Speaker 1 00:00:04 Hey, this is Subscription Heroes, and I'm Scott Herf, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Turnkey. I loved the chat I got to have with Cory Haynes. In this episode, he's a marketer, entrepreneur, podcaster, and investor who's building swipe files and swipe well. You also might know him for his time at Baremetrics as head of Growth or his consulting work with companies like Savvy Cow, Riverside fm, and Time Tastic. In this episode, we cover the metrics he tracks for every one of his projects. Howie manages time across so many endeavors, Howie conducts customer research and so much more. Here we go. So I was just in swipe well yesterday collecting some things for a future top secret project. Felt good.
Speaker 2 00:00:48 I love it, man. What, what were you doing specifically? Or like what, I know it's top secret, secret, but like, what were you searching through? Like tell me like your process of how you're going back and using your swipe file.
Speaker 1 00:00:59 So here's, here's my issue. I have a billion tabs open in Safari, which presents another issue because Swipe Well is only in Chrome. So this is a, a live feature request
Speaker 2 00:01:11 For
Speaker 1 00:01:12 Safari plugin. But yeah, so I, I just have this really annoying habit of collecting, I don't know, probably 200 tabs across five, six browser windows. I know it's in there somewhere, like if I'm looking for inspiration or if I just see something on Twitter and I pop in and, and look at it, and then I, you know, I move on to the next thing. But what I used to do was I would just take screenshots, keep 'em in the Dropbox folder, super annoying, but now cue the ad. I have swipe Well <laugh> and uh, it's actually kind of changed how I keep track of screenshots and inspiration and all that. So how are things with that? That's
Speaker 2 00:01:51 Awesome to hear, man. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:01:52 Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:01:53 Yeah. Swipe belt's going well. It's one of those things, again, I, you know, this journey even better than I, but the SaaS journey, bootstrapping is a long, windy, arduous journey sometimes. I mean, honestly, I think building any SaaS company is like that. It's just when you have some funding that might feel a little bit easier, like you're making your, your, your learning quicker because you have more resources and you're in general just moving a little bit faster. But for what it is, man, it's been such an amazing journey. Learning, first of all, but two, like actually kind of being in the game and being able to implement a lot of the strategies that I've been doing for other companies and consulting and just re-sharing, you know, talking about other things that I see companies do and just talking about their strategies, doing tear downs and breakdowns and things like that.
Speaker 2 00:02:36 It's so much fun. And so every month we get new customers, MRR goes up not as fast as we want it to. Of course, never <laugh> never's, never fast enough. <laugh>. The, the curve is never steep enough, but yeah. That's so awesome to hear. I think one of the big things we're, we're still consistently beating the drum on is just customer research, getting closer to partner market fit and just trying to really nail down the jobs to be done of like, why do people use a product like this? And how do we find more people like that and help them do that job better?
Speaker 1 00:03:07 That's what's what's been fun to see. I mean, and you've always shared publicly what you're working on. You know, you're the way you think about things, but the coolest thing is you can just tell there's, it's different because it's your thing. You're running the show, you're doing everything for better or for worse, including your, your, your business partner. But like, you can just feel that excitement you have. It's pretty cool to see.
Speaker 2 00:03:29 Yeah. Thanks man. I, I try to like exude that, you know, sometimes I feel like I have to filter myself a little bit to kind of get the company voice down and represent the vibe of whoever I'm doing the consulting for or, or working for at the time, right? And I try to think more about like, how do I put myself in the founder's shoes or whoever we want to kind of be the face to represent the company and then working on swipe well, I'm like, oh, that's me. But now I have to like, take all the filters off <laugh> and um, you know, get back to myself in a way where I'm like, how would I talk about this? Cuz I'm so used to just being like ghost writing almost in a sense, right? I wanna, you know, let my freak flight even more with swipe. Well, it's a good reminder, actually,
Speaker 1 00:04:13 I was searching my email the other day for, for something, um, one thing we'd written to each other and I found something from, gosh, it was, I don't know, 20 19, 20 20,
[email protected] and I think you actually referenced this email the other day, the ones where you were sending targeted upsells. Yeah. But it's just funny to see your voice evolve over the years and Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's amazing. You are, you are kind of a, a ghost writer chameleon, so yeah, it's just, it's just really cool to see you out there on your own. Not that you've haven't always been on your own, but you know, um, you know what I'm saying. It's true though.
Speaker 2 00:04:49 Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a long winding journey. There's no straight way against, it's the bootstrapping way. It's just, uh, it's windy.
Speaker 1 00:04:56 Are you still doing, you know, you wrote that you did like a hundred customer interviews over one two weeks at one point. Are you still doing the constant back to back calls?
Speaker 2 00:05:07 No. No. Geez, that was only for kind of a period when we were trying to nail down our onboarding. Yeah. And so kinda the process was like last year we started working at Swipe Well, and in, in February of 2022. And then by around May we had kinda like an M V P that was ready for people to, you know, start using. People can log in, it works, it's a little bit buggy, but it's sort of like, okay, let's start getting people in. So then we had like an alpha invite, worked out some of the kinks there, had a beta invite, and then it kind of felt like, well, things are working pretty well the way that the tool should be used works now. How do we get people to use the tool the way that it should be worked, <laugh>. And so we needed to do kind of a formal self-serve onboarding flow, which we had none of at the time.
Speaker 2 00:05:53 And so instead of just kind of taking a first pass and trying to guess at what that might look like, I thought, you know what, how about I just hop on a bunch of calls and I tell people, Hey, I'm just gonna like share your screen. I'm just gonna be flying the wall. Just go through it and try to figure out how to work it and then like, stop and ask me questions whenever you feel like you get stuck or something doesn't make sense, or you're not really sure where to go next. And through there I started to kind of like piece the puzzle pieces together a little bit where I could see the patterns. And I'm starting to see, okay, for these types of use cases, this is what people wanna do first and second and third. And okay, this is like one of the aha moments where it kind of clicked for people.
Speaker 2 00:06:37 So it was through those, you know, a hundred calls over about two months that we designed the first iteration of the onboarding flow and then rolled that out to customers, had them go through a, again on a live call, Hey, sign up. But now they have a Selfer onboarding flow and then again, okay, another, you know, 10, 20 customer calls, work out the kinks, you know, move step forward, actually be step two and rearrange this thing over here. And then I think it was by like our fourth iteration after about 130 calls, maybe overall we felt like, okay, this is, we, we can stop here. Let's move on to the next project. We feel like it's good enough for now.
Speaker 1 00:07:16 130 calls. Impressive. What do you do with all that raw feedback? It was a lot. It was a lot. Yeah. I mean, how do you structure that? Is it just pattern matching and taking notes or, I mean, what do you do with all that stuff?
Speaker 2 00:07:27 I didn't have like a super formal process where I was, um, you know, like formally mapping every single customer call exactly what they were doing. We really didn't even look at any data to be honest, either, because there was just so much going on on the screen. It's kind of like these intangibles, right? It just really didn't make sense. And it was too, there was too many details for me to like actually write down and track for every single customer that I could kind of draw some patterns. So I was more drying patterns in my head, but I was, I was noticing and marking down all the aha moments, all the questions, all the places people got stuck. And the main thing that I was doing was I was recording the calls on Zoom using a tool called Grain and Grain. Now there's a bunch of tools accurate that allow you to do this, but Grain at the time was the only one that allowed you to basically create like an annotated timestamp on the call.
Speaker 2 00:08:18 And so live on the call, I would have this little, this little kind of chat right in front of me under Zoom, and someone would ask me a question and I would just be like, you know, question about Chrome extension installation and or be like, you know, confused about X, Y, and Z feature. Oh, you know, got really excited and things kind of clicked when they did this. And then that Tam timestamp would be connected back to that part in the call so that I could share it with Connor and be like, Hey, here's what I'm doing. So like, as the calls were going on, I was sharing that feedback live with him also so that he could also kind of see the patterns and draw some of the same conclusions that I was. And we noticed that after just kind of collecting all the timestamps, there were a lot of patterns and, okay, everyone gets stuck over here. Everyone has an aha moment over here. Just kind of taking like a raw list of all those timestamps annotations allowed us to kind of map what we thought would make sense to be a pattern for the onboarding flow.
Speaker 1 00:09:19 That's really cool, especially the sharing part because when I've done this kind of research, it's so hard to communicate, you know, the raw experience or the, or the patterns or the roll up and it, it ends up just being you in a silo saying, no, believe me, this button should be over here. Whatever. Right.
Speaker 2 00:09:37 That's cool. Yeah, that's, that's definitely one of the huge challenges. I mean, I found that across every SaaS company it's like, yeah, certain teams know different things about the customer that if everyone knew them, everyone would be on a lot more aligned in the same page. It would just unlock so much for the company to be inspired and creative and really just be a lot more autonomous to kind of take things into their own hands. What you find is, oh, you know, the engineering team is really, really well aware of kind of use cases and usage and the data is coming back and forth and what customers are actually kinda asking for. And then you have the marketers that are very aware of objections and conversion rates and interests in different topics. The sales team, the customer success team, et cetera, et cetera goes on. Everyone knows kinda like a different angle. It's like the, have you ever seen the, the little cartoon of a bunch of blind men feeling a different part of the elephant? You know, one guy is like, it's a tree and the other guy's like, it's a bush. Another guy's like it's a rock. And it's, it's an elephant, right? Because everyone's feeling a different part of the customer that they think is the entire truth. But in reality, if you were to kind of mesh 'em all together, then you have the full picture of the customer.
Speaker 1 00:10:49 Totally. I mean, and you said one word back there that, that popped out to me, which was inspiration. And you know, whenever we share internally a customer gift or screen share or video and the running into a problem, it is really inspiring to see one, your product being used in a, in a meaningful way. I mean, I kind of pinch myself every time. It's just kind of the dream <laugh>. And then two, you know, they care enough to say, this isn't working for me, I'm gonna tell you about it. And then, you know, for me at least that's super inspiring. I, I have to resist the urge to go and drop everything and go, you know, quote unquote fix it or, you know, interrogate the problem even further. Yeah. You know? Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 00:11:27 <affirmative> absolutely. Having that direct line of communication Yeah. Is like none other.
Speaker 1 00:11:35 Let's take a little break to tell you about Turnkey. The ones making this podcast happen. Now. I think turnkey's 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 gotta be a way to turn this around. There's gotta be someone who can improve retention and help us track down why people are leaving your product. And that's why Turnkey's here, turnkey's the only platform that fixes every type of churn for you. We handle retention for customer obsessed teams like Jasper Fair drop, AI, dungeon and casts. We lower cancellations by up to 42%, recover up to 89% of failed payments and even increase customer LTV by 28%. And we do it with our user-friendly, customer-centric, cancel flows, modern failed payment recovery and AI-driven feedback analysis. So if you wanna run a healthier subscription business, head to turnkey.co to get started, you're doing marketing, you're doing product name, your, your department, you're basically doing most of it beyond the actual coding. I mean, how do you, how do you approach this in a structured way? I mean, do you have like a framework you've developed
Speaker 2 00:12:50 Or
Speaker 1 00:12:50 That you've enhanced from the past that, that you've, you know, put to use in, in other places? I mean, how do you kind of manage all these inputs and outputs?
Speaker 2 00:13:00 You know, the one that I keep falling back on time and again now is jobs to be done. I feel like it's, at least for me, and again, I think it could kind of differ for everyone just based on what works for you. It's kind of just choose your flavor. Cause I, I think that in general, you know, what we're talking about is a framework is just kind of a different lens or a different way of viewing the underlying principles of, you know, psychology and, you know, motivation and just all these things that make business happen, right? So it's quite literally a framework. It's a frame of viewing a certain amount of principles. And for me, jobs to be done has been my go-to framework because mainly because of the four forces, you know, we have kind of the, the push away from the current solution.
Speaker 2 00:13:45 We have kind of the, uh, the things that keep you attached to that current solution. And then you have the draw to the new solution, and then the anxiety of adopting a new solution. And it's this kind of circle of life pattern that you see so often that I think is simple enough where it's, it's broad strokes enough that it covers all the bases and you're not feel like you're, you're really missing anything. But it's also specific enough for each one of those steps that it allows you to map certain campaigns, features, you know, reasons for doing things within the company to a specific force. So when we're thinking about like, uh, uh, swipe, well, for example, a lot of people, like if we were to map, okay, what's the current solution for people? It's Dropbox, it's Google Drive, it's their desktop folder. It might be a more, you know, general purpose tool like a, a Slack or a Notion or Airtable or something like that, right?
Speaker 2 00:14:42 It could even be like a screenshotting tool, like go full page, I think is one of 'em they used to use. What are the things pushing them away from those products? And that quite literally becomes like the opposite of those forces away become the value proposition for what we should build for our product, right? Right. So that to me just makes it so crystal clear and like, okay, well the only reason why we should build this product in the first place is if we can help people do the opposite of what's frustrating 'em about the current thing that they're using that's annoying them, that's pushing them away, right? That they feel like is, is missing a key ingredient. And if we can't do that, then we should not try to go build a product because what else are we building our product based on? We're just gonna go make the same mistakes and people are gonna feel the same way, or they're gonna feel like they're gonna be pushing, they're gonna be unhappy with the current solution, whatever we build.
Speaker 2 00:15:35 But also if we build it and people still feel that the, the same push away as some of the other current solutions, then we've worked on the wrong assumptions, right? Then we actually didn't nail down what those pushes away from their current solution was. Because if our current, our new product, the new solution still has those same issues, then we're obviously missing something. There's, there's a, a key data point there anyway. Like, on the flip side, you know, what pulls someone to the new solution and what are their anxieties about those new that that new solution, that was one of the really big ones. I can map that directly back to something on our landing page or something. I heard time and again when I was doing these initial kind of customer discovery calls of people trying to understand like, should we build a product around this problem, should we not?
Speaker 2 00:16:22 Is people would say, well, I love the idea of a swipe file, I just never end up using it. And that that's an anxiety, right? Where they're thinking, well, if I adopt yet another tool, am I just gonna go back to the same pattern that I always have and I'm not actually gonna make use of it? So on our landing page, again, our value proposition, but also one of the ways that we ease that anxiety is we say, build a swipe file that you'll actually use. So we're just kind of addressing the elephant in the room and we're saying, look, we understand it's scary. We understand that you're kind of, you're trying to protect yourself from being let down again by saying, ah, I just don't know if I'm gonna use it. Like, we know, give us a try anyways and let us prove to you that you will, and we're we'll live up to that value proposition for you, but we know that that's a concern and we're trying to address it. Whereas any other tool, like if you grow to, you know, I don't know, air tables landing pages, they're not gonna have anything about no bullets wifi file that you'll actually use, and they're not gonna have any specific messaging around, well, we know that you have thousands of screenshots in a folder somewhere that you never actually referenced. We get to be that specific and we get to put something like that on our landing page to try to address those objections and ease those anxieties.
Speaker 1 00:17:36 That's one of my exact anxieties where I, I become a collector and you know, I'm, I'm just so focused on the collecting part. I don't categorize it, label it market build in systems to go back and actually make use of it. Right. So you're speaking to me, man.
Speaker 2 00:17:54 Yeah, yeah. If I can philosophize here for a second, I think that with every category of software, there's kind of like a major anxiety specific to that category that is ubiquitous across that category for every single tool. You know, I found this with Baremetrics, every single analytics tool, people are like, well, what do I do with the data? Like, what do I do with what I'm seeing here in the analytics? You'll hear that across the board, whether it's Baremetrics or Amplitude or Google Analytics or whatever it is, right? It's people's always biggest question because really it's the anxiety is about, it's a question of the integrity of the value proposition. It's how true is this? Or what would stop me from realizing the value of using this product, right? So it's always, again, it's gonna be inherent, it's gonna go back to the product itself and what is the job, what are the, the things you're helping people do?
Speaker 2 00:18:49 So for analytics tools, it's always, well, what do I do with the data? I think for a lot of these like curation tools, maybe there's a better category to describe 'em, but I would put like swipe well and read wise and homegrown solution like a, you know, a notion database. Yep. That's like your second brain. That anxiety is always will I actually use it or am I just gonna like let this collect dust over here in this, uh, in this corner, you know, of my, of my computer? You can go through the list, right? CRMs have a certain anxiety dev tools have a certain anxiety, they all have their own anxiety. So it's all that to say it's really important to know what that inherent anxiety is about the value proposition so that you can address it upfront, because it's pretty easy to actually guess what the anxiety is going to be, even without hearing it directly from a customer, which is important of course, but by not addressing it, you're leaving money on the table because everyone's thinking that same question, and the chances are your competitors aren't answering it either. So if you can answer that anxiety, you can ease it, then you're gonna have a leg up on them.
Speaker 1 00:19:53 I felt the pressure to answer that in positioning or sales calls or whatever, but I've never actually heard anyone put it quite like that. And I think that's a really powerful way to look
Speaker 2 00:20:05 At it. Thanks. Yeah, I think it was up here somewhere. And <laugh>, you asked a great question that got my brain going and I'm gonna have to get the recording so I can write that down somewhere. <laugh>, I know
Speaker 1 00:20:13 It's gonna write a book on this in speaking of
Speaker 2 00:20:17 Soon. That's right. That's going right into the book <laugh>. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:20:20 What founder, founder marketing. Right.
Speaker 2 00:20:22 Founding marketing.
Speaker 1 00:20:24 Writing a book is amazing when it's done, but it, it is a grind of solitude, uh, in the meantime. Yeah. How's that? How's that feeling?
Speaker 2 00:20:34 Yeah, it feels like a bummer. Um, <laugh>, there's definitely a grind. Like, I'm amazing at just getting words on the paper and kinda doing like a word vomit when I don't have any pressure about like, what is this going to kind of turn into if it's just for myself? And so initially that that kind of was what it was. I'm just always collecting, this is how my courses came to be, this is how my newsletter came to be. I'm just like, eh, here's some stuff that I've found and some things that I've learned. I'm just kinda like, do this all for myself. And you can have a part of it as well. But the thing about a book is that it's, it is a lot more final than a course or a newsletter or just a, a tweet, you know, that kind of just goes out into, out into the universe.
Speaker 2 00:21:13 So the thing about a book is that you do their initial word dump, the, the brain dump and the word vomit, and then you have to clean it up and organize it, fill it out, expand the pieces that are kind of brief. And so that's been the hardest part. It's definitely I have to fight some perfectionism and all the other forces against you when you're doing creative work, but at the end of the day, I'm about 80% down with like, the manuscript, and I just need to push that to the end so that I can like actually just get into like editing mode. Yep. And so I feel like I'm kind of stuck in this purgatory where I'm like, oh, I'm almost done with the manuscript. I wanna start editing, but I can't until this is like done. And so I'm just, I need to finish that, that part up.
Speaker 1 00:21:55 The biggest challenge I faced was similar with mine, where you look back at like chapter three, you're at the end, you know, you're checking up on a chapter and like resisting the urge to edit in real time. Then you do it exactly and then you realize that, oh, I just changed something that I referenced later, which I have to update now. And you just get stuck in this tangled web of your own making. So yeah, it's like, okay, just get it done first, right? Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 00:22:21 <affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. I, I really need to though. I mean, it's, I think I started writing it like last summer, so I'm like, man, what are you doing man? Just like, get it done. Just get this thing out here. It's not like I'm writing a my like magnum opus of like a, a fiction, that's kinda thing of the, you know, the next great sci-fi book or something that I have to make perfect. It's like, this is just practical advice for people working at SaaS who wanna grow their, their company. Like I, I've been leaving or breathing us forever. It's very cut and dry. Just get it out there and publish it so
Speaker 1 00:22:53 Well, and the cool thing is like, you know, I want traditional with O'Reilly, but if you're self-publishing, you can just update as you go, which is, which is really liberating, right? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:23:03 Exactly. And people who get the first version, who maybe there's some grammar mistakes or that'll just be a collector's edition, right? <laugh>. So yeah. That's cool. It becomes a limited edition round. It's cooler.
Speaker 1 00:23:14 I wanna talk about like how, how you track success in your work, in your products, in projects, you know, you know, and there are the obvious number of subscribers, number of, you know, m r r, whatever. But is there something that you find yourself tracking consistently through every effort you're making, endeavor you're doing that feels unique? Or particularly Corey Haynes, you know,
Speaker 2 00:23:38 Something that I track across all the different projects or like how I track differently for each project? Could be either whatever speaks to you. I find that, um, having like one true North star is a little bit aspirational. I feel like that kind of just emerges. It's hard to just like pick one. And even then, I don't know if, if there's ever just one metric that is the thing above all else, it feels kind of obvious. Again, if we were to look at companies like Facebook, it's like, okay, well, number of users overall, okay, you got like 2 billion or 3 billion, whatever it is now as that number grows, the value of the company grows, et cetera, et cetera. But then you kind of like question, you're like, well, that's not actually true. How many of those people are active? And then you get down to another metric and you're like, well, is that one actually true?
Speaker 2 00:24:25 What if it's more like revenue per user, actually? Is that one true? Maybe it's more like, and then you just keep going, you're trying to nail it down and you get something so specific that you're like, ah, let's just go back to users overall <laugh>. Cause that's easier. It's, it makes more sense, right? It's, it feels more influenceable. So that's the thing that always happens with me. I think that I have different metrics for different seasons of what I'm working on. So I would say like the north star metric for swipe files, for example, would be subscribers overall. But then if I really like drill down to it, I'm thinking about members and they have core sales. I'm thinking about monthly kind of tracking what's the growth rate, what's the number of new subscribers per month, what is the kind of like revenue coming in per subscriber?
Speaker 2 00:25:09 And again, you can kind of see how the rabbit hole goes down. I'm like, which one is actually most important? Well, at the end of the day, for me, the one that I can influence the most is the total number of subscribers. So that one kind of is my north star for swipe. Well, we could have a, a similar approach right now for this season that we're in, where we're not a hyper-growth startup and we don't have a ton of money. We need to go and deploy bootstrapped, we're still finding our way around product market fit. And so for us, we kinda have a north star of like total number of users, and then we kind of drill down to like active, uh, users, active, like monthly users. And then we also have total number of swipes as well, like total number of, of items or, or things swiped, could be screenshots, landing pages, ads, emails, et cetera.
Speaker 2 00:25:57 Those are all kinda ways to triangulate the same thing, which is, you know, how much value am I creating for people that they're in my world receiving that value? It was similarly for, uh, for Sal, for Baremetrics. There was always like a different thing to focus on at the time. It's almost that it's, it's so specific to that thing, to the product, to, to the user that it's hard to kind of give like a broad sweeping, well, I always track this and I always track that. I'm always trying to get back to what is some semblance of what's like a really high level overview of how I'm creating value and then like what's a really fine tuned, you know, granular representation of that value as well. Having both helps, but it's kinda a meandering way to say it depends. <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:26:43 No, I like how you put that though. It's, it's how are, how are you providing value? And you know, that as a, as an umbrella I think is particularly useful. And is there a way that you, when you're looking at the data or the metrics, how do you approach extracting those key value metrics or, or North Star metrics? Are you, I dunno, choose your analytics platform? Are you looking at, you know, usage patterns or, I, I don't know. I'm just curious how you get into the, the nitty gritty on each one.
Speaker 2 00:27:14 Yeah, I mean, going straight down to the source, uh, for swipe, well, we're kind of just like pulling raw SQL queries from super base for swipe files. I'm just going into ConvertKit. I'm looking at my total number of subscribers and you know, how quality they are. What's my open rates, what's my click through rates, things like that. So always getting right back to the source of the data. I'm a big fan actually. Like this is something that I've been trying to get better at for myself as a marketer, is becoming a little bit more technical step-by-step, chipping away at that. But one of the things is just understanding like all the, the different data layers and okay, where does this data live and how do we connect this to another system? And really truly understanding tools like Segment or, you know, RUTER Stack or like choose your, your flavor of whatever, right?
Speaker 2 00:28:01 Kinda CDP that you want to use. But then that pipes into every other tool. So everything's piping into our own database, but then we're rerouting that to user list or to any other tool. Turnkey, right? Fill in the blank. It's just like now everyone has all the tools, have all the data that they need for us to pull the reports and be able to visualize what different reports, um, and things like that. So all that to say, I think that it's not only about like where do you go find that data, but like how do you make it available for you to even use and compare against other pieces of data from other tools that it's collecting, for example. So that's been one of the big things for us is just we try to keep it really simple for, for swipe. Well, for example, where we're using like super base user lists.
Speaker 2 00:28:45 And that's kind of it right now because like we have all the, that data in front of us, we're doing the raw SQL query reports on like, you know, swipes, user growth, all those sorts of things. Eventually we'll have like another layer on top of that where maybe it'll be easier to visualize that in real time. We compare against other things. But the big thing is just in the beginning, do you have the infrastructure set up in a way where you can route and reroute the data to all the right places so that you can put a load visualization layer on top of it.
Speaker 1 00:29:13 The data directness sounds super refreshing. I have to admit. Just two sources. We're all good.
Speaker 2 00:29:20 No need to overcomplicate it. No. Or tiny little startup, like, let's <laugh>. It's amazing. People go crazy like playing founder and like, oh, I wanna use this tool on that tool and do this thing over here. And it's like, all right, how about you just focus on what's actually important, getting users and just having like something that works and then you can think about as you need, you can add to the tool set. Right?
Speaker 1 00:29:40 So I, I wanna switch gears and talk about how you work. And I, I know I, I'm asking this because I kind of think of you as this renaissance man. You know, you're doing product, you're doing marketing, you got your newsletter, you got all these things, you're optimizing your domain, uh, rank on hres. I see you drop these threads and it's like, so how do you organize your day around all or your week around all these, these inputs? So I mean, do you have like an SEO Thursday, you know, where today is, you know, newsletter day, you know, how do you, how do you break this down?
Speaker 2 00:30:13 It's probably, again, simpler than you would think. That might be some of the magic to it. I don't really even claim to be like incredibly productive. I don't think that I have like insane amount of output compared to other people. I think that what I, my kinda like thesis of my work and productivity is just only work on really high leverage projects at any time. Just cut out pretty much everything else and then kind of roll through those high level projects, but only work on one at a time for any given product that I'm working on, for example. Well, I'll give you like a broad overview that I can go through how that looks practically. I try to batch most of my meetings on Wednesdays. That doesn't always happen. And a meeting here or there is fine, there's some meetings that come up Mon on a Monday or a Tuesday or a Thursday.
Speaker 2 00:30:58 But like most of my meetings, if they are being scheduled, especially if I'm sending out a scheduling link to meet with someone else, I'm doing that meeting usually on a Wednesday. That helps me just clear my mind thinking okay, I have like four other days in the week that I know there might be one meeting, there might be two meetings max, but otherwise my entire day's gonna be free for me to do deep work, really dig into projects, sink my teeth in and be productive at the beginning of the week. I usually, I have this little, uh, UNK analog, these little like cards I'll put just right here on my desk next to me. And I'll just write down what are those high level projects that I'm gonna work on for this week. And just write, okay, for product A I'm gonna work on projects A, B, and C.
Speaker 2 00:31:43 Product B I'm gonna work on projects A, B, and C. And that's my list for that week. If I get through that list early, then I just make a new list or add to the list. Otherwise, if I don't get it, then I just start at the top of the list for the next week and it's keep rolling through what do I think I need to be working on right now? And those things are also all decided by. Okay. You know, for myself was was spite files. I'm doing some kind of project management where I understand I need to do this first and then this next and this next. And again, I've been a bad project manager for myself cause I should be kicking myself to finish the book right now. That's one of the high level projects for sure. But for swipe, well me and Connor, we uh, meet every two weeks on a Wednesday and we decide, okay, what are the next things we're working on and how's this going?
Speaker 2 00:32:26 How's that going? Do a check-in where those things get discussed and agreed on. What goes on this paper at the end of the day for me to work on and basically entirely ignore email for the most part, <laugh>, most people just, most things just end up being completely unread or just archived and maybe responded to. My Twitter dms are like the main place where I communicate with people, which is funny, but emails just such a big dumpster fire of, I've tried to clean it a million different ways, a million different times. And I just kind of realized like, why am I doing this? I don't, there's no reason for me to go through this. It's, it's kinda like checking the mail these days, right? Which is a very like analogous, um, metaphor, but it's like <laugh>, I'm just clearing through junk. Why even waste the time on it?
Speaker 2 00:33:17 So I just don't even a lot of e uh, meetings these days, I just ask people to send me a Loom video or send 'em an email and let me know when you send it and then I'll go find it and look for it. But otherwise, like send me a DM on Twitter. I might get back to you. I might not, I might get back to you really late. I'm a horrible communicator. I text the way that I text funny. I was just texting my, my cousin and he was texting me last night like, oh yeah, I'll answer that tomorrow. I'm gonna go to bed now. I'm like, dude, I texted people back like a week later, like nothing even happened. <laugh>. Like I do the same thing over Twitter dms. I just, whenever I get to it, I get to it. I'm sorry. But that allows me to really just focus on trying to get these high leverage projects done at my own pace and just focus on them. And I wouldn't even say that I'm great at that. That's like, I have to do it that way so that I can be as productive as I am. Which I don't feel like is even that productive, but I just have to give myself that space in order to, to do it. I
Speaker 1 00:34:11 Love that. Yeah. I, I empathize with the select all archive method of inbox management, which having inbox management even be a thing I kind of resent because it's not really of my creation, right. It's it's other people's obligations. Yeah. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:34:28 What I do too with my email is, um, for each one of my email accounts, I will create like a, I'll kind of bookmark the page that when it, when it loads, when I pop up my email, it already is filtered for primary and unread. And I'll go through and I'll look through like my, my updates tab and my promotions tab and just kind of like quickly scan through to see if there's anything that should be in the primary inbox. But my like unreads are kind of like my to-do list to just like look through and then I'll, that is the list. I'll just be like, okay, not interesting, not interesting. Select select, select, select mark, read or archive. And then if there is something you respond to, just respond to it really quickly and then it's cleared. It's done like 10 minutes, I'm out of there.
Speaker 2 00:35:11 I don't wanna spend any more time in email. But that is what I found like helps me surface the most important things so that there's no like, oh yeah, 50 unread, but it's on, you know, page five from three months ago that would still like visible in front of me cuz I'm only filtering for unread. And then I can decide what to do with it. And if I see something that's been sitting there for a while, I'm like, oh, I haven't responded to this thing in three months. I'll either respond to it or I'll just like, all right, I'm just never gonna get back to that. Sorry. Right. But it's gone. It's too late now. <laugh>, just cut it loose.
Speaker 1 00:35:45 Exactly. Free yourself from the obligation. Right. All right, we're coming up on time. I wanna ask you two questions. I, I ask pretty much anyone. And the first is, is there a book or a, an article that you've read recently that's left an impression on you?
Speaker 2 00:36:00 Sure. This one's, this one will probably be a little bit off the beaten path, but I thought recently I haven't been reading a lot of nonfiction, a lot of business books. I've been reading a lot more like sci-fi. Especially recently. The most recent thing that I read was pretty much the only guy I I could read, which I actually listened to. Cause I had LASIK surgery recently. It's actually P rrk. But you know, you go through this whole process where, you know, they sit you down lazy your eyes. I slept for like two days straight. Oh man. And then you basically like can't see for a while everything's blurry until your vision slowly improves. And so I couldn't read up close for sure. I couldn't even read my phone. I couldn't work for like two weeks. Wow. And so I was just listening to audio books all day long. So I've been listening to some kind of OG Star Wars books. So I read um, path to Destruction about Darth Bain. Yes. Pretty rad actually. A really good book. I read a few others, but that one in particular, I was like, this is actually a really underrated book. I'm a huge Star Wars nerd. You can see there's a Mandalorian helmet behind me if you can see video at all. But I listened to that one nonstop and that one got me through my LASIK surgery <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:37:07 Oh that's Trilogy. Is it? It's a trilogy, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I, I devoured those when I, when I came across 'em, they were so cool. You know, Bain kind of becomes like this kind of James Bond figure, uh, in a way. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I really thought, I mean Star Wars, when you can actually get into when they humanizes the bad guys it gets really good. You know, it's not just this Yeah. Allegory of good and evil. Right, right, right. Have you read the one about, I'm blanking on the name now, but the one about um, Palpatine coming into Yes. The Dark side. Mm-hmm <affirmative> such a good book. I
Speaker 2 00:37:44 Read that one right before. That one's also really good. It also changed my, my frame about like kinda the traditional story where it's about good guy versus bad guy and then at the end good prevails happy endings, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And um, I just thought it was interesting that I enjoyed the book even though there wasn't really happy ending. The main character is a very bad guy, <laugh>, but it's not because I like bad things, but it's just, cuz it's an interesting story. It's like kind of watching a car crash a little bit. You're just like, whoa. You just wanna like watch. You just wanna observe and see it. And of course it does have like the traditional story arcs and there's a lot of character development and et cetera, et cetera. But um, also just watched, um, xna X mackenna, I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's, you know, one of the classic kind of scifi movies from the last decade. Yeah, same thing. I won't spoil the ending, but like not your traditional kind of story arc, not your traditional ending. I was like, that was a great movie. I love that story. That was awesome. I want more of stuff like that. But that one in particular challenged my like Darth bean. What a cool guy. I'm almost sad that I like it <laugh>, but it's so
Speaker 1 00:38:51 Enjoyable. Yeah. Should I like this? I don't know Right. <laugh>? Yeah. Created but created the rule of two major mythology. Mm-hmm <affirmative> source right there. I don't envy the burden of having to write that, but Drew Ian is, you know, legendary.
Speaker 2 00:39:06 He did a great job. Knocked out the park. I feel
Speaker 1 00:39:08 I could probably talk about this with you all day. So we need to move on though. <laugh>. Um, alright, last question. In life in business, in working out, who knows, do you have one high octane tip you would give other listeners? Could be anything.
Speaker 2 00:39:26 Oh man. If it's could be high octane. I gotta really think about this one. I should have put more thought beforehand. Could
Speaker 1 00:39:31 Just be, hey get, get a good night's sleep.
Speaker 2 00:39:33 Yeah. Honestly, that's the direction I'm going in. I think. Uh, one of the, it's so funny. So I feel like everyone in tech right now is all obsessed with uh, this guy Huberman. He's got the Huberman Lab podcast. Awesome, awesome dude. I absolutely love him. I feel like I was a little bit early to him, it's Mylan to fame, listened to him for a while, but everyone, you know, got wind of him. And one of the things he always talks about is get natural sunlight on your body but like in your eyes, you know, 30 minutes to an hour after you wake up and that helps your body kind of naturally wake up as this natural signal. You become more alert, helps your eyes exercise, getting that blood flow early on the day, you know, really gets you going. Creates a lot of doper genic effects throughout the rest of the day where you feel like you have more energy, motivation, focus, happiness.
Speaker 2 00:40:19 And it's so funny cuz we live in a apartment, I have a dog, a pug and I have to exercise him anyways cuz otherwise they'll just blow up like a balloon. But being in an apartment, I have to take him out to go do his business. So for the last five years I've taken him out twice a day, if not more, to do his business. And I always take him out first thing in the morning cause I'm scared that he's gonna do business <laugh>. So literally our routine is wake up, get dressed, go outside and walk around with him. Which I think is actually kind of one of my keys to success. Cuz the more I think about it, you know, then I heard the things about what Berman saying and I was like, oh, I've been doing this for years. <laugh>. I get outside, I'm looking around, I get sunlight, blood flow, I do something that's kind of meditative, almost walking the dog. So get outside early, take a little walk, take your dog out. That's my hi high octane tip for the day.
Speaker 1 00:41:09 Beautiful. I could take that advice. I'm dragging myself outta bed with three kids every day. Corey, thanks man. Yep. <laugh>, appreciate it. Go,
Speaker 2 00:41:19 Go take your your kids for a walk. I'm sure they'd love it.
Speaker 1 00:41:21 <laugh>. I'm gonna do that tomorrow.
Speaker 2 00:41:24 Put him on a leash and see what happens.
Speaker 1 00:41:26 Might
Speaker 2 00:41:26 Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 00:41:27 I might get some, uh, some, uh, calls from the police on that one. But, uh, yeah, awesome having you take it easy. All right, Scott, appreciate it. Don't miss out on future episodes. Get alerts from new
[email protected] or follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Special thanks to turnkey for sponsoring the show. Learn how to make customers happier while boosting
[email protected]. Your support for this show has been incredible so far and let's keep the momentum going. We are all slaves to the algorithm. Ratings and reviews really do help. Please rate as five stars on your platform of choice. We'll be truly grateful. That's all for now. I'm Scott Herf and this is Ben Subscription Heroes.
