Episode Transcript
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap. Web. Just getting back from spring break. Brian, how are you?
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Yes, sir. Yeah, doing good. Good. Back in it here. So you're just back in town from Austin, Texas.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Got in last night. We're supposed to get in yesterday afternoon, but we were in Austin with another family from Portland that we're close with. They have three kids. Everyone gets along. It's great. So we've got two separate houses. Been hanging out all week.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Nice. About Airbnb down there.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Yeah, Airbnb. Cool city, man. You know, it was very, very entertaining for a family vacation. Every day. Something cool, some swimming hole, bike rental. University of Texas campus. Took a drive down to San Antonio for the day. The whole thing was really impressive and just. Just fun. Just 75 and sunny and just fun.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Oh, that's great. Yeah, it seems like a good time, I think, to be down in Austin, like, weather wise, I love that kind of vacation. Like, that's. That's exactly what we do a lot is we just go to a city or go somewhere and get an Airbnb and just sound it, like, just, like, tool around the city for a week or something. Just do, like, random go restaurants and just go check stuff out.
Not like a crazy adventure vacation, but just living in a city for a week, a different place.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: We didn't have any plans. We had two or three dinner reservations or something, but we didn't have big plans. We ended up seeing music. We just kind of, like you said, just jumped into the flow of the city, and that city is alive. It is ambitious and optimistic and energetic. People are out, everyone being nice. Barbecue. It was really. It was really impressive. I generally default toward sitting on a beach, but. But we had a great time on this version.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Every time I'm down in Texas, I just love the state, you know? And I like, you know, growing up in the northeast, like, that's like, a part of the country that just seems so, like, polar opposite from where you and I have lived our lives. But, yeah, I've been down there a few times.
I love Austin, Houston, San Antonio. And then just, like, driving through the state is beautiful. I love it down there.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: There's a lot of building I had. Okay, here's my little thesis from being there for a few days. Tell me if this sounds like complete bullshit, but here's my take on it.
You and I grew up in the northeast. I live in Chicago now.
It feels like to me, like we here are coasting on the efforts made and the foresight of people 100 plus years ago. We have these amazing institutions and cities and architecture and established organizations like cultures, and that feels great at one level, but it is. It's decaying.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: It's like the, you mean like here in the northeast?
[00:03:18] Speaker A: Yes, it's like the hard times make hard men and that cycle.
And now it feels like it's decaying and it's not on the rise. It feels like a very slow decline.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: So here's. Yeah, I really agree with this, especially in New York City, in the tri state area and Long Island, New York, you see it.
You see it and feel it. And that's why I really believe NYC is another thing. I think there's. I love NYC, just like, in terms of the energy and everything. But, like, Long island, which is where I'm from, and you grew up.
I say it all the time. I think it's like one of the most overvalued. Like, it's like the worst value place to live in America. And I'm from there. I grew up there. Life, it's crowded just in terms of, like, how extremely expensive it is and how, like, old and run down so many parts of it are and overcrowded and you're stuck there. It's hard to take road trips out of it, get through the city, and it's just like. And prices are just at, like, insane even compared to where I live. I'm in Connecticut, like an hour away from the border of New York. And where I live is like a fraction of the price of living in that area. And, like, so much better quality of life. It's crazy.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that a long time ago, when it was being built out, it was so attractive and attracted a lot of people, and that created an amazing tax base, and then it fattened up the government and is bureaucracies, and they've gotten stale and the money goes there and it isn't productive and the roads get beat up and the subways aren't safe. So that's my general feel.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: So that, and then you look at places like Chicago and even down in Texas and all over the rest of the country. I remember I used to live in Chicago when I was in college. I lived there for two years. And I remember driving around the city with a real estate agent, finding an apartment. And I was commenting on, like, oh, man, like, this city's great. It's so clean. He's like, yeah, only New Yorkers say that.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Look, I would put the city of Chicago firmly in the decay camp along with New York and others.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Yeah. But there I love Chicago, man. It's like. It's especially, like downtown. Any big city is gonna have its share of, like, parts that are sort of, like, run down and decay. But, like, I don't know, a lot of it, though.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: A lot of it feels like policy choices.
It doesn't have to be that it that way. So you go to Texas, and in my mind, I'm like, oh, this is like the land of the free here. Everything's gonna be better. In reality, it was like a mirror image. So driving on the highway from Austin to San Antonio, that drive is ugly.
It's not. It's not. That stretch of highway is every national chain ever invented.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: That's true. Yeah, that stretch. Yeah.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: Chaos.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: We did that.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: It is chaotic. I don't know what other word to put.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: That's true. And a couple of years back, we did, like, around the country trip, where we drove through, like, through. From, like, we were actually in Galveston, Texas, on the coast, then out to Austin, and then out through west Texas and then into the southwest. And that drive is. I mean, you're just miles and miles of nothing, but it's beautiful, you know? Yeah. So it's.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: So what I felt was, like, this flip side of, you are more free there. You do get to start a business more easily. There is more economic movement, and the ability to go up in your income bracket is there, and capital is welcome. Like, you can build a big office building in Austin, and the government's not going to tear you to shreds, and you can make money on your risk. And because of that, there's a lot more. So it was like the opposite of decay, but it's not perfect, because when you let things go with a lot less restriction, it doesn't always end up as beautiful as a downtown Chicago with its unbelievable architecture that you can't believe this country was ever even capable of doing. Doing that.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: So it's a really interesting kind of, like, I'm happy where we live, and it's really nice to know that Texas exists as an option.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Yep, yep. Yeah, totally. Well, this is a bootstrapped web. This is our travel podcast where we comment on the state of architecture in America.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: I love it.
Let's talk about business. Yeah.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: I also want to say that today's podcast is going to be sponsored by thesis new Nootropic. Nootropic that I'm testing. They're not giving us any money. I'm just high as a kite off right now. And it's depending on how sharp I am or how repetitive, or, you know, inarticulate.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Oh, we're in for a good one today.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: No, I like it. I like it.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Any enhancement I can get, you know.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: There you go. Performance enhancing drugs, right? Yes.
All right. So I don't know if you've been following my Twitter or my LinkedIn or my YouTube this past week, but I made a conscious effort and I'm continuing to do this to, you know, what happened.
I realized about two weeks ago, it's been on my mind for a while this year that I have been living with a fear of clicking publish on content.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Okay. I don't usually have a fear of publishing.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: So what is that? Not historically, like, through my career, I made a network of being out there with content. But I have found that for like, with the exception of this podcast, like this podcast essentially, and a few random off the cuff tweets here and there, like, other than that, I've been pretty quiet in terms of, like, content, legit content creation for me personally, in my own voice and sharing my own ideas or opinions or theories or creative projects. Just being public other than publishing, hey, we launched a feature in clarity flow that's the final product of something I have not been hitting publish on content that I feel proud of. And I think that that has been a factor of a result of a bunch of things, mainly just feeling like I don't have.
I've sort of lost my voice in terms of like, what do I think is interesting? What do I think people want to hear from me or value and what I have to offer, you know, because my focus has shifted so much from like years ago, I was publishing a ton of content around productized services and helping freelancers level up and become business owners and things like that. But like, I've moved on from that years ago. I'm more in product management, product creation, product design world now. Full stack. Right, so there's that. And then the other thing that occurred to me is that this year I'm launching, I'm developing my new business called Instrumental Products, which is this product studio primarily. I'm working with clients now. Right now I'm working with a couple of good clients on building out a new app for one. For another one. They're a SaaS company. I'm helping with UI and Ux refresh work on their interfaces stuff, and it's been really good work. And I worked with a couple other SaaS earlier this year.
And many of the folks who I am friends with and have good relationships with, I've been reaching out and telling them, like, hey, I'm starting this thing. If you happen to know anyone who has a need for this type of value that I could offer as a consultancy, I'm out there. I'm looking for projects, right? And it occurred to me that that actually doesn't result in bringing in many leads and projects.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: It's a good way to start.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: It's a good way to start. But, like, in all the effort, like, week after week, multiple weeks this year, I've said, like, this week, I need to personally reach out to 20 people to try to drum up some business for this thing. And so the outbound, first of all, it's just really hard to do for me personally to just ask, ask friends, like, hey, do you know anyone who could hire me for this? Right. I don't like just doing it.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: There's tension or friction or whatever you want resistance.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: But more than that, I just realized, like, you know what? It actually doesn't work for the most part. And I looked at all of the clients that I am working with now, and actually, none of them were people that I reached out to. They all came to me because they are listeners of this show or they're longtime followers of my content. In some cases, like, I'm not even very close with them personally, but they know of me because I put content out there.
So then it occurred to me the outbound approach, and even if I were to fire up more traditional marketing stuff, like cold outreach to lots of companies who could have this type of need, that's not nearly as effective as inbound interest in customer client interest, there's nothing better than just in inbound because they already built up the trust. Like, they know, like, and trust you from afar. So they come inbound and they have a need, and it's a really good fit.
So I was just literally analyzing, like, the list of clients that I've been working with this year. It's like, well, where did they come from? Oh, they actually came from content. And so maybe I need to actually prioritize publishing more and actually being out there and actually circling back around to what I was trying to do this year, which is rebuild my audience.
And that's a long way of saying, like, it's just a reminder that I have to actually make it a priority. And that literally means, like, spending more hours and more creative effort on content creation and rebuilding that muscle, reactivating that muscle. And that's what I forced myself to do this week. I think this week I ended up publishing new pieces of content, unique pieces of content. Like, I think four out of five days this week, I published to LinkedIn for the very first time. I published, I think, four new YouTube videos. I got a new camera for YouTube, and I published to Twitter a bunch of stuff I can talk more about, like the creative process. Cause I sort of flipped the script on that as well. But the funny thing about YouTube, not YouTube, LinkedIn. I have had an account on LinkedIn since, I don't know, like, I don't know, 1520 years, something like that.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: And I actually looked at my profile to look at my posts. Like, my activity. You have zero posts. Like, I have never posted ever.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: Literally zero.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Literally zero.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Like, I've had a profile. I've had my. My work history or whatever listed it on there. I have never wrote and published anything on the LinkedIn network, ever.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: This week was your first LinkedIn post.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Monday of this week was my very first LinkedIn post. I ended up publishing, like, like three more. Like, this week, I think I published three times. Those are my number. Like, three. First post ever on LinkedIn.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: All right, you're on the map. The leads are. The leads are going to come pouring in now.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: And the very first day that I published on LinkedIn, I got a lead for a seriously, no joke.
And the funny thing was that it was somebody who was like, my second or third ever freelance client from 15 years ago as a freelance web designer. I haven't spoken to her in 15 years. She saw me post on LinkedIn and reached out. And this could. I don't know if it's going to happen, but it's like a potential large software development project that could happen.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: All right, fine. No more making fun of LinkedIn and the reach.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Like, you look at the analytics, I'm a person who has no history. I have whatever the connections, a lot of spammers in my connections list. But these posts that I put, they definitely have even more reach than some of my tweets do because LinkedIn's network seems to be a little bit more. Okay. Or their algorithm is interesting.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: I have a few questions. Can I read off a few questions?
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Let's go.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: When you say publishing content, is it just social? Just tweet and LinkedIn? Nothing that lives elsewhere like a blog?
[00:16:25] Speaker B: This has been an interesting learning for me.
I think what I'm getting into the groove of is, like, I have one idea for content per day, and that's ultimately going to go to all the places.
So this week I posted, I think, three or four different unique pieces of content, like different ideas, different topics. And all of those showed up on my LinkedIn as like long tweets, as YouTube videos. And I also copied it to my threads account, which I don't really use, but.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Right, right, but you made a video also.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Yes. Okay. Yeah. And I think at least one of these, I haven't done it yet, but I'll probably send it to my newsletter this weekend. Oh, and one of them I did publish as a blog post on the instrumental products website because I felt like it was a good fit for that site. Okay.
Yeah. So the other thing that I, as I'm getting back into this, rebuilding the muscle of content creation, I'm also flipping the script on how I create content because I have a few goals when it comes to this. Aside from just publishing.
I need to optimize how I produce so that I can do it consistently and do it have longevity with it. Right. I want to keep doing this for the rest of the year. Right.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: It can't be too big of a mountain to climb every time. Or you can't, you can't keep.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. I thought a few weeks ago, I thought the low would be like, all right, I want to focus on YouTube. Let me create a YouTube video first, put a lot of effort into that, and then turn that video into written content like tweets and blog posts. I thought that would be the case for me personally. I do my best thinking and content creation as a writer first.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: So the other direction then.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: So the other direction first. So I ended up now.
Now, where I'm at with it is like I write first and I think I'm sort of writing for LinkedIn first. But the, you could also say I'm essentially writing a blog post first. But my thought process is I'm writing as if I'm writing for a LinkedIn post where I don't feel too constrained on length, but I'm trying to keep it short and crunchy to put up there. I'm doing a bunch of editing.
I start with a topic idea and we can talk more about where.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Yeah, how deliberate. That's my question this week. I'm going to talk once about UI, once about onboarding. Like, how deliberate is that?
[00:19:02] Speaker B: I'm keeping a running list. And this is another thing that I'm still trying to explore and find my voice or find my theme and find the thing that resonates most with people and the thing that I, the things that I've always been most interested in publishing on and what I still want to work toward is just being.
I love building in public.
I love the content of building in public. I love watching others build in public. Right.
Not publishing your mrograph, that's bullshit. I'm talking about the creative process, especially product design and development. But what I really like and what I get fired up by is that is like the design and development of products and how we connect those creative dots to the business.
And actually, just an hour ago, I published a YouTube video that I'm kind of proud of it because it's the first, I think it's the closest that I'm getting to what I'm talking about here. So I published a video where I showed how I design these things, like popovers, tooltips inside of an app, little like little question mark icon. You hover over it, it shows you a little tooltip on what this setting does. I have 100 of those things spread out around the clarity flow interface.
And I'm working on a new app now, and I use the same component that seems like a little UI detail.
I did a YouTube video on how I design and develop that. I showed the code and all that, but that's a tiny design detail, but it actually has a huge impact on my product businesses. It keeps support down. It makes customers feel confident in using the tool. They feel like they are more successful. It actually turns our users into power users because I'm giving them in app instruction without them needing to go hunt the docs or needing to contact support. It means I didn't have to hire a tier one support. Instead, I could go straight to hiring a. A more senior level customer success because customers self help themselves thanks to these little popover components. So I did a whole video on that, and that's the kind of connecting the dots between product design and, hey, this is actually a growth lever for a product business.
I want to try to do more of that, bridging the gap between design and code and how this how to make a product business work. You know.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: It sounds to me like a search for what an audience will eventually think of you for.
Yeah, you know, become known for. I mean, we all have. We can't help but categorize people that we follow as like one sentence. Yeah, that person does x really well, or is known for or has done whatever that is. It's. You don't get a paragraph, you get a certain.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: You're exactly right. And I still don't really know what category people put me in today.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't think you need to, but that's the direction you're going.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: That's what I'm looking for, is to try to figure that out. Because the other thing that I really keep in mind when I'm creating content right now is what do my current clients, through instrumental products? What do they value? Like, why do they hire me for stuff?
And the thing that I think that we literally talk about this in the sales calls that I have with people or working in the projects is that I'm not just a designer and developer. I also think, like, a business owner and a founder. And so a big theme of what I do is, like, look, let's find the most efficient way to go from Peter point a to point b. How do we ship this thing? Like, I did a whole post yesterday on, like, how to ship, like, what. What's the difference between just a builder and somebody who ships product? And, and, like, I feel like that's the kind of thing that, like, if I'm posting that on LinkedIn, it connects with other business owners.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. The difference there, because they are, you.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: Know, like, I've heard some people that I work with voice it and, like, yeah, I could hire a designer developer, but, like, they don't, they don't think, like, I think as a business owner, you know, and, yeah.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: And they're left to make that connection themselves.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: All right, so, so Brian is now.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Like, I'm still trying to, like, figure out how to, like, make, like, make that, like, a consistent stream of content. But I mean, the sort of difficult thing. But the thing that I'm coming to terms with is that, like, this is really, like, being a content creator in this way is actually really important to my business, and I have to keep it going. And that means I need to give it the actual hours that it deserves. When I'm doing this this week, turns out I spend three or 4 hours in the morning creating this content and publishing it before lunchtime. And then that's when I actually get into the actual project. Work is in the afternoon. Now, instead of just thinking about it, like, all right, I do all this product work. And, like, as an afterthought, as a side hustle, I post to Twitter and YouTube every now and then. No, like, it has to actually be part of my business strategy. And if that means giving it, like, 50% of my hours, then that's what it takes.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: You know, it's better in every way than the, than the outbound. You enjoy it more. It's better for the long term. Inbound will match you up with the right people more closely.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: It's better. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is with inbound, I don't need to convince you why it makes sense to work with me. You already know, like, and trust me. Right. And. Yeah. Like, better terms on projects, just better projects in general to work on. Like, even, like, the ones that I'm working on now are great. It's been a sort. I can't believe how much I'm actually enjoying working on these projects.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: That's a good sign.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: Very cool. All right, well, we're going to keep watching for more content, and we're going to check your LinkedIn.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Hey, you can connect with me along with the hundreds of other spammers that are in my list there.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: That does seem to be a problem on the messages there.
All right, well, Brian, I have some crazy news. I think. I have big, big news. I don't even know how to categorize this.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: Let's go, dude.
[00:25:42] Speaker A: You know, and I get, like, a little nervous talking about it, which I think is a good sign.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Okay. So I think I'm leaving e commerce.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: Okay. Okay, explain.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: I've been in e commerce for, I don't even know, ten years, I think more at this point. I started off as a merchant, went into card hook as the abandoned card app, then turned into the checkout, then exited from that, and then rally and raised money, and we offered the checkout product. And then recently I talked about pivoting.
So I think the best way to explain this is just kind of talk about what happened to me internally in my head over the last few weeks as we decided to pivot out of the checkout product and toward the offers product, it made sense in that it's the same code base, same go to market strategy, same customers, same ICP, all that. And we can get to a new product in a matter of weeks.
So that's what we did. When we pivoted, it made sense. We stopped offering the checkout product. We published a new website. Only the offers, we started selling that, we've closed a few deals for five k upfront and then a percentage.
But what happened underneath that, like, to me, as the founder here, when I disconnected emotionally from the checkout, checkout was something that I, like, wanted to make happen on the Internet. It was wrapped up in, like, this ideological experience around Shopify. And I want to go out and create, like, a token for it so that it was like this free thing out on the web that people could use and it would reward them. You know, it was it was a thing I really believed in, has a very direct emotional connection to what I was trying to accomplish on the business as well.
I've talked about how that was not nearly as emotional of a decision as I expected it to be because it was just kind of the truth. Hey, we tried to push this boulder up the hill for a while. It doesn't want to go up the hill. Some boulders you should just stop pushing.
But once I did that, I started viewing the products skeptically or objectively, less emotionally.
And when I did that, I started looking at our offers product more skeptically and more objectively.
And what I started to come to terms with was I don't like what I see in e commerce as a software company for us right now.
And I went to Shop talk, which is like this giant annual conference in Vegas. And it was almost like confirming all of my bias. And yes, I was looking for it to be confirmed, but I found my confirmation.
And that is in very simple terms, to sell software to ecommerce merchants and not sell it inside of Shopify is idiotic.
Shopify is where all the energy is. They're going to continue to just eat market share because they're better than the other platforms. The other platforms are not good. Bigcommerce has way too many issues.
Salesforce doesn't care about commerce cloud. Adobe kind of cares about Magento and Adobe commerce, but not really. There's just no energy there and ambition. And we would lose one or two merchants every month as rally customers because.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: They left for Shopify, because they're going to Shopify.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: That's just the direction that is the vortex, that Polaroid center, the magnetic north, whatever you want to call it.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: And if you and, you know, we talk and think about like these, riding these waves of demand so, so much, you know, that the, the waves flow in the direction of Shopify all going that way.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: Yes, because they're awesome. They are executing 100 times better than the others.
Now, the checkout was intended specifically to be outside.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: Actually, just a quick sidebar. I wonder how I'm so disconnected from both WordPress and e commerce. But like, how does woocommerce in terms of that part of e commerce?
[00:29:52] Speaker A: It plays an important role in that it exists as an option, but it doesn't have any heat. There's no fire there. Yeah, it's like if you're growing any.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Serious e commerce business is not choosing woocommerce.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: If they are, it's out of wanting a lot of control or not being allowed on traditional platforms or having been there for ten years not wanting to replatform.
And I love woocommerce and I love Paul, and I love the team there. I'm not talking shit. That's just how I feel.
Now, the checkout product was specifically for outside of Shopify, so it made sense. Now that we're starting to sell e commerce software outside of Shopify, I'm like, what are we doing here? So then the option becomes, well, do we want to go into Shopify? Two comments there. Comment number one, it is not a good place for venture, venture scale businesses. There are a handful that got momentum and escape velocity earlier on recharge, Yotpo postscript, and those guys are going to cruise to 100 million ARR, God bless them. But that is really, really difficult to do right now.
You know what I think of it as it is an efficient marketplace. The app ecosystem in Shopify is efficient. There are a bunch of really smart, really ambitious, really talented people all solving problems on one little API. So every nook and cranny of bug or feature request or issue is filled in. And if you come up with something novel that does happen from time to time, you get annihilated by competition, copycats, undercutting on price and everything, not to mention Shopify itself.
Or if you get too big, Shopify might just take you out. Even Klaviyo that just went public. Shopify tried their best to kill them. They tried to kill them. They tried to acquire them, they tried to compete with them. And then, dammit, they. And then on the way to IPO, they invested like $100 million. So they still made their money anyway.
So it is an amazing place to build a one to $3 million bootstrap business. There are not many ecosystems on the web better than Shopify to do that on. But to build a 1020, 30, $50 million ARR company like, we want to build an adventure scale, not a good place.
And so I see all that. And then comment number two, I have no goddamn interest in working there. I have zero. And we're all in business to make money.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: No surprise there.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: No surprise. We're all in business to make money. But you got to like what you do. I can't hold my nose and say, yes, I have to go into this. Who wants to do that for the next ten years?
[00:32:25] Speaker B: What are we doing here?
[00:32:26] Speaker A: No, thanks. What are we doing exactly right?
And so I looked around and I checked my bank balance, and I said to myself, shit, it's time to build a completely new product.
And so what we did this last week is we cut the go to market team.
We cut burn, we cut our expenses. We have a core team. We have a few great developers, product managers, DevOps, and one go to market person, myself. We got our designers, we got our own little studio. Brian, I love it.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: I'm so psyched.
[00:33:02] Speaker A: And I cannot express what happened to me externally. The energy and opt. I'm up late, 01:00 in the morning, I'm researching, I'm reading Reddit.
I'm back. I'm so excited. And I was really worried about talking to the team, but I said to myself, you know what? There's actually nothing to worry about. The only thing to do is to be completely honest. This is a situation where you need to have complete trust, complete transparency, small team building stuff together.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: Remote. You need a ton of trust. So I was like, I'm not holding anything back. I'm just going to say completely exactly what I think, which is basically what this conversation has gone. And I said, if this sounds crazy to you and you don't want to be part of it, I will understand.
But if you do want to build new products together, we've got years of Runway and let's do something exciting. And I think what really, what was the reaction?
[00:34:08] Speaker B: So just to recap, what I understand is, you know, you trim down the team as you should in this scenario. Like, it wasn't an operating, Growing business to support a large team. Like now you're back into studio mode, like exploration mode, where we're looking for a new product to explore and build. And so now you have, now the team that you do have is like a product focus, like the developers, designers.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
[00:34:42] Speaker A: It's not go to market. And so, all right, so a few things on this.
We have existing customers and we have existing revenue. And so that needs to be maintained because that is a huge help on burn. Right. So you leave that alone. We actually got a few deals that might close next week. The product works. We're not going to build a bunch of new features for it, but people get value out of it, you know, leave it.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: Alright. And, you know, this right here is one of the hardest things I found.
[00:35:06] Speaker A: What, this weird, like guilt thing?
[00:35:08] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Like, especially you and me doing this podcast building in public or whatever on Twitter. And it's like, yeah, just because we're saying we're focused on something new does not mean what we have is dead. Or like, I still have a whole business in clarity flow that's operating with a new customer success person, my developers working every day on it. We have customers who actually like it. You can do more than one thing, and just because we're talking, talking about something here does not mean that, like, other areas of our life or our business are not still functioning.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: I think that's a good point because a lot of people hold themselves back and they think they don't have the full set of options that they really do. I am personally not good with guilt. If I say something that wasn't nice to someone that came out the wrong way, I'll feel bad about it for years. But there's a line. I heard it in some movie, I don't remember it, but it stuck with me for like 20 years.
Guilt is like a bag of bricks. All you need to do is set it down. So I refuse. Guilt. When it comes to business, personal, I go out to dinner with someone, I say the wrong thing, I feel like a jerk, I apologize. And I do feel bad. On the business front. No guilt. It's like a weird fake emotion. It's bad for you.
[00:36:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:28] Speaker A: So I really, now, you brought up something interesting when you talked about inbound and you talked about how that's you. You want customers to come to you, not just because it's easier, but because it's better in a bunch of different ways.
And so my experience over the last few years has been one of complex sales process and going into this brainstorming of what new product should we build?
What has been really helpful for me is like a list of characteristics.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Yeah. I love this kind of strategy and exercise. Is like the criteria. Like what are we looking for? We know that we're looking, we've committed to. We are a studio. Who's looking now?
[00:37:15] Speaker A: What filter can we run through?
[00:37:16] Speaker B: What are the filters that we're running through here?
[00:37:19] Speaker A: Yes. So it's like DNA.
It determines how you're going to grow up.
[00:37:28] Speaker B: This is that thing. This is why I love it so much, is because it's like no amount of marketing tactics or technical skill when it comes to growth or even product skill can beat making the right fundamental decision on choosing the customer, choosing the market, choosing the category of product and the characteristics. That stuff is what ultimately matters. That's literally the difference between, you know, products that take off easy path. The easy path or the hard path. Yes. You could have the best SEO, you could have the best paper click, you have the best interface.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: That's the wrong DNA. You can't grow the way you want. You don't work with the people you want all these different things. So that is what I see as my primary responsibility. Choosing wisely.
[00:38:22] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: And when I looked at the offers product, I didn't like the it. You know, once I started viewing it objectively, I didn't like the DNA.
It's e commerce. It's outside of Shopify.
You have to go out and get the customers. There's no search volume for it because people don't really understand the concept. It's a new category. It just had all this bad DNA. I was like, you know what I'd rather do? I'd rather launch a new product every few months and fail and maybe one of them hits or we run out of money. I'd rather do that than just grind my face against the sidewalk for the next two or three years trying to make it sustainable or something else when it has the wrong DNA to begin with.
[00:39:04] Speaker B: Yeah, but even before you get to the idea of multiple products iterating through idea after idea, there's still a huge list of criteria that something would need to check the boxes before you even consider it as the next thing to try.
What like, comes to the top of the list for you in terms of like this is once I see that, I'm interested.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: Okay, one sec, one sec. Let me open up. Canvas. You use slack canvases. I love slack canvases.
[00:39:34] Speaker B: People talk about it. I've never used it. I use slack can.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: It's like a little bit.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: I don't use that right inside of slack.
[00:39:40] Speaker B: I'm still pretty big on notion now.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: The only I do like notion, but everyone else hates it on my team.
The only bad thing about canvases is you can't edit on your phone. And that's a problem because then I just slack myself notes. Okay, so solves a clearly defined pain, right? No. Vitamins. I've been selling vitamins for a little while. I don't want. Hey, I promise you how much things are gonna get better. I'm gonna say I'm gonna take that pain away.
Large markets. Large.
Remember I told you about that story about the sdrs and the guy who had 60 sdrs? And I thought to myself, we can never have 60 sdrs. Our market isn't big enough.
[00:40:16] Speaker B: What are examples of large markets that you think about?
[00:40:21] Speaker A: Lawyers, doctors, accounting firms. You know, gigantic markets, large markets. Cool ability to advertise. I think that's a built in advantage when you have millions of dollars in the bank. If something works and you can spend $10,000 and it works and you can spend $100,000 the next month.
That takes advantage of our, of inherent advantage in the market. We just have, we have money to spend.
It's been a weird exercise for me. Okay.
Microconf. This is part of the reason I'm going back to Microconf, because I'm looking to acquire products. No, just kidding. Not kidding, actually. But I want to go be around new ideas. Okay. And one of the things about microconf that you and I come from, there is a, there's like a arbitrage opportunity between our microconf background and having millions of dollars in the bank, there is an opportunity there because you and I view a product. I started card hook with like $20,000 of my own money, and then I raised $200,000. And in this situation, I could basically allocate $250,000 to, like, four products and see if they work and still have years of Runway.
[00:41:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
All right. So listening to this list pain instead of vitamin. I'm totally on board. Okay. Large market. I'm totally on board.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: Right. Start with a niche, but a large potential market.
[00:41:45] Speaker B: Yep.
I don't, I'm feeling a little bit of a disconnect in terms of, like, looking at, like, ken, like, advertising as a criteria. That just seems like, that just seems like you're thinking about the marketing channel before thinking about the market and the product. Okay. We don't know what the marketing channel is going to be. But also, I think advertising in general, I'm sort of down on it. But the main thing for me is more about that product market fit and riding the natural demand first, and then going to things like ads to throw fuel on that fire fair. There's a lot of lawyers in the world. You can run all the ads. It's not going to make them buy whatever they're going to buy.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: You know, I guess what I'm doing is I'm thinking about distribution. I'm thinking about, how do I get this out there? And so the thing that exists right alongside the ability to advertise that I want is existing search volume.
[00:42:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:51] Speaker A: Like, there are people out there looking for a sol for this thing. It is understood. And I think when I think about advertising, I think about being able to identify that and capturing the initial search volume and then saying, hey, how do we just get out in front of that search volume? Because no one knows who we are, so we can just use money to get out in front of them.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, you know, you could use money.
Not that this is like an easy button that you can just go push. But, like, the idea of, like, buying a high volume YouTube channel or, you know, buying somebody's website who has a huge audience.
Number one, you have the cash to be able to do that. But number two, it shows somebody or maybe multiple people have built large audiences of this customer. So there are audiences to be built around this customer.
[00:43:43] Speaker A: Right. The fact that there's an audience interested in it is the key thing for me. The fact that existing search volume, whatever, that existing demand, I guess, is the umbrella terminal. Another one is self serve.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:43:57] Speaker A: I have been outside of the self serve game, and I don't want that friction to go from onboarding five customers to 20 customers is a challenge when it's not self serve, and then to go from 20 to 100 is very challenging. I would like to go from one sign up to 100 sign ups the next day and not actually experience much friction at all.
[00:44:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. One thing. I don't know if you. Yeah. Actually keep going with your list. I have one that I want to throw at you, but. Okay.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: Right next to that, I have product led growth as an ideal.
So, like, freemium element of virality, freemium, touching other people, inviting other people, some element of that, adding value to the product as an ideal. It's not a necessity.
[00:44:40] Speaker B: Well, yeah, and that's actually, like, what I was saying earlier. Like, rather than being, like, ad driven, be more product driven. Product led, meaning, like, people actually use it, and they talk about it because it solves such a hardcore pain that so many people have that they're excited to spread it for you. That's for the wave that you want.
[00:45:02] Speaker A: To spread alongside that. Or what was the one you.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: There's one that I feel like I've never really been able to find and achieve in any of my products that I've always felt a level of jealousy of with other people's products. And that is this set it and forget it value, that it's not required.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: To actively use the product on a.
[00:45:24] Speaker B: Day to day basis in order to get value. Yeah, I like that.
[00:45:28] Speaker A: That's interesting.
[00:45:29] Speaker B: That's a big one, dude, because it's like, that's retention. That's churn prevention.
Plug it in, and it makes you money, or it prevents you from losing money on a regular basis without you and without requirements, without making it a requirement that you and or your team have to, like, log in and use it every single day.
That's huge, dude. I mean, you know, there's like. I mean, honestly, like, a checkout process product is sort of like that. Like, you, you plug it into your checkout and it, like, it runs your business for you, right?
[00:46:06] Speaker A: Yeah, a little bit like a gum road type thing that just once you set up, you can just share the link and it gets used.
[00:46:11] Speaker B: The one that I tend to think of is like, I was a customer of Richard Felix's product for years.
He had a dunning product.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: Stunning.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Stunning for stunning. It was called stunning. It was first, you know, you plug it into your stripe and it sends failed payment emails to your customers automatically. It recovers those things for you. Great product. I was literally a paying customer for, like, I don't know, eight or nine years or something like that. Just left it alone from restaurant engine all the way through process kit and audience ops. We used it like, I was just a customer for years paying him $50 a month for that thing. I never even logged into it, but it made it fixed a problem in my business, plugged it in and, like, there are so many little things like that, you know, that I just set it and forget it. And it's like, I like that because as I've talked about for years on this podcast, with clarity flow and with process kit, before that, the big hurdle was not only onboarding and activating customers, but convincing them, like, hey, you should keep logging in and using this product every day and get your clients to use it every day and make it. Yeah. You want it to be essential and part of their workflow, but, like, as soon as there's friction in that, that's when they start to look elsewhere and churn. And so it's a constant battle of, like, keeping the product up, keeping customers engaged, making sure you're solving an ongoing problem, improving it, taking feedback, fixing bugs. But these set it and forget, like, it doesn't matter what the interface looks like. You know, it's interesting because you're.
[00:47:53] Speaker A: You're really, you're really talking about minimizing the amount of change in behavior that you're asking for. Yeah, it's just, yeah, the set it and forget it thing means you don't have to change your behavior that much because that's where the friction comes in.
[00:48:07] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe the first two weeks or the month requires a little bit of effort to get it installed and get it activated, but then you just let it go and you're happy to.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: I had that with the card abandonment product for a while because people would set up and literally not log in for three months at a time.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: Another good one. Yeah. I have a bunch of friends who have incredible SaaS businesses, and the thing just drives.
Charles Pileski runs spark shipping. It's like a zapier for e commerce. It just connects these obscure e commerce providers and inventory management systems and all these different things. You just plug it into your system and it drives value month after month.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: I have one last one, and this is connected to why I think the engineering team is so excited.
AI, brother AI. What are we doing here? I raise money from VC's. What are we doing here?
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Okay, all right. Talk to me. What are we looking at? What's exciting? Okay, what does that mean?
[00:49:10] Speaker A: Like, yeah, all right.
One of the most important things about AI is that because it's new, there isn't as much competition. So not only is it a growing field, but a lot of things haven't been done and solved and figured out and competed away on a margin front. So that's really exciting.
There's also a lot of investment and more importantly, there's a lot of spending. Like, revenue is growing.
I've been looking at these graphs and these presentations. When I went to the Montgomery summit for March Capital, our lead investor, a few weeks ago, they had this slide that showed the adoption and the enterprise of tech. I might have talked about this before, but it was like Internet 20 years, cloud ten years, mobile five years. And then AI is predicted to be like two or three years.
And so I think it took SaaS as an industry ten years to get to 2 billion in ARR.
And AI has already done it.
[00:50:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:25] Speaker A: So the revenue is the most important part. And that is mostly aimed at cost reduction. It's mostly aimed at headcount. That that's the truth.
[00:50:33] Speaker B: It's going, it's replacing people.
[00:50:35] Speaker A: It's replacing people. It makes people more.
[00:50:36] Speaker B: I mean, it just is.
I totally see it. I personally use AI every single day. I'm a big user of like copilot and chat GPT. Okay.
And I totally, and, you know, we've talked about, like, there was, I mean, crypto is, is sort of having another moment right now. But like, I still, even despite that, I still question, like, the use case and the worldwide adoption as a trend.
[00:51:08] Speaker A: But, like, not a problem on AI.
[00:51:10] Speaker B: Not a problem on AI. Like, you totally see how it fits in. And you can see activity across so many different industries.
It's so obvious. Like, so many different use cases are so painfully obvious with AI.
The question I do still have, though, and it's also obvious that there are already very successful SaaS businesses built completely on AI as the core infrastructure level stuff. Yeah.
And everything from bootstrapped businesses up to VC.
I still, at the same time, despite all that, I question who is really spending on AI tools these days. I mean sure I pay for chat, GPT, but like, and I guess I pay for copilot. I think I, yeah, I think. I guess that's a paid thing. I pay for that. But like I'm not seeing, like if I think about my, my father who's a lawyer, he's not buying AI tools.
[00:52:15] Speaker A: You know, his law firm might, you.
[00:52:19] Speaker B: Know, but not like, not this year, you know. Yeah, there's a bit of widespread, there's.
[00:52:26] Speaker A: A bit of a disconnect in my ideal of a self serve product and the fact that a huge amount of spending is coming from enterprise. So that is a bit of an issue.
[00:52:36] Speaker B: But even like where is that spending going? Like is it just going to Microsoft or is it going to lots of niche tools? I don't.
[00:52:44] Speaker A: So a lot of it's going to the big companies write Google and Microsoft and OpenAI and those others are becoming more point solutions for like legal documents. And you know, speaking of March Capital, it makes me think of one investment that they just made and is public now. 50 plus million dollar series A in an AI company for dental x ray analysis.
So you just don't need as many people looking at x rays when you have a machine that looks at it and says here's what's good, what's bad, what to look at. Basically the same decision making as a dentist. So that leads me to, I think the thing that I'm most excited about, that verticalization just got started.
It just, it's so horizontal now. Everything's like AI for developers, AI for, you know, these huge verticals. Everything is super, super wide and the verticalization just started. That means taking existing tech. So this is actually an interesting thing from like a product point of view.
I think there is a huge potential to build really healthy businesses using UX UI branding, positioning and marketing while leveraging 90% of existing tech. So you're building on top of chat, GPT or on one of these other frameworks and other models, but you're taking that dragging, dragging it over into a particular vertical and you're branding it, positioning it, marketing it. The UI, the UX on top of the experience solves the actual problem for the niche, for the industry. But you as a software company, you're not doing the hardest part of the tech.
[00:54:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:30] Speaker A: And that, I love that opportunity.
[00:54:34] Speaker B: Oh yeah, totally. Like being able to leverage these, you know, large language model APIs you know what I saw? That's the big unlock in terms of being able to build products with this.
[00:54:43] Speaker A: Here's an example.
[00:54:44] Speaker B: I still wonder about which categories of software can. Are people actively, like, you think about the big categories of software, like CRMs and help desks. Right?
[00:54:53] Speaker A: But what software. Oh, okay, okay. No, go ahead. Like, which pieces are being replaced?
[00:54:59] Speaker B: Yeah, like, those are still, like, I guess people like software tools that are used by people. And like the obvious one that you see everywhere, there's hundreds of tools that do, like content creation done by AI. Obvious use case, plug in your YouTube video, your podcast, turn it into AI written blog posts or tweets or whatever.
And speaking of content, earlier, I've been trying different tools, trying to make that work for my personal content. I just still come back to like, I want to write my own words.
Even trying to edit it myself, I end up being like the time it took me to edit the AI written stuff. I could have just written this myself, but that's just me personally. I wonder maybe more higher volume marketing content can be written by AI. I don't know.
[00:55:53] Speaker A: I think that goes in the wrong direction because all of the established players are going to just add AI features, right? So HubSpot can, like, don't come out with a new AI CRM because HubSpot's just going to add AI features and it's, you know, I mean, I think.
[00:56:09] Speaker B: Just yesterday I saw, I think the latest update in Google Chrome is like any, any field on the Internet. Chrome, like Google's AI thing, can, like help you write, like all these, all these like, SaaS tools, like help Scout and notion, they build in like an AI button to help you write content. Yes, but now it's built into Chrome. Now it's like, no matter what you're using, like, have Chrome write it like that.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: Why compete at that level? Yeah, exactly. I think the most interesting part about the position that we're in is to go towards something novel that doesn't exist because it couldn't exist in some form or another. Here's an example. I have a friend, his company is working with power companies on their solar panels. And up until now, these companies have people walk the fields and look at solar panels and analyze the health of the panel and how efficient it is.
Now they're taking drones, they're taking pictures, and AI is analyzing the reflection and heat and all that. And it's telling them, here's your efficiency, here's the problems. Here are the solar panels that are messed up that you need to replace. Here are the areas that are messed up. So instead of employing people to walk fields now using drones plus AI, and it saves them a ton of money. So it's not adding an AI feature that someone else is going to add anyway that has more distribution than you. It's something new. Another example is a company came out today that shows uses camera overhead of a chef and the chef is making a perfect version of the dish. And then the camera can be used to analyze how other people are making it and kind of work on it to perfect it so that your cooks and your applebee's throughout the country are able to get feedback on, here's what you're doing wrong and here's what you need to improve so that it's consistent throughout. It's things like that, they're novel, they can be done.
[00:58:05] Speaker B: How do we go about finding these niche pain points in these industries that like, how do you just walk into a foreign industry that we've never heard of?
Yeah, I feel like all the successful SaaS companies that you see walking around Microconf, it's like, oh, they got a brother in law who is a kitchen countertop installer. So they happen to have this insider track into this really tricky, painful problem that they can build a SaaS around.
How do we find that if you're not connected to someone just knocking on doors? Show me what you're working on. Take me through your process. Tell me about your industry, Mike.
[00:58:47] Speaker A: I think it requires curiosity, research, willingness to talk to people, willingness to copy others, and willingness to take the ideas of one person or company and apply it to a different area.
All these different things combined, it happens to be like my favorite part of business. So I'm really excited about it. And what I told the engineering team was, it is my, I'm very open ideas, but it is my primary responsibility to find the idea. It is your secondary responsibility to look for ideas, but it is your primary responsibility to get up to speed on models, on how to build with AI. And that's when their eyes lit up and they were like, oh, this crazy, this crazy guy is going to pay us a salary to get up to speed on AI and then we're going to launch an AI product. And that's when people on the team were like, all right, I'm game. It's super cool to falling behind. And now, now this is my favorite company ever.
[00:59:45] Speaker B: This is what's so exciting about your situation right now is that you have these resources and the team around you to be able to prototype and do like the technical research and the technical you're exploring for product ideas, but they can do the technical exploration. Like, for me, I haven't had any time or bandwidth or active projects for me to explore building with AI because we haven't done that in clarity flow. And I'm not currently working on any products that are AI focused. So I don't have the resources to just go explore what's possible on the tech side unless I have an active project to work on.
So that's really awesome benefit to be able to.
That would. Again, it's also like a challenge of me, like being like a solo founder and not having a partner where maybe like one partner is more technical, the other is more like product focused.
Yeah, it's a really, really good situation because you can make a lot of progress on the underlying tech research.
Your team can just be throwing out prototypes while you're, while you're exploring ideas, you know.
[01:01:00] Speaker A: Right. And so I think what we'll talk about on this podcast a lot over the next few months is what is the right process of launching a product today?
Right. If you look at it like one of the, one of the frameworks I have in my mind is like this like four month experiment. And if it's a four month experiment, you basically should start marketing on day one, get a landing page out. One of the cool things now is waiting lists are back. Like, so that's, that's totally cool. Now people join waiting lists, especially for AI products.
And so you should basically start marketing on day one and building a, talking to people in the industry, doing whatever you can, and then call it month two, like the, you know, a day 60, launch an mvp and have it in the market for two months, and then kind of decide, is this an experiment worth continuing or should we drop it?
[01:01:48] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. I mean, the cool thing is being able to build the core thing that a customer group wants, build that part of it first, and then build the bells and whistles out around it. I really think that I heard Jason fried talking about this with their recent launch of the hey calendar thing, which I haven't used that product, but I'm always a fan of how they go about launching these. And he was talking about, we focused on the most unique, differentiating factors first, those features first, and we didn't launch with a bunch of table stakes that other calendars have.
[01:02:28] Speaker A: Right. Bit counterintuitive.
[01:02:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of us get hung up on, like, if we're gonna compete in a competitive market, the only way to enter that market is to match all the features that the other help desks or the other calendars or the other CRMs have. And then layer on our. Our special sauce on top of that. Like, no, start with the special sauce, and the customers who really, really care about that special sauce, they will. They will deal with the other shortcomings of, like, of not having the other. Yeah.
[01:03:03] Speaker A: You are attracting the right people for your approach.
[01:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:03:07] Speaker A: And then lastly, I'm. I'm open to acquiring existing products, and that's part of why I want to go to Microconf and see what people are doing. I'm definitely open to someone who's gotten a little bit of traction, but doesn't have the, you know, resources or experience or desire to kind of keep going and then have them join forces. I mean, I'm. I'm. I'm open to anything at this point.
[01:03:28] Speaker B: Super interesting people.
[01:03:31] Speaker A: Cool.
All right, well, it is sunny and, like, 60. I'm gonna go take a walk.
[01:03:38] Speaker B: Hell, yeah.
[01:03:38] Speaker A: I think thesis did good. I think this new nootropic did good.
[01:03:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so, too. I think. I think we found the new. The new special formula for this podcast.
Yep.
[01:03:49] Speaker A: I don't know if you saw. I tweeted earlier, I think maybe yesterday. There's this drink on the market called breeze. Bro, these guys are selling drugs online.
They're selling a six pack of, like, a mushroom THC drink. And I'm like, let me try this thing. Cause that looks interesting, bro. It's drugs. They're on shopify with a credit card on the web.
Selling drugs, using the mail, shipping across state lines.
[01:04:19] Speaker B: It's the wild west. It's the Wild west.
[01:04:22] Speaker A: People go to jail or they're gonna be billionaires. One or the other. But I tried one. I had one can. I went off into outer space, and I immediately went downstairs. Cause it's in my fridge where my kids live. And I dumped all six of them. I mean, the remaining five into the sink. Like, I cannot have mushrooms laying around the goddamn house.
I tweeted the founder. I was like, dude, like, what? So, obviously, what are you doing? I respect it, but Jesus.
[01:04:49] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[01:04:51] Speaker A: Go breathe.
[01:04:51] Speaker B: It's so funny, like, the difference between us, like, for me, like, I need to be watching a movie or, like, just playing some video games. I can't get on a podcast after this stuff. Like, no way. I would just be, like, silent. That would be a terrible episode.
[01:05:05] Speaker A: Well, I'm looking for new product ideas. I gotta be out there.
[01:05:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right, you know?
Yeah, man.
All right, everyone.
[01:05:13] Speaker A: Thanks for listening.
[01:05:14] Speaker B: All right, later, bro.
