Business-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about how to know whether a new feature is going to be popular. What are some ways to see whether many people really need this or just a few noisy users. We also discuss realizing our team has a bias towards action and some ways to help us interview and hire the people that naturally have this bias.

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Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 15, season two, and we were talking about our favorite thing, not our children, our business as stop X. And there's a good one coming up a phrase that I've been like reading recently. That's really motivated me in changing the way I think about business.

But first let's also talk about how do you know if a feature will be popular. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about a feature that's been brought up repeatedly historically for our product. People have mentioned it and then we'll decide maybe we'll make a plan for how would you evaluate whether the popularity of this?

So, one thing is. WordPress user accounts. We're a membership plugin for WordPress. So it tacks onto WordPress allows you to create members in your WordPress site that login can access private things. Um, you can do a paid membership or you can do a free membership. So for this feature, um, all WordPress user accounts require an email address.

People have long said, what if I don't have users with email address? Is there a certain, uh, age that they're not email users? Along with that. What do you do if somebody has an account with an email address and just wants to update their billing, doesn't want to have to authenticate. Doesn't want to have to log in.

So I guess the feature is kind of twofold, a user accounts without an email address or some kind of magic links that would come to you by email, and you could use to authenticate yourself without a password to manage your account. Whether it's to update a payment method on file access and invoice, you see like magic links, a lot of places, whether it's secure codes or, or secret code sent to you, all kinds of things.

So how would you even evaluate if we should do that? It's been. In our internal channels for awhile and it's tough. And I know why we have them because I think the notion is that this is easier. It's less, you don't even have an email, but not in this case. It's like the internet expects you to have an email address and kind of accounting for those cases where you don't have one, or you already have an account on the site is complicated.

And that's why we keep kicking the can down the road. But it, um, we need like, There's other stuff they'll say, I want to be able to check out without an email address, but there's probably like something else. We could get more specific about what they really need. Um, But it is, uh, yeah. So both of those things w cause people are asking for them, is it still a good idea to do this also came up again because we're talking with a crypto protocol, which part of the unlock protocol and part of, uh, you know, crypto in general is kind of privacy.

And, uh, you know, you could sign in with a Ethereum wallet and we don't know your email address, and that's kind of one of the problems that has to be handled. And they're kind of diving in head on. Um, like how about WordPress user count without an email? Um, and just try to fake it. Um, Hm. So how would we evaluate if it's, I don't, I don't even, it's funny.

Like, I, I believe people would use this and like I would, on my own side, I realized, yeah, that one where like, w uh, on the alumni association site, we imported a bunch of users and then they want to come donate, but they have an account that they mailed in 20 years ago. They don't even know their past. And they say I'm going to donate a hundred dollars and says, well, we can't donate.

You're trying to donate with an email address as an account. You have to log in first. And I think there's some things we can do. This is like tricky too, because you worry about privacy, but we can, um, take their money. Like, like if someone went to like dot com and put in your email address, And then said, I'm going to pay your cable bill and then explain to me to be like, whoa, sign in first before you pay, I would, we should actually test it out.

Like big companies do this, but I think they do. I think Netflix is like login and then we're going to figure out your you and then charge you. But there, the thing where like, Hey, just let them pay and then don't log them in, like our checkout logs you in. But if you were, if it was like, if we detect there's a previous account, you know, just take their money and give them an error.

Like, Hey, I took your money, but you have to like also retrieve your account. Cause the thing is retrieving an account is so hard. Yes. I'm talking through this. She convinced me that that's why you want to just take the money because no one's going to do that. But the magic link thing is kind of cool when it works.

It's like we emailed you, but sometimes people don't know their email. They have different emails. Um, it would be, you know, yeah. Send me a magic link or however, you know, slack does this, however select does this. Yeah. Wait, is it like, so it's like JavaScript now notice how this is like one of the most popular things we could ever program into the plugin, but you're at checkout, you submit, you put in a password.

If you didn't, it's like what it's going to say, your put your password. We can even do that detect, um, I think I still would like it. Yeah. I know you probably like put in a password cause you're not logged in or whatever, but detect like actually, maybe even just by JavaScript, when you write in the email, you're like that's an existing email pop up.

Hey, you got to log in to continue. And then the magic link is kind of one of the easiest thing. Like you already put in the email address. So. I guess it's a way, this is also difficult privacy thing. Now your checkout form becomes a way to like validate someone's end-user on your website. So you'd have to put at least, like, I think three sites are getting over these, but yeah, like kind of like, Hey, you know, this feature turns off.

If you change the email, a couple of times I could see this is like rabbit hole of like what needs to be done, just so that like people that can't log in. Yeah. If you had a checkout form and you entered an email address and just took their money. I can change your membership account. You could be locked into a legacy, $147 a year version of paid memberships pro bought 10 years ago.

And now I could make you and lock you into a $600 a year where people have done this on sites. They do like donations, they'll do light bulb to whatever, you know, um, and then they can like, see it come up and they're like, look, they make fun of someone that for donating to the wrong. The magic link gets around that.

As long as you preserve and limit how many retries someone can do the other thing, and you don't have to validate that. It's true. You can just say if an email existed for this account, we have sent you a link. You don't have to say great. I found you in an email was sent. I've seen it. If, if you exist, we did something and it's not obvious on the browser, whether it's true or false results.

I think the other direction, like some big sites go is, you know, that, which is something you want to look into also, which would complicate this in some ways dependent. What we do is like multi-step checkout where like you have to log in first, you either register a login or you you're not even at the stage where you can pay.

Um, but it's kind of like more self-contained for people and maybe you do lose customers like that. And there's also these companies like fast and Stripe is house where maybe they're working together. All these payment gateways and apple pay, Google pay is like, you're on the checkout page. It's like, I know you're not logged into the site, but Google knows who you are and knows your credit card.

So just click a button and you're good to go. So try to just like accelerate it. Cause you're. But there's also this thing of like, you know, my 90 year old grandfather is in like the car club and doesn't have an email address, but he still wants to pay. So that's the thing too, is like, there's like, this comes out with a lot of these kinds of features.

There's like four different flavors of this. And is there a solution that kind of solves all four different problems or is one more important than the other? Or like, if we solve one and I don't know, they're like kind of related, but. But how do we make a decision? Like we just, yeah. How do we make a decision?

This is important versus the other stuff that we do. I don't know. Can I add one more version of this that people have asked for? Do we have a couple of minutes on this topic? Uh, people have asked for a membership account where somebody is the account holder for the access to the premium things. And someone is the account holder for the payment.

Yeah. We definitely want to management of the accounts. So really one person can get on the forums or carries the accreditation as the national nurses association of, of the United States of America. But somebody else is the person that makes sure that gets all billing related. It's all expiration and cancellation related notices.

And can log in and update the payment method or update and repurchase the membership. So a billing contact that gets certain versions of messaging and can interact with the account. In certain ways we have like the sponsor members and all that we have now, there was also this like student teacher add on that.

I don't know if we ever shared it that much. It was similar. And we want to take that concept and make basically like a new version of the sponsored members that supports that. Um, I think. You know, in our share, but it is important because there's different things to operate that way. And it is like a slew of problems.

I'm sure like folks who also implement this or figure figuring out we implemented it for like Jose's website value prop. Do you remember was like the first time we did it and like, um, the value prop accelerator back in like 2012 and some of the problems, some of the problems were as we maybe before that some of the problems.

Jason Kim checks out is paying for Jason Jason's in the system. Jay's like, this is really cool. I'm also going to buy it for something else. And then Jason buys his own account. So sometimes people are like parent accounts and child accounts simultaneously, or like, and then if, if should, should Kim stop paying for him?

Cause he was paying some other. So you ha you have to kind of have multiple memberships for user kind of in a sense sometimes. Cause it's kind of like, do you have a charity parent or child account? All the edge cases get really weird, but maybe you just lock it down and say, Hey, like Jason can't buy an account because he already has.

When you gotta talk to Kim and get her to cancel your account first, I would say if you're a billing account contact, you're not a WordPress user. You are a secondary email address on the account with the magic link functionality or some other. Password. So like I bill, but I can't even access the content I got created.

Well, then the F 50% of people are going to create a second account just for themselves. And can you do it with the same email? Are they like, I think a lot of the time, the parent, the person who pays the bill also wants to kind of like read the content. At least in the one user we spoke to most recently not they were the administrator for a doctor's practice and they w the doctor needed the access for the training for the accreditation.

For the community and they were strictly handling the billing processing for that goofy doctor who can't do a bill. I think you have to figure it out. I'm not that one is like, I know that's a good use case and we want to support it. I mean, we kind of already had plans to think about it, but we keep thinking of other stuff is more important and it's open source.

So a lot of times it's kind of, Hey, if someone wants to do these things, like come talk to us and like have a chat with me and Andrew and you. The rest of the team and we'll say, Hey, if we were going to build it, we would do it this way. That's going to like play the most nice with everything else we do.

And then we can work together. I think we under delivered on how do you know if a feature is popular? I think we just talked about the feature specific feature. We don't know how to talk about it until people keep you on it or make the smallest weird version of it. Uh, this is good. We didn't, we do. Yeah, we will do like workarounds and blog posts to work around and there were code work around.

And then if that gets popular, like what people are wanting to do this, they're going so far as to write code to do it, then we should like help them better. Uh, but basketball, I mean, this doesn't have to be a long discussion either. Um, that quote that I heard and I, I forget the source, I looked it up and this is like a quote as old as time, but the concept is biased toward.

And I think we've been doing a lot of thinking in the business and like, should we be doing this? Or like that, what's the process for like running meetings like this? Or like, uh, we have this question of, you know, should we, we talked to him the one episode about free versus paid and we can't figure out like, what should we actually focus on?

And, um, I think we've exhibited this before and we're kind of on the lookout for it. And the people who work with us as a bias for action is that when you're in this situation, like, are you, like we should step back and talk about this for six. Or is it kind of like, let's just pick one and see what happens, uh, and continue talking and be ready to, you know, your decision.

Yeah. So, um, it's a concept that I guess, I don't know that phrase. I heard that before, but it's like popped up a couple of, I don't know if it's just like, yeah. You know, the, well, you know, the other one is analysis paralysis. You can look at any dataset. Two people could have completely opposite analysis.

We were doing that today earlier. Somebody could look at the performance on Google analytics and, and I could paint it in a really pleasant picture. Someone else could view that data and painted in a negative, uh, picture. So bias toward action says, you know, don't get into a state of analysis paralysis, you know, Make a decision, try it, make something that's reversible.

Even the free verse paid. There's a very short path avoiding any AB testing is just for one week, remove the free level from our checkup, from our pricing page. And then for one week, put it back and get numbers on both. Yeah. And try not to change other things in the process, but otherwise don't overarch.

Uh, test for it. Yeah. Just take action. I'm ready to do that. 80, 20 principle. There's so many versions. It's like 80, 20 principle. There's you know, um, how quickly, when we've worked with new people in our team, could we identify if they present a bias toward action or how do you build that into an interview process or, right.

Yeah. Cause we're like core values and it's like, what's a good question. That would get a bias toward action. Um, I felt like we kind of realized how important a lot of the folks that we hire. And we like to, if whenever possible is have like test projects. And so the test project, you can figure that out.

Um, even like sometimes. We would have these coding problems. I'm free rolling here on us. It's a good idea. I would go on with developers and it always be like, it's too much. You can, you can't get it to it in the half hour, an hour that you're on the phone. Um, and then I, I didn't mean for this, but like a lot of times over the weekend, they'd be like, I was still working on that.

And I was like, no, no, no, no. That's just like a thing. Like I have the answer. We already did it like a. And sometimes this gets like, Hey, that shows like, you know, they have a problem. They have, you know, some other attributes, but is it like a bias towards action or yeah, maybe. Could you simulate that, look out for it in, in the case, when you're asking them about previous work they did and decisions they made or tell me, oh, you know what?

It was like, let's make a decision, you got wrong. And then how did you present it? Cause that's like, what are you scared of? That is, you know, if you can tell, sometimes you do have to slow down, you know? Um, it's. Matt Mullenweg, uh, you know, kind of leader of WordPress and a bunch of other people have talked about how, like, when you're making decisions, if it's easily reversible, like, go ahead, just make one.

You can always switch it as you, you're always going to learn, you know, always be learning. That's like another version of this. It's like, no matter what we're going to learn. Even if we learn, Hey, we made the wrong decision, but sometimes there's a decision where like, oh, once we go down this path, it's really hard to correct this and you have to slow down.

Um, we've done in some interviews I've conducted, we've done like a simulation role-play of how we work on a problem. So we've presented a problem, present a few options and the people who say, you know, that seems like the most straightforward group to attack and we could do it this way. Can very quickly get from a high level conversation that they've never heard of before never interacted with, to some actions as part of it.

That could be a piece how we analyze it. Okay. Yeah. I think it's good to be bringing like actual problems decisions. We don't know the answer to and talk it through with. And then at the end, you know, see if they have a bias towards action. Yeah. So, you know, how would you feel like, are you ready to make a decision or like, what would you do now?

And if they're kind of like, I would have another meeting then you're like, maybe not. Um, or if you say now that we're meeting, you have to pick which one, if they kind of like flake on that, if they feel uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it could be just, you know, They, maybe they can get over that, but it's just kind of shows that like naturally they don't have that.

And if that's an important part of the role they're having, you know, do you need that? Or if you kind of force it, Hey, if you had to make a decision, which one? And they pick one and you talk through it, like, yeah, that's cool. All right. Kind of put them on the spot. I like it. I like it. Let's go hire someone else doing something.

I need to make an action. Now I have a bunch of that I've held off on. All right, let's go do some stuff. Go do some stuff. Bias towards action and get stuff done. Just chip it. Always learning, always be learning. All right. Sorry. Uh, thanks for watching. Let's say catch up next week.

Family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about our children and how they think we work too much. Also covered is wasting food, specifically salad which we aren't sure that they really like but think is healthy. Why is wasting food such a trigger for Kim as an adult?

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Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim and Jason. This is episode 14, season two, and we are talking about our life. Yeah. Later on in the episode, we're going to have a funny story about our daughter. Uh, but first we'll start off with a question. Uh, do we work too much? And this was motivated by the fact that we had a list of ideas for this podcast.

And we had about eight business ideas and you're like, we have no life ideas. And I was like, maybe that's our first idea is why are we thinking about work so much? And we don't have life questions. I want to talk about that, but I want to also say, and not in a cryptic way, but our kids are getting older and we are going through some interesting things with both of them.

But I think that they're personal and I, as I don't post photos of our kids on Facebook, I don't judge you. If you do. We stopped doing that for their own privacy. Yeah. We advise them how to be safe online with their privacy. And I think if we exposed things that they were exploring in their lives and questions and things, we may have tiptoed a little bit around some things in the past, but the older they get, the more I want to protect.

Yeah, as preteens and teens, because I don't not have things about our life that I want to talk to you about. I just don't wanna talk to you about them. So I hope every parent can respect that. So I'll talk all about us. So books, do we work too much?

I don't know how so. Yeah, I guess you could, like, what does that mean? Like total time-wise is it spread out? Are we always thinking about work? All right. We look, I like our work, so it's kind of, you know, I tried to put myself in the mindset of like a person on our team who isn't tied to this business's performance success outcomes as directly as we are.

And has as much influence on it as we do. And, and I think they still think about their job off hours, but I don't think that they have unhealthy work habits logging on to early in the day, logging on too late at night, logging on, on weekends. Yeah. Is there a related question? Do you work way more than me?

And that's 10. No, no. I used to think that you've been keeping a better schedule through this year. Yeah.

We work in separate places that helps. So you can like, you know, when I'm not working, you know, now the whole time I'm in the office, you think I'm here. I used to think that, um, when I worked at Accenture, I think you knew I was a good worker. Like you'd meet my coworkers and the really Jason's a good worker.

And I would like get promoted and get paid. Well, Get stuff done. And then when we started working together, I guess it was rough. Cause it was the first time just working from home in general. But I think you realize like, oh, like Jason would like stop in the middle of the day and take breaks and get back.

And maybe he's working like four hours out of a seven hour day. Um, and like the gaps in between were more noticeable. Uh, I've been noticing for myself that I, I work to scout. I don't work at intentionally enough. And that was a comment you made about blocking eventually getting back to a place where you could say Friday was a work on the business time.

Right? I need time to write procedures and documentation and things like that. Instead of, I think we could both try some time boxing experiments. I know that it's always a failure. It always, we always have. Something that comes up suddenly last minute, that distracts us, that changes like having a schedule helps.

So I think even if you're gonna be breaking in, sometimes you have the intention. Like last week Isaac was home because he goes to school. His school is 30 minutes from our house and the doctor couldn't make an appointment. His pediatrician couldn't see him till right after lunch. So I wasn't going to send him to school in the morning, driving 30 minutes there to get him 30 minutes to bring them to the.

And the afternoon, I just kept him home all day because it was, you know, that's the trade-off we make where he goes to school. So at Workday was weird. That Workday was really weird. I had to pay that that morning and I feel like I take a decent break. I'm not, uh, I'm working more than four hours lately.

Cause I'm getting in earlier. We kinda figured out the morning. But I take like a decent, like two hour break, typically in the middle of the day. And I'm, I make it up. Usually I feel like we're talking about work, which is also work after hours and on weekends I usually get a session. And so we get to like close to a 48.

We're not, I don't think it's crazy. It's weird. Like how you track time, like some of the hustlers and they're like 80 hours a week and maybe that's good. And for certain businesses it's good. Would this be better? Like, definitely. I guess if I was physically capable of doing it, you know, like. Doing even 50% more in twice the time, or like whatever, you know, the ratio you would really get out of those extra hours.

I could find things to do with it, but I would, I would not like work as much. So, I don't know. I feel good about our balance mean, I guess I worry. It's hard to turn off. Maybe there's a problem. And when you were away at the beach house, the lake house river house and a body of water house. Yeah. It was like a different environment.

And it was probably easier for you to not work. Yeah. I asked if you worked and you were like, yeah, a little bit something, something, I was like, oh, that stinks. But you were really talking about the house. Yeah. I didn't bring my laptop and I didn't work. I didn't bring my laptop. So Puerto Rico, I didn't bring my laptop that weekend.

So, but it is weird. I like, it's good having this river house for a number of reasons, but like a change of scene. If you have an empty moment at home, besides the household chores. It's kind of like my laptop is right there and you know, my phone told me that someone needs something and I really could spend 10 minutes working on it, you know, before dinner or whatever random.

Yeah. What's a good strategy to like try deep focus. Try. I, I know people say like, shut off things that ping you probably don't have your phone nearby. You were talking about when you consider writing a book using an old style laptop that you would write in the archaic desktop publishing programming, are those the hacks that we, that our brain and our body need to have intentional focus, work time?

Yeah. I, I think, I always think about actually there was this a Seth Rogan interview. Where he talked about writing in the same space. And there was like the writing room where he would smoke weed when he writes. But it was like, all we did in this room was smoke weed and right. Uh, cause he wrote comedies.

Um, and I guess that helps him be productive, but so weed is not the answer. I'm not saying for focus. Uh, Having setting the environment and you don't have to have a separate building or a separate house if it's a room or like a different laptop, or kind of like drawing to shades or closing the door or do something like your brain really has these triggers.

I don't like switch. I used to do this. Like I have like different desktop backgrounds or like, you know, the left monitor and the right monitor would have like different kind of backgrounds and it switched to the other one. And it would like, you know, like, oh, I'm in programming mode. Um, so if he can switch the scenes, maybe you could do.

I can usually I'm in the office here. You're up. If you're like, this is my focus time for X, like come down to the office and I do the work that I can do the trade places I have done that I had to write when I wrote my hero press essay, I came down here to write it. Um, but I mean, children will always have.

You know, inflated perception of our work because we, we work together. So our conversations are work-focused that doesn't feel like work to me, talking about work at seven o'clock with a glass of wine on the sofa, with the fireplace and a dog on my lap that doesn't feel like work. It can be, I mean, I'm going to get some tense, like do kids to pay.

If the parents don't work in the same company and are talking about work with the kids, call that work. At night, if we didn't work at the same company, I was like, oh my boss, that's the thing. We're not just, chit-chatting like figuring stuff out and like using a part of our brain and kind of, and it's stuff that if we were in an office we would have been doing in the office and then like, that was a good day.

We got together and we talked for an hour about a thing. I mean, made some decisions. Yeah. You know, like it's work, but I used to brought up children and I thought you were going to go in the direction of like kids interrupting you. I know I had this problem where it's sometimes there's like something I have to do.

It's going to take one or two hours or four hours. And I don't even start it because I'm like, I know I don't really have the time. Like I don't work in the mornings like I do now. I try to like read, catch up on things and help out, like, because I could not get distracted and then mark, or, um, like I need to know like, Hey, for the next hour and, you know, limit the distractions.

I mean, yeah, that's it, it's kind of like find the place that your limit distractions, whether it's kids or devices or notifications would home. Is there a, this is a really work-focused life conversation, but maybe you should put something, put something on my calendar next week. I'll put something on your calendar to do that too.

Okay. And put something on my calendar to do. That's like deep focus block the time for me, I'm going to block deep focus time and you're going to set a fun thing. No, both. Both for me. And I'll do both for you. Okay, cool. Okay. Then I get my pet project work done. Yeah. User fields. And then in my work, I'm going to give you permission.

Yeah. Go, go to the river and work on user fields. We do have another family topic that hopefully doesn't get turned into a work discussion. Uh, we, we are talking comfortable talking about this with the kids. I think ma Marin, our daughter has, um, a couple of times taken like leftover salad from the dinner before I made a salad for lunch, but she doesn't really eat salads.

Like she'll, won't finish it like too many to, you know, like maybe 10% or she'll take a couple bites, but it's not like a real. For like, if she actually ate it, it would be, but so a couple of times before, and then once this week she took us out to school. Yeah. And it was like, I got like unnecessarily angry because it takes me more time to help her make her salad.

Yeah. Yeah. And she was excited about it. She's telling us she doesn't want to eat all the animals. She's choosing to only eat. Avian. I don't know why shaking the chicken and I convinced her Turkey. We do the Turkey tacos chain and how intelligent they are. I feel like that's a, I dunno if that's okay with whatever she chooses.

I support it. I will cook chicken and I will cook Turkey. We don't cook much else. We never really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have learned that. And so Isaac doesn't really care, but he doesn't and beef occasionally. Yeah. We'll make beef. Not very often. Yeah. It's even harder to make this out. You are really upset that you spent extra time in custody, made horrible legs in the morning for school, appealed them burning with my hands and that salad came home.

I was so upset because I think it's a vanity. That's what we're guessing. So we need to like ask her questions because yeah, I think like when I was a kid and how cool you felt to have like a certain, like a new lip gloss or like be the kid at school with such and such like the kids who got Lunchables or, you know, expensive things.

So I feel like she might be bringing the salad for that reason, which just makes me feel scared that, that she's like at 10. Presenting a person to the world that she doesn't love salad, but she feels cooler presenting as a person that eats salad. Okay. Like either a teacher or friends, or like, I'm really proud of eating salad, that's healthy or something like that kind of conversation is going on and motivating her to show off her food instead of like actually picking things she likes to eat.

But is that also maybe the first step is kind of like she, maybe she really feels that's health and she's like, it's good that she has the motivation to be healthy. Yes. And it's made me motivated. Partially or more by like impressing people, but it's good that there's motivation deep. She thinks eating salads is healthy, so that's good, but it's not like the kill it and be like, I don't know.

I also think they're all talking at lunch. Very talkative salad is a hard thing to eat quickly when, and to eat when you're also having a conversation. It's like, you have to fork it, find it. You have to. To it in a way that you're not dropping food out of your mouth or looking gross, it's not the same as a peanut butter and jelly.

That's also very sweet and delicious and quick to just get down. Yeah. I don't want her to be hungry and be hangry. And she's found her. Yeah, she seemed okay about like knocking hungry. Some of the days there was also a daily, like she made her own lunch and I didn't inspect it before she went out. And then I forget there was not enough food.

It's terrible. Sometimes it's not enough food, but it's also like all processed, packaged crap food. And I'm trying, that's the balance of like letting her do it herself, but also, so I usually let her do it herself. And then you like. Uh, but it hadn't been packaged, processed foods so fast and easy for her.

Our son gets lunch, bought at school, but for her, she has to pack a lunch and it's easy to throw packaged food into your lunchbox. I don't buy it. They say there's nothing to eat. If I don't buy even individually packaged or just crunchy snacks that. Then a lot of people though, like you cook a lot and you have, and I like to cook some that we eat out, you know, a few times a week, but we make a lot of meals, like by hand, by scratch.

We've never had GrubHub delivered to our home. We've never had what's the other one. Uber eats. Yeah. I've never used any of these services.

I've never used any of these services. So I have no idea they don't deliver to us. I wouldn't do it anyway. Like I wouldn't, she wanted something in her lunch and I was like, we can make that homemade. Yeah. So we, oh, we kind of like a minute. Um, I thought I said, when you start talking about it, I was like, Ooh, let's talk about it.

Is, can we still talk about it at a meeting on Sunday? Or like, what are the questions or give examples from our own lives? That's always like the trick is kind of talk about it as like, I remember when I was little, I have a memory of being little. I was at home, I think eating. Eating Kraft, macaroni cheese, but pretending it was a salad in my mind.

Cause it was like, like you said, it kind of elegant to eat a salad or something. I was like, oh yeah, yeah. I was like, maybe. And I think my mom was like, maybe watching it, like the equivalent of food network back then, like Graham Kerr or healthy something. But I was eating like macaroni and cheese to, yeah.

I don't know. It is it's good to try new stuff. I think if she wants some salad in her lunch, we will make her a small side salad. It will not be her entree. She's finishing it, then build it up. She also put an entire container of dressing on it. Oh, I think she makes her gross. Like she made the fish is getting better at that.

She did that at dinner. The other night she put sour cream on her, like taco burrito bowl, but it was covered in sauce. Oh, well, it's getting better. She used to be really well. Can I put chocolate sauce on my taco and you're like, I know it's not going to taste. Like, it seems like a good idea, but it's not.

But if you, the more you act like it's gross, the more that she'll eat it, that's the thing you have to say. Like that looks disgusting, then she'll eat it. Reverse psychology works well on her. We'll figure it out. Yeah. I guess there's parents out there listening who say my kid won't touch. Take one bite of salad.

So we're, we're. You know, complaining about something that is probably okay. Just not the biggest deal, but it was something I got triggered in that moment. I don't like wasting food. You really know you have a hard time with that's frustrating to me too. Yeah. Our kids will not have that problem. They're completely comfortable wasting food.

It's interesting. That's another one of those things where like I hear my dad in my head, like we heard the children are starving speech, every single meal. And we had those commercials on television. We had the dollar a day commercials. Our kids don't see those commercials growing up that vivid opposite problem where like with the eat, the food do not waste it.

We're overweight and eat all of our food. I'm there. Drive salad for dinner. Um, not having dinner today. Fasting day. Sorry we talked about self for lunch, then it was good. Yeah. All right. Thanks.

Business-focused topics from Jason and Kim. ...

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Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 13, season two, and we have some business topics later on in the episode, we're going to be talking about AB testing, if that's your jam. But first up, we're going to talk about freemium business models. And if should every membership site have a freemium model?

Yeah. What is a freemium model? Jason? Okay. Ah, freemium is when you have a paid product, but you give away. Something for free first. It could be as simple as a free trial. I seen people talking about free trials as being freemium, but more often there's a free version of something that is limited in some way.

Um, but you kind of capture people and then they have to upgrade. There's all kinds of like MailChimp has a free plan, but when you use it a lot, then you have to upgrade. Um, specifically, specifically, it was kind of a shower thought for me that, you know, our membership product is freemium and. I also had this thought that like, it was as simple as like we should write a blog post or have a video about the freemium business model and how it applies to membership sites.

And I started thinking, I was like, should every single membership site have a freemium version? And sometimes it's obvious like, yes, like a podcast, there's a free podcast and a premium podcast. And that's your. Membership. Uh, but sometimes it's a little more settled. Like it, your blog posts are free, but the stuff you actually pay for is your premium.

Like, so even if you don't have like a free product, almost every business is putting like free content out into the world. So I was trying to wrap my head around this and figure out how we could explain it to our customers. Patrick shared a tweet recently from Nathan Berry founder of convert kit. It was, you know, an audience is like a business hack.

Like one of the best things to have in your pocket when you're starting a new business, like just a runway to being more successful because you've created an audience and that's what people use freemium for a way to create an audience that's willing just enough to give you some personal information, willing to commit just enough to liking your stuff for some small downloadable PDF, for some access to something.

And you can later market that. So kind of the goal for us, we do open-source everything, but for freemium on our site, you need to create an account to access documentation. Yeah. That's really the only thing free people get as documentation, or you can get the plugin for free. We serve a version of the plugin for start download the generic membership site.

Writing this blog post, is it like the title could be like, you have to have a free, what did we, we had like stats on this. How many of our members had freedom when Patrick did the research? It was an overwhelming majority. Had a free membership level and were priced at a monthly payment under $30. Yeah, it was the most.

So maybe this is not news to folks like, Hey, you have to, but, oh, but, oh, the other motivation for this, remember when we're in person at booths at conferences, there's this order of conversation where they say, what do you do? It's a membership plugin for WordPress. And what does, what does that mean? Like you can charge for access to content.

And then as a. What does it cost, but it's free. And like, how do you make money? Or they say like, can you use it even if you're not charging for access? Yes. I remember some plugins got paid memberships pro, so it's kind of, we have to say, Hey, it's okay if it's free, you know, figure out like a nice way to include that message.

I think some of the app updates we're doing in the workflow is like, is this a free level? But I thought like, we should just recommend if they don't have a free level, like, Hey, you don't have free level that great one. But I think people don't realize that they could use a membership site with a free level only as a lead gen for other services, for other products, for workshops delivered in person or virtually for events coordinated, uh, for coaching, for things that, you know, they might see the membership site and say like, oh, that's like a paid thing.

People I don't want to get paid that way. My product has to be direct sold. My product has to be. Price configured based on, you know, the audience I'm serving with my coaching skills, but what could you segment off as a freemium version to get people interested and get them like a minor version experience version of your product.

As we were brainstorming videos on this morning, me and Mandy, and I said, how cool would it be if we collected a bunch of people's. Videos saying like, what's your hobby and we'll design a membership for it. We'll design. We could design a freemium membership. We could design a multi-level membership product so we could get videos of people saying, you know, I make handmade wood crafts for my family.

Every Christmas I make a new ornament for the tree, and then we could brainstorm three business models they could make. That's fine. Yeah.

I wonder, I was thinking like this really like Mr. B style, give someone a business instead of like, give him a car, give him a business. That's a little scary though. Cause we used to do that for people who sought us out and paid us and they still were like, wouldn't do anything. And you're like, you wanted a business and you're like, yeah, but I have to work.

Um, that's interesting. Do you think freemium works best when you start with. From the get-go like we, I think people over architect, their membership site design too much design for some end price level. They want some end like access level they want. And you think freemium makes the most sense at the like getting started stage or how do you tack on freedom?

Yeah, because it's like, just get something out there and get email addresses, which is, I think Nathan Barry's point too is, oh, I'm writing a book. It's going to take a year. And you're like, well, in the meantime, right, like the first chapter and put it out there and get an email address, an exchange or something like.

I didn't read that specific tweet, but I'm imagining it was, that was all, it was, it was just, it's like a business hack. You have an audience already. Sure. Yeah. So finding ways to build audience and there's like a social media version of it getting follows, but email is still just king. Um, Hmm. So I'm just like take it, but some people it's interesting.

Some people maybe they're turned off by freemium, but if you explain it, Hey, like it's not what you think it is. It's not. Given away something for free. It's like giving them content, giving them, you know, service, having hourly, you know, um, streams and videos where they can reach you. But if you want more, so you could really add free level to an existing monetized membership.

It wouldn't deplete the value of your monetized membership. Hopefully your members, you could hide it from them. You would present it in a way that it's, you know, the light version or just the steps, get your foot in the door, kind of thing. Yeah. And it's like trying to cast a wider net to find people. I don't know.

Maybe we've got to keep saying, we know for our own product, people who sign up for free versus people who sign up at the paid level automatically, this is a segue people sign up for free versus sign up for pay. They automatically what, well then who enters at the free level and the paid level. So, uh, if you have a freemium level, Mistake.

The fact that you'll lose out on paid sales, that some number of people are only willing to start at free. And some, even when we present a free level on our own product site, some number of people, I think it's 55% of people last week assessed many years ago was, would start right at a paid level. So they skip over free.

People will skip over that stat. So of all paid signups, half of them didn't have a free level first. Um, and something like 4% of free users will upgrade within three months and maybe up to 10, like over the course of some people will stay for free forever. Yeah. Which is because we don't want that. Okay.

Yeah. I think most membership sites, the free version would be more limited. The access would be more limited. If you were a course site, you couldn't find the course any other way than being a paid member of it, but there's a free version of the course. That's the first X lessons, the excerpts, you know, the first five minutes of the videos for page one of the workbook.

Yeah. That would be the challenge is to reverse it as like what business model would like having a free version hurt. Cause it almost seems like you're only going to get people's attention and potentially get customers. Like it seems like there's limited downside. You probably just have to think of. I know it's like dating sites.

Do like women are free. Men are paid kinds of things. Technically freemium, is it? Oh, I don't know. Yeah. That's um, what like pricing based on the audience demand pricing. Yeah, we met, we actually, we started a segue, but we missed it. Our next topic was about AB testing. So this free verse pay comes up in our AB testing we're doing, or, um, but, uh, I feel like we talked about this on podcasts before.

I'm bringing it up again, I'm having deja VU, but that is also an AB test. As you, for example, have a headline, let's try a different headline and see if it's better or not. And how do you know if it's better? You want to track some kind of conversion rate. And so do we want to track the paid conversion rate or the free conversion rate?

Um, because we're kind of seeing that in some of the stats from our pricing plan changes is it's, uh, it's still a little early it's, there's all kinds of factors, but it's like, oh, Paid sales have gone down, but free sales have gone up, but we're trying to figure out, well, how much do we make? You know, if you know, so many percentage of free people eventually pay, maybe that makes up the gap, you know, when the, the more free, eventually upgrade or something like that.

So I think going into the AB test, we have to pick one and that actually that's, maybe that's like we have to just pick that in general. Like as our business model, Hey, we have free stuff, but our website kind of funnels into the free or the paid plan or is it Hey, funnel into the free plan and that's on us to get them to upgrade better, which I don't think we've been historically great at converting the free people to pay it.

I think they are stuck at the free level.

Yeah, I would rather AB test. The entry at paid level, because I think that our competitors that don't have a free version. They have a benefit because I firmly believe that once a person has committed to buying something, they're also more emotionally committed to being successful with it. And we've talked about that before you and I have just talked about that fish.

There's like ego, you've made a decision. You've. Show him that you believe so much to give your credit card to it. When you buy something for free, you aren't motivated to necessarily activate it. You might've misspoke. So do you think we should focus on paid customers cause they're better and focus on AB tests that optimize for entering at the paid level?

Not entering at the free level? Yes. Whereas a business decision, we could say, Hey, we're going for market share. Like that's what's. And like the fact that our. Product is better than everyone else's paid product is kind of like our secret sauce. It's our marketing angle that, you know, is like, we're the judo that we're doing.

We're not hitting them direct on we're hitting, you know, if you compare our paid plans, they seem kind of similar or, but our free plan is so much, they don't even have one. And our free plan is as good or better than their paid plan. So it's like leaning into that and maybe they take a hit on revenue. If we have to always put, like, go for market share and longterm.

Let's maybe just a business decision. Maybe we have to make the business decision. And then the AB testing is clear. Like what actually, what we, we used to do this with customers where they, um, you know, their homepage they'd have the slider and it's like, call us or email us or download this or do this.

And I was like, which one do you want them to do? They're like, I realized like, realistically, I want them to call me. It's like, all right, but the call me front and center. And that's what you focus on, you know? And then you can have catch, you know, if they didn't take that call out, you know, if they didn't cover.

You know, at the bottom of the page or something, it's like, Hey, maybe you're not the type of person who call us. You can also contact us these ways. Yeah. So, but it's like, mark chair question is why I asked you, and this is something we don't know. What percentage of people come to our site, make a decision to join at paid or free, but have already installed our plugin on their WordPress site.

And we don't know that if we knew that, then I would, I would say market share is unrelated to how people buy on our site. Or it's not directly related. People signing up for free on our site. If I knew that 10% of them already had it installed, my gut is telling me 99% of them already have it installed, but I might be wrong.

Um, I don't know that people are, I think people are overwhelmingly discovering us through their admin of their WordPress site or installing they come to our site and they skip right the paid because they've been using our free plan without logging in for. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, we'll have to estimate that we'll get, when we do like some more, um, an app data we can track, like, I mean, long-term market shares related to the success of the businesses built on our platform because we could be the product that people use to try to start a business.

And if they keep trying and failing, then we're always just getting these entrepreneurs who have like a 60. To burn out on their business idea, but the people that are willing to pay from the get-go potentially have more of a commitment to their, it's a really good indicator that they're more serious.

You know, they are at least funded to some extent whether it's funded through an overdrawn account or not. And we got a couple minutes I want to back up. You said you wish you knew. So the 50, 50 stat doesn't feel good enough. Cause you're like some of those paid people. Warrant on our site yet, but they were probably using the product.

You'd rather have a more accurate number, but why, how does that help you make decisions? If, you know, for example, that it's 75% of people who checkout for paid levels already have, are using the product or 25% are already using the product. How would you change? Because free on our site is an email address, right?

Yeah. And we do that to get their email address cause we can convert them later. And so they get documentation now. Okay. When people are already using the platform, I get why it's different, but why does it matter? I would get, when I looked at the stats, I'm like, it's probably about the same. We have as many free users as there are like site installs on wordpress.org.

So I'm guessing like some large majority of people who use our product eventually goes to their email address. And it's 50 50, whether they give us for a free account first, or if I pay it, well, actually, I mean, we have way more free than paid, but of the paid of the people who end up paying eventually.

You know, they either jumped the Pater or cooperate. It was kind of trying to help us get our, figure out our messaging on the homepage. If you're saying like you're already using PM pro, but here's the stuff you're going to get then. But if you're saying like PM, president's new thing, I thought just where you're going.

And then the messaging is going to be different. Like they're not even using it. They don't know already. If they don't even know yet, it's like, are you stuck? That's like a big thing. Like people are reaching out to us cause they have a problem. I think if they're already using it, then we should be convincing them to pay.

To get the ad-ons they already are kind of bought in, but I think the people who haven't even had it yet, it's hard to sell them on paid. Right. Yeah. And I don't think there's that, is there a plan? Like we sh we should find a way to like, let people use it for free first, before they pay. And we should just do a better job of upgrading if it feels like the right business plan.

But we also, like a lot of times. Well, w this is we're getting into this, uh, time's up though, so we'll have to continue this conversation some other time. Good things to work on. Tough. Thanks. Thanks for listening.

Family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about empowering your kids to manage their own self-care. Things like showering schedule, physical activity, grooming (haircuts, nail trims), and keeping their room tidy. We'll also debrief the success of our first family trip in over 2 years and some tricks we used to manage anxiety and schedules.

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Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 12, season two. We have some life family topics, life topics, family topics, same thing. I wrote this topic a few weeks ago. I'm vague on what I meant with it. So we're going to peel back the layers of this onion and try to understand what I meant, but it's probably related to our kids.

They're 10 they're 13, they're getting older and the topic is empowering. Your. To care for themselves. When I think of this topic, I think it must relate to hygiene because I'm the kind of a hygiene, I'm the protein police and I'm the hygiene police in our home. And by hygiene, it's trimming your nails, getting a haircut, keeping your room kind of clean washing well and not smelling using deodorant.

Did I say using Q-tips so you don't have ear wax kind of just falling out onto your AirPods? Yeah. All of those things. It's probably rooted in this fear that people will at school will say my kids, the smelly kid, or the gross kid that the dirty kid or the kid covered in dog and cat hair. I don't know.

Hygiene is important to me to put on. Not that I'm like fancy and well put together, but I'm clean. Yeah. How does the topic of empowering kids to care for yourself? Translate as a mysterious topic? Yeah, that is a challenge. I think it's interesting. Your word choice, empowering the kids to care for themselves.

Cause it makes it seem like the kind of thing that we should like facilitate. Um, but like what you're also like for themselves or like yeah, empowering them. Like they have a toothbrush, you know, like what other sort of empowering, um, receiving reminders from us that your nails are getting too long. Your wax is in, you're hanging out right here, or it is time for that shower.

So empowerment to me means handing off the job of doing it, of communicating that it must be done to somebody else and putting them in charge that's empowerment. Yeah. I think the two of finding a way to get them to care about these things that they maybe don't care about. And sometimes other parents or books will tell us like, well, just wait, when they go through purity, they'll get interested in significant others and start to care about these things when they don't.

And you're like, I know some like 20 year olds that don't seem to care that they stank. So I don't want one of them

but that's like, yeah, how do we get that? So it's weird that trust as a lot of parenting is kind of like it's okay. Just love your kid and trust that it'll be okay. But if we care about this, we got to talk about it. Like, I guess we could care about ourselves if we're always like, yo your breast Mao's dude, or like making fun of them, um, or something, or like commenting, like, but it's so rude.

And like that one guy who, uh, there was some interview. Uh, a guy was talking, he studies like super successful people, become presidents and stuff like that. And he said like the formula is to have one parent that loves you unconditionally, no matter what. And another parent, that's like a hard ass and you can never please, and is like barely there.

And like, you know, you always want their affection and you re. And then I think the interview was like, oh, so how do you do that with your kids? He was like, oh no, we both loved them unconditionally. Like, you're not going to like, just yell at your kid. So like, if you really want them to care about that, you could yell at them a lot.

I often say that I hear my dad literally in my head when I leave a light on or I leave a door open and it that's kind of harmless thing, but it's just that he kind of yelled at me about those things. So often. So I'm sure if we yelled at them all the time, I don't know. Sometimes it seems not, like I said, it's like every day you brush your teeth by.

Yeah. I don't know. There's things that we've tried. We've tried a very hands-off approach for a short period of time. We've said I don't, I don't know, play as long as you want eat as much snacks as you want. I give up. Our children haven't put boundaries of their own in place through that. But I think something that we are doing, we did it today with our son.

We involved him in setting his own schedule cause he's, he's off Scalia's spring break this week. So we were on a trip. Our trip ended yesterday today through Monday, including Monday he's home and he can set his own schedule within boundaries. He operates well within a schedule. It's a quality of his that we've recognized.

But maybe that's a version of empowering him to take care of himself involving him in setting the schedule for his time. Yeah. Rather than say, do what you think you should do this vague, uh, no schedule schedule that's he can't live that way. He needs a schedule. So the Virgin today was, and mom set your schedule.

It was, we collaborated. That's a good answer. I often I would bring that out on Marin when I was, uh, I don't know if I like punishing her or doing something, but I would say, well, I was like, what would you do? Like if your daughter was doing this, you know, and she's like, yeah, that'd be hard. I was like, yeah, like, I kinda like, if I let you stay up really late, like, I won't be a good dad, so what am I supposed to do?

And so like involving them that way helps a lot. Um, I had another thought here. I don't come back. I'm still, I mean, they're kind of pre-puberty puberty age. Maybe that will still happen. Maybe they'll still be paper D and start to care. You see it at some things, you know, I think Marin brushes, like sometimes she does burst long enough, but like she does all those things.

Would that be unprompted and like, it's getting better. So it's good to see it getting better. Um, I find myself often thinking back to when I was a kid and maybe I think too romantically about who I was as a kid, but I think I was. A kid that was always compliant and kept clean. And I learned to cook at a young age.

I took care of myself. I kept my room really tidy and not because my parents were forcing me to, or not because the opposite that they were unclean or untidy or didn't make meals, it was like my nature. And I developed that value. Yeah. I don't know how we can. I feel like all of the above are true.

Aligned with your parents and become that adult. You are the opposite of them become that adult or you've kind of formulate your own variation of it. Yeah. Good luck. Okay. It's like our cough. Here's incredibly difficult thing. I don't have the answers. Good luck, everyone. It will be a slow process to translating what it means to empower our kids, to take care of themselves.

But I think handing over the responsibility of remembering self care to a degree. Yeah, you have to give them the chance to fail. Oh, I remember I was gonna say, there's a story where we made pizza while you were away like a frozen pizza. It came out the oven. It was crazy hot. And I cut it up and I told Marin like, watch out it's hot.

And she said, I don't care. And took a bite, like burn the roof of her mouth. And then like the next few days, She was like, oh, it really hurts every time she beats. Oh, I'm really sorry, babe. But honestly, but in my head I was like, oh, she kind of learned a lesson, like to not eat hot food, but when you got back then like the next week we had pizza, I think it was pizza or something else that was really hot.

And I was like, watch, I was really hot. And I was like, oh, she, like, she knows. She's just like, she's like, I don't care. And ADA, it didn't burn her this time. But I was like, I guess she didn't really learn that lesson. So sometimes yeah, like how many times? I don't know, but definitely saying stuff over and over.

Do you remember that used to run? They were oppositional so I can see why she didn't care. Just because you said it. Yeah, she must've learned something from burning her mouth. Um, but maybe it takes more than one time touching a hot stove. They used to run down the hill to the bus, stop. The bus, picks them up at the bottom of the hill and they were run on.

And like, every time I was with them, I'd be like, don't run, don't run walk. And it was like every day, not because they were running on a flat surface because they were running on like river rocks. Yeah. Um, I was mixing up my thing, my chair, cause I was like, how many times do I got to tell him also like with the kids, like, um, waking the dog up with their face when the sleeping and you're right in her face, like, Ugh.

And I'm like talk to a break. You and then one time I said, And I was like, I was like, I don't know, every day, every single day, at least like 10 times a day. So let me think. Like, that's like 3,650 times in the past year. My whole life I'm spending like 1% of my time telling you not to put your face in front of the dog when it's sleeping, but it, obviously it doesn't stick in.

So I don't care get bit by the dog. I kind of flipped. I did exactly that. I don't know if that was in the moment we talked last week about, you know, uh, staying calm. I, you stay calm. There's been a couple of cases, but it's been better. So it's kind of like, I don't know, maybe like the outburst work, it kind of like, it's like it stuck in their head or like, like that.

I don't know, like that helped, but I don't think it always, I used to just say like, you know, I was, I was kind of beat as a kid and I was like, I remember being beat, but I don't ever remember the lesson. There was always a lesson, which is, here's why I'm hitting you. And it's like, um, I don't remember. I was like, yeah, just so I always think of that as like, well, if you're, you know, you could think like I'm doing this to kind of get their attention, you know, a hundred percent get their attention, but they're not listening anymore, but maybe like my anger was wasn't directed as forced with them or something.

I don't know. But that did seem to help a little bit since that, or maybe I, yeah. How different the parenting style was in that moment was. Yeah. Yeah. You can only use it like every once in a while. Yeah. Don't overuse the data freaks out moment. Yeah. Yeah. It, yeah. It's hit or miss when I, when I do that.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll try it again. This week. I'll be out my kids. I'll let you report back. I don't know. Is it empowering? Your children to care for themselves is not like a model. Good behavior thing. We talked about modeling good behavior before, but I mean, we shower regular. We try to eat healthy. Yeah, on the topic of eating healthy, we should transition to our next topic, which is that we took our first family vacation, the first family vacation, where we took a plane.

Since COVID, since COVID, we've traveled by car and had kind of a modest, modest vacation, we flew to Puerto Rico or Jason's father and stepmom and extended family live. We took the kids and we did a lot of planning and advance because we know that our kids are kind of introverted slash have been affected by COVID differently than us.

Um, and that was a, it was a big change for them to take this trip, but all the pre-planning worked. It went really well. I was kind of worried. We, we, we had some. Vacations in the past, last time we went to Disney world, I was like, I'll never come here. Like the whole family hates everyone. Like why did we put ourselves through this?

And, um, there's kind of times when we were, we're doing a lot with our kids, but they just want to be home like vegging or something. And so it's. Screens and things and getting them away from them could be a challenge. And it was kind of like, man, it's like weird to like spend all this time and money and effort to get them somewhere.

And then are we going to have like a challenge, like getting them involved? But, so I was a little worried about that, but it went well. Like I said, it was, it was kind of planning, I think, like we know like our son in particular and our, our daughter to like need a schedule. So like we were on top of that every morning, this.

Message to the family slack list is what the schedule is. So they could expect things which really helps. I feel like I said, I told you also that we, um, like watch ourselves with the kids. We didn't what I just said, like freak out on the kids, right? Yeah. We were like, no, no, we caught her. There was moments where like, it was a little fight and I could see like, man on a different day, we were like, I'm not going to let her talk to me that way.

Or like, or I'm going to like, Um, I don't know. We just knew like, we're like, oh, like we were egging our kids on or kind of like annoying them or do you mean teachable moments? We didn't embrace any choosing battles and ignoring teachable moments. So we cut it off at the past. Like we didn't allow it to, oh, what was the one?

My, my son kind of had his phone out in a moment when he wasn't supposed to. And like, normally there'd be some kind of like parental tone of, like I told you not to have that here, you know, we were gonna put away and he was, oh, I'm sorry. And we're like, no, it's okay. You're like, what were you tracking?

Like, like, so we kind of like affected that like, oh, okay. Yeah. Um, like let him slide on that. And weren't as, and his phone out, we were like in the security line at the airport and. I didn't just say, please put your phone away. I said, please keep your phone in your pocket until we're sitting at our gate.

So I like got very granular as like for now, until this long, we made sure they were fed on time. Kind of like monitor. Although I gave them a lot of sugar at one time, like Jason gave our kids so much. They did at the bakery. So had they got something I can walk away? You can say no grass. Yes. Adios. No, post-race it was a vacation, but you know what?

Even then we had that thought, I don't know if you express it out loud, but some of you were just kinda like sugar again and more sugar. But even that could have been like a weird February. We handled it. And then we talked and we said, yeah, that's vacation. And then we had a conversation with like, the kids were like, well, Hey, this is like some more sugar, but it's okay to do this.

This is not like, what are we worried about? We're worried that you might get out. So like, as long as you guys are cooperative and as good as you have been, like, you can eat a donut and you'll be okay, like, okay. And we almost got like that, like tacit contract with them, which works on this vacation. I dunno.

And we, you know, we scheduled time for them to have free time, even though. No. I was really worried because our daughter is a very deep sense of fairness and equality. I was really worried that because she was waking up two, three hours later than Isaac. Every morning, he'll be up with me by seven. Yeah.

She might not get up until 8 30, 9, 9 30. He would have already had that much time playing his computer, playing on his phone. I think she just didn't notice. We talked about at a meeting recently, too, so maybe. But maybe yeah, we said, we were talking about, I was worried that she would squeeze back those hours, but even when we would get home from events to the Airbnb, our Airbnb had a simple kidney pool instead of getting showered and going to play on her iPad, he would shower right away, go play on his computer.

She would jump in the pool and play more. And then the one day she was like, oh really? I just want to like lay in bed and. And we figured it out and we were like, oh, but you'll get this time here. Like on the schedule. It's like, okay. Yeah. So I think, I think building in that time, like, I know I need to realize you asked me, should we invite friends over tonight?

And I was like, nah, like, I'm kinda like, like socialized out, even if it was just our family. And like, I haven't had like a long time. They were also on vacation. They had a pet pass away while they were traveling and some other things in their family were chaotic. So I know they're not, they didn't want to, but I, I felt like that was the thing I could offer because I know getting back from a trip for the mom is like grocery shop, crazy time, clean up, put stuff away, laundry city.

It's there's a lot that happens. Your house is chaotic. Cause whoever was watching. Your pets at home left things in disarray. Like there's so much work involved on vacation for me before, during and after that. And you were helpful with unpacking, but I just thought when we woke up at three in the morning, so I had a great nap.

I slept for two hours. Just thanks for letting me sleep. I just got up at eight o'clock last night. So I watched. Oh, cool. All that talk about Isaac's returning to the sea. I was like, I quit my ass. That was a good trip where do want to go next? Oh, okay. Um, Hm. She been Hawaii. It's on the bucket list for kids.

And I talked about that for that, but I also, I mean, we bought the river house and I kind of want to go there and use it instead of. Um, and it's apparently the home of a former nudists. So if you wanted to enter your forties and a clothing optional way, it would be, I feel like I'm due for a big change. I thought it would be like, go on a diet or something, but you had new glasses or a solid pair.

I'd kind of like, I'm going to end up with glasses. Maybe I'll just stop wearing clothes. No. Stay tuned for episode 13.

I don't know. Julie was when I was doing work on our river house with Julie. She was, um, reflecting on travel and all the places she wants to go. And I don't have a list like that. Oh, I really don't. My favorite thing is. Doing nothing. We haven't been to like a resort in Mexico for a while, so it'd be fun tracking Caribbean.

Oh, so that's what you want it to be something new? I don't know. I mean, we're all little crazy. Now. The kids are getting to the age where we could go to like Europe and look at museums and stuff. And as long as we have a skill set in some free time, um, keep them all fed. Like we could probably do stuff like.

We should have good, like, you know, some old buildings, Isaac school schedule for 20 22, 23. It's published. So we know our weeks. Yeah. Alaska was fun when I went to therapy. Cool. For the kids. Hmm. Yeah. I don't think big enough, but I'll try to, yeah, we never get comments on our podcasts, but if somebody did have a comment of where it was scrambled to that you went to that.

The only place on my list is New Zealand. Oh yeah. I want to go where they filmed Lord of the rings. Okay. Yeah. I think there's like a park or something. There's just like a thing it's probably just like one mound of a plaque. Bilbo Baggins house. Can you stay in the little Hobbit house? That'd be great. I, they must have something like that somewhere.

You're very tall. You'd be the Gandalf. I'll be the Hobbit. You'd be an Isaac's tall also. Oh, well you guys stay in the habit house. We'll go. I'm going to keep thinking about where to travel next. We should book stuff. Wow. Right? Yeah. It's good to be planning. That's a great thing. It's like to have a trip on the horizon is like a life hack to be happier.

You get something to look forward to. So we'll get all of that. Give us your ideas. Thanks. Happy travels. Thanks.

Business-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll discuss giving your team space in conversations vs. stepping in — when is the right moment and how can you avoid stunting ideas while also course correcting and stopping unapproved tangents. We also talk about A/B testing, specifically how our current "tagline" is a bit vanilla. Could we try something more inspirational?

Follow Jason on Twitter, Follow Kim on Twitter, Follow Stranger Studios on Twitter

Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim and Jason. Uh, we have episode 11, season two with some business topics. The first one it's about giving your team some space, specifically, not jumping in, into conversations that are happening. So either on zoom meetings, we work remotely or in our slack channels.

If people are talking about something, I found like I have an opinion or like, or someone asked a question and they're like, what do you think? What should we be doing? And I'm like, of course I have an opinion on this. I try now with, you know, a team of 15 to 18 and, um, you know, more managers as well. Like I'll, I don't have to jump in early.

I have to give them some space to figure it out. There's someone else on the team who also has an. And at least half the time, like someone that's like great job, someone else says it, you know? And then I get a moment of like, I can agree. Like that was a good idea. Like either behind the scenes or in the moment, like, you know, like that's a good idea, Andrew has, which is the same idea I would have suggested.

And it's almost like it's better. It comes from someone else. So it's hard to keep that in mind, but that's almost something like I write on a note for meetings and, um, lately. I think I'm proactively doing this, also trying to let conversations happen before I jump in, because I know as an owner, once I respond and comment, everyone else's comments are shaded by what I've said.

Um, but the problem is lately I've seen conversations that I hold back from, go down a path. Major correction either because it doesn't align with our goals, with our vision, with our core values, uh, with, with things I know that are happening in other teams and, and these conversations go too far. And before stepping in, they've gotten to a place where it's very much off the rails.

Think they're excited about a new feature, but like, we should totally do that. Let's do that. Let's pitch it, dot that speech has got to be awesome. And then like me and mom, but like, you know, and you get to a point and that conversation has gotten so far, like a slack channel specifically. It doesn't happen in video call as often because I wouldn't let it go that far.

I wouldn't let people falsely believe that their idea was great and they all got together and went pretty far. And I would just sit there with my eyes. Um, but it has happened in a slack conversation I come to later and it's very hard to hold on everyone actually now, and not just sound like a complete ass.

I think it's like that just like with kids is like, this is a learning opportunity. And like, in her mind, maybe don't say that, but you say it to yourself. You're like, oh, this is like, this. Isn't like a problem. This is a learning opportunity. We are in the process we talked about before about, you know, sharing the core values with the team.

And so if it is that's, the issue is, is kind of like, Hey, like our core value, you can talk from that angle or man, a lot of the time it's like, we've tried this, or we thought about this, or like we were doing this. Or we looked into that, you know, as like new people are coming on the team, they don't know the history.

And it's like, this is a great idea. And you're like, we tested that and it didn't work, you know? And so it's like weird if it gets really. I find myself, even in conversations, you're not in saying, you know, when Jason gets involved in this, we should use different language or we should talk about it in a different way.

Or this is something that I, I know that Jason will have a strong opinion about. I said, things like that. So before you go further, we should make sure that Jason has, uh, gets involved in this conversation. Uh, not throwing you under the bus, but just saying, I don't want to parrot your. And make the decisions on your behalf or share your opinion to them.

But I I've been in, especially the new feature type conversations where I know this is something Jason has been involved in, has an opinion about, and before you move forward with anything else, get him in, in this conversation. Yeah. I feel like I'm doing the same thing for you, but also others on the team, like, oh, like I know David has an opinion about this.

Let's bring him into this conversation or let's make sure we talked to him about. Or w you know, Kim had some thoughts on this let's, you know, CC and tag you. Um, but yeah, I guess, I dunno. Yeah. I dunno. Maybe it's good to, yeah. Like people it's weird. I feel this is related to something else that has gone on in the business where we're bringing out a manager's restructuring people, giving them different roles and stuff.

Um, I feel a little out of touch. And so like, conversations are going on that I kind of haven't been able to, like, I was talking to one employee and they talked about how they had a conversation with someone else and I was like, oh, that's odd. Um, and, uh, about kind of that kind of thing of like, here's a conversation that like is, I don't know, like I hate project management tool.

So I think, you know, like a lot of times you change your project management tool and it's like, great. Now you're documenting the fact that you're not getting anything done. Like it doesn't actually have to get done. Like there's like a deeper issue. And it's, so it's kind of like, if people say like, that's like the problem or whatever, oh, that's an example.

And it's just like, oh, like you said, like, I know Jason has a strong opinion about this. Right. And it's, um, how do I, yeah, have it's weird. Like, I feel like I got to have conversations with him, but it's oh. But I feel like what I was going to say is I feel like. Stopping people from having ideas, like what we were talking about, pitching someone pitched something early and we're like, we're not actually writing up the whole pitch, just ideas now.

And I'm like, it's in some ways a pitches like brainstorming and sharing ideas. And it's like, why am I being so authoritarian about like, you're not allowed to have ideas unless you talk to me first. Like I kind of wanna encourage. So that's the challenge I have is like, how do I encourage folks to like, have ideas?

Like I don't wanna, you know, they, maybe it's a good idea. A lot of times it's a good idea. You know, but still have the communication going on so that like, people aren't steered off track, um, people that like, is it really a problem? Or maybe they know more than you I'm like, I'm not so sure. Like, it really feels like it's kind of affecting productivity when people are spending too much time kind of going down a path and then it just feels bad.

Like you said, like when you say like, no, we're actually not, I know you spent like a week thinking about that, but we're not going to do it. Right. And you're like, I wish I'd talked to you on Monday and like kind of steered you in the direction of the version. Nina more acceptable. I think as we grow, that's going to be one of the biggest new things that we both refine as leaders as bosses.

And I think to this point, we've been small enough that we haven't had to write be un-involved in every small thing. Uh, I'm in a mastermind in, and a person had read a book and the gist of the book. She said don't read the book, but just the gist was be a boss. So if you are the boss, be the boss, uh, and use that as a decision-making as an, and don't sugarcoat it.

Don't tip toe around.

I think to this point, we haven't been bossy bosses, but we have been like declarative specific, strong, harsh, high standards type people, because we are kind, we are human and that's a core value of ours. Everyone is human, but I think as you grow there, that changes to a point and to see yourself as a boss.

And make a comment that say, we can't do that because X we've considered doing that in the past, but X and not feel sensitive about it and not feel sad about it and not rewrite your slack message 10 times to make it sound more kind. Um, maybe that's a female thing and maybe not something you need to hear, but for me, I use qualifiers, like just, and maybe when, I mean, no, now this, and I mean specific things, but I curtail my language with qualifiers to not sound like a boss when maybe it's okay.

It will make us more productive and more aligned in the long run because we are. Yeah, specific verdict. I think that employees, they want to know what to do and they want to be, you know, of course, corrected like that and yes, you know, know that and yeah, that's our job to tell them what to do basically.

Um, yeah, but also give them, how do we give them? Flexibility to feel like they control the space to be creative, have ideas, and when to step in constraints, help creativity. So we kind of provide the constraints and yeah. Focus on this. Hmm. You marinade on that. I'm going to introduce our next topic, which is.

Well, I mean, months ago you had this idea for a new tagline for paid memberships pro, and what's interesting. It comes out of a competitive research. Patrick did where he looked at other membership plugins, and just looking at the descriptive one liner, that what they call themselves, how they describe themselves in the fewest number of words.

He found that none of the us and our competitors relatively had the same tagline, the same core message. Similar ours is the most complete membership platform. So we consider ourselves complete someone, considered themselves customizable, which we also use that word. Someone said they're the most powerful, but relatively speaking, these are all very.

And I remember months ago you had this concept of a tagline, the membership platform that grows with you, that it could address levels of your business. As you were in the startup phase, in this kind of teenager phase, in this late stage membership site. Do you still like that tagline and how could it, what would a powerful tagline prove or change if you did an AB test?

I remember when Patrick brought that up, I was kinda like, well, we came up with that first. I was like, I was looking and I was like, oh, that's odd. I was like, I'm pretty sure, like, we've been the most complete membership plugin since like 2013. And like, they must've copied us. So like, why should I change my name?

Like, um, But cease and desist on your bullshit. Yeah. But we're actually the best. So I had a little of that. Um, so I was like, I don't think the tagline has to be different just cause it's all the same, but it was a good observation to make like, Hey, it would, because that, Hey, if everyone's angling for the same space, maybe we can, you know, kind of market ourselves in a different way to go around what everyone else is doing.

It's good and fresh. Um, and then, yeah, the idea for the tagline of the membership platform that grows with you, something like that came about when one of the hosted membership platforms like raised their fees from like 10% to 12% and everyone's like, I'm done, I'm leaving. I want to go to like, you know, something that doesn't have built in fees like that.

Um, and so we were like, oh, should we like really quick, like try to get, you know, whatever it was, Patriot and member full customers. Those those fees means that the more you grow, the more you pay, right? Yeah. So it's, it's um, for us you play pay a flat fee annually. Yeah. And there's no per member fee, so there's no impediment to your growth.

Like there's no limit. We don't make more money. If you're successful, you don't spend more money. If you're successful. If there's a 10% fee, that's great for the site that's making. A thousand dollars, it's a hundred dollars for a website for a year. That's a really good deal. But then when that membership grows to a hundred thousand dollars, they get $10,000 for basically the same, like a similar kind of service.

So people, you know, people were doing that math and then it's kind of a problem for that business. Cause then. They ha they lose their big customers and they usually give them sweetheart deals just to ground stuff. It's like a weird thing. So people are talking about that. And I was like, oh, like, we could address that.

Like we, like our plugin really is one that will grow with you because you can use it for free. You don't even have to pay, um, And, you know, there is no fee structure like that. That's going to hurt you when you grow up in, you know, it's kind of a flat fee. You pay for support and updates for things if you want it.

Um, and then like WordPress scales and people come to us and they're like, how do you scale? Do you address scaling? And it's like the same issues you have scaling any website, like scales this membership site. Um, and we try to do more with that. Um, but yeah, so that I was like, oh, that could be a tagline.

But I also think about taglines, like the best tagline. Our crazy simple, and just say what it is like there's a tendency to get flashy with it and like poetic. And it's like, no, it's a membership plugin for WordPress. Like the, um, I mean, a more spiffy specific is charger recurring payment to access your content.

Or that explains what it does. I mean, maybe. And learn about taglines and tagline foster, because there's also kind of like, just do it. Is that the tagline that doesn't say anything about sneakers. Um, but it's like about like the mission and the lifestyle, and that's why it's important. But I feel like the tagline we're talking about, which is like, I see the logo they're called paid memberships pro, and then it says, what does it do?

I think you want to be like really simple and straightforward. Um, and I've, I've seen other marketers kind of correct in this where they, it could be like a weird flowery version and he's like, you're basically, you know, whatever it is. Um, you know, you're a membership plugin for WordPress. Why don't just say that, you know, like that answers a lot of questions about what you do.

Um, but maybe there's a better way to answer. So I feel like even though I came up with the membership plug in the groceries, I was, I don't know, that's actually a better tagline, but we should AB test it. Cause maybe it kind of that message lands more. There's like a, another marketing idea of, you know, can you like, w what's the biggest, um, challenge or complaint that people would have, and just answer as soon as possible.

Like, I know you're worried about this, but you know, like you're worried, this is not going to grow with you. This is the membership plugging the gross. Um, I don't know that that's the best thing, but we could test different taglines. I guess if I, if I had to answer that, what would most people say? I think most people coming to our site have very little website building experience.

So their insecurity is whether they can even do it. Like they, they don't believe that they can launch that they can produce something worth paying for, even if they have great con. I think they believe it may be impossible. Yeah. To, because of their own skills. I think they believe it won't be as straightforward to me.

Can I do it? So like a tagline, like you can do it too, like, or like, I dunno, the emergency plan that allows you to something like focus on them. I think like knowing more about who that person is, who's reading, it helps. Cause then like, do people know what we're presses or not? Do they know what a plugin is or not?

Did they know? Like yeah. And so that kind of kicks, you know, oh, well we should really be focused on which we are, is kind of figuring out, you know, individual customers. And how do we kind of address them individually? Um, you know, different segments. Yeah. And it's related to that. I think of what you, you know, how yeah.

Is, if that's the biggest challenge is people don't think they can do it. And we talked before about like, we want to lean into that and be like, we're going to help you. We're here. It is hard, but we're here to help you. Um, so if we changed the tagline on the homepage, the homepage CTA, we would just want click-throughs to the pricing page.

To the view plans and pricing page. So would that be how we maybe test yeah, yeah. Change the tagline and then see which basically like sales is the metric you want to go for. So like people who see each tagline, does it affect sales or if there's not enough kind of data for that, um, you know, then like who clicks through to the pricing page is a good.

If the convert, when we can test the conversions from pricing page to sales, so we can kind of make an estimate. Um, yeah. How do we know which one's better? I mean, at the end of the day, that's what we want is kind of sales. So we're users sometimes, you know, so which one gets more people to install the plugin as kind of the one that we should do.

I know we're talking about AB testing, so it's cool to talk about. Yeah. I guess every AB test you run, you have to know what you're maximizing for. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing we ran into. It was like we were writing up. So we were thinking about AB testing this and a bunch of stuff and setting up like a routine for like, let's always be AP testing.

We had like a big change to our plans and pricing and we made good decisions on things, but, um, And some of that too is like, let's say B test. We already AB tested that and we found it out, but maybe it's time, maybe things have changed. Um, but yeah, we find like, we're like, Hey, we should maximize revenue, but we're like, oh, is that actually the goal maybe we should maximize for, you know, market share for years, let's trust that 10%, five to 10% of free users upgrade, then just try to get free users, um, or, you know, do we want money?

That's an interesting thing to maybe another topic, but in our tagline is. Yeah, I, yeah, that was, I was thinking about it too. It's like how, how important freemium is? Yep. It's another topic. All right. So we got to go, let's just go to the next podcast. So it's recording. We got to say goodbye next time. When we talk about the freemium and we'll be testing that next time.

All right. Cool.

Family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about a parenting hack: staying calm to diffuse reactive kids. Easier said than done! We'll also touch on the concept of "tending to the part of the garden you can touch" and how it is a good metaphor for how to get through crises in life, whether within your family, friends, community, and extending into problems throughout the world.

Follow Jason on Twitter, Follow Kim on Twitter, Follow Stranger Studios on Twitter

Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 10, season two, and we're talking about life topics. The first we need to wind to talk about our life. Uh, the first topic is as a parent, staying calm to diffuse anger and reactive behaviors. So this is something I think I wish I was better at when my daughter was two.

I'm getting better at now that she's 10. I found my self getting calmer and calmer and calmer. The more angry or reactive a child is when you talk to them about something and using calm words, using sympathetic empathetic language, it's not always easy, but it's interesting. I think as a parenting tactic to think about.

Yeah, it's so hard. And

one thing I noticed too, is sometimes the other parent can see, you know, like if our daughter, for example, is getting defensive about something she shouldn't like, why do I have to whatever do do this thing that I, or what shower it's like, you know? And we're like every day, everyone, everyone in the whole world showers about once a day, You have like 3000 times already.

Now this is like, why is it a surprise that you have to take a bath every day? Um, so she gets really defensive. Like I got to take a bath. And then if say you act defensively to that and you get engaged in this kind of like emotional conflict with the child. Like as an outsider, if I just haven't walked in, I'm like, I can see what's going on and tell like, oh, you let it get to you.

Or like you're taking it personally. And you shouldn't, but it's so easy as an outsider, or like when you see like another parent, like my brother with his kids and you're like, well, obviously he should X, Y, Z. And no, but the one I always say like in the shit, almost like when you're in the shit with your kids.

Cause that's what it is, is like, you're just like busy doing things. Yeah. So how do you cultivate that? You know, I don't know the attitude and the persona, like the, you know, the ability to. Wait and be calm and take it sometimes for me, it's like a sense of humor about it. It helps. It's like, oh, like, it's funny, like on some of it's funny that she's so like, it's like, this is crazy from the outside.

Looking in that is horrible to me to observe because I feel that you're minimizing their, how frustrated they are, how sad they are with laughter. Then I think they have something that they are justified in being upset about it's being laughed at her being upset. Yeah. So if you let that laughter get out, then it's just a different problem of you're laughing at them.

And then they're mad about that. And you're like egging them on. We re we were just on vacation. And so it was kind of really, it was a little easier. I mean, it was skipping ahead to future topics, but maybe one reason was that we were really self-conscious of like, no. You know, agitating the kids and it's like, why is it?

Like you have to walk on eggshells around your kids or whatever. They're like, I don't know. You kind of do. It's like respectful. Like they can't handle it. They're, you know, they're like, you don't have to stop playing video games. Is eternity that's forever. Um, we kind of recognize this with some of our customers not to make this business topic oriented, but, um, when, when people are deeply frustrated with something that isn't functioning the way they wanted it to, and we're like, okay, it's a simple thing.

We can help you fix it to them. It's the cornerstone of their business. The only reason they can point to for why they're not financially successful yet. And. So emotionally involved in it more than we are. And I think the same for the kids when they get reaction and get upset about something. There's another layer of feeling below what you're aware of, you know, something that happened to them one hour ago, something that they're expecting to happen to them three hours from now is involved and tied up in why they're angry or why they're reacting.

I think, I guess that helps too. If you realize, I feel like I say that a lot sometimes with the kids, when they're upset about something that's silly. And I tell myself, remember I tell you sometimes I'm like, oh, like, like they they're really upset though. Like I know it is silly, but to them it's really upsetting.

And so like, if you get on their level and like, yeah, that's sad, you lost a saved game and your video game, they're like, you could personally care less about, you know, in the grand scheme of things, isn't that bad. Maybe you can relate a little bit about like losing something. I don't know. But even so. You know, it's not a big deal.

It was like an hour of their time and all that, you know, they have tons of time and you're like, um, even at the, it feels bad, but there's other stuff that they don't really, you know, it's just like, you know, to them it's really. And so if you meet them on their level and you don't like the lesson now is, that's what I think too is in the moment they needed to be consoled, they don't need the lesson.

I think having like the weekly meeting, we do there's times where like, I'll file in the back of my mind where I'm like, Oh man. Yeah, that's really stinks. I'm sorry. You lost your save game. And in back of my mind, I'm like, oh, maybe we could talk about this at meeting, like how important are safe games or whatever.

Um, and sometimes that house meditation has helped me, like, it feels like life moves in slow motion, and then there's like, I'm a little bit detached from Jason. And so I'm like, oh, that's funny, Jason's angry. And then like, he shouldn't be angry now. Yeah. Like it really is. So it's a super power for meditation.

I noticed something Marin does is when somebody explains that they're having a feeling. So they're feeling tired, they're feeling sore, they're feeling hungry. She has to say how she also has that feeling or she has it more powerfully. Um, I've, I've started doing. To her. So she'll say, oh, I'm so tired.

She'll like, wake up, say I'm so tired. And then I'll say, oh, I'm so tired too. I've been awake for three hours. And that bothers her. So you're not, I don't think it does in her tiredness. It's something she does to other people. So now I'm doing it for also for her to like recognize, oh yeah. Her feeling isn't unique.

She's doing it to others. She's it's, it's how she reacts to other people. She's taking it fine, but it's been interesting too. That's sometimes worse. So when you're like, I'll show them, like, I think I'm doing it, like in an empathetic I'm using medic calm words. I'm not saying, well, you shouldn't be tired.

I should be tired. Yeah. It's funny. Like the subtlety of exactly how to do things really matters. So we, okay. So maybe we can analyze this situation. Do you remember? You got. Bill for roadblocks. Yes. Excuse me. So you got an email that there was $20 spent on roadblocks and you're like, I thought it was only $10.

Okay. Um, and then you sent it to me and you're like, did Marin buy roadblocks yesterday? And I was like, no, but she did like three days ago and it should have been this much, this much. So I thought the most obvious thing was that she bought Robox on roadblocks without permission. Yes. Maybe this is bad on us.

I didn't want to have to like always have my credit card when I'm buying stuff for the kids. And I think it's a learning opportunity. It's like, Hey, I trust you that you can click a button and buy something, but you have to talk to us first and give us the money and figure it out. Yep. So I was like, oh, does she like secretly buy something?

And at breakfast then I was like, Marin, like mom noticed that there was a robot under the bus. Maybe I didn't bring it up to him. I think I did though. I, but I said like, did you buy the robot? And I don't think I was, I was, I wasn't angry about it. I was like, did you go let's talk? Cause then she was like, oh, like, why would you take, I did that.

I did, of course I did it. And like, she was like really upset. I was like, I'm just trying to talk. We got to figure it out. Cause definitely someone bought Robux with our credit card yesterday, you know, like it really happened. Um, and she's like, it must be a mistake. And I'm thinking in my mind, I'm like, I don't think it was a mistake.

Maybe it was maybe it wasn't, but trying to talk her through it and. I think not accusing her, but talking to anyway, we figured out that there's like a delay of three days when the charge comes up. So it really was the purchase. She did three days ago. And that just happened to show up the day before. So it looked like it happened the day before.

And I spent like a half hour in the morning. I said, Hey, it's okay. We'll talk about that. Cause she was really upset and like crying and like hurt that we thought she had like betrayed our trust and it turns out like she didn't, that it just was. There was a delay in like how to charge mine. And when I went to the Robux and accounted for, it was like, oh, she only ever bought at the time.

She said, and she always gave us money for it. So I felt bad, but we had a really good talk then where I like apologized. And she said, you know, it just like, it hurts my feelings that you, when you don't believe me, And I think there's been other times where like, yeah, I don't believe you got like, I'm pretty smart.

Like, I guess this time though, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, the conversation. I don't know there was, but it was, I don't know, it has this like really intimate moment where she was kind of like, but it is remember, like when we, we wrote those, some meeting we wrote like, this is one thing that bothers me.

One thing I like, and the one I don't remember, I should know what was there? One thing that bothers her. Oh, is when people pointed. Float stuff that's wrong with her, like criticized or something and it was kind of related. So it's kind of, she's super sensitive to being told she's lying or doing, doing something wrong when she feels like she did something wrong, she like exits a situation and she that's a challenge we're going to have to choose.

You're like, sometimes you can't exit, like you have to address it. And like, with me, like she kinda talked to me and we would have figured it out. Not, we're not like unreasonably. But she, but she, but she kind of, I guess it was important. Like she realized like, well, I get really upset when people accuse me of something and at least she recognized a recognition for her as the first step to like, figuring out like, what do you do about it?

That you're Marin, you know, it gets upset when people accuse you of something. Yeah. For me, when she reacts like that, the stay calm when somebody's angry and reactive, I say, You seem really upset. I was asking you a question. I don't feel upset. Yeah. Can we talk about this? Yeah. So not engaging in it, not escalating it.

I find it's probably a mindset shift for me and I've just recognizing it and proactively staying calm. We're so used to like meeting people on level arguments and fights. Are we fighting now? Like, I mean, you're like, well, you're loud, I'm loud. And like, you know, such a natural, we're kind of powerful people who don't let people, you know, pick on us or bullshit us.

And so we react to our kids that way. I don't know. Yeah. Sometimes the black parents listening. Try it, try the opposite reaction then your heart and your mind are inclined to do, I guess like a key point is you're not, I don't think you're like letting them walk over you and yell at you. There's like a you're modeling, calm conversations.

That's one of the things. Kids don't learn what you tell them. They learn what you show them like they've learned by your example. So your example is being calm. They're going to learn, oh, this is how mom deals with this is in a calm way. And in the back of your head, you have to say at family meeting or whatever, your version of.

I really have to have a conversation with her about like, why she's freaking out on me. Cause I'm just asking her questions. Um, but if you do that in a moment, it just escalates and gets bad. And then the kids kind of learn like, oh, this is what we do is like, we yell at each other, you know? So it's really tough because it's tough.

It's tough. All right. Next topic. Go yell at your husband later. Next topic. Next topic. Um, next topic. Talking with my mother about the situation and crane, the war in Ukraine, and you know, like other global huge challenges that are just sad set. Also like, you know, I was re, this also happens with like COVID and it's like, what am I going to do?

Or like politics. And you're like, the people I don't like are kind of in charge of things and making decisions. I went. Um, not anymore right now, some of the places there's still some, we've got the United States federal government, but, um, there's, there's stuff that's out of your control and Ukraine. We were talking, you know, just about like the horror of what's going on over there and feeling powerless.

And it was funny, like in the moment I reminded my, I was reminded of this and I told my mom about, I was like, um, This quote by Jack Kornfield who's, um, an American, I think maybe especially, I think it's American though. Went to India, um, learned Buddhism and then came back and wrote a bunch of books about Buddhism.

So he's like a guru Buddhist guru. Um, he says tend to the part of the garden you can touch. And that's like a rephrasing of like Buddhist ideas. And you say, say like the world is blowing up Twitter. I'm doing. I'm so upset. I feel powerless. Like I can't do anything. And his advice is like, tend to the part of the garden that you can touch, you know, which I think some people read as when they hear that is like, oh, ignore the problems.

And instead like, literally go into the garden, you have a good day gardening today. And the weather like go into the garden and like do your thing, you know? Um, but in reality, I, I, cause I was trying to get the direct quote after I told my mom about it. And I saw like, when he, like, when in his blog or something, he shared.

He was in the video. He didn't say like, ignore the world problems. He said, you can help with the world problems, but you can't like change what's happening. You know, folks in Ukraine, I reached out to them and they said like, oh, like, what we really needed is to have jets shootout and Russian jets and keep our skies.

And I was like, I can't do that. Yeah. I have no influence whatsoever, but what can I do is like, what can I touch? But, yeah. So in reality, you can address these huge world problems. If you just like, instead of thinking about what the news is telling you to say, like, oh, okay. How can I, what am I personally in contact with?

What influence do I actually have? Who, what people do I actually have contact to? What can I do? And so, yeah, so I reminded my mom and then after I was, you know, it made her feel there. She was like, just that made me feel better. Like I just like thinking about it, you know? And she. You know, donating and finding things to do.

And like, it, it feels good to, you know, do you're like I'm doing what I can. Um, and it's funny, like the whole world is a bunch of people, just individuals helping. So anyway, I don't know, like we did something too in our business, so I was kind of thinking on that, meditating on that. And I was like, oh, like, what can I, I like, what do we have access to with respect to this?

I mean, I thought like, oh, we have customer. Where's your cranium. And we can kind of find them by saying, like, who checked out with a billing address in Ukraine who has a Ukrainian email address or Ukrainian web domain. And let's just email them and be like, Hey, this is weird out of the blue. You know, like we're really upset about what's going on the like, well, how can I help you personally?

You know, and it's, as a business, it's kind of like, I can give you free services. Sure. Like your website's probably not the most important thing going on right now in your life. Um, you know, but how, how it's going, I help you. Um, and it's funny, like I thought that the websites, that I'm part, but the website is, it turns out the people we've interacted with so far.

It wasn't, but it might be really important. Maybe like they're raising money through their website. Like we have a tool that helps people raise. Um, on the flip side of that, we didn't single out anyone that was a Russian website or a Russian email. Um, and I think companies have done that. Companies have like, McDonald's pulled like closed their stores in Russia.

Yeah. And stuff like that. And I think for us, it wouldn't have made sense to. Pull those weeds in the garden to S because it's an assumption that there's alignment that every Russian M uh, customer we may have is aligned with their country's decision-making, um, and they're at where they are in their country.

They aren't necessarily physically being affected by what's happening in the west. Citizens of Ukraine, regardless of agreement or disagreement with politics are being affected in their life, their exact place. So our motivation was to help, not isolate or harm or target anyone. Um, and it was good. It feels good.

And some people said like, oh, you know, I need money for this. And we're like, let's figure out how to get you money. And some people, you know, we set a budget and things. You know, some people said like I'm at the shelter, then he blankets. And I'm like, I don't know how to get you blankets. But I, like, I remember when we helped our family through hurricane Maria, it was like, I kind of realized that I was like, wow, like you watch on the news.

You know, like people are sending convoys and doing all this stuff. And you're like, there's a lot of people just doing, helping a few people, you know, if everyone just helped a few people, like it goes a long way and we all help each other. So I was like, I don't know how to get blankets to your place, but like, Are you able to share the address?

Cause I hear, you know, there's someone else I knew who was, you know, driving to the border through Poland and it's like, maybe I can get that money so that they can, you know, get, and it feels so silly and like, but it's like, what can we do? Like, that's the thing we can actually do. Yeah. But I guess it's the point.

Yeah. We're not being punitive towards, you know, our Russian customers and don't feel like we have to, right now it seems at some point it might become law. I don't think it's trickled down to like our types of businesses are supposed to shut things. Um, and then it would be a matter of law, but thinking back to black lives matter and how could we have applied a similar tend to the part of the garden you can touch.

So for us, what did that translate to that translated to informing our kids about what was happening? So not, we don't generally withhold any situation in the world from her. And try to hide them from no, but we got to go out of our way to like talk about it. And we don't have the news on, in the background along with things.

So I think we realized, like we have to start talking about things now that are 10 and 13, otherwise they figured out on their own, they couldn't. Hearing about things at school with ideas. And we're like, oh, if we don't version, if we don't indoctrinate them, someone else is going to suddenly like, at least give them our values.

Um, but also like talking in an open way and encourage them to like, be thoughtful and think, but yeah, why wouldn't a lot of black lives matter stuff was going on. I thought about that a little bit back then. And I thought, oh, like, what did we do? And we're like, we're an employer. How can we, you know, Employ people of color, like, or that's just like a version of, you know, um, discrimination, it's structural racism that's built in.

And so I engaged in working on this kind of stuff of like, trying to figure out how, how do we value diversity in our business and make, you know, we thought about that as, as we've been hiring. And, um, we know like when I actually got hired now, but we gotta do that and say, now I'm telling you that. You know, one thing that I've heard, I went out there and researched.

I was like, Hey, what do you do if you want to hire? And you can't just make a quota or say, you want to, cause you're not going to reach these people. That's kind of by definition what it, what it is is like, you're not in these communities, you're not reaching these people. So you have to go out of your way and be like, oh, well, where are, you know, why are people of color looking for jobs and applying for jobs?

Yeah. Network is a great referral source. Two yeah. Align with yeah. Um, tend to the part of the garden you can touch. Yeah. I don't want to say yeah. How does that help? Okay. Yeah. Thanks reminder. Cool. Thanks. Okay. Next time. See ya.

Business-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll discuss deceptive business tactics like perpetual sales, strike through pricing that isn't real, disabled plugin features until you "upgrade". We also talk about a new product idea for a global "Out of the Office" settings app that Kim had (and Jason isn't excited about!).

Follow Jason on Twitter, Follow Kim on Twitter, Follow Stranger Studios on Twitter

Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode nine, season two, and it's a business topic episode, and I'm stealing the show. I'm going to ask the only questions today and I hope I don't catch you off guard. No anything. So my first one is kind of a controversial thing. I'm ready to dig into this and name names and feel it because it's affects us.

It affects our business. It affects our team. So it's based on deceptive business tactics. What do users think about it? How do we as other developers of WordPress products, how do we observe these deceptive tactics? And does it even matter? Is it worth engaging in. The number one deceptive business tactic that a direct competitor of ours uses is a perpetual sale.

I was on a call with Patrick, our team member, and he said, don't you just wish one day they got their come up. And that users realize that this is a total lie. This isn't an opportunity to buy something at a discount. Their actual price is their discounted price. And I said, sure do I sure wish they would.

That would be revealed, but it hasn't been, so I guess it's two part, let's talk about what are some deceptive business tactics? What have we tried in the nature of testing deceptive tactics and what do users actually think of those things? Yeah. I'm not so sure that. Folks like MemberPress you said name names who have perpetual sales and by the way, like they're not the only website it's super common.

Yes. Are trying to be deceptive. Um, a lot of marketing is kind of psychology, behavioral modification type stuff. So when does it cross the line be high and like crossed a line? You know, just nudging the person, the buyer in a direction to really being deceptive or, you know, what we would consider a bad practice, but I always thought like, don't lie to your customer.

So that's kind of a line, right? So it feels really simple that I feel that the customer. So even if they're little lies, they subconsciously pick up on these things over time. And they just get the sense of like, they're not serious. And that is one that interests me when I see that, you know, it's, it kind of, it makes me just feel like, why are they doing that?

Or is it not really worth something or there's something wrong here. Um, but I also think folks who use those kinds of perpetual sales and I don't, maybe we didn't even describe what it is, but you'll see. It's like a banner at the top of the page saying you have three hours to save temporary. Oh, it's for four hours, three hours, 53 minutes or something.

Yeah. I, and then, yeah, it'll, their price will always show up as strike through because like people love getting a deal. And I think the philosophy behind that too. People come to your website, they might be comparing you to other options, or maybe they might get the thought to compare you to other options, some point during the checkout.

But if they feel like, oh my gosh, I have to make the decision. Now this is like FOMO, fear of missing out, encourages people to like, yeah, go ahead. Do it. You should get, you know, you got hurry up. Just kind of nudges people towards buying, which to hurry up is okay. But it is like, is it just, it's kind of lying to say this is a sale now.

I, I actually, I literally know that those folks would say, because they've said it back to me when I was like, isn't that weird? They'll say, well, it's not actually false. Like it's programmed for the sale to stop after four hours. I mean, it's tied to a cookie. That's gonna refresh every four hours also. I dunno, like they're fooling themselves a little bit.

I think some countries maybe have rules around these, but also a lot of online stuff. Countries have rules that are like very kind of this gray area. And if you really tried to adhere to every cent, you would have to, you know, have 20 engineers just to figure out. I see in this. And I think it's something we may be starting to do ourselves for our plugin.

Paid memberships. Pro is cripple where, or the idea of features that aren't enabled until some other thing is active. So whether that's a licensed key, a pro version or some other companion plugin MemberPress who owns exact metrics, is that what it's called? Has another plugin that is free and we're trusted monster insights that is free and.org.

And it has tabs of settings that are all disabled and grayed out and not able to be used until you you've added an upgraded to a professional version of the plugin. And we do this subtly in our plug and we have. Links that say to, um, expand on expiration date options, try the set expiration dates out on with a link to that add on.

So we're doing it kind of subtly. I think we've thought about ways to do it more overtly. Do you feel that that's a deceptive business tactic, like including things that don't actually work, but they're turned off now? I think it it's, it's an interesting way to show them how to use. You know, like, Hey, we have extra stuff that you have to pay for.

I think that's okay. From a user's perspective, how do they feel nickel and dime? Do they, do they feel like they're using a lesser version and incomplete? And so, yeah, I don't think it's that part of things is deceptive of like showing features that they may not have yet and they have to pay for, but I do, I do think it's a bad experience.

Sometimes with another product, there was a form plugin, there was free templates and paid templates and I used a free time. To build something. And then I realized I had to pay for something else, another feature. So I paid an upgraded and then the free template, like disappear. Like I couldn't use the free template with the paid version.

And I was like, oh, and I'm sure they would want to do this. This is development. They would want, you know, all the free templates to also be included in the premium. But I was like, I had to switch to like a premium template and like rebuild something I did. And I was like, that's silly. Like, and it's because they're trying so hard to like do those things, but I get it.

It's hard. Um, Yeah, I guess always think is being honest with the customer. You can have core base values. Um, I, I realized that we're not timing as well as we usually do. We don't have the timer ready and we try to stay on topic. I was like, do I need to wrap it up or not? Uh, well, behind the scenes, um, another deceptive tactic is like an over promise, which.

We don't do, but it's, um, in subscription products, especially there's this promise of make money when you sleep and become an overnight millionaire and the ease that some products yeah. Explain how profitable you can be from starting from nothing by using their product. And you're selling this promise that most people will not get.

Yeah. I'm almost turning around on that one too. Okay. This is kind of like superlative language. Like we're the best membership plugin. Like we were doing some copy and I was like, yeah, like I, like, I honestly think we're in the best. Like we should actually say that. That's like, like I'm being honest. Um, and I don't like being a little bit okay.

With some of that. Now that's your purlative language. If it's just flowery and doesn't mean anything is going to be an effective anyway. When you really are like, yeah, we're actually way better than these other plugins at doing X. Just you should, we should lean into it and say it. Um, it's not an over promise.

It'll be a millionaire tomorrow. Yeah. It's an over promise, right? Or like it's easy or, yeah, we I've struggled with, you know, some of the users of our products are like, wantrepreneurs like they, they want a business. Actually do the hard work or like they're like reading about business and trying, and kind of like cost playing, being a business owner, like setting up a website and putting a price on it.

Um, and it's like, I always I'm like, that's not like our real customer. We want people who are serious or really have potential or are doing things. And, and so we try it. I think that lines up with them sometimes, you know, it's like change your life in a big way. I think. Maybe like the fear of spreading that net and catching all those entrepreneurs who weren't going to be serious and we might get their money.

And then we feel like, oh, we're getting their money, but it's not really helping them. Cause like, I dunno, I think that's just going to be part of it. Cause I think we're also missing people who really are excited or they want to start a business because they want to change their life. So that same, it's weird.

It's kind of like how like Gary Vaynerchuks kind of message. It's very. Like often over the top and people will call them out to like, cause he's publishing every day. So every day it's like, you know, if your ass and do something and you could do it and people kind of get worn out by it. Um, but cause I've met Gary in person a while back, like I'm like, no, he really believes that stuff.

Like he's not, he's honest. And he really wants people to feel. You know, stuff, they buy garage sales, it's a more money to like start themselves on a path to financial independence and related sounds like it's just like, like a stick and a story to wrap people in and get them to buy his books. But I think he really believes it.

And so, I don't know. Yeah. Like there's plenty of how there's a way to be earnest about, say the same thing, but it's like your intention, an unpublished blog post in setting in draft. Starting a membership site is hard or this is hard, or this is, we had some technical difficulty, but we're recording again.

Um, we were talking about deceptive business practices in general, or just using some over the top language and how it feels a little icky. Uh, I was talking about how we have this draft blog post that says this is not easy. This is hard and trying to be upfront with it. So it's interesting to hear that you have.

Found a way to be encouraging and motivational, to cast a wider net, to catch people that are enthusiastic. And I don't think we need to say it's easy. It's there's zero work involved. There's probably a version that's a little bit, uh, somewhere in between the two, I guess I would say. Yeah. Yeah. I think users want to be motivated and they want to have a cheerleader.

They want you to be their cheerleader. They want you to believe in that. So the more harsh you are with your language, the more straightforward you are with your language, the less of a cheerleader and enthusiastic. Yeah. And I feel like the general tone we're trying to take now is not, this is really hard, so it doesn't seem like you're cut out for it, give up and stop wasting my time.

It goes through my headset. Okay. Yeah. That goes through my mind a lot. Yeah. But I've been trying instead to say, Hey, this is really hard, but we can. You know, like it's gonna take some effort, uh, read these things, watch this video, do this thing, wait for us, you know, we'll get back to you in a day setting expectations, but like taking the tone of, you know, we're here to help.

Um, which also means like we're here to spend a lot of time helping you. So we need to figure out how to like streamline all of our work and get enough people to actually be able to spend that time. But that feels like the path we want to take. I'm excited for it. Yeah, next topic. Sure. I had this idea because we just took a trip and I realized the number of places that you have to update a vacation message and update that year away.

So now there's a lot of parties, certain party services that we all use and Zapier that does automation, would it be cool if there was a central way to set a autoresponder vacation message and out of the office? That all of your platforms would know about. So it would respond on your Facebook messages to your page.

It would respond to your Twitter, DM. It would respond to your email with a vacation reminder, it would update your slack status. It would update your discord status, all the services you use, it would block your calendar and your Calendly, and it would turn itself off and on, on the schedule that you set, right.

Does that exist? How could that product be built? Is that cool, man, we could have done research. It feels like those things exist, but I still want to talk through it. Huh? I don't have this problem because I don't update. I don't answer my email. I don't, if vacation responders have auto replies, um, people don't, I'm never away for more than a week and people don't usually expect an answer from me with.

Except the people who know I'm on vacation. So yeah, I'm not the target market. It's hard, but I can think about this. It's, it's neat to think. Hey, one place you turn on and it automatically updates all this places. It's also, it's usually, yeah, it, I don't know if all these apps have APIs for setting them, so it might be pretty difficult to, you know, push it out, turn it on and turn it off.

Like, is there a Gmail API end point? I think that's the secret sauce. Like if it, if. Nobody would use this. Yeah. W so first we have to validate whether there's an API for Gmail to set a vacation notice. I guess it's not. Yeah. Google apps. I guess what I was thinking is you, and you could find a way to get around that you kind of program it in a box to click the buttons, but it has to know your Gmail password.

Then, then it's like, I have to trust a single my Gmail password, just to update my vacation message and everything else. It's kind of like a lot of control you're giving this company and I think. I wouldn't want to start this business. Cause it sounds like it would be a lot of effort to stay in like Gmail updates, certification message.

And now like your system breaks and you've got to like scramble to fix it. It's like the gateway problem we have, but like times however many servers, like, like they get the gateway is built to facilitate payments and subscriptions and they update that and we integrate and then we have to update it.

You know what I mean? Like it's meant to be used and we still have to spend a lot of time keeping it up. So if there's like an API that's like Dell, like we don't actually have an API for updating vacation messages and we're people are hacking it to do it. And then that breaks, like, you know, the developers, you know, someone in a room at Calendly is like, what if they're using the, you know, single vacation message app that hacks its way in, and this is going to break and they're like, nah, I don't care.

Like this calendar can post. Is that B R can post two years of Google calendar. Okay. So Zapier could at least create the calendar out of office and Calendly respects that. So that is possible. Yeah.

It would be like a Zapier app linked to assess if someone's. Wait Calendly. You can set your would say that again. Kelly can set you up. It looks at your Google calendar and only makes availability based on block you off things. Not at the time. So if it blocked off your Google calendar, Calendly blocked as well on vacation, maybe not slack status.

Yeah. It was like a lot of work though. Huh? It would be cool. I, it would be a kind of killer feature for a digital virtual assistant. So there's different versions of these. Google again, is working on stuff like this, where they did a demo a while ago. I don't know if it works like on my phone. If I say the magic words, that'll make my phone stop.

And then say like, book me, you know, dinner at Juliana's at 6:00 PM. Like it'll try to call them and book it and do all that stuff. So that kind of virtual assistant, it would be pretty cool to say, Hey, set my reminder away and do it everywhere. Um, It will happen one day, but yeah, it feels like it is. It's funny, like all their recognition of like voice recognition and figuring out what to do is kind of really difficult, but it kind of a solved problem, but it's not, it seems to my head, at least not as hard as, you know, integrating with potentially a hundred different API APIs that aren't really, you know, happy that you're hacking away to change the reminders or different things on source, but maybe.

All right. Next episode, I'm going, I've done a little bit of research and then I will give you a status update on this topic, but yeah. Yeah, maybe there's maybe there's something else. Cool. Alright. Until next time. Thank you. All right, bye.