Sean: What are the challenges you faced when starting up your tech company?

Edwin: You know, a lot of the challenges, like any entrepreneur, is the ability to do many things. So it all depends if you're coming with a large team. But most entrepreneurs, most tech founders, they're doing many things. They're not only building out their stack or their tech stack, their MVP but they're also needed to - we built our business on paying customers. We bootstrapped it, right? The biggest challenge I found was finding that balance of finding new customers, delivering a product, a superior product. The challenge that I'm seeing is finding that rhythm, right, and that balance. But if you want to grow in scale, you got to exit yourself from these different positions.

Edwin: And this is something Sean talks about a lot in terms of and I know we talked about, you know, firing, getting, and how to grow. But ultimately it's finding that rhythm carving out the time to build out the system. So when you hire someone, they're not just there waiting for you to tell them what to do, that there's a system and a process for them to follow. Otherwise, they're just sitting there twiddling their thumbs. So I would say the biggest challenge now that I said that out loud is doing the work when it happens. When I say doing the work is to write out the process right away, like, OK, I close a deal. This is what I have to do next. I got to send an onboarding email. So here's the template, and then I got to do this. I got a log into this system, so they're there. Or what if it's all integrated already, but write down that process right away.

Edwin: I've seen entrepreneurs not have a process after running their business for 10 years, and they're wondering why it's difficult to hire people because you know, "the people come and go. And when I don't know why, I can't keep people" and I say, Well, do you have a specific job role or do you have the process for them? What are they doing when you hire them? You can't just hire them and let them sit there. They get very quickly unmotivated. If you're not empowering these people, then they don't feel worthy or not motivated to work, they're already leaving. That is my biggest challenge - is probably on the scale, understanding processes and systems. It's easy to - especially today, Sean, there are so many tools out there. Like I said, like Bubble, you could resell a tech stack and just label it and you could sell right away. But the problem is scaling the sales, scaling the customer support, scaling the billing, and doing all those types of stuff.

Sean: And that is true 100 percent. But that is also something that you're going to want to do as you scale. Otherwise, you're building the company in a linear way. And the problem is when you lose someone's key while you're building it in a linear way, you're in line suddenly goes flat or goes down because you lose a key person. But if you have your processs documents to back you up when you hire, it's automatic. You hire, they get onboarded, they learn stuff, they read the process document.

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