The Accidental Entrepreneurs
Ep 12: What have you learned about working with engineers?
Stacee and Ira talk about their initial misconceptions about software development and the often overlooked immense value of an ongoing partnership with engineers beyond the launch phase. Lessons include learning the ropes of product development timelines and understanding the investment costs are critical for any entrepreneur aiming for success.
Stacee and Ira talk about their initial misconceptions about software development and the often overlooked immense value of an ongoing partnership with engineers beyond the launch phase. Lessons include learning the ropes of product development timelines and understanding the investment costs are critical for any entrepreneur aiming for success.
Hello and welcome. I am Ira Gordon and, along with Stacee Santi, the host of The Accidental Entrepreneurs podcast. We each previously founded successful companies. Along the way, we became business owners and eventually sold those businesses despite us having no real background in business or ever even planning to become entrepreneurs. In other words, we did this all despite originally having no idea what we were doing or getting ourselves into. In each episode of this podcast, we will share stories and tips from our journey and we'll answer a randomly chosen question about our experience. Let's jump right into the show. Stacee, how are you doing?
Stacee:I'm doing good. How are you today?
Ira:I am pretty well. I am excited to ask you about something I saw from you quite recently, which is that you are starting a new consulting business to try to help startups. You have your own startup to try to help startups. I thought I should find out a little bit more about how that came about and what challenges you're facing right now.
Stacee:That's funny. "A startup to help startups that should be my slogan. Well, people would just randomly be reaching out to me and say hey, do you have any advice for me? I'm getting started. I've got a bunch of these and I'm like maybe I should do something with that. It seems like maybe there's a need.
Stacee:One of the things that I've really noticed is that many startups in the veterinary sector don't know what it's like to be a veterinarian. They don't know what it's like to work in a veterinary practice. They have an idea that on the outside seems really great and amazing. Quite honestly, they usually are. Then they get stuck, or they maybe don't even know what they don't know about how it won't work in real life practice. Then they have a hard time getting in touch with veterinarians in a way that can be meaningful.
Stacee:That seems to be my sweet spot, where I have a ton of veterinary friends from my company serving veterinarians, and from just being a dork and a nerd knowing veterinarians, I thought "you know what? I could probably marry these two and bring veterinarians into a virtual boardroom for a company to come and run their idea by them. Or maybe they want to talk about a specific feature and then get real-life workflow feedback from their target customer. I started Firefly Veterinary Consulting. I don't know it sounds kind of cheesy but honestly, if I could help a startup get into the product market fit zone faster, I think that would be really exciting for me.
Ira:That's really neat. Let's jump into our question for the day, which is what have you learned about working with engineers?
Stacee:Oh yeah, the magical wizards. I call these the Dumbledores of your company. I think they're so amazing. In fact, I probably have a secret crush on all engineers and would like to. If I had another life, I think I would be two things.
Ira:I could get a lot of fan mails.
Stacee:I would either be a software engineer or I would be a crime scene investigator. Those are my two secret passions.
Ira:It's funny you say that. People ask me about things like my regrets. One of the things I always wish I learned to do was code my own stuff, because I love working with engineers. But my inability to actually just do what I want and instead have to explain to somebody what I want sometimes drives me nuts.
Stacee:What was your experience like working with your first engineer?
Ira:I worked with a lot of engineers. I was really lucky that our first engineer is not your stereotypical engineer. He's also just sort of like a brilliant business mind and a great outgoing person. Not to say engineers are all quiet nerds like me, but a lot of them are. But I was lucky that our first engineer was really everything plus.
Ira:But we've worked with a lot of other engineers since then and I think a lot of them really they don't ask for it, but they really like to be included in the thinking that goes behind the product.
Ira:And I think that my initial instinct was to think oh, I need to spell out all of the things that I want my product to do and I can't miss anything, because then the engineer will know exactly what I want and be able to build exactly what I want. And it never works out that way, because once something starts to get built, you realize there's a bunch of things that you didn't think of or what have you. But actually including them in that design process and giving them insights into the why you want things to work certain ways or what your goals are of the product that you're building oftentimes really gets their creativity going and helps them to make better decisions when they're trying to build what you want, and it's more fun for me to actually work with somebody that thinks about things differently and asks really good questions when you're having those conversations, and I hope and think that it's more fun for them to be engaged in those processes too. How about you?
Stacee:Yeah, that's really true. I couldn't agree more. So the real experience I got was when I decided I was going to build my own IP, I got connected with this firm called OK Grow. It was OK and then Grow, and the founder of that was an engineer named Paul Dowman, who is brilliant, like brilliant, and he had a kind of a boutique software developing firm in Canada. So I flew up there and I met with him and his team and I showed him what I had and then envisioned, brainstormed about what I wanted, and then they started building it.
Stacee:And the first thing I learned about engineers is and it's not a dig, it's just the way it goes is they almost never can predict the time or the money spent to get you this end product. And that ended up happening to me. It took twice as long and twice as much money to get what I was purchasing. Basically and I was so naive this is probably the biggest area I had a learning curve on is I literally thought I'm buying this thing, I'll get something delivered to me and then we'll be done with our relationship.
Stacee:It didn't really go that way and I learned over time. That's normal, because it's kind of like you're building something from scratch, and there's going to be things that you don't even know that are going to be hurdles, and so how could you possibly give an exact timeline when you don't even know? And so that's one key point of advice I would give anybody working with engineers or just starting, is they do their very best to give you a guesstimate, but it is certainly a guesstimate, and if you're the buyer, you need to know that that's how it works around here.
Ira:That reminds me of the mistake I made over and over again and I tell myself I won't make again which is having this mental image of asking an engineer to build you something, of it being kind of like a set of legos, like, ok, you've got to put all these pieces together, you're going to build it, and then you're going to have this cool looking Millennium Falcon or whatever it is and it's going to sit there and it's going to be beautiful for eternity. But in reality it's going to be beautiful. Yeah, it's never done right like there's always something, or?
Ira:that that you need to add on to it. Or you know something changes and you always kind of need to keep up and update it. And, yeah, somewhat related to that I think I've learned from working with you know outsourced groups of engineers that you know oftentimes when you do that, like they may build things in the language is that they're most comfortable in and those might not be the one that your in-house team really wants to work on. Or the rest of of your product is built on. And then you have this problem of like deciding what. Do you want to and need to continue to work with this group that you hired to build your Millennium Falcon but you didn't necessarily expect that they were gonna be working on it for the rest of your business? Or do you go through sort of the process of trying to integrate what they built into the rest of your product and sometimes that can result in a little bit of a Frankenstein situation.
Stacee:Oh, that this is exactly why Paul was so brilliant. In now, I, only now and I hope he's listening only now do I recognize how amazing he was, because he built my platform for growth and I didn't ask him to do that. He, I didn't know enough to say now I'm gonna need you to build this in a way that could be. No, he did it because he's a badass and and the thing too is I, I the job was to build the platform and integrate it with the practice management software. That was the job, which I'm like okay, that sounds easy. It's not easy, it's very hard, and I totally didn't understand.
Stacee:But I remember one day like I was so stressed out because we were way over budget. We were way over time is and I'm like you know what, if someone brings me a I said this to him If someone brings me a dog and it's limping, my job is to figure out why and fix it and make it so he can run again. So I just need you to make this product run. And he's like this is not the same. He's like you're gonna need ongoing care for your little dog here and you aren't even set up for long-term maintenance and I'm like why I just had this vision that when it was done, it was done and like a website right.
Stacee:He's like "no, no, no, no, you're gonna need your own engineers. There's problems to be solved every single day. Going on and going forward. I'm like, holy shit, like what have I done to myself? And Paul wasn't the firm to do that. He just built the stuff and then set, sent you on your way. And he's like I normally work with other engineer teams. I don't work with people like so I ended up having to find my own engineer team.
Ira:Yeah, yeah, we had a little bit of a different thing to help when we first built our test prep software. I'm the person that we partnered with to build it Eric who's this genius I alluded to before? Like he finished the project and it was kind of like, okay, we hired him to do to build the Lego set, right, and he was done and he's. So we're gonna need To realize we were gonna need to work on it. He's all. I've got a friend I let me introduce you to my friend, Yule and then you was a great guy, smart guy, gone on to do a lot of really wonderful things, but he just he wasn't Eric right and and and when we would meet things done like it wasn't the same as when we asked Eric to do something for us and we just realized, like this is, this is never gonna work.
Ira:We're gonna be miserable if every time we want to, you know, change something or need to fix something, it just isn't getting done the way that it was before. And so that was when we realized that we actually need Eric to be our partner at this business. Like we can't have just hired him to build a Lego set. We actually need him to be one of us.
Stacee:Yeah, if you're just starting, you have to find a good engineer team for the reasons you said the coding language they're using. You wanna build on something versatile. You wanna build for scale. It's many of the decisions you make right now are going to be super important to you down the road and I just wanna say I love what you said about using the engineer's thinking power with you, and especially the designers too, the UX, UI people like gosh. You cannot give them a recipe like, "Here are the directions. This is more like I'm thinking I would like to have you know a five course meal and I would like it to have some you know steak in there for the main course and you figure out what the best combination is for the dinner. It's more like that.
Ira:I feel like it's not the default method of working with engineers is not to include them in that, like they oftentimes, like they're in their own separate place in the org, like they don't necessarily, you know, share space and interactions and have meetings with the rest of the team, cause they're doing kind of their thing and it's maybe even a little bit uncomfortable to sort of drag them into those things sometimes. But I think they really do benefit from it. I think they often like it and I think it results in, you know, just getting a much better end product and it's good for team building too.
Stacee:Yeah, definitely when I met Mihailo, because I did get quite a few warnings to not work with offshore engineers because of the time difference was one, but also because of that silo-ing where they weren't feeling part of the team and they weren't able to contribute in that meaningful way. And when I met Mihailo I thought, well, okay, we'll meet once a week or something. He goes, "Oh no, we will meet every day. He goes until it gets boring. Let's start with meeting every single day. So we have our morning meeting at eight for me it was eight AM, four PM, for him and we would just get to know each other. And it became a true friendship really, and it became a like hey, I have an idea. And now he jokes a lot about me saying that I've one quick say I've got an idea. We laugh because I need him to bounce that idea around with me, and then some a lot of times we decide that idea is dumb. But sometimes he's like I like your idea. I think I can make it better though. So super nice.
Ira:I tell my partner, Mauricio, and my best friend, I tell the four scariest words in the English language are for me to hear you say "I've got an idea.
Stacee:So funny. Well, now it's time in our program where we will share a fun or helpful trick,q uote person, of influence. Ira, what do you have for us today?
Ira:So a book that we read at my last business that really helped us was a book called Blue Ocean Strategy and the sort of central theme or concept of the book is that the red ocean is sort of the competitive ocean, where there's lots of other products and you're going to be competing for a slice of that pie. But if you can imagine a blue ocean sort of an area beyond where there is currently not competition, there may not be a market yet, but you can create a product and create a market for that product, that then you have a business that is poised for much greater growth and much greater potential than sort of building something to compete with the existing market. And the sort of thought exercises that go along with with that line of strategy or thinking is really helpful and you really enjoyed kind of that perspective on thinking about how you might want to build or think about your startup.
Stacee:Kind of pushing yourself to get past that typical basic idea into something bigger.
Ira:Yeah, I mean, it requires a level of sort of creativity and potentially sort of leap of faith to start to think more outside of that box of what a business can be. But I often find myself encouraging entrepreneurs to sort of just try to be more creative.
Ira:You know, I gave a talk recently about artificial intelligence and imaging and I was like you know, yes, like there is cool potential for artificial intelligence to be able to read a diagnostic image you know as well as a veterinarian or radiologist can, but actually like if you can think outside that box about the really really cool things that artificial intelligence could do to images and for images that aren't just kind of doing things that people can do now without requiring a person to do them, but actually, like do much more and help the people by doing cool things for them. That is where I think there is a lot more interesting opportunity.
Stacee:Love it.
Ira:What about you? What is your helpful trick tool, person, quote.
Stacee:So today I'm gonna share this is probably not kosher if you're a big company, but you can totally get away with it if you're a little company.
Stacee:And this is using a credit card that you can get points on and you can convert those points into presents.
Stacee:So I used a card by Chase and I used it for everything in my business, so my day to day expenses. I put it all on that credit card and then I you know, of course pay it off every month and I ended up racking up a lot of points and I use those points to convert them to $100 Amazon gift cards and then you have kind of a under the wire way to reward your employees where they don't have to pay taxes on it. It's sort of a little loophole because if you just give a person cash, then you know first you can't just remove cash from your bank account without that being suspicious and you can't put it on their paycheck without them having to pay taxes on it. So I found this to be a really great way to give Christmas presents to my team and to just give people like hey, you're awesome, here's an Amazon gift card, and I know that's probably illegal in some ways, so I take no.
Ira:I just like to remind our listeners that we are not tax professionals and we do not give out tax advice on the show. But that's a great story, Stacee.
Stacee:All right. Well, let's spin the wheel and see what our question will be next time. When did you know?
Ira:Know" his in quotation marks.
Stacee:Yeah, when did you know you were on the right path or that your company was going to be a hit?
Ira:I can't wait to talk about it.
Stacee:Okay, we'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to the show today. If you want to learn more about my story or I restore it be sure to check out episodes two and three. And if you are an accidental entrepreneur and would like to be a guest cohost on the show and spin the wheel, just message "be a cohost, no spaces, to 1-833-463-9727 and tell us your story. See you next time.