Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Sherry Walling and Ali Taber discuss what it’s like being married to a founder and share their experiences on how they balance work and family life.
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Transcript
Sherry [00:00:22]: In this episode of “Startups for the Rest of Us,” Ali Taber and I discuss what it’s like to be married to a founder. This is “Startups for the Rest of Us,” episode 230, the five-year anniversary edition.
Welcome to “Startups for the Rest of Us,” the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Sherry.
Ali [00:00:34]: And I’m Ali.
Sherry [00:00:35]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we and our husbands have made. So, what’s the word this week, Ali?
Ali [00:00:44]: Well, my name is Ali Taber, and I’m married to Mr. Mike Taber, and I am currently a group exercise fitness instructor, a personal trainer, and a small fitness studio owner. And we have two boys, six and-a-half and eight, and Mike and I just celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary in October.
Sherry [00:01:08]: Woo-hoo. Congratulations.
Ali [00:01:09]: Yeah. Yeah, we made it ten years. Whoo. A decade.
Sherry [00:01:11]: Double digits.
Ali [00:01:13]: Yeah.
Sherry [00:01:15]: And I am Sherry Walling. I am married to Mr. Rob Walling. I’m a clinical psychologist, and I have a private practice and teach. I’m at a couple of different graduate-level programs. I’m the mother of two sons as well, and Rob and I are coming up on our fifteenth anniversary in about a month.
Ali [00:01:38]: Wow.
Sherry [00:01:39]: I think –
Ali [00:01:39]: Congratulations.
Sherry [00:01:40]: – hopefully, he listens to this, and it reminds him to begin shopping now.
Ali [00:02:01]: MicroConf Europe has been in October the last two years, and he was looking at dates or whatever, and he’s like, “How about this weekend,” and I’m like, “You know that’s our anniversary weekend, right?” And he’s got that look like, “Oh, right. Right. Ten years. Okay. So, looking for different dates now.”
Sherry [00:02:06]: I’m surprised he just didn’t roll over and say, “But I’m giving you a trip to Europe”
Ali [00:02:12]: Yeah. I’ve never been to a MicroConf, and that is something I hope to remedy soon, but we shall see.
Sherry [00:02:20]: Yeah. What’s the story with that? I wasn’t quite sure I really believed that Mike was married.
Ali [00:02:26]: It just doesn’t seem to work out with our schedules and with the kids’ schedules, and we don’t really have family nearby. His parents are in Upstate New York, and my mom’s not that far way, but she works full-time, still. It’s either been a scheduling conflict or a “I really can’t afford to fly the whole family to Europe for a week,” or whatever, “or two weeks,” or what have you. And there’s always a huge time difference. I mean even the Vegas, it’s a three-hour time –
Sherry [00:03:00]: Yeah, it’s a –
Ali [00:03:00]: – difference for us.
Sherry [00:03:01]: – pretty big disruption with your family.
Ali [00:03:03]: Yeah, and it’s a ten-hour travel. Between the connecting flights and the time difference, it just never really has seemed to work out.
Sherry [00:03:11]: Well, maybe someday.
Ali [00:03:30]: Someday. I’m hoping someday. He really wants me to come. He was really disappointed a few years ago, and he was like, “I want you to come.” And I’m like, “What am I supposed to do with the kids?” It’s just like leave them with a cell phone and say, “Call us if you need anything. We’ll be back in three days.” It doesn’t really work that way when they’re four and five. They’re older now, so it’s a little bit easier. But someday.
Sherry [00:03:33]: I bet they’d have a lot of fun in Vegas.
Ali [00:04:01]: We were trying to do it this year. We talked about bringing both of the kids out to Vegas and making it a family vacation, trying to do it the week of spring break so I wouldn’t have to get the phone call from the principal like, “Hey, you know you’re not supposed to take your kids out for vacation other than school vacation weeks.” But so much goes into booking the hotel and which hotel they can get and which week they can get, and nothing seemed to match up in our favor. So, that was kind of a bummer. Whatever.
Sherry [00:04:009]: Yeah, there should be some perks. Since you’re the wife, you should be able to schedule MicroConf around your schedule, but it doesn’t really work that way. Does it?
Ali [00:04:11]: Yeah, it doesn’t really work that way.
Sherry [00:04:12]: We’re not that powerful.
Ali [00:04:19]: No. No. I’m like, “Just schedule it this week.” He’s like, “It doesn’t work that way.” Why not? It should.
Sherry [00:04:19]: Make it work.
Ali [00:04:25]: Make it work. Tell those Vegas hotel people they need to make this work because you have an angry wife.
Sherry [00:04:50]: That’s sort of a nice commentary on what it’s like to be married to a founder, though. In a sense, you’re married to somebody who has a lot of autonomy and flexibility in their life, but it doesn’t always translate to being that simple and easy once you add in the other dynamics of family and other commitments that you have.
What have you enjoyed about being married to a founder, or, to Mike, specifically?
Ali [00:05:42]: Well, I never probably would’ve started my own fitness studio if Mike wasn’t involved in being a founder and being an entrepreneur and starting his own business and coming up with product ideas. He really kind of gave me that confidence to do it, not to be afraid of failure, because I never wanted to be a business owner. I never thought I was going to be a business owner. It wasn’t something like, “Yeah, I want to own my own business someday.” I was like, “No. I don’t want to own my own business.” Both sides of my family had had family businesses, and I’m just like, “Ugh. I’ve seen what that looks like, and I don’t want anything to do with it. I want to show up to work. I want to do my job. I want to get my paycheck, and I want to go home and leave office at the office.” And that was fine when I was a graphic designer. That’s what I did before motherhood. I was a graphic designer, and I had a career before graphic design, too. I’m on my third career.
Sherry [00:05:44]: You’re more advanced than the rest of us.
Ali [00:05:53]: Well, I don’t know about that. Some people would call it being fickle. I don’t know. Life keeps changing, so I keep trying to change with life, I guess, and my interests.
Sherry [00:05:58]: Well, you’re sort of a serial founder, too, in that way. You’re founding different careers.
Ali [00:06:04]: I guess. Yeah, I guess that’s one way to look at it. My student loans don’t really look at it that way; but, you know. Whatever.
Sherry [00:06:21]: Well, I think you were talking about how the fact that Mike is a founder and has started a number of different things has made it more easy, or has allowed you to be more supported in your ability to start your own studio.
Ali [00:06:50]: Yeah, absolutely, because I know if I ever have any questions, and even though it’s so different than what he does in that it’s a brick-and-mortar, and I’m dealing directly with customers as opposed to developing a product that’s going to be sold to a business. So, the dynamic is a little bit different, but a lot of the same kind of marketing applies, and the time that you have to put into building a business is all relevant.
Sherry [00:07:02]: Yeah. I mean he sort of understands the process of making something and being the one who is holding all the pieces together. And so it’s helpful to have him as a partner in that, I would imagine.
Ali [00:07:06]: Yeah, it’s been really good to have him on my side. That’s for sure.
Sherry [00:08:04]: I think we’ve kind of experienced that in our family. And I think me, personally, like you, I’ve done some career shifting and started as a traditional, tenure-track professor and just really didn’t like it. I think it was because Rob had had a couple of really great jobs. High-paying, really fabulous jobs, that he left simply because he really just didn’t like them. I know that sounds sort of obvious, like, “Oh, you don’t like your job? Leave it.” But when you get a Ph.D. and do all of this work and plan to be a professor, it was a really big shift and really hard to make that decision. But because I had seen someone else do it, someone else walk away from something that on paper looks good, but in reality it wasn’t right for Rob, and in this case wasn’t right for me, it made it less scary to take that leap into a less traditional job structure. And I think we’ve –
Ali [00:08:05]: Yes.
Sherry [00:08:31]: – seen it with our kids, too. Once you step off that 9-to-5, someone-else-pays-your-paycheck path, all number of things become possible when you’re more flexible. And so we’ve done some different things educationally with our kids, and I think it’s really affected the way that we’ve structured our family, including taking them out of school for a month to go to Thailand last year.
Ali [00:08:34]: Right, yeah. Were you guys homeschooling then? I know you were doing that for a while.
Sherry [00:08:42]: We homeschooled for two years, and now, actually, my oldest son returned to traditional school. And my youngest son is going to kinder next year. He’s only four.
Ali [00:08:43]: Ah.
Sherry [00:09:13]: No, he was in school, and we just made an independent study arrangement. We kind of said, “We have these tickets, and we’re going. So, if you want him to be a student, we’ll have him do his homework.” We apologized. We didn’t ask permission. We just did it.
So, how do you two work out taking care of kids and both running very separate businesses? And Mike, he’s no longer consulting, but he was for a long time consulting and traveling a lot, right?
Ali [00:10:00]: Yes, he was. That was really tough. I didn’t really do much professionally when he was traveling a lot simply because I couldn’t with the type of business that I was in, where I had to be present for classes, or present for clients. It was really hard. He basically traveled, and I did the family stuff. I was basically a stay-at-home mom. I did all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the laundry, all the stuff that made it possible for him to just get on a plane Sunday night, be in a different city, fly home Friday night and then be home for a day and-a-half and then get on a plane. I mean there were months that it was back-to-back weeks of traveling, and he saw the kids a day and-a-half before he was back out on the road. It was really, really tough. So, I’m really –
Sherry [00:10:01]: Wow.
Ali [00:10:13]: – glad that he’s not traveling anymore. And it’s really allowed me to start to work more outside the home and develop a business for myself and for us as a family, too.
Sherry [00:10:20]: Yeah. Of the ten years that you-all have been married, how many years was he traveling like that, keeping that kind of schedule?
Ali [00:10:27]: He started traveling right after I got pregnant with Luke, and Luke’s just turned eight. So –
Sherry [00:10:28]: Wow.
Ali [00:10:42]: – I mean it wasn’t always back-to-back like that. And there were definitely some years where his travel was less than years. There was at least one year where he was gone 42 weeks of 52.
Sherry [00:10:43]: Whoa.
Ali [00:10:43]: Yeah, he was travelling. Yeah.
Sherry [00:10:56]: [For] him [to] make the transition from doing side businesses to making those his primary vocation sounds like it’s probably a game changer for your family.
Ali [00:10:58]: Moving away from the consulting and doing –
Sherry [00:11:03]: Yeah, where he’s making money and has products out at Shark and those kinds of things.
Ali [00:11:32]: – yeah, it’s really changed how our family dynamic is. He’s home. He sees the kids. We’re all more involved in each other’s lives now as opposed to being a weekend parent. It’s been a huge shift for him, too, because there’s so much more he’s involved with. He’s like, “Homework? What’s homework? I don’t know what these kids have to do for homework.” I’m like, “It’s this, this, this, this and this.” And he’s like, “How do you know all this stuff?” I’m like, “Well, I’ve been doing it forever.” So, that’s been a huge shift for him, having to be more involved as well.
Sherry [00:11:36]: It sounds like a lot of the dynamics have probably changed with that transition.
Ali [00:11:38]: Yeah, it has, but in a good way.
Sherry [00:11:42]: Yeah, and it’s allowed you to have the time and support to start your own business. Are you enjoying that?
Ali [00:12:17]: I am enjoying it. It’s been a little scary, but also really rewarding just to see progress in clients and having them tell you, “You’ve completely changed my life.” “You’ve saved my life.” I had a client who, he was on his way to a grave: high blood pressure, high cholesterol. He’s off all his meds. He’s perfectly healthy now. I was like, “See? Diet and exercise. Pretty amazing stuff.” So, just seeing that transformation for people, being able to work with them more one-on-one and being a part of that has been really amazing.
Sherry [00:12:20]: That’s great. It sounds like it’s really rewarding.
Ali [00:12:24]: It is really rewarding. It’s exhausting, too, because they can also be very needy.
Sherry [00:12:26]: Yes. Yes.
Ali [00:12:49]: “Should I eat this?” “Should I not eat this?” “What do I do with this?” “How do I do this?” But it’s good. It’s really good. And then just figuring out how to make the studio run, how to get the schedules. Do I need to bring in more instructors to help me with all of this? What can I outsource? What do I need to do myself? How do I market this? Mike’s been really helpful with giving me some ideas about how to really grow the business.
Sherry [00:13:12]: It sounds like there’s a lot of parallel process, though, in that scAling-up process that I know that Mike and Rob talk about a lot. Like, how do you decide when to hire contractors? How do you decide when you need more employees? And the pros and cons of that, and then, of course, marketing is a big conversation always. Sounds like you and Mike probably have a lot to talk about at night after the kids go to bed.
Ali [00:13:48]: Yes. Yes, we do bounce ideas off each other. He’ll help me with stuff. He’s been writing this book, too, and he needed to get the cover done. And he got it back, and I’m just like, “Do you want me to just get this done for you so you can be done,” and was able to just whip out my graphic design skills from my back pocket, from my previous life. And we stayed up one night after the kids went to bed and got that out the door. And I’m sure you and Rob go through this, too. You really have to work not just as a partnership in your marriage, but there’s a partnership with your businesses, too.
Sherry [00:13:50]: Sure, yeah.
Ali [00:13:52]: You’ve spoke at MicroConf, right?
Sherry [00:14:30]: Yeah. Yeah, and we’re doing a podcast together now called “Zen Founder,” where we talk about actually a lot of the things that you and I are talking about today, kind of work-life balance issues and mental health, managing anxiety, all of the kind of human side of doing a startup. And so that has actually been really fun for he and I to join forces and work together in a more formal way. Our fields, of course, are very different. Although we certainly have a lot of things in common. We both supervise people, manage people. So, no, there’s a lot that we talk about that’s sort of overlapping in our two work lives, but to be able to really do something together is really fun.
Ali [00:14:35] And so how do you guys balance the family and the professional life?
Sherry [00:14:44]: It’s like playing Tetris. It’s like figuring out where all of those little boxes can go and find a little spot.
Ali [00:14:46]: Like Google Calendar on crack, right?
Sherry [00:14:48]: Exactly what it is.
Ali [00:14:55]: Who’s in charge of this? Yeah, and everything’s color-coded, and “You’re picking up, and you’re dropping off.” “And here’s the bus.” And, “Who’s making dinner tonight?”
Sherry [00:14:57]: Right. No, it is –
Ali [00:14:58]: [Crosstalk].
Sherry [00:15:38]: – very much like that. Yes, and we have this Sunday night meeting. We work on our Tetris board. We just figure out who’s going where and what help we need and what babysitters need to come when and where. Some weeks, it’s kind of crazy, like we’re both going 18 different places in a day. But it’s another way, though, that’s fun to be partners because we’re both pretty invested in the well-being of our kids, and we’re invested in each other. And so we just figure out as best we can to make sure that everybody’s getting what they need at a given day. And sometimes that’s really challenging, but mostly we problem-solve together.
Ali [00:15:41]: I like your idea about the Sunday meetings. I’m going to write that down.
Sherry [00:15:41]: Yeah.
Ali [00:15:45]: “Have Sunday meeting.” “Need Sunday meeting.”
Sherry [00:15:47]: That’s when the Google Calendar magic happens.
Ali [00:16:09]: Yeah. Usually, I just slap stuff on there and share it with him. But he doesn’t always see it, and sometimes it doesn’t always sync up. I’m like, “I put it on the calendar.” And he’s like, “Well, it’s not on my calendar,” and then that’s a whole other, like, when technology fails you. And then you’re yelling at your spouse, because it was on the calendar but they didn’t see it because it didn’t sync right, or whatever. So, it’s good to have an actual face-to-face meeting –
Sherry [00:16:10]: Totally, especially in –
Ali [00:16:12]: – to work that stuff out.
Sherry [00:16:24] – highly technology dependent families. I think if Google Calendar somehow went away, I would just wander around in circles, really unsure of where I was supposed to be and what was going on.
Ali [00:16:27]: I’d cry. I’d just be like, “I don’t know what to do.”
Sherry [00:16:28]: “I’m lost.”
Ali [00:16:34]: “I don’t have my list of my appointments and what I’m supposed to do right now.” Oh, man.
Sherry [00:16:53]: I guess since this is the five-year anniversary episode of “Startups for the Rest of Us,” maybe we could do a little bit of reflecting back about what the last five years have looked like. One thing that Mike has talked about at MicroConf and in a couple of other places is that he’s had some pretty significant health issues over the past couple of years.
Ali [00:17:57]: Yeah, he has. He’s had back issues since I met him in 2001. That’s always been an ongoing issue with him. And then more recently was his low testosterone diagnosis, which was the most recent health issue, which actually was kind of trying for both of us because he just wasn’t himself, and he didn’t know what was going on with him. He didn’t feel right, but he didn’t know what was wrong. So, I think he really struggled. He was really unmotivated, and a lot of the symptoms of depression are similar to those for low testosterone. So, I think he tried to do a lot of things to get him out of this, quote, unquote, “funk,” and none of it was working, and it was really stressful on our marriage. And when he finally went to see the doctor, the first thing she did was treat him for depression, like, “All right. I’m going to put you on antidepressants.” You know, they give you that mental health questionnaire when you go see your general practitioner. I don’t need to tell you. You know what they are.
Sherry [00:18:09]: Yeah, yeah. “Do you ever feel listless? No motivation? Tired? Like you have no appetite, or to much appetite?” Yeah. So, there was some screening, and he just marked them all because that’s what he was experiencing, but it wasn’t depression.
Ali [00:18:27]: Right. So, big, red flags when you mark “yes” to everything on there. So, she put him on antidepressants, and he took them for a while. And then he was just like, “These aren’t helping. I’m not depressed.” Of course, he just took himself off of them, which that’s another thing. You can’t just take yourself off that stuff. You need to go see your doctor. People do that kind of stuff. That must drive you [crosstalk] –
Sherry [00:18:29]: I don’t prescribe medicine, no.
Ali [00:18:29]: – okay.
Sherry [00:18:40]: No. But I work in a pretty integrated clinic, so I work very closely with psychiatrists. So, I have those same conversations with people about like, “Oh, you can’t just stop your medicine. You have to” –
Ali [00:18:40]: Yeah.
Sherry [00:18:43]: – “talk to us first. You’ll get sick.”
Ali [00:18:47]: Right. Yeah, you can’t just stop taking it. You’re supposed to wean yourself down and this and that.
Sherry [00:18:47]: Yeah.
Ali [00:19:01]: But anyway, she’s like, “All right.” She had sent him for some more tests and discovered the low testosterone and put him on a testosterone treatment, which is a gel he’s got to rub on his body.
Sherry [00:19:03]: And he’s doing much better now, right?
Ali [00:19:09]: He’s doing so much better. And it was almost like a relief. It was like, “Ah. Thank God there’s a reason I’m feeling this way.”
Sherry [00:19:27]: Oh, sure. Once there’s a problem, then you can work on figuring out what to do about it. That’s fantastic that he’s doing better.
And so the last five years, with all of the travel and the illness, there’s been a lot that’s been going on while Mike has been working on this podcast.
Ali [00:19:40]: Yeah, I guess so. It all seems kind of a blur. I mean we said, like, “God. They’ve been doing this for five years.” I’m like “It feels like a blur.” I don’t even know. It’s just so much has happened in the last five years. I’m sure everybody feels that way.
Sherry [00:19:43]: Yeah, we’re just in a time of life when time moves really fast, I think.
Ali [00:19:50]: Yeah, and you turn around and you’re like, “How’d the kids get so big?” Another year’s gone by, and –
Sherry [00:20:25]: I think the last five years, we’ve moved across the country, had a child. I changed jobs. Rob has bought and sold a couple of apps and companies and things. Started Drip. Maybe he started HitTail. No, I think we had HitTail, or, he had HitTail before then. But, yeah. So, life looks phenomenally different now than it did five years ago, both for him and for us as a family. And I guess the podcast listeners have probably walked alongside that process with Mike and Rob as their lives have changed.
Ali [00:20:30]: – absolutely. So, how do you feel about Rob’s latest product, Drip?
Sherry [00:21:53]: I think it’s cool. So, Rob and I have a little bit of an interesting arrangement. Even though we’re very connected and we do a lot of things together, even professionally, I’m pretty separate from the day-to-day running of what’s going on with the apps. So, I know that he has said over and over that he will never do this again. He will never start an app from scratch and do all of the design and architecture. I kind of ignore those statements, because I feel like I’ve heard them before. But, generally, I think Drip is kind of his mistress a little bit.
I think that’s a little bit how it is. He’s got HitTail. He’s got Drip. He’s got a couple of other things going on, and I sometimes have to vie for some attention from them. Generally, it’s gone fairly smoothly. There was a time about six months ago when he was really worried about the revenue flow, because he’d just hired several people, but, Drip wasn’t quite having the momentum that he needed it to have for the number of folks that he had hired. And he was sweating it. And it was really filtering over into our family life and our relationship, and I was getting a little Drip-angry. Like, “Get this app out of my life. This is causing too much trouble.” But since then, I’ve had more love for Drip. Drip is pulling its weight a little bit more.
Ali [00:22:19]: Yeah. That is true, though, how the stress of the business can really change the dynamic of your marriage and your family. Like you said, “Ugh. I hate Drip.” or, “I hate that product, because it’s ruining my life right now.” But it’s one of those things that kind of goes with being married to an entrepreneur. It’s interesting to hear you talk about it like that, because I’m like, “Oh, all too familiar with all of what you just said.”
Sherry [00:22:28]: Yeah, like the emotional quality of your relationship rises and falls along with the AuditShark, or the Drip growth curve line.
Ali [00:22:28]: Yeah.
Sherry [00:22:34]: How are you feeling about AuditShark? Do you and AuditShark need any couples therapy?
Ali [00:23:06]: Oh, yeah. I mean Mike’s been working on AuditShark for a really long time. It’s a very complicated product, and I remember when he first told me about it, he had that little-kid gleam in his eye about how amazing it was and this and that and everything he wanted it to be able to do. And of course, I just glaze over because I’m still not tech-savvy. I’m so far from any of this stuff. So, he gets all excited and tells me stuff, and I just glaze over. My eyes just glaze over, and he’s like, “You’re not even listening to me, are you?” And I’m like, “I’m listening. I’m listening.”
Sherry [00:23:09]: “I’m trying. If I understood the words you were saying.”
Ali [00:23:34]: Yeah. I’m just like, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” I’ve learned more about HIPAA Laws and all this security software stuff. I’m like, “You’re speaking a different language right now, but I’m doing my best to keep up.” But he’s put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it, so it’s hard to be “Down with AuditShark.” because I know how much nurturing of the product that he’s done.
Sherry [00:24:10]: And I think that is what’s really hard about being married to a founder. It’s not just that they have an intense or demanding job, it’s that so much of themselves is wrapped up in it. And so, really, if AuditShark, or if Drip is suffering or not doing well, I just feel like their souls or their psyche is going along with the product. I think it is, like you said, so much of them is tied up in that product, that it’s a different dynamic, even, than someone who’s a physician or a fireman and has a job that requires them to be really intense and focused. It just takes a piece of them in a different way.
Ali [00:24:26]: Absolutely. So, you mentioned earlier how Rob had left these great, salaried jobs. And was there any point at which [you] hoped he would go back to a salaried job and left all this founders stuff behind?
Sherry [00:25:34]: Not really, to be honest. Rob has done a pretty good job of, I think, assessing risk pretty well. He’s always stepped down, so when he first moved from having a salaried position to contracting, he went half-time at his salary job and did half-time consulting. And then when he moved from consulting to products, he just did this sort of slow shift. And so by the time he was all the way a consultant, or all the way an entrepreneur who was doing products, there’d been enough build-up process that I wasn’t worried about it. And I had seen that it was working before he made the leap. I think because we are so addicted to our flexible schedules, like, taking off on Fridays often, or being gone for a month when we want to, it’s been such a benefit that I enjoy so much, that I think it has helped buffer any anxiety that I might have about an instable income source or anything like that.
Ali [00:25:50]: What do you do with your patients that you see when you’re like, “Okay. I’m going away for,” because you have a very face-to-face, people rely on you, like, “Help me. I’m having an anxiety attack, and I need to talk to you right this second.” So, how do you take off time like that?
Sherry [00:25:52]: How do I abandon them?
Ali [00:25:53]: Yeah.
Sherry [00:25:53]: Yeah.
Ali [00:25:55]: Well, I didn’t mean it like that.
Sherry [00:27:02]: But they probably would think that. I try to do a really good job of just saying up front, “This is how I live my life.” I’m really committed to my work, and I’m really committed to taking care of my patients, but I am gone for four weeks, usually in the fall. And I’ve gone for a couple weeks in the summer and usually gone between Christmas and New Year’s. And I just try to tell people that when I begin to work with them, so that it’s not shocking or surprising. I also work with a really great team. I work in a clinic where there’re other therapists and other physicians, so generally the people I work with individually have at least another point of contact. So, they either have a psychiatrist, or they’re in a group therapy session, or something like that. So, I have people that help cover for me when I’m away.
Yeah, it’s hard on them. It’s hard on my patients, and it’s kind of messy. But they have consistently told me, and I believe them, I think, that they know that this is part of who I am and that they like working with me. So, they’ll deal with it.
Ali [00:27:06]: They’ll deal with it. They’ll suck it up for the month they have to talk to somebody else. Then –
Sherry [00:27:07]: Right.
Ali [00:27:09]: – as soon as you come back, they’re like, “Oh, thank God you’re back.”
Sherry [00:27:14]: It hasn’t really hurt my practice. I’ll say that. It hasn’t really hurt it.
Ali [00:27:23]: That’s good, though. That’s kind of where I’m at now. My psychologist might take two weeks off, or take a month off. We’re just like, I can’t just –
Sherry [00:27:24] I committed to these people.
Ali [00:27:33]: – Yeah. I’m like I don’t have anybody else to rely on. If I’m not there, then classes and sessions don’t run, and there’s no revenue. That’s –
Sherry [00:27:33]: Yeah.
Ali [00:27:43]: – the scary thing about being a sole proprietor. And there’s no one but me right now, so it’s all or nothing. So I’m either there making money, or I’m not.
Sherry [00:27:45]: And if you’re not there, there’s no money.
Ali [00:27:49]: There’s no money to be made. That’s kind of scary.
Sherry [00:28:30]: And it’s been interesting to see Rob and Mike do that to some extent, in that they have decided to be partners in some of these ventures. Sharing MicroConf, sharing the podcast. And I think that has been really beneficial to Rob, because he has somebody to talk nuts and bolts with that’s not me, and he has a partner in it. So, it doesn’t feel as isolating, or as scary when you have two brains. Maybe someday you’ll take on a partner or something like that, but that’s one thing that I’ve enjoyed about watching them develop over the last five years, is that they have a system of getting each other’s back and sharing the labor, certainly of planning MicroConf and things like that.
Ali [00:28:44]: Absolutely. It’s finding the right partner, too, because you just don’t want to find a partner. You want to find the right partner. I’m really thankful, too, that Mike has Rob who he can talk about all this nerd stuff with that I’m not like just “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
Sherry [00:28:45]: They speak the same language.
Ali [00:29:19]: Exactly. And I’m like, “Go talk to Rob about this stuff, because you’re speaking a different language, and I don’t know what you’re saying.” I try to do my best, but he knows I have limitations in that department. But you’re right, though. It’s nice that they have a different sounding board besides us, and it’s great that they even have built this community with MicroConf and the podcast so that there is, it’s not like a partnership in the sense that it’s two people working together, but it’s this, I don’t want to say “support group,” but it is basically a support group: “Where can I go to ask a question?” “How do I find out more about X, Y or Z?”
Sherry [00:29:35]: Both MicroConf and the Founder Café, I think, exist because people are married to people like us who are like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” They have filled that need and, thankfully, not had to go outside the marriage but just figured out where to find a spot to talk about these things.
You know, given that you are ten years into this relationship and so many years into being married to a founder, are there any words of wisdom that you have for other founders or their families about how to figure this life out? How to do it well?
Ali [00:30:36]: As long as I’ve known Mike, even when I first met him, he was already working on a side project. He had a full-time job, was going to grad school and was working on a product. So, I always just kind of accepted from the get-go that that was who he was. That was a part of him. That was kind of his deal. So, I think for it to work, you have to accept that about your spouse, that this isn’t just like they woke up one day and said, “Hey, I’m going to start a business today.” It’s almost ingrained in them. It’s part of who they are.
Sherry [00:30:50]: Yeah. This is who they are. And whatever business they’re working on, or dreaming up, or scheming, or doing the marketing for is like another appendage. It’s pretty intimately attached to who they are.
Ali [00:31:19]: Yeah. And asking, or expecting, or wanting them to be anything other than that is just not going to make the relationship work. And being really supportive and listening and, like you said, get that Google Calendar out and start planning how you’re going to balance everything. And communication is definitely key, because if you don’t have a good communication pattern with the person, it’s just not going to mesh. It’s not going to work, for either person –
Sherry [00:31:19]: Right.
Ali [00:31:31]: – because it isn’t going to do well, and your marriage and your family isn’t going to do well because you’re shut down from interacting or letting the other person know what you need, or what they need.
Sherry [00:32:16]: And I think, to add to that, one of the things that sounds like both Rob and Mike have done pretty well is that they have done a good job of listening to our dreams, of also using their entrepreneurial skills and their spheres of influence and investing in us the way that we have invested in them. At least in our marriage, it’s never felt one-sided. Like, Rob’s doing really cool, amazing things and has this interesting entrepreneurial life, and I’m schlepping kids around. I think both of us are really committed to the growth and well-being of each other and that my dreams are really important to him. And if I say I want to do something, he’s like, “Okay. How can I make this happen for you?”
Ali [00:32:17]: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Sherry [00:32:31]: That’s been really important, and I think that might be a little bit exceptional in the founder world, especially because the apps and starting these businesses can be so all-consuming if people aren’t doing a good job of paying attention to what’s going on with their partner.
Ali [00:32:59]: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. I would agree with everything you just said, because Mike’s been very supportive, too, of everything that I’ve wanted accomplish outside of raising kids and making dinner. Yeah, it definitely has to be a real partnership.
So, I was wondering. I know that you and Rob each take a personal retreat at least once a year each, sometimes twice a year. Is that right?
Sherry [00:32:59]: Yeah.
Ali [00:33:11]: And I was wondering how you both came up with the idea to take a personal retreat. What was the catalyst for that idea? And maybe what you guys consider a, quote, unquote, “personal retreat”?
Sherry [00:34:18]: Yeah. It’s a great question. It’s something that has been so significant in our lives. In our other podcast, on “Zen Founder,” we jus recorded, I think it’s episode 2, but it’s a whole episode about this, so you can check that out, or people can check that out if they’re interested. But, basically, we have just benefited so much from the time away from normal life. I think we started doing it when I realized that I was really unhappy in my job, and I just thought, “Oh, my gosh. I have spent years preparing for this job, and I just need to get away and sort out how am I feeling, what am I thinking and what do I want to do about it.”
So, the first retreat that was one that I went on, and it was really all about “What’s going to be my direction,” and it was so helpful, because getting away from home and stepping outside of the routine really allowed me to think pretty clearly.
We didn’t come up with this. There’s lots of material about how to do retreats. And –
Ali [00:34:22]: Yeah, I grew up Catholic, and going on retreat was just what you did.
Sherry [00:34:24]: – yeah, it’s a regular process.
Ali [00:34:24]: Yeah, yeah. But you go and pray. So, the whole idea of a personal retreat, I was just like, “Hmm. What’s that like?”
Sherry [00:34:34]: So, I go and go on walks, or –
Ali [00:34:37]: Think.
Sherry [00:34:51]: – right. But it’s the same kind of process. It’s that silence, a more quiet, subdued environment to look inside. So, it’s probably similar to your retreats as a child, but maybe less guilt-ridden.
Ali [00:34:54]: Less time on your knees, praying, maybe more of reflection.
Sherry [00:34:56]: More time drinking wine on the beach.
Ali [00:34:58]: Now you’re speaking [crosstalk].
Sherry [00:35:06]: Like that. Check out that episode. You might like it. It talks about how both of us have used them in slightly different ways.
Ali [00:35:19]: Okay. Yeah, I definitely will. So, do you have a special place that you go to do those retreats? Or, do you change the location of the retreats depending on what you need for the retreat, or what you’re looking for out of it?
Sherry [00:36:03]: Yeah. We have done different things. We live about a little over two hours from the Central Coast of California, which is a really beautiful, lovely area. So, we generally go there. The last one I went on, I went to the Santa Cruz Mountains. So, I wasn’t on the beach, I was just in the mountains in a cabin. Other times, I have just stayed in a nice hotel by myself, because I wanted a bubble bath in front of the fireplace, things I don’t get to do at home. We set aside some money and plan to do something that is really in line with whatever either of us is feeling like our vibe is at that time.
But, you certainly don’t have to spend a lot of money. You could go camping, if you like to go camping. I don’t like to go camping. That’s not restful to me.
Ali [00:36:04]: I don’t like to go camping either.
Sherry [00:36:05]: – so, no camping for us.
Ali [00:36:08]: No camping. That is not my idea of vacation or fun.
Sherry [00:36:10]: It’s a lot of work.
Ali [00:36:15]: It is a lot of work. I’m like, “This quest sucks. I’m not doing this anymore.”
Sherry [00:36:23]: Yeah. Send me to the hotel that has the wine bar and the nacho bar, and that’s pretty much what I do.
Ali [00:37:06]: That’s an awesome retreat. I can get down with that. You know, Mike and I have talked about it, and he had suggested it. I actually did one. I just checked myself into a hotel for a weekend. And Mike started doing a couple. He’s done, I think, one or two. But they really are nice. They’re just a nice break from reality, almost. I can just go and be alone and focus on what is it I want out of life, or to pursue next. Or, how am I going to build out from here? Would you say that that is really an important component to being a[n] entrepreneur, having that time?
Sherry [00:39:04]: I really think so because no one is telling you what to do. Right? No one is telling you whether to sell your app or grow your app. No one is telling you what to launch or not launch, or what features to add. And no one is telling you what kind of life you’re going to have. You’re not working for a corporation that says, “This is what’s possible for you.” Everything is possible. And so much of your life is determined by what you want, but I think the frenetic nature of doing a startup makes it very difficult to really check in and ask the question “What do I want?” “What’s going on in my life?” “What are my goals,” beyond just responding to bug fixes and customer complaints. Especially once you’ve got something going that has some momentum, you can just sort of coast on that for a long time.
And so I feel like taking a retreat as a founder is foundational. It’s essential, because how else do you know what the hell you’re doing? Like, how else do you know what your life is going to be like? And I think people who don’t have any mechanism for introspection can easily drift really far away from who they want to be and how they want to be living. And the retreats, for me, just totally reset me.
Well, we should, I guess, probably move to wrapping it up. But maybe if this isn’t too weird, I can actually say something to Rob and Mike, and that’s that we are really proud of you and really impressed with what you’ve done with the last five years and really proud of the community that you two have built together and proud of the way that you’ve handled yourselves and grateful for the good partners that you’ve been to both Ali and I.
So, congratulations on five years. We are very excited for what the next five years will bring, and whatever it brings, you know that you have partners who are super supportive and love you both very much.
Ali [00:39:07]: And we’ll, hopefully, make it to MicroConf someday.
Sherry [00:39:12]: And maybe all four of us will meet at some point in person.
Ali [00:39:13]: That’d be nice.
Sherry [00:39:15]: That could be your five-year goal, Ali.
Ali [00:39:28]: That is my five-year goal. You know? That’s my five-year goal is to make it to MicroConf and actually meet Rob and Sherry face-to-face so I have some faces to go with the names that I hear so much about.
Sherry [00:39:33]: That would be fun. Cool. Well, you want to
Ali [00:39:39]: And then we can all tell embarrassing stories about what Rob and Mike were like in their younger years, and that’s always a good time.
Sherry [00:39:46]: If we come on again in the next five years, we’ll just make it a total roast, like, all of the embarrassing stories that we don’t want to say yet.
Ali [00:39:49]: Oh, so fun. So fun. I’m in.
Sherry [00:39:52]: Sounds good.
Ali [00:40:24]All right. So, if you have any questions for us, call our voicemail number at 1.888.801.9690. Or, email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us at iTunes by searching for “startups” and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode.
Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 229 | 8 Years to Overnight Success with Phil Derksen
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike and Rob interview Phil Derksen and talk about his eight year journey to overnight success.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Phil’s plugins:
Other links:
- Rob’s “Finding your Flywheel” talk
- “Getting Real” book by 37 signals
- Kyle Brown’s WordPress support service
- Pressnomics conference
- Phil on Twitter
- PhilDerksen.com
Transcript
Rob [00:00]: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us Mike and I interview Phil Derksen and we talk about his eight year journey to overnight success. This is Startups For the Rest of Us episode two hundred twenty-nine.
Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products whether you’ve built your first product or your’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike [00:28]: And I’m Mike.
Rob [00:30]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Mike.
Mike [00:34]: Well, last week I think we got a little over zealous in our recording and we talked about some of the different books people should be reading if they’re a founder and one of the resources that I completely forgot to mention, because it’s clearly written down and I just totally spaced and forgot to mention it, Josh Kaufman, who’s the author of The Personal MBA has on his website a list of the best business books. He’s got a list of one hundred of them. If you just go to his website, we’ll link it up in the show notes but it’s personalmba.com best business books. They’re all categorized into different categories so there’s advertising and costumer development and all sorts of different things but that is a very comprehensive list that has been curated by him. He updates in on a yearly basis. So as new books come out, definitely go back and take a look at that list again because it does change from time to time.
Rob [01:22]: Right. And then as part of him keeping it updated is that he has to reevaluate every year which good books came out about business creation and weigh them against the classics, so to speak. So I think it’s a pretty cool list.
Mike [01:33]: Yeah, there’s definitely a mix between somethings that are fairly old that were written fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago, but then there’s also a lot of new stuff as well. It’s a testament to how good some of those older books are because they’ve been on this list and they’re still there even though there’s a lot of new stuff that has come out.
Rob [01:50]: So an update on my stuff. I’m in the process of hiring two people right now, not full time. One is actually just going to be a few hours a week. Basically she’s like a remote executive assistant. You know how I’ve been complaining every year about how much email I get and just trying to find a better way to manage that?
Mike [02:07]: How much email do you get? I use Gmail Meter to keep track and it emails me a report every month to let me know how much email I’ve gotten and all sorts of statistics. Have you used something like that to track how much you actually get?
Rob [02:18]: You can go into the Gmail settings and there’s a report and it will spit it out. I don’t use a special plugin but last time I looked I was averaging about a hundred and ten messages a day for every day of the month. So it was thirty-three hundred emails a month. It’s enough that it’s a pain.
Mike [02:31]: I get about that much as well.
Rob [02:32]: Do you?
Mike [02:33]: Mm-hmm.
Rob [02:34]: Look at you. If I hire someone who’s good maybe you could use her as well. I’m just getting her started today but as I’ve gone through it I’ve always struggled with what can someone possibly do that is actually helpful, that’s not just five minutes of time saving but really trying to get in and understand what I’m doing through all these different businesses and be able to intelligently reply to more stuff. She actually is going to be able to run my calendar so that if podcast stuff comes up I can just say “Yes, now talk to her to schedule it.” I think that sounds like that’s only a few emails back and forth and that’s only five minutes but what’s interesting, it’s not even the time I’m trying to get back, it’s the distraction. It’s the mental distraction of the sheer volume of tasks that you have to deal with. Because what I realized, most tasks for me, don’t take that long but I just have a lot of them. So my week is comprised of a few hundred five minute tasks. I obviously have some longer tasks but the more of those few hundred, five minute tasks I can get off my plate I think that’s going to free me up. I’m excited about embarking on that and I’ll keep you guys updated as that goes.
Mike [03:38]: I think what you’re really looking for there is the ability to off load a lot of the decision-making there so you can help yourself avoid any level of decision fatigue. Because if you can have somebody go in there and manually, essentially, categorize some of those emails or respond to the ones that don’t necessarily take a lot of time but maybe need to be responded to, maybe just a quick thanks or something along those lines, then those things can still get done and it helps you avoid those mental context switches between them that pulls you out of the more important higher level stuff that you need to get done on a regular basis.
Rob [04:08]: Yeah, that’s right. What I realized is that I do have some processes, as an example, if someone emails me for a podcast interview I now have questions of like “How long have you been around,” “How many listeners do you have,” and I’ve started just doing that exchange all the time now and realizing that I probably need to have someone else do that. There are criteria. I don’t just say yes to everything anymore and I think that someone else can really help out by saving me the time to do that. And then the other position I mentioned, I’m hiring someone for customer success which is basically doing Drip pre-sale demos, helping with onboarding, building tutorials, that stuff. That’s also probably a twenty hours a week contract but I have a couple pretty good leads on that as well. I just feel like I’ve been on Skype for the past two days doing a bunch of interviews. Both these people, maybe not the email one as much, but the customer success person is going to be video demos. I have to do an interview with them. It can’t be something I can hire over email.
So today I want welcome a friend of mine, Phil Derksen. Phil’s a lifetime Micropreneur Academy member. He’s attended every MicroConf even the one way back in 2011. He is a Fresno local. He actually lives just up the road from me and we’re in a Mastermind group together, which we’ve been in since, I think 2010. Phil has just left his day job. He has been on his own for about a month and he’s living, now, fully on his own product income after spending several years striving for that goal. His products are pinplugins.com, it’s a Pinterest WordPress plugin and wpstripe.net. So it’s a Stripe WordPress plugin.
Welcome to the show, Phil. It’s great to have you on.
Phil [05:49]: Yeah, thanks, Rob. Thanks, Mike for having me on. I’ve been a huge fan of the podcast since you guys started it out and obviously just honored to be here so I appreciate it.
Rob [05:59]: Absolutely. It’s our pleasure. I’m going to kick us off with a question that I think a lot of folks who have not had enough product income to quit there job [are] probably thinking about. So after maybe eight years of building products you finally reach that goal of supporting yourself and quitting your day job. Does the feeling that you have now, does it live up to how you imagined it would be now that you’re on your own?
Phil [06:20]: Yeah, it definitely does. I love the feeling of working when I want, where I want, what I want to work on, that feeling day in, day out now from the start of the day to the end, it’s an awesome feeling. I’m probably still working a little too many hours because I’m still adjusting. It was recently. But I’m loving it. To me it does.
Rob [06:39]: Have there been any major surprises as you basically moved on? You don’t have a boss now. That first week were you shocked or surprised by anything?
Phil [06:47]: Maybe. I think I expected that the day was going to have a lot less time pressure because I was used to having a full day of work each day and then working on my own products whenever I could squeeze them in, in the evenings or early in the mornings or whenever I could. I thought it would be pretty lax. I have the full day to do stuff. I know it’s early but I’m still finding that there’s just so much to do and I’m still trying to get caught up. Like I said, the big plus to it is I’m just working on my own products now so every minute I work that feeling I’m working on my own business, my own products not somebody else’s it’s getting me through. I much prefer what I’m doing now, even though I’m still busy, than what I was doing before.
Mike [07:26]: Do you feel like it’s a lot more stressful now because obviously, you have to be able to pay the bills and you just recently quit your job so there’s that added pressure to make sure that your products are performing. Do you feel that stress, yet, or is it too early?
Phil [07:40]: I think it is a little early. I do feel it though. But I think it’s a good motivator, too. It might kick in down the road but I also waited this long, I obviously got my sales to a certain point before I made that jump. So I’m not too stressed out but it is there a little bit.
Mike [07:56]: Was there a point during this journey that you didn’t know if you’d be able to pull this off?
Phil [08:01]: I never had a “I want to give up,” feeling, but I definitely got pretty discouraged at times. It just seemed like it was taking so long for me to get where I’m at, to get here. At times I was a little discouraged because I didn’t start sooner. I didn’t start really pursuing this seriously back before I had kids when my wife and I we [?] dual income, no kids. I waited until it was tougher. I had a mortgage, I had kids. As my job kept getting better and better I would change jobs, that trap that I felt I had to climb out of, got higher and higher. I’m not real risk adverse for myself. I’m not super risk tolerant either but for my family I didn’t want to take huge financial risks. I felt a little trapped there that I just had to do this over the long haul and take a long time to do this.
Rob [08:50]: You’re in a same position a lot of us are and a lot of listeners are where you are married and you may have a child or two and you have a mortgage. I think you made a really good point that the further down that line you get, with the greater income as you get down your career path, it does become a harder and harder thing to risk all of that. You have to take your business a lot further in order just to meet your existing standard of living rather than if you had done in when you were twenty-three coming right out of college, seems like it would have been a much easier path. I’ve thought that the same way about it myself because I didn’t really start until I was late twenties as well.
You said you experienced some discouragement along the way, you never thought you were going to give up. Why do you think you didn’t give up? How did you push through the discouragement?
Phil [09:33]: I guess, like a lot of listeners here, too, I just have that extremely strong desire to own my own products instead of working for a company or clients. I’ve thought about it a couple times, at this point in my career, maybe, I’m at the point where in a typical American career, it’s coming up about halfway through. If I had worked the rest of my career in a nine to five gig I might actually, financially, come out the same. I hope not. I hope my business does better. All things said and done it’s the journey more than anything, I guess, is what I’m saying. Even though it’s been tough doing this on the side up until now, this journey is what I want to do. This is the kind of path I want to work regardless of financial outcome in the end.
Rob [10:14]: So when you started out on this journey, did you think it would take this long?
Phil [10:17]: No. No, I didn’t. When I really started seriously trying to make an online product business, I didn’t think it would take this long but I was learning a lot going through the Academy, talking with other folks. There’s a lot to learn but I made a lot of mistakes along the way, too. I did not expect it to take this long but that’s just how it worked out.
Mike [10:36]: You just mentioned that you made a lot of mistakes along the way. I think that there are certain mistakes that you almost have to make in order to get the experience so that you know not just what not to do but why not to do it. Could you talk a little bit about what some of those mistakes were that you ran into?
Phil [10:51]: Sure. Failed products and things like that?
Mike [10:53]: Either failed products or decisions that you made to go after a particular market, for example, where it didn’t pan out and you look back out in retrospect and it’s clear to you why it didn’t work out but it’s also clear that you don’t necessarily want to go back and do it again and try and redo it anyway.
Phil [11:11]: I would say it was about eight years ago that I really started getting serious about building products on the side. It was about that time I read Getting Real by 37Signals, that book, and started following them, the whole stay lean and don’t worry about scaling, that kind of thing. That’s where I started my learning process. My first projects back then focused on tackling what would be a cool technology to solve not real business problems. For instance, there was one I remember that Amazon’s web services were just coming out around that time, getting popular like S3 and payment services and such, and I thought it would be cool to use that technology and create a pay to download game service. Going after the downloading game market kind of thing. Just –
Rob [11:59]: A solution in search of a problem, that kind of stuff.
Phil [12:02]: – right. Just because Amazon had these new web services.
Rob [12:05]: I did a few of those.
Phil [12:08]: Rob, you talked about, in one of the MicroConf talks, about the different levels of, it was the Flywheel talk, Asprin, vitamin, new and entertainment. I think that I was focused too much on the bottom end of that, the entertainment and new technology. When the need isn’t really there, people aren’t really looking for your solution. Obviously, I’ve always had the entrepreneurial bug but I also enjoy coding a lot. Even now, when I get into some coding problems, I’ll waste a few hours away even when I should have been using that time to spend on something else and maybe hiring out that work. I can get into that a little bit. Back then, it’s still the same thing. I just was wanting to tackle challenging technical issues. Another one I tried, it was just a web based grocery list creator. I built it to show off, at the time, cutting edge web based drag and drop. The iPhone app store just came out and was taking off so I thought I might get into mobile development. It was all focused on that technology.
Rob [13:07]: That’s when I met you.
Phil [13:09]: Yeah.
Rob [13:09]: Do you remember my first comment when I evaluated it as a business?
Phil [13:12]: It was something about if you enjoy working on it that’s great but that’s not a business problem.
Rob [13:17]: Yeah. It’s a nice little B to C app. You might make ninety-nine cents from it but it wasn’t something that was going to allow you to even get a few thousand bucks a month.
Phil [13:26]: That I entered into a local tech event here and it was fun but I didn’t make a dime from it. Those are a lot of my mistakes. It was about that time, too, that I found you guys, found the Academy, met Rob, and started in on that path.
Rob [13:39]: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting thing I want to follow up on is what finally changed? What switched from that to where here you stand today a few years later and you have two successful products and enough revenue to quit your job?
Phil [13:52]: Yeah, the Academy and just that mindset that finding real business problems and strategies for finding what people are looking for to solve these. Going through that whole process, and again, it took awhile, I had a lot of experiments, but I wouldn’t call them failures. They may have all not made any money but going through and learning SEO keyword tools and AdSense and affiliate stuff like that. I bought some domains to do the exact match domain name back when it was a little more popular. I got my feet wet with hiring VAs, paying for content, writing, that kind of thing. So I was just learning a lot at that time. I bought a four hundred dollar drop shipping site off Flippa. I don’t know if you remember that one. Rain water –
Rob [14:35]: Rain water barrels.
Phil [14:36]: – yeah.
Rob [14:38]: That was great.
Phil [14:39]: And I live somewhere where you won’t find any rain water barrels so I knew nothing about it. I eventually turned that into an affiliate site and eventually let it expire. Actually, I sold it but the guy never took it. He never did anything with it either. Those were all just early learning experiences and that was all before starting in on WordPress plugin.
Rob [14:58]: Right. And was there a mindset shift there as well? It sounds like moving from technology in search of a problem to more of looking for a business problem, like a pain point type of thing went along with that.
Phil [15:11]: Yes. And also some of the other guys in the Academy were having success with WordPress plugins so guys like John Turner and Dave Rodenbaugh, I say what they were doing and talked to them and thought this would be a good route to try.
Mike [15:26]: I guess during this process, what are one or two different internal factors or personality traits that you think are really the ones that carried you through to this point? Is there anything that stands out in your mind?
Phil [15:37]: I guess what keeps me motivated is my products are selling while I’m sleeping, while I’m on vacation, those things. Knowing that I’m not trading dollars for hours. I don’t know if you’d call it a personality trait but that’s one of my big motivators. Even the business name that I came up with for this, it’s called Moonstone Media, the way that came up is I was hanging out with my family at the beach, just enjoying family time, on vacation and later on I pulled out my phone and a bunch of sales came through. That was the time I was trying to come up with a business name. I named it after the beach which is called Moonstone. I guess that’s that biggest thing is that I can step away for a little bit and the business still moves forward and might even continue to grow a little bit.
Mike [16:22]: It sounds to me like that’s a lot of positive reinforcement as well because that isn’t necessarily an internal factor or a personality trait but it’s a situational experience that you’ve come to where you are in a situation, you’re on the beach, and sales are coming in. I can see how that can just be innately motivational where you see this is happening and not just that it’s possible, but it’s happening to you, and it allows you to double down on this behavior, which is of course pursuing this path.
Phil [16:52]: Yeah, exactly. I also set some sales and launch goals along the way and I didn’t always meet them when I wanted to, but I just think it’s important to have those goals but also to celebrate them. That’s another tip, I guess, if you’re not already doing it is when you have that launch, or you meet a certain sales member, I had sales members of five thousand a month and then the next one was ten and a half and then ten thousand, I had a little reward in mind for that already set out. It can be whatever you want. They don’t have to be extravagant, and I don’t even think they should be something that replaces special occasions like vacations with your family or anything like that that you’re already going to take. Something extra like I joined my first wine club when I hit five thousand a month, just something fun, a winery that I liked. You could also just go out to a nice restaurant, and extra night out, I guess, or extra vacation, or for us parents, maybe a whole day to yourself just for fun.
Rob [17:49]: I have a friend who bought himself an iPad when he hit a certain [?] goal.
Phil [17:51]: Yeah.
Rob [17:53]: That’s cool.
Phil [17:54]: And then for me, the top one there, the last goal when I hit ten thousand in sales in a month, that was my trigger I can finally quit my job. I did try more the punishments, if you don’t meet this you don’t get this. I didn’t find those worked as well. I can’t watch Walking Dead or any football games until my sales hit this X of dollars or something like that, just taking away some fun things. I found that wasn’t working. When I was striving for the rewards, I naturally sacrificed some things to get there.
Rob [18:24]: Yeah, I like that. I’ve never tried the stick approach, as you said it. I’ve only tried the carrot and I think it’s a really good thing for people to try to do. Assuming you have some control over it, right, before you have a product it’s tough, but as soon as you launch something and you’re at a certain revenue mark and you just want to grow it, you’re in more control of being able to do that and I think it can be really helpful. It’s motivation to work a little more, right, or to be a little more focused, or not take the evening and go out for happy hour and watch Walking Dead, but to take that evening and maybe put in some hours on your product.
Phil [18:54]: Yes, it’s what worked for me. Different personalities might work different ways but –
Rob [18:58]: Sure.
Phil [18:59]: – you got to find that.
Rob [19:00]: Phil, you obviously learned a lot on this journey, you made some mistakes, you had some successes, but you have a process laid out, you and I have talked about, where you are able to launch a WordPress plugin and turn it into something profitable, essentially. Could you walk us through that a little bit?
Phil [21:15]: Yeah, sure. After learning some of those basics through the Academy and seeing some other members successful with WordPress plugins, I went ahead and did my own. What happened was I was going to follow what I saw work for them, and that is the Free [?] Model, where you have a free plugin in the WordPress repository, you see if it gains popularity and then you start building a premium version of that. This was fall 2011 and my wife who’s a photographer, I had been helping her, tinkering around with her WordPress site for a year or two and I also got more familiar with WordPress building trying to build my own landing pages and such for the previous endeavors, and she was like “Hey, this Pinterest sharing button’s all over my site,” and this was when Pintrest was really starting to take off. So I said “Why not? I’ll try it.” The need was there . It wasn’t B to B necessarily but there were people online asking for it, she was asking for it. There were very few Pinterest plugins in the repo at the time. I taught myself a little bit of WordPress development and in December of 2011, around that time, I launched my first free plugin in probably a month, maybe two, of my own development time. So I didn’t yet hire anybody. Real simple, just outputting Pinterest embed code but in a plugin. I was pretty fortunate. Downloads started coming in pretty quickly and pretty rapidly and that’s when I was like “Wow, I have something here.” At that point I tried to make best use of my time and I did what you guys have done and I went oDesk and hired a WordPress developer. I went through a few candidates. At the time I was on the lower end, ten dollars an hour, overseas developer. I found one and the code wasn’t high quality but I wasn’t really good at WordPress development at the time and I wanted to make better use of my time so I used the approach off of a few test projects, trying to find the best candidate at that price point. Found somebody and took about four months and probably paid around a thousand dollars but got my first paid plugin out the door. Also, just a note, and I recommend this, I started building a mailing list within the free plugin right from the beginning. I’ve done that ever since, too. I did continue teaching myself WordPress development. I wanted to learn more and I wasn’t satisfied with the code quality. I did find myself fixing code quite a bit. I think the mistake I made here is that I spent a lot of time on this. I should have hired a more skilled developer and just risked that but I also wanted to get some more cash flow first –
Rob [21:49]: It’s also hard when you’re that early because you just don’t have the money. I was in the same boat where I had to hire developers that were five to ten bucks an hour and you just have to deal with it. I believe that you start where you have the means to and then as soon as you can you level up with who you can hire.
Phil [22:05]: – right. I guess that may have not been a mistake, necessarily, but it felt like it delayed my first paid plugin launch quite a bit. All of the other stuff always takes more time, like crafting the landing page and all the copy and everything. It always takes longer than you expect. May 2012 I launched my first paid version of the Pinterest plugin. It was right after MicroConf that year, I remember. My first plugin sale to a stranger was only twenty-three bucks with a launch discount but I still have that receipt, I printed and framed it and hung it on my wall. In fact, it’s behind my desk. My first ever sale to a stranger. That’s another motivator.
Rob [22:43]: Yeah, that’s cool.
Phil [22:44]: But I did expect a big launch and very few bought that first week. I was a little disappointed there. I had pretty high expectations, I think. In that first week, I think I only made about two hundred and fifty bucks. And the first two full months actually didn’t get that high, it was only three hundred or four hundred dollars. So, again, a down point thinking I was going to make this big bang and it didn’t happen.
Rob [23:07]: I think that’s pretty common. I think our eyes get pretty big. You hear of other people’s successes as well, right, and you start measuring up to that.
Phil [23:14]: Right. Exactly. I sat down and I think I also didn’t have the features prioritized correctly, like what people really wanted and wanted to pay for. Because when I sat down and built the next version of that plugin, it was a different plugin but the real pro version of it, I would call it. When I launched that in October that was a much bigger splash so it turned out all right. The two months previous, in fact, were less than a hundred dollars of sales so while I was trying to do this, I felt like that first paid plugin launch was a little bit of a failure. When I launched the next one in October, that actually made twenty-five hundred the first month and the next couple months. I count that as my big breakthrough.
Rob [23:57]: Right. There was a lot of trial and error to it. There was a lot of learning. It’s like you said, by the time you’d got there you had put together a number of sales pages, you had figured out how the WordPress repo works, you had figured out how to write the good copy, how to make a good wordpress.org page. All that honing the tools, it’s having the tools on your tool belt to do it. You didn’t necessarily need to learn content marketing and [outbound to cold?] email because you weren’t running a business that needed that. That’s what I think is something important to communicate, is you learned a very well defined niche skill set and you’ve learned to do WordPress plugins really well, but that means you shouldn’t be listening to folks who want to be venture backed or want to launch a SaaS app, in particular, or who want to do something else because you guys don’t necessarily need the same skills in order to succeed.
Phil [24:42]: Right. Exactly. Even paid acquisition doesn’t make sense up to a certain point.
Rob [24:46]: That’s right because you don’t have the lifetime value to support it.
Phil [24:48]: Right.
Rob [24:49]: The interesting part is you’re really a textbook case of stair-stepping. I talked about this a few episodes ago, Mike and I ran through it, and in essence that first step is the single channel, single purchase price app and then it’s non-recurring. You double down on that and you create enough products that you can eventually reach step two which is where you can buyout your own time and you basically find hat freedom. Step three is typically trying to find a recurring revenue model. It doesn’t always have to be but that’s how I played it out. Now that you really achieved step two, you’ve achieved a goal that a lot of folks are going after and you achieved it by leveling up, right. By going from playing high school ball to college ball to the minor leagues to just stepping up your skills and plotting along and doing it in a really repeatable fashion. I’m curious what’s next for you. Are you going to double down what you have already had success with, which is launching plugins, and launch more plugins at this point or are you thinking more along the lines of going towards recurring models like SaaS?
Phil [25:47]: I think I’m going to repeat this process. I did it for a Stripe plugin. It’s a lot easier the second time around, and I also changed some things with that. I’d went after a more eCommerce, B to B, so I was quicker to a certain revenue point with that. I do have another plugin in the works. Since it’s working and I still have quite a bit to build and I have quite a bit of features and add-ons and things like that that people are requesting, I’m going to continue that for a while. Maybe I will do that SaaS eventually. I’ve been going through ideas here and there but I’m just not rushing it or setting a deadline of when I’m going to do it because the plugins are working. I know it’s a long path on the SaaS apps.
Mike [26:28]: Yeah, I think that’s one of the features that I’ve seen of successful entrepreneurs is they find the thing that’s working and then they double down on it. I think what Rob just talked about, in terms of looking at SaaS because SaaS is viewed as the Holy Grail of the software industry, but at the same time you’d have to learn an entirely new set of skills in order to pull that off. It would be a pretty significant change from what it is that you’re doing now, right?
Phil [26:50]: Right. Exactly. On the second plugin, on the Stripe plugin, that’s when I went after a more B to B audience. As I was building that up I hired a more mid-level developer, tried to off-load that more and then when I launched the Stripe plugin I did the same thing [?] Model. Took me just a few months to get the first paid plugin out there. During that time I hired actually another Academy member, Kyle Brown. He has a product [ice?] service, I guess you could call it. It focused on WordPress. Just a shout out to him, wordpressproductsandplugins@wpsaas.net. I hired him to basically hire all my tier one support, him and his team. That has been a huge load off my back, too, and I continue to use him for future plugins as well. I already have that relationship in place. It’s a little bit of an experiment here, but my third plugin, it’s a Google Calendar Events plugin, if you look it up. It’s actually an adopted plugin. I adopted a free plugin off the repository and it already had a lot of downloads and the author agreed to hand it over after we talked back and forth and he wasn’t interested in maintaining it. I have had to do quite a bit of re-factoring, stabilizing, and updating it. The paid plugin’s not out now but I’m going to repeat pretty much all those steps on it except that I’m coming in where it’s already got a big audience. I’m not creating it from scratch basically.
Rob [28:13]: Right. So you’ve learned from your successes as well. Like you said, you hired someone who is a middle tier developer rather than super junior and cheap because you have the means and you know it’s worth the time. You’re working with Kyle Brown on handling support because you know it’s worth your time to outsource that. Even though you have to pay him money, you know that your time is more valuable. I know the backstory of you WordPress Stripe plugin and I know that that hit more revenue faster then either of your first two Pinterest plugins. There’s some luck involved, there’s something about the niche but there’s also something about you taking your experience and leveling up and expanding. I feel like the GCal plugin is probably the next step in your journey.
Phil [28:53]: Yeah, the only challenge now though is now I’ve set myself up with three separate customer bases –
Rob [28:58]: Mm-hmm. Makes it tough.
Phil [28:59]: – yeah. I’m happy with where I’m at but that is tough. There’s very little cross-selling between them but that’s where I’m at so that’s okay.
Rob [29:07]: Yeah.
Mike [29:08]: So you’ve mentioned the Academy and Kyle Brown, what are some other external resources that you’ve leveraged to help you get to this point because you can’t just go down into a cave and learn everything that you need to learn completely on your own. There’s obviously some help involved from other people and external resources. Could you talk a little bit about some of the different things that you leveraged to learn or get to this point, especially with WordPress because you said that you learned that from scratch?
Phil [29:54]: Yeah, definitely the conferences. MicroConf, I know it’s run by you guys but it’s been key because at those, each year, this will be the fifth one coming up, I’ve connected with a lot of peers and speakers, too, face to face, and then continued those relationships later on. Some of those guys are in the WordPress space. There’s another conference as well that’s similar that I’ve gone to for three years now called PressNomics. It’s a lot like MicroConf in it’s size. You keep it small, less than two hundred folks but it’s focused on the WordPress business. I’ve met a lot of guys doing the same thing there. In fact, it was just in January as well. Community, talking with guys online and offline, learning from them, just sharing with each other what we’ve learned. Masterminds, obviously are a big one. I have the local one here with Rob. You get a lot of inspiration, help with ideas but they’re keeping you accountable, all that stuff. It can be fun, too. I’ve had some off and on online ones as well, more focused in the WordPress space with John Turner and Brad Tunnard and guys like that. They’ve all been super helpful. They’ve gotten to where I am now before I did. They love sharing what they know as well, so that’s all a part of it, right there, that community and that help from peers.
Rob [30:52]: Phil, thanks so much for coming on the show. I’m sure folks have enjoyed hearing your story. It’s definitely inspirational and I think we’re all looking forward to your attendee talk at MicroConf 2015 here in a couple weeks.
Phil [31:04]: Looking forward to that.
Rob [31:06]: Yeah. So if folks want to keep up with you on the Interwebs what would be the best way to do that?
Phil [31:11]: Yeah, you can catch me on Twitter @Philderksen or you can head to my personal site Philderksen.com. I got all my products linked there and I’ve neglected the blog for a while but I want to start sharing more of my journey there.
Rob [31:23]: And your last name is D-E-R-K-S-E-N.
Phil [31:26]: Correct. If you’re at MicroConf say hi to me there.
Rob [31:29]: Sounds great. Thanks a lot for coming on.
Phil [31:31]: All right. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Mike [31:32]: If you have a question for us you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by Moot, used under creative commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 228 | 9 Must-Read Books for Founders
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us, Mike and Rob discuss 9 must read books for founders. They compile a list of book s that are tactical, deal with mindset, and how to setup and work remotely.
Other Links:
Books mentioned in this episode:
- Traction
- Remote
- Saas Marketing Essentials
- E-Myth Revisted
- Work the System
- The Ultimate Sales Letter
- The Ultimate Sales Machine
- Zero to One
- A Guide to the Good Life
- Essentialism
Transcript
Rob [00:26]: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and I look at nine must-read books for founders. This is Startups For the Rest of Us episode 228.
Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike [00:27]: And I’m Mike.
Rob [00:31]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, sir?
Mike [00:48]: Well, we’ve got a nice email from Ryan van Schoor from agentivity.com and he says, “Hi, guys. We’re now a successful startup in our fourth year, and we contribute a lot of our success from listening to your podcast. Just wanted to say thanks and if you ever needed to ask us a few ‘how did that work for you’ questions just give us a shout. Best wishes, Ryan.”
Rob [01:20]: Awesome. Thanks for writing in, Ryan. Yeah, if you have a success story, if you’ve been able to launch product, quit your job, we always love to hear it. We do have a success stories page on our website where we will link out to you, get a little bit of SEO juice, and a little bit of recognition. If we’ve had some type of impact on you, whether it’s MicroComf, the podcast, or the Micropreneur Academy, or my book, and your forthcoming book. I know you’ve talked about it on the podcast, but if you haven’t signed up for Mike’s mailing list, go to singlefounderhandbook.com and Mike’s looking to get his book out here in the next couple weeks. Is that right?
Mike [01:31]: Yes. I’m hopefully finalizing the editing probably tomorrow. And then after that I have to go back and forth with CreateSpace and get a printed copy of it to see how it looks and then after that it’s good to go I think.
Rob [02:32]: Very cool. I wanted to re-visit a question that had come through two or three episodes ago. The person who asked it originally asked : which magazines do we read? Because he likes to read physical paper in the morning. And I realized that I went off on a tangent and said “Oh, I don’t read any anymore, and I cancelled all my subscriptions.” But he did ask – assuming he’s listening to the podcast – what stuff he might have available to him? What magazines might there be? A couple came to mind actually. Ink Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine, they’re reasonable periodicals. I’ve always liked the articles in there. Over time I realized it’s more Entre-porn than anything else. There’s not a ton of tactical stuff. However, if you really are reading this as a hobby – just like you’d read the morning paper just to keep your mind occupied while you’re having breakfast – it’s not a bad thing. There’s worse things you could read for sure. I also used to subscribe to Fast Company but it’s so design focused that it does a lot of fashion and other things that just aren’t that interesting to me. And then, for news I will read Time Magazine now and again. How about you, any other ideas come to mind?
Mike [02:44]: No. Like I said, I stopped looking at magazines in any way, shape, or form after my wife left the publishing industry. And at the time, really the only one I even looked at was hers because she brought it home and it was free.
Rob [03:05]: No, I get it. That’s the thing, you aren’t missing anything if you’re not reading these. But if you really do want a physical copy of something, I used to stack them up, get a month’s worth on my desk and then whenever I’d go on an airplane I would bring them and basically I had to leave them there or throw them away. And this was before you could have Kindles during takeoff and landing. When I don’t have electronics I want to keep myself occupied.
Mike [03:07]: What year were you born?
Rob [03:12]: Just within the last six months they’ve allowed Kindles.
Mike [03:12]: I’m kidding.
Rob [03:21]: Yeah, all right. I was like, “Dude. It’s not like it happened that long ago.” You sound like the old guy at the club saying that though. Anyways, what else? We have any other questions or comments?
Mike [05:14]: We have an email from Mike Buckbee who says, “Hey, Mike and Rob. I run Expedited SSL which is a Heroku add-on for rapidly installing SSL onto your Heroku site.” I think this ties back into a previous episode we did where we had talked about some of the different levels of products and moving up the ladder and somebody had commented how building on an existing platform was essentially step one-and-a-half. You could essentially tie into an existing application infrastructure and leverage the benefits that that platform gives you, and essentially helps establish a recurring revenue stream for you. And Mike goes out and he lays out a couple of the benefits and the downsides of having an app like this. The first on he says is “Being on Heroku pre-selects an audience that’s willing to spend money instead of man-hours to accomplish infrastructure goals. [Discovery?],” he said, “probably ninety percent of my customers come from the official add-ons directory, greatly simplifies MVP because billing user management, et cetera is all handled for you.” It also forced him to have a very narrow target for his prospects which is a huge differentiator for something like GoDaddy, which sells certifications to everybody under the sun. Now some of the downsides he said was things like cash flow, because there’s this gap between when people buy stuff and when he gets paid for it. And in his case he needs to buy credits from a certificate authority in order to be able to re-sell them to people he’s servicing. And then, in addition, they take thirty percent off the top. So for every fifteen dollar plan that he sells he only gets ten dollars of that. So depending on what his customer acquisition plan looks like, and the sales funnel, it can be a little bit limiting. It obviously impacts your flexibility in terms of negotiating for some of those credits. And then there’s also limited customization of landing pages for the sales funnel because, obviously, you’re tied to that platform. So whatever they offer you, in terms of the sales page for being able to offer those add-ons, is going to impact how you can present it to the customer. So there’s definitely benefits to this, but obviously there’s downsides to that approach as well.
Rob [05:42]: Yeah, thanks for writing in Mike. This ties back into the stair-step approach , where someone had written in and said, This might be step one-and-a-half, where it’s a small piece of software in someone else’s ecosystem with a single marketing channel, but it’s recurring. So it could be that branch between that WordPress plugin and a Joomla add-on or Magento add-on and a SaaS app. There’s that in between of still having a small thing that has recurring revenue. Love to hear about it. Thanks for writing in, Mike.
Mike [05:44]: So what are we talking about this week?
Rob [07:55]: Well, we’ve put together a list of our nine must-read books for founders. Obviously, this list would change over time. I don’t feel like this is a timeless list that’s going to be around forever, because tactics change. The idea for this episode came out of a question from Jeff Hines at touchpointdashboard.com. He say, “Hi, guys. I’ve been enjoying the podcast and I know sometimes you recommend books to read. I’m going to by Rob’s book Start Small, Stay Small, but is there a compiled list of books you suggest?”
The answer to that is no, we don’t have a compiled list. That list would change pretty frequently. But we did sit down and think through what are a handful of books that if someone was asking, How can I market my startup or my SaaS app or my software add-on, what books should I think about reading? So we have a mix of tactical. We have some about how to set up and work remotely, and then we have some about more of the mindset. So today, in all, we’re going to cover nine books.
To kick us off I’m going to start with the book Traction. It’s by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. What I really like about Traction is that in my idea notebook I have several pages of writing ‘what should my next book b?,’ because I always knew I was going to write a second one, and I had three ideas I liked the best, and one of them was almost identical to what Traction turned out to be. And that is a list of a bunch of different marketing approaches. I think there’s twenty-something chapters, and each chapter covers a single marketing approach that you could use to market your startup or software product. Each one is an interview, or a case study, with someone who does that really well. So, they talked to Noah Kagan about a certain topic. They talked to Andrew Chen, I think about paid acquisition. They talked to several others, and overall, the book is an awesome overview. It’s not super tactical in a sense that you can read it and go do that approach right away, but what I like is it’s a big list that I would build my marketing plan from. If I’m going to launch a new app, I can just go down the Traction list and say, “Which of these could possible apply to my new app? And which do I want to prioritize at the top? And then individually go and research and dig in further somewhere else on the actual tactics that I want to attack.
Mike [09:49]: Yeah, and in the book they even go through and give you essentially a mechanism for trying to figure out which of those tactics you should start trying out first, and what is going to tell you whether or not it’s successful or not. So definitely take a look at that book. I would highly recommend it. We had Gabriel on the show previously when the book first launched, but it is very, very good.
Our second book on the list is Remote, and Remote comes from the guys over at Basecamp, formerly 37Signals. Remote talks about what it takes to run a remote team, for the most part. But I think that there’s a lot of this book that can actually apply to people who are running their own businesses. So, for example, there is an entire section on how to deal with the fact that you are a remote worker. So it’s not just for the people who are running the team, it’s also about what the people in the team should do, what they should expect, and how they should interact with one another, because if you’re running a business by yourself then you probably have contractors working for you around the world or in different time zones. The book addresses a lot of the issues with that. One of the other things this book goes into, which I’d highly recommend for people, is dealing with the excuses of why remote work won’t work for you. It goes through them and basically addresses them one by one about all the different excuses that somebody could come up with and say “Well, I don’t want to run a remote office,” or “I can’t run a remote business,” because of X, Y, or Z. It just lists them out and digs right into them and says this is why that line of thinking is wrong. So for example, losing culture. I need an answer from people now about whatever question you might have, or if I can’t see somebody how do I know that they’re working. The reality for a lot of those things is it almost doesn’t matter. It’s more about the people that you hire. If you can’t see somebody, how do you know they’re working? Well, even if you can see them, how do you know they’re not sitting there playing solitaire or some online game all day long? You can pretty easily alt tab into a different screen when somebody comes to walk by your desk. So there’s all these excuses and they basically walk through and debunk those.
Rob [11:27]: I think Remote is a good book for you if you’ve never worked remotely before, you’ve never worked on a distributed team, or you’re trying to basically pitch that case to someone in order to work remote. When I read it I didn’t get very much out of it, but it’s because I’ve worked from home for ten years, and I worked on remote teams for twelve or fourteen years. So I did like the way they thought through it, and I liked some of the stuff they referenced, but I didn’t take a ton of actual ways that I think will change the way I do business. But with that said, obviously, if you haven’t had that, if you don’t have that experience and you are trying to figure out if you want to build a remote team, or have everyone on site, I think it’s a good book to read.
The third book on our list is SaaS Marketing Essentials and it’s by Ryan Battles. What I like about this book is its laser focus. Obviously, if you’re not going to launch a SaaS app, then this may be one you want to skip. But I like the way Ryan dives into niche validation, he talks about some really tactical things on marketing, on building the app, on what it takes to support it and get it launched, and the whole process of getting it out into the world. It gives you a realistic expectation of what to expect, and gives a ton of resources that you can follow and learn more about. In my opinion, this is the most tactical and comprehensive book out there today on launching a SaaS app. Because a lot of the stuff that you read, if you do subscribe to blogs – let’s say SaaStr Jason Lemkin, he has really good posts – but a lot of it is aimed at the five to one hundred million dollar SaaS apps. It’s not aimed at bootstrappers. And while Ryan’s stuff can be applicable to both, it really is more focused on launching a product on your own with no funding.
Mike [13:13]: The next book on our list is Work the System. Work the System, it’s more of an advanced version of the book The E-Myth Revisited, whereas the E-Myth Revisited basically addresses – or at least brings to light the problems of – being an entrepreneur, and that the main problem that it brings to mind is that when you start out a business you start it for a number of reasons, probably because you looked at what somebody else was doing and said “Well, I can do that,” Or you didn’t like how things were being run, so you created your own business. Typically is starts out as a freelancing business and as you start promoting your business you start doing more and more of the work yourself. So eventually, what you find is that the business can’t run without you. Obviously, that’s a poor way to run a business, and the E-Myth Revisited essentially brings that to light, versus Work the System which essentially assumes that you know that that’s what the problem is. It talks a lot more in-depth about the systems, and documentation, and all the different considerations you need to take into account in order to build a business that is going to run without you. So in Work the System, they really drill down deep into those different things, tell you what you need to do, how you need to think through some of the different problems and the different processes and how to create, essentially, an operating document for your business that other people can follow.
I actually modeled a lot of the stuff that I did in my business around this concept because it’s so much easier to just have a document that people can go to if they have questions, or if they need information about how to do something. I’ve actually gone in there myself, where somebody else has written documentation and I’m like “Oh my God, this is an emergency. This had got to be done and it’s got to be done right now. How do I do this?” Instead of muddling my way through it, I was able to go to the documentation that somebody else – who I’d hired to do a different job – they did the documentation, they updated it, and I was able to follow it, which was awesome.
Rob [14:39]: Our next book is The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy. There are a lot of books out there about copywriting and there are some decent books about copywriting on the web specifically. But what I like about The Ultimate Sales Letter is it’s based in this history of direct email marketing and almost all of what’s in here applies also on the web. I think Dan Kennedy’s a mixed bag. We were talking before the show that some people love him, some people hate him. He really is a polarizing figure. And I’ve taken from Dan Kennedy the things that I like about his approach. I do think that he takes things too far sometimes, and I don’t necessarily agree with some of his stronger sales tactics – just not my style. With that said, he’s very smart, and he’s a very good copywriter and a talent marketer. What I like about The Ultimate Sales Letter is it gives you a really solid formula of how to think about the purchase process in a buyer’s mind. He talks about it in terms of a long form sales letter, but it can be broken down into a sequence of emails. It can be broken down into a sequence of web pages on a SaaS marketing website. It works in many different forms, and if you can pull the theory out of this, and not get caught up in, Oh, this is a stapled piece of paper being mailed to someone, the copywriting fundamentals that he talks about in here are really quite valuable.
Mike [15:49]: The next book is The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. Chet, in this book, goes through essentially what is a high-touched marketing engine for getting sales for your products. There’s a lot of different, I’d say, techniques in here that are more about gaining attention and standing out from the crowd. For example, one of them is to send people a mailer that is going to stand out from all the other things. Instead of just sending a postcard, you might send them a box, and that box might have some smaller things in it. It might just have some papers in it, but the fact is it’s a box. Or if you send somebody something in overnight mail, that’s going to rise to the front of somebody’s pile because they’re looking at it saying “I just got this thing that was overnight mail. It must be important.” There’s a lot of different techniques and strategies in here that he goes through, and talks essentially about the entire process of getting the attention you need from the people who are going to be involved in that high-touched sales process. It’s also about trying to optimize that sales process, putting the right people in place, and then make sure that your focusing on educating the people in that process in your organization, the skills that they need in order to do the jobs that they need to do to facilitate that process.
Rob [18:29]: This is one of the few books that I listened to on audio, then I purchased a physical copy of it. And it’s one of maybe twenty or twenty-five books that I still own a physical copy of, because it was so valuable to me when I read it. I’ve never actually implemented his process in full. His process is definitely for higher-priced items. It’s more of an enterprise sales thing, because he goes into spending a lot of time and a lot of money chasing after your dream one hundred customers. However, there’s so much else in this about the mindset of sales, the mindset of marketing that you can take away. He starts it off with time management secrets of billionaires – is the first chapter. Instituting higher standards and regular training is the second one. How to run effective meetings. Even if you’re not working in an office, all of this stuff is valuable. And he’s such a smart guy and he applies his systematic thinking to all of these topics. It’s one that I have listened to multiple times and I still reference back to the physical paper copy I have in front of me.
Our next book is more of a high level thought provoking book rather than a tactical one. It’s called Zero to One and it’s written by Peter Thiel. To be honest I didn’t think I was going to like this book. I listened to it because a lot of people recommended it, and I heard folks talking about it. And I have now listened to it twice. Again, it’s almost like he’s so smart that everything he talks about is not trivial,and it’s not obvious. I think that’s a big thing. When I’m listening to a book and I hear a lot of obvious advice, obvious time management advice, obvious ways of thinking about starting companies, it just gets boring, because I’ve either heard it before or I’ve thought it myself. Very, very little in this book is stuff that I’ve heard about or thought about before. It’s incredibly thought-provoking. He does talk a lot more about starting billion dollar companies. The idea is that most companies started go from one to, which means their incremental improvement. So all the business that our bootstrappers are starting, in general, in our community, are one two businesses and they are improving upon an existing idea. He talks in the book about going from zero to one, meaning starting from nothing and building a SpaceX or a Tesla, completely revolutionizing an industry. But as a bootstrapper don’t let that scare you away because while he does spend a chapter or two on that, the rest of the stuff he talks about is just how to have an open mind, how to think about things intelligently. He talks about how to focus more on marketing. He doesn’t go into tactics, in particular, but I loved when he starts talking about how engineers don’t know how to market their stuff. It’s a lot of what we see in dealing with developers who tend to build first and then think it’s going to market themselves. Overall, when someone this smart sits down and thinks about writing a book, anything he talks about is going to be eye-opening, and I think you need to check it out if you haven’t read it.
Mike [20:24]: The next book on our list is a little bit different from previous ones. It’s called A Guide to the Good Life. Rob you had mentioned this book, I think, on last week’s episode. But essentially, the Guide to the Good Life is about how to prioritize your life and the goals that you have in life and how to view them differently than you might otherwise be doing now. It really delves into, what’s called stoicism. Stoicism is a philosophical point of view where you look at things and you try to purge negative emotions. Let’s say that you’re trying to become an author. You’re going to have to submit your book over and over and over again to publishers – assuming that you’re going the traditional publisher route. And you’re probably going to be rejected time after time after time again. The way the stoics would view that is that instead of viewing each one of those things as a rejection, you view it as something that was essentially a milestone that you had to overcome. I think that I’ve heard Steli Efti talk about this on a couple of his sales presentations before, where, let’s say you’re doing sales calls for example. Instead of looking at it and saying “Well, I want to call somebody,” and you work up the energy and you call and they say no, or they get off the phone with you very quickly, instead of looking at that as a failure, look at that as a check box that says, I made one call. But your goal is not to make a sales call and land a deal, it’s to make the call. So by changing your perspective and what your goals are, you’re essentially helping to purge a lot of the negative energy from your life and allow you to do things that you might not otherwise be able to do, mainly because most people have psychological barriers that they simply can’t overcome. I thought that the book was really well put together, and there’s a lot of really good techniques in there that are extremely helpful. And in some ways you can look at that stuff and say you’re lying to yourself. But at the same time if those tricks are working for you, and they’re allowing you to reach what your ultimate goals are, then who’s to say that using those methods is wrong.
Rob [22:04]: Yeah, that’s the thing. I think when people hear stoicism they might roll their eyes, or think this is really touchy feely. I really like the framework that it gives. And of course, as with any book, it’s like you don’t have to believe or buy into everything that’s said, but there’s a lot in this book that I took away. I have several pages of notes actually, which is a sign that something was impactful to me. Some of the things I really enjoyed were, they talk about meditation, and they talk about dealing with difficult people, and how to avoid whiny and melancholy people. They call them [seep sorrows?]. This is two thousand year old, three thousand year old stuff. So it’s really interesting that people don’t change. We see them in our lives today, and you saw them two thousand years ago. He also talks about negative people kind of like trolls, essentially, or haters – as you put in the outline last week. He talks about gossiping. But it’s not just obvious stuff. As I say all that you probably think, “Oh, well he says don’t gossip, and stay away from those people.†But they give an entire framework of why that works, and then actual techniques and tactics of how to think about all this so it makes sense. So I’m a big fan of this. I actually heard some people talking about stoicism, I think it was Tim Ferris interviewed the author of The Obstacle is the Way. I listened to that book and I was not particularly impressed with it. So I was like I’m not going to get into this stoic stuff. Then I hung out with Travis Jamison from Supremacy SEO, he’s in the tropical NBA crowd, and he said that this was the book to read if I wanted to get an entry level into it. So I read it, I was blown away, I took a bunch of notes. I re-read it and I’ve been trying to implement pieces of it certainly over the past six months, since I originally listened.
Mike [22:51]: I think the other thing that I really liked about it was that it focused on living in today. A lot of us have smartphones, so what we’ll be doing is we’ll constantly be out with our families and checking your phone. It talks about being able to live your life today, like if God forbid something happen to one of your kids tomorrow, would you feel bad about the five minutes that you were spending on your phone as opposed to paying attention to your kids. It really puts things into perspective about what you should be paying attention to and how you can focus on the here and now, because it may not be there tomorrow. Or how are you going to feel if you weren’t paying attention and you’re going to have all of these regrets. You’re still going to feel bad no matter what if something were to happen to one of your kids, but you’re not going to feel as bad about all that wasted time that you weren’t present even though you were there.
Rob [24:06:] I want to wrap up the list with number nine, it’s called Essentialism. I mentioned this book a few episodes back as well, but what I like about this one is it’s also a mindset book. If you find yourself taking on too many things, if you find yourself saying yes to things and then getting to a meeting and wondering why you’re there, or if you find yourself overloaded with stuff that isn’t moving yourself or your business forward, this book is amazing. It reinforced a ton of stuff, of hard decisions that I’ve made over the past five to seven years of saying no to a lot of invitations, of saying no often. Basically making no my default answer. And that’s not always easy to do, and it doesn’t always feel good, but this book basically backs all that up and it solidified it and it gives a lot of reasons why, and it gives examples. It really goes into the ramifications of not saying no and of accepting everything, and then the ramifications of saying no and how it can change the way you work, change your productivity, and change your focus. So this – kind of like A Guide to the Good Life – might be one of the most important books on this list. Even though it’s not a tactical thing about marketing, it’s a five or a ten-Xer because it gets within your mindset, and it can make mental shifts within you, and that’s where enormous productivity gains can often happen.
Mike [24:41]: So just to recap, our nine books are Traction, Remote, SaaS Marketing Essentials, Work the System and the E-Myth Revisited – by default association -Ultimate Sales Letter, The Ultimate Sales Machine, Zero to One, A Guide to the Good Life, and Essentialism. And if you have a question for us you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by Moot used under creative commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 227 | How to Deal With Haters
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us, Mike and Rob discuss how to deal with haters, the different types of haters and strategies you can use to deal with them.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike:[00:00:00] In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about how to deal with haters. This is Startups For the Rest of Us, Episode 227. Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob:[00:00:23] And I’m Rob.
Mike:[00:00:24] We’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’d made. How are you doing this week, Rob?
Rob:[00:00:27] I’m doing pretty good. And MicroConf, is five, six weeks away, and we have several new speakers who’ve come on board. I’m very excited to have Steli Efti. He’s going to be talking about inside sales and how to do it as a two-person team focusing on B2B stuff. Steli was on the show. He was on our podcast 20, 30 episodes ago, and a lot of folks liked his interview. He does a lot of speaking and is experienced, so I’m stoked to have him there. Sarah Hatter from co-support, she spoke maybe two or three years ago at MicroConf and had a very high rated talk. She’s basically a support expert and so she talked to really small companies and startups about how to handle support and how to make your customers really happy, and how to, even with a one or two-person team, how to kind of make this work. So I’m stoked about that. And then Jason Cohen is coming and he’s going to be doing Q&A. And he’s also going to be doing Smart Bear Live, so I’m stoked to have him on board.
Mike:[00:01:18] Well, last week I was on The Business Insights podcast answering some questions about starting a business. It’s more of a generic entrepreneur podcast rather than a lot of podcasts that we’re probably more familiar with that have a developer slant. So they have a lot of entrepreneurs on from various different types of businesses in different markets — so think from construction to physical products, all kinds of different things. It was a fun episode to do. I think they’re going to have me back on there at some point in the near future.
Rob:[00:01:43] Cool, what did you talk about?
Mike:[00:01:45] It was a lot of mindset stuff about starting a business and what sorts of things people make mistakes about when they’re thinking about starting a business, or what sorts of things are preventing them from starting, mostly mindset stuff though.
Rob:[00:01:57] Nice, are you starting your press tour for your upcoming book?
Mike:[00:02:01] Yeah, that was a little bit a part of it. I almost kind of viewed it as a practice run or a trial run for that sort of stuff. He’d sent me over something asking me . . . he’s like, “Oh, can you send me a bio?” And “Send me this,” and “Send me that.” And as I was writing it out, I’m like, “Huh, I should really take this stuff and send it to the side and polish it up a little bit. So that way, when people asked me for that stuff, I just have it all ready to go.”
Rob:[00:02:20] Yeah, that’s a good thing to do. I actually have a couple of different-sized head shots, and I have a bio, multiple different copies of my bio in HTML and in text. And it’s in a public Dropbox folder, basically, so when I get asked or if I do quotes for a blog post or whatever, I just right-click and do “share as” and kind of let folks have that. It’s just an easier way because I kept finding myself rewriting stuff and digging through text files and random directories for it. So it’s nice to have all of that in one place.
Mike:[00:02:44] I am totally going to steal that idea.
Rob:[00:02:46] Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s pretty good. So on my end, I have hired someone for a trial to help out with HitTail marketing. I mentioned this maybe a month ago that I was going to start looking for someone, and I was going to do a whole formal process where I send folks to a Google form and kind of did some interviews and stuff. But just casually mentioning on the podcast, it got several emails. It’s like seven or eight different folks who said that they were interested in helping. And so I had conversations with several of them, and I arrived at someone who I think is a pretty good fit and wants to do it longer than just a few months, right? Because I want someone to be around for at least a bit of time to make it worth both of our whiles. And so I have extended him an offer for a 30-day trial. He actually has a full-time gig, so he’ll be doing this on the side, and is going to be helping with a lot of pay per click and some content and stuff with HitTail. And then hopefully he can help me move into Drip. It’s a lot of tactical stuff because I’m kind of doing the vision and the proving these things out. But once I know something works, it doesn’t make sense for me to continue to do that process.
Mike:[00:03:46] Yeah, but that’s a matter of making sure that you’ve got the process down, or at least, not even recently documented, but like understandable to somebody else, like you need to be able to explain it to somebody.
Rob:[00:03:56] Exactly, right. So I either need a Google Docs with some steps or a Screencast, or probably both, to be frank. The Google doc will be the high-level thing, and then the Screencast will be kind of the button-clicking and the theories. The nice part is when I was doing this five years ago, I’d hire someone to help with some ad network and there was just no material on this. I mean, there weren’t good screen casts. There weren’t good videos you could buy. I mean, that’s one of the reasons I launched the Academy was because I couldn’t find any of this stuff. These days, I want him to get more experience with Facebook ads. He’s already run some, but I want him to get experience. So sure enough, you go to U-2-Me. You go to AppSumo. You go to Coursera, Udacity. I mean, there’s all these places. StartupPlace I think is another one. And you can find some pretty good courses on exactly what you need, and so that saves me so much time into having . . . and I can just spend $50 bucks or $100 and give it to him, instead of me trying to record all the steps, and then trying to keep that up to date. Now, that’s the other thing. This stuff changes so quickly that I’d rather find someone who’s good at it and then just buy their new course and give it to someone on my team, rather than me having to always know how everything works, because that just doesn’t scale well, right? It just isn’t applicable as where you get a little bigger. So what are we talking about today?
Mike:[00:05:06] Well, today what we’re going to be doing is talking about how to deal with haters. And I kind of got inspired by this from a tweet that I put out, and it just kind of came to me. I tweeted out and I said, “It’s rare to see successful people who are also trolls. Successful people know how hard it is to do what you’re doing.” And most of my tweets, they’ll get a couple of retweets here and there or they’ll get a couple of favorites. And this one ended up getting retweeted 16 times and got 25 favorites, and it went out to like 30,000 or 40,000 people, which is kind of ridiculous for a tweet like that. I’m sure there are certain tweets that you hit the right person, or it gets retweeted by the right person, and it can go pretty viral very very quickly. But it’s been a while since I posted one that was for myself personally that got this kind of response. So it got me to thinking about the fact that as you start doing more and more things in public, you have a tendency to attract people who are going to talk down about whatever it is that you are doing. So I kind of wanted to talk a little bit through what different types of haters there are and what sort of strategies you can put in place to deal with them.
Rob:[00:06:04] When you did that tweet, did you get a bunch of trolls who responded to it?
Mike:[00:06:07] I got one.
Rob:[00:06:08] Did you?
Mike:[00:06:09] It’s awesome.
Rob: [00:06:11] The irony is so thick.
Mike:[00:06:12] I know.
Rob:[00:06:15] I’m glad you bring this up because as soon as you start doing things in public, there’s just going to be negative comments about it eventually, right, the more things you do. And I think what’s interesting is the term “haters” might be too strong in a lot of cases. Sometimes it is actual constructive criticism. Sometimes it’s meant to be destructive criticism. And sometimes, it’s just someone who’s off the deep end or not on their meds, or something is really obnoxious about them. So there’s a lot of levels do it, and I think that’s what we’ll be talking about today.
Mike:[00:06:43] So kind of in preparation for this episode, I went out and did a little bit of research. And I found somebody by the name of Dillon Forrest. He’s got website dillonforrest.com. That’s where his blog is, and he has a full blog post article about all the different types of haters. So I thought what we would do is we’d start by going through his list of haters, and then I thought we’d go through a different list, which is the ultimate cheat sheet for dealing with haters. So to start off with, the first type of hater is bean counters. And these are the people that Dillon says they’re the ones who are always counting your expenses for you and is trying to make you afraid of the things that it is that you are doing. And he kind of relates it more to the financial side of things, but I think that it also applies to anything, whether you’re doing AdWords, which is kind of a financial transaction. But if you’re spending time on different things, and they’re saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t be doing that,” but they don’t have a good reason for why you shouldn’t be doing that other than you’re wasting your time and you’re being dumb about it.
Rob:[00:07:36] So is this more someone inside your own company then who has insight into exactly how you’re spending your time? Because if it’s someone on Twitter, right, they wouldn’t typically know exactly what I’m up to.
Mike: [00:07:45] Well, that’s the thing. It’s more for people outside of your organization, so just people that you don’t know, especially on Twitter. Facebook, I think a little less so because obviously, you have a little bit of flexibility with saying who is kind of in your circles and who can see it and everything. But obviously, with Twitter, people can call you out randomly, and you have no idea who they are. So I think that this is much more applicable to people who are looking at what you’re doing from an outside point of view and they don’t know all the details. I think that’s one of the hard thing about these things is that you’re doing stuff, and they’re seeing this really tiny snapshot — that happens to be public — of what you’re doing, but there’s all this stuff that’s under the surface that they have no idea what’s going on, or what it’s about, or what you’re doing. They don’t look at any of the details because they don’t see them. And they just see this one little thing. And it’s almost like taking a comment out of context and they use it to attack you over.
Rob:[00:08:35] Yeah, it’s interesting. If we are going to talk about this type of person, or a troll, or hater, or whatever you want to say… if someone I don’t know starts commenting that something I’m doing with my marketing is incorrect or stupid or it’s not going to work, I don’t know this person, right? I have no idea if they know anything about what they’re talking about. And that’s the problem is if you’re unknown — at least in my eyes — then you don’t have the credibility for me to listen to you. At the same time, if a friend of mine, or a colleague, or someone that I trust, even if they don’t know exactly everything I’m up to, if they made the exact same comment, I would be much more likely to listen to it and engage because I know where they’re coming from. I know their experience level, and I know that I can engage them in a conversation, right? I can actually reply and say, “Oh no, you’re misunderstanding. This is what’s going on.” Or I can say, “Huh, I hadn’t thought about it that way and you’re right.”But again, if I don’t know that person, then more often than not, I find that people who are doing this kind of bean counter attitude, they kind of don’t know what they’re talking about. Like as soon as you push back, you find out oh, the person has never actually launched anything in public. And so why would they know that my AdWords spend was out of whack or that I shouldn’t be creating content? It’s like they haven’t done it.
Mike:[00:09:43] Yeah, I got one when I was running ads for my book. And it was funny because it was very early on, and I was running one of the Twitter ad campaigns. And I forget what the headline I had used was, but it was something along the lines of “Do you want to start a business? Click here to learn more about the Single Founder Handbook.” And somebody had actually tweeted to me, “Step one: Don’t advertise on Twitter.” I was really pissed off for like 30 seconds. And I was just like, “Yeah, you probably have never done this before so you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Rob:[00:10:09] Right.
Mike:[00:10:10] And I think at that point, I’d had something like 80 or 100 emails that have been given to me so far. So I was just like, “Yeah, clearly you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. So thanks, anyway.”
Rob:[00:10:19] Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s all too common. Because I’ve run ads on reddit, on Facebook for multiple products, and you get a similar response of like, “I don’t like your ads,” or, “There shouldn’t be ads on this platform,” or “Your ads aren’t working.” That’s the one I love where it’s like, “Well, how do you know they’re not working? I’ve gotten a bunch of trials out of this. They are working. That’s why I’m paying the money.” But the funny thing is, folks who complain about your ads, but then not realizing that if you weren’t advertising, reddit and Facebook would have no revenue model aside from raising VC funding. That’s how they make all of their money. There would be no reddit and no Facebook without this, so it just doesn’t make any sense.
Mike:[00:10:56] And on that note, I do have to call you out on one of your recent Facebook ads. Because I was looking at Facebook, and over on the right-hand side, I see this giant picture of a snake. And I’m like, what the hell is that?
Rob:[00:11:06] I’m getting quite a few comments about that one.
Mike:[00:11:11] And then I saw that it-
Rob:[00:11:11] It’s the highest click-through rate of all of my ads. It’s crazy.
Mike:[00:11:14] Is it?
Rob:[00:11:15] I know.
Mike:[00:11:15] That’s hilarious.
Rob:[00:11:16] I know, and it was purely on a whim. It was a stock photo that was in something and I accidentally clicked it. And I was like, “Oh, that’s a terrible ad.” And I was like, “Why don’t I just…” Anytime I think something is a terrible idea, I test it, and that’s what that one was. So yes, I have received tweets and emails about it. And I would stop doing it. I wish that it hadn’t worked. It does get some clicks.
Mike:[00:11:34] But that’s the thing. It’s like it goes back to these people who are making comments about stuff that they think they know your business better than you do, and that clearly there’s things that will happen that you don’t expect. And without looking at the data, you wouldn’t know. And of course you’re not going to share with these people anyway.
Rob:[00:11:49] So that was bean counters. We have four other types of haters. What are they?
Mike:[00:11:53] So the second one is expert spectators. And essentially, what these people do is they look at the things that you’re going through and learning, and then they dismiss them and say, “Well, that should’ve been obvious to you. I don’t know why you wasted all your time and effort doing that.”
Rob: [00:12:07] This one used to make me really mad. When I was blogging once or twice a week, I would spend eight hours plus on each post, and I would think through all the lessons I learned. I would do research. I would talk to people. I would what I considered crafted a very accessible and teaching blog post. It didn’t always happen, but every once in a while, I would get someone on Hacker News or Digg or something who would say exactly this, right? “Well, obviously,” or they would say, “Yeah, this whole post breaks down to this one sentence: ‘You should never do this with your customers.'” or, “They are toxic customers. Stay away from them.” And I always felt like, well, of course, you can summarize any blog post — any blog post — in a sentence, so how is that helpful to anyone? Like the actual post itself had all this information, and it felt like I’ve invested all this time and put in essentially hard work to communicate this message, and then somebody comes by and spends 30 seconds writing some obnoxious sentence trying to show how smart they are. And I don’t feel like it benefits anyone. And the first time it really pissed me off. And then, over time, I just learned to kind of let it go.
Mike:[00:13:05] Right, but I think there’s these expert spectators that they almost feel like that’s their job is to look around at what other people are doing and just comment on it without having any basis for teaching other people. It’s really what it amounts to. It’s like they’re not interested in teaching other people because they want to teach you what you have done wrong. It’s really what that comes down to.
Rob:[00:13:26] Right, which doesn’t tend to be helpful. People who are kind of self-appointed police of the internet to point out how everyone else is wrong, and it’s like, “Yeah, that’s helpful.”
Mike:[00:13:33] Yes, I think the quickest way to get attention anywhere is to spell something wrong on the internet. Isn’t that how the saying goes?
Rob:[00:13:38] Yeah, something like that.
Mike:[00:13:40] So the third type is of hater is club members. They make it clear that startup founders are an elite species of humans and you’re not good enough to join them. I don’t run into these types of people too often. I think that I used you on occasion, but I don’t know how many of these people that you run into. And I wonder if that’s because we don’t necessarily dwell in the funded startup circles. I mean, maybe it’s more common there, but I don’t seem to run into this very often.
Rob:[00:14:03] Yeah, I haven’t either. It doesn’t ring true with my experience.
Mike:[00:14:07] Well, number four is academics. They have no practical experience, but they read up on all of the entreporn and they tell you exactly what you should be doing.
Rob:[00:14:15] This kind of reminds me. I think we lump these guys in with bean counters. But probably a couple times a week, I get either an email or a tweet or something pointing something out about something I have done wrong in essence. And when I actually engage and say, “No, here’s why that’s not wrong,” or I’ll say, “Okay, what would you do?” I find out that they really don’t know what they’re doing. And oftentimes, they’re not actually haters. They were genuinely trying to help, but they just aren’t experienced enough to realize that it’s not helpful. And when I reply to them, they’ll actually be like, “Oh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the tip.” And so it really is just a conversation, but it’s almost like that first email comes off kind of like offensive or like, “I’m smarter than you and you’re doing this wrong.” When I get that, I’m like, “Really?” But the nice part is if you do engage in like a meaningful conversation, oftentimes it just turns out to be kind of a misunderstanding.
Mike:[00:15:04] Yeah, there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to deal with the people who come in either with an email or a tweet or something along those lines. And I don’t necessarily like seeing this stuff from Twitter just because of the fact that you’ve only got 140 characters. But I guess in some ways that is helpful to know that there’s only 140 characters. You know that they have to keep it short. But at the same time, there’s no room for that extra explanation that might push the conversation in a different direction. So the fifth type of hater is snipers. They always look for the best angle to shoot down your ideas, your efforts, and anything else that you are doing. I think with the sniper, most of these people are probably not going to be either your customer. Maybe some of them don’t even necessarily realize that that’s what they’re doing. I know that when that I first started business, I was talking to people — friends and colleagues and stuff like that — and they didn’t really understand what I was doing. And they would come up with all these different reasons about the things I should and shouldn’t be doing, and it almost fell back to like the academics where they didn’t have the practical experience. But at the same time, they were shooting down my ideas as invalid or, “You shouldn’t be doing this. You should be doing this other thing over here.” And it’s demoralizing, I’ll say. Like it has a combination of the no practical experience, but also it’s a just a demoralizing factor to have those people come out and say, “Oh, you shouldn’t be doing this,” or “That’s going to fail. Don’t go in that direction.”
Rob:[00:16:20] Yeah, and I think there’s a continuum here because those people who said that, I wouldn’t call them haters. I would call them maybe friends of yours who are critics, and they’re critical of your stuff. And they’re discouraging you because kind of their mindset is limited. And that’s where I think there’s this whole continuum. And it can start… maybe on the left-hand side it’s someone who emails you and they just don’t have a lot of tact. They’re actually nice, but they’ll send you an email that comes off like they’re really being a jerk, but they’re actually a nice person. And then in the middle, maybe someone who’s just critical of a lot of things. Again, they’re not a bad person, but their mindset leads them to believe something that is different than yours. And they have a limited mindset, and so then they say things that are discouraging. And then I think there are people who are kind of just intentionally, all the time, kind of ragging on everyone around them for whatever reason, if their life is bad or that’s their view on the world. That’s even where this term “haters” feel strong. And there’s this whole continuum of sometimes the feedback or the criticism can be constructive, assuming that it’s communicated well and that you are actually trying to help someone out. So I think that’s probably an important thing to keep in mind as we’re talking about this is this isn’t just people who are being belligerent on the internet. It can be friends and family, right, who are discouraging you and who are trying to kind of tear down your dreams because they don’t understand what you’re trying to do.
Mike:[00:17:33] Especially when it comes from friends. I mean, they’re concerned for you. They don’t want you to fail. In some ways, they see themselves as trying to protect you from harm, and that can be more difficult to get around because if you’re really committed to moving forward and trying to start your own business, you’re going to have to ignore some of those people and you’re going to have to do things your own way. You’re going to have to go out and make mistakes. And if you happen to fail, the response can turn out to be, “I told you so,” which of course is not going to be helpful for whatever relationship you currently have. But at the same time, you’re going to have to go against what their advice is. You’re going to have to sit there and say, “Yes, I’ve heard you. I hear what you’re saying, but I’m going to ignore you and go down this other path that you just told me that I shouldn’t even though I trust you.” So now that we’ve looked at the different types of haters, we’re going to look at an article from James Altucher, and he has the ultimate cheat sheet for dealing with haters. And he has ten different ways to deal with haters. He kind of lumped haters, trolls, and people who are kind of concerned about your overall general well-being and welfare together, but this is a cheat sheet for how to deal with them and some of the different ways to deal with them based on what it is that they’re saying. So the first one is that whatever they’re saying or whatever is being said, it’s about them. And there is a little bit of truth to this, I think. Because especially when you start relating it back to jealousy, if somebody comes in and says, “Oh, you shouldn’t be doing this,” then it’s possible that it’s because they want to do it or they wanted to do it, and they just have been never been able to get the willpower to do it, or haven’t overcome their fears, or basically made excuses to not go through and do that. And I think to a certain extent, the jealousy is a little bit part of it. But I don’t necessarily think that it’s all that either. I think some of it is just they want to project their fear on other people.
Rob:[00:19:14] I think sometimes some people are just having a bad day. And I think sometimes people are having a bad year, and other times, people are just more critical and judgmental than other people. It’s a personality thing or the way they were raised. So I would agree. In general, the churlish behavior or the extreme criticism that’s not constructive and not helpful, I think tends also to stem from that person.
Mike:[00:19:35] The second part of the cheat sheet is to realize that in some ways, it’s also about you. And one of the examples he gives is there are certain people out there who it almost feels like their sole purpose in life is to push people’s buttons. I’m sure people have kids like this. Mine certainly get on my nerves sometimes, and they definitely know how to push my buttons. But some people just get a little bit defensive when people push their buttons, and that’s going to happen, especially when people are out there and that’s what they do. They want to kind of provoke a reaction because some of it kind of boils down when you were kids, and to get somebody’s attention, you’d hit them and say “Oh, why did you hurt your friend?” “Well, he wasn’t paying attention to me.” And some of it is just about getting that attention from other people.
Rob:[00:20:15] And the third point that James makes, he calls it the 24-hour rule. And he basically says that if someone attacks you — whether it’s office politics, whether it’s someone in a relationship with you, or if it’s more of an online thing — he says the 24 hour rule tends to work, that if you never respond to the initial attack, it goes away in 24 hours. And if you respond even once, then go ahead and reset that clock. And especially as things get faster and faster online, this clock has, I think, has gotten shorter and shorter. I think maybe it used to be multiple days, even a few years ago, but now, in general, again, if it really is non-constructive feedback that you’re getting and it’s something that just feels like a blazing attack, ignoring it tends to be the best way to handle it. And in some extreme cases, it doesn’t work, and people seek out other means if they’re attacking you directly. But if it’s just kind of a drive-by or something like that, it’s almost never worth engaging in the conversation.
Mike:[00:21:06] Yeah, I’ve definitely found the 24-hour rule helps. I don’t think I’ve heard it called that before, but sometimes just ignoring those things can make them go away. Sure, it’ll maybe hurt your productivity for a little while, but you look at the other things that are going on, and it’s just like I could spend the next two hours worrying about this person who tweeted something at me, or I can get the work done that I had laid out for me because I’ve got six or eight-hour day ahead of me because I’ve got a ton of things to do. So which is it? Are you going to waste two hours thinking about that, or are you just going to brush it off and move on? I think the point about that clock getting reset is a really important note because I have seen places where like if you reply to somebody’s tweet or you email them back, it opens up the door for that continued conversation, versus if you just don’t touch it, then for whatever reason, it just seems like it goes away. The fourth one he has is the one-third rule. I think he calls it the 30/30 role. This is essentially there are three different types of people. There are people who they love you, they hate you, or they won’t care. So where do you want to spend your time? Where do you want to allocate the mental resources associated with the people who are sending you messages, whether it’s email, or tweets? Where are you going to spend the time that you have available? And you can either spend it on the people who are trying to drag you down, or you can spend it on the people who love you. And “love you” is — put that in quotes — the people who respect you and admire you and are looking at what you’re doing and saying, “Hey, that’s really cool that you’re doing that.” There’s also that subsection of people that don’t care, but those people that don’t care are probably not going to be interacting with you. So it almost really boils down to that love you-hate you thing.
Rob: [00:22:40] Yeah, it’s amazing that once you start blogging, or you have an app, or you sell books or something, if you’re doing a good job, you get a ton of positive feedback and it feels great. And then you’ll get one person or two people over time who make comments that just are kind of off-the-wall. Someone like disagreeing with the font choice you used on your blog, literally like a line height. I got an email about that one time. And the person was really upset about it. I had never heard about that. I never have thought about it and no one had ever mentioned it for years, and then someone writes in and like, “Your font and your line height are way off and it’s impossible to read,” blah, blah blah. And he was very [pained?] about it. It was just like, “Wow.” It’s crazy like certain people just have very strong opinions about things that you may not, right, and most people may not. And so you have to decide how you’re going to deal with that. If you’re going to say, “Okay, thanks for the feedback. I’ll address it.” Or just say, “Okay, thanks for the feedback,” and not address it, or if you just kind of brush it off. It depends I think on how attacking it is and what exactly it’s attacking. I think the other thing though is its easy to get that email and then stew on it for a day or two and kind of let it distract you and let it be a background process. Someone emails you and says, “Oh, I couldn’t use your app because the design is so awful.” And then they send you screenshots and they have all these things circled and, “This is wrong. This doesn’t work with the UX? Principle,” or just some crazy feedback about it. You can get hung up on that, right, and you can carry that with you if you let that person have power over you. The choice you have to make is, again, am I going to brush this off and delete it? Am I going to address it and say, “Thanks for the feedback.”? Or am I going to carry it around and let it distract me for a few days? Because it’s amazing the amount of time and energy that you can allow someone to suck from you if you let them, and that’s your choice. And that actually leads us to the fifth point here that James Altucher makes. He basically has a phrase that just says “Delet.” And he says, “I’m always happy when someone disagrees with me. I don’t mind that. But often, people are incapable of expressing disagreement and having it not come out in a way that is obnoxious or hateful. And when I can, I delete them.” I put “delete” in quotes. He says, “Sometimes it’s not a blog commenter but it’s someone in real life.” But even then, he says he deletes them. He doesn’t speak to people who are just toxic, right, who are bad and who are always… sometimes when the feedback itself comes across, and it’s like,”Well, that’s actually legitimate feedback, and it’s an opinion of yours.” But the way that it’s expressed is just very like he said. It’s obnoxious. It’s hateful. It’s rude. And it’s really hard to take feedback like that and not be offended by it, frankly.
Mike:[00:25:03] Yeah, you definitely have to take steps to cut toxic people out of your life. There’s definitely people I’ve done that with, whether it’s friends, colleagues, family, what have you. Everyone has to take those steps on occasion. And it’s not pleasant sometimes, especially if you do know the people. But then there’s other times where it’s a random email and honestly, the delete hotkey in Google is pretty easy to learn. So you can take those things, just flag them as spam or what have you. You don’t have to listen to them. You don’t have to let it affect you, but you do have to make the conscious choice to not let it affect you because the things that you are doing are important to you. The sixth point he has here is that hate is contagious. And he has a tweet here that somebody had put out that says, “James Altucheror = #humangarbage.” And he says he has no idea why the person tweeted it or who it was, but he got really angry about it because it didn’t follow any of these other things. It wasn’t about them. It was really about him and it was a personal attack. And your natural response, in many cases, is to attack back. And his argument is to not do that. Because as soon as you start that, it essentially becomes a never-ending path. There’s always going to be this back and forth. So if you can essentially restrain yourself, if you can go back to that 24-hour rule and not go back and start that clock over again, you can hopefully break that cycle. But at the same time, as Rob just said, you have to make sure that you’re not going to let those people have power over you because it will affect you.
Rob:[00:26:27] If you’re the type of person who struggles to let things go, and I think most of us are probably like that, that when someone attacks you that it feels harsh and that you carry it with you for days, there’s a book called “A Guide to the Good Life.” And actually, I want to give a shout out to Travis Jamison from supremacy SEO for pointing me in this direction when he and I were hanging out. But it’s basically kind of a summary of Stoic philosophy. But there’s a really good chapter in here about dealing with gossips and people who are toxic in essence. And the Stoic philosophy talks a lot about how to let this kind of stuff go and how specifically to do that, and why it’s worth doing that, and even ways that you can… like actual phrases you can use if someone insults you to your face, and what you can say to kind of exaggerate it or make a joke about it or whatever. And since I read that, I’ve used a ton of those techniques. Some of them are ignoring. Some of them are “deleting” — in quotes — like James said. And then some of them are engaging back, but with a joke, even when someone says something hateful. So you have to use your judgment on that, but I would recommend A Guide to the Good Life — I listened to it on audiobook and I’ve relistened to it once — if you need more practice of learning to let this kind of stuff go.
Mike:[00:27:36] Another tactic that James points to is that they look stupid. The idea behind this is that you can imagine that whoever this person is on the other end, especially if you don’t know them, that they grunt, they drool, and they look stupid. And it makes it easier for you to deal with them and kind of mentally relegate them to the background because they grunt, they drool, and they look stupid. I mean how could they possibly have an intelligent conversation with you or have a legitimate beef with the things that you’re doing because they simply can’t understand it? And maybe they had a good point, but if it came across wrong, you can use this as essentially a mental defense to help put you in a frame of mind where you can just ignore whatever it is that they have to say.
Rob:[00:28:16] The last point that James makes is he says, “Time heals all wounds.” In essence that he just starts and he says, “Hate can’t last forever. Often, it turns into a dull simmer.” And that’s really maybe the best lesson of all this. If someone posts a rude comment about you or says something that you find critical, it’s not going to be around in five years. This is a very short-lived type of thing, and that learning to shake it off quickly and kind of move on… because frankly, you have better things to worry about. And you have more important ways to be spending your time than going back and forth with someone on Twitter 140 characters at a time for two or three days and thinking about your next retort, and thinking about this and that. You know what I’m saying? One of the best pieces of advice I heard about it is Scott Hanselman, and he said, “I just don’t engage.” He says, “I get feedback and I just don’t argue with people because I found it’s a tremendous waste of time. Because, A, you’re never going to change anybody’s mind. And B, I have all this other stuff going on. I’d rather spend time with my family than be sitting there hacking away at my phone trying to prove someone else wrong. It just isn’t that helpful.”
Mike:[00:29:21] I don’t know if this is a function of age or not, but I definitely remember when I was younger, I would think to myself, “Oh, this person’s wrong, and I have to explain to them why it is that they’re wrong and why that I think that they’re wrong.” That probably boiled over into places of my life that it probably shouldn’t have, but at the same time, it was whenever when somebody was issuing criticism as well. And you’re absolutely right. If engaging them is really putting your energy in the wrong place because you’re not going to change their mind. It’s hard to accept that you can’t do certain things, and changing some people’s minds is going to be one of them, and it maybe something that you just have to get over it. It’s not necessarily easy, because it’s something that I definitely struggle with a little bit. But at the same time, you can’t do everything that you always wanted to do.
Rob:[00:30:03] I think this is a good reminder, too, to kind of temper your own feedback of people and to reread that critical tweet that you’re going to send or that email that you’re going to support to someone’s support queue, or when you’re giving someone feedback, and think about it from their perspective. Are you going to come off as a hater? Are you going to come off as someone who’s being obnoxious or not communicating your thoughts, your preferences with care? But you’re just firing off an angry email because you’re so angry about something when in fact, you’ll probably be taken as more legitimate if you temper your words and you’re more thoughtful and careful with them.
Mike:[00:30:38] Yeah, I think we’re all guilty of kind of going on Twitter and venting a little bit here and there. I know that I’ve been guilty of it in the past week. There was something with Google Docs, where like it popped up a message from the calendar, and every single tab in Chrome just stopped working. I don’t know what was going on. I had to flip over to that tab, click the OK link. And somebody tweeted me and said, “Well, that’s by design that way.” And it’s like, “All right, it’s by design, but it shouldn’t impact everything else that I’m working on.”
Rob:[00:31:05] That wraps us up for today. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690, or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for “startups,” and visit us at startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 226 | Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Churn (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and Rob define churn, talk about the different varieties, explain the different ranges you can expect, how to calculate churn, and present ideas on how to reduce it.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Rob [00:00:00]: In this episode of “Startups for the Rest of Us,” Mike and I discuss everything you always wanted to know about churn, but were afraid to ask. This is “Startups for the Rest of Us,” episode 226.