Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 2 00:00:20 All right. Welcome to episode two 60 of rogue startups. Craig, how are you doing this week?
Speaker 3 00:00:26 Uh, I'm good, man. I I'm playing the, a delicate balancing game of family time. My kids are off school for two weeks and working. So I have two weeks of like hanging out, playing with the kids in the morning, working all afternoon and into the evening, uh, for, for the next week and a half. But it's good. I'm glad we have the flexibility to do this and yeah, getting everything done. I need to
Speaker 2 00:00:49 Very nice. Very nice. How about you? Well, I just finished a partial week of vacation actually with my kids, so they had fall break and we went down to Santa Fe for four days. And just before we went to Santa Fe, my youngest came down with that minor head cold. And so we're down there the whole time and we had a great time and everybody was okay. Even my youngest who was a little snarkily, but at the end of that trip, I picked up her head cold and uh, I have been taking what should have been the remainder of that fall break week working on some other things, just recovering, like I've been, I've been down and out for four days. Uh, yesterday was like my first day of actual productive work, eh, of any kind, really. So there was a ton of catch-up I had to play as a result of that.
Speaker 2 00:01:44 And then today I was supposed to do some other stuff. Like I was invited to do an indie hackers AMA, um, and I wasn't even close to ready for that. I'm still catching up and recovery to my voice is kind of crap and I'm not feeling a hundred percent. So I was like, all right, got to reschedule that too. So yeah, it's, you know, one of the things that I was noticing about this in particular, compared to times in the past, I would stress a lot more when, uh, you know, I was freelancing cause it was like I was missing twice as much work. Right. And I was this time and this wasn't as bad because the, the week of vacation there, you know, I was catching up on some things I, you know, would spend less than an half an hour, a day doing some communication with, with my developer, Mike and catching up on customer support and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 00:02:38 Then I'd go off and spend time with family and we'd have a great day. And, you know, when the things were going down, I would like, you know, manage to crawl onto my computer for that half an hour, get what needed to be done, done, and then move on to the rest of, uh, my day of lame bed, sipping tea and pretending not to die. Right. Uh, yeah. So I mean, it just, it had a different feel to it. There was less of an urgency and stress behind it. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's still suck to be sick. That part was there, but it was very different this time, you know, feeling that. Yeah. Everything's okay. Just take the time to get well, like you don't need to panic and freak out about this. You can just relax, heal and everything is gonna continue to hum. Along without you here, which was a nice feeling I have to say.
Speaker 3 00:03:29 That's fantastic, man. Yeah. We've taught me, we've talked, been talking about it for a long time. I think that's the mark of a really healthy business is when you can step away planned or unplanned and things generally are, are able to be picked up by other folks or just kind of run on autopilot. Like I think that's, that's really great. So bummer. You got sick for sure. But glad that you didn't have the added stress of work on top of the, the shittiness of being sick, right?
Speaker 2 00:03:52 Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, just another reinforcement of gosh, you know, I made the best fucking decision in the world on May 25th this year.
Speaker 3 00:04:01 That's
Speaker 2 00:04:02 Awesome. But yes, that's why I sound a little froggy on the podcast today is, cause I'm still getting over that. I was wondering if I was going to have a voice or not today, but I woke up and I sounded better than I have in five. So this is a good sign
Speaker 3 00:04:14 Right on, right on. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:04:16 So things, uh, we're basically getting ready for black Friday at this point. So, you know, I sat down with Mike and we chewed through a list of things that were of an urgent nature. What we kind of wanted to work on during the downtime, as well as, you know, what are the things that we really need to get out for customers before we go into lockdown here so that we can, you know, provide at least the best possible experience that we're able to given the time and the constraints that we have. So we've been chewing through that list and it looks like we're going to make it with some time to spare before the beginning of November, which is great. Cause I always like to have a little bit of playtime in there in case something goes sideways and you know, then we can push a little fix out and know that the little fix is going to be stable as opposed to pushing out a bunch of things right before the lockdown and go, God, I hope this is going to work, which we've done in the past.
Speaker 2 00:05:15 Yeah. We've done that in the past, but there's always been a followup like oops, missed that one. Better fix that. Yeah. So yeah, I feel better about not having to do that. And then we can kind of move into the bigger stuff. So yeah, that's been a lot of the prep we've been trying to hire some additional development help here. And so far, you know, we've gone through one candidate and that candidate wasn't really up to par and the, the next couple of candidates we're looking at, we're scheduling to do that here this week. I'm still in the process of trying to find a cold sales guy. The hard part is like just finding a place that has cold sales guys or gals, you know, I'm, I'm not picking at this point as long as they know how to sell their gender is completely unimportant.
Speaker 2 00:06:04 But yeah, I'm still struggling with that. Plus trying to get some other stuff done. We've got some migrations, some big account migrations, you know, I took the time off last week. So none of those migrations happen and I'm the sole guy working on the migration. So these represent some pretty substantial new MRR. So they're very much high priority for me. So unfortunately my, my plate is more full than I really want it to be. And that also means that there are things that haven't gotten done in this, uh, five days sickness, hiatus that are now kind of backlogged. So my week coming up ahead is fairly busy. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:06:46 Yeah. On the developer front, where are you posting? Uh, like job ads and stuff.
Speaker 2 00:06:51 Oh, I posted a bunch of different things at this point, mostly on forums, you know, I haven't done like formal job listings, partly because I'm looking for sort of a friend of a friend kind of reference at this point where, you know, somebody says, Hey, Dave, I've worked with so-and-so. What do you think about working with them? And then, you know, that way there's kind of like that, you know, warm intro, if you will, or at least there's some, some moderate level of trust as opposed to random person off the street saying, Hey, I'm totally qualified to do this. And then you go through the resume and you're like, no, you're not. Um, so you know, I put it up on about four different forums. Uh, I've talked to a couple of different agencies. Uh, one I've worked with before one I have not. And the one that I've worked with before, they're the ones giving me some candidates and they're mostly Eastern European middle east candidates, which is great because they overlap with Mike's time zones really nicely since he's central Europe time.
Speaker 2 00:07:58 So that, uh, that's a, that's a big deal since he's going to be end up doing most of the training, questioning, answering technical support stuff. That was a major consideration there. So, you know, I'm hoping that one of those guys works out, but, uh, I, you know, at this point I don't, I don't have any real sense as to whether that's going to be the, the, the end all be all or not. And I'm not even sure how long I want to keep doing this. Cause you know, we kind of have this limited window here that we're trying to get a lot of stuff done. And if I'm still shopping for somebody into December, well, we burned a good portion of that window at that point. And you know, I need the focus, the technical focus in December. I don't need to be like bringing somebody else online in December. So that wouldn't, that, wasn't my ideal scenario there. Yeah. So
Speaker 3 00:08:51 You should, um, you should check out cloud devs. Uh, I think it's cloud devs.com.
Speaker 2 00:08:57 Um, dabs. I've never heard of that one.
Speaker 3 00:09:00 Yeah. They were recommended by a friend over here and I have chad@clouddevs.io, sorry, chatted with them off and on a couple of times. Um, but they're, they're like a placement agency kind of like a blue coating, um, mostly in south America, uh, Latin America. Um, so maybe from a time zone perspective, not perfect for you, but actually Brazil is like plus two hours from Eastern time. So like, it gets pretty middle of the road compared to like European and American time zones. But like my experience with them before is they delivered us some good candidates. They weren't quite right, but like they delivered them really fast, like the next day. So I dunno, maybe worth checking out. Um, I know some people have had a lot of success with them, so
Speaker 2 00:09:50 All right. Yeah. I'll check them out. Um, we're currently, uh, talking with upstack right now and we've had, you know, we, we had a developer from them in the past and he worked out great. So, you know, they've got some candidates, the stuff that we're getting so far, you know, he gave us one that was more front end than back end and we really needed more, you know, full stack. Yeah. So, or at the very least I would rather have a more backend heavy because that's what recapture mostly is, is backend stuff. And the front end is very template at, at this point. So, you know, even if you didn't know a lot of front end, we could, you know, you could fake the front end piece at this point. There's just, there's some minor things that are annoying up there, but most of our work is in the backend right now.
Speaker 2 00:10:34 So that's, that's where I'd rather see somebody anyway. Yeah. What's interesting is that when I put the stuff up on the job boards and I say, Hey, you know, we're looking for somebody, you know, we got the Marine stack, so that's Mongo express, react and node. And you know, we're looking for somebody with JavaScript experience and no JS experience that I'm getting people that are coming at, you know, saying, Hey, you know, I know a little bit of angular. I know some TypeScript. And I'm like, not quite exactly what we're looking for here. You know, that Venn diagram is not quite overlapping enough there. So yeah, that's, um, that's an ongoing struggle here. Hopefully we can get that resolved quickly. That's, that's something that, you know, I mean, you know, the struggle with this here, it never happens fast enough. Right. You can, you can put that stuff out there and you think, all right, I'm going to have this done in two weeks and then we're moving on and it's like, oh no, that's not going to happen that way. You know, everything in a SAS happens more slowly than you expect. Yeah. And that's just a fact of life. And you know, I try to remember that every single time it happens, but every time that it happens, I'm like, God damn it. Why isn't this going faster? Right. Right. And it just doesn't, it won't, it never will. So embrace the suck.
Speaker 3 00:11:49 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a constant source of frustration that I'm trying to get more okay with. Um, and I find coincidentally that like the busier I am, the less it bugs me, you know, like I think I just have less time to, to worry about like the problems. I don't know if that's good or bad now that I'm saying this out loud, but like we all have problems. Right. But like when I'm really busy with sales and marketing stuff, like I just don't, I don't worry about like some of the, I say products of just cause I can't do any of it. You know, like I don't design, I don't develop. And, and like, I just, don't worry about some of the things we want to do there that aren't happening as quickly as possible or bugs that I keep seeing or whatever.
Speaker 3 00:12:31 Like I just don't worry about it cause I'm busy. And I like, I dunno, maybe it's healthy, like cause cause you can like affect the business in multiple ways. And that's what I keep trying to tell myself as like, Hey, I can make a big difference on sales, marketing stuff. The product certainly is good enough for us to, you know, whatever double or triple in size. Like the things that we're doing in product are not the magical key that that will unlock this amazing next step in the business. Um, so I try to try to keep telling myself that, but, but it is frustrating sometimes when certain things don't move fast as we would like them to.
Speaker 2 00:13:03 I think when you have a little too much, I don't want to say you have too much time on your hands. I want to, I think there's a, a different way to phrase it. Cause it makes it sound like you're not doing anything. And there's, there's times that I'm thinking a lot about other things in the business and those are the times that I'm more hyper aware of when something isn't happening as fast as I want it to because I'm spending all that time thinking about stuff like, okay, well now I need to make sure that this, this and this are lined up for this other thing to happen. Oh, well that's not done yet. Well, what's going on over there. Like it's not that you don't have anything else to do, but the times that I've been like hyper busy with support or onboarding or customer calls or whatever, and I'm not thinking about those things, those are the times that I'm less stressed about this because exactly what you just said. I'm not, that's not front of mind. Right. It's not top of my mind. Yeah. So it's that kind of a problem? Uh, yes. I, I totally agree.
Speaker 3 00:14:00 And then I think that like, just being honest with yourself, like if you're really busy as a founder, like some stuff is broken, you know, and I'm really busy and I know that a lot of shit is broken with delegation and processes and ways that I can, you know, enable other people to do things in the business that I don't have to. And like that, that bugs me a lot that like, I'm so busy with like in the weeds stuff, you know, because cause like at some point you have to kind of be able to rise above all of that and think strategic long-term planning people and process kind of stuff. But I think that like we're at this weird like adolescent phase, you know, where like you're not big enough to completely take yourself out of the business day-to-day but you're too big to be in it. And there's too many things going on for you to be in every aspect of it all the time. So anyways, an assault it's better than
Speaker 2 00:14:55 Being in the toddler phase, I guess somebody still needs
Speaker 3 00:14:59 At we're walking. Yeah. Yeah. I think the big, the big update for me is just an update on our sales folks. So Chad and Michael, our account executives have been on just over two months now and uh, really this month and in the last like two weeks really have started like hitting their stride. And it's really cool to see like they're closing a pretty substantial amount of business mostly by themselves, you know? Um, and so like the work that we put in, I mean, geez, in the two months before they started just around like documentation and process and HubSpot and all this kind of stuff. And then the work that like Matt and Sam and I have been putting in to help the guys get started is, is starting to pay off. So it's, it's nice to see. And it's, it's kind of, we're just talking about is like that's happening kind of relatively on its own now, you know, but then, but then I know it's like, it's only optimized to a certain extent, you know, and I don't know what that number is right now, but like they're firing on, you know, one or two cylinders, maybe just with the amount of time we've been able to spend together and the amount of domain knowledge they have and the amount of lead flow we're giving them and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 00:16:15 So it's something I'm thinking about as we look to like the last part of the quarter is like, what are the things we need to do to get them firing on more and more cylinders? Because like they're, uh, a big leverage they're big lever, I guess I would say in the company to be able to like sell higher price stuff and to get them being able to be more successful is, is like a really important thing for us. So that that's kind of like the good and the, I still have more work to do, you know, the good is that they're selling stuff they're re they're pretty independent and like doing a lot of stuff by themselves, which is amazing. Like for two months in, and now it's like, how do we take that and optimize it. And man, like Dave fucking sales is like, and we're only two months into it is like just a numbers game.
Speaker 3 00:17:05 You know, it's just a, it's just a, how many leads do you have? What's the, you know, percentage, the book call, how many show up to a call? How many of those do you send a quote to? And then how many of the quotes do you close? Like we already have, we almost have enough data just in like really a month of them actually selling on their own to start like really being able to say like, all right, well, you know, this is like our total like funnel conversion within like the sales cycle. And it's, it's pretty cool. Like we're already saying like, Hm, like in January and February, we, we probably are gonna need to make some like data-driven decisions about like adding more people and increasing ad spend and things like that. Like we're going to collect the data for the next couple of months, just cause like you between Thanksgiving and Christmas new, year's like it's three weeks of the month, quarter, that's just shot. So we're basically have a month left of the year, but, um, it's, it's really surprising and in a, in a good way, but, but still like really surprising. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:18:06 Yeah, no, I hear you on that numbers game thing, you know, the, the cold calls and the cold emails that we were doing for the Jilt shut down really sort of drove that hall, that all home for me. Cause I could see all of the stuff in the spreadsheets there and you know, it kinda gave me a rough idea of how much MRR I might expect out of this. Um, some of those estimates were wildly off, but I could definitely put a floor on it. And those floors told me whether the whole thing was profitable or not to be going after in the first place. So since you've got a more, you know, we'll call it repeatable model at this point that you can go after for Casto. So I'm sure that that is, uh, uh, it's interesting and probably a bit frustrating to, as a sales guy to watch because you know, now you're no longer in the process there, you just have to watch them execute it. Right.
Speaker 3 00:18:58 Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it, it is a little, it is a little frustrating, but it's more exciting, you know, because it's yeah, it's like leverage, right? It's like, they're only two salespeople, you know, what if like, what if we are 10 more, you know, like you just do the math and you're like, are we need this much money to hire 10 salespeople? And that would turn out to be this much more revenue. And like, that's why people raise money. Right. Is they, they figure all that out and they can tell that story. So, yeah. It's cool. I tell you the one thing that's been a big surprise. It's not been a surprise, but it's been a pain, a pain for the company is like before I was a salesperson and I was like the account manager, you know, like onboarding people and getting them set up and answering technical questions about podcasting and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 00:19:44 Now like understandably, the AEs don't want to do that, you know? And they don't have the domain expertise of podcasting. And so we've had quite a bit of like, all right, when you close a deal, this is what happens. You know, you send this email, you introduce them to this person, they get this thing set up and you have to do whatever and Stripe and invoicing and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, I not thought about that at all. Like that was not on my radar at all to say like, oh, you know, they're going to close these deals and customers have to get set up. They need to handle handled off. Yeah. They need to get handed off to somebody. Um, but it was always just me, you know, managing it to myself. So for anyone listening, I guess who's thinking about hiring sales folks, like that's something you got to think about. And like, I think an account manager is probably on the horizon for us as these guys continue to get up to speed. Cause cause then it just takes the whole pain off of their plate and that person can handle it. So. Right.
Speaker 2 00:20:39 Yeah. And then, uh, not long after that maybe a manager of customer success. Right. We
Speaker 3 00:20:45 Have one of those already. Yeah. So Kim on our team is our, we call it a customer experience manager. So yeah. Customer, customer service and success, you know, and, and that kind of overlaps a little bit with what Matt does. His title is director of podcast or success, but it's really more of a marketing role than a true success role. Ah, okay.
Speaker 2 00:21:04 All right. Yep. Cool, cool. Well exciting things to come for sure.
Speaker 3 00:21:09 Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah. So I thought this week we would talk about a article, an article by Asia <inaudible> Asia, formerly Asia Matos, who has been on the show talking about 13 brutal truths about growth. I wish every SAS founder knew. So Asia's like super knowledgeable, like demand side marketing and yeah. Has 13 really good bullet points of things that she's learned throughout the years. And then working with her clients now with demand Maven to, to kind of help them grow that. I'm sure she's just running into this wall like every day and this is a really good article. So I think we'll talk about a few of these Hyundai.
Speaker 2 00:21:53 Yeah. And we'll also link to this in our show notes as well, but you know, of the 13, we're not going to go through all 13, but Craig and I thought there was definitely some, some bullet points in here that, you know, we, in our own experience that we could definitely say, oh yeah, that's definitely a real struggle there. Or boy, that's a, you know, there was a, one of the thing that, uh, she had pointed out there in terms of a timeframe. And I was like, yeah, that that's actually an underestimate, in my opinion, like that, that felt like a really optimistic, uh, growth period. And if everything is going well, you might hit it in that period because that certainly wasn't my experience with recapture. And that was, you know, when she tweeted this out on Twitter, I was responding to specifically that thing there and we had a discussion about it and yeah, she, uh, she agreed that this was not necessarily the, uh, the average case, probably more like the best case. So anyway, without further ado, uh, you can read the full 13 points on there, but, uh, let's just start with, uh, our favorites in here. Craig, why don't you, uh, jump in? Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:23:02 So my favorite, I say topic really comprises a couple points she makes, and it has combination of, uh, she says all growth stacks and compounds, just like a 401k, right. Uh, and the other one is that these big success stories of four T four X or 10 X in your business come from companies that are firing on the most important cylinders. And for me, these two go together that like we think about it as like incremental improvements that happen all the time, you know, like a little improvement to product, a little improvement to a marketing, you know, nurture campaign, a little improvement to our paid ads, a little improvement everywhere all the time is like what we're shooting for. So we don't have to bank on like this one crazy fucking thing that's going to like make the company, but just say like, Hey, everyday, show up and try to make it a little better.
Speaker 3 00:23:53 Uh, and then it lets it compound because you made that investment yesterday too. And so you're already a little bit better when you show up today and then over time that it gives it the chance to, to really you, you could be, you know, four or 10 times in your business. Um, but, but you don't have to do one single thing in this Herculean effort to, to make it happen. So like those two really hit home and like, we try to be kind of aspirational to work like that. Um, but that was the first thing that jumped out at me. How about you?
Speaker 2 00:24:24 Well, the comment on the growth stacks and compounds, I would say that there's a corollary to that. And I would say that small efforts add up into big results eventually, and it's about the growth. And so the story that I have with recapture that, that drives directly into that is that it took us a very long time to finally get SMS marketing, like fleshed out, implemented and, and driven home. And then at the same time, we were like on the cusp of being able to do the broadcast emails. And it was only when I put both of those out shortly after the Jilt shutdown, that we then turned around and started seeing expansion revenue in August, September, and now October as well through those two things. So the efforts that we put in for God, 10 months prior to that finally resulted in slowly expanding MRR as a result of getting in there. So all of those efforts took a very long time, but now that they're out there, new customers that are coming in, they are now bumping up into our new tiers and we're getting compounding growth out of that. So it's very much an example of that same thing there.
Speaker 3 00:25:41 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:25:43 But to your point, the, that, so there's a couple that really resonated with me. One of them was you will always move faster than your target market. And this is absolutely the case. Every single thing I've pushed out with recapture, you know, I've talked to people about it in advance said, you know, what is it you want to see us be working on? They tell us something, you know, SMS I've, I've been talking with, uh, customers about this for two years at this point on recapture. And now that we have it and I'm pushing it hard, like the adoption, it's not like everybody went, boom, SMS. We're totally ready for that. Now they're like, oh, you have SMS. Huh. Well, what can I do with that? Like, like they were asking for it. They don't quite understand it themselves. They just know that they want it and they don't fully understand the why or the how or the what, you know, it's.
Speaker 2 00:26:40 So you have to start figuring out all of those questions and answer them for your customers, which is fascinating. And I've seen this multiple times at this point with features that we've added in recapture, whether it was when we did the review reminders, we added in the, uh, the SMS stuff or some other things in there every single time, there's like this educational cycle I have to go through with the customers to let them know what is it that this can do for their business? How do they benefit from this? Why, why do they want to not ignore it? Like what are the costs of ignoring it and so on and so forth? So I, it, it, it always kind of struck me as weird. Like, why am I ahead of all these e-commerce business owners? When I probably, I always felt like I know less than my e-commerce business owners.
Speaker 2 00:27:27 And I'm finding out increasingly that that's not necessarily the case. Like they know their level of expertise in their stuff, but with email marketing, I I'm definitely at the forefront of the curve now. And I forget that they, you know, they might be hearing these things, but they don't necessarily know all the details or all the benefits or all of these things. And so there's that gap that you, as the founder have to close for them. And to me, that's been a lot of education, a lot of customer development calls, a lot of, you know, just effort, pure, straight up promotional effort to get people to do stuff. I remember when I first pushed out, winbacks like, it was probably like six months before I got people doing serious adoption on winbacks. And even now it's not like, you know, a hundred percent of our customers are using that.
Speaker 2 00:28:23 It's still very much a minority feature by comparison, even though that like is free money, basically, which brings me to the second one that I find that in my observation, this is probably true as well. And she says, it takes about three to six months to optimize most channels. And I would agree that if you are working heavily in a dedicated fashion, you might be able to optimize that in three to six months. My experience in a part-time fashion is that six months is the minimum time that you require to get a channel humming, like to where it's providing some results. And then maybe another three to six after that, to really push it to its limit. So the channel, like every time I've added a new channel in recapture a new integration, a new partnership, a new, whatever it's taken about six months for us to kind of get it to where a significant portion of the customer base is like, oh yeah, I'm into this.
Speaker 2 00:29:32 Um, and like, right, SMS right now, we're just seeing significant adoption and we're three months in. Yeah. So, you know, it's that, that's really a new channel of revenue for us. If you want to think of it that way it's an upsell and what our current offering is, but you know, it wasn't any different than when we did Shopify. I remember we integrated in 2017, I think, and it wasn't until 2018 that we started seeing real results out of that. And it was like late 2017, but it was like June of 2018 when we started seeing significant growth tick up.
Speaker 3 00:30:07 So, and I think that Asia would probably say like three to six months to really see if a channel is going to work, you know, like to validate a channel. Right, right. You're not done optimizing it until you've, you know, rung every ounce out of that rock, then you can. And so, like, it could be three to six years, right. To optimize content or paid acquisition or something big, because I think it takes a fair amount of time. Even, like she says here, even on paid to just know if it works, you know, cause you're going to be running the wrong campaigns, the wrong audiences, the wrong messaging, the wrong pages and the wrong CTS and all that stuff. And then after a couple months, you might know if it kind of works and then you optimize it forever, you know, and run it until it's done. And that's a lot later than a lot of people think, you know, like, uh, channel being truly spent like is like, I don't know, Intercom level, you know, growth, I think.
Speaker 2 00:31:09 Right, right. And this is where another Asia doesn't really mention this, but I think this piece of it right here, we've mentioned it in our own podcast, uh, several times. And that's about luck surface area. You really need, if you're going to be viable as a business, I still feel like you need some kind of element of luck along the way that helps propel your business faster. Because if you don't, then you kind of end up in this struggle world and by, and by luck, I mean, this is a very broad definition here. It could be you're in the right market at the right time. Like with podcasting, you got in early enough to where you could ride the wave of podcasting, right. With e-commerce and recapture. I got lucky to ride the wave of COVID like we saw a level of growth that I would not have seen in recapture based on the previous projections for years.
Speaker 2 00:32:07 So if I hadn't been part of that growth, if I hadn't had the tool set up at the time, I had it set up with the channels that I had available and all the features that were out there, we wouldn't have been able to take advantage of that growth. So there is an element of luck to this and those, those elements of luck help propel you to a level to where you can go from, you know, struggling to default alive. And that's a huge difference, right? If you're, if you're not at default alive, everything gets harder. So, you know, you're constantly like just trying to support yourself. Number one, and number two, trying to figure out what the hell do I need to be building for my customers and are they happy with what they have? And you know, am I serving their needs? Is this whole thing paint painful enough for me to be working on what's product market fit, look like all of these questions.
Speaker 2 00:32:59 That's really tough. And you know, the, the, the growth tactics in there make a big difference. So if you, and I think this speaks to the other thing that I really liked in here. So she says plan for two to three years of long-term growth after going live. I've been at recapture now for five years, it's going to be five years this Christmas. And yeah, I mean, it w it was probably like four in, before I felt like we were making some real headway in there. So two to three felt a little optimistic, but, you know, I was also not working a hundred percent on the business at the time. So there's that as well, but like two to three years of full long-term growth after going live. I mean, that's a piece, I don't think that gets talked about enough, right? Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:33:49 Yeah, yeah, no, totally, totally. Yeah. And I think that, yeah, the time to default alive, is it? Yeah, it's just longer than a lot of people think it's not just 10 K a month because you have server bills and people you have to pay for anything basically. And it's just like, yeah, this is it's the long road right after that, it gets a little easier, I think. But yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely the, the long path, uh, for, for most, all of us. The, I think the one I would, I would wrap up with is, um, she has one that says it's possible to die from a lack of execution. And like, I would, I would say maybe like execution and focus. And she says that in kind of the description of, of this bullet point, but like, we've talked about like rocks and we're doing okay is now, and whatever you want to call them, but like a way to make sure that you are focused.
Speaker 3 00:34:38 If you're a single founder, if you have a team to, for the team to know what is important to you as, as the founder and, you know, to the company and everybody rowing the boat in that direction, you know, like it's just so important. So that one person doesn't get a wild hair to go to a marketing initiative for this part and developer go build up product, you know, feature for this thing, and then support wanting to support, you know, these kinds of customers. And like, it's just like, if everybody is really clear about what's going on, it makes execution easier, I guess, is what I would say, because like folks want to do good, you know, and you just need to give them the goalpost of what that is. And then be able to be really honest with each other about like, you know, it's the Steve jobs, like this sucks thing, right?
Speaker 3 00:35:28 Like that that's actually like a really, it's a mean way to word something. But like the gist of what he's saying is like, you can do better. I know you can do better and this is important and we need this, you know, you could just say it that way. That would be better than telling someone their work sucks. But like, I just think more and more like, yeah, I mean, people like winning and succeeding. Right. And, and like, it's up to us to, to share what that means. So that like, when they show up, they can, they can be kind of helping us and the business get there. And yeah, that's, that's the thing that like, is maybe the most important to me. Uh, and it doesn't apply just to marketing, you know, it just, it applies to everything.
Speaker 2 00:36:11 Right. And I think there's another corollary to that one as well. And I've seen this, I've seen this with other founders where, you know, they think that execution means something other than what it really means. Execution is about a holistic approach to understanding growth, product, market, fit, customer development, and, you know, being able to provide your customers with high value so that they want to pay you something right. Execution isn't about pouring features into a product that nobody gives a shit about. Um, cause I've seen a lot of that and people are like, oh, I'm really executing. And you know, we're delivering all these features and I'm like, yeah, but have you talked to the customers? And they're like, what? And I'm like, you got to do that part. That part is the most incredible, it's the most critical part. If you skip that, you fucked up.
Speaker 2 00:37:04 Like, that's, that's a hard thing, you know? And when I see that with people, I really have to bite my tongue because, you know, I, part of me wants to be the blunt asshole and come in and say, yeah, you, you, you gotta retool that you, you fucked up there because I know at the same time, like if you don't come to that realization organically on your own, that that lesson doesn't get internalized because I was told the same thing, bluntly indirectly, every kind of way you can imagine. And it wasn't until I blew $50,000 on my own execution, trying to build something for a market that didn't exist, that I was like, shit, shit. I've been hearing this for years and I knew better. And I still did it wrong. Like, so yeah. I mean, that's, that's execution matters, but it's the right execution at the right time.
Speaker 2 00:38:00 And making sure that you're focused on what matters most. So if you're early in the product, you got to understand what is product market fit look like? What is your market need? Is this thing painful enough? Is there a trend or a wave that you can be writing right now? Is there, is there something that you're doing differently than all the other competitors that are out there, like understanding all of these things are just incredibly critical. And I don't think that people spend enough time on that stuff. I think they get enamored with a particular idea and they run with it and you know, sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you just up struggling for years wasting tons of time and money. So execution.
Speaker 3 00:38:40 Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. So thanks to Asia for writing this up, giving us all a lot to think about and reminders of yeah, like you said, Dave, things we know, you know, but butter are good to, to come to the front of our minds. Anybody has any kind of thoughts or questions about this. Please 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 as well. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1 00:39:05 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.
