Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti: And today on the startup chat, we’re going to talk about a piece of advice that I gave to somebody recently, which is, archive all your emails right now, you don’t have to respond to a single one of them. So I want to frame this and share the story, and then I’m really curious, Hiten, what your response and comment is going to be on this. Here’s the deal, here’s the story. Recently, I was talking to somebody and he was super stressed out. He was telling me, “Listen Steli, I just took a vacation, just came back, my inbox is a mess, there’s all these emails in my inbox, I have the super important priorities that I need to tackle, and then there’s all these other projects, it’s just too much right now. I feel my anxiety is on 20 from a scale of 1 to 10. I’m trying to manage this, it’s been a week since I’ve been back and I’m struggling. What should I do?” And there’s a lot of nuance in this conversation, a lot of things that I’ll put to the side, but one of the pieces of advice that I gave him was, I talked to him a little bit about his inbox. And I asked him, “How many times do you check your inbox right now?” And he was like, “To be honest, every couple of minutes.” I’m like, “Do you always respond to an email when you check your inbox?” He was like, “No, right now it’s just so bad. I look at my inbox and I feel terrible and I leave again. But then I have to check it again to see if there’s something new in there or if I find the focus and the flow and the energy to start tackling some of them.” I was like, “All right. How many emails did you get your vacation?” He’s like, “You know, it’s not,” and that was the interesting part, “It’s not that many. Maybe I have 50 emails or so.” I’m like, “Okay, cool. How many emails in your inbox do you have that are older than a month?” And he was like, “I don’t know, a couple of hundred.” I’m like, “All right, try this. Just go to everything that’s older than two weeks ago and just archive all of it. Just archive it.” And he was like, “What if there’s something important in there?” And I told him, “If it’s that important, you should know about it and remember it, or it will pop up again because somebody is going to follow up or somebody is going to respond to some kind of a threat. More likely than not, especially with emails that are older than a month, if you have not responded in a month, you’re not going to respond in three months. I’m sure there’s emails in your inbox that are six months old. What are they doing there other than stressing you? You’re not going to respond and it doesn’t matter anymore. Just archive all of it. Don’t worry, the world will not end.” And I told him this story that, I had experienced this many years ago when I came back once from vacation. And I was talking to Anthony, my co-founder, and I had a similar situation where I was like, “Ah, I have so many emails, this, that and the other.” He was like, “Dude, your inbox is not a prison, these are all optional. You don’t have to respond to any of them.” I was like, “Yeah, but no, no, no, no, no.” He’s like, “You just archive everything. If it’s important, it’ll pop up again. Don’t worry about it. You’re overthinking this. Just archive it, and then you’ll feel good, and with that clean mindset, you can tackle the stuff that’s really important. And the emails that you’re really into, you know about. There’s a handful of things you need to, people you need to address, you won’t forget. So just do it.” I was like, “Ah…” And then he was like, “Hand me over your phone.” And I gave it to him because I trust him. And he was like, “Here, I’m going to do it for you. Just archive everything.” And at first I was like, “Oh my God, this is going to be my death, I’m going to fail, my company is going to fail, we’re going to be bankrupt, terrible things are going to happen.” And then nothing happened. I remembered a bunch of people and things that I knew I needed to send emails to, and I did, and a bunch of things that were more important or urgent that popped up in my inbox again, and I managed them then, and there was a shit ton of email that was probably nice to have, maybe something that could have been even good that I didn’t address, but it gave me the space to tackle some really important projects and make important decisions and move on in life. And I’m not saying that my general advice to everybody on earth is always just delete or archive all your emails and never respond to anything. But this idea that you have to respond to every single email, especially also you have to respond to emails even if they are months and months and months old is ridiculous and false. There’s no rule. You’re not going to go to jail. And I think we are overly stressed, and when we’re in this constant state, especially, people come back from vacation and now they would have had the peace of mind and clarity and calmness to make big decisions and to attack some really creative work, but they can’t because they’re getting bogged down on bullshit that doesn’t matter at the end of the day. So I’m dying to hear what you have to say about this piece of advice of, maybe you should just archive all of your emails, you don’t have to respond to them, especially coming from somebody like you who’s prolific in email and responds to everything as far as I know. What’s your response? What are you two immediate cents listening to this story?

Hiten Shah: Well, first of all, I was expecting, not 200 emails, but a lot more. And so I’m like, “Oh, 200, that’s easy.” So that was the first reaction, because that’s not a lot of emails, and 50, that’s not a big deal, I can get through that pretty quickly. So first of all, that’s not a lot of email, in my opinion, after a vacation. I think the way I would put this, besides the things that you said is, the person must have been managing their life using email. And that’s not to say they were getting the wrong kind of emails or anything, it’s more to say that, if we get stressed out over how much email you have, you’re managing your life through email. There’s probably a better way to manage your life. And that means that you’re looking at that thing like it’s a task list, an inbox of shit you need to do that you don’t want to do. And so I think the higher level is, people probably have some work to do in general around their relationship with email. And the reason I say that is that’s how we communicate with the world today, and it’s probably the most ubiquitous, most common method people use to communicate today. And so I just look at that and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s a relationship problem with email. That’s not necessarily an inbox problem of too many emails.” I know a lot of people have that problem.

Steli Efti: Let me ask you, how would you describe your relationship with email? Because you get a lot more emails than most people, and you respond to a lot more emails with a lot more thoughtful comments than most people. How do you think about your inbox?

Hiten Shah: I don’t. I go to it when I want to go work on it, when I want to go through that list of tasks or whatever it is. And I get notifications rarely for it because I turn all those off. And so I go when I want to deal with it, and then I deal with it. And I try to answer things as quickly as I can and as best as I can and I move on with my life. So the way to not be in email is not be in email all the time. But that doesn’t mean you don’t answer your emails or you have to archive them all or anything like that. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t archive them, I’m good. I don’t know, for me, I don’t have any judgment over anybody on how they manage their time or how they manage their emails or whatever, because I think a lot of email is… When you learn how to deal with email, whatever your methodology is or your way of working is, you end up essentially realizing how to get control over parts of your life that you might’ve felt like you weren’t in control of. And so no judgment if you want to do and archive all, I think that’s great. If that makes you feel better after a vacation, that’s what you need to do, go for it. I think that there is an absolute truism around the idea that if you archive it all and something is important, you’re truly going to get bothered by it by somebody. And that’s acceptable. I think that’s okay, that’s something I believe in. But I don’t really archive my email very often. I’m also, I used to be way more into inbox zero, now I don’t care as much about having zero emails in my inbox because email just doesn’t stress me out. I think that’s the key. It’s your relationship with email, which is really about your relationship with how you do work.

Steli Efti: Most people check their email as if it’s like-

Hiten Shah: A chore?

Steli Efti: A chore that you, at all times, need to know what the status of it is. It’s like, “I’m not going to respond to it right now, but I will check it because maybe there’s something urgent or important.” I don’t know, it’s like a habit people build where sometimes people will… If you observe people that look at their, observe them at their workspace, sometimes people will check their email every couple of minutes without ever responding to anything. They just keep checking. “Have I gotten a new email? Yes. Okay. Have I gotten a new email? Have I’ve gotten a new email. Have I gotten a new email?” And it’s like, you could just check once in that hour.

Hiten Shah: Yep.

Steli Efti: And this is not that uncommon. It’s also a thing of, maybe a boredom thing where, when I don’t know what to do, I just check email, I don’t know what to do. Just like people check their Twitter timeline or their Instagram or something, that’s like, don’t know what to do right now, or don’t want to do the thing I’m doing right now, distraction. And one piece of social media that’s in the constant distraction bucket, but also email, just my inbox. I’m just constantly checking it. And then it becomes a habit that controls you and runs you. You don’t run it anymore. You don’t decide when you want to look and what you want to do, you’re just becoming this slave that constantly checks it and feels, every time… The other crazy thing. Let’s say you have one email that you ought to respond to and you don’t feel like responding to today. Let’s say that that’s the case. Now, you could feel bad about that once today, you could be like, “I should really respond to this today, I’m not going to do it, huh, this feels bad. Hopefully, and probably tomorrow, I will.” But instead of doing that, people choose to feel bad 37 times that day about it.

Hiten Shah: Yep. That’s totally true.

Steli Efti: For no reason whatsoever, it doesn’t benefit it, it actually makes it less likely that you’re going to have a response to this email, because you’re making it bigger and bigger and bigger in your head and emotionally, and it doesn’t help the other person that you worry that much about it, they still haven’t gotten an email from you. So you could have just worried once versus 37 times over the entire day. Those are the things, I think the inbox, I can’t think of anything else, other than social media, where people have a similar relationship to where it becomes this thing that runs their life, this thing that becomes a to-do, this thing where they feel pressure. Every single email, they feel like they have to respond, and where they have these really bad habits where they check in way too often and just make it a source of constant anxiety and stress for no reason whatsoever.

Hiten Shah: Yep. That’s what I see people do. That’s not necessary.

Steli Efti: And the people that don’t do it, at the center of it all, is a decision that, I don’t have to live this way and I’m going to take ownership and this is the way I’m going to deal with it. Either you have a process, or like you, you’re like, “I don’t feel bothered by this. This is something, whenever I want, I can do it, I can do it one way or another, it doesn’t really fucking matter.”

Hiten Shah: It’s like being bothered by all the spam messages you get. It’s the same. It’s like, dude, they’re just emails. What’s the big deal? You don’t really think of spam twice, so why think of your email box twice? Is anything that urgent? That’s the thing. I think email implies urgency to some extent, it’s just not that urgent. It shouldn’t matter, but we make it matter.

Steli Efti: But it’s in our mind. This is not gravity, this is not some physical law.

Hiten Shah: That’s right.

Steli Efti: We all, because we’ll pretend it is that way, it feels that way, but it really isn’t. You can choose what you’re going to do, you could answer all emails just once a day, you could choose not to answer most emails and just respond to the things that you really feel important. You could choose to respond to every single email with really thoughtful… You can choose what you want, there’s no rules. And this is not some homework that the world is putting on your table and you are this powerless being that has to finish it no matter how dumb it is, or no matter how little you want it, or no matter how little value it provides you. You can choose, you can make that choice and you’re not going to get to jail, and the world is going to be fine. You can choose whatever you want, the world is going to be fine, I promise to you. All right. I think that’s it for this episode. I’m curious to see what people will say about it, what they’ll share with us on this, and until next time, we’ll hear very soon.

Hiten Shah: See yah.

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how self-management is the best management, because I tweeted that and I think Steli liked it.

Steli Efti: Yeah.

Hiten Shah: And I tweeted it because it just came in my head. I had no rhyme or reason.

Steli Efti: How the fuck do you do this? You’re just like, you’re just walking down the street and you see birds chirping, and you’re like, “Ah, wait a second, before I continue watching these birds. Self-management is the best management.” How did it just pop up in your head?

Hiten Shah: I don’t know. I just thought about it. I don’t know. I just thought about it. I just thought about something and it just popped in my head, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is a good one. Let me go share this today.” I strongly believe that. And a lot of it has to do with knowing what you control. And you just control yourself and how you manage yourself. And I think that can extend to many different areas. We can talk about it in many different ways, but at the end of the day, I really truly believe self management is really the best management. And one thing, one way, if you are a manager of any kind that you can kind of resonate with this or maybe have some familiarity with the concept, is when you have somebody who you’re managing, you’re responsible for, and their ability to manage themselves is just incredible. So, the management you have to do is very light because they’re bringing what their needs to the table for you. They’re documenting things. They’re basically managing themselves, which makes it so that you don’t have to manage them. And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t manage them. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be involved. This isn’t even a management style thing. This is literally, self-managed people are some of the best people to work with. Self-managed people are sort of some of the people that have the most … That appear to be more put together because they’re just managing themselves. Even if everything’s going to hell in a hand basket or whatever they call it, they’re still sitting there capable of basically figuring out what to do. So, a lot of self-management to me is more about figuring out what to do and not having to ask other people what you should be doing. And this applies to so many different scenarios. It’s kind of hilarious because it’s kind of like this thing where you’re taking control of what you can control, and you’re not worried about things that are outside of your control. If you think of self-management and think of it as self-management, you could put yourself in that mindset even if you don’t have a lot of experience with management or managing people and things, or feel like you’re not good at to-do lists, and stuff like that. It’s not about that. It’s about having the sort of awareness that if you manage yourself, you get to control your time. You don’t manage yourself, you don’t get to control your time. Someone else is controlling your time.

Steli Efti: I love that. And this is one of these universal uncomfortable truths where if you want to start changing the world, clean your room, make your bed. Right?

Hiten Shah: Yeah.

Steli Efti: Get your affairs in order. Do your shit first. I remember. I used to say this to people jokingly. Before I had children, I always used to tell people, “I’m going to write a book about how to raise children before I’m becoming a dad.” I never did that obviously, but I was like, “I’m going to write a book.” [crosstalk] And that-

Hiten Shah: You and the books. Yes.

Steli Efti: And I’m like, “And that book is going to be two pages. And it’s just going to say, ‘Get your shit together. Just whatever you want your children’s life to look like, make sure you live it in front of them. You’ve got to tackle your fears. Be honest, grow, learn, be humble. Just live a truly good life in front of them and they’ll be fine. They’ll learn everything they need to learn by watching you. There’s nothing you need to pretend to do or say to them while privately your shit’s fucked up.'” Right? And think, “Well, I read these 20 books about perfect child education. And so, my children truly are going to benefit from this.” Maybe they will a little bit, but if you just don’t have your affairs in order, they’re not. They’re just going to copy your behavior. It’s the same thing … Back in the day when I was a kid … I don’t know I was for you, but all my uncles would smoke and all of them would forbid their children to smoke. And I always thought that’s kind of weird. I was like, “What logic is this? They’re sitting here in the living room smoking a cigarette.” But then once they saw that one of the kids, when they were 16 smoked in school or something, they had lost their shit, and they were screaming at them. And I’m like, “Motherfucker, you’re smoking as well? How you manage your child? What is this?” So, the same thing. But it’s so much easier. It’s for all of us. It’s so much easier for me to tell you what to do than to do it myself correctly. [crosstalk 00:05:24].

Hiten Shah: Always, yeah.

Steli Efti: To live up to it. And-

Hiten Shah: My dad actually told me, “Do what I say, not what I do.”

Steli Efti: Do what I say, not what I do. Your dad is not the only one, right. How many people have done this?

Hiten Shah: He just straight up told me that. I was like, “All right, dude. Cool. Great.

Steli Efti: Yeah. How illogical is this? Don’t do what I do. Just do what I say. Well, why don’t you do what you say?

Hiten Shah: That’s right.

Steli Efti: Why does your life not apply to this standard? This golden standard of [crosstalk 00:05:55].

Hiten Shah: Yeah. The background there is my dad doesn’t eat vegetables and stuff. He just doesn’t. There’s a short list. So, he’s always … So, it was really about the food all the time. But yeah, he meant that. So, yeah.

Steli Efti: This reminds me. I’m sure. I’m certain I’ve told this story before on the podcast, but this reminds me of this Gandhi story. I don’t know how true it is or not, but I love it. And I’ve told it a million times where there was this mother that came with a child to see Gandhi, and the child was obese and was eating too much sugar and was about to die because of diabetes or something. And so, this mother traveled really far distances and long times with her child, waited forever to get like a couple of seconds with Gandhi. She’d heard that this was this amazing person. And she asked him and pleaded with him, “Please, please, tell my son something so he stops eating sugar so he can become healthy and doesn’t die. He’s too young.” And then, he looked at her and told her, “Come back again in a month or something.” And she went on this … The whole travel back and all this time to travel again there and wait for days and days and days. And then when he saw … Got the audience with Gandhi again and saw the child, he just looked at him and said, “Stop eating sugar,” and then smile to them and was like, “Oh, sure. Nice day.” And she got really mad at him and was like, “What? Why didn’t you say this a month ago? Why did we have to wait?” Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da. And Gandhi was like, “Well, a month ago I was still eating sugar.” Right? I fucking-

Hiten Shah: It’s good.

Steli Efti: It’s so good, right?

Hiten Shah: So good.

Steli Efti: I love the story. He’s like, “Well, I couldn’t tell him to stop eating sugar. I was eating sugar myself.”

Hiten Shah: Because I was eating it. Yeah. What do you want me to say? [crosstalk 00:07:34].

Steli Efti: So good. And this is pretty much it. And this relates to self-management. People, we all, we like to complain, “Oh, there’s no leadership here,” or management is not this. Management is not that.” Or even better, “I should be given more responsibility. I should be given a chance.” Or on the flip side, “Oh, my God. I’m given this responsibility to manage people, but I’ve never managed anybody.” And it’s like, “Wait a second.”

Hiten Shah: What about yourself?

Steli Efti: What about yourself? You could start gaining management experience right now. You don’t need anybody. Just becomes really good at managing your own life. You can gain tremendous leadership experience by leading your own life. Right? Becoming a leader of your life, becoming a leader of your work.

Hiten Shah: Totally. Yeah.

Steli Efti: And the principles to becoming an amazing manager or leader, they’re always the same. If you know how to manage yourself really, really well, chances that you’re going to manage other people really effectively are incredibly high, because it’s the same principles. And if your life is a mess, if you’re always late, if you don’t get your shit and affairs in order, the chances that you’re going to read some book and then become an amazing manager of other people is zero. Right. So, [crosstalk] that book … Is there a Peter Drucker book on self-management. I feel like there’s a Peter Drucker book [crosstalk] management.

Hiten Shah: I think there is. Managing Oneself [crosstalk 00:09:06]. Is that it?

Steli Efti: Managing Oneself, yes.

Hiten Shah: Yeah.

Steli Efti: This is one of those books that I think I’ve read sometime, or at least I know have on Kindle, but I don’t remember it. But I’ve heard a couple of people recommending it, but I can’t recommend it firsthand, but this fits the [crosstalk 00:09:21].

Hiten Shah: [crosstalk 00:09:21]. Yeah, yeah. It’s Peter Drucker style. Yeah. Good book.

Steli Efti: All right. I think this is it for us for this episode, but this comes back to, I think the tidbit for people out there. As you said in your tweet, self-manage is the best management. Start with self-management, right? You have to ask yourself, How can I [crosstalk 00:09:44]?

Hiten Shah: How can I now [crosstalk 00:09:44]?

Steli Efti: “Right now, how can I be better at self management? How can I become better at managing my life and myself?” And then, pick one thing and start working on that. Start working on becoming a great manager over yourself. And lots and lots of things will fall into place afterwards.

Hiten Shah: Yep.

Steli Efti: That’s it for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon.

Hiten Shah: Happy managing.

Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today, on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about one of my pro tips that I tweeted about recently. It just said, “Pro tip, share your work.” Here, we like talking about more than just sales and marketing.

Steli Efti: We just want to bullshit and chat about business and life, and hopefully, while we’re doing that, provide a lot of value to people.

Hiten Shah: The world’s best business podcast.

Steli Efti: Oh.

Hiten Shah: Shit.

Steli Efti: Shit, we got it.

Hiten Shah: For people trying to get shit done.

Steli Efti: Done. Yeah. We don’t want to give you feedback that’s bullshit.

Hiten Shah: We want you to do your best. I think it caught Steli’s eye, which I’m not surprised about. What did it spur for you?

Steli Efti: Well, first of all, the tweet popped up in my timeline. I have to look it up again. It was not just you, but it was you with a tweet and a reply. You’ll know from whom. It was your tweet that said, “Pro tip, share your work.” And then below it, it showed the reply of somebody saying, “I love you.” Which was-

Hiten Shah: Yeah, Julian Shapiro.

Steli Efti: Julian Shapiro, who’s a badass. [crosstalk 00:00:58].

Hiten Shah: It was great.

Steli Efti: And a great follow. I had to laugh, both because I love what you tweeted, but also loved his response, just, “I love you.” It’s just classic. As always, when your tweets are inspiring or at least slow me down on my tweets, scroll, track. Wait a second.

Hiten Shah: Yeah, that’s fun, all that.

Steli Efti: This seems right. Hold on. I’m always curious, what prompted this? What happened in Hiten’s life? What thought, what conversation did he have? What happened just before he picked up his phone and was like, “All right, let me share this with the world. Pro tip, share your work.” Tell us.

Hiten Shah: Yeah, one of the most secretive people I know is David Cancel from Drift. I was looking up something he shared on LinkedIn. Over at Drift, they created yet another new category. They created a category called Conversational Marketing over the last few years. They recently, a few weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago, threw it out and said basically, “We’re creating a new category now again, and it’s called Revenue Acceleration.” Then, when they announced it, a bunch of folks, Dave Gerhardt, who used to work at Drift, had some commentary, a few other folks had some commentary about it, and then David decided to share some slides, I’m going to call them ugly because they are, and that’s a compliment in this case, share some slides that he worked on internally. And he had a nice little note about it basically saying that there’s no point keeping these secrets because we have to build with the customer kind of thing. He didn’t quite say it like that, but that’s what he said. What I realized is, well, if he is now advocating sharing your work, someone who’s been very secretive historically, even he’s catching on.

Steli Efti: That’s interesting. Remember, we did an episode a long time back now around transparency. Right?

Hiten Shah: Yep.

Steli Efti: Especially being a [inaudible] startup, sharing. I think, at the time, for a little while, it was this hot, new trend of sharing revenue numbers or sharing your [inaudible] metrics dashboard with everybody.

Hiten Shah: Open startups, they called it. Yeah.

Steli Efti: Open startups. Exactly. And then sharing salary numbers and sharing other things. I remember we had a really, I think, enlightening conversation for the listeners, a lot of people had commented on it, where it was like, well, there is no organizational human that is 100% transparent with the world. There’s always some things you just don’t know about. Even these open startups have things that they’re not sharing, or that they choose to share at a specific given time. This can be amazing marketing and it can be part of your culture and the kind of people you attract, but don’t feel forced into it. Right?

Hiten Shah: Right.

Steli Efti: Just make sure that it fits your personality and your culture. Even with the two of us, we both have co-founded… I think we both are fairly open. There’s lots of things that we keep private from the world, but I think we’re pretty open people, but we both have co-founders that are, in some areas, maybe a bit more secretive or uncomfortable sharing certain numbers with the world or something like that. We are close, have always been about sharing everything we know with the world, but when it came to our metrics, our revenue numbers, customer numbers and all that, those kind of things that we always kept close to our chest. It’s interesting that David Cancel sparked this idea of share your work. Now, here’s my big question for you or something that I’d love to hear your thoughts about. There’s beauty and there’s power in sharing your work, but there’s also risk if you do it while you’re still unsure about that work or the outcome of it, even if you fail at something or something fails that you’ve done. After it failed with some time passing, it’s pretty safe for founders or for startups to talk about it openly. Here’s the big failure. Here’s the big mistake we made. Usually they’ll get a lot of admiration, a lot of attention for it, so it’s kind of a safe thing to do. This is something in our past that we learned and we want to openly share with you everybody. I’ve seen a lot of that. What I’ve not seen a lot of is people sharing what they’re currently doing, where the outcome is completely unclear. It can’t be framed. It can’t be framed as, “This was the turning point of our success,” or, “This was the big mistake I made that I want to share.” It’s like, “This is what we’re currently doing. Who the fuck knows what’s going to happen?” And then, “Oh, we’re changing our mind. Oh, we’re changing our mind again.” Sort of like the more messy version of this is sharing in real-time, while you don’t have a narrative ready. You can’t frame it nicely. There’s maybe a fear that you’ll appear, I don’t know, less confident, less like you and your company have their shit together, yada, yada, yada. I’m curious about that, number one, if you agree with that observation. This is an observation I’ve made, but we’ve never talked about this, that I see lots and lots of really honest sharing, but always with some kind of time that has passed in order to be able to frame, and it appears to me that sharing your work in real-time seems more risky because you don’t control the narrative as nicely anymore. It’s harder to control the narrative.

Hiten Shah: Yeah, it shows a level of vulnerability when you do it, even if you don’t mean to show vulnerability when you do it, and I think that’s actually a big factor to how or what makes other people attracted by the idea that you did that and wanting to pay attention. It also sparks some level of curiosity that is natural for humans. We’re super curious, especially about other people. In a way, it’s a distraction from our own work, too. I think all these things are true and that makes sharing your work extremely beneficial to you, if you’re sharing it. Then, this idea of sharing it early or sharing it late, here’s the funny thing, when you share your work in a way, people feel like you shared it early even if you didn’t, because you shared your work, you did something that’s uncommon. Most people don’t share their work. They don’t go out there and go, “Hey, this is what I’m working on. Here’s how I came up with it. Here’s how I did it.” The benefits are literally incredible when you do it and you figure out how to do it for your market or your customer base or other founders, if that’s your market or whatever. I think that’s the part that’s hard to deny when it comes to this idea. It’s almost like there’s these weird false benefits to it that are hard to understand until you do it. What I mean by false benefits is, even if you didn’t intend to seem vulnerable, you will seem vulnerable when you share your work. Other people will be like, “Oh, that was so vulnerable,” or, “That was so transparent.” All you’re trying to do probably is just find a way to do marketing and get [inaudible] or get attention. The way you did that is by sharing your work, which is a lot of the intention behind it. While, if you think about a company like Buffer and their idea of transparency with salaries and all that stuff, I would say them being the poster children of the concept of sharing your work, they did it because they believe that’s the way it should be, which is very different than what I’m seeing a lot of people do today. It’s like David Cancel finally came around and kind of said this is the way it should be, we should be sharing this stuff in public so we can develop these things with customers. I think that’s obviously aspirational for someone like him who’s very private and secretive about what they’re doing at that company until they just do it. Now he’s saying that, look, even this revenue acceleration thing is a work in progress, and here’s how he thought about it. The promise was that he’s going to share more. Now I’m waiting for him to share more because I’m curious, but also he’s never been that transparent where he’ll share stuff that’s internal without it being marketing or it being super polished. This thing wasn’t really polished. It was really good. It was high quality, but it wasn’t polished. That’s just new to me from him, and it really got me thinking, this is the pro tip, especially if he’s catching on and into it and explaining it from a customer-centric mindset, because the second that clicked for someone like him, I think there’s no undoing it, if that makes sense.

Steli Efti: Yeah. Awesome. I think this last part is really important on the line and it explains so well why it spoke to you, why it stood out to you, is that it came from a customer-centric insight. That was the driver. It was not, did you know when you share your work it gets a lot of use. It was not, did you know sharing your work-

Hiten Shah: No, he didn’t say that. Yeah. None of that. Yeah.

Steli Efti: Yeah. I wonder, if he had said that, if he had looked at that and went, “Ah, okay.” But the customer-

Hiten Shah: Yeah, he himself put a narrative behind it of why he felt like he should share those slides. His whole idea was this is work in progress. In a way, you’re sharing your work. Sharing your work is really about sharing your work in progress.

Steli Efti: Love it. All right. Pro tip, you’ve heard it here, share your work, and let us know how it goes. All right, this is it from us. We’ll see you very soon.

Hiten Shah: Yeah.

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

Hetin Shah: And this is Hetin Shah.

Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about, how do we want to frame this, should founders sell themselves, or is that projecting a weird or weak message to the world? So, this is going to be a short rent episode, but I feel like, maybe especially our audience or some people in the audience, will benefit from hearing this. I was on a mentor call recently, and there were a bunch of self-funded founders and self-funded SAS entrepreneurs on that call. And there were a lot of questions around selling. And then one founder asked a question. It’s one of those rare ones where I’ve heard it many times over the years, but I’ve never addressed it afterwards, in kind of a one piece of content to share that, my opinion about this, with the world. It kind of clicked and I was like, “I can’t believe I’ve never talked about this on the podcast. I’ve never talked about this on a video or something like that.” So I wanted to chat with you about this real quick, the basic premise being… And I’ll ask you first, see what you think and what you would have told this founder and then I’ll tell everybody what I told them. But here’s a founder that has built a SAS product that is in the early days. And he asked me, he said basically, “Listen, I’m a bit concerned that if I’m starting to reach out to people by email and cold calling and all that, and I’m like, ‘Hey, I want to sell you this product.’ And then they’re like, ‘Oh what’s your position in the company?’ And I have to say, ‘I’m the founder.’ Then it will obviously communicate that I am tiny, there’s nobody else working at this company, and I’m probably desperate because why otherwise would the founder involve themselves in cold emailing people, and ask them for appointments, and giving them demos, and trying to close them on a deal?'” And he was like, “Wouldn’t it be better if it just hired somebody to do this? So, we maintain the appearance of being a successful, maybe bigger company.” That question was directed to you, Hetin. If somebody was like, “Hetin, should I sell myself? Or will they create kind of a bad impression in the market because I’m the founder? Should I rather just hire somebody to do that, so people don’t think I’m desperate and small?” What’s your general response to that?

Hetin Shah: I think it’s better if the founder sells. And I think there’s some level of imposter syndrome happening when these folks are like making up reasons why they shouldn’t be selling. I think it’s all made up junk.

Steli Efti: Now let me ask you, Hetin, you have a really big profile. You’re really well-known around the world. In Sudden Valley, you’re were an icon in SAS, you’re a pioneer in this space, you and are around amazingly successful human being.

Hetin Shah: Is this my obituary?

Steli Efti: No.

Hetin Shah: I’m just kidding, Steli, I take the compliment.

Steli Efti: And you are notoriously bad at taking compliments.

Hetin Shah: There you go. Thank you.

Steli Efti: This could be on both of our…

Hetin Shah: Obituaries.

Steli Efti: Or tomb stones where it’s like, “Does not take compliments well.”

Hetin Shah: [inaudible] for the life of them. There you go.

Steli Efti: But you, with your current startup, you’re doing it all. You’ve done, I don’t know, a bazillion customer development calls, and you’ve done surveys where you jumped on calls with millions of people, I feel like. And ask them about all their problems and everything. And, so I’m like, “Hetin Shah is offering almost anybody, hey, if you are the type of user that I want to build a product for and solve this issue for, I want to talk to you. I want to learn from you. I’m going to figure things out. I’m going to give you an hour and ask all the questions, trying to learn from you.” And here’s this less experience founder, or way less successful, way less known. And all of the sudden this person is like, “[inaudible 00:04:31] all these tasks, are they not beneath me? Will people not judge me if I sent them an email telling them I want to talk to them about my product, or sell it to them or whatever?” And so that kind of a thing drives me crazy, because it is an imposter syndrome problem, but it’s also so… This is the type of thing where insecurities are really standing in our ways of success, and of doing the right things.

Hetin Shah: Right.

Steli Efti: Right? All this insecurity that bubbles up, what will other people think of me?

Hetin Shah: Who cares?

Steli Efti: Boom. That’s why I love you. Who the fuck cares? Who cares? Who cares? Are you in the business of making this company and yourself successful? Or do you want to be popular? These things are not the same thing. Or do you want to have a glamorous appearance at all times with everybody you interact with? That is a…

Hetin Shah: Yeah. Here’s the thing, the customer wants you to solve their problem. They don’t care about anything else.

Steli Efti: They don’t care.

Hetin Shah: What is you as a founder, going out and talking to them have to do with that? In fact, it’s a framing. It’s a point of view. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m the founder, and I’m doing this. Because this matters. It just matters, because you matter, the customer matters.”

Steli Efti: Yeah.

Hetin Shah: So of course, I’m going to do this, Ill go do it all day. I’ll do whatever I have to if it’s in service to the customer. The customer matters. And it doesn’t matter who you are and what your title is. In fact, if you think you’re a founder and you’re beneath sales, Steli is going to check you at the door.

Steli Efti: There you go. And first of all, it’s above sales, which nobody is.

Hetin Shah: Yeah. Whatever is, above, below, I don’t know. Either way, you’re going to get checked at the door if you’re [crosstalk] selling for any reason, dude.

Steli Efti: You have to check yourself before you wreck yourself, because…

Hetin Shah: There you go.

Steli Efti: This is bullshit. Number one, nobody gives a fuck. Number two, people are thrilled to talk to the founder.

Hetin Shah: Absolutely thrilled. I’d never seen a scenario where it’s not like that. So, yeah.

Steli Efti: People are like “Wow. All right. I’m talking to somebody that has ultimate power. That probably has expertise, that has influenced.” How is that a bad thing?

Hetin Shah: I’ll even tell you what, both my co-founder and I, Maria and I, get on calls for sales, at the same time.

Steli Efti: There you go. Look at that.

Hetin Shah: Think about what that signals to people. We give a shit. And this is at FYI, we’re about 15 people, both of us are getting on these calls. Both of us. That’s how important they are.

Steli Efti: And you know what? Some person will think now, Hetin… And this is another thing we should do a whole episode about, because it pisses me off, is somebody is listening to this now and is thinking “Well, Steli Efti and Hetin Shah, of course, once I’m an icon, once I’m successful, of course, people are going to be thrilled to talk to me. But if I’m a nobody, and I’m the founder, people will laugh at me and will judge me. And you guys are out of touch with what it means to be a nobody.”

Hetin Shah: These people are not getting anything else from me, except my need to learn from them. They’re not getting anything else. I’m not sitting there giving them advice. I’m not doing anything except trying to learn what I can do for them.

Steli Efti: Besides that, Hetin, you’ve been doing this from day one.

Hetin Shah: Yeah.

Steli Efti: It’s like me. When we launched clothes, I think for the first year, I called every single trial sign up. And I was like, [crosstalk] “Hey, I’m the founder. I wanted to welcome you to the trial. You’re awesome, how did you find us?” And people were like, “Are you really?” And then eventually, once some people knew me, maybe the people that came and signed up, they’d watched a video of me or something, they’re like, “Are you really Steli? Are you shitting me?” I’m like, “Of course.” They’re like, “You have time to call people?” I’m like, “What is there that’s more important?”

Hetin Shah: What do you want me to do?

Steli Efti: What you want me to do?

Hetin Shah: [crosstalk] You signed up for my thing. You want me to help you out, right? I’m here to help you, what’s up?

Steli Efti: People are always going to be positively surprised. Nobody’s going to judge you on this. We’ve been doing this when nobody knew who we were, and it has nothing to do with, “Oh, once I’m so successful, then I could do this.” People are thrilled to talk to the founder. There’s nothing more important to do. Craig from Craigslist was doing support the entire time that Craigslist existed, it was hundreds of millions in revenue, where he was world famous, whatever, and he was still answering support tickets. There is no, this is beneath you, or people will judge you. And by the way, if there is a prospect or a customer that is so arrogant, misguided, and confused that they will judge you and go, “Oh my God, this fonder takes the time to talk to me. Well, then it’s not a company I want to buy from.” Then fuck them. [inaudible]

Hetin Shah: This is part of the experience. This is what you’re buying.

Steli Efti: If you have to constantly lie and pretend that you’re this big prestigious company, although you’re just a single founder that’s trying to get something honest and valuable out in the market, the effort it’s going to take you to keep up appearances with BS potential prospects, it’s going to burn you up, and you’re not going to accomplish anything. If somebody is telling you that your size is not a good fit for them. Fine. Move on. Find a customer that appreciates…

Hetin Shah: Yeah. They’re not an early adopter. They’re not right for you. It’s not a big deal. Don’t take it personally either. Just move on.

Steli Efti: Just move on.

Hetin Shah: I think the notion is a little crazy that, as a founder, you need to put up a front. And we sit there and we tell people, “We’re 15 people, and the companies we compete with right now are much larger.” And we don’t even bring that into account. As we’re talking, we’re like, “We’re 15 people, and the majority of companies are engineering, isn’t that what you want?

Steli Efti: Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s all an exchange of confidence. If you can find some level of confidence in yourself and belief, and you think, “You know what I’m doing can be really valuable. I really care. I have expertise and I’m going to deliver something valuable. I’m not going to deliver anything.” If you can bring that to the table, it doesn’t even matter what the answer is. You could see where two people or 2000 or 2 million people. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that people listen to you and feel like, “I think these folks are winners. I think these folks seem to be authentic and honest, and seem to be comfortable. And they seem to believe that what they’re doing is working. So maybe I should believe in it as well.” So, you have to find this in yourself, no number or no thing will make this work or not. You said you shared the amount of people that work at your company. We’ve been sharing that number from day one, and we’ve always, by a factor of a hundred X, have been smaller than all our competitors, right?

Hetin Shah: That’s right. Yep.

Steli Efti: We’re not shying away from this. We’re not pretending that we’re 4,000 people. We’re 40 people and our smallest competitors is like over 1,000 people. So, look at our products. Which product is better? And we sell it as a strength. We’re the best team in the market. Not the biggest. Don’t hide, don’t run away, and don’t try to pretend something you’re not. Ultimately, it’s just going to waste so much energy and it’s going to attract the wrong prospects, the wrong customers, the wrong employees.

Hetin Shah: Totally.

Steli Efti: And it’s going to be the beginning of the end. You’re the founder. Selling to customers, supporting customers, emailing customers, fixing bugs, all these things, nothing, cleaning the bathroom, your office, nothing is beneath you. You’re the founder. And especially when it comes to anything that relates to customers, you should be involved in the trenches and don’t feel two ways about it. And don’t make yourself crazy with these kind of bullshit things of like, “Oh, what will people think of me?” The right people will think that hopefully you’re awesome, and this is somebody that cares about their customers and cares about me. So I want to do business with them. And those that don’t…

Hetin Shah: That’s right.

Steli Efti: …think that, they don’t matter.

Hetin Shah: That’s right.

Steli Efti: All right. End of rent. This is it from us for this episode of the Startup Chat. Keep selling, keep talking to your customers, keep talking to your customers. Until next time, we’ll hear you very soon.

Hetin Shah: Talk to your customers.

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to answer the question, isn’t it too much SaaS? So this is another infamous episode that’s based on a tweet that you made, and that tweet was based on a ton of work and exposure that you’ve had in this area, I assume. But you recently tweeted something that stood out to me and it kind of stirred the pot a little bit, a lot of people that, a lot of friends, a lot of people that are respected, the SaaS space responded to it in one way or another. So I felt like that’s the perfect material to unpack for our listeners. So let me ask you, maybe you tell people a little bit about that tweet and what proceeded there. What made you write about that? And then let’s just unpack this question of there’s too much SaaS and what does that mean for founders out there that are currently building their first SaaS product or running a small SaaS product?

Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of SaaS, so what I tweeted was this idea that nobody you don’t talk to people and they’re all like, “Hey, I want more software.” You know?

Steli Efti: Yeah.

Hiten Shah: And the reason I tweeted that is because people are building a lot of software right now. There are new sort of products coming into the market all the time in almost every category and there’s people making very good living building the software too. So the comment was more like, I see a lot of software that’s being built and then whether it’s no code or things that people are just building really quickly and then kind of considering it a project, and then they end up moving on. And so that’s one scenario. Another scenario is I think there’s all kinds of bottlenecks in selling today that selling SaaS that just didn’t exist before, because there was less SaaS. So we’re seeing things like if you’re in certain markets, you need a number of features that are parody for the market, which basically means it takes you more effort, more time to build the product you need to build, and you might take it to market and people might have expectations that you were not even expecting until you actually built it and gave it to them. So, yeah, there’s just a lot going on in the world when it comes to software and SaaS and kind of all aspects of it. So that’s kind of where it came from. I’ve interviewed a ton of people about all the different tools they use and all kinds of different sort of configurations in terms of the interviews from understanding why people switch different document apps, all the way to general customer development on things like how many apps do you use? How are they bought? Stuff like that. So, yeah, there’s a lot going on in the world. SaaS is just sort of a delivery mechanism for the kind of value that a customer needs. And I think all that stuff can be easily forgotten when you’re building and especially when you start talking to people, because they’re not going to tell you they don’t want more SaaS, but they’re not going to tell you they want more SaaS either. And we’re kind of in this weird spot where a lot of people are just creating more software, adding more features to their software. And yeah, I guess I just wanted to say something about it, so that’s what I said, but high level, there’s a lot of SaaS.

Steli Efti: There’s a lot. Remember that chart that every year it was published by some site?

Hiten Shah: Yeah. The marketing tech one.

Steli Efti: Yeah. And it was doubling, it was 2000 and 4,000, 8,000, whatever. I think the last one that I saw was like close to 10,000. I don’t know if they published a new one this year, but it was doubling, but the numbers obviously, the numbers became… Every category in every vector was more and more and more and more crowded. And so there was this idea that I remember even us discussing on the podcast of it’s easier than ever to build a SaaS product and it’s easier than it used to be to get the early traction. But maybe after the first couple of thousand in MRR, maybe it’ll start becoming harder than ever to maintain that momentum just because the moment you get slightly up and running, you’re running into so much competition in so many customer expectations that it’s really hard to keep up as a super tiny company. Now, this is not the first time that this trend happens in software, where you have this trend to consolidation, like the one tool, in the B2B world, the one tool to rule them all. We just want to buy one piece of software that just does everything that we need in our business. And then we know it was obviously led to these overly bloated products that couldn’t do a single thing as uniquely well as people wanted. And then there was this counter trend where all of a sudden where this like, kind of decoupling of a B2B software for every little thing you would do in some other products that already exist. Now, there was a tool that allowed you to do it faster, simpler, more elegantly, maybe better. And now we’re too much of that. So there’s kind of a, it seems like we’re swinging back in the trend of customers saying we’re overwhelmed by the amount of tools our team uses, everything doesn’t talk well to each other. We’re overwhelmed. And the last thing we want is to continued to purchase more and more and more software. We just want something that integrates well, and that does most of it. Do you think that’s going to be a trend that we’re going to see kind of gain steam of a lot next couple of years, and then will it swing back again or will something else happen? I know, obviously you don’t know, but I’m just curious, how you would bet the market goes over the next couple of years?

Hiten Shah: Yeah. I don’t see it slowing down. I really don’t. I see us having more software. It’s just so easy to build. And there’s so many different needs out there that are niched up where a little tweak to your software can get you, like you said, those first early customers. And the thing is for some people that thousand, couple thousand bucks in MRR and growing even slowly could be something that they desire. And it’s actually very like… You get to a certain amount of recurring revenue and you’re able to sort of not have to work for money at least. And that means more traditional like a job or something, so I just see more, I see a lot more.

Steli Efti: And so do you think that, so if I’m a founder today, right, and I rent maybe, or let’s say I’m a new somebody that wants to become a founder and for the past maybe two years I’ve been reading online about entrepreneurship. I started reading a bunch of stuff about SaaS and starting something as a single founder in the SaaS space. And now I’m just getting ready to be like, “You know what, I’m going to jump into the cold water and do this.” Should I be worried that maybe the stuff that I read is outdated? And if I start building something small now maybe I’ll never get traction because it’s too crowded? Or is it just coming back to the core principle of you just better be really, really certain you understand that customer, you better be really, really certain you’re differentiated, you better be really, really certain you understand something about how you’re going to go to market and grow this thing? Would you advise somebody coming to you today and saying, I want to be an entrepreneur, what is a good space to go in? Should I do SaaS or e-commerce or something else? Would you still advise people to do SaaS?

Hiten Shah: I think there’s a lot of ways to make money. So it depends if they’re able to build SaaS like a software on their own or not. So if they’re an engineer, yeah, I’d say absolutely build something or teach people something. And if you’re not an engineer, then I would say, go teach people something and build some cash so you can spend it on building SaaS if that’s kind of the direction you go in. So build an audience that you sell something to would be the first thing I would do.

Steli Efti: Yeah. Yeah. What about people that have a SaaS company up and running that maybe the last year, or in the early days they were hyper-focused that were very differentiated and as they’ve grown, they just kept adding features and now they’re at this point where they are wondering, should we expand drastically and try to become this platform of sorts that does most of the things, but then we might be competing with much bigger competition that already does this, or should we try to kind of stay true to this idea that we’re going to stay a smaller “better product” that’s not bloated, not complicated? How would you make that decision today in terms of you’ve been already up and running for a year or two, the early recipe to success was being simple and being specialized. And, but now you kind of have this market poll of adding more and more and more feature of competing naturally with bigger competition and you’re wondering, are we going down a path that we’re not ready to succeed at because we just are still a tiny team and we’re self-funded or customer-funded and the companies that we would compete against that are kind of all encompassing, they have a lot more money, a lot more people. So is it kind of a trap or is it maybe the direction that every SaaS company today that wants to maintain fast growth just has to take?

Hiten Shah: I think it just goes back to the customer. What is the problem you’re solving for the customer in either of those scenarios? And if the customer, if there are customers out there and you can reach them at a profit, then why would you add anything? If the features you have are good and there’s no problem to solve, don’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. And so I look at it more like that. I don’t think it’s an absolute that all software needs to turn into all-in-one. I also think customers are kind of different across the board, so it depends what you’re building and kind of who’s competing with you and what the alternatives are. A lot of times I think that you’ll see, I think one more commonplace thing happened more and more, which is people competing on price. So that’s kind of what I mean. If you compete on price, let’s say with HubSpot, you’re going to end up building as much as you can to kind of have feature parody with HubSpot. So in a way, it has a lot to do with your point of view, more so than anything else and what you believe customers need. Hopefully they’re pulling product out of you. If they’re not pulling product out of you where they have more needs that they want you to solve, that’s where you kind of run into a problem because you just won’t know what to do and then you might go do all the things that you see in the market out there, regardless of what maybe people would actually buy from you. You see that a lot.

Steli Efti: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. All right. I think this is it for this episode. So I think we answered the question, is there too much SaaS with yes? Will there be more? Hell yes. What does that mean for you? It depends.

Hiten Shah: There you go, but talk to customers. Don’t forget. Just talk to customers.

Steli Efti: I don’t remember off the top of my head, the person that had made this little graph-

Hiten Shah: The flow chart.

Steli Efti: The flow chart, of after listening to 420 episodes of The Startup Chat, I came up with this flow chart. It’s basically, should I build a product? If you talk to customers and it’s like every possible problem a founder could have, it’s like, “Go talk to your customers to figure it out.”

Hiten Shah: Yep. Pretty much.

Steli Efti: All right. This is it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon.

Hiten Shah: See ya.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:04]

Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat, we’re going to figure out if founders know how to feel their feelings or they’re just thinking them. So, here’s why I wanted to quickly talk to you about this. Anybody that’s been listening to the Startup Chat for a long time knows we have talked a lot about the inner game of being a founder. We’ve talked a lot about it, we have a good amount of episodes around managing your emotions, managing your states, managing other people’s emotions, because it’s an emotional game. And if you don’t control your feelings, they might lead you astray and into problematic situations. One thing that I recently discovered about myself, and I wanted to quickly unpack with you for founders, because I thought this might be useful to people that listened to us, is this realization that I had about myself that I think at some point at a young age, I started realizing that I can’t quite fully trust my feelings, and if I just act on my emotions, I wreak havoc, and I create all kinds of problems. So, I started focusing more on controlling my feelings through my mind, and through thinking things through, and not acting immediately, and slowing it down, and de-intensifying my feelings, analyzing them first. Over a long period of time, very subconsciously over decades, I think that I mastered… I overdid this to the point where over the last many, many years, I think I thought most of my feelings, especially the negative ones, right? So, I could tell you here’s a situation that I think I was hesitant in and probably was driven by some kind of a fear, I didn’t feel fear or I didn’t feel hesitant, but I didn’t feel nervous. I just thought, “I’m probably nervous in this situation,” but it didn’t have a physical sensation. And for many, many reasons, I think that that’s not a good idea. It’s not a good idea to just think your feelings. I think it’s a much better idea to actually feel them, be present for them, not let them overwhelm you or runaway with you, but not run away from them either, but actually being fully present for the feeling. And then, you can still decide to think things through at times before you act. But, as I was thinking about all my friends that were CEOs and founders and entrepreneurs, I was wondering if this is maybe not so unique of a case. And what the downside, let’s just talk about that, the potential downside could be for founders who have lost touch with their feelings, who’ve lost the ability to feel their feelings and are just so cognitively focused, that all they do is all their internal experience is always just in their head, in their mind thinking and analyzing. So, first throwing that out there. Does this make any sense? Does this resonate? Do you think I’m crazy and alone or do you think, “Yeah, most founders are like that; that’s totally normal. That’s not special at all”? what’s your initial reaction to this?

[0:03:11]

Hiten Shah: Yeah, I would say that the there’s a few factors. So, there’s two factors that come to mind for me, as to how you deal with this or how this comes to be. One factor, which is probably the biggest one, is your personality. And personality is a longer topic, I’m sure. But, the reason I say that is your personality has a lot to do with how you express yourself to the outside world. And over time, as you run a business, your ability to bring out your personality in every interaction gets diminished. And the reason for that is most of the time in business, you are making decisions that involve other people and their wellbeing, as well as trying to bring those people on board with the decisions you’re trying to make. And you get really good at, honestly, not being yourself, if you want to put it like that. You end up becoming good at being a business person. That’s just what happens. And a lot of times that bleeds into all parts of your life and you end up suppressing your emotion and your personality unknowingly. And this shouldn’t necessarily be a negative thing. So, that’s one factor, which is what happens to your personality over time. This is inevitable. I don’t see anybody not hitting this, but their personality and then their own psyche and psychology points out like how this manifests in them. And I think the second piece that I’ve found with this is just this idea that when you are dealing with life, your first reaction for most human beings is emotional, and it’s really fast and it’s visceral. Some people would call it a gut feeling. Some people would just call it a trigger. Those things are what you start suppressing, is your ability to respond without emotion, ends up taking over the emotion itself and then you don’t even know what an emotion really is, and you start operating day-to-day, waking up doing the thing, going back to sleep, waking up, doing the thing, without having that feeling. And a lot of times your work takes over. So then your whole idea of life is really consumed by your work. And a lot of times this happens because you started the thing and you care that much about it, or for some people, some folks who are employees also get that same impact because of how much they care about the work they’re doing or believe they do. So, it’s not just founders, I think that are susceptible to this. I think the solution is just recognizing this might be happening to you, and in stepping back and actually finding ways to access your emotion at times when it’s safe to do so. Because I think what it really boils down to is that you don’t feel safe expressing your emotions to the people around you.

[0:06:40]

Steli Efti: Yeah-

[0:06:40]

Hiten Shah: Because that’s not you anymore.

[0:06:43]

Steli Efti: Yeah. That’s deep. I think also at some point, you attach to this new identity that is being created around you and so now you don’t trust yourself anymore to feel.

[0:06:57]

Hiten Shah: And that identity is a rules engine. That identity is a rules engine like you were saying, and that’s not emotion. Emotions aren’t rules. There’s no rules to emotion. There’s no rules to love. It’s a rules engine that you create because you’re like, “Well, when I’m in this situation, I need to react like this in order to get the best outcome possible.” Okay, cool. That’s great. But, how did you feel about it? Nothing. Why nothing? Because I’m not supposed to feel anything. Why aren’t you supposed to feel anything? Because we got this thing to do. That’s the thing that plays out in your head, right. And then eventually, you become that person and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Again, it’s just what happens. And then, you see this happen and I’m not going to… I don’t want to get into this, but I think it’s worth mentioning. The richest man in the world got divorced. Just think of that. And he got divorced because basically he didn’t want to be with that person anymore, go and be with somebody else.

[0:07:56]

Steli Efti: Maybe, yeah. Maybe he really was [crosstalk 00:07:58].

[0:07:58]

Hiten Shah: Yeah. I’m just saying. I don’t know. Either way, right? Something happened that caused that person to put half his wealth [crosstalk] sense.

[0:08:08]

Steli Efti: Which is not… Which is like…

[0:08:10]

Hiten Shah: I didn’t want to get into it because it’s his personal life. I don’t really care for it. It’s not my kind of drama, right? But dude, just think about it. You think that’s not from suppressed emotion? Oh, c’mon.

[0:08:20]

Steli Efti: Yeah, yeah.

[0:08:22]

Hiten Shah: For real? No, no, no. That’s 100% something from suppressed emotion. What? I don’t know.

[0:08:28]

Steli Efti: So, I think that, not to confuse, especially, young founders that are just feeling like they’re becoming more effective as they’re learning to suppress their emotions more and they’re like, Wait a second. Am I not supposed to do this?

[0:08:42]

Hiten Shah: No, no, no. You’re supposed to do it, it’s okay.

[0:08:43]

Steli Efti: No, no. It’s fine to do it. But, I think it’s important to recognize and then decompress, or then trans… You want to make sure that you don’t do this so much and so often that it becomes such second nature, that you just don’t feel any emotions anymore because then you dehumanize yourself. And then, you might accomplish all kinds of incredible things and be like, “Why don’t I feel anything? I wanted to be excited or happy or fulfilled. And just nothing. Look inside my body and soul is emptiness there. What happened?” And I think, it just popped up in my mind, we had an episode that I recorded once, where I lost one of my sons at a playground. And I was running for 30 minutes, searching around. Eventually like 30 parents in this entire big park were running around, trying to look for my son while I had the police on the phone. And then, we found him. I remember when we recorded this episode telling you that the entire time I was running around like a crazy person trying to find him, there were multiple dialogues going on. One was a very analytical like, “Okay, I’ve searched here, I’ve searched there. What’s the next logical point?” The next level of dialogue was just disbelief where it was just like, “This isn’t happening. This is just not possible. There must be some rational way. He’s not lost. It just need to figure it out.” And then, the third dialogue that was going on was a, “Why am I not feeling anything?” Right. “Holy shit, I’m really cold and empty and emotionless right now.” And I was telling myself, “Well, it’s probably because I just need to function.” And then we talked and laughed about this, where you like, “I would have been doing the same thing.” It was just, you have to function. This is an emergency situation. It’s not the time to feel pain or afraid or break down. You have to figure it out and then you can deal with your emotions. O. I think the important thing for me back then, this may be a good way to wrap this up or to pack this into a metaphor, was that once I found him and we went back home, I didn’t just tell myself, “Well, I didn’t feel anything. I found him. I managed the situation quite well. I’m a man. I’m a good dad. Whatever, let’s forget about this. Let me put on the television.” I was like, “All right, I brought him home, talked to his mom,” and then I was like, “I need to go on a walk.” And I went on a walk until I could figure out where are my feelings. Where is this? And then, I did feel them. And I had to be able to let go of all the panic and the fear and the stress that I felt during those 30 minutes. That was a very crazy moment, but in many, many other small stressful moments, I didn’t do this because I didn’t recognize and realize what was going on. And I think that you could pay a big price if you don’t make sure that, at times when you push away your emotions, you use the rules engine of your personality to strategically act and get the outcome for everybody that you then don’t forget that there still are emotions somewhere in your body that need to be processed. And if you don’t, there’s going to be a price that you’re going to pay that you’re probably not going to like. So, I don’t know. That’s the lesson learned and one maybe practical thing, because we always love to do practical stuff even if it’s philosophical or emotional. One thing that I started that I can recommend to anybody that’s like, “I don’t know if I have feelings or not.” You probably don’t. If you’re puzzled, if you don’t know, you’re probably in my camp. But, one thing that I did that yielded really good results that was really compelling, interesting, was just to start a little simple emotional diary. So, for a couple of days, I was just like, “Let me try a couple of times a day to write down how I feel.” And I struggled so hard with this exercise that it opened up a bunch of things and make me realize that a ton of things. It was super useful to me. So, just as a little pragmatic tip at the end of this crazy episode. If you don’t know if you have feelings, maybe try writing them down for a couple of days and see what happens.

[0:13:01]

Hiten Shah: That’s the best. I got nothing more to add. That’s good. Feel your feelings.

[0:13:04]

Steli Efti: Feel your feelings.

[0:13:05]

Hiten Shah: Just at the right times.

[0:13:08]

Steli Efti: That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. Bye bye.

[0:13:11]

Hiten Shah: Yeah.

[0:13:11]

[0:00:01]

Steli: Hello everybody. This is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:04]

Steli: And today on this [hollow chat 00:00:05], we’re going to talk about buying and cross-promoting apps in SAS, or products in SAS. So here’s the deal. As the world of SAS products has matured and grown and scaled and exploded, and there is a ton of different SAS products out there. There’s SAS extensions, mobile apps, web apps, whatever, desktop apps. Now we’re getting to the stage where we don’t just see kind of one type of company or startup that is building a SAS product, to be kind of a venture funded Silicon Valley based company or something like that. But you have single founders, you have people that build these SAS apps as side projects. Some of them are big. Some of them are small. And so now we’re starting to see kind of this trend of more acquisition happening in the space where companies buy smaller products to promote them, or to use them as lead gen for their main product. And I thought it’d be fun to unpack this a little bit for somebody that’s already a founder running a startup, or a SAS product, is it a viable strategy to buy other apps that have maybe similar customer base and cross promote? You’ve done this a good amount, you’re probably one of the more experienced people in SAS in buying apps or launching different products and doing the cross promotion. And so I wanted to unpack the strategy and kind of maybe highlight some of the unintuitive truths to this. Here’s the shit that everybody thinks would work easily, but it doesn’t. Or here’s the stuff that you think would be profitable, but most people don’t do X, Y, and Z when they do the math. So let me ask you, with kind of all the experience that you’ve had trying this, first of all, just throwing out there the big question in my mind which is, what’s not simple about the strategy of saying let’s buy an app or a SAS product that has a similar customer base that then we’ll be able to promote our main product to, and kind of do cross selling or cross promotion? What about that basic idea is what people miss? Because if it was that simple, everybody would do it and would do it incredibly successfully, and I’m not sure that that’s really the case. So what’s some stuff that we don’t know about this strategy or this idea?

[0:02:44]

Hiten: What you probably don’t know is it typically fails. And it’s not that you don’t know that, it’s just that when you’re in it and you see an opportunity, you’re thinking about all the things that could go right. And I think that that ends up getting people to be very optimistic about something that they should actually be very conservative about. So when you’re acquiring these things, my advice would be, be conservative in your thinking of what you can do with that thing. And the way you’re conservative, the way to do that is actually go model it out. What’s going to happen when we buy this thing. And that already starts kicking up a lot of dust, so to speak in terms of like, “Oh, well, why are we buying it? What is our goal with it? What do we expect this to do for us?” And it has to do something related to your existing metrics or your existing business, or it doesn’t really work. Even if that means we want to extend into this new product line and we want to do this new thing, we want to extend the capability of our product in this direction. Then there’s things like, do you keep the product? Do you merge it in? Do you rebrand it? Is your strategy to create what they call a family of brands? Best example’s Facebook, they have a family of brands. Or are you like Google? Even Google does, but really Google’s been much better at you buy it and you rebrand it to Google. And over time, most companies rebrand. The only reason I mentioned Facebook is their ability to rebrand these things, even though they’ve made some branding moves more recently is, pretty low because of the consumer market and consumers getting really attached to a brand. When it comes to B2B, one of the things that you see often is that someone buys something and then rebrands it, or adds their logo to it, much like Facebook has done recently with WhatsApp and Instagram and even Oculus. So you’re talking about something where most people are optimistic going in, and that’s why these initiatives fail. And the way to be conservative and appropriately assess it is get very clear about what you expect to happen after the purchase. And that’s based on things like, well, how many sign ups do they get? How much revenue does it make? How does it fit into our business? Is it something where we expect to introduce this to our customers and improve our retention, for example? Or is it something we plan on introducing to our customers through our sales team and get an upsell, because of whatever reason? So the devil’s really in the details, and I see teams have a lot of alignment issues when it comes to this. And what I mean by that is, the team itself internally, and this is why I suggest this approach of being conservative, the team itself internally is not aligned on the reasons. And you kind of make them up and different people in the company have different reasons for why this acquisition or purchasing this product or business is a good idea. When, if you start putting it on paper and do the math, I think a lot of things become clear. Even the idea of the company itself doing it itself instead of building versus buying, ends up being a more deliberate math, kind of cost based conversation. And the funny thing is, most of the time you’re not buying something like Facebook did with WhatsApp, where they spent $19 billion. You’re closer to buying something like they did with Instagram, where they spend a billion or you’re buying something like they did with some of the companies they’ve done historically, where they bought it for the technology and then shut it down. And all this just points out the fact that be very clear about the one reason you’re buying the thing. There can only be one reason, because you can only do math on one reason. If you have multiple reasons, then you’re really not thinking hard enough of what does this purchase mean to us?

[0:06:51]

Steli: I love that. That makes so much sense. And I think that this, just like many other examples that we’ve discussed as pitfalls for founders, is one of those things where it looks so appealing and so sexy and there’s a fantasy in our minds that can run away with it, of this could be this really exciting thing and it’s already there so it’s easy and fast. It’s kind of like a fast way to whatever, expand or grow, do something or launch something new or whatever it is. And the devil is in the detail as you said, especially if there’s maybe not enough time to slow down a little bit and think about the opportunity costs. If we spend all this time integrating this, rebranding this, promoting this, whatever, what are we are going to stop doing? Where are we going to take the time away from? Does that make sense? What does success even look like for this? What would this have to do for it to be a big success? And what would it have to do to be a big failure? Even not being clear on that could mean you buy something, you work at it for a year and you’re sort of in this fog where you don’t realize it’s been a failure and should move on from it, and you’re just kind of stuck in it.

[0:08:09]

Hiten: That’s right. That’s exactly right. That’s what you’re trying to prevent. Also, you don’t want to carry those feelings over into post-purchase. It’s exactly right, that’s the big problem. If you go into it the wrong way, you might end up with something on your hands that’s going to fail because it didn’t start the right way. It started with optimism, not with the conservative lens. And this stuff has to have a conservative lens. There’s so many unknowns about this and you can never know all of them when you buy something.

[0:08:37]

Steli: We recently had a conversation with somebody that had done this, I think he said nine or 10 times and one thing that he told me, it was really surprising, his strategy. This is somebody that had one big app, SAS product, that had a shit ton of signups every month. And then he’s been running this thing for a while, and then he started thinking, “Well, what if I bought smaller SAS products that have the same audience as mine? And then all I do is I buy this app that sells to recruiters and I have a big recruiter product. And then what I do is I just buy it for whatever it is, price X. And then I use my massive audience of customers to promote this product two, and maybe I double its customer base or triple its customer base. And then I turn around and try to sell it, because I grew it very quickly in a very short period of time, because I had one main product with lots and lots of customers and I can use this to infuse this unnatural growth for these SAS products and then flip them, basically.” That was his big strategy and idea, he told me. And then he told me that with nine different products that he acquired, it didn’t work once. And I was kind of baffled. I was like, “Really?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Why? Why do you think isn’t it working?” And his thesis, I don’t know if it’s true or not, his thesis was that he said he didn’t know. A lot of these products were very complementary, they did surveys before trying to figure out would customers also need this other thing? And he said, even for something where they would have for the main product, I don’t know, like 10,000 signups and maybe out of those 5,000 were good signups every month. Out of those five signups, they would promote this other product that would get like six to sign up for this smaller product that they were promoting. And he said, they even tried to brand it similarly to the main product that did slightly better, but also not. And then his thesis, why this wasn’t working, although he tried it so many different times, was that the main business, although he had a lot of customers, had a pretty weak brand. And he was like, maybe people just don’t trust it from this brand when we were promoting these other products. But that seemed kind of funny to me. I don’t know, I had no experience myself with any of this, but this was just such a interesting…

[0:11:09]

Hiten: So he failed not because of the brand, but because I think he failed to do the math on the conversion rates when you start trying to promote another product of any kind to a existing user base. And it’s really honestly not about promotion. It’s almost like treating it as if it’s a new feature you’re adding. And how do you ensure a feature adoption? So there’s two things. That’s one piece, and the second piece is user friction, and they kind of get related. So all the things he was telling you about, “Oh, if it was a stronger brand,” or “When we slapped the brand on it got a little better.” Those are all just optimizations on adoptions, but those aren’t necessarily like, “Hey, people are already doing X in our product. If we add a button for them to do Y, they’re going to actually click Y and a high percentage of them are going to actually go do that second thing.” It’s the same way you would treat a feature. You’d be like, “Well, if you put the button in, are people going to use it?” Or “If we put the feature in, are people going to buy it?” How do you figure all that out before you actually go and make those moves? So that’s why historically, and I’m sure a lot of people listening don’t remember any of this, but companies would basically, like Amazon and other companies that have been, historically even Google, this is like old school method, but known to directly compete with the thing that they’re about to purchase, in order to really assess what’s the viability of it, are they working. The second thing they do is if they don’t compete, they go partner and see if there is the kind of uptick that they thought there would be, and then they go buy. So the classic moves are to solve for the one problem, which is adoption basically. Will that thing be adopted through the methods we use at our company today. And that goes back to being conservative and also understanding what your real advantage is. So I think that person you talked to, he had a feeling that the brand might be an advantage or a feeling that the audience might be an advantage, but then he hit all these bottlenecks that were just points of friction. And so I’ve seen this work, for example, there’s a couple folks, who’ve done this in the Chrome extension space where they have an audience of, let’s say marketers, and they just buy up all the Chrome extensions for marketers. And then they have a pretty big audience for marketers and they’re able to do a bunch of cross selling and promotion across the tools. But you’re talking about someone installed a Chrome extension, they’re a marketer, maybe there’s another one that’ll install that does something different, but is still something for them. And there’s things like that that have worked, but they also have a channel, which is basically the Chrome notifications, that caused the upsells. So the channel’s built in, that I’ve seen over and over again, maybe four or five times people doing that. Now the Chrome marketplace is not as hot, so to speak on some of those strategies, but that’s worked. People have done that with WordPress too. So the folks at AppSumo, now sumo.com, grew their original widget business where it was popups on top of a website, by basically purchasing a lot of WordPress plugins and trying to consolidate, trying to put their technology into them. And I don’t know how successful that was from a revenue standpoint, but from a growth and adoption standpoint that was pretty good.

[0:14:27]

Steli: Nice. That makes a ton of sense. All right, we’ll wrap this episode up here. I think for any founder that is interested in potentially buying another SAS product or extension or something like that, and is maybe unsure if it is the right timing or the right approach can always send us an email at hnshah@gmail.com and steli@close.com. We are always happy to help if we can.  And this is it from us for this episode, we’ll hear you very soon.

[0:14:53]

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And I think in true Steli and, I guess, Hiten form, Steli and me form, we’re going to talk about something positive today and something that Steli came up with. I don’t know when he came up with it, but I heard about it right now. And what it is is, I think, something much needed right now, which is a discussion about what we’re seeing that’s actually working in business right now, considering shelter in place, COVID out of control, I think somebody called this Armageddon or something like that to me five minutes ago, before I got on this.

[0:00:40]

Steli Efti: Oh, really?

[0:00:41]

Hiten Shah: Yeah. They called it Armageddon. They’re like, “Yeah, how are you doing with the current Armageddon, blah, blah, blah?” I’m like, “I’m doing as fine as I can. And definitely better than a lot of people.” So I can’t can’t really complain about anything. And so, yeah, let’s talk about it. I think the big thing was, what approaches are working right now for people that we can kind of talk about, right?

[0:01:03]

Steli Efti: Yeah. I felt that it would be a good idea to just share some examples in our network, or within our friends, or anywhere that we’ve observed, that we’ve seen, over the last couple of months that we thought, “Wow, this is inspiring,” or, “This is cool,” that somebody is creating, or innovating, or adapting and changing, and succeeding in some way, finding opportunity, even in these difficult times, just to give people inspiration, to simulate them, and just because we have enough of the critical things that we read and hear about every single day. So how do we want to do this? You can go first, I can go first, with examples, and we’ll go back and forth, and I’m sure we’ll come up with and be able to share a bunch of good stuff with people.

[0:01:47]

Hiten Shah: Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

[0:01:48]

Steli Efti: So the first thing that I’ll bring up is… Actually I want to go outside of tech, alright? So, at the very beginning of COVID being a bigger thing in Europe, I remember that, in the first few weeks, there was this shortage of masks. It’s not a problem anymore. This is a past problem. But while it was a big surging demand and problem, I remember that people were trying to research and figure out where locally can I buy some masks, because nobody could order anything online and get it. And I remember that I heard from a friend about a little store that was… I don’t even know the English word for that, you know those stores that do leather work, they fix your shoes, or if your-

[0:02:37]

Hiten Shah: Tailor. A tailor. Equivalent to that. Something like that.

[0:02:39]

Steli Efti: Yeah. There’s a small tailor in this town that’s 20 minutes from where I live that has and does masks, just go to him. But you have to have time because there’s a huge line outside of his little store. And so, I go there and the whole shop window is full of all kinds of designed masks, all kinds of flavors for kids for this, for that, and there’s a huge line outside the… It’s a tiny store, really. So I wait in line, eventually I get inside, and I wanted to buy some masks for my family, for kids, for relatives. And I start chatting up the guy that was running that tailor store, and the first thing that I noticed that, as I entered, there were all these, thank you letters that he had hung up from local hospitals and doctor’s offices. And I was like, “Oh, that’s cool. Did you just supply all these people?” And he’s like, “Yeah, all these hospitals and medical professionals in the area had a difficult time obtaining masks. Now, some of the masks that I do hit the medical grade, but I am not sure getting certification for it. That would be too difficult. But they still wanted them, so I’ve been just donating them.” And he’s like, “And the other reason I have this, to be honest, is it’s just good marketing. People just feel good when they see this. And so, I thought it’d be a good idea.” I’m like, “Oh, cool.” And then I asked them, I’m like, “How many other tailors are doing this?” And he started laughing, and he was like, “Nobody does this except me.” And I was like, “Why is that?” He’s like, “Well, the thing is, tailors are not very entrepreneurial. They’re very risk averse. And honestly, what I’m doing, sort of may be questionably legal.” So he’s like, there was twice that police had shown up to talk to him, to see if he’s allowed to turn this into a mask shop or whatever. And once they saw all the thank you letters from the medical community, and they talked to him, they just left again. They’re like, “This is fine. He’s just providing a service. He’s helping the community. It’s cool.” And he had, basically, a bunch of women that would build these masks in his tailor store, and he’s like, “I’ve never been busier in my life. I’m making a ton of money right now, and I don’t feel like I’m taking advantage of people. I’m providing a service, giving people something. I’ve priced my mask. I could price them three times the amount, and people would still buy them, but I priced them at a margin where I feel like I’m making good money, but I’m also fair, they’re still affordable to people, and I’m just raking in it.” But the reason why other tailors wouldn’t be doing this is because they’d be too afraid if they allowed or not, if they’d get in trouble, and they’re just not flexible enough to be like, “You know what? Nobody’s going to come into the store to fix their leather shoes right now, but there is a huge demand for an item that nobody has and we could easily provide.” And that was one of my favorite examples of just somebody being creative, being positive, adapting, changing what he’s doing, and crushing it. For weeks, there were lines out of that person’s shop. And the other benefit of that is I’m never going to forget that guy. And I don’t go to the tailor that often, but if I need to, I’m going to him. I’m just going to that store. So that’s one of my small local stories that I really loved and that was inspiring for me to see.

[0:06:20]

Hiten Shah: Yeah, I’m going to continue the trend. And that’s amazing. I mean, there’s so many levels of that that are amazing. Part of it is he just didn’t let things that he knew would get in the way of other people get in the way of him from doing it. And I think that’s super powerful. I mean, legal or not, he was providing a service and people needed it, or a product and people needed it. And it was their choice whether they took it from him or not. And by donating it, I think he’s definitely skirting a lot of things in a good enough way. And at a time like this, I think it’s difficult for people to get in trouble on some small things like that, and what matters more is that people are taken care of. So on that note, I’ve been most impressed by the amount of restaurants that I’m seeing really iterate, and ones that I was most impressed by are the ones that iterated super early, their whole model, and they started doing take-home meal kits, where you could make that spaghetti that you love from that Italian place at home, and they gave you all the ingredients to do it. So that was what happened really early on, when even food pickup was not acceptable. And that was really crazy to see, even watching them iterate through a few different platforms to help them sell. It was kind of fun to see, just being in tech and all that. And then lately, just the amount of creativity to be able to provide people with food that’s of restaurant quality that you can pick up from restaurants that didn’t do takeout and just watching the menus iterate. You could just tell they were really focused on optimizing their business so that they could survive during this time, and they were iterating it, and kept changing things until they found things that worked, and also used Instagram heavily to do this. And it’s just been impressive to me to watch this. I even saw something else that was interesting, which is, if one restaurant figured it out, what you’d have is, you even had these things where if it was, let’s say, a sweet shop that mostly sold sweets, vegan sweets or something like that, this is the one that comes to mind, they’d go partner with a savory shop, somebody who made sandwiches, for example, and then they’d started bundling them together. And it’s because one of them had an audience and they were already buying from them, and so they decided to basically partner up. And you started seeing all these collaborations, so to speak, starting happening, and combinations of things you could buy. And these were just restaurants doing it. So you saw this almost call to arms, and folks partnering up, and then using Instagram for the marketing, and creating the equivalent of bundling multiple products together and selling it to the audience. Really, really cool. Another thing I’m seeing is just more focus on, “Oh, these are items we use in our kitchen to cook with.” Whether it’s these special canned tomatoes or what have you. And outside of even the meal kits and making your own meals, a bunch of these folks were just selling that stuff. Just for a long time, and I think this is a pretty funny one, but people were selling their excess toilet paper because the commercial category had an oversupply and the consumer one had an under supply. And so they started doing that and necessities, even though they’re a restaurant, but they have these items. That was really cool. Some of them started bundling it with the food. So, “Hey, buy some food, get some toilet paper. Wow.” I think that was really cool. And one other example I’ve had is, there’s a company that I know that that sort of is a pretty popular tea shop in the Bay Area, and they tried some of the iterations around meal kits and stuff like that. They even gave away a certain item every day, whether you bought or not. So they were really community focused. They shut down all that stuff recently, but the reason they shut it down is they’re going to a full on tea box, sell it online from their website model, and they call it going into hibernation. So they’re going into hibernation with their stores and really focusing all their efforts on e-commerce. And I know they’ve been setting that up for the last one or two months, because that takes a little bit of time, but they’ve been doing it really fast. Normally it would be a six month thing for them to figure out how to sell something like a tea box or something like that for people, or tea subscription and stuff like that, just because of branding and things like that. They’re not necessarily the fastest because they really think about a lot of these things and are doing them well. And then, I was actually speaking to them and I just told them, “Do you really need to change the branding? Why don’t you just slap your own current logos on it, and ship it, and just figure out what the actual package is? Or figure out what you put in the package and what people really want, what kind of tea they want on a subscription that they drink regularly.” And they caught on to that, and latched on to that, and basically were able to ship this in a month or two, the whole thing, versus something that I know they would have taken six months to do otherwise. So it’s that hustle, so to speak, that I find important right now. And the ones that seem to be succeeding are the ones that are able to iterate, and figure it out, and think about it that way.

[0:12:24]

Steli Efti: Yeah. I love that. All right. So I think the last example from my end, and then we’ll wrap up the episode for today. So in a similar vein, basically, a startup that was building and selling mostly stuff that you would wear going to the gym, so their flagship item would be a gym bag that you can also use to go to the office with, so it has all these cool hacks, you have your laptop in there, and phones, and everything, but also the perfect bag for an active professional, somebody that wants to go to the gym and to the office with one bag. That was the main seller, and then they had a bunch of other little items, but it’s all around the idea of going to the gym and going to work. And then COVID hits, and nobody’s going to the gym or to work, so their sales basically went to zero, nobody buying any of these items. And so, what they did then was think, “Okay. We have a customer base. We know these people. These are young professionals. We know that they’re really athletically active. They want to do sports and now they’re stuck home. And we know that they are always self optimizing and trying to improve themselves. What can we do? What can we offer these people to keep generating revenue, to offer a service, or product, or something of that sort?” And I think at first, they tried to figure out if it could come up with some home gym equipment thing, but they quickly realized that all their R&D and development was in such a different direction, there was nothing quickly that they thought they could both come up with and then successfully sell during that time. So they came up with a totally different approach. They sent a survey to the customers, asking them a bunch of questions on what their current struggles and challenges are, what they’re currently interested in, and then they came up with this idea to sell, basically, a, I don’t know what you want to call it, almost like a virtual fitness boot camp of sorts, where what you would do is you would say, “I’m interested in keep improving my body and mind even during these times.” And what I’m going to get is basically a six month coaching program where once a week, I’m on a Zoom call and I’m sharing some of my results and some of the data, and I’m getting coached in these improvements, and there’s going to be different themes. The first month is about sleep and recovery, so they would ship you a sleeping tracker band, and then they would review the data with you, and they’ll give you suggestions on how to improve your sleep. And they’ll check in with you. And then the second month is all about, whatever, nutrition. And then they would have a nutritionist do calls with you and set up a nutrition plan for you, and a shopping plan, and cooking plan and check that. And then the third month was about body workouts, and they’d have this famous body workout guy that gives classes, and does this and that. And there’s all these different… They had products from other vendors that they would ship you and sell you. They had these other experts they would bring in to do coaching sessions, or do webinars of sorts, or something. And then they would have these one-on-one check ins. And it was basically like, “Hey, during the next six months, you can’t go to the gym, you can’t do a lot of things, but maybe this is the time to change your life. And we’re going to go and take a note of everything, from your sleep, to your nutrition, to your workout, to your whatever. There are all kinds of other things.” And they packaged it really nicely. It was just a PDF, but it looked really awesome. And they sent this as a rough idea to a number of people based on the survey results and had a ton of people that wanted to buy it so much that they wouldn’t be able to supply that, because it was much more of a manual service. But it ended up being so successful that it basically is floating the company, it’s paying for everybody’s salaries. It has been super successful, so they have all these great case studies that people are going through the program apparently love it. And it’s kept the company alive and vibrant. And through this process, they’re also now developing all kinds of other ideas for products and other things, because they are doing much closer interaction with their customers than they usually would, where they would just ship them the product, basically, a gym bag. And so, I love that they just creatively went from selling a bag to selling a whole change your life in six months, and using other companies products, other experts, and just packaging this in a way that seemed super appealing to their customers, and that generates so much money that nobody had to get fired, they didn’t have to close shop because they’ve had many months of basically no sales.

[0:17:39]

Hiten Shah: That’s awesome. That’s a great story. I don’t know a better way to end this.

[0:17:45]

Steli Efti: Yeah. I think the common theme is really, you said it with hustle. It’s just, there’s people out there that are harder to discourage, that are more creative in their thinking on solutions, that are less inhibited by fears of, is this going to be the wrong step, or is this allowed, or how will people think about this? But they’re just like, “This is a time to get creative, and to get shit done, and to figure out how we’re going to provide value to the world, how we’re going to make money. What do we need to change to survive and thrive in this environment?” And there is a ton of these people out there, and they’re a huge inspiration to all of us. And whenever any of us… And we’re all going to hit a wall here and there during these times. It’s good to remember that with that type of thinking, you can actually create some amazing things, even during difficult times.

[0:18:38]

Hiten Shah: You said it there.

[0:18:39]

Steli Efti: There you go. I think that’s it from us for this episode. By the way, if you have a super inspiring example that you’d like to share with us, we love to hear from you, and we can’t hear enough good news these days. So if you want to email us hnshah@gmail.com, steli@close.com. Share your positive stories, your good stories, your awesome stories. We want to hear all of them. Until next time, that’s it from us,

[0:19:02]

Hiten Shah: See ya.

[0:19:03]

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And I’m going to let you say it, Steli.

[0:00:06]

Steli Efti: Cash is King.

[0:00:08]

Hiten Shah: Yes. So, that’s what we’re going to talk about on the startup chat today. And yeah. Wow. That statement is more true than ever.

[0:00:20]

Steli Efti: Never is cash more king during a crisis, right? I mean, it’s always king, but during difficult times, even more so. So, we thought it might be useful for us to just share a couple of things that we have either done ourselves with our businesses or have seen others do successful during these times in order to improve their cash positions, to improve their cashflow, to just strengthen their companies and their startups to financially be able to make it through whatever rough waters we still have ahead of us, right? So for you, if I come to you Hiten and I’m like, “Hey, I have a startup. We have revenue, we have customers, we have costs. We need to improve our cashflow position.” What are the go-to tips that you would give? I know that this is, every case is different, but in general, what’s some of the things that you’ve seen people do, or you’ve done yourselves with your companies that can make a big difference during these times on improving cashflow.

[0:01:21]

Hiten Shah: Yeah. I mean, Oh God. The reason I say that is, sorry God, but is… Wow. There are founders and business people out there that have said they get confused when they look at a P&L, a profit and loss statement.

[0:01:48]

Steli Efti: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

[0:01:50]

Hiten Shah: So, step one, stop saying that. It’s not a tool you need, you just need to go spend the time, get your P&L for dummies book or whatever, and learn how to read a P&L. It is not hard. Full stop. Period. I could teach my ten-year-old how to read a P&L if I needed to. And so, I know I’m getting a little serious about this shit, but man, I get so frustrated when I hear someone tell me that they’re a business person, they’re responsible for cash, and they say that the P&L or whatever accounting statements or whatever confuses them. It’s like, okay, well, it’s your responsibility. This is your job. Managing cash is your job. Even if you have a finance person or whatever, you happen to be lucky enough to have that scale or whatever-

[0:03:00]

Steli Efti: Hey, Hiten?

[0:03:15]

Hiten Shah: Like recently, she was reviewing something with me because usually I don’t have to review those things. And we were just reviewing and she literally said, “Do you understand this?” I’m like, “Yeah, I know how to read these, just because I haven’t had to read them like you do every day or every week or whatever,” because she does taxes and manages the finances and all kinds of stuff for all of our businesses, as well as personal. I’m like, “I know how to read it. In fact, I get excited to read these.” So, again, just cash in, cash out, where you’re spending the cash, that’s all a P&L really is. Nothing else. And it’s categorized in a way that might be confusing for you. So, just figure out what those categories are and what they really mean. Because honestly, every company uses those categories slightly differently anyway. Just figure out how you need to use it or how you’re using it. Or go talk to a finance person on your team or an outsourced finance person or whatever, and just make sure that you can ask them the questions to understand what a P&L is and what it means to your business. And even things like accrual accounting and cash base and all that, it’s not hard stuff. It’s stuff you need to know. So, I would even stop this podcast and go figure that shit out if you don’t know, because otherwise, you’re not going to be able to manage cash if you can’t look at statements, if you can’t understand a profit and loss statement, if you can’t get into QuickBooks and at least get to the reports, if not go deeper in. It’s not hard. And it’s frustrating to hear founders and people think it is. And then, also outsource it because that’s when all the problems start when it comes to cash management. So, my big number one thing is just learn how to understand it. And then, the second thing I would say is look at it at least on a monthly basis, if not weekly. Usually monthly is good, but the thing is if whoever’s responsible for it, especially if it’s in QuickBooks and things, they can stall that and not have to look at it for like quarters, even six months because it’s just happening and you have enough cash, let’s say. And I know that sounds absurd, but that’s the norm. So, I force everybody. My wife is kind of forced, so to speak, into making sure we can see it on a monthly basis for every one of our businesses, no matter what. And then, sometimes you might want to look at it weekly. Another thing I would say is, it’s good to have a spreadsheet with the expenses in them that isn’t in a P&L format and have some level of hygiene of keeping that up to date, because one other important thing, which if you don’t have it at the top of your head is you always want to know how much your company is burning every month and how much is in the bank. You want that idea. You want to know a rough idea of that, if not a specific idea of that. If you don’t have that, that’s a problem too. So, it’s not just about these times. I think this is the most ridiculous thing that I’ve heard from people. And I hear it way more than Steli you might imagine. And maybe you’ve heard it a lot too. So anyway, that’s my mini rant. To start.

[0:06:18]

Steli Efti: Nice. I love it. All right. So, I mean everything you said I would sign. I don’t hear this as much because people don’t come with that kind of advice to me usually. But, I’m not surprised about it at all. So, step one, get financially literate, right? The best time was 20 years ago to plant a tree; second best times’ today, the old Chinese proverb. So, it would have been great for you to be proficient in these things when you started the business. But if you haven’t, today’s the second best day to get started with this. And the second thing that you said that I want to highlight is, you want to check those numbers. I mean, during this time, I would highly encourage people to do that more frequently than you would usually, more frequently than you’re comfortable with, whatever that is, right? If you used to check them monthly, check them bi-weekly now. If you used to check them bi-weekly, maybe you should check them weekly right now. But just do it at a higher frequency. Make sure you are very much on top of your numbers, so that if things start going astray, you see that coming way ahead of time and you can act and course correct, and you don’t figure this out when it’s already too late to do much about it. What I’ll say about cash flow during these times, I mean, this is not rocket science, right? You want as little money to leave the company and the money that leaves the company to leave it as slowly as possible. And you want as much money come into the company and you want it to be coming as fast as possible, right? I mean, this sounds dumb, but this is the basic principle in many ways. So, you need to ask yourself what are all available options for us to keep improving this. And so, on the one hand, when it comes to the money that’s leaving your business, it’s now the time, if you haven’t done this already, to think about, to make a list of all the expenses you have, obviously to ask yourself what is really absolutely crucial and critical. Maybe there’s a bunch of things that we’re not getting real value out of that we should cancel or stop paying for. But then, out of the things that you are getting value from, now’s the time to renegotiate. Now’s the time to see, can we get a discount? Can we get a lower price? Can we get more favorable payment terms where we don’t pay month over month. Maybe, at least the next three months, we can kind of swap out. A lot of gym memberships did this, where when you have a gym membership, but you can’t go to the gym. So what did they do? They’re like, “We’ll keep charging you, but your membership is going to be extended. So, it doesn’t end on that date. For every month you pay, we extend it,” right? So you want to negotiate with any vendor that you have on price and on payment terms. And then, the other thing I’ll say is, especially if the times are tough, you’re going to want to keep renegotiating this. This is not a one and done. This is not a, “We approach this vendor, they said no and so we tried our best.” Try again in two weeks. Try again two weeks later. Make more cases. Have your mom email them and call them. Have an investor tweet about it. Just keep going at it. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve gotten a yes after I got a hundred no’s before from the same person, or how something that started as the best thing we could offer is a 5% discount ended at a 25% discount, right? So, you just have to be very persistent here and realize that just because you negotiated something this month, you’re not done. You should keep working at these within reason, obviously, over the next year for sure. And then, on the flip side of the revenue side, it’s a very simple thing. Try to encourage as many of your customers as possible to prepay you or pay you a larger chunk upfront as possible by giving them, potentially, a really good deal, right? So, I think I mentioned this in a prior episode where… We did this end of February, we decided longterm contracts that are paid monthly are worthless in an instable world, where customers are going to go out of business. Cash is king in a crisis. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to offer our customers no contracts anymore for a better price if they pay monthly only for prepays, but we’re going to make these prepaid deals really, really sweet. And we’re going to tell them, “Hey, right now times are really tough and insecure and instable, but you’re going to get an amazing deal if you prepay.” If you wait until the world is sane again, you’ll pay what everybody else is paying. And surprisingly, shockingly, an insane amount of customers chose that. They were excited about that. February we had our biggest prepay month in history. March beat February, was the new record of prepays in company history. May, for four months in a row, we had record prepays, right? And we made a significant difference in our capital position as a business. And it was not rocket science. It didn’t need hard convincing or any kind of crazy tactic. We just offered people a very simple, straightforward deal. And for a long time, they decided they wanted to have it. So, think about what you can do to get more cash upfront and make these offers. Way too many founders are too scared to even propose something like this, because they are afraid of the reaction of people. And when it comes to the cost that you have, just try to figure out what is the way that we can cut down costs and what is a way that we can slow down the payment of these obligations. Anything within reason. But if you stay on these two lanes of thought and you just keep going at it every month, every other month, you’re going to be in much better shape than a lot of companies that either do nothing about this and then have to, all of a sudden, fire 50% of their employees, or that do a little bit timid action in the early days. And then, they’re like, “Well, we tried our best and this is what we were able to do.” No, it’s not good enough. Just keep trying. This never stops. Cashflow is not a flow, it’s a river; it never ends. You keep having to peddle it and work it. So, if you have that attitude and approach, you’re going to be in a much better position than many other companies in your space that might be too slow, too timid and not aggressive enough around cashflow.

[0:12:44]

Hiten Shah: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I think all those tips are super valid. I’ll give one on my end. There’s a lot of stuff out there around negotiation and all that kind of stuff. I think when it comes to cashflow, there’s a lot of typical things that you do, like getting payments up front, things like that. But the thing that I see, kind of near and dear to my heart too at this point, is in many organizations, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, especially even in smaller ones that could be saved every month, just that looking at what are the different tools that the company is using, and just determining whether they’re really important or not, and cutting them. I know it sounds weird because it sounds obvious, but we just don’t do it regularly. My brother-in-law and co-founder on a few things, Neil, he’s looking at that sheet, not sheet, but those statements every week and trying to prune constantly in the businesses that he’s running and responsible for. And that habit, I think, is very healthy and can save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month, pretty quickly. Another area where this is actually a bigger deal is it happens to be on in software companies on the Amazon Web Services side. The number of times that I’ve found companies, as well as my own, have essentially instances and servers and things like that, that are just extra sitting there, running and being charged for them, it’s pretty ridiculous.

[0:14:34]

Steli Efti: Yep.

[0:14:35]

Hiten Shah: I bet if anyone on the call running a software company, if you haven’t talked to your head of engineering and asked them about AWS and found a way to spend some time doing an audit, we’ve had times when we’ve hired a DevOps person at the company and a person who’s not inexpensive, they were able to pay back their salary within a month off of the infrastructure savings, just because they put their time and energy for a whole month and just digging into all that and figuring it out. And that ends up being like four or five figures for a lot of companies, if they can save on those hosting costs, because that’s just what it’s called now, but it’s really just Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. It’s just so easy to spin these up and almost any engineer can. So those are hidden costs that I think a lot of us that might be not nontechnical just assume, “Hey, that’s the cost, that’s the cost.” That being said, if an engineer is asked to dig into it, I’m sure they can figure out a lot more about it than just, “Oh yeah, that’s the cost, that’s a cost.” And can then help make trade offs. Even trade offs on the customer experience sometimes. We’re like, “Hey, if we reduce the servers here, there might be a little bit of slowness over here on the interface. Is that okay?” Right? Even just having the discussion can be really, really valuable. This is the discussion I would have first, if I were running a software company, looking to manage costs, which is everybody basically now.

[0:16:05]

Steli Efti: Love it. All right. I think that this is it from us for this episode on improving cashflow. If you listen to us and something we said scared you or excited you, or you want more advice, more feedback on how to put your startup, your company in a better cashflow position, reach out to us. Hitenshah@gmail.com, steli@close.com. We always love to hear from you. It’d be even more helpful if we can. Until next time, cash is king

[0:16:31]

Hiten Shah: Cash is king.

[0:16:32]

Steli Efti: There you go. That’s it from us. We’ll be here soon. Bye-bye.

[0:16:36]

Hiten Shah: Bye.

[0:16:36]

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:02]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:04]

Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about the power of encouragement. And here’s the reason why I want to talk to you about this, Hiten. Well, there’s many reasons I want to talk to you about this. I think recently, I just saw something on social media that talked about, it doesn’t cost you a lot to be encouraging, but you could change somebody’s entire life. And there was some story attached to that that was beautiful, inspiring. And it made me think, how powerful encouraging others can be and how that’s still something that, in some ways I do a lot of in my life, but in other ways, I always feel like I’m not doing enough of, right? And sometimes I even have a difficult time because I can be quite critical with people as I’m with myself. So, just wanted to talk about this concept of encouraging others. Why is it so powerful? How do you do it and how do some people do it so well? I’ll give one other example that kind of has been lingering in the back of my mind. I think that plus seeing that story connected the dots in a way that made me think, I want to talk to Hiten about this. I’m sure he has something incredible to say and we’ll have a great discussion and I’ll learn a ton of things. So, people know that I’m crazy about martial arts. I’m a huge fan of Muay Thai, which is kind of the Thai-style Kickboxing. And so, there’s this guy, there’s many old legends of Muay Thai in Thailand, these older gentleman that used to be in the sixties, kind of the Muhammad Alis and kind of the superstars of the sport. There’s one of those guys, his name is Dieselnoi, who was a legend, unbeaten, this crazy legendary figure, but then sort of became forgotten, right? Because it’s not like with boxing, where it’s a worldwide audience and if you’re a superstar, everybody in the world knows you. And so in Thailand just kind of became forgotten and eventually a Westerner that I’m friends with, she kind of discovered him and started training with him, bringing him into gyms, promoting him heavily, creating video content around him, sharing kind of who he is with the world and kind of helped him rise up again in status in Thailand. And all these Westerners come now to train with him and he’s making a ton of money and he’s getting recognition and he’s living a much happier life. The one thing that I found really fascinating about this guy is that when you see him train people, and this is something that people also shared about and talked about that had trained with him multiple times, they would describe him as the type of coach and trainer that is incredibly intense, very, very demanding, but when he tells you to do things, he says it with such passionate belief that you can do them, that you want to live up to that, that you want to please him. And he apparently never gets tired of it. They were like, the first day would tell me, “Throw the knee this way.” And five days later, he’s still, for an hour, is screaming with passion to throw the knee that way. And at no time, does he ever seem deflated, cynical or giving up on me. He just never gives up on people. He’s just intensely screaming at them to do this with a passion of a man that believes they can, no matter how long it takes them to learn it. They were saying how this kind of intense encouragement, how powerful that was as a training concept. When I heard that, when I saw that, I was like, “Wow, this is not how I would coach people.” I think that in many ways, I’d be much more on the side of passionately encouraging, but if you’re a slow learner, I don’t know how much patient I have and when I would run out of it and when I would maybe be a bit more critical and cynical versus positively encouraging. So I think there is a lot to learn here for me in a lot to improve still, but this idea of encouraging people and how powerful it can be, it’s been roaming around my head. So there you go, the power of encouragement. That’s how the topic popped up today and I’m curious to hear your thinking around encouragement. Do you do this consciously? Is it a part of your daily ritual and habits? How do you think about this? What’s your take on it in general?

[0:04:41]

Hiten Shah: I think anyone can use encouragement, in both ways. Being encouraged by others and then encouraging others as well. And it’s wild. I’ll get into the negative side of it for a second, but the level of insecurity that exists as a human, that you have, even if you’re the most confident person, is pretty high. You might not share it with anyone if you’re the most confident person, but some of the most confident and sure of themselves people, I know, I get to talk to them at times when they’re not in that sort of normal mode of theirs and all they need is encouragement. That’s it. And that really is, I think that’s the thing that gets me every time about advice, feedback, interpersonal relationships, people asking for help, et cetera. As the person on the other side, who is looking to help somebody or is in a conversation, even if you’re not looking to help someone, you’re in a conversation, it’s kind of your job to identify what does this person need? Because as humans, I don’t think we’re very good at, especially when we’re caught up in something in our own heads or whatever and we need help, we’re not very good at recognizing it. And it’s almost a lifelong journey to recognize your bullshit, right? And this is incredible to me, how easy it is to be encouraging, yet how often we forget to do it for others and even try to figure out who can do it for you. So, I don’t think I was looking for encouragement, but yesterday I told somebody on my team, “Hey, I need some conviction on something.” And this is a person I know I can say that too. And either they understand what I mean, or they at least will listen and help me with this. So I talked to them and I’m talking to them. And I usually don’t go to them with a specific, “Hey, I need some conviction.” And I talked to them and we talked for a while. And then I forgot why we got on the call about the conviction thing. And then he brought it up at the end, not even at the end, but at one point he’s like, “Well, sounds like you have the conviction you were looking for.” I was like, “Oh yeah, I think I do.” But talking it out with him was really the key. And I think I got encouraged by him because I was talking it out and it’s somebody who’s got equal responsibility here and has a need to make sure that I’m convicted too and they are as well and it was fantastic. But really, could I have texted him and said, “Hey, I need some encouragement?” I mean, yeah. But did I? No. I asked him for something a little more specific for me, which is, I want some conviction on this, but really I needed some encouragement, honestly. I was having a day of a lot of inputs and it was kind of making me feel like I’m not sure. And he gave me the encouragement I needed, even by just asking, by just mirroring back and saying, “Hey, it looks like you got conviction. What do you need from me?” And I was like, “Oh, this is what I needed, I guess.” Right? And then we went into another convo. But it’s interesting. I think it’s a very important concept in a world where most problems that you have, especially business problems, are temporary. And they’re not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Honestly, these days, I feel like not much, is that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, as long as you have your health. Period. And your family does. Period. But everything else, you can figure it out, you really can. I think those things are the hardest. And in this case, even in the current situation, the only thing I can say about this at this point is, becoming aware of when encouragement is what someone wants or needs. And at the same time becoming aware when you need that and finding your right way and right people that, you know can give you that if that’s what is kind of appropriate. And I used the word conviction yesterday with somebody, because it was about a business thing and all that, and it was a person I do business with. But there’s a lot of other kind of words you can use to replace encouragement or that replace encouragement. And I think he, with that word that I used, he realized I just need some encouragement. Because he asked me that question and I think he gave me that. And so I almost feel like that’s all we can do for each other. We can’t understand each other. We can’t really give each other real advice that we should expect someone else to take, but we can encourage each other. We can encourage each other to solve our own problems. We can encourage each other to continue when things are tough, personal, or work or whatever. We can definitely encourage each other. So, and I think that when you use that word and you think of it that way, your approach is kind. You are compassionate. You are not trying to tell someone what to do. You’re trying to help them figure out how to do what they need to do. And I think that’s the shift that happens when you think of it as encouragement. I mean, for a while, I’ve been saying this about advice, which is like, people just need encouragement, they don’t really need advice. They don’t even want it. And I don’t mean to say that in any negative way. Just as a quick note, over time I thought people needed advice. And I think I was right at the time because there was just less information out there. And Google was not the primary source, it was just a source. Now, Google is a primary source of information. You can get any information you want just by Google. It’s not even just incredible. You can argue that the iPhone changed the world or Google changed the world. But I think it’s a big debate and maybe not mutually exclusive. And when I think about it like that, and taking the advice thing, whether it’s personal advice or whatever, most of the advice is out there that you can get. And so what do people come to each other for? I think it’s encouragement.

[0:11:38]

Steli Efti: That’s super powerful, yeah. If you think about it, the thing that slows people down is not that they’re making all these wrong choices all the time, it’s that they don’t make the choice. It’s that they keep continue trying to find the right answer and feel overwhelmed or feel confused. It’s not that people take too much action and create too many learnings and too many iterations to get to a point. That’s not the issue. And so you’re right, I think a lot of times when people seek advice, what they really are seeking emotionally is feeling good enough about what you’re about to do, that you’re going to go and do it, right? And believe in it. And so when you just purely play this as a cognitive game and what is the right formula that if you give it to me, I’ll know instinctively, it’s the right one, I’ll go and execute on it with energy and immediacy. I think it’s really the, I just want to feel that I can do it and what I’m planning to do could work and that I should go and attack that plan, right? Whatever it is. And there’s so many stories of this. So I think one, there are so many stories and maybe, I was thinking about this in my mind. There’s stories of somebody just saying a kind word or giving you a word of encouragement or words of encouragement at some point that was kind of for the outside world a meaningless exchange, but that kind of changed your life or changed the way you, or gave you the energy to go and do something you wouldn’t have done otherwise. And you can still remember that person and you can still remember the moment that person said this encouraging thing to you. But to them, it was just just being nice to somebody. They didn’t realize how impactful their words were. And there’s so many examples of that, just saying a kind word can really change somebody’s whole life, can make somebody stop from committing the biggest mistake of their life or from doing something terrible or give them the energy to do something really beautiful or incredible. But the other thing that you said that I wanted to bring up, because it’s not something I thought about, which is usually why I like to talk to you, because you’ll bring up something that I’ve not,

[0:14:07]

Hiten Shah: Likewise.

[0:14:07]

Steli Efti: That I wouldn’t have thought about, is the flip side of, I mean, maybe there’s two questions here. One is who am I in the best position to encourage right now in life, right? Who are the people that my encouragement would mean the most or would have the most impact or that I know need encouragement the most because they’re maybe lacking in that area? Who could I take responsibility for in the sense of, or take the opportunity for to say, these are the people that I’ll invest in encouraging because I can? And then on the flip side, who encourages me, right? Wow. That’s a good question. Who is the type of person, who is the person or the people in my life that encourage me when I need it, when I need it. And that’s a question, it’s also a good one to know the answer to, right? I think intuitively we probably gravitate to these people at times, but maybe we lack, I think especially entrepreneurs and many, many founders, sometimes we’re so used to being the solution machines, right? There to solve things for ourselves and others and to be strong, perceived or otherwise, internally and externally, that we are the kind of people that others seek for encouragement, for advice for help. And we are undertraining the muscle of seeking help, seeking advice or this case, seeking encouragement. Encouragement might be even trickier because I think founders and entrepreneurs, that at some point that was a cultural shift where it’s totally fine to ask for advice as a founder, but is it fine to ask for encouragement, right? That’s an interesting one. Shouldn’t you as a founder be so burning in your convictions that you don’t really need anybody to tell you that you can do it? Maybe there’s a bit more of a stigma around that, but I think that’s such a powerful question to ask, who are the courageous people in my life? Who are the people that I can go to when I need encouragement? And even having the awareness when we need it, right? And I feel like it’s easy to be confused personally, when you think maybe, what you need is advice or what you need as a “solution”? When what you really just need, is some words of encouragement from somebody that you can, because that’s also the point. It needs to be somebody that is not going to only say the words or encourage you, but then you’re going to believe and want to receive it from, right? So who is that person or who are these people in your life? That’s a beautiful question. I wouldn’t have thought about that at all. And now it’s going to keep me up at night and I’m going to be like, who are these people? And you’re definitely one of them, but-

[0:17:04]

Hiten Shah: I’ll take that. I am happy to be that for you and whoever else needs it. I think that it’s so important. And I got to say it takes you as an individual getting out of your own head for you to be actually able to encourage somebody else. And I think that’s what makes it hard. That’s why it’s not common. And that’s why when you experience it from somebody else, you’re like, wow. And because that’s what you needed at that time and you just kind of find the person, who can provide that, or you don’t. And when you do, it can come out of nowhere sometimes. I mean, this is also, the thing I like to say about this and it’s coming up for me as I think about it, this is why you go to your parents for advice. This is exactly why do you go to your mom. This is exactly why you go to your dad. Because at the end of the day, for many of us, those are the people in our lives that encouraged us the first time as kids.

[0:18:06]

Steli Efti: Yeah.

[0:18:07]

Hiten Shah: That’s why you might go to a older sibling too. Right? If you’ve had that kind of experience with them. I would say that when you go to parents with problems, it’s kind of a weird thing. But when you go to parents and just talk about something, you’re really usually looking for encouragement in this same kind of framework and in the way of thinking that we’re going after. So I feel like there is somebody in everyone’s lives that they can go to. They might just not think of what those people provide them as encouragement when I think it really probably is.

[0:18:41]

Steli Efti: Yeah. Beautiful. All right, this is it from us for this episode. Again, as Hiten said, our offer stands as a duo, if any of you are like, “You know what? I could use some encouragement right now in my life”, send us an email. Hnshah@gmail.com, steli@close.com, we’d love to be that for you if you don’t have anything or anybody else that you could share that with. Even if you do, we’d love to encourage you. And until next time, we’ll see you very, very soon.

[0:19:10]

Hiten Shah: See you.

[0:19:11]