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Rishabh (00:00)
He was like, dude, you would not believe the amount of time I spent trying to get a real tiger in here. And I was like, no, I actually would exactly believe the amount of time that you spent trying to get a real tiger in here. Cause if you told me it was possible to get a tiger in here, you better bet. Like all of a sudden, it's like, if there's like a 2 % chance, it's like, yeah, two seems high. Like I'll do, you know.
Zach Murray (00:04)
Hahaha
Jack (00:05)
Yeah
Zach Murray (00:24)
Yeah.
Rishabh (00:25)
We can figure it out, you know? That all of a sudden, as soon as you open the door, it's like, I'm gonna step in into the room.
Zach Murray (00:27)
Yeah. Yeah, the other one that's that I'm like obsessed with right now and it's actually a resurgence of an obsession. Have you ever like heard of a player's piano?
Okay, they're essentially, I found these when I was like a kid and they're essentially pianos that play by themselves, but they're completely mechanical. and like they created these like, like in like the early twenties and it's essentially sheet music. That's like almost like Braille where air flows through it. And then it like pushes the keys down and plays music. And so like, I'm now like obsessed with like, I'm like, like how, how nice would it be if like there was always like a player's piano playing and I'm just like figuring out how these like work and like, just like, why am I spending my time figuring this out? But I just say, I can't let it go. Like I'm like, yeah.
Rishabh (01:14)
That's amazing.
Jack (01:14)
On the topic of live animals, Rishabh, Zach, have you guys heard about when Harrods used to live animals? Harrods in London, it's like a department store, a luxury department store. They used to like full bloat lions and people would just go into harrods and buy lions. There was that, I'm not joking. Like in central London, right? Like in the parks, there would be people playing with their lions.
Zach Murray (01:22)
No.
Rishabh (01:31)
He's serious?
Zach Murray (01:39)
That's crazy.
Jack (01:41)
There was a full-blown documentary, I mean, this is quite old now, about a guy who, it might have been two guys, who bought a lion and then took it to Africa to re-release it. But they had this experience raising this lion on camera.
Rishabh (01:57)
That is wild.
Zach Murray (01:57)
I would, I've always been someone that's like, whenever, I don't know, when you see like people own like exotic animals, I think people have like a certain reaction. Like, it's like weird. It's whatever. Like I've always been like, man, I think I would do it. Like, I just think the context of being like, of being able to just observe one of these things, like, even if you had like a massive like ranch or something, just like seeing it like move and stuff would just be like one of the most magical things.
Jack (02:26)
Every now and then I have that realization with just normal household pets though. I look at a cat and I think this is kind of magical.
Rishabh (02:36)
Jack, wait, before we get started on the topics, where are you located?
Jack (02:41)
I'm in Peru. It's a small, sleepy fishing town. If you like the cinema or you like, I don't know, going to night clubs, it's not your spot. But if you like surfing, it's a pretty good spot. A very popular place for extreme sports for surfing and kite surfing. So people who love surfing, kind of, yeah, pitch up here, I think the same thing happens in most countries, like there's areas of Mexico, areas of Colombia that are populated with expats.
Zach Murray (03:11)
I need to head down and check it out.
Jack (03:13)
Yeah, you heard all the noise about Bali, Rishabh.
Rishabh (03:17)
No? What noise about Bali?
Jack (03:17)
This is like a, this is the wish.com Bali, right? It's not quite as built up. It's definitely not very built up at all, but it's a sunny location where there's good stuff.
Rishabh (03:27)
Got it. Got it. All right, okay. All right, should we dive in?
Zach Murray (03:31)
Cool. Yeah, let's dive in. So we're, coming in with like three today. Um, Jeremiah is, had his, he had his child, right?
Jack (03:39)
Yeah, right.
Rishabh (03:40)
Dude, three, it was funny in the last episode where he was just like, yeah, you know, it's like, this is like now normal for me. was like, that's the funniest part of it. I'm mostly just gonna be surprised that if he actually shows up next week, just to be honest with you, that's gonna be the most surprising thing.
Zach Murray (04:02)
Or he's like looking for an excuse to just be like, Hey, I just want to talk to someone different or have like an hour of, like, you know, I don't actually need to be working, but like would be a minute mini escape. it's either that he's not going to show up or it's like going to be the best thing in his week to like take a breather.
Rishabh (04:20)
That's very true, that's very true.
Jack (04:22)
This is the tweet from Jeremiah. This is where he is this week, know, introducing his new baby girl to the world. It's lovely. I found this video of you, Rashabh, reacting to it.
Rishabh (04:39)
Strong, strong, strong move, strong play, strong play, that's funny, that's funny
Jack (04:48)
What is all this about? Did you do an event with your team?
Rishabh (04:52)
Dude, yeah, I'm not like a big, like ra-ra person actually, so this is like completely anti my personality. like that was our team offsite and like at the end of the day, the people's energy is only ever going to be as high as your energy is. And like, I finally realized that because - I can't remember.
But I think it was Frank Slootman. He he said it somewhere. He was like talking about the simplest situation. He was talking about somebody coming in and pitching like a design for a t-shirt for some offsite that we're going to do or something like that. And he was like, so this person walks in, you know, person on the team walks in to like pitch me the t-shirt and they think it's like, Hey, I just need to get him to say, okay. So I just go and come in show him and leave. And so it just says like, Hey Frank, here's what we're going to do. Here's what the t-shirt looks like.
And he was like, no, it's like, you're so unexcited by the design of this t-shirt. So I'm unexcited too. And I was like, wow, like that is a really good point. Like you will, the max, the excitement ceiling is set by the person who is like coming in to the call and setting whatever the ceiling is. And then after that, everybody else is going to be somewhere underneath that ceiling.
That's that's like literally why I did it like I was just like I'm gonna go set the ceiling super high So that way people land wherever they land But I'm not gonna set an artificially low ceiling and so I just went way over the top and the most over-the-top thing I could think of was the Steve Ballmer like developers developers developers basically, so
You want to know a crazy hack?
Jack (06:41)
Yeah, go for it.
Rishabh (06:41)
On calls with external parties too. You can just say the words. Guys, I'm so excited to be on this call with and the tone of that call will just change.
Zach Murray (06:53)
Yeah, that makes lot of sense. It's like the classic idea of just framing the situation, right? Or just creating narrative. It's like if you're reading a book and the first line says it was a dark and stormy night, it's like, okay, whatever. if it's like, it was the most incredible sunset you've ever seen in your entire life, your expectation of what's to come is completely different. Your expectation of what's going to unfold is completely different. That's a really good point.
I feel like I need to...be more mindful about that kind of stuff. Because I'm like, I think I get very excited about stuff randomly. But I would say like, you know, as like a general, like, like, generally, I'm like very to the point and like very just like, this is reality. And this is the state of affairs. And like, I feel like my output doesn't really change that much based on my excitement. But I can definitely see on like a receiving party how like it's the number one thing that affects the next hour, day, and then week after that call. So I'm actually going to probably reflect on this a little bit.
Jack (07:58)
I think it's a common trap. mean, we live in such an operationally complex world, right? Building software, lots of things can go wrong and are constantly going wrong all the time. But things are actually a lot simpler, right?
Especially when it comes to conversation. you know, like you said, Rishabh, we're leading teams, right? Smiling has a huge impact. The way you turn up has an incredibly huge impact. And you're gonna put one foot in front of the other. I think I'm seeing this across the board everywhere I look as a common thread is that things are actually a hell of a lot simpler than we think they are. But because we're involved in the minutiae in inescapable complexity of things, right, it's easy to forget that actually things are probably a little bit simpler as long as you just zoom out a bit.
Zach Murray (08:41)
Smiling is like my number one Achilles heel. I never smile. Like unless I'm laughing or I got incredible good news, I never smile. And when I realized it was a problem, I go to like a lot of like founder retreats or I also go to a lot of fitness retreats. And I've been on two retreats now where at the end of the retreat, someone comes up to me and they're like, hey, I just need to tell you something.
Jack (08:45)
haha
Zach Murray (09:06)
And I'm like, okay, what's up? What's up? They're like, the first day I met you, I thought you're the biggest miserable asshole in the entire world because you never smile. But then like, I got to know you like over the last like four days and you're like a lot of fun. So they're like smile more.
And I had that happen to me two times, like two separate instances, two separate retreats. And I was like, all right, like maybe I do have a problem here of like, my default is just like not smiling unless I'm laughing or like, honestly, just like, like humor is the only thing that will make me smile. And so I'm like, man, I definitely need to try to fix.
Rishabh (09:38)
Kind of wild the sets of things that you end up having to pay attention to. Especially like when you're like when your impact is multiplicative for whatever reason. So like you're a founder, have like a lot of distribution for whatever reason, like just the ways people will read different parts of what you do is just astonishing. Like truly astonishing.
I'll share a sort of funny story. I just got told by my co-founder, like I said something at a meeting internally where I was just like based on the size of our company. And I was like, Hey, if you just do the math and you take the average tenure of three years and the number of people, like probably once every two weeks, somebody's going to end up leaving the company.
Just given the size of the team and the fact that the average tenure of people is three years, right? And so I said those words and it was meant to be like an observation of how long people stay at companies. And somebody interpreted that as Risha wants to fire someone every two weeks. And I was like, what? And he literally texted me saying like, hey man, I just want you to know like, there's this group of people all thought that you were saying you are probably going to fire someone every two weeks. And I was just like, my God, like, I like don't even know how to react to that. So yeah, yeah. Anyway.
Zach Murray (11:15)
Yeah, I think it's interesting because it's like, think, I think in the position of BFHunter, it's like, you, you care so much about a bunch of stuff and you just like, you like say things, ⁓ or like most of the time you're kind of just like in your own head. And I think the idea of, of even like thinking about the impact of saying something is like so far down the list of things that you're thinking about that, like it never surfaces.
Whereas I think in a lot of ways, like I think most people are like, I want to say something and they maybe consider in that moment what will be the impact of what I say right now. But I think that is, you know, yeah, just like a truth that happens is that I've never thought what will be the reaction of something I say.
But in talking with people, think it's like, yeah, people consider some of these things, or they consider who they're saying it to. I don't know, maybe I don't take life as seriously or words that seriously, but yeah, no, it's new right now at Firm-Ot? What are you guys super excited about?
Rishabh (12:22)
The thing that's actually new, I'm not able to share yet. So I will share it when I can share it. But the, I would say that like the shareable part underneath it that I can share is we're expanding pretty aggressively right now. And so like, our traditional sort of like go to market has been, Hey, we're going to pursue mid market brands and we're just going to like sign them through a sales motion, whatever. ⁓ we just announced our like agency program like a month ago. ⁓ and then the one that's coming is we're going to have like a touchless self-serve version of the product, which I'm very excited about. that's more sort of like, has the opportunity to be a more traditional PLG style motion that we tack on.
And I think that we will just create coverage across the market with the different like offerings and emotions associated with them. And that is like very exciting. And I mean, you know, Robert well, so it also like leans on the strengths of the team really well too. yeah. What about you Zach?
What's coming up at Foreplay?
Zach Murray (13:47)
If this podcast was getting launched today, I wouldn't be able to share it. I think it be a couple of weeks trailing, so I'll just share it. We're coming out with a new product called Lens, which is just creative analytics to complete our workflow. so I've just been in product for the last... Honestly, since December 15th, working on this. And I'm at the point now where...
I realized, I re-realized a realization, which was that the last 10 % of a product is significantly harder than the previous 90%. And like, there's a part of me that's like, I shouldn't even have cared as much as I did about the first 90%. Because in the last 10%, so much of it is going to shift. And like so much of it, it was almost like, now I'm kind of considering how do you get to be like, we're at the last 10 % faster rather than even thinking about how much can we do in the first 90 %? Because it really is in that last 10 % that all of the decisions are made. And so I'm really excited about it. Yeah.
Rishabh (14:53)
Can I give you?
Sorry, while we're just talking about it, I have to give an idea, which is create the version that you would be comfortable launching to a hundred customers, but not more. That's the way that we do it. even for us also for the self-serve thing, the way we did it is like, we will not launch it publicly. We're going to send it to an email list of like 500 customers from one of our marketing email lists.
We're going to like segment it, send it to only the 500 so that way we get like a subset who are interacting with it and then because you put the finish line as I'm going to send it to this list as opposed to I'm going to GA it you get to that 90 point very fast.
Zach Murray (15:41)
No, that's super helpful. Because we're kind of at that right now where we essentially added a tab inside of the app in which you need to fill out a form to then get access. And we're kind of just onboarding sort of like beta brands onto But it's like, there's just so many moving parts right now, right? Because it's like, oh, the product is still being built. And then there's feedback coming from the beta list. And so prioritizing that and everything like that. And we're so PLG that there can't really... But by the time we go to just general, we cannot...have little issues.
And so it's moving. But I'm super excited about it. think it's going to completely change the unit economics of our business. And I think it's going to make a lot of really... I think it's going make a lot of customers very happy. Essentially, the situation we're in right now is like we have a ton of product love. And there's people using other products that they don't love with in combination with Foreplay and just bringing it in and taking our product approach and how much we care about user experience and things like that. I'm just very excited about it I think it's something that people actually want. The other really interesting thing is that it's the first product that I've launched where was like, there's certainly product market fit in the product category. Everything we've done up until now were things that I thought of, things that would be useful, things that a couple of customers had mentioned.
Whereas like this, kind of have like some market sort of buy-in already about like the product category. so, yeah, I'm like super excited about it. think the biggest mistake that I made is I use it as an opportunity to fix a bunch of other things that I had on the back burner, like new website and like new messaging and like all this kind of stuff. I was like, this is the time to do it. But...
Realistically, when you're coming up with a new product, thing you shouldn't do is change a bunch of other stuff. But I often get sucked into being like, this is a moment. Let's do it all and make it clean and button up all of the loose ends that I've let trail on for the last 12 months. So feeling very scattered, but pretty stoked to just get it out the door.
Rishabh (17:55)
And so this is going to launch by the time this airs. So by mid April. Nice.
Zach Murray (17:59)
Yeah. Yeah, our initial launch date was April 9th. But I think it's going to be mid-April. If not, like last week of April. Yeah.
Rishabh (18:09)
Nice, nice, nice, nice. Dude, that's exciting. That's super exciting.
Jack (18:14)
I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on viable product. It sounded like you were going maybe a little close to that, Rashad, the second anchor. not sure, I imagine you're both very familiar with the term. I don't know. I have a hard time wrapping my head around it, so I'd love to hear what you guys think.
Rishabh (18:29)
I mean, I'm a little bit more extreme than probably Zach is, because Zach cares more about UX. But I do things that even every person in my company for example, this is now like two years ago, I want to say. I was like, hey, guys, I think that if we had the ability to check out with Apple Pay in a firm-out experience, anywhere arbitrarily in the funnel that would actually be very valuable.
And then people were like, this and that, this and that. And I was like, just put the button there and have it not work and just put a counter. Like it's a button and the only job of the button is it counts how many times it gets pressed. And so it just keeps a count of how often that button gets pressed. And then eventually somebody is going to get annoyed and then go to the actual checkout because at that point they've already made a buying decision and they're trying to buy. And so we're actually not going to get that much drop off from a not working button.
Everybody hated it. My designers hated it. My engineers hated it, whatever. Like everybody hated it. But that's how I, like that is my version of an MVP. It's like, I think you just put things out there even in it's like painted door format to understand what the market wants to do.
Zach Murray (19:50)
I generally agree with that. we actually previously were always like move very fast. Like we never even had a dev environment. Everything just always got pushed to production. is the first time that I've taken a different approach for the only reason that there are incumbents in the space. the messaging that I wanted to, yeah, the messaging that I wanted to convey wasn't that we were coming out with a Me Too product, because I think that's what everybody in our space is doing right now.
They're coming out with Me Too versions of everybody else. And one of my absolute idols, I make most of my life decisions based on things he has said, is Steve Jobs. And was like, at Apple, we don't make Me Too products. And before, we were always coming up with new stuff. And yeah, the hacky version of it was like, there's value here that you can't get anywhere else in a space where, you know, I look at this as like Apple taking time to launch widgets on like the home screen.
They did it in like the best way to where it was like the moment you used it, it was just like seamless. And I thought that this was my opportunity to do that because everything we had done before was just completely new ideas. They needed to be validated. Whereas like in this situation, I've been overly obsessive about not making a Me Too product and making the best version of what this could And then being like, this is the new standard. And so I generally agree with your approach. In this situation, I kind of just saw it as an opportunity to be like, okay, let's go really deep here.
And in a way, I looked at it as a challenge for myself of...how do you plan with excellence being the final objective rather than our normal approach, which was like, we get to excellence through iteration. And again, it's been painful. But I think I learned a lot. think now in the future, I know what the more hybrid approach will be. And so I think it's been one, super rewarding, two, a really good learning experience. But right now, we're in that, ⁓ the no man's land of 10% which is just like, hell.
Rishabh (22:05)
Yeah, I believe that, dude, I believe that.
Jack (22:08)
I'm not sure what the difference is between an MVP and a Me Too product is, but when I first came across MVP, I thought there's already an MVP. It's the most valuable player, or the most valuable product. And I think maybe that's not the same thing as a minimum viable product. To your point, Zach, about the Me Too products, and there's just so many Me Too products, so many products that are copies of each other. I think...
The founders that are doing something different, that people love more than the generic alternative, are making their margin there by making something better. There's a race to zero in the MeToo products. When you have a huge amount of options, they're all perfectly suitable alternatives to each other, then the price just drops. The supply of alternatives outstrips the demand. But if you're making clothes, you probably don't want to compete with Shein. You want to make something that's better.
If you're making supplements, you don't want compete with the cheap Chinese supplements. You want to be making something better, grass-fed, organic, something that works, right? Or is it at least really tasty, right? If the time to market for a completely new market entrant to do exactly what you're doing is zero, then I feel like it won't take long before the market and your minimum viable product isn't even a viable product anymore, right? And definitely not.
Zach Murray (23:27)
Yeah, I think another too, just like with the size of our development team, is that the most taxing thing that we have is like bugs that come up on things we've already launched. And so there was another, and like, I'm not saying that we're going to have zero bugs with the new thing, but there was a part of me that was like, I want people working intensely on the things that matter as much as possible. bugs aren't, they're kind of just like maintenance, right? And so I was really kind of thinking of how can we get this out to where the day one maintenance would be lower and less fire drills.
I'm excited to get back to shipping small features on the products we already exist because I love the velocity and I love the speed and it makes me feel accomplished. But this one was just end-to-end, let's do this thing. Yeah, it's been fun. So yeah, I'm excited to get it out.
Rishabh (24:26)
How do you think about managing your time? Like on a given day? ⁓ really?
Zach Murray (24:29)
I'm horrible at it. Yeah, I'm horrible at it. So.
Rishabh (24:35)
I was not expecting that.
Zach Murray (24:36)
Yeah, no, no, no, I'm very bad at it. I'm very bad at it, but I think I have an approach that works really well for me. So like, what do I know about myself? I can work as a, I can work like a dog infinitely if I feel inspired. and so what I do is I optimize for, I work on whatever I'm the most excited for at any given time.
The consequence of it is that I often have things that pile up in which I hate. And then there's like a day in the week when I eat the frog and I like get through all of the bullshit I didn't want to do. And there's a lot of stuff that I leave on the back burner. It ages longer than it should. But I think that the net outcome at the end of it is that like the work I did in the times when I'm feeling inspired and whatever, and I feel like I have an unlimited gas tank, like outweigh like the little things that get pushed off or the things I should be doing and like, or things like that.
So I'm really bad at managing my time because I wake up every day feeling a little bit differently. And so I think a lot of people would say like, plan your day. Like the night before the thing I'm excited about, like the night before is not the thing that like at 9am the next day that I think I can make the most impact on. So that's the way I do it. I don't think it's like scalable or like the right way to do it, but I think it's the the shortest path for me to do the personal best work that I can do.
Rishabh (26:01)
That's wild. That is wild.
Zach Murray (26:01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Rishabh (26:04)
I'm the exact opposite.
My time at this point is very well organized. basically I have a block in the morning and a block in the evening with my kids. And so those are very clear. Before the morning block, I mean, up until today, now we're changing the system a little bit, but I used to have a daily standup with our account management team sort of like start to shift a little bit of the operating mechanism and culture of that team.
But then during the day, it's like basically from call it like 8.30 to five, the way that I am like thinking about how to spend my time is over the week, I need to have a day when I'm seeing the entire customer pipeline. So I do that every Tuesday.
Then I need to meet with my... leadership team to decide like, what do we want to do the next week, which we do at the end of the week. And then I do one-on-ones mostly in the afternoons. So that way I can like do external meetings and real work in the mornings basically. And, and so like my, sort of like schedule over the, over the course of a week and within a day is like quite well defined, ⁓ in order to optimize for the types of activities that I need to do at different points during the day.
And then like with my inbox and messages and things like that, it's like only the important things get replied to and everything else just gets ignored.
It's like they just still get replies. If somebody DMs me in Slack internally at the company, they're not getting a response.
Zach Murray (27:40)
DMs on Slack are the most likely to get response, but we have so many channels now, even with customers and stuff. I'm just like, man. been trying to hire an executive assistant for a while now, but I need to find someone that's very okay with just the absolute manic nature of my... I really believe that my personality type is to work like an artist generally. And so...
The actual work time is not structured at all. Everything outside of my life that's not work is very regimented and scheduled. Food and exercise and all of that kind of stuff is in the calendar. Everything else is just work, deep work. The thing I decide to work on is sometimes a pressing thing that needs to be fixed or something like that. But then sometimes it's like, there's a developer that just completed a task way faster than we thought he was going to.
And so the way that I look at like, OK, what's the best thing that I can do to unlock him right now? It's like, OK, like I just need to go into product and figure out what he's going to work on if we didn't plan it properly of what he was going to work on next. I would like to get to a moment to a place where I could be like, today's like the day I'm going to work on marketing stuff or like with the marketing team or something like that. But it just doesn't.
Like I very much sometimes go like, you know what, like your mind's kind of like a manic thing, like just like hold on to it like a bull and like just like go for the ride is like kind of my approach.
Jack (29:12)
It's so funny that you said bull because I actually describe people like you that have more of a manic approach, like a scattered approach to things as a raging bull, right? It's a more artistic approach to work. It's a less structured approach to work. But when you're confident about something and when you're passionate about something, it's like a raging bull. You're to run through a brick wall, right? I'm different, right?
Like everything's on my watch 15 minutes at a time, but some of the most talented people that I've met are agile. They respond to things and they're able to, in the moment, on an every 10 minute to half hour basis, reevaluate what it is that needs their attention. They go, this needs my attention now. I'm going after it.
Zach Murray (29:58)
Yeah, that's why I'm not hireable.
If I was like assigned a task that I'm not like excited about, it's like, have a lot of discipline and a lot of like will and like all these types of things. But if I'm not like, this is like what I want to do right now. Nothing gets done because it's like, I also just have like such a high bar, I think for my personal work of like, I don't really like completing tasks. I like doing my best work. And so like my reward mechanism is completely.
Like people that say, I love finishing a list of tasks. I get zero benefit or personal gratification by finishing a list. All I care about is if I did one thing as best as I possibly could do, that's the only thing that gives me a reward mechanism. I know when Jack was in Toronto and we were working together, he would have the meetings and would schedule time in. it was good because stuff actually got done. But it's completely the opposite of my approach.
Rishabh (30:57)
That's so funny. I don't know what the fuck to say about these terrorists, man. It's not good. That's what I'll say.
Jack (31:01)
Haha
Zach Murray (31:06)
I just know that I'm not logging into like my E-Trade account or like any brokerage account. I'm just like, no, like not logging into it. It's just going to ruin my day. It doesn't matter. Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of wild.
There's some news that's a nothing burger.
And it's like the worst thing you can ever do is like listen to news that ends up being like completely irrelevant a week later. I'm pretty confident that we are living through like a change in the world and like what outcomes are possible? Like complete restructuring of like the United States economy, which is like kind of cool and interesting. But then on the other side of that is like, I don't know, like there's a higher chance of like de-dollarization across the entire world.
It's like, okay, well, but what does that mean? Like on both sides of it, like there's good things that happen and there's bad things that would happen. But like we are, think in a way like living through like a shift in history with these things. And I don't think that they're, I don't think it's just news hype. think the way that potentially news is presenting it as hype, but like, I think we are living through a change, like, which is, I don't know. It's cool. I guess.
Rishabh (32:13)
Yeah, it's funny. was telling Rob, I was like, man, this is if nothing, this is interesting. And this is like, you would rather live in interesting times than uninteresting And also as like a founder, there is a little part of you that is like, all right, like, you know, like, this is my moment. Like, this is like, this is the job, it turns out everything that you plan for, you can execute on and like, other people on the team can execute on. It's like the startup journey is by definition, the things that punch you in the face that you didn't expect.
And it is always like for me, the most extreme version of that was when SVB went under and like a hundred percent of our money was at SVB. And I was like, well, I wasn't expecting that. And it's like, it's like, of course I worked on it the whole weekend, but it's kind of like, you know, I wasn't like panicked.
Zach Murray (33:01)
Yeah.
Rishabh (33:10)
It was kind of like, I'm gonna work on it. And like, that's the job, right? Same thing with the tariffs. It's like, can't, mean, panicking is not gonna do anything. And so it's like, okay, this is now the thing. It's different than we thought it was gonna be. And now this is the job especially in software, you have the benefit of being highly agile.
Like, look, don't get me wrong. your supply chain has to move and things like that, those are really hard to do. And those are the types of things that obviously like people like us are going to do whatever we can to be helpful. And at the same time, it's just true that in like SaaS, when wild things like this happen, the fact that it is more adaptable you're expected to be able to react quickly because you can basically. Yeah.
Zach Murray (34:08)
Yeah, I think approaching these is always like...
I think it's the place to almost anything, but like generally the most stoic approach to anything is always like the best one. Um, and then I think like one of like the best ways to approach like, Oh, like bad things that happen or things that are like radically shifting is like setting the actual baseline and getting rid of any sort of a sunk cost fallacy. Um, and so if you set the baseline as I will only be sad if I die or go broke.
If not only die, then like everything above it is still above baseline. And I think like, as long as you set the proper baseline is I am not dead and or in the hospital, then like everything is kind of like pretty sick. like maintaining that through life is like hard. ⁓ but like approaching it from that, like gives you the highest chance of success in any situation.
And so it's like, if I know it's my highest chance of success, then it's by far the best way to approach I think for me, like the biggest one, I always get sucked into a little bit of sunk cost fallacy because I care so much about stuff. I'm like, Oh, I can put so much effort into like one direction or another direction. And it does feel like what hours of my finite life did I give up for something that's not going to happen? But I always just go back to like, okay, baseline is dead and or terminally ill and everything above that is radically awesome opportunity.
I think I land on that maybe 50 % of the time and like the other 50 % I'm like, this sucks, what the fuck is going on? But I think that's the best approach.
Rishabh (35:50)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, it's yeah, it is going to be hard though. And the other thing I was like telling the team when it got announced was it's going to be hard. Like that's, that's the thing to like not pretend. It's just like, Hey, you just got to acknowledge it's going to be hard and that's fine. And you know, that's what we get paid for. get paid to work on hard things.
Zach Murray (36:14)
So what would you say are like the main areas of the tariff announcement in which are causing you to consider things in your business right now?
Rishabh (36:26)
Dude, the number one problem is when you're a customer, because we serve this customer base that's going to get impacted so heavily. When your customer base is unhealthy, like no matter what you do as a vendor to that customer base, it is just going to be like tough for everyone. Like budgets get reevaluated, people get exited. So like your users are getting potentially exited from their jobs.
Like no matter how you cut it, it's just like a ton of pressure on the entire ecosystem. And so that's the part where I'm like, hey guys, like, look, it is just going to be hard. No matter how we cut it, it's gonna be hard. And so let's just be prepared to like interact with hard just note that we will like have to navigate through it, right?
And it's so volatile, which is the other part that makes it hard. And people don't love volatility. so that's like those two forces combined. I think it's just important to like be upfront with the team and be upfront with people basically.
Zach Murray (37:24)
Right.
Jack (37:33)
I think in one of our last conversations, you were speaking about how the problem that Formart exists to solve and the environment that we're experiencing is another problem that has to be solved, maybe a bigger problem. It's not quite as pointed as the reason that Formart came into existence and that problem that you initially were trying to solve, but every single time something like this happens that affects so many different businesses it represents an opportunity, right?
And that might sound like a... a bad way to put it, right? It's opportunity. It sounds like benefiting from other people's loss, but it's not. It's an opportunity to solve a problem for someone, right? To meaningfully improve the state of things, right?
Rishabh (38:16)
I hope someone can like meaningfully improve it. I think the part of it that is just tough is the volatility. Like if it's a persistent problem, it's actually because now it's like, okay, here's this new reality and this is it, it is here. And now we like start to do a bunch of things. Designing against a moving target is extremely difficult by the way, I am the most optimistic, I am an extreme optimist.
Believe me, I really am. And that's why in a situation like this, while I agree that there's a set of things that you just have to do in order to say, all right, here's how we solve this problem, here's how we navigate it, view it as an opportunity, the part of it that is...
I think just tough is the volatility. Because designing on a moving target is very hard. Very hard. Right? So that's the part of it that, least, look, I hope by the time this goes out, it's less of a moving target, to be totally honest. Right? Whatever the target is, it's just not moving. So, yeah.
Zach Murray (39:18)
Yeah. Yeah, Dennis Hegstad made a tweet two hours ago saying that they track the most, the highest number of e-commerce price changes on Shopify stores between April 2nd and April 3rd. Over 5 million price changes tracked, which is like looks significantly higher than daily price changes. And so it's like, yeah, like what are the down, if these brands right now are saying, okay, we have to account for the tariffs in like our price to end consumer, like even like on our end on the advertising side, like...changing the price of the product is a massive change in potentially your conversion rate, your CAC.
And so it's like what might have been a well-oiled machine 48 hours ago could instantly change. I remember when I was running traffic still, any change I was incredibly delicate about that had anything to do with our CAC or acquisition you know, like changing a button on the checkout page or changing like anything with our ad account. you know, when stuff's bad, you're like willing to change anything. ⁓ when stuff's good, you're kind of like, like there's tons of like apprehension to it.
And so it's interesting to see that, yeah, it'd be like a lot of changes, right? Like it's a, there's a world in which the offer you were running right now will not be your winning offer anymore. And you have to like go and discover that and find it. But again, then there's opportunities for this. ⁓
Right? Like how does FirmOt allow people to, you know, potentially test, you know, their pricing on products and their funnel and find what is the new reality of what will work for them and stuff like that. So.
Rishabh (40:56)
Yeah, no, yeah, I think. Jack, I'm gonna go on your side of the fence. You know what? We're just gonna start viewing all of this as opportunities.
Jack (41:06)
Someone's gonna win, right? Someone's gonna win and someone's gonna roll over. And I mean, you don't get to choose, but you get to choose which direction you're gonna strive in, right? There's gonna be a lot of businesses that go, well, the environment at large, it just beat me, right? I can't continue, right?
And maybe that's true. And then there's gonna be people that look at this and they go, I'm gonna find the way through.
Rishabh (41:17)
Totally. Yeah, totally. I totally agree.
Zach Murray (41:32)
Yeah, there's a world in which right now you have a business that was the most expensive option, right? In whatever your category was, like maybe you were the premium option and you maybe don't need to shift pricing and instantly potentially like brands that don't have as much of like luxury positioning or whatever are now like in your price category and your conversion rate goes up, right?
Like there's like... an endless butterfly effect of the effect this has both positively and negatively on anybody affected by terrorists.
Luckily, software is not affected by tariffs, like directly on like a cash collected basis. But it might be in the future, right? Like I was like thinking about that. was like, man, if we needed to start paying a 25 % tariff to the customers that we serve in the US or whatever it is, like that would be a massive change to like our unit economics.
Rishabh (42:29)
Alright guys, I gotta head out, but this one was awesome. Yeah, see you next week.
Zach Murray (42:30)
Yeah. Cool. Sweet. Awesome.
Jack (42:33)
This was fun.
Zach Murray (42:35)
See ya.
Jack (42:36)
See you.
Head of Marketing
