Ep. #678 - Why Should Anyone Choose You?

Matt DeCoursey 0:00
And we’re back. Back for another episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey. Here with Matt Watson. Hi, Matt.

Matt Watson 0:06
Hey, what’s going on, man?

Matt DeCoursey 0:08
Oh, I’m just trying to figure out. I mean, honestly, why? Why would I choose you?

Matt Watson 0:14
Yeah. Why did you choose me as a podcast host?

Matt DeCoursey 0:18
I didn’t, did I? Or did I just kind of? Well, I mean, there was a lot of different reasons. And maybe that’s what we’ll talk about. But we’re here. And we have arrived at episode 31 of our 52 part series about how to start a tech company. And this is a good subject to talk about. Now, before we do that, now we’re going to actually move in true startup fashion, we’re going to have a little mid game pivot. And this, we will be publishing these episodes on Fridays rather than Wednesdays, okay? Yeah, just cuz, just because there are reasons which I don’t need to get into. Now, one good reason to do anything is that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is brought to you by FullScale.io, helping you build a software team quickly and affordably. And you know, map a lot of people, a lot of companies and startups and tech companies have chosen us as their tech services provider at Full Scale. And there’s a lot of reasons for that, some of which we’ll talk about in the show. But, you know, we’ve talked so much about why you do this, why you do that how to go to market, blah, blah, blah, audibly. I know, I know, you are cheap and easy. I mean, right.

Matt Watson 1:34
Hiring software developers is a nightmare.

Matt DeCoursey 1:37
Well, it can’t be I thought, we thought we got off track there. You are still cheap and easy, though. Yeah, I know. I know. I’ve known you for years. So but now with that? Why do people choose to do business with other people and you know, you can have a great go to market strategy you can have, you can have good messaging and branding. But in the end, there are some things that can get you off track in a hurry that make people not choose you. And there are a lot of reasons that people do so. I mean, why don’t you choose to do business with people?

Matt Watson 2:10
Well, in the context of a startup, you know, it’s even different, right? Because you’re, you’re taking the risk of doing business with some new company you’ve never heard of, right. And so, as the old saying goes, right, you don’t get fired for buying Cisco or IBM or whatever. But why should I buy something from you and take a risk when I could buy the same thing from name large market leader and the segment? Right, like, that’s the challenge?

Matt DeCoursey 2:39
Yeah, for me, there’s a couple of things that come in, you know, well, and I’m not gonna lie, I mean, some of it, if it’s an interpersonal thing, like, Do I like you? I feel like I will like doing business with you. Sure. You know, because I, you, yeah, if you sit, if you’re around me enough, you’ll hear me say that life’s too short to do business with and around people that you don’t like. And there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot to be said about that. Other things like, what’s your expertise, I have no problem with giving somewhat unproven things a shot, my leash for my leash might be a little shorter in those cases, and then a value. But you know, there’s a lot of different reasons that people choose to do things and choose not to do things. And one of the things we were mentioning with Full Scale, and a lot of people have chosen to do business with us. While some of that had to do with the first talking point, which is like, people give consideration to like, how long have you been doing something or what’s your level of success? So with Full Scale, you and I used a model of our own entrepreneurship and created something that we like to say is by founders for founders, we started by solving the problems that we felt that other people like we, we were, we were our first clients. So we said let’s solve the problems that that need to make sense for us. And like one of them was, you know, a lot of our competitors wanted you to only talk to like a project manager and stuff like that. And we said, there’s no value there. Let’s simplify this and give people a direct line of sight to their team. And we’ll give them some advice about where we’ve won where we’ve lost and what they do with it’s up to them. But that was a direct, you know, effective like the question of like, how long have you been building or leading or doing something successfully? It’s like, yeah, they’ve been around forever so like, No, you don’t get fired for hiring idea.

Matt Watson 4:42
Yeah, I mean, for sure you touch on like being credible and trustworthy. Been doing this for a while, but also hitting exactly at the talking points of the of the problems, you know, they have right like, We know you’ve done offshore development before we know you’ve had this problem, this problem and this problem, and we aim to solve those problems, right? Immediately getting to the pain points that they have and how we are different and how we solve them, along with being credible, and all those other things, immediately helps you out.

Matt DeCoursey 5:10
So one of the things that people that aren’t highly seasoned at selling stuff often get backwards on is objections. So, you know, whenever you’re trying to sell something, or get somebody to do business with you, they will often have simple rebuttal questions. And these are known as objections, like they’re objecting to saying yes, for different reasons, they might need clarification about what the service is, or the offering or the pricing or some of it. And people that aren’t experienced with sales often confused this. They’re like, Oh, my gosh, this person, just, they’re never gonna buy they have so many questions. That’s actually a good thing. It’s when people don’t have any questions is almost usually when they don’t buy. Yeah, that’s, that’s my experience.

Matt Watson 6:02
Yeah. If I’m totally uninterested, I want him to call right now. You’re not gonna ask any questions, I’m just done.

Matt DeCoursey 6:09
And for those of you listening, if you ever hear Watson just completely dropped off of any of our past shows, that’s why he just say, I don’t like this topic. I’m out of here. You’ve never done that, actually. But no. But with objections, you’ll find that the more people you talk to you, they become like an echo that I’m always talking about, like, and when you hear that echo, you can structure your messaging around kinda like Matt was alluding to a few minutes ago, hey, look, here’s why. Okay, at Full Scale, I know exactly what the problems are that people are going to have. And it’s oftentimes related to communication, reliability, or quality. So address those right away. And no one even needs to ask, you know, like, if you know that, that it’s, it’s overwhelmingly going to be a question or something that comes up, then begin to shape your messaging around why you are providing benefit. And I think really, when it comes to Why are you going to choose someone? What are the benefits that I get of doing business with you, not just the features of what you’re selling? How does it benefit me?

Matt Watson 7:14
Well, and when it’s an early stage company like this, kind of the topic we’re talking about, usually it’s they’re solving a industry problem that nobody else has solved, or they’re solving in a different way or new way. Or they’ve created a whole new segment of things, right? Like, oh, I didn’t know I needed this thing called slack. But they’ve created this thing. That’s a whole new segment, and everybody is buying products like this. And maybe I need to buy a product like this because you’re in a new segment. And that’s way easier, by the way than being like I do exactly what slack does. But just slightly better. Like, that’s way more difficult. Do you want to be the market leader in that situation?

Matt DeCoursey 7:54
Well, we’ll continue talking about slack because we provide a Slack account to over 200 people who work at Full Scale. Yeah, now, theoretically, I could use Google Chat. Yep. Because I give them a Gmail too. But it’s not the same, it doesn’t do what I needed to do and how I want to do it. And like, I mean, in that email, I can send a message from one person to another, but we use Slack for I use Slack for a hell of a lot of stuff. I mean, it’s a, it’s a connectivity hub, and a notification hub that allows me to not have, so what’s the benefit of it, I can centralized communication and integrate different things to create communication within slack that either makes me not have to ask someone, did you do this? Or is it done, or something along those lines, and that’s the benefit for me is I don’t have to engage in a shitload of redundant conversations. That’s why someone does business with you.

Matt Watson 8:53
Yeah, because they can benefit and part of it though is if you’re the vendor on the other side, you’re you’re creating a product for a new industry market and space. And you’re going to companies that you know, have that problem and you have a solution for it and some of them may not even realize they have the problem yet, but you’ve you’ve solved the problem that you know that people have and you don’t even necessarily have any competition or your competition isn’t direct its indirect, which is a great place to be and as a startup that’s where you want to be you want to be creating something new not just necessarily competing with you know other competitors and doing exactly the same thing they are that that is way more difficult.

Matt DeCoursey 9:32
So some of this also comes down to some basic buyer psychology, and you know you mentioned so one of the one of the reasons that people buy stuff, a really popular one is safety. So safety is also like peace of mind. So like you mentioned in that and that yeah fear and risk or mitigating that right so like we both have kids we before I bought a new car we the question Windows, is it safe? Is it safe, right? And those are things that can come to come to pass. Now, if you have a startup, or you’re a service company or any of that, like, that’s the thing like, do I get peace of mind with what you’re going to provide it because the thing is, is you can be cheaper, but if it’s a pain in the butt to use your anything, and they’re not going to stick around there, you can’t really without peace of mind, nothing else has much flavor. It’s just that simple. So when people are going to choose you, like we mentioned, Full Scale helps you build a software development team quickly and affordably. Like those are things like you met, you said it, you’ve got my attention. I’m into that. Because I’m busy doing other stuff. So can I do it quickly? And does it make sense within my price structure? If the answers to those are yes, you have a clear path to doing business with someone because the last thing I want as a founder or an entrepreneur, is to feel like I’m going to spend all of my time messing around, or being distracted by your shitty service model.

Matt Watson 11:04
Well, and, and I think part of what you’re describing just boils down to being easy to do business with, right. I mean, what and what’s great as an early, reliable, reliable, and as an early startup, a lot of times, you’ve got lots of inefficiencies, you’ve got lots of problems, but you’re in business, and you’ve got customers, right. But you may internally have lots of inefficiencies in your process and procedures. But your customers don’t need to know that either. Right? Like, you can make it easy for your customers to do business with you, even if it’s a nightmare for you internally, until you grow to a point that you can improve those internal processes. But the key is making it easy for your customer, to sign up for your product and buy it and even at Full Scale, that’s something that we we work at on a weekly basis is making it easier for our customers to find the resources we have available and tell them we have new resources and improve all that now we can, we can be in business without those things. But we want to try and be easier and easier to work with. And anytime you’re selling a product to somebody, the last thing you want to do is burden them, as you said, with a lot of things. So the more you can do and say look, we’re going to help you through this, we’re going to train we’re going to consult we’re going to help you this we’re going to help set it up, we’re gonna hold your hand, all those things help a lot. And that also, I think, reduces some of their, you know, fear of doing business with an early stage company, if you’re telling them that, that you’re going to hold them hand and give them great customer service. Because I can tell you right now one of the biggest differentiators you can have with your competitors is your customer service.

Matt DeCoursey 12:30
Yeah, and that’s and that’s, that’s a subcategory of reliability. Because here’s the thing, as well as like, if you are really reliable, then why you might not even need customer service, like set it and forget it. That is that’s the goal on so many, you mentioned that you like software platforms that do boring stuff.

Matt Watson 12:52
Yeah, they need to be reliable, they need to work

Matt DeCoursey 12:55
they’re like, because if they’re not if they aren’t like so I you know, I used to own a high volume event ticket brokerage. And with that, we had a sophisticated point of sale and a bunch of different stuff that was involved with aggregating a whole bunch of workflow automation. But I’ll tell you right now, if any bit of you began to believe that it wasn’t reliable, you’re like your mental state crumbled. Because Because those things in your business not being reliable. They create a headache, you have to go and clean up after him. And if you don’t get that mentality out of your head, you don’t find the value in it. So it really when if you are selling a business to business product, that being able to why are people going to do business with you, they also they want to know that they’re going to save time, they’re going to save money, they’re going to experience some simplicity, when doing that as well. Because if it’s as difficult to do, the other task is it has to do the one you’re trying to create efficiency around. There’s no point.

Matt Watson 13:58
Right? Well, and in speed is such a critical piece of this. We talked about customer service and example. This is from Stack fi. Inevitably, a lot of people would download our product and try it and they’d run in to something they’d have questions right? It’s pretty normal, like I installed it, but how do I do this or whatever. Our SLA, our internal SLA goal was to respond to any question within one hour. And 99% of the time we did that most of our competitors would take one to two business days. So if they’re trying our you know our product or a competitor’s product and they get stuck, they might download our product instead and try ours because they got stuck on the other one. We responded quickly got them up and running, they saw value in it and they buy so much so much of it is speed and when people will have questions or problems you want to get you want to help them as fast as possible because ultimately they may decide to just use a different vendor or ultimately just get distracted and go work on something else.

Matt DeCoursey 14:56
You know, I’ve found over the years that There are a ton of situations where, okay, look, the idea that we all do a perfect job. Every time all the time is silly, right? We’re human. Now, when some when someone’s upset or not happy, or whatever that exponentially amplifies, the longer you take to just have simple communication with them, like you mentioned, like, getting back to someone quickly is just does wonders and but that’s back to that whole, that’s back to peace of mind.

Matt Watson 15:36
Well, I can honestly say some of the customers we’ve had problems with, that we fix their issues extremely quickly, actually become some of our best customers because they, they have so much more faith and trust in us, versus the ones we never hear from, like they just disappear one day, but the ones that we’ve kind of like been through the battle with together and solve their problems and build that, you know, relationship with actually strengthen that strengthens it, which sounds weird, because like that problems, but actually, it kind of makes them become an even better customer.

Matt DeCoursey 16:07
Right. Right. And that those are people that appreciate the peace of mind. So, okay, um, I mean, some of this is also like we mentioned convenience, depending on what it is that you’re offering. You know, now, you know, I’m kind of, I’m a big fan of quality onboarding. If it’s, if it’s difficult to do, just to get set up to do business with you, people aren’t going to do it. Like, I mean, like Twitter is, is infamous for having the world’s fastest and easy onboarding. Like, it’s literally like, click boom, you know, and then you look at like Amazon, which has, over the years evolved into, like, I just push here. And it’s convenient. How much stuff have you bought on Amazon that you wouldn’t have bought somewhere else, if you clicked it, and then they’re like, now you need to set up an account. And then you have to, like, type in a bunch of shit. And then they’re like, verify your email, you know, and you go through, like, 94 steps on the way to like bot should be quick.

Matt Watson 17:16
Honestly, it’s, it’s sort of the opposite, right? It’s the reason I don’t buy stuff other places. I already have an Amazon account. So within like two clicks, I can buy virtually almost anything. Or if I go to walmart.com, or target.com, or whatever the hell it is, I gotta sign up for an account, I gotta do this, I do that or whatever. And all this crap, right? While Amazon just makes it so easy to just keep buying more and more and more and more.

Matt DeCoursey 17:38
That’s convenience. Yeah, because it’s faster, it’s easy to buy. And that and that makes people buy

Matt Watson 17:43
and I don’t even compare prices, I just go to Amazon and buy.

Matt DeCoursey 17:47
So one of the things too is, in some cases, you have a premium service offering. So Full Scale is like that. So Full Scale. And we were just talking about this before we started recording, we hire one out of 40 applicants, which means you’re paying us to go through 39 people that aren’t a good fit for you to help you find the one that is and go ahead.

Matt Watson 18:15
I was gonna say so we joked earlier about how hard it is to hire software developers. And so we were the crazy people that decided that was like our entire company.

Matt DeCoursey 18:26
But here’s the thing now it is it was a problem we’re solving. Yeah, absolutely. We and for those of you that are listening, you know, Matt, and I own Full Scale. We’re 5050 partners there. But that did not that business did not start like that. And we didn’t it didn’t take long for us to quickly realize that there was a big problem that needed to be solved amongst people like ourselves that were like you just want good. You want good, quality, reliable people to be on your team to build your software and hopefully stay in that seat for a while. Yeah, so that’s a problem. We went, we went through solving, and we knew that if we wanted the best people that we were going to have to charge more because they were going to want to get paid more and rightfully so. But how do we go about determining who’s any good? And so like, people will sometimes ask me that. They literally say, Well, you’re a little bit more expensive than the than the competitor. Tell me why? Well, that’s why because we are literally hiring two and a half percent of people that apply like could we hire more than that? Probably, but we don’t because our model is a premium as a premium service offering and there are a lot of people that that’s what they want. They I want the bat give me the best. And I will tell you that the clients that that want the best and are ready to go for it and they’re the best clients we have. Because they appreciate the quality. They help push the quality and then the service providers we have Want to be in that environment? So it works out really well. It’s a win for them, it’s a win for us. It’s a win for the, you know, client and our employees. So that’s, I mean, that’s a great thing. And if you have a print, so bottom line, if you have a premium service offering, just admit it, say why, like, don’t be afraid to say, Hey, everybody, Hey, out, I literally say exactly this amount, I say, Look, we won’t be the cheapest, but we’re going to be the best, you know, and that’s, and that’s if you have to iterate through that. So when I owned the ticket business, some occasionally, someone would buy like, center row three Taylor Swift, like four days before the show. And they would be expensive tickets, because they were a premium. And then people would get it. And they’d be like, what is the face value on the so much lower? What am I paying for here? You’re paying for me to get up and buy that for you four months ago, on the day that you forgot? Right? And I got it. And I would tell people that and they’d be like, You know what, you’re right, thanks. Cuz, because that’s the thing. So sometimes in that case, like that was a premium service that we offered. For that very reason, it was also convenient. And, you know, here’s the thing is on you, that isn’t like an A, get the, I’m pretty sure that nowhere in the Constitution are American citizens guaranteed to have front row center tickets available at face value, the day or two days before our show, you know, so like, I mean, that’s just a simple thing. So if you want if you want quality, and you have quality, I don’t think you should cheap in it. Like, you know, like, I’m not a big fan of just discounting in general, like set a fair price that’s good for you, it’s good for the client, and they they take out or they don’t

Matt Watson 21:50
well, and how much money you should charge for your product and your pricing model. And all that is probably its own episode. But the key is, it could be more about the value you provide, right? And not necessarily the cost that the cost that you have to provide it, right? You know, they, it could be like, hey, you know, you could eliminate five employees with our solution, even though it cost us $1, to provide you the solution, it’s super valuable to you, because you’re gonna reduce your labor by x or whatever, right? So it’s sometimes it’s like, what you’re charging to have a super high value, based on the value it provides. That’s the key.

Matt DeCoursey 22:27
So let’s talk about trust for a minute. Cuz I think like, trust is an interesting thing. And it’s quite possibly what we should have started the episode talking about, because, and we kind of did without using the word Trust, we talked about reliability, we talked about being established or having expertise, or maybe a premium quality about something. But if you can’t build trust, or appear to be trustable, or reliable in that regard, it’s game over. So like, so what I mean, would you ever do business with someone you didn’t trust? Because I wouldn’t

Matt Watson 23:06
know. And it starts with one thing you always joke about, right? If somebody gives you here, their business card, and they’ve got like a Gmail account, and they don’t have like, their own website, and domain and all that, right? And so some of it’s all perception, right? Like, you’ve got to look like a real company that is trustworthy. Even though you may just be like you and a couple buddies that have this little startup, it’s so much about your reputation, and you look like you have your shit together. And it’s a professional business or not, right? And part of that all comes back to the trust.

Matt DeCoursey 23:38
And you’re talking, you’re talking about when I say you need to look like you’re in the business of whatever it is that you’re saying that you do. Right, you know, and that’s, I mean, I run into that, like, it’s like, it’s funny, I’ve occasionally like, just you run into like a human and you’re like, Well, what’s your, well, I don’t have a website, I’ve got a Facebook page. I’m like, Dude, it’s 2021. Man, like, that shouldn’t be it’s costing you business, if you don’t have that stuff, but yeah, you gotta you gotta in and that’s, that is that first impression? And like, if you can’t present yourself well to clients or prospects from the job, then why would you expect that they’re going to want to do business with you?

Matt Watson 24:19
Well, there’s so there’s other there’s other things to talk about in regards to this too. And in some cases, it’s the reason why people won’t do business with you. And especially if you’re a young startup and you expect to go sell to enterprise type accounts, they may expect you to have different kinds of credentials or certifications, and things like that, that you may not have, for example, are you socked to certified? Which is like this giant mess to go through from an IT perspective and you’re hosting? Or are you GDPR certified like all these different kinds of crap, which GDPR is for data privacy? All of that kind of crap, can keep people from doing business with you. And in a lot of it comes back to the trust, like big enterprises are not going to do business with you unless you have gotten through these hurdles. And those hurdles, by the way, are huge nightmares. And some of them you should thank our governments for that just makes it harder to do business.

Matt DeCoursey 25:18
And the thing is, is you’re not going to do much to change those standards. No. So don’t spend a bunch of time bitching about it, just adhere to them. And know that those are the obstacles. I mean, really, in the end, your goal, if you want to sell something is to get as get, you need to eliminate, get around, do whatever all the obstacles on the in between you and the cash register. Now, if you are self creating those obstacles, and you have the ability to move them or remove them, do it, do it. That’s back to that, like, thanks. So there’s a few things related to trust the and I think that this is a key thing. So like, you know, and I’m kind of just reading these that as you know, suggested things, but say what you’re going to do, and then do what you say. And you know, like that’s the thing is, it’s really easy to depreciate trust. Now, if you lose someone’s trust, it is 10 times harder to get it back than will probably 100 times if not more harder to get it back than it was to just lose it in the first place. I see a lot of people mess up and basic trust relationships by doing things like being late, saying, Oh, sure, I’ll reply to you this afternoon. And then it comes three days later. And like these people notice you people notice you

Matt Watson 26:39
passed on a vendor for Full Scale because that right? They said they go well, we’ll get back to you on Monday. And like a week later, you’re like, Yeah, nobody ever replied, I’m moving on.

Matt DeCoursey 26:49
Well, in that particular case, I had also when I did like a kind of an initial client interview, I mentioned that we had had problems with prior service providers, when it came to communication agenda or reliability. So, so telling me that, well, it was it was a Friday, and then we would have what we needed on Monday, a full Friday later, still didn’t have what I want. And that kind of brings me to the next thing when it comes to trust, like Communicate, communicate, communicate, so like frequent, honest communication. So now it’s it’s funny, because I’ve had this discussion about Full Scale with other people at Full Scale and around and some people like I don’t like sales, I told some I was just telling our staff, it’s like, I don’t even feel like I’m in sales at Full Scale, even though I technically am. Because all I do is show up to a meeting and I say this is what we can do. This is how we’re going to do it, we will do it. And this is how we’ll support that. And if and you know, some of that is like if I don’t think we can, I will just tell you, and you need to not bullshit people because the the clients and the accounts and the relationships that you don’t want, are the ones that you’re not suited to serve and perform the best whatever for Yeah, right. Like, learn how to say no, learn how to say next, learn how to move on, there is someone out there that does that. But you can see, here’s the thing is if you tell people that you will deliver and you can’t, they’re not going to stick around. So you’re wasting their time and your time that’s not going to turn into anything meaningful. And like, you know, like, you can, like I said, you can you want valuable long term relationships, and not delivering or not communicating? Or, I don’t know, like you can sell without selling out. It’s, I do it every day. So like, what are your core principles? Where does your customer loyalty come from and know what people want? Like, if you’re providing the services or trying to sell something you’re in the business of proving that you can do it, not the other way around? Yep. So yeah, what’s something What’s something that that you’ve run into in the past where you’ve just like someone like a situation or something where someone just implodes that trust factor, like immediately?

Matt Watson 29:22
I think a lot of time it is the it’s communication and follow up, right? You ask people to do things, and they just don’t do them, or they have excuses or just goes on and on and you just kind of lose faith in them. You’re like, I just can’t trust them to deliver what I need them to do. Not sure this is somebody I want to partner with. You know, I am part of it.

Matt DeCoursey 29:44
I agree with that. And I feel exactly the same and then if I feel like someone’s bullshitting me or wasting my time, I’m done. I’m done. Like I hate like, I think that maybe I’m just turning into a cranky old man. But while I’m doing that anyway, yeah, but for me, like my biggest pet peeve anymore is when I feel like people are wasting my time. You know, like, I mean, and that’s just because time is, is, you know, like that’s finite, I can’t make more of it. So I have to arbitrage what the best use of my time is. And, and I think that that’s like whether you’re a software platform or a product or anything. That’s why I like quick, easy, convenient onboarding, like, Can I get you in quickly? And conveniently, because if not, I’m wasting your time. And some of that, too. It’s like, you can even go to the FullScale.io io site. I mean, parts of it are like that, what do we do? And what do we not do? Because I can tell you up front, like we don’t do short term engagements. If you need help for 30 days, we’re not the right place for you. If you need help from one person part time, we’re not the place for you. It’s not it’s not that, I don’t want to see you be successful. That’s just not what we do. Matt, you say a lot when it comes to product services, especially software, like I heard you say, I can hear you echoing in my head. Oh, well, this just isn’t what this is made to do.

Matt Watson 31:17
Yeah, and you get get distracted by it. Right. I mean, you talked about Full Scale, we’ve done some of this in the past are like, Okay, we do a little bit of this, we do a little bit of that. And it’s just it’s like, why don’t we do this, if it’s like 1% of our effort. It’s like, just to distract. It’s

Matt DeCoursey 31:31
more like 90% of the effort and 1% Yeah, Robin. And,

Matt Watson 31:35
and we have this problem. You know, it’s stuck fie and Metro and lots of software companies, right, where you easily get distracted by things. And you never accomplish what your end goal is. Because you keep getting distracted by other random things that come up every single day.

Matt DeCoursey 31:51
So there’s another thing related to trust, which is compassion. Right, like, and we were alluding to this at the beginning of the episode, hey, look, I know that you’ve had problems with this in the past. And I empathize with that I had problems with it, too. That’s actually why I built this business, this service, this product, is to help you not have that problem in the future. And that’s, that’s compassion, and empathy and selling all in one because that will rain. I literally talked to a Full Scale sales prospect earlier today, who looked at our website where it says, We have built this company. This company was built by founders, four founders. And the guy said that to me three different times. He said, he said, Look, I love this message, because I have a problem. I haven’t found other people that saw that, and I want to work with people that get me get what we’re trying to accomplish and want to help me win.

Matt Watson 32:58
Yep, absolutely.

Matt DeCoursey 33:01
Nuff said. Nuff said. But that but that comes from some of that begins with the messaging of saying, Hey, I get you, I understand what you’ve been through what you’re doing. And that leads to the like, the final thing about trust, which is just that basic competency. Are you competent, like sometimes. But do is unbelievable. How many people are out there reppin competency that are nowhere close?

Matt Watson 33:31
Well, and even if you think about for a second, just the employees that you have in your own company, how much you trust your own employees, is really the speed at which your business can move, right? Like if you don’t trust whoever it is on your team, it makes it so much difficult, more difficult for your business to do things quickly and grow and all that. And it’s the same thing with the vendors you deal with. Right? If it’s a vendor, that’s super critical to the success of your company, you’ve got to have a lot of trust in them.

Matt DeCoursey 33:59
Yeah, yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s back to convenience and headaches. And I gotta tell you what I’m telling you, if you can, if you can find a way to sell peace of mind, you’re gonna win. It all comes down to peace of mind, man, it really like in the end, like, I’ve been a super salesperson forever, and like really 25 or so or however many years later, like that is really like my thesis statement, like, find a way to sell peace of mind and benefits and you went and you went to, like zero. What’s the peace of mind that Stackify offers?

Matt Watson 34:38
Matt, letting you know, if you have problems with your software, like it’s not performing well, and customers aren’t happy and all that sort of stuff. I mean, otherwise, you just you don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Matt DeCoursey 34:48
And that’s just, and that’s, and that’s delivered for a very reasonable price every month. Yep. If not even free.

Matt Watson 34:57
Very inexpensive.

Matt DeCoursey 34:58
Right, right. So No, I mean, overall, like, that’s it. All right. So what do you know, we mentioned some of these, like we kind of went through, like the reasons that people buy or the people that want to do business with you. Like, let’s talk a little bit, because they gave us a pretty broad overview here. So we’re talking as if why people choose you. Why should anyone choose you? We made the assumption that we were talking only about selling or using services. What about people that want to come work at your startup?

Matt Watson 35:32
Yeah, and that’s a big, that’s a big part of it, too, right? You’ve got to you’ve got to convince people that may have a cushy corporate job somewhere with great benefits and stock plans and bonuses or whatever right to come work for your little startup that has a pretty good chance of failing. That’s hard to do. Let’s be honest.

Matt DeCoursey 35:52
Yeah, so yeah. And here’s the thing is you need to assume that nobody understands anything about your business. So I was, I was trying to recruit someone the other day. And he asked me what you guys have insurance, right? We have 225 employees? Yes, we have insurance, like all different kinds of it. But you know, and submit my thought with that, like, I actually, like sat back after that. And I thought I first I was like, wow, that’s a weird question. You know, I have hundreds of employees? Of course we do. Right? But the thing was, is it when I sat back and thought about it, I was like, man, like, I didn’t really present or sell that? Well. Because if you’re asking that fundamentally elementary question about what we’re doing, that’s probably me not framing it? Well, right. So part of what you need to keep in mind if you’re starting your own tech company or your own business, is there a hell of a lot of mega competitors out there that are probably offering more? Oh, yeah, better benefits. I mean, whatever it is, well, whatever it is.

Matt Watson 36:59
You’ve heard me lots of times joke about, you know, I’d hate to be in Silicon Valley where the best people I can hire were the rejects from Google and Facebook and Apple and everybody else, right? Because they’re just going to pay way more and provide more stock options and all that. And, well, now we work in a remote world where everybody can work for anybody. And yeah, those companies are recruiting away from you, nationwide. Now. So yeah, that’s crazy.

Matt DeCoursey 37:27
So now, pre-pandemic, I had just gone, I was just out in the valley. And we went and visited some past Startup Hustle gas and did a lot of different things went to TechCrunch. And I actually asked, I recorded some shows out there. And I actually asked the guests, I said, How do you compete for talent out here? And I actually got a I actually got responses that I wasn’t expecting, because much like you mentioned, you think a lot of these people want to go work at Google, or Facebook or whatever. And actually, a lot of the people that I talked to, said they found the opposite. Like there wasn’t a lot of passion around solving the problem of helping people posted a picture of a slice of pizza. Yeah, sure. on a on a news feed. So but that might be the reason why people come work for you like, Hey, do you want to solve meaningful problems and do it in a way that you can grow? So it’s not always about the benefits or the size of the company? Sometimes it’s about the mission. But that has a lot to do. So if you solve a specific problem, like a specific issue, especially one that or people are passionate about, that could very well be the reason, or one of the reasons that people want to choose you. Absolutely. Like it’s meaningful like you like I like, in the things that people are passionate about. Didn’t one of your sales people that was pilot work go to work for?

Matt Watson 38:58
Yes, yes. Do

Matt DeCoursey 39:01
About It. Yeah. Every time I talked to him, we were talking Yeah, we were talking about flying, fly and plant another I see him on Facebook. And but that’s the thing is he was a he could have probably gone and worked at Cerner, which is a huge company here or Garmin, or like who knows or stayed there. But he got around something he was passionate about. And that is really, really interesting.

Matt Watson 39:25
I had another I had another a previous employee that worked in it. He was like software developer, and went to work for chess.com. Because guess what? He loves? He loves chess. Yep. And I mean are and that’s the thing in the early stage, like when when you also can’t afford the biggest salaries and stuff and the best benefits. If you can get recruit people in that are passionate about what your company does and the problem you’re trying to solve and try to get them in on the long term vision of it. You’ll be a lot better off.

Matt DeCoursey 39:58
So for those of you that are unaware, I worked in and around the music industry for almost a decade and now I’ve moved run into people all the time that were like, so I worked for Roland, and that’s the world’s largest maker of electronic musical instruments. And that was a marquee place to work. And there’s people that like, wouldn’t have ever quit their job they’re ever, like, they could have probably come and been like, okay, we’re cutting everyone’s pay in half, and those people still would have stayed. Because it’s hard to get in a spot to get like, if you want to nerd out and play with all that stuff and deal with it like and that’s your life, then then the pain, the benefits become pretty second, because there really, really is a lot to be said. And so I always I was in sales, I would always people would be like, Oh, well, this or this, Hey, you could be selling plastic, you know, and that was always like, by default, it’s like I wouldn’t have ever wanted to wake up and knowing like my job every day was to sell the one thing that is truly polluting the planet right now. Right? So because it wasn’t, it just felt very redeeming. So like, I knew all kinds of people. And so then I went for the music industry to, to, to event ticketing. Do you know how many dude, there were so many people that worked for teams and venues like they were just like, Okay, so like our rep at the Kansas City Royals? That too, just loves baseball, and is a huge Royals fan like so that’s a huge upside. That’s why I choose this job. Yep. And if you can now guess what, that passion shows that

Matt Watson 40:30
We had a lot of that at Stackify too? Yeah, because we are we are software developers. So software developers like to work at stack five because it’s all them problems. Yeah. Healthcare software, or selling plastic, or selling plastic

Matt DeCoursey 41:42
or selling plastic? No one No one wants to sell plastic. I mean, yes, the oil can so maybe, but no one wakes up and they’re like, Shit, I gotta find a way to sell more oil. I mean, they do. But I don’t I mean, the driver for that is a huge commission check or paycheck or something? Yeah, so I mean, it’s gonna be one or the other. All right. So Matt, did you know that today’s episode of Startup Hustle was brought to you by Full Scale data? Check it out. We talked a lot about Full Scale. So I won’t make a big ad read out of that. But you want life to be fast, easy, convenient. When it comes to building qualified teams of software developers go to full scale.io. A couple of things. Thank you for people that have recently reached out to just say hi, and hello. If you want to interact with us and participate with other entrepreneurs, and yet another community created for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. Come on over and find us in the Facebook chat group, the Startup Hustle chats, go to Facebook, type in Startup Hustle, you can find us in which I may later today, post a poll about whether I should continue to not get a haircut, or just shave my head out to do one or the other. It’s good. It’s getting pretty bad either way. So now we’re here at the end of the episode, we like to end with the founder freestyle. And you know, I want to point out, go check out Andrew Morgans from Mark Knology talking about Amazon and E commerce and go listen to the episodes from one of my personal heroes, Lauren Conaway, who tackles tough issues that she’s really good at tackling. So thank you for that, Lauren. Now, what are your takeaways from today’s episode? Like, what’s your favorite stuff?

Matt Watson 43:32
Well, so in regards to if I’ve got a tech business, I’m trying to get people to do business with me, and why should they do business with me? I mean, I definitely a big fan of the speed and the customer service part of it, right, like, kind of bending over backwards to give people amazing customer service, you know, even to the sales process, all of it right, caring about their problem trying to help them. I mean, in some sense, I’m, like, really lucky that anybody gives a shit about whatever I built. So I’m going to bend over backwards to work with them, and do things quickly. They say, Oh, well, we needed the product to do X, we need the product to do Y, whatever. Like you got to move quickly, and really build that trust and relationship with them. And that’s, that’s how it’s all gonna work. And as we talked about earlier about trust and all these things, and you just got to get your foot in the door. And you got to work fast and hard to try and keep it in the door and be grateful that they’re even helping you at all.

Matt DeCoursey 44:27
So you saying that just made me write down something that I felt like we didn’t hit on? You got to make people feel important. Yeah, so what you just mentioned, like being responsive, doing things quickly and with priority, or at a minimum communicating when you will and then doing it doesn’t mean you have to drop everything you’re doing every time like it can be as simple as hey, Matt, I understand this as an important problem. I have to finish this and then I’m gonna do this which is solve your problem like that kind of communication can do it but nothing if you You can’t, if I don’t feel important, or that you give a shit about my problem, which is pretty much saying I’m not important or the problem isn’t important to solve, you’re not going to get a whole lot of business. So that’s a good way to kind of ruin a relationship. Now, one other thing I wanted to add in and have you heard of the term, the trust equation? Oh, no, I don’t think so. So this is this is referred to the trust equation. And I found a little simple summary of it. The trust equation says an individual’s trustworthiness is equal to their credibility, reliability, and intimacy, all divided by their level of self orientation, individuals can develop their trustworthiness by addressing these underlying trust factors. So those are like the things like you have credibility, but credibility without reliability, the whole equation falls apart. Okay. And that intimacy feel, is that like vulnerability, or that transparency or saying like, hey, I’ll be the first person to tell you if there’s something that I don’t think we can do, because I don’t want to let you down. Right? That’s intimate, that’s empathetic, that’s beginning to tell you so if these things don’t exist, you can like Okay, so if you anything times zero is zero, right? Yep. So you can put a zero in any multiplication equation, and it’s going to come out to be zero. It’s the way it goes. So trust is the same way. There are multiple parts of it. But that credibility and reliability are the two fundamental things in there. That if you lose either one, or can’t establish either one, it’s over. So if you want people to choose you, that’s where to start.

Matt Watson 46:52
Yeah, absolutely. It’s all about trust.

Matt DeCoursey 46:57
I overwhelmed Matt. Right there. He was just looking off to the side. Then I realized he was daydreaming he was I thought that the trial

Matt Watson 47:06
I was thinking about something you were talking about zero times zero. Did you know that? What is zero to the power of zero?

Matt DeCoursey 47:12
No.

Matt Watson 47:14
It’s not zero.

Matt DeCoursey 47:16
Is it still zero?

Matt Watson 47:17
No, it’s one.

Matt DeCoursey 47:19
Zero to the zero power. I don’t even know that was a thing.

Matt Watson 47:23
Yeah, you learned something new today.

Matt DeCoursey 47:24
There’s so much about math, I don’t understand because it’s like a negative times a negative is a positive, but in every situation where I see a negative in business, and then I take it and I cross pollinate it, or multiply times another negative problem. Positive, usually just ends up like 100 times worse. So I’m really I’m thinking about redoing math, because you get to reinvent math every 20 years now, right? Yes, now that my kids come home with homework, I realized that I don’t know how to do math anymore. Yeah, and by the way, if anyone wants to reach out, you know, there’s one other thing. I need someone to create fan art of Matt Watson, so whoever delivers that to me, however you find it are you are going to be in the Startup Hustle Hall of Fame. So if you’re still listening, and you know how to create fan art of Matt Watson, do it. Matt, I think that’s a perfect way to end the show. I’ll see you next week.

Matt Watson 48:25
Thanks, everybody.