This Week in Startups - E1047: Ask Jason Slack Special! Sourcing talent during a crisis, building strong culture & motivating remote teams, investing in distributed startups, importance of market timing & more!

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

0:01 Jason intros today's #AskJason and talks about the This Week in Startups Slack! 4:04 Ethan asks where and how Jason gets his news for general industry knowledge 6:43 Sean asks Jason how to acquire talent during a crisis 9:54 Vik asks Jason about building strong corporate culture while working remotely 15:44 David asks about SF mayor London Breed capping fees for delivery companies 19:32 Craig asks for Jason's perspective on investing in fully distributed startups 23:52 Mayur asks which audience do you sell to first when starting a marketplace 28:23 Stuart asks about how to price when launching - Free trials or charge right away? 33:05 Rob asks what investors think when they hear a CEO has 1 or 2 other side hustles 33:18 David asks about the importance of market timing - Will a great business always succeed, and how much of it is due to timing? 39:40 Onyx asks for Jason's take on the future of growing & scaling emerging natural food (or food tech) brands in this environment 41:21 Paulo asks how CEOs should act to motivate a remote team 48:08 Allen asks about syndicates that don’t contribute any money into a deal

Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us for another Ask Jason. My favorite thing to do. Today's episode is a This Week in Startups Slack special. And you no longer have to email Nick at launch.co to get into the Slack. You can email him your feedback on the podcast. He loves that. But if you want to get into the Slack, we crossed 11,000 members in under two weeks. Amazing. It's like 5% of the audience for the podcast is now in a Slack room. It's blowing my mind. and you can do that by going to this week in startups.com slash slack. You fill out a form. The form tells you to confirm that you are not a dirty, rotten, spamming a whole,

that you're a founder or a fan of the podcast who wants to be part of a community and have discussions, but not spam people, your ebook. You know who I'm talking about, the two of you who I kicked out for spamming your ebook constantly. It's not, this week in startup Slack is not the top of your funnel. And if you act that way, I ban you for life. and I'll do it personally. I did it 20 times since we started this goddamn thing

from people who are just like spamming and spamming. Like you go to a dinner party, spam people? No, you go to dinner party, you act normal. Have a conversation. If somebody asks you what you do, then you tell them. You don't sit down and say, I'm an insurance assessment.

Do you have insurance? No, you don't get invited back to the party. Okay? And it's my house, by the way. Don't come there. Somebody was debating with me that I wasn't clear about offers and promotions and promoting stuff.

You know what? It's my house. If you come to my house and you're just rude, You're instantly out of the house. And that's what happened to you for being rude, for questioning my authority in my house. Other than that, it has been magical. We had a book club. We have small wins.

We have, I'm going to kick ass today. We have 1,500 people in the Australian channel. We have 400 people in the Bay Area Channel. We have people in New York from all over the world, Lisbon, Germany. I saw all these great conversations going on. And you know what? we have channels for every job role, angel investors, venture capitalist, product, UX, developers, salespeople. And you know what? Everybody's sharing the war stories and helping each other.

It is the greatest manifestation of this podcast. I cannot believe how good it's doing. Thank you to the team at Slack for just making a kick-ass product. It's not perfect for these large communities, but it's damn good. I have to give you guys credit. It's damn good for a large community. We're actually controlling it with 11,000 people, which is amazing. And I would love for you to be there too. This week in startups.com slash slack. And you can sign up and you just have to, again, you got to approve. You're not a dirty, rotten spammer. Okay. So I asked everybody to give us a bunch of questions for today's show and you delivered so many great questions. And I think I answered a dozen questions here. The best way to source talent during a crisis, which are in the

middle of at the taping of this during the COVID crisis. Building a strong culture as a remote team, very timely. I gave some examples of what I'm doing. I think there's some pretty good experiments going on in terms of remote culture. Investing in distributed startups, again, very timely. The importance of timing when you're creating a startup and so much more. Stick with us. It's an amazing episode.

This weekend startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist and get a $50. credit towards your first job post. Send Pro Online from Pitney Bowes. Save time and money no matter what you ship or mail. Try it free for 30 days and get a free 10 pound scale when you visit pb.com slash twist. And Clavio helps brands build relationships across any distance, delivering email marketing

moments your customers will appreciate, remember, and share in good times and bad. Visit clavio.com slash twist today to start your free trial. That's K-L-A-V-I-O-O-com slash twist. All right, we've got another question. This one is from Ethan. Go ahead, Ethan. Hi, I'm Ethan from Old Line, Connecticut. It's been super educational and exciting following your content.

I wanted to ask where you get your news, what publications do you subscribe to, who do you follow on Twitter, what services do you use, especially for general industry knowledge. Thank you. All right. That is a great question. So I have a service called launch ticker.com, which I created, I don't know, six, seven years ago. And I just hired writers to read the news for me, all the tech news, and summarize it nice and cleanly.

And they send it to me twice a day. And I guess 30,000 other people get it, a couple hundred people subscribe to it. So it's really easy. And then I have Inside.com, which is a series of newsletters on different topics I care about, that people pay 10 bucks a month for, for one newsletter, $25 a month for all of them. a similar format where they're going deep into verticals. There's also the Wall Street Journal, obviously, in the New York Times. I use Twitter a ton. I look at trending topics. And I generally have a collection of friends who introduce me to stuff on Twitter. And then I have some SMS groups

amongst friends where we talk about topical stuff. And I think there's a big change happening right now where a lot of the people in the news are really not insiders. They're journalists. And so what I found over my career is that my friends have inside information and really interesting deep knowledge. And then you can follow people who have deep knowledge in each vertical. So what I encourage people to do is to really curate your Twitter following list and look for people who are subject matter experts and follow them, like them, and interact with them, the people who basically are the subjects of the people who are writing stories. So if you could follow, you know, tech crunch or the information, that's one level. But

following Bill Gurley or Chamath is like the next level, right? You want to follow the people that they're covering because more and more people are going direct to their audiences, whether it's Shamath and I doing the All In podcast or me doing this week in startups or Balaji, just directly having many more followers than the average journalist. What all the subjects are doing today is they're building direct channels and podcastings where I get most of my news. I'll be totally honest. I want to go deep with people. So whether it's Tim Ferriss's podcast or Brett East Nellis for film, or Preet Bihar for the, you know, legal news and he did a great job covering the impeachment and the Mueller investigation, now COVID. It's just like all these really interesting

people on podcast. So I think podcasts and self-cureated Twitter lists are the way to go. And then some of the aggregation services like launch ticker or even tech meme are really good. Great question. Okay, we got another question. This one is from Sean. Go ahead, Sean. Hey, Jason. My name is Sean. I'm the founder of Somoto, a auto repair marketplace, similar to Toro's business model. However, right now it's just me and my co-founder building the product and we're pre-launch and we haven't yet raised any money. However, I do realize now is a great time to source talent since there's a lot of availability on the market. So my question to you is, what is the best way to source talent? Should I right now offer them

equity or should I do a fundraising event and then try to attract with a great salary? Thank you. Yeah, it's a great question. When you're booed, bootstrapping, which it seems like you are. You don't have a lot of resources. So equity is what you have to offer. So who wants equity over a compensation? Well, if you've got, if you've already made a bunch of money out of startup, that person's ideal. That person also has a lot of options. They can not work. They can work part-time, et cetera. So finding those people is as simple as looking at companies that are adjacent to yours. So if you're doing something in insurance or tax or sales or sales automation or SaaS or consumer subscriptions. You can find the companies that had exits

and then look on LinkedIn, obviously, and find people who work there with that title. And it's really a numbers game. And it's really about personalizing your approach. So I find people don't have a great hiring experience because they don't put the work in. People will spend, you know, days trying to get one person on the phone to sell them a product. But then they put like an hour into trying to hire somebody and they don't get a great result. I would, would put at least 50 hours into each hire. Now, that sounds crazy, maybe even 100, maybe 150. And that means you could email hundreds of people, a short description of what you're doing and ask them, hey, I've got this company, here's what I'm looking for. This is the vision. It's very

early stage. I was wondering if you knew anybody or you might be interested in talking. I could just use some really candid advice and maybe some feedback on the product. You have five or 10 minutes for me on Zoom. And if you do that 100 times, you might get 30 people to reply. You might get 10 people to actually take the Zoom call, and then one or two of them might be interested in the job or know somebody who is. It's a numbers game, look at it as a funnel, and do targeted outreach. And don't think that putting something on Craigslist is going to result in you solving your problem. You really need to be more sophisticated in that. That's why LinkedIn, you know, I know the sponsor of the podcast often here, but the response of all podcasts. And the reason people use LinkedIn

is because you have the titles and you have the history and you have in-mail and a really easy way to connect with people. So I'm a big fan of using LinkedIn. to make lists and then to just methodically reach out to people in a very personalized way, not in a cut and paste kind of way. Make it personal. Hey Jason, I saw that you worked on weblogs, you're in blogging. I'm doing something similar, except it's newsletters atinside.com. And I think what you did within gadget was interesting for these reasons, like really personalizes so the person feels obligated to respond. It's very easy to delete an email. That's a generic email about you. It's very hard to delete an email. That's about me. For me to delete an email,

about me is hard. So if you talk about me in your email, it's supposed to talking about yourself, you're going to get much further and a much higher response rate. Great question, Sean. All right, Vic's got a question for me. Go ahead, Vic. Hey, Jason, this is Vic from Los Angeles. Love the new Slack Channel. Here's my question. I really like working from home. You get so much more time in the day. You don't have to drive to and from work in L.A. particularly. That's worth 45 to even 90 minutes. At the same time, I've read Tony Shea's book on corporate culture building happiness. And I wonder, can you build as strong a corporate culture with everyone working remotely as you can if everyone has to come into the office to work?

Yeah, it's a great question, Vic. And your voice sounds like it's made for radio or like the serial killer from American Psycho when he's discussing the business card scene. We should maybe cut those two together. So you've got that interesting cadence there. Marcus and I even go to the same barber, although I have a slightly better haircut. I'm joking, I kid. So you're right. Corporate culture is going to be very hard on remote workers, and I think remote workers get very lonely.

And I think what we'll see post the pandemic crisis that we're in the middle of when we're taping this episode in 2020, I think we're going to see people go to a hybrid. Now, an offsite every six months is probably not going to do it. But I think what you'll see is people say, you know what? We're going to be in the office on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Monday, and Friday, it's arduous to get to an office. And Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we're having the engineering team. Wednesday we're having the sales team.

Thursday, we're having everybody. And there'll be some cadence that comes up that will blend the best of both worlds. That's what I think's going to occur. But I have to say, I can see culture bubbling up. And we see it in the Slack room with This Week in Startup Slack that you mentioned, which if anybody wants to join, you don't have to email Nick atlaunch.com anymore. You can just go to this week in startups.com slash Slack. And there's over 11,000 members now.

So that happened quick. And I do think we'll see a culture occur, but culture you have to invest in. So one of the things I did was a book club in our Slack. And I did another one called Small Wins. And I did another Slack room called I'm going to kick ass today. And I just said, hey, and I'm going to kick ass today. Just say what you're going to get done today. And you'll get some moral support from other people in Small Wins.

At the end of the day, mention what your small win was. And then in Book Club come and we had 60 people in the first book club talking about Robert Eager is the ride of a lifetime, and we're going to do the second half of the book. And now everybody's got suggestions for the next book, and it's turning into a thing. So I'm trying to figure out what are little culture things we can do that make people want to show up and make them feel, you know, with all this distance between us, which I really hate, I'll be totally honest, I'm a social butterfly, make up for that distance between us. We did a funny thing on our weekly Zoom call.

when we usually have my CEO lunch every Wednesday. I just said, hey, everybody, order yourself lunch. I spend up to 25 bucks, which means you can probably order two things and have your dinner too. I know that. I just want to be generous with everybody. And I said to everybody, wear your funniest hat.

And the winner gets like a Casabundaburg, which is my favorite, like, Gingerale from Australia. And people had a fun time with it. And we voted on who had the best hat. And, you know, people got to express themselves. And then in another Zoom call we did for launch, investment company that produces this week in startups as well, the media company. We said, have your kids on for the first five minutes because we know kids are going to come running in.

So we might as well just let the kids come in to start. The kids will see how boring this is and then not want to interrupt it. So just get the kids in there. They wave and you ask the kids to do two or three things. And if you tell a kid, you want them to be on the Zoom, they don't want to be on the Zoom. When you tell the kids they can't be on the Zoom, now they want to be on the Zoom. See what I did there? So I think all those cultural moments we're going to define, just like we figured out cultural moments for social media and before that for podcasting and before that for blogging. We figured these things out. There's cultural issues around email. You don't CC 100 people. You use BCC. All of those cultural things we're all going to figure out together. And I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for the

question. Vic. Hey, everybody. Instead of me reading you copy in an ad about LinkedIn Talent Solutions, I thought, you know what would be a great idea? Who made LinkedIn Talent Solutions? Who's the product manager? Give me the head of product. And let's talk about why this product is so awesome. We've had so many great hires with me today. Blake Barnes, the head of product for LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Welcome to the pod.

Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks for that. Hiring is a tough journey, right? I mean, we talked about how what you want to be doing is growing your business. And you want to find your qualified candidates quickly. And so we're just always looking for ways to get you more information, get you more insight to help you to do that.

Screening questions are one of them. You know, we also build our platform in a way that you pay for performance, right? So you don't pay one lump sum for when you're posting a job. You pay for the cannons that you receive. And then we build all sorts of smart things in the process to make it faster and easier. So, you know, we talked about how candidates might not be the right fit. You sounds like you've experienced a fair share of that. I think everybody's experienced that way you're like, you come into the meeting and it's like, oh, wait a second.

Is this a fit? And the person's like, no, it's not a fit. It's like, what do we do now? So you want to be able to talk for 20 minutes and gracefully at the meeting. You want to be able to filter the people that aren't a right fit out early. and you want to be able to let them know that it wasn't the right fit. It's only fair to let them hear back. Right.

And so we can build, we've built tools using these screening questions and using automated systems that help you to automatically tell candidates that they're not the right fit for the role. Find the right person for your business today with LinkedIn jobs. You pay what you want and you get the first 50 for free. The $50, the $50 bill. Just visit LinkedIn.com. Again, LinkedIn.com. You got that in your URL already.

Just add slash twist. TWIST and you get that $50 for your first job. Post is $50 for terms and conditions, of course, apply. Thanks, Blake, for coming on the pod. Thank you for having me. It's been a great fun. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Okay, David asks me, I notice a lot of founders are not happy with San Francisco

mayor London breed for capping fees for delivery companies. I assume he's talking about Uber Eats and Postmates and Doordesh. They argue a limit supply. Is this really the case or are these delivery companies just poorly run? Okay, it's a great question. I don't believe that the government should. should get into the middle of a very competitive space and start regulating it. It's completely unnecessary. These companies that are doing food delivery were getting absolutely admonished and

barbecued for not paying drivers enough and for not being sustainable and losing money by the press. Now the press is like, oh, you're charging too much. Well, if you want to pay people a better rate, you've got to charge people. What it costs to actually make the service be viable? And that's really what is happening here. You really want these services to be vibrant and viable because imagine if DoorDash ran out of money right now or Uber Eats or Grubhub. If these services weren't here right now, how would we get food? We're all quarantined. The delivery services have been amazing. So for the, you know, for the mayor to get involved on this level is ridiculous. There's already competition and it's not like a restaurant can't say I'm not going to use any of these services

because they're too expensive and run it myself. A lot of restaurants are actually when they see what the charges are making a decision to only allow delivery through their own websites. And so there's a natural competitive backstop in a capitalist society and you don't want the invisible hand to be moved around by politicians because they will screw it up like they always have. They are in charge of a lot of things that, in this world. And you only need only look at their response to the pandemic. Now, London Breed happened to do a good job here in San Francisco. I will give her credit for that. But what a disaster we've been in prepared for this pandemic. Now you want to get them involved in delivery

services? What next? What will they touch next and screw up? The free market works. And I've got a lot of people pitching me now on this very issue. Many companies are coming to me saying, I'm making software for restaurants and restaurant chains so they can have their own app and they can have their own delivery service and they don't need to use DoorDash or Uber Eats or, you know, all the different grub hubs and whatever. That's pretty amazing. That's how the free market works. If you take too much, if the take rate is too much, then people will stop electing to be part of that marketplace. If eBay charged 50 percent or Airbnb charged 50 percent, what would happen? You'd have 10 Airbnb competitors and they would get demolished. There is a natural

give and take that occurs, and there's no price gouging going on here. These companies have largely been venture subsidized. So stay out of the free market, let free markets run, and you get a better outcome. It's very rare that the free market does not hash itself out because there's so many entrepreneurs out there who want to build better products and services, and when they see somebody charging too much, like people thought open table as a reservation service was too expensive. You know what happened, Yelp came out with a service for wait lists, I think, many times better than open tables. And so you want the free market not putting your thumb on the scale. You know who puts the thumb on the scale? You know who picks winners? Communist countries, authoritarian countries.

And you know what happens? There's no competition because they pick the winner. Do you want to live in a society where the government picks the winner? You know what happens ultimately? If there's no competition, then they have an unlimited path to raising prices. It's the love of God. Get out of the way the free market, London Breed. Okay, next question. Craig asks, what is your perspective on investing in distributed startups? Some fully remote teams, base camp, GitHub, GitLab, Zapier have done really well. Is there a biased amongst investors against distributed teams?

Do you see a change in this mindset going forward due to recent events? I think it used to be pretty impressive for investors, especially old school ones, to come to an office and see a culture and to see everybody working out of one place and to see the scale of something and that could trigger an investment because people were just wowed by the in-person culture. Today, even before coronavirus, people were looking at the number two expense in most companies, sometimes number three, but number two was number one, obviously human capital, number two, marketing or real estate. And if you're thinking about it, do I want to spend a ton of money, millions of dollars, on having fancy office space for my team? In some cases, it leads to a great culture and a lot of great stuff happens inside an office. But if you're the type of founder who can

manage a distributed team and then that money gets poured into more marketing, you know, the money that would have been spent on a fancy office or it gets poured in the facilities that come with it, if that gets poured into better salaries, or you open yourself up to having more talent on a global basis and that's really what it's about is talent at the end of the day, the distributed teams can hire anybody from anywhere. The team that's based in Cupertino can only hire people within 50 miles of Cupertino.

And even if they hire people from San Francisco, they're going to have to convince them to get on a bus, right? And it's going to be really arduous. And then they're going to have to convince people to relocate to one of the most expensive places in the world. So it is really hard to run a distributed,

a non-distributed team today. And I think, for me, I care about results. I don't care about fancy office space. All I want to see is that your customers are delighted and that revenue is going up and to the right. That's what we're looking here. We're here for, investors are here for outcomes. And the outcome is, I give you a dollar, you give me back 100 in 10 years. Literally, that's what I want to do.

I want to give you $1 this year, 2020. And in 2030, I want you to give me a $100 bill. Seems like a pretty good deal for you and for me because I'm willing to wait 10 years to get any money back and I'm willing to accept a 70 or 80% fail. value rate, and I'm willing to accept 50 companies going to zero for the 51st to do that 100 to 1, and then I double my money overall, and maybe there's some other singles and doubles in there. So it's a great question. I think if you're good at it, and I also think now, because everybody is in quarantine, whenever is in quarantine, I keep saying quarantine, in quarantine, all the VCs are doing their meetings on Zoom, which is really exhausting, just as an

aside, like just having to look into the camera and being afraid that you're looking down and people think you're on your phone or whatever. It's just exhaust. to be in front of camera all day. And I do that for a living, obviously, with the podcast, not all day, but hours a week. It's exhausting, but I do think you get more meetings because it's more efficient. So I think smart teams are getting on the phone and you can bring four or five of your team members and then meet with the VC or you can meet with the VC and then say, okay, after the first 15 minutes, I want to bring on my five team members and introduce them. And then you dismiss those five people and say, then we'll go into private session again. That is going to be

the big win. So founders, take my piece of advice here. When you're working with you, when you're working with an investor say, I would love to introduce you. You get that second meeting. Can I introduce you to my team on a second Zoom call? Or I can do a half hour with you. And then optionally, if you want to set up a half hour call with your team and the five members of my team, I can jump off the call. You can just meet each member of my team sequentially or at the same time. So I think there's going to be some power moves happening. And Zoom has a cool feature of breakout rooms. So imagine you're meeting with the VC and they have one person who's growth and one person who's in talent and one person who's in tech. And you say, okay, the tech person is going to meet with our tech

team, the HR person and the talent person are going to get together in their Zoom room, and then we'll all come together after we've worked on this deal. There's going to be a lot of collaboration in people figuring out these features because they're forced to, you know, sometimes these frustrating moments in time lead to a lot of innovation. So I think it makes you more attractive if you know how to do this and you can save the money and deploy our dollars as investors more intelligently. Nothing would feel worse than me to give you $100,000 and you give $40,000 of it to a landlord or even 10,000 of it. I'd rather see that money go towards growth or talent. Great question, Craig. Next question for Mayor.

When you first start out trying to build a two-sided marketplace or community, which audience do you sell to first? The ones with the most pain or you get both audiences on board at the same time and facilitate via sneaker net before you build. Okay. So let's take a marketplace, for example, Airbnb, very famous one or Uber, another very famous one. When you have those marketplaces, you have to have supply first because you can't bring demand to Airbnb. be and say, hey, would you like to rent a place in Hawaii and there's no places? So there is no choice but to have supply first. So how do you get supply first? You can pay for supply. So there is a rumor that certain ride heroin companies worked with small cab companies and said, we're going to be

launching in your city of Los Angeles. We would like to have 20 of your drivers on. We'll pay you this amount of money to have access to your driver network. I can't confirm, deny, or etc. Reddit famously. They talked about creating a bunch of fake accounts and having conversations with themselves. So when people came to Reddit, they didn't see an empty homepage. So seeding your cell side, your inventory is required. And the way you can do this to create critical mass is to limit yourself by geography if you're doing a real world marketplace or you can limit yourself to a certain product segment if you're doing an online marketplace. So if eBay started only with baseball cards or Craigslist only started with jobs in real estate and then added everything

else. That's one way to do it because you can get, it's easier to get to critical mass at a faster time. So it's a great question and it's a really simple answer. When you say sneaker net, I think what people mean is doing it manually. Marketplaces, you do a lot of manual. So something like a thumbtack, imagine they didn't have piano teachers. And they said, hey, let's say you want to make a musical, I'll just make one up here, a marketplace for music teachers to do virtual. lessons. Not a bad idea given the market. So now you've got a bunch of people and you just, you buy a bunch of traffic saying, would you like to get a quote for guitar lessons? And you have them fill out a form. And then you go call up manually and say, hi, I am looking

for a music teacher and I need somebody to do this, this, and this. What would you charge for that? And can I send the customer to you? Because I run musiclessons.com. Maybe musiclesons.com exists, who knows. If it doesn't, somebody buy that domain now and let's build it, I'll fund you. So you would, you could fake it that way where you, if you, but you don't have a great experience because there's a little delay between when they fill out the form and when you go find the talent, but other people have done that before. They just set up a form, they get demand and then they call up the supply if it's easy to get to supply. If it's hard to get to the supply, like Airbnb is kind of hard to get to couches and extra rooms. But for something like,

you know, dentists, pretty easy to find a bunch of dentists. They're on the phone booth. They're online in Yelp. So you can kind of fake it to you and make it in that case. Great question. With Send Pro Online from Pitney Bowes, you can simply print postage stamps and shipping labels even when you're working remotely. Yes, for as low as $4.99. That's $4.99 a month.

You'll get access to special discounts and save up to 40% off USPS priority mail. Plus, for being a This Week in Startup's listener, you'll receive a free, 30-day trial to get started and a free 10-pound scale to ensure that you never overpay, which always made me crazy. Some SendPro Online benefits include printing shipping labels and stamps, even when you're working remotely. Scheduling packaging pickups is easy and tracking shipments from departure to arrival is seamless. And you're going to save up to five cents on every letter and up to 40% off USPS priority mail. If you don't know what priority mail is, it's a great deal.

starting at $4.99 a month, that's $4.99. You can also calculate the exact postage online, print right from your PC or Mac, and avoid trips to the postups. Go ahead and visit pb.com slash twist to access this special offer for a free 30-day trial, plus a free 10-pound scale to get you started. That's pb.com, a really short domain name, slash TWIST, to experience huge savings in your shipping costs with a free trial of SendPro Online from Pitney Boast. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Okay, a question from Stuart.

What are your thoughts on pricing when launching? Should you offer free for the first few companies on trials and hope they renew discounts for a period or straight to what you're hoping of charging straight away? I am a big fan steward of charging people so that you get the information of if they find value in your product. Superhuman has never been free. It does not have a free trial.

you pay, you do an online, and then you're vested in it. The problem with free is that people have no skin in the game, which means they're not going to really use your service. They're not going to do the training. So what you want to do is challenge them to pay and find out if your product is good enough for people to pay. Now, on pricing, you could charge a lower price that's very accessible when you start, $5 a person per month.

Sounds fine for like a SaaS product. But the truth is, people will also read into that, and you have to look at the person buying and say, how much value are they getting from it? If you're a corporation and you're paying on average $60,000 a year to the employees in your company, and this product costs $60 and it makes each employee 1% more efficient, well, there's a 10x there. Maybe you could charge if it makes the employee 10% more efficient and they're getting $6,000 in value from it. Maybe you should be charging $50 a month or $30 a month, which is how a lot of the SaaS companies think. and you want to really think that through. How much value are they getting? And you can test pricing,

especially when it's early on. And what I find is people always give it away for free. And then they push out the answer to the question of, is this worth paying for? And then they go meet with investors. Investors want to know the answer to that question, and you can't answer it. You want to get the answer. Will people pay for this? And how much will people pay for it? And the next question you would ask me, if we were investing in the company or you were in our accelerator, is how much do we charge, and you keep raising the price until you break the market. Keep charging more money and see where the breaking point is. Now, there's some people who have a philosophy of undercharge over deliver.

I get that philosophy, but when it comes to business, you really want to charge for value and you want people, you don't want the people who are bargain hunters. The people who are unwilling to pay and want a discount are typically a huge pain in the ass to deal with. The second somebody asked me for a discount on stuff and they want two for one or they want ads on the pockets, but they want to buy one at a time and then look at the mattress. It's like, no, 10 times, 10 ads minimum buy. We don't discount the ads. We don't do freebies. If you want it, you want it. We do a great job for you. That's it. Somebody comes into your restaurant and they want you to

give you the steak for free or they want two for one. Their bargain hunters, their value, they're going to be annoying. They're going to argue with you about the bill at the end. They're going to give you a bad tip and they're not going to be repeat customers. If somebody's cheap and they're unwilling to pay, you get them out of your funnel. They're not your ideal customer profile. I-CP. Get that ideal customer profile. Who's got the money to spend on this? Who sees value? It's not about the people who are unwilling to pay. It's about the people who are willing to pay. You need to focus on the people who are willing to pay for value, not the people who don't get value. And another thing, I'd just make a final point here. I love people who have the chutzpah to charge yearly.

it's really great to charge people $10 a month, but if you're com.com and you charge people $60 a year, now if they use it three times a year, they don't have the cognitive distance of every month paying for a subscription. That's what I hate about the Wall Street Journal. I hate you, economist Wall Street Journal, financial times, all these gimmicks to get me to buy $1 for one week. Screw you guys.

I hate you all equally. Just tell me what it cost every year. Let me pay you per year. And stop playing games with the God, damn pricing Wall Street Journal, economists, Financial Times, Washington Post. I know that there are people who love to get these deals and then get off of it or whatever. Just be like Netflix. Easy pricing. Make it easy for us to make a decision. I hate when people make it difficult. I would buy the Wall Street Journal or the Economist or the Financial Times and Washington Post for five years if they would just

give me a simple, easy deal. But you know what? I've only bought one of those five because every time I go to the website to try to buy the deal, it's too goddamn confusing. Make it simple. You're over-optimizing and fire that whole goddamn department that's doing those Fugazi trickery deals. Seriously, economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, fire that whole group of people who do the pricing and just make it clean and simple. And you'll do better and you can get rid of all those excess salaries of people trying to manipulate your goddamn audience. Here I end at the lesson. Rob asks, what do investors think when they hear a CEO has one or two other side hustles or lifestyle companies they also run? They think unfundable. Okay, next question. David asks me, how important is market timing? How much does why now matter? Will a great business always succeed and how much of it is due to timing? Timing is critically. Obviously. I've seen people who are very dumb hit timing perfectly. They hit the wave and boom. Their company gets bought very quickly. But that's not how you build. That's not how you build startup.

what you want to do is you want to look for a market need, you want to study the customers, you want to over-deliver, because timing is very hard. And really what it's about is not quitting because I see over and over again, somebody doesn't quit, and then some opportunity makes their company go supernova. Now there is the why now, that's a separate issue. Why now is why will this company work now and when it hadn't worked before? Well, listen, marketplaces are going to work all the time. And eBay, you can buy and sell clothes on there.

there's all these second markets that have come up for clothes specifically. And people, I don't know the names of them, but there's all these different names of companies that are doing, you know, reselling of clothes. I'm not buying old clothes or vintage clothes. That's not my thing. That's not my trip. But a lot of people are into it. And there's all these secondary marketplaces for clothes and they're doing phenomenal. That's because they're probably living in a world where people have Venmo or the cash app or PayPal and many more of these services. So it used to be like having PayPal was a weird thing. Now everybody's got these like very simple payment. So payments made it a lot easier. Then you have tools like Shopify made it a lot easier for people to become

sellers. And then in addition to that, you have mobile phones and people becoming more into buying on Instagram and, you know, Instagram culture kind of helped us. You have like multiple YNows leading to these marketplaces. And now we're going to have another one, which is we're going to move into a time of frugality. You know what happened the last time we had a frugal time where people didn't have as much cash and discretionary spending? Groupon, living social. A bunch of new ideas came out of people being able to buy flash shells.

Maybe we'll see the return of a Groupon or a flash shell where people saying, hey, every day. And Woot was another one, which was a real fun company. They used to advertise on and gadget. Woot was a really fun company. They would put one product up every day. They'd have a hundred of these things. They would discount them heavily and boom, they would ship them.

It was like flash shells. One King's Lane was another one. one. And fab.com was another one. Von Preve still exists, I believe. There were a bunch of these interesting flash shell companies and new spins on deals and deal sites. Deals were everything when people were broke.

So maybe we'll see that happen again now. And maybe the deal thing will happen on a mobile phone or SMS. In fact, this is a great idea for a goddamn company. I do this all the time on the show. Somebody, here's a request for startup. A flash shell over SMS. You get an SMS. You sign it for an SMS.

You like things like, let's say it's electronics, right? You're into electronics. You get an SMS. It has your name, phone number, and credentials already in there when you signed up. And they say, would you like to get this anchor battery pack normally $99? And now this battery pack dongle is $49. And you just say yes.

And boom, that's it. You're done. That would be an incredible platform. A flash out group on or living social over SMS. So friction-free. I would love to create that myself. What a great product that would be. Go ahead and create that product.

So yeah, timing is everything. And you have to think about market conditions. You're releasing your startup. You're releasing your product or service into a system. The system is going to radically change post-pandemic in all likelihood. Because there might be, you know, some recessionary or depressionary kind of era where people really want to have their dollar stretch a little further. You might have social distancing taking on a more permanent fixture. You might have remote work and work from home.

occurring more frequently. So there's going to be a lot of opportunities and just you got to monitor the system and not quit. That is one of the big lessons that I've had in my lifetime. Don't quit. If you believe in what you're doing, if you're delighting customers and they love it, just stick with it. Netflix didn't quit. They knew they wanted to service people who loved movies and love the moving image and love storytelling. They originally did it by emailing you DVDs in an envelope. A lot of people who have Netflix today. Do not remember Netflix, the company that mailed DVDs. They never experienced that. And Netflix is a juggernaut today because they didn't give up and they lived to fight another day. Marvel was a comic book company originally. Marvel was not a movie company. Marvel made comic books.

But boy, did they focus on their customer, young kids, and they refined their product and made better and better characters. Dr. Strange, come on. Alpha Flight, Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four. I mean, they just made them better and better and more intricate and more interesting. And who would have guessed 50 years later that it would spawn what the Marvel Empire of Movies has spawned? Incredible, right? That's what sticking around the rim does, right? You're playing basketball.

They say hang around the rim, good things happen. You could get a rebound, make it a put back, okay? You might even get a foul. All these things are great. An uncertain time supporting your community and growing relationships with your customer. is a strategy that will be appreciated, remembered, and shared. In good times and bad, open and empathetic communication with your customers is key. It's critical.

Email is and always will be one of the best channels for delivering these communications. We all know that email marketing is one of Clavio's core offerings. And when you leverage personalization driven by a 360-degree view of the customer, those emails will feel even more relevant fostering stronger relationships. Clavio truly understands how challenging it is for each and every entrepreneur to get their business off the ground, let alone navigate trying times like today. If you're feeling overwhelmed and growing your business is hard, especially in this climate, you're not alone. Clavio is here to help brands build relationships across any distance. So here is your call to action, create meaningful, memorable email marketing moments that last a lifetime.

Visit Clavio. that's K-L-A-V-I-O dot com slash T-W-I-S-T to start a free trial. Thanks again to Clavio for supporting independent media like this week in startups. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Onix asks me, and he's a Patreon member. Thanks for supporting us on Patreon. What's Jason's take on the future of growing and scaling emerging natural foods or food tech brands and environment given the challenges of new product discovery in e-commerce?

Wow, it's a really specific question. I do think people are very open to new food and new food tech. People are embracing things like the Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat. I think there's a huge appetite, so to speak, for people wanting new products and services and food. And then going direct to consumer is it, I mean, athletic greens and Sigma coffee, mushroom coffee. I mean, people are crazy about these products. They become, what's that coffee with the butter in it?

Like, people are into this stuff. They want to experiment. They want to try new stuff. People are obsessed. And I think the way to do it is to pair yourself with an influencer. I think Tim Ferriss has been very influential for Athletic Greens and that Sigma Coffee. I know we had different food bars on here and they did well. So I do think aligning yourself with not necessarily celebrities, but influencers who really

enjoy the product and are speaking about it authentically because they're getting value from it is the secret weapon. And I don't know that these are venture-scale businesses. I do have one smarty pants, smarty pants vitamins that some friends of mine started, and it's done incredibly well, but it's been a decade of working on it. And they make the gummy vitamins for kids. So good luck with it. And I think using the influencers and social media and content is the path to victory.

And making a great product, obviously. You have to make a great product. And I think finding great influence and making great content is the big win. Okay. Let's take another question. This is Paolo from our Slack. regarding managing a team of 25 plus employees, how do you think a CEO should act remotely to motivate a team? I'm dealing with that right now. Sometimes I feel my team is going through

some anxiety issues. They are, for sure. We all are. Should I keep them on a tight leash or go more soft on them? Okay. So I think accountability is the word I would use instead of a tight leash. I understand what you're getting at there. I'm not going to, you know, kill you over language. I think your intent is probably good. I know that. that a lot of people who work for me probably have not worked remote before. So what I did was I said every day in Slack, I want you to give me three or four bullet points of what your intention to get done today is. And at the end of the day, I want you to send your EOD report, which is what we normally do.

And by doing that, and I said put it in the general Slack channel. And now everybody sees what everybody else is doing. And then maybe every other day or every third day, I'll just go down the list. I mean, I read it every day. But I'll take the time to actually comment on how they could have more intention. And I'm holding them accountable and telling them to have be. better at their job. Because I think the true anxiety for team members is not working remote necessarily. It's that they don't want to feel like they're not a good contributor. I believe people are good by their

nature and they want to be not good contributors. I think they want to be great performers and great contributors. And I think it's your job as the boss to tell them what the difference between an okay, a good, and a great contributor is. An okay contributor is somebody who puts in eight hours of work. They worked hard. A good contributor is somebody who exceeds the expectation, and a great contributor is somebody who's focused on outcomes. And I've had this talk since the coronavirus and the quarantine of our employees and our team of talking to, especially some of the younger folks, about the outcome.

The outcome is we got 250 people to come to Angel University the other week. That's a goddamn great outcome. I set up the web page, you know, press set up the web page for Angel University. That's okay or good work. That qualifies you for okay or good work. Oh, Charles and Nick, you know, working on the podcast, they got the podcast released. Guess what? Table stakes.

That's okay work. Okay, you did your job. You don't get any credit for that. Good work. Good work is you got your job done and you did a little extra and great. Or you got your job done quicker. Great work. Okay.

the number of views. You got a great guest. You came up with a really great, innovative clip to put on social media. You made a trailer for the episode. You did something that made more people watch the podcast, that got us a better guest for the podcast. That's great work, the outcome. So that's how you motivate people. People want to be accountable and they want to do great work. I believe that. I don't believe there's any human out there who wants to do bad work. I don't think there's humans out there who want to phone it in. I think they make it disheartened or they might be anxious about the current situation. But I think showing people the path is the job of management. And I think I try to do a good job of that. And I think actually

during a crisis like that, it actually makes you better as a manager because you're thinking about it more. And then I also just tell people, I just tell people in front of everybody, this is an okay job, this is a good job. I want to see results. I want to see you move from doing okay and good work to doing great work. And here's what that means and defining it for people. So in your company, what you have to ask yourself, Palo, is, are you being candid with people about what the difference between doing okay, good, and great work is in your mind for your company? And start working on outcomes with them and then trust them to hit the outcome. I don't want to micromanage people. I just want to be able to tell Prash and the team, I need 250 people

at Angel University and I want to do it monthly while we're in this pandemic situation. It's important to me and it's important to founders. We get more people in the angel investing games. get more people out there trying to support founders. So get me 250. We every month. I don't need to tell Prush how to do it. He did retargeting. He did some emails.

Whatever it takes, get it done. Right? I want to double the number of episodes we do a year. That requires more sponsors. It requires more video editing. It requires more clips. It requires more views.

Get it done. That's the outcome I'm looking for. I'm not looking to tell you how to get it done. Now, if you're a young person, your first job, second job, I do have to show you how to get it done, or people on the team have to show you to get done. But I want the outcome. And that's what you need to do, Paolo.

Challenge yourself to get people to do great work on outcomes. And you got to recognize it and celebrate it as well. So when we hit those 250, I just told everybody, that was amazing. When we did Book Club on Monday night, I said, that was amazing. Great job, everybody. When we did Angel Series 4, I told Nick and the team and Charles, that's a great series. It's the best season of Angel, just incredible guests. And when we started doing this remote work and, you know, it was really,

Let's be honest, it was kind of shitty when we did the first couple of remote accelerator classes. People didn't have headsets on. People didn't have their Ethernet cables. It sucked. And I had told my team to do that. And they told the people who were on the video call to do it. But they didn't, I had to explain to everybody. You can trust people, but you have to verify they do their work.

And that was my team verifying that our founders who were on the accelerator class doing remote zooms. We had to verify they were using Ethernet and they turned off their Wi-Fi. and they plugged in an Ethernet cable. We had to verify they had a proper headset. We had to verify they had the background working in Zoom to have a virtual background. And so that's your job, too. Trust but verify. Trust your people are doing a great job, but verify they're doing a great job and doing great work. And also, you know, you can't be like hardcore all the time. You've got to have a sense of humor. People have to understand that's not life or death what we're doing at our jobs. It's important work, hopefully. But it's not life or death. If something doesn't get done or if there's a mistake, that's made and people did put in the effort, like the other day, we had internet issues here. That's out of our control. I'm not going to freak out on Nick and Charles and my team that the internet went out. But I am going to study them and see what the reaction to it is. And the reaction, I was very proud. They immediately jumped on and said, you know what? We need to get a second connection from the office. We need to have a backup to the backup. And they started jumping on that,

which is what I was going to tell them when I got off. I was very proud that they were thinking about that. And then at one point during the podcast, Nick handed me his phone dialed into the thing and said, here, just use my phone, dial in. If our internet connection is spotty, we can always dial in. That's thinking on your feet. Take an ownership. You want people to take ownership. So there's a lot of thoughts there.

But whoever's idea was, I don't care. I just care that people are thinking smart. You know, great. I expect Ashley to do great work. She's been with me for, I think, five or ten years. All right. Next question comes from Alan Maris. What do you think of some of the syndicates on angels that don't contribute any money

into a deal? It seems suspicious that may, Maybe they don't believe in the deal, but they're passing it along in case it does make some money and they can just get their 20%. That seems like a bad way to get repeat investors, but maybe I'm just being too cynical. No, I didn't know that they allowed that on Angelus. I actually don't think they allowed that. I thought you had to have skin in the game. In fact, in the early days, I remember some people were putting in, I think I was putting in 25K deal.

And I think Gil Pinchina was putting in 5K a deal. And Gil was incredibly influential. And then sometimes his deal would be 500,000. And there was a little criticism like, hey, you're only putting in five and you're getting a hundred times your money. And I was like, well, 5K for him and he's doing a lot of deals. That actually is skin in the game for him. So I wasn't too critical of that. But there was some talk at the early days of Angel list of maybe there should be a ratio. So you should only be able to raise 10 times or 20 times what the syndicate lead is putting in. And I think there's some merit to that. Like you could be getting an incredible deal for the syndicate member if they put in 1K and a million dollars. came in behind them, right? The ratio is 1,000 to 1 there. So maybe it should be, you know, 100 to 1 should be the max ratio.

So I do think there are some topics there. But ultimately, if you're going to be a member of a syndicate, it's your job to make these decisions. You're being offered in access to a deal. You should be grateful you're getting access to it and you should evaluate each deal and you should evaluate the track record of the person sharing the deal. And you should

consider their skin in the game. And you should consider that. If they're not putting enough skin in the game and you think it's de minimis and it's not commasurer it with the risk, well, then your job is to not take that deal. That's all. Just don't take the deal. But I don't think that that's occurring. It might be something that's occurring on pro rata. So there's a second round occurring and they're offering the prorata. And maybe they don't want to participate in the prorata, which is another piece of information for you. Excuse me, as a member of the syndicate. Great question.