Delivering a Minimally Viable Product

The Small business show episode 232 for Wednesday, July 17, 2019 Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at businessshow. Co the show, you know, BFA small business. Three sponsors today, which means three URLs for you. Linode.com SBS thealternativeboard.com SBS and go CO SBS. Visit all of those now. We'll tell you why you visited them a little bit later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out on the west coast, I'm Shannon Jean. I gotta put my guitar down after that intro.

Yeah, you're rocking that, man. You really got that down.

Killing it.

Yeah, it's awesome.

We've talked about. I wish I could play the guitar on the show before, but you could always think, just have to learn. I know.

That's all.

Yes, I just have to learn. Yeah, that's right. Future. Future endeavor.

There you go.

So. Yeah. Yeah. So what's going on, man? How you doing?

I'm good. I had something come up this week that I just wanted to like, share as a psa. I think that's all it's going to be. But you know how we are. It might turn into the entire episode. So I was talking with, I was following up with a customer on a potential ad campaign. Right. And, and it was, they, you know, they had pinged us a couple of months ago and said we're looking for this particular sponsor, what shows would fit and you know, what's the pricing and availability and downloads and you know, all that stuff. Right. For podcast ads. Okay, sure, no problem. Sent him a thing. And because I, you know, am in business and want to stay in business, I put that into my, I use SaneBox to do my follow ups and so I put it into sanebox and then I followed up with them, you know, was like, hey, like a month's gone by or whatever. Anything on this? No, not yet. Okay. There's. And I, and you sort of get an idea of pacing how long a certain customer takes to turn around on a deal or whatever. And this customer I knew would take potentially a month or two. Like these things aren't, you know, I'll, I'll give you an order tomorrow. Like it's, there's a whole pitch process that goes on. It's like, okay, that's fine, no problem. So I followed up again a month later. Hey, just wanted to see, where are we? Oh, right. So their budget became a lot smaller than they thought, which happens all the time. And so no problem. And they decided to only go with. And actually I had this happen twice. So I'm trying to figure out which story to tell. It doesn't really matter. They only happen to go with like TV related shows and entertainment stuff. So we didn't go with you guys. I was like, oh, like it, like, as I'm reading this, like, why didn't you. We represent the Roddenberry Star Trek Network. Like, oh, they said they went with only Sci Fi related content. And I'm like, holy crap, we have the Roddenberry Star Trek network. Like, not only do we have Sci Fi content, we have what I like to call the, you know, unfair competitive advantage because no one else can sell Roddenberry Star Trek podcast ads. You know, there's, there's one Roddenberry doing this right now and we've got them, you know, so, and we, you know, we are their representative. And so I was like, hey, you know, and it was just like, I was, I mean, there was a frustration within me, but of course I don't express, express this to the customer because it's really not their fault, you know, and it hit me that it was like, man, you know, it's so easy for your customers to get tunnel vision about you and your business. Because if we're, if they're working with me on say the business shows that we have or the tech shows that we have, they think about us as, oh, we can get you. Oh, that's where we go. There's a client that wants business shows call Backbeat Media. You know, there's a client that wants tech shows call Backbeat Media. And both of those things are true. But also, client that wants Sci Fi shows, holy crap. Call Backbeat Media. Right. They don't think about it that way. They get their tunnel vision. They get into automatic, you know, responses and they just, they stop thinking about you broadly. They start thinking about you as the one thing that they've done with you that, that works well. And there's nothing wrong with that. Except when the next deal comes in and they don't.

Yeah, the opportunity. Yeah, yeah, you lose the opportunity. So how do you go about, you know, presenting that to them in such a way that it's not, you know, going to take away from what you are talking to them about the specific, you know, niche market perhaps.

Right.

But then also letting them know, hey, by the way, if you're ever in this other markets, we also have, you know, these opportunities.

That's it. You need to create that opportunity. And what I do is we Keep with, especially with our ad agency partners, which is who this was. I keep a, like a live spreadsheet, like a Google Doc or a Synology Drive Doc or you know, whatever it is, but some web based spreadsheet that every, everybody can have access to. And whether I actually change anything or not, once a quarter I go through. Now I used to do it whenever we change something. Now it's just going to happen once a quarter where I go through, I make sure everything's up to date and then I send them a thing. Hey, you know, here's the new shows that we've added in the last quarter or this show grew. Any actual changes I will highlight but otherwise, you know, I also just send them. Hey, just wanted to remind you, you know, here's this. I just made sure I went through, I looked, everything's up to date for you. Not only does it have our tech stuff on it, but of course, you know, all our great business shows, all our great music shows, all our great sci fi shows or our Star Trek shows, you know, however I want to pitch it to that person and just reminding them like here's the thing you know about and then here's these three other things that all you have to do is click this link and you will be able to see them, you know, so I, that's one way to do it. But honestly, you know, the other way is to just keep following up and saying what do you have? What do you have? And eventually someone will tell you, hey, I don't have any business for you because all you have is tech shows and I'm looking for sci fi shows and it's like, haha, great opportunity knocks. I have those, you know, so yeah, that's cool.

That's really, I think that's important to be aware of so you don't, you know, miss out on those opportunities. Yeah, for sure.

Yep. So good reminder. Tunnel vision. Yeah, exactly. Because it happens, it happens to all of us. It's, it's, you know, I don't, like I said, I don't fault the customer at all. It's hard even to fault myself.

Excuse me.

But, but it always falls back to me, right? Like I have to take accountability for this, otherwise I can't fix the problem. I always say, you know, well, it's a whole other topic. But you know, if, if something's my fault, that's actually a good thing because I can fix it. Like that makes life way better.

Accountability is powerful.

That's a whole other episode. Or maybe it's this Episode. But before we do that, I want to talk about our first sponsor, which is linode at l I n o-e.com SBS if you need a server for your business, and I don't know how you wouldn't, Linode is where you want to go. And the cool part is their plans start at just five bucks a month to use their all SSD based servers. Because that's the thing that slows you down more than anything else is running on spinning disks. Linode has standardized all their servers on SSDs. So even at that $5 a month plan where you have, you know, like limited CPU and, and limited RAM, but probably enough to run like your little WordPress site or whatever, you've got the SSDs there. So when someone requests information, boom, it's coming up right away because you're not reading it from a spinning disk. This makes a huge difference. Of course, if you need more resources than that, you can scale all the way up to something with a dedicated CPU and distributed applications and hosted services and all of that, of course, but it really starts with that same foundation all the way through 10 worldwide data centers. And you pay for what you use with hourly billing across all their plans and add on services. 20 bucks? Why do I say 20 bucks? Because that's the credit that you get for being a small business show listener. Visit linode.com SBS and use promo code SBS2019. That gets you 20 bucks onto your account. $5 a month is where you can start. So you could have up to 4 months free. Linode.comsbs Our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, man, so what is our topic for today now that I've brought us in six different directions.

Yeah, no, that's good. No, I have something I'd love to talk about today. And it is related to MVPs.

Minimum, not most valuable players.

Nope, nope. Minimally viable. And I also kind of subtitled this, you know, powering through the last mile. And one of the issues that I've faced numerous times in my small business career is when you're developing a new product or service or when you're starting a brand new business, it's, it's that last mile, the last maybe 20% of work that has to get done as you get close to being ready to launch. Yeah, you know, you're almost ready, but you know, you or someone else just wants to make a few changes, add another feature, run one more test, change the website, do something like that. This is the point where Things can go terribly wrong, and I'd love to talk about it today on the show.

Yeah, well, perfect is the enemy of good is what you're describing here. Right.

I like that. Yeah.

That philosophy. That's. That, like, that's the thing is if you're. If you're trying to make it exactly perfect, but also everything that you have in mind for this, you will never finish.

No way. Forget it. Yeah. And I would argue that we talk about mindset and creating your own reality in your subconscious a lot on this show. And I think in. In a lot of us, there is something that. That holds us back. You know, there's that. Whether it's fear, whether it'. I want it to be right. I don't want to be embarrassed by this, whatever it is. I don't know, but I just see it, you know, frequently come up and you're like, why. Why is this person including me? Yeah, why are we in front. Getting. Stopping from. From getting it out? And so I have some steps that I've implemented to try to help me get through this, and I'd love to share them.

Yeah, because. Yeah, because it's that fear of success, fear of failure, fear of change. Right. Like, if you're rol something out. Like, you know, I think about it when we're talking about this, I think software, because we're constantly rolling different engines or something with the website at Mac observer, or, you know, we have different engines at Backbeat. And we did, we did. We just recently rolled out our. What we call our Podman Podcast manager, where we manage all the timestamps and ads and, you know, so all the podcasters can have everything in one place. And we rolled out the new version of that three months after we. We planned because of, you know, like, some of this. Some of it was legitimate, like, whoa, we got some showstoppers. But sure, but, you know, you can start. You have to start drawing the line and saying, nope, we're just gonna. We're going to embrace this change, not fear it. So, yeah, what are you. What are your tricks there? Yeah, sure.

So one of the things that I think is important is to know that it's, you know, recognize it's not going to be perfect, and to embrace iteration and to start from the beginning that way and have this discussion like we're having right now is to talk about, okay, so how do we get to this mvp, this minimally viable product? What are the steps that we need to take? And then when we release it, okay, maybe it's not going to be. Well, we know it's not going to be exactly what we want, but where does it have to be where we can push it out there and we can tell, you know, tell people that it's not exactly what you want? You know, there's a lot of. Especially software. Especially. And I happen to be involved in a software venture right now. I'm going through this, you know, it's never going to be exactly. Right.

Right.

Ever. That, that's the whole concept. Right. You know, we've been talking about subscription services a lot on the show lately, and that's what these companies do. You know, they're constantly iterating and as a subscriber, you get the benefit that iteration.

Right.

And it just, it's not going to end when you launch it. And you know, like Google is, is famous for pushing out MVPs, right. And then just stamping beta on it. And we think this thing's going to work. But just in case, you know, it's beta software. I mean, Gmail had a beta stamp on it for, I think almost a decade.

Felt like a decade. That's right. Yeah. No, that was their way of sort of training people to be, to be accepting of iterative, you know, design. But it is the best way to do it. And what I find, you know, thinking about this most recent thing with Podman, but, but this was the, you know, the most recent project. So I certainly have had projects that have gone on even longer and even worse. But, you know, we started making a list of all of the things. Now this was version 2 of podman for us. So, okay, we had the idea, like we already had one working and it was like, all right, what do we want to change? If we had this to do all over again, which it turns out we're going to, you know, what would we change fundamentally with this? And there were some things that caused this change. And then while we're at it, what else are we going to do? And what we did was we went through and thought, okay, what are the things that, like, let's just list all the things we want. Doesn't matter what order, just throw them all out there. Now, looking at all the things that we want, what are the, what are the things that have to be there in order for, you know, some of these features that are on this list have to be precursors to others. And so those have to be there in the beginning. Right. Because you got to lay the right foundation because you. Now you know where you're going with it. So instead of that entire thing being, you know, the 1.0 development process, it's like set. 1.0 is exactly what you call it, MVP. What can we roll out that people can use and gives us the foundation to build on? And then, you know, we can start work on 1.1 the day after we roll 1.0. Now, that's not necessarily the smart. Because there's going to be bugs in 1.0 that you didn't test for, and you probably need to have some time to fix those. But yeah, you know, if not then right now, you know, you, like, just keep on trucking. And internally, while there is the, you know, release day, internally, not much changes. Like, release day becomes a distraction. It's like, oh, we have to change what we do and go and roll this thing live and communicate it to the users and get everything right. And. And then once we're through that, now we can go back and put our heads down. I mean, we still got to listen, but now we can go back and do exactly what we were doing two days ago, which is continuing to build this thing and we're just adding more features. You know, that.

That's right.

That that's the way to get your head around it for me.

So you're going to. Yeah. And that's like one of the first things on my list is, you know, decide in advance what features you have to have to ship it.

Right.

I mean. Yeah. What are the minimal viable, you know, features that have to make this. To make this thing work? If you're going to launch a product or if you're going to launch. If you're starting a new business. Okay, what product or services are we offering? And how do we kind of. We talked about tunnel vision, but in the beginning of the show, but in a little different way, how do we just keep our focus on this and kind of come up with this punch list of what needs to happen before we launch? What are the minimal things? Do we have to have a very expensive sign on the building or can we put a banner up there and let that run for a couple of months, you know, until we make some money and then go buy a $5,000 sign or whatever it is? I mean, there's all kinds of steps that you do. And then again, to your point, as you're working on this stuff, you're going to think of all kinds of things. You'll be like, oh, wouldn't it be great if we could do this? Wouldn't be great. That stuff is very valuable, really powerful, but it needs to go on another list.

Yeah, I was just say capture. Don't ignore them just because, you know you're not going to do them now. In fact, like that. That's where your great ideas come from. You know, I always say that the hardest part about running a business is that no one is there to tell you what to do. So you have to listen to yourself. And also you listen to your employees and your team and your customers and all of that. But you really have to listen to yourself. So when you're in one of those moments where you're like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we did this? We can't do that right now, but wouldn't that be cool? Write it down, because you will forget.

That's right.

As cool as it seems in the moment, you will forget about it. So write it down.

I love that concept. And having a big whiteboard or turning your entire. An entire wall into a whiteboard or a hallway or something. And not only, you know, for stuff that you think of, but just anybody in your organization. This. Wouldn't it be great if.

Yes, right.

Where somebody could go by and write something down that they get frustrated with and, you know, wouldn't it be great if we could offer this? Wouldn't it be great if the product did this? Those are, you know, those are gems that are tremendous opportunities. Maybe, maybe 90% of, maybe 99% of them are just not realistic or not affordable, whatever. But there's going to be some stuff in there that I would suggest to you could change your business in dramatic ways and could become an entirely new business or new product or new service that you offer because you've been capturing that data. It's. That's a gold mine of stuff. And I'm really glad you mentioned that because too often somebody makes a comment as they're walking by and you're like, yeah, that's a good idea. And then you never think of it again.

That's it.

You know, write it down, put it on a board, create some, you know, put it on a piece of software that you guys are sharing. But I really do like the visual of having stuff in front of you on the wall. You know, we used to post quotes all the time because I like to see them as I'm walking by. If you're having a bad day, you know, looking at quotes that help you power through things from people that have succeeded or overcome obstacles is really that visual. So write that stuff down and, you know, and keep it front and center. I think that'd Be awesome and maybe even let your customers do it. Yeah.

And that whiteboard, right? Yeah. If it's the kind of thing that, that's okay to share with customers and have them participate in, then that's.

Maybe have a, maybe you have a second one and put it in your lobby. You know, hey, what if, what, what, what would be great if we did this and have customers write things down when they come in? Because people get, you know, I mean, I dealt with, I've been dealing with customers for, for 25 years. And people are always like, I wish you guys could know. Why can't you do this? Okay, put it on the board. Not only can you get some good tidbits of information, I mean, you know, again, maybe 99% of them are going to be psychotic, but I doubt it. But you also are going to make that customer feel good. Like, wow, that's interesting. I get to contribute something to this, to this company. It's a really unique idea that I've never really thought of until we started talking.

Yeah, no, that's a great. I like this idea. Plus it, you know, to, to your point with that. But even with your employees having that there with, with just random, even crazy ideas.

Absolutely.

On. It encourages people to share. I. To not put up as much of a filter. Right. Because you don't even need to put.

Their name on it, right?

No, they don't want to. I think this is cool. I'm going to put it out there. Somebody might think it's stupid. There's no such thing as stupid. You know, like just in this environment, like just throw it out there. If it actually turns out to be stupid, that's fine. We just don't do. It's like, yeah, that's right. No harm, no foul. You process the idea out and maybe, just maybe you thinking about that idea or someone else seeing that idea will get you to the next idea, to the next idea. And then the third one down the chain is the one that is that light bulb that dramatically changes, you know, your efficiency or maybe grows your business, whatever it is, you gotta just let that stuff you talk about. And it's something I've struggled with in my businesses and I'm trying to be a lot better about it. But you talk about, you know, fostering a culture of change, and I like to insert perpetual change. So, yeah, and the nice part, and to fit that in here, you're developing an mvp, but you're just throwing all these other ideas that are coming up out. You might not implement all of them. That's okay. But don't implement all of them for your mvp, you know?

No, you can't. You can't.

No.

Yeah. And another thing that I, and I love this idea and I want to just say this is one of the reasons why I do this show because I always learn the most out of anybody because I'm going to implement this. Wouldn't it be great if board. Maybe you could call it a why can't we board too. Right. Why can't we off. Why can't we offer a lifetime warranty?

I don't know.

Why can't we?

Yeah, that's right. Okay. Right. When you said why can't we, my first thought was, ooh, I hate to say anything.

Yes.

But when you say why can't we do a thing now that's challenging negativity. I correct this.

Correct. Yeah. Why can't we? What's stopping us from doing X? You know, and that really gets you. I don't know. That's just what everybody's done or that's it.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, why can't we do this? Why can't we offer that? So I, I really, I love that. I love it.

So I like this. All right, well, wait for a minute. Why can't we talk about our second group of sponsors right now?

It's brilliant. Segue.

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Yeah, it's good. Yeah, that's great. So I have a few more things on my list in order to kind of power through and get to a minimally viable product and avoid this, what I call the stagnation of perfection because it just slows you down. And you know, the first one we talked about, you know, decide in advance what features you're going to have. Stick to that list, but create that secondary list for future features or services that you're going to offer, products you're going to sell for your business. The third thing is I like to set hard dates for your benchmarks. You know, okay, in two weeks we're going to have this and we're going to meet and have this done. In 30 days we're going to be here and this, you know, you mentioned launch date mean I do like to have that on both of them. I like to give myself a cushion and be like, okay, we're shooting for, you know, August 1st. That, that, that would be great. But we know we have this, you know, if we get it out by the 15th, it's going to be fine. Or whatever you, whatever we want to do.

You got to be careful with that I both sides of it. If you, if you have A launch date in mind, and you hold so firmly to it that, you know, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face. You're releasing truly before it's ready. That's really bad.

That's a problem.

Of course, if you have a release date and you look and say, well, it doesn't really matter if we wait three extra months. Like, who cares? We just got to get it right. Like, there's a balance there. And I. I don't. I don't know how to communicate how to do this. But what we do is we start looking and we say, like, when we start the project, it's okay. This is probably going to take three months. I mean, we say it's probably going to take six weeks. So therefore, it's going to take three months because we've learned, you know. Right, right. But that's fine. Y.

But then.

Okay, then. So I'll put a thing on the calendar for, you know, a month before we thought we were going to be finished, or depending on the scope of the project, maybe a week before we thought it was going to be finished, if it's smaller or something. And then it's like, okay, are we still on track here for that? And if not, why? And is it for good reason or is it because we've gotten distracted with something else or we're not focused or what? You know, whatever. Let's answer that question. Okay? Let's keep marching towards that date. And then, you know, if that was a month out, two weeks out, it'll be okay. Realistically, where are we here and could we launch in a week? Because if we can't, if we're two weeks out and we don't believe that we could launch in a week, there's no way we're launching in two weeks. It's just like that, you know? I know if we buckle down, we can work twice as fast on something to just sprint to the end. And there's no reason usually to sprint to the end, but if you couldn't, that's indicative of a bigger problem. Okay, so now let's identify what that problem is. Let's solve it. And maybe it means paring down your MVP further at that point, like, okay, can we launch without that? Well, you know, you have a discussion. Yes. No. Okay, fine. You do that with a few features. Great. Okay, now let's just get it out. And then you get closer and closer, and, you know, we most of the time will have a false launch. We'll get together and say, okay, tonight's the night we're going to roll this all around and we start doing it, it's like, hey, here's a thing we didn't think about. You know, like, oh, here's a little wrinkle. Great, no problem. We already had tomorrow night scheduled because we knew that we needed a second night. We just didn't know why. You know, those sorts of things. And, and you learn that about yourself and your tolerance for risk and all of that stuff. But there is some risk and you just have to, you have to bottle that up and deal with it. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, and I think that those are really important. And I think also when you're getting ready to launch, another thing on my list is, you know, plan for a soft launch. You know, don't go out of the gate with, you know, the horns blaring and every PR thing going and, you know, attracting tons of users or whatever it is. You're probably not going to be ready for that kind of volume. You're not, maybe, you know, if it's a brand new business, maybe you're not ready for hundreds or thousands of customers to come barreling through your door on your website. And I also think when that, as I wrote this soft launch, I also think, especially when you're creating something, it's good to be humble and get that across to your customers. Like, hey, we built this new thing, we think it's great, but we really want your input. You know, we know we're, it's version 1.0 or we're just getting started, whatever it is. So getting them on your side of the table, like we talk about that all the time on this show. But getting them to be like, oh, hey, this is something new so I can get involved and, you know, have a chance to have some input on is powerful versus somebody thinking, oh, I'm going to go buy this thing. And you know, damn it, it doesn't work. And I'm not happy with this thing. It's a fine line. And that's again, launch. Maybe you got to market as beta. Maybe you have to get some friendly reviewers to come in and explain it and get their feedback. But I like that soft launch, the quiet launch, if you will, before you really put your foot on the gas.

Yeah, no, that's smart and that communicate humility, that's key. Here's a new thing. I know we screwed some stuff up. I know we missed some stuff because we're testing from our perspective and not yours. I love it. If you take a look and if you see anything wrong, let me know. We are here ready to jump on this stuff, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. And I also think that humility lets you take more risk. And I will tell you from first, my own perspective is, like, doing this show has really allowed me to take more risk and feel more confident because I often fall back on. Hey, this is what's worked for me. I don't know. I mean, like, I'm. I'm the first to say I learned the most on this show always. But these are the things that I have used to reach some level of success in the last, you know, 25 years. And these are the companies that I started. But it doesn't mean it's right. It's not right for every, every situation. This is, you know, so I, I think it's really a powerful thing to put that out there, that you're. You're ready for corrections or feedback and different, different takes on it. I think it gives. Gives you some freedom that maybe you wouldn't have. Again, speaking of my own thing is that who wants to listen to me talk about business? Right? I mean, but by. You think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, nobody wants to. That's. Your inner judge is saying, well, you know, nobody's going to listen to me.

I don't know. Whatever I do learned more during every episode. And I just chuckle because I know that I'm the one that learns more and that's okay. Yeah.

And. And. But it kind of opened a door for me. I don't have a business degree. Right. Nobody told me what to do. Like you said, I just did it and try to figure things out. That works for me. And I made a million mistakes. And, And I think that's another way I've opened the door is talking about our mistakes all the time. Instead of trying to prop yourself up as this, you know, huge success story by actually sharing those mistakes and talking about them, it. It really can change things for you and make you, I think, much more confident in whatever you're doing with your new business, new product, new service and all that stuff. And, and then the last thing I have, I mean, is know that it's not going to be exactly what you want when you first start. It's just not, you know, you're not going to be able to, or you'll sit there wiling away forever again, stagnating in perfection, you know, trying to create this thing, just get it out there. We talk about starting on this show all the time. That's the critical part Start and then iterate over and over and over. Explain, you know, solve problems as they come up, and, you know, you'll be on the way to success. I. When I was in college, this is the last story I'll tell on the show. But the. When I was in college, I worked in the summertime building decks with a guy who was just an unbelievable carpenter. And, you know, I used to get really hung up on all these little details and everything else, and he's like, hey, you know, we're building decks, we're not building a piano. And he used to constantly tell me that. And I was like, oh, yeah. You know, people are going to be walking on this on their feet. And he'd be like, look at the view. That's what they're going to look at. Look at the people. Think about it. They're going to be looking at people. They're not going to be staring at the ground. You know, you got to make it good. Your quality has to be good because the person paying you wants to see that good quality. But if. If you're building a piano that people are going to walk on, you're never going to finish, and your. Your business is never going to succeed.

Yeah. Wow, that's great, man.

I remind myself all the time about that not building a piano. Let's go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a.

It's a common issue that lots of business people face, I think.

No, it's true. And throughout the process, one thing you need to bear in mind is. Is the concept of a sunk cost. Right? Like, if. If you're doing something, even if you thought it was part of your MVP and you get, you know, where you finish some part of it, and then you realize, whoa, we did that wrong. You know, like, be okay with scrapping that. Like. Like, that's what this version 2 of this podman thing that we released was all about. It was like, wow, we did it wrong the first time.

Sure.

Okay. Yeah, fine. Do you want to take that and try and fix it? No, I want to start from scratch. Like, it was way better for us, but. But, you know, it's hard.

Hard to do.

It's hard because you've put all this time and. Or money or both, you know, into it, and it's like, well, it's the wrong thing. Okay, fine. Just let it go. It's all good. Yep.

So on that note, if. If you're done with this topic.

Yes.

I want to introduce a new segment to the show where I just want to know what's going on with your business. And I'd like to talk about what's going on in our. We each have multiple businesses that we run. And the topic that you just mentioned is that sunk cost, I think, is a really good thing. And I'm in the middle of that right now, and I'd love to talk about it.

Yeah, you go first, but I've got something to share, too.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. So what's going on with me is. So I started a business almost a year ago with. With some great guys, great partners, very smart, and it was a software company because I fell in love with this piece of software they created, and I used it to run another company that I have, and I couldn't live without it. And I thought, man, we really have to build this thing and promote it. And after spending a significant amount of money and a significant amount of time, you know, almost a year, I realized that the software wasn't what people wanted to buy from us. It was really more about our knowledge and why we were using. Yeah. The software was we couldn't charge enough to pay for the support that it needed.

Okay.

If that makes sense.

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Yeah. It couldn't do it. We didn't have a big enough user base, and it was too specific.

And you couldn't retool the software to need less support, Right?

No.

Okay.

No.

Okay.

I tried that. We tried. I tried that, too. And automation and everything. And it. And it was. There was a lot of sunk costs involved. And finally we said, you know what? We can't sell these subscriptions anymore. We have to stop. And we have to then create this business that what people really want. There's all kinds of software out there to do what we're doing. Got it. And. And so we realized that said we would make more money and maybe and more importantly, provide a better service and be more personally fulfilled by changing the entire business model and creating. Giving access to the knowledge that we have to these people. And so that's what we're in the process of doing right now. And. And letting go of those sunk costs. And. And maybe even more importantly, the time. You know, I'm always in a rush. I'm always like, we got to be able to launch. We got to get this thing off the ground. Giving up that year, it took me a year to really figure that out. That was the tuition that I had to pay.

Yeah, right. Sometimes that's what it is. Yeah. Right. You know, man, what a great phrase you just uttered. The tuition I had to pay. So here's the thing, right? You and I experience this because we currently live it with, you know, kids in college and going to college and all of that.

Yeah.

But, you know, college tuition is super expensive right now, especially, you know, if you go to certain places or. Or navigate the financial aid waters a certain way or the wrong way. And I often say, you know, for these schools that cost 70 grand a year, whatever, like that, that's a quarter of a million dollars that you're going to invest in yourself. Where is the payoff on that? Right.

Like, yes. Yeah.

And for most people, the answer is it's not anywhere. So beware. That too. Just as an aside, but saying that was the tuition I had to pay, like, there are those lessons that we learn, we call them mistakes, but so often they become that tuition. Like, okay, I paid this. I learned a thing. Was it fun? Well, you know, there were some moments. We had some parties on Friday night that was cool. But, you know, all in all, no. I worked my butt off. And what did I get out of it? I got knowledge. Like, that's what you. You got experience.

Yeah.

And, man, what a val. What a valuable perspective, man.

It is.

I love it.

Yeah. Once I get some more distance on it and we launch this new product that we're. That we're selling in this new community that we're creating to help these people, because that's what I was doing and that's what they valued. It's going to be great. And I'll talk about on the show and everything out. It's a little raw right now still, but, you know, and we're kind of in this MVP thing as well. This is actually what led me to, you know, develop the topic for this show was how do we make sure we keep powering through when we're at, you know, 90%. So it's good. It really helpful for me. So what's going on with your business?

Actually, you know, I have an idea. This segment is new, Right. And we're literally starting it now. What if we just alternate weeks?

Oh, that's a good idea.

Right. And then we can. It can almost be like, you know, we're. We'll. We'll coach each other. We'll be our business therapists. So there you go.

I like it.

Yep. And if you folks have a thing going on and you want us to do this with you and with your scenario, write us a note. Feedbackusinessshow Co. That's how we find out what you're thinking, what you want us to cover in the show, and it can be generic or it can be very specific. You choose. And just let us know whether you want us to mention your name or your business name or not. And that's okay. We're okay either way. No problem. We get it. Some things need to stay obscure or confidential, and that's totally fine. So we'd love to hear from you. Yeah. It's good stuff.

That's great. Yeah. Great show. Thanks for listening, everyone, again. I always learn the most. And we're looking forward to hearing from you at feedback@businessshow co.

Feedback@businessshow.co. yeah, we love it. Thanks to our sponsors, of course, Lino. Com sbs, thealternativeboard. Com SBS and go co sbs. See you next week.