Stacee: 0:40

Good morning Ira. How's it going?

Ira: 0:42

It's going pretty well. How have you been?

Stacee: 0:44

Pretty good, pretty good. So I've been working with a startup company and I wanted to get your opinion on it. I knew we were going to be talking and I had like the most interesting conversation with this engineer team today. And you know, here's a company. They got amazing idea, super amazing. They have been working on it for a while with an engineer firm which ended up doing crappy coding. And not like they don't know what crappy coding is, they're just founders with great idea, right, and how do you even know like the coding is bad? It's almost like how would you know the spay was botched if the incision looks fine?

Ira: 1:34

So I, you know, I would say from my experience, crappy coding is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

Stacee: 1:42

The beholder of the phone using the application. Let me give you an analogy that I've been through.

Ira: 1:49

But if you've ever hired an attorney to work on a document for you and then you ultimately move on and you have a different attorney, look at the work the previous attorney's done.

Ira: 2:01

They always say they have to start over, right, and that the previous work is, you know, just not appropriate or relevant or you know whatnot, and they can't fix it. They have to start over, right? And often the same is true when you go from one engineer or engineer group to another. I think they're just. They do things differently, they use different languages and they're comfortable doing and fixing things when they're built the way they like them right.

Stacee: 2:28

Yeah, and then there are situations, I guess, where it is shoddy work.

Ira: 2:34

I'm absolutely sure that that's true too, and especially when you have a non-technical founder that hires a random person or firm and tries to sort of provide their spec to them, but they don't necessarily know enough about the tech and how. The tech and the vision need to sort of align, and so somebody's going to do their best to sort of interpret what they need, and often they don't do the right thing the first time.

Stacee: 3:05

Well, that's where this company is actually. They've been working so hard and now they're at a point where it's not good enough. To be honest, it's not going to fly in the market and it's nearly like we're almost there to launch. It's like we're almost there. We're almost there. We just need to do a little more. And this morning the engineer said to me he doesn't want them to become a victim of the sunk cost fallacy, which kind of reminded me of when I'm in Las Vegas and I'm playing blackjack and I've lost, you know, 10 hands straight and you start thinking like just one more hand, one more role, I can get on, I can turn this negative into a positive and everything will be fine.

Ira: 4:01

And then you realize it's a trap when you go back to your room with no more money. It is, yeah, a strong cognitive bias. I'll use a family example. But, like you know, if you pop the family in a car and you know, drive three hours and pay a bunch of money to go someplace and everybody's miserable, you just can't give up.

Ira: 4:17

right, like you're, like this is not working, like we should go home because nobody's having a good time. Instead, you think about the fact that you've invested so much time and money into this thing and you have to sort of see it through, even if everybody's going to be miserable and nobody's getting you know good value at this point in time.

Stacee: 4:36

You're like, we're going to Clark Griswold this where do you think you're going?

Clark Griswold: 4:51

Nobody's leaving. Nobody's walking out on this fun old-fashioned family Christmas. No, no, we're all in this together. This is a full-blown four alarm holiday emergency. Here we're gonna press on and we're gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap danced with Danny f-ing Kay.

Ira: 5:10

exactly, oh, man, and yeah, I mean absolutely seeing the same thing happen in business over and over, where you've invested time and money and an idea that just um isn't working and you've got to decide whether it's fixable or whether you need to go a different direction or even give up altogether. And I think the more time and money you've sunk into it, the harder it is to come to terms with the fact that maybe you had a bad idea and maybe you didn't spend your money well this is where a lot of people are either made or broke right.

Ira: 5:48

Absolutely. Yeah, it's not always a matter of like you did it bad. I mean, sometimes the only way to do something is to iterate right and to sort of start and build something and then fix all the things that aren't working. And if you could look at the completed project once, it's great and say, well, if I had to do it again, would I have taken all these steps? No, probably not. But you learned a lot of things along the way and maybe that was the only way for you to get to that end point, based on what you knew back then.

Stacee: 6:17

Yeah, it's kind of like you got to think of it as like money paid to the university of learning.

Ira: 6:35

What is our question for the day Stacee?

Stacee: 6:47

The question of the day is how did you start marketing your company, which is a really good question, because for almost everybody I've talked to, that's starting a company. They always ask me I've got this great thing, how do I get it out into the world?

Ira: 6:58

Well, at the risk of dating myself a little bit, we launched our company around 2006. So Facebook was small, google Ads was not like a thing. Right sort of focused on our relatively niche sort of core user base, which was junior vet students, and we tried to get representatives at each school right, and so we had some success, just kind of reaching out through our network, because we were not that far out of school and we also attended the student veterinary symposium called SAVMA, and our goal there wasn't necessarily primarily to sell a bunch of subscriptions to people, but hopefully to find student reps. And then, once we had them, we would help them to do this, but they would put on like a session where they would talk to their classmates about all the things they need to know about board exams how do you sign up for board exams, how much does it cost, what's the format of board exam, you know, just kind of like stuff that they should know.

Ira: 8:13

And then, of course, including that, it's like how can you study for board exams? And there's this new thing that's now available that we um, that we built Right, and so that was kind of the core of how we tried to get the message out. We also, of course, uh, provided food at those meetings because, um, starving vet students, the best way to get them to go anywhere is to feed them. And we, you know, sent a bunch of you know posters and flyers that they could post on the common areas where you're supposed to do that stuff at the schools. And so that was our approach. I think still would be a good approach if you were to do it today, but you would do that probably, and some of those other things.

Stacee: 8:50

Yeah, I think you're talking about like finding out where your key customers congregate and hang out, and you have to go there and hang out and you have to go there.

Ira: 9:09

I think that, and then also this notion that you need to be kind of communicating with them about their problem and the things that they're worried about and thinking about as sort of a primary message and and that potentially sort of you know, the solution that you have to that problem can can be part of that, but but it shouldn't overwhelm the primary message, because nobody's looking for your product if it's new, right, but they hopefully are experiencing a problem that your product can help them solve, and so if you can provide them with a more comprehensive reason to listen um related to their problems, then I think you can better engage them than you know, sort of just letting them know that there's a solution.

Stacee: 9:52

Yeah, and I, over the years I've worked with some, had the privilege of working with some great marketing people, and that is what they've taught me is you've got to lead with marketing people, and that is what they've taught me is you've got to lead with. What's your pain? You know what is your problem that you're having right now that you need a solution for, instead of I find that you tend to forget about that part of the conversation and just lead with your solution. But when you can really lead with, you know you are at the end of a very expensive and time-consuming journey and you're probably worried you're not going to pass your boards and get your license.

Ira: 10:32

Yeah, I think we had the benefit, or, if I were to give myself credit, the insight to sort of provide a solution that you know really felt like a critical need. I don't think we we talked about sort of my, the oxygen, aspirin, jewelry, sort of paradigm Stacee.

Stacee: 10:52

Oh yeah, we did yeah.

Ira: 10:53

So you know it's so good.

Ira: 10:57

So, yeah, the idea is, you know, if somebody has a problem and there's a solution, is it oxygen, you know, like something they need to literally sort of breathe and survive, or figuratively, probably, and is it aspirin? You know they're in pain and you can alleviate that pain. Or is it jewelry, something that's nice to have and looks nice but isn't really sort of, you know, alleviating a key point of pain, but isn't really sort of alleviating a key point of pain? And I think we found ourselves with a product that was somewhere between oxygen and aspirin, which is, you know, those are the places that you really want to be and to have a great value proposition most of the time.

Stacee: 11:35

Yeah, that's so good. I love thinking of it that way. It helps. You really know if you have a great idea or just a good idea.

Ira: 11:44

All right. Well, how about you? What did you do to try to market Vet2Pet?

Stacee: 11:47

Well, I, as usual, had no idea how to market a company at first. I was literally just trying to tell people about my product to see if they would like it. That is where I started. But what ended up happening is what I would consider more of a grassroots approach to marketing, which, in veterinary medicine, I think you can pull this off if your product is pretty good, because we're a small enough industry really, with all of our connections through our classmates and colleagues and state associations and so forth that if you can get some you know key customers using your platform that feel excited to tell others about it, you can start growing. And so I kind of took that approach and I also decided I didn't do a lot of Facebook.

Stacee: 12:43

I certainly didn't do a lot of Google ads, although maybe now I would have done those things, but it was earlier, before that was that popular and I think you know engaging those key customers and just like checking on them all the time and making sure they stuck with it, so you could build some evangelizing people to go out and tell others, was kind of how I approached marketing, and I remember I thought my goal would be to get an ad in one of the veterinary news journals like DVM 360 or one of these journals they were so you know.

Stacee: 13:27

These things came to me every month and I always looked at them, or eventually looked at them when they as they would tend to pile up on my desk sometimes, but it was a way to reach the audience and I called them and it was going to be like $10,000 for a one page ad with one run. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I had no idea it was that expensive to advertise. So, yeah, I took more of a grassroots approach until eventually I could go to a trade show and we should probably talk about that for a little bit. Did you ever go to any trade shows?

Ira: 14:06

Yeah, we went to a bunch. Turns out something I'm no good at them.

Stacee: 14:10

They're miserable. They're so miserable and I'm so not a car salesman. I mean, I would hate when I'd go to trade shows and you'd see them try to grab you out of the aisle, lure you by saying where are you from, how's your day going? And it was always a trap and I knew it and I hated it. So I would be at my booth just standing quietly for someone to approach.

Ira: 14:37

I know, when I walk around those trade shows, the last thing I want somebody to do is, like you know, try to grab me and talk to me. And when I'm in a booth, the last thing I want to do is do that to somebody. So I'm terrible at it. I just stand there hoping nobody talks to me.

Stacee: 14:52

We ended up winning at the trade show thing, or finding our definition of winning is we would just gamify the whole booth and try to have fun with people and not force them to learn about what we were doing, and I liked that approach a lot. It felt more like me. So one of my ideas early on is I found these paper clips at Office Depot, and in a little box was like 10 different animal paper clips which were so cute. They were so cute and of course they're fitting for veterinarians. So I thought, well, we could give these away at the booth as the swag. But it was very expensive. I think it was like $10 for this little box, so essentially like a dollar paperclip, which is not affordable.

Stacee: 15:41

So I went on Alibaba and I found that you could order 30,000 paperclips for like a thousand dollars. So I ordered all these paperclips and I still have a whole bunch of these paperclips, but we would try to give them out and we found that they just got all globbed together, as paper clips do, in a giant wad of animal paper clips. So we came up with this idea we rented a table at our booth and we put the glob there and we invite people to go head to head and we have a contest to see if you could find all 10 animals. And if you found all 10 animals first, you won the prize, which was basically nothing. We would just hug you and high five you. But it was fun. You got to keep the paperclips. People really liked it.

Ira: 16:39

You still have a bunch of them.

Stacee: 16:41

Oh my God, I do yeah.

Ira: 16:42

I have a whole attic full of that kind of stuff, yeah.

Stacee: 16:47

So I don't know, marketing's a funny thing. It can eat your wallet up really quickly, so you have to think about what you want to get out of it, and trade shows used to be like where everybody went to sign up for stuff, but I don't think that is how they work anymore. It's uh, that changed probably about seven or 10 years ago. Once you can buy stuff online, you don't need to go to the trade show to buy it, so your goal at the trade show is to, I think, get your name out there so people can start to recognize you.

Ira: 17:26

Yeah, that makes sense. I think lots of people look at it as sort of a place to just kind of gather a bunch of contacts that have potential interest in what they have to follow up with and the like, and that probably works a little bit. Follow up with and uh and the like, and that that probably works a little bit. Um, but there is also just a like if you're not there, you know you people, you wonder if people think you still exist because it seems like you're supposed to be there.

Stacee: 17:53

Yeah, the other path I took I don't think you took this path was with distribution.

Ira: 17:58

Oh yeah, we never really worked on the distributor side of things, yeah.

Stacee: 18:07

Yeah, that's a whole nother conversation we should probably have is the pros and cons of working with the distributor because, like any relationship, it's got its big ups and some of its downs. But I worked with Patterson and they did. I must say they were key in getting the word out for our product.

Ira: 18:29

Yeah, we worked a little bit with, you know, the schools themselves as sort of a you know they would purchase a big, you know swath of subscriptions and then provide them to their students.

Stacee: 18:40

But that had pros and cons too, but very different than sort of sort of you know, really working with the distributor as you described yeah, well, I think the key takeaway here is find your people and try to connect with them in whatever way makes sense for your product, but go where the people are and then you mentioned, um, yeah, getting some of those early evangelists, and I think that that's just extremely critical, right?

Ira: 19:13

I think once we add students using our product that liked it, all the students that came after them would ask them what did you use to study and what worked best, and how did you do X, y and Z? And if you've made those people happy and they're gonna say, oh, like, yeah, you should use this product, like that does the selling for you, which is great. Nothing better than having a customer selfie.

Stacee: 19:34

For sure that's the best, well cool. Well, let's hop over to this part of the program where we're gonna share our favorite tip, trick tool. Inspirational quote what's on the docket for you this time?

Ira: 19:46

I got one, but it's pretty bad, pretty cheesy and nerdy and not very creative.

Stacee: 19:54

Oh well, now I'm very excited to hear it.

Ira: 19:59

All right, I can't imagine that there's anybody out there that is not aware of the tool that I'm about to share. But I have become a very, very, very big fan of Microsoft Excel. It is worth it to become as much as you can sort of a power user of the spreadsheet. And it seems super boring and nerdy at first to be like a spreadsheet guy, but I lean into the nerd anyway. But it's pretty cool to be able to take a data set or a set of numbers and actually do a lot of deep dive analysis and to automate all that. All that. And you know we had an exhaustive database of everybody that ever used our product and you know information about where they came from and how they did. And we could look at it every which way in Excel and create charts and graphs and all those things as we needed. So I'm sure everybody's aware of it, but I would say it is worth spending time to get good at it. I would say it is worth spending time to get good at it.

Stacee: 21:03

Okay, well, I have a question on that. What is the use case or why would you use that over what I would consider? The more simpler tool is the Google Suite, Google Sheets.

Ira: 21:17

So Google Sheets is really a great tool. I mean I would say they have pretty much stolen everything they legally can Microsoft Excel right and applied it. It's great for collaboration. I, because you know I started doing this before Google Sheets was you know the product that it is now? This before Google Sheets was you know the product that it is now. Yeah, I sort of learned and sort of became comfortable in Excel but can actually do I mean I'm not really like a true super user of Excel like some people that I know, the finance guys but you know, for everything that I do in Excel, you pretty much can do it in Google Sheets and it's not a lot different. So it's it's a great tool too.

Stacee: 22:06

Yeah, I know I always use Google Sheets and it's not a lot different, so it's a great tool too. Yeah, I know I always use Google Sheets because it's a bit maybe for the novice type or not the super user. But when you get to the accountants, they don't like Google Sheets, they want Excel because it has all the advanced formulas and I mean that is amazing to watch a power user of Excel build a spreadsheet. It is mind blowing.

Ira: 22:32

And I think this might not be true, but I think that when you get to having like a really huge data set right Of you know tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of like you know cells that are filled, yeah, having that all as sort of you know a file on your desktop in sort of an Excel piece of software, is a lot easier to sort of navigate, get where you want and have things work fast than using sort of you know Google Sheets in the cloud.

Stacee: 23:02

Yeah, so probably the key takeaway is Google Sheets are for beginner to moderate users and Excel is for the pro or the ultimate nerd.

Stacee: 23:16

For me, my tip of the week is also, I would say, rather boring but important, and something you might forget about doing as the founder or CEO of your company, and that is you must always be evangelizing the pain that you're curing for your customer, because, while it might be really strong in your brain, the people around you tend to forget why they're there, and they it's.

Stacee: 23:47

You get into the daily grind and I find that you've got to figure out how to weave this into almost every team meeting or, you know, conversation you're having about customers, where you're constantly saying, well, what is the pain our customer is in and how are we here to help them, and kind of adopting a little bit of a servant mentality, servant leadership, where you're putting your customer first but you're talking about it all the time. And I've went so far I don't know if you can see this picture on my wall like we'd have our team meetings and at every team meeting in person, which was usually once or twice a year, we take a team photo and I'd have a big mat made for the photo and I would ask every team member to write down why they are on the team, and this helped us really focus on our purpose or our why we are working so hard, and I just always thought that maybe that helped us keep the moon in the window for where our rocket ship was going.

Ira: 24:57

That's great, especially important for a person that's motivated by the things I'm motivated by, which are sort of innovation, building things, and more on outcomes than people. You know, having a reminder of that focus that this is the problem that our company is about and about solving, and to use that as kind of your North star of what, what sort of is guiding your company. Because, to get back to sort of sunk costs, like you can spend a lot of time and money building cool stuff, but if that cool stuff isn't really addressing the problem that your company is all about solving, you may be sinking those costs into something that's not going to really pay dividends.

Stacee: 25:44

Yeah, totally All right. Well, let's spin the wheel and see what we're going to be talking about next week.

Ira: 25:50

All right. What did you decide on the pricing of your product?

Stacee: 26:03

You mean there's a strategy to that?

Ira: 26:06

I was going to say I think we just guessed.

Stacee: 26:08

Yeah, it'll be a short episode!