In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to get unstuck when you’re trying to complete a project. Sometimes when we’re trying to complete a project or a task, we may get stuck at some stage and not know how to get past it. This is very common and not knowing how to get past this can reduce your productivity or cause frustration. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what causes people to become stuck, tips that can help you get unstuck and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:35 About Brain.fm and how it can help you focus. 03:00 The first tip that can help you get unstuck. 04:39 How doing this one tip can raise your confidence. 04:45 Hiten’s number one way to get unstuck. 05:09 Another thing Hiten does to get unstuck. 07:06 Another thing that helps Hiten gets unstuck. 08:51 How getting in the mode of getting things done can help you get unstuck. 09:45 An example of how to get into a flow.  3 Key Points: I’ll reach out to people that I know have successfully done this in the past.I do these really weird things to get unstuck.Writing is really helpful to me. [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 this startup chat we’re going to talk about tips and tricks to get unstuck. [0:00:12] Hiten Shah: I am such a fan of these kind of topics. One, because I think you and I have a lot of thoughts on a lot of things, and that’s why people listen to the startup chat. And one thought I have is that everyone who’s listening in can do it, because some of you are not able to do this yet, but you should do this later. Go to brain.fm/startupchat. The reason for that is it’s a service we’ve partnered with to be a sponsor of the podcast. It’s a service both Steli and I use and it’s one that we think you should check out, no matter what. It’s only $40 a year, or $6 a month with our 20% discount. And it’s going to actually give you music to help you either focus, relax, or sleep. And the reason I am such a big proponent of it is because it works for me. And same with Steli. He’s told me it works for him. We primarily use the focus music because we work and we want to focus. And I actually use the relax version a little bit ago once and I found the music to be actually, not even just relaxing, it just put me in a different mindset really quickly once I was ready to relax. So, computer was off, I was on my phone, I use brain.fm on my phone, and that’s what happened. We do have sponsors now, and it’s only sponsors whose products we really believe in. I know everybody says that, but I’m not kidding. Go to brain.fm/startupchat, and just check it out. It’s so inexpensive. It’s basically the cheapest way I’ve found to focus and give me something that usually before I quit caffeine I was doing with caffeine. And caffeine, specifically coffee, I still drink tea, but I’ve actually even lowered my tea consumption more recently. And this is almost like a shot of espresso when you turn it on and you start using it to focus. Brain.ft/startupchat. [0:02:08] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right, so the how to get unstuck. Right? Let’s maybe go back and forth and share some of the tricks, tips, or some of our go-to methods to get unstuck. Whenever we get into a project, a task, or anything where we feel stuck, anything that we’re ever trying to accomplish something, we’re trying to complete something, and in the middle, at the beginning, or just before the end, we feel stuck for whatever reason. I’ll give you my first tip that comes to mind here. To me, if it’s something more complicated, if there’s something that I’ve done for the very first time, so maybe part of me being stuck is that I just don’t know how to do this or it doesn’t feel like familiar territory or I’m not a 100% confidence that the way I’m approaching this as right and I’m just fucking around too much. What I have found oftentimes is that, yeah, I want to do a little bit of online research and try to see if I can learn the basics and come up with a game plan of how to tackle this project or this task. But the other thing, if it’s a really important one, is that I will reach out to two or three people that I know are awesome, that have done this type of thing before many times successfully, and I’ll just ask them for 10 minutes of their time. I’ll tell them, “Hey, here’s what I’m trying to do. This is the project, this is the task, this is the responsibility I have. This is the way I’m thinking about tackling it. Give me feedback. Give me an idea. What are some things you wish you’d known? What are some pitfalls to avoid?” And, beyond the knowledge that I’m getting from maybe doing three calls each, 10 minute with three friends or three people that I admire or that I respect, is the motivation and inspiration it gives me. Just talking to a bunch of smart people about the way they’ve done this before will put me in a much more excited, much when inspired mood, and it will raise my confidence level to go, “You know what? Maybe I’ve over thought this. Maybe this isn’t that complicated.” Or maybe when I talk to somebody and tell them, “Hey, I started working on this project, in the middle I just got stuck, I can’t find the motivation. I can’t find the clarity. How do I get over this?” Just talking it, verbalizing and externalizing it oftentimes can help me. This is not something I do all the time, but when it’s a really important project or something that’s really impactful and I get stuck somewhere, I’ll reach out and ask for help and just talk to a few smart people about it, and 9 out of 10 times they’ll help me. [0:04:40] Hiten Shah: Yeah. My number one way to get unstuck is take a quick nap, like a power nap, because I know that my thoughts really crystallize if I take a quick nap. Another thing is I go for a walk. Sometimes I’ll just pace around my house. So I work from home quite a bit and I’ll just pace around my house. Sometimes it’s even more effective than going outside for a walk. Part of it is the familiarity of my house. I can even tell you right now, I have a carpet, I don’t know how we got this carpet, that has a bunch of circles in it, round circles in different colors and they overlap. And I can’t tell you how many times I remember those circles. Right now, even the memory of those circles is coming back, when I’ve tried to solve a problem I have in my head and walking around. I have a counter in the kitchen, sometimes my family will see me just walking around the counter. And there’s something about this repetition that just gets it going for me. And it’s almost like I’m repeating some thought in my head. I’m stuck on it. So by going in circles somewhere, I’m getting it out of my head and doing something repetitive in the physical world, that’s really helpful. So I do these really weird things. I would say seemingly weird things to get unstuck. I think I really like your idea about talking to someone, an expert or someone. I generally will, there’s at least one or two people I’ll call or just go talk to if I’m stuck. And those people are generally people who I feel very comfortable saying whatever to. And they’re generally people who I have no friction with. So, even if it’s someone I work with, it’s someone who almost like I could say whatever and they’re not going to judge it. Or, if it’s a friend, it’s a friend… I think friends don’t want anything from you and don’t want anything from each other. That’s like the [inaudible] of that. And so I have some friends like that who just tell me their deepest darkest thoughts and issues and all that. And when they’re stuck they’ll definitely ping me, and I do the same with them. So, it’s something where you are stuck and you probably don’t have a way out, but there’s a lot of different methods you can use. One final one I’ll share, just because we’ve been jamming on this, is writing. Writing is really helpful to me. And I love writing on my phone. And so, I’ll just pick up my phone, open my notes app and just go. And that’s been probably one of the easiest things I can do that doesn’t bother anyone else either. [0:07:11] Steli Efti: I love it. All right, so I heard this a long time ago, and this actually came from somebody that was talking about productivity, but he came much more from a clinical psychotherapy background. And he came up with this great metaphor that when you are stuck with something, it’s similar to having paralysis. And when somebody has paralysis in some part of their body, let’s say, it’s not so much that the neurons are not firing, that the entire nervous system in their arm is saying nothing, or say pause. It’s actually that it’s firing, stop, go, stop, go, or left, right, left, right, left, right. So the neurons are firing on opposite ends all the time, which is what makes the arm not being able to move, for instance. Right? And he used that as a metaphor for when we are stuck. It’s not so much that we’re just pausing or stopping somewhere. It’s that we’re going back and forth between things. Right? That creates the sensation and the phenomenal feeling of being stuck. And I love that because that then leads to one of the tips that I’ve learned from him, or from that person that I heard this from, which is when you have a difficult time completing a task or getting unstuck from something, try to get into the flow and mode of getting things done. And he was even going so ridiculous of saying you could do the simplest things on earth, you could just even be like, okay, write down 10 tasks, even if they’re bullshit tasks, like you have four books on your desk, and you have a bookshelf, putting the books in the bookshelf, is one task. And then, whatever, putting all the dirty laundry outside the room into the laundry room or something. It could be the smallest of things. Folding my t-shirt. Just make a list of things and complete them. And this could be maybe smaller tasks. This is something that I like to do sometimes. Just to ask myself, “What are some super small tasks that I could complete at the first go, and how can I do that for a 30 minute timeframe or so?” It needs around 30 minutes for me to really get into a state of completing things into the zone of flow. And so, if I go and I complete a task, complete the next task, complete the next task. I’m building momentum and getting into a flow and then I’ll re-attack this bigger task or bigger project that I felt stuck in, because oftentimes the sensation of the phenomenon of being stuck, to me, comes from I’m starting to work on this thing and then I distract myself with something else and then with something else and then I go back and forth, and then there’s three options of how I could finish this and I’m not sure, I’m thinking about all three options, and then I get distracted again by something else. I’m just adding more and more distractions, and going more and more directions. And that creates more and more tension in the body. Which is another tip that I’ll say. So one is get into a state of completing things, even if it’s small things, before you re-attack the bigger task. The other thing is physical sensation is such a great way to reverse engineer this problem. A lot of times for many people, when they get stuck, it comes with a physical sensation. The physical sensation is tension. Right? It means you might start breathing less and more shallow. You might be tensing up your body, your muscles, your posture might be changing. Those are all things that are happening on consciously, but they’re adding to that. If you are getting stuck in a task, I guarantee you your posture’s not going to be great, your breathing is not going to be deep and in a good rhythm and healthy. There’s going to be physical manifestations of that. So, what you can do is reverse engineer that and go, “Wait, I’m stuck.” This is what you, I think, part of what walking around for instance can do. Maybe just take 10 super deep breaths. Walk around to get your body in a better posture, to get more oxygen, to be outside. But it helps me sometimes just to do the 10 deep breath thing where I feel tense, tense, tense, and then I realize that and I recognized that tenseness, and I go, “Okay, stand up, take 10 super deep breaths, oxygen, relax the body, put your body in a better posture, sit down, re-attack this thing, and get unstuck. [0:11:59] Hiten Shah: I really like that. And I like that it’s backs by someone who would know. That’s the important piece. [0:12:06] Steli Efti: Yeah. All right. I think that’s it from us for a couple of tips on how to get unstuck. If you have some, we always love to hear from them. [Agentchai] gmail.com. Steli@close.com. And as Hiten said, make sure to go to brain.fm./startupchat to get 20% off of the subscription, a service that we both love and that helps us, has helped me numerous times, no bullshit here, to get unstuck. When I don’t feel that productive, it’s become a go-to. I just go to brain.fm, start playing a playlist. Within like 10, 15 minutes, it helps me get in the zone. So it’s been super, super useful with that. All right. This is it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:44] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:12:44] The post 450: How to Get Unstuck appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to know if your conversion rates are good or not. In the startup world, it’s very common for founders to get hung up on benchmarks, conversion rates and so on, that they lose focus on what really matters – testing and optimization. There are just too many variables that affect the results that it is impossible to know what a good conversion rate for your business is until you’ve tested things out. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about benchmarks, how knowing the right benchmarks depends on a number of criteria. how different variables can affect benchmarks and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 03:00 How knowing the right benchmarks depends on a number of criteria. 03:39 Why ranges don’t matter. 04:10 Why you should look inside your business not outside it. 05:00 How different variables can affect benchmarks. 05:15 Why you should benchmark yourself. 06:39 The importance of testing and optimizations. 08:12 An example of things you can test out. 08:43 Why you shouldn’t get hung up on benchmarks. 3 Key Points: Everybody wants to know what the benchmarks are.There are ranges for all of this stuff.I would look inside your business not outside it. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to explore the question, “Are my conversion rates good or bad?” This is the setup for this episode. I was talking to a marketer, and he was telling me about the SaaS company that he works for. He was telling me about the current conversion rates that they see from traffic to trials, and from trials to paid. He was asking me basically, “Are these conversion rates good,” to which of course I said, “I don’t know. It depends.” Right? How much did it cost to get this traffic? How much traffic are you getting? How long do these customers stay versus churn? How much does it cost to service these … I mean it’s a complicated question. As I was going through this with him, at some point he was like, “Yeah, but aren’t there benchmarks? Where can I go to get 2019 benchmarks for SaaS companies, or SaaS companies in my vertical industry, or in my country? There must be some place where I can just look at what do other SaaS companies get to have some kind of an idea if this is good or bad, or how much worse or better I fare?” I had to tell him, I was like, “Yeah, I’m sure there are some studies of some stuff, but I don’t have this on top of my head. I don’t really know. I haven’t looked into this.” To which then that marketer said, “Well, why don’t you bring this up to Hiten? I’m sure he has good answers. You guys should do an episode on this. I think I’m not alone with this kind of predicament or challenge.” So here we are Hiten, and this is a big call out and props to all The Startup Chat listeners. We listen back to you, and any time you guys send us an email, steli@close.comm, hnshah@gmail.com, or you tweeted us, or you come up to us in person at an event, conference, or anywhere else, coffee shop, where you see us, we love the suggestions, and we always try to make it happen for you. So any time a listener tells us, “Hey, wouldn’t this be a great topic for an episode? I’d love to hear this,” we try to make it happen. So here we go Hiten. This is the mandate I was given, and hereby I offer you the big question, “What the fuck should be my benchmarks, and how do I figure this out as a marketer in SaaS in 2019?” [0:02:24] Hiten Shah: Everybody wants to know what the benchmarks are. Everybody. It’s just like, “Hey, what are my benchmarks? Well, what should I be aiming for? What should I target?” There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to this because you’re talking about things like, “What should the sign-up rate be on my homepage? What should my conversion rate be if I have a free trial with no credit card upfront, what percentage of people should pay? If I have a free trial with a credit card upfront, what percentage of people should pay? If I have an ecommerce site, what percentage of people should I expect to buy?” I mean, yeah, there’s ranges for all of this stuff. There’s ranges for all of this stuff, and you can almost drive yourself nuts trying to find all this information, and being like, “Okay, these are the ranges I should be in.” Then you might go after those ranges, and what you’ll realize is that they don’t matter. They don’t matter because you could go after those ranges, but if for whatever reason your business isn’t set up so that those ranges will lead you to a profitable business, those ranges don’t matter. It doesn’t matter if they say, “Fifty percent of people who sign up for a trial should convert to a paid plan.” If one, you don’t have 50%. Two, if you have 50%, your business is still not viable at that level. Like you can’t make money, or your margin’s high. So I think the conversion rates, and the way everybody thinks about it in general about finding these benchmarks, is like looking outside yourself, if I were to get a little spiritual on you. I would look inside your business, not outside your business. Any benchmark is outside your business. Anything that’s inside your business, here’s what I mean. You have a funnel. You have a certain conversion rate for everything. Even if it’s things like, “What percentage of people that we email get on the phone with us?” Right? Yeah, there’s benchmarks. You should make it so that you have as high of a percentage as possible. There’s some general benchmarks that people say, whether it’s like 10%, or 20%, or 5%, or whatever, and you’re aiming to get better and better at it. The thing is, there’s so many variables, like particularly there’s variables like, “What’s in the email? What are you sending these people? Is it a problem they actually have? How painful is that problem?” There’s just a number of these things that come up when you start thinking through this, and you’re like, “There’s so many variables. How do I even make sense of any of this in a way where I can justify knowing a benchmark, or justify that I should go after this benchmark?” So what I like to do is, benchmark yourself. Find your baseline, find out how things are right now, and then based on that, go decide what kind of changes, what kind of improvements you want to make. That’s what I would be doing. That has a lot to do with knowing, not what those benchmarks are that are out there about all these different conversion rates, but really knowing where you’re at today, and what you think you need to get to in order to make your business work. So if you’re spending $100 to get every signup, your product costs let’s say 50 bucks, and so a signup costs 100 bucks, your product costs 50 bucks, it’s obvious that you’ll never make money. Okay? Because not everyone’s going to pay for it after they sign up, and it costs you a lot of money to sign up. This is what I mean. I could tell you that “Hey, if half the people pay, you’re good,” but that’s just not true. Because your own unit economics, the math in your business of how much it costs to get people to sign up, your customer acquisition cost to the amount of money that you make from them either on first purchase or their long-term lifetime value, might not map out. The other thing I’ll say to this is, typically people do a lot of what I would say “optimizations” that are going to work, but are optimizations. What I mean by that is, if you ask for a credit card upfront versus no credit card upfront, in theory more people will come in. I mean not in theory. More people are likely to sign up for your product if you don’t have a credit card upfront, but that does not necessarily mean more people are likely to pay. Another example would be, if you have a free trial, and it’s 14 days, and again no credit card up front, and they put in a credit card later, what’s the difference between a 14-day and a 30-day, or a 10-day, or a 7-day, or even a 60-day trial? I don’t know. You don’t know either most likely. So those are all the kinds of things you can test. All those things impact, well obviously how fast people pay because these are trials, but two they also impact the conversion rate to people paying. Some products a 60-day trial is better than a 30-day trial. Other products, a 7-day trial is better than a 14-day trial, and some of the stuff you don’t know. In other examples it’s like, “Well, is a timed trial like 7, 14, 30, 60 days better, or is it better to do a usage-based trial where they get some amount of usage for free, and then they convert?” Even as of this writing right now, if you go to Basecamp’s pricing page, they just introduced a free plan that they didn’t have forever. Now they have a free plan. They had one a long time ago, and they call it “limited but free”. It’s built for freelancers, students, families, personal projects, and light use. Three projects, 20 users, one gigabyte of storage space, and this is new. They didn’t have this plan before. Then their other plan now they’ve just consolidated into a $99-a-month plan. They’ve experimented with 30-day trials, and 60-day trials, and things like that in the past. They’re now on a 30-day trial. It’s really interesting. These companies that are doing this the best are tweaking all these things constantly as the market changes, as they learn, as they do A/B tests, and things like that, that I would just not get hung up on benchmarks, and would focus on, “What is happening in your business, and what do you need to change about it, or what do you want to test about it to make better things happen?” [0:08:48] Steli Efti: Beautiful. Enough said. There’s nothing really much to add to this. This is exactly what I wanted to happen here. So there you have it SaaS marketers, and really anybody. This applies to almost any business there is. Beautiful. This is it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:09:07] Hiten Shah: See yeah. [0:09:08] The post 449: How to Know If Your Conversion Rates Are Good? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on sleep for founders. Being a startup founder can be very stressful, and It’s very common for founders to struggle with sleep. Not getting enough sleep can not only affect your productivity, but it can also be detrimental to your health. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how founders tend to struggle with sleep and some challenges that keeps founders up at night, how there’s a science to sleep and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 02:44 How founders tend to struggle with sleep. 02:57 Why some founders struggle with sleep. 03:11 One main challenge that keeps founders up at night. 04:07 Another challenge that keeps founders up at night. 05:42 How some founders feel like they need to outwork others 06:18 How there’s a science to sleep. 07:32 Tips for getting better sleep. 08:48 How everyone has trouble sleeping. 3 Key Points: Make sure you don’t rely on one big customer.When I’m unable to resolve an issue, I tend not to have proper sleep.Founders feel like they need to outwork others. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about sleep, and specifically we’re going to talk about how to get more sleep because sleep is really about … Usually when you talk about sleep, it’s about how do you get more sleep. And so, I think even deeper than that, and this could be applicable to others, but we wanted to focus on basically thoughts on sleep for founders. I think could be really valuable to anyone who’s not a founder as well. So that’s the topic to just give you context on why a founder might not be able to sleep. [0:00:40] Steli Efti: Awesome. Well, before we go into it, I want to give a shout out to a sponsor of ours, Brain.fm. That’s a music app that actually helps you focus, relax, or sleep better. This product uses science backed music and it actually does work. Both Heaton and I are customers. We love the service. We use it all the time. Don’t believe us, just give it a try. You can go to Brain.fm/StartupChat to get a 20% discount, so that’s less than six bucks a month or less than 40 bucks a year. Once you’ve given it a free trial and you notice its power and effect, Brain.fm/StartupChat. Make sure to check that out. Now back to sleep for founders. This is actually an interesting angle, right? Let’s maybe highlight a little bit on, before we talk about the importance of sleep and why having good quality and quantity of sleep would aid a founder, I’ll just for now assume that many people could just rationally understand why those things would be important. But what do you think are unique challenges when it comes to sleeping that apply to founders more so than other people maybe? [0:01:55] Hiten Shah: I think a founder can have more things in their head in general. Just so many different things that they have to worry about. At some point in a company at some scale, there’s somebody in the company you’re definitely looking to figure out whether you should let them go, figure out whether someone else, figure out whether you should move them around. So I think what ends up happening is at some point you have so much going on that there’s a number of things that could be in your head that could be impacting your ability to actually get a good night’s rest. And that’s not exclusive to founders, but I find that founders tend to have more trouble with this then other types of folks in an organization because they’re dealing with so many different factors that other folks might not be dealing with. And that usually has to do with people problems because those are the ones that tend to be less clear, the ones that we as human beings generally struggle with, and ones that I think can cause us a lot of anxiety and thoughts in our heads about should I do it, should I not do it? What should we do? What’s going to happen? A lot of that kind of things. There’s also other types of uncertainty that orient around being able to raise money, for example, or running out of money on a similar note. So I would say that there’s a number of these types of things that I find constantly on people’s minds as their founders and they greatly impact your ability to actually get sleep. For me, for example, and I think people are different, and different people have different perspectives and skews depending on what occupies their brain. So for me, a lot of the time, when I’m unclear about a relationship I have, whether it’s at work or personally and I haven’t found a way to resolve it, I tend to not be able to get sleep. [0:03:53] Steli Efti: Yeah. Lots and lots of worries as a founder, which impacts typically how you go to sleep. The other thing that I find particularly challenging, especially for founders that … founders like us, which is an increasing amount of founders that just use a lot of technology or even the core of their business is technology, is that now more so than ever before, you’re probably, you have an easy time to be impacted by work even way late into the night, right? So even if you’re at home on your couch watching a movie, you have your phone and maybe somebody’s writing you a chat on Slack or maybe you’re checking an email that you just got. Somebody texted you or you saw a tweet about somebody complaining about your service. It’s so easy for your employees, your customers, the world to get in touch with you, which means as a founder that a lot of people and a lot of problems and a lot of worries and a lot of communication is constantly raining onto you. And for most founders, especially those that, this is most of us probably at some point or the other, that don’t have the discipline to have really good hygiene when it comes to what they do, you know a couple of hours before they go to sleep, is that there’s a high chance you’re working maybe even a couple of minutes before you go to bed, or even worse you go to bed with your phone and you might be answering a couple of emails as the last heroic work act of the day and you’re falling asleep with work on your mind. So that that can be one thing which also leads to the next thing, which is maybe the feeling of guilt if you sleep too much. I don’t know if that’s … I feel like that’s still a big thing. Founders feel like they need to outwork others. They feel like there’s so much to do that there’s not time to sleep. Or if they go to sleep, they try to, maybe just for now, maybe just for the short term, I’m going to be on a six hour sleep cycle or five hour sleep cycle versus eight hours, which you know, the science today at least suggests would be much healthier for our brains and our health. [0:06:06] Hiten Shah: Yeah. One of the reasons I’m excited about a product like Brain.fm is because there’s this science to sleep. There’s a science to so many different things in the world today and there’s not a clear path in terms of how do I believe that this thing is going to help me. I mean that’s even why we have this episode, right? If everyone knew how to get better sleep, they would be getting better sleep right now. I guarantee it. There’s no doubt in my mind. So, products like that feel like the types of products that have that ability to give us something that we can feel more confident about in trying, and it might not work for us. Who knows? These are things that … But at least it’s science backed. At least there’s studies behind it. I think there’s more and more of this that’s going to happen in the world. I for one think that there’s people that go into sleep studies and try to figure out why they can’t sleep or sleep apnea is a thing and there’s a lot of studies around that and there’s machines around that. I have friends who carry around those machines when they travel because their sleep is dramatically improved. I don’t know enough about it. I don’t have it. I haven’t studied it, but I have friends who have told me all kinds of things about sleep apnea and things like that. There’s so many factors here. For me, I have another issue, which is I want to get blackout blinds because my eyes stay a little bit open when I sleep. I actually have a little blanket, like a small one, like a kid’s blanket that I wrap over my head. To me that’s better than one of those little eye things. [0:07:48] Steli Efti: Eye things, yeah. [0:07:49] Hiten Shah: For me, right? And it helps me sleep, you know? And if I need to take a nap in the middle of the day and it’s sunny, because sometimes I do take a nap in the middle of the day, and it actually helps me think, then I need that. I need something like that. So I’m excited for the fact that we’re going to get technology that can help us with this. I think music and sound and things like that can be a great driver to help you relax, or help you focus, or in this case even help you sleep. And there’s even other products in the market, whether it’s products like Calm that are more meditation focused, or even Headspace. Everyone’s getting into this game of being able to help give us these kind of tools. So that’s my sort of mini rant on this and why I’m excited about the topic in general. We have trouble sleeping. And the more demanding our work is, whatever that means for you, it doesn’t mean you’re a founder or not, it doesn’t matter, I think the more chances are that we have trouble sleeping. And for me specifically, I’ve never had trouble sleeping until maybe like six months ago. And what happened six months ago was that I started feeling a lot more pressure in my life around my work, my family, and the things I wanted to accomplish. Maybe it’s the age. I’m getting closer to 40. I’m 38. I just turned 38 a little while ago, about a month ago. And so, I don’t know what it is, but I definitely have been more digging into this and look forward to figuring out some really good solutions for sleep. [0:09:19] Steli Efti: Yeah, I’ve heard Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, on a podcast a couple of months ago and I thought it was, he was super insightful and thoughtful. And I bought the audible version of the book, Why We Sleep. I haven’t listened to it yet, but it’s been … For the last six months or so, I’ve kept seeing this being recommended within my circles. So I have a bunch of friends who read the book and really loved it and through this conversation right now it’s kind of bubbling back up at the top. I think similar to you, honestly think of, I’ve never had a problem falling asleep, so that’s never … That’s been an issue a lot of my friends have had. But a challenge with sleep I never have encountered. And I’ve never been, I mean I had phases in my entrepreneurial career where I probably slept only five or six hours, but not for like decades, for maybe for two or three years. Mostly I’m on an eight hour sleep cycle. So I sleep for eight hours almost every night. But the quality of my sleep, especially in the last year, has drastically declined. And here is. How I know when I wake up, I don’t feel rested and it doesn’t matter. I’ve played around, I’ve slept for nine hours, 10 hours, wake up, don’t feel rested. And then the second thing is, if you saw me the first 15 minutes after I wake up in the morning, you might get really scared. I look like I was in a fight all night long. Like my face is just like has this angry expression that comes from many hours of not good sleep. And so just- [0:10:59] Hiten Shah: I love it. [0:11:00] Steli Efti: So, this has been on top of my mind. It’s been really personal. So I was excited when you suggested that we should talk about sleeping because it’s kind of bubbled up. I’ve been ignoring it for a couple of weeks, but now it’s bubbled up to the top of like, I know I need to tackle this. I need to figure out this. There’s some issues that worry me and I know that if I tackle them that could make a difference, but I also know it’s I need to experiment with the temperature, light. I’m very light sensitive and I know that the blackout sheets that you talked about, the blackout, not sheets, whatever they’re called. Like making sure that the room is really dark, making sure that the room is really cold that you’re just sleeping in. Those are kind of some basic things that science has figured out can really help us. And then making sure that an hour or so before there’s not a lot of electronic light and all that stuff. Those are some of the things that I have very high on my list of things I want to tackle. I need to [inaudible] this because I’m getting more and more scared looking in the mirror in the morning and I’m like, “Okay, I get enough hours, but the quality is not good.” So I need to play around and figure this out and work on it. [0:12:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I mean for me it’s usually just my hair stands up in the mornings, pretty funky looking. So I definitely have, what is it, like morning hair or bed head or whatever they call it. And so if I get on a call before I take a shower, it definitely looks funky. Sometimes I’ll just literally go to my sink and put water on it and it looks great. So that’s my morning issue. And I think, one thing I’m going to leave everybody with here is I think there’s a lot that happens while we’re sleeping, in a dream state that we’re just not privy to and we don’t necessarily remember or understand. And sometimes that can leave us feeling a certain way in the morning. And I’ve noticed that about myself and other folks. Even you, Steli, maybe you’re going on big missions in the … Some kind of missions while you’re sleeping in your dream state, being Santa Claus all over the world or something. Who knows, right? And whatever you want to believe. But I find sleep to be one of these things where it’s if you can sleep, and this is what I’ll leave us with. And maybe you have one of these. If you can go to sleep with nothing on your mind and find whatever is required for you to do that, your life will be better. It doesn’t matter how long you sleep. And so if I were to give a very prescriptive thing that I think is true, is going to sleep with nothing on your mind. And that means like you’ve shed the day and you’re ready for a new day. Because every day you could have a blank slate like that if you really tried. And if we woke up with a blank slate, like just ready to take on the day without anything from the past impacting us in a negative way, that would be amazing. So that’s what I would try to do if it were me looking to improve my sleep, which I am. So I’m going to probably take that advice soon enough. [0:13:55] Steli Efti: There you go. Beautiful. Hey, if any of you listeners have advice, tips, stories to share when it comes to your sleep, your challenges with it, or your victories with it, let us know. We always love to hear from you. Steli@Close.com, HInCharge@gmail.com. And if you’ve not checked it out before, please do us a favor, and this is a real recommendation. Go to Brain.fm/StartupChat. Check it out. It’s a dope service. Both Heaton and I are customers and love it. So make sure to check that out as well. This is it from us for this episode. We’ll see you very soon. [0:14:28] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:14:28] The post 448: Thoughts on Sleep for Founders appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about launching a starter plan. Recently, the team at Close.com introduced a Starter Plan for their software – a plan that’s designed for 1 – 3 person teams and costs $35 a month. This comes after years of focusing on bigger companies and charging a lot more for their CRM In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk dive into why Close decided to introduce a starter plan, one of the main philosophies at Close, how fear preventing the team from introducing a lower priced plan and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 02:20 Why Close decided to introduce a starter plan. 03:11 One of the main philosophies at Close. 03:38 How Close discourages certain companies from buying their product. 04:21 How Close’s reach grew over the years. 07:55 How fear preventing the team from introducing a lower priced plan. 08:43 How Close is now ready to support smaller customers. 10:00 How a lot of companies focus on startups initially and move on to bigger customers. 3 Key Points: We never wanted to compete on price.We always believed in the founders of small and medium companies.We’ve probably told a thousand companies not to buy our product. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about something that I see a lot of companies do. And I just saw the folks at Close.com, happens to be Steli’s company, do this a very recently. I think a little quietly. But I go stalk his pricing page and his site sometimes. So I saw this. And so I’d love to talk about it. So what they’ve recently done, and I’d love to hear the thinking behind it, is for their CRM, they’ve launched a starter plan. And that’s for one to three person teams, and it’s at $35 per month if you pay monthly. And it’s right under $29.75 if you pay annually. And prior to that, their lowest plan was actually $65 per month if you pay monthly. And $55.25 if you pay annually. So with that, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because this is a very common practice that companies do. And I’d love to just understand how you folks thought about it. And I think it’d be really beneficial to our audience to kind of hear what this sort of thinking was like. [0:01:07] Steli Efti: Yeah. So this took us a very long time to launch, right? So we from day one … We launched in January 2013 with Close. And from day one our lowest tier plan was 65 bucks a month if you paid monthly. And from day one, we had a lot of competitors that offered a lot cheaper products and entry prices. But they were always, if you looked at their kind of a comparable product, we were always at the same range or even a bit more affordable. We just never wanted to compete based on price. We always wanted to build and create the most value, and built the best fucking product for our type of customer, which are small and medium sized businesses. And wanted to just crush it, help companies close more deals and drive more revenue where it wouldn’t matter if you close a couple of deals more a month, because you have the right tool in your hands. That’s tens of thousands dollars more in value to your business. It doesn’t matter if you’re paying 65 or 45, or 35, or whatever bucks a month per user. So that was our philosophy from day one. And I think that philosophy served us pretty well in the early days. I think one thing that happened kind of slowly, and it built up more and more over time. And I think we were a bit tone deaf to it, and a bit kind of with a blind spot around that was that … I mean, we always believed in, and invested in founders, and startups, and the smallest companies possible. We always knew that we are probably going to be one of the few, if not the only CRM that’s fully dedicated on small and medium size businesses, and never gets pressure from the market to go up market and go after the enterprise. So we always invested a ton in teaching entrepreneurs and teaching freelancers and designers, and teaching small tiny businesses how to do sales, and how to do sales right in today’s world. And we never cared if these people can purchase our product or if our product is too expensive. We actually had a whole thing of telling them not to buy our product. There’s a whole email sequence and there’s a … I don’t know. Probably by now we have told … Yeah, probably a couple of 1000 companies not to purchase our product, right? “Proactively, don’t buy our product. Buy something less expensive or use this other free tool at first.” Or, “It’s too early for you. You’re too small, too early stage.” And so we always cared about supporting the entrepreneurial in kind of the smaller side in the S in the SMB. But we never, we thought … Always thought of it as a long-term play where eventually as they grow to more mature teams, they would come to us when they need the right tool. And they will be loyal to us and they’ll feel connected to us, because we taught them how to sell in the very early days. And so we never really worried about it too much. One thing that started happening … A couple of things that started happening, one is our reach grew quite significantly over the years. In the first couple of years, there were maybe were a couple of 1000 people that were in the bucket of small single founders, tiny team, less than three people working on a project that were reading our blog and being on our email list. And over the years, that number is grown to probably more than half a million people a month that fit into that category that consume our content, and learn from us how to sell in the very, very early days. So the scale of audience went up significantly. With that, the amount of people at first when I would get maybe once a quarter, I would get an email from somebody that said, “Steli. Team at Close, you changed my life. I closed my first deal because of this blog post, or this ebook, or this video, or this talk. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you guys have done and taught me. Unfortunately, I’m not a Close customer, because it’s too expensive. I’m just starting out and I bought this cheaper tool. But I can’t wait for the day where my business can afford to be your customer. It’s going to be a milestone for me.” First time I read a message like that, honestly it was kind of cool for my ego. I was like, “That’s kind of cool when people can’t wait to become your customers.” That’s a nice thing to be an aspirational product. Right? That’s kind of cool. And I love the idea of helping people even before they can be customers to make a change and have a real impact in the business. That happened once. Then it happened twice. Then it started happening instead of once a quarter, it started happening once a month. Then it started happening once a week. Then it started happening multiple times a week. And at that point I started thinking, “Well, if there’s seven, eight people week that email me with this content, more or less. How many are in this bucket that aren’t emailing me?” Right? [0:06:11] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:06:11] Steli Efti: Because there’s only a small group that emails me. And maybe instead of being proud and touting that, “Wow, we have this massively growing group of people that like to pay us money, and they’re going to our competitors to pay them money. Maybe this isn’t such a great thing.” Maybe today as our business has scaled, as our team has grown, as our resources are much more rich, our business can support making supporting a lot more customers and investing in the customer journey a lot more earlier. And honestly, even people that say they’re going to purchase our product and they’re go and buy a competitor’s product, the reality is a lot of them will either stay with that competitor for much longer than they could technically afford to come over to us. Because there’s lock-in into having a CRM. There’s habits, there’s processes, there’s familiarity. And it’s also not maybe in the early days we’re top of mind that we’re learning a lot from us. But as their business grew that kind of forgot. And then when they look again into a CRM, maybe they’re not as bought in and as emotionally connected. So there was a moment in time we had a really close relationship. Instead of converting that relationship into a more committed relationship, into a business relationship, where they are customers that we can now keep investing in them and they invest in us. We pushed them away to somebody else in the hopes that eventually in the future they will remember. And just eventually just as the business grew, it seemed less and less of a smart idea. And this year we made a decision and said, “You know what? We can make some really big bets. We can make a lot bigger investments.” In the early years, I have to tell you, Hiten, we were also a bit afraid honestly, to invest in these smaller customers. Because we were like, “Can we really do the support for them? Will this mean a lot of distraction? We really don’t just want to have massive volume of customers. We really want to just have the most awesome customers. And we don’t want to get distracted by these super tiny customers that churn maybe at a much higher rate, because they start a side project for a month and then they stop it again. And maybe three months later they start again and they stop again. And will this be more distraction than it’s worth it?” So I think that was a lot of internal debates in the first two or three years when we were discussing this. Today as our business is not a startup anymore and we are a much bigger company with much more scale, it just seems like such an obvious investment to make in our market, in our audience, in our customer base, and in our business. And we know that we can support them and we can invest in them. And we know that we’re just going to be able to create a lot more value to that. Because the type of people that read our content and learn from us how to sell and get their first couple of sales, they are the type of people that will benefit from our tool, because we build Close, the software, based on our philosophy of selling. So they love our philosophy enough. Our philosophy works for them and creates results. Our software will create results. So after many years of being in the market and being not accessible to the largest grouping of our audience, of our readership, we’re now officially opening up ourselves to these customers and make a bigger investment, bigger commitment to the S in the SMB. The smaller startups, the tiny and early stage founders and entrepreneurs, and freelancers. And we’re giving them an entry point that’s much more affordable and allow them to kind of grow into a more powerful feature suite down the line. [0:09:50] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think it’s really smart for companies to do this, because what ends up happening is they start with startups. Then they move away from startups. In SaaS especially. And then you introduce to startup starter plan at some point. In your case, you didn’t quite do that. It felt like you always knew the market you were in and going after it. And then it’s nice to see that the kind of market pulled you towards it. So I think that’s a really awesome way to think about this, which is the market pulled you towards it. And once you just couldn’t take it anymore, you just had to deliver on the value. Right? I really like that. I think it’s awesome that you folks have done this. It makes Close more accessible. I know a lot of folks, obviously thousands of people and companies love your product. So it’s really nice to see you open up the market like that. Look forward to what comes next. Just as someone who watches all this stuff, I’ve been very aware of the ideology that companies use to sort of grow early on, on the backs of smaller companies. Paying a little bit of money, and then over time shed that. And then new companies come in and sort of go after that low end, and start out that way because you can get a lot of feedback on the low end. And then sort of move up. So it’s just nice to see you folks do this and support earlier stage companies with a sort of limited plan. That’s great. And I’m excited to see kind of what happens with that ,and kind of follow up on this in a few months or something. To see if people are actually coming onto it, and are successful using it. [0:11:35] Steli Efti: Yeah. We’ll definitely do a followup episode on this. I think that what’s important to keep in mind at the end of the day is that … And the big lesson I think that we have learned, I think we were too slow. We could have launched a year or two earlier probably. And we’ll see what the outcome is going to be on it, but the early results seem super promising, and I’m super pumped about it. But I think that there’s all these … Whatever created your success, one of the big challenges in life and in business is that whatever is your biggest strength is your biggest weakness. And some of the philosophies that have created a massive amount of success are the philosophies that you’re going to be most calcified around, most kind of stuck on, and most convinced on because it generated success. And it’s hard to change your mind on some of these things, or soften up on some of these things. And staying flexibly committed to ideas is kind of the challenge. And I think that for us it was that our philosophy on pricing has always been, so far has always been serving us really, really well. But I think on this topic on when to decide to actually offer a more kind of entry level plan, and why. I think we’re a bit too dogmatic, a bit too afraid, a bit too stuck in our ways, which ended up just leading us waiting a bit longer than we probably needed to. So that’s the big lesson that I would share with people kind of early on of staying committed to the ideas that have served you well, but still keeping a certain level of flexibility. The other thing that I’ll say in kind of my … As a call out to all the people that are listening to the Startup Chat that are close customers, or that were thinking about being close customers. If you ever thought about buying Close, and you check it out and you thought that the product was awesome, but the pricing was privative. Just send me a quick email about it. Steli@close.com. Say, “I was one of them.” Or, “It was too expensive for me,” in the subject line. You don’t even have to expand on it. I just want to hear it. I just want to get that feedback to see how many people out there would out themselves and raise their hand and say, “Yeah, I also wanted to buy your product, but it was just too expensive for me at the time.” I’d love to hear from listeners that are in that boat. And for those of you that are excited hearing that we are now kind of more affordable for the smaller kind of companies out there, give it a try and I’ll be your personal sales person. I’ll be your personal support persons. Steli@close.com. Check out the product. Let me know what you think of it. Let me know how much success or value you’re getting out of it. Or if you have any challenges, I’m always there. I’m always happy to help in any way I can. And I’ll make sure that in a couple of months once we have more results and more data, we’ll do a followup episode on what the impact of this was to our business. [0:14:25] Hiten Shah: Awesome. [0:14:27] Steli Efti: All right. This is it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:14:29] Hiten Shah: So you. [0:14:31] The post 447: Launching a Starter Plan 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 your employee’s side project. When an employee begins a side project, it’s easy to think that that project will affect his or her productivity. However, this is not always the case and in fact, doing a side project can actually increase the productivity of an employee. In this episode, Steli and Hiten how to decide if an employee should be allowed to do a side project, examples of side projects that are ok, the difference between a side project and a hobby and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:20 Why this topic was chosen. 02:20 Hiten’s take on this issue. 03:44 Redlines to look out for. 04:50 Examples of side projects that are ok. 05:22 Why your priorities should be your work. 05:40 The difference between a side project and a hobby. 06:41 What side hustle means to Steli. 07:50 Why running a side startup can affect an employee’s productivity. 10:46 Why the discipline of an employee is crucial when deciding if he should be allowed to do a side project.  3 Key Points: Some of these things are required for these people’s happiness.As long as the project is not competitive with the business then it’s cool.Your priorities should be your work. [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 how to deal with your employees’ side projects. So here’s why I want to talk about this with you, Hiten. Just got an email from somebody that was asking me… He basically, he has a small team of five people in a startup, and he discovered that one of his developers is working on a side project, on a little app on the side. It’s something that he didn’t know about and kind of like just stumbled over it, and he was kind of conflicted about this. I think that this is something that a lot of entrepreneurs go through, especially probably less experienced ones, where maybe you’re a bit more, I don’t know, afraid of the energy and time commitment and work that your employees put into your company, versus potentially putting into their side projects or something that could turn into their own business one day. And I have gone through this… a journey of this of myself. I think when I first started as an entrepreneur, I was maybe not as cool with it, and I’ve become a lot more cool with it and even would hire people that had very prominent side projects and tell them that I would support them with them. And if, in a couple of years, those side projects grew bigger, they could go on and do that full time. And that has happened successfully many times before. And I’m sure you have a bunch of good examples, bad examples. So I just thought it would be a fascinating topic to talk about from a founder perspective. How should you think about the side projects of your employees? Good, bad, encourage it, discourage it? What’s been your experience? What’s kind of your take today on this topic? [0:01:56] Hiten Shah: I think it’s… There’s two answers I have. I don’t really have a take. I haven’t experienced this a lot in my businesses, and when I talk to people about it, I think it’s cultural. Is it accepted or a norm at the company you’re at? Is the leadership, founders, whoever, are they encouraging it, okay with it? How do they view it? And then what do you want, as a team member, in a company too? And then there’s a piece that’s like… So I guess there’s more than two things, but there’s a piece where it’s like legally what are you allowed to do and not do based on the agreement you signed? Yeah, so I think it’s a topic that’s definitely something where I see a lot of people doing… Or I see an increasing amount of people do freelancing on the side just because… [0:03:05] Steli Efti: On the side, okay. [0:03:06] Hiten Shah: … They want to make more income, or they have a passion or something that’s not coming out at work. And so myself, as a sort of manager, I mean, there’s a case-by-case basis, in some ways. There’s a way to think of this as something where, as long as these things aren’t competitive to the business… Because I think that’s a no-no. It’s just not cool. It’s just not cool, right? And you’re still able to get your work done as well as you possibly can, there is a work-life harmony, work-life balance, your own personal happiness as a team member and thus your ability to contribute to the company that come into play here. So we have a designer, and he is a… He likes cars. He has a fixed-up car, and he’s part of a car club, and he sometimes on the weekend he’ll go… Like, they have a car meet-up, like a big one, and he helps organize it and stuff. Or he’s working on their website or working on their merchandise. It’s not like a side job. It’s not like a side gig. It’s not like freelancing. It’s just something he does. It’s a project, right? And it has nothing to do with work. So yeah, there’s stuff like that. I’ve had a couple of designers, and again I just mention designers because they’re just the ones that end up having this. They have a personal site. They were making a bunch of icons for people and things like that. Not for people, just icon sets and wanted to play around with it. So I wouldn’t say I’m the type of person to encourage it. I also wouldn’t say I’m the type of person to discourage it. I’m just the type of person that’s like your priority should be your work when it comes to how you’re making a living if you’re going to work at a company. So there are very rare exceptions where they don’t need to make a living, but they’re willing to work at another company. Some people are like that, but usually they’re working in a really large enterprise or a large company. So I look at it more like, from my end, on a case-by-case basis. And I look at it as some teams have this cultural thing where a lot of people have side projects. Other teams are way on the other end, where nobody does. And there’s, I think, folks in the middle. And then I think about it as like what’s the difference between a side project and a hobby, because everyone probably has a hobby? I actually… On Twitter, someone asked me about hobbies, and I’m like, “I don’t have a hobby.” I don’t. I think that’s just a construct, but that’s a whole different story. But a lot of people have hobbies or what they would call hobbies. Is that okay? I mean, look, ultimately we don’t control anybody. They control themselves. So I look at it as, again, case by case. And when I look at it as other companies and team members, some of these things are required for certain people’s happiness. [0:06:07] Steli Efti: Mm. Yeah, I mean, I think on this one we’re pretty much on the same page. For me, as many times as we said this before, it depends, right? I think there’s a few things that are important to consider, though. A, to me, there’s a difference between a side hustle, a side project, or a startup on the side, right? So there are differences there. Side hustle to me is something that is like… or a complementary income. So some people, especially like developers and designers is a good example, they might make a little bit of money here and there opportunistically in a way that’s very easy for them to do. Maybe they were freelancing for many years before joining your company as a, let’s say, designer, and then they still get approached by people that want design contracting work, right, or freelance work. And they might just be recommending somebody else and taking a small commission for that, or taking on projects but giving them to somebody else to finish, but doing that very kind of inbound, very sporadically. Maybe it’s two or three times a year. It just happens when it happens. It’s very easy, light work, very little bit of income. It’s just very opportunistic. That’s very different from working on… From supplementing your income and being like every weekend I’m doing freelance work that I’m practically pitching and bidding for projects. And then I have to work and finish them on a deadline, and it’s because I want to make more income, and I can’t make that income at my full-time job. Those two things are very different in terms of the context around them, versus doing a side project where it’s like something that you start with the intention to do this on the side and grow it and eventually have hopes to do this full time, versus do this as a side project where the goal is really to learn a new language or learn a new toolset or create something that’s small that just creates this kind of monthly income and runs on its own, but never becomes really a big thing. It’s just like getting something to generate a few 100 bucks a month and playing with some new tools or doing some creative endeavor and then move on to another side project. There are people that are launching five, six side projects a year on the side. Those are very different things than somebody starting a side project with the hope and goal to turn it into a full company and something that’s going to become their full-time job, versus somebody doing another startup on the side, where from day one maybe they are co-founders and they are investors, and they’re having contractors, and there’s a whole team in place, and they have tons of responsibility and pressure. All these things are very, very different, and they all might work for your company and your startup. You might be totally cool with your employees doing that, or one employee doing that, or some of them. And they might all not work, or some of them might work and some of them might not. I would always be concerned if people have to do a side job to create the income they want. That would be a big red flag to me. Like, I would always try to figure out why can’t we help this person create enough value in our business to make the entire income they want to make here, versus having to do side jobs purely for the income. To me, doing some side hustle here and there and just generating easy income with kind of creative ways, so with things that are inbound, that’s just smart and healthy. There’s no distraction. There’s no long-term implications of conflicts there. Side projects, it depends on what kind of a side project it is. As you said, is it competitive or not? Is this also somebody that’s disciplined? Like, the person also matters. Some people can be very ethical and very responsible with their side project, and they will do their job and do it amazingly. And they will allocate certain time in their free time to work on those side projects, and they will be very, very disciplined and ethical about it. And some people get overly excited about their side project, and it takes over their life and over their work. And instead of finishing the work you’re paying them to finish, they use that time and that income to tinker around on their side project and do what’s fun for them. And that’s not fair, and that’s not cool. And doing a whole nother startup, but doing something that’s more involved, that has a whole team in place and all other things, that rarely works out. That’s just so demanding, and it has to be unfair to one or the other side. Maybe it’s going to be unfair for you, or it’s going to be unfair for those other people in that other startup because the person’s not putting in enough effort and time. I think the important thing, just to round up this episode on my end in terms of tips, I think the important thing is to be clear in terms of your expectations. I’ve heard this many, many times. There are companies oftentimes that will say, “Oh, we’re totally cool with side projects. We totally encourage it, and everybody should do one, and we’re totally for it,” because they feel like that gives them a positive image and that’s the cool thing to do. But then when people actually work on those side projects, people in the company get really upset. I heard this so many times of people telling me… Like, I’ve had conversations with employees and teammates that I would tell… And one person that I actually hired while he was doing, while he had left his last job to fully dedicate his energy to his side projects. I hired him, and I told him that it would be… For him specifically, it would be totally okay to keep working on his side projects, and I will support him and try to help him grow them to a degree where he could do that full time. And he told me, “You know what? My last boss told me the exact same thing, and then he wasn’t cool, and he was constantly making comments and being passive-aggressive, and it just created this negative vibe.” And then we ended up working for two years together, and multiple times he thanked me for giving him a totally different experience and being true to my word of like actually supporting him. But I feel like, if you tell people that you’re supportive of this, you should be all in on it and truly supportive and not just say it and then, when people do it, be passive-aggressive. So be clear and concise and keep your word in whatever you tell people. Is it okay? Is it not okay? What are the rules, or what are the guidelines? What’s the general culture within the company when people want to have side projects? And I know some companies go really crazy on this. Lately, I’ve seen one company specifically basically publishing a ton of content, encouraging people that do side projects and want to do something else to come and work for them as a supplementary income for the short term. Like, “This is a great place to come and work for a couple of months until you’ve figured out your side project and it’s big enough.” That, to me, is fascinating. It’s difficult to believe that that will work out for both sides really in a positive way. But that, to me, is too extreme maybe. But, yeah, today I’m totally comfortable with side projects, depending on what it is, who it is, and why they’re doing it. And then it’s all about being transparent and communicating really clearly and honestly with each other. If you work on a side project that you’re really passionate about and you think eventually is what you really want to do full time, don’t hide it. Don’t do it in secret unless you work in maybe some big corporation where it’s impossible. At least, if it was somebody on my team, I’d love for that person to come and tell me about it practically and say, “Today, it’s a small thing. I have a plan for the next 12 months to make it a big thing. I’ll keep you in the loop. I still do my job here, but this is kind of what my ambition is.” I love that level of honesty and transparency, and that would then make me go, “Okay, I’ll support it. What can I do to help you? How can we make sure this stays fair during the next 12 months for both sides?” And I would just check in with that person. And even if that person left, I would respect the honesty and transparency so much that I would lifelong be a supporter and be a fan of that person and that company or side project or whatever it is. So just be transparent and be clear about what the rules are and what your approach is. And when you tell people something, make sure that you’re just… you’re not just saying it because you feel like it’s the right thing to say or is the accepted thing to say, but just make sure that you will be able to live up to that. And if you’re not cool with side projects, if you don’t want anybody to have a hobby or a life and to ever work in any other way or make income in any other way, then just say it and just be honest and fair with them. Be like, “Hey, if you want that, this is not the place because this is the kind of culture. The kind of people I work best with are totally obsessed with what we’re building here, nothing else. And if that doesn’t seem cool to you, then this probably is not the best place for you.” Just be honest and frank. I think that always leads to the best results. [0:15:21] Hiten Shah: There you have it. Honesty, the best policy. [0:15:25] Steli Efti: All right, this is it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:15:29] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:15:30] The post 446: Should You Let Your Employees Work on Side-Projects? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about why focus is so important and how to get more of it. If you’re going to be successful at anything, then staying focused on that thing is super important. If you lack focus in your life or your business, it is a safe bet to say that you will not succeed with your mission.   In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why staying focussed is super important, tips to help you stay focused, they share a mental hack to help you when you feel stuck.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:41 Why this topic was chosen. 01:00 About Brain.fm and how it can help you focus. 02:15 One way Hiten stays focussed when working. 03:21 The importance of staying focused. 03:29 One thing you can do to stay focused. 04:40 Another thing that can help you stay focused. 05:29 How accomplishing your big task can be a challenge. 06:45 A mental hack to help you when you feel stuck.  3 Key Points: Without focus, nothing gets done.Music can help you stay focused.Have one big rock for the day. [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli: And today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about why focus is so important and how to get more of it. [0:00:11] Hiten Shah: And one way that both Steli and I have discovered in the last few months is a product that actually helps you focus, relax, or sleep. And specifically the number one use case I have for it. And I know Steli does too, cause we talk about this is focus. And the product is essentially replaces the music you listen to with their sort of music, and it’s backed by science to actually help you focus, relax, or sleep. And you probably don’t already believe me because it’s like how can something like that actually be scientifically proven to help you focus? Well they’ve done studies on it, and I know you’re probably dying to hear like what is he talking about? Well it’s this product, it’s a, and you can get a 20% discount on it. So I’m going to jump right into that part of it, which is it’s that brain.fm/startup chat, and it’s only 40 bucks a year or six bucks a month. If you go to brain.fm/startupchat. Now, here’s the thing, we’re going to talk about focus today. This is the number one way we’ve found to actually focus, which is listen to music that’s designed to help you focus. That’s it. And the studies prove it. So you know, the episode’s over. It’s just a big, you know, ad for brain.fm. Just kidding. I wanted to mention this because I rarely find something that works this well for me. The last time I found something that works this well for me, that actually helps me basically focus. It’s something really weird, which is I would play the same song on repeat, while I’m working. So that’s the last thing that worked for me. And I still like that sometimes, but this is way different. So, you know, it’s like, it’s one of these things where you really desire focus if you’re working especially when you’re in work mode. Whatever you’re doing, whether you’re having to jam through, you know, a whole bunch of emails, or you’re writing a blog post. Or you’re sitting there trying to do some actual like programming even. There’s like this almost like how do you get out of your head while you’re doing that and get into the work? And that’s what I really like about any of these methods that help people focus, which is this idea that you’re getting out of your head, you’re getting into the work. And that’s what I’m really looking to do when I want to focus. So I think it’s important because we can be in our heads and like even right now, while I’m talking to you, I could have five billion other thoughts in my head, right? [0:02:35] Steli: Such as you thoughts there’s like you could do five other things. You could be checking your phone while at responding to some Slack chat while it’s having a blog post open. [0:02:44] Hiten Shah: It’s so true. So there’s so many distractions you cannot have when you’re actually trying to get something done and you either have a deadline, or you just want to be really productive and focus is really important for that. So it’s something where like I think we take some of these things for granted. Like you said that we can do all these things at the same time, and then we end up doing them. And then we ended up like, you know, looking back at the day and being like, well, what did we get done? Without focus nothing gets done. [0:03:09] Steli: So how do we focus more? Right? So one thing people can do, and I think this is something everybody has probably experienced. That music can really help you focus, right? The right type of music. I’ve always struggled with this in the past when I was listening to music I liked that didn’t work to put me in a focused zone. Where I was like, you know, trying to listen to music to get into the zone, and that the music itself was actually making it harder for me to focus and concentrate. Until I kind of found the few types of either songs or types of music that worked. But even then it’s always a hustle if I don’t have the right playlist or if I don’t like the playlist it may or may not work. I really love brain.fm, so definitely do what Hiten Shah told you to do. Brain.fm/startupchat and check that out. So music can be a way to get into the zone. What are other things that can help people to focus more and to get more focus into their day and into their work? What are some of the tips we can go back and forth and give people a few new ideas to try out. [0:04:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I find this one, not a new idea, but an idea that always works for me at least. With just have one big rock for the day. So what’s that one big thing you need to get done no matter what for the day, and make sure that you get it done. I have one big rock that I have actually today. I even had one big rock on the weekend. So today there’s this document I need to make to go send to a company. And it’s probably my biggest rock today. Because I know it’s gonna take a little while and it’s something where if I get that done, I’m going to feel really accomplished. So by having that one big rock and actually writing it down, I think you can literally focus just on that thing, and do that thing early on in the day. That’s the other key. And if you do that… [0:04:57] Steli: I love that. [0:04:58] Hiten Shah: If you do that, then it just makes it easy to focus on the one thing, because it’s just the only thing on your list. [0:05:04] Steli: Yeah, I love that. So I’ll give you the opposite of that just to play off of it. Right. Y. [0:05:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:05:11] Steli: So I love having the one, the 80/20 the one big item only can get one thing done today. What is it? Let’s go and do that. Let’s do that first, because I’m going to feel great and then everything else is just a cherry on top. That’s killer. Sometimes though that one big thing, it comes with a certain level of resistance to me, at least to me, right? Sometimes the thing that I really should tackle first is the thing I really don’t want to tackle first, or the thing that where I don’t know, maybe I’m lacking clarity. Maybe I’m lacking the right approach. So when I start working on it, I feel a lot of internal resistance. It’s hard, it feels hard to me to get into the task and get that done. And sometimes what I’ve learned is that I can get stuck if I get too attached to that thing. So then I have to go the exact opposite route and ask myself, what out of the things that I wanted to do today is the simplest thing to get done? And basically what I’m just telling myself is I am not in the zone yet. I’m not in a flow state. I’m not in a productive state. So hence, I need to get maybe a few small things done to get myself in a flow state, to get into a productivity and focused state to then be able to tackle this more complicated or more valuable, more complex tasks. So maybe I’ll just get a few small things done to get some easy wins and quick wins, feel good, get in the zone, get focused, and then I go back to tackle that big item. So that’s something that I’ve tried many times. I’ve used many times as a little bit of a mental hack. When I feel stuck and when I have a difficult time to focus to get a really important thing done, I go and tackle some easy small things to get into the zone before I reattack that big item. [0:06:59] Hiten Shah: I like that. I’ve used that before too. Start with small things? If you’re stuck. [0:07:03] Steli: There you go. The other thing. The other thing I’ll throw out there in terms of getting more focused in your life, and we’ve talked about this before and this is an episode I recommend everybody to listen to again. It’s actually one of the, one of the first episodes that we did in the first hundred, right. In the golden, the golden age of the these podcast episodes that we’ve made, which is episode 38 how learning how to say no. So go to the startupchat.Com, episode 38 learning how to say no. I think that’s an incredibly powerful tool to get more focus in your life and in your work and day. You can always… I mean we all tend to just look at what are the things I should say yes to. What am I to use for today? What other things I want to focus on. But a great way to actually focus is not just to look at what you want, but also to decide what you don’t want, or what you’re not gonna look at, or not gonna work on today. So sometimes I’ll start my day with a not to do list and just go, what is all the shit that’s been on my mind,, on my to-do list in my inbox that I am not going to give any energy or attention today. And I’ll make a list and be like, this is all the things I’m giving myself permission to ignore. And then I go, well, okay, if I can ignore all these things, what other things I don’t want to ignore that I want to focus on? Sometimes just the mere act of saying no to things, or defining what you’re not gonna get distracted by, what you’re not going to give any attention to. Can kind of free up all this mental Ram space to really apply your energy and your brain power to the thing you really want to want to apply to. And so to increase the level of focus that you have on your tasks. [0:08:48] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I really liked that. [0:08:51] Steli: All right. I think this is it for us for this episode on my focus is important. How to get a little bit more of that focus your day and in your work and life. As Hiten Shah said, please go check out brain.fm/startupchat. If you sign up for the free trial. Play around with the music list, both Eaton and I love it. We wouldn’t talk about it otherwise. And if you ever have any challenges, any questions around it, or need any help, we personally vouch for any service that we are advocating for on the podcast. So you can just email us directly. You don’t have to deal with anybody else’s support. You just email the study of hidden support team and just steli@flows.com or [inaudible 00:09:29], we’ll take care of you. We’ll make sure that you are taken care of. This is it for us for this episode. We’ll see you very soon. [0:09:38] Hiten Shah: Cheers. [0:09:38] The post 445: Why Focus Is so Important and How to Get More of It appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to increase your productivity. If there’s one thing founders struggle with a lot, it’s being productive. With all the distractions of social media, mobile gaming, and the internet, in general, staying productive at work can be a challenge, and this can have a negative impact on your startup. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what it means to be productive, how to define productivity for the role you’re in, tips for being more productive. and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 01:50 How being productive makes Steli happy. 03:42 Why it’s a good idea to consciously review your day, week or month. 04:10 What some of Hiten’s most productive days look like. 05:00 How to define productivity for the role you’re in. 05:35 Why Hiten works a lot on weekends. 06:01 The different angles to productivity. 06:37 Tips for being more productive. 07:14 How to measure productivity as a manager. 3 Key Points: Productivity is a human desire.The feeling of productivity is really high up on the list of things that make me happy.Some of my most productive days are the most random days ever. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti`. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about how to increase your productivity and there’s a really good reason we’re talking about this. We’ve been wanting to talk about this. We know that this is something that is on most of your minds, whether you’re working in a company or working on your own company or in a really large company of some kind. It doesn’t matter. Productivity is something that’s almost like a human desire, especially at work. [0:00:34] Steli Efti: Okay? [0:00:34] Hiten Shah: That’s where I’ll start. I’m like, hey Steli, I think it’s a human desire. [0:00:37] Steli Efti: That is not what I thought you would say. So like my mind was wandering off in a specific direction and you took a left turn while I was still going straight and eventually I was like, where is he? He must have taken a left turn. I kind of lost it over there. [0:00:55] Hiten Shah: There we go. [0:00:57] Steli Efti: What did you say? Human desire? [0:00:59] Hiten Shah: Yeah, we want to achieve. We want to be productive. We want to get stuff done. I also want to be happy. Don’t get me wrong. [0:01:07] Steli Efti: No, but you know what I mean. I fucking love this because that is actually one of the, I’m sure it’s the same with you. I’m sure it’s the same with most people that listen to us. If I have to identify a very big contributor to either my happiness or my lack of happiness. Productivity, the feeling of productivity is really high up the list. So even when everything is going well, like I could have a great day with lots or a week where lots of good things happen, where there’s a lot of reasons to be happy. But if I personally didn’t feel productive that week, I guarantee you I’ll be unhappy. It’s feeling productive is kind of a crucial, fundamental thing I need to be feeling kind of good in my own skin, right? To feel comfortable, feel it. [0:02:03] Hiten Shah: When you reviewed, you actually think of it like that? [0:02:06] Steli Efti: Yeah. But you know what it is? The crazy thing is it is not a mental thing. It’s not a, wow, I had so much fun this week. Everything went well. Let me review the week. Let me think, what is everything that happened then? Shit, I wasn’t as productive. God and then I start mentally making myself feel bad about it. It is literally like not showering the entire week, right? If you told me we’re going to have an amazing week. You’re going to make a bunch of money. We’re going to have fun. We’re going to laugh. It’s going to be all these great things happening. That’s all cool. But if I can’t shower the entire week, it’s really going to bug me, right? By day two, I’m going to feel uncomfortable and by day four, I’m really going to be irritated by that. No matter how many great other things happen. The same thing is true for that sense of productivity. If I feel like I haven’t accomplished enough. I haven’t created enough. Haven’t done the things that I really wanted to do or norm people were doing, no matter how many good things are happening, there’s discomfort. There’s a physical sensation of discomfort that I have, that I carry around with me and I can tell what is going on with you. I can instantly go, I feel unproductive. I haven’t been productive since it’s bugging me. [0:03:21] Hiten Shah: So I think one thing we can do is suggest that people actually consciously review their day and, or their week or even their month and just gauge it and say, “Was I productive?” In my opinion, “Did I accomplish what I wanted to accomplish? Do I do I feel like I was productive?” Because sometimes it’s like you might not accomplish what you wanted to or what you thought you were going to, if you had some preconceived notions about that, but you still could be productive. Like some of my most productive days are the randomest days ever. And what I mean by that is ones where I took some meetings that, you know, I didn’t know how they’d turn out. I didn’t know if they were going to be worth it, so to speak. Or I just woke up and I had an empty day and all of a sudden like I do a whole bunch of stuff. My to do list is pretty low and I feel really productive because I accomplished things right? And a lot of times for me, that’s a lot of different things. It’s like I’m not an engineer. You’re not either. So it’s not like we’re sitting there and productivity to us means, we cranked on a bunch of code. Right? And chips and stuff or whatever. I’m assuming you’re not doing sales full time either. So it’s not like set up these many meetings, right? Or had these many calls or got to the next step in your sales process with so many different customers. So you know, one way to think about it is like how do you define productivity for the role you’re in? And I think as a manager, it’s probably one of the trickiest things to figure out. It doesn’t matter what level of manager, because a manager’s job is management and management is somewhat vague. So you know, I think it’s much easier in certain roles than others. And you know, one thing I actually shared this weekend was the fact that I think I’m kind of weird like this maybe, but I got a bunch of responses. I wasn’t really looking for responses. I made a confession, Steli. I confessed that I actually work a lot on the weekends and I work a lot on the weekends because I like the fact that there’s less Slack and less email. [0:05:23] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:05:25] Hiten Shah: Just change the game. Like even right now, like there’s engineering messages coming through as I’m talking to you that I just had to close Slack because I’m like I don’t need this right now. You know? And a lot of those messages I don’t look at. Like there’s folks on our team that look kind of, but I still see them and I want to know what’s going on so to speak on it like a high level. So I think, for me there’s a lot of different angles to productivity. One of the biggest ones is just, you know [inaudible 00:05:48]. What does it mean to you? [0:05:51] Steli Efti: I love that. I love that question as a fundamental question to start with. I think for me a couple of things. When I think of productivity, one I think you know, there’s a powerful question. I don’t know where I heard this but it’s the question that I’ve been asking myself for many, many years now, maybe close to a decade. Not daily, but almost every day where before I start jumping into tasks and to-dos and calls and meetings, I try to start my day by asking a number of questions and one of them is usually if I could only get one thing done today, what would be the thing that I feel like it would make the biggest difference? Like what’s one thing that if I do that and nothing else, I feel like I’ve accomplished something significant for reason? I had an impact. I helped to empower somebody. You’re right. As a manager, often times your productivity is not measured by the units of work product that you got done or you shipped, but by how much you’ve helped your direct reports. Your team to produce better work and to be more productive. Like how productive is your team is really the KPI that tells you how productive you are as a manager, how effective you are as a manager. So have I helped somebody else to accomplish great things today? Have I helped somebody else to unbottleneck or get unstuck or do better work? But asking the question, what is the one thing that I feel like could make the biggest difference is kind of a clarifying question and a tool that I found helpful. The only thing that I want to say touching on the weekend for work, because it’s a more focused, quieter time to work is the early mornings or late nights. I often find that for most people, for me specifically super early in the morning or super late at night, I can often times be a lot more productive for the exact same reason, right? Even for better reasons sometimes because everybody’s asleep. It’s not just that people don’t bother you because it’s the weekend, it’s they’re not even conscious. Nobody’s around to make any noise, any demands or stimulate you in any way. And I know for certain late at night it’s tough for people because usually they have a long day of other stuff going on. But when you can get into a routine, I’ve gone on and off of it many, many times, but when I’m in a routine where I wake up super early. For almost like a year, I was waking up at like 4:30, 5 AM. The hours between 5:00 AM and 9:00 AM, those four hours were worth, you know, 15 hours during the day. Like it’s just such a focus, such a clear time. But it came with the challenge that I had to go to sleep super early, like 9:30 or so, which I don’t always enjoy doing. But finding the right time in the day where you can’t, or the right day in the week where you can do the best work can be a big, a big help and a big hack to becoming more productive. [0:09:03] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I think one thing that you know really inspires me is like you said, when you have, you know that maker time, right? There’s maker versus manager, something really old from Paul Graham. We’ve talked about it before on the podcast as well. And that concept really hits home for me and I really try to figure out, what do I do? How do I get into that sort of maker mode and make sure that I maximize my time when I do have that whether it’s morning, evening, weekend, you know, whatever it is when I have that maker time, how do I maximize it? [0:09:42] Steli Efti: I love it. All right, so those are some of our tips on how to increase your productivity. Now I want to give a shout out to one of our sponsors, Brain.fm. This is actually music that you can listen to that will help you focus, more relaxed, sleep better. This product uses science backed music and it actually works. Both you Hiten and I have used it before. I’ve used it mostly for focusing and doing like two or three hours of hyper focused work and I absolutely love it. I think this stuff really works. It really gets you into kind of a certain hyper-focused state of mind. I love listening to Brain.fm to the the the kind of playlist that they have there and the music they have there. If you guys listen to us and want to become better and be more focused and therefore also more productive. Just give it a try. You can go to brain.fm/startupchat to get 20% off your subscription of Brain.fm. Just go to brain.fm/startupchat. They have a free trial. You can play around with it. You can listen to it and see if you can really get incredible work done. I’ve used it for the past two, three weeks, a ton of times and I absolutely love it. Have you used the, mostly the focus one or have you played around with a relaxing of the sleeping modes as well? [0:11:05] Hiten Shah: Yeah. So I have been using it for a while now, several months and I’m actually a paying customer and it’s one of the cheapest things to get me focused. And I’ll call it cheap cause it’s only six bucks a month or $40 a year. And yeah, I’m like you where I spend most of my time using the focus sort of version of it. And the key to it is whether it’s focused, relaxation or sleep, whatever you want, you can get because it’s science backed to focus on those things. And I used to be someone that used to play around with binaural beats, which is sort of, you can find those on YouTube and they kind of help you with similar things, but they’re not as effective as Brain.fm. And so I actually tried to relax just few days ago when I just wanted to relax after I was getting off my computer and going to bed. I don’t really think I want to try the sleep button quite yet because I don’t necessarily have much thought much on sleep, but we can talk about that some other time. And so yeah, I tried it and it was actually really fascinating. I did relax when I heard it. And this is something where you’re just gonna have to try it to believe it. So brain.fm/startupchat 20% off. Check it out. One of our sponsors and one of our favorites too. Not that we should have favorites just because it’s such a simple product and it’s something that anybody can use. [0:12:31] Steli Efti: Absolutely love it. Definitely check it out. This is it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you there soon. [0:12:36] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:12:36] The post 444: How to Increase Your Productivity appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how we’re all dreaming of our own realities. Sometimes, we tend to dwell too much on past experiences that we don’t enjoy the moment that we live in. This can make us unproductive and lead to so many of the issues and uncertainties we encounter in life. In today’s episode of the show, Hiten’s theory about how every experience we have is all a dream, how holding on to memories of that past can diminish our future experiences, why you should figure out where your primary focus is in your thinking and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:38 Why this topic was chosen. 02:51 Hiten’s theory about how every experience we have is all a dream. 03:47 One way to test this theory. 06:03 How holding on to memories of that past can diminish our future experiences. 07:49 A killer quote by Erich Maria Remarque. 08:30 When Hiten typically brings up this concept. 10:45 3 ways people tend to look at the world. 11:52 Why you should figure out where your primary focus is in your thinking. 3 Key Points: It was all a dream.As human beings, we hold on to so much of the pastEach individual has their own perspective. [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 a thing Hiten told me, an idea that he planted in my mind that months later I still think about. I will just give you guys the quote and then Hiten will unpack the conversation and we’ll dig deeper. “It was all a dream.” [0:00:30] Hiten Shah: Yeah. So yeah. There are so many people that I’ve explained this to privately and I don’t think I really shared much publicly, maybe randomly somewhere on some podcasts, but this is our podcast and it’s something I told you and if you’re still thinking about it, I know other people are, too. And it really kind of makes you wonder about a lot of things when you think about it like this. So I said this in reference to something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and what I’ve been thinking about a lot is the fact that as human beings we hold on to so much of the past and we hold on to things typically that are related to ourselves and also that are related to other people. And one of the points I want to make about life is that whatever your perspective is today, now or was, or even the fact that you and I right now, Steli, are having two very different experiences, even though we’re in the same moment, in the same conversation recording a podcast. Now, let’s just expand that. There are thousands of people that are going to hear this. Think about all the perspective that they’re going to have when they read this and how many different perspectives there are. Each individual has their own perspective. Even if we see and hear and talk about the same thing, we didn’t really have the same experience. It was our own individualistic experience to have. And so when I think about those kinds of things, and a lot of the theories people have out there that make it very complicated, like we live in illusion or quantum theory proves there’s multiple dimensions or aliens, right? And all these things and whatever you want to believe. I have no judgment, zero judgment. I probably know more of these theories than most people who are listening because I just am curious. And so my summary is, it was all a dream. Whatever you’re hanging on to, whatever happened. Even if it was literally 30 seconds ago, whatever I just said, it was all a dream. It was just all a dream. And what’s a dream? It’s something you don’t even believe was real. It wasn’t real. You woke up from it, you’re like, “Wait, what just happened? It was so intense. I did this and I did that and wait, I was sleeping and I was dreaming. It didn’t really happen.” So anything, even your best moment in life, it was all a dream. You can’t go back to it. It’s in your mind. And whoever else was there, has a different version of it in their mind, so we’re all just dreaming. [0:03:20] Steli Efti: Holy shit. How do I even respond to this? One beautiful thing or one, I think, practical application of this to test this at the end and see how it feels to people that are listening is to take something, an experience that happened to you a long time ago. It doesn’t even have to be a long time ago, but just for fun, something that stands out. Maybe your last vacation, since I’m on vacation right now, maybe this is what’s on top of my mind, your last vacation and just to think about a few things that happened during that vacation and see what remembering that vacation, what it feels like, what it looks like, how intense the images are, the feelings, the sounds, the moments, the memories. And then imagine going on vacation to a country you’ve never been. Imagine you walking through the streets, and meeting people, laughing, having experiences. And now tell me if those two, if the one memory and the one imagination, if they’re drastically different, right? This is one thing that I’ve noticed is when I remember even super intense experiences, it’s hard to tell that it ever really happened. There’s something, I don’t know yet what it is, some criteria to that memory that makes me internally go, “Yes, I know this happened for sure and I know this didn’t happen.” Or, “I’m not sure if this happened.” But in terms of the intensity of its realness, it’s all the same. If I imagine something, if I remember something, it’s obviously not reality right now. It wasn’t even to get metal physical, it wasn’t even real reality back then because there’s no … There’s some overlap of shared reality if we’re all in the same room, but that overlap can be quite small, surprisingly small, depending on who you are sharing that reality with. It’s always an interpretation of what really happened in that moment to you and that will be drastically different interpretation that other people have in the same room or the same space, but when you think back even more so, it’s not real reality. It’s not happening right now. It’s not some kind of a thing that’s indisputable that everybody shared it in an exact way. And so we use memories of events in the past. Oftentimes we hold on to these in a way that is diminishing our present moment and that is taking away from future potential. We’re creating these stories about ourselves, about all the bad things that happened to us that now have diminished us in some way and are taking away opportunities from us or chances or whatever. And this is particularly strong. I think that that was the case when Hiten and I talked about this, we had a private conversation about it in a coffee shop. Our private conversations are very rare. Most of our conversation, the vast majority of our conversations, happens publicly on this spot. [0:06:31] Hiten Shah: Right here, right here. Right now. [0:06:33] Steli Efti: Right here, right now. So it’s very rare that we have a conversation that’s not recorded and published. But that was one of them. And we talked about people in our lives and I think that’s what made Hiten share the idea of it’s all a dream. We’re all holding onto these things that happen in the past in some kind of way that influence how we feel and how we act and how we see ourselves and others right now. But we don’t have to, if we understand that this shit is all dream, we can just all let go of this, of what happened and focus on the now. A lot of weight and a lot of burden can be lifted. And there’s another quote, funnily enough, I didn’t share that with you then, but I want to share it now with everybody. One of my favorite quotes, and I have to find who said it. Boom. I got it here. Remarque. I don’t know exactly how to say his name. R-E-M-A-R-Q-U-E. Probably some older Roman or something, but the quote is more important. The quote is, “To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.” I love this. This is so dope. There’s much too little forgetting. We’ll only grow old through memory. Yeah. What a beautiful way of thinking and feeling. You probably haven’t … It’s not just me that you shared this with. Is it typically in relation with … Does it typically relate to the relationships people have with other people or the struggles they have with relationships or to their self image and the story? When does this, “It was all a dream” come up most frequently in conversations for you? [0:08:25] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I’d say it’s in one of three conversations. So one out of three conversation. So maybe like two or three times a week because I end up having a lot of conversations every week, besides this one, and it just comes up. I feel like people need to hear this. I feel like people need to be more lighthearted about their life, their past or whatever’s even happening right now because it will be all a dream. It is all a dream. It wasn’t just … It was all a dream. We are dreaming in every moment that we think we’re alive, and the reason we’re dreaming is think about all the stories you’re making up in your head in every moment. It’s like maybe when you meditate, maybe you’re not actually making any stories up. Maybe. But at the end of the day we’re like story machines. We’re making these things up in our heads. I just wanted a label for it. Let’s just call it a dream then. It just comes up. It comes up because it’s in my head. It comes up in a way it’s like … It goes back to something I think you and I talked about in some episode about advice versus encouragement, right? And as I move towards encouragement, I’d rather say things that are going to sit in people’s heads that are not advice. This is encouragement. This is encouraging you to just treat life just in a more lightweight way, not take things so seriously. I wish, I really wish, I internalize this and understood this even six months ago, a year ago. And it’s just one of those things where it’s I’d rather walk into our walk around life pretending it’s a dream. It makes me feel like it’s full of more possibilities. It makes me feel like whatever’s happening or has happened isn’t as important as I thought it was. And a lot of people say, “Oh, only the present moment matters.” And one other thing I wanted to share about this, and it’s related and in a strong framework that I’m developing in my head about people. I think everybody has one of three ways of looking at the world naturally, and the three ways that are … They either are thinking about the past, the present, or the future, so for me it’s the past. In my head, when I have my thoughts, the past is what’s in my head first. And it’s not to say I don’t think about the present and I don’t think about the future. I think about both of those too. But where my head goes first is the past. When it comes to my wife, Amy, where her head goes is the present. And so I would say that, and and my co-founder Maria, I believe her head goes to the future constantly. This is just my belief. We haven’t talked about this concept and hopefully she doesn’t listen to that. You don’t ever have to talk about it. And so because if you work with me and we’re that close in a business relationship, you might not want to hear me talk about my philosophies about you. So just out of fairness, I hope she doesn’t hear it. Anyone who knows her that’s listening right now, please don’t tell her. But I feel like you should figure out where your primary focus is in your mind and your thinking, and that can help you with this concept of it was all a dream as well because then you can just stay more grounded. That’s another point here. It is nice to stay in the present and be present in the moment of where you are now. And if you’re thinking about the future a lot, it’s going to prevent you from being present to what you’re experiencing right now. If you’re thinking about the past, it’s going to also in the same way, but a different style, keep you away from the present because you’re just nostalgic about the past, at best, or regretful about the past at worst. And that sucks. So I really admire folks who are not like me, who focus on the present or the future. I like to surround myself. I like to surround myself with them because they drag me to the presence or they drag me to the future, and it’s so helpful. For example, with my business partner, Marie, it’s nice that she focuses on the future. It helps me do the same. With my wife, it’s nice that she focuses on the present. It helps me do the same because I am definitely very, very much my thoughts automatically go to the past and not in any good or bad way. It’s just where it naturally grabs me. I was talking to someone. And this was really helpful because they were going through some change and struggles in their business. They actually had a kind of a CEO switch out. They were the CEO, their co-founder is now the CEO, and you could be unhappy about it or you could have a really great attitude. And so the way he was struggling with it, I just explained this to him. He’s like, “Yeah, I’m focused on the past.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s done. It’s gone. We don’t live there anymore. It was all a dream.” And so this is an example of when this comes up for me. It’s when somebody is really hung up on something, especially about the past. And when I say that it really clicks and it helps them move forward and it goes back to, “Hey, let’s encourage people, let’s not give them advice.” I didn’t give much advice to him. I just encouraged him because I gave him a perspective. [0:13:55] Steli Efti: Beautiful. If you’re listening, take one thing that comes to mind, one past experience that you are holding on to for whatever reason, and repeat the mantra: it was all a dream, and see how that maybe softens the memory up a little bit. Maybe it becomes more playful. Maybe it’s not as serious, as rigid, as factual. Maybe it’s just a dream, a thought, an idea, something that you are still thinking about in some way that you can think differently about today or not think about at all if you choose to. So I think this is it for us, for this episode. And if you’re wondering, yes, even this episode was probably all a dream. [0:14:45] Hiten Shah: Oh, God. [0:14:47] Steli Efti: Oh, God. [0:14:49] Hiten Shah: You went there. [0:14:49] Steli Efti: I had to, I had to. [0:14:51] Hiten Shah: Thank you. Thank you. [0:14:52] Steli Efti: Don’t worry about it. [crosstalk]. Next episode, everybody will be about landing page optimization or some other shit that is very practical, but … [0:15:01] Hiten Shah: We should talk about that. That’s a good one. [crosstalk]. That’s good topic too. [0:15:02] Steli Efti: But at this one, we had to go there. We had to go to places that are beautiful, magical, and put out there. That’s what The Startup Chat is all about. All right. This is it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:15:21] The post 443: We’re All Dreaming Our Own Realities appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to become a customer-first company. The startup world is very competitive. One way to stand out is to build a customer-centered culture at your company. This is the key to surviving the modern business environment.  In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why everybody in the company should be obsessed with the customer, how to create a culture around customer-obsession at your startup, why you need to hire people who are customer-obsessed and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:39 Why this topic was chosen. 02:20 Why everybody in the company should be obsessed with the customer 02:44 One way to create a culture around customer-obsession. 04:16 Another way to create a culture around customer-obsession. 05:17 Why the best way to be customer-obsessed is to be the customer. 06:03 Why you need to spend time with your customers. 09:04 Why you need to hire people who are customer-obsessed. 09:28 One tip to help you hire the right people. 09:46 Another tip to help you hire the right people 3 Key Points: I think that everybody in the company should be obsessed with the customer.Your job as a business is to serve your customer better than everyone else.Use your product [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to become customer obsessed, how to create a culture of customer obsession, or becoming a what today a lot of companies call customer-first companies. So here’s why I want to talk about this with you in this kind of framework, Hiten. Obviously, for people that have been listening to us for a long time, you can go back four years ago when we started this podcast, 400 and soon to be hitting 450 episodes deep. We’ve always been talking about customer obsession in one way or another. A lot of times our advice boils down to, well, you need more customers insights, you need more customer intimacy, you need to talk to more customers, you need to spend more time with your customers. Your customers are what matters. They have the answers you need. They need and deserve your entire focus and attention. We’ve been saying this for a really, really long time. Now, there are companies out there, I think Amazon is the first company I remember, that very publicly communicated this very well. As in, this is the way we’re going to do things, is we’re going to obsess over the customer. Moreso than anything else, we’re going to let the customer and the customer’s wishes dictate what we build, what we do, and how we do things. But in the last couple of years, this has come up more and more and more. I see it more when I look at value statements sometimes where companies will state, always help the customer, or customers first, or they will state it as an explicit part of their core values. [0:01:41] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I- [0:01:43] Steli Efti: Go ahead. [0:01:43] Hiten Shah: I call this customer obsession. I would just call this customer obsession. And I think that all parts of the company, everybody in a company, should be obsessed with the customer. And if they’re not obsessed with the customer, then you’re going to end up having a problem at some point. It’s for a very simple reason. And the reason is that, the way I think about it, your job as a business is to serve your customer, or the customer, better than anyone else. And the only way you can do that is being obsessed with them. So I think that’s why we’re seeing all of, like you said, customer first, a lot of values that involve the customer. But it’s really about how the company behaves and acts and whether the customer thinks that they are thought of first or not. [0:02:40] Steli Efti: So how do you create a culture around this? Now, obviously… Let’s take it step by step. Let’s take two steps for sure. One is, you’re a founder. Let’s talk about the type of founder that has never started a company, is thinking about starting a company now. How do I make sure that I don’t forget about the customer? That I obsess about the customer? That I keep the customer in my forefront? If I’m not experienced in this, and if, let’s say, I don’t naturally already instinctively have that way of thinking, can I practice this? Can I cultivate this? [0:03:16] Hiten Shah: Of course you can. One of the ways, and I think we’ll both have a bunch of ways, but one of the ways is, use the product. You got a product, use the product. If you use the product, you’re already obsessed by the customer because you’re having the same experience they’re having, and you’re having it regularly if you use the product. If you don’t use the product, you’re not going to have that experience, and you’re not going to be able to know what your customers are experiencing. Because a lot of this is about, what are your customers experiencing? Most of it is about what are your customers experiencing, and how can you make that experience better? So a simple basic one is, use the damn product that you built. Hopefully you can. [0:04:01] Steli Efti: I love that. [0:04:01] Hiten Shah: And if you can’t and it’s in a weird market, or not a weird market, but if you’re servicing people that are not like you, find a way to use the product. Just find a way. If you built a product for restaurants, then go one day a week and work in a restaurant and use your product. [0:04:18] Steli Efti: I love that. I love it. [0:04:20] Hiten Shah: That’s totally what you have to do. The other trick related is, go shadow your customer. So if you really can, just shadow them once a month, twice a month, whatever. Customer obsession is really about closeness to your customer. And so I think there are many different ways to do it, but the fundamental ones are you being able to understand the experience they’re having with your business. If you’re at a coffee shop, you own a coffee shop, go buy from your own coffee shop. Or, this is… What do they call that? [0:04:54] Steli Efti: Secret shoppers? [0:04:56] Hiten Shah: Boom. There you go. Get secret shoppers to do it and get you all the data. Get them to wear a camera, a hidden camera yet. Figure this out, understand the experience. Because if you’re owner of the coffee shop, everybody knows you, you probably hired them. So you walking in there and having an experience like the customer is kind of difficult. So find a way to get that pulse of what’s happening in the business. Those are a few. [0:05:23] Steli Efti: I love it. I love it. So the first thing, I just want to double click an underline that. The best way to be customer obsessed is to be the customer. Because we’re all obsessed with ourselves, and there’s no better intimacy than to be the customer. They inspire a lot of times the advice that we have given in terms of, how do I come up with an idea? Or what kind of prompts should I work on? Is, solve a problem that you have, build something you want to use. And the reason why that’s a good thing, it’s not just because it’s selfish, it’s because if you feel really passionately about something, there’s a good likelihood that a lot of other people feel the same way that are similar to you. And you know yourself. You know the pain, you know the desire. And so you can build something that hopefully is really, really close to the customer, because you’re close to yourself. So I love that. I love the shadowing. We’ve talked about this many, many times. I’ll add on to this. Spend time with your customers. And spend time in all forms and formats, not just in the way that you prefer or the one that is convenient to you, which is the one that all people will default to. So one of the most powerful things you can do is go visit them in their natural habitat. Shadow them, just like you said. Go and visit them in their office if you sell to businesses, and spend time there. Walk around, have lunch, have coffee, chat, sit somewhere and watch. Observe how this company works, how they use your product, how the product is being used in the wild. Nothing is more insightful than that. Go to dinner or to lunch. Break bread. Actually having a meal with your customers can also be a totally different format and context that opens up the door for a new kind of understanding, a new kind of obsession and insight. Having customer dinners where you invite a bunch of customers, you wine and dine them. But also, you create this casual, relaxed environment where they can open up more personally, and maybe they’ll bring up some things that they wouldn’t tell you in their office. Can be incredibly powerful and incredibly insightful. And then you might want to have customer meetups, right. Or even more crazy is a customer conference. Actually create a space and invite a ton of customers to mingle with each other and to mostly spend time with each other. And you would mingle the room and listen to your customers talk to each other, give each other tips, talk about each other’s problems. Again, totally different flavor and perspective of intimacy, of insight. You need to spend a ton of time with your customers in one way or another. And then there’s other things, like having the policy of everybody in the company doing customer support a couple of days a week, or one day a week, or one day a month. So everybody in the company hears from the customers that have problems, issues, confusions. Some companies do this with sales, where one day a month, you call new trial sign ups or new prospects and you talk to them, or new customers and you help them get onboarded, or you give a webinar training. You need to spend time with them. And the excuse that you don’t have time or that your time is better spent on things that are, quote unquote, more scalable is a really bad one, because whoever understands the customer best will ultimately own their business and deserve it. And so if you don’t have time to spend a lot of time with your customers and your competitor is finding the time to do so, sooner or later, that competitor will get your customers, and they will deserve it. So you need to find that time. Now, I want to switch to one more thing and highlight one more thing before we wrap up this episode for today. Now, we talked a lot about what to do individually. One thing that I’d like to hear your thoughts on, Hiten, as well, is on hiring people that are customer obsessed. I don’t know who said this, but there’s this great quote. A company becomes the people it hires, not the plans it makes. So you could talk about customer obsession and write it down as a core value. If you hire lots and lots of people that don’t give a shit about your customers, your company will not be customer obsessed. So how do you gauge for that? Any tips for people that are starting to hire a few people, building out a team, or building up their company on hiring for customer obsession? [0:09:39] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think that it is about values and having certain values, and then basically asking people what they think of those values. Okay, these are our values. What do you think of them? And do they resonate with you? And can you give me any examples of how you’ve lived out these values in your life? And that’ll give you a gauge of how people think about the values, which really ends up being your culture. So that’s one way. Another way is, I just want to know how often that person wants to talk to the customer. Not how often have they or anything, but it’s literally, how often do you actually want to talk to customers? How do you feel about talking to customers? I’d even ask engineers that. Not that there’s a good or a bad answer for engineers on that one. But it’ll give you a gauge of where the person’s head is. One of the things that people on our team say at FYI, internally, is one of the reasons they work with us is because they have this almost explicit trust that when we bring them things to build, that there has been a ton of research that went into it. And that we really talk to the customer. Even if we don’t show them it, which we actually try to as much as possible, and we do. But even if we don’t, there’s just this explicit trust that it is very customer centric. It is very researched. It is not something we’re making up and saying, hey, build this. It has to do with things we want to solve for the customer. It comes from customer obsession, and they believe that. And so a lot of it is just like many other things in an organization, where you have to embody it as a leader in the company. And then people start getting bought into it. So a lot of times if that’s happening, you’re already in the market, that impression already exist of you. So people coming and talking to you and wanting to work with you might even already have a bias. And the reason I mention it like this is, then what you can do is, if you launch something new or you have a tweet that you shared or something that your company did, you can literally just ask the interviewee questions about it. So in your case at Close, I know you folks have been iterating the product a little bit more than you have in the past publicly, and have talked about some of the new things you’ve done. Those features seem very customer centric to me. They seem pretty well researched, and things that are right for the market, and are almost a doubling down on what your core value prop is as a certain type of CRM. And so I would ask any hire what they think about those announcements that you made, and just listen to what they have to say. Do they speak of the customer? Do they speak of it as benefits to the customer? Do they think about it in a way that you might have internally when you decided to do it? Because if they don’t, then that’s your choice to make on whether you feel like you can train them or they can come on board and get there. Or if they just don’t know how to think in that way, and you don’t want folks like that, or you think folks like that might not be ideal for you. [0:12:58] Steli Efti: I love it. I’ll double click on that before we wrap up the episode. I mean, obviously the best… Another really great way to hire people, the favorite way for me to hire somebody, is when you hire a customer at time. So we’ve had this a couple of times now, where somebody was in a company that was using Close, was a Close user for a really long time, really passionate about it. And then when they saw we were hiring for a certain position, they applied and they said, “I’ve been using your product for over a year, I’ve been loving it. Nothing would make me happier than to help bring that product to more people like me.” So if you can hire your customers, that could be a great hack. But then also a simple thing, this seems so simple and trivial, I would never thought that it’s a thing that needs to be brought up, but it does. Have they signed up for your product? Have they played with the product? Have they put themselves in the shoes of your future customers? You’d be surprised how many people don’t go through that. Simple step to me, is the most obvious thing. I apply for a software business, the software business offers a free trial, of course I’m going to sign up and play around with a product if I want to work at that company. Get a sense for what it’s all about, what it feels like. It’s surprising, but still a good amount of people, they will not go through that trouble. And to me, that’s a big red flag. If you don’t even sign up for the product you’re applying for, if you don’t want to see how it feels to a user, to a customer, then you’re probably not that obsessed about the customer experience. So we’re looking for those two things, can be super useful and valuable when it comes to thinking about who to hire. And I’ll end with one great example. Probably one of the most impressive things in terms of customer obsession that a candidate has ever displayed to us was a candidate that researched a couple of review sites, people that have given us good and bad reviews. Pinged them to ask if they could jump on a call with them and ask them for a few more data points about their experience with Close, and then put all those learnings in a presentation and sent it to us. I mean, that was pretty dope. Just talking to 20 customers of ours to get a little presentation of what he learned talking to our customers, current and prior. It was super impressive. Just shows the type of thinking, the type of wanting to be close to the customer, and thinking about the right way about this. That really impressed us, and we ultimately hired him. So I think that’s it in terms of our tips, our thinking, on customer obsession. We shall hit all of you very, very soon. This is it for us for today. [0:15:27] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:15:28] The post 442: How to Become Customer-Obsessed appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what to do if your clients and customers are not paying you or paying too late. When you provide your services to a client, you expect to be paid for it. But sometimes, clients pay very late or worse, don’t pay at all, and it’s important to know how to handle a situation like this if it arises at your startup. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why you shouldn’t rely on one big customer, the first thing to do when a customer doesn’t pay, how to prevent this from happening and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 01:44 Why you shouldn’t rely on one big customer. 02:25 The first thing to do when a customer doesn’t pay. 03:40 What it’s like working with big companies. 05:37 Things you could do when this happens. 06:10 How to prevent this from happening. 07:14 Why you should ask for payment upfront. 08:47 How cash is king and key to a successful business. 10:10 Why having a great contract really matters. 3 Key Points: Make sure you don’t rely on one big customer.You don’t control other people.The best thing to do sometimes might be to take it as a loss and move on. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hello everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: Today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about what should you do if your clients or customers aren’t paying you or are paying way too late. Here’s the reason why I wanted to talk about this, Hiten. I had a founder email me a few days ago, basically asking for advice. He has one very large customer, the problem might already start there, and that customer just decided not to pay and isn’t paying, is basically saying that they are going to pay but he has to wait to get that money. He was describing how helpless he feels in he’s like, “This is a really big company. I don’t really know what to do. Should I get a lawyer? I don’t have that much money. Should I just wait, but I need the money right now. Can’t wait for a couple of months to get it. What do I do?”. That triggered the thought like this has happened so many times in so many different situations when a customer’s not paying or paying way too late that I thought, “Hey, this would be a good, cool, fun episode.”. To jump to this one specific example, we might go more broad broadly, but to start there, what would you advise this founder to do? Single founder, you have a big customer, the customer decides money is going to come a little later, what can you do? What should you do? [0:01:30] Hiten Shah: Make sure you don’t rely on one single customer. That’s that large [inaudible 00:01:36]. That’s what you do before you get in a situation. But even if you’re in this situation, go find more customers. You don’t have much of a choice. This is the reason this is going to be a fun one, you don’t control other people. There are actually things to do and I know we’ll talk about them, but someone doesn’t want to pay you or is lagging, then the first thing I do is I go look in my contract. What does my contract say? Hopefully they signed a contract and they’re contractually obligated to certain things. Usually some of them involve paying on time and on time is determined by the contract. I start there, I send them an email or a message, or a phone call, or whatever and I let them know basically work’s going to stop until they pay. You don’t need to work until they pay. [0:02:41] Steli Efti: The service will be interrupted, whatever the service is. [0:02:45] Hiten Shah: Just like your cable, just like your water bill, whatever. You don’t pay, you don’t get service. I would look at my contract because you probably forgot what you put in there, and make sure that you know what the terms are. Based on that, I would email them and then tell them the service, like you said, the service will be paused until they pay. [0:03:13] Steli Efti: Yeah, it’s as simple as that. All right, there’s a lot to unpack there. Number one, I want to give a tip for people that are interested in going after large customers, check out episode number 236, 2-3-6, how startups should go after the enterprise. You can just Google the The Startup Chat [inaudible] 236 and you’ll find the episode. You should listen to that one. But number one, don’t have one large customer like Hiten said. This relates to the episode, to have large customers, you need to have the infrastructure to be able to support that. Part of the infrastructure actually needs the financing. The money it requires to service a customer like that, and at times, to wait as long as it might take to actually get the money from them. A lot of big companies, they like to pay 60, 90, 120 days after they received the service. They like really push this as far as possible. They manage their cash flow, they have a whole department to do that. You want to make sure that you have the infrastructure to be able to deal with it, as well as having maybe a big customer that might be very costly to service and support, and to acquire, and then they go out of business or something like that. All these things are part of cost of doing business when you go after a large customers, hence why it’s a good idea to have the internal resources, the people, the money in the bank, the expertise, to go after that kind of of a customer. Now as Hiten said it, once you’re in that situation, there’s really not that much that you can do. You can look at the contract and demand, you can threaten them either with pushing the off button and stopping service or with legal action. You could lawyer up and go after them, and fight, or PR up and be like, I’m going to publish this big blog post. I’m going to write a whole thing about my bad experience. But the question is usually small teams, small companies, startups, they either don’t have the resources or the expertise or the appetite to really go into a big fight. Turning off the services is a simple fight. It’s a simple thing to do, but really lowering up and taking legal action can take a ton of time, resources, energy, focus, money. Most startups won’t have that. Same thing also with PR battles. If you’re a genius at that and you have fun picking fights, maybe the opinion types with your prior customers, not always a great idea. It’s just one of those things that might not be advisable depending on who you are and what your situation is .You might have to just suck it up and move on with life, cost of doing business. Sometimes a big customer might do something terrible and the best choice for business and for your sanity might just be to eat the shit sandwich and move on with life. Just take it as a loss and move on versus a pouring a lot of attention, energy and fight into it. I think the better part of this episode, we might want to switch into the prevention part. Which, one, is obvious advice. Try to not rely on one customer. Try to have as many customers as possible. If you go after really large customers that pay huge amounts of money, make sure that you have a really good grasp on the payment structure. People would be surprised how many startups have closed large deals. Upon me asking what the payment structure was, they really didn’t have a good handle on it. They were so focused on the total contract value. “Oh, this is a $250,000 deal. Awesome. When are you getting the money and how?” “Well I don’t know”. It really, literally like not [inaudible] would be like, not quite sure. Or they would guess. I could just tell people, “Well they’re gonna pay the week where we started, they started using our software”. Really? Is that in the contract in those words? Then they go, “No, but isn’t that normal?” It’s like no, it’s not normal. [0:07:21] Hiten Shah: One thing I suggest is literally asking for payment up front. [0:07:26] Steli Efti: Yes, yes. [0:07:28] Hiten Shah: If you can do it, do it. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, just do it. Ask for payment upfront, please. [0:07:37] Steli Efti: You should always ask for a payment up front. You should incentivize. In some businesses, I’ve seen this and I’ve advised people do this, in certain circumstances it should be mandatory. It’s not even optional. You always have to prepay for a whole year, that’s the way if you want to be a customer of ours, this is the way this works. You might lose some potential customers, but you might have a much more stable business and much healthier business. In other markets, it’s harder to do because it’s not the way that your competitors are doing it. It’s not the way the customer is used to buying or capable of buying. But you should always, always push as hard as you can for prepayment, pay upfront. Maybe you have to incentivize a little bit. Maybe they get a better deal in terms of a better price if they pay up front. Maybe they get better service. Maybe they get some support for free. Maybe they get access to certain features. Whatever you have to do to incentivize your customers, you should always heavily push for them to pay up front. Especially in the early days, cash is king. Cash flow is really important and most one, two or three person teams that at the very beginning that you can afford to lose a little bit of money in the long-term, but having great cashflow money always comes in even before you start servicing a customer, that’s going to put you in a so much more of a strong, healthy position than other way around where you set them up, you onboard them, you customize the software, you travel there 10 times, you have a million calls, you put together PDFs, you sign contracts, you do all this work that costs money. Then you start servicing them and then you’re like, “Well, where’s the money?” Then you send them an email and it takes them two weeks to respond and be like, “Well yeah, we’ll typically pay vendors 90 days after whatever,” and then even in that case, you know, 90 days are gone. Money’s still out there. You send an email, it takes them three weeks and then they say, “There was an error in our bookkeeping. We should have this done in the next couple of weeks,” and you know you’re dying a slow death while they couldn’t be bothered by this. This is actually standard practice. Don’t think this is like an exception or something that’s just unreasonable, only a terrible company would do this. Most of the fortune 500, most of the really notable great large organizations are going to squeeze their little vendors as much as they can on payment terms. Ask to be paid upfront, push to be paid upfront. It’s going to put you in so much stronger position to not have to be in a situation where your business might run out of money. You might have to fold up your business because the customer decided not to pay you or pay you way too late. [0:10:12] Hiten Shah: That would suck. Yeah. Just suck. That’s the position people get themselves in. I think like the contract really matters. Getting paid up front is a critical component if you can do it, and, like you said, you can incentivize it if you need to. Look, the part of this is psychology. People are just not willing to ask for things. They’re not willing to ask for the money upfront. They’re not willing to put certain terms in their contracts. Essentially when you do that, you’re devaluing the service you’re providing, and that’s not a good idea. You’re providing a service to people or you’re providing a software, whatever it may be. Make sure that you’re taking care of yourself too. Make sure that you know that they’re not doing you a favor. You’re not doing them a favor. There’s a transaction there. People are giving you money, you’re providing a service and make it very clear that’s what’s happening, and ask for what you need. You will generally prevent a lot of these kinds of issues because one way you’ll prevent it is you just won’t get the clients that won’t exempt your terms because if they won’t accept those terms and then they might be the type of client that will will pay you eventually. Plus, if they think they can’t pay you, they won’t pay you. [0:11:26] Steli Efti: This is probably the biggest one, is that if you act nicey, nicey and super reasonable, and you always wait two months until you’ve voiced that there’s something that they didn’t do, like pay you or something like that. If they think they can get away with it, they will take advantage of you. It can be a harsh work world out there and businesses will take advantage of you if they think they can and they’ll get away with it. Make sure that companies are in business with you, respect you more than liking you. Liking is nice, but respect … This is a business transaction and they need to get the impression that you’re confident, that you’re successful, and that you’re experienced. If you ask for something and they don’t like it and push back it’s not the end of the world. That’s how adults do business. But most founders, you hit the nail on the head, Hiten here. Most founders lack the confidence to ask for the things they need and then they get what they deserve, what we all deserve when we do this mistake, which is way less than we need. Make sure that you’re confident in those interactions, those conversations, especially on the closing side of things. A lot of times founders are like, I don’t want to ruin the romance of this great conversation by having to discuss terms or pushing them to prepay, I don’t want to, so I’d rather not discuss this. I’d rather not bring this up. You’re an adult. This is adult business. Bringing up how are they going to pay, when they’re going to pay this part of it. If it ruins the romance, and if the customer doesn’t want to buy because you had such a great brainstorming conversation about the longterm impact that the relationship could have, and then you ruined it with bringing up details and terms, then they would have been a terrible customer at the end. Please, please, please be confident and please always get paid. That’s it from us for today. [0:13:25] Hiten Shah: Get paid. [0:13:25] The post 441: What to Do When Your Customers Don’t Pay on Time? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.