Fireman 🚒 turned SaaS founder. CEO @ Precision. Prev COO @ SaaS Academy, CEO @ UpLaunch (acq. 2020). Husband, father of 3 boys.
Frederick, MD
Joined July 2011
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🛸 Matt Verlaque retweeted
I'm starting to sense a divide in the tech industry:
- People thriving on autonomy who are reinventing how they work and what tools they use with AI: LOTS of work, but they're enjoying it and getting very efficient
- People used to being mentored / trained / or simply told what to do and how. Frustrated with the lack of guidance from management on what to do with AI; also frustrated by seeing some of their peers thriving; increasingly bitter about AI and the state of the industry, as a whole
Neither group seems to be aware that there's another group, or have empathy for the other group
🛸 Matt Verlaque retweeted
The founders you're told to copy can't all be right.
Instagram and WhatsApp raised venture money and grew as fast as they could.
37signals stayed small and calm on purpose.
@levelsio builds his companies alone.
The course-sellers say their system works for anyone who buys the course.
And my company, WP Engine, was built on 24/7 uptime and a lot of customer service.
You can't follow all of them. So which one is the right way to build a company?
None of them. They're outliers, even among the founders of their own time. Fewer than 10% of software companies raise money at all, so the Instagram path isn't a playbook. It's a rare exception that makes a good story. So is Smart Bear, so is WP Engine.
I couldn't even copy myself. If I tried to build a new company today the way I built Smart Bear in 2002 or WP Engine in 2010, it wouldn't work at all -- the world has changed, markets have changed, competitors have changed, to say nothing of AI.
The right path depends on your goals, your market, your life, and I guess everything else.
Your path doesn't need to look like ours. In fact, it probably won't.
longform.asmartbear.com/rela…
The first time I made a computer say "hello world," I felt like a freaking evil hacker 😈
That feeling is why people build things they don't need.
The question to ask first: should I build this, and is it the best use of my time?
AI can turn a 30-minute job into 45.
I've seen 2 steps become 10 because building felt good. Before any AI build, ask three questions. Do I do this often? Is it highly repeatable? Does automating it save or make me money? If you're not 3 for 3, it might not be the best use of your time.
My rule for perfectionists: make it, then make it good.
If something has been almost ready for two weeks, send it to one person tomorrow.
Most companies are a 10-year overnight success.
Overnight success is the biggest load of shit in entrepreneurship. Nobody sees the thousand failures before it starts to work.
I sold my first company 5 weeks before COVID.
Luck picked the date. Years of fixing why customers quit made it worth buying.
Nobody understands marketing.
The best marketing sells the buyer a point of view, long before sales sells anything at all.
Send a short video before the demo. For everything you teach, give them a question with three options and tell them you're gonna ask about it on the call.
If they didn't watch it, cancel the call. Yes, really.
(My win rate against eight billion humans is terrible 😂)
Handing off a meeting? Ask one question:
"What needs to be true for you to feel comfortable running this?"
Then be quiet long enough to get a real answer. People run the plans they helped write.
I never sold a single account at my first company.
My co-founder was the ideal customer. He ran a CrossFit gym, so he ran sales from day one until the day we sold.
I didn't start going pro at sales until years later. If you're a founder who hates selling, it's learnable. Start now.
Adding more to your top plan can make customers quit faster.
People stay when they feel like they use what they pay for. Launch with 3 killer features everyone uses, pile on 8 extras that help 10% of customers, and now they're using 3 of 11 things. That's when they start shopping around.
If you're sending Slack messages for actual emergencies, you're setting yourself up to fail.
Our rule, said out loud:
1. Emergency? Call me.
2. Not an emergency? I'll reply when my meetings are done.
If my phone ain't ringing, it's not urgent. It rings for a real emergency somewhere between zero and 0.5 times a month.
What's your team's rule for urgent?
One hour of sales calls a week and you're mad about revenue growth?
What are you doing with the other 59 hours? 😅
Run a time audit, from Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time:
1. Track your real time in 15-minute blocks for two weeks.
2. Tag every block by category, energy, and dollar value.
3. Find the low-value blocks and what category they roll up into.
The inverse of that list is the work you need to be doing.
Most of the time, urgency is an emotion.
They're elevated. You get elevated. Now everybody's sucked in and you're punching out of a meeting for something that could wait an hour.
The founder's calendar is the most expensive document in your business.
Yet almost nobody designs it. We just do whatever and call it being busy.
Do a time audit (hat tip Dan Martell): 15-minute blocks for two weeks, each tagged by category, energy and dollar value.
