Ryan Shank nearly misses Techstars demo night in NYC while juggling an Amazon meeting about cloud infrastructure, 102 cold-call dials, and a $25 sale. The vlog captures the chaos of early-stage startup life: KPI meetings, paperwork, and the team's competitive push to land new leads.
Chapters
Alright guys, there's literally like this demo night. Fuck, I'm so late. So this is demo night for Techstars. Internally, it started at— Good morning guys, it's July 24th. Welcome to the vlog. We do this every single day. I'm about to go back here, walk into a meeting with Amazon. They're gonna help us figure out if our servers and all of our databases and all that technical stuff you guys have no idea about, that I have no idea about, is good. I appreciate you guys joining us along. If you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is the vlog. We do this every single day. We're building the company From the ground up, going through Techstars in New York City. I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagoneers. Welcome to the vlog. Probably the long-term move eventually would be to move over, but like, I just didn't— that's just like such not priority.
Right, right, right.
Just because I was like, right, if we lose because like our storage on public audience is wrong, it's like too expensive, then like we did something else wrong. Right, right.
Yeah, it's a replacement for like tape systems. Um, and so yeah, the other thing called lifecycle policies inside of S3, so you just have your script, you pull the data, you throw it in S3, and it will automatically, after a period of time, go into Glacier. And then you have some sort of processor on the backend. You could also use a product called Kinesis, which may actually even further simplify your architecture.
So I just talked to my man Leland, um, I cold-called him and he actually just emailed me back and was like, "Hey, uh, Nick and Ryan, I appreciate you guys setting this up, look forward to speaking next week." So not only did I cold-call him, but I established a relationship enough for him to email us back directly right after the demo was set up and be like, thanks guys, really appreciate it.
Okay, so we have dinner, 6:30. It's 6:28. It's 10 blocks away. We're eating the latest shit. It doesn't matter. Just gotta work out in. I feel great. Nick's over here cheating out, making me come to his like family dinner midweek on a Monday when the day's busy. We have, we only made one $25 sale today. So we have a lot of shit that we still need to do. Gotta come back to the office. So I just did this KPI meeting. Then we gotta come back to the office because there's some like internal like demo night for like us to show each other our shit or something like that. And then we're gonna actually be able to get some stuff.
Nice.
On the way to dinner. Kane, I'm getting you hella B-roll right now. You're gonna appreciate this. Love you, bro. Walking through the mean streets in New York. Alright, we're gonna bust a rap.
Here we go.
Street 27, we in New York. They call it heaven. If you in the other city, gonna go to the other girls, gonna get nitty-gritty, gonna get the call tracking people. We're gonna go back, we're gonna have to get them to go to the steeple, not stable. Hey, we're gonna go and our call tracking software is really, really stable. We're on the Twilio platform API. We're gonna go and make these competitors die, but not kill them off because they're just gonna starve to death. They're gonna get in the coffins because they don't have any customers left. Alright guys, there's literally like this demo night. Fuck, I'm so late. So there's this demo night for Techstars internally. It started Started at like 7:30, it's already 8 o'clock. Late as shit. I'm texting with Michael, he said there's only 1 or 2 people left. I'm literally running there. I just had a dinner meeting, tied up. And then hopefully I'm just gonna go straight to the demo and find out. Late as fuck. Alright, so Mike said that there are still people inside of here for this. I feel kind of bad, but it's 7:53. He said it was from 7:30 to 8:30, so I figure if I get here at like 8, I could still have time to go. So, getting off the elevator right now.
So I had 4 sets, 3 shows, 1 reschedule. Wasn't bad, it was alright. Hit about 102 dials. I don't know off the top of my head. iBack Creative was one. Amelia from iBack Creative. She's gonna end up converting.
She's gonna be a customer, right? Yep.
She wanted the free trial right away.
Honestly, I thought that dude was like just, I mean, he literally said, I was like, I'm just giving you feedback. He's like, I'm like, I've been working with Lions forever and like they integrated Salesforce. And I was like, fuck, don't do that. So I was kind of like, I don't want to do this like feedback call, which is good for product stuff. But I was like, this is a waste of time. But then it sounded like at the end it actually like turned around. Yep, it did. And he was like, all right, well, this could be good for some of our clients. Because I was on the call with that guy, then I had to drop because Amazon was here. For instance, like they have a bunch of different, their servers are hosted in a bunch of different locations like Oregon, Virginia and stuff. So what you're supposed to do is have like coast-to-coast redundancy. So like if the Virginia server goes out, then it'll just ping over to Oregon and then you're up. So you never have downtime.
If there's any sort of disruption, your traffic is going to be routed over to the other availability zone.
Can I see that face again?
Do what?
I did payroll. I do the health insurance stuff because they require— Listen to this. Thanks for that money. The health insurance stuff requires fucking wet signatures. So I signed this doc and I like I like DocuSign'd it like every other application ever and they're fucking like required, they're like, oh no, they rejected it 'cause they're like, you need wet signatures. Fucking what? Met with Michael, then I went to the gym at like 4 because I looked at the rest of my schedule and I was like, I'm not gonna be able to do it for the rest of the night. Went to the gym at 4, then we had our KPI meeting so that we could look at our like week over week metrics with all these other companies and did internal demo night. Then met up with, he's my videographer, I don't know if you guys have heard of him, Kane. And then we just shot the shit. Now here we are, it's like fucking 10:30. Anyway guys, appreciate you joining us. This is our journey. We're building the company. If you're new here, my name is Ryan Shank. Appreciate you guys coming on the journey. Hope you're out there being pioneers, being wagon ears. Hope you have a good day. Hope you're working hard. Peace! This B-roll game by yours truly is lit.
