The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the value of hype in your marketing campaign. In the startup world, it is common for a business to try to build some hype around a product that they are about to launch. However, this can leave a sour taste in the mouth of users, if the product doesn’t meet expectations, and it can hurt a brand In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how some companies are really good at being out there, the good and the bad kind of hype, how to separate hype from the quality of a product, and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:24 Why this topic was created. 02:00 Hiten’s thoughts on hyping your product. 02:40 How some companies are really good at being out there. 02:54 The bad kind of hype. 03:46 How to separate hype from the quality of a product. 03:59 How a great product will sell itself. 04:54 How there’s no perfect product. 05:40 There’s no such thing as a product that everybody loves. 06:39 How hyping is a balancing act. 3 Key Points: I think there’s good hype and bad hype. There are many reasons why a product might not work for your company.If people are sharing things about a product, unsolicited, you’ll see it [0:00:00] Hiten Shah: Ask me. This is when it started. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:08] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:09] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about the value of hype in your marketing, or for your company. Here’s what I want to talk about Hiten. Hyping things. I think maybe the tech industry this has been a discipline that’s been practiced quite a lot. Some companies had mastered that. Some companies were really, really great at hyping the next big thing they’re launching. The thing they’re launching, why it’s the most amazing thing and will change everything forever, and then there was, I think, a counter trend to that where companies became much more, or startups specifically became much more engineering driven, so much closer to being truthful. The truthiness factor went up a lot and it was just like, “Let’s just tell people what the product does and what the features are and functionalities.” We’re going back and forth, I feel like between how much tech companies and startups are hyping what they’re doing, versus how much they’re understated, but I recently in B2B SaaS I recently see a resurgence. There’s a bunch of companies out there that, to me, seem to be particularly good at hyping. Creating hype around their brand. Creating hype around their product launches, and then when you look under the hood, they’re shit is not that exceptional. Their technology is not that crazy. Their things break. A lot of when you dig a bit deeper, there’s a lot of disappointment for people that look really deep, but what I realize is that the vast market doesn’t look that deep. They just buy into the hype. I wanted to ask your opinion on is hype good or bad? Should hype be a thing that you excel at as a company or not? What are the dangers? Let’s just digest this, or dissect this a tiny bit. [0:01:57] Hiten Shah: I think there’s good hype and bad hype. Immediately when you started asking about this topic and wanting to talk about it, which I think is a really important topic. My first thought was, “Well, what is hype? Do we need to worry about that? I don’t know.” Because in a way, hype implies smoke and mirrors or something that has no substance. It implies that maybe. I want to get away from that though. I want to talk about the fact that I think what you were really getting at is some companies are really good at being out there, and basically building out a brand for themselves. We can call that hype. They’re hyped up. They have hype, and things like that. I think that there’s a bad version of that and there’s a good version of that if we were to really wanting to get practical. Then there’s the other aspect of it, which I think could be separate which is, we see all this hype for the company, then you end up actually going deeper in. You, I don’t know, you sign up for their product. Then it doesn’t work for you, or it’s buggy, or something like that. There are many reasons why a product might not work for you as an individual or as a company and it’s working for other people. I think that it’s very easy to say, “Oh, that company just hypes themselves up, and their stuff sucks because it didn’t work for me.” Right? [0:03:33] Steli Efti: Right. [0:03:34] Hiten Shah: I have a hard time with this, because I’m as you know, and probably everyone who’s listening, even you, we’re just very critical, in general, because that’s just how we are. We’re critical and we want to understand things, and we want to dig deep in and say, “Oh, is that crappy or not?” We both have our different ways of doing that, and that makes us slightly judgemental too. Myself, I had to divide this up and think about it more objectively and say, “There’s good hype and bad hype and let’s separate that from whether the product works or not.” The reason for that is, if people are sharing good things about a product out there unsolicited, you’ll see it. It’ll be in conversations you’re having with people. It’ll be on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram. People will just be talking about this company in one way or another, and if they’re talking about the company in reference to their product, you will see it. What you want to think about is, “Is that product right for me or not.” Based on the people that are sharing it. I think that’s really important. I’m going to do my best not to name any companies on this. [0:04:37] Steli Efti: Same here. [0:04:38] Hiten Shah: You’re doing the same. [0:04:39] Steli Efti: Yeah, same here. [0:04:40] Hiten Shah: That’s judgemental, critical and I think defeats the purpose of anybody listening learning from this. That’s one aspect, and then I’ll say one more thing, and then I know you’ve got thoughts on this. I would like to cut that out of it. I’d like to cut the idea that people are talking about the company and the product. Specifically the product, not the company, out of the equation because I that there’s a lot of judgment we can have about a product regardless of how good or bad it is. There is no perfect product. There’s only a perfect product for you maybe. [0:05:08] Steli Efti: I love that. I love that and there’s the other part of that that is … You could check out a product from any number of company, no matter how successful it is, and you’ll find buyers, or people that will be like, “This is bullshit. Why is this buggy? Why is this broken? This is dumb.” Which goes to show you, there is no such thing as not being criticized. There’s no such thing as being the type of company, or building a product that everybody loves. Even when we say, this is a product that everybody loves, we mean many people. [0:05:43] Hiten Shah: Yeah, not everybody. [0:05:44] Steli Efti: Well, not everybody. There’s not a product or company out there, that doesn’t have people that think it sucks and it’s [crosstalk]. [0:05:51] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:05:52] Steli Efti: Right? Especially for the strengths. Some companies we admire for their brand, or we admire for one thing that we all agree that done incredibly well at, and then people will look at that one thing that’s even their strength and go, “This sucks. I hate particularly this thing about the company.” There’s no such thing. I think my one point on the hype thing, on the topic of hype, I think it’s a question about a balancing act. I think that typically companies and people, and companies are just a collection or startups are collection of the few people that are involved with it, we tend to be on one end or the other of the spectrum typically. I find that most people, the majority is not somewhere in the middle. By default, we’re on the edges of something, and so we’re even on the end of the spectrum that is, “I’m not comfortable with hype or with promoting what I do, or what my company does or selling it, or being overly enthusiastic about what I’m doing, because that enthusiasm puts me out there for more criticism because that enthusiasm means that if somebody disagrees it’s going to really hurt me. It might make me seem a certain way that I don’t like to have in terms of my appearance in the market, so I’m always going to be really understated. Never talk about what I do. Never pitch what I do. Never sell what I do and just let the magic of the value of my product acquire all this attention and get all these customers.” That’s one end. The other end, there are more people on this end in the startup world, in my opinion, and then there’s the other end, which is a smaller group that is just naturally comfortable with bullshitting, lets say. Stretching the truth. Maybe slightly over confident and over excited about everything they’re personally involved in, and some of that can be inexperience and youthfulness, and sometimes it’s just a personality trait. I find that on both of these ends, you are creating problem and troubles, in one way or another. I find that wherever you are on the spectrum, what you need to do as a company, and as a startup, is just working towards moving further to one side or the other. Getting more to the middle. If you’re not comfortable with hype, get more comfortable thinking about it as putting yourself out there more, and get outside your comfort zone and push yourself to get better at that. Because there’s nothing wrong with putting yourself out there. There’s nothing wrong with actually … This is something I have trouble with. We should talk about this one day. I’m pretty sure you have the same trouble. It’s speaking well about yourself. Saying something like, “I’m really amazing at blah.” That just feels wrong to me. I have a visceral reaction to like, “I don’t want to say anything nice about myself out loud.” There’s a problem with that. Getting comfortable with that I think is one big part, and pushing your company and promoting it and putting it out there, and then for people that are doing a bit too much of that, maybe it makes sense to think about when to use it, and when not to over use it, and try to make sure that what you promise and what you deliver are not just black and white, completely different worlds. I think that’s it for this topic. We’ll wrap this up and ribbon it up, and we shall hear you and see you very soon. [0:09:00] Hiten Shah: Hype it up. [0:09:01] The post 410: The Value of Generating Hype 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 meditation for founders. Meditation is an ancient practice that helps those who do it control their mind and consequently their lives. It’s a practice that is becoming increasingly common in the startup world and this isn’t surprising as meditation has many benefits. In this episode, Steli and Hiten they got into meditating, the different things you can experience when you meditate, how meditation is much more about being than doing and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 01:25 Hiten’s point of view on meditating. 02:24 How meditation is becoming common in the startup industry. 03:25 How meditation isn’t something you get good at. 04:30 How there’s a lot of different things that you can experience when you meditate. 05:28 How Steli got into meditation. 06:51 How hypnosis can be very directive. 11:58 How meditation is much more about being than doing. 10:10 How meditating has affected Steli. 3 Key Points: I didn’t start meditating until a few years ago.I don’t think meditation is something you get good at.I think there’s a lot of different things that you can experience when you meditate. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah. Today, on The Startup Chat, because Steli insisted, we’re going to talk about meditation. [0:00:11] Steli Efti: Exactly. This is basically … We could call this the podcast, Because Steli Insisted, that would be a cool podcasting title. Steli and Hiten Shah, because Steli insisted. Well, we’ve done an episode before on mindfulness, which was episode 286, 2-8-6 Mindfulness For Founders. We touched about that subject in very broad terms and we talked a little bit about meditation, but I thought it’d be cool to take meditation as a single focus for an episode, and talk a little bit about that in the context of you and I, which then puts it in context for, I think founders and CEO’s and people in startups. Since meditation’s become quite popular over the last couple of years, especially in the startup community, but even more broadly so. Here’s my question to you and I’ll answer that question as well, which is, A, do you meditate? And B, if so, tell us why. [0:01:11] Hiten Shah: All right. I guess I’m going to go first. I didn’t start meditation until a few years ago, but I grew up in a house where my grandmother meditated pretty much 75% of the day. She was either reading scriptures … I grew up in a Jain household, so it’s a religion between Buddhism and Hinduism. We don’t eat meat and things like that. I’d say I’m definitely practicing a lot of the principles of Jainism, and I go to the temple whenever I get a chance, but not on a regular schedule, so I actually hadn’t really meditated beyond any of the religious activities growing up. Then more recently in the last three or four years I started meditating. One of the biggest reasons is because my co-founder, Marie, is really into meditation, and helped me see the sort of benefits of it. There’s a lot of movement right now in the sort of tech culture around meditation and things like Transcendental Meditation and there’s the [inaudible], which is a breathing one. Then there’s meditation retreats, silent retreats and all these kinds of things as well, so there’s a ton of this stuff going on and a lot of different methodologies and techniques and things like that. I’ve tried a number of them in different ways, and I think for me, to answer the question more succinctly after that background is I do my best to meditate at least once or twice a day. I do like finding a mantra in the moment that might pop in my head, and say it if I’m feeling really intense about something, or something like that. I don’t really care about the thoughts part of it, or any of that, like, oh, go clear mind, or any of that. There’s a way to get to a place where you can be in a meditative state and still be speaking to people. Or you can be in a meditative state and just go into one pretty quickly and be there. I’m not saying I’m any good at anything. I think meditation’s not something you get good at, it’s just something you do and there’s waves of it. Right now I’m going through a wave where there’s a bunch of things that are consistently on my mind, and it’s actually a little bit harder for me to get into that state when I actually try. When I don’t try, it’s much easier, which is really weird. But anyway, to me, I want to be in a meditative state as much as possible, because I feel like I’m more present in the moment. My practice, so to speak, is all about getting to that place. How can I be in that state more often without actually having to think about it? How can I be in that sort of presence that I like? Then on top of that, I believe that, and then I’ll leave it at this for a second until you kind of share your approach. I believe that the benefits of meditation are unlimited. The amount of depth you can go into, even meditating for an hour, two hours, three hours, doing these long things, there’s a lot of power there. There’s a lot of … Not even, power’s the wrong word, but there’s a lot of impact it could have. There’s a lot of, what I meant by power is there’s a lot of different things you can experience when you meditate that I think we’re barely scratching the surface of, and quite frankly like, it’s somewhere in the esoteric side of things, all the way, like different dimensions and planets and aliens. You can get into all that kind of stuff, all the way to simply being one with the world, which almost is another end of it, which is like, I’m here, I’m in my little bubble so to speak, but yet I am everything in all those theories. I’m a student of meditation, I’m a student of mindfulness and I will be for the rest of my life. That’s kind of where I’m at. Really for me, the trigger was meeting somebody who really valued meditation a lot and taught me about it, so my co-founder Marie is the one who really shed light on that and taught me a lot about it just by doing it, not by specifically being like, “Hey, I’m going to teach you,” but more like just embodying it and meditating and sort of helping me see things, then I’ve been just devouring whatever I can. As esoteric as it gets, just to understand and know and try things, all the way to just the simple idea of just being present in the moment. [0:05:39] Steli Efti: I love it. For me, it started out very differently, so I didn’t have meditation around me culturally growing up. [0:05:49] Hiten Shah: At all? [0:05:49] Steli Efti: I had the opposite. I had how to be … I had a lot of the television is on at all times. 24/7, so silence is kind of drawn out by noise. That was kind of, a big part of me growing up was when we were not, even when we were talking, I remember even at lunch or dinner, the television was always playing. I remember myself just being in a state where I needed noise. I was never just sitting somewhere silently. There was either music or television playing at all times. I didn’t have that growing up around me. I first got into hypnosis before I ever got into the practice of meditation. Hypnosis was something that kind of opened the door to a certain degree just sitting there silently and just focusing on … I think focusing on breath as the power of breathing. I think first I got introduced to that by the concept of hypnosis, but hypnosis always was a much more directive way of getting into a deep state, but then doing something practical with it, right? Trying to trigger something, learn something, tap into a piece of information. Hypnosis can be very directive in a way that meditation isn’t at all, but I think it was my first kind of soft introduction into different states of minds and the importance of breathing and the power of breathing. Then later in life I started picking up books about mindfulness and meditation. I started meditating probably 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago I started experimenting with meditation. Mindfulness, on and off over the years have done all kinds of things from going to two or three hour long meditation group sessions to just meditating for two minutes a day in the morning by myself, to reading a lot of books, so I’ve been practicing and studying the topic at least for a decade plus. I find it’s such a fascinating thing, because meditation to a certain degree, when you meditate, to me is such a beautiful contrast to most of my life and most of life and most of the life that I observed with other founders that’s it is very action and progress oriented. For the past five years, I’ve seen this wave come and go of friends of mine, that are founders, or acquaintances of mine that are founders or CEO’s that pick up meditation as kind of a productivity pill. It’s like, “How can I do even more? How can I self-hack even more?” Then eventually they … Some self-hacker writes about meditation as a way to be more capable and all that, so they pick it up and they pick it up with a very deterministic and worldly productivity mindset and they’re trying to be good at it, right? They’re like, “Oh, I’ve gotten up to an hour of daily meditation at this point.” As if the amounts of minutes that you sit there is any meaningful indicator for the quality of what is happening during those minutes. It’s funny to see a lot of founders take on meditation as this thing that they then either brag about, they can’t shut up about it, so they tell everybody about meditation, meditation’s the new cool thing. They are trying to get “better at it.” They’re like, “Oh, when I started, I wasn’t good, now I really got the hang of it,” which is kind of understandable, but still I have to smile at that, because I look at it different today as like, meditation’s the thing you, the one thing that is much more about being than doing, so it doesn’t … There’s no being good at it or bad at it, there’s no getting your black belt at meditation, verses being a white belt. It’s much more about experiencing life fully in that moment and yourself fully, to me, than being good or bad at it, or anything else. Just getting fully in touch with your body, your mind, your feelings, your surroundings, for as many minutes as you want or you can versus, I don’t know, reaching some heights in one book. I’ve been, I think for the past year or so I’ve been meditating pretty consistently, but for a very short period of time, around 10 to 15 minutes a day usually. It’s not that long, but it’s still has provided me, or provides me with an instant, almost increasing quality of the rest of my day, and it’s kind of a really beautiful check-in for myself. It makes me go, “Oh, this is how I feel right now,” or “Ooh, this is what my mind is like right now.” It just gives me a chance to check in with myself and the world and surprise myself with something I’m kind of aware of, but not fully of like, “Oh shit, there’s a lot going on in my mind.” Or, “Wow, my body’s really tense, all right, relax.” Or I’m really peaceful, I’m in a really good mood. Whatever it is, but it gives me a moment to check in with myself and life. It’s been super, super valuable. The one book that I’ve always recommended and I keep recommending, it’s one of the few books, it’s the only book on meditation and mindfulness that I have read multiple times. I’ve read it maybe four times by now, is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s, Wherever You Go, There You Are. [0:11:50] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:11:51] Steli Efti: I love that book. I find it very accessible. I find it very easy to read. A lot of people that gifted that book have seemed to enjoy reading it and it’s had its impact. It’s written in a very kind of small chapter, like three or four pages at a time. It’s written very beautifully, but also very accessibly. I find it a beautiful introduction. For those of you out there that want to read more about meditation, or maybe afraid of the satiric nature of it, or don’t want to be too much challenge, so don’t want to … I find that book to be a really beautiful starting point, so I want to throw that recommendation out there, but yeah, that’s kind of my background and also my current practice around it. [0:12:35] Hiten Shah: Love it. [0:12:37] Steli Efti: All right. [0:12:38] Hiten Shah: It’s powerful. It really is. There’s a lot you can do with it. I think it goes beyond the things that we’re hearing about it, about stress relief and things like that. There’s a lot to it, but just suggest doing it basically, and I think you would too. [0:12:54] Steli Efti: Yeah, there you go. That’s it from us. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:58] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:12:58] The post 409: Meditation for Founders appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about quantity versus quality when it comes to content marketing and marketing in general. In the startup world, it’s common saying that content is king. However, deciding whether if your content marketing strategy should be to push out tons of average content or just a handful of quality content can be tricky. And making this choice comes down to your content marketing goals. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why your goals matter more than anything else in content marketing, the various types of content marketing goals you could focus on and why you should focus on distribution first much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 01:50 Why your goals matter more than anything else. 01:55 The various types of content marketing goals you could focus on. 02:14 The importance of figuring out the worth of content to you. 02:21 How brand awareness could be a short term goal 03:05 How random content doesn’t help you. 03:13 Why you should focus on distribution first. 03:20 The importance of keyword research. 03:28 Various sites you can use to do your research. 3 Key Points: Goals matter more than anything else.Do your research on the right keywords to create content for.Start with the distribution and then worry about the content. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:06] Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat we want to talk about quantity versus quality when it comes to content marketing, or maybe marketing in general. What is better? I had somebody recently ask me this question, and I didn’t quite know. I wanted to say it depends, but I was like, “Does it still … Maybe I should talk to Hiten about this.” That was a question … It was phrased very kind of current, where the person asked me, “In today’s reality of content marketing, does it make more sense for us to focus on sheer quantity – just try to create as much content as possible, promote ourselves as much as possible, be on all podcasts, do blog posts and guest posts on all the blogs, just fill up the market with our presence, or, should we just focus on doing less stuff, but really, really high quality? Maybe for work for six months on a super in-depth long-form article with insights and data that you can’t find anywhere else, and really just … Or do a video that’s highly produced? Should we just aim more on quantity or more on quality when it comes to our content marketing efforts?” What is better in today’s content marketing reality as a software company as a startup? [0:01:25] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Goals matter more than anything else. What’s your goal? Forget everything else, what’s your goal? So let’s talk about some goals, right? If you’re doing content marketing today with all the content that’s out there already, and with, I think, more than ever people understanding that content is really about getting search traffic, you need to figure out if content is worth it to you in the short run, or if it’s a longer term thing. If it’s a longer term thing, you’re focused on SEO, and it’s going to take a while. There’s no quick win there. If it’s a shorter term thing, then you’re just focusing on brand awareness, and you’re probably much more focused on making sure the things you write get a lot of social media traffic, or things like Hacker News, or Growth Hackers, or Reddit traffic. And the honest, real truth is, when you do content marketing, you should be aiming for a long terms SEO benefit researching all those things, as well as finding things that will hit on social in the beginning, so you can just start building up the traffic in the back links and things like that as well. That’s a very elementary way to put it, honestly. But let’s just talk about content marketing for a second, because you talked about podcasts and stuff, right? And a lot of us have been either deliberate about this, or learned the hard way that random content doesn’t help you, unless you know how it’s going to get traffic for you. So working on your distribution and your promotion of content, is what I might even start before you write content. That way you can do research. So do keyword research to figure out what search terms make sense for you. Do research on those communities, Hacker News, Reddit, Designer News, whatever one’s that you can target. Even Get Hub is a content machine if you really start digging into, and can get you traffic, but that’s if you’re a developer focused product. And go do your research and figure out what’s popping on those things. What’s popping off, what’s working right now, last month, last two months, last 90 days. You don’t have to go too much further back in most categories to learn a lot, and then use that to inform whatever content strategy you go after. So start with the distribution, and then worry about the content. And that’s what I mean by goal. What’s my goal? I want to get traffic. Well, where am I going to get the traffic from? Cool, I’m going to get the traffic from those places. How do I get traffic from those places? Study those places, engage with those communities if you have to, and figure out how you’re going to get the traffic before you worry about the content. That’s the upside down way to do content marketing, which is now the right side up way. So that’s content. [0:04:05] Steli Efti: I love it. I just want to rip this up right here. There’s nothing more to add. [0:04:09] Hiten Shah: Okay. [0:04:09] Steli Efti: This is a beautiful way to respond. This is it from us for this episode of The Startup Chat. We’ll be with you very soon. [0:04:15] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:04:16] The post 408: Quantity vs. Quality in Content (Is More Always Better?) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to deal with Investor conflicts. Disagreements happen all the time between founders and investors, and these can affect your performance and that of the business as well. So it’s safe to say that how you handle these conflicts when they arise is super important to the success of the business. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten dive into how why conflicts might arise between founders and investors, what to do if these conflicts arise, why you shouldn’t get too emotional when they do and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 03:50 Reasons why you might have a conflict with your investors. 04:32 What to do if you’ve got conflict with your investors. 05:08 The importance of making conflicts a business problem. 05:55 How to address investors you’ve got conflict with. 07:04 Why you shouldn’t be emotional about these things. 08:41 The first place to start when you’re trying to contain emotions. 09:33 How to deal with your emotions when you feel like you’re being attacked. 10:00 The importance of being cool and collected. 3 Key Points: You’re a business person first and these people have given you money. Find your part towards being professionalThe first place you should start is with your own emotions. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hi 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 gonna talk a little bit about investor conflict. Here is why I wanted to talk to you about this Hiten, a listener has been emailing back and forth with me for the last couple of days, and basically he describes a situation where he has perceived conflict with a number of his investors. And I thought it would be cool for us and valuable hopefully to the listeners to kind of talk a little bit about how do you deal with is when you have investors that wants you to do something completely different from what you want, or if you perceive that there’s conflict and pressure with the people that give you money. So in this particular case, I’ll summarize to my best of my abilities what has happened so far, which is, this guy a raised a small round, I think a total of 500k from some angel investors and some small VC investors, has gotten the company to profitability. And now that the company is profitable, he feels really proud of himself and that things are going really well, but now he’s starting to get pressure from some of these investors. The pressure that he’s getting is that, A, he’s not thinking big enough, so they want him to expand into a lot more markets much more aggressively than he thinks is right. And there are also, he shared some quotes that they’ve used in talking to him, that seem fairly aggressive to me. The sort of thing of like, don’t fuck with your investors, you might regret it one day and that sort of thing. It’s slightly like intimidating language on taking on their path or their advice versus resisting or pushing back on it. I went back and forth quite a bit trying to understand how many investors are those, have they orchestrated this, is this is a bigger problem that he describes to me or a smaller problem that he perceives it to be, how much power they really have in terms of voting and all that. And my summary is that right now it’s not that big of a deal, I think he is, he seems to me to be very sensitive to this problem, maybe hypersensitive. He has full control of the company, these people can’t really like just politically do anything to him or force him to do anything. And there was never a kind of a departure of what he promised in the early days when he raised money and what he’s trying to do now. It seems that one investor in particular is not a professional technology startup investor and has a change in life situation that is maybe making him care too much about what the startup is doing and what they need to do. And so that’s kind of the situation, he’s basically saying what he wants. What he’s asking me or us in this situation is, how can I deal with this conflict in a way where I can bring all these investors on my side of seeing the world so I can just execute without worrying, without arguing or without having that mental stress of knowing that one of these people is getting angry with me because I wanted to do something different with my company? So I thought it’d be valuable for us to discuss this, inspire around this a little bit on the episode. [0:03:36] Hiten Shah: I’ve seen a scenario a number of times where there are, and I’m sure you have, where there are people that are investors. When you’re the operator running the company and these investors are speaking to you, and telling you things and giving you advice or telling you, you should do this, that or the other. And you’re a businessperson first, and these people have given you money and you’ve said a bunch of things about what you’re going to do and they have opinions about what you should do. And sometimes their opinions come from an emotional place because we’re all human, things happen in our lives and whatnot, and sometimes these opinions are just like based on information that they have and they’ve seen. So step one, if you’re seeing that you have a conflict like this arising is, you need to find the supporters that actually support you, trust you. And regardless of what their ownership stake is in things, ideally these people have more ownership stake than the folks who are more on the descent side of this, but you find supporters. That’s important just because they’re a good sounding board, not because you try to use them to say anything on your behalf or anything like that, yet you’re just literally trying to have a sounding board. And then what you do is, you make it a business problem. A business problem is that you have stakeholders in your company that wants you to do certain things, you feel very confident about the things you want to do. And so my idea would be if it’s like something that’s causing this kind of discomfort, is actually go talk to everybody, get their opinion, let them know you’re going to do that. Be like, I’d love to talk to everybody. Anyone that wants to talk to me, please let’s set up a call and let’s talk about what your opinion and take is. And then ultimately this is my business to run, and that’s why you guys put your trust in my money and you trusted me to make the best decision possible at the time, and I continue to do so and I will continue to do so. And so I’d like to talk to you and get all your perspectives and then I will take the time to write a summary and a write up of what I’m going to do based on all of your inputs. Some of you might not be happy with what I want to do, but you’ll know that I heard you and you’ll know that I’m taking it into account because honestly I have a business to run and that’s the best I can do is, take your input into account and if it is something where I can adjust direction or do something, I would love to hear it. I would love to know what it is and I’d love to do it, if it makes sense. But I need to hear everyone’s opinion because it seems like there’s a bunch of conflicting opinions here and these opinions are not in alignment with what I told you I’m going to do, and what I’ve said. So in his case, he holds a lot of the power here. He holds all the responsibility because it’s his company, but he holds a lot of power here because he said, hey, I said I’m going to do a bunch of stuff and I’ve been doing it. Now it’s different if there’s a problem in the company and what you said you were going to do you weren’t able to do or something like that, that’s a different story. That’s one where like the same process would work, but you probably need to put more weight on everyone’s opinion because you have a decision to make, you might either not be seeing or realize you need to make and need to change. [0:06:51] Steli Efti: Yeah. The other thing is the, what you said, I think for him a lot of this is also just not being as emotional about things because the undertones oftentimes were that, he feels like he’s accomplished all these great things and to some degree he’s like just heartbroken why he’s not getting the support or why he’s not getting enough recognition of why he has to deal with these things. So it seems like he’s amplifying these conversation to himself to degree more than it should be, instead of just being very rational about it and being like, all right, so there’s multiple stakeholders in this company. Also when everybody agrees is in full alignment, but in life and in business, there’s going to be opposing opinions at times. My job is to hear those opinions, to bring in those data points, to make these people feel heard. But at the end of the day, I as the CEO have the mandate to make the best decision for the business, and that means that sometimes I’m going to make a decision that doesn’t conform with what every other investor wants, what the loudest investors that disagree with me want. And that’s okay too, it’s not the end of the world. As long as I communicate transparently, as long as I listen and manage those relationships, might be that if I’m right, they’re going to respect me for more down the line that I didn’t listen to them or that I didn’t listen, but that I didn’t go with their advice and went the other way. And if I fail, because I listened, maybe the dialogue will continue and I might see that I went down the wrong way and I can course correct. But I think the biggest problem or the start of making investor conflicts even larger and more complicated conflicts to resolve and to manage is when you amplify it emotionally. It’s the emotions that make things so much trickier, especially conflict, so much trickier to manage and to resolve. The first place you can start at is your own emotions, and recognizing that just because an investor is telling you, hey, I think you could do even better, and I think you should be thinking bigger and more aggressively and going that direction. If you have a strong emotional response to that, then maybe you need to meditate on this and try to figure out, this person just wants the best for our business. This person maybe just wants the best for me and challenge me to do even better, and I don’t have to take this as a personal attack. I don’t have to feel angry or betrayed or attacked all day long. That’s my choice in how I manage and deal with that pushback or with that conflicting kind of direction, and managing my own emotion first is the step that I need to take before I’m able to manage other people’s emotions and manage the board. But I think that’s the one step that we all like to avoid or that we like to skip and we’re like, why is this person so unreasonable? We get all crazy and we’re like, why are they sending me this terrible email? It’s like, well, why are you overreacting so much? Why are you responding so strongly? What’s going on with me? Right. I think if you’re able to like be calm, cool and collected even when other people lose their minds, even at the extreme cases where people lose their minds and are super unreasonable, it’s going to put you in a position where you’re going to be able to manage them and their emotions better, but also it’s going to reflect on everybody else that’s a stakeholder. They’re going to see how cool, calm, collected you are and how kind of overly emotional other people are, and it’s going to instantly make all the parties or more person want to align with you just because you seem rational versus emotional, right? [0:10:28] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think it’s important to take a professional approach even when someone else is being emotional, especially when someone else is being emotion. I think that’s the … Find your path toward being professional would be the key here. A lot of times we can feel someone else’s emotion and like take it on and we should realize that like, it’s theirs not ours and we should definitely feel good about the actions we take and the steps we need to take, and just get really practical because it’s not just about investors, this can happen in any situation. [0:11:10] Steli Efti: Love it. All right. That’s it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:11:13] The post 407: How to Deal with Investor Conflicts? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about mistakes people make when they ask for advice. Asking for advice can be a tricky thing. Often times, when asking someone is struggling with something, that person might not know exactly how to ask for it. Other times, that person might not be seeking new ideas but is rather looking for validation or an affirmation of a choice they’ve already made. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about some common mistakes people make when they ask for advice, how to ask people the right questions, why you shouldn’t give unsolicited advice and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 01:43 The first mistake people make when asking for advice. 01:56 The second mistake people make when asking for advice. 03:48 Why you should always take negative advice gracefully. 05:16 Why observations from other people are really valuable. 06:14 How to ask people the right questions. 07:02 The importance of meditating on a piece of advice before acting on it. 07:43 Why you shouldn’t give unsolicited advice. 3 Key Points: The first mistake you can make is not knowing that you should ask for advice.When you’re struggling with something, it’s really important to ask for help.Observations from other people are really valuable. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on The Start Up Chat we’re going to talk about mistakes when asking for advice and we’re just going to do a relatively quick episode going back and forth. I think the first mistake I’m going to share is probably not obvious and that mistake is not knowing that you should ask for advice in the first place. Right? So we’re assuming people are asking for advice. I think one that I’m bad at and you might be too I don’t know, but I think we’ve talked about this in the past is that you just don’t ask. I think it goes beyond just work or business. It’s a life thing where like if you’re dealing with something, there are people that will just talk to you. You know and go talk to them and ask. When you’re struggling or suffering, even worse, it’s really important to do that. It might even be people you don’t even know that well. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not a humility, it’s like the opposite of humility but there’s like a vulnerability that we might not be willing to go to certain people or anybody when we have a problem. I would just say if you have a problem and you don’t know anyone else to call, call the A team. I’m going to leave it at that ’cause I think that sums up one of them for me. [0:01:25] Steli Efti: All right, I love that. Yeah I didn’t see that coming. I already was in that mind frame of people have already asked for advice so I love that. Two things that come to my mind instantly, one is making sure that when you ask for advice you ask from a place of curiosity instead of from a place of trying to confirm that your idea, your opinion is right. Not that it’s bad if somebody confirms that the direction you are going towards is one they think as well is the right direction to take, but I always find that people make that mistake where sometimes they come into a conversation, they are seeking advice, but what they really seek is confirmation. All that we really want to hear is that they’re right and what they’re doing is correct. They’re not there to truly here what this other person or this group of people has to say. So that closes you up to all the value you might be able to receive if you’re totally open minded in that conversation so make sure when you ask for advice, you truly want to hear everything the other party has to say, even and especially if it contradicts what you think the right thing to do would be here, or the tendency, the leaning you already bring to the table when you ask for advice. The other thing that I’ll say when it comes to asking for advice is making sure that the one thing that I’ve noticed myself is that when the advice that somebody gives me is particularly painful, some emotional response that I have that is instant and strong and negative, that is to me such a big kind of red flag that they’re either probably right or there’s something here I need to investigate. I think it took me a very long time to get to that level of self awareness to notice when I had a super strong negative response to a piece of advice when I strongly disagree. ‘Cause my first instinct is to say, “No that’s absolutely not correct.” Then I’ll take a double take and be like I have to meditate on this and I feel like too many people are not doing that so when you give them advice that when they strongly disagree that they’re closing down and not listening anymore and they try to now they’re switching their conversation to try to convince you you’re wrong versus trying to investigate why you said what you said if they might be wrong. The two of us, I just actually thought about this, you are smiling [crosstalk] [0:04:07] Hiten Shah: Yeah me too. [0:04:09] Steli Efti: The two of us last time we met for coffee a few weeks ago in San Francisco, he gave me some advice that at first my first gut reaction was like, “No that makes no sense. I don’t believe that at all.” But because it was him and because I disagreed so strongly at first, my gut reaction was like, “Let me actually marinate on it.” It took all of like ten minutes or so for me to come around and be like, “God damn you Heaton. I think you’re right. I think this is the way this worked out.” [0:04:41] Hiten Shah: That leads to another tip I think that I have which is you might have taken it as advice, I considered what I said an observation. I literally said, “Hey Steli, this is what I think is going on.” I didn’t even say advice, I didn’t try to offer any advice on it. I know you call it advice which makes sense and that leads to my point which is … This one will be a little bit interesting but I don’t want anyone to pick my brain. I don’t want anyone to pick my friend’s brains, I don’t want to pick your brain. So stop thinking of it as picking your brain. I don’t mean to say that ’cause like the visual of picking your brain, ’cause a lot of people have said that and tweeted about it and I have too probably in the past. You and I have probably talked about it but what I mean to say is observations from other people is really valuable. We bucket advice [inaudible] tell me what to do or tell me what I should do. If you just observe and say, “Hey this is what it sounds likes going on and you just repeat it back to me, often times I don’t see it like that. Just like I did to you right. I was like, “Oh this is probably what’s going on.” It wasn’t advice it was observation so it was like, don’t take advice like someone telling you what to do, it’s more like somebody either observing or helping you think. You don’t need to pick their brain. You don’t want really what’s in their brain. You don’t want to know what they did in the past right? That’s picking their brain for sure. What you want to know is how would they think about a situation you’re in. Often times an observation is so much more powerful if you can get it would of somebody. My tip related to this is tell me how you see it. Here’s my situation, please tell me how you see it would be the question I would ask if you want observations, which is really interesting because that shows you how the other person thinks, which is what you care about. [0:06:26] Steli Efti: Love it. All right last mistake when asking for advice for me and then you and then we’ll wrap this one up. The last piece of advice that I’ll give on advice, and actually one of my favorite episodes, I’ll give a shout out to ourselves because we deserve it sometimes on the Start Up Chat Episode Four, we surpassed the 400’s just recently but episode four was advice on advice. I highly advise all of you listeners to go back and listen to that one. My last piece on that is, or a big mistake that I think people ought to avoid is to separate between the moment that you received advice from somebody and marinate what you heard for a little bit before acting on it or believing that that is the right solution or the right advice. Basically what I’m saying is don’t take the word of anybody as gospel. Don’t get over enthusiastic just because in the moment something might feel totally right or somebody said something in a very convincing way. A lot of times people, they seek advice from others that they admire or that they respect and just because somebody that you respect or admire tells you something and maybe tells you something very convincingly in the moment, you might over commit to that piece of advice versus taking the appropriate amount of time to marinate on that advice, to think about it, then to truly confirm was this sound advice? Does this make sense for me? Do I really want to do this? Versus just instantly accepting everything somebody of authority tells you, ’cause then anytime you ask somebody else for advice, you’re going to get a lot of conflicting advice, especially in the start up world. You’re going to be zig zagging to nowhere land versus truly checking what is right for you. [0:08:27] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I got to give one more and this is like a total … This is just interesting to me. The reason I say it’s interesting is because I’m going to give it as if the advice giver should … This is advice for the advice giver but I think it’s advice for the person receiving advice too. I learned this about myself recently and I’m looking to do better. What I learned about myself is I used to, I’m going to say in the past, ’cause it’s very recent but it’s in the past, ’cause that’s what I’m working on. In the past, I would especially to the people around me that I cared about the most, would give advice even if they didn’t ask for it. I need to work on that. Nobody wants my advice. Like they don’t want it. That might sound crazy to everyone listening but it’s like, nobody wants it unless they ask for it. Nobody wants it unless they ask for it and I would give it all the time because I felt like I don’t know I just got good at it or I thought I was good at it, but I felt like that’s what I should be doing in life is offering my thoughts to people or my advice. What I realized is sometimes I just don’t need to do that. Probably most of the time I should do it. So these days, my advice for people who are giving advice or are in a meeting or whatever and they think it’s about that, ask if you should. Ask if you can. Find your way to do that. Don’t just assume that in the meeting all you have to do is give advice. That’s been a game changer for me ’cause honestly may advice is better and if somebody doesn’t want it, I don’t need to give it. That just makes everybody’s life easier. So if you’re asking for advice, I mentioned something earlier about asking about an observation and going for that. I would go even further and be very explicit that you want advice and what you want advice on and give people the context and then let them just share their advice with you or their thoughts or their feedback. At the same time, if you don’t want advice on something and you’re in a meeting and that person, the context is advice or the context is just meeting, then you can explicitly tell them, “I’m not looking for advice on this, I just want to talk to you about it because it’s what’s going on right now and I’m talking to you about it because I don’t have anyone to talk to or I want to just share.” Right? ‘Cause sometimes people just want to share and I’ve noticed that too. Like people will share. I think they want advice. They say they want advice and then I share what I’m going to share. Like you said earlier, they don’t either care or it was just not valuable for anybody, me or them. Really think hard about whether you want advice or you just want someone to talk to. And that’s okay. [0:11:25] Steli Efti: I love it. All right that is all the advice we have to give you about giving and receiving advice. [0:11:33] Hiten Shah: Yes exactly. [0:11:34] Steli Efti: We shall [inaudible] all very soon. Bye bye. [0:11:38] Hiten Shah: Bye. [0:11:38] The post 406: Mistakes Startup Founders Make When Asking for Advice appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today’s episode of The Startup Chat is a special one, in it, Steli asks for your help finding the right person for a job at his company, Close.io. Close.io is currently looking to hire a director of marketing for their team. This is as a result of the growth and scaling they are currently undergoing. While Steli has been talking to some amazing candidates, he’s decided to appeal to the Startup Chat community for help finding the right person for the job. In today’s episode, Steli talk about what they’re looking for at Close.io, the best and worst case scenario of recommending someone for the position, what Steli is going to do with what he learns from this experiment and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:24 Why this topic was created. 00:47 What Steli needs help with. 01:25 What Steli is looking for at Close.io 02:25 What to do if you know someone that fits the role. 02:33 The worst case scenario of recommending someone the Steli. 02:47 The best case scenario of recommending someone thh Steli. 03:00 Why Steli had to try this out with the Startup Chat community. 03:09 What Steli is going to do with what he learns from this experiment. 03:39 A reminder of what the role is about. 3 Key Points: No one knows me better than the Startup Chat community. Worse case, they make a new connection and I make a new friend.Best case, you could be the one that connects me with the perfect candidate for the position. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti with The Startup Chat. No Hiten Shah, this is a special tiny little, it’s not really an episode. It’s just me basically asking for help. So if you don’t want to know what I need help with and if you don’t want to help me, just move on. Just delete this episode and go do some of the older ones that I we have that are incredibly valuable. Basically I just need two minutes of your time to tell you what I need help with and see if there’s anybody out there that can help. At Close we’re currently looking to hire a director of marketing, a marketing leader. I’ve been talking to many amazing candidates and still talking to many more and I thought who knows me more than The Startup Chat Community? Who would be kind of an army of people better qualified to help me find the right candidate than you guys? Nobody obviously, so I thought I’d record a quick video and tell you what I’m looking for and see if anyone out there can help me out in one way or another and I’ll come up with some way for me to repay the favor if one of you guys helps me out finding the right candidate. So here’s what we’re looking for. Close is growing and scaling really fast. We have a tiny marketing team of just four people. We’ve been doing incredibly well with content marketing up until this point and so we’re looking for somebody that is a proven marketing leader, that is experienced in SaaS and SMB. Somebody that’s a bit more senior, so somebody that has taken teams as small as four people and managed teams up to 20, 30, 40 people. Somebody that has incredible leadership skills but is both a player and a coach so is not so far removed from marketing that they have never got their hands dirty in the past couple of years, and somebody that obviously would be a culture fit and would work well with people like me. So if anybody comes to mind, especially people that you think have an amazing job right now and are not looking for a new gig, anybody that comes to mind, don’t filter too much, just send me an email at Steli@Close.com with a name and a little bit of a backstory and I’ll try to connect, make a new friend. Worse case, if it doesn’t work out you helped them make a new connection and I made a new friend and I’ll repay you and I’ll find ways to appreciate that connection. Best case, you could be the person that connects me with the perfect candidate and help them in their career find an incredible opportunity, new home, new company to join and help me in an incredible way find the right person to help my team and help my company. I know in over 400 episodes we have never done this before. I don’t know if this is going to work at all, but I had to try, right? I had to try. I’ll talk to Hiten later about some of the results. I’ll share my learnings on how well this worked in terms of recruiting efforts and connecting with the right candidate. Again, if you know anybody that’s an incredible leader, is a marketer in SaaS, email me, Steli@Close.com with a name. Let me take it from there and if it works out I promise you I’ll make it worth your while. Thank you so much. [0:03:20] The post 405: Steli Needs Your Help Finding the Right Person appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about why your biggest strength is your biggest weakness. Sometimes we think we’re really good at something but then, after some evaluation, we realize that we’re not as good in that thing as we thought we were. This could be a bad thing as our belief in our capability at something can turn out to be a huge weakness for us In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on why our biggest strength is your biggest weakness, how Steli misses certain things about people, the importance of always trying to improve oneself and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 01:25 Steli realizing something about himself. 02:01 How Steli misses certain things about people. 03:22 How Hiten had similar experiences with Steli 03:36 One thing that Hiten is trying to change about himself. 04:34 How we are the stories we tell ourselves. 04:58 How Hiten is not great at understanding people. 05:58 The importance of always trying to improve oneself. 05:51 A question we should always ask yourself. 3 Key Points: The biggest leaps I’ve made are probably because I keep studying myself.I think the big problem is that I thought about it as a strengthWe are the stories we tell ourselves. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: This is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:03] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we want to talk about your strengths being your potential weaknesses. So, here’s why I want to talk to about this. [0:00:12] Hiten Shah: This is very relevant by the way. [0:00:13] Steli Efti: Oh really? [0:00:14] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:00:14] Steli Efti: Beautiful, beautiful. So, here’s why I wanted to talk to about this. I knew that you would enjoy, and I knew I would enjoy this conversation with you and our listeners probably too. A few weeks back I was, I had this super strong flu; I was like out, cold for two weeks, high fever, shivers, and slightly delusional. Right, slightly in the state where you’re dreaming, not fully there where you like have these kind of delusional states. Kind of fun but, not that much fun. And, one interesting thing that happened like, one night where I was sweating, and fever, and cold, and like having these weird dreams and weird thoughts; was that I had a thought, I don’t know how it happened but, I had this realization, more than a thought that you know one of the things that I’ve always thought is particular strength of mine is actually something that I am not that good at, after all. And that is, my people skills and my intuition about people. And it was very, a very original thought, something that I had never thought about before in this way. And, a realization I never had before about it and I thought “you know what its been part of your identity that you know people so well, you have, your intuition about people is so incredible and you know how to deal with people. And, there is all this shit you’re getting wrong about people. And there’s all these things where you’re not flexible about how you’d interact with people. And there’s all these things that you miss about people.” Maybe, maybe because when I was young at 18/19 there were a few years where I really studied the subject. I read all the psychology book, I study hypnosis, Neuro Linguistic Programming, went to all these workshops, seminars and that. I accumulated all this knowledge; I did have some, I think, natural skills when it came to dealing with people. And those natural skills, with a little bit of study, gave me a little bit of success and that instantly made me think “I’m great at this so, let me move on trying to learn something else.” And became part of my identity. And what that means is that, honestly, if I look back at the last 15/20 years, the biggest learnings when it comes to dealing with people, like I didn’t learn and grow as much as I could because I was stuck in my way of thinking, “I’m great at this already.” The biggest leaps I’ve made, probably are the leaps that I’ve made because I’ve kept studying myself and learning more about me and that made me a bit more aware of other people. But, it was this really mind blowing moment where I was like ” Wow! I am a completely different person than I think I am and I have huge weakness that I’ve always thought, I’m really, really at.” So, and I think that the big problem is that I thought about it as a strength. As like this static unit; I’ve accomplished this level of ability, or skill, and boom I am done with this topic. And, I’ll walk around and it becomes part of my identity, to think I know everything about people; I’m really good at this. And so, I stop evolving and growing. Boom, I’ll stop at this rant. Strength, your biggest strength is your biggest weakness. You said it’s very relevant and I’m dying to hear your reaction, response to this. [0:03:26] Hiten Shah: For whatever reason, we haven’t talked about this before. You and I, or even on the podcast. And, the exact experience that you had, besides the fever and the delusional state although, delusional state I’m may have more often than not … [0:03:41] Steli Efti: I want to say, it’s perfect to describe this [inaudible] perspective as like, I have very similar experiences than Steli, mine is the delusional part. You like that? You like that, huh? [0:03:59] Hiten Shah: And then, I’m like you know the same, like literally word for word, I could’ve said what you just said. [0:04:06] Steli Efti: Wow! [0:04:07] Hiten Shah: Except the part of how you got, how you learned it. I learned it just by doing and spending so much time with people. Like accidentally almost. And I learned a lot of this accidentally like that. I’m trying to change that about myself, whatever. So, here’s the deal so, I’m not gonna get into the details of it because it’s essentially the same thing. Which is, I thought I was good at something and I’m not. I literally am objectively, when I look at it, I am not as good as I thought I was. So here’s the thing, we are the stories we tell ourselves. If we tell ourselves we’re great at something, that means we’re just great at it. If we tell ourselves we’re always getting better at it, that means we’re always getting better at it. So my story now is, anything that I feel I was great at, I am always getting better at. I am not great at understanding people; I am always, constantly, getting better at understanding people. And that shift, I am looking to internalize in myself because this is something that I do pride myself in. Just like you do. Right? There’s some pride. But we can’t pride ourselves at being great at it because, I think if we do, we get lazy and we think we’re great at it. I don’t want to be great at anything. I always want to be getting better at everything that I care about. [0:05:35] Steli Efti: I love it, there is nothing more to add to this. We’ll wrap this episode up right here. [0:05:41] Hiten Shah: Now. [0:05:41] Steli Efti: Use the extra six minutes, seven minutes, that we’re gifting you, of podcasting time and instead of just keep listening to next podcast take seven minutes and ask yourself “What is something I think I am great at and maybe I should be thinking about it, that is something that I constantly am getting better at.” I love that, it’s so powerful. Thank you so much. [0:06:06] Hiten Shah: Peace out. [0:06:06] The post 404: Why Your Biggest Strength Is Your Biggest Weakness appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of the startup chat, Steli and Hiten talk about 4 lessons for podcasters after 400+ podcasting episodes. Today’s episode is a special one. After over 400 episodes of hosting the Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten share the biggest lessons they’ve learned from the experience. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why it’s important to do your research on guests on your show, the importance of making your podcast conversational, why consistency is king when it comes to podcasting and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:50 Why this topic was chosen. 02:14 The first tip for podcasters. 02:41 Why it’s important to do your research on guests on your show. 03:07 The second tip for podcasters. 03:30 The importance of making your podcast conversational. 04:28 The third tip for podcasters. 05:06 Why consistency is king. 05:35 The fourth tip for podcasters. 06:00 The importance of finding your value proposition. 06:31 The final tip for podcasters. 3 Key Points: Do your research.Don’t just make it an interview.Consistency is king. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:06] Steli Efti: Hiten is like, “What are we gonna talk today? I don’t know.” I told him that this is gonna be a fun one, so, he was like,- [0:00:13] Hiten Shah: No, no, no, no, no, no. Wait. [0:00:14] Steli Efti: What? [0:00:14] Hiten Shah: You said I’m gonna love it. No, no. Don’t get it twisted. [0:00:16] Steli Efti: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair. That’s fair. [0:00:18] Hiten Shah: And so now, I’m completely scared. [0:00:20] Steli Efti: Alright. So, here’s the setup. [0:00:22] Hiten Shah: Thanks for scaring me, bro. [0:00:23] Steli Efti: Alright. It doesn’t happen that often, so I enjoy when I’m able to do that. [0:00:27] Hiten Shah: I’m like, “What? What?” I’m like, “What?” [0:00:30] Steli Efti: You’re like, “Wait a second.” Your “Hey, this is Heten,” was really slow, because you’re, What is he talking about? What is this gonna be? [0:00:36] Hiten Shah: If anyone tells me I’m gonna love something, it doesn’t matter who it is, right away I’m, “Alright. Let’s-“ [0:00:43] Steli Efti: I hate this. Let’s see. Let’s see. [0:00:44] Hiten Shah: Oh, no, no. I don’t know. Not “I’m gonna hate it,” but- [0:00:46] Steli Efti: Okay, okay. [0:00:46] Hiten Shah: …I trust you. [0:00:48] Steli Efti: Alright. [0:00:49] Hiten Shah: Let’s go. What you got? [0:00:49] Steli Efti: Let’s go. So, here is what we wanna talk about today, or what I want to talk about today. I want to do a four-minute episode, so were gonna- [0:00:56] Hiten Shah: Wow! [0:00:56] Steli Efti: …After this intro. We’ve done 400 episodes of the Startup Chat. Big milestone. [0:01:02] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:01:03] Steli Efti: Over 400 now, and what I’d love to do is, turn it around a little bit. There’s an episode … We’ll link to it. I’ll need to search for it. Where we talked about everything we’ve learned. Having a podcast and doing a podcast. [0:01:14] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:01:14] Steli Efti: So, what I’d like to do, is a quick, four tips to people who are doing a podcast or starting a podcast, based on everything we’ve learned, or based on all the interviews we’ve done. You have done thousands of podcasts. [0:01:26] Hiten Shah: Same with you. [0:01:27] Steli Efti: Other people’s podcasts. [0:01:27] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:01:28] Steli Efti: Same with me. So let’s talk to people- [0:01:29] Hiten Shah: Heck yeah. Let’s do it. Love it, love it, love it. [0:01:31] Steli Efti: …that have a podcast. Four tips in four minutes. I’m gonna stopwatch this. [0:01:34] Hiten Shah: So, we get a minute each and we get two each? Is that what’s up? [0:01:39] Steli Efti: Yeah. Let’s do that. [0:01:41] Hiten Shah: I don’t know. I’m just making it up. [0:01:42] Steli Efti: I thought, four tips one minute each, and we’ll go one minute me, one minute you, one minute me, one minute you. [0:01:48] Hiten Shah: Alright. Cool. And of course you first. Go first. [0:01:49] Steli Efti: I’m gonna be doing the stop watching. [0:01:52] Hiten Shah: You’re timing. Great. [0:01:52] Steli Efti: Alright. [0:01:52] Hiten Shah: Thank you. [0:01:53] Steli Efti: So, I’ll go first. First tip that I’ll give to people that have a podcast that interview people is, do your research. Right? And either interview people that you’ve been calling for a while, or that you know intimately. Maybe it’s just your friends, or people you work with, or people that you’ve been following for a long time, so that when you talk to them, you can make your interview stand out. You can ask questions they have not been asked, or ask the questions that they have been asked before in a different way, and have a conversation that makes the person that you’re interviewing really enjoy it. Because if they enjoy it, and if they feel like your questions and your interaction with them is really engaging, they’re gonna give you really amazing content. Versus asking them generic questions, because you know nothing about them, nothing about their business, and never listened to them, and never heard anything about them. I have ten more seconds. And I’ll tell you, I interviewed Gary Vee a long time ago, and he told me at the end of the interview, “This was one of the best interviews I’ve ever done.” Because I asked him a bunch of shit nobody had ever asked him. Alright. That’s it. That’s my first tip. You go next. [0:02:54] Hiten Shah: My tip for being a podcaster and podcasting, meaning being the interviewer, is, don’t just make it an interview. You have to have a conversation. You have something to say, you have a response to what they’re saying, don’t just ask them questions. I don’t care who you’re interviewing, how popular they are, how smart they are, how much you want to learn from them, or even how much you know about them. In fact, the more you know about them, the more conversational you can make it. And so, to Steli’s point, research is important, but I hate it. And hate is a word … And I don’t hate a lot of things. Okay, fine. I dislike it. I dislike it, when all I’m asked is a bunch of questions, and I have no opportunity to go back and forth. I recently got on a podcast. All I got was questions, and we could have had an amazing podcast, because I’ve know this person for over ten years. We have a whole bunch of history, and all he did was ask me questions. And I love this person. I think he’s great, and we could have done a ten-times better job. And it was on him to ask me questions or not, and I had no opportunity to flip it. So, then I got on another podcast. I was getting asked questions. I got two questions deep … This person is amazing. Very successful. And so then, I flipped on them and said, “What about you? Here’s what I think. What about you?” And I think he caught on, and the whole conversation and the whole podcast was so much more interesting. So, I think when you start a podcast, you don’t understand this. [0:04:14] Steli Efti: I love it. Alright. My next tip is – consistency is king. Right? And this goes very much to us surpassing 400 episodes. We’ve been doing this very consistently, right? [0:04:24] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:04:24] Steli Efti: Almost every week. Once in a while we’ll travel and we can’t. [0:04:27] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:04:28] Steli Efti: But have been incredibly consistent- [0:04:30] Hiten Shah: True. [0:04:30] Steli Efti: …considering how busy our lives are with families, with kids, with businesses, with ventures, with responsibilities- [0:04:36] Hiten Shah: We’ve been around drama whatever. Yeah. [0:04:37] Steli Efti: …all kinds of things. Life has happened to us many, many times, and will continue to happen to us many, many times, but we are both committed to this. [0:04:46] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:04:46] Steli Efti: And when you start a podcast, when you’re at the beginning, understand that this is going to take you a long time to get into a groove, to really understand what you are doing, how you’re doing, how to make this better. This is not a short-term game. A podcast is not like a short-term growth act that will get you millions of followers or audience over night. That’s very rarely what happens. Even some of the biggest podcasts in the world, sometimes it took them two, three years building a little audience, building a little audience, and then there was an inflection point where they exploded. So, you need to be consistent about your publishing schedule, you need to be consistent and committed, when you start this, to do this for the long haul and not just for a few weeks. [0:05:26] Hiten Shah: Alright. Last tip. Find your value proposition. This is a thing I don’t see enough people do. And what I mean by that is, “What’s your thing?” And you might not figure it out in the beginning, but what is your thing? Our thing is simple. Two founders talking. I was gonna say, “Two friends,” but I’m not your friend, right? Kidding. Kidding. [0:05:44] Steli Efti: No, no. [0:05:45] Hiten Shah: Yeah, yeah. It’s too bad, but you- [0:05:45] Steli Efti: You’re my brother from another mother. [0:05:47] Hiten Shah: Yeah. There you go. But when you think about it, it’s called the “Startup Chat.” It has a name, it has a brand, and there’s two founders talking. That’s how I’d want people to describe it, right? You can say, “Two crazy founders,” you can say, “Two remote founders.” Whatever it is. Two founders talking, and that’s our thing. And in fact, that’s been our thing since the first day we started it, right? We got lucky. We figured that out, and obviously we’ve changed it up a little bit, and this and that, in terms of our time, amount of length, and things like that. End of the day, find your thing. And if you’re interviewing people, it’s even more important to find your thing, because otherwise no-one will listen to you. You have to find, what is your value? What does that consistency? What is that thing people come to you for? Not because you interviewed blah, blah, blah, right? Not because you interviewed this famous person or whatever. It’s because you have a thing. And it is about you. It’s about the interviewer, not just about the interviewee. [0:06:39] Steli Efti: I love it. Alright. Last tip from me, and then we’ll wrap this up. Get started. Listen to our first episode. It’s the episode that was recorded an hour before we had the idea to do a podcast. It was an episode recorded on a laptop with no mic, no nothing, no equipment,- [0:06:57] Hiten Shah: On a balcony. [0:06:59] Steli Efti: …on a balcony. Right? So, I see this all the time. Friends of mine tell me, “I want to start a podcast, what’s the equipment you use? What is the setup? What kind of studio do I need?” All this is bullshit. Don’t procrastinate. Get started. You have a laptop, you have a webcam, you have a- [0:07:13] Hiten Shah: Headphones, yes. [0:07:13] Steli Efti: …headphone and a mic. Boom! Go! Get started! You can get better in quality. And this is something we have not really invested a lot in, even after 100 episodes. [0:07:19] Hiten Shah: Yeah, yeah. No. Sorry. [0:07:21] Steli Efti: But, just get started. You don’t need equipment to do this well. All you need is good content, right? And you need to start putting yourself out there, getting feedback, learning about yourself, your point of view, the guest and all that. And once you get into a groove, you can still invest in all this stuff. That’s it. That’s it from us for this episode. Four-ish minutes for four tips after 400 episodes. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:07:44] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:07:44] The post 403: 4 Lessons for Podcasters After 400+ Podcasting Episodes appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about personal finances for founders. One of the biggest mistakes founders make without realizing it, is neglecting to manage their own personal finances while they focus on starting, building and scaling their startups. This can be disastrous if it goes wrong as not paying attention to your own finances, ultimately slow down the development of your startup In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about common monetary situations founders find themselves in, recommendations on when to take a salary, the importance of having savings and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:50 Why this topic was chosen. 02:35 Common monetary situations founders find themselves in. 02:19 Hiten’s recommendations on if a founder should take a salary. 04:02 Why survival is your game if you haven’t raised money. 05:03 Steli’s advice on how to manage your finances. 06:37 When you can expect to see ROI. 06:58 The importance of having savings. 07:52 Why you should live one level below your income level. 08:55 Hiten’s experience with founders who struggle financially. 09:31 How Hiten started his business initially. 3 Key Points: As a founder, if you weren’t doing your work, you’d have to work for your money. If you raise money, you should definitely take a salary. If you haven’t raised money, survival is your game. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: All right. Hey, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today we’re gonna talk about Hiten Shah’s favorite topic, money. Right? [0:00:10] Hiten Shah: It was a joke. [0:00:11] Steli Efti: Particularly. [0:00:12] Hiten Shah: It’s the topic I never talk about, so it’s great. [0:00:15] Steli Efti: Yes, yes. Personal finances for founders, we wanted to chat about that. [0:00:18] Hiten Shah: Let’s do it. [0:00:19] Steli Efti: So here’s the reason why I wanted to chat about this with you, Hiten Shah. I had a little bit of a back and forth email chain with a founder that basically, I’ll summarize his situation. There’s a lot more going on, but I’ll summarize it to successful quote unquote founder, raised a good amount of money, had a strong salary, so was thinking about himself as wealthy? Started to immediately do a lot of angel investments. Started to live a pretty great lifestyle. And startup is has been going through troubles, cannot raise more money. Had to let a lot of people go. Had to decrease salary and now has started to be having growing personal financial issues. Credit card is piling up, bills are piling up. Personal debt has to, had to lend money from a few people. Is now worrying what to do about all of this. And basically there’s a whole other component that we could do an episode on on like him, I feel like there was a big, big part of his trouble is him mourning how rich he thought he was and then how poor he thinks he is right now. I think a lot of that is bullshit, but I thought that this prompted to me particularly the idea of like talking a little bit about how to, maybe some basic advice that we have to give to founders on how to manage their personal finances as they are starting a startup. What’s your immediate reaction to this? [0:02:08] Hiten Shah: There’s been a few blog posts about how much founders should get paid and things like that, early on or later on and things like that. I think the number one thing I learned if you’re a founder is you’re in one of two situations, basically. You’re in a situation where, if you weren’t doing your startup, you would have to work for money. There’s another situation which is regardless of you doing your startup, you wouldn’t have to work for money. And I don’t mean you’re rich or anything, I just mean that like you have enough money or you have some kind of passive income or you have a services business and you’re working for money but you’re not working. How about this? You’re not working for someone else for money. And I think those two things can definitely shape how you think about, what do I need? What are my needs in terms of money? For me, what think is fair is, let’s just take a scenario of if you raise money you should definitely take a salary. And you should take a salary that makes it so that you’re not dipping into your savings in order to keep continuing the business that you’re in, the startup you’re in because your investors wouldn’t want you to take money from savings if you’ve raised money, it makes no sense. There is things like ramen profitable and making sure you’re not like living in like a $5,000 per month rent place if you can’t afford it with the startup budget that you have in terms of your salary, because quite frankly you have a lot of ownership and that startup, right? But you shouldn’t be a martyr and make it so that you’re not able to cover your living expenses at the very minimum. That that’s my very straight forward advice. If you’ve raised money. I Think, if you haven’t raised money Steli or I’m sorry, yeah, if you haven’t raised money, survival is your game. You have to figure out how to make money no matter what. So you might be doing consulting, you might have side gigs, you might have something else that you need to do in order to sustain whatever you need to to continue doing your company. That’s why we see so many companies and base camp, 37 Signals being the poster child of this so to speak, come out of a consulting company. We came out of a consulting company, too. My first SAS business, Crazy, came out of our consulting company because we were able to do consulting and make money and then we were able to fund our software and that’s how we did it. So I would say that this is a very important topic, but it depends on if you raise money or not. And if you can afford to not make money. [0:04:39] Steli Efti: There you go. There you go. So I love that. I think on top of that, one thing that I saw him in this founder’s story and I’ve seen many, many times before in other situation, this might be something that’s hard for you to actually relate to because I think you’re very different and a unique case on this. But one of the kind of foundational advices that I give to people in general is to always live one or two levels below what you could afford paying for, right? So a lot of times as people progress in their career and as they generate more income or more personal wealth, what happens is they upgrade their lifestyle instantly. Right? And if anytime you have more income, you instantly increase your expenses because you’ve improved your lifestyle. That can make for really great life. But the problem is that if your income or your wealth goes down at some point, which for most people it will, like it will fluctuate. There will be some bad times potentially in there no matter how successful you are, now you’re instantly in trouble, right? Because you instantly have to change your lifestyle because you can’t afford all the expenses anymore. And so especially with founders and in this case like what I see is a founder that the moment that he thought his company is succeeding, he instantly maxed out on how much income he could pay himself and instantly upgraded the car he was driving, the apartment he was living in, the kind of expenses he had. And he instantly thought of himself as this wealthy guy because of some kind of evaluation and started taking the savings he could accrue and instantly invest them, so wanted to be an angel investor, right, instantly investing the bit of savings and cash flow that he had on the site into other startups. That’s a very aggressive way of managing your personal finances, which means you just spent all the money you have. It doesn’t matter if you invest in startups. Investing in startups means you might take forever to see the money back and in most cases you’ll never see that money back. So when you’re very little savings and savings buffer on the site to deal with bad times, quote unquote, and you instantly always upgrade all your expenses and your lifestyle to max out on spending all your income, you cannot afford a time that is tough financially. You can’t afford a time where your company isn’t doing well or where income isn’t coming in the way that you have now been used to it. And that creates an increased amount of unnecessary stress in my mind. So to me, that was the biggest mistake that this founder made. And I see a lot of founders do this. Once they see a little bit of success instantly start making angel investments like there, they’ve now for the first time in their life they have 10 K in savings. So boom, now the angel invest them. They’ve invested 5k into startups. It’s like, and that can work, right? But, but oftentimes my biggest piece of advice to founders is, I mean obviously in the early days you have to be as scrappy as possible, but even as you become more successful and as you generate more wealth and more income, my advice would always be to live one level at least below your income level, so you have some buffer. So if things go a little bad, you don’t have to instantly move houses or apartments. You don’t have to instantly sell a car. You don’t have to instantly change everything about your lifestyle. I think that’s the simplest piece of advice to give. It’s not that complicated, but it’s, I think a tough thing for many people, for many founders to do, especially the ones that made a lot of sacrifices for a long time. And then finally they’re seeing success and money and they feel successful and maybe even quote unquote rich. And so they wanna spend their money. They ant to live in that great apartment, buy that cool sports car, and want to spend that money and kind of treat themselves. But that obviously has the big risk that if things become a bit tougher again at some point, they’re going to be in real trouble. [0:08:53] Hiten Shah: Yup. I mean, I think you laid it out. I can relate to this simply because I talk to a lot of people about this. I definitely have been in a position where I was taught since I was a kid that I need to work for myself and figure out how to pay my own bills and things like that and not work for anyone. But I meet so many people who are in the situation where they’re struggling with this and making sure that, I think you have to make sure you’re taking care of. You have to make sure that you’re able to live up to whatever commitments you have to other people, including your family, yourself, and take care of yourself and being able to make money is in this society, such a big part of that. Right? I mean, one thing I’ll say is, for the longest time when we were running our consulting company, back in the day, I actually lived at home. I was married and I lived at home, at my father’s house. My rent was zero. And so I made decisions like that in order to start my businesses. So to some extent I kind of get it, even though I already had some money because what I wanted to do was put all my money, not in to have to live somewhere, but literally in our businesses instead of that. And so that was really helpful. And even my cofounder, Neil, lived at his parent’s house throughout the, he was getting into college when we started our first business together and he lived at home as well. So I think there were these things that we did that some would say are sacrifices or things you wouldn’t do because you don’t want to live with your parents or whatever. But myself and my wife were actually able to do that. So there is some level of context there that that can be helpful. But it was a conscious decision. I wasn’t forced to do that. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do for achieving what I wanted to. [0:10:36] Steli Efti: Beautiful. So right, I think that the big thing that we’re sharing here, there’s no news. But I think the important thing is if you’re early on, obviously money is such an important thing. You want to be careful, you want to be resourceful and make sure that you are in a stable situation financially. And once you see a bit of success, might not want to get overly enthusiastic and instantly spend all that money but want to be a bit careful. Especially if the main source of your income is very risky and not super stable and there’s highs and lows and explosiveness in all directions. You might want to be careful of how quickly you spend all the money you’re generating. Because it might be fun in the short term, but in the longterm in my cause all kinds of trouble and stress that then circle back into the way you run your business and the decisions you make. This founder in many, it seems like a bunch of, there’s a bunch of options on the table and his personal financial troubles are now influencing the way he looks at these options for his business. Right? Which is a tough spot to be in and one that you particularly or that you could force you to make some really bad decisions for your company, your team, your employees, your investors, because you personally have overextended yourself and caused yourself to be in kind of troublesome situation. So I think the call to action here is that the riskier you live life as a founder and with your startup, maybe you want to be a bit more careful and a bit more conservative with your personal finances to give you a chance to take bigger risks, make bigger bets with your startup. That’s it for us for this episode. If you have money trouble or personal finance questions, not that we’re experts, but we’re always happy to help. So you can always get in touch with us, Steli@close.io and hnshah@gmail.com. Until next time, we’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:36] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:12:37] The post 402: Personal Finances for Founders appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to work successfully with designers. Working with a designer can be quite challenging, especially when you’re not a designer. From choosing one to giving them feedback on their work, to actually getting feedback from them. Managing your interaction with a designer requires some sort of skill. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten dive into how to work with a designer when you’re not a designer, the importance of interviewing designers you want to work with, how to give feedback to a creative person and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:43 Why this topic was chosen. 03:03 How to work with creative people. 03:17 The helpfulness of a portfolio. 03:52 The importance of interviewing designers. 04:13 One of the biggest challenges of working with designers. 04:54 How to give feedback to a creative person. 05:41 How to treat designers at work. 06:00 How Hiten works with designers. 07:53 How to approach getting feedback from a designer. 3 Key Points: The good news is that designers tend to have portfolios. With creative people, you need to figure out what their requirements are in order for them to do their job. What do they need from you to produce good work? [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah:  And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today on the startup chat we’re going to talk about how to work successfully with designers. Heaton when I just proposed this topic to you about 11 seconds ago, you were like, ooh, this is a fun one, yes, let’s do it. There was a lot of enthusiasm there. So this obviously is focused on founders that maybe haven’t had a lot of chances to work with designers and that aren’t designers themselves. We’ve done some episodes prior, that makes you look it up real quick. Boom, there you go. So we talked about how to work with like a technical co-founder when you’re not technical yourself or how to work with an engineer when you’re not an engineer yourself in episode 277. So we thought today might be fun to talk about how to work with a designer when you’re not a designer, kind of do’s, don’ts and all that. So what comes to your mind at first when it comes to avoiding mistakes? The way to think about this? If you’re not a designer, you’re starting a startup, let’s say it’s something technical, how do I choose who is a good designer? Who isn’t? Then how do I work with somebody that is a designer when I myself don’t have experience designing things? [0:01:21] Hiten Shah: Yeah. So the good news is designers tend to have portfolios. The other good news, unlike a developer is like far relatively inexpensive, like $500, $1000 dollars, sometimes less, you can get them to do some work with you. Well, engineering is a lot different and it takes usually lot more money than that to figure out whether you like working with the person or not. That means that even if you’re looking to hire a designer or even like, let’s just talk about the entryway. Like you’re hiring a designer, you’re looking for one, you can try this with three or four different designers and see who you like and assess them in appropriate manners around like quality of their work, timeliness of their feedback, how much input they need. Because I think what we forget is that, when working with creative people, they have their own requirements of what they need in order to do their work, and we need to be able to provide that as people who are wanting something done. I think it’s a lot more straightforward than hiring and working with developers except that creative people, you need to figure out what are their requirements in order to do their job, and how can you get them what they need. Do they need wire frames? Do they need a writeup? Do they need examples? What do they need from you in order to create the work that you’re looking for? [0:02:54] Steli Efti: I love that, and I want to underline this a little bit because, you said designers have portfolios, you can look at those kind of the pass work they’ve done. And because it’s visual, it’s not just pure code, you can as a layman look at it and say, do I find this visually pleasing? Do I find this intuitive? Or practical or whatever it is. And based on your taste and what you’re trying to accomplish, you can make a probably a much better assessment than just looking at somebody’s coat, but he is right in deciding if they’re a good developer or not. But one nice thing that you can do on top, what you brought up is like what do they need to work well with you or to produce good work. And that’s a question oftentimes we don’t ask, like what does this person need from me in order to do the best work they can? One little hack around this is to just look at their best work or the work that you like the best and just interview them about that, hey, out of your portfolio, these two things stood out to me, can you tell me a bit about the process on how you develop these designs, who you work with, what they provided you with? And if they say that, typically they like to have a writeup or wire frames or usually a lot of times creative people like this when they work for clients or they work with somebody else, one of the biggest challenge will be lack of clarity or lack of directions. The person told me to do X, I did X, and then they told me they expected something totally different, something they never brought up before. That was important. So ask them who worked particularly well with them and what they did. Maybe you could even ask them to share the project writeup or the wire frames that this other kind of theirs or other prior coworker had shared with them, to see a good template of what they need to do their best work. [0:04:42] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think that’s great. I love your question of asking them how, what they needed in order to produce the results that they got. I think that’s really great. [0:04:52] Steli Efti: Beautiful. One other thing that I wanted to bring up with you is the, how do I give feedback to somebody that’s creative. Two, things that have popped up in the past is kind of like, I worked with a designer, typically I really like their work, but then this thing I think is really ugly or terrible. How do I see these things? How do I give really frank feedback without hurting that person’s feelings? And the other question is this thing that happens often I think with creatives in general and with designers in particular sometimes, is that sometimes particularly great designers, they might just be a bit looser on the deadlines. They might be a bit late with their work. Do I let that slide because I like the designs? Do I push them to be super hard on the deadlines but maybe then frustrate them or burn them out on that relationship? Do I have to treat designers differently from other coworkers basically because they are creatives, and particularly in the way I give feedback or how firm I am on deadlines and timelines and things of that nature? [0:06:00] Hiten Shah: I like to always no matter what focus in on the other kind of person to like the designer and have them set their timelines and dates for me or for them. That way I’m very much focused on what they say they can do. Sometimes you might have a deadline and you can ask can you do it by this date? But my typical process, and I might be a little different than other people like that, is to understand what they can do and in what amount of time. Because sometimes you’ll be surprised at how fast someone can work. Sometimes you’ll be surprised at how slow something is going to be, and that allows you to have an opportunity to discuss it. I tend to not like the relationship where I’m dictating the timeline, and then the person feels pressured to get it done in that time, or the person is like, that’s easy, I can take my time doing it. I’d rather figure out what they think. [0:06:59] Steli Efti: I love that. In terms of feedback, again, we can loop this in back to some of the things that we said prior. Again, I would ask just the designer, what kind of feedback? How do you like to get feedback? What happens when there’s strong disagreements? When you design something and somebody is very critical feedback, what’s the way that you typically like to receive this? Is it better to have kind of a virtual audio video call to receive feedback? Is it better to have it written up so you can like marinate on this? Just ask them how they’d like to receive feedback and just pay attention to, if they’re the type of personality that needs more positive encouragement to do the greatest work. Or if they are the type of person that just, when you have something critical to say they just want you to say it really kind of directly, because if you dance around it, it kind of insults their intelligence or whatever. Because they see through it and they might get upset about that. Just ask them what kind of feedback they need to do their best work and then see if you can adjust to that, and see how they respond to the feedback that you give them. If you give feedback and every time you give feedback to the designer, they don’t respond well, or the work they do afterwards is still not what you needed, obviously the feedback loop isn’t working and then you can choose to get frustrated with a designer or you could choose to be flexible and try to adjust and change the way you give feedback and see if that’s gonna work out. But that’s it I think for this episode, these are some kind of very simple things that we shared, but I think everything that you need to get rocking and rolling, and then I think the same tip that we’ve given prior in other episodes in terms of working with other people, applies here. Just because you’re not a designer, this is somebody that’s doing design, you shouldn’t constantly doubt yourself and second guess yourself. These are also just people like you, they want to do great work, you want them to do great work. When you have opinions or you have directions just give them and just create a culture where they can give you feedback as well on your style, on your feedback, on your direction, so you can improve and grow versus constantly being endowed, well I’m not a designer, I don’t like this but I’m not a designer so I’m not sure if I should change it. Well, I’m not a designer. You know what you need to accomplish, you know who you’re trying to build things for, hopefully for your customers. And so, don’t over second guess yourself and dug yourself just because you don’t have 20 years of design experience. [0:09:45] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:09:46] Steli Efti: I think that that’s kind of a big thing that we want to throw out there to people. Just encourage them to trust in your gut and your intuition and try to just learn and improve as you accrue more experience working with designers. [0:09:59] Hiten Shah: Get better every day. [0:10:01] Steli Efti: There you go. That’s it from us for this episode, we’ll hear you very soon. [0:10:04] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:10:04] The post 401: How to Work with Designers appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.