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)
Tue, 17 Sep 2024
In episode 731, join Rob Walling and Derrick Reimer as they tackle some more advanced listener questions. They discuss delegation and giving up areas of control as a founder, including examples from their time together at Drip. Derrick describes how he approaches partnering with other SaaS businesses and why planning a full quarter ahead doesn’t work for many bootstrapped founders. Episode Sponsor: Hiring senior developers can really move the needle in your business, but if you bring on the wrong person, you can quickly burn through your runway. If you need help finding a vetted, senior, results-oriented developer, you should reach out to today’s sponsor, Lemon.io. For years, they’ve been helping our audience find high quality, global talent at competitive rates, and they can help you too. Longtime listener Chaz Yoon, hired a senior developer from Lemon.io and said his hire ”definitely knew his stuff, provided appropriate feedback and pushback, and had great communication, including very fluent English. He really exceeded my expectations.” Chaz said he’d definitely use Lemon.io again when he’s looking for a senior level engineer. To learn more and get a 15% discount on your first four weeks of working with a developer at lemon.io/startups. Topics we cover: 1:17 – Delegating as a perfectionist 7:19 – Learning to hire those that are better than you in some domains 14:50 – Risk vs. certainty 19:01 – Finding specialized marketing roles vs. a generalist 24:04 – Managing partnerships with other SaaS products 31:17 – Reaching out about partnerships 32:46 – Quarterly planning for your SaaS 34:20 – Planning in smaller time blocks 40:58 – Quizzing developers’ on their knowledge Links from the Show: Purchase The SaaS Launchpad TinySeed The SaaS Playbook MicroConf YouTube Channel Derrick Reimer (@derrickreimer) | X SavvyCal Finding Fulfillment by Jason Cohen Shape Up If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify
You're listening to Startups for the Rest of Us. My name is Rob Walling, and I am your host this week and every week on the show. Today, I welcome back Derek Reimer, and we talk through some really interesting listener questions. How to delegate as a perfectionist, how to organize and think about SaaS partnerships, and planning your next quarter as a bootstrapper, as a super small team.
We'll jump into those questions in just a moment. If you haven't checked out my new course, the SAS Launchpad, head to saslaunchpad.co. This is the first course I have created in 14 years. It is incredibly in-depth. It's a video course with transcripts and worksheets and quizzes, and it's all about early stage.
It's all about going from zero to one, going from finding ideas to vetting them to getting them launched successfully. saslaunchpad.co if you want to check it out. questions Derek Reimer thanks for coming back on the show pleasure to be back So I have some really good questions today continuing on this topic of more intermediate to advanced questions.
The first one is from HelloIt'sOli on Twitter. Oli asks, we're at $32,000. I'm going to assume that's MRR. And we've done it through long hours, endless experimentation, and a lot of good luck. Hard work, luck, and skill sounds like it. My question is, how should co-founders with perfectionist tendencies delegate work? And what qualities should they look for when hiring?
And then Ali actually goes on to ask two or three more questions, which we can take in due time. But as someone with perfectionist tendencies... We laugh because you and I are both that way in certain areas.
That's the name of our band. Co-founders with Perfectionist Tendencies.
Just Perfectionist Tendencies for short. What are we, like a third wave ska band?
Perfectionist Tendencies.
I think that's it. You're the guy just dancing on stage. You know I love to dance. Tuba? No, drum major.
Drum major, yeah.
And sax. And sax, I forgot that. Everything's in B-flat, people. You have to play it all in B-flat. Okay, so back to Ollie's insightful question. Perfectionist tendencies, which I think a lot of founders... not all, but a good chunk of founders become founders because they really want control over things, right?
They don't like a day job because they're ordered around and they work with people they don't want to work with and they can't hire and fire and they, but whatever, you know, and I want to control because if I can control everything, it will be better. And oftentimes that's true, but it doesn't scale.
You can't run, I say can't in quotes, you can't run a million dollar, $2 million error SaaS company with just you. At some point you have to let some stuff go. So To that point, how do you think about hiring people to do stuff that you're a perfectionist about and what qualities do you look for?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I think it's a key differentiator you've made between delegating things that you really shouldn't be doing. I would include customer support in that. Now, in the early days, doing customer support is really helpful as a founder because you learn a ton. As you transition, I believe I did email support with Drip for three months, four months, and then we brought Andy in.
He was doing part-time stuff, but he obviously is better at customer support than I am. And people say, well, I don't want to lose touch with my customers. It's like, yeah, Andy fed me all the feedback. Anything that was real feedback or like, ooh, this is coming up, you and I learned about it, you and I fixed it, right? So I would lump that in.
But I like that differentiation of starting to figure out what is your zone of genius. Because just because you're a developer, not everyone listens to the show as a developer, but a lot, just because you're a developer doesn't necessarily mean that development and or product are your zone of genius.
you might find that you're really good at left-brain marketing, as folks like Ruben found out, as folks like I found out. Look, I've been writing code since I was eight years old, and I loved it, and I was a developer, and I identified as a developer.
It turns out I'm pretty good at building audiences and at coming up with educational frameworks, the stair-step method, and being an entrepreneur is making hard decisions but then complete information, and writing books. I have this other thing that I've found in myself of almost like, I don't know, it's marketing, it's copywriting, it's whatever, brand building and stuff.
So all that said, there are really only six areas of a SaaS company. There's product, which is deciding what do we build next and how do we build it, how does it work? There's design, which is obviously the visual aspect of that. There's engineering, which is building, writing the code, keeping things going. There's marketing, there's sales, there's support, and there's success.
And then there's HR, legal, and finance, but you should delegate all that. I mean, you have to do it. Look, on day one, you have to do all those. If you're a single founder, if there's two of you, you have to split up those, you know, six, seven things I just named. But what you said is exactly right, which is if you're going to hire, you need to hire someone who's better at it than you.
And that's something that I really didn't realize until in the last 10 years.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It is. And you can learn from them. When we were acquired, I was stressing to everyone about, oh my gosh, I have to go work for somebody. I have to go work for this company for a bit of time. And Ruben actually asked me, he said, what can you learn? How can you make this the best it can be? What can you learn?
And we got in there and it's like, I had been running marketing for Drip, working with Zach, who was our junior marketing hire. And I was like, yeah, I'm pretty good. Like, drip's growing, obviously, so I must be good at it. Hey, I'm really hard, aren't I? Good marketer, look at me. And we get in there and I'm like, oh, I don't know sh**.
Like I, we figured it out, but like I was not actually, I was fine. I was middle of the road by the time we got in there, just people who knew how to execute and like you said, build systems and just be better at it. So I was a perfectionist with every word, every word that was on that website I had written, right? I wrote all the copy up till that point.
And I did want to let it go because I was just tired of having to, for me to write all the copy when I was trying to run this company. But what I realized was people came in and rewrote it. And at first I was like, ooh, that's not mine. And then I was like, huh, that's actually a lot better. So that's the tough part.
But it's tough, you know, when you're bootstrapping and you're at 5K MRR, it's like, can you hire someone who's way better at you than in these things? You know, maybe not. And that becomes the struggle of, I do start looking in cheaper locales. I say overseas, being in the US, but really it could be South America, Central America, to find someone who is senior and who's better at me than...
than I am at that thing. And to maybe not give away my zone of genius, like I wouldn't hire someone to host the podcast and be high level strategy for MicroConf and TinySeed and to be the face of the brand, you know what I mean? Like those things, those are kind of the things I need to keep doing.
And so in your SaaS, you know, in your company, or if you're a consultant or whatever, you're listening to like, what are the things that you really need to do? without the self-importance of, I really need to do everything because I'm the best, but like really get down to it. Most of us are good at one, maybe two things. Like for you, I would say it's product.
It's the ability to think of like what to build, how to build it, how to elegantly incorporate it in, and then engineering, like the actual nuts and bolts of writing code. And design is a third. I mean, you're full stack, obviously, but to me, design is kind of a third discipline, even though you're very, very good at it.
I think you're actually genius level at the other two, and you're quite good at design. So those are things that you tend to hold on to with SavvyCal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's exactly right. That is something that I've learned throughout my career and it took me a long time. The first one was learning to just not do some things that seemed important that you just don't do them all together and it doesn't matter. The second thing is when I can phone it in and do it quickly is really what it is.
When can I do an unedited loom that's just like, hey, I'm Rob here, blah, blah, blah, and I kind of mess around. Watch this on 2X because it's not great and send it to a customer. most of the time, probably if it's a one-off thing, you know what I mean? It's like, you can just crank on these things and then when to really polish it and when does it matter?
And differentiating between those three levels is a skill that I think is very helpful to develop. We've actually answered one of Ollie's later questions, which was how would you decide what to delegate and what to keep? We've kind of talked about that like zone of genius. Are there things founders should never delegate?
And I don't say never, but certainly there are certain things that if you love doing them and you're really good at it and the business needs it, that's kind of what you want to keep. Your role will change over time as you get to a million, five million, 10 million, you got to move more into strategy.
I would also say something we haven't brought in is I have this very simple dichotomy of risk versus certainty. There are areas of your business where there's just a bunch of like, I don't know, we don't have marketing, we don't have leads and I don't really know how to close sales demos and there's a bunch of uncertainty or risk there. And then there are things like customer support.
We get the same 10 questions every day, we have a KB, I know that someone with knowledge of the product can do that so that's a certain thing. In a lot of instances as your code base matures, not in the first month, but two, three years down the line, there's a lot of certainty in writing code. Now you may have to spec it out.
You may have to say, oh, it's this feature and we're going to hit all these. But you have a map in your head of like, I can code this or I can hand it to a developer who's good and who I know will write high quality code and they can do it. And so that's how I think about stuff in my businesses is, Where's the risk or uncertainty? That's what the founder should be working on.
It is so easy and tantalizing and it's like a big bowl of ice cream to work on certainty because it makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I'm getting stuff. It is entrepreneurial procrastination, unfortunately. If you have any type of money to hire someone, go for the areas of certainty.
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.
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...
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.
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,
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
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.
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To learn more and get a 15% discount on your first four weeks of working with a developer, head to Lemon.io slash startups. That's Lemon.io slash startups. And Ali's last question is, would you recommend several people across several marketing channels or finding a generalist? The answer is it depends. It depends on budget, really. I mean, it depends on the stage. But here's the biggest thing.
There's kind of three ways to structure a marketing department in SaaS. It's the infinity budget plan, which is I have infinity dollars that I've raised from budget. They just keep depositing this in my bank account, Derek. It's great. I would hire a high-level marketing strategist slash project manager, and then I would hire five individual contributors.
They could be freelance or contracted, or they could be W2, it doesn't matter. But one is just an expert copywriter, and one is an expert AdWords, and one is an expert Facebook, and one is an expert, you know, you get the idea. It's like each marketing channel. That just costs a shit. load of money. And so almost none of us can do it.
So when I look at the tiny seed companies that are doing seven figures in ARR, I have this list that I keep this quite a few of them, every single one of them without exception, the founder has figured out enough about marketing or sales or lead gen, you know, driving new customers. They have not outsourced that from the start.
Now some of them, at a certain point, get to 500, a million a year, two million. They do, they hire ahead of growth, but they already know the engines. The engines are already in place. I don't know anyone, maybe there's an exception here or there, so we can bring up, who has just hired that out of a, cool, go find out how to find more customers. It's much like doing sales demos.
The founder, you just have to do it if you're going to do it in the early days. So usually the model is, one of the founders says, I'm going to learn marketing or lead gen. Because the reason I differentiate is marketing I tend to think of as inbound and then outbound is not marketing, that's outbound. So I'm kind of lead gen, I'm combining those two into that term lead gen.
But they learn marketing well enough that then they, and they probably start as the IC, the individual contributor. I remember logging into the AdWords console and logging into the Facebook ads console and writing blog posts for SEO. Like I did all of that. Am I the best in the world at it? No.
Did I do it until we figured out, ooh, this kind of works, and then I went and hired freelancers to take over? Yeah. There are some exceptions to this. If you have budget, obviously running ad platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, AdWords, Instagram, obviously, those do have experts that you can hire and are way better than you and they aren't that expensive, so I would consider doing that from the start.
But even to test, but almost everything else, it's usually the founder being that strategist and then hiring ICs. First the founder doing the IC work and then hiring individual contributors to help out with that as you get budget. Because as marketing works, the company grows. And as the company grows, you have more revenue and you take that revenue and you should invest that back in marketing.
Usually it's marketing and sales are the first things you should be doing as a growing SaaS company. You have anything to add to that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It perhaps would have been too expensive at the time.
You have a luxury of a marketer wants to work with you because of who you are and because of the beautiful products you build and they know that you're going to execute quickly. Zero to one marketing is what we talk about. That's the founder level marketing, trying to figure it out. And Corey Haynes can do that. Asia Aranjo can do that. Any founder who succeeds can usually do that.
I mean, I can pretty much list all of the successful, fast-growing companies within Tiny Seed or MicroConf. It's like, oh, the founder has some hand in the marketing or sales. So you're right, you're the exception. It doesn't mean, that's where it's like it's not always and never, but in general, like pretty 80, 90, 5, 8% of the time, that's the pattern that I see. Yeah.
So thanks for those questions, Ali. I hope our thoughts were helpful. Next question comes from Tiago. His ex-Twitter handle is WBETiago. He says, how do you manage partnerships with other SaaS or products in your industry? What do you look for when partnering with other SaaS? How do you reach out to them? What are red flags? And I asked him, tell me more what you mean by partnering.
And he said, I mean, guest posts, integrations, giveaways, joint ventures, that kind of stuff. I wanted you to weigh in on this because Savikow, you've done a lot, you know, quite a few partnerships and I think some of them have resulted in good results. So I'm curious your thoughts. And then obviously I have my own from, you know, just from my own experience.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
Yeah, I think that's a really good way to think about it. To go one level higher in terms of strategy, I think about integrations and partnerships as kind of the same thing, but an integration involves writing code. So a partnership, let's just say it's a JV partnership, joint venture partnership.
This is what internet marketers used to do in the early 2000s where it's like, I have a list, you have a list, let's cross-promote our course to the other list. It's free, free sales. We can either do a one-for-one trade of we email without affiliate links, I email my list about yours. You email your list about mine. No affiliate links. Or we can do the same thing and do affiliate deals.
And that can happen. I did several of those with Hytale, which is a long tail SEO keyword tool. You remember, Derek, you worked on it. Oh, yes. And I reached out to rank trackers because we did not have rank tracking. And I sent like 10 emails and I got like eight responses of like, absolutely, let's do this. And what assets did I have? Well, we had however many, you know, a thousand customers.
I'm trying I didn't remember what the numbers were, but it was like a thousand customers and a marketing list of like 10 or 15,000 maybe at the time. No, it was bigger than that actually because it was like 20,000. And so I would reach out and say, let's just do one for one emails. Just say, I want to use your rank tracker and then I want to recommend it.
and use Hytale and recommend it, and that's it. And we did. Was it a massive flywheel that completely grew the business? No. But was it something that absolutely worked every time we did it? Yes. It would drive dozens of new customers. It would drive hundreds, if not a thousand or two thousand of MRR If the list was big enough, right?
So that's a joint venture where you don't have to write any code. You're literally writing marketing copy. And then in integration, to your point, I see there's integrations that you do for your customers. You integrate with Stripe because everyone wants you to integrate with Stripe. Stripe's not going to promote you. PayPal's not going to promote you.
They may not even list you in their lab market, right? But you do it for your customers. Then there's integrations you do for integration marketing, which is, remember with Drip, we integrated with like SendOwl and... We had 35 integrations, so I can't remember them, but they were lesser known. Even Gumroad at the time, because we probably integrated with them in 2013 or 14.
They were around, but they were not as known as they are today. We integrated with them, A, because our customers were asking. They were like, oh, I use Sendel, I use Gumroad. But also, I approached them and I said... I want to integrate with you. We're getting requests from customers. Here's a screenshot of an email. Here's things we can offer. We can publish a blog post.
We can email our email list of, it's probably by that time, 20, 25,000. We can post a tweet. We can write a knowledge-based article. We can mention your company in an app. We can host a webinar if you want. And so I would offer all that up and say, what can you reciprocate with? And whatever they could, we would just one-for-one those things.
So if they could only do a blog post and a tweet, we did a blog post and a tweet. And if they said, you know what, this isn't a fit, we can't do it, we would seriously debate whether to do it, to do the integration, if I was doing it more for marketing purposes. By the way, the whole list I just read is from the SAS playbook, page 97, if you want to know all the things that we used to do.
I'll tell you, the SAS playbook's a great reference for me, so that I remember these, you know what I mean? Because I don't remember that list off the top of my head, but... So that's how I think about it. I mean, you and I are definitely on the same page in terms of like, be cautious with just building things, thinking that it's going to be promoted.
I would get a commitment, like a, I'll say a verbal commit. It was a, in an email, this is what we're going to do. What can you do? This is what we're going to do back. So I had something in writing in case, you know, a product manager or a marketing manager switched things up later. I think that's it. Oh, I guess Tiago asked, like, how do you reach out to them?
I mean, with Hytale, I did a bunch of cold email. With Drip, it was a lot of warm network stuff. Like, as Drip became a brand, people knew it, and it was easy to reach out and say, hey, I'm the co-founder of Drip, and we want to do this. And what's the other thing, Derek? Go into events. Go into MicroConf. Mm-hmm.
There are a lot of people there at a micro-conference business software, even a bigger SaaS event. This is why I say build your network, not your audience. Because that network is so much more valuable than 10,000 people on X Twitter following you.
Having five people that you can integrate with or co-promote or get in front of their audience is worth five times, ten times the value of a social media following.
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
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.
Yeah, to your point. And that's something that didn't used to happen. So if it's happening to you now where you're like, oh boy, I'm in a funnel, this is because marketers ruin everything. That's exactly why. Our last question for the day was a question that was posted on a YouTube video from YouTube username DerekDuPlessie215. And
I don't remember what video it was on, but the question is, I would love a follow-up to this episode on how you prioritize your Q3 or any quarter. So obviously building a SaaS versus what I do these days is different, but the question still applies. So I'm going to kick it over to you first, Derek Reimer. How do you plan for your quarter of SavvyCal?
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.
Part of our biggest strength is that we are so nimble and can move so quickly. And frankly, 90 days in the life of a startup is like a year in the life of a big company. So trying to think, I don't know, I'm going to be responding to customer inquiries and things as the market's shifting, how can I move really fast?
And so planning a quarter ahead would be, that's just anathema to what you're doing until you're at, I don't know, I don't want to, 5 million, 10 million, like when you have a bigger team, that's when planning needs to happen because you've got to get a bunch of departments on board.
And we're going to launch this feature so we need sales to learn about the feature and we need support to know how to support the feature. We need success to know how to success the feature and we need marketing to know how to market the feature. You know what I mean?
That's when you need quarterly planning because you can't just come with a feature and say, hey, we're pushing this live tomorrow because that starts breaking things. So there's a certain point at 20, 30 employees maybe where you need that. But today, so how do you do it? How far ahead do you plan?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it depends on the stage. In the super early stage, you and I would plan like a day or two ahead. You know, I mean, there were some features that took a week or whatever. It's like, all right, we're going to plan for that. But we would shift pretty frequently when it was two or three of us because we could. And then it started being like, well, let's do one to two weeks out.
And one to two weeks was fairly locked in, although we would sometimes pivot of like, oh my gosh, there's a huge opportunity here. But then what happens is in my head, I kind of knew what two to four, two to six weeks was, but it was fuzzier. It was like, well, we'll do when we get there, but I kind of have an idea, right?
And then as your code base matures, as your marketing matures, just your whole company matures, you hit 10, 20, 30K, maybe 50K MRR. That timeframe just, not slips, but it moves out a bit. weeks of, of being more in focus. And I bet, but I bet still, if I were to say, all right, so what are you going to do from six to 12 weeks? You have a fuzzy idea. You have a general idea.
You, you're not going to lock in and be like, oh, it's this and that, but, but you kind of know, but once you get there, you're then going to plan that far out.
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.
I don't actually know. Sales teams specifically, I don't know. Obviously big like Salesforce and these huge companies that have Slack and all that have these big sales teams run like that. Even if you were to ask me why do they do that, I have a guess.
Oh, it's because you have a deadline and your sales people are motivated by this and that and maybe the commission's paid quarterly, but I don't actually know. So I'd be curious to get someone on the podcast, to be honest, a Jen Abel or a Matt Wolock or somebody someone else who really knows sales and say, why is that? Is it just because that's how you've always done it?
I mean, here's something, man. A friend of mine works at Intel and we both graduated college at the same time. And he got a job and has worked at the same company the whole time. And I'm on my 23rd job. Not literally, but close. Anyways, from the time he started, he would say, yeah, we're doing our quarterly blah in the engineering department, right?
They're designing chips that are fabricated, you know, overseas. Like, you imagine the pipeline of that, the waterfall-ness nature of that, where it's like, you have to lock it in, you have to freeze this, and it's in silicon, and then it's blah, blah, blah. So they did quarterly stuff. And I was kind of like, why do you do that? And he's like, well, that's just how the company operates.
And it does, to me, feel like an older school thing coming from that of Intel. But I also think you have to get people on a cadence of some kind. Otherwise, you're just flailing around. Like we said, if you have six, seven departments and each department is five to 50 to 100 people, obviously Intel's bigger than that, but in a startup, you gotta have some type of cadence to get everybody on.
This is the group of things that we're gonna do in each department during this quarter, so.
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.
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.
Yeah, and I totally agree with that. And those are the companies where we eat their lunch. Right? Those are the companies when you start moving by a quarter or by a half a year on product development, nah, good night. Like that's when we're going to demolish you. Remember, wasn't it Infusionsoft, they're now named Keep? I thought they did like one release a year. Yeah.
And we were like pushing code every three days. Some kind of version thing applied to SaaS, which is like, why?
Old school, right? And it was an old school mentality, and that's not how you win in the market today, given how competitive it is. Awesome, man. Well, thanks so much again for joining me. Folks, I want to follow you on ex-Twitter. You are Derek Reimer. And if they want to use the best scheduling link on the internet, SavvyCal.com. There it is. Thanks again, man. Thanks.
Thanks again to Derek Reimer for joining me on the show. He'll be back again in another month or two. If you enjoyed this episode, it'd be amazing to get a five-star review in Apple Podcasts or Google, whatever they're calling it these days, a thumbs up on YouTube or a like, question mark, plus thumbs up something in Spotify. I don't know what Spotify does at
If you're listening to Spotify, look around and see if there's a heart. But it's great to have you here this week and every week. I'm Rob Walling, signing off from episode 731. Well, hello, listener. You've stumbled upon our secret track. If you remember the track Endless Nameless from Nirvana's Nevermind, that's what you're about to hear. Except that was just a metaphor.
I hope you picked up on that. Mr. Derek Reimer, I have questions for you. Oh, boy. These are questions that I asked ChatGPT to generate for me. My prompt was, what are five intermediate-level questions to evaluate a software developer's understanding of Ruby on Rails? The first question, just so everybody knows, Derek has no idea what these questions are coming.
And to be honest, I'm a little concerned the answers might not be right, because I don't know. ChatGPT gave me questions and answers, so we'll see. I'll compare what you say to chat. All right. First is, what are concerns in Rails, and how do you use them to refactor and organize code?
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.
Just so everyone knows, Derek wrote tens of thousands of lines of Ruby on Rails code for Drip. The entire big monolith written in Rails. So you had a decade of Rails? You had a lot of years of Rails. But it's funny how quick, like you said, it's five years old and you've replaced a bunch of that knowledge with, is it Elixir Phoenix?
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.
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.
You've recoded it. So in the early days, when I was becoming a professional developer, meaning getting paid for it, I was a full-time employee of like a dev shop. And so every project was a different language. And so it was like PHP, it was original active server pages before .NET. There was ColdFusion, I learned. Perl, you know, this dates it, right? It was 20, 24 years ago.
But I rolled through them all. And I remember being like, all right, I'm not great at any of these, but at least I had a big swath of it. Then at a certain point, I went where the money was, which was .NET. And I dove deep, deep, deep into .NET. And then I was five, six, seven years into that. And the pay rates were great.
But when I tried to then come back to anything, to PHP, I was like, I just can't. The paradigms are so different. Like you have to unlearn it. And that's where it's tough.
Totally. Yeah.
It's good that I come prepared then because I also asked, no joke, ChatGPT, what are five intermediate level Elixir Phoenix questions? I did this on purpose, so let's see if these are easier.
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.
It just said this question tests their knowledge of code organization and how to keep their models and controllers clean and maintainable. So maybe someone can tweet us, ex-Twitter us, at Derek Reimer, at Rob Walling, and let us know, hey, was Derek right? I'm guessing you're right. That's going to be mine. All right. How does the Phoenix framework handle real-time communication?
Explain the role of channels and presence in Phoenix.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I think that's correct. Because once again, so here's the problem. I asked ChatGPT for questions that I'd like for an interview. It didn't give me the answer. It just says what each question will test. So yes, correct, Derek.
Am I hired?
these are the questions do we never ask these questions remember in interviews or like now do you have a take-home test or we can look at some of your code yeah yeah explain how a web request works you know yes exactly what is https all right uh last one what are gen servers in elixir gen servers in elixir and how would you use them in a phoenix application
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love that you're giving me really serious, complete answers. It's just that I'm like, wow, do you really know your shit? Of course you do. And now you're taking this seriously. It's great. It's great. So anyone listening? I'm trying to get hired here. You are. I really need a gig, man. All right. Last question. In Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, what is Hunter's mark?
So just for context, Derek has played a, well, it's a 7th level ranger now named Ford. Yes. Ford Ranger. And you have played this Ranger for, I believe, five years now. I think the first game was in late 2019 that we played. Five years, Hunter's Mark is a critical key component of a Ranger.
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.
you gain extra damage. Extra damage, there we go. Yep, so it's not technically advantage on attack. That would mean like two D-tires and you take the high one. But once you hit, you get an extra D-6.
Lowercase a advantage.
Exactly. I'll give you half credit on that. Okay, all right. Well, thank you for playing the Startups for the Rest of Us pop quiz.
Yes, I'll just be waiting to hear from HR. Yep, we'll be back in touch. Okay, cool, thanks.
Let you know. Awesome.