looking for somebody to do some keyword analysis and some really in-depth SEO stuff, he was really solid and he, his pricing was totally reasonable. Uh, you can reach out podcast@roguestartups.com and I'll be happy to give you that information if you're in the market for that. But he gave me a great report. So now we've got like months worth of content marketing to work on and I've got, you know, two writers here. So I'm going to get them started on things and see how that goes. We're doing paid acquisition right now. And we've been running a bunch of Facebook ads and we've had these cute little videos to try to get people to the blog. And it's starting to kind of see some traction a little bit now.
Speaker 2 00:13:49 And I just finished an explainer video update that got published. Ah, I guess it's going to get published this week. I just finished it up, uh, last Friday and that's getting out there. So yeah, there's a lot going on right now. And that doesn't even include like all the other stuff that I have on my list. So, you know, we're trying to do a database migration to get off of, uh, our Mongo provider. That's totally gouging us for an unreasonable amount of money every month. And, uh, I need to separate the website from the code base so that I can actually start to make that its own thing and then do a marketing site on there because it's all tied up in the code right now, which is a mess. So it's like, I'm finally getting some traction on all these big projects, uh, with recapture, which is awesome.
Speaker 1 00:14:36 That's cool, man. That's a, I can imagine you're only able to do all of that because you have the Headspace, not, not, I mean the Headspace on a time, right. To, to focus on all that stuff. So that's really cool. I'll be, I'll be very keen to hear how like, you know, in another few weeks, some of those things have come together, uh, and like with the results we're seeing, that's really cool. Yeah. And
Speaker 2 00:14:56 You know, and then of course there's the random day to day stuff like yesterday, apple announced that they're going to be doing this privacy update. And it turns out that that Apple's email client has apparently has a 50%, 58% market share of all emails out there. And I was like, oh, that sucks.
Speaker 1 00:15:16 That's crazy. Because now they're gonna start blocking track emails and stuff like cookies. They're going to be blocking
Speaker 2 00:15:21 Open pixels. And you know, this, I know that some ESPs out there kind of flipping out a little bit about this and email marketing gurus are definitely flipping out about this, but I'm kinda like, yeah, whatever. Um, open rates are in some ways kind of a vanity metric anyway, because they're not really accurate. If you've got them really high, then there's reasons they might not be as high as you think they are. And if they're not high, then people quite likely could still be seen all your stuff anyway. And so, you know, the whole, when do you do your list, hygiene and standardization and, you know, purging people off of it that opens up those questions and stuff like that. But for recapture and other things, I'm like, yeah, it doesn't really change our stuff. We still do the tracking. The attribution gets a little harder at this point, but it was already a little squirrely to start with. So yeah. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1 00:16:16 It's a level playing field, right. You versus MailChimp versus whoever is all playing by the same rules
Speaker 3 00:16:22 Are all screwed. Right? Yeah. We're all scared. Yeah. So
Speaker 2 00:16:25 It's not like they get an advantage that I don't and you know, their size does, does nothing for them at this point, if anything, they're probably going to have more disgruntled customers than I will.
Speaker 3 00:16:35 So yeah. Yeah. All good.
Speaker 2 00:16:39 Yeah. So how are things in the podcast world?
Speaker 1 00:16:42 They're good, man. They're good. We are the kind of two big things from our end is we're hiring a front end developer. So if anybody's interested cassius.com/careers, you can see it there. It is really interesting to be hiring a front end developer, everyone on the team so far as, you know, full stack, which really means backend backend heavy. And so the thought of having a front end developer that is really skilled with HTML and CSS, but also like react and all this is really cool and the doors that it opens up for us to be able to do product differently, uh, and hopefully ship product faster. So, so that's really cool. And we'll be like, uh, a bit of a learning curve, I think for us in how we work, but that is really cool. And I'm testing out, chatting with blue coating. So, uh, I think everybody that listens to this podcast probably knows a blue coating.
Speaker 1 00:17:35 So it kind of like a development developer placement service that focuses mostly on Latin America. And there's a couple of other products out there that are similar or services out there similar. But, um, yeah, I mean, thinking at point that like you pay a little bit more for a developer from a service like blue coating, but all of the work of recruiting and interviewing and all this bullshit is just handled by them. So like, for me, that's really nice right now. So like basically just had like a quick 20 minute conversation with someone the other day gave them our test project. And like, if that comes back reasonable kind of figuring the rest of the vetting has been done by the service. So it takes a, it takes a fair amount of that, like interviewing and screening lift off of me. So this may be how we hire developers going forward if it goes well. So that's, that'll be interesting to see. Nice.
Speaker 2 00:18:28 I actually, hadn't heard of blue coating. I've heard of other ones there's like trust sharing and you know, obviously you have Upwork, but then there's a, another one. Upstack, that's the one I used for, um, hiring a developer for recapture. So there's a lot of them and they source from different areas. I think the, um, upstack was mostly Eastern Europe, but they also did a little bit of, uh, Northern Africa. Cause I got a guy from Egypt and he was fantastic. So, but yeah, that's, that's awesome. So, uh, I needed to hire another developer. I'll check them out. I'll uh, check in on that later to see how that experience went. Once you get that person on board and see how they turn out. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:19:08 Yeah. And you know, like just on that, on that topic, like I was chatting with another founder last week about this and like we have, so we have five developers right now, plus like a designer that also does front end work. And those people are in Ukraine, Montenegro, Nigeria, uh, New York and the U S uh, Mexico and Vancouver. Right. And like, it's fucking hard. Like we try to have a dev meeting. Right. And we're spanned over like nine hours. Right. And so I, I think if I had it to do over again and, and part of like working with a service like this is to like concentrate our locations a little more, not to say we would never hire someone from here or there or whatever, but like, I think just practically to say like, we're a remote distributed team. You can live wherever we want is, is like true and cool, but maybe not as optimal as it could be to say like, you know, like when Jonathan was our first developer, we very easily could have, and maybe should have said, we're only going to hire developers in South Africa.
Speaker 1 00:20:18 Right. There are a whole bunch of really great developers in South Africa. We can make that work, you know, Jordan Galt. Right. All of their developers are in Slovenia. Right. Um, even if it's not where the rest of the team is, because I think that, that, like, we kind of have that same model to an extent, like we have three developers kind of over here plus me and then like a lot of the customer facing stuff like marketing and support are in the U S like, I think that model is fair to say like product and development are going to be wherever they are, you know, South Africa or Nigeria or Brazil or Ukraine or whatever. And then the rest of the team, you know, is wherever they are. And for a lot of folks that's north America. Yeah. Just kind of like, I think that's subconsciously part of what I'm thinking and doing with this is like, all right, as we get more people, let's try to get like a nexus, not in a legal sense necessarily, but like a concentration of people in an area.
Speaker 1 00:21:12 So that, even things like, you know, what, if we had a product in person meeting right now, it would be like, we would literally like be coming from all over the world. Whereas like if five, our developers were in Brazil while we just go to Brazil, you know, so kind of, kind of thinking about that as like, as we continue to grow, that that might be a strategy of like where we hire people. Um, the other thing is like, I know that ProfitWell does this as like, you get this like seed, you know, of like a really talented developer in a place that isn't where you live and then they can go recruit other people for you. And like, and I think Jordan has done this with rock is like Jordan hard rock rock then went and hired all the rest of those developers and, and kind of manages that. And I think that's, I think those are good models, just so you're not recreating the wheel from scratch every time. So just something I'm thinking about, I guess, uh,
Speaker 2 00:22:08 That's a solid, solid thing. And until you crystallize that, I didn't really think about it too much, but I kind of implicitly done that. So time zone productivity is a thing. I mean, uh, with freelancing, I've worked with a number of teams where we were distributed, usually U S versus India, or somewhere similar Asian time zone where you're, you've got like a two digit time zone difference. It's pretty significant. And as a result of that, it really, you know, if your communication skills are not up to like the highest of high levels on both sides, productivity will suffer there. So when I started looking for developers for the plugin, I very much wanted to find something that was more nearshore, so that the time zone difference was not that bad. And, you know, I ended up hiring, uh, Willington from, uh, Columbia Modine, and he ended up doing exactly what you just described.
Speaker 2 00:23:10 He was the senior developer who became the seed. And then he ended up recruiting his friend, Jorge, who was also another great guy. And they both worked on those plugins for years. And then they ended up hiring, or they ended up recruiting another friend of theirs who wasn't as, quite as great as they were, but that community was sort of jelling around that area in Columbia. And as a result, when I started looking in later, I made sure that I found other plugin developers in that area, or certainly in a compatible time zone. And similarly recapture Mike is in Europe, he's in Spain. So when I was looking for somebody to help out, I wanted to make sure that he and Mike would be able to overlap. So, you know, when I was talking with the upstack folks in Eastern Europe, Mike had already had experience working with Ukrainian outsource developer.
Speaker 2 00:24:05 So I was like, all right, great. If that is where we end up outsourcing from, Mike has experienced with that. We can work with that. But even then when we found, uh, Omar in Egypt, then I think they were like a one hour off. And then even during that, like when the daylight savings time things switched, I don't think Egypt went to daylight savings time, but he did. And so they were like on the same time zone, it was like perfect productivity. And so they would give me a report when I, uh, got up in the morning and I'd find out whatever was going on there and it all worked out great. And, um, and I guess Omar also wanted to work some weird hours on top of that, so that there was, uh, you know, some great overlap with Mike great overlap with me, but, you know, I, you can't overestimate the, the value that comes from having that time zone overlap and the time zone productivity there. Cause if you have to deal with cross time zone delays, that can really screw things up. And I can't imagine what kind of a, an organizational nightmare, it becomes trying to like bring everybody together across like nine different times zones. You know, I've only tried to do it across two or three at most, but yeah, that sounds hard.
Speaker 1 00:25:16 Yeah. I mean, what you end up with is, you know, four or five o'clock here, which is 10 or 11 east coast, U S, which is six, you know, five or six o'clock in Ukraine and as seven or eight o'clock in Vancouver. And so it's just like, there's no, there's no perfect answer. Someone, someone just, you know, gets their all into the deal. And that's just unfortunate, but yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, we're not changing anything that we do now, but going forward, maybe we'll try to concentrate, uh, and some areas. And I think that, you know, the places I talked about, you know, Ukraine, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, all make a lot of sense. Argentina, I've heard a lot of really good things about developers from Argentina, but I mean, generally just, there's a lot of really good Latin American and a lot of really good kind of Eastern European developers.
Speaker 1 00:26:04 And so, yeah, just, just trying to be a little more intentional about that rather than, you know, put the job posting up and take, take whoever. I don't know how companies like automatic, you know, hundreds of employees, you know, just all over the place. I don't know they do it and they're mostly, totally asynchronous, no, no calls or anything like that. So they are better at it than I am. But, um, yeah, just, you know, just something I'm thinking about, if people have experience with this, that they've done it better, I would love to hear about it. So send us a message. The other thing I'm working on Dave is, uh, we're hiring a sales rep. Um, so we call it an account executive. And so right. Saw that on Twitter other day. Yeah. So really exciting. Um, you know, we had a sales rep at podcast motor before, and then the pandemic hit and our leads just dried up to nothing.
Speaker 1 00:26:53 And unfortunately Chris went and did something else totally understandable, but wanting to get that person back in the organization to drive sales, drive some revenue. Um, and so just a lot of work around, not just, you know, recruiting and starting to interview folks later this week, but, you know, getting HubSpot, right? Like gotta get a CRM set up and get all the processes there and how are we getting leads? And so, I mean, just really doing a lot of work around conceptualizing our sales process instead of it just being made, you know, flying by the seat of my pants, um, and documenting it and getting systems in place and the right tools and the right place to be able to like get leads, put them into some kind of a system, nurture them along, have some idea of, you know, how the pipeline looks so that when we get this person, I actually think we're in hired two of them when we get these people in, they will feel at home, feel productive, uh, and be able to be effective as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 00:27:52 So it's just, uh, it's definitely like the big thing that I'm, that I'm thinking about right now and, and working on. And it's really cool. It's really exciting. Um, because like when, when Chris was on the team before, like we saw a major shift in revenue, you know, like for the few months that he was really up to speed and, and like understood how to sell, you know, our services. Like it, it's just a totally different thing than it being, you know, this kind of afterthought of, of me, you know, when I have time to follow up with leads is, you know, someone wakes up every morning and thinks like, how can I get more leads and how can I close the ones I have? Like, that's, you know, that's really powerful to have somebody having that kind of intensity of focus. And it's cool.
Speaker 1 00:28:39 I feel like the company is ready for it. You know, we get the leads and we just really need someone or some people multiple, multiple someones, uh, to be, to be focusing on this all the time. And, and I think it's, you know, my job Matt's job, Sam, our new head of growth to feed that person, um, feed them leads and, and keep them, you know, ready to, to close stuff. So it's a, it's a cool, it's a cool process so far. Um, I've thought about documenting it on my blog. Uh, cause I think that like hiring salespeople for like our kinds of companies is really intimidating. It's really intimidating for me. And like I have a sales background and I've hard
Speaker 3 00:29:16 Salespeople before. Oh, the rest of us are doomed.
Speaker 1 00:29:20 Um, so have thought about just documenting, like how we'd write a job posting, how do we, you know, screen candidates? How do we, you know, so I probably will create like a little mini blog series about it on my site to, uh, it's going to document it. So that's chicken shit, Dave, I'm going to say on the air right here, go to Craig hewitt.me. By the time this episode comes out, I will have the first in this series of blog posts, uh, talking about how we position the job and do a good job posting and everything. Um, so that I can attach some kind of like, what is it like peer pressure, positive peer pressure to myself to, to actually get this done. Cause I wrote about half the blog posts the other day, so nice. That's smart
Speaker 2 00:30:02 Goals right there. Folks that just
Speaker 1 00:30:04 Happened, making it happen, making
Speaker 2 00:30:07 It happen. That's beautiful. Yeah. But yeah, I totally agree with you on, you know, I'm starting to feel now that I have the Headspace for just recapture, I'm starting to feel the chaos of the street, the pull between strategy and tactics, where before it was just like, fuck it. All I have time for is the tactics. So it's like support, make sure engineering is okay. The infrastructure is up and hope for the best on the rest. Right. And that's terrible. That's a really lousy strategy by the way. But now that I've got the time for all of it, it's like, okay, now I've got the tactical stuff handled and I've got more space for the strategy, but now I'm realizing there's a whole ton of strategy to work on. Like I've got to work on the launch strategy, the marketing strategy, I've got to build the website, I've got to still do the engineering direction.
Speaker 2 00:30:58 We've and then we got to do things like sales and churn. And I'm like, oh my God, what have I done to myself? Like, it feels a little overwhelming when you were describing all of that. And then I realized like all of these things in the background that I haven't been focused on and that way, like I probably need a sales person to, I can't afford them right now. So it's going to have to be me, but you know, that's still like, wow, uh, I need somebody whose job it is to like find and close leads. And right now I'm doing a piss poor job of half-ass in it, but it's better than another job not getting done at all. And eventually that half-ass is going to be a, it's going to require somebody else's ass besides. Right.
Speaker 1 00:31:45 Right. And that is conventional wisdom. Is that, that the founders should do sales, uh, for, for kind of a long time. Right. It's like maybe one of the last things you should give up. So I, you know, I think, you know, if it's something you like doing and you're good at and other, you can find other people to do other parts of the business. Um, and yeah, I mean, I feel like, I feel like I have done a lot of sales. Uh, I ha especially for like the podcast motor stuff, I could definitely teach someone how to do that. Uh, and we have, you know, a pretty good system for that for, for like selling private podcasting, which is a big part of what this person will do. We are, we are much younger in the process. And so a fair amount of like the person we bring in will be someone who has a lot of sales experience and sales process experience, um, and who can kind of bring that process with them. Um, because like we, you know, we don't have that yet for that of the business. So it's a, it's an interesting person we're looking for. I think, uh, someone who almost like entrepreneurial, who can come in and kind of craft that division almost so it's cool. It's cool to, it's cool to be able to think about hiring for that type of person. Cause they, they will be a huge asset to the company. So it's exciting. Good thing. You're not asking for anything big. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:33:02 No pressure, no pressure, no pressure, but you know, I, I
Speaker 2 00:33:06 Will talk about how it's working out here in future episodes.
Speaker 1 00:33:10 You know, what's cool, Dave, I actually, I had an interview with a listener of the show, uh, earlier this week. So there you go. Power of podcasting, someone reached out, they heard me talking about it, uh, and you know, reached out and said, Hey, you know, I'm interested. Let's, let's talk so pretty cool. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, man, that's, that's, what's new and what's top of mind over here. Yeah. But congratulations man. I'm out. Yeah. The, the response like I saw on Twitter was, was massive. And just congratulations to you and your family. Right. I think it's like a huge thing for all of you to, to kind of be, be where you are and since no, no small feat to, to have achieve that. So congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It's uh, it's very exciting
Speaker 2 00:33:53 And I am very much loving being on the other side of it at this point.
Speaker 1 00:33:59 Awesome. Awesome. Anyone have questions or comments for Dave or I should just messaged podcast@roguestartups.com. And if you're enjoying the show as always, our ask is for you to share it with someone who you think would enjoy
Speaker 0 00:34:11 It as well. Gonna see you next week. 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.
