In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what startups should do once they launch a product. For many Startups, launching and selling a product can seem like the end of a long journey. However, it’s really only just the beginning. It’s great to have a strong product launch, but if the launch of the product is not managed properly, sales can fall flat. So what should you do to make sure that you keep sales in your product alive? In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what startups should do once they launch a product, the emotional side of launching a product and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:22 Why this topic was chosen. 01:17 Why Hiten is the best person to talk about this topic. 01:51 What to do on day two of a product launch. 02:40 The right question to ask once you launch. 02:40 How to figure out what people think of your product once you launch. 04:31 Why it’s important to figure out what users think of your product once you launch. 05:33 Why you should continue talking to users a month or two after launch. 06:32 Hiten talks about what he calls “cleaning up house”. 09:14 Why it’s important to make sure that your team is ready for what’s to come after launch. 10:35 The emotional side of launching a product. 3 Key Points: Spend time with your launch customers and figure out what to do next. You don’t actually know what people think of your product until they’ve used it after launch. I find people who have discontinued using the product, and send them an email asking them why they discontinued.   [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah. Today on the Startup Chat we’re gonna talk about what you do after you launch.   [0:00:09] Hiten playback: The thing you like talking about more than just sales and marketing.   [0:00:11] Steli playback: We just want to bullshit and chat about business and life. Hopefully, while we’re doing that provide a lot of value to people.   [0:00:16] Hiten playback: The world’s best business podcast. Shit.   [0:00:17] Steli playback: Oh. Shit. We got.   [0:00:20] Hiten playback: For people trying to get shit done.   [0:00:22] Steli playback: Done. Yeah. We don’t want to give you feedback that’s bullshit.   [0:00:25] Hiten playback: We want you to do your best.   [0:00:27] Steli Efti: Yeah. Who better to talk about this than you, because you have just launched something … You’ve been launching things for many, many years. I think it has accelerated in the past two years in terms of how many completely brand new products you’ve launched. You’re like one of the world leading experts in launching things, I feel. Recently you had what I think was one of the most successful or the most successful launches of the kind of recent memory of yours. You have the big day … We’re talking about … This is not launching it in limited alpha, this is not launching it internally with your employees, this is the moment that you decided to open it up and to potentially also promote. Do some marketing to get attention that now this thing exists, this product exists in the world. That day is really exciting. We’ve talked about it. We’ve recorded an episode about what to do prelaunch, what to do on launch day, and this is the episode on what to do post launch. Maybe we go through your most recent experience? Kind of lessons learned and things that people can glean from it and take away from it, but the day of the launch has ended. You’re probably exhausted. The next morning what do you do on that day? What do you do on that week? On the month post launch? What are kind of dos and don’ts? Let’s break it down for the listeners.   [0:01:52] Hiten Shah: … Do is just keep building more of a product and get ready for the next launch. I’ll start with what I used to do, which I think is this huge mistake and it’s what everybody does. You launch and you’re like, “Alright. Let’s go build the next thing.” What that implies though is that you’re so good, that you know what the next thing to build is. But, guess what? You just had all these people sign up for your product … However many. Even it’s 10s more, 100s more, 1000s more. Whatever. They’re prime, they’re there, they signed up, you launched. Now what I do is I take those people and I go figure out how to learn the most I can from them and spend that time and effort to figure out, “What do we do next?” My biggest question to ask isn’t, “Oh. How do we build the next feature?” It’s more, “What do we do next?” Do could mean you do more market, do could mean you focus on acquisition or you focus on monetization or you have a retention problem and you need to fix retention. You don’t actually know, because you just launched. You don’t actually know what that sentiment is, all you know is what you heard before launch and what you heard on the day of launch. What you don’t know is, what do people actually think now? Is it the same as what you heard before or is it not? You’re gonna have a different mix of people coming to your product when you launch, compared to whatever you had before that. Most people don’t even do a lot of stuff before, to be honest. They don’t necessarily have a lot of detail or depth on what the sentiment is. Then it’s even more important to understand all the people that just came in and signed up and what they’re all about. There’s a couple of ways I do that. The biggest, easiest way is I find people who have not continued with a product and I just ask them in an email, “Why haven’t you continued?” I find the right way to say it for whatever product I’m building. Like, “Oh. You didn’t continue signing up or you didn’t do X behavior. I’d love to hear why.” You tell them, “You’re one of the first people to use the product and that’s why I want to hear from you. I don’t care how critical you are or how much you didn’t like it, I’d love to hear, because that’s the only way we can get better.” That’s an important piece, because generally with most products … All products. There’s more people that sign up and bounce … Especially with PR launches, product talent launches, and things like that, because there’s a lot of tire kickers than there are people who continue. You want to go figure out why the people that signed up didn’t continue if they didn’t. And then, you want to know for the people who did continue, what are they up to and why do they like it. In that scenario, I try to go get interviews with them. Those are the two ways and the two groups of people I like talking to. People who bounced and left, and people who’ve continued and actually got to a good place with your product, hypothetically. I go different levels there, because I would love to interview the people who bounced, but those people tend to not be wanting to talk to me. Right?   [0:04:52] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:04:53] Hiten Shah: They will answer a single question via an email and reply to an email really quickly, they will do that. Feels really lightweight. If I can get them to talk to me I will, but I don’t try to give that ask right away. While people who are more active or engaged with the product, I’ll go after them and say, “Hey. What’s up? I want to talk to you for 20 minutes. What’s up?”   [0:05:15] Steli Efti: I love that. I think that, that’s … It’s hard to put this in a timeframe, but that’s like the way people should think about probably at least for a month or two after launch. Right? Post launch is like, continue talking to the people that continue to use the product that are getting value from it to learn what is valuable, how they think about the product, why they use it, and what’s going on with it.   [0:05:39] Hiten Shah: I would say that you should do it as fast as you can. I like your timeline of a month or two, because that’ll probably help people understand that this is some shit you take seriously, but I like to do it immediately. I like to do it and get that done within about a month. What I mean by done is you’re continuously having conversations, there is some scheduling for interviews, and there is some back and forth, and there are still a trickling in of people signing up. Or, lots of people signing up, depending on what your product is and how it works. You want to continue to do that. I agree. I think this something you should continue doing even beyond the launch, but it’s so critical during launch. But, really fast you’re gonna have a team that’s sitting there. Right? Even if it’s two or three people. What do they do? What do they do? For us, in our launch we actually spent a whole month … It’s actually the month that’s ending right now as we record this, what I call, “Cleaning up house.” The reason is, and I’ve heard this over and over again and I haven’t really been able to articulate it well until now in having this experience myself. Basically, that’s why I call it cleaning up house. In order to get to a launch it’s likely your team did a lot of things that were really messy. One example … I can go across all sides of the company, depending on whether you have sales, and marketing, and product now. But, for example on sales you probably don’t have any process. You were just trying to close deals or get people in the funnel and get them into trials and pilots if you do have sales before you actually launch, which some people do. Right? In marketing, you didn’t have any kind of discipline around SEO or marketing channels or anything like that necessarily before you launch. Now you can step back and say, “What are the things we need to do that we haven’t been doing?” In our case, we didn’t have proper meta tags, we didn’t have proper ways where if people shared on Facebook or Slack or any link from our marketing site that it would show up properly. Right? There’s a bunch of stuff we scrabbled to just finish and those weren’t right. They’re not as good as they can be. We didn’t have all the pages we wanted on our marketing site. We stepped back, made a list of all those things, and started attacking those. That’s marketing. And then, on product it’s even messier. Especially, when you account for engineering. There’s design polish that probably didn’t get done, because you said, “Oh. That’s gonna take too long.” Or, “We don’t have time to do it.” You make a list of those things. Ideally, you made a list of those things before launch and just picked them off. There’s another level of product, which is like technical dept. Are there things you just did quickly and you needed to just pick up later or things you did quickly, didn’t even realize you needed to clean up later? You should look at all those things. It’s likely that an engineering unit testing and testing is a big thing as part of engineering. If you launched, it’s likely you don’t have enough test coverage. What that means is it hurts your ability to iterate. Test coverage is essentially the idea that you write code, and then automate a test run by machines to help make sure that code doesn’t break anything old. Well, guess what? It’s likely you don’t have a lot of that, it’s likely you didn’t need it. If your product actually has some amount of traction on launch day you can decide whether you do that. Or, if you’re gonna scrap your whole product completely or completely change it up, you decide you’re not gonna do that. That’s a decision to make. We knew we weren’t going to scrap this product after launch. We didn’t know that before launch, but we definitely knew that after the launch. We had a bunch of unit testing to do. In our specific scenario there’s a lot of sign up processes that happen, a bunch of accounts you have to connect with FYI. We didn’t have enough testing there, we didn’t have any really. We had an engineer spend literally five/six days, which is a lot of time figuring all that out and getting it done, because that’s a very key part of our product and he was very hesitant to build more features until he did that. Because, every time he’d deploy a new code something over there would break. That scares him. He doesn’t want to deploy new code and build new stuff, it’s a big blocker to his mindset around engineering and the team’s mindset. Those are a bunch of key examples and there’s probably others, but those are the ones that come top of mind on what I call cleaning up house. Then, there’s this factor that you and I loved talking about that I need to mention and I’m sure you’re gonna have some opinion. What about your fucking team? What about them? Are they ready? Do they know what they need to … Are they gonna be ready to build 10 features in the next two months or six months or whatever? Whatever you learn from these new users you’re gonna want to act on. Are they ready for it? Do you have enough people? Can you hire more people? How fast can you do that? Are the people you have ready for shifting from maybe going day-to-day or week-to-week to planning a whole quarter if that’s where you’re at with your business? Wow. That’s something you don think about.   [0:10:21] Steli Efti: I love it. It makes a great … I think this outlined a really good framework in terms of what people need to think about and I think we’ve given people a lot. The only thing that I’ll add before we wrap up this episode … The one thing I want to touch on briefly is the emotional side of things, which is one of our favorite angles to look through the world ourselves, and our startups, and the things that we do and the products that we build. I know that launch day can be this super thrilling, exciting, emotional roller coaster and I think a lot of people are excited about launch day and stressed and whatever it is. They’re going through the motions on the day, depending on how well things go, what kind of feedback they’re getting. I find a lot of times that founders and startups, post launch day they’re kind of emotionally crashing a little bit. Probably the time before the launch was really stressful and intense, probably the release of the launch was really stressful and intense. Usually it’s the day after where people are either drunk on their success or they’re depressed by the perceived failure. If things didn’t go as well as you wanted, maybe you’re feeling sorry for yourself, and your exhausted, and a bit depressed, and kind of pissed. If things went as expected or even better, you might be a bit high or drunk on that success and kind of exhausted. I think it’s important to manage … A, anticipate those emotions for yourself and your team, and manage them properly. Because otherwise there’s no fucking way you’re gonna get the right work done that you just outlined for us, because you’re like, “Well, post launch is … Keep working.” You might have to accelerate some of the work you have to do, you might have to do a bunch of cleanup for all the mess that you created pre launch. You might have to continue talking to people really intensely to understand why they’re using it, and continue to use it, and why did they stop using it. That all is still a ton of fucking work. If teams are not prepared, if founders are not prepared on, “What are we gonna do post launch emotionally to stay stable? What are we gonna do to make sure that we keep executing consistently without burning ourselves out?” I think that one of the biggest hindrances to doing the right things is that people crash after the launch emotionally, and then they either slow down when they should really speed up or they make the wrong decisions. They keep working, but they’re working on the wrong things, because they’re now making overly emotional decisions on what to do and how to deal with the reactions and what really happens. I think launching is such an emotional event that, especially post launch you need to really anticipate, “How are we gonna feel? How is the team going to feel? How are we gonna manage our emotions to make sure that we are ready, resourceful, in the right state of mind, and have the right internal energy and passion to continue doing the important work that needs to be done post launch?”   [0:13:25] Hiten Shah: Couldn’t agree more. I think that’s really important to gauge with your team right after launch. Figure it out. People make your product happen.   [0:13:34] Steli Efti: “People make your product happen.” There you go. Hiten, with a quotable tweet moment at the very end to wrap up the episode. I love it. Alright. That’s it for us for this episode. By the way, if you have not done this make sure to go to iTunes. Give us a review and a four star rating or five, whatever the maximum rating is. Try to give us even more stars. All the stars. That’s all I’m gonna say. Give us all the stars.   [0:13:56] Hiten Shah: All the stars.   [0:13:57] Steli Efti: All the fucking stars.   [0:13:58] Hiten Shah: I like that. All the stars.   [0:14:00] Steli Efti: We’re looking forward to hearing you soon.   [0:14:02] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:14:02] The post 329: What to Do Post-Launch? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what startups should and shouldn’t do before launching a product. The startup world is very competitive. Everyday, new products and services are launched. A great way to ensure that your launch goes successfully is to conduct a pre-launch marketing campaign. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what pre-launch is, how to do it the right way and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:22 Why this topic was chosen. 01:03 An example of a wrong way to launch a product. 01:12 What you need to understand before launching a big PR campaign. 01:54 The right thing to do pre-launch. 02:40 Why the pre-launch process is super critical. 03:26 Why you shouldn’t rely on your own website or advertising. 03:46 About ProductHunt’s ship feature and how it can be helpful. 04:50 How there’s a lot less focus on the marketing side of launching a product. 05:40 Why it’s important to learn about the value proposition of a product. 06:17 How conducting multiple tests at the pre-launch stage can help you have a better launch. 3 Key Points: The pre-launch process is super critical. There’s a lot less focus on the marketing side of launching a product. Use those early interactions with your users to inform your marketing team on how to marketing the product when you launch.   [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re gonna talk about the pre-launch. How to do it right with or without the hype. This even rhymes, I didn’t this realize this when I was writing this down. What I essentially wanna quickly talk to you about is like the kind of best practices of how companies and startups are launching their products. We had an episode where we talked about how to do the launch right, and you recently launched a pretty significant and very successful product. But what I wanna talk about today a little bit is like, what do you do before the launch? Back in the day, companies would invest all this time to do like a really big bang launch, I’ll call it, where they had the product and the marketing and the PR and everything, all happen at once, in one big day. We then learned that that’s a bad idea for various reasons. The biggest being that you need to disconnect and understand that launching product or feature and testing it and getting it in the hands of your users and customers and learning what works and what doesn’t, and collect feedback about how to talk about it and all that, can happen before you do a big PR or marketing push and launch. That has kind of, I think that that’s been something that has improved in our industry, in the startup world in the last few years, like going away from this big event where companies, where startups would spend tons of money and cross their fingers that this one day would define them as a startup. We’ve gone away from it, which is a big improvement. One thing that I’m seeing today though, more and more again, is the … what’s the right thing to do pre-launch in terms of limited alpha, limited beta? And then, how do you create anticipation? I see some startups now that are much better at like quote unquote hyping what’s upcoming, and doing a lot of social media around, “Hey, we have something coming up next week, a new feature, you guys are gonna love it.” And, just like, teasing, teasing, teasing and then launching. You know so much about it, you’re involved in so many launches and pre-launches and all that, so I wanna just do a quick rundown of like how startups, what startups should and shouldn’t do before the launch.   [0:02:07] Hiten Shah: Yeah, this is such a good topic. It’s really important to be conscious of it, and understand what you should do before a launch because it’s a different world. I think when we grew up, so to speak, in SAS, it was much different. There was a lot less products out there, customers had different sentiment about product and were honestly willing to try new products much easier, and give you feedback and talk about your products to other people. The bar was just lower. Now the bar’s pretty high on like what they’re willing to use, what they’re willing to do, whether they’re willing to share it with other people. The pre-launch process is super critical and the most high level thing I’ll say about this, is we have many tools available to us, whether it’s social media, media, dot com, blogging on our own sites, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, all these tools that have a tremendous amount of reach and can give us reach even before we launch a product. We’re not just relying on our website and advertising in order to get people to get excited about our product or use it early or sign up for it early. And then on top of that, we have Product Hunt’s ship feature, which has this specific feature inside of it called ‘upcoming,’ where you can basically put your product on there and get a lot of early access users from their community, which are actually product people, for the most part, and people who are really interested in products that will give you feedback early. That’s the kind of feedback you want. You want the feedback from those people, so you can essentially make your product good, create that feeling of early, feeling like people having exclusive access to it, because they do. It’s early, you haven’t launched yet, and they’ll give you feedback, and you create those kind of early evangelists that are so critical to your kind of early stages and later stages of a product. So you can get feedback and learn from them. To me, what I do is I share early and often with a small group of people. Small could be tens of people, small could be thousands of people, depending on the type of product.   [0:04:15] Steli Efti: I love that. I think a lot of times when we talk about the pre-launch phase and customer development, I think a lot of the assumption and a lot of the focus goes into product feedback, and usage, and bugs, and you know, analytics, and like how people use the product, and how do they use certain features, and what they understand and don’t understand, and what kind of value it creates for them or not. There’s a lot less discussion and focus on the marketing side of it, doing customer development, talking to your users to understand how they think about it, what they truly value, what language they use to express their experience with your early product, right? And like use those early interactions to inform your marketing and sales team, basically, the customer acquisition side of things, on how to talk and market the product once you’re doing the launch, right?   [0:05:16] Hiten Shah: You know, that’s so important. What we tend to do when we do these pre-launch things is learn about the value, learn about the value proposition, learn about the words people use to describe the product, people’s expectation of the product. So it is actually, you’re totally right, I would say that only about 50% of the work is product, product generation, product improvement. The other 50% tends to be understanding people’s expectations of the product. What do they expect? What do they want? What do they need? What are their problems? What are the most important things for us to actually focus on as a product team, or just a team in general? Then, being able to get down to value propositions. So in our case, like we tested dozens of versions of our homepage before we launched. We used the users we had as well as user testers to go figure that out. Why? We weren’t doing any marketing. Well, that’s the first entry point to a website. When we put a new product on or get press or whatever way we’re gonna do marketing, people need to hit our homepage and our landing pages, and they need to understand what we do. They need to understand it so well that they want it, and they wanna sign up and continue, right? Those things don’t happen in a void. You need feedback to nail that stuff. We wanted to nail that. In fact, a lot of that was more important to us than nailing the product.   [0:06:39] Steli Efti: I love that. And it’s so crucial, and I think it’s overlooked. On the marketing side of things, I think, sometimes marketing teams and sales teams, they tend to be kind of getting the information from the product or engineering team on what the pre-launch phase is and how the limited alpha or beta is going, and what users are saying, or how successful or unsuccessful things are, or what needs to be worked on. But they’re not right in the middle, in the midst of it, soaking things up, trying things, testing things, so that when it’s launch day, they know they’re gonna hit the nail on the head. They know they’re gonna hit the target because they’ve had the chance to iterate, improve, and test and learn. One thing that I wanna run up this quick episode on when it comes to pre-launching, is the question of teasing, or hyping, or creating buzz, whatever you wanna call it. Many SAS startups I’ve found have gone away from it, or have maybe never even done it that well, but they are publicly launching once they’ve done all the customer development or the research or the limited internal testing. Then they’re like, at some point, ready to announce and to promote and market, but not many are teasing or actively trying to create anticipation for it for people that have not yet used or seen or heard about the product. But I do see now, more than ever, in the last year or so, a few startups, even more established startups that are really good at the marketing side of things, that are doing, that are investing a lot in this, what I would call teasing, in the teasing part of the pre-launch phase. I’m curious if you’ve seen the same thing, what your thoughts are. Is this good? Is this bad? How do you do this well? How should startups think about creating buzz, anticipation, or teasing something before they’re opening it up to the world?   [0:08:33] Hiten Shah: I think teasing’s important. You get to tell a story. You get to tell your story. I don’t think it’s important until you actually know what problem you’re trying to solve, and what category you’re going after, what type of people you wanna attract. I would spend a lot more time doing that privately, unless you need to go public a little bit to help you figure that out. But the second you figure that out, the teasing’s super important. It’s super important to get people to understand you exist and you’re solving this problem, and what your journey is. The journey aspect of a business, a startup, is super important. It’s super important for people to resonate with your story. It’s super important for you to tell a story. Even like your marketing site tells a story, whether you believe it or not, right, whether you think of it that way or not. So teasing, to me, is all about story. It’s all about starting that narrative early, and making sure people are resonating with it, and testing it by writing. I love that. I think that it’s definitely something that’s … Honestly, it used to happen a long time ago. I remember this company Amoeba, they were a chat tool that allowed you to chat across many different platforms with one tool. Google ended up buying it many years later, but that team would blog a lot from like the earliest days to help people understand what they were all about, what they were doing, why they were doing it, all that stuff. It’s so powerful, and it was so compelling, like I became a fan of the company, a huge fan. They were like, I think they are a very prime example of what I would do today and what needs to be done by pretty much everybody.   [0:10:17] Steli Efti: I love it. All right, that’s it from us for the pre-launch mini-episode of The Startup Chat today. Make sure if you haven’t checked out the “How to launch your product” episode, make sure to check out that one as well. And until next time, we’ll hear you soon.   [0:10:31] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:10:31] The post 328: The Pre-Launch: How to Do It Right (With or Without Hype) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the benefits of in-person meetings and relationships. In the startup world, it’s very common for salespeople to sell their products through virtual meetings. While these can be useful in certain circumstances, there are other situations when in-person meetings can be much more effective for your businesses. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on when it’s appropriate for you to have business meetings in person,  the benefits of doing so, how to utilize such meeting in the best possible way and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 02:03 Why in-person meetings are good. 02:49 When in-person meetings can be much more effective. 03:41 How in-person meetings can differ from virtual ones. 04:08 How meeting in person can help teams understand each other. 05:26 How meeting someone in person is a more context-rich interaction. 05:55 Why in-person meetings are much less distracting than virtual ones. 07:22 How to determine when to do an in-person meeting. 07:40 How in-person meetings can help with conflict resolution. 10:49 How meeting in person can establish a much stronger relationship. 3 Key Points: In-person meetings are good. There are things that you accomplish faster through in-person meetings. Meeting in person builds trust in a way that might not happen on the phone. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:04] Steli Efti: In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about the benefits of in-person meetings, relationships, just like when is it appropriate to meet people in the business context in person, and what is the benefit of that, and how do you utilize that in the best possible way? I realize that especially in today’s world and especially with our audience and our listenership, we’re such tech people oftentimes that we love to utilize more and more technology to reach more and more people. We love automation to scale things up, and all that shit is amazing. We, too, have a particular soft spot and have talked about this many, many times on the podcast on the benefits of doing things that’ll scale, the benefits of human interaction, relationships, the benefits of having a brand that’s particularly human. I don’t know. I’ve had this conversation recently with a few people on very sales-specific on when and how to meet in person and what the benefits and downsides of it is, so I thought it would be a fun episode for us to break down, share some tactics, and just open up the minds of some of the people that are listening to this that are not used to meeting their customers or their users or anybody really within the business context frequently in person.   [0:01:29] Hiten Shah: You might be reading my mind here.   [0:01:31] Steli Efti: Huh.   [0:01:31] Hiten Shah: Because we didn’t talk about this until we just jump in, because I’m sure the listeners by now know how we do it.   [0:01:39] Steli Efti: That’s how we do it.   [0:01:40] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I don’t know. I was talking to somebody, I barely remember who in literally the last couple days. We were talking about, hey, in-person meetings are good. This sounds obvious, but it’s weird because my company is a remote company. All my companies are remote companies, and that’s on purpose. We don’t meet as a team. We don’t even do retreats or anything. We’ve never done them at that company, at the companies I currently work at or work on. I was just talking to somebody, and I was like, “It’s nice to meet in person.” I think there’s something where, in the past, I wouldn’t have agreed. I always felt like I could get things done without meeting in person, even especially with Google Hangouts and Skype and this video stuff and all these things that you can use, Zoom and all this stuff. What I’m realizing, though, is there are things that you just accomplish faster or accomplish with more depth when you can meet somebody in person. I think they go across many different areas of life. One is friends, right, in general. But you can go to business, right? Because, again, you’re right. A lot of people listening might have remote companies and all that kind of stuff, and that’s a trend. But there’s this aspect of being able to see somebody and literally be in their presence that’s a change. It’s different. It’s not the same as talking to them on the phone or seeing them on a Google Hangout or something. You get to actually experience that sort of physical aspect of them, whatever that means, right?   [0:03:18] Steli Efti: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:03:19] Hiten Shah: I’m not saying you touch them or anything like that. I’m just saying that you’re in each other’s space in way that you’re not when you’re remote, and that can create a different cadence, a different set of emotions, a different set of conversation. I find this extra important when you’re looking to accomplish something with a person, whether it’s a sales sort of thing, and meeting in person builds trust in that case, I would assume you would say. Right, Steli …   [0:03:44] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:03:45] Hiten Shah: … In a way that might not happen on the phone and in other ways, email and things like that. Then, when you’re with your team, meeting in person can really help you understand each other. Because a lot of the context is lost when you’re on a Hangout, or when you’re on the phone, or when you’re in email, or when you’re on Slack. Context meaning, like, we have people on our team that come across, especially some people in engineering, that come across as very aggressive when they write just because they’re short on time. They’re very short sentences and very specific, and they can be abrupt because there’s less feeling that you can understand. But if you met these people in person, one of them … He’s just like a teddy bear, literally. Like, if you met him, you’d think he’s a teddy bear. But he’s this engineer that’s very short and precise and all that on comments and sometimes abrasive, it could come across as, right, and he’s a teddy bear. If you met him in person, you’d be like … If you see him on a Hangout, you’re like, “This is a teddy bear.” There’s no ill will there, right? I think in-person helps you set context level set and gives you this appreciation for the person and the relationship and what you’re looking to accomplish that’s, I think, actually hard remote. This is hard for me to admit, because I like remote.   [0:05:06] Steli Efti: I mean, I love remote. I couldn’t agree more with you. I think first of all, when you meet somebody in person, it’s a more context-rich interaction. You have more communication channels because you don’t just hear their voice. You don’t just even see their face. You have the entire body language as a means to communicate both to you and the way you communicate back. So, it’s just a much richer channel to interact and communicate and to understand each other and also to connect, right? The other thing is that it’s a much less distracted way of interacting and communicating. Because no matter how great you are at this, typically when you’re on the phone in today’s world, most people will get distracted and look at their screen at times, or there’s a notification that pops up. They will give you their attention, and you will give them yours, but it’s very rarely undivided, right? But when you’re in person, you sit down in coffee shop or in their office or somewhere outside. You talk to people, and you have eye contact. It’s much harder for you, while they’re talking to you the entire time to be checking your notifications on your phone or laptop. People do that a lot less just because of the way the interaction happens. Man, I mean, we’re humans, and we do like other humans. We like human interaction, and we remember it differently. It’s a much more richer experience. I would say that obviously for most people, if an interaction with another human being is not worth an incredible amount of money, you probably can’t do it every day with every single user or customer or whatever it is, or even with every single employee. But it is important to do that somewhat regularly and frequently. Then, there are situations where I would say it’s absolutely crucial to do it because the in-person conversation or meeting communication will drastically improve the chances of success, right? One thing that I’ll bring up is conflict situations or conflict resolutions, right? If I have a conflict with a customer, let’s say, or an employee, writing with them and trying to figure things out in writing is going to be much more challenging and harder to do than talking to them on the phone or in a video call. Even a video call or a phone call will be much less fruitful than if you meet with them in person. I would grade this based on how big the conflict is, right, how important the person is. Sometimes it’s just hard to resolve things in a communication channel that’s not as humanly rich as in-person communication. So, when there’s conflict with customers or with people, employees, team members, co-founders, if you can, whenever you can, I would always meet in person. It’s funny you brought up the teddy bear that’s abrasive in writing sometimes. I have the same thing, and we’ve talked about this before where one of my co-founders … In writing, he comes across really aggressive and really abrupt and really unpleasant. When you talk to him in person, it’s a much better experience. He comes across much more thoughtful, much more calm in his energy than just aggressive and negative, and so it’s usually a super fruitful conversation. So, I’ve learned … This year, I was traveling. I was sailing in Croatia. I would check in my email or Slack. I would get these messages from him that were particularly unpleasant for me to read, but because I have so much experience dealing with him, I didn’t step into the … I didn’t step into the trap of responding in writing because I knew it would just escalate, and I just ignored it. I just wrote, “I will call you or we will talk when I’m back.” In the moment, he was not happy about that response, but now that we’re both in New York … Yesterday, we had dinner together, and we were able to have a really beautiful and human and just a really, really great conversation where all these issue that we had got resolved in a really beautiful way, in a way that writing back to him and trying to figure these things out in chat would have never succeeded. So, I think conflict is one really big one where I would encourage people to step up the communication channel if possible to meet in person.   [0:09:43] Hiten Shah: I like that a lot. I think you can sort things out much faster in conflict, and I would say that having even in-person conversations prior to conflict can actually help you with your conflict as well. There are a lot of tactics to this, like going and actually meeting the people. We work with a lot of dev shops from time to time, and sometimes consistently. Some of them actually like to come see you in person, and they’ll put that on them in terms of cost. Because a lot of them are out of the country and things like that. We’ve found that to be actually really valuable in building the relationship and avoiding some of the issues.   [0:10:31] Steli Efti: The other thing I’ll say in the sales context is that meeting in person can establish a much stronger relationship, a much more trustworthy relationship, and one that stands out, right? They had three calls with potential vendors, and then they had an in-person meeting that was really fruitful and positive with you. Most humans will tend to want to do business with people they like, they trust, they feel connected with, so that could be a real competitive advantage. There’s this old, quote-unquote, hack or trick in sales that’s been used countless times and has worked so many times, where sometimes sales people will tend to go to try to get on a call or schedule a meeting or something and then go back and forth and keep following up in email and keep following up and just not getting a response or not getting a timely response from the prospect and just … The relationship is really not progressing, and eventually, they would go … They would just show up at their office and say, “Hey, I was just in the area, and I thought I would drop by and try my luck and say hi.” These kind of just drop-by, drive-bys from salespeople, like, “Oh, I was just in the area. I thought I would drop by and say hi, see if you’re here to quickly chat with you for five minutes,” or bring you some coffee. You know, “It’s 2:00 p.m. I thought I would bring in some coffee since I was in the area grabbing some and say hi.” These have led to multimillion dollar deals. These have led to really incredible things. There’s a story even with Sam Altman who’s heading Y Combinator today. Back in the day, when he was running his own startup where they had lost a really important strategic partnership and decided to basically buy a ticket and fly to New York from San Francisco the other day and then just show up in the office of that potential partner and go, “Hey, we were just in the area. We were really heartbroken yesterday when we got your email that it didn’t work out. We wanted to say hi and chat about this a little bit more.” Then, when they sat down, they were able to figure out some details. They were able to build trust, and like an hour or two hours later, the partner decided, “You know what? Scrap what we had decided prior. Let’s actually work with these guys,” right, and they closed the partnership that ultimately saved the company. There’s so many stories of that. So, in sales, once in a while, not every day, not every time, but once in a while, when it’s a really important relationship, it does makes sense to actually just show up in person if you can progress the conversation and the relationship in other way and try your luck. Obviously, people know me. I’ve taught people to follow up forever, but you can’t show up at somebody’s office every day, not without getting arrested. Right? But it can be a really useful tool in sales if you use it in a measured way and the right way at the right time to show up in person and get somebody’s full attention, be able to connect with somebody on a much deeper level, and then hopefully convince them. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s really something that I would advise and give as a tip at the end of the episode to people to try out.   [0:13:35] Hiten Shah: I really like that. I don’t have a tip. I think your tip was great.   [0:13:41] Steli Efti: All right. Today we’re going to end up with one tip, then. Either way, we always love to hear from you, so if you guys have any feedback, any questions about this topic or any other, just send us an email, Steli@close.io, hnshah@gmail.com. If you have not done that yet, we’d highly appreciate all the stars and all the ratings you can give us on iTunes. We get this all the time. Once in a while, when I travel, I get a lot of Startup Chat listeners to pick me up from airports and drive me to hotels or show up at the conferences and chit-chat with me. We always love to see you and meet you in person, so if you ever have that desire, and you’re in San Francisco, New York, or anywhere where you see we’re at locally, please be courageous and reach out and say, “Hey, I’m a listener. I’d love to meet you in person.” We always love when people do that and when we can make that happen.   [0:14:33] Hiten Shah: See you.   [0:14:34] Steli Efti: See you. [0:14:35] The post 327: The Benefits of In-Person Meetings & Relationships appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about a really important piece of career advice, which is, never making compromises when it comes to people. This comes after a talk Steli gave recently to a bunch of students at a career advice seminar. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what kinds of people to surround yourself with, what to do to meet more great people, how to avoid meeting bad people, what to do when you meet amazing people and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 Steli introduces today’s episode. 01:33 What kinds of people to surround yourself with. 02:02 How to avoid meeting bad people. 02:44 What to do when you meet amazing people. 05:54 Why you shouldn’t invest in a shitty relationship. 06:24 How to figure out what is important to you. 07:11 Why it’s important for a relationship to be mutually beneficial. 07:38 Why you shouldn’t have shitty relationships. 09:15 A big ‘AHA’ moment of Steli’s. 07:23  Why it’s important to define who is an asshole and who is not. 3 Key Points: When you find somebody that is an amazing person, invest in that relationship for the long term. Do you want to invest in a shitty relationship? Be ruthless in weeding out bad people from your life. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:04] HIten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat, I don’t know what we’re going to talk about yet. So, Steli, what do you got?   [0:00:10] Steli Efti: Those are my favorite ones.   [0:00:12] HIten Shah: Me too.   [0:00:12] Steli Efti: Here’s what I want us to talk about and what I’m dying to have a conversation with you about and share it with the world. It’s the most important career advice that I have to give, and it’s one of the most important pieces of life advice that I have to give. So, it translates very importantly for startups as well. The reason why I want to talk about this is that recently, I gave talk. It was a talk in front of a fairly mixed group of younger people. Some of them were entrepreneurs. Some of them were still students. Some of them were young professionals. They asked me to give my career hacks or my career advice, and this is very unusual. I never talk about this type of topic. I usually don’t talk in that kind of a mixed crowd. It took me aback, and it took me a few days to think about what fucking career advice do I even have to give? I’ve never thought about my life or my work as a career, and probably nobody else has, so I’m like I don’t even know if I am qualified to talk about a fucking career. I have never had a real job in my life, but ultimately what I settled on and what I talked about … I was really impressed by the response in terms of both how honest the audience was telling me how difficult what I told them seemed to be. My advice was really simple, and it boiled down to this. When it comes to people, you cannot make any compromises. Never, ever, ever, ever make compromises when it comes to people. Only, only surround yourself with amazing people. Do everything you can to meet more great people, and do anything you can to run away and get away from bad people, bad people being assholes, people that are robbing you of energy, people that make your life harder versus making it better. When you find somebody that is an amazing person, invest in that relationship and think about that investment for an investment that you are willing to make for decades until it pays off. Don’t think short term. Don’t think about the next job. Don’t think about your next project, the next week. Can this person help me, yes or no? Is this person going to help me in my career in the next year, yes or no? Don’t make decision on who you invest time and energy in in terms of people based on a very short-term lens. Think about people relationships with a very, very long-term view and be ruthless in weeding out bad people from your life and only surrounding yourself with amazing people. I thought that it’s such broad advice that it’s probably going to be hard for people to grasp the significance of it or to really apply it, but I was surprised how many young people came to me. Basically the summary of their response was, “What you say makes perfect sense, but you would agree that, you know, you can’t quite do this all the time. Like, my boss is an asshole. What am I supposed to do? I can’t fire him.” Or, “Sometimes, there’s somebody that’s can help me with something. I might not like this person, but I want them to help me to accomplish this goal. Surely, you would agree that that’s cool.” People basically agreed with me in principal and argued with me in how radical my advice in execution was. Yeah, a lot of these conversations. That led me to be like, “Okay, we’ve talked about this plenty of times, but let’s talk about it again.” You can’t make compromises with people. I’m dying to hear your response. I know that we are pretty aligned, but I know that you’re going to flip it around in some way, or … I’m dying to hear what your response is to that topic.   [0:03:41] HIten Shah: Yeah. Man, people.   [0:03:46] Steli Efti: People.   [0:03:49] HIten Shah: I was just talking to a friend earlier about people and how he feels like he doesn’t need more relationships in his life, so he’s talking about … He has two kids, and he’s married. He’s has the money to hire a nanny or some help. They don’t have any help today, besides somebody who helps once a week for cleaning and stuff like that. He was telling me his house is a mess. His wife works as well, and he works … He’s a startup founder. Then, he’s like, “You know, I’ve been wondering for like … I want to almost say years. Why don’t I want help at home?” I’ve heard all the typical ones, right, like money, or I can’t find good help, or all that. Those weren’t his issues. His was one that I think it took him a while to get to, and I think it’s very related to this, which is I just don’t want another relationship.   [0:04:50] Steli Efti: Huh.   [0:04:50] HIten Shah: He’s like, “I just don’t want another relationship I have to worry about.” I’m like, Oh.   [0:04:55] Steli Efti: Oh.   [0:04:55] HIten Shah: “Interesting.” To me, this has been the theme of the day, and I think what this has to do with is we’re constantly investing a lot in our relationships, whether we realize it or not. All of them, as important as a nanny, potentially, obviously as important as a partner, wife, husband, whatever, as important as a boyfriend, girlfriend, et cetera. We’re constantly investing in these relationships, and they’re investing in them, too. So, when it comes to people, like, let’s go talk about your team members. Yeah, we’re investing in those, too. Do you want to invest in a shitty relationship? That’s the big question to me. You’re saying, “Hey, good people, great people, not asshole,” blah, blah, blah. Totally agree. That being said, if you’re an asshole, you probably have assholes around you, and that’s good people to you.   [0:05:54] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:05:54] HIten Shah: I just want to point that out, Steli. Just want to point that out.   [0:05:57] Steli Efti: That’s very important. I have an anecdote on this very soon, but I agree with you.   [0:06:00] HIten Shah: Please. Yeah. That’s important. What is a good person to you is super important. How do you figure that out is you just figure out is this a shitty relationship? Am I willing to invest even more in it to make it great or not? I have a relationship right now on my team that is a team member, not my co-founder, but someone who we consider a partner in the business, and I am willing to invest as much as I can, my mental energy, my emotional energy, into that relationship to make it work. Now I need that other person to meet me there, too. If they don’t meet me there, that is on them now, and that relationship will clearly be over if they don’t do that. To me, it’s such a valuable relationship, such a high potential. Something’s gone wrong. I can just make clear to them I’m willing to invest in it. Here’s how. I’m willing to go the mile to make it work. But I know this person’s not a shitty person. I know this is a person who I want to continue having this work relationship with, and so I’ll do whatever it takes. But it takes them to come back and say, “Hey, yeah.” Because the relationship has gotten shitty, just to be quite frank, and we can’t have shitty relationships, period, because they drain us. They cause us to have so much unclarity, so much bullshit. We don’t have time for bullshit. I hear more and more people who get older and older having this sentiment. My friend is … He’s older than me. He’s 39. He’s about to be 40. I’m 36, and you’re right around there.   [0:07:41] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:07:42] HIten Shah: He’s like, “I don’t know if I feel this way because I’m old or because I live in the Bay Area or what the heck it is, but this is how I feel.” I’m like, “I don’t think it’s any of that.” I don’t even know if it’s age. I just think it’s like at some point … Maybe it’s age that you realize no shitty relationships, so that’s my rule. If I feel like I have a shitty relationship with someone, I’m the first to decide, “Hey.” That’s what I tend to be. “Hey, do we continue, or do we not continue?” All it’s based on is am I willing to invest in that relationship to figure this out or not?   [0:08:13] Steli Efti: I love that, and I have a ton of thoughts on that. Let me go back-   [0:08:16] HIten Shah: Bring it.   [0:08:16] Steli Efti: … And throw in the anecdote first on the asshole versus non-asshole person. My older brothers were both bouncers in popular clubs when I was growing up. I was like 16, 17, and I was getting into all the clubs because I knew all the bouncers.   [0:08:32] HIten Shah: That is so cool.   [0:08:33] Steli Efti: That was-   [0:08:34] HIten Shah: Can I just stop you?   [0:08:34] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:08:34] HIten Shah: That is so cool for a 16-year-old.   [0:08:36] Steli Efti: That is very true.   [0:08:37] HIten Shah: So cool.   [0:08:38] Steli Efti: That is very true.   [0:08:39] HIten Shah: Explains a lot.   [0:08:40] Steli Efti: No, well. Yes and no, but that’s a different story.   [0:08:43] HIten Shah: Just kidding.   [0:08:44] Steli Efti: You would think that at 16, to-   [0:08:47] HIten Shah: We’re going to talk about clubs.   [0:08:47] Steli Efti: We need to talk about clubs.   [0:08:47] HIten Shah: We’re going to talk about clubs in our future episodes, yes.   [0:08:49] Steli Efti: All right.   [0:08:51] HIten Shah: Done.   [0:08:51] Steli Efti: I was not really maximizing the potential of that. I was not that confident with 16 as you would imagine, but anyways … Here’s one really big aha moment I had once. There was this person that I thought was a huge asshole. I remember talking to my brother about that person and my brother going, “That guy? No, that guy’s super nice.” I was like, “Really? Every time I interact with him, he’s so arrogant, and he’s really harsh. He did this shitty thing to this person, that shitty thing to that person.” Brother’s like, “No. I mean, every time I meet him, it’s a really good …” da da da. He had lots of good stories to tell. It really confused me. Then, a few months later, we had the same exact conversation about somebody else. In the middle of the conversation, something clicked in me, and it was like, “Of course they’re really nice to you. The only time you interact with them is when they’re trying to get into the club, and you’re the fucking bouncer. Right? Of course they’re like the nicest fucking humans to you. You’re the bouncer.” He’s like, “Yeah, sure.” In that moment, I thought everybody is nice to somebody, and everybody’s an asshole to somebody. Then, I was like, “Are there people that think I’m an asshole?” I was like, “Yeah, there are tons of people that think I’m an asshole.” Are there people that think that I’m a really cool, nice person?   [0:10:04] HIten Shah: Yeah.   [0:10:05] Steli Efti: That was the moment I realized this definition of bad or good person, asshole or really nice person … It’s a personal definition, and it’s not a static, global experience. Right? Everybody, even the biggest asshole, has friends that think this person’s amazing, and even the sweetest person probably has some person that doesn’t like them. Right?   [0:10:24] HIten Shah: I like it.   [0:10:24] Steli Efti: So, I’m totally with you on the this is a very personal definition. I think that people need to define what is an asshole to me, and what is somebody that I like? I remember in a very early episode, first 20 episodes of The Startup Chat years ago, where you once gave me the framework, and I never forgot this, of does this person give me energy or does this person cost me energy? I don’t think it’s the only framework, but I think it’s a really good question to ask sometimes. In your case, it seemed like there’s a relationship that for a long time was giving energy, now has turned the page and is costing energy. You’re now doing anything you can to turn it around again, right, make this a positive relationship again, net positive.   [0:11:05] HIten Shah: Absolutely. Yeah.   [0:11:09] Steli Efti: I couldn’t agree more with you on that. I think the big lesson for me, or the thing that I’m … The lesson that’s getting reinforced more and more every day, every year, the older I get, and I do think that that to me has to do with age, is that the older I get, the more I reap and I experience the benefits of long-term, healthy, good relationships that I’ve invested in, and so-   [0:11:40] HIten Shah: Oh my god, I like that.   [0:11:41] Steli Efti: Right?   [0:11:41] HIten Shah: I like that so much. That is so powerful.   [0:11:44] Steli Efti: When I was really young, when I was 14, 16, 18, I didn’t have enough life to experience that. I didn’t have relationships that were long enough around for me to really notice the difference of the significant benefits of a long-term, positive relationship versus not. Today, every day, everything that’s great about my life I can directly attribute to the people in my life. All the opportunities I get, I can attribute to people, and it’s usually and mostly people I’ve known for a long time and people that I’ve invested in and that have invested in me for a really long time.   [0:12:23] HIten Shah: You’re right.   [0:12:24] Steli Efti: So, the older I get, the more reinforced this belief gets in me and the more … This morning, this is funny … I didn’t realize how big of a … How many anecdotes I would have about this. It’s been a topic for you today. It’s been a topic for me today as well without even realizing it. A big shout-out to who’s like a big man behind the podcast, a person on the team that’s really running The Startup podcast in the background as like a producer, basically. Rameen has been with me for this week. He traveled here from Thailand. He’s staying me and my family for the week, and so my kids have interacted a lot with him this week. This morning, I was driving my two boys to kindergarten, and one of my boys went, “Hey, Dad. Now I know a good friend of you really well as well.” I was like, “Well, you know-   [0:13:14] HIten Shah: Aw. Oh, man.   [0:13:16] Steli Efti: It was like, “Well, that’s true. But you also know another good friend of mine as well, and that’s .” He’s like, “Ah.” This other friend has kids. We hang out, families hang out, but my kids basically thought that we’re only hanging out because of the other kids, not that I am friends with the dad of those kids. Right? I’ve known the dad since I’m 14 or something, so I’m like, “He’s also a really good friend of mine.” My little one was like, “Wow. Yeah, you’re right. I know two of your friends really well now.”   [0:13:42] HIten Shah: Aw.   [0:13:42] Steli Efti: My oldest one then said, “You know what, Dad? Your friends are really awesome.”   [0:13:48] HIten Shah: Aw, yes.   [0:13:48] Steli Efti: They’re really nice people.   [0:13:51] HIten Shah: Aw.   [0:13:51] Steli Efti: I turned around, and I told him, “You know what? You’re right, and that’s why your dad is really rich.” Then, that sparked another conversation. Then, both of my boys went … Both of my boys in unison went, “What is rich?” I was like, Oh, well we have … That’s true. I’ve never talked about rich with you.   [0:14:07] HIten Shah: Oh, no.   [0:14:08] Steli Efti: So, I had a little discussion about rich and the different definitions and what I mean by that, and then we went to kindergarten. But it was like this reinforcement, and I was really happy that I had that moment to talk to my kids to talk about this. The people in your life are what makes the quality of your life. Right? That really is it. Not necessarily make how successful you are in your career, though that’s also true. But more important than anything else to me, everything great about my life is directly attributed to the people, so that’s why I’m so … And now I’ve gotten so many benefits from investing in good, long-term relationships that I’m such an extremist on this, where I’m like, “No, I can’t have any relationships that are shitty, and every new relationship that is good is so valuable, is so precious.”   [0:14:59] HIten Shah: Yeah.   [0:15:00] Steli Efti: It’s impossible to understand when it’s just starting, but if you invest in it, in five, 10, 15 years, it’s going to be compounding so much that it’s going to be amazing.   [0:15:11] HIten Shah: Oh, man. I don’t want to say anything else.   [0:15:15] Steli Efti: Well, we’re just going to keep it at that.   [0:15:17] HIten Shah: Yeah.   [0:15:17] Steli Efti: I think for people that have been listening to us for a long time, they know exactly how this topic related to this podcast. Right?   [0:15:26] HIten Shah: That’s right.   [0:15:26] Steli Efti: And why it’s very directly connected to the very existence of this podcast.   [0:15:34] HIten Shah: Oh my god. That’s so true.   [0:15:35] Steli Efti: All right. That’s it from us for this episode.   [0:15:37] HIten Shah: Wait, hang on. Hang on.   [0:15:38] Steli Efti: Oh, okay.   [0:15:38] HIten Shah: Hang on.   [0:15:39] Steli Efti: Help me out.   [0:15:39] HIten Shah: Thank you for being a friend, Steli.   [0:15:43] Steli Efti: Thank you.   [0:15:43] HIten Shah: Thank you.   [0:15:44] Steli Efti: Thank you, Hiton.   [0:15:46] HIten Shah: All right. Later, guys.   [0:15:47] Steli Efti: Later, guys. [0:15:48] The post 326: Steli’s Most Important Career- (And Life-) Advice appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about consistency in execution. Consistency is something very important to Steli and Hiten and it is what makes the difference between good teams and great ones. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on how teams execute consistently, why it’s important to do so, tips to help you and your team become more consistent and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 Steli introduces today’s episode. 01:41 Why it’s important to have values as an organization and be consistent at living them. 02:08 Why you need rules and guidelines to be consistent. 02:24 Why clarity is important to achieve consistency. 03:33 You should be able to demonstrate that every team member is committed to the guidelines. 03:30 Why it’s important to have your values written down. 04:11 The definition of consistency. 04:49 Some reasons why teams are not consistent. 05:46 How you can be consistent. 07:23  Steli has an “aha” moment. 3 Key Points: If you have values, you should consistent in living them as an organization. You can’t be consistent without having your values written down. If we want to be the greatest team there is, we can’t fuck around. [0:00:18] Steli: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti with The Startup Chat. And for the first time in over three years, I’ve messed up. I forgot to hit the record button at the first two or three minutes of the podcast today. The topic is gonna be about consistency and execution. Now I obviously broke the rule not consistently clicking the record button. And here’s what we’re gonna talk about. The meat, the best content of the episode is all recorded, so don’t worry. But I just want wanted to reintroduce it so the episode doesn’t start kind of in a weird way. Consistency is one of the most important topics for me personally, I know for as well. It is what makes the difference between people and teams, and companies that are good, versus those that are truly great. It is the enabling factor to true greatness in my opinion. And in today’s podcast, we’re gonna unpack that. We’re gonna poke holes in this theory. We’re gonna challenge each other. We’re gonna talk about how teams execute consistently, why it’s important, and how you can think about it in a little bit of a different way that might enable you to become a lot more consistent and kill it in your execution. All right, without further ado, enjoy the episode.   [0:01:35] Hiten: Being consistent and living those values as an organization. So if you have values, are you consistent in living them as an organization? If you don’t have values, then I think I’ll drop a Stelli bomb and say, “Why the fuck don’t you have values?” Why haven’t you written them down? You can’t be consistent without having some level of values written down or represented in some way, so that the company can literally follow them. So consistency doesn’t come without, for a lack of a better word, rules.   [0:02:07] Steli: You need rules, you need guidelines, you need clarity, right?   [0:02:10] Hiten: Right.   [0:02:11] Steli: What-   [0:02:11] Hiten: Clarity.   [0:02:12] Steli: Clarity. What does execution mean for us? What is really important? What is valued within our company and within our team and organization? And then once you have that level of clarity, you have to have the conviction to enforce those rules or those guidelines. You have to prove that those are not nice to has, but those are not just like cool ideas that you’d like to sometimes adhere to. But you have to demonstrate that everybody has a level of commitment to these rules, to these guidelines, to these values. And whoever can’t keep up with that, or whoever isn’t as committed to these, can’t be part of the team, can’t be part of this company. Right? You have to have real conviction in uncomfortable moments to enforce them, right? So everybody knows that this shit is for real. This is not just lip service. This is not nice to haves. These are absolute must-haves, and we’re all committed to it. And if we wanna be the greatest team there is, we can fuck around and we can’t do this sometimes, or a little bit. We’re doing it all the time, and we’re all in on these.   [0:03:17] Hiten: Yeah. Exactly. I think that that’s really the gist of it, right? If you can’t come up with what those things are, then you’re not gonna be able to move. You’re not gonna be able to do anything. Your efforts towards consistency will literally be non-existent. And that’s something that I think people have a hard time with. ‘Cause we’re not naturally inclined to be like, “Oh, I should live up to these values that I have. And if I don’t know what they are, then how can I live up to them?” Is essentially what if I were a sort of team member in a company, that’s what I’d be thinking. Yeah, so if you have no values written down, or you have no ability to communicate them, there’s no clarity around what they are. Then the consistency just doesn’t happen. And for us, I think defining consistency is literally like when the same thing, when something happens to an organization, there’s a … Whether it’s a fire or a good thing, or a day-to-day what people are doing, are they consistent? Was there a consistent communication coming from the company to their customers? When a customer comes in and they’re very angry, how do you respond? Is that response consistent when one person comes with kind of anger towards a company, or criticism? Is that consistent when someone else comes to the company with anger and criticism, and things like that? And part of this is like, not knowing how people are actually interacting with customers, or interacting with the world between the company and the world. And so there’s also a component of visibility. If you wanna get consistent in your company and have execution consistent, whatever that is for you, then you need to be able to understand how people are communicating. You need to be … And I mean even communicating internally. So one thing for us is, one of my companies is we have these processes that happen. And for a long time we’ve been honestly, a bad kinda consistency. We’ve been consistently late on saying we’re gonna ship a product on a certain timeline, and actually making it happen. I know all of you listening, including Stelli is like, “Yeah, that’s common, dude.” Yeah, but to me that consistency of not doing it is a big problem. It is a massive problem. So now every Monday there’s actually a meeting that a couple people have. And they talk about the projects and the timeline, and where we’re at. Right? That’s cool. That happens, that should happen. And they’re talking about where we’re at and whether we’re gonna make it on the dates we set like a week ago, a month ago, or whatever it is based on the timeline. Then we do one more thing, which is we literally have a document that talks about each project whenever it does actually get delivered, how late it was, what the project was, how late it was, who was involved, and why it was late.   [0:06:13] Steli: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:06:14] Hiten: And then what we’re gonna do about it next time. And so I think there’s this level of brutal honesty and granularity when it comes consistency that I don’t see most people doing when they have a problem or a pattern. So to me, consistency of execution start with knowing, when we say we’re gonna do something, we’re gonna do it. So that’s the value, right?   [0:06:37] Steli: Yeah.   [0:06:37] Hiten: Then it comes to, “Okay, in what areas of the business are we not doing that that are really important to us right now?” We might even list all those out and prioritize, “Okay, these are the ones that are most important.” Shipping product to customers is super important, it’s top of the list. Right?   [0:06:49] Steli: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:06:50] Hiten: “Well guess what? We’re failing. We got an F there.” Right? I’d even like score it like your in school, right? “We get an F there. We get a straight up F.” So then we put all our energy towards figuring out why, and then getting to an A plus as fast as possible. That to me is a representation of how to go from a bad type of consistency, a pattern that’s bad to getting that consistent execution that makes everyone proud.   [0:07:14] Steli: I love that. ‘Cause this is such a gem, I don’t want even wanna ruin it with a lot more detail. This is gonna be a really short episode. But you know, I just had an ah-ha moment where I thought, “Maybe it’s not … Maybe you’re always consistent.” The question just is, “Are you consistently good, or consistently bad, or consistently inconsistent in your results.” Right?   [0:07:33] Hiten: I love it.   [0:07:34] Steli: So maybe-   [0:07:35] Hiten: It’s so powerful.   [0:07:36] Steli: And maybe the reframing here is that we’re all consistent. We just have to take a really good brutal, honest look at what kind of output are we putting out there in the world. Are we consistently late? Are we consistently up and down in terms of our results? Or are we consistently keeping our word to ourselves, to our customers, to our teammates? And executing them the highest level without any excuses or explanations? So we all just have to move from wherever we are the consistency level, or range, all the way to the consistently good execution level.   [0:08:18] Hiten: I like that. So we’re always consistent. Are we just consistent in the wrong ways or the ways we don’t wanna be?   [0:08:24] Steli: Yeah.   [0:08:24] Hiten: And how do we change that?   [0:08:25] Steli: Yeah.   [0:08:25] Hiten: Which you now have a framework from us.   [0:08:28] Steli: Beautiful. Well, I will wrap this up. Thank you for listening. Very soon.   [0:08:33] Hiten: Later. [0:08:33] The post 325: Consistency In Execution appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what it takes to launch a new product or company. Launching a new company or product can be intense and stressful. However, when planned properly, you can reduce any launch headache and give your team a solid plan to help manage the intensity. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on how to launch a product, lessons that can be learned from their experiences launching a product, tips and tricks on how to launch a product and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:43 Why this topic was chosen. 01:17 Hiten talks about his new product Usefyi.com. 02:26 Some interesting statistics about the launch. 05:20 What counts as a successful launch. 06:33 Typical launch goals for startups. 07:26 What people tend to focus on when they launch a product. 08:12 The biggest thing to think about when you launch a product. 09:50 How they were able to get a ton of feedback for FYI. 11:04 How Hiten created a lot of value on Product Hunt before launching his own product. 15:49 Things timeline of launching FYI. 3 Key Points: Anything you do before the launch is part of the launch. With FYI we had spent a lot of time learning about the problem and figuring out what the right solution for it. People tend to focus on the vanity of launching a product versus value created. [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli: In today’s episode of the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about something I’ve been dying to talk to you about, which is let’s talk launching a new product, a new company. You had a really big launch going on recently. You’ve been building up your launch muscles like crazy over the last few years by launching multiple products, but the latest launch that you had, as far as I could tell, seemed to be the most successful one. You’re really onto something here with launching FYI, it’s a Chrome extension if you guys don’t have it yet make sure to go and search for FYI. A pretty dope product that I’m using. I wanted to just get the freshest, most up-to-date piece of advice from you in terms of how was the launch, lessons learned, things that you guys did really well, things that didn’t work anymore if there are any like that, just an updated here are the tips and tricks from a recent example on how to launch something.   [0:01:02] Hiten: Absolutely. It’s usefyi.com. The reason I’m giving you that is our SEO is not as good as it should be, so if you search for it on Google you might not find it, it’s usefyi.com. You can always search for it on Product Hunt, you will find it. We launched this thing on May 22nd, so it was a little bit ago. I’ve had another launch that we launched on October 23rd, so that was what? Six, seven months before that, another product. Draftsend was the first product, and that was actually the number one product of the day, on October 23rd, it was the number three product of the week back then. It has, right now, 1700 plus uploads, almost 1800, I guess it was 8 months ago. Another interesting fact is that it had 34 reviews that were just ratings and it had seven in-depth reviews that people did. That’s the stats for that and I’m going to contrast that to FYI because you said some interesting stuff and I think this is something worthy of jumping into, I haven’t really talked about. Then, on FYI it was so far, obviously one’s eight months old, this is literally less than a month old right now as we’re recording this, is 1139 uploads and it was the number two product of the day, we didn’t get any weekly rankings on that one. Here’s the interesting thing it had 47 reviews, so it had more reviews, less uploads, but it had 25 detailed reviews, that’s 25 versus 7. Now, here’s the thing, I want to point this out in neither of them, and I do this on purpose and it probably hurts me, but in neither of them did we ask people to give in-depth reviews. As per Product Hunt’s rules we never asked anyone for an upload either, so what’s interesting is that with Draftsend it was a product where we actually did a lot more work in getting other people to create presentations, because it was a presentation tool where you can publicly have a link for it, create presentations, add their audio to it because that’s what the product did and then promote it on Twitter or wherever they wanted. That got us a lot more uploads by almost like 50% more uploads roughly speaking because obviously that was 8 months so there’s been uploads trickling in since then. You could argue when you look at some of those stats that oh, Draftsend was more successful. The thing is though we had like 4X the detailed reviews with FYI and we didn’t ask for any. We didn’t tell anyone, “Hey, go review us,” we didn’t do that on either product. One got more uploads than the other. Also when it comes to Product Hunt a lot of it does have to do with what day you launch on and what other things are out there on that day, and other factors that honestly are not under your control. You just control the things you can control. With FYI we had spent a lot more time learning about the problem and we spent a lot more time figuring out what the right solution to the problem was, and we did not launch it until we really hit the mark. You’re right, it is, for us and what we’re looking for to accomplish in the world, it was a much more successful launch than Draftsend even though if you look at the numbers and you’re just focused on the vanity of the number of uploads you would think Draftsend was more successful.   [0:04:43] Steli: That’s so interesting. There’s two things you said that I want to dive into a little bit. First, is you can launch something, I don’t even know how to put this in words, but you can do something that seems exciting and will get a lot of people to give you a small token of support like a like or an upload, or I don’t know what, a retweet, or something, some form of yes, I approve of this, I also support this. That’s awesome and that’s the beginning or can be the beginning, but the question’s what is success in a launch? There’s a big difference between a lot of people uploaded us when we launched, they supported the product, they thought it was cool and exciting. In this case, potentially, a lot of people just on a theoretical level, on an intellectual level, versus here’s a product that got a little bit … Still a significant amount of support and uploads, and prominence, but obviously got a lot more usage and not just usage, created a lot more instant value so much so that a good amount of people in a very short period of time felt the urge to go and leave a detailed review. In your mind, obviously, that’s a lot more valuable, having people that are using the product and instantly see the value and feel so strongly about communicating or sharing that with the world that they’re going to leave a review versus people that saw the logo, a screenshot, whatever it is, maybe even just signed up but never used the product but just liked the idea of it so gave it a small token of support. There’s a really big difference between what to focus on. Mostly, when we think about launching, we’re thinking about the Big Bang, we’re thinking about uploads, we’re thinking about whatever, sign ups, we’re thinking about the top of the funnel numbers. We’re not like, “Oh, we’re going to launch this product and we really, really want to see 50 people use it for five years in a row for at least two hours a day and then give us a really positive review or positive MPS score.” That’s not typically the goal that companies and startups put on the white board when they’re thinking about their launch. It’s usually 1000 uploads, or get 10,000 unique clicks on this, or let’s get X amount of sign-up trials, or let’s get Y amount of people giving their email address or something like that. The very much top of funnel focus when it comes to launching versus more the middle or the end of the funnel like usage and satisfaction and value creation.   [0:07:18] Hiten: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think that people tend to focus on the vanity of it. “Oh, we had a great launch, we had more uploads than this other person or had this many number of uploads.” You got something out in the world that’s already a really, really big accomplishment and I think it’s super fascinating how when you dig into some of these things you look at on Product Hunt and you’re like, “Oh, they were the number one of the day,” yeah sure, they were the number one of the day, that’s great, but what did it do for their business? How do you know it did something for their business? What’s the quality of that product? There’s products out there that launch on Product Hunt and they get no review. None. What does that mean?   [0:08:01] Steli: What does that mean?   [0:08:03] Hiten: What does that mean? I don’t know, it could be that they just launched and they didn’t let anyone use it beforehand. I think the biggest thing to think about when you launch a product and especially when you do it on Product Hunt because that is the spot, that is the place to launch almost any product just because it’s the new TechCrunch, and it’s a lot lower barrier to launching something, and it’s not to say that you can’t launch in other places it’s just an easy way to launch and get something out, and get a bunch of users that are very specific. These are users that will try any product is the way I like to say it and that’s good. It’s PR, it’s like PR 2.0 or whatever you want to call it, where you’re able to get some publicity just by posting on Product Hunt and doing some extra work there. We did spend a lot of time on the images, on the FYI page. We did spend time to make sure that we had early access users and used Product Hunt’s upcoming feature that enabled us to get a whole bunch of early access subscribers before we launched and we did work with them to, basically improve the product, and get their feedback early, and brought a lot of them into the product early so that they could check it out, and things like that. We did, if you want to call it this, play the game on the platform. Just like back in the day you would have to go make friends with a TechCrunch reporter or whoever you want to write your story, whether it’s TechCrunch or some other publication, in this case you actually have super direct access to the audience. You put an upcoming page, even if you have a few hundred people subscribed to it which everyone can basically get you could get feedback from them. We did that. You go to our upcoming page for FYI and you saw a little GIF because we like GIFs and then you saw this little copy talking about how we’re going to help you save time, and search through all your documents, find your documents. Then, we got about 2000 people subscribing there and we, basically, because we had a survey too asking them a few questions we were able to pick off people smartly that use certain apps that we integrate with, so we were able to pick them off smartly and were able to actually get them to use the product early, and we got a ton of feedback. That probably impacted the reviews we had because people were already actually using our product before we launched it, and so that’s basically a big deal and something that people don’t really think about when they’re doing this. They don’t really think about using the platform that you have out there in the best ways possible, that’s why I call this a new to do PR. I think those are aspects of a launch that I haven’t really spoke about, which is how literally you have a platform that give you direct access to the audience that’s essentially using, reading, whatever the service, and this being Product Hunt specifically.   [0:10:52] Steli: I want to dive into the timeline for this, but doubling down on the play the game or understand the platform that you’re launching within the context that you’re launching within one thing that has to be brought up is that you’ve invested in Product Hunt being, and a participant, and being somebody that created value on the platform for a long time before launching your own products. You are one of the top product hunters out there in terms of sharing links, and sharing new products, and commenting, and supporting product launches, and participating in the community. You invested a lot of energy, and created a lot of good will and value, which now whenever you are launching a product you can benefit from and rightfully so. That’s also something people don’t see oftentimes, they just see the outcome. You launch something and boom it shoots up to the front page or it does really, really well, but they don’t see the years that you invested in being a “good citizen” of that platform, and a participant, and somebody who created value, and somebody that built a little following on it. Anything you do even before you launch is part of the launch Go ahead.   [0:12:10] Hiten: I think that’s a really good point. The funny thing about me is I don’t actually use that as much as I probably could. I’m some level of top user somewhere on Product Hunt, somewhere in the top 50 at least, maybe top 100, maybe top 25 depending on what stat you’re looking at. I definitely invested in it, I was early on in it, and you’re correct about all that. I would say that, let’s say, I was able to get … According to up votes I am number 8, right now, I just looked at it. I have 90,000 votes, I’ve got 247 products featured. The thing is though yes, I’ve been a good citizen, I probably could’ve commented more to be honest, on Product Hunt, and that probably would’ve helped me even more. Here’s the thing about communities like Product Hunt and communities in general, if you’re an active participant, you’re not just uploading and doing things like that, you’re actually commenting and that takes work. Someone today who wants to build a reputation and knows they want to launch a product and it may be product people or the people that are on the site, or are more of your audience I would be commenting on a lot of different people’s stuff. I’d be trying products out, and I’d really make a name for myself that way. The reason I say that is because I don’t want people to think I’m actually using that access I have because I’ve built it up over the years in a way that I feel like I’m using it to my advantage. I actually feel like I could be doing a lot more. You could be doing a lot more if you really are newer to the game, so to speak, haven’t really went deep into it. You could just be engaging with the community and that just literally means commenting. Uploading stuff is great, but actually engaging, commenting, giving thoughtful feedback on people’s things you do that for like even a week or two and you’ll have more followers on Product Hunt and you’ll even build an audience that potentially is stronger than mine in some ways. That’s the brilliance of a product community or any community like Product Hunt, it was also the brilliance of TechCrunch back in the day. Even today, I bet if you’re an active commenter, and people see your comments regularly, and you’re being thoughtful you will probably build a name for yourself there, some of the writers might even start following you. In fact, now, it’s an opportunity because there’s not that many great comments on TechCrunch either and so I got emphasize that yeah, I’ve paid my dues, so to speak, I’ve spent time for years but I feel like I could do more, which is an opportunity for anyone listening if you really want to engage with something, you really want that audience to love you, you really are going to put your product out there or want to get writers to pay attention to you just be thoughtful and actually engage.   [0:15:05] Steli: I love it.   [0:15:05] Hiten: In whatever ways possible.   [0:15:06] Steli: I love that, that could be a whole episode in itself is just talking about how to utilize these communities just by commenting and participating to really build a brand, and a build a reputation, and build a network. There are so many spaces, I’ve seen this within music, in sports, in many areas these obscure characters that are “nobodies” that start participating and commenting, giving so much value, and all of a sudden they become really prominent figures in a certain industry or space all through just participation and value creation through commenting, tweeting, or whatever, or writing, or sharing some kind of content within the context of that community. Putting that aside, let’s just briefly talk about the FYI launch, the things that you talked about that you did prior to launching. What was the timeline of that? When did you start doing that all the way up to the day that you officially launched?   [0:15:59] Hiten: I believe right around April 17th is when we launched our upcoming page and that’s the early access page where you tell people, “Our stuff is coming. This is the product I’m building and it’s coming.” Then, we started promoting that. What we like is about a four week window between doing that, launching it on there on upcoming, actually putting it on upcoming, and then actually launching it officially on Product Hunt. I think you should have about a four week window I don’t think you should wait longer than that. You can wait less time if you want, but that really depends on where your product is at. The product we were basically ready to give people the day we put it on Product Hunt upcoming, maybe a few days after, so then we could let people into it pretty fast after we put it on upcoming and they started subscribing. I think that’s the key, if you want to launch something brand-new especially like a brand-new business, brand new product, put it on Product Hunt upcoming for about a week … I’m sorry, about a month before you actually plan on launching it publicly. Then, let people in as soon as you possibly can and actually ask them for their feedback as you let them into using your product. It is a classic, what I like to call, an early access period and we used to have to do this through a landing page and email on our own website and getting people to fill in their info there. Now, Product Hunt gives you that ability and an ability to tap into their community, which means that maybe you won’t get 2000 people subscribing before you launch, but you’ll definitely get at least 100, 200, 300 which is better than zero. That’ll lead to a more successful launch when you actually put it on Product Hunt especially if you’re engaging that audience and sending them messages and stuff. We probably sent them … Every week we had at least one email, I guess, it’s email, one message that we sent them. Then, we were privately letting in as well at the same time.   [0:17:47] Steli: Beautiful. Two more things before we wrap this episode up. One, I’m curious, how did you choose the launch date and what flexibility did you have? Bringing it all the way to the beginning of the episode today where you said, some of this is luck. The day that you’re launching it’ll matter because you don’t know who else is launching, what other products are launching that will determine the success of the amount of ability that you’ll get. How did you choose the day, is there some strategy behind it? When you choose the day do you have any kind of flexibility of saying we’re going to, I don’t know, observe the first few hours of the day and see what else is happening before we pull the trigger? Or are you just like, you know what? It doesn’t matter, we put the date in and on that date we’re launching no matter what. You can’t control the world, you just have to rock and roll?   [0:18:31] Hiten: I think the first launch date, obviously, don’t launch when Apple’s having a conference or anything like that. Actually, on the day we launched Slack was having a conference, so I’m sure we could have had some better stats if Slack wasn’t having their conference because some segment of our audience was sitting there at the Slack conference. We didn’t launch anything Slack related, so I think that would’ve been interesting. On a higher level, I would say that don’t launch when there’s a conference or something that you know is going to happen on that day, make it four weeks after the upcoming so work backwards from the launch day, and literally I’d like to set the date and then make sure it’s reasonable, check with everyone on the team that it’s okay, and then just set the date and a launch that day. Whatever’s going to happen happens especially when it comes to if you’re launching in a community like Product Hunt or even you’re trying to get PR someday. You can only be so smart, you can think yourself to death about a date. Generally, I like Tuesdays personally. Wednesdays are okay, Mondays sometimes are okay, but I really prefer Tuesdays personally. Do I have any evidence for that? No. Do I do any analysis? No. I just thought through it like Monday people are getting back to work usually, Tuesday’s they tend to have a little bit more time, but they’re still in work mode which is great for most products. If you’re launching a consumer product it might matter less what day it’s on, I might even consider doing something counterintuitive and launching it on a Saturday and being the number one just because you did it on a Saturday and most people aren’t online on a Saturday, so you could be number one just because that’s cool. I think that’s a big aspect of it in my mind and really the bigger problems with a launch date is organizing your team around it and making sure it happens and gets done because it can be a tough day. Not the day you launch, the day before. For us, it was a very tough day. I had a call at 11 PM, we had a call at 11 PM our time and 1 AM our head engineering’s time where he was like, “I’m not gonna make it.” “What do you mean you’re not gonna make it? You’re going to go to sleep? That’s okay, we’re launching.” He’s like, “No no, no we’re not launching.” I’m like, “No, we’re launching. We’re launching no matter what dude. Hell or high water this is happening, I don’t care.” Marie and I were on the call and we were just telling him, “We’re kinda tired too dude, but like this is happening. There’s no going back now.” Honestly, we told people we were launching that day. We told our whole email list that hey, we’re launching on this day. I think the bigger issue is just have conviction, set the date, and do whatever you need to get there.   [0:21:15] Steli: I love it.   [0:21:15] Hiten: Once you set that date everything changes after that day. Everything changed for us after that day.   [0:21:22] Steli: I love it. So much value in this episode we’re going to wrap up at this point, but I promise all the listeners we’re going to do an episode, a full out one of what happens after the launch. I think that’s a really interesting topic for us to dive into.   [0:21:35] Hiten: Sounds good.   [0:21:35] Steli: What do you do the day after you’ve launched?   [0:21:38] Hiten: Take a nap.   [0:21:40] Steli: Take a nap for instance. For this episode, we’re going to say thank you for listening and we’ll hear you very soon.   [0:21:47] Hiten: Later. [0:21:47] The post 324: Lessons Learned Launching FYI appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about something that has affected a lot of companies out there, and that is GDPR. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that came into effect on May 25, 2018. It was designed by the EU to modernize existing laws that protect the personal data of individuals and it has been causing a lot of uncertainty in the business world. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on what GDPR is, how it affects startups, how to small startups can deal with it and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:43 Why this topic was chosen. 01:29 Why dealing with privacy is so complicated. 02:26 How Europe is very conservative when it comes to privacy and data collection. 04:50 Hiten’s thoughts on how smaller companies can deal with GDPR. 06:33 One theory about GDPR that you should know. 07:00 A theory on why GDPR was introduced. 08:50 How Hiten’s company is dealing with GDPR. 09:35 Why context is super important when you deal with GDPR. 10:04 How Steli’s company is responding with GDPR. 12:23  How companies in Europe and USA are dealing with it differently. 3 Key Points: Because we live in such a global world, legislation in other parts of the world can affect your business. It will be easier for newer companies to deal with GDPR. In theory, as long as you’re trying to do something about it you’re should be fine. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today we’re gonna talk about four letters, GDPR, that has affected a lot of companies out there, especially obviously software companies. And I think it really is all about privacy. And the reason we’re talking about it is we just think it’s interesting, not necessarily GDPR as a whole, but the fact that we have such a privacy conscious legislative bodies in Europe that have been pushing GDPR and it’s really interesting to hear a lot of the theories out there as to why and all that. But at the end of the day, it has to do with privacy and all of our privacy, basically.   [0:00:48] Steli Efti: Yeah. I think there’s this growing … So to zoom maybe at the started the high level view and then zoom into the specifics of how do you deal with this as a startup, especially when you have less resources to deal with some of these things. But on a very high level, I think that there are kind of very big debates and a lot of political shifts going on around the world when it comes to how do we deal with privacy in a world where software companies can capture so much information about the individual users and customers and can keep that information indefinitely and could potentially use that information in all kinds of interesting ways, how do we protect consumers and customers from their information being misused in some way, or their information being not within their control in a sense of they’ve used a service 10 years ago and that company still keeps their data around and potentially uses that data or sells the data or whatever the hell they do with it? So there’s a lot of concerns around privacy and software, I think, going on. Politically, Europe is usually a hyper-conservative political sphere in the world, especially when it comes to privacy and data information. A lot of that, from my perspective, comes from Germany’s place in Europe and Germany being a nation that is hyper, hyper sensitive when it comes to privacy because of their history. And so there’s a lot of stuff going on politically of many big nations, but also interestingly on top of that is even as a software business in the US where you have nothing to do … Nothing, quotes … To do with Europe and European legislation and laws, because we live in such a global world and because it’s very, very rare that if you have a SAS company or a software company out there that you’re not gonna have any customers that are around the world or are in Europe, or you’re not gonna have any customer who do have customers in Europe, which in effect puts you in the middle of this law indirectly, because we live in such a global world, now these laws that are happening around the world can impact the way you run your business, the way that you have to administer and the amount of legal fees and precautions that you have to take, but also philosophically I think that up till recently, software business, a lot of us got away with not having to worry or think too much about how we deal with the data that we were acquiring about our users and customers. And I think that it’s interesting to ask the question “Will this stay this way? Or is there a shift happening that puts a lot more pressure on software companies on how they’re allow to deal with the data they have?” What does that really mean, at the end of the day? How do you navigate these waters, especially in the earlier days? In the smaller days, I know that companies like Salesforce, they had like an insane, like a 200 person team working on GDPR for like a year or something. Something insane like this, where millions and millions have been spent by a single company. I think generally I saw the number 7,000,000,000 in terms of the estimated amount of money spent for software companies to prepare for this law. And I know from our experience, I don’t know about yours, but I know from our experience, it’s been a huge pain in the ass for us to prepare for GDPR and do all the things required to be compliant. And so it’s a hot topic and I’m curious to unpack it, both kind of long-term philosophically, but also just tactically. How do you deal with it when you’re a smaller company? Dying to get your thoughts on this.   [0:04:37] Hiten Shah: Yeah, we had to deal with it for a while. We’re an analytics company. I know that you guys are a CRM company. There’s differences between the two, but at the end of the day, we all have to deal with it, regardless of who we are, where we’re at to varying degrees. I have a new company that launched publicly that had to deal with it right after launch for the next two or three days because it was … We launched on the 22nd and the 25th, I think, is when it kicked in. So literally we went from launch, which was already pretty hectic … I wish it wasn’t, but it was because it was the first launch of that business. And then we had to go and pour ourselves into GDPR for a couple of days. Thankfully, my other company had been dealing with it for a month and a half, so I had a lot of heads up on what we needed to do on a minimal basis. So at least that’s my context. New company, super easy, relatively was able to pull it off really quickly. Old company took a lot longer because there’s lots of old data. It’s an analytics company, so there’s a lot of analytics stuff going on that requires cookie-ing and ability to delete users, and do we do it automatically, or abide by the 30 day request window and all kinds of stuff. So one of the key things about GDPR is I think it’s unprecedented because there were no real rules and every lawyer we talked to said “Hey, you can go implement this to a varying degree. It doesn’t matter.” And the reason they said that is as long as you’re trying to do something and make an effort, you’re fine. Because even the regulators and the people who are gonna look at your sites and all that, they’re not really looking for the little guys, so to speak. They’re really going after the bigger companies, and that’s what this whole thing was intended for. Again, that’s the theory. I don’t wanna say that’s any legal advice or anything like that, but that’s the theory. Another theory I heard is that … And this is important because then it can provide context as to what you do as a business. So what I like to do in these scenarios is really figure out from multiple people, what do I need to do, and what is their take on it. So another theory that’s out there is that the US was having a hard time regulating these tech companies. And so the EU was convinced, in a bunch of ways, to do that. And I think there’s some valid reasons why. For example, the lobbying that the tech companies do in the government, with the government spending money on it. If you look, they spend a ton of money lobbying the government. So the government is probably a little hamstrung, or their hands are tied because of the years of lobbying that these tech companies have done, which essentially means they’re giving money to various people who can make these decisions and the EU didn’t have as strong of a lobbying aspect to it, where these tech companies are lobbying the EU or foreign European entities and stuff like that. So I think there’s just this worry that people have, people meaning people who can impose these laws that privacy of the citizens across the world are at risk, primarily because of these companies that store data and then use it. It’s not just storing it, it’s also using it. But it’s not just using it, it’s the fact that they’re storing it, like you said, for 10 years or whatever, after you used the product and things like that. There were no rules. We’re in a whole new territory here. So I think for me, I like to understand all that. And once I understood all that, I’ve also dealt with a lot of privacy issues in past company, so I have a very good viewpoint on some of this stuff in terms of I just wanna learn. I wanna learn what the theories are, why this is happening, and then what do I need to do based on that. So what we did is we did the best we could in the shortest amount of time in both companies, considering what kind of businesses we were. Like Crazy Egg is a pretty widely used analytics tool, so us not having appropriate action there so that people feel comfortable would just not be good for business, but it also would put us at risk as a company because we rely on people putting Java Scripts on their websites and us tracking their users to some extent. Thankfully, we don’t have much if any personally identifiable information coming to our system, just because of what the product does, while a lot of another companies like analytics companies that are tracking that kind of info have that coming in and have different things that they need to do as a result of that. So what we decided to do was do as much as we could in whatever given timeframe and make sure that we can show and document that we’re doing that stuff. And it turns out that that was fine because of some of the things that I mentioned earlier. So I think context is super important and trying to learn that context is the first step in that. So I’d love to hear what you guys learned and what your story is. But that’s where I start with these things.   [0:09:33] Steli Efti: Yeah, so I think very similarly. I think number one, you never wanna really … You wanna make sure that you don’t approach these topics emotionally, but you take them seriously. So in our case, we took a good amount of time to really do our research and do our homework and try to understand what is the law really saying, what are multiple different experts saying, and then talking to a number of lawyers and saying “What are they telling us?” And then taking a really good look at inventory of what are our practices right now and what about these practices is already kind of within the law, what are some of the things that we do that we could improve on, or that we could highlight better on what specifically we do? And didn’t end up being some kind of crazy thing, but what we noticed was what was even more interesting than just putting our privacy household in order and making sure that we document a lot of these things and clean up kind of a situation and make sure we’re in really good standing, what was interesting was even more interesting to a certain degree was to see both how a lot of other companies in our space were dealing with this. And even we were co-hosting webinars, so all of a sudden we’re saying “Hey, you other software companies that are partnering with us to do these webinars,” we tended to share. We tended to offer free webinars to the world. People could sign up with their email address and then every partner of the webinar would have access to that email and be able to send those people emails. How do we deal with this now moving forward? It was so interesting to see the variety of responses from companies in our space that were on top of their situation and really responsible, all the way to companies that were like “Well, I don’t know. We don’t understand what that is. It has nothing to do with the US. And we don’t really care.” Companies that were super unprepared all the way to companies that were really well-prepared, and then other companies that took it too far from our vantage point, where it’s like now they’re freaking out about everything. And they’re going so far in trying to implement this new regulation that they are going overboard, they’re almost in a panic. And seeing all the companies that would get in touch with us to make sure that we signed their privacy documentation because they’re using our product and vice versa and all that. It was just interesting to see how the other software companies were responding to this and kind of the wide variety from total carelessness to panic to a few of them that seemed to be in a space where we thought we occupied, which is the thoughtful, careful, responsible but not insane, in terms of going overboard in the reaction. And it’s also interesting for me because I travel so much back and forth between the US and Europe these days, just to see the difference in response in the US. Most of the founders that I’m talking to are like super annoyed by GDPR and like this is so dumb and this is just all this waste of money and time and energy and why do we have to deal with this and just being totally annoyed. And then when I’m in Europe, the founders are like “Yeah, this is a little inconvenient, but we think it’s the right thing for privacy and the right thing for our customers and we had to put these laws in place otherwise they are misusing people …” Just seeing the differences in how people respond to these things. I just realized the same thing is true with Alexa. A lot of our friends’ families use Alexa quite heavily in our household. We do and our kids constantly interact with Alexa to ask questions or to get music wishlists played from Alexa, so it’s kind of part of the household. Then when I’m in Europe, people freak out, families freak out by the idea of having an Amazon-owned device that listens to everything you say and that knows your family and listens in even when you don’t ask a question. People here are so much more sensitive to their privacy and to what technology companies can do with their data, than people are in the US. At least that was my experience in the last few months. Just interesting to see, but in terms of tactical and practical, I think it’s always good to do your homework, do some research. Don’t just read an article, one source of information that says you don’t have to worry about it, or that says that you have to absolutely panic and take it as truth. But read a variety of different opinions, do a bit of homework yourself, talk to a few different lawyers that have expertise and then sit down and come up with an adult, responsible game plan to make sure that your household is in order without letting lawyers run your business. I don’t wanna go off on this, but it might be a topic for a separate episode, but it’s always interesting when you deal with lots of lawyers is getting their advice, but then still making the decisions yourself, versus letting lawyers run your business. A lot of times, in my experience, lawyers tend to be so risk adverse that they’re gonna try to eliminate any kind of risk, no matter how unlikely it is. And if you go by that rule, it becomes sometimes very hard to run a business. But it’s interesting to see how the market is responding and I don’t see a unison response. I see a wild variety of how software companies are responding to this. Even some big ones. I’ve been surprised we use a marketing automation tool that’s really, really big and we pinged them and we’re like “Hey, GDPR is coming. We have all these forms. We have to make a few changes. What is your support in terms of making all these lead capture pages and all this stuff GDPR compliant?” And they were basically like “Well, nothing. I don’t know. We haven’t done anything. You guys have to figure this out on your own.” They didn’t even do their own stuff as far as I can tell, based on what you would expect a $100 million plus SAS company to do. So it’s funny to see a variety of responses in the market and it’s gonna be interesting to see in the next year or so on how this law is actually gonna be put in practice and how it’s gonna be enforced or what that’s gonna mean for different companies.   [0:15:47] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think you make a good point and what I’ve seen from talking to a lot of lawyers about this and getting a lot of data is that, depending on who your lawyer is, you’re gonna have a different level of compliance.   [0:16:01] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:16:02] Hiten Shah: And compliance on GDPR is one of the most interesting things about it is that the rules and laws are unclear. And they’re, just like many other things, they are an opportunity for lawyers to spend your money. Or they’re an opportunity for lawyers to help you be smart. And I like the lawyers that help me be smart versus the ones that just wanna spend my money, and/or take my money. And again, no offense to any lawyers, even if you feel like you had to do a lot of work for GDPR and you charge your clients a lot of money, that’s totally cool. It’s just not my kind of law and not what I prefer. What I prefer is when the lawyer is pragmatic and is like “Hey, here are your options on what you need to do here.” I’d rather pay a lawyer for that, than pay a lawyer to charge me a lot of money to implement something that might change. So the smartest lawyers, to me, are like “Here’s the three things you need to do. The other 10 things are possibilities if you wanna do them. Considering you’re this type of company, maybe these two things you should do. So five out of these 10 things, you should probably do sooner than later. The rest of the five, maybe be prepared to do them, but don’t worry about it too much.” I wanna hear that. I don’t wanna hear “Hey, there’s these 10 things. Do them all.” I wanna know what the priority is, right? And where my risk is, right? And I’ll pay you for that. I will pay you for that any day. That’s what a lawyer is supposed to do. I will not pay you to do those 10 things because you think I should do them and you have no context of my business, or you didn’t bother listening what my business is. And honestly, with GDPR, it’s very simple. Get your policies in place. No body had a cookie policy last I checked. Everyone that I see that’s compliant enough, from what I heard, has a cookie policy in place. And has a list of their cookies and is showing what trackers they’re using, or has language that says we might use other trackers, but here’s a list that we have for you right now. Those kind of things I was told are important because then the regulators come and they’re like “Oh, they’re revealing the cookies. They’re not trying to hide them from anybody.” And simple stuff like that, as a small company, is what I wanna hear I have to do. So I guess that’s my mini little thing, which is like be smart and know, talk to the lawyers in the right way and find the lawyers that are gonna help you be pragmatic, not ones that wanna make you check a bunch of boxes off the list.   [0:18:31] Steli Efti: I think this is the perfect way to end this episode. Like a little bit of advice in terms of how to deal with lawyers, which can be translated into any kind of outside counsel you’re taking, is ask yourself, is this person giving me pragmatic advice? Is this person giving me the 80/20? Hey, here are the options, here is the priority. I think this is an absolute must. I think these things are nice to haves. Somebody that weighs things for you and helps you, guides you through it, versus somebody that says “Well, there’s 450 things that need to be done. I’m sending this list over.” And the expectation is you just do everything to make sure that you’re compliant to law. That is typically gonna lead to a lawyer that’s gonna A, make you work way too hard, B, is gonna charge you way too much money, and C, he is not gonna be that helpful because at the end of the day you could yourself just download a list from somewhere. You need somebody to give you advice and help you interpret and get context, versus “Well, I don’t know. Here’s all the things we could do to be compliant, so let’s just do all of them.” Now that’s just not pragmatic or practical. And that’s also not useful, right? So alright, with that being said, GDPR, take it seriously. Make sure you have your privacy household in order. If you need help with that, you know where to start. Just send us an email. Hitenshah@gmail.com. Steli . We’re not lawyers, we’re not giving legal advice, but we might just point you, share some links, give you a bit of advice where to find some good lawyers and hopefully help you not to waste a ton of money by getting really bad advice.   [0:20:09] Hiten Shah: See ya.   [0:20:10] Steli Efti: Bye bye. [0:20:11] The post 323: GDPR? How Does This Effect Software Companies? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about changing your mind about something. A lot of people see changing your mind as a sign of weakness, however, this is not always the case. Often times decisions are made in the startup world, however, there are times when you may want to change your mind about something. Doing so in the right way and at the right time can be the difference between failure and success. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on when and how to change your mind on something and how to do this the right way. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 How founders not changing their minds about something is a major reason why a lot of startups fail. 01:41 Why strong opinions are not loosely held. 02:42 How to loosely hold strong opinions. 03:24 One of Steli’s main drivers of personal happiness. 04:33 Examples of a good way to change your mind. 06:07 One of Steli’s favorite experiences. 07:06 How being open-minded about certain things can sometimes be difficult. 08:13 How often Hiten changes his mind. 10:04 How Steli deals with times when he’s wrong about things. 11:23  Hiten’s approach to managing a team and decision making. 3 Key Points: There are experiments I do that prove that my strong opinion is wrong. Strong opinions are not loosely held. Changing my mind is an indicator that I am growing as a person. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:06] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about changing your mind. This is the concept of when and how should you change your mind or your opinion about something as a founder. How do you get better at learning to change, especially changing your mind, which is probably the first step in change of everything. And that to a large degree, when we talk about startups that fail, we always go back to they fail because they didn’t change. They didn’t learn fast enough. What does learn fast enough mean? To a certain degree, it means changing your hypothesis or changing the direction of your company or changing your execution or changing something, your idea or whatever. It means that you didn’t change either enough or you didn’t change when it mattered. So I think that’s a fascinating episode to talk about, especially from my perspective in terms of how and when do we change our mind? When was the last time we’ve changed our mind, and how do we work on this, at getting better at this, etc., etc? I know that we had a prior episode when this popped up, and I’m dying to dive into this in more detail and unpack this.   [0:01:27] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I’ve always loved the quote and loved people who have strong opinions that are loosely held. I really love … Personally, it’s one of the things that I really live by. It’s such a powerful thing to me, and I think it’s one of the hardest things to do in life, because especially when you’re really driven to succeed or do things, because this idea that you have these strong opinions. By nature of those words, strong opinions means they’re not loosely held. You have to hold them tight. You have to be like, “Hey, this is it. This is what I’m doing or this is what matters. This is what’s important.” A lot of times, when you’re a manager or you’re a founder, you’re a leader in the company, or even personally, you have to go make that a reality. Anything. You want to get better at your job, even if you have a job, you have to make that a reality. That takes having a strong opinion about yourself or what you need to achieve or whatever. How do you loosely hold those strong opinions? I think there’s a simple trick, which is I might have this opinion today, but I am willing to change if there are facts or there are experiences or there are experiments that I do that prove that my strong opinion is wrong. That’s the way I think about just how I like to live and not get stuck or held up by these opinions I have that might be holding me back. That really is what relates to willingness to change. At least that’s my starting point to discuss with you this topic from my end. I’m curious how you do it in terms of change.   [0:03:30] Steli Efti: I think one of the main drivers of personal happiness that I’ve come to understand about myself is the feeling that I’ve grown. The feeling that I’ve grown as a person. And grown, to me, one of the best indicators that I have grown as a human being is usually, sometimes it’s making new experiences or making life expanding experiences. That’s one part of it, but the other part of it is changing my mind or expanding how I think about things. One exercise that I’ve been doing for a number of years now. I’ve always known this, but I’ve never really tracked this in any meaningful way. One exercise that I started over the last few years was that during the end of the year, New Year’s period of time, one thing that I typically sit down and do is I try to look back at what I was doing and who I was a year ago. I ask myself if there’s anything that I thought or that I did a year ago that today I think is totally dumb or completely wrong. If I can’t come up with a good list, that is usually a bad sign. That usually scares me. That means that if I think still that the things that I was doing and the way that I was acting and thinking two years or three years ago is totally on point and awesome today, to me that means I haven’t grown. I haven’t changed enough. I have to tell you. Last year, one of the main reasons, at the end of the year, although a lot of things went really well in my life … In general, so many things go so well in my life. Last year, I felt a little unhappy at the end of the year and to a large degree, I feel like I didn’t change enough. I didn’t learn enough. I didn’t grow enough. I still was holding on to a lot of my shit. One of the reasons why this year, although it’s been a wild year and a challenging year in many awesome ways, one of the reasons why this year I feel much better already or much more happy is that I have changed my mind about a bunch of things. In a weird way, changing my mind is an indicator for me that I’m growing. Now, one thing that’s challenging or one thing that I’m particularly interested to talk to you about is that a lot of times … I’ll give you an example. A lot of times, I tell people, and I mean it, that one of the greatest things for me is working with people that will attempt to do something I think is wrong or dumb and then prove that they were right. That was one of my favorite experiences when working with people is when I tell somebody, “This won’t work,” and they go and they do it and it worked. I love that. I absolutely … This is my favorite. The few moments where I’m beaming of life and excitement when that happens. I have zero ego about it, and I won’t spend a second talking about, “I told you not to do this.” The moment you prove me wrong, I’m like that second I adopted your way of thinking, and I’m championing that. I love that. But one thing that I’ve noticed is that at times, especially in areas where let’s take sales. Sales is a good example. Sales is an area that I’m very, very experienced in and I’m pretty skilled at. Every week, I get so much data about it, and I learn so many things, and I hear so many things and I see so many things. In certain areas where I’m really knowledgeable, it’s harder and harder to come by these, “Oh, my God. I was totally wrong about XYZ.” At least it’s harder for me to … I don’t know. To maybe be more open-minded about seeing that I was wrong or it’s not as obvious, but it’s harder for me to come by these moments where somebody proves me wrong or I prove myself wrong. My hack or my thinking on this, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts. My hack and my thinking of this is that I probably have to put myself in more challenging situations or I probably need to bring in more experienced people, more talented people that can easier disprove my theories. It’s all about the people I surround myself. That level needs to continue going up more and more dramatically for me to be stimulated to change and to see that I was wrong faster, because 10 years ago, I was seeing that I was wrong and changing my mind quite frequently. Today, with more success, more seniority, more experience, it doesn’t happen as frequently if I don’t work really hard at it. I’m curious to hear your point on that. You’re somebody that a lot of people admire, somebody that has incredible wisdom, not just good looks. How often does it happen that you change your mind? What is the design that you created in your startup and your team with your co-founder to make sure that that really happens and it happens as fast as possible and you’re not slowing it down for whatever reason?   [0:08:38] Hiten Shah: We assume we’re wrong. We just assume we’re wrong. Even when you say what you said, which this is one of those points where it’s like I love the way you think about someone on your team doing something you disagree with and then it being right. I feel like that holds you back. The reason I say that is on the one hand, I get why you say it. You’re basically saying that your team has the okay from you to do things you disagree with. I love that, but then you’re also saying that you disagree with it. To me, that means that there might be a flaw in how you’re able to execute as a result of that thinking. Imagine if instead you had an outcome that that team member was responsible for, and you let go of every opinion you have about how that outcome gets achieved, except that that outcome needs to be achieved. The reason I say that, and I’m really curious to hit on that first, is mainly because I want to know why you think you need to be so negative and you need to disagree with things, because I think there’s a lot underneath that. I’m not saying you’re wrong in doing that. I’m really curious how that drives you and your team.   [0:10:05] Steli Efti: That’s a really good point. I come back to remembering one of my favorite quotes of George Soros, who was asked once, I think at a Google author event, how he’s been so successful and so right about so many things when it comes to investing and all that. He said, “I just know I’m wrong all the time about everything, and all I do is I constantly try to be a little less wrong about things.” I love that. The honest truth is that I don’t live that, because you’re right. I’ll have a conversation with somebody. When they come to me and they ask for advice … I’m not a super hands on manager, but when they come to me and they say, “Okay. Here’s the goal that we’re trying to accomplish. Here’s my three ways of how I’m trying to accomplish this goal,” I will have opinion on these, sometimes strong, sometimes not so strong. I’ll always share my opinions and then tell them that it’s their ultimate responsibility to go and do whatever they want to. They’re responsible for the outcome, so I’m with you on that. But inside of me, I believe that I’m right. My base assumption when I talk to people is not, especially in certain areas where I feel confident, it’s not that I’m probably wrong. It’s that I’m probably more likely right. I don’t know how to change that. Philosophically I totally subscribe to that philosophy, but I honestly don’t live it. I’m not sure what to do and how to do to switch that and think totally differently on that.   [0:11:36] Hiten Shah: Love it. That’s really valuable to understand where you’re coming from. My approach on people on the team is a little different. Maybe it’s just from giving a ton of advice and then realizing that this whole theory of you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink it. To me, I’m not trying to make anyone drink any water, even if I know where it is and I know they should drink it. Instead, I’m trying to help them see how to get to the water themselves. When someone comes to me and says, “Obviously this is the outcome. Here’s the three ways that I think we can get to the outcome, and I just want your advice,” my advice to them would be, “Okay. I’m not going to give you an opinion on those three ways and specifically on any of them. I’m going to help you figure hot how can you evaluate for yourself which is the right one to start with or how do you get to the right answer?” All you’re trying to do is get to the best answer. Not even the right answer. Best answer. So I’m going to assume that even though I have an opinion on those three, my opinion is not even just wrong. It’s irrelevant. What’s more relevant is this person learning how to get the answer to that question so they never have to fucking ask me again. What I find in organizations is that people don’t build up that ability in themselves to be able to find an answer the way the culture, the way the founders, would like them to or would do themselves. I just want to tell you how to find the water. I don’t even want to tell you how to get to the water. I want to tell you how to find the water, because you will drink it if you find it yourself. If I tell you where it is and show you how to get there, you might not drink it, because it’s not your … You didn’t do it. So that extreme ownership is probably what I would go for. That’s where I come up with this concept and this idea that I’m wrong. But it’s not even that I’m wrong. It’s that I’m irrelevant. My opinion is irrelevant. Someone else’s ability to find the right answer is so much more important to me than my answer.   [0:13:51] Steli Efti: I love that. It’s not that I’ve never heard this before, but it’s one of those things that I don’t live yet fully. Here’s a chance-   [0:14:00] Hiten Shah: It’s hard.   [0:14:00] Steli Efti: Yeah. Here’s a chance-   [0:14:01] Hiten Shah: We all have opinions.   [0:14:04] Steli Efti: Here’s a chance to grow and to change behavior, not just mindset. This is such an important thing, but it’s been something that I’ve been agreeing with for a long time, but I think I’ve been failing at in various degrees for a long time. This conversation might be an interesting start.   [0:14:21] Hiten Shah: I don’t want to pick on you. The one thing that my strategy is when I hear people, when I hear organizations on how they operate is are they coming from a place of negativity? When you say, even the idea that I might be wrong or that I’m assuming I’m wrong, I know I said that that’s how I do it, but that’s just the starting point. I think irrelevance of my opinion is actually what I’m going for. It’s not even irrelevant. It’s more of a core, deep understanding that people need to find their own way to answers, and I can teach them how to get to the answer. I should not be giving them the answer. They should not think. Again, this is the hardest thing, too. They should not think I have the right answer, because that’s detrimental to an organization’s scaling and people being able to make the kind of decisions you would make in your organization if you are the founder or a manager. You’re not even necessarily looking for them to make the kind of decision you would make. You’re looking for them to make the right goddamn decision for the business. The right one. The best one. The best one in this moment. The best one right now. Actually, it’s the best one right now. This is probably the best way to say it. It has right and best in it. Perfect. The best decision right now is what I need you to make. In my head, I go like, “How the heck am I going to help you make the best decision for right now?” I think that this is one of the hardest things to create when you think about this whole idea and this concept of making sure that you’re developing people and making sure that you’re willing to change.   [0:16:05] Steli Efti: I fucking love it. I want to put a nice bow on this and wrap this episode up. Those are super wise words and I think a ton of inspiration and stimulation for people to change what they’re doing. This is a very typical startup founder journey, I’ve found. I think that in the beginning, it’s like being the all-knowing source of truth and solutions, and then it’s the in the beginning, that’s what’s awesome and empowering, and then that’s what’s holding the company back from growing to all it can be. You turn from the enabling factor of your startup to the disabling factor of it. I think that founders that are able to make that switch and make it fully are the ones that succeed most or have the biggest impact, which is what we are all or most of us are in it for. All right. Changing our minds. This is probably one of the most important things to work on as a human being is the way we deal with change, and how good we are in changing I think are super under … Those are things we know are probably valuable, but there’s not a lot of real discourse, real advice. There’s not a lot of examination and working, really working on it versus just agreeing with it in theory. I love it.   [0:17:27] Hiten Shah: I know change is constant. I live every moment as if it’s changing, and every day … I know you mentioned about a year and this and that. Every day I want to feel like I changed. Every day I want to feel like I changed my opinion about something, and not just one thing, but so many things. I think that that idea of thinking about thinking, thinking about change and figuring out what do you need to change is really powerful. It’s really about what do you need to change, personally, organizationally, all those things. For me, I think the reason I’m really passionate about this topic is it’s a really core part of life. Change is constant, which means you have to change. Change is constant, which means you need to identify what’s worth changing and what’s not in every moment almost. The better you get at that, the more likely you are to get to your goals and meet them and beat them.   [0:18:22] Steli Efti: Amen, brother. All right. That’s it from us for this episode, everybody. Don’t tell us we’re not giving you everything we’ve got. All right.   [0:18:30] Hiten Shah: We are giving you everything we’ve got, for sure. Definitely.   [0:18:34] Steli Efti: Well, we’re looking forward to hear about your change. We always love to hear from you. Shoot us an email. Steli@close.io, hnshah@gmail.com. Especially when you have just changed or are about to change. We love those moments. We’ll continue to share our journey with everybody that’s listening. Until next time, that’s it from us.   [0:18:57] Hiten Shah: Take care. [0:18:57] The post 322: Changing Your Mind (If You Can’t You’re Fucked) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about startup handicaps. According to Steli, a startup handicap is anything that you believe gives you a disadvantage in succeeding with your startup or as an entrepreneur. And this is something that a lot of founders struggle with and prevents them from being successful with their business. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on what a startup handicap is, why it shouldn’t hold you back and how to overcome it. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 The meaning of startup handicaps. 01:23 Some examples of startup handicaps. 02:58 Why having a handicap is a mindset problem. 04:20 A way to overcome your handicap. 06:05 How having a handicap is something most people are not conscious of. 06:53 Why as a manager, your number one job is to make sure that the people you’re working with are unblocked. 07:20 Something Steli hates about the whole idea of having a handicap. 08:55 How having this kind of mindset can be detrimental. 11:20 How being an entrepreneur means pushing through handicaps. 11:57  Why you should be aware of what may be holding you back. 3 Key Points: A startup handicap is anything that you believe gives you a disadvantage in succeeding with your startup or as an entrepreneur. A lot of founders have limiting beliefs. A lot of people who overcame their handicap did so because they believed it didn’t matter. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about what we call startup handicaps. Steli, what does that mean?   [0:00:12] Steli Efti: Well I would say anything that you would attach to yourself or your startup or team that you think makes it harder for you and your team to succeed or you and startup to succeed than your average competition or the average other person out there. So things that could fall in that category, you’re a foreigner or team of foreigners in a country, you have a strong accent, you don’t speak the language fluently. You’re broke, you don’t have money, you’re sick. You don’t have the amount of energy, and health, and time. You don’t have as much time, it’s just a side gig or whatever else your life situation is. You are unknown and don’t have a hoe to your experience. You’re too young, you’re too old. Anything that you would believe gives you a disadvantage in succeeding with your startup or as an entrepreneur.   [0:01:08] Hiten Shah: All right, I like that. One that I’m going to throw out that might be a little offshoot is I think a lot of people and founders have limiting beliefs.   [0:01:18] Steli Efti: Preach.   [0:01:18] Hiten Shah: One simple one-   [0:01:22] Steli Efti: Preach.   [0:01:22] Hiten Shah: Yeah. One simple one is I need to raise money in order to create a company. I think that’s the one I hear more often than I feel comfortable hearing when there’s so many self-funded and some would call them boot strap companies out there that didn’t raise any money and are massive. It’s not any different than raising money in a lot of ways, although people believe it is. One other limiting belief I will say is that you need experience. That’s probably one of the biggest ones that prevents people from doing things, whether it’s starting in the first place or when they’re already there. For example, I have a company, this is a scenario, I have a company is it’s a B2B and I need to do sales but I’ve never done it before so I should go hire a salesperson because I have no experience. Well have you listened to Steli’s videos? Have you watched them? Have you seen him talk? Have you read his blog post because if you have then you wouldn’t have that limiting belief in your head. You’d be like anyone can do it. You’d learn how to do it. Anything is learnable is kind of the corollary to this idea that you need experience.   [0:02:36] Steli Efti: I love that. I absolutely believe that this is a mindset and limited belief episode to a certain degree, right?   [0:02:45] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I like that.   [0:02:46] Steli Efti: There are really a few thoughts that I had when I hear this, number one, nobody gives a fuck. When I hear people’s problems on the one it’s this, and I’ve noticed this with you and probably that’s one of the many reasons why we get along so much, is that I have this mixed emotion when I hear this from somebody both of empathy and getting that people’s problems are people’s problems no matter how I feel about them. At the same time, I feel an obligation and responsibility to not take these problems seriously because if I do I am going to not be able to make them aware and empower them to crush these problems. The more serious people take certain problems, at times I find the more debilitating they are and they more they’re going to use them as excuses and explanations for their shortcomings versus as motivation to overcome and overperform. Nobody gives a fuck. Everybody has problems. Everybody has problems. You think you have bigger problems than others and I would always challenge almost anybody on that I meet there’s always somebody you can find that has overcome bigger challenges, bigger handicaps than you probably even in the same market. Now, I could just tell people, “Shut the fuck up. Nobody cares, get your shit done,” that might help some, but most people are not going to be helped by that. My next piece of advise typically is well look for proof that this doesn’t matter or this isn’t going to be a defining problem. Look for somebody that has the same handicap as you and that crushed it despite that handicap. Look for proof, like probably if you have that handicap you are encountering some soft or hard amount of proof that this handicap is making things more difficult to you. You’re going to have experiences every single day that make you believe, look, the world is really hard to me, or really unfair, or this thing that I’m lacking is really making it difficult for me. You’re going to see some stuff and explain it to yourself that that’s a reason why things aren’t going your way. Well that’s not going to help you. What you need to do is you need to look around and find the counter examples. Find the people that had as strong accent, or were as broke as you, or as sick, or as young, or as old, or inexperienced and crush it and succeed it despite these handicaps. Focus on these people both from learning from them, being inspired by them, but also changing your beliefs because a lot of people that accomplish a lot despite having massive shortcomings and handicaps did so because they believed it didn’t matter. They believed this shortcoming, this handicap, this problem I have that’s just another thing I need to fix, another thing I have to overcome. That’s not going to hold me down. That’s not going to make me fail. You want to adopt the way they think, the things they believe so you can act the way they act and generate the result they generate. Look for proof that it doesn’t matter versus zeroing in on proof day in and day out that this matters a lot and this is probably the reason why you’re not succeeding.   [0:05:48] Hiten Shah: Yeah, wow. This is so powerful, right? It’s something like this whole idea it’s something that most people are not conscious to. They’re not necessarily conscious to actually what’s causing this for them, what’s causing them to have these handicaps. For me, I think the biggest thing that I look for even in myself is what’s actually blocking me. As a manager, as much as a lot of people don’t like the word, many of us are managers. I’m sure there’s a bunch of managers listening, whether you identify with that or not. Your number one job is to make sure that the people you’re working with are unblocked, whether it’s professionally, personally, anything. That’s your job, in my opinion. I’m sure there’s some episode we talked about this or one we’ll do in the future Steli, but unblocking people is your number one job. Well have you ever thought about what’s blocking you and how to unblock yourself, especially if no one’s managing you? You’ve probably never asked yourself that. I think one of the most powerful things to find your handicaps is to do that.   [0:07:05] Steli Efti: I love that. Oh man, I don’t know where to go with this other than maybe if you feel like you have a handicap. If you feel like you have a legitimate reason or shortcoming that makes it … I don’t know, maybe what I had about this handicap thing is this feeling of a lot of times I sense an underlying feeling of injustice, there’s a certain level of victim hood in that type of thinking where you’re like this is unfair. I’m sure if I didn’t have X, Y, Z things would be easier for me and I deserve easier. Why do other people have it easier and I don’t? There’s a certain level of being a victim and a certain level of hurt at times that I detect. By myself it’s not that … I’ve been free my entire life of thinking this way. I’ve had probably moments where I was whining and being a victim, but also many times when people come to me with this and they’re like we want to accomplish X, Y, Z, but just like your example earlier we just don’t have enough funding to do the things we know how to do. If we had the money we could change the world. We could build this amazing thing or we could reach success, whatever that means. The underlying tone is one of I’m a victim of my circumstances, and it’s unfair, and I feel a little hurt. If the world could just be a little bit more just, and fair, and equal then things would go better for me. A, on a human level it hurts that you’re hurting. I want to hug you. It sucks when you’re hurt as a human, but on a practical level I’m like that’s such a tough belief to hold onto and at the same time, have any reasonable expectation or hope of success. You can do either one, but you can’t believe that things are unjust and the world is unfair to you and at the same time, attack the world with an energy, and a passion, and a vigor, the type of energy you need to make changes happen, to overcome challenges. I think realize that the world isn’t supposed to be fair and things aren’t supposed to be easy. Our entire lives are just an unlimited stringing of struggles of sorts. The better you get at overcoming these struggles, and fixing these problems, and pushing through these barriers the happier or more accomplished, or successful you’re going to be in life. Being an entrepreneur and starting a startup by definition means pushing through handicaps, and pushing through shortcomings, and lack of resources, and fixing problems, and dealing with “unfair” circumstances because you’re always going to go against some bigger company or the way of things that have always been this way that are going to be hard. You are a change maker and change is tough. I don’t know, I feel like that level of hurt and that feeling of injustice makes people feel depressed and powerless. It’s impossible out of those emotions, and feelings, and states to really take the action and do the work that’s needed to accomplish your goals.   [0:10:38] Hiten Shah: Yep, if you have goals and things are holding you back you should know what they are. It’s funny, there’s this ambulance going by as I say that. I think you took it to a good place. I think people really need to hear that they don’t need to be handicapped by anything and things aren’t bad, and nobody’s out to get you. But you’re most likely just causing yourself more stress than you need to. If you can just think of it more objectively and think about what’s actually holding you back, and what are the handicaps in your life that you don’t need to have, I think that can be a really meaningful exercise. Again, I don’t see founders doing this. A lot of times I see a lot of the advice I give and that you give related to someone’s handicap because they’re asking a question that they already know the answer to, for example. They’re just blocked because they don’t know how to think about it. The funny thing is, this wasn’t one I expected to turn into this, but most of the advice you and I give on these podcasts and when we talk about these things it ends up being all about how do you get better. It ends up being how do you get passed your own shit. My advice is just to figure out what your shit is, otherwise you won’t get passed it.   [0:11:54] Steli Efti: Amen. All right brother, that’s it from us for this episode.   [0:11:59] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:12:00] The post 321: How to Become Resilient: Overcoming Any Startup Obstacle appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten share some tips on how to optimize the time to respond to inquiries. In the startup world, it is important to not only respond to customer’s inquiry in a positive way but quickly as this will start the communication that should lead to a successful sale. However, this can be a tricky thing to pull off, especially if you’re very busy. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why it’s important to respond to customer inquiries quickly and they share some tips, tricks, and tools that founders can use to get better at shortening their turnaround time. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:39 Why it’s important to have a quick turnaround time in today’s world. 01:55 How to deal with inquiries on the personal side of things. 02:58 How a quick turnaround time can be a good thing for your brand. 03:45 Factors that can affect your response time. 04:42 Times when responding quickly can be a negative thing. 05:53 Two major factors that affect your response time. 09:08 Why the turnaround time is everything. 11:10 Tips and tools that help improve your turnaround time. 11:20 Why you should and how can monitor your response time. 11:57  How automating some tasks can improve response time. 3 Key Points: The turnaround time is everything. Monitor your response time. Your mindset of what your what your trigger is when you receive an inquiry determines the way you respond.   [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, what we want to talk about is we want to share some tips on how to optimize the time to respond, right? So first, let’s talk about why it’s really important to have a quick turnaround time, especially in today’s world. This is people email you, people pinging you on social media, but probably even more importantly, people that come to you and are interested in your product or service and want to start up communication or a conversation with you, why it’s important to get back to them really really quickly, and then let’s share some tips and tricks on tools and methodologies that startups can use and founders can use to become better at shortening the turnaround time.   [0:00:51] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Man, like I’m probably the worst at this in a weird way where like, I have a need to just respond as fast as I possibly can to everybody.   [0:01:02] Steli Efti: You’re crazy.   [0:01:02] Hiten Shah: And so, this might be a little bit of therapy for me. So, you tell me how people should be thinking about this. But, for me, if I get a customer support message, or if someone wants to buy something from me, or if I get even an email, my typical response is to try to answer it as soon as I possibly can, within seconds if I can. One of the things that’s worse for me is that the positive feedback I get on my response time, makes me want to keep doing that and it’s horrible, so. This is probably therapy. I’d love to hear what your take is on this.   [0:01:34] Steli Efti: Okay. Well, I’m thinking right now. Maybe we should start on the like the personal inbox level and then work our way to the company-wide level. And so, on the personal side, I know intimately about your issues with this because we do have a little bit of a shared inbox for The Startup Chat, right? We love to hear from people. People email us all the time with their questions, with their challenges, sometimes with their praise. You can always get in touch with us steli@ gmail.com. In the early days of this podcast, I was even trying to attempt to compete with you on response rate and losing consistently and then eventually, I just gave up and I was like, all right, you know if somebody emails us, nine out of ten times, I won’t be able to compete with Hiten’s turnaround time. In case that doesn’t happen for whatever reason, I’ll chime in or if I have to add something to, you know, whatever your response is, I’ll do that. I remember talking to you about this and I remember the thing that stuck with me was you saying that a quick turnaround time is kind of, you’re first way or one way of how you create a brand and how you stand out because people are not used to hearing back very quickly in general. But they’re even less to it and less expecting of it when they email people that are in high demand, quote-unquote, or that seem to be getting lots and lots of email. So, when you, as somebody that’s in such high demand, somebody that people admire, and look up to, when you reply or respond within a short period of time and always very thoughtfully and with great advice, or at least a very helpful stance, it blows people’s minds away and creates a very strong and emotional impression on them. I remember hearing you say that and thinking, oh my God, this makes so much sense. I shall also try to get better at this. But, I have to admit that I’m, you know, that I personally, the way that I do it, is because I don’t like doing email on my phone and because I’ve de-installed email on my phone because I do a terrible job at responding on my phone, I try to be really good at responding to people when I’m at my laptop. But, I also kind of made my peace with it that at times where I’m not at work, I’m just going to be with my … I’m not going to be having these like insane turnaround time on at least on personal email or emails that go into my inbox. But, I’ve always been so impressed with you. I’ve been impressed with some other people as well. You know, it’s been a few years, but I remember Seth Godin or Mark Cuban, have been people I’ve emailed with that I was blown away back then. This now, you know, eight years ago, nine years ago, but I remember still almost a decade later how impressed I was that these people are responding to me within like minutes. And so, I admire that, but I can’t compete. I’ve not attempted to do that myself, but I can highly recommend, if you can. But, I don’t know if it’s always advisable, dude, because you said you have an issue with it. Are there times a day where you wish you didn’t have that, like, need to respond really quickly?   [0:04:46] Hiten Shah: Yeah, of course. Like, and I’ve gotten better at it, but then I swing the other way and I have emails that I haven’t respond to in too long, right?   [0:04:55] Steli Efti: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:04:56] Hiten Shah: So, I think it just has a lot to do with time management, to be honest. And so, there’s a few concepts. Time management and context switching. I think those are the two most important things that it has to do with. And most things that people say or believe, I usually don’t believe. So, like people say that it’s bad if you’re context switching, and it takes you time to ramp up to the new things. So, if you’re working, let’s say I’m writing a blog post, for example, and then I for some reason decide to go check my email. It takes me longer to come back to a blog post then if I would have not just checked my email ever and just finished the blog post. I think there’s a lot of science and theories that say that’s how it works, right? That it takes longer for you to come back to something after you get away from it for the use case of it, distraction. So, in that context, I’m like yeah, maybe that’s true, right? Like, I should manage my time better, so I don’t get distracted by these random things coming in. Not random, but you know, email or things that I feel the need to be on top of. Whether it’s, for me right now, it would be email and support, right? Coming in, or a slack message with someone with a massive need, right, or like a need for something from me. So, those are the three places that I get pulled into these days on the whim. I found that for myself, I’m very good at context switching and then switching back. I have a lot of practice with it. What I’ve always learned is that most people are not very good at that. So, and they do lose some amount of energy as they’re switching back and forth for the thing that they were doing that they need to come back too. So, if you are one of those people, which I think is the most common case, where context switching is very damaging to your time management, then don’t do it. I think it’s horrible. I think it’s a bad idea. Check your email every two hours, every three hours. Set a schedule for it. Be more structured, if you can, or just turn it off and check it when you feel like it, not when you’re doing something else. So, I think that’s important. To me though, I’m very much like a people person, for lack of a better way to say it. And also, an introvert, at the same time, or can be, where I want my own time and space. And so, if I’m a people person, I want to please people, make them happy. To me, that’s the mental model that makes me want to respond to them. So, you know, as with many things we would talk about here, in The Startup Chat, one of the biggest things for this is like, just know yourself and make sure you understand the reason why you either are lagging on a response or are like me and wanting to respond really fast. For me, I’m a people person. I want to please them, so I will respond because it makes them happy, right, which has little to do with me and my time management, and it probably is detrimental. While other folks, when they see an email come in, they take it as an emotional drain, or when they see something come in, they take it personally. They take it as emotional drain, they take it in a much different way than I do and I’ve seen that with people I work with where they get a support ticket in and they’re like, “Oh, crap. I have to answer, I have to answer.” And for me, it’s like, oh, I get to make someone happy today, right? And I think that mindset of what your response is, what your trigger is when you receive something, really determines what you’re … How you frame the response to it. And I’m not saying is either good or bad, I’ve just seen reactions to things like this that lead to certain behavior that then affect your time.   [0:08:26] Steli Efti: I love that. All right. So, let’s switch from person to business, right?   [0:08:30] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:08:30] Steli Efti: And I mean, the two things for people like us are kind of almost the same.   [0:08:33] Hiten Shah: But, not for everyone.   [0:08:34] Steli Efti: But, not for everyone.   [0:08:35] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:08:35] Steli Efti: And still not quite, right, but let’s go from the individual to kind of a team and the perspective of that. I’ll throw out a claim and that is that, you know, what I have learned in my life, as an entrepreneur, and both in any kind of capacity of doing sales, is that the time to respond when there’s incoming interest, a prospect, a lead, a signup, a trial, somebody wanting to get in touch with you because they’re curious, they have questions, or their interested in your services or your product, in any way shape or form possible, the turnaround time from them reaching out to you and you getting back to them, that turnaround time is everything. And it’s everything both from a branding and having an opportunity to wow and create an impression perspective. But, it’s also everything from actually having a chance to convert that interest into business, right? From a real business perspective because what I always teach founders is that there’s no such thing as an old and hot lead, right? There’s such thing does not exist. Somebody that came to your site a year ago and requested a demo, is as cold of a contact as somebody that’s never heard of you and you’re reaching out to present something. Both, you would think, well, that person a year ago came to us, so they’re probably more qualified. They probably remember us. They probably still may be somewhat interested in the conversation, but the results, the numbers, prove that you’re going to get the same response if you email a list of leads that are over a year old, although they were inbound and maybe warm or hot, versus, when you cold email a highly qualified list of people, right? You’re going to get the same open rates, the same response rates, the same kind of results because once intended time really matters. Google has shown that with their business model and the amount of money that they’re worth, made that, you know, I might be a potential customer to you in life, but the timing truly truly matters. So, if you get back to me very quickly, both the chances of you now getting to get another response from me and get the communication conversation started, dramatically increased and the chance that I’m not going to be somebody that’s going to turn into a real prospect, but eventually and hopefully into a customer, dramatically increase. So, from a business perspective, your company should optimize the hell out of turnaround time when it comes to communication, especially with prospects and do anything and everything possible to get in touch with people really quickly once they show interest. It breaks my heart how many startups today, today, not like 20 years ago, today, with all the tools, all the technologies, everything that’s available for them to automate some of this and to make this feasible and possible at scale, how many startups? You could go to their website and fill out a form that you want to demo or some kind of a contact and it takes days, sometimes a week or two until they get back to you. It’s insanity. So, that, throwing that out of the way, maybe we could just for the last few minutes of the podcast, give teams that agree with this and want to improve on it, give them some tools, some hacks, some ways of doing it and really decreasing the time to respond in their company in the next week or two.   [0:11:57] Hiten Shah: Yeah. You know, I don’t see enough people monitoring their response time. How about that?   [0:12:04] Steli Efti: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:12:05] Hiten Shah: I’m just going to start with that one. Monitor your response time. Know how fast you are or slow you are.   [0:12:12] Steli Efti: Beautiful. Yeah. I would agree with that 1,000%. Most people don’t know. Time to find out. Maybe find out right now. If you have a team, sign up with an alias email account and see what happens and a phone number and see what happens, right?   [0:12:26] Hiten Shah: Oh, yeah. Test your team. That’s great.   [0:12:28] Steli Efti: Test your team. Secret shopper your team, right? Even if you think you know the process, even if you put the process in place yesterday, do it anyways and see what happens and time it, right? Time it. All right. That’s beautiful. Okay. So, my advice is look for ways to automate this. So, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a habit or a, you know, almost nobody’s going to be as good as you as terms of their personal time management, so try to create automation, right? So, what does that mean? That means use email tools, drip email tools, email automation tools, and set things in process so when somebody signs up with an email or downloads a white paper, or piece of contact, or requests a demo, anything. The first response is both individual, in terms of from what email it comes and what the email looks like, but it’s automated, so people get a response that starts immediately. Saying, let’s say somebody signs up for a demo, a response happens, and says, “Hey, you know, I saw your demo request come through. That’s exciting. Here’s a link to schedule a time to get the demo going.” Or, “Here’s the number one question most people have.” And answer and, “Please hit reply and let me know .” Whatever the next step is. But, write up the first email in a way that’s automated when you can or if you can. Or, when you do phone calls, like we do. We call our incoming trial sign-ups and what we’ll do is, we’ll actually use a little bit of automation to make sure that when somebody fills out their form and puts in their phone number that our sales reps get that phone number into their system and call that lead within … When possible, within the first five minutes during their working hours. When it’s outside the normal working hours, we make sure that it’s kind of the first person they contact the next day when they start their day and start calling. But, use a bit of automation. The software is out there. You know, it’s widely available. Is a tool that I’ll selfishly, but there’s so many tools out there that can help you automate that first response, so the conversation can start and you can get in touch with people much faster.   [0:14:34] Hiten Shah: That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s great. Automate it. You know, make it easier. Make it easier to respond. One more.   [0:14:42] Steli Efti: One more.   [0:14:44] Hiten Shah: Cool. See the impact of the response time. So, once you know your response time, the next step is to figure out is there any impact on speed or slowness or whatever? Is there a certain amount of feedback you get when you’re faster or slower? Are people responded back because if your speed? A lot of times in sales, speed dictates the response, whether you get a response or not.   [0:15:08] Steli Efti: I love that. That’s a perfect way to conclude this episode. Start measuring, put some tools in place to improve it, and then measure the impact once you’ve made headway’s on decreasing the time to respond. Beautiful. We want to hear from you. If you’d go through these three steps, good, bad, ugly, you know, exciting, or depressing, get in touch with us. Steli@ gmail.com. Let us know what the results are, your lessons learned, and we’ll share it with the community. Until next time, that’s it from us.   [0:15:40] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:15:41] The post 320: How to Optimize Your Lead Response Time appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.