Internal Newsletter 20240304

What's up!!! 🚀🚀

I am writing this from Palermo, Buenos Aires. I'm so excited to be here, to be honest. The last time I was here, I had a very tough time at my previous company. It was my last two weeks at Owners deep inside I knew I had to let go, but the fighter inside me wanted to keep fighting for every teammate, investor, advisor, and person who believed in me and Owners as a project.

It’s crazy that 5 months later I arrive at the same place in a very very different headspace. Even though it is still Day 1 for Sidetool and we are still getting started, it is an excellent opportunity to look back at what can be done in a few months if you are fueled by the proper mission and surrounded by a team you respect and trust.

I am a big believer in celebrating Shabbat. Shabbat is a day of rest and spiritual enrichment for those not Jewish from Friday evening to Saturday evening. Shabbat has evolved and has different meanings to different people, but the origins of Shabbat come from God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh.

My take on Shabbat is that no matter which religion you practice or how religious you are, we need to schedule gratitude for ourselves to fuel the future. Sometimes we are too hard on ourselves, we keep building our businesses, lives, and careers. We forget to look back and be grateful for everything we have created. This perspective is critical to keep fueling the future.

Thoughts 🧠:

• Uli (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulisesmenem/) has officially accepted the offer to join Sidetool. I met Uli through a mutual friend. Initially, when I got the intro to Uli, I needed a hand to set up some scrapers. I have built hundreds of scrapers, so I grilled Uli over email on his approach to building. Uli took the time to dive into every question I asked him in extreme detail. For the ones he did not have an answer for, he recognized his lack of knowledge and showed his eagerness to learn more. This email thread continued for about a week until I asked Uli to jump on a call with me; I had to meet him. We immediately hit it off, and Uli joined the team at Owners. I have been fortunate to see Uli grow not only as a dev but also as a person. Uli has a lot of exceptional technical and soft skills (Gentle Giant), but the thing I respect the most about him is his extreme loyalty to the people he cares about.

  • We are fortunate to have Uli on the team.

• We keep tracking the number of jobs for tools like GoHighLevel, ServiceNow, and Adobe Experience Manager. AEM has taken the lead extremely fast. We found duplicate jobs coming in for AEM, but the number of jobs is still overwhelming. The signs at this point are clear: we should not ignore what is going on with AEM.

  • As we test these new tools, I will be implementing Test Cards (https://www.strategyzer.com/library/validate-your-ideas-with-the-test-card) to make sure we define them as experiments before we divert too many resources into it.

• As we keep exploring new tools, we will need to start dropping the ones not getting any traction. Tools like Retool, Zapier, Stacker, HubSpot, Pipedream, and Phantombuster.

• Bubble and n8n/Airtable keep leading as the two main stacks we work with. OpenAI is part of these two stacks.

Customer overview 🤘:

• I will try something different here as we keep adding more customers; diving into each customer is becoming harder and harder. I don’t mention the customers because everything is running smoothly with them.

• CompanyCam, this week will be their last week with us, so I will make sure we handle the deboarding as amazing as possible for them.

• Datos is starting to hand us more and more work. Gio, the founder of Datos, is a good friend of Automate All The Things. He gets a lot of traffic from Automate All The Things, which is an excellent opportunity for us to grow with them. He should take these initial weeks to overdeliver and build a strong relationship with Datos.

• We did not get much work done with Respiris last week. But we need to figure out how to fit in the Cal and Stripe integration before the 11th; they have an essential conference were they need us to deliver usable app for them to use the conference.

• With Bold, we need to help them connect the data pipes to Snowflake so they can display them in Tableau. They have been struggling since Ronald (Their CTO) left. Similarly to CompanyCam, they have some use cases with us that are quite outside of what we are getting done. Not making a decision around this, but something to keep in mind.

• We kicked off both VolleyBox and Bidx last week. Not a lot to show yet as we are just getting started, but with Bidx we are on a count down. We should aim to deliver a “production-ready” version within three weeks. With Volleybox, we have more wiggle room.

• We have a potential opportunity to upgrade Adhesive Media next month, depending on what we deliver this month for them. I think we have gotten into a better rhythm with them lately, so I am sure we can do this. The Missive implementation will be key for this.

• Manu keeps doing an exceptional job at working with Playbook Systems. We should expect more work from Ben coming to us in the next couple of weeks.

Meet the new customers:

• Aprende — https://aprende.com/. They help Hispanics learn valuable skills to advance in their careers, like plumbing, real estate, and beauty. These are some of the initial things that we will be working on for Aprende:

  • Meta scheduler

  • Performance alerts/automated rules to turn off Meta/Google

  • Downloading and scanning Google data, such as search queries

My Focus 🎯:

• Spending time with Pancho, Manu, Juan Ma, Fran, and Uli in person.

• Spending time in person with potential future hires.

• Closing seinergy.com and work-flow.ai.

• Deboarding CompanyCam. They were our second customer. They are a fantastic company, but the use case we handled was too far from our core offering (Email Campaign Ideas). I decided to pull the plug and let them know that we would no longer be able to serve them. There might be an opportunity to serve them on a parallel need that might be more in line with what we do, but the chance is relatively low.

• I will add this again since I could not get this done “Migrate CRM to HubSpot + Arrows; Foundry will stay for the incoming leads and engage with them. However, once the lead shows an interest in working with us, I will create an opportunity on HubSpot and no longer on Foundry. This week, we suffered a bit with our current setup.”

Cool Stuff I found 🔎:

• Bill Ackman did a wide-ranging interview on Lex Fridman, and it's excellent; you can check it out here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgGKhsWhUu8

• Nothing pisses me off more than seeing huge recurring charges on our credit card for simple software. Jason and David from Basecamp are fighting this trend with Once.com. TLDR: They’re building simple apps to replace all the basics companies rely on, starting with Slack (Campfire). You pay $300, once, then you run it on your server. Genius.

The smartest businesses tend to stick around for the long haul — know that existence is also about avoidance. Overkill is the dust that settles on the stuff that took a lot of energy to build or buy but turned out unnecessary. Slim down the stack. Sharpen things up. Eliminate the work that doesn't need to be done. Kill overkill.