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.
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.
Yeah, you can't. People can't see this, but Jason is chugging from a large bottle of bourbon regularly.
It was a large bottle of bourbon.
Exactly. Now it's just a bottle. So, in case you have not heard of Jason, he is a four-time entrepreneur. He's done bootstrapping. He's done fundraising. 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.
Okay. So, a relatively small enterprise.
If you establish the baseline at 700, then it's small.
That's true. Yes, comparatively. So, we'll go back and like pricing logic, you have to set the frame up and it can feel like it's expensive or not.
I can't. Anchoring is such a powerful, ridiculous brain hack. I can't even believe it's like legal. You shouldn't be able to do it.
Well, fortunately, you know it. Although, even when you know it, it's still difficult to ignore it.
That's the thing. Yeah. Like if only knowing your cognitive biases meant they didn't work anymore, right?
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, 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.
Well, I don't know if I would say it was contrarian.
Um, yeah, that's fair. I mean, contrarian by saying it's not semic. Okay, never mind.
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.'
What's nice about being straight, even if it kind of hurts, is that you can get right to the solutions. Just stop beating around the bush about what's going on or what's wrong, and it's nobody's fault. 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? Let's just get to that part and stop arguing about how that works. Let's just get to it.
Have you seen Paul Graham give advice to startups?
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 a common phrase: people give advice to themselves.
Meaning, 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. Of course I'm not an exception, but there are 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 that's the context. So the advice is in that context. Is that advice still accurate if you're a bootstrapper and you don't want to be the next Facebook? If you don't want to be a Y Combinator company, which is what the advice is tuned for, then is the advice right? The answer is sometimes, because some advice is more universal, or maybe there are other reasons why it's right for you. The closer you can get to an advisor who either naturally aligns with you because they have the same kinds of goals, attitudes, worldviews, and life trade-offs as you, even though they're talking about themselves, that works. Or someone who's conscientious and aware enough to ask lots of questions first to try to understand those very same topics, so that hopefully the advice is tuned.
So, the reason I brought him up in particular is because I feel like he has a 0% buffer before he's like, 'Stop talking. I have another question for you.' 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 dispenses with all the pleasantries, subtleties, all that normal social stuff.
That's good. They're boring anyway.
Yeah. And especially if you're advising like 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 an hour of the adviser asking you questions about what your goals are.
And did you come to that conclusion because you had bad advice in the past that wasn't tailored for you?
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, maybe a decade ago, had a presentation at a conference 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: 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. 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 37 Signals. But anyway, he 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 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 advice is just good and bad and you can't tell. Probably all that advice is good for somebody and all of it is bad for somebody. So it's not really about the advice, is it? It's really about 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. And so 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. There are maybe 20 big questions like that easily that you could ask to really understand what a person's trying to do, what their strengths are, what they should avoid, 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.
Yeah. It might still be bad.
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 adviser, it's still maybe who knows. 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 that's good. You can get an adviser 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. So 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.
I like this point here: even if the advice were perfect for you, amazing advice and perfect for you, even then that's not really enough. All you know is a blueprint at this point, but everything after this is execution, which is the hard part.
And random and luck and stuff like that. Maybe you say, 'Look, there's these three options.' You weigh it all, and option A is the best way to reduce risk and increase upside. Let's say for the sake of argument you could prove it, even though you can't prove it, but there's still a chance for upside and a chance for risk. So even if it was the best bet, that doesn't mean it comes up right. The best poker players clearly have skill, that's why they're always at the last table, but they don't always win because luck.
Do you still advise people at Capital Factory?
Only like one or two, because I don't have any time. I certainly haven't done any new investments in a long time because WP Engine has taken all the time. I don't want to dilute time. I am clear that I want to do WP Engine and I want to be at home. 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 Capital Factory more, and now I don't because I'm clear on that.
Does this position, your philosophy on advice, come from trying to advise other people on the regular?
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 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 a funding program. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on with it. But early on, there were many startups that came through, some of which were in a program. So there was kind of intense advisory and investment, and others just there. So by observation, you can see some things, and just by talking to a lot of founders, you get a certain sense of different kinds of personalities and 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. This is just experience and trying to formulate something.
Right? And did you experience finding your advice kind of out of joint with the people you were talking to, that made you realize, 'Oh, I'm not thinking enough about the context of these people I'm advising?'
Yeah. So what would happen is they would say, 'Well, here's our situation.' 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. So I would say, 'Look, you know that investors turn off when you say that, because whatever the reason is, 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? The very fact you're pitching means you're pitching to an investor. I don't know why else you'd pitch. And 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? What would you do? Well, you could say, '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 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 de-emphasize the team and emphasize these other things. Now all this 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 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, the whole thing is, wait a minute, the goals were different. So none of this advice was any good.
Yeah, you just said something there. I liked a lot: you characterize a company as a learning machine.
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. You don't have enough time. You have nothing. So one of the few things that you have when you're little is you can move really fast. You can change directions really fast because you don't have any of those things like customers. 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 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. When you're little, you should use that. You should be on the homepage and on social, so that people have a personal connection. That doesn't scale. That's okay. Who cares? Maybe you never want to scale. So that's fine. Or you do, but first you have to get to the point where scaling is a problem. So move in ways that a big company cannot. These are some of the few advantages you have. You must take advantage of them since you have so few advantages when small. One of them is this agility that you just mentioned: 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 it probably doesn't learn fast. So be a learning machine that's always getting better. That's a good recipe since most of what you're doing isn't quite right yet by definition.
You touched on something that stands out to me a lot: embracing your humanity and your smallness. I've seen friends running one-person businesses that talk about themselves as 'we' in their marketing copy. I know why you would do that. I understand that the feeling of smallness or insignificance would cause you to do that. But I think we're on the same page that you're abandoning something actually useful.
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 it's clear that you've kind of lied. The usual reason why you say 'we' and act like it's huge is so that people will trust us and become customers. But what will happen is they expect 'we' to answer the phone and emails all the time because 'we' is enough people to do that. And when they do talk to you, they talk to different people because there's 'we,' but they 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.' It's just the reverse. It's like, 'That's awesome. I'm so glad I'm supporting an independent person that's badass.' 'Oh, the servers went down.' 'Yeah, because it's just me.' '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 one server out of 7,000 goes down for 4 seconds, there's Twitter. Like, 'Hey, what? That's not what I'm paying for.' And they're not wrong. It's just 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. 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, why are you raising prices because you just want to pad the bottom line?' When you're one person and you send out that email, '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? 'That's awesome, great.' 'What? Great that I raise prices?' So I mean, talk about an advantage.
I'm trying to grow a baby company right now, and one of the first things we did was slap a picture of me and my two co-founders on our landing page. It's like, 'This is Ben, Spencer, and Joel, and we're trying to make this company happen. Here are our smiling faces. 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? It's great. And you get these loyal people because by supporting you, they're kind of part of it, and they are.
Totally. Yeah. And by podcasting about it and tweeting about it and sharing good and bad things, people totally feel connected to the journey.
Yeah. Someday it won't be there. Well, maybe not. Maybe it'll stay there forever. It'll be small like 37 Signals have kept it forever.
So, I don't want to say it will never end. It may not end.
But or maybe it will. It can end. That can happen.
But you want to take advantage of it while you can.
There's a bunch of great reasons to tell people the behind-the-scenes stuff. I think I just philosophically I'm into that. 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 people get bought into the journey. It becomes like a drama they're following along with, and that only helps.
And that they're even part of by supporting the business.
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 send you prepay for something just to kind of support the effort.'
See? Yeah. So cool. You can't buy that. Google cannot spend any amount of money on ads to make that happen for Google. It's cool. 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.
You touched on this concept in your conversation with Justin that I liked a lot: when it comes to making decisions, I really like filters. As in, you just decide a thing and that lets you eliminate a whole class of decisions. Do you have any favorite filters that you apply right now these days or in the past?
It depends a lot on the decision. A hiring decision, product strategy decision, should you move? There are 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. You can have too many priorities. 'Well, this is important and so is this and so is this.' Then you can't really make a decision because these options are going to have different peaks of what they're good at and what they're not, and then you're confused. So more priorities, identifying more important things, does not make it easier 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. That's good. You can have 20. It's all right. But if you're hiring for someone, there are some based on culture, others based on things they've accomplished or things that other people say about them when you go around. There are a lot of things you could sort of pile on there.
You know, I feel like you've touched on one possibly. I'm not sure this is exactly a filter, but you said earlier, 'I do two things. I've decided that my life has space for two. Home and WP Engine are them. Therefore, I have a filter, and I don't need to go work at Capital Factory right now.'
That's right. Yes, constraints are useful for making decisions. 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, '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 later on it's still crushing because you have employees, and you really feel like you're still serving them. They're all people that either have expectations, or you want to provide for them and so forth. And so it's still crushing. And the customers because they gave you money, and of course you're trying to make them happy. This whole thing of 'you don't have a boss' — in a sense, it's like no, everything is a constraint and coming back on you. It's just not exactly what you thought it was. Sometimes these things sound trite: 'There are two things,' or 'You can only focus on one thing at a time,' or whatever. All these little rules are probably all 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 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, 'Here's my schedule for the day: from this time I write code, and from this time I do this.' 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. Haven't we learned that's 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. But if that just means you eat less and more healthfully, it's probably good. So yes, 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...' It's not really about what's the best framework or proving that this framework is right. 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. So I do like frameworks and I do like some of these sort of truly arbitrary rules that are self-imposed. I like that because it just lets you get to some answers.
Stop the planning phase. There's a part I want to quote from a blog post you wrote, which is getting a little bit back to this advice: what's good advice and how do you recognize it? I'm going to quote you: '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: you are all in. Applying an extreme amount of energy is more important than exactly which path you're taking.'
That's good. You can print that.
Yes. There's a funny story about a mathematician named Littlewood in the UK, probably late 1800s. He was proofreading a manuscript by somebody else, and there was this quote in there not attributed to anybody. He made a note in the margin: 'This quote is amazing. I wish I had said it.' In the final version, it was attributed to Littlewood: he had said it and forgot.
Anyway, so I feel that way with the old blog post: 'Oh, that's pretty good.'
Totally. I've had the same experience.
It's better than I come up with now.
Doing it. So I don't like the whole 'follow your passion' — that's crap. 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 there are things where you naturally throw yourself into it. 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. So, and of course, you can't be in there all the time, but seeking things where that can happen is just logical. And exactly to this point: 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 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 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, especially when you're a founder because that means you don't have a boss telling you what to do or holding you accountable, is that you do the thing 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. I'm not saying that because of VCs and growth. I'm talking about bootstrap companies. Probably the most impactful thing you could ever do is increase sales 10%. If you could add one feature and double sales, then freaking add that feature. But I'll bet that one feature won't double sales. But there are 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, the trap is to do the flow thing instead of the thing that must be done or should be done.
Mhm. But it's way less scary to add the feature. I already know how to do it.
Exactly. And that's why the world is littered with version 1.2 products that no one buys or not enough people buy. Here's another way to look at it: look at all the risks in a business. Again, forget the VC crap. Just a 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 a 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? Same thing with your homepage or landing page: they land on it and you get one second. They better go, 'Whoa, nice.' That's a very difficult reaction to create in somebody in one second. Can you do that? Can you cheaply enough acquire those eyeballs to get them to come in? There are 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 build the features. There's actually very little risk in 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 — I'm exaggerating — 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. A good rule of thumb is to keep in mind the one or two things the business really needs to change. It's probably more sales, and that's it. But it could be other things. And then ask: 'The things I'm doing today, are they causing that thing to increase?' 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. There's stuff you have to do, and of course you need to make features because that is tied to revenue. If it doesn't do enough, then they won't buy it or they won't stay. 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. Now we're talking. 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. But usually, we're simply avoiding the things that need to be de-risked and need to be addressed. So keeping in mind what is the number one, maybe two, real actual business priorities that you need to be pushing forward and making sure what you're doing is actually doing that.
I'm probably your target market in that rant right there. 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, 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. I want to get better at this stuff in a hurry. Is there anything beyond just '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?
Well, one is to get help from people who have done it and are good at it. Help could mean advisers, but not advisers in general, just on this topic. Sometimes you pay people for that, sometimes you don't. Help could mean learning really fast. Just deciding, 'I need to be an expert in some of this stuff in three months.' That means I can't be an expert in all of it because that's ridiculous. So I got to pick something to become an expert in. What am I going to pick? What are these things that might move the needle on the business? Again, probably new customers or something like that. And also seem tractable: build a whole sales force? That doesn't even make sense. We can't even hire. We don't have money to do that. So that's not even on the table. 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 one has to work. So I'm just going to go ape and do nothing but live in paid marketing places doing experiments, trying to make one work. Because if I can unlock one, then we can pour money into it because it's working. And then once that's established, you can 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 is my goal. And when I define 'really well' as it's pulling in, say, $5k of MRR per month, or 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 consultants who will work on a performance contingency basis. So if you don't get at least this much, 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 it out of the water, you can make a bunch of money. That kind of stuff 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 you can revisit at the end of that contract period what to actually do to make it sustainable. So I did that at WP Engine. That's possible. Same kind of thing with any paid stuff. It could be AdWords. It could be other channels. It could be affiliates, which is a whole different universe. It could be email marketing, although I think that's more of a longer-term play. Content marketing is where you can't just do it and get a return. You have to work it. So it's strategic, but it may not be fast. And that might be okay. You might be all right with strategic and slow. 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 now: pay a dollar and get a customer this month.' So that's what I need to focus on.
Can I describe where we're at and just have you ask me questions, do a health check? I'm like at the doctors and you're just checking this and making sure this is okay.
All right. So, we started this company back in May. It's me and two co-founders. We're all technical. It's called Tupal, and our goal is to build an app that lets you do remote pair programming. 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. 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. Through that, I started getting people on an email list and actually populated a paid alpha. So I 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 minimum viable versus smallest lovable product thing. Our whole pitch is that it's going to be really fast, and we know that's the most important thing, but it's really hard to make it really fast. So we're kind of racing the clock to make it fast enough by the time we want to hit. Do I have to use a certain IDE? Like it integrates with something?
No, it's a desktop app, so it could be anything. You can use your terminal, your IDE, whatever you want.
So is it like desktop sharing, but you're super smart about diffs, sending diffs and compressing that?
That's right. Yep. And really good keyboard support and dual mouse, and also pairing-specific features like I can...
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.
That's nice. The interest is great. We got like 3,000 people plus on our email list. People are asking me pretty frequently to get into the next alpha beta. 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 one of my concerns. 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. So we're kind of in this thing where it's like we should get something out there and get the feedback, but also it's going to take a while to get it to where we want to be, of course. So we have this push-pull going on. First of all, I'm kind of hung up on this thing of if it's not really, really, really good, then the business isn't going to work. I do see that in the long run. Why would someone love, not just like, but love the tool? Latency that's so low that you don't even know what's going on totally, especially with developers. So like, well, how does it work? You know, I get it. I totally agree. But this whole thing of well we launched in May except it's still in alpha and we're as far as 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.
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 Tuple, 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 Tuple at all and having a slower than it will be Tuple? It changes my life, and the other part makes me go from Tuple 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 maybe you're right, 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 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 because it would be like Apple has to make a product that's all the way done even if it's new because it would be contra-brand 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 because 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 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. So 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 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 file the edges so you can charge more or they can be more thrilled and tell their friends because it's that good. 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, 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, 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 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.
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?
Well, why would you not take their money?
I guess for focus because we're sort of at the point where we have the cash in the bank is useful but we're not hurting for it. And so me doing product management for example and testing the app out with people and things like that is seemingly more useful right now.
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 by the way, if someone right now would pay to use it because they... Why would you stop them from that? Because you need to ask them more product management questions.
No one's paying to use it yet because no one has it. So people are like paying to eventually use it.
Well, why don't they have it?
