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All Your Contractors Are Belong To Us! S3E6

All Your Contractors Are Belong To Us!

This week The Founders give an update on their new contractor system and how to nurture an "I don't care" work culture. Plus don't miss Beavis and Butthead memories, Heroku integration speed bumps, and chopping chonky trees!

· 36:16

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Show Notes:
Links:
The Boys in The Boat
Founding Sales
All your base are belong to us
Write for us

Full Transcript:
Starr:
I loved Beavis and Butthead so much in the 90s.

Ben:
Yeah, it was awesome.

Starr:
I was prepared not to like it because all I heard was everybody talking about how stupid it was. And then I watched it. I was like, this is amazing. This is just my brand. I was the target demographic. I was, I don't know, 16 17.

Josh:
Yep.

Ben:
Yep. That's a great show.

Starr:
Yeah, so.

Ben:
There was some picture. I don't remember who it was. It was Josh Hawley and I can't remember who the person was. But they had them as Beavis and Butthead. They did a montage, had them in a picture together and it was pretty funny. 

Starr:
I feel like the children and their deep fried memes are the spiritual successor to the spiritual child of Beavis and Butthead.

Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh:
Could be Yeah.

Ben:
No doubt.

Starr:
Because Beavis and Butthead were pretty deep fried. So, this podcast is just all about giving. We all live in the Pacific Northwest. And this podcast is going to be all about giving our readers, I know, what does it feel like a sense of what it feels like to live in the Pacific Northwest because I've got a guy chainsawing right outside my window. They've got a wood chipper going. And it's an extremely Pacific Northwest thing. I've lived all over the country. And I've never lived in place for about a third of the time, you can hear a wood chipper in the background in a residential neighborhood.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
I think part of that is due to the trend here that I haven't seen anywhere else, of allowing 90 foot cedar trees to grow right next to the houses, right? And so at some point, someone's like, "You know what? We probably should take that down." And repeat that over and over again in every neighborhood around here.

Josh:
Speaking of, I have some chainsaw work to do right after this podcast. So we do live in a grove of cedar trees. And one of them fell in my backyard and took out my fence the other week so I've been working on that-

Starr:
Oh that's good.

Josh:
Slowly.

Starr:
So I learned, a what?

Ben:
You are going to be all set for firewood this winter then.

Josh:
Yeah, for sure. I've been all set for firewood since we moved in here, trees fall every year, it seems.

Starr:
One thing I learned when I started the permitting process for my backyard office is that Seattle has a concept of, I forget what exactly it's called, but it's like there is significant trees or important trees. There's an official designation for if a tree is worth living or if you can just kill it with impunity.

Ben:
Yeah. Kirkland is pretty uptight about that whole tree thing as well. In fact, apparently Kirkland is tree city USA, but there might be, I don't know, 5000 of those in the country. But anyway, for some reason, the people that owned my house before me or maybe the people that owned the house before them, decided to plant a nice Maple right close to the driveway. And that Maple over its lifetime, of course, grew and grew, and its roots grew and grew under the driveway and heading towards the foundation. And I'm like, I got to take this tree out. And the city of Kirkland was not terribly happy with the idea of me taking out this tree that had that designation. I don't know what they call it, substantial tree or something. But yeah, we actually, we have a policy in Kirkland. You can only remove two trees per year from your property. And you have to get special permission if the tree has a particular diameter of trunk. If it's been around long enough kind of thing. So-

Starr:
Oh, yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
That'd be the absolute unit designation.

Ben:
So I actually sent a Google Earth view of my house, my lot and I had to circle this tree and get permits to be able to remove it.

Starr:
And they're like, "Sorry sir that tree is a chonk, you can't remove that."

Josh:
What?

Starr:
That big boy's an absolute unit. You can't just cut him down.

Josh:
So Ben, what's it like living under tyranny?

Ben:
Well, and then tree removal service that, because I didn't want to do it myself. I'm not that manly. They came out and the contract was if you get sued by the city, then it's all you basically, they disclaim any liability of getting in trouble with the law.

Starr:
Oh, that's funny.

Josh:
Do they have tree lawyers or do they hire.

Ben:
They have the tree police that go out every year. And they look for the tress gone missing.

Starr:
Well, actually, I did, so when I was permitting my shed or my office, I call it the shed, but it's actually a pretty nice office at this point. I was originally going to have it on the other side of the lot, but that was too close to the roots of this special tree, which is good. I don't want to kill the tree. So I'm glad that they told me that. I don't care what side I build it on. But there are actually tree lawyers and tree laws. And it's a whole big deal with forestry. Let me tell you a little bit. This is just going to be the gossip episode where I just tell you all about all my family's dirty laundry. So my sister, my half sister, I've got several siblings and my half sister is 20 years older than me. And she got a little weird there and got a little hostile towards the rest of the family. And essentially, the family owns in common this little plot of land in Mountainburg Arkansas, it's just forest, it's pretty useless. It's not even really flat enough to build on.

Starr:
You'd really have to go in and clear it out and bulldozer it to make it a decent place for our house or anything. And so, she is not an owner due to some complications, she sold her part or something like that. But anyway, later on, several years ago, she went and hired a forestry company to cut down all the trees on the land and sell them to-

Josh:
Log it.

Starr:
Yeah, to log it and give her the money, the proceeds which is a pretty shitty thing to do, right?

Josh:
Industrious?

Starr:
Yeah. So anyway-

Josh:
Just take the initiative.

Starr:
So of course, we had to sue her. Just because I don't know it is just out of principle. Anyway, it was such a paltry sum of money, but it ended up being a principle of the thing. But yes, there's lots of laws about cutting down other people's trees. This is something people have really dealt with in the past.

Josh:
Well, if you're going to go into law, tree law seems like a pretty good way to go.

Starr:
Very stable.

Josh:
There will probably be trees in the future. Have you all, back to the Pacific Northwest, have you seen the pictures of the trees back before the whole, the Pacific Northwest was logged, back in the day?

Starr:
It was amazing.

Josh:
Pictures of entire logging crews sitting on the stumps of these trees. That was 20 people or something.

Ben:
Yeah, I was just reading actually, the book, The boys in the boat. It's the story of US Olympic team, rowing team in 1936. And they were from the Seattle area. They were the University of Washington crew. And so there's a lot of Seattle area history mixed in with this book. And they followed one of the members of the crew, his name is Joe and followed basically his life story. And he lived out in Sequim for a while. This is during the Depression era and so he had zero money. And he learned from a friend how to do various things that were handy enough to that someone would want to pay for. And one of the things that was interesting is they would go behind the logging crews who were chopping down these chute cedars and taking what to them was useful like cedar shingles was a thing.

Ben:
And so they would take the core, the straightest part of the tree and just leave the rest. And so Joe and his friend would go behind them, and get the rest of the tree that was left there on the ground. And then carve it up and sell their own shingles. That's pretty clever. It's a great book, though, check it out. It's so well written. It's so well written that, by the end when they're talking about the Olympics and talking about the race, there's so much drama. I was really engaged. How's this going to go? Even though I already knew the end, Right? But still it was really cool.

Josh:
Yeah. Well get your affiliate link.

Starr:
Oh, yeah. Right.

Josh:
This is how we're monetizing the podcast.

Starr:
That's going to pay for the second. We're just going to second mortgage, second house, a second mortgage is not a second house, that's a very different thing.

Ben:
Well, I have anticipated further problems with my tree situation, because my lot has a few more old trees, legacy trees that are going to need to go at some point. And so what I've done to avoid any future problems is I've planted more trees on my lot so that by the time I'm ready to cut down the ones that go down, I have some replacement trees ready to go.

Josh:
Yeah. There you go.

Starr:
It's just all trees. There's no place to walk. Well, what happened this week? I didn't do anything this, I did stuff this week but I look back on it. It's like, I didn't get anything done this week. I realized yesterday, Thursday that I ended up with a schedule where I got zoom meetings every day. And I realized also because I've never had a schedule this. I've never done so many freaking calls in my life. In the morning, I get to choose what I do. I can be like, get on calls, social Starr or I can be don't talk to me, I'm looking at my computer Starr. And I can't choose one of those per day to be. And so if I take a call, I fall into the social thing. And then it's just really hard for me to do any work. I don't know why, it's just really hard for me to get in the mindset, the frame of mind.

Ben:
So it sounds like you did a lot of work this week. It was just all talking work.

Starr:
I did a lot of calls. That's for sure. But yeah, we're getting some PHP authors. So that's exciting.

Ben:
Awesome.

Josh:
Cool.

Ben:
And Josh, this week got some PHP developers.

Josh:
Yeah, I've been sending email this week. Not something I normally do. But yeah, we're building out our little contract developer team. And I think we got a few people interested and excited about that.

Ben:
So the Starr is making calls, Josh is sending emails, I was doing a lot of backfilling. I've had backfilling scripts running all week, and we're now ready to cut over for Dynamo. And by Monday we are ready to cut over for Elastic search.

Starr:
That's amazing.

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
So I think I'm going to roll the dice. And I'm going to cut over both at the same time on Monday. I can see both of you cringing as I said that.

Starr:
Why not?

Ben:
This is funny.

Josh:
Did I tell you Ben, I'm going to be on vacation Monday.

Ben:
So we were having dinner last night and I was telling my family about the day and I was mentioning about this cut over thing. And I said, yeah, I've got the code ready. And I was ready to cut over Dynamo but there's a little bit of code that really depends on the new Elasticsearch and I was like, well, I could take that out and just deploy the Dynamo stuff now. But I think I'm just going to deploy it all at once and wait, and my son is like, "That sounds like a bad idea." And I'm like, "I have trained you well."

Josh:
Smart kid. I just had the picture of Ben's dinner table, by the way, with a white giant whiteboard next to it. So he can get up and diagram all his stuff out. That's it, that's a pretty technical dinner talk, Ben.

Ben:
I'm picturing myself as that conspiracy guy with the strings on the pictures and stuff-

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
There you go.

Josh:
Dad's getting the whiteboard again.

Starr:
You want to know the first thing that went through my mind when he said that and this requires a little bit of setup, so bear with me, but so last week, I was making jokes about buying call options on GameStop. And I didn't do that, because I learned that so little tip for the readers or the listeners, when they list the price of an option on the internet, that's per share. That's not for the whole contract of 100 shares. So yeah, I was like, this is going be 100 times more expensive than I thought it was. So no, forget that. But I was like okay, this is interesting. So I'll read a book about options and learn about them. And so the second you said that I was just like, got to buy a put option against us. It makes no sense.

Josh:
Everything.

Starr:
Yeah, it's just going to be like Wolf of Wall Street in here all day long.

Ben:
That makes me think we should launch a new product. It should be markets, that way you can bet on your your internal ops team's performance, right, if you know a big release is coming up.

Starr:
That would be great for morale. We would love that, yeah. We can incorporate it into Honeybadger. People could bet on who caused an error.

Josh:
There you go.

Ben:
Hey, I like that. Maybe you'd bet on your competitors.

Starr:
But backfilling wasn't the only thing I did this week, I also had some bad news. The bad news is that the approach that I took for the Heroku provisioning portion of Hook Relay is not what they would like to see they being Heroku. So I might have to redo that.

Starr:
That was a shame.

Ben:
There was some documentation that I missed, and they came back and they're like, "No, we really don't want to approve you, because you're not doing this this way." I'm like, "What are we talking about?" They're like, "See this documentation?" It's like, "Oh man, I did not see that documentation."

Josh:
And there was documentation?

Ben:
Well, it's very well hidden in my defense. Yeah, it's like, sub paragraph of a subsection, hidden under a filing cabinet with a lion in front of it saying. But and then also discovered that I thought we had had enough alpha testers test, but in fact, we have not had enough alpha testers test, because the requirement is you have to have 10 Alpha customers who have provisioned the add on. And we have not reached 10 yet, I've invited more than 10 but I guess I didn't keep close enough track as who's actually using the thing. And so yeah, we've got some work to do there so that's a bummer.

Ben:
Yeah, Heroku would know that that Yeah. But good on them that I asked them to double check, because I thought they were saying, well, you only have X number provisioned. And I'm like, "Well, maybe someone provisioned and then deprovisioned, right? So could you check your logs?" And they came back and they're like "Yeah, we checked the logs, we know what we're talking about." So yeah, I'm going to have to do some work there, I think or maybe hire a contractor to do that work for me.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
There you go. This all seems a little bit more rigid than when we started with Heroku. It feels like when we started with Heroku, they were like, sure, just slap the Heroku menu on your app, it's done.

Josh:
I'm positive that we did not know what we were doing as much as we know now. So we probably made many more mistakes.

Ben:
Yes. During this process, I thought, I sure hope they don't decide to go look at the Honeybadger add on. Because hopefully, we're grandfathered into the old ways of doing things there.

Josh:
Yeah, what happened? Why is it gotten harder to-

Ben:
Yeah, well, you know.

Josh:
To start a business? Start a SaaS?

Ben:
They have good reasons. They're a bigger company now, they got bought by Salesforce, what, 10 years ago now. And they have to, they've gone into, and I think since we've launched Honeybadger, they've gone more into supporting bigger enterprises and so they have a better story to tell, like around compliance and private spaces and things like that. So they're pretty touchy when it comes to security issues and making sure that you're all on the up and up.

Josh:
Makes sense.

Ben:
For a new add on, well, for coming like Honeybadger who is used to doing that kind of stuff now that we've gone through the compliance thing it's not so surprising, but if Hook Relay was our first go round and I've built this and I got that kind of feedback, I'd be like, "that's hardcore," right? So, yeah, it's getting harder, but I think that's just the nature of the beast. There's so many bad actors out there who want to take advantage of you that you got to be defensive.

Starr:
So you're saying that when we were initially approved, they didn't quite know what they were doing? And since then they've learned a lot more about what they were doing?

Josh:
Things change. It was just the Wild West back then.

Ben:
And it was a kinder, gentler internet.

Starr:
Yeah. I miss it, I miss the kinder, gentler internet before all the terribleness.

Josh:
Before the internet was ruined.

Ben:
But it was good week. I'm excited to have that backfilling stuff done and get the cutover done.

Josh:
Yeah, well I might still get to some React Native stuff this afternoon. That is my stretch goal. That was, this stuff just keeps getting pushed back and back by this, sometimes I forget how much work we actually have just sitting across all these different repositories and things that I maintain. And the effect that that has on me as just hanging over my head constantly. This week, I've been trying to go through everything and find someone to handle, someone to basically assign to cover all of that stuff. But then in the process, I'm getting distracted by it again. And then, of course, we have issues coming in, new things popping up constantly. So we had a few of those and then we've got the inevitable support requests that come in, we've got some source map, issues and debugging, so little debugging projects popping up here and there.

Josh:
By the end of the week, I realize, I've pretty much just spent the whole week doing support and pretty much writing and documentation is what I spent, I think, most of my time doing, but sometimes it just feels like you didn't get anything done. But I know I worked a lot. So hopefully all that documentation pays off.

Ben:
Laying that foundation.

Josh:
Yeah. But yeah, I'm excited to, I would really love to, because that was my goal, for this week was on Monday, I was going start on testing out this React Native integration that we're trying to roll out. It's Friday, and I haven't even looked at it yet.

Starr:
Yeah, sorry. My main goal this week was, I'm just going to lay, I've got about 20 blog posts, I need to write descriptions for and that's it. I'm just going to sit down and do it this week. And I haven't done a single one because I just so much stuff has come up in the meantime.

Josh:
Yeah, I will say that, I think I did really well this week resisting the urge to actually dive in on work that would distract me for, if I kept doing it, it would distract me for months, probably. So my goal is to really finally get serious about delegation. And so instead of actually, when something, when I see an issue that's nagging at me, and I'm like, oh, I could jump in and fix that and that's my instinct, this week, instead of actually just diving in and seeing if it was a quick fix or something, I'm just documenting the process of what I would do to address that issue. And then just putting in an issue for someone else, hopefully soon to take on. So basically spending that time just documenting the problem which will make it easier to pass off to someone.

Starr:
Yeah, you spent a lot of time writing a document about how this contracting system will work, how we're going to manage contractors going forward. And we had that call on Monday and that was really interesting. That was, I felt like you had a really solid, need to come up with a really solid foundation for building this contracting system on top of.

Josh:
It's funny, I forgot, as I've been fleshing that out, I forgot how much, I'd actually started on this, a couple years ago. And so, half of this was already completed somewhere or in process, so. I think that's helped. I had been building this out and just never brought it completely into reality. So I'm hoping that this time, it'll actually, we'll be able to make it work and it seems yeah, I'm pretty excited about it.

Starr:
You shouldn't have told me that because I was impressed. So I was just like it's been two weeks and your made the whole document.

Josh:
Well, it's still impressive Starr. It's pretty great.

Starr:
Yeah, it is pretty great. Time is an illusion. The past doesn't exist so you've brought forth this little thing, this document. I'm just going to start talking in hippie words from now on, that's going to be my thing.

Josh:
The document exists now, but honestly, I think that's probably still the easy part. The hard part is creating some cohesive community around the people that participate in this ultimately. And keeping people engaged, because our problem has always been, we don't always have, we have a lot of ongoing long term work that we'd like to engage people with. But for contractors, it's you get a big job, and you tend to move on, and it's hard to keep people around long enough to, a lot of times people will just get distracted or wander off. And we're trying to create some team. I want a team dynamic that we can rally around or something. So, I want an active Slack channel where we can hang out and -

Starr:
That'd be really cool.

Josh:
Actually work together.

Starr:
So one thing I am curious about, and I imagine that as you move forward in this, you're going to try lots of different things and we'll see what works. I'm curious about whether or not it'll be any easier or harder to get people to do jobs that are very, what's the word I'm looking for? Very finite and well defined and concrete, right? So, I'm curious, because one model of working with a contractor is to be like okay, so we're going to pay you, however many dollars an hour. And here's a list of things, go to town on them. Another way of doing it is be like, okay, you can do this one thing for us, and we'll pay you X dollars, or x hours at your hourly rate. And so, I'm curious, if those will get different responses in terms of interest. Yeah, because that's going to be, like if I was working a full time job, which I'm currently not.

Josh:
Same.

Starr:
But no, if I was looking for extra work on top of my normal job, I wouldn't want to do a hourly thing where I'm supposed to go in and pick up tickets, really, but I might be like, okay, I've got five hours, I can do this one project. So I don't know, it'd be interesting to see how that works.

Josh:
Yeah, like the open source metaphor. And I mean it works here, especially because these projects are open source for the most part. But I think eventually, if we have a group of contractors, we're going to be able to utilize them across the whole company. We could work on our Rails app and do other things eventually, but treating it like an open source project, with those well defined, finite issues and things like I don't know, it seems like people do, like you said people do, who are even employed full time, do still sometimes find time to contribute to an open source project, or knockout an issue that they ran into during their day job or something. So, it seems like, that could translate and I mean you get paid for it with us, which is always a nice plus. So the thing that I worked on this week that I think is important that I had not created before, is coming up with how we're going to actually handle the project management side of this whole thing, because we don't do project management really.

Josh:
And I want to keep it that way. I want to create an environment where everyone is individually responsible for the work that they sign up for. So, if you take on a job or take on an issue, for instance, if you're submitting a pull request or something to a open source project, you're going to be in charge of figuring it out and submitting it. And you don't have a manager who's trying to keep you on track for that necessarily. So I want it to be, I'm trying to figure out how to have it be up to, everyone feels responsible for the work they're taking on while at the same time creating an environment where it's all about helping each other move forward. So it's not necessarily that oh, well, it's just on your shoulders, and you just have to deliver. But it's like, you're responsible for the ultimate success of this thing happening. And that means that it's your responsibility to ask for help if you're stuck. And once you ask for help, you have more help than you could ever need, basically.

Starr:
Yeah, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about one aspect of the blog contracting, that I don't know, it might play a role in this whole building of a team and fostering that community. And it just might be something that needs to be accounted for but at least for me, I find that most of the people I talked to about doing blog posts, and who were like, yeah, I'll do a blog post, never write a blog post. And I'm not blaming them, right? Life happens. Maybe they got in touch thinking that we want some little 500 word BS, like search engine optimization piece. And we're like, no, you need to do a textbook chapter. And they're just like, okay, forget that. And they just ghost me but one thing I've tried to do is I've tried to foster this sense of, I don't care.

Starr:
I personally don't care, if you take a month to get back to me, or two months or whatever. People come, you can come you can go, I'm not going to get mad at you, if you take three months to write an article. And I may have to do certain things to keep my project going, right? I may have to flag your article as stale or something and put it in a different category so it's not clogging up the system. But that's not personal and just come back and you can finish the article if you want, sure.

Josh:
I like that a lot.

Starr:
So it's less of a dynamic, where it's less of a startup dynamic, where it's like, okay, there's five of us and we're all just living and breathing this stuff. And we're all up each other's butts all the time. And it's more of a, here's a nice little coffee shop, you can come and hang out for a little while, if you want. And then you can leave and we'll see you next month.

Josh:
Right. And then you're also get paid to be there.

Starr:
Yeah, exactly. We could buy a literal coffee shop for people to work in, wouldn't it be great?

Ben:
Once you can actually sit in a coffee shop again. That'll be nice.

Starr:
Coffee shops are really cheap right now. It's a buyers market.

Ben:
I got to say that, having the opportunity to do a lot of I'll buy a coffee type meetings via zoom, rather than actually going somewhere to a coffee shop. Love it. And I really appreciate, thank you COVID, for that particular thing, I do appreciate that.

Josh:
Removing that constraint-

Ben:
Coffee shops are cool, I got nothing against them. But just to go and chat with someone for 15 minutes, you have drive across town and. I'm happy doing that via zoom.

Starr:
One thing that occurred to me is that, we've talked about, hiring a salesperson. And in my mind, these high powered enterprise software sales people are always on flights going out to people and stuff. And I wonder, since, pandemic happens, I'm sure that'll come back to some degree, but I also have a feeling people will be much more open to doing things via zoom. And so, it may be possible to have somebody who just stays in the office and does those things. And that's going to be much more acceptable.

Ben:
Yeah, I was actually reading this week, a book called Founding Sales. And it's about how to go from being a founder to being the salesperson. And so it's exactly for people like me, who need to figure out the sales stuff. And I'm early in the book, but so far it's good. But one of the, a throwaway comment in there was talking about getting outside of the building, going and visiting your customers and you hear about this advice, plenty of places, but just there's something about it struck me as funny as like, oh, yes this was written pre pandemic, because he's talking about, you going and visiting someone in their office, and you've got to have that Facetime. I'm like, yeah those are the days.

Josh:
That's that's how to save time.

Starr:
I've got FaceTime? We can do that.

Ben:
But yeah, I started on that this week. So I read that book. And I have an idea, actually. So I've also been chatting with a couple of mentors and just really smart folk about our current situation and wanting to get into the sales game and had some really good conversations about why do you want to do that? And what are you thinking and stuff? So it's been helpful. And one of the ideas that fell out of those conversations was, and I don't know if this is actually going to work or if I'm actually going to do this, but it's just a thought.

Ben:
What if I went through our existing customers, and looked at those customers that are parts of larger organizations, and I go to them and say, hey, you are using Honeybadger, you love using Honeybadger. You probably have some other teams at your company that aren't using honey badger. How about you introduce me to them. Or find some way to get more Honeybadger into your business so the land and expand? This is not a new strategy. But I'm just thinking maybe for us, that's a good entryway as opposed to just dialing for dollars, right?

Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
Just going with relationships, we already have people like us, and finding ways to get them to help us expand in their works.

Starr:
That's really cool. I had assumed we would contact you some existing customers, but I assumed that would be like a trying to upsell them thing. But I forget that, big companies have lots of teams inside of them. So you could sell Honeybadger to like 50 teams inside of a company.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. So-

Josh:
Is that a situation where the other teams would like purchase a new account? Or would it be under the same account of the company, but then it would just result in more usage?

Ben:
I think both of those scenarios could happen easily. Yeah.

Josh:
Cool.

Ben:
So we're going to be doing some queries next week, and pulling out some of our good customers, we, this pro tip to people who are SaaS operators, what we do in our helpdesk system is when we have people give us kudos, we flag that particular response with a testimonial tag. And so we can easily go back to people who we know, love us and had great experiences with us. Because we can just filter on that tag. And so I think I'll be running some query this week and cross referencing our testimonial people, and finding out some good potentials to talk to sending out some emails. One of the things that so one of the early points in this book was this idea that you have to change your mindset, because again he's writing to people who are engineers, or product people or, maybe marketing people, but generally people who have not done sales before. And so the first part of the book is changing your mindset. Like, one of his points was, you're used to thinking things through, and planning things out and being very deliberate about the stuff and he's like, really sales is different, sales is, you just need to be talking to people, you just need to have activity, you just need to be making things happen, like

Starr:
Wheeling and dealing.

Ben:
Not exactly, well, yes. But also why don't we Yeah-

Starr:
Snapping your fingers a lot.

Ben:
Exactly. One of the specific points was instead of spending 10 minutes, reviewing the email to make sure that it sounds perfect, just send it right and move on to the next one email.

Starr:
That explains a lot of sales emails I've received.

Ben:
Yes it does.

Ben:
Yeah, very little proofreading going on.

Starr:
How I sit Yeah. I seriously sometimes I look up and it's like, I've spent an hour editing this like one paragraph email and sending to somebody I don't really care about.

Starr:
Why do I do that? I don't know.

Ben:
There's your sales tip for the day, maybe off the main theme, a regular feature of the FounderQuest podcast, come up with a sales Tip of the Week.

Josh:
A sales tip.

Starr:
That's cool. I love it when you often talk to people who know what they're doing, and then you come back and tell us what they say I'm pretty bad at that. So it's-

Ben:
We should do more of that.

Starr:
I always really enjoy hearing what comes comes out of it.

Ben:
So yeah, we'll see what happens.

Starr:
Oh, cool. I'm all up for becoming a hardcore hard driven sales or organization right? Coffee's for closers. Greed is good.

Ben:
Slap the top of that thing, "you fit so many errors in this."

Starr:
You can fit so many errors in there. You know how many errors you can fit into the trunk of a Mercedes? I don't know either but it's a lot more than a Honda.

Ben:
Buy now. Supplies are limited. We only have so many bits.

Starr:
You've been listening to FounderQuest. And go give us a review at Apple Podcasts or whatever they call it now and yeah if you want to write for us go our blog look for the write for us page and I'm drowning in new authors right now so it I may not be able to get to for a while but contact us and until next week we are the FounderQuest people. I guess.

Ben:
Beavis and Butthead shall return.

Starr:
Oh no.

Josh:
He did it.

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