Podcast appearances and mentions of amy hoy

With uncertainty surrounding the future of the BMR market, Amy Hoy joins the show to discuss how it affects your operation and what you can do about it.

In this week's special guest podcast, Alex Hillman (of Stacking the Bricks and 30x500) joins Andrew to coach him on early stage marketing at MetaMonster. They talk through Andrew's recent failed launch (and why not to worry about it too much), what he's doing differently now, and how your identity as a founder can impact your marketing. Plus, what pro wrestlers get right about identity and storytelling and how to create great content when you aren't an expert in your niche.There's so much great info packed into this discussion, enjoy! By the way, check out Alex's description of 30x500 at the 12:11 mark for a masterclass in positioning.  Links:Follow Andrew on BlueSky: @andrewaskins.comAndrew's writing: https://www.andrewaskins.com/MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/Follow Sean on BlueSky: @seanqsun.comSean's writing: https://seanqsun.com/Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/Follow Alex on BlueSky: @alexhillman.comJumpstart your product empire in 12 weeks with LaunchFTWFor more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.Transcript:00:00:01.42AndrewAll right, so we've got a little bit of a different type of podcast episode. Usually it is me and Sean riffing on the things that we are building, but I'm super excited today because Alex Hillman is here to join us. So Sean is at a conference, so unfortunately couldn't be here today. But as I mentioned on the last episode, Alex very kindly took time out of his day to roast the shit out of my half-assed launch attempt. And then was even more generous and said, hey, I'll take an hour out of my day to come talk to you some more. Let's talk about this in public so that people can learn from this as we work through it together, is super cool. And for anyone who doesn't know Alex's background, Alex has been partnered with Amy Hoy on stacking the bricks and 30 by 500. They've been working on that for, you said 15 years?00:00:58.53Alex Hillman15 years, yeah.00:01:00.15Andrew15 years. I've been reading Stacking the Bricks for ages and really, really love all the content that you all have put out, have looked up to you and Amy for a long time. Still apparently didn't learn anything from from all of that reading, but i'm I'm trying to learn it now.00:01:15.29AndrewSo yeah, we're gonna get into it. But Alex, thanks so much for for being here. Just so appreciate you, man.00:01:22.85Alex HillmanYeah, i'm I'm happy to. This is going to be a good time. And, you know, I think the the common theme through all of this is and there's a lot of folks that read our stuff like our stuff and then willfully do the opposite or think that they did. what We told them and I go, I don't know where you got that from because those words never came out of my mouth. So I say all of that with, you know, with love and, you know, the the roast.00:01:47.38Alex Hillmancame from, from that point of view as well. You know, I think that there's, there's cool people doing cool things on the internet. And I know you're, you're a fan of the build in public, trying to eat those and mindset.00:01:59.19Alex HillmanI'm a fan of the help in public. And so that's my thought here is if I can help you, whether it's through a roast on blue sky or a podcast, and there's other folks that that benefit from that perspective, then that's a,00:02:08.00Andrewyeah00:02:13.34Alex Hillmanand at least three-way win. I win, you win, and and whoever listens wins. So really, really stoked to get into this.00:02:18.10AndrewAwesome.00:02:19.52Alex HillmanI think you're working on stuff that is common and and easy to get wrong.00:02:25.03AndrewYeah, appreciate that. Yeah, so to give folks some context, because I imagine there might be people who will listen to this episode who who don't typically listen to small efforts. So a few weeks ago, I sort of kind of launched a alpha-y type thing. Like I'm having trouble even describing it because it was so like half formed. But I basically like got in my head,00:02:53.09Andrewwe're okay I'm building this mailing list, I'm getting people on this list, I need to convert these people to you know potential paying users and we don't have a product yet so I need to like kind of pre-sell them but I don't want to actually ask them for money yet so I'm gonna pitch them on being a founding user and I sent out this this one email and basically said like Hey, I want you to be a founding user. You'll get a couple of things. And in return, I want a lot of your time. Click here to sign up. And I'm sort of being facetious, partially to protect my ego, because I candidly was like, once I realized like, kind of how bad I messed up, I was a little embarrassed. Like I had this feeling of like,00:03:44.44AndrewI have run a business before. I thought I knew how to do content marketing and knew how to do some of this stuff. I've been reading your content for years and so um so um realizing that I was making a lot of rookie mistakes was a little embarrassing and so even now as I'm describing it, I'm catching myself using self-deprecating humor as a little bit of a shield.00:04:04.73Alex Hillmanthat cushion00:04:05.14Andrewhello But but i mean that's kind of that's that's the basic context. I tried to pitch people on being early adopters of some sort. It was a very half-formed ask.00:04:17.85Andrewand and unsurprisingly, the result was kind of crickets. I got one person who responded to me and said, hey, I'd be interested. other than that, no responses. And so I tried to share about this on Blue Sky in that building public mindset and just be like, hey, anyone what what do you all see when you make these kinds of asks early on? And that's when Alex jumped in and was like, hey, tell me more. like what What was the context here? How much did you email these people and And so, yeah, why don't I kick it over to you and you can kind of give that initial context from your side and, you know, we can talk about some of the advice you got and then we'll get into what we're doing next.00:04:57.12Alex Hillmanyeah Yeah, I mean, ah you you know first of all, first of all like congrats on shipping anything. like for like to to not Not to backpedal the mistakes that were made, but you know the the making mistakes is is the result of of doing things and trying things. And one of the beautiful things about launches is that there's you know I think there's a myth of a single launch, a single chance.00:05:22.14AndrewMm hmm.00:05:23.16Alex HillmanAnd the trut...

In another special episode recorded on the grounds of World Dairy Expo, Scott is joined by Amy Hoy to discuss how biologicals are improving yield and nutrition in corn silage.

Brennan Dunn is the author of This Is Personal, The Art of Delivering the Right Email at the Right Time.For the last decade, Brennan Dunn has been building "email-first" businesses.Currently, he owns and operates two companies: RightMessage, a software company that builds personalized marketing software, and Double Your Freelancing, an online community offering courses, events, and other resources to 60,000+ freelancers and agencies.In this episode, we discuss:

Todays guest is the Founder and CEO at zencastr.com where he helps podcasters create and successfully find and grow their audience. Josh bootstrapped Zencastr to profitability while traveling the world.   Josh is now a father of two amazing girls. His personal interests are gardening, woodworking, snowboarding, guitar, synthesizers.   Josh Nielsen shared in this episode: His journey as a founder, emphasizing geographic independence as a driving factor due to visa restrictions and family circumstances The power of Zencastr for podcast hosts Zen.ai helps you find an audience for your podcast. Demonstration of Zen.ai and how to make content quickly How Josh turned Zencaster into a successful business without raising external funds initially but focusing on achieving financial goals instead The need for geographic independence and quicker route to revenue was a driving force to start the business and resolve issues for podcasters. Why he gave the tool for free for 2 years and then added a paid function and got to $17k MRR How he found 100 users through twitter, by identifying people who were getting challenged on the quality of their podcast He reflects on his journey of starting a business and the challenges he faced As his business grew, he took on a co-founder (Adrian Lopez) to help scale the business, which led eventually to VC funding. Why VC funding is not the path for everyone. Insights on leadership and why Josh was not passionate about managing people, and got stuck doing everything himself, anyhow things changed when he  His life changing question: What can I make to make a difference in the world? Steve Jobs quote that inspired his life and journey in business: “LSD shows you there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” And much more…    Resources Mentioned In The Show: zencastr.com try.zen.ai Amy Hoy https://30x500.com/academy/   If you would like more insights on profit maximization for your business, visit www.ProfitHive.com.au

In this episode we introduce Rob-See-Co's Forage Portfolio Manager, Amy Hoy. Amy has a wealth of experience in the livestock and silage world, so you won't want to miss this one!

When North Star started, we initially resisted requests to create persuasive copy for our clients, because we didn't know how to write it without feeling a bit...skeezy.  Part of the reason we felt hesitant was because we didn't have a structure, and we certainly didn't want to sound like used car salespeople. And then Marie discovered Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman's formula called PDF: Pain Dream Fix. In this episode, Jessi and Marie will discuss applying those three components to persuasive copy. 

Jane Portman is a UI/UX consultant specializing in web application design, founder of UI Breakfast and Userlist. At Userlist, Jane's goal is to provide flawless onboarding and engagement for SaaS companies through a simple customer messaging platform. Jane has also been running UI Breakfast Podcast since 2014. In this episode, we talked about: How did Jane get into design? Software design and Saas Products Life as UI/UX consultant Productized Consulting Jane's workflow and process in writing a book How to network? Podcasting to build a network What is Userlist and what designers need to think about as entrepreneurs And MUCH MORE! Links: UI Breakfast Podcast Better Done Than Perfect https://userlist.com/ UI Audit by Jane Portman Authority by Nathan Berry Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick Stacking the Bricks with Amy Hoy - https://stackingthebricks.com/ The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick USE PEK300 as a code to get $300 OFF - https://userlist.com/

Jane Portman is a UI/UX consultant specializing in web application design, founder of UI Breakfast and Userlist. At Userlist, Jane's goal is to provide flawless onboarding and engagement for SaaS companies through a simple customer messaging platform.Jane has also been running UI Breakfast Podcast since 2014.In this episode, we talked about:How did Jane get into design?Software design and Saas ProductsLife as UI/UX consultantProductized ConsultingJane's workflow and process in writing a bookHow to network?Podcasting to build a network What is Userlist and what designers need to think about as entrepreneursAnd MUCH MORE!Links:UI Breakfast PodcastBetter Done Than Perfecthttps://userlist.com/ UI Audit by Jane PortmanAuthority by Nathan BerryWrite Useful Books by Rob FitzpatrickStacking the Bricks with Amy Hoy - https://stackingthebricks.com/ The Mom Test by Rob FitzpatrickUSE PEK300 as a code to get $300 OFF - https://userlist.com/

Listen to the Changelog: https://changelog.com/podcast/467Essays: https://www.swyx.io/LIP https://www.swyx.io/api-economy https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go TranscriptJerod Santo: So swyx, we have been tracking your work for years; well, you've been Learning in Public for years, so I've been (I guess) watching you learn, but we've never had you on the show, so welcome to The Changelog.Shawn Wang: Thank you. Long-time listener, first-time guest, I guess... [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Happy to have you here.Adam Stacoviak: Very excited to have you here.Jerod Santo: So tell us a little bit of your story, because I think it informs the rest of our conversation. We're gonna go somewhat deep into some of your ideas, some of the dots you've been connecting as you participate and watch the tech industry... But I think for this conversation it's probably useful to get to know you, and how you got to be where you are. Not the long, detailed story, but maybe the elevator pitch of your recent history. Do you wanna hook us up?Shawn Wang: For sure. For those who want the long history, I did a 2,5-hour podcast with Quincy Larson from FreeCodeCamp, so you can go check that out if you want. The short version is I'm born and raised in Singapore, came to the States for college, and was totally focused on finance. I thought people who were in the finance industry rules the world, they were masters of the universe... And I graduated just in time for the financial crisis, so not a great place to be in. But I worked my way up and did about 6-7 years of investment banking and hedge funds, primarily trading derivatives and tech stocks. And the more I covered tech stocks, the more I realized "Oh, actually a) the technology is taking over the world, b) all the value is being created pre-IPO, so I was investing in public stocks, after they were basically done growing... And you're kind of just like picking over the public remains. That's not exactly true, but...Jerod Santo: Yeah, tell that to Shopify...Shawn Wang: I know, exactly, right?Adam Stacoviak: And GitLab.Shawn Wang: People do IPO and have significant growth after, but that's much more of a risk than at the early stage, where there's a playbook... And I realized that I'd much rather be value-creating than investing. So I changed careers at age 30, I did six months of FreeCodeCamp, and after six months of FreeCodeCamp - you know, I finished it, and that's record time for FreeCodeCamp... But I finished it and felt not ready, so I enrolled myself in a paid code camp, Full Stack Academy in New York, and came out of it working for Two Sigma as a frontend developer. I did that for a year, until Netlify came along and offered me a dev rel job. I took that, and that's kind of been my claim to fame; it's what most people know me for, which is essentially being a speaker and a writer from my Netlify days, from speaking about React quite a bit.[04:13] I joined AWS in early 2020, lasted a year... I actually was very keen on just learning the entire AWS ecosystem. You know, a frontend developer approaching AWS is a very intimidating task... But Temporal came along, and now I'm head of developer experience at Temporal.Adam Stacoviak: It's an interesting path. I love the -- we're obviously huge fans of FreeCodeCamp, and Quincy, and all the work he's done, and the rest of the team has done to make FreeCodeCamp literally free, globally... So I love to see -- it makes you super-happy inside just to know how that work impacts real people.Like, you see things happen out there, and you think "Oh, that's impacting", but then you really meet somebody, and 1) you said you're a long-time listener, and now you're on the show, so it just really -- like, having been in the trenches so long, and just see all this over-time pay off just makes me really believe in that whole "Slow and steady, keep showing up, do what needs done", and eventually things happen. I just love that.Shawn Wang: Yeah. There's an infinite game mentality to this. But I don't want to diminish the concept of free, so... It bothers me a little, because Quincy actually struggles a lot with the financial side of things. He supports millions of people on like a 300k budget. 300k. If every single one of us who graduated at FreeCodeCamp and went on to a successful tech career actually paid for our FreeCodeCamp education - which is what I did; we started the hashtag. It hasn't really taken off, but I started a hashtag called #payitbackwards. Like, just go back, once you're done -- once you can afford it, just go back and pay what you thought it was worth. For me, I've paid 20k, and I hope that everyone who graduates FreeCodeCamp does that, to keep it going.Adam Stacoviak: Well, I mean, why not...?Shawn Wang: I'd also say one thing... The important part of being free is that I can do it on nights and weekends and take my time to decide if I want to change careers. So it's not just a free replacement to bootcamps, it actually is an async, self-guided, dip-your-toe-in-the-water, try-before-you-buy type of thing for people who might potentially change their lives... And that's exactly what happened for me. I kept my day job until the point I was like "Okay, I like enough of this... I'm still not good, but I like enough of this that I think I could do this full-time."Adam Stacoviak: I like the #payitbackwards hashtag. I wish it had more steam, I suppose.Jerod Santo: We should throw some weight behind that, Adam, and see if we can...Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. Well, you know, you think about Lambda School, for example - and I don't wanna throw any shade by any means, because I think what Austin has done with Lambda... He's been on Founders Talk before, and we talked deeply about this idea of making a CS degree cost nothing, and there's been a lot of movement on that front there... But you essentially go through a TL;DR of Lambda as you go through it, and you pay it after you get a job if you hit certain criteria, and you pay it based upon your earnings. So why not, right? Why not have a program like that for FreeCodeCamp, now that you actually have to commit to it... But it's a way. I love that you paid that back and you made that an avenue, an idea of how you could pay back FreeCodeCamp, despite the commitment not being there.Jerod Santo: Right.Shawn Wang: Yeah. And Quincy is very dedicated to it being voluntary. He thinks that people have different financial situations. I don't have kids, so I can afford a bit more. People should have that sort of moral obligation rather than legal obligation.I should mention that Lambda School is currently being accused of some fairly substantial fraud against its students...Jerod Santo: Oh, really?Shawn Wang: Yeah, it actually just came out like two days ago.Adam Stacoviak: I saw that news too, on Monday.Shawn Wang: Yeah. It's not evidenced in the court of law, it's one guy digging up dirt; let's kind of put this in perspective. But still, it's very serious allegations, and it should be investigated. That said, the business of changing careers and the business of teaching people to code, and this innovation of Income Share Agreements (ISA), where it actually makes financial sense for people to grow bootcamps and fund bootcamps - this is something I strongly support... Whether or not it should be a venture-funded thing, where you try to go for 10x growth every year - probably not... [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Yeah...Jerod Santo: So after FreeCodeCamp you didn't feel quite ready, so you did do a bootcamp... Did you feel ready after that?Shawn Wang: [08:03] Yeah. [laughs] I did a reflection, by the way, of my first year of learning to code, so people can look it up... It's called "No zero days. My path to learning to code", and I think I posted it on Hacker News. And doing everything twice actually helped me a lot. Because before I came into my paid bootcamp, I had already spun up some React apps. I had already started to mess with WebPack, and I knew enough that I wasn't understanding it very much, I was just following the instructions. But the second time you do things, you have to space, to really try to experiment, to actually read the docs, which most people don't do, and actually try to understand what the hell it is you're doing. And I felt that I had an edge over the other people in my bootcamp because I did six months of FreeCodeCamp prior.Jerod Santo: So this other thing that you do, which not everybody does, is this Learning in Public idea... And you have this post, Learn in Public. You call it "The fastest way to learn", or the fastest way to build your expertise - networking, and second brain. I'm not sure what the second brain is, so help us out with that one... But also, why is learning in public faster than learning in private.Shawn Wang: Yeah. This is a reflection that came from me understanding the difference, qualitatively, between why I'm doing so well in my tech career versus my finance career. In finance, everything is private, meaning the investment memos that I wrote, the trade ideas that I had - they're just from a company; they're intellectual property of my company. In fact, I no longer own them. Some of my best work has been in that phase, and it's locked up in an email inbox somewhere, and I'll never see it again. And that's because tech is a fundamentally open and positive-sum industry, where if you share things, you don't lose anything; you actually gain from sharing things... Whereas in finance it's a zero-sum battle against who's got the secret first and who can act on it first.And I think when you're in tech, you should exploit that. I think that we have been trained our entire lives to be zero-sum, from just like the earliest days of our school, where we learn, we keep it to ourselves to try to pass the test, try to get the best scores, try to get the best jobs, the best colleges, and all that, because everything's positional. For you to win, others have to lose. But I don't see tech in that way, primarily because tech is still growing so fast. There's multiple ways for people to succeed, and that's just the fundamental baseline. You layer on top of that a bunch of other psychological phenomenon.I've been really fascinated by this, by what it is so effective. First of all, you have your skin in the game, meaning that a lot of times when your name is on the blog posts out there, or your name is on the talk that you gave, your face is there, and people can criticize you, you're just incentivized to learn better, instead of just "Oh, I'll read this and then I'll try to remember it." No, it doesn't really stick as much. So having skin in the game really helps.When you get something wrong in public, there are two effects that happen. First is people will climb over broken glass to correct you, because that's how the internet does. There's a famous XKCD comic where like "I can't go to bed yet." "Why?" "Someone's wrong on the internet. I have to correct them."Jerod Santo: Right.Shawn Wang: So people are incentivized to fix your flaws for you - and that's fantastic - if you have a small ego.Jerod Santo: I was gonna say, that requires thick skin.Shawn Wang: Yeah, exactly. So honestly -- and that's a barrier for a lot of people. They cannot get over this embarrassment. What I always say is you can learn so much on the internet, for the low, low price of your ego. If we can get over that, we can learn so much, just because you don't care. And the way to get over it is to just realize that the version that you put out today is the version you should be embarrassed about a year from now, because that shows that you've grown. So you divorce your identity from your work, and just let people criticize your work; it's fine, because it was done by you, before you knew what you know today. And that's totally fine.And then the second part, which is that once you've gotten something wrong in public, it's just so embarrassing that you just remember it in a much clearer fashion. [laughter] This built a feedback loop, because once you started doing this, and you show people that you respond to feedback, then it builds a feedback and an expectation that you'll do the next thing, and people respond to the next thing... It becomes a conversation, rather than a solitary endeavor of you just learning the source material.So I really like that viral feedback loop. It helps you grow your reputation... Because this is not just useful for people who are behind you; a lot of people, when they blog, when they write, when they speak, they're talking down. They're like "I have five years experience in this. Here's the intro to whatever. Here's the approach to beginners." They don't actually get much out of that.[12:17] That's really good, by the way, for beginners; that's really important, that experts in the field share their knowledge. They don't see this blogging or this speaking as a way to level up in terms of speaking to their experts in their fields. But I think it's actually very helpful. You can be helpful to people behind you, you can be helpful to people around you, but you can actually be helpful to people ahead of you, because you're helping to basically broadcast or personalize their message. They can check their messaging and see - if you're getting this wrong, then they're getting something wrong on their end, docs-wise, or messaging-wise. That becomes a really good conversation. I've interacted with mentors that way. That's much more how I prefer to interact with my mentors than DM-ing and saying "Hey, can you be my mentor?", which is an unspecified, unpaid, indefinitely long job, which nobody really enjoys. I like project-based mentorship, I like occasional mentorship... I really think that that develops when you learn in public.Adam Stacoviak: I've heard it say that "Today is the tomorrow you hope for."Shawn Wang: Wow.Adam Stacoviak: Because today is always tomorrow at some point, right? Like, today is the day, and today you were hoping for tomorrow to be better...Jerod Santo: I think by definition today is not tomorrow...Adam Stacoviak: No, today is the tomorrow that you hoped for... Meaning like "Seize your moment. It's here."Jerod Santo: Carpe diem. Gotcha.Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, kind of a thing like that.Shawn Wang: I feel a little shady -- obviously, I agree, but also, I feel a little shady whenever I venture into this territory, because then it becomes very motivational speaking-wise, and I'm not about that. [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Kind of... But I think you're in the right place; keep showing up where you need to be - that kind of thing. But I think your perspective though comes from the fact that you had this finance career, and a different perspective on the way work and the way a career progressed. And so you have a dichotomy essentially between two different worlds; one where it's private, and one where it's open. That to me is pretty interesting, how you were able to tie those two together and see things differently. Because I think too often sometimes in tech, especially staying around late at night, correcting someone on the internet, you're just so deeply in one industry, and you have almost a bubble around you. You have one lens for which you see the world. And you've been able to have multi-faceted perspectives of this world, as well as others, because of a more informed career path.Jerod Santo: Yeah. When you talk about finance as a zero-sum game, I feel like there's actually been moves now to actually open up about finance as well; I'm not sure if either of you have tracked the celebrity rise of Cathie Wood and Ark Invest, and a lot of the moves that she's doing in public. They're an investment fund, and they will actually publish their moves at the end of every day. Like, "We sold these stocks. We bought these stocks." And people laughed at that for a while, but because she's been successful with early on Bitcoin, early with Tesla, she's very much into growth stocks - because of that, people started to follow her very closely and just emulate. And when she makes moves now, it makes news on a lot of the C-SPANs and the... Is C-SPAN the Congress one? What's the one that's the finance one...?Shawn Wang: CNBC?Jerod Santo: CNBC, not C-SPAN. And so she's very much learning in public. She's making her moves public, she's learning as she goes, and to a certain degree it's paid off, it's paid dividends in her career. Now, I'm not sure if everyone's doing that... When you look at crypto investors, like - okay, pseudonymous, but a lot of that stuff, public ledgers. So there's moves that are being made in public there as well. So I wonder if eventually some of that mentality will change. What do you think about that?Shawn Wang: [15:45] It's definitely changed for -- there's always been celebrity investors, and people have been copying the Buffett portfolio for 30 years. So none of that is new. What is new is that Cathie Wood is running an ETF, and just by way of regulation and by way of innovation, she does have to report those changes. [laughs] So mutual funds, hedge fund holdings - these have all been public, and people do follow them. And you're always incentivized to talk your book after you've established your position in your book...Jerod Santo: Right, but you establish it first.Shawn Wang: ...so none of that has changed. But yeah, Cathie has been leading an open approach...Jerod Santo: Is it the rate of disclosure perhaps that's new? Because it seems like it's more real-time than it has historically...Shawn Wang: Yeah. I mean, she's running an ETF, which is new, actually... Because most people just run mutual funds or hedge funds, and those are much more private. The other two I'll probably shout out is Patrick O'Shaughnessy who's been running I guess a fund of funds, and he's been fairly open. He actually adopted the "learn in public" slogan in the finance field, independently of me. And then finally, the other one is probably Ted Seides, who is on the institutional investor side of things. So he invests for universities, and teachers pensions, and stuff like that. So all these people - yeah, they've been leading that... I'm not sure if it's spreading, or they've just been extraordinarily successful in celebrity because of it.Adam Stacoviak: This idea of "in public" is happening. You see people too, like -- CopyAI is building in public... This idea of learning in public, or building in public, or exiting in public... Whatever the public might be, it's happening more and more... And I think it's definitely similar to the way that open source moves around. It's open, so it's visible to everyone. There's no barrier to see what's happening, whether it's positive or negative, with whatever it is in public. They're leveraging this to their advantage, because it's basically free marketing. And that's how the world has evolved to use social media. Social media has inherently been public, because it's social...Jerod Santo: Sure.Adam Stacoviak: Aside from Facebook being gated, with friends and stuff like that... Twitter is probably the most primary example of that, maybe even TikTok, where if I'm a creator on TikTok, I almost can't control who sees my contact. I assume it's for the world, and theoretically, controlled by the algorithm... Because if I live in Europe, I may not see content in the U.S, and the algorithm says no, or whatever. But it's almost like everybody is just in public in those spaces, and they're leveraging it to their advantage... Which is an interesting place to be at in the world. There was never an opportunity before; you couldn't do it at that level, at that scale, ten years ago, twenty years ago. It's a now moment.Jerod Santo: Yeah. Swyx, can you give us an example of something learned in public? Do you basically mean like blog when you've learned something, or ask questions? What does learning in public actually mean when it comes to -- say, take a technology. Maybe you don't understand Redux. I could raise my hand on that one... [laughter] How could I learn that in public?Shawn Wang: There are a bunch of things that you can try. You can record a livestream of you going through the docs, and that's useful to maintainers, understanding "Hey, is this useful or not?" And that's immediately useful. It's so tangible.I actually have a list -- I have a talk about this on the blog post as well... Just a suggestion of things you can do. It's not just blogging. You can speak, you can draw comics, cheatsheets are really helpful... I think Amy Hoy did a Ruby on Rails cheatsheet that basically everyone has printed out and stapled to their wall, or something... And if you can do a nice cheatsheet, I think that's also a way for you to internalize those things that you're trying to learn anyway, and it just so happens to benefit others.So I really like this idea that whatever content you're doing, it's learning exhaust, it's a side effect of you learning, and you just happen to put it out there; you understand what formats work for you, because you have abnormal talents. Especially if you can draw, do that. People love developers who can draw. And then you just put it out there, and you win anyway just by doing it. You don't need an audience. You get one if you do this long enough, but you don't need an audience right away. And you win whether or not people participate with you. It's a single-player game that can become a multiplayer game.Specifically for Redux - you know, go through source code, or go through the docs, build a sample app, do like a simple little YouTube video on it... Depending on the maturity, you may want to try to speak at a meetup, or whatever... You don't have to make everything a big deal. I'm trying to remove the perception from people that everything has to be this big step, like it has to be top of Hacker News, or something. No. It could just be helpful for one person. I often write blog posts with one persona in mind. I mean, I don't name that person, but if you focus on that target persona, actually often it does better than when you try to make some giant thesis that shakes the world...Adam Stacoviak: [20:22] Yeah. Too often we don't move because we feel like the weight of the move is just too much. It's like "How many people have to read this for me to make this a success for me?" You mentioned it's a learning exhaust... And this exhaust that you've put out before - has it been helpful really to you? Is that exhaust process very helpful to you? Is that ingrained in the learnings that you've just gone through, just sort of like synthesize "Okay, I learned. Here's actually what I learned"?Shawn Wang: Yeah. This is actually an opportunity to tie into that second brain concept which maybe you wanted to talk a little bit about. Everything that you write down becomes your second brain. At this point I can search Google for anything I've ever written on something, and actually come up on my own notes, on whatever I had. So I'm not relying on my memory for that. Your human brain, your first brain is not very good at storage, and it's not very good at search; so why not outsource that to computers? And the only way to do that is you have to serialize your knowledge down into some machine-readable format that's part of research. I do it in a number of places; right now I do it across GitHub, and my blog, and a little bit of my Discord. Any place where you find you can store knowledge, I think that's a really good second brain.And for Jerod, I'll give you an example I actually was gonna bring up, which is when I was trying to learn React and TypeScript - like, this goes all the way back to my first developer job. I was asked to do TypeScript, even though I'd never done it before. And honestly, my team lead was just like "You know TypeScript, right? You're a professional React dev, you have to know TypeScript." And I actually said no, and I started learning on day one.And what I did was I created the React to TypeScript cheatsheet, which literally was just copy-pasteable code of everything that I found useful and I wish I knew when I was starting out. And I've just built that over time. That thing's been live for three years now, it's got like 20,000 stars. I've taught thousands of developers from Uber, from Microsoft, React and TypeScript. And they've taught me - every time they send in a question or a PR... I think it's a very fundamental way of interacting, which is learning in public, but specifically this one - it's open source knowledge; bringing up our open source not just to code, but to everything else. I think that's a fundamental feedback loop that I've really enjoyed as well.Break: [22:31]Jerod Santo: One of the things I appreciate about you, swyx, is how you are always thinking, always writing down your thoughts... You've been watching and participating in this industry now for a while, and you've had some pretty (I think) insightful writings lately. The first one I wanna talk about is this API Economy post. The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy. You say "Developers severely underestimate the importance of this to their own career." So I figure if that's the case, we should hear more about it, right?Shawn Wang: [laughs] Happy to talk about it. So what is the API economy? The API economy is developers reshaping the world in their image. Very bold statement, but kind of true, in the sense that there is now an API for everything - API for cards, API for bank accounts, API for text, API for authentication, API for shipping physical goods... There's all sorts of APIs. And what that enables you to do as a developer is you can call an API - as long as you know REST or GraphQL these days, you know how to invoke these things and make these things function according to the rest of your program. You can just fit those things right in. They're a very powerful thing to have, because now the cost of developing one of these services just goes down dramatically, because there's another company doing that as a service for you.I wrote about it mainly because at Netlify we were pitching serverless, we were pitching static hosting, and we were pitching APIs. That's the A in JAMstack. But when I google "API economy", all the search results were terrible. Just horrible SEO, bland, meaningless stuff that did not speak to developers; it was just speaking to people who like tech buzzwords. So I wrote my own version. The people who coined it at Andreessen Horowitz, by the way, still to this day do not have a blog post on the API economy. They just have one podcast recording which nobody's gonna listen. So I just wrote my version.Jerod Santo: You're saying people don't listen to podcasts, or what?Shawn Wang: [laughs] When people are looking up a term, they are like "What is this thing?", and you give them a podcast, they're not gonna sit down and listen for 46 minutes on a topic. They just want like "Give me it, in one paragraph. Give me a visual, and I'm gonna move on with my day." So yeah, whenever I see an opportunity like that, I try to write it up. And that's the light side; a lot of people talk about the light side. But because it's a personal blog, I'm empowered to also talk about the dark side, which is that as much as it enables developers, it actually is a little bit diminishing the status of human expertise and labor and talent. So we can talk a little bit about that, but I'm just gonna give you time to respond.Jerod Santo: [28:05] Hm. I'm over here thinking now that you're not at Netlify, I'm curious - this is tangential, but what's your take on JAMstack now? I know you were a professional salesman there for a while, but... It seems like JAMstack - we've covered it for years, it's a marketing term, it's something we've already been doing, but maybe taking it to the next level... There's lots of players now - Netlify, Vercel etc. And yet, I don't see much out there in the real world beyond the people doing demos, "Here's how to build a blog, here's how to do this, here's my personal website", and I'm just curious... I'm not like down on JAMstack, but I just don't see it manifesting in the ways that people have been claiming it's going to... And maybe we're just waiting for the technology to catch up. I'd just love to hear what you think about it now.Shawn Wang: Yeah. I think that you're maybe not involved in that world, so you don't see this, but real companies are moving on to JAMstack. The phrasing that I like is that -- JAMstack has gone mainstream, and it's not even worth talking about these days, because it's just granted that that's an option for you... So PayPal.me is on the JAMstack, there's large e-commerce sites... Basically, anything that decouples your backend from your frontend, and your frontend is statically-hosted - that is JAMstack.I actually am blanking on the name, but if you go check out the recent JAMstack Conf, they have a bunch of examples of people who've not only moved to JAMstack, but obviously moved to Netlify, where they're trying to promote themselves.Jerod Santo: Sure, yeah.Shawn Wang: So yes, it's true that I'm no longer a professional spokesperson, but it's not true that JAMstack is no longer being applied in the enterprise, because it is getting adoption; it's moved on that boring phase where people don't talk about it.One thing I'll say - a thesis that I've been pursuing is that JAMstack is in its endgame. And what do I mean by that? There's a spectrum between the previous paradigm that JAMstack was pushing back on, which is the all-WordPress/server-render-everything paradigm, and then JAMstack is prerender-everything. And now people are filling in--Jerod Santo: In the middle.Shawn Wang: ...I'm gonna put my hands in the Zoom screen right now. People are filling that gap between fully dynamic and fully static. So that's what you see with Next.js and Gatsby moving into serverless rendering, partial rendering or incremental rendering... And there's a full spectrum of ways in which you can optimize your rendering for the trade-offs of updating your content, versus getting your data/content delivered as quickly as possible. There's always some amount of precompilation that you need to do, and there's always some amount of dynamicism that you have to do, that cannot be precompiled. So now there is a full spectrum between those.Why I say it's the end game is because that's it, there's nothing else to explore. It's full-dynamic, full-static, choose some mix in the middle, that's it. It's boring.Jerod Santo: Hasn't that always been the case though? Hasn't there always been sites that server-side render some stuff, and pre-render other things? You know, we cache, we pre-render, some people crawl their own websites once, and... I don't know it seems like maybe just a lot of excitement around a lot of things that we've been doing for many years.Shawn Wang: [laughs] So first of all, those are being remade in the React ecosystem of things, which a lot of us lost when a lot of the web development industry moved to React... So that's an important thing to get back.I mean, I agree, that's something that we've always had, pre-rendering, and services like that, caching at the CDN layer - we've always had that. There's some differences... So if you understand Netlify and why they're trying to push distributed persistent rendering (DVR), it's because caching is a hard problem, and people always end up turning off the cache. Because the first time you run into a bug, you're gonna turn off the cache. And the cache is gonna stay off.So the way that Netlify is trying to fix it is that we put the cache in Git, essentially. Git is the source of truth, instead of some other source of truth distributed somewhere between your CDN and your database and somewhere else. No, everything's in Git. I'm not sure if I've represented that well, to be honest... [laughter]Adam Stacoviak: Well, good thing you don't work for Netlify anymore. We're not holding you to the Netlify standard.Shawn Wang: [31:58] Exactly. All I can say is that to me now it's a good thing in the sense that it's boring. It's the good kind of boring, in the sense of like "Okay, there's a spectrum. There's all these techniques. Yes, there were previous techniques, but now these are the new hotness. Pick your choice." I can get into a technical discussion of why this technique, the first one, the others... But also, is it that interesting unless you're evaluating for your site? Probably not...Jerod Santo: Well, it does play into this API economy though, right? Because when you're full JAMstack, then the A is your most important thing, and when the A is owned by a bunch of companies that aren't yours - like, there's a little bit of dark side there, right? All of a sudden, now I'm not necessarily the proprietor of my own website, to a certain degree, because I have these contracts. I may or may not get cut off... There's a lot of concerns when everybody else is a dependency to your website.Shawn Wang: Yeah. So I don't consider that a dark side at all.Jerod Santo: No, I'm saying to me that seems like a dark side.Shawn Wang: Yeah, sure. This is the risk of lock-in; you're handing over your faith and your uptime to other people. So you have to trade that off, versus "Can you build this yourself? And are you capable of doing something like this, and are you capable of maintaining it?" And that is a very high upfront cost, versus the variable cost of just hiring one of these people to do it for you as a service.So what I would say is that the API economy is a net addition, because you as a startup - the startup cost is very little, and if you get big enough where it makes sense for you to build in-house - go ahead. But this is a net new addition for you to turn fixed costs into variable costs, and start with a small amount of investment. But I can hire -- like, Algolia was started by three Ph.D's in search, and I can hire them for cents to do search on my crummy little website. I will absolutely do that every single day, until I get to a big enough point where I cannot depend on them anymore, and I have to build my own search. Fine, I'll do that. But until then, I can just rely on them. That's a new addition there.Jerod Santo: One hundred percent. So what then do you think is the darker side? You mentioned it, but put a finer point on it.Shawn Wang: Yeah. The dark side is that there are people -- like, when I call an Uber ride, Uber is an API for teleportation, essentially. I'm here, I wanna go there. I press a button, the car shows up. I get in the car, get off, I'm there. What this papers over is that the API is calling real actual humans, who are being commoditized. I don't care who drives the car, I really don't. I mean, they may have some ratings, but I kind of don't care.Jerod Santo: That was the case with taxis though, wasn't it?Shawn Wang: That was the case with taxis, for sure. But there's a lot of people living below the API, who are economically constrained, and people who live above the API, developers, who have all the upside, essentially... Because the developers are unique, the labor is commoditized. My DoorDash pickers, my Instacart deliverers - all these are subsumed under the API economy. They're commodities forever, they know it, and there's no way out for them, unless they become developers themselves. There's a class system developing below and above the API. And the moment we can replace these people under the API with robots, you better believe we'll do that, because robots are way cheaper, and they complain less, they can work 24 hours, all this stuff.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Shawn Wang: So that's the dark side, which is, yeah, as a developer now - fantastic. I can control most parts of the economy with just a single API call. As a startup founder, I can develop an API for literally anything, and people will buy it. The downside is human talent is being commoditized, and I don't know how to feel about that. I think people are not talking enough about it, and I just wanna flag it to people.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Adam Stacoviak: So dark side could mean a couple things. One, it could mean literally bad; dark as synonymous with bad. Or dark as in shady. And we're not sure, it's obscured in terms of what's happening. And so let's use an Instacarter or a Dasher - to use their terminology. I happen to be a DoorDash user, so I know they're called Dashers; that's the only reason I know that. It's not a downplay, it's just simply what the terminology is...[35:59] You could say it's below the API, but I wonder, if you've spoken with these people, or people that live in what you call below the API, because I would imagine they're not doing that because they're being forced. Like, it's an opportunity for them.Shawn Wang: Oh, yeah.Adam Stacoviak: And I remember when I was younger and I had less opportunity because I had less "above the API" (so to speak) talent... And I do agree there's a class here, but I wonder if it's truly bad; that dark is truly bad, or if it's just simply obscure in terms of how it's gonna play out.Shawn Wang: This is about upside. They will never get to that six figures income with this thing.Adam Stacoviak: Not that job.Jerod Santo: No.Shawn Wang: It's really about the class system, which is the dark side. You don't want to have society splinter into like a serving class and whatever the non-serving class is. It's also about the upside - like, I don't see a way for these people to break out unless, they really just take a hard stop and just go to a completely different career track.Jerod Santo: Right.Adam Stacoviak: Here's where I have a hard time with that... I'm not pushing back on that you're wrong, I'm just wondering more deeply...Shawn Wang: Sure.Adam Stacoviak: I imagine at one point in my life I was a DoorDasher.Shawn Wang: Yeah.Adam Stacoviak: I washed dishes, I did definitely unique jobs at a young age before I had skill. And so the path is skill, and as long as we have a path to skill, which you've show-cased through FreeCodeCamp in your path, then I think that dark side is just simply shady, and not bad.Shawn Wang: Okay.Adam Stacoviak: And I'm just trying to understand it, because I was truly a DoorDasher before DoorDash was available. I washed dishes, delivered papers, I had servant-level things; I was literally a server at a restaurant before... And I loved doing that kind of work, but my talents have allowed me to go above that specific job, and maybe even the pay that came with that job. I've served in the military before, got paid terrible dollars, but I loved the United States military; it's great. And I love everybody who's served in our military. But the point is, I think the path is skill, and as long as we have a pathway to skill, and jobs that can house that skill and leverage that skill to create new value for the world, I just wonder if it's just necessary for society to have, I suppose, above and below API things.Jerod Santo: Until we have all the robots. Then there is nobody underneath. At that point it's all robots under the API.Shawn Wang: Yes, and that is true in a lot of senses, actually. Like, farming is mostly robots these days. You do have individual farmers, but they're much less than they used to be. I don't know what to say about that, shady or dark... I think it's just -- there's no career track. You have to go break out of that system yourself. Thank God there's a way to do it. But back in the day, you used to be able to go from the mailroom to the boardroom.Adam Stacoviak: I see.Shawn Wang: I see these stories of people who used to be janitors at schools become the principal. Companies used to invest in all their people and bring them up. But now we're just hiring your time, and then if you wanna break out of that system - good luck, you're on your own. I think that that lack of upward mobility is a problem, and you're not gonna see it today. It's a slow-moving train wreck. But it's gonna happen where you have society split in two, and bad things happen because of it.Adam Stacoviak: I mean, I could agree with that part there, that there definitely is no lateral movement from Dasher to CEO of DoorDash.Shawn Wang: It's just not gonna happen.Adam Stacoviak: Or VP of engineering at DoorDash. I think because there is no path, the path would be step outside of that system, because that system doesn't have a path. I could agree with that, for sure.Jerod Santo: Yeah. I mean, the good news is that we are creating -- there are paths. This is not like a path from X to Y through that system, but there are other alternate paths that we are creating and investing in, and as well as the API gets pushed further and further down in terms of reachability - we now have more and more access to those things. It's easier now, today, than it ever has been, because of what we were talking about, to be the startup founder, right? To be the person who starts at CEO because the company has one person in it, and they're the CEO. And to succeed in that case, and become the next DoorDash.Adam Stacoviak: True.Jerod Santo: So there are opportunities to get out, it's just not a clear line... And yeah, it takes perhaps some mentorship, perhaps ingenuity... A lot of the things that it takes to succeed anyway, so...Shawn Wang: [40:05] I'll give a closing note for developers who are listening, because you're already a developer... So the analogy is if you're above the API, you tell machines what to do; if you're below the API, machines tell you what to do. So here's the developer analogy, which is there's another division in society, which is the kanban board. If you're below the kanban board, the kanban board tells you what to do. If you're above it, you tell developers what to do. [laughs]Jerod Santo: There you go.Shawn Wang: So how do you break out of that class division? I'll leave it out to you, but just keep in mind, there's always layers.Jerod Santo: I love that.Adam Stacoviak: I love the discussion around it, but I'm also thankful you approached the subject by a way of a blog post, because I do believe that this is interesting to talk about, and people should talk about it, for sure. Because it provides introspection into, I guess, potentially something you don't really think about, like "Do I live below or above the APi?" I've never thought about that in that way until this very moment, talking to you, so... I love that.Break: [40:58]Jerod Santo: So another awesome post you have written lately is about Cloudflare and AWS. Go - not the language, the game Go... I know very little about the language, and I know even less about the game... And Chess... How Cloudflare is approaching things, versus how AWS and Google and others are... Given us the TL;DR of that post, and then we'll discuss.Shawn Wang: Okay. The TL;DR of that post is that Cloudflare is trying to become the fourth major cloud after AWS, Azure and GCP. The way they're doing it is fundamentally different than the other three, and the more I've studied them - I basically observed Cloudflare for the entire time since I joined Netlify. Netlify kind of is a competitor to Cloudflare, and it's always this uncomfortable debate between "Should you put Cloudflare in front of Netlify? Netlify itself is a CDN. Why would you put a CDN in front of another CDN?" Oh, because Netlify charges for bandwidth, and Cloudflare does not. [laughter]Jerod Santo: It's as simple as that.Shawn Wang: And then there's DDOS protection, all that stuff; very complicated. Go look up the Netlify blog post on why you should not put Cloudflare in front of Netlify, and decide for yourself. But Netlify now taking on AWS S3 - S3 is like a crown jewel of AWS. This is the eighth wonder of the world. It provides eleven nines of durability. Nothing less than the sun exploding will take this thing down... [laughs]Jerod Santo: Right? You know what's funny - I don't even consider us at Changelog AWS customers; I don't even think of us that way. But of course, we use S3, because that's what you do. So yeah, we're very much AWS customers, even though I barely even think about it, because S3 is just like this thing that of course you're gonna use.Shawn Wang: There's been a recent history of people putting out S3-compatible APIs, just because it's so dominant that it becomes the de-facto standard. Backblaze did it recently. But Cloudflare putting out R2 and explicitly saying "You can slurp up the S3 data, and by the way, here's all the cost-benefit of AWS egress charges that's what Matthew Prince wrote about in his blog post is all totally true, attacks a part of AWS that it cannot compromise on and just comes at the top three clouds from a different way, that they cannot respond to.[44:17] So I always like these analogies of how people play destruction games. I'm a student of destruction, and I study Ben Thompson and Clay Christensen, and that entire world, very quickly... So I thought this was a different model of destruction, where you're essentially embracing rather than trying to compete head-on. And wrapping around it is essentially what Go does versus chess, and I like -- you know, there's all these comparisons, like "You're playing 2D chess, I'm playing 3D chess. You're playing chess, I'm playing Go." So Cloudflare is playing Go by surrounding the S3 service and saying "Here is a strict superset. You're already a consumer of S3. Put us on, and magically your costs get lower. Nothing else about it changes, including your data still lives in AWS if you ever decide to leave us." Or if you want to move to Cloudflare, you've just gotta do the final step of cutting off S3.That is a genius, brilliant move that I think people don't really appreciate, and it's something that I study a lot, because I work at companies that try to become the next big cloud. I worked at Netlify, and a lot of people are asking, "Can you build a large public company on top of another cloud? Our second-layer cloud is viable." I think Vercel and Netlify are proving that partially it is. They're both highly valued. I almost leaked some info there... When does this go out? [laughs]Jerod Santo: Next week, probably...Shawn Wang: Okay, alright... So they're both highly valued, and - like, can they be hundred-billion-dollar companies? I don't know. We don't know the end state of cloud, but I think people are trying to compete there, and every startup -- I nearly joined Render.com as well. Every startup that's trying to pitch a second-layer cloud thesis is always working under the shadows of AWS. And this is the first real thesis that I've seen, that like "Oh, okay, you not only can credibly wrap around and benefit, you can actually come into your own as a fourth major cloud." So I'm gonna stop there... There's so many thoughts I have about Cloudflare.Jerod Santo: Yeah. So do you see that R2 then -- I think it's a brilliant move, as you described it... As I read your post, I started to appreciate, I think, the move, more than I did when I first read about it and I was like "Oh, they're just undercutting." But it seems they are doing more than just that. But do you think that this R2 then is a bit of a loss leader in order to just take a whole bunch of AWS customers, or do you think there's actually an economic -- is it economically viable as a standalone service, or do you think Cloudflare is using it to gain customers? What are your thoughts in their strategy of Why?Shawn Wang: This is the top question on Twitter and on Hacker News when they launch. They are going to make money on this thing, and the reason is because of all the peering agreements that they've established over the past five years. As part of the normal business strategy of Cloudflare, they have peering agreements with all of the ISPs; bandwidth is free for them. So... For them in a lot of cases. Again, I have to caveat all this constantly, because I should note to people that I am not a cloud or networking expert. I'm just learning in public, just like the rest of you, and here's what I have so far. So please, correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll learn from it.But yeah, I mean - straight on, it's not a loss leader. They plan to make money on it. And the reason they can is because they have worked so hard to make their cost structure completely different in AWS, and they've been a friend to all the other ISPs, rather than AWS consuming everything in its own world. Now you're starting to see the benefits of that strategy play out. And by the way, this is just storage, but also they have data store, also they have service compute, all following the same model.Jerod Santo: So what do you think is a more likely path over the next two years? Cloudflare --Adam Stacoviak: Prediction time!Jerod Santo: ...Cloudflare steals just massive swathes of AWS customers, or AWS slashes prices to compete?Shawn Wang: So I try not to do the prediction business, because I got out of that from the finance days... All I'm doing is nowcasting. I observe what I'm seeing now and I try to put out the clearest vision of it, so the others can follow.I think that it makes sense for them to be replicating the primitives of every other cloud service. So in 2017 they did service compute with Cloudflare Workers. In 2018 they did eventually consistent data store. In 2019 - website hosting; that's the Netlify competitor. In 2020 they did strongly-consistent data store, with Durable Objects. In 2021 object storage. What's next on that list? Go on to your AWS console and go shopping. And instead of seven different ways to do async messaging in AWS, probably they're gonna do one way in Cloudflare. [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: [48:34] A unified API, or something like that...Jerod Santo: Yeah, they'll just look at AWS' offerings, the ones they like the best, and do it that way, right?Shawn Wang: Yeah, just pick it up.Adam Stacoviak: Maybe the way to get a prediction out of you, swyx, might be rather than directly predict, maybe describe how you win Go.Shawn Wang: How you win Go...Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, what's the point of Go? How do you win Go? Because that might predict the hidden prediction, so to speak.Shawn Wang: Okay. For listeners who don't know Go, let me draw out the analogy as well. So most people are familiar with chess; individual chess pieces have different values and different points, and they must all support each other. Whenever you play chess, you need the Knight to support the pawns, something like that... Whereas in Go, you place your pieces everywhere, and they're all indistinguishable from each other. And it's more about claiming territory; at the end of the day, that's how you win Go, you claim the most territory compared to the others... And it's never a winner-take-all situation. Most likely, it's like a 60/40. You won 60% of the territory and your competitor has 40% of the territory. That's more likely a mapping of how cloud is gonna play out than chess, where winner-takes-all when you take the King. There's no King in the cloud, but--Jerod Santo: Are you sure...?Shawn Wang: ...there's a lot likely of territory claiming, and Cloudflare is really positioned very well for that. It's just part of the final realization that I had at the end of the blog post. And partially, how you take individual pieces of territory is that you surround all the pieces of the enemy and you place the final piece and you fill up all the gaps, such that the enemy is completely cut off from everything else and is surrounded. And that's what R2 does to S3 - it surrounds S3, and it's up to you to place that final piece. They call it, Atari, by the way, which is the name of the old gaming company, Atari. They have placed AWS S3 in Atari, and it's up to the customers to say "I'm gonna place that final piece. I'm gonna pay the cost of transferring all my data out of S3 and cut S3 off", and they cut off all the remaining liberties. So how do you win in Go? You claim the most amount of territory, and you surround the pieces of the enemy.Adam Stacoviak: Which, if you thought maybe that was oxygen, the territory, you might suck the oxygen away from them, so they can't live anymore, so to speak... And maybe you don't take it by killing it. Maybe you sort of suffocate it almost, if their space becomes small enough; if you take enough territory and it begins to shrink enough, it's kind of like checkmate, but not.Shawn Wang: Yeah. There's also a concept of sente in Go, which is that you make a move that the opponent has to respond to, which is kind of like a check, or checkmate -- actually, not; just the check, in chess. And right now, AWS doesn't feel the need to respond. Cloudflare is not big enough. Like, these are names to us, but let's just put things in numbers. Cloudflare's market cap is 36 billion, AWS' market cap is 1.6 trillion; this is Amazon's total market cap. Obviously, AWS is a subset of that.Jerod Santo: Sure.Shawn Wang: So your competitor is 40 times larger than you. Obviously, Cloudflare is incentivized to make a lot of noise and make themselves seem bigger than it is. But until AWS has to respond, this is not real.Adam Stacoviak: Nice.Jerod Santo: So as a developer, as a customer of potentially one or both of these... Let's say you have a whole bunch of stuff on S3 - I'm asking you personally now, swyx - and R2 becomes available... Is that a no-brainer for you, or is there any reason not to use that?Shawn Wang: You're just adding another vendor in your dependency tree. I think for anyone running silicon bandwidth, it is a no-brainer.Jerod Santo: Yeah. So over the course of n months, where n equals when they launch plus a certain number - I mean, I think this is gonna end up eventually on Amazon's radar, to where it's gonna start affecting some bottom lines that important people are gonna notice. So I just wonder - I mean, how much territory can Cloudflare grab before there's a counter-move? It's gonna be interesting to watch.Shawn Wang: [52:12] So Ben from Vantage actually did a cost analysis... Vantage is a startup that is made up former AWS Console people; they're trying to build a better developer experience on top of AWS. They actually did a cost analysis on the R2 move, and they said that there's probably a hundred billion dollars' worth of revenue at stake for Amazon. So if they start to have a significant dent in that, let's say like 40%, AWS will probably have to respond. But until then, there's nothing to worry about. That's literally how it is in Amazon; you have to see the numbers hit before you respond.Jerod Santo: Yeah. It hasn't even been a blip on the radar at this point, the key metrics to the people who are important enough to care are watching. You said you started watching all of these CDNs. Of course, you worked at Netlify... You take an interest in backends. There's something you mentioned in the break about frontenders versus backend, and where you've kind of been directing your career, why you're watching Cloudflare so closely, what you're up to now with your work... Do you wanna go there?Shawn Wang: Let's go there. So if you track my career, I started out as a frontend developer. I was developing design systems, I was working with Storybook, and React, and all that... Then at Netlify I was doing more serverless and CLI stuff. At AWS more storage and database and AppSync and GraphQL stuff... And now at Temporal I'm working on a workflow engine, pure backend. I just went to KubeCon two weeks ago...Jerod Santo: Nice!Shawn Wang: What is a frontend developer doing at KubeCon...?Adam Stacoviak: New territory.Shawn Wang: It's a frontend developer who realizes that there's a career ceiling for frontend developers. And it's not a polite conversation, and obviously there are exceptions to frontend developers who are VPs of engineering, frontend developers who are startup founders... And actually, by the way, there's a lot of VC funding coming from frontend developers, which is fantastic for all my friends. They're all getting funded, left, right and center. I feel left out. But there is a Career ceiling, in a sense that survey a hundred VPs of engineering, how many of them have backend backgrounds, and how many of them have frontend backgrounds? And given that choice, what's more likely for you and your long-term career progression? Do you want to specialize in frontend or do you want to specialize in backend? Different people have different interests, and I think that you can be successful in whatever discipline you pick. But for me, I've been moving towards the backend for that reason.Adam Stacoviak: Describe ceiling. What exactly do you mean when you say "ceiling"?Shawn Wang: Career ceiling. What's your terminal title.Jerod Santo: Like your highest role, or whatever. Highest salary, highest role, highest title...Adam Stacoviak: Gotcha.Shawn Wang: Like, straight up, how many VPs of engineering and CTOs have backend backgrounds versus frontend.Jerod Santo: Yeah. I mean, just anecdotally, I would agree with you that it's probably 8 or 9 out of 10 CTOs have -- is that what you said, 8 or 9?Shawn Wang: Yeah, yeah. So there's obviously an economic reasoning for this; it's because there's a bias in the industry that frontend is not real development, and backend is. And that has to be combated. But also, there's an economic reasoning, and I always go back to the economics part, because of my finance background... Which is that your value to the company, your value to the industry really depends on how many machines run through you. You as an individual unit of labor, how much money do you control, and how much machine process, or compute, or storage, or whatever runs through you. And just straight-up frontend doesn't take as much. [laughs] Yes, frontend is hard, yes, design is hard, yes, UX is crucially important, especially for consumer-facing products... But at the end of the day, your compute is being run on other people's machines, and people don't value that as much as the compute that I pay for, that I need to scale, and therefore I need an experienced leader to run that, and therefore that is the leader of my entire eng.Jerod Santo: I wonder if that changes at all for very product-focused orgs, where I think a lot of frontenders, the moves are into product design and architecture, and away from - not software architecture, but product design. And it seems like maybe if you compare - not VP of engineering, but VP of product, you'd see a lot of former frontenders.Shawn Wang: [56:03] Yeah.Jerod Santo: Maybe that's their path. Do you think that's --Shawn Wang: Totally. But you're no longer a frontend dev. You suddenly have to do mocks...Jerod Santo: Yeah, but when you're VP of engineering you're not a backend dev either.Shawn Wang: Yeah.Jerod Santo: So you're kind of both ascending to that degreeShawn Wang: Backends devs will never report to you, let's put it that way.Jerod Santo: Okay. Fair.Shawn Wang: [laughter] But somehow, frontend devs have to report to backend devs, for some reason; just because they're superior, or something. I don't know, it's just like an unspoken thing... It's a very impolite conversation, but hey, it's a reality, man.Jerod Santo: So do you see this personally, or do you see this by looking around?Shawn Wang: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Yeah. You felt like you had reached a ceiling.Shawn Wang: Well, again, this is very impolite; there's a ton of ways to succeed, and there are definitely exceptions. Emily Nakashima at Honeycomb - former frontend person, now VP of engineering. I don't know, I could have done that. I have interest in backend and I'm pursuing that. So I will say that - this is a soft ceiling, it's a permeable ceiling. It's not a hard ceiling.Jerod Santo: Sure.Shawn Wang: But there's a ceiling though, because you can see the numbers.Adam Stacoviak: What is it in particular the VP of engineering does that would make a frontender less likely to have that role? What specifically? I mean, engineering is one of the things, right? Commanding the software... Which is not necessarily frontend.Jerod Santo: Well, frontend is also an engineering discipline.Adam Stacoviak: I guess it kind of depends on the company, too. Honeycomb is probably a different example.Shawn Wang: I haven't been a VP of engineering, so I only have some theories. I suggest you just ask the next VP of engineering that you talk to, or CTO.Adam Stacoviak: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Yeah. That'd be a good one to start asking people.Adam Stacoviak: What do you do here? What is it you do here?Shawn Wang: What is it you do here?Jerod Santo: Exactly.Shawn Wang: [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Well, I just wondered if there was a specific skillset that happens at that VP of engineering level that leads more towards a backender being more likely than a frontender to get hired into the role.Shawn Wang: I think there's some traditional baggage. Power structures persist for very long times... And for a long time UX and frontend was just not valued. And we're like maybe five years into the shift into that. It's just gonna take a long time.Jerod Santo: I agree with that. So tell us what you're up to now. You said you're doing workflows... I saw a quick lightning talk; you were talking about "React for the backend." So you're very much taking your frontend stuff into the backend here, with React for the backend. Tell us about that.Shawn Wang: Let's go for it. So at Netlify and at AWS I was essentially a developer advocate for serverless. So this is very cool - it does pay-as-you-go compute, and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it. But something that was always at the back of my mind bothering me, that serverless does not do well, is long-running jobs. It just does not do well. You have to chain together a bunch of stuff, and it's very brittle; you cannot test it... It's way more expensive than you would do in a normal environment.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Shawn Wang: And it made me realize that in this move to take apart everything and make everything as a service, we have gained scalability, but we've lost basically everything else. And what I was trying to do was "How do we reconstruct the experience of the monolith? What are the jobs to be done?" When you break it down, what does a computer do for you, and what is not adequately addressed by the ecosystem?I went through the exercise... I wrote a blog post called "Reconstructing the monolith, and I actually listed it out." So what are the jobs of cloud for a computer? You want static file serving, you want functions, you want gateway, you want socket management, job runners, queue, scheduler, cold storage, hot storage. There's meta jobs like error logging, usage logging, dashboarding, and then edge computing is like a unique to cloud thing. But everything else, you can kind of break it up and you can locate it on one machine, or you can locate it on multiple machines, some of them owned by you, some of them not owned by you.The thing that serverless -- that had a whole in the ecosystem was job running. Not good. Basically, as an AWS developer right now, the answer is you set a CloudWatch schedule function, and you pull an endpoint, and that should read some states from a database, and check through where you are, and compute until the 15-minute timeout for Lambda, and then save it back in, and then wait for the next pull, and start back up again. Super-brittle, and just a terrible experience; you would never want to go this way.[01:00:08.13] The AWS current response to that is AWS Step Functions, which is a JSON graph of what happens after the other, and this central orchestrator controls all of that. I think we could do better, and that's eventually what got me to temporal. So essentially, this blog post that I wrote - people found me through that, and hired both our head of product and myself from this single blog post. So it's probably the highest ROI blog post I've ever written.Jerod Santo: Wow. That's spectacular.Shawn Wang: It's just the VC that invested in Temporal. So what Temporal does is it helps you write long-running workflows in a doable fashion; every single state transition is persisted to a database, in idiomatic code. So idiomatic Java, idiomatic Go, idiomatic JavaScript, and PHP. This is different from other systems, because other systems force you to learn their language. For Amazon, you have to learn Amazon States Language. For Google Workflows - Google Workflows has a very long, very verbose JSON and YAML language as well.And these are all weird perversions of -- like, you wanna start simple; JSON is very simple, for doing boxes and arrows, and stuff like that... But you start ending up having to handwrite the AST of a general-purpose programming language, because you want variables, you want loops, you want branching, you want all that god stuff. And the best way to model asynchronous and dynamic business logic is with a general-purpose programming language, and that's our strong opinion there.So Temporal was created at Uber; it runs over 300 use cases at Uber, including driver onboarding, and marketing, and some of the trips stuff as well. It was open source, and adopted at Airbnb, and Stripe, and Netflix, and we have all those case studies on -- DoorDash as well, by the way, runs on the Uber version of Temporal.Jerod Santo: There you go, Adam.Shawn Wang: And yeah, they spun out to a company two years ago, and we're now trying to make it as an independent cloud company. And again, the

In dieser Episode habe ich Dr. Dominik Dotzauer zu Gast. Dominik ist Arzt, hat über das Thema 'Psychologie der Veränderung - wie man Gewohnheiten und Verhalten ändert' promoviert und ist mittlerweile als privater Gesundheitsberater tätig. In unserem Gespräch erfährst Du:

Michele Hansen  00:00Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear. If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you know that I'm passionate about customer service and listening to customers. A few months ago, we noticed something wasn't working on the Oh Dear dashboard. We reported it to them, and they fixed it almost immediately. Everybody has bugs occasionally, but not every company is so responsive to their customers, and we really appreciate that. You can sign up for a 10 day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app. Colleen Schnettler  00:35So Michele, I'd love to hear about how things are going with the book.  Michele Hansen  00:40They're going. Um, so after our episode with Sean last week, I realized that I kind of, I have to launch this thing eventually, right?  Colleen Schnettler  00:54Yes.  Michele Hansen  00:55And, you know, for, you know, I mean, for months I've been hearing that advice of, you know, do a, do a presale and like, start selling it beforehand, And, and I was like, yeah, I mean, you know, I, that's the best practice. That makes sense. And then just kind of be like, but that doesn't apply to me, right? Like, I couldn't make, um. It's, you know, it's funny, because it's almost, I feel like the way people feel about when they hear about customer interviewing, they're like, that sounds really valuable and like the right thing to do, and I'm just gonna act like that doesn't apply to me.  Colleen Schnettler  01:29Yep.  Michele Hansen  01:30So that's kind of how I was, and talking to Sean really kind of got me to be like, okay, okay, fine. I should actually sit down and do this. So I got a very simple website together, and then I actually did end up launching the presale.  Colleen Schnettler  01:46Oh, congratulations.  Michele Hansen  01:48Yeah, that was super scary. Like, because the book  Colleen Schnettler  01:50I bet. Michele Hansen  01:53And, like, random places where it says like, insert graphic here. Colleen Schnettler  02:01So tell us how many books have you sold?  Michele Hansen  02:03Okay, yeah, so I guess I get to do, like, a numbers update for the first time. This is fun. Um, so I have sold 34 copies.  Colleen Schnettler  02:15Wow.  Michele Hansen  02:16Presale. Colleen Schnettler  02:17That's a lot.  Michele Hansen  02:18So, and that's not including for like, you know, platform fees and whatever. Just like, you know, $29 times 34, basically. $986.  Colleen Schnettler  02:32That's amazing. Congratulations!  Michele Hansen  02:35So close to that, like, 1000 mark, which, I was talking about this with Mathias earlier, and he's kind of like, I feel like that's like a, you know, that's like, the legit threshold, is 1000. Like, and I don't know why, but it's like, yeah, it's like that feels like, that feels like the, the, like, the first big hurdle.  Colleen Schnettler  02:55I totally agree. That's wonderful news. Congratulations.  Michele Hansen  03:00You know, I expected to feel excited, or relieved, or something positive after releasing it, or the presale, at least. And I gotta tell you, like, I just feel pressure. Like, I'm really glad I didn't do this sooner.  Colleen Schnettler  03:25Really?  Michele Hansen  03:27Yeah. Because now I have, you know, at least 34 people I can't disappoint. Colleen Schnettler  03:32Right.  Michele Hansen  03:32And I feel like, just like, the pressure to make something that is a quality product, like, I already had that pressure on myself to put something out there that I'm proud of.  Colleen Schnettler  03:44Yeah. Michele Hansen  03:46Now I have all these other people who are expecting that, and not that anyone has emailed me and said anything to that effect, but that's how I feel. And I was thinking about this earlier. And I was like, man, like, writing and selling this book has like, brought out all of these, like, vulnerabilities and, and self-doubt and everything, like all of this stuff that I like, thought I had dealt with and then it's, like, sort of like bursting out of the cabinet, being like, hey, I'm still here. So it's, you know, I mean, I have tools to, like, deal with that, but it's been like, oh my gosh, like, I thought I had dealt with, like, I never feel this way about anything about Geocodio, like, so.  Colleen Schnettler  04:33So, this is interesting, because I, when I was feeling a similar way, many months ago, I don't actually know if I talked about it on the podcast, but I had a very high value client that I had a great relationship with that needed a file uploader, and mine wasn't quite done, and I had this moment of terror, panic, I don't know, where I was like, I shouldn't use mine because, because if I put it on my client's site, like, it has to work, right? There's no get out of jail free card, Kind of like, you've now sold this book. Like, you have to finish it.  Michele Hansen  05:07Right. It's not just like, throwing it in a PDF and then like.  Colleen Schnettler  05:09Yeah.  Michele Hansen  05:10Oh, whatever, nobody paid for it. Like, it's not a big deal. Like, it's like, no, this is, like, this is serious now.  Colleen Schnettler  05:17Yeah. And I think something that, that I'm thinking of as you're talking about this, I remember at the time, Alex Hillman had a really great tweet thread about you're not scared of failure, maybe you're secretly scared of success.  Michele Hansen  05:32Mm hmm.  Colleen Schnettler  05:33It was really interesting. Like, just when you think about, like, the psychology and all of these new insecurities coming to light for you, like, maybe you're scared of success.  Michele Hansen  05:42You know, and it's so I feel like we should have them on the podcast more, because I feel like they are, like, Amy and Alex in some way are like characters on this podcast, they're just not actually on the podcast. But like, the amount we talk about, you know, 30x500 and everything. She had, I think, I think it was her, or maybe, no, or maybe it was Dani Donovan, the woman who does the ADHD comics. But I think it was Amy, had a thread, like, couple months ago that was like, you know, people with, or maybe, I don't know if she has ADHD, so I don't know if this was her. Okay. Somebody had a thread that was like, you know, people with ADHD, like, you don't ever feel accomplished when you finish something. It's just over. And then you're on to the next thing. And it was like, yes, like, I expected to feel something when I finally got that out there, and now it instead feels like, oh, now I have to put in the graphics. Now I have to do the cover art. Like now I have to like, like, it just, it didn't, there was never this, like, moment of, like, feeling accomplished or anything like that. It just, it just rolled into the next thing. Colleen Schnettler  06:58Interesting. I don't, I don't have that problem. Like, that doesn't happen to me. I mean, but it's interesting, I find that interesting because one of the things, for me, is when I accomplish something, even if, I feel like if I'd been in your position and I got the presales out there, I do feel that, like, internal satisfaction of hitting that goal, and that's what keeps me motivated. So, if you don't get that same kind of dopamine hit, doesn't that make the whole process kind of painful? It doesn't sound fun.  Michele Hansen  07:28Well, what I do get that from is people, like, you know, positive reinforcement from other people. Like, so I've been asking people for testimonials to put at the front of the book. And on the one hand, that terrifies me, and, and then on the other hand, when they do come in, and people are talking about how the, the book and also sort of newsletter and like, like, all this, all this stuff is all sort of meshing together, has helped them, and what it has helped them do, and how they wish they'd had it sooner and everything. Like, that makes me feel good. That makes me feel like I am delivering the, like, a product that is worth somebody paying for, and that I can be proud of seeing how it's impacted other people. But I like I, I don't really get satisfaction out of achieving things, which is really ironic, because I think about younger versions of myself and I've like, you know, I describe me in high school as an achievement robot, like. Colleen Schnettler  08:39An achievement robot.  Michele Hansen  08:41Yeah, you know, you're, like, just taking as many AP's as you can and your life is over if you don't get in a top college. You know, that whole, that whole song and dance that turned out to be a lie, because now I work for myself. Not at all bitter about that. Anyway, um, yeah, it's but, this, so that is really, like, keeping me going or like, people tweeting out you like, hey, like, what is the book coming out? And part of me is like, oh, my God, am I gonna get them by then? But like, I've been getting a lot of really good reinforcement from people, and that, and I think that's, for me, that's been one of the really big benefits of building in public is not, not necessarily knowing that, exactly that people are going to pay for it and how much they're going to pay and having that money up front, but knowing that I'm creating something that is useful for people. Like, that is what keeps me going. Colleen Schnettler  09:31That sounds great, too.  Michele Hansen  09:33But now I got to finish the damn thing, so.  Colleen Schnettler  09:35Yeah. Now you gotta finish it.  Michele Hansen  09:37I was saying that the release date would be June 24. I actually just had to push that back to July 2, because I just, I don't think I have enough time.  Colleen Schnettler  09:44Yeah. Michele Hansen  09:45I do have an idea for the cover. Like, I want it to be like a terminal printout that's like, basically like installing, like, you know, like installing like empathy and like, loading scripts. Colleen Schnettler  10:00That'll be cute.  Michele Hansen  10:01Like, sort of corny. Developers aren't the only audience for it. But I also want them to know that this is a resource that is, like, accessible to them.  Colleen Schnettler  10:14Yeah. Michele Hansen  10:15I don't know. I have zero artistic abilities, like, I can't even, like, think visually, like, so I have so many people who are reviewing the draft right now, which is pretty amazing. Some of them are, like, super close friends of mine who are harsh editors, and I'm super grateful for that. And others are, like, people I have never even met who are so, I guess, so taken with, with the idea of the book that they're, like, helping me edit it, and I have never met them before, which is just so moving. But anyway, so someone has been giving me a lot of feedback on like, oh, like, this should be a graphic and like, this should be a graphic. And I'm like, I'm so glad you're saying that because it would have never occurred to me that that could be a graphic because I communicate in speech, and in text, and there's -  Colleen Schnettler  11:01Yeah. Michele Hansen  11:01Not a whole lot of pictures going on.  Colleen Schnettler  11:03Yeah. Michele Hansen  11:04So, so, yeah, I gotta kind of get all of, all that together in the next couple weeks. And like, hopefully release the, like, the print-on-demand version at the same time, but it's unclear. And then after that, I get to do the audio book, which, honestly, I'm really looking forward to, because then I just have to read the book out loud and as a podcaster, I'm like, I got that. Like, this does not involve any pictures. Like, I am good. Colleen Schnettler  11:32No pictures required.  Michele Hansen  11:33No art skills required. Colleen Schnettler  11:36Are you gonna hire someone to do the graphics? Have you figured that out yet?  Michele Hansen  11:39No, I've been making them in PowerPoint.  Colleen Schnettler  11:42Okay. I'm just saying there's - Michele Hansen  11:45Really simple. Like, there's not going to be like, pictures-pictures, like. Colleen Schnettler  11:47Okay. Michele Hansen  11:48If it turns out this book is a huge hit and I need to do a version that actually has pictures and like, somebody doing, like, professionally doing the layout then like, yeah, I'll, I'll do that, but.  Colleen Schnettler  11:59Yeah, so. Michele Hansen  11:59I mean, so like, more like flowcharts if anything, or like, putting something in a box so that it's, like, called out like even that kind of stuff. My brain is like, doesn't.  Colleen Schnettler  12:09Have you ever seen, there's a couple of people I've met at conferences that are developers, but they're also visual thinkers. And so they'll like, make sketch notes of someone's conference talk. Have you ever seen these? I'm going to send you some after the podcast. They're so cool. I mean, for your, for, you know, especially to hit, like, the developer audience, that would be, and that might be like version two of the book, but like, like sketch notes, or something would be super cool. Like, I could see a lot of cool opportunities here.  Michele Hansen  12:37Yeah, I tried to use something called Excalidraw, and I think my problem is like, I just don't think visually.  Colleen Schnettler  12:47Yeah. Michele Hansen  12:47Like, I never graduated beyond stick figures. My, my efforts that were beyond stick figures are hilarious. Like actually, like, yeah. Um, so I probably should, like, should bring that in, you know. But again, I mean, the book has only made, you know, just under $1,000. So I'm not, I'm not, I don't really want to, like, go out and hire an artist for a couple $1,000 for it. Like, I don't feel like that's a reasonable- Colleen Schnettler  13:21Not yet. Not yet. Right. I mean, that might be in the future. Yeah. I feel like that's not yet. I totally get that.  Michele Hansen  13:27Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's-  Colleen Schnettler  13:34It's exciting. I'm glad we gave you that push. I mean, I kind of felt like I gave you that push when I was basically like, you're gonna have this up by the time we launch this podcast, right. I'm happy. I hope it wasn't too stressful. But I'm happy you got there.  Michele Hansen  13:49I think I needed the external deadline because- Colleen Schnettler  13:52Yeah.  Michele Hansen  13:52And again, this is kind of one of those, for me, ADHD things. Like, I need an external deadline because if it's a deadline I've come up with then it's not happening. But like, the reason why the book was, is gonna be out by July 2 is because, like, our, well, it was gonna be June 23 because our daughter finishes school for the year on June 25. So I was like, it has to be out before she gets out of school. But then I remember that she has a week of summer camp. So I'm like, okay, I have another week.  Colleen Schnettler  14:16You have one more week. Michele Hansen  14:18No, it has to be done before she gets out of camp because otherwise then I, you know, I won't have as much time, so.  Colleen Schnettler  14:25Yeah. Michele Hansen  14:25External deadline. Super helpful. Yeah. How's, how's stuff in Simple File Upload world? Colleen Schnettler  14:33So, things are good. I, you know, signups have still been consistent, but because I lost that big customer, I'm just below 1k MRR. So I haven't really seen that reflected in-  Michele Hansen  14:48Is the big customer the one that, like, wasn't using it and you couldn't get in touch with them?  Colleen Schnettler  14:53No, that person's still there, but like, I lost one person that was, like, a tier below that, which is, because I have three tiers. And so things are fine. I mean, I'm not seeing a big increase, or really any movement on the revenue because of the churn at that level, at that more expensive level. But I'm pretty excited about some of the things I'm going to be trying to do in the next couple months. My summer is crazy. So I had at first resigned myself to just not really working on Simple File Upload for a couple months. I was like, I'm just gonna let it sit. It's doing great. It requires almost no customer support. But then,  Michele Hansen  15:32I mean, a thousand dollars a month, and then it recurs is like.  Colleen Schnettler  15:35Right! It's like, I mean, okay, can we talk about how awesome this is? By the way, this is awesome. Like, after fees and stuff, after I pay my hosting fees, and my storage fees and my Heroku fees, I clear like 606, 650. Like, that's like, pretty cool.  Michele Hansen  15:52Yeah. Colleen Schnettler  15:53It's like, I'm not so much. So I wasn't upset about this. But like, I just needed to see kind of where my life was and what I was doing. And I was like, I might just have to sit on this for a couple months because I don't have the time. But then I got an idea. So I am going to take, really what happened is I was really inspired talking to Sean last week about 30x500. I have never taken that course. But I read, like, everything Amy Hoy writes on the internet, and so I kind of feel like I get the idea behind Sales Safari, the idea being find where your customers hang out and find out what their problems are. Conceptually, it seems easy. I just haven't had time to do that. And him, he said last week that he spent 80 hours. Think about that. So he was trolling Reddit forums for 80 hours. That is a lot.  Michele Hansen  16:45I mean, I probably already do that, and there's no business purpose behind it. Colleen Schnettler  16:49It's just no focus to it, right? So, so that's, so I really think I'm at this inflection point where what I have is working. It's doing great. I don't need to build new, more features until I know what features people need. And as we talked about, I think two weeks ago, different audiences want different features. As a solo founder, I do, with a job, I don't have the bandwidth to build all the features for everybody. Like, I'm not trying to take on CloudFlare, right. I really want to niche down and find my people and build for my people. I can't do that until I know who my people are, and I still don't really know. So, I am going to hire someone to do some of the Sales Safari research for me since I don't have time.  Michele Hansen  17:42Oh. Colleen Schnettler  17:43Yeah. So I'm kind of pumped. And by someone I mean, my sister. She, yeah, so it's like, you talk about how, like, you love having a business with Mathias.  I would love to have a business with my sister. Like, I would love for her to be able to work for me, for this to become a real company, and, you know, for us to do this together. So she is just coming off her maternity leave. She has decided not to go back to her job. So she has only a little bit of time because she doesn't have a lot of childcare, so she has, like, one day a week that she's going to work for me doing marketing research and Sales Safari, and I was to kind of trying to teach her, like, what I think is useful. We're both kind of learning as we go, neither of us really knows we're just making it up. And we're gonna do that for the summer and kind of see where it takes us.  Michele Hansen  17:55Yeah. Wow, wait, so what is her background in?  Colleen Schnettler  18:35She's an environmental consultant. Michele Hansen  18:37Oh. Colleen Schnettler  18:40So she actually, it's in no way relevant. But she's, so really the deal is she's a writer. So in her job as a consultant, what they do is they, they have to write these, like, epic report. So her background is really in writing. So originally, she was gonna write content for me, and she wrote me a couple pieces, but it's really hard to come in, since she doesn't have the technical background, it's, I, and my, my audience is developers, like, I need really technical content. So I don't think she's going to fit as a technical writer. But she's going to do, she's taking a class in SEO. So she's going to do, like, keyword research, and she's going to jump into the forums and Reddit and try and like, find out what people's pain points are surrounding file uploads. Michele Hansen  19:24You know, it sounds like you guys have a good working relationship together. Colleen Schnettler  19:31Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, all problems, this stuff that I was thinking about. All problems are people problems, right? So, if you want to control your business, and I'm just hypothesizing here, the number one most important people, but the number one most important thing is the people you work with, and I can't think of anyone else I'd rather work with. So, I think she'll figure it out, or she'll hate it and if she hates it, then she won't do it anymore. I'll find someone else. But that's kind of our plan. I'm pretty excited.  Michele Hansen  20:02Like, yeah, you, if you have someone that you work well with, and you believe that they're capable of learning what you would need them to learn, then, you know, like, you trust them.  Colleen Schnettler  20:17Yes. Michele Hansen  20:17And that matters.  Colleen Schnettler  20:18Yes. Yes. So yeah. So this summer, for me, is really for, for Simple File Upload, I think, is really going to be a focus on figuring out what niche to serve. I was talking to another friend, and he just got a new job, and he works for a big event management company. And he pointed out, you know, he was, he actually mentioned you, because he listened to the podcast, and he was like, these huge companies, they don't care about the little guys who are making a million dollars a year. And his point was, they don't care. So he's like, if you can carve out a niche in one of these huge industries, like, you can be incredibly successful, and like, these big guys, they don't care.  Michele Hansen  20:58No. And you know, on your sister, it might be really interesting to have her do interviews with people because she will be completely coming in with a beginner's mindset. Like, I find this is something that is difficult for people to adjust to like, like, we've talked about when, when someone says like, oh, like, could I do this? And you start thinking through, like, whether they could and how you would implement it, or you know-  Colleen Schnettler  21:23Right.  Michele Hansen  21:24Talk about what they wanted to do, and you just like, oh, of course, you wanted to do this because of this, and like, you don't even question it. But she, but she would be like, well, why do you want to upload a file in the first place? Like, Colleen Schnettler  21:33Right.  Michele Hansen  21:33Well, how is that, how does that work? Because she's genuinely beginner. Like, I feel like, in some ways, the fact that I don't have a geography background has been an advantage for- Colleen Schnettler  21:45Yeah. Michele Hansen  21:46You know, for this because like, I don't come in, you know, with it, with all of these preconceived notions about why someone would want to do this.  Colleen Schnettler  21:56Yeah. Michele Hansen  21:56So I think that can be really interesting when she gets her feet wet, and kind of a sense of what's going on, to try to talk to the customers.  Colleen Schnettler  22:05I think that's a great idea. I hope we can grow into that. I definitely think there's opportunity there. I think of her as like you, and I'm like Mathias in the power couple building of a company. So we'll see. I mean, she wants to get into mark, we kind of are going down this route, because I don't have enough time. I want to do it, I need to do it, and she wants to, really she wants to transition into a remote career that's flexible, like most parents, and she's really interested in SEO and marketing. So, I think it's gonna be a fun little adventure. I'm excited to see what she finds out. Part of this was also, I think we've talked a lot about, I have an interest in no-code. So I had a call with the Jetboost IO founder, Chris. Michele Hansen  22:51Yeah, Chris. Colleen Schnettler  22:52Who, I believe, you know, as well, because you're a mentor and he- Michele Hansen  22:55Yeah, I mentor him through Earnest Capital. I literally just had a call with him the other day. Colleen Schnettler  23:02So I had a call with him, independent of your call with him.  Michele Hansen  23:06Which we didn't know about. Colleen Schnettler  23:07Which we did not plan, to talk about opportunities in the webflow space. And, so I think one of the first things I'm going to have my sister, well, not the first, but one of the things my sister is going to try and do this month is really see if there's a need in Webflow. The thing about Webflow is, in 2018, Webflow introduced their own file uploader. So before that, there was a huge need for it. Now, they have their own file uploader. So it might be that what I provide is no longer, you know, something people need or want. So before I go and build an integration with Webflow, I'm going to have her do some Sales Safari research. They have really active forums to kind of see what people are looking forward to see if there's opportunity there.  Michele Hansen  23:54Yeah, Chris was telling me that they have a, like, feature upload, like a feature up vote thing where people go in and request features.  It's exciting. Colleen Schnettler  24:03Yeah, I think it's gonna be great. I think, I think it'll be fun. It'll be good to have someone actually dedicated to reading Reddit and Webflow forums and Heroku forums and whatever, to try to identify, you know, the need there and in the file uploading space. And then with the SEO research, you know, I can then either write the content myself or hire someone to write technical content, depending on my time commitments, my time, you know, what I can do, so. Yeah. Yeah, I saw that. I think, you know, the interesting thing about file uploading and Webflow is they have a maximum size of 10 megs, and I, you can't do multiple file uploads at the same time. So the question is, how many people really care? Like, who really, did, are there enough people that are uploading large files, or want to do maximum, or, I'm sorry, want to do multiple file uploads at a time that it would be worth it for me to make an integration into that space. So, so, you know, she's going to kind of dive into that and see what we can find out and like, this is just gonna be a fun marketing learning time because I built this thing because I wanted to build something, as you know, and I'm really happy that I built something to scratch my own need because it's worked out really well. But I still haven't really honed in on who I can serve best, and there's lots of opportunities out there, so. Michele Hansen  25:42There's a lot to be, I think, sort of learned and discovered here, and, and also that SEO work you can do, that, like, that can also inform the kind of feature development that you do, too, like, because there, I mean, this just happened to us the other day, like there was something that I noticed we had a couple of customers ask us how to do, and so I wrote up an article about how to do it, and then, but like, to basically do it manually. And then I just saw this morning that it's, like, our top performing growing piece of content and has like a 400% increase in clicks, and-  Wow. And looking into like, oh, how might we add that? And it's like, okay, maybe we should like there's, you know, SEO isn't just for bringing in customers, but also for figuring out what, what people might want as well.  Colleen Schnettler  26:38Yeah, and you've said before, I think that SEO is your number one channel? Activation channel? Michele Hansen  26:44Yeah. We, we don't run paid ads. We don't do any outbound sales. Like, we occasionally sponsor conferences, but that's mostly because, like, our friends run them, and it's just like, kind of-  Colleen Schnettler  27:00Yeah. Michele Hansen  27:00To support our friends, like we're a sponsor of Longhorn PHP, the Texas PHP conference. But like, that's just because our friend runs it.  Colleen Schnettler  27:12Okay.  Michele Hansen  27:13It's not very, like, organized or intentional. It's just like, sure, like, we'll help you out.  Colleen Schnettler  27:18Now, when you do SEO, do you do, like, now you just said, like, you were talking to a customer and then you got this idea of a good page, but do you do traditional keyword research as well? Michele Hansen  27:34Maybe? Like, we use Ahrefs.  Colleen Schnettler  27:36Yeah, I don't, okay. Michele Hansen  27:39I don't know, I still don't know how to pronounce the name of that company.  Colleen Schnettler  27:42I know, yeah, I don't either.  Michele Hansen  27:43But yeah, Ahrefs, we use that. We used Google Search Console for a long time, which is honestly a really good tool, and it's free, because Ahrefs is, is pretty expensive. But yeah, you can do keyword research and rankings and referrers and all that kind of stuff. I don't keep a super close eye on it. Um, but yeah, whenever we're, you know, we, every so often, like every couple weeks or so we go in and look at what content is performing and what else we might need and whatnot. Colleen Schnettler  28:19Cool. Yeah, I don't know. I really haven't done, I've done absolutely zero keyword research. So I think it's probably worth our time to put a little bit of effort into that to see what people are searching for to get a better idea of how to use those tools. Michele Hansen  28:36Yeah, I mean, our approach is, you know, find those keywords and then write stuff that people might be searching for and show them how to do it with Geocodio, and I think I like that because I, and I think we talked about this is kind of something that I have struggled with with the book, is, like, I struggle with sounding salesy, like and writing, like conversion copy, like, it's just really something that I feel like I sound way too infomercial-y when I tried to write it. Like, you know, there are people who are really good at writing conversion copy and sounding like a natural human being when they write it, like, I mean, you know, Amy Hoy is one of those people. But I, you know, I might as well you know, be like, hocking something on the Home Shopping Network when I try to write it. So, so like writing be like, oh, you're searching for geocoding? Hello, we do geocoding. Here is how you can do it in like, like, all of these different ways you can do it and rephrasing all of those different things. And then here's where you can try it. And then here's where you can do it. And it's very, like, straightforward. That's like, maybe you need it. Maybe you don't. All of those options are fine. Not, like, buy this now or you will die. Colleen Schnettler  29:56Yeah, I'm hoping with our keyword research and kind of, like, since I haven't done this at all, you know, with what, the marketing research she does, as you've talked about, I think a lot of that is going to inform my content and building out future landing pages. So, that's really going to be a focus for me is like, trying to get content and you know, pages out there that appeal to people. Michele Hansen  30:24Well, I'm going to be spending the next week working on the book and you're going to be onboarding your sister and getting this research going. Sounds like we got our work cut out for us.  Colleen Schnettler  30:34It's gonna be a good week.  Michele Hansen  30:37All right. Well, I guess that'll wrap us up for now. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Michele Hansen  00:00Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear. We use Oh Dear to keep track of SSL certificates. If an SSL certificate is about to expire, we get an alert beforehand. We have automated processes to renew them, so we use Oh Dear as an extra level of peace of mind. You can sign up for a ten day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app. Michele Hansen  00:28Hey, welcome back to Software Social. So today we're doing something kind of fun. We're leaning on the social part of Software Social, and we have invited our friend, Sean Fioritto, to join us today.Sean Fioritto  00:44Hey guys. Thanks for having me.  Colleen Schnettler  00:47Hi Sean. Thanks for being here. Michele Hansen  00:48So, and the reason why we asked Sean, in addition to being a great person, is that Sean wrote a book called Sketching With CSS, and as you all know, I am writing a book and figuring it out. And there is a lot of stuff I haven't figured out, especially when it comes to, like, actually selling the book. Like, I feel like that, I feel like the, writing the book is, like, I feel like I kind of got a handle on that. The whole selling the book thing, like, not so much. Um, so we thought it would be kind of helpful to have Sean come on, since like, he's done this successfully. Colleen Schnettler  021:36So Sean, I would love to start with a little bit of your background with the book. What inspired you to write it? How did you get started? Where did that idea come from?  Sean Fioritto  01:50Yeah, so I wanted to quit my job.  Colleen Schnettler  01:53Don't we all? Michele Hansen  01:55Honest goal. Sean Fioritto  01:56I always wanted to go on my own, be independent, run my own business. That's been a goal for a very long time. So, I tried various things, you know, in my spare time, with limited to no success for years and years before that, and I was just getting sick of, the plan was, you know, I'm like, okay, I have this job. And in my spare time, I'm gonna get something going and then, and that just wasn't working. So I was getting impatient. Anyway, I ended up signing up with Amy Hoy's 30x500 class. This was seven or eight years ago. So, I signed up for that class. Actually, wait, I'm getting my timeline a little mixed up. So, I started reading stuff by Amy Hoy. It's funny, I'd actually bought another book that she wrote, and she used her sort of process for that book. And I bought that for my, for my job earlier. And I was like, oh, this Amy Hoy person is interesting. And so I started reading her blog, and then she has these things she writes called ebombs. You guys are probably familiar with that term. But they're basically content that, it's educational content directed at her target, you know, customer, which she would call her audience. So I was just, she, at that point, she had started 30x500. I think it was actually called a Year of Hustle at that point. And so she had all this content, and I was just devouring it, because I was like, she gets me. She knows my problem, and this is awesome. So I was just reading everything that she could write, that she wrote, and, you know, finding any resource that she'd ever written about, like, what's her process, because she was talking about this mysterious process that she has, she, she would talk about it. And I was able to sort of reverse engineer part of her course, the main thing called Sales Safari. So I'm not, I'm at my job, coasting, doing a half-assed job, spending a lot of time doing Sales Safari, trying to figure out what, what product I should do. Not product, but that's not the way to think about it with Sales Safari, but trying to figure out like, what, who, what audience should I focus on? And what problems do they have, and what's the juiciest problem that makes sense for me to tackle? And then, and she would call them pains, by the way, not, not problems. So what's the juiciest pain that they have, for me, that was like, be the easiest for me to peel off, and, and work on. So I started digging, and it was like, alright, well, what audience makes sense for me? This is kind of the process, and it was like, you know, like web designers, web developers, because I was a web developer. And so like, what are the, you know, audiences that are close to audiences that I'm in is kind of ideal. So I started there, and then I just read and read and read. I probably put like, 80 hours of research time into that process.  Colleen Schnettler  05:05Wow. Michele Hansen  05:06That's a lot. Sean Fioritto  05:06Of just reading and reading and reading and reading, and taking notes. And really understanding and whittling down and figuring out my audience, and figuring out, so the thinking, the benefit of that amount of time spent deliberately going through a process like that is that at some point, I became so in-tune with the audience that I could identify, and this is gonna pay off for you, Michele, this, this little story, because this feeds into like, how do you sell it. At some point, it meant that I could tell when a thing that I was, like a piece of content marketing that I was working on, was going to resonate very strongly with my audience and be worth the effort, if that makes sense. And it didn't really take much. Like, after I got done with that much amount of research, it was sort of, like, pretty trivial for me to come up with ideas for content that I could write that I knew people were gonna just eat up. And so that's, that's how I started building my, building my mailing list. And then that's how I eventually, Colleen, to your question, I came up with Sketching With CSS, which it was a solution to a pain point that I'd identified in my audience, which at that point was web designers. Colleen Schnettler  06:37How big did your mailing list grow? Sean Fioritto  06:39I have 20,000 people on my mail list. Colleen Schnettler  06:4120,000? Michele Hansen  06:42Holy guacamole.  Sean Fioritto  06:46Yeah. So like I said, I got really good. No, no, no. Michele Hansen  06:51I've got like, 200 people on my mailing list, or like, 220. And like, for context, that's like, 200 more people than I ever expected to have on the mailing list, and hearing, like, 20,000 feels very far from, from 200. Sean Fioritto  07:10Yeah, well, let me say something that will hopefully be more reassuring. The, Amy and Alex, for example, they've been running 30x500, for years, and I think their mailing list is just now approximating, like 20,000 or so. And like, the, they have been making so much money with that course with a significantly smaller mailing list. And that's a really, like, high value product, too. So anyway, if it makes you feel any better, I really think they only have like, a couple 1000 people on their mailing list for a long time. And then, for me, I launched pre-sales of my book, at that point, my, I think I only had, boy, I used to, I used to have this memorized. But like, it's been so long now. But I think I only had like, it was less than 2000 I think. I think. So, and even then, I don't think you need that. I know people that have launched with much smaller lists than that, and, and it was fine. Because the people that are on your list now guarantee it, your, will be very interested in, in buying the book. You know, that'd be like a low, low barrier to entry, assuming like, your mailing list is one of the ways that you're thinking of selling the book. Michele Hansen  08:26Yeah, I guess. That's not a good answer. But like, I, I, I actually, I admit, I'm a little bit like, wary to kind of hit it too hard. Like, I would probably send out like, like, if I did a pre-sale, which I guess I should. Actually, I had someone a couple days ago, who has been reading the drafts, who actually I think is also a 30x500 student in the past, say that they wanted to, like, pre-buy the book and asked me how to do it. And I was like, that's a great question. I will figure that out. And like, so maybe do that, and then maybe one more when, like, the book comes out? Um, yeah, cuz, so I've been thinking about the newsletter as a way to draft the book because I find writing an email to be a lot easier than, like, staring at a blank cursor just, you know, blinking at me. And I guess I haven't really, like, and like, people signed up for it to read the draft of the book, so I guess I almost feel bad like, using it for sales too much. Like you know, I want to let people know that the book exists, but like, I don't want to. I don't know, does that. Sean Fioritto  09:45So, it's very considerate of you to think about that. Michele Hansen  09:52Another way of saying that another, also a way to not make any money off of this. Sean Fioritto  09:57Well, yeah, that, but also, it's kind of inconsiderate of you to not be thinking about all the people that really, really, really want to buy it and also would like to read anything that you're writing right now. Like, you're just completely leaving them out there to dry. And there are definitely people like that on your mailing list. So, they're like, there's like, some people on your mailing list are not going to be interested in your content if you're sending it too much, or, or just in general, really lightly interested in what you're writing about, or mistakenly signed up for your mailing list, which at this point, you probably don't have that problem. So like, to some extent, that's always the case, and it used to bother me a lot. I would send an email, and sales emails especially would result in bigger unsubscribes after every email, because you know, your little email tool tells you like, can, you know, so nice of it to tell you like, this many people unsubscribed after you sent this email. And it's always a big jump after like, a sales email. That used to bother me a lot. But then I started, kind of watching even my own behavior, and you probably do the same, and you probably like, look forward to some emails from some people that hit your inbox from some newsletters that you're looking forward to, and you'd very much like them to send you more. And then there's other people where you're like, well, I signed up for that, like, a couple years ago, and I just am not thinking about that anymore. And I need, like, to like, whittle down my content. So you unsubscribe. So then you become that unsubscribe number on the other end of the person sending the email, but like, you weren't annoyed, you didn't mind. It was just like, time to move on. And that's usually the case. So I think people can just unsubscribe as long as it's easy. I would literally put it at the top of my emails. So like, because I would send emails very infrequently. I was not disciplined about that. And I still don't think that that's a problem. But the, but because I sent them infrequently I put at the top like, hey, you know, you signed up for this, because you probably read this thing I wrote. You weren't interested in the book, whatever, if this is not for you anymore, just unsubscribe, like, first thing. So that always made me feel better about sending emails. And also, I don't know, I think that's the right thing to do so people just know, like upfront, that you know, oh, okay, there's the easy to find unsubscribe button when they're done. And then that's fine. Michele Hansen  12:26We did that for Geocodio once, like, I want to say it was like a year or two ago, and our lists had been like, super disorganized. And like I think we had, we were sending stuff like, we send like one or two marketing emails a year from MailChimp. And then we also had Intercom, and those things didn't sync up. And so like, sometimes people would unsubscribe in intercom and then like, not be unsubscribed in MailChimp, or like vice versa. And then, since we didn't send a lot of email, we used MailChimp's pay as you go. And then they just like, shut down their page and go option a couple of years ago, even though we had a ton of credit, which was a little annoying. And, and then, so like, the next time, and I think we migrated over to Mailcoach. And so the next time we send out an email, we actually like for some reason, we were like, there's probably a lot of people on this who have meant to unsubscribe. And so at the very top of the next email, we put an unsubscribe link and we also put a link to delete their account. And like, a bunch of people did it, but then our number of people who were unsubscribing later on like, went like, way down. So it was like, ripping off the band aid basically. Sean Fioritto  13:36Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think like, I don't know, when people unsubscribe from Geocodio, at this point, it doesn't like, break your heart anymore, I'm guessing. Right?  Michele Hansen  13:45No, I mean, we're like, we're kind of like jumping into something that has been very much on my mind, but I hadn't been wanting to admit that it was there and just trying to like, pretend that it's not there, which is all the dealing with rejection around either, you know, people being mad that they were being sold to or negative reviews. And I like, you know, it sounds like you kind of have a process for, like, accepting those feelings.  Sean Fioritto  14:19It used to bother me a lot.  Michele Hansen  14:22Like, yeah. Sean Fioritto  14:24Yeah, it used to bother me a lot. There are two things that I hated. I hated frontpage Hacker News, and I hated getting angry emails.  Michele Hansen  14:33Oh.  Sean Fioritto  14:35I also got creepy, tons of creepy emails. Once you get, like, past a certain threshold and the number of subscribers you have, the creepiness factor increases. Yeah. Yeah. But the, but I got used to all of that. I just realized, like, there's just some percentage of people that are just angry right now or whatever, like, whatever they're going through. And I know that, like, I am very carefully crafting things such that the most, most of my content is not self-serving, most of it is directly a result of research that tells me that this is a problem that people are having, and now I'm helping you. So I'm like, I never feel bad about those, and then even the sales emails, I started to not feel bad about those, too, because I'm like, this is also a thing that's helping you. But that took a while to get to. I mean, honestly, it did. And it got worse when it became my only source of income, which added extra, extra feelings. But yeah, there's a lot of feelings to like, get through. And now I have just developed more of a thick skin, you know. Like, I'm not terrified of having a super popular article anymore, or, you know, stuff like that. That doesn't, that doesn't bother me anymore. I think it just came with time, just like with you and Geocodio. I mean, I'm sure you are used to like, some fluctuations of revenue, which probably bothered you a lot at the beginning, but now, not so much. I mean, I'm just, I'm guessing, but that seems, you know, I'm sure there's some things they're that you've got a thick skin about now. Michele Hansen  16:12Oh, my gosh. I mean, for years, every time a plan downgrade came through, like every time it was like a punch in the gut. Like, and yeah, I think now that I, I guess I trust the revenue more, I'm not as impacted by it. It's more like, oh, I wonder, like, why that was. Like, did their project end, or like, you know, like, what happened? But yeah, in the beginning, especially when it was first our like, when it, when it became my, like, full time income. I mean, as, as you said, like, that is really painful. Like, I'm curious, like, so you,  so like, when did you start writing the book? Sean Fioritto  1705Let me think, like, like the year, or a timing, like, in terms of the timeline?  Michele Hansen  17:12Whichever one you want to go with.  Sean Fioritto  17:15Yeah, I can't remember the year cuz it was a while ago. It was like, eight years ago.  Michele Hansen  17:19Oh, wow. Okay. So you started, Sean Fioritto  17:22I think it was 2013 is when I started. Yeah. Michele Hansen  17:24You did the, sounds like you did 30x500 first, right? Sean Fioritto  17:30Yeah, I had the, I had started writing the book before 30x500. But like I said, I was ,I was following her process already at sort of reverse engineered it. And then I felt like I just owed her the money for the, for the course. So, plus I wanted to meet her, so. Michele Hansen  17:44Yeah, so you started like, the research process basically, like, like 30x500 like, was only one part of your, like, research. Like, cuz you said you had sort of, you had figured out what her process was based on the blog posts and whatnot before you took the course. Yeah. Sean Fioritto  18:00Yeah.  Michele Hansen  18:01Okay. Sean Fioritto  18:02Yeah, and at that point, I had already generated the research I needed to see, to choose Sketching With CSS as a, as a product. I pretty much had, I think I had a landing page. I hadn't done pre-sales yet, but I was, I was gearing up for that. Michele Hansen  18:17You are so organized. Colleen Schnettler  18:19Michele, do you have a landing page?  Michele Hansen  18:22There is a website.  Colleen Schnettler  18:24Okay, I didn't know. Michele Hansen  18:26I haven't told anyone about it because I talk about,  Colleen Schnettler  18:29Your secret website. Michele Hansen  18:30I actually have two. I thought of the domain name, or like, the name for it in the shower, and then I like, immediately like, ran for the computer to see if it was available. And I actually bought two, and then I think we put, like, a book, oh my god, I just typed it wrong. Colleen Schnettler  18:55This is the part where you tell us what it is.  Michele Hansen  18:57There's nothing on it, and actually, if I say it now then we have to have something on it by, Colleen Schnettler  19:01Well, there's no way to pressurize a situation than to tell us right now. Michele Hansen  19:06So okay, it is DeployEmpathy.com. Okay, okay, crap, now I have it out. I don't even know how I'm going to sell it. Okay. So um, and I think I have another one, too. But yeah, we have like, a very basic like, WordPress template on it. Like, it's not, it's not, okay. While I was trying to figure it, so like, people keep asking me like, oh, like, when's your book coming out? And I'm like, I have no idea. I have never done this before. I don't know what steps are ahead of me. So, okay, so you started writing the book while you were doing research concurrently, and then how, and you were also, Sean Fioritto  19:48Oh, sorry, there's two types of research.  Michele Hansen  19:50Okay. Sean Fioritto  19:51So, we could clarify that. There was my audience research and understanding the pain that I was solving, and then there's the research about the book. I didn't have to do as much research about the book. I mean, I already, like, the type of book I ended up writing, I already had, you know, the expertise I needed to write that book. So yeah, I was, audience research was already done by the time I was writing Sketching With CSS. So I wasn't doing research like that while writing the book. Michele Hansen  20:16Okay. And then you also had the landing page up, and you started building your list while you were doing this research and writing phase. Okay, so how long did it take you from, like, the time that you had the idea for the book to when people could, like, buy and download the book, like, just like, the big picture? Like, how long did that process take you? Sean Fioritto  20:45Well, I mean, keep in mind, that ton of the work was while I was still full time working, in theory. Michele Hansen  20:56I mean, I guess I am, too, right? Like, this is not my full time thing. Sean Fioritto  21:00Yeah, but I think like, from, from, from research to launch, like, book is done, it was like, in the four to six month range. Michele Hansen  21:14Okay. Okay. So I think I started at like, the end of February with the newsletter, and it's May, so that's like, yeah. I do feel like I'm doing a little bit of, I think what we have termed Colleen does, of putzing in the code garden, rather than selling things or doing marketing or whatnot. And I am totally doing that with my manuscript, I guess you could call it. Sounds so fancy. And just like, moving commas around and like, totally procrastinating on making images for it, like totally, totally procrastinating on that. Okay, so it took you like, four to six months to get to that point.  Sean Fioritto  21:59Yeah, there was a, there was a launch in between there. Michele Hansen  22:02So when was the like, so was your pre-sale your launch? Or like, how does that work?  Sean Fioritto  22:08You could do lots of launches.  Michele Hansen  22:11This is like, the part that is like, just sort of like, you know, in my head, it's like step one, write book, like, step two of question, question question, and step three, profit. Like that's sort of where I am right now. Sean Fioritto  22:24I feel like you're already doing most of the things that I would do. The, the one thing, so alright. So you're, you're working in public, so you're getting interest via Twitter. You're writing to your mailing list. You're doing the right thing, which is writing content for your book that, you know, is also useful to your mailing list, like, independently. Like, like getting double bang for your buck is smart when you're doing this kind of business. So you're keeping your list warm enough. People are, you're building anticipation, people are telling you you're building anticipation, because they're like, hey, when do I get to buy this book? So, you know, you're basically doing all the things. As, you know, from from my perspective, looking in, it seems like you're just accidentally or intuitively doing the right, doing the right stuff. The thing that's missing between like, what you are doing and what I did is probably, I would press pause on book writing and do specific content marketing things just to build my mailing list. Michele Hansen  23:37But I love putzing in the code garden.  Sean Fioritto  23:39And I'm not, I'm not, sorry, I didn't mean to say that as like, you should do that. That's what I would, as in like, I was doing that. And I don't know, Michele Hansen  23:48And you wrote, like, a successful book and sold it, and it was your full time job for a period of time. So you're kind of here because you're good at this and because I need to be told these things. Sean Fioritto  23:59Right. Well, I'm just saying what I did. But it's, it's really ultimately you get to pick and choose what you do. The, you know, I actually happen to very much enjoy the process of coming up with content that I knew would be popular and writing it and sharing it everywhere and doing all that stuff. And also, I knew I needed to because I was going to try and make this my full time living, so I'm like, I need more people on my mailing list. So that was pretty important to me based on the goals I was trying to achieve. The, the other thing is though, like, even with a small mailing list, your book as the, a lot of book sales are gonna come from word of mouth. Like, I sort of forced the book onto the scene. But like, it's not a, the Sketching With CSS is not like a, while the marketing theme is, like, the marketing message at the time, it doesn't connect anymore because  the world has moved on from that phase of web development. But like, while people could read the marketing, the landing page and connect really strongly, and, you know, be interested in the book, the book didn't really lend itself well to word of mouth, because it's not like, it was not like a, oh, you should read this, like, it's this lightweight, like reading recommendation. It's got to be, you've got to be like, ready to commit to learning a bunch of code. So it's like, there's like, a smaller group of people at any given time that are like, at that point, does that make sense? Versus your book, it's, it seems like, it's like a higher level of value, like, it's a more abstract, then like, here are the, learn this code. Here's how to type in Git commands, here's how to do that. You know, like, I was really like, down at the, like, here's what you're gonna be doing day to day in your job. And you're giving them the same message, but like, in a way that can be, that is at like, a higher level, it's maybe easier to read, you know, in your spare time. It's like a business book, has the same qualities of, like, successful business books. So, I think that you may not have to do any of the content marketing stuff that I was doing is what I'm getting at, because, like, I can already tell, I'm ready to read your book, and I'm ready to recommend it to people, because it does it solve, like, a question that people have all the time, and a problem people have, and they're like, oh, I wish I knew how to, you know, talk to my customers more effectively, or understand, you know, the types of customers that are gonna be interested my products, or what problems they're having, etc, etc, right? Customer research, that kind of thing. That is a topic of conversation that comes up a lot in my communities that I hang out in, and so, you know, your book’s gonna be like, at-hand for me to recommend. That's, that's what I suspect. That's my, that's my theory for your book. Michele Hansen  27:00Yeah, I guess, I mean, there's parts of it, definitely.  Sean Fioritto  27:02It's also got a catchy name.  Michele Hansen  27:04Hey, I thought of it in the shower, and then I ran to register the domain, which is exactly what you are supposed to do when you have a good idea for something right? Like, this is the process. Colleen Schnettler  27:13Definitely. Michele Hansen  27:13Like,  Sean Fioritto  27:14You already had a book though, so it's different. You're like, I'm gonna write this book called Deploying Empathy. And you already, like, wrote it. So I think you're good to go. Michele Hansen  27:20Yeah, actually I didn't have a name for a while. Okay, so, so something else I have, like, a question on, which you kind of just sort of touched on with that about, like, super practical elements. So some, some of it is you can, you can definitely sit down and, and you could probably read it in a sitting or two. But then there's, there's the stuff that's more like a toolbox with all of the different scripts, which, by the way earlier, when you were saying like finding the type of content that people are really hungry for like, that, like, those scripts are the thing that people are the most excited about. The problem is, there's only like, so many sort of general scenarios. So I've basically written the main ones, but, so something I noticed with your site, which is SketchingWithCSS.com, just for everybody's reference, so you have the book plus code, which is like, your basic option for $39. And then you have one with the video package for 99. And then you have another one with more stuff for 249. And then there's one with like, all the things for your team for 499. And so, something that people have asked me for is like, like, there's the book piece, and then there's also, people want to be able to easily replicate the scripts so that they can then like, use them to build their own scripts off of it, and like, modify them and whatnot. So people have said, like, well, that could be like a Notion Template, like, bundle that it's sold with, or Google Docs or, or whatever. And so I've been like, kind of like, how do you sell the book with this like, other bundle? And like, can you also do that, like if you sell like a physical book to like, if I did it through Amazon, like, could I also sell a Notion Template bundle or something? Like, I just, I'm kind of, that sort of like, something that's on my mind is like, I'm not really sure how to approach that. And I'm wondering if you could kind of like, talk through your approach to creating like, different tiers, and what you provided at those different tears.  Sean Fioritto  29:33Mm hmm. Right. So, at the time, I know, I have a more sophisticated thought process about it now, but the, when I did the initial set of tiers, it was because Nathan Barry told me that I should have three tears because it tripled his revenue. So I was like, oh, okay.  Michele Hansen  29:53I mean, that's a good reason.  Sean Fioritto  29:55Like, we just happened to be at the bacon biz. That was the other person that I was, I bought his book. So here's the thing I always do, I would buy people's books that way I could email them. Michele Hansen  30:08Is that a thing? Like, if you buy someone's book, like, do you have a license to email them? Sean Fioritto  30:13Well, you get one. You get one email. And as long as it's, you know, not creepy. That's, that's the main thing. But yeah. So we had a bake in this conference in real life, and then, yeah, that's what he, that's what, he told me that I was like, oh, yeah. Okay. I think Patrick McKenzie was there, too, and he said something similar. So I was like, oh, because they did a landing page tear down for me at that conference. That's right.  Michele Hansen  30:36Wow. Nice. Sean Fioritto  30:37Yeah. So anyway, so I did the, I did that, because somebody told me to. And in fact, it's true. Like, if I hadn't done that, you could just see like, the way the purchases ended up that like, that absolutely almost tripled my revenue. So,  Michele Hansen  30:53Oh, wow. Yeah. Sean Fioritto  30:54Which is a big deal for books, because it's not like, yeah, anyway. The, the, the way, the way you were talking about it, though, because there's another way to think about it. I was thinking about in tiers with the book, but another way to think about it is in terms of a product funnel. So your, your book could be super cheap, and it is the entry point into your product, your little product universe. Because like, you're, what you're doing is naturally, because you're literally writing a book about this, listening to your customers and understanding that they have other like, you're really understanding what their, their pain is, and you see that there's different ways that you could solve it for them, right? Those things as a product. So you could bundle that stuff into your book, you could create tiers, like I did. And maybe it does make sense, we talk about this more, but like there's, there's, there's different ways to do tiers with books that, that makes sense, that aren't exactly what I did. But also, like what you're describing is basically different courses. So let's, so, like, people that run these info product businesses, like, what you end up with is like, you've got this world of courses, and you've got this world of content. And people come in from like, search, you know, or whatever channel that you've worked on, usually it's like an SEO channel, like through your content. And then they enter your automated marketing system. And then the first thing they do is buy probably your cheapest thing, your book, and then you're moving them on to the next level into your email marketing system to get them to start looking at, you know, your course, which is like a more in-depth version of the book, or whatever. So anyway, I'm just sort of sketching out, like how, how these content marketing businesses tend to work. So you kind of end up in their little universe and then you just get bounced around all their various email automation. If you've been in anybody's like, any internet famous person's little, like, email world, you'd probably notice eventually, if you're there for long enough, like, I already got that email. And so anyway, so let's there's like a different way of looking at it. You don't have to do tiers. You could just sell your book, you know, digital version, here's the hardback version, you make it cheap, and then, you know, lots of people, lots of people read it. And then you, turns out that this is still really interesting to you, you still like solving people's problems and you're like, you know what, like, I should release like, some recordings of customer interviews as like, examples or whatever, you know, and then you peel that off into a different product and you sell that, and slowly you build up this machine, basically. Also the guy to talk to would be Keith Perhac, who's in our group, too. Michele Hansen  33:51Oh, yeah, I should totally talk to Keith.  Colleen Schnettler  33:53Did he write a book? Sean Fioritto  33:55Yeah, he did but also his, his job before running SegMetrics was with the internet famous person that you guys know of that ran these huge content marketing programs and had this whole product funnel thing and all this stuff that I was talking about. So Keith is like, expert on that topic. Michele Hansen  34:15I guess I don't know if I want to go that direction just now because I do, you know, I do have a job. Um, so I'm, yeah.  Sean Fioritto  34:28You could just be like Amy.  Michele Hansen  34:33So, I, yeah, so I guess I have to think about that, and thinking about like, like, where to price it and those bundles and whatnot. Actually, I have another super like, mechanical question. So, between the time you announced the pre-order, and when you, like, people could actually like, to like, first of all, like, what was the incentive for somebody to pre-order? And then, what was the time from like, when you announced the pre-order to when you like, people could actually get it? Like, how far in advance do you do a pre-order? And what do you like, do you have to give people something? Sean Fioritto  35:10Yeah, I can't, I actually can't remember. I can't remember, what did I do? I did a pre-order. I can't even remember if I gave him the book or not. I don't think you have to. Some people just buy it ready to go. I think I, I probably did give ‘em like, here's everything I got so far, and it's gonna change, but, you know, here's that. Here's what I've got. And, you know, whatever version, like, people don't care if it's like, not even formatted or, you know, give me everything you got. Because the people that are going to do that are ready to just devour it. And then also, some of them might be like, I'm not wanting to, I don't want it right now, but I had a discount, right? So there's like, the pre-order, it's like a little bit cheaper to buy it now. Because I knew I was going to be selling it at like, as, like, a $40 product. So the discount, I think I sold it initially for pre-orders for like, 29 bucks, or maybe less even. Yeah, maybe like 20 bucks or something like that. Michele Hansen  36:08Okay, and it's 30 now. Colleen Schnettler  36:11Yeah, it probably makes sense for you, as someone who, I'm using it and referencing it, even though it's not done, because those scripts, like you were saying, are so valuable to people.  Michele Hansen  36:20Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess I sort of like, feel like everybody already has everything. I mean, reality like, they, they don't because everything has been changed so much. But I guess I need to like, set it up, too. Like, I need to decide on a platform to use to actually sell it.  Sean Fioritto  36:42Oh, I didn't do that at first.  Michele Hansen  36:45Okay. So did you just use Stripe? Sean Fioritto  36:47I think I used PayPal. I was literally like, here's my email, send PayPal money there. And then I sent it to ‘em. Michele Hansen  36:55How did you deal with that and sales tax and stuff?  Sean Fioritto  36:57I don't think that existed. But also I would have just ignored it. Michele Hansen  37:03Okay, yeah, I guess I'm in the EU, so I kind of can't. Sean Fioritto  37:08It's the wild west out here. Michele Hansen  37:12'Murica. Sean Fioritto  37:15No, I had a really bad tax bill the first year because I ignored all of that stuff.  Michele Hansen  37:19Oh, okay, so you're not advising. This is not financial advice.  Sean Fioritto  37:26I'm just saying what I did. I'm not saying you should do that.  Michele Hansen  37:30This may or may not be good advice, what you are hearing, just so you know. All of this may be bad advice. Okay, so I basically, Sean Fioritto  37:39I got audited, too, actually. I forgot about that. So don't, yeah, definitely don't do that. Being audited is not as bad as it sounds, it turns out but that's, anyway, that's a different story. Michele Hansen  38:55I was, I feel like I should do a, like a talk hear, hear, and be like, well, on that massive disappointment, thank you and good evening. Um, so okay. So you know, I feel, see, I feel like I look at you and you're like, you, like, have your stuff together about selling a book. And the fact that you had all like, you had these fears about, like, getting rejected by it, and like, put all this into it, and you did it without having done it before. And, you know, made mistakes, looking back, that you are now helping me not replicate. Um, I feel, I feel a little, I feel a little better about this. And also, I guess I have a deadline now, which is five days from now to have the website functional. So, that's fun.  Colleen Schnettler  38:51You're welcome. I'm here for you, Michele. Just push you over the cliff. Michele Hansen  38:56Like, copy paste content into it, right? Um, I noticed actually that Sean, like, your site has a ton of testimonials, and that's something I have been sort of tepidly starting to collect. Like, I guess I'm a little bit afraid to, like, ask people for testimonials. But I've gotten a couple. Sean Fioritto  39:17So what you do is you write them the testimonial, then you email them and you say can I use this as your testimonial? And then they say yes, and then you put it on your page. Michele Hansen  39:25That's lower friction than what I've been asking for. Um, but, but that makes sense. Sean Fioritto  39:32I mean, I would also peel out, so they said something good in an email and I'd copy it and then change it so it sounded better, and then, can I use this as a testimonial?  Michele Hansen  39:39Yeah. Yeah.  Sean Fioritto  39:42I mean, when I say sounds better, I mean, just like copy edit, right? Michele Hansen  39:45I mean, I guess, like, we do that with Geocodio. And I think, like, Colleen and I have talked about this how, I guess I've like, gotten over all of these fears with Geocodio, and I'm so much more confident with it. And maybe it's because it doesn't have my name, like, directly on it, or it's just been around for like seven and a half years now. Versus this, I'm like, I'm so much more unsure. Like,  Sean Fioritto  40:07You haven't done this in a long time.  Michele Hansen  40:08I never have written a book. Sean Fioritto  40:12Well, whatever. Like, you haven't done a launch. Because you can launch anything. You could have launched Geocodio. Michele Hansen  40:18Yeah. Sean Fioritto  40:18You could've launched it this way, too. But you just haven't done that before. And it's weird, launch is weird because launch is like, everybody, pay attention to me now.  Michele Hansen  40:29Yeah, I'm just super uncomfortable with that.  Sean Fioritto  40:33Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's what it feels like. But then when I realized it was, if you're doing it, right, it's not that. It feels like it, but you're not actually making it about you. It's about them. And then for like, a couple days, you know, you gotta be like, here's the product, you can buy it, and you got to be like sending more emails than you normally. Lots of people will unsubscribe. But like I said, those people are not subscribing. Some of them probably hate you, but you know, most of them are probably just unsubscribing because like, they're, turns out, they weren't interested now that they actually see what it is. They're like, oh, no, that's not what I was thinking it was, or whatever. You get used to it, like, you definitely get used to it. I did it for a couple products. And over time, I just didn't care anymore. Like, I absolutely felt like I was doing a good for people. And I know that I was because I didn't get nearly as much. I think that some of my friends who were in that space would tell me that I needed to go harder, you know, like a little more salesy than I was. But anyway, the point is, Michele Hansen  41:39The thing is, like, I'm not like, I'm not averse to marketing, I think, I mean, this is something that like, we were actually talking about the other day, like people, like technical people being averse to like, sales and marketing and like, like, I have written the book with this in mind that like, hopefully, like, people will recommend it, like, like an audience of the book is like product leaders and marketing leaders who need to teach their teams how to do this. And so like, that's an audience I'm writing for because if they then they have like, buy the book for like five people, and then if they get a new job, or promotion, or whatever, in two years, and they need to teach the team like their new team how to do it again. Um, and so like, that is like, comfortable for me. But yeah, I guess as you were saying, like, hitting the sales hard is, is a little bit uncomfortable. And I guess I will just have to deal with a couple of days of like, that being awkward and like, doing the whole, like, you know, I don't know, like home shopping network style, like, and here's this book, and you can have it for the low, low price of $29. Plus, all of these bundles. Like, Sean Fioritto  42:43So, the thing that, okay, maybe this will help you, but they would help, it helped me, is I just focus on, on the, on the people that are, on your audience, and like your copy and everything is about them. It's about you. You're using, I know you're doing this, right, so you're gonna use the word you in your copy. Like, you never use the word I in your copy, right? So everything is about them. You've done all this research, you know, them, you know, you know, the problems they're facing, you know the pains they're having. And so you could just keep talking about that, talking about that. Launch, then, is then just like, more of those types of emails, like, a higher cadence than you're used to, which is still just about them. And then you're hitting them with like, okay, and now it's here. Like, you're, the whole time you're telling them it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And then now it's here, here's what's in it, and you're gonna have these emails that just say, here's everything that's in it, and then here's questions that people might have, email that follows up, and then hey, this is gonna end in like a certain amount of time, follow up and then you got one hour left, you know, email. So you do these, you do this sequence of emails, but like, you have to remember when you're sending those that are the most uncomfortable that some people are really, really excited, and if you don't send them that stuff, they won't buy it and they'll, they'll regret it. Like, there's some people that genuinely are very excited and super thrilled to get those emails. Michele Hansen  44:03Can I run a, I have like, a tagline, or not like, a headline I have been throwing around in my head. Can I run it past you?  Sean Fioritto  44:12Yeah. For an article?  Michele Hansen  44:13No, for the book, but like, so like, this would be the like, main headline on the site. Sean Fioritto  44:18Yeah, yeah.  Michele Hansen  44:21Your time is too valuable to spend it building things people don't want.  Sean Fioritto  44:27Perfect. I mean, it's a little wordy, but yeah, like, the concept is perfect. Michele Hansen  44:32I will work on the wordiness. Sean Fioritto  44:36I mean, it's really, it's good, though. That's perfect.  Michele Hansen  44:38It's good. I guess it's good enough, right? It's good enough for me to slap a site together in the next, checks watch, five days, and, and get that going. Sean Fioritto  44:50Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like, you could roll with that as an H2 on a landing page. Easy. Yeah. That would be fine the way it is. Michele Hansen  44:57Cool. Second image of the book. All right. There's all this stuff I'll have to do, but I guess I'll just be working away at this. Sean Fioritto  45:04You know what would be fun for you? I have an archived version of like, my old initial website, if you go to, oh, it doesn't work anymore. Michele Hansen  45:15Can I look it up on Internet Archive? Or it's like, Sean Fioritto  45:19Probably you can, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't. I used to have it just up so that I could, you could go to the URL. But yeah, so you'd have to go through the Internet Archive. But I had, and I did a, I did a write up on the landing page tear down and discussed screenshots from the, from the old version. It was truly, truly awful. But I sold $7,000 worth of book through it. So, Michele Hansen  45:40Can I ask you how much you sold overall? Do you reveal that? Sean Fioritto  45:44Yeah, yeah, of course. So it's actually hard to know because the, well, because as I've revealed I'm not fantastic about keeping track of my finances, or I wasn't then, but the, the book, through its lifespan, has made about $150,000.  Michele Hansen  46:06Whoa.  Sean Fioritto  46:07And most of that was the first two years because I was really, really actively pushing it. And then it just sort of, like, continued to make sales in dribs and drabs, and now it makes, probably, I don't know, I think I sold $1,000 worth of it last year, which makes sense, because it's pretty out of date at this point. Michele Hansen  46:28That'd be interesting to know why people are still buying it. Sean Fioritto  46:32Well, because the concept of designing in a browser is still something that people, you know, talk about from time to time. Should designers write code, or should they be using Figma, or at the time, you know, Sketch or Photoshop, I think all my copy is about Photoshop. So, you know, so like, I think that that concept is still valid. My copy is a little dated, the, the tech inside the book is a little, little dated at this point, though, still useful. So yeah, I think that is just the, so that was one of the things that I learned for content marketing was the, so if you want something to be really like, a really big hit, and to sort of like, make the rounds on the internet, you know, just those articles, it's sometimes just like, everybody's reading. The key to those is there has to be, well, there's like three rules. But like, one of the rules is, it has to be something everybody's talking about right now. And so at the time, everyone was talking about should we design in the browser? That was a big point of conversation. I would say now, like a similar level of conversation would be people talking about how much they hate single page apps, like in the Ruby on Rails community and trying to like, get off of that, right. So like, if you wrote a book about building single page app equivalents in Hotwire or something like that, that would probably resonate really, really well with that community right now. And you'd get a lot of free buzz when it's, people are already talking about it. So that's the problem. I think that that's why, like, hardly anybody's buying it now. But still, people are talking about that. So you get like, a little bit. And then also, I have all these marketing automated things that are still running. So like, I have some content that I accidentally wrote that has a lot of Google traffic, right? Like, I didn't accidentally write it, but I accidentally, like, did some search engine optimization on it. And so I get quite a bit of traffic from those pages, and then they end up signing up for, like, my tutorial things. And then they're in my little email automation thing that I set up, and eventually they get a pitch and then they, and then they buy. So there's some trickle down of that. Michele Hansen  48:50That makes sense. So, I guess, and this will be my last question. Um, is there anything else I should know about selling a book? Sean Fioritto  49:02Yeah, you don't have to do any of the things that I said, like. Like, well I think, I think you're already like doing all the right things. I was pushing really hard to make it my business. And so that, and frankly, once it got to the point where it was my business, that was a distraction for me. It made it hard, harder for me to stay relaxed and focused on doing the things that were the best for my customers, like, once money became this, like concern. So to me, you have this advantage of like, you don't have to, you don't have to worry about that. Like, each one of the things that I did, like it feels like you should bone up a little bit on how to do a launch, though that's not too difficult. You don't have to do like, the greatest job ever, and you maybe even already know how to do that to some extent. But other than that, I don't know, like 200 people on the mailing list, probably enough already. And you'll get more as people are more and more interested. And, you know, do you have an email subscribe on any of your content at all that you've written? Michele Hansen  50:16So it's all in review, so I think it all has a subscribe link at the bottom.  Sean Fioritto  50:22Perfect. Michele Hansen  50:23I think I have one on Twitter, like, on my pinned tweet is a subscription to the newsletter. Sean Fioritto  50:30Yeah, yeah. Cuz like, by the time I was doing it full time, I mean, the number of, I was doing so many other things that we didn't even talk about, for marketing, which it's like, we don't, we don't even need to go there. Because you don't, you don't need to do any of that stuff. I think you're doing everything right. And I would think carefully about, like, what your goals are with the book, and, for both you, you and for your customers, and then kind of size it right size it accordingly. And don't feel guilty about not doing all the right marketing things, because the right marketing things, just as long as you're focused on your audience and the people that are going to be reading your book, you're doing the right thing. Michele Hansen  51:13Hmm. Well, thank you for that, like, boost of encouragement.  Sean Fioritto  51:19You're welcome.  Michele Hansen  51:21I guess to wrap up, we should mention, by the way, that you have your own show. And you're actually getting something off the ground right now. Do you want to talk about that for a second? Sean Fioritto  51:34Yeah. So my friend Aaron Francis and I, we have a company called Hammerstone, that's at Hammerstone.dev. Our podcast is, is linked to there on the home page. We have, like you guys, it's kind of like a ride along podcast, and we just do our weekly check in we record it as a, as a podcast. And what we're working on is a drop in component for Laravel. The component allows you, allows your users to build, dynamically build queries, which they can, you could then use to display reports, etc. to them. Yeah, so that's, that's our new thing that we're working on. That's a new thing for me. I should probably have a whole other podcast and invite you on, ask you about how I should be marketing my software business. Michele Hansen  52:30So by the way, so, the podcast is really good. We finished it on a road trip a couple of months ago, and you should totally start at the beginning because, like so, so yes, like, the software part is interesting. But there's this whole other element that Aaron's wife is pregnant with multiples. And the podcast started in like, December, right?  Sean Fioritto  52:52Yeah.  Michele Hansen  52:53So, and she was due in April. And so there's this like, whole, like, tension of it of like, oh, my god, like, are they gonna get to launch stuff before, like, Aaron goes from being not a parent to the parent of multiple children overnight? Like, is it like, is it gonna happen? And I found myself as I was listening, I was like, oh, my god, like, like, it really added this element of suspense that I have not felt while listening to another podcast, and it made it very enjoyable. Sean Fioritto  53:24You know what's frustrating. I just realized your audience actually overlaps with the audience of my product. And I just did a horrible job of pitching it. I was like, I could just sort of half-ass explain it here. But, Michele Hansen  53:34All you Laravel people, like, just check it out.  Sean Fioritto  53:37Yeah, that's good.  Michele Hansen  53:40Just take my word for it. This has been really fun, Sean. Thank you so much for coming on.  Sean Fioritto  53:50You're welcome.  Michele Hansen  53:51I really appreciate all of your advice. And I, I don't know what you call the, the anti-advice. You know, don't ignore taxes. And encouragement and perspective, that really means a lot to me.  Sean Fioritto  54:08You're welcome. Thanks for having me on.  Michele Hansen  54:11This is awesome. So if you guys liked this episode, please leave us a review on iTunes. Or let us know that you listened on Twitter, and we'll talk to you next week.

Mario Gabriele is the founder of The Generalist. His mission? To bring the most interesting tech writing to your inbox, every week. And he's not doing it alone, either: Mario works with a team of contributors to deliver new ideas from some of the most original minds in venture capital and tech.In this episode, Mario talks about how and why he left a career in venture investing to build The Generalist, and his lifelong obsessions with writing and technology. The Generalist is not only a really successful newsletter, it's a thriving business, too! Tune in to hear how Mario did it.You'll learn about approaching and collaborating with the people you only dream of working with. Mario talks about how he went from merely admiring certain writers' work to joining their “club” in 18 months!Mario also shares the most reliable way to advance your career, and the safest ways to accelerate it. There's a lot of good stuff in this conversation!Links & Resources Stratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology. Exponential View by Azeem Azhar The Nathan Barry Show 028: Packy McCormick – How Much Are 30,000 Subscribers Worth? Acquired Podcast Atonement by Ian McEwan Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg Webflow: The no code platform for web design and development Pico - Signup and payment tools for the internet's most passionate communities alexdanco.com – subscribe weekly at danco.substack.com Mario Gabriele's Links Personal site: The Generalist Twitter: @mariodgabriele Episode TranscriptMario: [00:00:00] I just really love writing very, very much. And so, as soon as I got the width that like, maybe I could make this a real thing, then suddenly like a flip switched in me where I was like, all right, I have to go as hard as possible and feel like the value was accruing directly to me. As soon as I was like fully on my own thing, I suddenly felt like, Oh man, I'm unchanged to go after this. Nathan: [00:00:30] In this episode, I talked to Mario Gabriele. Now Mario runs an email newsletter called The Generalist, which is focused on tech venture capital and investing. He comes from the venture capital world himself, and then he really brings forward all of that into the newsletter. A couple of things really impressed me about Mario. One, he really collaborates, well, he's got something called the S–1 Club, which is where they do tear downs of filings that companies make before they go public. And he really brings in other creators and they write them together. He also has something called RFS, which is Request for Startups and he brings in other venture capitalists and operators and everyone else to share startup ideas.So he's got this interesting mix of his own Content, Community Content, and he's built it not only into a really successful newsletter, but also a thriving business. So it's a lot of good stuff. Let's dive in.Mario. Thanks for coming on the show.Mario: [00:01:25] Thanks for having me, Nathan.Nathan: [00:01:26] Okay, so you have this line. I think you said it on Twitter and a few other places that I just want to start with. You said, it sounds ridiculous to announce your dream is to build a great newsletter and then you go into like, you know, but that's what I'm doing, you know, my love of technology and writing and everything else. So maybe just start with why, like, why did you want to start a newsletter?Mario: [00:01:52] Yeah. I mean, honestly it wasn't, something that was necessarily in the back of my mind for a long time, it really sort of happened organically. and I think work is often like this where for a long time, you're not really sure exactly what you're doing. And then. When you sort of find something that actually feels incredibly right, you can sort of trace back all the little things along the way that brought you there.And so for me, that was really two main, explorations. One was that, you know, from a very young age, I've always really enjoyed writing. and so I did a lot of that in school. and then after I'd left university, I started to take night school classes and fiction writing at NYU. Starting in 2012, I started to like write a novel every morning, getting up early, you know, spending an hour before work, just sort of like practicing, practicing, practicing.And it was just sort of this hobby I had. And then simultaneously where I was really building a career was in technology. so. You know, on the operating side, at a few companies and then on the investing side in sort of a few venture firms and, starting The Generalist really was just a way to.You know, I express that hobby in a slightly different way. I had folks be like, all right, cool. You're spending all this time writing. Like what, why don't you write a thing or two about, about your actual work? and so just started as sort of a side project on the weekends and then bit by bit, it just was absorbing more of my thought.More of my excitement, more of my energy. And it started to really feel like it was pulling me in this direction. And, once I felt like it might be possible for writing to become. My life's work and be a viable career, which had always been sort of the reason I hadn't tried to go full-time as a novelist.You know, even though, you know, unless you're JK rallying, it's pretty impossible. newsletters felt like a way I could do that and really write the stuff I wanted to write, and make, make a living out of it. Hopefully.Nathan: [00:04:09] Yeah. So, it's, we're recording this in February, 2021. When was it that you started The Generalist?Mario: [00:04:16] So I start, I wrote the first ever post in August of 2019. And honestly was sort of an accident that I started it as a newsletter. I had just been seen seeing people like switch over to Substack over Medium. This is before I had heard the gospel of ConvertKit. So, yeah, I was just like, cool.I'll do this instead of Medium, like whatever. and then. That first post, even though it was very small circulation just led to so many interesting conversations and people started to sign up. And so it suddenly became like very clear why you should make it a newsletter versus a blog. and then I would say the other sort of critical point was in August of the following year. I went full-time on it. And the growth since, since then has been like significantly different, I would say, just like being able to put more time into it.Nathan: [00:05:15] Yeah. So, there's a few things that I want to dig into there, but, I think there's all these creators that we look up to and admire, right? The newsletters that we read, that YouTube channels that we follow, all of that, and there's sort of this. Feeling of maybe otherness, we're the person watching it.And they're the, you know, the famous person creating the content, whether it's the Casey Neistat or the Ben Thompson or, or whoever. And I'm curious who were a few of those first, like newsletters that you were reading where you're like, Oh, maybe, maybe I want to be like that.Mario: [00:05:48] Yeah, definitely. Ben Thompson was like the first person I saw doing this in where I was like, is this, this guy's job? Like he's obscenely smart. And it seems like he's doing well. but I didn't realize you could do that. so, so he was really one of the first and then. Azeem Azhar writes something called Exponential View.I don't actually know if it's his full-time job. Cause I think he's also a venture investor, but, it's certainly a business. and so that was another one where I was like, yeah, this is a brilliant tech commentator who seems to have it as part of his career stack. And it just felt like, you know, the very least it was going to be a massive advantage to any traditional career I wanted to do.And, you know, hopefully the, the way to build a career.Nathan: [00:06:41] Was there any feeling of moving from? So from my perspective, you've moved from that, like the consumer, who's just, you know, reading these tech news letters to someone who's. Part of the clubs, right. if you've got all these other newsletter creators who are sharing your work as a great example, you come up in conversation like, Oh, talking PARA who I was talking to.It was Jason from Pico and I, and a few other people chatting. And there's like, everyone's just like, Oh, we love Mario's stuff. Right. Has, has that been a shift for you? Or like, is there anything pricing in that shift of going from the consumer to like part of the creator clubs?Mario: [00:07:20] For sure. Yeah. I always, it always feels like a little bit of a trip. Like for example, last night, on Twitter spaces, me Packy McCormick, and of Not Boring and the two hosts of Acquired, David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert. I've been listened to Acquired for a long time. I think it's an amazing podcast and Packy and I sort of have come up at a similar time.And I remember talking with Packy about it offline. And I was like, man, isn't this a trip that like, we get to jam with these two guys that a year ago or 18 months ago, we were just like really admiring their work. and I think that the real takeaways for me are just that like, One, the Content can really speak for itself as long as you are putting in a ton of work and, being really, really, really consistent about it.And that just like can accelerate you way faster than you might've imagined. I think, I constantly underestimated what I might be able to achieve alone as a solo creator. Both in terms of like, you know, traditional growth and just in terms of like being a part of these conversations.Nathan: [00:08:33] Yeah. I mean, that was exactly it for me, you know, and this is back in probably 20, 2012, 2013 of you just go from all the people that you read in mire. And then, you know, at some point you realize like, Oh, I'm, I'm part of the group. How did that happen? And it really, it, I mean, it just comes from that. There's not this huge gap between the person consuming the content, the person creating it.It's not like the creators, this legend or anything like that. It's just like, Hey, just showed up and, and made stuff. And it works really well. Yeah. something else that I was thinking about is you mentioned like your career, you know, so working in, in tech and then getting into venture, and then as you start the newsletter, right?There's a couple of different paths. There's a lot of venture capitalists who have newsletters and, you know, drive incredible deal flow. So like that's one path. It doesn't sound like that was your primary path. You're like looking to. You know, leave venture and, you know, be a full-time, newsletter creator.But one thing that I, that I was thinking about is there's probably no faster way to accelerate your career than to go create an online presence. Go create a newsletter and teach and everything, because maybe you could just speak to this, like the amount of time it would take to move up through venture versus like, short-cutting that entire process by building your own audience.Mario: [00:10:05] A hundred percent and it's sort of frustrating because it's a piece of advice. I think a lot of people will give you early on in venture, which is like, Hey, you should really start blogging and like building an audience. And even for someone like me who was like writing every day, regardless, I still always discounted it as like, yeah, but I mean, what do I know I'm new to this industry?You know, there's so many other people writing about this. Like there's no way I'm going to generate an audience. I have to wait until I know a lot more. and I'm already a partner for anyone to care. And the truth is like, it's the opposite. It's the, you know, obviously a partner can generate that interest maybe off the back, but they kind of don't need to, and there's way fewer impediments to you, gaining that audience than you think.So. Yes. I think one, if I was starting my venture career, earlier on, I would've just like started a regular newsletter off the bat and recognize that like the quality curve would be hopefully, you know, a little steep. and the first, you know, it would take a little bit of time to get up and running, but yeah, I think if you wanted to start a fund today, I would probably start with audience and Content first.And I think writing is. Probably the best thing, for, for tech, I mean, definitely there's some great audio formats as well, but, I think for some of the complexities of tech, writing is particularly good for it.Nathan: [00:11:39] Yeah. What's interesting. Is as people dive into this, well, I speak for myself when I start something new, I'm always like, Oh, what if it fails?And so I always like kind of map out what, what does failure look like? One, the, the true failure would be that you write like three essays or something, and then you just stop. But let's say that I write an essay a week or even an essay a month for, a year. Like my worst version of failure in that is that I'm going to have some number of people paying attention to me.And then the next time I apply for a job that they're scrolling through and they'll click to my website. And instead of seeing like something that was updated in 2016, they'll be like, Oh, He can write, he can communicate these they're interesting ideas. He seems proactive, right? That's one like actual worst case scenario.If you show up is that it will make you more employable. And then the second is like, it would meaningfully accelerate your career. And then the third, you know, the third option is like, you could actually have a path forward as a creator. And that's where I just, I mean, I encourage everyone to write.Mario: [00:12:48] Hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, as you said, at the very least, it's an extremely valuable skill to have and will make you better at your job and, and more attractive to others. And, you know, on the outside or, you know, frankly, probably more accessible than, than many of us realize, like it can really be a career in and of itself.Nathan: [00:13:08] Yeah. What, what advice would you have for someone who maybe is in tech is consuming all of this content, and doesn't have that writing background, you know, and it's like, Oh, but I'm not a good writer. How, how should I practice? What should I do? Yeah.Mario: [00:13:23] I mean, unfortunately I think there's sort of no huge shortcuts. I think it's all just like putting the work into, to keep getting better. and for writing specifically, I think. No, you got to just like show up and do an hour, or at least, you know, some amount every day or at least a few times a week, I think, to get really good.And I'm still very much on the path where I feel like I have a lot more to learn. I hope to keep improving and like honing this muscle over the course of my life. and then, you know, you have to read really widely, I think. and in particular, my, Evangelism is I think people should read much, much more fiction.Then is common in business circles. and in tech circles in particular, for a few different reasons. One, I think like a great deal of nonsense section is essentially a Podcast of an app power that has been, you know, bloated to eight hours. and that you can really get most of the meat in a short amount of time.This is not always the case, but I think it's a good amount of time, the case. And second, like. The cadence and imagination and insight of fiction is like, has a less expressible ROI, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just because it's like more ineffable. and so that is the other thing that I think like hugely helps.My writing is like, because I very, very rarely read nonfiction and has been obsessed with fiction for years. I think that at least helps me stand out from a storytelling perspective.Nathan: [00:15:06] Right. Is there, if you're trying to hook someone into the world of reading fiction, what are like one or two, series that you would start with?Mario: [00:15:15] I would say my favorite writers are, Ian McEwan, an English author, most famous book is called Atonement. Like I, I think that's a pretty accessible book and really awesome. He has a very, very short book called, On Chesil Beach, which is like a beautiful small novel. I think like Murakami has a great book called Norwegian Wood, which is weird, but not like full-bent, Murakami weird.So I think it's like a good intro book as well. but yeah, I think all of those things like. When you're writing about tech or anything else, having a story to frame this may be more wonkish world and makes it so much more accessible and interesting. And I think helps build an audience.Nathan: [00:16:00] Yeah, that makes sense. Something that you've done with The Generalist that I think is really interesting is you've brought in, like fellow writers. You've made these clubs to try to, get a lot of different people's takes, but it's also play this role of, Getting more friends and advocates for The Generalist and, and participants it's it reminds me of the advice that YouTube would always give to YouTubers of saying like, go and do collaborations.That's the best way to grow your channel. And you've like, systematized it. where did that come from to do it? The S–1 Clubs.Mario: [00:16:38] Yeah, so I think initially it was like pure happenstance that. Things were constructed in such a way as to be so collaborative. I think it was probably ultimately came out of, you know, a strength than a weakness. Like maybe the strength is that I really do enjoy, meeting with other people. I really enjoy learning from other people.I try as much as possible to like, listen less than I. And I sort of speak. and then I would say the weaknesses, you know, from a perspective of insecurity, you know, especially as you're starting as a creator, for me as a VC, what about like a large public company? I was like, Oh, I'm not the guy who did two years of investment banking or, you know, work that a hedge fund, like my really going to be able to break down this business.Well, but I clearly want to like talk about it. So, how do I like make this amazing? and what I think I learned after sort of the early version of all of this and also RFS, which is like also a collaborative, sort of, project. Is that just like. Yeah. So RFS is, basically my Friday email, every Friday, you get five startup ideas that are curated from some of the best and brightest VCs and founders from leading firms around the world.So you'll get like a GP of Andreessen Horowitz sharing a startup. They hope it gets made, or. You know, the CEO of like a unicorn company being like, if I wasn't building this, maybe I would like, think about building this. and so I think it's, you know, helpful, hopefully for folks that are just sort of going down the idea maze.I think like, you know, at the times when I've considered maybe starting a software business, and I think flick anyone in tech has vaguely, entertain those thoughts. I was always like keen for vetted ideas. and so that sort of this, the premise of this, but again, it's like fundamentally collaborative there I'll share some ideas of my own, but really they're everyone else's and I'm just sort of playing the role as curator.Anyway, all to say that. It sort of came about by accident, but I think to your point, like very quickly early on looking at folks, that, that use YouTube and even audio, it was just like very obvious that collabs help you drive growth in a very different way. And I think they also. Create a very different product, that feels differentiated.So, you know, increasingly the way I think about The Generalist is like a multi pelt, a multiplayer experience that you're tapping into. so I, I need to do more work on that, but, that's like informing a lot more of my strategy at the moment.Nathan: [00:19:37] Yeah. I'm just realizing so many creators do it as a, as a fully solo activity, which could work really well. And a lot of people, you know, grow quickly, or like they have the brand of the newsletter as, as their name. But. Like the thing that I noticed about The Generalist is how many people are like in your corner rooting for you and, and for the amount of time that you've been doing it, right.We're two years into this, not even 18 months, basically. Right. and so, and I think that this, as you described it, the multiplayer experience is a big part of it where you've built in these two systems where it's not just like. Hey, we're fellow creators. We're all in it together. Like, I'm commenting on your story and saying, Hey, I particularly love this one.Or that kind of thing. Cause we're friends are interested in similar things. It's, you've actually built in these two systems of the S–1 Clubs and the requests for startups that are every, you know, every week, sometimes we've asked one club four or five times a week because it's been wild. And I'm just thinking about how other people could do that.Like, say if you were writing your newsletter every Monday at Monday and Wednesday, and that was the thing that you were writing, but every Friday, you know, you're going out and you're saying I'm. Doing like, and you just make sure your readers know this, I'm doing a cross-post from one of my favorite writers.And so it forces you to do two things, one, go out and meet new people. And then like, to the people who you follow it and admire, like you actually send them the email and be like, Hey, do you want to collaborate? Because I need, I need someone to fill the slot. And I think it really accelerates growth.Mario: [00:21:31] I totally agree. Yeah. I mean, again, Packy I think did a really great job with this, with his Thursday post. Like he writes a Monday post and a Thursday post, and sometimes he writes the Thursday post, but a lot of the time, it's someone else who, you know, is an expert in something. So. he had, I think one of the founders of managed by Q talking about sort of like the, the new sort of food ecosystem and logistics, and like, this is someone who's clearly thought about the future of cities, the future of spaces very deeply.And you know, maybe that Dan isn't running a newsletter, but still takes a lot of value in sharing his thoughts. with an in-built audience and Packy derives the benefits of, you know, his audience in turn. So I definitely think there's many, many ways to do it.Nathan: [00:22:20] Yeah. Are there other examples that come to mind of, creators who sort of have that collaboration built in?Mario: [00:22:27] The, the one that comes to mind beyond that is not newsletter newsletter related. I would say the, have you ever listened to the All-In podcast?Nathan: [00:22:36] Yes. Yes.Mario: [00:22:38] Yeah. So like that sort of now has just become sort of another Podcast. But I think at the beginning, like really sort of emerged from that same spirit of like, cool, we all have these, these separate audiences, like let's come together and see what happens.And you know, now it's a piece of content in and of itself, but, I think it sort of emerged from that same feeling. but yeah, I don't, I don't know a tonNathan: [00:23:02] so for anyone who doesn't know that all in Podcast that's, Jason Calacanis and and, who else. David Sacks.Mario: [00:23:09] Freeburg and David Sacks.Nathan: [00:23:11] Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like it just started as them. They had like, they want to talk about specs maybe. I don't know.Mario: [00:23:19] I think so. Just like kind of shooting the shit. Like I don't, I think it was, just Jason and Chamath to begin with. And then they sort of just like brought in the Davids initially as sort of guests that sort of morphed into full-time, you know, co-hosts but I think, you know, there's lots of ways to do that with, with newsletters.One of the things that like, I really want to try out soon is. a debate in newsletter format. So take another writer who writes about tech, find a topic where we have a genuine disagreement and, you know, sort of interrogate the two different sides in writing in a newsletter that we both shared with our audiences.And so finding conversation in writing I think is, it's something I've found really, really useful.Nathan: [00:24:14] Would that makes me think about, is like all of you think about collaborations as one plus one equals two, right? Where you have your audience, I've got 20,000 readers, you've got 20,000 readers and we'll we'll cross promote, and we'll both get this bump and that'd be great. The debate that you're talking about.Goes and make something that's bigger than the combination of the two things. Right? You have multiplicative effects because now it's like, Oh, did you see Mario? And whoever debate that, like, it was so good. And it, because, you know, we both have big enough platforms to get some level of attention, you know, then the fact that the debate is happening turns into a larger thing and it is its own event.And then we might get way more attention.Mario: [00:24:59] Yeah, I think that it adds a fun, fun element in general. I would say that like my, practice for collaborations now is always about pulling someone in to make a piece of content together rather than I think it can be fine to cross-post to, and I bet that like works really well, but I especially enjoy it when I can say to someone like Greg Eisenberg, who, you know, is the founder of late, late.Check-out really thoughtful about community. Has written and shared a lot of public's thinking about Reddit, where I can sort of like tap him and be like, Hey, I want to do a deep dive on Reddit and why it's this crazy undervalued company? Why don't we do it together? and so, you know, that's something we released over the weekend, but I think it was a good example of like, I don't think alone either one of us would have made it as good as it became.And, you know, it was, it was valuable for both of our audiences and still achieve the same growth bump.Nathan: [00:26:00] That is interesting. I feel like I have these topics that I riff on with friends. Like for example, I wrote a post called the ladders of wealth creation, which is an idea that I started with and then got input from, from friends, but like probably a third of the ideas in the post or more are from James clear and like him and I riffing on it.And so that would be the same sort of thing of like, I guess finding those topics that you, you know, you and that particular friend are talking about, you're both obsessed with and just say, let's go make this together. Cause then the other thing that we'll do is then the two of you, like, you have to promote it more because you wrote your friend into writing it, you know, you can't be like, Oh, that's just the Thursday post.I got it out. Cool. What's onto the next week. You're like, I pulled my friend into helping write this. Like now we're both going to actually promote it and share it and make it worth while, which is of course better for everybody.Mario: [00:26:53] Yeah. And it also just like leads itself to Content extensions more easily, right? Like you can then have a conversation around it in a clubhouse room if you wanted or something else. And like, you already have this other person who is like deeply invested in it with you. and like, you know, you get that conversational aspect to it.Nathan: [00:27:14] Yeah. Do you have like a list of people? that back when I did a lot of sales, I for ConvertKit, I would have like, sort of this dream 100 list of people that I wanted to have on ConvertKit or like, do you have that for collaborating?Or you're like, okay. Here's who I want to reach out to, but I'm a little nervous to send the email or something like that.Mario: [00:27:33] Yeah, I have, I have a list like that where I would say it's not so much that I'm nervous. I'm just like, I have to know. Exactly what the right project is. so for example, a person whose newsletter I love and I've collaborated with him on an S one club, is just engage, who writes technically great newsletter.And like, I know I want to do a collaborator with him, but I didn't have a clear idea until recently where I was just like, okay, this is it. And so we're going to, we're going to do something that'll come out soon. and so I think that's the, that's the pitch. And then sometimes, obviously like I'll pitch someone an idea and they're like, eh, I I'm too busy or but that's okay too.Nathan: [00:28:18] Yeah. Well, that's good. I think having the list written down like potential ideas and then people you want to collaborate with and just keep adding to those. And then sometimes they overlap and you're like, you know, or you're like, I really want to work with this person, but I don't have the right idea yet.And then when the idea comes, then it's like, Oh, I got the perfect thing.Mario: [00:28:37] Exactly. Yeah, I think it, I, I definitely like having the list because it also just like, even just writing that list, it gives you so many ideas.Nathan: [00:28:44] Another thing about the lists is sometimes I like anything that will be a snapshot of like your current, a worldview of what's possible.So for example, early on for ConvertKit. That list had people like Tim Ferriss, Gretchen Rubin, other people as like who to get as customers. And so when you write that, when you're like, Oh, it would be insane to collaborate with this level of person. And then like a couple of years later when it happens, you're just like, Oh yeah, well like their peers, you know, of course we know I have like 10 friends in common, so we just finally made it happen.But by writing it down, you get to have the snapshot of like, Past me thought this would be incredible, you know? And so just like you're talking about with, you know, wrestling with the guys on the, on the Twitter spaces the other day.Mario: [00:29:33] Yeah, a hundred percent, I think. well, there's, there's some, I think it's Aristotle, or one of the, the old philosophers, which is like, you know, the, I can't remember the exact quote, but they just have, it is essentially like, don't forget that you have things that you once desired greatly. and like, I think that's often the case where you sort of, treat happiness or pride in your work as a moving target that is really fleeting.And those lists, I think, help remind you that like, yeah, it wasn't that long ago that the idea of collaborating with this person or having this person send a nice note about your work would have like blown your mind. and now it's like, cool. Yep. That's awesome. Next.Nathan: [00:30:28] Yeah. Yeah. For sure. One of the things that's really impressed me about how you've grown The Generalist is you've taken it really seriously. I don't know if it was from the beginning, but from the point that you and I met, which was probably what maybe April or may of last year, June, somewhere in there.Yeah, that sounds right. And to the point that you, talk to, did you recruit a formal, like board of advisors or informal advisors?Yeah. But you, you had a pitch deck for it. You outlined the business model. like what made you take it so seriously rather than, you know, kind of be like, Oh, Write every week and see what happens.Mario: [00:31:11] Probably a mixture of like personality defects and, excitement. I think like, I just really love writing very, very much. And so as soon as I got the width that like, maybe I could make this a real thing, then suddenly like a flip switched in me where I was like, all right, I have to go as hard as possible.And honestly, like I would say that switch had not. Been flipped in me since college, like as a student, I was an absolute animal. Like, that's not a very cool thing to say, but I was just an absolute nerd. I was a relentless studier. Loved it. And, I think it was because. You know, I felt very empowered to study whatever it is.I wanted like go as deep as possible and feel like the value was accruing directly to me. and I think the struggle for me as an employee was always like, I'll give you 90%, but I don't want to give you a hundred percent because like, I kind of need the 10% to do something of my own or, you know, because I sort of resent it.And so. As soon as I was like fully on my own thing, I suddenly felt like, Oh man, I'm unchanged to go after this. and then I think the second piece of it was just that, I wanted to convince myself to a certain extent, that this could be real. And so making a business plan, bringing on people who I felt like could support and advise me and like make me better.All of those things started to convince me that. Okay. And maybe you're not crazy. Like maybe other people seem to see something interesting here. and your math adds up more or less that like, maybe you can make this work.Nathan: [00:33:08] Yeah. Yeah. I think that, well, one, if you're looking for advice from anyone showing that you're already in motion and that you're going to make it happen, like the number of people who reach out and say like, could I pick your brain or whatever else?And they don't have any track record that they're going to implement it. You know, is, there's just, there's so many. And so when someone comes along, who is like, Hey, I need advice on this specific thing. And you're like, yeah, there you go. And they take action. And then they come back like a month later and be like, that works really well.Hey, could you help with this? It's sort of addicting to help those people. And that's what I found early on for ConvertKit where people like Amy Hoy and Heaton Shaw and Patrick McKenzie, and so many others would come and help. Because I would like immediately turn around and try out theMario: [00:33:55] Do it.Nathan: [00:33:56] That they said. And I see you doing the same thing.Mario: [00:33:59] Thanks, man. Yeah, I definitely try to, I think it's, you know, early days you just got to keep a pretty high velocity as much as you can.Nathan: [00:34:07] Yeah. So let's talk about growth. if you're up for it, I'd love for you to share some numbers of where The Generalist is at now. And then we can dive into, how we got there on the growth side.Mario: [00:34:19] For sure. Let me actually pull up the, the live, the live look so I can be exact, ConvertKit tells me I have 27,147 subscribers. So thank you to every single one of them. And opens are 53.52,Nathan: [00:34:43] That is a very impressive open rate.Mario: [00:34:45] Thank you. Thank you. it's weird. It went up as I've grown, which I did not expect. Now it's more or less stabilized, but I think when I went full time, it was at like, I dunno, I have to look at the deck, but somewhere around 49 to 50. And it's now con consistently above 53. I mean, it's a small improvement, but like, I like to see it.Nathan: [00:35:09] Well, I mean, especially when you multiply it out over a larger, you know, a growing number, right. When you multiply gets 10,000 versus 20,000, It's a lot more. and I always encourage people to track engaged subscribers as like their metric, you know? So total subscribers times open rate, because then when something comes along, like if you have hung your whole like, self-worth on, total subscribers, you know, and then it comes along and you're like, Oh, I got these 10,000 who are just dead weight and don't open anything.And you're like, I can't cut that because like having a newsletter of a hundred thousand people is like, Part of my identity or something, you know, but if you've been focused on engaged subscribers, then you're like, I don't lose anything if I cut those people.Mario: [00:35:53] That's really? Yeah, that's a, that's a great point about just like tying it to your identity. I love the engagement score you guys have, by the way. I don't know if I've told you that, but ah, so nice to see that.Nathan: [00:36:03] Yeah, it's a fun, a fun little feature. And then on the, so you went, you went full-time in August about six months ago. how's it been on the revenue side?Mario: [00:36:16] So I didn't, monetize until. One month ago, almost exactly. It was January 24th. so that was the day I opened up memberships and was also, shortly after I started to like circle back to a few folks that have been interested in advertising and sponsoring in the past and was like, Hey,Nathan: [00:36:37] There, there was no way to pay you or for you to make money from it up until that point?Mario: [00:36:41] No, it was all free. and honestly it was like, There wasn't probably a good reason for that. I think it was partially because I wanted to build a little bit more of my own stack with Webflow and Pico. And of course you guys, and I didn't want to start it on sub stack. I was already switched over at this point for a long time.And so I wanted to have like a really awesome site and home for the Content before I switched on memberships. And it felt a little bit strange to accept sponsorships before that point, just because it wasn't really the way I expected to make the majority of revenue longterm. so yeah, flipped it on, on January 24th and, it's gone really well so far.Nathan: [00:37:33] Nice, nice. You were mentioning like how it compares? This is before we were talking, how it compares to, you know, past salaries, Do you track that? I guess like percentage of salary?Mario: [00:37:47] Yeah, I think that's like a nice way for, for me to look at it. and this definitely validating. So in the first month, I have to check, but it's something it's around 85 to 90% of my best ever salary. In the first month. So that was like, I know it's not always going to be like that. I think there was a huge, like initial bump and because of the types of memberships I did, like, I have a believer membership where someone buys five years effectively upfront.There's a bunch of like essentially bookings pull forward, but still the growth has remained really good throughout the month. There's still a good base of people who are on this sort of monthly or annual plan. And it really feels very much like it can be a business. So, you know, it's now really up to me to make sure I don't blow it. And you know, just keep executing as well as I can.Nathan: [00:38:48] Yeah. I mean, that's exciting to have that much traction, like the moment you turn it on now, like, as you said, you waited awhile to, to monetize right.Of having, you know, well over 20,000 subscribers, by the time that you turned that on, but it means that you can come out and have this big splash, which is great.Mario: [00:39:04] Yeah, it feels, it feels good to like get, get a, sort of a nice bump to it. But I think there's plenty of other people who start much earlier on and then, you know, that can work wonderfully as well. And you probably get a lot of interesting learnings. From, you know, monetizing early, finding out what people actually are willing to pay for.Like, those are all things that I'm now just learning, which is like, cool, what should be in front and behind the paywall? You know, what's the sort of messaging even that converts people, because I really haven't spent time thinking about that today.Nathan: [00:39:37] Yeah. How did you structure what's in front of him behind the paywall? cause that's something that I think a lot of people run into of I'm putting out this content and it's really good. So it should be behind the paywall, but I want it in front of you in front of the paywall so that it can help me attract more readers.Mario: [00:39:55] Yeah, the tricky thing I would say is that because of the, like multi-player elements of The Generalist, it's not that easy to put a lot of the content behind the paywall, because the people who contribute on an S–1 Club, like a lot of them are. The GPS of a venture firm or a CEO or an expert, like they're doing it because they're really interested in this subject and genuinely want to share their thoughts and trade ideas with other smart people, to limit the view of it feels like probably against their interests, even if I'm not sure they would necessarily.Express an issue with it, but it kind of doesn't feel totally right to me. so those things I think are easy to put in front of the paywall and those are things also that are easy to monetize with sponsorships. So that's great. then there's, I would say like a lot of more intimate or deep content that goes behind it.So every Sunday folks get a briefing from me, which dives deep into some. Area of tech or the financial markets often it's, you know, sort of unpacking an investment that I think might be interesting or a technical trend that I think is worth keeping in. and you know, or free members, free subscribers get one of those a month and paying subscribers, get four of them.And then the other piece of it, I would say is, you know, there's a bunch of other parts, but the, the core. Element, is this community, so I now have a, a community which is only for, for paid members. it's ended up being like very senior impressive group of folks. and so it has more of a feel of like a private conversation.That's ongoing with people that it would be probably like hard to get access to otherwise. that I think has also proven like a really. Useful conversion tool and also a, something proves the content itself because often before I write something, I'll post about it in the community and then five or 10 people will say, Hey, have you thought about this?Have you thought about that? And so it sort of has a nice, nice effect in that, in that regard too.Nathan: [00:42:22] Yeah. And is that a community that you're hosting on circle or Slack or somewhere else?Mario: [00:42:27] Yeah, circle. I thought a lot about, you know, where to host it. Ultimately I felt like circle was going to be the best call and, and so far I really like it.Nathan: [00:42:37] Yeah. It's been interesting of, of seeing communities become such a core part of a lot of newsletters. have you found, like, are there any downsides to it? Is it a pain to manage? Is there anything else or has it just been all upside?Mario: [00:42:53] I don't think anything SaaS, upside, I think like, you know, everything, everything has downside. the downside of community is time. I think. it's just, I don't think it works if you just sort of flip it on and expect it to take off. And actually I think like that's potentially a trade-off versus. live chat platforms like discord or Slack or telegram versus something that's asynchronous like circle.If you start a Slack group with 50 people, it very quickly feels busy and lively. once you hit 500 people, it very quickly feels noisy and chaotic. Whereas I think circle is sort of the other way around, which is, you know, 50 and maybe feels a little sleepy. and so you have people sort of like. Maybe looking for how to get the conversation going.But my hope is that really, as you scale, it leads to more focused, thoughtful discussions rather than just sort of like incessant back and forth and people like self-promoting stuff in this channel all the time. and those sort of things. So the, the trade off is time.Nathan: [00:44:05] Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And so I could see circle being something that you have to grow into. Whereas Slack being something that you would probably grow out of. And so that's a good thing to think about, of like, what's the long-term play for this community. And are we going to get into that, you know, 500 members and beyond, and if so, like go for a platform that's a good fit for that.Mario: [00:44:29] Yeah. I ran a bunch of like Telegram groups on the side that weren't like formally part of The Generalist, but I would, as part of the Friday startup ideas newsletter, like allow people to join this group if they applied, And it was great. I really liked it. but at a hundred people, it was already occasionally like quite noisy.And I didn't think it like created a compendium of knowledge in the same way as something like circle can where you can suddenly search like, you know, RPA. And there will be a really interesting thread that someone wrote and bunch of smart people commented on that, like is now this living document, in a really scannable way.Nathan: [00:45:11] Yeah. That makes sense. What about pricing? how did you come to the pricing that you chose?Mario: [00:45:16] Yeah, I actually, I want to write about this. probably not in the newsletter, but, maybe on Twitter or something, to explain it because I think people it's either two reactions. Either someone thinks it's a total no-brainer at 19 bucks a month. and you know, sometimes even folks will be like, I think you could push this higher off the record.Or you get folks that are like, why is this 19 bucks when Netflix is 12? and The Economist is 12 or whatever it is they are at. and the answer really is like a few different things. But one is that I think I've engineered as much as possible. The Generalist to be able to return your value like 10 or 20, or, you know, maybe even a hundred fold.In a few different ways, like the ways that I think someone gets to the point where they are really like ripping me off, let's say, is if I can get them into a company that they think is really interesting and investment that they think is really interesting either in the public or private markets, that I helped them find a co-founder or a key hire for their existing company.That I give them a startup idea that they then are able to use to build their next company. or I introduced them to just like an amazing colleague, whether that's another investor or, you know, a fellow founder, whatever it is. And so in each of the pieces of content and the community, I think there's the potential for that.So you have the Friday newsletter, which has five startup ideas. If one of the, you know, 150 that I think we have right now from these great theses and founders, like resonates with you or gets you closer. I think it's a total no-brainer it was obviously worth 20 bucks a month or 19 bucks a month. if the S one club helps you make a smarter decision about whether to invest in a stock or not.No brainer. If the weekly briefing gives you either, again, a stock that you're interested in or a private investment that you might want to make as a VC again, no brainer. and then the community, hopefully like stitches a lot of those pieces together where it's like, cool. I know that you were interested in this startup idea because you told me about it.Now it's time for you to meet this engineer who like also said they were interested in it and like, maybe you guys should jam on that. and so this is something that I sort of tried to outline in an interview. I did with Alex Danko who writes one of my favorite newsletters. And it's just like one of the smartest people in tech, in my opinion.I think there's a real. sort of almost mismatch in how consumers pay for a newsletter and how they receive value. Like consumers pay on this really linear timescale. It's like 19 bucks a month, 19 bucks a month, 19 bucks a month. Realistically, you probably won't read every piece. I write if you're a subscriber.And you probably won't see like every comment in the community, but as long as each individual piece of content has the ability to be worth like. 500 bucks or a thousand bucks to you. Like, I can take it my time. Hopefully if you're willing to be patient as a reader and you might not read one, two or three, you might find four boring, but then five might give you your startup idea or, you know, in the six week you might meet your cofaq.So I think there's like a linear line on the consumer side and a super lumpy one on the value realization. so that was a very. Inside baseball, look at how I think about the pricing, but, that's sort of where my head's at at the moment.Nathan: [00:49:12] Yeah, that makes sense. if you know some of this other stuff you had, what was some of the split between like monthly and annual and of course you probably launched your biggest fans.And so it's probably going to be a higher split annual. Upfront,Mario: [00:49:25] I don't, I don't know what it is actually. I think when I looked last, and this was a few weeks ago, so it's like a little bit out of date. I think I would make 5% of my best salary per month. So it wouldn't get me there on a yearly basis, but like, you know, would get me part of the way there. And then plus the annuals I'm yeah.I'm not sure what the split is. There was a good amount. I want to say maybe 10 or 15%, maybe as high as 20, that were believers. people who bought the five years upfront and, that is like amazing for me. One, because like, It's very nice that people like are excited to be a part of this for five years.And to also, because I think it hopefully allows me to like, reinvest that money in, in continuing growth.Nathan: [00:50:29] Yup. Well, I love that you gave people that option, you know, like I think someone who would launch just with monthly and say it's 20 bucks a month and then go like, okay, I guess I should have an annual version. People say that churn is better, so sure. I'll do that. And you've added this, this third tier of saying like no pay, is it $600?Something like that.Mario: [00:50:50] Yeah, it's a $642.Nathan: [00:50:53] $642, you know, just say like, Hey, all of this upfront and the way you message it around, like, you know, the believer tier, I think is really good. Cause for a lot of people. Especially in your audience, right. You're going to have the whole range, someone who's going to be like, Oh, 20 bucks a month. Yeah, no, it's worth it.Like, I'm going to go for that. And you're going to have other people who are like $600. It's it's going on the company credit card. Like, it just doesn't even, it just doesn't even register. And so, but that person would have given you $20, if that was the only option you've given them. And soMario: [00:51:25] A hundred percent.Nathan: [00:51:26] Always give them the other options.When I was selling eBooks, I would do, like. Books into courses and do tiers and your $39 $99 and then $249. And like a quarter of the people bought the $249 options, but it represented like 55% of all revenue.Mario: [00:51:46] There you go. There you go. Yeah, that makes sense. yeah, people have asked like, Oh, are you going to get rid of the believer tier soon? And I'm kinda like, I don't really think so. I think I'll just like, you know, maybe as prices change, maybe I'll adjust it or something like that. But like, if someone is excited to sign up for five years, like,Nathan: [00:52:05] Right. I might even play with it of decreasing the, like, if I think if I were flying with this, I wouldn't do five years.I would do two years or something like that. And maybe there's some other perks in there. but it is this high price that renews, like what if, what if the believers here was a thousand dollars a year? And maybe it has some extra things in it, but it really is like the believer tier. And I don't know if they would go for it, but I'm curious if they would, and if I were doing it or maybe it's $400 or $500 a year. And I would just be curious if people would sign up for it, my guess. Is that, that some wayMario: [00:52:49] I think you're probably right. I'd love to get to the point where I can like more explicitly message. What are the things I'm doing for those people right now? I'm like, cool. You get fast-tracked into the community. You are going to have some like extra events and channels within the community. So like, you'll have these moments of intimacy that like you are sort of getting, because you are so, such a believer in this, but I think you're totally right.Like, it probably is, is something I should think about of like, how do I build that extra two 50 or 300 bucks of value for someone on an annual basis that, that makes it worthwhile.Nathan: [00:53:31] Right? Yeah. I would even, you know, put a badge on their profile in the community, you know.Mario: [00:53:37] It happens.Nathan: [00:53:38] Oh, good.Mario: [00:53:39] Yeah. I'm a big believer in badging.Nathan: [00:53:44] At all.Mario: [00:53:47] I think people like it and I think it's fun and, you know…Nathan: [00:53:50] Yeah, good stuff. Well, thanks for coming on. This has been really fun to dive in and talk through all the details of The Generalist. Where should people go to subscribe and then to follow you around the web?Mario: [00:54:00] Awesome. Yeah. you can sign up, ReadTheGeneralist.com, and, I'm mostly active on Twitter. So, if you look up @mariodgabriele, on Twitter, That is me.Nathan: [00:54:15] Sounds good.Mario: [00:54:16] Know, still free to shoot me a DM or an email sometime.Nathan: [00:54:19] Perfect. Well, we'll link to both those in the show notes and we'll chat soon. I'm excited to keep watching, watching the newsletter grow.Mario: [00:54:26] Thanks man. Well, fingers crossed. I can, I can continue to deliver and that, you know, I have to thank you. And, and the team so much for one making a dope project, a product, and, to helping so much along the way with your advice and support. So I appreciate it a lot.Nathan: [00:54:43] My pleasure.

Today we’re bringing you the first episode of Better Done Than Perfect’s Season 2. Join us for a talk with Alex Hillman, founder of Stacking The Bricks and author of The Tiny MBA. We discuss the company’s conception and philosophy, how they handle customer service, what makes a great course, and so much more.Please head over to the episode page for the detailed recap and key takeaways.Show notesStacking The Bricks — Alex’s company together with Amy HoyNoko, EveryTimeZone — products by Amy Hoy, Alex’s partner30x500 — Alex and Amy’s flagship productIndy Hall — Alex’s famous coworking space, now a remote work communityJust F#*!ing Ship — a book by Amy and AlexWrite Useful Books — a book & tool by Rob FitzpatrickUI Breakfast Episode 206: Writing Useful Books with Rob FitzpatrickBear — a note-taking appThe Essential Podcasting Guide — a book by Craig Hewitt of CastosNathan Barry’s ConvertKit AcademyMastering ConvertKit — a course by Brennan Dunn available at Double Your Freelancing RateFundamental UI Design — a book Jane wrote for InVision (currently a free course)BadAss: Making Users Awesome — a book by Kathy SierraFollow Alex on TwitterThe Tiny MBA — Alex’s book (use promocode BDTP20 at checkout for 20% off)Thanks for listening! If you found the episode useful, please spread the word about this new show on Twitter mentioning @userlist, or leave us a review on iTunes.SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — the best way for SaaS founders to send onboarding emails, segment your users based on events, and see where your customers get stuck in the product. Start your free trial today at userlist.com.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here’s how.

Can we apply customer success practices to books and courses? And how can infoproducts help SaaS customers succeed? Season 2's first guest is Alex Hillman, founder of Stacking The Bricks and author of The Tiny MBA. We discuss the company's conception and philosophy, how they handle customer service, what makes a great course, and so much more.Visit our website for the detailed episode recap with key learnings.Show notesStacking The Bricks — Alex's company together with Amy HoyNoko, EveryTimeZone — products by Amy Hoy, Alex's partner30x500 — Alex and Amy's flagship productIndy Hall — Alex's famous coworking space, now a remote work communityJust F#*!ing Ship — a book by Amy and AlexWrite Useful Books — a book & tool by Rob FitzpatrickUI Breakfast Episode 206: Writing Useful Books with Rob FitzpatrickBear — a note-taking appThe Essential Podcasting Guide — a book by Craig Hewitt of CastosNathan Barry's ConvertKit AcademyMastering ConvertKit — a course by Brennan Dunn available at Double Your Freelancing RateFundamental UI Design — a book Jane wrote for InVision (currently a free course)BadAss: Making Users Awesome — a book by Katy SierraFollow Alex on TwitterThe Tiny MBA — Alex's book (use promo code BDTP20 at checkout for 20% off)Thanks for listening! If you found the episode useful, please spread the word about the show on Twitter mentioning @userlist, or leave us a review on iTunes.SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — the best way for SaaS founders to send onboarding emails, segment your users based on events, and see where your customers get stuck in the product. Start your free trial today at userlist.com

On the show today is Alex Hillman. Alex is a partner of Stacking The Bricks (which produces the popular 30x500 course), founder of the OG co-working space IndyHall, and the author of The Tiny MBA.I wanted to bring him on because Alex doesn't consider himself a marketer, but he's a fantastic marketer. He and Amy Hoy are always top of mind for me when I think of marketing digital products like courses and books.You'll hear about the similarities between teaching and marketing, "flintstoning" marketing and avoiding the temptation to automate, scale, and delegate everything, how he's marketing his new book, The Tiny MBA, and how to build an audience in way that's truly helpful and not spammy or self-promotional.More on Alex: @alexhillman on Twitter Use the code SWIPEFILES to get 20% off The Tiny MBA Here's the Twitch streamer Alex referenced: Harris Heller launches StreambeatsSponsored by SparkLoop — the referral tool for newsletters. Hundreds of smart newsletter creators use SparkLoop to get more, high-quality email subscribers on autopilot. Get started in 5 minutes and start a free 30-day trial → sparkloop.app/eim

Alex is based in Philadelphia, and after leaving Drexel University early, he started building websites for businesses. As he was freelancing, he had a deep desire for a community as he worked. He teamed up with a few friends to start Indy Hall, one of the first coworking spaces in the US, in 2006. For reference, WeWork didn’t start until 2010. Indy Hall has become a staple in Philadelphia and has grown to hundreds of members. Alex teamed up with Amy Hoy to start Stacking the Bricks, which is a company that helps freelancers bootstrap and build effective businesses. Most recently, Alex published a book, The Tiny MBA. This book is not your typical business book. Each page has one thought that is a small prompt to make your think about something bigger in your life and business. There are 100 ideas that will help you evaluate and execute on your built-in advantages in your business. In this episode, we discuss: How Alex came to write The Tiny MBA How to find your audience The difference between good self-promotion and bad self-promotion How Alex started Indy Hall and built an in-person community GIVEAWAY We will be giving out one copy of The Tiny MBA to one person next episode! All you have to do is write a review on Apple Podcasts or your podcast listening app! You can use the discount code HOWTOSHOW for 20% off if you don't win. Sign up for The Marketing Memo: https://www.gattozzicollective.com/the-marketing-memo Show notes: https://www.gattozzicollective.com/podcast-episodes/alex-hillman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/how-to-build-an-audience/message

Episode 087 - Alex Hillman, Author of "The Tiny MBA: 100 Very Short Lessons about the Long Game of Business" Our guest on this episode just can’t leave well enough alone.  He co-founded Indy Hall, Philadelphia's first co-working space, in 2006, and kickstarted the co-working boom that has exploded today.  In 2009, he co-founded "Stacking The Bricks" with Amy Hoy, where they taught creative people how to bootstrap their own businesses. Since 2019, he has been working tirelessly to help 10,000 people become sustainably independent by 2029. Through the 10k Independents Project, he and his collaborators are taking on the issues that hamper entrepreneurship such as access to affordable healthcare, skill-building, legislative support for solo businesses, and more. He is a serial-entrepreneur, but not a jerk, and he shares his experience and opinions generously on Twitter where the 100 tips that make up the book he recently authored, “The Tiny MBA,” first appeared. You can "@" him @alexhillman. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and friends, and loves food, travel, red wine or whiskey, and karaoke. Here for your listening pleasure are the Self Made Strategies of Alex Hillman. You can check out Alex's new book here: https://www.amazon.com/Tiny-MBA-Short-Lessons-Business-ebook/dp/B08DJ8ZDZV On this episode you will hear Alex discuss: How he came up with the idea for the book, The Tiny MBA: 100 Very Short Lessons about the Long Game of Business Nilofer Merchant (whose work you can check out here: https://atwork.substack.com/), in her foreword to the book, calls it the “anti-MBA,” but Alex is not really “anti” anything, he's a community builder, so we discussed what objective he hopes to accomplish with this book “Most business decisions are relatively reversible. If you have a decision that doesn’t seem reversible, try looking for ways to shrink the decision into smaller parts. That way, it’s cheap or free to undo the decision if things don’t go the way you expect.” “Money psychology impacts the ability to build a sustainable business in a massive way, but most people haven’t ever analyzed their own money psychology for habits and flaws.” Alex's theories on bootstrapping The 10k Independents Project and why Alex started it Production Credits: This Self Made Strategies Podcast is a SoftStix Productions LLC jawn. This episode was produced, hosted, and edited by Tony Lopes, remotely, in Philly, PA USA, with support from the team at SoftStix Productions LLC. The Self Made Strategies Podcast is sponsored by Lopes Law LLC (www.LopesLawLLC.com). Make sure you subscribe to the Self Made Strategies Podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. You can find us on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Blubrry and many other podcasting platforms. Don't forget to visit www.selfmadestrategies.com to sign up for our newsletter, or to get more information about our guests. Follow us on: • Facebook • Twitter • Instagram • LinkedIn

In this episode of the podcast, your host Louis Nicholls sits down with founder, author and all-round-business-expert Alex Hillman. Alex has decades of experience helping people build successful businesses. From running his coworking community Indy Hall, to his course, 30x500, where he and Amy Hoy have coached hundreds of founders. Now, Alex has distilled all of that experience and knowledge into his new book, The Tiny MBA. It's full of 100 short ideas to build your own business that lasts. I was lucky enough to read a prelaunch copy, and it's easily the best value per word of any business book I've ever read. Today on the podcast, Alex is going to walk us through three of my favourite ideas in the book. You can find Alex on Twitter at @alexhillman, check out his writing at StackingTheBricks.com, and - of course - grab your copy of the Tiny MBA at Tiny.MBA --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/message

Joel Hooks shares the story of egghead.io.Joel and chantastic talk about doing the work, the overrated role of passion, the power of a grudge, and building yourself into your own boss...FeaturingJoel Hooks — Twitter, GitHub, Websitechantastic — Twitter, GitHub, WebsiteLinksRich Dad Poor DadAdobe FlashSo Good They Can’t Ignore You book by Cal NewportMichael Jordan takes final shots at Hall of Fame induction30x500 product framework by Amy Hoy and Alex HillmanBrennan DunnNathan BerryPatrick McKenzieIntroduction to Robotlegs by JoelAngularJS — Superheroic JavaScript MVW FrameworkBaconBizBaconBizConf 2013 Sketchnotes by JoelBrennan Dunn’s Consultancy Masterclass Sketchnotes by JoelJohn LindquistRails TutorialDevise — Flexible authentication solution for Rails with WardenEgghead InstructorsStumbling on Happiness book by Daniel GilbertChad Pytel — thoughtbot CEOJFDI on Urbn Dictionary — “Just fucking do it”How I increased conversion 2.4x with better copywriting article by Amy Hoy on the Pain, Dream, Fix writing frameworkWes Bos as a Service tweet by Wes BosChris BiscardiKent C DoddsVojta HolikEgghead Swag StoreParty Corgi Tank TopEgghead Knit BeanieSean LarkinConvertKit — Connect with your audience. Make a living doing work you loveJust JavaScript — A course by Dan Abramov and Maggie AppletonBuilding a Second Brain by Tiago ForteRoam ResearchMy blog is a digital garden, not a blog on joelhooks.comSponsorBuild a beautiful functional React or React Native app with Infinite Red.Get two tickets to the 2021 Chain React conference when you start or refer a new project.Visit reactpodcast.infinite.red for details.

Hey family! This week brings you a special episode. Alex Hillman and I teamed up for a live podcast interview and Q&A as COVID-19 was starting to take a toll on business owners.  This is a tough time for most of us. Some online entrepreneurs are seeing a decline in revenue while several industries have been shut down completely. What do we do when we're facing uncertainty, struggling to figure out our next move, and are trying to avoid thoughts of giving up completely?We pivot. We lean into our communities. We get resourceful.Alex is the founder of Indy Hall, a coworking community in Philadelphia, and the co-founder of Stacking the Bricks along with Amy Hoy. He joined me to dig into practical pivot strategies, tips for building online communities, and effective sales strategies for a down economy.  Our live audience brought some great questions, so stick around after the interview for some more great advice about marketing during a pandemic, free vs. paid communities, and creating free content when your business is struggling.   Episode Quotes"If we wait, there may be nothing... so let's be resourceful.""The difference between a group of people and a community is the direction that the support flows.""The value of the community gets bigger if the more people are in it and contributing.""The value of a community is the resiliency of your customers in their businesses.""Short term thinking is the thing that will kill a lot of businesses." Listen to Learn04:45 - Getting to know Alex Hillman, Rapid 5 Questions11:52 - Challenges small business owners are facing due to COVID-1918:06 - Marketing and pivot strategies26:40 - Product sales strategy in a down economy31:30 - Community building and management essentials40:07 - Community building during COVID-19 crisis43:59 - Q&A on finding the right marketing tone47:28 - Q&A on free content53:02 - Q&A on free vs. paid communities1:00:05 - Tools for online community building1:06:02 - Practical advice for business owners Connect with AlexDangerouslyAwesome.comIndyHall.orgStackingtheBricks.comFollow Alex on Twitter!   Looking for the Transcript?Episode 124

Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) didn't merely survive the 2008 recession: she built multiple profitable online businesses that grew to support her and, eventually, to generate over $1M in annual recurring revenue. Amy and I sat down for a casual conversation (which we livestreamed to YouTube) about the looming recession, how Amy made it through the last one, and how founders should be thinking about their businesses going forward.

Alex Hillman joins us on this week's AOAS show! Alex has been carrying the coworking torch since the very beginnings of the movement. After founding Indy Hall (the world’s oldest fully independent coworking community) in Philidephia in 2006, Alex has gone on to teach those with creative skills to grow their business with Stacking the Bricks (with Amy Hoy) and their self-titled podcast. He joins us to talk about shipping products, the history and scaling Indy Hall, his philosophy and strategies on contributing and providing value, and the many projects he has ongoing.  Here are the topics discussed during the show:  The history of Indy Hall Scaling the growth of Indy Hall Contribution and connecting in a community Stacking The Bricks Providing value to your community Ecosystems & The 10K Independents Project Small businesses Vs. big corporations Learning about business from nature Make sure to check out all the projects that Alex has ongoing on is his dangerously awesome website or follow him on Twitter @alexhillman - Thanks for listening, we hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure to follow Tara at @missrogue & Carlos @carlospache_co on Twitter. You can also check out Tara's YouTube channel; it has over 200 videos on digital strategy and online audience building.  Truly Inc. is a digital strategy and insights agency based in Toronto, Canada. Visit our website trulyinc.com.  Anatomy of a Strategy podcast is recorded in Toronto, Canada in the offices of Truly Inc. Produced by Carlos Pacheco and Tara Hunt. Podcast editing by Joe Pacheco.

Rob introduces the concept behind his new app: Charm. Originally launched in 2012 by Amy Hoy, Rob and Jason are partnering up on relaunching the app. Today Rob shares one of the main reasons why.

Early in his life, Chris Cera knew he wanted to build his own business. But when he completed his undergraduate degree from Drexel University, starting his own company was the farthest thing from his mind. In this episode, we hear from Chris about what it took for him to make the leap out of the corporate world (GlaxoSmithKline, Traffic.com) and into the realm of startups. Chris talks about the idea of moonlighting as a way to ease the transition into entrepreneurship. And he discusses what it means for him to be an entrepreneur and how he parsed through all the “entreporn” (coined by the supremely talented Amy Hoy, it's the fetishizing of all things entrepreneurship).Chris also shares the backstory of the founding of one of the most successful and impactful startup communities - Philly Startup Leaders. Chris openly shares his learnings, including his biggest failure lesson - as well as his desire to create intentional experiences to help move people.https://anthonysdesk.com/chris-cera-entrepreneurial-journey-lessons-learned-and-creating-intentional-experiences/

Corey Haines is Head of Growth at Baremetrics and this episode is about the five factors of growth for profitable SaaS businesses. Corey uses first principles thinking and mental models in marketing to break down a profitable SaaS business in to its most foundational elements and reconstruct those pieces to understand what we as marketers should be doing. The five factors Corey has identified are Market, Product, Model, Messaging & Positioning, and Channels. Corey also explains how he and the Baremetrics team applied this model and first principles thinking to the growth of their own business. This episode will make you rethink the way you think about marketing! Links Getting Product Strategy Right – Des Traynor >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-498BBUJJE The Mission Matrix >> https://www.advanceb2b.com/blog/the-mission-matrix-saas-go-to-market-strategy Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34460583-building-a-storybrand Obviously Awesome by April Dunford >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45166937-obviously-awesome?from_search=true How I increased conversion 2.4x with better copywriting by Amy Hoy >> https://stackingthebricks.com/how-i-increased-conversion-2-4x-with-better-copywriting/ Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann >> https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41181911-super-thinking Mental Models by Julian Shapiro >> https://www.julian.com/blog/mental-model-examples Mental Models: Learn How to Think Better and Gain a Mental Edge by James Clear >> https://jamesclear.com/mental-models Mental Models for Marketers by Corey Haines >> https://mentalmodelsformarketers.com/ Refactoring Growth by Corey Haines >> https://www.refactoringgrowth.com/ This Is Marketing by Seth Godin >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40549476-this-is-marketing?from_search=true --- Advance B2B >> www.advanceb2b.com Follow The Growth Hub on Twitter >> twitter.com/SaaSGrowthHub Follow Edward on Twitter >> twitter.com/NordicEdward

Aaaaand we're back with our 2nd season of #12weeks (i.e. the second time 12-week accountability program between Haider and Abdulmohsen) There were a few weeks between the two 12-weeks, and this episode kicks off with some juicy updates (like Haider launching his first info product!). Note: The episode was recorded on 8 August 2019. We may experience a delay between recording and publishing as we're working on enhancing the audio quality of our episodes. Here are the highlights of this episode: - Haider launched a daily email course on productivity that's available as a 12-week program (obviously) and a 4-week program. It's available at http://donewithgrace.com - We discuss launching without having an entire product ready and other ways to break down a product to prioritize shipping - Abdulmohsen shares an update on his idea validation guide (from Season 1), which he's looking to publish THEN flesh out with additional examples and case studies - Using http://200wordsaday.com to get into the writing habit and creating content that can be used in info-products - Abdulmohsen's experience using the Streaks app (spoiler: he loves it!) - Abdulmohsen shares updates on his physical product Tre, both in terms of manufacturing and branding - Haider recommends the writings of Amy Hoy (http://twitter.com/amyhoy) of Stacking the Bricks (http://stackingthebricks.com) on building tiny products to create a passive income stream - Haider reveals the number of sales of his email course (it's currently a low number, but he'll be sharing updates on how he's growing his sales) Another note: The published calls will be every 2 weeks. We felt this would give time for better updates and richer content. We will continue to have our accountability calls weekly.

What’s up, everybody? In this episode, I’m joined by Joel Hooks, co-founder of egghead.io. egghead is an education platform built for developers by developers. They specialize in no-fluff, just-in-time online lessons and courses for web developers. Joel and I chat about the importance of instructional design, why it’s often overlooked, and how egghead is using learning design to improve their product--in other words, we geek out. Enjoy! I want to use these instructional design principles to help people reach their goals. Episode Quotes "I want to use these instructional design principles and wrap it in with our knowledge to help people reach their goals." "Monetization isn't the point. The point is to get people where they want and need to be, and the rest follows." "The nature of being helpful is profitable in my experience." "I think there is a craving for community, connection, and a sense of belonging." "Maximize the amount of free time you have available to you versus the amount of money that you have available to you." Listen to Learn 00:54 Getting to know Joel Hooks, Rapid 5 Questions 03:57 Overview of egghead.io - how it started and who it’s for 06:56 Joel's teaching journey 08:17 Instructional design principles - improving the quality of learning 11:43 Overcoming the stuck zone, Amy Hoy's concept of "backwards planning" 13:00 Instructional design and the affective domain 16:08 egghead.io approach to teaching 20:35 Exciting things coming up from Joel Hooks, website links Get the Bonus Episode! Join us in the bonus segment! If you’re a designer, developer, or coder, this bonus is for you. We chat about building authority in your career and share some book recommendations to help you implement instructional design in your course. Grab it here: https://get.zencourses.co/extra

Alex Hillman is an educator and serial entrepreneur who wears many hats. He discusses two of his ventures: Indy Hall (his coworking space in Philadelphia) and Stacking the Bricks, where Alex and Amy Hoy create content and courses that enable developers and creatives to start their own successful businesses.

Finding Mentors, Being Wrong, Surfing Change, and More Welcome to the Process Hacker News, your weekly roundup of useful news and updates from Process Hackers who have been guests on Hack the Process with M. David Green. This week we’re talking about finding mentors, being wrong, surfing change, and more. For all the links, or to watch the video, check out the show notes at http://www.hacktheprocess.com/2019-01-01-process-hacker-news-finding-mentors-being-wrong-surfing-change-and-more/. Enjoy! Events At the B2B Marketing Forum in the Netherlands on March 19, 2019, catch Tiffani Bova as she speaks about the current market’s growth, innovation, sales, and the importance of customer experience. Improve your relationship with money through the Financial Success Mindset Webinar with Michelle Dale on January 6. It’s free! Media On the Level Up Your Course Podcast, listen to Alex Hillman share his experience in building trust, community, and 30×500, a product launch course he created with Amy Hoy. Steve Goldbach appeared on BNN Bloomberg to reveal some corporate strategies that need to be blown up. If you have your own business, it’s a great help to have a guru to guide you. Here is an episode of The $100MBA Show, in which Omar Zenhom explores the topic of how to find a mentor. What’s the importance of being wrong? Jennifer Riel’s thoughts about mistakes and how often we need to be right are revealed in her TEDxToronto Talk. The Men on Purpose Podcast features Julian Hayes II for a talk about how he built his own health and wellness company. Jason Hsiao’s interview with Lou Diamond is one of the highlights of Thrive LOUD podcast’s special year end episode. Writing “This” is the new tattoo that Daniel Coffeen got inked on his arm on his last birthday, and you can find his thoughts about the constantly changing meaning of the word “this” and other indexicals in his recent blog post. Recommended Resources Develop resilience and learn to weather life’s tough challenges with Martha Beck’s workshop, Surfing the Wave of Change, from February 1 to 3 at 1440 Multiversity in California. Pace Smith recommended Martha in her Hack the Process interview. Starting January of this new year, you can ask Valeisha’s Desk for advice from Valeisha Butterfield-Jones, one of the top influences in Sasha Ariel Alston’s life. Check out the promotional video which is now up on Youtube! Thanks for checking out this Process Hacker News update from Hack the Process. If you liked what you saw, please leave a comment to let us know what processes you’re hacking.

Hey everybody! We have Alex Hillman on the show today. Alex is the founder of Indy Hall, a coworking community in Philadelphia; he’s also the co-founder of StackingtheBricks.com, along with Amy Hoy. In this episode, Alex and I discuss the essence of trust in relationship building and community building, the story behind 30x500 (he and Amy’s flagship course), and how to identify and close the gap between what is obvious to you and what is obvious to your students. There’s always going to be a gap, your job is to identify that gap and close it one step at a time Episode Quotes "Relationship building and community building is all about trust." "There is a range of what teaching really means but at the heart of it I think it's really understanding how to help people." "We are so used to being self-focused and wanting to be seen as that creative inspired genius." Listen to Learn 00:20 Getting to know Alex, Rapid 5 Questions 03:21 Alex's business journey: web development to co-working 09:47 The essence of TRUST in community and relationship building 15:32 Alex's teaching journey: HOW and WHY? 18:37 Overview of Alex and Amy’s flagship course, 30x500 22:53 Why people have the tendency to put the course before the audience? 25:15 Overhauling the bad habits, challenges faced, breaking down how to do things 32:09 A practical example: Sales Safari 35:12 Figuring out the "Stuck Zone" 39:15 Addressing the bad habits and changes that happened after 47:22 Alex's tips for course creators 51:50 Exciting things coming up from Alex, links and announcements Want More? Alex and I recorded a bonus segment on how to build community online, which tools work best, and more. You can grab it here: https://get.zencourses.co/extra

This is it! The Zen Courses Show is now Level Up Your Course. For the very first episode of Level Up Your Course, I’m honored to have Amy Hoy as our guest. Amy is a software developer, writer, co-founder of Stacking the Bricks along with Alex Hillman, and a course creator. She is here today to share her story and everything about her online course ‘Sales Safari’. Most importantly, we’re going to talk about the V word: validating your idea and why you should pre-sell. Don’t spend a year making something. Do a tiny product first. Episode Quotes "A good business doesn't mean it is a good business for you" "Just because people pay money for your thing doesn't necessarily mean it solves their problem" "You need to have a really clear vision of what the product is going to be" "It is better to sell a smaller product for less money than to sell nothing" "People buy when they are confronted with a reason to take time to read the details and make a decision" “The big thing I want people to avoid is to spend a year making something and then [get] no sales...do a tiny product first.” Listen to Learn 00:29 Getting to know Amy Hoy 03:26 Rapid 5 Questions 07:13 Amy's journey as an entrepreneur 11:44 Do's and don’ts whenever you have an idea in mind 14:37 All about validation, Why validation is backwards? 20:27 Pre-selling: Is it good or not? 24:22 Amy's pre-selling process 32:25 Is there an X-factor in this online business? 34:08 Steps to do your first pre-sell 40:28 About Sales Safari and how to find out what people want 43:49 Concepts about events, marketing and launches 47:21 Amy's tips for online entrepreneurs about pre-selling 51:34 Coming up: Exciting things to look forward to from Amy, links and announcements 54:50 What's your why? Why do you do this work? Check out the show notes for links to Amy’s work and to subscribe to the newsletter: http://zencourses.co/066

Show Notes EuRuKo 2018 Vienna (https://euruko2018.org/) Thomas Fuchs (http://mir.aculo.us/) Amy Hoy (https://twitter.com/amyhoy) Beginning Ruby (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1484212797/parpaspod-20) POODR (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0134456475/parpaspod-20) 99 Bottles of OOP (https://www.sandimetz.com/99bottles/) Elixir Forum (https://elixirforum.com/) ElixirConf EU 2018 Highlights (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncv-D8GbNBg) Ruby Habits (https://rubyhabits.github.io/) vienna.rb (https://www.meetup.com/vienna-rb/) This Bot Will Pump You Up (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_II771f7p4g) What Are Flame Graphs and How to Read Them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uKZXIwd6M0) Recommendations Book Yourself Solid (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1119431220/parpaspod-20) Get Clients Now! (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/081443245X/parpaspod-20) Cooking by Hand (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0609608932/parpaspod-20) Metaprogramming Ruby 2 (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1941222129/parpaspod-20) Aaron Cruz Twitter (https://twitter.com/mraaroncruz) Personal Page (https://aaroncruz.com/) Parallel Passion Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/parpaspod) Twitter (https://www.twitter.com/parpaspod) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/parpaspod) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/parpaspod) Credits Tina Tavčar (https://twitter.com/tinatavcar) for the logo Jan Jenko (https://twitter.com/JanJenko) for the music

Panel: Reuven Lerner Jonathan Stark In this episode of the Freelancer’s Show, the panelist, Reuven and Jonathan discuss “The Essential Consultant Library,” or the books you should read for consulting, marketing and business. Jonathan and Reuven share the exact books that helped them in the current area of business. Rather it is consulting, marketing, or entrepreneurship, the Freelancers share their favorites and much more. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: You should continue learning Books that help in various ways for business Value-Based Fees by Alan Weiss The Positioning Manual by Philip Morgan Selling to Big Companies by Jill Konrath The Secret of Selling Anything by Harry Browne How to Measure Anything by Douglas  Hubbard Just F  Ship by Amy Hoy Double Your Freelancing Rates by Brennan Dunn Hourly Billing is Nuts by Jonathan Stark The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza Patrick McKenzie website Getting Things Done by David Allen And much more!      Sponsors/Affilates FreshBooks Digital Ocean Picks Jonathan Little Nightmares Jonathan's Reading List The Pricing Seminar Reuven Lerner We Chat MEET

Panel: Reuven Lerner Jonathan Stark In this episode of the Freelancer’s Show, the panelist, Reuven and Jonathan discuss “The Essential Consultant Library,” or the books you should read for consulting, marketing and business. Jonathan and Reuven share the exact books that helped them in the current area of business. Rather it is consulting, marketing, or entrepreneurship, the Freelancers share their favorites and much more. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: You should continue learning Books that help in various ways for business Value-Based Fees by Alan Weiss The Positioning Manual by Philip Morgan Selling to Big Companies by Jill Konrath The Secret of Selling Anything by Harry Browne How to Measure Anything by Douglas  Hubbard Just F  Ship by Amy Hoy Double Your Freelancing Rates by Brennan Dunn Hourly Billing is Nuts by Jonathan Stark The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza Patrick McKenzie website Getting Things Done by David Allen And much more!      Sponsors/Affilates FreshBooks Digital Ocean Picks Jonathan Little Nightmares Jonathan's Reading List The Pricing Seminar Reuven Lerner We Chat MEET

Fast Food Humor, Scheduling Social Media, Lies, Lies, Lies, and More Welcome to the Process Hacker News, your weekly roundup of useful news and updates from Process Hackers who have been guests on Hack the Process with M. David Green. This week we’ve got fast food humor, scheduling social media, lies, lies, lies, and more. For links to all the resources mentioned, please check out the show notes: http://www.hacktheprocess.com/2018-08-21-process-hacker-news-fast-food-humor-scheduling-social-media-lies-lies-lies-and-more/ Enjoy! Events Interested in learning how to run events of your own? On August 23, Andi Galpern is hosting a webinar called Ask Andi, where she will answer queries about putting together events and growing a brand. Join Rhonda Magee, George Mumford, and Rose Pavlov at Mindfulness for Social Justice from October 5 to 8 in Garrison, New York, where practitioners will learn how mindfulness can help them address issues in the community. Rhonda also offers a more in-depth explanation about mindfulness and social justice in a blog post she published. Catch Sarah Cooper at Martech 2018 in October at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, an annual conference focused on marketing, tech, and management. Also, recent news about a mother giving birth at Chick-Fil-A also inspired Sarah to publish a hysterical guide comparing maternity services at fast food chains. The Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community, organized by Kimberly Wiefling, is featuring the principal of Critical Change LLC, Thea Singer Spitzer, at Collaborate to Achieve Amazing Things on September 20 in Palo Alto. The event, hosted by Ron Lichty, will be focused on team collaboration. Fundraisers For Jina Anne’s 35th birthday, she invites you to celebrate life by donating to the clean water campaign for Charity:Water she put up to help provide clean and safe drinking water to people all over the world. Happy birthday, Jina! Media Lies, lies, lies. As he launches season two of his Rendition Podcast, Alex Cespedes shares three short stories about lies and their effects. A new episode of the Groundless Ground Podcast by Lisa Dale Miller reveals how embodied cognition and embodied mindfulness can be explained, with philosophy professor and writer Evan Thompson. Listen to Alex Hillman tell the story of how he began coworking in Philadelphia and how he founded Indy Hall on the Philly Who Podcast. There is a difference between training like a power lifter versus training like a bodybuilder. Let Malek Banoun help you figure out which one is best for you in his newest vlog. There are so many ways social media have changed our lives, but not all of them have been positive. Curtis McHale tells us the reasons why he doesn’t schedule time for social media on The Smart Business Show. Recommended Resources Not feeling the thrill when working on certain skills? Amy Hoy, podcast partner of Alex Hillman, offers some tips on learning new skills you’re not passionate about. Marques Brownlee talks Tesla and tech in an interview on his Talk Tech show with Elon Musk, who is a prominent resource mentioned by a number of guests, such as Tom Morkes, Omar Zenhom, Ricky Yean, Loic Le Meur, and Alex de Simone. Scott Anthony discussed Leadership Lessons from the Trenches of Disruption in a recent Talks at Google presentation. Scott is a strategic advisor mentioned by Ron Carucci. Thanks for checking out this Process Hacker News update from Hack the Process. If you liked what you saw, please send me a note to let me know what processes you’re hacking, and how Hack the Process can help.

Nate Kontny (former CEO at Highrise) joins me to talk Highrise, product design / JTBD, and the app he's working on next. (60 minutes.)

Welcome to the Process Hacker News, your weekly roundup of useful news and updates from Process Hackers who have been guests on Hack the Process with M. David Green. This week we’ve got PR misconceptions, talent strategies, book reviews, and more. Enjoy! Media Increase your focus dramatically by asking yourself this question that Jay Wong has for you. Doing things differently may just help you find your way to success. Listen to how Josh Haynam adjusted his process and approach until his company became a hit on the Make It Snappy Show. Curtis McHale has been publishing book reviews on his podcast, Should I Read It, and his most recent review is of a book by Michael Hyatt titled Your Best Year Ever. Listen in! Pamela Wasley advises entrepreneurs to be strategic with talent on the Absolute Advantage podcast. Writing In honor of International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism, and Transphobia, Michelle Kim has written a little reminder for the LGBTQI community. What are the three common customer misconceptions about public relations? You can find out from an article written by Ricky Yean. A personal story about how a friend cheated him for money is shared by Luis Congdon, and he reveals the lessons he learned from this unfortunate experience in his latest Entrepreneur article. Michelle Dale gets more personal in her recent blog post and tells about the true story of her path to confidence and self-discovery as a digital nomad. The founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, recently passed away, and Loïc Le Meur wrote a post in his honor. Recommended Resources One of the folks that Michelle Kim looks up to, Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code, has been honored at Silicon Valley Forum’s 21st Visionary Awards. Congratulations, Kimberly! Are you working your schedule or is your schedule working you? Find out on this episode of the Here and Now Toronto Podcast with guest Eric Termuende, a workplace expert recommendation made by Tara Byrne. Amy Hoy, referenced by Alex Hillman, has written a blog post ranking nine ways to make software-as-a-service (Saas) customers hate you. Thanks for checking out this Process Hacker News update from Hack the Process. If you liked what you saw, please leave a comment to let us know what processes you’re hacking.

133 WP Tonic Interview with Kai Davis Outreach Consultant & Author We talk with consultant Kai Davis about podcast outreach and other forms of marketing. http://kaidavis.com/ Episode 133 Table of Contents 0:00 Intros 2:20 How does choosing a niche help you as consultant? How do you choose that niche? 3:56 Kai recommends The Positioning Manual by Phillip Morgan https://philipmorganconsulting.com/authority-resource-center/the-positioning-manual-for-technical-firms/ 4:33 What is digital outreach? How does digital outreach help you as a consultant? 6:41 Aligning the needs of the audience builder, the audience, and the audience guest (the outreaching business). How do you figure out how to align values for all three? 9:38 How important is it to nurture relationships within your industry? 10:56 Consulting is not a zero-sum game. 11:31 What prevents consultants from creating educational assets that will be valuable lead magnets? 15:49 Why it's vital to build a product ladder to allow people to engage with you at every price point. 18:08 Why is podcast outreach more important now than a few years ago? 20:55 It takes repetition for people to remember your brand. 21:44 Is appearing on other people's podcast a great way to get your feet wet before starting your own branded podcast? 24:24 What is the hidden benefit of having a podcast with guest interviews? 25:54 What is the Double Your Freelancing Academy? And what are some common mistakes that freelancers make? 28:55 Kai's background in consulting, and what would he tell his younger self about consulting? 33:34 Without clear positioning, it will be very hard to raise your rates or get return business. 35:47 How does Kai balance organic SEO and paid traffic? What changes does he see coming to both of these? 37:48 Without proper positioning, you are magnifying your problems in public. 38:21 Kai has a amazing story about spending money on advertising without having the other pieces in place. 40:05 Podcast outros. Find Kai at: http://freeoutreachcourse.com/ and http://doubleyouraudience.com/advice/   Find bonus content from this episode on the WP-Tonic website: https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/133-kai-davis-digital-outreach-podcast/   ===========   Links and resources mentioned during the episode: The Positioning Manual by Phillip Morgan https://philipmorganconsulting.com/authority-resource-center/the-positioning-manual-for-technical-firms/ Free Outreach Course http://freeoutreachcourse.com Expensive Problem https://expensiveproblem.com/ Kai Davis Courses and Books http://doubleyouraudience.com/courses/ Just Fucking Ship by Amy Hoy https://unicornfree.com/just-fucking-ship/ The Outreach Blueprint http://doubleyouraudience.com/outre

On the 77th episode of you favourite comedy podcast about technology and aging programmers, Chris and Ed spoke with Tracy Osborn about her new job in developer relations, living the sweet rent-free life in the Bay Area and how she is making the smart move of relocating with her Kanuckistanian husband to Toronto. Do these things! Check out our sponsors Backup Pro, Roave and WonderNetwork Get 50% off Backup Pro’s services by using the promo code ‘devhell’ Buy stickers at devhell.info/shop Follow us on Twitter here Rate us on iTunes here Listen Download now (MP3) Links and Notes Tracy on Twitter She works at DreamFactory Her wedding startup 500 Startups Accelerator Be sure to read the source at Reportive.com Docker The drive-in theatre near Chris Tracy went to Cal Poly for Computer Science but quickly switched Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way Tracy’s Hello Web App books Both Chris and Tracy know Amy Hoy Ed’s series of tweets about a self-absorbed programmer giving up on Rails

Fasten your seatbelt and greet Amy Hoy here at UI Breakfast! Join us for an exciting conversation focused on design. You'll learn about Amy's design background, strong product opinions, and the workflow she stands for when building SaaS products. Show Notes Creating Passionate Users — Kathy Sierra's blog on creating better user experiences The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo The Brain Audit by Sean D'Souza Just F---ing Ship — an awesome book by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman A dedicated page for our listeners at Amy's website

Summary: They're back for real this time, with a topic, no less! This week Jody pitches Matt his percolating creative ideas for some feedback (and minimal snark). (Real) Follow Up Matt and his partner headed back to NOLA tomorrow… And there was just a mass shooting (17 injured) in the 9th Ward More worryingly, Matt might be getting sick (early warning signs present now), which is never a good thing in NOLA This American Life, 10 years after hurricane Katrina Toups' Meatery #Toothless Tiger is doing OK after her full mouth extraction- she can eat wet or hard food, amazingly Jody’s Pitch Deck Intro "Internet of Things", a tired buzz-term for Jody, but still fresh and completely acceptable to Matt Since hearing Jody's topic idea, Matt keeps thinking of more and more applications for the “Internet Open Sign” switch. Diesel Generator Alert Monitor best intro into the deck (despite limited user base of 1 guy/1 family-business) The Don has an acquaintance who sells diesel generator add-on modules that make the generators run more efficiently Jody is baffled by this, but it's a family business that's been running for a long time, so he assumes it must work Matt's skeptic alarms are sounding, but he accepts Jody's hand-waving Currently the generator add-on module has an "everything is not OK" light THE PITCH: connect the warning light to the internet so it can send an email or an SMS when something goes wrong Proof of concept alert monitor xIsOpen Started as The Don's idea, specifically for tennis courts THE PITCH: the local Recreation Center has soft-surface tennis courts that have to be closed down if they're too wet. Wouldn't you like to be able to know if the courts are open before you leave the house? Rec Center employees don't want to have to field continuous phone calls, and they don't like telling people who have just driven across town that the courts are closed They would much rather have a nice, friendly switch to throw that can update a web page in real-time for everyone to see The Don hacked on the hardware previously, and already had a domain name, TennisCourtsOpen.com The Don went the extra mile and made a fancy case for the hardware (yes, the tennis ball glows green for "open" or red for "closed) Jody thinks this idea should also be used for the pool at the Rec Center which suffers from similar weather-related closures In fact, Jody also thinks this will work well for any restaurant that can't quite keep consistent hours Matt The Foodie probably knows a few places in this category Android fancy text entry app THE ITCH: Jody is continually frustrated with Evernote and other text capture apps on Android and on the web THE PITCH: reduce friction for text capture on Android, start typing and then decide what to do with it Similar to the Drafts app on iOS Jody made a tiny bit of progress here with what could be the web-based portion of this app Jody's "minimum viable" text box on web page demo...emphasis on minimum (NOTE to listeners who actually follow that link, if you're baffled by a non-cooperative, fat cursor, type 'i' and things will probably work more like you expect) Jody tries to blow Matt's mind with the included vim-style modal editing. Jody has written about his efforts to learn this weird trick to editing text (hint, vi has a steep learning curve) Podcast Hosting and Content Management System THE ITCH: Jody should have automated some processes for ALYT a long time ago, but instead he could leverage those efforts into an entire podcast platform! THE PITCH: setting up an online presence for a podcast is complicated. This service would provide a website for blogging and show notes, hosting of audio files, and podcast feed (re-)generation. This kind of grandiose thinking from Jody can be non-productive, or procrastination in disguise Jody is waiting until Dan Benjamin releases his podcast content managent system, but he won't ship! Dan's system will be a for-pay service (probably), but Jody will still use it if it's good The 5by5 service from Dan will include lots of fancy analytics for advertisers (not an important feature for Jody or ALYT...yet) Amy Hoy’s 30x500 theory. Jody’s math was way off on this, but it’s still a good guideline. No, this is not the same as podcasts on Spotify, or Google Music...the shows would still live on the open web. Things Matt wants internet-ed Some of this discussion was lost due to a smaller than expected SD card in the Matt's Zoom audio recorder This was harder than Matt thought it would be, he's not sure if this is a failure of his imagination, or if he's just reasonably happy with the currently available information about his things. Matt wants his car to be able to communicate at a more granular level what’s wrong with it when the CEL comes on, and maybe to keep track of more maintenance data (but right now there's a lovely Moleskine notebook for that). Matt notes this is already already a reality for some newer cars Matt doesn’t need to talk to his fridge or other appliances Possibly a security system. Matt and his partner have considered installing one. If Matt's HVAC was more than passably effective, he might want to internet with it, but as it is, there wouldn’t be much point Summing up It's much harder to scrape together contiguous time block for Jody to record ALYT, but he can consistently steal away to fix a small bug or make progress on these projects These projects have been a great balance of steady forward progress and technical challenges (which is very pleasing to Jody) Jody acquired many useful internet-plumbing skills while podcasting with Matt and they keep being useful on side-projects Jody's complained previously that his setup of the ALYT website was too well-planned and so he doesn't get to tinker with it. Thanks to The Don for giving Jody something interesting to work on

In this episode we talk with Kai Davis about strategic copywriting. Choosing the right words to describe your product is so incredibly important, maybe even more important than the product itself! You'll learn how to go out in the wild and pick the right language, and how to write a perfect sales page. Show Notes Just F... Ship It by Amy Hoy with Alex Hillman, where they teach to make products crispy, not soggy Amy Hoy talking about Sales Safari at La Conf Paris 2013 Getting Started with Fancy Hands by Kai Davis The Traffic Manual by Kai Davis Traffic Powerup by Kai Davis The best book on writing long-form sales copy: The Brain Audit by Sean D'Souza Good example of intricate premium language & positioning: Bounce Exchange Good example of a smart naming pattern: Double Your Dating by David DeAngelo The UI Audit by Jane Portman

Today we have another episode with Kai Davis as a co-host. We discuss the importance of the right audience for your products, our long-term product strategy, and the benefits of the "audience-first" approach. We dive into the history of my products one by one, breaking down all the mistakes. Jane's first book (flaky one-size-fits-all positioning): Mastering App Presentation Double Your Freelancing Clients by Brennan Dunn (he recommended to make a free course targeted at clients) Jane's free email course on managing designers (nailed the positioning this time): Coefficiency Jane's famous productized consulting service — monthly creative direction for software companies: Correlation Jane's training course for consultants: Client Onboard (a post-mortem screenshot) Kai's book that he wrapped up, killing a list of 500 people: Getting Started with Fancy Hands Authority by Nathan Barry (guides you through the actual writing process) 30x500 Academy by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman (teaches you to find the product-market fit) Kai's new book: The Traffic Manual Jane's new book: The UI Audit

In this episode we meet Kai Davis, who'll be co-hosting a whole new podcast season here at UI Breakfast. We learn about the early years of his career, what he did in college, and how he ultimately nailed his positioning as the outreach consultant. Kai also shares his product aspirations and gives us an overview of his current projects. Kai's website: doubleyouraudience.com 30x500 Academy by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman (helped Kai a lot to nail his positioning) Kai's new book — a guide to getting more traffic for your digital products, apps, and services: The Traffic Manual Kai's book on cold email outreach: The Outreach Blueprint The upcoming book by the Productized Consulting Roundtable: The Independent Consulting Manual Special free goodies from Kai Davis — exclusively for our listeners!

Episode 65: slow roasted for sweet mesquite flavor! Derick Bailey of WatchMeCode fame joins us for an awesome discussion of the trials and tribulations of developer entrepreneurship. Derick talks about why Signal Leaf is going away, and we swap terrifying PayPal stories. Do these things! Check out our sponsors: Roave and WonderNetwork Buy stickers at devhell.info/shop Follow us on Twitter here Rate us on iTunes here Listen Download now (MP3, 77.2MB, 1:28:12 ) Links and Notes Derick Bailey WatchMeCode Signal Leaf Brian P Hogan EntreProgrammers Podcast Derick’s series of videos for Pragmatic Programmers 30x500 Amy Hoy’s blog Gary Vaynerchuck’s TED talk DevChat.tv 5by5.tv

 EntreProgrammers Episode 77 “Wash My Door Knob”   3:05 The EntreProgrammers discuss the how the world’s violence has diminished since the dark ages.   8:45 Chuck talks about his merchant account issues during the week. Chuck is now working on making a switch with these accounts. The EntreProgrammers talk about the beauty of Stripe accounts.    18:00 John talks about how some vendors do not take credit cards in Europe.    20:00 Josh talks about leadpages.net, that renewed his account without warning. At they do not give refunds. Derick is shutting down his account with LeadPages because of their poor customers service.    28:00  Josh talks about his aunt who works at a hospital. She oversees the ignorant  staff who treat patience horribly and are unaware that the patiences could easy Tweet their bad experience. The hospital administration retaliates by attempting to turn off the internet on the floor of the patience.    29:30  John talks about how companies need to think about their customer service, and research the people they service before they decide to follow through with bad service. Because, tweeting about bad service is imminent, and can ruin your leverage.   34:55 Chuck talks about his Podcast Movement experience. Chuck did a whole lot of eating and networking in Fort Worth TX. Derick talks about his dinner experience with Chuck.    41:00 Chuck is working up setting up some training courses. Possibly a beta course then sell for regular price. This is Chuck plan to raise at least 10 thousand bucks.  John suggest sell the material before you create it.    Take a look at railsclips.com, Chuck updated his site with all the suggestion from the EntreProgrammers.    54:30 Derick ask Josh about some of the SumoMe features. Chuck ask is SumoMe Works with Drip.    57:47  Chuck has tickets available for Angular Remote Comf.    1:02:35 John talks about a course with and interesting upgrade approach by Amy Hoy   1:05:20 Derick figures out his SumoMe issue.    1:05:45 John publish a guess post on Simple Programmer. The EntreProgrammers talks about how to embed code from Gist.  John mentions he should have a least 5 post per week on Simple Programmer. John talks about his new Get Up and Code panel podcast discussion plans. Chuck gives pointers about the process.    1:14:00 Chuck talks about the guidelines for his panel podcasts. John ask if he could use Chuck’s guidelines. Derick talks about a fan who run Suggest a Guess.  John gives run down of his plan to free himself from have to watch some of his project.    1:24:00 John talks about start a new project. Josh suggest moving a forum to Facebook.    1:30:30 Josh mentions how he uses Copy Chief. This is his suggestion to John. This is John next project for recurring revenue.    1:40:00 Derick talks about Lead Page getting backing to him about his recent Tweet. Derick mentions the Sumo Me integration with Drip. John gives a lot of hype to Thrive. Derick mentions the monthly subscription SumoMe is offering of more advance features.    1:52:00 Josh has 21,000 signups for his giveaway contest.  Josh is really not sure how he was able to get a huge number of signups. Josh shares information about his email strategy for his contest.      2:05:00 Josh talks about some of his workflow issues with Edgar. Derick thinks John is no using Edgar to his advantage using the RSS feed instead of a blog. John may be have some traction issuse with the way he is using Edgar.    2:14:00 John explains where his traffic is coming from for the podcast. But still puzzled about how he is getting so many subscribers. Derick is shock that John has as many subscribers as he does, with how his setup is working.    Thoughts of the Day   John - Think about where you were.    Derick - Re-Focus…   Josh -  Take the time to research, or your homework   Chuck - Life is like riding a bike, in order to keep your balance, is to keep going forward   Resources mention in this episode Stripe https://stripe.com/us/pricing   Sumo Me http://sumome.com   Copy Chief http://copychief.com”

Check out Ruby Remote Conf! 01:56 - Alex Hillman Introduction Twitter Blog The Coworking Weekly Show Indy Hall @indyhall Amy Hoy Unicornfree 30x500: Build and Launch a Profitable Product Business Without Venture Capital 02:57 - Collaboration and Coworking Spaces 08:34 - Nights and Weekends? (After Hours/Night Owl Working) Unconferences and BarCamps 13:05 - Coworking is NOT a Talent Agency 15:02 - Isn’t Coworking Distractive? Choice Architecture Full-Time / Flex-Member Separation = Bad 22:33 - Forming Relationships for Collaboration Examples: Parker and Jake Flycops @flyclops   Domino Amanda and Christine Lanternfish Press @lfpbooks The Legend of Sherlock Holmes Kickstarter Project 35:13 - Interns 36:54 - Collaboration vs Cooperation Choice vs Forced Collaboration “Half Baked Ideas” Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson 45:20 - Committing to a Coworking Space 49:39 - Should You Cowork? Self-Management Confidence: “If I can do it, you can do it.” Honest Exposure 01:03:58 - Starting a Coworking Space Core, Committed People Community Barn Raising Resources: How To Fund Your Coworking Space How Much Does It Cost To Start A Coworking Space? The Three Necessary Ingredients For Community. Do You Have Them? Picks The Tim Ferriss Show - Lazy: A Manifesto (Eric) Kai Davis: How to Hire a Part-Time Employee (Jonathan) Working Podcast (Reuven) Startup Podcast (Reuven) Fundraising While Female (Reuven) CodeNewbie Podcast (Chuck) Ask Me Another Podcast (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck) Reply All Podcast (Alex) Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston M.D. (Alex)

Check out Ruby Remote Conf! 01:56 - Alex Hillman Introduction Twitter Blog The Coworking Weekly Show Indy Hall @indyhall Amy Hoy Unicornfree 30x500: Build and Launch a Profitable Product Business Without Venture Capital 02:57 - Collaboration and Coworking Spaces 08:34 - Nights and Weekends? (After Hours/Night Owl Working) Unconferences and BarCamps 13:05 - Coworking is NOT a Talent Agency 15:02 - Isn’t Coworking Distractive? Choice Architecture Full-Time / Flex-Member Separation = Bad 22:33 - Forming Relationships for Collaboration Examples: Parker and Jake Flycops @flyclops   Domino Amanda and Christine Lanternfish Press @lfpbooks The Legend of Sherlock Holmes Kickstarter Project 35:13 - Interns 36:54 - Collaboration vs Cooperation Choice vs Forced Collaboration “Half Baked Ideas” Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson 45:20 - Committing to a Coworking Space 49:39 - Should You Cowork? Self-Management Confidence: “If I can do it, you can do it.” Honest Exposure 01:03:58 - Starting a Coworking Space Core, Committed People Community Barn Raising Resources: How To Fund Your Coworking Space How Much Does It Cost To Start A Coworking Space? The Three Necessary Ingredients For Community. Do You Have Them? Picks The Tim Ferriss Show - Lazy: A Manifesto (Eric) Kai Davis: How to Hire a Part-Time Employee (Jonathan) Working Podcast (Reuven) Startup Podcast (Reuven) Fundraising While Female (Reuven) CodeNewbie Podcast (Chuck) Ask Me Another Podcast (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck) Reply All Podcast (Alex) Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston M.D. (Alex)

04:07 - At what point does it make sense to register as a corporation? Apart from liability, I assume. If you have profits to reinvest in the business? Types of Business Entities: Sole Proprietorship Limited Liability Company (LLC) S-Corporations “Piercing the Corporate Veil” Errors and Omissions Insurance Annual Minutes and Organizational Meetings 13:25 - Do you umbrella all your products, brands, DBAs, etc. under a main corp? DBA (Doing Business As) 18:32 - What was the comical, but legit contract you mentioned on a show recently? (Contracts) Contract Killer Sue => Fold 21:35 - Expensing Home Office for Tax Purposes Tax Deductions Tax Credits 31:12 - Errors and Omissions Insurance (Cont’d) 34:38 - Marketing to Launch Jeff Walker of The Product Launch Formula 41:26 - Contract Resolution 43:29 - If expensing a home office, do you pay for bills, utilities, etc. out of a personal or business account? 45:44 - Prototyping Tools 50:20 - Partnerships and Investments: “My friend has an idea!! ... I actually like this one!!” Even small-scale apps or services? Picks Just Fucking Ship by Amy Hoy (Eric) The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (and Why They Don't) by Sean D'Souza (Jonathan) The Silkworm (A Cormoran Strike Novel) by Robert Galbraith (Jonathan) The Positioning Manual for Technical Firms by Philip Morgan (Reuven) WASD CODE 87-Key Illuminated Mechanical Keyboard with White LED Backlighting - Cherry MX Clear (Chuck) Grifiti Fat Wrist Pad (Chuck) Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Chuck) Mastery by Robert Greene (Chuck)   Join us for our next Live Q&A on Tuesday, May 26th 2015! Sign up and get The Ultimate Guide of Marketing Tools for Freelancers here.  

04:07 - At what point does it make sense to register as a corporation? Apart from liability, I assume. If you have profits to reinvest in the business? Types of Business Entities: Sole Proprietorship Limited Liability Company (LLC) S-Corporations “Piercing the Corporate Veil” Errors and Omissions Insurance Annual Minutes and Organizational Meetings 13:25 - Do you umbrella all your products, brands, DBAs, etc. under a main corp? DBA (Doing Business As) 18:32 - What was the comical, but legit contract you mentioned on a show recently? (Contracts) Contract Killer Sue => Fold 21:35 - Expensing Home Office for Tax Purposes Tax Deductions Tax Credits 31:12 - Errors and Omissions Insurance (Cont’d) 34:38 - Marketing to Launch Jeff Walker of The Product Launch Formula 41:26 - Contract Resolution 43:29 - If expensing a home office, do you pay for bills, utilities, etc. out of a personal or business account? 45:44 - Prototyping Tools 50:20 - Partnerships and Investments: “My friend has an idea!! ... I actually like this one!!” Even small-scale apps or services? Picks Just Fucking Ship by Amy Hoy (Eric) The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (and Why They Don't) by Sean D'Souza (Jonathan) The Silkworm (A Cormoran Strike Novel) by Robert Galbraith (Jonathan) The Positioning Manual for Technical Firms by Philip Morgan (Reuven) WASD CODE 87-Key Illuminated Mechanical Keyboard with White LED Backlighting - Cherry MX Clear (Chuck) Grifiti Fat Wrist Pad (Chuck) Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Chuck) Mastery by Robert Greene (Chuck)   Join us for our next Live Q&A on Tuesday, May 26th 2015! Sign up and get The Ultimate Guide of Marketing Tools for Freelancers here.  

Are you a procrastinator? Don't feel bad about it - DO something about it. On this show, you’re going to be hearing a short story from my business partner and co-host Amy Hoy admit something....there was a time when she wasn’t so great at shipping. That's right, the author of Just Fucking Ship (http://justfuckingship.com) used to be a serial procrastinator. As she describes, "I could ship work and projects for other people - bosses, clients - but when it came to shipping my own things I was the worst." Amy goes on to describe the sequence of events that snapped her out of her nasty habit and started her down the path of shipping, including one of her most famous projects http://twistori.com, including the story behind one of her most famous projects http://twistori.com and how it helped her career. This episode is just a tiny excerpt from a longer interview hosted by one of our friends and alumni, Sean Fioritto, who has been writing a series called “Github Ghost-towns” (http://www.planningforaliens.com/blog/2015/02/04/how-to-ship/) where he’s been talking about all of those side projects that we spin up…and then leave to rot. You know what I’m talking about. ;) The FULL LENGTH interview with Sean is action-packed with stories and advice from Amy and I, including a bunch of tips that we use every day to make sure we keep shipping the products and ebombs that you all seem to love so much. So go check it out at http://www.planningforaliens.com/blog/2015/02/04/how-to-ship/ Get your own copy of Just Fucking Ship There are 21 principles that we used to Just Fucking Ship the book Just Fucking Ship. You can learn what they are here and pick up a copy for yourself: https://unicornfree.com/just-fucking-ship

Hi there! To help Chasing Product grow, please take a moment to visit iTunes and give the show a 5-star rating. Thanks! This episode of Chasing Product features Amy Hoy, sharing her no-BS-allowed outlook on startup realities and growing a businesses. Bootstrapped Product Talking Points Why the businesses featured in “entreporn” are outliers, not startup Read More The post Episode 17: Startup Realities w/Amy Hoy appeared first on Chasing Product.

Hi there! To help Chasing Product grow, please take a moment to visit iTunes and give the show a 5-star rating. Thanks! This episode of Chasing Product features Amy Hoy, sharing her no-BS-allowed outlook on startup realities and growing a businesses. Bootstrapped Product Talking Points Why the businesses featured in “entreporn” are outliers, not startup Read More The post Episode 17: Startup Realities w/Amy Hoy appeared first on Chasing Product.

Alex Hillman is many things: first, he’s the king of JFDI (he even has the tattoo to prove it). Second: he’s the founder of IndyHall, a co-working space in Philadelphia. Third: he’s Amy Hoy’s partner in 30×500. And fourth: he’s just recently launched his own product called  GroupBuzz.io. Our topic was: What do communities & product businesses have in common? Notable quotes “Having a connection with people is really important. A lot of people build tools without thinking about the people that are using them.” - Alex Hillman “It’s not hard to get a group of people in a room. It’s hard getting a group of people doing something useful together.” - Alex Hillman “Cult of personality is one of the most dangerous things for a community.” - Alex Hillman “Customer interviews are bullshit. Not because people are mean, because they’re too nice. You have to observe what they do, not what they say.” - Alex Hillman “Put a lot more stock in what people do as opposed to what they say. Be a pattern watcher. Pay attention to how people act.” - Alex Hillman Show notes GroupBuzz.io The Bullseye Model Alex on Twitter Alex's blog 30x500 Justin's JFDI communityA note from Justin: A big thanks to Alex for being on the show! Cheers, Justin Jackson @mijustinPS: I'm writing a new book right now called  Marketing for Developers.  Click here to sign-up for updates (and get a sample PDF).

Amy Hoy is known for her unfiltered, straight-shooting opinions on building product businesses. Her and her husband  Thomas Fuchs have built  Freckle, an awesome time-tracking web app - and have become well known in the bootstrapping, design, and Ruby on Rails communities. Amy is also a passionate teacher: her and Alex Hillman run the excellent  30x500 bootcamp whose students include the likes of Brennan Dunn,  Chris Hartjes, and  Jaana Kulmala. Our topic was: finding an audience, discovering needs, and building products people want. Notable quotes "The core problem with so many businesses is that they’re based on what the business owner wants." "They’re fantasizing about being the hero: “I’m going to ride in on my white ‘software’ horse, and save these poor people." "As much as you can, you want to sell to people who will use your product. People who buy your product and don’t use it will never buy from you again." "Target people already in motion." "Selling to wannabes has the least amount of upside; people who already have a business are more likely to spend money.” "I would rather have no money, than know that the vast majority of people that gave me the money aren't achieving what they wanted to. If that's true, I don't want to be in that business." "Being in business forces you to become a better human being." Show notes Freckle Time Tracking 30x500 Amy's blog post on why Freckle became successful The legend of 30x500A note from Justin: A big thanks to Amy Hoy for being Amy: no bullshit, nothing held back. Just real, hard advice for product people. Cheers, Justin Jackson @mijustinPS: I'm writing a new book right now called Marketing for Developers. Click here to sign-up for updates (and get a sample PDF).

Download this episode, in which Ian and Andrey talk about growing to a point where you have no idea where stuff is in your own company, building mobile clients for Snappy and Quintu, Minecraft, live coding streams, games, client work, system administration with SaaS, the Sturgeon/Laravel argument, the forums, SaaS growth curves, the PHP Book Book, Seinfeld, Bill Gates, and the Gone Home game.   Ionic framework Asteroid Jane Phil Sturgeon on The Tribal Framework Mindset Ian’s sideon the Sturgeon/Laravel discussion. Amy Hoy – 5 years of SaaS growth. Seinfeld – Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Gone Home    Discuss this episode.

In this episode of Product People: does Amy Hoy still get scared before a launch? How do you choose an audience? And she answers some listener questions.

Amy Hoy gives a personal interview on her growing up in suburban Maryland, programming on an Apple IIc, selling her My Little Ponies to buy a Power Mac, and how she ended up building her first products.

The Rogues talk entrepreneurship with 30x500's Amy Hoy.

The Rogues talk entrepreneurship with 30x500's Amy Hoy.

The Rogues talk entrepreneurship with 30x500's Amy Hoy.

Keith and I recorded the second podcast, this time with special guest Amy Hoy. (If you missed the first podcast, see here.) We’re still searching for a format which really works for us, so this is a work in progress. Please share your thoughts with us on what you like/don’t...

Justin & Jason talk to Amy Hoy of Freckle, and Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator about finding an audience and making money from it, what is SEO and how to do it, how important is design?, Jason's inability to have a boss, and what Amy and Patrick are up to these days.

94: TZ Interview – Amy Hoy / How to Build a Product Empire by techzing

Adam talks with Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Founders of Slash7 about product development, profiting from Open Source, the key to happiness, living a Unicorn-Free lifestyle and how Amy and Thomas met and ultimately fell in love.

Adam talks with Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Founders of Slash7 about product development, profiting from Open Source, the key to happiness, living a Unicorn-Free lifestyle and how Amy and Thomas met and ultimately fell in love.