Hiten Shah gets a lot of stuff done at Hustle Con
In this talk at Hustle Con, entrepreneur Hiten Shah (co‑founder of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics) demystifies his reputation for productivity by framing himself as a "lazy" hustler who invests heavily in self‑development. He structures the presentation around three pillars – Learning, Communication, and Context – and shares concrete tactics he uses to learn faster (speed‑reading, Audible at 3×, GetAbstract, YouTube playback tricks), to communicate effectively (personality frameworks like InColor Insights, email‑draft‑and‑sleep method), and to provide value by understanding context and reframing questions. Shah also introduces a founder‑type spectrum – Explorers (discovery‑centric) versus Pirates (market‑centric) – and reflects on his own placement as an Explorer while appreciating Pirate traits. He discusses hiring engineers without a coding background by leveraging hustle, networking on Ruby on Rails mailing lists, and building relationships. The session ends with a Q&A covering team composition, personality assessment, learning styles, and hiring practices. Throughout, Shah emphasizes investing in people (including himself) as the core of productivity and hustle.
Questions this video answers
Companies tend to reflect their founders. If founders differ, mixing both types is easier; otherwise the company leans toward one mindset, and changing culture is hard.
Understand yourself first via self‑assessment; focus on leveraging strengths and understanding others. Some traits are hard to change; prioritize self‑knowledge over trying to overhaul nature.
He is an audio‑person; he doesn’t take many notes, instead re‑listens multiple times and uses ambient walking to reinforce memory. He advises learning in the way that fits your personal style.
He hustled by emailing the Ruby on Rails mailing list, talking to many engineers, building friendships, and ultimately picking someone he judged competent through those conversations.
Chapters
Our next speaker is, uh, Hiten Shah, and if you know anything about this guy, you've probably seen his face everywhere. I don't know how he sleeps, or if he does sleep, but he's pretty much everywhere. He's a mentor at 500 Startups, is an active blogger, and is the founder of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics along with Neil Patel. Uh, Kissmetrics has raised about $13 million in funding. Funding, and Heaton leads a team of 50, 50 members. He's gonna talk about how he's been able to be so productive. So let's give a warm welcome to Heaton Shah. I'm just gonna get started because I have a shitload of slides and I gotta get through all of them, so I'm gonna talk really fast. You might not understand what I'm saying. Just kidding. So when we, when Sam asked me to speak, we actually did a little experiment. We did a blog post and he asked all of you and a bunch of other people to asked me what I should speak on. And what happened was a lot of people had a lot of different things to ask me about that were very specific, very tactical. And what ended up happening is that I decided to talk about whatever I wanted to, but it was actually based on a question from Sam. And the question was, "Why are you more productive than most people?" And this was like at the end of his email after like these 5 or 6 other sort of topics. And what I really realized is that Most people that are on stage today are going to tell you tactics about how they did something or how you can do something, etc. And I'm actually going to talk about something completely different. One, I don't know why people think I'm productive. I'm actually the laziest entrepreneur you'll ever meet. I walk around my office saying that I don't do any work. And hopefully this talk will help you understand why I do that, or not. So, I've had a computer since 1989. Does anyone recognize this? Circuit board looking thing? Some of you? OK, great. So this is going to date me. So all of you are old too. And so basically, this is a sound card that used to go in computers when they were big metal heavy boxes. And I've been playing with them since I was 8 years old. The last language I learned though was QBasic. So I don't know if any of you are familiar with that. Any of you familiar with QBasic? Cool, awesome. I don't know how to write code. But with QBasic, I used to terrorize Radio Shack employees. So I would go create a little loop and like run it, and then they wouldn't know what to do, because they didn't know how to use Ctrl+C and get out of it. And it was all MS-DOS at the time. So yeah, that's about as far as I get when it comes to programming. That being said, like I said, can't design, can't write code. But I work with awesome developers and designers. And some of the things I'm going to talk about are how I was able to do that. But also, I make them feel like this sometimes. They're all superheroes. But when I talk, sometimes they get kind of frustrated and give me that look. I've seen that look a lot. And the reason is, I can always out-Google them. So that's my superpower, if anyone needs to know. I can out-Google you. Bring it. They can tell me 2 or 3 things about some variable or parameter or whatever, and usually I can Google it for them. So, to prepare this talk, I really wanted to think about hustle and think about what the word meant, cause I think there's a, it's an interesting word. And I got links at the bottom. My slides are on SlideShare. I'll tweet them out right after this. I forgot to before this cause of Sam. But anyways, if you go look on Urban Dictionary, there's a bunch of stuff in the middle of these two things. That says things about selling drugs and other things like that. But this is basically what hustle means. It's basically anything you do to make money. If you're making money, you hustling. That's apparently what this is about. And this is like a way different talk than anything I've ever done before. I'm gonna share all kinds of stuff that I haven't shared before, and I'm gonna get right into it. So I've been doing business on the web for 11 years. I don't know how to code, so apparently I'm a hustler. I do know how to make money. I'd say lots of it, but I'm not— yeah, lots of it. And the one thing I know from Kissmetrics, these are actually our Kissmetrics values, and we only have 5 of them. We like to keep it simple. Kissmetrics, the KISS part stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Somebody actually walked up to me, and I know we're at a non-tech conference because someone walked up to me earlier today. I know you're in the room right now, and they said they really like my logo. And this logo that I'm wearing, which is the Kissmetrics logo, and usually when that happens, they usually know what the logo is, but I was stumped because he didn't know what the logo was, he didn't even know what Kissmetrics was, so that's awesome. I actually feel really good about that, 'cause there's a lot more people that need to know about the businesses that I run. And I've been theming my talks based on value at Kissmetrics, so I'm gonna talk about the value that we use. For this, that I'm using for this talk. So the value is take care of people. And the reason I want to talk about that today, and a lot of the talk's going to be around those kind of things, is because when you think of the word hustle, you think of money. You don't actually think about people. And the biggest person that matters in anyone's lives, whether you want to believe it or not, is probably yourself. And the way that I'm so productive is I basically invest in myself. So now you're going to hear a whole bunch of tactics, a whole bunch of things. About sort of how I invest myself and how all of you can too. Again, a lot different, a lot more of a different talk. Think of it as like self-help for hustlers, if you want to put it that way. And there's 3 parts to it: learning, communication, and context. And you'll learn about all these 3 and hopefully have tactics that you can take home with you so that you can sort of try to be like me, if anyone ever wanted to. Learning. So Also, one thing I'll mention is a lot of these tactics and a lot of these things are things that a lot of friends of mine have heard me talk about, but they're also things that I don't see anybody talking about. It's not something I have read in a blog post about in terms of holistically how to do this stuff. So for me, learning, I think that's the only thing that matters personally. And especially when you can't write code because you can't actually write code, make something, launch it to customers. But you can definitely learn as fast as you can. And I do really believe at this time, there's more information out there than any other sort of time in history. And so learning is really what you should be optimizing for. There's actually a book on the topic. This guy Josh Kaufman wrote a book. It's called The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast. Obviously, you can guess why that resonated with me considering this topic. So I did want to share the book. He actually talks about how you can learn Ruby in less than 20 hours as well. So in case any of you want to learn programming, which you should, even though I haven't yet, although I keep threatening that I will. I just turned 33 yesterday, and I'm threatening that by 40, I'll learn how to program. And I threaten this to my engineers, because I'm sure it's something that they are really looking forward to, all my questions. One tactic, Tim Ferriss wrote this blog post about how to read 300% faster in 20 minutes. It's really useful if you're into reading. You can take this tactic. I personally actually don't use the tactics in here, in this blog post. The reason is I don't actually read text, but I'll talk about that in a second. Another thing is a site called GetAbstract. It basically summarizes books for you, and it's really amazing, very thorough summaries. You have to pay for it though. And there's also an audio component to it. YouTube. Anybody know about this trick? You can actually listen to YouTube videos at 2x speed. People sound like chipmunks. It's pretty awesome. But— and here's the trick. You have to get through like the first 20, 30 seconds, and then you actually start understanding what people are saying. Audible. This is actually my favorite trick, and this is the exact reason. So I listen to Audible at 3x speed. There isn't a single book I've read in the last, I don't know, 18 months that I haven't read at 3x speed, actually listened to at 3x speed. Again, people sound like chipmunks for the first 30 seconds. After that, I believe, and I don't know any science around this, I haven't really researched it. I just really enjoy listening to people like chipmunks or speak like chipmunks. But basically, I believe you start understanding what they're saying. Now, there's one book that I haven't read yet because I couldn't really do it. It's basically a book called The Goal, I think. It's one of Jeff Bezos's favorite books, and it's narrated by a French gentleman. And I had a very hard time doing 3x, and I actually had to go all the way down to 1.52x. So, you know, every rule is meant to be broken. Everything I say is bullshit. So, you know, whatever. This is my favorite thing that I've read in the last 18 months. I've read it about 3 or 4 times. And I say read, but I heard it at 3x speed. It's a book called The Five Elements of Effective Thinking. And the reason I really like this is it helps me think. And I think learning is all about sort of getting inputs so you can think. And for me, I want to get that, those inputs as fast as I can. Also, it helps me understand fast talkers better too. So, onto communication. And really, I was working on these slides and I was actually, I had a buddy with me. I was working on them on a big 70-inch screen because I don't know, it's kind of fun that way. And we were looking at this slide, and he's like, "Well, can you?" And I'm like, "Well, what do you mean, can I? Of course I can talk about this." He's like, "No, no, no, can you?" And I said, "Oh, can you communicate? Got it." Yeah, I think most of us think we can, but we always can get better at it, right? So one of the big things I learned is it's very important to communicate, and it's very important to figure out how you can do it. And when you're communicating, you're obviously communicating with somebody else. So one of the things that I really thought about was personalities. And I used to really be allergic. How many of you are into personality tests, or have ever taken one even? OK, so everyone's kind of taken one and all that. How many of you are allergic to them? OK, not enough. All right, that's great. I guess I'm special. But anyways, I put this picture of food because most people are allergic to food and stuff. My kids are allergic to a lot of things, so I thought it was pretty cool. And also, The pie chart. Most of the personality tests have some form of a pie chart, and those always freak me out, 'cause then that's something else you have to understand and understand how to understand. But I had kids, and my first kid was actually when I was 15. It was my co-founder Neil. He's actually my brother-in-law, and he was 11 at the time. That's his sight and him on the left. I'm sure some of you have heard of him 'cause he's also apparently a hustler. And that's him taking care of my two kids. So technically, I had him, who I had to communicate with, because he's my co-founder, but I've known him a very long time. I'm married to his sister, actually. And then I had kids who are both quite different. Even though one of them is a baby, she's already starting to get a personality. And so after I kind of figured this out, I started researching, because that's what you do on the web. You start Googling, I guess. And I found this blog post on HBR, or HBS, or whatever, that site. They talk about the top sources of work conflict. And number one's personal insecurity, so someone just being insecure, a new job, or just generally being insecure about things. The desire for power and control, this is why I don't work at a big company, I call that politics. And then habitual victimhood. But once I started really digging into this, I realized that it's actually just people's personalities and how other people make them feel. And so, on that note, I'm gonna talk about a scenario that I basically discovered by understanding personalities better. And it's a very, very, just a scenario that I had happen recently. So the summary based on our personalities is, and I work with this person, so she's driven by winning. I'm more driven by having a deep understanding. And this is basically how it manifests. I'd ask her, "What do you need from me?" It's a very common question a lot of managers and leaders or whatever will ask. I do it quite a bit, especially if I don't know what the answer is, but that's also a sign in itself for me. And she tells me she needs something, and then I ask her why. What I learned is it drives her nuts. And I really didn't— I don't personally, on a personal level, intuitively understand why it drives her nuts, to be honest. But it drives her nuts, and it has a lot to do with her personality and mine. And she basically finds those types of conversations derailment and a waste of energy. And I wouldn't have really understood why or any of that stuff unless I really understood our personalities and the difference between them. And the way I did that is there's this system up here. Again, you'll see some pie charts soon, don't worry. But it's called InColor Insights, and this is all about your sort of behavioral orientations, and it's a way to kind of in my opinion, explain yourself to yourself. And it's got 4 things: action, people, structure, and ideas. This is actually my personal insight inventory. There's basically 3 sections to it. Behavior is basically the way you feel most confident. And for me, there's a lot of yellow. Yellow is people. There's also a bunch of blue. Blue is ideas. And when you kind of see the next slide, you'll understand kind of me a little bit better. So I'm just going to get to that. So I'm going to read these out because this is basically me. And it kind of blew my mind in a way because it's pretty accurate. But I like to consult with informed others. I explore ideas with valued colleagues and develop extensive personal knowledge, hence this talk. Believe people should be receptive to new ideas and probe for information. And then I assess the value of any activity or action based on the insight and feelings of self-worth it creates and its positive impact on other people. So if I feel like I wasn't valuable in a conversation or a meeting or something, it actually freaks me out right after. And then I start running it in my head and try to figure out how I could do better. It's just something natural I do. I don't even know why I do it. And it actually really bugs me. And then I sometimes will go ask the people, "Hey, was that okay?" And they're like, "Yeah, it was great. We learned a lot, blah, blah, blah." I'm like, "All right, cool." So this positive impact on other people is something that sounds all hokey and weird, but it's part of my personality. I don't know what to do with it. Another quick trick in case none of that mattered to you about communication, I wrote a blog post about learning, writing better emails. So just like all of you, I'm sure, you know, actually I get angry and I don't typically know what to do. So I basically now just draft an email to the person and I send it. I'm kidding. I draft the email and I save it. I don't include anything in the to field. and I sleep on it or whatever, and then I read it again. And usually that means I either don't send it, save it for later 'cause I'm still angry, or write a much better email. So that's just a quick tactic for all of you, again, in case you're still allergic to personality tests and stuff. That is, that one I showed before is my favorite one though. And this example is basically just a customer support example. So at Crazy Egg, which launched in 2005, it's one of my companies, I basically took care of support, customer support for the first 2 years. And myself amongst all the other things I was doing. And that was back when I actually used to do stuff. And this is what basically happened. I ended up being a line item when people were trying to make a decision between us and other competitors. So just another trick. Just help people, you know, share what you know. Really care about customers, but you've already heard a lot of that already today. So this is the last section. I have a little bit of a sort of long-winded thing at the end. It's not really long-winded. It's just something that I like talking about, and it's not very much talked about. So I'm gonna get into that in a second, but context is basically the idea of, you know, a lot of times you'll hear people say something, and then you'll have to correct them because they don't actually understand the context. So they might go tell you, "Hey, you should go buy a luxury car," or something, But really, you might not have the money for it. And this is a very crude example, but so you should buy like a Honda or a Kia or something instead. But if someone tells you to buy a luxury car, they're not really understanding your context if that's not affordable for you. So it's just a simple way to explain context in my mind. I also wrote about this a little bit. It's about how I give advice. One of the most common ways that people like to ask questions is they'll ask me about my own experience. So they might ask me about, "When you started Kissmetrics, what did you do about sales? How did you start your blog? When you raised money, how'd you raise money?" I go into this deeper in the blog post, but overall I try to reframe the question, because every question that most entrepreneurs and most people are asking about me is, excuse me, really a question about them. And that's something I've learned, so I just try to reframe it, that way I can get context, 'cause otherwise I'm just telling my story over and over and over again, and honestly, that's boring for me, but it's also not very valuable for other people. Plus, like, I've spoken a lot, and I've written about stuff a lot, and if you wanna know my story, go read it online or watch a video. Instead, let me figure out how to help you. So this is why I really focus on this sort of approach. As I was researching about questions and context, I ran into this book. I like books, but I like listening to 'em, as all of you know. I'm about 90% done, and I liked it. It also includes, talks about Lean Startup and Eric Ries a little bit in it. So it's kind of cool and kind of newer book. And it's called A More Beautiful Question. And it actually talks about questions, how to ask them, and even how to get a better understanding because of questions and stuff like that. So this is the last part. It looks like I only have a minute, but I might stretch it a little bit. Hope that's OK. Although you guys have a break and juice or something like that, so I'm sure you're dying to get there. And tired of me talking. But this graphic, the reason I put it up there is a lot of times I'll get into philosophical discussions with entrepreneurs and stuff, and many times it leads to discussion about this right here. This is basically the idea that everyone's against you. Has anyone ever felt like that? Don't lie. Well, I'll admit I have. So, you know, and I don't like feeling like that. And a lot of times it has to do, for me personally, it has to do with like competition or other companies and things like that. And so I just wanted to get a better understanding of founders, entrepreneurs, or even people hustling in general, and sort of the different sort of mindsets. So came up with a little formula. My buddy Joe Stumpf and I did a podcast on this. Anyways, that's a kind of funny picture of him. But he was looking at the Legos, and these are the two Legos. It's basically pirates and explorers. That's the concept. Explorers tend to be revolutionary. So these are the kind of people who always, always think that whatever they're doing is innovative, revolutionary, even if it maybe isn't. So that's why I use this cartoon for that. And pirates are the ones that are usually looking at something and trying to figure out how to get it, even if someone else has it. So then a classic example is if a pirate typically goes after explorers to go steal their loot. And that's typically what I've seen. So this example is more like something I commonly hear. So what I commonly hear is that— I just heard this yesterday. Some new product launched, and somebody who has a competing product already in the market was like, oh yeah, they've been trying to use our product for like 3 months now, and I've been talking to them thinking it's a sales pitch for this other thing they're doing, but then they end up launching basically a competitor to our business. So that's more of a pirate mentality. And right or wrong, it doesn't matter. This is what people do. And so here's the difference. And my big question for all of you, if you don't leave with anything else or any of these crazy tactics or start doing them, is where are you on this spectrum? So an explorer is discovery-centric, so searching for new land. New ideas, new things. They tend to be first movers in markets or very early movers, and they tend to focus on the problem to solve, like the right problem to solve for the customer. Pirates, on the other hand, are very market-centric. They think about all the different competitors, all the different solutions out there. Sometimes you'll see a grid of the features between all these customers or all these businesses and things like that. That's a very market-centric approach. They tend to be fast followers. So if you have, if you're running a pirate ship, you typically have a ton of, like, engineers, for example, that can build something really fast, faster than anybody else. And then they generally build solutions. And that's what I mean by faster than anyone else. Their worldview tends to be more skewed on, we can build it faster, we can build it better. And their definition of better is just, like, more of a feature list or a checklist. And in my experience, people fall pretty much one way or another on the spectrum. But the reason I'm saying this, and I brought it up in relation to competition and even context, is that you have to understand yourself and understand where you are on the spectrum and whether you need to move in a certain direction or not. Me personally, I tend to be more of an explorer. There's things I appreciate about pirates, and I've been trying to sort of figure out how to think more like a pirate sometimes. So I have built that. Sort of checklists and stuff like that, just to explore kind of how I can think and how I can be. This is one of the quotes. If you've ever emailed me, it's a quote at the bottom of my email. I'm not going to change it. It's really the words I live by. I really do believe personally, especially based on my personality type, that I will get everything I want in life if I help enough other people get what they want. So with that, how can I help you? Come on down. We've got some time for questions, maybe 3 or 4. Cool. You're the boss. Go ahead. Actually, I thought that was great, and in a couple minutes you're gonna be mobbed by people, so I just wanted to introduce introduce myself and say hi. How's it going? Hi, I'm Travis. Nice to meet you. Pirate. How you doing? And I hope I speak to you soon. Sounds good. That was great. All right. Anybody got a question? I like him, but still, anybody got a question? That was bold. Nice. Okay. My email's right there, dude, and I answer email. I actually have a question. All right. So I liked that pirates and explorers. And do you feel like when you're getting a group together, you should have some of both on the ship, or that the ship should be the culture of a pirate, or the ship should be the culture of an explorer? I really believe that companies are a reflection of the founder, or the founders, depending on that. And you need to understand what you are. So my advice on that would be, if you know that the founders, one is one and one is the other, or skews one way or another, it's probably easier to have a ship full of both types of people. But generally, in most cases, from what I've seen, the company is one way or another. And it takes a lot to change the culture of a company. It has everything to do with the culture. Hi, Samed Jikjini of Catalyst. And my question is, how much do you think of personality? Should you cater to your strengths or be, you know, working on those weaknesses when it comes to hustling versus, you know, trying to be true to yourself or whatever? I think you need to understand yourself, and if you start looking at a lot of the personality things, you start thinking a lot about nature versus nurture, and I think it's probably much harder to change sort of something that's nature, especially if you have an understanding of that. So I'd more do a self— to be self-helpy, I'd probably do a self-assessment first, and and then figure out areas where you actually truly believe you should and can change. There's a lot of things about yourself that you can't change. For me, it's more— it's not about changing necessarily. It's more about understanding other people and understanding how you can get along with them. For example, that person I described our relationship with, they're no longer with my company. And it just wasn't going to work out. And I was managing them. That's why. I'm sure if someone else was managing them at our company, it would have been different. But it's just better to understand that faster. That's the value of it. Okay. Thanks. Hey, I'm Cory. Big fan. You pop up in everything that I see. There's so many people that are quoting you and getting interviewed and whatnot. So it's cool. I hadn't heard that you do the 3 times Audible thing, but I'm curious, are you, are you taking notes while you're listening to this or are you like doing a different activity? Because I listen to podcasts a lot, but afterwards I always have to go back and like re-listen to them and take notes because just listening to it, it doesn't internalized. Yeah, the part I didn't include in there is I think it heavily is heavily dependent on how you learn. And so for me, I'm an audio person. So audio— so actually, it's even more interesting for me. I think there's a type of person, I don't know what it's called, but if I have audio and then I am ambiently around, like in a space, like walking around, I walk around a lot when I talk, I remember the conversation much better. So for me, if I can link those two together, I remember. If I just see something visually, it's actually harder for me. It's more of the spatial and the audio. And I would just study up on like how people learn and see how you actually learn. That's why I mentioned the other things like reading and stuff, because some people need to see the words and that's how they digest it. Some people need to take notes. In my case, I typically don't take as many notes when it's that fast. I might listen to it multiple times, but usually I'm listening to it multiple times because I think it's really good. and I need it over and over again to understand the concepts. But the taking the notes part, I never go back to them. Yeah. That's just you. That wouldn't work well for everybody as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Just learn how you learn. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Another question? One more question? Yeah, a question. Oh, yes. I think two questions. Yeah. One is, since you said you don't really have a true coding background, when you selected your first engineer, to work with you? Like, how did you determine that they had the qualities and skills to— for your idea, to execute it? Great question. Um, these— I think these days it's a lot different than before. Uh, for, for me, uh, the engineer that's been with us the longest, uh, he's actually a partner at Crazy Egg. I found because I hustled, and back in '06-ish, when, when, when the people that originally built Crazy Egg had couldn't do anymore. They were just running into problems that I could Google and fix if I knew how to code. But I went through the RubyOnRails.org, because that's when Ruby on Rails was kind of popular, and I emailed literally everyone on the list that was an engineer. And I spoke to, I would say, 20 to 30% of them. I made a lot of friends that way, like the folks that started Gowalla back in the day, Scott Raymond, I bothered him at the time. And I literally just tried to find someone who I thought was competent.
