Growing 10x Is the Wrong Idea

Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: We’re the co-founders of Aboard. And this is the Aboard Podcast.

Rich: We might change the name. Woo!

Paul: It’s true. We’re having important marketing discussions about the right way to get out there in the world. But wait, Rich, Rich, before we get into it, what is Aboard?

Rich: Aboard is a data-management tool that uses AI to spin up really useful software that takes care of what you need, whether you’re collecting, workflow…ing, researching. It’s just a really, really flexible software platform that kind of asks you what you need and it spins it up. It’s pretty cool. You should check it out at aboard.com.

Paul: That’s the place to go.

[intro music]

Paul: All right, let’s have a podcast.

Rich: Let’s have a podcast. Paul, I have a saying. It’s not really a saying. It’s actually like the world’s most boring fortune cookie.

Paul: All right, let’s go.

Rich: Ready? I’ve seen really lousy software succeed, and I’ve seen really beautiful software fail.

Paul: It is true. And it’s a really tricky one, because you want to build beautiful software and then you assume…

Rich: That everyone will come!

Paul: And they’ll see the beauty.

Rich: It’s so beautiful.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: It’s so beautiful.

Paul: I need to give it all of my time and money.

Rich: Doesn’t really work that way, does it?

Paul: No.

Rich: You know why?

Paul: Why not?

Rich: Because everybody’s watching eleven-second videos and drool is hanging off the end of their mouth.

Paul: Well, let’s actually be really charitable here, which is you build something because you have an ideal state in your mind of what people need in order to be empowered or what they want or whatever.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And you expect them to see it—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And then enter into that state with you.

Rich: And commit time to it.

Paul: The sort of drool-out-of-your-mouth hypothesis? I don’t buy that anymore. I actually think that what we’re asking people to do is come around to ways of thinking simply by looking at a website and clicking “sign up.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I think that in the early days when all of this was really new, including software as a service, like Slack and stuff like that, was still pretty new.

Rich: Yeah?

Paul: You could, they could do that because they were like, “I need to understand this new world, and I’m willing to give it some time and attention just to, like, get my bearings.”

Rich: Do you think that peoples’ willingness to give it time and attention is diminishing? Like, today, it’s a lot less time and attention than ten years ago?

Paul: Look, let me not talk out of school here. If you look at our product, it does a lot of things that other products of the last ten years do.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It has a table view. It’s about data.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Right? We’ve talked about our competitors and our peers on this podcast many times, right?

Rich: Yeah. You’ve heard of the term time to value.

Paul: TTV.

Rich: TTV.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Do you know, what is it?

Paul: It is the time that it takes for a user to achieve value.

Rich: That they perceive.

Paul: Out of—the interaction that, like, they’re like, I want and need this in order to accomplish my own goals.

Rich: That’s right. This makes me think of our dear friend Andy Baio, of waxy.org, put up a video of someone buying a camera on the internet.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s, like, twelve minutes long, and she goes on AOL and then goes to shop.IBM.com—I’m not kidding.

Paul: Whew.

Rich: And apparently IBM back then, this is like predating Amazon. What they did was they hosted a lot of different storefronts on IBM.

Paul: Oh yeah, this makes sense, because they had like a commerce platform.

Rich: They had a commerce platform. And so she navigates around—and I’m not joking, it took her about ten minutes to walk you through the purchase experience. First off, she’s on a modem, so it’s slow.

Paul: Right, right, and she’s, you know, “Now we put our credit card in…”

Rich: She’s utterly, she can’t believe she can do this.

Paul: Right.

Rich: [laughing] She can’t, she is utterly delighted.

Paul: Right.

Rich: She’s delighted that in ten minutes she will be purchasing a camera, which will take two weeks to get to her.

Paul: Time to value back then was ten minutes.

Rich: She couldn’t believe it, it was just joy! Absolute—

Paul: Right.

Rich: She’s like, “Look at this!” And then she opens the box in the video and she says, “Looks like it’s in good shape.” [laughter]

Paul: Oh, wow. So now, what are some products that have immense time to value, or incredibly low time to value? I would say Google Docs is a good example. You open up a web page, it’s an app, and you can start typing in a few seconds.

Rich: Let’s get the dopamine hits out of the way. When you open the TikTok app, it starts playing a video, and you haven’t signed in yet.

Paul: Right, right. So the value there, the fun experience, is the value—

Rich: In seconds, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: In like, two seconds. And so signing in, and this is something we’ve debated at Aboard, whether we should make our capabilities visible without you even signing in. So you can see the value of the thing.

Paul: We do some of that. You can publish your content and anyone can look at it without logging in.

Rich: But the AI juicy stuff, you have to sign up to try.

Paul: Correct. And there’s a strong argument to be made that people should be able to come in, put data in, do stuff with it, and then it says, do you want to save this?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then you need an account.

Rich: And then you sign in. Right? So TTV has gone down. We have been guilty of this probably four times already in the history of this startup. We are like weeks away from launching some new version. And then we look at each other and say, “Oh shit, we should do onboarding.”

Paul: Yes.

Rich: It is just us being told we have to finish our peas.

Paul: Well, there are—

Rich: We finished the, we ate dinner, man.

Paul: There are many categories—

Rich: No, you are not getting up until you finish your peas.

Paul: There are categories of work and technology that just are the worst. And so in engineering, it’s documentation. In design, it’s sort of like collecting and organizing things into nice folders so that you can find the assets again.

Rich: Design system?

Paul: Not—

Rich: Oh, you’re just organizing shit.

Paul: No, no, cleanup.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Everybody loves the design system. It’s the cleaning up, and like, I know where that stock photo is.

Rich: Folder called “old.”

Paul: Yes, that’s right. _99.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: In product, I don’t even know, but like, there is a set—onboarding is one of those, like…

Rich: It’s tough.

Paul: It’s the country that everyone avoids traveling to.

Rich: Or through.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: And it turns out it’s similar, you know, in a lot of ways, to broader kinds of, it’s the bridge between the marketing and the product.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so it’s kind of a no man’s land of product development. Marketing? You know, you buy ads and you promote in newsletters and you have the weekly update.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And product, everybody knows what product is. You click on stuff and it does stuff. In the middle is this zone of, like, I will explain to you why this exists.

Rich: It feels gratuitous and unnecessary for the team that has been staring at the thing for months.

Paul: Now here’s what I want to talk about today, because I woke up this morning.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And we’re doing okay. Things are okay. I’m always going to say that we’re doing—this marketing podcast. I’m always going to say we’re doing amazingly well. And in the back of my head—

Rich: We are doing well.

Paul: We are. And in the back of my head I’m always going to go, this is terrible. We must do much, much better.

Rich: That’s what success looks like.

Paul: I’m a co-founder. What do you want?

Rich: That’s what you’re supposed to do. Yeah.

Paul: Okay, so things are going pretty well, frankly, just flat out. We had a good launch. We’re figuring stuff out. All good. But I have x number of users sign up every day. I get an email tells me.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: There’s actually a notification in Slack. Let’s say it’s 10. Okay? Low number.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: 10 users sign up a day. I want to get to 100. I want to 10x the number—

Rich: You want to 10x.

Paul: If it’s 100, I want to get to 1,000. So how do I do it, in your—what are your thoughts about how to get 1,000 people to sign up? That’s what I want to talk about over the next 12 minutes.

Rich: Well, let’s get one thing out of the way. We are not a viral product.

Paul: No.

Rich: There is no gamification. There’s no hearting. There’s no, like, share this cool thing and make others happy. So there is no virality to drive growth in Aboard. There’s some. You could collaborate with others. But that’s very different than, like, check out my Instagram post. Wee! Wee!

Paul: We consciously built a product for groups of around, you know, like, there really starts to hit a sweet spot with, like, eight people.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It can go further. It can be for individuals.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But, like, yeah, we didn’t build something where, like, hey, all 5 million of you need to check this out.

Rich: No, that’s not, so let’s get that, we don’t have that quiver in our…

Paul: I mean, Slack is—

Rich: Arrow in our quiver?

Paul: Slack is a perfect example.

Rich: Tell me, Robin Hood.

Paul: Arrow in our quiver.

Rich: Oh, okay.

Paul: No, Slack’s a perfect example because once you start chatting and somebody invites more people to chat?

Rich: It’s communication.

Paul: Off you go.

Rich: We don’t have that in hand. Right. And so, I would restate your question.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Because through brute force—money—you can have a lot of people sign up. You could just…

Paul: If I said—

Rich: If I said if you spent a lotta money—

Paul: Okay, I want 1,000 people to sign up a day. And I want to spend $1,000 per person for conversion? I can absolutely do that. I could spend a million dollars a day.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I could get those signups.

Rich: Yeah. You just buy them. I mean, you’re not buying them literally, but you’re essentially, you’re putting so many eyes on the platform, 2% will click through.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And they give it a go. That’s the wrong question.

Paul: That’s what Monday.com does, literally, right? Like, just millions—

Rich: That’s what everybody does.

Paul: Millions of dollars get spent on marketing, and—

Rich: Millions. It’s a very, very, like, long and narrow funnel. Like, you gotta jam a lot of—

Paul: It’s sort of this 10-year spreadsheet where it’s like, we’ll get this money to sign up, we’ll spend all this money, and then enough of them will pay that over 10` years. It’ll make a lot of sense if.

Rich: They can retain them. So there’s churn. Right?

Paul: That is the next guy’s problem.

Rich: That’s the next guy’s problem. Okay. So the question to ask isn’t, how do I get more to sign up? That’s easy to answer. Money.

Paul: Okay. Marketing.

Rich: Ads—

Paul: Marketing—

Rich: Buy some ads—

Paul: Smart marketing, and spending x amount of money.

Rich: Sponsor some podcasts, sponsor some newsletters. There’s a million ways to do it.

Paul: Well, this is the concept of cost for acquisition. Right? So it’s sort of like, it’s—and, you know, if you told me my cost for acquisition was 5, 10 bucks, that’s a pretty good deal.

Rich: Yeah. The issue is, is that signed-up user acquisition is relatively cheap compared to whatever metrics you have to effectively anoint someone as an engaged user. And we actually know those metrics. We’re not going to share them because it’s our secret sauce at Aboard.

Paul: Retention.

Rich: If a user does, like, five or six different things in Aboard, they stick around. And when they stick around, they stick around a long time.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: It’s actually impressive.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: So how do we get them to engage the product so they can cross those hurdles and then become effectively invested in the product? Committed—by the way, I think one of the things that is probably keeping people away from engaging with the product is it’s not clear when we’re going to shut it off. Like, we don’t take your money. Money is funny. Money isn’t just paying for services.

Paul: It’s stability.

Rich: It’s a promise. Right? Like, there’s a contract now between us and you. And hopefully by me giving you money and others giving you money means you’re going to be around, you’re going to pay your bills, and I can rely on you for my information. We don’t have that yet. And so I’m not that shocked—like, we want our retention rates to be better, but let’s face it, a company department isn’t going to commit to Aboard until we are showing them that we’re going to be around, and money is one way to do that.

Paul: That’s fair, that’s on us to communicate that. That’s fine. No, hold on. Let me go back. So I said, Rich, let me go get 10, 100, a million new users a day. And you said, absolutely, go, go for it. But you have to spend a certain amount of money, and you can do that. But then you said, but that’s actually the wrong metric. The right metric is—

Rich: Engaged—

Paul: Engaged users.

Rich: —users.

Paul: So now, so let’s say that I have x number of people coming in. How would you do it? Because it’s like, let’s say I have 1,000 a day and I’m pretty sure I can get 300 of them to be engaged.

Rich: Okay? And then there’s another hurdle—

Paul: Break that down for me. That sounds like I’m doing a magic trick. Like, what does that even mean?

Rich: Let’s say I’m Adobe Photoshop Online.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I get 1,000 people to come in, 70% of them scribble, circle, and leave and never come back.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: I got 300 left.

Paul: Okay. It’s free so far.

Rich: It’s free so far.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Now out of the 300 I have left, a couple seem to fiddle around with some AI features. They’re trying some things. And then they leave, and then for five days they don’t come back.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: All right? And let’s say now I’m down to like a hundred people.

Paul: Did they, did they sign in?

Rich: Yeah, they had to sign in to see the tool.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: So they’re in.

Paul: So 300—

Rich: 1,000 signed in.

Paul: 365,000 a year new users.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And one third of that, roughly, a little less, is willing, seems to show up more than once.

Rich: Well, no, I didn’t say that.

Paul: Oh.

Rich: Maybe, I mean…

Paul: Okay, but they’ll do more.

Rich: Let’s keep it simple. 1,000 signed in.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: 30 touched the tool in a meaningful way, poked around, tried the fill feature, the layout.

Paul: 3%.

Rich: 30%.

Paul: No, no, 30 out of 1,000, that would be 300 if it was…

Rich: No, no, 30% is what I meant.

Paul: Okay, so 300.

Rich: 300.

Paul: 300 users.

Rich: Now of those 300, they poked around, they played a bit, and then they left.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Out of the ones that left, 100 came back.

Paul: And now they blurred.

Rich: Right. And they blurred.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They actually, here’s what I think is probably a spectacular metric for Adobe—upload photo. If they upload a photo, that means they want to manipulate an image. Nobody draws with their mouse on a browser. When they upload a photo or upload, even better metric, the golden metric is probably like uploaded five or more photos.

Paul: Okay. So they’ve brought their data. So now what they’re doing is they’re saying, I’m willing to have a relationship here. I’m going to give you a little of me.

Rich: That’s right. And the number, look, what’s a smashing success? Out of the thousand, if 75 uploaded photos, that’s 7 and a half percent.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah? That’s good.

Paul: Unless—

Rich: In the world of SaaS.

Paul: As long as your cost for acquisition is in the dollars, not the hundreds of dollars.

Rich: Correct. 7 and a half percent is an extremely good engagement rate.

Paul: Now, this is very different than the enterprise sell, where you might spend $1,000 on a lead.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Because—

Rich: That’s very different, we’re not gonna even get—we should have another podcast about that formula.

Paul: No, but I mean, that was our old world, right? But this world is like, I need lots of people.

Rich: Volume.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Yes. This was so unusual about ChatGPT. ChatGPT probably had an absolutely outlandish engagement rate because it was so… That comes once every 20 years, frankly.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, that was an unusual aberration in this world. Sign in and touch something.

Paul: Or Apple products, where people line up outside the door to get them.

Rich: Yeah, those are engagement rates that are just golden. Right? They happen very rarely.

Paul: Well, you know what’s brutal is the narratives in the industry love to favor those kind of products.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Here’s how to make the next iPhone.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And that is less than a 10th of a percent. Everybody else has to do marketing, has some spreadsheets, looks at some decks.

Rich: It’s a grind.

Paul: Yeah, it’s a grind

Rich: It’s a grind, and it’s one of the hardest things. So—

Paul: But I think, like, the point here is like, that I want to make is like, you gotta actually celebrate that grind a little bit. Nobody does.

Rich: It sucks.

Paul: It does. But it’s also like, you get results. I woke up, like, I’m telling you, we’re making a transition right now from launch mode. You know, we did this sort of big relaunch.

Rich: We’re in market mode.

Paul: There is no—we kind of jokingly, and not-so-jokingly, called this version three of Aboard. There is no version four. This is the one.

Rich: This is the one. And I think what we’re acknowledging is this. And if there’s one takeaway I would share with whoever’s listening to this thing, all 6 million of you.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: It’s this. You’re going to look at your engagement numbers, and as a product team, you’re going to think, if we could just add that one feature, the world unlocks, and there is no such thing.

Paul: There really isn’t.

Rich: There really isn’t. There really is no such thing. What you can do is lower the friction in those first crucial two or three minutes, present value quickly, and this is where I think marketing and product synthesize, which is when you bring those people to the door, have you vetted out a particular audience with particular interests that your product can resonate for them? So that your product can resonate for them. People don’t make the leaps to generic products. Right?

Paul: This is real. I mean, this is actually really tricky because, and this is also a complicated and difficult part of working inside of marketing. I don’t need a thousand bus drivers to sign up for Aboard. I love taking the bus. I respect, I say hello to my bus drivers, and I can’t drive worth a damn, so God bless them, but I actually, they don’t need what I have.

Rich: No, exactly. And when you tell that story, I think it’s an unusual thing in product. Right? In technology products, which is what you want to do is tell, because technology people are lofty, man. They love to tell you, you know what, your relationship with photography is about to end.

Paul: Yes. That’s right.

Rich: And a new one is about to begin.

Paul: Honestly, the fact what you just said is incredibly sane for—technology is like, have you ever considered what it would be like to buy in the cloud?

Rich: Right. It’s insane. It’s insane. Versus what works. I’ll tell you what works. What works is get to your recipes 70% faster.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And make them look pretty. [laughing]

Paul: Right.

Rich: It’s very basic, man. And then when you take them through that journey, don’t detour them over to your big, lofty vision. Stick with your story. You promise them a thing, give them the thing. You know what is the gold standard here? And I’ve said this before. Mobile games.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Mobile gaming is the gold standard in time to value. What has happened with mobile gaming is when you load that game for the first time, you’re playing it. And in fact, there’s a game for iOS, and I think it’s on Android, too, called Agent Intercept.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Where, you ever see, like, the old James Bond movies where the opening scene is not the credits? It’s like an action scene.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: Agent Intercept starts you in a, like, high-speed chase and teaches you how to play. Teaches you the controls? In the first minute or so.

Paul: Sure, sure. Tap left to drive left.

Rich: They make it super easy so you get a quick, satisfying success. And then about a minute in, the logo comes in.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And says, game title, let’s play, you’re the guy. Right? That is utterly optimized. Essentially what they did was they said, you know what? This isn’t about us. This is about you. You are the star of this movie.

Paul: You want to play a game, you.

Rich: Want to play a game, and you are the center of that game.

Paul: So I’m going to give you an, you’re going to win the first round.

Rich: But look what they achieved. A) they taught you how to play it. B) they gave you a win.

Paul: Yeah. And now you’re leaned in to keep playing.

Rich: By the way, I’ll tell you what the name of the game is and who the game company—that’ll come later. Don’t worry about that.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich: That is utterly user-centric. And what you find with software, here’s what they know. They know A) you installed that game in a minute. You will uninstall it in another minute. Like it’s the most brutal environment in the world. The phone in hand—

Paul: Yes, yes.

Rich: Is brutal. So enterprise software, software in general, productivity software, they could always learn from that laser focus around that absolute fear and paranoia of abandonment that game developers, good game developers, use.

Paul: All right, so this is what you are actually saying to me. So I came in—and this is true. I did wake up this morning and say, how do I, 10x the number of people come in.

Rich: That’s what you want in an executive. So thank you for thinking that.

Paul: You do. But hold on. And so I’m coming to you and I’m saying we need to 10x this. And you’re saying you can, you can spend money and you can get 10x the number of people to come to the website and sign up for the product. But if you focus on that, that you’re like, we’ll turn those dials.

Rich: If you stop there.

Paul: No, no, we’ll turn those dials. We’ll figure out 10x, 5x, 2x, whatever.

Rich: [overlapping] Yep, yep, yep.

Paul: We’ll spend money on marketing. But instead, you should be optimizing the bridge between the value that the product provides, which we think we have a good solution for all kinds of data tools.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And people getting past that website to that initial signup. There’s no—little, there’s a chasm there.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And it takes a long time to cross the chasm. And you need to actually make it. We need to have so many bridges that it feels really easy to just get from point—no bottlenecks, just point A to point B.

Rich: Absolutely. You know what it takes more than anything else? Humility. Because it is arrogant to think that everyone is going to A) understand what you built and B) feel committed and invested in spending time to understand it if they don’t right away.

Paul: All right, let me pitch an idea I just had and you can tell me this is a bad idea. I’m going to start a daily newsletter. I’m not committing to this. I’m just saying this is what we could do.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: The daily newsletter would be one of cool, interesting use case for our software because it has hundreds. It’s got AI in it, so on and so forth.

Rich: Yup, yup, yup.

Paul: Then you sweeten it with three interesting links from the world of technology and elsewhere.

Rich: That sounds pretty great.

Paul: And then five—

Rich: Are you making this commitment?

Paul: Not yet. I’m just saying what I’m doing is I’m throwing out what that bridge looks and feels like. It’s not simply coming to the website and it says here, you can do this and that and the other. It’s like, I have to build this relationship with, you know, many people are on our mailing list right now, but, like, this would probably start with a dozen people. Like, it would just like, get them to sign up for the daily.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: So Aboard Daily, is that the kind of mechanism that you’re thinking?

Rich: I’ll tell you, I would take it one step further, which is every so often I have tried products I’ve gotten on their list, and they didn’t wow me, but I didn’t unsubscribe. I just wanted to keep tabs on them. And what I would often see over a period of months is that they kept at it and—

Paul: You do appreciate that.

Rich: Right? And they got better at it. And so it’s not just a matter of, like, constantly selling to me, but more like, hey, we heard you, we learned, and we’ve made some big improvements, and we want to talk to you about this new release.

Paul: I’m the same way. I appreciate velocity. I really do.

Rich: It’s not just that. It’s also, that’s more of a dialogue than it is somebody marketing to me in my inbox every day, or whatever. Like, that’s much more appealing. So, hey, we saw this was our number-one demand. We wanted to take our time with it, and we’re excited to share it with you. Like, that means that not only am I marketing to you, but I’m also listening to the community that’s around the product.

Paul: So now, m obviously we’re going to still have our weekly newsletter and we’ll have our podcast. But let’s say we did the Daily. So it would be like, here’s a cool application. Here’s a thing that’s getting better because we heard you. And here’s a couple cool things that are outside of our world just to kind of keep the conversation going.

Rich: Not long. Our weekly is a meaty newsletter.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: This would be a shorter—

Paul: This should take one minute to read.

Rich: That sounds great. That’s a relationship.

Paul: Maybe I’m doing that. The other thing that obviously—

Rich: I love it when you assign yourself work. Also, you’re getting an email from Paul Ford every day in your newsletter.

Paul: You lucky devil.

Rich: In your email.

Paul: The other thing I think that’s obvious and that we’re not talking about here is like, I have a scheduled meeting next week where I’m going to watch somebody try to solve a problem with the product and we’re going to see where it breaks. This is somebody who really wants to use it. And then we’re going to see, we’re going to start a feedback loop that way. We’re getting very interesting questions from people about, can I import this? Can I do this?

Rich: A lot of import questions.

Paul: Yeah. And so, like, following those through, because those are time to value questions.

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: I would like to shorten the time to value with Aboard, is what they’re saying.

Rich: Yes. Yes.

Paul: Okay, so this is, this is good—

Rich: This is about humility.

Paul: All right.

Rich: This is about listening. And this is about not assuming that you’ve built something so spectacular that if you just bring them to the door, they will come in and hang. They just won’t.

Paul: I think that’s real. I think if I could get those 10x signups per day, I don’t know if we can retain them with the platform just yet. We gotta keep—

Rich: That never ends.

Paul: Yes, that’s right.

Rich: Never ever ends.

Paul: So that is a good reframing, and I like and appreciate that reframing.

Rich: Well, it’s my pleasure to assist you here, Paul.

Paul: Yeah, you’re a good management consultant. [laughter] All right, so look. That was a good conversation. Rich, who should sign up for Aboard? Who should use it? Who’s it for?

Rich: I’m not going to use the word prosumer. I’m not going to do it. I know you’re trying to bait me.

Paul: Prosumer is a good.

Rich: You’re a pro. And you’re a consumer.

Paul: Yeah. Or you’re an organization that needs to build something pretty for your team.

Rich: If you’re managing workflow, if you’re collaborating together around data, if you’re dealing with a spreadsheet to keep track of things, you should check out Aboard.

Paul: More and more of our conversations are along those lines. Turns out that there is a shocking enterprise hunger for usable software.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I don’t want to go into that.

Rich: Go play with it at aboard.com.

Paul: Dot that’s right. And send us an email at hello@aboard.com. We’d love anything. Podcast topics, suggestions, thoughts, and comments.

Rich: I have an idea.

Paul: Yeah?

Rich: Email us at hello@aboard.com what to call this podcast, and if you win, we will send you five hats. Not kidding.

Paul: No, we definitely have five hats. And I will give you three free years of Aboard once it’s monetized.

Rich: There you go.

Paul: Or two. Three. Three is fine.

Rich: Three is fine.

Paul: And then, you know, check out this podcast at aboard.com because we have transcripts, we have sort of, like, all the sort of niceties to keep it accessible.

Rich: Pro. We’re pro.

Paul: Yeah, we’re doing it right.

[outro music]

Paul: All right, Richard, I will talk to you next week.

Rich: Have a healthy and happy week.

Paul: Bye.