The Power of Thanks with Cooper McGoodwin, VP of Product at Thnks.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Cooper from Thnks about product development philosophy, workplace gratitude, and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:14) What is Thnks, and how do people use it?

(Cooper at 00:00:17) Yeah, absolutely. So at a high level, Thnks is a relationship building tool. If you think about it, people like to do business with people they like. Thnks makes it really easy to show appreciation, whether that's to a client, to a prospect, to a colleague, whomever.

(Cooper at 00:00:37) And that gesture of appreciation, you know, that can be, if you know someone's going to the airport and it's raining, you can send them a rideshare. If they've had a long day, you know, someone's been really busting their butt for you, being able to send them a night off from cooking. Or, you know, if they've got a big meeting coming up, send them a caffeine boost. And what that really translates to, so each of those gestures of appreciation is all delivered digitally to the recipient. So you never have to know anybody's—you don't have to worry about what's their address or anything like that.

(Cooper at 00:01:22) You know, we have both digital and physical Thnks on the platform. If it's a physical item, the recipient, when they choose to redeem it, they're asked to input their address, so the place they prefer to be shipped. The other cool thing about Thnks, you know, the redemption process is the recipient also has the option to donate that value to charity too.

(Cooper at 00:01:42) So we partner with a company called Cauze that is a charitable donation platform. So you can literally donate to any 501(c)(3) in the country of your choice with Thnks. But getting back to kind of what Thnks is, so that coffee break, you know, might translate to a cup of coffee at a local or national coffee establishment. What our clients found was, like, all right, that $1,200 that we would have spent on one client to, you know, fly our folks out there, take them to a nice dinner and so on, we can turn around and have a similar level of impact to 10 clients by sending them $120 worth, you know, of a gesture of appreciation or something like that—nice bottle of, you know, cocktail kit, nice bottle of alcohol, or a night off from cooking, things like that. So it's this ability to kind of have an outsized impact and leverage portion of your T&E spend or portion of your employee appreciation spend on these kind of small and large gestures of appreciation has been kind of what's been really powerful. So the cool thing about Thnks is anyone can hop on the platform and use it. We're not a SaaS model.

(Cooper at 00:03:10) There is no recurring or annual subscription fee to use Thnks. So anyone can go to thnks.com, sign up, create an account, and start using it. We're purely transaction-based as a business model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:25) Why did you start at the company? You're not the founder, are you?

(Cooper at 00:03:29) No, no. Thnks was founded in 2016 in New York City and moved down to Tennessee kind of early 2020. So I joined Thnks in October '21. And it was kind of one of those things where you hear the elevator pitch of Thnks, and you instantly get it. You know, it's a B2B gratitude platform. It's kind of one of those things where you think about it a little bit more and realize, like, man, this is industry agnostic.

(Cooper at 00:04:09) It is great for multiple teams or kind of departments within an organization as well. You know, HR, sales, customer experience, all that. So what attracted me to it really was the total addressable market of the potential user base. And then also, the company had already found product-market fit. It was growing really fast, kind of needed someone to kind of come in and take over and help just kind of grow the product discipline within the company. So it just sounded like it was a really cool opportunity and kind of one of those things where I couldn't really pass it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:51) Where did you learn product? Like, what prepared you for this experience?

(Cooper at 00:04:56) Yeah. So I'd say I've got about 10 years of experience in technology. I actually got my start—I was living in New York City about 10 years ago, and my first role in tech was as a project manager for a custom software development company. We were a consultancy.

(Cooper at 00:05:18) So we built custom software for other companies, and acting as sort of the go-between between the client and translating the client's business needs, and then talking with our developers and, you know, translating those into technical requirements and back and forth and all that. So I was in that role for about three and a half years. It was a phenomenal experience. I didn't know it at the time, but it really laid a great foundation for my career in product because I got to see, like, how the sausage is made from a development perspective—understand, you know, I was doing QA, writing user stories, learning about technical considerations, scalability, performance, all those sorts of things.

(Cooper at 00:06:11) And then also working with the clients. Because we're coming in on a project basis, but of course, you want to continue to kind of grow that account and deliver value. So to do that well, you have to learn about their business and then identify other opportunities or other ways that technology and custom software development can help them grow their business. So this was before I even knew product was a thing, really, a product with a capital P. So it was just something I really enjoyed doing and ended up moving down to Nashville after about four years in New York.

(Cooper at 00:06:49) And I went to a product meetup in Nashville and ended up meeting a gentleman named Tom Noser, who was hiring a product team for this healthcare company out of California, but it'd be a remote team in Nashville. And so that was my first product role, official product role. And then it's kind of progressed ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:16) And when you joined this startup that's in, you know, this gratitude industry, and they wanted to expand and improve their product discipline, where was it at when you came in, and where is it at today? Was it like the Wild West where the undisciplined monkeys just run around writing their own code? Or—

(Cooper at 00:07:35) No, I'll give them a lot of credit to our CEO, Brendan, who was having to assume some of the product responsibilities. He has a background in product management. The VP of Operations was also doing some of the product roles. But it was one of those things where once a company gets to large enough size and traction, that, you know, you can get by early on without a head of product, you know, that can be the CEO.

(Cooper at 00:08:14) And, you know, a lot of times that is the CEO for startups as they're finding product-market fit, or, you know, as they're working on their MVP and so on. Product isn't typically a job function that you need to fill right away when you're starting out with a company or, you know, building a startup. But it kind of becomes a point where you need someone who owns the customer experience, you know, the user experience, who owns, is able to talk to users, is able to interface with developers about what to build and what's that going to take and prioritize and all that. It very quickly becomes a full-time role that you need someone to fill. So I came in—they'd done a phenomenal job. You know, there were some folks who were filling a product capacity before I joined, but there was kind of a vacuum, and then they needed someone to come in and kind of just take product and help build out that entire function for the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) I want to talk about layoffs and the economy. Before we started actually recording, we pulled up layoffs.fyi, and we were talking about how in the past quarter, there were more layoffs than the entire initial part of the zombie apocalypse that was COVID. What is your take on the economy and the layoffs?

(Cooper at 00:09:46) Yeah, it's really fascinating. Recently, I kind of dug up a—Sequoia Capital had put together a deck in, like, May of last year, and they called it Adapting to Endure, is the name of the deck. If you guys have show notes, I'd love to give a link to it so folks could check it out. And one of the slides talks about—and, you know, it's looking back, it's trying to take lessons from earlier kind of recessions and things like that and helping their founders or, you know, the companies they're investing in navigate what, you know, is looking to be or may already be the recession that kind of we're currently experiencing.

(Cooper at 00:10:35) And one of the slides that really stuck out to me, they called it "Survival of the Quickest." And it's companies who had done a—we'll call it a cut exercise—where they looked at their expenses, they looked at their R&D, headcount, all of that. And the companies who acted the fastest in immediately dropping their expenses to increase their run rate had a much higher chance of survival throughout the rest of that recession than companies who did it kind of piecemeal, where maybe they'll lay off, you know, headcount in one department and then six months later, another department, and so on. And it makes a lot of sense because part of the problem is layoffs and cuts, especially of this magnitude, it's really demoralizing for the employees who are left at the company because they don't know if they're next or what's going on there.

(Cooper at 00:11:38) So the better you can—if you can do it just once and then retain and, you know, maintain and retain, you know, the rest of your employees, that becomes kind of the name of the game to survive the recession, kind of slowly build up back up to where you were kind of pre-cuts. But that's one of the things that I think is a really compelling use case of Thnks, is adding Thnks into your employee retention strategy. So we're not a replacement for your employee retention strategy. You know, you're not going to cup of coffee your way to maintaining your entire, the remaining folks on your team. But, you know, and I hope everyone does have a solid retention strategy.

(Cooper at 00:12:28) But the cool thing is, is, you know, you can weave in Thnks as another tool in your tool belt to be able to make the folks on your team feel, you know, appreciated and recognized and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:42) Yeah. Well, we use it. Yeah, we love it. That's how we got connected. We've been using it for, I think, well over a year now.

(Cooper at 00:12:52) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:52) And we send it to all of our past guests and then all of the past guests of the shows that we manage.

(Cooper at 00:12:57) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:58) And it works out really well. The only feedback I have from our product is chill out with the bank transactions because every time there's a refund for, like, $3.57, it fills up my bank statement. I'm like, why don't they pool them and then, like, batch them? Why is it all happening in real time?

(Cooper at 00:13:17) No, that's a great point. So, and that is definitely something we're aware of. I mean, it happens as well with credit card transactions too and refunds back to the credit card. So what we're working on currently is revising our strategy around refunds to avoid all those kind of incremental charges that get posted back to your payment method.

(Cooper at 00:13:45) So we're definitely—we're well aware of that, and it's, you know, classic product guy fashion, I—you know, I've learned over time not to actually, you know, give hard dates because wins can change, but it is something we are actively working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:03) I do the Apple strategy. I'll use a season. It's coming in fall. It's coming in summer.

(Cooper at 00:14:09) It's coming in spring, so we'll see that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:11) Yeah. That's exciting, because it makes sense. Well, first of all, it's just such a small thing as far as feedback. I just think it's funny because it also acts as marketing. Like, I'm always very aware of Thnks because I see it every time I look at my bank account.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:27) You know? And then I thought the other day, I was like, oh, I'm going to be talking to him. I wonder why there isn't, like, a pool of money where we're, you know, depositing $100, and then when it hits $20, it deposits another $100. You know, I've used some credit system, like, I think my transactional email system looks like that. Right? And I was like, well, I wonder what they're going to do that.

(Cooper at 00:14:46) So we actually do have a balance method, balance payment method, where—and we can take a look at how your account is set up. But, and it works like that. You deposit a set amount of, you know, funds on the platform and then just draw down from that. And so any refunds get posted back to that balance on the platform. Oh, that's a refund.

(Cooper at 00:15:10) Never hit your bank account.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:12) That's an ID-10-T error. Right? The idiot error. I'll talk to my team about that. It's just a switch you could probably flip and move to that sort of accounting.

(Cooper at 00:15:21) Well, I mean, I'd say that's more on, you know, I'll take—I'll share some of that, you know, from, just a product awareness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:30) Yeah, the more you know, you know.

(Cooper at 00:15:32) Well, and that's the thing. Like, so with product, you know, if I could go back and tell my kind of younger self, just because you've shipped the feature, you're not done. Like, there's no such thing as, like, you build it and they will come. It is—shipping it is really half the battle because then you've got to focus on adoption and making sure that you've got all the different—you're using every lever possible to make sure that your users are aware of and understand the value of the new thing that you just spent the past few sprints working on and devoted resources to. So that means making sure that your account management team is well versed in the value and has, like, you know, a list of their accounts that they're going to go and promote this thing to or switch them over to, and making sure that your support team knows how to handle any incoming questions that come to it.

(Cooper at 00:16:31) And, you know, if it warrants being a part of the—taking a look at your sales team's demo scripts and things like that, and whether it, you know, is weaved in there, if it's enough of a value proposition to be part of that sales conversation. So that's just something where it's like, yeah, just because you've built it and it's live, you really got to monitor that adoption and make sure that it actually is providing the value that, you know, your original hypothesis when you decided to prioritize that feature is delivering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) Yeah. The communication of it is incredibly important. I also was talking earlier with a reliability engineering expert. I had him on a couple times, really cool guy, and he is writing a new book called Time to Reliability.

(Cooper at 00:17:22) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:23) Now he comes from the physical manufacturing world, but he does software, and he takes the principle. Like, lean is a manufacturing principle. Right?

(Cooper at 00:17:30) Toyota and—yes. Got it. Yeah, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:33) And so he takes those principles and applies them over. But when he was talking about time to reliability, he says most people, when they use the word "complete," like, delivered. Right? Like, it's delivered. But what complete really means, whatever your definition of it might be, but what it really means is that plus recovery time, plus the communication time, plus everything else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:58) When can you pull 80% of your people off of that project? You know, or that feature for our world? Because they—you know, they manufacture something and then that's it. The team goes and manufactures something else. In the physical—you make a router, you do that version, the router shipped, you know, you do some software updates or maybe some—

(Cooper at 00:18:15) Firmware updates. The assembly line all figured out and then everything's just, you know, it starts humming and then you're able to devote those resources to the next router.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23) Exactly. And it's an entirely different router. Yeah. Yeah. So when he was talking about, you know, that, when do you consider it done or how is it reliability, he says most people want it—they really focus, as far as leadership goes, on the deployment of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:37) When is it out there? When is it in the hands? And he says, that's not what you want. You want, when is it reliable?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:43) When can you drop 80% and then put those people on another project and just do the normal maintenance?

(Cooper at 00:18:50) Exactly. Yeah. Logically, it makes sense that what you want to avoid is becoming what's called a feature factory, where you're kind of measuring the quality of your product department or your technology department on their output. You know, how much are they shipping? How many new features are they rolling out? And what you really want to focus on is outcomes.

(Cooper at 00:19:17) So from a product perspective, that means starting with the metric that you want to influence. And then rather than starting with a feature you want to build and then building that and then hoping it works, you start with the metric you want to influence. You think about, alright, what are all the different ways that we might be able to influence that metric? Some of it may be product related, something to build into the product, improve user experience, make stuff clearer. Some of it might be marketing related or things like that. And depending on resources and your appetite for risk and things like that, then determining, okay, you're starting with a hypothesis that we think building this feature is going to influence this metric. And then once you ship that feature, still continuing to monitor it to make sure it's moving that needle in the right direction. And if it isn't, then going back, revisiting your prior assumptions and seeing, you know, what's the phrase? It's only failure if you don't learn from your mistakes or something like that. So learn from it, understand, alright, these are the assumptions we made. Here's our hypothesis. Why didn't it work out? And how do we need to kind of rethink about this? And then continue to focus on improving that metric, and whether that's building something else or continuing to refine that thing you just shipped. So I totally agree with, you know, I see how that relates to the physical product world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:58) Yeah. What feature are you building right now, if you can talk about it publicly, that you're super excited about?

(Cooper at 00:21:05) Yeah. Very reductive, but there are two types of users on Thnks. There are those who are great at gratitude already. And so they take to the platform, they understand how to use it. You know, oftentimes their company has given them a budget of money to use each month towards gratitude and gestures of appreciation. They're able to fully utilize that and, you know, they're off to the races. It's not a problem. But then you have other users who gratitude maybe it doesn't come naturally to them. I'll be honest, it's a personal area of growth for myself is recognizing, you know, both in my personal life and in my work life, recognizing that I need to make sure to show the folks who are important to me and make sure that they understand that they're important to me. And, you know, Thnks is one way that I can do that by being thoughtful and, you know, pairing a nice gesture like a cup of coffee with a thoughtful message or something like that. But it's really kind of understanding what are the opportunities or different ways that Thnks can be leveraged to help those folks who, you know, maybe they don't have a mental playbook of when to send, you know, what item to send at a certain time. So one of the things we're working on is, you know, we call it a use cases feature. It's more like a playbook. So each department, there's a parent category. So you might have a sales category, you might have a customer success category or HR category. And then, you know, as subcategories within that are scenarios, we'll call it. So for sales, it might be pre-demo, post-demo, you know, second touch point. For HR, it might be birthdays or employee milestone, you know, employment milestones, things like that. And then in those subcategories are curated things that are specific to that scenario.

(Cooper at 00:23:29) And so I'm excited about it for a couple of reasons. Number one, I think it's going to really help folks who may kind of struggle with understanding all the different ways that you could use Thnks, not only within their own department, but also from a, you know, a sales team might be leveraging Thnks very effectively, but their marketing team might also benefit from it. So they can see like, oh, here are marketing use cases. Let me tell our head of marketing about this. So I think that there's also kind of a bottoms-up growth strategy there too, or organic growth strategy of spreading it. But then when you start thinking about teams coming on the platform at our enterprise tier, that they'll have the ability to customize those playbooks to where, you know, it can be their specific scenarios. And so, you know, turn it on just for this team, for their customer success team. So they've got a playbook built right into the platform that they can leverage right away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:35) That's pretty cool. Yeah. That'll be really useful if you start going into enterprises as well, right? Because they would really use that heavily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:44) Yep. This is how we give thanks at IBM, or this is how we do it at, you know, this company. We found it because I had, for two or three years, wanted to send merch to our guests. You come on the show, boom, send merch. But it's such a big undertaking, and I would have to, you know, get third-party logistics and then building the merch and then the orders and the, it was just this huge ordeal.

(Cooper at 00:25:10) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:11) Right? And after a couple of rounds of people suggesting that and then us not really making a lot of progress at it, somebody brought up Thnks. And I was like, oh, so I don't have to do anything, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) And then if they don't accept the thanks, it rolls back into my account, and so I can look at all the pretty transactions. So we started it, and since then, we haven't stopped. It's been great. And then so we did it at first there, past guests. And then our sales team had just heard about it, and then we, on Mondays and Thursdays, we do all hands. We only have 15 people, but we have sales and production, and I like them understanding that there's no magic paycheck fairy. That we make sales. We use that money to make our paychecks and to pay our bills. And so I like everybody really understanding what's going on. And Thnks came up, and one of my sales guys approached me, and he said, hey. Can we do this? And I said, yeah. You can definitely do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14) He said, when someone signs a proposal or when someone's going dark. So we actually use it when customers go dark in the sales cycle or we win deals. So a contract's out. They've said yes. Everything's going, and then, you know, they just disappear for, in B2B sales, because they're waiting on budget approval. They don't want to talk to you until they get the yes or there's whatever it may be. So in between, we noticed that if we send them a thanks with a nice message, you take the relationship to a different plane.

(Cooper at 00:26:46) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:47) Right? From being very cordial and professional, to, here's a coffee. Hey, you know, when you guys get to it, just let us know. Or we, he says something casual, and then they'll often reply really quick, like, yeah. We're just really waiting on this one thing. And he's like, okay. Cool. Versus if you just sent a professional update, they would probably just ignore it again. So we use it for go-dark scenario. We use it for a won-proposal scenario, but it's not automated. So when a proposal's won, our sales team is just trained that, you know, they do it. And if something stands out about the individual, they'll customize it.

(Cooper at 00:27:22) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:22) For example, I think there was some sports-related thing David was telling me about. Do you guys have any sports stuff on the platform?

(Cooper at 00:27:29) We do. I mean, the Thnks are themed, so it could be, you know, around Super Bowl. There are a lot of party options.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:39) Super Bowl tickets? No.

(Cooper at 00:27:40) I wish. Yeah. A lot of party options. And, you know, credit to our amazing curation team, we keep things very topical, so that way it's helpful when it's not generic. So yeah. But we do have sports-related things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:59) Yeah. That's the hard part is if you just hook it up to your CRM and deal-won proposal triggers an API call that says thanks, you know, or whatever. I don't think that's the sentiment of what you guys are trying to accomplish. That's not, you know, automated gratitude. I mean, doesn't sound like the worst idea in the world, but you would want to personalize it. At least pull it up into a queue so it's queued up in your system, and it's like, hey. Here's the thanks you want to send out. Personalize it and then send it out. That would kind of be assistive technology.

(Cooper at 00:28:27) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:28) But just sending a generic message.

(Cooper at 00:28:31) Our sales team, you know, to that point, you know, as a part of their process, they send a thanks 30 minutes before every sales demo. And it really helps with, you know, the appearance rate, or making sure that folks appear. But it's also a great primer because the recipient gets to experience what their users might do or might receive. But it's not automated. You know, they're still crafting that message to the person. It's just kind of baked into their sales playbook in terms of, this is what I do 30 minutes before every demo.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:13) Yeah. So you can personalize it.

(Cooper at 00:29:15) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:16) So when some attribute stands out, they'll personalize it. I think he sent some sports thing one time to a person who had brought that up on a call or they were on a video call and saw in the background a ton of sports stuff.

(Cooper at 00:29:26) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:27) But if we don't have any, you know, very distinguishable features, we'll do, I think our most common one that we do is the, a coffee or a brownie, some...

(Cooper at 00:29:37) Probably the Thanks a Latte.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:38) Thanks a Latte. Exactly. That is exactly the one. I see that one a lot. So that's our go-to when we don't have something that's really standing out about somebody.

(Cooper at 00:29:47) And it's really amazing what a comparatively speaking, small gesture, you know, that might be a $10, $11 send to the recipient, the kind of outsized impact that that can have when paired with a thoughtful message. And that's really what we try and encourage our users to do. And that's why the email templates, that the emails that the recipients receive, the message in front is front and center. You know, the thanks item that is accompanying it is almost secondary. You know, it's really it's a way to demonstrate that you were listening, that beyond kind of a superficial level, you're really trying to get to know and develop the relationship with that person. So that's why we really encourage, you know, a thoughtful message at the top of the template.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) Yeah. It's good. And people use comedy. When Halloween came around and we were getting ghosted, they did a ghost joke, you know, with Halloween.

(Cooper at 00:30:53) Uh-huh. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:54) I think it was candy or some chocolate. They found a way to take one of your standard, Thanks a Latte offerings and use words to make a joke about Halloween, them being ghosted, ghost, and then here's a treat.

(Cooper at 00:31:07) I mean, the opportunity for creativity and, sometimes excellent, sometimes terrible puns is endless on the platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) Yes.

(Cooper at 00:31:16) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:17) Actually, pun marketing is the most successful thing we do to get new meetings for us. Isn't that crazy?

(Cooper at 00:31:21) Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:21) That's awesome.

(Cooper at 00:31:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:23) You know, I found this out. You have a little one, so Frozen must be playing a lot at your household. So I had been writing these marketing emails for the podcast production services that we do.

(Cooper at 00:31:34) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:35) And, yeah, it's just ROI or, you know, just the standard type of stuff. Instead of having a team, you know, use us because it's more cost effective. And then I was just really frustrated one day because the kids were going off. Frozen was on for the millionth time. I had to be in the room. So usually, I'm in my office, but I had to be there because someone's, something's going on with my wife. And I just started making all of these jokes about, how Sven thinks we're the best podcast production company on Earth and Elsa agrees. And then I just started using every little thing I could do, and I sent it to my team, and they're like, no. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, dude, that's, you can't do that. That's crazy.

(Cooper at 00:32:15) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:15) And I said, well, that's usually, you know, as an entrepreneur, I'm like, well, that's usually the sign that it's a good thing to do. Let's give it a go. And I did, and we booked more meetings off of that one email than we had booked in the entire history of that product line because we've only been doing the podcast production stuff for a year or so.

(Cooper at 00:32:32) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) So it's not been going on forever. And we booked, I think 12 meetings off of that one email, and then I did a series. I just kept doing different pop culture-y things. I did a Shrek one. We did a Fourth of July one where I made a bunch of Fourth of July jokes.

(Cooper at 00:32:48) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:49) And it just works so well. And I was asking myself because, you know, I'm not a marketing guy, right? I was like, why is this working? And I found it's working because it's just how you would normally interact with a human. It's a human-to-human thing. I don't walk up to you and just give you this static, sales-pitchy email. I mean, you're a technical leader. You get this stuff on your LinkedIn all day.

(Cooper at 00:33:10) Yeah, I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:10) Right? I like this great exercise, but if you imagine the message that they send you, is that something if you were at the mall and you saw someone wearing an IBM shirt and those are, I'm an IBM CTO. Would you walk up to them and then just start talking about yourself?

(Cooper at 00:33:29) Doing the yeah. Here's...

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:30) Here's all my awards. We have people overseas, outsource developers. We do Node.js and list 87 languages. You know, you wouldn't do that.

(Cooper at 00:33:37) No. Not at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:38) You would look for some common ground, something that makes it human, really, to be honest, a way to build that connection. Yeah.

(Cooper at 00:33:39) Funny story. Similar vein, not using Thnks, but, you know, we've been working with this partner. We're trying to get an integration with their expensing platform. It'd be a real big win for us, especially, you know, from an enterprise perspective. And just kind of long cycle times when it comes to hearing back from them and, you know, we'd have a fruitful conversation and then it'd be two weeks and wouldn't hear anything. And so just, you know, kind of on a whim just like you were saying. I took a photo of John Cusack from Say Anything with the speaker above his head and just put our logo in place of the speaker. That was the only thing I sent in the message in the email to them and ended up getting a response back, you know, probably less than an hour later.

(Cooper at 00:34:41) So just, I don't know, little things like that. Another benefit to you and why Thnks is such a great company to work for is because literally everyone at the company comes into work each day, and their job is to help spread gratitude. So, I mean, you couldn't ask for a better gig there. You know, we're not mission critical software.

(Cooper at 00:35:03) We're not a health care SaaS company. We're not doing an EMR or anything like that. So there's just a brevity or there's a playfulness to the office environment and our interactions and so on that everyone at the company really kind of lives and breathes the brand, which is a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:30) Yeah. No, it sounds like a great place to work. Are you mostly an office in Tennessee?

(Cooper at 00:35:34) We are. Yeah. So it feels like we're the weird kids now who actually go into the office. So we're in office four days a week. But that being said, you know, it's still a very flexible work environment in terms of if something comes up, if a little one is sick or something like that, able to work from home when needed.

(Cooper at 00:35:58) But, yes, we do have an office just south of Nashville that everyone comes into.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:04) We picked up a lot of great talent from some of these companies forcing their people back into the office all the time, just right back to it. And that was good. It was sort of the yang to the yang of us. Like, we hired a bunch in COVID, but we ended up—and you'll appreciate this because us as in technology, we work remote more frequently.

(Cooper at 00:36:25) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:25) It's not such a foreign thing for us. Well, I picked up a bunch of salespeople during COVID who had no choice but to work remote. And when things opened back up, I lost 80% of my sales team because they all went and rejoined in-person things because the salespeople wanted to be in person.

(Cooper at 00:36:42) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:43) And then so that was the rough part, right? And then coming back around, I realized that I sort of didn't connect those dots as an engineering type leader or executive because I should have. If it wasn't COVID, I would have walked them through the normal, do you like working remote? You know, what is your experience? Have you figured out how to solve the work from home depression concept?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:06) Yeah. Like, I want to know their maturity as—because it is, and there's so much to working at home, right? It's a whole entire skill, but I didn't do that because of COVID. I was just like, oh, great salespeople. They need stuff, and it's really easy for them to move now. But, yeah. And now it's come full circle, and a lot of positive has happened because we've brought on great people. But I like that you're the way you're describing it is you didn't come full JPMorgan Chase dropping the hammer. I think it was JPMorgan that was like, you're back in office now or—

(Cooper at 00:37:35) Something like that. JPMorgan, Tesla did that too. Yeah. You know? I mean, also Twitter.

(Cooper at 00:37:39) Yeah. Yeah. So before, prior to joining Thnks, I had worked from home for the past seven years before joining Thnks.

(Cooper at 00:37:52) And was kind of worried about it because I had been a pretty staunch evangelist of working from home and the benefits of that, of which there are many, especially for technology positions—developers, product as well, where you benefit from being able to get into a flow state, large blocks of uninterrupted time. And so there has been kind of a transition period, but I am also seeing the benefits of working in an office, especially if everyone else is there. Because I think the hardest thing to do is have some sort of hybrid model where you've got half the folks in office and then half the folks remote.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:37) Doesn't work.

(Cooper at 00:38:38) No. Unless you're still a remote first company where your processes and your communication channels are asynchronous and you're able to—otherwise, it's very easy for the remote employees to essentially become second class citizens because they're not in the room when some decisions are being made. They lose out on those serendipitous conversations by the water cooler, the refrigerator in the break room, overhearing things. So that has been a benefit from a product perspective to working in an office is being able to really quickly engage with our sales team or our marketing team and talk about something without having to schedule a meeting or blow up their Slack channel or something like that. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:28) Yeah. And I like both. Yeah. To be honest with you, we've had to make—our company started out as in person. COVID happened, and then we had to make a conscious decision to be fully remote. And even when we come together, maybe some people are together in a specific area. When we do the team calls, everybody goes into a separate quiet area, and they all join from their computer so that we're all on the same playing field with the team meetings and things like that.

(Cooper at 00:39:54) That's nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:54) Because we'll do our conference or annual thing where we bring everybody in. And so it's important to, you know, handle those moments.

(Cooper at 00:40:03) It's kind of funny. I think, so examples of companies that do remote at scale very well, like Automattic, the makers of WordPress and everything, you know, fully distributed team and all that. And it's kind of funny. They don't actually save any money by not having offices because they end up spending so much money bringing all their folks together a couple times a year for those team building trips, you know, destination events and so on. But the company itself is kind of asynchronous. It's a writing culture, you know, kind of asynchronous communication channels to start. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:43) I want to talk a little bit more about the economy.

(Cooper at 00:40:46) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:47) What's your feeling? You've got peers. You've got friends. You made a new friend today.

(Cooper at 00:40:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:51) Yeah. What are they feeling as far as the economy? Are people tense? Are people relaxed? Do they think we're at the bottom of the curve, at the top of the curve? Where are we at? Oh, man. You're an economist, correct?

(Cooper at 00:41:04) Yeah. Exactly. Armchair economist. Part of it, I think, depends on where you are in your career right now. Like, you know, as someone who is, gosh, fifteen years removed from college, you know, college and all that. Of course, I was coming out of college in '07/'08. So that wasn't the greatest time to be trying to find a job. But here, I think this time, it's even more daunting because you have the inflation piece alongside with—everything's just more expensive. So it's interesting there. I think there's an article in the Wall Street Journal recently about how, although there have been a lot of layoffs in the tech sector, the time to find a new job is still relatively short for folks in technology. So I think, yes, it sucks to lose your job, especially if it's, you know, through no fault of your own or anything like that, just as kind of a nature of business. But for the most part, I don't think folks in technology are having too hard of a time bouncing back or finding a new gig.

(Cooper at 00:42:27) It's harder, you know, coming in as an entry level person. If you've got teams that are already kind of, you know, they might be stretched thin due to reduced resources or headcount, having the proper kind of mentorship structure within the organization to grow kind of junior or entry level employees into roles might be taxed. But at the same time, yeah, we're looking at these numbers of Amazon laying off 18%, Coinbase 20%, Salesforce 10%, and so on. But if you actually look at how much those companies grew their headcount at the start of COVID, where they added 50% to their, you know, in some instances, almost doubled their headcount during COVID when everyone was going remote. So now there's a little bit of a market correction, but for the majority of companies, it's not as if they're going back to pre-pandemic levels. They might just be cutting back on more speculative investments, you know, R&D, or taking a harder look at things that might not be delivering the expected value and cutting those teams and just focusing on their core product offerings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:53) The free money went away.

(Cooper at 00:43:55) Yeah. Oh, I think so too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:56) The amount of money we got as a business and the amount of opportunity that was available. At first, I was of the mindset, oh, I'm not gonna take the free money or whatnot because I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Just I'm a very self-reliant type of person. And then it occurred to me when that opportunity, you know, came up, I thought to myself, I said, okay, I'm in a marketplace, and we're competing, right? And if all of my competitors are just grabbing the money, well, that's gonna create inflation later on. And this is right when COVID starts. Like, that's gonna create inflation because that's—well, you don't even have to—you could go do your 101. You could do the first day of your first economics class and understand this stuff.

(Cooper at 00:44:35) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:35) Right? It's not super complicated. Put more money in. Yeah. And so I said, well, now I have to take it. I'll take every freebie that they're giving me because every single one of my competitors are doing that, and it's just gonna change the entire marketplace. And if I sit there and say, oh, I'm not gonna take it, then it's just gonna increase my chances of failure.

(Cooper at 00:45:05) Exactly. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:05) But then right when that spigot turned off, you know, then that's when the layoffs started because they were paying people to keep more people, and they're paying you to hire people.

(Cooper at 00:45:05) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:05) Like, you were incentivized to keep the person versus letting them go.

(Cooper at 00:45:09) Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:10) And so that ruins competition.

(Cooper at 00:45:13) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:14) I just want to touch back briefly to the product conversation we had earlier about communication. Sure. Do you have a product communication person on your team that's communicating with all of these departments, or is it part of the product leader's role? Is it separate from the product leader, a communications person that goes around and interfaces with the company or no?

(Cooper at 00:45:32) Yeah. It's a great question. So, ultimately, it's the product leader's responsibility. We do have a product marketing person on our team. Brenna, she's fantastic. She helps us out with, you know, client-facing release notes and updates and so on. But at the end of the day, it's the job of the product leader to make sure that—and ideally, you're doing this well before the product's been launched. You know, when you're kind of in that discovery phase where you're still kind of ironing out, like, what's the value proposition of this? Like, how do you—you know, it's the product person's role to kind of get that feedback internally and also from clients to kind of evangelize the opportunity or, you know, what we're looking at building and really kind of smoke test it with everybody. So that way, you're not surprised on release day when suddenly it's like, oh, you know, we've got a handful of clients that—this won't work for us, so we've gotta turn it off for them or something like that.

(Cooper at 00:46:39) So I think it's a continuous part of the process. There's a portion of it during the discovery phase, well before you've kind of committed to building it and really ironed out what the functional requirements are and the user stories and handed it off to the development team. And then post release, it's continuing to sell, essentially, the new functionality to the users as well as your folks internally. Because, you know, the better you sell your team on it, the better they can kind of scale that messaging out to their contacts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:19) Alright. So we're gonna enter wrap up mode now. Okay. Best piece of leadership advice that you've ever received. You've heard this piece of advice. You put it into action. It stuck with you. What was it?

(Cooper at 00:47:33) It's okay to say you don't know the answer to something. I think there's a tendency to want to be the hero or not show that you don't know something. But what I've found is you end up getting yourself in trouble that way. And this relates to something I'm not very good at, but I'm working on, is delegating as well, where it's really kind of asking for help. It's asking—it's saying, like, listen, I don't know this, but I want to learn. Point me in the right direction or give me some advice. And not only do you take kind of that pressure off yourself, you also give the other person, whether it's your boss, whether it's your colleagues or so on, the opportunity to be of service and to help you. And so that's nice for them as well. So I'd say, yeah, don't feel like you've gotta be the hero all the time and don't be afraid to ask for help or speak up if you don't know something or clarify something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:49) I love it. And delegation, I like that you brought that up because that's one of the four things I'm working on this year.

(Cooper at 00:48:55) Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) Being a great dad.

(Cooper at 00:48:57) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:57) Becoming a better speaker, becoming a better writer, and delegation.

(Cooper at 00:49:02) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:02) That's for 2023. It's those four things.

(Cooper at 00:49:07) Those are great. Yeah. We made a podcast. This was fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:08) How do you feel?

(Cooper at 00:49:08) I feel great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:08) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.