Episode 42 | Rob puts it to Mike With an Accountability Session

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Show Notes

• The 4 hour Body by Tim Ferris
• SingleFounder.com
• AuditShark

Transcript

[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 42.

[00:02] [music]

[00:11] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or are just thinking about it.  I’m mike.

[00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob.

[00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.  What’s going on this week Rob?

[00:24] Rob: Well, I just got a new laptop, and I spent way too much time shopping and trying to figure out what I wanted.  Yeah, this is one of those times…you know, typically, I’ve been buying Dells for years, and I’ve had, in general, pretty good luck with them, and  I’ve always liked them.  And actually, their service has gotten quite a bit better of the past few years.

[00:43] Mike: [laughs]

[00:44] Rob: I know.  It was really good in, I don’t know, 2000, 2002, and then it just tanked.  And now I had to call them when I got this laptop, and they were just on it and figured out a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t figure out with some drivers, and I was just really impressed, and they did it quickly.

[00:58] So yeah, this time I had spent a bunch of time, because I typically just buy the Dell Latitude or Inspiron, just go with the next model.  And this time I really wanted to reevaluate because my needs have changed, or as I’m not doing a lot of hardcore coding anymore.  I still write some code, it’s just not all about super fast and huge screens and all of that.  And when I’m at home, I have these two huge 22 ½ inch monitors in addition to my laptop screen, so I don’t actually need a massive screen.

[01:22] And I’m traveling a bunch more now.  Probably once a month I’m heading out, and I’m also working from coffee shops a lot when I’m in town.  So just my 15 inch Inspiron that weighs 6 or 7 pounds, it feels like a beast all the time.

[01:35] Mike: Yeah, I have the same problem with my ThinkPad.

[01:37] Rob: Yeah, and I love that 15 inch screen or the 17 inch screen you see.  It’s just like carrying a desktop around, it feels like.  So I really went back to the drawing board like I haven’t in 10 years, and just had to totally go back to square one and say, “What are all the good 13 inch and 14 inch laptops out there?”  I looked at Sony, Toshiba, Macbook, Macbook Pro, I looked at the Macbook Air, and then the Dell stuff.

[01:59]  I was down between the Dell Vostro, which is like a business laptop that’s really light, I think it’s under four pounds, and the Macbook Pro.  And I eventually went with the Dell.  I could just get some screaming fast stuff.  I got a 256 Gig SSD drive.

[02:19] Mike: Very nice.

[02:19] Rob: And 8 gigs of RAM.  So it’s just awesome.  I mean the screen is small, but it’s unbelievably fast.  So quite pleased with it.  And then the laptop itself…I got the SSD drive separately.  But just the laptop, all the stuff was under $500 because it was on sale.  So it was this 13 inch ultra portable with everything you need, and it was like $480.  The list price was seven something, but they had this deal because, you know, I think the new model is coming out.

[02:47] Then the SSD drive is $500 itself, 256 gigs.  So, you know, it was around $,1000 for everything.  But the equivalent setup with a Macbook Pro was over two grand.

[02:57] Mike: Wow.

[02:58]  Rob: Yeah, I know. I love the aluminum though.  You know the aluminum body?  I was just so tempted.  And I almost went with the Macbook and didn’t do the SSD to try to reduce the cost.  I eventually went this way.

[03:11] Mike: The SSD is totally worth it.

[03:12] Rob: I know, I know.  It’s really amazing.  It came with Windows 7 32 bit.  And, of course, I put in 8 gigs of ram and then wanted to install 64 bit, and it installed in under 10 minutes from start to finish.  It was like eight minutes.  I could not believe it.

[03:31] Mike: Yeah, it’s crazy.

[03:32] Rob: Such a difference.

[03:33] Mike: I put a SSD drive into another laptop that I’m actually going to be moving to shortly, just because now I’ve got SSD drives in both laptops and my desktop.  They just fly.  I mean it’s just an unbelievable difference between what is used to be and what it is now.  I don’t even think I would buy a machine anymore that didn’t have an SSD, or at least rip out the hard drive that’s in it and just put a new one in.

[03:58] Rob: Yeah.  I think I’m spoiled already.  And it’s super quiet.  That’s the other thing that’s crazy.  Yeah, there was so much other stuff.  It was fast and it came with a connector; I could connect the SATA side of the drive into the USB port of my old laptop, so the data migration was super simple.

[04:15] Mike: Oh, cool.

[04:16] Rob: Yeah, because it doesn’t need power.  Or whatever power it needs it can get from the USB, this little cable thing.  It was nice.  It probably took about a third of the time as all my other migrations have taken just because of the speed of this thing.

[04:29] Mike: Cool.

[04:30] Rob: Yeah, it was about five hours of work instead of…typically it’s about 12 hours.  So well, that’s my laptop adventure lately.  What’s been going on with you?

[04:37] Mike: I have new toys as well. I have an iPad 2.

[04:41] Rob: Do you?  Did you win it?

[04:44] Mike: No.  I don’t really have an iPad 2.  It was just an April Fool’s joke. (laughs)

[04:47] Rob: Oh.  I don’t feel like there’s a compelling reason.  I mean unless you really want the cameras, I don’t really see a compelling reason to go with an iPad 2 if you already have an iPad.

[04:57] Mike: No, not unless you’re doing a lot of things on there where the processor just can’t keep up and you really need the dual core.

[05:04] Rob: I’ve never…

[05:05] Mike: I know. I’ve never run into anything where it’s really that much of an issue.  And it’s got the same amount of memory, so if you run into a lot of the crashing problems, my understanding is that some of the programs that crash, they actually run up against that memory barrier and the OS just kills them.  And I could be wrong about that.  Hopefully, if there is a listener out there who understands it better than I do, because I haven’t really looked into it.  But my understanding is that that’s how it works, and that’s kind of been the limiting factor here and there. But I have never had something just react so incredibly slow that it just doesn’t keep up.

[05:39] Rob: Right.  Me neither.

[05:40] Mike: I am transitioning from one ThinkPad to another, so I’m bumping up my screen resolution a little bit and hopefully not adding too much weight.  But we’ll see.

[05:50] Rob: 17 inch monitor?

[05:51] Mike: No, it’s still a 15 inch, but it’s a 15 inch widescreen, which anyone who’s read my blog knows…

[05:57] Rob: You love widescreen.  (laughs)

[05:59] Sword screens you mean?

[06:00] Rob: Yeah!

[06:00] Mike: The thing is, this isn’t as bad because I’m going from 1600×1200 resolution to 1920×1200 resolution.  So I’m actually gaining screen real estate.  It’s not like I’m bouncing down.  I’ve had a lot of people who come to my blog and they’re like, “Oh, widescreen doesn’t actually give you less,” blah, blah, blah.  “You’re just getting more pixels wide.  How is that any different?”  I’m like, “It is different.  Trust me.”  (laughs)  Because most…if you look at any laptop that’s out there on the market now, you are very, very hard-pressed to find a 15 inch laptop that gives you 1200 pixels in height.  It’s just very difficult to find one.  You can get 17 inch laptops, but not the 15’s.  And there’s no way you’re getting under a 15 inch laptop that’s got that kind of screen resolution.

[06:46] Rob: Right.  And on my new 13 inch, I have 768 (laughs) in vertical screen real estate, so you would be pained.  1366×768.

[06:58]  Mike: Yeah.  And since I just got that eye surgery a few weeks ago, I would be able to see that!  If they put the 1600×1200 onto a 12 inch screen, I would be able to see it. Actually, you know what?  I had a question for you, though.  It’s been a while since we talked about this, but have you tried Google’s Priority Inbox yet or no?

[07:15] Rob: I still haven’t.  I switched it off like the first week and I forgot about it.  Is it working?  Are you using it?

[07:21] Mike: I use it all the time.

[07:22] Rob: Do you?

[07:23] Mike: Yup. I separated things out into my high priority and low priority stuff, and it’s very nice to be able to have that delineation between things that I’ve responded to or the ones that I haven’t yet and I need to.  It’s just nice.

[07:37] Rob: I feel like I didn’t have a need for it for a while, and now as you and I were just talking, I’m handling some more of the email support for the Academy right now, and so I do actually have a delineation between kind of high and low priority stuff.  So I should probably re-enable it and get used to it.  I was having so much trouble changing my workflow, I’m like, “It works the way it is!”

[08:00] Mike: I have found that it probably has lost a little bit of its usefulness now that I’ve cut down on the number of emails that are in my email box.  I did an email purge over the past couple weeks and I dropped from 13 or 1,400 emails in my inbox down to about 50.  So the 50 that are left are things that I just either haven’t archived off to the side because I still need them there or still reference them or whatever.  But I’m working on getting that down to like 20.  (laughs)

[08:30] Rob: Right, right. Yeah, that’s typically where I stay.  I try to stay under 20. I think I’m at 46 right now.

[08:37] But hey, so I saw this really cool blog post.  We’ll post it in the show notes.  You ever heard of this blog called SingleFOunder.com?

[08:43] Mike: Yeah, I have heard of it a few times.

[08:45] Rob: Yeah, this guy has the same first name as you.

[08:48] Mike: Same last name as well.

[08:49] Rob: So this is Mike’s blog!  He totally didn’t put me up to this, but I read this post he posted about a month ago.  It came through my RSS reader.  It is Mike’s goals for 2011.  What I liked about it is that you’re stepping out here.  You’re kinda putting yourself on the line saying, “These are my goals and there’s some public accountability here.”  And I admired that.

[09:14] In addition, I just read through the goals and I thought they were cool, so I just wanted to run through them quickly.  I wanted to find out maybe how things have been going in terms of them; your progress and stuff.  You didn’t know this was going to be an accountability session, did you?

[09:23] Mike: No I didn’t! You’re putting me on the spot here!

[09:25] Rob: Yeah, I totally am!  Your first goal was to blog more often, at least one full-blown article per week on average.  How’s that been going?

[09:31] Mike: I’m still playing catch up because my goal was actually to put out more than 50 articles for this year.  It’s not just write one article per week on average.  Because I didn’t post that until March.  So I was already like eight or nine weeks behind.  So at this point I’m probably 11 weeks behind, so I’ve kind of not gotten quite to where I want to be, but I’ve gotten ideas.  And I’ve had a lot of things going on, partly because of number four, which is to speak at a conference, which we just announced the MicroConf 2011, and I will be speaking at that conference.

[10:08] Rob: Nice.

[10:08] Mike: So, you know, there’s a lot of work that goes into putting that conference on.  So I’ve been spending a lot more time doing that stuff than I would have…I would have probably spent that time doing blogging if I had had it available to me instead of working on a conference.  But I’ve come up with some really good ideas for different blog posts based on stuff I’m doing with AuditShark and various other things.  So, you know, the ideas are there, it’s just kinda carving out some time to actually write has been a little bit lacking. But I did document my entire Lasik surgery.

[10:39] Rob: Right.  I saw that.  Those pictures were gross.

[10:41] Mike: (laughs)

[10:43] Rob: Don’t go to Mike’s blog.  There are pictures of his eyes; they’re all bloodshot. OK, that’s how it always is, I find.  I always have this list of ideas and just find it so hard to actually flush them all out.  It’s hard to find the time.

[10:56] Rob: OK, so number two is launch AuditShark before the end of June.  Do you think you’re on track for that?

[11:02] Mike: I don’t know if I’m on track for that!

[11:04] Rob: Not with the conference, huh?  That’s totally set me back more than I thought it would.

[11:08] Mike: Yeah, it totally did.  I was really shooting for June 27^th, I think I’d said.  But I have blocked off about 100 hours at the beginning of May to do nothing but work on AuditShark.  So I’m looking forward to having that time available to really buckle down and see how much further I can bet on the code.

[11:29] I think I’m not really that far off from having it done.  I almost wonder if I could have it done in 100 hours of work.  But again, I gotta sit down and actually figure out if that’s realistic or not, and I just haven’t had time to do that yet.

[11:42] Rob : Right.  So you’re taking time off from consulting to do that?

[11:45] Mike: Yep.

[11:47] Rob: That’s cool.  That will be nice; super productive during that time.

[11:49] Mike: Oh yeah.  (laughs)

[11:51] Rob: OK.  Number three is reach out to fellow developers more often.  Have you been doing that?  Have you been able to pull it off?

[11:56] Mike: Yeah, I have been.  I’ve been having some email conversations with people.  I’ve sat down with a couple of different people over dinner and just kinda talked through some of their products and some challenges that they’re experiencing, and just emailing with various people.  Some if it’s just kind of, “Hey, how you doing?” and other people it’s just trying to help them through the challenges that they’re facing with their product, whether it’s marketing, or technical, or what have you.

[12:20] Rob: Yeah, that’s cool.  It’s funny.  About two years ago I made the same commitment to myself.  Basically, I kept hearing about Google’s 20% time and I realized I wanted to do the same thing for myself. I decided then, and I’ve kept up with this, that 20% of my time I try to donate it to help entrepreneurs.

[12:43] And I don’t advertise that just because I feel like I might get bombarded with stuff.  But in any given week I spend 20% of my time doing essentially free either in-person, over Skype, or email consulting.  And that’s been cool.  I have the flexibility to do that because of the products and stuff.

[13:01] Well cool.  Number four is speak at a conference, which we talked about.  You’re speaking at MicroConf.  Congratulations.  Man, I heard that guy who’s recruiting speakers for that thing is just a bastard.

[13:11] Mike: He is. (laughs)

[13:12] Rob: That’s me, obviously.  That’s cool.  And that’s in Vegas.  Tickets are going on sale soon.  And then number five: finish your book.  Have you had any time to work on it?

[13:22] Mike: You know, I have.  I’ve got a partial outline done, and I’ve come up with some good ideas for a couple of different chapters.  I still need to flesh out some of those ideas a little bit more, but it’s interesting.  It’s one of those things where what I kinda like to do is position part of the book as how to build a company that is…I don’t want to call it an empire.  I think there’s a book out there called “Empire Building” or something along those lines, but how to build a strong company and go against much larger competitors and beat them solidly.

[13:53] The problem is that I don’t really feel like I have any credibility in that area because I  haven’t done it.  So it’s almost one of those things where I’m writing the book kind of as I do it.  It just doesn’t feel credible to me.

[14:06] Rob: Right.

[14:06] Mike: And I mean, obviously, I don’t want to make anything up.  I want to base it off of experiences and things that I’ve done and things that I am doing.  But it’s also one of those…it kind of gives me the realization that if I’m going to follow that line of thought and put the entire book in kind of that vein, it’s not like I could finish it this year, because that’s a process, and that process can take years.

[14:28] Rob: Right.  More of an ongoing story.

[14:30] Mike: Yeah.  So I don’t really want to do that with the whole book. I think I might devote a chapter to the thoughts and ideas around that.  But there’s a lot to be said for trying to go up against larger competitors and finding ways to win.

[14:43] Rob: All right.  Well good.  So in looking at your goals, you have these five goals and only one of them is about launching a product.  The other four are dealing with blogging, reaching out to developers, speaking, and writing a book.  What does that say?  Like, 10 years ago would you have had the same goals?

[15:03] Mike: No.  I think even last year I probably wouldn’t have had most of the same goals.  AuditShark probably would have been on there.  I’ve been working on that for quite a while.  But I don’t know.  It seems to me like most of the things that are on here are more personal development than product development.

[15:18] Rob: Right.  Almost like building a personal brand a bit.

[15:21] Mike: A little bit.  But I think it’s more having fun, to be perfectly honest.  More doing the things that I want to do versus doing the things that I have to do.

[15:30] Rob: Right.  So would you say building a product is something you have to do and the other things are things you want to do?

[15:34] Mike: No. I think that I want to do the AuditShark product.  I have a lot of really great ideas, and some of it’s pent up frustration about what I see out there for AuditShark.  I mean if you look at security software kind of across the board, they really prey upon fear.  You read a lot of marketing books you kinda come to understand that there are only so many factors that will drive somebody to buy a piece of software.  And one of those is fear.  And the security industry in general tends to really clamp down on that and say, “Well, if you don’t buy this, then this could happen.”

[16:14] It just feels so…malicious isn’t quite the right word.  Dishonest probably isn’t as well, because I mean they’re right.  Those sorts of things could happen.  You know, bad things can happen if you don’t have all your AV software up to date or this and that.  But it just seems like they take it a little too far.

[16:31] Rob: Yeah.  So you want to enter that market and try to be more ethical or more realistic.

[16:37] Mike: No, I want to open it up and share information like it’s never been shared before.  So the idea is to…you know, when you look across all the different companies that are trying to secure their environments and try to lock everything down and make sure that people aren’t getting in or taking things out that they shouldn’t be, every single one of them is its own silo.  Like you look at a large enterprise corporation…I’ll throw out IBM or something like that.  It doesn’t matter who it is, whether they’re technology based or not, they’re going to have silos of information and they’re going to have silos of responsibilities.

[17:11] And the problem with that is that you end up with lots of people duplicating the same efforts for no good reason.  And it’s not efficient.  And you end up with people who are doing things over that other people have done just because they don’t have access to it.  They just don’t have the ability to see what other people have done.

[17:32] And when you look at a lot of small businesses, they are trying to do the same things that everybody else is doing, but nobody is willing to share that information and say, “Hey, these are the types of things we’re doing.”  And for some reason they think that it makes them more secure.  But if you look at open source software, for example, the source code is out in the open.  Is it less secure than propriety software?  Well, that whole argument is kind of debatable, but I don’t think that you can realistically make the argument that it is significantly more or significantly less secure, it’s a different kind of secure.

[18:04] Rob: Right.

[18:06] Mike: My idea is to essentially share a lot of security information across customers so that they can leverage it together and kind of leverage their collective wisdom to figure out what sort of things they should be doing and what sort of things they shouldn’t be.

[18:18] Rob: Right.  But it’s not share information, it’s share aggregated anonymized information.  Is that accurate?

[18:24] Mike: Yeah.

[18:25] Rob: OK.  Just to be clear.

[18:27] Mike: Yeah, it’s more what they’re doing, not necessarily what the results are.  You know, what their specific results are.  You know, they’ll have a benchmark where they can see where they rank in comparison to everybody else, but they won’t know that, “Oh, I’m X percent better than this person over here.”  They’ll know that they’re X percent better than the average, but not necessarily who every single person who constitutes that average is.

[18:50] Rob: So you have an early network effect that you need to overcome then, because when you only have one, two, three, or even five users of your system, it’s going to be a bit clunky because you’re not going to have smooth data, so to speak.  Do you have a strategy for kind of getting past that?

[19:05] Mike: I have some beta testers who have hundreds and hundreds of computers.  So I don’t really see that as too much of an issue in the beginning.  I mean don’t get me wrong, it is kind of an issue.  But there’s definitely the potential for…let’s say I sign up a customer who’s got 10,000 machines and collectively, everybody else is only 5,000.  Well yeah, that new customer could seriously outweigh a lot of things and skew averages and all kinds of things like that.

[19:33] But the way around that, what I’ve been thinking is that if you do kind of a rolling average, which is the way that I track statistics on my blog, I’ll do a 30 day rolling average where I’ll track kind of a velocity of new subscribers.  And as long as I’m blogging, that velocity is constantly going up. And it may dip down here and there, and it obviously dips on the weekends, but because you’ve got a 30 day rolling average, the most recent ones kind of outweigh the ones that are 30 days ago because they are most likely lower.

[20:06] What I’m looking for is I’m looking for trends.  And that’s kind of what  the information that people will see is, because on day one, they’ll be 10,000 new results, for example, one from each of the computers.  Let’s say we’re only evaluating one rule.  With the 5,000 machines that are currently in there, there are 5,000 times 30 days worth of events.  There’s 150,000 events already being tracked.

[20:30] So you’re adding in 10,000.  That’s less than 10%; it’s about 8% or something like that, 7.5%.  It could conceivably affect it by that much.  But unless they are at 0% or 100%, it’s not actually going to affect it by 7.5%.  It’s going to be like maybe 2% or 3%.

[20:49] And what will happen is over time, over 30 days, over the course of 30 days, they could significantly affect the swing of any particular rule, and they could become sort of the defacto benchmark.  But as the subscriber base grows, then presumably, everybody else is going to be making their own decisions and based off what everybody else is doing and what they feel is important in their own environment.

[21:13] What you’re really trying to do is just get everybody on the same page.  You let the people who know what they’re doing kind of drive the decision making process.  And the people who don’t know what they’re doing will depend on those people.

[21:27] So I think it is a network effect, but I don’t know as it’s nearly as significant or as dependent upon the number of people in play as like Twitter or Facebook.

[21:36] Rob: Right, or Ebay or something like that.

[21:38] Mike: Yeah, because one customer could have anywhere from 100 machines to 10 or 100,000.  Each of those machines basically constitutes one vote.

[21:47] Rob: Right.  So early on it won’t be so hard to get the volume that you need.

[21:51] Mike: Even on the low end, I mean I don’t anticipate signing up those very, very large customers.  My target base of customers is really under 1,000 machines in the environment.

[22:02] [music]

[22:05] Rob: You know, while we were talking I was continuing to look at your list of goals.  I guess there were kind of two questions that came out of it.  The first is you have your blog.  You’ve been blogging for years.  What purpose do you feel like your blog serves?  Do you feel like it’s helped you in your career, in your personal…

[22:20] Mike: No.  (laughs)

[22:21] Rob: OK. So why do you blog?

[22:23] Mike: Why should I write a blog?

[22:25] Rob: Yeah, because everyone says, “Oh, you should have a blog.”  And it’s like I don’t necessarily believe everyone should.  But I was curious to hear your take on it.

[22:32] Mike: I like writing.  I mean when I was really little I wanted to be a writer.  It was one of the 50 million things that I wanted to be, but I was very good at it, and I was very good at crafting stories.  Writing was just one of those things that I just wanted to do.

[22:47] It’s kind of a…I find it as a creative outlet for me.  It’s something other than programming.  It’s still typing a lot, but it’s stringing different syntax together, I guess.  So it’s just something I enjoy and it kind of fires up my creativity a little bit.  And it shifts my focus away from the user experience and marketing and things like that, because I don’t track how many people come to a specific page, or using keywords on a given page, or what have you.  That’s not stuff I look at, really, for my blog. I mean I write my blog more for personal therapeutic purposes more than anything else.

[23:21] Rob: Right.  Yeah, and see, that’s funny.  Your reason is because you like to write.  I’ve talked to so many successful bloggers who that’s exactly why they do it.  That’s why  I started.  I started blogging six years ago. It was because I used to write all the time when I was a kid.  And I won like fiction contests.  I used to submit articles to magazines when I was 12.  I never got any published, but that’s what I did.

[23:44] And I think that without that…I think that’s why so many blogs stop is if you are convinced that you need to blog because you have to do these other things, because the blog is supposed to be like a promotional tool, or because it’s going to make you famous, or because it’s going to make your product work, I think those motivations fade pretty quickly, because it is so much hard work, you know?  I feel like the ones who’ve stuck around are people who just love to write.

[24:06] Mike: Right.  It’s interesting because I look back on my goals a little bit.  I thought about this a few weeks ago, even.  One of my goals was to blog more often, and at least a week.  I’m hesitant to start blogging on my AuditShark website because there’s a lot of stuff that I have to say.  And the piece that’s actually held me back is, “Will this count towards that goal?”  Because there’s different articles that I want to write.  Because I’ve done a lot of work in the security and systems management industry, and if I were to write an article on what’s wrong with the security industry and I were to post it on the AuditShark website, does that count as an article towards my blog goal or not?

[24:47] Rob: Right.

[24:47] Mike: And I’m just like, “Well, I don’t know.” (laughs)

[24:49] Rob: Yeah.  Depends on how legalistic you are about it.

[24:51] Mike: Yeah.  I guess, technically, no, it really doesn’t because it’s more marketing than anything else.  But I suppose I could cross post it and post it on both places.

[25:00] [music]

[25:03] Mike: I’ve been reading Tim Farris’ new book, “The Four Hour Body”.  Have you read that?

[25:06] Rob: No, I have it hear.  I’ve heard some interviews with him and have friends that are doing the diet.

[25:12] Mike: The carb diet, yeah.  I’m actually doing it now. I started a week ago.  It’s boring and repetitive.

[25:18] Rob: Is it really?

[25:19] Mike: But he says flat out: “It’s not intended to be fun.”  I started it the Monday before, and by Saturday I had already lost five pounds.

[25:28] Rob: Really?  Wow!

[25:30] Mike: Between five and six pounds.  And that was one week.

[25:32] Rob: What’s the one sentence explanation of how you’ve changed your eating habits?

[25:37] Mike: I eat at Chipotle twice a day.  (laughs)

[25:40] Rob: Seriously?  Wait, that’s part of the diet or not?

[25:43] Mike: It’s technically…Well, it is and it isn’t.  Basically, the pitch is you eat a lot of carbohydrates that are going to take more for your body to digest than anything else.  So, for example, you avoid white foods.  So white rice, white bread, milk, dairy, those kinds of things, you don’t eat them.  And he goes through the different reasons why you shouldn’t eat certain things.  And I forget what it was for milk and dairy, but basically it reduced your weight loss by like 30% or something like that.  It was something ridiculously high number.  I was like, “Wow.”

[26:21] He goes through and say, it’s like, “These are the things that I tried.  And although it’s not a scientific proof test,” he’s like, “The proof is in the pudding.”  So I figured I’d given it a shot.  And what have I got to lose?

[26:33] Rob: Right.  Just five or six pounds.

[26:35] Mike : Yeah!  So I’ve lost five or six pounds so far and I’m doing it again.  One of the stories he had was from somebody who said, “I go to Chipotle twice a day.  I eat their steak fajita bowl.  I don’t get white rice with it.  I don’t get cheese, don’t get sour cream.”

[26:53] And don’t get me wrong.  It is really kinda boring.  But so far it’s been working for me.  And I can feel myself losing weight.  I’m not saying I feel great about it, but, you know, it’s more or less my taste buds hate me.  That’s really what it is.

[27:07] Rob: Right.  Yeah, I’ve heard several interviews with him about this diet in particular.  It sounds like a lot of people are trying it and getting good results.  It overlaps with the concept of Adkins of just cutting down the carbs and how bad they are for you, and that maybe we’re not designed to eat so many of them and stuff.  There’s also the Paleo diet.  I don’t know if you’ve heard about that.  But it’s kinda like Paleo is going back to saying, “When we were cave people we used to eat a lot of meat and veggies and didn’t really eat carbs.”  But the gist, at least from my laymen’s perspective, is they’re all kinda related.  So certainly I think there’s some value to these as an approach.

[27:46] What’s nice is that you can still eat steak and you can still eat vegetables.  You can still eat stuff that tastes good.

[27:52] Mike: The one thing that’s killing me is the two eggs every morning.  Ah, it gets old!

[27:57] Rob: You eat two eggs every morning?

[27:58] Mike: Yeah.

[27:59] Rob: OK.

[28:00] Mike: Two eggs and usually like a small bag of beef jerky, mainly for the protein aspect.  One of the things he advocates is that you have a fair amount, at least 20 grams of protein within half an hour or so of waking up, then that really helps to not only satisfy cravings, but keep your body in a state where it feels like it’s getting the food and nutrients that it needs.

[28:25] And then you get to binge one day a week, which is awesome.  (laughs)

[28:28] Rob: Right.  That’s what I’ve heard.  Yeah.

[28:30] Mike: So last Saturday was my binge day and I got a lot of things.  I didn’t eat myself till I was sick, but I had all sorts of stuff.  I had pizza, I had wings.  I had almost a whole bag of chips.  I had a bunch of soda.

[28:42] Rob: Did you gain five pounds in a day?

[28:44] Mike: No, I gained I think three.

[28:46] Rob: Did you?

[28:47] Mike: But it says flat out you will lose than within 48 hours or so.  But I would  imagine I’ve already lost that three pounds.  Yeah, other cool stuff in there is how to sleep better.  And it’s got some stuff on polyphasic and biphasic sleep. So you’re basically sleeping on a different schedule than you probably currently are used to.

[29:09] And then he’s got some exercise stuff in there.  And then, of course what everybody kind of focuses in on is the sex chapters as well.

[29:19] Rob: Although, what’s funny is no one’s asked him about it in the interviews.  It’s always about the weight loss stuff.

[29:24] Mike: Really?

[29:24] Rob: Yeah.  And that’s what he said.  He’s like, “It’s funny that no one ever asks me these questions.”  It’s like how to perform like a superhuman in bed.

[29:31] Mike: Yeah.  You have to read it.

[29:33] [music]

[29:36] Rob: My last piece of news for the day is I have a potential acquisition in the works. It’s very large.  Well, for me it’s large.  I’m under NDA, so I can’t really say anything.  But it’s kind of a big scary process right now.  It’s a completely private sale and I was contacted through someone who I’d never met before, but he connected me with someone.

[30:00] What’s weird is that I actually know of these people and I know of their group, and I know what apps they have and stuff.  And no, it’s not 37 Signals.  They are looking to sell an app that kinda fits within my schema of things. And since this guy read my blog, he’s like, “Yeah, I thought you might be a person who would be interested in it.”

[30:16] So I’m in talks with them right now.  It’s a fascinating process.  I will kind of keep you updated in terms of if it just falls through, and I’m sure I’ll be able to talk about some vague reasons of why it did.  Or if it goes through, then obviously I will be able tell you what app it is and what the news is.  But should be another, I’d imagine a few weeks.  Right now I just have a lot of questions.  And if things pan out I’ll make them an offer.  And then I’m sure we’ll have due diligence and transition for a month or two.  It’s kind of an interesting thing.

[30:46] So frankly, that and the conference prep I’ve been doing has totally just swamped me.  I pretty much don’t do anything else.  I do email and those two things.  So everything new, all my other projects that I had that I was going to launch in the next few weeks are just on hold until further notice.  So that’s been interesting.

[31:03] [music]

[31:06] Mike: I think last week you’d turned me on to that Instapaper app.

[31:10] Rob: Instapaper, yep.

[31:11] Mike: I tried it and I loved it until I ran into a webpage that I tried to save and it had other types of media in it, and it just…the whole thing bombed.  (laughs)

[31:21] Rob: I’m afraid it just didn’t pull the media down.

[31:23] Mike: It seems like it didn’t pull anything down.

[31:26] Rob: Really?  Because I’ve had it go before where it will just…like there will be a video there and it just won’t pull the video but it will pull all the text around it.

[31:32] Mike: Yeah, it was getting nothing.

[31:34] Rob : Oh, interesting.  But I mean I haven’t had an issue with the multimedia stuff.

[31:42] Mike: Yeah, I don’t really know what happened.  The problem is that I had saved…I just came across it and I’m like, “Oh, I’ll save this, and save this, and save this.”  And then I just left it.  I didn’t save the links to them.

[31:52] Rob: Sure, yeah.

[31:53] Mike: I haven’t checked their website to see if they still have the information on those links or not.

[31:58] Rob: They probably do.  But realistically, what I learned as I started Instapaper and stuff, it’s like anything.  If you lose one of these, how important is it?  We consume a lot of media that really isn’t that critical to what we’re doing.  I find that when I accidentally delete 10 of the PDFs that I was going to review that week, it’s like, “Oops!”

[32:16] Mike: Or four of my emails.  (laughs) Is that what you’re saying?

[32:19] Rob: Oh, oops!  You noticed?

[laughter]

[32:21] Rob: I hope this is a good catch-up I think for both of us to kind of hear what we’re up to, as well as for the listeners.  Maybe they can get a little insight into what’s going on with us at this point.

[32:30] So next episode we’ll back to our hard hitting, informative and actionable podcast. Is that right?  I think you actually have one outlined, right?  It’s called “The Customer Acquisition Process”; something people can look forward to.

[32:41] [music]

[32:44] Rob: If you have a question or comment, call it into our voicemail number: 888-801-9690, or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.  If you enjoyed the podcast, we really would appreciate a review in iTunes.  You can just search for “startups” and we should be, I think, the number one or number two rank there.  And, of course you can subscribe to us on iTunes.  That helps us.  Or you can subscribe via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com.

[33:07] Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons.  And, as always, a full transcript of this podcast is available at startupsfortherestofus.com.  Thanks for listening.  We’ll see you next time.