Power of Engaging on Social and How to Interview with a Startup w/Founder, Rae Lambert

All righty, I gotta do this. Gonna do this. Good morning, everybody. When I mean everybody, I mean nobody, because no one's here yet. Um, I, I have seen people go live on LinkedIn and there's just like awkward pause for the first like minute or something like that. Um, so, uh, we won't have that here, but for those of you tuning in, welcome. Good morning. I'm excited for this episode.

Hello.

Um, I'm excited for every— people probably like, Taylor, you're excited for every episode. I am, because I feel like I get some pretty cool people on the show. Um, but really excited about this, the power of Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it. Um, I had a chance, uh, Ray, I don't know how something popped up about your platform or something, the algorithm.

I was replying to something.

You were, you were on— I mean, your response rate was tremendous. And so literally it was like 4:30, I think it was like 4:30 my time, 5:30 your time, and you're like, hey, let's hop on a call. And I was like, what? Okay, great. So, uh, shout out to you, you're wonderful. Um, and that's—

My job is to just be on Twitter.

Isn't that wild?

That's my job.

Isn't that wild? People ask me, they're like, Taylor, what do you do? And I was like, well, it's a lot, but I live on Twitter. And they're like— and especially too, like, my wife is like freelance commercial videographer, photographer. So like, she just, she doesn't play in the X world. Instagram's her platform. She's like, yeah, what are you doing? I was like, trust me, it worked. I don't, I don't understand it, but I just live on X.

It's interesting. I mean, I think we're live streaming on LinkedIn, but I have way more followers on LinkedIn, but I just feel like Twitter is just like heavier hitting connections. And just like somehow there's a barrier that's lower in like Twitter DMs, I don't know, it's just—

there's something— The best way— the best thing I heard, um, and we got some people trickling in this morning, um, now, which is good. We did start a few minutes early, but, um, yeah, the way, the way I describe it is like X is like, is like you catch somebody at a bar, or if you're not a drinker, a coffee shop, right? And, and like you like grab like a moment of their time I feel like that's what X is. I feel like LinkedIn is, is still, um, a little bit more like I'm going to a conference.

Yeah. Plan more like planned meeting times.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. The number of like, oh, I have a, I keep a list of like when someone create like some juicy account starts following me, I have this list and it's just like crazy list. And then We had Tim Ferriss use River to get his fans together for the 10th anniversary.

Humble brag. And we're gonna dive into the platform too.

Yeah, no, but everyone's like, how'd you get Tim Ferriss? I'm like, Twitter. He tweeted and I tweeted back.

Crazy.

I replied to his tweet. Like, literally, that's all.

It's nuts. Okay, all right, real quick, I'm gonna do the intros. We got people tuning in. Ricardo, it's good to see you. Chris, Devon, it's great to see you as well. Good morning from Amazon warehouse in Dallas. Hello, thank you for tuning in. All right, so first off, housekeeping stuff as always. First off, say hey. We'd love to hear from you. This is a networking show platform, right? We're gonna talk about networking today. We're talking about community. Listen, we're not in the metaverse yet. I don't know if you're tuning in unless you comment, right? So connect with other people in the chat. Again, we're gonna talk about networking. Prime example, Ray's streaming with me today because I just reached out on Twitter, right? I eat my own dog food or whatever that saying is. I'm terrible at saying. Again, please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. Next thing I tell people is like literally with the networking thing, like network with every guest, right? Shoot Rae a connection, you know, follow her on Twitter and she's a great follow and just tell her you obviously saw her from the show. So first off, I want to give a shout out to Appwrite. I'm one of probably the only non-technical heroes on a technical program. Love the crew at Appwrite. Great product. Basically just help you deploy an app faster. Um, I don't really know all that entails, but it's a great product and I love the team, so go check them out. Um, another thing too, listen, we have a lot going on within the Torque community. Um, we have, uh, 5 to 7 streams a week, not to mention some small streams. If you want to be kept up to date on all the things we got going on in our community, check out our site torque.community. Um, and then if you do want to be kept up to date when I go live with amazing guests like Ray, shoot me a text. It's actually my number. Um, it's not some AI chatbot or something like that. Um, so just text LIVE to 615.

That's insane.

What?

What? Giving your phone number? That's insane.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so text me, text me. Actually, actually, this is an app called Community, uh, that I use.

So this—

yeah, so it's actually, it's actually me. It's my number. It's like my second business. It's like my second number. Um, and, uh, and think, think of Community like, um, it's basically like texting meets like email. And like, like if I throw— if I go to a conference in a city, I can like see all the people. I can like drill down into the city and then text those people to like come to a meetup. So it's pretty cool. Yeah.

How much is it?

I don't know how much it is now. I, I, I got grandfathered into like the intro price.

Okay, good work. Yeah, yeah.

But, but if you create a community number, right, I will sign up, trust me. Um, uh, let's see if we got some more people tuning in. Jason, my colleague from Torus, good to see you, brother. Taya, Uh, Michael, Richard, Chris, it's great to see you. Andre, it's great to see you as well. All right, so enough, enough with me yapping. Ray, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And then we'll dive in.

I don't know.

You live on Twitter. You are a professional Twitterer.

Uh, maybe, although I would have more followers if I was professional at it. I'm just on there a lot. Um, yeah, I'm Ray. My original— originally my background's in finance. Hated it. Hated it. Um, read The 4-Hour Workweek when I was living in Boston working at like custodial finance at State Street Bank. And my husband and I decided we wanted to work in startups.

Okay.

After learning, we're like, what's angel investing? What's Silicon Valley? Uh, moved out to San Francisco sight unseen in 2012, got a bartending job really quickly, and then just started looking for tech jobs.

Yep.

I ended up getting this like finance operations office manager role at an early stage startup called Sauce Labs. I was like the 19th employee there. Okay.

Yeah.

You've used Sauce. Yeah. A lot of engineers know what Sauce is. Yep. Helped with rounds of funding, moved them, you know, from Excel sheet invoicing into Zora. There you go. Found a new office, helped plan the Selenium meetups, which is like open source. browser testing. I don't even know what it is. Yeah, uh, so a lot of meetups for them. And then ended up pivoting into product marketing at Intercom back when Intercom was like— it was still pretty early there.

Yeah, yeah.

I joined, uh, pre-Series B, helped them launch a couple of products, had incredible work experience, learned a ton. Um, and then after 7 years in San Francisco, was trying to move back to New York to be back on the East Coast, assumed I would get a like marketing job at some like consumer tech like Spotify or something, but just started freelancing in the meantime and ended up making like $200 grand my first year freelancing, even though I was undercharging and didn't know what I was doing. And I was like, maybe I am an outdoor cat now and I will stay outdoors.

Stop.

I'm an outdoor cat. Um, Ended up forming an agency with my co-founder Ashley. We grew to $2 million a year in revenue.

Wow.

Um, and I was just like cooking on that, like no meetings on Fridays, like didn't work with companies that use SharePoint because I was like, uh, um, but then this kind of like weird— I started this like meetup group by accident and then realized there was no tools to like do what I was trying to do and ended up Make— starting a company.

And then that company is River.

Um, River. I put up— yeah, uh, yeah. So what happened was I was a big fan of the All In podcast. Yeah. Um, which is kind of rare because it's mostly men that listen to it, but sure. I went to the first summit. Um, I don't really care that much about women's events, but I noticed that women were nervous about attending the summit because it was like mostly men. So I was like, oh, I'll put together a brunch reservation for like 12 women. And then I invited Jason Calacanis, the host, like the moderator of the pod, thinking like, I'm like, obviously you can't come, but don't even bother saying no because I'm not going to tell anyone I've invited you. But if you want to stop by and like take a selfie, we'd love to meet you. Yeah, he joined for the entire brunch. A lot of pictures were taken. And then I was like unfortunately known as brunch girl at the summit, which was like very unserious. I was like, I was like, oh great, love that. Yeah. Um, but then ended up moving to Miami, um, after the summit and was like really struggling to meet the types of people in tech I wanted to meet. Um, all the tech events were like parties full of crypto boys who like can't read a P&L.

Yep. And a lot of loud music.

And yeah, loud music. It was like very sexy but like not productive.

Um, right.

And episode 100 was coming up from— for the pod. And I was like— my friend Melissa was like, I'm gonna host a listening party. I was like, that is such a good idea, I'm gonna do that too, and I'm gonna meet like 6 people. So I DM'd J. Kel again and was like, you should livestream episode 100 and tell me what time it is for my party. And he was like, oh man, we're not gonna livestream it. And that's like the power of Twitter. Like, yeah. Whenever someone asks me for an intro to Jason, I'm like, have you tried DMing him? The man replies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not that hard to get him to pay attention. Um, and, uh, yeah, so he's like, oh, we're not gonna livestream it, but make a signup form and I'll retweet it. And I was like, oh shit, Jake Hill's gonna retweet it. I better think like really big.

Sure.

So I made my signup form on Airtable for San Francisco for my friend Melissa, Miami for me. And then like I had just spent 6 weeks in Austin, so I was like, okay, Austin. And then I used to live in New York, so I was like, maybe someone else. I wrote other, write in your city, check this box if you want to host, thinking like we'd have 2.

Yep.

And that would be it. Sign-up form goes viral. We end up hosting meetups in 24 cities, which was insane. There was no tech. It was an Airtable, a BCC email to each city list, people who chose a city, and a Google Calendar invite. Like no, no tool. And I had used all the event tools. I'd, you know, I used Partiful, Luma, I remember, like, I know, like, Posh. I know all of them, but I was just trying to, like, keep it really simple. And, um, so yeah, like 1,000 people got together in 24 cities. It was insane. And my husband was like, I was staying up really late to, like, get it done. He's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I don't know.

We're just doing our best.

I'm too tired to even ask myself that. Like, I'm just gonna, like, get this done. And then I was like, that was weird. And I ran all the emails through Apollo. I was like, Jesus, there's some juicy people in here.

Yeah.

Okay, but I still like— I'm so dumb. I was like, oh, now when I go to Zurich, I can like email people and meet for coffee. Like, that was my big outcome.

Yeah.

And I had started a Slack channel so I could talk to all the hosts at once because I was just like got overwhelmed with DMing people, like one-on-one emails and stuff. So anyway, the Slack grew. Yes, aim higher, Eugene. I'm rooting for you. Um, the Slack group grew to like 2,000-3,000 people, and that was crazy. And then, you know, 6 months later everyone's like, hey, it's episode 125, we're doing it again, right? And I was like, God, no, that's terrible. I like— why did I do that? Why did I pull all-nighters to like plan meetups that I'm not going to?

Right, right.

But enough people asked, I was like, okay. There's apps for this. Let me, let me put my big boy pants on. So I got a LumaPro account.

Okay.

I like hooked into the like API and got it like the data talking to Airtable and I like set up some automations and I was like, we'll be golden.

Yeah.

We ended up hosting it in 50 cities with like 2,000 people, but no time for me was spared. Not one moment. of energy was like automated because, yeah, all these other event platforms, they all assume that the host is initiating the event, right? And so I had to duplicate the event 49 times and change the image, change the title, change the time zone. Then I had to like find a host like somewhere, you know, offline, like using other tools. And then I would add them to the event and they'd be like, no, no, I just meant like sometime. I was like, well, These are worldwide, like, simultaneously. I need it like today. Or hosts would like download the attendee email lists and like subscribe them to their bullshit newsletter and then ghost the event. I had like no dashboard to see like which events had locations and like if the host was like definitely paying attention and like what was happening. Um, so we, you know, we did it in 50 cities, but it was just like just even harder actually than doing the other way because now there's kind of like— now you need assets and like, yeah, more organized.

Yeah.

And it like looked more official, so people had higher expectations. I was like, ah, shit. Um, but yeah, so J. Cole DM'd me after the— we did the 50 cities, and he was like, what the hell? Like, I hire full-time event people and they don't do 50 events in a year.

Yeah, people don't realize. I mean, like, like, we, we have a very small lean team at Torque, and it, it takes all of us to, to even do what we do, and it's mainly online, let alone in person. I mean, I— people just don't understand how much work that is.

Yes, yes, so much work. Um, and then, yeah, like, try, try planning like a dinner for 12 of your friends.

Oh, it's impossible.

It's impossible. Let me know. Yeah, so he, he tried to hire me and I was like very honored, but I was like, I'm not gonna leave the marketing agency I'm running to like be your event bitch, basically. Like, basically, basically. And, uh, so I was like, no thank you.

Also, like, probably like the only person that would turn him down too, if we're just being honest. Like, like, like, if Jace Kalkanis is in your DMs asking to hire you and you're like, nah, I'm good.

No, it was a— yeah, but I'm just like, also, I know he's like a lunatic and like probably like works like a dog. And I was like, oh no. Oh yeah. So I turned him down. And then 3 weeks later, he's like, what if I invest $100 grand and you start a software company? So now I work even harder and make even less money building River. But River is all about like letting the community host and basically like letting other people host events in your— under your brand with some brand control and like data control, um, but without you having to do like any logistics. So for example, Tim Ferriss tweeted, um, that he wanted to do something wild and crazy for the 10th anniversary of his podcast. Since I'm chronically on Twitter, I just replied to his tweet. Someone tagged me in and I dropped everything, was just like, let me type it. Like, let me write the best reply.

Reply guy.

Reply guy, like right now. Anyway, like 2 days later I got like an email from his team. So we spin up the events, you know, you just create one event and then we duplicate it across every city in our database in one click. So you don't have to like, you know, duplicate every individual event.

Yep.

And then they're fake save-the-date events. They're not real. But what happens is the community page is geolocated. So Tim is just like, hey everybody, go to, you know, river/tim.

Yep.

And if you're in Nashville, you see Nashville. If you're in Boston, you see Boston. Like, you can also propose a new city, but our database is like, of the cities, is pretty big.

Sure.

You can either register to attend and then it's a normal event app. Although like kind of crappier until recently because we just like were so early stage.

It was like, yeah, yeah, just we gotta get out the door.

Yeah, but now, now it's like a lot smoother. But, um, you can register to attend and then it's a normal experience, or you apply to host and the event only happens if a host steps up. And then once you apply to host, you get dropped into like an applicant tracking system, kind of like when you apply for a job.

Sure.

But it's like, it's much lighter than that. Um, we kind of vibe check you some Maybe the community asks questions, you fill 'em out.

Sure.

Once you're approved, you take over limited edit access of that event. So if the community settings let you have emails, then you can have emails, but some communities don't. Certain things you can change, some things you can't. We have like show notes that are just like instructions for once the host is approved that they just see right in the event. And it's just the result is instead of waiting for people to propose events, it's just orders of magnitude higher conversion on events. So Tim announced and then 3 weeks later he had 100 people 154 meetups with like 5,000 people.

Jeez.

And it's just simultaneous. And then while everyone's at the event, we text you and say, hey, snap a pic and a video and upload it to the event page. We curate all of those for the community. And then Tim gets like tagged and inundated with like tons of user-generated content. So it's just like a really fun way to let your community get together without you.

Yeah.

And then you're just, instead of promoting one-off events, you're just promoting the community page in general, and then people can propose events whenever they want, but we kind of do like campaigns and like activations.

Yep, that's so cool. And there's so much— let me ask you this, do you have a hard stop in 15 minutes?

Nope.

Okay, all right, good, because, because there's so much I want to unpack. I'm not going to keep you too long, but like there's so much to unpack. So talk— let's, let's talk about— I know we were yapping about it before, about people who are joining in, but talk about the power of literally just liking and commenting. I mean, you've built a product essentially based off liking Twitter, the liking and commenting and engaging. I mean, talk about why this is. So I wanna talk about from the individual side, and then I wanna talk about from like, like community-first companies moving forward. Um, but talk about from the individual why it's so important just to put yourself out there and start engaging.

Yeah. And I know you have a lot of engineers in your, like, audience and your community too. Yeah. So like the engineers on my team, I'm like, they'll say something like, that's a banger tweet, tweet that. And they're like, ah, nah.

Yeah, yeah.

They're very like risk-averse and like people are afraid of being judged, but it's like, listen, no one's listening to you at the beginning.

Nobody.

No one gives a single shit about it. And you can also just like, I delete tweets all the time if they just like didn't really pop and like get— maybe it was actually a good concept, but like I posted at 1 AM and like no one's online or, you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah. You can always delete tweets, but I just think it's like thinking out loud, sharing my thoughts, like sharing what I care about. And then eventually, like, the right people start to notice. And I don't really have a strategy. I'm not like investing any like time or money.

Sure.

But it's like the people who follow me are like insanely juicy. And yeah, you just— it's just like an amazing way to like get connected and let people know what you care about. But the thing is, is like every individual post is worthless. It's the history. It's the sum of the parts. And it's like, there's been a few times with my engineers and my co-founders where I'm like, okay, please post this. And they're like, it doesn't matter. I'm like, okay, but that's why you have 147 followers and I have 4,500. You gotta—

Yeah.

It's just like one grain of rice every few days.

Yeah.

And then it compounds. And then pretty soon, you know, Tim Ferriss sees my reply and then it's like, oh, Jason Calacanis follows me, all these like other, you know, people from the All In podcast follow me, like a bunch of people follow and it gives you some credibility. Yep. And then now they're in your DMs or they're like giving you a phone call, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I, I tell people all the time that I think the, the world has kind of preached this whole virality thing and that like if you don't go viral, it's not a good post. And what I've realized is that, and I've started, I've I've been listening to more marketing podcasts as of late, and they're all starting to say the same thing, and that going viral now doesn't really move the needle in terms of buying power.

It doesn't. Yeah.

And what I say, it's more of the smaller posts over time that actually make a difference.

Yeah, it's all flash in the pan. I mean, when I worked at Sauce, it was like heavy engineering, you know, culture for devs by devs.

Yes.

And like my biggest My biggest advice now to engineers is to start caring about marketing. I felt like when I worked in kind of sales and marketing roles, the engineers kind of looked down on us.

Yep.

They just think that, oh, I can speak English, therefore I can do marketing. Or I can talk to people, therefore I can do sales. It's actually way fucking harder than it looks to get people to care about your idea and to give you money for your idea. The thing is, is like go-to-market people know that engineering is hard. We know that. We know that it is hard to write code. We completely recognize it and respect it, but it is not the other way around. Engineers do not understand or respect how hard go-to-market stuff is. So they end up— I pronounce it GIF.

Michael.

Engineers just don't understand how hard go-to-marketing is.

Yeah.

Go-to-market stuff is until they start building their own product and then they're like, wait, I built all this time. And I see so many engineers post like, new thing coming out, we spent this many hours on it. I'm like, no one fucking cares how much time you spent on it. They wanna know what have you done for me lately? What is this going to solve for me? And I just find it such a shame that there's so many smart engineers who just like didn't give me as a go-to-market person the time of day. They could have learned from me. I was busy learning from them, let me tell you.

Yeah.

And now they're like wondering why no one cares. Or it's like, oh, you couldn't be bothered to like tweet or write a comment. Or, you know, my team, sometimes they will like just share something on LinkedIn, but they won't like say something about it. I'm like, don't you dare just like repost it without saying something about it.

Yeah.

And they're just like, oh, it's not, it's just this one. I'm like, that's, these are the reps, man. Like, it's like saying, you know, one line of code doesn't matter.

Yeah. Well, and I think too, I, so I was in a, so Ronstadt bought Torque. Ronstadt's like, like the world's largest staffing company technically on paper, not tech staffing, but just overall staffing. And I was in, I was, I was presenting one of their leadership meetings last week and it was really interesting. Like their COO of Americas was like, like there was like an arbitrary number on a slide and he was like, what's the importance of this number? I need a story. Like, like, like where, where is this number coming from? Is this more than usual? And I think like, I really like that because that's how, that's what I preach to my team. That's what I preach in my content. I think, and listen, we don't have to get into the age of AI, but I think, I think what I'm seeing is sales and marketing is everything. And, and the way that can be applied to even a developer who's not an entrepreneur, who is sitting behind their desk coding, when you get into the job search, and we can talk about this as a founder and hiring people, like you have to know how to tell your story. And I think that's incredibly, incredibly important. I don't know if you had thoughts on that.

I do, yeah. I mean, everyone needs to be a good communicator. Certainly, like, you know, as a— as like the CEO and a founder, and I'm a non-technical founder, I mean, I'm like pretty hacky on like getting all these things to talk to each other.

Yeah.

But, um, I'm looking for— yeah, I'm looking for engineers who like understand the business goal. And like, um, because tons of engineers don't. And like, I'll give you a couple of examples. So I was asking one of my— I've, I've worked, you know, with my product marketing agency, built a ton of websites and stuff. And the number of times we've like hired an agency and it has all these fancy animations and all these gradients and the fucking sign-up button doesn't work. And I'm just like, you're fired. I don't care about all these animations and like this, like the button needs to work and you didn't even test it.

Yeah.

You didn't make sure that the button works or like I was asking one of my— we started our website on Squarespace for River. It's on Webflow now, but just Squarespace is like what I was comfortable with, and I knew I could just get something up really fast. And I was asking one of my engineers to help me with like one little custom code snippet, and he's just like really young and like doesn't— has never like run a business, right? He kind of like condescendingly was like, oh, you should just like let me build this for you. And I was like, if you say that ever again, you're fired.

Yeah.

We are not hand chiseling toilets here.

Yeah.

I'm renovating a bathroom and I'm choosing the toilet that I like. We are not hand chiseling toilets. We are getting these things to talk to each other. And so many engineers have never been involved with anything go-to-market that they don't even know how marketing tools work.

Talk about go-to-market. I hear that term a lot. I'm sure, hey, I feel like that's becoming more of a thing. Can you talk about what go-to-market is?

Yeah. So bringing your product to market and bringing your market to your product so you can build, you know, satellites in space that talk to each other or whatever, but if no one knows about it and no one cares about it, you don't have a business.

Yep.

So, you know, it's kind of getting people to know about, care about, and spend money on your product. And there's tons of ways to do that. You know, there's whole different strategies if you're in B2B or selling to businesses. There's a whole different strategy if you're targeting individual consumers. You know, if you're trying to build a 2-sided marketplace, that's a whole other strategy. Like there's, there's so many things that go like into it, but like a lot of engineers don't know what a UTM is, which is just like very basic URL tracking of like, where do people come from? Like where do leads come from? I mean, I was talking about like an affiliate, like kind of like an affiliate marketing idea with River. And I was just showing the engineers like my personal blog that has some affiliate links in it. And it had like one of my favorite books, which is, um, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, uh, and it was— I can't remember what it's called. It's like Astrophysics for People Who Are in a Hurry, actually. One of my engineers, who's like a fucking brilliant engineer, yeah, like he's like, oh my God, how'd you get Neil deGrasse Tyson to like agree to let you promote your book? And I was like, what?

Yeah.

Oh God. And like so many times, you know, an engineer will be like I'll build this thing. I'm like, yeah, Intercom does that. We're not doing that. They just don't know. There's a whole world of go-to-market tools and how the marketing tech stack works that they just don't even know that they don't know.

Yeah.

And it's just a huge problem because they end up building things from scratch. Their funnel is completely disjointed. Funnel is like a relay race of getting people to find out about you and go through the whole journey of becoming a Delighted paying customer, right? Like, if you've never tried to get anyone to care about and give you money for what you're building, you're just not familiar with these things.

How, how can somebody, so if somebody's interviewing for a job with you or with any other founder, how, how can they, how can they position themselves as fast as they feasibly can during the interview? Because I think a lot of, I think the hard part of interviewing is definitely like thinking on your feet. It's framing the conversation in real time. How can people understand the problem that the founder is trying to solve as fast as possible?

Yeah, I think the Jobs to Be Done framework is pretty interesting. It's a good way for engineers and marketing, like, business people to kind of try to get on the same page. And Jobs to Be Done is like a well-known framework. And it's like, as this type of person, I want to do XYZ so I can—

Sure.

And I find that if we're like talking past each other, sometimes I just try to write that sentence so that I can understand. I also just think like being a user of what you're building, um, a ton of, you know what, this is hard with what we're building because we're an event platform.

Yeah.

And a lot of engineers, some of the best engineers are like, Cheeto, like, cave coders who just, like, you know, they just want to, like, be in their cave and they don't want to ever talk to anyone. And, like, I love that about them, but, you know, they just, like, you got to be out in the field, like, using your product or, like, caring about the people. I think it also helps to, like, like your customers, like, like the types of people you're building for.

Sure.

Yeah, I think it's like trying to use the product yourself instead of just saying, like, hey, it works, you know.

Do you What do you— let me ask you this. I, I, one of the things I've always said is like, if you want to get in front of somebody, use their product like a lot, like, like in public, like, hey, like I'm passionate about this product.

Yeah.

Or yeah, yeah. Like, like, do you like that? Like, like if somebody was out here and they're passionate about helping people and they're passionate about community, they're out here trying to leverage River in a certain way. Well, I'm assuming that will catch your eye in a very good way. Okay.

Yeah. By the way, Emre, I do not, I do not threaten to fire people very often. Probably, probably just that one time. But, uh, it was mostly a joke. But like, just kind of, it's just like me reacting to the like condescending nature of engineers who like don't always— they think that they like, they think because I'm not technical, they just like know way more than I'm like, well, sure, there's a big ocean out here. Um, yeah, so I really like when people like use the product, give feedback, or give ideas, you know. And I will say like, it's hard to give me an idea I haven't thought about because I have been like crying, sleeping, breathing, eating River for like over 2 years straight. So like, yeah, yeah, don't expect that you're gonna have an idea that I've never thought of. Or like, oh, have you heard of this tool? Like, yes, of course I've heard of this tool. I'm like, I do nothing else but River. But if someone comes at me with like a pretty good idea, even if it's not a new idea, and I'm like, wow, this person has Clearly only been thinking about this problem for 15 minutes and they're on the right track.

Yeah.

Very impressed.

I love that. I love that.

And I love when people like use the product and give like actionable feedback. That's fantastic. Although like I was chit-chatting with my neighbor and they were like introducing me to their son who just graduated from college this year with a degree in entrepreneurship. And he's like, not really a target user of River. And he's like, I'll take a look and give you feedback. And I was like, mm, go fuck yourself. Like, yeah, like, what even— how do you even study entrepreneurship?

Like, right? Well, that's a whole nother conversation. Going to school for entrepreneurship is kind of like a— is kind of an oxymoron. But neither here nor there. Let me ask you this. Let's, let's, let's talk about, you know, I, I keep harping on community. I know people roll their eyes because I talk about it so much. In my opinion, I think it's really the new way of marketing. Uh, I, I, I I think there's a huge shift in marketing right now. And what is marketing? What is traditional marketing? What is kind of the newer way? Why do you think companies need to be community first?

Yeah, I gave a whole talk on this. So studies show that people are really lonely. The time we spend alone has skyrocketed since COVID It has not really dropped down. And when I first like double-clicked into this data, I was thinking, oh, we're just working from home. But that's not even true. Um, the percentage of 12th graders going out with friends 2 times a week has just been on a like steady decline since the '90s.

Interesting.

Okay. Like kids aren't hanging out. And then we actually don't— I was like, okay, maybe we're just all homebodies now. We prefer it this way. We don't. Like if you look at Google search trends for terms like Where to make friends, how to meet people, social groups near me.

Do you have your talk up right now? Are you reading it?

I've been reading it. Yeah. I love it. All these data is just skyrocketing. So there's just a clear need. We're more connected and more disconnected than ever. And then there's just with content has become a commodity. So it used to be, okay, you got to do your SEO. Okay, now you got to start a podcast. Now you got to be tweeting every day. The problem is like with all these, this generative AI, like, so right now there's 4 million blog posts published per day, 95 million Instagram posts, and 500 million Twitter posts. And with generative AI, this content is gonna double by 2030.

Yeah.

So like, you can't just like post content, you have to engage. I call these people cold creators, people who just like churn out content and then they never chit-chat or they're never like, they never answer questions or never like held accountable. to like their ideas or anything like that. And so people just really want like more connection. And, you know, also people are just gonna share their ideas more in a smaller group, like vetted setting.

Yeah.

You know, for example, like the All In Slack has like 3,000 people. It's not really that juicy, but then like the little, like the city channels, like this WhatsApp LA, what's up Boston? It's just like constant. And so, so people just want to be more with like-minded people. They want to feel like safer space to exchange ideas and like give each other feedback. Um, so yeah, I just think like figuring out community is going to be super important because like, you know, when, you know, when the internet came online, it's like, okay, now everyone needs a website. Okay, shoot, now everyone has a website. How are you going to stand out? Okay.

Yep.

Like, as all these new tactics come into play, you just have to— like, the, the goalpost keeps shifting and the tactics change, and, you know, that tactic's exploited and then you need to move on.

Yeah, yeah. I think, I think people— and, you know, I pull a lot of my inspiration, I've talked about this all the time, from like run clubs. I don't run, but I think, I think run clubs are fascinating. I think like CrossFit was, you know, kind of the original OG community, right? You have HYROX now, you have all these And I think, I think people— I think, well, I think people— I think community is built off shared suffering. Um, I think the shared suffering for what we're trying to build is the job search, right? Everybody, everybody goes through it. Everybody knows suffering. So that's what, that's what kind of I'm building our community around is a job search.

Yeah.

But I think too, I think people, you know, it's just like Barrett, you know, you know, my kids never go out. It's one of these things where If, you know, and this is what I'm so passionate about, is like starting super small, right? And I mean, you kind of went for it with all in, and props to you for that. But like, I think too, I think people see a you, a me online, and, and, and these communities of thousands of people. I started my career inviting 10 people out to lunch.

Yeah.

That's it. And then you slowly build on that, and I feel like you know, in the age of AI and just everything, everything's a commodity now. Like staffing companies— Tort, Ronstadt— we're a staffing company. There's a gazillion of us out there. You go to the Northeast, there's probably more staffing companies than there are churches in the Northeast, right? And so it's like, what's going to make you want to use that staffing company over another staffing company? It's, it's how that, how that staffing company is loving on people. And I think that goes for Every organization, every skill set, everything, um, from a business perspective.

Yeah, yeah. You just— then the trick is to like keep it curated enough that it has that touchstone and you can develop that group lore. And I agree with you, like that shared trauma. I mean, I always say the best, the fastest way to grow your network is go work at like some shithole company that's like completely toxic and you'll all bond over shared trauma.

I have texting groups. I have personal texting groups that are literally called company trauma bonded. Literally the company and trauma bonded. Uh, and I have, I have group text.

Because it's a bad company, everyone leaves. So now your network just like exploded. Whereas if it's a great company, everyone stays. Like, you don't know anyone in any company. So it's so funny.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, I think this community stuff's really important. I think hosting is such— like, I host a kind different types of events like pretty regularly, and it's just such a great way to build relationships and meet people. And for example, once a month I host this month fancy toast and walk on the rail trail. We just literally, um, make toast and like a pot of coffee, and then—

I'm coming.

Make their own toast, and then we live like near a rail trail, so we go for a walk. And it's kind of our catch-all event. Like if we meet someone interesting like out and about or at a coffee shop, we just invite them to it. And then they come and it's kind of the top of funnel for like a little bit of an interview, you know, and if we like them, we start inviting them to more intimate kind of stuff.

Yeah.

But I think, you know, it's really interesting as me myself, I'm still me when I attend a normal event as a normal like attendee. I've still like raised a pre-seed round. I've still like built an event platform. I still like Lead a team of 8. I'm still me, but when I host the event, everyone wants to talk to me. When I attend an event, no one wants to talk to me. And so it's just such an interesting dichotomy. And hosting is actually not that much more work. Once you get a couple of reps in, it's really easy. You're just like, oh, I know this place is good for groups. This is the time that works for me. You just like, it gets much easier every time you do it.

Yeah.

And so then I'm like, OK, well, it takes me 20 more minutes to host an event than it does to attend an event. But now everyone wants to talk to me. Quite the ROI there.

Yep. Yep. I love it. I love it. All right. So as we wrap up here, again, I don't want to monopolize too much of your time. I want to go back to any other thoughts, encouragement to folks who are on the job search right now, anything that maybe we didn't cover, anything that kind of pops to the top of your brain.

Yeah, I mean, I think being— so like we hired pretty much everyone in the T3 Discord, which is like run by Tio. Um, Theo, Theo. Um, yeah, so I think like being active in a community, like in the tech stack that you care about, and we were just kind of like poking around. We're like, okay, well, who's been answering questions like well?

Yeah.

Hire them. Um, so that's kind of an interesting The piece of advice, um, this is like a hot— I get like a lot of flack sometimes for this, but I require a Loom video for people who apply. It's just like— I love that video.

I love that.

Yeah, some people will tell me that's like a big L because then you're just only attracting people who like, like talking about themselves or are comfortable. And I'm like, listen, I'm not dumb. I'm smart enough to realize that like I'm not hiring you to be a public speaker, right? But if you can't like introduce—

you gotta Presenting yourself now is starting to be like—

that's like, yeah, like if you can't present yourself in 1 minute or something, yeah, and say like, hey, this is what I'm interested in, this is why I think River's cool, you know, it just like weeds out the noise so much more and just shows me that you're interested. And so, and like, we have some pretty quiet personalities on the team. It's— it isn't like— like I said, I know that this is not—

Not everybody's like you.

I'm not expecting you to host, you know, Wheel of Fortune or whatever, like But I just want to know that you care enough to like record me a Loom video. And then I actually don't read resumes anymore. I just think they're kind of bullshit. Like people just have ChatGPT write them or they hire a resume writer. I'm just like, let's, you know, work on something together. So I always start with a paid test project.

Oh, you do pay?

Oh, at their market rate. You tell me how much you want to be paid and I will judge you accordingly.

Yeah, yeah, but that's awesome though. I love that.

Yeah, so we do a Loom video. If I think you're cool, I'll meet with you for 30 minutes and if that works, then we'll go straight to a paid test project and I'll give you something. That's awesome. Yeah, I'd like to see how people work.

Um, let me, let me ask you this. I do want to highlight this real quick. I feel people are hiring. I feel like the general notion right now is tech hiring's dead.

Well, so here's the thing. I'm never going to post a job posting on LinkedIn because I'm going to get inundated with 100,000 applications. And then, then people will like apply And 16 hours later, they'll be like, how come you haven't responded? And I want to kill myself because I want to give everyone a good experience. But I'm like, I do not have the bandwidth to like run a proper process.

Which is why you should use torque.dev. Sorry, I had to say that.

Go ahead. Yeah, I don't have the time. I do not have the bandwidth to like look at 500 resumes. I get it.

I get it.

So I never post that I'm hiring publicly on LinkedIn or Twitter. Never. I'm just like going into these smaller places, communities. I'm going to the T3 Discord and being like, hey, we're in the T3 tech stack. Yeah, who's looking to work? Let's work together. Yeah, I need a designer. I'm going to like a design community. I just, I can't deal with the, I can't deal with the flow. And then it gives people a bad experience and then they get their hopes up and like, that's not what I'm—

They get frustrated with your brand, which is a whole nother conversation to have. I think interviewing and the way you market yourself from a job search perspective and job postings and The candidate experience is, is a huge part of marketing.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's just the reality. And if, hey, if you're a really big company and you have like an HR team, sure, you can process that kind of flow. But, you know, I can't. And then some people will like kind of accuse me of light racism or whatever because it's like, oh, it's just in-group stuff. And I'm like, well, no, I have employees in São Paulo, Brazil, Kenya, Poland, Costa Rica.

Like, yeah.

This, this is not— that's not like what's happening. It's not all in-group stuff. It's just like, this is the skill I need. I want someone who's great at Figma. Let me go to where all the Figma people are hanging out.

That makes sense. That makes sense. Yep. Yep. Again, like I said, being community, it's pretty simple. Pretty simple. All right. So anything else? Anything else? No, no.

I mean, I'm, I'm rooting for everyone. I think, you know, it's a brave new world out there with all these AI tools. Sometimes I've judged like hackathons or like demo days and especially young engineers, they'll be like, hey, like I rebuilt YouTube from scratch. And I'm like, does it work? Can I play a video? And they're like, well, no. And so I would say like, think of yourself as like remodeling a bathroom. You don't have to like hand design like the sink and the toilet and the shower, but we do wanna like put things together.

You wanna be able to go to the bathroom.

And yeah, I wanna be able to go to the bathroom. And I want these things to like work. And so just, you know, I saw someone commenting like build versus buy. You usually buy. Um, I, I think like especially as an MVP, um, just getting things to work or like I would love to see a Figma prototype where, you know, I just click through to like understand your idea.

Yeah.

Um, I just think this like, oh, let me go write, you know, 5,000 lines of code is the first thing. I just think we're like, we're less and less interested in that. We're really, we got to get down to brass tacks and just focus on like, what is the experience for the users? Like, does it work? And I'm just less, I'm less into this like purist stuff.

What do you mean up here, purist stuff?

Like, um, the integrity of like having built something from scratch, or like, you know, sometimes my designer, like, she kind of like sticks her nose up at Canva, and I'm like, well, listen, like, Curved text works in Canva and it doesn't in Figma. I don't care which tool we're using. I just need this shit done.

You know what I'm saying? Shots fired. Shots fired.

Yeah. Just like focus on like really understanding exactly what the job to be done is and the exact problem. Yeah. And then just like do whatever you can to do that as quickly and just test, test, test, test, test.

You know? Yes.

I just think this like, oh, I built this from scratch. Like, you know, here's the analogy. My husband loves road cycling. I love road cycling with him. I'm never going to be in the kind of shape just because my body weight. I'm never going to be able to keep up with him. So I, for a little while, I hemmed and hawed, but I ended up getting an e-bike because the reality is I want to keep up with him and I want to carry snacks.

Girl, that'd be me too. That'd be me too. Yeah, yeah, I'm just here for vibes. I'm not here for the actual workout.

Be e-bike engineers.

Yes. Yeah, well, and I think that's, I think that's so— all right, so I, this just popped my head and I want to confirm this with you. So I love the way you broke down how you interview and for people for the job search So what I'm hearing is, hey, maybe have a Loom video going over something you built and, and talk through the steps on why you did it. Maybe have a Loom video to introduce yourself and, and tell about yourself.

Yeah, just on deck, like just ready.

Yeah, I literally created a video yesterday for Torque, like, hey, and I'm gonna put it out, like, just like, here's how to get involved. Like, I just want to have something for people that have questions. Is there anything else like that's kind of non-normal for somebody to kind of have in their portfolio like that, that, that we're missing? So a Loom video about themselves, maybe a Loom video going over a product they developed. Is there anything else you'd like to see maybe just off the rip?

I mean, it depends. Like if you're an engineer, you know, I think like contributing to stuff or like making little tiny like personal projects is super cool. Like I don't need it to be necessarily in this tech stack, but if I see that you're interested in something, you're building something like One of my friends kind of like hijacked Airtable to make this, um, protein, like whey, like, like pea protein whey comparison tool for like costs.

There you go.

And I'm like super nerdy and I'm trying out my protein intakes. I'm like looking through it and it's like, I love it. Just building stuff that you care about and showing me that you are a creator and you're a creative person is so much more interesting to me than like whatever certifications, like bullshit certifications you sign up for.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't care. I just want to see what you're building, what's interesting to you, even if it's not my taste. Even it's like this like totally like weird rando game, like I don't care. I just want people who are like hungry and creating stuff and have like opinions about what to make in the world.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

Um, all right, I wrap up kind of rapid fire. I'm kind of coming to these, uh, off top of my head. Are you a coffee or tea person?

Oh, coffee. Hot, always hot, even in the summer, even though I lived in New England.

It's just, it's like just hot liquid.

Yeah, I love it.

I think, I think my hot take is cold coffee actually embodies the actual taste of coffee. You're just drinking hot liquid.

I believe you, I believe you. But I'm like, I'm from New England and these lunatics will drink iced coffee in February.

I get it. I do, I do. It was like, it's been like 15 degrees in Nashville and I'm like pulling up to the coffee shop asking for cold brew. Um, next question. I do— I always ask people to give a shout out to somebody else, a founder, somebody in the community who's doing good work. Do you have anybody off the rip that you want to, uh—

I love Brooke Bowman. She's so freaking cool. She's the creator of Vibe Camp, which is like kind of like a, a baby Burning Man for like tech nerds or something. Okay, super interesting things. I mean, not that Steph Smith needs a shout out, but I just think she's super cool. She's like She has the Internet Pipes community. She just does like really nerdy like data research work and then publishes it. Um, okay, she's super cool. I really like Jordan Mix from Late Checkout. He's like Greg Eisenberg's like right-hand man, and he's just been like a great connector for me and I know for other people. Uh, and he's in Nashville. You should know.

Yeah, I don't— yeah, I would.

Yeah, yeah, there's some Bolt people in Nashville. They're doing World's Largest Hackathon right now, which is pretty fun. We're doing that on a river. Yeah, those are my off-the-top of my head shoutouts.

That's awesome. Um, all right, last question. The show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and kind of college, but now as adults we don't really have necessarily somebody to turn to. If you could go back and tell young Rae one piece of career advice, what would it be?

Oh man, I was actually just thinking about this because my 20th high school reunion is coming up. Please do not do any math, thank you. And we're doing like a paid event because we rented a venue and we're using River for it. And I like barely got the paid events working.

Imagine that.

Barely. But if someone had like told me back like in high school that like you're gonna build like an event platform and like you're gonna have an app and everyone's gonna like use it to buy tickets for your high school reunion, I would've said, What is an app? Um, because it was a long time ago, but I really like— I wasn't a great student. I was like, really struggled and like B-, B student.

Yeah, yeah.

I like, I was very dabbling. I was dabbling in lots of things. Like, I wasn't fully committed. I was kind of like checking a lot of stuff out.

Yeah.

And high school is just so rigid that it just like— I really felt like I was gonna be a loser and that I just wasn't like gonna be successful because I just wasn't doing particularly well in school and I wasn't doing particularly well in sports. And I like, I just didn't like, you know, and part of me wishes like a guidance counselor or a teacher would have been like, that's okay, like this isn't real life. But then maybe I wouldn't have tried as hard anyway.

Yeah.

But saying like, A, like following your curiosity, you, you have no fucking idea how great it can be. You, you do not have the imagination to predict the upside of like doing the things that you care about with people you care about. You have, you, you do not, you lack the capacity to imagine how great it can be. Yeah. You're very good at imagining how bad it can be. And it's like never that bad.

Right.

So I would just say like following your curiosity, like working hard and like creating something only you can create. And that takes years to find, like. I just feel like I was circling it for like such a long time. But if you just keep saying yes to the stuff that excites you and no to the stuff that just doesn't feel right, eventually you will be in your own bowling lane and no one else will be competing with you because you'll be doing your own shit.

Yep. Yeah, my brother was the same way. He and I are very different. Um, my brother definitely bounced around a lot, uh, and some people would, would have called him like non-committal or not motivated. I know that was kind of told to him. But he's a fantastic product owner. And he's very passionate about it. And he's, he's kind of wedged himself in the ticketing space. And so, so yeah, he's, he's fantastic. So yeah, I agree with that.

Yeah. And then the last thing is, if you have, if you're someone who has new ideas, just used to being treated like, you're just gonna be exhausted all the time, because everyone's gonna think you're a lunatic. And, like, that's just the cost of being, like, right on the edge, like, right in front of kind of, like, mainstream ideas and thinking. And, like, It's happened to my husband so many times. We're co-founders. He, you know, he's a data scientist in the AI space. Like, there's just so many people with PhDs telling him like, no, no. And it's like, just know that like, if you are thinking of things early and new, it will be exhausting. And you'll just, you'll get to the point where you'll stop telling people because they'll just like think you're an idiot. And you're like, okay, well, I think you're an idiot, but you know, you can't say that.

Right, right, right.

Just know that if you're doing like innovative stuff, like you're gonna, you know, it's gonna be a table for one, table for 2. It's gonna be kind of small.

Yep, yep, agreed, agreed. Well, awesome. Well, Rae, where, where can people find you? Twitter?

What's your Twitter handle? Twitter, @RaeChelLambert, but it's spelled funny. It's R-A-E-C-H-E-L. Um, @RaeChelLambert. Yeah, same on LinkedIn, I think.

Awesome, cool, fantastic. Well, y'all, thank you for tuning in. A lot of comments today. Rachel, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Um, but tomorrow Going live 9:30 AM Central with my dear friend and MC co-host from Epic Web Dev, Bri Hall. She's a senior DevRel at HubSpot. We're gonna talk about how, uh, how she pivoted after 3 years of not finding her first job in tech and just how to stay positive. It's gonna be a great conversation tomorrow. You have a good one. Connect with Rachel. She's obviously fantastic. And we'll see y'all tomorrow morning. Peace.

Bye.