Join us as we sit down with Connor Archbold, Founder and Co-CEO of Tracksuit.
Connor shares his compelling journey and what lead him and his co-founder Matt Herbert to start Tracksuit.
Through his story you’ll gain insights into the resilience and innovation required to launch and scale a tech venture at speed.
Ever wondered how Tracksuit developed its game-changing SaaS market research model? Connor dives deep into the strategic manoeuvres that turned a white-labeled data visualisation app into a standalone powerhouse. Discover how early commitments from customers validated their vision and propelled their growth. Understand the pivotal role of customer feedback, the balancing act of maintaining other jobs during the early stages, and the critical decisions that led to focusing full-time on Tracksuit.
Culture is the bedrock of any successful startup, and Tracksuit is no exception. We chat about the importance of fostering in-person connections and maintaining high hiring standards as the company scales. From managing the excitement and stress of scaling to balancing startup demands with family life, Connor shares invaluable advice on staying focused, avoiding burnout, and making values-based decisions.
Tune in for rich entrepreneurial wisdom, personal anecdotes, and actionable strategies for growing and managing a thriving tech venture.
You can connect with Connor via LinkedIn and check out Tracksuit.
Join us as we sit down with Connor Archbold, Founder and Co-CEO of Tracksuit.
Connor shares his compelling journey and what lead him and his co-founder Matt Herbert to start Tracksuit.
Through his story you’ll gain insights into the resilience and innovation required to launch and scale a tech venture at speed.
Ever wondered how Tracksuit developed its game-changing SaaS market research model? Connor dives deep into the strategic manoeuvres that turned a white-labeled data visualisation app into a standalone powerhouse. Discover how early commitments from customers validated their vision and propelled their growth. Understand the pivotal role of customer feedback, the balancing act of maintaining other jobs during the early stages, and the critical decisions that led to focusing full-time on Tracksuit.
Culture is the bedrock of any successful startup, and Tracksuit is no exception. We chat about the importance of fostering in-person connections and maintaining high hiring standards as the company scales. From managing the excitement and stress of scaling to balancing startup demands with family life, Connor shares invaluable advice on staying focused, avoiding burnout, and making values-based decisions.
Tune in for rich entrepreneurial wisdom, personal anecdotes, and actionable strategies for growing and managing a thriving tech venture.
You can connect with Connor via LinkedIn and check out Tracksuit.
Gratitude is one of the main feelings, like wow, how lucky are we that we've got this great opportunity, we've got this amazing team and we get to learn all these new things and take advantage of this opportunity.
Speaker 2:Connor. He almost needs no introduction in the tech system. Connor is co-founder and co-CEO of a company called Tracksuit.
Speaker 1:If it's not better than global best practice and made Tracksuit-y. It doesn't exist at Tracksuit. And that's just like our way of saying find what is best practice and make it better and then align it culturally. Love that.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, it's Greg Sheehan. Welcome to my podcast, where you will hear from a range of guests, including those from the startup world and those that have had incredibly interesting lives and some stories to tell. I would really appreciate it if you could hit the follow button and share this amongst your friends, but, as you know, time is limited, so let's get on with it and hear from our next guest. I want to tell you a little bit about desk work. Desk work is your offshoring option. If you want to save around 50% of your total headcount cost for equivalent talent across accounting, marketing, sales, your operations or your admin, then check out desk work. Honestly, if I was looking to start an accounting firm again, it would be a no brainer for me to use desk work. I've used offshoring teams before in the past. I got past my skepticism on being able to do it and it was so phenomenally successful. Go have a look at desk-workco backslash, greg, and book yourself a free discovery call to learn more about it. Better still, a free discovery call to learn more about it. Better still, mention my name and get yourself some discounts. Check it out.
Speaker 2:Now back to the show. My guest today is Connor Archbold and Connor, he almost needs no introduction in the tech system. Maybe for those outside of New Zealand, I'll give you a little bit of a background. So Connor is co-founder and co-CEO of a company called Tracksuit. I have not been able to not see Tracksuit in New Zealand I'm actually in Australia now but I saw Tracksuit at the New Zealand High Tech Awards, where one of the Tracksuit team received an award wearing none other than a tracksuit. But Connor, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm absolutely stoked to be here and we're not at the no introduction stage at all. That's crazy talk. I appreciate the sentiment. Awesome to be here.
Speaker 2:Well, it's so cool and I want to start, as I always typically do, talking a little bit about your origin story. And I tell you what. I got super excited when I saw where you went to school, because you're a Rangitoto boy, as am I. I was about 100 years prior to you, but I went there as well. And then you went to Otago. But I'd love to start with your origin story. How did you get to be here before you got anywhere near starting tracksuit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great, go to the shore as well. I'm still living on the shore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go to the shore Love the North Shore in New Zealand.
Speaker 1:My story. I mean, I guess I've got a twang. I have an American twang because I was born in the States and immigrated to New Zealand with my parents and siblings in 1999 to the wonderful shore, and grew up over there, went to Rangy and then went to Otago and that was a nice combo because Rangy is the biggest school in New Zealand and then went to Otago and that was a nice combo because Rangy is the biggest school in New Zealand, biggest high school, and then Otago is sort of A lot of people from Rangy don't go to Otago. So I met a whole other raft of individuals so that was really cool for me. And then I became a lawyer. I was a lawyer straight out of university and did that for 3.5 years and I loved that because I think I'm naturally like that strategy sort of thinking, entrepreneurial brain. But I really had details drilled into me through that three years of being a lawyer and I loved that time. I met my wife there, so that was awesome and a lot of my best friends are there and a lot of them have gone on to be entrepreneurs as well, so pretty interesting group of folks.
Speaker 1:And then I wanted to get into startups so I worked with the Ice House. I came out of that worked at the Ice House to raise a fund to launch Lightning Lab here in Auckland, which had been in Wellington a couple times. At that point I'm relatively risk-averse for maybe for a startup person not compared to the total population, but for a startup person so that was doing like running Lightning Lab is my way of learning about startups without actually having to do one myself. And then I joined one of the startups that had gone through Lightning Lab, actually in Wellington. But I'd met the Mishkuru team and founders and they were kind of one of the early darlings of the New Zealand ecosystem and there was Snapchat third party app. And they were one of the early darlings of the New Zealand ecosystem and there was Snapchat a third-party app, and they were riding the wave of Snapchat being this modern. It felt like how TikTok feels right now, something new and cool and vertical video focused, which had never been the case.
Speaker 1:So I joined that team and that's actually where I met Matt, my now co-founder. We joined on the same day in the Auckland office and then he went and led the Sydney expansion and I joined the team in New York and became COO of that business and so I came up through operations and customer success, actually through that kind of pathway, I really understood the engine of a SaaS business. And then when we both returned Matt from Australia and me from New York when COVID hit and my first daughter was on the way, so my wife and I moved back and tracksuit kind of was a very, it was an idea, it was a hypothesis, and then all of a sudden it was a business opportunity that we kind of had to take advantage of because it was flying off the shelves before we even knew what was happening. Because it was flying off the shelves before we even knew what was happening, so Matt and I jumped into it as soon as that was deemed very obvious and we worked with BBC Unavailable and TRA and I've told that story a lot.
Speaker 1:You can get into that where Tracksuit came from if you want. But yeah, that was my origin story anyway.
Speaker 2:It's super cool and I know that with Tracksuit you are definitely solving a problem that I know anybody that has a brand and lives inside a company that wants to understand its brand really struggles with, or they did up until Tracksuit came along. I had time at Nike for about five years and I can remember around the leadership table we would just debate the value of the brand and how we could track it. We used to use these really primitive spider web diagrams on the sort of attributes of the brand and it used to sit on a shelf. It would sit on a dusty shelf and we'd occasionally do it. So you were really tapping into something that brands are, by their very nature, are something that are kind of they're very hard to measure in many respects, but maybe with a lot of digital automation, digital marketing, it's got easier. How did you sort of tap into that original insight that gave you the genesis of the idea for Traxit? What was that?
Speaker 1:First of all, I really appreciate you saying that because I think about the problem Traxit solves, because you came up through management and finance functions as well, which were actually by quantifying brand a little bit, we're actually helping. One of the problems we solve for marketers is that they get buy-in from C-suite and boards and finance functions, which is the hardest part of marketing. It's no longer that we're making sure that people don't see it as the coloring in function. It's like this is real. This is building the business's success long term. So I really appreciate you saying that when Traxsuit came from.
Speaker 1:Essentially, matt and I had been working with brands in MarTech for years and we were fascinated by this modern brand trajectory where they grow really really quickly and Warby Parker is an example in the States, casper Mattress is another one but they grow really, really quickly and then they find it hard to keep that growth going. And if you read the listing documents when those companies IPO, they talk about awareness and awareness is really low, like 14% or 10%, and that's not enough to compete with incumbents in the category that have 80%, 90% awareness across the population that are actively purchasing those products. And so me and Matt have this software as a service scaling skill set, and we were sitting down with James Herman and the previously unavailable team who have the brand strategy skill set, as well as TRA, the research agency, who are very brave market researchers and forward thinkers who wanted to disrupt their own area. And with those powers combined, we came up with this software as a service market research model that actually solved the problem for brands and for marketers, rather than maybe insights people, and that was the initial idea, and so we came up with this five-page mock-up of what it might look like and we went around and had I think I had around 100 people brand managers, marketers in an Excel spreadsheet that I thought I could talk to and get warm intros to, and the moment that we were like, oh man, this is a thing was by the 68th conversation, 11 of them had committed 'd signed a sass contract for this product that didn't actually exist and we weren't.
Speaker 1:We weren't like selling snake oil or anything. It was just like we said, hey, we don't have funding for this, like, if we're going to build it, we need 10 people to sign up for it and commit. And yeah, 10 people 11 did out of those first 68 conversations. And that was the moment that we said, okay, we're going to go build it and we have these commitments, we have these customers already, and that was really impactful. It was a great way to build something, because you're actually building it alongside these early customers. So what they're saying they want, that's what you're building.
Speaker 2:And it allowed us to focus on the right things and ignore the wrong things and keep customers in the forefront of our mind yeah, it's interesting and from what I've heard and I heard you do an interview with troy hammond on the we fucking love startups podcast and massive shout out to troy and you talked about that check size, if you like that commitment from those early customers was not insignificant, like it was actually quite a decent chunk of money. Were they all large brands or were they smaller brands? What kind of customers were they early on?
Speaker 1:It was a mix. I mean, our hypothesis was around those growth company brands. So they're well-known enough and they're investing enough in brand and marketing to be making leaps, but they're not incumbents, they're not conglomerates. They haven't been around for a long time. So Sharesies was in there and still a great customer. We love them and that sort of style of that sort of size and ambition of company were what made up those early customers and we largely focus on them. Now it's expanding out a bit more. We go smaller sometimes, we go bigger sometimes and there's sort of different ways our product works for that. But that was the initial hypothesis.
Speaker 2:And did you get those customers to then kind of throw the checks in and then from there start building a basic product out with a developer? Like how did that work?
Speaker 1:The first product was done in about a month and a half. So we said, hey, you're going to get the first version of this within about a month or two months. And the first version was, like you know, we were doing surveys of the population and we built it into like a white labeled data visualization app basically you know, a fancy Power BI and it wasn't our app at all, it was just we'd collected the data and we'd serviced it in a way that was usable for the client and it sort of looked like what we'd put in the slide pack. And then we launched version two, you know, another couple months after that, and it probably took seven or eight months to actually build our own app, a standalone thing, and we were building that simultaneously alongside the white labeled version, which was what customers were using every day, while we were kind of building the true app in the background.
Speaker 2:And give us a sense of sort of some color around that. Is it just you and Matt at this point in time? Have you got any others working with you? Are you working day jobs? How did that all look in those early days?
Speaker 1:I was a full-time employee at Previously Unavailable, which is James Herman's venture studio, and I was committed to this project for a certain amount of time. I think it started off as one day a week and then it gradually moved up into three or four days a week and Matt had basically come on board as the co-founder of Tracksuit and I'd say it was like a little bit in the air as whether I would stay in tracksuit or go back to previously available, depending on how big the opportunity was. It turned out to be big enough and matt and I at one point looked at each other and we're like, okay, should we just do this thing?
Speaker 2:you're like yeah high five and then? And were they easy conversations to have at home? You know you're married, you've got a couple of young kids and probably at the time did you have children yeah, it actually was founded within four months of my daughter being born. So yeah, a couple, basically twins almost so you go home and you're like okay, so we've got a four month old and I'm gonna throw everything at this here's the thing like I'm super bullish on the venture studio model.
Speaker 1:I've done done a lot of research around how Venture Studio models work and what works and what doesn't, and I actually think that New Zealand is the perfect place for the Venture Studio model. And I've spoken about this a little bit and I don't know if you want to get into that. We have this petri dish, this beta nation. That's quite easy to access a certain number of potential customers in any field, because it's one degree of separation across all of New Zealand so we can Launch stuff here, get feedback really quickly. We've got great product and engineering talent here, very skilled, and so you can get something to MVP level really quickly and really efficiently and it also can be quite high quality. And so I actually think that New Zealand is the perfect place to launch stuff and figure out whether it's worth putting more into. And that's sort of what Vent venture studios are really good at. So there's this nice combo of like if you can have a venture studio and the risk the family risk, like you were asking is basically are you going to get paid? And the beauty of a venture studio is like yes, because we're not just building this thing. We're building a lot of things and my salary isn't solely tied to this one idea and it actually makes it easier in other startups I've been involved in.
Speaker 1:If anyone's been in startups, you know that like there are times when you maybe should have turned the tap off. You're like this juice isn't worth the squeeze. They're like let's just call it. And if you're early enough in the journey, if you haven't raised investment, if you're early enough in the journey if you haven't raised investment, if you're at a venture studio it's really easy to do that. It's like these metrics don't line up, the margin isn't there, this isn't the thing we should pursue, and you turn it off and you go work on ideas 3, 4, 5, 6. And so we had a number of ideas at TU and actually it was one of those and it just turned into this high growth, amazing opportunity, and then the snowball kept rolling.
Speaker 1:And so there wasn't any real risk from a family point of view, and I give a lot of that credit to the Venture Studio model and also to the Venture Studio model in particular in New Zealand, where you can start the ball rolling a little bit faster.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's super interesting. You hear you talking about the Vent venture studio model. It's something that I'm involved with as well and I would give a massive shout out to it too, and particularly in a place like New Zealand where, as you coined that phrase, you know the beta nation. I think I've actually never heard that. It's a really nice way of putting it. We've got a population of 5 million people. It's relatively easy to make connections across the right part of the ecosystem, but it's a big enough customer base with forward enough tech population to be able to trial things. So that's pretty cool. So you get started and you start getting early customers. You are only three years in before you start looking at it. Your second funding round is a $20 million Series A. Take us through what the last couple of years have looked like. They must have been insane.
Speaker 1:It's pretty insane, really fun, really fun, pretty insane. We bootstrapped for the first kind of nearly two years. We bootstrapped and bootstrapped from Venture Studio. So like, I guess, taking that kind of privileged-y start into account, where there was less risk and it wasn't like we were just eating noodles for two years, we started with the support of PU and TRA and we bootstrapped our way through. But we only ever used I guess I use the word bootstrap because we only ever used customer revenue to pay salaries and to pay for dev work.
Speaker 1:So we had that restriction on ourselves and we intentionally put that there because Matt and I had so much scar tissue from what we call VC validation, where it's way easier to raise Don't tell all the VCs this, but it's way easier to raise VC money than it is customer revenue. You can make a nice slide pack, you can come up with a cool idea and if you've got the right connections and you've got a way to get a foot in the door, you probably can get some level of VC funding if you have enough conversations. So if you spend all your energy doing that instead of being focused on customers, and then you have to build the thing that you put in the slide pack for VCs. You don't know whether anyone wants that. That's just what VCs thought was a good idea, so they're not customers. But anyway, we desperately wanted to only build with customer revenue and so we focused on that and that's why we use the word bootstrapped and that lasted for about 20 months. We built, we in-housed the product team. That was our biggest spending moment. We hired a few people in the first year Hamish and Michaela, sales and customer and marketing and then we slowly expanded and then we in-housed the product team all at once and brought in some devs and product folks and that was a big moment in early 2023, 2022.
Speaker 1:And then we kept building and we got to of that, like 3 million arr in 16, 17 months and we were like, man, this is going quick. One of the things that I guess we forgot was that you have like you have receivables, like a lot of that cash is tied up. You don't actually have a block, and so we'd like we kind of model these things as like we've sold this much, we think we can hire these people, and then people pay their bills 30 days, 60 days, 90 days late and you're like, oh, we actually don't have any of that money and when you're a 2-year-old startup, you can't get debt. No one's going to give you any debt selling and focus on our customers and just build this thing and drive value, because we're able to sell it as much as we. The energy that we put into sales brings in more customers and that stretches the team even more, because we were only like 10-12 people with 3 million ARR getting pulled into 4 countries. So we were like, okay, something's got to change.
Speaker 1:And actually the best thing to do was we lined up with Blackbird and Icehouse and some other strategic partners globally and raised a small round and that was really exciting. It took the pressure off of that counting how many dollars were coming in. Can we hire one more person? It allowed us to lean into growth, into Australia in particular, and now Australia is our biggest market and we've got around 15 people there, which is great. And then it took 12 months and at that point we were like, okay, we'll lean into Australia, we will test the US and UK markets and see if our product market fit is the same and then if we can prove that Australia gets all the flywheels turning and if we can prove that the product market fit in the us and uk feel the same, then we'll raise a seriesa and we thought that might take like two years and a normal startup timeline of raising every two years.
Speaker 1:But actually we, matt and I did a couple trips into the us each. We had a lot of conversations and we ended up hitting that millionaire I mark in both countries just from word of mouth and under a of conversations. And we ended up hitting that million ARR mark in both countries just from word of mouth and under a year each. And we were like, oh my God, it's happening again. We got to go and so we lined up some US partners we love Althausen Footwork and brought along the earlier partners for the ride as well and then leaned into the US. So that was February this year. We closed that round out and yes, it's been a wild ride these last couple of years. But I think the highlight is just this team Like the team that we have is just phenomenal. The culture that we've managed to hang on to throughout that growth is what Matt and I are most proud of and, yes, it's pretty exciting.
Speaker 2:So give us a sense of size of HeatCount now, like what kind of team size have you got all up now?
Speaker 1:We were 75, but we hired 10 people last month, so I guess we're going to be 85 soon.
Speaker 2:So you're operating across how many geos? Four?
Speaker 1:Four we have teams in Sydney, new York and London, but we've also opened up. We have customers in Canada.
Speaker 2:So we've got kind of five customer geos but four offices team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how do you go about building culture across four different countries, like, do you feel like you've got a culture across all of them and that is common, or does each have their own kind of unique culture?
Speaker 1:yeah, this is, I mean, it's a good question. I think we're still pretty early days in the us. You know we got five people in each in the us. Matt, my co-founder, has moved from Auckland to the UK and I think that's how we think about it.
Speaker 1:We don't think there are any shortcuts to building culture. A lot of it is in-person time. A lot of it is we repeat the values over and over again. We try to instill them through in-person connection. So Michaela, who is in plane number two and head of marketing, she's going to be heading over to the US, along with Charlotte, who was our first salesperson, and Hamish's team, and they're both going to head to the New York office and be our cultural pillars there. And Matt and I are spending a lot of time on planes. At the moment, matt's in the US at least a week out of every month and I'm there probably about a week every two months.
Speaker 1:So I guess we wear the burden and we don't see it as a burden. We put the time in and we think that that's really important. There aren't any hacks. You can't just have a bunch of slack bots that pump up the values or something. You got to just be there you got to meet people. There's a way that we show up at TrSuite, which is really important. How we show up is a big part of the culture, but also we're really tough on hiring. I think that's a big part as well. Just holding the standards extremely high on hiring has enabled us to grow this fast for one, but also it feels like everyone who's coming into the team is adding to the culture, and that culture of high care, high performance, is something we talk a lot about and that we interview for.
Speaker 2:And it feels like at a headcount of kind of 85 next month, you're heading towards that magic hundred person level which a lot of founders talk about. Getting to that point it's almost a little bit of a and I use this phrase in a good sense a bit of a break point, because you start to go once you go beyond 100, maybe you've got an extra layer of management in there. Maybe you don't necessarily know every person in the team, maybe the induction is not a phone call from you or a face-to-face, it's a video that they're watching. It gets different and it'll be really interesting to see you guys as you translate into that next era for you. But you've kind of done the startup thing for a while with lightning lab and with mish guru etc. Does that make it a lot easier starting tracksuit and kind of going through this evolution of growth that you're going through now?
Speaker 1:I mean, I think there's definitely things that you know, you learn along the way and that helps you and you you see second time, third time, founders or people that have been involved in other startups. I think you do have a bit of a leg up, especially on the early part. But right now, matt and I are leaving our comfort zone completely. We've never been here before. So everything is People talk about you're building the plane while you're flying it. But Matt and I now are like like okay, so now we're learning to build planes while building it and flying it. Like that's a whole nother level. So like we're motivated by that, we're super excited about learning. But we acknowledge that we're like leaving our comfort zone and starting to enter new territory, which, yeah, is great and all those you know.
Speaker 1:We try to see things as well like a privilege. Like it's the privilege to break your operating model and have to rethink how you do onboardings. We know that when we reach that 100-person level, things are going to change, but that's such a privilege If you're growing fast enough, if you're able to support that many people in your team. It's fun to learn and, I think, being comfortable with slowing down a little bit in order to make the right decisions is something we talk about and so that you're not kind of getting too burnt out or missing steps, you know we interviewed the team not too long ago and, yeah, everyone's number one fear was like losing the culture that we've built because we're moving too fast. And I think trying to stay conscious and be intentional about how we're building as well as what we're building, is something we think about a lot.
Speaker 2:And how does it feel going outside your comfort zone when you're trained as a lawyer and, as you say, in the startup sort of world, you are lower on risk tolerance. How does it feel then to be stepping outside things that you now can control?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's scary for sure, but it's exciting, scary, exciting, exciting. And yeah, I think the overall feeling like gratitude is one of the main feelings Like wow, how lucky are we that we've got this great opportunity, we've got this amazing team and we get to learn all these new things and take advantage of this opportunity. So I think it's awesome and Matt and I, when we started Tracksuit, we were super motivated by the opportunity and getting to build something that would help challenger brands grow and even New Zealand brands grow and take on the world. That was really motivating. But we were also really motivated by the idea of focusing on changing how startups are built.
Speaker 1:Can the venture studio model become more important in New Zealand? Can we change? We have things like transparent compensation and we really focus on a lot of that culture and maybe better benefits and good parental leave and there aren't too many people in the office after 6pm. We try to schedule messages for the next day and we're definitely not perfect by any means, but we're motivated to try and create a new way of building startups and so, as long as we're continuing to be successful, as long as we're continuing to grow, we find that being able to put in cool new initiatives that make our culture very unique is motivating, because then maybe other startups that are being built will have to do that stuff as well in order to If they want to grow in the same way and they want to have their people inspired in the same way. So we think a lot about that and that's something that kind of keeps us going for sure.
Speaker 2:You're an intelligent guy, you're a lawyer, you've done investment banking, you've been around the startup scene for a while, but is there something that freaks you out here in this current journey? Everything, yeah, everything, yeah, yeah, and it's great for other founders to hear that right yeah, yeah, like reassuring I mean.
Speaker 1:So everything broke. We were still managing the team and operating like we were 20 people when we got to 60 and everything broke. There was like a two-month period, sort of december, january, february where I was crispy I don't know if I was like fully burnt out, but but I was definitely. I'd been working hard. I'd just spent 3 months in New York and taking the family over. It was like raising the round. I was building the New York team and running the New Zealand and Australia teams after hours and it just got too much.
Speaker 1:And so we think this year is about learning how to scale the business, but also scale ourselves and figure out how to grow ourselves and the business together. And it freaks me out. That can happen really quickly. I didn't notice that I was close to the edge until it was a little bit too late, and then it took a couple months both for the company and for me to recover and like that's time you don't necessarily have. Lucky that I've got a co-ceo who could like step in and help out, but it freaks me out. But there's a lot of uncertainty and in order to do it well, there's like 10 plates spinning and one of those is like yourself and you know so.
Speaker 2:Getting good therapists, getting a good coach those things have helped a lot early this year yeah, it's interesting that you talk about that, because I think the reality of having to grow and scale a company and if you're successful in that, it's going to continue to grow and scale means you need personally to grow and scale.
Speaker 2:And if you use the analogy of it's, you know and it's probably an overused analogy in startups like climbing a mountain, there's a ton of people who've gone to base camp. There's lots and lots and lots of them, and it's kind of cool, it's kind of funky, the tents are all brightly colored, it's fun, we all hang out at the same conferences, but to go to camp one, camp two, camp three, actually you know, shit's getting real at this point and it's getting harder and your skillset has to change. Leading a company of 50 people is very different from leading a company of 500 people or 5,000 people in time, and so you, as a CEO and a leader, you're just changing how you spend your day, you're changing your skillset. So I'm pleased you raised that, because I think that is something that a lot of founders don't necessarily, you know, consider at the beginning of the journey.
Speaker 1:That's probably one of the toughest points is you grow yeah, absolutely, and you have to be pretty introspective and possibly get other people's help to be introspective, get a lot of feedback and you have to adapt because you can't be the same person that you were 12 months ago. Yeah, but it's true for actually everyone in the team like the blog they ask everyone to read when they join. I mean, one of the things we ask everyone to read when they join is this first round review give away your Legos blog. I don't know if you've ever read that, but it's essentially like.
Speaker 1:The metaphor is like when you start, you're building one Lego tower and then you're like, ooh, I got to also do marketing, I have to do customer success. And then you get to 10 things as a founder and you're like, oh, no, I got to hire someone to do each of those things. And then they all start with their own Lego block and maybe that marketer is doing marketing. And then they're like, actually there's brand marketing, there's performance marketing, there's SEO, there's that you have to hire one expert to do all of those things to get it off. And I think that that analogy for the founders here now, I'm realizing, is actually like even more. Like I just hired an EA and that EA is helping me like manage LinkedIn messages and emails, and so like handing over, like podcast interviews.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, this is an AI interface. It's very good. It's very good, it's very real. It's just like you have to constantly look at what's taking up your time and what's taking up your energy and carve it into half and get someone else to do part of it and hopefully well, almost always in my case they're better at it than I am. I'm like one of those classic generalists who's like 80% good at lots of stuff. That's my skill set is that I can do most things 80% good, and then I need to be very good at handing them over to someone who's 100 or 110% awesome at that. One specific thing.
Speaker 2:Hey, just let me pause you there for a second and tell you about some help that's available for startup founders. One of the biggest reasons startups fail is that the founders give up. They just burn out through struggling with aligning all of their people to what it is they're trying to do. It doesn't have to be like that, though. Jess Dahlberg is an expert in startup performance and she works to align your team to the performance you need so that you, as founders, can get on and scale with confidence. Simply head to jessdalbergcom. Backslash scale up. That's jessdalberg D-A-H-L-B-E-R-Gcom backslash scale up. Use promo code scale up 2024 and start removing those headaches. Let's get back to the show. What's been the toughest part of the tracksuit journey to date that maybe you really did not consider would be an issue? Was it the working capital? You know like when you're growing, you forget, actually, that people will take 30 days to pay you. I mean, what's been the toughest part of the journey so far?
Speaker 1:I mean I think, like disclaimer, that it's definitely been a pretty like blessed journey and that we've had part of market fit, which is unique and wonderful. The thing that throws us off is when we lose focus, and that's still the case, like the analogy that people always use. The overused side of thing is like drive the wedge in as deep as possible before expanding out. And I think we've occasionally like we've been driving the wedge in as deep as possible before expanding out, and I think we've occasionally We've been driving the wedge in, and the wedge in our case would be like brand tracking is one specific part of market research and you can do that. Or you can do NPS and other customer surveys and other things, or you can even do strategic partnerships that aren't just selling to that one ICP. You could expand out your customer groups, so you're selling to enterprise and mid-market and small. So there's like lots of ways that wedge is refined into an ic selling a certain product into a certain customer with a certain messaging. And they always talk about driving that wedge in as deep as possible.
Speaker 1:And I think over the three years that we've been around, we've been like I mean, I think we've driven the wedge in like should we do this other thing? And we sort of start playing around with other stuff and we immediately slow down, like everything gets way harder, and so it's been kind of fascinating to see us mess that up and then like the whole thing, and then you're like carve it back, get back to just the wedge, and then all of a sudden we start speeding up again. And so, yeah, the hard thing has been saying no to opportunities. I guess that's a great problem to have when you're a pro market fit. But staying focused, saying no to things that seem like they might be a smart move but actually just end up distracting that's the beauty of bootstrapping, I think as well If I can encourage other people to just use customer revenue to pay bills and build product is that you have to stay focused, and so it forces that for longer than you might do it otherwise.
Speaker 1:And yeah, so the hard part for us is sticking to our guns, sticking to the wedge, and then maybe the other part is in trying to be intentional with culture and trying to keep the standards really high while hiring. We've done that, but there have been lots of really difficult conversations where you need someone and you run the whole application process all the way through to the end, and there's a bunch of really good candidates but they're not the best possible person you ever envisaged for that role. And then we say no and it's like, oh my god, we have to go back. It's like another three months away before we find this person and basically whoever it is that's been lacing up their boots to do that job and their job is like another three months before that person joins what? So that's also been really difficult, but I also stand by those decisions because it's helped us retain the culture and sort of that go slow to go fast mentality.
Speaker 2:And I think Steve Jobs used to talk about. You know, be slow to hire and quick to fire, because it is just so critical that you hire the very best talent and actually that A players hire A players and hang out with them and D players kind of tend to hire D players and so having a high bar for your hiring, you know that's amazing that you've been able to kind of hang on to that, even though it's tough because you've got jobs to do and people are getting stressed and that sort of thing. So you talked before about you can get to 80% of basically everything. Is that your superpower? Or is there something that you would go leave me to do this all day long and I'm pretty good at it Like, is there something that you would say that's my superpower?
Speaker 1:I think that's. That's up there. That's one of the things that I rely on, you know, for who I am and how I operate. It's like I've never done that before, but I'm going to go do it, don't worry, I got it and it ends up going pretty well not perfect, not the best in the world, but it can be pretty good. That's up there.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I do that maybe I didn't know before TrackSuit was something that I did well, but I've now kind of figured that out is thinking about things from a first principles basis, looking at a situation and I guess not seeing why it's done that way the status quo doesn't necessarily make sense and then able to quickly kind of synthesize something that makes more sense, at least to us, or maybe is more aligned to our culture and how we're building, and that doesn't take insane amount of effort. And you know, it's sort of a creative problem solving muscle that I'm able to flex and a lot. When you read about that I think I thought I always of a creative problem-solving muscle that I'm able to flex and when you read about that I thought I always called it creative problem-solving. But I think now that I've read more books and I'm learning to build the plane while flying it. I realize that's sort of a first principles-basis thinking that's what other people call it and I think that's one of my superpowers that I'm lucky to have.
Speaker 2:And do you find that tough when there's lots of fires burning superpowers that I'm lucky to have. And do you find that tough, when there's lots of fires burning, to kind of strip it back?
Speaker 1:to first principles. It is tough, but maybe not as tough as others find it, and that's why it ends up being a superpower. It's hard, but you know one of our operating principles. The thing we talk about is like global best practice improved and then made track CD, and so that's the standard, Like if it's not better than global best practice and made tracksuit-y. It doesn't exist in tracksuit and that's just our way of saying find what is best practice and make it better and then align it culturally.
Speaker 1:Love that and that's our first principles thinking, and historically that wasn't always as possible, but now you can ask ChatGPT to write you a 12-month customer journey for a mid-market SaaS product and it can do a global best practice job. It can research, it can find all of the ways that you should manage a 12-month customer journey. So that's the global best practice. It's pretty easily accessible and then you should be able to look at that and say, Well, this doesn't make sense for these reasons and then change it, and then you should be able to, based on our values and some of our views of the world, you should be able to update it in a way that feels more attractive, and so we hold that standard across the whole company and encourage everyone to just call out anything that feels just global best practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a pretty high bar. That's fantastic. So global best practice is the starting point, then improve it and then ultimately it's track city. I love that Now. You talked before about getting to a point of being pretty close to being burnt out, and I like your phrase of being crispy. How do you avoid that? Now? What do you do to recharge?
Speaker 1:Getting an EA was really important to me because I'm bad at saying no and working on getting better at saying no, with therapists, coach people that are much smarter than me who can give me the tools to do that.
Speaker 1:That's not a quick fix, that's like, hey, let's dive into your past and figure out how you ended up here as a people pleaser. So then getting an EA who can do that for me was like the immediate fix. It was like, okay, yeah, yeah, maybe in a year I'll be better at saying no because I can put up boundaries, but I need something now. So, yeah, hiring to solve that for myself, knowing that that is not my skill set, handing over that lego of like managing my calendar was a huge part of that and, like you know, if you ask anyone on the team, I'd say, yeah, three weeks ago I became a different person. I started sleeping more, I started exercising again, got some color in my cheeks, so it's all rosy over here now that my, my ea is joined and you've got two children under five at home as well and your wife, so you being able to be present for hanging out with them.
Speaker 2:Do you find that you do incredibly long days and you know you don't spend enough time with your kids, or do you manage that pretty well with your calendar management?
Speaker 1:I have to create that culture at tracksuit that isn't work all the time. So, yeah, I'm pretty good. I sort of start my days early 6 37 am and I don't do anything with the family in the morning, I'm sort of out the door, but then I get home at 4pm and I do the afternoon shift and occasionally particularly before Matt moved to the UK I had to log in late and do some UK calls or investor calls. But now that he's over there, that's a huge benefit. I can sort of just spend that time with wife and kids in the evening. Yeah, I love that. So yeah, it's actually you become much better at prioritizing when you become a parent.
Speaker 1:It seems absolutely wild looking at it from the outside. You could have a one and three-year-old and build a company like Traxsuit and say that you don't work all the time. But it's been possible and I think I'm a different human than I was before kids. I probably fluffed around a lot more when I was at work. I probably would spend more time choosing a Spotify playlist to plug into my headphones or something, and now I'm just like I'm in and out Seven till four, bang, and then I'm home. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And the reality is and I was having a conversation with Cecilia Robinson from my Food Bag on an interview the other day and we were talking about young children and by the time your child is 18, apparently, statistically, you have spent about 90% of the total time you will ever spend with them in their life. So, and one in three, it's a huge part of that percentage and journey. So good on you, because I think there'll be people who are in startup life who maybe, you know, could spend a bit more time at home and a bit more time with their kids. You'll never regret that. You'll never, ever regret that time. Final question you know you're with a bunch of people that obviously are incredibly high performers in the tracksuit team and those people will be a source of inspiration for you and you'll be learning from them Outside the team. Where do you get your inspiration? What do you listen to? Is it music? Do you listen? You read books, like? Where do you get inspired?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the team are a huge part of the inspiration for me they're the biggest part Absolutely. My kids and my wife is absolutely brilliant, so I usually run most ideas by her and she improves them and indexed. But I think, like I'm one of those people who, you know, I need the downtime in order to come at it in a creative way. So, like I'm listening to music often on the commutes or something, I will have some of my best ideas. So listening to music is very important.
Speaker 1:I think there's too much advice out there right now. One of jeff bezos's camera was one of his principles or just something he talks about a lot. But he sort of says that if you've gotten to a certain level of success like if you manage to make something work, you have part of my kit fit you probably got there by making lots of gut decisions and so as long as it's a two-way door like it's something you can reverse if you need to the best thing you can do is just to make more decisions and so to move faster. You just have to make more decisions in order to move forward and as long as it's a two-way door, you can't regret it that much because you can just exit out of that decision.
Speaker 1:A lot of the advice out there there's so many books, there's so many things you can just exit out of that decision. A lot of the advice out there. There's so many books, there's so many things you can digest in order to help yourself improve and a lot of them end up just making you sort of second guess, your gut decisions. So I try to have a few absolute things that I follow and listen, but I don't try to expand beyond that too much. I choose a couple of favorites and then I also make sure that I have, like, ample time for quiet and the music and to be able to like let my brain go on its own little journey. So, yeah, it's important to me to have both a couple north stars that I listen to regularly and lots of times with quiet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, ultimately, the decisions that you're making and the ones that are flowing up to you, to make other big ones. And to make the big ones, you have to have the quiet right, you have to have the ability to make a decision. I think it's I think it's Peter Thiel who talks about only making one massive decision per year and therefore you need thinking time, you need space away from the email slack, you know, etc.
Speaker 1:just to be able to really be thinking about focus and that sort of thing I think big decisions come up, definitely, but also the smallest decisions still boil to the top in a lot of ways, and one thing that I'm learning to do more and more is you sit with the little things that come up and you just make those decisions a hundred percent in line with like values and you really showcase the values over and over again.
Speaker 1:I've found that to be really important in this current phase, and it's like in this 50 to 100 phase, a lot of the stuff still comes up. The only way you should be making decisions is based on the values and the principles. So instead of saying, oh, this is how I would write that, you just say global best practice, improved matrixity, and that's the feedback. It's like that's what we do here, because otherwise the little things keep boiling up and you have to keep solving those problems. But it's's like you have to have those operating principles in place and you have to just remind people over and over again it's a lovely way of synthesizing those decisions, isn't it?
Speaker 2:because you're actually giving almost a codified way to your team of how to handle a decision on a small problem or a mid-sized problem, because the values are going across the top of them, and therefore it's a nice way of deconstructing the problem to come up with some sort of pretty obvious solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the hope is that when stuff starts boiling up eventually, when someone's about to take something to you, they're like I think Connor's just going to say global best practice and proof of matrixity. So I should not even do this. I know the answer yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2:It has been an absolute joy to talk to you. I've been looking forward to this interview for a while and you've been a busy guy. You have been a super, super busy guy. I think there's going to be a bunch of founders out there who will have picked up a lot from listening to this. I'll make sure there's ways that people can connect with you on LinkedIn and with Tracksuit in the show notes to the episode, but I just really, really want to thank you for your time today. It's been fantastic, oh it's been wonderful chat.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Greg. I'm so glad we got to help the time.
Speaker 2:Hey, don't forget to check out Deskwork, the team behind you, being able to build high performing offshore teams for your startups and SMEs. It's deskworkco. Backslash, greg, and go and save yourself some hard-earned money.