Playing Offense: Reflections on Seven Years of Running a Startup | Ep 3

Caleb Roth  

I think the only thing that stands between us and the life that we want usually is simply action. And so habits are actions that are repeated that either stack on top of each other and get you to where you want to be, or bad habits can compound the other direction. We all want to improve our lives. But sometimes, it's hard to know where to start. Join us each week on the Stacking Habits podcast with your hosts, David, Matthew and Taylor, as we uncover life changing habits from inspiring people. One another best part, you can then apply those habits to enrich your own life and move closer to your goals.

David Chung  

Going back to the conversation that we were having at, at dinner, I think we've had this conversation several times. We need to find the next business we start. We need to find the business where we can go to a you know, $1,000 weekend golf trip with our clients. Because how sick would that be? I just I'm like, nearly done with Alex we're moseys 100 million dollar offers. Caleb you read that right? Yeah. up like a huge chunk of the book. I'd say like 40% of the book, he just talks about, hey, increase the price increase the price? I mean, like that's like 40% of the book. And I'm just like, thinking back to scout IQ. And I'm like, man, we're a lot of these lessons. relatable to scout IQ, like could we have raised the price to 10x?

Caleb Roth  

Probably we had a tool that do it in Pallet IQ, our product aimed at larger sellers. But somehow we we started shortchange ourselves and only charged, you know, two and a half X.

Matthew Osborn  

Yeah, yeah, there's always that question too, when you raise the price substantially are, of course gonna have a lot of the customers that can't afford a drop off, you just have to know well, more customers stay to make it worth it than the ones that will drop off the product. But as we know, it happened all throughout Scout IQ to oftentimes the customers that cause the most trouble are the lowest paying customers, the customers on the $14 a month plan, that it only paid for a single month are the ones messaging support every single day, whereas the customer paying annually paid once did it never contact customer support their customer for three years, and they paid substantially more than anyone else. And so the lower paying customers were mostly I think talks about this a lot in the book to just cause a lot more of the problems normally, than people that are willing to invest more in the product.

David Chung  

Oh, absolutely. Well, the other thing, too, is one of the big issues that we faced in the company was churn. And it wasn't just our software, it was just churn of the market. You know, people would jump into this market thinking that, hey, this is a great opportunity for me to make some money, and then, you know, two weeks in a month, then they realize, Oh, this isn't really for me. And I'm just wondering, like, hey, could we have charged a much higher price? Let's just say like, let's just throw this out there? $5,000? Right. $5,000? A year? Or a year? Okay. Yeah, you know, $5,000 a year? And yeah, maybe we go from having 1000s of clients down to a few 100. But could that have allowed us to focus on each of our clients or our customers, even the the way that I'm describing the customer change? It goes from customers clients, right? Because we're doing more one on one support, maybe we're giving them the tools that they need to actually survive longer than, you know, a few months. Any thoughts on that?

Caleb Roth  

I love the concepts. And I think it goes without saying too, but I'll say just in case someone's out there going well, yeah, people are just going to jack prices for no reason. I think if you charge a higher price, and no one pays it, then you didn't provide any more value. I think the goal of a business outside of creating a customer is ultimately to serve a customer. And so if you're not serving anybody, it doesn't matter what you charge, you won't you won't have people come to you. So that's something I wish we had done. That's something we've talked about as we're trying to sort out what's next for us? Do we want to serve a small number of clients in a huge way? Or do we want to serve a lot of customers in a very small way or somewhere in between? And I think somewhere in between tends to get kind of in dangerous territory because you kind of lose sight of who you are. Are you going to have 100 customers and serve them and have massive impact in their life and they're so grateful that you're there. And as a result, hopefully your churn is minimal? Or do you want to serve 1000s or 10s of 1000s or millions of customers on the lower end of the spectrum but not be able to provide you know in depth support customer service, etc. I think one of your strengths David is getting to know people I say intimately but I think that's probably the is you You just take an interest in people and you want to go deep and get to understand who they are. And that's hard to do when you have, you know, 1000s or 10s of 1000s of customers.

David Chung  

Yeah, absolutely. I'm also thinking to like, you know, $500 a month or $450 a month, it's like, we can take the time to dive into their business and really analyze what's going on, you know, how do we, you know, how do we improve this? How do we optimize that at, you know, $15 a month, it just doesn't make sense. You just don't have enough time in the day.

Matthew Osborn  

It also is more fun to dive into those businesses too, because you know, those people paying $5,000 a year or a month, are way more committed to their business and seeing it be successful than the person paying $14 a month, that it's a side hobby that you heard about online, they're hoping to get rich, quick type thing with it. And so people that are investing that much more, you know, they're actually literally invested into their business and want to see it be successful. And so those those clients are always fun to work with too, because they're actually committed and doing stuff in their business. Actually,

David Chung  

Matthew, You You nailed it on the head is like by charging the higher price, we it's sort of like a natural selection process. And it really distills it down to the people who really are committed to the process. And it really narrows your target demographic. And that makes marketing a whole lot easier to now you can instead of running general ads or running tic tock campaigns, like we have specific metrics that we're looking for a specific demographic that we're looking for, it makes it a lot easier to target. Well, you can

Caleb Roth  

probably actually do word of mouth a heck of a lot better. That way, because you serve one client remarkably well, and they get so much value, they're going to tell somebody else in their circle that probably could benefit from the same thing. I'll tell you, David, one of the hardest parts I love to meet with, with our customers, I love to interact with people. And I've had in you know, individuals, a lot of times older women, older men that would reach out and say, Hey, I'm you know, two hours from you an hour from you. Can I buy you coffee, lunch, beer, and just pick your brain? They always use that phrase, can I pick your brain? And I would almost always say yes, because, you know, people have done that for me, and I like to help people. But one of the challenges is you sit down for an hour and a half lunch and you get to know the person which is great. But I can just tell probably 80% of the time, most of those people were going to churn out like selling books was not for them, especially me an older lady that can barely pick up a 30 pound box, much less a 50 pound box. And you know, she's got other skill sets and she's, you know, she's got other things she could be doing. And she's so focused in and honed in that I have to flip books. And that was hard because I'm going to tell her, Hey, here's how to do it. But it may not be right for you. And so I'd rather sit down with clients that are all in you know, like the Michael Ford Nalls the Kyle Preston's the Michael Crider is like the people that are doing it at a deeper level. I love to interact and have impact in their life. And I'm going to learn from them as well, because usually they're doing things at a higher level. Absolutely.

David Chung  

I don't remember what it was or where I saw it. But I remember seeing something just recently where the author or the person talking about it was was talking about how people would ask for, you know, a cup of coffee with them or lunch with them and to pick their brain. And they sort of reframed it as it being insulting, like, you know, do you know how valuable my time maybe it was in the hormones ebook, but it's just like, turning those Yeah, turning those down. Because just like, my time is worth a lot more than a $20 lunch, you know, it's just like, Oh, you think over $20 lunch, you know, that's what you know, that's what my value is for time. Now that being said, I think there is something magical in like reciprocity like going into something and like not really expecting anything out of it. And that's one of my good habits that I listed. But what what are your guys thoughts on that? Like, are you in favor for like, I guess quote unquote, spontaneous connections or are you more like you guys and I we know people who are more guarded of their time.

Caleb Roth  

I don't think there's a right or wrong way. I a phrase that keeps coming to my mind, I don't know if it's good or bad is do things that don't scale. And so that flies in the face of all of the common business wisdom and to say, hey, value your time, what's your time worth? 500 bucks an hour, 1000 bucks an hour. If you know you can hire someone to do it for cheaper. Let them do it. You do it only you can do that whole philosophy. But I think there's something beautiful about taking an hour for lunch. And yeah, you're getting a $20 lunch right? Hopefully they pay pick up the tab that lets the least they can do. So from an ROI perspective, that's not worth it. But sometimes it's worth going beyond the ROI. I've met some incredible people, I've picked up some great, you know, information from some of those lunches. So it's hard to know, I can value. You know, I can be okay with either option. But sometimes I do like to do things that don't scale. Where do you fall on that spectrum? Matthew?

Matthew Osborn  

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think with the people that are always talking about the return on their time and stuff like that, I think one thing people don't realize is, they always say, Oh, I'll never do this task or that task, because I'm worth $500 Now or $1,000 an hour. But that only works if you're actually working instead of doing that task. And so it's like, people say, Oh, I'm not going to mow the lawn, because I gotta hire somebody that my time is worth $1,000 an hour. Well, unless while the person is mowing your lawn, you're in here working. That doesn't translate, because you're only worth your time when you're actually putting in the work to do that. But I think there's a lot of value in doing some tasks, even if it's, of course, not worth your normal hourly rate. Because like mowing the lawn is a good example for me. I could hire someone to go out and do all of my lawn maintenance. And I've thought about doing that in the past when it's annoying me to go out and mow the lawn and do everything else. But there's also some time there's like a, there's something refreshing about just going outside and doing manual labor and getting out there mowing the lawn and the kids are playing in the grass. And I could hire someone in being here in the office working instead of out there mowing the lawn. But I think there's just something good at times of taking a step back doing something like you say, Caleb, it doesn't scale, and just putting in the work. And sometimes when I'm outside doing yard work and things like that some of the best ideas come into my mind as well. And so it's not like it's, there's no value in it either. And so I think there are definitely times we're going to coffee with someone that you know, you're probably not getting some major connection with or not going to lead to some major business deal, but you're just contributing to someone else's life. Or you're doing something like lawn maintenance, it's not going to scale, it's not going to provide to your business. But it's something that's kind of refreshing your mind doing something different doing some manual labor, putting you in a different frame of mind, I think is really important sometimes to do even if it doesn't relate to your $500 An hour or $100 an hour type thing that you'd normally make if you were working. Yeah,

David Chung  

absolutely. Caleb, I think you know, what you talked about is a great segue into some of your positive habits. You listed three here and two of those three, relate to connecting with people and how to really structure that you want to dive into that, or do you want to talk a little bit about what the show might be about this episode?

Caleb Roth  

Let me I like that segue. Let me close the circle, actually on the Hermoza comment, because yeah, what I love about Alex and Leila is they are playing a really high level game. So almost everything they do, whereas we gave a lot of free content. Actually, I was talking to Avery about this, a lot of what we did with Scout IQ, mirrored not all of what they're doing with the Hormoz ease, but I think some some things actually did line up quite nicely. Here's what I mean by that we offered free training, we had free courses. So anybody that was just starting off, we didn't necessarily make them buy in and spend hundreds or 1000s or 10s of 1000s of dollars to get access to us we had for YouTube videos and podcasts, and interviews and everything else that we threw out there. So one of the thing with the Hormoz E's is they everything they do is in alignment, they are trying to get people that have multimillion dollar businesses that they can invest in and help grow and scale because that's what they're the best at. So if you're a beginner, they believe in entrepreneurship, they believe in small business, they would love for you to get off your butt, and contribute to your local economy or the global economy. And so a lot of their training and their low hanging fruit, they sell books, they're not that expensive. And so all of that information is geared toward the masses, and the ones that rise and get started and get to that first $100,000 in sales or million dollars in sales, they then have access to additional training, but ultimately, they're trying to get the rising stars, and they're going to serve them. So I doubt that us with a podcast on our third episode, if we called up the her mosey somehow got through to them, they're not going to sit down and do anything with us because we don't have anything that they can they can help us out with. So I love it. They took the low end of of the market out of play and said we're just going to give away the content for free. Then if you're successful when you hit these certain benchmarks, and I forget what they are, then come and have a conversation. And we'll see if we can do business together. So I love what they do. And I think in some ways we did that. So with that, let's let's do a little formal welcome. So welcome to episode three of the Stacking Habits podcast this as a team only episode. I guess one of the benefits of having three hosts is that we can sort of host some of some of these Fireside Chats without a formal interview. And so I'm pretty excited today we're gonna dig into some of the habits from the company that we built and sold. Matthew still wearing the swag there, the scout IQ. So we we had a community of booksellers, all of us have sold books, David still sells books. And we built a community, we built several pieces of software to help booksellers just be a little more smarts about how they ran their business. So our main tool was Scout IQ. It was a book sourcing software, it was an app, you could scan anything with a barcode, but we were really focused on the book niche, you could scan it, it would tell you, if you should buy it, if it has a high likelihood of selling, and roughly what we think you can sell it for. So we had a pretty impressive community, we learned a lot in the space. And it's really easy to say, hey, we were successful, we built something up to lots of dollars in sales, we are not allowed to say what those are. And then we sold it, we had a great exit for, you know, a multiple of the profit of the company. And so it's easy for us to high five, sips and bourbon have a party, which we did back in January, and just say, hey, we were great. We crushed it. But I think what's more useful is to sit down as a team and say, Hey, let's do a post mortem. Let's do an analysis of what went well in the business. What do we all do? Great. And then I think equally important is what did we miss out on? What could we improve on. And so the the purpose of our show is to dig into habits and rituals and routines. And so that's what we're going to do, we each put some comments in the show notes, I'm really excited because most of them don't overlap. And so we're just going to aim to have a free flowing conversation. Now, if you don't run a software company, if you don't have a SAS tool, if you're not in the tech space, I think this still applies most of these habits are not tech specific, they are going to be what we call transferable skills. So hopefully as you listen in, whether you're an athlete, or a teacher, or a parent, hopefully you can pick up some some nuggets of wisdom from this conversation and apply those to your own life. Because that's ultimately what it's about. I think the only thing that stands between us and the life that we want usually is simply action. And so habits are actions that are repeated, that either stack on top of each other and get you to where you want to be, or bad habits can compound the other direction. So that's that's the purpose of today's episode. David, you had you had asked some questions. So if you want to re state that, and then we'll dive in.

David Chung  

Yeah, absolutely. So Caleb, you know, we were talking about talking with customers, and how important that is, in any business. To have your three habits listed are habits around customers, blocking your time off for customers, and, you know, setting up time to communicate with them. You want to talk a little bit maybe about the calendar management tool.

Caleb Roth  

Yeah, I'll dive in. I think when we launched the tool, it took about a year of building. So I was a bookseller already, I knew that there were tools out there on the market. But there were some some, in my opinion, glaring weaknesses and things that I thought we could improve on. And so we got set to build that Matthew and I were kind of kicking around ideas and building toward that tool. And one of the biggest takeaways, when we rolled out with our beta launch was I thought users were going to come back and I really wanted to build this not only for myself, but for our audience. Obviously, if you don't have customers, you don't have a product, at least not a paid product. You can't put food on the table. And so one of the things I was excited about was to ask our customers, what do you love about the tool, and I thought they were going to come back, I pride myself on on having slightly higher than average intelligence. And I thought I knew exactly what customers wanted and some better data points we could have. And I thought they'd come back and say, I love that tool. Because I'm so much, you know, I'm scanning so much more efficiently. The data is incredible. The profit based analytics, you know, I thought they were going to kick back all these like technical things. And the reality is from day one, most of our customers came back and I said, Do you love the tool? And what do you love about it? And they said, Yeah, I love it. It's incredible. I said, why? And I thought they would say e score data or metrics. And all they said was, I'm buying the Green Books, and I'm making money. So the app turns green, or red. And so that was the customer feedback early on. And I could get frustrated and say, well, they don't understand why or I haven't done my job to tell them why it's so smart and so intelligent. But the reality is, we were making a tool that made it simple. And so that's what we started doing with our customers. So customers ultimately drive everything you do. I had a two of the habits. The first one was was calendar management. So one of my pet peeves is when you reach out to somebody or they reach out to you and say, Hey, can we connect and I say sure. And then this begins is awkward email dance of hey, how does next Tuesday at three look? Wow, no, I'm busy Tuesday afternoon. How about Wednesday? In the morning. I got to take my kids to practice So I hated that. That's just something that's inefficient in business. So I always try and go upstream as much as I can. This is something incredibly simple. And I think almost anybody should do this. If you have any sort of meetings with other people, I use a tool called book like a boss. There's tons of other tools like like Calendly, and similar, but all it does is it syncs up to your calendar. And it just shows pockets of time that are available. So as long as you keep your calendar up to date, if David reaches out and says, Hey, Caleb, can we chat, I literally just send them a link, and he pops in his it actually knows what your timezone is. And then you can just look and see pockets of time on my calendar and schedule it. And it's, you know, connects to zoom, or Google meet or whatever you want it to do. And so that was incredible. It's something little, but it just saved all of the back and forth. And just allows you to just jump right and so anytime someone wanted a meeting, if I was willing to grant it, I would just drop in the link and say here, here's my here's my availability, feel free to schedule when

Matthew Osborn  

it's at your convenience. So that was that an app sumo deal?

Caleb Roth  

It wasn't app sumo deal. Yep.

Matthew Osborn  

Nice. I'm gonna get a lot better at that. That's a habit I really need to implement better because I always put things on my calendar. But I'm terrible at remembering to look at my calendar to see what I've scheduled. And I'll overschedule things double booked things. Or especially, I won't check the little box that displays Joy's calendar, and then I'll book something and realize, oh, I have a kid soccer practice where I have to do this with this at that time, because I need to be a whole lot better. I'm decent at putting things on my calendar, I'm not good at remembering to look the night before see what the next day is, remember, and things are I always get that reminder on my phone, oh, 10 minutes. Now I'm supposed to be on this call or like that, and they get reminded. So I need to be a lot better that habit. So you're really good at that. You've always been good at that. Caleb, I need a lot better at managing my calendar. So I'll have to check out this book like a boss is the calendar you use specifically? Yeah,

Caleb Roth  

I think they rebranded to blab, which is sort of funny, but that's there. Yeah. And I am not a structured individual by nature, I tend to be more free flowing. And but one thing I've tried to explain to my wife, I just, it's somewhat of a joke. But I say if it's not on the calendar, it's not happening. And so if I don't schedule something, then I will forget. And if I don't have the announced the alert pop up half hour, 15 minutes before, I may forget about the calls as well and it helps the other side. In a perfect world, I'd reach out the day before and say, hey, just confirming we're on for coffee tomorrow morning, or we have a zoom call in the afternoon. Because a lot of times if you scheduled it two or three weeks out wonderful people may forget about it. And these tools show up on the calendar, I think they send reminders or you can you can have it send reminders. And so the technology just ensures that whatever you cared enough about the schedule actually happens. So those are simple ones. But do

Matthew Osborn  

you have a nightly review? Like do you go over your calendar each week? And look what the week ahead is? Or do you like look the night before? Or do you just kind of look in the morning and see what's planned for that day? How do you manage it,

Caleb Roth  

I try to look the night before because I'm not as much of a morning person as you. And so sometimes I will have things scheduled at eight in the morning or nine in the morning that I might need to wake up and drive an hour to go go meet up with somebody or or play golf or whatever it may be. So I try and look the night before just to make sure I have an alarm set up. And it's one more chance just to run things over with my wife or just in my head to say hey, you know, here's here's the schedule for tomorrow, let's just talk through it. So in a perfect world, I try and do it weekly. I've got some some habits and some rhythms set up in reflect, which is a notetaking app I use. We'll get into that another time. But I have a weekly ritual where on Sundays I kind of look at the week ahead, I figure out what my game plan is what I want to accomplish. And we talk through things as a family. And then at the end of the week, I again do a post mortem. And I go back and say, Hey, what were the highlights of the week? What can I improve on? So again, I don't do that as much as I'd like. But that is a habit that I do try and implement.

David Chung  

Do you guys share calendars with your partners with joy or with Alicia? Yes,

Matthew Osborn  

her calendar shared with me my calendar is not my main was actually not shared with her most of the time. But most of my meetings are during the early to middle part of the day and most of her stuff is scheduled after that. So most of the time, it's not a big overlap, but I probably probably do need to share our calendars across a little better than we do. Caleb,

David Chung  

Caleb, can I just say, would you agree it's an absolute game changer sharing calendars.

Caleb Roth  

Yeah. And what we've actually done is we just have a shared calendar, we call it us. And so it's something both of us see and I put even all my business meetings typically show up on that shared calendar, because she needs to know especially with, you know, five kids right now and a six on the way, we've got to make sure that we that stuff is covered. So if two kids have dance, we can't schedule a third item. Otherwise we gotta get a babysitter. or somebody to drive kids. And so I

David Chung  

guess it works. Sorry, I guess it works really well for you guys, because you guys can't have overlapping commitments because someone has to be with the kids, I'm guessing. Yep.

Caleb Roth  

And so it may be a little different for you. But I don't know if this was on your habit list, David, but you do a weekly meeting with Katya as well. Do you want to kind of walk through that? Because I really look up to that admire what you guys do there? Yeah,

David Chung  

absolutely. So in a nutshell, our weekly meetings happen on Sunday mornings. And it's just what what went well during the week. So we highlight, you know, what went well, we talked about one thing that we wish we did better on and how we can improve moving forward, and then we do a quick calendar sync. And so I have her calendars, and she has mine and her calendars are crazy. Like if I usually muted on my main calendar, just because it's like, her calendar is red in my calendar. And it's just a bloodbath, like, my entire calendar is red, because she just She's so busy. But it really helps on Sundays when we sync up to say like, specifically what we're looking for are the evenings that we don't have engagements, right. So like, Katya does like yoga every other day, and I do jujitsu and she goes to happy hours now go to happy hours, we have dinner plans, and will typically try to block off one or two evenings in the week to either do like a simple date night like walking around town, or, you know, a more structured date night, like going out to a new restaurant or something. So that's been remarkable, to say the least, it's really changed the way that you're talking about habits and how they can actually make meaningful impacts in your life. Like prior to our weekly meetings, when we were having for us just unstructured time together. You know, sometimes Katya would be on our phone, sometimes I'd be on my phone. And, you know, that could lead I mean, that has led to, in many times, like sort of resentment towards each other. And like how much screentime we were getting is like, there was a misalignment in expectations where, you know, maybe I was expecting to spend more time with Katya. And she was expecting to spend more time with me, and there was just a mismatch. One of the things that syncing up at the beginning of the week, really helped us out with is, oh, hey, we have these dedicated times blocked off throughout the week. And that is time that we're actually going to be intentional with each other, we're going to spend time together. And if we're sitting on the couch watching Netflix, and we're on our phones, that's okay, because that was sort of like a free time that we didn't have booked. And so there aren't really expectations. And so that's been really helpful.

Caleb Roth  

I love that. One thing that stood out to me when you talk about what's something that he kind of debrief the week, you know, behind you say what, what's one thing that went well, what's one thing that could have gone better? Does that ever lead to some really difficult conversations or defensiveness? Or is this kind of a habit that both of you just understand that the chance to simply verbalize how you're feeling about the week? Yeah,

David Chung  

I'd say most most weeks, it's something small, you know, it's, it's something like, Hey, you mentioned this this week, I wanted to talk a little bit more about that. And usually, it you know, it's, it's nothing major, it's just something like, oh, you know, I was really irritated that day, or, oh, you know, you done something previously, that sort of reminded me of that. And so like, it brings up good conversations. Now, I will say, every now and then we will have a conversation where it's like, hey, what's one thing that we could have improved on? And we almost get into like, a three hour conversation about, like, you know, like how we're feeling and it's been such a powerful tool, man, like, honestly, having structured time to talk about how you're feeling about the situation, what a powerful tool, like, instead of just like, feeling the need to or like, not having a structured and like never, because like, when is it comfortable to bring up uncomfortable things like you're never going to be comfortable?

Caleb Roth  

It's not the only time you will is when it boils over. Which is like the worst

David Chung  

time right? Yep. So anyway, it's been

Caleb Roth  

creating a release valve or a specified time really helps. And one last note on that. I've got one other note on kind of time blocking. But I think the same thing applies to budgets, where if you don't tell your money, where to go, it just disappears and if you don't tell your time where to go Oh, the week simply slips by, you get to the end of the week and go, Man, I had these priorities over here. And I may not have done any of those, you know, what did I actually do? I just played defense the entire week. So I think there's something to be said for with budgets, telling your money where it's going to go. And we've talked about this on previous podcasts with minimum budgets. And that's another that's another conversation for another day. But I think the same thing applies to time, if you don't block it off. If it's not on the calendar, then it's not important. And if things are important, like date night, or intentional time with friends, then block it out and do it. So one last note on on time blocking, this is something I picked up from the book, The One Thing by real estate agent, Gary Keller, and then I think Jay Papasan helped write that as well. But they talked about the one thing principle is what is the one thing you can do? So that if you did it, everything else becomes easier? Or not necessary? In other words, what is the most leveraged thing that you can do in your day, and once you identify that, then you can act on it. And that's the same thing with habits is, there's a million habits out there, we're going to display, you know, 1000s, hopefully over the next couple of years on this podcast, you can't implement all of them. So the question is, What's your intention? Where are you aiming. And then once you have that dialed in, that helps you figure out, you know, which which habits you should attempt to implement, one of the biggest things, but the one thing was, we all tend to play defense, we can chase shiny. I know, David, you're going to talk about that in a little bit. But one of the best things I did is I blocked four hour segments of every day. And so I think Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that was in the afternoon, and Tuesday, Thursday was in the morning. And what that allowed me to do is with my book, like a boss tool, you couldn't book me during those times, those were uninterrupted times. And what I wanted to use those times for was the most important thing I could do in the business. So whether that is talking to customers, I would kind of carve that time out, whether that was working on research, or spreadsheets or whatever that might have been, that gave me a chance to have uninterrupted time. And usually I try and put my phone on focus mode or airplane mode, I try and close my email app, so I wasn't getting bombarded or getting distracted. And I found that if I actually applied those four hours to whatever I wanted to do business wise, I would often have a way more productive day with four hours than I would with eight hours with a lack of focus. So I don't know if either of you have done anything like that. But I can't I mean, that's probably the greatest habit that I applied. When we started Scout IQ was simply time blocking, removing those distractions, and giving myself time to focus. And if I did that, and executed, that business, definitely move forward.

Matthew Osborn  

The thing, it's almost embarrassing how much of a difference that makes, because I don't know if you guys are as bad as me sometimes. But if you sometimes I feel like when I even just do one full hour where I've narrowed down what's most important, I spend my time focused all in full attention for one hour, or two hours, even just that feels way more productive sometimes and multiple days of just unproductive tackling all these little random things. Until I feel like it doesn't take much if you're honed in, you know what's most important. Heck, even an hour or two hours of dedicated focus on that feels way more productive than two days worth of responding to emails doing all this random stuff that doesn't really move the main needle forward. Now it's tough because sometimes those, which is one of the things I want to talk about a little later, sometimes putting out those fires is necessary. But it never feels productive doing that. And so even though you're gonna have to still respond to those emails, put out those fires later. I think like you said, making that most productive time in the morning, dedicating an hour or two, three or four to those main tasks really makes a difference. For me in the outlook of the entire day, I can miss some of those emails, not respond to a few things. But if I've dedicated those two, three hours in the morning, and I got a lot done and moves the needle forward in a big way, I have a much better outlook. I feel like on life in general throughout the day, and I'm happier than if I didn't do that. emailed a lot of people tackled a lot of things the morning that were small, little random things. And then at the end of the day, you feel like you've worked all day, but you've got absolutely nothing done is the most discouraging way to end the day. And so I think it's just important from a mental standpoint to get at least a few hours of clarity and work done before you start tackling all those those smaller tasks that need to be done.

Caleb Roth  

Yeah, I love that. I think that's one of the pieces that drives us to enjoy cutting the grass or mowing the lawn or however you call that depending on where you live. It's so easy to spend all of our time focused on our glowing rectangles, our screens or phones or iPads. And at the end of the day, you close it down and go. What just happened today, that was literally all just in this, you know, augmented reality that I created. It's just this digital world versus going outside smelling the grass, cutting the grass you can actually look after an hour or two depending on how big your yard is and go, I did that. I just accomplished this. And there's something really gratifying. And so that same thing applies is if you tell yourself here's, here's what a productive week is going to look like or a productive day. And then at the end of the day you revisit it. That's almost the same thing as looking back and saying, Oh, I just cut that grass. I just did that my yard is improved. Here's what I did. And I think that's a way to kind of combat some of the challenges of living in a technology driven world.

Matthew Osborn  

It's the random side now to random though, but did you just buy a giant like zero turn lawnmower?

Unknown Speaker  

Yep. Or guilty?

Matthew Osborn  

I saw that on a real I was like that. That's pretty nice lawn mower.

Caleb Roth  

Yeah, probably overspent I got a gravely zero turn. I think it's a 60 or 52 inches or something. But I've got I've got a five acre yard, three acres of that are trees. And so I only have two acres, I could do it with a push mower. But that'd be pretty challenging

Matthew Osborn  

acres would be crazy with the push mower. Yeah, the amount of guy, I have this grass vision. I even hate doing the push mower.

Caleb Roth  

I went out and got a defect grass to facture to kind of pull up some of the dead grass and then overseed here as we come into the winter. And I went out on Saturday and just spent the day I mowed I detached I spread grass seed. And I just I just was smiling the entire time going this is pretty cool. I'm actually out here doing stuff. I don't view myself as very handy. And so being able to go out and you know, do something. I don't know if that's inherently manly, or just feels productive. But I was like a kid out there. So it was worth every every penny I spent on it. Matthew, you said you had a couple of side notes. So that was one about the zero. So what's the other one you had? Oh,

Matthew Osborn  

sorry. No, no, that was yours. If you're just sitting on one.

David Chung  

I guess there was only one good one. Matthew, you want to jump into some of your habits, you've got some really interesting ones listed.

Matthew Osborn  

Yeah, so of the good a couple good habits, couple bad habits for things I thought of for Scout IQ and start time building that business. One of the habits is reflected in the business that I think we did well at, but it does kind of closely tie in one of the bad habits. So maybe I'll merge these ones together a little bit. But the good habit was I think we did pretty well at capitalizing on opportunities that came to us. I read that book in college, the one by Malcolm Gladwell called outliers. And I had a tough time going through the book at first at first I read it and I was like, this is an awesome book, it's super cool to see how Bill Gates and all these people kind of became successful wasn't the way you think they became successful. And then I went through this period of time where it's super discouraging, because at first I was like, wait a minute, we're always told, like growing up, hey, we can be anything we want to be. And then you read Outliers, like wait a minute, only Bill Gates could have started Microsoft, even if I went back in time knew everything I knew today, I would not be able to start Microsoft the way Bill Gates did, because he just had all these opportunities that I did not have in my life to be able to start that business. And at first, it was discouraging, because I was like, Hey, I always thought if I work hard enough, I can do this, or I can do that. And then you read that book and you're like, hey, all these people had very unique opportunities that no one else had, which enabled them to build the business they did. And it was discouraging, until I realized that the fun part about that is that each one of us have very unique opportunities, putting our lives that are different than everyone else. And if we take advantage of those opportunities, we can build something very specific to our lives that no one else can do. Caleb, you're gonna have opportunities, and you've had opportunities that I don't have and David hasn't had. And then vice versa, that works. The other way, too, all have opportunities. And people tell me that you guys did not. That'll enable me to do different things. And so looking at Scout IQ, we had a lot of opportunities come to us which I think most people have businesses, they'll have opportunities in different ways, shapes and forms come into their business. And what matters is if you take advantage of those opportunities, and actually do something with it. And I think we did a fairly good job of doing that throughout the business. A couple of key examples that stood out was that one time, this was in COVID year, this was middle of COVID Tiktok was just beginning to really kind of go crazy. It was mainly just a dance video platform before and people finally started using it for different things. And the entrepreneurial niche kind of popped up on there. And there was a random video of someone talking about Scout IQ going to a store and scanning books or software that went viral. I got I think 1 million viewers or 1.2 in a very short period of time. And we saw a lot of customers come into the business because of that. And we could have sat back and said hey, that's awesome. We had a viral video pretty cool. We got some new customers, but our first thought was let's take advantage of this opportunity. We had this given to us let's actually find some of these new influencers on Tik Tok. Let's pay them to make very similar videos the one that went viral and see what happened and we paid the very first we paid 10 Different or we paid more like three different influencers to make about nine different video Yo Yos, because we knew each one wasn't gonna go viral. But of those nine or 10 videos that were made three or four of them went viral to the same degree, if not more than that very first video. And we had one influencer video specifically, that got almost 5 million views that we paid for shortly after that first one. And all he did was very much copy the similar nature, it didn't copy it exactly. But the similar nature of the first video that went viral, almost 5 million views to date, I think on that video. And it was because we saw an opportunity and we didn't just let it sit there we noticed it, we realized that we took advantage of it. We paid some money to get some videos made. And then we 10 ext what would have been just a single viral video because we took advantage of that opportunity. Another idea that kind of came to mind was just

Caleb Roth  

wanting to hit Matthew, well, let me let me jump in there. You're being too humble, because you keep saying we this was essentially, this was you. I mean, we encouraged you. But this was you saying, Hey, guys, there's something here. And to really back up just just a moment set the stage COVID heard us a lot because thrift stores closed down, a lot of our customers are older, and we didn't know what we didn't know about COVID at the time. And so we lost somewhere around 40% of our recurring customers. And for almost any business losing 40% of your business. Of course, we didn't, you know, we weren't a brick and mortar, we didn't have to shut down like a lot of restaurants did and a lot of retail. So it could have been worse. But we lost a big chunk of our business. And we're just trying to stabilize the business. We weren't even concerned with growth. And I remember I was with Mike our episode, one guest, we were closing down to college and picking up books. And we flew in somewhere. And I always looked at this is probably a bad habit. I kept looking at our sales over and over and over, I was pulling up stripe. And you know, we averaged, you know, whatever it was 2030 trials a day. And we were getting, you know, several days in a row of several 100. I think we wouldn't have one day of 1000 trials in one day. And I remember calling you Matthew going.

I didn't think growth was really going to happen right now. What on earth is going on? You looked it up and figured out you know, there was a certain affiliate that was sending us a bunch of traffic. And I just picked up the phone and called him and said, Hey, man, I don't even know who you are. But thank you and what is going on? And then once we learned that it was Tiktok. Matthew, you really took the reins and jumped in and said, All right, let's pour gas on this. So kudos to you because you you really helped turn the ship around in a really dark time. Yeah,

Matthew Osborn  

so we've talked about a few good habits when you guys want to bring up one of the one of the bad habits, something you've noticed that did not go very well or something we can definitely improve if we build another similar business.

Caleb Roth  

Yeah, can we can we pick on you first, Matthew, one of the ones that you you put here in the show notes really resonated with me as well. And it's something I want to improve on just personally and also as a leader. But you you the note just reads out of my hands mentality. Do you want to explain what you mean by that what that feels like? Because that again, that's something that really resonates with me as well? Yeah,

Matthew Osborn  

no, I definitely think there were times in our business where I think each one of us the business partners felt this way individually together at different times where we felt a lack of progress in the business, things weren't progressing the way we wanted to. But we felt like the control of it was out of our hands. So oftentimes, it would be like, Hey, I think this and this should be done. But I can't do those things. And I think the business can't go forward unless those things are done. Therefore, I'm going to kind of just sit here, and twiddle my thumbs waiting for progress to be made, because I feel like it's out of my hands. And I think the book that I've read multiple times now when to the conferences that they're really just changed my mind on that was the Extreme Ownership by jakka. Willing, which basically, the premise of that book is nothing is ever out of your hands, there's always things you have control over. And there's always things you can do to move the ball forward, it might not be. For example, for a scout IQ, a good example would be development, if we knew there's X Y, this feature we needed to get developed, we needed to get it developed and pushed out for this reason. But Caleb, you and I are not developers, we often had different developers throughout the time of Scout IQ, and then our main developer or other business partner, and certain times developmental remove way slower than we thought it should, or there's little fires that needed to be put out. And so it took a lot longer. And instead of just waiting for this feature to be done and feeling like the business can't move forward until it's done. There's a lot of things I could have been doing that were in my control, I could have focused more on building out more training material, we could have focused on improving the website, we could have focused on improving the customer journey, I could have focused on retaining more customers and trying to limit churn versus just feeling like hey, we just need this feature to be able to move the business forward. And I'm going to sit down and wait until this feature is done. There's a lot of times where I felt like control was out of my hands, but I really just needed to look inside and figure out what do I have control over and let's move full steam ahead with that. And also there's a lot of things we think about or control that I think are And actually as much about our control as we think they are, we could have figured out how to develop better processes for managing the development lifecycle and figuring out how to set better sprints and be able to outline that better from my perspective of building out a cleaner UI. Focusing on step one, step two, step three, with the developers, we can hand it off to them. And they're not trying to create everything from scratch, they have a game plan in place of what they need to create. And that could very well move things along faster. And so I really realized that a lot of times, I felt like things were out of my control. I really just needed to take a step back, figure out what is in my control and double down on that, versus sitting back and trying to just wait for things to happen and hope they happen eventually.

Caleb Roth  

Yeah, I love I love that concept. And I don't know if it's from the Extreme Ownership book or something else. But it's the idea that it's easy to look at things out of your control and say, It's not my fault. And that may be true might not be your fault that the developments not being done as fast as it could be. But I think one thing Jocko called out as he goes, You are responsible. So even if it's not my fault, I can still be responsible to look at it and say, Alright, even though this thing is happening to me, this is a victim mentality, I'm still going to be responsible for asking the questions, can I improve this process moving forward? What can I do, even though I'm still waiting, and the minute you say, well, we'll we'll start marketing, we'll start doing other things. Once the development is done, you just put yourself in a spot where you are purposely checking out of the ballgame, and just say, I'm going to sit on the bench and wait until something else happens. And I think that's, I tended to do that as well. And I know there's some leadership elements that can play into it.

A big piece of it for me, too, was I think, lack of focus. And if we if I had done a better job, I'll say, I'll take responsibility instead of trying to lump the team. And if I had done a better job of setting the focus, setting the priority, the one thing for the team, and then purposely helping to block other things that were coming up because software is its own entity. And it tends to break when you when you least expect it. And when you least want it to, I used to joke that the software knows when you're traveling, and if I was on a golf trip or on vacation, something would inevitably break. It's just Murphy's Law kicking in. And so I think the more that I could have set the focus, and then kind of blocked and tackled and said, Hey, these other things are important, but they're not, you know, fires that we need to address today that I think we could have stayed on track a little bit better.

Matthew Osborn  

Yeah, absolutely. Have you noticed that in your businesses at all, David, anything similar to that?

David Chung  

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the positive Funny enough, one of the positive habits that I put in for Scout IQ is near the near the tail end, we got into these quarterly meeting cadences where we'd been in person, once a quarter to talk about the previous quarter, similar to my weekly meetings, what went right, what went wrong? And then, you know, what should we focus on the, you know, court moving forward? And I think once we started doing that, I don't know about you, Matthew, but definitely helped me as far as like prior prioritizing where my energy should be going to. Would you agree with that? Yeah,

Matthew Osborn  

no, absolutely. I think that we always I, I often blame this. I've said the same during the podcast that there's a lot of communication is lost, and all meetings are virtual, and we'd meet up multiple times a week, virtually going on the camera talking through things. But there's something that just that they feel like for all of us recess, when we met in person, we're able to sit down, have dinner together, talk through things and then go to the whiteboard, go over what we did wrong and plan for the next quarter. That really just resets things that you can do virtually very well. I feel like you have to have that in person atmosphere. And when we be in person, reconnect, and then plan for the future and review the past, like you said, I think that was key and just getting our minds focused in the same place. Or remembering that we're all human and not just some robot on the other side of the world that we see once a day or once a week on a video chat. But reconnecting his friends and stuff like that was really just good. I feel like for the business of getting ourselves on the same page again. And when we're on the same page, we just work better towards goals that we've set. And so I think that was really key, especially later on, we got more consistent with that. I think that was great.

David Chung  

Absolutely. And when you're drinking by yourself in front of a computer, people call you alcoholic. But when you're amongst a group of friends, you know, it's totally fine. So,

Caleb Roth  

yeah, now it's been social. Yeah, I feel that you know, we all started in Denver, Matthew, you and I shared an office. We had top golf as our honorary secondary office. And just those times together are way more impactful because when we jump on a call, we always have this pressure of well, we got it. We got to be somewhere else. We have an hour to be here. It's easy to be distracted versus sitting down face to face. That's When the best ideas come up, they come off the cuff. And you can view that as being lucky, you know, air quotes, Lucky. But the reality is, the more you put yourself in a position for good things to happen, the better, the better things will happen. And you do feel lucky. But I think those in person meetings were tremendous. And I know that's something we've discussed, continuing to do. Now the benefit is we live in three different cities. And so are three different states, really. So it's easy for us to now say, Hey, we've got, you know, once a once a quarter, we're going to Phoenix, once a quarter, we're going to Denver, once a quarter, you guys are unfortunately coming to the middle of nowhere, Indiana, and then that leaves the fourth quarter to kind of pick, you know, alternative location, maybe somewhere warm, somewhere different, somewhere exciting, maybe somewhere where we have some great guests to interview. So yeah, I'm a huge proponent of in person.

David Chung  

Absolutely. That sort of leads to my other habit, which was creating luck through connections, and I threw some quotes around luck originally. Because, you know, when you think about it, I'm sure there are a bunch of great sayings there. I'm just gonna butcher all of them. But like, you know, you, you create, you truly do create your own luck. And like, one of the things that I feel like all of us did really well. But you know, one thing that I pride myself on really focusing on was casting a wide net of connections over a long period of time. And just pinging those connections regularly. We talked about that in the Mike McCarthy episode where, you know, Mike, I forget how many people he messages in a week. Do you guys remember? It was a crazy amount?

Caleb Roth  

Said it's like three to three a day, wasn't it? I think it's three a day. Yeah, that's

David Chung  

a lot of people that yeah, you know, my entire phone book in like two weeks. Joking. But, yeah, I mean, just like essentially casting a wide net, and following up on those connections, like, you're bound to find synergies or like areas where there's total alignment and those connections. And, you know, one of the two of the examples that I put down where there's if it integration, which, you know, was a little rocky to begin with, but just being able to connect with Jeff Highlander back in 2013. And, like, back when he was with a totally different company, I was with a totally different company. And we both just so happened to be in companies that really mesh well together, and being able to integrate his services into ours. That was really cool. And then also, the other thing, too, is just like, how the three of us ended up being part of a team, at least for me, being able to join the book flipper community, and I go to a lot of the in person events, and being able to connect with you guys over over time. You know, we were able to create bonds, and I was able to, quote unquote, be lucky enough and truly lucky to join you guys team.

Caleb Roth  

You do that better than most, David. And it's something I really look up to you and admire. But having those you know, there's their angle this, there's no angle, you're not calling someone because hey, I've got this idea. And you're doing this thing, and I think we should partner up. I think I said that the first time we ever met. I'm like, David, you and I should partner up at some point. I think I kind of rushed the gun, but it ended up working out. So I guess it worked, you know, all's well that ends well. But you do that so remarkably well. No agenda, just simply reach out, get to know people. And you know, it happens to work out for you and for us. But even if it doesn't, those deeper connections are incredibly meaningful. And I think that's something you know, Matthew, you did a lot of this as well. And I did, we ended up becoming friends with a lot of people in our industry that use competitive products, or actually, they weren't competitors. You know, I talked to other teams, developers from time to time, and just we shared ideas we didn't, you know, didn't get too much into the weeds, because that would be a conflict of interest. But we got to know each other, there was a mutual respect. And I think that that helped all of us just move forward. more impactfully. One thing that I struggle with kind of one of the one of the last habits that I that I sort of missed out on. And David, you mentioned this a little bit, Matthew did as well. But the idea of offense versus defense, I, my happiest moments were the first year when we were building the prototype, because I had very clear, you know, I was very focused on what I knew the market needed or what I thought the market needed. And so we were building this thing to kind of solve the problems that were out there we were, we were creating something new. And I think there's something in me that loves to create. And the second happiest time was when we were doing the exact same project with palette IQ, which was our bulk tool. And so there was a period of building this tool, sort of the injustice Is that other companies were charging too much money. And we could do very similar things kind of stripped down some features and make it very affordable. I love those periods of time. And sort of the concept of building in public comes to mind at something that's very trendy, especially in the tech world. But when we were doing our initial build out, we were very upfront, we did a keynote speech, here's the features we're doing, here's why we're doing it. Here's how it's important. And I think people really rally to that. And they felt like we were creating something for them. And then what happened is, our competitors are namely, one main competitor would shamelessly copy from colors, two features, two, you name it, they would essentially copy and tip the hat to them something that would take us a month or two to build out, they would copy in a matter of a week. And so I got really frustrated and started playing more defense and saying, Well, I don't want to get burned. Again, I don't want to explain what our feature is, and give them the chance to beat us to market. And I think what happened then was that was playing scared. And so that was kind of being you know, contracted and being worried and afraid that or an anxious that someone was going to copy us. And at the end of the day, it didn't really matter. You know, they had essentially the same tool as we did. They were actually cheaper than we were they dropped their price. When we announced we were coming to the market. And we held steady, we never increased prices, which to Matthew's earlier point, maybe we could have and maybe we should have. But I was happiest when we played offense, and not in a sense that I don't give an F about what anybody else is doing. But the sense of we are going to just do play our game, serve our customers. And whatever happens happens. And I think that is the best approach. And that's something I want to apply to whatever business we get into next is play more offense, be more outward focused, and tell people what we're doing, and then just go do it. Yeah,

Matthew Osborn  

no, overall, I think it was a very hit everything. So one thing I do have on my list that I'm curious, this may be a little off topic. But I'm curious if you guys thoughts real fast on this is I put education, education is one of the good things on my habit list. And what I meant by that was that we're always putting out content for our customers for Amazon sellers in general, whether it be fee changes, and Amazon updates to how people could store their inventory, releasing some free spreadsheets CanLit that you would make to help people manage their business, we just always kind of defaulted to putting out educational content and helping people in our community. And we always heard feedback over and over again, that a lot of times why people used us was not because we had the fanciest software or the software that always worked the best. But because they liked our team, they liked us as individuals, they liked that we're always helping them build their business. And we kind of defaulted to that creating content and education for the customers a lot of times that really had nothing to do with our software, our software, help people find books, and a ton of our content was how to manage your business, how to give your numbers to your accountant, all the different things that had nothing really to do with our software itself, but just in general helping people sell on Amazon. And people tend to really like that. But going back to what you talked about at the beginning, Caleb, we talked about the Hormoz ease a little bit and how they give a lot of their content away for free and how we kind of did that to an extent. One thing that I noticed, I don't know if you guys listened to his keynote speech when he released his new book, The 100 million leads. Did you guys listen to that at all? Yep, you did. Okay. So one of the things in there was he had this thing where he had all of this informational content, all these courses he's made. And he said it was gonna be $9,000 a year, and then he dropped it. And then it was $1,000 a year. And eventually, at the very end, he said it was gonna be free for everyone that was there, you can grab the link, take all of it. And he said his goal, kind of like you said, Caleb was to give the information for free that way people can build these businesses, and then they can go off and they can help them afterwards. Do you guys think that when you give something away for free like we did, though, that it devalues that information and that people will not consume it as much as they would if they had paid money for it. Because when I think back on that I'm conflicted with that, because I do like our process of making a lot of free content. I think it definitely helped customers feel like they related to us more. But going to the Alex for mosey thing. If I had paid $9,000 for those courses, I guarantee you I would have listened to every minute of all of those courses by now. But when I got a free link to get all of that content for free, I've gone through very little of that, because I have no investment into and I know it'll help me I will eventually probably go through all of those. But if I had paid for that content, I probably would have applied a lot more of it to my life right now. I probably would have watched a lot more of it, and take an action on it a lot more. But given that it was free in your mind, the thing that automatically devalues the content to an extent do you guys see that in your life? Or is that just me and that's how kind of I'm relating to this or do you guys see the same type of thing happen in your life?

David Chung  

I so I would I see where you're coming from Matthew But in my mind, it's not necessarily devaluing, it's more a sense of priorities right? And so right now, like all that free content that, you know, Alex, where mosey posted it, it's important, you know, it's useful, and you know that it could impact your life. But right now, it's not a priority, you don't really see how that could impact your life in a major way, right this moment. And so you've deprioritize it, and it's not necessarily that you devalued it, you just deprioritized it. Now, I think that if you did pay the $9,000, it doesn't make it any more and more valuable, it just increases the urgency of you consuming that information, because it makes it a higher priority, because you paid so much money for it. I just think about like, Instagram and Tiktok. Where, you know, all day, we're just consuming this social media, we're consuming information all day. And it's not necessarily that the information isn't valuable, you know, a lot of the recipes, and, you know, different videos that you see on there are actually valuable, it's a matter of priority, right? And so, like, How many times have you seen, you know, short form content, where you're like, Oh, my God, that's exactly what I was looking for. Because Tiktok and Instagram knows. And you're able to quickly apply that to, you know, whatever you're doing or to your life. Again, it's not because that information was more, you know, valuable or less valuable, it was more so that it was a higher priority for you at the time. That's sort of my take on it.

Caleb Roth  

Matthew, you and I kind of went back and forth on this. And I don't want to say we struggled, I think there was certainly some tension there. I understand your points. And I'll give an example. We kind of went back and forth on this as it relates to a course. So I remember Jim Pickens rolled out a course I think it was $100, maybe $200. And I know he sold a couple $100,000 worth of his course it was substantial. And a lot of people spoke incredibly highly of it. And it's like, Well, man, we should be putting that content out. And fortunately, you know, he affiliated affiliated some of our products. But it was like, man, we could we could be doing this, we're relevant, we have the knowledge between the three of us. And so we rolled out I think book flipper academy or university, whatever we called it. And I wanted to do it for free. You talked me into selling I think we sold it for 450 bucks. I don't I don't remember the price point.

Matthew Osborn  

Price point either. Yeah, it wasn't crazy high.

Caleb Roth  

No, it wasn't. And I remember the principle and I completely agree. If you pay for something, you are then going to place more emphasis on it. Because if something's free, it's exciting. And you want to you definitely want to jump in and poke around. But ultimately, everything else fights for your attention. And just like we're in a consumer driven culture with Tiktok, and Instagram and Facebook reels, it's really easy just to forget about it and say, wow, it's there. I'll check it out sometime. Versus if you pulled out your credit card, or you know, Apple Pay or whatever and bought it, you are now going to place that into a higher priority in your life. So I love that concept. And I do agree with it. It just felt weird. And maybe I was too concerned with what people thought because there be comments out there, like, why would you pay for this, there's free information on YouTube, which isn't true. But a lot of times you get what you pay for everything is you know, put together in a nice bundle for you. But also just the habit of paying for something means you are going to be more serious about it. So I go both ways on that I understand the benefit there. But I ultimately felt better about making it for free. And when we removed. You know, I think we sold, I don't know $10,000 of the course or something. It was nice. It didn't change our lives. Hopefully the people that bought it benefited but then we eventually just rolled it out for free. And if you were Scout IQ customer, you could have access to it.

Matthew Osborn  

Yeah, yeah. We just kept it behind our customer paywall versus having it Yeah. As a paid course. Yeah, I think the balance is really important. So sorry, go ahead.

Caleb Roth  

I say the biggest thing I think we missed goes back to your original point was we didn't have a very expensive product. So if you loved us and bought the tracking spreadsheet and our repricing software and scout IQ and pallet IQ and you know, fill in the blank, I think the most you could have ever paid us in a calendar year was somewhere around, you know, five or $600, which that's a lot of money in aggregate, you get, you know, 1000s or 10s of 1000s of customers doing that, and it's a it's a pretty substantial business. But we didn't give anybody the chance to to pay $10,000 with us. And I know that the value that the three of us can provide and did provide to people was worth more than that for some of the larger clients. So I think that's our biggest myth. is saying how can we provide crazy value and charge for it. And that's something I'm eager to sort of figure out the next go round. This

David Chung  

conversation just went full circle.

Caleb Roth  

I love how that happens.

Matthew Osborn  

And I think that wraps it up pretty well. Is it good. I think there's a lot more to discuss here. But obviously, we can't do it all in one episode. But I think we've covered some really good key points here. And I like some of the habits that we outline and definitely a lot to think about. And I'm sure if we come back and have this same conversation a few few months from now, we'll have new insights we've gained from just pondering what we've talked about in this episode. So that's pretty cool.

Caleb Roth  

So word of wisdom that I'll leave you with. And then David, if you have anything else to chime in with, if you just listen to this whole episode, kudos to you. Congrats for giving us an hour, hour and a half, whatever this ended up being of your time, I got a challenge for you take a minute right now, pause what you're doing. If you're driving, obviously, don't do this while driving. But pull over, take a minute and write down just one or two action items you want to take away or something that stood out to you from this conversation and put it into practice. Because ultimately, you can read as many books as you want. talk to as many intelligent people as you want, listen to podcast, watch videos, you can put tons of content up here into your noggin. But unless you act on it, unless you put it out into the world, your life won't change one bit. And so it's better to listen to one thing and put one piece of content into action than to listen to 1000 things and put nothing into practice. So that's my takeaway is simply write something down that you want to apply. And then revisit that a week or a month from now and see if you're doing it. David, any last words as we close things up?

David Chung  

Nope. I think that's it. Cool. That's it.

Caleb Roth  

Tune in next week as we get back to interviewing some intelligent and intentional guests. And with that, we will close our episode. Thanks for listening