Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what we have learned from each other in 500 episodes. After 500 episodes of the podcast, Steli and Hiten dive into what they’ve learned from hosting the podcast over the last 5 years. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about the very first episode of the show, what Hiten has learned from doing the podcast, why the podcast was started and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:12 Why this topic was chosen. 01:15 About the first episode of the show. 02:11 What Hiten has learned from doing the podcast. 03:50 How friendships should be natural. 04:56 The importance of friendships. 06:11 Why the podcast was started. 07:03 What the podcast has allowed the guys to do. 07:40 The nature of Steli and Hiten’s friendship. 09:14 A real gift of the podcast. 3 Key Points: It’s been a wild ride.We don’t talk about our personal lives as much as other things.To me friendship should be natural. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about, today is a big day, the 500th episode of The Startup Chat. What we’re going to talk about is what we have learned from each other in over 500 conversation’s over five years now or so. So would you believe it? Who in the fuck would have ever known when we first grabbed the coffee and I told you we too have great chemistry, we should do a podcast together, and you said, “Sure, whatever you want, Steli,” who would have known that? That’s the first encounter would have led to this type of relationship, friendship, and this kind of podcast. If all of you that are like, “I wish I was at the coffee shop, and could have listened to how they came up with the idea and how they put it together.” You can, a lot of you don’t know this, but the very first episode, if you Google thestartupchat.com and then episode one you’re going to find the episode that we recorded right after walking out of that coffee shop where we basically came up with the name, what should it be, how long, why do we want this? Like that very first conversation we had about doing the podcast is recorded and published as the very first episode of The Startup Chat. So go and check that out, but who the fuck would have thought would have made it so long, to 500 episodes. Man, it’s been a wild ride. It’s been a wild ride. So today I thought it’d be fun to reminisce a little bit, to look back and to share a little bit of some things that stand out today, for us, in terms of what we have learned from each other, from doing a 500 episodes on The Startup Chat. So I’m going to put you on the spot. Since I had the idea for the episode, you’re going to be the first one that’s going to have to answer this. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind, if somebody, if you had coffee with some founder and that founder said, “Hey dude, you’ve been doing this podcast thing with Steli forever. What have you learned doing the podcast with Steli? What’s something that stands out to you?” [0:02:13] Hiten Shah: Yeah, yeah. Huh. What have I learned? I think talking to you and doing it in public basically, so like I’d say 99% of the time we’ve spent together has been essentially in … Sorry. [inaudible 00:02:56]. Or enough friends or whatever. You have your five friends, whatever we want to think about it. You got friends, for sure. Like your friendly guy. It’s taught me about friendship and what I mean by that is, we don’t talk about our own personal lives as much as we talk about things that are not our personal lives. Obviously sometimes on the podcast we talk about it, but usually it’s something that’s on our mind, some advice, something that we think the audience would find valuable. Just some topics we want to talk about. It’s very natural. To me a friendship should be natural and our friendship that has developed over time because we knew each other before we started this, but we didn’t really know each other and so in a way I’ve got to know you, but I’ve gotten to know you in the weirdest way possible. I’ve gotten to know you by talking to you, but not talking to you. If that makes sense? Right? I think that if you ask me, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, is like, it inspires me to think about friendship, in not necessarily a different way but in a way where it’s like, “Oh, there are a lot of different ways to have a friend or make a friend, or develop a friendship,” and this is one of them. I don’t have any other friend that I’ve developed a friendship with like this. Well a lot of other friends, the friendships are very similar in the way that they’ve developed. For example, and this is for everybody, basically. Wherever you go to college, you’re going to have some friends from college guaranteed, like guaranteed, even if it’s just one person. I have a crew from college, you could call it, and we’re just friends. That’s it. I don’t even know how many of us there is. Like if I start counting, I could probably count it solid dozen. But they’re friends. Like we never counted like that. We even have a picture from a dinner in college where we were all there. It’s some fancy dinner for one of our friend’s birthdays, and it’s like those are my friends, but it’s because we had proximity and somehow we got along. We bumped into each other in college. We didn’t know each other, most of us didn’t know each other before college. But this is different. I don’t know what this is. So there you go. It’s helped inspire a different type of friendship that I don’t even know how I could have predicted. [0:05:38] Steli Efti: Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. I’m not sure if there’s even … There’s definitely not many friendships have developed this way of that [crosstalk 00:05:48]. I think it’s crazy also because like when we started with a podcast, I think there were a mix of reasons why we wanted to do it. One very significant, one was that we connected very quickly, very deeply, and before we could rationally explain it there was an intuition that this is somebody that I could have a really deep friendship with, and I want to hang around with more and get to know better. But there’s no way that this will just happen casually by liking each other and saying, “Let’s grab coffee once in a while,” so that we knew, “Hey, like having a podcast will also help us spend a bit more time with each other because we have something, some common mission, some common commitment that allows us to do something that’s good for people.” We both really love helping people while we get to explore this, maybe intuition that early days that this dude is, there’s something here. Maybe there’s a real friendship here, but I don’t know how we would ever get to really explore it. It’s funny. Then the other thing that I’ll say is that in a weird way, our friendship goes so much deeper than the things we have discussed or experience together because we have spent such consistent time together, like almost to a tee, once a week, right? Once every week and over five years there’s a lot of life that happened during those weeks, highs and lows. There’s a little bit of personal problems, business problems, anything, you name it. I think the energy we have brought to each other, the commitment we’ve brought and also the care at times where we could help each other, really exceeds the things we’ve discussed. Both you and I, like I know this from you and I think you know this for me, we’re not just podcast friends, we’re not just like professional friendly. If you woke me up at 3:00 AM and you said Steli fly to San Francisco and I’m currently in Germany or anywhere, in Thailand, anywhere in the world, I would buy a ticket and I would fly the next day, like I would ask you why. It’d be like Hiten says he need to be in San Francisco. What’s the next flight I can be on? In a weird way, I know this from you. I think that also, we knowing how loyal- [0:08:36] Hiten Shah: I’ve said it to you- [0:08:37] Steli Efti: Yeah, you’ve said it. Yes, you have. [0:08:38] Hiten Shah: You just tell me. [0:08:40] Steli Efti: You have, you have. [0:08:40] Hiten Shah: Of course, yeah. [0:08:41] Steli Efti: It is rare to have people in your life that care about you that deeply. Finding friends later in life and building such a deep friendship, although we don’t live in the same city, we don’t work in the same company, we’re not neighbors or anything like that. We don’t have that close proximity. It’s been a real gift of the podcast to our lives, that has nothing to do with the audience or with podcasting in and of itself. That’s deep. All right. I mean you’re, as I suspected you, the first thing that came to your mind is obviously much more profound than anything I can say. [0:09:22] Hiten Shah: [crosstalk] got to kick it off with a bang. [0:09:24] Steli Efti: But I mean, I’ve learned an incredible amount from you and from talking to you. I think beyond just the influence that somebody has on you that is just exceptionally kind and somebody that is a true giver, which you are, and somebody that is really helping an insane amount of people. I know you’re annoyed when I’m giving you this face, which is part, that’s the only fun. The only positive I’m taking from this is that you don’t like people to praise you, which I’m doing. But when you, for anybody, like you spend time with somebody who’s very giving and that’s very kind and it will rub off on you. So I do think it has impacted me in many, many ways. But one thing that really, I think, have gotten significantly better through your influence is the thoughtfulness of the advice that I give to people. I think you really had a profound impact on me on thinking about how I give advice, where I give advice to. I think I’ve always been in the, it depends camp, but I think you would really deepen that philosophy. Who knows? I shrug a lot more like, “Huh, who knows? It depends, like every case is different.” I think I definitely, I have learned to try to be more thoughtful, more kind and more … I think just more kind in the way that I try to help people versus before I think I tended to be a lot more hardheaded. Like I had one type of advice I wanted to give and I’ve always tried to be very helpful. I’ve always been very giving, but I think you helped me be better in the type of advice I give, how thoughtful I give advice, and how also how many questions I ask before I think I have the minimum amount of context to maybe offer a question or offer and impulse to somebody that’s coming to me and ask for help or advice versus just hearing the minimum amount of words before I can jump in and tell them what to do. Which is something that I probably stepped into way more before. So I think the real level of thoughtfulness, especially when it comes to giving people good advice or helpful advice really had a tremendous impact on me and has really changed the way I approach it. The way I think about it. When I asked myself the question, what’s the number one thing I learned from Hiten? That was definitely very high up the list. [0:12:19] Hiten Shah: Thank you. I’m trying to get better at that every day and at the same time, sometimes go through bouts of not wanting to give anyone advice because I don’t think they want to hear it. So, that’s great. I’m in one of those bouts right now, but that’s cool. I need to do another podcast I guess. The thing that comes to mind for me as you were talking is I think there’s two related things that are important in life to feel, and they’re very related. One is this feeling of gratitude. I think something a little deeper than that a friend reminded me of is, and she studies this stuff and did some research on it and all that, is this idea of a feeling, how lucky am I? I got to say like the amount of gratitude and that idea of how lucky am I that I feel that you have is incredible, and it’s definitely rubbed off on me a lot. I feel like I gravitate towards those things myself. But like the level at which you bring that out in every conversation, it’s not even positivity. I think positivity is like ruined for most people. But it’s this feeling of like how lucky am I? And you embody that feeling, and that is even more powerful than gratitude because gratitude is one of those things where it’s like you can be grateful and you can remember to be grateful, but remembering just how lucky you are, is so much more powerful because it’s this idea that if you believe it, that you bump into the world and luck shows up. I mean it’s way deeper than that, but that’s like one way to think about it. So I would say that every time I talk to you, that’s what you embody it, and it reminds me of that. Every time, of just this feeling of like how lucky am I? It’s not like even like how lucky am I to talk to you or how lucky am I to be on the podcast? No, I’m talking about literally just in life, how lucky I am, that reminder. Somehow you remind me of that constantly and that’s such a good thing. [0:14:41] Steli Efti: Holy fuck. Wow. All right. I don’t know what to say. This is so good. I’m like, let’s wrap this episode up right here. This is amazing. [0:14:52] Hiten Shah: Let’s do that then. Let’s do it. Let’s wrap it up. [0:14:57] Steli Efti: Okay, so for people that are like, “Wait a second, I just listened to a 10 minute love fest?” Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know if you took something from it, but- [0:15:05] Hiten Shah: You did, yes, it’s 500 episodes, and we get to do that. [0:15:09] Steli Efti: We get to do that. On top of it, I mean I think this, in a weird way, if you step behind, this is something that anybody that’s listening to us should be doing more. Who did you pass 500 episodes with? Maybe it is- [0:15:24] Hiten Shah: That’s true. [0:15:26] Steli Efti: Maybe it’s your significant other. Maybe it is a family member. Maybe it is your co-founder that you just went through the five hundreds, whatever, fundraising call or the second year anniversary, whatever it is. Think about the people that you’ve been through the trenches with, that you have been in it for the long haul that you’ve experienced things with, that you’ve really accomplished something with. Not just the people that have been in your life for a minute, but the people that you’ve done things with and work with and invested with an experience with for a long time. Maybe today’s a good day to send them an email and tell them what you learned from them, or what you appreciate about them, or what it has meant for you to go through this with them. It sure is not going to make the world a worse place and this [crosstalk 00:16:10], we know each other really well. We have said nice things to each other on the podcast and off. We say a lot of nice things to each other off the podcast as well, but it’s still, I heard things like the last one that I never realized, never knew, and now a treasure in my heart forever. [0:16:28] Hiten Shah: So there you go. [0:16:31] Steli Efti: There you go. I think this is it for us for this episode. Onto the next 500 ones. [0:16:37] Hiten Shah: Let’s do it. [0:16:37] Steli Efti: Let’s do it. [0:16:38] The post 500: What We Have Learned From Each Other in 500 Episodes appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to sell in the current climate. In the current environment, making sales right now is extremely difficult. A lot of sales people will be working from home and that in itself can be very tricky. Also, many businesses are going to be struggling financially and this will hinder your ability to sell your product or service.  In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what to do right now if you work in sales, how working from home can be tricky for sales people, tips to help you cope when working from home and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:12 Why this topic was chosen. 01:26 What to do right now if you work in sales. 01:59 The nature of sales. 02:38 How working from home can be tricky for sales people. 03:11 Tips to help you cope when working from home.  05:04 The importance of authenticity when working from home. 05:32 Why you should focus on what you can control. 05:58 Why speed matters a lot right now. 08:10 Why cashflow is king right now. 3 Key Points: This is going to be a tricky time for people in sales.Sales people working from home is highly unusual.Nobody is going to care about what you sell in a week or two from now. [0:00:02] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:05] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on The Startup Chat in our pandemic series… That’s what it is. We’re going to talk about sales because I have a sales something, savant genius, whatever word people want to use, but he knows a thing or two about sales. So let’s talk about sales. I’ve seen some emails you folks have sent, I’ve seen some features you folks are releasing and I know you’ve changed it up, your roadmap a little bit, yourselves, in order to service folks. But I think the big question on people’s minds from a sales standpoint, both if they’re managing salespeople and they have sales people or they are a salesperson, what do I do? Everything’s different now. I’m not in an office. I don’t know if my prospects are going to listen to me anymore. Or even like… What do I do? So please lay it on us. [0:01:03] Steli Efti: Yeah. This is going to be a very tricky time for people in sales, but there’s many other people that are in much worse situations. Okay, so a couple of things. I think first on an individual level, salespeople working from home is highly unusual and selling just from their home. And on top of it, it’s going to be even much more unusual if the whole family’s with them, right? Sales is such a context sport, kind of high velocity, high quality context sports, such a communication sport. And it’s so fundamentally relying on the state that you’re in being a powerful enough state to be able to influence people, hopefully in a positive way. That if you are at home and you are depressed or anxious or fearful or confused and there’s children screaming in the background and you’re in your pajamas and you’re not trying to call somebody that is equally distracted at home, confused and you’re trying to now make people pay attention to you and then make buying decisions, it’s going to be tough, right? There’s no sugarcoating and this is going to be a tough time. It’s funny the first big surge of questions that I got from sales team, salespeople, sales leaders, was the selling from home piece. And on that, there’s a lot of advice out there. And I think the only things I can say there is you’ll have to find a way to get yourself in as good of a state as you can and you’re going to have to improvise and incorporate, right? So if you do Zoom calls, for instance… I heard this multiple times people are like, “I’m doing these Zoom calls and then my children come into the room.” Don’t be like the one guy that was like whatever expert on BBC that had the wife or whoever it was trying to secretly grab the little girl and get it out of the room in the background, everybody could see it. Just have fun with it, be a human. If your children show up, just have them come over and wave hi and ask the person you [crosstalk]- [0:03:18] Hiten Shah: [crosstalk]- [0:03:18] Steli Efti: … That you’re on Zoom with, “Hey, do you have a family? You have children? If so, are there at home as well? My kid is always looking for more remote trends right now, so if your kids are around, tell them to come by and say hi as well.” Just turn it into a positive like you are human being, you have maybe children or distractions at home, things are going on, the prospects of people you’re talking to are in the exact same boat. They’re the same situation and pretending that this isn’t happening. Pretending your in some kind of corporate office in your suit and tie and pretending that this is normal times is just inauthentic and will push you further away from making real connections versus getting you closer to your customers and getting them feel like they can trust you, they care about you and they like you. So when crazy stuff happens, just make it part of the deal. And if you’re in the kitchen and you have to make a cereal for all the kids while at the same time you have to be on a call because your wife or your husband had to jet out for some emergency, then you have to make that part of the deal. You have to tell people, “Hey, it’s a crazy time, I’m at home. I don’t want my children to die, so I have to make them some cereal, but I’ll talk you through some of the big points. We could talk about some of the big questions you had and we won’t let cereal stand in the way between the two of us getting things done in life,” right? It’s just make light of it and be authentic and be okay that some craziness is going to ensue and you can expect perfect quiet focused environments at home for your sales calls or sales presentations. I think that that’s really important. Whatever you need to do to manage yourself, your own emotional states of minds is going to be much more important during a pandemic where you’re locked in your home than it usually is. So get your shit together and manage it and don’t complain, nobody cares. It’s very difficult, we all get it, but nobody gives a shit. Just do your best as good as you can and focus on what you can control and don’t worry about the things you can’t. Now I’ll say some other highly tactical things that I’m very surprised about that almost nobody gets. Like these things are not that difficult and they’re going to make a very big difference. I’ll lay them out for the people that are listening to us. Number one, speed right now in sales more so than ever before is everything. The only thing that matters. I get this, I have this multiple times, Hiten. Especially with people I care about like my friends, I want to kill them when I hear this. If you’re in the middle of a negotiation with a customer right now, right? [0:06:04] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:06:05] Steli Efti: If you’re in the middle of negotiating a big deal with a customer right now, this is not the time to fuck around as if you have all the time in the world to get this deal done. This is the time to optimize closing the deal way above any little… Like how we could get a few $1,000 more because we know that we could get it if we just negotiate hard enough. And if we give them the silent treatment for a couple of days, don’t respond to the email, they’ll come around and they’ll want this. Unless you have fucking face masks or ventilators that you’re selling, nobody is going to probably care about what you sell in a week or two from now, right? [0:06:45] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:06:45] Steli Efti: If you have people’s attention right now, it is worth gold, diamonds, everything. You cannot throw it away and you can’t be casual with it. Any deal you can get done today is much less likely to get done tomorrow, is much less likely to get done next week. Get the fucking deals done, especially the ones that are in the final finish line, push it through whatever it takes at this point. Whatever it takes. I guarantee you, once there’s lockdown in the entire country, wherever you are, and once some of your family members might be sick, even if it’s just mildly, they don’t have to be in the hospital and once the people are started to lay people off, it’s going to be much harder to convince your prospects to become customers and sign contracts, right? They’re going to have other problems and they’re going to be paralyzed and not going to want to buy anything for a while. So speed, close the deal and close it now. And the other thing, it goes hand in hand with this is cash. Cash is king much more so than ever before. Give people a… And people who know me know this. I never tell people to give people discounts, I never tell people to not care about the quality of the deal and negotiate OBP too urgent or too eager to close the deal, but these are different times. This is the fucking pandemic. Cash flow is king. If you can get a prepayment for a year or for six months or three months, it’s much better than closing a customer on a monthly basis. And you can give them hefty discounts if they have the cash cushion and the confidence, get all the money you can from them upfront. You’re going to need it. You’re going to need any dollar you can on your bank account upfront. So optimize for prepays and for cashflow over anything else, right? Now it’s not the time to close deals that have net pay 90 days and where they don’t have to pay the first three months. Because they don’t pay you now and there are new customers, there’s a very good chance in two or three months they’re not going to pay, right? If the economy crushes. I hate to break it to you, but negotiating contracts that are paid monthly is worthless. A contract is only worth something when we have some level of stability in the world. Negotiating, going back and forth with a customer right now to have them sign a contract that they’re going to be paying you monthly and they’re going to be a customer for two years is not going to be worth anything. If in four months that company’s bankrupt, that contract is worthless. Or if they’re in such dire financial situation that they either pay you and go bankrupt or they decide to break the contract and just not pay you. The contract is worthless. They’re just not going to pay you and you’re not going to do a damn thing about it. You’re not going to start suing customers that are in the brink of bankruptcy when there’s a world economic downturn to get your $200 per month payment because it’s some kind of a contract. You’re not going to do that. So just realize that negotiating contracts if the payment terms on monthly right now is probably not worth much. Because when there’s crisis, contracts are not really worth that much. So cash flow and cash is king and speed kills, move with it, a high degree of urgency, focus in any and every deal you can close right now. Get as much money upfront as you can, even for much better terms for customers. Do these things. And if you have any kind of customer outstanding bills and invoices that if you’re a consultant and you’re like, “Yeah, here’s some invoices I have outstanding,” don’t fucking wait around. Get those paid and get them paid right now as if your business and life depends on it because it might a couple of months from now. So, that’s kind of all those short-term advice that I can give to people right now on how to do sales during a work from home pandemic. But there’s a lot more information. I’m putting together a whole resource on how to sell during a crisis. If you want more, if this is super relevant to you, you can always send me an email, steliclose.com. Selling crisis or something along those lines in the subject line, I’ll know what you mean, I’ll send you more information if you need. So this is kind of high level all I’ve got. [0:11:10] Hiten Shah: That’s a lot Steli and that’s great. [0:11:14] Steli Efti: All right. I hope everybody is listening. I hope you close those deals, I hope you get that money and I hope more so than all those things that you and your loved ones stay healthy and stay sane over the next couple of weeks. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:11:29] Hiten Shah: Cheers. [0:11:30] The post 499: How to Sell During the COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about marketing during the COVID-19 crisis. Due to the current coronavirus crisis, a lot of companies are sending out a bunch of emails to their customers, updating them about how they are handling the situation amongst other things. However, while it may be necessary to do so for some companies, it may not be the case for yours, and if so sending an email out might not be the best thing to do right now.  In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how some brands are reacting to the situations, how some brands are using the opportunity to send emails to their customers, what type of marketing is working at the moment and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:15 Why this topic was chosen. 00:59 How some brands are reacting to the situations. 02:12 How some brands are using the opportunity to send emails to their customers. 03:16 Brands that should be contacting their customers. 04:20 How FYI is handling the situation. 05:57 What to say to customers during this period. 07:09 Why you have to think about the audience. 07:52 What kinds of messages companies are sending. 09:26 What type of marketing is working at the moment.  3 Key Points: There are a lot of brands that are using this opportunity to send emails to their customers.None of the essential companies that I’m a customer of have sent an email.Part of it is reminding people that you exist. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about marketing during a crisis. Actually, marketing during a pandemic, as everyone’s working from home while everyone’s checking information about the pandemic all day long. [0:00:24] Steli Efti: All right, well- [0:00:25] Hiten Shah: This is… Go ahead, go ahead. [0:00:28] Steli Efti: No, go ahead. Go ahead. [0:00:31] Hiten Shah: I mean, seriously, I was just going to say that it seems like there are a lot of brands out there that are taking this, and I want to hear your reaction, taking this opportunity as a reason to send email to their customers. Are you noticing that? [0:00:58] Steli Efti: Oh, no. No, just about 20 to 30 emails every day. Who was it? I saw a bunch of people funny tweeting about this like, “Thank god, every company I’ve ever given my email is telling me how they’re managing the COVID-19 situation.” Yeah, there’s a lot of emails about COVID-19 from brands. And the funny thing is, I would say that almost all of them, with a few exceptions, are from companies I don’t even know. Or I’m not even like, “Am I a customer of this? Why use this? Why am I getting an email from this particular brand?” It’s not very relevant. It’s not, I don’t know, if AWS sends me an email, or [inaudible 00:01:40], or some software product I use every day, Zoom, is sending emails. Zoom hasn’t sent an email and if they sent an email- [0:01:48] Hiten Shah: They have not sent a single email. That’s right. Let’s think about that for a second. [0:01:55] Steli Efti: But if they sent an email, it’d be like, “At least I’m curious to know because I really fucking need this service right now.” But it’s none of these essential infrastructure type software products and services I’m a customer of that have sent me an email, none of them. It’s all this other bullshit that I don’t even know why they have my email that’s sending emails about COVID. [0:02:15] Hiten Shah: That’s right. [0:02:18] Steli Efti: So I assume your recommendation is not necessarily, first thing you have to do is send an email to everybody in your email list telling them how you feel and what you do about COVID-19. [0:02:29] Hiten Shah: Yeah. There’s an exception and this exception, I’ve seen data on now. But if a company is direct to consumer and they’re an e-commerce brand, and I’ll put the other brand in there, which is a caveat, and it’s relevant to people right now because they ship things that people might want to buy right now, I’ve seen that work really well. The messaging still is important, but I’ve seen that when it relates to this crisis, the pandemic, people working from home, if you have a direct to consumer e-commerce brand and you sell online primarily, it’s likely that you might actually see an uptick in purchases at the moment. That’s an exception I’ve seen. Part of it is even reminding people that you exist. To your point, right, you might’ve signed up for this thing, you never bought anything, you have a coupon, and right now it might be relevant to you. So there is that exception. Outside of that though, the amount of sass tools that I’ve seen emailing Obviously restaurants are just a really weird and wild exception right now because they’re hurting, I don’t want to say more than any other type of business, but very close. Because you go in a restaurant, they don’t really do online. Things like that. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the things that I’m seeing out there when it comes to marketing and, and from a FYI standpoint, we haven’t done anything. I have an email newsletter with my co-founder Marie, called Product Habits. We’ve done some things there, but it’s not marketing for us. It’s just literally like talking about how we feel about this. So we sent out a remote work, a sort of employee assessment and we just literally sent it out and are looking to get as many people to fill it out as possible so we can figure out, is there an assessment of remote work, virus or not, that makes sense, that we can create now that so many people are working from home. How do you actually figure out how people think? So, I think there is this idea of relevant content right now when it comes to marketing, but I’m not seeing people do that. And relevant, meaning helpful. That’s the one word I would use right now. Whether your brand is helpful or not normally, right now if you’re going to do marketing, being helpful, genuinely helpful, is really important. I was talking to a friend because he’s got something pretty good in terms of data that he wants to put out and he’s asking me about the narrative and what exactly you should say. And he proposed something. And I mean, I always tell the truth as far as I see it, right. And so he decided to propose something, and his proposition was, it’s on brand for them to say things the way that he was pointing out to me. But to me, the way he was pointing it out, I’m like, “Hey.” It was like he was calling out other companies for their marketing and then saying that we’re actually going to be helpful to you, but he did it. He was doing it in a way where I was like, “I mean, I know it’s kind of on brand, the way you say it, but it’s not the right way to go.” You don’t need to call anyone out for their marketing and then go do some marketing. Your marketing shouldn’t call… And he wasn’t really trying to call them out, but there’s just a line in there. Lots of people are sending marketing messages right now. We’ve got something and we’ve been really thinking about how to be really helpful to you. He’s like, “Okay, cool, dude.” But you just called everyone out. And he’s like, “No, I didn’t.” And I’m like, “No, you did.” You called everyone out. And the sensitivities around negativity right now are very high. And I think people don’t realize that. This is the bottom line. Just like any other marketing, right now, you have to think about the audience. And you probably have to think about the audience and their state of mind way more than ever before if you’re going to actually bother them. And so that’s what people don’t realize. I’m also seeing a lot of tips about remote work come out. And from someone who’s been preaching this for a little bit, just like you, it’s kind of fascinating how many people are on the train right now. Or how many companies that I know do remote work or just scrambling and producing content. And I’m looking at it like, “You know that this content is short-lived, the way these companies are producing it.” Even the other day, “We’re doing pretty well in Google and a few remote work terms.” We didn’t plan for this. We just wrote those things, and knew what to write about. And Forbes comes out and writes some remote work and best practices. The coronavirus workplace series. And I read it. And no offense to Forbes, I know their game, but it’s just news content. It’s not something where, for that term, that we’re ranking for it. They should be ranking higher than us, objectively speaking. But they did for a while. Not anymore. But they did for a couple of days because all of a sudden remote work is news. Remote work went from being a topic to being news. Google knows it because before, it didn’t say top stories and more news, they didn’t have that box on these terms. Now they have that freaking box on these terms. So that’s, I think, the biggest telltale sign, which is, it’s news. Why is it news? Because everyone’s writing about. That’s when it becomes news. That’s Google’s viewpoint on it. So think about how much content there must be on this topic for Google to call it news all of a sudden. Because remote work wasn’t news. And that’s what’s interesting to me. So believe it or not, the type of marketing that works right now, short term, temporarily, is when you treat it as news. And I’m seeing a lot of companies do that. I’m not going to judge them. They got to do what they got to do. You know the biggest issue? I think it’s, marketing teams don’t know what to do. So the marketing teams are doing whatever they can to capture this because they don’t know what to do. All of a sudden all their events are canceled. They probably don’t even have real budget anymore for the moment. There’s a lot of freezes, right. That’s what happens when nobody knows anything. [0:09:37] Steli Efti: Nobody knows anything. Well, let me share my thoughts. A couple of things. Number one, there are exceptions to everything. I agree with you. I get a lot of COVID-19 emails from brands and companies, where even if I knew the company, I read the information and it’s, “So what?” They’re telling me things about how they’re dealing with the situation in a way that doesn’t serve me and I don’t care. I was not worried about them right now. I wasn’t even thinking about them. So them telling me that, they take this seriously and their company’s stable, is maybe a concern that a lot of people have. And if they get a lot of calls and emails and people are concerned about them, maybe it makes sense to send an email. But in most cases they don’t. I send an email to all of our customers, but the email was not some kind of information about COVID-19 or reassurances that we’re doing well, or whatever the fuck. I know that in the traditional working from home, everybody struggles. But one of the team that struggles to the hardest are salespeople. Salespeople are not necessarily, especially the ones that were used to, working from a sales floor. Now they’re in their living room with their children. This is not a normal setup for them to be making calls, sending emails, and closing deals. This is a very harsh transition. [0:11:06] Hiten Shah: You’re right. [0:11:07] Steli Efti: And also, sales managers that were used to be rallying the troops in person, now having to do that remotely. This is very tough. And we had paid attention to kind of what our customers and prospects were telling our sales team, support team, and success team what they were struggling with most. And all of them were like, “Everybody’s working from home now. We’re trying to figure this out, and can you help us with that and this?” So I sent an email and I told people, our customers, if you’re transitioning to work from home and you need help on how to set up your salespeople for success, how to deal with this, let me know. We will help you. We’ll give you information. We’ll set you up, we’ll support you in that transition. Now, a shit ton of our customers fill out a survey and give us some information. What their struggles are, what their worries are, what their specific situation is, and what they need help with, and we organize that. And for some of our largest customers, we do one-on-one calls and helping them. With some of our smaller customers, I’m doing webinars now, just trying to support them with their very specific questions. We’ve got a very good response from that and a good, also, temperature measurement for us on how worried our customer base is and what their worries are. How we can serve them during this time with those worries because we think we can. This is also a thing. If we’ve never taught anybody anything about sales or remote work, this would not be the week to start teaching people, if we don’t have specific knowledge and can take people and offer useful and practical advice. The other thing I’ll say is there’s a lot of tone deafness out there. There’s so many marketing campaigns or ads that I see that it’s being promoted that I’m like, “Are you guys living on Mars? Who set this up five months ago and who’s not checking on these campaigns?” Because they’re publishing information that’s just not going to capture anybody’s imagination right now, or is not relevant for the worries and the world we live in right now, right. And we had to even adjust. We were supposed to bring out a kind of a big resource and launched that. That was a different sales presentation deck templates. This is not the fucking week to launch a library of sales presentation decks, some generic one, even if it’s a good one. It’s just not the worry and the problem and challenges that’s on people’s minds, so don’t do generic marketing. And maybe stop some of your ads that are just tone deaf, where it’s not just that they’re not effective because I’m not interested in this, it makes a negative brand impression. Because I’m like, “This fucking company is out of touch with reality. What the fuck is this, right? How does this make sense for you, to spend money on advertising this particular type of ad in this tone today? This makes no sense.” So I would definitely advise people to check on their marketing campaigns and just ask themselves real quickly, “Do all these things still make sense? Are they useful? Are they helpful? Is the tone the right one?” As you said, negativity. Maybe people are overly sensitive to that right now. If you are using humor in a cute way in a way that’s distracting, people might really appreciate that. But if you use humor in some kind of a cynical way around maybe something that a couple of weeks ago, like the flu might’ve been an acceptable thing to make fun of for whatever, your antivirus software, but today it’s not. Today, it’s not a good idea. If you have a flu joking ad and then your security software is going to kill the virus, that’s not funny or cute at all right now. So just making sure you’re not tone deaf with the stuff that you’re doing. And to me, tone deafness is also all the remote stuff that’s out there that, to me, is completely delusional. I see so many remote tips that are completely devoid of the reality that the people that are working from home with their children, at the table, throwing food at them. They don’t need this generic vanilla advice that you probably wrote two years ago about the four lessons you learned doing remote work, which are lessons that are irrelevant for people right now, right. “Make sure you get out of the house every day.” I’ve even seen a remote blog post that when I clicked on it on the screen, one of the items was to make sure that you leave your house and there’s coffee shops you could go to. I’m like, “You guys are shitting me. Nobody read the post before you published it or re-published it right now?” So making sure that if you teach people something about remote, it should consider the reality we’re in right now. That this is during a pandemic, and maybe say something useful or valuable. And if you can’t, just shut the fuck up and say something else, do something else. But it is interesting. I do feel like there’s a lot of marketing teams right now that are just like, “What the fuck do we do right now? How do we deal with this? Events are canceled, sponsorships are canceled, everything we had scheduled to be published over the next few months doesn’t make sense right now. The hell do we do.” So hopefully some of the criticism that we shared or some of our ways of approaching it is hopefully helpful to you. More useful, more helpful marketing, and therefore long-term productive. [0:16:38] Hiten Shah: I do like what you folks did and you really focused on figuring out what is the challenge that your customers have right now and how can you help them with it. You folks have been doing content for a while though and that’s probably what makes what you’re doing differentiated and possible. And then you rejiggered your schedule so that you’re actually shipping things that matter to your customers right now. And that’s, in a way, like very much treating this like news and saying, “Hey, look, this is an event. It’s something that’s going on.” And I don’t mean an offline event, but this is the thing. This is news. And we’re going to figure out what we can do in order to help people during this time, and I think that’s really important. And the part that I think is most important is the fact that you actually went and figured out what they needed, which is not what I’m seeing most people do. They’re not going and figuring out what people need. They’re just literally scrambling, and writing marketing, and doing campaigns. But they’re not actually thinking about, or even doing research to find out what people actually need. So the biggest tip I would give people about marketing is go find out what people need, and see if you can help. [0:17:48] Steli Efti: Amen. This is it for us for this episode. Stay safe and we’ll hear you very soon. [0:17:55] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:17:56] The post 498: Marketing During the COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about daring to WFH without losing your mind during the COVID-19 crisis. With the Coronavirus epidemic going on, a lot of companies are being making their teams to work from home. This will inevitably lead to some challenges especially if a company culture and the way it has been set up is not designed for remote work. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how there’s been an increase in remote working since the virus broke out, the biggest issues about working from home, why your company culture and how your team is set up matters now more than ever and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:21 why this topic was chosen. 01:12 How there’s been an increase in remote working. 02:15 One of the biggest issues about working from home. 02:52 The biggest concern companies have about WFH. 04:08 Hiten big tip for companies dealing with the current situation. 05:10 How Hiten’s team is handling the current situation. 06:19 Why your company culture and how your team is set up matters a lot. 08:35 How the current situation is not normal. 10:21 How the current situation will reveal what’s broken rather that breaking it. 3 Key Points: I don’t think there has ever been more companies going remote in the history of the worldBeing distracted is a big issue when you work from home.All it takes is for someone you know to get the virus and everything changes. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:06] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to work from home without losing your mind as the world is melting down right now. So it’s been an interesting decade. Over the last week or two, Hiten, a lot is happening- [0:00:23] Hiten Shah: Pretty much. [0:00:23] Steli Efti: … Has happened and will probably continue to happen. But one relevant thing for people that are listening to us is that you and I have been championing working remotely for many years. We’ve been teaching anything we learned as we’ve been running remote teams and companies for many years, but I don’t think there’s ever, in the history of the world, been more businesses going remote than in the past three, four weeks. And so now there’s this surge of demand for all these companies, and we’re going to focus on startups, that were used to going into an office and working, collaborating, and communicating with each other in person, that are now forced to do that from home. Which is also a slight different flavor than working remotely, since many people who work remotely might go to a coworking space or a coffee shop, now you’re full-fledged, you’re working from home, all your colleagues work from home. How the hell do you do this? How do you coordinate this? How do you kind of manage this transition? I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen with our customers last week, the number one worry was, “How the hell do we work from home?” This week it’s 50%, “How do we work from home?” And 50%, “Oh my God, how do we deal with the financial crisis?” And I assume in a week all people are going to care about is, “Do I have to let people go? Customers are not buying anymore.” They’re going to be moved on from the working from home problem. But right now it’s still really, really large. So what is the advice that you give to people that are like, “Shit, Hiten, we had to send everybody home, we have to work from home now and what the fuck? How do we do this?” [0:02:08] Hiten Shah: It’s interesting. One of the biggest issues right now working from home is the amount of distraction you can have if you’re just reading and looking into this stuff. [0:02:21] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:02:24] Hiten Shah: Look, this is not a normal work from home situation. [0:02:27] Steli Efti: Yep. [0:02:29] Hiten Shah: I think that’s the first thing to call out and understand. People are just so… Right now what you’re more concerned about when people work from home is their ability to actually work. And it’s going to vary based on personality, and life situation, and things like that. Let’s put it this way, all it takes, and I hope this doesn’t happen, but this will happen, all it takes is somebody you know getting that virus. [0:03:09] Steli Efti: Yep. [0:03:11] Hiten Shah: And then just think about what happens to you, your family, anyone around you. Like I said, God forbid, but that’s the real problem, Steli. I think there’s a lot of tips for working from home. We put a bunch together at FYI last year. We did a report, we wrote a bunch of best practices. And there’s, Oh my God, there’s so much content right now around remote work. It’s crazy. We’ve seen our content really take off in terms of traffic recently, and we haven’t produced any new content on this topic yet. We have some content coming that we were planning already. But my tip is find whatever you can find for yourself that helps you honestly not think about the stuff that’s going on in the world for as long as you can, so you can work if work is what you want to be doing. Otherwise, when it comes to like employers and people employing people, my advice there is give people as much slack as you can. It’s really interesting, right? I’ve been working remotely, we’ve been working remotely. I don’t know what you folks have done, but I’m really curious to hear this. We haven’t really in any public channel in Slack mentioned it. Our team is really small right now. It’s about a dozen people at FYI, and we didn’t mention it. Instead it comes up every time there’s a community meeting or a talk. So we have these emoji decks, which I think I’ve mentioned in some call recently or one of our podcasts. [0:04:58] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:04:59] Hiten Shah: Yeah. The one I did last week had that green germ bug virus thing, emoji in it. And we talked for about 20 minutes about the virus. That took place, sorry, a couple of days ago. So this was this week, the second week. It had a lock icon with a writing pen because everyone was locked down by then basically, whether it’s self-imposed or imposed by the government, some kind of lock down. I just call it a lockout. I mean, whatever you want to call it, quarantine, shelter, this, that, whatever it is. I’m in my house, you’re in your house, you can’t go anywhere, you’re not allowed to. Right? Then we talked about it for another 10, 15, 20 minutes, and moved on. And I’m not trying to brush it off and I’m not saying that, you know, the way we did it is the right way to do it, but it comes up, one-on-ones, it comes up in meetings. We talk about it, then we move on from it. And our team is set up that way. Our team has a certain culture that that works. So I think this has a lot to do also with your culture and how the people are, and whatever’s going on for them. So this is just a time we’re working from home. All the issues of working from home, they kind of don’t matter. Productivity, those kinds of things. The reason I say they don’t matter is everyone’s family is going to come first before anything else. [0:06:28] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:06:28] Hiten Shah: And so it’s just a different situation. And that means that all these tips and all these things, unless they’re related to policies, not policies, but ways to manage. Ways to help people manage this situation that we’re in. I’m not sure if they’re actually like as relevant and I’m talking about day-to-day. Right now. Because it might change if we’re in this for like 30 days, but I don’t see that part changing, because like I said, all it takes is for someone you know to have it and then you’re thinking, and then your mind’s on it for a bit, if not more than that, depending on your personal impact by that person having it. [0:07:09] Steli Efti: Yeah. My oldest son four days ago developed a high fever. He’s had fevers many times before in his life, but I never paid as much attention. [0:07:24] Hiten Shah: That’s right. [0:07:25] Steli Efti: Definitely. It was not like afraid for him, but it would’ve been different if it was my mother who is more in the danger group, but still I was like, “All right, you need to keep an eye on this.” And for two days where he had a fever and didn’t feel good, had headaches, and all that, it did create a different kind of anxiety and energy at home. And even the third day where he was totally fine, I was like, “This was faster than his typical flus go. Did he have it or not? What does that mean now in terms of the risk exposure for other people and all that?” So I think one thing that you said that I’m going to add a few things on top of that I think is really relevant is that this is not a normal situation. And work from home when your entire family and children are at home is different than work from home because you set up an office, and it’s different if it’s going on during a global pandemic. Seriously different than normal. I tweeted a couple of days ago that all the people that are like celebrating that this is going to be something big, a great moment for remote work and will turn everybody on to remote work I think is insane. I think that people- [0:08:37] Hiten Shah: Yeah, and I retweeted that and I said what that means for software, which is, people might try your software if it’s a remote work focus, supposedly, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to stick with it. This is not a normal time. I have lots of opinions on this, but I’m sure we’ll talk about it in other topics, but keep going. [0:08:59] Steli Efti: Yeah, when people are forced to stay at home and work in an environment that’s highly unusual, it is not a great way to introduce them to remote work. Right? I think what you said is really important, which is, number one, I think that if things become really difficult around work… For instance I had a bunch of people, this always breaks my heart, ask me, “How do you trust that people are really working when they’re now working from home?” And this always bums me out as like a, this is the type of problem this person has to manage in their life and I don’t think it’s a good one. To me, somebody wrote this about the nation, a crisis of this sort is not really breaking things. It reveals what’s broken, right? It reveals what systems and what foundations are not solid anymore because they crash and they’re not strong enough to support the crisis. I think the same thing is true in your business. Maybe this is a bummer of a statement, but if things… Independent from personal productivity, if now you have all this anxiety that your team members are not working aligned to you or other things, this is not due to a global pandemic. This is due to a poor culture, or you hiring the wrong people, or you are creating an environment that is absolutely dependent on micromanaging and breathing down people’s necks, and now it’s breaking, right? But it’s because it’s a bad culture. It’s a bad system to build a business and collaborate in teams and not due to the work from home necessarily or working remotely necessarily. I also think that the thing that you said that’s really important is cutting people some slack, but this is the thing, most importantly for yourself. People during this time need to be more kind to themselves than they usually are. And the type of people that listen to us and the type of people we are, we are workaholics, we are people who love to work, we love to be productive. I feel literally like if I’m having a day that I haven’t been productive, it’s like a day that I didn’t brush my teeth. I just can’t find comfort anywhere. If I didn’t feel productive today. And sometimes it happens, right? But this is the type of time where just mentally you need to shift and accept that you can only do as much as you can, and if your kids are going nuts at times because they’re way under-stimulated, because they’re at home all day, you have to cut them some slack. And then if you’re distracted because of that or annoyed or just not able to focus, then you need to cut yourself some slack and be like, “Well, these last two hours just haven’t been productive and this is just what it is right now.” There’s no way to try to bend reality to something that will resemble normal days because those aren’t not normal days. So all you can do is try to do good as you can with the circumstances that are presented to you. But I think that many times during the next couple of days and weeks, potentially there’s going to be things happening that are outside your control and all you will be able to do is deal with them as good as you can, and at times it means your productivity is going to go down to zero and that’s fine as well. Just making some level of peace with that I think is going to be absolutely crucial to psychologically survive this. Because, I think everybody’s worried about toilet paper and food, but I don’t think people realize the potential harm to the mental health that this could have if you approach it the wrong way. Right? And if you create all kinds of anger and resentment and all kinds of stress around things where you can avoid creating stress around. So I think that that’s important. Just realizing that maybe some days or some hours during the day things will pop up that are outside your control, and your productivity will not be at peak at all times and you’re just going to have to deal with it, right? And be okay with it at times. The other thing is the information diet, right? I mean, Jesus, this week I’m getting a little bit better. I’m mitigating this, but last week, my time on Twitter went up 600%. My consumption of Twitter information is just through the roof. And although that was useful, as it was still earlier emerging and I was collecting some information, trying to make decisions, at this point it’s not that useful anymore. Right? [0:13:29] Hiten Shah: Nope. [0:13:29] Steli Efti: At this point, getting an update on what happened in the world once a day is plenty. I don’t need it once every five minutes. I’m going down slowly. I’ve not gone cold turkey on this, but I’m trying to go down in the amount of time I spend on Twitter, reading articles, threads and shit, because it affects my productivity and my wellbeing and my comfort level. If I’m on Twitter all day reading this shit, it just doesn’t make me as calm, cool and comfortable of a human being as I want to be. So making sure that as you work from home you still practice some good things like taking a break from screens, reading maybe a physical book, listening to music, doing some things that are just good for your mental health and taking breaks from reading articles and having discussions about this current crisis is going to, I think, pay huge dividends over the next couple of weeks or potentially the next couple of months. [0:14:30] Hiten Shah: Now, that’s that. [0:14:31] Steli Efti: Before we wrap up this episode, for those that are like, “Yes, but I still want to learn so much more about remote work,” go to Google, type in thestartupchat.com and then type in remote and you’ll find a ton of stuff from us, but Episode 439, the Remote Work Report that he’d mentioned earlier, Episode 181, How To Manage Remote Teams, Episode 459, How To Build A Remote Sales Team, and Episode 482, Remote Work Worries, these are just some of them. We have more, but these are some episodes. If you want to check out more podcasts episodes about this, you’ll find more information there. And this is it from us for this time. Take care of yourselves, your loved ones. Stay healthy. And until next time. [0:15:15] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:15:16] The post 497: How to WFH Without Losing Your Mind During the COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about whether you should be the face of your company. Being the “face” of a startup can be very intimidating for some founders, which is why a lot of prefer to not approach marketing this way. However, being a public CEO or founder can be a very effective way to market a startup. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what made them become the face of their companies, examples of companies whose founders are the face of the brands, how to approach this if you’re starting a business today and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:12 Why this topic was chosen. 01:55 What made Hiten be the face of his brands. 04:37 How Steli became the face of his brands. 06:11 How Steli created videos in the early days of Close. 06:31 How Steli stumbled in public speaking. 07:01 Example of companies with public faces. 08:17 How to approach this if you’re starting a business today. 08:33 Why you shouldn’t make it complicated. 09:33 Why you do what’s right for your customers. 3 Key Points: It started out with me wanting to do the best job with the businesses that we had.There’s ego involved in everything.Once I discovered that creating videos was super easy for me, I just started creating a lot of them [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about humanizing your brand and being the public persona behind your company. Hiten, both you and I are pretty public people and are very closely associated with being kind of the humanized version of our companies, right? A lot of people but no closed in connection with Steli, right? Or Steli Efti. [0:00:33] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:00:33] Steli Efti: And same with FYI and Hiten Shah, right? It’s inseparable. And I had an interesting conversation recently with somebody that was asking me lots of questions on how I strategically decided to go down that route. What are the pros and cons? Who should do it? Who shouldn’t do it? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it just an ego trip? And I thought this is actually fascinating topic and I thought it’d be fun for the two of us to kind of quickly unpack this for people. So let me first ask you, you know, FYI is not the first company and product that you launched, that you have been very closely as a human associated with versus just being a brand where people don’t know who the people are behind the company. Pretty much every company that you’ve been involved with, you’ve been a very kind of public face off and you’ve been building kind of your personal brand in conjunction with the companies that you’ve been building. Was that a strategic move? Did you ever do research and then decide this is the best way to make a company successful, hence I’m going to go down that path? Was this kind of more random? How do you think about that, kind of looking back? Why did you in particular ended up doing this and building kind of a pretty public profile and brand on your own? [0:01:52] Hiten Shah: Yeah. For me, it started out particularly with like wanting to do the best job I could with the businesses that we had and kind of fell into it naturally. I actually fell into it by doing a ton of customer support for Crazy Egg back in 2005 and I was mentioned as a line item by people when they talked about our product versus like alternatives to our product. And a line item meaning like Hiten will respond to you really fast, if do you have a question? And I was just, I just knew that, particularly for that business, we helped you, we basically helped you see what’s happening on your web pages by creating a heat map and so it was a very visual representation of analytics data. And at the beginning, there were a lot of compatibility issues with your website. So people would like write in and be like, yo, it doesn’t work with my website or this thing’s off. Then I’d be like, yeah, we’re looking into it. And then, you know, I’d have an engineers work on it and then follow up, etcetera. And so anything that came up, I was handling. So for the first two years of that business, I was in frontline of customer support and you’d hear from me. So that’s really how I fell into it. And then once Twitter came along, I happened to have an early account. I was under the first 5,000. I was one of the first 5,000 users. And my following just grew because I was early and people were just trying to find people to follow and Twitter made that really easy back in the day. I was never on the suggested user list, but they had a sidebar that showed you different people on Twitter and then you can click on them and follow them. So I ended up with like 10,000 followers early on and I was like, whoa, I got this little audience here, like maybe I should do something with it and I just started sharing links because nobody was really doing that at the time on Twitter. And I found that I was really good at finding stuff and then that built a following there. And outside of that, like I’ve been super, super friendly with startups in general. Like when people, I mean, I’m sure people listening know this by now, but people email, I do my best to respond. I mean, over the years, I’ve definitely gotten a little bit slower at it, but I used to almost make it my full time job when I was in between companies. So for me I fell into it and it just feels right. That would be my response. I didn’t study it. I didn’t think about it too hard. It just felt like the right thing to do and it still does. [0:04:20] Steli Efti: That’s beautiful. I think for me it’s very similar, although it might be more surprising to people, but really, there were two things that happened when we started Closed. One was we wanted to have a blog and wanted to do a lot of content marketing and me writing, like I had a lot of stories, tactics, experiences that I thought were worth sharing, but me writing blog posts was just a kind of, I was very slow at it, so it just took a lot of time. Eventually I brought on Rameen to help me, was a good friend, who is still part of the Closed team. And you know, I would write a rougher draft and send to him, but even that took always forever until one day he was frustrated and asked me to just record like talking through the blog posts or the idea and he would just write it. And once we did that once or twice I realized wow, talking through it is super easy for me. [0:05:11] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:05:11] Steli Efti: And then if I just recorded this on a webcam and if I stopped saying Rameen’s name and referring to it as on the blog posts, say this and this and write this and this, then the video itself could be content, the audio could be content and then we could also turn it in to written content. And this was so easy for me that for the, you know, once we kind of discovered that recording video was kind of super easy, didn’t take that much time and effort for me, I just started creating a shit ton of them. I think for the first two years, I would do one a day, and the videos were 10 minutes long and it took me 10 minutes to do it because I would just like think of an idea, hit record, stop. No editing, no real trying to be professional. And so I just created thousands and thousands of videos over the years. And then eventually somebody saw some of these videos and invited me to speak at a conference. And then as well, there was no strategy. I didn’t say, Hey, I need to be on stages. Public speaking would be a great way to promote my company. I just went to that one time because I was flattered and I thought, Oh, it’d be cool to give a talk at a conference. And people enjoyed it so much that they invited me to lots more and we saw a spike in signups and we saw a bunch of really good customers come out of it so it was like, Oh, maybe this is a useful thing for my business and for me to do. So just kept going and so kind of just stumbled into that without sitting down and necessarily setting this as a goal for myself. Now, lots of amazing companies have built without the public persona, right? You know the brand but people weren’t seeing the founder or CEO every single day. But then there’s plenty of examples of great companies that we all know instantly, Virgin. I instantly know Richard Branson. Even Salesforce, you know Mark Benioff. There’s like Mark Zuckerberg. There’s many companies that have like a humanized public face of the business. In some cases, multiple public faces. So it’s definitely been a very successful strategy. Now, let me ask you, if I’m a kind of early founder and I’m thinking about starting my business and promoting it, how do I, should this be a real decision that I make? Should I put myself out there a lot in order to humanize my company and my brand or shouldn’t I? And what are the pros and cons? I do think that we both, I’ll go ahead and say that we both, I assume, would say that it can be an ego play, but in our cases maybe to some degree, but in our case, it’s not that we love seeing each other in videos or be interviewed for podcasts. It’s not like we, I always tell people that I am already very sick of myself, but I do think it’s an effective strategy to serve my customers, the market and my business employees. And I assume you feel the same way, but how would we advise somebody early who’s trying to figure out should I do this or not and what are the pros and cons? [0:08:18] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Yeah. I hope people aren’t making this too complicated. I don’t, I mean, there’s ego involved in everything. [0:08:28] Steli Efti: Right. [0:08:28] Hiten Shah: So let’s not get that confused. Even monks have ego. I mean, like let’s not, like there’s ego involved in everything. I think, yes, your ego can get … Carry you away with it and you want to prevent that. But to me, it’s like don’t make it complicated. If you are able to help your business, not even by being a public figure, but by helping your customers, go do it. Go do it. Whether it’s your current customers or your future customers, whatever it is. Like in your case, if you did those videos and I’m sure that that brought a lot of attention to your brand and your business and I mean, look, you’re a sales expert. Everybody knows it. I don’t know if you are not Steli, but like you are. You know, and that’s because of those videos, right? That’s how you establish yourself and you stumbled upon it, right? And in my case, I learned similar to you that if someone asks me a question or if I’m talking on a podcast or a video or a conference, like people like what I have to say, meaning like it resonates with them and they like it. So I’ll keep doing it because it helps my brand. It helps my business. I think you can go the other way and like just start wasting your time on stuff like that, absolutely. So that’s why I just go back and say, don’t over complicate it. Just do what’s right for your customer. We’re doing it because we believe that there’s something there for our customers of value that helps us as well. That’s why we’re doing it. There’s alignment there. If you don’t have that or you can’t find it, you’re probably thinking about it the wrong way or doing it for reasons that are not about your business. [0:10:02] Steli Efti: Beautiful. I don’t think I could say it any better. I think if you see that it comes natural to you, if you see that it serves your customers, it serves the market, it serves your team members, your business, then it’s a strength to help create value. Why wouldn’t you want to use that? Why? Why wouldn’t you want to double down on something that’s working? [0:10:23] Hiten Shah: Exactly. [0:10:23] Steli Efti: But if you find that you are doing this because you like the idea of being famous or having your name on some outlet or have people recognize you, if that’s the thrill that you’re chasing and you’re seeing that you’re doing all these things and now you have like all this public recognition but it doesn’t translate, like your customers are not really consuming that information and are not really affected by what you’re putting up in the public. Your team members don’t benefit from it. Your business doesn’t benefit from it. Then you need to think about it as a hobby and you need to treat it as such and not confuse it as your main job because being featured in some media outlet or speaking at some stage at some conference in and of itself is not equal to creating value for your business. It’s just isn’t. It can but it doesn’t have to. So you need to track these things and if it’s something you do because you like to be famous, that’s cool with me, as long as you treat it like a hobby, unless you see that it really drives results for your business. And I have to tell you, one thing that people don’t realize, maybe especially with people like me, is I still at times have to be comfortable with that. Like I still have some insecurities around this. Internally in the business, I’m okay being on stage or being interviewed, all that is not making me uncomfortable. But internally in the company, I don’t like to, I like to stay behind the scenes much more and I don’t like to share at all anything that I do in public. And it always surprises me when team members, I just had this conversation two days ago or so where I talked to somebody on the engineering team and I was like, what could I do to help more? Anything that you would criticize? Anything that you think I could do better? And he’s like, you know what? Anytime I stumbled over your content randomly on the net, I’m always happy and I’m always excited. I know that every time we interview customers, your persona has really benefited our brand and benefited their lives. But you don’t bring this internally. You know, I have to find that stuff. You never share that stuff. We don’t really celebrate it internally as much. And he’s like, and I think that maybe the people that have been around for many, many years and know you so well, maybe they’re over it and they know this and they’re cool, but we have so many new people and they’d love to hear that. A lot of them came because they were watching your content out there. So you should promote that a bit more internally. And I was like both flattered but also uncomfortable. I was like, Oh yeah, you’re right. [0:13:02] Hiten Shah: Mortified. [0:13:03] Steli Efti: Yeah. Right. To me, if I was like, look everybody, I did this big new thing somewhere or I spoke here, watch the video. You know, I’m insecure about that, like I feel like I’m a show off or something internally, like some kind of an idiot that wants to promote himself internally in his company. But it’s interesting to hear that the perspective internally is so different sometimes, but I thought it might be valuable or useful for people to hear this because I don’t think people recognize or realize that even somebody that seems as attention hungry as I am is uncomfortable and insecure about where he shares these things. [0:13:42] Hiten Shah: That’s really fascinating. [0:13:43] Steli Efti: All right. I think that’s it from us. If you have any experience, if you have any questions around this, any first attempts, or just need feedback or want help around this, we’re always happy to hear from you. Send us an email, hnshah@gmail.com. Steli@close.com. Until next time, see you very soon. [0:13:59] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:13:59] The post 496: Should You Be the Face of Your Company? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to give presentations to your team. Internal presentations are very common in the startup world. And while these presentations can be very boring and packed with data, it doesn’t have to be. Learning how to make your presentations exciting will help a long way in communicating your message to your team. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about some mistakes people make when they give internal presentations, examples of good presentations, how to improve your presentations and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:29 Why this topic was chosen. 01:23 A big trend in internal communications. 03:20 How to present your data. 03:56 Why your presentations should have context. 04:27 How internal presentations are similar to speaking at conferences.  05:00 An example of how to create good presentations. 07:14 How to improve your presentations. 07:45 How the best presentations have stories in them. 09:10 What teams need from presentations. 3 Key Points: Internal communication is a very big topic.People are not used to presenting.People are overwhelmed by with too much information. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about something that plagues every company at some point. And Steli had an experience that I haven’t heard yet, or some experiences, so I’m dying to hear them and talk about this. But it’s basically the idea of how do you communicate internally inside your company? Steli, take it from here. Lead out. [0:00:26] Steli Efti: Yeah. There’s obviously the internal communication is such a big topic. The one thing that I’d like to zero in on, because we are going through this and I’ve just personally had to go through this a couple of times and I’m currently working with leadership at close on this, is when people who are leading teams are giving presentations either for those teams or company-wide. And this could be a monthly report, hey, let’s a summary of what happened last month and what we are projecting or our goals for next month. It could be a big project that was concluded or that is planned. Any kind of communication where somebody that is responsible for a project is sharing the learnings, pros and cons, or what has happened, or what is about to happen with people. One big trend that I see, one thing that I’ve seen again and again and again, is that people will go through the, this is a general communication challenge, they’ll go through the simple work of just collecting information. So let’s say I’m running a sales team. February concluded, so I’m doing a summary of what happened in February and it’s a slide, and let’s say there’s six bullet points and it goes, we had a, whatever, 20% conversion rate, we closed this amount of customer, our goal was this revenue, but we only had that hit that revenue, with this one audit that affected closing two deals. Just reporting on a bunch of information, a bunch of numbers, a bunch of random events that happened. Just [crosstalk 00:02:12]. Yeah, go ahead. [0:02:14] Hiten Shah: No story. [0:02:15] Steli Efti: No story whatsoever. [0:02:17] Hiten Shah: That’s what you’re trying to get at, right? No story. [0:02:19] Steli Efti: Yes. You’ve instantly got it. [0:02:21] Hiten Shah: I was like, wait, I’ve heard this before. [0:02:23] Steli Efti: So you look at this and basically as an audience, as the sales team, or let’s say the company that is getting this presentation about the sales results of last month, as a team member, or as an employee of the business, I look at that slide and now I am burdened with doing all the hard work. You were just lazy. You plastered the slide with a shit ton of random numbers and information and now I have to look at it and ask myself, what does this mean? What does it all mean? What of all of this is important? Did we do a good job or not? If we learned something, what was it? What are we changing? I have to do all the interpretation. You’re giving me no story. You’ve given me 10 random facts and characters and you think I’m going to be entertained by that. Just sitting there and putting these characters and events together in some kind of a story that would entertain me as much as watching a movie. People are overwhelmed by the amount of information and they’re underwhelmed by how much of that they can, A, remember, or, B, the meaning. There’s just no context or meaning. There’s no narrative. And to me that is the worst type of internal presentation you can have. You’re basically just wasting everybody else’s time. You’re making the company worse because you’re polluting people with overwhelming them with information that’s not meaningful or actionable to them. It sounds like you’ve heard and seen this before many, many times. I’m sure we’re not the only ones. This is just a general challenge, right? [0:04:06] Hiten Shah: Yeah. This is a big deal. Look, people are just not used to presenting. They’re not used to creating that experience for other people where they’re motivated and they’re compelled by what they see. These internal presentations are actually not that different than you, Steli, giving a talk at a conference. They’re not. We treat them differently. We make them really dry. We don’t tell the story. But at the end of the day it’s internal marketing. That’s essentially what you’re doing. And so my way of thinking about this stuff is make sure that you’re not… I’ll give you that example. How about that? So I make these emoji decks. I actually tweeted about one the other day. I was like, the first emoji in this emoji deck that we make for our product team, and I said, we make it, but for the product team, the deck. Look, the deck has emoji. And literally it says, FYI on the first slide. I make these every week that I can. I make it myself because I just tend to know what everyone’s working on and it has FYI logo on the first slide, then every other slide is literally one headline, like latest designs, or login design, or whatever, with an emoji. And then different people on the team are talking about it. And I’m picking on them so to speak, not really picking on them, but there’s a slide or two or three for each person and there’s just an emoji. And then people are wondering what’s the emoji for? It just creates, in a way, it’s like a story. I had the duck one because we’re working on a bunch of stuff and things look really calm above the water, but underneath the water it’s like a duck. And the duck is just scrambling with their feet. That’s why I used it. So it’s like, hey, you don’t have to make it. It’s not hard. It was a couple of words at most and an emoji, and then someone talking in the meeting. And I know that’s not like a presentation with stats or anything, but hey, it’s a literal… People missed my decks when I couldn’t do them for a month or two. And so I just did, literally this week, I did one of these again after last time I did it was two months [inaudible] haven’t had the time to do it. And it’s crazy how people just like stuff like that. So it’s add some emoji. I’m not kidding. Add some emoji. It’s okay. Even if it’s corporate, just add some emoji. Make it look good. Make it look good, meaning make it a story. When there’s stats, if the stats don’t look good, then put a sad face. I’m bummed out about this stat. I’m bummed out about this metric. We went down in signups since last week. Or whatever. And it’s because of X, Y, and Z. It’s almost, in a way, when you make these presentations, you could think of it like, if I’m talking to a close friend, what are the kinds of things I’d say? Because your team is basically close. They’re close to you. No pun intended. That’s important. I feel like we are not trained on this, especially in startup land. And then the corporate side of it is very, very dry presentations most of the time. But the best ones in corporate land do have stories. And the story you’re really trying to tell is, we’ll assess status of something. What happened? What are we trying to do next? What’s the situation you’re in? Things like that. It’s not really that hard to figure this out and make it not boring. The problem is that the boring stuff is a quickest, easiest way to just get away with it. And everybody thinks this is a chore. I get excited about it and once I get excited about presenting the numbers, whatever they are. And if the numbers suck, that means you have to make some changes and improvements, so I get excited about the potential to communicate this so everyone’s aligned and then talking about what we do next and I get excited about that. And if the numbers are great, then I get excited about the fact that we’re going to keep them great and we’re going to make them even better. And so I think the word excitement comes to mind of instead of treating it like this is an update, here you go. It’s more like, let’s talk about what’s going on and let’s actually discuss it. Or let’s communicate it in a way that everybody understands. Things like that are how I think about it and what’s on my mind about it. [0:08:47] Steli Efti: I love that. I think there’s a couple of things that I want to add. One, I think that what people need, and what teams need is, and what they’re looking for, is meaning. When you report on anything, a project, a month, whatever it is, I don’t just want to hear necessarily a list of things, events, that happened, or numbers of stats. I want to understand what do these things need. How are we doing? What have we learned? What is happening next? And a good hack for this in reverse is to ask yourself once I’ve given this internal presentation the next day, if the partner of one of the people that was in the team meeting asked, “Hey, how did the sales month goal in February for your company?” What will be the summary this person could tell their significant other based on what I presented and shared with them? Are they going to tell them, “The conversion is 7% and we had 317 prospects, but we did…” They’re not going to do that. What they want to do is speak in plain terms. February was a good month. February was a bad month. February was a so, so month. Here’s what we wanted to do. Here’s what we really got done. He is why. And here’s what we’re doing about it. Thinking about this in a storyline, or in a narrative, there’s a hero, that’s the team. There’s a goal the hero has. There’s probably some challenges along the way and some learnings. Tell me what happened with the hero. What were the challenges? What were the accomplishments? Where are we in the story and in the narrative of things? And I had that conversation with one particular person that was honest enough to tell me, a manager, to tell me, “What I realized is that sometimes I take a look at all these numbers and I’m not sure myself, what is the meaning of this? I don’t have enough confidence in the data, or I don’t have enough data to feel like I can claim a stake and say, this is the reason why this worked or didn’t work.” And I told him, “Well, congratulations to leadership. If things were 1000% sure and crystal clear, we wouldn’t need you.” It’s your job to do your best, to take the imperfect and incomplete information you have and make a judgment call. And you have to make a decision, or call, based on all of this. It’s my understanding, or it’s my belief, this is why X happened and this is what we’re going to do to either confirm that belief or to dispel it. And if at some point it turns out that you were wrong with what you said last month, you bring that up, you share it, and you adjust. But you cannot because you’re not sure or 100% certain, you cannot relieve yourself of the responsibility of doing the job, of creating the meaning and the story around this and say since I don’t know, I’m just going to give people all the information I collected and leave them alone with figuring out what the hell all this means. I think what you said is really powerful and important. I think people need to treat internal presentations with as much, if not more, care than they would with public presentations. If you give a keynote, you wouldn’t have a slide with 300 stats on it. You would think about how to tell a story, how to say something that has narrative, that creates meaning, and that is memorable to the audience and meaningful to the audience and valuable to the audience, is another thing people don’t think about. I’m going to sit here for 30 minutes, present something in front of 40 people in my company. How are they going to benefit from this? What actionable insights will this help them generate? How is this a good use of everybody’s time? Questions that are simple, but oftentimes we miss approaching these internal presentations with this amount of a sense of responsibility and a sense of impact. We just go, wait Tuesday, I have a presentation internally. Tuesday morning I’m going to collect all the numbers, put it on a slide template, and then I’m going to just go in front of everybody and just read through all the random data points I collected on a bullet point list. [0:13:33] Hiten Shah: I think it’s really important to think about the audience and that’s what you’re really calling people to do. Which is obviously super important, especially in this case of when your audience is internal. These things are critical. They’re either going to motivate people, or people are going to feel demotivated, or feel nothing. That would suck. So I think thinking about your audience is really the way to get this right. [0:14:03] Steli Efti: There you go. All right. We want to hear from you on this. What is your company doing internally to have really killer communication, to do really killer presentations, presentations that are really useful and powerful and valuable? What are lessons learned, mistakes made? We want to hear from you. Send us an email, steli@close.com, hhi@gmail.com. Until next time, we’ll hear you very soon. [0:14:28] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:14:28] The post 495: How to Give Presentations to Your Team appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to deal with rejection. Rejection is very common. If there’s one thing that is going to happen to you as a founder is that you’re going to be rejected a lot, and this hurts. But just because you’re likely to be rejected when you ask for something shouldn’t stop you from asking. How you deal with rejection can determine if you’ll be successful or not. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how nobody likes being rejected, coping mechanisms that you can use to deal with rejection, the problem with rejection and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:23 Why this topic was chosen. 01:08 How Steli doesn’t like to be rejected. 03:13 How Hiten deals with rejection. 04:30 The problem with rejection. 04:50 Why rejection is just an idea. 06:01 Why you need to ask all the time. 07:43 Why your decisions matter. 08:24 Why you shouldn’t put your self worth in someone else hands. 11:00 Tips to help you deal with rejection.  3 Key Points: I encourage people to get rejected and put themselves out there.I, for sure, don’t like to be rejected.Ask the person who you think is good at dealing with rejection how they do it. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to teach you how to deal with rejection. If you know Hiten and me, you know that we do believe great things come with taking great risk. If you know me, you know that I encourage people to get rejected. To put themselves out there, and to ask for things specifically that will place them completely outside their comfort zone, and with that bring a lot of risk of being rejected. Both Hiten and I have been rejected many, many, many times in our lives, and we know a thing or two about it. I do believe this is such an important topic. We thought today we’re going to do a little bit of a back and forth of just like coping mechanisms that we have developed, strategies, ideas, habits that allow us to deal with rejection. One thing that I’ll say right out of the bat, before I’ll ask you for your first tip Hiten here, is that I do not know anybody, I’ve never met somebody, and I surely I’m not somebody who doesn’t care about being rejected, or who likes being rejected. I for sure don’t like to be rejected. People think, especially when they see somebody that is as outspoken and as loud as me, and has as much sales experience as I have that I don’t care anymore. I could attempt anything and get rejected and I would not even just nothing from me, I would just dust off my shoulder. It’s not true. It is simply not true. [0:01:46] Hiten Shah: That’s not true? [0:01:46] Steli Efti: That’s unfortunately not true, no. Even after many, many, many, many, many thousands of rejections over the past 20 years of being an entrepreneur and in sales and all that, I still don’t like the feeling. I still don’t like the word no. No does not feel good to me. It doesn’t. I have just learned to deal with it. I’ve just learned to deal with it better than most people. I have learned to not run away from it as much. Not delay my actions as long. To me it’s like I’ve jumped a thousand times from this super high point into the water, and every time I’m a little afraid I get a little bit of goosebumps, but when I look down, I’m like, “I’ve done this many times. It sucks the first few seconds, but I’ll just jump.” That’s how I deal with this, versus what I think most people think, which is after he learned the magical art of not caring about being rejected and being so confident, nobody can shake his confidence. Now Steli walks around like a machine, and could ask anybody for money or for anything. Has zero emotions, zero fear, zero hesitation or anxiety around it. It’s just not true. With that disclaimer out of the way, which I think is a really important one, let me ask you, Hiten, how do you deal with rejection? What’s the first thing that comes to your mind if somebody asks you for advice on dealing with rejection? [0:03:18] Hiten Shah: On my end if someone came to me for that advice, I would do something that you just did. What I would do is I would go ask the person who I think is good at dealing with rejection, how they deal with it. This would be the best person that I know that’s good at dealing with it. Even if I’ve already experienced it myself and done a good job, but if I have some hesitation. The reason for that is I think you’re just basically down, you said, “Hey, I still deal with it. I’ve been rejected a lot.” You still deal with it, and it still either bothers you, or it’s something that you have in your mind, it’s not something you just literally just ignore. I think that that’s really important for you to hear when you are dealing with rejection, or more importantly, this is one of the problems with rejection. The problem with rejection isn’t rejection itself, it’s what it stops you from doing. What that means is rejection is just an idea. The idea of rejection stops you from doing whatever it is that you thought people are going to reject you for, or reject you about, or say no to you about. I have a story from my father that I don’t forget, and when I deal with rejection, that’s all I really need. But sometimes I ask him and he says the same thing every time. Basically when I was five years old, we moved from, I was born in Africa so I was born in Zambia. We also lived in Zimbabwe, and then moved to New York when I was five. In order for my dad to get his job that he got, he had to basically apply for 1200 jobs. He’s a physician, and he applied for literally 1200 jobs in two rounds or something like that. I just remember that because I’ve never done 1200 of anything that I can remember, except maybe lived for 1200 days obviously. I’ll ask him and he just says the obvious thing, which is like, well, if you don’t ask then the answer’s already no. I think that that’s really powerful. We get caught up in our rejection story of, if I do that I’m going to be rejected, or what if this happens? I’m sorry what if this does not happen, this thing I want? In his case it’s like he really wanted to come to this country. Bunch of reasons I won’t get into today, but in short it was just to provide better for his family. Myself and my mom and him. He essentially didn’t take no for an answer. I don’t mean like he would cause any trouble with the people, but he just didn’t take no for an answer because he believed that he will be here and make it, and then he will do whatever it takes for him to do that. He could have stopped at 100 and said, “Wow, I sent 100 of these applications nobody said yes I’m done.” He didn’t stop till he got the answer he wanted. I think that’s another way to think about rejection, which is like if you don’t ask, the answer’s already no. Then perseverance, enduring the process however way you find it is key. That’s really key and finding it is really important. [0:07:03] Steli Efti: Fucking love the story. Particularly today, the way you shared it today I think is incredible. One thing that stood out to me that I want to share, that I haven’t thought about in this very specific way before I think, which is see there are small distinctions that really matter. Sometimes you make a decision, like let’s say your father made the decision, I want to move to the US with my family. Your father’s decision was not dependent on any singular entity, person, institution. He made the decision. He knew I’m going to go to the US this is what I want. Anytime he applied somewhere, they could say, “No, we are not going to be the ones that will enable that step.” But they couldn’t tell him, no, you’re not going to come to the US. [0:08:06] Hiten Shah: That’s right. [0:08:06] Steli Efti: They couldn’t tell him, no, you can’t have the desire or no, you can’t have the determination. They just said, “It’s not going to be us.” When they rejected your father, your father was like, “Well, it’s not going to be them. Must be somebody else.” I think it’s when we put the decision, and the complete outcome in the hands of the person or institution that we are approaching, it’s then when the rejection feels so devastating. It’s when we put our self worth in the hands of somebody else, is when it feels so devastating. This person said, no, I’m not worth anything. I will not accomplish my dreams. My family will not get an opportunity for a better life, I have failed. If you think in those terms, that’s very devastating. Anybody would be devastated. Any father would be devastated by a single rejection, if you gave that person or institution that type of vote, but your father didn’t all right. Your father just gave them the appropriate amount of vote, which was is it going to be you guys? Is it going to be you that gives me the job? But I am going to get a job independently if one person or one institution says yes or no. I think whenever you go out, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to raise money for your company, if you’re trying to close deals and acquire new customers. Doesn’t matter if you go and approach a man or a woman somewhere, and because you find them interesting, you want to get to know them better. It doesn’t matter what it is that you do. If you place disproportionate amount of power in their hands, the power to fully decide what your destiny is going to look like with their vote, then it becomes so much bigger of a daunting proposition. When they reject you, it is going to crush you. But if you realize and put things in context, and acknowledge that you have to make the decision that you are going to raise money, you’re going to succeed at that. Or you’re going to close a deal. Or you’re going to find a partner that loves you and that you love and that you find attractive and vice versa. If you make that decision and it’s decided within you, and then you approach somebody to see if they are interested in giving you money, becoming your customer, whatever. Even if they say no, it’s never going to feel as devastating. It’s a bummer. It’s like, it’s not going to be you, I wanted it to be you, but okay. Well then I guess it’s going to be somebody else. It’s never going to feel great. You’re like, not you? All right. That’s sad. I wanted it to be you, but okay. But it’s different. It has a different emotional impact if the outcome is, you don’t want to date me versus I am going to be alone for the rest of my life unloved. That’s a very different outcome. Who wouldn’t be crushed by that? Every human being would be crushed by that. I think that that kind of making that clear to yourself first rationally, and then emotionally. A lot of times it has to do with the power and clarity of decision. I find that when people have made a very clear decision in their mind, then through that decision, they gain the confidence to approach people or institutions, and not put that power in the other person’s hand because they made the decision in their mind, this is happening. I am doing this, I am going to accomplish this. It’s when you’re not sure, when your decision isn’t as crystal clear, when you’re not as confident, when you’re not as determined when you’re like, not sure, is where you over proportionately place the responsibility at the response of the person that you’re approaching. With that your overall responding when they reject you. That’s one big thing. I love that story because it’s so clear that your father had made a decision, and it was not up to anybody else on the planet. It was decided. Your dad decided, and now who was looking for the right partner to make that decision manifest and become a reality. But it didn’t matter if it took him 100, 1,000 or 10,000 sooner or later he would find the right entry point to make it happen. [0:12:35] Hiten Shah: That’s right. [0:12:37] Steli Efti: I fucking love this. Maybe we’ll do another episode with 10 different hacks and tips, but I just want to wrap this [inaudible] up. [0:12:44] Hiten Shah: Let’s do it. [0:12:44] Steli Efti: This story was so beautiful, let’s just wrap it up right here. But rejection is a really important topic and it does, and I love the way you phrased this so poetically before. The problem with rejection isn’t the rejection it’s what it’s stopping you from doing after you’ve been rejected. If you’re listening to us, and you’ve just been rejected or you’re afraid and you’ve been messing around, waiting, hesitating because you’re terrified of being rejected, send us an email. Steli@close.com, HNshah@gmail.com subject line rejection. Tell us your story. Tell us what’s going on. We will help you with advice, with stories, with encouragement. We want to help more of you deal better with rejection, because you’re going to accomplish a lot more in your life, and it’s going to be a lot more fun if you know how to deal with this very important topic. All right, that’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:13:44] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:13:45] The post 494: How to Deal With Rejection appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about daring to be different in all that you do, for your future happiness. In a world where most people seem to be doing the same things, being different can be a good thing. It can help you stand out from your competition and lead to you being very successful in future. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about What it means to be different, why being different takes courage, how being different pays off in future and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:33 why this topic was chosen. 00:43 Steli’s initial thought on Hiten’s tweet. 01:39 What prompted Hiten’s tweet. 03:00 Why being different takes courage. 05:46 Why Hiten used to word “dare”. 05:05 What it means to be different. 08:39 How being different pays off in future. 09:07 Why Hiten chose the phrase “future happiness”. 10:34 How being different helps you express yourself better. 3 Key Points: It’s ok to be different.Being different takes courage.Different means going against something [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about a tweet of mine that was very impulsive, not in a bad way. And I’m tweeting a little bit more than I was over the last few months and the tweet said “dare to be different in all that you do for your future happiness” and Steli, it must have like struck a nerve or did something cause we’re talking about it today and Steli suggested it. So yeah, it’s about being different and daring to be different. So how did you take it? What did you think? [0:00:39] Steli Efti: Well, the first thing I thought was what prompted this? (laughing) When I see a tweet of this nature, especially with somebody that I know like you, I’m like, huh, I’m curious what… Typically I would assume it’s a conversation that inspires this with you, but who knows? It could be a million different things, but the first thing that it made was make me go, huh, this is interesting. I wonder if there’s a backstory or there’s a thought or a conversation that made Hiten want to send this message out to people. [0:01:14] Hiten Shah: Yes. [0:01:15] Steli Efti: What prompted this? [0:01:17] Hiten Shah: Yes, so there’s no exciting story or a conversation. Some of the tweets definitely are part of a conversation. I think this one was just, I think I was thinking about it. And I was thinking about what makes people exceptional? And what causes them to, achieve things, basically? And I think one of the factors that if you start looking at a bunch of patterns of people that have achieved exceptional stuff, whether in business or personally, is they were different, there were different, something was different. They did something different. And in that process, thinking about that, I just came to this thought and I wanted to inspire myself, but also others that, hey, it’s okay to be different. And I think it comes with happiness too because if you’re not different, you’re likely conforming to whatever, society’s expectations are or your own expectations are based on society and other people of what you should be. [0:02:34] Steli Efti: So one of the reasons that I love this tweet is in the details, right? And so let’s break them down one by one because it’s two statements basically right there. I mean it’s one statement, but it’s like two sentences. So it’s broken in two parts. The first one, the thing that I found interesting in my mind, the thing that stood out was the choice of the very first, word which was “Dare”, right? You didn’t say “aim to be different” or “be different in all that you do”, “aim to be different in all that you do”, “You should be different in all that…” It wasn’t “should”, it wasn’t “try”, it wasn’t “hope”, it was “dare”. And to me there’s an important golden nugget of wisdom in that in being different takes daring, it takes courage. It’s not something that doesn’t come without risk. And I don’t think that people always understand this. I don’t think we intrinsically understand this. I think we all understand, we all get, that it’s attractive to be unique and different. But I think the reason why so few of us maybe fully live their true unique self is because it’s very risky to do so. And in the moment you don’t know if it’s going to pay out. And the risk could come in humiliation, the risk could come in failure, the risk could come in shame. But you need to exert some level of courage to dare to be different. Did you think that or did you just write it and you know, sometimes you can just like analyze things after the fact. But that kind of stood out to me. I love the, that you use the word “daring” to be different versus aiming to be different, trying to be different or anything else. [0:04:43] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think that’s on purpose and the reason I use that word on purpose is because I really feel like people just don’t do this. They don’t try to be different. They don’t make an attempt. And dare is the word because you’re going… Different essentially means that you’re going against something, you’re going against what’s normal or what’s expected. Different means whatever your behavior is, your actions are, your thought processes are, whether you’re writing something different and crazy or a different take. Like for example, right now the coronavirus is going on. What if you had a different take on it and you would just didn’t want to write it because you’re not, I don’t know, you’re not thinking about it like that. You’re just like, “Oh all these people are saying their opinion. I actually have a different opinion” And you don’t share it. So I think the word dare is important because to be different, you have to dare to be different. And if you aren’t able to do that it’s like a disservice to yourself and other people. And I think that the bar pretty high in terms of being normal. The bar to [inaudible] normal is actually high. What I mean by that is there’s a lot of risks when you’re [inaudible] well, a lot less risk- I would say more risks when you’re… What I’m trying to say is, normal is normal. Different is different. [inaudible] impact the world the most tend to [inaudible] differently about it and you think Apple and their whole thing for a while was think different [inaudible 00:06:52]. It’s the way I’d say it if I were talking to somebody and I thought they had a different take on something with that, right or wrong. [inaudible] And more [inaudible] to be different. [inaudible] It’s likely that [inaudible 00:07:28] will [inaudible 00:07:29]. [0:07:30] Steli Efti: Let’s look at the second statement, which is the second part of the tweet and then we’ll wrap this up, which is the, “for your future happiness”. Hey, can you still hear me? [0:07:45] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah. [0:07:46] Steli Efti: Okay. Perfect. So the second part of what you wrote was not, you didn’t write dare to be different in all that you do for your happiness. You wrote “for your future happiness”. Again, my interpretation that I’m curious to hear what you actually thought, but the reason I really liked that and that stood out to me was that being different in the moment oftentimes is not going to pay immediate or short term returns. You’re not going to instantly know that you being your full self or your authentic self, or your differentiate itself is good or will be rewarded or will feel satisfying when you do it. When you differentiate yourself, when you act differently or think differently, or speak differently from the, from most in the moment I think is where you carry most of the risk. But in the future is where all the reward lies of differentiating yourself. Right? So, I really liked that it wasn’t just dare to be in all that you do for your happiness, but for your future happiness. Am I onto something? Why did you choose to wite “for your future happiness”? [0:09:07] Hiten Shah: ‘Cause I don’t think the different will necessarily make you happy in the short run. I think it makes you happy in the long run. And the reason, it takes so much effort for most people to share an opinion or a thought or anything that they feel is different from what other people are saying or doing right now. And when you do it, it might not feel great in the beginning cause you’re, you’re risking something, you’re risking putting yourself out. So it’s a dare. And I would say that it’s really for be your future happiness. It’s not necessarily your present happiness because, when you propose something different or you are being different, it’s very likely that there will be people who disagree or there will be people who look at it, and you could imagine them thinking you’re weird or thinking you are not conforming. And so there tends to be a reaction to that from other people. And that reaction can make you kind of, not necessarily happiest early on in the process, but over time, by being different and sharing your thoughts, that might be different. You learn this ability to express yourself. And I think a lot of human sort of interaction and life is really about being able to express yourself, feeling comfortable enough, not just with others but with yourself. And that ultimately leads to happiness cause you’re essentially not hiding behind everybody else. [0:10:51] Steli Efti: I love it. All right. I think that we could turn this into a segment of, maybe we’ll call this “putting Hiten’s tweets on a couch”. Like put that tweet on… Yeah, I like that. All right, so if you’re following Hiten, good. If not, then that should be the very next thing you do is open the Twitter app and go to @Hnshah and start following him. He’s a phenomenal Twitter follow and if he ever tweets anything that’s super wise, insightful or puzzling to you, just reply and CC @Steli and say “@Steli put this tweet on a couch” (laughing) we’ll make this, a startup chat episode where we’ll analyze the wisdom, the golden nuggets, and the behind the scenes of Hiten’s infamous tweets “dare to be different in all that you do for your future happiness”. I love this one. I’m glad that we talked a little bit about it. This is it from us for this episode. We will hear you very soon. The post 493: Dare to Be Different in All That You Do. For Your Future Happiness. appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about business Intelligence for startups. Handling all the data that you interact with at your startup can be a challenge, and it gets even more complicated as your business grows. It’s important to be on top of your data as things can easily get out of hand for your startup if you don’t. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what business intelligence means, questions to answer when you do business intelligence, tools that can help you do business intelligence better and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:20 Why this topic was chosen. 03:06 What business intelligence means. 03:48 How you’re always doing business intelligence. 05:12 Questions to answer when you do data intelligence. 06:32 How some companies handle business intelligence 06:43 Why doing data intelligence can be tricky. 08:01 The right way to handle business intelligence. 08:33 Concerns to have when doing business intelligence. 09:14 Tools that can help you do business intelligence better. 3 Key Points: The amount of data in your business skyrockets as your customer base grows.You’re always doing business intelligence as long as you’re looking at some metrics.Trying to put data together is tricky. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about business intelligence for startups. So here’s the deal, Hiten. Here’s a trend that I’ve seen over the last few years and also something that’s been on my mind. It’s the big topic of data and insights within your company. I think when you’re just starting out in your startup and you’re a handful of people and you’re working day and night and you’re super involved with everything, you generally have, and should have, everybody care about data and look at the numbers. Look at the information and collect and do the research, and constantly and consistently generate insights that help you adjust and pivot until you figure out the big building blocks of your business. Try to figure out what is it that we’re building? Who is it that we’re building it for? What differentiates us? How do we bring this to market? All these things. But as your company grows and as you become 20 people and then 50 and then a 100, and as your customers are now thousands and thousands of customers, and you grow to hundreds of thousands and millions in revenue, the amount of data in all regards of your business, this can be marketing data, this could be sales data, this could be success data, this could be product metrics and data. The amount of information in your business skyrockets. And there comes a point where any time there’s a question around specific metrics, you can have a team go after it and try to figure it out. But it seems like there are more and more companies that will have somebody or a team that’s actually, to a large degree, responsible for doing business intelligence, which means having an overview and an insight into most of the big business metrics, and trying to generate insights or view opportunities or risks ahead of everybody else. Because they have a holistic view and the mandate to be looking and driving data to generate insights for the business. And this is still a new field. There’s a lot of bullshit involved. There’s a lot of lack of clarity on, is this needed? When is this needed? Who should be doing this? How should it be done? So I wanted to chat with you a little bit about this, because I know you are incredibly experienced and insightful when it comes to data in companies. So first of all, when you think about business intelligence for startups, is that just bullshit? Is that an amazing field that needs a lot more investment? What’s your initial reaction when you hear that? [0:02:54] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think that at some scale, something like business intelligence starts making sense inside of a company. A lot of it has to do with the company culture, how data informed the company wants to be or is. I think this is a very fascinating topic because at the end of the day, you’re always doing business intelligence as long as you’re looking at some metrics. When it starts getting official inside of companies is really what we’re talking about, I think, in great part. And at that point, you have dashboards, and teams are looking at dashboards and are making decisions based on what they see in the dashboards. Ideally, this is happening on a meeting by meeting basis. This isn’t something you just do once a quarter. And so then once you start developing that workflow or that type of way to run the business, you end up needing business intelligence, as they say, which really a lot of times just points to dashboards. But those dashboards are powered by data. That data is when you started. That data, making sure it’s accurate, making sure it’s the right data, making sure that the teams have what they need across the whole company. That’s when you start building out basically a business intelligence team, or buying a product like looker.com or something like that, where you can have dashboards that help the whole company see what’s happening, see what’s going on in the company, and make better decisions. So on a high level, it’s really just this idea that the whole company should be looking at data. And in some parts of the organization, they’re using a sales tool if it’s sales. Marketing is using a certain marketing tool. They already have these dashboards and these tools. The thing that gets really interesting is when you’re trying to put it all together. It’s really tricky when you’re trying to put data together across all the departments, especially if some of those departments have some level of scale, like handful to dozens of people, business intelligence starts becoming a thing. And companies want to wrangle their data and make sure they can build holistic dashboards, these kinds of things. This is a big business in terms of business intelligence. The big question is just, how do you do it just in time or with enough capital or resources that you can put behind it so that you can be successful doing it? There’s so many failed attempts at this inside of organizations. It’s one of the probably areas that fails, that at the same time can have the biggest impact in a business, but also can be one of the most wasteful things a business tries to do. [0:05:31] Steli Efti: Yeah. It’s one of those areas where a business might be not that data driven, not have a good handle on the dashboards and the analytics and the metrics, and then at some point it becomes a glaring issue. And then it’s like an overreaction is the attempt to solve this. Let’s put together a business intelligence department. And you want to hire a bunch of people, come in and fix this holistically, when maybe that’s too big of a first step. One thing that I’ve seen been done a lot is that sometimes companies will start having these individual teams that have the biggest need for a better handle on the metrics and on the analytics and numbers just hire an analyst. So the marketing team might hire a marketing analyst, or the sales team might hire a sales analyst, instead of just building from the get go a business intelligence department or group. These teams will identify that they, themselves, have a big need for it, and then bring in somebody like an analyst person to do that. But it’s always a tricky role because most startups, by the time that they would entertain hiring somebody like that, it’s a very different hire from the culture before. I’ll tell you for me, I’ve never hired an analyst. And so even evaluating a person like that and knowing, how do we evaluate this person’s performance and how to integrate them into the entire company, it would be very difficult because the people are not difficult but different. Because the type of people that we used to hire as a startup, you start hiring developers, designers, salespeople, marketing people. Those people are much more direct impact and their work product is much more transparently viewable. And then when you start hiring for ops roles, and then even later now for an analyst role, it’s much more outside the sphere of where you operate probably in the first couple of years as you grow. What’s your recommendation there? Is it a good idea even to think about hiring an analyst or building a BI team at some point? Or would you always say the company should just try to have everybody in the company become more data aware and better at it first before hiring externally and bringing somebody in to own that area? What have you seen work best here? [0:07:52] Hiten Shah: I tend to try to start by using the tools that might be available to me and using the teams that are helping with that. So for example, if I’m using Amplitude for analytics, I might talk to their team more and see what else they can do for us along these lines. I do think the team at Looker has probably one of the more modern BI solutions that I see at a lot of startups. Once they hit 25, 50, 100 people, they start using Looker. Between those two, I think there’s a lot of help you can get without having to hire an analyst, as long as you have some engineering resources and somebody who owns it. I think I’m more concerned about who owns it internally, and less so about hiring an analyst or even data people. [0:08:43] Steli Efti: Makes sense. What are some of the tools for the dashboards or for just getting a better handle on their metrics for startups in the earlier days? This is maybe advice that a lot of our startups reach out to you and ask for. It’s like, okay, maybe this is between 10 to 100 customers, five to 10 people, and it’s still early days, but there’s a bunch of data already coming in. And a startup is trying to figure out, what should we use to keep track of all our business metrics and company metrics? Should we build something internally? Should we put together a number of tools? Should we just use one external tool? Do you have any recommendations there? Any tools that you think work well in the early days for startups? [0:09:30] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I try to get as far as I can with the tools I’m using already. So Looker is a really good example if you’re thinking of going from the standard Google Analytics. And Amplitude if you want something deeper and you have resources to put towards it. So that’s the one way to think about it. And the other way is literally just utilize what you have. I think that’s underrated. Whatever you’re already using, whether it’s whatever sales tool you’re using, using Google Analytics and all that, try to use the reporting functionality and dashboarding there. And sometimes importing that into Google Sheets or Airtable or what have you can be good enough to get you really, really far, before you need to go get all official with the BI and data project and things like that. So I tend to just start with, what do we have already and what can it do for us? And then figure out in that process, what are the gaps before we really go into hiring or having a big initiative around it? I didn’t see too many companies running too fast into this. [0:10:50] Steli Efti: Awesome. All right. This is it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very, very soon. [0:10:56] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:10:56] The post 492: Business Intelligence for Startups appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about 100 ways to count your blessings. Being grateful for the things in your life is key to being happy in your life. The life of an entrepreneur can be super stressful sometimes and we tend to dwell on the things we don’t, which tends to increase our stress levels, versus being grateful for the things we do have.  So in this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why you should be thankful for what you’ve got, why you should appreciate the people around you, the importance of counting your small blessings and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:13 Why this topic was chosen. 02:18 Why you should be thankful for what you’ve got. 02:47 Why you should appreciate the people around you. 04:23 When to have a moment of gratitude. 04:53 Why you should write down what you’re grateful for.  05:49 The importance of being grateful with somebody else. 06:05 Why you need to find something to be grateful for when you’re feeling down. 07:08 The importance of counting your small blessings. 08:31 The need to be grateful for your health. 3 Key Points: No matter what the experience is, be thankful for what you’ve got.Tell people that you’re grateful for them.I think it’s good practice to have a moment of gratitude everyday. [0:00:01] Steli Efti : Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti : And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about all the ways in which you can count your blessings and why you want to become an expert and really good at doing that. So any of you that have been listening to us for a long time, and a lot of you do and we really appreciate your attention and we really appreciate all the feedback and you sticking with us through all these years. We’ve been doing this podcast for a while now. For those of you that know us well, you know how much the power of gratitude and the power of appreciation means to both Hiten and me and how much we think about it and how much we try to practice it. We did a really popular episode awhile back, episode 161, The Power of Gratitude. You can just search it on thestartupchat.com or if you just put it into Google, Startup Chat, and then episode 161 you’ll find it and you can check it out. But today I don’t want to talk that much about why being grateful is of benefit to you in the world and why using the power of appreciation is really impactful. We’ll just assume you already know. What I’d like to do is just do a quick episode where we share all the ways we have practiced and counted our blessings and just to stimulate people maybe with new ideas or to push them to pick up some old habits that they had accumulated. Because I really think that if we can increase, if we can even just get a handful of listeners to start counting their blessings a bit more every day, the impact is impossible to measure, but it’d be very exciting to me. So I want to just ping pong, go back and forth between you and I. I’m going to share a way I have counted my blessings or practice gratitude or have seen others or heard from others. And then you go and I go and we’ll do this for a couple of minutes and we’ll wrap it up and hopefully people won’t be able to help but to start using some of these ideas to increase the level of appreciation in their daily life. [0:02:04] Hiten Shah: That sounds good. [0:02:05] Steli Efti : All right. You go first. [0:02:08] Hiten Shah: I think one thing to practice is, no matter what the experience is, being thankful for whatever experience you got. You’re next. [0:02:19] Steli Efti : No. All right. I love it. I was like, “This is a negotiation tactic.” I’m like, “Silence, maybe he’ll say more.” I was like … [0:02:27] Hiten Shah: A nice try. [0:02:28] Steli Efti : Yeah. Well, can’t blame me for it. Okay, so- [0:02:31] Hiten Shah: Well I hope you’re thankful for the experience. [0:02:33] Steli Efti : I am. I’m very thankful and grateful for you. Not to get too cringey on this podcast, but I am. And this is the thing, okay, tell people that you’re grateful for them and what they bring to your life. Don’t just think it, don’t just feel it, say it. This is really true. The amount of times, we’ve been doing this podcast for, I don’t know, four years, five years now, and we have surpassed over 100 times. We definitely have told each other over 100 times how much we appreciate and how grateful we are for each other, for the advice for the laugh, for the friendship, for the connection. Oftentimes we stop recording this podcast and then we’ll chat for a couple of minutes about our lives, our struggles, what’s happening. And then we’ll say how much we appreciate each other, how much we mean to each other. And it’s not just because we’re softies, although that’s part of it, but it’s because that’s what we feel. And communicating to the people that you appreciate them, that you’re grateful for them. It doesn’t matter if it’s your co-funders, your coworkers, your parents, your family, your friends. If somebody means something and brings something to your life, tell them, don’t just think it. [0:03:48] Hiten Shah: Yeah, that was great. I think morning gratitude or a time where you’re grateful, whether it’s morning or evening or after you’ve woken up, after you brush your tea or after you put on your pajamas, whatever it may be. Just mentally having that trigger of after you do something, just have a something that you do every day, just have a moment of gratitude. Just have a moment of just think about like what you’re thankful for. Either this morning or this evening or whatever happened in the day. I think it’s a good practice to just find something where you can just sort of have a natural cadence for doing it every day. [0:04:31] Steli Efti : I love it. So related to that is write it down. So what I do in the mornings is I do start fairly early in the mornings writing down a couple of things that I’m grateful for, and that sets my mood and it’s important for me or it’s a different experience and a different feeling around it when I write it down versus when I just think it or feel it. It’s not better or worse or stronger or weaker. It’s just different. So I like to write it down in the morning. And then in the evening, one practice that I have with my two sons is that the very last thing we do before they go to sleep is each and every one of us shares what we’re grateful for that day. And that’s another beautiful thing, is you can go through this alone, but it’s also nice if you have somebody where you can actually share with that person, here’s what I’m grateful for today, and then listen to their gratefulness. A lot of times what happens between me and my two sons as they share things and as I share things, we remember other new things to share with each other. One is pollinating and stimulating the other. So that’s also a beautiful way to do that is to to do it with somebody else. [0:05:47] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I like that. That’s awesome. I think the shared experience is always great. I’ll throw a different one around. One that I tend to use is actually if I’m not feeling that great, I think finding something to be grateful for, even if it’s just a roof over my head can be really useful. So I think it’s a way to solve a problem where you’re just not feeling that great for whatever reason. Maybe you’re upset about something or things that didn’t go your way. I think it’s important to just be grateful for anything, and that usually tends to at least make my mood slightly better if I’m not feeling great. [0:06:34] Steli Efti : I love it. Yeah. So this relates to another thing. So I think it’s important or it can be really powerful and beautiful to be grateful for the significant things in life. There’s also a power, and I struggle with this to be honest, I don’t do this as much, but I’ll practice this more, is counting your small blessings as well. Being grateful for a glass of water, being grateful for fresh air, a deep breath of a fresh air, being grateful for a warm bed, just practicing being grateful for things that are really amazing. But because they’re so abundant in your life, maybe they’re not as significant as the million dollar deal you just close today or the whatever. We always look for these peak moments to stand out to be grateful for and we should. But there’s also, I think, true power in learning to be grateful for the quote unquote tiny or small things in life that are actual magical or essential. So practicing gratefulness for small things, not just big things, I think can be also incredibly rewarding. [0:07:53] Hiten Shah: Yep. Small things, not just big things. Absolutely. I think one other one I would talk about would be the fact that there are, and we mentioned this a little bit, or you did. But I think it’s like if you have a significant other, you have kids, it’s just simple and easy to just be grateful for them, count those blessings. The fact that they’re there. And in relation to that, they’re alive, is your health, just being grateful for your health can go wonder … It can be wondrous. [0:08:33] Steli Efti : I love it. All right, we could go on, I think we could go on for a little longer, but I’d rather do this. I’d rather wrap up this episode at this point, but then ask anybody that has listened all the way to this moment, this very moment. I have a big ask for you. Well first a tell, we’re really grateful for you and for your attention. We know that it’s something special to listen to the two of us for this long and to give us your attention, your time and your energy. And the second is an ask, which is send us a quick email even if it’s just a word or a sentence and share with us what you’re grateful for. The more of these emails we’ll get, we’ll share back what we’re grateful for, but let’s just spread this, let’s cross pollinate each other. But I’d love to hear, I’d love to hear what comes to your mind after listening to the two of us for a couple of minutes. Just shoot us an email, [Steliequals.com 00:00:09:36], [HSI@gmail.com 00:09:37]. Subject line counting blessings, blessings, gratefulness, appreciation, whatever you want. And just write, it could just be a word, could be a sentence, whatever it is, just share a little bit of what you’re grateful for today with us in writing. We’d really appreciate it. [0:09:56] Hiten Shah: Please. [0:09:58] Steli Efti : That’s it from us. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:10:01] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:10:01] The post 491: 100 Ways To Count Your Blessings appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.