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 All right, welcome to episode 2 81 of Rogue Startups. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 3 00:00:26 Uh, pretty good man. Pretty good. Um, we had a great Mother's Day yesterday. We're talking on May 15th, so yeah, really nice Mother's Day. Got to spend some good time outside. The weather is finally beautiful here. So, uh, yeah, on that side of things, all uh, all cannons are firing, or all pistons are firing, I guess is the expression.
Speaker 2 00:00:46 <laugh> depends on whether you're from the 17 hundreds of the 19 hundreds, I guess. Right, right.
Speaker 3 00:00:51 <laugh>. Yep. How about you? How are things? Uh,
Speaker 2 00:00:54 Things are good. You know, spring is springing around here and, uh, my wife and I bought a new rv, so we are like obsessing constantly about things to get for it, things to put in it. We've like hung out inside of it a few times, just having a glass of wine and chatting inside of there. So we are very anxious to go on our first trip and I am very excited that the weather has finally turned here. And, uh, I'm mostly done with all my repairs at this point, so it's pretty much time to, to head out on the trail. We're doing that for the first time next week, so. Oh,
Speaker 3 00:01:31 That's awesome. Where are you all going?
Speaker 2 00:01:34 We are, so this is gonna be super lame. You know, I, I did that whole buildup and now it's gonna be a massive letdown. So we're going to a local state park that's about 20 minutes away from my house, and it is our quote unquote test trip.
Speaker 3 00:01:47 Yeah. Uh, I think it's very smart.
Speaker 2 00:01:49 Yeah. Well, it's a used rv, it's not brand new, so I haven't had a, the opportunity to 100% validate all the systems in the RV yet. And you kind of have to go out on a trip to do that. Like, yeah, you're not gonna dump the toilet unless you're at a place where you can dump the toilet <laugh> and lemme tell you that is not happening at your house. Uh, and if it can happen at your house, let me know so I can come over to your house and test this next time <laugh> when I get another rig. But yeah, so I mean, we're, we're basically just gonna go spend a night at this place. It's, it's thankfully very close. We actually go paddle boarding there quite a bit, but they have a full hookup campground. Yeah. So we sprung for a night there. We're just gonna get away from the kids and hang out for the night and enjoy life in our RV for a night, test everything out, probably have some wine, sit around a campfire, and, uh, all that good stuff.
Speaker 2 00:02:41 So. Nice. Yeah, not far. And then our first trip, our first real trip is gonna be after I get back from Spain, so we're taking our daughter on her, uh, high school graduation trip, that's her present, uh, to Spain. First time she's been to Europe, so we thought, uh, Spain would be a great place for her to get introduced to. And after that, we'd go on our first trip across the mountains to a place called Redstone in Colorado. Mm-hmm. Which means nothing to most people listening to this here. But it's a great place, beautiful Aspen forests. It's, uh, one of the favorite places that we like to go to. And they've got hot springs nearby. We like to go horseback riding, so it is very much a highlight of our June coming up. So I'm looking forward to that. Nice.
Speaker 3 00:03:27 That's awesome. That's really cool. Yeah, we're doing a bit of, uh, outdoors too. We go, last year we went and we're going back to a place in Maine for Memorial Day, do a camping tent camping, not as, not as fancy, but we have a boy scout, so, or Cub Scout, so we have to do tent camping still, uh, to show that we're <laugh> that we're not quite old yet. So yeah. Trying to, trying to stay young for him. Uh, but no, it's, it's cool. Yeah. Like, like you're talking about, it's like perfect weather for camping. Just a great chance to get outside and, and enjoy. So Yep. Is the season
Speaker 2 00:04:02 Nice. Nice. Are you going all the way up to Bar Harbor or is this somewhere along the coast? It's,
Speaker 3 00:04:05 Yeah, it's along the coast. It's in Ken Bunk, so just like, oh yeah. 30 minutes south of Portland. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:04:11 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly where that is. Yeah. So, yeah, that'll be nice. It's beautiful there.
Speaker 3 00:04:15 Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Well, Dave, I think this week we are, um, waxing poetic about growth, uh, potentially and <laugh>, I think, well, no, like, following the theme I hope of the show is like sharing what, what we're going through, right? Like what we're winning with, what we're struggling with and what we don't know. And, uh, I think for both of us, and I think for a lot of people, like growth has been less in the last couple of years and, uh, I think it's, some of it's macroeconomic. I think that's an excuse that some of us use <laugh> as well. Um, but either way, like it's, it's a reality we have to face and, and we're all trying to figure out how to, how to grow faster and more sustainably. And I think, we'll, we'll, we'll kind of chat through some of the things we're seeing and experiencing and experimenting with maybe today.
Speaker 2 00:05:03 Yeah. Yeah. I, and I tell ya, now that I'm focusing on recapture full-time now, which actually I am a week away from my two year anniversary mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I just realized that looking at the, the calendar here, which is awesome, having been focused on the growth aspect for two years has given me a real perspective on the true difficulty of being the person in charge of that role and moving the business forward all the time. And then there's the question of the balance. Like the thing that I struggle with in growth and recapture is how long do I beat the tactic to death? Yep. Before I declare that it is not working, because not all of them work and some of 'em work for a while and then they stop working. So do you, is it just a lull or if you kept going, would you get there? Or is it like, is it done? Is it, is it all the way over? And that's one of the things I struggle the most with, I think when trying, working with or experimenting on any growth tactics that we're trying and recapture.
Speaker 3 00:06:17 How do you, and I don't, I think important here for us, just in this conversation, is not to be too specific with what we're doing, cuz one, like, I don't wanna share some things, but also two, it doesn't really relate to the listeners, right? So folks listening are like, Hey, you know, your business and your channel is not exactly the same as mine. So like, being ultra specific I think is not as helpful. But like generally when you think about evaluating whether a channel is working, what numbers do you look at or, or what yeah. How, how do you approach evaluating that? And I'll share how I do it, but yeah,
Speaker 2 00:06:49 So for me it really, well there were, I, I have two answers to this question. There's the way I used to do it and the way I do it now. So the way I used to do it was strictly about looking at revenue growth in general in the business. And I think that that was wrong. And the reason that it was wrong is that it sort of smears out the attribution and fuck attribution is hard. <laugh>. Yeah. Let's let lemme say. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah. I mean, attribution sucks. So if you're trying to determine if a customer came from any channel, I don't care what that channel is, getting reliable, consistent, accurate, easy to understand data, accurate, accurate data, all of that shit is fucking hard. You know, I think I struggle with that more than anything. But putting that all aside for a second, which is a zone hole episode, really the thing that really sort of chaps my hide on all of this is that once you figure out that a, a person came from a particular channel, then you kind of have to set up these cohorts to understand like, is this customer better than other customers that you have now?
Speaker 2 00:08:04 So there's this quality evaluation, am I getting shittier customers or better customers? Are they bigger customers or smaller customers? Do they do more support, do do less support? Like all of these things that I'm trying to figure out here and, and all of those are, are hard questions to answer on top of that. But mostly I'm now looking at a combination to get back to your original question installs and what kind of revenue that customer is contributing. So just cuz I got a customer, if I'm getting a bunch of low tier customers and they all turn out in six months, it doesn't really do me much. Yep. But if I'm getting like a handful of really good big low support customers, like those are awesome, I'll take those all day. But you know, then there's the whole question of, well how much did I pay for those customers?
Speaker 2 00:08:48 And are they really worth it? And yes, they are, they're super big, but is my CAC low enough for my LTV to make this profitable? And what's my payback period on the revenue? And just all these constant questions that I'm asking here. And it's hard to get good answers to that. That's the hard part of all of this is getting answers to any of those questions. Forget about all of them together, which is really what you want. Uh, I, I mean, I don't know what you are looking for and what you want, but I, I like certainty and you are working in a very uncertain, probabilistic area here. <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:09:25 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, a as you were talking through that, like, um, gosh, I, I don't even, I don't even know a, any of those metrics. <laugh>, it's a terrible thing to say. I, I don't, I don't know my cac, I know my L T V, but I don't, I don't know my cac, I, I computed it once about a year ago for a couple months in a row and um, you know, at that time my ced L T V was saying like, we're not investing enough in customer acquisition. Um, which means we, we could be more aggressive. But, but I haven't calculated in about a year at the time when I was calculating it though, it was kinda all the tools we used all the, you know, marketing tools like Drip and fucking HubSpot and all this kind of stuff. Uh, and then like salaries or consultants, you know, um, and uh, and then like ad spend if you have ad spend.
Speaker 3 00:10:14 Yeah. I don't, I don't, I don't track any of that stuff on a regular basis. Uh, mostly cuz like l t v literally hasn't changed in five years for us. Like it's, it's exactly the same as it was when we started, uh, which is like good and bad I guess. But yeah, I mean I I I I look at like, is marketing working more from a global perspective first of like, are we growing, we're growing fortunately, uh, or we're not growing as fast as I want to. So, so then I start kind of saying like, where in the funnel do I feel like customers are f or like we're, we're either broken or we have the most opportunity, depending on if you're pessimistic or optimistic, you know, that that's kind of how I look at it is like, okay, we're growing at pick a number 5% a month, right? Okay. Uh, are we growing traffic, you know, more than that? Or are we, you know, is conversion rate good? Is retention good? All that kind of stuff. And I, I haven't even gotten down to like the channel level yet. When, when evaluating this, I don't know may, maybe I'm not thinking about it like deeply enough.
Speaker 2 00:11:15 I don't know. I mean, I think the problem, so all those things that you were just talking about, y you're looking at it from a bigger business wide perspective and I'm trying to like focus down on a specific channel. Yeah. And I think to do the right thing for your business, you really need to do both, right?
Speaker 3 00:11:33 Because, and the fucking 87 other things that you have to do on a daily basis, uh,
Speaker 2 00:11:37 Well of course like yeah this is like one of of 86 other things on your plate, right? So that's, that to me is the, the really hard part is that I don't feel like I give it the attention that it truly needs. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:11:50 And it really does require a lot of attention. And sometimes, and I'm jumping around all the time, so sometimes I'm like, oh hey wait, I gotta look at the big business picture here. I know we've been focusing on this channel, but what about all of our other channels? Are we still seeing growth there? Do we see general expansion revenue? And for us, L T V is, we don't have a constant L T V, which is super weird to me sometimes. Mm-hmm. Because sometimes profit well will be like, oh, your LTV is way up. And then somebody will turn and it'll be like, oh, your LTV crashed and it comes down like 600% or something like that. But then the next month it'll go up 800% and you're like, what? Yeah. It's because of the expansion revenue and one big customer can sway it one way or the other.
Speaker 2 00:12:30 So if I get a big customer that signs up and they're still going, like it slowly starts growing over time, but then if like one of my larger customers churns out, then all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's a lifetime in that customer. Boom, here's your ending number there. And then it goes back and recalculates stuff and I'm like, what <laugh>. So it does, it does fluctuate a lot because of our expansion revenue, which is a little bit disturbing. So at this point I've kind of like taken an average of a 12 month period and I say that's my LTV I should be kind of shooting for here. Cuz otherwise the numbers just drive me nuts. Yeah. One of the few times, I would say an average is probably a better move than, than what you see is your live data. But yeah, I mean the, the, the push and pull of the global versus the, the channel local stuff, I struggle with that a lot in the, in the growth stuff. Tons of tons of time. Cuz I, you know, you just reminded me that a little while ago I set up this thing in mix panel for our onboarding to figure out, oh well what the hell is going on? And I realized I haven't checked that in two weeks
Speaker 3 00:13:34 <laugh>. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:13:35 Because I've been focused on this other channel specific thing and I'm like, oh crap, I wonder how that's doing now. Like, you know Yeah. You have to kind of have a pulse on all of it all the time, right?
Speaker 3 00:13:46 Yeah. And I think that No, that's exactly right. And I think that one thing that, that I've seen is we, we at Casto, and I think we all just generally try to do way too many things because we feel like we should, you know, like legit, uh, there's like peer pressure and just like that internal voice to me that says like, well you have to do like educational stuff and you have to have a YouTube channel and you have to do email marketing, you have to do nurturing and you have to do blogging, you have to do tools and you have to do, you, you have all this kinda shit. Whereas like, I think the most, I, I think we do that because we don't know what the best thing is, right? So we're kind of hedging our bets and saying, we're gonna just fucking do everything and see if by some chance we get lucky and, and we don't even know it, right. To your attribution point, like we don't even know it, but we feel like just doing a bunch of stuff makes us feel better and we sleep at night saying, man, I'm working really hard on marketing <laugh>. And like to some degree some of it's working, but I don't know what that is,
Speaker 2 00:14:42 Right? 50% of my marketing is working, I just dunno which 50%. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:14:46 Yeah. And like, I think there's a couple problems with it. One, like attribution of course, like you, you just don't know two like lag, right? Unless you're talking about paid acquisition, like the lag of most other things are, are really long. Especially if you're talking about like ltv, right? That's not even like getting a customer, it's them staying for a period of time to where you can see like the benefits in your metrics of them paying you money over time. Um, yeah. And, and to where like we've scaled down the amount of stuff we do quite a bit and I feel like we still do way too much and, and I think it is because like you don't know at the beginning what the right thing is. And as much as like I hear people saying like, well just test this thing. Like just do it and test it and see what happens.
Speaker 3 00:15:29 Like it's kind of hard to do in, in an established company that has a bunch of other stuff going on. You know, like to, to start, I'll use my shitty example of myself <laugh> of like, I've been putting out a ton of like social content lately and a lot of it is around podcasting. It has made zero impact and like even that's like two months of work and, and like a pretty, pretty decent investment of like my time and, and like, you know, money and people and stuff like that. Um, to, to see what works. And then you're two months that like, that's a pretty long time. You only get to make six of those bets a year, much less, you know, time to ramp 'em up and down and stuff. So I think that's the real challenge is like, we all know that focus is the most important thing and doing one thing really well over and over and over, but, but we don't know what that one thing is. And even admitting we don't know and saying we're just gonna test a bunch of stuff assumes that you can get the an answer whether it's good or bad, <laugh> in like a, a timely manner to where you can make a an educated decision based on data.
Speaker 2 00:16:30 Right. And that gets back to my original point there about the whole growth thing. Like how long do you keep doing that social tactic to say, this is just something I need you to put more time into, or it just doesn't fucking work, right? Yeah. Like this isn't something that resonates with my audience versus I just haven't quite put enough time in there yet. You know, with, with posting an seo, we were doing content marketing at one point and I gave up on it and then later I came back to look and it was like, oh, it actually did resonate. It just took like six months to get there. And I was like, ah, shit, all right. But then I left it aside because I didn't have the time or the budget to do it. Now I've come back to it at the beginning of the year and again, I had to put it aside for some other things and it's, it's about that focus thing, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,
Speaker 3 00:17:17 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:17:17 I don't have enough hours in the day to get all the things done. And when I focus on one thing, I feel totally guilty that I've, I'm leaving some good opportunities just laying all around me and I still don't have confidence that the opportunity I am focusing on is truly the most important or the best or the one that's gonna be the most successful until I've had some time to play with it. And then it's too late, right? Because then you, you have run two months, three months, whatever, four months and then you can only make 6, 4, 3 of those bets in a year. And for us it's also about timing because there is a time when people are moving and switching stores Mm. Right? And there's a, a time that they're not right. And when you are in that knot time, it's like you just, you're sitting around kind of twiddling your thumbs, waiting for them to start wanting to move again and you're like, ah, fuck. Well what am I gonna do next? So yeah, it's hard. It's hard.
Speaker 3 00:18:13 Yeah. I, I obviously don't have any answers. I mean I think this is just, uh, hopefully like interesting and helpful for us to talk through how we think about frankly struggle with <laugh> with a lot of this stuff for, um, cuz I think there's a fair amount of like social aspect to it, right? Just the kind of social media and the pressures of, you know, these people talking about, oh, I did this cold email campaign in book 27 calls and all this kinda stuff. Like one, you only see the good stuff, you don't see all the bad stuff, you know, uh, and then two, like there that person's context is always different than yours. And so like to be able to say, Hey, they did this thing, I should be able to as well is like totally unfair. And then three, like I think a lot of it comes down to the execution, you know, that the, it probably is true that all of us can win and, and most channels if we execute on it well, and that's a big f <laugh>, you know, like executing on a channel is, is like the skill and the, the strategy and the discipline to do it well and do it well over time.
Speaker 3 00:19:16 And, and I think that's just like, that's a bigger thing than we all, uh, like give it credit for. You know,
Speaker 2 00:19:22 The other thing that I've noticed a lot on social media in particular, and I don't know if this is true in the podcasting space, as much as it is true in the email marketing space, is the bullshit factor. There are so many fucking liars out there <laugh> that are talking about, oh, I made such and such revenue from this one campaign DM me for D you know, DM me the hand wave emoji and I'll send you the details. And it's like some half baked playbook that they basically regurgitated that they picked up from some $79 course so they just scraped off of somebody else's website. Yeah. And there is so much of that that's going on in the email marketing space. It, I mean it's just, it's predictable at this point. I, when I'm scrolling through my feed, I follow so many email marketers and then some of them either follow other email marketers that are like that or they themselves are like that.
Speaker 2 00:20:17 And I just see that content getting regurgitated again and again and again. And I'm like, does that even fucking work? Does that, you know, are you getting followers from that? Does that translate into sales? Do you get people to sign up for it? Because it just seems so repetitive and I mean, it must be working at some level, but at the same time, like you just said, you put all that time and effort into a social campaign for two months and you're like, I didn't get much mad of it. And these guys are like hammering it all the time, time. So maybe they just are like, hustle, hustle, hustle. I gotta hustle harder. You know? And they're still doing it. You can't tell, that's the hard part. You just can't tell if those things are working.
Speaker 3 00:20:58 Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:20:59 Yeah. That sucks. That totally sucks. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:21:03 Yeah. I mean I think it's also,
Speaker 2 00:21:04 If you're one of those thread boys on Twitter, please stop <laugh>, just please. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:21:08 Yeah. I don't know man. It's, uh, it, it sure is challenging. I mean, I think that I take solace in the fact that like, I talk to a lot of founders, you know, like, and everyone struggles with this, you know, like everyone to, to some degree struggles with like, what do I focus on? What's the ho highest roi? What is, what does the company need? Because that not, and we're not even talking like marketing. It could be like product, you know, could be, you need features and you need stuff and reliability in UX and all that kinda stuff. Yeah. You know, it's interesting Dave, um, I did a, a personality test called Working Genius, uh, recently. So there's six different types of working genius. There's like personality traits, uh, there's wander, invention, discernment, galvanizing enablement and tenacity. And you can kind of, as you can figure out what all those mean.
Speaker 3 00:21:57 Um, and, and it came back that like mine was, um, my two were like discernment and enablement, um, <laugh> and, and like, uh, enablement I get cuz I like, I like being a team player and a, you know, boss and coach and founder and all that kinda stuff. And discernment really got me because it's not what I like, but it's what I have to do because otherwise we got a bunch of wonder and invention people who just wanna go do stuff, you know? And it's always me saying, well what's the ROI of this? What's the, what's our expected outcome? How, what confidence do you have that this is gonna be the right bet for us with fucking product and development and marketing and sales and operations and you know, production services. So I just said it was funny that like, it's not me, but it's who I have to be to where we're not just a bunch of people going around doing whatever we want and nobody's thinking about like, hey, what's the, what's the value of this? You know?
Speaker 2 00:22:51 Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I I you're gonna just send me a link to that test cuz now I'm kind of curious. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 3 00:22:58 It's great. It's great. Working genius.com I'll send it to you. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:23:02 Okay. Yeah. And anybody in the audience, please take that test and uh, share it with us and, and tell us if it's a surprising result to you as well. That would be interesting to know.
Speaker 3 00:23:12 And and the cool thing about it is like, it's not just you, but then think about hiring and you're, you're wanting to hire someone and you're like, okay, I need, like for me, I want, if I, if I wanted to hire a marketing person, okay, it's gotta be a complimentary personality type to me because like I don't need another, you know, discernment person maybe, you know, or, or whatever. I need someone who can like, dream up good campaigns and then execute on 'em, right? So they're like either end of the spectrum or I'm kind of in the middle. So yeah, it's not just for you and knowing yourself, it's like knowing the people you have on the team and then where the gaps, uh, cause its like not just functional gaps, it's like personal or personality gaps that you wanna fill.
Speaker 2 00:23:50 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating. Pretty cool. I mean, maybe you do want that discernment person. If you don't want to be the discernment person anymore, clearly you need one. So Right. Maybe that's where somebody else, I don't
Speaker 3 00:24:03 Know, chief of operations or something could come in. Yeah. Yep. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 2 00:24:07 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Very good. Yeah. Very, very interesting. So speaking of personality types, that reminds me of something that kind of stuck in the back of my mind from Microcom this year and talking to some founders afterwards. I've noticed a pattern I guess you could call it, and this pattern. So I'm also a volleyball coach for my youngest daughter. And I noticed that this pattern also holds true for teenage girls as well. Uh, it probably holds true for the entire human population, but I'm drawing from the, the groups of humans that I've had the most contact with, uh, recently here, of course. And that is, there is this, I'll call it coachability. There's this ability for some founders to have a reasonable amount of tenacity, talking about your personality trait before to say, I'm gonna stick with something here. I have this idea, I'm gonna just carry it through to the end.
Speaker 2 00:25:14 Versus somebody who can also look at where they're at in a journey and listen to somebody else's advice about where they're at in that journey and suddenly realize they're not where they want to be. They're not where they should be, or they're on a path that's gonna send them in a direction that is just not a happy place. And so I call that coachability and I'm noticing that founders tend to, uh, especially new founders that I've met in the space lately, they tend to stick to the tenacity side of things. And I find that really fascinating because I had several conversations either at Microcom or afterwards where I was talking with somebody and they were describing where they were at, and I saw some yellow or red flags coming up in that data. And so I pointed them out and I said, Hey, have you thought about this?
Speaker 2 00:26:16 Is that something that concerns you, worries you, bothers you? And they're like, now just, I'll figure it out down the line. Like, it's not a big deal right now. Or, oh, I've already thought about that. It's not a, it's not a thing. And they just kind of swept it aside. Like, my concern was invalid. Unimportant. Yeah. Yeah. Shut, shut up, old man. Get off my lawn. And I should be telling it the other way around. But yeah, it was one of those things and I I, I found that kind of strange, but at the same time it's, it's also pretty common in our space it seems like in order to be that entrepreneur and, and to endure that constant battering of, are, are you sure you can do that? You can't do that. Come on. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you should just give up and go back to your nine to five job.
Speaker 2 00:27:03 That's just crazy. You're never gonna get through that idea. You know, that's, that's insane to go spend money on that. There's, there's a certain amount of that that you need, but at the same time, like if you've been beating your head against the wall, your forehead is just a bloody mess and you resolve to yourself, well I'm just gonna do it for another week and we'll see what happens after you've been doing it for two years. Like, wait a minute, maybe that's not a smart idea anymore here. And you have some data, the bloody forehead, <laugh> and the, the patch of concrete on the wall that is mostly red and not changed whatsoever, that maybe this isn't the right move. And, you know, what, what is your experience with that?
Speaker 3 00:27:45 Yeah, so I I I think it's really interesting like, uh, cuz cuz it is a balance, right? Like you need to be coachable enough to, to continue learning, especially for, for people that have gotten some traction, you know, uh, then you start thinking, oh, I know everything. And that's like probably the most dangerous when we start. We're super coachable cuz we don't know anything. And so we're just in learning. Oh yeah. Uh, and then as we go along, we, I think there's a phase where we think we know everything. And then I probably at this point, and really only in the last year, um, have gotten outta that stage to where I think I know nothing again, which is awesome, uh, because I I I consider myself pretty coachable now. But yeah, I think it's, it's this kind of, uh, pendulum that we swing on, you know, it's like you start being super coachable, you get to a point and you kind of need to be, because you're in the, you know, you're in the desert, right?
Speaker 3 00:28:41 <laugh>, you're, you're, you quit your job and you're going Ill in on this thing and you just gotta make it work and you don't know, and you don't know what you don't know, and you just gotta deal with it, right? And, and just go through the shit until you get to the other side. I think you gotta be in those, in that phase. You gotta be kind of coachable, but you, you mostly just need to be heads down and you stick with the bad decisions you made and just make it work, right? I think that's, I think that's not a bad thing. And then you get on the other side and you have the, the freedom and the time and the mental space maybe to say, okay, now like I'm default alive. We can take a look at this and we can, you know, work smarter.
Speaker 3 00:29:15 That, that's a little of how I've done it. And, and I think it's not totally wrong, but maybe that just means I'm not coachable <laugh>, I don't even realize that my, my way of doing things is wrong. But I I, I think that like, you definitely need that bullheadedness just to get through stuff because if not, and you're so coachable, then influences like social media and your peers and people that are saying they're killing it are, are gonna pull you in a million different directions. And that's not healthy because you gotta stick with something, right?
Speaker 2 00:29:46 Right. Yeah. There's, you, you can't be a hundred percent coachable because then everything's gonna sway you and you'll never get anything done and you can't be a hundred percent tenacious because you're gonna get on a track and if it's the wrong track, you're totally fucked. Yeah. So, I mean, it has to be somewhere in between. And yeah, I mean the thing that, that thing that really sort of made me realize, the more I see this in my life, the more I try to remind myself of it, multiple big snows I've gone to where a suggestion was made. I was at there and I kind of just mentally rejected it out of hand because I thought, oh, they don't know what's going on with my business. And this has happened over multiple years, this hasn't been that recently. But then three to six months later, I'll come back and then I'll realize that there was deep wisdom in whatever that comment was and suddenly I'm in a better place.
Speaker 2 00:30:37 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and maybe it's because the data changed, maybe it's because I changed, or I've softened or now like I, my, my mental thinking has come around to like get to the point where that idea suddenly makes more sense to me and then I go, oh man, I really should have considered that sooner. So nowadays, you know, I feel like I kind of end up in a, in this default no thing when I hear suggestions a lot of the times and, you know, maybe it's just being a dad with my kids and they're bombarding me with random stuff. Like, Hey, let's go, can we stay up all night and drink root beer and uh, you know, yeah. Blow peanuts out of our nose. I'm like, no, no, that's just dumb <laugh> and o o obviously I'm not saying yes to things like that. Now let me just be clear.
Speaker 2 00:31:24 My kids do not drink, uh, root beer all night, stay up till midnight and blow peanuts out of their nose now because I've reconsidered that and I'm somehow coachable. But you know, like I, I think for me, this is my personality. Like that's how I, I worked. And so now when I resist an idea, I stop and maybe I don't realize it right away, but within 24 hours now, I usually go, Hmm, was there something to be had there and I missed it because I went to default? No. Yeah. Or was I right, you know? And a lot of times I find myself coming back like, oh, you know, there was something to be had there. So I've noticed that in the last few big snows I've had conversations where I might have given some resistance to whatever the discussion was initially, and then the next day we'll be talking about it again and it'll be like, yeah, I thought more about that and I think you're right, but I have some questions about this cuz I'm not sure about X, y, and Z.
Speaker 2 00:32:18 And, you know, then we get to dig deeper into it instead of me just throwing up a wall. And so I think that is super healthy entrepreneurial behavior and I think that if you are like me and you're doing the wall thing all the time, saying no to somebody else's advice, you know, maybe you can say, look, yeah, I'll consider that and then come back to it 24 hours later and then be like, okay, well I thought about it and mm-hmm <affirmative>, I did think about that before mm-hmm. <affirmative> and here's why it doesn't work because of reason A, um, or here we tried it previously and it's, you know, reason q that that resulted in that. So we know that that's not a fit for us or something like that. Like base it on the data, base it on, base it on some thinking, some analysis or something.
Speaker 2 00:33:01 But yeah, I mean the, the ones on my daughter's volleyball team, not this current season, but the last season they thought they all like knew everything and I was trying to teach them some, some different ways to try something and they were, you know, they said, oh, I totally know this technique and whether it was setting or bumping or hitting or whatever it was. And I was like, well, okay, so if you really knew it, you'd be hitting it a hundred percent of the time and you're getting maybe 33%, so maybe we can try something different. No, I just, I'm not gonna do that. That's, I'm, I'm above that. Yeah. And I'm like, uh, okay. Yeah. So they weren't coachable. But now this team that I have this season, I'm like, I sit down and I say, all right, look, I want you to try it this way.
Speaker 2 00:33:42 I know you may have heard this somewhere else. And they look at me and they're like, okay, sure, I'll try it. No, no resistance on that. You know, they, they try it, they practice it, and for some of 'em it works, and for some of 'em it doesn't. So I see some of 'em improving and then others that are coming back like, Hey, this didn't work. What am I doing wrong? Or, you know, can I do something else? Or, so they're, they've turned it into a curiosity thing. And I think that is an important lesson that we should all be trying to cultivate in our entrepreneurial lives is less resistance, more learning and you know, are you coachable enough? You know, not a hundred percent coachable.
Speaker 3 00:34:19 Yeah. I, I think it's great advice. I don't, I don't have anything else to say on that. I think it's, um, it's hard to, at the same time be tough. Like we have to be, uh, and be coachable and, and I think that more success should breed more, uh, curiosity and learning, you know, and I, I I think it does, but, but I think there's like a hump you have to get over to get there first. Um, and uh, and it sounds like maybe you just have two kind of different levels of success or experience on those teams, and that's why they are kind like they are. But, um, I think when it comes to founders, like, yeah, I, I, I think that, I think we gotta put up that, that tough facade just to get through this, you know, <laugh>. Um, and, and I think that, I think the other part of it is we only should be learning from people who know what the hell they're talking about.
Speaker 3 00:35:04 And that's not always the case. You know, like we only should be learning from people who have done a thing, uh, not read a blog post on it. Um, and so like, I think that if you only, maybe maybe this can kind of lower the, the, the mental overhead of knowing when to listen and when not to is just saying like, does this person know what the fuck they're talking about? And like, what, what quantitative hard data do I have that, that they're probably qualified like that, that that kind of is the beginning filter for me, I guess.
Speaker 2 00:35:34 Yeah. You don't want to get volleyball coaching from Bozo the clown. You want <laugh>, you want somebody, you want Gabrielle Reese coming in, coaching your team, and if you don't know who the hell Gabrielle Reese is, she's former Olympic volleyball player for the US women's team back in the nineties. Amazing woman. Very, uh, truly top tier athlete. So you, you want somebody like that, right? You, you want the, the Rob Wallings and the Ruben EZs and the Dan Martel's and the, the, uh, the Josh Pigford, the ones who have gone, had been in the arena, done the battle. You don't want the rando that's like, oh yeah, I read a book about that. So this must be the answer to everything, you know, the Golden Hammer
Speaker 3 00:36:12 Syndrome. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2 00:36:14 Yep. Too much of that out there too, I'm
Speaker 3 00:36:16 Afraid. Yeah, and it's tough to tell the par sometimes too, you know, folks are pretty convincing on social media, huh? Yeah. Well, I hope this is helpful. Uh, you know, one, just kind of, uh, you know, hearing Dave and I chat through how we evaluate slash struggle with, with growth, um, and knowing what to focus on and what to prioritize. And then, and then really, you know, kind of related how, how to, um, how to take input from others and, and have it be constructive and, and like productive in our businesses. And we'd love to, we'd love to hear from, from everyone else, like, what, what are you, what are you doing to focus and to prioritize smartly what, what you should be working on and, and what you shouldn't. I think both are really important. You know, shoot us a message podcast to rogue startups.com, hit Dave or I up on Twitter, uh, and we'd love to hear from you. And as always, if you're enjoying the show, please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. And we'll see you next week.
Speaker 1 00:37:04 Thanks for listening to another episode of Rogue Startups. If you haven't already, hit 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.
