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 00:00:19 Hello. Welcome back to Rogue Startups. This is Craig Hewitt with Dave Roden Baugh. Dave, how's it going?
Speaker 3 00:00:26 I am doing fantastic. How about yourself?
Speaker 2 00:00:29 Uh, it's four o'clock on Monday and I've been sitting at this computer since eight 30 this morning and it is a picture fucking perfect spring day outside, so I'm a little pissed, uh, <laugh>, but, uh, but, but all good. Can't complain. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:00:44 Yeah, yeah. Well, I went out and spent like, um, probably about half an hour at lunch just sitting in the sun. I also had breakfast outside as well, trying to absorb as much of that UV radiation as I possibly can cuz it is just doing wonders for my mood. There's no question. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:01:02 Nice. Nice. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Well, I'm sorry to everyone that we haven't podcasted in a while. Uh, I know Dave, you were at MicroCon recently. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:01:10 I was indeed, yes. Uh, I was right in my backyard, so, you know, it would've been kind of stupid for me to say, oh, I'm not going to this one. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:01:19 Yep.
Speaker 3 00:01:21 And yeah, I, I, I went and as usual, I had a very good time and do not regret it, uh, at all. So yeah. You want a little recap on that?
Speaker 2 00:01:32 Yeah, I mean maybe, uh, I maybe let's not do like highlights and lowlights, but like things you took away, uh, might be more interesting. How about that?
Speaker 3 00:01:41 Okay. Yeah, sure. So in terms of like things I took away, um, one thing that I've noticed having attended 10 comps at this point, so there, there was a, a little thing where they had everybody stand up and then sit down depending on the number of micro comps you attended. At the very end, there were three of us that were standing up who had attended 10 micro comps. It was myself, Mike Tabor, and another guy Mike. I forgot his last name. But we basically have all been there since the beginning, aside from Rob, of course.
Speaker 2 00:02:13 That's awesome.
Speaker 3 00:02:14 Yeah. And so, you know, I kind of feel like I'm in a a, a weird unique position here to sort of describe what, um, Microcom has been like historically. I feel like at some point I'm gonna be like the MicroComp histor and they're gonna lock me in a dungeon somewhere. I'm gonna have some glasses and these musty toes all around me. I'm gonna have a Feather quill and me writing down the history of MicroComp. But to that end, you know, one thing that I've noticed over the years is that I get less out of the talks and more out of the conversations. So it's more for me about going and kind of catching up with folks, seeing where people are at, seeing what people are up to, talking about what's working, talking about what's not. So those were like, you know, obviously the, the big things for me.
Speaker 3 00:03:07 With that said, you know, there were a couple of talks that I thought were pretty standout this year in terms of their content and their value to me and my business personally, which is not to say that the other talks were somehow less valuable, cuz that is simply not the case. There were some really great speakers there. It was Deb Basu, Claire Soro, Rob Walling, Patrick Campbell, and, uh, that there were some other breakout sessions as well. Uh, BET Hannon was there, uh, Andrew from DN Simple. And, and you know, there was a lot of high quality stuff going on there, but the ones that resonated with me the most because of where I'm at, uh, one was Devs talk. Uh, and he was basically giving some of his playbook that talks about what they do at Powered By Search to really juice somebody's growth. And what got my attention on this one here is that he threw out this playbook slide and he had five things on the playbook slide.
Speaker 3 00:04:07 I had already done one of them and I had the plans to do two more of them. So of course, naturally I'm looking at the list going, well, what the hell are these other two <laugh> if he's already got dialed in? Three things that I'm looking at, what other suggestions does he have that are really good? So he was talking about, you know, how do you do your comparison pages with your competitors? How do you drive customers when people are talking about your competitors, how can you inject yourself into the conversation? He was also talking about, you know, how can you go and pick on customers, or sorry, on competitors when they're doing things like price increases and how you can sort of put your name out there as part of that as well. And then, you know, one of 'em that's sort of been a, a, a, a long standing trend of just micro-businesses in general is flexing your flexibility.
Speaker 3 00:05:00 And then the last one was about Google Discovery ads. So of those, you know, we have worked on comparison pages and we've tried commenting on our customers coattails before. And of course I'm in the middle of working on a picking on MailChimp's recent price increase, and that's certainly working on driving some customers over here as well. But, you know, these other ones that he had mentioned were like, oh, I, I hadn't thought about those. Let me go check those out. So that was really cool. And the other one that really resonated with me that, uh, I've taken away a lot is, uh, Patrick Campbell's talked, so, you know, of course Patrick Campbell now with Paddle former c e o of ProfitWell, et cetera, et cetera, some really cool stuff that he was talking about retention and acquisition and pricing of which, you know, he has just tons and tons of content out there.
Speaker 3 00:05:52 But one, so one specific tactic that he threw out there that I had not heard of before was, when you are having somebody cancel, you know, we put up a little cancel reason dialogue in there. So of course that's the, that's the negative thing. Like, somebody comes and they're unhappy with your service, they say, here's why I'm canceling. I don't like this. But then here's the thing that he threw in there. He said, oh, well it's not all bad, right? Did you like something? So then there's a list of like some major things in the app. So instead of like leaving them with this impression of, oh, I hated this one thing about your app and I'm totally leaving it now, you've kind of flipped it psychologically so that the customer's like, oh, well, you know, I really liked your customer support or, you know, maybe your UX was pretty good, but it just didn't have the features I need, or something like that.
Speaker 3 00:06:45 And then he found that if you took those two and then moved it into a cancel flow where you could do a down cell, they're more likely to accept the down cell based on the data that he has on that one. So I thought that was really cool, and I thought that was pretty amazing. He was also talking about some different kinds of frameworks, uh, that you would use in order to do things like how do you make sure your, your team is all aligned at the same time, and how did we do that at Paddle? And then also talking about like demand generation and how you can take a river and create a pool. So you might have something like, you know, your traditional search-based funnel where you've got top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel content there.
Speaker 3 00:07:34 And at the top of the funnel, you're just trying to dump everybody in there and move 'em along the journey. But it's the middle of the funnel that kind of gets the most ignored because bottom of the funnel we're focused on converting top of the funnel, we're focused on filling, but the middle of the funnel, he's like, Hey, there's some really great stuff here. Normally you would do like traditional inbound sales, uh, but we could do some other things like, you know, what about freemium acquisition or what kind of demand inbound media are you doing here? Are you doing some kind of advertising that moves people along from the educational step into the interested step here? So it was kind of some cool stuff here. And basically what he's talking about is the, the, the funnel as a whole as a river. And then he's talking about, well, if you add these pools, these pools of customers are ones that you can tap on later after you have created, uh, either potential in their mind about your solution being a good fit for them or get them hooked on your product through freemium, then you can kind of pull 'em out later and say, all right, you know, it looks like you've been using this tool a lot, why don't you upgrade to pay that kind of a thing?
Speaker 3 00:08:42 So I thought those were pretty cool and those were pretty strong takeaways for me.
Speaker 2 00:08:46 Yeah, yeah. I, I like the second one a lot more than the first one. Um, and I gotta say like the, so, so the second one, like yeah, a hundred percent. Like folks who are already somewhat interested in your stuff, like that's the low hanging fruit probably in every business. And I think a lot of us discount that opportunity, myself included for sure. Like we, we have our nurture flow in place and we just assume it's done. And like, I, I think we should always be split testing that and working on iterating it and measuring it and, and trying to improve it. The first one is just like, I, I totally get what he's talking about. I think that for me, as, as I kind of qualify that topic, I say like, first of all, like, is churn a problem that I need to address? You know, and if it is, if you have, you know, 9% monthly churn or something like that, then I would, I would a hundred percent do that.
Speaker 3 00:09:37 Oh yeah, you've got other problems besides your funnel <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:09:39 Yeah. But, but I mean, I largely think that it, it kind of relates to the other one, which is that like focusing your energy on people who don't wanna be in your house is a waste of time. Right? That's a very general statement, but, but it's not the easiest like highest r o ROI thing. A and so like, if somebody doesn't like my shit, like I want to get some feedback, maybe, but like, it might just be wrong for them. They might need a free tool or they might need, so, well the way more, you know, features and it's enterprise-y or they fucking stop podcasting and like, whatever, that's fine. Like, it happens. I just like, I think trying to spend a bunch of energy to get to like 0% churn in everybody to love you is, is a fool's errand. And I think for most of it is not like our biggest problem. And so, like when you say that, I say, oh, that's cool. Like repositioning, you know, the cancellation flow is, is really cool, but like they're gone already, you know, and like, if, if you just phrase it in a different way, they, they still just don't need your stuff. So, I don't know, I I've an enormous amount of respect for Patrick, and that's, that's really cool if turned your problem. But, but I think for most of us, I just wouldn't focus on that.
Speaker 3 00:10:49 Yeah. And it clearly depends, you know, on what kind of a market you're in and where Yeah. You know, if, if you're in a more mature market and you've got massive competition and people are just switching solutions left and right, and you are all on kind of on feature parody, like that would be something that you could really see probably some retention improvement doing that alone. Right. But if you're in a market where you are the leader and you know, there isn't, uh, a ton of competition like that, that's just a total fucking waste of time. <laugh> Yeah. In my opinion.
Speaker 2 00:11:21 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, that's cool, man. I, yeah, dev, dev and Powered by Search are, are amazing. I mean, they, they put out so much content. I'm in a, in a group with Mark from, from his group, and just the, the depth of knowledge of those folks is, is unreal. So, uh, I would listen very much to anything they say <laugh>, so that that's cool. I, I'm looking forward to like checking that talk out when it's up on YouTube.
Speaker 3 00:11:45 Yeah, yeah. It should come, I don't know exactly when, I mean, they, they never published what those, uh, timeframes look like, so, yeah. But it was good stuff. And yeah, like I said, you know, there was a lot of great talks. You knows, you know, I, I will say that the thing that I enjoyed the most about Microcom was of course the MicroComp d and d competition. <laugh>
Speaker 2 00:12:05 Nerd Alert. No, nerd
Speaker 3 00:12:07 Alert. Nerd Alert. Yeah. Woo woo. Yeah. <laugh>,
Speaker 2 00:12:11 How many people were, were there just outta curiosity, not that I I were ever gonna go, but just outta curiosity, <laugh>,
Speaker 3 00:12:17 Oh, well, you know, let me entice you with some, some statistics here. So there were six of us.
Speaker 2 00:12:22 Okay.
Speaker 3 00:12:23 And, uh, Mike Tabor was the Dungeon Master, and as he has been for a number of years at this point, and he's very good at it. So, you know, we gathered together with all of the traditional snacks, although, you know, this was definitely catered more towards middle-aged men than it was for teenagers. So whereas we might have had like
Speaker 2 00:12:43 Kombucha and everything Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:12:45 The kombu, kombucha, green tea, and, uh, you know, some slightly healthier stuff. Patrick brought some, uh, very interesting Japanese snacks and, uh, some whiskey, uh, so clearly not what you had in your, uh, d and d playing campaigns when you were, uh, a teenager. Certainly I didn't, but yeah, we had a good time. It was, uh, it was a lot of fun and, you know, we pulled this one out by the skin of our teeth and enjoyed every minute of it.
Speaker 2 00:13:12 That's awesome. That's awesome. Very cool.
Speaker 3 00:13:15 Yep. That's now a, a, a tradition at this point, so I think I'd be disappointed if I missed out on it next year.
Speaker 2 00:13:22 Yeah, yeah. Neat. Neat. I have two updates from my end, aside from Missing Microphone, which I'm, I'm bummed I couldn't make, but just wasn't in the cards this year. We're, we're actually doing our team retreat in six weeks, uh, five, no, shit, five weeks <laugh>. We're doing annual team retreat. We're going to Greece, uh, which is where Word Camp Europe is gonna be. So pretty excited about that. We have about half our team in Europe, and so it's about the same to go there as it is to come here and fucking, everything there is cheaper. So it's actually probably cheaper, uh, <laugh> to just go to Europe. Um, so pretty excited about that. We're gonna have two days retreat and then word Camp contributor day, and then the two is of the conference, which is largely just like you're saying, uh, hallway track and meetings for me. Um, but several of the team members are gonna stay for Word Camp, so pretty, pretty excited. It'll be almost a week in Greece, which I very much am looking forward to.
Speaker 3 00:14:18 I can totally see that that's gonna be an amazing experience, I think, for you and the team. And it is, you know, it is quite hilarious that it is easier for you to just jump over to Europe and, and get everybody to congregate there than it is to try to get them all to come to the United States. I'm kind of, I'm in exactly the same boat since my team is all in Spain right now, and, uh, yeah. It's easier for me to just get them to move somewhere else and then me go over there and the whole cost of it's considerably lower.
Speaker 2 00:14:46 Yeah, for sure. For sure. Are you all thinking about getting together in person?
Speaker 3 00:14:51 So, I am actually going with, uh, my wife and I are going with our daughter for her graduation present this year. She graduates high school, we're taking her to Spain. Awesome. So on the last day of the trip there, I am gonna try to meet my team for dinner up in Barcelona. Hmm.
Speaker 2 00:15:10 Lovely. That's super cool.
Speaker 3 00:15:11 Yeah. So they'll have to travel up a little bit, but for them, they like getting away, uh, from their respective cities. They're down towards Valencia. Yeah. So coming up to Barcelona is nice, and it's not that hard. I think it's like a couple hours to drive up there or something. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, you know, which, if you live in Spain, that sounds like, you know, horrible <laugh>. You know what the, the, the classic joke about the difference between the United States and Europe is Right.
Speaker 2 00:15:37 Uh, there's a lot of them <laugh>, well,
Speaker 3 00:15:39 Okay. Yeah. Okay. No, the, the, but this, this is the classic joke in, in Europe. Um, they think a hundred miles as far in the United States thinks a hundred years is old.
Speaker 2 00:15:49 Oh, right. Yep. Yep. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:15:52 So yeah, it's, it's same thing there, right. But yeah, so that will actually be the first time ever we've ever gotten together in person.
Speaker 2 00:16:01 Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it?
Speaker 3 00:16:02 Yeah. And we've been, yeah, Mike and I have been working together for six years, six some change now. Yeah. That's awesome. Never met in person. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:16:12 Yeah, they're weird. That's cool. That'll be interesting. Like we, uh, yeah, we have several people I've never met and not six years, but, but like I've only met one of 'em once and that's five years that we've been working together. So, and it's always surprising like, oh, you're really tall, or <laugh> something, or they say that about you or whatever. Um, they just can't get across in Zoom, so That's neat.
Speaker 3 00:16:34 Yeah. Everybody seems taller in real life than when you're on Zoom. I don't know what it is. It's just like I meet somebody, I'm like, oh yeah, you're a lot taller than I thought you were. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:16:42 Yeah. Yep. Dave, I have to ask, where are you and where is recapture in the kind of greater ai, I wanna say arms race, that's not the, a adoption curve, maybe is the, is the more political adoption curve, uh, way to say it. Like you personally, are you using chat g p t in AI a lot and, and like, what are you thinking about it, uh, as far as your product?
Speaker 3 00:17:06 So yes, we are using it and yes, we do have something on the roadmap as an integration point for chat G P T into our product. I'm primarily doing content generation and idea generation. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So here's an example. Um, the other day I was doing a migration for a customer and I needed some ideas about their specific vertical for ban and cart subject lines. I've been writing a ban and cart subject lines for six years, and I'm, I, I feel tapped out sometimes. <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, there's only so many times I can say, oops, you forgot something. So like, I'm looking for something new and fresh, and so I'll like go to chat g p t and I'll be like, tell me 10 subject lines for the clothing industry about abandoned carts. Like, give me some new ideas. And then when it spits out 10 of 'em, I'm like, eh, continue.
Speaker 3 00:18:03 And I'll just have it keep doing that for a while. And then after a while it kind of like starts to pick up, or, you know, sometimes I'll throw in additional content and I'll say, all right, take this description of what this company does and these kind of products. Now tell me some abandoned cart subject lines that would fit with this. And I usually get some pretty decent ideas to work with from that. And I also use it to start the basis of email content that I'm writing. I've had it, uh, generate outlines and first drafts of blog posts, all of which would require heavy editing because at that point, you know, a lot of them have very generic stuff in them. And, you know, chat G P T can get really vague and, and repetitive all at the same time. And you're like, you just said that a minute ago. Or I, I've had it do competitor analysis. And it was funny because every single co competitor had the same things. I'm like, no, that's not competitive analysis. That's just lazy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:19:05 <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:19:06 So, you know, it, the, the tool works best when the human evaluates the content and says No that shit, and then, you know, has 'em redo it or you edit it or whatever. But, you know, in terms of like increasing my productivity, I feel like it has been a substantial boost to that because I hate the, the blank page syndrome. It just drives me nuts. And that's the hardest part for me to get past. So if I can have like a ton of stuff on the page, even if it's like 50% garbage, that 50% that isn't garbage is totally something I can work with. And it makes me way more productive to add onto it, to expand on it, to go and enrich it with other details or, you know, have it regenerate certain sections. So I have found it to be extremely valuable on all of those dimensions, but, you know, I don't feel like it's replacing anybody on our team anytime soon. I don't feel like you can just leave it unsupervised, you know, much like a toddler and you definitely have to check the output much like a teenager <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, all of those caveats to say I'm positive about it. I feel like there's strong potential for now and in the future, but you know, it is not working independently yet. And that's totally fine by me. Yeah. How about you?
Speaker 2 00:20:31 Um, yeah, so I, I have been, uh, I'll say like on the sidelines for a while, and in the last two weeks really have, have Doven div dived, I dived in PR pretty deep. Um, we've been looking at it from a product perspective for a while, like for months. And unfortunately just have other big things that we're focused on. We released our first ad product, uh, this past week. So Cast us Ads is live. So Dave, this very podcast may have ads on it here soon. So we're, we're appending pre and post roll ads for our customers automatically just click a button and your podcast says ads and you make money. It's amazing. So check it out, casto.com/advertising if you wanna make money from a podcast. But stuff like that and a few other monetization focused things have taken a lot of our dev focus and it's really just crappy timing cuz they're really super important and they're really big features like this one.
Speaker 2 00:21:25 And so I say like, shit, like these AI features and tools in the product are amazing. Nobody's doing them yet as, as like an integrated into a host. We should a hundred percent do this. And it's just bad timing that we can't and, and shouldn't like, take our focus away from other things that arguably are more important. But, but we definitely have it on the roadmap. I think one thing that will be interesting, just very generally is the combination or maybe the intersection of how much people expect these things in, in every product going forward. And if they're willing to pay for them, <laugh>, you know, because I think that I, I think that nobody expects them now and people may be willing to pay for them, and I think it will come in a year or at the end of next year, maybe, where they expect it everywhere and no one will pay for it <laugh>, you know, so I think there's a bit of a, a gold rush right now.
Speaker 2 00:22:16 I a hundred percent see that in standalone tools. You know, we've been pitched by companies doing, oh, podcast summaries, you know, AI generated blah, blah, blah, blah as a standalone tool. And I'm like, man, I would not put my eggs in that basket because no, oh my God, no. Just the, the barrier. Its entry for all of these tools. E even, you know, Jasper, you know, Justin McGill's working on content at scale, like y y you gotta have something else to make that defensible. Generally. That's how I feel about, it's like, as a feature, it, it could be defensible for a period of time, which I think is the definition of not defensible, but, but like, if you do things better, if you implement AI better than everyone else, maybe that's defensible for a period of time. So it's kind of just like any other feature.
Speaker 2 00:22:59 But anyways, we're, we're, we're thinking a lot about that. It's definitely on a roadmap for like the next few months, uh, which is really cool. And then personally, yeah, using it for some ig idea generation, using it a lot for like synthesizing content. So, um, like a webinar, oh yeah, that's another good use case doing webinar tomorrow. Took the podcast transcript from someone vetted in there and it summarized it in like four paragraphs for me. So like, that's a, that's a really good example. And I'm actually having Christina, my assistant do that for people that I interview. You know, I'll say, Hey, take the last four or five podcast episodes you find from them and gimme like a summary, like a two paragraph summary of them. And so I go into that conversation like, pretty well educated on this person and, and kind of what they've been up to in the podcasting world lately.
Speaker 2 00:23:44 There are two Chrome plugins that I really like. <laugh>. One is chat, g p t sidebar. So it's just like always in the browser. It, it like summarizes Google results automatically and then if you're on a page, it's just like, instead of having to go somewhere else, you can just say like, Hey, summarize this page or transcribe this audio or whatever. So that, that's pretty cool. And then the other one is chat g p T for web. So <laugh>, it's a plugin for chat G P T where like you can say, okay, not just the shit back to like 2021 or whatever when the models were trained, but like, go, go out into the web now and find like resources about this. Um, and like associate it with the, with a model that you already have. So that's pretty cool. And then like the thing that, I'm just fucking stupid, so I really just am learning <laugh> is like the concept that like a thread evolves and can get smarter, you know, and I, I, I just haven't played around with that much until recently, but like, I'm just getting that like you can say to a, like to Chad b t okay.
Speaker 2 00:24:45 In a thread. Like, okay, I am this person and here's a set of data, and then they do their thing and they say, okay, based on what you just learned, do X, you know. Um, and so I think I previously thought of it as just like there's a one-time input and output, but it really is like, gets smarter I should say, as the conversation goes along. Um, or, or can, and that's, that's pretty powerful.
Speaker 3 00:25:06 Yeah. Who knew a learning model could actually learn, right? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:25:09 Yeah. I mean <laugh>, I kind of thought it was on a global basis, right? But it is literally like within a chat thread. Um, I,
Speaker 3 00:25:15 Yeah, I, I made the, that's pretty powerful. Exact same mistake when I started using it. And I, I still do, I mean to the large part, I just, I jump in, create a new thread and start from scratch every time and have to like redo prompts. And so I'm, I'm trying to get a little smarter about that in adapting my own work where I know, oh, I was working on this with this customer over here. Dig up that thread and then start from there. Cuz they already know something about that, right? But yeah, I mean there's some, you talked about content summarization. That's a real powerful one. I know the thing that, like you told me just a second ago about the, the defensibility. That's what scares me about all these AI tools that are coming out there. I see these, uh, notices that come into my inbox from acquire.com about AI powered chat, AI powered customer service, AI powered, you know, whatever.
Speaker 3 00:26:04 And I'm just sitting here scratching my head going, this is clearly a gold rush and you are just trying to cash out while it's good, but you have no defensibility if you cannot make this part of a larger ecosystem. Like you can't just do podcast transcripts, you know, AI summarized podcast transcripts, <laugh> totally not defensible. Adding that into Casto boom, you just invalidated everyone that's out there for everybody that's already on the platform. And the same thing is true. You know, it's the same reason that, you know, the, the startups are freaking out because being and Google are incorporating that directly into the search engines, I keep hearing people say, oh yeah, AI's gonna kill seo, it's gonna kill search. I'm like, I don't know about that. Because as soon as Bing and Google integrated into their search, it just becomes the search and they will train it on all of this SEO data that they've been having all of these years and we'll just have new ranking factors.
Speaker 3 00:26:57 That's it. That's all there is to it. It's been same shit, different ranking factors, it changes all the time anyway. So why would you think it's gonna be any different? Yeah, it's not like the game has totally, you know, gotten different. It's just that these big players here are now finding new advantages. So yeah, I mean I'm not worried about AI tools that are generating emails out there cuz I am literally one integration away from being able to say, all right, recapture does AI content generation for your emails and your subject headers and those tools are now redundant for all of my customers. So Right
Speaker 2 00:27:33 <laugh>, right? Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:27:34 It's
Speaker 2 00:27:34 Ridiculous. Yep.
Speaker 3 00:27:36 The cool one that I heard of the other day, I don't know if you heard this, you can feed chat G p t Excel files and then ask it questions like an analyst.
Speaker 2 00:27:47 Hmm, that's cool. Feed
Speaker 3 00:27:48 It a, like feed it a p and l or feed it two p and Ls and say compare the, you know, the variability ratio or the volatility from one year to the next over this expense category. Uh, and predict, you know, based on the trend here, if you feed it multiple PNLs, predict where you think it's gonna go in the next year. Wow. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Powerful stuff.
Speaker 2 00:28:10 The, the, the best analogy I've heard in this is from a r uh, at Tiny Seed I is, he says that it's like a really smart college freshman <laugh> that works really quick, right? It's really smart, has no fucking idea what it's doing, but, but it can produce a lot of work. And then it's up to you to say like, oh, well yeah, this whole thing you did is just wrong. <laugh>, here's, here's more guidance on on how you should do it. Um, and then it will go back and it will, it will give you the right answer with the information you give it. But, but it's not, you know, a seasoned, uh, you know, m and a analyst to, to where it could just infer all this stuff, uh, without, without you guiding it the right way. And I think for me, that that's helped like with the prompts that I'm writing and, uh, and just how I'm interacting it and like what I expect back. I think that's a, that's a pretty good mental model.
Speaker 3 00:28:57 Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. Ex keep your expectations low and you're okay <laugh>. Yeah. It's
Speaker 2 00:29:04 Just life, right? Yeah. It's just life. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3 00:29:06 <affirmative>. Yeah. So I wanted to bring something back up that we had talked about at least one podcast ago, maybe two. So remember when I was telling you that I kind of, you know, hit the wall with seasonal effective disorder and had the whole doldrums and my productivity all went to shit and all that stuff. Yep.
Speaker 3 00:29:26 Yeah. So it's been in the last week that it finally like snapped and I thought micro cough would immediately snap it, but even that was not like, oh bam, I'm right back in the game again. Like it kind of helps swing the pendulum back. But definitely, uh, literally this week has been the first time that in two months that I've really felt like, all right, I am ready to hit the ground running. Let's write some goals down, let's get some shit done cuz I am motivated to do it now. And I thought that was deeply fascinating considering that, you know, that has also coincidentally been the week where the sun and the weather have finally gotten to a point where I can be outside regularly. So yeah, I do not believe that this is a coincidence <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:30:14 Yeah, no, that's, I mean, I'm sorry to hear that it was that long, but I'm glad to hear that it's getting better. That's, that's great.
Speaker 3 00:30:21 Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:30:22 Now you just need to move to Phoenix.
Speaker 3 00:30:24 Well definitely we have some plans in the works for what we're gonna do this next winter. Cuz I mean, the winter was rough on my wife too. Yeah. And we just need to have some of those breaks where we're getting the sunshine and some warmth and you know, kind of recharging the batteries cuz they just got too low this year. Yeah. And then that made it really hard to pull out of it when you were trying to charge them during that, that period. Yeah. April is just kind of rough here in Colorado it's not, it's not warm enough and it's just an extension of winter most years. So, Ugh.
Speaker 2 00:30:58 I told so, so my birthday's the end of May. It's like always right around Memorial Day, May 27th, I told my wife yesterday, I said, if I'm wearing a fucking hoodie on, on my birthday, like we're gone there. There's no two ways about it because it's fucking jeans and hoodie right now, which is fine, but it's the 1st of May. We're recording this on May 1st. If my birthday, I'm wearing a hoodie, like I'm just getting in the car and driving south until I'm warm. Um, cuz I can't fucking take it anymore. <laugh>. Um,
Speaker 3 00:31:26 Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:31:27 I got a, I got a recommendation for you and it's so cheesy, but, but trust me, just like read it everybody Dave, if you want to read it, like,
Speaker 3 00:31:38 Is this cold showers? Please don't tell me's cold
Speaker 2 00:31:40 No's not cold showers. Okay.
Speaker 3 00:31:41 Thank you. I hate cold showers.
Speaker 2 00:31:43 <laugh>. No. Okay, so, so it's a book like you've probably heard of like The Miracle Morning, right? Hal Elrod. It's, it's a, it's a book similar to that. It's called The 5:00 AM Club, right? It's written by Robin Sharma talks about how like, just get up early, take care of like yourself first and then do fucking everything else. And I've been doing it for like the last six weeks and it's like totally awesome and, and I'm the last person to want to get up at five in the morning. But it's like, get up, go to the gym and then like journal and meditate, uh, and then learn something, right? So like the first hour of your day is about roughly 20 minutes of those two things or those three things. And it's totally changed like my energy level and my kind of perspective on things. And I definitely had like seasonal effective disorder and just like, it just gives a lot more purpose to things.
Speaker 2 00:32:31 So like for anyone who's kind of struggling with motivation or anything, like it's worth a try read the book. It's written in kind of the e-myth style where he is like telling a story about these people in some parts of it are kind of hokey, but like, just the idea is really sound, right? Get your ass up before you have to <laugh> right. And take care of yourself. And then like when you gotta get your kids up to go to school or you gotta make the commute or whatever, like you've already won because you've already done these awesome things. So yeah, pretty, pretty highly recommended. It's, it's been a pretty significant change for me.
Speaker 3 00:33:03 Nice, nice. And sort of riffing on that same idea there in my two month productivity shit storm, we'll call it <laugh>. The one thing I really noticed was that I needed more me time.
Speaker 2 00:33:17 Mm. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:33:18 Where I was just like not forcing it. Like the worst thing that I tried to do was to try to force myself to be productive. So there would be days I would write the goals down. I'd say, here are the three things I'm gonna get done today. And then I would get none of them done. So the next day I'd move those over to the next day and say, all right, I'm gonna get them done today. And again, nothing would happen then I'd be like, okay, I'm gonna hack this. I'm just gonna say two goals tomorrow. Couldn't fucking do those either. So it got to a point where it was like I just had to like walk away and do something else. You know, there's a, I'm trying to remember where I heard this from, but there's a saying that says something like, if you work with your head, go take a break with your hands.
Speaker 3 00:33:59 Mm mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I just did that. Like, we just bought a, a trailer recently, so I was like, all right, I'm gonna go find things that I can do for the trailer. I'm just gonna go work on that stuff because it doesn't involve me thinking about content, trying to be in front of the computer, talking to customers. None of this stuff I'm struggling with right now just get away and get into this other space. And after doing that for a few weeks, that helped a bit. Like I wasn't, you know, I didn't totally just like ignore the business for three weeks and make it all me time, but it was very much like, okay, you know, I'll do what I need to do to kind of keep things moving along and now we'll take some me time and then there's family time. But th that important me time really made a huge difference to give me additional energy to recharge. Now I will say I did not get up at five in the morning if fucking hate getting up at five in the morning <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:34:53 And you know, nothing against those people that are morning people. I am, you know, I will tell you I am a morning person, but 6:00 AM is about as early as I want to get out of bed cuz I go to bed at 10 and I get up at six and that's a very regular natural schedule for me. It just, uh, it's hardwired and that's how I work best. So I'm like cool, 6:00 AM no problem. Like in the summertime I can get up like that no problem. In the winter it's a little bit harder cuz it's dark outside. But yeah, that, you know, you should align with something that works for you and if you can make it work for you, great. I've tried the 5:00 AM thing when I was meditating regularly with my wife. Ah, just, it just made me start to hate that activity because I was getting up that early Hmm mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So, you know, it worked, it worked against me. So yeah. Yeah, just find, find something that works and definitely take that time for yourself and get a routine in there. I think those are all the, the key points that really make it successful, so.
Speaker 2 00:35:52 Yeah. Yeah. No, a hundred percent. I think, I think you, you nailed it, right? It's, it's different for everyone. It doesn't always have to be the same either, right? Like it can be you do early for a while and then like something and your life changes and then you're a midday exerciser or, or whatever. I think that, um, I think the important thing is yeah, time for yourself to to, to recharge and get perspective, whether that's meditating or exercise or, you know, for me it used to be like the commute, you know, actually commute was kind of nice. It was me time. I would listen to podcast and when I got home I was ready to be home. So I think that it can be different for other people at, at different times. So that's good to keep in mind.
Speaker 3 00:36:28 Yep, totally. So we'd love to hear from all of you. Do you have some productivity hacks out there that are not cold showers? Because that is never gonna be recommended on the show ever <laugh> by me, by, if Craig ever recommends it, I'm just gonna tell the editors to take it out because that's just fucking crazy. And if you love cold showers, cool, keep it to yourself. Uh, but if you do have a suggestion or something that's working for you, we'd love to hear about it. Send us an email, podcast rogue startups.com and as always, our one ask is, if you found this valuable, please share it with somebody else you think would benefit from it as well. Until next time,
Speaker 1 00:37:07 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.
