Latest / 1 to 100 / E26: The Bootstrapped Playbook for Dominating the Shopify App Store with PJ Celis

Transcript

E26: The Bootstrapped Playbook for Dominating the Shopify App Store with PJ Celis · 1 to 100

• 0:00
  PJ we spiced it up on X Man, I'm so excited.
• 0:05
  That's why I'm here. We shop, that's why I'm here.
• 0:07
  Let's continue the fight. Game.
• 0:10
  Game, game, game. I loved it.
• 0:12
  I was so excited. I think some people might have
• 0:15
  gotten actually upset, though. I was just like, God, PJ is so
• 0:18
  great. Like, this is amazing.
• 0:20
  Yeah. I also think from what I know of
• 0:24
  both of your takes, I think you probably see, but I, I don't
• 0:30
  know if Ida is fair, but like very similarly, you see the, the
• 0:33
  world of capitalism and, and how like all of that plays out is
• 0:39
  kind of what I feel like based on, on what I see on Rashad from
• 0:43
  our conversations here and PJ from what you share on, on X.
• 0:46
  So yeah, I think it's funny that it's like it to me, it seems
• 0:50
  like a similar mindset in terms of like a little bit of like
• 0:53
  capitalism. I don't want to be unfair with
• 0:56
  this, but like maximizing of capitalism and and how that
• 0:58
  plays out two very different business models, so.
• 1:04
  Yeah, to me the point of reason is to is to drive down prices in
• 1:07
  the economy. So that's what I'm doing.
• 1:11
  Exactly, right. You create value right by doing
• 1:14
  that. Yeah.
• 1:15
  By definition, that's consumer surplus, right?
• 1:18
  The difference between how much value you give and what you
• 1:20
  charge is all consumer surplus. So yeah, what's your, I guess I
• 1:27
  am like really curious. I mean, you know this, but we're
• 1:30
  like the three of us are basically all totally different
• 1:33
  capital structures, right. So we're obviously we're VC
• 1:36
  found dead and Jeremiah was like in APE context and then Jack is
• 1:43
  totally basically in a bootstrapped completely context,
• 1:46
  right. I think similar, just to make
• 1:48
  sure I'm actually characterizing it correctly, is judging me
• 1:51
  entirely bootstrapped? Did you raise a little capital
• 1:54
  early on? Like how did you, how did you
• 1:56
  guys think about company formation?
• 1:59
  Yeah, we are bootstrapped completely.
• 2:01
  I actually have some Excel sheet from back in there where I was
• 2:03
  checking every expense. I put in like 8.8 K US store in
• 2:07
  the company. If you add up all the losses I
• 2:10
  made before it's became profitable.
• 2:11
  So basically nothing. Yeah.
• 2:13
  And I do believe that being Bootstrap gives you the
• 2:16
  flexibility to like do things that you cannot do if you have
• 2:19
  to show error wire and everything you do.
• 2:20
  And so I think a big part of why we want in the App Store is that
• 2:25
  we make this like indirect bets that are not necessarily like
• 2:29
  spend some money now we get to some payback, some payback
• 2:31
  period in six months. It's more like we do things that
• 2:34
  optimize for Shopify and then we we get some return over time.
• 2:37
  But but if you give me $10 million or $100 million, I can't
• 2:40
  go faster in the same thing. I can only do more of the same.
• 2:42
  And so I think it's actually a benefit that's my strategies
• 2:45
  like this, because this allows me to do things that you cannot
• 2:48
  do if you raise money. Because obviously, I mean, I was
• 2:50
  competing against like youth PO in the beginning.
• 2:52
  I mean, now we're like everyone different position, I would say.
• 2:55
  But in the beginning it was really like going after youth PO
• 2:57
  and it's just hard to go after a company with 400 million in
• 3:01
  funding. If you have no fundings, you
• 3:02
  have to be different, right? So I think it's a benefit to be
• 3:06
  bootstrapped. In my case I.
• 3:08
  Got it. The velocity is really
• 3:11
  interesting too. I mean, PJ, it'd be really cool
• 3:13
  to hear a little bit more about the path for you.
• 3:16
  But I remember I was AI was a Judge me customer in 2018, maybe
• 3:21
  20/17/2018 somewhere around there.
• 3:25
  And then to see like, I mean, like you, I see you posting your
• 3:29
  numbers every so often on on XLC, a tweet that has, you know,
• 3:37
  like your ARR numbers. You you back that out in terms
• 3:39
  of like the number of merchants, but that means it's just a
• 3:42
  massive. Yeah, exactly.
• 3:45
  But I mean the way we look at it is, I mean the ARR is the ARR.
• 3:48
  We can't really control it. We do try to grow at 40% per
• 3:51
  year to have rule of 40 numbers still to still have somewhat of
• 3:55
  respect for SAS metrics. We want to be not completely
• 3:57
  crazy in the SAS world, but for us it's always been about
• 4:02
  dominating the one go to market that we pick, which is
• 4:04
  dominating the App Store. And so everything we do in the
• 4:07
  company is about optimizing for the App Store and we ignore
• 4:09
  everything else. And so I think I saw a previous
• 4:12
  episode of you guys where you guys were discussing about is it
• 4:15
  a good thing or a bad thing that your compares are growing.
• 4:18
  Like I mean, our view has always been that it's good that the
• 4:20
  market is growing as long as you dominate the actual go to market
• 4:24
  that you pick. So in within the App Store, I
• 4:26
  want to dominate. There is no #2 that I allow.
• 4:28
  I mean we have to just kill everybody off.
• 4:30
  We didn't App Store go to market.
• 4:32
  But then if you have to pull grows to a sale smaller than
• 4:34
  expense the markets up markets, that's great for everybody.
• 4:37
  You know, that's how I look at it.
• 4:40
  That's super interesting. What do you think it's possible
• 4:43
  for a new entrant to take the App Store?
• 4:46
  So one of the debates that we have like all the time,
• 4:51
  essentially both internally with Informat and actually on this
• 4:54
  pod also is whether it's possible to take the App Store
• 4:59
  distribution approach now or is it not really possible to do
• 5:08
  this to get discovered If you're a new app, right?
• 5:10
  Like you're at this point like you are #1 you have been number,
• 5:15
  you know what I mean? Like imagine if I'm starting a
• 5:17
  competitor to you today, Like is it even feasible?
• 5:20
  Right? Yeah, I would.
• 5:22
  I think there's two parts of the answer.
• 5:24
  So I think first it depends on the category.
• 5:26
  I think we've proven this model just for reviews, but I actually
• 5:29
  found it surprising how little we have, we've been copied in
• 5:32
  other categories because I think the opportunity space is wide
• 5:35
  open to do a judge me for Clearview or judge me for
• 5:37
  Gorgeous. And you see it's happening to
• 5:39
  some extent. You know, you have like honestly
• 5:41
  are doing it like a much more affordable Gorgeous.
• 5:45
  You have like most another act $15.00 a month.
• 5:47
  I mean, I see some people in my Twitter reply and I also cut a
• 5:49
  price of $15. It's happening to some extent in
• 5:51
  smaller categories. So it's still possible if you
• 5:54
  want to go after reviews. I mean, why would you come after
• 5:57
  me to make half of 13 million? That's not really like spent 10
• 6:00
  years to make six and a half million.
• 6:02
  And I don't know, it's a bit bit weird.
• 6:03
  There's this guy who said that that's not successful.
• 6:06
  So yeah, I kind of agree. No, it's crazy, guy.
• 6:10
  The other thing I would say, I mean, the downside of this
• 6:13
  model, I mean, because we are of course providing way more value
• 6:15
  than we charge for is that you have to be very disciplined
• 6:19
  internally on the organization. Because I can get away with not
• 6:22
  doing much. I can go sit on the beach for
• 6:25
  six months with the entire team or my company can become very
• 6:27
  bureaucratic and it will only show up after a while because
• 6:30
  it's kind of a trade off, right? If you, if you like, maximize
• 6:32
  the price of your software, the market will tell you if your
• 6:36
  sales and marketing campaign is, is good, because if you maximize
• 6:40
  the price, there's no consumer surplus.
• 6:41
  You have to always put all the effort in sales and marketing,
• 6:43
  but you get the market feedback. If you minimize the price, you
• 6:46
  actually can grow for free and take the market like like we've
• 6:49
  done, but you have to stay disciplined.
• 6:50
  You have to be almost a bad cop yourself on the organization
• 6:54
  because otherwise they can just become slower and lazy and just
• 6:57
  become a bureaucracy that takes up all the consumer surplus.
• 7:00
  So it's kind of like peak room poison.
• 7:02
  Now I prefer to be product driven and have this like high
• 7:05
  consumer surplus approach and low pricing and take the market.
• 7:08
  I think it's more sustainable. I think it's a better position
• 7:10
  to be compared to a short point, just me.
• 7:12
  I think we are in a better position to take the entire
• 7:14
  market eventually. It's easy for us to go after
• 7:17
  them, for them to go after us, Yeah, but it's not without a
• 7:20
  trade off. You know there is a trade off
• 7:22
  organization having to remain efficient even if things become
• 7:25
  easier and easier as to scale. Do you feel like that's gotten
• 7:29
  harder as you've scaled the keeping the organization
• 7:32
  efficient? Yeah, I've been trying now for,
• 7:35
  I mean multiple attempts to to like sort organization, because
• 7:39
  to me it's like playing the defence.
• 7:40
  I want to play the offence, you know, I like to be shit posting
• 7:43
  on Twitter and just doing things like this.
• 7:44
  It's much more fun. It's my thing, like be the best
• 7:47
  couple of my people, you know. And so we tried EOS.
• 7:49
  It didn't work. This entrepreneurial operating
• 7:51
  system that wasn't like like like decent enough for our
• 7:56
  organization. I think we're a bit too complex
• 7:57
  for that. I heard ACEO for 10 months.
• 8:01
  That person also left. Now last month, I'm back as CEO.
• 8:04
  And so now the next attempt is going to be make our own like
• 8:07
  founder mode tools and try to make everything in software, all
• 8:10
  the rules and software so we can have the automated
• 8:14
  accountability. But yeah, it is, it is what I
• 8:17
  feel is holding me back because we have many ideas to do beyond
• 8:20
  reviews, you know, be. But I feel like, yeah, at this
• 8:23
  moment I want to make sure the organization stays efficient
• 8:26
  enough as we scale to multiple things before I do multiple
• 8:28
  things. PJ, can I obviously I don't know
• 8:32
  your organization, but one thing that we have done that we have
• 8:36
  found to be successful over the past four weeks and I'm actually
• 8:40
  I'm curious to get everybody's feedback here on this, is we've
• 8:43
  started to run daily stand ups by like POD.
• 8:47
  So at our company we have like an SM on the go to market side.
• 8:52
  We have like an SMB mid market agency and enterprise pod.
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  And I just have like a 15 minute other enterprise.
• 8:59
  I have a 30 minute stand up, but the other ones are all just 15
• 9:01
  minutes and then the rest of my day is clear basically to like
• 9:05
  get stuff done. So I have like an hour 15 of
• 9:09
  stand up in the morning. My Co founder has a little bit
• 9:11
  more because he runs the engineering teams, but it's
• 9:15
  basically like the whole company is running on a daily stand up.
• 9:19
  And I mean the amount of like self fulfilling accountability
• 9:24
  that has flown into the system since we started doing that four
• 9:29
  weeks ago has been incredible. But it has, I mean, it has its
• 9:32
  trades, which is like mid level, like people who are mid
• 9:37
  managers. So like it flattens A hierarchy
• 9:41
  tremendously when you do something like this because like
• 9:43
  as the CEO, you can be sort of like directly aware of what's
• 9:46
  happening. So the place where it introduces
• 9:49
  risk is like your, your management layer.
• 9:53
  Some of them may like it may not like it react differently
• 9:56
  because they're not used to it. So it has a lot of risk in that
• 10:00
  regard. But otherwise, from a pace
• 10:02
  perspective, I found it to be very effective.
• 10:04
  Do you? With that model, because I think
• 10:08
  there's a, there's a way to do it where you're just listening
• 10:10
  basically and asking questions versus dictating the things that
• 10:14
  actually get done. Is that kind of your approach or
• 10:17
  are you actually like pretty like leaning in and being like,
• 10:21
  hey, why aren't we doing this, we should do it sort of
• 10:23
  approach? You know, I want to say that I
• 10:29
  do the former, but I'm just going to be honest.
• 10:32
  Yeah. So.
• 10:33
  It's so hard at a context like that not to dictate.
• 10:38
  Yeah, but also I would say companies need an asshole in
• 10:41
  charge. You need somebody to dictate it.
• 10:43
  I mean, most things, it depends if it's actually, it's actually
• 10:46
  top level important, right? So I mean, if you're going to
• 10:49
  choose which feature to develop next, I'm not involved.
• 10:51
  You know, it's pure technical. The pro team can decide.
• 10:54
  But if it's about enforcing all the factors that go into
• 10:56
  strategies to say #1 in the App Store, I'm going to come and
• 11:00
  dictate it to you. You know, if you try to increase
• 11:01
  the price, good luck in my company, it's not going to
• 11:03
  happen. So yeah, you have to be, to be,
• 11:07
  I guess, aware and explain yourself when you are down for a
• 11:11
  good reason, when you're not. But also I do.
• 11:13
  I do also believe that sometimes entrepreneurs know things
• 11:16
  without really knowing why they know it.
• 11:18
  So I think just gut feel also is important, you know, so it's
• 11:21
  sort. Of like an aggregate of
• 11:24
  everything that you know, right? Yeah.
• 11:26
  People say, hey, you shouldn't make emotional decisions or
• 11:28
  decisions of your gut, but your gut is what you know, right?
• 11:32
  Put together, you said so many things that I find interesting.
• 11:35
  You say grow for free. Yeah.
• 11:37
  What? To what extent do you think that
• 11:40
  Judge dot me hasn't been responsible for its own demand
• 11:43
  generation? Getting people interested in
• 11:46
  Judge me because you're on the shop fly app.
• 11:48
  We've been zero responsible for our own demand generation
• 11:50
  because we've literally don't prompt and support only for the
• 11:55
  1st 9 1/2 years of the company. We're now 11 years old almost.
• 11:58
  We have no marketing team. We have won now since 12 months.
• 12:01
  We still have no sales team and we've just optimized.
• 12:04
  We're basically asked ourselves, OK, what would Shopify want us
• 12:07
  to do if like Toby was sitting in in the meeting all the time,
• 12:11
  what would Toby want us to do? That is maybe not in our
• 12:13
  benefits short term, but it's in their benefit long term.
• 12:16
  And our strategy is basically things tactics that we don't do
• 12:19
  that we would want to do for our own quarterly optimization.
• 12:22
  Let's say we want to increase the price if you could get away
• 12:23
  with it. We want to become an app suite.
• 12:25
  We want to do maybe less support to save some money.
• 12:27
  But we do things that make us ideal partner to Shopify and
• 12:31
  gives them the incentive, their personal incentive to put us at
• 12:34
  the top of the App Store. Even if they don't, even if they
• 12:35
  don't like me personally, they still want to put me at the top
• 12:38
  because it's their benefits. And that's how we think of it.
• 12:40
  And so our strategy is basically what are the least amount of
• 12:44
  things we can think of that all together gives an incentive to
• 12:47
  Shopify to put us at the top. Because we all start from the
• 12:50
  idea that the App Store is a, is a power law.
• 12:53
  Being number one is 3 times more important than being #2 and it
• 12:57
  goes down very quickly. So basically, you have to be #1
• 12:59
  or nothing. And actually in that way, it's a
• 13:02
  very conserved strategy because I think it's too risky to raise
• 13:05
  the price and because the risk of losing App Store ranking is
• 13:08
  too high, It's too risky to become an app suite.
• 13:11
  It's too risky to do less than 5.0 support at scale.
• 13:15
  And so in that way, I'm very conservative.
• 13:18
  But then at the same time, I'm also pushing the organization to
• 13:20
  be very risk on if it doesn't matter for the App Store
• 13:22
  ranking, if it's about, oh, there is some legal risk,
• 13:25
  whether our contractors just go like it's just like a fine or
• 13:30
  just a small likely like one of cost, just go and risk it.
• 13:34
  And so that trade off, that's basically what I'm doing all the
• 13:37
  time, like managing that top level view of what we're
• 13:39
  actually about and enforcing the companies what I do.
• 13:43
  That's. Really interesting.
• 13:45
  Yeah, yeah. I feel like when I think about
• 13:46
  the product LED growth side of things, all of the time these
• 13:50
  teams are trying to provide demand to the, it's trying to
• 13:54
  provide supply to the markets demand.
• 13:55
  But you're actually thinking of what is it that Shopify wants us
• 13:58
  to provide to Shopify users? Yes, exactly.
• 14:01
  And also I mean. PJ Can I?
• 14:03
  Go ahead, shop. Oh, sorry, I was just going to
• 14:05
  ask a different question. Please finish your thought.
• 14:07
  Yeah. I mean, I just want to stress
• 14:09
  that. I mean, I think what works so
• 14:11
  nicely about Judge Me is that because low cost we defined as a
• 14:16
  reason that Shopify really prefers at the top of the App
• 14:19
  Store and I can explain what it is if you want me to.
• 14:23
  We then also found a way to execute on a strategy without
• 14:27
  sales and marketing, which shaped a bunch of expense which
• 14:30
  we then could pause on into more products for less money in the
• 14:33
  App Store. So it all kind of was a virtual
• 14:36
  circle and it was such a simple call me to run because we just
• 14:39
  did product and support. We didn't have any finance team,
• 14:42
  any Martin, any sales team. It's drastically simpler now.
• 14:45
  I have AI, have a marketing team, I have a partnership team.
• 14:47
  I have other things as well, a finance and OPS team, because
• 14:49
  we're betting on new things for the future that are beyond just
• 14:53
  being like an actual review upon Shopify.
• 14:56
  But yeah, it, it just, it's much, it's like much more
• 14:59
  difficult now to run the company.
• 15:00
  And so keeping it simple, I mean, it's exponentially simpler
• 15:03
  if you have less things to do in a company, because I, I look at
• 15:06
  this like a weak link game, you know, like if you do like 5
• 15:08
  different things, the weakest part of your 5 things you have
• 15:12
  to do is your overall outputs, like a water pipe.
• 15:14
  You know, if one, one part of the pipe is very tight, that's
• 15:17
  the maximum you can put water to the pipe.
• 15:19
  You know, so the less things you have in the pipe, the easier it
• 15:21
  is to, to maximize the pipe. That makes sense.
• 15:24
  And so I think if there's anything genius about judging me
• 15:28
  in the 1st 9 1/2 years is the things we didn't do, the fact
• 15:31
  that we found a way to do this with just Proton support.
• 15:34
  And we ignored the fact that we had bad UX.
• 15:37
  We ignored the fact that we had no sales and no marketing.
• 15:40
  We looked a bit like maybe like for some shops, we looked a bit
• 15:43
  weird. You know, we had no website,
• 15:45
  actually, no, no actual websites on the home page until 1,000,000
• 15:48
  ARR. We had a very bad looking
• 15:50
  website until 10 million AR. It's only now since six months,
• 15:52
  we have a nice looking website, at least I believe so.
• 15:55
  I hope so. So I don't know, I think the the
• 15:58
  clarity of what we, the clarity of the things we could ignore
• 16:01
  was probably the most important thing.
• 16:04
  How do you think about future investment?
• 16:07
  So now you guys are I think the last public number I saw was 13.
• 16:13
  And so that's like let's call it a million a month.
• 16:19
  What is the, what is the way that you think about investing?
• 16:22
  Like how much of that is keep the lights on for the existing
• 16:26
  business? How much of that is new
• 16:28
  investments? And then in the category of new
• 16:31
  investments, whatever you're willing to share, which by the
• 16:35
  way, if you want to say like, hey man, there's a set of things
• 16:37
  that I don't want to share yet, that's obviously totally fine.
• 16:40
  But whatever you're willing to share at whatever level of
• 16:43
  granularity, how do you think about allocation going forward?
• 16:47
  Because that's a meaningful amount of capital that you can
• 16:50
  allocate now. Yeah, I think always first
• 16:54
  things goes first. So we're always going to make
• 16:56
  sure we keep winning the first level of our strategy.
• 16:58
  And I mean, basically I think a good company is built on
• 17:01
  secrets, right? And our secret was basically
• 17:04
  that we aren't a SAS company. We are Shopify app and we
• 17:06
  optimize as a Shopify app, right?
• 17:08
  Because the things we've done don't make sense as a SAS, it
• 17:10
  doesn't make sense what Shopify wants.
• 17:13
  And then we did that and that's how we want.
• 17:14
  So that was our secret, as in that we knew this ahead of the
• 17:17
  market. And that's what that's what we
• 17:18
  want. We've got two more secrets that
• 17:21
  we have in mind that we think are true that the market doesn't
• 17:23
  realise yet that we're investing in.
• 17:24
  Now this I will keep secret for now.
• 17:26
  But I mean, it's going to be obvious, I think after I share.
• 17:29
  But basically, I will invest in those two extra secrets to the
• 17:33
  extent that I can, if my organization can handle it
• 17:36
  without losing. Folks on winning #1 if I lose
• 17:39
  the App Store ranking like this, this like the foundation of
• 17:43
  Level 2 and 3 for strategy, like I can't have this.
• 17:46
  So it's always, I mean, it's like stacking the bricks and the
• 17:50
  first brick has to stay solid. Otherwise it makes no sense.
• 17:53
  That's how we look at it. I'm, I'm kind of annoyed that
• 17:56
  it's going so slow, but I think we all think that in our
• 17:57
  companies. But so yeah, I wish we could fix
• 18:00
  organization like permanently with like the right set of
• 18:03
  software to just now it's good enough.
• 18:04
  Now we can invest fully in brick two and three.
• 18:08
  But yeah, I'm trying to do both at the same time.
• 18:10
  Fix organization. Why not isolate?
• 18:12
  Why not isolate the teams? Or sorry, what is the approach
• 18:16
  so far and which parts of the approach are working and not
• 18:19
  working? It's, it's not that we have to,
• 18:21
  I see the teams because we just only have one product team.
• 18:23
  By the way, we have only one product manager, only two
• 18:25
  designers. You only have one team really,
• 18:28
  which is also on purpose, by the way, to keep it very simple.
• 18:30
  We think it goes exponential complexity as you skilled
• 18:32
  people, we don't think it's necessary.
• 18:34
  But for us, it's literally my gut feel whether we're ready to
• 18:38
  have a second product team doing a second secret, a second
• 18:41
  product, because I think we need maybe 3 or 4 proteins in total.
• 18:44
  If I do all, all the ideas that I have for the next stage.
• 18:47
  But at this moment, I would feel that it wouldn't run as lean and
• 18:52
  as official office as, as, as good enough on its own without
• 18:56
  my micromanagement every day. So therefore, the best way to
• 18:59
  keep the focus in the company is to keep the company small and
• 19:02
  just focus on the one thing we know we can do for sure and just
• 19:05
  keep that up while fixing organization on that.
• 19:08
  And then we can replicate into more.
• 19:10
  That's how we look at it. So again, it's actually very
• 19:12
  conservative in a way. Yeah.
• 19:15
  One thing that Stu and I promise I'll stop asking, one thing that
• 19:19
  Stu who was on last week mentioned to us was he's trying
• 19:24
  to reinvest 100% of revenue back into the company.
• 19:29
  And as a Bootstrap founder, and I'm happy to share how like
• 19:33
  being venture backed, I think about these questions, but as a
• 19:37
  Bootstrap founder, I have to imagine that these are that's a
• 19:41
  pretty non trivial decision because you have to decide how
• 19:46
  much of it do you want to invest in enterprise value for an
• 19:48
  eventual outcome versus how much you want to take in
• 19:51
  distributions for ongoing, sort of like whatever you lifestyle
• 19:55
  you want to live or whatever that may be.
• 19:58
  How do you think about that equation for, for you and, and
• 20:02
  the reason Stu's and he's very open about this.
• 20:04
  The reason Stu does that is because he has a separate
• 20:06
  business. Which happens to cash flow off
• 20:09
  of which he's living the lifestyle that he is happy with,
• 20:11
  right. And so this one for him is
• 20:13
  enterprise value maximizing. And so I'm, I'm curious how you
• 20:17
  think about that, that equation and that balance.
• 20:19
  Yeah. I mean, we reinvest almost
• 20:21
  everything. So revenue wise you grow a bit
• 20:24
  over 40% a year. So that's already rule of 40
• 20:26
  covered. We also make about 10% profits
• 20:28
  or let's say rule of 50 in total.
• 20:30
  But my goal is always to make rule of 40 with just the revenue
• 20:33
  growth and we reinvest everything because to me there's
• 20:37
  no choice. I mean, we do have this
• 20:39
  strategy, which is five factors. And we do have to like keep
• 20:42
  investing in more software so we can keep number one spot in the
• 20:46
  App Store. We added compliance last year as
• 20:48
  a fifth factor because compliance was such a big deal
• 20:50
  superfy last year. And so we keep investing in more
• 20:53
  and more and then trying to get the company ready to do in, in
• 20:56
  the, the business used for level 2 and three of the strategy.
• 20:59
  And so I can see a lot of opportunity to keep investing
• 21:02
  everything. I pay myself like a small amount
• 21:05
  of money compared to the revenue.
• 21:06
  I mean, I pay myself 200K per year if you, if you really want
• 21:08
  to know in pounds. So it's barely anything.
• 21:11
  And so yeah, all the money stays are in the company or gets
• 21:15
  reinvested. And by the way, we also pay 25%
• 21:17
  profit tax on a marginal pound of profit, so to meet a subsidy
• 21:21
  to reinvest faster, so. It's interesting too, because
• 21:25
  that the way you've built this business, there's like if you
• 21:31
  ever want to sell it, you will not have a hard time selling
• 21:33
  this business. So there's that aspect as well.
• 21:36
  Or like you get to a certain point where it's like, OK, I
• 21:38
  just now we can set, let's say we operate at a 20% profit
• 21:42
  margin set of a 10% or 30%. Like you'll get to a point where
• 21:45
  you grow it large enough, the return to you is going to be so
• 21:49
  big that it doesn't matter what you're taking at now.
• 21:51
  And at least that's kind of the way.
• 21:53
  Yes, that's true, but I'm also turning 40 next year and at some
• 21:58
  point the future has to be novels, right?
• 21:59
  You're probably, however, tenors in the future.
• 22:03
  Dude, PJ, we're the same age. What do you know?
• 22:08
  What do you know? Yeah. 86 born, Yeah.
• 22:13
  If you wanted to move out of the UK, I'm not sure on the the laws
• 22:17
  in the UK for getting your business out of the UK for tax
• 22:21
  purposes. Would it be too complicated at
• 22:24
  this stage? To move out of UK with the
• 22:27
  business. Well, I was in US again for a
• 22:30
  couple of weeks, just last week and the week before and it's
• 22:34
  just more energy there. I wish I picked US to move my
• 22:36
  company to five years ago, but at the same time I really
• 22:40
  believe in having one office and everybody in the same room
• 22:43
  again, I feel well, if it was just me living here in Uki would
• 22:46
  move to US tomorrow. I do love the team that we have
• 22:50
  and I want to make sure this works.
• 22:52
  And again, once the company is organised better and I've more
• 22:55
  trust in the found remote system that we have, we can potentially
• 22:58
  deal with the second office location.
• 22:59
  And I'll probably pick LA or New York and we will see.
• 23:04
  But again, it's, it's not some it's some of those things I
• 23:06
  would want. Like if I can magically have
• 23:09
  office tomorrow in like Santa Monica, I would prefer it, but
• 23:11
  it just isn't now. And it is what it is.
• 23:13
  And so I don't think it's the most important thing for me to
• 23:16
  worry about moving. It's for me most important to
• 23:19
  keep winning the exponential in in the App Store, right?
• 23:23
  I mean, maybe more fundamental. I think the point of a tech
• 23:25
  company is to win something exponential, you have to have
• 23:28
  some power outage you chase to be #1 in.
• 23:31
  So that's all that matters. Even if you have to live in a
• 23:33
  place you don't really love anymore for a while, so be it,
• 23:36
  you know? Right, But it would free up so
• 23:38
  much capital, right, to put back into the business, right?
• 23:42
  If the UK isn't so friendly for taxes.
• 23:46
  Yeah, I mean it's fine. We can still we can still deduct
• 23:49
  R and DI think is coming back in US now.
• 23:51
  So it's still OK on that front. We get some Rd. credits, but it
• 23:54
  just like more attitude and mentality in the company like or
• 23:57
  in the in the country sorry like everything is going bad, the
• 24:00
  economy stops growing. There is like this malaise.
• 24:03
  It just got nice. I mean, even the sunshine is
• 24:05
  less than in New York or LA, Yeah.
• 24:09
  PJ, I'm curious about the you're talking about the Shopify App
• 24:13
  Store and that being or you and the thing that you're owning.
• 24:18
  I'm curious what categories you think that it's possible to have
• 24:23
  anywhere near the outcome that you've had, because I don't no,
• 24:26
  in my opinion, I don't know that there is one outside of reviews
• 24:29
  where that's even possible. Like there are apps that are
• 24:32
  like the banner on your your website app, right?
• 24:36
  That I bet maybe dozen million a year in revenue, if that.
• 24:39
  Like there's, there's, there's other things out there where
• 24:42
  like there's apps that are basically one a certain
• 24:44
  category. But even for me with no on the
• 24:47
  survey side of things, more than 90% of our revenue comes from
• 24:51
  discovery outside of the App Store.
• 24:52
  Like the only way we exist as a business is where we're kind of
• 24:57
  creating a category is by actually investing in marketing
• 25:00
  and sales and and doing those kinds of things.
• 25:02
  If we had just relied on the App Store, we would be, I don't
• 25:06
  know, I'd have one, I'd be like myself and one other person
• 25:08
  probably trying to run the app, which would be fine.
• 25:12
  But like in five years we would have not made it very far at
• 25:15
  all. So I'm curious how you think
• 25:16
  about that. So, OK, the first part of the
• 25:20
  question was which are the categories?
• 25:22
  I mean, look at the top categories in Shopify #1 is
• 25:24
  e-mail number 2 is reviews #3 is I believe helpdesk.
• 25:28
  So I would say those are the top 3 ones that I would consider
• 25:31
  doing this strategy. And so I I really believe the
• 25:33
  e-mail site, the Clavio site is, I mean, somebody has to take the
• 25:37
  market in a judge me way as an open yet I think it's a massive
• 25:39
  opportunity cleave the unlike the gorgeous side held us
• 25:44
  cutting comms layer is attempting to do it.
• 25:46
  I think it's starting to work. And then there's also smaller
• 25:48
  categories. So that's one answer.
• 25:52
  If you're the founder, sorry can I ask a somewhat personal
• 25:55
  question? If you're the founder of Comms
• 25:57
  layer, shouldn't they just be calling you and saying like hey
• 26:01
  I'll give you 5 points, tell me what to do?
• 26:06
  But I think what I'm doing is pretty obvious, actually wrote
• 26:08
  it, actually explained it all in a talk in, in like Toronto.
• 26:11
  So it's our strategy actually very simple.
• 26:13
  As soon as you realise we just optimise for Shopify instead of
• 26:16
  ourselves, everything becomes obvious.
• 26:19
  And so I think, I mean, you can copy me for free.
• 26:21
  You don't have to give me points in the cap table.
• 26:23
  So it's fine. And I think actually the comms
• 26:25
  here guy comes quite a bit to our events in London.
• 26:28
  We know him, he's a nice guy, I wish him well.
• 26:31
  But in general, by the way, about things we're doing, I
• 26:35
  think one under under realized part of looking at the App Store
• 26:41
  ecosystem or Shopify ecosystem is that I think you're best of
• 26:44
  doing things Shopify has done before, but hasn't tried to
• 26:46
  monetize. That's what we tried to do.
• 26:48
  So Shopify had the review app, Shopify had an e-mail app or
• 26:51
  even has an e-mail app at the moment.
• 26:53
  But this is not key revenue driver for them.
• 26:55
  So of course, if they make money with it, like let's say with
• 26:58
  like Shopify capital or, or like check out, you don't touch it
• 27:00
  with 10 foot bombing. It's like not not to be touched
• 27:02
  at all. But if it's something big enough
• 27:04
  for them to care to make something, but put like a second
• 27:07
  trade team on it, because it's not not like really a core
• 27:09
  driver for them. These are the best
• 27:11
  opportunities, you know, so things like review app, like
• 27:15
  e-mail solution, maybe even some like network for like warehouses
• 27:19
  because they had it, but now they don't have any more.
• 27:21
  So basically in a way, Shopify gives us the IDs and we look at
• 27:25
  Shopify, what they want us to do and we just do it better.
• 27:28
  The things that for them are secondary, but for us, our
• 27:29
  primary and then so I mean, the only thing that is not in that
• 27:34
  logic, that is still maybe we're doing, I would say is help us.
• 27:37
  And you can also look again, which app, which companies did
• 27:40
  Shopify invest in? There's another way of looking
• 27:42
  at it, right? So the invested in gorgeous.
• 27:44
  So maybe doing the judgement for gorgeous is a good idea because
• 27:47
  help us is important for them to invest in.
• 27:49
  So I mean, there's some ways of looking at it, I think.
• 27:51
  I mean, you can make a small app making 1020 KA Mountain, doing
• 27:55
  something more small like, I don't know, printing out some, I
• 27:58
  don't know, some whatever, some some some, some random small
• 28:00
  app. But to me that's not appealing.
• 28:03
  But if you look at big categories, I think it's very
• 28:05
  limited. But it's also obvious once you
• 28:07
  understand things. And I I just really think
• 28:11
  there's only a handful like the three you mentioned.
• 28:13
  Yeah, there's those. I don't like you, Maybe ship?
• 28:18
  Me also. Yeah.
• 28:20
  What's that shipping? Something with shipping?
• 28:23
  But I think if you wanted to do what you've done, like if
• 28:26
  somebody wanted to say, hey, I want to build the judge me of
• 28:28
  this category, I think there's only a couple of other
• 28:31
  categories that you could even get to technically in ARR doing
• 28:33
  that. Yes, but they are still open.
• 28:35
  Like, it's not like everybody's Donuts five years ago.
• 28:38
  Still open right now and you can see.
• 28:40
  Interesting. I mean it's.
• 28:41
  Only 13 million after 10 years, but you can still sell this at a
• 28:44
  nice multiple. It's still like life changing
• 28:47
  money if you bootstrap this. So and to me it's kind of crazy
• 28:50
  how people look down upon the opportunity, but you but you do
• 28:53
  have to be able to think in a Shopify app way, not in a SAS
• 28:56
  way. I really think most of the
• 28:58
  mistakes happened in the App Store in the last 10 years is
• 29:00
  basically people come in and thinking this is a SAS
• 29:03
  opportunity, but it's not. This is a Shopify app
• 29:05
  opportunity. It's different.
• 29:07
  Jeremiah, I think the one counterpoint to what you're
• 29:10
  saying is the Aaliyah guys, right?
• 29:14
  Like he was on too, remember. And I mean, that's like, but
• 29:20
  they do market for I mean, I just want to be clear, they are
• 29:23
  not following the same approach as judge me.
• 29:26
  Like they are marketing like crazy.
• 29:28
  In fact, it's just that they're good at the organic style of
• 29:32
  marketing. So don't have to like put that
• 29:33
  much capital behind it. But they went with one to
• 29:38
  Aaliyah Alia. Such a funny business.
• 29:42
  I mean it's similar to the same feature because they they like
• 29:45
  they took, you know, Shopify forms, something Shopify is not
• 29:48
  paying attention to. But they didn't just take
• 29:50
  Shopify forms. There was another pop up app
• 29:53
  that MailChimp acquired. Yeah, dude, this, this company.
• 29:58
  The the the market insertion was perfect.
• 30:02
  OK, I forgot the name of the other company, Jack.
• 30:05
  It was. It was, yeah, So MailChimp,
• 30:08
  Yeah, quite Amped. And then Alia, we're just like,
• 30:10
  OK, no one can use Amped anymore, We'll just make Amped
• 30:13
  for everyone, right? And they crushed it.
• 30:16
  Yeah, they just literally, Yeah. I mean, not, I don't, I don't
• 30:19
  want to denigrate it. It's not like actually copying.
• 30:22
  But they like, there was a company that filled that space
• 30:27
  and then that company went away and they were just like, Oh my
• 30:31
  God, there's this vacuum here and they just like filled it in.
• 30:35
  Like I think in what is it 18 months, 24 months they hit 5
• 30:38
  million arr completely bootstrap.
• 30:40
  You should have seen the landing page.
• 30:41
  It was literally amped, just redesigned with Alia and
• 30:45
  everyone's like, oh, Alia's here, right?
• 30:47
  The website looked exactly the same as incredible.
• 30:50
  I it is definitely a different playbook though, and I don't
• 30:55
  like their pricing model is so different, right?
• 30:57
  Like I'm I just looked at the website.
• 31:00
  Yeah, they charge a lot, yeah. Yeah, the list price goes up to
• 31:03
  $2500 a month. So like I, I don't think like
• 31:07
  let's say they, my guess is very little of the revenue comes from
• 31:11
  the App Store and to grow on the App Store I think isn't, I don't
• 31:18
  think that that happens. That pricing model, I think it
• 31:20
  has to come from elsewhere. Can I also say, if you want to
• 31:23
  dominate the App Store, you have to do all the use cases for the
• 31:26
  entire market. You can't just be like, oh, we
• 31:29
  care about the plus stores, we care about the best stores in
• 31:31
  America. Like we do a lot of features
• 31:33
  also for drop shipping from Thailand, you know, because
• 31:37
  there's a lot of people, they may not make any revenue for us.
• 31:40
  But if you want to dominate the App Store in the category, you
• 31:42
  have to serve everybody within the category.
• 31:44
  And so basically I'm trying to make it very easy for the
• 31:47
  whoever writes the algorithm in Shopify App Store in Shopify
• 31:49
  site to be like, oh, there's any search for reviews, Let's send
• 31:52
  it to judge me because they cover everything and support is
• 31:55
  always good. The price is always low, comply
• 31:58
  is always high. Like you do just everything
• 32:00
  right. And even by the way, staying
• 32:02
  within just reviews, not making an app suite, not doing loyalty,
• 32:04
  etcetera is also part of the value prop to Shopify because
• 32:08
  they want merchants to go to the App Store to find the next app
• 32:12
  and to mix and match as as they please.
• 32:15
  And therefore we just integrate with everybody.
• 32:17
  But obviously we could make easy extra money to do loyalty.
• 32:21
  And also again, I also also want to provide to my competitors a
• 32:24
  way out, which I want to provide them some safe haven to run to,
• 32:27
  to notify too much with me, right, So they can go upmarket,
• 32:29
  they can go into sweet like you're doing Jeremiah, to be
• 32:32
  honest, it's good for me, you know, like and you guys can go
• 32:35
  there. We didn't go to market.
• 32:36
  You can innovate. And if something is really
• 32:37
  amazing, I can always look at it and consider do it myself.
• 32:40
  But so that's how I look at it. But for me, staying within
• 32:43
  reviews is also part of the value prop to Shopify.
• 32:47
  Well, and on the flip side, like I have 0 incentive to try to
• 32:50
  compete against you like there's no it's.
• 32:53
  Because there's no point, Yeah. Yes, but it's only because I say
• 32:57
  that that I will stay low market and I will stay within reviews.
• 33:00
  If I would come after everything you do within a within like a
• 33:02
  month, you would go fight that with me.
• 33:06
  Yeah, but. I I still wouldn't try to.
• 33:08
  Instagram that you do this. Yeah.
• 33:09
  I still wouldn't try to compete on price though.
• 33:12
  Like it's, it's interesting. Like I think PJ, one thing
• 33:15
  that's that's interesting and, and obviously like I inherited
• 33:18
  stamps, there are a lot of things that I'm working on
• 33:22
  changing. And so this specific thing I'm
• 33:24
  about to mention hopefully will not be this way soon.
• 33:26
  But literally our infrastructure costs to support our customers.
• 33:31
  Like we spend more than you charge your paying customers on
• 33:37
  that infrastructure. So that needs to change.
• 33:39
  Like that's obviously a problem, but like if somebody comes to me
• 33:42
  and says, why don't you just charge $15.00 a month, the
• 33:44
  answer is I literally cannot do that.
• 33:46
  Like it is like we would lose money just on the AWS bill and
• 33:54
  the other pieces associated with that without accounting for a
• 33:57
  team and all those kinds of things, so.
• 34:00
  Lose money on their biggest customers.
• 34:03
  Yeah. And you, yeah, and you, I'm sure
• 34:05
  you're losing money on your, your biggest customers.
• 34:08
  Hosting is more than $15.00 a month for some customers, but
• 34:11
  again the the benefit of staying simple and having this $15.00 a
• 34:15
  month pricing to us outweighs the $5 we lose on the customer.
• 34:20
  Totally. It's also tend to be copied by
• 34:22
  their competitors, so there's some some 5 in effect as well.
• 34:25
  So. And what what happens is when
• 34:28
  you charge, I'll just pick a number.
• 34:29
  Let let's say if you're, you're trying to charge customers $500
• 34:33
  a month, you don't have to optimize your cost profile and
• 34:37
  your business the same way. And so you have spent 10 years
• 34:40
  optimizing everything to be cost effective and nutrition in a way
• 34:44
  that you just aren't thinking about if you're charging $500 a
• 34:49
  month instead of $15.00 a month. And so like that's, that's the
• 34:52
  part that a lot of people don't understand is there are software
• 34:56
  is not like it is not as cheap as you think it is, unless
• 35:00
  you've invested millions of dollars in the people and the
• 35:05
  time that they're spending to optimize these things and make
• 35:07
  it more efficient. I.
• 35:08
  Agree. I agree.
• 35:10
  And so like you, you've been doing that obviously that's the
• 35:12
  only way you can, you can be charging $15.00 a month is to do
• 35:14
  that's. True.
• 35:15
  I always tell the team that our innovation is not on the product
• 35:18
  side, it's on the go to market side.
• 35:19
  It is our ability to give it away for so cheap is the
• 35:22
  innovation because the API is roughly the same between your
• 35:26
  post stamped loops. Judge me.
• 35:27
  I mean it's a commodity category in my opinion.
• 35:30
  I mean, yeah, we have. I can explain you how we did
• 35:33
  some things better than you guys.
• 35:34
  You can explain the other way around.
• 35:35
  But like fundamentally it's the same software roughly.
• 35:39
  It's for us. It's the ability to provide at
• 35:41
  scale with amazing support at low cost that is the innovation
• 35:45
  and that's indeed. And that is far harder to do
• 35:49
  than most people realize. And it does.
• 35:50
  And it doesn't happen overnight. It takes a long time to be able
• 35:53
  to do that. Yeah.
• 35:55
  But to me that's a hard, hard problem.
• 35:57
  But once you figure it out, it feels more sustainable and I
• 36:01
  feel more secure in that position than to always bet on
• 36:04
  out innovating the price challenger.
• 36:07
  I mean, I would, I mean, I actually love where we are in
• 36:10
  the market. I think it's, it's a very
• 36:12
  comfortable space. Like the only enemies myself or
• 36:15
  my organization becoming lazy, but all the time easier to make
• 36:23
  for like even larger stores at $15.00 a month, you already see
• 36:26
  it. I think last year we were the
• 36:28
  app with the most Shopify stores with more than a million revenue
• 36:32
  that are were like adding us to their stack.
• 36:34
  So even more enclave you. So this was new for us to be
• 36:38
  soap opera in this segment of the market above a million.
• 36:40
  Anyway, to me it's great news. For example, the 555 is going
• 36:43
  even more upmarket again is great because it allows your
• 36:46
  poor enclave, you and all the other players to go even more
• 36:49
  upmarket and hopefully leaving even more of the market to me
• 36:52
  from a low end perspective, right?
• 36:54
  OK. I have a question for you
• 36:55
  because you've been talking about how you are optimizing for
• 36:59
  what Shopify wants. There is a potential
• 37:03
  counterpoint to this, which is that Yapo with a much smaller
• 37:08
  number of customers than you is generating over 100 million in
• 37:11
  revenue and is paying shop of I, I don't, I don't know what their
• 37:16
  structure is, but presumably they're paying a, a significant
• 37:19
  amount of that in Rev share shop of us making far more money off
• 37:25
  off of their relationship with Yacht.
• 37:27
  Put them there off the relationship with you, even
• 37:29
  though you have more customers. So there is a Ave. here.
• 37:32
  Like let's say you went and you took the entire reviews market
• 37:35
  and you cut that. I don't know, it might be 200
• 37:38
  million and and reviews revenue that you don't manage right now
• 37:42
  across the whole market. If you shrink that down to 20
• 37:48
  million, that actually has a negative impact on Shopify's
• 37:52
  revenue. So how are you thinking about
• 37:53
  that? Yeah.
• 37:55
  I mean, our strategy of being low cost depends on the idea
• 37:58
  that Shopify wants to commoditize their compliments,
• 38:01
  which is a very standard strategy in in technology.
• 38:03
  So the the idea is that, I mean to some extent a shop can only
• 38:08
  pay so much for all the software that they use.
• 38:10
  And then the idea is if Shopify wants to maximize how much they
• 38:13
  can charge for their part of the stack, you want to make their
• 38:16
  compliments, which is the App Store as affordable as possible.
• 38:20
  So yeah, the money they lose in the short run by getting less
• 38:23
  revenue share from me actually helps them to charge more for
• 38:27
  the core plan of Shopify where they can charge 100%, not not
• 38:31
  take 15% revenue share. So if they understand their own
• 38:34
  strategy, well, they will prefer me to be low cost over having
• 38:38
  more revenue in the review category, right.
• 38:40
  In their ideal world, all the apps are free and are amazing
• 38:44
  and they can charge all the willingness to pay on their own
• 38:46
  for doing nothing. That's the ideal world.
• 38:48
  And so if you're any company wants to either you want to own
• 38:52
  the compliments, you want to own the marketing channel or
• 38:55
  whatever or you want to commoditize it.
• 38:57
  So Shopify is the center is to commoditize the App Store,
• 39:00
  commoditize Spain and gateways commoditize capital in like
• 39:03
  Shopify capital. So that is their objective and
• 39:06
  we're just a lighted objective. And but of course if some bean
• 39:09
  counter Shopify things short term, yeah they may not like me.
• 39:13
  Right. Yeah, that's a, that's a really
• 39:14
  good point. I think, yeah, I'm.
• 39:19
  I'm trying to think about the way to say this without getting
• 39:21
  into trouble. Take your time.
• 39:24
  I think, well, the good news is you're here, so at least at
• 39:32
  least at least one person. Is, I will think the worst part
• 39:34
  of this entire indigent put on Twitter, trust me.
• 39:38
  Be careful dude. I love it.
• 39:39
  I love it. What what little I can see, I I
• 39:46
  think that Shopify is continuing to promote and highlight the
• 39:54
  approach that PJ is talking about over over the short term
• 39:58
  one. Yeah.
• 40:00
  And that's, that's like from like outside looking in, in
• 40:04
  terms of like all the sources you can like look at their
• 40:07
  earnings calls, their leadership changes, like all sorts of
• 40:10
  different things. You can kind of like watch that
• 40:13
  pathway. And it's becoming increasingly
• 40:16
  clear that what PJ is describing is exactly the the, the, the
• 40:22
  path that they are walking down in terms of like, yeah, trying
• 40:28
  to make every application a commodity as much as possible
• 40:31
  because. And in fact, anything that was
• 40:33
  like too much of Rabbit like too much revenue, they ended up shut
• 40:38
  it like again, I don't I don't know because I'm not there,
• 40:43
  right. But they tried to buy deliver
• 40:45
  and they tried to buy Flex port, right?
• 40:50
  And those are like real revenue businesses with a revenue that
• 40:53
  does not look like payments revenue.
• 40:56
  And they ended up not continuing that and instead partnering with
• 41:01
  them, right. And I can.
• 41:05
  Sorry, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, I can
• 41:07
  bet you anything that there were people internally who advocated
• 41:12
  very strongly that they should be pulling in that type of
• 41:16
  revenue and having that type of business.
• 41:19
  Yeah. And that the like, you know,
• 41:22
  Toby probably was like, hey, this is actually not aligned.
• 41:27
  And now that we have it and we've had it for a year.
• 41:30
  Yeah. Like it's very clear that this
• 41:32
  is not aligned. The core logic that Toby needs
• 41:35
  to use and probably, I mean, he knows this is that do you think
• 41:38
  eventually you can commoditize this business?
• 41:41
  So for example, they're not partner with Stripe for the for
• 41:44
  the payments payments in Shopify, but to me they have to
• 41:47
  get going with commoditizing as well.
• 41:49
  There there should be like 10 providers in like shop pay and
• 41:52
  then you people can choose and mix and match and they can have
• 41:54
  maximum competition because now they make one payment getaway
• 41:57
  the team maker. It's praised to give all the
• 41:59
  data they generate the stripe, but same thing with capital.
• 42:03
  I believe it's one provider in the back end was the Shopify
• 42:06
  captain. I'm not sure about this 1%.
• 42:08
  Again, to me it's a good like temporary solution, but
• 42:11
  eventually you either want to be the old cap provider or you want
• 42:14
  to have maximum competition like making one third party the king
• 42:18
  in this country is is almost the worst of all worlds.
• 42:21
  It's it's only key if you believe it's only temporary.
• 42:26
  And so I think their strategy or their incentive to commoditize
• 42:29
  everything is furthest along in the App Store, but I think you
• 42:33
  should apply to everything else or what are complement behalf.
• 42:36
  So yes, right, It's also capital providers.
• 42:39
  It's also payment gateways. It's also everything, you know,
• 42:42
  So they should think how how do we commoditize payments in the
• 42:45
  world? Or oh, they're for.
• 42:46
  Sure. I mean, PJ, they're for sure
• 42:48
  doing that. I mean, this is the type of
• 42:51
  thing that can get me in trouble.
• 42:52
  I have no idea. OK, I have no idea.
• 42:54
  I want to be really clear, but think about the fact that one of
• 42:57
  the first modules that they made available to enterprises is Shop
• 43:01
  Pay, which is basically a consumer module, which means if
• 43:04
  you own the consumer interface, you can route to the back end
• 43:07
  however you want, right? And so once you own the routing
• 43:11
  logic, that's the first step, yes.
• 43:15
  And and like, but you want to do that only at the point at which
• 43:19
  you actually own enough of the surface area because I guess of
• 43:22
  course they own the surface area for the people who are already
• 43:24
  on Shopify, but they need to, they need to actually get enough
• 43:27
  coverage on the rest of it. Yeah.
• 43:29
  Yeah. And then you can exert
• 43:30
  exceptional bargaining powers, right?
• 43:32
  Like that's the way these things work.
• 43:34
  Correct. It also means that the the
• 43:36
  riskiest partnerships the shop of has right now are those
• 43:40
  temporary exclusive ones. Like Stripe isn't meant to be
• 43:44
  exclusive forever. I mean, that's that's isn't in
• 43:45
  their incentive, right? Eventually there's going to be
• 43:48
  some renege on this deal, right? And so it's going to be very
• 43:52
  interesting to see. I mean, it's all going to be in
• 43:54
  the benefit of Shopify in the long run, but there can be some
• 43:57
  like tension in in the way there, right?
• 43:59
  Because of course Stripe will want to keep the deal forever
• 44:01
  the way it is. But Shopify now having grown so
• 44:03
  much and being so dominant, they actually want to renegotiate and
• 44:06
  maybe they are getting paid more money in the back end already.
• 44:08
  I don't know about the deals of the term but if I was if
• 44:11
  harmonizing Shopify, what is the biggest risk to them?
• 44:14
  It's the Stripe deal like 100%. I'm like, I am very certain like
• 44:18
  their deal with Stripe is probably incredible, right?
• 44:20
  Like they they're doing, I'm sure Stripe, if Stripe is smart,
• 44:23
  they're doing everything they can to reduce the incentive of
• 44:26
  Shopify to try to do that, yes. But you're totally.
• 44:28
  Missing something you're trying to get into, into this market.
• 44:31
  You want to deal with Shopify, right?
• 44:33
  And you want to become one of the 10 providers, you know,
• 44:36
  anyway, I think it's very interesting.
• 44:37
  But I do believe, I mean, eventually Superfi wants to be
• 44:40
  this connecting note of everything, the back end with
• 44:42
  every sales channel, every payment gateway, every app,
• 44:44
  every, every, whatever. And they make all the money
• 44:47
  being the connecting note that you can't replace.
• 44:50
  And it's a great strategy. And they're going to win.
• 44:51
  They're going to go for the global win.
• 44:53
  And so if anything, I hope they keep thinking bigger and bigger
• 44:55
  and not slow down and become bean counters here.
• 44:59
  But I think. Missing something here in this
• 45:02
  end state where all of the apps are commoditized and nothing
• 45:06
  costs anything. I think that it's, you know,
• 45:09
  it's obviously good for the market.
• 45:10
  Saturating supply is the best thing that you can do for the
• 45:12
  market, for the customer because it decreases price and it
• 45:15
  encourages innovation. It also encourages innovation,
• 45:18
  right? As the mark margins get squeezed
• 45:21
  by you, the incentive to compete with you is extremely low.
• 45:24
  The incentive to do something better that provides supply to
• 45:26
  emerging market demands like what Stamped or YOPO is doing is
• 45:29
  very high. So I, I can't understand, I I'm
• 45:32
  clearly missing something, why they wouldn't want a thriving
• 45:35
  app ecosystem where there's actually a very real incentive
• 45:37
  for builders to make something incredible, which over time
• 45:40
  maybe becomes in a commodity, right?
• 45:42
  But if you, if everything's free and there's no reason to build
• 45:44
  on Shopify, you don't build on Shopify.
• 45:47
  No the. Actual they.
• 45:48
  Want innovation? They want people to find who go
• 45:50
  to markets investing those have higher revenue to pay for that's
• 45:54
  go to market to pay for and the innovation on the product side.
• 45:57
  And then also people like me to come in and say what of those
• 46:00
  things can you commoditize and then do that maximum speed so
• 46:02
  they won't Buster both worlds. And then Mick is is happening,
• 46:06
  right? Now, even just looking at the
• 46:07
  reviews category, there will always be merchants that are
• 46:10
  willing to pay, you know, 20 * 50 * 100 times what PJ would
• 46:16
  charge them. Because there's something that
• 46:18
  makes sense to them where they say I want this one thing and I
• 46:22
  think that this one thing is worth something.
• 46:23
  So there is still incentive to go build innovation for those
• 46:25
  people. It's just that over time like
• 46:28
  that, that's cohort shrinks and there's less of those people
• 46:31
  that want to invest in that regard at least.
• 46:33
  More actually want this to happen.
• 46:35
  I won't stem to keep existing in that form because it's like
• 46:39
  outsourced innovation department to me.
• 46:40
  I can look at what the market is doing and gets inspired by it.
• 46:43
  So it's better for both of us, honestly.
• 46:46
  And then and then you could say we just got to get a copy this
• 46:48
  thing and it costs you. I'm trying to say anything about
• 46:51
  saying it's so yeah, once it becomes standardized enough and
• 46:54
  it's, it's obvious enough that it's something I can
• 46:57
  commoditize, I will do so. But so like, but you want both
• 47:00
  sides of the coin. But The thing is, within the App
• 47:03
  Store, go to markets. There's going to be 1 power law
• 47:06
  winner per category. Yeah, yeah.
• 47:08
  Because Jack, the other problem is, is like I don't think, by
• 47:12
  the way, I don't think any of us are saying 0 is the commodity
• 47:14
  price. It's just some low commodity
• 47:18
  price number that can be supported by a given
• 47:20
  distribution channel. So like said differently, like
• 47:24
  the other complexity PJ has is he can never win a store that
• 47:29
  does not buy through the App Store, just like he can win
• 47:32
  everyone who buys through the App Store.
• 47:34
  He can't win anyone who does not buy through the App Store
• 47:36
  because those other channels like people are going to be
• 47:39
  louder than him just like he's the loudest on well, I'm not
• 47:43
  never win right? Like people make choices and all
• 47:46
  sorts of crazy ways in B2B, but I'm I'm taking an extreme
• 47:49
  purposely. It's like on the if you are a
• 47:52
  App Store buyer, the probability that you don't buy judge me is
• 47:56
  like very small. If you are a enterprise buyer,
• 48:01
  the probability that you buy through the App Store is very
• 48:04
  small, right? Like these things kind of like
• 48:09
  everything works the way that that they expect that you expect
• 48:12
  it to work, right. And so then the strategy becomes
• 48:14
  very clear both for both for everyone, for the PJ's of the
• 48:18
  world, for the yacht's of the world and for the Shopify's of
• 48:20
  the world, right. And then you can like create
• 48:22
  this dynamic, yeah, which which honestly like benefits Shopify
• 48:26
  long term big time. Something I would put as a
• 48:28
  sidebot here, it's all true what you say, but we do get also word
• 48:30
  of mouth from the fact that people like, hey, this is free
• 48:33
  money basically to go to judge me when in Facebook groups,
• 48:36
  forums, we also get port of mouth there.
• 48:39
  So it's that plus the App Store. But yeah, beyond that, like we
• 48:41
  cannot compete on Facebook ads or Google ads.
• 48:44
  We don't even try. Whoever you don't think we pay
• 48:46
  ads is Shopify App Store ads just again to please Shopify
• 48:50
  optimize for them, not for us, right?
• 48:53
  Yeah. PJ, all I'm trying to say is
• 48:54
  like no one on your team is going to fill out an RFP, right?
• 48:59
  Like unless, so that is a channel like.
• 49:03
  What is that? Maybe if the AI can automate it
• 49:06
  soon that will do it, but not if it's human effort.
• 49:08
  Yeah. This is like this is the type of
• 49:10
  thing where like kind of like rubber meets the road on on like
• 49:15
  channel market. Like I mean, you said it really
• 49:17
  well like channel market fed product channel fed, whatever
• 49:20
  you want to describe it, right So and.
• 49:22
  You want to go. To markets, go ahead, sorry.
• 49:25
  Was it the buyer that wants the RFP honestly doesn't want to pay
• 49:28
  $15.00 a month either. There's also that aspect like
• 49:31
  there there is an element of. Yeah.
• 49:33
  When if not that Judge Me is a very good product.
• 49:36
  So I'm not saying this is going to happen, but like if there was
• 49:38
  some sort of issue with Judge Me and the middle level manager
• 49:43
  that made the decision to buy Judge Me, that their boss comes
• 49:47
  in and says what's going on here and it was $15.00 a month.
• 49:51
  They're gonna be like, why did you go with the $15.00 a month
• 49:53
  thing? That's a.
• 49:54
  High risk for the person recommending it.
• 49:55
  Yeah. So are ideal customer is their
• 49:58
  own merchant, their own business owner and they will save the
• 50:00
  money. They can go lease a port with
• 50:01
  the savings that's easier sell than you taking risk to your CMO
• 50:06
  or CEO recommending us. Exactly, Yeah.
• 50:09
  And so there's there's always going to be pieces of the market
• 50:12
  like that that are just like they're going to go with a more
• 50:16
  expensive option. But can I highlight to you that
• 50:19
  did cut our price recently a bit.
• 50:21
  So I do believe these two sites are getting close to each other
• 50:25
  and over time they may merge actually, right.
• 50:27
  So we're also watching that because we are trying to get
• 50:31
  like high rent with $3 a month plan.
• 50:33
  At the same time, you're always cutting the price.
• 50:35
  So it's getting closer and closer.
• 50:36
  So we'll see how it goes in the future that there is a potential
• 50:39
  that even big companies won't pay $10,000 anymore for software
• 50:42
  in the future. We'll see.
• 50:46
  Guys, I'm dying to know Rashab hearing everything that PJ is
• 50:49
  saying on his philosophy and ideas around pricing, where do
• 50:53
  you think you're the differences in your opinion?
• 50:58
  We don't we. So sadly, Jeremiah was right.
• 51:01
  I was hoping for way more spice, honestly, because like I, I like
• 51:07
  different points of view. Really challenge your thinking,
• 51:09
  you know what I mean? Like you want a different point
• 51:11
  of view because you're just like, why haven't I ever thought
• 51:13
  of it this way before? But to be totally honest with
• 51:16
  you, I actually agree like 100% with, with everything that PJ
• 51:20
  said, which is kind of, I mean, yeah, I, I and I have the same
• 51:25
  view of the market actually, right.
• 51:28
  And how the, and how the market is playing out and how the
• 51:30
  market will play out. Which is, by the way, the amount
• 51:34
  of shit I got on Twitter, I'm like a little bit irritated
• 51:37
  because all the, if all they did was listen till minute three,
• 51:39
  they would have heard that. But whatever the, the yeah,
• 51:45
  that's like, that's like the reality of the situation, right?
• 51:47
  Is that like all of these are just strategies and most
• 51:50
  business owners are playing a certain strategy.
• 51:52
  Now I think there's a separate question, which is like, OK, if
• 51:55
  I believe that, then why am I not doing that with Fermat?
• 51:58
  And actually PG is exactly right, which is like every
• 52:01
  business owner is going to take a different approach to like
• 52:04
  cracking open the market and then creating that surplus in a
• 52:07
  different way. And like the approach that we
• 52:10
  took, I would call it to be much more similar to the approach.
• 52:15
  Look, I'm not at all as good of an entrepreneur as Elon or
• 52:18
  anything like that. But what he did is he started
• 52:21
  selling a roadster at an extremely high price point and
• 52:23
  then just like build a ton of tack off of the ability to
• 52:27
  reinvest from selling something at a high price point early on.
• 52:31
  And then you just compress the price yourself very fast over
• 52:34
  time. So if you were to look at our
• 52:36
  price history, like literally 18 months ago, you would see us in
• 52:40
  market quoting 6 KA month and now we're all the way at like a
• 52:44
  couple 100, right? And and like we are doing this
• 52:49
  to ourselves because I actually agree with how the market plays
• 52:53
  out. I think that how you approach it
• 52:56
  in the meantime is actually the only thing that changes, right?
• 52:59
  Like each of us sees the market the same way.
• 53:02
  And I think you just take different approaches.
• 53:05
  Like what PJ said is like, hey, you charge more in order to
• 53:08
  invest more in sales and marketing and blah, blah, blah,
• 53:10
  blah. But ultimately, the price of the
• 53:13
  product is going to compress. Like that's what's going to
• 53:16
  happen. And so you should be the one
• 53:18
  compressing it yourself, yeah? Yeah, but it's, I mean, your
• 53:22
  model only works if what you're doing is so new that you're the
• 53:25
  only one who can make it in the early days, right?
• 53:27
  It's like you're the first one to make in like live TV or
• 53:29
  something. Then you do this strategy,
• 53:31
  you're the first one to make a Tesla car, you know, then that's
• 53:34
  when you do this like I, I wasn't the first one to make a
• 53:37
  review app like everybody can make one.
• 53:39
  So that's why we entered 2 differently.
• 53:41
  Yeah. What's interesting, I mean, I'm
• 53:43
  trying to put myself in the shoes of like Rashad's ICP and
• 53:47
  there isn't an amount I wouldn't spend if it significantly
• 53:51
  improves my business, right. This is like.
• 53:55
  But that's how we got away with it in the early days.
• 53:57
  Yeah. Can I also see what?
• 54:00
  Yeah, about about reviews. In our customer development,
• 54:04
  it's pretty obvious that a lot of merchants think that a
• 54:07
  certain amount of reduce is good enough.
• 54:09
  So it's not as important to be like squeezing every single
• 54:14
  review out of every e-mail you sent.
• 54:16
  Well, for example, in e-mail marketing or everything about
• 54:18
  driving bottom line directly, it's much more important to the
• 54:22
  last incremental improvement in performance, right.
• 54:25
  So being a commodity is easier in the review app space and in
• 54:29
  the e-mail marketing space. I still think by the way, you
• 54:32
  can make a judge me for Clavio, but you can have a harder time
• 54:35
  convincing larger stores that there's no performance
• 54:37
  downgrade. Moving to you.
• 54:39
  While it doesn't really matter. I mean we are, we are optimizing
• 54:42
  for conversion rate as well for collection rate of reviews.
• 54:45
  But even if you are a bit lower for a while because we had less
• 54:47
  resources, it doesn't really matter compared to your because
• 54:50
  most apps most companies are good enough with.
• 54:51
  Like I got 50 reviews from our products, it's fine.
• 54:55
  Yeah, it's not worth paying 10 times much for 2% more reviews.
• 54:59
  Exactly. Hey, BJ, I'm sorry, man, I got a
• 55:01
  drop, but this was incredible. Yeah, this was incredible, man.
• 55:06
  I really appreciate, appreciate you doing this.
• 55:08
  We. Can fight some more times.
• 55:09
  Don't worry, we can find some other thing to fight over over
• 55:11
  Twitter. I'm also disappointed I was here
• 55:16
  like preparing for like those like 0 crops, 00 questions told
• 55:19
  to me is like there's going to be a fight for an hour and it's
• 55:21
  a good conversation. I don't know what's happening.
• 55:26
  It's nice meeting you. Oh, gosh, what a world.
• 55:30
  Hey, man, it was so nice. All right, see.
• 55:32
  You PJI actually have one more question for you.
• 55:34
  I'm interested. You were talking about the
• 55:38
  opportunity on Shopify and you mentioned e-mail reviews help
• 55:41
  desk and I feel like there's a big difference between the the
• 55:47
  players, the main players in that space on Shopify, right?
• 55:50
  E-mail Clavio or or maybe there's a couple other players,
• 55:54
  but mainly Clavio reviews Yoppo maybe at the very high end pop
• 56:00
  ups, Alia shipping ship station. There's like there's a big
• 56:04
  difference between all of these different players and, and some
• 56:06
  of them are very big and that's that they exist outside of
• 56:09
  Shopify's ecosystem as well, right?
• 56:12
  Do you think that you could serve more customers, more
• 56:16
  people by having a fraction of the market penetration that you
• 56:20
  have on Shopify in a different market?
• 56:22
  You mean the different go to markets within the same vertical
• 56:25
  or a different market entirely? What do you mean?
• 56:27
  Yeah, in a in a different market.
• 56:29
  So like if if we look at Shopify, not the Shopify user,
• 56:32
  but that that market as in where customers go to buy, right being
• 56:37
  the Shopify App Store if you existed in.
• 56:40
  To talk about maybe combining different go to markets, being
• 56:43
  on the App Store, but also doing other things as well.
• 56:48
  Well, I think it's very hard to combine go to market.
• 56:50
  You have to always make sure they're compatible, right?
• 56:52
  So I mean, for App Store go to market, you have to be low cost.
• 56:55
  If, if I will, if I want to optimize for let's say Reddit
• 56:58
  ads or Facebook ads, I would want to adjust the price of my
• 57:01
  app compared to what works best for those campaigns.
• 57:04
  I come to both at the same time, right?
• 57:07
  So therefore, we decided because we already on the App Store go
• 57:10
  to market train, we can't also be on the paid marketing train,
• 57:13
  right? And so yes, I would love to
• 57:15
  combine, go to markets, but it's hard to combine.
• 57:18
  And also again, being so low cost, if I try to sell to a big
• 57:22
  enterprise and I'll be like, oh, it's now 10,000 a year just
• 57:25
  because we do custom as a layer or something, you'd be like,
• 57:27
  yeah, but you're charging me 10,000 more for one feature for
• 57:30
  one thing, and it's $15.00 a month for the rest.
• 57:33
  I think I'll have a harder time selling my software, it being so
• 57:36
  low cost for 9 times of the markets.
• 57:38
  Students like charge the same enterprise price for the small
• 57:41
  ones in the market. That's also the reason why, by
• 57:44
  the way, you'll prevent higher price because it's it's easier
• 57:47
  to ask for 50K per year for review app if everybody pays
• 57:50
  hundreds of dollars a month, right.
• 57:52
  So again, so I think there's a pot dependency in how you pick
• 57:56
  your go to market. And I wish I could do all of
• 57:58
  them together, but the reality is I cannot.
• 58:01
  And then one side benefit of not doing everything is that I do
• 58:04
  allow my competitors to take their spot and we can be
• 58:07
  coexisting without too much fighting.
• 58:09
  You know, maybe you have a different point of view.
• 58:12
  I don't know, but that's how I look at it.
• 58:14
  No, I agree. I agree with that.
• 58:16
  I think it's, I mean honestly even for for me with like with
• 58:22
  no we have flat repricing. We like there are brands that we
• 58:26
  actually do not want to serve because it's just too expensive.
• 58:30
  And if somebody, and sometimes we'll pitch somebody on a,
• 58:33
  they're asking for something that's kind of outside of the
• 58:35
  scenario what we do. And we'll say, hey, that's 1500
• 58:38
  bucks a month with a, with a 12 month contract if you want us to
• 58:42
  do that for you. And usually they say no because
• 58:45
  they can get the list price is $300 on that.
• 58:47
  But the reality is it is not worth my team trying to execute
• 58:51
  on that for them if the price point isn't five times higher.
• 58:55
  So yeah, I agree. You mentioned something BJ
• 58:59
  earlier about being the app that had the most stores over
• 59:03
  $1,000,000 last year, this year or something.
• 59:07
  Is there any plans to serve those people more with something
• 59:11
  else, a different product? Well, it is our plan to serve as
• 59:16
  many people as possible within the constraints of our $15.00 a
• 59:19
  month, right. So if tomorrow we can have an AI
• 59:22
  salesperson for free running the show, we will go up market more,
• 59:26
  you know, but then you will see the opposite of the world going
• 59:29
  even more enterprise, you know, they'll go run away even more up
• 59:32
  market. But we'll see how the technology
• 59:33
  goes with going multi product. Yeah, we do have IDs for the
• 59:39
  second and third secret of our strategy.
• 59:40
  The second third bets that we want to make.
• 59:43
  They're more innovation than before.
• 59:45
  It's no longer just copy pasting something else, but I will share
• 59:50
  later once we're what was this emotion?
• 59:52
  But again, I'm also not happy where the organization is right
• 59:55
  now in terms of like being self managing enough in at the height
• 59:59
  of performance level without me always being there to trust
• 1:00:02
  going multiple products. I mean, I really prefer to make
• 1:00:05
  sure I keep the wanting going perfectly rather than risking
• 1:00:09
  all by going three things at the same time.
• 1:00:11
  So. Well, that reminds me.
• 1:00:13
  I'm so sorry. I have one more question.
• 1:00:15
  It's what is the founder mode and the automated this.
• 1:00:20
  ID by by Brian Chesky from Airbnb.
• 1:00:22
  I think he gave a talk last year at Y Combinator, right in
• 1:00:26
  Silicon Valley. There was a private talk, but he
• 1:00:29
  talked to all the YC applicants of that batch talking about the
• 1:00:33
  realities of running a big company at scale and how he
• 1:00:35
  found that by following the standard advice of hiring
• 1:00:39
  managers and trusting them and then basically letting them do
• 1:00:41
  their thing. That didn't work and he ended up
• 1:00:44
  always having to come in and configs things after they went
• 1:00:48
  wrong and then actually get associated with being the bad
• 1:00:50
  cop that always is associated like problems, you know, and as
• 1:00:52
  a founder, you actually get a bad reputation.
• 1:00:55
  And then he, he found that actually by forcing the team to
• 1:00:59
  tell you about everything and being everywhere all the time
• 1:01:02
  early on, you actually prevent problems.
• 1:01:04
  And also you get, you actually become part of also the good
• 1:01:06
  things in the company. And so it, when Airbnb went down
• 1:01:10
  like I, I think it was 80% or something like that in COVID
• 1:01:13
  because there was no, there was no travel.
• 1:01:14
  Of course, he used that opportunity to be like, we're
• 1:01:17
  going to go founder mode now on the way out.
• 1:01:19
  And now his life is way better. And so that ID founder mode
• 1:01:22
  started there. And I think it is the future, I
• 1:01:25
  think is the only way that's as a founder, you can have more
• 1:01:28
  than 5 or 7 reports and still still manage it as long as you
• 1:01:32
  have software to help you stay informed and automate your
• 1:01:35
  enforcement of certain rules you want to put in place.
• 1:01:37
  So that's my current bets. I mean, I can't say it's working
• 1:01:40
  yet because I'm still starting on it.
• 1:01:41
  But that's the the new CEO of the company's basically
• 1:01:45
  software. That's how I talk about it.
• 1:01:47
  Nice. That's that's how it's looking
• 1:01:49
  practically in your business software CEO.
• 1:01:53
  Yeah, because I mean, we used to have EOS this this standard like
• 1:01:56
  you'll use based on advisor and the commitment EOS for you that
• 1:01:59
  didn't work. Then we have this experienced
• 1:02:01
  Amazon GM that became our CEO or Coco that didn't work.
• 1:02:05
  So now we're going to try founder mode.
• 1:02:06
  And I I do think the future of CE OS is to have more reports.
• 1:02:11
  At the moment I have like 12 or 13.
• 1:02:13
  So it's too many to put in one meeting every every week.
• 1:02:17
  So we stopped doing that. But now we have these like
• 1:02:19
  groups meeting incoherence parts.
• 1:02:22
  I mean, the product and design team meets together, the
• 1:02:24
  marketing partnerships team meets together every week and
• 1:02:27
  the OP site and the support site, whatever.
• 1:02:29
  I mean, all these separate meetings keeps up to date.
• 1:02:31
  And then all the cross communication we need in the
• 1:02:33
  company. It's not going to happen through
• 1:02:35
  software or to like monthly demos or everybody shares
• 1:02:38
  whatever what they've been doing.
• 1:02:39
  So it's all very new. But I think that is more
• 1:02:42
  sustainable than hoping for this middle manager humans to do it
• 1:02:45
  all for you, because in my experience, not having too much
• 1:02:48
  power of after a while. And also they have an actual
• 1:02:51
  tendency to become the good cop and only want to do the nice
• 1:02:53
  things and keep the raising anything.
• 1:02:56
  And I'm forcing you if you have the standards to come in over
• 1:02:59
  them and do enforcing the bad cop stuff, giving you a horrible
• 1:03:03
  reputation. I mean, part of my team when I
• 1:03:05
  came back as CEO last month, was actually scared of me coming
• 1:03:07
  back. We had to do like all this
• 1:03:10
  parking loss because look, the cornerstone for me to be harsh
• 1:03:13
  on purpose. I just want, I want the, the bat
• 1:03:17
  cop stuff we have to do like accountability to be automated
• 1:03:20
  and impersonalized the software so I can be more like a neutral
• 1:03:24
  person to them or or maybe even a good person to them rather
• 1:03:26
  than always having to be there only when things go wrong, you
• 1:03:29
  know? I, I, I couldn't agree more.
• 1:03:31
  People do protect their reputation with their teammates
• 1:03:34
  at the expense of the the priority, which is the business,
• 1:03:37
  right and its health. I've seen and I've worked with a
• 1:03:41
  lot of different teams. I used to be, I used to have my
• 1:03:43
  own brand than I used to have an agency and worked with a bunch
• 1:03:46
  of different agencies and some of the agencies that I worked
• 1:03:49
  with were very good at managing teams and they just didn't have
• 1:03:54
  managers. I can kind of explain to you a
• 1:03:56
  little bit of what it looked like, but it was basically
• 1:03:58
  receipts. The same reason we turn up to
• 1:04:00
  this call and everyone reliably turns up to calls unless there's
• 1:04:03
  a anomaly, is because it there's total transparency and
• 1:04:08
  accountability. I am fully accountable to turn
• 1:04:10
  up to this call and it's totally transparent.
• 1:04:12
  If I didn't turn up to this call, you'd be like, OK, Jack's
• 1:04:14
  not here. He's not meeting the
• 1:04:15
  expectation. So some of the teams that I
• 1:04:17
  worked with that nailed to this, they built some sort of
• 1:04:20
  changelog that was externalizable, like everyone
• 1:04:23
  had access to the changelog, exactly what they were doing,
• 1:04:26
  but concise. You don't want like a, a list of
• 1:04:28
  all their clicks, right? Or time tracking or some
• 1:04:30
  nonsense, right? Because that's too much detail
• 1:04:32
  that the signal gets lost in the noise, right?
• 1:04:35
  And then also a list of what they're going to do next.
• 1:04:38
  All right. So that I think that this is
• 1:04:39
  actually why the stand ups work so well for Rashab is because he
• 1:04:43
  forces everyone to one, think about what they're doing, build
• 1:04:46
  a plan for what they're going to do next, and then make totally
• 1:04:48
  transparent in the context of a call exactly what they've done.
• 1:04:52
  And even Toby, I think in his last interview on what's the
• 1:04:55
  name? Again in this product podcast,
• 1:04:58
  I've got a name now I'm blanking.
• 1:04:59
  But anyway, he was talking about how our technology and how to
• 1:05:02
  organize ourselves is probably something that can really
• 1:05:03
  improve. There's so much like wasting how
• 1:05:07
  we organize companies and yeah, I think rethinking that is going
• 1:05:10
  to be a massive unlock of productivity and.
• 1:05:13
  I think. In the eye and just technologies
• 1:05:15
  allows you to have a wider reach as a CUM be aware of more things
• 1:05:19
  easier not have to rely on humans as communication APIs.
• 1:05:26
  That's a good thing. That's a good saying.
• 1:05:27
  Communication APIs, right? I think that there's this
• 1:05:30
  natural tendency in teams to lean towards comfort as opposed
• 1:05:34
  to challenge. And people being challenged is
• 1:05:36
  how they get better and they do better, right?
• 1:05:39
  And people being comfortable is is how they get worse over time.
• 1:05:42
  They might be comfortable and enjoy being comfortable, but
• 1:05:45
  they're not going to do good work and they're not going to
• 1:05:46
  become better. Actually, I'm actually writing
• 1:05:48
  this founder modes memo for the team with all the these
• 1:05:53
  tendencies I see. And there is indeed a tendency
• 1:05:55
  towards comfort. There's also a tendency towards
• 1:05:58
  extroversion. By the way, we're a very
• 1:05:59
  introverted company. And then if you look at this
• 1:06:01
  bell curve of extroversion, the most extroverted people keep
• 1:06:04
  asking me for one more social as if it's going to fix introverts
• 1:06:07
  or something. And then we end up providing
• 1:06:10
  breakfast multiple days a week. And then we do like social at
• 1:06:12
  5:00 PM. There's always one more social
• 1:06:14
  is going to fix it. It's, it's a minor thing.
• 1:06:16
  Of course, it's not going to ruin a culture.
• 1:06:18
  But there's this tendencies towards some extroverted like
• 1:06:22
  theaters keep taking over the culture, you know, And so you
• 1:06:23
  have to stop that. There's a there's a tendency for
• 1:06:26
  people who want to have a more easygoing lifestyle to start
• 1:06:29
  during the norms rather than the people who want to really excel.
• 1:06:32
  And so you have to keep adjusting and keep fixing for
• 1:06:34
  that and making sure it doesn't happen.
• 1:06:36
  But yeah, I think once we define those things that we see in the
• 1:06:39
  company going wrong naturally over time and in a realization,
• 1:06:42
  we can make software to reinforce the fix that all the
• 1:06:46
  time continuously. And it should make running a
• 1:06:48
  company easier for me and it should allow me to go multi
• 1:06:51
  product. That's that's the hope.
• 1:06:53
  Or even just not having to do being the best cop all the time.
• 1:06:57
  That would also just increase my quality of life, you know?
• 1:07:00
  Right, right, right, right. Because you want the people who
• 1:07:04
  work for you to, to like you, right?
• 1:07:05
  Because then they're a little bit more motivated to.
• 1:07:07
  It's hard for you maybe. Yes, you have you have this
• 1:07:10
  balance. I mean, you want to enforce the
• 1:07:11
  right standards, but also you want people to able to speak
• 1:07:14
  their mind to you. If you're so afraid of you that
• 1:07:16
  they won't speak their mind, they'll they become yes, man,
• 1:07:19
  that's also not good. So you have to have both, you
• 1:07:21
  know? Yeah.
• 1:07:23
  I agree man. Awesome.
• 1:07:24
  Well, thank you for joining man. This was a great conversation.