Ryan Shank of PhoneWagon walks through a Techstars NYC happy hour and explains the "Big Rock" exercise, a weekly challenging goal tied to revenue. A live demo of PhoneWagon's custom plan fails due to technical issues, prompting Ryan to stress the importance of clear systems and processes.
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Alright guys, so we are at the tech, one of the tech front tech stars, happy hour. We have our official advisor Adam Levy. What's up? Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop yelling at the fans, bro. Good morning guys, if you're new here, my name is Ryan Shank. I am the founder of PhoneWagon. So this is our journey going through tech stars in New York City. We're building PhoneWagon. I really appreciate you joining us. Without further ado, we're gonna start the vlog. Okay, give me one second. I'm gonna talk to— I'm gonna go talk to my partner. If I'm able to get the 1,500, you'll go ahead and go with us though? Alright, give me one second. Let me just chat with him. This is art right here. I'm doing art. I'm talking to my partner. I think we're good to go. What I have to do would be to create a custom plan for you, so it would be one number in 1,500 minutes, right? We're waiting waiting for a guy to show up for our demo and we're having a little bit of technical difficulties. He can't download Google Hangouts, he's in a conference room, he can only make outbound calls, so he can't call inbound. So we're going back and forth with him trying to figure out how to get him onto the demo. Things like this are gonna come up, these are things, this is the reason why you have to have really good systems and processes in place, right? To make everything crystal clear and like, hey, this is what is gonna happen at this time, we're gonna call into this place, we're gonna, you know, send the confirmation email so that everyone is on the same page so that you don't run into things like this. Wait, so what is it? It's like a happy hour? Oh, well, there's a happy hour, but there's something before that. Some like rock— rock is in the name. I don't know what it is. Big Rock is like your goal for the week. It's not a rock band. Yo, yo, please tell me this is recording. Shut up. No, no, for real. Okay, hold on. You're laughing, but your friend told me The band thing. Like the dude who works here. Yo, okay. And I was like, yo, is it like a Christian rock band? And he was like, yeah. Yeah, 'cause he probably was like, yeah, it's a Christian rock band. This is what just happened. This is good. This is good. I'm so— Alright, so at Techstars we do this thing called your big rock for the week. It's something that's like difficult. It's like a goal that you set, usually attached to like revenue or something like that. So today we're going over our big rocks and Kane just asked someone, I guess he asked someone at Techstars if it's a Christian rock band and the Kane said yes, probably because that's so ridiculous. So Kane is— was literally— it's 6:40 PM. He was gonna go home to Brooklyn to pick up his laundry, which is like probably an hour commute, come back to Techstars office another hour. That's 2 hours to video a Christian rock band and then go another hour back. That's 3 hours. It's already 6:45. Still crushing the phones. 6:40 at night. And then now we're about to go over what's called the big rock. So it's basically everyone's like, goal for the week and then we're all gonna say like, how are we tracking towards our goal for the week. So that'll be pretty cool. We just heard, by the way, from like alumni of old Techstars programs. And basically they were just kind of like saying, how do you get the most out of Techstars? Adam, Leadman, Sales Advisor, talking with, uh, sorry, it's so blurry, talking with our account executive, John, just giving him some good advice. Alright guys, so our event ended. It is now, I don't know what time it is, like 11? Look, we're watching the god himself. The playbook god himself. I'm just kidding. That's a joke. Anyway, I hope you guys have a great day. I think I already did my outro for today, but I appreciate you joining us on our journey. Hope you guys are working hard. Hope you're gonna see us tomorrow. We're out here every single day, 7 days a week. We're vlogging the entire journey building the company from the ground up, and we're sharing it all with you. So if you guys have any thoughts, please let us know in the comments. Subscribe if you like this. Maybe share with a friend who could get value out of it, and just let us know what you think. What you think, because, uh, you know, we're hoping to get feedback from you. Hopefully we're delivering you some value and that you can give us some value. So we appreciate all the comments. I see you, Noah, I see you in the comments out there. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Peace!
