I quit with the rights I was a soft one, she now is very happy coding, scared to hell, going to talk to me and doing the sales.
And it becomes quite visible quite quickly that if you don't go and sell, you're not going to pay your rent, pay your mortgage monthly, you're not going to eat.
I ordered about 20 bucks or fam as then and spent a weekend leading through every single book and sales and marketing that I've got all of.
And then just going out and failing, figuring out how to do it.
Hello and welcome to the Builders Gonna Build podcast episode 8. It's a podcast where we interview creators of amazing products about how they do stuff.
And this is the start of our second season, season 2, where we want to focus more on finding product market fit, getting your first customers, getting your product promoted on social media so you can find your first customers, etc. etc.
So this is the superlining for our second season. And today we have John Crickett as our guest. And I guess I'll just pass to you John and let him introduce yourself.
Cool, thank you. Thank you for inviting me on. So I'm a soft one, sometimes engineer, sometimes manager.
I've worked in all sorts of companies from small startups to very traditional engineering companies to financial institutions.
I've been doing this for nearly 28 years now. Part of that, working with people, part of that, my own. I'll say startups but not VC back startups, I've been more on the bootstrap side.
Awesome. So what are you doing right now?
So right now, I'm about a month since leaving my last permanent job and I'm totally focused on building up my own business.
Hopefully, around coding chats, but I am being very led by the market. I've built an audience over the last 18 months, primarily over the last 12 months.
I've not made a redundant in 2022 and I thought, I don't want to do that again. I see where the market's going.
I've learned my own business in the past. I want to go back to being in control. So I started hunting down five days and then I decided I didn't have an idea like this.
Plenty of ideas, but there wasn't anything that I really was excited by. So I decided to turn it and build a distribution, build an audience first.
And then let them lead me into what the products are. So that's what I did. Started patient in the social media.
And after a comment about MVP, so I decided to start a newsletter, sharing some of the things I've done. And that's I expected to get a thousand subscribers by Christmas 2023.
I had nearly 2000 by the end of the first weekend. And it's now grains were over 50,000 and that is coding challenges.
And your legal thing the following is, I think, over 100,000 at this point.
It's over 150,000 now.
And so how long did it take you to grow from whatever it was to 150,000? I don't have the full stats going all the way back, but it was around about 3000 in March 2023.
And it was 130 something thousand in March 24.
So if you were backed by VCs, you could have claimed the 50x increase.
You can still claim it. Yeah. I drew the hockey stick graph and it's going to ask them for the money.
Yeah. So did you have like some background in this coding challenges, coding chats, kind of area before or I know you said like you didn't know exactly what you were going to build on.
You're going to first create like a newsletter or an audience and then see where it takes you.
But how did you decide where to start with that self? I didn't so much decide where to start with that.
I was commenting on a post I saw in LinkedIn, a entrepreneur in Europe posted about they spent 780,000 euros and a year building their MVP.
And they were about to get money before they launched their MVP.
And I just made the comment, if you're a year in and you spent nearly a million euros on your MVP, you've missed the point of an MVP.
That's not an MVP. And to kind of present the counter argument, I said, look, an MVP, you're very first MVP, you should be looking at $100 and two weeks.
Something that gets out there and starts getting some validation.
And I posted about that on LinkedIn and it was kind of the first sort of viral post I had.
I didn't really expect to on this pick up, it was more like, are you crazy spending nearly a million euros on an MVP and not having it launched and not being able to launch.
And I got a lot of pushback on that. A lot of people saying, well, you can't buy a software engineer for $100 and you can't build anything in two weeks.
And I engaged in quite a few comments on that and a lot of people just said it was ridiculous and you couldn't do it.
And yeah, they're like, you know, you can't go and hire a software engineer for $100.
But if you're a founder, you put in swear equity, you build out yourself in the evenings and weekends.
I started a few businesses back in 2001 and was reasonably successful in a bootstrap scale, not on VC scale.
And in that process, I met a lot of people who were starting businesses with their redundancy payments from the financial recession we had in 2001.
And I watched them burn through hundreds of thousands of their savings or the redundancy payouts.
And ended up with nothing because they went out and they got business cards, they got a stationery, paid a fortune for a website.
They got all their branding, they did all these things.
And not once did they go to a customer say, I'm going to do this, will you buy it?
I watched so many people lose their life savings with that that I was determined this time I'm not going to do that.
So that's, I mean, yes, it's not necessarily easy to do an MVP for $100 and two weeks.
But if you're thinking in those terms, you're thinking, how do I validate this as quickly as possible?
And I thought, okay, I'm going to try and demonstrate how you can validate something.
I'm going to prove my point.
And coming back to the coding challenges, since I started working in 1996, I have done things like building a real world application to learn a Pokemon language.
So I learned C by doing health and compression challenge that I've got.
I've repeated these excites over the years to learn C, C++, Java, Python, and I was also using some of them to go and lust at the time.
So I thought, there's my idea.
I'll buy the main name for $17, stick up a quick website, substacks free, I can start a newsletter.
Boom, that's it.
MVP in 24 hours, I spent $17.
And if I get a thousand subscribers, I validated that people interested in this.
And it kind of took off from there.
Okay, so help us kind of understand the coding challenges part a bit more.
In coding challenges like every post, you kind of present a problem and you try to envision what a very, very minimal bare bones like MVP would be.
Do you help solve it also?
Do you leave it up to the readers?
What sort of engagement do you expect?
It's a very choose your own adventure.
So you can take what I've done and figure it out of yourself.
And I do provide some context and background of here's where you can look at the live and algorithm data structures or the formats or the specification.
We also have a GitHub repo of shared solutions.
So if you look at the older challenges, there are shared solutions you can look at to get an idea there.
And we have a discord server that you can come on and discuss with other people that's tackling them.
And then I know people doing them in about 20 different languages.
So there's 7 or 8 that quite common on a discord server, you know, all your other common ones you expect like C++, go Java, C Sharp, C. So people are coming on there discussing it and sharing ideas.
I'm active on there when I can tell people out and talk to people on LinkedIn.
People sharing their solutions on LinkedIn and working together.
There've been a couple of people who are solving them and streaming them on Twitch.
So it's growing into quite a widespread use and there's lots of different resources.
After a few requests, I built a couple of courses that I sell that walk people through that.
Do you create challenges yourself or do you borrow them from, I don't know, some classical examples?
They are all ones I've learned myself.
Sometimes I've had inspiration, so I've looked around and seen a good example.
So like a netcap, I saw a cyber security thing talking about netcap and you should build that.
So that's one of one recently that I thought that would be quite an interesting challenge.
I haven't used netcap before. I'll dig into that and learn about it.
Some of the others say the Huffman one I've been doing since 1996, inspired by what I did at university.
Are you familiar with that advent of code thing that happens in December?
I did it for about three, four years. It comes together really quite a lot but haven't done it in the last couple.
See, Bizarre, I've never done it. I've heard people talk about it but I haven't actually looked at it until this year
and I just had too much of my plate this year to do it. I was too busy liking my own coding challenges to be doing someone else's because most of the coding challenges I like during the week
and I solve myself as well. So I've been fitting that down a day job a month ago
and family, wife and kids in a dog. So you brought a very interesting point about the MVP for $100.
I just wanted to probe into this a little bit. Like for an information product, like a course, for example, you could start essentially for free if you have the skills to do what it takes.
If you want to build a software product, I mean, build an example in 24 hours, it could be practical but it's probably so simple that it will be more like a landing page where people just land but it's actually not even an MVP, it's just like a smoke test where
people will leave their email or whatever. And obviously if you don't have the skills to build software
then like building something for $100 is just out of questions. You have to be an engineer to
build software. It depends on the problem, I think. Well, good example there is Drew from Dropbox.
He was not technically I believe. He found somebody to draw some mockups and create a video and create a video demonstrating, showed people a video and asked them to buy.
The other example is Buffer. They do social media posting. I believe for their own view opinions a little bit before I looked but I've looked at some of their records of it.
They created a landing page and they took you all the way through to put your credit card in
and they went, put your credit card in. It says, so I will not actually get it yet.
So they verified that you would pay for it. They had that proof that people were going to get
their credit card out and buy. Again, most of us can build a landing page with a sunlight card
or one of the other easy to build websites. Integrate it to stripe and then just decline the sale.
So you could still do that with a software product? Yeah, maybe some more philosophical question.
So what is MVP in this case? Because a landing page lets you test the idea but it's not a
viable product in this. It's a minimum sellable idea. It's not a product really. Both Dropbox and
Buffer. I know Dropbox went through by C. I don't know if Buffer did but I don't know if they
went or found it. Buffer was a famous YC reject, I think. Oh, were they? Yeah. Yeah.
Cool. No, you're absolutely right. It's not really an MVP. MVP is just a term that everyone's
familiar with and there are lots of people that reject the term of MVP. So you should go for a simple
levelable complete or one of the other variations of that. To my mind, it's an easy term that a lot of
people recognize and so I tend to abuse it. Clearly it's about how do you conduct that experiment? How
do you get that next level of validation? How do you get that next data point? And kind of like
growth hacking, which is also somehow find quite interesting and I'm trying. What are the experiments
we can do to validate that? How can we get some validation that what we're going to build is
is in demand. They're going to be wanted. How do we get that feedback? So not we're going to
MVP, but more of the kind of lean start-up model. Yeah, you're trying to get validation like within
24 hours. That's the goal. Yes. Yeah. So you said you commented on this person's post and then you
just said to create a post of your own. Basically, piggybacking on the same idea, right? I was surprised
so I just put a post up. From honest, I'd taken my kids to Warhammer Gaming Place where it's at and
I was a little bit bored in between his tournament while at the top. So I wrote something like
founders. If you spend more than $100 and two weeks on your MVP, it's not an MVP. And I always
getting off my chest, should we say, rather than actually expecting any engagement. You said 780,000
euros spent on that? Something like that, yes. Was it because they were not building it themselves,
were they hiring somebody else? Do you know why it was such a... I mean, the time to build an MVP, I understand that amount of money, almost three quarters of a million euros, that's astounding.
We're going back for over a year now and it was just a post that I saw in somebody else's feed.
If I remember lightly, it talks about it's been about 780,000 euros. It hired a team of 20 people
and they were trying to get it feature complete. And again, that's kind of missing the point of
get that validation, find out what you need. Make sure that actually somebody wants this and
somebody's going to be willing to pay for it. Yeah, I think that's a danger of using money from
venture funds. Would you debate those people themselves? Because that would be... They were
angel funded. And that's why they were posting about it because they needed money to now make it
to the next point. And of course, they spent all this money, they had no traction to show, they had
no validation. So I think they were struggling to raise. Great. So let's take this hypothetical
example. Well, not hypothetical. You had two good examples already, Dropbox and Buffer.
Let's say you're a non-technical founder, right? You have an idea, you've created this landing
page using card or something like that within 24 hours. Let's say that you have validation at this
point. What's the next step? How do you go about building this thing? What would you expect the
actual MVP, Dimeframe and all that to be? So my approach with all these things, if I was to build
a software product, to go back to those people, make sure you've captured their details. So let's say you've captured it, they've put their credit card in and you've rejected it because you haven't
got it in cell. Go back to them and talk to them about what do you want? What's the main feature?
What made you buy? And again, I'd keep that initial feature set on a sales page that they
see quite small and then build the first thing they want. I've forgotten the name as a chat now, but there's a great talk I think on the micro-conf YouTube channel from a guy that built a
thing called Pull Panda that you eventually sold to GitHub. And he literally did that. If I remember likely he described some of these features, people asked about it and he spent his weekend
iterating. He got two or three people that were leaking on it. I think there were CEOs of VPs at small startups and he just started emailing them and building features and iterated over
two weeks, building the features that they wanted to smooth out how he managed pull requests. And at
the end of that, I think two or three would purge if I remember rightly. He had that very
most basic minimal product and people were prepared to pay for it. He iterated and then I think
after about 80 months sold to GitHub. Mike's like a sense. So I just want to go back to the actual
mechanics of how you grew on LinkedIn. You made that post and you said that you went viral.
I hope for my two or three thousand followers at the time. I think he had reached about 10,000
views, which was massive for me at the time. And I was like, wow, my normal post get 500 views.
And this has got 10,000. It's like, wow, this is amazing. I've never seen this much engagement.
Yeah, also I think a year ago, LinkedIn wasn't as oversaturated as it is right now.
Yes, it's definitely got more saturated over the last year.
Yeah, I think maybe like with the Elon Musk's ex-curvefuffle. I think there was like mass
exodus from Twitter, which probably LinkedIn benefited from. LinkedIn have been having a bit of a push
on creative content as well. They've made some of it friendlier, some of it less so.
So you just stick with social forum for a moment. What was the next sort of step function where you
saw maybe like another viral post or many new followers? What were those moments in the trajectory
from 3,000 to 150,000? So there hasn't ever really been a big step change. Once I started thinking
about it and I set myself a modest target of growing at 5% a week. And actually pretty
consistently hit that for all of the last year. So it's never been a particular step change,
obviously. The number's growing up 5% is a big number each week, but it's just been fairly steady
at 5%. And I have just focused on getting consistent posts out. I tried to niche down because I know
from past expense funding a business that niche works. It is the light thing to do. I've consistently failed to do it on LinkedIn because I tried to niche down just right about coding challenges, but
I don't want to just lie about coding challenges. I've been an NGO manager, I've been a VP
engineer, I've started businesses, I've got views on MVPs and I've puffs is testing. I'm interested
in marketing, growth marketing. I don't want to just lie about coding challenges. Much as I enjoy it,
I love it and I love writing the coding challenges every week. I've catastrophically failed to actually
fall on the advice that I know is good to niche. It's kind of still work there, I've grown a fairly
big following, but I should have nicheed. Instead it's been fairly consistent and that's also meant
I have never actually had a viral post. Most of my posts are pretty consistent and they have grown over time, offices that I've got a bigger following, but they're all fairly consistent,
they're very little variation between posts. Back in March last year I may have hit a thousand views
opposed. Nowadays it may fairly consistently be 20 to 30 thousand views opposed. It's very little variation where a few other people I've networked with on LinkedIn, I've seen some of them have
opposed hit 405 million views when I've talked to them and I have never done that. For me it happened Aegro from 2000 to 11000 in about half a year, but these were maybe two or three big step jumps like a post reaching over a million impressions and then you have like 3000 people coming from it,
but then it's like flat for like weeks and weeks after that. UgaHu Pandi of Talo has the same,
he's posted the last year. He had three big inflection points from three things and I think he gained like one of them as 20,000 followers in a couple of days from just these three things.
Mine has just been that steady for 5% no viral post, nothing particularly amazing.
Occasionally I've had a post that may be hit 150 to 200,000 views, but nothing that's really
convival. Yeah, what I'm noticing on your post because I read most of your posts because I like your style, I like how you write because I don't code day to day so some of the topics, if it's like ghost, the deepening engineering, I mostly skip, but if it's more like career related or relationship
related, you know, that's applicable to actually any kind of role within software development
I've always been enjoying those. I see that your posts get quite good kind of likes and engagement
which probably helps propel them forward. I don't know if you ever figured out what it is in your
writing that makes people click. Is there some kind of like a structure that you use or it all
just happens organically? Do you understand why people like your posts so much? I do have a bit of
a structure. I do try and think of how do I have not so much a hook, but how do I explain the topic
in the first line? I think of it more as a newspaper headline. When you pick up a newspaper, you don't start with the article, you read the headline and decide whether you're going to read the less of the
article. It's the same on LinkedIn because we've got seen more. So I think as a first line as that headline format, how do I make it clear to somebody that this is something they want to read or something
they don't want to read and they can move on and ignore it? After that, I've seen some people post
some amazing content, but it's really hard to read because it's a wall of text. So I try to keep
them shortish and I try to focus on having short paragraphs. When you were at school, you were taught to write and we write in these big paragraphs of four or five sentences, it's a very consistent
structure, but that's not how people read. So I try to like more as I talk, I quite often
read the post back to myself aloud. Epic, we fail at that because I still managed to have plenty of
typos and grammar liars, but I try to look at them and read, is this how I would talk? Is this
what I would say? Do I pause here? If I read this paragraph, is it just going to make some
of me breathless? Now, how do I make it easy to read and how do I try and have that focus?
I find it quite strange because the one or two things that I thought I want to provoke an emotionally action here, I want some debate, I want some discussion on this, have kind of sometimes
slipped by with nobody really being bothered. And other things that I've posted thinking, well, this is in controversial, nobody will have any interest in this, but I want to talk about it because I think it's interesting, have blown up with people taking very strong and getting
emotionally triggered and I've been like, didn't I expect that? What is that about?
So yeah, I have a structure, I can't say that it's necessary, we dig to all, I think it depends who your audience is on a day and how people are feeling, we're into that communication and
soft skills. So that's why I think I've never really had anything to worry about because I've not hit the triggers for that, but instead I'm fairly consistently providing that structure that's
easy to read, that has some engagement and that has normally that interest for people. I've pulled some of the detail out from the past now to try and leave it so that you can have a conversation because again, it's much Senate Finals, I've learned a huge amount of the last year by lighting
and the comments and feedback I get, I've had some very good comments and people are making,
ah, I was wrong, I'm going to change my mind on this. So now I want them to be a start of a
conversation to learn from the comments. I think it's a great point about the comments. I love when people write something in comments and it actually changes my mind or what enhances my understanding.
I mean, I haven't gotten that much engagement on LinkedIn, sometimes do what some, you know, don't, but I've gotten pretty good following on Instagram, it's in Russian language, so it's like I can't
really use that audience to build a meta-cast business. So it's more just for fun, but what I found
there is sometimes I was basically just blurred out something in stories, right? And then I get like
a bunch of people write back to me and that's the laziest way of learning. You just say something in a way that people want to educate you on, like why you're wrong or most people would just share
their perspectives and you learn a lot from those, it'll give you pointers, right? But there are also some haters and you just maybe ignore the tone of how they're saying, but there is sometimes
also some essence that can be extracted even from sort of negative comments, right? From not
critique, but criticism, right? I'm curious if you've gotten any, I mean, I'm sure you have
at your scale any sort of comments that make you like, why am I doing this social thing? Why is
this person so mean? Yeah, there have been a few that have been like that. They haven't been too bad, they haven't been particularly rude or personal, so most of the time I may be trying to engage and ask questions and it's my approach of everything, I don't know some random person on social media
that's criticizing me, if I don't know them, I don't really care what their opinion is, I'm not going to get upset about it, but I might learn from them as you say, so I try and ask a question or two
and try and understand it. Some people then have come back off some intelligent debate and sometimes
I have changed my mind and agreed with them, and that's awesome. Other times we've asked a question and then I just landed you, so I've either walked away or if it's got particularly negative, a few times I have blocked people, but mostly, yeah, it hasn't been too bad and I've tried to engage
if it's not positive. This probably also depends on the media,
myself. You would expect much more of this in Reddit, where it's completely anonymous, a bit more on X or Twitter, and I think much less on LinkedIn because you're professional, your job and everything is very visibly openly tied to your identity in LinkedIn, so you're going
to get much less, I think the stuff you get on Reddit, and I'm saying that as I love Reddit,
way more than LinkedIn. I've seen that on Reddit, on Twitter, X, whatever call these days.
I have a smaller following, I get less engagement, but it's growing and I'm following my 5% a week there and trying to repeat my paper on that, but I've actually seen it's been more positive and
more supportive, I've seen less of the negativity. I've already started to build a nice network there, I met some great people and it's been really positive, so I'm quite enjoying that at the moment as well.
Did you say you're doing this on Reddit also? Or no, on X and LinkedIn?
On X. Do you post the same content on X or do you actually do it more like platform specific?
It depends on the content. Some of the content that's more particularly shorter or more relevant, I'm posting to both, sometimes I edit it down, I'm still learning Twitter, still thinking out what to do there, so some of the posts I take in really like to make a bit shorter,
and I'm still thinking out just what works. I have heard that long form articles work better on Twitter,
I haven't been seeing that. I also quite often schedule my posts, which you can't do on Twitter if it's
not whatever the character of them it is. You've got a long form post, you can't schedule it, and I don't use any tools over there on platform zone tools, so I'm constrained by what they have.
Yeah, I think Twitter is designed so that you just blurt out whatever it comes to mind.
I mean, that's the origin of the back when it was still a SMS base. Actually, there's a very good
book called Hatching Twitter. I think it was published in 2012-2013. I read it when it first came out, yeah, because I just moved to the US, it was in 2013 when I listened to it, and I think it just came out.
Yeah, I signed up to it in 2010, but at the time it was all, I just had a coffee with Bob,
but I had a great piece of some money, and I was like, why do I care about this? I want something
interesting. Yeah, like Instagram and text. I joined in like 2007 or it was brand new, it was like,
before it started failing a lot, while it was scaling up. For a while, I loved Twitter.
That was the way I was learning rather than like audiobooks or anything else, basically, right?
But I think eventually at one point, the people that I was learning from stop posting,
or they moved off to other places and things happened. Right now, my Twitter is all sorts of mix.
It's kind of like, I think Twitter is trying to figure out what I want to hear and what will I be engaged by and throwing random stuff at me, and I'm not engaged by any of it, so I hardly go there.
But at one point, that was like the best social media experience for me.
Yeah, if you tried air-chat, then air-chat, no. I've never heard about it. I'll go check it out right now, yeah.
That's a new voice-based social network that Neval started, speaking of a lot of hype over the last month or so since it launched.
Did you see Neval? Neval Drivecans?
Yeah, nice. It's like Clubhouse 2.0.
Yeah, it's like Clubhouse meets Twitter, basically. There's tweets, but voice,
the voice is sped up and it's also transcribed. It's really interesting seeing effectively what's like your Twitter feed, but with people's voices saying it.
That sounds interesting. I'll check it out, yeah.
So let's bring in, you talked a little bit back about how the gospel is to grow into a niche
in social media and keep doing that, right? That's hard to do in a platform like LinkedIn.
Like you said, because it's not just your coding challenges personality,
your person with so many other dimensions, right? And you want to talk about all of that.
Whereas in the coding challenges, the newsletter that you have, that's focused on like
some sort of a cadence of weekly. I want to post about weekly or whatever cadence. I want to
bring up this problem. It's a very niche kind of thing, right? How do you think the audiences? Are they
kind of like the similar audiences? I'm guessing not. What's the engagement there? So the 53,000 subscribers at the moment on there and about 30,000 of them have come from my social media.
So there's a fairly big overlap. As you say, it's got to make your cadence, it's weekly.
So I'm posting a new challenge every week. That keeps it very focused and also because I'm doing
that and it's something I enjoy. It's a nice mix. It's partly hobby and partly forming the
basis of a business. That's quite easy to do and it gives me that interesting. I get to stay
hands-on coding, building the challenge each week, learning about it. I get to learn something new.
I love learning new things. So a lot of the challenges again, I've used Docker and containers for
years. I hadn't understood how the work went ahead. So that was quite a fun one and a few people
said to me, can you do a Docker challenge? Yeah, cool. I'll go and learn about that. That was quite
fun. I got a bit carried away and spent weeks on it getting quite detailed and building more
than I put in the challenge because it was fun to learn about. That's the fit. But as you say,
I've got so many more interest that the niche thing is the right way to build a business. I've learned that in the past one I nearly failed my first business, but it's really hard to do on
social media because I wasn't building a business. I was building my personal brand. I was sharing
ideas. I was trying to build an audience that I could figure out what business to build for that
audience and avoid being facing a lot of it again in the future. So where are you on that journey of
like initially you wanted to figure out what do I want to work on next? What do I want to build?
You started with like, I don't have any great ideas right now. I'm not excited by something
specific. So let me figure that out by building this audience. Where would you say you're in that
journey? I'm very much trying to figure out what a market fit. I've got a nice audience now.
Now I'm trying to figure out what I've built for them. So the coding challenges was again,
still a way of building the audience. I've had that audience ask me, well, cool, we've got challenges,
but how do you do them? So I built some courses to walk people through how to do some of the challenges.
That's not particularly scalable as a business right now because people are doing them in 20 different
languages. There are 56 different challenges. I have to build over a thousand courses to meet
everyone. And so the individual demand isn't that to be great. And as you know, the poor grand thing,
buildings that don't scale, well, that's fine up to a point. But I now need to really find a
scalable way of doing that. And again, ironically with the growth in my LinkedIn and social media, instead, I'm going to have a lot more people say, can you tell us how to create a social media?
So I'm responding to the market there and saying, well, okay, I can niche there. There are lots of
people who tell you how to grow a LinkedIn. Some very big names that will do it. And there are lots
of people selling personal branding, whatever, like 100 to them. But none of them, hardly,
have got the kind of size following, have none of them as softwingenies. Most of the people that have got a big following have built that big following, telling you how to get big following.
I've built it, talking to softwingenies. So I can finally follow my own advice and niche and say, like, I'm going to build a thing that tells softwingenies how to get a personal branding and audience.
So then the 360 and come back to that nation. I'm building that at the moment. I've just launched a
course. And again, that's very much following the principle, as I put a survey out, I ask people
that they want. I got some feedback. I got some early commitment that people would be interested
in passing with money for it. So now I'm iterating on that. And that put it will evolve, as I get more
feedback and find out from that. What's the name of the course and where can people find it?
I'll send you the link afterwards, you put it in the show next, if you want. It's on Gumroad,
or you can go to my LinkedIn and find it. I can't remember the URL.
You're on coding challenges on Substack. All your courses are listed there, right?
The coding changes once I guess. The LinkedIn one is not linked from there, because it's not
relevant to our audience. Since you brought up the LinkedIn influencers who tissue, how to kill LinkedIn.
When I first got serious about LinkedIn, I followed the bunch of those, and then I just realized
it's a lot of content that's either conflicting or repetitive or both. Over time, I followed almost all of them, except for maybe a couple of people, just because I didn't just felt like
they were too noisy. And here's what I saw people do. We could actually take Alex Hermose as an example, even though he is not teaching LinkedIn, but he is a guy who teaches business, right?
If you read all his posts, you would start noticing after a while, maybe after a couple of months,
that he recycles the same content many, many times. And it just starts to get boring when people
do that. But they attract new followers for themselves, but it's just like for the existing
audience. It's like there is little incentive to stick around. I mean, I express my opinion right
of this. I'm curious what yours is and how do you prevent yourselves from not becoming that?
Well, I think that's the problem you've hit the nail on the head. If one of the line about personal planning and growing the following and saying they're a personal planning expert, they've nicheed
awesome, but there's only so much you can say about that. I mean, personal planning on LinkedIn,
like posts, comment, get your profile in order. It's kind of that. Everything you then say is
repeating that in different ways. You haven't really got much direction to go then. So it just
become a bit of an echo chamber, it just become quite repetitive. It just become people talking
about the algorithm and the algorithm changing optimites for this, that other. I've not focused on
that. I've been focused on this is me. I'm interested in software engineering, I'm interested in
engineering leadership and management. I'm interested in startups, but not VC back startups because
I know nothing about that. I'm interested in the lean startup idea because I bootstrapped my businesses.
I'm interested in business in general. I did an MBA a few years ago because I was interested in that.
I've quite interested in finance because I did the MBA and finally enjoyed the finance side.
I'm interested in marketing because when I started my business in 2001, I quickly realized I was
a soft engineer. I was very happy coding, scared to hell of going to talk to anyone doing the sales and it becomes quite visible quite quickly that if you don't go and sell, you're not going to
pay your rent, pay your mortgage month, if you're not going to eat. So at that point, I've got to
go into the sale and market really, really fast. I ordered about 20 bucks or farmers then and spend a weekend reading through every single book and sales and marketing that I've got hold of
and then just going out there and failing and figuring out how to do it. So I'm interested in
all these different diversities. So I quite about what's interesting me. I have a little bit of structure so fight and set that they're post about coding challenges, what's coming and announce in the challenge.
I have a second email newsletter that I focus on, more of the soft skills post that on the first
day so I mentioned that on the first day. The rest of the week it's sometimes I like a post in the half an hour before, sometimes I've written a day or two before and I have a back catalog of
about 50 posts that already written. So if I'm not in the mood or if I'm not going to be around, I pick one of the ones that I want to really written and schedule it and then I have a file of I think about 300 draft posts that I've half written or I've written a idea of something to
write about and those can be anything from one of two words to a 200 word, 300 word kind of draft
that I'm going through with it. At some point I've gots to be interested in or decided that
it didn't actually leave work when I did it or I've gone all out of the way. I should post about
that and I've written two or three words about it and I've then forgotten about it. So when I go
through and go and find one of those posts and just finish them. So curious about your workflow, which software do you create those drafts in and then how do you organize those because it's a lot of
posts. So I started off at Microsoft Word. I literally had two Word documents. I had drafts and used and I wrote a bunch of drafts and eventually I got to being organized of moving the ones that were nearly finished to the top of the file and then when I used them I cut them out and
paste them in the used document. That was my entire workflow for basically two long files where you
just moved extra out. Basically you know control enter after the end of each one to each one was
on a separate page. That was it. Nowadays I've switched to notion. I find that's quite useful because at the time I was always lying on one computer nowadays I'm a bit more flexible and as
I've got a bit more into the flow. One is where to keep notes easily so notion I can have my phone so if I walk in a dog and I get an idea I can quickly put the two or three words in and I use
notion now for all of it. But it's still the same thing I've got a folder in notion with like say about 300 drafts of various stages and I've got a another folder that's got 50 or 60 finished posts there for if I don't have time or I don't feel it to or from going on holiday so I can schedule a
bunch in advance because I try and post twice a day and a def idea once a day and Saturday and Sunday
and I haven't missed that for about nine months now. You think your posts tend to be relatively short
right? Yes. Just because I don't read long posts if there's a wall of text and it's not interesting I stop reading it so I'd like for myself as much in a final step figure if I wouldn't
read it who else is going to read it? So building these audiences and then converting them to actually
whatever your product is right that's another kind of spectrum of problems there. I was talking to somebody a fellow founder in the Vancouver area I live in Vancouver Canada and they were saying that they haven't had any success with LinkedIn and we started talking a little bit of of that
not that I'm an expert at all. I don't like LinkedIn I don't post much I don't post anywhere much but coming back to the topic I saw that they pretty much post about their product and how it can be used and it's the same weekly thing of like okay this is the industry and this is the kind of
people who would like it so it's kind of very catered niche product for that whereas what you're doing and I think Ilia what you're doing is you're more generalist you're posting a lot about everything else that's going on in your life not just your particular thing which helps you I think gain
much more about following also the challenge that he asked me at that point when I said like hey maybe try something like this post about other things that's going on in your startup journey and everything
else and he said what's the end use of that right like how am I going to convert them from that into paying for my product which is a very specific B2B SaaS so I'd love your thoughts both of your thoughts
on this yeah cool why do you go first Ilia I don't know because I have not figured it out of myself we've been trying to grow a newsletter kind of in parallel to the other posts that we were posting on LinkedIn and what I noticed is that if you just post about your product I guess our product
because it's a podcast app so by the way we haven't put the plug for our app yet so it's a podcast app which you can get at metacast.app it's a podcast app it transcripts where you can search for things and make bookmarks it's really awesome yeah metacast.app so it potentially has mass appeal
because people listen to podcasts but if you like in the business of medical equipment there's someone I know in acquaintance of mine he runs venture back startup and company is called TRUV they do like
income verification API for lenders so like when you get a mortgage they help that mortgage provider to verify your income so he sometimes posts general stuff about what it's like to be CEO and all that
it is what I'm seeing they tend to get what if you like and some comments but then some of his other posts he would go so deep into whatever that whole lending thing which I usually just stop reading it line three because it's just not my cup of tea but at the same time like I'm not going
to be his customer regardless so I guess maybe my perspective here is if I was him I would probably just try to build a personal brand with more mass appeal and then maybe some people would be interested in buying what I have you're talking about growing the top of the funnel right yeah
growing top of the funnel but also it like in a some point he will maybe stop that business maybe he'll exit the business he maybe he starts with something else and that audience might be helpful to bootstrap something else bootstrap is starting something else whereas if you only focus
on the lending thing and maybe next thing he does is magical equipment for example right this will be too completely orthogonal audiences because they just don't overlap at all but like I said like I have not figured it out myself yet so I'm curious what do you have to say John my approach
that would be depending exactly what he's doing how about half my content focused on this is and you say it's sad what I see a lot of people do those this is who we are this is what we do they don't talk about who you are as a customer they don't talk about how they help you so
for the business posts I talk about let's say it's a tax planning sass as somebody doing your taxes facing this judge are you struggling with this one with taxes this is how we help you this is some of the things you can do and I'm going to business in the UK VAT is a big problem I think
quarter and electronic submissions are now required if you're doing a sass about that you could post about either wherever aware of the fact deadlines can be applied you're aware of the changes to making tax digital that we've had here are five different solutions to get and we have a solution
to or similar to that so talking about the pain points that your customers have is far more useful and too many founders I see they talk about the business they talk about their brand they talk about the cool feature they've got so now you want to explain how you benefit the users or how
you solve their pains the other side is I greatly believe in that top of the funnel you're talking about when I was learning my first business which was software consultancy one of our best customers and our best deals with nearly quarter million pounds to us which was quite a lot bigger
than our average customer and it came from networking not from anyone so the customer I'd never met and never met the person that signed deal before we met and signed the deal but for three years beforehand I talked to his wife who was in a completely night field had no interest in what we
did in our business but we've been at various business networking events scene of standing on alone occasionally sort of set hello been polite asked what she was doing and maybe introduced us with a couple of people that were looking for what she had so then two and a half years later
when her husband mentioned to her frustration he had over dinner one night about me she said oh you should try these guys out so you never know who's going to be in that network you know LinkedIn is still a networking platform there's still that network you don't know who's
leading your posts it's going to come across it who's married to somebody that's your perfect customer whose son or daughter is your perfect customer again another customer picked up for my business was my parents and neighbor my parents got chattens of them one day and they were
mowing the lawn and they got into a gran about their outsource some software they gone drastically long and my parents said oh John can help you out so you never know who that network is so build those relationships and see what takes you right I think a perfect case in point Ilia we had a
moment like this couple of weeks back where through Ilia's LinkedIn actually going back so Google shut down their Google podcast app at the beginning of April yeah and people are not happy with YouTube music as a podcast player couple of weeks back Ilia and me and Jenny we were looking at
our weekly metrics our app is in beta right now so there's still a few people like using it consistently so we like to see what's happening what are they what features are they using what's working what's not working and we found out that there's this one new user that we don't know personally a lot
of our users are like through our networks and all that so we kind of know who they are but this one this person has been like way more active than Ilia and I and we are the two most prolific users of our app because we built it for ourselves first off we found out that they have been like
using this app basically five six hours I want to say a day I want to say we did some calculations for the duration of the podcast that they listened to because we weren't sure if it's humanly possible to listen to so many podcasts so it's like we had to run a sanity check
just to figure out is this person even real or is it a bot right yeah and then we were like pleasantly surprised wow this is awesome right not from our networks or we don't know who they are they're using it quite a lot so we decided to set up a customer like kind of research but just
the informal like who are you what do you like about the app what's working what's not working that sort of thing and we found out that this is just like you said we are linked in I don't want to get too much into the exact this thing but this person spous when they were frustrated with Google
shutting this down they said oh I saw this meta casting on LinkedIn through this person that I follow go check it out and then that person now became like one of our most biggest users so yeah actually the most active user yeah came from a second degree or third degree connection I don't know if I
know their spouse or not maybe I do maybe they just saw something randomly and that's how things happen I'm curious on your thoughts on whether it's different for B2B versus B2C because for B2B you just need to land a few of those big customers and you're fine right all like the same landing
example there are only so many mortgage providers that you need to network with B2C where everybody pays you just a little you can't possibly have a relationship with everybody I wonder how you would approach it maybe differently for B2B versus B2C if you end goal is B2B versus B2C
so I think for me personally I would laugh at have a product in even market that was quite similar so I would laugh at B at the end where an individual user I'm getting them to spend tens or hundreds of dollars if you get to the B way you have five or six customers you are then getting into a big
complex sales cycle so as VPengineering at Telco company we were saying to I act upon Facebook ourselves were about a million dollars typically that takes weeks sometimes months to get for a sales cycle it's expensive it's slow and again typically if your cash trap start up it's quite
hard to get through so for me personally I've always focused if I'm going to build B2B or B2C I want it to be hitting that easy level so a lot of my early B2B sales I was aiming at things that were under a hundred dollars for the sign off because then typically in a lot of organizations
a manager or even an employee can expense that so then your effect we send them as a consumer they're coming in going I want that can help you on my job it's like expensing a book or something once you get above say five thousand dollars in most companies you've got to go for procurement
you've got to become a preferred supplier you've got to go through getting their proofs that makes your sales a lot longer or a lot slower my expensive yes you can build a great business off I mean I work for one company who's doing multiple billion pounds a multiple billion dollar sign
they had two customers but you're very exposed with two customers till there's one customer about 90% of the left in you awesome business but you're fairly exposed there sales cycle is massive it's years long for that I don't want to do that I'm a software guy I want to knock up a landing
page quickly build something useful and integrate with Stripe and get some money fairly quickly validate it iterate so yeah very different approach I would always stick to that the one I can get quick validation I can iterate on quickly I don't mind doing sales because it's talking to people
it's solving their problems it's all about listening of gun we have that horrible issue of sales and I did and why I didn't want to do it when I first started my business of it is that use car salesmen where you belly push you and horrible and you're trying to kind of con people but really
selling particularly B2B sales is going to talk to people saying what is your problem hi yeah you're trying to optimize your global telco network cool that's what we do let me show you how we would take your network in how we'd model it how we'd optimize the field and we can save you
this X million dollars in building your network it's a long-served process but it's an easy sell it's not an uncomfortable experience because you're solving a pain point for them but I still love it have that small purchase that doesn't need that approval doesn't need to be on the prototype list
it has a bit of a tangent when you mention sales and it's lazy use car salesmen personality right like a stereotype but yeah if you ever bought a car in the US even if you go to like an expensive car dealership they're still like that I mean many of them are so it's not completely stereotype
same in the UK but what got me thinking like because I grew up in Russia so I was born in US star and when it collapsed when I was a kid and sales generally had a bad rap being a salesman was sort of look down upon right maybe because just sales as a profession didn't exist in the
US because everything was state run and you just whatever two people actually not even two people I probably like a command comes from the high up and then you just do whatever you're told you work with whoever you're told to work with and it's just how it works so people had to figure out sales and
nobody wanted to be in sales it was almost like look down upon right whereas in more developed markets like the US or the UK it's this pushy salesman stereotype that got a bad rap it just made me curious that in both worlds the rest same bit of sort of negativity towards sales but for different
reasons if you have to make sense yeah it's also interesting though even between the UK and the US we're very similar cultures in a way but still companies in the UK salespeople often get paid far more than tech salespeople are often the ones that promoted to the CEO and the scene is quite
higher up the hierarchy and that gave an interesting contrast when I was working for the start of doing telco stuff in that we had fairly old management team pop for myself and people that were in their 50s to 70s and they all came from a sales background so their focus was that I should
hire engineers on 25,000 pound a year and salespeople cost 100,000 plus basic salary with on target earnings of above and they thought the sales guys were their kind of healers of the story then we go over to Silicon Valley and go meet Facebook and Apple and the people there it's an
engineering organisation they wanted to speak to the engineers and the sales guys were quite put out and our CEO was actually really quite offended when director of engineering there didn't really want to talk to him and kept turning on to talk to the engineers that would come out with
me and was interested in the technology and how we saw the solution and we also went to try and raise VC finance when we're there and again in that meeting the VC soon as he found out I was a VP of engineering they'd just turned and blanked him and talked to me because he talked sales at
them and they knew some of the directors of engineering at Facebook and Apple that we were dealing with they knew almost as much about some of the networking stuff as out some of them had engineering backgrounds and they weren't interested in 65 year old British sales guy pitching them on
a mostly used car salesman pitch they wanted to know if I could technology but it was an eye of me that clash of cultures and how I can't really handle the market was so different in our age group this is probably going to change also but I'm gonna say about five years back when we
bought our Tesla that's the first time we experienced like no salesman you can go to a Tesla store test drive they won't push you anything and if you say like hey I'm interested they just go go to the website place your order just like Amazon or you're buying anything else on the internet
was very nice yeah I am still surprised been what I don't know 10 years now or at least five years of this model other companies have not yet picked it up I don't know if it's a matter of time or maybe the ROI on having expensive sales people is actually beneficial for these car
companies but I am still a bit surprised that it's taking this long to move to that model it's probably partially inertia it's difficult to change isn't it difficult for people to imagine a different model yeah like there are huge unions and all that probably yeah yeah but do you
remember there was a state I forgot which state was in the US the band that Tesla dealerships there because whatever the car dealership lobby on a state level basically legislator that you have to have a dealers to sell your car you can sell your car yourself it's such a US thing to do
by the way I don't know if it's possible anywhere else in the world but it's a bit like taxi unions in your or wherever they band over so yeah there are groups that have one interest here and it's hard to unseat them you mentioned the Tesla right I was buying a my last car was sort of a custom build
expensive German car which I thought I would just order online and then it just shows up in the dealership I just come suddenly paperwork and I off I go right well the thing is I did everything I had to do on the website and then it sent these details to the salesperson at the local car dealership
who then called me and we had to talk and then some of the specs were a bit different some of the price were a bit different and then we had to do all the paperwork and then when I was driving to pick up the car he's like oh sorry like I made a mistake so actually your payment is about 50 bucks more
than it should have been actually you're better off taking the loan instead of doing the lease and I feel like it's because they sales a paid more for the loans and for the leases things change last minute yeah exactly I'm like am I buying a cheap Chrysler it's like a second hand lot or am I
buying like a premium German car it's anyway so I can bitch about this for a long time and I feel like you have to start to wrap up but again that's something Apple does well isn't it is that premium sales
experience where they treat their customers well yes yeah and that's what I didn't feel like I was treated any better than buying a car of second hand lot in the industrial part of the town for us too I think the worst car buying experience was with another premium German brand Audi
was like the horrible most horrible experience on the day of the final day where you get the delivery of the car where everything changes and you're there for like six seven hours while your kids are home and you're calling the babysitter to say can you stay like two more hours it's still not done
yeah anyway all right so there's one question that we ask everybody who comes to this podcast is what are you listening to or reading right now or what is a book that you want to recommend that people should read aside from buying 20 marketing books from Amazon and the league them
again so the book I've been reading at the moment or mostly something is stop asking questions I've forgotten the offer he hosts a podcast so as I've been watching my own podcast I've been learning about that so I've read that it's been really insightful of looking at how I can ask
good questions and make a podcast good there and I've really enjoyed that it's opened my eyes with different approach so that's been great if you want to go podcast or even if you're interviewing people say as I highly manage I think there's some good stuff in there that you could transfer to
asking good questions around behavioral issues and so on listen to I've been listening to my first million a lot recently as fast podcasts I quite enjoy the banter between the two hosts Sam Pa and Sean Puey they're quite characters and quite different some of the episodes I don't
typically engage with but they listen quite interesting stuff from there gives me an awareness that some different things that are going in different parts of the entrepreneur space so I wouldn't hell otherwise are they second entrepreneurs or they are more in the traditional business
Sam did the hustle and saw that helps well that was a newsletter about entrepreneurship and I think a conference series and Sean was the CEO of Twitch I think for a while fully sold to Amazon so not particularly take your person but intake I've been meaning to check out that podcast
actually have one of those episodes in my queue it's something about tax evasion legal tax evasion but taxism is over we are not making enough money for me to be motivated to listen to that episode just yet so I'm curious is there a sort of favorite episode the episode that really stood out for you
like a new listener for my first million what should start from so as somebody in tech I've really enjoyed the ones with Jason Cohen I was about a month ago obviously they found a WP engine in smart bear so I really enjoy his tweets I engage them quite a lot he has a lot of very useful and
interesting things to say so I really enjoyed that one so really good interview had a lot of useful stuff to say and they've also talked to Andrew Wilkinson who's built a portfolio of little tech companies that are not so little anymore and they have Jason from 37 signals on as well so
as somebody from a tech space those were the three that were really interesting to me because they hit a lot of the audience of me like to and I engage with and it's quite like a very playful kind of vibe I do listen to them once in a while too lots of like throwing punches at each other
kind of things going on in the podcast area yeah there's some nice pantser it's nice back and forth they have a nice rapport with their guests as well so he's a listen to him it's quite educational sometimes there's some bits that I'm not interested in that most recent one was about a app for
male grooming so you can get a sense of how pretty you are don't go and understand that all right yeah this was a great episode Ilia do you want to do the closing part?
no I think we should just say goodbye and thank you for coming I really enjoy the conversation thank you for having me it's a pleasure to talk to you Beth you don't want to talk about meta cast I don't know if people actually listen to those ads yeah regardless of whether we say them or if
it's like Squarespace pre-recorded ad it just gets inserted right I think we need to find a really good way to insert plugs as part of the conversation so let's not talk about meta cast today yes and what is meta casting and Arna the podcasting app you cannot find it at meta cast dot app web app
yeah do not download it and do not solve your pain points of finding great podcasts and yeah learning better from podcasts