Espresso Hour Plan 2024, Theming Our Weeks, And The Value Of Boring Work

It doesn't matter how much you've done or achieved in a different medium or vehicle, when you pick something new, you are at level one again.

What I'm trying to embody is the swan. Above the water, it looks smooth, nothing's happening. And then underneath, there's just a bunch of chaos and craziness.

Every step we take forward, I look back at other things that I've done in the past, other ventures, other businesses I try to start, and I'm like, oh, I see exactly where I went wrong.

Yes, the product is good and working for some people, but until everyone brings more than one friend back into that product, it could be better, period. Full stop.

It is always the boring work that separates the really successful people from everybody else. You could pour as much as you want into the top, but you have seven holes in the bottom of your ship.

So what with both Ride with AI and typeshare, it's not a marketing problem. The tripling question is not drive three times as much more traffic. It's.

Boom.

Welcome back to another episode of the espresso hour, the first one of 2024.

That's right.

We're here, we're hyped up on caffeine and we're glad to be back after, what's it been, four or five week hiatus.

Wait, is this really the first one of 20?

First one, 2024.

Oh my gosh, time flies.

But we're back. The last one we did was the end of your recap. So a lot's happened since then. And ready to dive back in, ready to settle back in and just start cranking these out on a weekly basis.

This year already feels way different than where we started last year. I remember where we started last year. I remember sitting down at that. We work. Oh yeah, we're at the end of the giant table that was that we.

Now have over there.

Entirely too large for two people. And Dickie and I were at both ends and we were talking through the big question of what do we do? You know, do we refine ship 30 and captain's table? Do we build something new? We made the decision to launch PGA and now we're starting this year with essentially everything built. And now we just got to go improve it relentlessly.

And that is something that's settled in or soaked in for us over the first week of really three weeks of building so far this year. So why don't we first start with what we think about Espresso Hour for the rest of this year, how we want to do it and that'll tie us into the first recap.

Yeah, this has been an interesting realization is because, you know, the shipyard's new Espresso Hour as a, as a vehicle for us is still relatively new. Us recording Espresso Hour in the shipyard is still very new. And so in hindsight, I think we both sort of realized that we were using Espresso Hour as a catch all. You know, we didn't really know. Is it a podcast? Is it intended to create content? Is it where we just share our learnings in public? And as we've started exploring the video side, you know, the first thing to share is that we just hired an all star video editor is as we've started to explore that path, we realized that we can make espresso really just us sharing our learnings in public. This is pure build in public and share what we're learning.

Yeah, this came from the feedback we got from every single episode, which was, hey, I love the tactical frameworks and I also love you guys just breaking it down in the context of your own business. And so the best way to do that will be going forward, doing weekly recaps on what happened in the business and what we learned. And that will generate content ideas for us to make actual scripted videos on.

And just so you know, I mean, this is now what we've started doing internally. So Espresso Hour is really the reflection of an exercise that we're doing internally every week anyway. You know, especially you, you're sitting down, you're recapping the whole week, you're going, what were some of the biggest learnings? What were some of the big things that we did? And because we do that internally and then we share it with the team and we continue to crystallize, you know, here's our priorities, here's the progress that we've made, here's what we're focused on next. Espresso Hour is really just us open sourcing that and going, well, might as well share it with you.

And that's the content I find the most valuable. Like, imagine if you could look up to or the, the people that you looked up to who are running different businesses, if they wrote a weekly recap of what happened and put it out publicly and talked about it. And it's just a nice forcing function for us to clarify what's going on, and it benefits the whole team. So rather than, you know, leave that in the slack for no one else to read, we just put it out for everybody.

Yep.

So first big thing was we made A really exciting hire. We hired an all star lead editor. She's worked on another very large YouTube channel for a long time. This was, I think this was the most effort we've put into a hire. This was the most we interviewed. This was the, you know, we had so many conversations about who we were looking for, why, what skills we needed, what we were really optimizing for. And also we sort of came to the conclusion that we've postponed it as long as we possibly could. You know, we prioritized X and LinkedIn for a long time and now I think Espresso really confirmed it for us. Like, it's not like our episodes have gone massively viral, but the density of signal has been so strong that we'll get people who go, I have watched every single thing and I absolutely love it. And thank you for sharing all of this in public. So we've really made the commitment that we're gonna go all in on video this year and, and really excited about who we hired.

Yeah. Having the lens for what are all the different things we could share via video is way different than what are all the things we could talk about with Espresso Hour. So having those as separate things is gonna be huge. And I think we underestimate what a fully focused video editor could do for us, whose one job is to take this and take our. Whatever we put on camera and make it look good and make it engaging and effective. And it's going to be a learning process for sure. But it's better to just start with that now than wait any longer. We've been in here now for six months. We signed the lease three months it's been built and now I feel like we're finally ready to turn up the dials on YouTube.

Yep.

And it's so funny, even just, you know, before this I was working on some videos here and it's so funny how it doesn't matter how much you've done or achieved in a different medium or vehicle, when you pick something new, you are at level one again. And I feel like such a beginner. And every single video, whether it's a short or a long form video or whatever, I'm just downloading into my brain like, oh, I could improve that.

I did that.

I could do that better. So we're starting over and we're doing it in public. So you're going to watch the whole, the whole skill progression.

Yeah. And that's what excites me about documenting the full year too, is at the end of the year there'll be 52 episodes for someone to watch. If we say, hey, want to see how we built the business for the entire year? Go watch and listen to that. And then in 10 years, we'll get to look back on 10 years of recaps like this. It'll be really cool. Why don't we just keep going down this list? So for context, I've been sitting down on Friday mornings every week so far this year for an hour and recapping everything that happened in the business. So I go through our slack, I go through all of my messages, I go through my daily recaps and I say, what? What is it that we built this week? I write it up, usually five or six things and then I try to distill the lessons and realizations. We also open source this to the team to share any wins that they had or things that they learned and things they worked on. And then I sent it to them in the morning. This is just going to be the video version. And so the second thing we did this week was boring infrastructure.

A lot, a lot of boring infrastructure.

And that's been the theme of the year. So one of the lessons from earlier. So the first or second week is theming weeks at the beginning of this is Blank week. So we did it with Success week two weeks ago. And this week was Infrastructure week where it just primes everyone to think I'm putting my effort towards something like infrastructure. If it was a new product, it would be new product week or new feature week or something like that. Just the high level focus of the team on one specific thing has gone a long way already.

Yeah, I think that's super important too because the default is always, yeah, yeah, I got my priority, I'll remember. And then Tuesday afternoon rolls around and there's all these things fighting for your attention and it becomes so easy to forget. No, this is infrastructure week. This is the number one priority. This is what we have to focus on. So I really like this idea of theming weeks. And also it kind of dovetails into a realization we shared. Maybe it was our end of year espresso hour where you can do anything as long as there's an end point, but you can't do things that just drag on indefinitely. So when you theme a week and you go, this is infrastructure week, everyone can push really hard because, you know, when we get to Friday, we've completed infrastructure week and then we'll probably move on. Maybe not, but we'll probably move on to something different the next week that.

It Also ties into another lesson we had which is you can only accelerate one area of the business at a time. And so this is not Infrastructure Week and also go launch new product week, it's backend infrastructure. So the way I look at this is getting clear data across four different areas. Sales, marketing success and finance. Everything we've done is basically build an airtable or a spreadsheet in the last four days. That gives us pure clarity to make decisions. So that took a lot of boring work, a lot of clicking, a lot of just staring at a spreadsheet saying how could this be more efficient? But, but we're pretty close to it. I do think though, next week will be Infrastructure Week 2, because 2.0, 2.0. And that's, that's the cool part is we did Infrastructure week all week. We got to Friday and all the open loops on my list are finish this piece, finish this piece, finish this one. And it's all infrastructure related. So doing that again the next week until those loops are closed is how we want to operate. Because before you can move on to the next thing, it's let's finish this one, let's close all the loops here and then move on.

Yep.

Yeah, I think it's worth just sharing for context. So our big focus right now is in fixing and improving and scaling our Premium Ghost Trading Academy. We've talked about this in previous espresso hours. Ship 30 has been and was an amazing vehicle, especially when we were first starting out. But we've really learned that cohort based programs, they're just, they are harder to scale in a, in the sense that your feedback loop is significantly longer. You know, we would come up with hypotheses about the marketing of ship 30, but we wouldn't be able to apply or see the results of them until the next cohort, which was three months later. Whereas Premium Ghost Trading Academy is a one to many group coaching model, it's evergreen. So there's people joining every day, which means we can iterate every day or even every hour. So all of these things that we're talking about are all being focused into how do we improve and scale our Premium Ghostwriting Academy.

And I think we shared this in the end of year recap. But the reason is on a quarterly cohort, each day of the marketing and fulfillment cycle happens once every 13 weeks. Which means if I make a change on something we're doing, I won't get to see the actual result of that until the same cycle 13 weeks later. But for PGA, it's a daily feedback loop where we can test things. Different emails, different opt ins, different parts on the sales call, different parts on the student success side where since everyone is going through it and you have new students starting every single day and you have new people going to the landing page every single day, 13 times faster feedback loops. And so we were able to move pretty quickly with ship 30. I know we can move way faster with PGA, but we've made mistakes in the past of trying to optimize something without the clear metrics. So that's why I've just been getting everyone back on. Gotta have the infrastructure. Gotta have the infrastructure. And now I sit down, I have an airtable that's telling me everything about the business and it's much easier to make changes and smart decisions based on that.

Yep.

And something that we've been talking about a lot is, you know, because PGA is growing and scaling very quickly, it's really crystallized for us that the separator for, I'll just speak. In our world, especially for education businesses, digital businesses, the separator largely comes down to complexity of infrastructure and fulfillment. Anyone can create a course, anyone can create a program, but the programs that really grow and scale and are able to service hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people are the ones that end up having a lot of complexity on the infrastructure side. And so I think we're both noticing this is more your domain than it is mine. But even I can witness it as you, as you dig into it is the more complexity that you lean into, the further and further that gap widens between you and anyone else that would be considered competition because it's hard. What's the quote? Whoever can tolerate the most operational complexity wins and the most money.

It's showing as we're doing this just how much operate. But what I'm trying to embody is the swan. I don't. Maybe it's a swan or the dog, whatever it is, where on the, above the water it looks smooth, nothing's happening, and then underneath there's just a bunch of chaos and craziness. That's kind of what's going on right now underneath the surface. But it's working. And I enjoy this part of the optimization process. Getting this all set up is the most mentally stimulating thing for me, which is great because it's not for you.

It'S not for me.

And meanwhile you're able to go look at something that is completely unrelated to infrastructure and it's improving the curriculum.

Yep.

Right. And so we're able to Sprint in parallel.

Yeah. I was gonna say this is a great example of how we can build and do things in parallel, because while you're doing infrastructure, I'm completely overhauling the curriculum, because now we've had 500 people go through PGA. We know every possible question that someone could ask. So now I'm going back through. Talk about falling in love with the monotony of it. You know, this is a curriculum that took me a hundred hours to build. And the reality is it's working, and it's working fine. But we want more than fine. We want great. And so, again, same thing. Sitting down, going back through, essentially rewriting and rerecording the entire curriculum just for a, you know, 20% improvement, because we know that that's really important. That's the type of boring work you just have to fall in love with doing.

Yeah. I think we'll talk about this more in next week's episode after we sit down and refine them a bit more. But one of the product pillars that we're talking about is build until they tell, Right? And so if we're using a referral metric as an indicator of product quality, yes, the product is good and working for some people, but until it's working so much that everyone brings more than one friend to back into that product, it could be better, period, full stop. Which means strap it on, like, strap it up and get ready for boring work. Because, you know, if that's such a clear indicator for me, it's if the product is good enough. So everyone's going to bring someone else. And until then, you have more to improve. And then you can just ask them, why aren't you telling your friends? Well, it's this, it's this, it's this. Go fix it. It's this, it's this. And that's the beauty of picking one vehicle, because we learn how to gather enough feedback to make it so someone wants to go tell a friend. And then the. The skills we end up building through that iteration process, we can reapply. And that's a theme we've talked about a ton. What else have we gotten up to?

Right with AI yeah, right with AI is very exciting right now. Right with AI is closing in on 1300.

Yeah.

1300 paid subs on on substack. I see so much potential for this vertical specifically, but really just our paid newsletter portfolio in general. I think we're really starting to crack the code on what makes a super valuable paid newsletter. Shocker. The TLDR is you got to put A lot of effort into it. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of thinking. You have to treat this not just as, oh, I have a paid newsletter, but this is a business in and of itself. We think of right with AI just like we think of ship 30, just like we think of PG. So there's levers you can push and pull.

Yeah. And we learned while we shut down two paid newsletters or stopped the promotion and creation of them because we want to follow the hormozy framework of one product, one avatar, one channel to a million dollars a year. And so right with AI, we had the choice of starting other newsletters while this is now around like 300k a year. And we said, well, all the effort that we were putting on another newsletter is not going to be as lucrative as putting more effort into this one. And so we said, let's scrap the others for now. Let's put more effort here. And what are all the things that with that new time we would start doing, which was a referral program and a better weekly cadence of product. Right. And we've already seen it with. Okay, we made that one decision. Now we're a few days away from launching a referral program and back to build until they tell our new KPI is going to be. How can we make sure that one person who signs up for Right with AI brings one other person? And what's going to happen, we will double and then soon enough that'll be at a million a year just on that simple framework.

Yeah.

And that's just on the subscription revenue. Like, we really don't have any. We don't have a path from. I love Right with AI like, what's the higher ticket AI writing products? So I think once we get to a million a year in revenue on Right with AI then we'll probably start thinking like, how do you extend the LTV with some of that? But yeah, there's a very clear path here.

Yeah, it's a tripling from here just about.

Yep.

Right. And so I know that we're going to get some swag. That's the easiest one. And this is just a reminder as we're talking about this, the power of these little phrases. Because as I think about build until they tell, we're having Justin, who runs our Right with AI newsletter, think about that of let's look at this every single week. How many did we get from internal referrals? How can we improve it until that is true? If you just follow that one rule on every product you have in each of our different verticals. It kind of takes care of itself. And it's way more difficult and more boring than just doing more marketing.

Yep.

But build until they tell. Build until they tell is I just want to staple that to my eyelids because it's working. Every time we've done that, we've seen more success because of it. Like, think about how many times we changed the ship 30 curriculum until now. Everyone tells at least one person when they join ship 30. This was the best thing ever. And then it took us 15 cohorts to do that, but it took us 15 cohorts with a quarterly feedback loop. So that really means 15 iteration cycles. But that took two and a half years. So now if we could do the same thing on fewer iteration cycles in less time per iteration, that's how we move faster. I chatted that to you yesterday.

Yep.

Yeah, it's really starting to crystallize for me. That and I. It's every step we take forward, I look back at other things that I've done in the past, other ventures, other businesses I try to start, and I'm like, oh, I see exactly where I went wrong now. Because the impulse is always, oh, something's working. I should start something new. And that is the impulse to fight. It is always the boring work that separates the really successful people from everybody else. And we get it because we struggle with that, like, every week. Every single week, it's like, shiny object. And then we both run to it, and then the next day we sit down and we're like, that was a shiny object.

That wasn't.

It shouldn't have done that. You know, so we get it. But the key is embrace the boring.

Work just to crystallize that learning framework. I think there's two ways to improve faster at something. You can improve more with each iteration, or you can cram more iterations into less time. So if you're going to iterate 10 times, you can learn more on each of those 10 iterations. You'll get faster. And you can also do those 10 iterations in a week rather than in a quarter. And so that's on the infrastructure side. We want to get it to a daily feedback loop. Then once we have a daily feedback loop, we want to learn more from each test we run. And that excites me because if we were able to do what we've done over the last couple years without this, it's that because of or despite framework. Right. We've been a little bit messy on a lot of this back end and someone could say, oh, it's allowed you to move faster or whatever. I'm like, I think it's. Despite being unorganized or disorganized on the back end. Let's see what happens when we have full clarity across the board.

Yeah.

And to recognizing you can't do everything, you know, especially when you're building something new, you're really just optimizing. Like, what's the bottleneck? Well, it doesn't exist. We need to make it exist. You know, it's not live. We need to turn it live. So inherently things are going to be messy as you're solving that first zero to one. But then now we're at that point where all of the creation is essentially done. We're starting 2024 with. We don't really have to create anything new. We sort of just need to go back, recreate and clean up what we have. And that's the boring work. Like, no one wants to sit there if. Do you have any idea how many times I've rewritten the modules for ship 30 or how many times I've rewritten modules for PGA? Like, I think we've easily put 3,000 plus hours into ship 30.

Yeah, easily.

And like that's. And that's just what it takes. We couldn't have gotten there any other way.

Speaking of iteration, next feature in Typeshares Live. So we've done a lot of thinking on this and you've kind of been masterminding most of the product here. So what's been going on there?

Yeah, I give I, Sam, our third co founder and Typeshare a lot of credit here too, because we go back and forth almost every day. And I think our big realization is with typeshare, the. The most beneficial feature to users that we've seen are the templates. That's what people get the most out of. Typeshare obviously has a lot of other really cool features, especially on the AI side, like Athena, which is the digital writing assistant. Inside of Typeshare is really cool to get feedback on your headlines and formatting and things like that. But the real value is in the templates. So we've decided again, just trying to drink our own Kool Aid, see what works. We're going to double down on templates. We're going to release new templates every single week. And then we're also. And this is sort of a newer model that personally, I think is going to become more and more popular. We just saw a big validation with this with Hormozi taking A big stake in school and immediately combining sas, which is the school platform, with education. That was step one. He's like, I'm incorporating my own digital education into this. And that's how we're. And we've been. We've had this idea for a while. That's what we're going to start doing with typeshare is actually weaving in the education into the platform. So when you use a template, it'll also come with a video or a series of videos explaining here's why this template works so well or here's how to think about using this template. So I personally think that as time goes on, we're going to see more and more digital education creators either launch their own SaaS or partner with SaaS companies, and vice versa. Because there's so much overlap between the tool and the education.

Yeah. And it forces us to clarify what do we need on the software side to do this education better? Right now we're operating from, hey, I want to talk about a template. I have to just speak over it and hope we could hack together the video to edit it instead. What if we were able to go line by line and break down that template and educate on the back of that?

Yeah.

So lots of interesting things in the works there that are kind of. They're all merged throughout the year. I think it's slowly, step by step of, here's where we're at with Type Share. Here's where we want to go from a full everything you need to start writing online side of things. Just not going to happen overnight.

It's kind of interesting. Both typeshare and Write with AI are right at that sweet spot of the Tripling question, you know, and I think if we've learned anything, I remember early days with ship 32. Whenever you start to feel yourself confronting that tripling question, it could be as early as 10 or 20k a month. The answer is almost always take the thing that's working and just do it a lot more. You know, and. And that's true in both of these cases. Right. With AI, we're like, take the thing that's working, do it a lot more. Typeshare, take the thing that's working. Templates, do it a lot more.

Some nuance on that. I think it's do it a lot better.

Improve the product.

Because with both Ride with AI and typeshare, it's not a marketing problem, it's retention on both of them.

Great point.

And so the Tripling question is not drive three times as much more traffic to both of those newsletters, it's create again, we're just repeating the same thing here, but it's improved the product until that retention number is or the churn number is cut in a third and then you triple, triple that way. And then when you pour more marketing on top, which is something we know how to do, you keep all of that newfound customer. It's funny, but when you have high churn, like the worst thing you can do is just continue marketing. To think that that's gonna work because you're just driving more people to a product that they don't really like, they don't tell their friends about. And actually it's working against you the entire time because you drive more traffic to the product. What is the people do that get there, they tell their friends not to use it. So instead you're really just shooting yourself in the foot. And if you see something declining over the long term, it's because people come, they use it, you drove them to it, they're not enjoying it. So the next person they tell is like, yeah, I used it and I didn't like it. And that's silently working against you the entire time.

Yeah, great point. It takes a lot of discipline to fight the urge to just. We just need more attention, you know, and we, we see it with a lot of businesses. I've consulted for a lot of businesses where it doesn't much. You point this out, they're like in one ear and out the other and they're just like, no. I think if we just run more ads and you don't realize like it has nothing to do. You could pour as much as you want into the top, but you have seven holes in the bottom of your ship.

So what we've started this year doing all this on top of a ship, 30 kilowatt, where at this point we've kind of optimized it, where it doesn't take quite as much as on the operational and mental bandwidth side as it used to. But we still have been doing twice weekly live sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which are like full blown performances at this point. They take a lot of energy. We make sure there's only seven or eight of them during the cohort. So we show up with full intensity like it's the first time we've done it. But we were joking in one of them. We could totally swap roles and tell the same jokes that each other tell each others tell the entire time. And we should maybe try that with. That would be funny with the next one.

Yeah.

It hit me the other day as I was driving home that right now we are in a season where we are doing three completely different things at the exact same time. We're in a cohort, so we're performing, we are doing boring infrastructure upgrades. So we're building. And we're also, not to mention, and hiring and managing and all, all the things that go into growing a team. And then we're also constantly creating, writing new things, recording new things, redoing the curriculum, thinking of new frameworks. And those are three very different frames of mind. And so being in seasons where you have to bounce between those three, like, I. I was really feeling it earlier this week. I'm like, oh, that takes some endurance to be able to go between those different modes.

It's really the context switch that becomes the most tiring. You can apply so much more effort when you're doing one thing. Like, if we were only creating video and that was the only responsibility, I think you could do 10 times as much with the same amount of effort versus trying to do three different things. There's just no way you can put that much out.

Yep.

Yeah, but that's what we signed up for.

Yeah, that's the game.

Exactly right. I wrote that down this morning. I was journaling. I was like, what are all the hats that I've worn this week on both the business side and the personal side? Cause like, I.

We basically do have hats for each of the different things I wrote.

I was like, I yesterday I was tired. Why was I tired? Well, I've context switched a lot. What are all the things I've context switched? Let's just put them in a list here. And then you realize, yeah, we're playing multiple things, but it's only through the playing of all these roles that we can properly define them to eventually hire ourselves out of them.

Yep.

Which we just are still not that close on a lot of these major roles. And that's okay. You know, I think we're too early in the process. We. We've held a couple different, like mid to upper level manager levels or interviews over the last few weeks. And I emerged from those interviews saying it was too early. Like, I need to keep playing this role until I have a better understanding of exactly what that person would do.

Yeah.

Which, by the way, I think would lead to a. Forever. I mean, this is a realization we have every single week, which is just pay for the ideal scene. You know, as you're in a role and you feel this, especially as an entrepreneur and as you're building anything is you're trying to figure out, okay, what is this role, how do I crystallize it and then who do I pass this off to? But the problem is that's the first time you're playing that role. So you don't even really know what a world class version of that role looks like. You only know what you've experienced. So a realization that we continue to have is go find the best possible person who's been in that role for 10 years, 20 years, pay for their time and just download the whole framework of this is what this role should be.

So we should do that with YouTube.

I think we are doing that with you.

Right. We should find out who we could consult with with that would show us their entire system. Here's our posting cadence, here's our workflow, all of that. And this is as I write these lessons and realizations each week, I sit there for a second and say, okay, how can I actually put this into practice? And then I reread last week's and I'm like, yep, forgot that one. So a couple of these lessons I just copy pasted from last week and put it to this week just to remind myself of that again.

Yep.

Which by the way is a great. I think that's a really helpful framework for hiring as well. I think there's really only two types of hires. You're either hiring someone that is more entry level and you're hiring them because you want to nurture them from the beginning, or you're hiring someone who's been doing something for so long that you want them to teach you. So that's the biggest question I'm always asking myself whenever we go through the hiring process of a role is is this someone that I am going, I want to teach you or am I paying for your expertise and you're going to teach me? You know, and just a quick example, like if you were hiring a, like a salesperson, there's a big difference between hiring someone who has some innate talent but is brand new to sales. You can train them on your process versus hiring someone who's been in sales for 20 years. They know a lot, but it might be harder for them to adopt your process because they go, I've been doing this for a long time. So you have to figure out which role you want to hire the specific type of person for.

So that leads to another lesson realization we've had which is a players. Make it immediately clear they're a players. So we've had a couple of Interviews. And we've probably in the last two weeks held 15 job interviews. Sixteen, maybe like, between YouTube sales, a couple others. There's such a clear difference. When someone gets on and they're ready to rock and roll and they're just. You almost. Even if they're not the best fit for that role, you just want them on the team.

Yeah. You'll figure it out.

We'll figure it out. And I think that's a. You know, you have to be careful of not just hiring for hiring sake, but when you recognize that there's a big potential in someone, just get them on the team. And I think there's a couple people in our ecosystem that we're feeling that for. But same with our video editor. It was so clear after all the other interviews, there was, like, one person that stood out. And you bring them on and they're already cranking. The reason you're watching this video is because they were already cranking on it.

Yep. Yeah.

And I. And I can't stress enough. That's why it's worth interviewing a lot of different people for one role. Because, I mean, I feel it every single time I hold, like, one or two interviews, and I'm like, oh, I think I found someone. And then you go interview six more people and. And you start to realize there's so many other options out there than you would have considered. And you also start to realize what you like and what you don't like. Really Little things like how people show up to the interview, how they follow up with you. It never ceases to amaze me how many people show up and are like, what do you do? Like, they've. They haven't looked into our stuff at all. You know, I'm like, it wasn't. You could have just taken five minutes. You know, it's not that hard. So go through the process.

Yeah.

I can't tell if January is flying by or if it's moving very slowly.

It's always both.

It's both.

Always.

Definitely both.

And excited to keep everyone in the loop on what we're building, how things are going, lessons we're learning along the way, new priorities. You will probably watch us make the same mistakes that we talk about and oscillate between shiny object. You know, next week, we've decided that we're going to go build this and.

Then hold us accountable if we start doing that.

Yeah. Careful of the shiny objects.

But that's the best part, because I'm doing the same thing, documenting my personal lessons and realizations each Week. It's so nice to have that container where it's like, I plan on turning that in a video by the end of the year, is just sitting down and talking out what I'm learning this week. Because you have context. The viewer or the reader has context for the lessons you're talking about. Like, if we got on here and just said, you know, you should be bored with whatever you're building and that's how you know you're on the right track, we could say that all day. But then to follow up with the story of exactly how that's going in our business, every lesson that I've learned from someone else always has a story or context tied to it. And I find this to be the most sustainable creation process by far. It's just talk about what you're doing. I'm not going to teach. I'm not dictate. I'm not saying we have it all figured out. It's like literally, here's what I did this week and here's what I learned.

And that's really helpful, you know, and.

It'S what we like to consume.

Yeah.

I just think about how many people I've looked up to or I've consumed over the years and I just wish so badly that they that's what I want. I want on a week by week basis. What did you focus on? Why did you pick that priority? How did it go? What did you learn from it?

We thank you for watching. If you have questions, ideas for things for us to cover any of that, drop them in the comments. Anything else?

I think that's it.

All right, first one of the year is complete. If you're on Spotify, could you take one minute for us and leave a five star review? It really helps the podcast grow. If you're on YouTube, smash that subscribe button like button. Leave a comment. Oh, secret word, secret word for this week, what should it be?

Robot.

Robot.

And you have to use it in a sentence.

Just like that.

Use robot in a sentence. We'll pick one person a year of right with AI.

All right, first one in the books. We'll see y' all back here next week to share everything that happened and what we learned. Have a good one.

See you everyone.