Ryan Shank walks through a Friday at his startup preparing for Techstars, covering team check-ins, hiring, and health insurance. He argues creators should stop making low-effort keyword-stuffed content and instead produce work they'd actually share themselves.
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Do you have your one-on-one on there? With who? With all 3 of us. Is that a one-on-three? What up guys, it's Ryan. Thank you guys for joining us today. Today's Friday. Thank you guys for being pioneers, for being wagoners, for being here with us every single day because we're vlogging, we're creating a massive company, we're just having a good time doing it. No! Okay, so today we're about to go into the office. Today, today is Friday. Finally, first day today. We're getting John on the phone all day. I'm gonna be on the phone all day because we got sales to make. About to do a phone call with my developer Michael right now so that we can get on the same page. Monday starts Techstars. We're working through the weekend, we're vlogging through the weekend. Uh, by the way, I want to thank you guys for just joining us. So, so, so excited for us to be sharing the journey with everyone. I'm still in the hotel room, by the way. I still only have one more week now. One week down, one more week to go, and then we're back in my own apartment and I can actually get into a nice routine. That's what we're doing today. We're also going to work out today. Every single day you have to do some form of exercise for at least 45 minutes, and what that's going to do is going to help make your mind more sharp and you're going to be able to think clear and you're going to work longer and you're going to have more sustainable energy and you're gonna have better quality thought, things like that. So I'm gonna walk to the office right now and, and then I'll see you guys when I get there. You ready for this transition? I got Mike here now. So this is Tim with eHealth Insurance Benefits. So we are gonna get you that individual plan. But Tim, Tim, Tim, come through with that money, that money talk. Yeah, so hey Mike, Mike, Tim. Hey Tim. So what I would do in your situation, you left your last job on June 30th, so after Friday. Hey, worst case scenario, say something catastrophic happens to you, get hit by a car or whatever, you have full benefits. Really? Like you can just like retroactively extend my past insurance if something were to happen? I don't have to pay Cobra or like we don't have to pay Cobra or anything for me? Kane almost gets hit by a car like daily. Casey Neistat meal time. Our shirt should— You feel it? No, look at this. Look. It's riveting. This is my— this is Clemson right here. This is one of my student loans from Clemson that I finally paid off after 10 10 years. Give me 10 years. I'm like fucking 40 years old now. How old are you? Yeah, I have no idea. How old are you? Founders NYC 2017. But this is like for my groups? Yeah, check it out. I would just click on groups and then I could see group. Yeah, this is Founders at Volkswagen. Sales happening, beware. All right guys, we just got our t-shirts in that Michael was spending a lot of time designing, so we're gonna open them and hopefully hopefully they are exactly like they look on the internet. Because nothing on the internet's a lie. Not orange. Not orange. Yeah, that's tight. Yeah, that's right. Where'd you order these from? Huh? Moving out all these foods so, uh, look a little more professional. Are you moving them out of my shop? Organized. The other thing too, Techstars is us today. They have a ton of interns and associates, and they're all helping us really get organized, but really get our shit together. Mentor and advisor email updates, giving everyone an update, tracking our key metrics, things like revenue, growth, number of customers that we're adding, number of leads that we're getting, all of that sort of thing. What else did we do? I just have a little notepad right here. Hiring more developers as well to help us test the product. You know, the main takeaways really are that we're hiring awesome people. They're putting processes in place because process documentation, all of that stuff is really important, whether you're a real estate agent, whether you're a designer, whether you're anyone, you want to really, you know, build your business and scale it, right? You want to make yourself replaceable, and the only way to do that is to create systems and documentation so that you can train other people to do these things that you've already done yourself and you've already proven work. So I want to talk about right now about content and creating content, doing content marketing. So I think a lot of people, especially back in the day, and I used to do this, was like they would put out bullshit content, they would keyword stuff it, they would We were just trying to get pages out that would just show up in search results. But one, it's like, I heard a saying that said, if you're not proud of the content that you're creating enough to promote it to your friends and family and literally put it on like your personal Facebook page, even if it's your business stuff, then you shouldn't put it out. One, you need to create awesome content. You need to actually invest time and money creating that content. I think too many people these days are still putting out bullshit content, or they're just, you know, checking the box like, oh yeah, we have a blog on our site or whatever it is. We want you guys to engage with it, but we also don't want to be douchey and kind of be too like, grind, grind, grind. That's what we're doing. Create content, you create content, we'll all create content, and the internet will be better because we're doing this for the internet. Thank you guys for joining us today for the vlog. We are about to go home. It's Friday afternoon. Hope you guys are being pioneers, being Wagoneers. Keep killing it, keep checking out your gear. We'll see you guys tomorrow because it's every single day we're vlogging. Peace!
