Get Some Sleep

[00:00:00] Speaker A: If I had to bet on a legacy company versus a small. I think you said you're five people. Small, nimble team. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Yeah, six people. [00:00:07] Speaker A: You being able to think of this from scratch, you're going to get to such a better place than this Fortune 100 company is going to get to, where they're trying to replace this old legacy system. Because there's anachronistic ways of how they're doing things where they're just not thinking about what's possible of like, oh my God, we could send a customized, seemingly handwritten postcard or something to these people. I don't know. I don't know where you would get it feels to me like an advantage being in a position like yours where you're growing fast, you have a small, nimble company and you can be rethinking these sorts of processes from first principles of like, what, what makes the most sense in an era of LLMs. [00:00:38] Speaker B: Welcome to the offsite podcast. I am your host, Jordan Gahl. This is where I team up with friends to catch up on our work and just as importantly, what's going on beyond the work. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Rosie, the AI powered phone answering service for small businesses. Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of the off site podcast. I have my good friend Chris and now I know how to pronounce your last name. Janko. [00:01:05] Speaker A: You got it. Except I go by Christian Jordan Jor. That's unbelievable. I keep preparing two for two. [00:01:14] Speaker B: Two for two. I came prepared to be like, you really put me on the spot last time. I was like my good friend Christian Geico. You're like, you don't even know how to pronounce my. Listen. And now we start off with Chris and as I said it, as I said it, I knew. So two for two. [00:01:27] Speaker A: There we go. [00:01:27] Speaker B: We'll see what happens next time. [00:01:28] Speaker A: I'm number three. We'll nail it. [00:01:31] Speaker B: Welcome back. How you doing? [00:01:32] Speaker A: I'm doing so well. I've had a string of really, really good days. Some days are like Blair. Some days are like eh. And I've just had for like the last two weeks. It's been, it's been really good. [00:01:41] Speaker B: First of all, two weeks. I was going to say a string of good days is a great thing. [00:01:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:01:46] Speaker B: You said two weeks. That's, that's a nice string. [00:01:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I feel like a different person. [00:01:49] Speaker B: Great. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Can barely remember the mad days. [00:01:54] Speaker B: Okay. We started talking a little bit before recording and I asked you what does that mean, a string of good days? And you linked It. You linked it to health and I want to hear more about that. [00:02:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So I've struggled my whole life off and on with sleep onset insomnia, which is a difficulty falling asleep. So I think the diagnosis is something like, if it takes you longer than I think, it's 35 minutes to fall asleep, then it's categorized as sleep onset insomnia, distinct from sleep maintenance insomnia, which is difficulty staying asleep. It is not unusual for me to take like two hours to fall asleep. And that has not been happening recently. And it feels great. [00:02:28] Speaker B: And that is, you know, you're busy, you're. You're married, you have kids. Like, people think of that as, oh, that's exhausting, because it is. I have three kids and married and all that, and I usually have a lot of energy, but sometimes. What. By the time I get to bed, I'm like, I can't. I'm done. I'm toast now. We had a laugh. Because I have the opposite problem. [00:02:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:02:52] Speaker B: In the past, I have been diagnosed. Diagnosed with narcolepsy, which is literally the opposite. [00:02:57] Speaker A: You want to trade? [00:02:59] Speaker B: No, I don't think you want to trade. I got a CPAP machine. At the end of the day, I think it was a misdiagnosis. I think it was just very severe sleep apnea. But it messed up my life. And the CPAP machine and cutting out drinking and all these other things changed my whole day to day experience in terms of not being tired all the time and not being worried about driving long distances and all these other things. What have you figured out that works for you? I mean, you've been doing this for a while. [00:03:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's my perpetual dragon. Like, it comes off and on, and in different periods of my life, there's different things that have worked. Right now, the thing that's working the best is this cocktail of not sleep medication, but just supplements that ChatGPT recommended after I had a long conversation with it about my whole medical history and the stuff that's worked and then just basic sleep hygiene stuff. So right now, right before bed, well, an hour before I would like to fall asleep, I take.03 grams or.03 milligrams. No, it's 3,300 milligrams of melatonin, which I think is not great to take long term. So I'm, I'm trying to transition off of that, but that seems to be the, the key factor in it. Not taking too high of a dose is also important. So I take that with L theanine and Ashwagandha, which are just like general relaxation things. And then magnesium glycinate, which apparently everyone is deficient in magnesium. And, and it can help fall asleep. So all those, I get knocked out and then in the morning I take creatine, which all the G on X have been excited about for a long time. So I started taking it for lifting because at the same time I'm also working on less fat and more muscle. And so creatine is like the thing that they say to take. And saw a post by. Oh my gosh, I forgot her name. My fitness something. Anyway, she, she said that there have been recent studies that say if you take twice that, so 5 milligrams kind of saturates your muscles, but if you take 10 milligrams, that starts to get into the brain. And so I was like, ah, let me see what it feels like to take 10 milligrams. And all of a sudden I'm like, resistant to the negative effects of sleep. Depri. So if I'm waking up a few times in the night, you know, with Isabella or daughter, usually I'd be wrecked, like for the next day or 2. And on 10 milligrams or on 10 grams of creatine, I'm cruising like, I can still think clearly. It's, it's amazing. So I recently upped it to 15 just to see what would happen. And I noticed that difference between 10 and 15, but there's a huge difference between, between 5 and 10. [00:05:16] Speaker B: Okay. I, I am a creatine fan and advocate. I'm with you. I have been taking it for maybe 18 months. I first came across creatine with my high school gym bro friends. This is, you know, what, 25 years ago, and they were all super into getting super muscular. I'm from Long Island. There's a whole thing, you know, whole culture there. And I never understood it. And I, I, because back then it was, it was not well understood. It felt like it was steroids. [00:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:05:43] Speaker B: And I'm happy. It's kind of come back around. I find the same thing as you. I have no issues with energy during the day. I, I feel great all day. It's. It's kind of amazing. And I take seven and a half, three little scoops. [00:05:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's probably about right. Dr. Rhonda Patrick is who I was trying to think of. [00:06:00] Speaker B: That's it. Yeah. [00:06:00] Speaker A: Do you, do you work out also? Do you, do you. [00:06:03] Speaker B: No. Do you lift? I don't actually. I go through long stretches where I don't go to the gym for two, three months at a time. And then I kind of mentally get sick of that and then I. And then I restart again. I like classes that I pay for and are at a certain time of day, so it removes my decision making and like resistance entirely. And sometimes I'll just fall out of that. Like in the summer vacations, too busy, the class gets booked up and then I just. It'll just go three months and I won't even notice. What I do is, you can see in back me there's a little exercise equipment. So I will do a literally five minute workout. I'll do 25 pushups and then I'll do some ab roller thing and then I'll do like 25 on the dumbbell. [00:06:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:06:46] Speaker B: And it's just, it's like a shock. [00:06:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:06:49] Speaker B: To basically just the upper body. And maybe I'll do some squats and that's it. It's five minutes. And I know I should do a second set, but just. That feels like amazing maintenance. It changes my posture, it makes my muscles feel a little bit sore. Just like I know they're there and they're real and I'm. I should keep going. And it, it has just enough of a cosmetic impact that when I look in the mirror I see the difference. That that gives me the motivation to do the next five minute workout. So that's my in between. And when I'm better at it, I'll go to a class. [00:07:21] Speaker A: Yeah, that'll do something. Just taking a little break. I'm reminded of Brett Victor had an essay probably 15 years ago now that talked about humane computing and how inhumane in his words, it is to be sitting at a desk all day and punching on keys. And we're humans and designed to move around and built for the savannah to go hunt lions and stuff. And here we are just sitting on these chairs, do, do, do, do, and punching glass with our ape fingers and having something like that just as a, like, oh yeah, remember you're human and get the blood pumping and like everything moving again helps me to like reset for getting more work done. And I would love a way to figure out how to do work. And we talked about this last time of like, if I could do meaningful work while doing more human things, like while out on a walk or like imagine instead of typing you had to like lift weights to like type keys into the keyboard or something like that. I feel like it would transform the quality of my life, of the environment that I Was designed to live in. [00:08:18] Speaker B: It feels like what people are reaching for with a treadmill under their desk. [00:08:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Which I have and I've tried, but it's. [00:08:25] Speaker B: I don't think so. [00:08:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll do it for like a half an hour or an hour every other day just to. As part of the weight loss thing. Walking is like one of the best ways to have this sort of cardio where you're losing weight, but it's still with the form of computing where you're typing on a keyboard on a screen and like, it doesn't quite work. But I want to be able to like hike in the woods and talk to a person in my ears and be like, hey, let's try redesigning this thing and oh, let's, let's do this campaign or whatever. Like, if I had a full time assistant that was. And I think we'll get there with AI eventually, but that's, that's the future that I'm excited about. [00:08:55] Speaker B: I do walk, so I almost ignored that in the conversation of what I do health wise. But I do a walk maybe four days out of five per week. I try. I mean, the issue with Chicago is it is so lovely to take a walk for a few months and then it's really actually tough to motivate to go take a walk because it's not fun. You mentioned like, the, the human aspect. I'm not going to remember the writer, but someone tweeted out like, just get the doordash or get delivery for your groceries and here's how much time it saves you and here's how much more work you can get done. And the response to that was like, yes, but that can also be horrible. [00:09:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:35] Speaker B: And they quoted. I'm forgetting the writer. I think it was someone I really admire too, but he was like, we are like a social animal. Like, I'm gonna go to the store. It might have been Mark Twain or something like that. And his wife was like, why don't you just buy more than one envelope at a time? And he was like, no, no, no, no. I'm gonna go around town and I'm gonna see like a cute baby and I'm gonna say hi to someone I know and I'm gonna buy one envelope and I'm gonna have more fun on the way back home and I'm going to do it tomorrow. And if I just went out and blocked 10 envelopes, I would miss all the other experiences between here and there and back and forth. And I like that version better. I like that Version a lot better. [00:10:13] Speaker A: Yeah, same. Because otherwise, what's the goal of this Peak optimization? That you're a brain in a vat that maximally increases shareholder value. And what's the point? What are you doing? [00:10:22] Speaker B: Yes, Yes. I like maximizing. Maybe fun isn't quite the right word. Enjoyment, satisfaction, experience, whatever that is. [00:10:29] Speaker A: Meaning has been a good word for me because, like, having, having kids is not fun for a lot of the time that you have. There's waking up in the middle of the night and they're crying and. But like, meaning in terms of the amount of meaning that I felt in my life that, you know, having having kids feels like a meaning maximizing thing. So same. Same sort of thing with work. Like, lots of days in business when it doesn't feel fun. But if, If I'm. Because fun is like exciting. Fun is like I'm. I'm on the Superman ride at Six Flags or something, and that's, that's not how I want to live my life. That would be like do a bunch of drugs and burnout. That's. That's how you maximize fun. Right? I want to maximize meaning. Yeah. [00:11:04] Speaker B: It's very, very high variance, highs and lows with the parenting. And I think what a lot of people do before they have kids is they look at the pain involved and the loss of freedom and the, the expense. And not monetary expense, monetary expense also, but the other expense of your freedom, your time, your attention, all that. But once you have kids, then you see the flip side of the bearings. The other side, where you're like, well, just waking up and snuggling on the couch is. It feels better than all the other things I've experienced before that. And so, okay, fine. If one goes with the other, I'll make the trade off every time. [00:11:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:11:49] Speaker B: So I want to move to something somewhat related. This week was really a tough, dark week. [00:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:56] Speaker B: For people who pay attention to what's going on in the world, you've got really nasty stuff in the news. You got the Charlie Clark assassination. You've got. I mean, there's a lot. There was. I, I think the attack on Hamas and Doha was this week also. And I think maybe the Charlotte story was also this week. I. I don't even remember. It was just so much all at the same time. And I want to ask you how you juggle the impact of consuming all that news and the opinions and the backlash and the accusations and the negativity and all of that while working? I personally don't block it out. You Know, during working hours, it's all mixed in, and I go down to get lunch, and I listen to a podcast, and I'm consuming it. Then I go take a walk, and I'm on Twitter and I consume it. And how do you juggle that? [00:12:48] Speaker A: I'm so interested in this question. I'm so happy that you asked it, because I had the realization this last week because all this other stuff is going so much better. And I have a pretty direct comparison, because I remember getting really pulled into the news cycle of the last election, and more so than I ever was in any other election. I was getting into all the different stories, and I knew all the talking points, and I was actively engaging in these debates and had a bunch of people block me. Some people that are mutual friends of ours. Yeah. [00:13:14] Speaker B: And same. [00:13:15] Speaker A: It just felt like that was what I had to do, and I. How would I frame this? It felt. It felt like. It felt like there was a fire in my room, and I was like, oh, my God, there's a fire in my room. I got to put. I got to put the fire out. What are you talking about? There's not a fire. There's a fire right there. And, like, at that level of intensity. Yeah. [00:13:34] Speaker B: Across the screen. [00:13:36] Speaker A: Right, right. And in this most recent news, like, things. Things are happening at the same level of severity. There's assassination attempts, there's innocent people getting killed, all the. All the terrible things that happen in the world, and I can recognize that those are terrible. And it's important for me to stay abreast of what's happening. But I feel no pull in the same sort of way. And I think what I attribute that to is my health was in a very different spot in the 2024 election. Jordan Peterson is a controversial character, but he has a lot of lines that I really appreciate. One of them is, clean your room before trying to save the world and. And make your bed. Right. Yeah. Make your bed. That feels like, for me, the explanation of what was going on. Oh. Like, my bed was not made in the last election, and I think I was externalizing a lot of the internal. How would I frame that? Internal discontentment and internal pain of what was happening. It's much easier and safer for me. Instead of saying, like, oh, well, this is because I haven't slept well. It's much easier for me to be like, oh, no. I read this news story, and now I feel bad. It's because of this news story that I feel about. Well, no. Okay, take a nap. Like, I can see this. So clearly in my daughter, when she's grumpy, I'm like, okay, kid, you haven't. [00:14:42] Speaker B: Slept, you haven't eaten. It's like, literally just eats something. Right? [00:14:45] Speaker A: Right. This isn't about that your doll just fell on the floor. This is about that you need to take a nap and eat some food. And that's. That's my explanation for what's happening, I think, is like, in. That's now become a litmus test for me of if I notice myself getting sucked into those sorts of external stories, same sort of thing of there's family drama that happens in my family every once in a while. And it's the same sort of litmus test for me now of, like, when I feel myself getting sucked into it and feel like, oh, my gosh, I have to. I have to solve this right now. Okay, hold on. Have I really. How well did I sleep last night? Have I eaten enough protein today? What else is going on? Do I just need to lay down and take a nap? That's my current framing. [00:15:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that. That sounds like a level of awareness of what's going on as opposed to just an immediate reaction. You know, one of the. One of the better concepts that I come back to often is Viktor Frankl, the distance between stimulus and response. And in there is kind of like our freedom. That. That's our. That's our power, our choice on how to react. And when there is no distance between stimulus and response, you're like, you know, you're in this crazy mode, and some level of awareness around what's happening to you is just expands that distance between a stimulus. Like a bad story, someone making a comment that you disagree with something and the response. Just being aware of a stimulus coming in and then saying, hold on. How do I want to respond? As opposed to just this instinctual response. I feel like that's healthy. The more distance we can create between those two, I feel, like, healthier in general. [00:16:21] Speaker A: Where do you feel like you're out with that this last week? Do you feel like you. Are you aware of that healthy distance? Do you notice when you're reacting instead of taking the time to respond? [00:16:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I've trained myself over time to improve on it because I get very emotional about it, and it's not healthy. It doesn't feel good. And it messes with my friendships and relationships and the way I interact with my family. And I've kind of gotten to a point where I'm aware of that, and I know I don't want that. And so this week, it's kind of helped me go the other way, deeper into positive experiences. So I've gotten an incredible amount of joy out of work this week, and I've said it in Slack at some point over the last week as things just felt really dark in the outside world. The team is clicking, and things are going well, and I just kind of just showed some gratitude. I was like, this is just an amazing thing we have, that all this stuff happens outside, but inside here, the six of us do something meaningful and rewarding, and we add value to other people. We improve our lives. Like, it's something to, like, believe in and work on, that we almost try to protect with, like, a little force field that doesn't let all these other things come in, and it turns into a sanctuary for everyone to jump into and not talk about any of that and not care about it for a period of time. So you just kind of have this space where you get to be productive and creative outlet and productive outlet, and it's intellectually challenging. And so that. That's what this week did for me. I found even more, like, contentment and enjoyment from that because all these other things were going further in the wrong direction or felt even worse. [00:18:11] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm reminded of Basecamp. I want to say in, like, 2019 or 2020, released something that said work is a political free zone or something that this isn't the place to. That was their personal ideology, their big. [00:18:21] Speaker B: Their big moment, and at the time. [00:18:23] Speaker A: Got a bunch of pushback. I remember feeling like, hold on. This doesn't feel socially responsible. Like, we all, you know, in every aspect of our lives, we need to be working to better society. And I've personally flipped on that. That. No, I think they were prophetic and ahead of their time of. Yeah, the way. The way you're describing, like, work being a sanctuary and having more. More compartmentalization of, you know, if. If one thing is going wrong halfway across the country, that doesn't mean everything ever is bad. Also, like, we can. We can be more nuanced in the. Creating good in the world. [00:18:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I. I had a huge challenge with that in. In that same time period, because, I mean, the. The. The environment was very different online and in the world, and our office was in Portland, and Portland was a politically charged place. [00:19:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:19:06] Speaker B: And so that. That was. That was challenging. And then I. You know, when we look over at 37signals, it was like you have that cluster in the public eye, and that felt like it was a huge challenge for them to go through. I think even more importantly what it helps is on the family side. So like walking downstairs at the end of the day, by that point in time, the kids are home and the good chaos is happening. Maybe one of the girls has a friend or two over. The other one's getting ready for the soccer game. The other one's talking tea with my wife about what's going on with her friends. And walking in that environment, I'm like, I need to create the same bubble and same force field here even more so than work. And that helps me like put the phone down and like get this like amazing feeling of being present. Maybe it's a little self congratulatory. Look at you, you're being so present. [00:20:05] Speaker A: Good for you. [00:20:07] Speaker B: But it does feel like this. [00:20:08] Speaker A: I'm so enlightened. [00:20:10] Speaker B: Yeah, but it does, it, it feels so. I like, you know, I like look at the environment and I'm almost like looking at it from a distance. And then I'll like, you know, I'll say, siri put on, we're in, we're back into Hamilton. And then everyone starts seeing a little bit. I'm like, gee, this is, this is just as good as it gets. It is a mundane Thursday that means not very much in the grand scheme of things. And it is as good as it gets. It's peak. [00:20:35] Speaker A: Philosophically, I'm curious now if, if it's not a high probability strategy to try to create as many siloed spheres in your life like that where work does not impact family life or does not impact the doom scrolling on Twitter. Right now I'm playing this fantastic game on the iPhone called Polytopia which I found out about through Elon Musk. He really likes the game. He brought us into the slos. It's like this real time strategy game. And that for me feels like another just totally separate sphere because sometimes I'm winning in these games. It's like player versus player. Sometimes I'm winning and then that feels great and then sometimes losing and that feels terrible as a practice of kind of separating that from okay, that's not going to color the rest of my life. I also have my family life and things can be going good or challenging in that arena and work also. And at any given time, if one of those things is going poorly and I let that kind of spill into the other ones, that feels like a recipe for just always being discontent. Whereas if I kind of let them be separate and switch modes. Okay, yeah, I had a tough day working on stuff, but now I get to switch and enjoy some wonderful family time and then crush my brother in polytopia. And that feels great. [00:21:44] Speaker B: Yes. [00:21:45] Speaker A: So, you know, two of the three things are going, are going well. [00:21:48] Speaker B: I have a hard time getting too into sports. It's just, you know, kind of goes over my head. I just can't pretend to care. But when I see people who really, really care, I understand it. It's. It's a nice escape to care about something that's fun and meaningful but not overly serious. I mean, maybe some people take it very seriously, but it does create a new sphere. And I was just having a conversation with my brother. So we're planning a trip to Aspen. My younger brother sold his business after 10 years of working on it. Amazing roller coaster gym business. So Crunch Gym franchisee went through Covid in New York. Just a very, very difficult roller coaster and successfully landed the plane and sold this business and did great. And so we want to celebrate. So Geistrud, my. My. My brothers and my dad. And one of the things he wants to do is go see a singer. Sam Beam, Scott Beam, something. The guy from Iron and Wine. [00:22:45] Speaker A: Okay. [00:22:46] Speaker B: Okay. It's not really my dad's style of music. My older brother style of music. I'm. I'm fine with it, you know, but my younger brother loves it. And it's, it's his trip and he's like, you know, so he talked about this. We were kind of making fun of each other around, like, okay, fine, I guess we'll go suffer through this. Like grown man crying into his beard. Fine. But what it made me think and what I ended up saying was any space that we can focus on hanging out together and like art, music, beauty, like this like pure thing that can just be like this two hour experience. I'm in, I'm in as much of that as possible. Yeah, it feels almost even more. This is, this is like a. All right, we're gonna move a little bit into politics, but not really. When those spaces get corroded, it's even more offensive, you know, like, there's a story out right now about a Munich philharmonica, this orchestra being disinvited because their composer is Israeli. This disinvited from a festival in Belgium. And to me that's like, don't mess with the good things. Don't, like, don't let these other things intrude on these really, really good things that should just be just left alone. [00:24:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:24:01] Speaker B: I get offended by that. I think maybe because I want to go have those experiences. I want Everyone to have experiences like that that are just. Just good. Just leave it alone. [00:24:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I like the word you used of sanctuary. Of. It's important to keep sacred spaces that are kind of remind us of the deeper humanity of. Oh yeah, we're all having the same sort of human experience and there is beauty and wonder and enjoyment in the world and we can return to those spaces even when other spheres of our life are going poorly. [00:24:34] Speaker B: Yep, more of that. [00:24:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Speaking of which, you mentioned that stuff in your team is going well, that people are vibing. [00:24:41] Speaker B: Yes. [00:24:42] Speaker A: Yeah, talk to me about that. [00:24:43] Speaker B: So I think at some point, you know, we know what helped me see it. I have this Slack group with my Portland friends. We've been friends for a long time, since I lived in Portland. I no longer live there. A few other guys don't live there either. But we kept this Slack and we're close friends through it. And we very often go into that to share what's going on at work and either problems or celebrate things and whatever. And I found myself going into there and kind of updating what's going on. And the feedback I got was, damn, you guys are like moving fast. Like, what, what? Every day you're like this new thing, then this other thing, then this experiment, then we're changing this and this is launching on Tuesday. And I think it made me look at our Slack and our team and just think for a second like we are at a. We are operating much, much better. Maybe it's the summer lull, everyone's on vacation, things kind of go slow. We have to focus on agent quality for a while. And as soon as September hit, we just like turn the corner, hit the gas. And all of a sudden it's just, you know, six people. There's only one person per battle station. There's no fluff. There's one person that does support. There's one person that does this marketing. There's one person that does front end, one person that does back end, one person that does product. You know, we. This constellation of people that work from outside the company, I can't remember the word that help us with design, that sort of thing, but everything's just humming. And I was trying to figure out like, what. What is going on? That how do we get here, how do we, how do we stay here? [00:26:09] Speaker A: What do you attribute that to? What do you. The first thing that comes to mind for me is that that's an indication that you're doing your job as CEO correctly. The CEO is the person who builds the thing that builds the thing. So your, your job is to pick the people that are going to jive together to pick the A players. They're going to be able to own their own spheres and that's an indication that you've got done your job well. What else might you attribute that to? [00:26:30] Speaker B: I will take that credit up to the point that it's. That it's worth. Which is I'm not doing the work for everyone. Right. So. So yes, it's kind of been set up properly. I do think I attributed some of it to my increased engagement at a ground level. So my. Sometimes I have a tendency to kind of lean back a little bit and let everyone do their thing and kind of coordinate in that way. And when September hit and the AGU quality got to where we needed to be and we basically said, all right, summer's done. Like, let's go, it's go, go, go, go time. Here's what we want to do by the end of September, end of the quarter, end of the year, all these other things. And that really motivated me to kind of jump in and be much more hands on. So an example, all day yesterday, I wasn't just kind of waiting for these screens to come back and give comments on it. I was like in Figma and making comments and making copy changes. And I think I've done more of that. So maybe it's a combination also of the fact that things are going well and I also feel that they're going better because I'm more involved and I can see them going better. But I also attribute to a very, very positive feedback loop that as soon as we had this big conversation of it's September, it's go time, growth, like clicked and we started adding like a thousand bucks a day in mrr. Amazing. And to, to do the work and get the like immediate feedback loop is so motivating that everyone's just like leaning in because it's so fun. Everything you do, like seems to work. [00:27:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:28:00] Speaker B: So you want to do more. [00:28:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:01] Speaker B: And then it's fun and then it's. So I think it's this combination of like positive feedback loops and being more involved and the motivation that comes with it. And yeah, all these things combined, but I definitely want to just keep it for as long as possible. [00:28:15] Speaker A: So that's very interesting to me because Certainly, I mean, $1,000 a day in MRR, that's, that's astounding. That's great. [00:28:21] Speaker B: That's motivating. Right? You do that, you know, three, four days in A row and you're like this, like, how do we just this never stop. Make this never stop. [00:28:28] Speaker A: So that to me is certainly an indication, like to be able to get to that point, that means a lot of things have to be going well and a lot of things have to be working. However, the feeling of that things are going well, like increasing revenue, can hide a lot of other problems. So I think the thing that I'm curious about is are you merely feeling that the number is going up and at the right and any sort of underlying problems that might have been there in terms of communication or in terms of that the wrong person's in the wrong role don't matter because, well, as long as that number's going up into the right, then that's fine. But what I would find to be much more convincing is if you felt the same way while revenue was flat or going down and you still felt this internal sense of like, you know, there's external stuff outside of our control that we can't really find. But like, my gosh, everybody's killing it. Everyone's like, we're still on the right path, we're still doing stuff that, that to me would be a stronger indication that, that things are working. [00:29:15] Speaker B: I get that. A few weeks ago I was saying that and, and what I was saying then was that the revenue growth is a lagging indicator. The things we're doing now will make September great. Yeah, yeah, and I do recall saying that, but it was, it's more hope and less concrete. Yeah, yeah. So the positive feedback loop is like, is very real and it's just. [00:29:36] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. Well that's great then because that, that to me means, you know. Yeah, you, you were feeling good about this a couple months ago and I remember you saying the, the lagging indicator thing. And so, yeah, that, that probably means that, you know, if you're, if you're feeling even better about it now than you were then, that revenue, revenue is going to be going up by $2,000 a day in a couple months or something. Yeah. [00:29:54] Speaker B: Yes. You know what, it, it brings up something that happened this week. Maybe the reason I felt this way and like posted it at the end of the day yesterday is because the day started with an argument, a multi person disagreement debate thing, and it was over. We are trying to make a big change. We're trying to switch from a 25 minute trial, a usage based trial that has served us well for the last year, but we are now ready to move over to a seven day trial and that requires a Bunch of changes, screens and what happens when the seven day runs out but you haven't put your card on file. And what. It's just a lot, a lot more. A lot of changes. And at some point on Wednesday, Jessica, our VP of product and I were looking at these screens and saying, let's stop doing the checkout ourselves. Let's just kick people out into the stripe checkout. And we thought that made sense. It reduced one click out of four that was required to get to this. And then all of a sudden we could lean on that and stop doing it in our product. So we had the ticket ready to go. Everything's ready, all the designs. But then we made a last minute change. Right. Wednesday afternoon, she and I are talking, it is 1am in Europe. And so the engineering team's not going to see this change in the ticket until the next morning. And at that point in time we were saying to ourselves, we want to launch on Thursday. So I think maybe this was on Tuesday. So we want to launch. So we're giving to them on Wednesday morning. And they came back to us with, what is this? You can't change this. This is. Then we can accomplish this thing and this other thing that we need to do. And they can't control and the portal doesn't do what we need. And they were like upset. They're like, we want to do this on Thursday. You made this change. You didn't consult us. You know, they kind of like were like mad. And so Jess and I walked in on Wednesday and all of a sudden we find ourselves like defending ourselves. Hey, we're just trying to save time and we're trying to this. And it very quickly became obvious, you know, what's happening here is we're just designing, we're pushing to production, we are testing, we are just doing everything really fast and mistakes are going to be made. [00:32:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:32:06] Speaker B: And we made a mistake. [00:32:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:07] Speaker B: And that's it. And it was like, look around. And it's like, this is what should happen because of how hard and how hard we're pushing and how fast we want things to go. And we have to be okay with that mistake because we want to go super fast. So the right response is not to be mad at us. It's to say, clearly these people want the same things that we want. They want to go just as fast. So something must have happened. So now I got to come back to them. And yeah, now we got to push it to Monday because we don't want to deploy on Friday. And that's on us. And everyone's okay with that, right? You got to be okay with that. Because if you're not okay with us making that mistake, then what we're not going to be okay with? You make a mistake on something that you released because you needed to make the decision, but you couldn't consult us and so you just made the decision to go faster and it was a mistake. Like, okay, so I think the fact that there was a negative experience in terms of like a mistake from me in the middle of all this very, very fast experimentation like we did. I remember all the things we did this, this week. We, we, we launched lot warm transfers, we added email verification to our signup process because we kept getting too much spam. And then we did the seven day trial switch and we did advertising changes to optimize toward conversion events that are further in the funnel. We just like did so many things. So we were able to kind of turn that mistake into the celebration of like our speed culture. Of like, oh, okay, that's part of it. We have to be okay with that because this is what we want to do. So I think maybe that healthy response to a negative experience helped me feel like, ooh, this is healthy. This, this is working. [00:33:41] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. And great too. For you to be able to model what happens when you make a mistake and to own it. I can imagine a much less healthy response if I was in a team like this that would have me feeling like things were more dysfunctional is if you as the. Because there's a power imbalance there, you kind of get to set the tone of how to handle this sort of thing. A much less healthy response would have been something like you pushing this on the engineers. Pushing back of like, well, who are you to try to push back on this and say that I'm the boss here and don't you forget it. Well, now that's like creating this tyrannical thing. But the, the way that you're describing that you responded to it of like owning that you made a mistake is fantastic. Now that's communicating. That's, that's showing instead of telling people like, hey, it's okay to make mistakes. And you know, this is actually from a philosophical, like company mantra perspective, moving fast and breaking things is a, is an opinionated choice that we're making. Like, as a company, that is our strategy. We want to be moving faster and every strength is a weakness. The downside of that is, okay, well, we're going to make more mistakes. We're going to Break things and that's okay. That's, that's the trade off. You can't have it both ways. You have to decide or the other. Right? That's right. Yeah. Like the, the, the vibe that I'm getting I think is it seems like from what you're saying, the things that are working are because of interactions like that that you're having with the team where you're setting up that healthy dynamic of being able to vulnerably admit that you made mistakes and clearly communicating what the values of the company are and yeah, it sounds like you're killing it, dude. [00:35:06] Speaker B: Yeah, it's been fun. Thank you. What, what's your working dynamically? How many other people do you work with? [00:35:13] Speaker A: If we were having this conversation about a year ago, I would have said that I am scaling up, I'm like upgrading myself and I have my assistant that I've been working with for the last two years and I just brought on my fourth junior developer and also working with a senior person and coordinating stuff and some work on file inbox and some consulting stuff and that has dropped to. I don't even use my assistant anymore. I don't want to use the word use. I barely work with my assistant anymore because of AI and as a, oh man, this is a conversation my wife get into. My wife and I get into all the time. But my personal strength, my brother in law, is very similar to you in that it seems like your strength in this sort of thing is coordinating people and bringing on the A players and figuring out where people need to go. I struggle so much with that. I thrive and I do my best when I'm just like jiving with like I have a really hard technical problem in front of me and I can just kind of shut out the world and I can really focus on that and create this beautiful thing and other people getting into it are just like, oh, I don't know, figure it out, do whatever you want. And then that like kind of goes off the rails. But like with. So I was stretching myself a year ago into well, what does it look like for me to be outsourcing more stuff and had a lot of benefits from that. I was able to get stuff done much faster and kind of develop a little bit more, more of a skill of outsourcing instead of just doing everything myself. And then AI just like really hit its stride and now I'm like, well, what a amazing enabling tool for me to just really into the part that I like. So I think I mentioned this last time, but the main, one of the main jobs that my assistant was doing for me is triaging my personal email. Her job is like to free up more of my time. And in a weekend I made a Claude script that runs every half hour on the hour that does a better job than she was doing. And if it need, if something needs my attention, it like sends me a push notification on my phone and it can star things. I haven't needed this yet, but it can automatically respond to emails. And so like what am I supposed to do? But like I can create these tools now where like I'm hunting now because I have this experience of having worked with people, of doing stuff. But like the most value that I'm currently getting from interacting with other people in terms of business is just kind of like high level strategy talks where I'm like, okay, can we get on a call for half an hour and I can show you this thing and just kind of bounce off you what I'm thinking of. But even that, like a lot of those conversations for me are just happening with AI now if I'm just chatting with Claude about, oh, I'm struggling with this architectural decision or like, you know what, what might the best way to do this marketing strategy go? That's a thing that I can just talk with it endlessly at any time that I want. It responds immediately. It's pulling from this giant corpus of everything any human has ever thought for the last million years. Yeah, so, so I've, you know, I started off doing this just kind of being a solo person and then growth looked like it was going to be, I'm working with more people and now because of AI, all the people that I'm working with are now robots. That's, that's where I'm at right now. [00:38:10] Speaker B: Okay, that, that is very interesting. I, I often think of that as impacting an individual role. Right. Where a salesperson in the ideal form should really be coordinating three or four agents along with themselves so they expand their capacity dramatically. To apply that to like solo entrepreneurship is, is amazing because a lot of entrepreneurs don't want to work with people and they don't want to manage people and that's not their strength and they're self motivated and they have to compromise to go hire people and manage people and do all the things that don't come naturally because you do need to expand your capacity. You can't do everything yourself in many situations to then think about that solo person not having to bend their preferences and their personality and their just instinct that you know what they want to do but still expand the capacity in that way is amazing. There's a lot there, right? I mean people talk about the extreme version, the solo billion dollar company and who cares if it's a billion. The fact that it can be a solo company that can grow to something substantial, much more substantial than it used to be able to with just one person's efforts, but now it's not one person's efforts, it's like one person times a multiple. Do you find the most leverage there? Is it on the development side? [00:39:42] Speaker A: That's where I'm realizing the most leverage right now. Just because that's the domain that I'm most familiar with. Something I'd love to pick your brain on though is I found an opportunity to get a massive lead list of almost every one of my competitors customers and I am seeing the potential for a lot of leverage there. Of like once I figure out what, what is the interaction that I can be having here of Is it about booking calls, is it about sending emails, is it about, you know, I remake their file upload form for them and then send it to them as a demo and then also send them a postcard that's a screenshot of it or something. I'm not sure what that thing's gonna be, but once I crack that nut of like, okay, this is the repeatable thing that a year ago I would have said, okay, let me hire a salesperson to go and do this. When I'm designing this pipeline. Now I'm thinking in the back of my mind, well eventually I'm gonna want this to be done by AI and that' the scalable way. So if we have a conversation a month or two from now, I think I hope to have some sort of automated direct outreach AI powered pipeline where it's bringing in new customers and then that's going to be incredible leverage. But yeah, from the technical front, I'm in a day I'm able to get done more than I was getting done in a week while working with two junior developers and it's insane and it's just amazing. [00:41:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like you can't argue with that, period. That's just a new thing that now exists and can't go back. That's it. I'm with you on the magic wand of a marketing or sales process. That element of just imagining what you would like to be able to do. And a year, a long time ago, a year ago, it was just an ideal process that you could think of and then you would Then immediately need to compromise to make it reality. Assuming you can't just go out and hire people to just do all of it or just start throwing large sums of money at it. And now I really challenge myself. I had a conversation with Craig Hewitt last week on this podcast that just went out yesterday and he's doing his 100 days of AI like YouTube series and he is uncovering the tools to do this. So I'm with you. If I think about my ideal process and I want to wave a magic wand. Right, let's just play it out for a second here. I want to identify a second tier city. I don't know Charlotte. And I want to find all the SEO companies that work with local companies and I want to find their contact info and then I want to set up an email and then I want to have a voice agent call them, have Rosie call them and then like, right, I want to send a postcard and that. I want to do that for tier two cities all over the place. You know, times 3,000 SEO companies to try to partner, to convince them that they should introduce Rosie to their customers because their customers care about phone calls. That's why they hired the local SEO company. [00:42:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:46] Speaker B: That was like a fantasy just in your head. Wouldn't that be nice? [00:42:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:42:51] Speaker B: And now it really bothers me. I think it should bother us that it is possible and it's not overly expensive and we're not doing it like that. That's a problem. It should just kind of scratch at us constantly. [00:43:03] Speaker A: Because a long time ago, back in 2024, you to. To implement that strategy, you and to do it well, you would need a sales team. And reaching more tier 2 cities would mean, okay, we need to double our sales team force. And now, yeah, it's just burning more tokens. Right. For another $10 in tokens, we get to reach two more cities. And yeah, everything, you know, having, having the customized conversations with people and a customized email sequence, I'm like, yeah, all that is possible now and was not possible a year ago. Yeah, it's insane. [00:43:35] Speaker B: Yeah. I always link it back to the opportunity in productized services and AI right now. Because if someone came to me and said, jordan, I can set that up for you for X, I would almost certainly buy it because it would be 1/10 the price of hiring 2 SDRs and someone else and another thing and an outsourced service and something else to even accomplish that at all. Right now it feels like it still requires stringing together multiple products and it's not actually Easy to do. I love hearing people that are doing, doing it. I love Cody blanking on his last name on, on Twitter. He's always talking about this stuff with Greg Eisenberg and they're having 30 minute conversations about how they're doing this crazy automations and I'm like, I can't do what they're doing. But now knowing that it's possible, it just has lodged itself in my mind as don't forget, whatever you're currently doing, you could probably doing 10x more. [00:44:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:44:31] Speaker B: But you're just not being creative enough or you're not well. [00:44:33] Speaker A: So from the position that you're in, like your strength as a CEO is assembling the A team. And so the way that I would be looking at this from your perspective is like who is the person that you could bring in that's the A player that can create this virtual sales team. It's not going to look like what it would have looked like a year ago, which is how do I hire a lead of sales and how do I recruit? [00:44:54] Speaker B: That's right. [00:44:54] Speaker A: It's going to look like one dude who's like yeah, I'm really good at stringing these tools together. Yep. And then you just have the high level conversation with him of like, here's what the shape of this campaign needs to look like. Figure out how to make this work and then, and then that one person is going to have the output of what a sales team would have had a year ago. [00:45:08] Speaker B: It's like an AI marketer. [00:45:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:10] Speaker B: Right. It is not a traditional anything. It's, it's not, it's not a traditional role. [00:45:14] Speaker A: Right. Buddy of mine is doing some consulting projects with, he's targeting like Fortune 100 companies. So people who like companies that have already grown and already built out huge sales teams and stuff like this and his pitch to them in this consulting and I'm doing some subcontracting contracting for him. So I'm talking to him a bunch about this. But the without, without getting too detailed, the broad strokes are like find a company that has already built out a team like this and figure out within the shape of the company if we were rebuilding this today, what just makes no sense. So right now you have 50 people who are all doing this thing that could be replaced by a voice agent. Let's talk about why not do that from a high level C level sales pitch that it makes a lot of sense. And then that's the whole question of well, what do we do with these people now if we're going to replace them with this process. But in the position that you're in. If I had to bet on a legacy company versus a small. I think you said you're five people, small, nimble team. [00:46:15] Speaker B: Yeah, six people. [00:46:16] Speaker A: You being able to think of this from scratch, you're going to get to such a better place than this Fortune 100 company is going to get to, where they're trying to replace this old legacy system. Because there's anachronistic ways of how they're doing things where they're just not thinking about what's possible of like, oh my God, we could send a customized, seemingly handwritten postcard or something to these people. I don't know where you would get it feels to me like an advantage being in a position like yours where you're growing fast, you have a small, nimble company and you can be rethinking these sorts of processes from first principles of like what makes the most sense in an era of LLMs. [00:46:46] Speaker B: Every area of the company, every function, we should demand extreme leverage from leverage like people aren't used to. I think we had a little bit of trouble getting on board because the people in our company, especially the engineering team, have been engineers for a long time, right? They're pros. This is their career. And it took them a little bit to be open minded and as the tools got better, they became more open minded and then they started using them and then they adopted them and now they're like, you never going back. You can't go back. Why would you have to go back? It's ridiculous. So I, I think, I think now it's flipped. Now the engineering is leading the way on that usage and the marketing is now trailing behind. Here's an example of marketing adopting it. We just hired Mark Thomas. You know Mark, great guy. [00:47:38] Speaker A: I don't recall. I don't think so. [00:47:40] Speaker B: Great guy marketer. Used to work at a agency called Powered by Search that we worked with when we were running Rally. So got to know him and then he went on Outer Zone and we just hired him to run our life, a lifecycle email project. And what he does is he interviews us and in a week comes out with a 27 email sequence that you can send to your list. Three emails a week for nine weeks straight. And on Monday it talks about how to grow your business for our icp. And on Wednesday the email is about a feature and how people are using the feature. And then on Thursday it's like a customer spotlight. So every week you get a Monday Wednesday, Thursday with these topics. And in one week we have 27 emails. And I obviously don't care that he didn't write them by hand. It is irrelevant, actually. It is irrelevant. Yeah, but they're not slop. But what he's done is built up a process leveraging AI and all the prompts and tools that he has in place to make sure that the emails are really good. And in one week we now are going to reach, you know, our email list of tens of thousands three times a week for the next nine weeks. And that's just it really. We really didn't do it because we couldn't do it before. We couldn't do it. No one's. We have an email, we have a welcome series, you know, that's so important that yes, you just sit down and you take your time and you write it. [00:49:05] Speaker A: That's what high performance is going to look like in 2025. 2026 is someone at a high strategic level that if you gave them a team a year ago, could have output the same sort of thing that has taste, that is also really familiar with what these tools are good at and what they're bad at. That then yeah, can have really high leverage processes of like, I'm sure if you looked at the prompts of the way that he did those, I'm sure it's not just like generate 27 emails for me of the thing. He probably has a whole process of. Probably similar to the process that he would have done if he had a bunch of writers of like, here's the rough scaffold. Here's. It's the Monday, Wednesday, Friday theme. [00:49:44] Speaker B: Here's the voice. [00:49:45] Speaker A: Right. I guarantee he's reading all of them because yeah, some of it is still going to be slop and they're really good, period. [00:49:52] Speaker B: Yep. [00:49:53] Speaker A: Yeah, but the, the, it's the, it's the combination of like learning how to use these high leverage tools and still having the taste of knowing when to cut back on them. Knowing. Knowing when they're good or bad. And yeah, that's, that's going to get high quality, strong output. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Along those lines, I'd love to pick your brain specifically about what, how, how might you design a direct outreach campaign for File Inbox with a lead list of all of the customers of all of my competitors. So I have like, it was hard for me to figure this out because I was looking on Google like, how do I figure out these hosted pages for Wetransfer? So it's like a page where businesses have set it up to get files. And so looking through the leads list, it's like if you're a business that needs to get, oh, one of them is like an orthopedic 3D printed thing for animals. And as part of doing business, they need to get pictures of the animals to be able to like design those prosthetics. So what I'm looking at is a list of a whole bunch of businesses like that, where I can see that their website, I can see their Wetransfer page of what that looks like. And from the website I can do scraping and figure out what their phone number is, what their email is. Where would you go from there? Some thoughts that I've had are like, it's probably going to be easier to get people on the phone if I'm saying that I just want to interview them about. And I am curiously interested in how did you find out about Wetransfer? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? And then after I've done 10 of those, maybe go from there of like, oh, everyone is saying that they're annoyed that Wetransfer does do X. And so I can go back to those people and say, hey, I have this feature now, or something like that. But at a high level, like, how would you be looking at that list? [00:51:22] Speaker B: You know, one of the first questions that I would ask is how big is the market? Because if the market is 500,000 potential businesses compared to if it's 5,000, I think that dictates your approach and how aggressive or not you should be. [00:51:39] Speaker A: I'm looking at a list of 40,000 right now. [00:51:42] Speaker B: Okay, so it's medium sized, right? Not tiny. Look, sometimes, you know, people have 500 people in their world and like, you should not, you should not just send the same email to everyone. You really should be much more careful. Yeah, I think 40,000, you know, that's pretty big. So you have more freedom to do things at a larger scale. And then I guess I would try to figure out how do I make it feel to the recipient that it's not at scale. Whatever personalization you can do would help. And whatever you can do to articulate the problem accurately, that is where I would focus. Not on how amazing your solution is, but if you can articulate the pain is how is. Is how I would go about getting the attention that you want. [00:52:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know that I can do that yet. [00:52:29] Speaker B: Now here's the thing. That can be a process. So Instead of saying, oh, here's the campaign, I'm going To send all 40,000, you can do that more carefully. You can say, here's a campaign, I'm going to reach out to 500 and based on the responses or lack of responses, I'm going to start adjusting. If I take it back to when we first started, we have a much, much better understanding of the pain involved. And it's not what we thought it was. It's just not. We thought that people were going to be very skeptical about an AI sounding human enough. And we thought people would be very concerned about replacing their receptionist that they don't want to do or their business looking bad because an AI was answering the phone. What we learned over time is that it's actually very different. People are very, very concerned about the emotional weight of having to answer the phone constantly and the psychological exhaustion around missing phone calls. And every time I miss it, I feel like I miss business. And it's Saturday and I have to walk away from my kids soccer thing. And it turns out it wasn't an important call. So I just. So we just had a misunderstanding of the most powerful message possible in articulating the pain. [00:53:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:53:40] Speaker B: And now when we reach out and we articulate that pain much more, you know, clearly, like sharply, people feel like, oh, you get it, you get me. And they're much more open to responding. [00:53:51] Speaker A: That makes so much sense to me. And yeah, that, that sounds much closer to the pain. I'm reminded of my brother in law, a different brother in law is starting a handyman business business. And that was one of the major blockers for him of starting the business is like, well, I, I'm gonna have to have a phone and like, I don't want to be like, I have to find a way to answer the phone and have a receptionist or something. And well, that would be too expensive. So yeah, maybe they just text me or trying to figure that out. How did you narrow that down? How did you go from thinking that it was, is this voice gonna sound robotic to oh, actually the pain is this emotional weight of answering the phone. Is that customer interviews? Is that like, what's your process for digging that sort of information out? [00:54:28] Speaker B: We put out a feature set that we thought was necessary to compete in the market, mostly looking at competing products and using our own filter of our decisions. But a lot of it was driven from, okay, this is kind of where the market is. Which of these features do we feel like is necessary? Let's launch with a thin but working version of these features. And the first thing was people that can order 80% of the features and just zeroed in on the features that they cared most about. And then in the conversations around, well, how do you want this feature to work? Or, and that's, I mean that's, that those are complaints. Those are, I'm trying to accomplish X, how come it doesn't do what I wanted to? And then asking, well, why would you want to do it that way? [00:55:11] Speaker A: When you're saying they're zeroing in on it. This, are you like manually onboarding people? And this isn't a call, is this an email exchange? How are you getting this information from people that they're zeroing in on that subset of features? [00:55:20] Speaker B: We, we have been self serve at the very, very beginning when we, when we first started, we were talking to people, there was no self serve. Like, I don't even think you could create an account. I think we had to create an account for you. Like, it was, you know, very rudimentary. And in those conversations, mostly over email, it was, here's what it does, you know, we'll set you up. And then, and then asking them, you know, what do you think? And what we expected to hear back is not what we heard back. It was, I want this feature to do X, why doesn't it do it? And all of those questions ended up being about very, very few features. And we just, we just removed the extraneous features that people didn't care about and weren't very good. We added them back in later. But then we came out what our product was. Effectively, it wasn't an AI receptionist, it was an AI voicemail. It was a better way to take messages. [00:56:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:56:10] Speaker B: And we didn't re, we thought we had to book appointments automatically and look at your schedule and all this other stuff and people were like, like, no, I just don't want them to go to voicemail. [00:56:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:56:20] Speaker B: Because everyone hangs up on voicemail and doesn't like it. And those are just missed opportunities. And so if you just take messages the same way my voicemail does, but actually have people not hang up and give you the messages, you have added enough value that I'm going to pay you 50 bucks a month. [00:56:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:56:34] Speaker B: We were like, oh, okay. I guess that's our base plan. [00:56:37] Speaker A: I remember that positioning of yours surprising me of like AI voicemail. That's, that's not what people want. But yeah, no, that's, that's great. That, yeah, the process you're describing of like listening to what people are honing in on this is I'm not there yet with file inbox. And I'd really like to be there because what I have right now is there's a lot of things that I do differently that I would say I do better than WeTransfer of like, you can embed it in your website. You can make it look much more professional and make it look like it's a seamless experience in your website. You can set up all these rules of like automatically organizing the files into your cloud storage. But like, the way that I'm even talking about it now, those are features, those are like, those are fun things that I made. What I can't. What I don't quite have my thumb on is like, why does anyone give a shit? What does it mean that you can embed it in your website? Is it that people. Well, I don't know. Do people even care about this actually? But like, for embedding in your website, is it that it feels unprofessional or feels insecure if you're getting popped out to WeTransfer and People Security is something that's come up a lot in the customer interviews that I've done. So there might be something there, but at a high level. I think the thing that I'm missing is a process of figuring out what is the subset of things that people are actually caring about and how do I find that stronger positioning? Because my God, if I can figure out what that. That short condensed, like, this is an AI voicemail is for file inbox. And I can crack that code. And I can now unleash this on the. On the 40,000. Did I say 40 or 60? It's 70. It's an even number. But around 50,000. I don't remember if I can crack that code of like, this is the messaging to give to people of like, hey, right now you're on WeTransfer. I bet you don't like that blank. My thing does blank. And here's the pain that you're currently experiencing that I solved with that thing. Like, that's. I'm missing that right now. And I feel like as soon as I can crack that nut, then it's going to get fun. [00:58:15] Speaker B: I think it's close in terms of knowing what the process should be. So. So right, you. You identified it. Those are features, great. But if you can link those back to pain points and each one can. Each pain point can be like, there are multiple angles to each one. So the fact that you don't need to kick a user out to a we transfer page. That's a great feature. And so I guess then what you're doing is you are guessing at why would that benefit someone? And then you might construct two or three angles on that. Are you sick of seeming unprofessional by sending people out of your website when they need to transfer an important document to your business? Right. That's one angle. Maybe there's another angle of are you frustrated by coming off as an insecure interaction with your customers because they're not on your website? Or so another angle. So if you send out 500 emails with this angle, 500 emails with that angle and 500 emails with a different angle, you basically have 1500 opportunities for people to say yeah, that's it right there. Right. And that's one feature. So then maybe you have two or three features that are like the big story of why someone uses your product. If you connect those two, three emotional business pain points. Excuse me, yeah, three emotional angles for each of those features and you send emails, maybe you'll find a pattern that comes back and oh, clearly this angle gets the most responses and so maybe you can lead with that. So I think it's that process that's multi step but going into it saying I don't really know, we're going to find out but if I were them, maybe it would be this or this or this, these three possible angles on this very big feature. One's security, one's professionalism and one something else. Ideally there's some difference in the responses that you get, but I think it's that process. [01:00:10] Speaker A: Okay. And that, that is the high level process that you do of doing that experiment is sending out like 500 emails at a time with different experiments. Okay. [01:00:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And you, you have customers. So here's, yeah, here's something I've learned very recently. Customers love surveys. They love the ability to express their opinions. [01:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:00:26] Speaker B: I've used surveys over the last like three months more than I've ever in my entire career. We sent a survey a while back and we got so many responses we were like what, what is this? Why is 15% of our customer base answering this like 10 question survey in 48 hours? Like what, what is going on here? And we realized these people really want to make their opinion on, they want to tell us. So now when we have a question we, we just did it. We're about to start doing integrations so we just, there's server, we have 120 responses or something in the last like three days and we're like, how much better off are we now knowing that? Instead of saying, who should we do an integration with? Who do I know? How can I network into this. This company? [01:01:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:01:05] Speaker B: And if you have a customer base, as you already do, do not ignore that as the starting point. Literally, ask exactly what you want to know. [01:01:14] Speaker A: Yeah, this feature. [01:01:15] Speaker B: Why do you like this feature? [01:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:01:17] Speaker B: You know, what does it do for you in terms of like, solving the pain point? Can you tell me? [01:01:21] Speaker A: I ran a survey like that, gosh, maybe, maybe three years ago, and I remember being blown away by a few different things in it, like the pricing. I was, I was surprised that for my current customer base, I think it's. I think it's overpriced in the market, which I'm not. I'm not sure what to do about. Yeah, no. Okay. I think, I think my very next step is have a. Have a good ChatGPT session where I'm like, what are. Well, you know, given that this is a product, what are some good hypotheses of things to test? What are going to make up those 3, 500 email tests? Let's really craft that with a deep, emotional business pain around security or around professionalism or around something else. And that's an experiment. And then another way to test those assumptions of what is it actually that people care about. What is the emotional pain Organization might also be a thing. That's a thing that I've heard pop up a bunch of the hecticness of having your files all over and not being able to organize them and wanting the business process to be more streamlined and so I can test out those hypotheses and maybe a few more with a survey going to current customers. Okay. Yeah, great. That. That perfectly answers my question. [01:02:24] Speaker B: Yeah. I also think the, you know, LLMs are really good at researching for negative sentiment. So going out and finding an LLM and saying, what are the top five reasons people don't like WeTransfer? [01:02:39] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. [01:02:40] Speaker B: What are the most common complaints in the review sites like G2 and others and Reddit. You know, give me the list of five. Here's my website. I mean, you. Right. You know this stuff because you're kind of used to. But I think you could just keep leaning on it. [01:02:53] Speaker A: Yeah, cool. At a high level, I think taking like me personally, taking more of a strategy of that. I don't know anything like, I. Because I think I've gotten so caught up in these loops of just sniffing my Own farts of like. I think this would be a cool feature and it'd be fun to implement. So let me spend three months doing it and actually no one cares. But taking. Taking more of a position of ignorance of like, I don't know why people are buying this. I don't know what the important things are to them. I don't know what the. What the differentiating factor between me and Wetransfer is going to be to. To be strong enough to get them to switch. How do I figure out what the process is to find that out and let me. Let me just optimize for like, how do I increase the learning of learning more about this market and what people actually need? And I think that's going to be how I get like faster feedback. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. [01:03:41] Speaker B: So, Chris, cool. It's. It's been a great conversation. It's Friday. I hope you got good plans. Speaking of like music, enjoy. I'm going to see a concert this weekend with my daughter and a bunch of her friends at the United Center. Yep. Mountain Joy. I have no idea. I don't know if I heard her songs. Same. But my daughter and friends want to go. One of the dads has like a box through his company. [01:04:03] Speaker A: Love it. [01:04:04] Speaker B: Hell yeah. Then some soccer games. I hope you got. You got some good plans yourself. [01:04:07] Speaker A: I'm getting my concealed handgun test tomorrow morning. So if all goes according to plan, by tomorrow afternoon I'll be able to legally carry a concealed handgun. [01:04:18] Speaker B: What state are you in? [01:04:19] Speaker A: Texas. [01:04:20] Speaker B: Okay. I'm in Illinois. I'm not very familiar with the process. I've looked into it a few times. So you've done a bunch of training and tomorrow's like the final exam? [01:04:28] Speaker A: Basically, I've done no training. Actually. I've gone shooting once or twice and it seems pretty straightforward. You've got to like hit a target from different distances and shoot it five times within some number of seconds. And it seems pretty straightforward. There was a written test I had to take online that was. I probably could have aced it without even taking the course. Those sorts of like governmental tests are just like, if you know how to take a test, you can figure it out. But yeah, so. And also in Texas, it's not strictly necessary to get this, but it was important for my wife that I get some training on this. So. [01:05:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:05:04] Speaker A: Cross my T's and dot my eyes. [01:05:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I wish you luck on the exam. [01:05:08] Speaker A: Thank you so much. I. Cool. I doubt I will need it, but I will take it regardless. Good. [01:05:13] Speaker B: I'll update you if I ever do it in. In Illinois. I think I just want some training in general. I've. I've shot a few times. You know, my dad. My dad, you know, was in the IDF for a long time, so he's like. Like a marksman. [01:05:24] Speaker A: I. [01:05:24] Speaker B: You know, my problem is I'm righty, but my left eye is dominant. [01:05:28] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. [01:05:29] Speaker B: And so it doesn't work with the scope. Right. I'm. I'm holding with my right arm, and I'm closing my right eye. You can't. You can't ever be that good if you do that. So that's very challenging for me. [01:05:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:05:39] Speaker B: But I'm going skeet shooting for the first time when we're in Colorado. That. That sounds like fun. [01:05:44] Speaker A: I had no idea The. The force that it hits your shoulder with. The. The first time I went, I had this huge bruise on my shoulder afterwards. Like, it. It. It goes. It's. It's got some kickback, but know it. I. I'll be. [01:05:54] Speaker B: I'll be prepared. Cool. [01:05:58] Speaker A: Cool. [01:05:58] Speaker B: Thank you very much for joining. Great combo. [01:06:00] Speaker A: Likewise. Thank you for the invitation. See you next time. See.