Derrick Reimer
Appearances
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
if you recognize where you are in that, and I think a lot of makers are like, joy and skill. We're very good at building products and we love doing it, but the business probably needs more marketing. I think that's the story for maybe 90% of indie hackers and people who come from the angle of developer founder.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And maybe you have the resources to bring in marketing help, maybe you have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself, but like,
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
even just being aware that like okay even if you don't find it that joyful joyous to do that work like it needs to be done so you got to force yourself to do that and maybe there's you know in the course of wearing many hats maybe you do also spend some time doing the stuff that you really love like I don't think you should maybe I don't think you should give it all up you might
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Find yourself burned out and delegate when you can to bring in help so that you don't feel like you're just failing at marketing and not getting anywhere. But I think just being cognizant of the traps of focusing only on the stuff that you enjoy and that you're skilled at, but not missing that key component of what does the business need.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
That's the name of our band. Co-founders with Perfectionist Tendencies.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Perfectionist Tendencies.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Yeah, I mean, I think my own story is a little bit of an outlier case, in part because I could find, because Corey Haynes was available, who's like a very good generalist, marketer, founder-minded person. So a lot of times people have this type of person on their co-founding team. And Corey happened to be available.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
a collaborator for me to work with because I was, at the time, didn't have a developer, so I was just building product day and night, but also we were getting it off the ground and trying to do launches and figure out how do we get SEO engines rolling and how do we, kind of working through the strategy.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Drum major, yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So we collaborated together on developing the strategy and it was just helpful to have an extra mind to think about these things. And then he did a lot of the delegation of, okay, we want articles, we're going to We're going to sub these out to a freelancer. Or a pool of freelancers. So he was in charge of building the spreadsheet of the keywords.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
It was all very collaborative between the two of us, but he was just basically in that role of the boots on the ground project managing marketing stuff. And so that worked well for us. I don't know how many generalist marketers are out there available to do that type of work as a contractor. Almost no one. I probably wouldn't have been able to hire full-time a marketer.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
It perhaps would have been too expensive at the time.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Yeah, I mean, I think just in general, these are a lot trickier in practice than they look, I think, oftentimes. So many times, I think partnerships are fraught with kind of the dynamic of if someone is much larger than you, do they feel like you're getting more of the benefit than them or vice versa? What do you both have to bring to the table?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Early on in SavvyCal, there was one particular partnership attempt with a company that was related and made sense for us to explore building an integration at a deeper level than just our baseline integrations. It ended up being a pretty big waste of time in the end because they felt like they were so much larger and
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Ultimately, they were afraid to drive too much traffic to us because that felt out of balance. I think going into any kind of partnership, it's important to have a deep understanding of... what's the vision for how you're actually better together? Why bother doing anything at all?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Because if there's not a foundational story that we can all agree on, then these things are going to either quickly or very slowly crop up and kind of taint the whole endeavor.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Sometimes it's like getting your product in the hands of their customers helps drive retention or fill in a gap in functionality where they're losing sales because they can't provide this thing and your product can fill in that gap. So it's that question of how do you both win with whatever it is.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
It could be as simple as we're going to build an integration and email our customers both about that. Those are oftentimes pretty simple, especially if they have an API or you have an API depending on the direction that the integration needs to go. A lot of times they can be pretty simple and the main benefit is it's helpful for their customers.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Maybe you get a backlink from their website on their docs and there's kind of a good little... good little link together. And other times, you know, when it's when it's deeper, I think the big thing is like looking for, are they actually willing to invest in this? Or is it just sort of like a transactional sort of thing?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Like, I've had outreach from larger companies that are almost like putting me through kind of a BDR process where they're like, you can tell they're reaching out to a lot of companies asking for integrations, because they have some some random person in their partnerships department who just is working the long tail of trying to get their service integrated with a bunch of other people.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And those are not super high value. I don't have any evidence that their customers actually want to use my product. They just are looking for another backlink and another notch on their list of integrations to be able to say, we integrate with thousands of tools. So I think it's trying to make sure, is there an actual case here?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Have you actually heard demand from your customers for something like my product and vice versa? can we develop something meaningful here? Or is it kind of just this transactional, like we're hoping to get a quick win on some traffic?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So I think there's, as I was thinking this through, there's kind of like two buckets, two different kinds of delegation, I think. So there's like the mindset or the task before you of, you know, I have some less skilled work that's not worth spending my valuable founder time on. And when I could be working on higher leverage things.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Yeah, I think that's the majority of, well, we have our integrations with the big players, but the smaller players that we integrate with, a lot of that came from some degree of warm connection to the point where I could reach out, ping them and DM them or email them and make the case like you talked about. We're hearing a lot of customers mention wanting to
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
wanting to integrate our two products together. Here's what we're seeing. Are you guys seeing anything similar? You know, and just like start the discussion on like, have you heard anything? Oh, that's interesting. You want to do a test? You know, like we get the ball rolling on conversation for good reason and not just like cold outreach.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Oh, yeah, there's no notion of quarterly planning in my flow. And I think that's probably the case for a lot of startups.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So maybe bookkeeping or scraping some data to build a cold email list or even support, which I think is something that a lot of founders hold on for way too long. So there's kind of that bucket of things that's like, okay, my time's valuable and this stuff is potentially not worth my time. Then there's the stuff that's like, the business needs certain expertise in order to keep moving forward.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
We generally have a sense for what the next four to six weeks looks like. I'm not a religious follower of shape-up. I think that's a pretty popular methodology from the Basecamp folks that people have latched onto as a way to budget your time as a team and say, what are we going to let's fix the time budget and then get done whatever we can on what we set out to do and flex the scope as needed.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And I think that's kind of generally, folks have kind of coalesced around that as a good way to kind of shape your work. And I think it scales down to to pretty early stage as well. You might want to keep the cycle a little shorter.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Six weeks feels kind of long for a super early stage, but when you get to a place of product maturity where you're really just kind of incrementally improving it, I've seen that be a pretty helpful time range.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
The goal there is to try to say, we're going to build this thing and we're going to build whatever version of it we can get done within our time constraints so that you don't let projects just run away on you.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
I know the notion of quarters is very normative in sales, in the realm of sales. Sales organizations often think in terms of quarters, probably even more so than product development teams. But I wonder, do you have a sense of when does that normally kick in? Is it 20 to 30 team size-ish? Or when do sales teams need to start running on quarters, basically? Yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And though I want to hold on to this thing, like, Actually, I'm not the best person for the job. So then that's delegating stuff that's really not in your zone of genius. And a lot of times when you're just starting out, depending on what your resources are, how much funding you may have or may not have, you just got to... roll up your sleeves and do it.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
I would venture to guess that, again, speaking a little bit from ignorance here, but that product teams, even when you're a $10, $20, $50 million company, I'm not convinced that a product development team should ever lock themselves into something that rigid.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Maybe sales, but depending on when you bring in the adult supervision and people who know what they're doing from large company sales orgs, maybe that's the right way. But I would be very leery about ever trying to apply that to kind of a product development cycle.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And we were like pushing code every three days. Some kind of version thing applied to SaaS, which is like, why?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
But I think that, you know, that ends up holding you back at a certain point if you're, if you're just holding on too tightly onto something where you're, it's not actually in your zone of genius. So, you know, for that, I'm like, it feels like an obvious answer, but it's like, look for someone better than me at the job. You know, someone who has that particular specialty.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Okay, a concern in Rails. And this is funny, too, because my Rails knowledge is about five years outdated. So... But I think a concern is basically a mix-in. It's a way to abstract some logic into a separate, my terminology's all messed up because I've been in functional land. It's like a separate, it's not a class. Is it a module? Do you have modules in Ruby? I think it's a module. I love this.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Yeah, so it's more like functional paradigms. I haven't written object-oriented code in a while. It was funny, I was doing a podcast episode with Ben Orenstein recently who was also a Ruby Rails expert back in the day.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And I was trying to explain how something would work in Ruby land, but I was using all the wrong names for the active record accessors because I was just so used to the naming conventions from Elixir.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So I think about the initial branding for Zavical I did myself and it was fine. And then we came to the point of, I feel like this is holding us back in certain ways with being able to really push our marketing forward. And I looked to someone who is just this amazing brand designer and has just a ton of skills on the aesthetic side of things where I just get a little bit limited.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Totally. Yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
We'll just skip the Rails one. We don't have to do five, let's do a couple. Wait, on the concerns, was I right? What did ChatGPT say? I actually didn't say.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
This is actually one of the cool benefits of Elixir because it's built on Erlang, which has all of this very real-time capabilities built into it because it was built by Ericsson back in the day for running text message infrastructure. Think of all of these gazillions of processes that need to be running and they're all in parallel and they don't necessarily need to affect each other.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So it's just designed inherently with that in mind of many, many processes that shouldn't crash each other. And this works really well for WebSockets use cases where you have a bunch of people potentially on your site and you want to keep an open channel via WebSockets to be able to stream data back and forth. over a channel.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So channels are the mechanism that Phoenix has for basically opening WebSocket connections and then sending data up and down that pipe instead of going through old school HTTP requests, which are a little bit slower. And then the presence feature, this is actually a tricky computer science problem to solve.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
When you're active on a browser window and you want to show that that person is actually present there, keeping that state synchronized with the server is kind of tricky. And you kind of just get that for free from Sockets. So, yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Am I hired?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
This harkens back to that fundamental architecture I was just talking about. Basically, it's a way to manage state in an Elixir application. It's a little bit quirky. This is more in the advanced principles of Elixir that a lot of new Elixir developers don't even necessarily have to learn about in order to get started with it.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
If you start peeling back the layers on how Phoenix works and then how to do certain tricky things that involve you have this centralized state and you need to make calls to it or just either fetch data out of that state or just make a mutation call or something. And it's like the shared state that's shared across all the processes that might be running in an Elixir application.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So we use these as an example, like this cool little subsystem where we have to throttle how many requests we make to the Microsoft API. Like they don't allow more than five simultaneous requests at a time to any given API token. And this is actually a pretty difficult problem to solve in a distributed system.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
But using a gen server, we can basically spin up a pool of threads, sort of, and these threads service requests. And if If you get 10 coming in at the same time, they kind of line up in the pool and you can control concurrency. So that's just one example of how you can use gen servers to help out.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And it was so fun to work with someone who is actually an expertise in their field. So I feel like, I don't know, this one, it takes a while to get to the place where you're comfortable with it, but as soon as you embrace the fact that it really is a joy to work with people who are actually better at stuff than you, and you get to be a collaborator with them. It's not that you have to...
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So, Derek, what does Hunter's Mark do? Oh, boy. Okay, I think it's a spell, right? And it allows me to mark an opponent and when I do that, I gain some sort of advantage on attacks. I don't remember what that advantage is.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Lowercase a advantage.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Yes, I'll just be waiting to hear from HR. Yep, we'll be back in touch. Okay, cool, thanks.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Totally offloaded and now you have no say. Ideally, if you're still the founder in the CEO driver's seat or whatever, you are still collaborating on important things, but you're not the bottleneck anymore on holding back that area of the business. Those are some initial rambling thoughts.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Yeah, because I think that's what a lot of us, when you put yourself in a position, maybe an artificially elevated position of like, I know best because I started this company and I have the vision for it. And I mean, I totally understand this like pull to like hold on tightly to everything. And I think sometimes that can lead you down a path of like, okay, I just need to find extra hands.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
I just need extra hands to delegate, to offload some of the stuff that I'm still going to hold on tightly to and own. And I remember when we were acquired, Drip was acquired, we joined Leadpages, and we Brian Reed as our first designer. I never fashioned myself as a graphic designer, but I think I'm a pretty good UI, UX designer.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
But working with Brian definitely opened my eyes to, okay, here's somebody who has worked in companies where we need to actually start to scale a design department. And that is a different thing than having the expertise to take something from zero into something that customers love and use, to then scale it into systems. So he started working on, what's our design system?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
That doesn't necessarily mean spending a bunch of time working on something that's not actually moving the product forward, like a bunch of internal work. We did very lean on developing our design system so that we weren't just spending a bunch of time spinning wheels.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
But he brought this experience on thinking about how do we scale this so that when we bring on more designers, they understand the system and we're working in a coherent manner. He had more expertise at that than me and it was really cool to work with someone then who who brought that to the table and it was a really fun collaboration.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So I think that's the, the big word of encouragement here is to like, to recognize that it doesn't devalue what you bring to the table, but like, you know, working with, with a subject matter expert on, on some of these disciplines is actually really fun. I think when you, when you get used to it. Yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And I think just in general, this perfectionism quality that a lot of us have is, it can be a really helpful inclination because that's what allows you, drives you forward on performing your best work in certain areas.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
But I also think the blind spot that comes from that is, especially early on, like you're talking about, when you don't have a lot of resources to go higher, like a world-class fill-in-the-blank, And you have to try to be a little bit more scrappy with bringing in extra hands. I think there is that phase where you just don't have the luxury of being able to go find an all-star.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And then it's an exercise in figuring out what stuff actually matters. And I think I'm still trying to grow in this area, to be honest. It's a big struggle for me because I tend to think that a lot of things matter a ton, especially as I'm competing on user experience. So all the details have to be on point. But the fact of the matter is, you can get by with certain things.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
Just take, for example, an educational video that you send to a customer that explains how to do something. My inclination is to want to either not do it or do it at a very, very high degree of execution. And really, what matters most is that the customer understands how something works, that that knowledge is transferred.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
And if it's lacking that extra polish that would come from something that's from a world-class video producer or something, that's okay in the early days. Maybe you want to work to the place where everything you put out is at that Adam Wathen level of polish. But most of us don't have Just the resources to be able to do that and it's not going to move the needle in that big of a way.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So you need to just convince yourself about what things are really, really important and what stuff is it okay to just be good enough on.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
I think you just touched on this, but Jason Cohen's joy, skill, need framework, which has been a really helpful framing for me to think about this. He's proven to be the master at reinventing his roles. He's gotten his companies to much later stages than a lot of us have, so he's moved out of CEO into CTO and then into a strategist.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
So he's very good at thinking about this and releasing the reins on control when he recognizes that he needs to reorient himself into kind of the ideal zone. And I think a lot of us can't necessarily be right in the middle of that Joyce Gill need Venn diagram because, again, resource constraints. But I think...