Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible> welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where to start a founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig. All right, welcome to
Speaker 1 00:22 rogue startups. Episode one 83. Craig, how are you today
Speaker 2 00:27 man? I'm good though. You have a, I have a ton of stuff going on right now, but it's that good busy where you're like really productive and have a, a lot of irons in the fire and a lot of people were working towards the same goals. Uh, so it's good, but it's, it's nerve wracking and stressful at the same time. So I'm good stressed right now.
Speaker 1 00:47 Good stressed. I like, how about yourself? I am just stressed, you know, the a, the freelance client is, uh, causing me consternation, which I, you know, can't really talk about in great detail, but suffice it to say they're not terribly organized. There's a lot of political, backstabbing going on in there and it's, it's always been a little like that, but like, it's full on fucking game of Thrones there now. And, you know, I'm feeling a little like John Snow, not quite ned stark. They haven't been mad at me, but I'm definitely getting screwed over and you know, a ostracized off to the, uh, the wall and, you know, it's not making me very happy. But uh, yeah, it still is a substantial part of my income, so I kind of have to put up with it for the time being, but I am looking at other options at the moment. So
Speaker 2 01:43 other options like not consulting
Speaker 1 01:45 well other options like different freelancing clients. Yeah. Trying to find something not quite at a spot where I can do that yet. Although a recapture did have an absolutely fantastic month and it was, uh, probably our biggest month of growth to date. So that was really awesome. Blows you the applause. There's tons of customers that are signing up. We're probably seeing about 10 signups a day now. Roughly. Nice. Uh, and of of those, you know, we're getting a pretty significant number of them converting into paid accounts and the ones that aren't converting into paid accounts, uh, there's usually like pretty solid reasons why they're not paid, like the, just not making any money on their store. So I can't really help them at that point. So the ones that are converting to paid are good. The ones that aren't converting to paid, they're not in a position for being helped.
Speaker 1 02:38 So that's, I mean, in a weird way that's good. That means that I'm not doing something wrong to screw it up. And so yeah, it seems like the channel is, is working in the Shopify absence and so I'm kind of pleased about that. I've been trying to dig into other reasons, like, is there specific things going on with the growth and the words and Yada Yada, the positioning in the Shopify app store, stuff like that. And just trying to figure out, is there a better way I can instrument that? And the bad news is there isn't a good way to instrument that. They just give you the, the Google analytics. Um, the, the code that you can put on there, not the javascript code but just the little thing, the ID that says here's my Google analytics account. That's all they give you. That's all you can have them put on the page.
Speaker 1 03:27 There's a couple of other trackers you can put on the page. But you know, I mean I would, what I would really like to do is throw on something like crazy egg or mixed panel or you know, kissmetrics but they don't exist anymore. But something like that, you know, to be able to actually see what the hell they're doing on the page, what's engaging them, what's not. I can't see any of that. And the ecommerce stuff that I was looking into last week for Google analytics, it's not the right fit. It doesn't, I can't, well first of all I can't enable it. Like enabling, it means that I have to like generate events and I don't have access to any of the javascript on that page to fire an event when they do certain stuff. So it's more like I have to do like post app store engagement with that.
Speaker 1 04:10 And if I'm going to do that through Google analytics, I'd rather do it through something else. Uh, because the funnel stuff in Google analytics is just not as polished as something like mixed panel or even like ProfitWell or even something like user lists. Dot. Io. I mean, I was seriously considering like, should I just migrate to user list.io and have them do like all of my onboarding stuff and then have that more event triggered. But that's like a lot more work for me to do right now. And so, yeah, I don't know that that's the right move at the moment. But yeah, I mean that's, that's where things are with, uh, with recapture.
Speaker 2 04:45 That's a, those are good problems to have though, right? You're growing, you want to figure out why attribution is a tough thing, especially within a marketplace because you don't control the whole world that you're living in, but, right. Yeah. I mean that's, I, I a bit with just kind of take it and run with it and try to do as much as you can with the surge you're seeing. Cause, yeah, you're, you're probably never going to get a complete picture of it. I mean, even like we're, we're trying to get some better data around what's going on with, with Castillo's growth right now and understand where some customers are coming from. And it's just like, yeah, it's, it's not complete. And then like the, the numbers never add up. Like the numbers should all add up to be, you know, zero or a hundred or whatever it is. And, uh, they never add up. So it's like you have to take a little bit with a grain of salt and say, Yep, we can get like 50% or 80% marketing attribution and then the rest is just stuff that happens on the Internet. That's just terrible to say. But that's
Speaker 1 05:38 maybe a grain of salt that can desiccate a water buffalo. I mean, you know, this is, this is stuff that, yeah, it's, I mean, I think it always seems like everybody else has this way more dialed in than anybody I've ever talked to. But when you get down and actually have conversations with people, they're like, oh, well we don't really, we sort of know, but we don't totally know. Yeah. You know, I talked to guys like Lars Lofgren and he knows, I mean he, he definitely has it all down, but I mean, he, I think he spends 24, seven on this. I think he's at the gym. He has an iPad and he's sitting there like crunching numbers while he's like on the treadmill or lifting weights or something. I mean, this is, he's just a really intense guy and, and I see him doing that. I feel like Ruben knows, but he spends a lot of time in it too. And I'm just not spending enough time in it to get the same things out of it that they're doing. So, you know, I feel like there's a gap that needs to be traversed there and I'm not sure how to get across it aside from just, you know, becoming as intense as Lars law, which isn't going to happen for me.
Speaker 2 06:40 Yeah. I mean, I, especially with Lars, uh, there is a a scale difference there that that is not a insignificant, right. I mean he's spending hundreds of times the amount of dollars and time and time people hours that you're spending on it. So having the money or having the time and the resources to get the accurate data because the amount of money you're spending is so much more important. I mean, I think for you and I to say like, yeah, I wish I knew a little bit better where my leads are coming from is kind of important. But for the couple thousand dollars we might be spending on marketing and a month, like how much is all of that effort really gonna pay off, you know, not to not sell ourselves short.
Speaker 1 07:20 Yeah. And the, I mean, to be fair, you know, Lars is dealing with a volume of data that's coming through his site on, I will teach you to be rich and then previously on kissmetrics where you know, you and I would love to have that kind of fire hose of data because then you can start to segment it off and run experiments and do little Ab tests and still get like massive volume going through that. And you can get statistical confidence really quickly. But you know, for somebody that's like me with recapture or even the plugins, I got to wait a month for a test to, you know, complete. And you know, I'm, I'm hearing from other people in my mastermind group, I, you gotta run more tests, you got to run them faster. And I'm like, my p level isn't there until I run it for a month.
Speaker 1 08:03 I just don't have that much data. Like if I run a test for a week and it starts to show a little bit of a lift that could easily turn south in three more weeks. And I've seen this, this, it has turned south. You know, there's like the a, what's the, what's it called? Uh, the, um, the newness factor. There's some better name for it. Uh, but basically it's the fact that you've changed something on the site and everyone's like, Ooh, hey, different. And then after a while it wears off novelty effect. That's it right there. The novelty. Yeah. And, and it wears off, like you'll get an initial bump, but then over time it drops off. And so, you know, I've had some Ab tests that run, we've done something that looks like it has this initial bump and after the first week or two, it looks okay, and then after that it just goes away. You're like, well, uh Huh. One as a novelty effect. Yeah. So you've got to watch for that stuff and it's tough, but when you have a big enough volume of data, you can weed that out really fast. Yeah.
Speaker 2 08:58 Yup, Yup. For sure. For sure. Uh, yeah, from our end. I guess our big, big update for me was I was in the u s last week, uh, at the first tiny seed retreat, which was awesome. It was cool to be able to get to meet the rest of the, the founders and the companies that I hadn't met before, which was most of them. Um, yeah, it was really cool. We spent three pretty much three full days together just talking shop the whole time, which was awesome and exhausting. It was going to pick up a little tiny microcosm for something maybe because at the end of it, all of us were just like one first terribly hung over after the party the last night. Uh, but also just like, you know, there's so many things going on in our heads about our businesses and what we, what we thought when you came here and what we think now.
Speaker 2 09:45 You know, after, after talking about this for a couple of days with, you know, a lot of people that are really smart and know what they're talking about to, to, to try and suss out like, okay, you want to get back home on Monday, what am I going to do? I think as has been a little challenging for all of us cause there's so much that that's the fire hose, the fire hose of knowledge and perspective and opinions about everything. It was, it was great, but, but kind of daunting at the same time. But overall a really, really cool trip.
Speaker 1 10:11 Nice. Nice. So what was your number
Speaker 2 10:13 for one takeaway for cast us? I cannot talk about my number one takeaway. It is super, super secret. Um, but it's gonna be awesome.
Speaker 1 10:27 Uh, no, it's a tell me, but then you'd have to kill the entire eyes,
Speaker 2 10:31 right? It is a no, it's, it's definitely a marketing, the marketing initiative. Um, yeah, just, just really, really different than what we've done before. So I will report on it in a couple of weeks. Okay. All right. Well, we'll uh, we'll wait with baited breath until, yeah. Yup. So, uh, so there was this blog post from maybe like one of the, the ogs, the original gangsters of like a transparency in the startup world. Alex Turnbull from groove where he talked about, uh, you know, all these things and situations that almost and a wrecked his $500,000 MRR business. Um, and so I thought, Dave, we could kind of walk through that. The blog posts will definitely link up in the show notes cause it's amazing. Um, but maybe just kinda talk through some of the things that he felt like he learned, uh, along the way and, and kind of how they righted the ship and maybe, you know, for us maybe things that we would all do different next time.
Speaker 1 11:33 Yeah. And before we dive into that, let me just give a little bit of background on Alex. If you're not familiar with, uh, Alex Turnbull and Groove groove as a help desk software. It's a SAS product that's basically similar to help scout. It's a competitor to help scout and Zen desk and Freshdesk and some others. And Alex started blogging about this, I want to say 2013 2014 something like that. And they really made a name for themselves based on the quality of their content marketing. And you know, I would see that these articles would regularly get shared on hacker news. And so after a while I just started signing up for the email list. And then of course when I was building my own help desk, you know, I was paying attention very closely to things that Alex had learned and pitfalls that they had run into and et Cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1 12:24 So it was a really great thing to follow along with. Also his, you know, he was tracking the MRRs, they would change it every month and then all of a sudden mysteriously in 2017 they kind of just dropped off the face of the planet. Like I stopped hearing updates from Alex, we stopped getting new content marketing on there. There were some guys that were working for a groove that were content marketing guys. They had left and the whole blog just kind of went quiet. Well recently, now we know why. It's because in 2017 Alex started having this massive crisis. And what he's now talking about on his blog is basically what that crisis was about, what it caused them to do, how they had to rethink everything. And the first thing that really sort of blew me away about all of this, Craig, is that, first of all, I didn't remember, you know, when they sort of shut off the revenue tracking, but I want to say they were making like, I don't know, 200 k a month or something like that, which is just ridiculous.
Speaker 1 13:27 I mean, that's awesome. Like I would love to get to that level of scale, but then all of a sudden they're like, well now we're at 500 k a month. So that's a $6 million a year business. And you know, he was talking about how unhappy he was, how stuck they were, how, how their previous culture had basically myered them into this position. And it made it very difficult for them to get out. They didn't really have the right people in the right places. And like all this stuff came together for this massive perfect storm and he was ready to drop the whole fucking thing like right then and there and that. As soon as I read that and his Twitter thread on there before he posted the blog posts just made my jaw hit the floor.
Speaker 2 14:14 Yeah, no, I mean I, I was reading the Twitter thread to like, you know, first thing in the morning I was reading, I was like, oh my God. And the next one, oh my God, the next one. Oh my God, I can't believe it cause I mean it's, well he's a really transparent guy in and shares a lot of his emotions in this post in particular I think. But I mean I, I can imagine, I can't relate, but I can imagine. Yeah. Saying like, okay, I built this whole business and it's about to fall down and it's everything I can do to, to just hold it up for another day. Does that mean I've been there like man, like podcast motor in the early days we're growing like a lot and had no idea how put the processes in place to, to scale and to support our customers and yeah, I mean I, he talks about it in this blog post a lot. Like letting your customers down and doing it so visibly like he is is, is just gotta be like worse than failing. Cause then you're like, I'm successful, but I kind of wish I wasn't because then you know, all these troubles we're having wouldn't be so, so tough.
Speaker 1 15:14 Yeah. Yeah. And even opened up the conversation saying, you know, your investors and your board and the people on your, you know, your advisors and things like that all say you should never publicly sit share this stuff. And he said, fuck it. I'm going to do it anyway. Like that, that right there, I appreciate because the insight into this is really, it's super helpful if you're struggling as a founder and you've seen some success, but then you hit that plateau and you just don't know where to go with it. Like you're struggling to get off the plateau. You talk to people, they offer ideas, the ideas aren't working. And sometimes it's just you gotta revisit everything from the ground up. And that's a painful thing to do because you're basically saying everything that we've done up to this point needs to start over. And that socks, that sucks cause that investment is not cheap.
Speaker 1 16:10 You know, one of the things he said in his most recent blog posts, he said they spent in total over a million dollars trying to revamp everything to make this a platform that could move forward and restructuring the team and setting priorities, changing features sets and all of it. $1 million. They had to invest $1 million in that. Now of course, you know, that's a sixth of his year of their total revenue, but you know, that hurts and that's just not something that, you know, he's going to be pulling out of their bank account. You know, that's sitting there, fat, dumb and happy. You and y'all, you're investing much of what you have in that coming MRR into the business. And so you know, this personally hurt him to do this.
Speaker 2 16:57 I love the, so he has this quote says being scrappy is great when you're just starting out and have no other choice. But scrappiness doesn't scale as your business matures, you'll pay for your earlier scrappiness and you'll need to be much more thoughtful and forward looking with your decisions. And I, I can imagine a lot of people listening to this show that are in similar boats to you and I, Dave are like, Yup, they're just nodding their heads like yeah, I'm digging my own grave right now or I've, I've dug my own grave before. Uh, and no, you've gotta you've gotta face the music sometime. Cause, I mean I think that like, yeah, unless you're venture funded, like really venture funded, you're going to cut corners because you have to just to get to market and just to sell something at the wrong price point or selling the wrong product or the wrong version of the product to the wrong people and all these things that that you have to, to try to like is it through and away from like as gracefully as possible.
Speaker 2 17:53 But yeah, I mean I think all of these things have like this c talks about technical debt, but I think there's all sorts of like cultural debt and customer fit debt and all this kind of stuff that you get yourself in the wrong in the wrong boat early because you have to, and then like to pivot out of it I think is, is tough cause it's not like I'm going to spin this million dollars or this, these months of effort, but it's not changing the, the top line or the bottom line today. It's, it's months and months from now that like, okay, we're just going to reveal the whole app or we're going to fire the whole marketing team because they're not attracting the kind of customers we want. <inaudible>
Speaker 1 18:32 or they're not, you know, they're not executing to a plan or they don't know how to make a plan. They're not there to provide the leadership to generate a plan. Yeah. Like all of these things that could go wrong in there. And you know, that's one of the things. So one of his things in the first blog post really sorta hit home for me about, um, one of the lessons learned that he had at the bottom. We didn't have the discipline to execute quickly. And I am feeling this pain right now, not with recapture because I think we're doing pretty well with that. I mean, it's one developer, it's me. We have a number of customers that are coming in and asking for features that were sort of on a mental roadmap that I had. And basically their requests are just prioritizing that roadmap. So I feel like that is kind of set in place.
Speaker 1 19:16 And we're executing to that. Okay. But with the plugins, the plugins, I feel like we've been myered you know, especially with business directory plugin, we have enough support that it basically keeps one developer busy all the time and one support person busy all the time. But if I were to take the remainder of the money out of the plugin, I can't hire another developer who works on just features to move this whole thing forward. And it used to be that I had a couple of guys that were senior and they were able to, you know, balance that to a certain extent. But after awhile I could see them slowly petering out to a point where they couldn't add as many features because they were a wash and support. And so there's a discipline about executing quickly and prioritizing. And I'm, I'm struggling trying to make this work in the plugins with guys that are like mid level engineers, you know, at this point they're not junior, but they're not really senior either.
Speaker 1 20:18 And getting them to in internally think about priorities and to say, all right, I'm going to spend x percent of my time on features this week and the rest of it on support and try to get the support out there. It's like a lot of us are so crisis driven, you know, whatever's the loudest customer, the biggest fire, whatever, that's what we're going to focus on and put out. And it takes an extraordinary amount of discipline to actually say, all right, you know what, I'm gonna spend percent of time on features and 60% of time on support. So when I put out all the top fires here in that 60%, which I'm going to say is, you know, this many hours, I'm gonna put that aside and I'm going to start working on features. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's hard to be able to, because you know, support is constantly banging on the door. When is this going to happen? Where this customer is. Ask them for an update. Who, who's supposed to be getting this done over here. You know, that's tough. That's really tough. And I don't, I don't have a good answer on how to fix that aside from hiring, but I don't have the money to hire somebody who could really execute to that and have the discipline because it's like a three x increase on the salary I could afford probably. So that's tough. I don't know how to fix.
Speaker 2 21:30 I think you, you probably never have enough resources, people, time, money, whatever it is, because as you, as your business grows, you're gonna expect more out of everything. And so it's just, you know, I think unless you can always prioritize this to be right, then you're going to be kind of forever, you know, a person away or you know, a month away from having that feature done or whatever. Uh, or from being able to, to execute like you want, you're always gonna be 20% late or something. Cause I mean, yeah, we're, we very much feel this too, is it's never, nothing has ever fast enough. Nothing has ever right. The first time he talks about this a little bit in the article like, and we've come a long, long, long, long way in this respect of like planning out our month and trying to stick with it as best we can.
Speaker 2 22:22 But, but the reality is like we're a young company, we're two years old. We have to be really, really nimble because the most important thing is not the same like throughout the month even sometimes, you know, so like if, if you're so rigid to say like this is the thing for this month and we're going to do this and yeah, the engineers are going to do some, some support, that's cool. But, but then like, you know, whatever your API breaks, uh, two to your main integration of do you gotta go fix that API? And I mean, I think stuff like that just happens all the time. I mean, I don't know, maybe we just are a shitty company and so stuff like that just happens all the time to us. But I talked to enough other people where I don't think that is the case. I think that everyone that is say, doing less than, you know, a $100,000 a month in MRR is, is just sitting there waiting every day for something to happen to where they have to pivot into, into this.
Speaker 2 23:17 And maybe that's, maybe that's where they were and then they got past it, right? Cause they were in 500,000 a month or something like that. And their culture didn't change, but it looked like base camp. I mean they, they plan these six month cycles and they're planning the next six months cycle when the first one starts. So they're planning like 12 weeks away. Uh, there is no effing way that we could play on six, six weeks away and, and be in touch with our customers at all. But I think you need some scope, uh, and some size two to be able to have that information and be confident.
Speaker 1 23:48 Yeah. I W W one of the weird things that my freelance client does right now, so each of the teams, they're all agile teams and you get to decide like how long your sprint is. And so we've tried some longer sprints and now we're working on a shorter sprint. It's like a two week sprint. So we're spending literally 10% of our time every sprint on all of the sprint ceremonies. So you really only have like 90% available to work. But then that doesn't include like all the weird meetings that happen in the company and other side discussions and design this and do that. So there's really no strategic thinking time and everything becomes very reactionary. So like something will come up on the support and then they're like, okay, this got to happen today. You know, like half of our story points on any given sprint are allocated to support.
Speaker 1 24:37 So if you're already taking away half of your team's velocity on that sprint just to deal with issues. And then on top of all that you've got all this overhead stuff in there, it ends up squeezing the strategic stuff. So I'm seeing that the strategic discussions are now infrequent and when they do happen, you know, they'll happen piecemeal where you only get through part of what you really needed to do. And nobody can like sit down and say, you know, if we're going to make this happen by December 31st, here's, here's how we have to back solve to get there. Like, you know, it's not to say that I want to go back to a waterfall method because that has its own set of problems, but at the same time, it's like they're too agile at this point there. And I see that, you know, we kind of end up in the same way with the plugins. We're more reactive than proactive. And then when we try to be proactive, the support kind of squeezes out that strategic piece.
Speaker 2 25:33 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 25:34 yeah,
Speaker 2 25:35 yeah. I don't, I don't have an answer to this, but it is, we talked about this in our weekly meeting this week. You know, someone brought up like, hey, you know, do we have a way to really like find out what the big picture is for this month or this cycle <inaudible> and keep it in the front of everyone's mind and then build the, the smaller, you know, stories or whatever around that. And the answer for us is no. Um, and I think even if we did, you would need some flexibility in there to say like, okay, this is the big picture. We're like 70% sure this is, this is the right, you know, the big picture, but there's a 30% chance we're going to pivot from it. Or maybe you build in some buffer to say like, this is the big picture and we're only going to plan to work on this, you know? Yeah. 70% of the time, 30% is going to be for fires to put out and bugs and stuff like that. I think kind of intuitively, I think that's kind of how we think about it as to say like, you really don't have six or eight development hours in the day. You have, you know, four or five and the rest are, are spent doing other stuff that just has to get done, but you have no idea what that's going to be when you start a cycle.
Speaker 1 26:39 Right. And groove just ultimately fell into a category of everybody was, you know, kind of doing their own thing and there wasn't like this overarching strategy of what they should be heading towards or doing. It was this team is trying to address this issue and this team is working on support and this team is thinking about this. And Alex is the nontechnical founder didn't kind of have a handle on all of that. And so the whole fucking thing came down. I mean, well that's not really fair. It really ground to a halt. I think that's really more of where they ground to a standstill where they just weren't able to make forward progress on anything because they had accumulated all of these internal debts. Yep. Cultural, technical, you know, um, structural, they didn't have the right people that were executing on the right things and people thinking about the right stuff and you know, that's, Oh God, that was so painful to read. It really was just absolutely painful. I mean my a, you made a comment about a, you know, the Twitter thread made you want to cry. And I, you know, I just had this horrible pit in my stomach when I'm going through this thinking what would I have been doing if I sat down with my wife and had that exact same conversation that he had making 500,000 a month, you know, I'm ready to walk away from miss honey and you know, my wife would be like, w see, I believe that the fuck you are.
Speaker 1 28:03 And you know, just letting that all come out, right? Like just to have this huge weight on your shoulders, man. So,
Speaker 2 28:09 yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I, I, I can't imagine, I can't imagine, and I think it like, to me like it kind of resonates because yeah, there are times when you're super busy and you're not effective and there's other times when you're not so busy and you're really effective. And for me because I 100% been in both of those places. And as I'm saying this, I'm realizing that right now I'm in one of those busy and not effective times a little bit, but it's because not organized. I don't have a lot of communication and like clear expectations with the people I work with so that like I am wanting to do all this stuff and like that's not really clear to everybody and I'm not doing the things to enable them to be successful. And so you're the one that just shoulders all of the responsibility you have to do all the work, you make all the delegations and all the decisions and, and you can only be so productive and effective like that cause you're just one person.
Speaker 2 29:07 You have eight hours in a day or whatever and you're just like holding the, holding the ship up like by yourself. And so you feel stressful and like you're not doing anything. And that's the worst possible combination as opposed to like I'm thinking in a really high level talking with our team members who were executing and planning everything. And I'm just here as like a sounding board. Like that's the opposite end of the spectrum. And I think that that's probably where they got in the end is where he kind of was able to rise above a lot of this stuff. And I have to say, man, I think we've gotten lucky a little bit with this and maybe a little bit smart but probably more lucky is I think this is where like hiring senior
Speaker 1 29:41 talent really comes in to say like, here are the keys. Go, just go make it happen. Uh, and if you can afford to pay for those people, I think a lot of this responsibility on us as like an owner gets easier cause you can just pay somebody twice. We have to pay a junior person. Uh, but no, that they, they pretty much take care of a lot of these pieces of responsibility that, that you would have to showed otherwise. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean there's no question that one of the best decisions I ever made in recapture was to hire somebody who is a senior and no js engineer. And he also knew react. And other stuff. And he's just unbelievable. You know, when he came out of the project, I think he knew some stuff about AWS and Reddis and other technologies that we had in there, but he's become the resident expert on all of this, how it all integrates.
Speaker 1 30:31 You know, when we have a problem, I just basically have to say, Hey Mike, this is going wrong over here. What's wrong? And within, you know, a few minutes he'll come back to me and say, all right, so I saw this and we have this and you know, we need to change this right now, but I've fixed this and we pushed a patch out to the cluster over here and it's doing this. Like I just feel 100% comfortable. That shit gets handled and I don't, and I don't have to intervene, but I don't like, I used to feel that way with the plugins. I don't feel that that way anymore. Not with the new crop of developers that are in there. And it's not a knock against them, it's just they're at a different place than the other guys were. And it's gonna take them a while to get there and they will get there.
Speaker 1 31:16 But it's, you're investing in them. And as a result, if you're paying that lower rate, that investment means there's going to be hiccups. There's going to be problems that you're gonna have. You're gonna have issues and you've got to patiently go through those issues and you have to be willing to do that. But if you're willing to pay more, you get the benefit of that experience and things just get handled, but you have to pay for it. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. So it's funny, I haven't read the second article yet, but it'll be interested to hear what that, uh, what the, the way they came out of this looked like, well, it's really, you know, not to burst your bubble or anything, but it's, it's not that good. I didn't really like, well, it's not that it's not that good. It's that he didn't basically say, all right, this is how we got out of it.
Speaker 1 32:06 100% he was still just sort of talking about the challenges that they had to make in order to scale up well the things that they had to fix and you know, they're all pretty important things in there, but there are definitely stuff that are, I would say that they're more applicable to larger startups. You know, a little bit bigger than where we're at now cause he's got a staff. And then like for example, making tough personnel decisions. How many personnel do you have? You know, if you have a marketing person and a developer and yourself, you know there aren't a lot of tough personnel decisions to make there. You either made the right call or you didn't make the right call and they're working out or they're not working out. But when you have a team, like you have a marketing team and then there's like three or four people you know, then you have to figure out are they all carrying their load?
Speaker 1 32:58 What is it that the marketing team needs to address? Do the people on the marketing team have the skills to address that problem effectively? Is there somebody that can lead that effort to have they really taken the time and effort to be that leader? Like, I mean there's just a lot of different questions that you ask when you have those team dynamics at play and that's more or less what this article was talking about was stuff like that. I mean it was very interesting and very heart wrenching to hear that you know yet to part ways with some team leads that had worked with grew for a very long time because he had tough choices to make and there were specific roles he needed and restructuring that basically said we're not going to have these scrappy silos sitting all out here. We're going to have people organized in a certain way with structure and hierarchy and you know, things that were very antithetical to the original groove hypothesis of being the scrappy little startup.
Speaker 1 33:52 So, yeah, I mean it's interesting to see how your culture has to shift. And you know, they brought in an outside consultant, this woman called Elizabeth O'Neill, who was very helpful in identifying like what are the core issues that are there and how can we address those and what are the shifts look like and what things are gonna work on? What things do you probably want to avoid? You know, I don't even know how many people physically work at groove, but for a $6 million a year company, I have to imagine that there's somewhere in the 20 range 15 you know, somebody between 10 and 20 so you know, those, those 10 or 20 people are going to have to be really, really effective. And so you're, you're making some really tough decisions too. Figure out who's the right person for this role. Do the people I have fit the skills that are needed for this role? Could we level them up or do we have to hire from outside? And if somebody isn't really fitting, do I have to let them go? And you know, building startups sucks when you have personal relationships with these people and you get to a point where you're like, this isn't where we need right now. We don't need you and your skill set. But it's not personal to you. I mean that, you know, firing somebody really sucks. So
Speaker 2 35:06 the thing, the thing that I really appreciate about this, this article and this type of conversation is like, there's a lot of like, you know how I made my first thousand or how he got to 10,000 MRR or whatever, and that's, that's really great. But it's been talked about a lot and I think conversations like this of like, okay, so I'm at 10 or 20,000 or 500,000 or whatever he's at, you know, what are the things that are going to be different from, you know, 20,000 to a hundred thousand or a hundred thousand to a million that I don't think about or that I don't because that, that's kind of like the next phase of the journey for, for a lot of folks is like, okay, I got started, I'm off the ground. I was scrappy now like I need to build a real, a real company with processes, uh, and expectations and I need to look at like, are the people that got us here and not going to be the people that can get us there.
Speaker 2 35:55 A kind of things. And that's, I mean, emotionally really hard, uh, tough to tough to even realize that those are questions you have to ask yourself. But yeah, I mean really important, really important questions. Even early on, even if you're not there yet, but just like to be conscious of the fact that like, okay, this day is probably going to come. Uh, and like, if I'm aware of that upfront, you know, can I save myself some pain later on? Um, I don't know. I think about this a fair amount like, or the, the decisions we're making today, you're gonna come back and bite us in the ass later. If the answer is like, yeah, and it's not too painful, then I'll probably do it if it's like the best thing for it today. But I am trying to have like a longterm strategy with a lot of decisions I made make now so we don't have to go make them again later on. I don't know stuff.
Speaker 1 36:44 Yeah, I mean that, that ship has sailed for me with the plugins, you know, certain decisions were made a long time ago and we did it for the sake of expediency. And you know, I have a competitor that's going a little bit different direction at this point, sort of embracing the whole Gutenberg block thing. And I kinda said, well, we're going to hold off and not do that right away. And so far that decision has paid off because there's just not tons and tons of people that are looking for that and not hearing people come in and say, why the Hell doesn't business directory support blocks, you know, but I will at some point, if this gets big enough then I'm going to hear that and when I do then it's going to be too late. Right. So it's one of those things, but it's a lot of effort for us to go and rework that.
Speaker 1 37:27 And I know our competitors spent a good year reworking their stuff to make that happen. And you know, if it took them a year, it'll probably take us more. Cause there was a, they have multiple developers on their team working and I've got one. So yeah, a, it's going to be painful and that's gonna suck. So yeah, it's going to be one of those questions. Do I just start over, go from the ground up at that point and say, here's the new version a, or do we try to actually migrate what we have or have a, a plan that says we're gonna migrate the listings, we're going to take the listings in this format and we'll bring them over here and we'll bring them into this new thing. You know, I don't know. I don't know. Do I even want to invest in that at all? Do I want to sell this to somebody else and let that be their problem?
Speaker 1 38:15 You know, I think ideally I would love to sell the plugins to somebody who was like a wordpress developer because they could get the most benefit out of it. They wouldn't need to have the developers onboard unless they wanted them to just handle the support stuff and then they could get direct benefit out of it by handling the code requests and the feature changes and stuff and take the money out as kind of a paycheck. But if you're trying to like hire a developer to do this, ah, the economics of this get a little weird and there it's harder to really make it profitable. So anyone,
Speaker 2 38:49 one thing I've realized recently is it to that effect that like a lot of us play in this pretty dangerous space with our businesses of, you know, they're making five, 10, $20,000 a month, which is a really good business or a really good job for us all to have, right? Cause without us all these businesses would just go away. But when you get to like 40 or $50,000 a month, you can have the people and the quality of people and you can invest the time in the processes too to where these businesses run without you. Um, and you can take the time to invest in things like rebuilding the Plugin for Gutenberg and it won't, it won't kill you. Um, but yeah, man, early on, like we all are, you're, you're still in the pain. You're in the pain house of like, okay, we gotta just make this work until, until it doesn't, or until we get to the point like the promise land where you know, we have enough time and people and mental energy that you have as a founder to to take a step back and say, okay, you know, this is, this is what it's going to be in this hour.
Speaker 2 39:49 We're going to get there. Uh, and, and you know, have the team execute that. Uh, because yeah, I mean, right now we're all just in like survival mode and that's just what it has to be. I think. So I don't, I don't feel too bad about it, but the promise land from what I hear is a, is definitely on the other side of the fence. And like it's, I think that's when growing the business gets actually kind of easier because you have the people and the levers to pull. Um, whereas you know now especially like, you know, we're all kind of relatively new. It's just like these little incremental wins that we have. No,
Speaker 1 40:20 I dunno, I don't believe us. That Utopian vision. I think the promise land is always like that rainbow one. You're trying to chase the end of the rainbow to find the pot of the gold and start digging. You never gonna find it, man. You just have to, you, you enjoy whatever's happening now. You take whatever challenges are happening now and you do the best to plan ahead so you don't get bitten by all that stuff in the future. But I don't think, I don't think there's ever, I've, based on everything that I've heard with other conversations, blog posts, discussions, masterminds, there is something that always vexes you at any level of revenue that you're making. It's, you know, my uncle wants said to me said getting rich. And my uncle was by no means wealthy, but compared to my family growing up, he is, he was actually doing really well. And I heard him say to me one time, he said, getting more money doesn't fix your problems. It just changes their magnitude.
Speaker 2 41:16 Yup.
Speaker 1 41:17 And I think that's 100% true in business. You know, you're making 10,000 a month, you have 10,000 a month problems, you go to 100,000 a month, now you have 100,000 a month problems and they're very different than 10,000 a month problems. And they suck in totally different ways than hundred thousand a month problems. And that's what I keep hearing consistently. Like there is no utopia. You're just gonna change piles of Shit. And that's an on that happy note. I think we should wrap it up for this one. It's a perfect, that's a perfect ending to the episode. I love it. I love it. Yes. So we want to hear what you think. Was there something that really resonated with you about Alex Article? Was there something that we said pissed you off or made you think we'd love to hear about it. Send us an email
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Speaker 0 42:27 thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more <inaudible>.
