Transcript 0:00 Welcome back to another episode of Two Dads and Tech. Daniel Burke, happy birthday. How are you? Happiest, happiest of days. Feliz cumpleanos, little, little Troy D. How was that intro? Was that kinda cool? 0:12 Was that like, maybe- That was pretty cool... we can use that? That was pretty cool. That was pretty cool. It was, you know, like a, a, a Morty. Let's use it. [laughs] Let's u- let's use it. 0:20 I feel like you're a big, big Rick and Morty fan. Like- [laughs]... your humor is right up the alley, and if anybody has listened for the last 23, 24 episodes, episode one, 0:30 Daniel brought it up, Rick and Morty, and here we are- I did... episode 24 or something. I did. You bring it up again. Are you a big fan? 0:37 It's a, it's a very specific type of humor that not many shows can, can tickle me in the same way, so yeah, I, I am a big, I am a big Rick and Morty fan. I have to, I have to say, I have to say. Attaboy. Cool. 0:49 Also, you've been slinging some coughs. Are you a little sick, or are you getting over something, or what? I'm overcoming, overcoming something. Yeah, I got super sick last week. 0:57 Uh, so through the weekend I was just kind of on the mend, so I'm, I'm micing off every time I have to just cough up a bunch of gunk, but do I sound sick? 'Cause that would be terrible. 1:06 I think I sound okay, okay enough to record the, the pod, right? No. No, no, you sound good, and maybe it's just me, but when you're kind of sick but not too sick, your voice sometime gets kinda cool, right? 1:17 You're like, ooh, I kinda sound like- Oh. I sorta gotta- When you-... raspy a little bit. That's right, when you wake up and you have, like, the deepest voice ever, you're like, "Oh, I was... I should do a radio show." 1:27 [laughs] Like, "I, I am powerful." Hey. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. "Hey, hey all. I'm gonna go, uh, make a cup of coffee." [laughs] And you're like, "Whoa, what was that?" [laughs] Yeah. Yes. Yeah. See, y'all hear that? 1:37 Yeah, you hear that cough? You hear that cough? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a cough. Every time I laugh, I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to mic off. Just let it, let it happen all episode. 1:43 [laughs] No way, dude. Hey. Uh... So we have some awesome topics curated for today's episode. We do. And I must say, I'm pretty proud of myself for getting Dance and Trowberg to cooperate. 1:56 If you've listened to, uh, to the last episode or maybe two episodes ago, we talked about how we trained Dance and Trowberg, which is this AI model, to just sorta help us get our thoughts together before these episodes, and they were giving us a whole bunch of awesome, like, links and annotated bibliographies and a bunch of sources to, like, pull from, just to, like, get our juices flowing, and turns out 100% of those links were just bogus. 2:19 Like, not even like, oh, this article exists somewhere and it's linking to the wrong thing. It's just, like, made up. [laughs] Like- Yeah... like it'll be like- Yep... New York Times recently wrote this post about... 2:28 And it, like, it never happened. Like, it just completely fabricated these articles. Anyways, that's no longer the case. Yeah. And so we have some awesome curated concepts and, and ideas. 2:39 One of them that we were actually just gonna roll with right off the bat, but I thought it would be interesting to first talk about the recent article that LinkedIn published. 2:48 It's a study that reveals the most top in-demand jobs for 2025, and some of them are actually... 2:55 Like, usually these articles are really lame, but I wanted to bring it up because some of them are really, like, AI-driven titles, and I thought it would be really helpful to talk about at least the top few. 3:08 Number one for the top 10 jobs on the rise in the US in 2025, number one is- And let's stop right there to give a quick shout-out to our sponsor of today's episode, and that is Tango. 3:19 I have been seeing Tango everywhere on LinkedIn, so I caved. It's like one of those things, right? When you see something enough, you end up caving, and you decide to try it. 3:28 I caved, I tried it, and honestly, I think what they're building is gonna change the way that CRM automation is done. 3:34 A lot of companies today do data entry and all that fun stuff, but what Tango is doing is they're automating every single thing that a sales rep does within Salesforce. 3:42 You just have to do it once, and it'll automate it from there on out, so things like adding leads to Salesforce, progressing a deal from stage one to stage two, uh, closing a deal, creating your quote, all of those processes can now be automated if you just do it one time. 3:54 And so that's what they're doing for organizations. I think it's incredible. I think it's incredible. I used it for a HubSpot workflow. 4:01 I also used it for a step-by-step how-to guide on setting up HubSpot web posts in Demo. So many use cases. 4:08 Literally anything that you wanna automate in your CRM can pretty much be done through Tango, so go check 'em out. It's tango.us. That's T-A-N-G-O dot U-S. Now let's get back to the episode. 4:18 Artificial intelligence engineer. Engineer, yep. Okay. Number two is artificial intelligence consultant. Mm-hmm. And then a bunch of stuff that you'd expect, like PT- Yep... event coordinator, all this random stuff. 4:28 But the top two are AI related- Yep... the second one being really vague, just a consultant. Yep. And I think it shows, and it, it really proves, that people don't really know how to get started. 4:41 I mean, they, they know they need to be in this ecosystem with AI, but they're like, "I don't even know where to start." So AI consultants are on the up and up. What do you think about that? 4:52 Are, are AI tools and j- and engineers sorta gonna take over 2025 job market? Yeah. Um, personal experience, we actually worked a little bit with an AI consultant, believe it or not, at, uh, at Demo. I don't believe it. 5:06 I don't believe it. [laughs] Yeah. And what I did was... 5:10 And we'll probably get into this topic as well a little bit more, uh, here in a few minutes, but what I did was I reached out to my investors and I said, "Hey, we really wanna take Demos AI to the next level." 5:22 At the end of the day, it's just a ChatGPT wrapper, which most AI products are nowadays. A lot of times it's just like, "Hey, ChatGPT, summarize this, fetch me that. Thank you." That's it. 5:32 Very little companies out there are AI native. Obviously they're coming out, and they are AI native, especially all these newer companies, and then a lot of companies are turning to AI native companies. 5:41 I think Shopify announced it, maybe even Fiverr. There's a c- few large companies. Duolingo. Duolingo. Um, yeah, Duolingo. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were like, "Hey, we are now an AI native company." 5:51 Don't really know what that means. 5:52 I always, I always think that AI native means, like, you started with your foundation and core being AI, but maybe that just means your foundation and core is AI regardless of when it became AI. I'm not sure. 6:03 What do you think that means? But we'll get back to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 6:06 AI native to me just means-I, I think of languages, like when you're a native English speaker, it means you are inseparably aware and familiar with that language. It doesn't mean, like, everything you do 6:19 starts with the English language. Like, that's almost like a, I don't know if non-sequitur- Yeah... is the right word. That's a cool word though, so I'm gonna go with it- Yeah... even if it doesn't mean- No, it's cool... 6:27 what I think it means. But, like, native English speakers are familiar with the English language. Yep. Got it. It doesn't take any extra thought. So native AI, it doesn't take any extra thought. 6:38 It's like an inseparable part of their DNA. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I think a native AI company means. Got it. So it sounds like a lot of these companies that are becoming AI native that are not are 6:49 somewhat similar, right? It's almost like build- building your foundation, but also, like, we're inseparable from AI. 6:53 So all that to say is we're like, "Hey, we're just a ChatGPT wrapper, and we wanna talk to some people that are really smart with AI. Like, really smart." 7:01 And so we got introduced to a handful of people, had a handful of conversations with these people that are building, like, biotech companies all based on AI, like, zero, like zero non-AI stuff in their company. 7:13 It's just like, "Hey, I think that I could take these cells and these, these cells and these molecules and this and that." And I'm like, "I don't know what you're saying. 7:19 I just wanna know if, like, our demo platform can, you know, do this and that." [laughs] Um- Yes... but it was... 7:25 All that to say is it, it was really interesting to hear how much more intelligent people are with AI than- Yeah... we really can understand and grasp. 7:36 Because right now we, we all, I feel like most people have, like, this idea of AI of, like, making your life easier. But there's a lot more to uncover with AI than just making your life easier. 7:45 And so to answer your question, I'm not surprised. Um, I do see a lot more AI and ML engineers requesting to connect with me and things like that. Who knows what they're doing? 7:53 Maybe they're just wanting to, like, build a, you know, platform and sell it to me or whatever, but I see a lot of people nowadays with AI/ML engineer on their profile, and I don't know- Yeah... 8:04 if that's because it makes them more attractive for a job or, or what. Right. But, but yeah, I, I'm not shocked at all. 8:09 Like, I'm not shocked whatsoever, especially when these massive companies are making big bets on, like, you have to use AI in your job or else- Yeah... you're out of here. Well, I think it begs the question, 8:19 when someone calls themself an AI engineer, what does that mean? 8:23 Because I think there are machine learning artificial intelligence engineers, like, actually creating the models that we, you and I, non-engineering, like, product growth guys, are using to engineer AI stuff. 8:41 But, like, there's actual, like, literal engineers behind the scenes at some point. If you go all the way down the rabbit hole, like, there's real engineers. 8:47 But I think a lot of people are calling themselves AI engineers 'cause they spent an afternoon on Lovable or, you know, Replit, and they made, like, some awesome tool. 8:54 Which, mind you, like, people are making a lot of money doing this, and so yes, you're building something. You're using a tool to build it. One could say you've engineered something just using, like, the verb engineer. 9:08 But are you an engineer because you built something using Replit? Well, I don't know. I- I'd be kind of offensive- No... to, like, actual engineers to call yourself that. 9:16 But I think to become attractive to the job market, a lot of people are calling themselves, like, AI automation engineers or AI engineers or a machine learning engineer. I mean, that'd be a stretch. 9:27 I don't think there's [laughs] any machine learning engineers out there- Yeah... calling themselves that if they're not that, but I don't know. Yeah. You know, there's not verification on any of this stuff on LinkedIn. 9:35 You can call yourself whatever you want. Yeah, and we see it in sales all the time, right? 9:39 We see people say enterprise sales or enterprise account executive or maybe they'll just say, like, sales rep, but they're really just a BDR, right? Like there's... We see it a lot in sales, and it's funny. 9:48 I was just helping a friend kind of like curate his idea. He has this idea of... A- and actually it's a similar idea that we talked about, like a centralized brain for a company. But he was like, "I spoke to a sales..." 10:00 Or not a sales rep. "I spoke to s- one of my friends. He works at a healthcare company, and he said, 'No chance would we ever use this in healthcare because we can't use public LLMs like OpenAI, Google, et cetera.'" 10:11 So now he's thinking of this idea of creating literally private LLMs for every single healthcare organization and going out there- Mm-hmm... 10:19 and essentially building an LLM on all of their data, every historical data, all new data, connect to all their EHR tools, all that stuff, so people can start making decisions faster in healthcare. 10:29 But all of their data is private with their own trained LLM, and it's completely separate from anything public, which, I don't know. 10:35 I think when you niche down in healthcare, there's so much money to be made in healthcare, so much- Yeah... that I don't think that's a bad idea. 10:42 I know there's a company out there called Fresh Paint that does that- Yep... where they, I think they, um, they, I think-- We wanted to talk about this, but they popped off. They're doing a lot of revenue. 10:51 I think they- Yeah, yeah... essentially cracked the code for HIPAA. Like, essentially, what is it? HIPAA compliant ads or something like that. Interesting. 11:00 Yeah, and so, like, they're able to go out there and run ads for healthcare organizations, and they just niched down and, like, within 12 months they did 10 million in revenue. Crazy stuff out there. 11:09 But yeah, HIPAA's got a... Or not HIPAA, healthcare's got a lot of revenue to be made in there. They do. 11:14 Healthcare has a lot of revenue, and I think there has to be a way for healthcare at the macro to use AI effectively. My friend is the founder of a company called Hello Patient. 11:26 They just came out of stealth after, or maybe like six months ago they came out of stealth, and they're doing well. He's hiring people. They raised a round. Uh, they have a ton of daily active users respectively. 11:36 They're growing. But, and I'm just reading, I'm on their homepage right now. It says, "Get your team off the phone and in front of patients. 11:43 Meet Mia, the healthcare AI assistant that automates perfectly timed calls and texts." And it's like an interactive AI bot- Interesting... 11:51 specific to healthcare, trained on I don't know how many billions of lines of healthcare vernacular and verbiage. And, you know, healthcare, like, you say the wrong thing, someone dies, so it's like really- Yeah... 12:01 really important that you're saying and communicating exactly the right thing at the right time to the right person. And so I don't know to what scale, um, you know, I'm, I'm just reading there. 12:12 It's a, it's a fairly complicated AI.Chatbot. I don't know if it's a wrapper. It probably is, but it's trained really, really specifically on this medical, you know, terminology. 12:23 So I think there's, there's a lot of tools like that that are gonna start popping off because there's a lot of admin work that goes into otherwise incredibly, uh, 12:34 I, I was gonna say important work, but that undermines admin work being important, but like more like skill necessary work. Like a surgeon, a surgeon requires admin work, but he's also a surgeon. 12:44 They have to, you know, they have to go do surgery. So it's like you gotta like delegate some of the stuff, but can't delegate it to just anyone. So I think that's where AI is gonna come into play. Yeah. 12:54 Well, we'll, we'll get to this, uh, this whole, uh, idea, I think, that we talked about a little bit. 12:59 I think two of the main topics, by the way, if you're listening, that we will chat about today outside of this LinkedIn article is, one, like, if you have the itch to create something, like, what do you even do? 13:08 I know, Daniel, you and I talked about, like, what do people even do? I know... 13:12 And we spoke about it a few times, like how to start something, but maybe even getting into like the nitty-gritty of like, if you have the itch, how in the world do you make it work if you have a family? 13:20 Like, that's so difficult. It's something that I had to do and had to take that risk, and it was not a fun time in the family for a very brief amount of time. 13:27 And then the second thing that we wanted to talk about was, what was it? Oh, how to break into tech sales. And you actually have an amazing outlook on this, and I think you even wrote a newsletter on this as well. 13:36 But- I did... um, I think that those are two topics that a lot of people want to hear about and would- Yeah... resonate with them. But with AI, there are so many ideas I have in my notes app, very, very- Same... 13:51 specific to like AI where I'm like, "Ooh, like AI is going over here. I wish I had the time- Yes... and the effort and all of that stuff to go and build this," but I don't. 14:01 And so I've actually been trying to toy around with like how in the world do I build even like a prototype of things and maybe even sell a prototype and be like, "Hey, here's the prototype. Buy it. 14:12 I'll help you like scale it- Yes... and then I need to back off from operations." I don't know. There's so many things coming out, man. So many, so many things that you can do with AI. Yes. So many areas that could be 14:22 helped with AI, and everyone knows it. That's why there's AI companies popping up- 100%... every day, hundreds and hundreds, so. Greg- Yeah... we've talked about Greg Isenberg recently, uh, on one of the pods. 14:33 Uh, he's a builder, entrepreneur, investor, and he recently tweeted something. I can't find the exact tweet. 14:40 I found one that gets the point across 'cause he, he speaks a lot about this idea, and it's, "Hey, how do you actually start a cash flowing business on the internet?" 14:50 Um, this tweet says 2024, but he did another one in 2025. And I think the, the easiest way, absolutely foolproof way, is to go on Reddit, find a niche subreddit with less than 75k members. 15:06 Use AI, so this is where AI comes into play, so, you know, chatbot, you know, whatever your AI tool of choice is, to figure out the biggest problems in the subreddit, just people complaints. Reddit is a- Mm.... 15:16 is easy place to find complaints. It's huge, yeah. Sort problems by how easy it is to create an MVP. 15:22 So let's say you go to a subreddit, you ingest all the content, you sort the top 10 problems, you sort those top 10 problems by top three easiest to solve, and you can use the AI chatbot or whatever tool you're using to like help you think through this. 15:36 Create a short form video to build audience on one platform. So wherever you're gonna choose, you can use subreddits. You can create another subreddit. You can go to X, whatever. 15:46 Convert the audience to a private community, and then build the product with no code like Cursor or Lovable or, or Replit in 30 days or less. Use AI to build a creative landing page. 15:58 Sell the product to an audience with a wait list, and then use profits to fund a PPC or some paid growth model. And it's like actually that easy. 16:06 I mean, what I just said, the actual steps to take toward this is, you know, it, it could take weeks or months depending on how far down the rabbit hole you go, but in theory, you should be able to do this, you know, discovery to build to proof of concept to first sale over and over and over again. 16:25 Yep. If you don't have anything going on, like you don't have a full-time job, you don't have a family, like you're just made of time, you could probably do this every day- Yeah... with a new tool. Yep. I mean, actually. 16:34 Yeah. And so I think, you know, how do you... You, you mentioned like how do you break into tech sales as, as kind of the, the topic, but 16:41 I think there's this whole idea of how to leverage AI just to do whatever you want, to start a side hustle, to start a product, to start some passive income, cash flowing business. 16:49 Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on the breaking into tech sales, but I think just the creating revenue for yourself. Like, there are so many opportunities now that there's really just no excuse to not be able to do it. 17:02 I'm gonna, I'm gonna piggyback off that. So I have a landing page out there for an idea with some ad dollars going behind it to see if anybody would join the wait list. 17:12 Um, and exactly like you said, I didn't build a community. I didn't look up anything along the lines of like what's the easiest thing to build. I literally was just like, "Hey, I have this idea. 17:21 I'm gonna spin up a landing page." Did it within 30 minutes- Yep... to an hour with, with v0. Landing page is live, and I put some ad spend behind it just to see if there was anybody that would join the wait list. 17:31 So it literally is that easy. Second thing is I also reached out to, before demo, I sold a company called Referral. 17:40 I reached out to my old co-founder, and I was like, "Hey, man, there's this very easy idea that I think that would take almost none of my time, um, very little aside from like getting things stood up in the very beginning." 17:52 And we've already generated $5,000 of revenue in that company. I love it. It's not even launched. Love it. It's not even live. It's just the idea alone, people are like, "Yes, I wanna pay for this." Yep, yep. 18:01 "How do I pay for it?" And so I think people overcomplicate, like they don't know where to start or anything. Yeah, they do. 18:07 So I will tell you, like literally I had this idea that sellers can compete online all over the world. That's literally just it. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I was like, "Hey, can we build this?" He's like, "Yep." 18:16 I reached out to companies saying, "Hey, I'm gonna shout this out on LinkedIn when it comes out."I expect thousands of people to go to it. Do you wanna pay for ad spend?" They're like, "Yep." I'm like, "Sweet, cool. 18:26 We'll throw your ad on there, whatever, it doesn't matter." And we did that for two companies. Yep. And it was just as easy as reaching out to them and, and you don't... There's two things that came from this. 18:33 One, you don't need to reach out to an engineer, but two, there is... I was gonna make a post about it this morning. Vibe coding is the future, but it's not the now. It's not. 18:41 Like, I- there's a lot of things that he's doing that I would've- You need an engineer to get through that last mile of the marathon. You- dude, you do. 18:48 'Cause there's a lot of things that he's doing that I would not be able- Yep... to do vibe coding it. Yep. But I vibe coded the entire MDP, passed it off to him. He'll have it done- Yep... within a month, and that's it. 18:57 Like, all I did was reach out to companies saying, "Hey, this is launching, and do you wanna pay for a spot?" Uh, and it can be with anything. If it's an actual tool, you'd be, "Hey, this is launching in a month." 19:06 Like, just reach out to people. Like, that's how you make money is the same thing with sales. 19:10 Like, if you're in sales and you're listening to this and you have the itch, same thing you do today but as your W-2, just do it by yourself. Like, that's, it's that simple. It's crazy. Yes. 19:20 I have, I have a blog written. 19:23 It, it actually was supposed to be a LinkedIn post, but LinkedIn, it's funny, the, the blog starts out with, "I crossed the 3,000 character limit," and moved it to this website of mine because, [laughs] like, I, it's like this v- fairly complex step-by-step method to break into tech sales. 19:38 If you do this, like, I hire salespeople. I have been hired as a seller and a salesperson, sales leader, founding team, and everything in between from marketing to sales many times. 19:49 I've been offered many jobs that I've turned down because I've gotten better job offers. Like, I, I know how to break into tech sales. 19:55 If you follow these instructions, I can just shy of guarantee you will get a job offer in tech sales in the next few months. 20:03 I can't tell you what timeframe because I don't know what your experience level is, but here is... Let's see how many steps this is. Steps are 11 steps, okay? And I'm just gonna spout right through these. 20:14 Step number one. Do it. Let's hear it. Make, make a super simple website, just a landing page. You can do this on Beehiiv, which can literally be done in, like, 20 minutes. You can do this anywhere. 20:25 You can do this on Squarespace, on Wix. There's a million different landing page websites that you can do. 20:30 Have an About Me section that just says what you're about, what you've done, why you have transferable skillsets to this job or market that you're trying to break into. Super simple. You don't want a ton of links. 20:42 You don't want a ton of navigation. Just, like, one simple landing page. Add this website URL to your social media platform, like LinkedIn, to your profile so people can go there and they can learn more about you. 20:53 Step number two, connect that landing page to an email flow. You might not have to have a newsletter at this point, and I'm not gonna sell you on a newsletter, although I could probably spend an hour doing that. 21:06 But you want to be able to collect people's emails at that About Me page so that you can send them emails. 21:12 Maybe they're interested in hiring you, maybe they're interested in working for you, maybe they just wanna see this journey that you're on. You wanna start your network there, and you wanna start it at that landing page. 21:21 So send them a welcome email. Give them more information. "Hey, I'm breaking into tech sales. Follow my journey here." Send some emails periodically. 21:28 Step number three, make a post on LinkedIn about who you are, what you've done, and why you want to break into tech sales. I have advised countless people on this third point so many times in the last few months. 21:40 People are afraid to make this post. If you do not currently post on LinkedIn or on a social platform and you want to break into tech sales, I cannot emphasize this point enough, you need to just make the stinking post. 21:54 Spend 30 minutes writing an About Me, what you've done, and what you're trying to do, and be vulnerable. 22:02 "I'm trying to break into tech sales because I believe my job as a teacher or blue-collar worker," whatever it is, "gives me the skills to sell this product in this niche for this type of company. 22:15 Follow me on my journey." Make that post. I promise this is the post that's gonna kinda launch off this entire process. And I even write in here, if you can't post, just get over it. 22:26 You can't go onto the next step without doing this very important step three. Yeah. All right, step four, make a dream 100 list of companies. It can be actually 100. It can be 1,000. It can be 50. 22:36 But you wanna actually have a specific list of companies that you want to work at. Like, if I get hired at that company, I'll t- I'll accept the job. That, that specific. And you can use LinkedIn Sales Nav. 22:47 You can use, uh, you know, ChatGPT. ChatGPT. You can use whatever- Yeah, yeah. 22:50 Yeah, no, seriously, just get a list of companies and start curating that specific list of if they, if this company offers me a job, I will accept it. This is the t- this is the exact company I wanna work at. 23:01 Get comfortable on camera. This is step number five. Go yell at a mirror, whatever you need to do to get very comfortable hearing your voice, seeing your face, and showing other people both of those two things. 23:13 You're going to be set apart in the, in the sea of job applicants if you can be on camera and speak confidently to a camera, like what we're doing right now. If you can just go at it, you're gonna win. 23:23 The power of having a familiar face is priceless. If somebody knows your name and your face, you will get any opportunity before the person that has no-- Like, no one knows about them, their face, their name, nothing. 23:38 Like, I promise you, be a familiar face. That's in sales, that's getting a job, that's being- becoming a, an entrepreneur, that's getting investing, anything, be a familiar face. But keep going. Yes. 23:48 Uh, I'll actually riff on that for just a quick second. I was recently at a conference in New York with hundreds of people that I had never met. A lot I had. People... 23:57 And this is not me patting myself on the back, but I have a presence on LinkedIn and on Twitter, s- especially in this community of newsletter operators and media businesses. 24:07 A lot of people came up to me just to say, "Hey, see you all over LinkedIn. Really wanted to meet you. Love what you're doing." And, like- Yeah... 24:14 that happened enough times for me to be like, "Oh, what I'm doing is working." 24:18 And I'm on camera talking to the camera, talking on mic for Two Dads and Tech, for Beehiiv, for personal content creation, for a newsletter founder community I launched. 24:27 I launched a community for Beehiiv that has over 5,000 people. I launched a community for myself that has over 3,000 people. 24:34 I'm on camera talking and posting about stuff, about life, about health, about newsletters, about tech.Everywhere, all the time. If you do that for a day, no one cares. 24:43 If you do that for four years, people will notice your face and recognize who you are and know about your life. It's just gonna make your life easier. So that's me riffing on point number five. Keep going. One more riff. 24:57 Um, one of my good friends, he's now doing so, so well financially, owns a couple small... 25:02 He was one of those, like, bought ugly businesses and then try, like, flipped a few of the operations around, ended up doing incredible. 25:08 But he was the youngest large enterprise sales rep at Symantec when I was, like, twenty. He was also twenty. And I was like, "Dude, how in the hell did you go and get a promotion that quick before everybody else?" 25:18 And he said, "Make sure everyone knows who you are." And so he had relationships with his boss, the VP, with the VP of enterprise. 25:26 Like, he would go behind his boss's back to go and build relationships with people way above him, just so everyone- Yep... his name is Omar, just so everyone knows who Omar was. 25:36 Easily the most hir-- like, uh, not horrible, um, promotion, like the most, the most easy person to promote because you know who he is. Everyone in the field knew who he was. Everyone knew Omar. Yep. Like same thing. 25:47 Yep. It, it goes with every single aspect in life. But keep going. The more people you can touch with your content and in your job, the easier the next thing is gonna be to get, and the- Yep... 25:56 and the more champions you're gonna have to help you get that. You just want to have the widest reach that you can in everything you do. So that's point number five, is get comfortable on camera. 26:06 I, I could stop here- Hmm... and I promise you're gonna be better off for it if you're not already on camera, but just get comfortable on camera. 26:12 Point number six, with the list you built, so that step four dream 100 list, prioritized, prioritize from most to least desirable companies and do 30 minutes of research on each. You don't have to do it all at once. 26:25 One at a time is fine. But you wanna do a deep dive on each of these companies. Beyond just the ChatGPT, "Hey, what does Beehive do?" And it, you know, gives you 100 words, and that's all you know, that doesn't cut it. 26:36 You wanna be an expert, 30 to 60-minute expert on that company. Step number seven is once you d- you want to do 30 minutes of research on each of the companies, here's a few different subpoints. 26:46 Come up with a sales pitch. Point number one on this subpoint, the sales pitch, decide, one, who you're selling to. So who are... You're selling yourself to who? Are you selling to a product manager? 26:56 Are you selling to a seller, like a sales leader? Are you selling to a C-suite? What person in this company are you selling to? Two is what part of the product will you be selling? 27:05 In this make-believe scenario of you being hired by this company, what part of their product do you hope to start selling? 27:12 Film yourself for 60 seconds pitching that product as though you are selling a prospect on buying the product that this company- Mm-hmm... would hire you to do, okay? 27:21 If you're really good at creating TikToks, you can go pretty deep, and you can start talking to yourself. You've obviously seen the videos where there's, like, two types of the same person having a conversation. 27:31 You can get pretty creative with this, but example is, like, "I'm leaving my job as a teacher and breaking into tech sales," and y- you're doing this one-liner of, uh, trying to create familiarity with this video, and then you jump into the actual pitch. 27:45 And if you do that enough times with enough companies on a TikTok channel, you're gonna start being known as that, that guy who's leaving their teacher job to break into tech sales, and boom, here's a pitch. 27:54 Do that 100 times, you're gonna get famous on TikTok, and you're gonna start getting job offers. So that's point number seven, do a 30-minute deep dive and start pitching the product to these people in the company. 28:03 Point number eight, post that video you just did on LinkedIn and tag the company and say- Hmm. Yep... 28:09 "If I were on the sales team at company, Beehive, at whatever company, this is how I'd pitch their product on a cold call." 28:16 You can focus on a more broad sales approach, but I think a cold call is probably best because you're most likely gonna be an entry-level SDR if you're breaking into tech sales for the first time. 28:24 So focus on product pitch in a video on LinkedIn, tag the company, tag a couple people. You do not care about looking weird. You're trying to get as much exposure with the right people as possible when you're doing this. 28:36 Point number nine, reread step number eight and do it 100 more times, okay? So you're posting that video, you're doing a TikTok, you're posting to LinkedIn, you're tagging the company. Wash and repeat. Yep. 28:47 Step number 10, I'm almost done. You're bearing with me. Post the video you created on TikTok, not just on LinkedIn. So if you don't have an account, start one and start posting these videos all over the place. 28:59 You can reuse and recycle. You can do short form on... 29:02 I mean, X is not really gonna help you a, a bunch in this regard unless you're, like, a super specific tech niche, but you're just trying to get as much exposure as possible. 29:10 And then bonus step 11, make a post with a newsletter of all the stuff you just did with step one through 10, and then create newsletter content that, again, just creates a more expansion of reach with all these pieces of content you're creating. 29:24 And I really cannot stress enough i- in my post here on itsdanielburke.beehive.com if you wanna go read it, there's a lot more you can do here. 29:35 But doing just this, doing nothing else but what I just described, you're gonna be at the top of the list of most of these sales hires because there's thousands of applicants doing the bare minimum to get in the door. 29:47 Yeah. This is not the bare minimum. You will be noticed by the hiring manager. You'll be noticed by the sales team. 29:53 You'll be noticed by actual colleagues, future colleagues of yours, who will champion you to their boss saying, "This guy, this gal, they get it. They're going-" Yeah. "... way above and beyond. They want this job. 30:04 We should give them a shot." Yeah, and I think it's worth being extremely transparent here and say that 30:13 most of you listening, like, if you randomly found this video because you're looking to break into tech sales and you don't actually know who Daniel and I are, 30:23 chances are you're listening and you're not gonna do anything that he just said, and that's just me being blunt, and it's because most people don't want to do the work these days to get the things that they want. 30:31 They like instant gratification. They like when things are handed to them. 30:34 And I, I hate that that's the world that we live in, but that's just how things have become because everything is so easy to get nowadays.But then there will be those couple of people that listen to this podcast that do this and change their entire lives because they decided to take away the fact that you might be humiliated, you might look stupid, you might look dumb to your colleagues, your friends, whoever it is. 30:57 When I started posting on LinkedIn, I, I know we talked about this before, but I felt so dumb. I felt so stupid. My colleagues would be like, "Oh, you're the LinkedIn guy." I'm like, "Ha ha ha." 31:06 My friends would make fun of me. But like, I say this because it's similar to really any advice. Like, that is amazing advice, and I know for a fact. 31:14 And there's even a few steps in there that you wouldn't even have to do to get into sales, to, to break into tech sales, to be honest. 31:20 But if you did all of those steps, it's almost a one hundred percent guarantee that you will land a job in tech sales if that's what you really want to do. Yeah. 31:30 And I think that that's like the, the thing there, 'cause a lot of people have the idea of like, I want to get into tech sales, but not a lot- Yep... 31:35 of people have the idea of I wanna get into tech sales because in three years it can completely change my life going from making sixty K as an accountant that I can barely get a promotion for- Yep... 31:43 and when I do, it's one percent, to making two hundred fifty to three hundred K in the next three to five years. So like, 31:49 I don't know, there's a lot of people that don't want things enough, but then there are people that are like, "Yeah, screw it." Like, what's gonna- Yep... what's the worst that's gonna happen? 31:56 I'll post on LinkedIn for three months in a row of videos and things like that, and everyone will forget about it a day later. Like, that's the thing. Every-- If-- It will work. 32:05 I, I know for a fact that exact process will work. But if it doesn't work, if just in the off chance, no one will remember anything that you did the day after you're done doing it all. 32:15 Like, it's, it's it, the journey's over, whatever. So I don't know. I just wanna be like super blunt and transparent that like most people won't do it just because they don't really care. 32:24 Like there are too many people are content, and that's okay to be content. 32:28 I also want to say that like it's totally okay to be content, but if you really wanna break into tech sales, just look stupid for a month, two months, three months maximum, you'll get a job in tech sales. Yep. 32:40 There's no doubt about it. Yep. I, I think it's, it's worth saying that 32:46 both Troy and I come from years of experience doing exactly what I just said and much more, so I tried to simplify it and condense it to eleven steps. 32:54 But you also-- Like the grass isn't always greener, so breaking into tech sales like sounds fancy and like the loudest people that have done it on LinkedIn, even if you're listening to us, like we're obviously telling you how to do it, like those are maybe the minority. 33:11 Like not everyone breaks into tech sales and makes millions of dollars. 33:13 Like it's sometimes you break into tech sales, you get laid off because you're not a high performer, and you gotta go through a couple different rounds of companies, and you gotta find the right one. Some of it's luck. 33:22 Joining the right company at the right time has so much to do with the success of a seller. 33:26 If you're selling a crap product, you might be the best seller in the world, but the product still sucks, and you're just not set up to succeed. 33:33 Um, but to your point of like posting and forgetting, no one in the world is thinking about you as much as you. Yeah. So true. 33:40 And if you can drill that into your brain and into your psyche and just start acting and performing and creating like no one cares, you're gonna be better off for it. I left my first job when I started my career. 33:54 I made fifty-five thousand dollars. That was negotiating from fifty thousand, which is what they offered it to me, and I was like, "Well, fifty is not enough." I think I asked for sixty-five. 34:02 They were like, "Well, we can't do sixty-five. Fifty-five it is." So I started at fifty-five. I was a marketing strategist. I worked my way up. I left as a director of, uh, national sales and director of marketing. 34:10 It was a dual role. It was a small company, like fifty people. But I left with incentives. After incentives, I got-- it was a ninety-five-thousand-dollar-a-year role. Usually would make closer to seventy or seventy-five. 34:22 I left for a role in tech paying a hundred thousand dollars, uh, on the content marketing team. 34:27 From there, I went, and I made, I mean, I think this year I'll do with side hustles and passive income and, and, and salary combined, anywhere from three to four hundred thousand this year. 34:37 That's just me for the last five years working my way up slowly but surely. And that, I think, is a reality where people can go from making fifty to five hundred, and that's like a real feasible reality. Super real. 34:50 The only reason I'm sharing these numbers with you guys is not to pat myself on the back. Like, I'm pretty stressed. 34:56 My life is sometimes working more than I would like to for the rest of my life, but I'm doing something very difficult and time-consuming now because financial freedom is within reach. Yeah. 35:07 Like, I know I will not be grinding my life away for ten more years. 35:11 Maybe for five more years, maybe for three more years, but if I'm doing it for ten more, I've done something horribly wrong, and that's the light at the end of the tunnel that I can actually see and grasp because I took a leap of faith and I went after really difficult jobs in a really versatile and, and, you know, uh, risky market. 35:29 I went into deep, deep startup territory for like three years before I found Beehive, and I joined Beehive at, you know, pre or seed. 35:36 I was, it was, it was still a tiny startup with a short runway, uh, and it was the right time, right place, right role, and so here we are. 35:44 I think Beehive's gonna make it, and you just gotta take some chances and go after it and, and really focus on you. You care more about you than anyone else does. I love that, by the way. I love that. 35:53 I think that my wife and I and her parents joined the conversation as well this, this weekend, um, so this past weekend. We talked about demo and just like in general, how are things going? 36:04 And, and they all know like for me, the outcome, I want it to be acquired, and I want a life-changing amount of money. I don't need- Yep... a hundred million. I don't need a billion. Like, that's just not who I am. 36:13 Don't really care. But I want enough to where I can be financially free, and the next decision that I do for money will be because I want to do it and because I think it's really fun. Mm-hmm. 36:23 And so we talked about it, and one thing that my-- I loved it, [chuckles] that my father-in-law said was every single thing-- 'cause my wife's like, "Oh, demo this, demo that. 36:32 Like, you should-- We're both at home with, with the four-month-old," so like we kind of switch off. 36:37 And he was like, "Look," 'cause my wife doesn't want to work, but she does work mainly because I need to be-- we need to have healthcare. We need to. It's just the US. Yep. Yep. You know how it is. 36:46 So we need to have healthcare, so she's working. 36:48 Um, luckily she does have a pretty flexible job.Doesn't get paid a ton of money or anything like that, but she's like, "I wish I just didn't have the stress of needing to work." 36:56 And so my father-in-law was like, "Every little thing that y'all do right now from a financial perspective should revolve around Troy making Demo successful, so in three to five years you will never have to work again in your life." 37:08 Yeah. And I think that's really hard for even myself, but my wife and many people out there to, 37:14 to really understand and comprehend that like your life can completely change in three, four, five years, like to the point- Yes... where it's like oh my goodness. It's, uh- Yep... 37:24 it's super easy to think about like now, like oh, but like I don't wanna work now, you know? Like I, I don't know. So I think that that's really important. 37:31 Like you just mentioned your personal story, in five years going from X amount to X amount, which is almost like a seven to eight X increase just in that amount of time. Um- Yeah... so yeah, it's, it's insane. 37:41 If people really want to do what they wanna do and kinda change their life, one, everybody has to know you, and two, you have to work your ass off for just like a certain amount of time. 37:50 Like we're not saying go work for 40 years- Yep... and then you change your life because you're finally retired and you get your 401[k]. Like that's not what life should be about. Um, but real quickly- Yep... 37:59 on the, um, my leg is in my chair. I hope that you can't... Can you see it? No. No. Or is it not... Okay. I can't. I'm like, I'm like Criss Cross applesauce right now. 38:07 [laughs] But, um, uh, so on the getting a job front to kind of end that, end this conversation, we can move on to like a whole having an itch conversation. 38:17 We kinda talked about it a little bit, but the way I got a job at Proofpoint, so Proofpoint changed my life. I, I had an amazing year at Proofpoint. I loved my job. It was extremely flexible. 38:27 Big companies, by the way everybody, are pretty flexible. You're just a number on a sheet, so your impact is a little less, but they're typically more flexible when it comes to hours. And they have a big brand name. 38:36 Assuming it's a really big brand, they have a brand name, so it's hard to beat a brand name, especially when there's like hard times. 38:43 Anyways, the way I got the job was there was a guy named Jay Bryant who was my direct boss. There was a guy named Michael Blair who was his boss, and I had found this all on LinkedIn. 38:51 And I knew I wanted to work there, because my friend worked there. They were like, "Ah, dude, I love it. It's amazing, making a lot of money," whatever. 38:58 So what I did was I just looked, l- all I did, like you said 30 minutes of research, 60 minutes of research. Mine was like two. 39:04 I think I got a little lucky though, but all I did was I went to proofpoint.com, scrolled to the very bottom, didn't look at anything else, click- clicked on News and Press Release, went to that tab, saw the most recent news. 39:14 About a month prior to this email that I sent to get a job, they had acquired a company called Elusive for X amount of money, and I said... 39:22 And I read the article, it was like 84% of people fall victim to breaches, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 39:27 Reason why that's important is because I reached out to Jay, and I reached out to Michael, and then there was one other person, I can't remember their name. With me, and it was in my face. 39:34 It was a white- I talk about this all the time, but it was a whiteboard image. It wasn't a video. It was a whiteboard image. Drew the logo of Proofpoint, wrote like, "Jay, would you like to chat?" 39:42 And it said something along the lines of, "Hey, Jay, like I see that you're hiring for the Raleigh enterprise role. Considering that you recently acquired Elusive..." 39:50 Like I think it said something along the lines of like, "Considering you recently acquired Elusive, it shows that there's a lot of growth for Proofpoint because 84% of companies fall victim to breaches." 39:59 I got that from the article. Yep. 40:01 I was like anyways, I attached, I have a file, I still have it, called Battle Scars in my computer, and it's like every single compliment that I've ever gotten from prospecting in the sales cycle. 40:10 I screenshot it and I put it in here, and I just block off their names. Yep. Where it's like you- Yep... you ran an amazing sales process, or you did this so amazing. Or like oh, you're such a good hunter, whatever. 40:19 I just have this entire sheet, and I said, "Here's a sheet that shows that I, I can actually do the job. Let me know if you wanna chat." Yep. 40:25 I applied, got com- like auto-rejected from Proofpoint, but then Jay reached back out to me- Love it... and said, "Let's chat." Got the job after the auto-rejection. So like it's just, 40:37 just do more than what other people do. Shoot your shot. Like [laughs] Shoot your shot. That's it. And shoot your shot. Yeah. Like that's- You can literally just do things. You can literally just do things. 40:44 I think- We talk, we talk about that so much. People just don't understand. You can just do things. No, it, like my, my friend Jay Yang just came out with a book. He started at Beehiiv when he was 16 years old. 40:55 He was an intern. Ooh, child. He left Beehiiv to work as a head of content directly for Noah Kagan, uh- He, yeah, yeah... founder of AppSumo. You know, Noah Kagan. Yeah, yeah. Big, big deal. Um, now he's in college. 41:08 Like he like graduated high school during all this. Uh, he launched a book. He's doing at least six figures in recurring revenue with his newsletter and book launch, and he's... 41:19 The book is called You Can Literally Just Do Things, or possibly- I would love that... You Can Just Do Things, one of the two. 41:23 And that's his entire life, and I echo that sentiment, because people are so curious about like how do you get into tech sales? How do you create passive income? How do you get financially free? Like all these hows. 41:35 Like just go, go try. I, I think you and I, it's so cool, this, this whole journey that we've been on with Two Dads in Tech. Like Two Dads in Tech is creating meaningful passive revenue for Troy and myself every month. 41:48 And I have a local media business that creates revenue for me and my wife every month. 41:53 I have a newsletter course that I just launched last month that is creating meaningful revenue for me and my co-founder there every month. And then of course I have Beehiiv. 42:02 Uh, is, you know, I am doing exceptionally well at Beehiiv, and the company is also doing exceptionally well, and it's a really exciting time to be there. 42:10 And that, of course, is paying me money, and I'm, you know, continuing to work there full time. And so you can, you can just do things. Like you don't have to- Yeah... 42:17 just show up to a 9:00 to 5:00 and live your very standard life if you want to break out of that life. Like there's, there, there's a lot of things that you can do, especially with AI. 42:27 Like we, we've been really nailed this AI point home. Like you can just... I just built something yesterday with Replit. 42:32 Someone reached out, they're like, "Yo, do you, do you have a good recommendation for a CRM, but like for your personal contacts?" 42:37 Like you meet someone at a conference and you wanna like log their information, like keep them in your own like digital Rolodex. I was like, "No, I, I'm sure something exists, but let me just build it." So I did. 42:46 I went and just built it- Yep... on- That's what I do. That's what I do... Replit. Yeah. 42:49 I'm like, I could go research this for 30 minutes and find the best tool and then have to pay something, or I could spend the same minute, 30 minutes, and just build it, so I did. 42:57 So I built a digital Rolodex that works and functions, and I have it now, and I could sell it. I'm probably not going to, but like it works. It's cool. Yeah. It's a CRM for me. Yeah, yeah. Um- Yep... 43:06 you can literally just do things. So anyways- Yeah... we've nailed that point all the way home, I think.Yeah. Yeah, we can. And I think people, a lot of people appreciate the fact that we're, we're pretty authentic. 43:15 We're pretty transparent about everything we do. So like, you can just do things. Yo, we signed a six-month contract, so we have passive income with a sponsor for the next six months. 43:25 And I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but like, that's- Oh, a hundred percent... how we make passive income on, on this podcast. I don't have a problem saying it. I don't. So yeah, we have a six-month contract. 43:33 So for the next six months, not only one, are we gonna have passive income, but two, it also forces us to do this podcast for the next six months. That's right. Which is great because- You can't get away with it now... 43:41 it's only gonna grow. It's only gonna get bigger. Yep. And those- It is... those sponsorships in the future will be worth a lot more money because- Yes... 43:47 at the end of the day, consistency trumps almost anything out there. You can't get around it. Besides luck, maybe, maybe luck- Yep... can trump consistency. Yep. 43:54 But if we're consistent for the next six months, like it's just gonna continue to go up and up and up and up and up and up. Yes. Yes. But you 44:04 are very similar to me, and there's a lot of people very similar to me, especially sellers, that have this like just burning desire. And- Yes... it's like, gosh, I just wanna go off on my own. But I've got a family. 44:16 I've got a kid. I gotta make the money. I gotta do this. Yep. And I was in the same, I was in the same boat. Uh, you know, and I know a lot of people have reached out to me and they're like, "Yeah." 44:23 Literally, I-- There's one guy's idea where I'm like, "Dude, this idea is so sick and so simple. You need to just build this and sell it to X, Y, Z company. Like position- Yep... yourself." Yep. 44:33 Like anyways, I don't know if he's building it. I hope he does. Maybe I'll give him six more months, or maybe I'll go build it on V0 or Replit or something. Yeah. 'Cause it, it's an, it's an amazing and simple idea. 44:43 But all that to say is there's a lot of questions around that, like, how in the world do I do it? Maybe I can even tell my story of how I went from just sales rep to founder. I don't know. But- Yeah... 44:53 what questions, like- You should. You know, I, I think the, the reason it's sellers, not always, but a lot of times exceptional salespeople get that itch they, they can't quite scratch. 45:05 It's because when you're really, really good at selling something, and you start to sell these ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million dollar packages to customers, you're like, "Wait a second, I'm making ten, twelve, twenty percent on this sale. 45:21 Why don't I go just sell me instead of this product, or go build a product and sell it, so I get eighty percent of the profit instead of ten percent?" 45:31 It, it's because those sellers realize like, oh, the yes, the product is, is driving the sale here. Like, you can't sell nothing, although you kinda can. I sell nothing sometimes and it's effective. But you, you, you, 45:45 you can probably sell more than you realize you can sell if you're an exceptional seller. I think a lot of times the... 45:53 You get in your own head and you, you have that like false humility of like, "Oh, well, it's just the product, the product right." It's like, no, you are selling that stinking product. Yeah. You're great at selling. 46:03 So there's a reality probably where you're selling you or you're selling your own thing. So that's that insatiable itch. 46:11 I would love to hear your story going from Proofpoint and sales to founding your own thing and Demo. 46:17 My two cents here is start something with the extra time you have and build it until there is meaningful recurring revenue. 46:25 And I leave it loose-ended that way because meaningful recurring revenue is something different to everyone. It doesn't have to be a hundred thousand MRR or something crazy. 46:33 It could be, you know, one to five people paying you every single month and you're like, oh, three to six months of that every single month recurring revenue, you realize like, I have some cushion, maybe I have some savings plus the guaranteed revenue I have from this small product or service I started. 46:50 Like that, that could be enough to jump off. And so I, I think you'd be surprised if you put your mind to it, you decide to start something on the side, you'd be surprised what time you realize you have. 47:01 It doesn't take a lot. Two to five hours a week is all it really takes- For sure... to start something. Two to five hours a week. It could, could be one just bulk, you know, night, uh, Thursday night, two to five hours. 47:12 So anyways, tell me your story. How'd you go from Proofpoint and The Ringer through, uh, sales world to founding and launching Demo? Yeah. Yeah. So I want to start by saying it helped by being a familiar face. 47:26 I had an audience, not, not a crazy audience on LinkedIn at the time when I started, fifteen, twenty K followers. 47:31 Um, but I got a co-founder that had sixty-five thousand followers, and that made a big, big impact in the beginning of Demo. So I do wanna start by saying that. Now, what I will say is this. 47:44 It's kind of, uh, this weird thing. I made a post about it yesterday, and it resonated with some people. 47:49 Every single time that I've created a side gig and I started to drive meaningful revenue from it, or we started to get more and more sales, it took away from my day job more than those two to five hours. 48:00 So like in the beginning, getting something started, two to five hours a week, easy. But once you start getting customers, you want the customers to be happy. You have to onboard them. 48:08 Your tech's not gonna be perfect, assuming that it's tech. It's not gonna be perfect. Like, there's gonna be bugs. Yeah. There's gonna be all this stuff. You have to support them. 48:14 You have to make sure they're happy 'cause they're paying you money, and I always say never give anything away for free unless it's for like testimonials and something like that and you're a consultant. But- Yep... um, 48:24 so the story's a little weird because I actually wasn't at Proofpoint. I just, I'm-- I don't really say this, and there's some things that I can't say. 48:31 But at the end of the day, I started Demo last January, so January 2024 with Demo Days. All I wanted to do, and I've told this story, if you follow me on LinkedIn, I've told this story a few times. 48:43 All I wanted to do was pay my mortgage, and we were making enough money from the first month to be able to do so, but I never used any of it. I just continued to do more and more Demo Days. 48:52 We did about four or five of them, and then we finally were like, "You know what? Let's turn this into a marketplace. Everybody wants to see demos. Why not just have a platform of demos like YouTube, but for software?" 49:01 So we're like, "Cool. Let's do that." We did that. Our Demo Days total, we had about like thirty, thirty-five customers. We had a handful of Demo Days. 49:08 Five to six people would present at these Demo Days and-Um, all that fun stuff. 49:13 So anyways, we, we built this platform, and we launched it on May 15th of last year, so we're actually coming up on the one-year anniversary of the launch of the marketplace. 49:21 Myself and my co-founder, because we do have audiences on LinkedIn, we made a post about it, and, like, I did, like, a job change thing, you know, and they always... LinkedIn loves those. So it went, like, semi-viral. 49:33 Like, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were like, "Oh, my gosh," impressions on LinkedIn, and we had thousands and thousands, 50, 60, 70,000 people on the day one, like, just going to our site, and we're like, "Oh, my gosh- Hmm... 49:43 this is cool." We wanted to launch with 15 companies. We launched with 45. 15 of those were paying customers. Um, now again, like, there's this whole... 49:52 The whole reason why I'm telling you this is because I went full time, I had a kid, my wife was pregnant, we were moving to Wisconsin. So Proofpoint, I had an amazing year at Proofpoint, and I, I love Proofpoint. 50:02 Like, s- parts of me is like, "Dang, I wish I was still there 'cause I'd be making so much more money," but it's okay. Like, long vision. So we don't have much time here, but I was at Proofpoint. 50:09 I was moving to Wisconsin 'cause we got pregnant with our second kid, and my job was North Carolina based. 50:14 They could not hold me in Wisconsin, and then they didn't want me to travel out every single week to, to North Carolina. So my job was ending at Proofpoint, and I knew it was. 50:22 Um, they were kind of talking about how to make it work and stuff like that, but I was like, "Yeah, I'd rather just get a Wisconsin-based job." 50:29 At the time, I'm still running Demo on the side, but almost every single post that I'm doing on LinkedIn is about Demo and about nothing else, so it's very clear. 50:36 And at Proofpoint, I had a lot of HR and legal conversations, but I got it approved before I announced it publicly, but I did that purposely so, like, I couldn't get in trouble. 50:45 But every one-on-one with my boss at Proofpoint was like, "Hey, man," like, "I keep getting asked about this Demo thing. Like, how, how big is it? Like, are you focused more on that, et cetera?" 50:52 And I was like, "No," and I was hitting my quota, so it didn't really matter at the time. Anyways, had to get a new job 'cause I was moving to Wisconsin. 50:58 Got a new job with an old boss, um, amazing human being, um, but he had a position opening up, two positions in Wisconsin opening up, very small company. 51:07 And I was like, "Oh, sick," and he pretty much just was like, "Hey, you got the job." And I was like, "Yes, let's go." Come to find out, um, one, Demo's taking off a little bit more than I expected. 51:18 I needed to have an income. I needed to have health insurance. My, my wife wasn't gonna be working for, like, that pa- or the mat leave time and stuff. Like, I needed money. I needed money and all that stuff. So 51:29 I kinda was, like, riding this job out when I was very passionate about Demo, which is not a very smart thing to do for anybody listening. And he was like, "Hey, man," like, three, two m- two months into it. 51:39 It was two months into it. He's like, "Hey, man," like, "I don't think your heart's in it." And I was like, "Yeah, you know, it's not." 51:44 But at this time, we had about 60 customers, and I was out there talking to investors every single day, and I had finally gotten my funding round. 51:53 So then there's a lot of stuff I could talk about, like how to get in front of investors and how to, like, reach out to these people and things like that. Number one, referrals. Number two, outreach. 52:01 Like, those are the two things you can only really care about with investors. But I finally, like, got... 52:05 We got around $900,000 in funding, and, like, at the same time that we closed that out, I ended up getting let go because my heart was not in it. My heart was at Demo. Nice. And I was completely... 52:15 I completely agree with that, but it was like, oh, my goodness, like- You gotta pour, pour one out for the homies. I know. Shout out. What up? 52:21 Um, but all that to say is it was really stressful because it was like I knew it was coming because I kept getting talked about at the new company as well, and they kept ask- they pretty much said, "We hired you for your LinkedIn audience," even though we were selling to, like, cybersecurity people. 52:35 Nobody in my audience is cybersecurity people or maybe very, very few. 52:38 But yeah, they were like, "We thought that you were gonna come in here, post about us on LinkedIn all the time," and I was like, "It's not my contract, and, uh, my LinkedIn is my personal profile. 52:48 Like, it's kinda, like, how I built a lot of my audience and my, my brand." So yeah, that kinda all just shook out, and next thing- Wow... you know, I got canned, and now I'm, I'm running Demo. 52:58 And again, amazing company, amazing founder, amazing- Yeah, yeah... you know, boss that I had. But just, like, my heart was very clearly at Demo. Yeah. 53:06 So the only way that I went full time on Demo with having kids was the fact that I got funding and I got let go of my job, and so now I'm running Demo full time, and I'm happy as can be. I love it. It's fun. Yeah. 53:17 Stressful, but that's the story, man. That's the story. [laughs] Sometimes you need a nudge. What's clear to me is that everyone's story is completely different, but it's exciting. I mean, you... It's stressful. 53:28 You gotta make money. If you're the breadwinner particularly, you don't really always have a cushion to, like, launch out and, you know, take five to six months to, like, prove something. 53:38 Sometimes you need to prove it before you go all in. But, like, I don't know, I think everyone's story looks different. 53:44 I think it's important to find those people who have at least done something similar to what you're looking to do, and even, like, what you mentioned with raising a round, like, find someone who can talk to you about what it looks like to, whether it's break into tech, start a company, raise a round, whatever you're trying to do, and, and ask them for advice and, and tell them to speak the truth to you. 54:03 Like, you don't want someone that's just gonna hype you up if it's a really dumb decision. 54:07 Like, you want someone to be like, "Uh, you know, that's probably not the smartest move right now considering X, Y, and Z, your life, your family, your job, your income," like, all that stuff. 54:17 Your debt, that's important. If you have a ton of debt- Yep... if you have, like, bills that you can't, you know, get rid of. 54:24 I mean, there's, there's a right time to do something really risky, and there's a wrong time to do something really risky. Hell yeah. And so you gotta assess your risk. You know, what is your risk aversion? 54:34 And if you can take on a lot of risk, maybe do something risky. If you can't, call a spade a spade and do something less risky or don't do anything at all. Just be a conservative, you know, day job worker- Yeah... 54:43 and be okay with that. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. Not everyone is, is capable of, you know, jumping into risk stuff. So anyways, this was a good episode. Hopefully it was helpful. 54:50 Hopefully if someone's listening and they're trying to break into a new role or a new industry, this is at least a little bit helpful. If not, you know, thanks for listening anyways. Yeah. [laughs] That's it. 54:58 That's the episode- Yeah... for today. Awesome. Where can they find us? You wanna do the sign-off today? You do it. I don't. I'm about to pee myself. I gotta go. [laughs] I gotta go pee, so- All right... do it. 55:06 Where can they find us? Find us at twodadsintech.com, twodadsintech.com. Subscribe, like, follow, share. Thank you everyone. Thanks for listening. See you next time. We'll see you next week
