Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)

Rob Walling:
You’re listening to Startups For, the Rest, Of Us. My name is Rob Walling and I am your host this week and every week on the show today, I welcome back Derek Reimer and we talk through some really interesting listener questions, how to delegate as a perfectionist, how to organize and think about SaaS partnerships and planning your next quarter as a as super small team. We’ll jump into those questions in just a moment. If you haven’t checked out my new course, the SaaS launchpad, head to SaaS launchpad.co. This is the first course I have created in 14 years. It is incredibly in depth. It’s a video course with transcripts and worksheets and quizzes, and it’s all about early stage. It’s all about going from zero to one, going from finding ideas to vetting them, to getting them launched successfully. SaaS launchpad.co if you want to check it out. Now let’s dive in to listener questions. Derek Rimer, thanks for coming back on the show.  

Derrick Reimer:
Pleasure to be back.  

Rob Walling:
So I have some really good questions today. Continuing on this topic of more intermediate to advanced questions. The first one is from hello, it’s Ali on Twitter. Ali asks, we’re at $32,000. I’m going to assume that’s MRR and we’ve done it through long hours, endless experimentation and a lot of good luck, hard work, luck and skill. Sounds like. My question is, how should co-founders with perfectionist tendencies delegate work and what qualities should they look for when hiring? And then Ali actually goes on to ask two or three more questions, which we can take in due time. But as someone with perfectionist tendencies, we laugh because you and I are both that way in certain areas. So  

Derrick Reimer:
That’s the name of our band.  

Rob Walling:
That is my co-founders with perfectionist Tendencies. Tendencies, just perfectionist tendencies for short, what are we? Like a third wave ska band.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, perfectionist.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. No, I think that’s it. You can be the guy. You’re the guy just dancing on stage. I love to dance. Tuba, no drum, major drum major. You’re drum major drum  

Derrick Reimer:
Sax.  

Rob Walling:
Alright, and sacks. I forgot that everything’s in B flat people. We have to play it all in B flat. Okay, so back to Ollie’s insightful question, perfectionist tendencies, which I think a lot of founders, not all, but a good chunk of founders become founders because they really want control over things. They don’t like a day job because they’re ordered around and they work with people they don’t want to work with and they can’t hire and fire, but whatever. And I want to control because if I can control everything, it will be better. And oftentimes that’s true, but it doesn’t scale. You can’t run, I say Canton quotes, you can’t run a million dollar 2 million a or SaaS company with just you at some point you have to let some stuff go. So to that point, how do you think about hiring people to do that you’re a perfectionist about and what qualities do you look for?  

Derrick Reimer:
So I think there’s, as I was thinking this through, there’s kind of two buckets, two different kinds of delegation I think. So there’s the mindset or the task before you of I have some less skilled work that’s not worth spending my valuable founder time on and when I could be working on higher leverage things, so maybe bookkeeping or scraping some data to build a cold email list or even support, which is I think is something that a lot of founders hold on for way too long. So there’s kind of that bucket of things that’s like, okay, my time’s valuable and this stuff is potentially not worth my time. Then there’s the stuff that’s like the business needs certain expertise in order to keep moving forward. And though I want to hold onto this thing, actually I’m not the best person for the job. So then that’s delegating stuff that’s really not in your zone of genius. 

And a lot of times when you’re just starting out, depending on what your resources are, how much funding you may have or may not have, you just got to roll up your sleeves and do it. But I think that that ends up holding you back at a certain point if you’re just holding on too tightly onto something where it’s not actually in your zone of genius. So for that, it feels like an obvious answer, but it’s like, look for someone better than me at the job, someone who has that particular specialty. So I think about the initial branding for iCal. I did myself and it was fine. And then we came to the point of I feel like this is holding us back in certain ways with being able to really push our marketing forward. And I looked to someone who’s just this amazing kind of brand designer and has just a ton of skills on the aesthetic side of things where I just get a little bit limited. 

And it was so fun to work with someone who is actually an expertise in their field. So I feel like I don’t know this one, it takes a while to get to the place where you’re comfortable with it, but as soon as you embrace the fact that no, it really is a joy to work with people who are actually better at stuff than you and you get to be a collaborator with them, it’s not that you have to totally offload it and now you have no say ideally if you’re still the founder in the CEO driver seat or whatever, you are still collaborating on important things, but you’re not the bottleneck anymore on holding back that area of the business. Those are some initial rambling thoughts.  

Rob Walling:
I think it’s a key differentiator you’ve made between delegating things that you really shouldn’t be doing. I would include customer support in that. Now, in the early days, doing customer support is really helpful. As a founder you learn a ton as you transition. I believe I did email support with Drip for three months, four months, and then we brought Andy in to, he was doing part-time stuff, but he obviously is better at customer support than I am. And people say, well, I don’t want to lose touch with my customers. It’s like, yeah, Andy fed me all the feedback. Anything that was real feedback, we like, Ooh, this is coming up, you and I learned about it, you and I fixed it. So I would lump that in. But I like that differentiation of what starting to figure out what is your zone of genius? Because just because you’re a developer, not everyone listens to the show as a developer, but a lot, just because a developer doesn’t necessarily mean that development and or product are your zone of genius, you might find that you’re really good at left brainin marketing as folks like Ruben found out as folks. 

I found out, I’ve been writing codes since I was eight years old and I loved and I was a developer and I identified as a developer. It turns out I’m pretty good at building audiences and at coming up with educational frameworks that the stair step method and being an entrepreneur is making hard decisions with incomplete information and writing books. And I have this other thing that I’ve found in myself of almost like, I don’t know, it’s marketing, it’s copywriting, it’s whatever, brand building and stuff. So all that said, there are really only what six areas of a SaaS company. There’s product which is deciding what do we build next and how do we build it, how does it work? There’s design, which is obviously the visual aspect of that. There’s engineering, which is building right in the code, keeping things going. There’s marketing, there’s sales, there’s support and there’s success. And then there’s hr, legal and finance. But you should delegate all that. I mean you have to do it. Look on day one, you have to do all those. If you’re a single founder, if there’s two of you, you have to split up those six, seven things I just named. But what you said is exactly right, which is if you’re going to hire, you need to hire someone who’s better at it than you. And that’s something that I really didn’t realize until in the last 10 years.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I think that’s what a lot of us, when you put yourself in a position, maybe an artificially elevated position of I know best I started this company and I have the vision for it. And I mean I totally understand this pull to hold on tightly to everything. And I think sometimes that can lead you down a path of like, okay, I just need to find extra hands. I just need extra hands to delegate, to offload some of the stuff that I’m still going to hold on tightly to and own. And I remember when we required, drip was acquired and we joined Lead Pages and we brought on Brian Reed as our first designer. And I never fashioned myself as a graphic designer, but I think I’m a pretty good UI ux designer. But working with Brian definitely opened my eyes to like, okay, here’s somebody who has worked in companies where we need to actually start to scale a design department. 

And that is a different thing than having the expertise to take something from zero into something that customers love and use to then scale it into systems. So he started working on what’s our design system and it’s not, doesn’t necessarily mean spending a bunch of time working on something that’s not actually moving the product forward. A bunch of internal work. We did very lean on developing our design system so that we weren’t just spending a bunch of time spinning wheels, but he brought this experience on thinking about how do we scale this so that when we bring on more designers, they understand the system and we’re working in a coherent manner. So it’s like, yeah, I mean he had more expertise at that than me and it was really cool to work with someone then who brought that to the table and it was a really fun collaboration. So I think that’s the big word of encouragement here is to recognize that it doesn’t devalue what you bring to the table, but working with a subject matter expert on some of these disciplines is actually really fun. I think when you get used to it. Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
It is. And you can learn from them. When we were acquired, I was stressing to everyone about, oh my gosh, I have to go work for somebody. You have to go work for this company for a bit of time. And Ruben actually asked me, he said, what can you learn? How can you make this the best it can be? What can you learn? And we got in there and it’s like I had been running marketing for Drip, right? Working with Zach, who’s our junior marketing hire. And I was like, yeah, I’m pretty good. Drip’s growing obviously, so I must be good at it. Hey, I’m really hiring. Hey good marketer. Look at me. And we get in there and I’m like, oh, I don’t know shit about this. We figured it out, but I was not fine. I was middle of the road by the time we got in there. 

Just people who knew how to execute and like you said, build systems and just be better at it. So I was a perfectionist with every word, every word that was on that website I had written right? I wrote all the copy up till that point and I did want to let it go. I was just tired of having to, for me to write all the copy when I was trying to run this company. But what I realized was people came in and rewrote it and at first I was like, Ooh, that’s not mine. And then I was like, huh, that’s actually a lot better. So that’s the tough part, but it’s tough when you’re bootstrapping and you’re at 5K MRR. It’s like, can you hire someone who’s way better at you in these things? Maybe not. And that becomes the struggle of I start looking, I do start looking in cheaper locales. 

I say overseas being in the us, but really it could be South America, central America to find someone who is senior and who’s better at me than I am at that thing. And to maybe not give away my zone of genius. I wouldn’t hire someone to host the podcast and be high level strategy for MicroConf and TinySeed to be the face of the brand. You know what I mean? Those things. Those are kind of the things I need to keep doing. So in your SaaS in your company or if you’re a consultant or whatever, you’re listening to you, what are the things that you really need to do without the self-importance of I really need to do everything the best, but really get down to it? Most of us are good at one, maybe two things for you. I would say it’s product. It’s the ability to think of what to build, how to build it, how to elegantly incorporate it in, and then engineering the actual nuts and bolts of writing code and design is a third. I mean your full stack obviously. But to me design is kind of a third discipline, even though you’re very, very good at it. I think you’re actually genius level at the other two and you’re quite good at design. 

So those are things that you tend to hold onto with Cal.  

Derrick Reimer:
And I think just in general, this perfectionism quality that a lot of us have is it can be a really helpful inclination what allows you, drives you forward on performing your best work in certain areas. But I also think the blind spot that comes from that is especially early on, you’re talking about when you don’t have a lot of resources to go hire a world-class, fill in the blank, and you have to try to be a little bit more scrappy with bringing in extra hands. I think there is that phase where you just don’t have the luxury of being able to go find an all-star and then it’s an exercise in figuring out what stuff actually matters. And I think I’m still trying to grow in this area, to be honest. It’s a big struggle for me because I tend to think that a lot of things matter a ton, especially as I am, I’m competing on user experience. 

So all the details have to be on point, but the fact of the matter is you can get by with certain things. Just take for example, like an educational video that you send to a customer that explains how to do something right. My inclination is to want to either not do it or do it at a very, very high degree of execution. And really what matters most is that the customer understands how something works and that knowledge is transferred. And if it’s lacking that extra polish that would come from something that’s from a world class video producer or something, that’s okay in the early days, maybe you want to work to the place where everything you put out is at that atom wa and level of polish, but most of us don’t have just the resources to be able to do that and it’s not going to move the needle in that big of a way. So you need to just convince yourself about what things are really, really important and what stuff you, is it okay to just be good enough on?  

Rob Walling:
That’s exactly right. That is something that I’ve learned throughout my career and it took me a long time. Well, the first one was learning to just not do some things that seemed important that you just don’t do ’em all together and it doesn’t matter. The second thing is when I can phone it in, and that’s not, it’s do it quickly is really what it is. When can I do an unedited loom? This is like, Hey, I’m rob here, blah, blah, blah, and I kind of mess around, watch this on two x because it’s not great and send it to a customer most of the time, probably if it’s a one-off thing, you know what I mean? It’s like you can just crank on these things and then when to really polish it and when does it matter. And differentiating between those three levels is a skill that I think is very helpful to develop. 

We’ve actually answered one of Ollie’s later questions, which was how would you decide what to delegate and what to keep? We’ve kind of talked about that zone of genius. Are there things founders should never delegate? And I don’t say never, but certainly there are certain things that if you love doing a man, you’re really good at it and the business needs it. That’s kind of what you want to keep. Your role will change over time is gives you’re a million, 5 million, 10 million, you got to move more into strategy, blah, blah, blah. I would also say something we haven’t brought in is I have this very simple dichotomy of risk versus certainty. There are areas of your business where there’s just a bunch of, I don’t know, we don’t have marketing, we don’t have leads and I don’t really know how to close sales demos and there’s a bunch of uncertainty or risk there. 

And then there are things like customer support. We get the same 10 questions every day. We have a kb. I know that someone with knowledge of the product can do that. So that’s a certain thing In a lot of instances as your code base matures, not in the first month, but two, three years down the line, there’s a lot of certainty in writing code. Now you may have to spec it out, you may have to say, oh, it’s this feature and we’re going to hit all these. But you have a map in your head of like, I can code this or I can hand it to a developer who’s good and who I know will write high quality code and they can do it. And so that’s how I think about stuff in my businesses is where’s the risk or uncertainty? That’s what the founder should be working on. It is so easy and tantalizing and it’s like a big bowl of ice cream to work on certainty. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I’m good stuff. It is entrepreneurial procrastination, unfortunately, if you have any type of money to hire someone, go for the areas of certainty.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I think you just touched on this, but it sort of Jason Cohen’s joy, skill, need framework, which has been a really helpful framing for me to think about this. And I mean he’s sort of proven to be the master at reinventing his roles as now he’s gotten his companies to much later stages than a lot of us have. So he’s moved out of CEO into CTO and then into kind of a strategist. And so he’s very good at thinking about this and releasing the reins on control when he recognizes that he needs to reorient himself into the ideal zone. And I think a lot of us can’t necessarily be right in the middle of that joy skill, need Venn diagram because again, resource constraints. But I think if you recognize where you are in that, and I think a lot of makers are like joy and skill. 

We are very good at building products and we love doing it, but the business probably needs more marketing. I think that’s the story for maybe 90% of indie hackers and people who are come from the angle of developer founder, and maybe you have the resources to bring in marketing help. Maybe you have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself, but even just being aware that okay, even if you don’t find it that joyful, joyous to do that work, it needs to be done. So you got to force yourself to do that. And maybe there’s, in the course of wearing many hats, maybe you do also spend some time doing the stuff that you really love. You should maybe, I don’t think you should give it all up. You might find yourself burned out and delegate when you can to bring in help so that you don’t feel like you’re just failing at marketing and not getting anywhere. But I think just being cognizant of the traps of focusing only on the stuff that you enjoy and that you’re skilled at, but not missing that key component of what does the business need.  

Rob Walling:
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And Ali’s, last question is, would you recommend several people across several marketing channels or finding a generalist? The answer is, it depends. Depends on budget really, and it depends on the stage. But here’s the biggest thing. There’s kind of three ways to structure a marketing department in SaaS. It’s the infinity budget plan, which is I have infinity dollars that I’ve raised from gie, they just keep depositing this in my bank account. Derek, it’s great. I would hire a high level marketing strategist slash project manager and then I would hire five independent, I’m sorry, individual contributors. They could be freelance or contracted or they could be W2, it doesn’t matter. But one is just expert copywriter and one is an expert AdWords and one is an expert Facebook and one is an expert. You get the idea. It’s like each marketing channel that just costs a load of money and so almost none of us can do it. 

So when I look at the TinySeed companies that are doing seven figures in a RR, I have this list that I keep this quite a few of ’em. Every single one of them, without exception, the founder has figured out enough about marketing or sales or lead gen driving new customers. They have not outsourced that for the start. Now some of them at a certain point get to 500 a million a year, 2 million. They do, they hire ahead of growth, but they already know the engines. The engines are already in place. I don’t know anyone, maybe there’s an exception here or there. So we can bring up who has just hired that out of like, cool, go find out how to find more customers. It’s much like doing sales demos like the founder. You just have to do it if you’re going to do it in the early days. 

So usually the model is one of the founders says, I’m going to learn marketing or lead gen because the reason I differentiate is marketing I tend to think of as inbound. And then outbound is not marketing that’s outbound. So I’m kind of lead gen. I’m combining two into that term lead gen, but they learn marketing well enough that then they, and they probably start as the ic, the individual contributor. I remember logging into the AdWords console and logging into the Facebook ads console and writing blog posts for seo. Like I did all of that. Am I the best in the world at it? No. Did I do it until we figured out, oh, this kind of works, and then I went and hired freelancers to take over. Yeah, there are some exceptions to this. If you have budget, obviously running ad platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, AdWords, Instagram, obviously those do have experts that you can hire and are way better than you and they aren’t that expensive. 

So I would consider doing that from the start. But even to test, but almost everything else, it’s usually the founder being that strategist and then hiring ICS first, the founder doing the IC work and then hiring individual contributors to help out with that as you get budget. Because as marketing works, the company grows and as the company grows, you have more revenue and you take that revenue and you should invest that back in marketing. Usually it’s marketing and sales are the first things that you should be doing as you’re growing SaaS company. You have anything to add to that?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I mean, I think my own story is a little bit of an outlier case in part because I could find, because Corey Haynes was available who’s a very good generalist marketer, founder minded person. So a lot of times people have this type of person on their co-founding team and Corey happened to be available and is a collaborator for me to work with because I was at the time, didn’t have a developer, so I was just building product day and night, but also we were getting it off the ground and trying to do launches and figure out how do we get SEO engines rolling and how do we kind of working through the strategy. So we collaborated together on developing the strategy and it was just helpful to have an extra mind to think about these things. And then he did a lot of the sort of delegation of, okay, we want articles. We’re going to sub these out to a freelancer. And so he was in charge of, or a pool of freelancers, so he was in charge of building the spreadsheet of the keywords and it was all very collaborative between the two of us, but he was just basically in that role of the boots on the ground kind of project managing marketing stuff. And so that worked well for us. I don’t know how many generalist marketers are out there available to do that type of work as a contractor. So at the time I probably  

Rob Walling:
Almost no one.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have been able to hire full-time a marketer. It perhaps would’ve been too expensive at the time. So  

Rob Walling:
You have a luxury of a marketer wants to work with you because of who you are and because of the beautiful products you build and they know that you’re going to execute quickly. The zero to one marketing is what kind we talk about. That’s the founder level marketing, trying to figure it out. And Corey Haynes can do that. Agent GIO can do that. Any founder who succeeds can usually do that. I mean, I can pretty much list all of the successful fast-growing companies within TinySeed or MicroConf, like, oh, the founder has some hand in the marketing or sales. So you’re right, you’re the exception. It doesn’t mean that’s where it’s like, it’s not always a never, but in general, pretty 80, 95, 8% of the time, that’s the pattern that I see. So thanks for those questions, Ali. Our thoughts were helpful. Next question comes from Tiago, his ex Twitter handle is WBE Tiago. 

He says, how do you manage partnerships with other SaaS or products in your industry? What do you look for? What partnering with other SaaS, how do you reach out to them? What are red flags? And I asked him, tell me more what you mean by partnering. And he said, I mean guest posts, integrations, giveaways, joint ventures, that kind of stuff. I wanted you to weigh in on this because Avi, you’ve done a lot, quite a few partnerships and I think some of them have resulted in good results. So I’m curious your thoughts and then obviously I have my own just from my own experience.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I mean I think just in general, these are a lot trickier in practice than they look. I think oftentimes, so many times I think partnerships are fraught with the dynamic of if someone is much larger than you, do they feel like you’re getting more of the benefit than them or vice versa, what do you both have to bring to the table? So early on in Savvy Cal, there was one particular partnership attempt with a company that was related and sort of made sense for us to explore building an integration at a deeper level than just our baseline integrations. And it ended up being a pretty big waste of time in the end because they felt like they were so much larger and ultimately they were kind of afraid to drive too much traffic to us. That felt out of balance. And so I think there’s going into any kind of partnership, it’s important to have a deep understanding of what’s the vision for how you’re actually better together, why bother doing anything at all? 

Because if there’s not a foundational story that we can all agree on, then these things are going to either quickly or very slowly crop up and kind of taint the whole endeavor. So sometimes it’s getting your product in the hands of their customers helps drive retention or fill in a gap in functionality where they’re losing sales because they can’t provide this thing and your product can fill in that gap. So it’s that question of how do you both win with whatever it is. And it could be as simple as like we’re going to build an integration and email our customers both about that. I mean, those are oftentimes pretty simple, especially if they have an API or you have an API, depending on the direction that the integration needs to go, a lot of times they can be pretty simple and the main benefit is it’s helpful for their customers. 

Maybe you get a back link from their website on their docs and there’s kind of a good little link together. And other times when it’s deeper, I think the big thing is looking for are they actually willing to invest in this or is it just sort of a transactional sort of thing. I’ve had outreach from larger companies that are almost like putting me through kind of a BDR process where they’re like, you can tell they’re reaching out to a lot of companies asking for integrations because they have some person, random person in their partnerships department who just is working the long tail of trying to get their service integrated with a bunch of other people. And those are not super high value. I don’t have any evidence that their customers actually want to use my product. They just are looking for another backlink and another notch on their list of integrations to be able to say we integrate with thousands of tools. So I think it’s trying to make sure, is there an actual case here? Have you actually heard demand from your customers for something like my product and vice versa, can we develop something meaningful here or is it kind of just this transactional, we’re hoping to get a quick win on some traffic.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good way to think about it, to go up one level higher in terms of strategy, I think about integrations and partnerships as kind of the same thing, but an integration involves writing code, so a partnership, let’s just say it’s a JV partnership, joint venture partnership. This is what internet marketers used to do in the early two thousands where it’s like, I have a list. You have a list. Let’s cross promote our course to the other list. It’s free sales, and we can either do a one for one trade of we email without affiliate links, I email my list about yours, you email your list about mine, no affiliate links, or we can do the same thing and do affiliate deals, and that can happen. I did several of those with Hit Tail, which is a long tail SEO keyword tool. You remember Derek? We worked on it.  

Derrick Reimer:
Oh, yes.  

Rob Walling:
And I reached out to Rank Trackers. We did not have rank tracking, and I sent 10 emails and I got eight responses of like, absolutely, let’s do this. And what assets did I have? Well, we had however many thousand, I’m trying to even remember what the numbers were, but it was like a thousand customers and a marketing list of 10 or 15,000 maybe at the time. No, it was bigger than that actually, because maybe it was 20,000. And so I would reach out and say, let’s just do one for one emails. Just say, I want to use your rank tracker and then I want to recommend it and use Tail and recommend it, and that’s it. And we did that. Was it a massive flywheel that completely grew the business? No. But was it something that absolutely worked every time we did it? Yes, it would drive dozens of new customers. 

It would drive hundreds if not a thousand or 2000 of MRR if the list was big enough. So that’s a joint venture where you don’t have to write any code. You’re literally writing marketing copy. And then in integration, to your point, I see there’s integrations that you do for your customers. You integrate with Stripe because everyone wants you to integrate with Stripe. Stripe’s not going to promote you, PayPal’s not going to promote you. They may not even list you in their lab market, but you do it for your customers. Then there’s integrations you do for integration marketing, which is, remember with Drip, we integrated with Send, and we had 35 integrations, so I can’t remember them, but they were lesser known, even Gumroad at the time. We probably integrated with them in 2013 or 14. They were around, but they were not as known as they’re today. 

We integrated with them because our customers were asking, they were like, oh, I use Sendell, I use Gumroad. But also I approached them and I said, I want to integrate with you. We’re getting requests from customers. Here’s a screenshot of an email. Here’s things we can offer. We can publish a blog post. We can email our email list of, it’s probably by that time, 20, 25,000. We can post a tweet, we can write a knowledge based article. We can mention your company and app. We can host a webinar if you want. And so I would offer all that up and say, what can you reciprocate with? And whatever they could, we would just one for one those things. So if they could only do a blog post in a tweet, we did a blog post in a tweet, and if they said, you know what? This isn’t a fit. We can’t do it. I would seriously debate whether to do it to the integration if I was doing it more for marketing purposes. By the way, the whole list I just read is from the SaaS Playbook, page 97. If you want to know all the things that we used to do, I’ll tell you, the SaaS Playbook’s a great reference for me so that I remember these. You know what I mean? 

I don’t remember that list off the top of my head. So that’s how I think about it. I mean, you and I are definitely on the same page in terms of be cautious with just building things, thinking that it’s going to be promoted. I would get a commitment, I’ll say a verbal commit. It was in an email. This is what we’re going to do. What can you do? This is what we’re going to do back. So I had something in writing in case a product manager or a marketing manager switch things up later. I think that’s it. Oh, I guess Tiago asked how do you reach out to them? I mean, with Hit Tail, I did a bunch of cold email with Drip. It was a lot of warm network stuff as Drip became a brand, people knew it and it was easy to reach out and say, Hey, I’m the co-founder of Drip, and we want to do this. And what’s the other thing, Derek, going to events, going to MicroConf. There are a lot of people there at a MicroConf business software, even a bigger SaaS event. This is why I say build your network, not your audience. That network is so much more valuable than 10,000 people on X Twitter following you having five people that you can integrate with or co-promote or get in front of their audience is worth five times, 10 times the value of a social media following.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I think that’s the majority of, well, we have our integrations with the big players, but the smaller players that we integrate with, a lot of that is came from some degree of warm connection to the point where I could reach out, ping them and DM them or email them and make the case like you talked about, we’re hearing a lot of customers mention wanting to integrate our two products together. Here’s what we’re seeing. Are you guys seeing anything similar? And just start the discussion on have you heard anything? Oh, that’s interesting. You want to do a test? We get the ball rolling on conversation for good reason and not just be cold outreach  

Rob Walling:
To your point. And that’s something that didn’t use to happen. So if it’s happening to you now where you’re like, oh boy, I’m in a funnel, this is because marketers ruin everything. That’s exactly why. Our last question for the day was a question that was posted on a YouTube video from YouTube username and Derek Ddu, Plessy two 15, and I don’t remember what video was on, but the question is I would love a follow up to this episode on how you prioritize your Q3 or any quarter. So obviously building a SaaS versus what I do these days is different, but the question still applies. So I’m going to kick it over to you first. Derek Kremer, how do you plan for your quarter of Savvy Cal?  

Derrick Reimer:
Oh, yeah. There’s no notion of quarterly planning in my flow, and I think that’s probably the case for a lot. Same for me, for a lot of startups,  

Rob Walling:
Part of our biggest strength is that we are so nimble and can move so quickly, and frankly, 90 days in the life of a startup is like a year in the life of a big company. So trying to think of now, I don’t know, I’m going to be responding to customer inquiries and things as the market shifting. How can I move really fast? And so planning a quarter ahead would be, that’s just anathema to what you’re doing until you’re at, I don’t know, I don’t want 5 million, 10 million. When you have a bigger team, that’s when planning needs to happen. You got to get a bunch of departments on board and we’re going to launch this feature. So we need sales to learn about the feature, and we need support to know how to support the feature. We need success to know how to success the feature, and we need marketing to know how to market the feature. You know what I mean? That’s when you need quarterly planning. You can’t just come with a feature and say, Hey, we’re pushing this live tomorrow. That starts breaking things. So there’s a certain point at 2030 employees maybe where you need that. But today, so how do you do it? How far ahead do you plan?  

Derrick Reimer:
, I mean we generally have a sense for what the next four to six weeks looks like. I’m not a religious follower of Shape Up. I think that’s a pretty popular methodology from the Basecamp folks that people have latched onto as sort of a way to budget your time as a team and say, what are we going to? Let’s fix the time budget and then get done whatever we can on what we set out to do and flex the scope as needed. And I think that’s kind of generally, folks have coalesced around that as a good way to shape your work. And I think it scales down to pretty early stage as well. You might want to keep the cycle a little shorter. Six weeks feels long for super early stage, but when you get to a place of product maturity where you’re really just kind of incrementally improving it, I’ve seen that be a pretty helpful time range. And yeah, the goal there is to try to say, we’re going to build this thing and we’re going to build whatever version of it we can get done within our time constraints so that you don’t let projects just run away on you.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it depends on the stage and the super early stage. You and I would plan a day or two ahead. I mean, there were some features that took a week or whatever, and it’s like, all right, we’re going to plan for that. But we would shift pretty frequently when it was two or three of us because we could, and then it started being like, well, let’s do one to two weeks out. And one to two weeks was fairly locked in, although we would sometimes pivot of like, oh my gosh, there’s a huge opportunity here. But then what happens is, in my head, I kind of knew what two to four, two to six weeks was, but it was fuzzier. It was like, well, we do when we get there, but I kind of have an idea. And then as your code base matures, as your marketing matures, just your whole company matures. 

You hit 10, 20, 30 K, maybe 50 KMRR, that timeframe just slipped, not slips, but it moves out a bit. Like you’re saying you’re now at about four to six weeks of being more in focus, and I bet, but I bet still if I were to say, all right, so what are you going to do from six to 12 weeks? You have a fuzzy idea. You have a general idea. You’re not going to lock in and be like, oh, it’s this and that, but you kind of know, but once you get there, you’re then going to plan that far out.  

Derrick Reimer:
I wonder, have you seen, because I know the notion of quarters is very normative in sales in the realm of sales, sales organizations often think in terms of quarters, probably even more so than product development teams. But I wonder, do you have a sense of when does that normally kick in? Is it 20 to 30 team size ish, or when do sales teams need to start running on quarters basically?  

Rob Walling:
I don’t actually know. So sales team specifically, I don’t know, and obviously big Salesforce and these huge companies that have this Slack and all that, have these big sales teams run like that? Even if you were to ask me why do they do that? I have a guess. Oh, you have a deadline and your salespeople motivated by this and that, and maybe the commission’s paid quarterly, but I don’t actually know, so I’d be curious to get someone on the podcast, to be honest, a Jen Abel or a Matt Ock or someone else who really knows sales and said, why is that? Is it just because that’s how you’ve always done it? Is it, I mean, here’s something man, A friend of mine works at Intel and has, we both graduated college at the same time and he got a job and has worked at the same company the whole time, and I’m on my 23rd job, not literally, but close. Anyways, from the time he started, he would say, yeah, we’re doing our quarterly blah in the engineering department. They’re designing chips that are fabricated. You imagine the pipeline of that, the waterfall, this nature of that where it’s like 

You have to lock it in, you have to freeze this, and you put it’s in silicon and then it’s blah, blah, blah. So they did quarterly stuff and I was kind of like, why do you do that? And he’s like, well, that’s just how the company operates. And it does to me feel like an older school thing coming from that of Intel. But I also think you have to get people on a cadence of some kind, otherwise you’re just flailing around. Like we said, if you have six, seven departments and each department is five to 50 to a hundred people, obviously Intel’s bigger than that, but in a startup you got to have some type of cadence to get everybody on. This is the group of things that we’re going to do in each department during this quarter.  

Derrick Reimer:
I would venture to guess that, again, speaking a little bit from ignorance here, but that product teams, even when you’re 10, 20, $50 million company, I’m not convinced that a product development team should ever lock themselves into something that rigid, no, maybe sales. Maybe sales, but depending on when you bring in the adult supervision and people who know what they’re doing from large company sales orgs, maybe that’s the right way. But I would be very leery about ever of trying to apply that to a product development cycle.  

Rob Walling:
And I totally agree with that. And those are the companies where we eat their lunch as right, those are the companies. When you start moving my quarter by half a year on product development, no, good night. That’s when we’re going to demolish. You remember it? Was it Infusionsoft? They’re now named Keap. I thought they did one release a year and we were  

Derrick Reimer:
Pushing code, some kind of version thing, applied SaaS, which is like why  

Rob Walling:
Old school? And it was an old school mentality, and that’s not how you win in the market today, given how competitive it is. Awesome, man. Well, thanks so much again for joining me. Folks, want to follow you on X Twitter? You are Derek Reimer, and if they want to use the best scheduling link on the internet savvy cal.com. There it is. Thanks again, man. Thanks. Thanks again to Derek Rimer for joining me on the show. He’ll be back again in another month or two. If you enjoyed this episode, it’d be amazing to get a five star review in Apple podcasts or Google whatever they’re calling it these days. A thumbs up on YouTube or a like question mark plus thumbs up, something in Spotify. I don’t know how Spotify does if you’re listening to Spotify, look around to see if there’s a heart, but it’s great to have you here this week and every week, I’m Rob Walling signing off from episode 731. Well, hello, listener. You’ve stumbled upon our secret track, if you remember the track, endless nameless from Nirvana’s. Nevermind. That’s what you’re about to hear, except that was just a metaphor. I hope you picked up on that. Mr. Derek Rimer, I have questions for you. Oh boy. 

These are questions that I asked chat GPT to generate for me. My prompt was what are five intermediate level questions to evaluate a software developer’s understanding of Ruby on Rails? The first question, just so everybody knows, Derek has no idea what these questions are coming, and to be honest, I’m a little concerned. The answers might not be right. I don’t know. GBT give me questions and answers, so we’ll see. I’ll compare what you say to chat. Alright. First is, what are concerns in Rails and how do you use them to refactor an organized code?  

Derrick Reimer:
Okay, a concern in Rails, and this is funny too because my Rails knowledge is about five years outdated, so well boy. But I think a concern is basically a mix in, it’s a way to abstract some logic into a separate, my terminology is all messed up. I’ve been in functional land. It’s like a separate, it’s not a class. Is it a module? Do you have modules in Ruby? I think it’s a module. Great.  

Rob Walling:
I love this. Just so everyone knows, Derek wrote tens of thousands of lines of Ruby on Rails code for Drip, the entire big monolith written in Rails. So you had a decade of rail, you had a lot of years in Rails, but it’s funny how quick, like you said, it’s five years old and you’ve replaced a bunch of that knowledge with, is it Elixir Phoenix? Is that  

Derrick Reimer:
Basically, yeah, so it’s more like functional paradigms. I haven’t written object oriented code in a while. It was funny, I was doing a podcast episode with Ben Ornstein recently who was also a Ruby Rails expert back in the day. And I was trying to explain how something would work in Ruby Land, but I was using all the wrong names for the active record accessories. I was just so used to the naming conventions from Elixir,  

Rob Walling:
You recoded it. So in the early days when I was becoming a professional developer, meaning getting paid for it, I was a full-time employee of a dev shop. And so every project was a different language, and so it was like PHP, it was original active server pages before.net. There was ColdFusion. I learned Pearl this dates, it was 20, 24 years ago. But I rolled through ’em all and I remember being like, all right, I’m not great at any of these, but at least I had a big swath of it. Then at a certain point I went where the money was, which is.net, and I dove deep, deep, deep into net, and then I was 5, 6, 7 years into that, and the pay rates were great, but when I tried to then come back to anything to PHPI was like, I just can’t. The paradigms are so different. You have to unlearn it, and that’s where it’s tough. Totally.  

Speaker 3:
Yep.  

Rob Walling:
It’s good that I come prepared then, because I also asked no joke, Chad, GBT, what are five intermediate level elixir Phoenix questions? I did this on purpose, so let’s see if these are easier. We’ll just skip the rails one. We don’t have to do five. Let’s do a couple. First is  

Derrick Reimer:
Wait on the concerns. Was I right? What did Chad GT say?  

Rob Walling:
Actually didn’t say, it just said, this question tests their knowledge of code organization and how to keep their models and controllers clean and maintainable.  

Speaker 3:
Okay.  

Rob Walling:
So maybe someone can tweet us XX, Twitter us at Derek Reimer at Rob Walling and let us know, Hey, was Derek right? I’m guessing you’re right. That’s going to be my, alright. How does the Phoenix framework handle real-time communication? Explain the role of channels and presence in Phoenix?  

Derrick Reimer:
Ooh, yes. So this is actually one of the cool benefits of Elixir because it’s built on Erling, which has all of this very realtime capabilities built into it because it was built by Ericsson back in the day for running text message infrastructure. So think of all of these gazillions of processes and need to be running, and they’re all in parallel and they don’t necessarily need to affect each other. So it’s just designed inherently with that in mind of many, many processes that shouldn’t crash each other. And this works really well for web socket’s use cases where you have a bunch of people potentially on your site and you want to keep an open channel via web sockets to be able to stream data back and forth over a channel. So channels are the mechanism that Phoenix has for basically opening web socket connections and then sending data up and down that pipe instead of going through old school HTP requests, which are a little bit slower. And then the presence feature. This is actually a tricky computer science problem to solve when you’re active on a browser window and you want to show that that person is actually present there. Keeping that state synchronized with the server is kind of tricky and you just get that for free from sockets. So yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I think that’s correct because once again, I said, here’s the problem. I asked Chad JPT for questions that I liked for an interview. It didn’t give me the answer. It just says what each question will test. So yes, correct. Derek ding,  

Derrick Reimer:
Am I hired?  

Rob Walling:
You’re hired. These are the questions. We never ask these questions. Remember in interviews or like, no. Do you have a take home test or we can look at some of your code,  

Derrick Reimer:
Right? Yeah, yeah. Explaining how a web request works.  

Rob Walling:
Yes, exactly. What is H-T-T-P-S? Alright, last one. What are gen servers in Elixir, GEN servers in Elixir and how would you use them in a Phoenix application?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yes. So gen servers, this is kind of hearkens back to that fundamental architecture I was just talking about, but basically it’s a way to manage state in an elixir application. And it’s a little bit quirky. This is kind of more in the advanced principles of Elixir that a lot of new elixir developers don’t even necessarily have to learn about in order to get started with it. But if you start peeling back the layers on how Phoenix works and then how to do certain tricky things that involve, you have this centralized state and you need to make calls to it or just either fetch, fetch data out of that state or just make a mutation call or something. And it’s like the shared state that’s shared across all the processes that might be running in an elixir application. So we use these as an example, like this cool little subsystem where we have to throttle how many requests we make to the Microsoft API. Like they don’t allow more than five simultaneous requests at a time to any given API token. And this is actually a pretty difficult problem to solve in a distributed system, but using a gen server, we can basically spin up a pool of threads, sort and these threads service requests. And if you get 10 coming in at the same time, they kind of line up in the pool and you can control concurrency. So that’s just one example of how you can use gen servers to help out.  

Rob Walling:
I love that you’re giving me really serious complete answers. It’s just that I’m like, wow, do you really know your, of course you do. And you’re taking this serious, it’s great. It’s great. So anyone listening, I’m trying to get hired. Here you are. I really need a gig, man. Alright, last question In Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition, what is Hunter’s Mark? So just so for context, Derek has played a, well, it’s a seventh level ranger now named Ford, Ford Ranger, and you have played this ranger for I believe, five years now. I think the first game was in late 2019 that we played five years Hunter’s. Mark is a critical key component of a ranger. So Derek, what does hunter’s mark do?  

Derrick Reimer:
Oh boy. Okay. I think it’s a spell right and it allows me to mark an opponent and when I do that, I gain some sort of advantage on attacks. I don’t remember what that advantage is.  

Rob Walling:
You gain extra damage.  

Derrick Reimer:
Extra damage.  

Rob Walling:
There we go. Yep. So it’s not technically advantage on attack. That would mean like 2D 20, you take the high one, but once you hit, you get an extra D six.  

Derrick Reimer:
Lowercase a advantage.  

Rob Walling:
Exactly. I’ll give you, yeah, credit on that.  

Derrick Reimer:
Okay. Alright,  

Rob Walling:
Well thank you for playing the startups For, the Rest Of Us pop quiz.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yes. I’ll just be waiting to hear from HR about that.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. We’ll be back in touch. Got that job. Okay, cool. Thanks. Let you know. Awesome.