In this 55th vlog, Ryan Shank opens with a spontaneous, humor‑filled street‑level segment where he and his friends joke about luxury houses, drive‑through affluent neighborhoods for motivation, and head to a sushi dinner at Yamaku in Bridgehampton with the whole squad. After the casual hangout, the vlog shifts to an office setting where Ryan shares his disciplined approach to tracking startup metrics. He emphasizes weekly and monthly reviews of spend versus return, cautions against pulling the plug on campaigns or sales hires too early, and cites industry insight that a sales rep typically takes 12 months to fully ramp. Ryan outlines his financial workflow: updating QuickBooks every week, feeding data into a custom two‑tab model (built by Darko) that merges QuickBooks and Stripe subscription data to produce a detailed P&L. He reveals that the company burned $45 K in August, which coincided with a rise in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and discusses the need to move toward cash‑flow positivity. Finally, he reflects on reallocating his time toward lead generation, SEO, site conversion, and overall marketing efficiency, urging viewers to maintain a pulse on all inflows and outflows while allowing investments to mature over time.
Chapters
Kane, Kane, Kane! That's gonna be the climax tease for the vlog today. Yeah, I know, exactly. Oh, that would have been tight if I was wearing the sweatshirt. You could go, "It's fucking cold, man." Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna do that. Are you kidding me? Like what? Like what? Oh, I think I saw this. Like, like what? Like there's that fucking 3-car garage. I think I saw this online. Yo, this is like ridiculous. Yeah, I think I saw this literally online. Like I thought it was fake though. I thought it was like a 3D rendering cuz it looks— about to go down the whole thing. Oh my God, look at, look at, look at the fucking— you think The door's unlocked. Wanna film in there? Kinda, huh? You kinda do? Yeah, I don't not. One of the things I used to do when I was younger, and I still do it now, and I literally have done it for the past few years, but to get motivated, I would literally drive around and I would go to all like the rich neighborhoods and I would just drive through where all the massive houses were, and then I would take a look at the houses and like it just literally motivated me. It's like when you're around that kind of wealth or, you know, all these houses and you think all of these people did it, every single person here made it, right? They all have these really nice houses, these really nice cars. It like just shows you that it's doable. Okay, what's rule number one? Don't let the cat go. Hey, I think your Uber's here. Yeah, Uber is coming. What you got there, Dan? Is it pumpkin spice season or is it still rosé season? No, it's actually Hampton's Gatorade. Alright, fam, we are about to go to dinner right now. Oh my God. Namakyu Sushi restaurant in Bridgehampton. We're bringing the whole squad. I'm gonna do a time travel there because you know I don't like going in cars anymore. So we're just gonna time travel there. So in 3 seconds we're gonna be in the car. Okay, 1, 2. That was sick. We just time traveled. We're at Yamaku right now. This is gonna be our table right here. We have like 15 heads eating so much sushi. This is like one of my favorite restaurants in Bridgehampton. We're gonna pop it right here. Yamaku, uh, in Bridge. So I'm gonna go meet the— meet the squad. Everyone's inside. Here they come. All right, guys, what's up? We are back. The vlog you just saw was when we were this past weekend. It was a lot of fun. But today we are back to the office. One thing that I've been going over a lot today, I just want to share with you guys, is that I like track all of our metrics pretty religiously. I like to break out things line by line and kind of see, hey, what are we spending money on? What are we getting for that amount of spend? I think it's important, one, to look at these things week over week, month over month. And so you kind of have a pulse on what's happening. One, you know, tracking it and kind of knowing what you're getting is important, but also, you know, letting it ride for a bit. There's obviously like when you deploy, you know, spend at a new campaign, for instance, if it's marketing spend deployed at a new campaign, there's going to be time to learn, you know, test, optimize, things like that. So you don't want, you know, you always want to look at the numbers, but then you don't want to pull the plug on something too soon before it's had enough time to, you know, materialize, ramp and that sort of thing. Same thing with like sales hires and even like sales in general. It's like you might have a rep who's, you know, month 1, month 2, and let's say they're not doing, you know, really well. You have to think like, you know, I actually know that a couple of companies that I look up to, they actually say that a sales rep takes 12 months to fully ramp. So you want to give that person time to fully ramp and you want to, you know, make sure that you're spending a lot of time training, helping them one with the process stuff. Also learn, you know, a lot of times it's like we're so— you're so like involved in your business that you might not realize how many things are not like common knowledge, you know? So it's like when you're talking to someone, it's like not common knowledge for them to know these like really granular levels of information about your, your industry or your piece of software, your product or your service or whatever it is. Okay. So you really want to be able to, you know, take a look at things and make sure that you give them enough time to fully materialize, that people have time to ramp, and so that that spend, you know, the results from the spend are going to ultimately, you know, come from in the future. It's like, so you might spend, you know, $5K right now and then you might not get anything same month. But if you think about it from a cohort basis, like in the future you might get some sales or you might get some stuff that came from that $5K of spend, or you have to think of it as you're like investing in humans and then you're going to get, you know, that outcome like in the future. But you have to put in this like upfront investment and things like that. So that's one thing that I'm like looking at, you know, like week over week, month over month. I always like update update our QuickBooks at the end of every single week. I'll categorize all of our expenses and stuff. I drop it into our P&L. We have this beautiful model where I literally have two tabs that I can upload QuickBooks data and I can upload Stripe subscription data, and then everything else in this full, like, beautiful model that Darko created for us because he's the man. Just like basically updates. I just drag some stuff and then I can see, you know, everything broken out line by line. And then it's like I'm looking at one— I'm looking at top line because it's like for startups and early stage companies, top line is super important. But like, I pretty much like just personally funded this, so I'm also looking at bottom line. And it's like, you know, we burned $45K in August. So it's like, all right, we burned $45K, but, you know, that jumped us up in our MRR, which was nice. But it's like, you know, what do we got to do to get to a point where we're like cash flow positive? So that's like one thing that I've been thinking about that I think you guys should look at, like look at the numbers. But again, like, one, don't make like rash decisions that, you know, you're like, oh, it's not materializing right now. So like, it does— it's not working. But make sure that it's like, if it's not working, figure out like what you got to do to get it to work and then make like allocate your time, right? It's like, for instance, I noticed I was like spending too much time on something that it's like, that's not the one thing that you need to like improve on right now. It's like you need to improve on like getting— I need to improve on just like getting leads to the site. So I need to improve on like marketing and lead gen and conversion rate of the site and SEO and all of these things. Like, that's where I need to spend the majority of my time right now. So, you know, basically kind of like taking a step back, reallocating time so that you can figure out what you need to do. But two points: track the metrics, let them play out over time, and then just make sure you have a pulse on exactly all the dollars going in, all the dollars going out.
