CEOInterviews.AI69: Sound, Actionable Advice with Jason Cohen

H

Host0:00

Hey everybody. Normally I would be starting off this podcast by welcoming Derek, but instead I have a guest. Derek has left me all alone to fly solo, but fortunately I have a co-pilot today, and it is Mr. Jason Cohen. Hey, Jason.

J

Jason Cohen0:13

Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I didn't realize I had to fly, though. That's uh I guess I need to put the booze down now.

H

Host0:20

Yeah, you can't. People can't see this, but Jason is chugging from a large bottle of bourbon regularly.

J

Jason Cohen0:26

It was a large bottle of bourbon.

H

Host0:28

Exactly. Now it's just a bottle. Um, so in just in case you have not heard of Jason, he is a four-time entrepreneur. He's done bootstrapping. He's done fundraising. Uh, currently he is the CTO of WP Engine, which you started off bootstrapping and then raised money for and now is enormous, like 700 employees or something.

J

Jason Cohen0:47

Only 615.

H

Host0:50

Okay. So, a relatively small enterprise.

J

Jason Cohen0:54

If you establish the baseline at 700, then it's small.

H

Host0:58

That's true. Yes, comparatively. So, we'll go back and like pricing logic, you know, you have to set the frame up and it can feel like it's expensive or not.

J

Jason Cohen1:08

I can't. Anchoring is such a powerful, ridiculous brain hack. I can't even believe it's like legal. Like, you shouldn't be able to do it.

H

Host1:13

Well, fortunately, you know it. Although, even when you know it, it's still difficult to ignore it.

J

Jason Cohen1:19

That's the thing. Yeah. Like if only knowing your cognitive biases meant they didn't work anymore, right?

H

Host1:26

Yeah, that'd be great. So, I saw you on Justin's podcast and live stream extravaganza, and I really liked what you were saying. I appreciate your sort of semi-contrarian, no BS kind of tell it like it is attitude, I guess. And also, I didn't realize that you did podcasts, so I was like, 'All right, I got to get him over here.' I don't know.

J

Jason Cohen1:45

Well, I don't know if I would say it was contrarian.

H

Host1:48

That's a joke.

J

Jason Cohen1:48

Um, yeah, that's fair. I mean, contrarian by saying it's not semi. Okay, never mind.

H

Host1:53

Yeah, right. You backed yourself into a tautology, anti-tautology. I appreciate anyone that will talk straight with people. And I got the sense that like Justin was kind of hoping you would say, 'Yeah, you can work on this business about 10 hours a week and that'll be fine. Like don't worry about it too much.' And you were like, 'Nope, no way. Sorry.'

J

Jason Cohen2:12

Right. What's nice about being straight even if it kind of hurts is that you can get right to the solutions. Like just stop beating around the bush about what's going on or what's wrong and just, and it's nobody's fault. Like just stop it. Let's just call it what it is. And then let's spend all the time thinking about what could we do? What are some options? Can we weigh those? What could I try? Like let's just get to that part and stop arguing about how that works. Let's just get to it.

H

Host2:38

Have you seen Paul Graham give advice to startups?

J

Jason Cohen2:41

Um, not in person. Of course, I think many of us have seen the advice in the form of blog posts and tweets. I think it's a great example of there's a common phrase people give advice to themselves. Meaning, but what I would sort of amend a little and say people have a certain thing in mind when they give advice and it's often themselves because we're all egotistical and of course I'm not an exception. But there's certain goals you have in mind or a certain context. Like for him it's you got to change the world and make something huge. And so that's the context and so the advice is in that context. And so is that advice still accurate if you're a bootstrapper and you don't want to be the next Facebook? Is that still, and you don't want to be a Y Combinator company, which of course is what the advice is tuned for, Y Combinator style companies. So if that's not you then is the advice right? And the answer is sometimes. Because some advice is more universal or maybe there's other reasons why it's right for you. Maybe it's not. So the closer you can get to an advisor who either naturally is aligned with you because they have the same kinds of goals and attitudes and worldviews and life trade-offs as you, and so even though they're talking about themselves, that works. That's one way. Or someone who's conscientious and sort of aware enough to ask lots and lots of questions first to try to understand those very same topics so that hopefully the advice is tuned.

H

Host4:01

So, the reason I brought him up in particular is because I feel like he has a like 0% buffer before he's like, 'Stop talking. I have another question for you.' kind of thing. Like, the questions are great and his suggestions, at least for the type of companies he advises, I think are great. It's like if you had to condense everything down into 10 minutes, he just dispensing with all of the sort of pleasantries, subtleties, all that normal social stuff.

J

Jason Cohen4:24

That's good. They're boring anyway.

H

Host4:27

Yeah. And especially if you're advising like a 100 companies or whatever they were doing, I have to imagine you really need to do that. You touched on this thing that I wanted to ask you about, which is advice that's any good starts with like an hour of the advisor asking you questions about what your goals are.

J

Jason Cohen4:43

Yeah.

H

Host4:44

And did you come to that conclusion because you had bad advice in the past that wasn't tailored for you?

J

Jason Cohen4:50

I'm not sure how I came to that conclusion, but I think it's more as I give advice to others, I've realized that I'm speaking from my own experience and all those other things I just mentioned. I don't have to repeat them. And that's not necessarily right for people. I also, I don't know, maybe a decade ago had a presentation, you know, one of these go to conferences presentation on this topic of advice and how to know if the advice is good, how to take advice. And I started with this premise which I think is still true which is if you find any advice whatsoever I can find you someone else who's very smart and successful who will tell you to do the opposite no matter what. Anything. Um, the thing about being able to do it on the side. DHH says you can do it 10 hours on the side, even though that's not actually what they do with 37signals, it turns out. But anyway, Zell says so. You can find it and he's smart and very successful. So, what the hell? And then you can find many people saying no, you have to work very hard. Easy to find both sides. You could find people that say you have to be good at social media like Twitter. And other people that say, look, I built a million, a hundred million dollar bootstrap business without ever using social media. It's easy to find all those. So given that, what do you then do? Because that means none of the advice is necessarily the make or break. And probably it's not true either that like well that's because advice is just good and bad and you can't tell. Like probably all that advice is good for somebody and all of it is bad for somebody probably. So then it's not really about the advice, is it? It's really about like okay so how do I know what's right for me? And so that's how I eventually got to this notion of it has to be tuned to your context, goals, etc. All those things we just said go into more detail on those things, I guess. And so then the advice giver is usually not introspective enough or conscientious enough to know that. Therefore, they're just giving advice. Therefore, that's not helpful. So the conscientious person knows this and therefore asks a bunch of questions. What are you trying to achieve? In what time frame? Do you care about money more than being at home? Do you care about changing the world? And if so, what does that even mean to you? Because it means very different things to different people, as it should, right? And I mean, there's maybe 20 questions on big questions like that easily that you could ask to really understand what a person's trying to do and what their strengths are and what they should avoid and help they may need or things they should ignore. Then you start getting into, okay, here are some real options that address the situation you're in and are consistent with things you're actually trying to do. And now we're into the realm of good advice. Or at least the chance of good advice, right?

H

Host7:27

Yeah. It might still be bad.

J

Jason Cohen7:29

Yeah. Well, who knows? You can't run life twice, right? You can only run it once, which is all just to say, don't obsess about the damn advice. Try to think for yourself. Try to limit it to a couple of main things that you're going to decide based on a couple of main ideas and then move on. Because even if you have great advice from a really good advisor, it's still not, still maybe who knows. And the exception is when it's very black and white stuff such as, hey, what's the employment law in Texas about X? Okay, now there's an answer and so that's good. You can get an advisor that gives you the answer and that's a good thing. And if you learn that, then you have some experience you can bring forward. Good. So, I mean, there is such a thing as stuff that's just correct, but it's few and far between and usually not the strategic important stuff.

H

Host8:14

I like this actually point here of even if the advice were perfect for you, like amazing advice period and perfect for you, even then that's not really enough. Like all you know is like a blueprint at this point, but everything after this is execution, which is the hard part.

J

Jason Cohen8:29

And random and luck and stuff like maybe you say, 'Look, there's these three options.' and you weigh it all and option A is the best way to reduce risk and increase upside and maybe let's just say for the sake of argument you could prove it even though you can't, you prove it right, but there's still a chance for upside and there's a chance for risk and so even if it was the best bet that doesn't mean it comes up right. You know the best poker players clearly have skill that's why they're always at the last table because skill, but they don't always win because luck. Right? Like so this same thing except we have less skill and there's more luck.

H

Host9:05

Do you still advise people at Capital Factory?

J

Jason Cohen9:07

Only like one or two because I don't have any time and I certainly haven't done any new investments in a long time because WP Engine has taken all the time and I don't want to dilute time. And I am clear that I want to do WP Engine and I want to be at home and since I'm clear on those two things I don't do other stuff. I used to have other hobbies and I used to mess with companies at the Capital Factory more and now I don't because I'm clear on that.

H

Host9:31

Does this position, your philosophy on advice come from trying to advise other people on the regular?

J

Jason Cohen9:36

Yes. Especially in the early days of Capital Factory, which is sort of like Austin's version of what started out as Austin's version of Y Combinator when both were small when it was like a class of five or 10 for a summer. That's what we did, too. Now, Capital Factory is hundreds of companies. Some are co-working, some are inside of a funding program. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on with it. Um but early on there were many startups that came through some of which were in a program. So there you know kind of intense advisory and investment and others sort of just there and so by observation you can see some things and just by talking to a lot of founders you sort of get a certain sense of different kinds of personalities and what things and you kind of see what things work. None of that's very scientific obviously but you do get a gut feel of stuff and that's where this comes from. I don't have data that shows you should ask the following questions, right? This is just experience and trying to formulate something, right?

H

Host10:28

And did you experience like finding your advice kind of out of joint with the people that you were talking to that made you realize like, oh, I'm not thinking enough about the context of these people I'm advising?

J

Jason Cohen10:38

Yeah. So what would happen is they would say well here's our situation and let's say especially in the context of an incubator you're usually talking about raising money because that's what incubators sort of gear you to most of them not all. A lot of times the idea wasn't very big or the traction wasn't very good the story wasn't really one that would excite an investor and so I would say that I say look you know that you're saying these things and investors turn off when you say that because you know whatever the reason is. Um you emphasize the team but this team is not very investable because you don't have previous experience. Now if you were just bootstrapping, who cares? Don't even have a team slide. In fact, don't have a slide, get back to work. What are you doing? Right? The very fact you're pitching means you're pitching to an investor. Like I don't know why else you'd pitch. And then this team slide is bad because these are not the qualities that an investor is looking for. But there are different qualities we can emphasize that are what the investor is looking for. And you can be more honest. Going back to what you just said about appreciating being honest and straightforward just be honest and say look this isn't the normal team that you see. So then how would you overcome that with an investor if the team isn't normally investable because you don't have prior successes blah blah blah. What would you do? Well you could say well we could prove that we are a learning machine. We could prove that every month we learn stuff change it and the business gets materially better and we never stop doing that. In other words, we could overcome the fact that we don't have previous success to point at by saying, 'We are such an engine for building a great company that we know how to do this.' And you just really emphasize it. Have proof points. Show look, we saw this, so we changed that, and then this was the result. We saw this other thing, we changed this, and this result was negative. So, we did this, and then it was positive. And then, and like you tell these stories, and no one cares what your bio is because who cares? You're able to do this, and that's obvious. So, let's deemphasize the team and emphasize these other things. Now, all this though is talking to someone in the sense that they want to go raise money. But then sometimes at the end of all that they go, but you know, honestly, I don't care about impressing that person. I'm like, well, what you don't? They're like, no, why not? Because I don't want to raise money. I don't want anyone telling me what to do. Well, then why are you in a pitch practice? Oh, they just said it would be good practice. But see, so the whole thing is like, wait a minute, the goals were different. So, none of this advice was any good.

H

Host12:57

Yeah, you just said something there. I liked a lot which is you characterize a company as a learning machine.

J

Jason Cohen13:02

Mhm.

H

Host13:02

I dig that a lot.

J

Jason Cohen13:04

You're constantly failing. You're constantly not doing the right thing and you have no resources at all. You don't have brand recognition. You don't have money. You don't have a big customer base to motivate. Your social media has four followers. Like you don't have enough time. You have nothing. Right? So, one of the few things that you have when you're little is you can move really, you can change directions really fast because you don't have any of those things like customers. Um, you can make changes. You can change the product or the brand or how you sell or the pricing or what features are there or delete features. You have the ability to move really fast. So, you should do that like you should use the advantage that you have that your bigger competitors cannot do. It's one of the few things you can do. Another one is being really human. Big company's a big company. Every time you call them, you get a different person. That's the nature of it. You're not when you're little. You should use that. You should be on the homepage and you should be on social and you so that people have a personal connection. That doesn't scale. That's okay. Who cares? A maybe you never want to scale. So that's fine. Or B, you do, but like first you have to get to the point where scaling is a problem. So move like on ways that a big company cannot do. So these are some of the few advantages you have. To me like you must take advantage of them since you have so few advantages when small. You got to. So one of them is this agility that you just mentioned which is to learn fast and react to it. A big company can't even if a big company learned fast it can't react fast and also it probably doesn't learn fast. So be a learning machine that's always getting better and that is a good recipe for since most of what you're doing isn't quite right yet by definition.

H

Host14:45

You touched on something that stands out to me a lot, which is embracing your humanity and your smallness. And I've seen friends running like one person businesses that talk about themselves as 'we' in their like marketing copy. And I know why you would do that. I understand that the feeling of smallness or insignificance. I think that would cause you to do that. But I think we're on the same page that this just, it's you're abandoning something actually that's useful.

J

Jason Cohen15:08

So the issue with that and I've done it too. I did it at Smart Bear for sure. So it's not like I'm not guilty of these things. The problem is that you cannot in fact act like a bigger company. You will not deliver like a larger company will deliver and that will come out and then it's embarrassing because then it's clear that you've kind of lied. The usual reason why you say 'we' and like act like it's huge is like but see this way people will trust us and become customers of us. And what will happen is though they expect 'we' to answer the phone and emails all the time because 'we' is enough people to do that and that when they do then they do talk to you they talk to different people because there's 'we' talk to the same person all the time it's not 'we' and they detect that. So in other words you're doing it to build trust. Trust that you're big but you've done exactly the opposite. You've destroyed trust because you lied and it's going to come out when they interact with you. How come you barely ever release features and barely answer the email? Well, because there's one of me. Now, on the other hand, if you're honest in the first place, there's one of me. People are actually happy with it. Why the email takes so long? Because it's just me. Oh, cool.

H

Host16:21

Like, it's just the reverse. It's like, that's awesome. I'm so glad I'm supporting an independent person that's badass.

J

Jason Cohen16:28

Oh, the servers went down. Like, yeah, because it's just me. Like, oh, that's okay, man. And that happened to us at WP Engine early on when our servers went down. They were like, 'Hey, I know you're trying something brand new. That's really cool, man.' Now, if a server, if one server out of 7,000 goes down for, you know, 4 seconds, there's Twitters. Like, hey, what? That's not what I'm paying for. And they're not wrong. It's just it's a totally different thing. Again, take advantage of the thing you can take advantage of, which is that humanity. It's great. And you can't have servers up all the time when you're one person or whatever the equivalent is for your product, right? So, don't set the expectation. And then actually, you get a lot of benefit of the doubt. You want to raise prices at a big company. There's a lot of well I don't know like why are you raising prices because you just want to pad the bottom line or whatever. When you're one person and you send out that email going hey everybody I'm just me I'm just trying to make ends meet I need to raise prices a little bit more so I can hire one person what does everybody say?

H

Host17:23

That's awesome, great.

J

Jason Cohen17:25

What great that I raise prices, you know. So I mean talk about an advantage.

H

Host17:31

I'm trying to grow a baby company right now and one of the first things we did was like slap a picture of me and my two co-founders on our landing page and it's like this is Ben, Spencer, and Joel and we're trying to make this company happen and like here we are and here's our smiling faces and like we're glad you care about this at all because we're literally just three guys in Joel's second bedroom trying to make this thing work, right?

J

Jason Cohen17:49

It's great. And you get these loyal people because by supporting you, they're kind of part of it and they are.

H

Host17:56

Totally. Yeah. And like by podcasting about it and tweeting about it and sharing good and bad things, people like totally feel connected to the journey.

J

Jason Cohen18:04

Yeah. Someday it won't be there. Well, maybe not. Maybe it'll stay there forever. It'll be small like 37signals have kept it forever.

H

Host18:10

So, I don't want to say it will never, it will end. It may not end, but or maybe it will. It can end. That can happen.

J

Jason Cohen18:17

Oh, yeah. I'm sure. But you want to take advantage of it while you can.

H

Host18:20

There's a bunch of great reasons to tell people like the behind-the-scenes stuff. I think like I just philosophically I'm into that. Like I like to share the good and the bad and let people see what it's really like. And it tends to I think people think of it as a cost, but I think of it basically as a positive where it's like people get bought into the journey. It becomes like a drama they're following along with. And that just that only helps.

J

Jason Cohen18:40

And that they're even part of by supporting the business.

H

Host18:43

I've literally had people reach out to me and be like, I don't even think I need your product, but I'd be happy to like send you like prepay you for something just to kind of support the effort.

J

Jason Cohen18:49

See? Yeah. So cool. You can't buy that. Like Google cannot spend any amount of money on ads to make that happen for Google, right? It's cool. Like you have something even Google can't do. That's amazing. So do it. So don't hide behind a 'we' where you just threw away that advantage.

H

Host19:06

You touched on something this concept in your conversation with Justin that I liked a lot where you're saying when it comes to making decisions, I really like filters as in like you just you decide a thing and that lets you eliminate a whole class of decisions. Do you have any like favorite filters that you apply right now these days or in the past?

J

Jason Cohen19:24

It depends a lot on the decision like a hiring decision, product strategy decision, should you move, like there's pretty different filters you would then apply for those things. So I don't know about favorite filters, but I would say you can't have too many, which is nice. Like you can have too many priorities. Well, this is important and so is this and so is this and so is this. And then you can't really make a decision because these options are going to have different peaks of what things they're good at and what they're not and then you're confused. So more priorities identifying more important things does not, it actually makes it harder to make the decision. Filters which are thresholds or negatives make it easier because they cut out things until there's not many options left which is good because that's helping you focus on making a decision. So you can't have too many. So that's good. You can have 20. It's all right. But so like if you're hiring for someone, are there some based on culture, others based on things that they've accomplished or things that other people say about them when you go around? Like there's a lot of things you could sort of pile on there that you're...

H

Host20:32

You know, I feel like you've kind of touched on one possibly. Oh, this is I'm not sure this is exactly a filter, but like you said earlier, I do two things. Like I've decided that my life has space for two. Home and WP Engine are them. Therefore, I have a filter and I know I don't need to go work at Capital Factory right now.

J

Jason Cohen20:47

That's right. Yes, constraints are useful for making decisions and you know especially bootstrapped entrepreneurs don't like constraints. That's the whole idea. I don't want a job. I don't want this. I can be my own boss and do whatever I want. And then of course you realize very quickly like this doesn't feel like doing anything I want. This feels like I'm being crushed all the time about to die. This does not feel like freedom at all. And then you say things like, 'But at least it's mine,' which is true, but you're still being crushed. And then later on it's still crushing because like, you know, you have employees and you really feel like you're still serving them. They're all people that either have expectations or, you know, you want to provide for them and so forth. And so it's still crushing. And so are the customers because they gave you money and of course you're trying to make them happy. Like this whole thing of you don't have a boss. In a sense, it's like no, kind of everything is a constraint and coming back on you. It's just not exactly what you thought it was. You know, sometimes these things sound so trite. There are two things or you know, you can like Peter Thiel says, you can only focus on one thing at a time or whatever. You know, all these little rules and like no, they're probably all sort of extreme in a way that makes them a bit ridiculous. The reason why they're kind of useful anyway is exactly that it reduces options. And that is good because you sit there and you look at the blank screen and think what should I do? What should I work on? Should I write another blog post? Should I write this feature? Which feature should I do? Constraints like let's say you arbitrarily said here's my schedule for the day from I write code and then from here to here I do this like well you don't have to restrain yourself like that. You can do anything you want with the whole day. Yeah I know but if I do that it'll make sure that I'll do some of this and some of that and overall globally I want to do that. So although it's artificial, I'm going to do it anyway. Same thing with a diet. Which diet is right? I don't know the haven't we learned that that's not just not the right question anymore. But it's also probably true that just anything that says, well, you can have this but not this and it's sort of arbitrary, whatever. Yeah, but if that just means you eat less and more healthfully, it's probably good, right? So yes, but the constraint is helpful because it helps you make a decision and stop thinking about it and whatever it is is probably okay. I feel that way about a lot of frameworks in business. This is a framework for product strategy. Here's another framework for figuring out how to do like it's not really about what's the best framework or proving that this framework is right or there's four things that this card well not three not five sure maybe like it's not really about that it's just having any framework just kind of stops a certain part of the conversation you start filling in boxes instead of being stuck with too many ways to think about it and that's why it's helpful and so I do like frameworks and I do like some of these sort of truly arbitrary rules that self-imposed arbitrary rules. I like that because it just lets you get to some answers.

H

Host23:42

Yeah. And get to work.

J

Jason Cohen23:44

Get to work. Yeah.

H

Host23:45

Stop the planning phase. There's a part I want to quote from a blog post you wrote, which is kind of getting a little bit back to this advice like what's good advice and how do you recognize it and all that and I'm going to quote you which says as you accumulate a set of principles that you have a lot of energy for, you throw yourself into it and run to the extreme. Doing that is perhaps one of the truly universal rules of success that you are all in. Applying an extreme amount of energy is more important than exactly which path you're taking.

J

Jason Cohen24:12

Yeah, I love that. Like crazy.

H

Host24:15

That's good. That's pretty good. You can print that.

J

Jason Cohen24:18

Yes. There's a funny story about there's a mathematician named Littlewood in the UK. This is probably late 1800s or so. And he was proofreading a manuscript by somebody else and there was this quote in there and it wasn't attributed to anybody and he made a note in the margin that says this quote is amazing I wish I had said it and in the final version it attributed to Littlewood he had said it and forgot. It's amazing. Anyway so I feel like that with the old blog post like oh that's pretty good.

H

Host24:51

Totally. I've had the same experience.

J

Jason Cohen24:53

It's better than I come up with now. So I don't like the whole follow your passion that's crap like you can be passionate about stuff and chess and that doesn't mean you should make a company doing chess. I think that's silly. But I do believe in there's things where you do naturally throw yourself into it and it doesn't have to be a topic like chess. It can be designing things or writing prose or writing code or whatever kind of creation thing that you like. Clearly, if you're in your zone, if you're in the flow and you have energy for it many hours a day, not because you have to and you're not upset after, but because you love it and time flies by and you don't realize and you forgot to pee and all that, that's the good kind of all-in, it's clear that being in that is more productive and fulfilling both. So, and of course, you can't be in there all the time, but seeking things where that can happen, that's just logical. And exactly to this point of you don't know what advice is right. Actually, there's probably many paths to success and failure. Therefore, pick the ones that more naturally fit you because whatever that is, at least you'll maximize whatever that option was. And even if you make some math that says that some other option was better, but what if you can't execute that better? Then it's still not better. So going back to that notion of what drives you in that way that helps you say look even if it's a second best option in some objective sense it may be first best in terms of your ability to execute and that's a way to ask what can I execute well. The trap is especially when you're a founder because that means you don't have a boss telling you what to do or holding you accountable the trap is that you do the thing that you love the flow thing and not do the thing the business needs you to do. So if you're an engineer the classic version is I will add another feature today when what you probably need to do is double the amount of traffic coming to the website because you don't have enough sales. Almost always the problem with any company is not enough sales. And I'm not saying that because VCs and growth, I'm talking about bootstrap companies, blah blah blah. Like probably the most impactful thing you could ever do is increase sales 10%. If you could add one feature and increase and double sales, then freaking add that feature. But I'll bet you that one feature won't double sales. But there's other things you could do that actually might. And so there's no doubt that it's better for the health of the business to double sales in the next say one to three months than to add the feature that doesn't double sales, but you love adding the feature and you know which feature to add and you will have customers that will genuinely be delighted to have that feature. Those are all true. Therefore, you do it instead of doing the thing you need to do. And since there's no one telling you what to do, you know, the trap is to do the flow thing instead of the thing that must be done or should be done instead.

H

Host27:40

Mhm. But it's way less scary to add the feature. I already know how to do it.

J

Jason Cohen27:44

Exactly. And that's why we, you know, the world is littered with sort of version 1.2 products that no one buys or not enough people buy. And here's another way to look at it. Look at all the risks in a business. Again, bootstrap, forget the VC crap. Just bootstrap business. What are all the risks? Can I get enough customers? Will they pay the price that I need them to pay? Will they stay around if it's recurring revenue business long enough for that to work? Can I do the tech support? Can I make an ad where they can tell in a fraction of a second this is for me because that has to be pretty compelling and use exactly the right words because it's in the middle of all those other ads. And same thing with your homepage or landing page because same thing they land on it and you get one second. They better go whoa nice. That's a very difficult reaction to create somebody in 1 second. Can you do that? Can you cheaply enough acquire those eyeballs to go say that thing to then come in? There's lots and lots of questions. All these have to be more or less in the affirmative for the business to work. And I still didn't say features yet. So here's the one thing I know for sure a good engineer can do. I know for sure that engineer can build the features. There's actually very little risk of building the features. But will that same engineer be able to do everything else I said? Almost for sure not. That's where all the risk is. Zero risk in building the software, 100% risk in all the other things the business requires to exist. So what do we spend our time on? The thing that has no risk at all because we understand the reason it has no risk is because we know how to do it. That's why it's not risky. So a good rule of thumb is to keep in mind like the one or two things a business really needs to change. It's probably more sales and that's it. But it could be other things, but it's probably more sales. And then ask the things I'm doing today. Is it causing that thing to increase? And if the answer is no, it's a problem. Now, of course, that's a rule of thumb because you have to do your taxes and that doesn't make revenue up and of course you have to do it, right? No kidding. There's stuff you have to do and of course you need to make features because actually that is tied to revenue because if it doesn't do enough then they won't buy it or they won't stay or whatever. So that is true. Maybe you have huge cancellations due to lacking three features. That is a good reason to go to the features because it's for growth. Now we're talking. You're getting people in the door, but then they're leaving. Fix the reason why they're leaving. Oh, now that's, now we're talking. Yeah, exactly. Why get even more people in the door if they're just going to leave? Good point. So, that would be a reason to do features in order to grow. Good point. But usually, we're simply avoiding the things that need to be derisked and need to be addressed. Um, and so keeping in mind what is the number one, maybe two, like real actual business priorities that you have to be pushing forward and making sure what you're doing is actually doing that.

H

Host30:35

I'm probably your target market in that rant right there. So, I'm a technical person. I know how to write code pretty well, but I'm in the CEO role for this and I'm on sales and marketing duty and trying to make sure that sales actually happen. Assuming that I've drunk the Kool-Aid, which I have. I agree. I shouldn't be writing code. That's not going to help the business that much and I want to get better at this stuff in a hurry. Is there anything beyond just like build the learning machine, try to get awesome, pay attention to what works, try lots of stuff, see what works for you. Is it like everything else where you just learn it by doing and trying to figure it out?

J

Jason Cohen31:08

Well, one is to get help from people who have done it and are good at it. Help could mean advisors, but not advisors in general, advisors just on this topic. Um, sometimes you pay people for that, sometimes you don't. Help could mean, yeah, learning really fast. Just deciding like I need to be an expert in some of this stuff in 3 months. And that means I can't be an expert in all of it because that's just ridiculous to say I can be an expert in all of it in 3 months. So, I got to pick something to become an expert in. So, what am I going to pick? Well, what are these things that might move the needle on the business? Again, probably new customers or something like this. And also seem tractable like build a whole sales force. Well, that doesn't even make sense. I don't, you know, we can't even hire. We don't have money to do that. So like that's not even on the table. So stop. So maybe not sales. Or maybe it's self-fulfilling sales. Or maybe it's building an email list. Or maybe it's I need to get one paid marketing channel to work. Doesn't matter which one, but like one of them has to work. So, I'm just going to, I have to go ape and do nothing but live in paid marketing places doing experiments and blah blah blah trying to make one work because if I can unlock one, then we can pour money into the one because we can afford to because it's working. And then once that's established, then you could take a breath and ask what's next. Do I try to find another one? Maybe it is time for sales. Maybe I can hire someone at this point. Maybe hire someone part-time. I don't know. But I have a few options once I have one working. So, just getting one working really well. That's my goal. And when define really well as it's pulling in, it's creating, you know, 5k of MRR per month or I don't know, just make up a threshold that says that's really doing something. So yeah, just trying to focus down on one thing and then there's probably a few options of how to get there. At WP Engine there were some things like AdWords where I was able to find there's sometimes consultants who will work on a performance contingency so like if you don't get at least this much, you know, the cost per conversion has to be at least X or else I don't pay you or I pay you some minimum amount on the other hand if you blow out of the water you can make a bunch of money like that kind of stuff so that can work sometimes for a bootstrap company who's like yeah if it fails I can afford it and if it doesn't fail then I will have unlocked something that I can afford to pay for and then I can revisit at the end of that contract period what to actually do to make it sustainable. So I did that at WP Engine so that's possible. Same kind of thing with well really any paid stuff. It could be AdWords. It could be other channels. It could be affiliates is another whole universe. That's a whole different sort of thing. Um, it could be email marketing, although I think that's more of a longer term play like content marketing is where you can't just do it and get a return. You have to do it and work it and so it's strategic, but it may not be fast. And that might be okay. You might be all right with strategic and slow. Um, you're already doing content marketing, which is that so maybe it's okay. Or you might say, look, I am already doing stuff that's strategic and slow. I need some things that are not slow. I need some things right. Pay a dollar and get a customer this month. So that's what I need to focus on.

H

Host34:16

Right. Can I describe where we're at and just have you like ask me questions slash do a health check? I'm like I'm at the doctors and you're just like let's check this and make sure this is okay.

J

Jason Cohen34:26

All right.

H

Host34:27

All right. So, we started this company back in May. It's me and two co-founders. We're all technical. It's called Tuple and our goal is to build an app that lets you do remote pair programming. So, two people on one computer writing code together. We think all the solutions out there are pretty crappy because you need to make something that's really, really fast, screamingly fast. And the existing things out there have too much latency and people don't like them. I started off by doing pre-sales. So, I reached out to a bunch of people. I have a bit of an audience. So, I came to this with an audience, which is nice. I've been working in public for a long time. So, I had a bit of a Twitter following and some email people and a podcast and through that started getting people on an email list and actually populated a paid alpha. So, pre-sold about $8,000 worth of people on that. So we have a handful of teams and a handful of individuals who have said, 'Yeah, I want to try it. I want to be your first customers.' We're hoping to launch that alpha early next year. Get the first people in there. We have a bit of a like minimum viable versus smallest lovable product thing where if our whole pitch is like it's going to be really fast and we know that's the most important thing, but it's hard, it's really hard to make it really fast. So, we're like we're kind of racing the clock to make it fast enough by the time that we want to hit. Do I have to use a certain IDE? Like it integrates with something.

J

Jason Cohen35:44

No, it's a desktop app, so it could be anything.

H

Host35:46

So you can use your terminal, your IDE, whatever you want.

J

Jason Cohen35:49

So is it like desktop sharing, but you're super smart about diffs, sending diffs and compressing that and I don't know things.

H

Host35:56

That's right. Yep. And like really good keyboard support and dual mouse and also pairing specific features like I can...

J

Jason Cohen36:02

Send you a link and it auto opens in your browser so we can look at the same Stack Overflow article really easily, kind of thing.

H

Host36:08

That's nice. The interest is great. We got three like 3,000 people plus on our email list. People are asking me pretty frequently to get into the next alpha beta. Like I'm telling people no and they're like no please, I really want to. So the market feels very there where people are dissatisfied by the existing tools. We've promised a lot and it's a kind of a hard thing to deliver. So that's like one of my concerns is like I think we eventually will have a great product that will deliver on these things that we're saying but to do it fast is hard.

J

Jason Cohen36:39

So, we're kind of in this thing where it's like we should get something out there and get the feedback, but also like it's going to take a while to get it to where we want to be, of course. So we have this sort of push pull going on. So, first of all, I'm kind of hung up on this thing of like if it's not really really really good, then the business isn't going to work. I do see that in the long run. Like, why would someone love like not just like, but love the tool? Like latency that's so low that you don't even know what's going on totally is that especially with developers. So like well how does it work? You know like I get it. That's I totally agree. But this whole thing of like well we launched in May except it's still in alpha and we're as far it's still going to be hard to get the stuff we want and yet everyone's asking for it. So to me that sounds like a contradiction. You're saying the customers are saying I want to pair program with it and you're saying no you don't understand. No you don't. because it's not a little bit faster.

H

Host37:37

So, you know, one thing to consider is that they may be wrong because like you said, you may be promised a certain thing and that's what they're thinking and they won't get it and they'll be upset. So, they may be incorrect, but what if they're correct? What if you're right about in the long run about having the best product? But what if you're wrong about what people will pay for today pay for now? So for example, if I'm used to a workplace that has pair programming and on the other hand the engineers in the building say we'd really like to work from home sometimes but there's no way to make those two things work pair programming and working from home is hard to do simultaneously. So here's Tupil, a way to do that and they're like oh my god I could transform the way that I work except you're saying because the latency is 100 milliseconds not 50 milliseconds I'm not allowed to do that dude I will take a slightly higher latency so I can work from home do you understand the transformation that is the difference between not having Tupil at all and having a slower than it will be Tupil changes my life and the other part makes me go from Tupil required to and also I love it even more. Why would you stop one until you have the other bad? No, no, no. Let them do it. So, I don't know which one's right because, you know, maybe you're right like the experience is so bad right now that actually they would be disappointed. I don't know. But my guess is usually creators are extremely self-critical. If it's not all the things that you imagine, it's just not good enough. And you're in fact not you're not even proud of it. and you certainly feel bad charging money for it because it's not that good. But this is the wrong mentality for a new product. It's the right mentality for an immature product and maybe even a mature company who can't really have a crappy product cuz it would be like Apple has to make a product that's all the way done even if it's new cuz it would be contrabrand otherwise. Fine. But none of these things are relevant to you or me for that matter, right? There are those phrases like if you're not embarrassed by your first version then you release too late and all that kind of stuff and you know that cuz you said SLP and all that stuff. So you know all that but still maybe you're doing it anyways. Maybe allowing all those people to do it and charging them for it even is would work and they would say yes and then look your company would have a lot more revenue which would be great. It would help you do everything. Revenue solves all problems. And so, you know, maybe maybe they're wrong because they don't understand how bad the experience is, but maybe they're right. Maybe they don't even need link sharing. You know, maybe there are certain use cases like the one I just mentioned, but there's probably I'm sure there's other more common ones where no, you don't understand. They have zero. You help them go from zero to something and that's huge and they'll pay for it already. Then you can go file the edges so you can charge more or they can be more thrilled and tell their friends cuz it's that good. Yeah. Then but going from zero to something could change a lot of people. So when is that when is remote workers just in general like companies that have remote at all? Also I would ask like who what kinds of organizations are obsessed with pair programming at all? Like whether or not it's remote. So like if I'm an extreme programming organization, then I have to. I doubt there's very many of those, but just, you know, whoever whatever is, you know, maybe some famously are. If I'm just obsessed with pairing at all, I might need this. I mean, who knows? Like, who knows what the use cases are. Even if I'm in the same office, it might still be there might still be a reason why we don't like like it's actually nice not to sit next to each other for some reason. You know, even we only have 610 total people and we have engineering on three different floors right now. So we have pairing rooms, but sometimes they're full. So like even if everyone's in the building, you might need this. I don't know. So I don't know. But I wouldn't arbitrarily restrict those use cases. Maybe someone would pay for it. So I think it's good to maintain that high standard for what you think is good. That's good. But it's bad if it means like I feel bad about charging or I'm not sure if I like then it's bad.

J

Jason Cohen41:48

Yeah. Okay. So, like one of my options is like just keep going full speed ahead on the sales. We could almost certainly close more people. Like there are people that want to sign up to like pay to be in the beta that launches at some unknown date in the future. Like am I crazy to not keep doing that?

H

Host42:04

Well, why would you not take their money?

J

Jason Cohen42:07

I guess for focus because we're sort of at the point where it's like we have like the cash in the bank is not is like useful but we're not hurting for it. And so like me doing like product management for example and like testing that the app out with people and things like that is seemingly more useful right now.

H

Host42:25

Well, putting money in the bank is one utility of revenue but not the only one. It's a commitment by the and a signal by that customer. And that is valuable. Yeah. And by the way, if someone right now would pay to use it because they Why would you stop them from that? cuz you need to ask them more product management questions.

J

Jason Cohen42:48

No one's paying to use it yet because no one has it. So people are like paying to eventually use it.

H

Host42:52

Well, why don't they have it? You launched in May, you said. So why don't they have it?

J

Jason Cohen42:56

No, no, no. We started working. We started in May. So the product is not launched.

H

Host43:00

Yeah. Okay.

J

Jason Cohen43:01

Yeah. So yeah. And no one's using it because it's not ready enough. I guess.

H

Host43:08

I wonder just the fact that you're obsessed about a link pasting opening in a browser. It's like again I go back to like you are preventing me from switching my work style from having to commute to the office from being able to work from home. And because you want to add some link browser crap, you're stopping me from doing that.

J

Jason Cohen43:34

I mean, I have Slack. I can send someone a link. It's really not hard to send a link. That's not why I need your tool.

H

Host43:42

Yeah. I guess my concern is there are other things out there that do similar things and we want to make our like we think the thing the value we can add is to be faster and better than those things.

J

Jason Cohen43:53

So why people want to give you money now? Why don't they just go use the other thing?

H

Host43:58

Because they don't like them.

J

Jason Cohen44:00

Okay.

H

Host44:02

So but like I don't want to be like the next thing they don't like. Like I'm just sensitive to this idea of like so like I've seen this happen to other tools in our space. Like someone goes, Yeah, we tried X. It sucked. We're not into it. And like they tried it 6 months ago and like that they just don't get another shot at trying it again because they tried it six months ago and it sucked. So they're like, Well, screw that tool. And I just don't I'm wary about getting that rep or like just like being like, No, no, it's going to be really good. I promise. Trust us. Like no, no, we've moved on to other things. Goodbye.

J

Jason Cohen44:32

That's interesting. So why do all the other tools suck? because they can't get it fast enough.

H

Host44:37

I mean the biggest reason is it's a hard problem to solve period. So you have to really care about this particular use case and almost no one does. Like most people want to build generic screen sharing and maybe remote control and they don't think about low latency and programmers and that kind of crap.

J

Jason Cohen44:51

So what is the typical use case? Why do people need this?

H

Host44:57

I think the best use case is you have a distributed development team and you want to collaborate. it's easy to feel super isolated and get knowledge silos and all that particularly when you're remote and so it's nice if you can pair program anyway even though you're home.

J

Jason Cohen45:11

And so you're saying look they could get on Slack video or Hangouts now and the problem is that it's high latency and other things. So if you give them a product that also is high latency even though it's for developers they're like whatever I have Hangouts and it doesn't work. So you want to wait till it's better than Hangouts.

H

Host45:30

Yeah that's my thought.

J

Jason Cohen45:31

How long do you think it'll take for it's better than Hangouts that the three guys who are good at engineering will beat Google at desktop sharing.

H

Host45:41

Great question. I don't know like it's that's tough to say. Like we are making steady progress. The numbers get better every week but like I said it's a hard problem. It's hard to predict when.

J

Jason Cohen45:50

Here's another interesting thing. Your audience is devs and that's great and bad. The bad thing is they all know, they all want to tell you like you should add this feature and it'll be easy and they have some reason in their own mind why it's easy and they're probably wrong. The good news is they're devs and so they geek out about the same kind of things and they understand what alpha means. They understand a graph that shows latency and how it improves over time and how that might imply that in the future it can continue to improve. I remember at Smart Bear, of course, we also sold to developers only and that was really helpful when there was a bug. we could actually explain why it was a bug and a lot of times they were like wow yeah yeah no I totally see why that would be a bug and like in a way that you could never do to another type of customer and you really got this like not benefit of the doubt but you got this understanding that was really really cool. Same with features we really want this feature and then you could really geek out in crazy detail about why it's hard or why well but in these cases it doesn't really work and we're not sure how to solve that and so and they're like ah Ah, yeah. I see that. Dang. Yeah. And like, wow, I just like said no to a customer feature and they understood. What the hell? So, with that spirit that you can if you communicate about the geeky stuff, they actually typically come along.

H

Host47:10

If you publish, what if you publish the latency chart week by week? And so, you're like, look, we're entering alpha and I'm telling you right now, it's not good enough because here's our chart and here's the line of what good enough looks like. And look, see how we're not there? See that? Right. Like I'm telling you right now, it's not good enough. But look at our trajectory. So if you want to, you can start using a tool that we know is not good enough, but might be enough to get the job done better than not having it and you can follow along.

J

Jason Cohen47:42

Yeah, I like that. That's like the I we thing where it's just like, yeah, it's just us. It's sort of the same idea. It's like, look, we're being honest with you. We're not trying to pretend we're bigger or better than we are. It's like this is where it's at. This is reality.

H

Host47:54

It is. And but I guess what I'm doing is trying to tap into what you said which is it isn't good enough. And so you get this reputation of this tool sucks and I'm not trying it again. So how could you dispel this notion of the tool sucks today and so it will always suck which I 100% agree with you about that that people do that.

J

Jason Cohen48:11

Yeah.

H

Host48:12

Well, one way would be if you were crazy about this graph. Like what if it's so crazy that when you install it and it comes up it says hey all this is our graph like in the tool like they not at the blog but in the tool. So like when you run the tool you cannot escape the fact that you know it's not fast enough and it but you're working on it and it's improving so hang in there. And if it weren't a dev audience you're probably still screwed. Like what are you even what is this? But with a dev audience you can geek out about this crap. Learn more about how hard latency is. click. Here come a bunch of tech articles you wrote about, well, even measuring latency is hard. Is it the 99th percentile? Maybe it, you know, is median right? Not really. But there's this other way because when you're really using it, if it hiccups every 5 minutes, but otherwise is clean. That actually is good. Whereas if the average is a little higher and it never hiccups, it's actually bad. Exactly the opposite is true in audio. And that's why all that shit's wrong when it comes to us. Blah blah. I just made all that up. I don't even know if that's true. But like just geek out about like this is what even latency means and how we think about it and measure it and all these algorithms. And then so because of the way we define it, we have these like here's a little test harnesses we use to micro test some of these things because of this macro thing. Of course the only the macro matters and in the end and you don't want to pre-optimize but and blah blah blah blah blah. You do that and they see that graph and it's not fast enough but they know that. Now do they stick around? I don't know, but it's better bet. And if you can get that revenue going because revenue is this, it's a commitment. They're part of it. They're loyal. They'll talk to you about stuff and maybe they'll talk now, but it's different when they're really using it. Then you're getting real product feedback, right? Maybe they share it with others. Maybe they share the articles about the latency cuz everyone, you know, we all like to geek out about stuff like that. That doesn't mean you release it now, but like there's got to be ways to say, well, I'm worried like you just did. I'm worried that it's not good enough. and we'll get a reputation. It's like, well, what if it's not good enough, but you actually have the reputation of being super awesome geeks as opposed to the reputation being slow, even though it's the same product because of how you show it, right? Now on the one hand, you've just set yourself up. If you can't get it there, but you just told me if you can't get it there, it's done anyway, right?

J

Jason Cohen50:28

Yeah. We're screwed either way. Get it there. Yeah. Now the real ultimate thing would be to say so this whole thing about latency and measuring it could that become an open source package that people contribute to the part where you measure it. Conversely what about this video codec or whatever the hell you're doing for all that part can that be an open source thing that people can contribute to. So when people say it's not fast enough you can say well jump in the codec and see if you can make it faster against these.

H

Host50:53

Request welcome jerk. Yeah, run the Docker container with the integration test and see if you can make it faster and suddenly it's a contest. Now, I'm not saying that that's necessarily a good idea, but what I am doing is trying to say like how creative can you get in engaging what you have, which is a very specialized audience, which is other developers. That's really that's not the normal customer. You can throw away a lot of the normal customer playbooks. You can talk about all kinds of weird stuff. In fact, it's better. It's better. Totally. A developer would rather buy from a geeky developer who's Why do people buy Marco's podcast crap? Cuz it's Marco and he geeks out about microphones. That's why, right? Like, this works. This works. So, geek out about the damn thing. And I'm sure his software wasn't so good at first, but everyone knows Marco's going to obsess over everything and it's going to be better. You can win that. You have a platform and things like the podcast and blogging and the email list and stuff reputation. and you have a platform in which you can do that, great. Take advantage of it. Do it. Take advantage of the weirdness of your audience.

J

Jason Cohen52:03

I would say I like that a lot.

H

Host52:06

Now, open sourcing is that's a whole another thing like what if no one contributes? Are you managing pull requests, which is now more work? Just making open source is kind of you got to pull it out and I don't know do things and document stuff in a way that you don't need to do now and that's just time. What if you don't want to accept someone's pull request? Now that's a thing. People use it for purposes other than yours, so they want to make other changes that don't really make sense for you. Do you do that anyway cuz it's open source? So like pro unless you're super into open source, in which case maybe it's worth it because personally you want to have open source stuff, then awesome. If not, probably it's too much work. Another thing, and we think about this at WP Engine too because we do release open stuff as open source on purpose. One of the things we think of is, you know, whenever someone looks at our open-sourced item, they will judge our engineering prowess based on that code. So even if this the whole point of this was it was a skunk works product that's not at the normal standard that we use, nevertheless, we will be judged on that standard. So even though it's on the side, we actually have to make it really really good in terms of everything quality and tests and documentation and you know CI/CD and whatever because we'll be judged and actually so it turns into a whole lot of work cuz we'll be judged and we want to be judged well. So again maybe not a great idea at this stage for those reasons but it's kind of fun to talk it through anyway because it's a possibility I guess.

J

Jason Cohen53:28

Mhm. The thing I like about this advice is that it energizes me and it feels like authentic to me where it's like I'm being honest with you. I'm not saying like here's the alpha version. I think it's amazing. Like here's the alpha version. It's not fast enough, but like don't worry. Like we're working on it. We're going to get it.

H

Host53:44

Well, what if you had a tool like that and it said, Hey, it's not good enough. I bet you'd use it and go, you know, it's okay. Hey, if you're going to make it even better, great. Like again, it's just like we said at the top of the podcast, you just anchored it as like I know it's not good enough. That's actually could be good. People say, Oh, it's pretty good. you know, if this is going to get better, then okay, I'll come along for the ride, but it's fine. You know, I like the link thing or whatever, you know.

J

Jason Cohen54:05

Yeah. Yeah. I also feel like it would make like that honesty would make me want to help improve it, right? I would be like, you're right. It does have some rough edges. You think about this thing. I noticed this one little bug over here. Like maybe take care of that one. That might be good.

H

Host54:17

Yeah. And what if you do and the latency is still not better yet? Will I come along for the ride on the latency given that you're honest about it and you're doing other things that I do want?

J

Jason Cohen54:26

Maybe. Like maybe that relationship's good enough, right?

H

Host54:29

Yeah. Interesting. Just think of it yourself. If you got a tool like that, how would you react to that? Right.

J

Jason Cohen54:35

Totally.

H

Host54:36

Which is not a great question actually because you're not like your customers at all. They have jobs and they write code. So like you're not actually like your customers. So that's not a really a good question.

J

Jason Cohen54:48

They have jobs and I like that. Yeah. And income and you know an office.

H

Host54:53

What is that for? I don't know.

J

Jason Cohen54:55

Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. I like that. Anything else jump out to you or do we just wrap it?

H

Host55:01

One other thing about DevTools, again, having bootstrapped a company that sold Dev Tools, I think in general, it's fun to sell to devs for the reasons we just said when it comes to the money and getting money, it's actually kind of hard. Like people that type code into computers generally don't have a budget. There is a budget somewhere, but they don't personally control it. Sure. Right. ask the front line developer. Yeah. They have to go ask and it can be hard to get on the radar of that other person cuz that other person who does have the budget, they have lots of concerns and worries and things. It's hard for like some random tool for something to sort of get on the docket. I find it's different for different companies. The smaller the company, of course, the easier it is for someone to whip out a credit card and it's fine. And the bigger the company, once they decide to pay, you're on there forever because now it's a tool in the tool belt and they sort of have to pay because it's like in the list. So that's great. It just takes a little bit more effort to get in the list.

J

Jason Cohen56:05

Yeah, I'm going through that right now.

H

Host56:07

Yeah. And there it's helpful if there's more than one team. Even better is like multiple business units, but just more than one team. So, in other words, if it's just one team out of 20 teams and that team wants it, that is very hard to get the senior director of whatever it is to like even pay attention to the thing. But if there's like two different teams, then it's different. It's like, you know, we tried it and liked it. Someone else in the office tried the totally different team tried it, they like it. You know what? Maybe we should just standardize on this. Let's just buy this. That's a totally different thing. it becomes a thing that we do as in our processes as an R&D department or whatever it becomes a different thing and it's a much bigger sale too like there's more seats that's good. So typically like that helps get over the line on those bigger organizations with dev tools even though of course it takes more time it's more work but the you know it can be 10 or even 100 times more revenue per customer meaning company or organization so okay so maybe that's worth it you know that timeline's it's worth it for that.

J

Jason Cohen57:10

Of course, this could be a viral tool in the real sense of the word viral. Two people use it, then a third person wants to use it for fourth, so they get in. So, I think it'd be very good if the business model maybe, and you probably already did this, but the business model allowed these incremental ads like just throw someone in. And later we'll come back to your boss and they won't have a choice because she'll look at it and say, What the hell is this? And you say, Well, 10 people are using it. Wait, 11 people are using it. And she'll go, Oh, damn it. What do I have to And you're like, Well, you buy the license that lets you use it up to 20 times and we'll come back to you if more than that use it. And she goes, well, either I have to go and tell everyone to stop using it or I pay. So that's almost for sure the right way to go is to make it viral that way.

H

Host57:48

So one thing that we had thought about doing is make it so that in a given pairing session between two people, only one person needs to be paid. So it's like if you buy it, you can use it with your friends and then but your friends can't use it with somebody else.

J

Jason Cohen58:02

And the thing is you want the friends to use it for somebody else too. Like that's how viral works like you've skipped the part where someone's infected.

H

Host58:10

Right that's interesting. So another way is kind of there are other tools which come behind like Slack like Atlassian etc. And I picked those because those are other tools which are viral and work well in the business world and are viral which is very different than consumer viral which is obviously isn't but the business world viral are certain companies. And so what they'll do is they'll say like well we're never going to stop someone from making an account and using it cuz if they made an account and they don't use it it's hard to go to the boss and ask for the money. But if you make an account and use it, then the conversation with the person with the budget is you have 11 active users, so we need to settle up. See that? See how different that is in like 11 people logged in this one time. No, that okay. Well, they don't need to log in anymore. That's the answer. 11 people are using it and it's growing. And actually, we're behind on licenses cuz you only bought five or zero. So, we kind of need to true up. Like, we don't need to go back in time. None of that kind of stuff. It's fine. It's fine. We're happy to be generous about that. That's not the point. But, we do need to true up. Let's just go ahead and get you on the 20 pack so that we don't, you know, let's just get you trued up there.

J

Jason Cohen59:27

Mhm.

H

Host59:28

And then we can go back to sleep. So, it's a totally different thing when they're actually using it than when they're not actually using it. So I think it'd be better if they were in the system actually using it and then you can have the payment argument.

J

Jason Cohen59:44

Interesting. Okay. I have to think about how that would work.

H

Host59:47

Yeah, it's not necessarily easy to design, but these are fundamental business model things that could really really change the trajectory of the thing. So unlike a Slack, like Slack is often used for people that are not at the same organization. So that's an interesting way that it becomes viral. But pair programming is probably with people in the same organization. So it colors the way you think about what viral means. So it could be, you know, when the first person signs up, they kind of establish this company object as it were and then things can slot in there. And why would you do that? Because you don't pay for it. Because it just works. Otherwise, you have to pay or I don't know like there's some or it's by your work email address. So there's a domain so you can tell and so like some way where yeah like we can just keep using this and then we'll see if we really like it then the argument is it's already here either pay or tell the developers they have to stop using a tool they like. That's hard. There is no manager who wants to have that conversation with an engineer. They might say there's no budget but like they don't want that. They really would rather not have that conversation.

J

Jason Cohen1:00:55

That's interesting. So, this is interesting because this feels kind of like a sort of like a bottom-up approach where it's like let people use it in a low friction way and then hopefully come back and we'll pick up a sale and figure out how to make it work there. I've had pretty good success so far in basically like pre-selling a certain number of seats at a pretty high price for an annual plan and like that's pretty cool too. Like I mean I'm pretty into that.

H

Host1:01:18

Well, you say that but no one's using it. You say have success but that's not really true.

J

Jason Cohen1:01:24

Yeah. Yeah. Right. But I'm with you. Like if that's the mode is like we're going to have a sales team. We're going to marketing is going to generate leads for the sales team and the sales team is going to call in and make annual chunks and like 50k at a time or whatever kind of things. I think that's awesome.

H

Host1:01:40

What Slack does is both. And again, I'm not saying you have to do what Slack does. I'm just these are just ideas, right? And things that have worked in similar context. So what Slack does is both. there's an easy way to just get in there and go because that's part of how anyone even knows about it in the first place. Again, even if you're having that conversation about the whole thing with someone if they have one team that's actually using it and saying, Oh, yeah, yeah, we like that. How much easier is the sale now? So, it's pretty easy to argue that some kind of grassroots bottoms up thing is helpful, you know, even if you're selling from the top down. And then so what Slack does is that's easy and then maybe you just buy the number of seats that you have and that's fine. Maybe they go to the top and say, You know, we could do that, but then we're going to be coming back to you all the time and you're going to keep paying a different amount and your budget's going to keep changing. And you know what? If we just go with an annual license and cover up to x people, the unit rate goes way down to this and we'll just talk again in a year. That's exactly what Slack does, right? That is also what some other companies that do dev tools in particular, will do. So there's this grassroots and this like hey man we can see where this is going. Why don't we go ahead and get this all organized and that's a good argument and then you can sell either way you can go in from the top and at Smart Bear we did both. Sometimes we would go in at the CTO level or VP of engineering level or sometimes at a big company like a Qualcomm there would be an entire group just about programming quality for the whole company like a whole group devoted to those things. So it depends on the structure, but there would be someone who in that sense that you're saying is like sort of above it all either in the org chart or cuz they're tasked that way, which this could be that too by the way, right? Pair programming could be something that a group like that would consider, right? And so sometimes it would go in there and they're like, great, here's let's buy 2,000 seats and that's the trial and if that works there'll be 8,000 seats. Like you're like, whoa, trial? That's what? Yes. Right. So there is that we had that motion, but also we had the motion where in our case it was code review. So just like you, it would be a group of people. So we'd have a group of people try it and there's just three of them or maybe 10 or something like this and if it works they go get the money and then another team looks at it. So four months later we see another sale for a little bit more and then eventually we sort of go high up the chain and go look you now four different teams across the country using this. It seems like this is what you need. Why don't we and so sometimes we would grow that way. So it did both in that case. I know it does both in Slack too. I'm pretty sure Atlassian is the same way, right? Like someone sends a Bitbucket, someone sends a Jira, it's free or it's cheap. Eventually they go, you know, you just need one Confluence for everything because having millions of wikis is not good, you guys. And everyone agrees and so then they make the one big Confluence and charge you whatever. So again, I'm not using those to prove that this is right, but just to show well there's a lot of successful footprints along this path. So it's and you do have a viral component. Therefore, maybe although that's work, maybe that could really help the business be successful because as we all know the business model is just as important as a feature. And the business model is just as tuned into product as features is. It's not marketing, sales, and business model on the right and product on the left. We all know that's not true. And here you have a product that's naturally viral, which is amazing. Most dev tools aren't. And so a lot of these things don't apply to most dev tools. It's more like that one engineer has to want it or like you said like it has to be mandated from on high which is not very common. And so that's hard and that's like so it's super hard to sell an IDE for example. So they're all free you notice that like so some aren't like there's like two that have figured out how to do it and they're still around. It's hard like it would be very hard to launch an IDE, wouldn't it? Like oh my god, right? But you have a naturally viral thing. Wow. And I hate that word actually cuz people typically use it and it's not really viral but you really are. It really is like we need you need to use the software for us both to use the software like it actually is viral. So wow. So I would lean into that and even if that means product features that allow for certain pricing things to happen. Man though that could mint the business in terms of the business model. So that doesn't sound like a bad use of time. Now is right now the time? I don't know about that but because no one's paying anyway. So maybe it doesn't matter. But maybe architecturally you could think about that in terms of what does it mean to sign up? What does it mean to be part of a company? How do you account for that? How do you see that? That's where you could think about that.

J

Jason Cohen1:06:06

Right. Yeah.

H

Host1:06:07

And is the key thing to think about there making it spread easily? Is that the play with the viral situation?

J

Jason Cohen1:06:13

So if you go to the breathless Silicon Valley type podcasts about super growth or whatever they call it. Yeah. Then what you just said the answer is yes. The point is spread like a virus and you know things which basically treat your users like units humanless units to go exploit with your viralness. Right. So yes in a more friendly way. Yes of course the idea is to spread it. Of course we want you to spread it. Rather than in this mean kind of heartless way, you can think about spreading it in the way that says when I find something I love, I like to spread it. It's because I want other people to use it because it is good and also it makes me look good to spread something that is good. That makes my reputation go up, right?

H

Host1:07:05

Yeah.

J

Jason Cohen1:07:06

Or just we are a distributed team and two people use the tool and they liked it and so of course they each want to use it with somebody else because like it's actually good for them in their use case. That's why not for some nefarious reason or some weird built-in horrible thing, but because actually they want to. So yes, the point is to spread it, but you can come at it from an attitude of spreading it for good reasons like it really does help. This helps us work in the way we want to work. Hooray. That spirit of spreading. And so what kind of language goes with that? What kind of features goes with that? What would be allowed or disallowed in that case? When you have that mentality, you might have different answers to that than if you have the mentality of, you know, like the Facebook mentality. That's a different mentality for how to make people use it or make people increase engagement. It's a different reason. So, you make different choices. Even though anybody with a tool probably wants to increase engagement or utility, like yeah, that's not bad. But like your attitude toward what that means really matters because you will make different product and business decisions as a result. So, like this thing about charging, I think you do want it to be easy for someone to for the nth person to invite the n plus 1th person to do it because that is better for them and it helps you spread and the best way to do that is not make the n plus 1 person pay right now. That would be the easiest way for this to actually happen.

H

Host1:08:28

Good stuff.

J

Jason Cohen1:08:30

Yeah. One of my favorite lines, which I wish I invented, but I did not, is that there's only two industries that call their customers users. And one is the drugs you buy on the corner. And the other is us, the users. So, if you think of them as users, like, you know, right, then it's bad that you're infecting their world. But if you think of them as customers and you're thinking about that people really want to work this way and you're helping them and of course you want it to spread so that you can get paid for that. Duh. Like that's not evil. Like if you're calling them customers so in my language if you're calling them customers it can be good and if you're calling them users then it's not.

H

Host1:09:10

Yep. I feel the same way. Awesome. This was really helpful. I don't want to take any more of your time but it was great talking to you.

J

Jason Cohen1:09:17

Same. It was fun. I of course I love dev tools cuz I'm an engineer and I love dev tools companies because I made one.

H

Host1:09:24

So yeah, I didn't even realize that overlap there, but that worked out nicely.

J

Jason Cohen1:09:29

Yeah, Tupil. So some people at WP want to work from home. So I don't know, maybe after this they'll too bad they have to pay. No virality allowed.

H

Host1:09:39

That's right. They suddenly get an email. Hey we're going to try Tupil.

J

Jason Cohen1:09:43

Yeah, cool. Well, plus I just told you that the product is too slow. So I don't know. We'll see how that turns out.

H

Host1:09:48

Perfect. Yeah. Awesome. Is there anything you want to plug by the way while you're here?

J

Jason Cohen1:09:54

Well, if you like this philosophy of business, just as you said, people who like you or your way of doing things, maybe they just want to do business with you. So maybe it's the same. And if so, it's WP Engine. WPEngine.com. And we are the largest and the most sophisticated platform for running WordPress sites. So, if you feel that way, then there you go. Obviously, the intent is not to plug anything, but there you go.

H

Host1:10:22

I've been a customer in the past and it works beautifully. So, nothing but good things to say there. And I'm going to throw you another plug too actually which is your Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business talk is one of my all-time favorites. So, folks should for sure go watch that. Yeah. Microcom site. And I guess I should plug myself. So, blog.asmartbear.com is where I've been writing for about oh jeez 13 years on these topics.

J

Jason Cohen1:10:49

Beautiful.

H

Host1:10:49

Well, thanks Jason for coming by. I appreciate it.

J

Jason Cohen1:10:51

Yeah. Thanks.

69: Sound, Actionable Advice with Jason Cohen

About Jason Cohen