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.
Speaker 1 00:00:20 Welcome to rogue startups. Episode 2 53. Craig, how are you this week? I am
Speaker 2 00:00:26 Good, man. I'm good. Uh, last day of school here for the kids about an hour ago. And uh, so summer is officially here and my, my time is, uh, is going to be stretched between all sorts of fun and family and work and that whole delicate balance that we all try to achieve. But yeah, it's good. It's gonna be an exciting summer. Very
Speaker 3 00:00:45 Nice. Very nice. Yes. We've been living that for the first month here. You know, July 4th is it's kind of a mixed blessing for me because it's, it's one of my favorite holidays. I love fireworks. I love to blow shit up, you know, and it's just like, it's kind of like a pinnacle moment in summer for me. Like it is the quintessential moment of summer. You get together with friends and family and have the picnics and you do the fireworks and barbecues and all that good stuff. And we did all of those things last weekend, but it also means that like summer is kind of halfway over for my kids because they go back to school at the beginning of August and they go out at the end of may. So it's bittersweet. Like I feel like, oh crap, it's all downhill from here. But you know, I, I also realize that's, you know, a dumb way to look at it because I've got vacation coming up and we have two more camping trips this month. And yeah, I mean, there's lots of fun stuff and we're going to the Renaissance festival this weekend in, uh, south of Denver. So, you know, there's plenty of good fun stuff coming in the summer here, but yeah, it always makes me a little sad after July 4th because of that.
Speaker 2 00:01:56 Yeah. That that's a trip, man, that your kids get back August 1st. Like
Speaker 3 00:02:00 Yeah, it's August 7th or eighth or something like that, but it's way too fricking early. I mean, just like I, yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about that, but that's not what this podcast is about, but there is some big news this week on your end. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:02:19 Yeah. I mean we, um, so we announced last week that we closed a funding round, so yeah, all sorts of new responsibility and pressure and stress and everything.
Speaker 3 00:02:32 That's nice. That's nice. So, um, I, you know, I saw the public details about it. It's a 750,000 investment from automatic and team Yost and some other individual investors here. You know, my first question to you
Speaker 1 00:02:48 Is what are you going to do? You got the shit
Speaker 3 00:02:51 Ton of cash you're sitting on top of now. What's the plan.
Speaker 2 00:02:55 Yeah, yeah. I mean the whole, the whole premise of the money raised was to go after the private pot, private podcasting market. Uh, so private podcasting for what we call like the maker community, you know, online courses, membership sites, online communities who want to offer a private podcast content to their members. And then the other application, or kind of persona of it is companies wanting to have internal employee only podcasts. And both of those are much higher touch sales, especially the company side than, than we're, then we're equipped to deal with frankly. And so a lot of this is just around hiring a really kick ass sales team. And in building out the few things on the product side that, that we really need to stand apart from folks. So that's, that's what it's all about.
Speaker 3 00:03:45 It's amazing. And congratulations to you and the whole team for putting that together and pulling that off. And you, you did this all stealth, like you, there was no back channel discussion. I mean, I didn't hear a peep of this and then all of a sudden Friday afternoon lighting up Twitter and I'm like, holy crap. That's amazing. So yeah, you were playing this one close to the vest. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 2 00:04:10 I, it's the kind of thing that like for folks who have raised money before, like it's, it's somewhat uncertain for like kind of a long period of time and then like some things fall into place and then it, you know, is pretty certain, but I mean, we really just got the last piece of paper signed a couple of weeks ago. So it's, it's, you know, it was frankly up in the air for the first few months of the year and then the last month or so is pretty, pretty sure that it was going to happen. It's just a matter of, kind of how much and from whom and everything. So yeah, just not wanting to count my chickens before they're hatched, I guess
Speaker 3 00:04:44 Now I have to ask, how did this whole thing get started? Like you had this idea, did you reach out to other people? Did they reach out to you? Did you broker this stuff through tiny seed? Like how did everything sort of come about? Hm, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:05:01 Um, a little bit of everything, I guess. So I, I did a fair amount of just kind of networking and reaching out to people, letting them know what we're up to, uh, from that other introductions were made. And yeah, I think that's just how life kind of works. Um, and yeah, that's, I mean generally how a lot of it went, tiny seed does not do follow on rounds themselves, but they, uh, they do kind of share what we're doing with their investors who then can, can invest. And I mean, that, that's kinda how it all worked, both from kind of the Yost and the automatic side to kind of the individuals, you know, some individuals, you know, outside of tiny seed in some individuals, um, that are associated with tiny seed.
Speaker 3 00:05:41 So it's interesting that Matt Mullenweg got involved in this because I wouldn't have necessarily thought that, you know, he would be the one specifically interested in like this private podcasting space or even like to be a big supporter of those in general. I mean, it's not that you're not important in the WordPress community and have it made a splash there and clearly an impression, but at the same time, like if I was thinking of, well, what's Matt going to invest in next? I don't know. The cast dose would have been in my top 10. Cause that seems like there are a lot of other things in WordPress that he might consider more important. So did he like talk about, you know, what is it about castoffs that, that, you know, attracted him here?
Speaker 2 00:06:24 Yeah. So I didn't talk to Matt directly. Um, automatic has kind of a whole BizDev arm that were the folks that I chatted with. Say, I can't say from their end, like what was interesting about this specifically, but, but I mean, it, like, I think it's, it seems to me like, and this is just me, like, this is me talking, not anything I know about kind of their strategy or anything, but it seems to me that this is not so far from like their core competency of like, you know, democratizing the web, right? Like democratizing content podcasting by its nature, open RSS, you know, free to a lot of people. There is like the platform limitations like apple and Spotify that, that can confound that. But by its nature, like podcasting can be run kind of like a blog just from someone's website. So again, this is just me, I think that, that it's not so different than like what they're trying to do. And then if you look at what they do with, you know, woo commerce and some of these things with, you know, monetizing traffic and websites and, you know, introducing commerce that like private podcasting and the things we're doing with like paid access to private podcasting is, is kind of, kind of in line with a lot of stuff that WordPress does, I think.
Speaker 3 00:07:38 Cool. Cool. Yeah, it's kind of, you know, knowing what I know about the WordPress community and how automatic works, I would have a hard time thinking that Matt didn't sign off on this personally. Like it had to, it had to cross his desk and they had to say, all right, look, we want to invest in cast dos. What do you think about this? Here's the details, you know, cause Matt's not the kind of guy that just sort of lets things run on the side without him having some kind of say in here. I mean, that's historically been the WordPress community. So yeah. I mean to get signed off by Matt, uh, that's quite a vote of confidence there. So congratulations on that. Thanks
Speaker 2 00:08:14 Man. Thanks. Yeah, it's a trip I was thinking about like in a company that size, like how much of this happens with, without someone like his knowledge and can, you know, how much authority do some people have to, to do things like, I don't know what the answer to those things is, but it's definitely interesting. You think about that, like in your and I's business, we know pretty much everything that happens in as the businesses get bigger, there are definitely pretty big things that happened that, you know, the CEO and the founders just don't know because they don't need to. I don't, I don't know what point that happens, but that's just an interesting thing to think about.
Speaker 3 00:08:44 Yeah. Nobody here is going to be getting into the head of mountain mulloway anytime soon. So yeah. That's awesome. All right. So I have another question for you. What is your greatest concern at this point? You're sitting on this huge pile of cash here, you know, what freaks you out the most right now?
Speaker 2 00:09:06 Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest challenge to tackle and it's why we wanted to raise money just to have more resources to achieve it is, is going to making sales work at a kind of mid market to enterprise level. Um, so we've, we've proven it a bit, you know, we do have some customers at that price point and it's just doing a lot more of it and that's everything from, you know, getting a bunch more leads to, you know, nurturing and verdant converting them is, is, you know, the, the big thing that we just needed help with. And that's the, that's the challenge.
Speaker 3 00:09:39 Right. But what about that? Like, so if I'm reading between the lines, it, they can't all scale your, come on, you're a sales guy, you get this stuff, right?
Speaker 2 00:09:50 No, I mean, I it's a little tongue in cheek, but all of it scares me and is the stuff that like, that's all I'm spending time on right now is sales and pipeline. And you know, what can be kind of self-service, you know, marketing driven sale, you know, customer acquisition, what needs to be marketing driven, like lead acquisition for sales, how to those leads go into the sales pipeline? How do we nurture them? How do we close them? What does our pricing and packaging look like? Like we have the V1 of all that stuff, you know, but, but like we're hiring for two sales reps right now. And like, we're going to bring these people in and say like, by the middle of August, like they need to be able to be successful. And, and so like, it's just making all of that as good as it can be, because like, what's interesting is, you know, when you start mapping out the math of like what a sales rep should be able to do in terms of revenue is like doubling our revenue by this time next year with two good salespeople. Um, and so it's just a lot of pressure for me to say like, okay, that's their potential, you know, and that's what we can pay them for. Um, it's up to all of us, you know, Matt and Sam and me from like a marketing perspective to drive leads and then for those folks to, to take and convert those leads and generate revenue. So yeah. I mean, that's, it's all like just what I'm working on.
Speaker 3 00:11:12 Right, right. So interesting tangent. Uh, so have you ever heard of, uh, a site called academic research in your hands?
Speaker 2 00:11:22 No. That's a very long URL, but no.
Speaker 3 00:11:25 Oh, actually it's a, it's an even more obnoxious, short URL because it takes the first letter of every one of those words and condenses it down into almost a nonsense word. That's five letters long it's R a R I a Y h.com. And you're like, what? The, like the first time I got an email from them, I had to like, look them up. Cause I'm like, who the hell? What is a spam site here? And I had signed up for them, like, so the guy like goes and condenses academic research about sales and marketing and e-commerce and other stuff in general. And what's awesome about it is that he basically it's the cliff notes of all of that academic research, but in like human language, not academic language. And he just published something this morning that talked about a pharmaceutical company that instead of just offering commissions on closed sales, they offered commissions on activity like sales activity means booked calls made, you know, number of contacts reached out to et cetera, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 00:12:31 And they noticed that in this one company, those that were basically getting the higher commissions based on the activity or also the ones that were generating the sales too. So, you know, this is like, it's a data point of one, really. So, you know, your mileage may vary tax, title and license are extra, not valid in the state of California, that kind of stuff. But it was interesting to see that like by incentivizing the activity, they actually were able to get the salespeople to make more sales, even those that would have not normally done it just based on the closing rate. You know? So I wonder if that's something that you might consider or think about for Castillo's.
Speaker 2 00:13:15 Yeah. So I think this is a huge point and something that we'll be talking a lot more about, or I'll be exploring a lot about in kind of report back on, on what we find is how to compensate salespeople and like what we saw with Chris before at podcast motor. Hi Chris. I know you're listening to the show and thanks for reaching out. And I think Dave, we'll we'll touch on this later is, um, you know, how we paid Chris, I think very naturally and appropriately drove a lot of how he worked, you know, and from like, you know, close deals or book calls or, you know, make outbound emails, you know, like you're talking about, like, I think that we have to think about, and people just general in general should think about like, what is the desired outcome and then compensate your sales team on that.
Speaker 2 00:14:00 If it's just you're in the discovery phase and you want to have a bunch of calls, then I think you should pay people on calls, booked or calls held. I think we're, we're past that to where we have an idea of like the need and the product and kind of the market. And so it's actually closing sales, but even with that is like, do you close? Do you pay people, you know, one time upfront? Or is it like for the life of the customer or like all of these kinds of things. So like it's yeah. It's this whole hornet's nest of, of, of like sub topics and angles around sales compensation.
Speaker 3 00:14:30 Yeah. I mean, if that follows into the same thing that I'm having right now with affiliate compensation. So, you know, I have, I have an affiliate program with recapture and, you know, I've had a few people sign up for it. I, you know, have very small number of actual contributing folks to sales pipeline. So they're the only ones that benefit from it. And, you know, I've got a new guy that was asking me to like alter my terms, um, because he's, you know, he says, he's going to bring a bunch of clients over from Jilt and he showed me some stats on a dashboard. So I don't think he's bullshitting me, but at the same time, I'm like, okay, well now I got to kind of rethink this because I wasn't really planning on doing that. But you know, this guy looked like he had a pretty substantial amount of customers would move the MRR if he brought him over. And he claims that they're all on the upper end of the revenue scale so that, you know, further tips it in his favor and in my favor. So yeah, it's definitely one of those things that you have to constantly reevaluate this stuff, because whatever you said a year ago might not be valid now. Yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah. So,
Speaker 2 00:15:41 Yeah. And so we got some feedback from listeners on your topic of, of sales from the last episode, right? We did.
Speaker 3 00:15:47 So I want to do a couple of shout outs first to Duncan Murtaugh. Thank you for the loom Duncan and the awesome suggestion of Lem lists. Uh, I am actually using it. So I appreciate that. And in fact, uh, after this podcast is over, I'm going to be launching my first AB test cold email thing. There was great debate on Friday as to whether I should have a long form or short form email in my mastermind. And so I'm going to test both because I can see merits at both sides of this. And, you know, I had cold email experts on both sides telling me that I should do one versus the other. So I'm like, we're just going to try and both I've got enough leads we can try and both. So I'm excited to do that today and a shout out to, uh, Simon Bennett for, uh, thanking me for the catching, the wave here, appreciate the kind words there, Simon and for everybody else and your positive thoughts and vibes and likes and all that good stuff on Twitter.
Speaker 3 00:16:44 I appreciate all of that as well. Recapture is definitely pulling in some new Jilt leads here, and we are very much working toward getting that all done. We did our big launch about five days ago for all the upgrades that we needed to get out there for Jilt. So it's been a chaotic time to say the least, but yeah, now that that's out there, uh, we are looking at some other things in addition to the cold contacts to see if that works, if that is working, then you know, I'm going to ramp that up separately. And I have a discussion that's scheduled with Chris tomorrow. So we'll talk about that by the time Chris hears this it'll be after the call, but, uh, yeah, so we'll be, we'll be talking about that. And if my outreach does actually have some traction, then it might make sense to hire a CRISPR, a short-term gig to start go reaching out to these customers and try to bring them over because there is definitely a window of opportunity and that is slowly closing at this point.
Speaker 3 00:17:46 It's a month old, but you know, based on I saw with the, the cart hook, abandoned cart, shut down, you know, there's a, an initial burst and then people sort of slowly trickle out of there from there. So, yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, there's probably a significant chunk that aren't going to do anything until it finally shuts down next year. And then we'll probably see another jump as well. But for now, you know, I, I've got my hands full with migrations and other things, so that's, that's all very positive and encouraging news and, uh, maybe some additional product follow on is, uh, is happening here. It may or may not be happening. I'm not saying at this point
Speaker 2 00:18:29 We talked in a previous episode about like, uh, product influences, you know, like how, how are you seeing that at this point with the stuff that like the Jilt customers are asking for and that you all are needing to do, and then like the, the pipeline that you have in your head and like how, how things are looking from that perspective, like at this point, is that all kind of leveling off or, or what
Speaker 3 00:18:55 It's kind of weird. So funnily enough about, I'll say maybe two years ago, 18 months ago, it was probably two years ago, maybe a little bit longer. I noticed that Jilt had revamped their email editor, and then I got screenshots of it one day, because I think we were checking it out for other reasons. And I noticed that there's looked a hell of a lot like mine, and before it didn't look anything like ours at all. So I was like, oh, interesting. But we are, I guess we're using kind of a standard react component for that. So, uh, and we had had ours in place for a long time. So I don't think that Jilt went out and copied us that doesn't make any sense cause we were smaller than they were. But I think that they, you know, took that same look and feel and put that in there.
Speaker 3 00:19:47 And so we looked at what they had and there was like, oh, well we could throw in like these five or six other email editor enhancements. And they're not that big, but they were things that would dramatically improve. So we kind of, we were sort of approaching a feature parody with Jilt on a lot of things in the editor stuff. And now that we're getting migrations over, customers are asking for certain things. So there's, there's a different set of emails that they, they provided. So they had like receipt emails and welcome email series and other transactional emails that were available. So they could like, for example, replace all of the transactional emails inside of WooCommerce, you could shut them all off and turn gilts on and then you would have one place to see everything, one consistent look and feel, et cetera. So, you know, I see some of those things creeping onto our list.
Speaker 3 00:20:39 I mean, a couple of them already are there, you know, we had to finish up the broadcast emails. That was a, that was a must have. And now we're able to do that and was able to do that as well. So the customers that are coming over, they get this that's great, but there were definitely other things that we didn't have like that welcome series. So we're adding that now. And then we're also, uh, we already threw on some stuff about coupon code support for EDD that we didn't have that Jilt did. And we're pulling over a lot of EDD customers from Jilt. So that was kind of an important thing to get in there. So we're, you know, we're finding little things like that and, and dropping them onto the roadmap. But you know, the, from a bigger standpoint, you know, I'm not looking at recapture as, oh my God.
Speaker 3 00:21:23 If I, if I only had these three big features, I could really compete, you know, like I don't, I don't see that now those, those aren't the things that are missing from recapture at the moment. And I don't want to add those to recapture because our core simplicity is what people like, like that's the, that's the same language I keep hearing from customers over and over. It's easy to use. I like how quick it was to get started. I like the fact that it's uncluttered. I like the fact that, you know, it's easy to navigate, et cetera, et cetera. These are all comments that they make to be largely unprompted. So, you know, I want to, I want to maintain that because clearly that resonates with the customers. And so, you know, with that in mind, there's only so much, you can start cramming into the feature bucket at that point. So I think we're looking at a strategy of expanding laterally instead of in more depth within the product. So that's why we're exploring right now, a new possible, it's not really a competing product, but it's like a product in the family that would be complimentary. That's what I'm looking for. That's the word I would,
Speaker 2 00:22:31 Yeah, that, that's interesting, man. I, and I can relate that like when a product gets relatively feature, complete use, start looking other places. Um, and I guess like, we're kind of doing that with private podcasting, right? Like that our core product for conventional podcasting is pretty complete. And the, yeah. You start looking to either really do things with sales and marketing, um, to, to drive revenue or if it's easier doing it with product, if there's a gap in the market. So yeah, I think, I think that makes a lot of sense, man. How, like how big of a kind of project or feature is this that you're looking at?
Speaker 3 00:23:04 Well, it's early, uh, we just started investigating it this past week, but, uh, I found this opportunity and it looks like it has incredibly low competition and it's a relatively simple thing to build it. That's what it seems like, but we're going to build it as its own service. So it's not going to be like built into recapture. It's a separate thing, separate standalone thing. So you can use them independently, but I will promote them, uh, across the thing. So that's going to be how I actually get some of my first customers for this new service, uh, is to use the recapture lists to, to bootstrap that. But, you know, I haven't gotten an official version of this yet, but this isn't like months of development. Um, yeah. And I think, I think we could get something up there pretty quick. My goal is to have it out there before black Friday this year, because things are going to start going up in September and if I can have it out and ready by October, then we can catch the last minute crowd and I can still do promotions with it, to the recapture list and see some product growth before the end of the year here.
Speaker 2 00:24:15 So like just based on that and knowing the space and the dynamics of black Friday, I would guess this is like, not something that like your super power users would want to use, but maybe something that's a little more kind of mid-market. Cause I know those power users aren't adding anything kind of last minute.
Speaker 3 00:24:31 Uh, it will depend on the store. Um, but yeah, I mean, in general, you know, if you're a big store, you kind of try to get things locked down by late September and then leave it the fuck alone. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it'll be for the stores that are still struggling to sort of get everything nailed down, but that's okay because that'll give me some time to sort of harden up the service before we bring on the bigger customers. Yeah. You know, that it definitely is one of those things that you want it to make sure that it's pretty Bulletproof. Uh, so yeah, I mean, I'm fine with doing it on the mid, mid to low market to start with, just to get some traction, but I'm really excited about it because it's all usage based. So like, you know, I get to charge pennies per transaction, uh, and it's not like a payment service, but you know, it basically is, is it has to do with the checkout and yeah. I mean, I think this could be pretty lucrative on a store of moderate to high volume. <inaudible>
Speaker 2 00:25:29 How are you thinking about the, the balancing of like priorities and like people resources and your time and everything between these two things? Cause I mean, recaptures got good traction. Like is there a risk of this new thing taking away from the, the traction and the growth you're seeing there and like, how are you thinking about that?
Speaker 3 00:25:48 It's probably a risk, but at this point, you know, I just went from three things down to zero in the span of 12 or three things down to one in the span of 12 months. So, uh, you know, I do feel like there's some extra bandwidth in there for me to look at the second thing and, you know, develop it as a side thing. I'm still not like, you know, if I do, like, for example, if I get Chris to do a cold sales outreach on this contract thing here, you know, that means I'm not doing the cold sale. So now I've got more bandwidth for other things like this. And you know, the main concern I have is that my developer, Mike, he doesn't have like as much to work on with recapture, unless we start going into like, you know, technical debt and stuff like this.
Speaker 3 00:26:34 So this is something that could really move the needle with technical debt. Doesn't change my MRR. So, you know, I would like to see this stuff, get out there. Then what I could do is I could hire him on full time and then we can also do that other technical debt. Like I can thread that in when he's got, you know, less of the other bigger projects to work on. Cause I don't think this other thing is like this huge gargantuan years, long effort or months long effort, you know, once you get it to a certain point, I think you're done. And if it starts generating a decent amount of revenue, then either we can do more things with recapture or we can do bigger things or we can start a third thing. Like there's all kinds of options there. So yeah. I mean, I'm trying to get to having that extra pool of MRR to be able to do that sort of choice, you know, have those sort of choices that are more flexible. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:27:27 That sounds interesting, man. I I'll I'll uh, I'll be keen to hear how the balance goes because it does seem like easy on the surface, but, but just, you know, multiple things competing for head spaces is a real thing. Like, like you've seen since giving up the consulting thing right. To focus on recapture and yeah, I mean, this is, I say that only because this is my first time having one thing to focus on and it's really nice and like, like you I've been, you know, dancing, uh, with, you know, multiple dates for several years. And like, it's really nice to be able to, to just focus on one thing, uh, at this point. But yeah, I, I, but I do, I do see, and I know what this thing is. You're talking about. Like, it does seem like a good opportunity. So be keen to hear how that goes, like all the way from like product to launching, to cross promoting and how those can play off each other and things like that. Cause they do seem complimentary, which is cool.
Speaker 3 00:28:18 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the fact that, you know, I'm not necessarily starting this from a cold start, it makes a big difference. You know, I mean, I've got several thousand on the recapture email lists and you know, this is definitely an advantage that I didn't have before. You know, it's like what the list of Rob's unfair advantages. You have a skill, you have an audience, you know, growth hacking or whatever. Well, in this case I've got an audience and I know, I know their pain at this point. So, you know, I I'm, I'm definitely not leveraging this from a position of weakness. It's more of a position of strength. Mm mm mm. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. Trying to be smart about
Speaker 2 00:28:55 It anyway. Yeah, no for sure. That's cool. That's cool. I wanted to talk about and get your kind of thoughts or impressions on it. Um, something that we're kind of struggling with in batting around internally is we were supposed to have a team retreat last summer. Obviously it was canceled, uh, would love to have another one. Um,
Speaker 3 00:29:17 I can't imagine why. I mean, you know, it's just totally escapes me.
Speaker 2 00:29:20 Yeah, yeah. Would love to have another one or an a at this point because we were three people last time and we're 14 people as of today. Oh yeah. We, you know, many of, many, many of us have not met and it's not so straight forward just say, yeah, fuck. Let's do it. You know, let's go to wherever. Fortunately, like we have the money to, to do it, but, but just me as like a team member and as like the, you know, the boss kinda says like that, you know, there's an element to this that is kind of reckless, you know, like having people from all over the world, literally getting on airplanes and flying to a place and us hanging out in a conference room and, you know, restaurants and stuff like that for two or three, four days. Like, I don't think it's super dangerous, but also I don't think it's like totally cool.
Speaker 2 00:30:11 So it's just something we're, we're kind of, yeah. We're struggling with how to add, to make that decision. I say we, because it's me that it needs to make the decision in the end, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm trying to get like the team involved to, and, and, you know, getting their input and feedback and kind of get a sense from how everyone's feeling about it because ultimately it's their kind of personal decision about like, yeah, cool with this. And I'm comfortable with traveling and being around people that I don't know, and some of them are vaccinated and some of them aren't vaccinated. And so it's just complicated, man. I chatted with a few folks that, that have, you know, companies that have done team retreats and they're, they're kind of in similar boats, I saw a tweet thread between the CEOs of buffer and help scout kind of talking about the same thing last week. And it's just, yeah, it's weird that like, I feel like this is as good as COVID has gotten in a very long time, you know? And like maybe we're at the, as good as it's gonna get for a while phase. Yeah. I don't know. It's just, I don't have an answer, but it's just a thing we're thinking about.
Speaker 3 00:31:12 Yeah. I mean, it's tough. So, you know, I told you earlier that we're having big snow fall edition here, summer edition, and you know, one of the motives behind it was the fact that we had all gotten vaccinated. So that was kind of a prerequisite, you know, I didn't feel comfortable until I knew that, you know, I was personally vaccinated, but I think that was sort of a general thing that other people in the group didn't want to hang out with other people if they hadn't gotten vaccinated because you know, we're putting each other at risk by doing that. And it, by being vaccinated were less at risk. So, you know, that feels like a, a starting point. But at the same time, I know, you know, we're all in north America. So that's a data point that you don't necessarily have in your favor because you're scattered all over the globe and vaccine distribution all over the globe is not uniform and it's not consistent.
Speaker 3 00:32:05 So, you know, somebody may want it and simply not have access to it and may not have access to it for a long time. So that's, that's definitely a bit of inequity that take into account there. And I, you know, I don't have an answer for you and I, you know, my, my suggestion was going to be what you already said, which was, you know, talk to your team about it, see what they feel like, what do they say? You know? And I think you, you should, the one thing you should try to do is just say, look, I want everybody to be profoundly honest about this. If you have misgivings, so please, I want to hear it about it. Like, this is, this is not a, this is not a time for you to stay silent in the background. If you have a misgiving, I need to known like it's important.
Speaker 3 00:32:50 Yeah. Yeah. Because there is that tendency, I think when you're in the position of authority that people don't want to give you bad news and you kind of have to prompt them to say, look, it's okay to give me something I don't want to hear. Um, cause I need to know, I need to know how you're feeling about it and that's, that's important. So, you know, that would be my one, one tidbit there based on prior experience where you say something and you expect them to take it the way that you think you're giving it and they take it a different way because you're the boss. Yeah. I hate that. I get that. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:33:27 Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. And I mean to, to the point where, you know, we, we have talked about it in our team meetings and I have brought it up in slack and basically got no feedback. And then I created a survey and sent it to everyone and, you know, asked everyone to respond. And so now, like I have hard data points from most people and yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's a lot of what you're talking about. As you know, there, I can send some reluctance just in general and, and I have a lot of reluctance and, and so maybe that's just me projecting kind of how I feel like I would love to see everyone and for us all to be able to get together. But honestly I don't, I don't think it's smart, you know, like I don't think it's smart and maybe we'll do it anyhow, but, but, but I think we might not too. So interesting.
Speaker 3 00:34:15 Other alternative you might consider an, you know, I hate suggesting virtual conferences, but throw it out to the team and see, you know, is there another suggestion that you would feel comfortable with that helps you get to know your team on a personal level that we can try instead, whatever that is. I don't know. You know, I've heard people doing like online escape rooms together as a team, you know, kind of a team building exercise, but still COVID friendly. Right? Yeah. I don't know what that looks like for your team specifically, but something like that might be, might be in the sweet spot where everybody is feeling comfortable with that. And it might not be ideal, but at least everybody's okay with it and you're not putting anybody at risk, you know, or you say, look, we're gonna do this at a different time a year from now or something like this and plan on I, you know, I don't know, I'm just spit balling here for the most part, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, the team buy-in is huge and if they're not like a hundred percent saying, yeah, let's all get together, then I think you need to definitely listen to that and you yourself are already not a hundred percent behind it. So, you know, I think expressing that to your team as well is important. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:35:28 Yep. Yeah. I mean, so, so I'd love to hear from folks listening, like, you know, if you have a team and you've done retreats in the past and you're looking at doing it again, how are you about it? How are you structuring it? I think there has to be an option for people not to do it and participate remotely. That's what, uh, Joel from buffer and, and Nick were talking about on Twitter. And I think that, that, you know, Dave, we talk a lot about like things from COVID that will carry over into, you know, the foreseeable future of our work lives is I think stuff like that is, you know, if we are at the point where we can do an in-person retreat, it has to be inclusive of people who can't or don't want to come. Whereas in the past, like I think the assumption has been, everyone comes and like, that's kind of not fair to some people because they don't want to, or they can't be away from their families or they don't like traveling, you know, but they still want to participate in the things that the company does. And I think that's like as a remote company, we need to be inclusive of, of all those things. And I think sometimes we've just said like, Hey, fuck it. We're going to Lisbon. Or we're going to San Diego, here's your plane ticket. And that's like us assuming that people are cool with that. And that's not always the case
Speaker 3 00:36:33 As the company grows. That's certainly more important. But yes, we'd love to hear what your thoughts are on it. Give us an email podcast@roguestartups.com hit us up on Twitter or wherever you can find Craiger. I hanging out. We'd love to hear from
Speaker 0 00:36:48 You. 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, that over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
