My guest today is Luke Thomas who is the founder of Friday, a remote work orchestration platform. In this episode we discuss the benefits of a cold shower, delaying instant gratification on purpose, automating status updates on teams, Maker/Manager schedule, how Luke got hooked on to remote work, real-time vs asynchronous work, supplement remote work culture with company on sites, coffee shop co-working sessions, running a startup with a full-time job, finding product-market fit before hiring employees and Luke's outlook on investing. For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
Luke Thomas is the founder of Friday, an asynchronous update platform that helps distributed teams stay connected. Previously, Luke was Head of Product at Crystal and has been working remotely since 2013. Outside of work, Luke enjoys hanging out with his family and he lives in Portland, Maine. If you ever visit, he will gladly show you around town.
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Jayneil Dalal: Today's amazing guest is Luke Thomas. Luke is founder of Friday which is an asynchronous update platform that helps distributed teams stay connected. Previously, Luke was head of product at Crystal and has been working remotely since 2013. Outside of work, Luke enjoys hanging out with his family and he lives in Portland, Maine. If you ever visit, he will gladly show you around town. If your team is remote and you are looking to increase the productivity of your remote team, then definitely go to Friday.app and check it out. By automating your daily standups to telling the team what you're working on, you never have to hear “Hey, what are you working on? Give me an update. Where's the daily status update?” All of that shit is automatically automated. So, head over to Friday.app and check it out.
Luke, thank you so much for joining on the show, man. Super excited to have you here.
Luke Thomas: Yeah, I’m excited to jump on and chat.
Jayneil: The most amazing thing is ever since I read about your articles at LukeThomas.com about you taking cold showers, I actually tried it for the first time in my life, out of volition, not out of force.
Luke: That's funny. I guess a little bit of context. So, myself and some other guys, we started this kind of little breakfast group and we had a variety of tasks or a variety of things that we would do for a span of about three months. And the whole idea was that you practice some type of delayed gratification or you would consciously think about these things that came and happened on autopilot. And so, one of the activities was taking a cold shower every morning. And I’ll be the first to admit that I got sick a couple weeks ago. So, I needed to jump back into the routine but for almost two months, I would just take a cold shower. And just outlined quickly in the blog post that you read these surprising benefits of doing something that sounds painful and not very much fun. And so, I guess I’ll do the quick summary. The long story short is most of our day is spent doing things that just come on autopilot. And by practicing some type of delayed gratification or by intentionally telling yourself “No, I’m not going to do this thing,” there are a variety of very interesting benefits. So, for me, I was way more awake. It almost was like drinking a lot of coffee. Gosh, I’m trying to remember all the different benefits. I mean, that was the most obvious thing. Second thing was that it really laid an interesting foundation for saying no to things in other parts of my life as well. And so, long story short, this is something that I heard about a long time ago, I remember hearing Ben Franklin would take cold baths and I thought it was stupid but I tried it for myself and it was surprisingly actually a net positive to my day even though it was very, very cold. Up here in Maine, the water is not very warm when it is 10 degrees outside.
Jayneil: I found myself the first couple times I tried it that if I just went all the way the knob down to the cold, it was just really hard but then I would start a little bit lukewarm and then slowly and slowly and slowly turn down. I also do this cryotherapy from time to time. So, it almost felt similar because there you're stuck in a chamber for a little bit and then here, you're just taking the shower. And I definitely felt awake, man.
Luke: Yeah, it'll definitely wake you up in the morning, for sure.
Jayneil: And on that note about delayed gratification, something else that I find useful, and I think you already do this, is I also do intermittent fasting every Monday. So, today, I’ll start. And one of the hacks that I do is, it's hard to kind of do it for 24 hours, I usually do it on, for me, Monday evenings, I’ll start at about like 9 p.m. or sometimes earlier, around 6 p.m. and then it will go to Tuesday 6 p.m. And then usually you're at work in the morning.
Luke: Yeah, that's another area where I was surprised at the benefits. My mom started doing it probably six months ago or so and she’s lost a bunch of weight and felt great and would say a bunch of really good things about it. And I was just like “This is ridiculous” like “I love my breakfast. Why would I give that up?” And, gosh, probably around November, it was right around the time I jumped into Friday full-time, call it late October, so I started doing it and I would just essentially skip breakfast. So, I would start eating at noon and then I’d be done by typically like 5-5:30. And at first, it was a little difficult. I had lunch a little early today because I had to jump on a call. I think I’ve lost like 20 pounds or something and I feel really great. I think I’m actually going to keep doing this. That's another area where it is surprising how effective it's been. And it boils down to this premise of okay, if you want average results, you should do what everybody else is doing but if you want atypical results, you have to do something that does not come naturally for you, right? I think that's kind of my big learning with cold showers, with intermittent fasting and with other parts of your life as well.
Jayneil: And then you spoke about jumping full time to Friday. So, how would you describe Friday in your own words?
Luke: I’m still working on best explaining this but the long story short is Friday makes it really easy to share regular updates about what you're working on. And pretty much every company I’ve ever worked at has these kinds of communication routines that are set up. Some of those are at the team level, some of those exist at the company level but the idea is that you need to create some type of process to the way that you communicate and share information. And so, what teams will do is they might do something like a weekly staff meeting. If you're an executive, you might do like an all-hands or maybe like a monthly email to the entire company but the idea is that if you want a predictable result, you need to create a predictable kind of way to communicate. And the reality is that that's actually way more difficult than it needs to be. So, at some previous companies, we would be responsible for sharing an update of what we did over the course of the week. We would use that just to kind of serve as a bedrock or a foundation for Monday morning meetings. And typically, the process would go something like this. Friday rolls around and some of us would have Google Calendar reminders to fill out a document, some of us wouldn't. So, Monday morning rolls around. Some people have filled out their updates, other people haven't. And then the boss or the manager needs to manually ask those people “Hey, can you fill out your update? Our meeting starts soon. Fill out the stock.”
Jayneil: That's usually me. And they're like “Jayneil, where's your updates?”
Luke: Yeah, exactly. This happens all the time and I would just get distracted. It wasn't me necessarily being a bad employee. I just had a lot going on and I guess I didn't prioritize. So, anyway, sometimes we'd show up to the meeting and then the meeting kicks off and half the people haven't read it. And so, you end up just reading what you wrote in the document, if you wrote it in the document.
Jayneil: Yes.
Luke: And then you're like “Wow! This is a massive waste of time” like “This is a terrible meeting.” Halfway through the meeting, sometimes more than halfway through, the updates are out of the way and then people finally jump into the best part of the meeting, which is kind of collaborating or talking about stuff that needs to be discussed in a real-time format. And so, what we've done at Friday is we've really tried to automate as much of that process as possible. So, if you were to create an account on Friday, you could invite your team and set up a kind of communication workflow is what we call them. And so, we'll handle the notifications. That could be over email, Slack or Microsoft Teams. We have a structured set of questions that you can answer or you can add your own right like “Hey, what are you working on this week? What are your priorities? What did you accomplish last week?” It's really up to you about how you want to do that. And then, if you don't fill it out, we'll send you a reminder over email or through a bot. And after you've filled out the update, we'll push it to the right people for visibility. So, what we've essentially done is just broken down the barriers to sharing regular updates at work. And this is something that's incredibly important with distributed teams in particular because they are, in many ways, missing stuff that people in the office passively can learn through observation primarily, right? You can run into someone in the hallway before and after a meeting occurs, you can kind of shoot the breeze with your co-workers and you learn a lot through those experiences but when you're remote, it's very difficult to understand what's going on. And so, we think the best way to really improve productivity and kind of overall happiness at work and to make remote work a lot better is by making it easy for teams and companies to create systems to the way that they communicate and share information. There's plenty of tools on the market that make it easy to have a video call or they make it easy to chat back and forth with coworkers. We see Friday as a complementary tool to those that provides just this high-level insight into what's going on at work.
I realize that was a bit of a rant but that's really what Friday is and how it works.
Jayneil: And that makes sense. And Friday lives on top of the existing communication channels. If somebody's using Slack, they can just use it on top of that.
Luke: Yeah, exactly. So, for example, internally at Friday, we use slack, we use Trello and we use Friday. And we hear this over and over again from some of our customers but in many ways it's kind of like you have a project management tool, you have this collaboration tool for the quick back and forth or that ad hoc communication and then Friday provides the high-level view into what's going on. So, that's what we've seen over and over again. I mean, I certainly couldn't run a company without a tool like Friday. I mean, we only have one meeting a week and that's only possible because information is flowing on a regular basis to the right people.
Jayneil: So, what was your first experience with remote work that led you to think about “Maybe this is something I’m excited with.”
Luke: It's a really good question. I grew up and lived in Maine most of my life. And so, I graduated college and moved to Boston with my wife. And the long story short is we knew we wouldn't be there forever but the idea and the rationale for moving to Boston was there wasn't a lot of tech jobs where I was, I wanted to work in tech and I really wanted to kind of learn and grow and then ideally, at some point in the future, wouldn't it be nice to move back to Maine or some other place and live out in the middle of nowhere or wherever you wanted and to still work on what I would call interesting things, right? When you're in a more rural area, oftentimes you don't have as many opportunities. And so, what I was trying to do is kind of hack the system, so to speak, so that I could still work on interesting things or work at interesting tech companies and live in an area that was a bit cheaper and where I could have some land and go outside and play, right?
Jayneil: That's why I’m still in Dallas.
Luke: So, for a while, even before this experience, I did kind of contracting which frequently was outside of the office. And so, I would contract on the side throughout college and all that. So, I was familiar with doing work outside of the office but my first experience, this was my second job out of school, and I worked for a small startup based in the valley, Paolo Alto specifically, and I was working in Boston. And part of the team was in California and another part was overseas in the UK and the Netherlands. So, that was my first experience working remotely. And at the time, Slack wasn't around. We were using HipChat. We were using this tool called Squiggle which was like this virtual office of sorts and Google Docs and Asana.
Jayneil: Wow! Something amazing, as I’ve started doing more remote work or given the epidemic we are in these days, we are forced to embrace remote work whether we like it or not. And as I think about comparing this to just real life work day to day, we just see everybody, I feel like my productivity has really gone up with remote work.
Luke: Yeah. Certainly, there's a lot of variance, right? So, for example, and this was largely true, I mean, these days, pretty much everyone is working remotely out of necessity, as you mentioned, but let's say rewind a couple of months, you would see certain teams would work remotely while other teams would be in the office. That's a different dynamic than if everyone is fully distributed. There's a lot of variance here. Some of it is based on the role, right? Some of the work that you do may be more obvious and more quantifiable in nature than others. If you work in Sales, for example, the idea of a remote sales person has been around for a while and tools like Salesforce really give you that insight into someone's productivity and output. Engineering is now largely remote because of tools like Github where the code that you write is kind of written in stone. So, the remote work experience, there's a lot of variables at play that can make things a lot better or worse. I would argue that, based on my experience in working remotely for almost seven years for a few different companies in a few different kinds of roles, whether it's individual, contributor, manager, kind of more executive role … There's a really great essay that I would recommend. If you haven't read it, you should check it out. It's called Maker Versus Manager and it was written by Paul Graham. I’ll try to summarize it. There are essentially two modes of work. There are people that are actually producing and delivering some tangible output and they're people on the maker’s schedule. And so, they need a lot of time. Small distractions are very harmful. I remember when I worked on an engineering team, this was my first job in school, if someone would tap you on the shoulder and ask you a question and you were in the zone, it could throw you off for an hour. And so, having that time to really get into kind of that flow state is super important for certain types of work. Then you have people who are kind of the team leaders or executives where their responsibility and their output is the output of their team. So, as a leader of a team, I am essentially judged on the output that my team is doing. So, what happens is, as a team leader, there's almost like this conflict that happens. Team leader, you need to know what's going on, you need to be able to steer the ship, so to speak. And in order to do that, you need to gather data about what people are doing, where they might be stuck and other key things but if you're an individual contributor, those things can just suck the life out of you.
I’m getting into another tangent but what I’ve noticed is that the key to making remote work, work is essentially giving people on the manager's schedule where you need to understand what's going on and you need to steer the ship, how do you give them the most important insights in a way that minimizes the number of meetings, minimizes the amount of back-and-forth chatter. How do you do that? And I think, personally, the way you do that is through these kinds of communication habits. And so, I personally love being remote because I can wake up and, in some mornings, I’ll start working at 5 a.m. in the morning and other days, I can't do that but some mornings, I’m up early. And then it makes it easy to take a break, hang out with my son, do all of that before he goes off to daycare and I’m done my work day typically a little bit before 4 and that's so I can pick him up at daycare and then hang out with him and not feel bad because I’ve got the work done but my schedule is different than a co-worker. And so, what matters a lot to me and what makes remote work really, really great is balancing the need for kind of real time collaboration with giving people the freedom to really have time to do really meaningful and intrinsically interesting work.
Jayneil: And you already touched on this and also, I’m currently reading this by Jason Fried, the book It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. And both you guys are touching the same topic which is not everything has to be real time. The updates can be not at the same time or asynchronous. And I remember in some work environments, working where I told the boss “We don't have a meeting till noon. Can I just finish some other things that I have in the day, my appointments with doctors or something like that or just some other things I have on my plate and then come in later and I’ll stay later?” And then the boss was like “No, I need you at this desk at 8:30 even if there's nothing to do.” And in my head, part of me is just like “This just doesn't make sense in my head” like “Why do I have to follow this rule?” And then you touched upon these meetings where everybody's got to get the status update. And I think the best reward an employee can get is having some kind of structure or ownership over the structure in their day to day where they're like “Okay, I want to work out in the morning but then I can start my day later at 10.” And if there's, like you said, a strict meeting with all the entire hands-on team at noon, then that's fine. Then I’ll just make time around it.
Luke: I’ve spent probably way too much time researching what makes a meeting great, what kind of necessitates real-time collaboration and what can be done, how many of the meetings should have been emails, right? So, it’s like how do you balance both forms of communication. So, there's the need for the real time and then you can do things asynchronously or in a delayed way. And based on my research, here's how I think about it. And I’ll try to explain it as best as I can. I’m still kicking around the concepts in my head. This is a fun topic. So, the way I think about it is that there are two pieces of criteria that you should really think about when it comes to the need for a real-time meeting or real-time conversation. And the two variables to think about, one is the potential for misunderstanding, high, and is there a lot of ambiguity in what we are discussing. If those are true, you should gravitate towards using the richest communication channel possible. And in many scenarios, that's in person, but the next step up is like a Zoom call or a video call and then you work your way up from there but here's the basic gist. If those two factors are true, you need more data points to be able to establish common ground between you and the other person or the group of people talking. And so, what can be very useful and where real-time meetings and real-time conversations are extremely useful is you can read body language, you can capture their tone. You have all this data flowing at you that allows you to better interpret the message of the person speaking. And if you aren't on the same playing field, you can quickly hash things out, right? The feedback loop is very fast because you can say “Well, I don't really get what you're saying. Can you explain that more?” And that fast iteration is what a meeting is best for, I would argue, right? So, those are kind of the superpowers of real-time collaboration: a fast feedback loop, tons of data points to help you establish common ground.
On the flip side, let's say you are communicating and you are sharing facts or basic bits of information that is very cut and dry. It's very obvious. There's not a huge misunderstanding or the potential to be misunderstood and ambiguity isn't very high – “Hey, I’m working on this thing today and I’m going to be out at 2 because I want to go to the gym.” That's a message that the probability that it will be misinterpreted is pretty low. So, that is an example where asynchronous communication, I would argue, is ideal because what you can do is you can, instead of holding a real-time meeting and going around in a circle saying “What are you working on? What are you working on? What are you working on?”, which is just a ridiculous waste of time, you can share that information asynchronously, people can process it at the time that makes sense for them and then if you have questions or if you need to establish that common ground, well, then jump on a call, right? So, an example of running a daily stand-up which is popular in engineering circles is kind of typically three questions – what did you do yesterday, what are you working on today, and do you have any blockers. The first two questions are pretty obvious, generally speaking. The third one is one of those scenarios where figuring out if someone's blocked oftentimes necessitates some type of real-time conversation. And so, anyway, that's how I think about the balancing act between real time and delayed because I think of it like a yin-yang relationship. Each has benefits, each has drawbacks and if you use them in tandem at the appropriate time, you can create this very, very interesting kind of combination.
Jayneil: So, if you're in a remote first world or if there's a company that's completely distributed and the richest form of communication they would have, as you alluded to, is probably getting on a Zoom call. So, in that case how does one go about judging those body languages? I mean, I can see you and stuff but compare that to real life, how would you go about doing that?
Luke: Well, the way I talk about it is Zoom call versus real life is kind of like 1080p versus 720p. It’s like HD video versus a more fuzzy video. I mean the reality is that there is no replacement for an in-person kind of back and forth. You just learn so much. Zoom gets pretty close but it's not fully there. And so, what a lot of remote and distributed teams will do is they kind of understand this, they understand that you learn a lot just hanging out with people and being in person. So, what many of them will do is they'll do some type of company on-site typically once or twice a year. Ideally, you could do it a little bit more frequently but that provides a way to get to know people and to have those really kind of tricky conversations. For example, if I’m going to talk about annual strategy, I would argue that you should probably think about maybe doing that at your company on site. And so, the reality is remote work is a trade-off. It will not solve all your problems but the reality is a lot of the work you do on an everyday basis, you don't need to have the richest feedback loop possible all the time. You just need to be able to pull that lever when you need to. And so, that's kind of how I think about things. Zoom, in many ways, it's the next best thing to being in person but it will not replace those in-person conversations, I don't think.
Jayneil: And that's what I miss is even though I love remote work, I’m an extrovert person. So, for me, that people-to-people interaction is really important. SO, if I’m working remotely right now, I don't need to buy anything right now but I’m just literally standing in line at a grocery store because that's the only thing I can do, we have a stay-at-home shelter right now in Dallas, but just that seeing some people around me, it just makes me feel sane.
Luke: Absolutely. I’m super extroverted too. And so, there's a few things that I personally do to try to help this, some of which you can't really do right now because everyone needs to stay at home but I’ll kind of share what you can do now and then maybe what you could do if you were to work remotely post coronavirus outbreak. So, what you could do now, and one thing I have found really, really helpful, is what I call a coffee shop coworking session. And so, the idea came about when I flew down to Nashville. We have a couple full-time employees at Friday who work down there. So, I just decided to fly down and hang out with them in person. And a couple days, we would meet up at a coffee shop and we would huddle around a table and we'd get work done but it also was kind of obvious that it wasn't only about just getting work done. It was about kind of hanging out, being around each other, being able to kind of quickly pick up your head and say “Hey, quick question” or “Hey, let's talk about X, Y and Z.” And so, after that experience, I kind of went home and I was like “How could we replicate that in person experience where we were just shooting the breeze, it wasn't about the work necessarily but work was kind of getting done as well?” And I just came to the conclusion “Okay. Well, why don't we just try to replicate this?” And so, what we do is once every two weeks, I would maybe think about doing it more frequently, if you really need people interaction during this time, maybe do it twice a week, maybe do it on a Friday or maybe do it in the middle of the week but essentially, allocate, call it an hour where you all jump on a Zoom call or a video call and the point of the call is not to necessarily talk about work or to do status updates but instead, you get on and you treat it essentially like the experience we had, all huddled around a table at a coffee shop, right?
Jayneil: Like the water cooler conversation or something like that.
Luke: Yes, exactly. And so, we've been doing this for a couple months and it's been a really, really cool experience. So, we have people all over the world that help us out to build Friday. And clearly, people are in different time zones. So, you can't do this all the time. It would just be crazy but to allocate an hour every couple weeks, jump on a call and just talk about things. Sometimes it devolves into work-related conversations. Typically, I kick things off by just quickly saying “Hey, here's a few cool things that I’ve noticed from customers” or “Here's what our investors are saying” or something else. I just kind of seed the conversation a little bit but typically, we talk about “Oh, how's your family doing?” or “How are you holding up during this coronavirus?” It goes all over the place sometimes. It's like we do kind of the show-and-tell where an engineer that's working on a feature will show that off but the idea is that this meeting is not about work. It's essentially the opposite. It's about hanging out as people and then if we do a little bit of work at the same time, that's fine. And I would say that, from my perspective, this has had a huge impact on how connected I feel to the rest of the team. And so, I would strongly recommend thinking about that because I just think flipping the meeting format on its head, before it's work plus a little bit of personal conversation, instead flip it, so it's personal conversation with a little bit of work.
Jayneil: So, as the leader in charge of this meeting, do you find yourself monitoring that if the conversation is getting too technical, too much work related that you have to like dial it back down?
Luke: No. I mean, part of this is because the group of people isn't huge but I’ve heard of other companies that do a similar thing even with larger groups. And I would certainly advocate that if you're part of a bigger company, do this at a team level but the reality is if you're trying to replicate hanging out in a coffee shop, that's pretty free form. You shouldn't feel the need to curtail conversation because that wouldn't really necessarily happen in real life at least at most places I’ve worked where you're in person. It's like if the boss is like “Hey, can we talk about something else?” and I’d be like “I think I should go work somewhere else.” So, anyway, that's the best way I’ve found to stay connected and to feel connected when you work remotely, doing those coffee shop coworking sessions, an hour every week or so, try it out, see how it works. I think you'll be surprised. It sounds kind of cheesy but it works very, very well.
The second thing that I do as a remote employee when I am allowed to leave the house and go places, I book time to meet up with people in the local community. So, I try to have two to three meetings a week where I am meeting up with someone at a coffee shop where I am able to talk with someone and do the extroverted people stuff. And what that does is it gives me energy and then I go home and I’m able to accomplish a lot of work because I’m pouring water into that extroverted bucket, for lack of better words. So, that's how I personally deal with it, as an extrovert. It's like the source of social interaction will not happen inside of your house or your apartment. So, just like get outside of the house. Your house is not your home. That's how I think about it. And so, I have to be intentional about getting out of the house. And once again, I think if you spend all of your day in meetings, taking those coffee shop breaks to meet up with someone in your community is much, much more difficult. So, you have to reduce your dependency on meetings to be able to do stuff like that. And so, those are the two things that I found. I mean, there's a lot of people that work remotely, probably in your neighborhood, to be honest. And I’ve been able to randomly meet a bunch of people in the city that I live. And so, we're all in the same boat. We had a meet-up early January before all the coronavirus happened. 80 people showed up to the meet-up type event and they all worked remotely and it was like super cool. And so, there are people around you. It's just a little difficult to find them.
Jayneil: Yes. And especially in Portland where you're based, one of my former bosses used to, I believe, he's still there, and I remember one time I visited Portland, we actually biked down. I think it was the dockyard or something. It was just beautiful.
Luke: Oh yeah, it's a great city.
Jayneil: So, you were bootstrapping Friday for quite a while doing a full-time job and using that capital to fund Friday. So, how did you even manage all this workload because you got the full-time responsibilities and then you're running a startup full throttle? How did you go about doing that?
Luke: It was pretty brutal, to be honest. I’ll kind of try to tell that story a little bit. I’ve worked in early stage tech for most of my career. And the thing that I always found a little bit annoying was … There's a lot of startups that are founded based on an idea because if you're an investor frequently, you just don't have that much data to go off. And so, you make a bet on the team. And what that looks like in practice is you have a team of people working around kind of the central thesis to why the company should exist. And they'll start hiring people oftentimes from like day zero or day one. And here's what happens. You start building out the product and that thesis is tested. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't or, I would say, most of the time it doesn't. So, what happens is you have this kind of struggle to find the product market fit which, I would just call, a repeatable behavior that people use your tool to do. And what happens is if you're an early stage employee, there's a lot of what I call thrashing that happens. So, you're on the hunt for product market fit. You're constantly pivoting the product. One day you need someone in this role. The next day you change strategy and you let them go. There's just so much thrashing that happens. And I personally experienced that at companies and I thought “This seems kind of like I get it like I get why they do it but wouldn't it be nice if I could like build a product or build a software product and do it in a way where I was able to test those assumptions and find that repeatable behavior or find some semblance of product market fit before I started bringing on a bunch of like full-time people?” because if you can limit the thrashing, you can be way more capital efficient, you can hire people and be and play a long-term game of sorts where you bring on people and you don't have to let them go three months because your strategy completely changes because the fundamentals of the business are kind of consistent or at least certainly more consistent than they would be if you were to just hire them without building anything. So, I started off building Friday on nights and weekends kind of based around that premise I was just trying to scratch my own itch. Some of my first jobs out of school, I had a bunch of different managers. And the best managers would have regular one-on-ones. The managers that weren't so great, there was no dedicated time where I could say “Hey, things aren't going so well.” So, I thought at the time, this was a while ago, I thought at the time “Why isn't there a tool to just ask questions on a regular basis for employees and then push those insights to managers?” So, that's how I originally started Friday. It was based around the concept of improving the employee-to-manager relationship. And I worked on that for a while. I mean, the product continually grew. It was just more out of chance than anything, I think. And we ended up selling to one team who would start using it and then all of a sudden, the larger group would start using it. And it kind of grew organically. It was relatively slow but fortunately, I wasn't in a huge rush because I was working on it nights and weekends. And so, I ended up growing it. Last December or so it was doing about 60K or 70K a year in revenue. And I was still working on it nights and weekends. And fortunately for me, the product wasn't super complex. So, I didn't have a lot of people that would email and reach out about support-related requests. I kind of knew that if I’m going to make this work nights and weekends, the product can't be super complex and difficult. With that being said, I would still answer emails before work and at lunch time and at the end of the day and on weekends and stuff like that, just try to find times to be able to work on it. The product kept growing. We closed a pretty big customer. I kind of feel bad saying this but we closed a 35,000-dollar-a-year deal with it still being a side project. That was when I started to go “Okay, I really need to think about doing this full-time.” At the time, I had my first son, we moved into this new place and I was renovating it while having a full-time job. It was really rough.
Jayneil: And the crazy is how you would convince your wife to let you do this. I’m assuming you had some conversation that “Hey, I’m going to try this out.” Maybe there's a time limit like if in two or three years it doesn't work, then you get a job. How did that conversation go?
Luke: It was really kind of funny. As it kind of grew slowly over time, there was a lot of give and take that I had to do, I mean there were times, and I would not recommend it, sometimes you just don't know what you're getting into. That's kind of the bucket that I fell into. I know you're in Texas but there was one time that our website went down and I was on the road and I was doing like support and trying to reboot servers from a parking lot at Bucky's.
Jayneil: Oh my God.
Luke: I would not recommend that. Anyway, long story short, I started the company and I started Friday when it was just my wife and I, before we had kids and all that. And so, it was a little bit easier to manage but when a kid arrives, it totally changes the game and that was also kind of a forcing function for me like “I need to like figure out if this is a business or not because I can't keep doing this.” It was just constant something I needed to do and it was not easy. So, working on Friday full-time as a founder, sure it’s stressful but it's not as stressful as …
Jayneil: … as juggling two jobs.
Luke: Two jobs, renovating a house, and a newborn that cried all the time.
Jayneil: Oh my God.
Luke: Yeah, it was pretty rough. So, I would not recommend that, first of all. I mentioned it in the post that I wrote. Make sure that if you're in a relationship, you really need to talk about that. And if I was going to do things again, I would time box the entire thing. So, I’d say “If it is not doing X between now and this date in the future, I will do this other thing.” And we did some of that. So, for example, my wife was like “Hey, I don't think you should go full time on this unless you can pay yourself X amount.” And I was like “Okay, I really need to take that into consideration.” So, there were certainly some guardrails that we set but I would probably be a little bit more thoughtful, I guess, around what guardrails you set if you try to do something like this. I kicked the can a bit too much. I worked on this on nights and weekends a bit longer than I probably should have. I mean, looking back, it kind of worked out. Make no mistake, there's a sacrifice involved and you have to be very thoughtful about what that actually looks like and who it also impacts.
Jayneil: And then the thing with the time boxing and guardrails you mentioned, I feel sometimes just optimistically delusional to some degree and having those things in place, my mind is like “What if I set a time box of like I’m going to give it three months or three years?” for example, whatever that number is. What if I just needed to give one more month? Maybe it was supposed to be three months and maybe there was supposed to be two more weeks to it and then the product could have kicked off. So, that's always a dilemma. How do you resolve that “No, you know what I said. Three months is the timeframe. If I don't hit this revenue or this metric, then I need to stop.”
Luke: It's a really interesting question. I think, from my perspective, the only way to short circuit that process is by being incredibly intentional about what you work on. So, for me, I fell into this trap of “Oh, I should add another feature,” “Oh, I should add another feature” like “We need to add this and then the product will be ready.” This is a common trap with entrepreneurs is that there's this core product hook of sorts. It's like this repeatable behavior that people use your tool to do. And oftentimes, that can be validated or invalidated very quickly. So, for me, the idea of a notification that triggers an update that is then sent to stakeholders and to do that over and over again, that's technically something you could set up with Zapier, Google forms, Google Drive or Spreadsheets or something. You could glue together tools to do that. And, for us, that's kind of that product hook. So, if you want to kind of short circuit the process where you get in a place where it's like “Oh, if I only had invested another month, then the product may have been successful, it's like “Probably not.” Instead, you should focus all your time and energy on measuring and validating essentially human behavior around your product because if you can build some type of repeatable behavior that people use your tool to do, that's a big deal and you should double down on that specifically before you keep adding features or keep optimizing something that may or may not work. And so, if I were to start another company again, I would focus all my energy on finding some repeatable behavior that people use your product to do. You don't have to hire a bunch of engineers to do that. You can probably validate it cobbling together different tools and kinds of low-code like solutions. And then, that gives you kind of the motivation and the evidence you need to be able to sync more time in but even then, you can keep things really simple. That's what I would recommend but at the end of the day, a business typically has some type of trajectory and if it's a very slow growth, you know that; if it's very exponential growth, you know that as well. And so, if you were to extend things by just another month, you probably won't move the needle that much on the existing trend that exists.
Jayneil: That makes perfect sense. And it's my understanding that you live a very frugal life. I think you also mentioned this in one of your articles that you knew that you were going to go on this journey of entrepreneurship. So, you started changing your lifestyle and focusing more on savings. So, can you talk a little bit more about that? How does one prepare for that?
Luke: I think that's kind of a big deal. At least that's my personal take is that building a business is tough. It seems like building a business while struggling and trying to make things work for yourself financially or for your family only adds more stress and increases the probability of something bad happening. And so, I knew that I wanted to start a company and we just kind of saved and didn't take as many trips as we wanted. We really have been very fortunate but for us, what that means tactically is you don't need to buy a new car, for example. We do not drive new vehicles. We have purchased used vehicles. Another thing is, for us, where we live, we've been fortunate to be able to buy a home and we could have probably afforded a more expensive home but we didn't really need it. And so, if you're able to slow the growth of lifestyle inflation, that can have a huge impact. In many ways, I feel like we still live similarly to how we lived our first year out of college. Not much has changed. I mean, we live in a house versus a tiny apartment in Boston.
Jayneil: And it's hard to do. It's really hard to do, not to get involved in the whole Keep Up with the Jonases game.
Luke: I don't know how this happened but I was talking with my wife about this last night and I asked her “What's your superpower?” And for her, it's when she sets her mind to something, she will just be like a machine until that's done. And for me, I feel like my superpower is just not really caring what people think. And I think part of that is because I grew up in a family that didn't have a lot. I was one of four kids. My dad was the only one who worked. So, we were always kind of scraping by. We were certainly more fortunate than other people. I grew up in a small town in Maine and half the town was on some form of welfare or federal assistance and we weren't but we didn't drive nice vehicles. There were times where my parents were very nervous about finances, they clipped coupons, they did all that. And so, for me, how I’m living now compared to how I grew up, I feel very rich. And so, that experience growing up kind of taught me it doesn't matter how you look, the clothes that you dress in. I’ll still oftentimes dress up. If I were to go to a conference, I’d probably be wearing something like a T-shirt or something. And part of that is to force me to remember what it's like and to also just be comfortable with people thinking you're weird or something like that. It's a muscle. It's very much a muscle that, I think, you have to train. If you are able to reduce your personal burn or to not even let it escalate to a point where it gets a bit crazy, then you can weather the storms that will be thrown your way when you are trying to grow a business.
Jayneil: I love that. Just like you, I’m a big believer in that. I moved from India to over here in Dallas and I’ve been in Dallas about eight plus years now, haven't moved outside of there much. And since that time, one of the most weird things in my apartment is I don't have a TV. I know it sounds really weird but one of the things I feel is … I use social media. There are benefits but one of the predominant views I have about is also a large-scale programming machine that programs you. So, if I’m always watching something about people in flashy cars and stuff, then you kind of start to think about it. So, I’m like “I don't want to get influenced by what other people think is cool. I want to focus on my own self.” And then when you mentioned wearing that T-shirt to remind yourself, there was a year in Dallas when I was broke and I used to live in this really shady apartment for a while. So, even now, from time to time, I’ll just drive by there, park my car in that apartment parking lot and then just sit there for a couple of hours to kind of humble myself, to your point, if I find myself “Okay, we're going overboard.”
Luke: Yeah, it's really interesting. I deleted Instagram and I’m a little more active on Twitter just because I see it has something I kind of should do for work, which may or may not be true, but Instagram, for me, that was one of the things that I stopped doing simultaneously while taking the cold showers. And I think Instagram in particular is really, really bad when it comes to … it's very easy to be envious of what other people have or the experiences that they're having when you just are scrolling through that and it's like that's what people are talking about. It's like “Oh, look at where I am, look at where I am today.” And I thought about this in the context of coronavirus especially but with everybody being home, it's created this really interesting dynamic where all of a sudden, people can't show off where they are, you can't take those photos from the middle of Brooklyn or New York or whatever. And I started to notice this when … I have a TV. I periodically try to not watch TV but I was watching the news and they did a segment on the movie stars and the artists that were doing live streams of themselves and shows in their homes and I was watching that and I was like “I feel like they're so starved for attention.” Imagine, three days of your life, let's say, you have a show in a new city and all of a sudden you don't. And now, you're just playing the piano and singing from your home, which is a nice home, don't get me wrong, but it's created this very interesting leveling effect where it's like “You can't really show off as much when you're just inside your house bored on the couch.” I think about stuff like that quite a bit but I think Instagram in particular, it’s like if you were to focus on all the good things that you have in your life even if it's not like a ton, there will always be someone that's doing something or has something that you don't have. And instead of focusing on that gap between your reality and what you want, you should realign your thoughts and expectations to focus on the ground-truth reality that you have it a lot better than most people.
Jayneil: And to paraphrase a teenager, I might have to edit this out, but I was talking to a teenager and he is like “I quit Instagram” and I’m like “Why?” and he said “Bro, it's literally an endless stream of just beautiful women that don't even exist around you and cars, expensive, expensive cars.” And it just shocked me that this teenager here actually just realized that ground truth and I was like “My God.”
Luke: Yeah, you'll live a way better life if you stop focusing on what you don't have and instead focus on what you do have and all the good things, just focusing on little things. This is a lot more difficult in practice. It's easy to talk about it but it's really something you have to actively force yourself not to do. And for me, the most obvious thing is just not to be on Instagram, delete the app, just get rid of it, maybe visit it once a week but just get rid of it.
Jayneil: Now that you're a venture-funded company, one of the things I was curious about is how does a CEO solve this dilemma of “Well, I want to pay myself what is a good market salary but then if I do that, maybe that's some money I could have invested back in the product or company.”
Luke: Yes, sure. So, for me, as I mentioned before, my wife and I kind of agreed on a rough number and that may change if we have another kid and she finishes up at her job and all that but for me, I know the bottom end, I haven't upped my salary at all. And so, I knew the minimum amount that I needed to pay myself. So, for me, I just haven't budged from there. And, quite frankly, I was talking to my wife about this. I really hate it when I get those email alerts like “You've been paid.” I’m having way too much fun building a company and trying to service customers and all that, for me, I’m perfectly fine with what I make and, for me, it's not about the money. It's about a super interesting learning experience, working with people that I really enjoy working with and trying to tackle what I would consider to be a meaningful problem. Before when I was full time at other companies, I definitely was optimizing. I would optimize a lot more for salary. Now, it's way further down on the list. It's just something that's like “Okay, I need to set something because I need to be able to live and to live in a way where we aren't struggling or whatever.” So, that's how we came to that conclusion. It was kind of a collaborative process with my wife and we may have to adjust it in the future but, for now and for the unforeseeable future, I’m totally fine with it. When you work for a company, when you run a company, you're working for the upside, whatever that might be. Maybe it doesn't pan out, maybe it does. For me, the upside is learning and really trying to build something meaningful in the market. And then if there's a financial outcome or if there's something else, “All right, great. Cool” but it's really way less focused on optimizing for a paycheck at this period in time.
Jayneil: You just nailed it. As I was listening to you, I just realized that, I don't know how much of this might be true, but I think when you work in jobs or roles that are not satisfying to what we are doing or we don't feel a sense of accomplishment, we generally tend to optimize on the number, the salary. And then when you mentioned that you're having so much fun that you don't care, maybe that's something to it where you're having so much fun that you don't feel the need to optimize or over optimize maybe is the right word on the salary part.
Luke: Yeah. I mean, there's a common saying, it goes something along the lines of if someone comes and they threaten to leave and they're just saying “Hey, pay me more and I’ll be happy,” that generally doesn't work. Usually, there's some other issue. The money is not typically that driving force for looking for a job elsewhere. And so, typically, if you get the other variables in place, the money or the salary isn't as big of a deal. It still is a factor but it's not obvious where salary falls when you have other things that are prioritized more highly like autonomy, mastery and other things.
Jayneil: What is your outlook on investing and what is a no-brainer investment for you?
Luke: I guess, I kind of think in terms of two buckets maybe. My family, especially on my dad's side, it's all about finding the deal. And so, to use a simple analogy, it might be finding a great deal at a yard sale. You know that this thing that you want is worth, let's say, a hundred dollars but it's on sale for 50 at the yard sale and maybe you could turn around and sell that for a hundred dollars tomorrow if you wanted to. So, there's kind of the idea of finding those deals. And I think about it like there's that one bucket and then there's kind of the idea of this thing that can grow exponentially or that has these unique advantages that will pay off over the long term, for example. I guess one example is Amazon 20 years ago. They would constantly reinvest the capital, they would continue to grow the business, they haven't made “a profit” for a long time or they didn't make a profit for decades and now they're a massive company. And so, bucket one is finding a deal where the price of the thing is less than the value that the market assigns it. And then the second is latching on to some mega trend or some really interesting business that is deploying the capital effectively and has a history of doing that. And so, that's how I think about how I invest is in one of those buckets. And time will tell if this is a good idea or not but most people, they'll diversify. So, it's like “Okay, I put everything in an ETF or in a basket of goods. I can buy a basket of stocks that are in the airlines” or “I can buy a basket of tech companies.” And for a long time, I was like “Wow! That's like a great idea. You can kind of distribute the risk across multiple ones” but the reality is actually what you end up doing is you might pick a few really great ones but a lot of bad companies are lumped in as well.
Jayneil: Yeah, the upside is less too.
Luke: Yeah. So, you limit your upside. And for most people, that is actually the best way of doing things because you don't have the time or the knowledge or the desire to learn more about these individual businesses. You'd rather buy the index. Okay, that's fine and that's probably a good idea for most people. From my perspective, that's not really what excites me. What excites me is kind of finding the deal at the yard sale. So, I do not diversify. I try to find stuff that I really like and double down on it in a pretty aggressive way. That could be from my career perspective, starting a company where I’m making a bet on myself and these market insights that ideally or hopefully, I’ve found but it could be diversifying by buying a bunch of one stock or buying bitcoin. So, for me, I think about those two buckets. And I do not generally diversify. I will try to double down. So, the proxy I use to find the deals at the yard sale is … Once again, time will tell if this is actually a good idea or not, but it seems what you really need to find, and once again, this is all my experience and my theories. You should be very skeptical maybe about what I have to say. If it works for you, great. If not, then that's fine too but this is the yardstick I use is you don't typically find good deals when the market is excited about something. So, the proxy I use to find the deals at the yard sale is I just like periodically check CNBC or I have a few companies on my “watch list” which isn't very big because I just don't have time and I’ll just see if anything bad happens. And when I hear about them in the news in a very negative light, that is my cue to investigate further. Sometimes this works out, sometimes it doesn't but, for me, it's like if everybody's ranting and raving about something in the news, the price is probably a lot higher than the value is because there's kind of this hype cycle but the inverse can apply as well where people are way too negative on something and they should have been a bit more positive.
So, I’ll give a couple of examples. For me, specifically, I check this probably a few times a month but, for me, the things that my experience or the things that have worked out for me, I guess, I’ll say, is six or eight months ago Tesla was really beat up. There was kind of this question of “Well, are they going to make a profit? Do people actually want electric cars?” And I think their stock price dipped under 200 probably eight months ago or so, maybe it was a little bit longer and they were just getting pounded in the media. Once again, I do not recommend that this is the only way you pick a stock but for me, I just kept looking around and I kept seeing more and more Teslas. And this was up here in Portland and not a bunch of people have 40 grands to spend on a Model 3 or whatever. So, I kept seeing more Teslas and I followed them pretty closely. I ended up buying a little over 200. And then the stock popped. And I sold early. I always kind of cut my losses early. I think I sold at like 330 or something and then it went to 900. The market went way overboard the opposite way. And now, I think it's 400 bucks or something. I mean, I made pretty good money off that.
Jayneil: You didn't know it was going to go there.
Luke: I didn't know. Turns out the hype cycle worked the opposite way. And so, I typically sell early if I’m happy like “This is good. Fine. Be out.” So, yeah that's how I think about the deals at the yard sale is like finding some companies that you can investigate and dig deeper into, where maybe you have an advantage because you work in tech or in the industry of the business that you are looking at. That gives you an unfair advantage. And then wait and see and use negative news as maybe like a proxy for investigating something. So, right now, for example, oil stocks are getting super beat up, Bed Bath and Beyond has gotten just destroyed and those are the places that I’m looking at. It may not work but that's how I personally try to find deals at the yard sale. And then, ideally, if the price goes up, you're able to harvest the gain because you've just bought at a lower price. I realize I’m maybe talking about this way too much. On the growth side, I look for something that just fundamentally will change something in a big way. And so, I personally am pretty long in bitcoin especially when there's so much money printing that happens. I don't know if that'll work out but for me, that potential upside is really interesting. So, for example, if I put one dollar into bitcoin and it grows to three dollars, I’ll typically try to get that dollar out so that I can think about it in terms of I’ve already extracted the amount of money that I’ve put in. So, now, anything else is upside. If it goes to zero, it's not the end of the world, you haven't lost anything. I try to place aggressive bets and for me, I’m like pretty long in bitcoin It also has created this very interesting behavior where a 30% drop, you're kind of just “Whatever.” So, everybody's freaking out about the stock market dropping for obvious and good reasons but this happens in bitcoin land all the time. And so, it's created this weird behavior where it just doesn't faze me that much to see a large drop largely because I’m not throwing all my eggs in one basket but also because bitcoin has kind of conditioned me to not really think about the large fluctuations.
Jayneil: I have a similar strategy for going long and investing in the stock market. So, for me, I know my tendency to sometimes be impulsive. I work with a financial advisor, this really amazing guy that we've worked together for the past five years, and usually, I love to hustle, I like people who hustle. I guess the reason I kind of ended up working with him was number one, if you're a financial advisor, I want you to be independent, work for your own company because if you're working for somebody else, then why is the guy or girl you're working for not managing my money? So, he had his own company but what really hit me was he had this email framed on his wall where he had emailed Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, before he passed away. And Jack Bogle replied to him and I’m like “That's what I like because I also send cool emails to people.” And when I would go around, I would ask them questions like “What are the top three books you would recommend in the world of finance?” And then if I would get really weird answers or no answers, that's like a red flag to me because I’m like “I want you to be so passionate about this that you get hard on before just being blunt about it. I want you to be really into this field.” And our investment thesis is just like China and AI. I think I had read this book Chinese Disruptors in 2015 when I was at the airport. I saw the book and I read it and I found out about companies for the first time like Tencent. I knew about Ali Baba at that time but also Baidu. So, essentially, we just keep going long and long on those positions. And the way we've set up our stuff is, we use Fidelity. So, I can only view my stock portfolio. I can't sell or buy. I have to go through my guy. I have to go through him. So, this way, it's like a two-step process so I don't ever do something panicky like “Oh my God, I watched the news and I just sold the whole thing.” Things can happen like that. So, that's the way I go about doing my stuff as far as investing goes. And then, I think, similar to you, I believe you are also a big investor in books. And after reading your article, I do the same thing. If I’m at an airport and I see a book, I think something my dad taught me is just like “Don't try to save that 10 dollars trying to find a free PDF or try to borrow it from somebody. Just buy the goddamn book.”
Luke: Yeah, it's really interesting. Sometimes my wife gets mad at me because it's like an Amazon package. It hasn't happened the last month or so but there are some weeks where three or four packages will show up on my doorstep and they're all books. And sometimes, I honestly won't read the whole thing but if I can figure out one or two really interesting learnings from that book, it's paid for itself. There's just something about a 200-page book. That is someone's life experience that is compressed and is available for you to learn and to absorb and to use in your life. And maybe the entire thing is worth reading and maybe only part of it is but for 10 dollars, that seems like it's an obviously good deal. Now, the one thing I do think about is reading better books more slowly. So, there's a bunch of new books that come out all the time. Every year there's more and more books. I like to try to find those classics because if something was true a hundred years ago and you can pick up that book and read and things still resonate today, there's a principle or there's a nugget there that you should probably pay attention to.
I’ll give one a quick example. I read in a book, and this was on the concept of distributed teams, but back in the 1600s, the Hudson Bay Company, they settled in somewhere in Canada, north of Maine. I should know this, maybe Quebec territory. They were essentially a distributed group of people. They had different outposts. The central office was in London, I believe, and they were a distributed team. And so, what they would do is, as the executive team in London, they would do annual letters and quarterly letters that was kind of top-down communication but they also required that people at the outposts to write a report of how things were going and additional information that would help them make better decisions. So, when I read that and I thought about it in the context of what I’m building, it's like “That is a timeless principle that will probably be true 30, 40, 50 years from now.” So, if you can find the similarities that have existed for a long period of time, that indicates it's kind of a relatively immovable human behavior. And if you can latch on to that, you might be able to build something interesting. I don't know if that's useful but I love reading old books because it helps you better separate the signal from the noise. If something was true a hundred years ago and it resonates with you today, really think about that principle because the new books today, it's hard to separate if it's a trend from a principle that will be consistent 20 years from now.
Jayneil: You couldn’t have said it better. Something to be said about how a book ages.
Luke: Yes. Have you ever read, it’s one of the Nassim Taleb’s books, I can't remember the name of it, but he talks about this idea of the Lindy Effect? And the Lindy Effect is the thing he coined. It was named after this restaurant in New York City. I can't remember the name of the restaurant. Maybe it was Lindy or something, Lindy’s Diner, I can't remember, but the idea was it was this kind of run down place but it had been around for 60, 70 years and he came up with this principle that's like “Hey, if something has been around for 60 to 70 years, it will probably be around for another 60 to 70 years, you can use the same principle with books” like if something has been around for 500 years, it will probably be around for another 500 years. If you think about nuclear decay or something like you lose cells or you lose atoms over time and you can estimate the half-life of certain things based on, I don’t know if it's radiation or something else. That is a principle that happens in our daily environment. You can apply that principle in many different ways. I know I just totally screwed up the science project but there's a principle there. And I think there's something to take away, I guess.
Jayneil: Absolutely. I think one of the books that I recall is How to Make Friends and Influence People. Even though it was written a while back, I still find so many nuggets of wisdom when I read the book still applicable today.
Luke: Yeah, that's a great example of a book that will be probably still as prevalent as it is today 60 years from now.
Jayneil: Any last words of wisdom, Luke, for people looking to follow their dream or start their own company.
Luke: There's a lot of different directions I could take but I think the advice I have for someone if they're thinking about starting a business is you have to really be passionate and excited about the problem that you're trying to solve. And, for me, the way you get to that point is maybe you should scratch your own itch, you should try to find a problem that you experience on an everyday basis and try to solve that because if you can solve it for yourself, a) you can feel pretty good about that but b) there's probably other people that feel the same pain. That's part one. Part two is try to de-risk the business as much as you can. You don't need to go out and spend a ton of money to hire engineers or investing six to eight months in building a thing. You can cobble together different tools and different things to try to validate the behavior, first. With that being said, there's a hype bar if you're trying to build a really interesting product where you really want to find super smart people and work with them. That has been such a huge impact on me working on Friday is just working with people that I enjoy working with. It's had a huge impact on me. Solo entrepreneurship is super cool and kind of awesome if you can pull it off but, as you mentioned earlier on the podcast with the idea of remote work, at some point, you just kind of want to hang out with people, the social interaction is kind of a big deal. And so, for me, don't overestimate the value of having a team of people that you can work with. Sure, there may be interpersonal relationships or things you need to figure out but I think that's worth it. I think that's worth the effort.
I’m just trying to think of anything else. Scratch your own itch, try to de-risk the business as much as you can at least in the early days, try to find people that you could work with for a long period of time and then just don't over complicate things. At the end of the day, a business is a transaction. You have something of value that you can provide to someone who has a need. And that exchange, ideally, there's some value that is traded and that is just the basic mechanics of a business. And so, don't over complicate it. And then the only other thing I’ll mention is your customer can be a rich source of insight for where you need to take the business. So, get on the phone with them, talk with them, ask them questions on a regular basis. If you're super close to the customer, they're not going to tell you exactly what you need to build but you can pull the pieces together from four or five different customers and you can start identifying trends but you will not figure that out if you sit behind a screen. You have to get on a real-time call, you need that rich feedback loop and you just need to ask open-ended questions. And they will probably lead you down a path in which you can improve your business or can build something interesting.
Luke: That's my advice, I guess.
Jayneil: Thank you so much, Luke, for the words of wisdom and coming on the show, real time learning from you.
Luke: Well, this was a fun time, for sure.
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