Show Notes

Matt Paulson is an entrepreneur.

His journey of entrepreneurship started at an early age. In fourth grade he made a website that gave him a passive income of $25 – $100 per month.

Like most of us, he went to college, graduated with a degree, went on to his masters, and finally landed a good job. After a few years working in that job, he believed that he could do so much more with his skills. He quit and went on to start his own company.

Since then he has made several successful online companies.

• Market Beat; a financial media company, send out daily investment newsletter to about 445,000 people
• GoGo Photo Contest; helps animal shelters raise money
• US Golf TV; publishing company in the golf industry
• Falls Angel Fund; regional angel fund to invest in high growth companies in South Dakota and surrounding states

In this episode, Matt talks about being a Christian Businessman in this industry, managing employees that are stationed around the world, and about his own superpower – automation.

Follow these links to learn more or get in contact with Matt Paulson.

mattpaulson.com

twitter.com/matthewdp

facebook.com/matthewpaulson

ICQ: 4370199

 

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

Transcription

[00:00:00] Welcome to the business design podcast. The podcast that helps enterpreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a six-month vacation. We are your hosts, Ian, John, and Scott. We’re here to share the successes and pitfalls of many enterpreneurs like you and equip you to make Daily Progress in your business.

V1

John: can you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little about yourself?

Matt:  Sure my name is Matthew Poston. I am the founder of a business called Market. It is a financial media company. We send out a daily investment newsletter to about 445,000 people. I have a few other businesses GoGo photo contest helps animal shelters raise money. And then Us Golf TV is a Publishing Company the golf industry. And finally Falls Angel fund is a regional Angel fund to invest in high-growth companies in South Dakota and surrounding states. Wife two kids. I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I think that’s it.

John: Awesome, can you take us a little bit back to the beginning. And shares a little life story about, kind of how you got to where you. Are trying to look into your childhood and a little bit about yourself.

Matt: Yeah, so my first internet business happened when I was in fourth grade. This would have been like 1995, back before nobody knew, anybody knew about the internet really. But I had a little website about SimCity 2000 and all the other Sim games. I played at cheat codes that we’d used and screenshots, and little apps that worked

John:  wihat year was that.

Matt:  It’s probably ’95, ’96, ’97 somewhere in there.

John:  Oh my God, who taught you how to write or like build it a website at when your fourth grade?

Matt: nobody. kids can learn anything if they put their effort into it. It’s easy to learn stuff as a kid. [Fair enough] Harder learn stuff as an adult. So while I really got started with HTML like on message boards, like you could, you know, putting the HTML tags, I figured oh that’s how you bold text. That’s how you italic text. And that’s how you do an image. You know fourth-grade Matth picked that up, so I mean my SimCity website hosted on geocities, and I put little ads for an ad Network that was then called Save Thought, and it had actually like free hosting from somewhere else. I get like a buck 50 if anybody ever clicked on it, and I think I was making maybe 25 bucks a month as like a middle school student, or as a grade school student. Middle School student getting checks in the mail, and my parents are like how the heck are you getting these checks in the mail, and I kind of told them, it’s like oh that’s interesting. So for my middle school years I was making between 25 and hundred dollars a month with a little website, and that that was, that was the origin story of the original. You know Matt Paulson business.

John: Did you have anything else like in high school or college that you kind of dabbled in because of that experience?

Matt: Yeah, so most of my high school years I spent on the debate team which is an all time consuming kind of thing so I didn’t have time for a business. I worked at Burger King High School. I didn’t really enjoy it. Then I worked at a gas station my senior year and had a lot of free time to think about internet business. Didn’t really do anything with it. I really got to start in college again when I was a sophomore this talent. I went to school with 7,000 people not a lot of job opportunities though. I started doing freelance writing on a site called Associated Content, and they would pay like five to ten dollars for a 400 word article. So I started about you do 10 of them a day, something like that. I made a nice income of about 4,000 $2,000 a month doing that as a college student. Eventually that morphed into being that I could just do this on my own blog and see where that went. And like everybody else in 2007 or so had personal finance blog telling people how I’m going to get out of debt, and you know there’s a million those websites back then. And I can’t figure it out. It’s like wow people don’t really care about my content, but there are plenty of people that are going to buy links for me and people are clicking AdSense ads. So I made like four others just like it. So I had you know five personal finance websites that I’d tell blinks on the SEO agencies, and they’ll get a little bit of Adsense revenue and 2010 I grown that too. I  think we did over Pike. I think we did 139,000 in 2010 in revenue from those five little websites. Which going great until February of 2011, which is when the panda update happened and everybody that had a personal finance blog in world just got creamed. So my traffic went half overnight. I mean that was really when you’re starting to punish you know link buying too. So people stopped doing, because site-wide links were not a good thing to do anymore. So that Revenue took a real dive, but

John: just to interrupt real quick you mentioned, “we.” Is that just habit, or is there a partner? Someone you’re  working with?

Matt: No. I’ve, I’ve had team members since about [00:05:00] 2008. I and my first website that people that write for me. Now I have actual employees in my business, so not a huge team, but we’re at four employees including myself, and another five contractors. So though the whole Market B team’s currently nine people. [Wow!] So we’re growing up being kind of a real company now with a 401k plan and PTO and all those other scary words that most solo entrepreneurs don’t ever have to think about.

John:  Right are they all based in your hometown. Where you work out or where they are located?

Matt:  Sure. So two of my employees are in Sioux Falls, and then one of them is in Florida, and then my contractors are Guatemala, India, New York, Chicago, and Sioux Falls. So it’s just– people I work with– our people– people out– our employees are people, are you know mostly I’ve met in person. and Don, my guy in Florida, I’ve met him once actually, but you know I’ve been working and stuff for 10 years. He’s been doing so much for me is like, huh yeah, I better start calling you an employee. Yeah, so we’re in the process of getting him to be employed.

V2

John: When that happened in 2008. When you’re having those sites, were you working a job while you’re doing that? Or did you– call –was that like a full income kind of source of income?

Matt:  Yeah, so I graduate from college in 2008. I had a full-time job that summer. I did a master’s degree the following year. And then after that I took a job at the little web design agency called Factory 360. I did dot net web development for them, and I did that until November of ’12. And frankly I probably quit way later than I should have if I were doing it over again. <I would> have probably never took the job and just done my own thing, but you know, it’s easy to look back and see how it worked out and think I could have done that sooner. But you know that you think I got this really risky internet business. You know. It could disappear overnight. I should probably keep my job. But eventually had enough revenue for enough months in a row, or I thought well, I suppose if it doesn’t work out, I just go get another job. And finally made that jump.

John:  Do you remember that kind of period where you were feeling like I couldn’t trust this and then and then finally seeing okay? What made you get the confidence about saying I can just go get another job and whatnot what was that?

Matt:  Yeah, so I was actually thinking about quitting maybe year and half before I actually did and I think I had gotten it up to about 25 Grand a month in Revenue. But some’n happened with one of my sites. I think I got penalized actuall, something like that, but I went from twenty five to 14 the next month, so it’s like. Oh well. I mean it isn’t so stable. [Sure] But then I kind of figured out what I did wrong. I fixed it. I kind of spread the money around a few different sites, so like wow if one of these get penalized, I’ve got the other. So it was less worried about it, then

John: yeah, two years ago when we first met– micro comf yeah, I think. My recollection you said yet one employee, full time employee back then [yep] and some maybe two or three contractors is what I remember

Matt: yeah, that sounds about right.

John: okay. What’s changed so far that you decide to hire more people or not? I’m sure you’ve grown and you’ve rebranded and other things, but like what’s, what’s the growth behind the growth? I guess.

Matt:  Yeah, so 2015 when we met. I think we did about a million and half and revenue than last year we did 2.7. So with growth you know, there’s more work to do, need more people. I think we operate 23 different websites right now. My guy, Don, manages our four writers. And I’ve got a full-time web developer now that works on stuff. My customer service person is the person I had then. Still have her. Nobody’s quit on me yet. Thankfully. But yeah, I mean it’s just the company’s gotten bigger, and there’s more stuff to do and it’s kind of stuff that you can’t really automate.

I love to automate stuff. But you can’t really automate customer service. Can’t automate programming. You know you can you know some ways… But you need somebody to say hey, I want that, go do that for me. Right. You, you need a person. So as much as I love to automate literally everything. They’re just some things that’s like wow OK. I need to hire somebody.

John: Thank you, um I wanted to talk about this master’s program that you did. And if I’m correct you’re currently on the board of a seminary.

Matt: That’s true.

John: Right. and you did you go to Seminary? Is that what it was?

Matt:  Actually have two master’s degrees. So I have an information systems degree MSIS. I got on my college same place. I went to undergrad and I was able to knock that out in like 12 months because it was really easy and designed for international students and [OK] got a 4.0. If it’s like well, I got the degree, it’s kind of wasted time, and then when I moved to Sioux Falls. I had a friend named Nate. He was a vice president at the Seminary, and he encouraged me to check it out. I took a class. I really enjoyed it. Like learning church history and just the leadership stuff that they taught. Found it very valuable and it really influences how as a businessman happens via Christian. How I manage my my company today, and how I treat my employees and that was a really good experience. So I ended up. I think I did about three years there. I ended up with uh like a Master of Arts in Christian leadership, and then I’ve decided that I don’t need any more school loans since then.

John: Yeah, thank you. I will, [00:10:00] I guess, I’d like to dive into the topic of leadership, and the founder and especially how that training, as well as your worldview has a Christian, and the the leadership in the Christian readership that you’ve been stilled with yep. What are some unique things that that instills into your leadership style? Or how you actually organize your company?

Matt:  Yeah, I think the way that I treat my employees is, is fundamentally very different than most companies because it’s really about. Caring for them as a person first and what’s best for them, and you know how that plays out and the benefits that they get, when they get paid, you know, how I treat them. It’s like, “Your mom’s sick in Colorado for a week? Ok, go take care of her and work when you can.” Instead of, “No, this is your job. You need to be here.” So there this more flexibility and just understanding of what the human condition is. And like this is your job, but it’s like not your only part of life, and you got other stuff to do then work. For me, and I get that. You know like we do birthday presents for everybody, birthday presents for people’s kids, and we just try to be really generous with our employees and treat them well. I feel like that was a good witness to to me as a Christian and just treating people in a way that honors and just respects them as people.

V3

John: Is there a leadership principle that kind of stands out as you as they say you would not be able to maybe practice this if do you run more of a kind of East Coast, West Coast Corporate environment versus something that you’re able to do now? Kind of beyond being treating your employees well and personal?

Matt:  Yeah, this wouldn’t work in a corporate like in a normal corporate structure. But you know when you get to make your own company you can design it in your image. So that’s why we don’t have a company office. I have an office, but my employees don’t like– I don’t want to be in an office with them all day making sure they’re working. I want to hire people that can work hard by themselves and don’t need me to check on them every five minutes. So the company is, is really designed around that DNA. Like myself I have a life outside the company and that is more important to me than my life inside the company, right? And I think that it should also be true for the other people that are in my company. So we are all very self-motivated people we work very hard when we’re working. And then we just kind of do our own thing on our own time. So we don’t do company parties. We don’t have company Retreats or anything like that. Because it’s my assumption is that you’ve got your own friends, your own family, and you’d rather be hanging out with them than me. And I’m not going to force you to go to some company thing just because it’s part of your job.

John: Right that’s really interesting actually. I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit as myself, and I have a very similar philosophy. Can I dive a little bit more into, I read also on LinkedIn that you publish an example of your sop, standard operating procedures. What are some practices like that? And can you first of all describe what that is to our audience, and then why that’s important? And then a follow-up question to that would be other– any other practices or disciplines that you like to introduce to your company that makes it more productive or more creative than what it does?

Matt: So as I mentioned, you know I really want hard-working self productive people that can do work right on the first time. So I guess first, you know we were huge believers in automation. So I think if there’s anything that can feasibly up be automated, that we have to do more than once a month, we should automate it. So I’m a software developer. My employee Rebecca, she’s a software developer. So anything involving data or anything that could be automated is automated. So really the only tasks that are left are stuff that people have to do. And anything that is something we do more than say once every couple months that can’t be automated, we create a standard operating procedure for just so that the employees know exactly how I want it done,

what steps to follow. Like say if we were to a set up a new website, we’re going to publish financial news on it, like here are the 38 steps I want you to do. I want you to install these plugins, this theme, I want you to do these settings. I need you to set up this site map, and do all these things. That way I can just say, “hey we need this new site set up” to Rebecca, and then she goes and does it andvI know it’s going to be right. I don’t even have to check it over anymore because she knows exactly what to do. And she knows that it’s important that gets done right the first time. So she will check over her own work and make sure there aren’t any mistakes. You know it and the reason we do that stuff is because I don’t want to spend a bunch of time managing my employees. So with the SOPs in place, they know what to do. They know how to do it exactly the first time. We screenshots all that stuff, and then I just don’t have to do as much management because that written documentation is in place.

John: So in terms of additional practices like SOPs, like these great practices that ensure quality as well as consistency and whatnot, are there any other practices that you guys introduce, that you’ve introducing the company to ensure to encourage that?

Matt:  Hmm good question. I think automation is probably the big thing because if a computer is doing it, computers’ always going to do it the same way. And their just not very not inconsistent. So like a lot of our customer service responses, they are all boilerplate text, and, [00:15:00] you know, just shows in their information. So instead of my employees saying, “Hi name. I’ve reset your password, your username is this, your new password.”  You know, there’s just one button that says click here to reset this person’s password and send them an email.  So it’s like you know that they’re always gonna get the right email with the right password and it’s going to be a decent password, and they’ll be able to log in and there won’t be mistakes.

John: Right. In terms of your businesses let’s kind of circle back a little bit about your personal practices. How you evaluate like ideas, also things that you do on a daily basis that you would maybe make yourself a little more productive or consistent? So let’s first start there, but can we first start about like, I had a question in mind I always want to ask you. You have so many, first of all, sites, right? You have 25 + sites. How do you know or how do you determine or decide like what kind of site to start? And how it was that process like?

Matt:  Sure so. I probably get, you know, one to three opportunities per week for people that want me to invest in their businesses be partners with them stuff like that. And I realized I only have a limited amount of time to spend on new stuff. You know, I’ve got a four-year-old boy and an eleven month old daughter, a wife; and they all want attention. So if I want to do something new it’s probably going to happen at the expense of them. So anything that I do has to be a really, really good opportunity and something that like I can’t possibly say no to. So when it look at an opportunity, it’s one, do I want to do it ? Am I excited about the opportunity? I’m excited about the space? Do I think it could be something cool? Two, is there a unique skill set that I have that is going to really add value to this business or this website that the other people working in the websitevdon’t have? So like with GoGo photo contest like what I brought to the table was email marketing and then help with software development. Like our only marketing strategy is to. Go to e mail animal shelters and say, “Hey, when everybody other animal shelter like you has run this thing they’ve raised five to ten Grand. How about you do it too?” And like they don’t know how to do that. So I found a database of animal shelters. We send him email once a month, and you know we get three to four hundred animal shelters that run contest a year because I brought that marketing strategy to the table. They run the business, I don’t have to put a lot of time into it, but I brought that to the table. I brought some decent accounting practices to the table. I helped write the initial code base. But now they run it. And they’re– my partners are Jason and Stevie in that business. They do a great job with it. I don’t have to think about a lot. So I look for opportunities like that where to really bring something to the table initially, and then they don’t have to do a whole lot later on. Because I’m going to be busy with something else invariably. So let’s see, those reply the top criteria. Well, and do I like the people obviously. So [right] am I excited about it? Can I add something? And do I like the people? And even then I can maybe only say yes once a year.

V4

John: What would you consider your superpower? And if you were say I- what I can bring to the table? Email marketing. And you mentioned accounting practices and whatnot.. But what would you say always your are your strengths and your superpower?

Matt: I think my superpower is automating stuff through software. Like my main business MarketBeat,  we publish one to two thousand financial news stories a day, and they’re all written by computers.

John: you say are 1 to 2000?

Matt:  That is correct.

John:  And the computer writes the Articles.

Matt: Yep.

John: How does that work?

Matt:  So we take structured financial data and turn it into human readable content. So if you think how the game ad libs works. It’s kind of like that. It’s more complicated, but like, this company announced their quarterly earnings. It was this amount per share. They had this much revenue compared to the analysts consensus estimate of this much. Here’s how, compared to last year [right] report all these different data points. And we can make a very readable, quite decent, 700-800 word article. Nice company logo and some charts and some graphs in there. And if you like to look at my domains on Reddit like people are interacting with these like they’re/were articles written by people, and like commenting about them like that were real articles written by people. So they’re, they’re pretty good. I’m pretty proud of them.

John: So automation. That’s what you’re saying is your superpower. What contribution to you becoming good at that? Like what do you think like work or ingredients or influences that help you develop that skill?

Matt: Oh, yeah. One, you know, I know how to write software. And two, I’m kind of lazy. So like I’m lazy in the sense that I don’t want to do work that I don’t have to do. If there is a task that looks like uploading this piece of data, this website; yes, I could do it by hand everyday, or I could write a script to do it. So I’m always going to write that script. Or anything that the process that’s repetitive; like I don’t want to do it over and over again. I don’t want to like commit myself to doing the same thing every week or every day, and just you know if there’s any crazy way that I can make code do something I’d much rather have the code do it than me. Because one, I’ll probably forget to do it. And two,  I just don’t want to.

John:  Right. Great qualities that for good programmers, so I’m going to ask at Tim Ferriss question that he does and the question is: who is the one person that comes to mind when you hear the word [00:20:00] success? I’m going to follow up with why? So who is there a person when you think of success who’s the one person that comes to mind?

Matt:  Good question. I guess you know it’s really, um, a question, you know, how do you define success? And it would be easy to say like Mark Cuban or somebody like that. But I don’t know Mark Cuban, but I can’t– sure he has a lot of money, but does that make him successful person? If you’re going only by finances, sure. But I don’t think that’s how I would judge whether or not somebody successful in life.

I think it’s: they have their stuff together, for one. And then two, are they like a well-rounded individual? Do they have healthy relationships? Are they a good person? Do they care about other people? Are they generous? By that measure like, I have no idea if any of the people that we, you’d comonly hear as the answers, like Gary V or Mark Cuban or anybody like that, would– I don’t know those people. I don’t know what they do. Like I can tell you like my friend Nate, who is– works at the Seminary. Great guy. I can definitely say he’s successful. Got a wife. Yeah. Treats her well. Has a kid. He treats him good, well. Does his job well. Generous guy. You know that that is really more how I see success than whether or not you’ve got a million people following you on Instagram. Who cares. You know if you’re doing coke every night, and your life’s a mess, like that’s not successful to me.

John: Right. Right. Would you dive in a little bit more kind of like maybe other other aspects that you consider that defines that person as well rounded or has their stuff together. What are some other thing to come to mind is things are important for successful person, attributes every successful person?

Matt:  Yeah, I think, when we think of traditionally successful people and you look into their lives, they tend to be very unbalanced. I mean you have to work real hard for a long period of time to be successful. And oftentimes that comes at the expense of like personal relationships, and family, and friendships, and how you take care of yourself. So for me, you’re being successful… It’s a lot of things, but it’s, you know, do my parents hear from me every week? Does my wife feel like, that I love her? Or do I spend enough time with her? [Right] Am I getting off the computer at 5 p.m. and actually like sitting down to play with my children and my playing Legos with Micah  every night. Am I taking him to church on Sunday? You know, or do I have quality conversations with people that are my family? Do I have friends? Do I take care of them? Am I a generous person?

So like when I was fine to Vegas today. There was a lady sitting next to me on the plane. And she told me that she comes to Vegas and like hangs out with guys and does massages. I’m pretty sure I sat next to a prostitute one the  plane. And it’s like oh well, well, I guess that’s your life. I’m not– It’s not my job to tell you otherwise. But you know if you’re flying to Vegas multiple times a year to do that kind of work, like are you… Gotta kind of wonder, like what other problems they would have in life in terms of their relationships. [Right] it’s just I don’t know how you have a have a successful by doing that kind of thing.

V5

John: You written a lot of books. How many books have you written so far?

Matt:  So, there are eight books with my name on them. I’ve written six of them. Two were ghostwritten by some longtime friends of mine. Those books were ok, but they just don’t feel like they were the quality of my other books. So I probably won’t go write another one, but I’ve got it out there with my name on it. Ultimately the goal was– I have a friend named Steve Scott. He has sixty books on Amazon. He makes Thirty Grand a month in book royalties. I thought well maybe I could do that and make some nice passive income that way that’s kind of separate from Market beat. And I got it up to about eight grand a month by publishing five books last year, and it was okay. My– I mean, it’s decent money for anybody. But when you’ve got Market beat throwing off a couple million dollars a year in revenue, its just not at the same scale. And for the amount of work it took to put all those books out. It just wasn’t generating enough revenue. And it kind of became a distraction for Market beats type. So I decided to put the brakes on it. I think I have one last book project. It’s on Amazon now, but it’s officially coming out like next month. And then I’m going to be done probably for the rest of the year. And then maybe next year I’ll write like another investing book that I can use as like a lead Magnet. Or just stick it on Amazon anyway because my Market Beat audience will like it. But I’m definitely not writing five books again this year, and do not want to do that. But I may do one more next year. Ready to go for this year is just do the podcast startup Q&A. I’m doing like a video show where I answer people’s questions really trying to make it a little bit different than most podcasts. Just because it’s one, it’s video it’s not audio. And two, its really trying to be a multi-channel thing. So it’s on Facebook. It’s on YouTube. It’s on Stitcher. And get it over RSS give it out on iTunes. And really get it anywhere you want to consume it. And that’s one little way I’m differentiating. Two, there’s no guests. I don’t do guests because there are enough guest podcasts. like yours. And I don’t need to do another one. Which is kind of funny because now I’m getting like cold emails saying, “hey this person would be great for your podcasts.” Like great. Clearly you’ve never [00:25:00] listened to it because there’s never ever any guest on it. And there’s never going to be a guest on it. Because I don’t want to organize getting people on my show. I was just too much damn work.

John: Yeah. Yeah,

Matt: so I don’t do that.

John: Can you tell me a little bit about the benefits that you’ve gotten by writing books? And how that’s raised your profile as well as your personal brand? Was there any kind of intention or intentionality or something that you were thinking about as you were working on those? In producing those and leading into your podcast now while you’re doing it.

Matt: Yeah. I mean certainly. It’s, it’s, it’s a long-term, ballgame of personal branding really. I do the personal brand and stuff, one, because it helps other people. I won’t be doing it if it wasn’t valuable content that other people could consume and find Value in. Because, I mean, I get the million people that want to talk to me on Skype, meet me for coffee, whatever, and I just don’t have time to do that. But it’s like oh here’s a book that has everything that I would tell you when we’re having coffee. Go read this. Here’s a copy so there’s that. And two, its, you know, I think there’s just an economic value in knowing a lot of people. And like you know maybe we don’t have any business we can do together, maybe you know somebody that I could get a real business benefit out of. So it’s just–  it’s maybe it’s good to know John for that reason and maybe it’s not for the current business. Maybe it’s not for the next business. Maybe it’s for the one after that. Like I know that Market Beat isn’t going to be the only business I ever start and I don’t know what the next one is going to be. But I feel like by having a pretty wide Network like I’ve got enough connection through us. Like oh I need somebody who would be good at this … one with the esoteric thing. I can ask around and chances are somebody that I know is is going to know somebody that knows how to do that.

John: That’s great. I lied again, and I’m going to ask you another question this one that has to do with how are you able to be so prolific and consistent with your work? What is their secret around that?

Matt:  Like how do I produce so much content or what?

John:  Producing content not for Market Beat, because you’re automating a lot of those, but in terms of your personal productivity? To how prolific you’ve been with number businesses you started, number people you’ve been able to help, the books that you’ve written, and the pockets you continue to produce …  so little time, which I’m sure that you’re actually very guarded with that.

Matt: Yeah,

John:  you seem to be producing multiple X’s that most people wouldn’t be able to do that time.

Matt:  Yeah, I got really good at writing. And a way that I did that was in college I wrote for my campus newspaper. And then it was really doing a freelance writing in blocking. I was doing probably four articles a day for like three years on my website called American Consumer news back then. And I just got really good at pounding stuff out and that allowed me to like write a book in 21 days. And just produce content at a speed that most people can’t. And I think it’s just part of–  it’s just how I’m wired. I’ve been told I’m really quick at doing work, and I don’t know how to replicate that, but it’s just must be unique gift that I have.

V6

Matt: Can I tell a micro comf story.

John: Yes, please .

Matt: So two years ago when we are both at micro comp, I wasn’t here last year because my wife had a baby like the same week. But two years ago we were here. this was one of the first conferences I went to. And I was telling all, everybody about my business, and it was called analyst ratings Network then. And so many people botched it up that I changed the name of the business. So like I would say, “Oh the business name was Analyst Ratings Network. This is what we do.” It’s like, “Oh your thing, analysts Network or ratings Network or analyst… Like what is it again?” It’s just like, “Oh, this is a really terrible name for my business.” So I changed the name and I changed it entirely because everybody messed it up at micro comf. So I blame micro comp and you, John, for changing the name of my business two years ago. Which was great because now I have a fantastic name for my business, and I got their domain. And they got the trademark. And you know Market Beat is just a really great name, and I can, can thank you and Christian and a whole bunch of other people for messing this up forgetting that name.

John: There you go.

Matt: Well. That’s been background story.

John: That is a wonderful background story. Thank you so much for joining us today, and where can people find out about you and get your podcast your website and all these other things sure so.

Matt: I still have a personal website, which apparently is like now an old-fashioned thing to do. But if you go to Matt Paulson.com: m a t t pa uson com. You can get the latest podcast episodes there. Got a person or emails with some stuff I send out on there you. Can check that out. Twitter is at Matthew dp. D is in dog. P as in pony. Facebook is facebook.com / Matthew Poulsen. I have Myspace page. You can check me out there. And then of course my icq number is for 3701 99. Think anybody’s use icq in 15 years, but I think it’s funny to share that.

John:  That is terriffic. Well. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it

Matt:  right. Thanks John.

John: Yep.

Thanks for listening to our podcast for complete transcript of this episode or to find previous episodes, visit our website at business design podcast com. Have a question or comment? Email us at the [00:30:00] [email protected]. don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. On Itunes by searching for business design podcast and follow us on Twitter for updates between episodes.

 

Show Notes

Many people dream of a job where they can travel all over the world while they work remotely. Christian Genco lives this dream.

Christian Genco is a software developer from Dallas, Texas.  Since graduating from SMU in 2013, he has gone on to develop many projects that make more money than he spends.

On this episode, John and Christian discus different experiences in his life–from homeschooling to traveling–that have brought him to where he is today.

To find out more about Christian, visit his website here.

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

Transcription

[00:00:00] Welcome to the business design podcast. The podcast that helps enterpreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a six-month vacation. We are your hosts, Ian, John, and Scott. We’re here to share the successes and pitfalls of many enterpreneurs like you and equip you to make Daily Progress in your business.

John: Can you share with our audience who you are? Your name and where you’re from what you work on.

Christian: My name is Christian Genco. I’m from Dallas, Texas, and I have been full-time making software since 2013 which was the year I graduated college, so I have I’ve never had a real job.

John: Let’s take a step back and talk a little bit about like where you grew up from, did always grow up in the area, or where you’re originally from around Dallas.

Christian: Yeah, I went to high school at Southlake Carroll, and my dad has a urgent care practice in the area, and then I went to college just to just a few miles away at Southern Methodist University.

John:  I think you have like a really interesting background because I heard that you were homeschooled and that your parents like obviously you’re homeschooled, and you didn’t go to school until High School. Is that correct?

Christian: That’s right. Yeah. I was homeschooled up until eighth grade. I think it’s a decision that I’m going to be making with my kids too. The things that I’ve seen coming out of homeschooling, the effect that it has on kids, I think is overwhelmingly positive. We were talking a little bit earlier about how it teaches kids to be more independent thinkers, to be more self driven, to be motivated more by internal goals and internal motivations versus just what their teachers are telling them to do. I think it makes people more interesting.

John:  So can you expand on that little bit more in terms of can you give me an example of how that how that works out in terms of how did that? How does it get you to be more independent and self study and do things like that like well. We’re specifically about homeschooling that inherently makes you be more like that than as opposed to going Schoo?

Christian: My upbringing in particular was very Loosely structured, and you can homeschool in many different ways the way that I was home-schooled was structured basically as here’s this book that’s your main curriculum. You’re expected to do a lesson every day. You have one for math, you have one for English, you have one for science. You can get through these if you’re motivated in under an hour, and that’s your school for the day. The rest of the day is up to you. You can do whatever you want. You can work on your own independent projects. There are stories from when I was I think two or three that I would just spend hours piecing together pieces of paper with tape. And I made a parachute every one point and tried to convince my mom to let me jump off the balcony to test it because I was sure that it would work. It was reinforced with lots of tape. Um. That’s the environment that kind of shaped the thing that I do in my free time. I got very very comfortable with long stretches of time that were undirected and got very comfortable exploring different options. So I would get a, a passion for something like magic. I used to do magic tricks for birthday parties when I was younger. Just because I had so much time that when I got excited about something I could really dive deep down into it and learn everything there was to know. Go to the library and rent every book on the topic and learn them all, watch videos about it, and practice the same tricks over and over, which is just that kind of long stretch of time, it’s not popular to call it deep work. That’s something that from a very early age. I was fostered in to getting very comfortable with and learning systems for how to deal with and how to how to do productive things during. I think it was incredibly beneficial that shaped now. A lot of the ways that I approach work now. Whereas before I would spend all day, you know, learning trivia facts about Harry Potter or doing magic or making these things out of tape and paper and now it’s spent making software. Which, in talking with other people who have more traditional jobs, is not something that I think other people are comfortable with. Other people are very comfortable in the environment they grew up. Where they are sitting in a room with a bunch of other people and the teacher tells them exactly what to do and defines what success is. The idea of you have unbounded time you can work on whatever you want scares them. Because that’s not that’s not an environment that they grew up in. I find it funny sometimes how how hard it is to convince people of the advantages of your in my lifestyle where you can work on whatever you want. You are in complete control of your business because it’s very scary if you don’t come from a background where you’re comfortable in that.

John: Did your parents didn’t know that was going to be the benefits was intentional on their part? How much awareness did they have of the benefits of those stretches and the kind of practices that you develop and disciplines it develop.

Christian: I think their primary motivation was that they were very disappointed in the level of Education of public schools in Dallas. They looked at private schools. They looked at different public schools, and they both had disappointing experiences in public schools that they went to. So for them it was a it was a educational choice. It was a you get one-on-one attention, as opposed to ideally five minutes of a teacher’s attention per day, if you divide it among the students that they would have. So just educationally you’ll have a better education. The plan I think was for me to be a doctor so everything was designed kind of with that in mind. We’re going to try to get you the best education to prepare you for medical school. And it just so happened that it also prepared me for being very flexible and being able to deal with working on my own.

 

V2

 

John: So what was transition like when you went back to school? That must have been one hell of a transition from being unstructured, being able to work on your you know things that interested you alongside with the curriculums and schooling that you had to do. You know they also talked about you know the negatives of homeschooling potentially being about, you know, being sold peeing able to socialize, and that’s the benefit of sending kids to school. Maybe that was one reason why they decided to send you to high school, and what not. But in terms of, why did you go to high school, like a traditional high school? And what was that transition like, I mean, that must have been hard.

Christian: The transition is definitely hard. It’s a vastly different environment. You’re interacting with kids on a very regular basis. I had done social things before like Theater, which I really enjoyed. I think that that prepared me in a lot of different ways. Different sports teams and things, but it’s really not the same. It’s not the same as school and seeing the same people over and over. And the level of social interaction is is definitely different. I don’t know a good solution for that. I don’t know what better way to transition. That’s definitely something that I’ll be trying to figure out with my kids.

John: Do you think College transition is the better time to transition? Or?

Christian: I think transitioning at College. Would have been easier socially. Because the type of work that you’re doing in homeschool is much more similar to college than in than high school is to college.

John:  Right right

Christian: it would have been much more difficult socially. Being homeschooled you spend majority of your time at home. In the culture that we’re living in now, there really isn’t a good culture, letting kids go out and play with your neighbors. So it was it was incredibly isolating. And when the internet was invented, and we got AOL on my iMac G3, yeah, I was thrilled because this is now my primary Outlet to the outside world

John:  Right.

Christian: I can, I can be involved in these online communities and, and socialize on the internet. There’s I don’t know, I don’t, I don’t know of a better solution. I think ideally the switch would happen around there. I would love to see I would love to see some kind of a model more like a like a Montessori school. Or like the Acton Academy in Austin, I think, is a very interesting model where it’s almost as if you’re getting homeschooled in a group of kids. So you still have the social benefit of your around these kids, and you can learn interactions with people, but the curriculum is still very self-driven. You have to come up with your own ideas for projects. If you don’t want to work one day, you just don’t work. If you want to play video game all day, that’s what you do. You kind of have these Baseline goals to keep track of where you are and where you’re supposed to be. And, you know, do one unit of math everyday. And but you can go at your own pace.  I think that kind of model would make a lot of sense today, especially in an age where we have Khan Academy now, and of course era, and crash course on YouTube. Fantastic education. A lot of ways much better than the education that I got even from College. There’s a new course on YouTube from Crash Course about computer science that’s, I think, they’re only five or six episodes in. But it’s already much better than most of the undergraduate lessons that I had in my undergraduate degree in computer science. So that kind of a model, I think, would be very interesting to experiment with.

John: That’s awesome, so let’s dive into in college, you sounded like you were able to travel pretty extensively as part of the kind of program that were part of. You got a scholarship? Is that what it was? Or?

Christian: Yes my wife, and I were president Scholars at Southern Methodist University, which is full tuition full room and board and they pay for you to study abroad for two semesters, so we went to Australia. There was a study program within the Australia program that we got to go to Malaysia Thailand Singapore Vietnam, and then we went to Oxford for the summer. And then from there went to France and went to Ireland. And that was all in college, mostly paid for by SMU through scholarships.

John:  How did that kind of contribute to your your worldview and kind of how you see the world? And what not, like what was that like?

Christian:  that’s an interesting question. The main takeaway that I had from it was, this would have been I think in 2014 or 15,  the world that we’re living in now is so globalized. That I was almost disappointed at how similar everything was. When you go to a major city, it doesn’t really matter what country you’re in the world. If you speak English, you’ll be able to get by right. Transactions work the same way, you can pay with a credit card wherever you go. When you get more rural, it’s a little bit more differen,t and a little bit more more esoteric and quirky. But I was just appointed that, just, kind of how similar everything is. Capitalism and individualism have largely taken over the world. There’s not nearly as many interesting pockets of really strange, really truly foreign experiences.

John: Did you almost get like this desire to travel globally out of your system a little bit because they were supposed similar it was that one of the effects of that?

Christian:  Don’t get me wrong. I E. I love travel. And there were definitely new experiences, and it’s fun seeing new sites. And when you’re in a new place and don’t have those habits formed, you form a lot more memories because you’re experiencing all these new inputs. So yeah, I to this day, I love traveling and that inspired, in large part, my– when this software business started taking off, I realized I could work from anywhere and didn’t need to be rooted in a single place. So my wife and I bought an RV, and sold our stuff and drove around the country for about a year. And that was a ton of fun. So yeah traveling is definitely something that I’d like to keep in my life, but it’s an interesting balance of. it’s more about just changing things and getting into different environments than it is about the actual place that you’re going. Every city is going to have a Starbucks and a Whole Foods and people are going to be driving into cars. It’s more about throwing your mind off from the set habits, not making it too easy for yourself to live. If you can just go through life on autopilot. You will live a much less interesting life. You’ll be using your neurons less than if you’re traveling kind of forcing yourself into into uncomfortable positions, that’s more what travel is about for me.

 

V3

 

John: You mentioned it was really difficult at times for you to do some of the deep work and the products that you were hoping to continue working on while you were traveling, partly because of the schedule aggressive it was for you guys to move from one city to another and whatnot. What are some of the tips that you give to people like me who want to travel with my family and still be productive? So I’d only be a tourist or moving from one city to another place every week, maybe that’s a little bit longer that we stay in one place, but what kind of similar advice is or things we should keep in mind to balance the desire to experience new things and be present in that City and yet still be able to pursue deep work, and interesting work? What are some advices you give?

Christian: For me in the RV, it was a very interesting experience of just learning more about myself. My wife and I, before we left, planned the trip so that we would be going to a new city about once a week. That seemed very generous when we were planning it out, but in practice, especially in an RV, you lose so much time in transition the day that you’re traveling, that your going somewhere is completely lost to traveling. You take everything up, and you have to pack it out, but then you have to drive to the place, which takes several hours, and you have to figure out where you’re supposed to be parking and what the system is for paying by the end of the day. You just kind of set everything up, and then you just need to de-stress. Your you’re not functional the next day, you spend half the day kind of still distressing, and then you have to figure out. Okay. Where is Food coming from? What are we going to do? Then of course you’re in a new city, so you need time to explore the city. So maybe the second half of the second day is spent exploring, and then oh there’s– you find out about the thing to do in this new place, that you spend the third day doing. So now you’re three days into your week. For you, travel, you have four days left before you leave. The last days going to be lost to traveling again. So you really just have three days. Well, there’s other things to do in the city that you’re going to want to be doing. So it was, it was a struggle. Especially early on to come up with a more realistic goal. I didn’t realize about myself how much enjoyment I get from work. I love solving those kinds of puzzles, and I would be you know three or four days in, having felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything, which psychologically affected me much more than I thought it would. I realized about myself that I need opportunities. I need long stretches of time to be able to do that kind of work. I in a very real way, am addicted to software development. I love the the quick feedback cycle. I love the types of problems. So I know now, going forward scheduling a trip like that, I know more about myself and how to schedule my time so that I can spend time doing that.

John:  So what would that look like practically for you if you were to do that again? Whether it be both RV or international travel? Would you schedule a month at a time for location or would you do still pretty aggressive and travel schedule and yet, but what would that balance look like practically?

Christian:  I think a month is a good amount of time because that gives you a solid week to explore the city to really get situated. And then that’s enough time that your surroundings can get boring again your surroundings can get more normal. You’re not worried about going to all the tourist routes because you’ve seen them. It’s fine.  So yeah, then you could settle into more of a routine. You could settle into more of a work schedule. If I were doing it again. I would be much more generous with scheduling. I would I would schedule closer to a month in each Place.

John: Wow, so let’s dive into this idea of productivity a little bit more. How much time do you need usually for you to really kind of dive into doing deep work? I mean other than saying hey, we need a whole day to work on something like that. Do you find yourself being able to do it in a couple hours or that full days or half days it will how much time do you find yourself needing to be able to get into flow, deep work, and whatnot?

Christian:  That was another good self-realization during this travel was really being disciplined with myself about getting in and out of it faster.  And so what that means in practice is setting up tools so that I can, with a, with a terminal command I can set up a coding environment for whatever project I’m working on now. That means setting up systems so that I can keep track of the next thing to work on. And the problem that I was in the middle of, I found a lot of success with the Pomodoro Technique, which is spending twenty five minutes completely uninterrupted, and then I mandatory five minute break. That’s extremely beneficial because for those 25 minutes if you get distracted, if there’s something else that you’re doing, you set it aside you have a little list next to you of oh, I have this impulse to check Facebook, after these 25 minutes I’ll check Facebook. And it doesn’t count if you get interrupted during this 25 minutes. So really organizing myself around pomodoro has been a huge boost in productivity because I can now jump in and out of it faster. 25 minutes is a good amount of time that I can kind of spend five minutes getting into it. I’m much better now at really getting into it, so I spent 20 productive minutes. And I have a whole system now where I have EDM music that I listen to that as soon as I’m listening to it. I can just kind of snap in that work mode in my brain says. Oh, this is this is what we’re doing now. This is fine. So the transition is as much easier.

 

V4

 

John: You talked about keeping track of the work that you were doing and we’re in a micro conferring now, and you’re probably the most organized person I know at the conference of seeing someone who takes meticulous notes, and who you meet and you’ve written your own systems for doing this kind of stuff. Tell me a little bit about your whole thought around how you capture things, and how you keep track of things to work on. What are some of the systems that you’re using to kind of track of them and be able to organize all that information?

Christian:  Sure. Firstly this is constantly in flux. I will take new information I get from new books I’m reading, a productivity or new new research, and adapt the system. So if you ask me this next week, it would be different. What my system looks like right now is I have a central system, similar to how you use Evernote, that’s a system of– its really just plain text files organized in folders in a git repository. So it’s backed up, and I can have snapshots of it, so I can go back at any time and see where it was. Everything else flows into that system, so if I take a note on my phone. I know that that note eventually will make it into the system. If it’s something that I have to do, I have a next list inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and then I just work from the top of that list. I’m starting now to Branch off specific chunks of it in two different systems. So for this conference I wrote an app that I can keep track of notes about people on my phone, the code name for its “BlackBook.” I don’t I don’t know that’s going to be the the title if I ever end up publishing it. But this system is designed specifically for the problem of keeping information on people. So if I meet someone and they have a really interesting connection, like I met someone a few weeks ago whose Uncle works for the Gates Foundation– super interesting– I will probably never need to know that, but it would be great if several years from now I have an opportunity that I think would be perfect for the Gates Foundation. If I could reach back and you know remember who this person was, how I met them, what my connection is to them just by remembering that oh, I met someone at some time that had a connection to the Gates Foundation. I built the system so that I could search Gates and their name would pop up. Now I’ve, this is this is incredibly valuable for me because I can make links and I can go back and say oh, hey we met at this party. I have this great idea for this thing that would be great for the Gates Foundation. Could you get me an introduction through your uncle? By the way, how is your cat Lucy doing? Yeah? I built this so this would also be in the in the system. I built this because I get very frustrated. This applies to a lot of different things, but the core frustration I have is just in my own biological limitations. I hate how fallible my memory is. I hate that I can have a conversation with the person and a year later not remember anything about the conversation. I can see the amount of information I’m exposed to, and useful connections that could be making, and I feel a very real sense of how limited my own brain is of keeping track of it. So as much as I can, I try to offload the storage of this information into into an external system. I’ll give you one other example of a subsystem. I for the longest time would get book recommendations from people, and just forget them. And sometimes if I heard about a book, you know, maybe three times in a week, then I would actually remember it, and then I would go through the steps to get it and read it. And sometimes they would be good and sometimes they would be bad. So I thought for a long time about what an ideal solution to that would be. And I thought oh, well you know if I had a perfect memory I would just remember every time anyone ever recommended a book to me, and I would keep track of that, and then I would just read the next book that was recommended by the most number of people. So I built a system that’s, it’s kind of a subset of this get system in markdown, where that’s exactly what I do. It’s it currently has close to 8,000 books. And when it’s time for me to read another book, I just sort it by number of recommendations, and I filter out the ones I’ve already read. And it’s a perfect system for me. It’s a perfect solution to me not being able to remember all of these 8,000 books, and how many times they were recommended. So it’s a methodology that I applied to different areas in my life. And yeah usually produces useful things.

John: Is your wife pretty, also into a lot of productivity topics and things like that or does she use any other systems? Or do you find that that there’s a little disconnect between your systems and those around you and kind of how they live in organized their life?

Christian: I’m definitely much more radical than, I think, anyone I know in most of these things. My wife in particular is naturally much better at them. She is very good naturally at remembering names and remembering dates and remembering.

John:  funny. My wife is the same way as well.

Christian:  I have to, I have to work to give up with her. For memory in particular I’ve been focusing a lot of recently on memory techniques. Selected mnemonic major system for remembering numbers. It’s a system for taking numbers and turning those into sounds, and from The Sounds you can turn it into words and from words you go to pictures. And everyone’s brain is very very good at memorizing pictures. That’s kind of how we evolved if you think of when we evolved hunting and gathering, remembering pictures of places and images was very useful because you can remember this terrain. And even if you hadn’t been in this place in several years, having a map of it in your head and a picture of kind of where everything is is very useful and depends on your survival. So if you can get things to that place where it’s just a picture, you can now remember any arbitrary information as long as you can encode it as a picture. So I’ve been working a lot on the system for remembering numbers, and remembering names, and different fun things like memorizing a shuffle deck of cards. But now that I have this system, I can cheat to be as good as my wife is. And that’s, that’s kind of how I feel about a lot of these productivity systems top. She now, in in productivity specifically, I think with my system. I’ve been able to surpass what my wife can just naturally do. And I think she’s seen that and picked up on something. So she’ll borrow things, like some things from David Allen. I think she uses to do lists, which if I was not a software developer I would probably be using to do lists. I like to be able to to play with things though. But yeah sure, if she sees, if she sees me doing things that are useful that have a positive Roi, she’ll usually pick them up. A lot of things I do though are experiments that don’t pay off for several years. Or I’ll be, I’ll be trying a lot of different things before I settle on something that actually works for me. So she’ll let me be the guinea pig for a while, and then if there’s something that’s provable that it works well, then she’ll usually us it.

 

V5

 

John:  How do you practice these practices that you find like memorization technique? How do you get better at some things? I’ve I’ve read about, or heard about you know speed reading or memorization techniques of how to imagine and  create a story of all the cars that you see or at the words that you kind of like come across and all these other things. But I’ve never been successful at spending enough time or practicing it that becomes something that I can get good at doing and therefore I abandon it. What do you think are some key things that you’ve been able to do or notice and making sure that you’re able to acquire those as skill sets that reliably you’re able to use? What what’s your experience? Or what do you have a practice technique or something that you could share with us?

Christian:  Yes, so this, is this is the topic of habit formation. And how you can get yourself to change your own behaviour. Lot of very interesting books by Josh Kaufman and Tim Ferriss and Charles duhigg about this topic. It boils down to you have to set very clear goals for what success is. So a goal like I want a better memory is a bad goal. A goal like I want to be able to walk into a group of five people, hear their names once, and remember it when I leave the conversation is a very good goal. Because you can very clearly measure was this successful, or did I fail. Great. So that’s the first thing set set very clear goals once a goal is set. I guess specifically in habits. You want to be able to Define when practice happens. So coming up with triggers for when you would be thinking about this with an example you would try to install and yourself the mental trigger of oh, if I’m in a group where someone is saying their name, that’s the trigger that I need to remember. Oh, this is the time to practice names. I’m going to pay super close attention to when this person says their name, and I’m going to remember it. This is charles’ digs book The Power of Habit. I’ll talk briefly about habits. The the structure of a habit is you have a trigger, you have the action, and you have the reward. So this applies both to positive habits that you’re trying to install new things that you’re doing, and negative habits that you’re trying to stop doing for a positive habit. Let’s say that you want to when you’re in the kitchen and you notice that you’re out of mayonnaise, you want to keep track of that on your phone because your current habit is not doing anything, and then you get to the grocery store, you don’t remember what you’re supposed to, right, right. So the way that you would practice. You would say okay, the trigger is I am in the kitchen and I notice that I am out of something. You would then want to Define what the Habit is. So first just spend a minute thinking about: what is the correct behavior in this situation? Well I would love to be able to keep track of this in some way. It’s easier if you can do it kind of in the space and make it something that you can do there. So maybe you always notice when you’re doing this maybe the trigger always happens when you open the fridge. So a great place to put the note whether to do this would be on the fridge. You stick it on there with a magnet. The reward would be oh, now I’ve kept track of this. And you feel kind of a sense of accomplishment. So now in the future, when you notice that you’re out of mayonnaise you remember back to the Habit that you installed. You look right up, and oh look, there’s The To Do List this is perfect and you write it down the list. That’s how you install new habits. Replacing old habits would be something like I struggled for a while. I didn’t even notice I was doing this, but I when I would get stuck in a coding problem, especially if I wasn’t working in Poms, I would feel the impulse to go to the kitchen and get a snack. And I didn’t notice this until I started fasting.

John: You said Poms? What does that mean?

Christian:  Pomodoro?

John: Okay? So you’re in the middle of a 25-minute kind of pure ok?

Christian: I’m not as susceptible to this when I’m working in Pomodoro, but it still happens at the end of it. So I would feel the impulse to oh, it’s time to go in the kitchen and get a snack and as a separate experiment, I was practicing fasting. So in the middle of a three-day fast I would find myself walking in the kitchen and you know opening the jar of nuts or something and then realizing wait a minute. No. I’m not eating what is this what am I doing? And I was, I was abhored at how many times it was happening. I found myself in the kitchen, you know, ten times within just a couple hours. So in that case I was able to identify. Okay. Why? What was the moment that I decided to walk in the kitchen, and why did I do it? And by kind of taking steps back and okay, well it wasn’t like the I was walking in the kitchen because I had already kind of decided what I was doing. Uh it wasn’t you know when I when I got up because I got up with the intention of going in the kitchen. It’s really this moment of I feel kind of frustrated because there’s this problem that I don’t know the answer to and I’m really just looking for like a dopamine hit of okay. I, you know, I can do something successfully and get a reward from it so looking at it that way, I needed to find something that gave me that same dopamine hit that gave me that quick sense of commitment when I found myself in this search stressful situations. So trigger is I find myself frustrated at a project. I wanted to install a new habit. The old one was I would go in the kitchen and get a snack. Instead of that I would like to do push-ups, or do some pull ups so I installed a pull-up bar between where I work and the kitchen, and I put the little power push up things, a little handles that make it easier to do push-ups, or let you dip deeper right in front of me, right in front of where I work. And that fixed it. You know the next day, I found myself getting up, and I tripped over the the push up things, and I said, “oh yes. I’m going to do pushups right.” and I did and it fulfilled the same thing. I was able to to overwrite that habit of going to the kitchen, and so then passively I was just doing you know instead of going in the kitchen 20 times, I was doing a hundred pull ups, and 100 pushups, so it worked really well. Finding those kinds of things finding the tons of optimizations has paid dividends in my life. The more I ask myself those questions of okay. What are things that I’m doing now that don’t really make sense? And what are what are better ways that I could be doing it? It has just been fantastic. I’ve seen huge huge improvements in all areas of my life. There’s really no problem that doesn’t benefit from this kind of thinking.

 

V6

 

John: See you talked about DB inboxes of projects you’ve been working for a long time. You tell us what that is, and you know just like how does it work, and how do you make money with that?

Christian: Yes, deviant box is a tool that I made for myself in college. It’s a file transfer utility that’s used by businesses to receive files from their clients. So if you’re an accountant, or you make mortgages and you need to receive files from your client. I can give you a web page that you send to your clients. Your clients drag and drop files into that page, and then they show up on your computer. I made this for myself because I was at school and I needed to send myself some files, and I didn’t trust the school computers to log into my email to email it to myself. So I threw this together just for myself and used it and it was great. I think I sent it to a few people on Facebook forgot about it for two years. Two years later, I think it was Lifehacker, uh no it wasn’t uh TechCrunch. It was, it was a big news aggregator blog wrote about it, and I looked at the Google analytics and traffic. Shut up. It was I think I got maybe twenty thousand hits in a single day.

John:  Through a dbn box of or

Christian: yeah, there’s little side project that. I hadn’t really told anyone about it, and then I saw a huge surgeon signups. It was a need that people had to be able to anonymously receive files. So I thought, I didn’t know about micro conf. I didn’t know about kind of this. I didn’t even know that it was possible to run a one-man business. That was a thing that you could do so I looked at that saying. Oh well. This is neat. I don’t know what to do with it. So I’ll just forget about it for another year, so I did. And then I was reading about stripe. And how cool it was that you could receive credit card payments on the internet, so I said oh well. I have this side project that has a lot of users, and they’ve been emailing me asking for these features, so I’ll put some time into implementing these new features, and I’ll put it behind the paywall so that I can have people actually given me money because I had a donate button on the site before that. And I think I got like maybe two hundred dollars total in donations. So the day that I launched this new version with the extra features and the payment plan, I just launched it I didn’t send any emails about it. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I had 10 people sign up for the $30 a year plans, so I did the math and said oh shoot, this could be a thing. Well, maybe this was just a fluke. Maybe this was just the first day. Second day same thing about $300 of recurring Revenue per year. And the third day same thing. When a week, and I remember very distinctly I was driving in the car kind of doing this Mental Math of O three hundred dollars a day, oh oh my. I don’t need to work. I don’t need to get a job and this was very soon after I had graduated college, so I never had a real job. I never had a 9 to 5 that I had to go to. And I was just elated at you know the the possibility of this. And you know that this was a thing that I could do because in that year before I implemented the payment plans. I was really inspired by Patrick McKenzie, and bingo card creator, and the things that he was able to do with that. That he could quit his job with a bingo card creator. Like how much simpler of a product could you imagine? So from there, I put a lot more work into development, but I still didn’t really understand the market of it went to micro conf, got really inspired by people of the other side of the business, of the possibility of re-engaging people, and really focusing on, on conversion rates and all these other tricks that I, lots of things that I kind of accidentally got right without realizing it. Like product Market fit. I just kind of stumbled into without intentionally doing it. But you know conversion rates, and, and knowing your customer, and having any kind of a channel for being able to advertise it. Were things that I just didn’t have. So it’s been, it’s been a really interesting process of kind of going back and redoing these things that I got wrong. And trying to figure out new ways to do it and since then I’ve developed other projects like this. I really enjoy the process of just making something for myself. So a lot like this system that I’m making for myself of keeping track of people. This is something that could probably turn into a product, but I really enjoy the process of making it, and I enjoy solving problems for myself. So that’s probably what I’ll continue to do is continue making products that are useful to me. And then once they reach a certain point they’ve kind of proven themselves useless to me then then I’ll go off and make a process that I can make money for me.

 

V7

 

John: From what I understand you’re letting this products kind of like die almost. Just kind of just continue on without really touching it or having do anything major to it every time. I get the desire to not have it intrude in your life. You know like you’re not interested in maybe working on it, but what’s the motivation and the thought process, Philosophy for not trying to grow this like will raise prices, add more features get somebody else to run it or… What’s your thinking around that? Why aren’t you growing it?

Christian: That’s partially something that I don’t fully understand myself. What I’ve noticed is I enjoy much more making choices that optimize my time than I do for more money. From day one DB inbox was making three times more money than I need. There’s a fantastic Financial blogger called Mister Money Mustache that talks about how the key to wealth is not making more money. It’s limiting how much money you need. So much more powerful multiplier of money and time and happiness. So in a way, it’s already more successful than it needs to be and I know about myself that I I enjoy much more the process of building new things. So when I’m faced with the problem of okay dbn box is at this level. To get to the next level I would need to double down on, you know, finding marketing channels, on really focusing on conversion rates, on building up user personas and trying to figure out who the person is that’s actually using this and then marketing to them through Google AdWords or something. It’s not a problem that excites me right now. Not to say that I won’t pick it up in the future, but there are more exciting problems in my life that I would rather be solving. Things like keeping track of all my contacts, that’s something that has a really useful value to me from break. I’m doing day-to-day dbm box. I feel incredibly fortunate that it gives me more time than anything else, time to kind of figure out. What really is my bigger goal in living? What am I really trying to accomplish in life? These really big deep questions that really don’t have obvious answers. And to me the answer is certainly not that I need more mone. So just as a life philosophy, I’ve been focused heavily recently on trying to make choices that increase my quality of life and happiness. And for me right now Dbn box making more money doesn’t do that. What is doing it for me right now is making new products, and you know learning new technologies. I’m really excited right now about react and fire base, and there’s a new product that I’m building that uses those technologies that is really really cool. And and I’m building with all of these things that I’ve learned and micro comf in mind, so it’s going to make marketing it and growing it much much easier. I know now the mistakes that I made in DB inbox and how to make things that don’t make those mistakes and that are much easier to grow. So I’m, I get really excited about building new things that get those things right from the beginning.

John: So let’s talk about micro conf little bit. This is your 3rd gear in micro comf I remember three years ago you and I we met at one of our lunches or something like that. You set next, right next to me, got to know each other and since then we’ve you know we’ve been meeting each other year after year. Why are you coming back to this event? What made you first initially be interested in it. And you know what’s, what makes you come back to this event out of all the other events so out there in the world? Like what makes it micro comf particularly interesting for you?

Christian: Micro cuff was the first community of people that I found that are in this space of building companies with a small number of people, that are in venture-backed. And I found about it initially through Patrick McKenzie through the the bingo card creator. I think he had given a talk here or written about. It so when DB inbox started succeeding. I remember thinking OK. You know the first whatever $1000 is going towards my micro comf ticket, so I can find him. Thank him in person. I I printed a jacket for him. That was his twilio jacket. With his kazimierz logo, and he was so happy. I loved being able to give that.

John:   that’s funny. Yeah, that’s a power and networking move.

Christian: with yeah it in retrospect. I just really I felt a lot of gratitude to him. He introduced me to this community. Unknowingly. I don’t think he knew who I was but I stumbled on his blog and seeing the things that he had done. But micro conf as a community for me has been fantastic. Being able to meet other people like that, other people who are doing this independent software thing. Being in Dallas Texas, there is not a huge Community even of people doing interesting startups. They’re trying. They’re trying very hard but even, you know, looking for people there are not a lot of people doing this kind of thing. So for me Micro Comf is incredibly refreshing to be able to talk to people about, you know, who you don’t have to explain all the acronyms to you can say the word SASS, and CAC, and you know B2B, and people know what you’re talking about you don’t have to explain every every piece of it. I people have made the same mistakes that you’ve made and come up with different solutions for it. People are kind of motivated by the same types of things. People are interested in the same things. It’s a fantastic group of people all you know very very self-motivated. Doing very interesting things. Very up on technology yeah, I’ve made some fantastic friends here. And it’s, it’s very refreshing to have. I would love to be able to do it more than once a year, so I started branching out trying to find out their other things like this, but there’s really no place like micro comf yeah. I’ve just really loved interacting with this type of person.

John: Thank you for joining me today. Where can our audience find more information about you, maybe your blog or Twitter or your website adress, some of the links in different places we can find more information about you.

Christian: Yeah, everything about me all my different projects, and I have probably dozen things that are active that are a little experiments that you can use all my contact information. So my Twitter in my Facebook and everything else is all at my website that you can get to. It’s my last name with a dot in the middle its dot CO.

Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to our podcast for complete transcript of this episode 4 defined previous episodes visit our website at business design podcast com have a question or comment email us at questions as business design podcast com don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes by searching for business tonight podcast and follow us on Twitter for updates between.

Show Notes

John Somnez describes his work as “helping software developers become cool.” He is a personal development coach for software developers, he helps them develop other areas of their life in order to succeed in their careers and live a more fulfilled life. He takes what he’s learned from his own life and brings that to software developers.

In addition to having a successful career as a software developer, he’s built an amazing business on PluralSight where he published over 50 courses and was one of the top 3 highest grossing instructor on the platform. In the past 2 years, he’s grown his YouTube channel to over 135K subscribers.

To find out more about John, check out his website at http://simpleprogrammer.com/.

In this podcast, John Somnez tells his story of growth from a shy, awkward boy to striving to be the best version of himself that he can be.

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

Show Notes

As we head into the new year, it’s time to think about planning an annual strategy retreat for your team, department, or office. Why are strategy retreats important? How often should you plan these? And what do you do during these?

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

Show Notes

Today’s talk is based on Dave McClure’s “500 Startups.” We will take you through the ins and outs of what they call “marketing for pirates.” AARRR!

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by Ian Labardee, John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

Resources

Marketing for Pirates – “AARRR”

Dave McClure – 500 Startups

Link to slideshare – http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version

Link to youtube presentation – Ignite Seattle – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjgfW0BIrw

Conversation Outline

Acquisition

How do you get people to know about you and to your site?

• SEO
• SEM
• Inbound Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Advertising
• PR
• Social Media
• High volume channels
• Low cost channels
• Best conversion channels

Activation

• Happy first experience
• 10-20 seconds on the site
• # of pages
• Low bounce rates
• A/B Testing

Retention

• How to get people to come back?
• Figure out what are retention measurements
• Life Cycle Emails +3, +7, +20 days
• Email open rates
• RSS click throughs

Revenue

• How you get people to pay for your product?
• Minimum revenue
• Break-even revenue

Referral

• How to get people to share about your company/product?
• Viral co-efficient (x > 1)
• Only encourage people to refer if your product is worth referring or good

Conversion Metrics

Multiple Marketing channel

• High volume channel
• Low cost channel
• High conversion channels

Types of Metrics and measurements

• Measure for conversion
• Less, not more – Choose 5 metrics
• Measure bottom of funnel not the top of the funnel
• A/B testing
• Hypothesis Testing

Why is this important to us and how are we using this?

• Product Management Tool – Focus & Define theme for the iteration/week.  Helps keeps tabs on what’s working and not working… (Foundational to build on – Customer Journey Map)
• If we didn’t have this, I wouldn’t know what to work on and fall back to my engineering tendencies and just work on more features that nobody wants.
• Prioritization – Visually it helps us focus on what we need to solve first
• Keeps your eye on the forest and not just the tree
• Makes metrics and measurements front and center

Show Notes

Our guest for this podcast is Ryan Carson, founder of Treehouse, a online teaching resource. Users can subscribe to Treehouse for $25 a month and watch lessons from great teachers. The road to success for Ryan was involved a lot of hard lessons, some that he is still learning from. In this podcast, Ryan and Scott discuss Ryan’s experience from his beginnings as an entrepreneur to his current successes with Treehouse.

 

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by Ian Labardee, John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

 

Full Transcription

Welcome to the business design podcast. A podcast that help entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a six months vacation. We’re your hosts Ian, John and Scott and we’re here to share the successes and pitfalls of many entrepreneurs like you and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

 

Scott:          We’re joined today with Ryan Carson. He is from Treehouse and we’ve been using Treehouse app for training actually for the past year or so to train our ruby on rails developers to get them up to speed. So it’s really cool to have the opportunity to actually talk to the man who is behind all of this. So welcome to the show Ryan.

Ryan:         Thanks guys. It’s an honor to be here. Appreciate it.

Scott:          So your current startup is Treehouse and its doing extremely well but you actually made a little bit of a name for yourself before you started the company. Could you give our listeners just a little bit of a recap just of how you got to the point of where you are and some of the other companies that you built and sold along the way to getting here.

Ryan:         Yeah, sure. I am 36 so old enough to have started and failed a couple of companies now. So my Treehouse is technically my fourth company. And my first one – I was a web-developer – so my first company was just me building a product. And that one actually failed and I learned a lot of lessons about pricing and sales. In that company I priced the product way too high and had to go out and try to sell it and I wasn’t prepared for that. So that was a fun lesson to learn. And then the second business was actually a business where we do conferences and workshops. The goal there was to train people and say hey, if you want to be a web designer, web developer you can come to this conference and learn and you can also meet other people and get inspired and connected. That business was a lot of fun. We eventually did events around the world and met amazing speakers Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams from Twitter and Kevin Rose and all these kinds of stuff but I really wanted to reach more people at a more affordable price. I wanted to really make an impact in the world and did something I really thought mattered and I really loved the idea of teaching people and giving them something that allowed them to change their life but we just wanted to do it at a more affordable price. So we thought hey, why don’t we hire some teachers and film it and then just charge people 25 bucks a month to watch the videos online. That was the beginning of Treehouse . That was in 2010, and thankfully we’ve grown. We’re up to 70 people now and have over 55,000 students around the world. So it’s been a fun run.

Scott:          That’s great. How do you feel like your experiences with those other businesses prepared you for Treehouse? Do you feel like that was good practice I’d say or just some of the things you’ve learned along the way?

Ryan:         Definitely. Everything I do I look back and think I didn’t know very much before, and then I get to the next day, I didn’t know very much before, and then I have a feeling I am going to die. The day before I die I will be like, I didn’t know very much yesterday and I think that will continue. And the biggest thing I’ve learnt though is that is nobody knows what they are doing and nobody started something big and knew how they were going to get there. I often was intimidated in the beginning by meeting entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs, or Evan Williams, or whoever. And then I started to meet a couple of those people and then I just realized they really don’t know what’s the right answer and they really don’t know they were going to succeed. It kind of levels the playing field. I realized anything is possible. I’ve just got to go start trying to figure it out and then maybe I will be one of those folks that succeed. So that’s been the biggest thing that I have learned.

Scott:          I think that’s a really important point. I think it’s really easy to look at people who are successful and say, “they must have all it together, they knew what to do, I couldn’t do that.” But I don’t think that is true. It’s amazing even for myself to see how much I have learned over the years. I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning but we’re still around.

Ryan:         One of the things that I say to my son – because I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old – I say a lot, “it’s OK to make mistakes.” And you can see Even this morning – we joking about this before we started this interview because today was a hard day at Treehouse. I sent out an email that I regret sending out and basically I had to backpedal and apologize and really try to tell everybody that we were sorry and I was sitting at the breakfast table sweating and feeling like I was going to throw up and I said to my son, daddy made a mistake today and it’s OK to make mistakes because I don’t want him to grow up thinking you’ve got to have it figured it out, it’s got to be perfect.

Scott:          And if you don’t make mistakes I feel like you are probably not taking enough risks and I know because I found that out for myself. If you are trying to play it safe then you are not going to hit anything.

Ryan.         No. but they still are not very fun though, are they?

Scott:          No. sure isn’t. One of the things that you said just talking about meeting people through the conference business I’ve heard you say this on other podcasts too just the importance of getting out, meeting people, talking to people. Now, when you were running that conference business, you were doing that from the UK, right?

Ryan:         Yeah. It’s currently in a small town called Baths.

Scott:          Do you have any suggestions for people? Like we’re in Michigan for example, for someone who is not in a big tech hub where you have all these people around you all the time, Any suggestions for meeting people and for getting out there?

Ryan:         Definitely. I think that going to conferences and having a beer or a tea or a coffee or a meal with someone has been the most powerful way that I have made connection and I think I leverage that even more by actually starting to run those events myself. So what I found happened is I was able to do a conference and invite one big-name speaker and as soon as I got that one big-name speaker, everybody else kind of flew in. and for me, the very first conference was we got a speaker named David Heinemeier Hansson the creator of Rail. And miraculously he said yeah and I was just some nobody saying could you come and speak at our event and we’re not going to charge much money this is really about uniting the community. And it was. That was the community event and as soon as he said yes, then it just connected to the him and then to his friends and kind of just to cascade the fact that it’s almost like a psychological trick. If you get on stage with someone that’s famous, people associate you with them and all of a sudden you have these doors open to you that just weren’t open before, people respond to your email that happened. So I always say to people what works from doing an event in a non-vertical without doing business in and becoming a connector. It’s been very effective for me and I didn’t know that’s going to work it was lucky to do that by mistake.

Scott:          Now one thing that I have noticed about you, you’ve always been pro-bootstrapping, especially with your companies before Treehouse, were all bootstrapping. Even Treehouse, I believe, was bootstrapped at the beginning, is that right?

Ryan:         So we just used capital from profit from our event business to fund it. So we were clearly bootstrapped, we got to profitability with zero outside investments and then I’d changed my tune. Basically I had Treehouse which actually had a different name back then. I showed it to a friend and his name is Kevin Rose and he did this site called Digg and he was becoming pretty wealthy as well and I showed it to him and he said, this is awesome and he said I want to put $50,000 in. This and I was like OK, that’s crazy. Alright, well, let me think about that and he said I will help you put together a group of inter-investors and I felt like we will be able to build a successful, profitable amazing business without picking up any money. But, we might be doing something that happened to be at the right moment in history to truly change the world at a very big scale. If we take this money we can probably get there faster so maybe we should do it and I think we decided, because it could be we’re lucky enough to be involved, it could be world changing and it was worth taking the investment and kind of learning that and understanding how to do it. And at that point as soon as we decided to do it was like getting on bucking bronco. It was just this kind of wild, intense ride and I am very glad we did it looking back because it pushed me really hard. It’s kind of like you’re playing basketball and all of a sudden a crowd is around you and they’re watching. You just have to perform better, be faster, there will be more pressure and thankfully that has really pushed me a lot harder as an entrepreneur and now we’ve raised around $60 million total and now we can move a lot faster and we can hire quicker and we worry less about cash flow that’s still very important and we want to build a profitable business but we were able to hire more people than cash flow allows right now because of that. So that’s been kind of a journey.

Scott:          That makes a lot of sense. One of the other things that I have always thought about venture capitals is the connections that bring in the expertise of the people who are investing. Could you talk a little bit about value of having people who are very well connected advising your company and being part of the investor board?

Ryan:         I have noticed that there is definitely different types of investors and there is good and bad, and there is connected and not connected and we were lucky to get our biggest investor is called social capital and its really one guy his name is Chamath Palihapitiya and he is a wonderful investor because he is extremely passionate about our doing, he is very connected and he is very aggressive and So he’s wonderful to have in a company because he really pushes you hard and actually contribute value. So he connects us to super important people all the time. He says he, I think you should talk to this person here’s an email instruction, go! Or hey, I have got this idea let’s make it happen. And then there is unfortunately some investors they just don’t work hard, they don’t take of you, they don’t put in the time and that usually happens when they don’t put in enough money to care. So the big thing I learned is every venture around you will typically give away 20% of the company. So really most venture capitalists want 20% of your company or more and if they don’t get that, they’re just not going to put in the time. So the mistake I made with getting a bunch of investors is we had one big one and then a bunch of small ones and basically the small ones except for one or two just add zero value. So you effectively given away part of your company for nothing. So that’s the lesson I learned.

Scott:          I guess before you raised capital you hadn’t done that before. Where did you go to learn about that? Was it reading books, was it talking to people? How to really make sure you don’t get burnt

Ryan:         I just read a book and it was an amazing book it was by Brad Feld it’s called how to be smarter than your venture capitalist and lawyer and it’s just so good. I learned everything I need to know then I did a ton of Googling around and stuff but that book was very valuable.

Scott:          One thing that I am curious about as far as being bootstrapped before and then deciding to take money and building a company that way, do you think that I guess the discipline maybe of being bootstrapped has changed the way you built this company versus somebody who’s taken VC for the first time and trying to build something.

Ryan:         Definitely. I just think it’s so much better to have a grounding and how to get to profitability before you do that so that’s been helpful and if anything its kind of frustrated investors that we are trying quite hard to be profitable. They often want you to push and get as big as possible as quick as possible which means bringing in a lot of cash because they invested money in you and want to see that capital put to use. It doesn’t do them any good if you just leave it in the bank. So I am very thankful that I know how to get a business to profitability and that’s our goal. In getting Treehouse to profitability before we raised money was really key in getting a good valuation. We were profitable, didn’t need the money and therefore is much easier to negotiate another first couple rounds of capital.

Ian:             I think it’s a really cool story especially these days to hear about a company that was successfully bootstrapped and profitable before jumping into the – I really admire that.

Ryan:         Thanks. That turned out to be a really key strategy for us and it means the truth of it is that I own personally a lot more of the company now because of that because I was much less looted in the earlier round which is when founders really get killed.

Scott:          Have one other question for you just about the whole venture capital thing. So you have some kind of let’s say unconventional workplace practices four-day work weeks, no mangers things like that, what do your investors think of those types of  things? Have you got any pushed back from them on that and how do you address that?

Ryan:         Thankfully zero push back and it’s that the reason that we talked about before which is we were a profitable successful company before we raised money and thankfully we’ve continued to grow even after we took the money. So what I have learned is investors don’t care if you wear a banana suit to work. As long as you’re growing it doesn’t matter so I think that the takeaway. I think clearly as far as growth slows down, they’ll start asking some pretty tough question but thankfully and in part think because of our unconventional practices, we are growing very fast. These folks are all smart. They know that in most companies middle management kills all the morale that slows everything down and if they could get rid of it they would. So we are just one of the few companies that was naïve or brave one of the two not enough to actually do it.

Ian:             You talked a little bit about being involved in pitching and selling and you’ve done this a lot ever since [inaudible] [00:17:01] days. I was actually a big [inaudible] [00:17:04] fan. Would you say that selling your own ideas for products and businesses in your entrepreneurial pursuits, talk a little about selling those things and has that always come natural to you or is it something that you’ve sort of worked out developed all the time.

Ryan:         I am very bad at traditional sales and the reason why is because I hate selling people. I have kind of a thin skin when it comes to that and so normal basic sales when you go out and you get rejected 95% of the time I find it really hard personally. But thankfully, I am really enjoying marketing, hey, how do I speak to someone in a way that’s interesting to them, that helps them, that makes them want to act and I find it fascinating. So marketing is always one of those things that thankfully I am actually am interested in what makes other people tick, how do I help them, how do I please them which means marketing especially in today’s age of social media much easier. A book that I read recently I thought was brilliant and it really captures the way I look at marketing was Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab Jab Jab Right Hook and I would highly recommend it just packet with really good case studies about how to actually do marketing today in a world of social media. And I thought I knew a lot and then I read that book and I was like I didn’t know much than I thought I did. For instance, we pay to boost posts on Facebook. That’s one of our ways we spend money and we changed our strategy based off of what we learned in that book and we saw like a 10x improvement on our effectiveness on those ads, it was crazy.

Ian:             One of something that’s specific to web entrepreneurs in terms of a challenge just because if you’re around and you’re investing all the time it sometimes maybe easy to forget that the act of selling is painful sometimes. Do you think it’s something that is especially difficult for web entrepreneurs?

Ryan:         Yeah, totally because you are disconnected from real people physical interaction. And that was one of the reasons why today when I screwed up on email and upset a bunch of people was something a learning experience for me because you just have to interact on a very personal level email-to-email, one-to-one and instead of like hey, his website and you never see people coming to it and rejecting it and I think you’re right. There’s detachment from reality and one of the things that has worked well for me as a CEO is really quote and quote getting out of the building and interacting as closely as I can with our students. Whenever I can I email them, I tweet with them, I talk to them, I meet them just to bring it back to reality like hey, these are and they all have things going on in their life and that’s always been both rewarding and valuable. It’s really amazing to hear real stories from people lives that we’re touching and it definitely keeps me going.

Scott:          I’d like to talk a little bit more about marketing actually. We do a lot of Google Adwords we’ve been doing that since the beginning of our company and I know I have seen you do Adwords, you do YouTube advertising, you mentioned Facebook. What are some of  I guess the channels that you’re finding work the best for your type of business?

Ryan:         We are finding, YouTube is really great just because it’s kind of native to what we are doing we’re teaching and we’re about to do a bunch of new YouTube ads so that’s always been good. We haven’t found any kind of magic vault. I think that’s one of the things that we’re learning actually about marketing as there is no kind of secret. It basically for us has been experiment after experiment after experiment and it never ends and as soon as we find a marketing channel that appears to be scalable, it scales then it declines. So you got to go and find new ones you got to change and adapt and its exciting but also kind of it wears you down. We’re trying to spend as much money as we can on marketing and what we find is actually sometimes it’s hard to spend enough money because you’re trying to find the channel that scales and Adwords supposedly should be the perfect channel for that because its infinitely scalable almost but the trick is how do you get a CPA that is profitable and you’re paying essentially $1000 for a conversion and you’re only getting $500 of  time value obvious it’s not going to work. So beyond Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book and what he says is just appears to be really no right answer to any of that unfortunately.

Scott:          Now I feel like it’s very different for different businesses to like we’ve been very successful with Adwords for our business but then I’ve actually tried doing some Adwords marketing for other businesses it doesn’t work the same. You feel like you must just be missing something. This always works but that’s something you just learn. One of the things that I know we’ve struggled with too is just attribution especially as we are doing so many different types of advertising. Can you talk a little bit about I guess what you’ve may be learned or thing you’ve struggled with?

Ryan:         That’s absolutely the hard part for us. Now we’re spending on YouTube, Adwords, display, social and our students are touching all of those. So how do we do attribution? I think the way we’re going to do it is basically a blended model. So we’ll 20% of attribution to the first click, 100% the last click and then 60% to the all the clicks in-between because for a while we thought YouTube is like a black hole of money that we were pouring money into and apparently it was very expensive just to get a conversion and then we turned it off and then all of a sudden we saw a big hit in our sign ups. I think we were like we’re not doing attribution correctly. So the new blended model should give us at least kind of better average view of what’s working or not.

Scott:          So I had more questions too just about video. Did you have an experience doing video production before this or is that something that was brand new for you when you started this company?

Ryan:         I had zero experience. It’s almost funny how little I knew about it. So it’s basically [inaudible][00:24:33] learnt. We hired good folks to start taking care of that and now we’re effectively professional production TV environment. It’s pretty insane. I am walking through our studio right now and it’s like being on a movie set crazy. So again that’s kind of a great example of nobody starts and knows what they are doing. So I think it can be figured out.

Scott:          Any tips for someone else who’s I guess doing video and trying to figure out how to make that work as far as hosting, as far as production, as far as things that I guess even the content what engages people, what gets people coming back.

Ryan:         I would say like as far as hosting most hosts can just use YouTube initially. I don’t know if technically you’re supposed to do that and YouTube doesn’t seem to mind similar competitors like Udacity are on YouTube and they’re really a pro-profit company. So you couldn’t just not worry about your hosting on social at all initially. The second thing is just a couple of good quality light and a little bit of money spent on a set will really go a long way. And then thirdly, probably just hiring a freelance audio-visual person to help you with the first kind of bit, it’s pretty cheap. So that’s kind of the basic stuff. We’re basically learning that, the shorter the videos the more engaged people are because their attention spans are short so that’s been one thing we’ve learnt.

Scott:          And as far as the actors’ people who are teaching the content, now, I know several of them are on staff. Do you also hire people to just come in and teach a course and do some type of a royalty structure with them or is it strictly in-house people?

Ryan:         We have both in-house and guest teachers and we just pay our guest teachers its straight up like a project and that seems to work pretty well for us because we definitely need in-house teachers. We want a real core set of teachers who we can rely on that, that set their core curriculum but we also want to scale quickly that’s why we’re adding more guest teachers.

Scott:          Makes sense. And then I had a question to just about as far as the revenue model for Treehouse its subscription so you’re really counting on people signing up and  then sticking with it for a while and I’m wondering I can definitely see that for businesses, how does that actually end up playing out for individuals? Do people tend to stick with it or do they learn a skill and then cancel their subscription in three, four, five months?

Ryan:         It really varies. What we’re seeing really obvious things like emailing our students really helped keep them engaged and it seems kind of obvious but we weren’t really doing that for a long time because we kind of thought, people don’t want to be bothered. The truth is people like to hear from you if they want to be engaged. So that was a big key for us. And as far as our life time value for the students goes, we want to get to the point where actually you’re a lifetime learner with Treehouse, you pause occasionally and then you come back and you keep learning because as you that’s kind of nature of what we’re teaching, you always have to stay up-to-date. So that’s our hope.

Scott:          It just seems like you continually are adding new content now. Just got some emails about WordPress training and I mean you are going into a lot of different areas where hopefully it becomes something that people just sign up for and then stick with it.

Ryan:         Totally and the truth is we wish we could release like a course a day. Really we’re realizing a course a week which we’re still happy with but yeah there is so much (Crosstalk)

Ian:             That’s impressive.

Ryan:         Thanks. That’s shocking and we’re getting there. We would like to do even more but that’s kind of where we are at.

Scott:          I am kind of curious with being a technology company that’s teaching other people how to program and how to use technology, what’s Treehouse actually built on?

Ryan:         It’s primarily the ruby on rails spec. we have some kind of crazy stuff under the hood occasionally I like to co-challenge and in a super advanced and technical. I don’t even pretend to understand how it works but we decided to go with actually basically running our own hardware. We used to be on Amazon and we actually moved off Amazon because it was actually starting to get kind of slow and what we found with that is you actually have to pay a lot of money in Amazon to get the same kind of performance you’d see on your own dedicated hardware. So we’re up to something like 23 servers now and we’re at a company called Blue box for hosting so the basic structure.

Scott:          I’d like to talk a little bit we’d mentioned it before with the four-day work week. I think Ian had some more questions about that actually that he wanted to dig into.

Ian:             Its funny because there are some similarities in the kinds of businesses that we’ve started kind of why we’ve gotten into entrepreneurship and when I say we I mean Scott, John and I and it’s kind of been a lifestyle thing for us. We’ve have also obviously done it. You’ve chosen to do it somewhere other than sort of the common place in a silicon valley to do it because we really try a lot of balance and that sort of thing and obviously you guys moving to the four-day work week, your sending them messages loud and clear and I’ve heard you talk a little bit about that in terms of balance and stuff. And we have families, we have wives and kids all three of us as well. So I just was curious, do you have suggestions or things you learned specifically about balancing and being an entrepreneur and bootstrapping outside of the tech industry and trying to be balanced when it comes to your own life.

Ryan:         A lot of these started when I had kids. So I really realized they were going to grow up real fast. So the primary way that I look at work class balance now is the stage where my kids want to hug me and kiss me and talk to me it’s going to end at some point so I really just protective of that. I think the trigger point that I’ve always fallen back to is that no matter how much I work, it will never stop and I think I realized, hey, I could work Fridays and Saturdays’ and Sundays and the work will never go away in fact I will just create more work. So what do I really want to happen with my life and I think I decided you could have a successful company and be efficient and just work a little bit less and so far that experiment has proven to be true. Now we’re seeing that work at Treehouse and it’s hard to know, it’s hard to measure that. We don’t really know the actually effect of it but it appears to be that everyone is a lot happier.

Ian:             That’s really big I think it resonates for us because that’s something that we’re learning too. I guess sort of in that it’s more a vein balance and privatization. I’ve heard you talk a little bit about before in other sort of interviews about you’re doing things that matter and spending your time on things that make a difference and clearly that’s a big reason why you got into teaching and helping people be lifetime learners. Just curious, are there other things that you would like to do outside of work sort of in the vein of changing the world and doing other things that matter Things that you sort of aspire to do beyond Treehouse and those things?

Ryan:         Yeah. Treehouse is definitely going to be taking up kind of all my attention for a long time so it hurts me to even think about that. But I have had just kind of fun daydreams about eventually trying to fund and create a free hospital. I saw a friend of ours basically go bankrupt because she had to go to an emergency room for seven days and it just ruined her financially and I thought this shouldn’t be happening and I lived in the UK for 12 years they have free healthcare there and it works. It’s amazing and I thought I bet it’s possible somehow to create a hospital where you could go for free and that it wouldn’t be for wealthy people, it wouldn’t be for the poorest of poor who are taken care by the government, it would be for this kind of strange milligram where people are getting screwed. They don’t quite fit in to healthcare coverage. So that’s something if I could I would love to try to figure it out but that’s going to be 20 years from now.

Ian:             That is such a cool idea.

Ryan:         Yeah. Some day.

Ian:             You should run for office.

Ryan:         Yeah. No maybe OK.

Ian:             That’s great. Thank you for sharing. It’s good to hear those things too.

Ryan:         No problem.

Scott:          Were there any other big takeaways that you feel like things that have influenced you from living in the UK just cultural things that maybe you hadn’t experienced in the US things you hadn’t really thought about you feel like they have shaped kind of the way that you are now and the way you build stuff?

Ryan:         The biggest thing that living outside it did to me is teach me that America is not the center of the universe. I thought I was worldly and open-minded but I just wasn’t because it’s impossible to really understand until you actually live somewhere else. I realized a lot of people don’t like America, they don’t like Americans and I said oh wow, OK so no everybody wants what we have and learning to kind of respect other cultures and religions and other points of view was pretty impactful to get personal. I was raised in a strong Christian environment and that was a very big part of my life until I was probably 25 and moving abroad changed my point of view fundamentally on all that and I don’t think it’s good or bad it’s just is. And now I wouldn’t call myself a Christian and this is weird to me but that’s kind of moving abroad did to me. So [inaudible][00:35:37] I feel like I am [inaudible][00:35:41] kind of a happier place now not that I was sad before but I just feel more like I am able to kind of feel like I am cohesive and it makes sense to me now. But at the same time the UK is kind of a tough place. It’s a little more cynical. I found it almost kind of antichristian in a way. That was hard coming from that environment. And then there are some of the fun things like I got to go to Paris and Amsterdam and Rome and Italy it’s amazing to be able to experience all of that which is just so hard to do when you live in America it’s so far away. But having said that, I am thankfully back in the US. There are so many things about America that are wonderful and I think of the optimism of America that I missed and I really love that.

Scott:          I think one thing that is interesting to me we have one of our business partners lives in the UK and runs that side of our company and one of the things that he says so frequently is just that Americans seem to have a lot more of an entrepreneurial spirit that he really doesn’t at least in the UK that he really didn’t feel like that’s something that’s valuable that there’s a lot of entitlement. I don’t know if you’ve experienced the same thing but that’s something that seemed overwhelming to him.

Ryan:         Its kind of a bummer that People are just left optimistic and it was kind of frustrating they kind of have the old class system over there and people kind of feel like they shouldn’t reach outside their class which is crazy to me but it’s a pretty and grim thing.

Scott:          Well, it looks like we’re running out of time here but there’s still so many other things that we could talk about.

Ryan:         Thanks for your time you guys.

Scott:          Thanks for your time. This was wonderful Ryan.

Ryan:         If any of you are listeners out there or having questions for me or want me to share any experience I will be happy to do that. You can just email me at [email protected]

Scott:          Wonderful. And then people can follow you on Twitter too is it ryancarson, is that right?

Ryan:         Right. Just @ryancarson

Scott:          ryancarson, perfect.

Ryan:         Thanks guys. I think it’s awesome what you are doing sharing knowledge and getting it out there and I really appreciate you having me on the show.

Scott:          We really appreciate Treehouse. It’s been great for our company and it’s a cool vision. I think you can change the world with it so best of luck.

Ryan:         Thank you. Thanks Scott, I appreciate it.

Ian:             Have a great night Ryan.

Scott:          Thanks Ryan.

Ryan:         Take care guys.

 

Thanks for listening to our podcast. For complete transcript of this episode or to find previous episodes visit our website at businessdesignpodcast.com. Have a question or comment? Email us at [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast by searching for business design podcast and follow us on twitter for updates

 

Show Notes

In this episode, Scott and John gives an introduction to the Business Model Canvas.

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by Ian Labardee, John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

Show Notes

In this episode we interview Jeremy Hitchcock, Founder and CEO of Dyn. Jeremy shares insights on bootstrapping Dyn, forming the company structure, and growing Dyn to a highly successful company with some 170 employees serving over 13 million users and 65,000 domains.

About Dyn

Dyn is an infrastructure as a service company that provides DNS and email services to many well-known Internet companies such as Twitter, Netflix, and Zappos, among others. Learn more about Dyn at: www.dyn.com.

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by Ian Labardee, John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

Show Notes

In this episode, Ian, Scott and I talk about the definition of an entrepreneur and discuss the qualities and common failure points that entrepreneurs encounter while starting their first company.

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by Ian Labardee, John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.

Show Notes

In this episode, Ian, Scott and I talk about the definition of a startup and discuss Steve Blank’s lessons learned in his “Search vs Execution” blog post.

Definitions:

“A startup company or startup is a company, a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” – Steve Blank

“A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” – Eric Ries

Steve Blank’s Blog Post
http://steveblank.com/2012/03/05/search-versus-execute

Show Description

The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by Ian Labardee, John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business.