Podcasts about Saas

In this episode Colleen and Michele look back at their 14 months on podcasting to see how far they've come, and look forward to see where they want to go.

Victoria Ransom, founder & CEO of Prisma, her middle school alternative to the antiquated education system. But don't call Prisma a school - she prefers a Connected Learning Network that aims to bring joy to learning today, and prepare millions of kids to thrive in the world of tomorrow. She's a highly successful entrepreneur from New Zealand, most known for Wildfire Interactive, a social marketing SaaS company, sold to Google in 2012 for $450 million. Ransom was listed as one of Fortune's Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs as well as one of their 40 under 40 in 2012. In 2015, she was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum Now a mom, her mission has become far more personal. How can she prepare her child to thrive in a tumultuous, ever-changing world where we can't even begin to imagine the careers that will exist? Today we take a deep dive into this modern education model called Prisma.

Topics discussed: How HubSpot developed a data-driven sales playbook The powerful potential of combining marketing and customer success The Science of Scaling Leading indicators that signal a readiness to scale What to do when scaling breaks This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

About this episode My guest this week is Neil Shah, a co-founder of ThinkNimble. Neil is a serial entrepreneur and technology expert and ThinkNimble is a software development agency that helps startups and socially-focused companies grow and scale. As the show has expanded its reach, the demographic that we reach has shifted some as well. Within the last few months I have had some very early-stage founders reach out to me with some very specific questions, and many of them have been tactical in nature. Questions like: * What does product-market fit really look like? * Are Facebook Ads still as beneficial to the startup as they used to be? * Are subscription-based businesses as great as they sound? * How can I acquire my first 1,000 customers for my SaaS solution? Yet, despite the various questions I receive is some variation of “How can I launch a technical startup if I'm not a technical person?” Well, that is the exact question that Neil and I discuss in this week's episode. In this episode, you'll hear: The reality of thinking that you are “non-technical” Common misconceptions that non-technical founders get hung up on How to think about your budget when building a technical solution Can no-code solutions help you get to market How you can move forward on your technical solution Resources from this episode Join Grindology: https://grindology.com/ ExpressVPN: Get 3 Months Free → https://www.expressvpn.com/startupstory Get Emails: https://app.getemails.com/referrals/newaccount?ref=R18HWW5 The Startup Story Inner Circle: https://www.thestartupstory.co/vip The Startup Story on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thestartupstory The Startup Story is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/jamesmckinney The Startup Story on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thestartupstory ThinkNimble: https://www.thinknimble.com/ Neil's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-shah-85909714/ Share the podcast The Startup Story community has been so incredible sharing our podcast with others, and we thank you! We do have more stories to tell and more people to reach. There are three ways you can help. First, the most powerful way you can support this podcast is by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Telmo Silva, CEO and Co-Founder of ClicData discusses why those chose Microsoft Azure, how to decrease bad data protection habits, and the risks and challenges of moving to SaaS and Cloud.

Meet Tiara Yracheta-Udziela, Marketing Coordinator at Banzai, where she helps marketers develop engaging and meaningful connections with their customers through all types of events.  She has five years of experience executing grassroots marketing strategies, and is always seeking out creative, scalable opportunities to add a human touch and a sense of community to the SaaS industry.  In this episode, you'll discover what personalization, networking, and engagement marketing look like during COVID for in-person conferences, what Tiara thinks the future of in-person marketing events will look like, and what leaders need to consider when making decisions about in-person vs. virtual events. Enjoy!Notes:- 02:00 Attending Content Marketing World in Person- 04:50 What Engagement and Networking Opportunities Looked Like- 08:30 A Closer Look at Hybrid Event Experiences- 11:00 People, Engagement, and Networking as the Drivers of Conferences- 13:20 The Move Towards Making Regional Events More Specialized- 15:00 The Future: Engagement Marketing and Events- 16:00 The Importance of Defining and Clarifying the Purpose of an Event- 19:00 How To Gain More Value From Events as a Company- 21:15 Top Takeaways and Learnings From Attending Content Marketing World

When it comes to organic content strategies, Brad Smith really knows his stuff. As the founder of Codeless, he's helped well known SaaS companies like Monday.com, Chargify, and WordStream create high quality, high performing organic content at scale. And as the CEO of Wordable, Brad and his team are making it easier for content creators and managers to transform content drafts into published articles. In this episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Brad breaks down the process his team uses to create content, and digs into all the nerdy details that are important to nail as part of a truly world class organic content strategy.

How to make your company easier to run and immune to competition using 3 specific CEO habits. Simon Severino is the #1 speaker on agile strategy and agile sales. He is an Author, CEO of Strategy Sprints and Host of the Strategy Sprints podcast. He has interviewed powerhouse entrepreneurs like Rita McGrath, David Allen, Nir Eyal, Perry Marshall, Verne Harnish, Brian Kurtz and hundreds more on business, productivity and growth. He helps business owners in SaaS and Services run their company more effectively which results in sales that soar. He created the Strategy Sprints™ Method that doubles revenue in 90 days by getting owners out of the weeds. Simon leads a global team of Certified Strategy Sprints™ Coaches that help clients gain market share and work in weekly sprints which results in fast execution. As a member of SVBS (Silicon Valley Blockchain Society), he enables cross-stage capital flows and helps minimize execution risks in technology startups. His team is trusted by Google, Consilience Ventures, Roche, Amgen, AbbVie and hundreds of frontier teams. He is a TEDx speaker and has appeared on over 500 podcasts. He writes for Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine about scaling digital businesses. Website | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Instagram  

Today's podcast features special guest, ServiceMax CEO Neil Barua. ServiceMax is a leader in asset-centric field service management software. On the podcast, Neil discusses: -Private equity firm Silver Lake's role in the evolution of ServiceMax -Why the company's SaaS business model may be attractive for investors -Details regarding its $1.4 billion merger with SPAC Pathfinder Acquisition -Key opportunities in its future growth plan -And more

Key Points: How G makes winning a repeatable science (02:38) How G starts establishing opportunities for growth (04:10) My thoughts on maintaining 'scent' and keeping pre and post-click messaging consistent to drive conversions (07:19) How G works with a client, step-by-step (08:20) My thoughts on how drift managed to lead by introducing a new narrative (11:15) G's thoughts on category creation and how to stand out whilst avoiding a feature war (11:55) My thoughts on successfully creating new categories by adding 'must-have' features (17:05) G's thoughts on establishing the full extent of your theoretical customer base (18:00) My thoughts on choosing the ideal market segment from the pool of potential customers (19:50) How G uses data to work out who to target and how to effectively communicate with them effectively (20:55) My thoughts on brand-based differentiation (or lack of) between competitors (25:35) G on how to ensure a connection with your audience using brand ambassadors (28:10) G on how to build up an insight-based customer persona in order to differentiate your brand and offer the right solutions (30:40) Wrap-up (33.40) Mentioned:DriftSegmentGorgiasGainsightG2OwlerForrester ResearchGartner Research My Links:TwitterLinkedInWebsiteWynterSpeeroCXL

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X'ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10xI recently took part in a Million Dollar Mastermind. Today I will break down some of the things I learned there that can be applied to your business right away. There was a wide range of people involved in the Mastermind, and it focused mainly on entrepreneurs. Most of the people were earning well over $1,000,000 a year and crushing it!I will break down three takeaways that you can apply right now to grow and scale your business:#1: Boring beats beautifulSomeone who works between 20 and 25 hours a week and earns between 7 and 8 figures a year said the following:Do not let your creativity get in the way of your profitability.Stop getting bored and start getting paid.His primary mechanism for growth was to do the same event once a month for this entire year and continuously convert and refine it. Using that method allowed him to crush the numbers! #2: Consistency creates a crowdAnother person runs a multiple 7-figure options business. He was on Impact Theory, one of the world's top podcasts, and has more than 700,000 followers. This is what he did to build up such a massive audience:He spent 2 hours every day on Facebook, in groups, or forums, answering questions based on his subject matter which was about money.He showed up to do a Facebook Live every day at the open or close of the market.His consistency created a crowd.#3: Disconnect from dreamsWhether you are a consultant, a SaaS founder, or a revenue leader, you need to create opportunities to disconnect your revenue generation from your time. Doing that has to do with product creation and product fulfillment.Even though the results might not be 100%, here are some key areas in which you could do something at a massive scale and make a huge amount of money while serving your audience at the highest level:Create digital products for your product creation by doing one-to-many solutions for people instead of one-on-one.You can do that by creating a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution.On top of that, you could also implement a subscription or a membership model and build a team.Links and resources:Apply here for a Revenue Growth Consulting Session with me, Ryan Staley.

Geeta Pyne is the Chief Enterprise Architect - Platform and Architecture at Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU). Intuit is a finance and accounting software development company serving millions of customers worldwide with popular financial products like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mint. The company has 10,000 employees worldwide with $9.6billion in revenue in 2021 Geeta is currently leading Capability driven Architecture (aka City Map) and Design to drive Intuit's Platform Velocity by delivering design patterns, composable services, and reusable solutions. Geeta is also a Board Member of SIM San Francisco Bay Area. The Society for Information Management (SIM) is the largest National technology leadership organization in the US providing Programs, Events, Employee Development, and Networking for members. Before Intuit, Geeta was the Vice President of Data at Zuora, where she drove data strategy, and architecture to build the foundation of data-driven decision making and execution to help the company scale to $1 Billion. With specialization in SaaS, data, analytics, hybrid cloud, digital transformation, cloud migrations, and enabling new business models, Geeta has been working in the world of data, technology, and engineering for almost two decades in verticals ranging from healthcare to supply chain to cloud and data management. Prior to Zuora, she worked in multiple senior leadership roles at high-tech companies, including Veritas Technologies, VMware, BMC Software, and Mount Sinai Health System Geeta also holds an IP in India's first parallel computer PARAM and Image Processing system ISROVISION. This exclusive episode starts with Geeta sharing about the early days of her career at the Indian Space Research Organisation, and how she came to patent India's first parallel computer and image processing system. How the lack of modern cloud computing meant it was essential for us to fully utilise what we had in the old days. The role of enterprise architecture, especially in the context of data science. The importance of thinking about the big picture and building reusable blocks so that they can be used across the company and multiple products. The role her team plays and how they create the enterprise architecture culture with a focus on reusable blocks that allows Intuit to continue building itself as a platform company. Geeta also shares many examples of AI, ML models and emerging technologies being used at Intuit to solve the problems for their customers. Whether you're a technology or a non-technology company, as Geeta puts it, necessity is the mother of invention and all of us are going to need software to empower what we do in the business. If you're a data scientist or business executive, tune in to listen to Geeta Pyne on this episode to understand how enterprise architecture and reusable blocks are equally essential in data science projects. If you have any questions for Geeta or myself, make sure you send us an email or a message on LinkedIn. This episode is sponsored by the new program at DDA. It's an analytics leader mentorship program for senior managers and executives in the business team who want to develop a data-driven business to drive customer experience excellence. For a small one-off annual fee, you get to book Unlimited Strategy Sessions for a Full Year. For more information about this program, please reach out to DDA! #BusinessAnalytics #MachineLearning #NaturalLanguageProcessing #Agile #CustomerExperience #DataScience --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/analyticsshow/message

Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash In Episode 66 of the CELab Podcast we discussed Best Practices for keeping your Customer Education content up-to-date despite the rapid-pace of change that we experience in Software-as-a-Service businesses.   But what happens when you also have a highly-configurable product? Charlie writes: I have been tasked with creating a customer education program at our software company. I am devouring your book and podcast episodes. I am trying to create a strategy for implementation based on your guidelines, but the sticking point I keep getting stuck on is that our software is configured for each customer. We have many functions that are fairly standard, but every implementation looks and acts a bit different. I know that I can create education material for more advanced topics that our customers would consume without any customization, but our basic user training is the main thing we are trying to standardize, and I am struggling to determine the best way forward. Thanks for your brains! The hypothesis we'll challenge today is:  We are able to create content at scale that meets the needs of most customers without any customization. Thank you Charlie for your submission and if you have a question, use this form to send one in for us to consider and answer on the show!

Last fortnight, India added 500 more “Tech Crorepatis” as Freshdesk Inc IPOed at a valuation of $13 billion making it the first Indian SaaS company to get listed on Nasdaq. For more details - https://ajuniorvc.com/freshworks-india-saas-zoho-unicorn-ipo-story-history-girish/

Embedded Lending and SME BNPL

Today we talk about service design, a holistic approach to design that considers all involved stakeholders and processes. Our guest is Eleni Stathoulis, design director at Mad*Pow. You'll learn about the design artifacts created in service design, how Eleni conducts research, real-world examples of service design in action, and more.Download the MP3 audio file: right-click here and choose Save As.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.Show NotesMad*Pow — Eleni's companyServicedesigntools.org — a resource for service designersFour Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy — a book by Isadore SharpFind Elena's writing on MediumFollow Eleni on TwitterToday's SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — the best tool for sending onboarding emails and segmenting your SaaS users. To follow the best practices, download our free printable email planning worksheets at userlist.com/worksheets.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

Today's episode of In The Suite with Samantha Russell is about creating your own momentum in the ever-changing world of technology, innovation, and social media. Samantha Russell is Chief Evangelist at FMG Suite & Twenty Over Ten, a leading SaaS company in financial services providing marketing automation and creative content for financial professionals. She's a mother of two, a voracious reader, and an articulate communicator who has delivered over 600 presentations since 2015 about how to use digital marketing to grow your business. Samantha is a 2020 Honoree for the InvestmentNews 40 Under 40 award and was also named to the "10 to Watch" list by WealthManagement.com that same year. She has a B.S. Cum Laude in Organization Communication from Miami University and has a decade of experience, but appreciates being a student of life. “I'm a lifelong learner, I read incessantly, and I love to just learn,” Samantha says. As she puts it, There is nothing she finds more inspiring than being able to empower advisors to market themselves effectively and who are enjoying returns on their marketing investment…In The Suite. She boldly evolves with the social media platforms, breathing life and fresh air into everything she touches. Listen to Samantha's episode to learn about examining who you're targeting with your pricing, facing the hurdles of compliance, the art of storytelling, and so much more.Referenced MaterialsSamantha Russell - Website Samantha Russell - TwitterTwenty Over Ten - WebsiteTwenty Over Ten - YouTubeFMG Suite - Website8 Ways Financial Advisors Can Use Google Search Console To Improve SEO - Twenty Over Ten WebsiteSamantha Russell Named to 2020 Class of 40 Under 40 by InvestmentNews - Twenty Over Ten WebsiteExcell Conference 2021 - WebsiteJustin Castelli - Website

If you lead a SaaS company, you likely know Dan Martell, as the Founder & CEO of SaaS Academy. But even if you're in a different industry, Dan has a ton to teach about how to scale your business. Fast. Because he's built & exited 5 companies. Most noteworthy, Dan was Founder & CEO of Clarity.fm which connects business leaders with experts in any field (I'm a customer). It was successfully acquired by Startups.co Now, Dan is Founder & CEO of SaaS Academy. He coaches & teaches over 1,000 Founders to become high-performance leaders (…although much of what he teaches is relevant to any business.) Dan began his career as a software developer. But his passion (and gift) is leadership, strategy, culture, and communications. Plus as a native of British Columbia, Canada, he's just nice as heck. In this 20-minute conversation, Dan reveals how he's scaled his companies and how he teaches other leaders to do the same.

Show notes:Links:Hook RelaySSL Server TestSecond brand marketing tips Twitter thread XhtmlchopHook Relay Twitter announcementHook Relay blog announcementDerrick Reimer & Corey Haines Product Hunt launch Startup Director List Indie Hackers launch repeatedly Not very accurate auto-generated transcript:Ben - you know, last week I recorded a quick little message talking about why we weren't recording our podcast. That was in the middle of the let's encrypt ssl certificate fiasco that swept across the internet and you know, at the time it really didn't feel like a huge problem. Uh like from our perspective there wasn't much of an impact, but there was some impact, but then later on that day and the next day I was reading some articles and like apparently it was a pretty big deal for a lot of people. So uh yeah, wasn't wasn't just us, it's one Josh - of those things like I could just kept seeing it more and more like just pop up in random places though to like, not, not necessarily in our world, but it was just like affected all kinds of different things. Ben - Yeah, yeah, so shout out to ssL labs for their ssl testing tool to put a link to that in the show notes. Whenever you have a question about your ssl you should check that first because it does tell you when, when things are bad. Josh - Yeah, I hadn't used that tool before and it was very very helpful on customer support. Especially like sending to people and we needed to like prove that we were, we were not at fault like you know, it gave us like a smoking gun that we could. Yeah. Yeah. Really great. Starr - That's always a weird thing to do in customer services and it's like um it's like no, actually like I found the line in the library you mentioned. That's actually the problem. It does everything to do with this. Yeah. Yeah. And then um and then facebook goes down so I'm thinking I'm thinking we are like, like spooky Tober is starting up like things are starting to get witchy. Josh - I kind of like I I was like checked out the day facebook went down so I like missed most of like the fun on whatever online and I guess on what the other social networks that didn't go down, twitter mostly. But yeah, that's kind of wild. The story that I at least what I picked up. Yeah, I'm not on facebook. So Starr - my favorite part is how they house since everything was tied together, they couldn't get access to the building. They have the servers to do the like you know, manual physical reset then you had to do Josh - because of that security. Starr - Yeah. Like that's like I don't know that. It seems like it's out of some sort of movie or something. Yeah. It's just like a comedy. Josh - They like accidentally deleted their private keys to the building or something. Starr - Yeah. Or maybe like in oceans  type movie where um like they like the crew does that like the cruise like well if we mess with their DNS records and they'll be locked out of the hotel for six hours, let's give us time to like airlift the loot out. Josh - Yeah. Or what about like just like mission impossible. But with nerds. Uh huh. You know like trying to break into the building. Starr - I mean that's what we are here at found requests aren't right. Mission impossible with. Starr - Okay. Um So in addition to all that um just terrible stuff happening, there was um some good stuff happened. We had our, you know we have the hook relay, we did a little launch to our user base or honey badger user base. Um Do you wanna talk about that a little bit? Ben - Yeah that was that was the day before the ssl problem. So Josh - that was it. Yeah that's maybe that's why I was like the details. I was like trying to like remember what I did last week or whatever and I was like I could and then I remembered I'm like how did I forget about the hook really launch. But yeah, maybe that's I spent the next day, like on support. Ben - Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, who really was impacted by the ssl thing. And so like, the day after our launch day, we had to deal with the on fire kind of situation. But you know, props to kevin very quickly finding that issue and fixing it. And uh, it's nice to have, you know, the service, uh, deployment that we have, pushing it out was quick. That was that was nice. But yeah, we, we were able Josh - to help some people on twitter because we, uh, we did some crowd sourced troubleshooting and yeah, we're able to share our fix with a few friends. So that was heroes. Hopefully we Starr - were, hopefully we think people like you for everyone. Ben - Yeah, but I think think the launch went well. We had an email out to our, to leveling up mailing list and got a pretty good response right on that. We had put a banner up and on the, on the website and put a banner up on the app. And those had some pretty good click throughs as well. I'm just looking at the stats from Fathom this morning and yeah, it's a good good share of traffic from those sources. So it's nice to see that people care enough to click through and zero working on that was pretty cool. Josh - Yeah, because I think, I think like the, uh, it was, I felt pretty encouraged by just the, you know, the level of engagement that we got from, from everything, like it seems like, I mean the worst that could happen is like you put out the, you know, you put out everything that's just crickets, like, you know, and so yeah, I mean people signed up, we got some sign ups and we started, I mean like we've our support and feature request throughput has increased for sure on like from almost zero to something. So, you know, we got, we got some feature requests coming in, that's that's all good. Starr - Alright. I suppose we should mention what hook really is and why people should be interested in it. Um since, yeah, that's some people might want to know, Ben - are you gonna tell the star what it is? Oh, I, I mean, I'm trying to find out Starr - your, well, uh, I'm on the edge of my Ben - seat over here. Starr - There you go. I don't know. Hook relay is an enterprise level Blockchain analysis tool. It's not love it, look really uh, lets you have um, web hooks that are, you know, as high quality of stripes. Web looks like very high quality, very fully featured and just like a couple of minutes without much code or work. And um yeah, and honey badger. We have a lot of, you know, web hooks that go out and stuff and we use that for all of ours, I think right now for some of them at least. And yeah, so so that's what it is. Ben - Yeah, great for debugging and in the past week I've been doing a little side project that has inbound web books and so uh since I don't have it's launched yet, it's been handling my inbound web books for me and just storing them so I can go back and you play the we play the payloads against my uh my test instance. And uh there's a there's a button in hickory. They that I think I think kevin added, which I'm totally in love with now it's the copy as curl button. And so I can just click that button and dropping my terminal and boom, now I have a curl payload that I can send to my my dove, you know, server great. Starr - So you can be so so the the thing you're working on the like you can just like go do other things and will collect your inbound web hooks like just like your Jeffrey Bezos or something like you could be on the beach um doing whatever you want and then just um yeah, then just copy the curl Ben - you got it. Yeah. And then and then even better once I do launch, I would just add my production U. R. L. As the hook relay in point and then we'll actually start delivering them. So I want to change anything with that web provider that's sitting in the stuff right? Josh - Doesn't have as replay to right, Like if you if you have a bunch, can we do we do that add or? Yeah there Ben - is a re send button so you can okay you can send it again. Josh - So like for local development you could also like pointed out like an end rock like to your local host or something and replacing my books or something if you wanted to do if you wanted to do it in real time. Right? Yeah, Starr - that's cool. Yeah, pretty heavy. Josh - Maybe we should make like a like a hook relay native End Rock. They just like, you know, you can spin up your hook directly to your local host or something. That would be kind of cool. Ben - I had the same thought this morning. Yeah like stripe provides you a cli tool that will listen to their web hooks and then relate it to your local instance while you're developing. I'm like oh yeah, we should have the same thing really. So they can just listen to your endpoint and suck it down and replay it for you with it on the feature list. Josh - Yeah I do. Starr - I mean what's there? There is a danger here though that like if you make it too easy for people like they might not feel like they're being productive or like they really bring much value. Like if you make it also turnkey for developers and so easy. Like the developer just might be like what what am I even here for What's my job? Josh - You wouldn't feel like a hacker anymore. Starr - No, no, like that's something we've got to watch out for as we move forward boldly. Josh - Well how do you like write some like assembly code for a capture or something? Mhm. Josh - So yeah, we got a lot of the ideas for the uh hook relay uh launched a honey badger customers through a tweet that I had sent out a few weeks before just asking like like what's the best way to um launch for, you know, for what company with one product to launch another product and let their existing customers. No, and ah asking twitter is always, I mean it's usually helpful at least in our indie hacker space, everyone's always got ideas so we got a lot of good ideas from people there um including I think one of, one of the ideas was like depending how far along we are, like, you know, do you make a separate brand or like how do you like, like how does it change the, like the parent company, you know, if you're moving from, Josh - You know, a one product company to multiple products. That's all, that's all interesting. We opted just, you know, we're kind of like honey badger is the company and then it's hook relay by honey badger, I think it's kind of our our approach there but there's a lot of different ways you can do it. Ben - Yeah the one the one snag on that has been the other day. I was poking around in stripe and I was looking at the email setting options. They have, you can, you know, have stripes and emails when a payment fails for example and then it points them back to a payment collection page. I was like, yeah, we should have that, it's like click the button to turn it on and I preview the email and the, it's based on the business name. So uh it says oh honey badger industries LLC, you know, payment page or whatever. And I was like, well people who are hungry customers aren't really going to recognize that name necessarily. Uh so I Ben - can't have that. And so I went dug around the stripe settings and it's like, well you can't really do anything but the actual business name on that particular page, even though on the end of stripe settings you can set the credit card like, you know, that shows up on the actual payment thing, you can change that and uh so that's set in our case to hook dot gov but you can't change the the email header from to be something different from the business name and well we haven't registered cookery they as a business name because it's like yeah, it's just a, it's just a product, right? So I didn't feel comfortable changing that in stripe because like, well it's really not our business name so I think what can you Josh - do like a D. B. A. Or something? Yeah. Ben - Yeah that's what I thought it's like, well I guess perhaps it's time to register that? D be a for every day so I can actually change the business name and blah blah. Josh - Yeah. It's kind of exciting though, like all the all these, you know, new problems come up, but it's because we have this new product that has to become more official. So um we're like we were also talking about like like now that we actually have some people using it, we're gonna need a way to like notify them of changes to the product or improvements or you know, all the all the little infrastructure things that we have for honey badger that we haven't quite gotten around to yet on hook relay. Mm Ben - Yeah, these are nice, nice things to deal with as opposed to like crickets. Josh - Yeah. Ben - So glad that somebody showed up to actually use the app. Nice. Josh - So next up for hook relay is this quarter, we've decided to do some uh spend some additional time on product development and implement some of those feature requests. I think that should be uh should be a good time. Ben - Yeah, I think I think we have a backlog of like  or so items and in good health, so I think we have plenty of stuff that we could keep us busy for the next few months on a greeting. It's cool. Starr - Yeah and you were talking about taking a, um, and sort of multi lunch approach, right? We just got out of always been watching. Yeah, always be launching. So we're going to just have from now on every episode of this podcast, we're just gonna launch really, I'm gonna make people explain what it is. Uh, Josh - next week is show hacker news. Starr - Yeah. Yeah. So I guess at some point like you have to just call these things campaigns and instead of launches, but it feels very dynamic to call them launches. Josh - Yeah. Well you got to call him a launch. Like for the sake of the whatever platform you're your campaign is speaking to because you know, you got to make them feel special first. It's the launch for them. It's, you know, it's, it's for them. It's, it's a, you know, it's the first launch ever. I've never heard of us before, I'm sure. Starr - Oh, that makes sense. It's like you're launching the campaign, Josh - right? Yes, you're launching the campaign. So I think we'll probably be doing, I will do a show H N. And we'll do a, we'll probably do something with indie hackers at some point. I imagine. Um, there's a list, I, I saw a list somewhere, I'll take it if I can find it, but just a list of like all those little, like all those, like a big list of platforms basically like that that you can, you know, forearms basically. But Ben - yeah, you know, we should go, we should go old school and we should do regional launches. Like I used to work for a company where it was very much local and so like every, every few months would be a new city. We're gonna send the crew, we're gonna set up stuff and we're gonna launch in this city. So we should totally do that. Like we should start and of course here in the Seattle area and then branch out to California and then you move across the country and you're saying Josh - we're gonna do a national tour. Starr - Does that mean you like, can we get a bus, you lock access based on geo location? A very p Ben - it's like, yeah, sorry, we're not in your area yet. Please check Josh - back. Mhm. Ben - Please sign up to be notified when we're in your area. Starr - Nice. Josh - Well if we do regional launches, we might have to have regional managers. Oh, you know, I gotta think about your chart. Mhm. Josh - Yeah. So I think like the launch, you know, there's a lot of small places you can kind of launch to. Um, I think the big one that is on our um, on our radar is product cut. But I think we're quite, you know, based on the advice, we've heard about doing an effective like initial product launch. It sounds like maybe it would be better to polish polish the product hops and feedback feedback about it. Maybe like be a little bit more established or something. Um it just seems like the, the products lately that have been really had really successful product launches have been, have had like um they put were like a lot of work into the actual like launch campaign Josh - before products like had a video and some of them almost seem like Kickstarter quality type campaigns or something, I don't know how over the top we're going to go, but I think that the current plan is to uh you know, kind of do some of the smaller things and implement some feedback and start to, you know, we might we're planning on doing like a redesign of the website eventually um with what we learn, so um then you have a designer in progress I think Ben - Yeah, three years. Yeah, yeah, first I guess it's the first time we've had an external designer working on one of our products, so we have a we have Josh - someone do, we had someone do the honey badger website at one point started, I think you did yeah, yeah, way back, I thought that was all star Starr - um now I built it, I built the html but I built it based off of uh like pds or something. Ben - Yeah, well this time it's being built so it's even more hands off, that's nice uh someone reached out to me on twitter and uh we mentioned a few episodes ago that we were getting this design done and I didn't know at the time what kind of built was option we had, whether it's going to be a tailwind, which is what our new hotness these days that we love or is going to be something else and it's going to be something else going to bootstrap, but even bootstraps as long as as long as we can modify it, that's that's my thing. Like, I remember back and way, way back in the day before a bootstrap when we were doing, you know, freelancing for people, we would get those designs from the designers and it would be a PSD Ben - right? And then I had no, no way to really deal with that. And so I would send it off to this chop chop shot. Yeah. X. Html shop I think was the name of the business, I think they're still around even and and they would they would take the PSD and convert it into html and CSS, which was, you know, of questionable quality I guess. I mean it worked, but it's like, oh, it's ugly, like just like I don't ever want to touch that and uh and being able to actually have like a designer give you html CSS and it's actually going to be, you know, structured like in the same way because it's based on a framework like Duceppe like that's that's awesome. That's much as Josh - an alternate, like tabs and spaces. Mhm Ben - Yeah, the good old days Starr - they just wanted to keep you on your toes josh. Josh - I remember, yeah, I used to do why I didn't do, I wasn't a chop shop, but I used to, you know, implement my own Photoshop, um, yeah, designs and html and stuff and yeah, that was, that was fun. Like getting all the pixel dimensions and the, you know, in your overall Photoshop layout, piecing it all together. Kind of like, it's kind of like a puzzle. Like you're putting a puzzle together. Starr - Yeah. I mean they called it a chop shop because like it was, they made a lot of, they made big use of the slice tool in Photoshop. Josh - Yeah. Starr - Where you basically, you basically went in and you know, you couldn't do CSS borders or drop shadows or anything like that. I mean, I guess you could do borders but not like nice. They didn't have rounded corners. They didn't drop shadows, anything like that. And so, um, you basically had to go and like tell Photoshop like, okay, like, like you could you tell it to split up the image in these parts and then like, you know, leave make this middle sort of a place for you to put some html so you can put stuff in the middle of your box and then, I don't know, it was just, it was not the best and so a lot of that bad. Html and CSS was, I mean, I imagine a lot of it was auto generated. Yeah. Josh - Yeah. Yeah. There were even some, some tools just to like that, you know, you kind of like dry your borders and stuff and fill out, I don't know, like fill out some stuff in the app and then it just like generates the html page for you. And that was always like the worst, like the absolute worst thing you could go with. But you know, it, I guess the people's standards weren't as high in those days either. So you could get away with a lot, Starr - I guess not. Josh - But yeah, we'll, uh, we'll get to product hunt eventually. And uh, yeah, I guess if if you as a listener have a tip for us on how to get a good product launch, go and let us know. Um, and also we will hopefully involve, um, we're gonna want to like bring in our networks to this, I think eventually. So, uh, yeah, I hope that all of our listeners will, um, will help us when the time comes to, uh, to have a good product launch with lots of up votes and, you know, telling your friends and whatnot. Ben - And, and maybe we could even get one of our listeners who might be interested in a half a particular talent for doing a product promotion. Like we could even just hand out to someone and say, hey, go go do that for us. Josh - Yeah, that would be, that would be nice too. Because then we wouldn't have to do it ourselves. Yeah, like a product consultant. Ben - Exactly, there's gotta be some out there, I mean product has been around long enough now, there's got to be specialists. Right? Josh - Yeah. Well isn't that kind of uh Cory Haynes helped derek with for the cow? Right. Yeah. Yeah, Ben - I'm sure Corey is really busy, so if someone wants to be like Corey do that for us, that would be totally awesome. Josh - We just need a we just need a guru. Ben - I was surprised on the day I signed up for the uh product hunt rss feed, I put that in my news reader and I was I mean I've seen you know probably things on twitter from time to time and I click through and I look at stuff but I never really followed closely, I was surprised how many launches there are products on every day, There's a lot there, so I think you really got to stand out in some way to be able to mix them, get some head space because there's just a lot of competition for things on the products on, Josh - I gotta say like just the Indy hacker space, like not indie hackers dot com but like just the overall in the hacker community is just like wild lately, like I don't know about you but I feel like a total just like dinosaur. Um Like I feel like I've like like I'm becoming out of touch so I need to like I need to I probably need to pay a little more attention to like, you know what the what the new uh what the latest is? Starr - I think it's inevitable that you get out of touch, right? I mean that's that's why Josh - Yeah, but like people I don't I don't think there yet, like I don't I don't want to be there yet, I'm not ready for it start. Josh - Uh huh Ben - Yeah geriatric highly valued developers there we are Josh - now we're we're you know, we're getting back out there. We did our we did our Emma or any hackers Emma. Starr - Uh that's right Josh - yeah, we'll have to do it, we'll have to do some Amas for uh for relay to like all that sort of stuff. I just like that. I love that. Like it just think it seems like the ecosystem is just much, it's so much more developed than when we launched honey badger. There's so many more places to go, especially if you have a tool that appeals to like the, you know, developer, you know, I guess just developers and yeah Ben - and it feels like there's so many people in the community now who are, you know, identify in that group. Uh you know like there were three micro conferences in the past three weeks or four weeks right? There was to locals and then one in europe. So Uh that's just one indicator that there are a lot of people out there like us, you know definitely more than there were  years ago who are enjoying this life of building things and sell them to people. It's nice Josh - love. It's awesome. We should talk about um the Q one  marketing campaign that we have in the works for Hook really? Because I thought that was an interesting idea. The I guess I'll just say it the the idea, I think this was been your idea uh to basically we want we want to like try some marketing like you know, putting some dollars behind Hook really and see if we can actually generate some, you know new customers that way. And um we already have like a marketing budget and um like a bunch of you know ongoing relationships and campaigns and stuff that we run for honey badger. So the idea was to basically just like have a swap. Josh - Not I think we're gonna go with a quarter, not a month, like just basically try swapping out some of our advertisements for honey badger which are typically like um more like just kind of general awareness brand style. I'm like, you know, keep us top of mind sort of advertisements. Um you know like we do a lot of podcast ads and that sort of thing, newsletter sponsorships. So swap them out for a little while and just replace them with hook relay and uh you know, see how that goes um at this, you know, I guess a side benefit of that approach is that we we get to see what happens when we stop putting money into the honey badger advertising, which is always, I mean like that's a good experiment in its own like, Josh - you know, so I'm interested to see how that how that turns out both on both sides. Like you know, do we, do we lose any momentum with honey badger? Do we gain a lot of, you know, how much momentum do we gain with hook? Really? Ben - It feels like kind of like the pricing experiments that you're always nervous about doing because you don't know if you're going to like royally hose your business, you know, you won't and in our case you don't know for a while you have to let it play for a few months before you find out. Right. And so uh yeah, so switching the marketing like that feels like one of those experiments like well this could be really bad or it could be like there's no impact. And so it's like, oh well then maybe it's we re evaluate how we spend our marketing dollars for honey badger at that point, you know? So yeah, I'm pretty exciting, nervous and excited about trying that. Experiment Josh - my prediction. I'll make a prediction is that I don't I don't really think it's I don't I don't imagine it's going to uh have a huge impact on honey badger, like conversions and sign ups and all that at least not if we do, if we do like a quarter, I would all kind of be surprised if we see any difference if we, you know, as long as we resume at some point. Um Just because like a lot of our advertising and we just we really don't have like clear, you know, like clear objectives necessarily. It's more just like brand advertising. Like and we see we do see a lot of sign ups like Josh - of people coming to us because they heard us heard about us on a podcast, or they saw us in a newsletter, but it's not like click click through, it's not like a like pay per click or something or like click through this and you're gonna convert and we're going to track that. So I think like the it would be bad if we stopped advertising entirely for like a year or two because people forget about you. Like I think that's why we do advertising for the most part at this point, it's just like so people remember that we're here. Um and so that's my prediction is that I don't think we'll see a huge impact on honey badger. Um but I think that because no one knows about hook relay, it could potentially have a big impact for hook relay Starr - uh side now. Um you know, just all of it, all of our listeners, you all should really um you know, enable tracking on your browser's disable your ad blocks and that will make life a lot easier for us because we will be able to um, you know, track funnels a lot easier. So Josh - we can do, we can do marketing, do real marketing on the internet. Um we are using uh, we're using fathom on hook relay and they're like the privacy, whatever privacy first um analytics tool that a lot of people use these days and they're also indie hackers and I don't know, maybe twitter friends for some of us, but they're pretty cool. And uh, they have a feature that um, you can set up like a custom, like domain that like hosts, they're tracking scripts like, because it's all like GDR and like privacy compliant like by default. But even so like if they're added to like a ad blocker, you know, like tracking prevention thing, um you can't host on your own domain so that, you know, it's, it's, you're guaranteed to have accurate accurate results Ben - except for those people who are still using links as their browser, Josh - right? If they're using or Yeah, they're like if they're browsing from their terminal that or if they have javascript disabled. Um Yeah. You know, I mean, I guess if you're, if your audience, your Starr - richard Stallman, if your Josh - if your audience is Lennox, it's like arch Linux users, you're, you're kind of out a lot. Like no matter no matter what. Ben - Just, just put ads on on slash dot and call it a day. Yeah Starr - slash hot. That's that's a tragedy in that they really went downhill. Ben - They're still around though. Like one of the cockroaches of the internet last time is still there. I don't know. I haven't looked at it for years, but you know, but back when I was posting my code to source forge, I was reading slash out everyday Josh - source forage Starr - source for it for ages Josh - still there, isn't it? It's Starr - really hard to use. Ben - It's probably still there. I don't even know. Yeah. Josh - And that was two cows Ben - subversion instead of get we're just this this is the way back episode. We're going back to P. S. D. S. And S. V. N. And slash talk. Josh - Every episode is kind of the way back episode. I mean, yeah, we're way back founders. So Ben - I mean our our company name is now a vintage meme. So it's gotta be a way back. Yeah. Josh - All right, okay. I just got like we had a marketing meeting earlier and Ben Finley, our marketing manager was like looking at R. S. E. O. Performance. He's like, Like we we could improve our website if we if we like if we optimize the three MB Jeff on the home page. I'm like wait we have like a three, we have like a chip on the home page and I remembered I had like this easter egg that if you click like the resolve button in the, in like the screenshot of our, of honey badger on honey badger. Yo it well you can go and do it and you can see what happens. Um We'll make sure we leave it in even if we optimize it. But yeah, that's how we roll is like, we just like kill our search engine optimization. Because Josh - we had to have uh like, yeah, for the walls, we had to have this easter egg. Starr - That's awesome. Ben - Uh The the main thing reminded me that I have an interview being published tomorrow. I believe in Saas Mag at a link that in the show notes but had a great chat. Uh And it was funny because I was like, we were talking about humor and that's like one of our core values of the honey badger our business. And I was like, well, yeah, because like, I mean, we named our company after me, right? So like, you got to have fun in that kind of business, right? Josh - For sure. We should, we should like send out a leveling up email that just is designed to rick roll our customers. I don't know if they'd appreciate that. Starr - We should rename hook related berries and cream. Josh - Uh huh. Yeah, that's a that's creative. You can do that. I mean hook really is kind of like, very like business business formal descriptive. So we could, we could definitely get weirder Ben - for sure. Yeah, that was, that was not one of my more creative days when I picked that name. Josh - I mean the other, you know the upside is that it actually tells people what it does. It's instead of, it is not just named after a, after an animal joke on the internet. Ben - Yeah. Josh - Yeah. Um also it has a proper casing. Ben - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's you know, one of the things that's funny, I have this I now for whenever we write anything, like we're doing any kind of copy or a blog post or whatever and if we ever reference get hub without the capital agent. And I always catch it now because because of how many people miss capitalized honey badger, like so I knowing how much that like I catch that. I was like, I bet they get how people really appreciate what people actually capitalize their name properly. So yeah, it's like six out to me all the time. Starr - Just for the listeners. The proper capitalization is one capital at the front because it's one word. It's not two words Ben - and go, Josh - yep. For honey badger. Starr - Yeah, yeah, sorry, not get up Josh - as uh two capital letters to capitals. Get lab. But I also now notice the companies that are like us where they have just, they have opted for the lower case in the second word as well. There's a few of those out there. I'm not remembering them off the top of my head, but they always stick out. I mean, I usually remember those now too if I'm familiar with them or I I know that I need to go check and I always go and like check when I'm writing their name at least usually. Starr - And then if you just want to, oh I'm sorry. And then just like if you just want to like just set the world on fire, you can be stripe and have your logo, your name of the logo, low, all lower case. But then in your body text capitalize it. Like they just want to watch the world burn. Uh huh. Ben - Oh, Ben - they're probably trying to punk the new york times editors, you know? Starr - Yeah, probably. Starr - Well, um we're getting a little quiet. Are we reaching the end? Ben - I think we are Josh - depends how far you want to go because I mean like we've got a whole list of topics here, but we are already into this episode of ways. And uh I think like this has been a pretty good episode, you know, it's it's for once. We've actually like managed to stay on topic for the most part. Like this has been mostly a hook really episode. So I think we should probably quit while we're ahead. All right now. And you better you better wrap this up quick start because I'm like, I'm ready to like Starr - dive in the rest of this. So you're about to explain this episode of founder class has been brought to you by hook relay a striped quality web hooks in minutes. That's awesome. Thank you. Uh, if you want to give us a review on Apple podcast, whatever they call it now, I don't know itunes, music to itunes. Um, please do that. If you want to. If you're just in writing for our blog, we are, you know, currently looking for um, ruby python, PHP writers. Um, go to our blog, honey badger to I.  slash blog and look for the request page. And yeah. All right. So I will talk to you guys next week. 

Omar L. Harris, former General Manager of GSK and Allergan, joins me in this conversation on race.  He has more than 20 years of experience as a global pharmaceutical executive. Omart is the founder and managing partner at Intent Consulting, a firm dedicated to improving employee experience and organizational performance. He is the author of "Leader Board: The DNA of High-Performance Teams", "The Servant Leader's Manifesto", and “Be a J.E.D.I. Leader, Not a Boss”.  Omar shares his journey to the top, the cost to him as a Black man in America, and how he came to speak out and no longer compromise his identity and his beliefs. Key topics: Omar's first experience with racism was when he was voted Prom King of his high school in Louisiana. The principal told him that he was “allowed” to be the Prom King to “snitch” on the other Black students. Harris refused, stood up to the principal, and kept his title What happened when Omar L Harris met Ku Klux Klansman David Duke while in high school How he was the only Black product manager, the only Black Director of Marketing and the only Black General Manager outside of Africa, and the only Black General Manager of a global company in the world The psychic toll of assimilation and having to whitewash himself without even realizing it Why he now feels responsible for opening the doors for other Black people How he refuses to compromise his values and will always speak out against racism and discrimination of any kind Why people who are not Black don't understand the full gravity of racism and the dangers of working while Black Why white people who call themselves allies must be willing to speak out and take a stand with friends, family, and colleagues even if parts of their lives unravel as a result How white allies can be more prepared to take action if they practice and prepare for different situations His books on leadership and how they are different than white leadership books. Why it's essential that every CEO needs to take action against racism, or they are not real leaders Check out his playlist, the TV shows he recommends, and the books he reads   Bio OMAR L HARRIS (Charlotte, NC, born in Pittsburgh, PA) is the founder of Intent Consulting and TYMPO.io (the world's first and best SaaS application for employee inclusion), a Former GM (GSK and Allergan), Business and Servant Leadership Thought-Leader, Speaker, Award-Winning Bestselling Author of 5 books, including "Be a J.E.D.I. Leader, Not a Boss: Leadership in the Era of Corporate Social Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion", June 25 2021, “The Servant Leader's Manifesto”, 2020, and “Leader Board: The DNA of High Performance Teams”, 2019). With 20+ years of global pharmaceutical executive experience building teams, Omar has worked on 4 continents (U.S., Middle East, Asia and Latin America) for Pfizer, Merck, Schering-Plough and more. As a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach, Motivational Speaker, Entrepreneur and Florida A&M University Alumni, Harris is passionate about leading teams, high-performance coaching, and inspiring the future leaders of today and tomorrow to adopt the servant leader mindset and stop toxic leadership behaviors.  Omar is also the Co-Author of “From Authors to Entrepreneurs F.A.T.E.: The Personal Side of Indie Publishing” (2015) and Author of “One Blood” fiction book (2011, pen name, Qwantu Amaru – currently being developed into a television series). Harris was a featured speaker at the 2021 International Institute of Leadership Conference with his compelling topic: “The End of the Boss – 7 Rules for the Modern Leader”, a keynote speaker at the Leadership Harrisburg Area Graduation event, a featured speaker at the 2021 Rising Leaders Summit, a featured speaker at the BB21 Rise Conference, and a featured coach at the 11th annual WBECS Summit. His work has been featured by CNN HLN Weekend Express, WPXI-TV NBC Pittsburgh, Black News Channel, The Jewish Journal, The Beating Alpha Podcast, The Living Corporate Podcast, Real Leaders, SHRM Blog, Thrive Global, CEO World Magazine, Human Capital Innovations (HCI) Podcast, VoiceAmerica Business, Culture Stew and many more. As fun facts, Omar speaks 5 languages, plays 7 instruments, and started his first company at the age of 7. https://www.omarlharris.com/

This episode features Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel, and Harry Stebbings, Founder of 20VC. Harry interviews Philippe about the Accel Euroscape 2021, which was unveiled on Day 1 of SaaStockEMEA. He shares: - 70% of the top 100 SaaS companies in the Euroscape came from the UK, France, Israel and Germany. Listen to the full episode for the findings and breakdown of the Accel Euroscape 2021 report. This episode is sponsored by Capchase: capchase.com/saastock Become a SaaStock Founder Member - join a private community of ambitious SaaS founders scaling to $10M ARR. Apply now: https://cutt.ly/2ECKuDW

Themes from Lisa's interview: Working with lenders to secure an SBA loan Choosing the right lender for you How to prepare for your SBA loan conversation Getting an SBA loan for SaaS and eCommerce businesses How business owners can plan ahead for a cash crunch Why now is a great time for buyers Reach Lisa at: lisa [dot] forrest [at] liveoak [dot] bank Live Oak Bank

In this episode, our guest is Kevin Ward, former Senior Director of RevOps at Electric – an IT service management company that provides IT support, security, network and device management. He joins Intricately CEO Michael Pollack and VP of Marketing Sarah E. Brown for a discussion on how today's cloud go-to-market teams can use data to inform strategy and drive revenue.

With Special Guest Randy Herbertson Founder and CEO of "The Visual Brand" Randy is a recognized brand strategist, conceptor and creative director with over twenty years of marketing and innovation experience in the client, agency and media worlds, from entrepreneurial to corporate environments. Randy has worked in the WPP and Omnicom agency networks, Conde Nast Publications, Allied Domecq and E&J Gallo. He also spent several years in the digital start up world in during the height of the dotcom boom. Most recently, Randy has worked in the boutique agency world, owning and operating two firms, including The Visual Brand, founded in 2013. He has a strong expertise in social media, digital innovation, packaging, industrial and environmental design. Randy has balanced his training and experience to play a key role in a number of product innovations and corporate transformations. He has worked with a diverse range of companies industries that include retail, financial, professional services, technology, and entertainment, pharmaceutical, automotive and consumer packaged goods. He has spoken on numerous industry panels, and is a corporate mentor to a number of emerging companies and individuals.Have You Got Promotional Head Shot That You Like Us To Use? http://www.thevisualbrand.com/

Dave Hurt is co-founder and head of product at Verb Data. He began his career working in customer success at SaaS startups and stepped into product management as a way to help his customers get the features they needed for success. He caught the entrepreneurial bug and started a software development and design agency which eventually sold to a customer - where his team worked for a few years. Dave and his long-time business partner, Oleg, started Verb at the end of 2019 as a way to help SaaS companies build better dashboards for the end-users.In this episode:1. Dave shares his experience working with building dashboards & KPI's at various startups and agencies which led him and his partner to build dashboards inside customer productsthat would be easier to scale and maintain.2. Using a product-led, self-service growth model, Verb Data has about 20 customers in their first cohort.  Mostly B2B (eCommerce SaaS and RFP/documentation software) are main targets inside B2B space.Dave talks about the onboarding process and how they have started a white glove service which allows them to stay close with these initial customers to establish an onboarding process.  Eventually will move to a more strategic self-service model.3. Dave shares his lesssons learns - stay close to your customer and do not be embarrassed to share early products with customers.  Also, Dave feels the foundershould perform all fucntions (sales, marketing, etc) - experience all roles before you hire someone for that role.  Although it's uncomfortable, it'sa valuable process.You can reach Dave by email or Twitter....Dave shares the market trends he's seeing, what's next for Verb Data and much more!  

The best pricing metrics are highly correlated with users value metrics.  A pricing metric is what do we charge for McDonald's charges for hamburgers? That's a simple pricing metric, PayPal charges a percentage of the revenue that we collect. That's a pricing metric. There are many different types of pricing metrics, especially in the world of SaaS. We have the ability to choose many, many different possible pricing metrics. We could choose the number of clicks we could choose. The number of leads we could choose, the amount of data that somebody downloads or the number of gigabytes. Someone has access to there's many, many different possible. Pricing metrics. Probably the most common is users. How many users are there or a per seat basis, we get to choose what pricing metric we want to use. And what we want to do is choose a pricing metric that is highly correlated with a value metric and a value metric is how is it that a customer perceives value from the product. “Choose a pricing metric that is highly correlated with a value metric.”- Mark Stiving Now, if you think about Netflix a long, long time ago when they first came out, they put Blockbuster out of business. Well, how did they do that? They did that by changing the pricing metric metric. Blockbuster was charging rentals of a movie by the night plus late fees. If you forgot to return it, Blockbuster changed the entire pricing model. And instead of charging a rental per night, They charged a monthly subscription, which said how many DVDs you were allowed to have at your house at any one point in time. They just changed the pricing metric. And because people love that pricing metrics so much more than they loved paying late fees to blockbuster. Netflix took off. What you want to do is think really hard about how is it that your customers perceive value. And then see if you can find a pricing metric, what is it that we're going to charge for that is highly correlated with how your customers perceive that. PayPal is probably the most perfect example of this possible as a salesperson, as a selling company, I may X except revenue using PayPal. So somebody pays me money using PayPal, and I love getting more money. The more money I make, this is just awesome. This makes me happy. Well, PayPal takes a small percentage of that. Well, I don't like giving PayPal a small percentage of the money I make, but I like making money. I hope someday I pay PayPal a million dollars in a year because that meant I made $50 million. If they're taking 2%, you can see how their pricing metric is highly correlated with how I perceive value. That's what you want to be thinking about your best pricing metrics are highly correlated with users, value metrics.  We hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you see have any questions or feedback please email me mark@impactpricing.com.  Now go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving:  Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn  

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform our workplace into a fair workplace - starting with fair pay. My guest is Maria Colacurcio, CEO of SyndioMaria is a tech veteran – she previously co-founded Smartsheet, which went public in 2018. She spent three years at Starbucks, one of the first Fortune 50 companies to go public with pay equity results. Having started her career working on congressional campaigns, she has a long history of mission-driven work, and a compassionate and competitive attitude to spur change.She serves on the board of the nonprofit Fair Pay Workplace and has been named by Goldman Sachs Builders + Innovators Summit one of this year's 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs.As a CEO and a mom of 7, Maria is walking the walk on eradicating workplace inequities. Today Maria is the CEO at Syndio, a SaaS startup helping companies around the world create an equitable workplace for all employees, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity. That inspired me, and hence I invited Maria to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's workplace when it comes to valuing people for the contribution they bring and paying them fairly independent of who they are. We discuss the pivot and what it took to change course. We discuss the effects the Pandemic introduced, and what was critical to not only bounce back, but actually come out stronger. And last but not least we address the role of the CEO in creating a business that people love talking about. Here are some of her quotes:If we get it right we quite literally transform society. I think the gender and race pay gaps resulted in lifetime wages that are often hundreds of 1000s of dollars less for women and people of color. So I think when you think about the wealth gap, and how we just compound over time, that's where we have a tremendous opportunity to transform society. And for companies, it's just as big because, if we get it right, it means they move away from this cycle of annual one and done remediation. And they actually get to stay on top of this proactively overtime on both sides.We really believe that workplace equity is a combination of two things. We started with pay equity, and now we're moving over to more broad workplace equity to look at promotions and when you can get to both. That's when you have a company that Really has an enduring ability to create value and to measure how they're valuing their employees not just for who they are, but the contributions they bring.During this interview, you will learn four things:That the odds of success and surviving any crisis starts with having a solution that's perceived as mission-critical, and not a nice to have.How to prioritize your roadmap by focusing on the smallest ingredient that driving the biggest impact for your ideal customersThat your ideal customers are not the ones that have the biggest budgets, but the ones where you align on world-views and show the courage to stick to it no matter whatHow to focus your leadership team on looking at a problem and brainstorming a solution collaboratively without blaming and fingerpointingFor more information about the guest from this week:Maria ColacurcioWebsite See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mike Slaats is the founder of Upvoty, an instant feedback software which has recently hit $17k MRR. Mike also runs the SaaS pirates community, where he talks all about running a SaaS company. Previously, he scaled Vindy, an only marketplace for home development to 1m ARR in 5 years.What we covered in this episode Why did you start Upvoty? Stopping a $1m business to start from scratch Why your work should be fulfilling Should you be passionate about your audience? How to validate your idea How Mike got his first customers for Upvoty The value of an MVP and a landing page Why you should build runway or have an alternative income source How you can make your own luck Why indie hackers should build a personal brand Mike's one bit of advice for founders; validate How to build an MVP with the BML framework Recommendations Book: Intercom on Marketing Podcast: How I Built This Indie Hacker: Arvid Kahl Follow Mike Twitter YouTube SaaS Pirates Upvoty Follow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Buy A Wallet Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.'‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.'‘Absolutely love this community.'These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet's most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you've ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites' for 50% off your first month.

How do you bridge the gaps that occur in your workflow? What's the best way to adapt? Join host Todd Weyandt and guest Justin Saeheng of Stanly X as they discuss the connection between the field and the shop, the most rampant problems in the industry today, and the potential of an open innovation platform in Contech. Justin Saeheng leads the Construction Technology team at Stanley X, where he is responsible for defining the product vision, strategy, and overall roadmap execution. Prior to Stanley X, Justin led product teams across various startups and large enterprises. Most recently, he was at a Series A software startup leading the Supply Chain team on first to market logistics SaaS features. Prior to that, Justin was a product manager at Uber Freight for the Marketplace Dynamics and the Carrier Fleet teams. At Adobe, Justin delivered innovative features for Adobe Analytics for Fortune 500 customers and led partnerships with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

#0065 What does it take to start and run your own SaaS (Software as as Service) business?How do you build an audience?How do you know your software is one that your audience will want?The last thing you want to do is pump a ton of time and effort into something your ideal client doesn't want.Today, we are chatting with Jeroen Corthout, Co-Founder of SalesFlare, about how they managed to plan, build, launch, and grow their own CRM software.Throughout the episode, Jeroen shares some of the mistakes they made early on (so you can avoid them yourself), and talks with us about how to effectively and efficiently build our own SaaS company from scratch.Top 3 Key Takeaways:What is means to build a minimum viable product and what that looks like in the SaaS worldBetter understanding of how to get your first feedback and possibly first customers for your SaaS businessHow to expand your network and potential customers beyond your immediate circleTo get the links and resources discussed in this episode, head over to the Episode 65 Show Notes.If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to leave a review of the Nine-Five Podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Saroj Ativitavas, CEO of Wisible, talks about funding his MVP, gaining his first customers, and navigating his zero to 30,000 MRR journey. Get more insights from the podcast. Wisible is a sales intelligence platform that enables B2B firms to reduce sales cycles, increase conversion rates, and enhance sales prediction accuracy. Listen to Saroj as he shares his exciting journey with Geordie. What You'll Learn The core problem Wisible solves for customers Why the Chinese market is not ideal for the Wisible concept How Saroj transitioned from the corporate world to a startup job How Saroj and his team transitioned from an agency to a SaaS platform The impact of content marketing for businesses In This Episode: According to Saroj, many customers who approach them seeking a tangible solution often have a leaky sales funnel. The team behind Wisible strives to help their customers determine the critical spot and underlying bottlenecks. They work together to provide a robust solution based on their needs. Wisible focuses on CRM tools while tracking any interactions and data that may have been generated during the sales procedure. The platform also features a dashboard and an analytic report that can display in the sales funnel interface. Customers can also track their conversion rate, determine their average deal amount, and sales cycle.  Saroj has been in the B2B sales sector for 20 years, during which he encountered a wide range of challenges and learned crucial lessons. He was a salesperson for a mobile telecommunication operator in Thailand before graduating to become a sales director. During his stint in the sales industry, Saroj tried numerous tools and software but could not identify the ideal option to meet his needs and those of his customers. The quest for an effective solution pushed him into developing a platform they could rely on to solve their problems. Saroj explains why he left his job at the mobile telecommunication company, and you can learn from the podcast. Currently, there are numerous click funnel options in the market. Why did Saroj feel the need to develop a new one? To answer this question, Saroj begins by defining what B2B businesses do and why they need aggressive salespeople. Get all the details from the podcast. Saroj reiterates that their system integrates with their customer engagement's business channel. This feature relieves salespeople from having to feed data into the system manually. He gives an illustration to help listeners understand this concept better. Nearly 100% of Wisible customers come from the Southern Asia region, but Saroj and his team plan to expand their business to other regions. He explains why they are not yet ready to venture into the Chinese market.  After leaving his job, Saroj first launched a robust product that focused on giving software developers a healthy platform to exercise their talent. They later quit the market to launch the sales intelligence agency. Saroj and his co-founder had worked together in the telecommunications company for ten years and were conversant with their customer's pain points. They also knew there was a ready market for their idea in Thailand. Saroj and his team would spend an entire year developing the Wisible MVP and another year before acquiring their first paying customer. At first, Saroj says they gave out the system for free and explains how they finally won their first paying customer. Find out the details from the podcast. Promoting a startup can be a difficult task. How did the team reach their target audience? Saroj says they run a blog where they share content about their services before sharing it on different social media platforms. The journey from zero to 5,000 was easier after winning their first paying customer; Saroj says and explains the phase further in the podcast. Did you know you could make money from customizing customers' platforms to meet their specific needs? Listen to Saroj as he discusses this concept and explains how it worked for their business. Apart from content marketing, Saroj and his team engage in teaching as a marketing concept, where they create courses and train their staff. Saroj mentions their go-to content marketing strategy that aspiring entrepreneurs can benefit from. While some online businesses grew tremendously at the peak of Covid, Saroj says they experienced slow growth rates. What would Saroj do differently if he had an opportunity to go back in time? He would be more focused. He concludes the podcast by explaining why he thinks Wisible is the best in the industry.  Resources Wisible Saroj Ativitavas LinkedIn

“Any idea is a hypothetical solution to a problem. It is basically spending time to figure out if your solution to the problem is the right problem to solve first of all”— Hiten Shah Our guest today is Hiten Shah (@hnshah), co-Founder and CEO at Nira. Hiten has started multiple software companies since 2003 including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Nira. Here are some of the topics we discuss: Two approaches to entrepreneurship — the difference between pirates vs. explorers Hiten talks about his own approach and helps you understand which one you should choose Finding the courage to be disliked in order to progress His personal development journey and how it's reflected in his professional life Product development and Hiten's approach to solutions and problems Why you should base your product on people's stories over what they say they want Just a quick note: this episode was recorded last year (2020). Welcome to the Conscious Creators Show; where through intimate and insightful interviews with authors, actors, musicians, entrepreneurs, and other podcasters, you'll learn tools and tactics to 10x your creativity and improve your business and life. Like this show? Support us by following the show, leaving a review here, and helping us spread the word by sharing the pod with one (or three) friends: https://refer.fm/creators Do you want to learn how to make a living as a creator? Check out the CreatorsMBA where we show you how to get paid to create online: http://www.creatorsmba.com Follow our host, Sachit Gupta, and get it touch if you have any questions or ideas related to the show: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Please enjoy today's episode and thank you for listening! Show Notes 01:14 - Building a business as a Pirate vs. Explorer 03:29 - How innovation can happen 06:01 - The building of business with Hiten's explorer tendencies and the pioneering outcomes 11:41 - The importance of self-awareness, being genuine to yourself as a framework 16:47 - How you can value yourself more while respecting your personal goals 21:53 - Why is better to have a conversation, or when is better to ask a friend than to ask Google 23:28 - The Ups and Downs of building a business 28:26 - How to get rid of stress by finding the answer within yourself 34:46 - Your way to finding a path to be non-judgmental 35:44 - The implications of self-awareness on pirates vs. explorers 37:17 - What Hiten wants other founders to know to progress professionally and personally 43:12 - The style of content on Hiten's blog and research work, and his intentions behind it 48:35 - Tips for self-care while on the emotional startup rollercoaster 52:50 - How does the process of developing a framework for a product look like for Hiten 56:55 - The role of stories in defining the audience and their problems, and how to reach a solution 64:00 - Should you use intuition or stories or data on the product development journey? 66:52 - The principle of “measure twice, cut once” as a way of dealing with confirmation bias 69:58 - The power of talking on a podcast vs 1:1 conversation for learning and advice for current and potential funders 76:51 - On getting the right answer when facing with a conflicting advice 77:24 - How by being an example he can be of the biggest help 81:20 - The future envisioned by Hiten Tweetable Quotes "You can tell when someone is self-aware because they are able to clearly articulate why they are doing something, and how they are doing." — Hiten Shah “A pirate wants to see what's out there in order to copy it. An explorer wants to see what's out there in order to go against it and do the opposite.” — Hiten Shah “In reality, our collective experiences don't exist, there is only individualistic experience, which means we are all dreaming.” — Hiten Shah “The impact you can have on yourself and self-improvement on your mental health to understand what triggers you and why, and digging into it, is tremendous in order to look at actions as an observer, instead of a participant.” — Hiten Shah “The more prescriptive you are about the things you're doing, the more you keep it as close to business as possible and not personal.” — Hiten Shah “The children were taught to live with certainty, and that is not the world we live in anymore.” — Hiten Shah “Great product developers are good at intuitively knowing the problem, not intuitively knowing the solution.” — Hiten Shah “You save your creativity for the solution. Don't push your creativity on the problems.” — Hiten Shah About Our Guest Hiten Shah (@hnshah) is the Co-Founder and CEO at Nira. He has started multiple software companies since 2003 including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Nira. He also has a blog Hitenism in which he shares all the news and personal knowledge for anyone interested in SaaS businesses. Hiten builds data-driven solutions to help online businesses make better business decisions at KissMetrics. Hiten Shah serves as a Venture Advisor at 15Five, Inc., SpacePencil Inc., and Lean Startup Machine Inc. He serves as Advisor of Bitium Inc. Additionally, he Co-Founded Crazy Egg & Quick Sprout, an analytics tool that visualizes the user experience on a website. He serves as a Consultant of 500 Startups. Hiten Shah served as Advisor of CatchFree, Inc., iSocket, Inc., and Drumbi Inc. he advises startups about metrics, product & marketing. He started on the Internet by founding an Internet marketing consultancy, ACS. Hiten Shah serves as a Member of the Advisory Board of Recurly, Inc. He serves as a Member of the Advisory Board at DailyFeats, Inc. He serves as a Member of the Advisory Board at Classy, Inc.

This week Jon and Justin discussed: Tweet: what should we talk about? Justin's daughter wrote an article for the Transistor blog: https://transistor.fm/gen-z/  Customer case studies Dynamic audio insertion Integration with Descript Book: Range by David Epstein What should we talk about next? Twitter: @buildyoursaas, @mijustin, @jonbuda Leave a review/comment on Podchaser; it's like Reddit, but for podcasts. Email us: mail@transistor.fm Thanks to our monthly supporters: Mitch Harris Kenny, Intro CRM podcast Oleg Kulyk Violette Du Geneville Take It EV podcast Ethan Gunderson Diogo Chris Willow Borja Soler Ward Sandler Eric Lima James Sowers (like Flowers) Travis Fischer Matt Buckley Russell Brown Evandro Sasse Pradyumna Shembekar (PD) Noah Prail Colin Gray Josh Smith Ivan Curkovic Shane Smith Austin Loveless Simon Bennett Michael Sitver Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis,  Dan Buda  Darby Frey Samori Augusto Dave Young Brad from Canada Sammy Schuckert Mike Walker Adam DuVander Dave Giunta (JOOnta) Kyle Fox GetRewardful.com ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Topics: -We welcome Jon Brown of Grove Technologies. Jon is a long time VIP supporter of the show. -Jon recalls attending a WWE even with the CCP crew, thanks to Joe's sister. -Starting a new business proved to be challenging initially. He talks about his learning curve and experiences building his current business. -Jon has a concept like Uber for Tech Support. -Grove Technologies is going to offer its internal SaaS based tool for other businesses and industries. There are integrations built for other tools like Addigy, Watchman, Jamf, etc. -Working with others as a sub contractor can help broaden your area of expertise as a company. -Hiring remote technicians has proven to be useful to Jon's business model. -Should you increase your onsite rate vs remote? -Do your clients care if you or your staff make onsite visits to their offices? -Grove Technologies has put their stake in the ground about being a remote only support company. -People still don't seem to grasp the concept of password management or Multi-Factor Authentication. -Cybersecurity training for end users can be incredibly useful. It can also provide some discounts with insurance. -Malwarebytes for Mac proves to be less powerful than the Windows version.  -Hook Security and Breach Secure Now are two big services to help with employee training. -Jerry has some recommended security methods for his clients. -Customers have a tendency to conflate security terms like VPN vs firewall. -Jon wants you to become a sponsor of the show!

We talk with Niklas Begley about his Doctave service and the problems it's solving. From there we cover why they use Rust for a key piece of the service and how Elixir fits in. We cover tools like Rustler for integrating Elixir and Rust smoothly. We talk about business drivers, Nik's experience building a SaaS product using Elixir and more! Show Notes online - https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/068-rust-and-elixir-with-nik-begley The post #068 Rust and Elixir with Nik Begley appeared first on Thinking Elixir.

Go to deployempathy.com to buy the audiobook private podcast, physical book, or ebook!This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Reform.As a business owner, you need forms all the time for lead capture, user feedback, SaaS onboarding, job applications, early access signups, and many other types of forms.Here's how Reform is different:- Your brand shines through, not Reform's- It's accessible out-of-the-box... And there are no silly design gimmicks, like frustrating customers by only showing one question at a timeJoin indie businesses like Fathom Analytics and SavvyCal and try out Reform.Software Social listeners get 1 month for free by going to reform.app/social and using the promo code "social" on checkout.AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPTMichele Hansen  0:01  Hey, everyone, Michele here. Colleen is at a conference this week. So doing something a little bit different this week and wanted to give you a preview of the audio book podcast for Deploy Empathy. So as I've kind of mentioned on previous episodes, I am releasing the audio book every week as a podcast as I record it. Part of the idea of this was kind of to sort of sort of do like I did with the newsletter with the book and sort of you know, do it and you know, sort of chapters at a at a time. And so I didn't have to spend you know, two weeks recording which is just, I didn't didn't really have two weeks, you know, of full workdays to sort of lock myself in a closet and record it. So this is allowing me to record it as I have time. Which is kind of a challenge as I say this right now, my desk is literally surrounded and pillows from the last time I recorded which was like two weeks ago. So So yeah, it's been it's been kind of an interesting challenge. But I have been enjoying it. And it's also allowed me to get feedback on it as well. This is my first time recording an audio book. So if anything sounds weird, or whatnot, like people can, you know, give me feedback, and I get a chance to re record as I go. So, so yeah, so it started in I want to say the end of August. And currently, it's on Part Six, which is the how to talk so people will talk section of the book, which is maybe my favorite section of the book. I admit I was a little bit nervous going into recording these chapters because the tone of voice is so important. And I wanted to make sure that I got that right. And I think I got a little bit in my head about that. But I think it I think it came out Okay, so I think I think I'm happy with it. But so yeah, so So this week you're gonna get a chance to preview the the the private podcast, there are still spots in it if you want to join so it's limited to 500 people and right now I think there's about a little under 200 so there's quite a few spots left if you wanted to, to join along, but also you know what, once the full thing is recorded, which I don't really I guess it'll be sort of end of the year early next year. You know, it'll also be available as a regular audio book not quite sure what I'm going to do with the podcast I'm actually kind of curious to hear if people want that to stick around or whatnot. I don't I wonder if it makes it more digestible to get through but maybe that value is on the you know that it's coming out every week, right now. So yeah, hope you enjoy and Colleen and I will be next back next week.Part Six, how to talk So people will talk. This is the most important part of this book. The tactics you'll learn build toward one goal, creating a bubble of suspended judgment, where the person feels comfortable being open. Throughout this part, you'll also find ways to practice these skills before using them in customer conversations. We'll go into each of these in depth one, use a gentle tone of voice to validate them. Three, leave pauses for them to fill for, mirror and summarize their words. Five, don't interrupt, six, use simple wording. Seven asked for clarification, even when you don't need it. Eight. Don't explain anything. Nine. Don't negate them in any way. And let them be the expert. Love it. Use their words and pronunciation 12 asked about time and money already spent. Lastly, you'll learn how to pull it all together by picturing yourself as a rubber duck. Trust me, it'll take you some time and some practice. But I think you'll notice a difference even in your personal life. By using these phrases and tactics. I want you to make me a promise, you'll only use what I'm about to teach you for good, you won't be manipulative, and you won't use what people say against them. deploying the tactics in this chapter can make someone open up to you much more than they otherwise would. Someone's confidence is a sacred gift. And it should be handled gently, respectfully and ethically. That respect should continue after the interview to I expect you to carry through the empathy you build for the customer well beyond the interview, and use empathy as part of your decision making process. Before we get into the tactics and phrases, it's important to understand just how much these tactics can transform a conversation. I got my start doing proper customer interviews in the personal finance industry. In America, people are generally very private about their personal finance decisions and situations. It's an extremely delicate topic. And because of this, I had to learn interviewing in a rigorous way. I didn't realize how much the techniques outlined in this chapter had woven themselves into my everyday conversation habits until I was at the grocery store a few years ago, I was in line with a dozen items and notice that the cashier hugged the woman in front of me, and they interacted with one another in a heartfelt way. I must have just finished an interview because I found myself asking the cashier about it. me with a smile. Oh, I noticed you hugged her. Is that your sister? cashier? No, she's just a longtime customer. I've worked here for a long time. me. Oh, you have? cashier? Yeah, almost 20 years. I'm due to retire soon. Companies changed a lot in that time. me. Oh hasn't. cashier proceeds to tell me about how the store chain was bought out by another chain 10 years ago, how they changed the retirement plan how she's worried about having enough income from Social Security, her 401k her old pension and retirement and how she's making extra 401k contributions. This was all in the span of less than five minutes. As she rang up the dozen or so items I had in my basket. It's important to note that this cashier wasn't just a particularly chatty person. This was my local grocery store. And I had been there a few times per week. For several years at this point. I'd been in this woman's line many many times. And we had never had more than a simple polite conversation about the weather, or how busy the store was that day. I went home and told a former co worker about it and joked Do I have Tell me about your retirement planning written on my forehead. I was amazed that a stranger had told me that kind of information in such a short amount of time. My former co worker pointed out that it was a sign of just how much interview skills had worked themselves into my everyday conversation style. And how I become so much more effective at digging into the heart of an issue without too much effort. For someone who's only negative mark in their first professional performance review was that I was abrasive and was diagnosed with a DD it'll 11 years old, it came as quite a shock to realize I now had an active listening conversation style without even realizing it. That experience taught me how we need to be careful with these skills, and to know when to hit the brakes. It's a person's decision what to reveal. But I always keep that story in mind and remind myself to back off or shift topics. When it seems like someone is on the verge of saying too much. It's possible to make someone too comfortable and safe. It's always okay to say thank you for telling me that I was wondering if we could go back to something you said earlier. I'm curious about something else. It also reminded me of how so many people don't have people in their lives who will just listen to them. Especially about things that are processes or tasks they complete daily or goals that are top of mind. The cashier at the grocery store clearly spent a lot of time thinking and worrying about the different sources of Income she'd have in retirement and whether they would be enough, but maybe didn't have anyone who would listen to her talk about that. I find that once you build trust with someone and show them that you're willing to listen, they will talk. Because no one has ever cared about that part of their daily life before. Maybe they grew up to a co worker about how long something takes, but they've probably never sat down and had someone genuinely ask them what they think about creating server uptime reports or following up on invoices, they've probably never really talked through where they spend a lot of time the tools they use, and so forth. They've probably never had anyone care enough to try to make it better for them. Just being a presence who's willing to listen is more powerful than people realize how customer interviews differ from other kinds of interviews. If you're already familiar with other kinds of interviewing, it might be interesting for you to read with an eye for how this kind of interviewing differs, journalistic interviewing, motivational interviewing and a negotiation based interview all bears similarities to user interviewing, yet they also have significant differences. The first professional interview I ever did was the summer I was interning at the Washington bureau of a British newspaper. the BP oil spill had happened a few months earlier. And my boss asked me to interview someone thinking back that was a very different interview from the customer interviews I started doing years later, in that BP oil spill interview, I was digging for information and I was looking for specific quotes that could be used in an article I already knew about the oil spill, so I wasn't looking to learn their perspective on it. Instead, I needed them to say specific things and say them in a quotable way. Customer interviews by contrast, are all about diving into how the other person perceives an experience and intentionally suspending the desire to validate your own ideas. Later, after the interview has finished, you can analyze the interview and see what opportunities might exist. We'll talk about that more in Part Eight analyzing interviews. Chapter 25 use a gentle tone of voice.In Chris Voss, his book never split the difference. He suggests using a late night DJ voice in negotiations. You're listening to wb mt 88.3 FM therapists will often speak in soft slow voices as a method of CO regulation to calm their patients. These techniques help put the other person at ease and create an environment where they feel safe. These techniques apply when you're talking to customers to a customer interviews should be conducted in the most harmless voice you can possibly muster. Imagine you're asking a treasured older family member about a photo of themselves as a young person. There might be a gentle, friendly tone of voice, a softness to your tone, genuine judgment free curiosity. Or perhaps picture that a close friend has come to you experiencing a personal crisis in the middle of the night. You would listen to them calmly and just try to figure out what was going on. You probably wouldn't start offering ideas or solutions to their problem and would focus on helping them get back to a clear state of mind. use that same gentleness in your customer interviews. It's important to note though, that you cannot be condescending. I purposefully do not say to speak to them like you would a child because people have very different ways of talking to children. Think of your customer as someone you respect and you can learn from because you should and you can. Why did you do it that way set in a medium volume voice with emphasis on certain words could make it sound accusatory and put them on the defensive versus will lead you to do it like that. And a gentle, unassuming, curious voice will help them open up. Try this now. The next time a friend or family member comes to you with a problem. Intentionally use the gentlest voice you can muster when you talk to them. The next time use your normal approach. Notice whether the person reacts differently. Chapter 26 validate them. books on product development often talk about validation, validating ideas, validating prototypes, validating business models.This chapter is about an entirely different kind of validation. It's a pivotal part of getting someone to open up to you. This chapter is about what psychologists and therapists describe as validating statements. These are specific phrases you can use to show someone that you're engaged with what they're saying. It's okay to have trepidation about what you would say in an interview, and how you would come up with follow up questions. Yet most of what you say during an interview aren't questions at all. Instead, you use validating statement It's that shows someone you're open to what they're saying and are listening. Your goal is for them to talk as much as possible. And you as little aim for the interviewee to do 90% of the talking in the interview. In a customer interview, you use validation, even when you don't necessarily agree with what they say. Or even if what they say sounds absurd to you. It does not mean that you agree with them. It is instead a way of recognizing that what they think and do is valid from their perspective. You cannot break that bubble of trust ever, even when something wacky cans, which I can. In a memorable interview years ago, the interviewee suddenly said, Sorry, I'm eating a case of beer right now, about 45 minutes into the phone call. Mind you, this person had given zero previous indications that they were eating. My research partner, the unflappable research expert, Dr. Helen fake, just rolled with it and said, Oh, you're fine. Notice what she said there. She didn't say no worries or not a problem or don't worry about it, all of which either hinge on negating a negative word, worries problem, and thus leave the negative word in the person's mind. Or invalidating instead told him he was fine. Not, that's fine, which is abstract. But explicitly putting the interviewee as the subject. And that saying that he is fine, which validated his state as a person. It was subtle yet next level of conversational jujitsu that will start to come naturally to you, the more you practice this, you also cannot say that you agree with them, or congratulate them, or do anything that implies that you have an opinion. Even if it's a positive opinion, this is probably one of the strangest parts of how to make an interview flow. And for many people, it runs counter to their built in instincts to be positive and encouraging. The person you're interviewing may ask you if you agree, and you need to purposely find a way to make that question go away. I can see where you're coming from on that. Can you tell me rather than Yeah, I agree. agreeing or disagreeing will remind them that you're a human being with opinions and judgments, and the trust will start to melt away, you almost want them to forget that you're a person. For example, when I was interviewing people about their finances, they would admit to doing things that a financial planner or portfolio manager would never endorse, even though we knew that we couldn't correct them. We also couldn't agree with them, either. We were searching for their internal logic and thought processes. And if we were introduced outside information, or agree or disagree with them, they would have shifted into trying to impress us and holding back information, examples of validating statements. That makes sense. I can see why you would do it that way. I'm interested to hear more about how you came to doing it that way. Would you be able to walk me through the context behind that? I can see what you're saying. It sounds like that's frustrating. That sounds like that's time consuming. It sounds like that's challenging. Sounds like you think that could be improved? Can you help me understand What went through your mind? When? Can you tell me more about? It makes sense. You think that? It makes sense? You do it that way? Sounds like there are several steps involved. I'm curious, can you walk me through them? Sounds like a lot goes into that.When using validating phrases, I encourage you to use the word think instead of feel. Some people I've noticed will find it insulting to say that they feel a certain way. But think is interpreted as more neutral and factual. For example, you feel the process is complicated. Versus you think the process is complicated, or better. The process is complicated. And remember, most people like to think their job is challenging. years ago, I heard someone talk about their recent move to LA. their spouse was in the entertainment industry and this person was not. And they kept finding themselves struggling to make conversation at cocktail parties. But eventually they learned a trick. Whenever someone said what they did, they replied with that sounds challenging. Even if the person's job sounded easy or boring. People would open up because it felt like a compliment. And it would lead to an interesting conversation about the things that person did at work. What that person found was that encouraging someone to keep talking requires Turning the conversation back over to them. Rather than offering your own ideas. Try this now. The next time a friend or family member shares a problem with you and does not explicitly ask you for advice, say that makes sense or another one of the validating statements mentioned previously, rather than offering a solution. Sometimes people say I just don't know what to do, which sounds like an invitation to offer a solution but may not be. If that happens, ask them about what they've already tried. Chapter 27 leave pauses for them to fill. Several years ago, I was sitting in the audience at the DC tech meetup. I was there to support a friend who was giving a presentation. And something one of the panelists said stuck with me and it's something I remind myself about during every customer interview. Radio producer melody Kramer was asked what she had learned while working for Terry Gross host of the long running NPR interview show fresh air. She said that Terry Gross his interview strategy is to ask a question and then to wait and wait and wait at least three long beats until it is uncomfortable. Quote, the other person will fill the silence and what they fill it with will often be the most interesting part of the interview. I remember Cramer quoting gross as saying this tactic of saying something and then waiting at least three beats for the other person to fill it is something that I use in every single interview often multiple times. The length of what feels like a long pause varies from person to person. The research of linguist Dr. Deborah Tannen, shows that people from different American regions tend to have different conversation styles. A coordinator her research, people from the northeastern us may talk over one another to show engagement. While California and may wait for a pause to jump in. People from different continents can have different conversation styles to people from East Asia may wait for an even longer pause and could interpret what seems like a suitable pause to the California as an interruption. A three beat pause may seem long disarm and normal to others. I encourage you to experiment with us and add an extra two to three beats on top of whatever is normal for you. In addition to pauses, I also encourage you to notice whether you provide prompts and additional questions. What do you do if the other person doesn't respond right away? Imagine you're trying to figure out what kind of delivery to order for dinner with a friend or spouse. Do you say Where should we order takeout from and let it hang? Perhaps you had possible answers like where should we order takeout from? Should we get pizza? Chinese sushi? One of the ways people make a typical conversation flow is by adding these sorts of little prompting words, when someone doesn't reply immediately. Maybe the prompting is an offering answers like above. And it's just a rephrase without offering an answer like where should we order takeout from? Do you wanna? while adding gesticulation. In an interview, you need to avoid prompting as best as you can, lest you influence the person's answer. When you ask a question, you need to let it hang and let the customer fill the silence. So can you tell me why you even needed a product like your product in the first place? And wait?Don't prompt. If they don't reply right away? Don't say was it for use case one, or maybe use case two? Just wait. I know how hard this is. In fact, there's a point in the example customer interview where I slipped up and prompted cool was there, or is there anything else? Did you have any other questions or?Drew  24:10  No, I think that's everything I have.Michele Hansen  24:14  Now, sometimes it might get truly awkward. The person you're interviewing may not respond. If they say, Are you still there? You can gently bring the conversation back to focus on them and say something that elevates what they've already said like, Yeah, I was just giving you a moment to think. Oh, I was just jotting down what you just said that seemed important. And then rephrase what you'd like them to expand on. Yes, I'm still here. Do you want to come back to that later? Oh, we just sounded like you're about to say something. If anything too long pauses and the interviewers phrases the follow, make the customer feel even more important and reinforce that they are in the dominant role in this conference. It puts them in the role of teacher which marketing psychology expert Dr. Robert Steele, Dini, has identified as a powerful way of influencing another person's behavior. You want them to teach you about their view of the process. And this sort of almost differential treatment through pauses, helps elevate them into that teaching position. To get the answers you need about the customers process, you need to create a safe judgment free environment, you need to hand the stage entirely over to the customer, and talk as little as possible. And leaving silences without prompting is one of the ways you can do that. Try this now. The next time you're having an everyday conversation, not a tense conversation, not appointed conversation. Notice whether you ask a question and wait. Chapter 28 mirror and summarize their words. I have a friend who used that a parrot named Steve. I remember listening amused as he told me about the conversations he had with Steve. This was years before I learned about active listening. And now it makes more sense to me why parrots are great conversationalist, even though their vocabulary is limited. What parents do is repeat words back at people and repeating words back at someone and rephrasing what they've said, as the magical power of encouraging them to elaborate. It's a tactic that therapists and negotiators use all the time. CHAPTER TWO OF never split the difference by Chris Voss is a deep dive on mirroring. And you can also learn about it and nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Consider this excerpt from the example interview, I wasn'tDrew  26:44  really seriously considering anything that had a paywall on it was I wasn't sure that it would ever pay itself back off. I knew there were other options out there that would either require moving our storage and our database altogether, which didn't really seem appealing, or having two different services, one to manage each. But then the storage still being just as complicated only somewhere else.Michele Hansen  27:07  It sounds like you had a lot of things you were trying to like wave back and forth about whether you should sort of try to plunge forward with this thing that was already being very frustrating. Or then all of the the negative effects of switching and all the complications that that would introduce.Drew  27:23  I really didn't want to spend a whole lot of time investing, you know, building up a new infrastructure for a new product for new servers to handle this one thing that I think the most frustrating part was that it worked in now it doesn't.Michele Hansen  27:36  You'll notice there aren't any question marks and what I said as a follow up. I rephrased what he said as a statement, which then prompted him to expand on it. This is a combination of two conversation tactics, mirroring and summarizing, mirroring is repeating what someone has said. And summarizing is when you rephrase what they have said, and sometimes label their feelings, you can hear another example of mirroring in the sample interview, he describes himself running into a lot of walls, jumping through a lot of hoops. And that phrasing is mirrored back for elaboration.Drew  28:10  And Firebase Storage just did not work as easily. As it was we found ourselves running into a lot of walls, jumping through a lot of hoops just to make the simplest things work.Michele Hansen  28:22  Can you tell me a little bit more about those hoops and walls that you ran into? negotiation expert Chris Voss notes that it's important to say it rather than I, when summarizing, it sounds like is more neutral, then I'm hearing that since in the second one, you're centering yourself as the subject, but the first phrase centers the situation. For example, if your spouse or roommate comes home seeming frazzled, man, what a day, I had, like 10 calls today. You mirroring. You had 10 calls today. The other person? Yeah, and then my last one didn't even show up and I'd had to cut the previous call short to make it. If I'd known they weren't going to show up. I could have gotten this thing sorted out and then I wouldn't have to work tonight. You summarizing and labeling. Sounds like you had a lot of calls today. And because someone didn't show up, you're feeling frustrated that you have to finish your work tonight. Notice that none of these follow ups or questions? Oh, are you talking to new clients? The clarifications are simple restatements of what the person has said without added editorial zation of the events. Try this now. When a friend or family member says something to you about their day, try stating back at them what they've said. Then try summarizing what they've said as a statement. Sometimes a gentle upward tone implies interest more depending on the person

About EmmaEmma Bostian is a Software Engineer at Spotify in Stockholm. She is also a co-host of the Ladybug Podcast, author of Decoding The Technical Interview Process, and an instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters.Links: Ladybug Podcast: https://www.ladybug.dev LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/emma-bostian Frontend Masters: https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/emma-bostian/ Decoding the Technical Interview Process: https://technicalinterviews.dev Twitter: https://twitter.com/emmabostian 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: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the weird things that I've found in the course of, well, the last five years or so is that I went from absolute obscurity to everyone thinking that I know everyone else because I have thoughts and opinions on Twitter. Today, my guest also has thoughts and opinions on Twitter. The difference is that what she has to say is actually helpful to people. My guest is Emma Bostian, software engineer at Spotify, which is probably, if we can be honest about it, one of the least interesting things about you. Thanks for joining me.Emma: Thanks for having me. That was quite the intro. I loved it.Corey: I do my best and I never prepare them, which is a blessing and a curse. When ADHD is how you go through life and you suck at preparation, you've got to be good at improv. So, you're a co-host of the Ladybug Podcast. Let's start there. What is that podcast? And what's it about?Emma: So, that podcast is just my three friends and I chatting about career and technology. We all come from different backgrounds, have different journeys into tech. I went the quote-unquote, “Traditional” computer science degree route, but Ali is self-taught and works for AWS, and Kelly she has, like, a master's in psychology and human public health and runs her own company. And then Sydney is an awesome developer looking for her next role. So, we all come from different places and we just chat about career in tech.Corey: You're also an instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters. I'm going to guess just based upon the name that you are something of a frontend person, which is a skill set that has constantly eluded me for 20 years, as given evidence by every time I've tried to build something that even remotely touches frontend or JavaScript in any sense.Emma: Yeah, to my dad's disdain, I have stuck with the frontend; he really wanted me to stay backend. I did an internship at IBM in Python, and you know, I learned all about assembly language and database, but frontend is what really captures my heart.Corey: There's an entire school of thought out there from a constituency of Twitter that I will generously refer to as shitheads that believe, “Oh, frontend is easy and it's somehow less than.” And I would challenge anyone who holds that perspective to wind up building an interface that doesn't look like crap first, then come and talk to me. Spoiler, you will not say that after attempting to go down that rabbit hole. If you disagree with this, you can go ahead and yell at me on Twitter so I know where you're hiding, so I can block you. Now, that's all well and good, but one of the most interesting things that you've done that aligns with topics near and dear to my heart is you wrote a book.Now, that's not what's near and dear to my heart; I have the attention span to write a tweet most days. But the book was called Decoding the Technical Interview Process. Technical interviewing is one of those weird things that comes up from time to time, here and everywhere else because it's sort of this stylized ritual where we evaluate people on a number of skills that generally don't reflect in their day-to-day; it's really only a series of skills that you get better by practicing, and you only really get to practice them when you're interviewing for other jobs. That's been my philosophy, but again, I've written a tweet on this; you've written a book. What's the book about and what drove you to write it?Emma: So, the book covers everything from an overview of the interview process, to how do you negotiate a job offer, to systems design, and talks about load balancing and cache partitioning, it talks about what skills you need from the frontend side of things to do well on your JavaScript interviews. I will say this, I don't teach HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in-depth in the book because there are plenty of other resources for that. And some guy got mad at me about that the other day and wanted a refund because I didn't teach the skills, but I don't need to. [laugh]. And then it covers data structures and algorithms.They're all written in JavaScript, they have easy to comprehend diagrams. What drove me to write this is that I had just accepted a job offer in Stockholm for a web developer position at Spotify. I had also just passed my Google technical interviews, and I finally realized, holy crap, maybe I do know what I'm doing in an interview now. And this was at the peak of when people were getting laid off due to COVID and I said, “You know what? I have a lot of knowledge. And if I have a computer science degree and I was able to get through some of the hardest technical interviews, I think I should share that with the community.”Because some people didn't go through a CS degree and don't understand what a linked list is. And that's not their fault. It's just unfortunately, there weren't a lot of great resources—especially for web developers out there—to learn these concepts. Cracking the Coding Interview is a great book, but it's written in backend language and it's a little bit hard to digest as a frontend developer. So, I decided to write my own.Corey: How much of the book is around the technical interview process as far as ask, “Here's how you wind up reversing linked lists,” or, “Inverting a binary tree,” or whatever it is where you're tracing things around without using a pointer, how do you wind up detecting a loop in a recursive whatever it is—yeah, as you can tell, I'm not a computer science person at all—versus how much of it is, effectively, interview 101 style skills for folks who are even in non-technical roles could absorb?Emma: My goal was, I wanted this to be approachable by anyone without extensive technical knowledge. So, it's very beginner-friendly. That being said, I cover the basic data structures, talking about what traditional methods you would see on them, how do you code that, what does that look like from a visual perspective with fake data? I don't necessarily talk about how do you reverse a binary tree, but I do talk about how do you balance it if you remove a node? What if it's not a leaf node? What if it has children? Things like that.It's about [sigh] I would say 60/40, where 40% is coding and technical stuff, but maybe—eh, it's a little bit closer to 50/50; it kind of depends. I do talk about the take-home assessment and tips for that. When I do a take-home assessment, I like to include a readme with things I would have done if I had more time, or these are performance trade-offs that I made; here's why. So, there's a lot of explanation as to how you can improve your chances at moving on to the next round. So yeah, I guess it's 50/50.I also include a section on tips for hiring managers, how to create an inclusive and comfortable environment for your candidates. But it's definitely geared towards candidates, and I would say it's about 50/50 coding tech and process stuff.Corey: One of the problems I've always had with this entire industry is it feels like we're one of the only industries that does this, where we bring people in, and oh, you've been an engineer for 15 years at a whole bunch of companies I've recognized, showing career progression, getting promoted at some of them transitioning from high-level role to high-level role. “Great, we are so glad that you came in to interview. Now, up to the whiteboard, please, and implement FizzBuzz because I have this working theory that you don't actually know how to code, and despite the fact that you've been able to fake your way through it at big companies for 15 years, I'm the one that's going to catch you out with some sort of weird trivia question.” It's this adversarial, almost condescending approach and I don't see it in any other discipline than tech. Is that just because I'm not well-traveled enough? Is that because I'm misunderstanding the purpose of all of these things? Or, what is this?Emma: I think partially it was a gatekeeping solution for a while, for people who are comfortable in their roles and may be threatened by people who have come through different paths to get to tech. Because software engineer used to be an accredited title that you needed a degree or certification to get. And in some countries it still is, so you'll see this debate sometimes about calling yourself a software engineer if you don't have that accreditation. But in this day and age, people go through boot camps, they can come from other industries, they can be self-taught. You don't need a computer science degree, and I think the interview process has not caught up with that.I will say [laugh] the worst interview I had was at IBM when I was already working there. I was already a web developer there, full-time. I was interviewing for a role, and I walked into the room and there were five guys sitting at a table and they were like, “Get up to the whiteboard.” It was for a web development job and they quizzed me about Java. And I was like, “Um, sir, I have not done Java since college.” And they were like, “We don't care.”Corey: Oh, yeah, coding on a whiteboard in front of five people who already know the answer—Emma: Horrifying.Corey: —during a—for them, it's any given Tuesday, and for you, it is a, this will potentially determine the course that your career takes from this point forward. There's a level of stress that goes into that never exists in our day-to-day of building things out.Emma: Well, I also think it's an artificial environment. And why, though? Like, why is this necessary? One of the best interviews I had was actually with Gatsby. It was for an open-source maintainer role, and they essentially let me try the product before I bought it.Like, they let me try out doing the job. It was a paid process, they didn't expect me to do it for free. I got to choose alternatives if I wanted to do one thing or another, answer one question or another, and this was such an exemplary process that I always bring it up because that is a modern interview process, when you are letting people try the position. Now granted, not everyone can do this, right? We've got parents, we've got people working two jobs, and not everyone can afford to take the time to try out a job.But who can also afford a five-stage interview process that still warrants taking vacation days? So, I think at least—at the very least—pay your candidates if you can.Corey: Oh, yeah. One of the best interviews I've ever had was at a company called Three Rings Design, which is now defunct, unfortunately, but it was fairly typical ops questions of, “Yeah, here's an AWS account. Spin up a couple EC2 instances, load balance between them, have another one monitored. You know, standard op stuff. And because we don't believe in asking people to work for free, we'll pay you $300 upon completion of the challenge.”Which, again, it's not huge money for doing stuff like that, but it's also, this shows a level of respect for my time. And instead of giving me a hard deadline of when it was due, they asked me, “When can we expect this by?” Which is a great question in its own right because it informs you about a candidate's ability to set realistic deadlines and then meet them, which is one of those useful work things. And they—unlike most other companies I spoke with in that era—were focused on making it as accommodating for the candidate as possible. They said, “We're welcome to interview you during the workday; we can also stay after hours and have a chat then, if that's more convenient for your work schedule.”Because they knew I was working somewhere else; an awful lot of candidates are. And they just bent over backwards to be as accommodating as possible. I see there's a lot of debate these days in various places about the proper way to interview candidates. No take-home because biases for people who don't have family obligations or other commitments outside of work hours. “Okay, great, so I'm going to come in interview during the day?” “No. That biases people who can't take time off.” And, on some level, it almost seems to distill down to no one likes any way that there is of interviewing candidates, and figuring out a way that accommodates everyone is a sort of a fool's errand. It seems like there is no way that won't get you yelled at.Emma: I think there needs to be almost like a choose your own adventure. What is going to set you up for success and also allow you to see if you want to even work that kind of a job in the first place? Because I thought on paper, open-source maintainer sounds awesome. And upon looking into the challenges, I'm like, “You know what? I think I'd hate this job.”And I pulled out and I didn't waste their time and they didn't waste mine. So, when you get down to it, honestly, I wish I didn't have to write this book. Did it bring me a lot of benefit? Yeah. Let's not sugarcoat that. It allowed me to pay off my medical debt and move across a continent, but that being said, I wish that we were at a point in time where that did not need to exist.Corey: One of the things that absolutely just still gnaws at me even years later, is I interviewed at Google twice, and I didn't get an offer either time, I didn't really pass their technical screen either time. The second one that really sticks out in my mind where it was, “Hey, write some code in a Google Doc while we watch remotely,” and don't give you any context or hints on this. And just it was—the entire process was sitting there listening to them basically, like, “Nope, not what I'm thinking about. Nope, nope, nope.” It was… by the end of that conversation, I realized that if they were going to move forward—which they didn't—I wasn't going to because I didn't want to work with people that were that condescending and rude.And I've held by it; I swore I would never apply there again and I haven't. And it's one of those areas where, did I have the ability to do the job? I can say in hindsight, mostly. Were there things I was going to learn as I went? Absolutely, but that's every job.And I'm realizing as I see more and more across the ecosystem, that they were an outlier in a potentially good way because in so many other places, there's no equivalent of the book that you have written that is given to the other side of the table: how to effectively interview candidates. People lose sight of the fact that it's a sales conversation; it's a two-way sale, they have to convince you to hire them, but you also have to convince them to work with you. And even in the event that you pass on them, you still want them to say nice things about you because it's a small industry, all things considered. And instead, it's just been awful.Emma: I had a really shitty interview, and let me tell you, they have asked me subsequently if I would re-interview with them. Which sucks; it's a product that I know and love, and I've talked about this, but I had the worst experience. Let me clarify, I had a great first interview with them, and I was like, “I'm just not ready to move to Australia.” Which is where the job was. And then they contacted me again a year later, and it was the worst experience of my life—same recruiter—it was the ego came out.And I will tell you what, if you treat your candidates like shit, they will remember and they will never recommend people interview for you. [laugh]. I also wanted to mention about accessibility because—so we talked about, oh, give candidates the choice, which I think the whole point of an interview should be setting your candidates up for success to show you what they can do. And I talked with [Stephen 00:14:09]—oh, my gosh, I can't remember his last name—but he is a quadriplegic and he types with a mouthstick. And he was saying he would go to technical interviews and they would not be prepared to set him up for success.And they would want to do these pair programming, or, like, writing on a whiteboard. And it's not that he can't pair program, it's that he was not set up for success. He needed a mouthstick to type and they were not prepared to help them with that. So, it's not just about the commitment that people need. It's also about making sure that you are giving candidates what they need to give the best interview possible in an artificial environment.Corey: One approach that people have taken is, “Ah, I'm going to shortcut this and instead of asking people to write code, I'm going to look at their work on GitHub.” Which is, in some cases, a great way to analyze what folks are capable of doing. On the other, well, there's a lot of things that play into that. What if they're working in environment where they don't have the opportunity to open-source their work? What if people consider this a job rather than an all-consuming passion?I know, perish the thought. We don't want to hire people like that. Grow up. It's not useful, and it's not helpful. It's not something that applies universally, and there's an awful lot of reasons why someone's code on GitHub might be materially better—or worse—than their work product. I think that's fine. It's just a different path toward it.Emma: I don't use GitHub for largely anything except just keeping repositories that I need. I don't actively update it. And I have, like, a few thousand followers; I'm like, “Why the hell do you guys follow me? I don't do anything.” It's honestly a terrible representation.That being said, you don't need to have a GitHub repository—an active one—to showcase your skills. There are many other ways that you can show a potential employer, “Hey, I have a lot of skills that aren't necessarily showcased on my resume, but I like to write blogs, I like to give tech talks, I like to make YouTube videos,” things of that nature.Corey: I had a manager once who refused to interview anyone who didn't have a built-out LinkedIn profile, which is also one of these bizarre things. It's, yeah, a lot of people don't feel the need to have a LinkedIn profile, and that's fine. But the idea that, “Oh, yeah, they have this profile they haven't updated in a couple years, it's clearly they're not interested in looking for work.” It's, yeah. Maybe—just a thought here—your ability to construct a resume and build it out in the way that you were expecting is completely orthogonal to how effective they might be in the role. The idea that someone not having a LinkedIn profile somehow implies that they're sketchy is the wrong lesson to take from all of this. That site is terrible.Emma: Especially when you consider the fact that LinkedIn is primarily used in the United States as a social—not social networking—professional networking tool. In Germany, they use Xing as a platform; it's very similar to LinkedIn, but my point is, if you're solely looking at someone's LinkedIn as a representation of their ability to do a job, you're missing out on many candidates from all over the world. And also those who, yeah, frankly, just don't—like, they have more important things to be doing than updating their LinkedIn profile. [laugh].Corey: On some level, it's the idea of looking at a consultant, especially independent consultant type, when their website is glorious and up-to-date and everything's perfect, it's, oh, you don't really have any customers, do you? As opposed to the consultants you know who are effectively sitting there with a waiting list, their website looks like crap. It's like, “Is this Geocities?” No. It's just that they're too busy working on the things that bring the money instead of the things that bring in business, in some respects.Let's face it, websites don't. For an awful lot of consulting work, it's word of mouth. I very rarely get people finding me off of Google, clicking a link, and, “Hey, my AWS bill is terrible. Can you help us with it?” It happens, but it's not something that happens so frequently that we want to optimize for it because that's not where the best customers have been coming from. Historically, it's referrals, it's word of mouth, it's people seeing the aggressive shitposting I engage in on Twitter and saying, “Oh, that's someone that should help me with my Amazon bill.” Which I don't pretend to understand, but I'm still going to roll with it.Emma: You had mentioned something about passion earlier, and I just want to say, if you're a hiring manager or recruiter, you shouldn't solely be looking at candidates who superficially look like they're passionate about what they do. Yes, that is—it's important, but it's not something that—like, I don't necessarily choose one candidate over the other because they push commits, and open pull requests on GitHub, and open-source, and stuff. You can be passionate about your job, but at the end of the day, it's still a job. For me, would I be working if I had to? No. I'd be opening a bookstore because that's what I would really love to be doing. But that doesn't mean I'm not passionate about my job. I just show it in different ways. So, just wanted to put that out there.Corey: Oh, yeah. The idea that you must eat, sleep, live, and breathe is—hell with that. One of the reasons that we get people to work here at The Duckbill Group is, yeah, we care about getting the job done. We don't care about how long it takes or when you work; it's oh, you're not feeling well? Take the day off.We have very few things that are ‘must be done today' style of things. Most of those tend to fall on me because it's giving a talk at a conference; they will not reschedule the conference for you. I've checked. So yeah, that's important, but that's not most days.Emma: Yeah. It's like programming is my job, it's not my identity. And it's okay if it is your primary hobby if that is how you identify, but for me, I'm a person with actual hobbies, and, you know, a personality, and programming is just a job for me. I like my job, but it's just a job.Corey: And on the side, you do interesting things like wrote a book. You mentioned earlier that it wound up paying off some debt and helping cover your move across an ocean. Let's talk a little bit about that because I'm amenable to the idea of side projects that accidentally have a way of making money. That's what this podcast started out as. If I'm being perfectly honest, and started out as something even more self-serving than that.It's, well if I reach out to people in this industry that are doing interesting things and ask them to grab a cup of coffee, they'll basically block me, whereas if I ask them to, would you like to appear on my podcast, they'll clear time on their schedule. I almost didn't care if my microphone was on or not when I was doing these just because it was a chance to talk to really interesting people and borrow their brain, people reached out asking they can sponsor it, along with the newsletter and the rest, and it's you want to give me money? Of course, you can give me money. How much money? And that sort of turned into a snowball effect over time.Five years in, it's turned into something that I would never have predicted or expected. But it's weird to me still, how effective doing something you're actually passionate about as a side project can sort of grow wings on its own. Where do you stand on that?Emma: Yeah, it's funny because with the exception of the online courses that I've worked with—I mentioned LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters, which I knew were paid opportunities—none of my side projects started out for financial reasonings. The podcast that we started was purely for fun, and the sponsors came to us. Now, I will say right up front, we all had pretty big social media followings, and my first piece of advice to anyone looking to get into side projects is, don't focus so much on making money at the get-go. Yes, to your point, Corey, focus on the stuff you're passionate about. Focus on engaging with people on social media, build up your social media, and at that point, okay, monetization will slowly find its way to you.But yeah, I say if you can monetize the heck out of your work, go for it. But also, free content is also great. I like to balance my paid content with my free content because I recognize that not everyone can afford to pay for some of this information. So, I generally always have free alternatives. And for this book that we published, one of the things that was really important to me was keeping it affordable.The first publish I did was $10 for the book. It was like a 250-page book. It was, like, $10 because again, I was not in it for the money. And when I redid the book with the egghead.io team, the same team that did Epic React with Kent C. Dodds, I said, “I want to keep this affordable.” So, we made sure it was still affordable, but also that we had—what's it called? Parity pricing? Pricing parity, where depending on your geographic location, the price is going to accommodate for how the currency is doing. So, yes, I would agree. Side project income for me allows me to do incredible stuff, but it wasn't why I got into it in the first place. It was genuinely just a nice-to-have.Corey: I haven't really done anything that asks people for money directly. I mean, yeah, I sell t-shirts on the website, and mugs, and drink umbrellas—don't get me started—but other than that and the charity t-shirt drive I do every year, I tend to not be good at selling things that don't have a comma in the price tag. For me, it was about absolutely building an audience. I tend to view my Twitter follower count as something of a proxy for it, but the number I actually care about, the audience that I'm focused on cultivating, is newsletter subscribers because no social media platform that we've ever seen has lasted forever. And I have to imagine that Twitter will one day wane as well.But email has been here since longer than we'd been alive, and by having a list of email addresses and ways I can reach out to people on an ongoing basis, I can monetize that audience in a more direct way, at some point should I need them to. And my approach has been, well, one, it's a valuable audience for some sponsors, so I've always taken the asking corporate people for money is easier than asking people for personal money, plus it's a valuable audience to them, so it tends to blow out a number of the metrics that you would normally expect of, oh, for this audience size, you should generally be charging Y dollars. Great. That makes sense if you're slinging mattresses or free web hosting, but when it's instead, huh, these people buy SaaS enterprise software and implement it at their companies, all of economics tend to start blowing apart. Same story with you in many respects.The audience that you're building is functionally developers. That is a lucrative market for the types of sponsors that are wise enough to understand that—in a lot of cases these days—which product a company is going to deploy is not dictated by their exec so much as it is the bottom-up adoption path of engineers who like the product.Emma: Mm-hm. Yeah, and I think once I got to maybe around 10,000 Twitter followers is when I changed my mentality and I stopped caring so much about follower count, and instead I just started caring about the people that I was following. And the number is a nice-to-have but to be honest, I don't think so much about it. And I do understand, yes, at that point, it is definitely a privilege that I have this quote-unquote, “Platform,” but I never see it as an audience, and I never think about that “Audience,” quote-unquote, as a marketing platform. But it's funny because there's no right or wrong. People will always come to you and be like, “You shouldn't monetize your stuff.” And it's like—Corey: “Cool. Who's going to pay me then? Not you, apparently.”Emma: Yeah. It's also funny because when I originally sold the book, it was $10 and I got so many people being like, “This is way too cheap. You should be charging more.” And I'm like, “But I don't care about the money.” I care about all the people who are unemployed and not able to survive, and they have families, and they need to get a job and they don't know how.That's what I care about. And I ended up giving away a lot of free books. My mantra was like, hey if you've been laid off, DM me. No questions asked, I'll give it to you for free. And it was nice because a lot of people came back, even though I never asked for it, they came back and they wanted to purchase it after the fact, after they'd gotten a job.And to me that was like… that was the most rewarding piece. Not getting their money; I don't care about that, but it was like, “Oh, okay. I was actually able to help you.” That is what's really the most rewarding. But yeah, certainly—and back really quickly to your email point, I highly agree, and one of the first things that I would recommend to anyone looking to start a side product, create free content so that you have a backlog that people can look at to… kind of build trust.Corey: Give it away for free, but also get emails from people, like a trade for that. So, it's like, “Hey, here's a free guide on how to start a podcast from scratch. It's free, but all I would like is your email.” And then when it comes time to publish a course on picking the best audio and visual equipment for that podcast, you have people who've already been interested in this topic that you can now market to.This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I'm not sitting here trying to judge anyone for the choices that they make at all. There are a lot of different paths to it. I'm right there with you. One of the challenges I had when I was thinking about, do I charge companies or do I charge people was that if I'm viewing it through a lens of audience growth, well, what stuff do I gate behind a paywall? What stuff don't I? Well, what if I just—Emma: Mm-hm.Corey: —gave it all away? And that way I don't have to worry about the entire class of problems that you just alluded to of, well, how do I make sure this is fair? Because a cup of coffee in San Francisco is, what, $14 in some cases? Whereas that is significant in places that aren't built on an economy of foolishness. How do you solve for that problem? How do you deal with the customer service slash piracy issues slash all the other nonsense? And it's just easier.Emma: Yeah.Corey: Something I've found, too, is that when you're charging enough money to companies, you don't have to deal with an entire class of customer service problem. You just alluded to the other day that well, you had someone who bought your book and was displeased that it wasn't a how to write code from scratch tutorial, despite the fact that he were very clear on what it is and what it isn't. I don't pretend to understand that level of entitlement. If I spend 10 or 20 bucks on an ebook, and it's not very good, let's see, do I wind up demanding a refund from the author and making them feel bad about it, or do I say, “The hell with it.” And in my case, I—there is privilege baked into this; I get that, but it's I don't want to make people feel bad about what they've built. If I think there's enough value to spend money on it I view that as a one-way transaction, rather than chasing someone down for three months, trying to get a $20 refund.Emma: Yeah, and I think honestly, I don't care so much about giving refunds at all. We have a 30-day money-back guarantee and we don't ask any questions. I just asked this person for feedback, like, “Oh, what was not up to par?” And it was just, kind of like, BS response of like, “Oh, I didn't read the website and I guess it's not what I wanted.” But the end of the day, they still keep the product.The thing is, you can't police all of the people who are going to try to get your content for free if you're charging for it; it's part of it. And I knew that when I got into it, and honestly, my thing is, if you are circulating a book that helps you get a job in tech and you're sending it to all your friends, I'm not going to ask any questions because it's very much the sa—and this is just my morals here, but if I saw someone stealing food from a grocery store, I wouldn't tell on them because at the end of the day, if you're s—Corey: Same story. You ever see someone's stealing baby formula from a store? No, you didn't.Emma: Right.Corey: Keep walking. Mind your business.Emma: Exactly. Exactly. So, at the end of the day, I didn't necessarily care that—people are like, “Oh, people are going to share your book around. It's a PDF.” I'm like, “I don't care. Let them. It is what it is. And the people who wants to support and can, will.” But I'm not asking.I still have free blogs on data structures, and algorithms, and the interview stuff. I do still have content for free, but if you want more, if you want my illustrated diagrams that took me forever with my Apple Pencil, fair enough. That would be great if you could support me. If not, I'm still happy to give you the stuff for free. It is what it is.Corey: One thing that I think is underappreciated is that my resume doesn't look great. On paper, I have an eighth-grade education, and I don't have any big tech names on my resume. I have a bunch of relatively short stints; until I started this place, I've never lasted more than two years anywhere. If I apply through the front door the way most people do for a job, I will get laughed out of the room by the applicant tracking system, automatically. It'll never see a human.And by doing all these side projects, it's weird, but let's say that I shut down the company for some reason, and decide, ah, I'm going to go get a job now, my interview process—more or less, and it sounds incredibly arrogant, but roll with it for a minute—is, “Don't you know who I am? Haven't you heard of me before?” It's, “Here's my website. Here's all the stuff I've been doing. Ask anyone in your engineering group who I am and you'll see what pops up.”You're in that same boat at this point where your resume is the side projects that you've done and the audience you've built by doing it. That's something that I think is underappreciated. Even if neither one of us made a dime through direct monetization of things that we did, the reputational boost to who we are and what we do professionally seems to be one of those things that pays dividends far beyond any relatively small monetary gain from it.Emma: Absolutely, yeah. I actually landed my job interview with Spotify through Twitter. I was contacted by a design systems manager. And I was in the interview process for them, and I ended up saying, “You know, I'm not ready to move to Stockholm. I just moved to Germany.”And a year later, I circled back and I said, “Hey, are there any openings?” And I ended up re-interviewing, and guess what? Now, I have a beautiful home with my soulmate and we're having a child. And it's funny how things work out this way because I had a Twitter account. And so don't undervalue [laugh] social media as a tool in lieu of a resume because I don't think anyone at Spotify even saw my resume until it actually accepted the job offer, and it was just a formality.So yeah, absolutely. You can get a job through social media. It's one of the easiest ways. And that's why if I ever see anyone looking for a job on Twitter, I will retweet, and vouch for them if I know their work because I think that's one of the quickest ways to finding an awesome candidate.Corey: Back in, I don't know, 2010, 2011-ish. I was deep in the IRC weed. I was network staff on the old freenode network—not the new terrible one. The old, good one—and I was helping people out with various things. I was hanging out in the Postfix channel and email server software thing that most people have the good sense not to need to know anything about.And someone showed up and was asking questions about their config, and I was working with them, and teasing them, and help them out with it. And at the end of it, his comment was, “Wow, you're really good at this. Any chance you'd be interested in looking for jobs?” And the answer was, “Well, sure, but it's a global network. Where are you?”Well, he was based in Germany, but he was working remotely for Spotify in Stockholm. A series of conversations later, I flew out to Stockholm and interviewed for a role that they decided I was not a fit for—and again, they're probably right—and I often wonder how my life would have gone differently if the decision had gone the other way. I mean, no hard feelings, please don't get me wrong, but absolutely, helping people out, interacting with people over social networks, or their old school geeky analogs are absolutely the sorts of things that change lives. I would never have thought to apply to a role like that if I had been sitting here looking at job ads because who in the world would pick up someone with relatively paltry experience and move them halfway around the world? This was like a fantasy, not a reality.Emma: [laugh].Corey: It's the people you get to know—Emma: Yeah.Corey: —through these social interactions on various networks that are worth… they're worth gold. There's no way to describe it other than that.Emma: Yeah, absolutely. And if you're listening to this, and you're discouraged because you got turned down for a job, we've all been there, first of all, but I remember being disappointed because I didn't pass my first round of interviews of Google the first time I interviewed with them, and being, like, “Oh, crap, now I can't move to Munich. What am I going to do with my life?” Well, guess what, look where I am today. If I had gotten that job that I thought was it for me, I wouldn't be in the happiest phase of my life.And so if you're going through it—obviously, in normal circumstances where you're not frantically searching for a job; if you're in more of a casual life job search—and you've been let go from the process, just realize that there's probably something bigger and better out there for you, and just focus on your networking online. Yeah, it's an invaluable tool.Corey: One time when giving a conference talk, I asked, “All right, raise your hand if you have never gone through a job interview process and then not been offered the job.” And a few people did. “Great. If your hand is up, aim higher. Try harder. Take more risks.”Because fundamentally, job interviews are two-way streets and if you are only going for the sure thing jobs, great, stretch yourself, see what else is out there. There's no perfect attendance prize. Even back in school there wasn't. It's the idea of, “Well, I've only ever taken the easy path because I don't want to break my streak.” Get over it. Go out and interview more. It's a skill, unlike most others that you don't get to get better at unless you practice it.So, you've been in a job for ten years, and then it's time to move on—I've talked to candidates like this—their interview skills are extremely rusty. It takes a little bit of time to get back in the groove. I like to interview every three to six months back when I was on the job market. Now that I, you know, own the company and have employees, it looks super weird if I do it, but I miss it. I miss those conversations. I miss the aspects—Emma: Yes.Corey: —of exploring what the industry cares about.Emma: Absolutely. And don't underplay the importance of studying the foundational language concepts. I see this a lot in candidates where they're so focused on the newest and latest technologies and frameworks, that they forgot foundational JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Many companies are focused primarily on these plain language concepts, so just make sure that when you are ready to get back into interviewing and enhance that skill, that you don't neglect the foundation languages that the web is built on if you're a web developer.Corey: I'd also take one last look around and realize that every person you admire, every person who has an audience, who is a known entity in the space only has that position because someone, somewhere did them a favor. Probably lots of someones with lots of favors. And you can't ever pay those favors back. All you can do is pay it forward. I repeatedly encourage people to reach out to me if there's something I can do to help. And the only thing that surprises me is how few people in the audience take me up on that. I'm talking to you, listener. Please, if I can help you with something, please reach out. I get a kick out of doing that sort of thing.Emma: Absolutely. I agree.Corey: Emma, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Emma: Well, you can find me on Twitter. It's just @EmmaBostian, I'm, you know, shitposting over there on the regular. But sometimes I do tweet out helpful things, so yeah, feel free to engage with me over there. [laugh].Corey: And we will, of course, put a link to that in the [show notes 00:35:42]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it.Emma: Yeah. Thanks for having me.Corey: Emma Bostian, software engineer at Spotify and oh, so very much more. 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 incoherent ranting comment mentioning that this podcast as well failed to completely teach you JavaScript.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.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In today's episode, we get to listen again to Joe's chat with Chris Lema, Liquid Web's Vice President of Products and General Manager at LearnDash. He is a well-known blogger and public speaker, and leads the product teams to develop and launch Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce product lines.   Chris enthusiastically talks about the concept behind BeachPress and CaboPress, and what can potentially happen in these meetings. He also tackled the growth of e-commerce, how WooCommerce as an open platform creates more opportunities for a lot of businesses, and providing customers hassle-free access to plugin updates on their sites.   Episode Resources: Chris Lema is on Twitter and YouTube Leaders Blog Liquid Web Leave an Apple podcast review or binge-watch past episodes Visit the WPMRR Community   What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 01:48 What is BeachPress? 05:06 Be in a conversation with people in your circle 07:21 The CaboPress 12:31 Bringing SaaS people to CaboPress 14:47 SaaS platforms that do e-commerce 19:49 Looking at period over period growth 22:45 Partnership with Glue 27:01 The building blocks of a great storytelling 33:16 Fun stuff and new pricing at Liquid Web 35:18 Having e-commerce played out on open platforms 38:33 The ability to update plugins automatically 39:55 Find Chris online

Topics discussed in this episode: Their surprising founding story The mortar between the bricks of SaaS A set of principles that are always true Solving problems so customers can focus on value Saving the worry for the ones you haven't yet found This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

Welcome to another interesting and informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Today, Sima is happy to have Richard Thornton joining her. Richard used to work at CINT, and he recently founded an advisory services business. In this episode, Richard shares his career journey. He also talks about taking risks, his mindset, and his core beliefs. Stay tuned to hear more! Richard's journey Richard studied Business and Marketing at university. After that, he joined a business that served hardware and software players in the imaging space, like Hewlett Packard, Xerox, and Canon. He worked as a research analyst, supporting a team delivering content and insights around subscription syndicated services. That exposed him to working with data. He saw the value that data-driven insights could bring to organizations and gained a toolkit that he utilized extensively later in his career. After spending four years there, he moved on and became a consultant. Entering the market research industry In 2003, Richard fell into the market research industry by chance after being offered a position with Channel Surveys. He was fortunate to enter the industry just in time to ride the new wave of online data collection and digital insights. He was eventually put into the position of European Co-Managing Director, managing more than 300 employees in Europe. He left in 2008 when the business got sold to Microsoft. Joining CINT In 2009, Richard joined CINT, a Swedish-based technology company that was way ahead of its time. That was the start of a journey that took him out of his comfort zone and lasted for the next twelve years. Going public Richard was fortunate to be part of the leadership team at CINT that eventually took the business public in February 2021. Leaving  Richard left CINT in 2021 after the business had gone public. People-driven Richard has always been people-driven in his decision-making. He felt driven to meet his mentors in the process of evaluating opportunities that came his way. Taking a risk Richard has a good appetite for risk with his work and making investments. After making sure that the business model was sound, he always followed his gut feelings when new opportunities came his way. What leaving CINT felt like It was tough for Richard to leave CINT, but it felt a little easier because it was a planned move. He gave up a lot when he left, and that required a massive mental adjustment. Although he is still grappling with those adjustments to some extent, he has no regrets about his decision to leave. Re-learning Now, Richard feels as if he has gone from a teacher to a student again because he has to re-learn a new craft. It is humbling but healthy because it keeps him grounded. It has also given him a fresh perspective. Mindset You get to feel needed, wanted, and valuable when you're part of a growing organization. Richard misses feeling that way, so he had to adjust his mindset after leaving CINT. Choice Richard is grateful to be in a financial position that gives him a choice. Right now, he is considering what the best choice should be. A portfolio approach Richard always wanted to build a portfolio approach to work. That means that he has had to move into advisory roles. He intends to get onto the boards of some tech-led or enabled businesses and combine that with some angel investing. How Richard is spending his time Richard has been networking and looking for opportunities. He has built up a portfolio of businesses that he is advising. They are mostly founder-led and tech-enabled or SaaS businesses. He has taken a seat on the board of most of them and invested in some. He is bringing commercial excellence to the table and helping the founders scale. Diversity Richard loves the diversity of working with different businesses and being inspired by the founders and leadership teams. Driving diversity

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John Busby serves as Centerfield's Chief Marketing Officer & Managing Director. In addition to corporate marketing, John leads the content, editorial, research, video and PR teams for the Consumer Guides division, which helps millions of in-market consumers choose and purchase the right product or service through brands like BroadbandNow and SafeHome. Prior to joining Centerfield, John was Head of Analytics for Amazon's grocery delivery service and responsible for business intelligence, data science and automated reporting. Prior to Amazon, John was Senior Vice President of Analytics and Marketing at Marchex. John began his career in product management for InfoSpace, Go2net and IQ Chart. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Northwestern University.Follow John on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmbusby/Learn more about Centerfield here: https://www.centerfield.com/Follow and connect with the host, Connor Dube: https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialsellingexpert/Instagram: connor_dubeIf you're already thinking you need to find a more efficient way to conquer your monthly B2B content like blogs, newsletters, and social media – we'd like to show you how we can improve the quality, save you tons of time, and achieve better results! To learn more visit www.activeblogs.comEpisode Summary:John Busby, Chief Marketing Officer and Managing Director at Centerfield, joins Connor to talk about customer acquisition, essential marketing skills, and the impact of market research. Learn the ins and outs of the customer acquisition business model, the critical role of innovation and technology, and how to get straight to the [pain] point when you reach out to potential customers.Key Takeaways:Customer acquisition combines B2B and B2C marketing. B2B comes in when the company pursues new brand partners to sell the customer acquisition service, and then they deploy B2C techniques to pursue new business for their brand partners. Strategies include paid searching, social media marketing, paid ads, and leveraging an established web presence for the brand partner's benefit.The customer acquisition business model demands constant innovation because it requires improved performance every month to maintain the brand partner relationship. Creativity is necessary, but you also need technology and data analytics.Initial contact efforts should directly address a potential customer's problem or industry pain point right off the bat. If the subject line of an email doesn't inspire them to open it, your future emails are automatically relegated to the junk folder.Hope you enjoyed this episode of B2B Mentors! Make sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Leave us a 5-star review, so your friends and colleagues can find us too. B2B Mentors is brought to you by activeblogs.com. Head over to our Content Trifecta page to schedule a chat with Connor about custom marketing content solutions for your company and the Content Trifecta effect!

Joseph Ansanelli makes leadership look deceptively easy. Perhaps it's because he's done it more times than most. Or because he brings the humility to know that it's a lifelong journey. Based in SF Bay Area, he's CEO & Co-Founder of Gladly, the company he incubated during his time at Greylock Partners. Joseph is fond of saying “People first. Strategy second.” He believes that one of the keys to effective leadership is ensuring that teams have the right tools to succeed. With his team of 150 employees, Gladly empowers customer service agents with a SaaS platform that turns them into heroes. And he's onto something big… His investors include New Enterprise Associates, GGV Capital, SV Angel, Future Fund, and Glynn Capital Management. Prior, he was Co-Founder & CEO of Connectify which was acquired by Kana, one of the first digital customer service platforms which he helped take public. He was also Co-Founder & CEO of Vontu, the leader in data loss prevention, which was acquired by Symantec. During college, he & a few friends created Trio Development, which was acquired by Apple and their product became Claris Organizer. Joseph serves on the Boards of Directors of Sumo Logic and Trifacta. He also hosts one of my favorite podcasts Radically Personal In this 20-minute conversation, Joseph reveals where he developed his passion for hiring & leading teams. And how he does it every day at Gladly.    

▸▸ Get a 3-step action plan to grow your SaaS in record time: Schedule your growth session today! - https://bit.ly/2YAGbaV Just because someone's willing to give you money doesn't mean they're your perfect-fit customer. Watch this video and discover what you need to unlock all the authority, and demand you'll need for mass adoption of your SaaS Startup. // Let's connect on... + Instagram (behind the scenes): instagram.com/danmartell​  + Facebook (live trainings + Q&A): FB.com/DanMartell​  + Twitter (what I'm reading): twitter.com/danmartell​  // Join my exclusive Scaling SaaS Founders Facebook Group: + www.danmartell.com/scaling-saas-founders

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Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X'ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10xCovering a very wide market can be an exasperating experience! After solving thousands of pains for all kinds of companies in every different market, Aaron Krall finally got fed up and decided to niche down. So he started a group called SaaS Growth Hacks five or six years ago, and it now has 27,000 members. Aaron Krall is the former Brand Manager at L'Oréal and the former VP of Marketing at Lead Generation Specialists. He also founded a SaaS growth accelerator to help companies with their SaaS growth, and he developed a new SaaS software.When Aaron started SaaS Growth Hacks, he did not know much about SaaS. He did not have a SaaS product either. He simply emailed SaaS founders and asked them to share any problems that they were having. When he first started contacting SaaS founders, he felt out of his league and inadequate. Over the past five years, Aaron has spoken to at least 1,000 SaaS companies and worked with hundreds of them. So now he feels that he has a pretty good grip on the market. Aaron looked at all the data he collected over the last five years. He came up with the top 20 percent of everything that can be done with a SaaS company to make the most impact and get massive growth quickly. When Aaron finds SaaS companies he can help, he implements that 20 percent to give those companies a guaranteed revenue increase.  The companies Aaron can help the most usually meet three criteria:They are the best-kept secret in their market.They are succeeding despite themselves.They have excellent use cases, customer stories, or customer loyalty.When companies meet those criteria, the founders usually:Do not yet have a product-market fit. So they do not know who they can serve the most.Tend to undervalue their service and do not realize how valuable it is to their customers.They do not leverage partnerships.Identify your current customers who have paid you the most money and have been around the longest. Talk to them and find out what pain you could be solving for them. (Go to Aaron's Facebook page and ask him to send you the interview questions he uses. He will be happy to share them with you!)Aaron asks his customers what the highest amount would be that they would be willing to pay for his SaaS product. Aaron prefers to work with those clients who have partners out there who would love to work with them and are willing to increase their price and increase the perceived value of their product.Generally, most SaaS companies are undercharging because creative people tend to undervalue what they create.Aaron does not usually recommend raising your price for current customers.If you can solve something no one else is solving, you will automatically have a mini-monopoly.It is easier to find customers when you know who you're going after.An equation I used to grow from zero to $30,000,000 in ARR in less than six years:Have the big promise for a big outcome at the topAdd the certainty of the solution you are offeringAdd how fast you can deliver the result and how little hassle will be incorporated in that resultIdeally, you want to 10x the outcome of the solution you are providing.Partnerships can be broken down into three categories:Channel partners: Those are people who have built an audience similar to yours, who will promote you to their audience.Content partners: Find all the articles, listicles, and blogs that talk about the top 10 products in the market in the same category as yours, and try to get your product into those.Deep integration partners: Integrate your product with someone else's product in some way.As a founder, ask yourself what real estate is unused currently in your market that you could leverage while also benefiting someone else.You can find a lot of unused real estate in expired trials. If you have a retargeting list, that is real estate that you could rent to another company.You can also create partnerships by sharing Facebook audiences with other people on Facebook.Look at where your traffic spends its time and be aware of what they are looking at. Those are called traffic streams, and within them are transaction points. Come up with creative ways to get integrated into those traffic streams and transaction points.You can also get to know who your target audience is and do some outreach towards them.SaaS companies should not do free trials anymore because SaaS products are no longer something new or different. So instead of focusing on the offer of getting a free trial, focus on getting the outcome for free. Links and resources:Apply here for a Revenue Growth Consulting Session with me, Ryan Staley.Aaron Krall's website  Aaron Krall on LinkedInAaron's Facebook page Books mentioned:Play Bigger by Dave Peterson, Al Ramadan, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney$100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid by Alex Hormozi

In today's episode, I sat down with Trainual's Chris Ronzio. As a super happy customer of Trainual, I'm excited to put Chris in the hot seat, hear the backstory of his company, from starting out as a one-man operation, to the mind blowing growth to 10,000 companies in 183 countries in 3 years!    Chris Ronzio is the founder and CEO of Trainual, a leading SaaS company that helps businesses automate their onboarding and training by documenting every process, policy, and procedure in one simple system. Chris is also the host of the “Process Makes Perfect” podcast, author of “The Business Playbook,” and Inc. Magazine contributor with a column called “The Process Playbook.” With Trainual, Chris is on a mission to make small business easier by helping business leaders find the time to do more of what they love and providing a way to document and delegate what they do.   In the early phase of a business, you could be forgiven for not having your policies, operations, process and best practices documented, but as you grow, bring people on and scale, your business can't just exist and run in your brain, on a piece of paper or an Excel spreadsheet. Having a structured training manual that your team can easily access is the difference between having a business that feels organized, not messy. At some point, it becomes necessary to “get your business out of your brain” to keep growing it.    Guest Info   Chris Ronzio is the founder and CEO of Trainual, a leading SaaS company that helps businesses automate their onboarding and training by documenting every process, policy, and procedure in one simple system. Chris is also the host of the “Process Makes Perfect” podcast, author of “The Business Playbook,” and Inc. Magazine contributor with a column called “The Process Playbook.” With Trainual, Chris is on a mission to make small business easier by helping business leaders find the time to do more of what they love and providing a way to document and delegate what they do.   For more information, visit https://trainual.com/ and follow @chrisronzio on Instagram.    Buy Chris' new book The Business Playbook: How to Document and Delegate What You Do So Your Company Can Grow Beyond You here.   

Nick Abraham is a B2B lead generation expert who runs a portfolio of SaaS companies in the cold outreach space, including: Inboxy.io - a cold email domain warming tool, Quicklines.ai - an AI-powered email personalization tool, and Closify.com - a service that matches your business with proven salespeople. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/morgan-williams0/message

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