Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 2 00:00:19 All right. Welcome to episode 2 64 rogue startups. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 3 00:00:25 I'm good, man. I'm good. It's been, it's been a hot minute since we talked, but there, uh, there's been a lot going on, I think, in both of our lives. So yeah, it's good to, it's good to catch up and good to, to be able to chat.
Speaker 2 00:00:38 Yeah, well, we got, uh, COVID in the house over here, which is part of the reason we weren't able to podcast. When we thought we were going to podcast. Now I've got 80% positive cases in my house and I'm eight days into it. So I'm finally feeling a little normal now minus, uh, my inability to smell anything which makes eating kind of weird, but it's not that much worse, I think, than a real cold, that's just, you know, super bad and you kind of get stuck with that for a long time, but you know, we're, we're working through it and my kids definitely had a easier time of it than I, or my wife did, but yeah, we're all okay for the moment. Sorry to hear
Speaker 3 00:01:18 Sure that, that you, you got the Rohner, but glad that you everyone's okay. Obviously. Yeah. I mean, how did it go down? Like how did you think that you might be sick and test and all that kind of stuff? Cause actually, like I know of a lot of people, but I haven't talked to many people about like the whole process.
Speaker 2 00:01:36 Sure, sure. Well, first of all, you know, we were kind of getting a little more Alexa, Daisy Cole and cavalier about things in the last week of December, partly because, you know, just not, uh, thinking it was that big of a deal anymore. And partly because, you know, there were things to do, right? Yeah. My wife and I went out to lunch a couple of times and um, I went out with a couple of guys from the big snow group and we also went to some friends on new year's Eve and that's where we think we got exposed. Well, that's what I know we got exposed. Cause they had some positive cases that popped up immediately. They had some family that were visiting from the Midwest and you know, they were all Vaxxed and boosted and we were Vaxxed and about to be boosted and we still got it anyway.
Speaker 2 00:02:26 So yeah, uh, it was about four days after new year's Eve when I finally started showing symptoms and I was like, ah, shit, here we go. Um, and I'm pretty sure that I definitely, I gave it to my wife. I don't know if my kids brought it back at the same time as I did. We're not a hundred percent sure about that. Cause they weren't telling us about their symptoms until later after I had already tested positive. So it was kind of unclear as to when it really started for them. But we got everybody tested except for me on Saturday. Cause I was already positive and it took a lot of tests to figure that out. By the way, I went through two antigen and one PCR test and I had a split result on the antigen tests over 48 hours apart, one was negative. One was lightly positive, like so barely positive. You could almost not see the line. And then the PCR came back and said, dude, you totally have it.
Speaker 3 00:03:23 Did you do the test at home or did you go somewhere?
Speaker 2 00:03:26 No, I did the antigen test at home. We've had, we went through all of our test kits now. So we've had to order a bunch more, get new ones. Uh, yeah, they're not an easy thing to get ahold of right now. So, um, but anyway, we, the tests for everybody last Saturday, we got three of the four results back today. Interestingly, my wife's came back inconclusive, but I had already done a second antigen test on her and she was strongly positive. Like wait, like it didn't even take the full 15 minutes for that line to show up. Like it was there in the first 60 seconds. I'm like, I'm pretty sure you got it. But the one that we still don't know as my oldest daughter who interestingly enough, is the biggest introvert of the family and was kind of avoiding everybody else on new year's Eve. So I'm joking that she's probably going to be the only one to survive the zombie apocalypse. She'll be hiding in the library with a bag of snacks while everybody else dies from the zombie virus. So that's kinda how it all went down.
Speaker 3 00:04:21 I mean, I think that like not to get too into it, cause it said it very highly, a highly charged topic. But I think that like this thing about like the time, the time base of the testing is, is a real weakness in the whole thing. Right? Of like you tested negative and an indeterminate and then positive, like all of those tests should be positive all the time. You know, like if there's any bit of coronavirus in your system, they should be positive and like should be positive for a long time. And I know that's just a weakness of kinda where the sciences, but to me that's the big weakness of the whole thing right now is just tough to know where anyone stands because you're just taking a snapshot in time. That seems to be kind of imperfect,
Speaker 2 00:05:02 Right? I mean the markers of the markers, right? So the antigens are the result of the virus acting in your system. So it's a secondary characteristic. It's not like we're testing directly for the presence of Corona virus. We're testing for the results of Corona virus in your system that generates other chemicals that only Corona virus generates. That's what we're looking for. So it very much depends on viral load and the time in your system. And you know, you can feel the symptoms before that. And also I found something about Omicron that they're saying now that the tests, the nasal tests, aren't picking up as much of the antigen. So you have to swab the throat too. And that's what we did with my wife. I swapped her, you know, she's like, you gag me with a cotton swab, you know, that's the new eighties thing, right?
Speaker 2 00:05:45 Gag me with a cotton swab, but I did that and it came back positive. I didn't do that for me. And you know, I had the weaker negative test. So, you know, maybe the antigens are showing up better backup in the throat because they're being coated by the phlegm not to get turned this into some gross medical show. But yeah, I mean, I don't know, man. I mean the, the variants are getting tricky and they're getting weird and they're getting sneaky. Right. They got to. And obviously, you know, if we compare the flu from the Spanish pandemic in 1918 to the flu that we have today, the flu obviously has a benefit in evolving to be less deadly. Cause it can spread itself more without killing its host, which is sort of is detrimental to its whole goal of trying to spread. Right.
Speaker 3 00:06:29 Yeah. Well dude, I'm glad to hear that everyone is okay. You can, you can not worry about COVID for the next few months, I guess, which is, which is kind of a hidden benefit I guess, or a silver lining. Um, but uh, yeah, it's glad to hear everyone's okay.
Speaker 2 00:06:43 Yeah, yeah. We're definitely on the better end of things at this point. Um, yeah, I think my wife's gonna be getting much better here over the next couple of days. It's definitely not as bad as, uh, we had feared. It would be so all of that is good. Good, good.
Speaker 3 00:06:59 And I was just looking at, it's been a month since we published our last episode. So three weeks or so since we talked last, how are, how are things going in the business? Well, good
Speaker 2 00:07:08 December of course is a quiet time for recapture. Uh, interestingly, we actually had a little bit of a spike between Christmas and new years where people were starting at some people were sending out some promotions, uh, for their various stores, which was really cool because now this was the first year we had broadcast emails available to do that. And there were some people taking advantage of it and I could see some sales going on in their stores and all of that was super exciting to watch, but it was still, or just quiet overall on the platform. So, you know, we, we spent some time sort of evaluating what we were going to do with our technical stuff. And during December we had talked about doing this whole technical debt payoff thing here about our database. And what's interesting is that we, we figured out that we, we finally got a database expert who really knew document DB on AWS and they also knew Mongo DB in general and hosted, uh, Mongo solutions and things like that. So we got them to sort of give us what the magic formula was to size because we had trouble trying to source this. We, the one thing we couldn't figure out was is how fucking big does it need to be on AWS to be the equivalent of what we have now. And we finally got the answer for that. And the hilarious, absolutely hilarious result of that was if we moved off of object rocket onto AWS, it would almost double our current costs.
Speaker 3 00:08:36 That's
Speaker 2 00:08:37 Where we're currently at. No, it was not awesome at all. So, you know, we discovered that probably right before week before Christmas, I think, and you know, immediately that was a huge facepalm moment. Right? And then I went and I did some projections forward and there is a point at which the costs does invert, but the only way it inverts is if we self host. So we started looking like we basically have three options, right? We can stick with what we have. We can migrate to AWS document DB or we can self host and the self hosted solution isn't cheap, but it is cheaper in the long run. So if I projected our current traffic and growth and all of that out for the next 24 months, somewhere between 12 and 18 months, there's an inversion of that where self hosted actually becomes way more viable.
Speaker 2 00:09:35 But we, the problem is that with a Mongo database is that you need a shit ton of Ram. So basically you need to have all of your indexes in Ram and then you still have to have enough that the operating system has room to spare. So you're not bumping up into paging when you're going onto the disc and things like that. Cause that's where it gets fast or that's where it stays fast. If it all stays in Ram, as soon as you start going to disc, everything slows down and then it's all hell in a hand basket at that point. So that's where we figured out. We're like, okay, it's, it's not, we don't love it right now, but it's not as bad as we originally thought and migrating off makes it worse. And we could probably better spend our time on something else. So unfortunately, you know, we spent three weeks trying to get to that point, which sucked, but there were some, some bright sides out of it.
Speaker 2 00:10:22 One of them was, is that we're actually going to upgrade to Mongo four dot oh four dot three or whatever the current version is. I don't remember what Mike said, but yeah, that version is now something that we're compatible with. Cause we were going to have to be compatible to move to document DB anyway, and now we can actually upgrade our stuff internally and there's not going to be a problem for that. So that was good. That was not wasted effort. We needed to get that done anyway. So we did get a tech debt project off of our books, but it wasn't the one that I originally thought. And it certainly didn't have the intended impact, which was also unfortunate. But now I have some new information about our database stuff that I didn't have before. So there you go. That was our, that was our big December project. Let's see what else? Uh, I also did my EOS planning and an interestingly I did that right before, like the day I was starting to show symptoms for COVID. So I went and did my EOS planning for that. I did my annual review for last year. I looked at the goals that we achieved and I set my Q1 rocks as well. And of course then right after that I got COVID. So I've done fuck all on any of that.
Speaker 2 00:11:31 But I have a list at this point, you know, and I basically had dropped the ball on that the second half of the year, last year because of the Jilt stuff. And I kept thinking I was going to get back to it and I never did. And so now are back on track. I have it all down and I've done some annual projections here and I'm doing some annual reporting in prep for big snow. So, uh, yeah. Uh, busy time, busy time.
Speaker 3 00:11:58 Nice man. Yeah, the, the infrastructure stuff is, is tough, man. We did an infrastructure change a couple of months ago and it just never is as easy or as good from a cost savings perspective as you think. And it's just like, oh man, what this said on paper was very different than what ends up being in it just as a lot of opportunity cost of doing other stuff and cost savings are about half what they end up being, what you think they're in, ended up being typically. So it's, this is really frustrating. I totally feel you.
Speaker 2 00:12:28 Yeah. I'm glad we didn't totally make it a complete waste and be like, okay, well we just spent three weeks figuring that all out and have to throw it all away now. So let's move on. At least we didn't go there. I'm glad we didn't have that.
Speaker 3 00:12:40 You were, you were looking for a new developer to, uh, any, any update on that.
Speaker 2 00:12:46 Yes and no. So I had, yeah, I mean, you know that the, the whole looking for folks that are developers right now has real hard and I had, I had a job rec that was open. Well, let me back that up. I had a job rec that I opened up for a QA guy. We hired him. Then the holidays kind of hit, it, took me a while to get the training stuff ready for him. So I ended up doing a series of videos that were all like, all right, this is what you have to QA. This is what you have to QA. This is what you have to QA. So I like did a video walkthrough of the features so that he could see them working in a good case. And then he could figure out all the, you know, the other things that you would need to check.
Speaker 2 00:13:28 So I hired him right before Christmas. I just fired him yesterday. So that was not good. Basically did fuck all. And wasn't listening to anything that we asked Tim to do. Wasn't giving me any status reports, even with all the holiday stuff. Like I was, you know, trying to be respectful of holiday time and all of that, but I was still getting nothing and neither was Mike. So we kicked him to the curb. So now I had one filled. Now it's back open again. I got to find somebody else for that. But the developer one, I've opened that one twice and then closed it because that's how you get more people to fill it up on Upwork. But I haven't found anybody. That's like really exciting us, you know, we've interviewed, I think we interviewed three or four good people right before Christmas, and then we stopped. So nobody, nobody there is floating our boat so far.
Speaker 3 00:14:22 That's tough. That's tough, man.
Speaker 2 00:14:24 Yeah. Yeah. But the other thing that, um, I am now more focused on at the moment because it's going to actually help me support that new developer in Q1 here is cold sales. So I've got a cold sales guy. I don't have to interview that. They had to put that all on hold in December because of the QA stuff probably was a mistake. Now that the QA thing is all gone to shit, but it is what it is. Right. Um, so now I'm working on getting him onboarded. I just started working on that this week after being offline with COVID last week. So I think that pretty much catches catches us up on everything that's going on in recapturing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:15:05 Gotcha. Yeah. I definitely feel your Philippine on the developer side. We're looking for a, I guess we call it backend full stack backend Laravel developer right now. And, um, ah, it's just challenging. We've decided not to go through like Upwork and dynamite jobs like we do typically, but are working with blue coating. So David at blue coating who we've worked with in the past before haven't actually hired someone, but they've delivered us some, some candidates before have a call to kick off that whole kind of process with them here soon to see about adding backend developer to the team, which is cool. Um, but I know it's just so it's so tough right now. And I think one of the challenges that I have is like this balance of, you know, properly interviewing and vetting, uh, folks with like a test project and multiple interview rounds and different people on the team with the fact that developers can do whatever they want and get hired anywhere. Right now it seems. And so like the standard process we would put someone through is I think kind of like medium on the kind of rigor scale and wondering if we need to kind of tone that back because a lot of people who would be good developers, just say, I don't have to do that. So that's the kind of the question we're asking ourselves.
Speaker 2 00:16:21 That's exactly what I decided that we were going to do on our side for that exact same reason. So when we were doing the interviewing for the developers, uh, Mike and I were doing it at the same time, so he has, you know, we basically split it. We have an hour interview, he asks his questions for 20 minutes. I asked my questions for 20 minutes and then we give the candidate 10, 15 minutes to kind of wrap up. And then that usually leaves a little bit of slop for somebody who goes over. And then at the end of that, we'll decide, all right, is, are they good enough for us to take a look at some code samples? And we'll take a look at a code sample and then try them out at that point, but nobody's gotten past the interview slash code sample piece of it to go to the go no-go decision. So yeah, I mean, and that's, I feel like we're skipping a lot of what we would normally do. I would prefer a test project, but I don't think we can do that and get decent people.
Speaker 3 00:17:11 Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think it's, um, yeah, it's just, it's just challenging. I think that maybe going through blue coating or, uh, a recruiter like that would, would give you the optionality to do that a little more than someone through Upwork or dynamite jobs or we work remotely or something like that. Um, just cause there's a bit of a relationship there, but yeah, not sure. I'm not sure it's interesting. Well, I hope
Speaker 2 00:17:33 It goes well in our last experience with some, um, recruiting agencies, uh, didn't really provide us with candidates that were wowing us. And I think it's just the candidate pool is, is shrunk. At this point, the good people can have their pick of the litter. And then that leaves a lot of chaff out there and they're the interviewing around and nobody really wants him. Right. So that means there's a lot of chaff and not much wheat and you and I are left to sort through it. So
Speaker 3 00:18:01 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's, you know, we, I try to do a lot of, kind of like retro retroactive thinking or retrospective thinking and we talk a lot about it internally. And I think that like, if I was ever to do this again, I will have a technical co-founder. Um, just because for me hiring developers really hard just cause I'm not one and it's hard to identify who a good developer is and who isn't and just having someone who can own that side of things would be, it would be really nice. So a little late for that now, but I think my next, my next giddy up with this we'll, we'll have someone who's really complimentary to me. Um, I think there's just a ton of value in that.
Speaker 2 00:18:41 Well, hindsight's 2020, right. And I have a technical co-founder at this point and I am technical and that's not making it a whole lot easier. So if that makes you feel better.
Speaker 3 00:18:52 Yeah. Yeah. I'll give an update on personal side of things. So in the last episode we talked about us moving, uh, and we indeed moved. Uh, and we, David was the, it was the biggest shit show in the world soap. So fucking remove and we have the dog and the cat, two cats and a dog and they're gone and all this kind of stuff and just fucking moved all of our stuff out of the house and we get on the plane and that's all good. We have a layover in Amsterdam and we get to the gate for a flight to Boston and they're like, uh, there's a problem with the plane, blah, blah, blah. We don't know if it'll get fixed or when it'll get fixed, go to the Amsterdam airport is enormous. Right. Go to fucking the other side of the world to book another flight, uh, tomorrow or the next day. And we're like, uh, no dude, like we have things planned down for the next like four days, like almost to the hour, you know, like the walkthrough on the house is this action got the animals, animals are separate. Like they went and stayed somewhere and then they flew separate. But, but yeah, we had like,
Speaker 2 00:19:54 We're flying with you, which I'd be like, I mean, my wife would be freaking out about that.
Speaker 3 00:19:58 Oh. And that's why we were like pay a little extra for the animals to be, you know, in kennels for a couple of days. And then on like a proper pet carrier and it was ungodly expensive, but it was definitely the right move because it was a lot less stressful. And we stayed in a hotel here for a couple of days until we closed on the house and stuff. But like we had like get here land at one walkthrough in the house at three 30, you know, get fucking Verizon. We have cell service, you know, close on the house at 10 o'clock the next morning go to CarMax and buy the car that we'd already had shipped in and pre inspected and all this kind of stuff. Like the whole first three days were like planned down to the hour almost. And they're like, geez, you're going to be a day late.
Speaker 3 00:20:38 And I was like, no closing on the house is tomorrow at 10. O'clock like I gotta get there. And so, oh man, it was so super stressful so that I was just like sitting there. I was just like, I obviously can't help them fix the brakes on the airplane. Uh, and so I'm just going to sit here and drink maybe, um, like eight o'clock in the morning, but, and they, you know, so we're waiting in line to, uh, to get rebooked on another flight, like the next afternoon, which would have pushed them closing back and all this of stuff and they get on and they're like, uh, everyone going to Boston, please go to the gate, the airplane's ready. And we're like, oh God, thank God. So we did. And we were like a couple hours late. Did the walkthrough the next morning before the closing and everything was fine, but it was like the most ultra stressful thing that like Amanda and I had been working for a month, you know, six weeks for all of this.
Speaker 3 00:21:33 And it was all like perfectly aligned and everything was great. And then like the one thing that could really screw us aside from a COVID test before we left, which thank God was negative, um, was the airplane. And so yeah, we ended up getting here. Everything was fine, closed on the house, got the card. Cause they're in school. I have an office. Um, I have a very noisy radiator in the office. So I hope that the sound for the first 10 minutes of this episode, wasn't terrible. Um, but uh, yeah, I mean all in all like kids are in school and are happy or making friends and Amanda and I are happy and have a bunch of projects with the house that's 85 years old and like needs a bunch of work, but it's stuff we just really like doing. And it's a lot of fun for us and really fulfilling. So all of that can't complain so far.
Speaker 2 00:22:26 Nice. Nice. Well, welcome back again. And I'm glad that you survived all of that. Cause it sounds like a stressful as fuck nightmare. You know, they say that, uh, that building a house is more stressful, but I think we could rank moving from another country is more stressful than building a house. Cause I remember when I built my first house, it was nothing like what you just described. You basically compress six months of stress into a week and yeah, you win. Yeah. Ugh.
Speaker 3 00:23:00 Yeah, yeah, no, it's cool. It's cool. It's um, you know, I was telling someone that, you know, we took took the week between Christmas and new year's off, um, to which, which I'll talk about a minute, but like I needed that time just to like unravel a little bit, you know, like there was so much stress and so much going on in so much anxiety that like, I didn't even feel good until like Saturday afternoon before I was supposed to come back to work on Monday, just because like we did so much. And there was so much going on in flute Orlando to see my parents for Christmas and all this kind of stuff. It's just like, it was way a lot, but kind of what we had to do and really needed that, you know, kind of almost two weeks around Christmas and new year's to, to unwind, but I'm definitely feeling better now. It's great to be here. It's, it's a real adjustment to be on the same time zone as most of the team, you know, it's like only overlapping for a few hours with them and then, and then some stuff in the evenings, but now it's like, you know, eight to three or whatever is like prime time, go, go, go, uh, meetings, work with everyone all the time, which is like a real adjustment. Cause it wasn't like that before. It was like my afternoon and evening. So it's an adjustment, but a good one so far. Right.
Speaker 2 00:24:13 It's basically, I know that you were always describing your evenings as this sort of hectic pulled away time where you were kind of splitting your focus and attention between your family and random shit that happened in the states late in the day. Or like I know you and I podcast that a few times, well, many times at 5:00 PM your time, which would have been like right in the middle of your prime family time. So yeah, that, that's a huge distraction. Um, I'm betting that you, you feel a whole lot better about that. I know.
Speaker 3 00:24:44 Yeah. Yeah. I mean it did definitely is taking, getting used to cause it's just like I have to get my work done by five because I want to just go be with the family. So it's good. But it it's all, it's all good. I did, you know, Dave, I don't know. Did we do goals like this time last year? I don't feel like we did, but the year before, even my goal was to take a week off work and my failed miserably and I did it, I took from the 23rd to the third off and cast dose is still here and nobody's like flaming mad at me or like the house didn't burn down. So like, it was really amazing. Like I had a whole bunch of emails that I'm still not caught up with, like here a week later entirely. But, um, it was really nice to be able to take that time off. And I checked, I think I checked slack twice and I checked email once just to make sure that like some super important bill wasn't due that I didn't know about or something. Um, so it was cool to be able to take that time off. And I think it just gives me permission to do it more often, you know, like I want to take two or three different weeks off during the year. Um, so looking forward to being able to do that at this point.
Speaker 2 00:25:57 Very nice. Very nice. Yeah. I get that feeling of, you're always feeling like I'm missing something and you've got a bigger staff than I do. So for me, the worry is higher because I know that Mike can carry a lot of that, but the, you know, not every email ends up in his inbox. So I always feel like, oh, is there something that I missed that I should be forwarding to Mike? Like I remember that feeling when I was gone this last summer for a week and for a few days I was able to, you know, have that kind of serenity. But as soon as we got back into cell service, I was like scrolling through my phone, like mad, like, oh crap. Is there anything in here? Is there anything in there? Oh, look at that. Nothing's in there. Oh wait, there's one thing. No, that's pretty minor. All right. I'll send that to Mike anyway. And you know, like my anxiety about it was clearly way worse than what really happened in reality. So, but I totally understand that feeling and yeah. But congratulations on being able to pull it off. I know that's not an easy thing and it sounds like it was, it was needed. It wasn't,
Speaker 3 00:26:55 It was, it was definitely needed. Yeah. And I mean, I think before that's the other thing is like, it wasn't as needed because I had pretty good, like work-life balance to where I could just keep, keep trucking with it. But I think the next one will be even better because it won't be around such a stressful time, you know? And, and like, I can take good vacation, not just like necessary, get me back to baseline kind of vacation. Um, but like actually go to whatever, a warm sunny beach with a bunch of daiquiris somewhere or something and just really enjoy, uh, not just kind of recover. Um, but I think the thing that it really brought out was like how I spend my time, you know, in the business now. And, and like, I don't have an answer, but it's just a question of like, if, you know, for the most part right now, let's just say the team was good to be able to do their things. Like, what am I doing? You know, with all of my time. Um, so doing a lot of thinking about that and again, kind of like retroing myself to say like, okay, what was missed when I was not here? What, what do I do to add value if like I took a week off and everybody was basically fine, you know, like what, what is my purpose and value? Uh, and what are the things that I'm going to be focusing on? So don't have an answer, but that's the question, uh, at this point,
Speaker 2 00:28:13 Right. Well, that's a solid question. And one that I was asking myself, like, am I working? You know, we we've said this before, are you working on the business? Are you working in the business? Right. And for me, it's very much, it's easy for me to go into the business and start doing, you know, the support and the emails and you know, this and that. And I realized that there, you know, when I sat down and did the EOS thing that I was like, all right, I'm missing some big strategic things here. And I had a bunch of goals from last year and some of those goals change and I should've just dropped them so they didn't get, they didn't get done. And some of the goals, I was a little ambitious on and they didn't get done, but like the strategic tree, if you will, right.
Speaker 2 00:28:54 The strategic worry is what you should be focusing on and making sure that everybody is in alignment with that strategy. So yeah. I mean, you gotta be doing more strategic reading. Yeah. And that's, that's the thing, that's, that's the hard part about being a leader, especially when you've been responsible for day-to-day stuff in the business for you. You've got more people to do that. I'm not quite there yet, but even I should be doing less of what I'm doing. And I try to, now that I'm working on it, full-time, I feel like I've gotten a decent cadence to my day, to where I understand like how much it takes for me to do the stuff, to do the, in the business part. And then I can work on the, on the business part. And I even know, like during the week, what the cadence is like Mondays are usually kind of fucked, um, because there's a lot of stuff that builds up over the weekend.
Speaker 2 00:29:48 And for whatever reason, everybody just sends their shit out on Sunday night or Monday. So that's usually a high support day by like Friday, Friday's a great day to do strategy stuff or for me to take a day off and do stuff with my wife or half a day off. So like Wednesday and Thursday is a great time for me to do more strategic thinking Tuesdays, you know, maybe is there some spillover from Mondays, but like just knowing that and knowing that like, you know, I do stuff in the morning and that's more the, in the business and then the afternoon can be on the business. Just being aware of that has made a huge difference for me because now I can split the time better. And certainly that's one of the things I'm going to be doing moving forward here in 2022 is making sure that I protect that strategic time to make sure that I'm still paying attention to the things I need to pay attention to, you know, that plus making sure that I'm monitoring my rocks and being better about that, which I wasn't at the end of last year.
Speaker 3 00:30:46 You know, one thing that I have just started experimenting with in the last few days is not letting email and slack suck me into, I'll say this. Like, I don't mean this mainly other people's problems, you know, other people's priorities, but taking and do one thing that I think really needs to get done so that if I do nothing else, other than, you know, deal with other people's problems and put out fires and stuff, uh, the one thing got done at least, you know, it's like going to the gym at five o'clock in the morning. Like you go to the gym at five in the morning and you've been to the gym. Like they can't take that away from you. I'm trying to do that of like, yeah, check slack and whatever, but just leave those messages unread or mark them or reminders or whatever, and then do my thing.
Speaker 3 00:31:28 And I did that the last two days and it felt really good that like I made that priority for myself at least a little bit every day. And the weird thing again about like the timing is I find that like the four o'clock hour is a really good hour again. Cause like, I typically don't get booked for calls that late. And so at the end of the day, I'm able to do another thing that, that is, you know, working in on the business. Uh, and the rest of the time it's basically just on calls. Right,
Speaker 2 00:31:59 Right. Yeah. So find out what works for you and then stick with that, you know, a system you don't rise to the level of your, what is it, the rise of the level of your goals? You follow the level of your system.
Speaker 3 00:32:10 Oh, profound. I like it. I like it.
Speaker 2 00:32:14 Ooh, there you go. There's your, there's your new found profundity from rogue startups
Speaker 3 00:32:18 2022. There you go.
Speaker 2 00:32:21 Well, on that note, we probably had a wrap up because I don't think I have any more profundity in me. So four weeks
Speaker 3 00:32:26 Before we screw it up too bad, right? Yeah. So it was, so this is helpful and interesting for, for everyone. Sorry. We took a bit of time off, uh, around the holidays there, but hope everyone had a and happy and safe holidays. Dave, glad you're feeling better. God, your immunity is built up now to took Rona. So you can't get it again. Uh, but glad that everyone in your house is safe and happy and healthy at this point and wish everyone else the same happiness and healthiness going into the new year and uh, wish you all the best
Speaker 2 00:33:01 Happy new year to everybody. Hopefully it's healthy and Corona free. And as always our one ask is that if you found this episode and our show valuable, please share it with somebody that you think would benefit from it until next time.
Speaker 1 00:33:17 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
