{ "version": "1.0.0", "segments": [ { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "10.8", "endTime": "18.164999", "body": "Welcome to the panel where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, cofounder of transistor.fm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "18.164999", "endTime": "20.644999", "body": "And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "21.125", "endTime": "29.609999", "body": "And I'm Jordan Gal, founder at heyrosie.com, and feeling very comfortable without hosting duties. It's all it's all you, Justin. All the pressure's on you." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "29.609999", "endTime": "30.25", "body": "Yep." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "30.25", "endTime": "46.125", "body": "All on me. Now I wanna know if you guys have been hearing about well, you've heard about Jason Cohen's book, Hidden Multipliers, I'm sure. A lot of people in our ecosystem have been talking about it. And I wonder if you've heard about these skills he included with the the book." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "46.204998", "endTime": "50.845", "body": "I've heard about them, but I haven't had a chance to try them out. Everyone is saying You were" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "50.845", "endTime": "55.965", "body": "saying one in particular is very popular called find your carol? Is that like an ICP exercise?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "56.34", "endTime": "69.299995", "body": "Yes. Find Your Carol. So this is this is so interesting. I I think it'll be interesting for Jason too, because he has multiple skills here. There's one called find yourself, find your Carol, customer interviews, set your price." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "69.715004", "endTime": "79.635", "body": "And then he has some standalone ones. He has one called Rude Rude Q and A, which is very on brand for for Jason. He's okay with asking." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "79.635", "endTime": "83.7", "body": "Isn't that the title of his his new podcast? Rude q and a?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "85.38", "endTime": "93.619995", "body": "Yeah. I love that. Excuse me. Is there a problem? Positioning and the need stack." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "93.619995", "endTime": "115.090004", "body": "So he's has multiple skills included with this thing. They're all free. You can go to skills.asmartbear.com. But the one that everyone's talking about that I've heard people mention in Slacks and in podcasts and everything is Find Your Carol. And I just started doing it just before the call." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "115.41", "endTime": "138.79999", "body": "And I can't believe how like, I'm not I'm not even that far through it. But there's even just the beginning is it just says, explain what your business does in, like, three or four sentences. I find what's so interesting is just to see what it knows about your business already. And it has a very JSON kind of lens." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "138.79999", "endTime": "147.76", "body": "So you install this as a skill Yeah. And and then and then just Yes. Yes. Questions? You you you don't have to prompt it?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "147.84", "endTime": "154.81499", "body": "So here. It took me a while, actually. I I tried to install it the normal way. I got it installed via plug in. But then it goes okay." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "154.81499", "endTime": "161.61499", "body": "Here we're gonna go. So just, like, what does your company do in a sentence? Okay. My sentence does this. Transistor does podcast hosting and analytics." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "161.61499", "endTime": "177.46", "body": "Okay. Now it goes out and searches. And then it starts to bring up what it thinks are the key things with a very Joseph sorry. A very Jason Cohen lens. Support is the single most praised thing." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "177.78", "endTime": "190.83499", "body": "Best customer service I've ever experienced with any company ever. So that's its number one. Unlimited shows under one subscription. Basically, in one in two bullet points, it just outlined really our two major strengths." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "190.83499", "endTime": "191.875", "body": "I have a question." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "191.875", "endTime": "195.555", "body": "From the market point of view. This is what the market thinks of you, not what you think of yourself." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "195.555", "endTime": "196.275", "body": "That's right." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "196.355", "endTime": "210.01", "body": "Yeah. That's my question. It's like, where is this does it go get its research? Is it is it analyzing just the things that you've told it or answered it in the questions? Or is it going off and, like, searching the Internet to find examples of things?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "210.325", "endTime": "213.525", "body": "Capterra, Trustpilot, comparison articles." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "213.525", "endTime": "214.165", "body": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "214.325", "endTime": "226.56", "body": "Yeah. So it's pulling, you know, a bunch of stuff. It's it it pulls stuff from your competitors as well. Now, here's the interesting part. Is it these are such Jason questions." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "227.28", "endTime": "246.105", "body": "They're like, support. Reviewers repeatedly rank it as best in industry. Is that real from the inside? What specific evidence, response times, who does the support, a policy, a moment, a customer call out, can you give? So it's it's like Jason is grilling you." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "246.105", "endTime": "247.545", "body": "It's like his coaching built in." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "247.545", "endTime": "256.62", "body": "Yeah. And I can see why people like it because first of all, it's in private. You're not doing it on on it's on his podcast, getting grilled in public." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "257.97998", "endTime": "261.97998", "body": "Which means you're probably being even more honest about these answers, which is that's" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "261.97998", "endTime": "273.635", "body": "what you need to do. Yeah. These two here. Do customers actually choose you for this and say so? And there he's mentioned the skill is mentioning unlimited shows on one subscription." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "273.875", "endTime": "286.87", "body": "So the fact that it's getting me to think about these things in kind of a safe space is really interesting. I'm curious to see where it where it kind of nets out. And So I'm just like" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "287.19", "endTime": "307.765", "body": "I I love skills like that. Just as a as a design pattern for agent skills, I love this. Mhmm. I've I've seen it so many times. I I do it in in almost all the skills that I create for myself, building in like an interview process for the agent to interview you to to get this to is I think there's two interesting things." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "307.765", "endTime": "340.82", "body": "One is like, when we talk about, like, human in the loop on how we can give our input or our creativity or our perspective, we're not outsourcing the thinking to AI. We are programming AI to get the best out of us. Then supplement that with its research and its analysis. Yeah. But then also, when we we've been talking about this last couple of weeks where it's like, how how can people who are expert level in AI or offering products and services in AI help the normies start to adopt AI." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "340.82", "endTime": "361.555", "body": "I think this is the pattern. Right? Like, give them tooling. Maybe under the hood, it's powered with skills or something, but it's like we we program into it the right questions and things to get out of the end client so that the end client doesn't have to think about like, alright, what are what are the strategic questions I need to do? Or, you know, we do that part for them." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "361.555", "endTime": "363.075", "body": "Give them the structure and yeah." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "363.50998", "endTime": "395.74", "body": "Jordan, I think you would actually love this because this feels like it feels like executive fuel for meetings. So for you as a leader to go through this, and then just have it ask you the hard questions and then to take those questions and insights to the team. To in in this case, I said word-of-mouth is a big way we get customers. And Jason's skill is saying, is that trackable, Or is it your read from talking to customers? Like, how do you know that's true?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "395.74", "endTime": "397.18", "body": "Right. A little skepticism." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "397.18", "endTime": "398.78", "body": "Yeah. I kind of loved that." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "399.25998", "endTime": "406.795", "body": "Maybe he programmed it so that it's actually, like, texting Jason in the background and he's sending you back. It's like really him." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "406.795", "endTime": "421.9", "body": "If that was true, then I think that'd be incredible. Jordan, you mentioned you are in kind of a growth experiment mode. I wanted to get into that. What's what's that mean? You got out of the box, some out of the box experiments or something?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "421.9", "endTime": "422.13998", "body": "Like what" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "422.13998", "endTime": "454.19", "body": "are you experimenting with? Yes. So if you recall last week, what I described was this process of being okay with getting a sense of relief after putting some money onto the balance sheet, and then quickly realizing, okay, the relaxation is a perfectly understandable reaction, and now it's time to get more aggressive because you have the capital to be more aggressive. You wanna grow. You're rewarded for that growth and ARR not for cash in the bank." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "454.27002", "endTime": "469.305", "body": "Yeah. And so in that effort, I wanna do I wanna split my time and budget between the things that already work. Don't ignore those. Don't take those for granted. Make sure we invest there." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "470.59998", "endTime": "482.84", "body": "And we've done that. We're we're working on a new ad format with a totally different agency to create new creative, like, kinda swing for the fences at the top of the funnel. Okay. So what what does" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "482.84", "endTime": "489.755", "body": "that look like? What why why change to a different agency? What's the thinking? What what are you what are they gonna do that the other one couldn't?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "490.155", "endTime": "512.625", "body": "So we're still with the same agency, and we have really effective creative for the middle and bottom of the funnel. Okay. So this is solution aware advertising, mostly UGC, and, like, sympathizing with the audience, like, about the solution itself. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "512.625", "endTime": "524.145", "body": "So I'm like you. I kept missing phone calls while I was out on the job. Mhmm. And I found Rosie and these are the benefits and these are the features and this is why you should sign up for a seven day trial. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "524.145", "endTime": "537.87", "body": "And that works really well at the middle and at the bottom of the funnel. We have that mixed in with statics which take different angles on different features. And then there's a lot of spillover into Google brand search. So that that's our that's our advertising funnel." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "537.87", "endTime": "538.19", "body": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "538.19", "endTime": "549.625", "body": "What we we don't have really what we do is we just take that same UGC content, that creative, and we put into prospecting campaigns that that go out and find new audiences." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "549.785", "endTime": "550.425", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "550.58496", "endTime": "561.67", "body": "So you're showing middle of the funnel solution aware ads to the top of the funnel and it captures people because it's pretty direct but it's not opening up new audiences." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "561.75", "endTime": "562.31", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "562.31", "endTime": "581.165", "body": "And so what I wanted to do was create new ads that are meant for prospecting specifically to open up new audiences. Okay. The the way I'm doing that is following the direct to consumerecom industry the same way I have been this entire time." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "581.325", "endTime": "581.885", "body": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "581.885", "endTime": "594.60004", "body": "And and where that strategy has moved is away from UGC because, you know, someone looking at the camera talking about how cool the product is is so familiar that as soon as you see it on your feed, you know it's an ad so you scroll." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "594.60004", "endTime": "600.52", "body": "Yeah. And just in the side, UGC means you're hiring an influencer basically to make you a video." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "600.60004", "endTime": "614.97504", "body": "Right? These are at this point, they're actors. They're not they're not influencers, but they're pros, and they know how to take a script and make it good, and then the editors know how to turn it to a thirty second ad. And it's kind of like an understood format. So we all see when we scroll our feeds." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "614.97504", "endTime": "622.79", "body": "So this is like Kevin Costner riding a horse with a cowboy hat on saying he he he used to miss a lot of calls. You gotta use Rosie." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "622.95", "endTime": "627.43", "body": "So that would be the highest end of UGC. Okay. That that's UGC." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "627.43", "endTime": "629.91", "body": "Like, how much of this is is AI generated now?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "630.14996", "endTime": "631.82996", "body": "Like, 0.0." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "632.115", "endTime": "639.875", "body": "Really? Yes. Like, the there there isn't yet widespread, like, AI There is? Video generated video?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "639.875", "endTime": "641.635", "body": "It there is, but it doesn't work as well." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "641.635", "endTime": "642.675", "body": "Interesting. Not" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "643.15497", "endTime": "653.26", "body": "not for us and not for most people. There are niches where it does work very well. There's also an added complexity around legal issues." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "653.66003", "endTime": "658.14", "body": "Okay. So if not hiring actors, then what are you doing now? What's what's different then?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "658.14", "endTime": "665.995", "body": "Okay. So so we're still doing that. Okay. We're we're that we we we we kinda have this like six week cadence that every six weeks we get a batch of new creative. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "666.235", "endTime": "677.36", "body": "And and right now it's very exciting time because this is our first batch of ads that are going out toward the Shopify audience. Okay. So we're trying to open up a completely new market. So that that's interesting. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "677.76", "endTime": "688.07996", "body": "I'll know more about that in the next few weeks. I assume it'll be ugly at first because it's gotta go figure out how to find those people, and then we need to figure out the messaging and whatever else. Mhmm. So it'll be inefficient at first, which is fine." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "688.07996", "endTime": "688.64", "body": "But as long as we" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "688.64", "endTime": "691.91504", "body": "can open up that new market and buy customers there, then I'll be happy." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "691.91504", "endTime": "692.155", "body": "TD." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "692.155", "endTime": "711.19", "body": "So if you look at ecommerce and direct to consumer, where where creative has moved is into street interviews. Oh. The street interviews being a new format. Okay. And and it has an element of authenticity to it Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "711.19", "endTime": "720.15", "body": "That a creator looking at the camera does not have. So it's got this novelty and authenticity, and really what that means is that people watch for longer." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "720.625", "endTime": "732.945", "body": "Mhmm. Seen the street interviews, like, content formats, like, on YouTube and stuff. Yes. I'm Yeah. I'm wondering about I'm I'm guessing it's, a form of that, but run-in, like, paid campaigns." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "732.945", "endTime": "733.42505", "body": "That's right." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "733.53", "endTime": "738.97003", "body": "But isn't the idea that they are interviewing, like, anyone on the street? Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "740.17004", "endTime": "742.25", "body": "What are That's the authenticity part." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "742.25", "endTime": "747.85004", "body": "Right. But what what are the what are the legal parameters around that if you're gonna be running paid campaigns with some Just consent." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "747.85004", "endTime": "749.13", "body": "They they they sign something." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "750.07495", "endTime": "750.95496", "body": "Oh, interesting." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "750.95496", "endTime": "753.115", "body": "Oh, so these aren't actors. These are real conversations." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "753.115", "endTime": "753.595", "body": "Real people." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "753.595", "endTime": "783.905", "body": "That's that's the whole thing because it's authentic and the human mind picks up on authenticity within point one seconds. Mhmm. You know immediately if the person is, like, a spokesperson being paid if it's an ad or not. Yeah. And so because of that, you watch longer, and the actual mechanism that brings someone in an audience from the top of the funnel prospecting campaigns into the middle of the funnel is simply, at least one of the key factors is how long did they watch the video." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "784.465", "endTime": "800.14", "body": "Because if they watched it long enough, Meta can effectively determine that they have some interest. They're they're interested in this topic in some way or another. So why don't we move them down into the middle of the funnel where you can present your more solution aware advertising? Oh, interesting." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "800.69995", "endTime": "810.565", "body": "How how is it formatted? Like, what's the opening typically, on the street interviews have, like, how much do you pay for your apartment in New York City or what do do for a living? Like, what what's chocolate." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "811.525", "endTime": "820.965", "body": "Yes. So it's easy to do with a direct to consumer product because you literally have it in front of you and you're like, what do you think of this? Yeah. You how does this taste? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "820.965", "endTime": "842.71497", "body": "Right? And so what I wanted to do was basically just keep following dtocandecom and just say, how do we fit this into a b to b context? And that's the creative element. So we we hired a good firm that specializes in these. And we're in this process of brainstorming what what that should what conversation should look like." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "842.71497", "endTime": "870.705", "body": "Yeah. But but the goal of the entire thing is to capture the authentic reaction of a non paid person Yeah. To to Rosie. To having an agent built right in front of them in thirty seconds on on a phone, to calling it and and putting it on speakerphone, and hearing Rosie answer questions about their own business, and just that close-up of a reaction, that's the most important thing that" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "870.865", "endTime": "871.185", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "871.185", "endTime": "872.145", "body": "We're that we're going for." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "872.145", "endTime": "899.595", "body": "Is the ICP for you the actual business owner, or is it, like, another person in the another operations person? Like, who who needs to discover Rosie, and who then needs to, like, be motivated to either buy it or recommend it to their boss? Or, like, who do you need to reach? Because, like, I I wonder about those, like, kinda consumer style campaigns. It's like, you could probably get a ton of people who who who will complain about their their contractor not showing up on time." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "899.595", "endTime": "905.595", "body": "Like the like the the clients of those businesses. But Yes. But those are the those are the clients. They're not the business owners. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "905.595", "endTime": "917.42004", "body": "Yes. That that might be one angle from the caller point of view. Like, how would you feel if you could always get what you needed from your doctor's office type of thing? I don't think that's as powerful as from the business owner point of view." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "917.42004", "endTime": "920.86005", "body": "Like, maybe you go to, like, business conferences where a lot of them are hanging out or something like that." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "920.86005", "endTime": "923.58", "body": "You could do that. I mean, that this is what we were brainstorming." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "923.58", "endTime": "924.3", "body": "Yeah. We were like," }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "924.3", "endTime": "928.125", "body": "where should we is this is this a New York City, Washington Square Park thing?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "928.125", "endTime": "929.005", "body": "Not I don't" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "929.005", "endTime": "951.45", "body": "think so because that's everyone's an employee for the most part, and we Mhmm. We are unlikely to capture our blue collar bucket on the streets of New York. So we might go toward Miami or in LA or we might hit the street and go to the Home Depot parking lot. And so we have to kinda figure that out. Are you gonna, like, literally, like, walk" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "951.45", "endTime": "956.275", "body": "into businesses that look like your customers? Like, talk to talk to people who work there, you know?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "956.35504", "endTime": "968.31", "body": "Yes. So so it's not my job to figure that out. I help I help them. And so really what we're describing is an investment further into what's already working. How do we Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "968.31", "endTime": "994.085", "body": "Get our advertising to keep working? And then the other part, I guess, where this question started, sorry if I'm going on for for a bit long, is what else should we invest in? That is not in the advertising bucket. And there, what I've been trying to do is just think crazy. And and just brainstorm in the traditional sense of let's just get a list and don't worry about how stupid it sounds." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "994.24506", "endTime": "1004.16", "body": "Just every idea. Alright. I came across a very interesting interview with a competitortoowner.com. So this is restaurant software." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1004.16", "endTime": "1004.88", "body": "Mhmm. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1004.88", "endTime": "1022.715", "body": "Little bit of AI mixed in, but really it's like ordering and payments and that sort of thing. 3,500,000 ARR, 100% door to door sales. 100% door to door. Okay? So like he the founder was like, we're like a solar company or pest control." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1022.94", "endTime": "1043.855", "body": "We go to door to door and we incentivize our salespeople. The ACV is $6,000. Their quota is six deals per month. So it's 36 k in ARR as the quota for each salesperson. And as we make it work, what we start to realize is we can just have hundreds and hundreds of salespeople and maybe we got a a real thing on our hands." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1044.495", "endTime": "1053.59", "body": "So it's that type of thing where I'm like, yeah. Let's let's go out of the box. Mhmm. Let's make a list of insane ideas. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1053.59", "endTime": "1067.635", "body": "And so so, like, one of my ideas is is in that vein. I'm not gonna share my entire list, but it's like Home Depot is actually an official partner of ours. Yeah. What if we could convince Home Depot to allow us to set up a table at Home Depot? Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1067.635", "endTime": "1080.195", "body": "Because if that works, there are 2,000 Home Depot locations in The US. So it's like, what is not the advertising bucket? Mhmm. But but that we can run experiments on on okay. What if we spent $20 on this?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1080.6499", "endTime": "1088.2499", "body": "Yep. And just see if it works. Because if it works, then we could have another channel to invest in like we do with advertising. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1088.25", "endTime": "1088.9698", "body": "Love it." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1088.97", "endTime": "1104.4049", "body": "That's super interesting. I love that kind of stuff because you can see that your advantage is you have, like, because you have this these funds you've raised, you can actually hire, like, an agency to think through some of this stuff, you know? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1104.725", "endTime": "1132.825", "body": "Yes. What what what's in house and needs to be in house is the decision making around strategy and ideas and brainstorming and so on. But as soon as that idea gets selected from the list, then then you should use the the capital to to experiment quickly. Not, well, I guess, I'll go to Home Depot and I'll do x y and z. You know, like Jessica on our team for months has been like, hey, Jordan." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1132.985", "endTime": "1144.72", "body": "We just we gotta put flyers on cars. Mhmm. Like, you know, if we're so horizontal and the market's so big and it's so, like, gorilla and, like, straightforward" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1144.96", "endTime": "1145.44", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1145.44", "endTime": "1147.6799", "body": "Like, let's just let's just print flyers." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1148.085", "endTime": "1148.485", "body": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1148.485", "endTime": "1174.33", "body": "And just put a thousand flyers a day and just see what happens. So it's like that kind of thing where it's like, yes, actually. Let's really experiment because if we can find an acquisition channel that lives a bit outside of the normal Internet world, I think it will be very, very healthy for us. Right? There is there is a set of moves in this business to go from where we are today to 10,000,000 ARR in eighteen months." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1174.645", "endTime": "1182.565", "body": "Mhmm. It's like a click, then click, then click, click. Right? There's a certain set of moves and a combination of things that it's it's definitely out there." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1182.885", "endTime": "1183.365", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1183.365", "endTime": "1204.9349", "body": "And I don't think we'll find it if we just kinda stay in the same box because that same box is doing well, but it is growing linearly. Yeah. And we should continue on that path to the linear path toward profitability so that we can survive no matter what. We become kind of resilient and default to live." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1205.015", "endTime": "1205.655", "body": "Yeah. But we" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1205.655", "endTime": "1210.5349", "body": "should definitely have a a budget off to the side that is, you know, throwing things at the wall." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1210.535", "endTime": "1231.3949", "body": "Yep. Well, just like Colin Grace says in the chat here, this is the hard stuff that can't be outsourced to AI or isn't as easy as booking an ad on Facebook. And we talked about that Jesse Hanley quote of do the hardest thing, which often just puts you into the stratosphere of no one else is competing here. Like, who else is doing flyers? Who else is doing direct mail?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1231.635", "endTime": "1259.535", "body": "Who else is willing to, you know, pay to get these these very broad ad campaigns done? It kind of reminds me of Constant Contact, that that famous talk, this long, slow SaaS ramp of death. Most of that long, slow ramp was because they were doing radio advertising. They had to build awareness with small businesses that had never heard of email marketing before. And so they did they were like she was just, like, racking her brain." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1259.535", "endTime": "1272.9099", "body": "Like, how do we reach small business owners? Well, at the time, you go into any shop, they had the radio going all day. Right? So they're listening to the radio all day. Meet the customer where they're at in an unconventional way." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1273.6299", "endTime": "1281.5499", "body": "They did these radio campaigns, which are very expensive, but they built awareness for the category. And and then Mailchimp came and took advantage of it." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1281.5499", "endTime": "1298.48", "body": "But Yeah. But they they did well and close friend of the podcast, Henry Poitar, worked briefly at Constant Contact. Oh, no way. And and has shared a lot of things with me about this unconventional approach to solving these problems. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1298.48", "endTime": "1331.16", "body": "One of which is is one of my favorite that I've kind of come across in in this business context was the identifying the single most important action in the funnel for them was just hitting the send button once. The first time Mhmm. These are people who had never done email marketing. They had never sent an email. And the only thing that mattered more than anything else on whether or not that person was going to become a customer was if they just hit the send button for the first time." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1331.4801", "endTime": "1331.9601", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1331.9601", "endTime": "1353.2098", "body": "And once they identify that, they realized, okay. Not only is that what's most important, they're not doing it on their own. Mhmm. So they hired college interns to just get on the phone with these mom and pop shops and just walk them all the way to the point where they click the button for the first time." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1353.37", "endTime": "1353.69", "body": "Yep." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1353.69", "endTime": "1364.125", "body": "Right. So you got you got radio advertisements Yep. College interns on the phone and in person talking to people, no automation, and that that's what did it for them." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1364.125", "endTime": "1382.02", "body": "It's like it's just like they're just like getting them to make that final decision. Like, you know, we can do all the work we want on the onboarding, making making the the setup process easy, but ultimately, it still takes the business owner or the buying person to say, I'm ready to ship with this thing. I'm ready to actually commit" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1382.02", "endTime": "1382.8201", "body": "to do" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1382.98", "endTime": "1387.62", "body": "I have, like, I have the confidence this is gonna work. I'm gonna put this in front of my customers. So let's do it. Like" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1387.78", "endTime": "1405.145", "body": "Yes. And if you think about our product, like, there's a lot of parallels. Right? You can set up all you want. The only thing that matters is when you actually take the call forwarding and put your real customer calls to this new AI agent, it is a miracle that we have a business." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1405.23", "endTime": "1418.765", "body": "It is a miracle we don't talk to these people. They don't know technology. They onboard and then they just start forwarding calls. And then sometimes when they're trying to cancel, they're like, how do I get this off my phone? Like, they they do not know how it works." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1418.765", "endTime": "1432.57", "body": "You know what I mean? And so when I think about that, I think, okay. If we wanna zoom to 10,000,000 ARR, we we probably shouldn't count on everyone doing it that way. Those are" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1432.57", "endTime": "1433.77", "body": "the early adopters." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1433.77", "endTime": "1439.7699", "body": "Yes. Exactly right. We're like Yeah. We have to meet them where they are. You know you know what really helped me in this?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1440.17", "endTime": "1447.575", "body": "Charleston AI AI, bro. How's that going? Charleston AI. AI is not coming to Charleston. It's already here." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1448.135", "endTime": "1448.855", "body": "That that was" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1448.855", "endTime": "1452.855", "body": "a great clip. I I was watching it. I I still couldn't, like, tell if that was real or not. Like," }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1452.855", "endTime": "1454.6951", "body": "What about are guys referring to? What is this?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1454.6951", "endTime": "1470.92", "body": "Okay. So Charleston AI oh, I should have the link. Charleston AI is a video where there's a super boomer business owner basically showing off their new Charleston AI office Okay. And giving people a tour. Like, this is the lab." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1470.92", "endTime": "1481.295", "body": "Like, this is where it all goes down and it's just like a very just like a generic, plain, normal office. Yeah. And of course, what the internet does immediately is start pointing and laughing. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1481.295", "endTime": "1486.75", "body": "And then and then right after that, it's the it's the backlash that's like, well, homies making more money than" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1486.75", "endTime": "1487.23", "body": "you Exactly." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1488.99", "endTime": "1508.275", "body": "Homie's charging a $160 an hour to build AI stuff for people. Mhmm. And he's probably banking because he's meeting people where they are Yeah. Instead of expecting them to come up over into, like, inference Nvidia land where everyone knows everything and the latest model matters and who is it Fable? Is it Soul?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1508.275", "endTime": "1513.9401", "body": "Is it Luna? Where nobody cares. And I take a lot of inspiration from that. Like, oh, I gotta get" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1513.9401", "endTime": "1538.915", "body": "a CEO printing off emails, getting their secretary to print off the emails, and then they highlight them, and then they think like, this is you gotta look at where the money is. We could you can be a a smug Gen z or a smug millennial or whatever and say, oh, those guys, they don't know what they're talking about. But listen, Charleston AI. Yeah. Just you you show the old people with money how to do it or do it for them." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1538.915", "endTime": "1573.83", "body": "I mean, definitely see that with the I mean, like, it's like these huge AI companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, it's like, they, as like the rest of our tech industry, we're so in this bubble where we think, oh, the latest greatest model, we're gonna brand it Astro, we're gonna brand it Fable and everyone's gonna care. Like, 99% of the world is mostly against AI at this point. Like, they don't care about the the fancy launches. So that like, it's just like this is interesting complete disconnect. But I wanna go back to what what Jordan was talking about how, like, really the difference between that, like, middle of funnel and top of funnel exposure awareness." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1573.83", "endTime": "1625.52", "body": "Mhmm. Because I mean, I think about that a lot. Like the only people who've who've have ever really interacted with my products current, like, builder methods and going back many years, it's always been the middle of the funnel and down and never getting, like, the exposure to to the higher and I and frankly, if I look at most b to b, like, especially like bootstrap independent SaaS, like, part of it is like, we can build a successful business enough just focusing on like the direct to our direct, like, ICP customer, whether it's SEO, you know, high intent SEO or ads high intent or, cold outreach or, you know, or even like content that is targeting solution or pain aware solution aware people. Mhmm. That's been my entire business." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1625.52", "endTime": "1651.4949", "body": "I think most of our businesses. I think it's really interesting. Like, obviously, Jordan, you you know, you're playing that that larger game, which is like, okay, we we've got that dialed. Now, let's go out to the broader market and see how we can blow this thing up. But I I I am always interested in, like, ideas to open up my mind even even with, like, the constraints that I operate under as a as a super small, you know, mostly solo person here." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1651.495", "endTime": "1651.815", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1652.64", "endTime": "1671.6349", "body": "It's like I and and like yeah. Like, even even like experiments or systems or bots or processes where it's like, how how can I start to, like, get exposure or create assets that would drive audiences outside of what I'm actually doing at my desk every day? Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1672.035", "endTime": "1689.99", "body": "Well, how do you think that would work? See, I've always been, like, skeptical of this, like, convincing unaware people. It just feels like so much energy. It feels like even the the richest companies in the world often fail at it. So, you know, how many people use shortcuts on their iOS device?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1690.07", "endTime": "1708.235", "body": "I've always thought, like, maybe 1% or 2%. But this is Apple has all of the marketing power in the world. Yep. They can give a push notification to billions of people, but they can only get 2% of their user base using shortcuts. Like, it's like, man, how so what what are your thoughts on, like, how does that actually work?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1708.235", "endTime": "1708.475", "body": "Is it" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1708.555", "endTime": "1735.145", "body": "The way that I think about it is, like, there's really at the end of the day, there are two types of of marketing if you wanna really boil it down. There there is, like, there's, like, basically, like, inbound or there's, like, outbound. What do they call it? Like, like, interruption marketing or, like, there's, like, like, intent based marketing where it's like they're coming in, knocking on my door because they believe I have this thing that they want, which is great. But then there's" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1735.305", "endTime": "1736.025", "body": "I I forgot that" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1736.1051", "endTime": "1736.905", "body": "I think there's some term" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1736.905", "endTime": "1740.425", "body": "Interruption where like is is is kind of the right word." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1740.425", "endTime": "1762.0549", "body": "Yeah. Like just scrolling along, scrolling down my feed and like, oh, something is trying to grab my attention. Someone's sending me an email into my inbox that I did not invite and they're trying to tell me about this thing. Yeah. Is that, I think in general, from where I sit in my business, that's always been like, alright, well, that might work a little bit for a little while, but you can't really count on it." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1762.055", "endTime": "1787.285", "body": "But I I tend to think that the way to get broader exposure is to create audiences and assets. It's like multiple levels, right? Like grow the audience first and then a level below that is start to see like those who have signals that like they could be a potential lead and then give them easy pathways to enter my funnel. Like to go from the top to into the middle of the funnel. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1787.285", "endTime": "1802.15", "body": "You know, like where the top is like creating, whether it's like, like, I don't know, like audience assets, like it could be content, it could be entertainment, it could be free tools. It could be, you know, whatever that might be. But it's gonna be something separate from what I'm actually offering." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1802.15", "endTime": "1826.66", "body": "Yeah. Like, practically for me, what would actually grab my attention? And and as you guys were talking, because I was like, I'm skeptical about this. I'm having a debate with myself as you guys are talking. And then I was like, actually, I wonder if it's kind of like, you know, when a comedian articulates something that you've always felt, but you've never heard articulated out loud, you are essentially kind of in that unaware state." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1826.66", "endTime": "1844.625", "body": "You're like, oh, I didn't know that other people feel this way. But then them articulating it, you feel such this like, oh, this catharsis of somebody understands me, somebody understands my pain, somebody is you know, I wonder if that's is that the modality you're thinking about? I think that's" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1844.625", "endTime": "1852.5449", "body": "an element of it. I think we're starting to move into the conversation between brand and direct response." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1853.2001", "endTime": "1854.0", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1854.48", "endTime": "1876.525", "body": "So at the top of the funnel, if really what you're trying to do is just separate people from has no interest, not in my market, doesn't will will never never care. Yeah. To, okay, you something resonates. Yeah. Something about the message, the brand, the the position, the category, the pro anything." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1877.245", "endTime": "1887.4299", "body": "And that's a starting point. Yeah. So I I think a lot of this is like structural. Meaning, if you're bootstrapped, like, go for the bottom of the funnel." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1887.51", "endTime": "1888.47", "body": "Yeah. Obviously. That's what" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1888.47", "endTime": "1889.6699", "body": "I was gonna say. Start there." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1889.75", "endTime": "1900.215", "body": "There like, there are so many great businesses to just build on that. That's generally what we see. But it is interesting to think, like, else can can we do or, you know" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1900.695", "endTime": "1906.135", "body": "Yeah. It it's also it also makes sense to start at the bottom and creep up." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "1906.62", "endTime": "1907.5", "body": "Yeah. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1907.5", "endTime": "1927.9749", "body": "Instead of starting all the way at the top, which we see sometimes, people will raise a lot of money, and they'll go they'll try to fill the entire funnel from beginning to top. And I mean, filled in terms of, like, content and advertising and Yeah. Materials. And they'll do it all at the same time. They'll do thing." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1928.135", "endTime": "1934.135", "body": "They'll do direct response. They'll do bottom of the funnel. They'll do middle. They'll do content. They'll do everything at once." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1934.135", "endTime": "1949.33", "body": "And it's almost like, if you get that right, you're awesome. Mhmm. But but to the likelihood of getting the messaging right for everything right out of the gate is very unlikely. Whereas if you started at the bottom, which feels like a reasonable thing" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1949.57", "endTime": "1949.73", "body": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1949.8099", "endTime": "1965.7999", "body": "For us, you start to say, okay. I'm I'm only building something that I think people have a need for. This is less exploratory. Let's just throw out a product that maybe will take off. And so it makes sense to just say, this is what we do." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "1965.7999", "endTime": "1970.0399", "body": "This is for the people who need this done. And that's just all the way at the bottom of the funnel." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1970.0399", "endTime": "1992.325", "body": "I love how you put that start. That's such good advice to start at the bottom of the funnel. Because I've always said you wanna start with people who are actually searching for something that are already in motion. And once you know that that's there, like, you're not just guessing. You you have some real evidence that there are people in motion looking for a solution to this." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "1992.42", "endTime": "2006.5801", "body": "You've signed them up. They've found you. They've taken out their credit card. And then once you have that knowledge, it's like, well, this group of self aware people are got themselves in motion. And, you know, inertia is a powerful force." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2006.5801", "endTime": "2026.09", "body": "So if get yourself in motion, that's a big deal. Then you can go up the funnel, taking the insights you learned down at the bottom Yes. Up the funnel. And this is why, you know, all those stupid wearable AI devices didn't work. As they started with this, like, high level idea at the top of the funnel, like, we're just gonna create awareness for this whole thing." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2026.0901", "endTime": "2032.65", "body": "And, you know, it actually is like nobody wants that. Nobody's in motion looking for this thing. People don't want it." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2033.0549", "endTime": "2046.5898", "body": "It it it happens, but it is a much higher risk, high reward thing Mhmm. As opposed to starting it. I mean, this is also when people, you know I think good advice is, what content should I start with? It's like, your knowledge based content is what you should start with." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2046.6699", "endTime": "2048.03", "body": "Yeah. Satisfy the people who" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2048.03", "endTime": "2065.125", "body": "are already there and interested, start there. Don't go writing blog posts that are all the way at the top of the funnel to kinda call out an audience. Yeah. And and you're right. There's a big benefit in gathering that first group of people that have the problem and are so excited that you also have a solution." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2065.445", "endTime": "2065.845", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2065.845", "endTime": "2082.1", "body": "And then listen to them. And then understand, well, where do they live? What what what category are they what market? What industry are they in? And then at least the path upward makes sense as opposed to going super wide immediately, which is inaccurate, imprecise." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2082.74", "endTime": "2105.81", "body": "Yeah. I'm kinda seeing, like you know, there's that that YouTube series from New York called Keep Keep the Meter Running, where he gets into the taxi cab. He's like, take me to your favorite place and keep the meter running. And then he just talks to them about being a cab driver and how they came. It feels like something a series like that would be awesome for Rosie, where you just, like, jump in their service van and you're just like Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2105.81", "endTime": "2106.77", "body": "Like a ride along." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2106.77", "endTime": "2116.3052", "body": "Ride along. And it's just like the and getting clips of them, like, up on a ladder and their phone is ringing and they're like, fuck. And they can't get down to the the phone, you know." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2116.3052", "endTime": "2128.145", "body": "So so that would be top of funnel, you know, a little bit farther away from direct response, like, start your seven day trial doesn't really make sense in that context. It doesn't need to." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2128.55", "endTime": "2145.9949", "body": "See, that's what I think of as, like, these top of funnel audience stuff. It's like stuff that is worth subscribing to and following. Even if you'll never become a customer, it's still a valuable asset that is worth telling your friends about. Did you see that episode of the ride along thing with the like Yep. Like, that's how that those things really spread." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2146.155", "endTime": "2146.315", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2146.315", "endTime": "2147.115", "body": "And out of out" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2147.115", "endTime": "2150.715", "body": "of that some percentage, you know, fall down into the middle of the funnel." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2150.795", "endTime": "2180.2349", "body": "Right. Yeah. A key benefit of the advertising funnel is that the the platforms that people watch content on are directly linked to their advertising network. Right. And and the behavior of watching a video for fifteen seconds versus eight seconds versus forty five seconds can move those people into different audience buckets that you can then deliver different messages to." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2180.2349", "endTime": "2209.885", "body": "So there's like medium engage and high engagement and over 75%. And so if someone watches those videos and watches more than 75%, then you can just show them solution aware, product aware, just like make the offer Yeah. As opposed to people who watch for eight seconds, and then you can move them over into, okay, they need more convincing. That's where the UGC content comes in. So a lot of the benefit around advertising isn't so much in the ability to, like, spend money and and and get customers to sign up." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2210.2048", "endTime": "2219.35", "body": "It's just in this, like Build the recording. Yes. This constant stream of, like, where are these people? Who are these people? What should we show them at what point in time?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2219.35", "endTime": "2229.27", "body": "Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Emmett in the in the chat said it should be Jordan shooting a video in a crawl space. It just did." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2229.27", "endTime": "2231.19", "body": "Jordan in a crawl space with a contractor." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2231.7249", "endTime": "2236.685", "body": "So so I I hear you, but but one mistake. It shouldn't be me it shouldn't be" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2236.685", "endTime": "2237.805", "body": "me. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2237.9648", "endTime": "2252.82", "body": "Because it should be me it should be me writing a check for 25 k to a creator to go make six videos and then throw them at the top of the funnel and see if people care about it. So it's the same mindset, but okay. What what should we do? Where should we deploy experimental spend?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2252.82", "endTime": "2257.46", "body": "Yeah. See, that's the bootstrapper in me. I'm just like, I gotta be the one in the crawl space shooting these videos. This is" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2257.46", "endTime": "2270.0051", "body": "this is my constant challenge to myself also. Same filter because I go right where Emmy goes. I'm like, oh, I bet if I should go in the van, it would be cool then it it and I'm like, no no no no no no no. Stop stop stop." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2270.0051", "endTime": "2277.24", "body": "My mind is going to like how like, what are the ideas that I could do that I can put a bot on and just have that spin through to the whole thing, you know?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2277.24", "endTime": "2296.205", "body": "Okay. Well, means that We've talked about your plan, Brian, around just cutting up the content into smaller bits. And even even just that, it's almost like a behavioral funnel. Like, people who are willing to watch thirty second videos are different from people willing to watch twenty two minute YouTube videos. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2296.205", "endTime": "2301.8052", "body": "So even that starts to separate the audiences and and kinda pull them down into the funnel. Totally." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2301.8052", "endTime": "2303.245", "body": "Yeah. Yep." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2303.31", "endTime": "2326.945", "body": "Interesting. Kind of one one thing that Corey Griffin from Speak Flow gave us some some feedback. He's he says he listens every week, but he says he loves to hear the real struggles and how we're overcoming it. And Brian, you said this is actually your last thing you wanted to talk about, but maybe we could talk about right now. You're just saying, basically dealing with some low energy." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2327.345", "endTime": "2333.905", "body": "And maybe that maybe this also segues into your company of one operations. But, you know, that's that's a big thing, you know?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2335.17", "endTime": "2342.53", "body": "Yeah. Okay. So this this this starts to cross into, like, personal life a little bit. Well, personal work work life. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2342.8499", "endTime": "2368.9502", "body": "I have never been a person who has ever really struggled with energy or I mean, I'm always motivated. I never really have an issue with that. But in the last last month or so, I've just found, like, my day to day full full day energy, like, physical energy to to, like, push on and ship all that I want that I am motivated to ship every day. That's that's been going down. I mean, there's a couple of like obvious factors." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2369.03", "endTime": "2407.885", "body": "I I was I was on creatine for like a year and I and I cut that out about a month ago. So, like, clearly, you could just literally just point to that, like, that shit works, you know? And when you and when you take it out of the picture, it's it's like I'll I'll probably get back on it at some point. But for right now, I'm taking a break from it. And I you know, the other thing that I think about is my, like, health and exercise routine, but also I mean, I I feel like I sleep pretty good, but I do have a terrible habit of just going to bed, like, way too late for no reason at all, you know." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2407.885", "endTime": "2415.085", "body": "Like like, I'll watch I'll watch, like, Silo, and then I'll watch another forty five minutes of YouTube. Like, I don't need the forty five minutes." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2415.085", "endTime": "2415.965", "body": "Just because it's so fun." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2415.965", "endTime": "2416.285", "body": "You know?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2416.285", "endTime": "2418.96", "body": "Little buggers are funnily in bed to just hang out." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2419.44", "endTime": "2439.065", "body": "Yeah. And and so and and then that results in, like, okay, I'm I'm getting up at, seven or 07:30 when I should be getting up at, like, 06:30 and getting my workout workout on. Mhmm. Because I I've always been, like, exercise first thing right out of bed. Like, have to do it then because frankly, if I don't, I'm never gonna do it any other time." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2439.065", "endTime": "2469.865", "body": "So I like to do it first thing. And and then and then the other thing about like waking up too late is like that makes me want to compress. Like, I I only wanna allow twenty minutes for for workout or twenty five minutes because I gotta get into the office. Mhmm. But if I if I can get out there at 06:30, you know, can I can go I can go harder, which in my mind means I'll I I I think that, like, obviously, just getting in shape, but but working out more makes you wanna eat better, sustains your energy throughout the day?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2469.865", "endTime": "2488.1099", "body": "These are just things that I'm thinking about that I should do, and I'm trying to think, like, I'm a I'm such a routine oriented person that it's like, what do I need to what constraints or systematic things in my workday do I need to change to make this automatic? Know?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2489.615", "endTime": "2491.055", "body": "Yeah. Because And it's like, I" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2491.055", "endTime": "2494.255", "body": "do that kind of that kind of systems work in my business all the time. But when" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2494.255", "endTime": "2494.4949", "body": "it comes" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2494.4949", "endTime": "2500.415", "body": "to my personal life, it's like, fuck. Why am I still watching YouTube at midnight? I don't understand why, you know?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2500.415", "endTime": "2506.7698", "body": "Yeah. Yeah. There's people in chat already that can identify with this. I I think this is, like, everything. There's so many factors." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2506.7698", "endTime": "2530.135", "body": "It's like sleep, exercise, hobbies. Just like who's got who's doing hobbies? Who's actually unplugging? And yeah. Like, on the workout front, man, like, I used to just have this rule, like, if I woke up at, like, five or six in the morning, which I don't like to do, but if I do, I should just go down in the basement and work out." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2530.135", "endTime": "2532.455", "body": "Like, that was, like, the supposed to be the trigger." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2532.8499", "endTime": "2533.25", "body": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2533.25", "endTime": "2549.905", "body": "But that doesn't create a consistent routine. Another part of me thought, if I just had a pull up bar because this is down in my office. If I just had a pull up bar just right next right here, I would use that pull up bar all day because it's like you start to get sleepy. What's a good what's a good way to get your blood flowing? Okay." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2549.905", "endTime": "2557.825", "body": "Gotta do some push ups or get a Jumping jacks. Pull up bar or something. But, yeah, I'm I haven't been great at that I will. Structure stuff." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2557.905", "endTime": "2600.47", "body": "Where where this crosses into business and my actual work, and this gets into kind of the second item there, company of one operations. Right? Yeah. And my main project right now in the past couple of weeks is refactoring all of my operations in my whole company, which for me as a so as a company of one that it that also means like how I operate in in the types of in the work that I do and how I how do I actually create and how do I, develop and then deploy new things, whether it's marketing channels, products, features, whatever it might be. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2600.47", "endTime": "2619.1301", "body": "Yeah. Tying it back to the energy thing, it's painfully obvious. I've been talking about this for a year that my business heavily depends. Like, there's a there is a dependency in my business of me having enough energy to record videos." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2619.1301", "endTime": "2619.9302", "body": "And Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2620.1702", "endTime": "2622.4902", "body": "And like all the things, you know." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2622.6501", "endTime": "2661.69", "body": "Yeah. By the way, I can really identify with that. I've shared this before publicly. But when I got really depressed in 2016 or '17, I was a 100% reliant on course sales with marketing for developers and being a guy that could get on microphone and have that Justin energy that people liked. And when you when I couldn't do that and I had to fake it, it was like the most painful experience of my life that nothing more draining than feeling like, man, I just don't have the positive juice in my body to do this, but I have to like that." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2661.965", "endTime": "2663.3252", "body": "That pressure's real." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2663.405", "endTime": "2682.5798", "body": "Yeah. And like, so today, this morning, and yesterday, I recorded two new YouTube videos, finally. I've actually taken, like, the past month off of YouTube, because I because I just stopped. Like, a lot of other stuff was going on in my life that I was like, I need I need a month break to So I'm back on it today and yesterday. And it's yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2682.5798", "endTime": "2697.395", "body": "Part of it is like having that, like, on energy. Being being on, putting the camera But but I I tend to at least try to be pretty authentic to my personality. I'm not putting on a show here. I'm not putting on a personality that's not actually real. That's how I am." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2698.115", "endTime": "2745.1199", "body": "But what is very energy draining is like thinking create like thinking through something that is worth saying on camera. Like, I really stress out about like, it's not worth making a video if it's not something I would wanna watch. So I need to be coming up with some new takes, some new idea, and I need to explain it in a way that's accessible. And that that just takes a ton of energy. So coming back to, like, this idea of, like, company of one and operations, all the work that I put into these systems and the way that I create and deploy stuff, I I I'm on this, like, never ending, you know, journey to try to make it so that how how how can I separate my, like, creative inspiration" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2745.1199", "endTime": "2745.68", "body": "to be able" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2745.68", "endTime": "2758.555", "body": "to just, talk into my phone, like, here's a new idea that I want to have happen in my business? Mhmm. And then have bots and agent skills and processes and amp orbs spin up" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2758.555", "endTime": "2760.315", "body": "according to been orb in, hey?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2760.315", "endTime": "2761.355", "body": "Oh, hell yeah, dude." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2761.7551", "endTime": "2763.435", "body": "Keep hearing about orbs. Brian, I" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2763.435", "endTime": "2791.7751", "body": "I wanna ask But but like but one one second. Like like but all there is a certain way that I want to develop things, whether it's software and there are parameters and there are things that I need my agents and my systems to have access to. And there are things that they shouldn't have access to and their guidelines, right? So I can't let it just be Brian go hustle and ship that next thing all the time because there's always all the little, like, glue that you have to I I gotta put this API key in over here. I gotta fucking do that over there." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2791.7751", "endTime": "2831.6501", "body": "Like, all that stuff needs to be smoothed out, figured out, baked into skills, baked into processes so that all that's left is creative ideas when I have them, and everything else just runs in the background or automatically. And and also setting up these systems that that growth oriented bots can pitch ideas, project manage their own projects, ship them, track them, come up with new experiment ideas, and I can just approve and give input rather than spending a couple days doing them. So like, I'm just trying to like build systems that like optimize for my energy when I have it or when I don't, you know?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2831.6501", "endTime": "2842.935", "body": "Yeah. My question is, is that realistic to your standards? It's hard. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2842.935", "endTime": "2844.7751", "body": "No question. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2845.495", "endTime": "2847.2551", "body": "It feels really difficult" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2848.055", "endTime": "2848.535", "body": "think I" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "2848.535", "endTime": "2850.135", "body": "think it's more possible. I" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2850.375", "endTime": "2871.895", "body": "do think that it's more possible than think than people tend to to to realize. I also think it's worth look, I I know that you guys, Jordan, especially, your operating system tends to be who can I hire? Who can I put in place a human to own this thing creatively and and and all the things? And that's fantastic, you know? Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2872.295", "endTime": "2901.215", "body": "In my experience, that tends to be even more work. And Mhmm. Not only the expense the expense aside, but Yeah. Like, especially when it's, like, a creative thing, it's call it perfectionism, call it whatever, but like training a person and a team to run with a thing. And and especially when it's experimental, like the whole process of even just hiring the right person and then and then, you know, like Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2901.215", "endTime": "2902.8152", "body": "Yeah. This doesn't work for" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2903.375", "endTime": "2904.895", "body": "I do think that there's a lot" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2904.895", "endTime": "2916.78", "body": "that can be programmed into processes. And and with AI, like it used to be back in the day, did audience apps, which was processes in Google Docs for humans to run. Mhmm. No AI. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2916.78", "endTime": "2935.715", "body": "Yeah. Now you can do the same thing, but large portions of these processes can be like, okay, you are Fable 5.1. So you have these extra creative abilities in this step of the process. Make it awesome within these parameters. You know?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2936.4348", "endTime": "2961.935", "body": "I'm totally interested in how like, if it if it ends up feeling for you, Brian. Because the one thing about AI is I always still feel like I need to have the energy to drive it. Like, somebody's gotta drive it. Somebody's gotta be watching it. Somebody's gotta even have the energy to dictate to it in the shape it up and get it in like as a prompt, you know." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2961.935", "endTime": "2990.525", "body": "My belief now and and what I'm seeing with some like, there's a small one or 2% of builders out there who I'm observing Mhmm. Who have gone to another level. This is gonna sound super AI pilled, I know. But but look, I am like you, Justin, in that most of what I do, most of what I create Yes, AI is in everything I do, but it's mostly me plus AI working hand in hand together." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "2990.525", "endTime": "2991.405", "body": "Right? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "2991.645", "endTime": "3000.31", "body": "So, yes, I need to be looking at that one tab, maybe two tabs. Occasionally, I might have three running, but that's all the brain space that I have to manage." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3000.47", "endTime": "3001.43", "body": "But" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3001.67", "endTime": "3020.3152", "body": "there are definitely people and teams who are shipping thirty, forty, 50 PRs a day for individual contributors managing that load. And that is impossible for the human to be watching all 40 of those PRs a day. Yeah. How do they do that? They have verification loops." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3020.3152", "endTime": "3059.78", "body": "They have training systems. They have highly developed processes and and and training systems that like, look, if you're if you're in it, if you if you get into the weeds and you follow some of the more technical people in the AI agentic space, there is a lot of stuff. There's this, there's this woman who works she's one of the lead technical people at Cursor, goes by the handle Potetto or Potato or whatever. She her stuff has been has been, pushed around the Internet lately about like how she's built these incredible verification loops and how they ship so much. Ryan Carson has been talking a lot about this in recent stuff." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3059.78", "endTime": "3083.5", "body": "Claire Vaux, Matt Pocock. Like there's a lot of stuff out there where you can go at You can be technical and you can use your systems mindset to engineer these agentic loops. And I and I also think that that there It's completely possible to build in create Like, creative guidelines, brand guidelines, content guidelines." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3083.66", "endTime": "3084.06", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3084.06", "endTime": "3089.1802", "body": "Look. And it's not outsourcing completely. There's there's still human direction." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3089.26", "endTime": "3089.82", "body": "Like, this is" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3089.82", "endTime": "3094.94", "body": "the goal. This is the strategic goal. Or this is the strategic this is the training. These are the examples." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3098.115", "endTime": "3120.1902", "body": "Yeah. Think there's a lot of that I can identify with you on that. Like, I can understand the process part. I have a little bit of PTSD from being a solo founder just because when I did get depressed, it was so hard. And I just remembered that the one thing that actually really helped is I hired this guy, Tim Aiton." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3120.27", "endTime": "3130.245", "body": "Shout out to Tim. I just looked him up on LinkedIn. He, like, saved me. Basically, I said, listen, I'm not doing good personally right now. And I need somebody." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3130.245", "endTime": "3151.7202", "body": "He was young at the time. I need somebody to just get on a phone call with me every morning and just, like, help help me walk through this time. So to have a human in my corner and Tim was like he had lots of energy. He was feeling good. And so he could, like, say, hey, why don't we do a pricing experiment?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3151.7202", "endTime": "3187.745", "body": "Like, let's raise the price of the course and see how that so he basically, like, sustain me through that time. And I now I'm just like, like, if I get sick or I you know, if something happens, John Buddha's got got it, you know? Or if both of us need to leave, Jason and Helen and everybody else can run the company. We have people now. Working with people has its own challenges, but that's the one part of being a solopreneur that I don't know if I could go back to just because I had that experience of like" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3187.905", "endTime": "3210.8699", "body": "Well, I I just don't I just don't think that, like, being solo has to look like I've I've done it both ways too. I've had I had had a team of 25 people. I've had a team of one for many years. And, like, I don't think that being solo has to look like the traditional way of being solo anymore. And that that to me is like my big challenge that I'm trying to work through because I feel like in the last year of running Builder Methods, I got it to this point." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3211.785", "endTime": "3245.135", "body": "In the one to one scenario. Me plus AI. Yep. And now the question is like, how can I set it up so that, like, I'm actually producing Like, yes, I'm way more productive myself, using AI in my own personal process, of course? But it hasn't really crossed into yet where it's like I have actual teams of agents proposing, pitching, project managing, shipping on these loops that I've like, to a point where it actually operates like a real team." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3245.2148", "endTime": "3266.19", "body": "Mhmm. And like, I I think it does remain to be seen what, like, how much is actually possible and where where the friction points are. I've already hit on some of them. But like, as soon as you hit a friction point, it's like, okay, that's a new part of the system that I need to spend this week figuring out how do I how can I raise the level of trust to, like, this thing? And it's just it's just like you unpack it one piece at a time, you know." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3266.19", "endTime": "3294.22", "body": "I do think there's and there's also other ways as a solo founder, you can replicate some of that human stuff. Like, we're we're doing it right now. That's one of the reasons we do this podcast is to have that. You know, I've had lots of phone calls with Adam Wathen when I'm, like, you know, trying to figure shit out. Or Jason Cohen did a call with me when I was you know, I so having a network, I think can help and replace some of that, like, you know, need for human contact or whatever." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3294.78", "endTime": "3316.8398", "body": "Yeah. What we're describing is artificial organizational resilience. Because the way Rosie is right now and Transistor, it's with people. And Yeah. The resilience comes from the organization having people in places so that if you go away for a week on vacation, Justin Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3316.92", "endTime": "3330.915", "body": "Everything pretty much stays the same. Yeah. And how long you could go away and not be part of the business speaks to how resilient the business actually is. If you could go away for a week or two, is it two months? Is it six months?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3330.915", "endTime": "3338.355", "body": "Could you just back out entirely? And that will kinda reveal how necessary you are and how resilient the organization is without you." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3338.755", "endTime": "3339.395", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3339.395", "endTime": "3362.955", "body": "Right? All of us well, the two of us, Justin. We have one layer, maybe two of resilience, maybe a management layer and an individual contributor layer. Yeah. And it still feels like a big deal because you have removed this dependence on you being in a good mood, you being healthy, you feeling like you wanna do the work, you being inspired." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3363.355", "endTime": "3369.675", "body": "I remember watching my dad growing up. He was a solo guy, and he it was a tough go." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3370.29", "endTime": "3370.93", "body": "It was" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3370.93", "endTime": "3390.415", "body": "when you're not feeling great, nobody cares. And that is like a very special version of entrepreneurial resistance and pain tolerance. Mhmm. You know, I think all of us can identify with that to some degree, but it is a lot better with some organizational resilience underneath. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3390.495", "endTime": "3426.08", "body": "Where where Brian is describing is you you've glimpsed the potential that a lot of this is more possible than people think right now because you're, you know, you're a good bit ahead of the the other 99%. And so building in that direction is kind of building a solo organization with a lot more resilience than, well, I don't feel like doing a YouTube video today and therefore my business suffers Mhmm. Compared to actually the amount of effort required for me to do that is much much lower than it was a year ago. So let's do it." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3426.1602", "endTime": "3434.24", "body": "Yeah. I mean, it also still gets back to, like, the whole product. Like, what is builder methods? And what am I offering? And what am I and and what what does my portfolio look like?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3434.24", "endTime": "3469.4448", "body": "I mean, talked about it last week, but, like, again, it's like, if I'm optimizing for a company of one and I'm optimizing for energy, selling courses that require a lot of like personal brand. I mean, it is obviously a heavily personal brand business right now. Mhmm. But but yeah, like just moving, like figuring out the the right mix of products and like because like, again, like, I'm working on software products, like, that's that's like the easiest energy for me to give, obviously. Because I could be, like, quiet in my hole just building with with agents and all that." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3469.4448", "endTime": "3475.2048", "body": "Yeah. I think I think I think I have settled on some new directions for Builder Methods. We can get it we can get into it. But" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3475.4448", "endTime": "3476.565", "body": "Yeah. That's where" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3476.565", "endTime": "3476.805", "body": "we're going." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3476.805", "endTime": "3493.71", "body": "I maybe we'll do that in our last twenty minutes here. I think what's helpful about the company one thing is that the author, Paul Jarvis, is such a great example. And so if he's the author of that movement, Company of One Yeah. You look at his life. And so what work backwards from Paul Jarvis' life." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3494.2551", "endTime": "3515.28", "body": "He had incredible boundaries more than anybody I've ever known. Like, he was just like, these are the boundaries in which I am going to operate. A very private person, actually, for someone who made his living on the Internet. And he did eventually transition from courses to software." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3515.28", "endTime": "3515.84", "body": "To software." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3515.84", "endTime": "3528.9548", "body": "And then and then Paul also was When he quit. He's, like, one of the few people I know who's just like, you know what? I'm getting out. I'm going to sell the business to my co founder, and you guys are never going to hear from me again. It's like, wow, Paul." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3528.9548", "endTime": "3529.355", "body": "I" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3530.075", "endTime": "3533.1948", "body": "really wonder what Paul is up to right now. Like, where I did he did a" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3533.1948", "endTime": "3562.745", "body": "call with him not too long ago where we caught up and I just said, what's going on, dude? But he just had I think it is useful to look at his life. He he really had this box of what he wanted his life to look like. And I think part of the resilience, but also part of that company of one philosophy is having really clear boundaries. And once you have those boundaries in place, it's like, okay, this is what I'm going to try to operate in." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3562.825", "endTime": "3580.665", "body": "And he had to shift his business model in order to stay aligned with that. Right? Like, eventually, courses wasn't doing it. And then I mean, he had several transitions. He started out writing a vegan cookbook and then went into designer education and then went into Fathom." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3581.945", "endTime": "3584.2651", "body": "So yeah. Worth checking that out." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3584.9849", "endTime": "3585.385", "body": "Why don't" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3585.385", "endTime": "3598.25", "body": "we spend the last twenty minutes here? Nineteen minutes here? Just doing some updates that whatever you feel you wanna share. Jordan, you had a story about a Twitter to friend story or something?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3598.25", "endTime": "3609.055", "body": "I do have a feel good story. Okay. And, you know, why not? Why not? So if you could go to Twitter, Justin Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3609.135", "endTime": "3614.975", "body": "With your your screen share mechanism over there. Mhmm. And and find Andrew Warner's feed." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3615.135", "endTime": "3616.655", "body": "Okay. Here we go." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3616.655", "endTime": "3629.8599", "body": "So our our good buddy, Andrew Warner, the o g podcaster from Mixergy that we all know and love. Yep. Andrew's become a friend. He is an investor in Rosie. He's become a friend." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3629.8599", "endTime": "3639.5952", "body": "I I go to him for advice. And he wrote something on Twitter. This is it here. I will not become a go okay. Go down." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3639.5952", "endTime": "3643.675", "body": "See that? Okay. That that one right there. Mhmm. The the nested Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3643.675", "endTime": "3656.31", "body": "He's moving down to Mexico. So he's moving down to Mexico, and I see this post from him. And it's basically I mean, I could really identify with this. I do not go to The Caribbean. I don't mess with The Caribbean." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3656.31", "endTime": "3677.49", "body": "If you wanna go to The Caribbean, don't invite me. I I I it is like oil and water. I cannot get my capitalist New Yorker, everything works a certain way. I cannot deal with the lack of, like, discipline the culture. And and Mexico has some of that." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3677.49", "endTime": "3697.845", "body": "And so, like, Andrew is a gringo in Mexico right now, and he's like, there's a office that I'm trying to rent, and there's a smoke alarm in the corner, and it keeps beeping because the battery's low. So I went and I asked the office manager to change the battery, and she was like, no. So so he said, well, we don't have a ladder. He was like, alright. Cool." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3697.845", "endTime": "3708.8801", "body": "I'll go outside and I'll find someone with the ladder and we'll change it. And the woman was like, no. Because the the the government, like, would be upset if we did that. And he's like, what what am I supposed to do here? I don't you know?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3708.8801", "endTime": "3719.085", "body": "Okay. So it's like a perfect example and I I saw that and I was like, man, I I feel you on that. Yeah. So I reached out to him and he's like, yo. Mexico's crazy." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3719.085", "endTime": "3732.83", "body": "I almost got robbed on the way down there. If you if you scroll down on his feed, he'll talk about how he got held up Oh, man. Driving down there. So he's having a rough go, and I was like, okay. Here we go." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3732.83", "endTime": "3738.35", "body": "I got got shaken down. Two masked guys in a roadblock. Yes. Okay. So he's having a rough rough first, like, week or two." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3738.67", "endTime": "3755.745", "body": "And I look at it. I'm like, oh, I wonder if he's in the same town as my very good friend, John Ewalt, and his wife, Danny, who run a software company together with their three kids. We were very close with them in Portland. Our three kids and their three kids line up. Our wives love each other." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3755.745", "endTime": "3766.92", "body": "John right. Close friends. We left Portland at the same time. They went down to Mexico, and we went to Chicago. It was very useful for us whenever our kids complained to be like, you know, the Ewaltz are doing this in Spanish." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3766.92", "endTime": "3767.16", "body": "Right?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3767.16", "endTime": "3768.76", "body": "Right. And" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3769.72", "endTime": "3773.16", "body": "so I'm like, I wonder if he's in the same town, and it turns out he is." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3773.615", "endTime": "3774.015", "body": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3774.015", "endTime": "3793.48", "body": "And I'm like, I got I got a fellow gringle for you who's who's been doing it for three, four years now. And his kids are in school in Spanish, and, like, this is the perfect person. Yeah. So I connect them on DM, on on text, and then I get a picture later that night of the two of them, like, clinking glasses having No tossing" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3793.96", "endTime": "3795.4802", "body": "way. Awesome." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3795.8801", "endTime": "3798.12", "body": "Yes. That's love, baby. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3798.2", "endTime": "3806.0752", "body": "Dude, that feels like old Twitter. Right? That's what it felt like. Loved. Like, old Twitter is like, that could happen." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3806.395", "endTime": "3806.8752", "body": "Real." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3807.115", "endTime": "3807.435", "body": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3807.435", "endTime": "3810.5552", "body": "Yeah. Oh, that's your timeline. That's your timer." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3810.5552", "endTime": "3812.635", "body": "It's 02:15. I gotta call at 02:30. So, of course, I have" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3812.635", "endTime": "3813.0352", "body": "my line at" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3813.0352", "endTime": "3813.435", "body": "02:15." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3815.27", "endTime": "3815.75", "body": "Brian, what?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "3815.75", "endTime": "3818.79", "body": "So that's my story, but let let's go with lefties. Brian." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3818.79", "endTime": "3820.55", "body": "Yeah. Brian, what's going on with you, man?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3821.1099", "endTime": "3843.4102", "body": "Yeah. I guess so on one of the things that I've come back to on builder methods, this is like an example of, like, this was working in the very beginning. And then first, I convinced myself to abandon it. And now it's like, let's just go back to the thing that was sort of working, which is in the very beginning, the first, I don't know, four or five months of Builder Methods, I was doing paid workshops. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3843.4102", "endTime": "3866.4849", "body": "Low ticket price, paid workshops every month or two. And here is the current thing. Here's the current new thing that I'm interested in that I think you should be up on. At the time, it was probably like Cloud Code, this and that. Like, now I might do one on like Cloud Agents or my updated development environment or how I'm deploying Grokbots to run my business." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3866.4849", "endTime": "3872.68", "body": "Right? Like, whatever's currently happening, that should be the topic of a forty five minute live workshop" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3872.8398", "endTime": "3873.16", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3873.16", "endTime": "3903.11", "body": "That I charge $50 a ticket for. And then you can buy the ticket to get access to that one workshop. And on the on the order bump page, it's like, well, you can just use that toward your annual membership for Builder Methods Pro, which then gives you access to all the workshops, past and future. It's like that model worked well for a for a bunch of different reasons. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3903.11", "endTime": "3915.235", "body": "Like, we talked about, like, marketing funnels. Like, that is a thing. That is an event on on the calendar that I can and it's very, very current. Like, here's the hot topic. There's gonna be this paid workshop on it." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3915.315", "endTime": "3918.355", "body": "Yeah. No brainer. $50. I'm in. You know?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3918.355", "endTime": "3929.89", "body": "Like, that's that's a marketable asset that I can go out to the market and push every couple of weeks. Right? It doesn't take a ton of energy to create. It's not not like a large course. I don't even really need slides in a lot of these cases." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3929.89", "endTime": "3932.69", "body": "I could just kind of show up and and show what I'm working on." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "3932.85", "endTime": "3949.1948", "body": "I I think this is brilliant. I've I've actually recommended other content creators. I've used you as an example and this specific workshop thing as an example because it's such an easy it's like, oh, I gotta I gotta commit to a subscription or a membership or community. I can't do that." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3949.1948", "endTime": "3980.07", "body": "But then on the inside, the community members, I since since I've stopped doing that, I still have been doing live, like, office hour Hangouts with members as, like, one of the one of the benefits of being a member. I do that every, I don't know, four, six weeks. And I did a string of them, then I took a break over the summer, and then I'm getting messages like, when's the next one, when's the next one from members. And I remembered back that like the paying members go to those same workshops too, because that's also a benefit. They get in for free because they're members." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "3980.07", "endTime": "4027.725", "body": "And then there was also the effect of like, okay, new people who've only paid the 50 to get to see this topic today, but they're also seeing current members in the chat saying like, yeah, Builder Methods Pro great. So it's like live social proof, and it's still a community hangout with members and non members together. You get the benefit of talking about a current topic that whereas with the courses that are that's like a moment in time that has a short shelf life. This thing is like, here's what's happening now that we need to think about. So I think that's gonna be a new mechanism or or renewed mechanism in my business to, you know, because again, like, I'm I'm gonna be sort of moving away from, like, creating these big courses." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4028.045", "endTime": "4054.295", "body": "Mhmm. I still wanna have this touch point with both the community and a marketable asset. And in between, you know, every in between those four to six week periods, I'm just kind of building systems, build, you know, putting out new tools and and seeing what else I can sort of like piece together in in the portfolio around the membership essentially. But, you know, the membership is still the centerpiece of of everything, and and that could be an interesting mechanism to just kinda keep it going, you know." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4054.295", "endTime": "4069.1702", "body": "You know what what and this got mentioned in the chat as well. But what's helpful about the workshops for me as a customer is there's things that are floating around in my head. Like, we talked about orbs. That's one. Like, I I gotta figure that out." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4069.73", "endTime": "4091.79", "body": "If you send me an email that says it's orb in time and it's just like, I'm just walking through how I use the orbs. I'll be like, thank God. Because the job to be done is help me to understand this, but also create the nudge I need for to learn about this. Like, because I haven't yet. I just need someone in there in Brian's voice to just walk me through." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4091.79", "endTime": "4095.6301", "body": "Here's what it is. Here's how I'm using it. Show me on screen. That would be like" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4095.9502", "endTime": "4122.32", "body": "For anybody wondering, like, like, the two minute version is it's cloud based agent environments. Instead of working locally on your files, you're working on a cloud instance. And it's the same thing is available from Cursor, and even from Cloud and OpenAI, like, they have cloud agents. This company called AMP, which is my personal favorite version of this, they just call their cloud agents Orbs. They've got this, like, fun, branding personality thing around it." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4122.32", "endTime": "4142.675", "body": "And it's I I I think what AMP is doing, it's a fantastic, fantastic product. I I wish I had been on it sooner. I'm I'm loving it. It It like, the way that their cloud agents work is so much simpler and it just works compared to I I've had a lot of friction with them with other platforms. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4142.7554", "endTime": "4143.395", "body": "Really awesome." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4143.79", "endTime": "4147.3096", "body": "I like their website with the whole table of contents on the left side." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4147.3896", "endTime": "4151.63", "body": "Yeah. Yeah. And also, Orbitime is just such a" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4151.63", "endTime": "4160.005", "body": "way Yeah. Started to, like, sort of brand that it's that's not even the name of their company. That's just the feature. And and that's the thing that has get gotten traction, like, branding wise, you know? Smart." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4160.325", "endTime": "4161.125", "body": "Love it." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4161.3647", "endTime": "4173.445", "body": "Yeah. As a nontechnical person, it seems, at least maybe in hindsight. Right? Let's not give myself too much credit there. It seems like cloud was always going to end up as the preferred." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4173.765", "endTime": "4174.645", "body": "I think so." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4174.645", "endTime": "4194.665", "body": "Yeah. Yeah. And Ian Landsman brought up something that I think is he's largely interested in using it from a security perspective. Like, I don't want these things running around on my machine and, you know, doing stuff. And, like, the other day, Claude was hitting a bunch of headless Chrome browsers." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4194.665", "endTime": "4212.8496", "body": "But for whatever reason, it was opening in my dock, and it was just, like, jittering my Mac dock. I'm like, man, Claude's just got doing stuff on my machine right now. And it's it's a little bit worse. But you put that in a cloud and, you know, theoretically, a sandbox thing, maybe it's better. So yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4213.09", "endTime": "4213.33", "body": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4214.225", "endTime": "4228.22", "body": "On my side, one thing I'll share is that I'm I'm starting to think about spots.fm again and thinking about how I I basically, I need to get this out. I need to get it in more people's hands. This has" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4228.22", "endTime": "4229.3403", "body": "been years in the making." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4229.3403", "endTime": "4253.17", "body": "Years in the making. Spots, again, is a marketplace for indie creators to sell ads to businesses. And so if you're a creator, you can put up a listing of like, oh, I've got, you can buy an ad on my newsletter and you can buy an ad on my podcast. You can buy an ad on my YouTube channel. And then if you're a business who's looking to sponsor some of this indie content, which can be really helpful." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4253.17", "endTime": "4275.665", "body": "It actually works, especially in terms of getting backlinks and mentions and all this other stuff. But I need to get people using it. And so I need to start taking my own medicine and start writing my 100 emails to people. But if you're interested in trying it out, if you're a business that wants to browse the marketplace, there's not a list there yet, let me know. Or you go to spots.fm and sign up." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4275.665", "endTime": "4282.11", "body": "And if you're a creator and you're interested, sign up there too. And, yeah, I'll send you an invite." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4282.11", "endTime": "4292.365", "body": "Are you sorry if you you mentioned this. Like, are you integrating this with, like, the transistor Right. Like, customer like, I feel like that that's your marketplace. Eventually." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4292.365", "endTime": "4304.45", "body": "So what I wanna do is I wanna prove I wanna see how difficult this is. How difficult is it to get people to sign up? How difficult is it to get all this stuff? And then does the business model make sense? Right?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4304.45", "endTime": "4325.665", "body": "So I don't know if you guys remember how many times Gumroad had to rethink its business model. Like, it was just like every and then every time they changed their business model, they'd piss a bunch of people off, and then they eventually settled on something. But a lot of that is because the you know, a a lot of these marketplaces take a percentage. Right? So it's a percentage based business." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4325.825", "endTime": "4344.5303", "body": "It's that's a hard business to get right. You know, at a low level, that's Stripe's business model, very low margins. But even it's hard to get right because nobody wants to give up a percentage of their revenue. Nobody signs up for that. You know, in Apple's app marketplace, you know, they take 30%." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4344.5303", "endTime": "4347.41", "body": "Yeah. So it's it can be tricky. And so" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4347.5703", "endTime": "4376.72", "body": "I love spots for you and Transistor as, like, the growth play. Because, like, the I feel like the obvious model is, like, Kit and and Spark Loop, which Kit acquired, like, the that that, like, creator network. But what's different about podcasts compared to like sponsoring newsletters is like you sponsor a newsletter, it's sort of like one and done. Like, all right, let's see if I can and I have tried this before, like you sponsor one newsletter, see if it works. Great." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4376.72", "endTime": "4376.8804", "body": "Yep." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4377.215", "endTime": "4405.44", "body": "But if you sponsor a podcast, technically you could be sponsoring multiple episodes or maybe multiple popular backlog episodes that people constantly go back to. And it's also a way for existing podcasters to monetize their older episodes, even if you've like taken a break from podcasting, but you're still paying for Transistor to start to like monetize the backlog. So like, I just think that there are like so many interesting incentives" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4405.645", "endTime": "4406.2847", "body": "for Yep." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4406.2847", "endTime": "4415.165", "body": "For customers to to get in on that. And and you have and you all already have the technical like ad spots thing, like, inserted into the audio. So I mean," }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4415.165", "endTime": "4425.4697", "body": "it's it's the best business model in the world other than Costco. Advertising network is everybody wins. People who Yeah. Wanna sell the ads are happy. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4425.4697", "endTime": "4435.31", "body": "People who wanna buy the ads are happy. You keep a cut. Everything's great. So if you can make it work, it's not easy to make work because you need people on both sides. That's the hard part." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4436.915", "endTime": "4442.755", "body": "But you do have some of the raw material there between those two sides." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4442.995", "endTime": "4452.8496", "body": "Yep. Yeah. I think if it works, I've I've purposefully unbundled it from transistor. We talked about that last time. I think actually unbundling is the thing right now." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4453.3296", "endTime": "4461.1694", "body": "Distinct apps that do a purposeful thing. But that doesn't mean if it works, we can't leverage it inside I" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4461.4897", "endTime": "4465.4146", "body": "wanna hear your your anti take, and then I wanna add add mine. Go ahead, Brian." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4465.5747", "endTime": "4476.215", "body": "Yeah. Like, I I I do agree with you. In general, there's, an unbundling direction out in the ethos out there. But for this particular thing, I feel like your unique advantage is you have transistor." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4477.4", "endTime": "4492.515", "body": "Yeah. But I I I think I'm right on this one. I I think the spark loop thing every time I've seen something subsumed into an existing company, it's just like I don't go to kit for that. I'm not thinking about it. It gets lost to me." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4492.515", "endTime": "4500.915", "body": "It doesn't feel well integrated. It feels kind of latched on. Only applies to, like, a tiny percentage of your customers." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4501.3154", "endTime": "4525.205", "body": "So I Yeah. But I I do think that there are lots of people and businesses who love the idea of, like, having an audience and having podcast or having a YouTube, but they are not creators themselves. So they need to go look to sponsor, and you have that network. And then and then I also think that there's a huge market of podcasters who it's hard to monetize a podcast. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4525.205", "endTime": "4549.595", "body": "Or it's hard to and and like and then and then you couple that with not that you're like like, your business has has been growing and doing fine, but you you know about the podcast industry and, like, the pricing constraints, like, you know, like like, the willingness to pay for for podcast platforms and stuff. Like, I feel like this is an obvious growth lever that can add, like, a revenue thing. I" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4549.595", "endTime": "4549.835", "body": "don't know." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4549.835", "endTime": "4552.555", "body": "Yeah. But what but I you you know a lot better than I do." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4552.555", "endTime": "4554.955", "body": "My my 02:30 got canceled, so we're good for another thirty." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4554.955", "endTime": "4555.275", "body": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4555.275", "endTime": "4557.835", "body": "Let's go. Another hour." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4560.04", "endTime": "4584.695", "body": "No. I think that you are right to unbundle because you can still get the benefit of the bundle. Yes. So you can get the benefit of both. You can have a standalone brand that lives outside of Transistor, but you can still do what I think might be the biggest benefit to Transistor is the ability to differentiate between the other platforms." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4584.935", "endTime": "4594.66", "body": "Yeah. And so if you have video, differentiation point. If you have unlimited for the same price, differentiation. If you have an advertising network built in, differentiation." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4595.06", "endTime": "4595.4604", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4595.4604", "endTime": "4600.02", "body": "And so it can be powered by what's the what's the name of it? Not Spark Loop." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4600.18", "endTime": "4601.4604", "body": "Spots. Spots." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4601.4604", "endTime": "4611.585", "body": "Powered by spots. Yep. And you can use it as a differentiating feature, but you can still accrue value to spots itself. Yes. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4611.585", "endTime": "4611.825", "body": "I like" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4611.825", "endTime": "4630.445", "body": "it. Yep. And the other thing I've realized both from myself, but also our customers, is most of them don't just have a podcast. They are also monetizing a YouTube channel, a newsletter. And so if you look at the the interface, it's like you can connect it to your YouTube channel." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4630.445", "endTime": "4639.3247", "body": "You can connect it to your podcast. You can connect it to your email newsletter. You can connect it to your blog. If you got a ghost or substack blog. If you're doing social stuff, you can connect it there as well." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4640.445", "endTime": "4650.34", "body": "And you can also just have other. Right? You could just be like, you know what? Like, I'm a popular open source thing, and I'm just gonna have you sponsor my Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4650.98", "endTime": "4667.7554", "body": "Yeah. I mean, I do think that it's great that that spots is its own thing, its own product, its own brand, its own interface. I think it should be. Like, I I but I I also think that you should have, like, a heavy or or at least, like, your your early traction channel to me is, like Oh, the yeah. The transistor, you know, connection." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4667.7554", "endTime": "4685.2197", "body": "That'll be, like, step two. If I can manually get people using it and then manually get manually get advertisers using it and that's working and then the the business model is like, oh, yeah, this makes sense. Like, people are willing to pay for this." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4685.2197", "endTime": "4693.605", "body": "I mean, definitely YouTubers, you know, once you're at 20,000, 30,000, 50 k up subscribers, you're getting pitched sponsors every single day." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4693.765", "endTime": "4694.3247", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4694.725", "endTime": "4717.8545", "body": "And I've paused accepting sponsors, but I did a bunch of them, like, two months ago, and it was a ton of freaking work to like do the negotiation, get the assets, finalize this ad spot, like deliver it. Like, the interface that you have there is perfect. So if I like, you can go to you can go to like up and coming YouTubers who are like between 20 k and a 100 k subscribers." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4718.0947", "endTime": "4718.5747", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4718.5747", "endTime": "4723.5347", "body": "And and because they because they are currently getting hammered with sponsor." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4723.855", "endTime": "4725.68", "body": "Right. But they don't have a system and then they have to" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4725.7603", "endTime": "4726.72", "body": "They don't have a system. They have a" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4726.72", "endTime": "4727.2", "body": "published price." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4727.2", "endTime": "4735.12", "body": "Those bigger ones, the million dollar subs, they've got a whole team on that. But the but the small ones who are just up and coming, they're in chaos right now." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4735.2", "endTime": "4737.68", "body": "Yeah. Can I get can I get financing on you?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4738.015", "endTime": "4738.735", "body": "Yeah. For sure." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4738.735", "endTime": "4750.415", "body": "Once per episode, we gotta get a financy. Yeah. Let's do it. The real the real issue here is that spots is yours, and transistor's not a 100% yours." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4751.8804", "endTime": "4755.8", "body": "If we do spots, it'll be a it'll be a split between John and I again." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4755.8003", "endTime": "4762.2", "body": "Okay. So similar partnership arrangement or structure or so on? Okay. Cool. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4762.2", "endTime": "4766.3604", "body": "Especially if it benefits from transistor in in that way." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4766.475", "endTime": "4785.66", "body": "That's the idea. The idea is, like, creative destruction. No market lasts forever. And so part of me is, like, I should at least be doing something to hedge. And, like, here's a real threat to the podcasting industry." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4785.66", "endTime": "4805.9053", "body": "I keep saying this. Some people agree or disagree. But when I talk to Gen Z kids, they they think of podcasts, but they don't think of them in the same way. And for many of them, they're fine to just host it on YouTube and nowhere else. For many of them, they're fine to just host it on Spotify and nowhere else." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4806.27", "endTime": "4836.28", "body": "And so this model that was really built on Gen X podcasters and Gen X and certain extent older millennials listeners, that is going away. The Apple Podcast Apple Podcast used to be the majority of it used to be the biggest directory, the most important directory, and the most listeners. They still have the most valuable audience, which is these richer Gen X people. Yep. So if you look at like Acquired's audience, they have it right on their thing." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4836.28", "endTime": "4840.36", "body": "Like Apple Podcast is number one, and it's these rich execs that are listening on Apple Podcasts." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4840.36", "endTime": "4840.9194", "body": "Sure." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4841.6396", "endTime": "4847.395", "body": "But millennials and Gen Z, it could you never know what's gonna happen. Yeah. So" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4847.7153", "endTime": "4861.0796", "body": "recall when Spotify got into their controversy of paying Joe Rogan for his podcast. Mean, correct me if I'm wrong. That was kind of their launch of podcasts. Yeah. What was the controversy?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4861.1597", "endTime": "4861.56", "body": "Market." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4861.56", "endTime": "4863.08", "body": "I mean, remember the deal, but what was" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4863.48", "endTime": "4873.7197", "body": "I mean, whatever. Rogan's controversial, so there was controversy. Oh, just just the conversation. But but a a lot of the conversation for people like us who, you know, more aware of what's going on, Spotify wasn't known for podcasts." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4874.095", "endTime": "4874.6553", "body": "Yeah. And it" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4874.6553", "endTime": "4878.495", "body": "was like, who's gonna listen to podcasts on Spotify, which in retrospect sounds ridiculous." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4878.495", "endTime": "4879.775", "body": "Well, the the real funny thing is" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4879.775", "endTime": "4883.775", "body": "that me that, like, I don't wanna see any podcast on my Spotify. I it's just music for me." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4883.775", "endTime": "4885.535", "body": "Why? Yeah. Isn't that where you listen to things?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4886.2", "endTime": "4887.56", "body": "I go back to work. I just play" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4887.64", "endTime": "4888.52", "body": "listen to my podcast." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4888.6", "endTime": "4892.68", "body": "I listen to music on Spotify. I listen to podcasts in pocket casts." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4892.68", "endTime": "4893.32", "body": "Yeah. See, you're" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4893.4", "endTime": "4896.28", "body": "So he's he's part of your audience that that's that's going away." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4896.44", "endTime": "4902.025", "body": "Exactly. Yeah. I mean, even even Joe Rogan still downloading podcast onto my device." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4902.025", "endTime": "4909.865", "body": "Joe Rogan so Spotify had podcasts for a year or two before they got Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan was not on Spotify before they bought" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4909.865", "endTime": "4910.745", "body": "That's right." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4910.745", "endTime": "4911.225", "body": "Not at all." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4911.225", "endTime": "4929.1597", "body": "That's right. He was and so You got demonetized on YouTube, and he was somewhere else, and it was right. So so anyway, let I wanna take it back to your like decision around this. Mhmm. I I have been thinking about the same thing because I have been I I had a career first this week." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4929.4", "endTime": "4936.085", "body": "It was the first time that I ever met. I had a meeting with another founder where I was talking about buying their business" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4936.3247", "endTime": "4936.885", "body": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4936.885", "endTime": "4946.005", "body": "Instead of the other way around. I've had a bunch of conversations about people buying my business, but it was the first time I was on the other side of the table and it was it was a strange and fun experience." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4946.96", "endTime": "4947.7603", "body": "Tell me about it." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "4947.7603", "endTime": "4951.8403", "body": "But along how real is this? Or how how far along are we? We've got LOI? What?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4951.8403", "endTime": "4952.64", "body": "No. No. No. No. No." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4952.64", "endTime": "4989.3345", "body": "In initial conversations, I I'm I'm going up the learning curve myself. So I am starting off with just casual conversations with people and products that I admire and like and kind of going slow in that direction. But at the same time, going up the learning curve around the process and the math and financing and everything else. And and I often get into this question as I'm doing my research and I look at a product, and I think, should this get mashed into Rosie? Or is it better off living separately" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "4989.8945", "endTime": "4990.215", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "4990.295", "endTime": "5020.925", "body": "And still benefiting one another, but keeping the cap table and the ownership and the upside of the equity and all that separate or or together. And it's it's not it's not very clear cut. It's like very different strategies. Yeah. And so similarly to spots, if if this is a Skunk Works like, we've got a nice annuity going with this podcasting business that's great for our lives, but it might end in year five to ten, you know, from day zero from now." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5021.085", "endTime": "5057.455", "body": "And therefore, let's start working on something then whether or not to mash it together or keep it separate is is a very important, like, financial decision on Yeah. Is it gonna benefit from being together or do I get benefit from keeping them separate specifically? Mhmm. And where where I'm at on a lot of this stuff is keeping it separate actually has enormous benefits because first of all, you can combine them later whenever you feel like it if it makes sense to. But starting off separate gives you that optionality and it doesn't mean you can't get the benefit from one another." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5057.615", "endTime": "5069.88", "body": "You can license you can have licensing deals between the two. You can right share between you could do whatever you want as long as it's all above above board and written down in in formal contracts between the two entities." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5070.1997", "endTime": "5070.36", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5070.36", "endTime": "5074.935", "body": "And you don't lose out on the potential to combine them later on." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5075.2554", "endTime": "5076.935", "body": "Yep. A 100%." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5077.095", "endTime": "5098.83", "body": "I think there's so much to the idea of, like, what the what the product is known for first is is really gonna stick with it for almost forever. I see that all the time. And I I think, like, I just did a video about Grokbot, of course. But, like, why why did that really take off the way that it did? Like, it's you're still interacting with AI the same way that you do with Grok itself or with ChatGPT or or Claude." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5098.83", "endTime": "5124.1396", "body": "But, like, where Claude and ChatGPT are trying to pack in all these extra agent features and scheduled tasks features and browser usage and and, you know, skills and stuff. But like at the end of the day, you go to ChatGPT to chat. You don't really use it for much more than that. Whereas like Grokbaud is like, it's for doing tasks, and it's different from the chat. Like and I also looked at Riverside recently, you know." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5124.94", "endTime": "5148.46", "body": "Obviously, they're they're, you know, they're sort of killing it on product, but they're they're growing into this, like, video editing suite and and a and a video hosting suite and podcast hosting and stuff. But I still remember I still know them as what we're using it for right now. It's for hosting calls for podcasts. Yeah. And it's hard to break out of that, like, mold, you know." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5148.46", "endTime": "5152.94", "body": "Let's let's go one layer deeper on this in terms of product decisions." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5153.18", "endTime": "5153.5", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5153.5", "endTime": "5178.51", "body": "Because if if you look at Rosie, you know, we we we start off with this wedge product of just answering the phone. And now we almost wanna grow into the price. You know, we wanna grow the value while keeping the price the same so people get a better and better deal as they go on. There's fewer and fewer reasons to leave and whatever else. So it starts off as this very, specific point solution, and then you move more into a platform that does multiple things." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5179.39", "endTime": "5208.4", "body": "And my question is, like, how do you create the boundaries around okay. Well, Rosie is known for communicating with your customers. And, like, okay. That's kind of broad enough. But for example, if we wanted to step outside of that to some degree, what how do you decide what should be an additional feature that makes Rosie more valuable as a platform that you're already paying for compared to no." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5208.4", "endTime": "5233.94", "body": "This actually should live outside of it and it's like a complementary product that maybe we could cross sell to Rosie users. That's the that for me, that's the question mark and almost feels like it almost feels like destroying value by acquiring something and jamming it in as a feature under the rosy umbrella as opposed to letting it live on its own for what it's known for and and and how it is known on the Internet and in AI responses. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5233.94", "endTime": "5253.275", "body": "Certainly, if you're acquiring an existing brand, I think I would be more inclined to keep it on the outside. This just happens all the time. I don't understand. I actually still do not understand why companies purchase, acquire these companies, and then just roll them in and kill the brand. It's like, okay." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5253.275", "endTime": "5278.125", "body": "Like, why why did you do that? Like, it doesn't make sense to me. I I think yeah. I think you want to keep the brand because there's a especially now, like I said, LLMs are so simplistic. And now AI overviews and and ChatGPT answers and all these things, they're just like they do this word association where it's like, you know, transistor equals podcast hosting." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5278.3647", "endTime": "5294.95", "body": "But then if I add something else, it's it's just not gonna make it into that little bullet that I want, you know? And and the, you know, the AI overviews are like I don't know. Yeah. Like, I go, like, best podcast hosting MCP or whatever. This is just one example." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5294.95", "endTime": "5315.77", "body": "But if you look at what's below the fold, it's like there's like a bunch of other stuff below the fold here. But under the show more. But here, we've already got it. Like, once you're above that fold, then you're winning. And I I wanna keep that as clean as I can." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5316.57", "endTime": "5337.175", "body": "Also, terms of people's you know, in terms of how they think, I could be wrong about this, but this is actually strongly held belief. I I just have never seen actually expanding horizontal, adding way more features, like becoming a suite of products within a product. I've rarely seen it work except maybe in the enterprise where I" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5337.175", "endTime": "5341.495", "body": "don't have much Like like Soho. Yeah. You know? Sure. But they're they're they're pretty rare." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5342.0703", "endTime": "5352.9497", "body": "Yeah. And and in my mind, every time I they buy something and then they just put it in, I'm like, oh, fuck. This UI is so complicated now. It's like, I don't wanna I'm here for this. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5353.0303", "endTime": "5353.43", "body": "Like, there's just" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5353.59", "endTime": "5354.23", "body": "Give me this." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5354.23", "endTime": "5368.365", "body": "Like, no matter how good you execute all these different pieces into your all in one product, as a consumer, you're just gonna assume like, alright, it it might be good enough, but it's not gonna be best in class at that thing because they're not known for that thing." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5368.75", "endTime": "5390.215", "body": "You know? The the other thing I think about is I I told you about this few months ago, but I think everyone should do this. And I I didn't use AI for this. I just manually went through the app, and I just we have this little dice spinner in our admin dashboard that lets me see a random account at random. And I just opened it up." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5390.455", "endTime": "5402.6797", "body": "I manually went through every single feature. What are they actually using? These are features we've invested a lot of money in. These are features that are like right there in the UI. There you can't get more obvious." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5403.56", "endTime": "5417.815", "body": "I just said, what what is the buy in? What are people actually using? And this is all within the nice clean category of podcast hosting. We have an extended outside of it. It is some major features." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5417.815", "endTime": "5441.235", "body": "The actual, like, uptake is very low. Even with it being in the app, even with us pushing it. Eve so if it's that hard already, how much harder is saying we're gonna bring in this other thing? And now it's gonna be sitting here like a a stepchild, you know, in the in the user interface. I think it's just really difficult to get" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5441.395", "endTime": "5486.3496", "body": "It's also like there's also a case to be made that it's not like most things, it's it's never binary. Like, always do it this way or don't ever do it. Because it's like acquiring a business or building a new side business like spots or expanding into different features, they can serve different purposes than just adding value to the price point of your current like you could have something that might work much better at that broad based, top of funnel, like maybe that's what that thing is for is to attract the masses and then they eventually funnel down into the core product. Or maybe it's just something that you know a lot of leads are looking for in their checklist that they wanna see in the pricing page, even if reality is we know that they don't end up using it, but they still wanna buy based on that. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5486.51", "endTime": "5493.085", "body": "It could be something that just keeps people around, like like, it keeps the power users engaged from from churning off, you know." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5493.085", "endTime": "5506.46", "body": "Yep. Buying patterns. One of my, like, growth ideas on the list is a done for you service, but not inside Rosie. Just to spin out a new brand with a new website, with a" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5506.46", "endTime": "5508.4595", "body": "new funnel. We're Rosie consultants." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5508.46", "endTime": "5510.46", "body": "Yes. Yes. You even put," }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5510.46", "endTime": "5512.94", "body": "like, not affiliated with Rosie. Right. Because because we are." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5512.94", "endTime": "5520.025", "body": "Right. Think about this. What we're offering is a self serve done not done for you. Self serve. You do it yourself." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5520.025", "endTime": "5534.27", "body": "It's relatively cheap, and you get this up and running. And then for that same company to say, but if you want it done for you, it'll be a thousand bucks a month. Mhmm. Almost, like, doesn't make sense. I mean, I can tell you it doesn't make sense." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5534.27", "endTime": "5551.7046", "body": "We used to have it on our pricing page. We used to have it right there as a fourth plan, and people were like, you guys are too expensive just because they saw it on the pricing page. Yep. And so to to spin off and say, you know what? There are people that would pay a thousand bucks a month to just have it done for them." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5551.945", "endTime": "5567.1196", "body": "Yep. Just do it for me. And that should it almost pollutes the messaging and the positioning of the original brand. And and and keeping it separate, it's the same company, it's the same revenue, same bank account, but I think they really would be better off separate." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5567.44", "endTime": "5600.605", "body": "I feel like I've had enough experience with this myself and observing other companies with this, with the idea of a done for you concierge paid setup service. The I don't know if you guys agree or disagree with this, but I what I noticed is that every time just what you just said, Jordan, like, every time I offer an optional upsell to the thousand dollar setup service on top of the base level, like SaaS service or whatever it might be, almost no uptake. Like, close to zero, maybe just a few people go for that." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5600.605", "endTime": "5601.565", "body": "It's like different people." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5601.8853", "endTime": "5634.905", "body": "But but when it's baked into the service where, like, every customer has to do the serve has to do the setup service, then that could build a a pretty solid business. And I've seen sat like, plenty of SaaS companies who their whole business model depends on, like, getting people on the phone and and getting them to buy the $2,000 setup and and onboard. And and when everyone is going that way, that's great. But tacking on, like, oh, we like or that strategy of you you see this pattern all the time, especially with Bootstrap SaaS. It's like people aren't onboarding." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5634.905", "endTime": "5651.04", "body": "We can't get them to act to pass through all the activation hoops. Let's just offer a done for you setup service, maybe even offer it for free or maybe charge a little bit more, get that investment upfront. Like, yeah, it maybe helps around the edges, but like if it's optional, most people don't want it." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5651.3853", "endTime": "5674.7803", "body": "It's depend I I you know, the thing that came to mind is, car companies. Toyota has Lexus. Lexus is a is positioned to a different audience. It's like you're gonna get a better a different experience, maybe a more luxury experience, you know, more you're gonna you're gonna pay more often for the same chassis," }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5674.7803", "endTime": "5680.7046", "body": "you know? Like, it's just like Yeah. You think of yourself differently Yeah. When you wanna buy. You select." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5681.105", "endTime": "5701.44", "body": "Right? I am I am people like us do things like this. So if you if you have Jason Cohen talked about this on his his podcast. If have a $19 plan and a $49 plan and a $99 plan, and then I add a $5,000 a month plan, It's just like this I that doesn't work. I gotta create a different luxury brand for that segment." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5701.44", "endTime": "5727.71", "body": "Yes. What I really like is that Toyota and Lexus compete. Mhmm. They they they everybody they both win when either wins, but they are competing in some ways or at least they're they're positioned in different places. We see this in our market where a local landscaper will buy another landscaping company and not integrate the brand." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5727.71", "endTime": "5739.065", "body": "So they just show up twice when you Google. Yeah. And so you're you you win either way. There's like a whole thing right now in PE roll ups that are doing this, and and it's, the first four results are all the same company." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5739.065", "endTime": "5740.105", "body": "It's all the same company." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5740.105", "endTime": "5750.6", "body": "Yes. Mhmm. With a with a different brand in front. And so in many ways, like, what I would wanna do with Rosie in a done for you version is compete. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5750.6", "endTime": "5768.425", "body": "And go up into the ad network and and be very different positions. And say, Rosie is amazing and it's $49 a month. And then the other ad would basically be like, you don't wanna do this yourself. Forget those people. You're a real business and you wanna work with experts and we'll do it for you." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5768.745", "endTime": "5772.665", "body": "Yeah. And just let that both live in those two different positions." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5773.3853", "endTime": "5794.605", "body": "Yeah. Seth is asking in the chat, at what point does a price anchor become a liability? And I I don't even think about it like that. Just say, transistor is positioned to a certain type of customer, and it just doesn't make sense to add a price that doesn't make sense for that that market. You're you're just Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5794.605", "endTime": "5818.1147", "body": "Positioning it for this is the market I'm going after. It's not a liability because transistor's kicking ass with that market. It makes it we get you know, we we got a system that's working. The money the money, train is flowing. But there's the adjacent possible, which is what would it look like if we had a Lexus version of this company?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5818.1147", "endTime": "5823.155", "body": "What would it look like if we had a Rolex version of this company? It's kind of an interesting idea." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5823.155", "endTime": "5831.9697", "body": "Yeah. I think price anchoring is a is a very different thing, you know? And I think it it definitely has its place. Like, it it can definitely work. Like, even if I think about AMP's pricing." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5831.9697", "endTime": "5845.8247", "body": "Right? Like, I'm I'm on this $20 a month plan for AMP, which gives me, what, like, seven hundred and fifty hours of Orb time or whatever. It's like, that, I so far has been like more than enough. And then they have a $200 a month plan. Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5845.8247", "endTime": "5849.5845", "body": "You know, for for companies who who are just racking up hours on these things." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5849.7446", "endTime": "5852.545", "body": "Yeah. That still feels pretty affordable to me." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5852.545", "endTime": "5879.885", "body": "Oh, it's like to me, I'm like, this is like insane value, you know? Mhmm. Obviously, on top of that, I've got, like, OpenAI and cloud subscriptions that I use. But, like, but that that to me is the price anchoring piece. But going back to, like, the done for you service, that's typically like, oh, I'm trying to solve a problem with, like, sales or onboarding or activation, which, like, it it sort of works when it's required, but I haven't really seen it work when it's optional, you know?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5879.965", "endTime": "5881.98", "body": "Yeah. Anyway." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5881.98", "endTime": "5901.875", "body": "Yeah. I love this. I mean, this is kind of we're getting into, like, it feels like 40 chess for capitalists, which is it kinda harkens back to this this FreshBooks CEO story where he created a competitor to compete with FreshBooks. It feels like we're starting to talk about this kind of stuff. Like because everyone thinks about starting their own company." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5902.035", "endTime": "5931.665", "body": "I think other people think about, like, okay. Well, I've got a software company, and then I'm also gonna invest in, you know, a pizza restaurant or something. Like, something totally different. Sure. But this idea of of, like, working in a category and, like, going upmarket with a separate company or doing, you know, a competitor that's almost offering the exact same thing, those are such interesting ideas that rarely get tested, and I kinda love that idea of, like I mean, you need resources for it." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5932.625", "endTime": "5940.225", "body": "But if you have the resources for it, it just feels so fun. Like, why not try that? And it feels a little bit clandestine. You know? You're like you were like I'm" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5940.305", "endTime": "5942.9097", "body": "a gangster. Come on. Yes. Like we got Fruit Loops." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5942.9897", "endTime": "5947.79", "body": "We also have Fruitios. And we'll see if people like Fruitios better than Fruit Loops." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5947.87", "endTime": "5967.615", "body": "Right. What what are the most successful people in the world doing right now? They're taking money that they made in tech and they're buying sports franchises. Mhmm. And they're diversifying, like, what if I did the exact opposite of what I of what I think may not work for much longer or not in the same way?" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5968.095", "endTime": "5970.9004", "body": "Right? So you you see this, like Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5970.9004", "endTime": "5971.7803", "body": "Very different I mean, athletes" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5971.7803", "endTime": "5972.2603", "body": "have been doing" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5972.2603", "endTime": "5973.14", "body": "this at the same time." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5973.14", "endTime": "5980.1", "body": "Athletes have been doing this forever. Right? Like Tony Hawk made very little money from skateboarding itself. He has his own skateboard company, Birdhouse." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "5980.18", "endTime": "5981.46", "body": "He made it all from the video game." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "5981.46", "endTime": "5990.445", "body": "It's like he made it all from Tony Hawk Pro Skater and being on Bagel Bites commercials. So they've they've had these, like, other business models if you're, like, a influencer or whatever." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "5990.445", "endTime": "6006.2397", "body": "Yeah. I mean, it's you're cool. Everyone wants to take your money because you're a cool NBA player. I mean, didn't one of the NBA players just make, like, $200,000,000 out of, like, a $200,000 investment in in well, I don't if it was Hugging Face or it's one of the tech companies that just got acquired very recently." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6006.64", "endTime": "6014.735", "body": "Well, there's this big scandal with Kawhi with with the Clippers and and Steve Baumer getting you know, kick." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6014.815", "endTime": "6017.455", "body": "I mean, Shaquille O'Neal is famous for investing in" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6017.855", "endTime": "6019.055", "body": "Yes. Dealerships" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6019.055", "endTime": "6022.7354", "body": "and franchise. He's got yep. Early investor Back at Google?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6022.7354", "endTime": "6024.015", "body": "Every commercial ever." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6024.015", "endTime": "6047.235", "body": "Yeah. I mean, there's there's something that freaks me out about just depending on one thing and one company working out when that company working out is a result of an exit. And that's, like, not in my control. I don't decide when someone right. The days of raising your hand, I've decided to sell my company, you get this great multiple." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6047.475", "endTime": "6049.715", "body": "Mhmm. That that doesn't exist anymore." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6049.795", "endTime": "6050.195", "body": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6050.195", "endTime": "6056.2695", "body": "And so it kinda freaks me out. I'm like, okay. Well, I I don't know. It feels like you gotta take more things into your own hands?" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6056.8296", "endTime": "6062.59", "body": "Yeah. Yeah. When's that coming back? I want those 20 x multiples again. Those Oh, man." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6062.67", "endTime": "6064.59", "body": "20 times annual recurring revenue." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6064.59", "endTime": "6069.465", "body": "That's what I want. Smart people keep telling me that it's not coming back, and I do not want to believe them." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6069.625", "endTime": "6070.985", "body": "Yeah. I don't wanna believe them." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6071.705", "endTime": "6086.94", "body": "Yep. Yep. You know, someone asked me a very, very scary question recently. And they said, why should software companies that are not AIs, just traditional software companies, why should they get ARR multiples and not EBITDA multiples?" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6087.42", "endTime": "6087.98", "body": "Mhmm." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6087.98", "endTime": "6097.795", "body": "And I do not have a good answer for that other than, well, it hasn't happened historically, and I really, really, really don't want it to be that way, and therefore, I I'm gonna say no because I don't want it" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6098.035", "endTime": "6111.26", "body": "case that someone would make if they're if they're saying those multiples will never come back in the future? Like, what needs to be true in the next five to ten years that will just eliminate the value that that is created from SaaS and" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6111.5", "endTime": "6112.14", "body": "Well, I" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6112.86", "endTime": "6159.125", "body": "from a finance, like, perspective, I think the argument is that n r ARR never made sense because it's disconnected from return on investment compared to cash flow being a direct, you know, correlation to valuation and return on investment. And so if if a r if you look at ARR, which has no correlation to profitability or cash or return on investment or anything, it's just like, the here's the top line number. Mhmm. Irrespective of how much you're losing money or you're making money. Like, this it is a weird thing to not have any connection at all for evaluation to not have any connection at all to profitability or cash flow or or anything of the sort." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6159.765", "endTime": "6184.775", "body": "And so if you if you look at, like, a reframing of software evaluation outside of AI, and you're like, well, this is just a company, and it makes $10,000,000 and it loses $2,000,000 and therefore, I think it's kind of worthless. That's a decent argument compared to it makes $10,000,000 in revenue. It makes $2,000,000 in EBITDA. And so I can value it on the $2,000,000. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6184.775", "endTime": "6206.615", "body": "I'll give it a five x, a six x, an eight x because it's asset light and it's very efficient. Great. So you deserve a better EBITDA multiple than like a landscaping company that gets, you know, one or two x. But why would I possibly value you on your $10,000,000 in revenue when it has no connection at all to the return I would get on buying the company? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6206.615", "endTime": "6210.2153", "body": "And that that's, like that's so logical. I really don't wanna I wanna ignore it." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6210.2153", "endTime": "6225.3", "body": "Yeah. But the problem now is that now the the math has changed for both sides. So before, it was, like, listen. If you I'll sell this company if you give me 20 x. It's just for for as a founder, it makes sense." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6225.54", "endTime": "6250.15", "body": "But now if you're gonna base it on EBITDA, I'm thinking, why don't I just keep the EBITDA? Like, why would I sell to you for, you know, what you think it's gonna be worth? Like, five times EBITDA or whatever. It's like, I'll I'll just keep that five times EBITDA myself. I I the only advantage is it helps with my anxiety about the whole thing getting rug pulled from" }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6250.15", "endTime": "6250.71", "body": "me because" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6250.71", "endTime": "6251.75", "body": "I get the money upfront." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6251.75", "endTime": "6269.3647", "body": "Whatever you're saying, there's a clearing price. There's a price at which you say yes and a price at which you say no. And the only question is where does the market land on that? Yeah. Not on just one company, but across companies so that at least you have some sense of what what is the multiple range." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6270.165", "endTime": "6281.62", "body": "Yeah. Alright, team. We even went longer. You folks got a bonus. We were supposed to be done thirty minutes ago, but you got another that's called it's called a bonus round right there." }, { "speaker": "Jordan", "startTime": "6281.62", "endTime": "6287.06", "body": "This is this is three episodes in in in one. Every I think this was really good. It's free." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6287.06", "endTime": "6287.54", "body": "It's a good one." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6287.825", "endTime": "6303.23", "body": "I feel like thanks to Corey, by the way, for that feedback. If you've got feedback for the show, if there's something that you wanna see more of or less of, you can write you can email us. The email is in the show notes. I read them, And you won't hate" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6303.23", "endTime": "6303.8696", "body": "my feelings." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6304.75", "endTime": "6306.35", "body": "And Brian, don't if you want to say" }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6306.59", "endTime": "6307.87", "body": "We we get whatever Justin" }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6308.11", "endTime": "6320.155", "body": "Give us the hard truth. I'll filter everything to the everyone. But yeah. Love and also, we we need some more, recent reviews on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So do that as well." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6320.315", "endTime": "6326.395", "body": "And I love it when people comment on the YouTube videos. So please do that if you're watching on YouTube." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6326.76", "endTime": "6327.4795", "body": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Justin", "startTime": "6327.5596", "endTime": "6330.36", "body": "Other than that, we'll yeah. We'll see you guys later. Bye." }, { "speaker": "Brian Casel", "startTime": "6330.36", "endTime": "6331.0", "body": "Later, folks." } ] }