Podcasts about Saas

Ed Freyfogle shares with us his 50 tips for running a stress-free SaaS. This is based on Ed's talk he prepared for MicroConf late last year, but was unable to deliver due to misfortune.There was a lot of good content in this recording and we recorded for much longer than usual. So we have split this recording over two episodes.

In unserer Nachmittagsfolge sprechen wir mit Stavros Papadopoulos, Co-Founder & Managing Director von Lendis, über die heute verkündete Series A in Höhe von 80 Millionen Euro. Lendis wurde 2018 von Julius Bolz und Stavros Papadopoulos gegründet und ermöglicht es Unternehmen, ihre gesamte Arbeitsausstattung (z.B. Laptops, Smartphones und Büromöbel) und ihre Software digital aufzusetzen und zu verwalten. Mit seiner SaaS-Lösung hat das Startup bereits über 100.000 Mitarbeitende für mehr als 1.000 Unternehmen ausgestattet. Zu den Kunden zählen Konzerne wie Hochtief, Bitburger, WWF und Lufthansa, aber auch schnell skalierende Unternehmen wie AboutYou, Flink und Personio. Heute hat Lendis den Abschluss seiner Series A-Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 80 Millionen Euro bekannt gegeben. Hierfür konnte das Berliner Unternehmen die renommierten Investoren Circularity Capital und Keen Venture Partners gewinnen, die die Runde anführen. Außerdem haben sich Coparion, HGDF und KPN Ventures beteiligt. Die Bestandsinvestoren HV Capital, DN Capital und Picus Capital sind ebenfalls wieder dabei. Die Runde setzt sich aus 30 Millionen Euro Eigenkapital und 50 Millionen Euro Fremdkapital zusammen. Damit erhöht sich die Gesamtfinanzierung von Lendis auf über 100 Millionen Euro. Das frische Kapital soll die Entwicklung der SaaS-Lösung beschleunigen. One more thing wird präsentiert von OMR Reviews – Finde die richtige Software für Dein Business. Wenn auch Du Dein Lieblingstool bewerten willst, schreibe eine Review auf OMR Reviews unter https://moin.omr.com/insider. Dafür erhältst du einen 20€ Amazon Gutschein.

Every high-growth organization inevitably reaches the point of pivoting its strategy and offerings to capture new audiences—a journey made more complex with the new demands emerging this past year. In this session, Dorian Stone will share lessons learned from Grammarly's evolution from consumer to SMB to enterprise, address common assumptions and pitfalls in the process of scaling, and reveal must-know strategies to drive efficient growth this year and beyond.

Predict human emotion to content

This week we discuss Open Source Model Business Models, Cloud Migrations and the prospect of cloud providers becoming “dumb pipes.” Plus, some thoughts on the rise of Professor Galloway. Rundown There is such a thing as an open source business model (https://tracymiranda.com/2022/01/18/there-is-such-a-thing-as-an-open-source-business-model/) Web3 | No Mercy / No Malice (https://www.profgalloway.com/web3/) AWS is Not a Dumb Pipe (https://matt-rickard.com/aws-is-not-a-dumb-pipe/) Clouded Judgement 1.14.22 (https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-11422?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta) Remote work and cloud adoption lands 1Password with $620M Series C, now valued at $6.8B (https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/1password-series-c-funding/) Relevant to your Interests Kubernetes needs a developer platform (https://odedia.org/kubernetes-needs-a-developer-platform) Observable raises $35.6M to bring better visibility to enterprise data (https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/13/observable-raises-35-6m-to-bring-better-observability-to-enterprise-data/) People Building 'Blockchain City' in Wyoming Scammed by Hackers - Slashdot (https://it.slashdot.org/story/22/01/14/2049248/people-building-blockchain-city-in-wyoming-scammed-by-hackers?utm_source=feedly1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed) NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Custom Models Production Reportedly Halted Amidst BIOS & Design Issues (https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-ti-custom-models-production-reportedly-halted-amidst-bios-design-issues/) Superior Court judge rules that Google's nondisclosure agreements are so broad they violate the state's ban on noncompete agreements (https://twitter.com/josheidelson/status/1482172137100103681?s=21) Dutch competition authority recently ruled that Apple must allow dating apps to offer alternative payments. (https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1482352249359765504?s=20) Web3 is going just great (https://web3isgoinggreat.com/) It was nice to be invited but I wish I hadn't been. #aws #tektok (https://www.tiktok.com/@quinnypig/video/7051805142575828229?_d=secCgwIARCbDRjEFSADKAESPgo8n%2BSYoNkGjICEDwLtsEq5Vw8vYOrCeKA%2BYdnbH2q%2BGzCJSq0PR6HDK9dRZrD9ybwiTPzGCTYAE5wzEUzOGgA%3D&checksum=39492f2b99a6e16e45d03599f4c740f13d168c4885ba087d002c9da02d345c79&language=en&preview_pb=0&sec_user_id=MS4wLjABAAAAloz292Ou8nd0JpLkbR5Ni1HtvoxFxXznJH7K8cTaC-sb_PTSx0Gz3VJhg0IaQE-y&share_app_id=1233&share_item_id=7051805142575828229&share_link_id=ED4E7720-207C-4CE8-B721-3156FE8CBB61&source=h5_m×tamp=1642380671&tt_from=copy&u_code=dh620mifaijla3&user_id=6930822818507047942&utm_campaign=client_share&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=copy&_r=1) 10 real-world stories of how we've compromised CI/CD pipelines (https://research.nccgroup.com/2022/01/13/10-real-world-stories-of-how-weve-compromised-ci-cd-pipelines/) Ford signs five-year payments deal with Stripe for e-commerce drive (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/17/ford-signs-five-year-payments-deal-with-stripe-for-e-commerce-drive.html) Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device - Stories (https://news.microsoft.com/2022/01/18/microsoft-to-acquire-activision-blizzard-to-bring-the-joy-and-community-of-gaming-to-everyone-across-every-device/) I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone. (https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s2igq9/i_automated_my_job_over_a_year_ago_and_havent/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) Tales From Crypto: A Billionaire Meme Feud Threatens Industry Unity (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/business/dealbook/web3-venture-capital-andreessen.html) Better.com CEO Who Fired 900 Workers On Zoom Call Reinstalled (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2022/01/18/better-ceo-vishal-garg-returns-softbank/?sh=3d7d30903595) Charted: Big tech's ballooning deals (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-login-1a493767-1c76-4401-bcde-04aaa86927e2.html?chunk=1&utm_term=emshare) Airlines warn of "catastrophic disruption" in 5g service deployment (https://www.axios.com/airlines-catastrophic-disruption-flights-5g-55446670-0f98-4f7b-8a89-c76bdacb2675.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top) Harness releases open version of continuous delivery product with access to source code – TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/harness-releases-open-version-of-continuous-delivery-product-with-access-to-source-code/?tpcc=tcplustwitter&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly90LmNvLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADLmrkm7w_e6Izxgu7aR_NvVW7P0_mJUDI6o-fuqX4cafEZWt6pA7YDzu1R1QI58Z1Abyd6nBlRaz3J99j3TJdT7rBb_-hdPut3zznMQrSKhqeexm71mz9m5wJ4sG6InSkB4lr-mS63m7GT2EDpUFDyvAfhEoDoos75FVvDKH8An) Kubernetes needs a developer platform (https://odedia.org/kubernetes-needs-a-developer-platform) ‘It's All Just Wild': Tech Start-Ups Reach a New Peak of Froth (https://dnyuz.com/2022/01/19/its-all-just-wild-tech-start-ups-reach-a-new-peak-of-froth/) SaaS acquisition multiples in 2021 (https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/saas-acquisition-multiples-in-2021-d9f646f914ba) Google to free G Suite users: Pay up or lose your account (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-tells-free-g-suite-users-pay-up-or-lose-your-account/) Zoom multiple (https://twitter.com/gilbert/status/1482075188602699779?s=21) Nonsense Busy Simulator (https://busysimulator.com/) Sponsors strongDM — Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure. Start your free 14-day trial today at strongdm.com/SDT (http://strongdm.com/SDT) Conferences THAT Conference comes to Texas (https://that.us/events/tx/2022/), May 23-26, 2022 Discount Codes: Everything Ticket ($75 off): SDTFriends75 3 Day Camper Ticket ($50 off): SDTFriends50 Virtual Ticket ($75 off): SDTFriendsON75 THAT Conference Wisconsin Call for Speakers is open (https://that.us/call-for-counselors/wi/2022/), July 25, 2022 DevOpsDays Chicago 2022: Call for Speakers/Papers (https://sessionize.com/devopsdays-chicago-2022/), May 10 & 11th, 2022 CFP closes on Jan 31, 2022, DevOps Days Birmingham AL, 2022 Call for Speakers (https://www.papercall.io/devopsdays-2022-birmingham-al), April 18 & 19th, 2022 CFP closes on Jan 31, 2022, SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Brandon: Sweet Booby Podcast (https://www.tortoisemedia.com/listen/sweet-bobby/). Link to subscribe in Overcast (https://overcast.fm/+0oa3C8efk). Matt: Eufy RoboVac35c Wi-Fi Robotic Vacuum (https://amzn.to/35aVZUL). Cricket Explainer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZGLHdcw2RM). Coté: The Good Enough Parent (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58644937-the-good-enough-parent). 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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:10:39 - B2B SaaS tailwinds that have occurred from the pandemic.21:00 - The opportunity ahead for financial information migrating to the cloud.28:51 - Best metrics for tracking SaaS companies.33:11 - Logan's take on SOFI stock performance, since he was previously a VP there and is also an investor. 33:54 - Challenges ahead for the Fintech space, as there has been a lot of volatility as of late.46:11 - Logan's strategic advice for Fintech founders as they plan ahead for 2022.And a whole lot more!*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.BOOKS AND RESOURCES:Fin VC's Website.Logan Allin's LinkedIn.Logan Allin's Twitter.Brad Feld's Book, Venture Deals.Paul Graham's Blog. Trey Lockerbie's Twitter.Preston, Trey & Stig's tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool.New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs.See the all-new 2022 Lexus NX and discover everything it was designed to do for you. Welcome to the next level.Yieldstreet allows you to invest beyond the stock market with an evolving marketplace of alternative investments. Create your account today.Protect your online activity TODAY with ExpressVPN, the VPN rated #1 by CNET and Wired, and get an extra 3 months FREE on a one-year package.Push your team to do their best work with Monday.com Work OS. Start your free two-week trial today.Get access to some of the most sought-after real estate in the U.S. with Crowdstreet.Find Pros & Fair Pricing for Any Home Project for Free with Angi.Get in early on medical technology, breakthroughs in ag-tech and food production, solutions in the multi-billion dollar robotic industry, and so much more with a FREE OurCrowd account. Open yours today.Make it simple to hire and manage remote employees across all 50 states with Justworks.Be part of the solution by investing in companies that are actively engaged in integrating ESG practices with Desjardins.Stay on top of all your processes – directly inside Gmail with Streak. Get 20% off the Pro plan today.Learn more about how you can get started investing in some of the best cash flow markets today with Rent to Retirement.Canada's #1 employee benefits plan for small businesses! The Chambers Plan evolves with the way you work and live while keeping the rates stable. Opt for the simple, stable, and smart choice for your business.Reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient, daily nutrition. Athletic Greens is going to give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase.Donate to GiveWell's recommended charities and have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of August or as long as matching funds last if you've never donated before. Pick PODCAST and We Study Billionaires or enter code TIP at checkout.Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here.Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors.HELP US OUT!What do you love about our podcast? Here's our guide on how you can leave a rating and review for the show. We always enjoy reading your comments and feedback!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is our annual retro/goal-setting episode. Here's what we cover:Personal updates from 2021 Tyler Goal from last year: ✅Spend more time with family and friends once vaccinated Other updates Started exercising Froze embryos Rick Goals from last year ✅ Get sleep under control ✅ Adjust to being a dad Other updates Wasn't good about exercising Has only been on one date with Sable Professional updates from 2021 Tyler Goals from last year ✅ Get marketing to a point where if can be delegated ❓ Design a new appointment scheduler product ✅ Biggest worry: Growth leveling off ❓ Want to learn: Re-learn how to iterate and move fast Biggest disappointment: Losing a developer right when the product team was building momentum Biggest learning: Wants to be a product designer Other updates: Fewer management responsibilities Signed biggest client to-date Full-funded the treasury Rick Goals from last year ❌ Get to $10k MRR.  ✅ Automate/delegate so service can be scalable.  ✅ Biggest worry: Being able to scale service.  ✅ Want to learn: Learn more coding, especially working with API data and generating dynamic emails. Biggest disappointment:  Not being able to work on LegUp Health full time Biggest learning:  Sharing the journey at LegUp Health is better than going solo  Other updates: Tried bringing on another friend as a Marketing contractor, but he decided to take a full-time job before he ramped up  2022 Personal themes/goals Tyler Plan for travel as part of relationship Build more schedule flexibility so things can be done without needing willpower (e.g. exercise mid-day) Rick Reprioritize daily personal health habits (write/exercise before family wakes up, daily calorie tracking) Spend more quality time with Sable (have a date most weeks) and Oliver (take on errands) 2022 Professional themes/goals Tyler Theme: Spend more time working, but on my own terms Make space to do more individual contributor design work Other things Release 3.9 design Two blog post-worthy releases per quarter By end of year, have an equal balance of tech debt, core CRM, strategy, and product-led growth work on the dev team Run the coding fellowship Rick Support the growth of LeUp Health Structure a partnership and financial plan that enables JD to go full-time Grow the business to 400 clients Fully automate the new user onboarding experience Help scale Windfall the right way  Prioritize both performance and people Be a team player Deliver on my responsibilities Biggest worry Tyler: Growth slowed in 2021. Will it come back? Rick: Retaining JD for the long term What do we want to learn? Tyler: More professional visual design Rick: First principles of leading others (e.g. influence, motivation, habits, trust, negotiation, communication, and decision-making) Predictions Last year Tyler: ❌ San Francisco will become a good place for early-stage startups again Rick: ❓ Asynchronous video will become big in professional settings Next year Tyler: The world will be less interested in speculative bubbles (NFTs, meme stocks, etc.) Rick: VR headset use is going to become as common as playing a Wii

We all like to measure things: height, weight, company revenue, active users on our SaaS platform. Measurement, and a common understanding of that measure is critical whether you're a doctor, an athlete, or a business decision maker. Self-service analytics is much easier today, but without shared definitions for the metrics we're reporting on, trust in analytics is still relatively low. Is it time for a Metrics Layer? Join Tim, Juan and special guest Benn Stancil, chief analytics officer and founder of Mode to discuss all things Metrics Layer including what it is and why we should care. This episode will feature: Where does a metrics layer fit within the modern data stack What tools and skills are needed to make this a reliable part of your data strategy In honor of the Friday Fight post, what is the most controversial post/blog you've ever written, and what kind of feedback did you receive?

John Rankin is a qualified Business Systems Analyst, qualifying in 1988 in the UK. He has studied a version of Trait psychoanalysis and an Oriental methodology of how personalities interact. He spent five years studying under a Professor from Beijing University, qualifying in 1998. Realizing that most problems in work are caused by clashes of personalities, John designed and built an online SAAS that can be accessed globally to help business leaders to make better, informed, and unbiased decisions in Director or key employee selection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jody Glidden is the co-founder and CEO of Introhive, an AI-powered SaaS platform that helps companies improve sales by making sense of huge amounts of data and understanding their relationship graph'.Show Notes:https://saasclub.io/304Join Our Email ListGet weekly SaaS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right in your inbox:https://saasclub.io/email/Join Our Community for FreeSaaS Club is the community for early-stage SaaS founders and entrepreneurs.https://saasclub.co/join

As a Small Player Can You Succeed In The WordPress Ecosystem In 2022? Brian Jackson is the joint founder with his brother of Forgemedia a WordPress focus plugin shop that has a small but interesting library of commercial plugins. Also, Brian was for a period of time the chief marketing officer at Kinsta and was one of the key people in Kinsta connected to helping it grow as one of the leading WordPress managed-to-host providers in the last 5 years. Here is a list of their plugins Novashare: https://novashare.io/ Perfmatters: https://perfmatters.io/ WP-Coupons: https://wpcoupons.io/

About AndrewI create free cloud certification courses and somehow still make money.Links: ExamPro Training, Inc.: https://www.exampro.co/ PolyWork: https://www.polywork.com/andrewbrown LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wc-brown Twitter: https://twitter.com/andrewbrown TranscriptAndrew: 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 Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is… well, he's challenging to describe. He's the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training, Inc. but everyone knows him better as Andrew Brown because he does so many different things in the AWS ecosystem that it's sometimes challenging—at least for me—to wind up keeping track of them all. Andrew, thanks for joining.Andrew: Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Corey.Corey: How do I even begin describing you? You're an AWS Community Hero and have been for almost two years, I believe; you've done a whole bunch of work as far as training videos; you're, I think, responsible for #100daysofcloud; you recently started showing up on my TikTok feed because I'm pretending that I am 20 years younger than I am and hanging out on TikTok with the kids, and now I feel extremely old. And obviously, you're popping up an awful lot of places.Andrew: Oh, yeah. A few other places like PolyWork, which is an alternative to LinkedIn, so that's a space that I'm starting to build up on there as well. Active in Discord, Slack channels. I'm just kind of everywhere. There's some kind of internet obsession here. My wife gets really mad and says, “Hey, maybe tone down the social media.” But I really enjoy it. So.Corey: You're one of those folks where I have this challenge of I wind up having a bunch of different AWS community Slacks and cloud community, Slacks and Discords and the past, and we DM on Twitter sometimes. And I'm constantly trying to figure out where was that conversational thread that I had with you? And tracking it down is an increasingly large search problem. I really wish that—forget the unified messaging platform. I want a unified search platform for all the different messaging channels that I'm using to talk to people.Andrew: Yeah, it's very hard to keep up with all the channels for myself there. But somehow I do seem to manage it, but just with a bit less sleep than most others.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's like trying to figure out, like, “All right, he said something really useful. What was that? Was that a Twitter DM? Was it on that Slack channel? Was it that Discord? No, it was on that brick that he threw through my window with a note tied to it. There we go.”That's always the baseline stuff of figuring out where things are. So, as I mentioned in the beginning, you are the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro, which is interesting because unlike most of the community stuff that you do and are known for, you don't generally talk about that an awful lot. What's the deal there?Andrew: Yeah, I think a lot of people give me a hard time because they say, Andrew, you should really be promoting yourself more and trying to make more sales, but that's not why I'm out here doing what I'm doing. Of course, I do have a for-profit business called ExamPro, where we create cloud certification study courses for things like AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, but you know, that money just goes to fuel what I really want to do, is just to do community activities to help people change their lives. And I just decided to do that via cloud because that's my domain expertise. At least that's what I say because I've learned up on in the last four or five years. I'm hoping that there's some kind of impact I can make doing that.Corey: I take a somewhat similar approach. I mean, at The Duckbill Group, we fixed the horrifying AWS bill, but I've always found that's not generally a problem that people tend to advertise having. On Twitter, like, “Oh, man, my AWS bill is killing me this month. I've got to do something about it,” and you check where they work, and it's like a Fortune 50. It's, yeah, that moves markets and no one talks about that.So, my approach was always, be out there, be present in the community, talk about this stuff, and the people who genuinely have billing problems will eventually find their way to me. That was always my approach because turning everything I do into a sales pitch doesn't work. It just erodes confidence, it reminds people of the used mattress salesman, and I just don't want to be that person in that community. My approach has always been if I can help someone with a 15-minute call or whatnot, yeah, let's jump on a phone call. I'm not interested in nickel-and-diming folks.Andrew: Yeah. I think that if you're out there doing a lot of hard work, and a lot of it, it becomes undeniable the value you're putting out there, and then people just will want to give you money, right? And for me, I just feel really bad about taking anybody's money, and so even when there's some kind of benefit—like my courses, I could charge for access for them, but I always feel I have to give something in terms of taking somebody's money, but I would never ask anyone to give me their money. So, it's bizarre. [laugh] so.Corey: I had a whole bunch of people a year or so after I started asking, like, “I really find your content helpful. Can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?” And it's, I don't know how to charge people a dollar figure that doesn't have a comma in it because it's easy for me to ask a company for money; that is the currency of effort, work, et cetera, that companies are accustomed to. People view money very differently, and if I ask you personally for money versus your company for money, it's a very different flow. So, my solution to it was to build the annual charity t-shirt drive, where it's, great, spend 35 bucks or whatever on a snarky t-shirt once a year for ten days and all proceeds go to benefit a nonprofit that is, sort of, assuaged that.But one of my business philosophies has always been, “Work for free before you work for cheap.” And dealing with individuals and whatnot, I do not charge them for things. It's, “Oh, can you—I need some advice in my career. Can I pay you to give me some advice?” “No, but you can jump on a Zoom call with me.” Please, the reason I exist at all is because people who didn't have any reason to did me favors, once upon a time, and I feel obligated to pay that forward.Andrew: And I appreciate, you know, there are people out there that you know, do need to charge for their time. Like—Corey: Oh. Oh, yes.Andrew: —I won't judge anybody that wants to. But you know, for me, it's just I can't do it because of the way I was raised. Like, my grandfather was very involved in the community. Like, he was recognized by the city for all of his volunteer work, and doing volunteer work was, like, mandatory for me as a kid. Like, every weekend, and so for me, it's just like, I can't imagine trying to take people's money.Which is not a great thing, but it turns out that the community is very supportive, and they will come beat you down with a stick, to give you money to make sure you keep doing what you're doing. But you know, I could be making lots of money, but it's just not my priority, so I've avoided any kind of funding so like, you know, I don't become a money-driven company, and I will see how long that lasts, but hopefully, a lot longer.Corey: I wish you well. And again, you're right; no shade to anyone who winds up charging for their time to individuals. I get it. I just always had challenges with it, so I decided not to do it. The only time I find myself begrudging people who do that are someone who picked something up six months ago and decided, oh, I'm going to build some video course on how to do this thing. The end. And charge a bunch of money for it and put myself out as an expert in that space.And you look at what the content they're putting out is, and one, it's inaccurate, which just drives me up a wall, and two, there's a lack of awareness that teaching is its own skill. In some areas, I know how to teach certain things, and in other areas, I'm a complete disaster at it. Public speaking is a great example. A lot of what I do on the public speaking stage is something that comes to me somewhat naturally. So, can you teach me to be a good public speaker? Not really, it's like, well, you gave that talk and it was bad. Could you try giving it only make it good? Like, that is not a helpful coaching statement, so I stay out of that mess.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's really challenging to know, if you feel like you're authority enough to put something out there. And there's been a few courses where I didn't feel like I was the most knowledgeable, but I produced those courses, and they had done extremely well. But as I was going through the course, I was just like, “Yeah, I don't know how any this stuff works, but this is my best guess translating from here.” And so you know, at least for my content, people have seen me as, like, the lens of AWS on top of other platforms, right? So, I might not know—I'm not an expert in Azure, but I've made a lot of Azure content, and I just translate that over and I talk about the frustrations around, like, using scale sets compared to AWS auto-scaling groups, and that seems to really help people get through the motions of it.I know if I pass, at least they'll pass, but by no means do I ever feel like an expert. Like, right now I'm doing, like, Kubernetes. Like, I have no idea how I'm doing it, but I have, like, help with three other people. And so I'll just be honest about it and say, “Hey, yeah, I'm learning this as well, but at least I know I passed, so you know, you can pass, too.” Whatever that's worth.Corey: Oh, yeah. Back when I was starting out, I felt like a bit of a fraud because I didn't know everything about the AWS billing system and how it worked and all the different things people can do with it, and things they can ask. And now, five years later, when the industry basically acknowledges I'm an expert, I feel like a fraud because I couldn't possibly understand everything about the AWS billing system and how it works. It's one of those things where the more you learn, the more you realize that there is yet to learn. I'm better equipped these days to find the answers to the things I need to know, but I'm still learning things every day. If I ever get to a point of complete and total understanding of a given topic, I'm wrong. You can always go deeper.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, by no means am I even an expert in AWS, though people seem to think that I am just because I have a lot of confidence in there and I produce a lot of content. But that's a lot different from making a course than implementing stuff. And I do implement stuff, but you know, it's just at the scale that I'm doing that. So, just food for thought for people there.Corey: Oh, yeah. Whatever, I implement something. It's great. In my previous engineering life, I would work on large-scale systems, so I know how a thing that works in your test environment is going to blow up in a production scale environment. And I bring those lessons, written on my bones the painful way, through outages, to the way that I build things now.But the stuff that I'm building is mostly to keep my head in the game, as opposed to solving an explicit business need. Could I theoretically build a podcast transcription system on top of Transcribe or something like that for these episodes? Yeah. But I've been paying a person to do this for many years to do it themselves; they know the terms of art, they know how this stuff works, and they're building a glossary as they go, and understanding the nuances of what I say and how I say it. And that is the better business outcome; that's the answer. And if it's production facing, I probably shouldn't be tinkering with it too much, just based upon where the—I don't want to be the bottleneck for the business functioning.Andrew: I've been spending so much time doing the same thing over and over again, but for different cloud providers, and the more I do, the less I want to go deep on these things because I just feel like I'm dumping all this information I'm going to forget, and that I have those broad strokes, and when I need to go deep dive, I have that confidence. So, I'd really prefer people were to build up confidence in saying, “Yes, I think I can do this.” As opposed to being like, “Oh, I have proof that I know every single feature in AWS Systems Manager.” Just because, like, our platform, ExamPro, like, I built it with my co-founder, and it's a quite a system. And so I'm going well, that's all I need to know.And I talk to other CTOs, and there's only so much you need to know. And so I don't know if there's, like, a shift between—or difference between, like, application development where, let's say you're doing React and using Vercel and stuff like that, where you have to have super deep knowledge for that technical stack, whereas cloud is so broad or diverse that maybe just having confidence and hypothesizing the work that you can do and seeing what the outcome is a bit different, right? Not having to prove one hundred percent that you know it inside and out on day one, but have the confidence.Corey: And there's a lot of validity to that and a lot of value to it. It's the magic word I always found in interviewing, on both sides of the interview table, has always been someone who's unsure about something start with, “I'm not sure, but if I had to guess,” and then say whatever it is you were going to say. Because if you get it right, wow, you're really good at figuring this out, and your understanding is pretty decent. If you're wrong, well, you've shown them how you think but you've also called them out because you're allowed to be wrong; you're not allowed to be authoritatively wrong. Because once that happens, I can't trust anything you say.Andrew: Yeah. In terms of, like, how do cloud certifications help you for your career path? I mean, I find that they're really well structured, and they give you a goal to work towards. So, like, passing that exam is your motivation to make sure that you complete it. Do employers care? It depends. I would say mostly no. I mean, for me, like, when I'm hiring, I actually do care about certifications because we make certification courses but—Corey: In your case, you're a very specific expression of this that is not typical.Andrew: Yeah. And there are some, like, cases where, like, if you work for a larger cloud consultancy, you're expected to have a professional certification so that customers feel secure in your ability to execute. But it's not like they were trying to hire you with that requirement, right? And so I hope that people realize that and that they look at showing that practical skills, by building up cloud projects. And so that's usually a strong pairing I'll have, which is like, “Great. Get the certifications to help you just have a structured journey, and then do a Cloud project to prove that you can do what you say you can do.”Corey: One area where I've seen certifications act as an interesting proxy for knowledge is when you have a company that has 5000 folks who work in IT in varying ways, and, “All right. We're doing a big old cloud migration.” The certification program, in many respects, seems to act as a bit of a proxy for gauging where people are on upskilling, how much they have to learn, where they are in that journey. And at that scale, it begins to make some sense to me. Where do you stand on that?Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it's hard because it really depends on how those paths are built. So, when you look at the AWS certification roadmap, they have the Certified Cloud Practitioner, they have three associates, two professionals, and a bunch of specialties. And I think that you might think, “Well, oh, solutions architect must be very popular.” But I think that's because AWS decided to make the most popular, the most generic one called that, and so you might think that's what's most popular.But what they probably should have done is renamed that Solution Architect to be a Cloud Engineer because very few people become Solutions Architect. Like that's more… if there's Junior Solutions Architect, I don't know where they are, but Solutions Architect is more of, like, a senior role where you have strong communications, pre-sales, obviously, the role is going to vary based on what companies decide a Solution Architect is—Corey: Oh, absolutely take a solutions architect, give him a crash course in finance, and we call them a cloud economist.Andrew: Sure. You just add modifiers there, and they're something else. And so I really think that they should have named that one as the cloud engineer, and they should have extracted it out as its own tier. So, you'd have the Fundamental, the Certified Cloud Practitioner, then the Cloud Engineer, and then you could say, “Look, now you could do developer or the sysops.” And so you're creating this path where you have a better trajectory to see where people really want to go.But the problem is, a lot of people come in and they just do the solutions architect, and then they don't even touch the other two because they say, well, I got an associate, so I'll move on the next one. So, I think there's some structuring there that comes into play. You look at Azure, they've really, really caught up to AWS, and may I might even say surpass them in terms of the quality and the way they market them and how they construct their certifications. There's things I don't like about them, but they have, like, all these fundamental certifications. Like, you have Azure Fundamentals, Data Fundamentals, AI Fundamentals, there's a Security Fundamentals.And to me, that's a lot more valuable than going over to an associate. And so I did all those, and you know, I still think, like, should I go translate those over for AWS because you have to wait for a specialty before you pick up security. And they say, like, it's intertwined with all the certifications, but, really isn't. Like—and I feel like that would be a lot better for AWS. But that's just my personal opinion. So.Corey: My experience with AWS certifications has been somewhat minimal. I got the Cloud Practitioner a few years ago, under the working theory of I wanted to get into the certified lounge at some of the events because sometimes I needed to charge things and grab a cup of coffee. I viewed it as a lounge pass with a really strange entrance questionnaire. And in my case, yeah, I passed it relatively easily; if not, I would have some questions about how much I actually know about these things. As I recall, I got one question wrong because I was honest, instead of going by the book answer for, “How long does it take to restore an RDS database from a snapshot?”I've had some edge cases there that give the wrong answer, except that's what happened. And then I wound up having that expire and lapse. And okay, now I'll do it—it was in beta at the time, but I got the sysops associate cert to go with it. And that had a whole bunch of trivia thrown into it, like, “Which of these is the proper syntax for this thing?” And that's the kind of question that's always bothered me because when I'm trying to figure things like that out, I have entire internet at my fingertips. Understanding the exact syntax, or command-line option, or flag that needs to do a thing is a five-second Google search away in most cases. But measuring for people's ability to memorize and retain that has always struck me as a relatively poor proxy for knowledge.Andrew: It's hard across the board. Like Azure, AWS, GCP, they all have different approaches—like, Terraform, all of them, they're all different. And you know, when you go to interview process, you have to kind of extract where the value is. And I would think that the majority of the industry, you know, don't have best practices when hiring, there's, like, a superficial—AWS is like, “Oh, if you do well, in STAR program format, you must speak a communicator.” Like, well, I'm dyslexic, so that stuff is not easy for me, and I will never do well in that.So like, a lot of companies hinge on those kinds of components. And I mean, I'm sure it doesn't matter; if you have a certain scale, you're going to have attrition. There's no perfect system. But when you look at these certifications, and you say, “Well, how much do they match up with the job?” Well, they don't, right? It's just Jeopardy.But you know, I still think there's value for yourself in terms of being able to internalize it. I still think that does prove that you have done something. But taking the AWS certification is not the same as taking Andrew Brown's course. So, like, my certified cloud practitioner was built after I did GCP, Oracle Cloud, Azure Fundamentals, a bunch of other Azure fundamental certifications, cloud-native stuff, and then I brought it over because was missing, right? So like, if you went through my course, and that I had a qualifier, then I could attest to say, like, you are of this skill level, right?But it really depends on what that testament is and whether somebody even cares about what my opinion of, like, your skillset is. But I can't imagine like, when you have a security incident, there's going to be a pop-up that shows you multiple-choice answer to remediate the security incident. Now, we might get there at some point, right, with all the cloud automation, but we're not there yet.Corey: It's been sort of thing we've been chasing and never quite get there. I wish. I hope I live to see it truly I do. My belief is also that the value of a certification changes depending upon what career stage someone is at. Regardless of what level you are at, a hiring manager or a company is looking for more or less a piece of paper that attests that they're to solve the problem that they are hiring to solve.And entry-level, that is often a degree or a certification or something like that in the space that shows you have at least the baseline fundamentals slash know how to learn things. After a few years, I feel like that starts to shift into okay, you've worked in various places solving similar problems on your resume that the type that we have—because the most valuable thing you can hear when you ask someone, “How would we solve this problem?” Is, “Well, the last time I solved it, here's what we learned.” Great. That's experience. There's no compression algorithm for experience? Yes, there is: Hiring people with experience.Then, at some level, you wind up at the very far side of people who are late-career in many cases where the piece of paper that shows that they know what they're doing is have you tried googling their name and looking at the Wikipedia article that spits out, how they built fundamental parts of a system like that. I think that certifications are one of those things that bias for early-career folks. And of course, partners when there are other business reasons to get it. But as people grow in seniority, I feel like the need for those begins to fall off. Do you agree? Disagree? You're much closer to this industry in that aspect of it than I am.Andrew: The more senior you are, and if you have big names under your resume there, no one's going to care if you have certification, right? When I was looking to switch careers—I used to have a consultancy, and I was just tired of building another failed startup for somebody that was willing to pay me. And I'm like—I was not very nice about it. I was like, “Your startup's not going to work out. You really shouldn't be building this.” And they still give me the money and it would fail, and I'd move on to the next one. It was very frustrating.So, closed up shop on that. And I said, “Okay, I got to reenter the market.” I don't have a computer science degree, I don't have big names on my resume, and Toronto is a very competitive market. And so I was feeling friction because people were not valuing my projects. I had, like, full-stack projects, I would show them.And they said, “No, no. Just do these, like, CompSci algorithms and stuff like that.” And so I went, “Okay, well, I really don't want to be doing that. I don't want to spend all my time learning algorithms just so I can get a job to prove that I already have the knowledge I have.” And so I saw a big opportunity in cloud, and I thought certifications would be the proof to say, “I can do these things.”And when I actually ended up going for the interviews, I didn't even have certifications and I was getting those opportunities because the certifications helped me prove it, but nobody cared about the certifications, even then, and that was, like, 2017. But not to say, like, they didn't help me, but it wasn't the fact that people went, “Oh, you have a certification. We'll get you this job.”Corey: Yeah. When I'm talking to consulting clients, I've never once been asked, “Well, do you have the certifications?” Or, “Are you an AWS partner?” In my case, no, neither of those things. The reason that we know what we're doing is because we've done this before. It's the expertise approach.I question whether that would still be true if we were saying, “Oh, yeah, and we're going to drop a dozen engineers on who are going to build things out of your environment.” “Well, are they certified?” is a logical question to ask when you're bringing in an external service provider? Or is this just a bunch of people you found somewhere on Upwork or whatnot, and you're throwing them at it with no quality control? Like, what is the baseline level experience? That's a fair question. People are putting big levels of trust when they bring people in.Andrew: I mean, I could see that as a factor of some clients caring, just because like, when I used to work in startups, I knew customers where it's like their second startup, and they're flush with a lot of money, and they're deciding who they want to partner with, and they're literally looking at what level of SSL certificate they purchased, right? Like now, obviously, they're all free and they're very easy to get to get; there was one point where you had different tiers—as if you would know—and they would look and they would say—Corey: Extended validation certs attend your browser bar green. Remember those?Andrew: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just like that, and they're like, “We should partner with them because they were able to afford that and we know, like…” whatever, whatever, right? So, you know, there is that kind of thought process for people at an executive level. I'm not saying it's widespread, but I've seen it.When you talk to people that are in cloud consultancy, like solutions architects, they always tell me they're driven to go get those professional certifications [unintelligible 00:22:19] their customers matter. I don't know if the customers care or not, but they seem to think so. So, I don't know if it's just more driven by those people because it's an expectation because everyone else has it, or it's like a package of things, like, you know, like the green bar in the certifications, SOC 2 compliance, things like that, that kind of wrap it up and say, “Okay, as a package, this looks really good.” So, more of an expectation, but not necessarily matters, it's just superficial; I'm not sure.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: You've been building out certifications for multiple cloud providers, so I'm curious to get your take on something that Forrest Brazeal, who's now head of content over at Google Cloud, has been talking about lately, the idea that as an engineer is advised to learn more than one cloud provider; even if you have one as a primary, learning how another one works makes you a better engineer. Now, setting aside entirely the idea that well, yeah, if I worked at Google, I probably be saying something fairly similar.Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Do you think there's validity to the idea that most people should be broad across multiple providers, or do you think specialization on one is the right path?Andrew: Sure. Just to contextualize for our listeners, Google Cloud is highly, highly promoting multi-cloud workloads, and one of their flagship products is—well, they say it's a flagship product—is Anthos. And they put a lot of money—I don't know that was subsidized, but they put a lot of money in it because they really want to push multi-cloud, right? And so when we say Forrest works in Google Cloud, it should be no surprise that he's promoting it.But I don't work for Google, and I can tell you, like, learning multi-cloud is, like, way more valuable than just staying in one vertical. It just opened my eyes. When I went from AWS to Azure, it was just like, “Oh, I'm missing out on so much in the industry.” And it really just made me such a more well-rounded person. And I went over to Google Cloud, and it was just like… because you're learning the same thing in different variations, and then you're also poly-filling for things that you will never touch.Or like, I shouldn't say you never touch, but you would never touch if you just stayed in that vertical when you're learning. So, in the industry, Azure Active Directory is, like, widespread, but if you just stayed in your little AWS box, you're not going to notice it on that learning path, right? And so a lot of times, I tell people, “Go get your CLF-C01 and then go get your AZ-900 or AZ-104.” Again, I don't care if people go and sit the exams. I want them to go learn the content because it is a large eye-opener.A lot of people are against multi-cloud from a learning perspective because say, it's too much to learn all at the same time. But a lot of people I don't think have actually gone across the cloud, right? So, they're sitting from their chair, only staying in one vertical saying, “Well, you can't learn them all at the same time.” And I'm going, “I see a way that you could teach them all at the same time.” And I might be the first person that will do it.Corey: And the principles do convey as well. It's, “Oh, well I know how SNS works on AWS, so I would never be able to understand how Google Pub/Sub works.” Those are functionally identical; I don't know that is actually true. It's just different to interface points and different guarantees, but fine. You at least understand the part that it plays.I've built things out on Google Cloud somewhat recently, and for me, every time I do, it's a refreshing eye-opener to oh, this is what developer experience in the cloud could be. And for a lot of customers, it is. But staying too far within the bounds of one ecosystem does lend itself to a loss of perspective, if you're not careful. I agree with that.Andrew: Yeah. Well, I mean, just the paint more of a picture of differences, like, Google Cloud has a lot about digital transformation. They just updated their—I'm not happy that they changed it, but I'm fine that they did that, but they updated their Google Digital Cloud Leader Exam Guide this month, and it like is one hundred percent all about digital transformation. So, they love talking about digital transformation, and those kind of concepts there. They are really good at defining migration strategies, like, at a high level.Over to Azure, they have their own cloud adoption framework, and it's so detailed, in terms of, like, execution, where you go over to AWS and they have, like, the worst cloud adoption framework. It's just the laziest thing I've ever seen produced in my life compared to out of all the providers in that space. I didn't know about zero-trust model until I start using Azure because Azure has Active Directory, and you can do risk-based policy procedures over there. So, you know, like, if you don't go over to these places, you're not going to get covered other places, so you're just going to be missing information till you get the job and, you know, that job has that information requiring you to know it.Corey: I would say that for someone early career—and I don't know where this falls on the list of career advice ranging from, “That is genius,” to, “Okay, Boomer,” but I would argue that figuring out what companies in your geographic area, or the companies that you have connections with what they're using for a cloud provider, I would bias for learning one enough to get hired there and from there, letting what you learn next be dictated by the environment you find yourself in. Because especially larger companies, there's always something that lives in a different provider. My default worst practice is multi-cloud. And I don't say that because multi-cloud doesn't exist, and I'm not saying it because it's a bad idea, but this idea of one workload—to me—that runs across multiple providers is generally a challenge. What I see a lot more, done intelligently, is, “Okay, we're going to use this provider for some things, this other provider for other things, and this third provider for yet more things.” And every company does that.If not, there's something very strange going on. Even Amazon uses—if not Office 365, at least exchange to run their email systems instead of Amazon WorkMail because—Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Let's be serious. That tells me a lot. But I don't generally find myself in a scenario where I want to build this application that is anything more than Hello World, where I want it to run seamlessly and flawlessly across two different cloud providers. That's an awful lot of work that I struggle to identify significant value for most workloads.Andrew: I don't want to think about securing, like, multiple workloads, and that's I think a lot of friction for a lot of companies are ingress-egress costs, which I'm sure you might have some knowledge on there about the ingress-egress costs across providers.Corey: Oh, a little bit, yeah.Andrew: A little bit, probably.Corey: Oh, throwing data between clouds is always expensive.Andrew: Sure. So, I mean, like, I call multi-cloud using multiple providers, but not in tandem. Cross-cloud is when you want to use something like Anthos or Azure Arc or something like that where you extend your data plane or control pla—whatever the plane is, whatever plane across all the providers. But you know, in practice, I don't think many people are doing cross-cloud; they're doing multi-cloud, like, “I use AWS to run my primary workloads, and then I use Microsoft Office Suite, and so we happen to use Azure Active Directory, or, you know, run particular VM machines, like Windows machines for our accounting.” You know?So, it's a mixed bag, but I do think that using more than one thing is becoming more popular just because you want to use the best in breed no matter where you are. So like, I love BigQuery. BigQuery is amazing. So, like, I ingest a lot of our data from, you know, third-party services right into that. I could be doing that in Redshift, which is expensive; I could be doing that in Azure Synapse, which is also expensive. I mean, there's a serverless thing. I don't really get serverless. So, I think that, you know, people are doing multi-cloud.Corey: Yeah. I would agree. I tend to do things like that myself, and whenever I see it generally makes sense. This is my general guidance. When I talk to individuals who say, “Well, we're running multi-cloud like this.” And my response is, “Great. You're probably right.”Because I'm talking in the general sense, someone building something out on day one where they don't know, like, “Everyone's saying multi-cloud. Should I do that?” No, I don't believe you should. Now, if your company has done that intentionally, rather than by accident, there's almost certainly a reason and context that I do not have. “Well, we have to run our SaaS application in multiple cloud providers because that's where our customers are.” “Yeah, you should probably do that.” But your marketing, your billing systems, your back-end reconciliation stuff generally does not live across all of those providers. It lives in one. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I think we're in violent agreement here.Andrew: Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, Kubernetes obviously is becoming very popular because people believe that they'll have a lot more mobility, Whereas when you use all the different managed—and I'm still learning Kubernetes myself from the next certification I have coming out, like, study course—but, you know, like, those managed services have all different kind of kinks that are completely different. And so, you know, it's not going to be a smooth process. And you're still leveraging, like, for key things like your database, you're not going to be running that in Kubernetes Cluster. You're going to be using a managed service.And so, those have their own kind of expectations in terms of configuration. So, I don't know, it's tricky to say what to do, but I think that, you know, if you have a need for it, and you don't have a security concern—like, usually it's security or cost, right, for multi-cloud.Corey: For me, at least, the lock-in has always been twofold that people don't talk about. More—less lock-in than buy-in. One is the security model where IAM is super fraught and challenging and tricky, and trying to map a security model to multiple providers is super hard. Then on top of that, you also have the buy-in story of a bunch of engineers who are very good at one cloud provider, and that skill set is not in less demand now than it was a year ago. So okay, you're going to start over and learn a new cloud provider is often something that a lot of engineers won't want to countenance.If your team is dead set against it, there's going to be some friction there and there's going to be a challenge. I mean, for me at least, to say that someone knows a cloud provider is not the naive approach of, “Oh yeah, they know how it works across the board.” They know how it breaks. For me, one of the most valuable reasons to run something on AWS is I know what a failure mode looks like, I know how it degrades, I know how to find out what's going on when I see that degradation. That to me is a very hard barrier to overcome. Alternately, it's entirely possible that I'm just old.Andrew: Oh, I think we're starting to see some wins all over the place in terms of being able to learn one thing and bring it other places, like OpenTelemetry, which I believe is a cloud-native Kubernetes… CNCF. I can't remember what it stands for. It's like Linux Foundation, but for cloud-native. And so OpenTelemetry is just a standardized way of handling your logs, metrics, and traces, right? And so maybe CloudWatch will be the 1.0 of observability in AWS, and then maybe OpenTelemetry will become more of the standard, right, and so maybe we might see more managed services like Prometheus and Grafa—well, obviously, AWS has a managed Prometheus, but other things like that. So, maybe some of those things will melt away. But yeah, it's hard to say what approach to take.Corey: Yeah, I'm wondering, on some level, whether what the things we're talking about today, how well that's going to map forward. Because the industry is constantly changing. The guidance I would give about should you be in cloud five years ago would have been a nuanced, “Mmm, depends. Maybe for yes, maybe for no. Here's the story.” It's a lot less hedge-y and a lot less edge case-y these days when I answer that question. So, I wonder in five years from now when we look back at this podcast episode, how well this discussion about what the future looks like, and certifications, and multi-cloud, how well that's going to reflect?Andrew: Well, when we look at, like, Kubernetes or Web3, we're just seeing kind of like the standardized boilerplate way of doing a bunch of things, right, all over the place. This distributed way of, like, having this generic API across the board. And how well that will take, I have no idea, but we do see a large split between, like, serverless and cloud-natives. So, it's like, what direction? Or we'll just have both? Probably just have both, right?Corey: [Like that 00:33:08]. I hope so. It's been a wild industry ride, and I'm really curious to see what changes as we wind up continuing to grow. But we'll see. That's the nice thing about this is, worst case, if oh, turns out that we were wrong on this whole cloud thing, and everyone starts exodusing back to data centers, well, okay. That's the nice thing about being a small company. It doesn't take either of us that long to address the reality we see in the industry.Andrew: Well, that or these cloud service providers are just going to get better at offering those services within carrier hotels, or data centers, or on your on-premise under your desk, right? So… I don't know, we'll see. It's hard to say what the future will be, but I do believe that cloud is sticking around in one form or another. And it basically is, like, an essential skill or table stakes for anybody that's in the industry. I mean, of course, not everywhere, but like, mostly, I would say. So.Corey: Andrew, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about your opinions, how you view these things, et cetera. Where can they find you?Andrew: You know, I think the best place to find me right now is Twitter. So, if you go to twitter.com/andrewbrown—all lowercase, no spaces, no underscores, no hyphens—you'll find me there. I'm so surprised I was able to get that handle. It's like the only place where I have my handle.Corey: And we will of course put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:25]. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Andrew: Well, thanks for having me on the show.Corey: Andrew Brown, co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training and so 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 angry comment telling me that I do not understand certifications at all because you're an accountant, and certifications matter more in that industry.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.

On today's episode, Kunle is joined by Mike Shapaker, CMO at ChannelAdvisor, an SaaS company offering businesses a centralised platform to streamline operations, expand to new channels and grow sales.With the full-blown expansion of eCommerce and democratisation of Martech, businesses are in a race to be everywhere their customers are. And the ever-shifting privacy landscape has made it all the more important for businesses to be ahead of the curve. Since we're at the start of 2022, there's no better time than now to take stock of the eCommerce landscape and plan for the year.In this episode, Kunle and Mike talk about the major trends to look out for in 2022. You will get to hear about why we aren't quite done with supply chain issues, why more and more retailers are becoming marketplaces and why you should know about Shoppable Media. This is a great episode for business owners and marketers.-----------SPONSORS:This episode is brought to you by:Klaviyo This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo – a growth marketing platform that powers over 25,000 online businesses. Direct-to-Consumer brands like ColourPop, Huckberry, and Custom Ink rely on Klaviyo.Klaviyo helps you own customer experience and grow high-value customer relationships right from a shopper's first impression through to each subsequent purchase, Klaviyo understands every single customer interaction and empowers brands to create more personalized marketing moments.Find out more on klaviyo.com/2x.  RewindThis episode is brought to you by Rewind - the #1 Backup and Recovery App for Shopify and BigCommerce stores that powers over 80,000 online businesses.Direct-to-Consumer brands like Gymshark and MVMT Watches rely on Rewind.Cloud based ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce do not have automatic backup features. Rewind protects your store against human error, misbehaving apps, or collaborators gone bad with Automatic backups!For a free 30-day trial, Go to Rewind Backups, reach out to the Rewind team via chat or email and mention '2x ecommerce'GorgiasThis episode is brought to you by Gorgias, the leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce merchants. Gorgias combines all your communication channels including email, SMS, social media, livechat, and phone, into one platform.This saves your team hours per day & makes managing customer orders a breeze. It also integrates seamlessly with your existing tech stack, so you can access customer information and even edit, return, refund or create an order, right from your helpdesk.Go to Gorgias.com and mention 2x ecommerce podcast for two months free.

Yousign ging 2013 als Studienprojekt an den Start, heute beschäftigt das Scale Up aus Frankreich mehr als 100 Mitarbeiter. Dominik Drechsler ist der Country Manager für den deutschsprachigen Raum und teilt heute seine Story mit uns.

Es ist Bergfest und wie jeden Mittwoch möchten wir euch auch heute wieder drei spannende Jungunternehmen in unserer Rubrik „Junge Startups” vorstellen. Die Startups sind wie immer nicht älter als 3 Jahre und haben bislang Finanzierungen nicht über einer Million Euro erhalten. ​​Euer Startup passt in unsere neue Rubrik? Dann bewerbt euch bei podcast@startupinsider.de Den Anfang macht heute Benedict von Hoffmann, Co-Founder & CEO von Clanq: Das FinTech möchte Eltern und Familien dabei helfen, für ihre Kinder zu sparen. Clanq bündelt dabei ein Kinderkonto samt Sparplan, verschiedene Cashback-Varianten und Anlage-Optionen unter einem Dach. Christina Hammer, Jakob Kaya und Benedict von Hoffman gründeten Clanq 2021 in Zürich. Als zweites sprechen wir mit Nina Binné, Co-Gründerin und CMO von 202up: Das Unternehmen entwickelt weitergedachte digitale Lösungen insbesondere für Projektentwickler und Makler. Mit „Realtydesk“, dem digitalen Verkaufsraum für Immobilien, beginnt 202up den Transformationsprozess hin zur vollumfänglichen B2B E-Commerce-Plattform und E-Commerce Software für den Immobilienvertrieb. 202up wurde 2020 von Nina Binné, Justus Ettemeyer und Ivo Strugar in Berlin gegründet. Unser letzter Gast der heutigen Folge ist Fabian Pilz, Product Owner und Produktmanager von ApptiveGrid: Mit ihrem „Digitalisierungs-Werkzeugkasten” richtet sich ApptiveGrid vor allem an KMUs und möchte die Unternehmen dabei unterstützen, Prozesse mithilfe der Software leichter zu digitalisieren. Zum einen können mit der No Code-Lösung bereits bestehende Tools verbunden werden und zum anderen können eigene Formulare erstellt werden. ApptiveGrid wurde 2021 von Christian Denker und Norbert Hartl in Köln gegründet.

In der Mittagsfolge begrüßen wir heute Sven Lackinger, Co-Founder von Sastrify. Nur 5 Monate nach seiner Seed-Runde, gibt das Startup die neue Series A-Finanzierung in Höhe von 15 Millionen US-Dollar (ca. 13 Millionen Euro) bekannt. Sastrify ist einer der führenden Anbieter für Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Procurement in Europa und wurde im Sommer 2020 von den Serienunternehmern Maximilian Messing und Sven Lackinger in Köln gegründet. Durch die Software des Startups können Tech-, Finance- und Procurement-Teams ihre Software-Subscriptions in einer zentralen Plattform verwalten. Weniger als ein Jahr nach dem Markteintritt unterstützt Sastrify nach eigenen Angaben bereits mehr als 100 Kunden beim Softwareeinkauf, darunter zahlreiche Unicorns wie Gorillas, Pleo oder Scalable Capital. Zudem ist das Unternehmen offizieller Partner von mehr als 50 SaaS-Anbietern wie Google, Miro und 1Password. Erst im August diesen Jahres führte HV Capital die Seed-Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 7 Millionen US-Dollar an. Nun verkündet Sastrify seine Series-A-Finanzierung durch den US-Fonds FirstMark Capital (Investor von Branchenführern wie z.B. Shopify, Pinterest und AirBnB). Somit schließt sich FirstMark dem bestehenden Investor HV Capital sowie verschiedenen Angel Investoren inklusive Gokul Rajaram von DoorDash, Jeff Titterton von Zendesk sowie den Gründern des bekannten ScaleUps Billie und des Sastrify Unicorn-Kunden Sennder an. Mit dem neuen Kapital wird die internationale Expansion in den USA, Asien und Europa fortgesetzt. One more thing wird präsentiert von OMR Reviews – Finde die richtige Software für Dein Business. Wenn auch Du Dein Lieblingstool bewerten willst, schreibe eine Review auf OMR Reviews unter https://moin.omr.com/insider. Dafür erhältst du einen 20€ Amazon Gutschein.

James Carbary is the Author of Content-Based Networking, Founder of Sweet Fish Media (an Inc. 5000 B2B podcasting agency), Young Married Christian (a media company on a mission to end the foster care crisis), and Showcase (a SaaS platform that helps you build an audience). Jeff chat's with James about how he's learned to reverse engineer meaningful relationships that have tremendously impacted his business growth, how his worldviews around faith have impacted his leadership, how he's being challenged as a business leader in the midst of rapid growth, and some incredibly helpful resources that have been helping him find more wisdom and clarity around his leadership. RESOURCES RELATED TO THIS EPISODE Go to JamesCarbary.com for links to his book, podcast, and more Podcast Recommendation: Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast Book Recommendation: Pocket Prayers by Max & Andrea Lucado Book Recommendation: We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter by Celeste Headlee Podcast Recommendation: Leadership on Purpose by Blake Bozarth ABOUT CHAT WITH LEADERS MEDIA Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook @ChatWithLeaders See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Vimeo went public in May as an $8 billion powerhouse in video software. Better known as the indie version of YouTube for more than a decade, the company has redefined itself from a B2C destination to the B2B solution that empowers any business to create, collaborate and connect with professional-quality video. Join Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud for a conversation with Brent Thill, Financial Analyst @ Jefferies about spotting potential in what is now a $70 billion market, and how operating as a founder within a 16-year old company helped her take bets on a strategy that's paying off.

00:36 - Panelist Consulting Experience and Backgrounds * Debugging Your Brain by Casey Watts (https://www.debuggingyourbrain.com/) * Happy and Effective (https://www.happyandeffective.com/) 10:00 - Marketing, Charging, and Setting Prices * Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/) * Chelsea's Blog (https://chelseatroy.com/) * Self-Worth by Salary 28:34 - GeePawHill Twitter Thread (https://twitter.com/GeePawHill/status/1478950180904972293) - Impact Consulting * Casey's Spreadsheet - “Matrix-Based Prioritization For Choosing a Job” (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qVrWOKPe3ElXJhOBS8egGIyGqpm6Fk9kjrFWvB92Fpk/edit#gid=1724142346) * Interdependence (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interdependence) 38:43 - Management & Mentorship * Detangling the Manager: Supervisor, Team Lead, Mentor (https://dev.to/endangeredmassa/detangling-the-manager-supervisor-team-lead-mentor-gha) * Adrienne Maree Brown (https://adriennemareebrown.net/) 52:15 - Explaining Value and Offerings * The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz (https://www.amazon.com/Pumpkin-Plan-Strategy-Remarkable-Business/dp/1591844886) * User Research * SPIN Selling: Situation Problem Implication Need-payoff by Neil Rackham (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/833015.SPIN_Selling) 55:08 - Ideal Clients Reflections: Mae: The phrase “indie”. Casey: Having a Patreon to help inspire yourself. Chelsea: Tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes to in terms of a person's needs. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: CHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 267. I'm Chelsea Troy, and I'm here with my co-host, Mae. MAE: And also with us is Casey. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. And today's episode, we are our own guests. We're going to be talking to you about our experiences in consulting. To get this one started, how about we share what got us into consulting and what we like, don't like about it, just high-level? Chelsea, would you mind going first? CHELSEA: Sure. So I started in consulting, really in a full-time job. So for early in my programming career, I worked for several years for a company called Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Labs is chiefly, or was chiefly at the time, a software engineering consulting organization. My job was to pair program with folks from client teams, various types of clients, a lot of health insurance companies. At the time, there was a restaurant loyalty app that we did some work for. We did some work for General Motors, various clients, a major airline was also a client, and I would switch projects every three to six months. During that time employed by Labs, I would work for this client, pair programming with other pivots, and also with client developers. So that was my introduction to consulting and I think that it made the transition to consulting later, a little bit easier because I already had some consulting experience from under the Labs' umbrella. After I worked for Labs, I moved on to working at a product company for about 2 years and my experience at that product company burned me out on full-time programming for a little while. So in my last couple of months at that job, I realized that I was either going to have to take some time off, or I was going to have to find an arrangement that worked better for me for work, at least for the next little while. And for that next little while, what I decided I wanted to try to do was work part-time because I was uncomfortable with the idea of taking time off from programming completely. I felt that I was too early in my career and the skill loss would be too great if I took time off completely, but I knew I needed some space and so, I quit my full-time job. After I quit the full time—I probably should have done this before I quit the job, but I didn't—I called an organization that I had previously done some volunteer work with, with whom I discussed a job a couple of years prior, but for a couple of different reasons, it didn't work out. I said to them, “I know that you're a grant-funded organization and you rarely have the funding and capacity to bring somebody on, but just so you're aware, I like working with you. I love your product. I love the stuff that you work on. All our time working together, I've really enjoyed. So if you have an opening, I'm going to have some time available.” The director there emailed me that same day and said, “Our mobile developer put in his two weeks' notice this morning. So if you have time this afternoon, I'd really like to talk to you,” [chuckles] and that was my first client and they were a part-time client. I still work with them. I love working with them. I would consider them kind of my flagship client. But then from there, I started to kind of pick up more clients and it took off from there after that summer. I spent that summer generally working 3 days a week for that client and then spending 4 days a week lying face down in a park in the sun. That helped me recover a little bit from burnout. And then after that, I consulted full-time for about 2 years and I still consult on the side of a full-time job. So that's my story. Is anyone feeling a penchant for going next? MAE: I can go. I've been trying to think how am I going to say this succinctly. I've had at least two jobs and several club, or organization memberships, or founding, or positions since I was 16. So wherever I go, I've always been saying, “Well, I've done it these 47 ways already [laughs] even since I was a teenager.” So I've sort of always had a consulting orientation to take a broader view and figure out ways in which we can systematize whatever it is that's happening around me. Specifically for programming, I had been an administrator, like an executive leader, for many years. I just got tired of trying to explain what we as administrators needed and I just wanted to be able to build the things. I was already a really big Microsoft access person and anybody who just got a little [laughs] snarky in there knows I love Microsoft Access. It really allowed me to be able to offer all kinds of things to, for example, I was on the board of directors of my Kiwanis Club and I made a member directory and attendance tracker and all these things. Anyway, when I quit my executive job and went to code school in 2014, I did it because I knew that I could build something a lot better than this crazy Access database [laughs] that I had, this very involved ETL things going on in. I had a nonprofit that I had been involved with for 15 years at that point and I had also taken a database class where I modeled this large database that I was envisioning. So I had a bunch of things in order. I quit my full-time job and went to an income of $6,500 my first year and I hung with that flagship customer for a while and tailored my software. So I sort of have this straddling of a SaaS situation and a consulting situation. I embed into whoever I'm working with and help them in many ways. Often, people need lots of different levels of coaching, training, and skills development mixed with just a place to put things that makes sense to them. I think that's the brief version [laughs] that I can come up with and that is how I got where I am and I've gone in and out of also having a full-time job. Before I quit that I referenced the first year I worked a full-time job plus at least 40 to a 100 hours on my software to get it ready for prime time. So a lot of, a lot of work. CASEY: Good story. I don't think I ever heard these fuller stories from either of you, even though I know roughly the shape of your past. It's so cool to hear it. Thanks for sharing them. All right, I'll share about me now. So I've been a developer, a PM, and I've done a lot of design work. I've done all the roles over my time in tech. I started doing programming 10, 15 years ago, and I'm always getting burnt out everywhere I go because I care so much and we get asked to do things that seem dumb. I'm sure anyone listening can relate to this in some organization and when I say dumb, I don't use that word myself directly. I'm quoting a lot of people who would use that word, but I say either we're being asked to do things that don't make sense, aren't good ideas, or there are things that are we're being asked to do that would make sense if we knew why and it's not being communicated really well. It's poor communication. Either one, the other, or both. So after a lot of jobs, I end up taking a 3-month sabbatical and I'm like, “Whatever, I got to go. I can't deal with caring so much anymore, and I'm not willing to care less either.” So most recently, I took a sabbatical and I finished my book, Debugging Your Brain, which takes together psychology ideas, like cognitive behavioral therapy and programming ideas and that, I'm so proud of. If you haven't read it yet, please check it out. Then I went back to my job and I gave them another month where I was like, “All right, look, these are things need to change for me to be happy to work here.” Nothing changed, then I left. Maybe it's changing very slowly, but too slowly for me to be happy there, or most of these past companies. [laughs] After I left, this last sabbatical, I spent three to six months working on a board game version of my book. That's a lot of fun. And then I decided I needed more income, I needed to pay the bills, and I can totally be a tech consultant if I just deal with learning marketing and sales. That's been my… probably six months now, I've been working on the marketing in sales part, thinking a lot about it. I have a lot of support from a lot of friends. Now I consult on ways to make teams happier and more effective and that's my company name, Happy and Effective. I found it really easy to sell workshops, like diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops to HR departments. They're pretty hungry for those kinds of workshops and it's hard to find good, effective facilitators. It's a little bit harder to get companies to pay for coaching for their employees, even though a new EM would love coaching and how to be a good leader. Companies don't always have the budget for that set aside and I wish they would. I'm working with a lot of companies. I have a couple, but not as many as I'd like. And then the hardest, my favorite kind of client is when I get to embed with the team and really work on seeing what's going on me on the ground with them, and help understand what's going on to tell the executives what's happening and what needs to change and really make a big change. I've done that once, or twice and I'd love to do that more, but it's the hardest. So I'm thinking about easy, medium, hard difficulty of selling things to clients. I would actually make plenty of money is doing workshops, honestly, but I want the impact of embedding. That's my bigger goal is the impact. MAE: Yeah. I basically have used my software as a Trojan horse for [laughs] offering the consulting and change management services to help them get there because that is something that people already expect to spend some money on. That, though has been a little problematic because a few years in, they start to think that the line item in the budget is only for software and then it looks very expensive to them. Whereas, if they were looking at it as a consultant gig, it's incredibly inexpensive to them. CASEY: Yeah. It's maybe so inexpensive that it must not be a quality product that they're buying. MAE: Yes. CASEY: Put it that way implicitly. MAE: Definitely, there's also that. CASEY: When setting prices, this is a good general rule of thumb. It could be too low it looks like it'll be junk, like a dollar store purchase, or it can be too high and they just can't afford it, and then there's the middle sweet spot where it seems very valuable. They barely can afford it, but they know it'll be worth it, and that's a really good range to be in. MAE: Yeah. Honestly, for the work that I do, it's more of a passion project. I would do it totally for free, but that doesn't work for this reason you're talking about. CASEY: Yeah. MAE: Like, it needs to hurt a little bit because it's definitely going to be lots and lots of my time and it's going to be some of their time and it needs to be an investment that not hurt bad [laughs] but just be noticeable as opposed to here's a Kenny's Candy, or something. CASEY: I found that works on another scale, on another level. I do career coaching for friends, and friends of friends, and I'm willing to career coach my friends anyway. I've always been. For 10 years, I've reviewed hundreds, thousands of resumes. I've done so many interviews. I'm down to be a career coach, but no one was taking me up on it until I started charging and now friends are coming to me to pay me money to coach them. I think on their side, it feels more equitable. They're more willing to do it now that I'm willing to take money in exchange for it. I felt really bad charging friends until I had the sliding skill. So people who make less, I charge less for, for this personal service. It's kind of weird having a personal service like that, but it works out really well. I'm so happy for so many friends that have gotten jobs they're happy with now from the support. So even charging friends, like charging them nothing means they're not going to sign up for it. MAE: Yes, and often, there is a bias of like, “Oh, well, that's my friend.” [laughs] so they must not be a BFD.” CASEY: Yeah. But we are all BFDs. MAE: Exactly! How about you Chelsea? How did you start to get to the do the pricing thing? CHELSEA: Yeah, I think it's interesting to hear y'all's approaches to the marketing and the pricing because mine has been pretty different from that. But before I get off on that, one thing I do want to mention around getting started with offering personal services at price is that if it seems too large a step to offer a personal service to one person for an amount of money, one thing that I have witnessed folks have success with in starting out in this vein is to set up a Patreon and then have office hours for patrons wherein they spend 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that and anyone who is a patron is welcome to join. What often ends up happening for folks in that situation is that people who are friends of theirs support their Patreon and then the friends can show up. So effectively, folks are paying a monthly fee for access to this office hours, which they might attend, or they might not attend. But there are two nice things about it. The first thing about it is that you're not – from a psychological perspective, it doesn't feel like charging your friends for your time with them. It feels more indirect than that in a way that can be helpful for folks who are very new to charging for things and uncomfortable with the idea. The second thing is that the friends are often much more willing to pay than somebody who's new to charging is willing to charge. So the friends are putting this money into this Patreon, usually not because they're trying to get access to your office hours, but because they want to support you and one of the nice things about Patreon is that it is a monthly amount. So having a monthly email from Patreon that's like, “Hey, you we're sending you—” it doesn't even have to be a lot. “We're sending you 40 bucks this month.” It is a helpful conditioning exercise for folks who are not used to charging because they are getting this regular monthly income and the amount is not as important as receiving the regular income, which is helpful psychological preparation for charging for things on your own, I think. That's not the way that I did it, but I have seen people be effective that way. So there's that. For me, marketing was something that I was very worried about having to do when I started my business. In fact, it was one of those things where my conviction, when I started my consulting business, was I do not want to have to sell my services. I will coast on what clients I can find and when it is no longer easy, I will just get a full-time job because selling traditionally conceptualized is not something that I enjoyed. I had a head start on the marketing element of things, that is sort of the brand awareness element of things, my reputation and the reason for that is that first of all, I had consulted at Labs for several years, which meant that every client team that I had ever worked with there, the director remembered me, the product owner remember me. So a lot of people who had been clients of Labs – I didn't actually get anybody to be a client of mine who was a client of Labs, but the individuals I had worked with on those projects who had then changed jobs to go to different companies, reached out to me on some occasions. So that was one place that I got clients from. The other place that I gotten clients from has been my blog. Before I started my business, I had already been writing a tech blog for like 4, or 5 years and my goal with the tech blog has never actually been to get clientele, or make money. My goals for the blog when I started it were to write down what I was learning so that I would remember it and then after that, it was to figure out how to communicate my ideas so that I would have an easier time communicating them in the workplace. After that, it became an external validation source so that I would no longer depend on my individual manager's opinion of me to decide how good I was at programming. Only very recently has it changed to something like, okay, now I'm good enough at communicating and good enough at tech that I actually have something to teach anybody else. So honestly, for many years, I would see the viewership on my blog and I would be like, “Who are all these people? Why are they in my house?” Like, this is weird, but I would get some credibility from that. CASEY: They don't expect any tea from me. CHELSEA: Yeah. I really hope. I don't have enough to go around, [laughs] but it did help and that's where a lot of folks have kind of come from. Such that when I posted on my blog a post about how I'm going to be going indie. I've quit my job. I didn't really expect that to go anywhere, but a few people did reach out from that and I've been lucky insofar is that that has helped me sustain a client load in a way that I didn't really expect to. There's also, I would be remiss not to mention that what I do is I sling code for money for the majority of my consulting business, at least historically and especially in the beginning was exclusively that, and there's enough of a demand to have somebody come in and write code that that helped. It also helped that as I was taking on clients, I started to niche down specifically what I wanted to work on to a specific type of client and to a specific type problem. So I quickly got to the point where I had enough of a client load that I was going to have to make a choice about which clients to accept, or I was going to have to work over time. Now, the conventional wisdom in this circumstance is to raise your rates. Vast majority of business development resources will tell you that that's what you're supposed to do in this situation. But part of my goal in creating my consulting business had been to get out of burnout and part of the reason for the burnout was that I did not feel that the work that I was doing was contributing to a cause that made me feel good about what I was doing. It wasn't morally reprehensible, but I just didn't feel like I was contributing to a better future in the way that my self-identity sort of mandated that I did. It was making me irritable and all these kinds of things. MAE: I had the same thing, yeah. CHELSEA: Yeah. So it's interesting to hear that that's a common experience, but if I were to raise my rates, the companies that were still going to be able to afford me were going to be companies whose products were not morally reprehensible, but not things that coincided with what I was trying to get out of my consulting business. So what I did instead was I said, “I'm specifically looking to work with organizations that are contributing to basic scientific research, improving access for underserved communities, and combating the effects of climate change,” and kept my rates effectively the same, but niche down the clientele to that. That ended up being kind of how I did it. I find that rates vary from client to client in part, because of what you were talking about, Casey, wherein you have to hit the right price in order to even get clients board in certain circumstances. CASEY: Right. CHELSEA: I don't know a good way to guess it. My technique for this, which I don't know if this is kosher to say, but my technique for this has been whoever reached out to me, interested in bringing me on as a consultant for that organization, I ask that person to do some research and figure out what rate I'm supposed to pitch. That has helped a lot because a lot of times my expectations have been wildly off in those circumstances. One time I had somebody say to me, this was for a custom workshop they wanted. I was like, “What should I charge?” And they were like, “I don't know, a few thousand.” I was like, “Is that $1,200? Is that $9,000? I don't know how much money that is,” and so they went back and then they came back and they were able to tell me more specifically a band. There was absolutely no way I would've hit that number accurately without that information. CASEY: Yeah, and different clients have different numbers. You setting your price standard flat across all customers is not a good strategy either. That's why prices aren't on websites so often. CHELSEA: Yeah. I find that it does depend a lot. There's similarly, like I said, a lot of my clients are clients who are contributing to basic scientific research are very often grant funded and grants funding is a very particular kind of funding. It can be intermittent. There has to be a skillset on the team for getting the grant funding. A lot of times, to be frank, it doesn't support the kinds of rates that somebody could charge hourly in a for-profit institution. So for me, it was worth it to make the choice that this is who I want to work with. I know that my rate is effectively capped at this, if I'm going to do that and that was fine by me. Although, I'm lying to say it was completely fine by me. I had to take a long, hard look in the mirror, while I was still in that last full-time job, and realize that I had become a person who gauged her self-worth by the salary that she commanded more than I was comfortable with. More than I wanted to. I had to figure out how to weaken that dependency before I was really able to go off and do my own thing. That was my experience with it. I'm curious whether y'all, well, in particular, Casey, did you find the same thing? CASEY: The self-worth by salary? CHELSEA: Yeah. CASEY: I felt that over time, yeah. Like I went from private sector big tech to government and I got a pay cut and I was like, “Ugh.” It kind of hurt a little and it wasn't even as much as I was promised. Once I got through the hiring process, it was lower than that and now I'm making way less. When I do my favorite impact thing, the board game, like if I made a board game about mental health for middle schoolers, which is something I really want to do, that makes less than anything else I could with my time. I'll be lucky to make money on that at all. So it's actually inverse. My salary is inversely proportional to how much impact I can have if I'm working anyway. So my dream is to have enough corporate clients that I can do half-time, or game impact, whatever other impact things I'm thinking about doing. I think of my impact a lot. Impact is my biggest goal, but the thing is salary hurts. If I don't have the salary and I want to live where I'm living and the lifestyle I have, I don't want to cut back on that and I don't need to, hopefully. CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: I'm hoping eventually, I'll have a steady stream of clients, I don't need to do the marketing and sales outreach as much and all those hours I kind of recoup. I can invest those in the impact things. I've heard people can do that. I think I'll get there. CHELSEA: No, I think you absolutely will. Mae, I'm curious as to your experience, because I know that you have a lot of experience with a similar calculation of determining which things are going to provide more income, which things are probably going to provide less income, and then balancing across a bunch of factors like money, but also impact, time spent, emotional drain, and all that stuff. MAE: Well, Chelsea. [laughter] I am a real merry go round in this arena. So before I became a programmer, I had a state job, I was well paid, and I was pretty set. Then I was a programmer and I took huge pay cut because I quit. I became a programmer when I was 37 years old. So I already had a whole career and to start at the beginning and be parallel with 20-year-old so it's not just like my salary, but also my level and my level of impact on my – and level of the amount of people who wanted to ask me for my advice [laughs] was significantly different. So like the ego's joking stopped and so when you mentioned the thing about identity. Doing any kind of consulting in your own deal is a major identity reorganization and having the money, the title, the clout, and the engagement. Like a couple years, I have spent largely alone and that is very different than working at a place where I have colleagues, or when I live somewhere and have roommates. But I have found signing up for lots and lots of different social justice and passion project things, and supporting nonprofits that I believe in. So from my perspective, I'm really offering a capacity building grant out of my own pocket, my own time, and my own heart and that has been deeply rewarding and maybe not feel much about my identity around salary. Except it does make me question myself as an adult. Like these aren't the best financial decisions to be making, [chuckles] but I get enough out of having made them that it's worth it to me. One of the things probably you were thinking of, Chelsea, we worked together a little bit on this mutual aid project that I took on when the pandemic started and I didn't get paid any dollars for that and I was working 18 hours a day on it, [chuckles] or something. So I like to really jump in a wholeheartedly and then once I really, really do need some dollars, then I figure something else out. That is kind of how I've ebbed and flowed with it. But mostly, I've done it by reducing my personal overhead so that I'm not wigged about the money and lowering whatever my quality-of-life spending goals [chuckles] are. But that also has had to happen because I have not wanted to and I couldn't get myself to get excited about marketing of myself and my whole deal. Like I legit still don't have a website and I've been in operation now since 2014 so that's a while. I meet people and I can demonstrate what it is and I get clients and for me, having only a few clients, there's dozens of people that work for each one. So it's more of an organization client than a bunch of individuals and I can't actually handle a ton. I was in a YCombinator thing that wanted me to really be reporting on income, growth rates, and all of these number of new acquisition things, and it just wasn't for me. Those are not my goals. I want to make sure that this nonprofit can help more people this year and that they can get more grant money because they know how many people they helped and that those people are more efficient at their job every day. So those are harder to measure. It's not quite an answer to your question, [laughs] but I took it and ran a little. CHELSEA: No, I appreciate that. There is a software engineer and a teacher that I follow on Twitter. His name is GeePawHill. Are y'all familiar with GeePawHill? MAE: No. CHELSEA: And he did a thread a couple of days ago that this conversation reminds me of and I found it. Is that all right if I read like a piece of it and paraphrase part of it? MAE: Yes, please. CHELSEA: Okay. So this is what he says. He says, “The weirdest thing about being a teacher for young geek minds: I am teaching them things…that their actual first jobs will most likely forbid them to do. The young'uns I work with are actually nearly all hire-able as is, after 18 months of instruction, without any intervention from me. The problem they're going to face when they get to The Show isn't technical, or intellectual at all. No language, or framework, or OS, or library, or algorithm is going to daunt them, not for long. No, the problem they're going to face is how to sustain their connection to the well of geek joy, in a trade that is systematically bent on simultaneously exploiting that connection while denying it exists and refusing any and all access to it. It is possible, to stick it out, to acquire enough space and power, to re-assert one's path to the well. Many have done it; many are doing it today. But it is very hard. Very hard. Far harder than learning the Visitor pattern, or docker, or, dart, or SQL, or even Haskell. How do you tell people you've watched “become” as they bathed in the cool clear water that, for some long time, 5 years or more, they must…navigate the horrors of extractive capitalist software development? The best answer I have, so far, is to try and teach them how and where to find water outside of work. It is a lousy answer. I feel horrible giving it. But I'd feel even more horrible if I didn't tell them the truth.” CASEY: I just saw this thread and I really liked it, too. I'm glad you found it. MAE: Oh, yeah. I find it honestly pretty inspiring, like people generally who get involved in the kinds of consulting gigs that we three are talking about, which is a little different than just any random consulting, or any random freelancing. CASEY: Like impact consulting, I might call that. MAE: Yeah. It's awesome if the money comes, but it's almost irrelevant [chuckles] provided that basic needs are meant. So that's kind of been my angle. We'll see how – talk to me in 20 more years when I'm [chuckles] trying to retire and made a lot of choices that I was happy with at the time. CASEY: This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who's an executive director of an orchestra in the nonprofit space and he was telling me that so many nonprofits shoot themselves in the foot by not doing enough fundraising, by not raising money, and that comes from not wanting to make money in a way because they're a nonprofit, money is not a motive, and everybody's very clear about that. That's noble and all, but it ends up hurting them because they don't have the money to do the impactful things they would as a nonprofit. Money is a necessary evil here and a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. Including me a lot of the time. Honestly, I have to tell myself not to. What would I tell a friend? “No, charge more money.” Okay, I guess I'll tell myself to do that now. I have this conversation with myself a lot. MAE: Yeah. I've been very aware that when I become anti-money, the well dries up. The money well. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. MAE: And when I am respectful of and appreciative of money in the world, more comes my way. There is an internal dousing, I think that happens that one needs to be very careful about for sure. CASEY: One of the techniques I use with myself and with clients is a matrix where I write out for this approach, this thing that I'm thinking about how much money will it make, how much impact will it have on this goal, and all the different heuristics I would use to make the decision, or columns and all the options arose. I put numbers in it and I might weight my columns because money is less important than impact, but it's still important. It's there. I do all this math. In the end, the summary column with the averages roughly matches what's in my head, which is the things that are similar in my head are similar on paper, but I can see why and that's very clarifying for me. I really like being able to see it in this matrix form and being able to see that you have to focus on the money some amount. If you just did the high impact one, it wouldn't be on the top of the list. It's like, it's hard to think about so many variables at once, but seeing it helps me. CHELSEA: It is. GeePaw speaks to that some later in the thread. He says, “You've got to feed your family. You've got to. That's not negotiable. But you don't got to forget the well. To be any good at all, you have to keep finding the well, keep reaching it, keep noticing it. Doesn't matter whether it's office hours, or after hours. Matters whether you get to it. The thing you've got to watch, when you become a professional geek, isn't the newest tech, and it sure as hell isn't the org's process. You've got to watch whether, or how you're getting to the well. If you're getting to the well, in whatever way, you'll stay alive and change the world.” I think I'm curious as to y'all's thoughts on this, but like I mentioned earlier, I have a full-time job and I also do this consulting on the side. I also teach. I teach at the Master's program in computer science at University of Chicago. I do some mentoring with an organization called Emergent Works, which trains formerly incarcerated technologists. The work situation that I have pieced together for myself, I think manages to get me the income I need and also, the impact that I'm looking for and the ability to work with people and those kinds of things. I think my perspective at this point is that it's probably difficult, if it's realistic at all, to expect any one position to be able to meet all of those needs simultaneously. Maybe they exist, but I suspect that they're relatively few and far between and I think that we probably do ourselves a disservice by propagating this idea that what you need to do is just make yourself so supremely interview-able that everybody wants to hire you and then you get to pick the one position where you get to do that because there's only one in the entirety of tech, it's that rare. Sure, maybe that's an individualist way to look at it. But when we step back and look more closely, or when we step back and look more broadly at that, it's like, all right, so we have to become hypercompetitive in order to be able to get the position where we can make enough while helping people. Like, the means there seem kind of cutthroat for the ends, right? [laughs] CASEY: This reminds me of relationships, too and I think there's a lot of great parallels here. Like you shouldn't expect your partner to meet all of your needs, all of them. MAE: I was thinking the same thing! CASEY: Uh huh. Social, emotional, spiritual, physical, all your needs cannot possibly by one person and that is so much pressure to put on that person, CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: It's like not healthy. CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: You can choose some to prioritize over others for your partner, but you're not going to get a 100% of it and you shouldn't. CHELSEA: Well, and I find that being a conversation fairly regularly in monogamous versus polyamorous circles as well. Like, how much is it appropriate to expect of a partner? But I think it is a valid conversation to have in those circles. But I think that even in the context of a monogamous relationship, a person has other relationships—familial relationships, friend relationships—outside of that single romantic relationship. CASEY: Co-workers, community people, yeah. CHELSEA: Right. But even within that monogamous context, it's most realistic and I would argue, the most healthy to not expect any one person to provide for all of your needs and rather to rely on a community. That's what we're supposed to be able to do. CASEY: Yeah. MAE: Interdependence, not independence. CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: It's more resilient in the face of catastrophe, or change in general, mild, more mild change and you want to be that kind of resilient person for yourself, too. Just like you would do a computer system, or an organization. They should be resilient, too. MAE: Yes. CASEY: Your relationship with your job is another one. MAE: Totally. CHELSEA: Right. And I think that part of the reason the burnout is so quick – like the amount of time, the median amount of time that somebody spends at a company in tech is 2.2 years. MAE: I know, it's so weird. CHELSEA: Very few companies in tech have a large number of lifers, for example, or something like that. There are a number of reasons for that. We don't necessarily have to get into all of them, although, we can if you want. But I think one of them is definitely that we expect to get so much out of a full-time position. Tech is prone. due to circumstances of its origin, to an amount of idealism. We are saving the world. We, as technologists, are saving the world and also, we, as technologists, can expect this salary and we, as technologists, are a family and we play ping pong, and all of these things – [laughter] That contribute to an unrealistic expectation of a work environment, which if that is the only place that we are getting fulfillment as programmers, then people become unsatisfied very quickly because how could an organization that's simultaneously trying to accomplish a goal, meet all of these expect for everybody? I think it's rare at best. CASEY: I want to bring up another example of this kind of thing. Imagine you're an engineer and you have an engineering manager. What's their main job? Is it to get the organization's priorities to be done by the team, like top-down kind of thing? We do need that to happen. Or is it to mentor each individual and coach them and help them grow as an engineer? We need that somewhere, too, yeah. Or is it to make the team – like the team to come together as a team and be very effective together and to represent their needs to the org? That, too, but we don't need one person to do all three of those necessarily. If the person's not technical, you can get someone else in the company to do technical mentorship, like an architect, or just a more senior person on, or off the team somewhere else. But we put a lot of pressure on the engineering managers to do that and this applies to so many roles. That's just one I know that I can define pretty well. There's an article that explains that pretty well. We'll put in the show notes. MAE: Yes! So what I am currently doing is I have a not 40 hours a week job as an engineering manager and especially when I took the gig, I was still doing all of these pandemic charity things and I'm like, “These are more important to me right now and I only have so many hours in the day. So do you need me to code at this place? I can, but do you need me to because all those hours are hours I can go code for all these other things that I'm doing,” and [laughs] it worked. I have been able to do all three of the things that you're talking about, Casey, but certainly able to defer in different places and it's made me – this whole thing of not working full-time makes you optimize in very different ways. So I sprinkle my Slack check-ins all day, but I didn't have to work all day to be present all day. There's a lot that has been awesome. It's not for everyone, but I also have leaned heavily on technical mentorship happening from tech leads as well. CASEY: Sounds good. MAE: But I'm still involved. But this thing about management, especially in tech being whichever programmer seems like the most dominant programmer is probably going to be a good needs to be promoted into management. Just P.S. management is its own discipline, has its own trajectory and when I talk to hiring managers and they only care about my management experience in tech, which is 6 years, right? 8, but I have 25 years of experience in managing. So there's a preciousness of what it is that we are asking for the employees and what the employees are asking of the employer, like you were talking about Chelsea, that is very interesting. It's very privileged, and does lead a lot of people to burnout and disappointment because their ideas got so lofty. I just want to tie this back a little bit too, something you read in that quote about – I forget the last quote, but it was something about having enough to be able to change the world and it reminded me of Adrienne Maree Brown, pleasure activism, emergent strategy, and all of her work, and largely, generations of Black women have been saying, “Yo, you've got to take care [chuckles] of yourself to be able to affect change.” Those people have been the most effective and powerful change makers. So definitely, if you're curious about this topic, I urge you to go listen to some brilliant Black women about it. CASEY: We'll link that in the show notes, too. I think a lot about engineering managers and one way that doesn't come up a lot is you can get training for engineering managers to be stronger managers and for some reason, that is not usually an option people reach for. It could happen through HR, or it could happen if you have a training budget and you're a new EM, you could use your training budget to hire coaching from someone. I'm an example. But there's a ton of people out there that offer this kind of thing. If you don't learn the leadership skills when you switch roles, if you don't take time to learn those skills that are totally learnable, you're not going to have them and it's hard to apply them. There's a lot of pressure to magically know them now that you've switched hats. MAE: And how I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have a therapist, [laughs] I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have multiple job coaches at any time. Like why are we not sourcing more ideas and problem-solving strategies, and thinking we need to be the repository of how to handle X, Y, Z situation? CASEY: For some reason, a lot of people I've talked to think their manager is supposed to do that for them. Their manager is supposed to be their everything; their boss. They think the boss that if they're bad, you quit your job. If they're good, you'll stay. That boss ends up being their career coach for people, unless they're a bad career coach and then you're just stuck. Because we expect it so strongly and that is an assumption I want everyone listening to question. Do you need your manager at work to be that person for you? If they are, that's great. You're very fortunate. If not, how can you find someone? Someone in the community, a friend, family member, a professional coach, there's other options, other mentors in the company. You don't have to depend on that manager who doesn't have time for you to give you that kind of support. CHELSEA: So to that end, my thinking around management and mentorship changed about the time I hit – hmm. It was a while ago now, I don't know, maybe 6 years as a programmer, or something like that. Because before that, I was very bought into this idea that your manager is your mentor and all these types of things. There was something that I realized. There were two things that I realized. The first one was that, for me, most of my managers were not well set up to be mentors to me and this is why. Well, the truth is I level up quickly and for many people who are managers in a tech organization, they were technologists for 3 to 5 years before they became managers. They were often early enough in their career that they didn't necessarily know what management entailed, or whether they should say no based on what they were interested in. Many managers in tech figure out what the job is and then try to find as many surreptitious ways as possible to get back into the code. MAE: Yeah. CHELSEA: Additionally, many of those managers feel somewhat insecure about their weakening connection to the code base of the company that they manage. MAE: Yeah. CHELSEA: And so it can be an emotionally fraught experience for them to be mentor to someone whose knowledge of the code base that they are no longer in makes them feel insecure. So I learned that the most effective mentors for me – well, I learned something about the most effective mentors for me and I learned something of the most effective managers for me. I learned that the most effective managers for me either got way out ahead of me experience wise before they became managers, I mean 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, because those are not people who got promoted to management because they didn't know to say no. Those are people who got promoted to management after they got tired of writing code and they no longer staked their self-image on whether they're better coders than the people that they manage. That's very, very important. The other type of person who was a good manager for me was somebody who had never been a software engineer and there are two reasons for that. First of all, they trended higher on raw management experience. Second of all, they were not comparing their technical skillset to my technical skillset in a competitive capacity and that made them better managers for me, honestly. It made things much, much easier. And then in terms of mentors, I found that I had a lot more luck going outside of the organization I was working for mentors and that's again, for two reasons. The first one is that a lot of people, as they gain experience, go indie. Just a lot of people, like all kinds. Some of my sort of most trusted mentors. Avdi Grimm is somebody I've learned a lot from, indie effectively at this point. GeePawHill, like I mentioned, indie effectively at this point. Kenneth Mayer, indie effectively at this point. And these are all people who had decades of experience and the particular style of programming that I was doing very early in my career for many years. So that's the first reason. And then the second reason is that at your job, it is in your interest to succeed at everything you try—at most jobs. And jobs will tell you it's okay to fail. Jobs will tell you it's okay to like whatever, not be good at things and to be learning. But because if I'm drawing a paycheck from an organization, I do not feel comfortable not being good at the thing that I am drawing the paycheck for. MAE: Same. CHELSEA: And honestly, even if they say that that's the case, when the push comes to shove and there's a deadline, they don't actually want you to be bad at things. Come on! That doesn't make any sense. But I've been able to find ambitious projects that I can contribute to not for pay and in those situations, I'm much more comfortable failing because I can be like, “You know what, if they don't like my work, they can have all their money back.” And I work on a couple projects like that right now where I get to work with very experienced programmers on projects that are interesting and challenging, and a lot of times, I just absolutely eat dirt. My first PR doesn't work and I don't know what's wrong and the whole description is like somebody please help and I don't feel comfortable doing that on – if I had to do it at work, I would do it, but I'm not comfortable doing it. I firmly believe that for people to accelerate their learning to their full capacity for accelerating their learning, they must place themselves in situations where they not only might fail, but it's pretty likely. Because that's what's stretching your capacity to the degree that you need to get better and that's just not a comfortable situation for somewhere that you depend on to make a living. And that ended up being, I ended up approaching my management and my mentorship as effectively mutually exclusive things and it ended up working out really well for me. At this particular point in time, I happened to have a manager who happened to get way out ahead of me technically, and is willing to review PRs and so, that's very nice. But it's a nice-to-have. It's not something that I expect of a manager and it's ended up making me much more happy and manage relationships. MAE: I agree with all of that. So well said, Chelsea. CHELSEA: I try, I try. [laughs] Casey, are there things that you look for specifically in a manager? CASEY: Hmm. I guess for that question, I want to take the perspective inward, into myself. What do I need support on and who can I get that from? And this is true as also an independent worker as a consultant freelancer, too. I need support for when things are hard and I can be validated from people who have similar experiences, that kind of like emotional support. I need technical support and skills, like the sales I don't have yet and I have support for that, thank goodness. Individuals, I need ideally communities and individuals, both. They're both really important to me and some of these could be in a manager, but lately, I'm my own manager and I can be none of those things, really. I'm myself. I can't do this external support for myself. Even when I'm typing into a spreadsheet and the computer's trying to be a mirror, it's not as good as talking to another person. Another perspective that I need support on is how do I know what I'm doing is important and so, I do use spreadsheets as a mirror for that a lot of the time for myself. Like this impact is having this kind of magnitude of impact on this many people and then that calculates to this thing, maybe. Does that match my gut? That's literally what I want to know, too. The numbers aren't telling me, but talking to other people about impact on their projects really kind of solidifies that for me. And it's not always the client directly. It could be someone else who sees the impact I'm having on a client. Kind of like the manager, I don't want to expect clients to tell me the impact I'm having. In fact, for business reasons, I should know what the impact is myself, to tell them, to upsell them and continue it going anyway. So it really helps me to have peers to talk through about impact. Like that, too types of support. What other kinds of support do you need as consultants that I didn't just cover? MAE: I still need – and I have [laughs] hired Casey to help me. I still need a way to explain what it is that I am offering and what the value of that really is in a way that is clear and succinct. Every time I've gone to make a website, or a list of what it is that I offer, I end up in the hundreds of bullet points [laughs] and I just don't – [overtalk] CASEY: Yeah, yeah. MAE: Have a way to capture it yet. So often when people go indie, they do have a unique idea, a unique offering so finding a way to summarize what that is can be really challenging. I loved hearing you two when you were talking about knowing what kinds of work you want to do and who your ideal customer is. Those are things I have a clearer sense of, but how to make that connection is still a little bit of a gap for me. But you reminded me in that and I just want to mention here this book, The Pumpkin Plan, like a very bro business book situation, [chuckles] but what is in there is so good. I don't want to give it away and also, open up another topic [laughs] that I'll talk too long about. So I won't go into it right now, but definitely recommend it. One of the things is how to call your client list and figure out what is the most optimal situation that's going to lead toward the most impact for everybody. CASEY: One of the things I think back to a lot is user research and how can we apply that this business discovery process. I basically used the same techniques that were in my human computer interaction class I took 10, or 15 years ago. Like asking open ended questions, trying to get them to say what their problems are, remembering how they said it in their own words and saying it back to them—that's a big, big step. But then there's a whole lot of techniques I didn't learn from human computer interaction, that are sales techniques, and my favorite resource for that so far is called SPIN selling where SPIN is an acronym and it sounds like a wonky technique that wouldn't work because it's just like a random technique to pull out. I don't know, but it's not. This book is based on studies and it shows what you need to do to make big ticket sales go through, which is very different than selling those plastic things with the poppy bubbles in the mall stand in the middle of the hallway. Those low-key things they can manipulate people into buying and people aren't going to return it probably. But big-ticket things need a different approach than traditional sales and marketing knowledge and I really like the ideas in SPIN selling. I don't want to go into them today. We'll talk about it later. But those are two of the perspectives I bring to this kind of problem, user research and the SPIN selling techniques. I want to share what my ideal client would be. I think that's interesting, too. So I really want to help companies be happier and more effective. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective, and that has the impact on the users of the company, or whoever their clients are. It definitely impacts that, which makes it a thing I can sell, thankfully. So an organization usually knows when they're not the most happy, or the most effective. They know it, but my ideal client isn't just one that knows that, but they also have leadership buy-in; they have some leader who really cares and can advocate for making it better and they just don't know how. They don't have enough resources to make it happen in their org. Maybe they have, or don't have experience with it, but they need support. That's where I come in and then my impact really is on the employees. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective. That's the direct impact I want, and then it has the really strong, indirect impact on the business outcomes. So in that vein, I'm willing to help even large tech companies because if I can help their employees be happier, that is a positive impact. Even if I don't care about large tech companies' [chuckles] business outcomes, I'm okay with that because my focus is specifically on the employees. That's different than a lot of people I talk to; they really just want to support like nonprofit type, stronger impact of the mission and that totally makes sense to me, too. MAE: Also, it is possible to have a large and ever growing equitably run company. It is possible. I do want to contribute toward that existing in the world and as much as there's focus on what the ultimate looking out impact is, I care about the experience of employees and individuals on the way to get there. I'm not a utilitarian thinker. CASEY: Yeah, but we can even frame it in a utilitarian way if we need to. If we're like a stakeholder presentation, if someone leaves the company and it takes six months to replace them and their work is in the meantime off board to other people, what's the financial impact of all that. I saw a paper about it. Maybe I can dig it up and I'll link to it. It's like to replace a person in tech it costs a $100K. So if they can hire a consultant for less than a $100K to save one person from leaving, it pays for itself. If that number is right, or whatever. Maybe it was ten employees for that number. The paper will say much better than I will. CHELSEA: I think that in mentioning that Casey, you bring up something that businesses I think sometimes don't think about, which is some of the hidden costs that can easily be difficult to predict, or difficult to measure those kinds of things. One of the hidden costs is the turnover costs is the churn cost because there's how much it takes to hire another person and then there's the amount of ramp time before that person gets to where the person who left was. CASEY: Right, right, right. CHELSEA: And that's also a thing. There's all the time that developers are spending on forensic software analysis in order to find out all of the context that got dropped when a person left. CASEY: Yeah. The one person who knew that part of the code base, the last one is gone, uh oh. CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: It's a huge trust. And then engineering team is often really interested in conveying that risk. But if they're not empowered enough and don't have enough bandwidth time and energy to make the case, the executive team, or whoever will never hear it and they won't be able to safeguard against it. MAE: Or using the right language to communicate it. CASEY: Right, right. And that's its own skill. That's trainable, too thankfully. But we don't usually train engineers in that, traditionally. Engineers don't receive that training unless they go out of their way for it. PMs and designers, too, honestly. Like the stakeholder communication, everybody can work on. MAE: Yeah. CASEY: That's true. MAE: Communication. Everyone can, or not. Yes. [laughs] I learned the phrase indie today. I have never heard it and I really like it! It makes me feel cool inside and so love and – [overtalk] CASEY: Yeah, I have no record label, or I am my own record label, perhaps. MAE: Yo! CASEY: I've got one. I like the idea of having a Patreon, not to make money, but to have to help inspire yourself and I know a lot of friends have had Patreons with low income from it and they were actually upset about it. So I want to go back to those friends and say, “Look, this prove some people find value in what you're doing.” Like the social impact. I might make my own even. Thank you. MAE: I know I might do it too. It's good. That's good. CHELSEA: Absolutely. Highly recommended. One thing that I want to take away is the exercise, Casey, that you were talking about of tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes in terms of a person's needs. Because I think that an exercise like that would be extremely helpful for, for example, some of my students who are getting their very first tech jobs. Students receive a very one-dimensional message about the way that tech employment goes. It tends to put set of five companies that show remain unnamed front and center, which whatever, but I would like them to be aware of the other options. And there is a very particular way of gauging the value of a tech position that I believe includes fewer dimensions than people should probably consider for the health of their career long-term and not only the health of their career, but also their health in their career. CASEY: One more parting thought I want to share for anyone is you need support for your career growth, for your happiness. If you're going to be a consultant, you need support for that. Find support in individuals and communities, you deserve that support and you can be that support for the people who are supporting you! It can be mutual. They need that, too.

On the podcast we talk with Lisa about marketing an app with no revenue, the challenges of adding new revenue streams, and the importance of brand marketing in a post IDFA world.Our guest today is Lisa Kennelly, Chief Marketing Officer at Fishbrain, the #1 app for people who love fishing. At Fishbrain, Lisa manages a team of 20 people, and is responsible for everything from brand positioning and product marketing to business development and e-commerce. Lisa also mentors startup founders on marketing and strategy.In this episode, you'll learn: How to make the transition from growth to revenue Finding additional revenue opportunities beyond subscriptions Tips for balancing brand awareness marketing and performance marketing Links & Resources VSCO Clue Lisa Kennelly's Links Lisa's LinkedIn Follow Fishbrain on Twitter Fishbrain's website Fishbrain Is on Instagram Fishbrain's Facebook page Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club

My Guest Jeroen CorthoutJeroen is co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, an intelligent CRM built for SMBs selling B2B, mostly popular with agencies and SaaS companies. Salesflare itself was founded when Jeroen and his co-founder Lieven wanted to manage the leads for their software company in an easier way. They didn't like to keep track of them manually and built Salesflare, which pulls customer data together automatically. It's now the most popular CRM on Product Hunt and top-rated on review platforms like G2 for its ease of use and automation features. Our Sponsors: SalesflareSalesflare is the perfect CRM for any small or medium-sized B2B business that wants to make more sales with less work. The CRM fills out itself, by synchronizing with your email, calendar, phone, social media, ... and organizes all this data for you. Its email integration is unrivalled. It's instant, imports email signatures, tracks your emails on opens and clicks (with linked website integration), and brings your CRM right in your inbox. Start making sales simpler. Use Salesflare's automation features and enjoy its simplicity. Setting it up only takes minutes. Visit https://www.salesflare.com/ (Salesflare) and get 20% Discount for 3 months with the code: SUCCESSIQ

This article originally appeared on the Customer Success Leadership Network blog. We are thinking about customer success all wrong. We think it’s a function. A department. A post-sales team. The enlightened among us think customer success is a philosophy or even an organizational design principle. That’s better, but still not quite right. I mean, what am I supposed to do with “customer success is a philosophy?” I have no idea. After spending two and a half years running a SaaS business as a general manager with P&L ownership, I have come to this realization in my thinking: customer success is a business model innovation.To understand what I mean by business model innovation, we must first define business model. According to Alex Osterwalder, “a business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.”Notice the three parts of this definition: create, deliver, and capture value. All three are required in order for a business model to work. A mistake I see customer success teams make is focusing solely on “delivers,” ignoring “creates,” and “captures.” When a customer success team over-indexes on delivering value, the primary purpose becomes retaining customers, which seems like a noble pursuit until you examine the behaviors of a retention mindset.The downside of a retention mindsetRetaining customers is defensive. The mindset is, “If we are going to retain this customer, we have to get them to log in more or get them to use the software more or build a better relationship with the champion or get them to understand the value they are currently realizing. We must compel or persuade customers to act in ways we want them to act.” When a customer renews, we are relieved that we got the renewal at the same price as the last contract. We celebrate it. I know what you are thinking, “Bill, that is a good thing. We saved/retained/turned around that customer by delivering value. What’s the problem?”I see two [business model] problems.You didn’t create new value.You didn’t capture a portion of that new value.Here’s another way to look at it. A CEO came to me for advice on how to get her team to focus on net revenue retention (NRR) and said to me, “You know, I see my teams celebrate all these renewals, but I don’t see the value of the contracts going up. All of our costs are going up, including the raises everyone wants, but the prices we charge customers are not. This is not gonna work.” This is what happens when a software subscription business focuses primarily on delivering value and retaining customers. There is no “what’s next.” No forward-thinking about how to continuously help customers grow.The upside of business model thinkingSoftware companies that understand their business model get all of their teams rowing in the same direction by getting everyone involved in all three parts of the business model:Create valueDeliver valueCapture valueThe “what’s next” mindset is built into the system (your business model). There is no need to upsell or for account managers to sweep in to “close the deal” or argue about who should own the renewal or waste energy on debates about whether people can sell AND be a trusted advisor. You will understand how this is possible as you read further.A well-designed business model answers the question, “What’s next?” It creates a flywheel effect of the following: Step 1: Create “something” that solves a problemStep 2: Deliver that “something” to a customerStep 3: Capture 10% to 15% of the value of that “something” with reasonable pricingStep 4: Repeat this process with existing customers. FOREVER.Steps one through three are simple in the sense that most software companies already do this. The founder noticed a problem in the world, built a product to solve it, and found customers willing to pay for that solution. Step four is where the magic happens, where the flywheel can start turning, and where many software companies mis-understand their business model. A well-designed business model answers the question, “What’s next?” When you get to step four, I assume you have already delivered on the one main value proposition that new customers bought your product to address in the first place; and that the product has been designed to address. Step four is about “What’s next?” More precisely: “What is the next value proposition you intend to help a customer achieve; and if we do help a customer achieve that next value proposition, how much of that next, new value will we capture?” Pause and think about that for a moment, and while you do, let me ask those two questions differently.What value proposition can we deliver next?What offering (that we must create) can a customer buy in order to achieve that next value proposition? To over simplify what is happening here. If we operated our customer success in accordance with the business model innovation, at each renewal cycle (ideally before) we would identify the next value proposition that we are positioned to help the customer achieve. Better yet, the customer would identify the next value they want to achieve. We create an offering (or select an existing one) that will help the customer achieve this next value, and we charge a price such that a customer is willing to pay because of the value they will realize. “If we do this, we will save $100, I’d love to pay you $10 to do that. Where do I sign?”So the flywheel of the business model innovation (step four from above) is:Create valueDeliver valueCapture valueCreate next valueDeliver next valueCapture next valueCreate next next valueDeliver next next valueCapture next next valueRepeat. Forever.It is similar to what Rav Dhaliwal calls the continuous sale. What Dave Jackson calls the next best value. If you look through the lens of business model innovation, you transcend debates about who owns the renewal, the customer relationship, and a quota. The business model is designed more like an algorithm and less like a customer journey with owners and silos and hand-offs and confused customers, “Who are you again? My account manager? Then what’s my customer success manager for? Wait, I should call my technical account manager for that? When do I call support? Oh, I should have put in a ticket instead of calling you? Sorry. I’ll try to get it right next time.”All of this noise and friction becomes unnecessary. Business model innovation is a customer success algorithmThe business model innovation of customer success is an algorithm with the following rules: IF a customer wants to realize this value proposition, THEN they need to buy that offering. IF a customer wants to realize the next value proposition, THEN they need to buy the next offering. Your job is to work with multiple teams in your company and write as many IF/THEN statements as you can, such that you can help your customers. FOREVER. We called it “first” value for a reasonWe, customer success teams, just need to take one more step in our evolution. We are concerned with helping customers achieve value. One of our most important charters is to help customers achieve “first value” and help customers accelerate “time to first value.” All I am suggesting is that we don’t forget that we inserted the word “first” for a reason; because we know there is more value that we can create, deliver, and capture. My call to action to you is this. Write down a list of value propositions that you could help your customers achieve over time. Then, prioritize that list using the model above, answering the question, “What’s the next value proposition I can help customers realize? And what is the next one after that?” Then write down the list of offerings you have (or need to create) in order to help your customers achieve those value propositions; and capture some of it. Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

A recent Gartner survey revealed that nearly 80% of workers are using collaboration tools for work in 2021, up from just over half of workers in 2019. While many organizations relied on productivity platforms before the pandemic, the emergence of remote and hybrid work models has proven just how vital an all-in-one solution is to maintain workplace collaboration and efficiency. ClickUp, the world's first productivity platform, recently announced they raised $400 million in Series C funding -- the largest funding round to date in the workplace productivity market. This funding puts ClickUp at a $4 billion valuation, which will be used to support the creation of 600 European jobs, a regional European HQ, and a new development center. ClickUp's unique offering in the market has fueled their success as one of the fastest-growing SaaS startups in the world -- ClickUp is the only solution that replaces all individual workplace productivity tools within a single, unified platform. In less than 18 months, the company has raised $535 million in funding ($35M Series A in June 2020; $135M Series B in December 2020.) In the last year, the company has tripled its revenue and grown its user base from 200,000 to 800,000 teams worldwide and has more than 85,000 paying customers, including teams at McDonald's, Booking.com, and Netflix to name a few. Zeb Evans, ClickUp founder, shares how he has taken ClickUp from a 50-person Series A startup to a $4 billion-dollar company.

On this episode of The Compassionate Capitalist Show, Nathan Beckord, Founder and CEO of Founder Suite, and Karen Rands will talk about what steps a founder needs to take to increase the odds of seed round and subsequent  funding rounds successful. The steps to complete a successful capital raise are predictable, yet most entrepreneurs make the same common mistakes.  Even with all the free resources available through economic development organizations, incubators and accellerators, and an abundance of entrepreneur programs in colleges and universities, Nathan estimates that 98% of the startup founders have no idea about how to raise capital.  And as Karen has often stated, there is a science to the art of raising capital. With over a decade of experience working with 150 startups as Interim CFO, business development, and many advisory roles, and deep experience with financial equity markets, Nathan Beckord started his own startup FounderSuite.com to provide software tools and formulized guidance to entrepreneurs seeking to raise seed stage and growth stage capital. With access to the investing preferences of over 200,000 investors, nearly a 1/4 of the entrepreneurs using the research and relationship tools on this SaaS platform have successfully raised nearly $3 Billion in capital in just 5 years since inception. Karen Rands, the leader of the Compassionate Capitalist Movement and author of the best selling 'primer' for angel investors "Inside Secrets to Angel Investing", is an authority on creating wealth through investing and building successful businesses that can scale and exit rich. Visit http://KarenRands.co to sign up for her tips email and learn why her firm is hired to identify the red flags of deal before you invest or try to raise capital. VIDEO: https://youtu.be/uqFVe9y-ZaI

In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're excited to host Caleb. Barn2Door's own Operations Manager. Listen as he shares how he came to join the team and and how he was able to grow with Barn2Door.Show Notes:https://www.barn2door.com/careers

In this day and age, businesses cannot afford not to do digital marketing. The online space has made it easier for companies to reach their target market. On top of that, it opened their business to a global marketplace.   Dustin DeVries, a digital marketing expert, joins us today as we chat about all things websites, SEO, and the trends in digital marketing this 2022.   For everybody who'd like to grow their business through digital marketing, this is the episode you really need to listen to. So go ahead and jump into the episode! Resource Links: Connect with Dustin DeVries on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustinbdevries/ Visit their website here: https://caffeineinteractive.com/ Your Social Voice Website (https://www.yoursocialvoice.com.au/) Become the Mogul of your industry (https://www.mogulcall.com) Join our Mogul Mastermind (https://www.mogulmastermind.com.au/)   What we discussed in this episode:   Introduction [0:00] What does Dustin Devries do? [0:57] What got Dustin into Digital Marketing [1:22] Biggest shifts in digital marketing over the last couple of years [2:50] Limitations of drag and drop, easy-to-use website builders [4:25] SEO results: Custom-built websites vs easy-to-use site builders [6:12] Common pitfalls of businesses when it comes to digital marketing [7:48] Dustin's favourite aspect in digital marketing [9:50] Incoming trends for digital marketing this year 2022 [12:31] Dustin's New Year Resolutions [17:25]   About Dustin DeVries:   Dustin DeVries is the co-founder and technology consultant at Caffeine Interactive Technologies — a provider of web-based solutions for businesses. Typical clients include startups and web-based ventures looking to design the next killer SaaS app or web-based product. Dustin helps businesses solve problems with web and mobile software solutions. His hobbies include reading, gardening, tennis, fishing, camping, and spending time with family.   Thanks for checking out today's episode! Be sure to tune in for the next one, subscribe, and share this podcast.   Connect with The Kim Barrett Show: Subscribe on Youtube Follow Us on Facebook See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The landscape for search engine optimization (SEO) changes constantly, so staying on top of trends is extremely important but not always easy for sustained success. Today's guest is Georgios Chasiotis, Managing Director of MINUTTIA, about what to focus on with SEO in 2022. He shares insight into what SEO tactics should be used or are overused, especially when it comes to software as a service (SaaS).   Some of the highlights of the show include: Past, Present, and Future: SEO and SaaS marketing trends and tactics Where are things at right now? Not multi-dimensional or complex Alternative/Comparison Pages: Not aligned with website identity, but abused Organic Search: Find more ways to be creative and bold about things 2021: What separated top SEO performers from struggling SaaS companies? More/Better Experience: Google rewards websites that are trustworthy Vanity Metrics: Not only way to measure success based on user experience COVID Impact: Were there any behavior changes? Higher expectations Future SEO Tactics: Which will become less important or effective in 2022? Guest Blogging: Is it effective for reciprocal linking? Georgios advises against it Content and Links: What most brands and websites compete against   Links: Georgios Chasiotis on LinkedIn MINUTTIA CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer Ben Sailer on LinkedIn CoSchedule   Quotes from Georgios Chasiotis: “Unfortunately, what I see is pretty much all websites are doing what every other website is doing.” “Try new things, experiment, and fail a lot of times in the process of discovering new ways of generating interest and demand for our websites.” “SaaS companies have struggled when it comes to organic search.” “Everyone can play the content and backlinks game. Not everyone can build a brand and not everyone can create a wow moment for their website visitors.”

Jon and Justin recorded this episode sitting on the same couch! Photo of the Coeur de Boeuf The last time we were together in person: April 30, 2019 [Photo] 2022 roadmap planning. We're exploring what we'd like to accomplish this year.  Update and improve the podcast website builder Build new podcast website templates based on Liquid Add tools that help podcasters promote their show Continue to improve our Dynamic Audio Insertion features Create new features that help podcasters monetize their show Sales/marketing planning: Reaching out to major affiliates to see how we can better partner with them Looking at ways of rewarding our customers for referring through Rewardful Freemium? Employees/company stuff  Options: Carta Benefits Possible hiring Future:Long-term, we're looking at an acquisition: what do we need to do to build up to that? 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: Marcel Fahle, ​​wearebold.af Alex Payne Bill Condo Anton Zorin from ProdCamp.com Mitch Harris Kenny, Intro CRM podcast Oleg Kulyk Ethan Gunderson Chris Willow Ward Sandler, Memberspace Russell Brown, Photivo.com Noah Prail Colin Gray Austin Loveless Michael Sitver Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis, Fathom Dan Buda Darby Frey Brad from Canada Adam DuVander Dave Giunta (JOOnta) Kyle Fox GetRewardful.com Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of podcasting transistor.fm/justin★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Paul Klein is a business consultant and entrepreneur. From his days as a 1980s hair band guitarist and lifelong entrepreneur to starting and scaling a successful SAAS company to consulting for some of the biggest brands including Target, Neiman Marcus, Starbucks, Holiday Inn, and other global brands, Paul helps Consultants, Freelancers, and Solopreneur's price their services, stop undercharging in order to build 7 figure businesses.  Paul is also the host of the BizableTV podcast (formerly the Pricing Is Positioning Podcast) and Co-Founder Producer for BizableTV. BizableTV is a Netflix-style streaming service for entrepreneurs launching in January 2022 and will be accessible on over 1000 devices including iOS devices, Android devices, Macs, PCs, streaming media boxes such as Roku, Apple TV, Android TV, and FireTV." Sign-up for BizableTV TODAY! Use the code JS22 for 40% off for LIFE! www.bizabletv.com  Make sure to improve your sleep in 2022! Take the best magnesium supplement around! www.magbreakthrough.com/growth use the code GROWTH10 for 10% off! 

The idea of having a software as a service product sound great though, doesn't it? Solve a problem with software. Have a nice looking landing page and website. Get paying customers. Eventually have it make enough revenue so you can turn it into your primary source of income. There's a lot of software talent out there. We could solve lots of problems. But going from idea to product to first customer is non-trivial. Especially as a side hustle. This episode discusses some of the hurdles from idea to first customer. Brandon Braner is building Released.sh. It's a cool idea, but it's not done yet. Brandon and I talk about building side projects: - finding a target audience - limiting scope to something doable by one person - building a great looking landing page - finding time to work on things - prioritizing and planning - learning while building - even utilizing third party services to allow you to launch faster - and last, but not least, having fun Special Guest: Brandon Braner.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Lloyed Lobo, the Co-Founder and President of Boast.AI., a company that automates access to research and development, tax credits and innovation incentives so companies can fuel their growth while preserving equity and avoiding red tape. During the episode, Lloyed shares the details of his non-linear founding journey, his thoughts on building brand equity, and how creating a strong sense of community can magnify a business's impact.

Darrian Mikell is the Co-Founder and CEO of Qualifi, a SaaS platform that powers the fastest phone interview experience in the world and helps recruiting teams hire great candidates faster than ever before. He is based in the Indianapolis area and is a dedicated husband and father of three.We explore what it takes to launch a start-up and secure funding, the emotional pressures of entrepreneurship, and the leadership responsibilities of a founder and CEO.=======================0:00 Intro 1:21 Darrian attributes his drive today to ambition he felt as a child  3:34 Qualifi was co-founded by brothers  5:25 What problem within the hiring process does Qualifi solve for?9:12 What makes Darrian passionate about building his company?10:26 Using the Notes App 11:08 What few metrics do you measure at Qualifi and why do they matter the most? 13:09 Is Qualifi the only product on the market right now or is it the best? 14:43 How did you determine early adopters within the total addressable market?18:20 An error made when first starting the company 19:46 Understanding which key factors will drive your company's growth20:39 “Learn to sell, learn to build, if you can do both, you will be unstoppable” - Naval22:17 Figuring out what it means to be an effective leader24:01 Jobs of a CEO26:18 When you hire people, are you thinking about cultural fit or cultural add?27:40 Thoughts on bootstrapping versus raising venture capital 32:03 Describing the experience of raising money 34:40 The steps to take that can lead to a successful seed round38:49 What company or founder origin story stands out as special?41:43 Raising a family with 3 kids while running a business  45:35 Competitiveness as an athlete versus competitiveness as an entrepreneur 47:53 Misconceptions of building a business48:44 Life lessons learned by playing golf 54:44 How seeing success leads to more success57:29 Focusing on the future1:01:18 “One Final Question”=======================LinkTree to support us and leave an Apple Podcast review (thank you!)Let's get in touch!Join the discussion in the episode comments on our YouTube channel or social media pages...InstagramTwitter

Today we have another episode of Better Done Than Perfect. Listen in as we talk with Kieran Tie, founder of Chatty, the editorial service. You'll learn the different types of editing, negative writing habits to avoid, how to make niche technical content more appealing, and more.Please head over to the episode page for the detailed recap and key takeaways.Show notesChatty.so — Kieran's editorial serviceGrammarly, Writer.com — proofreading toolsGoogle Docs, Quip — collaborative word processing toolsFollow Kieran on TwitterSponsorThis 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.

In this episode, Randy Frisch—the co-founder, CMO & President of Uberflip, joins us to discuss 'how to create a personalized content experience to drive demand and improve customer engagement.' He was named one of the Top 50 Fearless Marketers globally by Marketo. Through this episode, Randy throws light on: --> Why he's mad about the way content marketing is generally done in B2B SaaS? --> What are some common mistakes that SaaS content marketers do? --> What is meaningful content personalization? And how to achieve it at scale in the context of creating relevant content experience? --> Should you control the content experience? Does it truly make sense to take people to a content hub? --> Content experience framework -- what are the components and how can you apply it today, and a lot more...

Bartley Wilson is the Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Virtual Pictures Corporation. He is a serial entrepreneur, sales rainmaker, and UX/UI developer of the world's first 360° SaaS platform for commercial and residential real estate. In the early 90s, Bart had a serious motorcycle accident that took him out of the Air Force but eventually led him to discover his passion for computer and graphics. He started doing virtual tour services in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and eventually founded his first company called Voyager International. Today, he runs a highly successful virtual tour platform company called Virtual Pictures Corporation or VPiX.   This Episode is Sponsored By: Express VPN is an app that reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers so your ISP can't see the sites you visit. Express VPN also keeps all your information secure by encrypting 100% your data with the most powerful encryption available. Protect your online activity today with the VPN rated no. 1 by Business Insider. Visit: millionaire-interviews.com/expressvpn and get an extra 3 months FREE on a 1-year package. Otis is an investment platform that makes it possible for almost anyone to invest in shares of cultural assets. Here's how it works, you download their app and sign up for free. They have over a hundred items available for you to invest in, from rare collectibles like sports cards, comics, and video games, to NFTs contemporary art, and even rare sneakers. Shares usually start around 10 bucks, plus they add new assets every week. Right now, Otis is offering listeners of this show a free share when they fund their account, all you have to do is go to: millionaire-interviews.com/otis Nearside is helping small businesses save money. With Nearside, there's no minimum balance requirement. Nearside business checking helps you grow your business by saving you money and providing valuable rewards and discounts. With Nearside rewards, you can earn cashback automatically on all the business purchases you already make. And they offer seamless online banking for on-the-go entrepreneurs. Go check out the Nearside app in both the Google Playstore and Apple Store. To learn more about Nearside and how they can help your business, go to: millionaire-interviews.com/nearside and sign up for a nearside business checking account. With one delicious scoop of Athletic Greens you're absorbing 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole foods or superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to help you start your day right. This special blend of ingredients supports your gut health, nervous system, immune system, your energy, recovery, focus, and aging. Right now, it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition, especially heading into the flu and cold season. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you a FREE 1-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin D and 5 free travel packs with your first purchase, all you have to do is visit: millionaire-interviews.com/athleticgreens What if I told you, you could be productive in business and in the bedroom. Magic Mind, the world's first productivity drink, is a nootropic shot of healthy natural ingredients that help you decrease stress, boost fluid flow, and keep you focused. If you're ready to race past your competition and satisfy your partner, then try Magic Mind today, go visit: millionaire-interviews.com/magicmind and use code – millionaire20 to get 20% off your first order.   Want to Support the Show? Well we'd love for you to join our Patreon Group!  What's in it for you?  Well you'll instantly get a scheduled call from Austin, where he'll help you with your current or future business... Sign-Up Now at millionaire-interviews.com/patreon.

Steve Pockross is the CEO of Verblio and has more than 20 years of startup, nonprofit, and Fortune 500 experience. He was part of the early management team at crowdsourcing pioneer LiveOps and previously led five SaaS and marketing businesses. Verblio is a content creation platform based in Denver, Colorado with a thousand highly curated writers and create 90,000 pieces of unique content per year. Verbilo is based on a marketplace of a similar dynamic to deliver high-quality content and a SaaS platform which holds all of content creation in one place. Read more about Verblio and their work in this Case Study with Rankings.io: https://www.verblio.com/case-studies/rankingsioOn This Episode, We Discuss...- Strategizing the Proper Content Creation Channels for Your Firm- Artificial Intelligence in the Content Creation Marketplace- Possible Trends in Content for 2022

Mark Stouse is the Chairman and CEO of Proof Analytics. He was 2020's Top 10 Most Influential Analytics Leaders. He was also CMO/CCO at Honeywell Aerospace, so he has tons of experience. Mark also hosts his own podcast called “Accelerating Value”, a weekly podcast aimed at guiding people in creating, defending, and proving value with the help of experts. In this episode, Mark discusses how analytics lead SaaS businesses to success as he shares insights most SaaS entrepreneurs need to know about the relationship between analytics and pricing.   Why you have to check out today's podcast: Discover how a different way of consulting like analytics can help SaaS businesses to become profitable nowadays; Know how much of a game changer analytics is in terms of keeping the relationship between customer loyalty and pricing intact; Find out how the scientific sense of inquiry helps pricing people reach greater heights in relation to sales and pricing with clients   “It isn't that you say, ‘Hey, what are you willing to pay for this?' That's not the question. You've got to say, ‘tell me about what you're really trying to solve for here and how big a problem is this to you. What would make you feel spectacular?' Then let's talk about the technical realities, and then let's talk about a price.” – Mark Stouse   Topics Covered: 02:02 – Getting exposed to pricing and learning things through failures with Mark's experience in Honeywell Aerospace and Proof Analytics 04:06 – Diving into the world of pricing with the help of advisors he trust 06:41 – Starting out in a SaaS company and initially doing consulting: a good way for one to be profitable 09:02 – A different consulting model – analytics – for a better, faster, and cheaper reality nowadays 13:16 – Business and the gap it has with data scientists due to the lack of contextual understanding in both concepts 18:23 – What does Proof Analytics charge for and why is that the right thing for them to charge for? 20:20 – Talking about the concept of 10 models equals 10 questions and how COVID affected the business industry in the past two years 26:05 – The differences in the opportunity costs of small and large companies 30:23 – A model as an indicator of customer success and people's obsession with margins 33:25 – What makes SaaS beautiful is that it concerns value at all times 35:30 – Mark's pricing advice for the listeners   Key Takeaways: “If you want to talk about a lesson in the reality of economics, start a SaaS company and you will learn more than you ever dreamed was out there.” – Mark Stouse “The problem has been not the math and not even the data. It has been the issue of how do we operationalize analytics so that everybody is able to make a better decision today than they were making before when they didn't have analytics. It really is taking the existing reality and making it better, faster, cheaper.” – Mark Stouse “Data scientists really don't typically have much subject matter expertise about any part of the business, so as the business person, you have to be very prescriptive with the data scientist in terms of laying out the non-mathematical equation.” – Mark Stouse “If you're a very large enterprise and you're spending $150-$200 million on marketing, what you are really after is maximizing the upside and minimizing the negative impact EPS from bad investments. That's what you're really after. If you are a much smaller company, you're really trying to avoid, among other things, being a two-time loser.” – Mark Stouse “The intersection of customer loyalty and pricing is also a piece that is usually ignored, because pricing is seen in a very short cycle sense rather than something that's a longer time.” – Mark Stouse “The human being has become key to the success of set which probably really and truly always was or should have been. There was just this unhealthy obsession with 90% profit margins.” – Mark Stouse   People / Resources Mentioned: Proof Analytics:https://www.proofanalytics.ai/ Honeywell Aerospace:https://aerospace.honeywell.com/   Connect with Mark Stouse: LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/markstouse Email: stouse@proofanalytics.ai   Connect with Mark Stiving:    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com  

As Global Head of Brand at Qualtrics, Jesse Purewal is a leader in brand experience. How can brands build standout experiences? It all comes down to purpose and empathy. This work is also at the heart of Jesse's Qualtrics-sponsored podcast Breakthrough Builders. We deconstructed empathy, experience, and how brands can be relentlessly relevant, this week on the On Brand podcast. About Jesse Purewal Jesse Purewal is a builder, storyteller, and strategist who works with leaders to define their organization's brand purpose, activate brands through modern marketing and drive brand-driven growth and impact through rigorous insight, unfiltered creativity, and experiential innovation. Over 12 years at global marketing firm Prophet, Jesse helped grow the organization from 70 to 450 employees and tripled the company's revenue. It was also at Prophet that Jesse and his teams launched transformative brands like T-Mobile's Uncarrier, Intel's Amazing, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, and Amazon's Amazon Business. Today, Jesse is the Global Head of Brand at Qualtrics, where he is defining the category of Experience Management and building a brand around breakthroughs at one of the most valuable SaaS companies in the world. He is also the host of the podcast Breakthrough Builders, a Qualtrics-sponsored show that invites people whose passions, perspectives, and instincts have impacted the world to share their stories. With curiosity at the forefront of every conversation, Jesse's mission is to pave the way for inspiration that unfolds into execution. Episode Highlights Defining experience management. We began our conversation on this topic. “It's really running your business from the outside in,” Jesse explains. Experience can be vast. How can we get our arms around it? “You have to take a deconstructionist approach—understanding each and every step of your customer's journey.” Qualtrics helps brands employ empathy at scale. “Being a purpose-driven brand matters more than ever,” notes Jesse. “It's not about the latest discount or product release. Brands have to be relentlessly relevant. Jesse then shared two great examples of brands doing this—Etsy and Google's new Pixel6. What brand has made Jesse smile recently? Jesse pointed us to Intuit's “You Do Your Thing” campaign for TurboTax. He was quick to note that this is a multi-layered smile as it showcases the brand's authenticity with both humor and empathy. However, it's also very on-brand strategically. To learn more, visit Jesse's website and check out the Breakthrough Builders podcast. As We Wrap … Listen and subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon/Audible, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeart, YouTube, and RSS. Rate and review the show—If you like what you're hearing, be sure to head over to Apple Podcasts and click the 5-star button to rate the show. And, if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review to help others find the show. Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you'd like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. On Brand is a part of the Marketing Podcast Network. Until next week, I'll see you on the Internet! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leading global SaaS for freelancers

In this episode, Joe will walk you through a simple but effective white hat local SEO strategy for building high-quality backlinks. Local backlinks increase the relevance of your website so that you can rank higher for local search terms in Google. This tried-and-true method will yield fantastic results by allowing you to build guest posts and sponsored posts at scale.

Could acquisition be the answer to your business needs?   On this episode of the Making Bank podcast, Roland Frasier talks about his entrepreneurial influences, acquisition and accomplishment, and advice for starting new business practices. Roland is an entrepreneur with a passion for business. He began his career in real estate, and soon his business practices evolved, leading him to bigger and better entrepreneurial success.   Roland has a history of building, buying, and selling businesses in e-commerce, e-learning, SaaS, and real estate. He is currently the CEO of All Channels Media, LLC, and principal in Scalable.co, DigitalMarketer.com, Traffic & Conversion Summit, Praxio.com, TruConversion.com, War Room Mastermind, Fully Accountable, Everbowl Restaurants, Big Block Realty, Scribe Publishing, and Real Estate Worldwide. Additionally, he has a virtual course called “The Epic Challenge,” where he teaches his methods for entrepreneurial achievement. Listen to Josh and Roland discuss acquisition and accomplishment: Starting in Entrepreneurship (5:17) Roland explains how he got his start as an entrepreneur and credits his father's tax attorney profession and entrepreneurial practices as motivators. Roland was inspired by his father's business connections and wanted to grow up and become a successful entrepreneur like them. Roland's Influences (7:10) In his youth, Roland displayed entrepreneurial behaviors to support his band and make money as a teenager. He discusses Robert G. Allen's book “Nothing Down” and how its concepts fascinated him at a young age and inspired him to get his real estate license at age 18. Since then, he has been evolving in his practices and experiencing business success. The Epic Challenge (11:43) Dale and Roland chat about Roland's new virtual course called “The Epic Challenge,” where he teaches participants how to gain entrepreneurial achievement. Accomplishment Through Acquisition (12:37) It is Roland's belief that acquisition can help you accomplish anything. He explains that there are seven different reasons one may have for desiring a change in their business and how these seven primary business needs can be solved through acquisition. The Acquisition Wheel (16:30) Roland expands upon his ideas regarding acquisition in business and the seven categories he refers to as the “Acquisition Wheel.” Using the “Making Bank Podcast” as an example, he describes the different categories and subcategories for acquisition, as well as his methods for using this practice to his advantage. Scaling Your Business (25:28) One of the most common challenges entrepreneurs face is determining how to scale their businesses. Roland elaborates on this challenge and how his acquisition strategies can apply. Additionally, he explains the importance of mindset for overcoming challenges in business. Overcoming Fear of New Business Practices (29:55) Roland chats about the acquisition process and how people are scared of potential risks when taking on new or unfamiliar business practices. He explains how starting something new like acquisition will seem difficult the first time, but the process becomes easier by starting small and gaining experience. Links mentioned: Making Bank - Website Nothing Down by Robert G. Allen - Amazon Roland Frasier - Website Roland Frasier - LinkedIn

Could acquisition be the answer to your business needs? On this episode of the Making Bank podcast, Roland Frasier talks about his entrepreneurial influences, acquisition and accomplishment, and advice for starting new business practices. Roland is an entrepreneur with a passion for business. He began his career in real estate, and soon his business practices evolved, leading him to bigger and better entrepreneurial success. Roland has a history of building, buying, and selling businesses in e-commerce, e-learning, SaaS, and real estate. He is currently the CEO of All Channels Media, LLC, and principal in Scalable.co, DigitalMarketer.com, Traffic & Conversion Summit, Praxio.com, TruConversion.com, War Room Mastermind, Fully Accountable, Everbowl Restaurants, Big Block Realty, Scribe Publishing, and Real Estate Worldwide. Additionally, he has a virtual course called “The Epic Challenge,” where he teaches his methods for entrepreneurial achievement. Listen to Josh and Roland discuss acquisition and accomplishment: Starting in Entrepreneurship (5:17) Roland explains how he got his start as an entrepreneur and credits his father's tax attorney profession and entrepreneurial practices as motivators. Roland was inspired by his father's business connections and wanted to grow up and become a successful entrepreneur like them. Roland's Influences (7:10) In his youth, Roland displayed entrepreneurial behaviors to support his band and make money as a teenager. He discusses Robert G. Allen's book “Nothing Down” and how its concepts fascinated him at a young age and inspired him to get his real estate license at age 18. Since then, he has been evolving in his practices and experiencing business success. The Epic Challenge (11:43) Dale and Roland chat about Roland's new virtual course called “The Epic Challenge,” where he teaches participants how to gain entrepreneurial achievement. Accomplishment Through Acquisition (12:37) It is Roland's belief that acquisition can help you accomplish anything. He explains that there are seven different reasons one may have for desiring a change in their business and how these seven primary business needs can be solved through acquisition. The Acquisition Wheel (16:30) Roland expands upon his ideas regarding acquisition in business and the seven categories he refers to as the “Acquisition Wheel.” Using the “Making Bank Podcast” as an example, he describes the different categories and subcategories for acquisition, as well as his methods for using this practice to his advantage. Scaling Your Business (25:28) One of the most common challenges entrepreneurs face is determining how to scale their businesses. Roland elaborates on this challenge and how his acquisition strategies can apply. Additionally, he explains the importance of mindset for overcoming challenges in business. Overcoming Fear of New Business Practices (29:55) Roland chats about the acquisition process and how people are scared of potential risks when taking on new or unfamiliar business practices. He explains how starting something new like acquisition will seem difficult the first time, but the process becomes easier by starting small and gaining experience. Links mentioned: Making Bank - Website Nothing Down by Robert G. Allen - Amazon Roland Frasier - Website Roland Frasier - LinkedIn

Ira Cohen's SaaS startup has already raised $70M and is expected to attract even more capital from investors this year. Anodot has acquired funding from top-tier investors like Redline Capital, Alicom, Softbank Ventures Asia, and Intel Capital. 

Digital Identity.

Increase sales through conversations

I’ve been feeling the pain that today’s guest is out to solve. Since moving to Austin, my wife and I still haven’t found a place to buy. So we’ve been jumping from Airbnb to Airbnb and we’re going a little crazy. Well, Luca Zambello found a way to make those check-in processes a little smoother and I want to find out how he did it. Luca is the founder of Jurny,  hospitality tech company offering SaaS-based management solutions designed to accommodate the evolving needs and expectations of the modern traveler. Luca Zambello is the founder of Jurny,  hospitality tech company offering SaaS-based management solutions designed to accommodate the evolving needs and expectations of the modern traveler. Sponsored byGusto – Gusto’s people platform helps businesses like yours onboard, pay, insure, and support your hardworking team. Payroll, benefits, and more. Their customizable onboarding checklists were built to keep you organized. Gusto offers employee benefits made to fit your budget. If you’re not sure where to start, Gusto’s licensed advisors can help you choose the right health benefits for your team. Lemon.io – Why squander time and money on developers who aren't perfect for your startup? Let Lemon match you with engineers that can transform your vision into reality — diabolically fast. Go to Lemon.io/mixergy for a 15% discount on your first 4 weeks with one of their devs. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

Productized or Software as a Service? A hot topic often discussed on TMBA. Of course, there's no right or wrong answer but on today's show Brian Casel talks to Dan about the factors that contributed to him changing from one to the other by selling Audience Ops and starting ZipMessage and also the different challenges of the two: “With a productized service, it really was much more about the processes. And building a service that is highly repeatable … but in a SaaS, it's less about process, it's just much more about building. And every single month there's something new. It's not only just building new features, but what's the next marketing channel that I can try to tap into and unlock a new pocket of customers.” You'll also hear about Brian's decision to take funding this time around, having always bootstrapped before and selling Audience Ops without using a broker. Plus, And the return of one our favorite participation games - ‘donate a business idea'.

Virtual Software-as-a-Service procurement service, helping digital-first companies to optimize their SaaS tools.

Danielle is a former teacher who used networking to land a new career with an education & healthcare start-up as a research and insights associate. Before she made the transition out of the classroom, she taught high school English for five years in New York City. In this episode, Danielle shares the story of her career transition and some excellent tips for networking.Important links:Blog: Teacher Networking, 5 Tips for Your Career TransitionLearn about The Teacher Career Coach CourseFind out more about a career in SaaS from our podcast sponsor, AspireshipRead the transcriptFREE QUIZ: What Career Outside the Classroom is Right for YOU?Connect with Daphne on Instagram @teachercareercoachSUBSCRIBE AND REVIEW:Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode! If you would be kind enough to support The Teacher Career Coach Podcast, leaving a rating and review would be very appreciated. By leaving a review, you are helping other teachers looking for support to find this community as well. Click here to leave a review.Would you make a great guest for The Teacher Career Coach Podcast? Let us know! If you're a former teacher, click here! If you're a burnout specialist, career coach, or other specialist that would be a good fit for this audience, click here! 

Simon 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 is a TEDx speaker, Contributor to Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine, and member of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. Less is more. 2. Don't do everything at once. 3. Whatever you think right now, even it's hard, just keep rolling. It's not about winning the game all the time. It's about staying in the game, learning, and keeping moving. Strategy Sprints – Book a time with Simon and get 1-hour FREE coaching.  Double your revenue in 90 days! Sponsors: Clay Clark: Looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs increase profitability by an average of 104% annually - all for less money than it would cost to hire a minimum wage employee? And all on a month-to-month basis!? Schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark at ThrivetimeShow.com/fire! HubSpot: Start giving your customers what they deserve. Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM Platform at HubSpot.com!