Podcast appearances and mentions of josh as

If you missed the first and second episodes with thoughtbot Incubator Program partcipant and founder Josh Herzig-Marks of Knect, you can listen to Josh's first episode (https://www.giantrobots.fm/incubators3e1josh) and his second (https://www.giantrobots.fm/s3e3incubatorjosh) to catch up. In the third interview with Josh, Lindsey Christensen, head of Marketing at thoughtbot, and Jordyn Bonds, head of the Incubator Program at thoughtbot, discuss the progress of Knect in the thoughtbot Incubator Program. Most of the conversation involves identifying and focusing on the right target audience. Initially, they considered startup enthusiasts, but after exploring other segments like journalists, they returned to startup enthusiasts with a more refined focus. Josh also talks about developing a prototype and its usefulness in getting feedback and refining the product concept. The technical feasibility of integrating various communication platforms into their solution is a significant focus. They examined different platforms like email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, and SMS to determine which integrations were essential for the minimum viable product. Looking forward, Josh outlines the next steps for the program, which include finalizing high-quality prototypes and making strategic decisions about the scale and funding of the project. Transcript: LINDSEY: Hi, everyone. JORDYN: Hi. LINDSEY: Thanks for tuning in and joining. We're going to be checking in on one of our incubator program participants today. If you haven't joined us before, thoughtbot runs a startup incubator, about an eight-week program for the early, early, early-stage company, idea, founder project to validate that business, find the market, and start thinking about how you build that thing. So my name is Lindsey Christensen. I head up Marketing here at thoughtbot. And today, I am joined by Jordyn Bonds, who heads up the incubator program at thoughtbot. And our guest of honor checking in once again, Josh Herzig-Marks, Founder of Knect, the company going through the program. Thanks for joining. JOSH: Super excited. I'm always excited. LINDSEY: How's it going? How is your founder sentiment this week? JOSH: This -- LINDSEY: Are you on a high? Are you on a low? JOSH: I don't think I'm on a typically high-high. I'm a pretty even-keeled, chill founder. I think it's appropriately enthusiastic but not excessively so, and definitely not at a low trough. LINDSEY: All right, even-keeled. We love to [crosstalk 01:19]. JOSH: Appropriately enthusiastic because we're doing really cool stuff. And this is a lot of fun. LINDSEY: Well, that's great. So, I mean, [inaudible 01:25] that you're working on and especially the last time I checked in with you in the really early stages, trying to find that target niche audience or invalidate, like, the problem with them. How is that going? How's that search for the people with the problem going? JOSH: Yeah. So just to, like, rewind the clock for the folks who maybe haven't seen every one of these, you know, there's a few things that I was trying to figure out to validate whether this problem that I saw was an opportunity for business. And, Jordyn, help me out if I forget some of these. So, number one, is this a Josh problem, or is this problem more broad? Question number two is, could we find an audience of people who are reachable, who share the problem, and who'd be willing to actually pay for this thing? And those little asterisks after pay, right? People pay for things with money but also with time or with reputation. Generally, we're thinking about money here, ultimately. But do they pay for this thing even in time? Would they be able to do that? And the reason we're looking for that kind of a more narrow audience is because you got to build for somebody in the very beginning. This isn't, like, we're limiting ourselves to a narrow audience forever, but we wanted a set of people who we could design this thing for, have prototypes, share it, and hopefully get some consistent feedback so we can build a thing which they would find useful and use that from there. That was two things. And the third thing: is this actually technically feasible? You know, the first time I was a founder, incidental to building our business, we built the world's fastest online transaction processing database that was processing, like, billions and billions of retail records in, like, the time it takes you to, like, click and drag and change the query that we're doing, which is really cool to say out loud, and it demoed really, really well. But that isn't actually a business. And what I wanted is part of validating if this idea, if this problem was an opportunity or something that wasn't a science experiment. And I'd love to talk a little bit more about what we've been doing over the past week, maybe a little later on in this. Because I think it's been a big week for the science experiment or not validation stage of this thing. So, two things we've also done over the past week and a half, two weeks since the last time we chatted, we have a prototype, which looks pretty good, which we can now use to show to people who we think are our core starting audience, our core starting market, and we actually have a core starting market. Both of these things are pretty exciting. I mean, I'm always excited. But we're doing it, like, we're doing the thing that we're supposed to be doing, and I like that. LINDSEY: That's really exciting. So, core starting market is happening. Do you want to talk about maybe how you got there? JOSH: One of the reasons why I was excited about doing this program is Jordyn, and I share the understanding of its importance. But when you're, like, actually the founder, it's really hard to see this, right? Jordyn is like the...I don't know quite how to describe it, but Jordyn is the person who, like, made sure we stayed focused on this part of the effort. And, like, it's a really key part of the thoughtbot incubator. And it's one of the reasons why I'm really appreciative of having gone through the program. JORDYN: So, Josh walked into the program with a problem that he had, which is frequently how products get made and companies get founded. Like, that's fine. It's a great starting place. And as he listed, his question was, is this a Josh problem, or is this a problem for more than just Josh? Because Josh isn't a market segment. Josh is an individual human [laughs]. And a lot of us have product ideas that we would love to have exist so that we can use them, but that doesn't make them good market opportunities. I may or may not be speaking from experience in that regard, ahem. Anyway, so part of the programming here was to figure this out. And it's great to start with, like, okay, well, if Josh is our primary user, who is Josh? Is there a market of Joshs, right? So, we actually started off talking to those folks. And, you know, we're human beings, and we tend to hang out with people like ourselves. And so, Josh knew a lot of people like Josh. One of those people that he knew was me. I am like Josh in regard to this pain point. I also had it. And then I was connected to a bunch of people who had this pain point. So, we broadly spoke to a lot of those folks at first. I don't know that we really had a persona name for this. I don't know, how would you frame this? JOSH: As you know, I only have poor pejorative names for people like us. JORDYN: [laughs] Pejorative? JOSH: There's, you know, a class of people who are at tech companies and startups, and sometimes they start their own companies, and sometimes they work at companies. And sometimes they do coaching. And sometimes they do a little bit of an investment. And sometimes they're on advisory boards. And, you know, when you kind of smoothly move from one thing to the next, sort of often doing several of these things all at the same time. And there's not a really good name for them, but they're kind of people, like I might go so far to say the three of us, and maybe a lot of people who work at thoughtbot and a lot of people we've all worked with in the past and, hopefully, a lot of the people who are listening to this conversation because they, too, could slip into the founding a company stage of this business. JORDYN: So, we've kind of loosely called those people, most recently, startup enthusiasts is our nickname, and there are a lot of folks under that umbrella. But as we talked to those people at this kind of high level, it was very broad. That maybe sounds fairly specific to some of you out there listening, but it's not specific, nearly specific enough to address with a product. So, we were talking. We were listening, getting people to talk to us, "Hey, tell us about how you keep in touch with folks. How does that go? What do you do? Have you ever built your own spreadsheet to keep track of people you know? Tell us about that." Broad questions. And we were learning things and hearing about trends. It wasn't coming into focus. We weren't hearing enough repeatable things. And we certainly weren't hearing about red, hot pain points. It was like a, "Yeah, this is kind of a problem sometimes, but not all the time. My system works more or less [inaudible 07:11]. Then we kind of found this range of personas. Some folks were just like, "I'm awesome at this. It's not a problem. I don't know what to tell you." Okay, well, clearly, that person doesn't need a product because they're feeling good. Great. At the other end of the spectrum, you have people who are just like, "I don't even know what you're talking about [laughs]. Like, this isn't [laughs]..." There were people who were like, "I know what you're talking about, but I'm good at it." There were people who were like, "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't care to ever do this." And then, there was this broad set of people in the middle who were like, "Yeah, I have a problem with this." But we were hearing a lot of different things. In the course of that, Rami, one of the folks on the team, ended up talking to a journalist. And that conversation was very interesting because it did seem like way more of a red, hot pain point with, like, something on the line. And we were like, oh, maybe we've been barking up the entire wrong tree and, like, startup enthusiasts aren't our people; journalists are our people. So, then we did a whole sprint with journalists and realized that journalists is a very broad umbrella [laughs]. There's a lot of different kinds of journalists in a lot of different kinds of contexts. And they have widely varying pain points, habits, needs, wants. We were like, okay, we're hearing some really interesting things in here, but they don't seem like early adopters because they are not the kind of people that just try an app who are just like, "Sure, new app, cool. I'll try that." Startup enthusiasts are people who just, like, try stuff. They're, like, on Product Hunt. They're friends with a bunch of founders, and those founders are, like, "Try this." And then they're like, "Sure, okay. Sure, I'll try it. I'll login." Login to anything once, right? Is kind of the attitude of this group of people, journalists not so much. And so, it felt like it was going to be a really hard thing to address those folks. But we learned a ton. And we really ended up mapping the emotional train in a lot of detail. And as a group, like, we came to a lot of alignment. There was a lot of, like, really good understanding, deeper understanding having gone on that journey. But where we ended up back was like, okay, startup enthusiasts really actually seem like [laughs] a place to start. And it feels like there's enough of them that they could create some kind of early adopter market. But now, with the information that we had, the new information we had, we were like, let us sub-segment this group of people. It's not everybody in that umbrella. Doing that whole journey enabled us to kind of come back to the question with renewed focus, but, like, conviction about how valuable it was going to be to do that, right? And sometimes that's what it takes. You kind of have to do the wrong thing for a second to appreciate doing the right thing, and that's totally fine. The fact that we were able to do that in, what, five weeks is, like, fine. JOSH: And I think the way that we found the sub-segment that made sense was actually pretty simple, right? Once we understood what are the dimensions that are actually important, we did a quick brainstorming session. This wasn't actually a very long process at the end of it, a quick brainstorming session. What are the different kinds of people who fall into this segment? And we just scored them on all the easy things you'd expect to score people on, namely: are they easy to find and easy for us to reach? Do they advertise this quality of theirs someplace publicly, like, perhaps on LinkedIn? And are they easy to find? Like, do we have enough of them inside of our network so we could, like, search for these kinds of folks? And as it turns out, we've already spoken to a lot of these kinds of folks as well. And primarily, we're talking to repeat founders and/or chiefs of staff at startups. JORDYN: If you are one of those people, please reach out to us. We'd like to talk to you. JOSH: We would love it. LINDSEY: Call to action. So, Josh, you mentioned one of the benefits of the program has been Jordyn's ability to kind of laser-focus on finding the target market. Jordyn, how do you do that? How do you keep the team coming back to that? Especially as sometimes it maybe doesn't take that long—sometimes it might feel like you're kind of circling around and around and still aren't finding anyone—and keeping folks motivated to do that or understanding, you know, when are we going to say, "This is it, you know, we're not finding someone"? JORDYN: I'll talk about how it worked in this case. And every team is different and is motivated by different things. And this process is a little different every time, so it's hard to make generalizations. But in this case, what was interesting is that after we did our journalist sprint and we were like, we do want to refocus on startup enthusiasts, but we need to understand a little bit better what we're doing, we actually prototyped a little bit given what we knew, which seems like a bad idea [laughs] on the face of it. It seems premature. The purpose of doing that, then, was to really take a different path to drawing out of each of us what was in our lines. That's, like, so much of the work of a team at this stage is, like, making sure that we're externalizing the things that we're thinking and the assumptions that we have. And it's strange. You would think you would just be like, "Hey, tell me what's in your mind?" But minds don't work that way. You can't just be like, "Hey, mind, what's up?" And then articulate it perfectly in a way that everybody in this group is going to know what you mean. So, prototyping actually drew a bunch of that stuff out. It really...I think that was the moment...I don't know, Josh, how you feel about it. We had been kind of in the doldrums because we did get to the end of that journalists' sprint. And we were like, what are we doing? What have we learned? And prototyping at that moment enabled us to...it was a different way of understanding what we had learned and what we were all now thinking. And it really drew a bunch of dynamics out that it was super helpful. JOSH: It brought some real sharpness to what we thought we'd be able to...the kind of value we thought we could deliver in the early versions of this thing, right? Fast forward two years, who knows? But it brought some sharpness to the kinds of problems that we thought we'd be able to fix and the kinds of problems we thought we couldn't solve. And that also clarified for us, certainly for me, why, oh, here's why this isn't really landing with the journalists, right? And here's why this isn't really landing with some other kinds of folks we were talking to. And -- JORDYN: Biz dev folks. We talked to a bunch of biz dev folks. It wasn't going to land with them, but yeah -- JOSH: They weren't at all excited about it, and then we can kind of understand why. One of the ways that I think about a prototype and I talk about this a lot, and I love doing this. Somebody called this a Pinocchio prototype, the wooden child who wants to be a real boy. Once we had a prototype, we could actually put it onto our actual phones. And I'm not sure how many other people did this on the team besides me but, like, I would carry my phone around with a prototype on it. And every time I thought I might use it, I would pull the damn thing out of my pocket and, like, tap away on the phone. It gave me, again, a very clear sense of the kinds of things I thought we were moving towards solving and the kinds of things that we weren't really solving. LINDSEY: Yeah, Josh, you mentioned there were some exciting developments in the past week. Is that around the prototype? JOSH: This is one. Having the prototype on there was good. It's also really nice to have this be part of a larger team. I was having a hard time. I had been playing with, like, our design team's paper prototype. I was having a hard time communicating what I was trying to do inside of my head. So, I built my own parallel prototype in Google Slides, which was exactly as awesome looking and as functional as everybody listening is imagining it must have been. If you would like your own copy of my Google Slides app development template, please reach out. I will share it [laughs]. But it let me think a little bit, again, the same thing, like, here's how these things fit together. And then it started moving really, really fast. Once we were all putting things down in a way that we could play with, and touch, and talk about in a concrete way, it felt like that part of things started to move really fast. And the quality of our conversations improved with people we were talking to as well. I would say that's half of the things that are really exciting. LINDSEY: Just to continue on the prototype for a second, Jordyn mentioned a major outcome of starting to use the prototype; well, I guess [inaudible 14:37] that you all as a team got better aligned around what you were envisioning for the solution. And then, it also helped you, again, kind of identify the true target market. Are there other things you're already learning from using the prototype and getting it in front of people? JOSH: Yeah, I think there are. By the way, this shouldn't be surprising. This is, like, the classic diverge-converge model that I know thoughtbot uses all the time with not just startup clients when you're building something new. One of the things which, you know, rewind the clock six and a half weeks ago to when we started this thing. I didn't realize how much intelligence would be required behind the scenes to make this thing actually sensible to the final users. And the more we show it to people, the more we realize that, like, intelligence to make things look simple is going to equal people actually using the damn thing. I think we started to see that ourselves in playing with it. But it's really important to have that be validated by actual potential users who aren't, like, in this shit themselves. JORDYN: I mean, immediately, you know, we were able to start showing the prototype to the folks that we were having interviews with, and there's just nothing better than that because they're not going to pull their punches with you. And we got a lot of great immediate sort of spicy feedback [laughs] from people, especially if you're showing them to people who are, like, startup people [laughs], they're just not going to be nice. And so, there was a lot of [crosstalk 15:59]. JOSH: They're like, "Have you considered making this suck less?" JORDYN: Yeah, exactly. "I wouldn't use this at all [laughs]." You're just like, "Okay, thanks." Tell me how you really feel [laughs]. But it's great. I mean, like, there's nothing better than that. Like, I would way rather that than a bunch of people trying to be polite. JOSH: And it also prompts feedback that we wouldn't necessarily have thought of, which is the idea of this. We [inaudible 16:20] thought of this on our own. Like the idea that sometimes you might want to not take an action when you don't really care about a person. But sometimes you really, like, dislike a person so much who you've been talking to you want to never see them again, right? Never show me this person again. It's a thing that we never would have come to, I think, if we hadn't, like, actually been showing the prototype to end users. LINDSEY: Okay, what is the second half of the exciting thing that happened in the past week? JOSH: This is very much a thoughtbot thing. thoughtbot is full of really talented engineers. And over the past couple of days, we've been able to bring a lot of those folks to bear on the question of like, is this thing technically feasible or not? Which was one of my big concerns. And it turns out, that was probably too large a question for the team that we started with. And to be able to, like, do this, like, little discovery spike with, you know, going beyond the three-and-a-half thoughtboter team that we had to some of your most talented, most experienced engineering leads, not forever, but just for, like, a short moment is kind of, for me, at least, like, a real taste of, like, the thoughtbot value is, you know, Jordyn gets to put out a call for assistance, you know, across the company, and people raise their hands and put real-time in. And, you know, we're able to do something in a couple of days that we probably couldn't have done because we have enough people. And, you know, all those, like, network effects of people coming together that could have taken us, you know, weeks or longer just kind of toiling on our own. LINDSEY: For those technical challenges, maybe you don't want to get into specifics, but in broad strokes, can you talk about what some of those considerations are? And maybe at this point, maybe it makes sense to also talk a little bit about, like, how the solution, how you're thinking about the evolution of what the solution is and provides. JOSH: I have an Android phone. I live in the world as a green bubble in a world of blue bubbles. My partner and I are in an interfaith relationship. She has an iPhone. I have an Android phone. And forever, people are accidentally trying to hit up my, like, iMessage account tied to my email address, and the things don't come through. And, all of a sudden, this company someplace in the U.S. figured out some way to, like, reverse engineer the Apple messages iMessages protocol, so I can put iMessages onto my Android phone. They built this thing. It's been, like, all over the tech news recently. This is the problem, if you're trying to bring together all of somebody's social network, is that there is no, like, handy-dandy API for iMessages. There is no handy-dandy API for regular SMS or RCS or any of those other variations of that. There is no handy-dandy API for WhatsApp, for Telegram, sort of ish, kind of maybe for Slack, not really for Discord. It remains to be seen how mature it is for LinkedIn. By the way, email works great, right? If we just build our entire lives off of email, we'd have none of these problems, but we can't. And we had some hypotheses about ways that we could make connecting these other accounts easier. And we just took, like, an awful lot of hands, right? More than two hands. It took more than two hands to figure out if these things were possibilities if those things turn out to be true. And the answer is if they are true, which we're still working to figure out, though it's looking better and better, this isn't a science experiment, right? And if it's not true, then step one is an awful lot of engineer hours to go do what those Beeper Mini folks did and reverse engineer a whole bunch of protocols and systems that were never intended to be open in the first place. JORDYN: I would like to say -- JOSH: Which is why we should all donate to EFF and promote an open internet so that startups like mine don't need to exist. JORDYN: To loop back to your earlier question, Lindsey, about how to keep the team focused on who something is for, this conversation seems like it's not about that. But, to me, this conversation is also about that because we have a long list of messaging platforms that we have heard from folks, like from interviewing them would be useful to have brought into a single place. This was one of the key pain points that Josh has that we heard from other people, which is, like, you connect with people across platforms, right? You might be connected to some on LinkedIn, but you're also emailing with them. Your email history with them is not a complete history of your life with them. None of your online stuff is going to be a complete history because sometimes you actually interact with people [laughs] in reality, which is still, at this moment, not being recorded all the time, but probably not for long. JOSH: As little as possible. JORDYN: [laughs] But still, even within the online world, you're communicating with people across platforms. Maybe you text with someone, maybe you message on LinkedIn, whatever. And having complete context for your relationship with them in a way that makes it really easy to kind of, like, boot up that context in order to reach out to them for some reason, like, maybe you haven't talked in six months, and you just want to remember, where did I leave this relationship? What's going on with this person, right? You're like, where was I talking to them? Oh, I was talking to them in these four places that don't have very good protocols for being brought into the same interface, right? So, like, the stuff is, like, all connected. But to get back to the who question, we have this list of places we'd heard from people, like, in the early interviews and places that Josh was trying to do this connect with people, et cetera. So, it's, like, Slack DMs, and it's email, and it's LinkedIn, whatever. But we also heard Telegram, and we also heard other things. If we don't sufficiently focus on a narrow enough group of people, we risk making the MVP way too big because it needs to connect with every one of these things. And we can't go to market with something that doesn't connect with 12 platforms or something, right? But because we're sufficiently focused, we could actually do the thing where we're like, okay, well, out of this list of platforms, what are, like, the top five? Where is the line? Where's the minimum viability here with what we can connect with that will actually bring value? And I also am an Android user living in an iPhone world. And Josh and I at least have enough awareness to be like, you know what? Maybe Android isn't necessary, even though we would love [laughs] for it to be there. Nine times out of 10, the people that look like us are using iPhones, right? So great, cool. Let's just do the thing. JOSH: Obligatory iPhone test device. JORDYN: Right. I have one, too, but I don't know where it is. So, like, the question of who really matters. Who, like, really helps you focus? If your answer to "Who?" is anybody with a smartphone, well, like, it's going to be really tough to build an actual MVP that's buildable. So, this question that Josh brought in to us, which is, like, "What's technically feasible here?" really intersects very directly with this question of who are we building for? Because you really want to be able to start somewhere. And, you know, if you have a sufficiently red, hot need and it's not, like, to time travel or something that is, like, probably impossible given the laws of our universe, you can find a way, right? And so, the question was, like, why don't we find that so that we can focus on whether it's worth finding a way? And then that intersection of who it's for, what their pain points are, and what's possible with what amount of effort. It all fits together. No single one of those pieces is sufficient for figuring out a path forward. LINDSEY: And are you taking the, you know, okay, we've gotten really good sight on these startup enthusiasts, and these are their top four communication methods; let's try to solve them? Is that the approach? JORDYN: More or less, yeah. Yes. It's like, can we interface with those top...I think for us, it's like a top five, maybe six. JOSH: Five or six. JORDYN: But, like, the first one on there is email, and that's not a problem. Like, we don't...that's fine. LinkedIn is also not a problem; one and two are email, and LinkedIn: good. We're cool with that. That's okay. JOSH: Because every individual has their own thing. So, you know, you may be talking about long tail services, you know, but for the person who uses Telegram as their, like, daily driver, which isn't most people in the U.S., but there's a lot of people abroad, not having Telegram means it isn't useful. And I think that's one of the things hard about this, right? This is a hard business potentially, or it's really easy. We have no idea yet. And that's part of what I find exciting about this is because over the next, you know, week or so, we'll find out how hard a business this is actually, or at least where are the technically difficult parts? LINDSEY: Great segue. What does the next week look like as we've got market niche, prototype, technical feasibility intersectioning, figuring those things out? What exciting things are on the horizon? What's next? JOSH: So, we have about two weeks left, and at the end of two weeks, we're going to end up with a set of high-quality prototypes, which, you know, are easy for any of us to have on our phones, and to flash around to rando strangers we meet at the grocery store because there's no better way to make friends than product testing. And we'll have a good sense of how big and complicated, and complicated in what ways might it be to build this thing. And then, it's time for Josh to make some decisions around, you know, the whole goal of this was to figure out, like, how big of an opportunity is this just to go and do that? What could growth look like? What could pricing look like? Where might the costs be? What would the cost be to build this? Is this, like, a side gig scale thing? Is it a small, you know, angel-funded startup thing? Is this, like, a VC-size thing? I really hope it's not a VC-size thing. And then to think about, you know, what are the resources that would be required to build it, and where might those resources come from? So, at the end of this, two weeks out from now, I think we'll have all the information, you know, that we need. And then, I know a whole bunch of people inside of thoughtbot who are in a great place to provide their own thoughts and advice and experience and feedback on this. And I'll take this to my personal board of directors, including my family, but also, you know, other experienced entrepreneurs and investors I know, and we'll talk through this. And we'll have to go make some decisions, which is a little scary and a little bit fun, but a nice way to kick off 2024. JORDYN: And a lot easier to do after this program. JOSH: We'll have some real information, right? [laughs] JORDYN: Yes. LINDSEY: That's the goal, right? JOSH: Yeah. LINDSEY: Of the incubator to get you in that spot where you can make educated decisions and get others up to speed really quickly with all that research. JOSH: That's right. LINDSEY: That's great. All right. So, you had a call to action earlier. What was that? Oh, if startup enthusiasts are listening, we want to chat with them and talk to them about the solution. JOSH: If you're a founder, if you're a multi-time founder and either done it a couple of times in the past or you're still doing it, reach out. If you are a startup chief of staff and you can define that role for yourself, please reach out. We'd love to talk to you there as well. If you would like a copy of Josh's free wireframing template for mobile apps, please reach out, and I will be happy to provide you that as well. LINDSEY: Amazing. Thank you once again, Josh and Jordyn, for joining and catching us up. It definitely was an exciting update. I can't wait to hear what happens in the final stretch. JOSH: Me too. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guests: Jordyn Bonds and Josh Herzig-Marx .

Josh Doody, Owner of Fearless Salary Negotiation, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how important tonality and communication is, both in salary negotiations and everyday life. Josh describes how important it is to have a positive padding to your communications in order to make the person on the other end of the negotiation feel like a collaborator rather than a combatant. Corey and Josh also describe scenarios where tonality made a huge difference in the outcome, and Josh gives some examples of where and when to be mindful of how you're coming across in modern communication methods. Josh also reveals how negotiating with companies multiple times allows him to understand their recruiters more than a person who is encountering their negotiation process for the first time.About JoshJosh is a salary negotiation coach who works with senior software engineers and engineering managers to negotiate job offers with big tech companies. He also wrote Fearless Salary Negotiation: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Paid What You're Worth, and recently launched Salary Negotiation Mastery to help folks who aren't able to work with Josh 1-on-1.Links Referenced: Fearless Salary Negotiation website: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com Fearless Salary Negotiation: https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Salary-Negotiation-step-step/dp/0692568689/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshdoody LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdoody/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Human-scale teams use Tailscale to build trusted networks. Tailscale Funnel is a great way to share a local service with your team for collaboration, testing, and experimentation.  Funnel securely exposes your dev environment at a stable URL, complete with auto-provisioned TLS certificates. Use it from the command line or the new VS Code extensions. In a few keystrokes, you can securely expose a local port to the internet, right from the IDE.I did this in a talk I gave at Tailscale Up, their first inaugural developer conference. I used it to present my slides and only revealed that that's what I was doing at the end of it. It's awesome, it works! Check it out!Their free plan now includes 3 users & 100 devices. Try it at snark.cloud/tailscalescream Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined by recurring guest and friend Josh Doody, who among oh, so many things, is the owner of fearlesssalarynegotiation.com, and basically does exactly what it says on the tin. Josh, great to talk to you again.Josh: Hey, Corey. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it and I'm glad to be here.Corey: So, you are, for those who have not heard me evangelize what you do—which is fine. No one listens to all of the backlog of episodes and whatnot—you are a salary negotiation coach, and you emphasize working with high earners who are negotiating new job offers, which is basically awesome. How did you stumble into this?Josh: Yeah, a good question. Really, it started as what I would say is a series of interesting career choices that I made, where I started as an engineer. I was pretty quickly bored in engineering and I switched to—I wanted to be customer-facing and do stuff that had impact on the business, so I did that and ended up working for a software company that made HR software that happened to do among other things, compensation planning. And so, I kind of started learning how it worked behind the scenes.And then over time, I started wising up and negotiating my own job offers. And noticed that wow that kind of worked pretty well, and I decided to write a book about it, a hundred percent just because I like to write stuff. I've been writing for 20 years on the internet, and I decided, why not just write a book about this? You know, five or six people will buy it, my mom will love it, I'll get it out there and it'll feel really good.And then people started reading the book and asking me if they could hire me to do the methodology in the book for them. And I said, “Sure.”Corey: When people try to give you money, say yes.Josh: Yeah. Okay, you know, whatever, you know? My first person that ever hired me asked me what my rate was, and I didn't have a rate because I had never considered doing that before. But she was a freelance writer and I said, “Well, whatever your rate is, that's my rate.” [laugh]. So, that was my first rate that I charged someone.And yeah, from there just, it took off as more people started hiring me. A number of friends were chirping in my ear that hey, you know, this seems like a really valuable thing that you're doing and people are coming out of the woodwork to ask you to do it for them. Maybe you should do that thing instead of the other things you're doing and trying to sell copies of the book and stuff like that. Like, why don't you just be a salary negotiation coach? That was, I don't know, like, seven years ago now, and here I am.Corey: I don't know if I ever told you this, but back when we met in the fall of 2016, I was trying to figure out what windmill I was going to tilt at before I stumbled upon the idea of AWS billing as being one of them. I thought that writing a book and being a sort of a coach of sorts on how to do job interviews with an emphasis, of course, on salary negotiation, would be a great topic for me because I've done it an awful lot. This is a byproduct of getting fired all the time because of my mouth. And then I started talking to you and my reaction was, “Oh, Josh is way better at this than I am. No, I'm going to go find something else instead.”And now the world is what it is, and honestly, at this point, all the cloud providers really wish you hadn't been there at that point in time because then they wouldn't have to deal with the nonsense that I present to them now. But I always had a high opinion of what you do, just because it is in such a sweet spot where if I were to shut this place down and get a quote-unquote, “Real job” somewhere, I would hire you. And it's not that I intellectually don't know how to negotiate. Half my consulting now is negotiating large AWS contracts on behalf of AWS customers with AWS. A lot of these things tend to apply and go very hand-in-glove.But there's something to be said for having someone who sees this all the time in a consistent ongoing basis, who is able to be dispassionate. Because when you're coaching someone, it's not you in the same boat. For you, it's okay, you want to have a happy customer, obviously, but for your client, it's suddenly, wow, this is the next stage of my career. This matters. The stakes are infinitely higher for them than they are for you.And that means you have the luxury of taking a step back and recognizing a bad deal when you see one. There is such value to that I can't imagine not engaging you or someone like you the next time that I would go about changing jobs. Although these days, it's probably an acquisition or I finally succumb to a cease and desist. I don't really know that I'm employable anymore.Josh: [laugh]. Yeah, I mean, you said a lot of really interesting things there. I think a common theme—you know, to work with me, there's a short application that people fill out, and very frequently in the application, there are a couple of open-ended questions about you know, how can I help you? What's your number one concern? That kind of stuff.And frequently, they'll say, “Yeah, I've negotiated before and I actually did okay, but I want to work with a professional this time,” is the gist of it, for I think reasons that you mentioned. And one of them is, there's just a difference between negotiating for yourself and feeling all of that pressure and having somebody who can just objectively look at it and say, “No, I think you should ask for this instead.” Or, “No, I don't think that you should give that information to the recruiter.” And the person instead of feeling, you know, personal subjective pressure can just say, “Well, the objective person that I hired and paid money to help me with this says, ‘don't do that,' or ‘do this instead,' and it's easier for me to just trust what they're doing as a professional and let me be a professional at the other things that I'm a professional at.”And so yeah, I think that's a lot of—you know, for some people, it's, “I have no idea how to negotiate. I don't want to screw this up. Please help me, Josh.” And for some people, it's, “Yeah, I've done this before. I did, okay, but I want you here to help me do this.”And that includes people who come back and work with me two or three times. They know the methodology. They've been through it literally with me, and I'm very open about what we're doing and why I'm collaborative with my clients. We're talking about the decisions we make. I will bounce things off of them.I'll say, “Here's what I think we should do. What does your intuition tell you about that? How do you feel about it?” Because it's important to me because they're in the game and I need to know what they think. And they'll come back to me and we'll do it again. They already know the playbook. And I think that's because it's easier to just have somebody who's a professional there to objectively tell you, “You're not asking for enough.” Or, “Did you think about asking for this instead?” Or, “Do you really care about that thing?” Stuff like that.Corey: There is so much value to that, just because it's a what's normal in this? Because I'm sure you've seen before where—I'm probably—I should put this in more of a question, but I already know the answer because I've seen it just from people randomly sending me things out on the internet—of their times for companies say or ask for things that are just absolute clown shoes. It's, I would barely consider it professional at that. It always feels like there's value in being able to talk to someone who sees this all the time who can say, “Hold on. That is absolutely not normal. That is not a reasonable question. That is not an expectation that any sensible person is going to have.” Because the failure mode otherwise is you think it's you.Josh: Yeah, part of my value prop is, you know, I know how to negotiate with companies. I'm not afraid of them. I've negotiated with Fortune 5 companies, come out way ahead—just as you do frequently—and I know the playbook that they're running. But part of it also is, you know, I have a compendium of recruiter responses. I know what they say, I know what their words mean, and so I can say things like, “Oh, here's what they actually mean when they ask you for that.”Or I can say, “That's weird.” Which, you know, if I've done 20 negotiations with this company and all of a sudden a recruiter says something that's weird, that makes my ears perk up and makes me wonder why. And so, I can dig in on my side and try and figure out what's going on, see if we tripped some wire that I didn't see or, you know, something like that. So, that's part of the value too, is just all the reps that I've had, even like you said, I'm sure that you would do a wonderful job negotiating; I've talked to you about negotiating online and off, and I know that you know the game, you know how to do it, for your day job but also for compensation. But I probably have more reps negotiating with those companies than you do and therefore my compendium is a little bit deeper, so there might be things that I could recognize that you would not recognize that I could see, right, in the similar way that in your negotiation world that there are things that I certainly would not recognize that you would catch on to.And I think that can be a very valuable thing. There could be something a recruiter says where I recognize, “Aha. That's a technical term or that's a key phrase that we can grab onto. And that is an opportunity to get more.”Corey: Or, “What are you making now?” It's like, yes, that's the industry accepted one free pass that's screwing the candidate. Yeah—Josh: Right.Corey: —let's not do that.Josh: Right. And we're—here's how to sidestep it and here's what happens when they ask for it for the fourth time, and here's what happens when they say the magic words and, you know, all that stuff. So yeah, a lot of it is just getting reps. It started with let me just run my playbook and then as I run the playbook, I get more data every time I do it, and I get to learn what the edge cases look like, and how to spot, you know, weird funky stuff coming from recruiters and that sort of thing.Corey: One aspect of this that has been, I guess, capturing my imagination since you first talked to me about it, and I am certain I'm going to butcher this into something that sounds insulting and demeaning, which sort of cuts against the entire point. Specifically, the idea of a positive language, or, the term you used was ‘Positively Persuasive.' What is that? Because it sounds like it's just someone who's setting me up, like, waving raw steak in front of a tiger, like, “Please maul me on this.” But there is more to it than that.Josh: [laugh]. Yeah, so this is something that, to be honest with you, I have done almost intuitively throughout my career, but certainly as a salary negotiation coach. And what it is, is a tendency to use positive, meaning, you know, not negative words. So like, essentially, if you're familiar at all with improv, which I would say probably half of the people listening probably have some idea what I'm talking about, you take improv classes, and they teach you an exercise called Yes, And. And the reason you do Yes, And is, you know, Corey says something wacky and I could shut it down.I could say, “That's not true.” You know, “My hair isn't red.” And then we're done improving. But if Corey says, “Josh your hair is red,” even if my hair is not red and I say, “Yes, and… it's on fire right now,” then we have something going, right? And so, using those positive words—yes, and is a positive way of responding to that—opens up a further dialog and also makes it easier for you to engage with me in that improvisation. In a way, a negotiation is an improvisation; they're all going to be different.A business conversation is going to be an improvisation. It's rare that you're going to have a conversation where you could write the script completely before the conversation starts. Often there will be an opportunity to improv, to do something different. And so, positively persuasive is essentially my way of thinking about how to use those positive words to accomplish an objective while building rapport with the person that you're talking to, and leaving the door open for that kind of positive collaboration and improvisation where you can work together with your co-party, with the person that you're talking to in the negotiation. And so, that's super abstract, and a concrete example of this would be for example, in a counteroffer email.Frequently people will, kind of unsolicited, just send me their counteroffer emails. “I'm writing up this email. What do you think?” Somebody on my newsletter or my email list or something. And sometimes they're okay, and sometimes it's like, they're giving an ultimatum and they're saying, “You promised this when we first talked on the phone and you're not giving me that. You offered me this and I want what you offered to start with.”And they're using all these negative words: “You promised this and didn't give it to me.” “That's not what I expected.” Whereas in the counteroffers that I'm writing, it says, “Hey, thanks for the offer.” Starts right away with something that looks like a throwaway line, a platitude, but really what it is is saying, “Hey, we're on the same team here. We're collaborating. Thanks for the offer. I appreciate it and I hope you're having a good week so far.”And then as it goes on, it says, “Here are the reasons that I'm super valuable to your team. I can't wait to join this team and, you know, express that value.” And then, “You offered $100,000. I would be more comfortable if we could settle on $115,000.” And so, that's a counteroffer. In some cases, the counter will be more than 15%. That's kind of a middle-of-the-road one, but the way I say it is, “I would be more comfortable if,” and so there's no sort of in-your-face, there's no ultimatum, there's no fist pounding on the desk—Corey: There's no, “No.” There's no, “This is not acceptable.” There's no, “I won't accept this.” It's a very soft approach that generally doesn't put people on edge.Josh: Puts it—it not only doesn't put them on edge, but you're sort of putting your arm around them saying, “Hey, you know, I'd be more comfortable if we could do this.” And they're like, “Okay, you know, let me see what I can do for you.” So, you're not making—you're not turning them into, you know, an enemy combatant; you're turning them into a collaborator. And now it's you and then working together to try to make you comfortable so that you can join their team. So, that's a subtle thing that happens in a counteroffer email and numerous other places.But that's the idea is that when you can, you're choosing positive language so that your requests will be received better, so you build rapport with the person that you're negotiating with, and so that they perceive you to be a collaborator and not an opponent.Corey: It sounds hokey, but I've also watched it work. It's weird in that we hear about things like this, we think, “Oh, that wouldn't work on me at all,” except it the evidence very clearly shows that it does. There's a reason that some people are considered charismatic and I think this is a large part of it. And I also wonder, I mean, you focus on salary negotiation for high earners, and that, historically at least, as included, you know, a fair few number of software developers and whatnot. And these days, let's be very clear that communicating what you want, clearly, concisely, and in an understandable way that something or someone can action is such a lost foreign skill for some of these people that they call the entire field ‘prompt engineering' because just communicate clearly is apparently a microaggression when you ask an engineer to do it without giving it a fancy name. Improved communication really feels like it has been part of a dawning awareness lately that, wait, this is actually important, not just one of those box-checking items that you say so that people don't spit in your food.Josh: I think you're a hundred percent right about that. I mean, it's interesting is you think about, you know, forms of communication that we have kind of experienced over the past, you know, however many years. But you know, at first, there was no writing, over, you know, thousands of years ago, or whatever, it was just all kind of oral tradition. And then we had writing and it was, like, long-form writing. And then, you know, fast forward to today and it's like you're sending a text with two letters and that means something right, or I'm about to head to my friend's house, and I text him three letters: OMW, right?It's like, extremely terse, direct, and to the point. And there is a place for that, I think. I think that efficiency probably has some benefits. I mean, there's not a lot of reason for me to spend six minutes, you know, writing a text to tell somebody that I'm heading to their house. But on the other hand, I think that sort of concision, that terse writing can also lose a lot in translation, and as we're using more media that look like Slack, or Discord, or these other chat-based ways of communicating—including email, by the way; I mean, email can be a place where you can be as terse, or I guess, as pleonastic as you'd like—and you get more and more words in there.And so, I think it's important to be intentional with those words in contexts where tone and meaning and intent can matter. And a lot of that is in interpersonal communication. And again, it's about how messages are received and what you're conveying. I use a lot of—this is [laugh] not directly related—I use a lot of emoji and emoticons and stuff like that and I do that because I'm trying to convey tone in a medium that doesn't really facilitate it, right?If I'm talking to you, you and I can see each other's faces right now, so you know if I'm being sarcastic, or telling a joke, or being very serious. And so, in emails, I'll put a smiley face. And that's me saying, “Hey, I'm not laying this on real thick. I'm just letting you know.” Right? So anyway, there are so many media that are available to us now that make it hard to convey tone that I think a lot of it is you've got to be intentional with your tone.Corey: I have worked with more people over the course of my career that have what I've taken the call being the asshole-in-email problem, where I have—I think these people are just these absolute jerks. They are completely onerous to deal with and I despise dealing with these people, but then I'll sit down with them and they are the nicest people and they are incredibly competent and effective. They just have a challenge where whatever they write an email, it sounds like there's an implicit, “Listen up here dickhead…” that they're starting the email with.Josh: [laugh]. Yeah.Corey: And, “You know what your problem is…” may as well be how they open these things. And it feels like effectively communicating and tone is becoming something of a lost art. I've talked to multiple people now who will wind up using Chat-Gippity to construct the bones of a work email and then they'll just change a sentence or two in the center that actually is the substantive thing that they want to send so it winds up handling all the window-dressing there. Now, I'm wondering what the other side is going to look like when you have someone using Chat-Gippity to paste a work email into it. It's like, “Okay, strip out the flattery. What are they actually asking from me here?” So, you effectively have, like, an API layer of padding provided by computers, where you could just like, say, the direct thing, but it comes with all the flowerly accouterments that has become expected in business correspondence.Josh: Yeah. I mean, I love everything that you said there. It's true. I mean, I've worked with people in the past where they would send me an email, or I would email with them frequently and then we were talking in person, I realized that oh, I totally misread what they were saying. Like, I misread what they meant to say, I misread what their outcome, their preferred outcome was, and it's because the tone is just lost in email.And I don't think it was necessarily due to any sort of deficiency on their side. It was on—they have a way of communicating, I have a way of perceiving communications, and they were different, and so the message that I got was different. So, I think a lot of what I'm talking about with positively persuasive is how do I communicate in a way where it is not ambiguous, where it is very clear what I'm saying, what my intent is, what my tone is. And sometimes, like you said, [laugh] use ChatGPT to, like, strip out the flattery. I put the flattery in because I want them to know, like, “Look, I know that you're a person. You and I are on the same team here. We're working together.”So, a lot of my emails will open with, “Hey, hope you're having a good day.” And it's like, do I care if they're having a good day? Yeah, but I don't need to say that out loud. The reason I'm saying it out loud is I want them—the opposite of everything you just described where I want them to read that email and think, “Okay, Josh isn't coming at me. Even if he does have critiques of something that I'm doing, or he has a suggestion to improve something, he's coming at it from the place of, ‘Hey, I hope you're having a good day so far.'” Whatever I say at the beginning of the email.And so, that's filler, a hundred percent, but it's filler with a purpose that is meant to convey the tone of the email, that is, I'm not coming down on you too hard. I'm trying to convey a message or ask a question and sincerely curious, and can we come together on this to figure out what the solution is or to move forward or to find the next steps or whatever the thing is that we're trying to do?Corey: It feels like this is an area that has massive application beyond the obvious negotiation piece of it, which is fundamentally where we sit down and try and convince people to do a thing that we want them to do that is in our interest. But it's like, okay, well, that's not just negotiation. That is, on some level, a disturbing number of human interactions that we tend to have. Where do you see this being applied? Is it something that just—that you're looking at just through a lens of communicating effectively in a salary negotiation, or does it extend beyond that to your worldview?Josh: I think it can get pretty broad. I mean, as you were describing, I was thinking kind of, as you were talking, like, when else do I use this? And the answer is a lot. But one place that I use this kind of thing a lot is when I'm emailing people who I don't know, and trying to get them to either just give me something or to allow me more leeway than they otherwise necessarily have to allow. And so for—here, I'll give you an example, which is, I recently switched homeowners insurance providers because I live in Florida and homeowner's insurance in Florida is a nightmare.And so, I changed providers. I thought I had crossed all my t's and dotted all my I's, but there was something that fell between the cracks, and that is that the mortgage holder—the bank that holds my mortgage—hadn't sent the premium check to my new insurance provider. They didn't get that memo. And it was essentially my responsibility, but I kind of goofed. So, the bank writes me an email and they say, “Hey, we see you changed providers but we don't have an address for them. We can't send them a check. Can you give it to me?”And so, now I'm—there are two parties that I have to kind of keep on my side. One of them is obviously the bank, but also the insurance provider, who might be mad at me because I'm ten days late on this premium or whatever. So, my emails to them are places where I use this where it's like, I'm basically going to make it so that the person who could get mad at me and cause me some kind of detriment is going to have to do it through a really thick cloud of, “Josh is a nice guy who isn't trying to be a jerk to anybody here. He's not trying to pull one over on anybody. There was an honest mistake that was made, he's just trying to make everything right, and he's hoping that I can help them.”And they're going to have to look at the way that I communicate with them and they're going to have to push through it and say, “Nope. I'm going to be a jerk. I'm going to follow the letter of the law or I'm going to be as punitive as I can be.” That's really hard to do when somebody like me is emailing, say, “Hey, listen, I know that we were supposed to get a check out to you last week. I'm working on it right now. I've already got everything to the bank. It's going to be overnighted to you tonight. Is there anything else I could do to make this easy for you on your side?”And then they're going to be like, “No, just, you know, as soon as we get it, we'll let you know.” Whereas if I'm, like, you know, mad at them or I'm mad at somebody or I'm being a jerk in email, then they don't really have any reason to not be as punitive as they can be to me. And so, that's just—it's a little manipulative, I guess, but it's also the way that I see life, right? Like, I'm like that with everyone, including people who are on the other side of that equation. I'm going to give them grace when I can.And so, it's a way of me saying, “Hey, can you extend some grace to me? I think you're a human being who's on the other side of this and you have a job to do and I understand that, and if you could be a little bit kind to me, that would be great.” And it works almost every time.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Panoptica.  Panoptica simplifies container deployment, monitoring, and security, protecting the entire application stack from build to runtime. Scalable across clusters and multi-cloud environments, Panoptica secures containers, serverless APIs, and Kubernetes with a unified view, reducing operational complexity and promoting collaboration by integrating with commonly used developer, SRE, and SecOps tools. Panoptica ensures compliance with regulatory mandates and CIS benchmarks for best practice conformity. Privacy teams can monitor API traffic and identify sensitive data, while identifying open-source components vulnerable to attacks that require patching. Proactively addressing security issues with Panoptica allows businesses to focus on mitigating critical risks and protecting their interests. Learn more about Panoptica today at panoptica.app.Corey: There's value as well, even everyday customer service interactions, if I have a bad customer experience buying something off of Amazon—I know, imagine that.j could that ever happen? Of course not. But in a magical world in which in hypothetically did, I can call up and they answer the phone, I'm probably going to be pretty steamed going into that conversation because this is effort I didn't want to have to deal with. But stop and think about it for a second. Usually, when I call Amazon for a variety of things, it's not Andy Jassy who's answering the phone. Those are atypical moments for me.Instead, it is generally some poor customer service schmo, who is basically given zero amount of autonomy to speak of in the course of their job, and surprisingly, does not set Amazon's strategic priorities for them. And if I unload on this person, maybe I make myself feel better, I've made someone else's day actively worse, but even if you want to set aside the story of being a good person—which I don't suggest people do—but view it in a purely Machiavellian self-serving way, you're still going to have a better outcome if you inspire people to like you by making yourself likable. Because when you're a jerk—and I used to work helpdesk; I remember how this works—Josh: Me, too.Corey: Suddenly, I will fall back on every policy that I can have, “Oh, we're not allowed to sit through a reboot. Bye.” As opposed to, “Eh, [unintelligible 00:22:31] say ever not to, but I'm enjoying this and I want to help you out and make sure you get there, so hang out. Why not?” There are ways people can bend the rules in your favor, but if you give them an excuse to fall back on that, they're not going to go out of their way to help you at all. They're going to make you go through every bit of procedural red tape they can possibly come up with. And again, you've made their day worse and that should not be lost on you. The outcomes are better for everyone when you're a nice person.Josh: As you were talking, it's funny because I remembered, maybe the most frustrated I've ever been talking to customer service. This is several years—many years ago, but I had some student loan stuff going on. I don't even remember specifically what it was, but it had to do with, you know, who was servicing the loan and I'm trying to pay off a loan and I can't get the right person on the phone and they say, you know, “It's this other place that owns that holds the loan.” Or, “You need to call this person,” and I'm getting the runaround and I'm not able to do the thing I want to do.And after I think I've been hung up on, like, three times, and I was really steamed. Like you said, I'm legitimately, like, very frustrated. My voice had been cracking a little bit, which is how I know I'm, like, really getting heated is my [laugh] voice will start to crack a little bit. But I said to the person—and I became conscious in that moment of like, okay, I'm very frustrated. I could say something I regret I could really, like, hurt this person that I'm talking to.As you said, they're just somebody who's a customer service representative for this bank or loan servicer, whoever they were. So, I said something like, “Listen, you can't hear it in the tone of my voice right now, but I need you to know that I'm extremely frustrated and I'm going to [laugh] I'm going to get really upset, and so I'm asking you to help me before I do that before I escalate. I don't want to talk to your manager, but I'm going to ask you to do that if you don't help me right now. And you should know that I'm super frustrated. My voice is not betraying that right now, but understand that I am.”And they snapped in and they were like, “Okay, I get it, I get it,” you know? And right there even as a place where I could have just started shouting at them or whatever it takes, you know, “I want to talk to your manager,” and, “I'm going to escalate,” and all this stuff. And instead, I was like, well, I'm going to give them one last chance, which is, let me just tell them how frustrated I am without using colorful language or mean words. And it worked. It was a subtle thing that actually, I think it got their attention more than anything else. They said, “Oh, this person is really angry. I should actually listen to them.”Corey: Now, there is a dark side to this as well and that is human nature. I have done experiments on this over the years, most notably on Twitter, back when that was the central place people went to, and when I would say something nice about an AWS service, it got in most cases two likes and maybe a bot would retweet it. Whereas if I say, “This AWS service is a piece of garbage,” and I come up with some reason for it, it went around the internet three times and it was misconstrued, with me saying, “The entirety of AWS is terrible.” Not usually, no. There are some frustrating elements, but yeah, there's context. It doesn't fit into a single tweet.The snarky negativity blows up and responds to—and resonates with something in human nature that the people love spreading that around and engaging with it, whereas the happy positivity does not work that way. On Twitter. I've noticed what seems to be the opposite effect on LinkedIn. Snark doesn't do well over there, but almost saccharine-sweet sincerity does. And I don't know what this says about various social media channels or human nature or what. All I know is that I'm confused.Josh: I think you're right. You know, I mean, as you were talking, I was thinking about clickbait, right? Like, there's a reason that clickbait is called what it is, and it's because you read it and you get annoyed or frustrated or angry, and I'm going to hate-read this article right now and I'm going to send it to six friends. There is something in human nature. I mean, you know, we talked—for decades, I've heard about how the local news is our news, “If it bleeds, it leads,” in news, right?We're not talking about how great the planet is or how things—like, this bad thing happened in New Orleans yesterday and you should be really upset about it, or wherever that place happens to be on that particular day. I do think there is something innate in us that allows us to gravitate towards those kinds of things and I have no idea what it is. But it is interesting, as you said, that there are places where either that's frowned upon or there's just a different mode of communication, which tells me that there's something sort of in the cultural water there that causes people to perceive stuff differently in different kinds of social media environments, right? Twitter definitely is a place where things can go pretty negative. And there are other places that are significantly more negative, right, on the internet, if you want to go, they get really bad, and then there's places that are really positive.And it's interesting how it's like a maybe people self-select into those places, but also, I think, you know, I think there's a big difference if you think about, like, who's using Twitter and why and who's using LinkedIn and why. I think that people correctly perceive on LinkedIn that for the most part, you're probably not going to be somebody that's at the top of a bunch of lists to be hired if your whole thing on LinkedIn is just being negative all the time and doom and gloom and snark and that kind of thing. It'll be entertaining to some people, but you're probably not going to get many job offers based on that because people are going to ask, “Do I want to work with this person 24 hours a day?” And they'll read your posts and say, “No,” whereas at least a saccharine sweet person, everybody knows those people who are like that in real life, and they can be I don't know, a little bit much, but also can generally be very good people to work with and it's not difficult to sort of like manage that.Corey: There's a lot that can be done just by having people want to help you. It's weird. Like, I take a look at some of the people that I identify publicly as the nicest in tech—Mark [unintelligible 00:27:48] is a good example. Kelsey Hightower is sort of the canonical example of all of this. These are just genuinely nice people. Ashley Willis, another good example.There are so many different folks out there who are just beacons of positivity. And I look at that, and it's like, first, that is admirable. Second, holy hell that is absolutely not me. No one is ever going to say, “That's what I love about Corey. He's so uplifting and positive all the time.” You know, I do strive to be a better person and inspire others to be better people, but I'm also willing to spare no quarter for corporate tomfoolery either. Which apparently means a lot of people think you're a jerk as a result. I'll take it.Josh: Yeah, I think it's, you know, everybody—that's the nice thing about humans, right, is we're all different. And there are lots of different types of person—if everybody had the same personality, what a boring place that we would live. And that's true for, more or less, any human characteristic. If we were all the same and vanilla, I think it would be pretty boring. So, I think that having really positive people out there is great, and having some people who are snarky is great, and having people who have, you know, an ability to just point out absurdity is great. If everyone is pointing out absurdity all the time, then we're not left with too much.So, I do think it's good that those people are out there and they're very positive. And I think that, you know, even for myself, like, I try to be positive and helpful. Like, we were talking about customer service. I'm like, overly nice to customer service people. I tip more than I should most of the time. And a lot of that is just, you know, that's a human; they have needs and feelings and this is a way for me to be kind to them.And I know most people don't think that way that I do. And I like that. And I think that some people don't think that way and I think that's totally fine, too. I think the variety is the spice of life and I think that makes it interesting and useful. I also think that being intentional with those different modes, having them all available to you, and exercising them in different environments can be, like, a level-up, right? It can be a superpower.You can either be a person with a personality who exercises that same personality all the time, or you can choose to exercise, sort of, different personalities or different ways of communicating or different levels of positivity or negativity in different environments. And I think that makes it even more interesting where you're able to essentially be a chameleon and find the right mode of communication for the environment or the situation that you're in, which can enhance that situation for you or for other people that are around you.Corey: I have to ask, do you find that this is something you do all the time or do you put on your negotiating phrasing the same way that I do when my children accuse me of putting on ‘podcast voice.'Josh: All the time, definitely not. I am aware of it as a way of communicating that's available to me and I do consciously use it a lot of the time. But you know, if I'm just sitting around with my buddies on, you know, Wednesday night watching the game, probably not. And a lot of that is because, you know, part of this is, it's a default to positive because you don't know sort of who's on the other end of the line, whereas if you're communicating with somebody that you've communicated with for hundreds of hours, you don't need all that stuff, you don't need all the tonal indicators and the padding and all that stuff because you know that person. So, a lot of what I'm describing, even like in a salary negotiation, I'm basically working from the default of I don't know the counterparty, I don't know the recruiter, and therefore we're going to default to positive, and that's going to essentially, you know, make things smoother.It's going to remove friction because there are things that I don't know, whereas, you know, if I'm communicating with somebody I know really well for 20 years, we don't need all that stuff. We can—that's where the shorthand can come in handy. It can be really useful because we already know all of the background there. One place that I'm very conscious of this is, you know, every now and then somebody, with a personal friend or somebody that I know, well, I'll have, like, a difficult conversation where they'll say, “Hey, you know, this is something that happened to me recently. Can you help me out?” Or, “This is a difficult thing that I'm going through.”And that's a place where I am very conscious of this and it comes in different ways. One of them is using positive words, but one of them is also just, like, exercising extreme sympathy or empathy if it's appropriate. Which is, again, it's a conscious decision to say, this isn't a time to point out, you know, for example, errors, or like, this person just needs someone that they want to talk to and I'm going to listen to them carefully, I'm going to try to give them reassurance that the situation will be resolved eventually, and that kind of thing, but it's not a time for you know, critique or, you know, negative words or pointing out flaws and that kind of thing. And so, I think that's also kind of a conscious place that I will exercise it. But to answer your question, no, I don't do this all the time.I would say without having ever thought about this before, the less familiar I am with the person or the situation, the more I will default to this, and the more familiar I am with the person or the situation, the less I will default to it. And I will just use more plain, kind of, direct language because that familiarity is there, and it assumes a lot that isn't there when I don't know the person well.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me about this. Where can people go to learn more?Josh: Maybe follow me on Twitter [laugh], @joshdoody on Twitter.Corey: It's a harder problem these days than it once was.Josh: Yeah. I really paused there. I am pretty active on LinkedIn these days. And fearlesssalarynegotiation.com isn't explicitly about positive language or being positively persuasive, but you'll see even just reading the articles that I write there that underlying most of what I write is this sort of implicit understanding that positivity is the way to make progress and to get closer to what your goals are. So, @joshdoody on Twitter; joshdoody on LinkedIn, of course, and then fearlesssalarynegotiation.com.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to all of this in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Josh: Thanks for having me on, Corey. This was a lot of fun. I always like talking to you.Corey: I do, too. Josh [laugh] Doody, owner of Fearless Salary Negotiation. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that rants itself sick, but also only uses positive language.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO, Blue Cadet (Philadelphia, PA and New York City, NY) Josh Goldblum is Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet, an experience design studio with around 30 employees in Philadelphia and 15 in New York.  Twenty-odd years ago, Josh worked in-house at the Smithsonian Institution, producing digital products and integrating technology into physical environments. Unfulfilled because big projects only came around every few years, Josh left and freelanced for a number of museums, doing single-touch Flash design and development. As his on-man Blue Cadet operation became a growing team, projects expanded to encompass touch tables, touch walls, and projection; technology evolved and became increasingly more sophisticated; and the organization's internal systems had to be more formalized to meet the needs of the larger business. Today's experience technology is far more powerful, interesting, and relevant than that in the past. Flash has been replaced by Real Engine, Unity, and JavaScript. The Blue Cadet studio continues to design large-touch surfaces and build immersive experiences but now works with augmented reality, haptics (touch-related communication), and using technology and digital products to make cultural content in physical spaces more immersive, engaging, and “magical.”  Although much of the firm's work is for museums, it has recently expanded to provide these immersive services for executive briefing centers and such brands as Nike and Google. Josh says it's important that the studio creates a “content experience that's not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space.” In working with clients, Josh finds it helpful to carve out a little paid research at the beginning of a project to prepare an ideation spread where the studio can research client needs and present ideas. At the end of this initial period, the client can either work with Blue Cadet or take the ideas Blue Cadet developed and work with another studio. Josh says, “It's better to carve off a little space to redirect (the project) than to get into that death march of implementing something that's just not going to be that great.” That time upfront also helps Blue Cadet discover what it is that a client really wants, whether they can provide what the client wants, whether they want to do the project, and whether the parties can develop a solid working relationship. Josh participated in a panel session discussion of Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture at the 2022 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. He says he is most active on LinkedIn, where he shares a lot of concept prototype material. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined live today at South by Southwest Interactive Festival by Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet based in Philadelphia and New York. Welcome to the podcast, Josh. JOSH: Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Blue Cadet and what is your superpower? What is your calling card? What do people come to you for? JOSH: Blue Cadet is an experience design studio. Most of us are based in Philadelphia. There's about 30 in Philadelphia, another 15 up in New York, and then actually, when I say “us” based in Philadelphia, we just moved out to LA. So my family moved to LA. We're the only ones out there. We're mostly known for experience design in the cultural space, and also really a lot of technology in physical space. Twenty-odd years ago, I was inhouse at Smithsonian doing digital product work, but also integrated technology into physical environments. So we've been in that experience design space, figuring out how you marry technology into public spaces, how you take cultural content and make it interesting. That's what we've been doing, and we do it across physical space; we also do it across digital products.  ROB: Got it. It rings of museums or themed places, but I can also imagine a building that wants to have something and not just be a hollow shell. What does a typical space look like for you? JOSH: We do a lot of work in the museum space, like the traditional museum space. All the big museums are generally our clients. We've worked with a lot of them. Everything from like science centers to history museums to art museums. We did a Van Gogh projected experience with the Art Institute of Chicago way before they were doing all these projections. ROB: All the immersive experiences. JOSH: Yeah, we've been doing that for a long time. But then recently we've been moving more into brand work. We've been doing some work with Nike, which has been really exciting. We've done work with Google. trying to take a lot of that museum flair, which is an obsession with content and making sure that what we're saying is true, and trying to figure out what's interesting about a brand and giving it that treatment where you're elevating the personalities, elevating the science. You're making something that's smart but also engaging. ROB: Where are they doing those things? JOSH: These are executive briefing centers, sometimes. These are museums or brands. Some of these are online. And then we started doing a little bit of work for real estate companies, just trying to – it's not for me. [laughs] Just to activate some of their public spaces as well. Again, trying to bring in content experience that's not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space. ROB: When I think about this space, I start off thinking about the sleepy old kiosk that became a touchscreen and the keyboard is broken. Did it start there and proceed from there? JOSH: Yeah, I would say when we started out – Blue Cadet was my freelance handle. I was at the Smithsonian; I did a pretty cool project there that got a lot of attention. The Smithsonian being what it is, they only had big projects every few years. I was getting kind of bored, so I left and I started going around museum to museum. I was essentially picking up jobs doing Flash design and development. When we first started out, it was a lot of those single touchscreens and those things that were kind of cheap. No one was going to lose their job if we really screwed up. But we overdelivered. We did really great stuff, and we grew on the backs of those reputations and then started doing touch tables and touch walls and projection mapping. These days, we still do a lot of large touch surfaces and things like that, but a lot more thinking about the technologies that are more interesting or relevant. Now we're doing a lot more with AR, things that are haptics, camera vision. Also just trying to figure out how to make an environment more engaging and magical. ROB: Some of the advantage, even, of the march of technology is that probably some of those early Flash things you were doing were still rather expensive and still took a big commitment. I think some of this has allowed the technology to come down into simpler spaces. My team's done really simple electron-based kiosks with a little bit of sound, a little bit of animation, and it makes it more available to more places. JOSH: Yeah. It's interesting because Flash was an amazing tool. Flash really allowed you to do a lot of very, very cool things. When Steve Jobs killed Flash, essentially – which he pretty much singlehandedly did – there was actually a little bit of a lull in experience design where the tools had to catch up. But now you see things like Real Engine, Unity – but even what you can do with JavaScript. You can do everything that you used to be able to do in Flash now to the nth degree. And it's much better. Flash probably should've died. ROB: How often does as client come to you with an idea of what they want? How often do they come to you with a topic – “Here's this topic, here's what we want to show people; surprise us”? Or is it more “We have an idea and a direction”? Do you know how much space you're dealing with? It seems like there's a lot of variables in there. JOSH: A lot of times if we're dealing with a museum client, they might have a big exhibit or something like that. Or even a brand, they have their stories, they know what they want to convey, they have the space. But then they come to us and they're like, “How do we tell the story? How do we do this?” A lot of times even if they come in with very, very fully baked ideas, we'll roll it way back into strategy and be like, let's create a little bit of space to figure out what you can do with contemporary technology, with contemporary tools. What can you do to make sure that content or experience really shines in a way that's not been done in the same way with different content six months before? ROB: It sounds like it's really a consultative opportunity, right? To show them – maybe they start somewhere, but sometimes they don't know what they don't know, in a very good way. You have a broader span of the industry. That's why they come to you. You bring some extra ideas to the plate. JOSH: Yeah. And usually what we do – we've been doing these things called ideation spreads. Sometimes someone will come to us with a pretty big budget and we'll be like “Hey, instead of having to sign the SOW for this real big thing, give us 10% of it and give us three weeks, and let us do a bunch of sprints where we reconceptualize it and see if we land in a better place.”  Sometimes it's better, particularly if you get a brief that you're like, “This is not going to end well. This is not something we want to be working on for the next six months.” It's better to carve off a little space to redirect it than to get into that death march of implementing something that's just not going to be that great. ROB: Right. Do you ever engage in that competitive sales process where you're competing over the big pie and you take the little pie? Does that happen? JOSH: Absolutely. I would say particularly as we were earning our market position and earning our reputation, we weren't always the safe choice. We were always known for doing the creative thing and for doing something cool and new, but there were a lot of people who had done it a million times. And it was riskier for them to work with us. So that was a great way. We'd come in and do these ideation spreads and say, “Look, you don't have to trust us with this giant thing. Bring us in here and let's see if we can set the vision. You're not even obligated to work with us after that.” ROB: Right, “You own the work, go ahead and take it.” I think every creative firm benefits when they find ways essentially to get paid for discovery instead of trying to do all this guesswork upfront. But there's always the tension between “How much are we spending on this?” versus “How likely are we to get the work?” Nobody wants to be in that tension. So, the 10% strategy there makes a lot of sense. JOSH: Also, I'd much rather do that than do spec on RFPs. You don't know anything about the client and really what they want. You don't really know what the problem set is. So if you're doing spec on an RFP, you're really just shooting in the dark. Whereas if you carve out a little bit of space where you can actually collaborate with a client, you usually come up with better creative; you're actually solving the problem. But then also, you get to build that relationship and the rapport, and that's usually what carries you forward. Or you sit there and you're like, “Okay, there's not great relationship or rapport here.” ROB: You can dodge a bullet. JOSH: Yeah, you can be like, “Okay, you really did want that thing. God love ya, go on with it.” ROB: We talked a little bit about the origin story, about you going around to museums. When did you realize it was a thing and you said, “You know what, this is my job now”? What was the inflection point? JOSH: For a while, Blue Cadet was just my freelance handle. I was living in D.C. because I was still at the Smithsonian and I was picking up odd jobs. It was fun. I enjoyed it. The projects I'd get weren't huge budgets, but I was actually making way more money than I was at the Smithsonian. But I finally got a project – a couple friends and I got this grant to do an interactive documentary, like a Flash-based documentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This was something where we came up with the idea, we went to a foundation, and we were like “Hey, can you pay us some money to put this thing together?” The timeline was such, the budget was such that I kind of had to hire a team. We had videographers, we had professional sound people. We were basically following this high school class – it was the only high school class to reopen after Hurricane Katrina. We were down there basically weeks after the hurricane. It was decimated. But when I was on that project – it was called Yearbook 2006 – I was like, oh man, if I bring in other people, it works way better. I was still doing the stuff that was too expensive to outsource, but I outsourced some other things and it ended up being really successful. It became really popular. I was like, okay, I want to start a studio. So that was the first point where I wanted to do a studio. Then that same team, we got another project the year after that for the Pulitzer Center and we ended up winning a News and Documentary Emmy, which was a pretty big deal at the time. We beat Wolf Blitzer or something. That put us on the map, and that snowballed to where we started getting a lot of work, and I was able to start building the team from there. ROB: It seems like something in that documentary space – of all the things you can fractionalize and take some people, do a project, get done with it, it seems like something in that video space, people are kind of used to it. That's the drill; that's what you do. You film something, then you move on to the next thing. JOSH: Yeah. Basically what happened was I was living in D.C. but I was from Philadelphia; I was turning 30. I was like, okay, I'm getting to an age where maybe I'm ready to settle down a little bit. I didn't really want to settle down in D.C. So I moved up to Philly and I made my first hire. It was someone straight out of college. She actually still works for me, 15 years later. ROB: Wow. JOSH: But that was the thing. We were hiring junior people and training them up, and then we grew very linearly, 20% year over year. There were weird inflection points along the way, but yeah, that's how we got to where we are now. ROB: What's a weird inflection point? JOSH: As you're growing a studio, there are always these different points where the wheels get real shaky and the systems that were working fine in this phase don't really work as well in the next phase. There's a point where you have to get really professional about bill pay, about HR, benefits. You just have to start layering in a lot of systems at various points. And those are the points where you start getting more professional and you start having to have an org chart. You can't just have a bunch of super creative people scrambling around all over the place. ROB: How have you digested that change? Is it something that comes well to you? Is there somebody, or many people, maybe a role that's been integral to making the jumps? JOSH: Yeah, my partner Troy. We both worked as new media specialists at the Smithsonian. He was like my sixth hire or something like that at Blue Cadet. He was living in Denver quite happily, and I sort of dragged him across country to move to Philadelphia and start things. But I love Troy. I'm one of these people who can talk a really good game and I can set a vision or get really excited about the idea and what this thing can be. Troy's the kind of guy who can sit down and actually make it happen. He can actually do it. So, he's invaluable. Over the years, we've been very selective. I spend a lot of time recruiting the people that I want into the team. Very few people necessarily applied to Blue Cadet, particularly at the leadership level. I always sought out people that I thought would really fit into the studio and scale out our capabilities. ROB: That's a great opportunity, because those strategic roles are also the ones where you could actually justify bringing a recruiter to, which you can't always do in the services world. But to find those people and recruit them in . . . . JOSH: I never used a recruiter. Where you find the best people is just like here at SXSW, you're meeting people. Or you meet clients. One of the people I recruited to Blue Cadet, who actually left to take over digital at the Obama Library, was client side, and she left midway through the project and everyone was like, “Oh my God, this place is going to fall apart without her. She is so instrumental to the studio.” This was a studio I was working with, and I was like, “That sucks; the project's going to go sideways.” But then I was like, “I'm going to poach her at some point. I'm going to get her on my team.” And she was fantastic. So, I'm always looking for people that I'm like, “Wow, that person's way smarter than me or better that me at these things.” ROB: That's excellent, especially when you know the capabilities you don't quite need yet, or you don't need another person in that capability yet, and you can keep your head on the swivel, keep the mental library going of who's next. It's a fun journey to have that wish list and then fulfill on it. JOSH: Yeah. ROB: So, you're here and you have a session coming up. It is “Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture.” What are you looking for people to get out of that? JOSH: Obviously, I've been speaking about experience design for a very, very long time. I was talking about how things were getting completely disrupted with physical space pre-pandemic. I was talking about Meow Wolf and Museum of Ice Cream and the changing face of retail and also some of the things that were happening with museums, and this was like 2018-2019. I was like, man, stuff's really going to change. I saw the trends, I saw this stuff happening. And then obviously the pandemic has accelerated everything. Who knows where the chips are going to fall, but one of the things we're seeing is a lot of people wanting to get back into physical space. Places like SXSW are now filling up again. People want to be around each other. But what are the spaces that bring out the best in us? How could those spaces operate to create better connections between people? That's the sort of thing we're really interested in. And then also, how do you discard the old stuff that doesn't work anymore? Honestly, I love museums but I also kind of hate them. Also, I know for my kids, they're not dying to go to the old-fashioned museum and read a bunch of wall labels. They're really interested in culture because they're my children, our children, but they want to consume it differently. And I want to make sure that they're consuming culture in a way that feels good to them, that's enjoyable and interesting to them. ROB: What do you think they're going to want? Where is it headed? JOSH: It's so funny; my kids like Roblox, they like all those things. I've taken them to a million museums. I've taken my son to Epcot and Disney and all the different – sometimes the things they like are the cheesy, colorful, fun Museum of Ice Cream rip-offs. But also, they would eat candy all day if I let them do that, too. So, it's figuring out, okay, what are the things that have a personality, that are fun, that are interesting, that are enjoyable, but also are not just mind-numbing or consumptive? ROB: Right. Even some of the newish stuff – I'm sure you'll see a lot of it around here at SXSW; there's different activations. There's some integration of different assets, even into the little doodles activation over here that's NFTs plus an actual physical space. How do you think about the difference between using a technology for the sake of the technology and using it because it's actually right for the environment? JOSH: I actually really like the doodles space. I thought they did a really nice job. I think part of it is a lot of times I talk to these museums and I'm like, “You should be looking more to that marketing. You should be taking a lot more inspiration from them,” because they move really fast, they put these things together really quick, they're not super, super precious, they don't expect it to be up in 5 years, let alone 10 years, let alone 2 weeks, and they're able to take more risks. Because it's sort of a one-and-done, they don't have to make sure that it feels the same 10 years from now. Obviously, that marketing is a very different business model than a museum, but I think there are things that can be borrowed. And personally, I think even that doodles exhibit – there were a lot of nods to themed entertainment. There was a lot of stenography, there was a lot of sculptural pieces. There were some really nice light applications of technology. I thought it was really successful. I would like to see museums looking more like that. ROB: Got it. I think there's times when we've probably all seen AR for AR's sake, VR for VR's sake. How do you filter “This is a good place for VR, this is not”? Or “It could be done this way but not that one”? JOSH: I used to take a much harder line on this in the past. Honestly, some of these things, you look at some of these AR experiences and you're like, what's the point? It's not doing anything except demonstrating the technology. It's like, okay, if you've never seen AR, awesome. That's really awesome. But if you have seen AR, you don't care. Same with some of these projection experiences. It's like, if you're never been in a giant room filled with Christie projectors, it's really exciting to be at the Van Gogh and see all this stuff. But then you go back and it's the same thing, but with Klimt or Picasso or Monet; it's like, “I've seen it.” So, I think part of it is I'm actually okay with technology for technology's sake where it serves a spectacle, where you've never seen it before. It makes people excited and engaged. I think where it gets old is where it's already been done before. You're not even doing that. You're just being lazy. The thing I always look at, too, is either you've got to really, really be serving that content in a way that's compelling and really getting people into it – and sometimes that is spectacle. Spectacle gets people excited. It gets them interested. But if you fail at the spectacle and then you don't provide the content, it's just a wasted experience. ROB: It seems like you're very adjacent to not only event marketing, but also perhaps even to entertainment, theme park, that kind of thing. How do you decide where you go and where you don't go in those markets, and where you compete and where you choose to stay in your lane? JOSH: It's funny; I used to be very selective about the types of clients I would take on. I was like, “I'm not working with brands. I'm working with museums and nonprofits and higher ed. That's my tribe.” The thing I realized is sometimes your tribe is not aligned to a sector. It's really just a way of being. There are people at Nike that have way, way more in common with me and how I see technology, how I see content, how I see culture than people at some of these museums. Some of the people in these museums are very, very retrograde, and they're like, “No, we need a clean white room with a painting and 7,000 words of text. Bring your seven-year-old in here and they're going to read my dissertation.” I have less in common with them than somebody who's at a brand, whether it's a technology brand or materials brand or someone selling shoes, that wants to tell this story in an interesting way or find something interesting to elevate out of it. ROB: The brands change, too. That's part of it. Once you're in the game for a while, the brands change. The legend of what Nike is has shifted several times at different inflection points. Shoe Dogs, one moment in time. I interned once upon a time at Chick-fil-A's headquarters. Chick-fil-A's museum was a little room with a trophy case and a fake vault, and they've expanded what that experience is. So, I think the brands change too, and who they are and what they need might be different from the thing you used to react to. JOSH: Yeah, 100%. Often it's just who's there and who's championing the brand, who wants to tell that story, and how they want to tell it. The thing is, there's so many projects at Nike that Blue Cadet should have no part in, but the projects we are working with them are very Blue Cadet-like projects. There's a lot of interesting content, stories. We did one for the LeBron James Innovation Center. It's all about how they use data to inform how they work with athletes, and that's really cool. That's really exciting and something that my team is very, very well-positioned to execute on. ROB: Your session also ties into trends a lot. What's next? What's something you think you're going to end up doing soon at Blue Cadet that you haven't done before? JOSH: I've actually been spending a lot of time looking at Web3 and NFTs and things like that. I think beyond the hype, there's something really interesting stuff there. I think there's something very interesting about digital ownership. I think there's something very interesting about bringing things from the physical world in the digital world, bringing things from the digital world into the physical world. I think NFTs help with that. I think there's some really exciting things happening there. Personally, I think it's a really exciting time to be in experience design because frankly, COVID screwed everything up. Everyone's rethinking things. Like, “Do I shake someone's hand? Do I give them a hug? Do I wear a mask here, do I not wear a mask here?” All the social norms, the way we behaved in physical spaces, have changed. So, now's a really interesting time to direct some innovation and say, okay, now that we're rethinking this, let's put some design thinking to it and figure out how to make these spaces better. ROB: Right. Some people shut everything down for two years, some people built nothing for two years, some people rebuilt everything during those two years. Some stuff was pulled forward, some stuff is waiting in the wings. It's very lumpy. JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. I think what'll be really interesting is we don't really know. We've all been in this one state and now we're entering into another, hopefully, and we're not quite sure how the chips will fall. We don't know what the new behaviors are going to be. It'd be really interesting to see, as you revisit the conference that you went to for 10 years or the restaurant you used to go to every week, as you start going back into those things, does it feel the same? Does it still work the same way? Does it still affect you the same way? I don't know. Does it feel great to go back to a movie theater? Maybe, maybe not. ROB: I haven't tried yet. JOSH: Honestly, I was one of those people like “Ah screw it, I don't need it.” Then I took my kids to see the new Spider-Man and I was like, wait a second. This is actually really nice. It was actually quite enjoyable. ROB: It was probably fairly uncrowded too, which helps. [laughs] JOSH: It was pretty uncrowded, yeah. [laughs] ROB: For me, same thing. We have kids, so me not going to the movies is more about me having kids and not going to the movies as much as I did when we were just a couple with time on our hands and it's like “It's Tuesday, what do we do? Let's go see a movie and get home at 11:00. Fine.” Different seasons. JOSH: Yeah. ROB: Are there any sort of behaviors that were adopted experientially during COVID that you think are going to stick? There's interesting things – I think about some escape rooms did versions of escape rooms where they would do it for you over Zoom. And they're still doing it I guess, but I don't know. Are there weird things that people did that you think might stick around? JOSH: I mean, I think remote work is not going anywhere. ROB: You're betting on it. JOSH: Yeah, I'm living in California and my studio is entirely on the East Coast. We started hiring people out of market, which we never did before. We have people who moved into the Hudson River Valley or out in the Poconos, moving away from the city, away from our offices. And it hasn't been affecting the work. So, I think that's going to be really interesting. I think also how we're thinking about the studios themselves – we have this beautiful, beautiful office in Philadelphia and New York with lots of desks, but we're like, do we all need these desks if we're not going to be there every day? Can we optimize this for prototyping spaces? We build a lot of things in physical space, lots of hardware in the office. We need that. That's part of our process. But it's like, do we need all these desks? ROB: Do you find you're still pulling people together to actually get hands on with the experience? You can do a lot of the design in your own place, but there's a point where it still has to get physical and maybe that's a good time to convene the team anyhow to build rapport? JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, I love it. It's great to bring people together in physical space. But when there's a reason. Let's bring them in physical space to prototype, but we don't have to bring them into shared space just for another meeting. That's not worth it. [laughs] That stuff can go to Zoom. ROB: Josh, all very interesting stuff. When people want to connect with you and with Blue Cadet, where should they go to find you? JOSH: I'm probably most active on LinkedIn. Just look me up on LinkedIn. I actually spend a lot of time sharing a lot of prototypes. ROB: I was going to say, you probably share some cool stuff. JOSH: I share some really cool stuff. I at one point realized that the Blue Cadet internal Slack where we're just sharing prototypes and process stuff was way more interesting than anything I was sharing on social media, so I was like, I'm just going to share that stuff. The Blue Cadet Slack is way more interesting than any social feed I follow. So, I share the stuff I'm allowed to share off that. ROB: That turns out to be great marketing on LinkedIn, too. Some stuff people won't connect with, some stuff probably goes to the moon, and then people are like, “Who did that?” “Blue Cadet did that.” “Hey, I need that.” I don't know if it's scalable, but it also doesn't have to. I don't know how many days a week you're LinkedIn posting, but it's one or two or three days a week. JOSH: Yeah. The LinkedIn posts I'm putting up are early prototypes. They're super messy. It's a lot of cardboard and projection and things taped together. But usually then there's some really interesting technology in there, and I feel like it's an easier way to see how this actually gets made. ROB: Excellent. Josh, thank you so much for meeting up, for coming on the podcast. JOSH: Absolutely. ROB: Wish you the best on your talk in a couple of days as well. JOSH: Hope you make it out there. It'd be great. ROB: Thanks so much. JOSH: Thanks for having me. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Book Your Free Revenue First Podcast Strategy here!Get Your Free Dial Session here!Want Your Reps Hitting Quota in 2022? Get Your Wingman Free Trial HERE!HIGHLIGHTSHow Josh started in salesJosh's first businessLearning business on-the-flyThe Focus on Digital TransformationJosh on Sales LeadershipQUOTESJosh: “There's a compounding effect. If you just treat people the right way, no matter if they're a fit for you or not. How often those people come around, and you'll see deals five years later that you completely forgot about just coming out of nowhere.”Josh: “Nobody really gives a shit about what you sell. Like, focus on them, focus on their business, how they make money, and then figure out if what you sell is the right fit. And be honest about it.”Josh: “Executives are looking for a perspective. So if you take the time to go experience it yourself, experience their product and bring them back your findings and your learnings and a solution, dude, anyone would get excited about that.”Josh: “As a seller, I evolved, like I went from volume and velocity like product based services. Now it's more of a consultative sale. There's more services we can wrap around this, how do we expand and then all of a sudden, we're playing with bigger companies.”Collin: “It takes a lot of discipline to know, and not just take that path, because I think sellers think you gotta know when you're ready, and you gotta know like if you're built for it? Like not everybody wants that? For sure. And top performing, high performing reps don't make great sales leaders.”Collin: “The problem with a lot of top performers is they think everybody should sound like them. This is how I get the job done. Why can't you get the job done? And why can't you get the job done the way I get the job done? And that is a recipe for disaster rather than managing a team of people.”Learn more about Josh in the link below: LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/joshwagnerazPodcast - lovesellinghatesales.comWebsites:Personal - joshuadwagner.comCompany - leadmd.comLearn more about Collin in the link below: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/collin-saleshustle/Also, you can join our community by checking out @salescast.community. If you're a sales professional looking to take your career to greater heights, please visit us at https://salescast.co/ and set a call with Collin and Chris. 

Welcome back to part 2 of my interview with my good friend Josh- As we continue our discussion, we dive into recovery, the meaning of the steps and Josh's personal journey through his steps. It was an honor to hear and be a part of Josh's story and have him as a pivotal figure in my own journey. We both hope our shared experiences enlighten and help you navigate the recovery path meant for you. Thank you for listening! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/p2ppcast/support

Chad interviews Managing Director at thoughtbot, Joshua Clayton, about what a Managing Director at thoughtbot does, what makes Boost at thoughtbot different than other teams, and the belief in integrated teams of designers and developers company-wide. Empathize with Your Customer by Josh Clayton (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/empathize-with-your-customer) thoughtbot Boost (https://thoughtbot.com/boost) Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) Follow Josh on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadclayton/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/joshuaclayton) Check out Josh's website (https://joshuaclayton.me/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Josh Clayton, Managing Director of the thoughtbot Boost team. Hey, I know that company. Welcome, Josh. JOSH: Hey, Chad. How are you? CHAD: All right. I'm back to the show I think. I didn't get a chance to look up the last episode you're in, but it was probably hundreds of episodes ago now. JOSH: Yeah, it's got to have been a while. CHAD: [laughs] Speaking of a while, you recently…now time is all messed up for me, but I know that you have been at thoughtbot for a long time. How long has it been? JOSH: It was 12 years in August. CHAD: It's been a wonderful 12 years, Josh. JOSH: I agree. I agree. CHAD: [laughs] JOSH: It's been fun. CHAD: So in that time, you have had a few different roles. But you've been a Managing Director for a while now. JOSH: Yeah, I think that's...let's see. It was seven and a half years for the Boston team. And then it's 10 and a half months with Boost. CHAD: So your background is as a developer. And you, like a lot of people who have a background as developers at thoughtbot, myself included, still do development on a fairly regular basis. What does the Managing Director job at thoughtbot actually do? JOSH: What don't we do [laughter] is maybe a better question. Effectively, we're running that team's business. So it involves some amount of software consulting. It involves software sales. It involves managing the profitability of the team. There are marketing functions, and, I don't know, anything and everything, hiring-related things. We opened up and recently filled our Development Director position, which was open for a couple of months over the summer. We've just opened up a Design Director position. So it's everything. [laughs] It's everything it feels like. CHAD: At the beginning of this year, we did an episode about the changes that we had made at thoughtbot to reorganize the teams around rather than geographic studios around the types of work that we would do on that team. And that's how the Boost team was created. So in that episode, we gave people an overview. But I'd love to hear in your own words, what makes Boost at thoughtbot different than the other teams, and what do you focus on? JOSH: So what makes Boost different? I think one of the drivers, one of the motivators, is to embed alongside existing product teams, engineering, and design teams, and help them get better, help them grow as well as ship features and fix bugs. So I think that the way that I position it is if there's an existing product that's deployed, people are using it day in and day out. Hopefully, it's been battle-tested. There are probably some funky areas of the code. Those are the codebases that we're operating in. It might be a team of two people; it might be a team of 200 people. But there is an existing product and an existing team. They're looking for our support to help make it better. CHAD: One of the things I love about Boost and the changes that we've made, especially relative to Boost, is that at thoughtbot, we really believe in integrated teams of designers and developers. And a big part of what we've always done has been to be a complete product design and development team that brings new products to market, big and small. And because we were one of the first consulting companies in the world to switch to Ruby on Rails and because of that deep experience with Rails, and scaling, and working on existing products, we had a significant number of customers who engaged us for development for that expertise, and to help them scale, and grow, and hire, and implement best practices or solve problems that they were having in their existing codebase or on their existing team. And even though that was a significant part of our business, it was always something that seemed that we maybe even didn't really want to be doing it, or it was on the periphery of our marketing and positioning. And I was super excited when we officially created this team because it allowed us to acknowledge that this was a significant part of what we do, a significant part of our revenue, and to have a team of people that opted into doing this kind of work who would not only love the kind of work but want to even grow it and do more of it. And we haven't really had that for this kind of work. We've had individuals wanting to do it but not at an organizational level in an organization that supports it. That was more of a statement than a question, but reaction? JOSH: [laughs] I think you're spot on. It's always been interesting to me to hear that it's...obviously, at thoughtbot, we have been building MVPs and working with a lot of different types of companies over the years and helping them launch products. But I think that the type of work that I and, ideally, obviously, other people on the Boost team enjoy working on is existing platforms and working alongside existing teams. We talk about legacy systems, and I think they get a bad rap. And it's like, no, it's battle-tested. CHAD: [chuckles] JOSH: The business has proven its viability. It is still around years later. Conway's law applies in all of the stuff. Again, there are gnarly aspects of the code. But I think that's what the folks on the Boost team enjoy being challenged by is problems where these things are larger systems. They've been around for a while, and they do get pretty gnarly. CHAD: I think one of the things that held us back in the past is that it is a skill set, and it's an experience. And you are going to be on an MVP project where you're doing design and development, going from concept to launching of a new idea, usually in a matter of weeks, working directly with a founder or a team of co-founders. And then you rotate on to this significantly larger project with maybe an engineering team of tens or dozens or hundreds of other developers on it. It's a very different skill set, and you have very different challenges in that environment. And when you're constantly switching between those different kinds of projects, you can't necessarily get better at it. And that's one of the other things that I think is helping us be more successful. JOSH: I remember one of the teammates had joined the kick-off call with me at the Boost inception that very first meeting. And it was Joël. And Joël had asked pretty straightforwardly, "What is the expectation in terms of project rotations?" Because I think historically across the company, we'd aimed to do two to four-month engagements before we'd rotate folks. And I told him point-blank it's going to be six months to a year probably. And I don't think it necessarily shocked him or other folks on the team. But I think when you're going into existing codebases and working alongside existing teams, there is inherently politics at play and complexities at play where it might take you being a new developer on a team six weeks, maybe longer before you actually feel comfortable and confident navigating the codebase and knowing where you can have and make an impact. And so, I think some of the shifts there have been particularly interesting to watch the types of consulting conversations that we have within the team just because it is a different beast, I think than building and launching products. CHAD: So let's get into a little bit of detail about the kinds of projects we're doing in Boost to the extent that we can give specific examples and maybe more importantly and relevant to the audience, what are the things that we see? What are the common challenges that we see as products grow and evolve, as teams grow and evolve? What do you think one of the most common challenges that people have is? JOSH: As teams grow and evolve, I think a lot of teams run into onboarding issues and general knowledge sharing. I think when you start a small team, and you're two, three, maybe five engineers, it's pretty easy for everyone to keep probably the entirety or the majority of that domain in their head at any one time. As you work to scale a team...there's a client of ours right now where they're effectively doubling every...I don't know what the time period is, but they're growing very, very rapidly. And the feedback that some of our team have provided to them is it's really hard, and there are very much knowledge silos. And they're working through, okay? How do we tease this out? How do we share this context so that you don't have a couple of folks that are effectively blocking every single other member of the team? And so that's one of the core areas that hangs up our team and other teams. [chuckles] Our clients bring us on, and a lot of times, it's like we're rip-roaring and ready to go. And it's like, I need information from a bunch of people, and the processes aren't in place such that we can be as effective as we would want to be given the nature of work that we're doing. CHAD: I think that's a straightforward problem, and it's a good example...I don't want to make this an hour-long thoughtbot commercial. But I'll just point blank say one of the reasons why sometimes working with us is positive for clients is it's really easy to have a certain pain around your onboarding process or company, even just simple things like how long it takes to get a new person a computer or to ramp them up on their existing team. If you're just hiring an employee, it's easy to ignore the cost of that. JOSH: Yes. CHAD: But when you're bringing on thoughtbot and we have a specific start date, and it's a certain cost, and those kinds of things, it can really expose the pain that is already happening but was just being ignored and provide the impetus to actually fix the problem. JOSH: One of the things that we try to set out to do on the first day for any project is to open up a pull request to the codebase, whether it's an improvement to the onboarding like the README for the repository or whatever it might be. Ideally, we are finding ways to contribute on day one. And sometimes, that's frankly not realistic for individual contributors doing it from their own machines. But oftentimes, we'll know that going in. And as we onboard new folks and things like that, we'll say, okay, well, day one is going to be your pair programming over Tuple or some other tool so that you are able to engage and interact with a team and work on the code, even if there's still a bit of a lag between GitHub access and everything else that's the base of onboarding steps. CHAD: So another common one that people bring us on to help with is scaling challenges in terms of the actual product itself, maybe that's performance or other scaling challenges. I'm working on a project now where that was how we first got involved. The service was failing, and it was only getting worse under the increasing scale. So, what are some tips that you have for how to effectively solve some of those problems while not bringing everything else that you need to accomplish to a screeching halt? JOSH: At the end of the day, you can't fix something that you don't know is broken. Or you might have a hunch in terms of, oh, I know this page or this set of pages are slow. I think so much of what we see is teams come in, and they're like, "We don't have New Relic setup." We don't have an instrumentation setup. So they can't measure anything. And so it's like, I know this page takes three or four seconds to paint, but I don't know why. And I don't know how to fix it. It's like, okay, well, the first thing that we need to do is set up some amount of performance monitoring and application tracking just to get a sense of what that's like. There is a potential customer who had reached out back in January of this year. So this was weeks into Boost's inception. And they said, "Listen, we've got some performance-related issues. We don't really know what to do, but we know the application is really, really slow on these couple of pages." It's like, "Are you using New Relic, or Scout, or anything like that?" They're like, "No." It's like, okay, that's the first thing that you need to do. And they came back about a month ago and were like, okay, "Here's the access to all of this data. Now we're ready to go," and it's like, "Yes!" They probably didn't need to wait for that long. But it really speaks to that in order to address some of the performance-related stuff; we need to have some sense of what is going on and where. I know Steph over on The Bike Shed Podcast had talked to Nate Berkopec. And she had floated one of the questions I had had. And he basically schooled me on that podcast and reiterated it really is ultimately about measuring so much of what we're doing. CHAD: Yeah. One of the things, especially for teams that are having a problem but feel like they don't know what to do it's tough when it's actually the case. But the reality is a lot of times; there's actually very low-hanging fruit that it's just no one has the time or experience to actually identify that. And putting some monitoring in place combined with actually taking the time to look through it, especially if it's the first time you ever hit scaling problems...There's either a missing database in that index or some N+1 queries, and fortunately, once you identify that kind of problem, it's usually fairly quick to fix as well. It's a different thing when there's maybe fundamental architecture things that are causing your app to have scaling problems. But it's very unlikely that those are the first problems you're ever experiencing. The first problems you're ever going to experience if your app is running slow are going to be things happening at the database level or missing an index or something like that. And it's very unlikely that significant architecture changes need to be put in place in order to fix the first scaling problems that any product usually has. JOSH: That wasn't the type, or at least I think when we got brought on, and you were working on your most recent clients, we were well beyond...maybe we weren't, maybe I'm misrepresenting or misremembering, but it feels like we were well beyond some of the low hanging fruit. CHAD: Yeah, there was a batch of low-hanging fruit. One of the things if you're working on a product that is scaling super rapidly, what can happen is that the low-hanging fruit masks the other problems that are happening there because it all happened too quickly, all at the same time. And that was the case on this project. So it went from having hundreds of people using it to millions of people using it in the span of a month. And so there was low-hanging fruit. But removing the low-hanging fruit didn't make the app suddenly work again; it just made it so that we could look at the metrics and say, "Okay, those things are no longer the problem." The real problems are not being masked now. We now can identify the architectural changes that need to be put into place in order to operate at the scale. JOSH: Yeah, it's the low-hanging fruit when the orchard is on fire. [laughter] That is true. CHAD: Right. So you got to peel back like an onion. And this is the case with I think a lot of...whether it be a technical challenge or a team challenge. You can't always come in and very quickly solve the root problem. You might not even know what the root problem is. You just have to start solving the problem that is obvious in front of you and learning more. And then you solve that one, and then you expose the next one, and you expose the next one. And even when you can identify the root problem, you'll be like, this is the problem, and everyone agrees it's the problem. It still might be too hard to actually fix that problem. It might be an organizational or a systemic problem. And instead, you say, "Okay, we have to iteratively solve that problem." And you start peeling back those layers to get to the point where you've positioned yourself to solve that core problem. And I think we face that a lot, particularly as external consultants. We're coming in, and we can't just be the bull in the china shop. Because we haven't built the trust with everyone necessary to make the changes, or we don't know enough to know what the changes need to be. JOSH: Right. And I think the people aspect of all of these things in my opinion...and I should caveat this with I've been writing software professionally for almost 20 years. The people, in my opinion, are always the harder aspects to any engagement. It's very rare that we go into a technical project where it's like we literally cannot figure out a technical solution to this thing. We can usually figure it out. And it might take weeks or months to implement, especially as it spans multiple systems. But more often than not, it's really navigating the people and the relationships and building that trust like you had mentioned that is really what will help dictate success within that project. CHAD: I have a line that I use fairly often, and it's that I really believe very few, if any, developers sit down and are like, I'm going to write a bad solution today, or I'm going to write bad code today. That's not what people are doing. I think the majority of people genuinely try within their entire capacity to do a good job. And so that means that when I'm coming into a situation where there are problems, or things are messy, or there were bad decisions or bad code written, it can't be chalked up to like, oh, that was a bad developer, or that was a bad choice that was made. There was usually some people or organizational problem that caused that to happen in the first place. And merely fixing the bad code is not going to be what we should focus our time on. We probably need to do that. But if we don't fix the reason for that problem in the first place, it's just going to happen again. A really popular example of this is when we get approached to do a Rails upgrade on a very significant product that is very behind with Rails. First of all, it's very expensive to do that on a very significant project if there's no test coverage. People could hire us to spend and spend a lot of money just getting to the next Rails version. But if they do that and don't solve the reason why they were so behind with Rails and have no test coverage and all that stuff, along the way, it will have been wasted effort because in a year or in two years, it will be back to the way that it was before. And that's one example that's very technical. But that kind of stuff happens all the time, even with squishy things [laughs] like the structure of a team or something like that. So if you could give advice to people that are struggling with a particular problem, what would you tell them? And let's maybe make it a little bit more concrete. Like, one thing that can happen is as teams grow, like you said, not everyone can know everything. And so it starts breaking down into pods; maybe is one way to organize the team. And then you've gone into a bunch of individual teams working on discrete features. And that's happening fairly quickly. What are some ways to manage that change and manage that growth while maintaining continuity and making it go well? JOSH: I think a lot of it depends on the goals from the technical leadership in terms of areas of ownership. That'd be the first part that I would dive into, I think. We work with clients where they segregate front-end from back-end development. And that allows the teams to focus on React and TypeScript versus Ruby or Go or whatever their back end is written in. But if the goal is to share that knowledge, I think you've got options in terms of lunch and learn and shared code review and team demos and things like that. There are other ways to spread that information across the team so that everybody still has maybe not intimate knowledge of the code that's being written on a day to day basis, but they're at least aware of those patterns and practices and what each of the individual pods is may be responsible for and is delivering. So you have that team cohesion across more of the functional space, on the engineering side or on the product design side. CHAD: One thing that I think I would also add is that a lot of times, people take for granted how better developers will do their job if they understand the reason or the business drivers behind what they're working on. And it's really easy for people to take that for granted because it's like, there's a ticket to the ticket. It says what to do on the ticket. [laughs] JOSH: I have a blog post about this, actually. CHAD: [laughs] Okay, great. We'll put that in the show notes. But if someone doesn't understand the reason behind that, it's not going to go the way that you're expecting frequently. It's not as straightforward. JOSH: Yeah. You're left guessing what the underlying customer need is. And if you're guessing about the motivations, I don't want to say not in absolutes, but you're likely not going to address all of those core needs and implement an effective solution. I think in the blog post that I had written, ultimately, it was advocating for getting engineers to participate in customer interviews and really understand, like, how are people using the product that I am implementing features for? Because without that exposure, without seeing those pain points, oftentimes, it's okay, you've got a product designer or a product manager who's putting together this list of things to do. And if it's treated as a checklist or oh, I need to go implement XYZ without understanding why that needs to be done in the first place, what is the pain point? What is the customer-facing? How are they feeling as they're going through the product? Without that context and without that empathy, the solution is going to be...it might functionally work. But will it be a good user experience? Will it be a good customer experience? It's a little bit more shaky, I think. CHAD: Yeah. And in a fast-moving, fast-growing startup where everyone has a lot to do, if you're experiencing this kind of problem, it might manifest to you as stories get caught up at the beginning stages of when a developer is supposed to be working on them. And you find yourself having calls about what something is even supposed to be or supposed to do. And as the person who originated that ticket or originated that idea, you might have the feeling like, I can't believe we're having this conversation. Like, we don't have time to educate you about all the reasons why this is important and just please just do what we've said on the ticket. That is a natural reaction to that thing. And so my advice would be if you're feeling that, if your team is feeling that or something similar, there's probably something small you can do. It might not even be having developers participate in discovery or interviews or anything. It might be as simple as just making sure that on the ticket you say why it's important. If your ticket is a checklist of things to change or do, making sure that the reason why is communicated there will go a long way to having the person pick up that ticket, get the context necessary to understand, and make good decisions as they work on it. JOSH: Yeah, I remember the switch to the jobs to be done format. And I remember just being like, oh, [laughs] this makes a lot more sense because we can understand the context and the why. What is driving it? What is the problem there rather than what is the solution? And I think that shift in mindset does go a long way, like you said. CHAD: I think one of the ideas behind a well-functioning team is we talk about this idea of collaboration which is you feel like you're doing your best work, that things are moving quickly, and you're enjoying the people you're working with, and you're building upon each other's ideas, and you're making things better as a team. And I was recently talking to someone else, a candidate for VP of Engineering at one of our clients, and they were talking about flow, the idea of flow. And it wasn't a way that I had articulated it previously, but it's certainly another way of thinking about and a good way of thinking about it, especially when it comes to what is the role of a VP of engineering? Or what is the role of a CTO at a small company? Or what is the role of a development team or a product team in general? And one way to think about that is to work to maintain a flow state. And when we think about the processes that we have in terms of retrospectives where every week we gather, and we identify things that could be better, and we come up with action items, a lot of the things that drive what could be better or what we want to try to do differently are all identifying the things that take us out of the flow state and trying to fix that problem so that items flow from beginning to end smoothly, that they go from concept to production smoothly as quickly as possible, and that individual people know where the next item to take is that it's ready so they're not blocked as they begin it. And they're able to get that to staging, and get a pull request out, and get that reviewed quickly, get it to staging, get that reviewed quickly, and then deploy it to production. And in theory, even do a continuous deployment so that that whole flow is automated as much as possible. So this idea of flow resonated with me. Has it resonated with you? JOSH: Yeah, I agree. I remember seeing the comparisons people saying, okay, you're not actually looking for an engineer's passion necessarily. What you're looking for...and I come back to the hiring side of things because I'm doing that right now. But rather than looking to assess passion, it's assessing capacity and ability to get into a flow state more quickly. And obviously, so much of that is dependent on the team, and the communication style, the management style, and things like that. But flow is very much...I think once you get into that and you know how to get into that like you said, every waking moment is spent trying to optimize how do I get into this space? Because when you're in that space, when you're flowing, be it from an IC level or above, there's nothing quite like it. It's just this calm state of just everything feels like it's firing all the time perfectly, and it's good. And I think trying to make those spaces available for the rest of the team to get into that state and maintain that state makes a lot of sense. I remember years and years and years ago, there was the focus on maker versus manager time. And we talk about anchoring manager time either at the start of the end day or around lunchtime or whatever is a logical time for a break. The idea is to maintain that flow state for as long as possible so that nothing else eats into that. Because you do an hour of writing software, and then you've got a 30-minute one-on-one with a teammate. And then you go, and you run for another hour, hour and a half, and then it's another half an hour meeting. It's like you're being sucked away. It is really hard to get into that zone and then stay there. So I think there's been a focus on it for a while. And I'm really glad that there's now a name and a thing that we can point to. CHAD: I don't want to lead people astray about what Boost is. There's a big important part of Boost, which may not be immediately obvious to people, and that is design. I may have insinuated that design wasn't part of Boost before when we were talking about it, but it is. And it's designed on existing products and existing teams which is a different need than going from concept to launch of a new idea. JOSH: So we had done some work with The New England Journal of Medicine. And their team, a very small team, internal team, had basically designed an application. And they ran into a number of accessibility and usability issues. They continued to hear feedback from a lot of folks saying, "This is not effective for what we're looking to do." And they'd engaged us in a couple of different times basically to rip apart and re-architect some of the application hierarchy and the usability side of things. It's been really interesting to see okay, well, within the design side of operating within existing products, it's often lended or leaned more towards doing some amount of a design audit and usability audit, talking to customers. And less around we're going to start from scratch and more what are some of these iterative improvements that we can make to make the product more accessible, easier to understand, easier to navigate, easier to use within what is, again, these very large platforms sometimes? CHAD: I know one common request we get is we're thinking about implementing a design system or introducing a design system with the first version of the product. And we're having this growing pain around introducing new features. Is a design system the right thing to do there? That's a request we sometimes get. JOSH: Yeah. And I think a lot of it at the end of the day, what we're looking to assess is what are the knowns? How much do we know about the application, about the interface? We talk about on the software development side of things avoiding premature abstraction, and I think the same thing is true about design systems. Like, if we're going through a product, maybe it's a wizard, and apart from forms, the pages are individualized, and there's not really any common patterns. It's like, okay, well, maybe now it doesn't make sense. But when you've got an application that spans hundreds of pages, there are going to be patterns across the different pages in terms of application hierarchy and componentization and things like that. And the work that we're oftentimes brought in to do is let's assess what's there, figure out what are the common patterns here. And it's almost like refactoring and teasing things apart to where we get slight...it's a reduction in code use or rather an increase in code reuse because we're removing some of the idiosyncrasies that maybe were not teased apart into some component-based system. And that's fun work. [chuckles] It's really interesting. You get things like React when you're doing client-side rendering. And within the Rails side of things, there's a big push for the GitHub ViewComponent. RubyGem is another example. It's both ways to introduce these layers of abstraction that allow more of the engineering team to take on more of the application development, not because design isn't necessary, but they're then empowered to reuse these logical set of components. And so it amplifies the dev work, but it also amplifies the design work because the entire team is now leaning on that pre-baked work. It enables designers to shift focus and priorities to okay; what are new components? What are different ways to position this or present this information? And also, for our designers, it frees up their time to talk even more to customers, to people using the system. CHAD: Well, I guess we'd be remiss if we didn't do a more blatant plug. You mentioned it earlier, but we do have an opening for Design Director on the Boost team. JOSH: We do. CHAD: So who would be a good fit for that role? JOSH: That's a great question. I think a couple of the things that we're really focusing on for this role is someone who has done the work, so to speak, at an IC level for a lot of the work that we're doing right now with customers. And so we ask point-blank on the application sheet, have you worked in HTML and CSS? Have you facilitated design exercises like design sprints? Have you facilitated user interviews? Because so much of what we're seeing from a vision and a strategy perspective is we need to take and leverage these tools in the skill sets that our teams are looking to hone in on, and we want to take it a lot further. I think there's a big opportunity there. So I think it's less around years of experience. I wouldn't say you need to have 15 years of management experience or having been a director in order to apply for the role. But it's someone that can empathize with the team and has some opinions and some thoughts in terms of okay, what is design? What is not only visual design but product design accessibility? What does that look like in the next 5 to 10 years? Those are the people that I would love to see apply. CHAD: If someone's interested, where's the best place for them to do that? JOSH: thoughtbot.com/jobs. And the listing is there. CHAD: So what's next for Boost, Josh? What do you have your sights set on as we wrap up 2021 and head into the next year? JOSH: Oh boy. A lot of where the focus has been on this year is continuing to double down on Rails as the technology stack and get our feet wet, not that our feet aren't wet, [chuckles] continue to invest on the front end with React. I think for 2022, I think the big focus...we've run in the past some pretty successful custom trainings workshops for engineering teams. I think one that we had done earlier was late last year into early this year. We ran about 120 or so of their engineers through a custom RSpec course. So we worked with their engineering managers and some of their teams and got a sense of okay; given this codebase and given the skill sets of this 100-plus person engineering team, where should we focus? And we put together a two-day RSpec workshop. We administered over; I think, five or six weeks. We did it virtually. And the reception from that was incredible. They ended up bringing us back on. We're getting ready to start another round of consulting work where we're embedding alongside their teams. So I see that as a huge opportunity for Boost coming into next year. And then I think one of the things that we've been pushing for is reducing some of the billing time from folks in leadership positions so that they're in a better position to support their designers and developers. And I'm really excited about the progress that we've made thus far. And I'm excited to continue carrying that into next year. CHAD: Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. JOSH: Thank you. CHAD: Part of this new season, Season 11 of the podcast, for the next few episodes, I'm going to be talking to each of the managing directors at thoughtbot about their teams, about the different kinds of work we do on those teams, and the challenges, and what phases are clients in those different stages of the product lifecycle. So you can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode and all the other episodes at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. Josh, if folks want to get in touch with you or follow along with you, what are the best places for them to do that? JOSH: Definitely Twitter. My handle is @joshuaclayton, all one word. CHAD: Awesome. Thanks again. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Special Guest: Joshua Clayton.

Show notes:Links:TwistHook RelayBen Orenstein TupleWrite for HoneybadgerFull transcript:Starr:So Ben is joining us today from his car. It's bringing back fun memories. I recorded, I think the voiceover for our very first demo video in my car.Ben:Oh yeah? Nice. So as you may recall, I have a two story building that I lease one of the rooms, and the downstairs is a wine tasting room. Well with the pandemic, the company that had the wine tasting room, they closed shop. They stopped leasing, because who's going to go to a wine tasting room during a pandemic, right? Well they're leasing the space to a new tenant that's going to take that space. Apparently hey, we're getting back, things are reopening, let's taste wine again, but the new tenant wants to have a new door put in. So I got to the office today and they're like, "Yeah, we're putting in a new door." And then I'm like, "Cool." Didn't even think much of it. But then a few minutes later, there's all this drilling going on. I'm like, "Oh, I think probably the car is a better place to record today."Josh:Well at least you'll have some new friends soon.Ben:True, true.Starr:Yeah. Well I'm glad you made it, at least. And so what's up? I missed a week of the podcast and you guys invested our entire Honeybadger savings account into Bitcoin.Josh:Yeah.Starr:And I'm not sure that was the most prudent investment decision, y'all. I just wanted to say that.Ben:Yeah, the timing could have been better.Josh:Yeah, we really pulled a Roam Research on that one.Starr:Oh yeah. What do you mean by that?Josh:They invest in Bitcoin, apparently.Starr:Oh, they do? Okay.Ben:Of course they do.Starr:Of course. It's just a dip. You're supposed to buy the dips, Josh. It's just what, like a 30% dip? 40% dip?Josh:I wasn't watching it, but I read that it had recovered pretty quickly too.Starr:Oh. I have no idea. I didn't even follow it.Josh:As it does.Starr:I don't even follow it.Josh:Yeah. I just read random people's opinions.Starr:There you go.Josh:I forget where we left it last week, but I just wanted to state for record that I think I mentioned I made some accidental money in Bitcoin back when I was learning about block chain technology, but I have not bought any Bitcoin since, nor do I intend to, and I do not really view it as an investment asset.Starr:This is not investment advice.Josh:I just need to state my opinions for the future so I can look back on them with regret. If I don't say what I actually think, I'm never going to have anything to regret.Starr:There you go.Josh:I'm just going to commit.Starr:So you've decided to die on this no intrinsic value hill.Josh:Right. I'll let you know if I change my mind.Starr:Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah, I don't really check. Last week y'all did the interview with Mike, right?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Yeah, it was a good conversation.Starr:Yeah. I don't really pay attention to it, except occasionally I'll look at the chart. It's the same with GameStop. Occasionally I'll look at the GameStop chart and then just see what wild stuff people are saying about it. Yeah.Ben:Yeah, GameStop was hovering at about 150 for a while, but now it's up to like 170-ish, 180. Something like that. Yeah. I peek at it every now... it's on my watch list when I log into my brokerage account, so I just see it. I'm like, "Oh, okay. Cool." And then I move on and check out my real actual stock portfolio.Starr:Oh yeah, yeah. I'm not going to buy it. It's like a TV show for me.Ben:Yeah, totally.Josh:Yeah. To be fair, I really don't have much of an opinion either way. I still don't understand it, so I don't know. I just feel like I probably shouldn't be buying it.Starr:That's really good advice. I don't understand anything though, so what am I supposed to do, Josh? Huh? Huh?Josh:Yeah.Ben:Just buy the index fund.Starr:Yeah. I don't even understand that.Josh:I don't understand that either though, if you really think about it.Ben:That's actually, there was a good thread or so on Twitter. I don't know if it was this week or last week, but basically the idea was if you feel really confident in your own ability, in your own business, given that, you're probably spending most of your time in that business, right? We spend most of our creative time in Honeybadger because that's where we feel the most potential is. So you're investing basically all of your personal capital in this one business. How do you diversify that risk? Or do you diversify the risk? Do you double down? Maybe do you take investment to diversify, and so you buy out? Let someone do a secondary and so you take some cash off the table? If you did that, then where would you put the money? Do you just go, "Okay, I'm going to go buy Bitcoin. I'm going to go buy an index fund," or whatever. And if you do that, is that a better use of your money than having just kept the equity and just plowing more time into your business? Right?Josh:Yeah.Ben:It's an interesting thought exercise. It's like, "Hm." The whole investment mindset of your business is interesting to me.Josh:Yeah. Yeah, that was interesting. I think I saw that conversation, or maybe I saw a similar conversation where they were talking about even just 401Ks and for founders who are already fairly... have at least made it in whatever sense that means. Is it the best financial move to keep maxing out your 401K versus investing in your ability to generate revenue in your business?Starr:So a little bit of real talk here. If you are a founder who's made it, maxing out your 401K isn't really a blip on your financial radar.Josh:It's not a big... yeah. That was kind of the same thought I had. It's not like you're putting 50% of your income into it.Starr:Yeah. What is it, like 20 grand? Something like that?Josh:Yeah.Starr:It's a good chunk of change, but still. It's not like...Josh:Yeah. I don't know.Starr:Yeah, that's interesting. I think I'm just going to go all in on Pogs. I think they're due for a comeback. I think that's going to be how I diversify.Josh:But I think it's probably a good move to invest in yourself if you have the ability to build businesses. That definitely seems like a good investment, in any case. Probably still have a 401K. I tend to do everything, except Bitcoin.Ben:A 401K is a nice backstop. Just keep stocking money away, and later it will be there, hopefully. But in the meantime, really, really spend your time and your energy on making your business even more profitable. Speaking of making your business more profitable, so this past week or two weeks, I've been working on our SOC 2 type two audit, so I'm doing the evidence collection.Starr:Oh yeah?Ben:So that in this case means I take a bunch of screenshots of settings, like the AWS console and G-suite console to show yeah, we have users, and yes, we have login restrictions, et cetera. All the 150 different things that you're supposed to check off the list when you do the audit. And as I've been going through this process taking all these screenshots, honestly it's getting a bit tedious, and it's surprisingly time consuming. And so I'm like, "You know, there are services for this sort of thing. Let me check them out." And so in the past three days, I've had conversations with Vanta, Secureframe, and Drata. These are three providers that what they do is they provide almost SOC 2 in a box. Basically they help you connect all of your systems and get the evidence that you need for an auditor in a more automated fashion. So for example, they'll plug into your AWS account and they'll pull out information about your security groups, your application firewall, your AIM, all the access permissions, all that kind of stuff, and pack that up into a nice little format that the auditor can then look at and like, "Yeah, they're good on all these different requirements." So you don't have to take screenshots of security groups.Ben:And I hadn't really looked at them before because I was like, "I don't know if I just want to spend that kind of money," but actually sitting back and looking at it, looking at the time that I'm spending on this and the amount of time I'm paying our auditors to audit all these screenshots that I'm taking, actually I think it would be cheaper to go with one of these services, because your audit is a bit more streamlined because the auditor knows how that data is going to come in and it's an easy format to digest, et cetera. But the thing is that after having gone through some of the sales pitches from these vendors, I'm thinking I really wish I would have started with these back the first time, because I think it would have been much easier just from the get go. So I think I've been doing the SOC compliance on hard mode, unfortunately, but lessons learned.Starr:With my experience, that just seems to be how projects are. You do it one time and you don't really know what you're doing, and you just push your way through it, and then eventually you figure out how to do it better and easier and all that. Because when something is new to you, you don't know what you can safely ignore. You know?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Well plus you're pumping up the value of FounderQuest.Starr:Oh, that's true. We got a lot of content out of that.Ben:That's true.Starr:At least $100 worth.Josh:That's useful knowledge. Yeah.Ben:Yeah, so I think the short version is if you are interested in doing SOC2 compliance and you have no idea what you're doing, talk to these vendors first and maybe just start with them. They will help you, because they have customer success people like SaaS does. They have people on staff who are there to help you have success with their product. And if you don't get compliant, then you're going to stop using their product, so they're going to help you try and get there. And it's still pricey. It's still going to be five figures a year, but it will definitely save you some time and maybe even save you some money.Josh:Nice.Ben:Yeah. So next year, our audit should just be smooth as silk.Starr:Just butter.Josh:Love it.Starr:So if we-Josh:What are you going to do with all that extra free time?Ben:I made an executive decision.Starr:Oh really? What's that?Ben:Yes. The executive decision is we're going to have more teamwork at Honeybadger.Starr:That's ironic.Josh:Instead of what? What we have now, which is anarchy?Ben:We pretty much do have anarchy, I think. We are coordinated, we do make our plans, and we do have things we want to get done, but yeah, we are very independent at Honeybadger. We work independently. You might even say we're kind of siloed. We go off in the corner and do our own thing for most of the time. And I was chatting with Kevin about this, and I think we're going to try an experiment. So I think we're going to try to actually work together.Starr:Kevin is our developer.Starr:Yeah, so you all are going to be developing features together. Are you going to pair program? Are you going to use Tuple?Ben:Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down there.Starr:Are you going to mob program?Ben:Pair programming, that's maybe too advanced for us, I think. Maybe actually we'll chat in Slack a little bit here and there and maybe have a Zoom call.Josh:Yeah, so you're talking about you're both going to work on the same project at the same time.Ben:Right. Right.Josh:Mostly independently, but coordinating.Ben:Right. Yeah.Josh:Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think that still can fit into our anarchy model.Starr:Yeah. It still seems a little bit independent.Josh:It's more like mutual aid or something.Starr:There you go. We should make a conference talk about mutual aid development.Josh:Right.Starr:That would go over well.Ben:Using NATO as a model for your development process. Yeah, so we'll see how it goes. I'm looking forward to it. I think I've been feeling a little lonely. I don't know if it's the right word, but maybe just off doing my own thing. I was like, "Oh, I think it will be nice to have some collaboration, some coordination." Maybe we'll even get to a level of synergies.Starr:Synergies.Starr:That's a blast from the past.Josh:Yeah, I think it's a good idea.Ben:Yeah, so more to come on that. We'll keep you posted. It's a bigger project. May not have results for a couple months. Don't really want to spill the beans on what it is right now. Competitive information. Don't want to leak it to all of our competitors.Starr:I like that. I like that. It's going to keep people on the hook for the next episodes.Josh:Totally.Ben:But yeah. That was my week.Josh:Yeah. Well my week, I took some time off, had some family stuff going on, so I was not very productive this week, but what I did work on was I've been working on this little guide for Hook Relay. I'd love to get the marketing machine, the fly wheel going on that at least, so we can be moving that along with everything else. And so yeah, working on some content and such.Starr:What is Hook Relay?Josh:Well you tell us what Hook Relay is, Ben. It's your baby.Ben:It's my baby. Yeah. So Hook Relay is a tool for managing web hooks. So you can record web hooks as they go out. In our case, to Honeybadger, we send a lot of web hooks, and so we built Hook Relay to help track all that web hook action. So we logged as pay loads that can go and diagnose issues that are happening, or maybe replay them as necessary, and of course it also handles inbound web hooks. So if you were handling, let's say, a post pay load request from GitHub about some activity that happens in your GitHub account, you handle that web hook and we can give you a place to store that, and then you can replay that, send it, forward it onto somewhere if you want, or just store it.Josh:Yeah. I think one of my favorite things about Hook Relay is just the visibility that it gives us into what's happening with the hooks, because otherwise we never had a dashboard. I guess we could have built one internally to see what the activity was and what's failing, what's actually... what requests are... because you're connecting to thousands of different people's random domain URLs, basically. It's really nice even for debugging and things like troubleshooting to be able to see what's going on, in addition to all the other cool things that it gives you out of the box.Starr:So you might say it's even like turnkey reliability and visibility for web hooks. For all your web hook needs.Ben:Yeah. Yeah, we modeled it on Stripes web hooks because we loved-Starr:I'm holding up a box up. I'm holding the TurboLinks box up and gesturing at it with my hand.Ben:Vanna White style.Josh:We should do our own channel, do our own infomercials.Ben:Yeah, I really wanted experience of Stripe. If you set up web hooks in Stripe, you can go and you can see all the web hooks they've sent you. You can see the pay loads, you can see whether they were successfully delivered or not, and I wanted that experience for our own web hooks, and also I thought it would be cool if developers could just have that without having to build the infrastructure. And so if you're building an app that send a bunch of web hooks on behalf of your customers, well now you can give your customers visibility into that web hook activity without having to build that tracking yourself.Josh:Yeah. That's pretty cool. So basically this content guide I'm working on is how to build web hooks into your application, including all the reliability and stuff that Hook Relay gives you for free. And the idea is that if that's what you're doing and you just want to save some time, Hook Relay will be a large chunk of that. You've just got to sign up. So I think it will be useful to everyone, even if they don't become a customer. If you're going to build your own back end and handle all the retries, build dashboards, and all that. But if you want it all turnkey, then Hook Relay is a big chunk of that work just done of you.Starr:So is this live? So can people go and sign up now?Ben:Yeah.Josh:Hook Relay, yes. It is.Josh:Hookrelay.dev.Ben:Yeah. In fact, we have enough customers now that it's actually paying for itself.Starr:What?Ben:Yes. So sweet.Josh:It's wild. That's wild.Starr:That's amazing.Ben:So Josh, is your guide going to have... are you going to dive deep into the architecture of here's how you build a whole web hook system, and so we're going to show you all the stuff behind the curtain so you can build your own? And then, "Oh, by the way, if you want it just done for you, here it is." Or are you going to just keep it more high level?Josh:I'm starting more high level. Yeah, I was planning on it being more high level. More like a high level architecture thing, or specification. Like these are the parts that you'll need to build, but you're going to have to solve some things, because it's not going to be specific to one system. It's not going to be like, "This is how you build web hooks for Ruby and Sidekick, or if you're going serverless." It will have suggestions on stacks or technologies to use for the back end, for instance, but yeah. I was thinking of leaving that to the user to figure out, but just showing the things you need to think about that a lot of people don't think about until they encounter the problems that might arise, like retrying and all the error handling that you add later, and validation for security reasons and things.Ben:Yeah. Yeah.Starr:This is giving me flashbacks to a whole two or three year process after we first launched.Josh:Yeah.Starr:It was just like, "Oh, crap. There's an edge case here that we didn't think of because we're not used to doing web hooks at this scale." And that just went on for like three years.Josh:Yeah. And it's nice having the two products because Hook Relay came out of Honeybadger and it's basically part of our web hook system. This is basically just documenting Honeybadger's web hook system for other people who might want to replicate that or whatever.Ben:Totally. I think that will be cool. A great piece of content, a great piece of SEO juice. And if you did decide to go deep into the technical side, like if you explain the entire infrastructure that we're building, that would actually be kind of cool too because you could maintain your technical documentation for the system internally and use it as a piece of content for marketing.Josh:That could be cool. Yeah. That's not a bad idea. Yeah, I was thinking just because I want to get something out there. I'm thinking it will help with both, having a resource for people who are already on the site to see this is basically how you will implement this. It's kind of like an implementation guide, really. But then also SEO. It should help get us in more search results.Ben:Yeah.Josh:And I also want to credit Ben Orenstein and and Tuple. They have a great pair programming guide which was an inspiration for this idea. I just really liked the format that they used, and I just think it's a great idea if you have a product that's highly targeted or focused on one specific thing and doing it really well. I think it's maybe even a great alternative to a blog, for instance. You can get some of the same benefits of having a blog, but without actually having to create a blog with a lot of different variety of topics and things.Ben:Speaking of the blog, I was talking to Harris, our sales guru, about our blog strategy, and I said, "Yeah, it's basically like a flypaper strategy. We want it to attract developers that come and see the content and they love it and they're like, 'Oh, let me check out this Honeybadger thing.'" Not particularly novel, but I like the flypaper idea.Starr:That's a good metaphor. And also for a long time, I poo-pooed SEO because in my mind, SEO was very scammy. I don't know. I learned about SEO in the days of link farming and all that, and I just didn't want to be involved in that. So I'm just like, "We're just going to put out good content and that will be enough." And it is, yes, but also I've looked at some metrics since then that make it clear that the majority of good things that happen because of our blog actually are people entering through search queries. That really outweighs people sharing articles and doing stuff like that, which I guess is obvious that it would be that way, but my own bias against search just made me not see that for a while. So maybe trying to pick some possible low hanging fruit. We've tried to make our site search engine friendly, but we having really done any explicit SEO type activities.Josh:Yeah. I went through recently through our documentation and just tweaked just small things on a bunch of pages, like headlines and some of the meta tags and stuff, but mostly headlines and content on page was what I was focusing on. And I wasn't using any particular tool to measure before and after results, but it does seem like it bumped us up in some of the results for people searching for more general terms like Ruby error tracking, for example, which are typically pretty competitive terms. But I think we rank pretty well for some of those terms these days. I think we've been around enough and we're one of the options that come up. So it does seem like if you already target the terms, it actually does what they say it does, which is good to know. You've just got to pay attention to it.Ben:So the moral of story is there is some value in SEO.Starr:I guess so.Josh:Yeah. Well and I think documentation sites. Your documentation, I think it's a great place to optimize SEO because a lot of times, especially for those... maybe not for the long tail searches. A blog is great for that, like what you were talking about with the flypaper, Ben. But for people who are actually searching for what you do, I think a lot of times documentation pops up first in a lot of cases when I'm searching for things, so don't overlook it like we did.Starr:Yeah. Well this week, I guess the main thing I did was I got our authors lined up for the next quarter of intelligence briefings. So if you haven't been playing along at home, we're having some intelligence briefings created. Basically everything that's going on in a certain language community for the quarter, and this grew out of Josh's need because he's basically in charge of our client libraries. And we have libraries in a variety of languages, so keeping up with those languages and what's going on is a real pain in the ass, so we were going to make these guides originally for him, but then also we were like, "This would be really great content to publish."Starr:And I've already got this system with authors who want to write about programming languages, and so let's see if we can make some authors make these summaries. And so far, yeah, I'm pretty happy. We had four or five of them created, and we're not publishing them because they were for a previous quarter, and this is just a trial run to see if the results are okay, and I think they were. I think the results were pretty good. We go some feedback from you two, and I updated my process and updated the template that all the authors are using, and so we should be getting round two done. I'm setting the deadline a week after the end of the quarter. My hope is if they get them to me then, then I'll have a week to get them up on our blog or wherever, and then they won't be too out of date by the time people see them.Josh:Yeah. That's cool. I'm excited to see the next batch. My favorite thing from the reports were the ones where they wrote some original content summarizing things or sections or whatever. That was super useful because there's a little bit of a story element to it that's specific to the quarter or whatever that you don't really get from just... if you just aggregate everything, all the weekly newsletters and what happened on Reddit and what happened on Twitter. If you just dump that all in a document, it's a bit of overload, so it's nice to have the summary the story of what the community was interested in.Starr:Oh yeah. Definitely.Josh:Here are some articles that they talked about.Starr:That's the whole idea, is to have somebody who knows the community explain to you what's going on, as opposed to... if I wanted a bunch of links, I could just write a little script to scrape links from places.Josh:Yeah.Starr:And it wouldn't be very useful. What's useful is having people who know the environment being like, "Hey, this is what's going on. This is why it's important." And yeah, so that's going to be something I guess I need to look for explicitly when I get this round of things of reports back.Josh:Start calling them secret agents or something instead of authors.Starr:Oh yeah.Josh:Or detectives.Starr:Operatives. Yeah. Assets.Josh:As our detective service investigators.Ben:I think having that analysis of why this news is important or why these things are important that they've collected is really handy, because the links are great. Like you said, I could just write a script to collect them, but having someone with that context in the community saying, "Okay, and it's important because, and this is why you should pay attention," I think that's really helpful to someone who's maybe not as deep into that every day.Starr:Oh yeah.Josh:Yeah. And also knowing what to surface, because there was one report that it really seemed to just dump every single link or article that was discussed or was in a newsletter or whatever, and I think it's more helpful if it's on a quarterly level, if you know what is actually the important things that you really want to know about.Starr:Yeah, that's true. I just made a note for myself to go back and explicitly just mention that to people, because I realized I didn't put it in the instructions anywhere. I put like, "Here's where a description of the content goes," but I didn't really put what I want inside that description, I realized.Josh:Yeah.Starr:So I'm going to do that.Ben:We're iterating in real time here.Starr:Oh yeah, yeah. This is where the work gets done.Josh:Yeah. Well and pretty soon, we'll have hopefully some good examples that we can show future authors, or detectives, or whatever we're calling them.Starr:Oh, definitely. Definitely. I'm going to call them authors because they're already in the blog system as authors and it just seems like-Josh:Agents?Starr:I don't know. I've got to be able to talk to these people with a straight face.Ben:You could call them research specialists, but then you might have to pay them more.Starr:There you go.Josh:Research. Yeah. Yeah.Starr:I don't know. I think I'm paying pretty well. Honestly, I think I'm paying pretty well for looking at... I don't know. How many weeks is a quarter? 12? 12 weeks of newsletters and just telling me what's going on. I think I'm paying pretty well.Josh:Yeah. You don't need to talk to them with a straight face though. You need to talk to them with sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette in a diner.Starr:Oh that's right. Yeah.Josh:Or a dive bar somewhere.Starr:Those people aren't smiling. Those people aren't smiling. Oh, that's right. I can do that. I just realized that it's two weeks since my second vaccine, so I'm ready to go out and recruit secret agents.Josh:Ready to party.Starr:Yeah. I'm very anxious talking with people in public now, but that's not a topic for this conversation.Josh:Yeah. We'll ease back into it.Starr:Oh yeah. Yeah, we're going to have dinner with my sister in law on Saturday, and I'm just like, "Okay Starr, you can do this. You can do this."Josh:Cool.Starr:Yeah, and I guess the other thing that we did this week is we are doing a trial run of Twist as a replacement for Basecamp messages, the message board on Basecamp. And yeah, so basically the long and short of it is the whole Basecamp BS just left a bad taste in my mouth in particular. I think you all's a little bit, or maybe you're neutral. I don't care. That sounded really harsh.Ben:You can be honest with us. We can take it.Starr:No, I didn't mean to sound that harsh. I just mean I'm not trying to put my opinions onto you, is what I'm saying. I just felt gross using Basecamp. Also if I'm being honest, I never really enjoyed Basecamp as a product. It's got a couple things that just really rubbed me the wrong way.Josh:We were having some vague conversations in the past. We have posed do we really want to keep this part of what we're using Basecamp for? And we were already using a subset of it, so yeah. It wasn't totally out of the blue.Starr:Yeah. And we were using maybe 20% of Basecamp, just the message boards feature.Josh:And the check ins, which apparently we all disliked.Starr:And the check ins, which nobody liked but we all kept using for some reason. Ben is like, "Can I turn off the check ins?" And I'm like, "I thought you were the only reason we were doing the check ins, it's because I thought you liked them."Ben:I think I was the only reason we were doing the check ins.Josh:It's because... yeah.Ben:Yeah, because I remember when I started it I was like, "Yeah, I really don't know what's going on," because back to that siloed, independent, off in the corner thing, I was like, "It would be nice to know what people are doing." But yeah, lately I've been like, "This is just a drag." So I'm like, "Would anybody be upset if this went away?" And everyone is like, "Please take it away."Josh:Everyone is just passively aggressively answering them.Ben:Everyone hated it.Josh:It wasn't that bad, but-Ben:I get it.Josh:Kevin used them too, but yeah.Ben:So I finally gave everyone permission to tell me that it was not okay, and now we no longer do it.Starr:There you go. And we're just like, "While we're at it, just ditch Basecamp." So yeah, so we've been trying a new system called Twist. Twist is, essential it's... I don't know, it's like threaded discussions. I figured this out on my own. I'm very proud of myself. So you have lots of threads, and you twist them together to make yarn or something or some sort of textile, so I bet you that's why it's called Twist.Josh:Beautiful sweater.Starr:Yeah. A beautiful sweater. The tapestry that is Honeybadger. And so far, I've really been enjoying it. I find the UI to be a lot better. There was one bug that we found that I reported, so hopefully that will get fixed. It doesn't really bother me that much. Yeah, it's amazing sometimes how the UI of an application can just be like, "Oh, ah. I'm having to parse less information just to do my task."Josh:It's much nicer.Starr:Yeah.Ben:It does feel like a lot less friction for our use case.Josh:Yeah. Well we talked about that, just the structure. The way that you structure conversation and organization things in a management tool like that makes a big difference. In Basecamp, we would create Basecamps for whatever. They call them Basecamps, right? They're the projects.Starr:They're like projects. I don't know.Josh:We'd create different ones, different projects for each project, but then there's five of us, so we'd basically just add everyone to every single project that is in there. But all the conversation is siloed off in each project, and with Twist, it's just much more of a fluid... it uses what, like channels? But yeah, it just seems like it's all together. It's kind of like a combination of Slack and a threaded message board or something, to me.Starr:Yeah, or like Slack and email or something.Josh:Slack and email. Yeah. It's a nice combo.Starr:Yeah. It has inbox, which I like, where it shows you any unread messages, and so you can just easily just go and scan through them, and it's all in the same page. It's a single page application, so you don't have to click out to a completely new page and then come back to the inbox and do all that. Basecamp had a similar feature, but it's like a timeline and it had a line down the middle of the screen and then branches coming off of either side of it. And for some reason, I started using the inbox in Twist and it was just like, "Oh, this is so much better." For some reason I think having things on different sides of the screen just doubled the amount of background processing my brain had to do to put it all together. And yeah, so I don't know. I do like it. Also, it's got mark down. It's got mark down.Josh:The mark down editor is so nice. It reminds me a lot of just using GitHub, the editor on GitHub, with the mark down mode and preview. And you can drag and drop images into the... I don't know if you knew that, into the mark down editor, like you can on GitHub, and it automatically inserts the image tag and uploads it for you.Starr:Yeah, it's all really slick. So I don't know. I imagine in maybe another... I've got vacation next week, so maybe after that we'll get together and compare notes. But I don't know, it seems like people like it so far.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Yeah, it's been good. It's interesting-Josh:If I had to decide today, it's a keeper for me.Ben:Yeah, I would go ahead and switch.Starr:Oh yeah, me too.Ben:It's interesting to me, you alluded to this, Starr, as you were talking about comparing it to your products and how they approach... it's interesting to me the UI, even if it's the same kind of functionality, how much different takes on the user experience can make a different experience for the user. How it just feels different. Like, "Oh yeah, it's basically doing the same thing, but it just feels better for whatever. My mentality or our business." Fill in the blank there, but I thought about that many times. Honeybadger versus competitors. It's like, "Yeah, they're doing basically the same thing, but we do have differences in how we approach the UI and different use patterns that we think are more emphasized by our UI versus the others." And sometimes it's just a matter of personal preference. It's like, "Oh, this just feels better to me." One night I tried Python before I tried Ruby, and Python is like, "Oh, that's interesting," but then Ruby really clicked my brain. It's like, "Oh, it just feels better." And I'm sure other people have the opposite experience, but I don't know. It's weird to me and fun to think about the human part of these products. Josh:Yeah. And it's surprising, the strong opinions that people pick up just based on those experience things when they're basically the same, if they're doing the same thing. Some people, they either love it or hate it based on that.Starr:Yeah, that's true. Maybe it all goes back to whatever business apps you used in childhood. It's just whatever your mom made you for lunch, you're always going to love that.Josh:Yeah. It's like a nurture thing, nature versus nurture. You were exposed to these apps when you were young, and so it's just what you're drawn to.Starr:Yeah. I remember putting my little friend's contact details into Lotus Notes.Josh:Right. I had to program Lotus Notes.Ben:I got my first dev job because I knew Lotus Notes.Starr:Oh, nice.Josh:Lotus Notes was an important precedent at the time, I think.Starr:Yeah.Ben:Yeah. Yeah. It was the bomb. You could do some pretty serious stuff.Starr:Yeah. I kept having these jobs that weren't technically dev jobs, but ended up being dev jobs just because I knew how to write V basic macros for Excel. I'm sure a lot of people had that experience.Josh:The thing I remember doing in Lotus Notes was setting it up to ingest email from the outside world into whatever, the system. And thinking about it now, that project I've done over and over and over since then.Starr:It's Basecamp.Josh:And I'm still doing that project.Starr:It's Basecamp all over again. Oh no.Ben:If only there was a service that took in emails for you, and then you could just bring them into your app data.Josh:Yeah. I bet in 20 years, we'll be writing programs to accept email.Ben:Process emails, yeah.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah. When is this stuff going away? Technology changes all the time. When is email going away? They've been killing it for years. It's like fricking Rasputin. When is it going away?Ben:It's the cockroach of protocols.Starr:There you go.Josh:After the singularity, they'll still have to have a way to import it directly into your consciousness, and yeah, I don't know.Starr:Yeah. I hope the spam filtering is really good then.Starr:All right, well it was great talking with y'all.Ben:Likewise.Starr:Yeah. So this has been FounderQuest. Go to the Apple podcast and review us if you want. If you're interested in writing for us, we are always looking for fresh, new talent. Young authors looking to make their mark on the world of technical blog posts for SAS companies. And yeah, just go to our blog and look for the write for us page. I don't currently have any openings, but who knows? People flake out. So if you're interested in writing these reports for us too, get in touch. These quarterly intelligence briefings, if you want to be an agent for our intelligence service. All right, so I'll see y'all later.

Here is the exciting final part of this special three episode series! On this episode, Russell and Josh talk quite a bit about the new book Russell is currently working on! The new book will be the first (of possibly many) personal development book that Russell has written. We also get to hear why Russell loves to write books and why he thinks everyone should write one. So listen in to the final part of Russell and Josh’s “Outwitting The Devil” interview. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: What's up everybody. This Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the third and final episode from the Outwitting The Devil interview with Josh Forti. Hopefully you enjoyed the first two episodes. If you missed any of them, go back and listen to episode one, two and this is part three of three. In this one, Josh started asking me questions about my new books. Why I was so excited about Outwitting The Devil, by how I'm using this? Why I'm writing my fourth book and a bunch of other really cool things. So I hope you enjoy it. And you've enjoyed this interview series, please let me know, let Josh know. The best way to do that is take a picture of any of these on your phone, post them on your social media and tag me and him and let us know what you thought about the episodes. Thanks again, you guys. I appreciate you all for listening with that said, let's queue up the exciting conclusion of the Josh Forti, Russell Brunson Outwitting The Devil Podcast interview. Josh Forti: Okay. I want to do this because we're talking about all these amazing books and I don't know, this is probably like two, three weeks ago. Maybe it's a little bit longer that. You start hinting on Instagram about this book. And I'm like, "Oh my gosh. There's another book? What could it possibly be?" And then last week I'm out here and you started telling me about it and what it is. Russell: Showing you the deal. Josh: It's not a marketing book. It's the next piece and it's your first ever... And I don't want to spoil it for them. I'm going to say it's like your first ever take at personal development. Talk to us about this book. When's it coming out? How did this come about and the details of that, because I'm super, super excited for it. Russell: I think it was my only, hopefully. But I said that about Dot Com Secrets too. Josh: I don't believe that at all. There's going to be a trilogy for... Russell you're going to be writing books till you die dude. Russell: I don't know. Writing is so painful but this one, again, it's me coming back. We launched Traffic Secrets. The world goes chaotic and I have more time and I'm trying to just occupy my mind. Josh: Which by the way, how perfect time. My heart was completely broken when you had to cancel the Traffic Secrets event because I was supposed to speak to there. I was like, "No." But how perfect of a timing was Traffic Secrets when- Russell: There are pros and cons of it. It was really good from a selling book standpoint. It was really hard for making New York times bestseller list, which we actually hit, which I'm still freaked out about. It was tough because Amazon wasn't shipping books. Things weren't shipped, all sorts of chaos. They said books weren't essential and so like it was hard to hit lists because you'd sell 10,000 copies of books in a week but Amazon was waiting two, three, four weeks to ship them because it wasn't... The way that the lists work is, how many did you sell in retail outlets? How many do you sell on USA today? All the things. And so when you have the big push, but then some books aren't being counted four or five weeks later because Amazon doesn't consider them essential. They're not sure when they can glut. Normally it takes 10,000 books or something to hit a bestseller list. We hit over 100,000 to be able to do it. It was way harder, way more stressful, but we got it. But it was easier to sell because I had more time. Anyway, a lot of pros with that. Plus it was crazy because in the beginning of the book I talked about there's a storm coming and then literally it was like, we're in the middle it. You should give this book right now... Josh: Literally right now. Russell: I think I'm similar to you. I think a lot of people in our community where it's just like, my mind is always spinning. I can't stop. Josh: I cannot shut it off ever. Russell: It's like there's got to be something I got to be thinking about. And again, it was harder me to find stuff for me to geek out on inside of marketing and business. It was just hard to find the next... I don't know. Every level you get to, it's harder to find the next level. I'm sure there's time where Michael Jordan's like, "I can't find people to push me anymore." Where do you go? And it's just like- Josh: Yeah. Like Tom Brady in the NFL just completely dominating every team that's out there. Yeah. That's right. Russell: Anyway. So not that I'm that level or anything. Josh: Right. Right. Right. Russell: For me it gets harder and harder- Josh: Likewise. Russell: To find things. I have to dig so hard to find the gold. And so I started just looking again at some of these things. And that's when I stumble on this book and just like, every page is gold and it's like I'm lit up again. I'm on fire. Again, I talked about earlier, for me one of my highest values is ROI. What's my return on my investment. So I'm learning these things. I'm growing myself personally, but I'm feeling empty because I'm not sharing them. So it's like, "What's the platform?" That's why I'm like, "Everyone go read this." I need to have this conversation with somebody. So having Dave reading it, everybody can get to read it I'm trying to read so I can get this conversations. Then when you're like, "Hey, do you want to talk about a podcast?" I said, "Yes." You forged some of this stuff because it's in me and if I can't contribute, it seems like I'm wasting it. And so there was this, there was other things. And I started looking more and more. Right now I've got five kids. Three of my kids are teenagers now and teenagers have been way harder than I ever thought or expected. It's weird. Kids are really fulfilling, but man teenagers have been just... It's different for me. I'm feeling like I have to grow to understand myself, but to also understand them. And what I envisioned my kids as teenagers are going to be what it is, has been so much different. I think for me, at times it got me depression, sadness and these things. And I was like, "I shouldn't be depressed this time in my kid's life. This is the greatest time I could be with them but I got to shift my mind." So it was me trying to do some work on myself, to fix myself. Not fix myself, but to get myself in a spot where I could enjoy the season. And then number two is how do I serve them now at this point? Because I envisioned the way I was going to serve my kids was when my dad did. Where I was like, he drove me to wrestling practice and we traveled the world, we worked out super hard because that's what I needed and I assumed that that's what my kids are going to need and it's not. That's not what they want. They want almost the opposite of those things. I'm like, "But I have these gifts. These skills I can give you." They are like, "I don't want them." I'm like, "I can help you start a business." Like, "We don't care." I get them value money because they've always had it. It's like all these things. Every gift that I have, it's like all my unique abilities I want to give my kids, they don't want it. So I'm learning this thing of well, instead of me trying to give my kids these things that I think that were so valuable to me. It's like, I have to sit back and understand what's actually valuable to them, which is so much harder and I'm learning this process. And so as I'm going through this lens of trying to learn these things, understand them, trying to figure them out for myself and I'm stumbling upon things like this and other things. It just got to a point where I was like, "I need to write this book first off for myself." If anyone who's done it, there's this weird thing as you start reading, you start seeing connections. You don't see any other spot. I feel like God opens up insights to you. They're just magical. Like I remember- Josh: When you start writing. Russell: Yeah. Josh: Yeah 100%. Russell: You have to get deep in a topic, you have studied all these things to figure things out. And I remember the first time I really understood this is, after I finished Traffic Secrets, I wanted to reedit DotCom and an Expert Secrets to publish the trilogy. So I went back. I remember reading those books and I was like, "Where did this stuff come from?" I was like, "This is good crap. I don't remember saying this or thinking that." I couldn't remember and- Josh: Interesting. Russell: It's the weirdest thing going back and fighting things. Somehow that was given to me because that was not something that I just intuitively knew. And I feel like for me, I wanted to start the book journey because I'm searching for these answers. The premise of the book is not, "I have all the answers, let me give them to you." I'm in the season where I'm going through it again and let me share through I'm learning on this journey because I'm learning some amazing things. And as I'm sharing as I'm writing them, again these insights keep popping in and it's fascinating. So I'll be doing something, I'll be doing something and I have a doodle. I'm like, "Oh my gosh." I run to Dave I'm like, "Look at this." He's like, "What am I explaining?" He's like, "I never saw it before." New to that. It showed up when I'm in this intense time. And so it's been fun as I'm writing it because these insights are coming at a speed that they don't normally come in. Josh: And I think also- Russell: It's really funny. Josh: I think... Hold that train of thought. I want you to keep going on that. But I've noticed that as well, when it comes to reading books. Reading a book and then applying the book, those are two very different things. I have read Expert Secrets, Dotcom Secrets, Traffic Secrets. And I'm going through, I've not read the hardcover of Expert Secrets. I've only read the soft cover. So right now I'm going through and yes, two nights ago I started it and it's- Russell: You started the hardcover? Josh: Yeah. I'm going through, I'm listening to it and I'm reading it and I'm taking notes- Russell: Get the hardcovers. They're way better than softcovers. Josh: So I'm going through all this stuff. For the last four or five, six months, all I've been doing, I have no front end products of my own. I'm not building anything. All I'm doing is working with big campaigns on the backend. It's like full out stuff. We're doing stuff with cash phones. All these stuff is up and I'm going through and actually inboxed you. I was like, "Dude. People say they've read this book but they haven't." They've read the words, but it's totally different when you actually experience it. And you're watching where it all fits in and you start to see how it all clicks together. So that broke from the reverse angle of when you're writing it and trying to put it on in together is what you're talking about here. Russell: Yes. It's super fascinating. So it's been fun. I'm excited. So my goal, I'm trying to get it done by summer for it to be a launch in March. So if you published traditionally, this publishing schedule is really, really long. So if you are going to read it in March, I'd have to have it done by June. Josh: If we want to read in March of next year, you have to have it done by June this year. Russell: Yeah. Josh: Dang. Russell: So that's where I'm at. So I'm also with the first section of the book and there's four sections. Back then this month I spent the section number one and then that's where I'm at. Josh: Do we get to know what it's called? Do you have a title yet? Russell: I do. I don't want to show a title yet because I don't want someone going and- Josh: Oh, that's true. Russell: "You guys all suck." And buys those domains up and they start like SEOing me and beating me and all that stuff. But it's going to be cool. It's a study of two things. So I'll give you this part. This is the subtitle. So subtitle, something Tony Robbins talks a lot about, but it's the science of achievement and the art of fulfillment. These two things. How do achievers achieve? And then how do you actually get fulfilled? Because it's fascinating. I think- Josh: Interesting. Russell: I see my own life. I achieve something thinking that, "When I achieve this thing, I'm going to be fulfilled and happy and everything." And you achieve the thing and you're like, "I'm not happy." And you figure that achievement and fulfillment, they don't work hand in hand. It's a science of achievement, which that's why science achieves more scrutiny. It's like, "Here's a step-by-step process to get this result." I want to be state champion wrestler here's a step by step process. Boom, got it. I want to be a known American step-by-step process. Got it. I want to start a business, step-by-step. Science. It's not thinking, you just follow a process and you get it. So for me, achievements always come easy. Anything I ever want in my life I've achieved it because there's a science. I figured out. Fulfillment's art, it's different. It's not follow these steps and you become fulfilled. The yin yang of these two things. And it's so fascinating. I've been going deeper into it and seeing the pattern appear over and over and over again, all these different things. And how do you apply it to your life? And there's so many cool things in this book that don't necessarily talk about science of achievement and fulfillment but they're all in here. The patterns in here over and over and over again. So it's pulling it from all these sources and showing it to everybody, that's what the book's going to do and then how to weave it all into aspects of your life anyway. So that's- Josh: One of the things and I'm sure you'll talk about it, but will be the balance of those two things. Because it's early on in my very young career of being 27 years old, but it was all about achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve. And there's always my mom's voice in the back of my head, it's like, "Things won't make you happy." "I know mom." Russell: Yes they will. Josh: Yeah. Yes they will. And then you get there. There have been moments in my life where right now in this moment I am completely fulfilled or I'm completely content and it's just like, I don't know what could make my life better. And it's not when I achieved anything, it's not when I did anything. But in that moment, whenever I take a step back and think about that moment, I have very little drive to go achieve anything more. And there's that balance of how do I stay fulfilled and content while also being driven to go achieve. Because for me and this is something I'd wrestled with and talked to Katie about it. And I'm like, "It's either one or the other. I can't be..." And she's like, "There's always another option. There's never black and white." And so balancing the two of those and understanding that. Like you said, they don't go hand in hand. They're separate things, I think it's really important and something that I'm trying to figure out and learn. Russell: So I got frustrated about all the times I achieve something and I'm so frustrated, why do I not feel how I thought I was going to feel and leads to depression or frustration or whatever. But when you start separating these are two different things I can achieve and I want to achieve, but how do I get fulfilled in the journey or separately from it and you start anyway. It's been fascinating and learning so many cool things and it's going to be fun to start sharing with everybody. I'm going to probably start in my podcasts, start dropping more and more things then getting deeper and deeper. More of the thoughts are going be flushed out. That's the weird thing about writing a book too, is initially I'm like, "Here's what I'm going to write." I write an outline of what the book is going to be and I write chapter number one. I was like, "Now this outline makes sense. You write that one" Chapter two. And so it's like, it's this rebuild, rebuild, rebuild. And by the time it's done, hopefully we'll find out. It'll be the perfect thing that's like, here's the frameworks you need. And for example, this whole concept here, there's a chapter that's going to be taking the frameworks from this book and this is going to be the chapter walking people through this concept of faith and fear. This doodle is a rough draft. I just tell you I sent this to you today. I'm like, "This is not the perfect doodle. I saw it. I'm not going to post it down below yet because this is partially done." It's going to be perfect by the time the book's done. I'm still thinking through and trying to get it right. And making it a simple form where I can understand it and hopefully it makes it easy for people to apply. But anyway, it's pretty cool. I think everyone should read a book. I think everybody listening should set that as a goal because when you do, just the act of writing the book will change your board. And I think anyone will understand. And when somebody asks, "What are you doing?" You're like, "I'm writing a book." Josh: That sounds very cool. Russell: There's no much cooler than that. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Okay. I know you have a hard cutoff, so I want to be respectful of that here. So I want to end with one question here and that is specifically about reading books. It's interesting. I'm pretty involved in the ClickFunnels world. Those are my people as well too. And so those are the people that follow me and that I interact with and I talk to a lot and it's always interesting when I talk to people about reading versus action. And some people have this... I feel like there's weird thought that if you're a reader, you're not an action taker, which I'm like, "That's not true. That's not how that works." But anyway, for you, if you are early on in your career, early on in you journey of building your business and your funnels and putting everything together. Do you recommend? Going back and thinking of your life, were you a big reader early on? Did you do a lot of reading or were you more action taking and looking back, would you recommend people read more, take more action? What's that balance? Because it's very easy. I know for me, I'm making time to read and then that's all I want to do. I'm like, "This is amazing." And then I'll take action. And so what's that Balance there? And what do you recommend as far as reading versus action? Russell: It's tough because some people read just because you get fulfillment or like there's- Josh: There's a good feeling that comes with reading. Russell: Comes with reading. Josh: For sure. Russell: So- Josh: It's a fake sense of accomplishment. Russell: Yes. So this is my belief. I remember when I first got started, I was reading a lot, I was listening, I was going to seminars. I remember at first it always frustrated because I was learning all this stuff and I was getting it but I had nowhere to use it and I was trying to use it all. That's why I think I launched... I can't remember. A couple of funnels by measure. It was like a 106, 116 or something funnels I launched before ClickFunnels. And that's because every idea that came to me, I was like, "I have to create something." I create this and I create this. I was creating funnel and funnel and coaching program. I joined Dan Kennedy's mastermind and they talked about, "You should have mastermind groups." So at the event I launched a mastermind group. I'm like, "You should have phone sales." We started phone sales and "You should be doing seminars." We launched a seminar. Every idea that came, I launched it. But man, I got a point where I was drowning. Because we had 8,000 things we're doing and nothing really worked. And I remember always feeling guilty because these ideas are coming to me. I'm thinking, "These are gifts from God. These are inspiration. I need to have these things." And it wasn't until... I don't remember when. But somewhere down the line, I realized that, "I don't actually have to take all these different things and do them, but I can understand them." Because I enjoy learning, understanding. So I would take them into my mind and literally put them on a shelf. I remember there's this Dan Kennedy on how to do high ticket, air exclusive program. So when we were listening to it, there's talking about franchise and this. All of a sudden, this is amazing. So I was taking it because I enjoyed the learning of it. And then I was like, "I'm not doing this right now." I'm so stretched thin, but I enjoyed the learning. So I'm flying an airplane, listening to this audio book or whatever. If I'm going to put it over here, I'm just categorizing and I put it over here in my brain. Like, "Hey. If I ever wanted to go back and do that, I know where it's at or at least put over here." So I started learning because I enjoyed learning but I didn't have to implement everything. And I've put things in these different spots. At the same time I had a very clear vision. This is definitive purpose. I had a vision. So I'm trying to execute on something I'm trying to do. So as I'm learning, when something came that crossed my mind I was like, "That's the next step. I could grab it and plug it in and I could use it." If it didn't. I'm like, "That's awesome. Put it right here. Someday I'm going to use that in future." And I talked to… James Friel and I talked about because he has a Trello board. He calls his shiny penny Trello board where anytime you have a great idea- Josh: Yeah. I have one of those. Russell: Instead of trying to implement, he puts it on his Trello boards. Keeps your ideas. I think for most entrepreneurs, every idea is like your baby, like "This is the greatest idea of all time." Josh: Yeah. I have a Trello board called Josh's brain. Russell: Oh awesome. This pre Trello because I remember getting a note card. I had three by five note cards and when I had the ideas, I put them in there, I put them there. And somebody I'm going to come back to this and I get ideas and put them there. I kept putting them there either in a note card or somewhere else. And it's crazy. And I fast forward. Man, I think it's 19 or 20 years, I'm doing this now. So whatever it is. Almost two decades. And it's really cool because when I coach people now and this is my inner circle so I have people in here I'm coaching and someone would appear on stage and they're stuck with a problem and they're frustrated. They're like, "I don't want to do this thing." And all of a sudden out of the back of my mind pops up this thing and it comes into my- Josh: Exactly. Russell: I have this thing. I'm like, "Oh my gosh. Where did that come from?" It's because I learned it. Because I read this book here, I saw this thing over here and all these things. And so I think a lot of times we have to understand that learning is fun. So enjoy it. Don't be like, "I'm not going to read because..." Reading is awesome. Read, learn, do those things, but also understand, what is your mission? Stephen Larson talked about this two funnel hiking lives ago. He called it just-in-time learning. It seems like if you are going to read the book you need... I agree with that except for this is a better pastime than watching movies. So let's read, let's study. But having your path, this is my goal, this is where I'm going to go. If you join my coaching program, we're going to talk about what's the first funnel. That's what we focus on. Don't do anything else, just focus on that. You can learn other things, but categorize them or wait until you're ready. And then as you get pieces right. I need that, I need that and figure out the next steps. I think that's how I would do the yin yang of both of those. Because I'm the same way. I'm learning so many things or study things or I find things are awesome that I'm not going to use but someday there'll be someone I come upon that that nugget is going to be the thing that unlocks something for them and they're going to super grateful. So, anyway. Josh: All right. Well man, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. This is so much fun. We could talk for hours, but we do have to wrap it up there. We've got a little something to get to, so thank you man. I appreciate it. Russell: No worries. And hopefully all you guys, two things I want to say. Number one, I'd highly recommend reading this book and read through the lens of this. The first time I didn't know where I was going. So I was all over the place and just freaking out. But look at the lens of Faith and Fear of, I don't want to be a drifter. I want to be somebody spiritually, mentally, and physically free. Look at that and start looking at everything he talks about from this lens and just look at it as protections of you that will be there to get to the spot where you're learn 2% or how to keep yourself from becoming a drifter or if you are drifter shift yourself back. And looking at this, because it's this guide book of all the ways that the devil uses to shift you around. And when you're aware of it, man, it makes it so much more powerful. Josh: And- Russell: This is huge. Josh: The thing that I would say we didn't have time to get to it, but I would say too is understand that it's not... If you're religious, understand that there's probably going to be some things that the devil is like, "You don't need God, you don't need me." Some of the things that are going to be in there, like Russell said, 97% is good, 3% is bad. Don't let that prevent you from understanding the value and the power that's in this book because there is so much good stuff in this. And any single time that I've ever had success at anything when I look back, it follows very closely to the principles that were taught here, so anyway. Russell: That's awesome. And then wait until next March to buy my book. Josh: And I will be the number one affiliate. So hopefully you all can be number two, three, four. That's cool. That's going to be super, super cool. So Russell, thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Love to do it again for The Book of Mormon or something like that and all right. All right guys, that's it. Russell: Thanks everyone. Josh: As always, hustle, hustle. God bless. Don't be afraid to think different because those of us who think different are going to be the ones who change the world. I love you all. See you soon. Russell: Bye everybody. Josh: See you.

Niching Your Business With Bryn Harwood Josh: Who out there in podcast land has been told to niche or even micro niche. It's something that we have drilled into ourselves, you need to do this thing. And I've actually got a special guest, I’ve Bryn Harwood from Tradies accountants in Brisbane. And he's gonna be talking about the process and some of the past, where he's been and where he's gone and what the future looks like. So, Bryn, tell me a bit about where you came from? Like, what was your original business venture? Learn more about niching your business at dorksdelivered.com.au Bryn: Thanks for that, Joshua. Well, I started out as that generalist kind of accountant, so you know, suburban kind of firm doing 30 different industries and doing tax returns, doing company tax returns, doing a whole bunch of different kinds of things. And then one stage through the career I decided that it's kind of hard trying to really understand every different industry because you already know so much. So when you’re in general, it's really hard to give advice, specific advice to business owners because you kind of, there's only one of you. So what I decided was I was going to niche out. I looked at my database, and I had a fair few trade business owners. So I had some kind of builders, plumbers, electricians, and I liked working with those owners that had good businesses. So, at first, I thought, well, for marketing, what I'll do is I'll name it trader’s accountant, but it was still part of my original firm. So that's kind of the premise on how I started the idea of niching and how I kind of got into it. Josh: Okay, so it's kind of like a bit of a sub brand underneath the original umbrella. And then you had the, I guess already clients are already resonating with that brand. And naturally, you'd have to learn more about what they're doing and how their business works and the different tax advantages and equipment finance things that they're doing and whatever else, and that just allows you to build out the brand from there. Is that right? Bryn: Yeah, exactly. I started with the sub brand, as you said, and I actually labeled it -and this isn't a joke- I labeled it GFC Tradies Accountant. And that's not a joke. That's how I started. Obviously, I didn't consult too many marketers, I just came up with it, maybe a few too many beers. And then everybody said to me, why are we putting GFC in front of these? Like, what are you trying to tell us? Josh: Fortune tellers, not accountant at all. Bryn: Exactly. It wasn't a great marketing pitch. But to be serious with it. What I realized really fast was that it's more than just marketing. And I think if you're going to jump into a niche, from my experience, you have to jump fully into the niche. Try to hold on to your original database and then have a separate database. From my experience, and other people might be able to do it differently and it might work, but from my experience, it didn't work. And the reason for that is you kind of alienate your older clients. And then the new clients are kind of wondering why they're the older clients, so why they’re the other brands. So, I found a real disconnect. And it's almost like you've got to reach that moment where you're confident enough to say, I'm going to fully jump into this niche, and that's all I'm going to do. Which is the hard step because if you've got 100 clients on your books, you might have 30 clients that have one industry, and 70 that are in another industry that you still make a reasonable revenue. But for my experience, if you want to go into it, you need to get rid of the other 70, otherwise, it's just really a marketing campaign and you can probably just create a landing page, and do that if that's what you want to do. Josh: So, we haven't, I guess niched the same way you have, but I understand exactly what you're saying. So when we started our business back 13 years ago, we were the IT company that did everything. You call us up, there’s a problem with the VCR. Well, I can fix that for you. I'm not even kidding. I was fixing people's VCRs at that stage, not really the same task to fix someone's TV once and that was going back in the days. It was a big cathode ray tube. So your big fat TV. So I'm always the person who did everything that knew nothing, I guess, or knew something but not enough about everything. Then as things progressed onwards, I saw a bit more of a trend and Dorks Delivered, the original brand as it started, became an IT business. And then we had business efficiency experts that did all the automation stuff. And then we had asked about marketing, because it became too cloudy to see what it was that we're actually doing. And someone came to us and they said, we want to have our business marketed online. We want to have our LinkedIn marketing automated or something like that. And we'd go, yeah, okay, we can do that. And they were like, oh, we had no idea. You could do the names Dorks Delivered, and sound anything like marketing at all, and I'm like, Yeah, okay, we got to sort that out. There's definitely like you're saying about the GFC. I'm like, I can't bring up the business name of someone that I know that just changed business names, but if they move the space character, just one spot, it sounds like a type of operation that you get to remove puss from your body as opposed to an awesome IT business. In making that transition, you said 30% of your customers was sitting in the trading sub business banner. When you made the transition to jump out on your own as a trader’s accountant, did you find that there was less friction when it came to marketing, and the overall message was more easily heard because the tradie would come to you going I know you know what I need to have done? Bryn: Exactly right. I think that's probably the main reason you'd go to a niche is for that. But what I've learned is we've hired, you know, some really exceptional chartered accountants, and some really exceptional team members. And when you're just in one industry, you realise that the advice that you can start to give is actually really invaluable, you know, so we have knowledge on VBA. We have knowledge on QBCC, these are regulators that work in the trade space. We've worked with associations like the Australian Shopfitters Association, and through that we've worked with a fair few different shopfitters where now we're at the point where we can quickly look at a set of financials and see what's wrong with the financials, like quickly see what's wrong with the business. So we can understand, you know, things like contractors and the business models. And every industry is different. You know, we've had people come to us that, you know, wanted to set up a medical practice or that were in different industries, and we actually tell them when. So I've actually referred them to other accountants, and regularly do that now, like I will regularly say, we're probably not the right fit. And the reason is, is because what we do do, we do extremely well. And that's the only thing we do. Josh: Yep. And I think like, the big take home there for me is when someone has something wrong with their books, you can see what's wrong. You can see if they're spending 20%, 30%, 50% higher on their staffing costs, and they're spending 50% less in their marketing costs, and they're wondering about where their money is going. You could probably more easily drill down and say, hey, you need to sort of maybe consider taking a course doing this and dropping down some of these people's pays. Why are they getting paid so much? Is that a discussion that you could have? Bryn: 100%. It’s like, we can look at it and say, look, these are the risks. You know, if you're in the trade space, and you set up like this, this is a risk down the track, these are the regulators in that space. These are where the risks are of your company. This is the way you'd want to set your company up if you're doing XYZ, and then also just, you know, look over the financials and kind of say, look, you know, charge out rates for these, you're probably losing money there, you’re probably not as efficient as you should be here. You know, your GPs is other people in your field. So, you know, we have that real specialised knowledge now, and I mean, it's only probably been three to four years, but that's only going to increase because every time we hire people, they're only dealing with shopfitters, builders, contractors, that's all they're dealing with. So we know that industry inside out. And I think that is a big advantage with doing all these that I've done. I've talked to different business owners that have been worried about niching because I've thought, you know, then I'm going to be reducing obviously my size, like my client database, like it's going to go smaller. But I've always had the philosophy that you almost go inch wide, but mile deep. So no, we have clients from Melbourne, I did a webinar the other day, I had clients from Western Australia on there, clients in Sydney. So I believe that actually the trade business owners in Australia quite large, and that'll haven't actually reduced my overall client. I've increased it. But you've just got to think, I think pf it actually. In saying that, I'm not saying that everybody needs to niche. I've got some good friends that are partners and other accounting firms. And that said, why does every guru say we've got a niche, we don't have to, we can be accountants, and I think that's fine. I think there's a space for generalist accountants, and they do a great job. And you know, if their job is to do tax returns and financial statements, that's what their job is. And I think that's fantastic. I wouldn't encourage everybody to go and say, I'm going to go niche, look at my database and do it because I don't necessarily think that it's necessary to grow your business. It’s probably looking at your capabilities within and saying, you know, what can I focus on? What can I serve as externally? Josh: Yeah, and it comes down to what your end goal is, I guess. You can own a fish and chip shop and make a lot of money, and you can own McDonald's and make a lot of money, but they're very different things that the business owner is undertaking. One's buying a job, and one's buying an investment, it depends on what you're looking to be doing. Buying a job isn't a bad thing, if that's what you want to do, if you want to have that flexibility. Bryn: 100%. I speak to clients, you know, and that's one of the first things I say, what do you want? What do you want to get out of your business? Like some clients want us to work on the tools so I don't try and work clients off the tools if they don't want to do that, they might want to work on the tools, ran a crew of five people, you know, turn over a million dollars and have a couple hundred grand profit. I don’t believe the guru's and I don't listen to a lot of influences and say you know, niching is the only way to go for accounts and you need to have your own niche. I don't think you do need to have your own niche, but my advice on niching would be or from my experience, my experience share would be if you're going to do it, jump in 100%, don’t put your toes in learn the niche, speak to the clients and then start to get that extra skill. And it's not a quick process, you're not going to do it in six months, and then say I'm a medical expert now and I know everything about dentists. It might take you four years, until you really start to cut your teeth on it and really understand the industry. So you need to be patient. Josh: Have you heard of the Dunning Kruger effect? Bryn: No. Josh: It's a cognitive bias. It's where you start doing something. Okay, for instance, we'll talk about beer brewing offline beforehand. You might brew one beer and be like, I'm a brew master. I'm amazing. I can do everything. I know everything, and then you bring your second beer and go, oh, that one's stuffed up for some reason. And then you brew your third beer and you go, okay, now one was alright, maybe I'm going ok again and then you start mucking around with hops, and then you start doing other bits and pieces that didn't work or that did. Then then all of a sudden you realise it's a really, really deep subject. As you said, inch wide, mile deep. If you don't know how deep something is, the Dunning Kruger effect is this feeling that you've got a you've… a false feeling that you know everything about something. And interestingly, when you actually do know everything about something or close to it, you have this lack of confidence around the topic because you know how deep it's gone. And that's exactly right. So when you start jumping in there, and then being able to answer those questions that would, again, remove a lot of friction from sales. because somebody's like, oh, what would you do with XYZ? And you've got bang the answer straightaway for them. Bryn: 100%. And like, I'm still talking to business owners on things, like I'm still sitting in a board meeting or sitting with a builder. And they're saying, actually, we do this because of this, and this is how this happens. And I go, oh, wow, I didn't know that, you know. I find myself sitting outside in shopfitters presentations with you know, Pythor or one of the products that I use and go oh, wow, that product’s amazing, that actually shows the shop before they're built, I never knew that you could do that. So you know, even I've been in use for a while I think continually learning and sharpening that industry that you're in. Josh: Getting that industry knowledge, though, as well like being told about this new cool thing you think why is no one else told me this, it gives you a fantastic piece of information, a nugget of information that you can then talk to any of your other clients about, then you become that authority. Bryn: That's what it is. Like, I sat with a client the other day, and they were using a kind of generalist accountant and he sat with me for 30 minutes. And say I'm really happy with my accountant. But essentially, in 30 minutes, you've told me more than I kind of knew about the accounting, and he has a general accounting team. But he said, in 30 minutes, you’ve told me more than I knew over the last year and a half. And that doesn't mean I was going to change him. But it was just the fact that actually knowing the industry, knowing the software's he needs to use, knowing where the pain points are going to be. And knowing his next steps, like you know, if you only go to 10, these are steps. If you want to go to 20, these are the pain points you’ll have. That's the advantage you'll get from niching, but you have to be patient, it will take time to get there. And the marketing around it isn't instantaneous, like if you just go out and say I'm the medical doctor, no medical accountant. I mean, there are a lot of people in the niche space and a lot of the big firms have their own specialists in different industries as well. So there is competition, a lot of competition, and probably the same with IT. I mean, I've heard there are IT providers that just do pubs and there are IT providers that just do retail, which probably isn't a good space to be in right now, unfortunately. Josh: A great segue actually. Niching, luckily, I'm not in a single niche, but we do have a lot of shopfitters, and obviously they rely heavily upon the retail industry in the growth in the retail industry. And we have automotive businesses that we work with and we have people in the financial sector, so I'm lucky enough to say that we've got our eggs in a few baskets. But there is businesses that don't, and you haven't micro nation and you've diversified enough that it’d be very unlikely that you have the entire industry disappear. But if you have done something like I don’t wanna say silly, but it's not silly. But if you have done something where you're only focusing all of your efforts on to pubs, for instance, so servicing gambling machines and things like that. What do you do when everything shuts down, when hospitality disappears? Where we've put in a spot where you thought there was an industry that would never die, people keep eating, people keep going out and gambling and then you're told sorry, shops are shut for the next three months or more and nothing you can do about it. How did you make sure you didn't fall into that trap? Bryn: To be honest with you there, I was just lucky. Like when I went into it, some of the due diligence I did at the start was to look at the industry and kind of say, well, trade based businesses most likely aren't going to be outsourced because they don't really have robots that can go and put plaster up, go and do your electrical work or go and do your drains, so a lot of them are very nearby. So I thought automation was probably not going to kill that industry. So that was one of the things, and then the construction industry is a massive industry in Australia, obviously, I think 20% of employment comes from the construction industry. So it's a very big sector. But in your point, the Black Swan effect you know, none of this would predict that there's going to be a pandemic, and that’s gonna knock out a lot of industries. Fortunately for me, trade businesses were an essential service. And that wasn't by design, that was by luck. That's meant that a lot of my clients haven't suffered, although the shopfitters in particular have suffered, as you said, because they’re linked to the retail industry. But to answer your question, if you do niche, I think you are taking, you are almost part of that industry now. So the same risks they have, you have. So if you have a range of different industries, you're diversifying that, and then if the sun go down, you are as deeply impacted. For me, some day with some of the things I looked at, and I kind of thought to myself, well, if we ever get to the point where there's a robot that can come to your house and do your fix your lights and do your plumbing, we're probably at the point where none of us have got jobs. The accounting’s gone as well at that point. I’m like well, that risks are probably can’t mitigate. Josh: So I'm in a great industry, obviously, IT, because I'm the guy fixing the robots. But the good news is they're never gonna take everyone's jobs, because moments before you think they're gonna be able to accomplish the tasks, you'd have to turn them on and off again. I think it's kind of like when you look at the car, the car killed those horses jobs, these horses had quality jobs and now we're getting new shoes all the time and that this bloody car came along and stunk up the place, but you don't really look at it like that. That is a horse that is automated. It's a car, it's just an automated horse. And there's so many different metaphor vehicle, there's certainly other vehicles like that that have just automated the process. The calculator automated the abacus. Excel automated the calculator. It doesn't remove jobs though. I think it just shifts your focus to things that are more important. Bryn: Exactly. I think that's the thing, isn't it? Like when one creates another industry creates from that, and I think, you know, in the accounting space, I think you know, there's a lot of automation happening. We use Hub Dock, some people use Receipt Bank or Hub Dock or one of these programs and that basically puts copies straight into the system. There's a few different programs that now sync to your job management software and put your APs or your purchase orders to match the bills and they put them straight into the system. What I found with that is this still uses behind that, because there are still people that have got to sit there and make sure it matches and press the buttons and make sure that happens. So, I don't necessarily think, and there's still a very big space for strategic accounting, and I think they're always well, you know, I think in my lifetime, there probably always will be a place where you need actual advisors. So that automation was a little bit of a risk, but I guess I looked up, and I guess every business owner out there is probably looking at that risking their business to some degree. Josh: Well, if you're not automating, it's again, if you're running a fleet of sports cars and horses, it's not going to work. You need to adapt and change with the times. Automation has been around us for years and years and years. It's just it's become a bit more of a buzz term lately. I think like, when you look at checkout chicks and checkout dudes, jobs that have been automated by those little telling machine things. If their job, if it can be automated with a machine that's that big, it means whatever that we're doing was not going to be advancing their life in the future anyway, it was just having them sit there and earn some money in a brain dead job you could do with a hangover, and I'm getting ready to get some fire word, I just said then, but if you can have a machine that does this, that doesn't remove jobs, all it does is as you said, shifts the focus of the jobs to the people that are generating the software, entering the codes to make sure that it can be done, making sure that every item is weighed appropriately, and making sure that the one person is actually looking and doing everything and I'd imagine, it's the way with the all industries it's going to happen. Bryn: I think so. I think like from my experience now when I'm dealing with builders or shop fitters. contractors, like, the biggest thing we're teaching them is it's all software, these jobs now are all software already. Like, if you're a shop fitter, and you're not using software that can track GP real time, then you're going to get burned by other shop fitters because it's amazing now, the technology like everything sinking, everything's linking, and you've got people that can see the GP on every shot that you're building at one time. And that's probably where I'm seeing the good entrepreneurs in those fields are really, really taking off. And the ones that are still on the old based systems are struggling, wondering how the quotes are coming in so cheap. You know, theres something wrong with the industry because people are taking things below cost. It's not necessarily the case. It's because these other businesses are more efficient, exactly. And they do that for people like you, like your companies that come in and look at where the efficiencies are, what systems they can use, how they can automate processes, and yeah, the clients that I work with have been doing that differently have a long way ahead above the other. The clients and on to starting to slowly kind of die off, if that's a good way to put it. Josh: As you said, you've got to be ready to adopt, you've got to be ready for the future. And if you got to be niching, you've got to be ready to make sure that your eggs are in multiple baskets or in a basket that is capable of some level of contingency should risk such as the pandemic come available, which brings me to my next point. So I've looked in going, okay, how deep do I want to niche? How much do I want to look into it? This is silly Josh engineering mind going into gear and I think okay, I'll look through the census data, I'll look at the growth data. I'll look through the data of the population and what different areas and sectors are doing whatever, and then try and work out where the growth pattern be from there. So you are fortunate that you had a number of trade types of clients already working with you and then you build the business upon that spot. Did you look into the census data or the growth? Bryn: We did actually look at a bunch of different figures like how many trade businesses there were, the size of trade businesses, we did do a bit fair bit of due diligence in regards to that. And I think, you know, factor, that kind of point that you're raising around a niche is that you are kind of taking that risky industry. So you want to do the due diligence to find out as much information as possible as you can about the industry. And I think you could go further and micro niche, like, you could be a plumber’s accountant, you could be, you know, you could be an electrician’s accountant, or you could go that far into a micro niche. And then I guess you really want to look at that industry. Lke one of my mentors actually said to me, my good friend said, the best entrepreneurs in the world aren't the best entrepreneurs, they pick the best industry. And that really resonated with me because I thought about that for a while and he said look at Elon Musk, for example. He's picked renewable energy. And where's everything going in the next 10, 20 years? It's renewable energy, like people don't want the pollutions out of hand down. It's cheaper and proved it's cheaper than coal now. I think PwC, can have their reported that it is actually cheaper to use renewable energy. And so back to that point, I think the best entrepreneurs actually look at the industry they're in and it's not by luck that they end up in any race that makes sense. It's being able to look ahead and see well, where are things going? Obviously, right now, maybe, and, you know, maybe the retail industry, bricks and mortar is not where you want to be. Because no matter how good you are at retailing, right now, if you're not running an e-commerce business, maybe that's not the space. But maybe if you're running an e-commerce business right now, you're Amazon, you're riding the right industry. And I don't think these people, I don't think people like Bezos or Musk, these people. I don't think it's by luck they've ended up in those industries. I think they have looked forward to going what's going to be the biggest thing in 10 years’ time? What industry is that going to be? How people going to leave? How are people going to behave? What are the things people are going to do? And then they focus their services around that. Josh: Yeah. And before everyone thinks that they're obviously not fortune tellers, but I think there's probably 100,000 other people that have tried looking into the future, and then they just bet on the wrong horse. And we don't know about them, because they bet on the wrong horse. Bryn: I would have never known that trade services was going to be an essential service in a pandemic. I never looked at that. And I read the Black Swan. I actually read the book. I went through it and I thought, well, how can you predict a black swan? I could never have predicted that, and that was luck. But some of the factors that I went through in that was that I thought that they couldn't be automated. I thought there was always a space. New houses were being built continuously in Australia. The construction industry has always been a booming industry. We are still like under supply of houses even to this day, there's an under supply of houses in the Brisbane market, maybe the Sydney and Melbourne market as well. So if you look at those factors, I think there's going to be a lot more houses that are going to be built. And there's going to be a lot more big construction projects like intercity rail. You know, in Melbourne, there's lots of projects that are being done there. Josh: It’d be different for living in a city that was 3000 years old, and you could knock down buildings, you had all these different restrictions, it'd be a different scope or we're in a faux landscape, beautiful land down under that we can't really be complaining too much. Even in this time of unknowing, we're in and I'm going to plug Australia obviously, we're in the best country in the world. We've got the best health care, we've got the lowest death rate mortality rate from the pandemic, and we've got all these different grants and everything else that's coming through that's helping businesses out, like I can't complain. I'm pretty, pretty happy with where we're at. Bryn: You know, in Australia like you say, we’re in the place to be. I mean, we've got obviously the mining industry, it's going to continue, we've saved a lot of money. I think we're well ahead GDP per debts pretty low here. You know, they've got the money to spend on the population. And pumped money into construction, which is probably the best move. I know all the governments have now announced all these massive projects. And I think that's just going to get people in jobs and going to keep the economy kind of moving along as we come out of the back end of this. Just on a personal level, we went out to the coffee shop in the weekend. And, you know, as soon as I opened it up, and we were at a coffee shop, and we're at the shops, and we're spending money, and I think that's what people will do, you know, they'll go back and support local businesses. So I think in terms of tourism, I see people traveling, you know, domestically now. Go to Northern Territory, go to Townsville, go to Cairns, you know. You can't really go to Asia or Europe or anything like that maybe for the next however long that's gonna be, but we can go and have a good holiday at the Great Barrier Reef. Josh: All the overseas listeners hear that, you can't even come see our beautiful place, not for a bit, but it's pretty good. For any of the tradies out there that are listening, you've obviously heard a bunch of advantages to working with Bryn’s fantastic business. It'd be worth jumping across the tradiesaccountant.com and checking out the voodoo that he does, and booking in some time to make sure that you're doing everything that you can be doing to automate your processes and make sure that you're getting the biggest bang for buck in this time of the pandemic. So, before we head off, Bryn is there anything else you'd like to go through, we'll cover off on? Bryn: The point of the podcast today was around niching. And I just say, you know, if that's something that you're thinking of doing, I think the main experiences I gave is, like I've said earlier, head into it, and do it. Research the industry thoroughly, try and although you're not Nostradamus, try and predict what's going to happen in the next 10 years and try and kind of have some something's weather, collect as much data as you can, and have the data almost make the decision more than the intuition to some degree and then speak to other people that have done it. You know, if you're an IT guy and you want to go and niche into the trade space or something like that, come and speak to me or if you're you know, whatever you're wanting to niche in, speak to other people in that industry, and get to know as much as you can. That would be my main, probably three kind of points to share with the listeners on how to niche if you want to niche. But I would also say to that as a caveat on the end, don't listen to the influencers because you don't have to niche. Josh: Terms and conditions apply. I agree. And that's why I want to get you on the show because we have had people that have been very against it and we have had people that are very for it, but I haven't had anyone that's actually walked the walk and talk the talk and you've got a biased opinion, obviously, you're running a business that has niche, but it's still good hearing the journey that you've come on, how you got to where you're at and what you've seen is some of your advantages of doing that. Bryn: Thank you for having me on. I've enjoyed it thoroughly and I've enjoyed the beers that we've had. Josh: Oh, now everyone knows we've been having sneaky bees. Oh no. Oh, no. I've loved having you on as well, and if anyone else has anything to say, leave a review, jump across to iTunes. Give us some love and give us some feedback. Everyone else out there, stay good, stay healthy and look forward to talk to you again soon.

Improving Your Business Process Flow with Pip Meecham Josh: Good day everyone out there in podcast land, I've got Pip here from ProjectBox. She is an absolute wiz-kid when it comes to any automation around your business and process flow, and making sure that your systems are working the way your systems are meant to be working. So Pip, tell me, how do you know when a system is broken and how do you know when to fix it, if you've always been using a broken system? Pip: That's a really good question. The way you know it's broken is customer complaints, frustrated staff. There could be a host of extra time issues, which then all comes back to frustrated staff as well, at the end of the day. Any kind of bottleneck, generally, you will notice things are starting to go wrong, but it can take some time to kind of pick up on that as well. Pip: Something could break and then six months later you'll finally pick up on it. It can take a lot of time without having someone come in and look at how you're actually doing things to pick up that things are any kind of different, if that makes sense. Josh: Yeah, that makes sense. For me, my big rule that I tell all of my staff is, "Have I asked you once?" Josh: They say, "Yes." Josh: I said "Have I asked you twice?" Josh: They go, "Yes." Josh: "Okay. Then I don't have to ask you a third time because you've already automated it." Josh: If you've had a problem come up more than once or you think that this situation is going to come up more than once, then template it out and automate it. You're saying, complimentary to that information, you would also make sure that the user experience, not just repetition more so the user experience isn't broken. Pip: Yep, and most people don't think like you. Most people don't have that trigger to go, "Hey, we've done this three times." Or, "Hey, this has gone wrong." Pip: Or anything like that, they just keep going with what they're doing, and there's nothing to really trigger that until something big happens, which could be a customer complaint or someone within the team saying something. It's a really tough one, if you're not systems tuned, most people don't pick up on it. Josh: It comes down to people continue doing what they think they're meant to be doing for an extended amount of time. Not knowing that what they're doing isn't what they should have been doing. Pip: It's rare to find people who have that kind of continuous improvement mentality to go and actively look for things. I actively try and break stuff all the time but that's my mentality. Josh: Yep. You're a hacker. That's exactly what a hacker does. Pip: I'm a breaker, not a hacker. I don't get in, I just break it. Josh: It can be both. You and I are very similar in that regard. We try our best to work out what is the best way to achieve something the fastest, most efficient way. Pip: Yeah. A to B. Josh: Yeah, and automation doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of code with loops and all sorts of other stuff that has an input and an output. It can be an input and output, but it can also be just a procedural document that allows for you to know when a staff is following something, very similar to how McDonald's work. Josh: They go through and they create an ice cream, a burger or whatever it is. And when you get it, whether it be in America, Canada, Australia, it's always the same crappy burger, but it's the same burger. And it's being made by a different 14 and nine month year old child or teenager, but it's the same burger, the same process. That's just come through repetition and the document that they've read, and knowing that this is the way that it works, this is the most efficient way. Pip: A lot of people don't think like that. Josh: No! Pip: There's so much decision fatigue in business where people wing it all the time, and they lose a lot of time because they're doing that. Whereas if you've got a straight out, set out processes. First do this, then do this, then do this. Automation kicks in to do some of that for you. It's so simple and it's so streamlined. Whereas other people are just weighed down because they're so overwhelmed on what to do next or how to do it. Josh: I'm going to talk on behalf of all the bloody Australians out there and say, this is the best time to be looking at your processes. Everyone's in lockdown. I'm sure everyone's working 120% of what they were before. That's why Bunnings is full of people, because no one's actually working. Pip: I can hear so many hammers and chainsaws around my neighbourhood. Josh: Me too. I'm like, "Yeah, everyone's really working hard guys. Are you all labourers at home?" Josh: Anyway, everyone's working at home and they're working on the house, which is great, but you should be working on yourself and on your business. This is the best time. When everyone goes, "I don't have enough time for that." Josh: Bang, this is enough time for that. You've got the time to do it now and this is the perfect time. They should be engaging in people like yourself and seeing what you can do to help them out. And as you said, there's always room for improvement and I'm not going to say what I do is right. But it's going to be better than not doing it at all. Pip: The problem is as well, is that people get so caught up in their own business that they can't see it, outside. What they're looking at- Josh: Can't see the forest for the trees. Pip: Yeah. They've got tunnel vision, like there's nothing else going on except what they, used to doing, what they know they need to do. Whereas I would come in and something that I kind of love doing and it's really wrong, but I love going in and pulling people's processes apart, and looking at the ripple effect that everything has on each other as well. Pip: Because everyone always talks about, a lot of people are changing technology at the moment because of everything that's going on, they're going, "Right. We're going to use this. We're going to implement new tools to do this. We're going to do this and blah, blah, blah." Pip: They look at that as a single element and they're not thinking about what's happening before and what's happening afterwards. So people are putting these new things in place and they think it's fantastic, but stuff is still falling over because they're not taking into account what's going on around it. The ripple effect. Josh: Yeah, exactly. The butterfly effect, ripple effect. It comes down to a big thing that people don't do enough. I started doing it 13 years ago, 14 years ago and then didn't realise how much of an impact it's had, but business plans. Why are you in business? Why do you exist here? What do you want to achieve? What are you going to achieve in one month, one year, five years, we've all heard it. Pip: Hate it. Josh: I started writing them. I'm like, "Uh, this is stupid." Josh: Then I wrote it and then thought, okay, let's see how this goes. Then I've looked back on some of them and I thought, wow, I've got so much more maturity, growth, direction. And some of the things that I thought were really important then, are no longer important and some of the things that are important now, I would never have thought I was even going to be doing. Josh: But being able to look back on what you've been able to achieve, lets you see the growth that you've done. That's the same, when you create these processes that sit there and can run autonomously or be running by someone else that's not you. You're able to have these processes running and then look at them from a distance to go "Hmm, how else can I tweak that?" Josh: While you're not sitting there being the driver. If you're always driving around, you're never going to be able to really see the sites out the window. Pip: It's being able to remove that connection. Josh: That's right. Pip: Cut the heartstrings. Josh: Absolutely, as long as that's what you want to do in business. I will say, straight away when I started my first business, I was the main driving cog and I was the person that did all the things in business, and I earned all the money and I earned all the debt. it was interesting, and good and bad. But overall, I didn't want to be the cog. I wanted to own the cogs. I wanted to have the systems, have the process to be able to step back. Josh: That's not for everyone, if you read any book on business or any masterclass, that's what everyone apparently wants, but there's businesses that we work with. One in particular, he's a cartoonist and he's big driving motivator is he just loves drawing. He said, "It's a lifestyle business." Now, to be fair, his wife's in a lovely position where she's earning enough money that he could have that decision. So, lucky boy. Pip: Yeah, but I get it. People always ask me what I want to do with ProjectBox. I don't ever want to stop actively getting into people's businesses and looking at their processes. I legitimately love that stuff, as geeky as it sounds, and people look at me like I am just stupid and crazy, and I'm off with the fairies, but I love it. I get this sense of, it's like a thrill with huge endorphin rush. When you go in and you help people piece this stuff together. I don't want to lose that, but I also want to be able to grow the company. Josh: Yeah. It's always about the balance. You need to make sure that you've got that interest. As I said, why did you get into business? Work at why you're in business, and this is, you brought this up earlier, probably not everyone's mentality, but when I first started Dorks Delivered in 2007, I thought, okay, I want to do this right. I've now got a trust and I've got a company, I've got all this stuff and all these structures. Josh: Let's make sure that I'm getting rid of any of the tasks that I don't like doing. And I thought, what do I like doing? Hate doing bookkeeping, hate doing invoicing, hate doing the car logbook. I thought, this sucks, so I created a process. I created an app back then, or was it a web based app. It worked on the Symbian mobile system for anyone that's out there that cares. Josh: It allowed for you to jump in there and see, as a technician, I had contractors working with me, they'd be able to enter where they're going and would work out their home address to where they're going, the amount of kilometres, how much to charge and how much to put on that invoice. Josh: They'd then get there and they'd type any prices and it'd automatically work everything out and then click submit or come up with a PayPal and they could get credit card details straight through their phone, right then and there, and this is 2007. Josh: So I built all that out and it was because I hated all the invoicing stuff. You could take photos and attach invoices and attach expense records, all sorts of things like that. You could do all that. I built this because I hated doing it. Now, not everyone's capable of building it and totally understand that, but that's why you bring in professionals that can help you out. Josh: The actual process of building it took me several hundred hours. Now, if I looked back and thought, would it have been more beneficial for me to have just learned how to do the invoicing and just done that and in a repetitious way? Possibly, but it wouldn't have been as fun, would it? Josh: And I've learned so many more skills and that's kind of what you're getting at. You get to learn. You're always growing, expanding and being in business is about being able to delegate. Whether that be in a digital sense through scripting and automation, or through staffing and process documentation, it's being able to delegate to grow your business. Josh: If you had to pick the top three things that a business owner should be considering with the way their business is set up and what they should change, what would you say they should be? And how can they achieve those for, let's say we're in lock down 'til September, yeah? Pip: Yeah. Josh: I think that that's probably likely. So what would you say, how can they do those between now and September? Pip: Yep. The biggest one is how information is flowing from one system to another. So no double data entry, too many people, literally they'll get it in one format and then be copying and pasting it into other programs. Stupidly time consuming and massive room for human error as well, because someone has to do that. That's a really big one. Josh: Yep. If you're using a pen, remove it. Stop using a pen. Stop having customers fill out forms with a pen. Pip: Definitely another one, try and go digital where possible. Josh: Absolutely. Pip: The number of people who are still doing it, there is a place for pen and paper. As much as I'm very much a digital person, when I am holding process mapping sessions or the brainstorming creative stuff, I have a roll of butcher's paper. It ends up running down my hallway and I'm literally dragging my computer down the hallway on my hands and knees filling out this paper because that's how I work there. It's really quick for me to draw arrows and then it gets turned into obviously digital [inaudible 00:00:12:31], the paper goes away. Sounds like a waste but I know that that is how I work best. Josh: I love that because I'm on computers for hours and hours, not because I have to, because I want to. I could spend 18 hours a day on a computer just working because I love doing it. You have people like Gary Vee say, "Work harder, work smarter." Josh: Well now what? I'm like, "Well, just do what you love doing." And I genuinely love doing it, but I also love the feeling of paper in my hands. And I've got a big whiteboard inside the house, like a four and a half metre by three by two metre whiteboard. I'll write up with my partner, Sarah, any of the new processes that we're going to be going through, any of the if-then statements we're going to be popping into any of the automations and make sure that we've written that out because it's easy to modify it and it changes your perspective. And get this everyone, it removes all those, how many times have you had a push notification from Facebook while you were dealing with butcher's paper? You don't have any of that. Pip: It's no distractions. Josh: No distractions. How good is that? It's great. Pip: Yeah. But it brings out the creativity as well. It's like going back to that cave person thing where we're drawing on walls. Obviously, there are some people that entirely a hundred percent digital is going to work for them. Most people, that's not the case. I know people who will still take their to do list and then send it to a VA to transcribe it into a project management tool because that's how they work. Pip: They just can't get on and do it, so they've delegated it to somebody. Yeah, get digital where possible. The next big one, and this sounds really stupid, but clean out your computer filing systems. I'm generalising here, but a lot of people it's like going to the supermarket where all the shelves have been knocked over and everything's been stirred together and trying to find fish in the fruit and veggie aisle. It is, looking for medicine and it's down in the freezer. Josh: And after a while the whole process stinks. Pip: Yeah. So it's taking time to sort out where everything is stored so that if a client rings, same with like your CRMs and project management tools, give everything like a cleaning over. It's a really good time to be doing that now, so that you should be able to find anything within about 10 seconds. No longer. Josh: Yep. I did a podcast a few months ago on defragging your filing cabinet and then your computer, or something like that. That's probably a cooler name than what I called it. But people do, we go into people's systems, I'm not going to say who it was, but I went into someone's system, they had two monitors and they had about 500 icons now. Pip: On their desktop? Josh: On the desktop. Anyone that has two monitors, if you've ever tried to put 500 icons on the desktops, you'll notice they don't fit on two desktops. So he had icons that he couldn't even see, they were on his two desktops. And you can't scroll up and down on a desktop, so they were just in the abyss. Pip: And for a lot of people, those computers die and all of that is gone. Josh: Gone, and they use these obscure systems where they go, "Okay, let's have this cloud of files that store on the right hand side of the desktop." Josh: Then you do a Windows update and then everything rearranges to automatic, and then you go, "Oh no! This is going to take me days to fix up my icons." Josh: Just fix it up now, you've got this great opportunity. That's great advice. That's a really good one actually. Pip: Yeah, nothing should be on the desktop. Josh: No. Well, you haven't seen my computers yet but I've got eight icons and it's the things that I use commonly, and use all the time. Pip: And there's shortcuts. So the original files have safety elsewhere. Josh: Somewhere else. Pip: Stored properly, with just shortcuts. And shortcuts is a great thing too, because most people will just copy the file, so there's two copies. So I update one and then they'll go to move it and not realise what's going on and go, "What file do I use now?" Pip: And end up with three, four, five, six or 10 different copies. So creating shortcuts, it's something that not a lot of people take advantage of. Josh: Shortcuts are great and I'm not going to get into heaps of detail on shortcuts, symbolic links and other bits and pieces of IT, but shortcuts are great. People should be using shortcuts. And in a filing cabinet, traditionally, you have things sectioned and it could be A to Z, but most of the time it's warranty information, ATO letters, bank statements, all that. Pip: Categories, yeah. Josh: Your computer systems, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. The way that I like to do it is, what would you share with your mum? What would you share with your partner? What would you share with your business partner? What would you share with your staff? What would you share with your nana and what would you share with the world? And then make sure your hierarchy has things in those categories and then from there then have projects inside those. Josh: For me, I've got family, personal, business, the three main ones. Then inside personal, it then stems off into different year categories for photos and things that used to go into your personal, it goes to photos. And then it has different years that these photos were taken inside each year, it then has different events for each of those years. And so if someone said, "Ah, do you have any photos from my 21st from way back when?" Josh: You'd be able to go, "Yeah, no worries." Josh: Click, click, bang, done. I had someone actually, and I've been a bit of a stickler for organisation for quite a while. I had someone say, "Oh, remember we did that school assignment on moths?" Josh: And I said, "Yeah." Josh: Said, "Oh man, if only I could see what my assignment looked like then." Josh: Anyone who knows me knows I'm a bit of a tricky dude. I happened to have acquired his assignment through the school systems back then, so I gave him a copy of his assignment. Pip: Wow. Josh: He's like, "What the hell? How'd you do that?" Josh: And I'm like, "Yeah, no, it's pretty weird, eh?" Josh: Having a hierarchy that works for you and the reason I say that those different categories to start off with, like the personal, and then the things you'd share with your nana or your mum and things like that is because if you are using different tools like Dropbox, you can then say, share this folder out to whoever, and it doesn't matter. And you know it's not going to have personal stuff. Pip: It gives people a great place to start because half the problem with this stuff is just getting started instead of looking at it going, "Oh my God, I've got like 10,000 files I need to sort out because they're all sitting in my downloads folder." Josh: Yep. The first five minutes is the hardest. Pip: Setting up that initial structure and then just, yep. Josh: Setting up the initial structure, and this is something I would've done on butcher's paper or would have done on the whiteboard. You just write it down and go, "Okay, that makes sense. Okay, that's sensible." Josh: And then you look at and go, "Okay, who's going to have access to what? If I give access to this folder, everyone has access to that." Josh: Obviously I'm talking a bit into the security stuff as well as just the organisation, but I just find if you start with security first and then organise around that, it'll make your life very easy and harder for people to break into your stuff. Pip: Definitely. Josh: As things become harder and harder. Pip: I guess my final one would be reviewing the tools and the software that you're using. Use the time to go in and look at all the individual platforms and work out if there's any overlap, because quite often we sign up to things or people recommend things and we don't really do a lot of research around it. So more often than not, the tools are capable of doing more than what you think and you can actually condense those down, or you can start to get them to talk which brings us back to first point. Josh: Yep. I would agree completely that and tools evolve even after you build them, they evolve over time and you look at some of the things and you go, "Man, that never did that before." Pip: It's really knowing and understanding exactly what that tool is capable of doing. Josh: It's going through it, having a look. Pip: Hey, you can't break stuff. Josh: Exactly. Just have a muck around then. That's great advice, especially as I said, while everyone's at home, hopefully with a beer in your hand, hypothetically we are having a beer, possibly, unless you listen to this at 7:30 in the morning, then we're definitely not. But it's a great time to be doing that and be jumping in and making sure that your systems are ready to go gangbusters. Pip: Exactly. So that as soon as things take back off again, you're ready to go. Holes have been plugged, you know what's what, you know what's happening by when, by who and how. Josh: Yep. And the cutovers, if there are programmes that you don't have to get rid of, you can't get rid of it because one thing does something really well and then another thing. We use ActiveCampaign internally. We're using another IT programme called ConnectWise, up until recently and ConnectWise did email marketing very poorly, but it did ticketing and invoicing really well, which ActiveCampaign didn't. Pip: That's like I said to you before, I use ClickUp for my sales dashboards because I couldn't get the data out of ActiveCampaign, But it's knowing that I could do that and understanding that. Josh: Yep. And that's where having a document on what the cutovers are, at least let you know where data is meant to be stored. The flow of data is very important. Knowing where your master, your primary, your truth data I guess, where you'd say this is where everything is pure. And then if people have entered dodgy records or transcribe things incorrectly somewhere else, then you can start to work out where the other stuff is. Pip: Go back. Josh: The last thing you want is if you've got five systems that you're running, as I've heard, or in a lot of American talks, "the silos of chaos." Josh: You have all these silos and you just can't control them and can't manage them and just everything gets out of sync, and then it gets out of whack. This is a great time to be bringing in people, especially like people from ProjectBox, that's able to look at your systems, integrate your systems and make sure that your data is staying the same between all of them, and you don't have any overlaps with your processes, and you're running an efficient shop because ultimately you don't know what you don't know until you know it. Pip: Yeah, exactly. The number of people that I've met or that I've done work with, who you ask the question, "How is this bit happening?" Pip: And they look at you and they're like "What do you mean? I know how that's happening." Pip: I'm like, "Cool. Lay it out for me. Tell me what's supposed to be happening at every step." Pip: And they either can't or we start talking, they're like, "Oh, well that should be happening." Or "I wish it could do this." Or, "Someone's supposed to do this." Pip: What they think is happening in their head is completely different to what is actually happening. Now a really good time to be looking at that stuff as well. And for the businesses who is super busy right now, this is the time where they will probably start to notice where those holes are. Josh: Yep, absolutely. It's interesting times, businesses are either crazy or quiet, or crazily quiet. I think there's a lot of good take-homes there. People need to be jumping in, making sure their systems are good. Their filing processes are good, and that you are engaging in people services. So if people did want to jump in and get a hand throughout South East Brisbane, or what is your reach with ProjectBox? Pip: So South East Queensland, Northern New South Wales, but because of what I do, I can do it remotely. So realistically, anywhere around Australia and New Zealand as well, I've got quite a few clients over there too. Josh: We're going to chuck a link down there to ProjectBox so you can check it out. Is there anything else you'd like to cover off, other questions that we haven't gone through? Pip: No, I'm pretty sure we got it. Josh: Yeah, cool. I've loved having you on the show and if anyone else has any feedback or bits and pieces, I'd like to say jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us some comments or a review and everyone out there stay healthy, stay well and start automating. Catch you later.  

Welcome to Fathership. This week looks a little different than the previous episodes because we are doing an Ask Me Anything! I’m welcoming previous cohost from the Edge-ucation Podcast and longtime friend (and father of 4) onto the show to answer your questions! We sourced too many questions from our social media to answer in one shot, but we covered as many as we could and will definitely be back for round two. I chose Josh to cohost with me again for multiple reasons: One, we’ve got chemistry. Lots of it. Two, He’s never hesitated to tell me what he thinks of me, bad or good. Three, he and I could not have different lives if we tried, and I feel like that gives us a broad range of experience to speak from. This one goes into some pretty serious (and some not so serious) topics, so buckle up for one hell of a ride.   2 surprise questions to break the ice from one cohost to another. What does it feel like to be a dad? What is your least favorite part of parenting? Have you sacrificed your dreams for your children? How did you feel when you first held your firstborn in your arms? What is the craziest thing you’ve done for your daughter that your younger self would have never done? What is something you take very seriously that your partner doesn’t? How do you navigate that? Do you let your kids in on household finance or allow them to live in “bliss”? What does it mean to be a father to Josh   “I was a dad really young and I still wouldn’t change it for anything.” - Josh “I’m proud of my children, I’m proud of my family, I’m proud of the man it’s turned me into” - Scott “The hardest part of being a dad is watching other dads fail their children” - Scott “It rubs me the wrong way to see other dads take this job so lightly” - Scott “The Grinch’s heart grew three sizes in that moment” - Scott “I didn’t think I would be that type of parent” - Josh “As a parent you have to set clear guidelines” - Josh “Scott 10 years ago would not have given up sex for any woman on earth” “Anywhere that I have been unselfish, my family has thrived” - Scott “I want to raise nothing short of Gentlemen” - Josh ‘If my parents kept me 100% from money, I would have never found that interest” - Scott “Right now, my family and my kids are the many, and my needs are going to come second to what they need” Join us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/groups/fathership/

The job interview can be terrifying. It's what prevents many people from searching for a new job, but in this episode of The ROI Podcast, Josh Killey, Director of Career Services, breaks down the dos and don't of the job interview process. ---- Do you have a question? Looking to get help on a business decision? Know a great guest for our show? Email roipod@iupui.edu so we can help your organization make better business decisions. ---- Ready to take your next step? Check out if a Kelley MBA is right for you: https://bit.ly/3m2G6D5 ---- Show Notes: (Dramatic Introduction Music) It can be terrifying. It keeps people up at night, causes shortness of breath, sweaty palms and prevents people from dislodging themselves from their cushiony comfort zone. We're talking about the fear that unravels even the coolest of minds – it's called: The job interview.  And today, we're here to tell you what NOT to do, and a great follow-up tip. Let's do this! (ROI Podcast Music) Shane: Have no fear, l, dies and gentlemen. That dramatic intro, hopefully, didn't bring back any chilling memories, but let's face it – people don't like job interviews. We've all been in that spot where you're trying to go over all the questions in your head, telling yourself not to stumble over your words or say something you might regret. But the fact of the matter is – we can nail that job interview when it arrives – and that's what we're going to be discussing today on The ROI Podcast. Of course, I'm your host, Shane Simmons. And today, we're going to tell you why people fear job interviews, and how you can prepare yourself to overcome that fear! This is going to be a fun episode – and who knows, maybe you're listening to this right now and you know you'll be interviewing for a job here soon, so pay attention! (Intro Music) Josh: In some respects, you're putting people on the spot, you're making them tell things about themselves, some people aren't comfortable with. Shane: You just heard from Josh Killey, director of career services at the Kelley School of Business on the IUPUI campus here in downtown Indianapolis. Josh has helped hundreds of people ease their fear of interviews and he says it really breaks down to this: Josh: I think the biggest issue we see with interviewees is the lack of preparation – not completely understanding themselves, the company, the position they're applying [for]. There's definitely some things that can help an interviewee if they've done the preparation and if they've thought through the process. Shane: Tip number one: Preparation. Preparation is huge with anything we do… And Josh says you've got to know who you are, what your strengths are, and how you can really impact the organization. And if you don't know enough about the organization, because you didn't do your research, you're not able to really put yourself into position and standout from all the other applicants. Now here's an interesting thought: You have two types of applicants who Josh helps: students who have little work experience fresh out of school, and working professionals who've been out in the workforce, but are looking for something different, whether that be a new company or position… Josh says the two have some similarities but area also very different. Josh: I think as far as similarities, there's going to be a number of them – they're still going to have to understand their own interests and skill sets to be able to convey that to a company. The experienced professional is going to have considerably more backgrounds, skills, and ability to demonstrate what they've done than an entry-level candidate would. This is what we focus a lot [on] when we talk to students, it's about getting internships and getting that related experience so that you have direct examples of what it is that you're trying to convey to an employer. Shane: Tip number 2: Know yourself. Know the skills you have and own them. Whether your new to the job market, or a seasoned veteran, you have to know your skillset and convey that to the organization. And part of that is building out your resume in a way that shows tangible results. Josh explains. Josh: A lot of times, what you'll see with [resumes and even] experienced [ones] is they've got key results/accomplishments that are embedded in them - that's a way of saying they've done these things at the particular position, but here are the three to five things that really impacted the organization. Being able to speak to those effectively, convey that to the company, and selling your abilities is going to be critical.  Shane: So for example, I helped generate the company an additional $200,000 in revenue through service sales in Quarter 1 of 2017 – or I help implement lean strategy that saved the organization $2 million in wasted manpower. Those are powerful. They stick. And that's what leaves an impact. Next Tip: Research, research, research. Here are some ways to research the organization you've applied for. Josh: As far as strategies, I think the most important thing is researching as much information as you can get [from] the company and the position beforehand. The job description itself will give you some of it, but [you should utilize] resources like the company website, of course, and another one is Glassdoor. Glassdoor.com is an excellent resource because people go on there and put things the company might not necessarily want you to know – the good, bad, and the ugly, if you will – about the organization, their culture, and even their interview process - a lot of information can be gleaned from Glassdoor.com. Of course, there's a variety of different resources, like LinkedIn and other things you can do to go through to prepare and understand the organization and position as much as you can. Utilizing those resources to help prepare yourself is key. Shane: And the final tip – follow up after the interview. Josh says handwritten letters can be very powerful because let's face it, most people are do everything digitally now. So if you can get a handwritten letter to the right person, this can be very powerful in your follow up. Just thank them for their time, and if there's anything you wish you would have mentioned during the interview that you didn't, that's a great time for that as well. (ROI Music) Shane: Closing Comments

I received a great question from listener Josh: As a drummer, does it help to move to a heavy musical city such as Nashville or the west/east coast? I am a drummer in Little Rock, Arkansas. I would prefer to start a career as a drummer with a band that comes out of my city. How do I leverage networking and building my portfolio while not necessarily being in a city that has a ton going for it in the world of music?Full transcript, free drumless backing tracks and more available at danielhadaway.com/132 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.