Dissecting the Wordle Business + Developing a Problem Solving Mindset

The Small business show episode 367 for Wednesday, February 16, 2022. Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co, where we are always small business ing every week. Sponsors for this episode include shopify.com SBS we will talk about how you can go get your 14 day free trial at that URL and why you're going to want to do that. We'll talk about that a little later in the episode. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in sunny California, I'm Shannon Jean. It's going to be 70 degrees out here, Dave.

Okay.

Today.

Listen, man, it's ridiculous. We had an, we had a weird set of precipitation this week where the temperature dropped from like 40 on Thursday down to about negative 2 at some point Saturday night. And now it's back up into like the 30s, 40s. Ish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the problem was it rained on Thursday into Friday. And so it was this rain that turned to ice, that turned to a little bit of snow. That was. And then for most of Friday it was literally just spitting ice. It was not sleet, it was just ice from the sky. And what we wound up with were mountains of ice in our driveway. The snowblower didn't work. Shovel didn't work. Not really the only thing I had to, I had to because I had to move some of these. I used a, I have a splitting maul, which is like a sledgehammer. Use it for firewood. Right. One end of the sledge is triangular. It's not really sharp, but it's got a triangle on it. Yeah. And so that was the only thing, thing I thought, well, let me try the splitting mall. And sure enough, I, I was able to get the, you know, the break up the ice mountain and then I use the snowblower to relocate the crumbs. But it hurt. I couldn't. The next day I had a gig. It sounds like it hurts. I literally couldn't hold drumsticks in my hand at times because it might like, my hands are just weak. So, yeah, you and your, your sunny weather, you can take a hike, man.

Everybody's liking shorts around here. I mean, we, we need, we do need some more rain. We're, I think we're still a little bit behind even. We had some massive storms in December, but my gosh, it's crazy.

Yeah, we're not, we don't swear on this show. So I'm, I'm choosing my words carefully here, my friend.

Yes, I Understand? I understand. But this is not a podcast about the weather. What are we talking about today?

We're talking about all kinds of things. We got a little bit of a grab bag of stuff. We are going to talk about the problem solving mindset. We had some examples of, of how that really is also the small businessing mindset. I think I'm gonna buy small businessing.com for us. I think we should have that. That sounds good. I am, I am pulling the trigger on that. Literally, as we type here. Yeah, so. So we're gonna talk about that. I think we're gonna have time to talk about creating a culture focused on results that may wind up, depending on how the other topics go, that one might wind up getting pushed to next week because that's a good one. The first thing that I want to talk about though is dissecting the wordle business. Listen, I know if you're on social media, you're probably sick and tired of seeing all the wordle posts. That's what I want to talk about. Okay, great.

Because this is perfect. Because I don't. I know nothing about that about wordle. I mean, I have a sense of what it is, of course, but just hearing primarily about it being acquired and some stuff going on, but I don't. So I'm very interested to learn about this.

Yeah, it's a fascinating business model and I think there's something to learn from this for all of us in different ways, perhaps. So to call it a business model is both completely accurate and also a little bit of a stretch. But bear with me on this because I really think that there is a model here. So wordle, you're right. It's a game where you guess a word of the day and everybody in the world gets the same word of the day. It will be a five letter word. You guess five letters, it tells you what letters you got right and if they're in the right spot or not. And you have six chances to get it right. That's all you need to know about wordle.

And it's an app. No, it's a web based.

Right, it is web based, correct. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

That's part of the model here, by the way. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

So that's all it is. And you either succeed or you fail. And when you fail, you can share your results. That's what it is today. What it started as was developer, this guy named Josh Wardle. W, A R D L E, hence the name. Right? Yep. His wife liked playing word games. I think the New York Times has a couple of word games before they bought wordle, but they did buy wordle. You know, they had some others she liked playing. He's a developer and as his wife said in an interview that coincidentally was done in the New York Times, you know, Josh's love language is creating things for her, writing little apps and things like that for her. And so this had a target audience of one, and it was Josh's wife.

That's cool.

And now she is a huge part of why this game is a success, because he built this game and the gist of it sounds like it was basically the same all the way through. Like the, the fundamental of the game never changed. Right. He conceived of this five letter word thing and that was that. He started with a Scrabble dictionary of five letter words because you have to start with something and it had like maybe 6,000 words in it, let's say his wife. So then he, he sets up this little engine. He built it in JavaScript, which I want to talk about in a minute because that's part of the model. And you know, and he said, here, you know, my dear, my love, the gift. Play this right. Here you go. Yeah. And she came back and she's like, this is stupid. I didn't know this, like today's word. I failed. But even when I got to the end and it told me what the word is, it looked like a jumble of letters to me. Like I, I did not recognize this word. And she's like, that's not fun for me. And he was like, oh, well, that's fair. And so then he had her go through this list of 5,000 words and select the 2000, 432 or something that she recognized. And so those are the only words that will be selected as word of the day. Now that still gives you several years worth of words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think I dug into the engine a little bit, but I think both dictionaries are actually loaded into the app. The dictionary of what the answers are from which one is selected each day. And like I said, it's the same one for everyone. And then also I think that 6,000 word dictionary is in there as the permitted guesses Dictionary. Right. So you can guess a word that would never be the word of the day, but you have to guess five letter words. You can't just put A, B, C, D, E, F, A, B, C, D, E. No, F. You can't put a B, C, D, E in there and find out if any of those letters are in the word. You have to guess legitimate words, and those can come from that 6,000 word dictionary. Right, but, but so it was. It was already being iterated on because the gameplay was needed to be challenging enough, but also fun enough and easy enough for it to be fun. Right? So, yeah, that makes sense. But this was. I think this was really important that, again, it was an audience of one. And it reminded me of podcasting. Right? We create the show that we would want to listen to. And the assumption is, and it has proven out many, many times, you know, not just with this show, but, you know, pretty much every other show that exists, the assumption is that there will be other people that want that same thing. And so, but you're. You're. You know, you. And I say the riches are in the niches, right? And it's that mindset of, don't worry about what everybody else wants. Pick your target audience, Pick your avatar. Now, in Josh Wardle's case, it was a literal human. There was no avatar. Right. It was his wife. She's real. But, you know, pick one person and build it for that. And that one person might be you, might be your wife, or it might be this fictitious person or a friend that you haven't talked to in 20 years, but this is the person you want to impress, right? They say when you're writing, you know, prose or an article, a news article or something, that you should have one single person in mind to whom you are addressing this.

Your primary customer.

Your primary customer, Exactly. And it turns out that if you follow Twitter, there are about 350,000 people per day that post their Wordle results on Twitter. So there are more than one person, like his wife, that wants this game and wants to play it. And so he wrote this, right? And he wrote it. It's important to know that this is not the first piece of software for the web that he has written. He is a software engineer. He is technically a solopreneur. He created this thing and then sold it so that, you know, that makes you a business owner. Yeah, but he's a. He's an employee. You know, he worked for a long time at Reddit as a software engineer and a project manager over there. He created the button at Reddit, which was this thing where, you know, you could reset the button or somebody else could. And it was this. Who's going to be the last one to reset it? But a social game, right? He created Place, which was this thing that was like the first wall of pixels that was this, you know, collaborative Art project. You place one pixel, somebody else places another. Yeah, he did both of those things. So, like, he thinks this way. Right? Okay. So he knew how to think about things that would be interesting to a sizable subsection of humanity. Right. And so, you know, mortal fits right into all of those other things. It's very much like the button. It's very much like place in those ways. But he also knew how to make it lean and mean in terms of the development. When you go to play wordle, you visit his website and you see wordle up in front of you. At that moment in time, you are finished interacting with his server. Wordle runs entirely in your web browser, including both of those dictionaries.

The whole thing loads.

The whole thing loads and you're done. So you're. It's not like every time you guess, his server has to analyze what you've put in there and all that. It's all there, including all of the words and a very specific calculation that uses the date and time to select a unique entry from the database of 2,400 words that his wife said were. Okay, so that's why everybody gets the same word of the day. If you change the clock on your computer, you'd get a different word. If you want to, you can look at the JavaScript code and grab that calculation, run it against the dictionary, and you can find out what tomorrow's word's going to be ahead of time. It's no problem. In fact, there are websites that will already do this for you because again, it's all right out in the public. It's JavaScript. It's really not that difficult. He wisely named his variables something not obvious, so that if you're just scanning through the code quickly, you wouldn't see like, you know, word of the day, you know, like he named it something very generic or whatever. So it's, you know, again, not his first rodeo. And so all of these things meant that it could scale very easily because it wasn't going to crater his server when it went from one person to millions of people playing this game. It's fine. He didn't need to worry about that. He knew how to do that and it was just how it worked. And it's interesting, the New York Times picked it up. I don't know what the terms of the deal were, but everything that I've read said that it's somewhere in the seven figure range. So let's figure he picked up a million bucks for it, right? That's, that's low seven figures. That's the lowest of the seven figures, right? Yes. He could have gone the Google AdWords route, right. You know, put some ads on the page and, and he would have made plenty of money, I'm certain.

Yeah, but he didn't promote him or market at all. Or was it just word of mouth and social media and that kind of thing?

Yeah, just word of mouth and social media. But he also, and this was, this was the one iteration, I think, that happened after his wife started playing. He created a very simple way for you to, when you finish your wordle for the day, whether you succeed or whether you fail. He created a very simple way. You hit share and boom. It puts on your computer or phone's clipboard that image that, if you've seen it all over social media, you might have come to love, to hate. That image is now on your clipboard. You can go paste it into a text message to share it with your family, or of course, post it on Twitter or Facebook or wherever the heck you want. And it's obscured. It shows everything that happened in your game. So you can look at someone else's game and see what they did, but you don't see the letters. You see which places they got right or wrong on any given attempt, but the rest is obscured. So I can go and look at your thing, even if I haven't done my wordle for the day. And you wouldn't, it wouldn't tell me anything. But then once I know what the word is, then it's really fascinating to go and look at what you did. And it's like, oh, I see how you. Again, I won't be able to know exactly what you guessed or, you know, especially maybe your first words. Not going to be obvious. But as you go, as you progress through it, it's like, oh, I see how you did that. And that's really interesting to us humans. Right. So the social aspect of this is just as important as the, you know, having his primary customer, his wife, go after it. So.

And I don't think you can put too fine a point on that, that we, you know, having.

Yeah.

That, you know, what problem are you solving and, and who are you solving it for? Right. And I think you look at just a ton of successful businesses that, that have moved from this idea to action stage is they've, they have a very narrow subset, even just themselves. Hey, I built this thing for me. I made this thing for me because I had this problem. And I think that's great.

Yeah, no, most, I think most simple Ideas are built for one person. You know, I mean, how many, how many people have we talked to on this show that it's, it's like, well, why'd you start your business? Like, well, I, I needed to solve this problem for myself. Yes. And, and you know, I had this itch to scratch and, and it was important to me to get it right. And then they realized, wait, that's actually our business now is selling that thing.

And I think it's good too, to ignore. Sometimes you have to kind of ignore the sexy stuff. You have to remind yourself, remember we had Greg and I forget his last name from Jungle Scout on. And he runs an amazing business that helps you ramp up an Amazon business and everything else. But his, his concept was you have to pick things that you would, your friends will think are just, well, that's a stupid idea.

That's too simple.

Product.

Yeah.

And he did it, he did a whole demo and he found these long bamboo s' mores sticks, oversized, big long things. And he created a whole product line around it. And he goes through this. I'm sure that the tutorial is still up@junglescout.com.

Yeah.

And the same thing, like, you know, if you like Shark Tank, you know, the number one product ever come through, the most profitable product ever to go through Shark Tank is a sponge.

Oh, is that right? I had no idea. No, that's Sponge Daddy.

The Sponge Daddy. And it has a little smiley face on it. And when the water gets cold on it, I think it gets little firm and when it gets hot, it gets, you know, a little softer. And it's used for different things, but that's, that's it. And so these simple, simple. Another huge one was the thing that hangs down in the drain and catches like your, the nasty hair falls down.

That thing's amazing. Yeah.

Yes. Product, you know, could be a billion dollar product by now. I don't know. But I knew it was several hundred million dollars. So that kind of when people come and ask me, talking like, hey, what should I sell? I want to get in the business, I want to resell. Da da da da. And they're always like, often I always say, I want to do like consumer electronics or I want to sell iPhones or you know, Apple products. And I was like, man, that's the worst thing to sell. It's just too popular, no money in it. Find something that's just a niche, a little small thing that you can really focus on and has great margin and won't be turned into a commodity overnight. So.

And, yeah, exactly like, yeah, this is a thing that you could try to create something like this, but we don't need another game like this. Like this game. This game takes up more of. More than its fair share.

It's done. It's done. That idea is. It's. It's small business. And now it's onward to, yeah, I'm just going to own it. So, yeah, good story.

A lot of good lessons are great lessons. I know. I love it. I love it. It's. It's, you know, I. It. It. As I dug into it, I'm like, oh, man, this is fascinating. And there's so many people creating different things. Like my son, when he was home over his winter break, he came down one day and he's like, has everybody. Because in the house, we started playing it, and it's fun, you know, whatever. And he says, everybody done their. Their wordle for today? Like, yeah. He says, okay. He pulls out his computer. He's like, I've been busy for the last three days, but I wrote this Python engine to help me guess what word the day would be by taking the feedback from the app. And he's narrowed this thing down. He did a lot of stuff last semester with genetic algorithms, where you have one algorithm that sort of spawns children and it figures out what the best path is and then sort of cascades back up. And he's like, yeah, he's like, I use genetic algorithms and was able to do this, and I think he had it to where it would solve it in an average of like, four guesses. Four and a half guesses per day. And then we found the dictionary from the. You know, from wordle. Like, oh, put that in. That's going to help. And he's down to, like, 3.6 now. Of course, he could just write an app to use the code to tell you what today's word is, but he didn't want to do that, right? Yeah. Not as fun, right? Yeah, exactly. It doesn't require nearly as complex an algorithm to do that. So.

Yeah, good stuff, man.

Yeah, that's good. All right, well, we have some stuff to talk about. The problem solving mindset. The next thing that I want to do, if it works for you, is talk about our sponsor for today.

Yeah, I love these guys. Let's do it.

You know what that sound is? I love that sound. That sound makes me happy because that is the sound of another sale on Shopify, our sponsor and the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business. This shopify platform has been designed for anyone to sell anywhere. Giving entrepreneurs like you and me the resources that were once reserved only for big businesses. And now we get to customize them for our needs. We can make great looking stores that bring our ideas to life and they have tools to manage your day to day and all that stuff. Shannon and I both used Shopify in the past. It is, it is so simple. You don't want to reinvent any wheels when you're starting a business, right? Especially if it's not the focus of your business. Well, this is the focus of their business and they invented a heck of a wheel that you and I just get to use. It's freaking amazing. You've got to go check it out. And it's not just you and me. Shopify powers millions of online entrepreneurs just like us. From first sale to full scale. Every 28 seconds, a small business owner makes their first sale on Shopify. So you can get started building and customizing your online store with no coding or design experience needed. They have all the tools that you need to help you find customers, drive sales. Like I said, to manage your day to day. They've got 24. 7 support, so you are never alone. Get started, go to shopify.comsbs all lowercase for a free 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to shopify.comsbs right now. That's shopify.comsbs and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. All right, man, take us into this. Well, you, you want, you wanted me to, you want me to share the story?

Yeah, yeah, because you, you kind of, you know, pointed it out that, you know, having this problem solving mindset is, is a, is really small businessing. So you know, share your example and then we'll, we'll take a little deeper, dive into it.

Sure. So, you know, I like the band Fish that might have come up once or twice on the show over the years. If, if it hadn't, then I, then I do. And they're playing in Mexico later this month. Covid's also, you know, been happening for the last couple of years, raging in, in January is, you know, the thing moved through and they offered people the opportunity for a refund. This was something people were hoping that they would do. And when things hit level four for Mexico with the cdc, they said, okay, there's refunds. And somebody was saying, well, is there a way to upgrade my room? And you know, and like they still want to go they just want to have a different room. Maybe when things went on sale, it sold out really fast. And so people wound up at, you know, a resort that's different from the one where the band is playing, and they wanted to, you know, move in and. And they're like, is there any way to do that? And I said, well, why don't you just book the new room that's available and then take advantage of the cancellation window that exists? And people were, like, astonished at this idea. And I was like, well, that seems obvious. I said, the only issue is you got to have access to capital to do that, because, you know, it's going to be somewhere between five and ten grand that you're going to. You've already got laid out, and maybe four and eight. I don't know, whatever it is. Yeah. You know, and. And you're going to need to do that again and probably wait 60 days for your refund to come through, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I'm like, you got to have access to that cash or cash equivalent, like a credit card that you're willing to float, or, you know, if maybe you've got the cash. I don't. You know, everybody's scenario is different. But, yeah, if you're willing to do that, the refund is a guarantee in this window of opportunity that they've given us. And you can go online and see that there's all these packages available. Like, why wouldn't you just do that? It seemed painfully obvious to me. Not even painfully, just like, well, that's how you would solve. That's the easiest solution to this problem. And so many people were like, wow, I never really thought of it. This is amazing. Thank you. That's what I'm going to do. I'm so happy, and I was super stoked to help people, but I was also like, why am I the only one to think? And I know I'm not the only one to think of this, but, you know, why isn't this obvious to everyone? And this is a problem, you know, a fault of mine. I think that what's obvious and logical to me should be obvious and logical to everyone. And if it's not, I'm happy to take 30 seconds and explain it to you. And by the end of which, I assume we're going to be on the same page and there's no further discussion necessary.

And it's not like a smart thing or whatever, because nobody's a genius in their own way, right?

Yeah. This isn't an intelligence thing. It's a mindset.

It's a mindset and it's the way. Yeah, it's just over time. You. I think the most successful small business owners either already had it or they certainly have to develop it over time to become successful. Because you're constantly solving problems. You know, I always make the statement, you know, no problems, no business.

Right.

So just get used to it.

Yeah. Gosh, what a great statement. I don't know that I've ever heard you say that before, but I love that. That's great.

It's true. Because I would hear people. You know, one of the parts of my notes is, hey, you don't. We used to shut down complaints unless it's followed up with a solution. It's like, okay, yes, we only allow complaints if you. If the end of your sentence doesn't end, it's okay, this is a problem, or I hate it when this happens. But here's my idea to make it not happen again. And, you know, and if you don't have those, like, there's problems, there's no revenue. You're fixing something with this product that you made for your primary customer or your service or whatever it is. We're all really in. I mean, I know you like to say, and I do agree with it, we're all in the customer service business, but it's. It is the same thing when you say we're all in the problem solving business.

Agreed. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You're solving problems for other people. Hopefully you can do it in a way where they feel loved and you were polite to them. But. Yes, but I think, I think, I think it's. I think both are true. And they. They can be mutually exclusive. Like, you can be solving people's problems and not be good at customer service. Like, just. Just solving the problem doesn't mean you did good customer service.

Well, and I think you. A really good point that you just made and kind of quickly went by that I want to revisit is there's a technique to it so that you don't, you know, you don't want to come across as arrogant or I think I'm smarter than you. You're just throwing out, what if we did this? Or how would this work? And then I think you also have to be open to other people tweaking your solution.

Right.

Because you're like, okay, well, this. You could try this, and then somebody could come and even make it better. Right. I think that's really important. Don't fall in love with your own solution. No, Just put it out there and let it. Let it live, you know?

Yeah, let it live. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need a little bit of humility, a little bit of compassion, really.

It gets your. It gets your solution. It's persuasion. It's totally gets your solution adopted more readily than if you came across as some jerk that are just like, oh, you guys are idiots. I know the answer to this. Let's do this. That doesn't work. You have to get everybody on board, and you may even have to hold your solution back a bit and lead people to it.

Totally. Yes. As you were saying that, I was thinking, okay, well, you know, I could have. And this was just in some Facebook group or something, you know, about the event where I posted this. But, you know, I could have said, what are you, an idiot? Why don't you do it this way? Right.

And now plenty of people that do.

That, they may still have taken my solution because. But again, this is me applying my logic to your brain. But, you know, if I. Even if somebody called me an idiot and I saw a solution that was that good, I'd be like, oh, well, I'm. I'm in. You know, I'll do that anyways. Screw that guy. But. But that doesn't always work, right? It rarely works. Yeah.

Yeah, it doesn't. And one of my arguments, you know, against the Internet is that it allows people to talk to one another like they would never talk to one another in person that way.

Right.

And you got to really be careful that you don't let that cynicism or negativity get involved, especially if you're trying to, you know, offer up a solution that you. To be adopted. Yeah, you need to. You need to think about it.

Yes, but you're right. Some people, and I learned this from both my wife and my daughter, that sometimes a solution is not the reason a problem is presented or what.

No, it's always that way.

Yes. The desire of a solution is often that, too, can be mutually exclusive from expressing a problem. And some people do just want to be. In fact, we all just want to be heard, especially people who, like us, who have major psychological issues and just do a podcast so that we know that we're being heard. But sometimes, to your point, you have to hold back that solution.

So how do you identify? Yeah, how do you. It brings up a very good point. How do you. Do you identify when that person, whether it's an employee, partner, whoever, will stay out of our personal lives, because that's a whole different Topic. But you know, how. What are the signs that this person that came to you, so you don't just jump on them like, what's your solution? You know, or offer up a solution. You know, what are the signals that, hey, this person just needs to share this problem or maybe even this experience that they had.

What I've learned to do, because anytime I'm presented with a problem, I am immediately thinking, how would I solve this? Like, and. And then once I come up with that, I want to share, you know, that's. But it's what I do. It's it as a small business. Like, the whole point of this segment, as a small business owner, it's sort of my default mindset. Right. It's how I approach things. What I have learned through trial and error is that I can come up with the solution. I can let my brain do what my brain does, because that's what it's going to do anyway. And then I need to look for signs that someone is asking for help, not just to be heard. And sometimes people will say, I need help. That's super great. I love that. Doesn't always happen that way. You've got to look for cues that someone is going to be receptive to the solution. And sometimes it's really difficult because if somebody's really upset about a problem, they, you know, we all like. What I do is I put myself in their mindset. They are venting about a problem I've done that they might want to solve it themselves. Like, there's a. There's a lot to be said about that. And so often I'm going to hold back on anything and let you decide whether you're going to try and solve this yourself or whether you're going to ask for help. And then at that point, if you ask me, I'm happy to come in. I say this like, I'm an expert at this. I fail at this all the time. But I've learned that I should, and I hate using that word, but that a smart thing is to be looking for those cues and waiting to act until I see them. Yes.

And I think that if someone's angry or upset, you have to wait it out. They're not open to hearing. That's definitely, for me, one of the signals that they just want to. And I really have to focus on listening instead of trying to think of the solution all the time. And maybe that's one of the cons of owning these companies over the years that you just constantly, okay, how do I solve it? So I can get onto the next thing.

Yeah.

And there are times when you just need to shut up. And I'm speaking to myself. You know, I need to be quiet, really listen, and, you know, whatever solution, if they want one or ideas to solve that problem may be in another conversation. Right. But they're so upset or, you know, need to share this experience with you that you just need to be quiet and.

Yeah. And just.

Maybe just ask them, do you want some feedback on that or do you just, you know, do you.

Did you just need to talk it out? Yeah, that's it. Yeah. That's actually a great. That's a great way to approach them, is. Is ask. Yeah. Because sometimes, you know, sometimes I will ask, and sometimes we even do it on this show where I say, look, I've got a problem. I want to talk it out.

Yeah.

The reason I'm talking it out is so that I can solve it. Not necessarily to have someone else tell me. I just need a sounding board. And I learned that when I was doing a lot of computer consulting, people would hire me. I'd come to their home or office and tell me their problems with their computer. Sometimes they'd also tell me their other problems. But we tried to focus on the computer. And then I would set about trying to figure out what was going on, what was wrong, and then what the solution was. And I found that both for my own troubleshooting, but also very much for. For customer service, I would check in with the client once every. You know, I would say every 15 minutes, but it was probably more like every 20 or 30. Right. I would check in with them if this problem was going on for a while and explain to them, okay, here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I've tried that hasn't worked. Here's what I'm thinking of trying next. If there was a decision to be made, I'd try to get them involved in the decision. You know, do we take path A or path B? What do you. You know, here's what I would do. What do you think? And it's good to get them involved because if you can't solve the problem, you still want the bill paid. But I also wanted to get them involved because they were another human that I could interact with on this problem. I did not expect them to have the answer because that's what they hired me for. Right. So. But just telling them and talking it out and trying to teach someone else what the problem was, I would often come up with, you know, a. As I was coming up with a way of phrasing it. I would also come up with potential.

Solutions and I think that's also part of the diagnostic.

Right, Correct.

They may say something like, oh, I forgot to tell you, every time that happens I hit this or this happens or whatever. So that, that back and forth I think is really good. And I think if one of, one of the things I really like to tell people is that, you know, the problems are really an opportunity. You know, it's a great book called the Obstacle is the Way. Right. And we'll put a link to. And it's. Who's the author? Let me find here. Ryan Holiday.

Okay.

And it's a great book and it just talks really about you need to embrace that problem and it's very solution based and you can get through these kinds of things. So even if you don't have advice to give, I think it's a valid thing to say. You know, once you figure this out, you're just going to be really, you know, even more powerful and more confident that because yeah, you know, you're coming up that that's what it builds up over time, you know. And I think that's a good way to do it. It shows empathy and it also helps, you know, them, them get to the other side of this.

To the other side. Yeah. That's the whole point, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. Yeah. Just ask you want help you do you just want to talk it out.

I like it.

I like another super.

Another thing I like to do is to. If you have a problem in your business and it maybe it seems insurmountable or you just can't figure it out is to look outside your company at other businesses and how they do things, even if it's completely non related business, sometimes that's even the best. And think about how they solve particular problems. Like what did they do different? You know, like okay, when it, when I can remember going to the AT&T store and there would just be lines and a big nightmare and then they changed their whole model. They kind of followed Apple, but they tweaked it a little bit to where you know, as soon as you walked in you were greeted by somebody. He put in a cue with what your problem was and said hey, okay, great, I got you. You know, somebody's going to come up to you as soon as they're done. So you know, it's like that's a really unique way to treat a customer versus having your lobby. If you're, you know, Retailer or whatever full of, of people that are just.

Queued up, that are. They don't even know they're queued up.

They're like waiting and recognized.

Yeah. Haven't been recognized. Yeah. And the AT&T store, eventually I left AT&T years ago for me too, but.

Me too.

Yeah. Because it saves a ton of money.

Because it's way better.

I'll put a link in the show notes for you, but it's like 15 bucks a month per line.

Like we've had them on the.

That's right, we had them. We interviewed them. They were a sponsor for a little while. We still pay them. It's happy, it's great. But I remember one of the last times I was in the ATT store, I did exactly what you described. And then there was a board on the wall that showed, you know, it was like, it was kind of like the upgrade board at the airport. I think it might just show my first name. It wasn't, you know, personally identifiable in any creepy way, but it showed when I checked in, when I was expected to be helped and where I was in the queue. But that transparency eliminates so much stress. Yeah, you might. I mean, it literally changes nothing. Right. You're still gonna get here. It's the same situation, it's the same scenario. You just get to see the screen instead of going up and asking, hey, where are we in the queue? Or trying to peek around the person's corner. You know, it's like, why are we peeking? This is just data. Just show me the data. And so they did. I thought it was great.

And so looking, yeah, looking at those kind of different things and how they're handled and can you apply them to a particular situation you're having in your business can be really helpful. I wish I had some more examples, but I'm sure that we could get some examples if you've done this kind of thing. Feedbackusinessshow.co. we'd love to hear from you.

We would love to hear from you.

Yeah, I have just a couple more things. Okay. I want to fall back to one of our favorite comments ever from a guest, Brian Frist from Digistore, where he said, don't make fear based decisions and you know, problem solving mindset. You know, that is just one of the rules. You have to, you have to slow down, think about what's going on and get out of the panic mode to allow you to really think. And sometimes you need to walk away from the problem for a little while. You say, okay, I need to just kind of let it percolate and look at it sideways and maybe you have to flank it a little bit because coming straight on, you just can't figure it out.

I have found in those scenarios, and I'm in one right now. I mean, it's not a big deal, but I say that, and it easily could be something that I just let, like, completely dominate my thought process. But I've learned. And so what I've done this time is I found out about the problem. It's like, okay, I called one of my business partners and just told him about it. You know, wasn't looking for an answer, but just told him about it. And simply by telling someone else about the problem, it was like, okay, this is no longer my burden to carry. It's mine to solve. Like, I still gotta figure it out, you know, but it's like, oh, I talked it out. It's really not nearly as big of a deal as I probably would have made it to myself. And then I get to do what you're talking about, where I get to put it in the background and let my mind percolate because that.

Listen to other stories. Like, they'll probably be like, oh, I had something like that happen one time. And yeah, and you're just kind of opening yourself up. So, you know, some of these solutions come in via osmosis.

Right.

Kind of trickle in and. Or you're, you know, you're reading or you're doing something like, oh, I could do this. I could use that tactic to solve it. So give yourself a break. You don't need to solve it right away. The last thing I would leave you with today, it's one thing that I learned over time, especially in the tech business, is that especially new employees or new managers, they often want to set policies on what I would call singular.

Situations where edge cases, man, you can't do it.

Yes, something happened. And then they came in and said, hey, we have to change the website or add this to our terms and conditions or make this new policy and that kind of thing. And I would always remind them, look, we don't set policy that way. We study. And if we have systemic problems that occur over and over and we see trends, then we can look about how do we change things or set a policy to avoid that. But don't respond to every single thing with a policy or, I mean, you'll have a 200 page term. Conditions would be like, it'd be crazy.

I learned early on in my publishing podcasting career, and it really Came home to roost when I started podcasting, but it was happening when we were just publishing Mac observer in the years before. Before was that if, certainly if there was something systemic like people started reporting, like every time I go to this page, my browser crashes. Okay, well, okay, let's take a look at that. But if it was like, I don't like this now, if, again, if there was enough of that to where there was a consistent number of people regularly saying, this is a problem for me, I don't like this about your site. We would give it a little bit of attention. We may not change it, but we would certainly have a conversation and like I said, give it a little bit of attention. But the one offs I found really interesting because most of the time it would be one of those things where it's like, okay, you're having a bad day, you're taking it out of me. I'm here for you, I got you, it's fine. And I would often reply, anytime I replied. It doesn't matter how vitriolic their email was, it was always, thank you so much for taking the time. I understand this is frustrating. I really appreciate that you wanted to tell me about this, you know, like.

That, okay, great, you're handing them the token you're taking. That's right, the two tokens.

That's right, yeah. Yeah. But what I noticed was sometimes just that one off, I would want to change policy because of it. And it was like, okay, why is that? And that's what I've learned to ask the team as well. Like some piece of feedback comes in and suddenly it has a champion. Right? We need to change something. Policy or the website or whatever. And it's like, okay, wait, this is literally one person that none of us know that sent this thing in and now you are their champion for this. Cause this tells me this means something to you. Because it means something to me when I find myself. And this is very much a projection thing, you know, it's not a finger of flame thing. And I've found that there are times when someone else is much better at articulating a problem I've noticed, but haven't yet been able to like bring to the surface with the business, the website, whatever it is. And usually it's my response or my reaction, not response, but my reaction to those things when they come in. It's like, okay, wait a minute, I care about this. I don't know that person, so I can't have any care. Some out of the ordinary care, because it's them. No, I don't even know who you are. And you said this thing and it is occupying a lot of my headspace. I don't think this is a new thing that I've noticed. I think this is something that I've been thinking about for a while and now you've put it into words that let me zero in on what it might be and that has served me well. But it takes a level of awareness like, okay, why is this comment the one that you're obsessing over? What is it about that? And so we would have those conversations again, like we were talking about earlier. Very your approach, especially when it's in someone else. With myself, I can be pretty frank and brutally honest and like, okay, what's up, Dave? Why are you thinking this way? But you know, when it's somebody else and it's like, what's it, what is it about you that makes this a problem? You know, it comes across the wrong way. So you got to make sure you couch that the right way. But it's like, okay, this clearly means something to you. Tell me about what you think. Don't worry. The person.

That's your job.

The person that wrote in is. Is now not relevant. I'm worried about you. You know, let's have this conversation. Yeah, yeah. And then it becomes. And again, it's usually that somebody articulated a thing that one of us was unable to. We probably eventually would have, but this just fast tracked it for us. Okay, great, let's have the conversations.

No problem. Help that person with a solution that they can use again and again. And then like, hey, keep an eye on this. If you start seeing this. And you know, but here's how, you know, here's some ideas on solving it.

Yeah, here's how it's going to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man, that's great.

It's good stuff. So we've got covered this pretty good. We'd love again to hear how you use your problem solving mindset. Feedbackusinessshow Co. Or join us in the small business support group at BusinessShow Co Facebook and we'll do the creating a culture focused on results next time because we have a lot to talk about there too.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good one to do. And we do have small businessing.com it's already pointing at the website and I'm trying to make the email work, but you know, there's only so many things I can do while we're recording a podcast.

Of course, of course.

But I thought that was a domain we should have. As I was saying it out loud at the beginning of the episode, I was like, oh, we should have that.

I agree.

Oh, yeah, I agree. Thanks for listening, folks. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks for spending your time with us. We won't take up any more of it. We will let you go check out our sponsor, though, shopify.com SBS. I think you're going to really appreciate the service that they provide. Keep, keep living that charmed life. We'll see you next.