Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to Subscription Heroes. I'm Scott Hurf, your host and co founder and chief product officer of Chernkey. Today I sit down with Claire Sullintrop, co founder of Forget the Funnel, a company, a book, and a powerful new way to unlock subscription growth. Forget the funnel helps you identify who your best customers are and how to reach and resonate with more of them. It's an approach that's been used by Wistia, Sparktoro, Calendly, Appcus, and so many more. I literally came away from this episode just bursting at the seams with ideas. I know you will too. Please enjoy.
So I'd love to start by having you frame Forget the funnel as a concept and kind of who's meant to benefit from it.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: So forget the funnel, as a phrase goes way back to when my business partner, Georgiana Lottie and I met. We both come from these marketing leadership SaaS backgrounds. When she left her final in house role, she was leading SVP marketing, I was leading as director of marketing. And our in house experiences, as you can imagine, really influenced both of our marketing philosophies. And working in SaaS, we were both keenly aware of the fact that even though the marketing department typically has like top of funnel targets, so to speak, so visitors to the website being like a major one, new leads in SaaS, that's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to where marketing can have an impact. And so forget the funnel was just this tongue in cheek way of saying that if you're setting all of your marketing targets and you're focusing all of your efforts on that top of funnel, you're totally missing the point of the business model. So that was the beginning of it. It was designed to kind of resonate with those practitioners, people boots on the ground doing marketing work, but also less tongue in cheek. It's meant to reframe or start to help the SaaS space or recurring revenue business space at large rethink their definition of what marketing is responsible for.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: It catches your attention. It's provocative.
We came up during a time with, I'll never forget when Dave McClure dropped the pirate metrics and everyone was flipping out about it. For good reason. But I like how it brings attention to the realities of the business model and that you're always working to expand revenue and keep people happy, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Yeah, pirate metrics were like you said, everyone was flipping out. It was such an important concept to bring to light, and I kind of think of our way of defining metrics that teams should focus on as the evolution of pirate metrics. We take that concept of pirate metrics, but we make it bespoke to each individual company and product and the customer they're trying to solve for.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: I read the book, which is great, by the way, go catch it on Amazon or wherever you buy it, but you kind of cast this as the antidote to panic mode marketing. It's reshaping, like you said, evolving from the funnel, but targeting, onboarding, improving support, docs, case studies, because you understand your customers so much better. Is that a good way of framing this?
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, and I can tell a very personal origin story with regard to that. So my final in house role, this is mentioned at the beginning of the book, so it's not news to you, but my final in house role was at calendly, which at the time was a tiny baby startup. Obviously they have become very successful, and I went into that role assuming that I would be responsible for the typical marketing metrics. Right. So growing our awareness in the space, driving, traffic, driving sign ups, but the product didn't have those problems.
Through a mix of the right timing and a really good product team, the product was gaining its own speed right in the way that it's shared. It gets shared with someone new, they're like, this is cool. It's already got all that shit built in. So as the director of marketing, I'm like, okay, how do I not lose my job? What do I do now?
And so my work became much more focused on what I didn't know was called product marketing at the time, but product marketing. So understanding how customers out in the wild were finding this product, what was making it such an obvious fit for them when they got in, what happened that made them realize, like, yes, I need this thing in my life. I basically had to shift gears and learn how to gather that customer insight and then apply it across that post sign up experience so that we could retain and convert to paid more of those many, many sign ups that were coming through the front door. So the reshaping of marketing as something that doesn't really stop when a customer signs up is kind of what we're going for.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Love it.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: I haven't heard it cast that way when relating to marketing. Kind of responding to the realities of a business model isn't something that I think we talk about a lot. And that's one of the more novel bits of Forget the funnel that I was really drawn to.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: What stage? Just in terms know. So we talked about calendly when they were smaller, baby startup. Is that the target for Forget the funnel? Or is it pretty much any subscription company who obviously wants to operationalize customer feedback and understand their customers better and retain more? Is this something that anyone can use?
[00:05:40] Speaker B: That's such a good question. So generally speaking, this concept of the customer led growth framework that we unpack in the book where you're learning from customers and applying that to improve your business, can be applied at most business stages and within different business models. The one exception to that is it is harder in the early stages where you don't have.
When you have not figured out who your best fit customer is or you're struggling to get your first initial customers.
That's the one scenario in which you might need to take a different approach and really rely more on customer discovery. So learning from your audience, the people you think you want to serve, and we do make some adjustments and we provide some resources for folks in that space in the book. But once you do have an understanding of who your customers are and who you really do serve, then this can apply across all stages and models. One of our team members, actually, his name is Ethan. He has been working with Forget the funnel as a team member for a couple of years now. But outside of work, he is passionate about performing arts. So he's an actor, he's a director, he's a production manager. He has his own early stage theater company, and it's been so cool to see how he's taken customer growth and he's applying it to the performing arts world.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: Oh, wow. That's awesome.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's wild. So there's lots of applications, both in a recurring revenue business and a totally different model. Our sweet spot, like as a team or as a company, our sweet spot is companies that have a smallish set of team members. So maybe it's like a founder or someone acting as a CEO, and then their first handful of folks on the product team and on marketing and customer success teams, because those are usually the folks who are trying to figure out, okay, what is our customer's actual journey? How do we make sense of this? They're doing it all for the first time or for the first time within this company, so we can provide a lot of value there. But this framework has been implemented at companies of huge sizes. Our friend Tara Robertson, who's featured in chapter two, when she was at Sprout Social, they were hundreds of employees. So it's got a lot of applications. It's just kind of your model and your stage are going to change kind of some of the steps that you take, I guess.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it would be a shame to limit its footprint too much because reading through this and just thinking about what I'm doing every day in my own business, it's like I get this feeling of relief, of know I haven't even been through the whole process yet. So just the hope and the promise of what it can provide is pretty amazing. And so I had this know that GIF with DiCaprio pointing at the TV with the beer can or whatever, probably from a Tarantino movie or something. I had this moment where I'm pointing out my iPad, like, yes, and it's tucked at the end of a chapter, I think chapter two. And it's this notion of, you call it how I met your product, and it's meant to push people, operators, founders, to understand that journey from your customer, saying, I have this problem. I can't live like this anymore. Beginning the source that leads to you and unlocking that in a very documentarian sense, those insights. So what have you seen when your clients embark on that journey? Are they unlocking new positioning, new marketing tactics, product strategy? I mean, it just seems like a really powerful notion.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: It can be applied in so many ways, both from a marketing and a product experience perspective. So rather than try to list them all, I'll give some examples. So going back to those early in house days when I'm trying to kind of figure out what's essentially product marketing and product activation, I came across the concept of jobs to be done. It wasn't new, but Intercom was doing a lot of writing about it at the time.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: I remember that.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: Yeah, they had like super latched on and had a bunch of success with the jobs to be done approach. And in my life before SAS, so funny how this ties in, but I had a journalism and radio background, and so just from that, I had a lot of experience conducting interviews. And the jobs to be done approach involves conducting customer interviews. And I was like, oh, this makes a ton of sense. Of course, you would just learn from the people who are already in the product. Like, duh, why aren't we doing that?
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Imagine that, right?
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Crazy. So when I first did this process in a SaaS environment, some of the immediate actions I was able to take based on those insights were things like, okay, when people come into the product and they're using it in their sales relationships, the value they're getting is driven by these particular features right here in the product. When someone's coming in and they're a professor and they're using it for student office hours. These other features over here actually matter a lot more. So I Guess what I'm describing is, and this is my favorite part of the process when we work with a team, is when you talk to your customers and you hear them describe the value that it created in their life. And as you talk to more of them, some themes start to bubble up. You can then look at how people describe the value and you can say, okay, for each of our customer types, we want to prioritize. We can build a short list of the features that matter most to them, and then we can create these experiences that drive them to those features more quickly and help them get to success more quickly. And you can imagine the applications there, copywriting, sending out emails that are tailored based on why someone is trying to hire your product and which features they should be driven to to get that job done. Those are immediate. In some cases, the positioning of the product as a whole might change based on the learnings there, but that's just a few to your point. It could be so expansive. We could spend like the whole episode on just that.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Totally. There's a great anecdote about this with auto books, I think it is.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: Where they were basically selling the whole toolbox, but you uncovered that this one tool is really valuable, and then that's what they adopted, and then they get introduced to the rest of the features. I love that anecdote because that's just the power of asking questions. Right?
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Totally. And I need to give all the credit to Chris Beck and the product team within autobooks. So Chris Beck, one of the pioneers of Jobs to be done, had taken this role as head of customer acquisition. And so naturally, he brought with him this culture of jobs to be done. And when I came on board to help them rework their messaging, I had this treasure trove of customer interviews that they had conducted. And so all I had to do is listen to them and start pulling out the insights. So shout out there.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah. But yes.
These small businesses weren't looking for an all in one finance management platform. They were in this moment of very specific pain where they were like, I've got to get paid. How do I make it easy for my customer to pay me? How do I do this? And so meeting them at that very sharp pain, rather than a broad message of, like, we will handle your finance stuff, was the turning point there.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: I've seen this done in really bad ways, where people are thinking they're asking good questions, but they're really projecting. I mean, it's human nature, I guess. Like, would you use this in a bar or a coffee shop? Well, I didn't say I would use it at all. Right, and that's just a bad example. But I've been guilty of those conversations at random Starbucks throughout Hollywood. But it's another know, but you cover this in the book, and I think it's one of the most powerful parts of it where you're showing how to ask good questions, what to ask. Is there some sort of beyond just following the questions in the book? Is there some sort of mental framing you found to be helpful in these moments where you want to lead the customer a bit, but you put guardrails on it.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Best way to sum it up, or rule of thumb, whatever phrase you want to use is stay open ended as much as you possibly can. So to your point about, and I actually don't think that was a bad example, like, would you use this in a bar or coffee shop? It's so hard to get out of your own head when you are working in the business or the product is your baby because you know everything about it, you're an expert on the product, and because you have this expertise, it's very hard to shut up and not talk about everything you know. So there's a very intentional focus in the questions that we share in the book of keeping things open ended and asking, so what did you do next? So what did you do next? So what did you do next? Versus what do you think about feature a or feature B?
There's a company we might end up working with in the future. I'm chatting with their CEO right now, and they've already done customer interviews. And I was like, that's amazing. We can move even faster. Their CEO shared some of the interview transcripts with me under NDA, all that stuff. And they had run four interviews, asked, leading questions asked. Okay, so when you got into the product, did you notice this feature? What did you think about this feature? Which is fully well intentioned? Right. It's an easy mistake to make, but what it did was get in customers way, and what they should have asked was, okay, so once you got into the product, what happened? When did you know that it was right for you?
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: And then the customer is able to volunteer what actually happened rather than fitting in somebody else's assumptions. So, yeah, rule of thumb is stay open ended. I know that's kind of vague, but to your point, that is why we were like, okay, here's the full list of questions to keep you on the right path.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Yeah. It's just so useful in how specific you get, because it's easy to kind of, like, hand wave this stuff. And it's the classic business book. What, you get one useful thing out of 150 pages.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Right?
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: Social media encourages us to all share platitudes and vague nuggets. But this concept of talk to your customers is, while a great idea, very. It feels very abstract in a lot of cases. And so, yes, the book was designed to be this manual for operators to be like, okay, no, but for real, how do we do that properly?
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I've seen this go off the rails so quickly. It's like, oh, we didn't filter out for people who canceled or left.
Very real kind of a big detail.
Or you're interviewing only your investors and you're chasing down these crazy one percenter features. Right.
[00:16:40] Speaker C: Let's take a little break to tell you about Chernke, the ones making this podcast happen. Now, I think Chernkee is awesome, but I am super biased because I'm a co founder. But I love what we're doing for subscription companies. You might look at your churn numbers and think, there's got to be a way to turn this around. There's got to be someone who can improve retention and help us track down why people are leaving your product. And that's why Churnkey is here. Churnkey is the only platform that fixes every type of churn for you. We handle retention for customer obsessed teams like Jasper, Fairdrop, AI Dungeon, and Castos. We lower cancellations by up to 42%, recover up to 89% of failed payments, and even increase customer LTV by 28%.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: And we do it with our user.
[00:17:23] Speaker C: Friendly, customer centric cancel flows, modern failed payment recovery, and aidriven feedback analysis. So if you want to run a healthier subscription business, head to Churnkey Dot Co to get started.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Speaking of specifics, there's this concept of the customer journey that you map out, but it's different than any I've seen. It's not the business goals. It's getting value to the customer as quickly as possible. You mind covering how you start that process, how you start mapping? You have this great matrix of struggle, evaluation, growth and all that.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And Gia is the one who brought this concept of CX mapping to our partnership. So when we met, she had done that within her team. I was new to that concept. I had done the customer research piece. She was new to that concept. And we were like, hey, look, we've worked together now that I've worked with her this long, once you've seen something, you can't unsee it. So where things start is I'm going to back up to the customer research piece that we've been on and kind of lay a foundation there. So leveraging this concept of the customer led growth framework starts with identifying who your best customers are. Who do you wish you could go out and clone more of? So typically you want to be learning from folks who are actively paying you to your point about not learning from people who canceled, actively paying you recently began paying so that they still remember what life was like before and are truly getting value. And what that means for every product is going to be different because different feature usage, different activation metrics and so on. But anyway, you identify folks who fit that criteria and run enough research to unpack some major themes in what struggle pushed them to start looking for something like your solution, how they found you, what that magic moment was, where they were like, oh, this is it, okay, I'm done. I'm done searching. And then what can they do now that they have you in their life? So you unpack all that, and from that research phase, whether you're running interviews or surveys or a combo are going to rise. Themes of the struggle that pushed people to seek a solution, what they were looking for in the solution, and the ultimate desired outcome. So basically, you've gathered the documentation, you've gathered the raw data of these people's journey. And so the process of building out a customer experience map is essentially taking that and making it tangible and unambiguous so that your team really understands. Okay, step one, step two, step three, step four, step five. These are how our best customers buy and get value. So the three yes to your point phases that we typically include in a customer experience map are the struggle phase, which represents however many steps they're taking out in the world when they're looking for a solution. The evaluation phase represents the part of their experience where they've found you, and now they're trying to figure out whether you're the right fit. And then the growth phase represents the point at which they have embedded themselves, or they've embedded your product within their recurring habits and they're fully, I don't know. I want to say they're lifers and there's an opportunity to either expand their usage or deliver more value through new features and so on. Cool. Any customer searching for a product is generally going to experience those three phases, regardless of whether it's B to B or B to C, self serve enterprise. But what changes, and this is, we were talking about pirate metrics earlier. What changes is the number of individual steps inside those phases. And this is where pirate metrics, in our view, kind of was ready to evolve. Pirate metrics is an excellent place to start from, but the number of steps someone takes to buy, I don't know, a CRM is very different than the number of steps someone takes to buy a scheduling tool or sunglasses or whatever it might be. You just had Corey Haynes on the show. I remember several years back when he was preparing to start his role at barometrics. We had just like, how's it going, call? And he was using pirate metrics to try to figure out where to prioritize his time. And I remember in this conversation with him, he was like, okay, so for barometrics, for us, awareness, I guess, is someone comes to the barometrics website, that can be awareness, and then there's activation. But is activation like when they sign up, or is activation when they're in the product? And they got to the AHA. And he was struggling because he didn't have a clear sense of how many steps were actually involved in barometrics customers getting to value. And it's a very real struggle. That's where people get stuck all the time. So having those documentaries, I guess, of your real customers experience helps you move past that and figure out, okay, for us, how many steps are really involved here. There might be two in a particular phase, three in a particular phase, and so on. And I can get more specifically with examples, if that's helpful. But I'm also kind of worried I'm, like, down a rabbit hole.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: No, I mean, everyone contextualizes what they know, right? And I'm just thinking about this for my own business, where totally, we vaguely understand the steps. We vaguely understand. Oh, they installed this embed code. Okay, well, then they did do this other thing. It's like, well, and so just being deliberate about through all these interviews, we understand for this segment of customers, they love getting to this part because they see X, right? Just understanding that having it on paper, being able to communicate that internally in a very clear way, to me, is borderline revolutionary. Right? Because totally, you vaguely think you know, but you dOn't.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: And you don't realize how much of a problem it is until you do have it on paper. And then you're like, how are we ever operating as a team? How are we on the same page without these data points? This is why I struggle when someone outside of SAS asks what I do. The classic when your dad is like, hey, my sister is asking what you do again with your job? And I'm like, I don't know.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: I work on computers.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: I work on computers. Yeah. But I struggle to put into words what we do because historically we were seen as marketing consultants. But to your point, the customer led growth framework actually extends and becomes like a way of improving how you operate as a team as a whole. And yes, that can help a marketing department, of course, but it can also impact the way that product and marketing work together and add in customer success and so on. It becomes a whole operating system, almost totally.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: It can help with resource allocation discussions where, why are we spending time on this? And it's like, well, this is the bottleneck right here. And you wouldn't have understood that unless you had done started at the basics.
I've been taking notes on this book. I've been preaching internally.
One edge case, I guess, is let's say you identify two, three, four customer segments and they each get crazy value. They each are great customers. Do you prioritize one over the other? Do you make that a central part of the onboarding phase or whatever? I'm just trying to understand that conflict.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: I love that question because it happens all the time, especially with products that have a very broad range of customer types. So anything that's got a lot know, horizontal market approach to it, I mean, calendly is a great example. There's a million different types of customer segments that need a scheduling tool, and I'm sure the same is true for Turnkey. Yes, it's for SaaS and recurring revenue, but there's so many different pricing models anyway. So the way that we approach it is, let's say you've got three different customer segments in the short term, like the next six to nine months. If you prioritized one and you attracted way more of those customers, which one would move the needle on revenue the most quickly? And that's one way of looking at it. We've actually got a whole rubric to support this discussion because there's other details that matter as well. For example, which one most aligns with the type of business you want to operationalize? Yeah, that's a really big one. Is there one that you have an unfair advantage with? Do you have personal experience in that industry? So you already kind of speak the language or some other unfair advantage? So there's different factors, but the exercise is not in turning away folks with those other particular jobs to be done. The focus is building out that CX map, and then the customer facing experiences needed to help that segment reach value faster. And once that's locked and loaded, then you go to the next segment. And then you go to the next segment. And next. And next. I remember, again, I'm going back to the in house days, which is so funny. I don't usually talk about this because it was so long ago, but it's just like very applicable in this conversation. The first version of an onboarding email sequence for calendly was super broad because I hadn't done the research yet. So it was like, welcome to the product. Here are five different ways you can use it. If you're in a sales role, go read this like getting started article. If you're in academia, go over here. If you're in HR, blah blah blah blah. But after the research was done, we were able to decide, okay, we're going to prioritize the folks who are in sales roles because easy willingness to pay, high motivation to get people to simplify the scheduling concept, they're a no brainer. So the first more tailored product experience and customer experience that we built out was for sales folks. And once that was in a solid place, then it was like, okay, who's next? And next. And next. And again, we didn't turn other folks away, but we kind of just let them have that more generic experience in the short term, knowing they're coming in. We're not retaining all of them, but we will. But let's focus on where we have the most leverage. And then go next. And next.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: I love that. It's fun to see what you did back then for this process and remembering my history of calendly, seeing how that product evolved. It's really cool. So I could go on about this for a while, but we're nearing time and I would love to talk about you. One appeal I think of forget the funnel, is finding order and chaos, and I don't know if the way you work is similar. Do you have any systems in place that you can sort the madness out from? Everything.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: Every day feels like chaos.
I hear you and I say that I genuinely enjoy the work that we do. Gia and I have a really solid partnership. When we're at our best, we are unstoppable. When we're at our worst, we drive each other absolutely crazy, as is a marriage.
In terms of how I manage the chaos right now, where we are with the business is we're getting to the point at which now that the book is out and we don't have to make time to write it. We can go back to focusing on building out the team of folks who know how to run research and training other folks who are not GIA or myself to start learning how to parse that research, applying the insights to customer experience mapping. So we're gradually beginning to operationalize our own process within our organization. And as I.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Very meta.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: Yeah, very meta. Very meta. As we do that, I'm beginning to see more empty blocks on my calendar where it's like, wow, I can maybe have some thinking time. That's new.
Unreal. Yeah. Systems wise, though, way of creating order out of chaos.
Just yesterday, at the end of the day, I opened up a mirror board and I was like, I need some kind of, like, do it now, do it later matrix. I can't remember which one I chose, but I just picked one and I was like, okay, here's the 50 things that are on my radar that need to be addressed.
What of these uses different skills or touches different areas of the business? And what do I have to do now? What can I ask someone else to do? What can I do in Q three?
[00:29:40] Speaker A: Taking inventory. Right?
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that was my attempt to create some order out of chaos. If you have suggestions, I am so open to hearing them.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: You know what's funny? I took that building a second brain course from Forte, and, uh, it was really fun. And I've been using the system in Rome for about a year and a half. Cool. And for some, I just, it just got too unwieldy. And I'm back to just writing out what I want to do for the week on paper. It just feels tangible and I can mark it approachable.
[00:30:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a constant struggle. I feel like I get on board with a system, and then to your point. Yeah, the system gets too overblown, and then I go back. And then I start over and then I go back. I don't know if that's just the human experience.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like, I don't know, chasing the newness and comfort and then running from the chaos and then, I don't know, it's just weird bounce. And it's impressive too, that switching gears, I know the pain of writing a book, and I've written like two novels or three that are shelved right now.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Prolific by now, which is super cool.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it feels good to have it done. It's like a bucket list thing, as I'm sure it feels good. I mean, you did the audiobook too, but two writers on a book like that has got to be. I mean, how did you manage that?
[00:31:03] Speaker B: It was such a pain at the beginning of it.
My mindset was like, yeah, I'll probably write other books someday. And at this point, I'm like, I probably will never write another book again. That was so hard working with a publishing company that I don't want to say she was a ghost writer, because that's not the right term, but we had a writer who worked with us every week for, like, a year and a half to get the content out of our heads and into an organized format on paper. And without that outside support, I don't think we ever could have finished this thing. We were very heavily involved. We did a ton of the editing and a ton of the rewriting, and we did many rounds of feedback with beta readers, which is why I feel like Ghost writer isn't the right term. But there definitely was a professional author who was part of our publishing team, who was responsible for getting the core concepts out on paper so that we could then manipulate them and turn them into this book.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: Idea translator. Writing coach.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: Idea translator. Yeah. And I genuinely don't think we could have done it without that help.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: That would be amazing. Also, that would be a really fun role. Like, full time gig, too. I imagine in some cases, it'd be maddening, but that's cool.
[00:32:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Really cool line of work.
[00:32:28] Speaker A: Yeah. All right, we're close to time. There's two questions I like to ask mostly everyone, and the first is, have you read a book or article recently that left an impression on you?
[00:32:38] Speaker B: One that is really top of mind right now is going back to finding order and chaos, figuring out where I should be, focusing my time versus not. I just came across an article about, and this is not a new concept you've heard of, like, $10 work versus $100 work or $1,000 work. So there was an iteration of that concept that I just read about that includes $10,000 work, and $10,000 work is the type of work that it doesn't have an immediate payoff. So you don't get the dopamine hit after you've done it for the day, but it's the stuff that creates major, lasting change. So you and the writing of your books, or me and the writing of this book with GIa, other major things that they're not immediately gratifying, but they create the long lasting impact. That's $10,000 an hour work. And that really struck me because I realized that I spend a lot of my time doing, like, $1,000 work. Which is the work that keeps the lights on and is client delivery and things like that. I'm like now that the book's out what's the other $10,000 work out there? So I've been sitting with that this week. It's a really cool article.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: That's powerful. It's pushing the Boulder uphill. Uphill. One push every day or something. I'm trying to messing a metaphor up here. But it sort of reminds me of. I think it's the twelve problems. Is it Feynman? Richard Feynman. Anyway. There's this concept of twelve favorite problems. So he had a list of twelve things he wanted. Huge things he wanted to work on in his life. Like I don't know. Revolutionizing physics or whatever. Right? It's like okay. That's great. Dude. How are you going to do that? But over time as his interests took him different places he'd say oh here's a book about this thing I want to do one day. And he would just sort of file it away. And then when it came time to he had time to do it. He had all that research ready to go. So it reminds me of that. Which is I think a pretty cool notion.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Super interesting.
What you just said I think ties in really well with the question that I know is coming. That I have been trying to think through.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: The most ridiculous thing you want to do but you don't think you'll be able to.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: So I am unrealistically optimistic about doing the things that I want to.
Like I don't think I ever will. But also I'll probably figure out a way.
But my answer to that is super boring. It's not anything cool like I'm going to climb Mount Everest or.
My husband and I are both very passionate about city infrastructure. What a cool thing to care about. Right? Caring about buses. Okay.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: It matters.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: That's the thing. It's a very unsexy boring topic. But it impacts the day to day lives of everyone. And there's this level of. Anyway that said there is an empty plot of land in our neighborhood that I want to somehow build a development on. I have no real estate experience. I don't know any developers. I am literally just someone who thinks that this is an important thing. And I have a really specific vision for it. There would be a commercial component with a very small scale grocery store. There would be a senior living component. There would be a childcare facility.
Like I said.
But it sounds so fucking boring.
That's what you want to do I.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: Mean, the ability to design a place you want to live that's not just your house is. I mean, how awesome would that be? I think there's a development like that happening in Arizona where there's no cars allowed and everything's designed to be walkable. And there are these fun, kind of old European style nooks and crannies you can discover.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: That's super interesting out in Arizona.
[00:36:39] Speaker A: Right? I know. I guess there's enough land, right?
[00:36:42] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. People do it. And it would just, like, for the neighborhood that we're in, which has direct access to a bus line and a lot of community resources, it would just make so much sense in this particular location and would have this major lasting impact long after I'm dead. But, yeah, that's the most ridiculous yet boring things that I really want to do and to the point you made a second ago. I am stockpiling research.
I've got a folder in my inbox with a bunch of stuff on this topic, and I had a call with a particular type of senior housing developer, and I don't have money to do this right now, but I'm just like. I'm in the stockpiling phase, so cool.
[00:37:27] Speaker A: Oh, that's super fun. I've never heard that one. That's amazing.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: It's a weird one.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: Love it. No, it's great. Well, hey, Claire. Appreciate your time. This is awesome.
[00:37:35] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Scott. This is so fun.
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[00:38:07] Speaker A: That's all for now.
[00:38:08] Speaker C: I'm Scott Hurf, and this has been subscription heroes.
