Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:11 — 16.6MB) | Embed
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, C-3PO is my favorite Star Wars droid, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
R2-D2 comes in at a close second place, but C-3PO has so many good one-liners, he takes the top spot for me.
In the opening scenes of Star Wars: A New Hope, we see R2-D2 and C-3PO panicking as Darth Vader and his army of StormTroopers capture a ship operated by the Rebel Alliance. After an encounter with Princess Leia, the two droids make their way to an escape pod and jettison off to safety. Their pod lands on the nearby planet of Tatooine.
The hot, sandy desert surface of the planet is difficult for them, and 3PO begins complaining. “How did I get into this mess? I really don’t know how. We seem to be made to suffer. It’s our lot in life. I’ve got to rest before I fall apart. My joints are almost frozen. What a desolate place this is.”
The Star Wars script describes what happens next this way:
Suddenly Artoo whistles, makes a sharp right turn and starts off in the direction of the rocky desert mesas. Threepio stops and yells at him.
THREEPIO
Where are you going?
A stream of electronic noises pours forth from the small robot.
THREEPIO
Well, I’m not going that way. It’s much too rocky. This way is much easier.
I’ve mentioned masterminds several times on this podcast and I can’t overstate the positive impact that being in a mastermind has had on my personal development and business development. In September of 2021 I approached my mastermind with a challenge I was having in my business. I was looking for their help on identifying a way to better grow my business. There are essentially only 3 ways to grow a business.
- Add more clients/customers.
- Charge more (aka raise your prices).
- Get your existing clients to buy more things (get them to buy additional services).
While I went into the meeting thinking we’d take a look at my services and identify other services I should be offering that would benefit my clients, the conversation took a different turn. While my mastermind agreed that I should be looking for ways to provide additional services that my clients would find beneficial, they were in unison in believing I needed to streamline the way I offer my services. In short, they all said I needed to productize my services.
It’s rare for all the guys in my mastermind to be in full agreement, so they had my full attention at this point. But I was confused. After all, I’d already combined our most desired services into products. For example, if someone wants our Pro level editing, they can choose from three packages: Pro, Pro Plus, or Pro Advanced.
They clarified that while I do offer those as packages, I didn’t provide a way for someone to visit my site, choose that package, put that package into a cart, buy it, and then immediately start sending me work. Because of that, my services weren’t truly productized. As such, there were way too many hoops to go through for someone to do business with me, and I was losing out on opportunities.
Naturally, I asked them what they thought the solution was. My mastermind consists of myself and three other guys: Jeff, Shawn, and John. We’ve all been successful entrepreneurs for over a decade. All of us have at least some level of experience with podcasting. Two of the guys are great at marketing. John has created and sold multiple businesses and is worth several million dollars.
John looked at my problem and offered up his idea of the best solution. He told me I needed to build a custom backend system. He told me there was nothing out there that was going to meet my specific needs and if I was going to solve this the right way, the best path was to build the solution myself. He told me to hire a designer and a web app developer. He told me what qualifications they should each have, what coding languages to use, what database systems to use, and which system to use for the designer.
Hearing him break down everything sounded overwhelming and expensive. Knowing that he’d built multiple web apps for some of his businesses, I asked him what he thought it might cost. He told me I should expect to pay $20-$30k for the project. For John, that amount of money was not an issue. But for me, it was too much.
Like C-3PO I looked at that path as too rocky. Not only was it more than I had the budget for, I knew that building the app was just the beginning. I’d have to keep a developer on retainer for bug fixes, updates, and security management. I didn’t want to be in the software development business. So I looked for a smoother path.
I didn’t see anything so unique about my business that it would necessitate a custom-built solution. Knowing there was no way John could possibly be familiar with every solution out there, I began searching for a solution that had already been built. I also took time to evaluate my product packages to make sure I fully understood their point of view that I needed to productize them.
The more I dug into my business, evaluated their advice, and researched the market for solutions, I realized that I’d opened Pandora’s Box. There was a whole world of software solutions that could streamline my business in a variety of ways. I came back to the group about a month later and told them I’d found a few options that were close to what I thought I needed and I was sure there was a pre-built solution out there. I shared with them some of the other backend systems I’d realized could be improved by getting an off-the-shelf solution, and that was the path I’d chosen. John reiterated that he thought a custom-built solution was best, but they all supported my decision.
Over the next three months I researched over 75 different pre-built solutions that I thought would work for what I was now calling our backend client portal. I found five that seemed to meet most of my needs and narrowed my focus on testing those. From there, I narrowed my search to three, then two, and finally one. It had nearly every feature I’d identified as wanting for my future backend system, and it even had several features I hadn’t considered.
However, there was one feature it was advertised as having that I could not get to work. So I set up a meeting with one of the company’s experts to find out what I was doing wrong. It turned out that I misunderstood the functionality of the feature. It did not do what I needed for my use case, but they liked my use case so much, they added that to their development roadmap. Not only that, but the owner of the company reached out to me and told me that he’d heard about my use case and thought it was such a good idea he’d fast tracked it. He thought they’d have the feature ready in about six months.
At that point I decided to wait. I continued to use the platform to build out my system, but I was mostly in a holding pattern until they finished development on my requested feature. Finally, in the fall of 2022 the feature was ready for testing. I loved it! What they had built was fantastic!
I spent the next two months finalizing the portal and creating training videos. In January of 2023, I invited some of our staff to the portal so I could get their feedback and they could help test it. A few weeks after that, we invited a few clients to the portal so they could give us their feedback. After using the portal for two more months, I was confident we were ready to start rolling it out to our clients en masse.
Each month I have a team meeting with my project managers, and before we rolled out the portal, I wanted to wait until we discussed it at that month’s meeting. As soon as the meeting began, one of the project managers spoke up and voiced concern about the new portal. He said that he felt it was great in some very significant ways, but in other areas it was a big step backward from our existing systems. He mentioned a couple of specific things and every single one of the other project managers agreed with him wholeheartedly.
As we dug into the issues and I listened to their feedback, I realized that they had hit on an area that I was blind to. I realized that one missing feature in particular was big enough to pull the emergency brake on the rollout and reevaluate everything.
I went to the owner of the software company and told him about the needed feature. This time I got a different response. While he understood how the feature would benefit me, he didn’t believe the feature was one that his larger client base would benefit from. He told me he would add it to the development roadmap, but it would likely be over a year before they could start working on it.
At this point I was in a rough spot. I’d spent a year developing a portal using the off-the-shelf software solution. In many ways it was great, but its limitations had become obvious. Not only that, but I was at the mercy of the development roadmap of the company and what was best for their clients as a whole. I’d gotten lucky with the first feature request, but even that took 6 months of waiting before I could proceed.
Once again I sought advice from my mastermind. Once again John told me that my best option was to build my own system. However, I REALLY did not want to be in the software development business. I’d seen that first-hand at my old corporate job and it was not what I wanted. So I began searching for off-the-shelf products again. I looked through all the solutions I’d identified the previous year to see if they’d improved to a point where they’d work for me. I also found dozens of other potential solutions. However, none of them fit my needs.
Here’s what I learned.
John was right. My best option was to build the solution myself. I turned my focus to trying to figure out how I could come up with $30k, and I figured I’d at least need to have $15k – $20k up front. I could deplete my savings, take out a loan, or put it on a credit card, but none of those were good solutions for me.
I based that number on software development projects I’d overseen at my corporate job. Those jobs required 50-75% of the payment up front, with the final balance due upon completion of the project. Coming up with that amount of cash was certainly easier than the full amount, but I still didn’t want to deplete my savings, take out a loan, or use my credit card.
I expressed this concern to John and he revealed something that brings about today’s lessons. It turned out, I was making an assumption based on my prior corporate experience. John never said I’d need 50-75% of the capital up front. I knew he was speaking from experience, but I assumed his experience was similar to mine. It turned out that projects like he has worked on are paid by the hour, by the week. That is, I give the developer a weekly hourly limit, he or she works up to that many hours per week, and I pay them at the end of the week.
This changed everything. Here I was looking at this elephant-sized project thinking it had to be consumed in two very large bites, and it turned out I could portion control it and eat it one bite at a time! All this time I’d been working off of wrong assumptions and failing to ask the right questions! The path I’d perceived as rocky, was actually very smooth! Once I was set straight on this, it was easy to see how I could pay for the project.
Fortunately, not all the time over the last year had been a waste. Truthfully, that year taught me a lot about what features the best portal for us would need, and it taught me a lot about how it should operate. That year of research and working with off-the-shelf products had actually helped me in significant ways.
I’m excited to report that the portal is now complete and it’s amazing! We’ve built something that improves upon every system we used previously and it’s given my company a very valuable asset that sets us apart in the market.
It’s a standing reminder of three powerful lessons:
- Listen to the advice of those who have traveled the path you’re now on.
- Carefully evaluate your thoughts to reveal where you’re making assumptions.
- Constantly evaluate your work so you can learn from it and be better prepared for the future.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on December 30th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.