Noah Jacobs: Hedge fund manager turned software founder | #32

Transcription

Matt: Noah Jacobs founded and ran a hedge fund from his University of Michigan dorm room. Now, years later, he's the co-founder of BirdDog. What's even more impressive about Noah and his co-founder are that they've cracked the code to LinkedIn and are booking over 30 demos per week, which is every B2B SaaS founder's dream. You won't want to miss this episode. It's so value packed. Let's get right into it. So Noah, just for the audience, we always like to start with just a quick overview of who you are, what you're working on. Daniel: So, I'm a co-founder of BirdDog, and really what we do at BirdDog is we work with sales teams to figure out the most important signals for them that are actually related to the companies that they're selling to. So stepping back, my co-founder and I did, like, research for sales teams. We were doing a bunch of manual research, spreadsheets, and we were finding data. One of the clients we were working with, what they did, I'm just going to paint the whole thing by giving an example. They worked with police dispatches to reduce the amount of time it took the people on the phone to answer and resolve the call. So we found for them some quotes from a chief of a very big police department saying, this is our number one priority. We're trying to fix it. So we give that to them, and they book a pretty, pretty big meeting and really are able to do so because they connect their value prop to what's actually going on at the prospects organization's. Matt: So we help salespeople do that at scale by understanding what they're actually selling, what problem they're actually solving, and then finding data at the companies that they're trying to sell to that they can relate to their value prop. So in a nutshell, that's what we do at scale with data. Daniel: Cool. So that makes a lot of sense. And the problem that you guys are trying to solve, I can imagine is a painful one for a lot of sales teams. Can you walk us back even further though, before the idea of BirdDog even came and for the audience, like we, we've talked to Jack, your co-founder previously, but for their benefit, can you also just explain how you and Jack met and then, you know, all of the events that took place leading up to actually working on this idea? Matt: Okay, it's a long story, so you're going to have to interject, cut me off if we go anywhere. Freshman year in college, I went to the University of Michigan with Jack. We were both business students and we both liked trading, trading stocks and options. And the problem was, as I'm sure you guys may be experienced, all of the clubs at the business school, all of the ostensibly finance clubs, were finance clubs, but they were really like pre-investment banking, which for the audience, that is not the same thing as like investing or trading, like trading options. Investment bankers help people, you know, close very big deals typically. So what we were interested in was trading options on our phones, walking between classes. Daniel: So we started this club, Theta Capital, and that's, that's actually, I'm wearing a shirt. It's really faded, so you probably can't see it. But we started this options trading club and that's how me, him, and a couple other guys. And that's really how we, how we met. And then, you know, we knew each other then throughout all of all of college. And then senior year, we lived together in the same house. And throughout college, I was really leaning into the finance stuff. So I actually started a small fund with another friend and I was running that. So that was my focus during college. And near the end of college, we had started trying to build out some software to track the equities that we were trading in the fund. And we were trying to sell that to people, but we were having a really hard time. So Jack got on the phone with somebody and he's like, Hey, will you, this some dude off Twitter. He's like, Hey, will you pay $5 for the month for the software? The guy's like, no. And Jack's like, okay, will you pay $1 a month for this software? And the guy was like, no. And then Jack's like, okay, will you pay $1 forever for the software? And the guy just says, No. And we're like, we're totally doing something wrong. Luckily, at about the same time as that, we had some salespeople who more or less stumbled upon the software for other purposes. And they really liked it. They said they were using it to monitor the companies they were selling to. And we're like, wait a minute. Daniel: There's definitely something here. So that kind of set Jack and I off down that road. We spent like six months doing a lot of manual research for these teams. That's anecdote I gave you. This was 2024, the first half of 2024. So we did a lot of manual research there and did really, really in-depth stuff with with some of these clients of ours at the time and really figured out kind of the, the data that was important. I'm sure I glazed over a lot. I know that's a lot of information. Matt: So like, by going to these companies and doing research, do you mean like you're almost doing what bird dog does now, but manually? Daniel: We're doing a lot of manual research. Yeah. We were like picking through PDFs from like, you know, at the time, like three years ago, that had like four or five year initiatives on them. We were like, yeah, board meeting minutes, finding long running initiatives, seeing where the budget is, getting quotes from press releases on websites that nobody looked at. So we were really figuring out how to find this information manually, which when you know that it becomes quite a bit easier to actually automate something. Matt: Are you learning to code at this time too, or? Daniel: Yeah. So I started coding in 2022. I took one class at Michigan, EECS 183. That's how you pronounce it. It's EECS. I don't even know what it stands for, but it was a, it was the first class. That's like electrical engineering. I think it is. Basically computer science. Yeah, that's a classic paper round too. Daniel: Yeah, so I took I took EECS 183, 2022, I want to say first to winter semester then. And then after that, I kind of just started doing like random fun projects that I was interested in. I had some people build out some software for the fund and started kind of learning through osmosis. And then when we were doing the software to track the publicly traded equities, that's when I started coding more. 2023, my final semester, that fall semester in college, I spent a ton of time coding. I would wake up at like, I was taking two math classes that were like, I'm a little arrogant, so I skipped more math classes than I should have. And I was way in over my head. And at the same time, I was trying to learn how to code. So I would like get up at like 5 AM just so I had time to do this. Like 5 AM to 8 AM, I was coding, trying to build out these different parts for the product. And that was really helping me learn a lot. And then, I mean, I guess at some point, you know how to code, you know? Like there's a moment. I want to ask you about like the hedge fund that you started in your dorm room, because I think that's really interesting. Noah's Ark Capital Management, right? Yeah. Great name. So there's two Noahs for clarity and I'm not a total narcissist. I didn't know that the Pastry was after the S. Matt: So, you know, up until that point, maybe it looked like to someone from the outside that you were probably, you potentially would just continue running it or go down like a more finance-focused route. What kind of pushed you more in like this more entrepreneurial direction of starting your own company versus like continuing to maybe run Noah's Ark or joining like a quantitative trading firm or something like that? Daniel: Yeah, so I, part of it, I was really liking coding. Like I was enjoying it a ton. I was like, and just code things and then they do things and the feedback loop is a lot tighter because we were doing a little bit of a longer term strategy. So the feedback loop is different. I really like being able to sit there and press enter and then the code runs and you see if it does it or not. And then you can iterate on it and move a lot faster with that. So for my brain, that was, that was working a lot better and I was enjoying it more. And then, yeah, I don't know if I would recommend starting a fund as your first business in college. There's a lot of logistical challenges with doing it. And yeah, it's, it's hard. It's a really hard thing to do. You know, if you, let's just hypothetically say you get a check from somebody for a hundred thousand dollars. Let's just say you get that and you're managing that. So you're getting a 2% fee on that money every year. So that's $2,000 a year. Daniel: If you sell a piece of software for a hundred thousand dollars, you know how much money you get? A hundred thousand dollars. And if you have software margins, it's a pretty good chunk of that. So there's a different level of scale that you have to hit when you're starting something like a finance business that I don't think I understood or comprehended right away. And I kind of learned that the hard way, hard way. And it's a very, very different business model and probably would not recommend doing it. So did Jack convince you to close the hedge fund and go all in on bird dog or what was that decision making process like to eventually close down the hedge fund? Matt: Sure. So I actually didn't close it down. I had a business partner and I left and he kept running it. So that was, that was part of it. He could, you know, keep running it on his own and it's a little bit more sustainable that way when there's only one person on it. So that was part of the decision. But yeah, I mean, another big part of it is I felt like I could not do two things at once. I felt like I was going crazy trying to do two and really it was three things. I was still in school. So I really felt like I was doing too much and that it was not going to work or hit any sort of significant threshold if I was doing too many things at once. So I felt like I was spread too thin, is definitely another element of it. And I decided to just double down on what I thought at the time was the best bet. Matt: And I think now it turns out it kind of was. Obviously hindsight 2020, you don't know, but I do think I ended up making a pretty good decision there. So that was the other thing. I didn't want to try to do like three things and succeed in nothing. So I was just graduating college. I left it to the other guy. He ran it for another year or two. And then I went all in on the sales stuff. Daniel: So you're all in on the sales stuff. You're doing this manually, almost like the AI does it now. When did you make the decision? How did you make that decision to eventually say, I'm going to go all in and spend the time to actually code this, as opposed to doing it manually? Matt: Yeah. You know, that's a kind of a complicated question. Because there was, we were Jack and I were starting it with a couple other guys and there was this whole team we had. And, you know, we just weren't necessarily seeing eye to eye on it. So effectively, effectively Jack and I had a fresh start at some point in there, midway through 2024. And at that point, it's like starting from zero. So what are you going to do? And neither him or I wanted to put ourselves in a position where we were doing 40 hours of manual research a week because we're just giving ourselves a job. So at that point, it's like, how do we actually build something that's like super automated from the start here? Daniel: So today, are you like the sole developer for BirdDog? You don't have like a team or anything like that? It's all you. Matt: It's just two of us, man. Me and Jack. And I'm doing all the backend coding. Daniel: Do you use any freelancers, anything like that? Matt: No, no. Yeah. And Jack doesn't do any coding either. He does the front end. We use a no-code solution for that. And that's actually super important because A, I hate JavaScript and I don't, I don't, I don't like having to be front end. That means I can focus all of my engineering efforts on the backend exclusively, which is where we're going to drive a lot of, which where we do, and we, where we will derive a lot of our alpha from, like a lot of our edge on anybody else, just like focusing on that, technically. Daniel: Got it. That makes a lot of sense. So both you and your co-founder Jack post pretty frequently on LinkedIn. How did that start? And yeah, let's just start there because there's a whole rabbit hole we can go down on LinkedIn. Matt: So it was back in 2024, first half of it, I made like a post. It was a very simple post and I did not have any connections at the time. I had maybe 700 connections and we had like three inbound off of it. I'm like, what is this? You're telling me people are coming to me? Keep in mind, I had just done this massive email campaign to like University of Michigan alumni, like salespeople. I was just emailing them. I'm like, I need advice. I want to talk to you. So we put in all this effort, got all these calls. It was great. And then one LinkedIn post and we get three inbound. Daniel: And we're like, what? What? You're telling me I don't have to send out hundreds or thousands of emails to talk to people? I can make one post and multiple people will come to me? That was kind of like a light bulb moment, if you will. And then it just kind of took on, took off from there at some point. Matt: How are you thinking about posting? Like, what was, what was that first post and how has the strategy kind of evolved from there? Daniel: I can't really remember the post exactly, but it was something along the lines of, here's the thing we're doing. Here's the product or service we're offering. Super excited about it. Here's when it's coming out. The classic, right? Like excited to announce. Matt: Yeah. We didn't use the, we didn't use that with the cupcake picture everybody used. Daniel: We didn't, you didn't use that. It was a photo of something else, I'm sure. But it was, it was really, we might've been our logo. But it was, uh, because we had just pivoted from the finance stuff and we felt like we had finally got something. So it's like, announce it, see what happens. And that, that was kind of the first post. It was like very, very much, let's just kind of see what happens. Like in kind of like a random, almost a random bet and kind of worked. Matt: Were you trying other social media platforms too? Daniel: No, no, we did not. Uh, no, I tried Twitter a little bit and I did not pick up as much. I didn't get any inbound from it right away. It's, you know, dopamine. Daniel: Where, where, where do I get the dopamine? I got the dopamine. Matt: Do you think that's because there's less like sales reps or your ideal customer on X or maybe they're like more active on LinkedIn? Daniel: So LinkedIn is absolutely awesome for what we do because to your point exactly, our ideal customer lives on LinkedIn. A lot of salespeople use LinkedIn to book business. So yeah, they're already on LinkedIn. Matt: That makes a lot of sense. I've heard from other people that there is a decent number of salespeople on Twitter and even a decent number of salespeople on TikTok. Some people have told me this, but we've kind of just been continuously doubling down on the one channel until we hit a certain threshold. And then we'll look at investing in other things a little bit more seriously or thoroughly. And just to be clear, like you guys don't spend on like paid ads on LinkedIn. It's all purely organic marketing between you and Jack. Daniel: Yes. Matt: Incredible. And Jack mentioned you guys were, for the audience's benefit, these guys are booking a lot of demos. A lot. A lot. Daniel: Yeah. Matt: Do you want to talk a little bit about that as well? Daniel: Yeah. I mean, I mean, the thing is, that's why we do it because we book demos, right? If like we were just going to give a little like like and get impressions or whatever, we wouldn't do it. But I mean, I don't know what numbers he gave you, but like, I think like one of his posts booked like 60 demos in like a week or something crazy like that. Daniel: And it's like, that's not uncommon for us to have like just completely booked out calendars. Like I was actually going on a trip this weekend and I canceled last minute because we were booked out for like two weeks. So, and then my Friday and Monday opened up and like I had between the two days, like between 10 and 15 calls appear on my calendar, like after opening those, those two slots up. So it's like a lot of pressure on it, you know, right now. And we're really just, we don't know how long that will last for. We're very grateful for it. And we just really want to make sure that we're capitalizing on that moment while we have it, because it's super valuable to have like all of that come to you. It's a lot easier than being having to be more proactive and go out and watch them. Matt: Yeah. And you never know when it's like the LinkedIn algorithm could change and then it could, you could not get demos. Right. And if that happened, we have to figure something else out, obviously. But it's like, we want to ride it as much as we can while it's there. How do you think about your LinkedIn strategy? Are you just, are you scheduling posts a week in advance? Are you writing down shower thoughts that are turning into LinkedIn posts? Yeah. Or do you have it like bucketed into categories of, you know, pure ads or how you think about LinkedIn strategy? Daniel: Yeah. So full disclosure, Jack is way better at this than me. I've learned a lot from him. Matt: So this is going to be probably redundant information to what he said. Daniel: Well, I mean, you still have like 10,000 followers. You're not doing awful. Matt: Yeah, we're, we're doing okay. So I, um, this, I, I write a blog every Sunday and I just do that as like a fun thing. I enjoy that a lot. Daniel: Great blog. Matt: Thank you for saying it. And then after that, I start writing LinkedIn content on Sundays and I'll write between three and five posts and I'll schedule them out for the week. Today, I ended up doing five. And one of the most important things I've found is definitely the hook. And it's kind of like talking like a perpetual tweet is the current meta. Like maybe the meta will change, but it's like, you know, really spicy hook and then talk. Looking like a perpetual tweet after that seems to be the stuff that gets the most impressions and hook. But you know, the more honest I am, the better it seems to do. And when I say honest, just like raw or telling a story, too, seems to be very important. It's like one of my posts that did really well recently was just telling that story I told you about like the 5 to 8 a.m. coding thing. Had a lot of engagement. So like actually telling a story, It's like the thing that's unique to you, you know, nobody can really copy that. That's a real thing. You can't like prompt GPT to make that up, I don't think. And if you could, it still wouldn't be right. There's definitely something there. But then also, sometimes it's just random stuff. Matt: Like some dude posted last week, he's like, if you do, if you do 10 push-ups and you're a founder, I'll give you $100. You guys saw that picture. He's like, I'll give you $100. And I'm like, deal. So I just took a video of me doing 10 pull-ups. And then that thing ripped too. Daniel: $100? Did he pay you? Matt: He sent me. He sent me the money. Ronaldo is a man of his word, if anybody is wondering. I got the money. I haven't spent it yet. I think I might get a, like a dose of place here a lot. Madre's dos. I'm probably going to spend it all on that. Daniel: I, I think the reason, you know, I love that post too, when you're talking about coding and your senior year. It's because of the emotion. We're just talking to Julia about this before because GPT can't copy that. And that's what's something that you can write and that you can connect with people on that no one else has. That's, I like that a lot. Matt: Yeah. I mean, what are you, you're both like very good at this. What are you guys seeing in terms of like stuff that's working on LinkedIn? Daniel: Yeah, I definitely think like the unfiltered, raw, authentic thoughts is something that, I mean, like you mentioned, we were just talking with Julia Alvarenga. She's seen crazy engagement on her posts and a lot of her posts are, one, very storytelling driven. And then two, they often are very raw, authentic, kind of like the things that maybe everyone is thinking, but nobody wants to say. Is how I would best put it. Matt: Or maybe like the things that kind of get discussed or thought of behind closed doors, but putting it out into the public domain and a lot of people do resonate with it as a result. So I think those personally on my account as well, like I've seen really good engagement with authenticity, things like that because I think on LinkedIn, it's the most buttoned up platform, right? So it's very easy to stand out when you do something that's like funny or humorous or you know, very authentic. Daniel: Pull-ups as well. Matt: Yeah, yeah. I totally, totally agree that it seems like the and it seems like the best way to do. I feel best about content like that. It's like very raw and authentic. Seems to be the best. It's the most true, which is important. I love your blog too. It's so, I mean, like I like reading it on Sundays. And it does definitely have a lot of that emotion for me. I'm curious why you stick to just your website as a blog and not posting those on LinkedIn or making another LinkedIn pitch that, if you've thought about that. Daniel: Well, I repurposed the blog for a post. So every Monday, the post I make is typically just the blog, but like rewritten for LinkedIn in like a very short form. And then I link to the blog below that. So I do repurpose it on LinkedIn. Yeah, I don't know. I've I've thought about it, like doing other things with it, but I really enjoy doing it. I love writing and I this is something I can do. I mean, I've done it for like 123 weeks in a row now. Daniel: And it's something that I know I could do. I'm going to write a book eventually. And it's something I know I could keep doing for the next five years, just because I just enjoy it so much. I really do like writing. And because of that, it's like, I can just kind of do it for forever, you know? Yeah, I think there's something to do it. Doing something because you enjoy it, not necessarily because you're trying to. Matt: Sure, yeah. Reach a million people because of it. For the audience, can you talk a little bit more about the blog? Like, what are you writing about? Is it similar to what you're building at BirdDog or completely separate? Daniel: Yeah, it's just whatever I'm interested in. Like, like this morning I was kind of talking about what did I write about this morning? This morning, I wrote about just being aggressive with iterations. Like, so it's in what I was talking about is, you know, if you're a professional athlete, there's this thing where you're like Kimora. Do you guys like martial arts? Matt: Yeah? Muay Thai. Daniel: Muay Thai? Okay, I've done a little bit of Muay Thai, but I'm much more of a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Have you done any of that? Matt: I've done a little bit of like the traditional jiu-jitsu stuff. Daniel: Like, allegedly, he would do an hour of judo against a tree. He would do 100 throws. He would do a hundred entries. He would do randori, which is just actual judo against somebody else. And the list goes on and on. And it's absolutely great. But that's, I say that, and you guys probably know other professional athletes you can think of. And you're like, oh, the same legend is true for like Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali or whoever it is. I think that's a really interesting thing that is not necessarily, there's something different when you're doing something like writing or coding, where for some reason people are like, You get fixated on this output where it's like, I'm coding this thing and it needs to be perfect, but it's the exact same thing as a guy like Kimura. It's like if you're coding for three hours a day, the output doesn't matter so much. Like you're still getting those repetitions. And I think that's like very true and very important. So things like that, where it's like just how I view the world, really, and the fact that I'm viewing coding as a performance sport is, you know, it's something unique that maybe isn't so obvious to other people. So I like sharing those things and doing so really helps me understand the thoughts more. Because one of the things I really realized at the start is I was not thinking as clearly as I thought, as I thought I was. I would like have this concept in my head, and I'm like, this is so good and true. Daniel: And then I would start writing it. I'm like, that's bullshit. Like, wait a minute, I can't make this consistent. Like that contradicts that. But when you start writing something out on paper, it so hardens the idea and it just forces you to be brutally honest with it. It's like Paul Graham talks about it a ton. Like writing, if you write good, I don't know exactly what he says, but it's something along the lines of, the better you write, the more clearly you're thinking. Like to write very clearly, you also have to think very clearly. So that's a very, very important thing that feels like it's a really high leverage way to understand myself and the world a lot more. Matt: I absolutely love that and uh resonate with so much of the stuff that you said around like the repetitions and overcoming like the perfectionism of, I think it's a, it's a big mindset shift of going from, okay, maybe like, I want this piece of content or this code, this tool that I'm building to be absolutely perfect before I show it to the world versus like, okay, let me just realize that 80% good 100% of the time is better than 100% perfect 0% of the time. And also on the point about writing forcing you to clarify your thoughts. Because oftentimes we'll have a lot of random disparate ideas floating through our heads. Right. And we think it all makes sense. And we kind of have like an intuitive, like, oh, this is like what I believe, or this is what I think about something. Daniel: But the moment that you're forced to put it on paper, uh, or even just like explain it to someone who has no context on it, I feel like it really forces you to confront whether or not you understand that thing just as well as you think you do. So I think that's a great way to, to put it into practice with the blog because you're forcing yourself to write about your ideas every week. Matt: Yeah, I could not say that better myself. Like, it forces you to be real. It forces you to be realistic and honest with yourself. I think a co-founder is great for that too, because sometimes, you know, even with this podcast, I'll get ideas of whether it's segments or guests and things to write and I'll send it to Matt and it's just another pair of eyes, like a sanity check before I even hit send. I'm like, wait, like, should I, like, you know, it's, it's an important exercise. Daniel: Yeah, that is, I totally, Jack is such a great co-founder for that reason because he's so no bullshit. Like, uh, I have that engineering mind where maybe you're on a sales call or something. I've had to like work on this very heavily. And somebody gives you feedback, and the first thing you do, the engineering brain says, oh, how can I make the product better to address this? But at the same time, there's that sales brain where it's like, Hold up. Matt: Is this actually the problem or do they just not realize they can do this other thing with the platform? Why are they complaining about what's the underlying thing and what can I say right now to make sure they're getting the important value out of it, even if the UI isn't exactly what they wanted because it's never going to be exactly what they wanted. But Jack's great at that because like, just like, let's not build things that we don't need to build, which is very, it's a very strong and important discipline, especially when there's only two guys, like the constraints are insane, you know, like we did not raise capital. There's only two of us. There are only so many hours in the day. So we have to be insanely careful with what we invest in. And, and everything is an investment, by the way, time, actual capital. Those are the, you have time and that's your main resource. And then you also have capital. And that's also a resource. And you have to be like very careful with, with both of them. Daniel: Yeah. How do you guys decide how to allocate your resources? That's a terribly complicated question. I think one of the big things is figuring out if, so it changes because at the very beginning, when you don't have any customers and you just have people you're kind of talking to, it's like trying a bunch of small things to get them to pay as fast as possible. It's like, how rapidly can we get this from nothing to something that they're actually paying for? That's very important. Daniel: And then once you start getting a few of those people, I think it starts to shift a little bit where it's, now it's like a gradient ascent, if you're into math at all, but it's like, how do we go from where we are up the hill towards the holy grail? Because now you actually have some direction and you can start optimizing or just going further in that direction. So I think it's understanding what things, once you start having your course of customers, what things do they actually care about, which is not exactly what they tell you they care about. And you have to be careful. You don't get caught on some like local maxima where it's like, one thing we did that was super great in, I don't remember what This was been made in February or March. We had a bunch of churn. It might have been April. We had some point where we had a bunch of churn all at once. And what we did is we put out a spreadsheet and we just did two features. Like, so we wrote everybody's name on a spreadsheet, everybody who churned, and we put out two features. I can't remember what they were. One was like, is an individual. Other one is like, doesn't really know, told us that they didn't really know what they were looking for. It was something like those two very simple features. And for each of the people who churned, at least one of those was true, if not most. Daniel: So, is that clear? The churn, and we figure out that the commonality between those, those people who churned was a lot of them were solo individuals, and a lot of them told us explicitly, I don't really know who I'm selling to yet. So it was like, that was a very big pattern. And we figured that out early, which meant going forward, we didn't necessarily listen to people who have those two things as much, because there was something off about them for what we're doing, right? Matt: So we doubled down on the people who didn't churn, and the people who were like the people who didn't churn, and figure out what did they like. So there's a lot of filtering you have to do, because it gets very, very, very noisy, very fast. And that's a benefit of having two people because it's less noisy when there's two people. When you have a, I've been on teams of like five, and that's, you don't get anything done. It's terrible. You're just all sitting there, like getting in your little powwow, and it's like everybody has a different idea. And then talk quickly outpaces action. And that's not it. I'm sure there's a way to do a team of five equal people and make it work, but not for me. It's very challenging. Daniel: How do you go about working with Jack? Because I'm sure there are a million updates on BirdDog every day, whether you're about to sign a big customer, Jack talked to someone and now you're talking to them. Something about a LinkedIn post that may be exciting. Daniel: And you can send texts at so many times. Like I sometimes worry about this with Matt, like, am I sending him too many texts? Should I batch this? How do you go about actually working to not distract your co-founder too? Matt: Well, for one, we respect the fact that the other one might be busy. So if I send a text and I don't hear from him, it doesn't matter. And if he sends a text and I don't hear from him, it doesn't matter. It's like, we both know that we're doing other things. So there's like a lot of trust to it, where it's like, no, like a nervous attachment style, like not, not that very much on that. We also talk like typically at least once a day in the evening. And we'll just like rapid fire debrief on all the important things that happened. So like when we get on the phone, I might like say like, here were the 10 calls. Not interesting. Not interesting. Really interesting for this reason. I said this, this was good on this call. This user said this. I think that's important. And then like, he'll do the same, like rapid fire through all the conversations and important things that happened. And that helps a lot. It'll just kind of like rapid fire, say everything that's important. Daniel: And then we're both processing the same information, but we're also filtering for each other because it's like, I'm not going to tell him every minute detail of every fucking sales call, right? Like I'm not going to tell him like, Oh yeah, this discovery call went bad because like this person like just had like family. It's like, no, no, nobody cares. It's like focusing on the important parts. So we're filtering for each other, which, which helps. Matt: Are you sending a lot of texts to each other during the day? Daniel: We do. We do send texts in Slack. We send both texts in Slack to each other. And that's typically, I don't know if there's a pattern, but typically like Slack for like things that should be fixed. If there's like a bug that one of us sees, we'll just send it to the other one and like Slack or whatever. Matt: I'm taking notes for Matt and I too, because I think it's hard. Like, I don't necessarily know the cadence of like, you know, should it be a text or should it wait for just the nightly debrief? Daniel: For us, it's like anything that I think it's more like anything we really don't want to forget as a text. And then like there's the natural filtering is good because like if it's not that important, If you didn't remember. Not all the time. Like sometimes I'll forget a very important conversation, but I'll usually remember it a day or two later. So it's like, obviously you don't know what you always forget, but it's gone. Matt: But I, I think, I think the filtering is real, right? You're very busy or whatever, but you can go back through your calendar and you can figure out what you did that day. And like, if it was important, you'll probably remember it. Fingers crossed. I feel like filtering just all the noise is one of the biggest skills that you need as a founder because of, and as you can probably relate, millions of different things happening every day. Like, so many different people, voices from the internet in person telling you guys that, Hey, you should do this. Hey, you shouldn't do that. Hey, you should raise capital. How, and this kind of also relates to content creation too, right? Because you get a lot of feedback from people on the content that you're, you're putting out there, but not all the feedback is, is good or bad. We were talking about hate comments earlier and how like the ability to filter through the constructive criticism versus like the, the baseless feedback is really, really important as a, as a creator, but also as a founder, clearly. So like how do you guys, or how do you specifically think about like filtering through all the advice that you're getting on a daily basis? Daniel: Yeah, I've, I mean, let's take a massive step back and go back to what I was doing in finance and tracking publicly traded companies. The reason we started building on that software, part of the reason, like I was so obsessed with it at the start was because I hate reading the news. Daniel: Like I, I absolutely hate noise. Yes, I abhor it. It's like so many things are not actually important, and there's so much vying for your attention that this is, like, such a hot button issue for me. I wake up and I don't go on my phone for 30 minutes in the morning. And that's just, like, whatever. I wake up, I stretch for 10 minutes, I get the coffee pot brewing, you know, that's very important. I get the coffee pot brewing, I maybe go walk outside for a minute, and then I sit down at my computer, and then I only look at the most critical messages. I'm just, like, filtering through, like, is there a bug? Is a user complaining about something? Do I have an email from a potential customer about a contract? Do I filter through that stuff very rapidly? And then I typically start trying to do deep work on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. that's a little bit harder, just because some stuff does come in that I want to address immediately. But for the first part of the day, I'm trying to do deep work there, which is entirely filtering out. And then on Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, that I have a lot more of that. And it's just like trying to filter out the noise by not listening to any of it, any of it whatsoever. I'm grateful that Jack is able to, like, look on LinkedIn, and he'll send me important LinkedIn posts. But, like, I think competition, to quote Peter Thiel, competition is for losers. Daniel: Like, I don't really care so much what the competition is doing, because I know what is valuable. I have salespeople telling me what is valuable. I have users who are saying, this is great. And sometimes it's, like, very obvious what the next valuable thing is. And it's like, nobody else is doing it. That's great for me. And if somebody else starts doing it, maybe I'll start paying attention. But it's like so many times. Also, sometimes people don't understand what you're doing, so they're like, oh, and you have to get good at explaining what you are doing compared to the competitors. Even if you think it's trivial, you have to explain it very well, because sometimes people will be like, how are you different than this? It's like, I can tell you a million ways I'm different than this. Just give me 30 seconds. So it's like that I'm getting a little off topic here. We're talking about noise, but yeah, so it's like ignoring a lot of those things. And when it's important is when somebody else directly asks you about it, and it's, like, in the way of something like revenue, right? Then you have to address it, and it's not noise. But you're pretty much convincing them that it's noise, too. Like, that's not your job to convince them that it's noise as well. It's like, this is actually not important for this reason. And, you know, you have to stay up to date on what's going on. So very grateful that Jack's doing that and keeping me informed. I mean, I also check out these tools, too. Daniel: And it's like, I very, you see a bombastic post from, like, somebody else in the space, and it's like, oh my God, we're doing this, this, and this. And you, like, read it and you're like, yeah, this is absolutely not at all what I'm doing. This is just, like, somebody reselling this one dataset that everybody resells, or it's just like a GPT wrapper. And it's like, okay, cool. Like, fine with that, you know? So it is really noisy, and I protect my attention super aggressively, very aggressively. I think you have to. Matt: I have a book recommendation for you if you haven't read it. Have you read Smart Brevity? Daniel: No. Matt: I think the guys are Michigan. Are Michigan alums. Uh, I think Jim VandeHei, the Axios founders. Daniel: Have you read Axios or Politico? Matt: I am familiar with them, but I haven't read the book. They pretty much have this book, highly recommend. Fundamentally changed the way I write. Daniel: Really? Matt: And it's, the whole point is how to say more with less words. Daniel: Love it. Matt: And it, you know, really helped me cut out a lot of the fluff. Daniel: I love that. Matt: My dad loves the book. Daniel: I'm gonna send it to you. Matt: Mr. Mayor loves the book. Daniel: He does on the book. Matt: Because the time, like, you're really doing your audience, whether it's on LinkedIn, or your blog, or whoever's reading your email, or whoever's reading your signal on BirdDog, a message, or you're saving them time and effort by condensing what you're going to say in a few words as possible. Daniel: Yes, 110%. Matt: And a lot of people think the opposite. Daniel: Yeah, yeah. Daniel: You get, like, these paragraph emails, and it's like, what are you doing? It's like, this is, like, a lot of words. I don't know if I plan on reading the whole thing. It's gonna be a challenge. It's a great book. How often are you getting asked, how is this different than ChatGPT? Is that pretty much the most question? I fumbled on that a couple weeks ago. I'm so sorry about it. Like, I was on a 48-hour fast. It was, like, one of the worst sales calls of my life. So I was doing a 48-hour fast. Matt: That's nuts. Yeah. No water? Daniel: No, I was doing water and coffee. Matt: Okay. Daniel: So I was like, water and coffee on 48 hours. I was like, not a good test. But I totally fumbled on that. But really, it's like not a hard objection to handle because once you say it, it becomes a lot obvious, a lot more obvious, a lot quicker. Can I pivot into the hacker house now? What do you think, Matt? Matt: Sure. Let's do it. Daniel: So, you know, you're building BirdDog. You're at home. How did you hear about the hacker house and why did you join it? I guess tell us more about it, too, after. Matt: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I am, taking a step back, 2023 in college, so I was running the finance business. And one of my buddies, Bobby, Bobby's a crazy... Daniel: You know Bobby? Matt: No, I don't know Bobby. Daniel: Bobby Housl, he's, like, a super... some people are like... Matt: Sounds like a unit, though. Daniel: He is a unit. Some people are, like, super connectors. He's one such person. Matt: One of the things he did was, he, like, recognized, like, as a founder in college, what do you do over the summer? Everybody else gets a real job, and they go work at their internship in New York or Chicago or whatever. And, you know, there's a social element to that. But it's like, as a founder, you know, you're not in, like, an incubator. It's like, what do you do? So he threw together this hacker house. It was... This was a pretty fratty one. This was very, it was like, all guys. It was, it was in um Austin, Texas. So we did some heinous things there. But it was a, it was a very, very fun, uh, very cool experience. And at the end of that, because again, like, you know, as a founder, you don't have like the The building a hedge fund or bird dog. Hedge fund, and then also the software to monitor the equities at that time. So we did some heinous things there. But it was a, it was a very, very fun, uh, very cool experience. And at the end of that, because again, like, you know, as a founder, you don't have like the, You're building a hedge fund or bird dog. Hedge fund, and then also the software to monitor the equities at that time. So we did some heinous things there. But it was a, it was a very, very fun, uh, very cool experience. And at the end of that, because again, like, you know, as a founder, you don't have like the... We just just like, hard to describe. Daniel: Again, when you're building a company, you don't have the built-in professional network that you do when you guys are like consulting, right? You run a bunch of other smart people, you're doing things and it's really smart, right? You have like one, one co-founder when you're building a company. And if you're not in like an incubator or whatever, there's no network there. So like, I went to this place and it's the greatest thing ever. Because there's these people, they're like showing me how to do like this magic with code. I'm like, what? I can do this thing so quickly. And it's, you're just like open your eyes. You meet, you meet some wizards really fast. And it's really cool. And good diversity of thought as well. So I go back there from like, end of May to like July. I lived there uh last year. Loved it. And then that's about the time that Jack and I were starting Bird Dog. I had bought like tickets to go to the Olympics like two years ago because, you know, like you'd start a company in college. You're like, I'm going to be like loaded to this. So I fly over to to Paris and go to the Olympics and it's cool. Uh, and I was thinking, I'm just going to stay there and like work or whatever, but it's like, I'm like, what am I doing? I'm sitting in an apartment in coma for 12 hours coding. And like, I'm just spending money to like sit and do nothing, to sit and work. It's like, why am I doing this? So at that point, then I fly home and I go home for a year. Daniel: And then after that, Bird Dog eventually gets like stable, you know, we have paying customers and everything. And then I decided to go back to the. Counter House, the, the hacker house in Cambridge, Sea House. Really cool. Matt: What was it like living at home for that year? Like, I mean, even I was home alone this summer and it's like, I love my family, but it also can like get lonely when you're not around a lot of other people your age doing similar things to you. Daniel: Yeah, it can. Uh, my parents are great and my family is great. So that was really nice. But, and it's awesome that I was able to like go live with them. I really appreciate that. Uh, but like, I think when you're starting something like that, Uh, the thing between, you're, you're going like zero to one at that point. Like, it was a clean slate. We literally did not have anything, Jack and I, like literally just the followers we had on LinkedIn. And we both put in like one and a half thousand dollars. So like total, it was a 3K investment from us. So all we have is time, basically. Because that's like money, like basically you can't do anything with it. Uh, and you're trying to not do anything with it. So we basically have like nothing for this. So when you're doing that, we have no product, we have no IP, we have no brand. So we're going zero to one more or less. And I don't mean this in the Peter Thiel way. I mean like taking it from like zero, like nothing to one. Matt: Something, a company with a product, at least, right, that people buy. It's like, you need to get there. And I think you need a lot of volume to get there. And being home, I could do a ton of volume. And that was super important to go from nothing to a legitimate business. I think the volume was the, the biggest variable was at that time. I have one question, and then I want to transition the conversation more about LinkedIn. But you and Jack, you're in different locations. You're here. He's, you know, in Atlanta. How do you guys think about remote work versus like in person? Have you guys tried working together in person? Daniel: We move way when we're together in person, but, but also, I think it works because we knew each other for like four or five years before we went remote. Like we went to college together. We were in like some same classes. We were in the club together. So we saw each other very regularly. So at the time, and we had been through like some business stuff before this as well. So it's like, by the time that we're actually doing it remote, we're already very good friends. So what I would say is I can see how it would be a lot harder if you didn't actually know that person. And I've done that before where it's like, I've had low, low touch with somebody, but I was working with them remotely and it was not as clean, so to speak. It was a little bit more. They're confusing, a lot easier for things to get lost in the digital communication. Daniel: We both had already built up trust, so it's a lot easier to uh do that remotely. He, him and I, are we gonna move closer to there? We might, we might, not sure yet. His girlfriend just moved down to Atlanta with him, so like, you know, they're gonna stay there for a bit. I really like it here though. And it's like, we don't need to be in person together. I'm probably gonna go. I haven't told him this yet. Jack, I'm gonna go visit you in uh January, I think. So there's that, right? For a week or two. I hope you're okay with that. But uh, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, I think it works if you know and trust each other. I can totally see the value of being in person, but it's certainly not necessary. We both get a ton done without it. But we do spend a lot of the time on the phone with each other too. What is it like living in this packer house? Like, is it like, I mean, were you in a fraternity at Michigan? Is it similar to that or like? Matt: So I was in a fraternity at Michigan, but I didn't live at the fraternity house. SAE. Okay. Yeah. I don't know anyone else. Yeah, everybody’s paying rent. Okay. Yeah. No equity of bird dog. Nobody's giving that. That's my most coveted asset. Daniel: Do you think the fan house is making money through that or? Matt: Um, they are. So these things are notoriously hard to run without losing money. Because yeah, content houses too have just been. Daniel: Are they bad? Are they? Matt: Yeah, yeah. They've all pretty much gone under. Yeah. So this, there's a nonprofit attached to this. Matt: It's kind of like this collective bargaining because if it's like you get this many founders and you have like a good track record, the thing's been around for like two or three years now. So you have a good track record of people like going here and raising money and then you can get VCs sponsor it, which really helps the model stay up. So it's, I do think it's incredibly hard to run, but we have like a good leadership team that's like doing it very well. And it is very challenging to do, but they are, it seems like they're doing it the right way. I don't, I don't have insights in the finances, but my take is it seems like it's sustainable. Daniel: Are there any specific qualities that they kind of select for when they look at people who want to live there? Matt: I actually should talk to them about that, but I don't, I don't really know. My speculation is, well, one thing that's naturally selected for is like high openness because you kind of have to have that if you're willing to go live in a house with like 16 strangers. Uh, so I think that's naturally like self-selected for, but everybody's very friendly, right? Obviously everybody's like smart. The house values are cracked and wholesome. And I do think they select for that. So everybody's like smart and doing things, but everybody's also like very, very friendly. It's like a very good environment. I'm ready to geek out on LinkedIn now. Let's get into it. Matt: Okay, where should we start now? How do you think about maybe commenting or screen time on LinkedIn? Are you like deep working LinkedIn where you're spending an hour on it or how do you do it? Daniel: Yeah, so it's one of those things like when I have sales calls, sometimes I'll have like five minutes between calls and I'll just go on and like how many comments can I rip out? And it works because I'll get on calls later with people and I'm like, dude, you're like everywhere. It's like, you know, it's like like robin fire. And the meme comments are the best. If you put like a photo, the comments and you just like comment a meme, those get great impressions too, a lot of the time. But yeah, I try to do it in between stuff. I'm conscious about it because I like, don't like social media as a whole. If I was not making money from social media, I would not be doing social media. And at some point, I will not be doing social media. So I'm very conscious of it because it's like wired to me, it's like designed to make you like addicted to it. I'm very conscious of using it without going overboard, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes I'm like, Oh my God, I just spent 30 minutes doing nothing. Matt: What about posting? Or so you're really just writing the post on Sunday, or you, like during the week, as you have ideas in the shower, on a walk, making eggs, are you writing it down on a notes app or how are you doing that? Daniel: I have a spreadsheet, actually. Daniel: I have a spreadsheet, and it's like, you saw Jack's notion. Jack's notion? Okay, yeah. I have a spreadsheet and like each cell is a post, and sometimes I'll just like throw a hook into one of the cells and maybe I'll come back to it. Maybe I won't, then I throw it in there. I also have the service where they send me memes to me, so I get texted memes, like the popular memes. And then I see the memes and I'm like, oh, it would be funny if I did this. So my post on Tuesday, it's going to be a funny one. And it's a meme that I got texted. Matt: What's the service? Daniel: MemeLord. MemeLord technology. It's really cool. I like it. I mean, it's trending memes too. So like that actually helps with content as well when you get when you get these. Matt: I've seen that. They raised some venture money too for that. Daniel: Yeah. Which is fascinating. Yeah, really cool. What else about LinkedIn are you geeking out on or optimizing, if anything? Matt: Yeah. How do you think about your profile? Daniel: How do I think about my profile? I tweak it. I like having like very like, to the point descriptions in my profile. Jack convinced me I had a like a side shot, headshot. It was kind of like this, but he convinced me to do like a front on one. So I just, I just changed that. The banners, we have banners. It's like a pitch. I think that's Yeah, I think that does work pretty well. But I mean, again, it's, there's so many things. It's hard to be really tested. I'm sure there are ways to do it, but we're not like going crazy on that. Matt: Is there something that you think does really well on LinkedIn that you try to have in your post, like in your hook or are you really just writing down hooks in your spreadsheet as you go come Sunday, you're picking a few and then scheduling them. Daniel: Uh, I think part of it is rage bait stuff definitely works well. Rage bait stuff definitely works well. Photos help. I do think that if you have a post and it does really well, you can basically redo the same post perhaps a month later with new information, right? You're not like selling a dog like over and over again. But if you have a post that really does well, that says something about it, it's hard to know exactly what it says about it. I mean, it's like algorithms magic, all these things. But it's like definitely says something about it. So something that does seem to work is to go back to your best posts and do a different iteration of it. I mean, there's something in there. It doesn't always work, but there's something in there that clicked, so why not? Why not try it again? Matt: So basically what you're saying is like repurpose something from the past that performed really well because even though you can't, you might not be able to figure out exactly what variable contributed to that, like, you have a higher likelihood of hitting another home run if you will. Daniel: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And I'm not very like a, I'm not the kind of guy who's gonna sit here and say like, I know the algorithm. Daniel: I'm actually the kind of guy who's gonna sit here and say, I don't really know. It's like more so just pattern recognition. What Jack will do is he'll like pull, like he plays this game with his girlfriend where he'll like grab her phone, she'll open LinkedIn, and she'll like scroll and he'll read the post. And before he sees the likes and comments, he'll say how many it has. And it's like plus or minus five without fail. And the reason is like, again, he's much better than I am at this, but it's pattern recognition to some extent. It's like what, what kind of, and that doesn't necessarily mean that the substance is pattern recognition, but definitely like the format, maybe the hook, all these, there's like some commonalities between it. It's almost like you're an LLM figuring it out. Matt: Literally. I mean, do you guys have any things that are working like now really well, although we talked about the authentic raw stuff, but do you guys have any like strategies that you really like at the moment? Matt had an authentic post that just did really well. I think, I think comparison and numbers do really well. Like when you were talking about comparing yourself to Zoom Info, like, that's so clear that the audience can understand or putting numbers about your ARR or where you like, or like 8am to give the reader an exact understanding of where you are. That's what I think's done really well that I've noticed. Daniel: I think so too. Matt: I think also, any post where it's like, you did a crazy amount of work or spent a crazy amount of time and it's positioned as like, I spent, you know, a hundred hours studying this and like, I'm going to give you everything in like two lines or, you know, five lines. Anything like that, that kind of a premise, I think tends to get a lot of engagement because people don't, people are lazy. They don't want to do all the work. Daniel: 100%. Like the sharing of information. I have a post for this week. I think it's going to do well, but now that I'm saying it, it's probably going to totally flop. Well, it won't be posted for this week, so we'll see after. It's just. It's about, like it's in line with what you're saying, but you take like somebody who's smarter than you, who said a thing, and you like explain what they said. I'm doing that this week, and it's like, we'll see if it works. Matt: But you know, like take distilling information, just like you're talking about, whether it'd be like, I did this studying or it's like, this really smart person said this really important thing, so here's what it means. I think that that kind of stuff works pretty well. And that would be a great format, too. Because some of the things we try to think about, like, even with this YouTube channel, it's like an interview is a great repeatable format, because you can be like, okay, you know, this is interesting. I'm going to go listen to Jack's episode. Daniel: Yeah. And then I'm gonna listen to Julia's one before. Matt: Sure. And you know, if you're talking about summarizing Alex Hermozzi, and then it's like, okay, I might listen to Peter Thiel, what you said about Peter Thiel now. Daniel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think format is like one of the hacks to making content creation super easy. I don't know if you've thought about making one. Matt: Say more, like just the template of repeating the template. Daniel: Yeah, like saying, explaining this celebrity's YouTube video in five bullet points, or over the summer, I did one, if I were the CEO of Chipotle, that was one that got a lot. Those were good. You had a lot of that. I liked those. Like that's a nice format that you can kind of copy and iterate on everything. Which I think would be helpful to make, like, scale it a little bit faster. Matt: Yeah, 100%. Have you thought about, because another thing that, so when we had Jack on, we pretty much pulled out both of our impressions. We both had around 3.3, 3.5 million impressions in the past year. Daniel: Yeah. Matt: And he's got 20,000 followers. I've got seven right now. Daniel: Yeah. Matt: And one of the reasons I think is because when you're following Jack, you're following a channel. It's very clear what he's building at BirdDog. It's very clear, like, what you're trying to change in the industry. And for me, it wasn't. Like, I was posting about Place to Place, Protein Bagels, graduating Brown, all this stuff, starting. Like, and I'm curious to go a step beyond that. Matt: Have you thought about having a specific goal for BirdDog that you want to take your audience on? Like, some people say, you know, day five of building a billion dollar business. Sure. Or I don't know if that's ever crossed your mind. Daniel: We've thought about that. Something Jack posts about, and I totally, we do like the idea of, like, revenue per employee, maximizing that, like that being the, our vanity metrics, so to speak. We don't think it's actually a vanity metric, but it, like, is our vanity metric. Matt: Yeah. I think that's a good one. And, like, talking about, like, getting to, like, whatever it is, like $2 million per year per employee. Crazy. Both of your companies are four or 500K per employee per year, I want to say, fact check me. But I was doing a bunch of research on this. Netflix is one of the highest ratios for, like, large public companies, but that's a really interesting metric for us. Daniel: I think that would be a cool thing for you guys to almost go on a road to, like, $2 million per employee. Because then, for me, like, when I'm following people that are on a goal like this, I feel like every like that I'm on is helping you towards that journey. Matt: Yeah. And also, on something like LinkedIn, when you're liking it, you're almost associating with them in a way of saying, like, I'm like part of this too. Yeah. And that might make it, like, cooler to associate. Matt: I think that the other thing I think that would be, like, more on topic would be, like, what we're doing product-wise and, like, associating with that. Like, trying to bring back the real world research function into sales teams. Like, and I think it needs to be more punchy than that. I don't know exactly what it would be. After you read Smart Brevity, you'll have a better idea. You'll have a better idea. But something along those lines, that's really what we're trying to do, is, like, make it, you know, the thing we're doing is the thing that the best salespeople have always been doing. It's just, like, now you can finally scale it with software, with good software. But because it was harder to do, everybody's still caught up on these all, like, midwit solutions that aren't very good. So it's like, you're getting sold on the thing that we're actually selling, and you're getting something else. So, like, that narrative of we're actually giving you the thing that salespeople have wanted since, like, salespeople existed, you know? Daniel: 100%. Like, it's not like, oh, hey, we made this new thing. Like, try it out. It's like, you've been wanting this, whether you know it or not, for all time. And here, we just made it for you. Matt: Yes. I also want to talk about DMs on LinkedIn. So, are you DMing people, like, outbound on your account, or are you mostly just taking these inbound requests that come through your content, Jack's content? Daniel: Yeah, personally, I'm taking inbound requests. Matt: Jack does a ton of outbound DMs to, like, people who are engaging. Every once in a while, if I see somebody engaging with a lot of my content, and they have, like, an ICP title or whatever, I'll shoot them a note and just say, like, yo, what's up? Or like, thanks for engaging with my content, whatever it is. Daniel: I don't do a lot of outbound. I do get some inbound on my account directly and, like, DM-wise, and I'll, like, obviously, fill that rapidly. So you're probably not sending as many connection requests, either? Matt: No, I should be. That's something I should be doing that I've been. What have been, like, the most effective DMs that you've received before from, it could be from pros? Daniel: Excellent, from other people. Almost nothing. If I'm being honest, like, uh, it's been luck on their part. Like if it's been good, it's like, they happened to say the thing that I was just thinking about, and maybe they have like some magic software in the background that like reads my mind or something. But like, almost, almost nothing. Like, if somebody sends me like, thanks for connecting, after they connect, maybe I'll say like thumbs up or whatever. And then if they immediately go into a pitch, I'm like, I'm running away. Like, and then if I get into a sequence with somebody where it's like, they just keep DMing me and I'm not responding, I seriously consider unconnecting with them. Like, what is going on here? Like, I, I, I, like, there's not a spam filter on LinkedIn. Matt: So it's like, I can't just like send a spam, so it's like, I, I usually don't unconnect with them, but I like seriously consider it. Like, you know? Daniel: Have you ever gotten a voice DM? Those have worked. Matt: You're 100% right. Yeah. Now that you say that I've gotten two or three of them and both times I responded. I literally made a post about voice DMs this morning because I think they're so effective. I totally agree with that. So I recant what I said. Daniel: I've gotten two or three voice DMs and I'm pretty sure I've responded to all of them. Matt: Do you respond with a voice DM? Daniel: No, I don't like sending voice DMs. I mean, I would if I was trying to book meetings, like I don't care, but like, I prefer texting. Matt: Do you remember what these voice DMs, like what these people were talking about, how they kind of approached pitching you? Daniel: I can't, if I'm being honest. I, I really can't. It's the novelty factor. Matt: Yeah, it felt personable because it was their voice and they like obviously called me by name or whatever, which makes it feel more personal. And I don't think it was AI. It didn't seem like it. Daniel: Yeah. I don't know how long this is going to be like a, a source of alpha in the LinkedIn outreach methods, but, uh, for now, I do think it's extremely effective. And even for like landing some guests on the pod, I've seen way higher response rates from, from voice DMs. Matt: So you guys hear that? They're giving out insane alpha right now. Matt: You need to be sent, if you're trying to book meetings on LinkedIn, you just rip voice DMs all day and it will work. Daniel: What we're saying, right? Matt: Yep. 100%. You heard it here first. You've gotten to the point now with BirdDog where you have the money for ads if you want ads. Have you thought about running LinkedIn ads or on other platforms? Daniel: We're superstitious about LinkedIn ads. We've heard that if you do them, it like nerfs your natural impressions. That's what Jack said. Matt: That's what Jack said. So we stayed away from that. Um, one of our friends does like, uh, an AI-powered content advertising thing, and we want to give away with him. So we're trying out a Facebook ad. I think, I don't know if he started them yet, but he's a good dude. Daniel: Which one is that? Is that Blueprint? Matt: No, it's Agent Web. Okay. Great guy. So he's trying that out for us. So that's kind of like our free way to like, you know, see if that works. Um, and you know, if that's working and we're getting net new meetings that we would not have otherwise been getting, I don't know why we wouldn't pay for something like that afterwards. But we're also like, you know, constrained already on the number of meetings that we're booked. So it's not like the most important lever to pull. Daniel: Have you guys considered potentially hiring like a sales team or anything like that to help you scale the demand? Matt: I don't, I think we're close to product market fit, but I don't think we have it yet. Daniel: And things are working so much better than we did when we had our first paying customer, but we know that it's not quite there yet, but we feel like we're really, really close. And once we get that, the probability of us doing something like that, reinvesting capital in, definitely goes up. But we don't want to put the gas pedal on before we have to because we have seen so many people in our space scale too early and just all of a sudden they're launching a new product every two weeks to try to increase their TAM. And it's like, you're doing that because you took on too much capital and now you have this crazy valuation you have to live up to. And it's just a completely different game than what we're doing. We're bootstrapped and we're profitable. We can go at whatever pace we want. So we're still going slow. The, the more important lever for us right now is raising prices and, you know, raising minimums and getting more significant deals because we think that's the better lever to pull at this moment as we keep getting closer and closer to product market fit. Then if you hire someone, you have to spend your time training them. Oh my God. And then there, there, yeah, it's, it's tough. Yeah. It's one of my mentors gave me really good advice on capital raising. He was just like, don't do it unless you know how you're going to get a return on it. Like, never do it just to do it. He's like, let's say we wanted, let's, let's say that Jack and I wanted to raise capital tomorrow. Daniel: We have like people who have asked, so we could move really fast. Uh, but like conservatively, you know, best case scenario, you're done with it in a month, right? Realistically, you have to budget three months to six months. Let's just say best case scenario, everybody who said they wanted, was telling the truth and we could get together around in a month. That's still three months after that before you even start to see any sort of ROI on your first hire. Because now you have to hire somebody, which is going to take a lot of time. And then you have to train them. And then you have to ramp them up. And if you don't do that right, then you just add another three months after that. So now we're seven, if we mess up the first time, now we're seven months out before we start getting ROI on that capital. And it's like, we've been doing less of what's working because we're trying to make something else work. So there's a lot of risk with raising capital, even if you like move the probability of you getting the money in the first place up to one. Like, even if it's a 100% chance you're going to raise the capital, it is still risky. Like if, yeah. Matt: Totally agree. Makes a lot of sense. I hate to, I hate to cut it, but I think we should go to get that idea out of here. Daniel: Yeah. Okay. We're going to transition here to a segment I love, and I've prepared. Matt: I've heard so much about it. Let's see. Only four ideas for you, Noah. Okay. And I'm going to read it to you. Daniel: And you're going to tell Matt and I, the audience, if it's a good idea or a bad idea. So, the first one is a viral stunt for you guys, is BirdDog for dating. So it notifies you when an ex updates their job title or their profile. We're not going to do it, but I love the idea. Love the idea. I don't know if it would be a good idea. Like objectively. It's good for virality. Good for virality. Matt: Um, okay. So the next one is BirdDog for networkers. And this needs a new name, but it scrapes Calendly slots of people you're going to meet with. And maybe they're super busy, so they don't have time like yourself. And they'll book last-minute slots. So, you know, like you're booked out until what, like a month? But then if I really want to meet with you, BirdDog can say, oh, he's got a time available just out of cancellation. You should book it. That's pretty cool. I don't think we're going to do it for the engineering challenges involved with that. But like, good idea. Okay. Good idea. Especially, you know, we'd have to look at your calendar too and make sure you're available. Right. But overall, I think that's a really good idea. Daniel: Okay. Blogging on LinkedIn. Anything else you want to add to that? Matt: No, that's it. Just generally blogging on LinkedIn. I think that's also a great idea. I've heard tons of people say it works really well. It's basically like TikTok, but for LinkedIn. And I've heard that that's actually performed phenomenally. So I do think that's a good idea. Matt: Just again, capital allocation. And when I say capital, I mean time. The last one is a bird dog report, which probably needs a new name. Yeah. And it gives a company or maybe a politician all of the information that you can find on them or that they should be aware of. It's into more company level data and less person level data. I think that would be a little bit misleading in terms of the offering. Daniel: So probably for us, again, high level cool idea. I think for us, probably not a great idea. I think maybe sending it to a company about like an executive at the company where it's like, here's everything we identified about a company that's relevant. That could be an interesting idea. So we can show them why we should sell to them. But the person level stuff is something we don't do so much of. Matt: That makes sense. Jack was talking to us too, how you can't scrape LinkedIn profiles or a lot of personal information. You can't, we won't. Yeah. Yeah. Just to be clear, guys. I'm curious too, like there even could be an angle that I was thinking about that about like insider trading. Daniel: And then it's like, what is insider information? Yeah. It's like you could have a definitive answer of what insider information is because of what is out there. It's like, yeah, like I've got this is clearly not insider information. Matt: That's a good idea to, like, defend people who are getting, it's like, hey, BirdDog found this. It's not insider information. Definitely like finance applications to it. Matt: Like we could, we'll totally circle back to, to finance. Maybe, maybe when BirdDog's ARR starts like multiplying, like 10X in a month. It's because we started quant trading on the, on the data. That would be crazy. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Noah. Is there anything else you want to tell the audience about before we wrap it up? Daniel: I don't think so. You guys covered a lot. Yeah. I really appreciate being on. Matt: Awesome. And where can they go check out their awesomely designed BirdDog website? Daniel: GetBirdDog.ai. That's G-E-T, BirdDog.ai. Two D's in BirdDog. Matt: And if you're a great customer, you've got some good merch too. Daniel: Oh yeah. I've actually got the. Let's see. I wear it. I wear it all the time. That's why I have it. Matt: As you should. Hoodie, BirdDog. Very retro. And then we got a little guy on the back, a little dog icon. Daniel: The coolest part though, is. There's this ABC. Do you guys know what that means? Matt: No. Daniel: Always be closing. It's from Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, Alec Baldwin, he puts ABC on the board and he's like, A, always be B, C, closing. Always be closing. It's awesome. Matt: That's awesome.