building the brand: missing flights, powerpoints, and mid iced coffee | ep. 21

It is 7:10 AM. We're at the airport an hour before boarding. You know, decided to get here, get the vibes going, uh, get some coffee. Uh, your boy just missed his flight. Thought boarding was at 8:15. The flight was at 8:15. So now I'm at the airport for another 3 hours after getting to the airport an hour early to get some work in. Took it down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All the time we got wasted was not wasted.

Thank you, sir.

Appreciate it. How you doing?

Thank you.

Drinking mine and race down in Old Town, babe.

Yeah.

All right, we are here at the Embassy Suite in, uh, it's a neighborhood. Anyways, it is 2 o'clock in the afternoon. All I've eaten today is a breakfast from Chick-fil-A and a protein bar. So your boy's getting some food and I'm gonna be honest with you, I'm gonna be heads down for work. Have some thoughts I wanna share, but I'm gonna eat and get to work. I was on a call with my friend Ken Collins, head of product at Torque, talking about just all the cool things that are happening right now and kind of where we wanna go in terms of how to tie in product with community. I think both go very hand in hand with the future of what we're trying to do. So now we're holed up in our room for the rest of the afternoon. It's 3:17. You know, getting— I got super behind with the flight, so that didn't help. You know, I think it's just such a— it's a conundrum traveling. It's sometimes not the best locations, but it's also just hard to like navigate working, right?

Yeah.

I mean, there's— I'm caught up in stuff.

I'm caught up in meetings.

I haven't been able to do a lot. Um, and so now it's like, you know, I, I, I, I have to work, and I'm going to probably work until I go to bed tonight. Um, and then I got to review my talks for tomorrow. So just a lot going on. It, it's wonderful. I'm super blessed to travel. This is what I'd love to do, but also it's very difficult to try to balance. Biggest Issue that we're trying to solve right now at Torc is what is community? Like, prime example, all right, we have over— we have close to 4,500 members in our Discord, right? Are we getting anybody on our Discord a job? Not that I'm aware of yet, right? But then we have like 2 million plus technologists on our platform with Torc. Does that count as community? Is that a database? Then there's numbers like that we're using where it's like, hey, like at least half of the folks have like at least filled out the profile. But then it's like somebody fills out your profile, like is that community? Does everybody want to be in community? Like some people just don't want to be in community. Like some people just want a job. Like some people just want to open up an email. Some people just maybe want to get a text message from you if you have a job for them. To me, in my opinion, I think community is everything, right? Community goes from Hey, our email open rates at Torque are like 45%, which is crazy. Like, I had Googled the industry average, it's like 20%. So it's like, you know, people are opening up anything we send out, which is huge, right? We have a very active Discord. We go to conferences. We have people buy the swag, or not buy the swag, like we gift out swag. Like, we have our ambassador team. Like, We're still in early stages. We've only been at this for 10 months, right? But it's really cool. I went live with Demetrius Clark on Guidance Counselor 2.0 recently, and he was very kind and sang our praises backstage with me. I had David Hicking from Laravel shoot me a DM this week and was like, love what you guys are trying to do. Here's like, it's, you know, it's very difficult to do. I mean, I can't tell you the amount of DMs I've gotten and the people that tell me at conferences that they love what Torque is doing. That's community. The whole point of like the community team is to develop enough brand recognition across the globe, which is going to take a long time for the record, to where if you get reached out by us for a job or you get reached out by us from an email newsletter or something, you go Oh, it's Torque. Yeah, yeah, I love Torque. I want to open this up. It's that time of the month, dog. Me and my friends, me and my friends. Just finished looking over my slides, which was good because I had some stuff that was like specifically for Barcelona when I spoke in one slide. So I'm glad I QC'd it. But I'm tired. Didn't sleep well last night. Like I said earlier, mind was racing with all the things I had to do today. I got a bunch of stuff done. I hated missing the speaker dinner. You know, it's a little frustrating that sometimes I have so much work and I hate missing it, but I had to get some stuff done. So excited to hang out tomorrow morning. Found a coffee shop close to me, which is good. But it's time to go to bed. Tired.

Good morning.

So tell me where the— Day 1 and really the only day. Heading back tomorrow. Quick trip.

Quick trip.

Day 1 and only day of DevUp. Got up a little bit early. If there's anything about me is I'm gonna go find a coffee shop that's not Starbucks. So I'm gonna go walk, get some steps in this morning. Also check out the new Torq tee. It's a little low. We're gonna fix it. But we got torq.dev. Um, and we gotta cool back. Let's go get some coffee. Cold brews secured. I've already downed one. Walking to the convention center. First talk, 8:30, Exposing the Interview Process. You know, this talk has kind of gone through a ton of iterations, so this is an iteration of my very first talk ever, which is Recruiters Suck, Use Them. Kind of refined it. I have slides now. This used to be like a total Q&A session. Uh, there's a lot of topics that like we actually weren't getting to that I think was super important with Q&A, so I have slides. Excited to give this talk. Let's get it. All right, we're Graham Ballroom C. Let's go find this room and get set up. All right, first talk in the books. Thought it went well. You know, to be honest with you, it still is a little hard going on slides. I haven't quite gotten my, like, cadence with slides. Like, I kind of talk ahead of my slides or behind my slides, so I need to— really need to keep, uh, um, really need to keep getting better at, at talking and figuring out my flow and cadence a little bit. But that was a great conversation. Heading back up to the room to regroup, um, answer some emails and answer some texts. But great first talk. I'm excited for the second one this afternoon. Presented my talk this morning, went great. Uh, 8:30 talks are a little rough. It's a little, a little hard to get going. And then just, I actually just finished writing my newsletter or finished, basically the way I write my newsletter is like, I like brain dump it all in one spot and then like the next day, like I read through it, make edits and add links to it and then I schedule send it out. So got it scheduled to send out for tomorrow morning and so I'm gonna look back over my talk and I present in an hour. So it's gonna be good. So yeah, let's, Let's have another great presentation here in a little bit. So I'm catching up with Ken Collins, our head of product, dropped like a 15-minute video, and, and those 2 clips, uh, that we just showed are like from the video. And man, what, what we are doing at Torque, it's super exciting. Ken Collins, head of product, he's brilliant. Um, he and his— we have an AI team and they're doing a bunch of stuff. I have no idea like what they do, but they're doing some cool stuff. So mind you, Torque is 2 things, right? Torque is a community, which I head up all the community stuff. Like my colleague Jason Torres just went live today with Scott Talinski from Syntax FM to review resumes. We have a really special guest tomorrow, Kelsey Hightower coming in. I mean, we're bringing in these like massive guests who know how to review resumes and help give back. So there's a community side, but also the talent side. So, so it's kind of— and then there's 2 parts of the and the talent side. So there's the talent hub, career hub, which is one of the last clips, which is like what we're gonna try to eventually build. And Ken, if you watch this and I'm wrong, please comment. But we wanna basically develop a product to where like if you're a developer and you're not getting calls or you're not getting searched on our platform or getting calls, like our AI can tell you what skill sets you're missing to like level up on. And then it's my job to provide the resources for you to level up on. See how that works? Then the other side of the platform is allows recruiters Recruiters to find you faster and better, and the content's better. And what Ken and his team are doing our app is is is is bar none incredible. We are truly going to transform the staffing industry for sure. Alrighty, talk number two. Good afternoon, y'all. My name is Taylor Dessin. It's good to see y'all. Basically, what we are doing is we are redefining the staffing industry. There has been this kind of like founder-like thinking in career ownership, right? It's like I said. Everybody, your career is your company in this sense, and you are your own founder right now. I'm gonna talk about a lot of content here. Let's talk about how we do it. But at the end of the day, I'm not asking you to turn into MrBeast. I'm not asking you to turn into a streamer like Kai Cenat. All I'm asking you to do is document what you're learning, and I'm telling you it'll fundamentally change your career. Talk two done. About to hop into talk. Talk was good. You know, talk with— here, we're gonna bring it. Here, I wanna sit down. Okay. Talk 2 was good. It was okay. Second time I've ever given that talk. Probably give it a 6.5 out of 10, 7 out of 10. To me, it felt like I was talking in circles, but I had some people come up to me and say it was great. You know, that it was like the kick in the pants they needed to start posting. So listen, here's the deal. As long as one person's impacted, that's good enough for me. So docking on the rest of the afternoon, again, I just kind of holed up in this hotel room. I got expense reports I gotta do. I got to answer some Slack messages. I got a call with Dave, my boss, and Mark Bosma on the matching team about some like KPI stuff here in about 20 minutes. I'm gonna make this Instagram post. So yeah, let's get to work. It's gonna be a good afternoon.

In the city, remember you used to drive a Yukon. I pick up whenever you call. In the parking lot in Tucson, like, are you with me?

Morning, headed back home.

In the Phantom with the roof gone. I pull up like Jimmy Neutron. I cannot be getting moved on. Like you howl and I know you like to go slow.

Alrighty, we are back in Nashville.

We made it.

Dev Up, thank you for having me.

It was a pleasure.

We're off for a few days, really actually not much, like 2 or 3 days, and then we are back to Raleigh, North Carolina for a quick trip speaking at the All Things Open Um, meetup. It's sold out, it's like 375 people, so I gotta work on my slides for that. Y'all have a good one. See you in Raleigh.

What would I do if I didn't love you?