Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the Rogue Startups Podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 2 00:00:20 All right, welcome back to episode 2 75 of Rogue Startups. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 3 00:00:27 Uh, dude, I'm amazing. Uh, we're recording this on President's Day. Today's President's Day, or I don't know, some random quasi <laugh> holiday where some people are working and, and some people aren't. And I feel like it's like a cheat code, right? It's like I worked most of the day because I wanna be off the rest of the week, and it's like zero stress, no, almost no calls. Uh, it's great. It's how work should be. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:00:52 Yeah. Uh, it's funny, you know, president's Day weekend here in Colorado sort of evokes the ski weekend. Like this is the weekend that everybody goes up and goes skiing. So just like, I won't go camping on the 4th of July. I don't go skiing on President's weekend. Uh, you know, so I stay home. The kids are here, they're doing stuff, they're hanging out with their friends and other things. But yeah, it's been a little bit of a cheat code for me today too, getting stuff done, customer support's been blissfully light, so I've been able to crank through some other tasks that I didn't get through last week and feeling pretty good about
Speaker 3 00:01:28 It. Awesome. Awesome. That's cool, man. So, I think today we're gonna be kind of chatting through just some updates and stuff we've learned. It's been a couple of weeks since we recorded Partly My fault, partly your fault because you were at, at Big Snow Tiny Con West. I'd love to hear like how that was and what you're taking away from it and stuff like that. I know it's a big event, big kinda like milestone event for you in the year, right?
Speaker 2 00:01:52 Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, at this point we, big Snow is definitely, you know, I, I've tried to space conferences out a across the year because they tend to have this, you know, jumpstart of motivation for me. And they also end up being like these buildup events where, you know, I'm coming to the event and I'm seeing all the friends and fellow business owners that I haven't seen in a while. So, you know, I want to have a story for them. I want to show them things that I've accomplished. And so, you know, that, that to me is motivating. So that between the events, I'm like, okay, well I gotta get shit done here because, you know, next time I go to Big Snow, I don't have anything to say, I'm gonna look like an idiot. And, you know, that's not good. So, you know, for me that's a, that's a personally motivating thing.
Speaker 2 00:02:44 So when I, when we got together here at Big Snow, we went up to Beaver Creek. Of course, the usual place where we meet the snow was fucking fantastic this year. Nice. Really high quality. Yeah. So we're having a La Nina here in, uh, Colorado La Laina, uh, year. And basically what that means is you get one of two options on a La Nina year. It can be absolute shit, or it can be like, shit, tons of snow. And most of the time it's the second one. Sometimes we get the first one. So with a La Nina, it's like maybe an 80 20 split. Thankfully we're in the shit ton of snow year. Yep. And so the ski areas have gotten dumped on, and it's been like pretty consistent. It's not like woo, you know, one big storm and then nothing for weeks. It's been like five inches here and 10 inches here, and, you know, three one inch storms right in a row and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 00:03:35 So that kind of consistency makes for some amazing conditions. So we went up there, had perfect, perfect conditions, like tree skiing was open. I think the, the resort was like 96, 90 8% open, which is Wow. Nice. You know, if you know anything about, yeah, if you know anything about skiing, like that is a rare thing to have it that open that early in the season. You, we don't usually hit 96, 98 until late February, early March, and that's after some big storms. And it doesn't stay that way very long. And it's been that way for a while now. So yeah, great conditions, great time. Everybody enjoyed, you know, nobody got hurt. <laugh>, you know, that's always a concern of mine as well. But, you know, the, the crowd is not that reckless. So anyway, so we did, you know, our usual bus business updates and business presentations, and that was all just amazing.
Speaker 2 00:04:30 And I, you know, I came away from it with, you know, some really great takeaways and some updates and some things that I'm going to start implementing here in the upcoming year. So those are the things, some of the things I wanted to mention actually today, and the first thing that I was kind of challenged on at Big Snow this year was about, uh, you know, how, how I actually spend my time on a day-to-day and basis mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And, you know, most of the time I've showed up at Big Snow, I'm mostly saying, oh, I kinda waved my hands. I'm not doing more than an hour or two support a day max. You know, most of the time it's less than that. And this year I got some pushback, like, really is is it really doing that? Because it sounds like from all the things that you're describing, like you're really spending more time on it and you're just kind of kidding yourself.
Speaker 2 00:05:25 And so I took the challenge and started tracking my time. And guess who was right? Not you. Not me. That's right. <laugh>. There you go. <laugh>. Uh, I was kidding myself. Uh, you know, our capacity to bullshit ourselves is huge, and mine is certainly no exception. And so, you know, in tracking that time, the thing that was the takeaway from it was, you know, audit your time, number one, but number two, start to do things to outsource and offload those things that just aren't that valuable to the business are repetitive. Something you can automate, like give yourself more valuable time, more energizing time. So, I don't know, have you read, uh, buy Back Your Time by Dan Martel yet?
Speaker 3 00:06:18 No. Huh? I've, I've, I've heard it's a very good book. Uh, but no,
Speaker 2 00:06:22 So it was mentioned, uh, also at Big Snow. Um, have you read Dan Sullivan?
Speaker 3 00:06:27 Uh, I've read several things by Dan Sullivan. Yep.
Speaker 2 00:06:29 Yeah, so I mean, Dan, Dan Sullivan's got a lot of good stuff in there. The self-managing company, the Four C's gap in the gain. And apparently, uh, somebody had read Dan's book, uh, Dan Martel's book at Big Snow, and the takeaway was, it's kind of a re repackaging of a lot of stuff that Dan Sullivan already said mm-hmm. In a lot of different ways mm-hmm. <affirmative> and an, and in more depth on Dan Sullivan's part. So, uh, not to take away from Dan Martel's stuff here, he, he had different stories and, and personal experience in there that obviously was not in Dan Sullivan's stuff. So, but you know, Dan Sullivan's stuff, uh, I've gotten into more since and he talks about, you know, making sure that you do an inventory of your time and he does it in an abc uh, fashion where the A tasks are like the irritating things and the B tasks are just sort of, okay, they don't really give you energy, but they're not really bothering you either.
Speaker 2 00:07:27 And then the C tasks are like the ones that are amazing, the ones that you really truly get benefit out of the ones that really move the needle on the business. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so, you know, Dan's thesis is ditch the As, minimize the BS and start going for just the C's and why he put the Cs at the very bottom. I really don't know. I mean, that seems like a really weird scale, right? Yeah. But a anyway, we're not here to evaluate Dan Sullivan. The thing that, uh, you know, I took away from all of that. I started reading Dan Sullivan and it was resonating with me, and I'm looking at my time and I'm going, there are just too many. A's in my daily, weekly routine, daily, weekly, monthly routine. There's quite a few B's and not enough C's. And so now I'm like looking through all of those, trying to figure out how I'm going to package this up, who I'm gonna hire, what skills do they need, and what am I gonna ask them to do.
Speaker 2 00:08:25 So I'm getting serious about, you know, trying to hire maybe a support person, maybe a VA person, maybe it's a combination of both. Don't really know quite yet. I'm still kind of inventorying all the shit that I don't like I shouldn't be doing, or that isn't giving me joy. But, you know, that was probably the biggest thing there. And then of course, uh, you know, talking about the four Cs, I'm also trying to put that into play. So if you're not familiar with Dan Sullivan's four Cs, he talks about, about if you're gonna make any kind of a change in your business, which isn't one of the four C's, by the way, then you have to start by making a commitment. And then from that commitment, which has to have like a specific deadline and you know, something to give you a reason to act mm-hmm. <affirmative>,
Speaker 2 00:09:11 Then that's followed by a period of courage where you're like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I gotta figure this shit out. Um, which then gives you the capability to actually carry through with it. Because in that period of courage, you're trying to figure this out, you go through, you learn stuff, whatever, and then that gives you the capability to accomplish it. And then once you have accomplished something that gives you confidence to go into the, the, the next thing that you want to do there. So those are the four Cs. And so right now I'm kind of in the commitment, courage phase here, just trying to figure the shit out. <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:09:47 So I have a lot of strong feelings about this. Um,
Speaker 2 00:09:52 Oh, love it. Bring it on.
Speaker 3 00:09:53 And I don't want to say it's bullshit because that's too strong of a, of a phrase. It's, it's, what you're talking about is challenging and nuanced. I'll, I'll that, that's, that's a diplomatic way of saying it. The problem I have with, because I'm going through the exact same thing, right? I had several emails out right now to between like growth assistance.com or looking for an EA or fractional kind of like marketing help maybe of a, like a specialist to buy back some of my time. The problem with this is it costs money, right? <laugh> like, yeah. And, uh, the thing that people writing these books don't remember is that like many of us are in this desert of like, we have businesses that we wanna reinvest heavily in and they're not ultra profitable to where you can, you know, just throw off another few grand a month to offload five hours of your week.
Speaker 3 00:10:52 Like I, and that's where, that's where I think this falls down is if you're doing 10 million a year, a few grand for the five hours of your time can be worth it, cuz it's just not that big a deal, right? But if you're doing 30 grand a month and you gotta pay yourself something and you gotta pay developer and support person, that's all the money, right? There's not just an extra few grand to have the luxury of giving yourself a little more time that like, you don't actually need to hire an EA or a person in the Philippines or whatever to do like these menial tasks. Like, you, you should just not do, I, I don't mean you Dave, I just mean like me, or we, you know, us as, as founders should just not do those things or automate them completely or find a way to grow the business to where, and this is where it really is challenging for me to where I have that courage <laugh> to say, I need to, um, treat my time as more of a luxury because if I do this thing, it will have outsized returns. Um, and I think that's the, that's the challenge is we all as founders are like pretty bad at any one thing. <laugh>, right? <laugh>, like, but we're pretty good at pretty much everything, you know, like, I consider myself like a solid B at basically everything except for design and development, right? Like, I would never try to do that, but like customer support and success and sales and marketing and ops, like, I'm, I'm pretty good at all those things. Um, and so to convince me that like, yeah, jack
Speaker 2 00:12:29 Of all trades message,
Speaker 3 00:12:29 Finding someone else to replace me with those things so that I can then like focus down on, on some area of those is, is challenging. I'm, I'm not saying it's wrong, but, uh, I think that's where you have to have a lot of data and a lot of conviction to gamble with that, that bringing that person on and delegating these things from your business, you know, because like to say, Hey, I'm gonna bring in an EA and they're gonna do X, Y, Z. Like the second you do that, then there's reporting and there's like Dan Sullivan's big thing is like, what is the defin definition of success? Like, what does success look like when you're doing these things? You don't have to define that once <laugh> and only get reporting on it once a week or once a month or something like that. You're just in the weeds and you're managing HubSpot and you're, you know, looking at the CRM all the time.
Speaker 3 00:13:21 Like, you don't need a, a strict definition upfront before you go hire someone, uh, for any of these tasks. Yeah. It, it, I'm, again, I'm not saying it's wrong, I know it's right. And that's why I'm almost like challenging myself to say like every 10 million, you know, plus a year business. The founder has an executive assistant, so I kind of just think I need to do it <laugh> because there's some like secondary benefit to me, like prioritizing myself and my time and being able to delegate some things. But so far I've found it to be a net loss to my productivity for all the reasons I just mentioned. I, I just think it's really hard. So like, I, I hope you do it and it's successful, but I think like for everyone who's done it and failed, I like, like me <laugh>, uh, like I I hear you.
Speaker 2 00:14:11 Uh, so I hear exactly what you're saying there and you know, you have raised some, uh, concerns that I have about, you know, like especially the money thing, right? You know, am I gonna be able to afford this? Is it going to buy enough of my time that I'm going to move the needle in other aspects of the business? And so, lemme tell you the other thing that really drove this for me. So I did the EOS roll chart in December, and uh, for those that aren't familiar that are listening here, the EOS roll chart basically says, you know, take all of the, the top level things that are going on in your company and, you know, if you're a bootstrap founder and you're under 10 K r, the answer is you're doing everything. Yep. And that's totally fine and there's no problem with that.
Speaker 2 00:14:57 But as you get bigger, you're gonna find that certain roles suddenly take on outsized importance depending on where you're at in your lifecycle. So it's less, for example, about development and it might be more about sales, or it might be more about marketing or, you know, maybe you're a FinTech startup and you need somebody to manage your finances or whatever. It's there, there's something that's in there. And so you need to define what all these things are. So I did that inventory myself and of course my name ended up on every one except one box. And there were six boxes, seven boxes mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that's a lot of boxes, you know, and especially for a company at the size that we're at. And so I was looking at, you know, well what's the box I could let go first? What's the one that doesn't, what's the one that I feel like I could get outsized benefit from and support was the one that, that I came up with on that there are definitely tasks that I'm spending my time on that aren't generating a ton of value for the business.
Speaker 2 00:16:04 Doing email follow-ups with customers, uh, that are not necessarily easy to, um, automate right now because they're deeply personalized about what's going on with their situation. There's some initial follow up with the customers where they're just not, they didn't ask a good question. And so I have to follow up with them to find out what the hell they're really asking. Right? And you gotta follow up several times to make sure if they're not responding, stuff like that. So I'm, I, part of the inventory that I'm taking right now is, can I find enough shit to make this worthwhile? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because if I, if the answer is I can't find more than three hours worth of shit in a week to do, it's not gonna happen. <laugh>. Okay. I totally agree with you on that, but so far I haven't found that's the case. Whether I'll be able to translate this and do something meaningful or not is kind of open to be seen.
Speaker 2 00:17:02 But I, I feel like even the exercise of going through with this, even if I end up holding on to a lot of the stuff that I said I'm gonna outsource, part of what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna set up SOPs and I'm going to document some things that are going on in the business so that, you know, it isn't just me in my head with the only, I'm the only one that knows what the hell to do about everything here. I don't want to do that. And the more I've done that, the better things I've gotten, uh, for other parts of the business. Right now when we've done that for engineering, when we did it, we did a little bit with sales. Uh, I had another one for support when I was doing the plugins and that got better. So all of those things I know are a net positive business.
Speaker 2 00:17:46 So part of this is me kind of pushing in, in those directions to open those pieces up. But part of it is, can I, you know, is the end of this exercise, can I offload some shit off my plate? Cuz I find that I don't, I'm not getting enough time for marketing. That's basically what it comes down to. Yeah. I feel like I could be doing more marketing and I'm not, I'm mired in these other things. That was really the motivator. Yeah. So, you know, if I can find that where I'm doing less of the support pieces, you know, I'll still be the top tier support cust, you know, and for certain customers I may just say, look, this customer, they always come to me cuz they're a, you know, a special customer and I know they're not asking bullshit questions. Like they've got real deep important stuff that I need to deal with and they shouldn't just go through tier one support. Um, that's not gonna make 'em feel special. So, um, you know, stuff like that. But right now where I'm at, that's kind of, that's kind of what's driving this and motivating the whole exercise in the first place. So yeah, I mean this is definitely a, let's see how it goes. Yeah. Um, but, but I can't, I can't figure out how it's gonna go until I actually sit down and try to actually do most, if not all of this, so mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 3 00:18:58 Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. No, I, and, and I want to clarify, um, cuz I love hiring <laugh>, I love hiring people. I love having a team. I want to grow the team. I think that the, the one specifically what I'm talking about is like not hiring subject matter experts because I think that's the easiest way to do what you're talking about. Like, hiring a person for support. Do it right. Hire a, a specialist within the marketing realm. Like do it, you know, I think those are easy to, to quantify the ROI for you. The challenge is like hiring a VA or an executive assistant like that, to me, that's where like, eh, like how, how do I quantify the return of my time investment, like, on, on this? And I think the thing that goes right along with that is how do you, uh, how, how much capacity do you have if you had more hours, right?
Speaker 3 00:19:50 Because like to me, more hours does not necessarily mean more ability to do work because I do like the most important things first. And that's where like most of my brain power goes. And then the rest of it is like, fucking sign in gusto to give the state of Virginia access to file my taxes and you know, like, remind this person about this thing or click around in HubSpot to follow up on sales leads and things that like, just don't require a ton of mental power, but like require a couple of hours. I couldn't do two more hours of intense like marketing creative work a day. And so like that, that's just where I question this. And I, and I want to be proven wrong. You know, I want someone to say like, Hey, if you never had to fucking worry about signing in to Gusto and managing the state of Virginia, or what state of Virginia's great.
Speaker 3 00:20:39 Um, but like, if you never had to mess with, uh, like what if, if you, you, the load on you to do email was half of what it is. You know, like maybe if if I just didn't have that cognitive load, I would be able to invest another hour in marketing a day just cuz I felt better. Maybe. I don't know. I I think it's worth an experiment. Um, but I think that's the assumption that people make about like VAs and eaas that, um, that I'm just not sure about. I think hiring a support person, a hundred percent hire a designer, a hundred percent hiring a marketing person, uh, maybe, you know, like to some, like to, to fill some role maybe. I think just hiring general marketing people is a little more challenging than that. But, um, anyways, I just wanted to say like, I'm not against hiring. I'm super for hiring, but, but I think it, like hiring of an admin person is tough to quantify the R ROI on
Speaker 2 00:21:37 <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and I thi I feel like at this point, you know, we ought to have a little disclaimer. The Rogue Startups Podcast would like to state that we love the state of Virginia
Speaker 3 00:21:47 <laugh> <laugh>. They're, they're great. They're actually really great. Uh, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:21:51 Yeah. Nothing wrong with the state of Virginia anyway. There
Speaker 3 00:21:53 Are definitely states that are not great. Uh, I won't name them, but,
Speaker 2 00:21:56 Um, yeah, no, no, no. Uh, but I mean, yeah, I hear what you're saying. I, you know, my only concern about the support thing right now, and the reason I have said maybe it's a va maybe it's a support, maybe it's combination. I don't still have a real sense of how many hours I have to give or I, let me restate that. I don't have a sense of how many hours are really required of my time that I could outsource to somebody else that are strictly support. Hmm. And so right now I'm just kind of doing an inventory of everything. Yep. And you know, maybe there are some things in there that I can add to this person's plate that are not necessarily support, but there are also things that I just don't really want to do. Here's a great example. Every month I have to go through and manually tally up affiliate revenue for three different vendors so that I can, uh, figure out what their revenue share is.
Speaker 2 00:22:53 And I don't have it automated. And for, uh, a variety of reasons, it's not, uh, immediately straightforward to automate that because there's some rules that we have to do in there, like if it's been in the last 30 days and if we haven't billed them yet and some other stuff mm-hmm. <affirmative>, some other stuff. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So it does require some manual checking, but I fucking hate this job. <laugh>. Like, this is not this, I really don't, I mean, I love our partners and I love our affiliates that are doing stuff. I hate this reporting aspect of it. I have to do it because it's part of the whole thing. But it really, every time I'm doing this, I'm like, ah, Jesus. All right, let me just get another piece of paper, tick ticked, you know, I'm writing down all the plans and doing ticks and I'm checking the plans and I'm like, ah, somebody else should do this.
Speaker 2 00:23:36 Like, this sucks. So that's the kind of stuff that I want to offload. Like that does not, that does not move the business forward. That is not making recapture better. That is not gonna grow our mri, none of that. Like, so I'm looking for those kind of things and maybe say, all right, your support and you also do these other things here on this frequency. Yep. Um, so that's what I'm kind of hoping out of it. But, you know, I'm still in the discovery phase of all of this, so I don't know what I don't know, uh, so far it looks like, yeah, there's probably something here, how much still to be determined. But I mean, it was important for me to go through this exercise mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because I definitely felt like, holy shit, I'm, I really need to do more marketing. I love the marketing. I'm enjoying the marketing. The marketing is getting some traction. We're starting to see like results in our organic SEO already. Uh, because it wasn't optimized before. I've done a lot of optimizations now, technical, seo, adjacent keywords, yada yada yada. And shit's happening. Like traffic's going up, I'm cool. I'm like, wow, okay, great. We need to do more of that
Speaker 3 00:24:46 <laugh>. Yeah. That's awesome. But,
Speaker 2 00:24:47 Uh, I, I don't have the bandwidth to do more of that right now, and I'm like mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So trying to, trying to solve for that problem there.
Speaker 3 00:24:55 Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Totally. A hundred percent.
Speaker 2 00:24:57 But that, that was probably one of the, the big takeaways from Big Snow this year. There was a couple other ones like, um, do I really understand my buyer's journey right now? And, you know, I, I can do that hand wavy thing where I say, yes, I totally understand their, their journey, but I think the truth is there's subtleties in there that I'm probably not up on and I really should be. Yeah. So I need to do more analysis on that, especially with the fact that we're doing some direct partnerships now. I, I'm signing up to do some cross promotions with other partners that are in the ecosystem and I did some paid advertising with one or a couple of apps that are gonna put our stuff in prominently. And I need to be able to track that and understand what they're doing. And like, I don't have the right infrastructure for that. So that's another takeaway about you need to know that better. Because if you don't, you're not gonna be able to measure this very well. If you can't measure it, you're not gonna know if you wanna keep doing more of it or you want to do something else, or you want to pick a different partner to do the same thing with because blah, blah, blah. Like, I don't have any of that. So Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:26:05 Yep. Nice, nice. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:26:08 Those are the big things.
Speaker 3 00:26:09 I think the, um, yeah, the big thing for me is, is a little similar in like, um, I don't wanna say marketing attribution cuz that's just like an eye roll, like black hole of <laugh>, of like helplessness, but, um,
Speaker 2 00:26:24 Oh God. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:26:25 Um, yeah. Better understanding our customers. And, and you know, what's really amazing about this is like, we've been at this like five years, right? Like, that we didn't just launch. Oh, launch. Oh yeah. And like we have, you know, a bunch of customers and I'm in this space, so like I'm a customer and, uh, still like the depth to which I don't, we don't accurately message right. To our customers is astonishing <laugh>, you know, because like, I mean, part of it is like the, the, the curse of knowledge a little bit, right? Like, I have been doing this so long and know so deeply what's going on that like, I can't think about how to message what we do to someone who works for the school board of the state of Nebraska and they wanna start a podcast about, um, you know, remote education and they come to castros.com and they see, grow your audience and monetize your podcast.
Speaker 3 00:27:19 And they say, what the fuck does that mean <laugh>? Like, what do you do? Right. And how can you help me solve my problem? Like, I, I mean, we're a like decently successful business and, and I feel like we're so far off the mark, uh, there, and that's like I was telling the team today that's like simultaneously awesome because I feel like we have a ton of opportunity to improve that and grow hopefully as a result. And it's really, I don't get discouraged, but it's disheartening that, you know, realizing this, like in some ways we're quite far off the mark. And, and I mean, it's, it's like, you know, the degree to which we're off the mark is much less than it than it ever has been, maybe. But, um, yeah, you just, like, when you, when you're able to really focus on some of these things like positioning and copy and messaging and stuff like that, you're like, wow, like we're fucking up really bad here, <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:28:12 And like, we have a huge opportunity to understand our customer better and they're buying journey and why they stay and what's important. And that equates to like price and onboarding and activation and product and all of that stuff. So it's interesting, man. I, um, and I don't mean to be too like, esoteric about it, but I think it just, it's different for everyone, right? And like, the, the thing that you need to improve probably is a little bit different for all of us. But, um, I've been spending a ton of time talking to like little micro subject matter experts around all of this stuff. And it's been, it's been really enlightening to show what we do to someone with fresh eyes and them ask some really basic questions. And you're like, uh, <laugh>, like, I don't know. Like, so as much as I absolutely despise the term, I think I need to like dust off my, like jobs to be done, uh, frameworks and like kind of go back to, to that step in some respects, uh, because that's the kind of fundamental stuff of like, uh, where I think we have some opportunities.
Speaker 2 00:29:20 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to, to echo your first point here, there is, there is literally no point at which you stop learning from your customers. Yeah. If you think you know everything about your customers, you are lying to yourself. Yeah. And it is bullshit <laugh>. Yeah. Because your customers, if you are dealing, you know, maybe, maybe you are in such a tiny market that yes, you could truly understand everything about those customers, but now you're stuck because you can't grow if you're in any market of, uh, any reasonable size. And I think you and I would both qualify in this category pretty easily. You are constantly learning about new things and what they're doing, how they're using your tool, why they picked you over the competitors, where your competitors are falling short. It's still, it never ceases to amaze me when a, a customer comes to me and I ask them, well, why did you pick us over somebody else?
Speaker 2 00:30:18 And sometimes it's the very basic answer that I understand, oh, I just liked your solution better. Oh, we're just checking things out. Oh, we're doing this. Sometimes it's like, yeah, this other competitor did this thing that really annoyed the shit outta me and your tool doesn't do that. And I'm like, I didn't even think that was a reason why you'd switch. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> like, whoa, where'd that come from? That's the kind of stuff that you have to pay attention to because suddenly you might realize that your competitors are falling over themselves and they're losing customers left and right because they've failed to understand this one crucial bit about how their market works, how their customers think about their product, why they use it, what job they hired it for, jobs to be done. Right. So yeah. I mean, uh, jobs to be done, dust that sucker off and, and figure that stuff out.
Speaker 2 00:31:10 It's cool that you are now down into the deep, deep weeds of trying to get into like all those niche specific things. Cuz I know Convert Kits gone there and HubSpots gone there where they like have all these niche specific articles that they're trying to attract the organic traffic from that kind of creator and talking specifically just to them mm-hmm. <affirmative> about their unique needs and how the tool really fits all of that stuff in there. And, and when you get to that level, I think you, uh, definitely are understanding your customers an order of magnitude better than somebody who's just starting out at least. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:31:46 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, it's humbling. It's humbling for sure. I mean mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I, I think that to contradict what I said at the beginning, uh, I only am able to do this cuz I've made the time to give myself like the mental space to think deeply about this stuff. You know, so like <laugh>, whether I'm just,
Speaker 2 00:32:06 But not because you hired a VA
Speaker 3 00:32:08 <laugh>, not because I hired a va, but, but because we're just not doing as much stuff. Yeah. You know, like we just said, we're not gonna do this anymore. I'm not gonna take these calls and, and stuff like that. Yeah. To, to where like, I think that's the limiting factor for most of us. It's not time, it's, you know, brain glucose, you know, um,
Speaker 2 00:32:24 It's a, it's about saying yes to the right things. Yeah. And I have such a hard time with that. I, I am like my, my idea hamster every time I'm like scrolling through Twitter, I'm, I'm following a bunch of accounts and I'm looking for ideas of things that we should, should be thinking about or kinds of articles that we could send to our customers or whatever. And you know, some days I'm like, oh, that's a really good idea. And I send myself the email for that and then, you know, I go back and process those later and maybe I've got 20 or 30 of them that show up on my inbox and then three or four of 'em end up on our issues list and then later I'm going back and I look at the, the, the issue list that continues to grow and grow and grow. And I'm like, oh, well what should we be focusing on here? That's a lot of stuff like <laugh>. Yeah. You have to say no before you can say yes.
Speaker 3 00:33:13 And like, huge shout out to Laura Rotor, wrote an amazing blog post on this, uh, recently just about how she runs her business and it's not click Beatty, but like only working a few hours a week. And, and I believe it, like I talked to her, uh, a fair amount and like yeah, she has, you know, two young kids and just doesn't wanna work 40 hours a week and is growing a very successful business. Already sold Meet Edgar, uh, which is a very successful business. And, and she does a really good job in the blog post of just like from A to Z, how she prioritizes and has frameworks around this stuff and then actually does it and like, uses tools to, to organize and manage her time and set her priorities and stick with it and stuff like that. So willing to that show notes, it's definitely worth checking out I think for, for everybody. Like I've seen, I saw on Twitter, like people that are very, very successful, uh, saying, wow, that's cool. I learned a lot just by reading this. So, um, worth checking out.
Speaker 2 00:34:04 Yeah, yeah. Prioritization. I still struggle with that even to this day, even with my new productivity planner, which I'm still using, by the way. Nice.
Speaker 2 00:34:13 Yeah. Um, it is a very humbling exercise to go through that every week and then look at and say, oh, you know, I said I was gonna do these five things, I got two of them done. Mm. Shit. Yeah. And then I noticed like early on, oh, I'm picking things off the secondary list, not the primary list, huh. Maybe I should focus a little more on that. You know, like, yeah. So, uh, it's a, it prioritization is fucking hard. It really is. So, you know, keep working at it and if you are struggling with it, you are not alone. Cuz let me tell you, Craig and I have the same problems here.
Speaker 3 00:34:52 <laugh>. A hundred percent. Uh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2 00:34:56 Now, before we wrap up today, I want to give one shout out to a, uh, rogue Startups listener, um, Jose down in Venezuela. Thanks for your message that you sent to me on Twitter. Uh, we had a great back and forth and he was asking for, you know, how can I help better my situation living under a dictatorship and, uh, all this kind of stuff. And, you know, I gave you some stuff in the, the dms there, uh, Jose, but I definitely wanna say keep plugging away at it. You know, the more energy and effort you can put in, um, the better off you'll be and priorities and, and skilling up at your age is definitely where you want to be. So, uh, thanks Jose for sending in that comment there. For those of you out there, uh, you know, our one ask on rogue startups is always, if you find it valuable, please share us with somebody else you think would benefit from it. And if you have a minute, we would love to get a, uh, review from you on iTunes, uh, which is also in the show notes. Um, anything else, Craig?
Speaker 3 00:36:04 Uh, that's it. Yeah. Thank, thanks for everyone for listening and, and hope you're enjoying the show. You know, I think Dave and I, we had, we had a bit of a quiet time last year and I think we're back to, uh, about every other week. I think we'll be recording and Mike sprinkle in a few guests, uh, in between then. So we're, we're definitely back. We're back at it. Um, and thank you everyone for sticking with us. Cause I know for the large part, Dave, like our numbers are similar to what they were, uh, this time last year when we were kind of going full boar. So thanks everyone for sticking with us and, uh, we, we hope we're, we're showing up and, and delivering value to everyone, uh, every other week or so. <laugh> every episode,
Speaker 2 00:36:39 <laugh>. Well, we'll deliver our value every other week whenever
Speaker 3 00:36:42 We
Speaker 2 00:36:42 Can. <laugh> whenever we can. Yeah. Until next time.
Speaker 1 00:36:47 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.
