Abram Isola CTO of Inkit

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Today, we are talking to Abram, the CTO and co-founder of Inkit, and we discuss the sexy parts of direct mail, being a young entrepreneur, and owning mistakes. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. So I'm checking out your LinkedIn and your profile. I'm reading all about you, getting all pumped up to talk to you. I see you've got a new website coming out, and I'm curious to know more about it.

(Abram at 00:00:44) Yeah. So the website is called The Entrepreneurialist. It is more or less going to start out as essentially just like a chronicling of my crazy startup-y kind of stuff. And that mostly just comes from the fact that I've had a whole bunch of friends ask me about, you know, how do you start your businesses? How does that work? You know, can you help teach us how to start a business? And of course, I can always tell them, hey, you know, there's Gary Vee or Pat Flynn online. If you want to start a business, go ahead and check them out. They'll help you out through their own education. But, you know, it's the personal relationships part of it. So what I'm going to be doing there is essentially just a mix between kind of chronicling what I'm doing as a CTO right now and kind of going forward in business, but as well as teaching other people just kind of the basics of, you know, how do you start a team, what is ownership structure, stuff like that. So the very un-CTO-y side of things that I deal with on a daily basis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) Well, that's super interesting. I mean, that's why I started, you know, doing this podcast and the book and everything was more untechnical things. So a lot of the CTOs, we have, you know, technical developer backgrounds. And then when we really get into the groove of being a CTO, it's a whole lot of nontechnical experience that we need, you know?

(Abram at 00:02:21) Oh, definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:24) And the other thing you brought up was super interesting. I can recommend Gary Vee or I can recommend, who is the other one, Pat Flynn, and those individuals. But they're so big and they're so far away and disconnected that, like, the people who know you, they want to know — they, like, they know you. They want to know what you're doing because there's this added benefit of actually knowing the person and then leveraging their experience.

(Abram at 00:02:51) Yeah. So I mean, there's a couple things that are actually happening there. I mean, the first really is that personal relationship, like I already mentioned. And you kind of mentioned this as well. Like, someone can look at the success of Gary Vee and just be like, oh, I will absolutely never get there. But one, yeah, most people probably won't ever get there. But two, that's not the point. You know, there's something that people are missing when they're talking about, you know, when they're comparing themselves to kind of these figurehead people, and there's a reason why you shouldn't be doing that. There's a lot of people, particularly people that I have personal relationships with as well, which makes this very convenient, but there's a lot of people who want to talk with someone who they can relate more to, which is kind of where I come in because I have those kind of personal relationships and because I'm not necessarily at the level — okay, I'm definitely not at the level of Gary Vee or Pat Flynn or anybody else up there. So with these people who I've been talking with, I'm just kind of inherently more relatable because I'm closer to where they are. Right. And that's something that's been kind of pushing me to start making The Entrepreneurialist in general, is just that, you know, yeah, there's a whole bunch of people out there who can teach people about how to do businesses of many different kinds. But that's not the point. You know, my own personal experience does have a benefit to some people who might have similar paths. And especially in my case where a lot of the people who I've talked to are, you know, developers wanting to become CTOs or wanting to start their own thing. And while it's not really — it actually definitely is not an uncommon path to go from a developer to a CTO — a lot of people think it is because when they see their CTOs, they expect and they kind of end up looking at them as a kind of a business figurehead because they're not necessarily saying they're coding every single day. Right. They were usually a developer too, unless it's a massive Fortune 500 company, in which case it's probably a little bit different in most cases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:18) And there's definitely a lot smaller — there's a lot more of the smaller startup-style companies than there are of the, you know, Fortune — it's Fortune 500 because there's 500. Right?

(Abram at 00:05:28) 500.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:30) So there's, like, 10,000 startups, like, every year or — I don't know. I just made that up, but I'm sure there are.

(Abram at 00:05:36) Well, I know last year in Minnesota alone, there were like 3,500 corporate entities created. So, you know, corporate entities — they could be used for anything, but I'd bet there's a significant percent of them that were actually created as, you know, like, top-level startups, if that makes any sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:55) Oh, yeah. I want to talk about something that I used to be kind of sensitive about talking about. But I have your picture here, and I feel like we would share the same sentiment. You look young. Okay?

(Abram at 00:06:10) I am currently 21. I started programming when I was six years old, and I took off from there. I actually started my first company when I was 10. Got a decent amount of success from there, and that's what I do. So, yes. I am very young for what I do. It is something that I'm very open about because it's obvious — that's not something I can hide. But it doesn't bother me, you know. Being young just means I've got more time to think about what I'm doing right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) Absolutely. My dad would take me to work with him when I was a child, like, six, eight years old. And he would sit me in the cubicle with him, and I'm 30 now. Right? So he would sit me in the cubicle, and I would play on the computer and ultimately ended up writing code and so on. But I've always — so I got in really young, and then I started making apps, and I sold my first app at 18. And it wasn't that — there's being young. There's being 18. There's being six. There's being 10. And then there's looking young. Like, I look young. Like, I have a baby. I have a four-month-old baby, and I go out with my wife, and, like, we get carded at dinner.

(Abram at 00:07:31) Nice. Well, hey. Maybe that's not a bad thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:33) Right? When I'm 50, like, I'll look like I'm 30. Right?

(Abram at 00:07:37) Hey. Maybe people will think you're much younger for quite a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:41) Yeah. So do you ever face any issues with that? Do you ever face any, like, people being negative about being young?

(Abram at 00:07:48) When I was much — yeah. I say much younger. Well, okay. I mean, it was because I was literally half my age. When I was much younger, yeah. I saw it all the time. It was one of those things where I would end up going to a meeting and they'd be like, okay, you know, kid, step aside, let your dad do the talking. Actually, I'm pretty sure someone actually said that one time. But, I mean, it never bothered me because, one, I knew that I wasn't going to do anything to convince those people anyway. There was literally nothing I could do to convince them other than showing them the actual talent afterwards. But these days, you know, I don't really see a lot of issues coming from that. Generally, I don't know. It feels like to me that now that I'm past 20, most people are able to get past the fact that I'm young. Yeah, they still realize that I'm much younger than them, but they feel like they're not dealing with a kid anymore. Right. You know what I mean? So I don't really see any issues with that on a daily basis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:10) Good. I love seeing the world's, like, coming around. It's helped a lot because there's been a lot of positive press the past decade about younger entrepreneurs, especially with the technology.

(Abram at 00:09:22) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:23) So that's definitely helped pave the way. I like your site. I think it's really pretty. Inkit.io. Looks like you guys are doing — oh, okay. Sorry. Inkit.io.

(Abram at 00:09:33) Yeah. No problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:34) Looks like you — direct mail API, and you hit up real estate companies. And is that what's going on with that?

(Abram at 00:09:41) Yeah. So it's a marketing automation platform for direct mail. We, you know, my co-founder and I thought it up when we were kind of looking through what is the hardest part that we deal with when we deal with marketing. Because I had previously worked at a company here in Minneapolis that is really big into marketing automation. And, you know, I had my own frustrations, you know, on companies in the past trying to market to different audiences. And one of the things that we both kind of came up with is that direct mail sucks to manage. It just does. If you have to do it manually, it's not an easy thing. It's a long process. It can take weeks. What happens when, you know, the printers have a miscommunication and then there's issues there? But the beauty of it all is that it can be automated like most things these days. So we've, you know, gone through and done the work to automate the process, mostly so that now there's just a platform that's ready to go for our customers to design their postcards right inside of our template builder, and it will be rendered and shipped out as soon as you press send to your list. Of course, automations are features that are coming as well. You can tag them and segment them in different ways. I mean, it's a marketing automation platform, but for direct mail.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) Excellent. It looks like you found your stride in the real estate space?

(Abram at 00:11:22) Yeah. That's one of the stronger cases. The other one is B2C. Literally retail companies. There are several niche retail companies that are obviously, in many ways, competing against Amazon that have found pretty great success with direct mail and, you know, are — some of them are using our platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:51) Nice. How did you meet your — how did you meet your cofounder, Michael?

(Abram at 00:11:57) Through the area here. He and I have known each other for a few years now. We were kind of just talking about, you know, the state of tech in Minneapolis and the state of just kind of business in Minneapolis in general because there's sort of a whole group of people in Minneapolis in business and in tech who think that everything is going great, and then there's a whole group of people who think that, man, everything is going terrible. And the real big difference there is the people who generally think it's going terrible are the people who are working at the really major corporations like the Fortune 500s, because over the past five years, the Fortune 500s in Minneapolis have not been doing stellar, unfortunately. But a lot of — there's a whole bunch of these smaller companies that are starting to kind of flourish and come out of the woodwork. So, you know, we were just talking about that kind of stuff one time at lunch in the skyways, essentially. And we became friends. For better or for worse, we became friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:05) Oh, yeah. For better or for worse. Dude, the co-founder is a relationship, like a marriage. You guys are locked in together, and you have to make it work.

(Abram at 00:13:14) Oh, yeah. Yeah. My fiancée says that she's actually the third wheel most of the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:21) Yeah. My wife makes jokes all the time because of how much time I spend with business and different co-founders and stuff like that. Oh, man. Do you guys have a physical location, or are you guys all remote?

(Abram at 00:13:35) Yeah. We do have a small physical location. I mean, we're a very distributed company. I've got a couple engineers out in Ukraine, actually. I've got an engineer locally, and I've got, you know, a team of various other people through marketing. But we're a very, very distributed company, so, you know, most people are actually rarely in the office anyway. But we do have a physical location inside of downtown Minneapolis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:07) Excellent. Well, just a couple of you, just two or three of you there?

(Abram at 00:14:11) Yeah. Usually. Usually, it's the co-founder, me, and the local engineer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:17) Is that Noah?

(Abram at 00:14:18) Yeah. That's Noah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) I'm creeping on your About page right now, by the way.

(Abram at 00:14:22) I figured you probably were. That's okay. That's okay. Definitely feel free to look at everybody there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:30) I won't go back, like, to 2010 in your Instagram, but I will check out the About page.

(Abram at 00:14:36) Hey. Fair enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:37) So do you find direct mail sexy? Like, how do you keep excited about direct mail as a — like, you're a modern technology professional and you're an interesting, hip individual. I see you're stylish by your different pictures. And, like, how do you keep excited about direct mail?

(Abram at 00:14:55) Well, it's not necessarily the direct mail per se. It's more the process around it and how we can use technology to improve it. So I mean, a postcard is a postcard. A lot of people would kind of agree with that statement. I mean, it's been around for quite a while. But the process around how to actually send them out and the information you can use to send the pieces out more efficiently, coming up with good ways to solve the problems around how do you fit dynamic fields of, you know, in many cases, undefined length when you're going to expose it to the internet, to a literally physically defined piece. And then there's the stuff about, you know, how do you price a software that is literally not about the software itself, but about the physical product that it produces afterwards, where more often than not, the customer actually doesn't ever end up seeing the postcard. They see a rendering of it, but they don't necessarily see the physical postcard unless they send one to themselves, which some of them do because they like to kind of either show their boss, like, hey, there's this great tool, and it made this, and this is what it looks like after it went through the mail. But you have to have kind of these controls in place so that renderings don't go wrong, and then you send out 100,000 pieces that don't look right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:41) You do manual review or?

(Abram at 00:16:45) We don't generally. No. There is — when we're going to make a deploy, we do have a QA person who will kind of test out the rendering process and just kind of check on it on both sides to make sure, hey, does this look the way that we expect it to?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:02) What did you just say? You said a QA person?

(Abram at 00:17:07) A QA. Quality Assurance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:09) Got it. Because I was like, is there a new role I don't know about? Has marketing done this yet again?

(Abram at 00:17:15) No. Well, I mean, probably. But probably. But I mean, no. We didn't invent anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:23) Okay. Because they do that. Marketing does that. They just come up with titles, and all of a sudden, they're like, oh, does your company have a Chief Heart Officer? It's like, oh my God.

(Abram at 00:17:30) Chief Heart Officer, like Disney's Chief Smile Officer, or like crazy things. And all of a sudden, like, growth stacking and that kind of stuff is a big thing. I mean, okay. That's been a little while now. But I remember when it was a big thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:44) I'm a 10x growth engineer.

(Abram at 00:17:46) Oh, yeah. 10x growth engineer. Yeah. It's like, okay. Like, everybody's just coming up with names.

(Abram at 00:17:52) I feel like what I want to do is I want to give my org chart to a creative person, like to someone in marketing, and just be like, name us all. Literally give us all new titles, all new names based on how you know us. Because I swear that would be really cool. Someone would end up with like the Senior Jedi of Code or something. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:16) There you go.

(Abram at 00:18:16) Clearly I'm not the most creative person in the world. I think of Star Wars first, which tells you how great at marketing I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23) So here's what I want. I want someone from like Dribbble. I want someone to come up with like taking a whole engineering team, okay, and then Star Wars the roles.

(Abram at 00:18:34) Oh, that could be a thing. I might steal that idea from you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:38) Please do it. And we call it, you could call the chatbot R2-D2, right?

(Abram at 00:18:42) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:43) Oh, that'd be good. Oh man, we gotta have somebody do it. If somebody's listening and does that, or if, Abram, if you do it, please, I want to see the engineering team, like the whole DevOps, like engineering code, like the whole, pick whatever little cluster of team members you want at, let's say, like a larger organization so we can get a lot of roles. And let's do a, somebody needs to do the Star Wars version of it.

(Abram at 00:19:06) I love that. I think that's going to be a thing. We're going to have to figure that out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:10) We will. What was the first piece of code that you wrote?

(Abram at 00:19:14) The first piece of code that I wrote was a, oh man, I don't even remember what game it was, but I remember I was playing a game on my dad's computer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:26) Mm-hmm.

(Abram at 00:19:26) And this was Windows XP, like pre-installed games. So not very good game, but a game. And I was frustrated because it kept getting to one of the, you know, like mini-levels that it had, and it would just stop working. But I figured out through chance, because I was trying to figure out why is this game not working anymore, so I actually went and I was looking online and I found that the game was actually open source. Like, now I realize the significance of that, because Microsoft and open source at the time were not very good friends. So the significance of that being that one specific game being open source and changing what I wanted to do for my life is amazing. But I ended up figuring out what the game was written in, and it was written in Python. I was like, oh, this doesn't look too hard. So then I spent probably the next like six weeks learning Python just to fix a game so I could play it. But I mean, hey, it worked, and I put in a tiny little patch that I, you know, I don't even know if this game exists anymore. I don't even know if I could find it. It was like a weird Minesweeper thing. But yeah, that was the first piece of code that I wrote.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:59) That is one game to this day that I've not figured out how to play. I put no energy into figuring it out. I just like, I remember I'd do what's called like busy clicking, like every once in a while when I was bored and just try to play with it. And I'm like, I'm sure there's a strategy other than just clicking.

(Abram at 00:21:16) There totally is. So when you click and there's a number, that tells you how many in the eight surrounding squares that there are of the bombs, the mines. So it tells you like the chance. So when you see like three or four, you might want to move to a totally different area to click instead of clicking on one of the ones around there, because there's a 50% chance if you have four out of the eight that you're actually going to hit a mine. And then, you know, when you see the numbers close to each other, then you can kind of figure out, oh well, you know, there has to be a mine in this specific spot, so I should never click there. I mean, it's really simple once you actually look into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:04) But it's not like Sudoku where like you can actually apply like a, you know, you know that when it comes down to the last two boxes, like you know which one it is if you're smart enough.

(Abram at 00:22:16) Yeah. I mean, depending on the circumstance, there definitely could just be a random chance too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:27) So alright, I want to know, do you see any uses? I've been really, really pumped about my new best friend, Alexa. And do you see any way you could apply that to what you're doing at your direct mail company?

(Abram at 00:22:45) Right now, not currently, but that's probably just because I'm not thinking about something for it. I mean, voice and that kind of stuff is probably going to be the future, for better or worse. So, I mean, when you look at it that way, there's probably some feature that I'm not thinking of right now that a customer someday is going to be like, hey, wouldn't it be great if we had this? And it's like, okay, well, then maybe we'll implement it. But right now, I just, I'm not seeing a specific use case. But if anybody else does, I'd be happy to hear it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:16) So I've got one, and it's not very effective like as far as actual functionality. Like people would use it frequently. But what I like to do is, because everyone's attention right now is really on voice, and it's only going to grow, so something that I would do with your company is I would just do a quick mashup. It'd probably take like an afternoon and have it read an order status back through a skill, to whether like, has my order been sent? To yes, you've reached 1,000 or 100,000 people across Minnesota. And then I would film someone interacting with that in like a nice, you know, like reasonably well-done video, just a quick 20-second interaction. And then I would market that video against potential customers. And the hype of that is like a way to communicate your product that's not like a banner ad. You know what I'm saying?

(Abram at 00:24:13) Yeah. That's true. That's true. That's not a terrible idea. That's for sure. There are more important things to be implementing than that currently. But, you know, if I ever find myself bored and can't find something to do, that'll never happen. But if I do, then, you know, I'm sure it would be pretty easy to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:40) That was like the most polite way to tell me it's never going to happen. If I ever throw myself forward, I'll do it, but that's never going to happen. And I love you, Joel.

(Abram at 00:24:49) You have to understand, I'm from Minnesota. Alright? If you couldn't tell by the way I just said Minnesota. Oh, yeah. We have a way of saying no without actually saying no. It's, yeah, I mean, it's weird. It is weird.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:08) That was beautiful. No, but it's a, I'm a big fan of just like thinking of marketing stuff pops into my head. And it's so funny because half the people like will take it and be like, oh my God, that's so great. I'm going to go stop what I'm doing and do it. And the other half of the people are like, you expect me to stop what I'm doing and do it? I'm like, no bro, I'm just sharing an idea.

(Abram at 00:25:30) Oh yeah, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) Right. It's so funny how different people like respond. Not you. I'm just talking about other people. Right? It's so interesting how they respond. Like, you don't have to do this. It'd just be, because as a developer, I'm like, I have this bias to "wouldn't it be cool if," because your customers always say that. And it's just like, yeah, but we're over here like fixing the empire. So we'll put that button on a hold list. Right?

(Abram at 00:25:58) Right. For sure. But I mean, everything's just ideas. And ultimately, it depends on what your customers want, what your customers ask for. So, you know, when you get these ideas, it's perfectly okay and it's totally fine to, you know, jot them down and have them in the back of your head for a while. But at the end of the day, a company isn't going to be a company without its customers being happy, because the customers will leave, or somebody will create something better, and then they'll leave. So at the end of the day, if you don't make them happy, they'll leave.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:31) So do you guys do a lot of marketing right now?

(Abram at 00:26:33) We actually do not do a whole bunch of marketing. The main reason why, we're almost growing too fast to keep up with it, which is among the problems that you can have. It is a good problem, but it's still a problem. So we don't do a ton of marketing. We actually, we don't have any paid media right now. We're mostly just relying on SEO from the amount of content we have on our website, as well as word of mouth and some minor outbound sales, essentially. Minor. Actually, that's mostly what the CEO does. Michael, my cofounder, he's usually out there talking with customers and talking with potential customers. So it's probably not as minor as I make it seem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:39) Oh, that's super important though to have a cofounder. Like, I've noticed the companies, and we've had people on the show that talk about this too. The companies that have three technical cofounders end up spending all their money on our product and have no business. And the companies that have a nice balance of cofounders, they end up having a business.

(Abram at 00:27:58) Right. For sure. I mean, everybody has their different skill sets. And I know that mine is very in the process and technology and, you know, how things work. But in terms of actual sales and how to ensure that revenue keeps coming in, I know that that isn't my top skill. I can do it in a pinch if I have to because I've done it before, but it's just not necessarily the best way to spend my time. And vice versa with Michael, you know, he does have a degree in, or a minor in computer sciences, but he hasn't spent all this time inside of technology. So it's just about using your strongest skill set to better the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:44) I want to know some nightmares that you've experienced as a CTO. How did they come about? How did you resolve them?

(Abram at 00:28:53) Man, sometimes deadlines are hard to definitely keep on track. And that's mostly, that's mostly a remnant from, I guess, my being a developer and having, you know, a project manager and superiors saying, you know, hey, this is what we need to get done by then. So there have definitely been times where there's a miscommunication about what the deadline actually is, and it ends up with the deadline, usually it ends up within the next day or two being done after the deadline, but it's still a missed deadline. At the end of the day, that's still not good. I've definitely had that. Hasn't happened in a while, which is awesome. And quite honestly, I mostly have Noah to thank for that because he's helping me out with ensuring that the project management stuff stays in check. But, I mean, those are just kind of the things you get used to as you're switching from developer to CTO. And even once you've been CTO for a while, if you're starting with a newer company, like the ability to just context switch from, you know, hey, I'm starting this new company and I'm the first developer here to actually starting to manage the company again once it gets to a significant amount of scale or a more significant amount of scale. That kind of context switching can be difficult for, you know, for me specifically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:29) Most people. Everyone. It's an, it's like, it's an art.

(Abram at 00:30:32) Oh yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:34) Yeah. To know what to be, to how to be dynamic and adjust what your focus is as you go through the different stages of growth from a single developer building a product to a developer of a, or to the CTO of a company with 10, 20, 30 people. Right? Like, it's all different. So have you had to fire anybody yet?

(Abram at 00:30:57) Unfortunately, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:59) Yeah. How did that go?

(Abram at 00:31:01) It went fine. I mean, I will always hate doing that. But, you know, what I ended up doing was, you know, I didn't just go right up to him and be like, hey, you're fired.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:18) That's good. That's a good start.

(Abram at 00:31:20) That's just not really a great way to go about that situation. But I also don't really think it was really a surprise to them. I mean, they kind of acted surprised, but I really don't think it was so much of a surprise to them. And I don't really think that anybody who's actually getting fired, as long as there's a good enough, any decent amount of communication between a leader and the employee. I think as long as there's some decent amount of communication, it's not really a surprise to anybody that they're getting fired. What I ended up doing with this person was, you know, I went up to them and said, hey, you know, here are these issues that we're having. You know, I like, well, actually, I didn't actually start with that. I said, you know, I like how this is going. I listed the positive things. Tried to set a tone that wasn't totally negative. Then I went into the pieces of, you know, here's where, you know, despite all this great stuff that's happening, here's something, you know, here's a couple things that are not good and quite honestly need to be fixed. And so I worked with them to kind of come up with deadlines and have them actually set an expectation for themselves. Because one of the things I've noticed being a manager or a leader, whatever you want to call it, at the end of the day when you're telling someone a deadline for something, you're going based on your own perspective, but maybe there's something that you could be missing from their perspective as well, which might be a reason why a deadline is unreasonable or deadlines are consistently unreasonable. So if you work with them to set a deadline, I mean, they're literally setting the deadline themselves. So if they come back to me and say, you know, hey, I didn't, you know, I didn't get this done. It's not great right now. At that point, I kind of have this feeling like, okay, you know, what do you want me to do about that? Because, you know, we worked together and came up with these deadlines. You know, okay, I'll give you one more chance, but, you know, let's set the deadlines again. But if it's not done, then, you know, I'm sorry. There's not much I can do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:46) Yeah. Well, you could take a very logical perspective to it, and it may even seem a little cold at first when explaining it. But a company can only exist when the output's greater, when you have profit. Right?

(Abram at 00:34:02) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:03) When the income is greater than the expenses, you have profit. Right?

(Abram at 00:34:08) For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:08) So what it's like energy. So you have this amount of energy flowing in, and you have to allocate it in certain places. And one of those forms of energy is cash, money. Right? So then money is going to this resource to accomplish this goal so that we can then get more money in. So if this goal is not getting accomplished, right, you're just kind of taking the emotion out of it. These things need to be accomplished not because I want them accomplished, but because it's a business and this is how a business can operate. And so if this task isn't done, then we're not going to have income and then the money and then the company won't exist. So this task has to be done at this time, and you get to tell, like what you said, I let people give me the deadlines. Like, you tell me when it can be done. Right? That way you're responsible and you own it. And then if it's not happening, we can't give you money. It's like, look, I love you. I want you here. I want you to be a part of what we're doing, but we can't allocate energy to the resource that is you because what you're doing isn't valuable enough like to the company. So like, please just do what's valuable, you know?

(Abram at 00:35:16) For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:12) Do what needs to be done and then own it. You know, you just come up with your own deadlines, and then it's very obvious because the next conversation you have a week later, look, you gave me these very concrete things that would be done at this time so that we could all do what we love doing here at the business and it'd run, and you didn't do them. And then they look at the ground, shake their head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:32) I know, I'm sorry. Alright, thank you. And then they fire themselves, essentially.

(Abram at 00:35:36) Yeah, yeah. Usually it ends up that way. You know, the times that I've had to do it, that is generally the way it goes. There are a couple times, though, where people still get defensive about it.

(Abram at 00:35:54) And I always think it's really unfortunate, but, you know, there's nothing really I can do about that either. You know, if they've set an expectation for themselves and they can't see that a missed expectation has these great effects on the company and themselves too, then it's kind of hard to continue working in that relationship.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:23) Then there's the whole personalities thing too. Like, some people just don't—they think everything is someone else's fault. They take no responsibility, and then they don't even see it. Right?

(Abram at 00:36:32) Unfortunately, those people do exist. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:35) Yes. I'm a big fan of owning my mistakes. And I wasn't always, but I found that it's easier for me when I do it. Like, I made a mistake yesterday. Okay? We had a call—very awesome guy, Rand Fishkin, SEO Moz—like, super, super great person.

(Abram at 00:36:55) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:55) And at the end of the call, he had to run to catch the bus, so the audio of the call didn't upload. And I had previously had this issue with the audio podcasting platform. So I had emailed them a few months ago, and they said, oh, well, we can't get it. We can't get the audio back because it's in their HTML5 local storage. And I said, okay, there's nothing we can do. Whatever. So we just lost the audio for that call. And then when that happened with Jake yesterday, when we found out that he went for the bus and we didn't get the audio, and it was like a really, really great call, he was like, oh, I'm gonna email support. I was like, Jake, don't even waste time emailing support. Like, let's move on to the next thing because they already told me they're not gonna get it. And he's like, well, I wanna try anyways. And I'm like, whatever, dude. You know, like, waste the time. And he did it, and they had a new feature, and they got the audio. So I called him this morning. I said—he's like, dude, we got the Rand Fishkin audio. I'm like, yes! I said, put my name up on the board. We have a whiteboard. I was like, put my mistake up on the board. Joel's owning it. Like, I'm gonna own my mistake. I told you not to try. Like, what was I doing telling somebody I work with not to try? Like, and then it was just because of the conversation—because I'm talking about it with you now—like, I'm aware of it so that the next time that goes to happen and my gut says, no, don't waste the time, I'll think to myself, is this person actually trying? Like, I shouldn't get in their way. Like, what am I doing? And so—

(Abram at 00:38:20) What are you doing? You're trying to stop the process, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:23) Yeah. Dude, I don't know.

(Abram at 00:38:24) There's progress here. No, I get that, though. I get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:28) Yeah. I'm not gonna hide from it. I'm not gonna pretend that I'm perfect. Like, stuff like that doesn't happen. I'm bringing up the conversation so that other people can own their mistakes too and then become better.

(Abram at 00:38:40) Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, every once in a while, I will definitely struggle with owning up to some mistakes. But I feel like that's also kind of a human trait that you really have to work against. That, you know, I do wanna be as open and honest about my mistakes as well as things that go well and go wrong and what we can fix.

(Abram at 00:39:07) And I like to be kind of internally thoughtful about how I do things so I can become better. And part of that is being just brutally honest about, yeah, I kind of screwed that up the other day. So, you know, it's always a process to try to improve yourself and all that kind of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:23) And it's always a balance too.

(Abram at 00:39:25) Right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:26) Because people ruin advice. Because somebody—I guarantee you—somebody's gonna hear this and they're gonna go and blast an email to their 800-person company, like, six times a day when they make mistakes. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's—this is not what I'm—do not do that. That's not what I'm talking about, buddy.

(Abram at 00:39:44) That's just called ruining productivity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:48) Right. I just like, in general, every once in a while, it's good to pay attention and bring it up to just remind yourself that, like, yeah, we're all human. We all make mistakes, and that's the lesson for the day. And let's move on. So, to kind of wrap it up, Elon Musk is gonna give you a text this afternoon—not about the flamethrower, although we're very excited about that. He's gonna say, Abram, I want you to come over. Alright, fine. I wanna come—I would come over. You can play with the flamethrower for like five minutes. Right? And then you're gonna jump in a time machine. You're gonna go back ten years. You're gonna give yourself some advice for a few minutes. What are you gonna tell yourself, Abram?

(Abram at 00:40:28) Ten years ago, I'd probably just go and tell myself to let go of the stress a lot sooner. Honestly, I spent so much time back then, you know, starting a company at 10 because, you know, it was weird. But I spent so much time worrying about everything being perfect. And, you know, I didn't fall into the trap where it made it so that I couldn't actually start the company, but I spent way too much time on things that just, quite honestly, didn't matter too much in the beginning.

(Abram at 00:41:15) I spent way too much time making sure that everything was beautiful from the front—you know, from the front end of the software where everybody would play with it to the actual code in the back end. Now that doesn't mean that you have absolutely terrible code, but it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. And, you know, on top of that, after letting go of the stress, I think the other thing is just continually learn and improve. Because there was a time, probably around high school when I was early in high school, where I was like, oh, you know, I don't have to learn much more, and that was not at all correct. You know, when you're going through kind of those times of, hey, you know, I know everything there is to know about this certain topic. And, you know, it happens to everybody. Everybody will get there at some point. And then you learn the earth-shattering new thing where you realize that everything that you knew was probably wrong. So it's just those two reminders, you know: let go of stress and keep learning new things, because those are lessons that I use a lot these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:34) I've had those same lessons, man. Letting go of that perfection and finding good enough, and then always be learning, always be improving, and then find balance inside of both of those things.

(Abram at 00:42:46) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:48) If you get these poor developers writing really poor code, they're like, no, I've been stressing about getting a little bit better, but I heard Joel today, so I'm just gonna keep writing my spaghetti code mess. No, bro, you need to stress a little bit.

(Abram at 00:43:00) Yeah, there's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02) Yeah. Martin Fowler up, you know? Like, write—read some code design books. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your time on the call. I'm super excited that we got to talk with you. Abram's awesome.

(Abram at 00:43:17) Well, thank you. Thank you so much for reaching out to me. It's great to be able to talk with you and also kind of hear different parts of your podcast every now and then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:33) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.