In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to get marketing attribution right. One of the most important thing a marketer needs to know is whether your campaigns are driving revenue or not. If you’re unable to answer this, you’ll struggle making the right marketing campaigns. While vanity metrics like number of shares on social media and open rates for your emails are super easy to find, the important data – the one that tells you which helped close a  sale – is less obvious. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what marketing attribution is, what startups need to do to get marketing attribution right, why you should do the best you can with what you’ve got right now and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:30 Why this topic was chosen. 02:40 What startups need to do to get marketing attribution right. 03:59 How to make decisions based on the data you collect. 04:22 Why you should do the best you can with what you’ve got right now. 04:53 Best practices to use. 05:24 Why you should regularly audit what you track. 06:50 Tips for tracking your data. 07:46 Hiten’s game on attribution. 11:59 Steli’s big take away. 3 Key Points: I just assumed that more companies will have marketing attribution figured out.If you know better, do better now.Do the best you can with what you’ve got right now [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:05] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about marketing attribution. [0:00:12] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:00:13] Hiten Shah: There’s a very specific reason why. Steli share why we’re talking about this. [0:00:18] Steli Efti: Yeah. So I think talking to a ton of marketing leaders recently, we’re looking to hire leadership on the marketing side of the Close. And so I’ve been reaching out to many super senior people, that work in really amazing organizations to ask for advice. And one thing that really surprised me and it didn’t, because on the one hand, I know that every company’s full of shit and all things always look better from the outside. But then again it’s good to be re reminded. But one thing that surprised me still in the moment, was that a lot of these people would share like the problem of running marketing organizations for really big SAS companies. And we were talking about the type of companies that are like 20 to 40 million in ARR, right? So much later scale. And one of the things when I asked them about like big projects over the last couple of years, things they wish they’d known and done differently when they first joined. The surprising thing is how many of them said, “Wish we’d had a data and attribution models figured out earlier.” And some of them even like they worked at analytics and metrics SAS companies, were like, “It’s really embarrassing. I would never admit this publicly, because we’re an analytics and metrics company, but we don’t have our metrics analytics shit figured out. Our stuff doesn’t work, our attribution doesn’t work and we’re still working on fixing that.” So it was surprising to me to see, I knew that early stage, a lot of companies don’t get this right, but I felt like at the 20, 30, 40 million, I just assumed that more companies would have marketing attribution figured out or prioritized. And it seems like it still was a struggle for many. So I felt like, maybe this is a topic. Maybe this is something we should bring up as advice for SAS companies. So that they don’t get to this level of scale and still struggle with it. And you’ve built a number of analytics and metrics companies, you’re pretty famous in this area. So just wanted to like quickly pick your brain and share it with the world in terms of like what should startups do to get marketing attribution, right? What do they have to do and why is it so difficult for most of them to do it? [0:02:43] Hiten Shah: Yeah. It gets more complicated as you scale. And you start going away from channels that are directly measurable, which already has marketing attribution issues. So directly measurable would be people visiting a website, right? And you knowing that those people converted and signed up, purchased, et cetera. So then you get into like basically channels like billboard ads, TV and things like that, where a lot of the things you’re doing, your goals are oriented around awareness. And then you have to think about how to measure those things and include that in your marketing mix and then figure out how to attribute it as well. So I have this like … Man Steli, like you couldn’t have picked a better topic that I can go so deep into, down to the how you track every single visitor appropriately so you can do the attribution appropriately, all the way up to or in the middle would be like your marketing stack. And all the way at the top would be like how do you make decisions based on this information? And there’s no right answer. I know folks, even at very large companies that are very big, ad based companies, which I’m not going to mention that struggle with this as well internally. Regardless of how like sophisticated large, multibillion the businesses are. And so this is one of those where it’s like do the best you can, at the point that you’re at right now. [0:04:47] Steli Efti: With what you have. Yeah. [0:04:49] Hiten Shah: Yeah. With what you have. Now hear the famous thing. Now that being said, and this is a big, that being said, if you know better, do better now. So I know better. I know way better in my businesses, because of my experience as well as like my conversations I’ve had with so many people across so many sized companies, that we instrument as early as we can. Here’s a few best practices. So we instrument analytics as early as we can. Everything in terms of the events. So things like page views, conversions, things like that, they always have a date of when they started being tracked, because believe it or not, that’s a very important thing. Because when you look at graphs and things look off, oftentimes you were just not tracking the thing early enough. So that’s one big piece of like the date you start tracking. Second piece of it is audit the crap out of your tracking. I would almost say audit the crap out of your tracking as often as you can possibly like handle it. So if you could handle it with every deploy that you do to your marketing site, or every update you do to your marketing site that you feel like might tweak the script, do that. And same with like your web app, because a lot of times I’ve had people update the web app, do a redesign and somebody forgot the JavaScript to track. So nothing was being tracked. And this gets worse when you’re like you’re really great at optimizing and improving things that you’re shipping a lot. Optimizing, onboarding, changing up your marketing site, improving the application. This is where the problem gets even crazier and that’s when it’s like, crap like our tracking is hose. Do you know how many times I’ve heard our tracking is hose, we have to start over. Or oh no like we missed this call, this tracking event or we forgot that this needed to be tracked and it’s not being tracked anymore, right? Like there’s so many of these things that keep coming up constantly, that I keep seeing and keep worrying about and see businesses worry about. So number one, know when an event was tracked or when you started tracking. And what I mean by that is, if you start tracking today and it’s like noon, that doesn’t count, because most analytics tools won’t show you from noon today, show me the data, right? So that means tomorrow midnight, right? Onwards is when the tracking actually you can trust it and it started, because today was only like a half day, right? Those are the nuances that people don’t get right. I know this has little to do with attribution, we’re not even into attribution yet, but like those are a couple of best practices that mess up any tracking and any attribution. I’m going to go on attribution for a second and then like I’d love to hear some thoughts from you, because like this is just the bane of some marketers existence. And they just do the best they can and that’s all you can do. And I think there’re some companies out there around helping with marketing stacks and stuff like that. So you can look at that. I’m not one for like talking too much about tools these days, even though I know people love it. But one thing I really think about a lot is, do you know the people who come to your site and convert on the first visit? Because if you do, then that’s one bucket. Then do you know the people who come to your site, who didn’t convert on the first visit, but converted on the second? Great. Those are other ones you put aside, right? So my game on attribution has a lot to do with, they got to the site because there’s a lot other attributional awareness on that, but I’m not as interested in that. But they got to the site and I know that they got to the website. And once they sign up, I know that they signed up and now I know who they are, and I know all the other times that they came to the site before they signed up. If I know that, then like my goal isn’t to get fancy with attribution. My goal is just to know and start filtering out of the pool. So the easiest filter is, they converted on the first time we saw them that they came. Okay, great. Let’s account for all those. Second one is two times. Okay, great. That’s a little more difficult, because two times mean there’s two channels. Okay, so what are all the second visits that happened that didn’t convert and what are all the channels they came from? Okay, great. Now I know those, right? And and then it’s like what’s the second one? And I just keep going. Like how many visits and what channels are what I’m looking to figure out and I just filter out the easy ones. And the easiest one is first one channel, right? First Channel, first visit, they converted. Second one is two channels. Second, first visit. I know all the channels. Then what are the second visit channels that brought people and which ones of those lead to conversion? Great. Any of the pool that didn’t convert yet? Pull those out. And I just keep going. And so this is a very tedious task. The analytics tools do not let you do this. Most people I know at some scale post 50, 100 million in revenue and ended up building the thing themselves, because they end up having to. And building something themselves means like they’re building their own JavaScript. They’re doing their own data warehousing and that’s how it works. Believe it or not, we’re 12 people in our company. We’re technically pre-revenue at FYI and we have these systems, because like we know better. And these systems took a long time, like way longer than I would admit to get built up in the company while we were building the other stuff. And the project has been called my pet project multiple times. And it’s one person working on it who happens to be the head of engineering that worked with me at KISSmetrics. So we know it and we know the issues. And I wish we could take something off the shelf. We use off the shelf analytics as well, multiple tools and they help us make decisions for now. But like ultimately we know that there’s a bunch of tracking we need to do, around how our business works and how we want to see some of the data that none of the analytics tools do today. And that’s okay, because like they do what they do, right? And more recently, and I’ll stop my rant. More recently, the analytics tools have focused on product analytics and so they’ve gotten away from actually being able to help you track your marketing properly. That’s a shame is the way I look at it. [0:11:40] Steli Efti: Yeah. I agree. I think that in the early days of this and KISSmetrics [inaudible] were pioneers in the space. There was a lot of, I think effort put in to build an analytics products that would make you understand where is traffic coming from, how is it converting, why is what happening? It was very marketing top of funnel focus. And I don’t feel like the products that were out there, like solved that problem. And I hit in some like elegant and universal way and now everybody’s rushing towards more product analytics, which is also super important. But that first product problem is still around. It’s crazy and there’s not a simple or single solution that lots of companies could use that fixes this for them, which is fascinating. All right, so I mean you are a genius in this space and there’s not much more that I can add to any of this. But the one thing that I’ll say, I think the most important thing I am taking out of this, which is a very universal lesson, but we have to apparently relearn it again and again in all different situations, is how we started this episode. Do what you can, wherever you are, with what you have right now, right? And so I feel like the advice that we have, is that the worst thing you can do is one of two options. One is to say, “Well, we don’t have x.” Whatever x is, an engineer developer, resources, money for marketing software, or whatever else. “We don’t have something, hence we cannot do attribution. Hence we’re completely going to ignore it.” That’s really bad. And the flip side of that coin is also equally bad, which is we need to get this perfect and right. We have never dealt with this. I mean, you are in a very different spot of saying, “I’m going to get distribution right from the get go.” Because you have an amazing amount of experience. But for most companies and most founders saying, “I’m going to try to make this my number one priority and get it perfect and get it right.” Means probably either procrastinating way too long on doing anything, because it’s like, this is going to be this overwhelming massive project. Let’s push it down the road or it’s going to be, you start off and you run out of steam or by the time you’re done, you realize you spend too much time, too much money, too much effort, and it’s still not right. And so those two strategies are probably really bad ideas. The alternative that I think we want to share here is, think about it as improvement versus perfection, right? Think about like what do we understand about attribution today? How can we understand a little bit more about it tomorrow? How can we continuously add to our understanding and add to it? And would you mention what’s just like, here’s a simple way to segment. Let’s just even look at first time visitors that convert. That’s one group, that’s a really important group. Let’s try to understand there’s just one that one group. And once we got that, let’s try it on and send the next most important group. That’s a beautiful way of going about it. I remember one time talking to the marketing genius and going, “Wow, we don’t …” This is many years ago, four years ago or something. I was like, “Wow, we don’t have really the attribution model to really understand what marketing that we do has brought people to the trial sign up.” And that friend was just like, “Well you call people, right?” And I was like, “Sure.” He’s like, “Why don’t you just ask them?” And I was like, oh my God, face palm moment. I’m like I’m here screaming at people. You should call people just like you should talk to people and learn everything you need from your customers. And here’s me at the same time complaining that I don’t know where these trial signup people came from, although it’s easy for us to figure out. And then we did. That very day, we called a bunch of them and for the next couple of days and this was not perfect, but we got a lot of insights by just for a couple of days calling. 100 or so trial sign ups and asking them and having conversations and seeing patterns, right? Which needed no software and no analytics whatsoever. Just needed us having a bunch of conversations. So this is a really important part of how you build your business. Don’t get overwhelmed, don’t push this problem down the line. Just continuously chip away at it. Try to get better and better at understanding what in your marketing works and why and how. And don’t wait till you’re a multibillion dollar company to then hire a whole department and give them three years to work on this. Hopefully you’ll get there much, much sooner. [0:16:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah. And just to be clear, like we wouldn’t have worked on the analytics. We didn’t start the project until I had it on the list, but we didn’t start the project until we had a product market fit. And we knew what this business was going to be and we were going to like pursue it like seriously. And the reason for that, is all the measurement that we’re going to do, and we are a very high velocity business. The business we have with FYI is a freemium business. And so the analytics matter that much more. We would have tried our best to get away with like tools in the market, whether it’s mixed panel, amplitude heap analytics, or the number of other ones there if we could have. But what we realized is that there’re certain things that they just don’t track very well, specifically around this kind of stuff, marketing attribution and things like that, that we’re just going to build it ourselves. But again, we know what we’re doing. So it’s a little bit different than most people who would do it, but we still waited even though we didn’t know what we’re doing and we knew we did it. We waited till we knew this was a idea worth pursuing before we spent the time to build the custom stuff. [0:17:26] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right. This is it from us for this episode. If you enjoyed it and you’ve not done this before, please do us a favor. Go to iTunes, give us five stars, give us a nice little review it’ll make us more visible. More people will listen and the Czech community will grow until next time. This is it from us. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:17:45] Hiten Shah: So yeah. [0:17:45] The post 430: How to Get Marketing Attribution Right appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about encouragement vs advice and the importance of encouragement. This episode comes after a recent tweet by Hiten about the power of encouragement and the impact it can have on the person who is being encouraged.  In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the definition of encouragement, why this tweet resonated strongly with Steli, the best thing we can do for other people when it comes to giving advice and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:39 Why this topic was created. 01:13 What prompted Hiten to share this thought. 03:04 How we really can’t do much to get somebody else to do something. 03:42 What people tend to care about. 04:03 How Hiten hardly does anything with great advice he gets. 04:59 The best thing we can do for other people. 06:00 Why this tweet resonated with Steli. 06:30 The definition of encouragement. 06:41 How Steli typically sees encouragement. 3 Key Points: We really can’t do much to get somebody else to do somethingYou don’t really care about my opinion and that’s ok.Some of the best advice I’ve gotten, I haven’t done anything with. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And, this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about encouragement versus advice. And here’s why we want to talk about this. It’s because you’d recently tweeted about it, Hiten. You had a few really interesting things to say about the power of encouragement and how the advice you were giving to people, how potentially the impact of that advice was more the encouragement that you were giving people versus just the pure advice itself. I responded really strongly when I read that. Probably… Well, I’ll get to that a bit later. There’s probably a few biases or things going on on my end, why that really stood out. But I wanted to unpack that. I saw that a lot of people actually responded to this tweet. So first and foremost, what prompted you sharing this thought or having this thought and talking about the difference between encouragement and advice and the importance of encouragement? [0:01:03] Hiten Shah: So most writing, whether it’s tweets or blog posts have been marinating in your head for a while, right? That’s just usually what it is. I mean, they might feel impulsive at the time, especially if it’s a tweet, but generally they marinate for a while. So one thing is, I mean, just like you, I’ve given a lot of advice in my life, or what I thought was advice, to the point of the tweet. And I was actually in LA, I was speaking to a bunch of product people in LA. And someone came up to me after and said… Well, she also emailed me after. So I’ll share the line from the email that’s relevant. She said, “As I told you in person, I had been feeling less motivated than usual. And since your discussion, I’ve been back to my jazzed/motivated itself. So thank you for that.” And I don’t know what I did. I was just speaking. So I gave a presentation. Actually, I was speaking for a while that day, but the two things I did she saw where, I gave a presentation and I moderated a panel back to back. And for whatever reason, that’s what she said. And she also said, “It was an amazing meeting,” and amazing all caps. So this was the latest event that happened. I didn’t actually give her any advice except whatever she heard from the presentation and the panel. And I’ve asked people in the past about my advice, more recently, people that I’ve given a lot of advice to or I’ve known for a while and gotten their feedback on it. And I think we really can’t do much to get somebody else to do something. We just can’t. And that’s a hard thing for some of us who give advice. It’s probably even a hard thing for people who receive advice, right? Like, hey, I can’t do anything for you. Like straight up, I can’t do anything for you. I can’t make you do something that’s right for you or wrong or whatever because it’s just going to be my opinion. You don’t really care about my opinion, and that’s okay. That’s totally fine. You care about yourself, you care about what you’re struggling with, you care about what you need to do, and that’s it. And at best, if you’re somebody who I am really good friends with or is my best friend or whatever you want to use, I’m really close with, I might weigh your feedback, your opinion, your advice a little bit more or maybe a lot more. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it. Some of the best advice I’ve gotten, Steli, I haven’t done anything with. [0:04:15] Steli Efti: Oh, you’re probably the only person like that. The rest of the world acts on the best advice. The best advice, Hiten, obviously we are acting on it. [0:04:25] Hiten Shah: And I’ve had an instance recently where someone was giving me advice for over a year and I should’ve just listened. I just should have listened. It would have prevented so much if I just listened. But I didn’t. I should’ve listened. They told me this advice repeatedly, very compassionately every time I brought up my problem, I didn’t listen. And so a lot of this comes from like, oh, we’re not going to listen to advice. This is not how we’re wired. Right? And so the best we can do for other people, I would say, in the context of advise or context of being around them is just be encouraging. So the tweet was, “Encouragement is more important than advice.” And then I went on to explain this, but I didn’t necessarily explain it in the way I just did to you because this is a podcast and it’s more intimate, and you and I are talking about it and you brought it up because apparently it struck a nerve. So I’d love to hear kind of what nerve it struck and what your thoughts are. But this is something that’s been on my mind for a while now. [0:05:33] Steli Efti: That’s beautiful. So I love that you shared this, and this is one of the reasons why we have this podcast is because you and I think about similar topics often very differently at first, but not really at all once you dig a bit deeper. But the reason why it stood out to me is because I do feel like I have… I feel bad about not feeling like I’m that encouraging lately. And with lately, I mean last couple of years. So when I read that I was like, would I say or describe myself as somebody that’s encouraging? And listen, not really. But then the other thing that I did that I learned from you is, I looked at the dictionary definition of encouragement. It was actually, at first I missed it, but then when I read it again, it stood out to me because the definition here, at least that Google spits out is, “The action of giving someone support, confidence or hope.” And so my definition, I think, when I hear the word encouragement, I always feel about somebody that’s telling people nice things, right, or positive things. Independently, oh, you can do it, this is going to work out. I believe in you. You are special. Like that kind of a thing. And when I think about it in that framework, I’m like, that’s not me at all. Like I’m actually very discouraging. I’m not telling you a lot about people that everything will be fine and just think positive and the world is going to… Things are going to be really nice. But when I read this, the dictionary definition, the act of giving somebody support, confidence or hope. I’m like, yeah, all right. Under this definition, I am probably encouraging to many, at least from the feedback that I’m getting. And so there’s some kind of an internal… I do feel like I’ve accumulated a bad conscious about not being more positive with people. I do feel like I can be very harsh. I think I can be just setting very high standards, I can be pushing people really hard. But at the same time, I constantly get the feedback that people do get a lot of support from me. So that’s something that the definitely checks off in my list. Do I support a lot of people? Yes. Do I try to help a lot of people? Yes. And a lot of people tell me that they get confidence or hope from consuming my content, listening to me or talking to me. But there was this, I think there was this interpretation that I had that encouragement was like maybe being overly positive and that didn’t fit with me. And I was like, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I need to be more positive. Maybe I need to be a little bit nicer. So I responded strongly to your tweet because I felt like I’m not living up to it and there’s maybe a missed opportunity. That’s really what stood out to me at first. [0:08:54] Hiten Shah: I think it’s the way we about it, right? I used to just pour on advice because I tend to be pretty intuitive about what somebody should do, right, or what I think they should do. It’s not even what I think. It’s what they should do. Right? What the most rational, pragmatic, logical thing is, I used to be able to get past my emotion or their emotion. This is much easier to do when you’re helping other people. And what I realized is they come to me, they want advice, but at the end of the day, they want the definition of encouragement. They want support, confidence, and hope, right? If they’re in a really crappy situation and they just need to go through it, they need hope, right? If they’re in a place where they don’t know if what’s going to happen next, they can do or they can achieve, they need confidence, right? And if they’re going through something legit, like emotionally tough, they need support, right? And it’s the best thing we can do to influence somebody, in my opinion at this point after struggling with this, is encouraged them. And that doesn’t mean we don’t give our advice. That doesn’t mean we don’t do any of that. That just literally means that when we speak to each other, we can provide more encouragement and less prescriptive advice like you should do this or you should do that. And encouragement comes in the form of just listening and having compassion for whatever journey they’re going on. Because a lot of times advice is like, oh, I know what they should do, I know what they should do. But you lack compassion for what they’re going through. Like you’re not actually listening, you’re not actually paying attention to their emotion. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll mimic and reflect back on, are you feeling like this? Because it sounds like you’re feeling like this, right? And that’s really helpful because then I’m not sitting there like, oh this is like… I’m not ignoring their feelings. I know that sounds weird, but that’s really powerful. And sometimes the words people use, some folks don’t like to speak of their feelings. So the words people use can give you a clue as to how they’re feeling. And then when you ask them, hey, are you feeling like this? They’ll open up more and they’ll actually talk to you in a more real way related to how they’re feeling. Surprise, surprise. And so, yeah, I think this is a big deal. There’s now more advice than ever. A lot of the advice is in blog posts and tweets and things like that. There’s encouragement in those places as well, don’t get me wrong, but when we’re one-on-one with people, I think that we can get to another level and just focus on being compassionate for their journey, their situation, whatever it may be. Whatever kind of problem they have, whether it’s a really tough personal problem or a really simple business problem, whatever it may be, let’s take it up a notch and I would say, be more encouraging, be more compassionate, spend more time listening to people and don’t rush to give them answers because that’s honestly not what they need or what they’re usually looking for. [0:12:08] Steli Efti: I love it. It’s such a beautiful way to end this podcast. So that’s a little bit of an action, a call to action from Hiten for all of us. And maybe just to double click on that in a different way before we wrap up. One is how can you be more encouraging to others because that really can make a big difference. But also ask yourself, who’s been really encouraging to you lately? Who’s been somebody that’s really given you hope, support, and confidence? Maybe today, maybe right now is the time to let them know. Tell them thank you or find more time to spend with them because people that are really encouraging should be a big part of your life or a bigger part of your life. You should give them more of your time because they’re really, really making a difference. So yeah, let’s all try to be more encouraging to others and let’s try to create a positive reinforcing feedback loop. So when we do receive real encouragement, we let those people know. That’s it from us for this episode. [0:13:11] The post 429: Encouragement vs Advice appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about we they recently learned as dads that helped them as founders. For most people, our first teacher is usually our fathers. From riding a bicycle to playing football, fathers typically teach us many lessons when we were children. Our dads typically are there for us through our heartbreaks and failures, and heartily encourage and pat us on our back when we achieved something. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what made this year’s father’s day different, an example of a situation where a person never had a father, special moments and lessons they learned from their kids and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 02:30 What made Steli appreciate being a dad. 03:00 What made this year’s father’s day different. 04:18 An example of a situation where a person never had a father. 05:59 Steli shares a special moment he had with his kids. 09:03 How Steli can sometimes be part of the problem. 10:37 How empathy can help people do their best. 11:33 Hiten shares a special moment he had with his kids. 3 Key Points: I just talk to my kids more.When things are difficult that a good thing.I am a big part of why he gets frustrated so much. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti . [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. We’re actually recording after Father’s Day. It’s the day after Father’s Day today. We wanted to do just a quick podcast on Father’s Day. Don’t know where it’s going to go, but I think ultimately it’s an important day for us fathers. We’re both fathers. I think it’s interesting. Steli mentioned that he wanted to do this, and it’s interesting you mentioned that, because this was a very interesting Father’s Day for me, and interesting in a great way where I actually felt the need, and I texted you too, actually felt the need to text as many fathers as I could remember yesterday, and just say Happy Father’s Day. I don’t think I’ve ever really done it. I’ve done it to a few people, but I’m talking, I probably hit 20 or 30 people. I don’t know, it just meant something to me this year in a different way. Not sure why. [0:01:02] Steli Efti: Interesting, because first of all, I got a very sweet text from you. I was really happy about that, and I wrote you something back. You’re the only person who texted me about Father’s Day, by the way. You really stood out for me. But I saw so many messages on social media about it. Maybe last year I was not mentally there. I don’t know what it was, but this year, more so than ever before, it was like, wow, everybody’s sharing something related to Father’s Day. What is going on? It was like my screen was flooded with content around this. For me, it made me do one thing that’s maybe not really practical, really doesn’t have anything to do with startups, but it did make me step back and re-remember to be grateful that I’m a dad. [0:02:01] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:02:02] Steli Efti: And that I’m having a chance, at least with my oldest … My oldest is now … This year was kind of interesting, because my father died when I was six. So last year when he turned six years, my oldest is going to turn seven in exactly 14 days, when he turned six, I was like, “Okay, I was this old when my dad died.” It was so interesting to see. I was like, “I was so tiny. I thought I was a bit older.” It was just a good, a funky thing to have my son as a way to relive that or go through that experience of what six even means, what that age even means. But also it’s like for me, a little bit of a, wow, I’m grateful that I get to spend more time with him than my dad and I got to spend together. It’s kind of a reminder for me to be a grateful and how much I actually enjoy and love having two little monsters as my sons. That was kind of a big thing about the whole thing. It was really beautiful. There were so many nice messages. People shared so many stories about their parents and their fathers. I don’t know if this has been as intense every year and I just missed it, or if this year, for whatever reason, was more special than before in terms of how much people shared around this. [0:03:30] Hiten Shah: Yeah, yeah. I got some really sweet messages back from people. I don’t know, it’s something in the air maybe. I don’t know. But I definitely feel like it was different. I like the grateful and the gratitude part of what you said, because I think it’s great, whether it’s Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, or any of these things where we’re actually celebrating a type of human in our life. It’s mother and father typically, whether you have a great relationship, whatever kind of childhood, whatever you had, I think there’s definitely ways to express this. A friend of mine, Melissa, she shared on Facebook how she never really had a father. Growing up, I guess he wasn’t around at all. Her mother raised her. She mentioned how, and she included me in this, so super humbled by this, but that she has role models that she described as embodying that for her. There was a bunch of us in there. Yeah. All I can say is I think something was in the air. It seemed like a really beautiful day on social media as well as, I think, in the real world for many of us with our kids. That’s special, you know? It’s nice to recognize that. I’m not sure if I’ve experienced that before in the past either. [0:04:56] Steli Efti: Yeah, it’s interesting. Well it’s beautiful. I don’t need to know why or understand it. It just made me grateful for, probably it was one of the best days on social media that I can remember in just terms of sheer amount of really sweet emotional things people shared about their personal lives and people that really matter to them. It’s super nice. One thing that I think might be an interesting idea for this kind of special, unique or different episode is, instead of talking about, which we can, and I think we have in some ways in the past, talking about what does it mean to be a dad when you run a startup? I don’t know. I’m not as inspired to talk about that, but what I’d love to do is maybe share either a special moment or a special lesson that we learned recently from our children or with our children that may or may not be in some way useful in other areas of life as well, maybe even in running your startup. I do have an example. That’s why I’m proposing this. If you’re up for it, I’ll share first, and then the you can follow me after. [0:06:04] Hiten Shah: Please, yes, go ahead. [0:06:05] Steli Efti: All right. Here is something that is a lesson that I learned, it took me a long time to learn. My oldest son is, so he’s six, he’s about to turn seven. He’s a super ambitious dude. He looks exactly like his mother. It’s like blonde hair, blue eyes, has got all the good looks from his mom, but he has my personality, 100%. When I look, his personality is very much like mine. One of the ways that that expresses itself is that he is, and he was since birth, since he’s been a little baby, just very ambitious and very driven. I love that about him, but one thing that frustrates me about him is something that is a weakness that I had for a long time, and maybe I still have in some ways, that he’s a pretty talented little kid. In most things that he does or tries to learn, he has a pretty easy time doing pretty well on these tasks or new experiences. So when he struggles, he is getting frustrated much quicker than usual. I judge him pretty harshly for that, or in the past I’ve been frustrated with him for that, because I’m trying to teach him that when things are difficult, that’s a good thing. That means that he can really grow, and really learn, and his character is going to be measured on how many difficult things he learns to overcome, not how easy things are for him. Trying to impart these important lessons, and sometimes he’s not that interested in learning them, and so we’ve had our fair share of frustrating moments with each other. Recently, there was a moment where he was trying to do something, it wasn’t working, and he was about to get frustrated about it, and I was about to get frustrated because he’s getting frustrated. Then I realized, there was just a moment where I realized that as he was trying to do this thing, there were many people in the room, but he was constantly looking at me, just checking in with me, if I’m looking at him, if I’m observing him. I don’t know what it was, but in a moment, it clicked for me. I realized, when I’m around, I’m actually making it a lot harder for him, because he really wants to impress me. He really wants to do well in front of me. So when he has a difficult time and I’m there, I am a big part of why he gets frustrated so much then, and why he wants to stop engaging in that activity, because he doesn’t want to look bad in front of his dad. You could really tell, the way he was looking at me while he was struggling, that he really didn’t want me to see his struggle. Then I realized, “Oh shit. I’m part of the problem. I’m actually making the situation worse.” Instead of going there, and being stern with him, and telling him that he needs to keep struggling in front of me, I need to have a bit more compassion, and actually understand that he has a hard time being vulnerable in front of me. Maybe just showing him that it’s okay to fail at something in front of Dad, and that I don’t judge him for that, is a much better way for me to help him than going there and giving him a speech about struggle is good, and struggle is important. Since I learned that lesson, we had a few moments where usually they would escalate, and I would get frustrated, and I would talk to him about these things, and I haven’t. I’ve seen, it’s too early to really tell, but I’ve seen in a number of situations I think I’ve observed us both dealing better with struggle together. And me being less of a source of acceleration for him not to want to feel it’s something I’ll look bad at something. It took me a long time, this is something for two years I’ve been asking myself, “How can I help him get better at this?” until I realized, “Oh, I am actually a big source of why he’s having such a difficult time with this.” To me, that translates really well to some of the challenges I’ve even had in the company, where when I get involved with something, or when people present certain things in front of me, just for the mere fact that I’m in the room, it makes it harder for people sometimes to succeed, because they really want to impress me, because they feel like I’m this important or special person. A way to help them is to give them even more empathy, and show them how okay it is to not be perfect in front of me, versus judge them for maybe their nerves or their struggle or whatever else. Yeah, that’s been probably one of the most profound lessons I’ve learned from my little guy recently. [0:11:05] Hiten Shah: That’s pretty awesome. That’s really awesome. I just talk to my kids more. I’ve just started doing that. They’re five and nine. I was talking to my son, and I asked him does he remember something from when he was younger? He’s nine. I did this because I want to remember things from my childhood, just experiences that are just in my memory, just there, and that I can’t forget, or that can teach me something. He literally right away mentioned, “Oh, I was eating. I was three years old. I was eating mashed potatoes.” He had a babysitter at the time, and he recalls not wanting to eat the mashed potatoes, and somehow he ends up breaking the plate. It was a glass plate, and the babysitter cut her finger. He remembers that. To me, it was just a fascinating moment. I wouldn’t have thought that he would remember something like that. It was pretty fascinating to me to see that he could remember it from six years ago, and it’s still in his memory. Part of the reason is, I think those are the types of things that I personally just want to understand about myself, which is like what did my childhood experiences create for me in my head? What kind of stories am I holding and carrying? So it was really insightful to see the one that he might be holding as a result of that experience. [0:12:42] Steli Efti: That’s incredible. What question did you ask him that led to him sharing this experience that he remembered? [0:12:49] Hiten Shah: I just asked him, “Do you remember anything from when you were younger?” [crosstalk] [0:12:53] Steli Efti: You didn’t specify what age? You just said, “Do you remember things from when you were younger?” and that was the first thing that popped up in his head? [0:12:59] Hiten Shah: Yup, exactly. [0:13:00] Steli Efti: That’s incredible. I need to ask that. Well, now I’m going to ask that question as well. [0:13:06] Hiten Shah: You should. It’s a fascinating one. [0:13:08] Steli Efti: I dying to hear what they’re going to say. [0:13:09] Hiten Shah: Exactly, right? Yeah. [0:13:13] Steli Efti: That’s incredible. That’s a beautiful thing to do. It’s such a simple thing, but so rare. I don’t, not sure if I’ve ever talked to my children about their younger years, and if they remember those, and what things come to their mind. Just a simple thing to do, but it can be pretty impactful. When he shared this story with you, did you just listen? Was there any kind of, did you follow up with anything, or was it just like, “Wow, you remember that?” Was there anything that followed up, or came out of this as a, I don’t know, something that you wanted to tell him about this experience being good or bad, or anything else? Or was it just a moment where he shared the first memory, and you just let it sit in the room without any judgment or any kind of dissecting that memory [crosstalk 00:14:07]? [0:14:09] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I didn’t dissect it much at all. I heard it, and I was like, “Oh. Did it make you feel a certain way?” He’s like, “I don’t remember. Not really.” I’m like, “Okay.” Then I just sat with that for a bit. But yeah, that was mostly it. Yeah. [0:14:25] Steli Efti: That’s beautiful. All right, well, this is it. This is it from our side. Again, if you’re listening to this podcast, and you are a parent, and this is not just about dads, this is just the perspective we can share because we’re not mothers, we’re fathers. But if you’re a parent, and you’re running a startup, and you have any special moment to share recently, any lesson learned from your child, and you feel encouraged to share it, we definitely would love to hear it. Make sure to reach out, [inaudible 00:14:56], Steli@close.com. We always love to hear from you. When this becomes a two way street, where we share something about us, and you guys share something back, that definitely always brightens our day. Then the last thing I’ll say is, if you do have parents in your life, and if you are in somewhat good terms with them, write them a text or give them a call, tell them that they’re awesome. Tell them that you love them. As a parent, you cannot hear it often enough. Make sure to let the people that are really special in your life know. That’s it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:15:38] Hiten Shah: Yup. Happy parenting. [0:15:39] The post 428: What We Recently Learned as Dads That Helps Us as Founders appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about lies founders tell themselves and others. It’s common for founders to unknowingly tell themselves and others lies about the state of their companies. And not realizing that what you may be saying to yourself about your company can lead to the lack of growth of your company or worse. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the common lies founders tell themselves, how to realise that you’re telling yourself these lies, how to prevent telling these lies and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 01:30 The most common lie founders tell themselves and others. 02:27 Why your belief in the success of your product is a lie. 03:40 Why you should use your belief of success to figure out how to make it happen. 04:34 The second most common lie founders tell. 05:47 Why this lie is a way of covering up the truth. 06:57 How things aren’t going well for startups most of the time. 07:39 The third most common lie founders tell. 08:07 The fourth most common lie founders tell. 3 Key Points: The number one lie is telling yourself that this is gonna work.You wouldn’t start something if you believed it wasn’t gonna work.Things never get easier, they just get different. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Boom. Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today on the startup chat we’re going to talk about founder lies. The type of lies that founder tell themselves and others, how to prevent them, how to realize that you’re telling yourself and others, things that might not be fully true or are completely untrue. And who better to actually talk about this topic that you hitting. I mean, we’ve both been entrepreneurs for almost our entire adult career lives. [0:00:35] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:00:35] Steli Efti: We have so many founder friends, we’ve adviced, we’ve invested, we talk to founders to every day. And if there’s one of the major themes of our podcasts in general has always been, have self awareness and we’ve talked about self awareness in many, many different versions. And I think this topic really fits into that theme as well. Being aware of the lies that you tell yourself and others. Right off the bat. Let me ask you top of head, what is the most common lie that you have observed founders tell themselves and others? [0:01:18] Hiten Shah: This one’s interesting because a lot of it has to do with the idea that, to start something, you’re essentially starting something from scratch, like in doing the impossible, right? And you have to have a lot of belief in yourself, belief in so many things that you don’t control in the beginning. And so I think the number one lie is a really weird one that I would say. And the lie is this Steli, it’s, this is going to work. [0:01:55] Steli Efti: This is going to work. [0:01:58] Hiten Shah: This is going to work. It’s going to work Steli. It’s just got to work. And you start your business with that lie. Like let’s just put it out there. [0:02:09] Steli Efti: [crosstalk]. [0:02:12] Hiten Shah: How could you start it if you didn’t believe that? [0:02:15] Steli Efti: True. But why is it a lie if you believe it Hiten? [0:02:19] Hiten Shah: You don’t know. You’re lying to yourself. You don’t know. You started with no conscious understanding of, if it’s going to work. And I’m talking about day zero, like you start, you’re like, I don’t know, right? Truthfully you don’t know, but the mind, you have to convince your mind that this is where it started. And the way you do that is by saying this is going to work. You wouldn’t start something if you believed it wasn’t going to work, right? [0:02:44] Steli Efti: Right. [0:02:46] Hiten Shah: But yet, how many of these things actually work? Not 100%. [0:02:51] Steli Efti: What not 100%. [0:02:53] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:02:53] Steli Efti: Early 10% probably. At least if we talk about the original version of whatever works meant, right? Like whatever the idea was, the thing you wanted to work. [0:03:04] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:03:04] Steli Efti: Without having to drastically alter or change what you wanted to work or how it was supposed to work. Yeah. Almost never. [0:03:12] Hiten Shah: Right. I think that’s the first lie you tell yourself and that one might trickle down into all other lies that you tell yourself. And that’s one way to think about it, right? Which is like, don’t let that lie trickle down into all other lies, right? Use that belief to go figure out how to make that the truth. That’s the way I would think of that one. I know I started pretty heavy, but … [0:03:37] Steli Efti: Yeah. [crosstalk]. I was just thinking this should have been the last lie we covered. [crosstalk]. No, sometimes we start with the ending in mind. It doesn’t really matter. [0:03:48] Hiten Shah: It’s not just founders either, right? You start a new job, you’re like, this is going to be awesome, this is going to work. [0:03:54] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:03:54] Hiten Shah: Right. Like this whole starting something, new job company, anything. I think you’re lying yourself in the beginning. If we were to put like a very, like, conscious hat on and objective hat on, you don’t know if it’s going to work yet, you’d start telling yourself it is. I think that’s lie number one and number one, maybe last one. It’s number one. [0:04:19] Steli Efti: [crosstalk]. All right. I’m going to build on that. Here’s the next lie that I love that I think is again, very universal and broad is, things are going well. [0:04:31] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:04:32] Steli Efti: And this relates to so many things. It could be like, I think that we’re really making a lot of progress. I think we are having really good traction. When you ask people how things are going, and they’re going, “Yeah, things are going well.” You can tell whether it’s true or not, right? You can tell if it comes from a place of confidence and comfort, or if it comes from a place of like, I don’t know how to say like, how to even say it, but it’s, I have to be strong moment. It’s almost like when you have to tell your children that something that’s actually bad news is going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. They’ll go like, “No, no things are really great Steli. Things are really great.” And it’s like they’ll probably aren’t, right? And I mean, we’ve all done this, I’ve done this, I’m pretty sure you’ve done this, but I think this a very fundamental lie. Things are going well. To a certain degree, is trying to cover up some version of the truth, which probably is things aren’t going well, or they’re not going well enough, right? And so first again, it always starts with ourselves. We’re trying to convince ourselves that all the things, all the goals that we had, that we didn’t reach, or the milestones that we aren’t reaching or the things we’re not accomplishing. Things are still going well. Like there’s still positive signs and I think we’re still all in all I’m doing okay. And so first you sell yourself, but then you want to keep everybody else on your team. Their morale up, right? We want to tell the story so that our co founders or our employees or team members, so they don’t start doubting. We try to tell them and convince everybody around us in our team that things are going well, don’t worry. Things are going to pan out. The funding run is going to come through, the customer is going to start paying. We’re going to hit this revenue milestone, this marketing campaign, or PR competing is going to work. Things are actually going pretty well. Just wait a little bit longer and you’ll actually realize it with true results. And it’s a story that we want the world to believe. Anytime we talk to advisors, investors, friends, family members, neighbors, people at events and they ask us, “How are things going?” “Things are going really, really well.” But it’s a really dangerous lie, because most of the time if you’re in a start up, things aren’t going well. Things are breaking, things are messed up, things are going too slow or not in the right direction. And you need to be really aware of that, instead of constantly trying to convince yourself that it’s going to be all right. You have to try to learn what isn’t all right. How to fix that. How to make it all right. [0:07:12] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think that’s really powerful, right? Like the lie that founders tell themselves about things going well, is probably like another really repetitive big one, because again, you have to find something positive, right? [0:07:27] Steli Efti: Right. [0:07:27] Hiten Shah: You’re just looking for positivity. [0:07:29] Steli Efti: Right. [0:07:32] Hiten Shah: Another one to keep going is, that person’s going to work out. [0:07:40] Steli Efti: Yes. [0:07:40] Hiten Shah: Right. The person is going to change, it’s going to get better, right? This is one where I haven’t met anyone that hasn’t hit this problem, right? Where they have such optimism about a team member, but it’s just not working out. I mean, the number of times that I have sat with the founder or a manager even and heard about a team member, right? Because they just either want advice or like I just have to say, “What’s going on right now, like what’s top of mind?” They’re like this person, right? This is what’s going on. I’m like, “YYou need to let them go. You just need to let them go.” Like everything I’ve heard so far. I mean, you need to let them go, they’re not a good fit, right? It’s not working. And the preamble to my statement from them is just literally so much like hope, about it working and so much like reasoning of why, and why this person needs to stay or why they can’t leave or things like that. And like I already heard it, right? The person’s already like not working out. And this person has a lot of hope and they want to make it work, because as humans, I think we want to make things work with other people. But not even nine times out of 10, every single time, you can just tell it’s not going to work. Because if they’re so far as that’s top of mind and they’re willing to talk to me about it, something’s up. It’s just not going to work. I think this hope, this feeling that it’s going to work with somebody is a big one. [0:09:15] Steli Efti: Yeah. Such a big one. All right. You know what I realized, and we’re going to do one more before we wrap up the episode, but we could probably do 100 lies. [0:09:24] Hiten Shah: Yes. [0:09:24] Steli Efti: Easily. Like it’s just like I have 30 more. [0:09:27] Hiten Shah: Wow. [0:09:27] Steli Efti: Like, we didn’t even touch a single one that I actually had discussed in prior with you. This is such a big topic. I don’t know what we’re going to do with it, but it’s important. We might need to do like an ebook with 100 lies or something with a little bit of like here’s the lie, here’s the [crosstalk]. We should do something about this. To me, like the lie I’d love to end this episode on is, it will get easier. And it’s usually once x, things will get easier. Once we raise our money, things will get easier, once we launched on product [inaudible] things will get easier. Once we have our first customers, things will be easier. Things never get easier, right? They really don’t. They just get different, right? The problems change, but unless you do something as a pure hobby, where the outcomes or the results don’t matter that much, or unless you do something where all you really want to do is just repeat what you’ve done so far and keep getting similar results, things won’t get easier. You’re just going to encounter bigger problems as you grow, as you scale, as you progress in your journey, things never get easier. They just get different. And I think again, all these things are very human lies that we tell in all situations, but this hope that once a certain level is accomplished or something is, you arrive at some point that then all the challenges of life will dissolve and you’re going to walk in a different drumbeat, is just an illusion. You’ll never get there. The problems that you’re going just have, are going to get bigger and bigger or more complicated or more challenging in one way or another. And instead of wishing, instead of putting all your hope on this one big thing, that will make everything easier, I think the best founders are those that realize that they have to stop wishing for things to get easier and they just need to start wanting to get better, right? It’s not about things getting easier. It’s about you getting better. The better you get, the easier things will be, right? And so instead of focusing on like, or putting your hope on some event or some outcome that will finally make the struggle that you’re in go away, try to become so strong, so smart, so good at what you do, that your challenges become less and less of such a dramatic struggle, right? Just try to get better instead of trying to get into a situation where things are easier. [0:12:15] Hiten Shah: Man, that’s really good. Yeah. You get better, things don’t get easier. I think that’s such a solid way to think about it. [0:12:21] Steli Efti: All right. I think that’s it for us for this episode of the subject. I’m actually going to leave all of you with a quote. I thought about this topic a couple of days ago and then I remembered this Richard Feynman quote that I love, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself. You are the easiest person to fool.” I love this quote so much and I think that, this can be one of the biggest sources for personal growth. Constantly ask yourself, what am I fooling myself about right now? Because we are all a little bit full of shit about something. And how can I stop that, right? How can I realize it and then stop it. Hopefully this episode helped everybody that listened to do that a bit more. [0:13:05] Hiten Shah: Yeah. That’s like a trouble prevention statement. [0:13:08] Steli Efti: Yeah. There you go. [0:13:08] Hiten Shah: I had trouble about figuring out what you’re fooling yourself about. [0:13:12] Steli Efti: All right. This is it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:13:15] Hiten Shah: Five stars. Don’t forget. [0:13:18] Steli Efti: Yes. [0:13:18] The post 427: Lies Founders Tell Themselves and Others appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to create a successful pilot program for your startup. In the startup world, running a pilot program for your startup is a great way to fine-tune your solution and get in some early customers. Sadly, many pilots end up failing due to mistakes made during them, and this is something that Steli and Hiten explore in this episode.   In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how to do pilot programs correctly, why you need to be clear about KPIs, why you need to be as hands-on as possible during the pilot and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:46 Why this topic was chosen. 02:36 Why you need to be clear about KPIs. 04:46 Why clarity is super important. 04:16 Why you need to be as hands-on as possible during the pilot. 05:13 How you need to babysit the pilot. 06:36 How to get more advice about your pilot. 06:41 How to handle contracts and timelines. 06:50 Why want to learn from your customers past. 06:33 A question you can ask your customer during a pilot. 3 Key Points: Find out from your customer what you’d need to do to get them to purchase your product.You need to babysit the pilot.You wanna learn from your customer’s past. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today we’re going to talk about sales but what we’re going to talk about sales is how to do pilots correctly so that they lead to successful outcomes and basically close deals. [0:00:19] Steli Efti: Yeah, this is one of the biggest heartbreakers. Whenever I talk to startups that have A, pilot or multiple pilots going on usually with either larger customers or maybe if it’s very early in their development phase where the product maybe doesn’t work yet or is very rudimentary. Startups like to do pilots, right? It’s these agreed upon times where a potential customer in a startup will come together and they’ll agree that they’re going to run a certain amount of tests. They’re going to try to use the product or implement it or integrate it and if it goes well the idea is at the end of pilot, once we’ve tested this out, we would buy. The company would become a customer. The heartbreaker is that a lot, the vast majority of the time, especially startups that are not super experienced in sales, they’ll put these pilots together in a way that’s destined to fail and they will work so hard and have such high hopes. Then at the end of a one month or three month period when they were hell bent on needing this pilot to turn into a successful customer relationship, it doesn’t, right, and it doesn’t just crush the morale. It doesn’t just deplete the funds and the money but it’s also wasting the biggest resource the startups have which is time. So let’s unpack a little bit of the mistakes that startups do, how to do avoid them and how to do this well in order to save some people a lot of trouble and a lot of wasted time. [0:01:49] Hiten Shah: Yeah, pilots are so key, especially to get the kind of deals that you’re looking for. They also help companies get really comfortable with your product and your technology and help you actually sort out how to make something that actually provides something that they actually need and want and help them get ramped up on something. I’m going to let you lead the way because I’m sure you have more tips than I do on this. [0:02:12] Steli Efti: I have a million of them. All right. [0:02:13] Hiten Shah: Go for it. [0:02:15] Steli Efti: After all, a few simple things and I know you’ll pepper and salt it with your wisdom around it. One of the most important things when you set up a pilot is to create clarity on what the key KPIs are that will indicate that this is going well. What do we need to do and what do we need to accomplish during the pilot for you to then purchase the product? [0:02:43] Hiten Shah: You would ask them that directly, correct? [0:02:44] Steli Efti: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, yes. [0:02:46] Hiten Shah: Okay. [0:02:48] Steli Efti: Yes, and to me it’s mind blowing that startups start pilots and don’t have the answer to the most fundamental question of the pilot, “What is our goal here?” What does, “this went well” mean? Who’s defining this? Who’s going to decide and how, when are we going to decide? Startups don’t know this. They go into these pilots with their own definitions of what successful look like hoping that’s the same definition as the client or the customer and their own definition when they would decide. “Oh the pilot is over next week, Steli Efti. That’s when they’re going to decide.” Then the week is over and they realize, no, no, no. The pilot is over but the company might need another two months to make a decision if it was a success or not or what to do about it. The most important thing is to have clarity and alignment with your client and to define on a piece of paper, in some written way, what we’re trying to accomplish during the pilot, who is going to do what in order to help accomplish that goal, hit those KPIs, hit those goals. Then, how we’re going to decide to purchase and buy, when, right? Like creating clarity on the KPIs, on the goals, on the outcomes we’re trying to generate that they will trigger a purchase decision from the client. That’s the most important thing. The next thing that I’ll say is that startups are too hands off during pilots. A lot of times you think, especially you know, if you’re a startup you’re probably going to be selling to somebody. It’s a bigger company than you’re three person team or five person team or whatever it is. You think, “Well, these are serious people. These are adults. We’re going to give them the software, the technology, whatever we told them and they’re going to use it or they’re going to introduce it to their employees or they’re going to train their people. They’re going to project manage this on their own and then they’re going to see success with it.” Nothing could be further from the truth. You need to quote unquote babysit the pilot. You need to be the adult, the champion, the CEO of the pilot within their company. You need to make sure that you’re involved in every single step from the e-mail they sent to employees to introduce this new tool, like make sure that you are writing this e-mail or co-writing it or at least editing it. Don’t just let them do it. Make sure that you are part of the training sessions. Make sure that you actually put together a plan week by week of what needs to even happen. You should have a plan that you give them, a template that they can follow in order to get success during the pilot. You cannot just ship software or give them a login access to something and then assume that the client will do all the heavy lifting and all the work and then see success. You really need to be as hands on as possible. I’ve given this advice to many startups, too. Even, if possible, set up shop in their office, right? Make sure you visit them once a week. You have meetings. You shake hands. You kiss babies. You meet people. You hear rumors. You see maybe physically a problem or you spot an opportunity that you would miss otherwise. The biggest mistake that I see startups, especially those that aren’t that experienced is sales, is that they think that the pilot basically means, “I’m giving you access for free to my software. You are going to use it and then at the end you give me feedback and money.” That would be beautiful but that’s just not the way it pans out usually. [0:06:09] Hiten Shah: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Is there a way you would think about the contracts or the timelines or anything like that? [0:06:18] Steli Efti: Yeah, so I’ll give you … And maybe this is going to be the … Let’s do this as the last tip of this episode because we want to keep it super short. If people right now that are listening are about to do a pilot, in the middle of one and they’re like, “Wait, wait, wait, I need more help about X, Y and Z.” Send us an e-mail, [inaudible]. We’ll give you specific pilot advice for the pilot that you’re running. So, yes, Hiten Shah, that’s a beautiful question, a good one to end on. Here’s my biggest tip when it comes to contracts, timelines, details. What you want to do is you want to learn from success and failure. That means you want to learn from your customer’s past. What I will always ask a customer before doing a pilot is I will ask them, “Hey, when was the last time you did a pilot like this, where pilot testing software, if it’s software or testing a marketing tool like ours or a marketing tool in general? When was the last time you’ve done a pilot period, right, in the company or in this department on this team?” Then I would ask them a bunch of questions about how did that pilot go? How long was it? What was good? What was bad? What would you do differently? I want to learn from other company’s mistakes. And I want to learn from this company’s past mistakes and successes. What worked particularly well? Did you buy it at the end of the pilot? If not, why? If the company has never done … You’ll uncover all kinds of incredible things. Sometimes they’ll tell you, “Oh, we’ve never done a pilot in our company history.” That is somewhat of a red flag, right? Maybe you should just sell them the software or maybe you should be just aware that they might need a lot more help because they’re not used to buying software or they’re not used to running an internal pilot for a product that they’re testing. Or maybe they tell you on the last three or four pilots we never purchased anything. Now, that’s important to know. Why? What is the pattern? What needs to be different with our pilot to make sure it will be a success? You want to always ask about successes and failures when it came to pilots in the past and learn from it. Related to that is the question that you asked about contract, timelines. A lot of the details of the successful pilots or the failed ones should be part of the way that you design yours. Many times what you can do, and this is a hack to get faster through procurement and through legal, is ask if they had a successful pilot, ask them if they have documentation that they would be willing to share with you. Ask them if they are willing to share that contract, right. Go, “Hey, instead of us sending you and your legal department our brand new contract and having to go through it, can you send us the contract you used with the last vendor that worked out successfully and we’ll have our legal team go over it and try to use that as a template so we can go quicker through legal and get it approved, since that was a contract that was already approved by your legal team before, right?” Often times you can tap into the contracts they used in the past and use them and edit them as templates to use something that will work and they will agree to faster rather than sending them something they’ve never seen and their legal team will take apart and take their sweet time around. That would be my biggest tip, a generic tip around how to make your pilot successful. Learn from their past failures and successes but also specific to what kind of a contract to put together. Whenever possible try to get a contract that they used before and use that as a template to speak up the process. All right, I think, Hiten Shah, that is it for us in terms of the biggest mistakes and kind of the framework that if you follow what we just discussed and what I shared on this episode, you’ll avoid some massive, massive mistakes. Then again, Hiten Shah and I can’t wait to hear about your current pilots, your failed ones, your successful ones, the struggles with the one that you’re trying to set up and help you specifically if we can. Don’t forget to give us a five star rating on iTunes and we’ll be here very soon. [0:10:15] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:10:16] Steli Efti: Bye bye. [0:10:16] The post 426: How to Create a Successful Pilot Program for Your Startup appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the value of overcommunicating. Communicating effectively in a startup is super important to the success of not just your startup, but also the businesses of those you serve. And it’s up to the leadership of a startup to communicate effectively. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why you need to be incredibly disciplined about how you communicate, why overcommunication is usually the reason projects succeed, the most powerful thing about “beating the drum” and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 01:10 Why you need to be incredibly disciplined about how you communicate. 01:59 Why overcommunication is usually the reason projects succeed. 03:13 Why you need to learn how to overcommunicate. 04:56 How Hiten writes more of his ideas down than share it with people. 06:37 How Hiten continues to beat the drum. 06:59 The most powerful thing about beating the drum. 07:40 An example of beating the drum. 08:33 Why you want to guide people to beat the right drum. 3 Key Points: You need to be incredibly disciplined about how you communicate.Whenever I see someone managing a team or project properly, it usually means they are doing one thing very well – overcommunicatingWhen people overcommunicate in projects, those projects always do well. [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about the value of over communicating or how to over communicate and why you want to do it all or maybe why you want to avoid it. So here’s the setup for this topic, Hiten. So there’s two sides to this, two reasons why I wanted to talk about this with you and why I felt this could be really valuable to our listeners. Number one, a lot of times when people ask me I get this question asked a lot, and I know you do too. Which is, how do you run a remote company? How do you run a fully distributed team? Isn’t it really challenging? Is it possible to do it well? And one of the core things I hear myself talking about again and again and again and again, is that I’ll say a lot of things that are important about running a distributed team or remote company with a great culture. But one of the things that I keep repeating when it comes to that is. You just need to be incredibly disciplined about how you communicate, you actually have to constantly over communicate, right? And I think that that’s just a muscle that’s good in any company, in any team. I don’t think this is just for remote companies. But then remote company, you can’t be lazy with it at all. You can’t get away with anything. If there’s any kind of lack of communication, things break down instantly. So I’m just keep repeating this theme a lot. And then the other thing that I notice is that there are people, whenever I see somebody do really well in managing a team or managing a project or championing something. It always goes back to them doing one thing particularly well, and that is that they over communicate. They state what needs to happen in a very clear way. They communicated in different channels and they keep repeating the message to keep everybody aligned and keep everybody on the same page as well as everybody remembering this thing that we’re trying to accomplish, the deadline that we have, the date, the reason why we’re doing things. And when people over communicate in projects, those projects always do well. They always do well. And whenever I see somebody managing a project, or a team, and I wonder well, I don’t hear much, there’s not much communication going on. They said big goals last quarter, but nobody ever repeated them. I don’t even remember what they are anymore. And I don’t know if they’re accomplishing them or not. There’s just not a lot of communication going on. Those projects always go bad. They never go well. So I am of the belief that when you deal with humans, you have to be great at communication in one part of communication, especially in team situations where many humans are involved,in that you need to learn to over communicate. Let me throw that out there. We’ve never talked about this before, because I’m dying to hear you’re probably going to say something that I didn’t expect. What’s your reaction to the topic of over communication? Is it good? Is it bad? What’s your take on it? [0:03:15] Hiten: Aargh. [0:03:16] Steli: I knew you would react this, like I knew it would be aargh. It meant something brilliant will follow. [0:03:25] Hiten: I used to and it’s publicly out there because I wrote about it. I used to over communicate in all the wrong ways. [0:03:35] Steli: Oh you mean “Hiten bombs” [0:03:38] Hiten: Yeah, that’s an over communication. It’s a form of over communication. And so that’s why I sighed. I’m like, all right dude, let’s do this. So I used to take every reaction and thought that I had in my head, not every but most of them and go shoot it off to my team or the team or people on the team have multiple businesses so it’d happen across many different areas. And it was out of excitement, more than anything else. I was just excited. I learned this thing, I should communicate it, I should let everyone know, I got to tell them so that they have the information I have, right? Of course. That made the message that I was sending everybody unclear. That made their work less disciplined, that made them distracted, that made them confused. I have changed and it was all the hard way or hard ways. And I’m still changing on some of the stuff. But now I write a lot more down. I used to have the need to go talk to someone about it. Now I write a lot more down. Like a lot. And sometimes I don’t share it with anyone. And they’re just notes about what’s in my head about the businesses or what’s going on with a certain thing, or what’s going on in the world out there, or what this competitor did, or what this friend told me or this advisor told me or this mentor, or this, whatever or you even, right? If I ask you something, anybody. And I write a lot more down, and that helps me keep my thoughts clear but my notes messy, if that makes sense. That’s cool because no one’s seen them. They’re out of my head, they’re not in my head, no one’s seen them. And then they naturally bubble up again. And they bubble up so that I’m just timely with communicating those things that are in my head that I took notes on, or were in my head that I took notes on. So, I know this is a little bit of a like, off the beaten path of the topic, because I’m going to get back to it before I hear your reaction to what I say. So that’s what I do now. And that helps me a lot to be clear, and how that relates to communicating or over communicating, or what I would probably more call repeating, beating the drum. [0:06:20] Steli: Beating the drum, yeah. [0:06:22] Hiten: I was told recently that, “Hey, Hiten continue beating that drum.” Just continue beating that drum. And this was very related to over communicate and things like that. I’m like, Okay, cool. I’m going to continue. This is from the general manager, Suneet. He’s our general manager at Crazy Egg and runs the business. And in the past, I would talk to him about stuff, and probably wasn’t as productive. But now I just got a drum to beat. I got the same thing, same tone, same tune, and I’m just beating it and he’s like, “Yeah, just keep beating that drum” I’m like, Okay, cool, right. That’s all I needed to hear. And I don’t think anything could be said more clearly to me if I say something, right. If someone says, “Hey, keep saying that.” Great, I could do that, that’s easy. Just tell me that I need to do it though, right? And he’s like, “Yeah, keep beating the drum.” So I got a couple drums I beat. And so the most powerful thing about this beating the drum concept, which some would call over communicating, others would call repetition is one thing. And it’s really powerful. It’s this idea that we need people in organizations, they don’t have to be the founder, CEO, leader necessarily, or even some manager that are going to beat the drum and keep repeating the thing, not in an annoying way, not always in the same way. But they’re just going to keep beating that drum because then it spreads throughout the organization and people start hearing it, they start believing whatever it is, and they start becoming it. And so a good example of this is if your business is basically not, like let’s say this is a problem that’s very common, let’s say that you have a lot of tech debt. So you have a lot of technical debt in your business, there’s a bunch of engineering, and a bunch of code that’s written that makes it so something that seemingly should be easy and take a couple hours ends up taking like a week to build or change. Well if someone were beating the drum about technical debt, and the importance of being able to move fast. Then eventually that technical debt will start getting fixed. But it’s one of those things where a lot of folks, engineers, and the team, they just want to build new stuff. So if no one’s beating that drum, you’re going to start getting a messier and messier situation, a bigger and bigger mess on your hands. And so someone beating that drum for weeks, even months sometimes is what’s going to lead to change. And you want to thank those people. You want to guide those people to beat the right drum. And you want to just let them loose the second that they’ve figured out what that drum is to beat and do it in the right way without them being annoying or anything like that. And if you are that person that can do that for your company, figure out what that drum is, what that thing that needs to be repeated right now is and do it, repeat it. So, that’s the way I look at it I used to look at this differently, where it was about communicating everything. Now, I’m all about just communicating the most important things and repeating the message to anyone that’ll listen. [0:09:23] Steli: See, this is why I love you Hiten because you actually sorted this out in a way that I wasn’t even aware of. Because when I say over communicate, I actually mean beat the drum. I mean, like champion a message but people could easily understand it for talk all the time, or say everything you do think. So when you started talking about it for like a second I was like, huh, I didn’t see why we’re taking this side road and then like a few seconds into it. I was like, oh I’m so glad we took this, Hiten you were clarifying this. Because the way I talked about it was not clear enough for everybody to be on the same page of what I mean, right? [0:10:17] Hiten: Yeah. [0:10:17] Steli: So that, was so beautiful. Eventually I actually just had to lean back and listen to you beautifully lay it out. Just do all the heavy work. [0:10:26] Hiten: I told you I’d get somewhere. You’re bringing up a really important point. And it’s about communication, which is, imagine if you went and told someone, “Hey, we need to over communicate, you should be over communicating that.” What are they going to do, right? They’re probably going to do something you didn’t intend. I don’t know what they’re going to do but what if you say “Hey, keep beating that drum.” They’re like, “Okay cool.” I’m in a parade, I gotta drum to beat, I’m going to keep beating that drum, right? Like, “Okay, cool got it.” It’s a very positive difference, right? And so I think the point that I reflect on, on this one is when you’re communicating, make sure that your message is heard in the way you intended it. Otherwise, what’s going to happen is you’re going to over communicate, or you’re going to beat the drum, and there’s a big difference. Over communicate means your message is not necessarily being heard, right? [0:11:20] Steli: Yeah. [0:11:20] Hiten: It’s getting lost in a lot of noise like I used to do, or it’s the wrong message because if the words are not resonating with people, and whatever they think it’s not what you think, but beating the drum is like, this is a drum. If I’m beating a drum, you better like the music, right? Better make sense to you, better like what’s coming out of there, or there’s no drum to beat, I’m doing the wrong thing again, right? [0:11:40] Steli: Yeah. [0:11:41] Hiten: So, I think about that a lot. And I would say that, like one strategy that I use to make sure that message is received is I ask people, “Hey, what do you think I meant?” And I do it in a non aggressive way. I might have sounded aggressive when I said right now but it’s, I would just like to make sure that we’re on the same page. And whatever way I said it, and then communicated, it makes sense to you, and is aligned with what I was thinking. Because if it’s not, then let’s hash it out, right? I have people on the team that, I literally said this to someone yesterday. It was actually my co-founder, Marie and I told her basically, if there’s anything that’s unclear, or confusing about what I’m saying to you, please just tell me, just tell me, I need that. Because I don’t always know how what I’m saying is interpreted by you. And we’re working on things together. And so if anything’s confusing, just tell me because I think people need to be reminded of that because one thing I’ve noticed too around this whole topic is that you tell people things, and they forget or not forget the thing, but they forget to ask you for clarification. Or they feel like they can’t, or they feel like they shouldn’t or they feel like worse yet, they feel like they should understand it. And so I’m looking for any piece of confusion in my communication in order to make sure that the party or parties that I’m talking to completely understand what I’m saying. [0:13:14] Steli: Beautiful, I love it. I think that the important thing is to kind of just make a distinction between the two things is that, if you just say everything you think you’re creating noise versus if you have a message that you’re repeating, you’re strengthening a signal potentially and there’s a lot of value in beating the drum, which means championing a certain message, singing a certain tune. The main value of it is that eventually it penetrates the minds and becomes such a part of the natural thought process, the natural rhythm of everybody on the team and in the company, that now they’re singing that tune in their mind all day long. They’re repeating that message, it always stays top of mind. They using it to make decisions. A good example of this is values, right? Some companies have values, they’re written on a website. And nobody on the team could ever cite or repeat what our values, right? Because nobody’s using them. Then there’s companies that create this unique internal language almost like a cult where they keep using the values to describe how they make decisions. They keep using them. Usually they make them a little bit quirky, right? It’s a little weird in a way that really stands out and eventually becomes part of the zeitgeist of that team part of the psyche of the team because they keep hearing it and then all of a sudden, people start repeating it and then, creates this unique language in this alignment tool of thinking and decision making because everybody’s always like, well. Let’s take the famous Facebook example they are like move fast and break things. If you keep hearing that then it becomes a tool to make decisions, you start seeing employees keep using the language all the time, and it becomes part of the company culture versus something that is only being said once. It’s very, it’s unrealistic to expect that you’re going to say something so profound to a group of people that they will not just understand and like it, but they will start using and repeating it in their mind and constantly thinking about it on their own immediately afterwards, it’s just not the way we work. So I think beating the drum is an important tool to make something really stick. Become in a way of beating the drum is beautiful because it’s about rhythm and this is as well about creating a certain type of rhythm that aligns the team and lets people walk and talk and think in a kind of, in the same direction some way. So it can be incredibly powerful. I’ve seen this works so well in many different situations. I think what prevents people often times before we wrap this episode, one last thing I’ll say on this on my end. That one of the main reasons that I’ve seen people struggle with this, even if they see the value, and they want to do it. Is they feel a little self conscious, a little weird, especially the more intelligent they are about saying the same thing twice, right? Or repeating themselves. They feel a little self conscious like, this is dumb. Why do I have to say this again? This makes me feel dumb or makes me feel like I don’t I treat other people in a weird way. So I don’t want to keep repeating myself. But I feel that’s such a limit. I completely understand why you would feel that way. And I do. I feel that way many times where I’m like, ideally I would just say this once, right? And I wouldn’t have to keep saying it. But it’s not about what I want. It’s not about looking smart. It’s not about my ego. I just ask myself, is this going to help my team, right? Is this my job? Do I have to beat this drum to use this lingo or this framework? And if I don’t, who will? And if nobody is there I should just do it and it shouldn’t be about this just feels dumb or not. And I don’t think that it’s smart as a human to think that repeating yourself is a bad thing. If you think about some of the best comedians, advertising in a way is about creating these catchphrases or these slogans or these whatever it is that these words and sentences that if repeated enough become part of the way people think and then the way people make decisions and feel. So repeating yourself is not a dumb thing. It’s actually, can be a very powerful thing if you do to the right way. [0:17:21] Hiten: Yeah, couldn’t agree more. I think it is a powerful thing. It’s not a dumb thing. It’s actually the opposite. [0:17:27] Steli: All right, this is it from us for today’s episode. We will see you very very soon and make sure don’t forget to beat that drum. [0:17:37] Hiten: See you. [0:17:38] The post 425: The Value of Overcommunicating appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to keep morale up in your company. In all startups, there are times where the moral or the mood of the team is not at it’s highest. When the morale of your team is low, it is important that you take steps to raise your team’s morale quickly, so that they can handle issues in your company better. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what morale is, why keeping up morale in your team applies to everybody, how to measure morale in your team and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:30 Why this topic was chosen. 00:40 Why keeping up morale applies to everybody in your team. 01:00 The definition of morale. 02:46 Why morale is a very interesting topic. 03:17 How to think about morale in your company. 04:03 How to measure morale in your team. 04:56 Why morale is important. 06:33 Why you need to ask people how they’re feeling about something. 3 Key Points: I don’t think this only applies to managers and leaders in your team. This applies to everybody in your team.Do you feel like the present is going well and the future is going to be better?If people are confident, they feel really great about what they are doing. [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah, and today we’re going to talk about how to keep morale up on your company. I don’t think this just applies to managers or leaders or founders. This applies to everybody on the team. I’m going to start off by saying that. Steli, what do you think? [0:00:19] Steli: Well, I think you couldn’t be more right. At the end of the day, first of all, I am going to do the Hiten Shah thing. I learned this from you Hiten. Let’s actually read the definition of morale. [0:00:34] Hiten: Let’s do it. [0:00:36] Steli: Let’s do it. Morale, what I found here is the definition says the confidence, enthusiasm and discipline of a person or group at a particular time. All right. Confidence, enthusiasm and discipline, those are interesting- [0:00:52] Hiten: Very. [0:00:53] Steli: … Words. I don’t think I would have picked any of these three if you had asked me to come up with word associations around morale. But I’m not sure which words I would have come up with alternatively. [inaudible] morale, if I wanted to describe it, it was like what is the outlook that people have on the future and what is their feeling about the present? Do you feel like the present is going well and the future is going to get even better? Is there an upbeat, positive, looking forward to, energized, motivated, inspired vibe, positive? Or are people having doubts, stress, struggle, misalignment, worry, thinking things aren’t going well, having doubt? A doubt and worry would probably be kind of the counter to morale in my free flow association. [0:01:52] Hiten: Morale. I think it’s a very, very interesting word and very interesting topic because when you think about morale, you might not be thinking about it too much. When you think about the definition, you say it’s confidence, it’s enthusiasm, it’s discipline. That’s three very different things, right? If people are confident, they feel really great about what they are doing and are confident in their ability to do it I would say in a business, right? [0:02:26] Steli: Right. [0:02:27] Hiten: Enthusiasm, that’s clear. You and I are always enthusiastic about this podcast. So everybody all right knows how that works. Then discipline, that a fascinating one. It’s this idea that you are actually getting the things you say you’re going to do and you want to do done, right? It’s the discipline to get the stuff done. You’re organized, you’re structured, you’re getting this stuff done. If you just take those three, then as somebody in a business right now you can do it and be like, “Okay. Let me look at my organization and see, do we have confidence? Are we enthusiastic, and are we disciplined?” If you just take those three things, by definition as you found out, they seem to be the way to think about morale at a company, or morale in general for yourself or as a group. [0:03:21] Steli: I love that you can take a word like morale, which I think even at the very beginning of this episode the two of us weren’t quite clear how to define, and when you break it down by the definition that we picked up from Google, you take those three more specific words and you ask yourself, “Well, what is the discipline currently? What is the enthusiasm currently? What is the confidence currently within me?,” if you’re trying to pick up or measure you’re own morale or within our team? That makes it more practical. These three things are easier to spot than if you ask morale. Morale is a little bit more hard to grasp, how to measure what that truly means. So I love that you instantly did what you always do so beautifully, Hiten, which is create a framework. [0:04:08] Hiten: Yeah, let’s just do it. Make it easy. [0:04:09] Steli: I love it. Let’s maybe even point out, this seems obvious, but usually the things that seem most obvious have the most potent wisdom in them because we don’t pay a lot of attention to them. Why is morale important? Why do we care that teams have high morale? [0:04:35] Hiten: That’s so good. You care because then they’re going to be able to deal with whatever challenges come and whatever the opportunities are in the business. If you have high morale, you’re motivated. That’s the assumption, right? What you’re trying to figure out, I think in great part, is the team motivated? Can they deal with what’s going to happen next? Are they able to execute, or are they stuck? Are they not enthusiastic? Do they lack confidence? Is there a lack in discipline on just being able to deal with the things that come? I think you can easily tell. This is the easy thing. The easy part is you can tell by the company and organization and people’s reactions in the moment when something bad is happening. Bad problem, a challenge or even as small as a customer support request coming in that is negative. You can figure out how that person is feeling, what their morale is based on their reaction. Do they react in a way that’s like, “Oh no, the world is ending?” Or something close to that. Or do they react in a way where they are like, “Okay, we got this,” or, “I got this,” or “I can figure this out?” I think about it like, when something happens and it’s critical, negative or seemingly like that, what does that feel like? What’s happening to a business, a company, the people in it? Another aspect of it would be what happens on a normal day? What’s the general sentiment of people and how are they feeling? This sounds so weird, but you just got to ask people. How are you feeling? What’s going on? Or how are you feeling about x? The number of times I ask people on my team that is probably pretty high. I would say “How are you feeling about x? How are you feeling about our marketing?” Or, “How are you feeling about where we’re going, what we’re going to ship next on our product?” Or, “How are you feeling about how sales are coming in right now?” I just ask people stuff like that. Depending on who it is, I’m going to ask a different question. I get some really good answers as to how they’re feeling. And it’s feeling, right? It’s soft. It’s not something where I expect a super crazy, tangible answer. But most of the time, people talk about the status of something or talk about how something is just not quite there, or it is there and they’re feeling great about it. That helps me understand essentially their morale. [0:07:15] Steli: I love it. I’ll throw out a thesis or a hypothesis, which is- [0:07:21] Hiten: Exciting. [0:07:24] Steli: … If you cannot answer the question, “How’s morale right now on the team?,” then it’s probably low. Can you really have a team that has high morale and you don’t know that, you don’t notice that and you’re not aware of that? I don’t believe that’s possible. I feel like for anybody who’s listening, who’s trying to figure out “How’s my morale right now?,” or, “How high is the morale in our team right now?” If you have a difficult time figuring that out, it’s probably not as high as it could be or should be. I feel like anytime morale on our team has been super high, it’s so obvious. It’s so awesome. There’s no second guessing. It’s the same thing with relationships. If you ask me, “Is your relationship with your co-founders good or bad?” I don’t have to think about this. This is not a difficult question to me. I’m not like, “Hmm, this is a good question. I’m not sure. Well, there’s some good things. There’s some bad.” No, it’s good- [crosstalk] [0:08:28] Hiten: It’s either one or the other right now. [0:08:30] Steli: It is good, right? I know that. The same thing is true when the team morale is high, you know it. So when you don’t know, you’re not sure, it probably means it’s not as high as it can or should be. Which leads me to I think the final question for this episode on the topic of [inaudible] morale, which is how do you make sure that there is a high morale within the troops, within the team and that you maintain that? What are the ingredients to keep morale high? Which means, again in the breakdown and the definition that self discipline, that enthusiasm and that confidence are high on the team. How do you make sure that these three things stay high and get high? [0:09:20] Hiten: Wow, yeah. Its awareness. It’s that question I ask. “How are you feeling about x?” I think it starts with awareness. Whoever wants to gauge morale. That’s awareness let’s say on the team when you ask people. I think what might be more important in some ways that we haven’t talked about yet is, “How do I feel?” You could answer the question about every part of your business right now just by answering the question, “How do I feel about x? How do I feel about marketing? How do I feel about sales? How do I feel about product? How do I feel about the team? How do I feel?” I found that to be really valuable for myself and to gauge my own morale about where we are at, where we are going and how I feel. I’m just going to double click, so to speak, on the thing I said already because I think that that’s one of the most powerful things to figure out awareness. You might have some thoughts on what you do with that. [0:10:12] Steli: Yeah, so what do you do with it? You know one funny thing? I don’t know if we have a resolution to this, but I find it funny. It says in the definition that morale can be something that relates to one person or a group, but I don’t think I’ve ever used morale as a word for myself. I maybe have talked about my mood. Maybe I’ve talked about my energy. Maybe I’ve talked about my state, I’m passionate, I’m excited, I’m depressed, I’m confused. I don’t think I ever either asked myself, “How’s my morale?” Or, I’ve never described, “My morale currently is very high.” I don’t think I’ve ever used those words. That’s interesting. To me, morale, maybe the way that we use it commonly always relates to a group of people, like a team, a group. The mood in the group basically. So you are always part of the team. Probably always part of that group that you are thinking about. So surveying yourself is a really good tool to figure out how the group feels. Because again, especially if your a founder or in a leadership position, it’s probably … maybe not. I was just about to say, if you feel really confident, really enthusiastic and really disciplined, that could mean that the team does too. But that may or may not be true. I think that, honestly, in many ways, I think if you hit on one of two things or both of these things, the sides of the medallion, typically morale is going to be high. Number one is winning. If you are, whatever word you want to call it, crushing it, winning, growing, hitting your goals, whatever it is. If the team perceives in the subtle context that you’re winning, that we are winning, we are progressing, we are growing, we are doing well, that’s going to play a huge part in the way people feel; how enthusiastic they are, how confident they are and how much discipline they want to use to keep that winning going. Positive reinforcement, what we’re doing right now is working, so I want to keep doing this thing every day. If you are not, if there’s not a sense of winning around, if everybody is working super hard and is super passionate and you never hit your goals and growth is really slow and things break and the product is buggy and retention shit, you’re not going to be confident. People are not going to be enthusiastic and they’re going to have increasingly a harder and harder time to be disciplined or to keep doing the same things or keep working really, really hard. I think that the honest truth is that morale is high in teams when teams perceive themselves as winners, and when they perceive their progress as being really, really good. The other side of the medallion is probably more a culture or an ethical thing. So I could imagine a team crushing it and quote on quote winning, but there’s a lot of lying going on internally. There’s a lot of politics. People treat others unethically. People take advantage of others. That can crush morale. That can make people feel really, really conflicted about wanting to be part of this team and want to be part of this group. If you have these two things figured out, if the team is winning and if the culture is strong, if people don’t perceive that there’s lying, deception going on and the culture is not toxic, then morale is probably going to be really, really high. If you have an amazing culture, but you’re constantly not hitting your milestones and progress is really low, morale is going to go down. I think it’s those two things that you really want to look at. The end of the day you need to figure out how to win as a start up. You need to figure out how to accomplish goals, how to progress, how to grow. It’s a number one goal. If you can empower, if you can attract the type of people and put them together in a team that allows them to win and to create great results, that’s going to make a big part of the morale in your team being high. The other think you need to take care of is that the culture is strong, that the ethics are strong, the values in the company are strong, the people are treated really well and as people, especially in difficult moments. If you do these two things, morale is a byproduct that will be high on it’s own. There’s nothing extra that needs to be done. [0:14:57] Hiten: Yep. [0:15:00] Steli: All right. This is it for us for this episode. I love these ones Hiten. When we start, the two of us don’t even fucking know where to go with this.[crosstalk] But we want to unpack these things together with the people that are listening here. Let’s unpack this and try to learn and go deeper and poke around and see what we learn and what we discover and how to approach this stuff in a way that really helps others. [0:15:26] Hiten: That’s the best part. [0:15:27] Steli: That is the most fun part. All right, so this is it for us today for starter morale. Hopefully the morale in your team is high and we’ll hear you very soon. [0:15:35] Hiten: See ya. [0:15:36] The post 424: How to Keep Your Team’s Morale Up appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Steli’s outbound recruiting hack. Hiring a new member of staff can be challenging. If you want to find the right person for the role, you need to invest a lot of time and sometimes money on the whole process. One way to approach the whole hiring process is by seeking the advice of people who are overqualified for the job, and this can lead to a lot of benefits for you. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how hiring for a role at Close is going for them, how approached the recruiting for the position at his company, how people can be very helpful when you seek their advice and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:41 Why this topic was created. 01:56 How Steli approached the recruiting of a position at his company. 02:44 How people can be very helpful when seeking advice. 03:31 How one simple question led to a ton of recommendations and referrals. 03:50 How this approach allowed Steli to meet people that he’d hire in the future. 04:38 How this approach helped him understand the quality of the available talent pool. 05:54 Why Hiten recommends more people do this strategy. 06:22 How this approach can help you build relationships. 06:41 Another benefit of this strategy. 3 Key Points: I did a lot of outbound recruiting.I met people that I know I’ll hire in the future.It was a very valuable calibration of talent for me. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hello everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: On today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we wanna share with you a [inaudible] recruiting hack that has been working wonders for me and have helped a lot of other people use. So this is kind of the hack of hiring people that are really hard to hire and getting smart in the process of it. Here’s the deal, a lot of you that have been long time listeners, you know that we’ve been looking for a director of marketing for quite some time. I put myself out there quite a lot with videos, and even with a podcast, tiny episode, 2 minute episode. Where I ask you listeners to help, and a lot of you did. We are very close to filling that position so this has been a very successful, even if it very intense recruiting effort. But one thing that I’ve done this time around that I’ve never done before that has worked really, really well, and I wanted to share, is something that I’ve used in sales as a strategy. But never in recruiting in this specific way, which is I did a lot of outbound recruiting. But the way I did it was, I didn’t reach out to people telling them I think you could be a good candidate, or maybe you’re interested in this job we’re looking for. I was reaching out mainly to people that seemed either slightly over qualified or drastically over qualified, and would tell them, I am currently looking to hire an executive in this position. I’d love 10 minutes of your time to get some advice from you on how to do that. A lot of people would take me up on that and would graciously offer their time and advice. Then what would happen, there were a number of benefits that came from that. One is that, one positive thing that happened, which is part of the strategy here, is that as I would describe passionately to them about the company, the opportunity, all the action that is going on and who we are looking for. Some self-identified and raised their hand and went, this actually sounds interesting, maybe I’m your person, right? Then we would engage into our conversation about that. Some people would not even entertain this because they were so clearly over qualified. I would have actually been shocked if they wanted the job. But those people would truly be at first, an advisor for me. So they would say, you know what, I’ve hired X amount of people in this position, here’s what I have learned. Do this, don’t do that. How do you think about that? What’s the team composition? They would strategize with me and give me pointers, advice, ways to think about, questions to ask that I haven’t asked. So I would learn a ton, and I would benefit from the experience from hiring this type of position. Then, I would always round it up at the end with asking them, well should, do you know somebody that fits the bill? Right? Do you know somebody that is incredibly talented? Not somebody that’s looking, somebody that would be perfect? Maybe we can hire that person, but I should know them. I should connect with them. More often than not they did. So it led to a ton of recommendations, referrals, and connections to super talented people and those are conditioned warm. So I didn’t ping these people cold, somebody the trusted and respected said, hey, you should talk to Steli. Maybe the opportunity they have is interesting. Even if not, I think you two should connect. So I got connected to a lot of really amazing candidates. The one more than the last added benefit to all of this, was that, well there’s actually 2, dammit. One is that I met some people that I know I’m going to hire in the future. That I can’t hire right now, but I’ve started the process. I have especially one person that I know, I’m going to hire next year. We’re not at the right stage, this person is kind of too senior and the timing doesn’t fit. But I know I wanna work with this person, and I know I’m going to hire this person successfully next year. So I am investing now, every month in this relationship. I found somebody incredibly talented that I wanna work with long term. That’s incredibly valuable. So I’m starting to invest in the relationships, so I can hire this person a year or 2. That was one, and the last benefit is, it was a very valuable calibration of talent to me. Talking to people that were over qualified actually made me understand better, what the overall talent pool is and how to judge the talent that was right in front of me with a better, more broader scale. So I didn’t just judge the talent based on the talent pool that was at my disposal. I judged them on the talent pool in the overall market. I talked to some people it was like, okay these are the executives at the top of their game and the best companies in the space. This is a good reference point for me. Although I knew that people existed that were that, it was different talking to them. It helped me really evaluate people and crystallize my idea on who I am looking for and how to judge them to add these conversations. So this has been super valuable journey. It was a lot of work. Right? As a lot good things are in life. It’s not a shortcut. It takes time, it takes energy. But the benefits have been really, really big for us. So I thought I’d share it with the world. I always love to share this stuff with you because you always add valuable stuff. You know, I’m dying to hear your response to the strategy. Have you ever done this? What am I missing? What’s bad about it? What’s good about it? What’s kind of your thoughts on doing this kind of [inaudible] advice-based recruiting. [0:05:46] Hiten Shah: I think its key. I think more people should do it. One, people love talking about themselves, right? Especially even at work and their achievements. So you’d be surprised at the response rate that you get when you’re looking to hire, and you want advice from someone who is in that role. Or is like even the manager of that role or whatever, what have you, right? It helps you build relationships too in that category or area of interest of yours. Cause if you’re hiring, its likely it’s an area of interest, right? If you’re hiring, you’re usually the hiring manager so to speak, and persons either gonna report to you or someone who reports to you. I don’t have much to add, Steli. I think this is something I wish more people would do. Its something that even for myself, when I’ve done it, its been really valuable to me. Its super key and you can get, not even free advice, cause it’s not about free advice. It’s more about how do you calibrate the roll that you’re looking to hire and how do you know whether someone’s good or not? If you haven’t really either hired for the role before or had experience in the role before, or even if you have, this can be really valuable to help you kind of make some connections to people that might know other people. Then on the sort of longer term end, folks that you might wanna work with in the future. Then you find people and relationships that you wanna invest in. So that you can sort of get ahead of this for next time, you know? Or the next role that you need to hire. I think it’s super valuable. This form of out-bound recruiting using advice as a way to get conversations and learn about other people, and also learn about the role is fantastic. [0:07:30] Steli Efti: Awesome. Alright, I’d love to hear everybody else’s thoughts, your feedback. If you haven’t tried this and want to try it, please do so and comeback to us and let us know if it worked, didn’t work, or what results were there. We always love to hear from your learnings and learn from them. So you can always get in touch with us hnshah@gmail.com steli@close.com Yeah, I mean hiring is one of the most important things any found, any seller can do. So getting better and better at that is a core competency has been a big focus of mine. So we’ll keep sharing all the lessons we learn and all the things we do, all the mistakes we make, to benefit you. We can’t wait to hear vise versa from you, your lessons learned, your tactics. But this is a recent one that really has worked tremendously well that I wanted to share with our listeners. That’s it for us for this episode and we’ll see you very soon. [0:08:21] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:08:22] Steli Efti: I thought you’d say, happy recruiting. [0:08:24] Hiten Shah: I was going to, actually. [0:08:27] Steli Efti: Beautiful, beautiful. [0:08:28] The post 423: Steli’s Outbound Recruiting Hack appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about introverts that learned to talk. It’s common to assume we know the difference between extroverts and introverts. One might be forgiven in believing that extroverts are talkative and outgoing people, while introverts are quiet and tend to be very private. However, this is not always the case. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the history of the startup chat, the idea of being introverted versus extroverted, the difference between an introvert and an extrovert, why categorizing people isn’t helpful and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:41 Why this topic was chosen. 01:00 The idea of being introverted versus extroverted. 02:11 The difference between an introvert and an extrovert. 03:20 Examples of introverts being extroverted. 04:05 Why categorising people isn’t helpful. 05:00 Why this might be more of an activity. 06:12 How one can use their fears as excuses. 06:44 How personality is a spectrum. 08:07 How it’s about stories you tell yourself. 3 Key Points: Everybody has people they could be extroverted with even if they consider themselves introvertsI’m not sure there’s a difference between an introvert and an extrovert.It’s not that helpful to think in absolute categories. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today, on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about a very fascinating topic. The topic is about introverts that learn to talk. That’s the title. I find it fascinating, I find it really fascinating, this whole idea of introvert versus extrovert. I’m going to sort of start it now that you’ve given me the topic, Steli, right before this, by saying, “Is there really a difference between an introvert and an extrovert?” That might be a really controversial statement. I think, my take, is that there are … That everybody has people who they can be extroverted with, even if they consider themselves an introvert. So I want to start there,- [0:00:57] Steli Efti: Beautiful. [0:00:57] Hiten Shah: … Because I know some self-proclaimed introverts, multiple ones. [0:01:02] Steli Efti: You live in Silicon Valley, how would you not? How would you not? [0:01:07] Hiten Shah: They tell me things like, “I don’t get energy from people.” But, these are the same people that I can talk to them, at least one of these two that I have in mind. I know that they’ll talk to me all day. They don’t have a problem talking to me. It’s just interesting to me to experience that, and yet, that person say, “I’m an introvert.” Sometimes, I think this is the whole point that we wanted to get to was, there are people who either consider themselves introverts, or very introverted, or have those qualities, that actually get out there and do things in the real world, and around people, and go speak like you and I do. It’s something definitely worthy of talking about, because, first of all, I’m not sure if there’s a difference. I’m not actually sure if I agree with the fact that there are people who are introverts and then there are people who are extroverts. I think there are just people. We tend to make up our own stories about what we like and what we don’t like, and who we are and who we aren’t. [0:02:15] Steli Efti: I love that. This is one of my favorite things about the podcast, is I’ll throw a premise at you, then you’ll step back and be like, “Is this premise even real?” And reframing it. So that’s part of the fun of this. There’s a part that I agree with and a part that I don’t. So what I like and agree with, is that it is mostly, most circumstances, not that useful to think in absolute categories. Label, introvert, extrovert, pick your label and then act accordingly, or pick a label that will then excuse your behavior, or create a box that you can now use as your limitations. I don’t like that, and I think that that’s bullshit, and you hit that point really hard and really, I think, powerfully. I completely agree with that. I also agree, I also love the kind of reframing it in a way where you go, “Hey, even if you think you’re an introvert, there are people you love to talk to. There’s people that you might be really loud, extroverted person towards.” So being extroverted or introverted might be much more of an activity versus a DNA personality thing that’s unchangeable. It maybe just means there are a certain type of people you love to be extroverted to. It might mean there are certain circumstances that are easy for you to be extroverted to. Or, it might mean that it’s convenient for you to be introverted, because you really haven’t faced your fears. The fear of being rejected, the fear of being laughed at, the fear of people not accepting you. So you use those fears, or you allow these fears to define you, and you gave it a label that says, “I’m introverted,” which now allows you to not face those fears and put yourself out there more. I agree with all of that. Now, the one thing that I have to say is that I have seen and observed, and I do believe it exists, I do believe that there are … People have a personality, and the personality can change, but they have one. I do believe that there is a spectrum. I have met people, or I know people very intimately, or really, really well, that will get energy from almost all human interaction. So they seek human interaction at all times. Those are people that never want to be alone, because they always get joy from having an audience or a group around them. They seek that out, and that’s how they design their life. Then, there’s the people that with most people, it will suck their energy down and drain them, so they avoid interacting with lots of people in most areas of life. And everything in between, there’s a massive spectrum here. But, I’m not sure if we are all exactly the same and we’re just choosing where we want to be, or based on our behavior, are placing ourselves, based on free will somewhere on the spectrum, without … Because they just know there’s nothing inherent in your DNA or your personality that would make you a little bit more or little less intro or extroverted. Does that make sense? [0:05:29] Hiten Shah: Right. Right. Yeah, I think … I’ll repeat something I said and see how it resonates. I think it’s about stories you tell yourself. I really think it’s about that. If you keep telling yourself you’re an introvert, you don’t get energy from people, or it drains you. Then, guess what’s going to happen, Steli? That’s just what you’re going to keep finding in the world. [0:05:54] Steli Efti: That’s true. Yeah. [0:05:54] Hiten Shah: That’s what you’re going to keep experiencing. It’s not to say that’s bad. If there’s something you’re doing there because it’s some subconscious thing that’s important to you, or you have some, whether it’s trauma or experience that makes you believe that. That’s fine. I’m not judging you for saying it. I’m more looking at it like, for me it works like this. I feel like I can go … I haven’t met many people like this, I think you’re like this too, but I can go all day talking to other people, and I can hit the end of the day and I could still keep going, and I don’t really need to stop. That’s on average, 80%, 90% of the people that I meet, or in general, the interactions I have. I can continue them. I can have … I mean, I’ve given advice to probably 30 founders back to back in 20 minute sessions or something like that. I don’t even know if the numbers add up there, but I think they do, it’s like 10 hours, right? I’ve done that before and it was fine. I didn’t go at the end of the day and … At the end of the day I wasn’t like, “Oh my God, I’m done.” I’ve had 12 user interviews in a day, maybe more. I think 12 is my peak. I could keep going. But, I think you mentioned this before we got on, which is, “Hey, Hiten,” you didn’t say it or label me, but you were implying that I was an introvert, right? [0:07:29] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:07:29] Hiten Shah: I’m wondering how you got that, because those tendencies I just described don’t necessarily mean … Wouldn’t necessarily make people think I’m an introvert. So then, how do I do it? [0:07:41] Steli Efti: Yeah, that’s a good point. That was the reason why I actually came up with the idea of talking about this, is because I feel like … I mean, with me it’s for sure, people think I’m the most extreme version of an extrovert, and they think that all I do all day long is kick in doors and scream at people, and I want to always have an audience. [0:08:02] Hiten Shah: Oh, man. [0:08:02] Steli Efti: Not true. [0:08:03] Hiten Shah: I know. [0:08:05] Steli Efti: I think with you, I don’t think with you it’s as extreme, because of your personality overall, and also your persona onstage or kind of any other public forum. But, I do still feel like a lot of people would think that you’re an extrovert just because you’re putting yourself out there, you’re a really good communicator, you give great talks, great interviews, you’re giving advice to so many people. You have a personal brand which then always equates to people thinking you’re a good communicator, a very charismatic one, which always translates into people thinking, “This is an extrovert.” [0:08:41] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:08:42] Steli Efti: I know that I’m not an extrovert in that box that I always want to talk to people, always want to be out there. I know that I, I think that’s also not true for you. [0:08:51] Hiten Shah: It’s not. Yeah. [0:08:53] Steli Efti: So what I wanted to accomplish, maybe the framing is wrong, but what I wanted to accomplish in the episode, is share that with our listeners so that people that listen to us that would self-identify as introverts, don’t think that we are just totally different human beings. There’s something to relate to, because we’re not always seeking an audience, or always seeking people to talk to. So it was more about showing a different side of us to our audience, that many people might miss about us. That was kind of the starting point of me wanting to talk about it. [0:09:28] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:09:29] Steli Efti: With you specifically, what gave me the impression that you could be sort of an introvert, that’s a good question, actually a damn good question. I don’t know if I have objectively … I don’t have an example that I can point to, and I don’t have you, your testimony. You’ve never told me, “I’m an introvert,” or something like that, right? But, I think just my observation of your personality and overall friendship over the years, definitely has me, it created the impression in me that you don’t just blatantly love talking to people or being extroverted at all times. [0:10:13] Hiten Shah: No, yeah. [0:10:14] Steli Efti: You prefer to put yourself out there, because it benefits you, your business, and the people. You want to provide value and help people. You enjoy it in the right context. But, it is something that it was not necessarily, I don’t know if … I actually imagine you, you should correct this if it’s wrong, because it’s fascinating. But, if you tell me, “Hey, Steli, imagine the seven year old Hiten at a playground.” I actually imagine a kind of a more quiet child, a more smart child that rather would play with some complicated toy and pull it apart and put it together, than the one that’s like painted in the faces like, “I’m the captain of this group,” and there’s bunch of children that are like, “Yeah,” and you’re like, “Follow me, we’re doing this.” I don’t imagine you that way, and I might be wrong, this might be a stereotype. But, I think it’s just more over the years, the image that was created in my mind. [0:11:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think you’re right. I definitely wasn’t the painted face child making people run around behind me, or in front of me, or whatever. Yeah, this is interesting. I just find it that I want to be able to do whatever I’m best at in my life. Best at could be things that I want to learn, or things like … Best at doesn’t mean I’m best at it right now. What I’ve found is that by talking to other people, I can get better at communicating. By writing, I can get better at communicating. By being in a group, I can learn how that dynamic works, my ideas get better. So even by speaking, like not onstage or something, the ideas get better and I learn a lot. So I think one way to think about this, if you feel like you … Whether you’re drained by people, or whatever your story is in your head, one thing to think about is, “What am I … What can I do? And, how can I do more of that, and either develop a skill that I have, or find a reason to not be so introverted, if you want to call it that, and get out there and do some things.” So for example, one of the main reason I like to practice communication and talking to other people, is because for me, one of the most important things in business is being able to talk to your customer. That could be sales, that could be research for your product, whether it’s customers that aren’t your customers yet, or customers that are your customers, then learning from them to make the product better and the experience better for them. So those kind of skills, that skillset of communication and relationships is pretty important to me. What I realize is if I’m not practicing it, that I’m not getting better at it. Then, so one of my simple things that might be helpful to some other folks is that, these things are important to grow your business, these things meaning talking to people. I try to find every opportunity I can to do it. I mean, just the other day I tweeted about wanting to talk to agencies and service businesses that have [crosstalk]. [0:13:35] Steli Efti: Yeah, I retweeted that. [0:13:39] Hiten Shah: Yeah, thank you. What I realize is there’s a certain group of people for my business, FYI, that I haven’t been talking to, and these group of people are interesting. I know I can offer some value to them, I’m sure they’ll take me up on it, and that’s fine. But, they can offer value to me, I want to understand them better. So I just did a tweet on a whim and I don’t know how many interviews I have now next week. But, I actually had one now before this call. I have another one today, and then I have a whole bunch next week. We’re on a Friday right now. I kind of forced myself to do some of that stuff. The reason being, I wanted to improve the way I communicate, I want to improve the way my relationships are. A lot of that has to do with how I speak and how I talk to people. [0:14:26] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right. I think this was a fascinating conversation, and I think one that is unexpected for people that are listening to us, to talk about are we introverted or not, does this exist? How do we deal with the act of talking to people and interacting with them. If you were a self-identified introvert or extrovert, and you have opinions you felt like you wanted to agree or disagree, or add something to this conversation, we’d love to hear from you. Send us an email, HitenShah@gmail.com, Steli@close.com, we always love to hear and learn from our listeners. If you haven’t done this yet, please do us the favor, do yourself the favor, go to iTunes, give us a five star review, right something about what this podcast means to you, why you’re listening to us. We’ll really appreciate it, it really helps the community grow. I think this is it for us for this episode, and we’ll hear you very soon. [0:15:17] Hiten Shah: Take care. [0:15:17] The post 422: Introverts That Learned to Talk appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the benefits of therapy for a founder. Running a startup comes with a lot of strain and stress, and if not managed properly, can affect your mental health. As a founder, if you feel you need help to get you over these trying times, it may be a good idea to talk to a therapist. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the history of the startup chat, why the name was chosen, why the show is all about startup mentality and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:41 Why this topic was chosen. 01:25 Steli’s experience with therapy. 02:24 How we sometimes give the answers we want to give. 03:18 Why every therapy session is different. 05:05 More on Steli’s experience with therapy. 06:00 What makes a therapy valuable. 07:14 Steli’s thoughts on mental health. 08:39 How to find the right therapist. 09:00 Why it’s important to understand the you’re paying them to help you. 3 Key Points: In some ways, a lot of our conversations borderline therapyWith therapy, some of us might give the answer that we want to give, not the answer that is true to us.One of the things I’ve learned about myself is that I can make some go around in circles in therapy.You’re paying them to help you. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today, on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about a topic that’s a little bit en vogue, especially in Silicon Valley startup land. But, maybe even further out than that, I would say. This idea of therapy for founders, particularly. I think it’s going to be an interesting topic, just considering how much attention it’s getting right now. It’s really about mental health. Right? [0:00:32] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:00:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah, let’s talk about it. What’s your experience with therapy? [0:00:39] Steli Efti: I’ve not been in therapy as an adult. I mean, in some ways, a lot of our conversations borderline therapy. [0:00:47] Hiten Shah: Like what? [0:00:49] Steli Efti: Especially the ones we don’t record, for many reasons. [0:00:52] Hiten Shah: Very true. [0:00:54] Steli Efti: But, so in a sense, I do feel like I have had many, many therapeutic discussions with very special people. But, I’ve not been to a therapist as an adult. I have thought about it though, on and off, as like maybe this would really benefit me, but I didn’t … Nothing propelled me to push that though forward. Although, I don’t think that that’s something that maybe I’ll decide I’ll do that sometime soon. I don’t know. As a child, I went through therapy for a little while. Maybe that jaded me a bit, because after my … I think after my father died, maybe I was acting up a little bit in school. I think my mom brought me to some kind of a test doctor or something. They gave me a … They did a bunch of tests with me, and then they gave me this multiple choice questionnaire that was basically like trying to figure out if there’s something wrong with me. I don’t know why, but I remember very consciously answering those questions in a way that I was like, “They probably want to …” “Do you want to be part of a group or be alone, because you’re afraid that people won’t like you?” “They probably want me to say that.” I found like fucked up … I feel like I knew what I had to ask for them to say that it’s some psychology issue. I don’t know why I wanted that. But, I know that I followed that. Like I didn’t really honestly answer that thing. [0:02:13] Hiten Shah: I think, Steli, you just brought up a huge point. With therapy, some of us will give the answer that we want to give, not the answer that is true to us. [0:02:27] Steli Efti: Yeah, that is fair. [0:02:29] Hiten Shah: That’s what I’ve found in therapy, where I’ve … A few years ago I went to five different therapists. I did their minimum amount of sessions they’d let me, and I wanted to understand what that field was all about. I know friends who are therapists, multiple friends. I’ve spent time talking to them as well, and had sessions with them just to kind of understand it, but also see what value it can bring for me. One of the things I learned about myself is I can make someone go in circles in therapy, and the therapists know what you’re doing. I find that kind of fascinating. So if you’re somebody like that, it’s going to take you a little bit of time, or a bunch of tries to find a therapist where you’re not willing to do that to them. [0:03:21] Steli Efti: Yeah. That’s interesting. [0:03:23] Hiten Shah: Yeah, keep going. [0:03:24] Steli Efti: Yeah, no, that’s really good stuff. I do think, to jump to that conclusion before I go back for a second, I do think that, just like everything else in life, you cannot take a thing and overgeneralize it as if no matter who the therapist is, the experience of “therapy” will be the exact same “product” that you are consuming. It’s not true. There’s people that are therapists that I would never send anybody to, because I think they have massive issues of their own, and they’re not maybe in a position- [0:03:57] Hiten Shah: Most therapists did. No offense to therapists. [0:04:00] Steli Efti: No offense. I would agree with that. But, I would also say some of them that are having big issues of their own, still maybe are capable of being useful to others, and some aren’t useful to others. I think they are harmful. You cannot just say therapy, as if it’s like this unified product, that’s going to be the exact same experience for everybody. Right? Because, it’s people doing therapy. It’s like, do you like singing? Do you like songs? It depends on the song. It depends on the band. Not every band, not everybody, not every human on Earth that performs the action of singing is doing it at the same quality or the same liking or taste to you. So I couldn’t agree more with that. Coming back to my experiences, to wrap that up, as a child, they did put me in therapy for a little while, and I do remember that that therapist, and the experience we were going through, seemed very … It just seemed like somebody that was just racking up the hours. She was asking questions that were so leading, it was so obvious to me what she wanted me to say. So it’s just playing. I was playing therapy with her. I was telling her the things she wanted to hear. She was very pleased with herself. Then, we would play these games. But, I didn’t really … Nothing really was improving. I remember at some point, my mom after a couple of months, because this took a lot of money and a lot of effort. Both things my mom didn’t have much to give of. So at some point, my mom was like, “What are you doing in therapy, and how do you feel? Is this like … Does it feel good? Do you really like the person? Do you trust them? Have you …” Because, the behavior stuff that was bad was still persistent. Nothing really was changing about my behavior. So my mom, at some point, started thinking, “Is this shit working? Do you like it at least? Is this good?” Then, when I told her kind of my experience honestly, my mom was like, “All right, we’re taking you off of this then.” Nothing has changed, we’re spending a ton of money, and if this … If what you’re telling me is happening is happening, then why are we doing this? To me, I think that was a … That was an experience that made me think, “Maybe therapy is just a bunch of bullshit.” I’ve come today, after reading a lot of books, and being very interested in the topic, and having many friends, just like yourself, that are actually therapists. I don’t believe it’s bullshit, I think it can be incredibly valuable. But, I also agree and believe that it really depends on who your therapist is, who you are, and how you approach the topic, I think can make a massive difference. That’s the same way I feel about the whole issue of mental health, especially in the world of startups, or business, or entrepreneurship. On the one hand, I’m really, really happy that it’s being discussed more, and that people are more open about anxiety, about depression, about their vulnerabilities. I think that is incredibly valuable. There are times where I spot a bunch of bullshit around this. Like where, at least my interpretation is that people are now using this as a way to make themselves a victim, and to relieve themselves of responsibility. I’ve seen people that I know quite well, self-identify as having a mental health issue. I’m not a therapist, and they might very well be. But, sometimes it’s just also a very convenient thing to classify yourself as somebody that has a disease, so it’s this thing that you’re not really responsible for. So every good thing comes also with some bad. I think that [inaudible] it’s a really good thing that it’s being discussed more. Mental health is a bigger topic in today’s world. I think that’s a good thing [inaudible]. Sometimes, I do roll my eyes and think, “You don’t have PTSD because your startup that you were doing for six months ended up failing. You didn’t go to a war zone and kill a bunch of people and see a bunch of your friends die, and then you come back to normal society and you have a difficult time dealing with it.” To me, that doesn’t seem like a good framework to apply to yourself in order to deal with maybe your burnout, or your stress, or whatever it is. Maybe you do feel really beaten up emotionally through the experience. But, using heavy terms like PTSD after doing a six month startup just rubs me the wrong way, I think. But, [inaudible] I do think therapy can be really, really great. But, I think it depends so much on who you are and where you are in life right now, what you need out of it, and finding that right person. How would we even go about giving somebody advice that is curious about therapy to find the right person? Since we do know a bunch of people in that space, how would you go about finding the right therapist for you? One thing that you mentioned was finding somebody, and these are my words, it’s not exactly what you said, but, I think what I heard was, finding the type of therapist that you don’t want to deceive or play games with, that you are willing to be completely honest and vulnerable with. [0:09:04] Hiten Shah: You’re paying them to get help. You’re paying them to help you. That is really important to understand. You’re not paying them because they know better than you. That’s another important thing to understand. For me, I would do my best to talk to these people and ask them how they work. What is their approach? What are the things they’ve studied? How do they feel about helping somebody? Not just feel, but what is their method, because that’s a therapist. There’s other things that I know we’re going to talk about and publish about coaching. Right? [0:09:44] Steli Efti: Right. [0:09:44] Hiten Shah: Which is a separate thing. One of the reasons, I think, this got in your mind is I’ve sent a few tweets out about therapist and coach, I’m like, “What’s the difference?” One question I asked was, “What’s the difference?” Another question I recently asked is, “Do you go to one?” It turns out, most people don’t go to a therapist. I think it’s like 20% or less. My ultimate thing here is, you are usually going to be dealing with something in your life that triggers you to go to a therapist. That’s usually what I’ve seen over and over again, whether it’s some kind of stress, or some kind of event. Like in your world, where you started having some different behavior, changed behavior, and your mom decided, “Hey, check this thing out.” So to me, finding one has everything to do with interviewing them and figuring out who can help you. My opinion is you want to understand how they do it. Usually, a recommendation from a friend is useful, at least getting conversations. But, just because a friend recommended somebody doesn’t mean that you’ll like them or work with them. Another thing I’ve found is, you could research the different methods of therapy. There’s a number of them. You could see what works for you. When you research it, what do you gravitate towards? What resonates with you? Then, try to find therapists that specialize in that area. [0:11:15] Steli Efti: Yeah, and then the last thing that I’ll add to this is a tip before we wrap up this episode. I think, in general, the sentiment of both our side is that we are all for it, and we think that it can be an incredibly useful tool for people and for founders in startups, specifically, or any person or startup, to have a therapist. If you find the right one, it can be of incredible benefit to you in your life. So there shouldn’t be any stigma around this. But, finding the right one with the right approach is the most important thing. So my last tip on this, on my end is, trust your gut. I find that a lot of times, especially in areas that we’re not experts in, people doubt their own gut, their own intuition. If you try to see a few therapists to find the right person for you to try this new thing out, and there’s something that rubs you the wrong way, or there’s some gut reaction that you don’t trust this person, you don’t like this person, or you don’t feel secure or safe with that person. You don’t have to justify that. You don’t have to have any good rational explanation for that. Just trust you gut. If you feel unsafe, or not comfortable, or in any way like a person that you’re interacting with isn’t doing the right thing, then find somebody else. You don’t have to be an expert in therapy, and you don’t have to be a therapist yourself. I find, a lot of times, people might go to the first therapist, be in sessions, find them not of benefit to their lives. But, then have this inner voice that goes, “Well, maybe it takes a long time. Maybe I don’t understand it. Maybe I need to give this person a lot more …” like this self doubt, “Because, I have never done this before. I don’t know how it’s supposed to feel. I’m not an expert. I don’t know why I feel weird about it.” You don’t have to know. Trust your gut. I find that our instinct are much better than we give them credit for. So with this type of thing, where you really need to trust the person, to fully open up, for things to be able to be uncovered, and then for change to be able to arrive and happen, you need to trust that person. You need to feel good about that person. If you can’t get there emotionally, you don’t have to get there rationally. You don’t have to have an explanation for it. Make sure you to trust your gut on these things to avoid wasting a ton of time, energy. Or, maybe even, instead of benefiting from it, getting harm from it because you worked with the wrong person. [0:13:49] Hiten Shah: Yep. It’s just like everything else, right? Try stuff, see what works for you, and if it doesn’t work for you, move on. I think there’s a line. What is it? Take the best, leave the rest. Yeah, I think that applies to a lot of things, particularly helps you have a sort of better life when you think of things like that. Take the best, leave the rest. That’s what I’m going to leave you with. [0:14:16] Steli Efti: That is it. All right. That’s it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very, very soon. [0:14:21] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:14:22] The post 421: The Benefits of Therapy for a Founder appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.