Episode 98
· 01:29:43
If you're just a technologist and you're cranking out code, you're not an entrepreneur, you're a hobbyist. Yes. This okay. This is so important. This is what founders do.
Jack Bridger:I was thinking, one of the things I really wanna talk about was the, the developer, board.
Adam Frankl:Technical advisory board. Technical advisory board.
Jack Bridger:The tab. The technical advisory board. I feel like that's one of the huge topics.
Adam Frankl:Absolutely it is. I feel like I I think that's probably the most important concept in the book and the one I get the most questions about.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Because I feel like most people aren't doing this and
Adam Frankl:And they should. They should be. In fact, not most. Everyone should execute a technical advisory board. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:There's no reason not to.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Do you think this is, like, the one of the biggest reasons that startups fail?
Adam Frankl:Absolutely. No. Let let's say the biggest reason is this part of the interview?
Jack Bridger:Well, I was actually thinking it could be. Yeah. Like, it was like Sure. I feel like that would actually be on sound bite. I'm like, the biggest reason.
Adam Frankl:The biggest reason developer facing startups fail is they're not listening to developers. That sounds kinda obvious. Yeah. Right? Okay.
Adam Frankl:But what's actually hard about it is that if you're a developer and you found a startup to solve an important developer problem, your natural inclination is to write code. Yes. That's what developers do. Yeah. Okay?
Adam Frankl:And you put stuff out there and you want your users to use it and they use it and you write more code and they use the code. Right? Where in this formula are you talking to the developers and are the developers talking to you? Right? It's not gonna happen naturally unless you make it happen.
Adam Frankl:And so after decades of working at it, right, I finally put together the pieces and figured out, okay, how can I create a system that is gonna give me feedback in a way that's actually valuable to the people that I'm working with? Yeah. And it it's a lot of different pieces that all came together to form what I call a technical advisory board. Now the here's the crazy thing about TABs. I could talk about TABs
Jack Bridger:all day.
Adam Frankl:Okay? Is that number 1, they're not technical. Number 2, they don't give advice. And number 3, they're not a bork. Okay?
Adam Frankl:It's just the technical advisory board is what it's called.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Okay? So number 1, because lots of people have tabs. Right? They think, okay. I know some smart technical people that can give me advice, and my last boss thought I was amazing, and I'm gonna I wanna get technical advice from them.
Adam Frankl:And my dissertation adviser, I'm gonna call them up, and and they should give me technical advice. So this is what they think goes into
Jack Bridger:a
Adam Frankl:a technical, an advisory board that is technical. But that's not what a technical advisory board is about. Okay? You start with the problem first. I can look at the camera.
Adam Frankl:I can look at you. Yes. Start with the problem first. Okay? And then you want to talk about the problem with as many developers as possible.
Adam Frankl:This sounds so obvious, but it's hard. You have to figure out what was the way you're going to do this. Alright? And you need to come up with some assumptions about who is gonna have this problem. And then you need to reach out to people who might have the problem.
Adam Frankl:If they have the problem, they might respond to you. Mhmm. And then you wanna talk to them about the problem. And that's hard. Why is that hard?
Adam Frankl:Because you're a developer. Okay? You've you've thought about the problem, you've thought about solution to it, and then you spend years thinking about your solution. You think about different approaches. You think about why you're selecting the one you're selecting.
Adam Frankl:You think about the obstacles. You think about how you overcame the obstacles. You you think about all the different aspects of your solution. You think about the different trade offs you made, the different design decisions you made. Right?
Adam Frankl:What you learned across the way. Your mind is full of how it works. Okay? But that's not what developers want to talk about. It's what you want to talk about.
Adam Frankl:But it's not what they want to talk about. What developers want to talk about is the problem. Okay? And that's what you need to talk about. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:You need to talk about the problem with them. And most developers, believe it or not, are eager to talk about the problem. They're not so eager to talk about how your product works. Okay? Because they have problems.
Adam Frankl:They have severe problems. All developers have problems. Yeah. And guess what? They've tried to talk about it with people, and no one else cares.
Adam Frankl:Okay? Their partner doesn't care. Their boss doesn't care. Their kids don't care. Right?
Adam Frankl:And you get them on Zoom, and you're a startup founder, which immediately you have some level of credibility. Right? And you care about their problems, they won't shut up. Right? Yeah.
Adam Frankl:So it's a matter of the the startup founder needing to understand the problem deeply and developers needing to talk about the problem deeply, just get together and do this. Yeah. But it's so hard because it's not natural for anyone.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That so okay. So playing that back, it's like developers actually do wanna talk to you about a problem. Yes. And that's what you need to spend a significant amount of time.
Adam Frankl:The developers aren't gonna be reaching out to you, though. Right? That's not their job. Their job is to solve the problem. Right?
Adam Frankl:It's your job to find these developers and ask them about the problem and then listen to them when they start talking about the problem.
Jack Bridger:So how do we assemble this team this, these developers that we talk to? Do we talk about talk to them on an ad hoc basis? Like, what do you advise?
Adam Frankl:Thank you for that puffball question. Okay. The question is is how do you assemble them? Right? And the the first rule I'm gonna tell you is don't assemble them.
Adam Frankl:Okay? Even though I call it a board, you actually wanna have lots of conversations 1 on 1. Okay? You never wanna interview 2 people at the same time because all that happens is the faster person will talk and the other person will just nod their head or nod off or lose focus. Right?
Adam Frankl:So when you execute a technical advisory board, you're in the idea harvesting business. Right? You wanna listen and capture everyone's ideas, which means that you need to interview people 1 at a time because if you interview them 2 at a time, you'll lose half the ideas. Mhmm. Not all the ideas are gonna be great, but in order to find the great ideas, you have to listen to them all.
Adam Frankl:Okay. So there's no assembly. All tab interviews are done 1 on 1. Okay? And then how do you find people?
Adam Frankl:Well, to be honest, LinkedIn
Jack Bridger:is great. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right? Everyone you ever wanna meet is there, and their resume is on LinkedIn. Right? So you need to come up with some hypotheses. When I say you, I'm I'm assuming you're a founder of a developer facing startup.
Adam Frankl:Right? So you just come up with some hypotheses about who's influencing the adoption of your technology. Right? A wide range of of job titles. And then and companies and types of companies and countries, and then go look for them.
Adam Frankl:Right? LinkedIn is great for this.
Jack Bridger:And when you say influence, I guess you're saying that specifically because it's not just
Adam Frankl:it's not just developers. Yeah. That's that's another tricky part. Okay? So the metaphor that I like to think about is that if you're gonna get your technology adopted by an organization, right, it's like picking a lock.
Adam Frankl:Every cylinder is at a different setting. And you need to find the correct setting to open each cylinder. And if all of them are open, then the lock will open. If you miss 1, the lock stays closed. Okay?
Adam Frankl:So any decision to bring technology into organization is gonna go through multiple people with different job roles. Mhmm. Okay? The problem is if you just talk to one person who loves what you do, but you don't talk to someone who has the budget, someone who is in charge of security, someone else who's in charge of network administration perhaps, right, then their cylinder is closed, and they're gonna block this new technology coming in. And the symptom of this is you have good meeting after good meeting with the person who wants to bring you in, but nothing ever happens because the people who are blocking it, you're not talking to.
Adam Frankl:Mhmm. And they're happy. There are lots of people who are happy to block technology forever. It's like, no. I'm not gonna let any of these things come in.
Adam Frankl:They they upset, you know, the the balance of the project, and and there's nothing in it for me.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. So I'm not early adopters.
Adam Frankl:You well, yeah. Exactly. So you need to have a value proposition for everyone involved in bringing your technology into an organization, and you need to be talking to them. Right? And the only way to construct a value proposition is to understand what the problems of that unique role are.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. And the only way to understand what those problems are is to talk to people in that role.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. One of the questions I have on this, is that I've tried to do a lot of user research from before. Like, well, I have, like, a hypothesis and I'll line up, you know, say 10 interviews. And the the maybe the first what I often find is that you get, like, a mixed you get very mixed, like, reactions to the problem and stuff like that. It's, like, how do you like, do you try to find, you know, like, say someone's like, yeah.
Jack Bridger:This is actually a real problem. Let me show you how I do this. Blah blah blah. Like, I love talking about that space, and then someone else is like, I don't care at all about that. That's not a problem for me.
Jack Bridger:That Yeah. And do we just discard that that person doesn't join the tab or do we say, oh, that's actually let's look at what they are, what problems they do have, and then maybe we almost, like, change.
Adam Frankl:That's it. Everyone has problems. And absolutely, if you have if you have a product that solves a problem for half the people necessary to bring it into our organization but does nothing for the other half, it's going nowhere. Yeah. Okay?
Adam Frankl:You need to work with, quote, the other half, whoever they may be, understand what their problems are, and come up with a value proposition for them as well.
Jack Bridger:But what if it's like let's say I was, like working with someone that's like I'm like I'm trying to make it easier to like process for developers working with video pipelines or something, and then the first person I speak to is like, yeah, this is like we do this. It's like on fire. And then the next person I speak to is like, we don't do any actually. We don't do that. Like is it like within that sort of thing, how would I, like, bring it so it's, like, relevant to that person?
Jack Bridger:Would I still, like, discard them?
Adam Frankl:So first of all
Jack Bridger:I shouldn't say discard. Anyway, so it's a bad choice or what.
Adam Frankl:The what I recommend and this is this is a key problem because everyone's an engineer, and you wanna talk about the product. Yeah. It's burning. You need to talk about it. So we're already
Jack Bridger:doing that when I'm saying it to you.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Yeah. And you gotta stop talking about the product and start talking about the problem.
Jack Bridger:So how would you for that specific case, like, how are you
Adam Frankl:Okay. Maybe there is a question recommend. Okay. This is what I recommend is that you come up with a list of questions ahead of time.
Jack Bridger:Mhmm.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And you ask exactly the same question to everyone you get a TAB interview with. Yeah. And my favorite question is, okay, is what I call the magic wand question. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:It's not original to me. I mean, I read it in Cindy Alvarez's book. She wrote the book, you know, Lean Customer Development 10 years ago. Great book. Okay?
Adam Frankl:And the question is, if you could this is great. So in an interview, I can just, like, tease people out. I'm about to tell you, like, the best question ever. Wait and wait. No.
Jack Bridger:No. If you ask this long question, we need this long question.
Adam Frankl:If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about how you do the problem, right, what would it be? Don't worry about if it's possible, just anything. Okay. And then you shut up. Okay?
Adam Frankl:And people will think. And what you're redoing what you're doing is you're resetting the frame. You're no longer discussing a product that you may or may not have developed. Okay? Now you're you're in you're changing the frame in that person to be, okay, something about this.
Adam Frankl:What would I change if it could be anything? Okay? And half the time, they won't have a good answer, but half the time, they will. Okay? And then you follow that up with, if I could deliver that, how would that change your life?
Adam Frankl:Because the answer to that second question is what you're actually selling. Right? To to use a crazy example. So Steve Jobs had this quote about Henry Ford, right, which may or may not be true, which is when people if when Henry Ford said, you know, if you Henry Ford was supposedly said, if you if I ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Okay?
Adam Frankl:But think about it in this context. So people said, yeah. What could you change? I want my horse to be faster. And then you ask them, if I could deliver a faster horse, how would that change your life?
Adam Frankl:Okay. And then you think about it in the time frame of of Henry Ford a 100 years ago. And people could say, well, I could live in the country and work in the city. Or I could get my goods to market, you know, 10 times faster. Right?
Adam Frankl:These were what people wanted from a faster horse. And if you came up with another way of delivering those same benefits, then people would buy it. So that's why you need to understand what is the change in life you're going for.
Jack Bridger:Mhmm.
Adam Frankl:Right? I could deliver 10 times as much video in a day as I do right now or a 100 times or cut the processing time by a 1000 x. Right? Now you know what people are willing to pay for. Right?
Adam Frankl:So those are my 2 most favorite questions.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:And I've got a third question, my 3rd most favorite question, which is, what change is going on in the world that makes what we just described more valuable than it was 5 years ago?
Jack Bridger:That's a good question.
Adam Frankl:Okay. It is a good question. Because what you're looking for, you you want to create urgency Yeah. In your users. Not fake urgency, like, oh, sales and need to quote close this thing or the prices up.
Adam Frankl:But real urgency. And real urgency comes from the fact that there are always trends going on that are making people's problems worse. And you want to articulate the one trend that is making their life a little bit worse every day and that if they don't address it, one day it will be catastrophic. Because they are doing fine without your technology yesterday. Right?
Adam Frankl:They're in a job. They're delivering in their job. The fact that they have a job is proof that they are effective at their job, and yet you're telling them you're not gonna be able to live without this technology tomorrow. You're asking them to make a huge jump in belief. Alright?
Adam Frankl:So you've gotta reconnect this with with something they know to be true, which is there there is this big change going on in my industry. And the problem I'm working on is getting worse every day. And I can continue to ignore it, but I can't ignore it forever. Right? The catastrophe is just around the corner.
Jack Bridger:Okay. This is amazing. So I'm just playing this for myself. I hope everyone else finds this useful, but at least this is very useful for me. So let's say I'm looking at, like, video processing.
Jack Bridger:I understand that. I'm not, like, solution, but I probably want to talk to people that are doing video as developers using video some in some way. And I would speak to some amount, which I'm sure we'll speak about in a second, but some amount of developers and ask them, one, your first favorite question, which is
Adam Frankl:If you could change anything about video processing, video development, however you wanna phrase the question, what would it be? Don't worry about if it's possible, anything.
Jack Bridger:And I listen to this. Yeah. And then I say, if we were able to do that, what how would that
Adam Frankl:change your life?
Jack Bridger:How would that change your life? Okay. So the first one is the problem that I want to solve for them. The second one is how I present that to,
Adam Frankl:what they wanna buy. Yeah. Right? Why would they be interested in improving how they do video processing? Well, I I don't know.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Do you have any idea why?
Jack Bridger:I think the the thing that I'm working on is just making it easier. It's just, like, saving them a ton of time. Okay. Oh, no.
Adam Frankl:I'm I'm yeah.
Jack Bridger:That's Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Air being sucked through teeth there. Okay. I really hate the word easier.
Jack Bridger:Okay.
Adam Frankl:It's not the worst word, but it's pretty bad. Yeah. Okay.
Jack Bridger:Hey. I'm so
Adam Frankl:As a developer, when a vendor claims they're trying to help do something easier, it's like, yeah, I don't believe you at all. Yeah. Okay. So if I see the word easier and it's not immediately backed up by a testimonial from a developer
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Not only do I not believe you, but your credibility has decreased that you couldn't come up with something more specific about what you do.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. So I guess it would be more like making sure the FFmpeg is available. It's, you know, wrangling with s 3. It's like making sure there's enough memory to process the video that
Adam Frankl:That's better. Like It's better. Okay? But, anyway, let me tell you. I've I've already using my worst word, which is better.
Adam Frankl:Okay. Okay. Never use the word better. Just sloppy thinking.
Jack Bridger:Okay.
Adam Frankl:But for each of those examples you can run both, can you quantify it? Quantity numbers make it real. Okay? But it's still only half real. It's only actually real when a developer says it.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. So
Adam Frankl:because here here's the essential problem, what gets the heart of everything I'm doing. Okay? You may be a talented open source developer. You may have written books. You may have given talks.
Adam Frankl:Right? People believe what you say. But now you're a vendor.
Jack Bridger:Okay?
Adam Frankl:Your credibility has suddenly dropped to 0 Yeah. Because every other developer assumes correctly that you're trying to sell them something. Yeah. And we know how to deal with people trying to sell us something. So it's like, nah.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Close down. Close down. Right? And so if you're a vendor, you can make assertions, but don't think people will believe them just because you're making them, especially if you're claiming you're better or easier.
Adam Frankl:Okay? But the flip side of that is that developers don't lie to other developers. Right? You've been to a meetup or a hackathon, and someone gets up there and says, I wanna talk about my project. But before I tell you what it does do, here are the 10 things it doesn't.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Because no developer ever wants to be accused of exaggerating the capabilities of their project.
Jack Bridger:So when you do say something and you back it up?
Adam Frankl:Pack it up with social proof. So Uh-huh. For developers, social proof is the only proof. You can give demos, you know, till you're blue in the face and explain how it works, and you're still lying. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:But if a developer said it, then it's true.
Jack Bridger:That resonates with me. I recently started using Cursor, and it was only because 3 or 4 people pretty much implored me to use it. I was like, oh, it must be good.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. That's it. That's it. And so many people, they mistake their assertions for actual proof. No.
Adam Frankl:No one believes their assertions.
Jack Bridger:If I say something, no one's gonna believe.
Adam Frankl:If you say something as a vendor, it's false. Yeah. If you say something as a developer, it's true. It can be the same thing.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And I guess especially if it's a developer that they know, like a respected OSS developer.
Adam Frankl:And that's the that's the amazing thing about social media is you can actually influence people, and then the people you influence can influence people they know. Yeah. Right? Social media is a great gift for developers, which which leads into another whole topic. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Developers are the most social profession ever. And this comes as a shock. Right? Because most people, you know, they understand the stereotype of the lone developer
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right, with the weekend project. Basement dwelling. Basement dwelling. And while it's true that many introverts become developers, okay, it's also true that to be an effective developer, you have to communicate with other developers.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:And every developer that's out there is is has problems. And the first thing they think about when they see a problem is, I'm not the first person to have this problem. Yeah. Right? I'm gonna do you know, I'm either gonna search or I'm gonna ask chatgpt, right, or look in developer social media and see who else has had this problem and how have they attacked it.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Right? Every developer I know has at least 2 screens up. Right? People don't develop on one screen anymore unless you're on laptop in a canoe or something.
Adam Frankl:Right? But still, right, one screen is the code screen, and the second screen is the answer screen. Yeah. And you are looking for answers from what other developers have already done to solve this problem. True.
Adam Frankl:And you're gonna spend more time on the answer screen than you are on the code screen, especially if you're using source graph or
Jack Bridger:Shout out Sourcegraph.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Yeah. Full disclosure, I was the first VP of marketing at Sourcegraph. Great product.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And you have to say that because developers always have to be truthful. Right?
Adam Frankl:Yes.
Jack Bridger:Full disclosure. Actually, I we didn't do an intro. So Oh, intro. Hi, everyone. You're listening to Scattered Dervitals.
Jack Bridger:I'm joined today by Adam Frankel, who is, who goes by the name occasionally of Triceratops because you were, the VP of marketing at 3 different
Adam Frankl:I was the 1st VP of marketing at 3 developer facing unicorns.
Jack Bridger:So JFrog
Adam Frankl:3 horns. Yeah. JFrog, Sourcegraph, and Neo 4J.
Jack Bridger:And you have now written a really good book, which we if you're watching the video, you can see out there. Developer facing startup, which is really good, and I think everyone should read it because you've from my perspective, here's my social proof, is that you've done a very good job at putting, like, formulas to something that feels very non formulaic. And I can say that as someone that's now interviewed, like, a 100 people about how to grow developer tools startups. I often feel quite muddled because people have very different advice and, you know, there's many ways to actually approach it. And what I like is that you've created a very, like, systematic approach that someone can follow and, succeed.
Jack Bridger:And I'm sure that maybe there are other ways to do it, but I think it's incredibly good to actually just have a process that you can follow, especially as devs, we like processes, we like documentation.
Adam Frankl:Yes. Yes. And yes. So, yeah, that's why I wrote the book. Well, actually, I can talk first of all, the whole book is designed to be a process, and in fact, I'm turning it into a course.
Adam Frankl:So next month, in October 2024, I'll be launching what I call Founders Academy, which is, a 12 week course for founders of developer facing start ups. The reason why this exists is developers are different. Okay? And all of the strategies for selling products to consumers or selling products to business executives don't work for developers. Okay?
Adam Frankl:But there are strategies that do work. They're just different. And so the problem that I see over and over again is that developer facing start ups will bring in a highly successful go to market team, a VP of marketing, a VP of sales that has succeeded in selling to business executives. And the first thing they're trying to do is duplicate the programs that have succeeded for them in the past, maybe over and over again. And they don't work with developers because they don't understand developer culture.
Adam Frankl:And 6 months later, they throw up their hands. They say, developers hate marketing. Yeah. The company hasn't advanced. Right?
Adam Frankl:And then the founders are left saying, you know, back to square 1, right, where we're not getting adoption. Okay? And this is a really important problem to solve. And let me let me tell you why it's important. Why is it that I do what I do?
Adam Frankl:Because, that this is the age of software. Alright? I don't think anyone doubts that, and yet, software still sucks. And I asked myself, why is software still so bad? It's not like we don't have the smartest people in the world working on it.
Adam Frankl:I think we do. Okay? The answer is the tools are still bad. So then it began thinking, why are the tools still so bad? The smartest people in the world use these tools.
Adam Frankl:Why aren't they making better tools? And the answer is, they are making better tools, but they don't understand how to get widespread adoption of these tools. So that's when I thought, okay, if I can do one thing, if I can help developers creating tools for other developers get widespread adoption of their tools, right, then I can reduce the suckiness of software in the world and everyone will be better off. So that's my personal goal. Right?
Adam Frankl:I need to make as many developer facing start ups successful as possible in order to accelerate the change in software that we all wanna see. That's it. If I do that, then I'll retire.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I think that's actually an incredible goal, and I definitely resonate with it. I feel like especially as, like, developers are making the world better, if you believe that, which I do. It's, like, giving them the tools they need to do the a job better, and as you said, adoption is.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. And I'm I'm certainly never claiming that I've figured out the only way to be successful. Alright. There are there are many ways to be successful, but I have figured out some baseline truths. Right?
Adam Frankl:And you can apply them. You have to customize them for everyone's unique situation. But here is some some fundamental things that you need to do if you want a product to be widely adopted by developers.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And I think the, for most people who are building a developer tool startup, they probably don't really care in a sense if they get, like, how their product becomes adopt you know, widely adopted. It's more like they care about the problem that they're solving. And so if you can just give them a thing that works, it's like they're not gonna be like, oh, no. I I don't like this style.
Jack Bridger:I want my own style that's like, you know?
Adam Frankl:Great. Make your own style. But but there are certain truths here.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right? And and there will be exceptions. Right? But if I think back in my career, I've actually been a cofounder or early executive at a dozen venture backed developer facing startups. Interesting.
Adam Frankl:First 9 of them all failed.
Jack Bridger:That's also I feel like that's that makes the free the work so much more interesting as well.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. And well, I don't I don't say they all failed. Some of them some of them were pretty successful, but but they were not
Jack Bridger:Not like unicorns. Rational
Adam Frankl:software, they were bought for a $1,000,000,000 by IBM. This was like 30 years ago. So I could say they were they were pretty good. But you there
Jack Bridger:wasn't a
Adam Frankl:But today's standards
Jack Bridger:There wasn't like a 4 horns dinosaur that you wanted to
Adam Frankl:No. There is a 5 horn dinosaur,
Jack Bridger:but there
Adam Frankl:was no 4
Jack Bridger:horn dinosaur,
Adam Frankl:but no one knows the the coin, you know, winteris offs or whatever. It's like triceratops, I'll stick with it.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Alright. So but here's the difference. The difference between the ones that succeeded well well, actually, let me give you more of a story. Right? So I'll give you my personal story.
Adam Frankl:How did I end up here here in this living room in San Francisco?
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right? Is that I'm I'm a former developer. Former. I haven't written code in professionally in many years. Right?
Adam Frankl:But I started off writing code. I have an engineering degree. I worked for Lockheed Skunk Works writing code for the f 22.
Jack Bridger:Which is super cool and the sort of thing that should also be its own podcast anyway.
Adam Frankl:Its own but Lockheed Skunk Works is a crazy place. And and it is an interesting angle because you compare Skunkworks with today's startups, and they have some things in common and some things are entirely different. Okay? I can get to that later if you're interested.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Okay? But while I was there, we had a presentation from the CEO of a DevTools startup. And I told told him, says that we like the tools. We're gonna buy them. But you don't really know how to talk to developers.
Adam Frankl:And that's a crazy comment. I was like 25 years old. And that crazy comment turned into a conversation that turned into a job offer that I took, and I became that startup's first product manager. Right? That was about 30 years ago.
Adam Frankl:And, you know, ever since then, I've spent the last 3 decades studying how developers adopt technology. And I've gone through many different phases in my career. Right? The the first phase was, okay, you just need to be really clear about what you're doing. Right?
Adam Frankl:Because we're engineers. We're selling to other engineers. Right? Let's describe how it works. That was the first thing I tried.
Adam Frankl:It didn't work. And yet I tried it over and over again. I thought if I just try harder, it'll work. It didn't work. Okay.
Adam Frankl:Then a big event in my career was the HBO series Mad Men. I love this series. Have you seen it?
Jack Bridger:I've seen some of it.
Adam Frankl:To me, it was absolutely amazing. Don Draper. Right? Don Draper. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:And I had this brilliant idea. Okay. This is what I'm missing. Right? Marketing is supposed to be about being clever.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. No one was more clever than Don Draper. And so I began adding cleverness to everything I did. Clever campaigns, clever taglines, clever websites. Right?
Adam Frankl:And believe me, I was clever. I could sit in the conference room and be clever with the best of them. But the problem was it didn't work. Okay? And I would try and be more clever.
Adam Frankl:It still didn't work. Okay? But I did this for years. Then Steve Blank came along. Right?
Adam Frankl:And he really changed everything. Right? His first book, Four Steps to the Epiphany, which is almost unreadable, but it was still an amazing book. Yeah. And if you take the gist of that book, right, what he recommends, I also took his course, right, is
Jack Bridger:Oh, cool.
Adam Frankl:Get out of the building and talk to customers. And so I thought, okay, What if I got out of the building and went and talked to developers? Right? And for someone who had spent years being clever in conference rooms, this was quite a revolution.
Jack Bridger:An epiphany.
Adam Frankl:But I said, alright. I'll try it. An epiphany. And it worked. Okay.
Adam Frankl:And the more I talk to developers, it's hard to talk to developers. I figure out ways to do that and how do you find them and what do you talk to them about? How do you think about what they're telling you? Right? And it it took a lot of trial and error to figure out a good way to do this, but all of the best ideas for how to market and promote and sell developer tools all come from users.
Adam Frankl:Right? So part of the hard part is being able to sift through everything developers tell you and say, this is a really good idea that can scale, and this one, perhaps not. But at the end of the day, right, what what's the one lesson here? You can skip paying $20 for the book. Talk to developers.
Adam Frankl:That's it. Talk to developers. Now if you don't know how to do that or you think you need some help in how to do that, then you can spend $20 and buy the book. That's it.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's amazing. And so we're kinda bringing it back to, to the stuff we're talking about with, like, the technical advisory board. That is how you that
Adam Frankl:is how you do it. Okay? But first of all, there there's so many different aspects of this. Right? The first aspect that I wanna communicate is you don't pitch people and say, let me get on Zoom and show you my product.
Adam Frankl:Okay? That that sounds awfully tempting. No one wants to see your product. Okay? The way that that's interpreted is, okay, this is a sales call.
Adam Frankl:This is a cold call, which no one wants to be interrupted. It's a bad use of developers' time. You're gonna show me your product in the hope I'm gonna buy it, or if it's free, adopt it. And it's like, this is a sales situation then. I know what to do in sales situations.
Adam Frankl:Okay? Nothing. And I don't give you any information. Right, because I know that we're actually negotiating or we're about to be negotiating. And what's gonna tell you will be used against me.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Okay? So don't get into premature sales situations. And so instead, alright, one of the the rules I've learned is you don't you don't they can't buy anything. So don't ask them to buy it.
Adam Frankl:Right? But they can give you advice. So let's ask for advice. Right? And also, you don't wanna have a one off meeting.
Adam Frankl:You want to have a relationship. Yeah. So the way I structure a technical advisory board, the way I teach people to do this, is you ask for a 30 minute meeting once a month for 6 months.
Jack Bridger:Mhmm.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And each aspect of that is really important. First of all, if the problem is important to people, they have 30 minutes a month.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Okay? There's no way it says, I can't fit that into my schedule if the problem is important.
Jack Bridger:Mhmm. Right? So it's a good filter. Yeah. For you to understand if it isn't important.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Because if they don't agree to that
Adam Frankl:Then it's not important for them. It's a good thing for you to learn that if no one will ever take a 30 minute meeting with you, then you are not attacking a problem that's important to anyone. Time to rethink what your startup is
Jack Bridger:about. Yes.
Adam Frankl:Okay? But it's also important that this is not a transactional call. This is a relationship. That's why you wanna say, I wanna do this every month for 6 months. Okay?
Adam Frankl:Because they're not gonna trust you the first time, first call. But by talking to them over time and by bringing valuable information to your TAB members, you can establish a trusted relationship. Now at the same time though, you're not getting married. Right? You say right up front, it's for 6 months.
Adam Frankl:Right? And then we're done. Right? I'm not gonna, you know, be too embarrassed to tell you 8 months later that we need to call this off. No.
Adam Frankl:We're gonna meet once a month, 30 minutes for 6 months, and then we're done. Yeah. And it's enough time for people to actually tell you what they're thinking.
Jack Bridger:That's that's, I I really like that actually. And how many people would you typically
Adam Frankl:That's a great question. I recommend when you're starting off that you aim for 50 people.
Jack Bridger:50 people?
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's that's not it's quite a lot, but I found that half the people you talk to, you're not gonna get anything valuable from.
Adam Frankl:Right? The way you overcome that is you talk to more people. You don't try and figure out ahead of time who's good and who's bad because that's not possible.
Jack Bridger:And what would you consider maybe this is obvious, but what would you consider as, like, a good good conversation and what's not a good conversation?
Adam Frankl:That's a great question.
Jack Bridger:Okay. A
Adam Frankl:great conversation because the point of these interviews is not to have a conversation. Okay? That's something that people take a while to get used to. Conversations, they start on topics, they go to other topics, they roam around. These 30 minute calls are not conversations, they're interviews.
Adam Frankl:Okay? Ahead of time, ahead of the first call, you write down exactly the questions that you wanna ask your TAB members. Okay? And, I have some recommendations in the book, but you can customize your own questions. But my real recommendation is you ask the exact same questions to 50 people.
Adam Frankl:Mhmm. Because by asking the exact same questions, including the ones that we talked about earlier, by asking the exact same questions, you become connoisseurs of the answers. Yes. Right? And you can tell, oh, this person said exactly the same as that person or here's how they're different.
Adam Frankl:And you say, well, someone from a large company says this, People from startups say this. Right? And you start really getting into details on what the difference between them are. If you just have conversations with people, then there's no way to analyze all that information.
Jack Bridger:That makes sense.
Adam Frankl:Okay. There's there's another thing that we haven't touched on here, which leads back what I talked about earlier, the wide variety of personas. Yeah. Right? You need to include representatives from every type of persona that you're dealing with in your technical advisory board.
Adam Frankl:Right? You can't just talk to developers. Right? If you have to talk to their managers, right, this depends it differs by product. Okay?
Adam Frankl:You might have to talk to CTOs. You might have to talk to vice presidents of engineering. You might have to talk to c CISOs, chief information security officer. Right? You might have to talk to SREs.
Adam Frankl:Right? You might have to talk to platform engineering. There are all sorts of different specialties, right? And in my point of view, if they've ever written code for a living, they're a developer. Mhmm.
Adam Frankl:Okay? Because what makes developers different from everyone else is that the culture around writing code is different. And it creates this extremely skeptical, prove it to me culture.
Jack Bridger:And in terms of categorizing as developers, is that important because you would group everyone?
Adam Frankl:Everyone yeah. And I have to say even though CTOs and VPEs, right, they're technically not writing code anymore. They used to write code. Yeah. Culturally, they're developers, and you need to talk to them because they will have problems.
Adam Frankl:And often, the problems first of all, no one knows what anyone else's problems are. Yeah. This is just the truth. You can sit next to someone for 10 years
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And yet you're asked what are his or her top three problems, You'll have no idea. You know your own problems. You know them pretty well because you were thinking about them last night at 2 in the morning. But your friends' problems, you've got no idea.
Adam Frankl:Right? And if you talk inside the organization, there's an engineer, a development manager, a CTO, their problems are completely different. Yeah. And if you wanna design a product, an enterprise technology product, you need to understand the problems at each of these different levels so that you can come up with value propositions that are appropriate to each person. And how
Jack Bridger:many of each persona would you say? Because you've got, like, 5th like, 50 altogether.
Adam Frankl:Well, the first thing to do, right, is is when you start off, make a hypothesis about every persona that could possibly be interacting with you. Interesting. Most of the companies I deal with, they come up with a list of around 12 different personas. Okay? Then when you're constructing your tab, you need to invite multiple representatives of each of these personas and interview them.
Jack Bridger:And multiple is like At least 2.
Adam Frankl:5. Ideally, 5. Okay. You get what you can get. Okay?
Adam Frankl:And then you discover if they answer in effectively the same way to your questions, then you can collapse the personas together. So you might think the VPE and the CTO are different personas, but when you're asking these questions, they give you fundamentally the same answers. Okay. From your perspective, it's the same thing. It's the technology executive.
Adam Frankl:Okay. So after going through this process, it's not unusual for someone to think they have 12 personas, but no. By the by the end of the 1st 30 days, they know they really only have 3 or 4.
Jack Bridger:Yep. So I feel like the if we're talking to founders, I feel like the reaction is, okay, 50 people, once a month, half an hour, You know? And there's always work. There's always work around the time. Right?
Adam Frankl:Think, oh my god. That's like my
Jack Bridger:full time job almost.
Adam Frankl:Yes. This okay. This is so important. This is what founders do. This is what founders do.
Adam Frankl:I'm repeating it. Because a founder is not like an executive at a miniature corporation. Startups are not miniature corporations. Corporations exist to execute a proven business model. And you bring in executives who are expert at their functional area to execute.
Adam Frankl:Whereas what founders do is founders are searching for a new business model. This is not original to me. This is Steve Blank. Right? And as a founder, how do you search for a new business model?
Adam Frankl:Well, you need to talk to people. You need to talk to a wide variety of people in a variety of different roles and then analyze what you've learned. This is the essence of being a founder. Okay? If you're just a technologist and you're cranking out code and you don't care about finding out why people need to adopt your product, then you're not an entrepreneur.
Adam Frankl:You're a hobbyist. Nothing wrong with being a hobbyist, but don't mistake it for being an entrepreneur. Am I going on thin ice here?
Jack Bridger:Great. I wanted to let it sit. I feel like that's let's scratch the previous sound bite. I feel like that's the sound bite. If you're worried that you have so much code to write, you have so many things to do, and you don't have time for this, then you're actually kind of thinking about this backwards.
Adam Frankl:Correct. Correct. Yes. Then and there are some definitions here that I like to use out. Like like inventors are people that create new technology.
Adam Frankl:Innovators use new technology to do old processes in new ways. That's the very definition of the word innovator. So if you're in a startup, you could be an inventor. You're probably not an innovator. Your customers are the innovators.
Adam Frankl:They're using your technology to do some existing business process some way new. Right? Some way better. Yeah. Right?
Adam Frankl:Even though I hate that word, that just means all the different ways that it could be changed. Okay. But then the other important thing is what is an entrepreneur? Right? An entrepreneur is someone who discovers a need and fills it.
Adam Frankl:Discovering a need is half the battle. Right? If you're just inventing stuff without discovering the need for it, that's a hobbyist. Nothing wrong with hobbyist inventors, but they are not entrepreneurs. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:That's the job, I guess. Yes. That's the essence of the job.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. There's a there's a soccer player, football player in, in England or in the UK and every time, like, someone says, like, oh, this this guy's great at defending or whatever, he's like, that's your job. That's your job. Anyway, I feel like that's it. It's like customer is, like, actually talking to users.
Jack Bridger:Like, if we say a company is good at that or a founder's good
Adam Frankl:at that, that's your job. This is the founder job.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And that the kind of a founder's job is kind of to put themselves out of a job. Right? At some point, you could say, I figured out the business model. I figured out what product we need, and I figured out how we're gonna get it to market and why people are gonna use it and how we're gonna support them.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And then I can just hire experienced executives for each of these functional areas, right, and leave because the company will just run on its own. Okay? I don't actually recommend that, but that's theoretic but people do that, and that's theoretically possible. The companies that continue to innovate, right, are the ones that maintain the the founder at the very top.
Adam Frankl:Paul Graham just wrote an amazing essay about that. What timing?
Jack Bridger:Founder mode.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. This is what founder mode means. Founder mode means you are paying attention, right, not to everyone, but to a certain set of people that you are using to figure out where the market is going so that you can make changes to your product, to your company, to your go to market model, whatever needs to be changed, right, to go fit that new emerging need in the market. Yeah. Right?
Adam Frankl:And that's the difference between an an executive driven company, which exists to perfectly execute executive and execute a proven business model and a founder driven company that's constantly searching for a newer and emerging business model.
Jack Bridger:I really want people to do this. I feel like I I wanna do it for myself. I I I'm like I put my hands up like I have not been doing this and it seems so obvious and so when you explain it like this, it's like
Adam Frankl:When I explain it, it sounds like why I haven't been doing it. But yeah. Yeah. It's hard because it's a change in cultural mindset. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:It's like, oh, I'm an engineer. I'm a good engineer. I'm a brilliant engineer. I see solutions to products. I should be able to create solutions to this product.
Adam Frankl:Right?
Jack Bridger:I feel like the more even the more common one because let's give people the credit of like, they are like, you know, they they they're not just building a solution because they've seen the problem themselves, and so they're, like, I'm an expert in this problem because I experienced it themselves. But I but I think it's still people need to do this. Right?
Adam Frankl:Yeah. You're right. Just because you have an idea does not make you an expert.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. It
Adam Frankl:means you have an idea. Yeah. Alright? You get to Or even even experience the idea. You've experienced it.
Adam Frankl:You that that means you've experienced the problem. Or if you study if you study it and you do research on it, right, you could become an expert. And when I say research, research is not something that you need, you know, a lab, you know, or a PhD to do. Research, it's only 2 parts to research. 2.
Adam Frankl:That's it. Okay. Number 1 is you have an original idea. Number 2 is you publish. That's it.
Adam Frankl:Okay. You can do research in 15 minutes. Okay. Because if you're in academia, well, you've got to publish papers and get them peer reviewed. Right?
Adam Frankl:In our business, no one does that. I guess some people do that, but no one reads those papers. Right? When I say publish, I mean put out put out a blog post. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Okay. Put out a podcast. Just write on LinkedIn, this is the problem. Right? And here's how I'm attacking it.
Adam Frankl:Because developers consume what other developers say, so be out there creating it, doing having original ideas and publishing on that. And then when people when other people appreciate what you're doing, they follow you. Right? This is how you judge someone's credibility. Okay?
Adam Frankl:And how do you know if someone is an expert? Okay? It's if you put out original ideas and other experts in the field start quoting you and retweeting you and reposting you, that's how you know that they're an expert. And when you have a podcast and you interview other experts in the field and other people refer to these things, that's how you become a world expert. Because developers are very influencer driven.
Adam Frankl:Alright. That's another thing I enjoy saying because it sounds counterintuitive. Yeah. Okay. It's like, no.
Adam Frankl:We're not watching, you know, Instagram models. You might be watching Instagram models, but that's that's something else. Right? When I say developers are influencer driven, every developer has a set of O'Reilly Books in their bookshelf. True.
Adam Frankl:And we can go look at what's on your I'd be very curious what's on your bookshelf, right, from O'Reilly.
Jack Bridger:For one one thing is that.
Adam Frankl:Oh, there it is. Great. Yeah. Alright. And these are the influencers.
Adam Frankl:You follow them on x. Okay? If you're giving a talk at a conference, you you wanna you wanna hear what they're gonna say. You watch their videos on YouTube. Okay?
Adam Frankl:Why? Because they've given you valuable information that has helped you do your job better. Okay? That's that they they built trust over time by being an expert. Your goal as a startup founder is to become a developer influencer by being recognized as an expert in the problem you're solving.
Adam Frankl:Right? That's the model that that I would hope you would aspire to. And what is the path to become? You just okay. The first step, the first most important and inescapable step is you start posting on social media.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And you don't talk about how your product works. Okay? You start talking about the problem. Okay.
Adam Frankl:Where did the problem come from? Right? What's the state of the problem today? What are people doing about it? Where is it going?
Adam Frankl:What are the influences that are making this problem worse? Okay. How could this problem develop in the future given the all sorts of trends that we're seeing? Okay. You write about that.
Adam Frankl:Okay. And what happens is when people engage with you on social media, you follow-up with them and invite them to join your technical advisory board and then you talk to them. And every time you have a technical advisory board interview, you say, oh, I I got a good idea from this interview because if there's at least one idea from every interview. Anonymize it. Right?
Adam Frankl:Summarize it in a small amount of words, and you put it out on social media. And someone else will engage with you. And you reach out to them. You say, I wanna talk to you. Right?
Adam Frankl:This is how you this is Yeah. You start by searching blind on Linkedin. It's hard. And then you've built up a social media presence as you establish yourself as an expert on this problem. Mhmm.
Adam Frankl:When people respond, you reach out to them. Talk to them. Yeah. Okay? Put out what you learned.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And then you will you will slowly start establishing a reputation as, oh, here's this person who is studying this problem. Yeah. Right? When people have this problem, you might get referred to them, hopefully.
Adam Frankl:They'll start following you. If you've learned something useful about the problem, they'll get something useful from it. They'll engage with you. You bring them onto your tab. You learn more.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. It's it's a virtuous cycle.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. And it sounds actually a lot more accessible than the pure facts of, like, being an expert because I feel like when you're solving a problem that you're not being very specific on, you could end up down in, you know, an area that you're actually not
Adam Frankl:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:An expert.
Adam Frankl:Here's the key. You could go buy a 100 books and lock yourself in some dusty library and say, I'm gonna make myself an expert.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Okay. And I guess this is what people used to do in the old days 20 years ago. They used to go get PhDs in this. Right?
Jack Bridger:Yes.
Adam Frankl:Don't do that. Don't do that. Alright. Instead, become an expert with a problem by interacting with people who experience the problem, have the problem, maybe they solve the problem every day.
Jack Bridger:And that's because people care about, people don't care about, like, clever No. Things. They care about actually solving their problem in your
Adam Frankl:That's correct. Right? And remember, right, vendors, 0 credibility, developers, a 100% credibility. So if you say, I'm an expert. I've studied this problem for decades, and here's the answer, like like I'm doing in my book currently.
Adam Frankl:Right? Right? You think about how you would believe that. And if you had someone else that said, I talked to a 100 experts in this field, and here's what they widely agree on. It's like, I'm ready.
Adam Frankl:You tell me. I wanna know that.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I think you actually told me to write the I should write an article that's like I spoke to a 100 Yeah. Founders.
Adam Frankl:Well, first talk to a 100. Yeah. You you have talked to a 100. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Well, I didn't
Adam Frankl:follow your Scaling Dental Experts.
Jack Bridger:I didn't follow your process though. But
Adam Frankl:Well, my process is designed to help you. You can escape from it whenever you need to. But if you don't know what to do, follow the process.
Jack Bridger:Well, actually, the something I realized, like, when I I I did start looking into writing that. And one of the things I realized is it's really hard because this because it's not structured, for me to actually gain those insights and, like, to narrow it down. It's like everything is kind of chaotic and
Adam Frankl:swirling. Yeah. That's why I like to teach people. You see, if you if you had this exact same five questions that you asked every single person, you'd now have a structure to do an analysis on.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. So do that. Yeah. That's that's true.
Jack Bridger:I actually wanted to go back to, the tab and just ask, like, 2 questions.
Adam Frankl:Ask me anything.
Jack Bridger:So the first one was, if there's multiple cofounders, should should they split this or should they do, like, one person takes the lead on this?
Adam Frankl:Yeah. You know, as long as it gets done, I I've seen success both ways. Okay. Okay. So both people can jump into this and, you know, with permit ask permission to record Yeah.
Adam Frankl:When you do it. 99% of people say yes. Okay. Okay. After you make a recording, make a transcript and keep that inside the company.
Adam Frankl:Keep it confidential, but share it among all of the founders. All the founders should be able to know what's going on with every member of your team. So you can have definitely have multiple people share the work, or it's not atypical for founders to split up and say one founder, you know, isn't comfortable talking to people. They're gonna focus on writing code. The other founder is gonna take care of the go to market and they're gonna do all the interviews.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That makes sense. The second question is, which I think is gonna be I would imagine people at home that there are some people who will listen and they'll say, you know, this makes sense. This is a good thing, but we have customers, we have users, we're growing, we're busy, great idea, but we don't. It doesn't apply to us.
Jack Bridger:Do you think that
Adam Frankl:we're not Yo. First, if for any start up, if you have users and you have customers and you're growing, congratulations.
Jack Bridger:Okay. Right?
Adam Frankl:You're not doing it wrong. Okay. Okay? The question is, can some of these techniques help you? Okay.
Adam Frankl:Right? And that's for you to decide. Right? One of the risks that every company faces, startup or not, is you get captured by your customers.
Jack Bridger:Mhmm.
Adam Frankl:Right? And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Clayton Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor. He wrote about this in The Innovator's Delenta. Says because you have customers and you love your customers and you talk to your customers a lot and they are solving one set of problems.
Adam Frankl:And so you design all of your future products to solve their problems. Yeah. And what you miss is the fact that there's another set of people for whom your technology could be solving a different problem. Mhmm. Okay.
Adam Frankl:Perhaps one that's much bigger. And Interesting. You know, Clayton Christensen has plenty of examples of companies that were really good in their business but failed to realize that there was a whole new set of customers that are coming along. Like, why is it today that that DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, did never make a PC. Right?
Adam Frankl:They owns the minicomputer market. Right? And they kept putting out better and better minicomputers. This is probably dating a guy actually programmed a PDP 11 back in the day. Right?
Adam Frankl:And and they never jumped to PCs because they thought they were toys, and their customers used PDP 11s, and they were serious people, and they completely missed out. Okay? The, other examples are the floppy that this is from Clayton's own book. He talks about the, floppy disk and then solid state storage. Right?
Adam Frankl:And the disk manufacturers, right, they're used to always sell to PCs. Right? And we're making the floppy disc better every year. Yeah. Right?
Adam Frankl:And they missed the idea that there could be whole new devices with solid state, right, like all the early music players. Right? And that market was 10 times bigger than all of the floppy disc going into every PC. Mhmm. Okay?
Adam Frankl:They could have been there, but they didn't. They didn't see how their technology could develop.
Jack Bridger:So they should most for most founders, you would expect that whatever stage they're at, they're doing, they've got a technical advisory board.
Adam Frankl:Okay. So you don't have to call it a technical advisory board. Okay? But it's kind of the difference we just discussed about founder mode versus executive mode. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right? Executives are cruising along, executing a business model, and every year they do it faster and cheaper.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Whereas founders are always looking for
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:The next business model. And the only way to look, they're not looking for it with microscopes or with telescopes. They're looking for it by talking to people. Yeah. And in our business, that means talking to developers, which is not something that comes easy to anyone.
Jack Bridger:That makes total sense. And I think that, in that talk that you're referencing, like, well, that's sort of that essay. He he references Brian Chesky a lot from Airbnb, and Airbnb is something that we would all I mean, I would be surprised if anyone listening has, like, a Yeah. A, like, a more valuable company that they're building than, like, Airbnb and if he's still doing founder mode.
Adam Frankl:I love the Airbnb stories. Alright. And for people that don't know how they got started, right, the founders spent an extraordinary amount of time working with their early customers, right, both their early renters and their early apartment providers. Okay. And Chesky himself talks about the example.
Adam Frankl:He went to see every the first ten people that rented their apartments on Airbnb, he went to see every one of those first ten face to face. Okay? One of them hauled out an notebook and said, hey, every, you know, renter that I've had in this apartment, I've taken notes about how long they stayed, what they liked and didn't like about the apartment, and why they rented with us. Would you like to see that notebook? And Chesky said, yes.
Adam Frankl:And, like, that was the first bible of Airbnb. I think. That was the interview in which in which he learned that you need to take photos. That no one rents apartments that are just have textbook descriptions.
Jack Bridger:And then they would take the photos and then they would
Adam Frankl:people take crappy photos. Yeah. The first thing Airbnb did was they, yeah, they contract with photographers to make sure they had high quality photos of apartments and houses.
Jack Bridger:And he wouldn't have known that without
Adam Frankl:Unless he went and talked to people. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:So okay. So it might look different that you're kind of more like walk in the factory floor sort of situation of, like, I suppose actually no factory is actually
Adam Frankl:Well, okay. There's another There's another story about Steve Jobs. I mean, there are lots of Steve Jobs stories and some of them might actually be true. Right? One of which is that he used to get out of his uniform and then lurk in the Palo Alto Apple Store.
Adam Frankl:Here he was, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and he'd forbid the staff from pointing him out or even looking at him. He'd just hang out in the corner and see how people interacted with all the stuff they had for sale.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right. Imagine the CEO of a Fortune 500 company just spending a couple hours in a retail store
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Just observing. It's that important. That's founder mode.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. So undercover boss kind of situation.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Except it's not the employees
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:You're worried about. It's your customers and users. Remember, in in developer business, often the customer and the developer and the user comes to completely different people. And when I say different people, I mean they have different sets of problems. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:And you need to have a value proposition for both the developer and for the person that signs the checks if they're not the same person.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. This is this is amazing. So I'm gonna say my takeaways and just like there's a summary because I I really feel like this one is actually like people really should be like. For me I'm gonna be following this.
Jack Bridger:So it's like build up your technical advisory board. So about 50 people of, like, different personas and kind of like narrow it down. Set up, monthly 30 minute calls with them, and have, like, a series of questions that's, you know, I mean, you've got them examples in the book, that you work through such as and it's very much, like, problem driven, what would that mean to you, and, the the third one that you said, how would I plan?
Adam Frankl:What is making it worse? Yeah. Yeah. What is the change in the environment?
Jack Bridger:Oh, yeah.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Okay. So let me go in on a couple things. Right? One of which is when are you done?
Adam Frankl:Right? After 6 months you're done with the TAB. And the answer is not every TAB member last 6 months. Okay. Some drop off because they don't want to participate anymore.
Adam Frankl:Some, you drop off because you think you've learned everything you can from them. Okay? I think in an ideal situation, you're always recruiting new TAB members. Uh-huh. Okay?
Adam Frankl:In my ideal situation, you know, a TAB founder would talk a company founder startup founder would talk to a TAB member every day, 5 days a week, 30 minutes for the rest of the life of their company. Yeah. Right? And this is how you stay in touch with what people are thinking. Not just your customers.
Adam Frankl:Some of your TAB members can be users and customers, and some people are not yet customers Yeah. Right, to learn what their real problems are and how they change. Yeah. So it goes on forever.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Well, it also reminded me one thing that you say is don't don't pay people for this. Right?
Adam Frankl:Oh, no. No. A tab member is not a paid role. Right? That's an that's an important point because there there are some people first of all, there are other approaches to startups that are not focused on developers.
Adam Frankl:Right? And there's such a thing as a customer advisory board, right, which is a related but distinct idea. Sometimes to get business people on board, you have to sign up them to add them to your customer advisory board, and sometimes they will insist on payment. The closer you are to revenue producing activities like, if you want sales VPs to join your customer advisory board, they're gonna wanna be confident. Okay?
Adam Frankl:It's just a fact. And it'll probably be worth it. Okay? But developers in general, no one turns down money, but this is not a paid position. The principle is appreciation, not compensation.
Adam Frankl:Okay? If you pay people cash, it'll feel like they're being bribed, and no one likes that. On the other hand, you have stickers? Tell me, do you have stickers?
Jack Bridger:I do.
Adam Frankl:Socks, a hat, coffee mug, t shirt?
Jack Bridger:We are we are a very frugal version. I have so many from other people there. Stickers. I've got a million people. Stickers.
Adam Frankl:Yes. Okay. This is what they're for. Yeah. Okay?
Adam Frankl:It's not for showing off your own startup. It's so you can give it to TAB members so that they can brag to their peers that, oh, yeah. I'm on the technical advisory board of this startup. And later on, when they make it big, they can brag about how they got involved when you were still tiny. Okay.
Adam Frankl:That's Appreciation not compensation. That's brilliant. That's really useful. I could go on.
Jack Bridger:No. This is so okay. But I think we've got so we've got that. We've got technical advisory board. We've I think there's a lot of stuff that People a lot of work to do.
Jack Bridger:And then that can form the basis of the content that you put out
Adam Frankl:because Woah. Okay. So we're just getting started with the TAB. Right? So when you do these TAB interviews, right, then you need to analyze them.
Adam Frankl:Right? And then Woah. Yeah. Turn what you've learned into a story. Okay?
Adam Frankl:Because remember early on, I talked about the difference between a grocery list and a story. Yeah. Okay? Now that you've talked to a lot of people and you've learned what their problems are, alright, and what their fears are and what their goals are, alright, put this in a story format. Stories are not complicated.
Adam Frankl:Okay? But they are essential. They can be short. They can be 6 sentences.
Jack Bridger:What's an example of a story?
Adam Frankl:Okay. Let me tell you the structure of a story. And and when I say tell you, I'm just telling you something that you already know. Because at least in 9th grade English, this is covered in the US. Okay?
Adam Frankl:Story has 3 parts, and some of you know this, and some of you have degrees in literature, and you're thinking he's just crazily simplifying it. That's true. I've tried to simplify this as absolutely much as possible. Okay? But all stories have 3 parts.
Adam Frankl:Okay? The beginning, the middle, and the end. Okay? The beginning of a story introduces the characters. Okay?
Adam Frankl:There's always a hero, and it's not the founder of the startup. Right? The hero is your user. Okay? There's always a villain, and the villain is probably the most important character in your story, and you should spend a lot of time thinking about who your villain is.
Adam Frankl:Okay? Then there's a wise adviser.
Jack Bridger:Villain villain is the problem.
Adam Frankl:The villain is the problem or or something that's causing the problem. Yeah. Alright. Something that you can you can personify out there. And villains, they have to be easily identifiable, universally loathed.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And, you know, make them as colorful as you can. Disney knows villains. Right? One of the characteristic of Disney villains, they're colorful, they're intelligent, and they're proactive.
Adam Frankl:Mhmm. Okay? Because if your story doesn't have a villain, it's not a story. It's boring.
Jack Bridger:What was the villain for, I think you've told me before, for Neo 4 j. It was like the
Adam Frankl:Oh, the villain was, connected well, the story was interesting. The villain was a graph data not a graph. The villain was a relational database. Right? Their relational databases, they're massive.
Adam Frankl:They're everywhere. They're good for many things. Okay? But they don't help you when you have connected data. Right?
Adam Frankl:In fact, they slow you down. They're they're hard to maintain. They are offer poor performance on your most important queries. Okay? And so you're not you're never gonna get rid of them.
Adam Frankl:Right? How are you gonna solve the problem? And the and the answer was, we're gonna give you a gift. Right? So so you have a hero.
Adam Frankl:You've got a villain. You have a wise adviser, okay, which is either Gandalf or Obi Wan Kenobi or you. This is what startups. The startup is the wise advisor. That's how they fit into the story.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And there's always a gift. And the gift can be a magic ring. It can be a lightsaber.
Jack Bridger:Or it's a secret.
Adam Frankl:Piece of software. Yeah. Could be invisibility cloak or it could be a piece of software. And I'm guessing for most of the people watching this, it's gonna be a piece of software. Right?
Adam Frankl:And then the other important part of the beginning of a story is there's an inciting event, right, that the villain is doing their evil things in the background, but but something specific, right, causes the hero who is always reluctant to say, I need to go address this villain. Right? And it could be, you know, dwarves showing up on the doorstep. You know, it can be a message from a princess. Right?
Adam Frankl:Or it can be, here's a problem might you know, that my relational database can't process this complex data and with insufficient time. Right? They're all inciting events. And then the hero is off on their journey guided by and then that that's it. That's that's all that makes the beginning of a story.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:The middle of a story. Okay? The hero on his way to, you know, defeat the villain meets an obstacle. Using the advice from the wise advisor and or the magic gift, the gift, right, is able to overcome this obstacle and move on. Repeat.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Okay. And that's why the middle of every adventure book or science fiction book is so long. Okay. It's all about the hero just getting to the next challenge.
Adam Frankl:Obstacle, What do we do? The obstacle is terrible. Oh, here's the gift. Here's the advice. We're able to overcome it.
Adam Frankl:Repeat over and over again. Okay? And then you finally get to the end. Yeah. Okay.
Adam Frankl:And what happens in the end? Using every the hero using everything that the hero has learned from overcoming all these obstacles and the advice from the wise advisor and the gift confronts the villain, right, defeats the villain or at least chases the villain off for now. The villain may show up in the sequel. Okay? And then the hero is transformed, gains some wisdom, and then shares that wisdom with the community that they came from.
Adam Frankl:Right? So you think about if your users could actually solve this problem that you are now the expert in, right, what would their life be like? What could they achieve? And you need to interview your users who achieve that.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right? And then that's what their peers wanna know. Right? Once I solve this problem, then what will my life be like? Once I'm able to, you know, correctly, you know, produce all this video, right, how will my life be changed?
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And that becomes the content that you put out?
Adam Frankl:Well
Jack Bridger:Okay. So I think that's the part.
Adam Frankl:That that's the wisdom part. So that Yeah. The end of a story, what does the story end with? It ends with sharing wisdom. Right?
Adam Frankl:So you can write it up as a case study.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right? But whenever you do a case study, right, and this is something else that drives me nuts. Okay? So a user says, I love this company. It's great.
Adam Frankl:Right? Yeah. That's a terrible quote that informs no one of anything. Okay? But when your quote is from a user that says, I was able to increase my video throughput 80 times.
Jack Bridger:I have
Adam Frankl:no idea that means anything. But but, oh, that that creates desire among that user's peers. It says I also wanna increase my video throughput by ADX. Okay? Now I'm incented to actually learn about this piece of software because I know what I can do at the end.
Adam Frankl:Right? The great quote, no one's decided to do anything. Yeah. That's like it's probably your brother-in-law.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Exactly. It's like whatever. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Right? Do I by being able to increase my video through, but ADX, my company is a unicorn. Or I can go home and see my kids at 6 PM. Whatever whatever the object of the
Jack Bridger:real object of the desire is. And so that so when we talk about like you were saying to post everyday. Yeah. It's like this sort of the stories and the lessons that the gifts that people got from the advice.
Adam Frankl:The gifts, the challenges. I like challenges. Yeah. Challenges make great posts. So and so had a challenge.
Adam Frankl:Here's how he overcame it. Interesting. You don't need to post the whole story every day. Yeah. You just need to post one little bit of it.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Right? This is a very old way of communicating. Right? Before the novel, right, every story was posted in installments.
Adam Frankl:Right? There's only when publishing changed that we used to get that now we get these 200 page.
Jack Bridger:Oh, yeah. We get yeah. True. Yeah. That's a good point.
Jack Bridger:That makes sense. Okay. So if if people are doing these things, that's they're gonna get pretty far with
Adam Frankl:You will get better if you have a story. At least have a reason for people to be interested in you. Yep. Okay? Yep.
Adam Frankl:Now you gotta map out the the journey that all of your prospects are gonna make as they, you know, as they adopt your technology, and that's something that everyone does wrong. Let me tell you why they do it wrong. Right? This is the lead funnel. Right?
Adam Frankl:Developers are not leads. I'm gonna say this again. Developers are not leads. The lead funnel was not meant for you. The lead funnel was a brilliant idea designed to model how business executives adopt technology.
Adam Frankl:Okay. I'm talking about the awareness, interest, consideration, decision, and you map how business executives go through each one of these phases and what you need to do to move them from each phase to the next. Okay? Yeah. Works great for executives, not for developers.
Adam Frankl:Okay. So I have a completely different model because I've been a developer. I've studied developers about how developers adopt technology. Right? It's not a funnel.
Adam Frankl:Okay? I call it the the dream sequence. Okay? And that stands for discovery, research, evaluation, activation, and membership. And I can talk about each one of these things in exhaustive detail if you're so interested.
Jack Bridger:Can we get the, I guess, like the
Adam Frankl:Yeah. The the the okay. I'll just talk about the first one. Right? Which is technology discovery.
Adam Frankl:How, you know, what do you start with? You're not gonna buy ads. Right? You're not gonna buy billboards. Right?
Adam Frankl:How do you people learn about you? Well, it's just so happens. Right? They used to you're a developer. Everyone watching this is a developer.
Adam Frankl:Okay? And every developer has a fear. And the fear that they have, they have many fears. Well, the fear that's common is that the years or maybe decades they've spent acquiring skills will be made obsolete because the technology is always changing. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:And they'll be of no value to their organization or any organization. Yeah. Right? So to combat this fear, every developer has a personal technology discovery loop. Okay?
Adam Frankl:There are certain things you do every day, every week, every year. You go to certain conferences, you read certain blogs, you go to certain meetups. Okay? And the reason you're doing this is you wanna stay abreast of what's going on in your field. Right?
Adam Frankl:Part of this is driven by ambition. Purpose is also driven by fear. And so that means that unlike business executives, developers already have this loop. You need to understand for your particular group of developers that you wanna influence, what is their technology discovery loop? Mhmm.
Adam Frankl:And can I get my story and insert it into their discovery loop? Right? So that they find it and are interested in
Jack Bridger:it. And does this come back to the tab a little bit? The tech
Adam Frankl:supervisor Because as a researcher out what the tab is, you ask them. Yeah. You ask them. There's no other way to do it. Where do
Jack Bridger:you discover stuff?
Adam Frankl:Exactly. You describe that loop and says, what what do you do? Right? And, you know, what conferences? Because in every technology area, there are specific ways that this technology is advancing.
Adam Frankl:You simply there's no substitute for finding people in the field and asking them how they find out about new technology. And the reason you have to ask so many is that any few people can give you off the wall answers. Right? If you talk to 50, you'll have a pretty good sense of where most people are getting their information from. Right?
Adam Frankl:They're also getting their information from influencers and you can figure out who are the key influencers. Okay? And then another great research project is figure out who are the top 40 influencers in my particular field. Okay. Write down their names and then go go search them or just ask chat gpt.
Adam Frankl:Where did they publish on social media? Right? Are they all on x? Right? Are they all on LinkedIn?
Adam Frankl:Maybe they're all in one Reddit, you know, subreddit. Right? If that's the case, fantastic. They've already assembled your audience for you. All you need to do is come up with a story that's interesting to the crowd that is already appearing there.
Jack Bridger:Yes. This is this is I actually I hear peep some people have marketers have said to me that they ask, like, the team, like, what, you know, the or like the target market, like, say iOS developer, like, what newsletters do you subscribe to or whatever. And it always struck me as, like, that's a that's a great idea actually to, like, ask people rather than to just Google, like, top iOS newsletters or something.
Adam Frankl:Would you believe it if you Google top iOS newsletter and then some vendor said, oh, yeah. I'm the number 1 iOS newsletter. I'm the number 1 iOS newsletter.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Exactly. It's like usually one of them has made the list and, like, you know, so that struck me as, like, a good idea, but this seems like an even better idea to just do it, like, systematically. And you just, yeah, because I always, even like, you know, some I used to kind of run newsletter and I feel like with Skin Dev Tools and stuff I've kind of seen this sort of thing and it's like it would be so hard to know, like, even the value of, like, sponsoring a certain thing. And I feel like this would actually help you a lot because if you know that even if the circulation is not high, but key people that, like, it keeps coming up again and again and again.
Jack Bridger:It's like Yeah. This is actually really influential even though the numbers don't.
Adam Frankl:Oh, let me tell you something that makes it even more complicated and important, okay, which is not everyone is an early adopter. Okay. So you think you've defined who your ideal user is and what the problem they have, right, but only a small percentage of them are early adopters. So you might find someone who is absolutely perfect for your product in every way, but when you talk to them, they say, yeah, I can't wait to use it. Call me back when you have 10 reference customers.
Adam Frankl:And this is personality. There's nothing you're gonna say that changes whether they're an early adopter or not. And so that's another reason why you need to talk to so many people.
Jack Bridger:I heard someone say the other day that they ask, cost or, like, potential, I won't say leads, developers, like, when was the last time they worked to a startup, Like, bought something from a startup?
Adam Frankl:That's a great question. And what was the answer? I'm dying.
Jack Bridger:Well, no. I think it's just like he would just, like, use that as a filter. So if the answer is like
Adam Frankl:Never. Actually we
Jack Bridger:haven't, then probably they're not gonna suddenly start buying
Adam Frankl:from you. Correct.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Okay. So we've got sorry. We've got dreams. So discovery.
Jack Bridger:Discovery and then research. Research.
Adam Frankl:So someone discovers you in their technology loop. Yeah. Right? And then they say, oh, I'm gonna research this. I'm gonna and usually that takes place on your website.
Adam Frankl:Okay? In other words, that I've made a decision. I'm gonna invest 30 seconds of my valuable time in understanding what you do. Yeah. Alright.
Adam Frankl:And and if you're really good in that first 30 seconds, maybe I'll extend that to 2 minutes. Maybe I'll extend that to 5 minutes Yeah. Max. Okay? And in that allotted time, you need to explain your story.
Adam Frankl:Okay. Who is the villain? What the pain that you solve? What are the symptoms of the pain? Someone might not realize they're in pain until you tell them what the symptoms are.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Okay. And what the inciting event is that would cause them to actually use your product. Okay. And the goal is they're spending research, they're spending 30 seconds on you.
Adam Frankl:You wanna take up a spot in their brain. Mhmm. Okay? Because are they gonna go through the rest of the adoption process? No.
Adam Frankl:Right? They're gonna get back to work. All they did was they were in their just technology discovery loop. They found something interesting. They went and did research.
Adam Frankl:I learned something. Now back to work. Yeah. Okay. This is what kills the lead metrics for developers.
Adam Frankl:It's developer curiosity that is driving this and it's great and it's wonderful. Okay? But they are not leads just because they're coming to your website. Mhmm. And every oh, you can track website visitors, you can get Google Analytics in real time.
Adam Frankl:Watch them come and go. Right? You want to just live in their brain and you want to, hopefully, maintain some type of relationship with them. Right? Maybe they'll follow you on social media.
Adam Frankl:Okay? Give them something easy for them to do to stay abreast of what you're going on because you want to be reminding them that you exist. Okay? Because when they do have that inciting event, right, that may be a day later, maybe that's a minute later, maybe that's a year later. Right?
Adam Frankl:You wanna be the product or the company they recall because then they're gonna start evaluation. And they're and, you know, evaluation is the next phase after research. And this gap between research and evaluation is what kills most b to b marketers. People are coming to the website, but they're not evaluating the product. That's right.
Adam Frankl:They're not evaluating it. They just did research on it to figure out what it was. They maybe they'll never have the inciting event.
Jack Bridger:But they have, like, some memory of, like, if
Adam Frankl:I ever get
Jack Bridger:this exciting event,
Adam Frankl:then go, you know, look up this this
Jack Bridger:product again.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Now evaluation also doesn't mean what you think it means. Right? Evaluation people want to believe that I make certain claims about product on my website Yeah. And people wanna evaluate it to see if it actually meets those plans.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Right? That would be so easy, but that's not what evaluation means. Okay? Evaluation from your actual software developers point of view is my shop is a unique snowflake.
Adam Frankl:Right? There are 40,000 frameworks, tools, libraries and platforms out there and we have a unique configuration that no one else has. Yeah. Now I need to understand, if I bring in a new piece of technology, what's it gonna break? Because if it breaks anything that's part of my essential existing pipeline, then I'm done with it.
Adam Frankl:I'm assuming that if you're in business, you do what you say you do. Yeah. Right? But are you gonna do it for me? Right?
Adam Frankl:That's what an evaluation. And the constraint on evaluation, okay, is it has to be done in a limited amount of time with no support. Right? Here's the model that I tell people about and this is from my own experience. Right?
Adam Frankl:This is a Fortune 500 architect. Right? They've been grappling with this problem. Right? And on Friday afternoon, they go home.
Adam Frankl:None of their approaches have solved it. And they say, I remember I read about this startup that has a different approach. Okay. So they're gonna spend Saturday Sunday with a burner email account downloading your software
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Adam Frankl:Trying to get it to work. Because if they can get it to work, Monday morning stand up, you're gonna tell everyone, hey, I found a possible approach. Yeah. Right? If they can't get it to work by Sunday afternoon, they're not gonna say anything and the evaluation is over.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That is very interesting.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Are are you ready for an anonymous burner email doing self download over the weekend and not calling anyone to get your software up and fully functioning in an enterprise environment?
Jack Bridger:Yeah. No. That's so interesting and you would just see like, random Yeah.
Adam Frankl:I'm begging you, don't block gmail.coms because people from the largest companies don't wanna give out their email. They don't want sales people calling them. So they create burner emails just for downloading software.
Jack Bridger:Wow. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Almost like the more legit they are, maybe the more likely to answer.
Adam Frankl:More likely they are to come up with a set of fake emails that they'll never use again. Yeah. Because they know people are just gonna after them. Right? They, you know, you can't reveal that you're a senior architect Goldman Sachs.
Jack Bridger:I was literally gonna say Goldman Sachs over the next
Adam Frankl:couple of years. Enterprise sales guy calling you in SAS.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That's that's amazing. Okay. So, discovery, research Evaluation.
Adam Frankl:Activation. Activation. So I've made the decision to bring in this technology. Right? How fast can we go from I've made the decision to do it to I'm actually getting value?
Adam Frankl:Right? Yeah. Speed is the key. And the the book that is a must read on this is Kathy Sierra's Making Badass Users. Right?
Jack Bridger:Because It's not a
Adam Frankl:ever the first when you first bring technology in, right, you suck at it and you know you suck. Right? And the different the question is, how fast can you go from I suck at this to I'm actually a badass at this. I'm good
Jack Bridger:at this.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. Okay. Not how fast can you get it installed and working. How fast can you make the user feel like they are the master of this? Right?
Adam Frankl:Speed is the key. Okay? And then the last part of the sequence is membership because developers, they hate to buy, but they love to join. Okay? This and I talk about community there there are people who study communities.
Adam Frankl:Right? Weeks has a book. The Art of Community is another great book. Right? Community developer community is our own thing, but this is where they fit in the sequence is that you need to have a community.
Adam Frankl:Right? Because developers want to talk to other developers not who are using your product, but who are solving the same problem. Yeah. Great communities are formed around people that are trying to solve a problem together, not people trying to use a product together. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:So that's it. Dream, d u r e a
Jack Bridger:m. Dream.
Adam Frankl:That replaces the, funnel.
Jack Bridger:Okay. That's amazing. Okay. That that makes that that makes so much more sense than, yeah. The traditional funnel.
Adam Frankl:Yeah. This is not rocket science. This comes from observing people over long periods of time.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. It's, it's definitely it's not rocket science, I guess, but it's it's very difficult and I feel like I like the way that you framed it because for me the challenge is just knowing what things not to do and and how to have, like, a structure because, like, it's, like, just to sit down and be like, oh, mate. There's so many things I could be doing. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:That's that's actually that's the heart of it. That's the hardest part about being a founder. Okay. Is every day when you wake up, you make a single decision. How am I gonna spend the hours today?
Adam Frankl:Yeah. That's it. Yeah. If you nail that, everything else will fall into place. Yeah.
Adam Frankl:But that's really hard for people to do.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I feel like that's that.
Adam Frankl:That's the hardest thing.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And I You know I think you've done a very good job of of helping people to
Adam Frankl:have a framework
Jack Bridger:of how to spend that time. So, yeah. I've re I've already recommended this publicly but like, you know, it's a great book, it really is. So Great.
Adam Frankl:Well, I'm gonna do some shameless self promotion here. I've built a course around this book and it's a 12 week course. It's cohort course, so it's not self paced. You learn at my pace, not your pace because I will push you through. And you also learn from your peers as you do it.
Adam Frankl:So if you're interested in a course, visit my LinkedIn. I think there's a link to the course from there. It's built on Mighty Networks, which is a great platform Amazing. Launching in October 2024. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:And you've already I I'm gonna get you on public record that you promised me that I can join it as well. Right?
Adam Frankl:Yes. I will send you the link. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Okay. So hopefully see some of you on it. Yeah. Adam, oh, do you wanna just say, like, any, like, websites and stuff that you've got to go to? I guess Adam Frankel on LinkedIn.
Adam Frankl:My LinkedIn profile. Yeah. Everything starts in there. Cool. Right?
Adam Frankl:I'm I'm not gonna set up a separate website trying to sell people things.
Jack Bridger:Okay. Amazing. Well thank you so much for your time and that was really really It's
Adam Frankl:a pleasure And actually, this was more fun than I thought.
Jack Bridger:I will take that as a compliment. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Adam, and thanks everyone for listening.
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