Eat Your Own Dogfood

In this episode, Patrick and Nick discuss the concept of 'eating your own dog food,' originating from Microsoft in the 1980s, which means using their own products to ensure quality before selling to customers. They emphasize the importance of applying this strategy to their art marketing business by consistently testing and iterating on their tech and playbooks directly with clients. They provide examples of running Facebook ads and live art shows in galleries to enhance marketing tactics. They also discuss the value of educating their staff through practical experience and the impact of this approach on customer success. Lastly, they address the futility of focusing on non-value-adding features and merchandise, advocating instead for focusing on what is proven to work through direct application and continuous improvement. The session highlights the significance of integrating customer feedback and using real-world data to drive product development and marketing strategies.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: You guys see that you never know what's going to happen right when you're going live. Okay, so eat your own dog food, right? That's the topic, that's the subject. No one knows what that means, right? Like, love it, it throws blush or whatever. I actually had to look it up, like the actual definition today, and it's disputed per usual, right? Like all the good stuff's always disputed. But the dispute centers around whether or not it was Microsoft in the 1980s, which I think it sounds like it was. I know, Joan, I owe you a call. I think it was Microsoft in the 1980s. Jonah, perfect topic because, you know, we're talking about dog fooding with you too. But it was Microsoft in the 1980s and I was pretty meta. It was Microsoft in the 1980s and Microsoft's deal is, you know, the premise is you would never hire a vegetarian to cook you meat, right? Because a vegetarian is never going to eat the damn meat and actually know what it is. Is it good enough, right? Like, is it high enough quality? In Microsoft's context, which is where it is for us today, you have to use the software that you're selling to your customers because if it's not good enough for you to use, it's for damn sure not good enough for the customers.

We sort of have a little bit of a different abstraction of it, I would say, right? In the sense that dog fooding for us is using our own product, yes, but what is our own product? 50-50, right? 50% the software and all that jazz. The other 50% is the marketing product, it's the education, it's the playbooks, it's what we're advising our customers to do on a regular basis and how that all looks. So dog fooding for us has become, we teach a marketing thing, okay, then we go and run the marketing thing on our customers. So let's just use an example to give it some teeth. Let's say it's how to run Facebook ads. We don't just teach you how to run Facebook ads, we are gonna go and grab a customer of which Joan is one, I'm gonna partner with him on one soon and we are gonna run the Facebook ads for you. We are gonna learn, we're gonna have, again, our fingernails in the dirt always, all the time, eating our own dog food. We're gonna have our fingernails in the dirt, we are gonna learn all the various different aspects of it and then when I come on here or when you come on here and we rant about it, no one can BS us because we know dead to rights what it is, how important it is.

That's one way it works. You know, a huge learning recently has been it also works the other direction. Okay, what do I mean? You write a playbook and then you go and run it on a customer, how to run Facebook ads, the playbook. Then you go and run it on a customer's site and you come back with the data and you're like, see, I know what I'm talking about. It actually worked. It actually works in the other direction which is, I need to write a playbook, I'm going to go run it on a customer and then write the playbook, right? Because the subtle difference that I found, which I think is so profound, is there's marketing the stuff that we're doing all day to try to grow our storefronts and you know, you learn live streaming and you learn copywriting, you learn email marketing and you learn ads, you learn every single solitary aspect of the marketing stack in their fundamentals in there that are important. But until you've run it for an actual artist or photographer, it's not always the same. The nuances in selling art and photography are so utterly, totally, completely different than just about selling anything else that it doesn't always apply 100%, right?

This underpins for me why every time 95, 97, I'm like 99 let's be honest, 99% of the times when an artist or a photographer hires a marketing consultant, they fail. They fail and there's two reasons for that. The number one reason is no one has the perspective of how long it takes so they always like hire a consultant for a month or two instead of a year which is failure written all over it. But the other is unless that consultant is only selling art or photography all day, even if they're really good, it's almost impossibly hard to win. Even like on a one-on-one like if I'm just tackling art or photography and I'm really good at marketing, it's really, really hard. There, it's just different. You know, there's just nuances that apply to that business. I'm sure it applies to every business but I think it's even more pronounced in art and photography sales. So big, big learning, huge part of what we're doing going forward and I think it's a massive differentiator. I think it's massive and I'm, I'm, I'm just, if I seem fired up about it, I think it will forever, forever change the trajectory of this company. How many people that we have on our marketing staff that are eating our own dog food, that's how far I take it.

Nick Friend: Yeah, well I mean, at the end of the day, like what we're trying to do here, you guys, is like we are reverse engineering artist and photographer success, okay? To create a marketing product, okay, that's step by step for everybody as well as a software product, a website product, a proper art gallery website, right? Is the way that I should define it. Based on only things that are working, that's it, right? From day one that's all we've been doing is like all we care about is what's actually working and reverse it. And when I say what's actually working, what's actually working for people that are selling, call it 20, 50 thousand dollars a year or more of their art, okay, online and off. Now we haven't been talking about offline much have we? We haven't been talking about offline because the pandemic has locked everything down and everything's changed but we use, we're holistic about the whole thing. It's all about the entire business, right? But all we care about is where the success is actually happening, diving into the nitty-gritty details of it, right? Reverse engineering it, running it, i.e. eating the dog food, right? Running it ourselves over and over again, iterating on that, you know, finding like the areas. Because, because here's the thing, when you, when you typically find an artist or a photographer like who found a way of doing something, right? If you, if you start putting some marketers and some experienced entrepreneurs into that strategy, you, you 10x it, right? So all you need is some little traction somewhere on something that somebody did that was creative and then and then now you can just, you can run it and you run it over and over and over. What happens when you run it over and over? Every time you get better at it. It's almost like you can't run a tactic enough, right? It's like reps. You, you literally can't run a single playbook or, or a marketing tactic enough. Especially when it comes to selling art, you know, because every time it will get better and better and better and more detailed and more detailed and then you're going to get better results every single time. So yeah, I love it. I love the whole thing and it just, it ties into this whole, you know, overall strategy of the like the way that we, we focus on customer success as a business, you know, and we, we, we seek out success everywhere. We created ourselves that matters only metrics that matters.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I mean let me ask all of you guys out there, let me ask all you guys out there. There's, because there's people, they, people get on our, our non-customer zoom sessions, right? Where we're doing free art business and marketing consulting and I'll talk about that in a second, right? But, but, but Pat, they come on these sessions and they say, well hey, you know, what about this feature, could you guys add that, you know, could you guys add that? And we, and you know, you and I are just like, oh my goodness, like you're asking for a feature, you don't even know what the features that people that are selling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year are asking for. You don't even know it, it's not even anything in your mind, right? What the, like we have every feature, we got a million gazillion features, you can't even ask for one, you can't even ask for one because you got a gazillion.

Nick Friend: Yeah, that's it. I believe it's like if I just have this feature I'm gonna get there. You don't even know what the features are. It's like you're asking for like a surfboard with like a water jet underneath it and you can't even stand up in the baby waves. Like stop it, you don't know what you're doing, right?

Patrick Shanahan: No, yeah, it's totally a shiny object too. It's just a shiny object, right?

Nick Friend: Yeah, yeah, but, but focusing on customer success and then working backwards from that, right? You all, you know what you end up with? You end up with the exact product that is needed, that's what you end up with. You don't end up with like a bunch of, you know, features that people like who are looking at it top down, um, uh, like top-down product people are like, oh hey, hey guys, hey developers, hey, uh, management, what features do you think we should have, you know? Oh, let's make a list together and let's, uh, let's all vote and let's prioritize them all within a bubble of a company not actually, you know, the, the, uh, the, uh, like the real customers with real actual results. I mean some of those feature requests can be coming from customers but there are stories of companies literally going down by focusing on feature requests that don't matter, you know? And so we focus.

Patrick Shanahan: And that are nonsense and we've, you know, uh, we've fallen for that trap, we implemented some of those in our early days but, uh, but on the whole focusing on what is working for individual artists and photographers and, and reverse engineering and building an entire product, an entire solution around that is exactly what we do, right? And a big part of that is you have to eat your own dog food. You have to use it. You have to use it over and over and over. If we're going to give you a playbook, we're going to give you that playbook and say, hey this playbook I'm giving you, we've ran it 10 times with multiple different photographers and artists, with people selling originals, with people selling limited editions, with people selling, you know, open editions, with people selling photography, with people selling this niche, with that niche. We're going to do that over and over so that when it's done it's like, sorry, there's no reason this can't work for you unless you did something wrong and you didn't and you changed something, right? Or there's something weird there and we got to talk about it. But that's what eating your own dog food is. It's like you're not a consultant up high, like upper management, hey, hey I think you should do this or these blogs or these Coursera's you read, you watch or you see, right?

About like go to go, go and Google, you know, how to be effective at Instagram marketing, right? You'll get like a laundry list, probably a thousand results of BS, you know, of generic BS. It doesn't matter unless you actually run it on an art or photography business, right? And then you go, oh, how does that work? You know, I would rather you gotta do what.

Nick Friend: I would do, I would even take it a step further and I said this to you in Slack and you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna come with a mild, mildly tawdry analogy, okay? Don't attack me on this, it's gonna be mildly tawdry. But you remember back in like the single days, okay?

Patrick Shanahan: Don't do this, don't do this. You always go here, don't do this.

Nick Friend: You don't like this one?

Patrick Shanahan: No, I don't like, go ahead, go ahead. I just said don't, don't do this but go ahead, go ahead.

Nick Friend: All right, now it's getting entertaining. I, I have to use, I have to use the analogies that are, that are poignant for me and maybe, maybe it applies to the ladies, that's fine. Just be real but yeah, I gotta be real. So back in the single days, okay? Nick and I are both married. It would seem no matter where you rank in the, the pecking order that you would get more attention from the opposite sex when you're actually in a relationship, okay? When you're actually in a relationship and less attention when you're not in a relationship. And I extrapolate out of that if there's just some sort of pheromone, some sort of inexplicable something that makes a male partner look more attractive to the opposite sex when they already have a partner. I honestly believe that there's probably some, some studies that.

Patrick Shanahan: Well, there definitely is. There's no question there is.

Nick Friend: Yeah, there's got to be. But track with me where it goes and so we're on 36, I think session 38 was this week of office hours with our customers, right? And one of the things that we're doing more than anything else is getting rid of self-limiting beliefs, unplugging trains and themes are emerging. It's such like a rapid clip and there's this whole large group, this whole huge cohort of people that, and, and I think it's human nature, it's not attacking our customers in the slightest, but that are getting all wound up about various different aspects of these early techniques. How many times they have to run it, um, like getting stuck in the minutia in the details. And we've had enough of these now where we start barking a little bit at them, right? We started barking at them in the sense that like stop it, stop it, that is nonsensical. I don't want you stuck on it and it comes from a really good place why we do it but there is going back to the relationship analogy as a result of doing the dog food, okay? And let me give you the case in point, run two million dollars worth of Facebook ads, right? Know what I'm doing Facebook ads. You run a ton of them too, you know what you're doing. We can talk confidently about this, right? Okay, but, but the actual like going back to my analogy, the actual girl on your arm is when you've run it multiple times for artists and you've won, okay? And where the analogy comes in is like when you're giving that advice succinctly to your customers and sometimes pushing kind of hard. Like what about this, Patrick, what about this, what about this, what about, none of that, here is how you do it. We've run it, we've run it successfully. There's a confidence in your voice that comes out that people respect and you can't fake it. You cannot fake it, you cannot be snowed when you're in the trenches, your fingernails are in the dirt and this, the dog booting takes it to the next natural conclusion. So you tell me another company that is not just teaching you how to do something but it's teaching you how to do something by actually running it with their actual customers and then coming back and teaching you one and I'll, I'll pick a company to invest in.

Patrick Shanahan: That's one, that's one, right? [Laughter]

Nick Friend: I'm sure.

Patrick Shanahan: I like it.

Nick Friend: You laugh but I'm serious, like the analogy has helped me like put it all into perspective. That's, that's what it is and I just see it continuing to compound and what an incredible way, what an incredible way to do things and, and we are literally taking this so far. I mean, I don't, I don't feel like I'm lifting up the kimono a little bit so if you feel like I'm getting out of line you'd tell me but every single solitary marketing hire we bring on going forward is going to go through our playbooks. They're gonna sit on Zoom sessions until they, until they get what we do, how we talk about it, then they're gonna go through the playbook, how to go live on Instagram. They're gonna learn every aspect of it. They're going to start running those lives themselves and then what are they going to go do? They're going to go partner with the customer and run it until they have the data, until they understand it, until they can touch it and taste it and feel it. So that they can speak eloquently about it because we've got a lot of teaching to do. We have a lot of teaching.

Nick Friend: Yeah, a lot. Tons. Yeah, and so by the way, I should mention, um, we, so we did a free art business, uh, marketing consulting today for non-art storefronts customers. Um, the session is if you're on Facebook, if, if you're on Facebook or YouTube it'll be in our feed. If you're on Instagram you can go over and check it out. It was a pretty good session. Um, tons of learning every single time and every session is, is different. That's what's, that's what's so awesome about it. I should also say that if you, uh, if you follow our podcast, the Art Marketing Podcast, they are all getting in there. So it's actually a great way to just, you know, kind of binge on those things and get a bunch of information and while you're exercising or whatever it is that you want to do. Um, but, uh, but anyways, we are, we will be running our next one, uh, with non-art storefronts customers on Friday at 11 Pacific, 1 Central, 2 Eastern if you want to join. So get, get on our email list so you can get the, uh, the Zoom link for that. And then I should mention that we are running a summer special right now, uh, which ends at the end of the month. So if you're interested in joining art storefronts at a, at a significant discount it is a very good time and it is especially a very good time because the fourth quarter, the biggest art selling time of the year where you should be selling like 40 to 50% of your total art for the year, um, is right around the corner, okay? October, November, December, right? The fourth quarter. That's when it's, you know, time to reap, uh, for all the work that you put in all year and the marketing for that begins in October and that's why we say it's not that far. So it's actually just an ideal time to get going, um, and start with your marketing and get things kicking.

Patrick Shanahan: I think it begins in September honestly. I'm gonna have them starting in September. It is, this is going to be the biggest Q4 ever. But staying on the dog food, staying on the dog food for a second, one, I want to tease what, which of these operations we actually have on the water. But contemplate, contemplate when the team builds out a little bit more and we honestly split artists and photographers, right? Three and three on each side. Sorry, three and three and whatever the new technique, new tactic, new playbook we come up with. Divide and conquer, three in the water, three in the water, three to three different styles, three different geographic areas. What that's going to look like, then the team, the team goes and executes on it. I'm saying our customers go and execute on it. That data comes back like we are going to be unstoppable and I'm excited about that. What dog fooding do we have on the water? You and I move so damn fast. If we slow down sometimes we'd realize we were banging the drum on the live art shows for like two months consistently or a month and a half consistently because they're the biggest thing, it's forever changing the way art is sold. We got to get back on that because it's just truth that we would grind it in different areas. So dog fooding operation number two, I already have one on the water, I got ahead of myself. The number two is we've got a buddy, uh, uh, that's having a, I'm not gonna use his name, that's having a actual gallery show, okay? He's in an area where they're not in lockdown, they're allowed to have 50 people at this thing. Um, there's some outdoor seating, whatever, they've got it worked out. We're running a live art show inside the art gallery. That's happening, that's happening I think a week from Friday. So a live art show by which I mean live streamed Instagram live stream, Facebook live stream, Twitter live stream, YouTube all at once in concert by both Facebook pages, personal page inside of an actual gallery, the actual gallery show. Now is he going to be paying a 50 50 split? Sadly he is. It's ridiculous. What are these people doing for him? Absolutely nothing. I'm done with that. But he's gonna be bringing like, like 20x the attendees. Yeah, virtually, right? We're gonna get to see how this whole thing goes down, what the trade craft is. I've got, that's gonna be fun.

Nick Friend: Yeah, I've got a schedule worked up like how to handle the pricing. And by the way he ran our, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, what do I, what do we call it, having formalized it, gallery show playbook, which was really sweet, pretty pandemic sort of little these days. And it looks like he's got four of the 20 pieces pre-sold to the show already, already done.

Patrick Shanahan: Love it.

Nick Friend: And who caught, whose audience was that with what in the galleries, those are four pieces he's got to pay 50 rack rate on. God, it's ridiculous.

Patrick Shanahan: Yup.

Nick Friend: Anyway, totally ridiculous. That one's going in the water next Friday, uh, Facebook warm ads in the water right now. We've already done a bunch of stuff on Facebook warm ads but this is, this is another new one because the nuances in trade craft of advertising on Facebook which I'm absolutely not advocating you do unless you know what you're doing, what conversions to use, uh, uh, where to drive the traffic home page, product page, something in between the landing page, what about the intro exit pops, are you running pops at all, do you understand what that looks like, the link tagging, okay, the spend per day, the audience generation, which, which audiences are using, which ones are you inserting, uh, how are you going about that, what is the frequency, how quickly are you rotating, you're rotating two ads in and out of a week or you're letting one run a week, there's so much there, right? There's so much there. So that's in the water. Jonah, who was on this thing earlier, I don't know, he's popped off, I'm not even sure which one to run with him. He's got that photo book, how to sell a photo book, that could be a good playbook too.

Patrick Shanahan: I, I love that.

Nick Friend: You know what?

Patrick Shanahan: Maybe grab that one.

Nick Friend: I could crush.

Patrick Shanahan: Oh no, I'll be in, I'm gonna be in on that. I'm going to be on that for sure because I'm very, very bullish on the photo books and that are, you know, fine art books and photo books. I'm very, very bullish on it. Um, and part of the reason is because, you know, I've been a part of that for many, many years. I've got a few in my house, they're gorgeous, like the big ones.

Nick Friend: Oh yeah, exactly, you got it, you got a stack, don't you, don't you have a stack of them?

Patrick Shanahan: A little stack, yeah.

Nick Friend: People stack them up, people stack them up and you don't need open wall space, right? You just have to like have a connection and love that person's work and it's a good, it's a high margin item, right? Like it's something that you could sell for 200, 300, 100 whatever you want to do depending on the quality of the book. You can even go higher, you can even have some that are signed that are 500 bucks like a limited edition, like version of them. I mean there's so many ways to go but these are items that people don't even need open wall space for. It could be more of an impulse buy and I love it and I just, I just love the quality of the product.

Patrick Shanahan: That's awesome. What, what would be in your estimation, okay, so just, just iron from the hip here, the best time of year to sell something like that? I'm asking for a friend, I'm asking for a friend. What would be the best time?

Nick Friend: Well actually, I think you're going with fourth quarter but I'm just saying literally all times of year.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: Fourth, fourth quarter that, that should blow up. It's a really, really good Christmas gift.

Patrick Shanahan: Oh phenomenal, phenomenal.

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: Phenom.

Nick Friend: That's, that's actually a great point, it's phenomenal but it's, it's a, I, the thing that I love about it is that it's not a mug, it's not a coffee mug, it's not a keychain, it's not a t-shirt, it's not things that are off the brand message of a fine artist or a fine art photographer who's trying to raise their prices eventually, right?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: Like if you don't, if you want to raise your prices eventually, watch out for those tchotchkes, watch out.

Patrick Shanahan: I, I am too, I, I don't love it. I mean a lot of people want it and you know, we're adding some of those things on the platform, we have to. Uh, there's some people who legitimately need it because they're, they're actually like more of a decorative art play. But if the point is, is that if you're more of a fine art, you don't even touch that stuff. There's other great products like the fine art books, that's where your mind should be, right? That's where your mind should be.

Nick Friend: I only like the coffee table books, it's like live show giveaways, uh, Instagram live giveaways, incentives and maybe some order bumps, right? Maybe some watermelons, some stocking stuff, don't ever sell a mug if you really want to grab it, like go grab the anchor like you know on that boat over there and just take it down, like if you're gonna go film mugs, forget the mugs. I'm serious. I gotta tell, I gotta tell you guys like forget the mugs and all those cheap less than ten dollar products like iPhone cases and, you know, nonsense like that. You're wasting your time, you know, and yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: Unless, and like you said though, if you're giving them away as promotional items, I like that.

Nick Friend: All good.

Patrick Shanahan: Right? But if you're actually spending time trying to market those, what are you doing? What are you doing? You know, I mean hey, like here's the thing, Pat, here's a great point. Show us anybody you know on our, like any of our members, anybody that we know, right, making a tremendous amount of money selling tchotchke. Let's go back to success. Let's start at success. Who's, who is selling 100,000 or 200,000 a year that has a significant amount of revenue coming from those items that makes it actually worthwhile to spend any time on them at all, right? And it's not there. It's just not there. Not at least not yet.

Nick Friend: It's just, it's just the sheer volume that you need. Like I'm sure the Green Bay Packers are selling a tremendous amount of tchotchke, right?

Patrick Shanahan: That they are.

Nick Friend: That Chelsea Football Club is, I don't know who else is, I don't know. All right, I don't want to make it about tchotchke, the subject's about dog fooding. It's going to completely change the game as far as I'm concerned. You've got a question, you're going to answer that?

Tony: Yeah, I'm assuming you're an art storefront member, um, so I'm going to give you an answer appropriate to that. Is there a way to get commission.

Nick Friend: Yeah, yeah, read the questions.

Tony: Yeah, I know. Is there, is there a way to get a commissioned paintings calculator on my site for customers to get cost ideas on their own?

Nick Friend: Yeah, we have a commission playbook actually that we released, um, it's in the marketing resource vault for art storefronts members only. This was released, uh, two weeks ago by Patrick's team, a commission playbook, a commission marketing playbook specifically for this. So, so go ahead, so go check that out, Tony. But the way that you set up the product in our storefronts, you can have different size options in there that you want to offer and so if you set some up in there, every one of those can have a different price and, um, and, uh, they can, they can toggle that and see what the different prices are, um, on there. And you know, we, we're recommending like having a table and some different things like that so I would just go ahead and check that out and see where you're at from there.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, but more than anything else Tony, don't worry about the couch. Like my answer is, is the calculator gonna get that deal done? No, the phone call is, you know, unless you're telling me you're doing good, get, get on the phone, get on the phone with them and get it done.

Nick Friend: Pricing table, pricing table is fine too, right? You, I mean you got to show pricing, it's always a good idea so that people know what they're getting but.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, yeah but you want to, yeah, you want, you want to take that to the hand-to-hand, uh, to the message. So, so, so something else I'm just going to say like eating your own dog food, I, I'll, I'll close it out with this on the eating your own dog food, you know how important it is, you know how important it is. What did I do like three weeks ago? I literally ran one of our customers like entire marketing for like two weeks, right? Now I didn't do all the hand-to-hand but I oversaw the entire thing including his arch.

Nick Friend: That's crazy, you're supposed to be running the business here, why should a CEO, I'm the owner of the company, why should I do that? Is it that important? It is that, it is that important, that's why I did it, it is that important, okay? Because the thing that I, the things that I were, I was working on were that important, they were that cutting edge and they needed to be, they needed an entrepreneur who was very experienced to actually see it through, you know, and so I did it.

Patrick Shanahan: And you, and you were doing the same thing in parallel with somebody else, right? And what happened out of that? We learned a ton about, uh, some, some, some details in tradecraft as we call it that, uh, that, you know, will pull in way better results for, you know, people selling art and that's where the difference maker is, right? And like Bill Stidham for example, he came on our, our, our customer workshop and he said, he's like my mind is blown. Like most, a lot of people don't realize that like when you get all that tradecraft, the differences can be enormous, right? Enormous, right? Like you might sell eight pieces versus zero, you know, you might sell ten thousand dollars versus literally zero, right? And that, that explains what all these people who are like I tried something on Instagram or on Facebook because I read a blog post or whatever and I sent out an email blast and I tried a few and nothing happened except people unsubscribed. It's like, yeah, no wonder, right? Like it's because all that stuff doesn't work and you got to actually have something that works, you know.

Nick Friend: Not, not only that, like to go back to your feature requests, like I'm dog fooding right now and I sent Nick a message in Slack 45 minutes ago saying I need this feature, I need it immediately. And you're going to go and get it built and we're going to deploy it and it's going to work. So you talk about, talk about like how amazing is that by the way? Yeah, do you have a thousand cuts when you're not doing this because you're making feature requests that are nonsensical, even if they're nonsensical.

Patrick Shanahan: Totally.

Nick Friend: The hypothesis is good, the feature request that you made is exactly the highest value feature request that we could implement probably right now.

Patrick Shanahan: Straight up.

Nick Friend: Because you're, you are, you are iterating on Facebook cold ads and warm ads, right? And you're iterating on it and iterating on that and you're like, you know as an experienced marketer, right, this, this, there's a feature, there's a, there's a certain sort of a tactic that requires like custom development that you normally would have to pay a custom developer to do. This is not out of the box anywhere, right type of stuff and, and you're like, you know what, is there any way to do this? We need this, like I'm running, I'm doing these ads and we're, you know, we're, we're, we're doing, you know, this and that and we need this and it's like, okay, it's getting done and we'll have it done in like two days.

Patrick Shanahan: Two days. Software company A, right? Bet, well-intentioned, listening to their customers and everyone's telling them like feature requests, feature requests, feature requests, here's what I want, here's what I want, here's what I want and you're well intentioned, you're like, man I want to develop all these things, it sounds like it's going to be awesome. Uh, software company B, right? Actually eating their own dog food and running the marketing for the customers which is, again, distraction to the dog food concept a little bit like I'm able to know conclusively what feature needs to be released, right? This software company is going to make them with the best intention, they don't know.

Nick Friend: They don't know.

Patrick Shanahan: They don't know, especially if their metric is customer success. We don't care at all what it is if it's not going to make successful customers, if it's not going to make successful customers I don't want to hear about it. I don't care how shiny and beautiful it looks, right? Like that, that obsession and remaining on that track will change the whole ball game. So why eating your own dog food, that's it, that's it, that's it. I feel like I covered it, I feel really good.

Nick Friend: All right, let's leave it there.

Patrick Shanahan: All right.

Nick Friend: All right, guys.

Patrick Shanahan: We have to all see you later, good night probably.