Daniel. Daniel, what's up, man? Hey, dude. Happy birthday. I feel like it's been a while since I've said happy birthday to you, although our birthdays have continued daily since. I know, I know.
I was actually thinking that, and last week I was wondering if we were gonna go back to saying happy birthday now that we don't have guests. I think that you said it last episode, but I didn't. I feel like I did. Yeah.
It's gotta be the motif of Two Dads and Tech. By the way, this is our 21st episode. That's a big deal. I think every, every episode we do now is officially a big deal. A big deal. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
In the last episode we talked about how few people make it to episode 20, and I asked ChatGPT how few of those there were, and, you know, it gave me a bunch of inconsistent and competing data, which is funny.
Also, shout-out ChatGPT for probably skewing a lot of data the wrong way for a lot of people.
Don't just listen to whatever you see on the internet, guys, although this is factually the 21st episode, so do listen to that. And if you haven't already, like and subscribe on our YouTube channel. Mm-hmm.
We're on our way to 1,000 subscribers, and we really appreciate your support. Usually we ask you to do this at the end of the episode, but I know a lot of you aren't making it that far. And I'm okay with that.
I, I r- I know reality is what it is. Please listen to the whole episode, but even if you don't, go ahead and smash that subscribe button. And with that said, that's today's episode. We will see y'all next week.
[laughs] What if, what if a, a minute and 30, uh, seconds, that would be... Dude, we should do that one day. Or just like off, off the cuff, not even on our Wednesday morning drop, but like a Sunday afternoon.
Like 30 second just, "Hey, happy birthday, happy birth- happy, happy birth- ha- happy, happy birth- ha..." And thank you for listening to Two Dads and Tech. [laughs] And then it's just done. Yep.
The- Like seven-second drop. We should. We should. We could do that. We'll do that on like some fun episode, like 100 or something like that. [laughs] Like something- That would be funny...
something where it's like you should expect something big and it's the worst episode in the world- [laughs]... of Two Dads and Tech. Like not even produced or anything, just like raw. Like no trailer- [laughs]...
no teaser. Dude, so funny. Yeah. That'd be great. Dude, so I sent you a video last night. Did you see Liam? Yes. He's starting to swing the clubs, man. Yes. I'm, I'm trying to get him- Don't-...
that much closer as an excuse to go golfing more, and he's starting. It's so cool. If anyone doesn't know, Troy just bought a house.
Well, they built a house, and they bought for it to be built, and they have, Troy has this like at home golf simulator which is amazing, by the way.
Uh, the, the moment I have enough time in my world to come visit you, we're gonna be playing a few rounds of golf in your garage. So that's exciting. But yes, you sent me a video of Liam hitting on the, on the simulator.
That's amazing. That's such a cool thing to have. I feel like... What is he, three years old? I mean, it's like so cool, dude. That's so cool. He'll be three in July, and I'm trying to make it my excuse.
I ha- I saw a TikTok of a kid that was two years old absolutely nuking balls into the yard, and I was like, "Yeah, all right. Maybe I start, maybe I start getting him on the sticks real quick."
Um, but- What's crazy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna look this up while I tell you. So my brother has his own golf simulator as well in his garage, and he first built it in Seattle where they had 12-foot ceilings- Mm-hmm...
so it was like legit so nice. Yeah. You could do a full swing. Yep. We're tall also, so having that 12-foot ceiling when you're tall swinging a driver, that's important.
But he has a four-year-old and a almost two-year-old, and the four-year-old plays golf. Like, he, he'll go for a round, a, a half round, nine holes, with his four-year-old.
And like he'll, he'll hit it for fun and it'll... But he's like got an actual swing and, and it's like he's four. And my three-year-old is also really into golf.
He has his own real set of clubs and then his own, you know, fake plastic set of clubs.
But it's such a cool sport, that if you stay healthy, you, me as the parents, into our 50s, 60s, or even beyond, you can play golf with your kids. I, I mean, like you can't go out... I mean, not everyone.
A lot of people can't go play like pickup basketball in their 60s. Yeah. Uh, some of you can, so if you're listening and you're 60s playing pickup basketball, like shout-out to you and your health.
But like golf and like long distance biking and walking are the three things that I can think of that is like most people can probably do this well into their 60s or 70s if they take care of themselves. Yeah. Yeah.
And golf is one of those things. And I'm gonna have to send you a picture of this room. It's probably my most prized possession in this house.
So it's in the basement, and in this room specifically we dropped it down two feet. So the normal basement ceilings are 8'9". Foot and a half. Eight, 8'9", yeah. Yeah. So then these are 11, 10'9"? No.
Yeah, something like that. You could do a full swing, and I think you're like 6'12" and so because you're so tall, I think you'd be able to knock out a full swing in there. I'll, I'll send you a picture.
It's pretty incredible. What's the ceiling height in your garage you said? So this is actually in the basement. The garage is huge. Oh, the basement. Yeah. So I'll send you a, I'll send you a picture of it.
And- If it's nine feet, I will not be able to use a driver. No, no, no, no, no. But- It's, it's 11 feet. It's around 11 feet. Oh, 11. Yeah, yeah. I can do it. Yep. I need like 10, I need exactly 10 feet. Oh, you're good.
10 1/2. Well, well if it's anything under 10, like my garage is 9'11", like 9'11" or 9'13". I almost built a sim, but I can only use my high wedges
because once I start getting out like the, the driver or even, you know, like a three wood and stuff, it's like even though I probably am not gonna hit the ceiling, there's a mental aspect where I'm like I, I'm preventing myself from doing a full swing.
So that's just like, ah, you know, you could do it. So anyways, I looked it up. Tiger Woods, because we're talking about young kids who started playing golf, and yours and, and my nephew.
Tiger Woods first stepped into organized competitive golf at just eight years old.
In 1984, he entered and won the 9 to 10 boys division of the Junior World Golf Championships, marking the true beginning of his tournament career.
He said from there he went on to dominate junior golf, claiming six Junior World titles by age 15, and later entered his first USGA event, the US Junior Amateur, at age 14 [laughs] in 1990.
Dude-I feel like people who just started watching golf who are like, you know, Scotty Scheffler fans and, you know, they watch like Justin Thomas, you know, shout out Justin Thomas winning the, you know, the championship in Hilton Head.
But like a lot of these really awesome golfers nowadays, Rory obviously winning the Masters. It's like a, a long time coming. Tiger Woods was so freakishly dominant- Yeah... for so long. Absurdly. Like the, the Tiger...
Pe-people look for like the career Grand Slam, that's winning all four majors in your career. Yep. Tiger won all four in the same year. Yeah. It's called the Tiger Slam. That's ridiculous. Like no one- Absurd...
un-unbelievable. And I, I've, I watched these montage re-recently- Same. Yeah, yeah...
of his like pitches from like, he's like 80, 90, 100 yards out and it's just like in the hole, like all these hole outs from [chuckles] like deep in the fairway.
I watched this one, he was I think 174 yards out in thick rough and the announcers are like, "Oh, this... What? Does he, did he just get his pitching wed out, his pitching wedge? What, what is, what is Tiger doing?"
And he smacks his pitching wedge- Jeez... 174 yards into like two feet of the hole.
And literally, the, the, the announcer was like, "I don't think I've ever seen anything so unbelievable in my entire life watching golf." He was like, he was like about to like just faint from this.
But y-you, just the way he hits his pitching wedge 174 yards in thick rough, oh man, it's just- Dude... insanity. Tiger Woods- Yeah... was just a, a behemoth. Yeah. Yeah.
People don't really understand how dominant he was. I mean, he was like the Michael Phelps of golf. Like nobody- Mm-hmm... could beat you regardless of how hard they tried.
Or Usain Bolt, whatever you wanna compare it to. Yeah. Just nobody could beat him. Crazy. He was, he was insane. But yeah, my... 174. Man, that's like a... I'm lucky to hit a four iron. Like especially- Yeah. Yeah....
like, I don't know. Yeah. Like my, my distance isn't, isn't too crazy. No, I mean, no one's hitting a 174 in thick rough with a pitching wedge. With a pitching... Yeah, no.
You can maybe out of the fairway, maybe out of the fairway you could smack it as hard as you can and make it that far, but the grass was like two, three inches long. I mean, he was- Yeah... standing in the grass.
That is- And he just smacked the crap out of it. I mean- [chuckles] Unbelievable... just unbelievable. Unbelievable. So yesterday we had one of our listeners, Brandon, hit me up on LinkedIn.
He was bringing up a previous TDIT episode that, where we talked about vibe coding.
I mean, he asked me for the tool and I said it was Cursor, but you need a little bit of dev experience for Cursor 'cause it's not like V0 or, V0 or Replit or any of those where you just type in an idea and then you get some sort of UI application.
Anyways, it made me think nowadays, like I, I feel like back in the day you, you didn't have to be scared to share your idea 'cause there's a very small chance that nobody's gonna go out and build it.
But now your idea can become at least an MVP or a prototype or something like that within seconds. Do you think with people
having these ideas, like this guy came to me, he wanted to share me his idea and I was like, "Honestly, you don't even need to tell me. I'll just help you like get it up and running and all that stuff."
It's like you don't need to tell me because like I'm not gonna steal it. But at the end of the day, like just kinda keep it close to the chest. Do you think that people should now
kind of keep their ideas, uh, as a secret or do you still think that people won't build it to scale if they do share it? That's a good question.
I think MVPs should be minimum viable products in this sense should be shared with people who would use that and whose workflows or lives would be improved by what you think the ultimate product will become.
Something we did really well at Beehiiv, our early cap table and our earliest large users were people who were before Beehiiv on platforms that just were not doing what they needed it to do.
And so we both put the platform in their hands as an early user, asked them to invest as early investors, and also got the most relevant feedback for actual product development from power users who were early adopters and early investors.
So it was almost like a perfect triangle of you invested, so the upside for you is that we succeed. You're a user, so the upside for you is that the product works.
And we want to listen to you because you are one of, at that time, the few relatively customers we had.
So I think I, I personally have a, a bit of a sore taste in my mouth or a sour taste in my mouth of people who build in stealth for too long. I think there's a time and place to build in stealth, but ultimately
it, I believe it becomes analysis paralysis if you're not careful. Like, oh, is it, is it what it needs to be for people to, to- Yep... to know it exists? It's like you're never gonna know.
Everything, literally everything is an assumption based on data or in some cases based on feelings [chuckles] that you won't be able to prove until you have real people giving you real feedback with the actual product.
There's a company out there called Saleboat. Oh, yeah. Saleboat being S-A-L-E boat. Yep.
I've done some advising with them in the past, and they built kind of in stealth for a while, but also like have a real product and they're building toward like this minimum viable solution for salespeople.
I think their approach is interesting. In their MVP and building process, they were getting real-time feedback from sales leaders about, "Is this actually helpful for you?" And don't hold back. If it's not, why not?
You know, why build something that's not gonna be useful for real people in their day-to-day? So I was one of, I'm sure, dozens of people giving them similar feedback in different go-to-market revenue roles.
And so I think if you're gonna build in stealth, and in this case stealth meaning you don't have a buy button and a website that someone can actually go and use the product, at least
tune in to the people who should be using the product once it's not in stealth and make sure you're not totallyOff with what you're building, 'cause you're gonna be really upset if you spend twelve to eighteen months building something that no one wants to buy.
Dude, I hate when people build in stealth for too long. I think it's dumb. Honestly, I think it's e-especially in a time, like, where people can ship features daily now.
Like, you will fall so far behind if you're building in stealth, and you're trying to make sure you build that perfect product. And then you're like, "Oh, great, here it is. It looks beautiful. It works well.
Let's go take it to market." Next thing you know, if it's a Gong competitor, Gong probably has that and then some on top of it. Yep. So like- Yep... I don't know.
I don't, I don't love it, but more so it's like, I can tell you a business idea right now. You can go build a UI for it and probably get some funding.
You could probably go get some angel investors to be like, "Yes, I like this idea. All you have to do is execute. Here's three hundred thousand dollars." And so what he then asked me was, "Okay.
Well, thanks for letting me know that." I told him V0 is my favorite. So everybody out there, I love V0. I think from a UI perspective and a UX perspective, it builds the best interfaces.
None of them are up to where they need to be to actually scale a backend application, like, none of them are there yet. But from a UI perspective, V0 has so far been the best.
And then literally minutes later, when I responded, shoots me over this application that he built, and I'm like, "Dude, that's sick. Like, I'm proud of you." And he's like, "Well, now what do I do with an MVP?"
And I'm like, at this point, it, it's for go-to-market people. At this point, I'm just reaching out to sales leaders, and I'm like, "Hey, I'm building something. Can I get your feedback?"
If they say yeah, share with them what it is, and they'll either say, "This sucks," or, "This is really helpful. Can we try it?" And so with an MVP- Yes...
if you're building one, you can build one literally by the end of this podcast. I swear, I'm not even kidding. Go to vzero.dev, type in an idea, and you can have an MVP. You don't need- Yes...
to have charging to be automated. Just charge manually. Send over a Stripe link if you want somebody to pay for it.
But I promise you, you can get an MVP, but in the next thirty to forty-five minutes, at least one that looks well. And then yeah, I just reach out to whoever your ICP would be.
And then the way I describe it for every company that is trying to build and that is in the really early stages is instead of saying, "Hey Daniel, I'm building this tool that automates personalized outreach," whatever, like, everybody's doing that today, right?
So instead of doing that, it's like, "Hey Daniel, I'm building something for small s- uh, for small sales teams. Can I get your feedback real quick?" Mm-hmm.
Daniel will probably more than likely respond to something like that than like some stupid little pitch about something that you're building that's shiny, like nobody really cares about that anymore.
And so I ran that test with a company that I'm working with right now, and their re- their reply rate's literally at fifty percent with that. Can I get your feedback for something I'm building for X?
Like, make it very small marketing teams or supply chain logistic marketing teams, whatever. Like, make it somewhat specific. A lot of people are willing to give you feedback. But that's what I would do if I had an MVP.
I don't know if you'd do anything differently. I think there's a misconception that the people doing that should be the sellers.
Hey sellers, go, go find these people for product feedback and, you know, eventually we're gonna build it and kinda turn the, turn the script on them to get them to buy it.
I think those, those product feedback conversations should actually be engineers, builders.
All the best MVP product feedback sessions I've had have been conversationally kind of awkward, because engineers are usually not your typical, very conversational, outward-focused, like salespeople. Losers. Kidding.
Ugh. No. But just, you know, typical pr- you know, general paintbrush here, but what they're asking is, is specifically tied to what they're actually gonna go use the feedback for and build.
And I think a, a, a step further, the best builders, I would say the metrics that you qualify successful versus unsuccessful in terms of building, I've seen the best builders do this where they're building for themselves.
And you've probably seen the tweets and the, the posts of- Mm-hmm... you know, don't build for who you think your ICP is.
Build for yourself first, and that will be how you turn that subjective is this the right choice- Yeah... is this the right features?
At least in the early days, into objective, well, this is what I need, so this is what I'm building. Yep. This is what works for me, so this is what I'm building.
You'll find that unless your idea is so remarkably niche that there's just not a market for it, that if you build for yourself, and it works for you, it will work for others as well.
Eventually you have to scale out of that mindset, but those early days, not really. Build for yourself.
You can get your first one hundred or one thousand users just by being or building exactly what you need in your day-to-day. Yeah.
Yeah, I built a few side gigs, and when I jump on podcasts, they ask me, almost every podcast will ask me how did I validate the idea? And I was like, "Myself. This was really annoying at the company that I was at."
And I was like, "Screw it." Like, let me build a small solution to solve for it.
Just like what you said, if I have the issue, my assumption is there's hundreds if not thousands of other people out there that have this same- Yep... exact issue or the same exact challenge or annoyance or whatever.
Exactly. But I don't know. That's what I think.
A-and it's so easy to at least get-- If you're wanting funding, like a lot of people are in this weird position where they're like, "Hey, I have kids," and especially a lot of the listeners. I have kids.
I can't quit my job because I'm providing for my family, and the only way that I can go out there and build a business and try something on my own, and this was my scenario, is if I raised money, and I was able to supplement my income with some sort of other income.
If that's a scenario that you're in, or if that's the position that you're in, go to V0, go to any of these, like, get an idea. Go to ChatGPT and say, "Hey, here's my idea.
Can you give me a detailed breakdown and business plan of how to build it? But then can you also give me some feedback on other, or ideas on other things that would make this idea better?"
I promise you will be like, "Holy cow, my idea just went from one to a hundred." So then once you do that, take that w- take that response back to ChatGPT or, or V0, sorry, one of these tools, Lovable, it doesn't matter.
Use any tool that you like. Build the UI and then go to vcsheet.com or look up angel investors on LinkedIn, reach out to every single one of them and just be like, "Hey, I've got this idea."
And then if, it would be even better if you had like five people that said like, "Yes, I'll spend money on this." But if you didn't, just be like, "Hey, I built an MVP. We're raising a round.
We wanna close the round by the end of June. Would you like to have a conversation?" Just reach out for an hour a day. I promise, like you'll get some funding at some point. But it's easy. And just do... It's not easy.
It's not easy.But it's simple, right? It's simple. I'll say it like that. Yeah. Anyways, let's, let's get away from, let's get away from all this building and... Well, no, let's not.
I, I, I kinda wanna stay in the same vein, but more so I wanna bring up a LinkedIn post that I made, like, two weeks ago. I thought it was gonna do so well, and it flopped.
So I'm gonna use this opportunity to make it do even better. Let's do it. And it's, it's a, it's actually great for Beehiiv, 'cause it's essentially marketing for them.
So somebody told me or asked me, "Hey, how do I build a business with no capital?"
And I kind of just explained it, but we're gonna go into a different way that you can build a business with no capital, and I love this way, and I think nobody's doing it, and all it takes is a little bit of time and $0, literally $0.
I'm gonna pull up the LinkedIn post real quick, so. Okay. Yeah, I'm interested to hear what, uh, I might have seen this post. I probably did, but if it was two weeks ago, so much has happened since then.
All right, you have seen the post 'cause I told you to blast it. Oh, yeah, yeah. I remember this one.
So I'm gonna actually have this, because we talked about golf early on in the podcast, I'm gonna have this specific example be towards golf.
So let's say there's so many golf apparel brands out there now, but let's say that you wanted to build a golf apparel brand.
This is exactly what I would do to build that brand with $0 today in hopes that I can get enough revenue to create clothing, hats, golf club covers, whatever it is that you wanna build.
So the first thing that I would do, and shout-out Beehiiv, and I'm a customer of Beehiiv, so it's not like I'm promoting it just 'cause Dan was on this podcast. I pay for them monthly.
I think I'm like, I'm like your highest tier. But go start a news- a newsletter on Beehiiv. So if it's a golf brand, start a golf newsletter, name it something cute, Fairway, whatever, who cares?
But just get their free plan. That's it, okay? And then from then, every single week, write a newsletter about whatever inspires you in golf.
So, for example, post Tiger Woods highlights, Phil Mickelson highlights, anything like that, okay? So every single week, and you can use ChatGPT, deep research, anything that does surface a lot of this information.
Screenshot some, like, Malbon clothing or whatever these other brands are, Roan, et cetera. There's so many golf brands out there nowadays.
But every week, just even if you're writing to zero people, just write a newsletter of golf things that inspire you, and then on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat, whatever, I really don't care what it is, make a post about golf, and then drive everybody to that newsletter, 'cause again, it's free.
You're gonna get their email.
And if you do this every single day, I promise, if you post every single day about this newsletter on all those social media channels, if you do it for a month, two months, you will have hundreds of subscribers, and you can use that for your early access customer list.
Like, "Hey, thanks so much for following us and following this newsletter. We're now coming out with XYZ. Be an early access customer here."
I genuinely believe that if you did that, just spend 30 minutes a day shouting out golf on all these social media apps and pointing everybody towards your newsletter, you can have hundreds if not thousands of people over the span of three to six months following that newsletter that you can easily flip into revenue, or brands will hit you up and be like, "Hey, can you put me in your newsletter?"
Like, I don't know. It's just, it's free, it's so easy, and I don't know why people don't do it. Yeah. I think it's interesting you bring up newsletters as a side hustle because I just recorded a course about this.
It's coming out soon. I won't give away too much information there. I know pre-sale is coming in hot pretty fast. We'll give some more details about that. But you think of the, the image where
there's a huge iceberg, and the image is the iceberg above the water, and then- Yep... this, like, 500X large iceberg under the water.
I think we're at the very tip of the top of where people have actually scratched the surface of what's possible with newsletters, and as they dig deeper and deeper and deeper, like, we're nowhere near the peak of what is to be uncovered.
There's just so much more. There's so much more value to having a newsletter, and I don't think it's going anywhere. People have been saying email is dead forever, for like 15 years, but it's, it's not.
I mean, we're still, we, we see acquisitions after acquisition after acquisition, people buying newsletters, selling newsletters, starting newsletters.
Lenny's newsletter is one that just hit a million subscribers, a very popular one, and he has these partnerships with, like, Replit and ChatGPT and Veo and Lovable, and basically, if you pay for a year of his paid subscriber newsletter, you get free access to the pro tools of all these AI tools for a whole year.
And it's $200 for his newsletter for a year, but the value you're getting from these tools that he gives you for free is even more than that. Yeah.
So you're literally saving money on these tools, these packages of tools, by paying for his newsletter for a year, and you're also getting this paid newsletter from Lenny.
And so that's one example of, of so many I can think of where the value out, is so outsized from what you're actually paying for the value, and in some cases, to your point, it's a free newsletter in a lot of cases.
So yeah, I think audience building has to include newsletters in 2025 and beyond. You can't just build on a social platform without thinking about, you know, the newsletter aspect. Yeah. Yeah.
I was asked that question on TikTok Live, and I told them, like, "Let's hypothetically say that you built your brand on TikTok and it gets banned from the US." Like, you have nothing.
You have nothing, so start with a newsletter. Just start getting email addresses. Who cares? Like, it doesn't look fancy on, you know, as, as a newsletter.
If you had a million subscribers on TikTok, it looks really cool, right? "Oh, I'm, I'm TikTok famous." I promise you, long run, you'd rather be newsletter famous than TikTok famous 100 times out of 100 times.
Like, I would. I wanna have a successful newsletter, but I don't even know... Like, we have a demo one, but I'd love to have, like, a personal one, but who knows? I'm not that passionate- You should... about things.
Uh, what do I talk about? Oh, we do, Two Dads and Tech. [laughs] Yeah. Uh, shout out Two Dads and Tech. Go to twodadsandtech.com, subscribe to our newsletter. We write one every week.
It coincides with our newsletter drop. A lot of times has similar topics, but is a product in itself, which, uh, I actually just recorded a video on this aside from the course.
So just, just before this episode recording, I recorded a video that I'll post on LinkedIn later today about-Just what I just said, which is, uh, starting a newsletter and, and owning that as a product itself.
So a lot of things around newsletters. I could talk about this for hours. I do- I know you do... every day, talk about it for hours. [laughs] That is my, my life. You do.
Speaking of, I, I saw this person on LinkedIn, and she was-- she made a post, and I thought it was a really well-written post. It, it kinda came off a bit complain-y.
I won't name any names here, but I thought the idea of it was, and the message behind it was pretty powerful.
It was just talking about having this sense of being overwhelmed as an AE at a high-growth startup with a lot of expectations that are just riding on, on your shoulders. Yep. And you're an AE at a high-growth startup.
Yep. And you've been there. You were one of the earliest employees. So I wanted to ask you, like, what are-- and I, I've been at a Series A company, Series B, Series C. Like, I've been all over the place too.
So what are for you the biggest frustrations about being an AE at a high-growth startup? Yeah, I'm doing that little, uh, the little Catholic cross here.
Uh, I'm not even Catholic, but just in case you're listening just before I start unveiling the layers here. No, I, I love Beehiiv. I was the first sales hire at Beehiiv.
I think I was the tenth employee, although who knows, uh, about tenth employee. Early days, it was seed when I joined, and so we had raised a tiny bit of money, but it was tiny bit.
And ten of us every single day would meet. We called it All Hands, but it was all ten of the entire company meeting every single day- All Hands... about, yeah, exactly, about what you were doing.
And, you know, that was in twenty twenty-two. In twenty twenty-three, we eventually segmented All Hands to growth and engineers. And so you were either at Beehiiv for growth or you were at Beehiiv and building.
And then, uh, from there, of course, we're at almost one hundred employees now at the time of this recording. We raised a Series A in twenty twenty-three. We raised a Series B in twenty twenty-four.
We've over ten x'd since I joined in revenue and in head count, and it's, it's been a wild ride. But I think
what people don't always know when they look at Beehiiv as an example, but any high-growth scaleup or startup, is that there are actual blood, sweat, and tears going into the company behind the scenes that are just not sexy.
I mean, hundred-hour work weeks early days, where literally, like, we use Zendesk for our support ticketing queue. We would just share the load.
I mean, there were, there were tickets, like, but we didn't have but one support person. Yeah. So everyone would go into Zendesk a lot of times in the middle of the night.
I remember I used to, this is before I stopped drinking, and I love a good scotch or whiskey. I would just pour myself a double pour of scotch.
I would show up at my computer at eleven PM, give or take, and I would go through Zendesk tickets till three, four, five in the morning. That's what you do.
And then come the next day, three hours later, you start seven or eight AM, and you just work for, you know, six to twelve hours, depending on the day.
So that wasn't every day, but those were, those were days that happened. And we were just building something bigger than each of us were individually.
We knew and we know still it's gonna be bigger than we could ever imagine. And so early days, we were just grinding our lives away. Now, you ask, like, what are some of the frustrating things?
Like, no one loves working a hundred hours a week. [laughs] So, you know, I, you know, I, I had a wife. I still do. I had one kid at the time. Now I have two.
I mean, it's hard to segment l- work and life in those, in those moments. And so you start to take on this brand mentality of, like, I am Beehiiv and Beehiiv is me.
If you follow me on social, you know the branding of Daniel Burke is in many ways inseparable from Beehiiv. That's by design.
I've created a brand around who I am online that is closely related to who I believe Beehiiv is and what Beehiiv means to me, what I do around Beehiiv day to day.
A lot of top of funnel for me as a salesperson comes from who I am on social, and so that's all by design. But now that we're a hundred employees, I don't own what I literally did own day one. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Two and a half years has passed. I owned everything. I was on forty to eighty sales calls a week. Mm. I would have lost my voice by Friday when I would give a forecast update to the whole company.
It went from a, a weekly sales report that I wrote in an Evergreen Google Doc to a now a sales report that's monthly written in Beehiiv, actually, which is pretty cool. But I don't own everything.
And so some of growing, I think, is knowing when your competency of going from zero to one is better suited for someone who's gone from one to ten. Yeah. So we've since hired a VP of sales who's awesome.
We have a solutions team. They're awesome. We have a customer success team. They're awesome. I have a whole team of AEs I work with. They're all awesome. When I joined, I was the salesperson.
I was the customer success person. I was the solutions engineer. I was growth and in marketing and on social. I had the Beehiiv account login. I would do the Beehiiv social posts, and we did everything.
We all did everything.
But I think part of a scaleup and what makes a scaleup successful, what goes from, like, early grind days of startup to, like, actual successful scaleup and, and, you know, more than just, like, the venture capital world, but like, oh no, you have paying users and you're growing in revenue and you're, you're outsizing that valuation.
You know when you're, you're in over your head and you hire people- Yeah... who are better than you. Yeah. So I think we've done that. It's not always easy. I like owning things.
You know, sometimes it hurts your ego a little bit. Yeah. You know, I'll, I'll be the first to say, like, there are, there are times where my ego was hurt. I'm like, "No, no, no, I wanna own this because I created this.
I built this. This is mine." I think it's good to hire people like that, not patting myself on the back, but I always look for that when I hire people. It's like, are you-- is this yours or is this just a job?
I mean, it is- Yeah... just a job for a lot of people. That's okay. You can't have everyone in the company always taking full ownership of everything 'cause it, like, that's not how companies work.
Eventually, you hire employees.But like there's something really sweet about those early days where everything's yours. Yeah. But anyways, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm dancing around the question a little bit, but- No, no...
I can talk about this for days. No, no, no, I like it because I was at a Series A company, and man, I joined at the perfect time.
COVID hit, and everybody had to go and do digital advertising, and I was at a company that sold literally, like, how to optimize Facebook and LinkedIn ads. Like, that's it. Nice.
And so everybody had to dump all their money into there. So I joined at the perfect time. Wild West, you had deals left and right, and kind of similar to you, as, like, you start to build your own process.
There was no process. It was like, whoever's hot, go after them. Yep. Close the deal. I don't really care about territories. Here's your list of, like, thousands of accounts. Loved it.
It was so, so fun, and then we ha- then we raised a Series B, and we brought in, like, a VP of sales. We brought in this person, and then a lot of processes started to get put into place.
And it's like, okay, now you have from thousands of accounts, we're gonna go hire 20 sales reps, even though there's only six of you.
We're gonna go hire 20 more, and everyone's gonna have 300 accounts instead, but we want you to tier them.
And it became, like, this same, like, this whole monotonous, like, every day you woke up, and it was, like, the same thing versus, like, this exciting, like, ooh, like, shooting fish in a barrel, who am I gonna close today kind of thing.
Yep. It became, I don't know, just not as fun. And so I think, like, you mentioned you're dancing around the question and, and, and maybe there's reasons for that, right?
Like, at the end of the day, Beehive's an amazing company and I think that there's... the growing pains suck for everyone for the most part, unless you, you mentioned it that one to 10.
There was this company I was at who where this VP of sales at all of his previous companies was able to scale those companies to 10 million ARR, but he could not scale to 100 million.
And I remember when he thought he was gonna get the CRO position, this was before metadata, he thought he'd get the CRO position because he scaled it to, like, 13, 14 million.
He's like, "Great, like, this is going well." He didn't get it. Somebody that scaled companies to 100 million and beyond got it, and he was pissed. He ended up leaving, like, very soon after. But- Hm...
ki- kind of like what you mean, man. It's like you build it, you own it.
It's like you have all this emotion and this attachment to the company, and then when you slowly, slowly it being ripped, ripped away from you, you're like, "No," like, "I did that. What? What the heck?" Yeah. Yeah.
But regardless. But it's, it's something you have to, you have to learn. You have to learn, I mean...
It's interesting, even Tyler, who we interviewed a few episodes ago, he and his two co-founders owned everything in the beginning. I mean, it was just the three of them building literally everything.
But Tyler, if you remember, we asked him, like, "When's the last time you touched the code base?" It's been, like, two years almost since he's actually touched the code base.
And there comes a point in everyone's career when they're building a startup where they have to put their foot down and say, "I shouldn't own this anymore." Yeah.
And when I looked at just the raw qualifications of what we needed in the sales team that I built, like, I built the sales team. It's my team. I hired the people. I scaled it. Yeah. I built all the process.
I had to be honest with myself about what I simply have not done before. What I have not done before, I have not taken a startup from one million to 100 million.
But I have taken a startup from 1 million to 15 million to 20 million. That's gonna be concreted on my, on my gravestone for as long as I live. You know, it's like- Yeah, it's sick... I've done that. Yeah.
And so now maybe the next thing in my career is, is doing the 20 to 100 or 100 to, you know, beyond.
It's I, I can lean on what I've done at Beehive, but at the end of the day, like, we need someone right now who has done what we need right now.
And I could sit and throw spaghetti at the wall all day and experiment and iterate and, and, and do great stuff, but we don't really have time for that. We're building too fast.
And, and I, I actually agree with that assessment.
I think we would prefer having someone who knows exactly what the playbook looks like, who can say, "Here's what we're gonna do, and this is why it's gonna work, and let me just follow them."
And, uh, that's kind of what we're doing, and it's an exciting time to be at Beehive. Yeah.
Yeah, regardless of the attachment that's to it and, like, what's getting ripped away from your possession, like, it's for the best and that's just, it is what it is. That's, that's what happens in a business.
I wanted to ask you about your day. So I wanted to take a quick pivot here. Does every day seem repetitive to you? Or like, are... You wake up, you do the same thing until you go to bed.
Like, what does your day look like from when you wake up to go to sleep? Yeah. It depends. Last night... So I'll tell you, I'll walk you through yesterday because it was a pretty, pretty standard day.
I have not been waking up as early as I would like. I'm gonna be totally upfront with you. I talked recently in an episode about the chronic pain I've been dealing with.
I have a ruptured disc in my neck and a ruptured disc in my lower back right now. Uh, so I can't run maybe ever again. That's a conversation for another day. I just canceled the Chicago Marathon. Terrible side note.
Yeah, so, like, yeah, all the doctors are saying you should stop running at least for the foreseeable future.
So swimming is gonna be my friend, but it's indoors and I'm like, "Ah, this, like, defeats the whole mental rush of running for me." So my days look a little different right now.
I'm waking up every day around between 6:30 and 7:30, usually as, as, as much close to when my kids wake up as possible so I can sleep in a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Eat breakfast with the kids, wake them up, get them ready for the day. I start work around 8:00 to 9:00, depending on the day. Let's pause there real quick. Yeah. Eat breakfast with the kids.
What does breakfast look like? Is it a quick grab and go, or are we making breakfast? Usually we make breakfast. Yeah. Uh, I would say every day.
And, and so it's typically something like eggs and bacon, you know, some fruit. You know, my, my one-year-old eats, like, bananas and stuff, and he'll eat- Yeah... some cut up sausage. Today it was pancakes.
You know, it kind of depends. Oh, sweet. Okay. We, we typically make breakfast. Yeah, yeah, and by we, I mean my wife 100%. I, I- [laughs]... almost do nothing, uh, to my own shame, but she is awesome, and I'm not.
So we eat breakfast. Tuesday and Thursday, my oldest goes to school, so my wife will usually take him because I'm typically working by the time he goes to school.
So yeah, I start work from, you know, 8:00 to 9:00, and my day usually looks, the first hour or two is, is getting through inbox from what happened after I stopped work the day before.
If it's on a Monday morning, it's the whole three days before or, you know, Friday through Sunday night.
I'll tune into emails a little bit at the end of the day or throughout the weekend but-I try to get through the inbox just as first thing in the morning.
Then I go through deal flow tasks and, you know, I'm looking at HubSpot, I'm looking at, you know, what, what tasks I set for myself that day from the prior days or, you know, from over the weekend. I'll look at social.
I, I social sell a lot and so what have I missed in the inbox? You know, what should I post about that kinda helps me get to the sales conversations in my role. And I usually have a full plate of meetings.
So, you know, today I'll tell you how many sales meetings I have.
One already, one, two, three, four coming up, so five sales meetings today with about 30 minutes in between each of those, and I have, you know, a list of about 40 or 50 emails I need to send in terms of outbound for meetings that I'm trying to set for my IRL event in New York next week.
So, I was just in New York. I'm going again next week for some sales stuff, and so really just trying to stay busy, but also not just mindlessly busy.
I want everything I do in a day to have some string I can attach to revenue it brings to me or the company.
So a lot of my social selling is gonna be, you know, outsized in terms of impressions it leads to Beehiiv and in many cases directly to my inbox. And so, yeah, that's the day.
After work, I, I end work between 5:00 and 6:00-ish, sometimes 6:30 depending on the day, but usually I end work when I smell dinner. Dang, she makes dinner, too? She's awesome. My wife is- Okay... is the GO- the GOAT.
Yeah. Sound like a- My life doesn't work, does not work without Courtney. I mean, legitimately- Yeah... not even blowing smoke, my life doesn't work without her. Yeah, same. Same. So we start dinner, I'll come down.
I, I try to leave recently. I try to leave my phone in my office so that when I leave my office, at least for the... until my kids are in bed, I, I'm like I'm there and I'm present.
Something I'm, I'm trying to do because of actual feedback I got from Courtney and from couples we meet with, like, I think I'm like a little addicted to my phone. It's really hard for me- Yeah. Yeah, me too.
That's a great practice. Wow. Yeah. It's hard for me not to be on it, so I'll be like leaving work, but then I'm like still working on my, on my phone while I'm eating.
I'm on Slack, I'm responding to messages and I'm like, "I gotta just have some breaks here." Like, I gotta be disconnected.
And so what better time than when I have the full attention of my kids and we're eating dinner, asking them about their days. We eat, I play with them, I read them books, I help them, you know, go about go down to bed.
7:30, sometimes I'm spending time with my wife, although she has, uh, some part-time jobs that she spends time doing. If she ends up working a little bit, I'll end up working as well.
Go to bed around 9:30 to 10:30, and then I do it all over again. Got it. Nice. Yeah, that's a pretty standard day. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love it. Yeah, nothing, nothing crazy. What, what about you?
I mean, walking through your day in 60 seconds, then I think we have to end this episode 'cause we're coming up on time here. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna do real quickly. Uh, I'm a little different.
Obviously, I know we talked about this. Yeah, you're way better. Your, your, your day is so awesome. No, no, no, no, no. I set my alarm now 20 minutes earlier. So my alarm goes off at 3:40 now. What? Because I'm do...
I know. I'm doing 20 minutes more of cardio just to kind of lean out for summer, all that fun stuff. So I wake up then. I get to the gym around 4:30.
When I wake up, I eat a [chuckles] so unhealthy, I eat a Rice Krispie and I take pre-workout. And then I go to the gym. By then you're going to the gym, so it's like- Yeah. Yeah... it balances out. So I work it all off.
I go to the gym, I do a workout, come back home. I make breakfast while my kids are still asleep, so I get back at 6:30. The kids start to wake up at about 7:00.
And I usually make yogurt and granola, and I have a protein bar, and that's it. Liam gets a really massive smoothie that I make him. He loves them. So it's just tons of fruit, tons of veggies, yogurt, all that fun stuff.
I take Liam to daycare every day, and right now we're in a weird period where Carly and I both work from home. We both had to have to juggle calls, and so I got Harrison here, Harrison there.
But let's just like, I work, whatever. I won't get through too much of my day.
At the end of the day, I clock out at about 4:30 when I go and get Liam from daycare, and then I only work after they go back down to bed so or go back to sleep, so it's like 7:00, 7:30.
But I'm typically the dinner maker. Carly has been doing it a lot more since we moved into this house. But yeah, man, we all eat dinner together, but I don't... We do use our phones.
Like, we sit on our phones at the dinner table, and I think that that's... Like you saying that, tonight no phones, so I'm gonna see how that works out. But yeah, I go to bed at 9:30.
I wanna be asleep by 9:30, and then wake up, rinse, and repeat. Asleep by 9:30? Yeah, yeah. Asleep by 9:30. When I'm doing well with my consistent gym/cardio stuff, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm trying to wake up at 4:45.
3:40's crazy. I mean, that's, that's impressive to do that consistently. I see a chiropractor very consistently right now for these, you know, this chronic pain I'm having, and he's like, "You have to start swimming."
I'm like, "What about biking?" I know I can't bike, but I'm like, "How can I get back to biking?" He's like, "Well, right now the neck problem I have, it's just I, I can't bike. It's just like impinged nerves." Oh.
"It's just too much." Jeez. Running is like, "Don't run." It sucks. Like I'm, I'm- Dude... I'm just, I'm not running. But like I gotta do something. Yeah. So I'm gonna probably pick up swimming.
I did that in college a lot. I would go and I would swim laps for like an hour. I wasn't a competitive swimmer, but I was pretty in shape doing, doing, you know, lap swimming and stuff.
And so I have a YMCA right next to my house. I can go swim laps whenever I want. So I need to do that. I mean, I need to do something, or else I'm gonna have to like figure out something. [chuckles] I mean- Yeah...
I gotta do something. Dude, I'd go crazy. Yeah. I'd go crazy, but- I know. No, I know. Well, cool, man. Day in the life of people in tech sales, man. Well, hey, this is episode- Day in the life... 21.
Where, uh, Daniel, we always end off like this. Where do they find us? 2dadsintech.com. Please subscribe on YouTube. Leave a review on Spotify or Apple, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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A lot of exciting episodes planned. Please do subscribe and follow. Sweet. Awesome, Daniel. Have a good one. Take it easy.