Ryan Shank and his Techstars co-founders discuss two operational mistakes: hiring a third developer while burning cash, and overpromising features to close deals. They explain how selling what you don't have yet creates backlog chaos and damages your roadmap, even when you need revenue.
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Oh, thanks, man. I can find it. John, are your sales alarming people? Yeah, we're gonna have to put on—
What's up, guys?
Good morning.
We're back.
July 19th. If you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is the vlog.
We're vlogging every single day, 7 days a week. We're doing it as we build our company, going through Techstars.
Hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagoners, and hope you guys are crushing it.
Welcome to the vlog.
What are y'all doing?
Solving problems.
Working, bro.
Well, what was that, Nick?
Actually just set a demo with my girl Rachel from, uh, from Suite4Social.
Ooh!
Uh, we should talk about problems, right? People like realness. Uh, that real real. All right, so one of the things that I was going over today is like we just brought on a third developer. I don't know, one of the things that we're kind of concerned about is like our dev team's overseas And by the way, they're like super, super good, but like one concern is that, you know, they're trying to, and I don't think this is the case, but it's top of mind for me, is like, are they just trying to get us to like almost like buy more resources from them? So like they're, you know, they would suggest it and by the time we're like, yeah, let's bring on a third one, it's like, they were ready to pull the trigger and get them on today. So we were like, seems a little fast. We contract them through a platform where we can actually, it like screenshots their screen every like couple minutes so we can see what they're doing. But like one concern is really like, are they actually all working on it or are they just like, you know, it's like we just don't know if the output is there and if it's fast or if it's slow, because none of us are like personally like full-stack, you know,.NET developers. It's just a concern. The other concern obviously that I have is like increasing our burn and bringing on another resource. I'm also trying to hire more SDRs as well, so it's like we're increasing our burn to like a pretty significant amount, whereas like we need to get the sales in the door to justify it.
What are you doing right now?
About to do a mock demo with Ryan Shank.
For training? Yeah.
Family.
Yeah.
Nice.
Hopefully get on a demo this afternoon.
Nice. Really simple.
You'll just go to add number, this orange button here on the top. Okay, so dynamic numbers would be used to kind of dive a little bit. Your account is live now. I'm going to give you your login. You also have my cell number, so if anything, I don't care at all.
John, are your sales alarming people?
One of the things I want to talk about is overpromising and underdelivering, or just overpromising in general. One of the things that I'm personally struggling with, I'll be talking to a customer, and this happened at my last company as well, but it's like when you're talking to a customer, they have requirements that you don't have and getting trigger happy with promising them like, oh yeah, yeah, we can do that, we can build that. It's really important actually to sell for face value and like for what you have because what happens is then you just become a backlog with your product team, your engineering team, you start to prioritize based on things that might not make the most sense, especially if you have like one customer that needs it and you just really wanna close the deal on that call. And this is totally like all on me, I'm personally like responsible, guilty of this, I've been guilty of it in the past, I just get like super, super, you know, like again, I call it trigger happy. It's like you're on the call, you don't wanna lose the deal because of like a little small feature, so you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can do that and get that out. Messes up your product team, your developers, again, and then it's like, like you have to prioritize that over other stuff that probably should take priority. The daily takeaway is really to, you know, sell for what you have and just be super transparent with your customers. It's like, look, this is what we have. We don't have that feature. We'll get to it when it comes in our normal priority. I think the challenge of this is when you're a super early-stage startup and you really want to get just paying customers in the door and you know that you're really, really, really close and you don't wanna lose that deal because of that. And again, you know, the good thing about being in an early-stage company is that you can move fast and you can, you know, get these features shipped really, really quickly. But you don't, you know, right now we're almost at like 50 customers, so it's like we don't want to like mess up that queue. And by the way, you know, the stuff that we do have at the top of our queue is at the top of our queue because we have even more customers that are waiting for those features that we can close. And you know, if we then prioritize one thing and we take engineering resources away from that just for one customer, when you know, the stuff they are building is prioritized high because there's multiple large customers that are waiting for it, it doesn't make sense. So sell straight up, and I think a lot of customers, they're either gonna buy you or buy the product or not, or they can wait, right? Um, and that's the takeaway for today. It is Wednesday, 8:07 PM. That's it for today. See you guys.
