Navigating the Product Journey with Andrew Askins
You're listening to Grief and Pizza, a podcast exploring the highs and lows at the intersection of business and emotional well-being. In this episode, we're talking to Andrew Askins about his experience growing an agency, getting acquihired, and getting fired. We talk about company culture, the unique challenges of being a founder, and what it's like to bootstrap a software business.
Andrew:Hey, y'all.
Marie:Hello. Welcome.
Ben:Welcome, Andrew. How's it going?
Andrew:Going well. Going well. How, how do you all feel about cocktails on the podcast? Yeah.
Ben:You can do whatever you want on the podcast.
Andrew:It's, 06:00 here. So cheers.
Marie:Cheers. Yeah.
Ben:Cheers. Yeah.
Marie:Yeah. That's awesome.
Ben:It's nice to meet you. Why don't you introduce yourself for our listeners?
Andrew:Yeah. My name is Andrew Askins. I am I don't know what I would call myself. It depends on the day you're asking.
Marie:Man of many talents and interests.
Andrew:I ran an agency for about eight years called Crit. It was primarily a product design and development agency. Went through many positioning changes over the years. But towards the end of my time there, our focus was doing product design work for seed and series a stage cybersecurity startups. So grew that to about a million in yearly revenue and then ended up selling to a client.
Andrew:I worked for the client for a year, got fired, took the rest of the year off, fulfilled a lifelong dream of white walking across Spain, and, I've spent the last year working on building something new. So, yeah, that's kinda my my short spiel, I guess.
Marie:Pretty pretty exciting milestone to get to to sell your own company.
Andrew:Yeah. It a
Marie:great product. Yeah.
Andrew:It's exactly as stressful as everyone says it is. Like, and our sale was really, really easy, I think, all things considered. We had a lot of trust built up with the team that bought us, and it was a pretty short time period. I think we started talking to them about selling seriously in, like, March and had closed everything by June. So I think that's pretty fast, all things considered, and yet it was still, like, the most stressful three months I'd ever been through.
Marie:Oh, wow. Can we yeah. Can we dig into some of, like, what were the either, like, unexpected things that came up or just the most challenging parts of it for you?
Andrew:So one of the really hard things was balancing what we could and couldn't share with our team. And, ultimately, we erred pretty conservatively on we got advice from from several friends who had been through it before or who had seen people go through this process before, and the advice was pretty unanimous of, like, you really can't talk about this too much. It feels crappy, but you just can't because until it's more concrete, it'll just create stress. And, you know, these things are often fall through, and so it can lead people to kind of the wrong conclusions. And so we ended up not really telling our team anything until we had things pretty locked up.
Andrew:And so balancing that was very stressful of, like, talking to them day to day about how we were going to continue to operate. And and the other piece of advice we got was you need to run the business as if this will fall through because if it if you don't and then it does you're really in a bad spot. And so just like trying to live in those two worlds of like okay, we might do this big thing and, like, this thing we've been working on for eight years. And, you know, for my partner, my business partner and I, we started the agency while we were in college, and so we'd never known anything else. It was our entire professional lives.
Andrew:And Mhmm. So, like, your entire professional life might change drastically in the next couple of months, but you have to pretend like it's not going to. And that was just, like, I had a really hard time with that. And then the company that was buying us was going through a fundraise, and so they were just incredibly busy. And so kind of went dark on us for several weeks at a time a couple of times.
Andrew:And so it was just like,
Marie:I don't know what's going on.
Andrew:I don't know if I did something. I don't know what's happening. And so, yeah, all of those, mixed emotions, mixed messages, and, yeah, it was all just just, created a big old pile of stress.
Marie:Yeah. I can only imagine. I know you've mentioned before, like, company culture being, like, one of your, I don't know, areas of interest or something that you're really proud of too. And so I imagine that tension of, like, wanting to well, I'd love to ask, you know, even just kinda how you created a culture within your team and kinda what was important to you during that time. Because I imagine that tension of not sharing, maybe if you're used to sharing more with your team, was part of that that tension.
Marie:Is that the case?
Andrew:A %. Yeah. So crit as an agency was not like a revolutionary business. Right? It was an agency, a product design, a dev shop.
Andrew:You know, there's there's a million of them out there. We weren't doing anything radical there. And I like product. I like product development and, you know, ideation and all this stuff. But the thing that I got most of my fulfillment out of in my time at Crit was was building a team and building that culture.
Andrew:Like, that that was where I kinda found my purpose of, like, okay, we're not we're not saving the world. We're not doing we're working with startups to try to help make their products look better and help them sell better. But, like, it's not like I'm not a doctor. I'm not, you know, I'm not doing anything that's, like, drastically making someone's life better. But the thing that I I always came back to that I, like, got fulfillment from was we can make this a great place to work for a small group of people, but still, you know, make a big impact on those people's lives.
Andrew:And we do that through culture and process and, like, trying to create stability and safety, psychological safety. And I I can talk a lot about culture and hot takes and Mhmm. You know, I wanna caveat all of it with, like, I ran a team of, like, 10 to 15 people, including part time freelancers and stuff. So that's it gets drastically harder the bigger you get. And so I I don't ever wanna pretend to have answers for that I don't have.
Andrew:But, yeah, I think a lot of culture, it's about being clear on your values, and then it's all the, like, little actions you take every day to exemplify those. A writer that we worked with wrote a great piece of about culture where she said talked about the difference between artifacts and and, like, true culture. And artifacts are all the things that kind of point at hint at what your culture might be, but it's really the day to day decisions that make it what it is. And all of this is a long winded way of saying, like, one of our core values that we've really, I think, did a good job of embodying was transparency. We were, you know, we were full on drinking the the buffer convert kit, now kit Kool Aid.
Andrew:You know, we were one of, not many agencies who were transparent with our revenue and and things publicly and then super transparent with our team about revenue and costs and salaries and day to day operations and everything that we could be. We really tried hard to to do that. And so, yeah, certainly during that that sale process, it was confusing because the predominant wisdom from people much more experienced than us was this is a time where you cannot be transparent. And that was, at that point, kind of unnatural almost and felt a little bit like a betrayal of our values.
Ben:Yeah. That must have been really difficult.
Marie:Can I ask if some of your your employees, was there, like, resentment when you finally did make this announcement? Like, was that a difficult thing or were people mostly on board?
Andrew:The emotions were pretty mixed. The really wonderful, kind of beautiful thing was that most of the negative emotions were not at all a feeling as far as I understood from people and as far as they expressed to us were not a feeling of betrayal or anything like that. It was more sadness that that the culture that we had built was going to change and that that there was now this uncertainty of about the future and and what was happening next. So our our acquisition was essentially an acquihire. So the company was buying us for the talent.
Andrew:And a really awkward part of that process that I never knew about beforehand, I always sort of assumed if you get acquihired, the whole team just gets an offer and you go over and alright. Now you're part of this new team. I realized that the standard operating procedure is you interview the entire team. Like, often the founders get a get a, you know, an offer right away, but then you interview the whole team. So all of our team had to go through interviews, and they weren't guaranteed a job.
Andrew:Now we, in our negotiations, tried to make sure we did everything we could to be sure they were taken care of. So, you know, we had assurances that, you know, that the company wanted them. If for any reason they didn't join the company, whether they were not given an offer or whether they were given an offer and and refused, they were guaranteed, I think, three months severance. And then we made sure that we gave everybody a bonus as part of the process based on, you know, what we got out of the sale. So we tried to do everything we could to make sure they were taken care of, but overwhelming emotions were people were very kindly happy for Austin, my cofounder, and myself knew it was a big milestone for us and were happy for us and and proud of us.
Andrew:Sad that the culture was going to change and that this place that they had enjoyed working was going to go away and then stressed at the uncertainty that they were now thrust into. And you know, thankfully, all of them were given offers. One turned it down. The new company, most of them are still there. You know, it's definitely a different culture.
Andrew:And so it's definitely been a change in a transition. No one told me they felt betrayed. You never know. But yeah.
Marie:And so you mentioned getting fired from your sort of own initial company. What was that like, and was that sort of expected? And did that open up some freedom for you? Like, I'm just curious what that was
Andrew:like. So I I joined the company. Once we once we all made the transition, I joined the company in kind of an interim role, interim head of product. And I spent, I think, like, five months or so in that role and and knew that part of that role was going to be helping the company hire a new, more experienced VP of product. We did that.
Andrew:Once she came in, you know, I transitioned to more of a product manager role, working with a a team in the company to help, try to bring a new product from zero to one. And I was on that team for probably five or six months when my new boss, you know, sat me down one day and said, hey, I'm really sorry. Like, I hate to do this. And as soon as she said the word, it's like I was like, oh, I know what's happening. Because I'd been in her shoes.
Andrew:I'd sat in that seat. You know, I'd had to have that conversation with people before. And, yeah, it was it was a shock, and it wasn't. I learned a lot at the company, you know, after the acquisition. And, you know, one of the big things I wanted to learn was, like, I've been a founder my whole life, my whole, like, again, professional career.
Andrew:And so I I wanted a chance to figure out, is that really what I want? Is that just what I think I want? So much of my identity was tied up in it. And, you know, my therapist is always telling me not to tie up my identity in it. And so I was like, okay.
Andrew:This is a chance to to try it on a new identity and and try to try to separate that out a little bit. And, you know, it was truthfully rocky at times. Like, I was jumping into a role that was similar to things I'd done, but not the same. I I tried to write about it, right after it happened and, ended up not publishing anything because it was still too fresh. And I I was worried it was gonna come across as bitter and not be helpful to anyone.
Andrew:I still wanna write about it someday. But one of the things I wrote that I think was pretty accurate was, like, I was undoubtedly in over my head in this role that I was thrust into after the acquisition, But that was also normal. I I'd been built in over my head my entire career. That's what being a founder is like every single day. And so it was strange to be in over my head and not be able to pull my head up enough, I guess.
Andrew:Not not yeah, it was it was a weird experience. And, you know, I made plenty of mistakes, while I was there, and so, you know, wasn't wasn't totally shocked. I think, ultimately, the biggest thing is that, not to take it too much back to culture, but I think, you know, I was not as clear a culture fit for the acquiring company as I thought. And I had a hard time shaking a lot of my founder tendencies to Oh, yeah. To poke at things and and Yeah.
Andrew:Stir the pot. And
Ben:That sounds really familiar to me. In 2018, I went and worked as a lead software engineer at a at a startup for a couple years. And I remember at the time feeling super, like, excited to be kind of, like, on the ground again, not not being responsible for the direction of the product the way that we had been with our previous SaaS. And, I also found that, you know, I I started having those same founder tendencies, like, poking my nose into systems that, like, weren't my own because I I the founder mindset tends to think more holistically, more, like, broader picture.
Andrew:And
Ben:so you start thinking about, like, the interactions between departments and things like that. And, like, oh, we could improve this over here. And I was getting kind of wrist slapped quite frequently and and said, like, no. You're you're in engineering. Stay over there.
Marie:This is your silo.
Ben:Yeah. And it took me a while to actually remember to do that. And I actually learned so much by actually being more of a, individual contributor for a while.
Andrew:Mhmm.
Ben:And I often encourage people that they'll start their side project or a SaaS, and it doesn't work out. And they have to go back to full time work, to make money or something like that. But I often encourage people to not see it as a failure. Like, that was a a great, like, learning experience, and then now you can go back and reestablish yourself within the context of a company knowing what you've learned as a founder now. Maybe you work there for another couple years, and then you take another venture out into founding.
Ben:But it I love the idea of developing this sense of elasticity as a founder because I think a lot of people like yourself, you may have coming right out of school and going into founder mode, you don't really know what it's like to be an employee Yeah. In a sense. And so it's almost impossible to manage from that position without the knowledge of what it is to feel like, you know, what what is what is a culture mismatch look like from the bottom up and from the top down? It's really hard to understand those two things. And I think, like, you highlighted something really interesting, which we do this thing called the holistic context
Andrew:Mhmm.
Ben:For developing, like, a North Star and a set of, like, modes of production, like, the things that we do that create our our, like, our vision in in the world. So, like, we we write blogs. We do this. And so it's kind of an interesting way of developing a, like, vision and a and a and a company culture. But what we found is we've had to scale up and scale down is that you can't really commit to culture, and leave it as is because every single person that is added or removed from the team causes culture to become emergent again.
Ben:And so you it you couldn't you can't just take, you know, your entire agency and plug it into a different culture because every single person within your agency is gonna have to adapt, and the agency has to adapt. If and if they're not willing to do that, then, you know, you end up getting fired, I guess. But it seems like it's been a good a good move for you. Like, tell us about the, this transition from kind of, like, find refinding yourself as a product person again and now moving back into, you know, being a founder with, Meta Monster and Chart Juice. I'm particularly excited to hear I I like, the reason I, like, asked you on the podcast was because I read your year in review, and I followed you.
Ben:And I was like, oh, like, you know, I really like that he was noting about, you know, the the insights into his own personal life and therapy as it applies to, like, choosing which product to work on and, you know, making some mistakes early on. So I'd love to hear about this, like, transition from from, you know, work to it sounds like you almost had, like, a gap year type thing, kind of discovery type thing and then back into product.
Andrew:Yeah. So a couple of things that I'd love to say about that. So first off, real quick before we move on from getting fired, one thing that I've think is fascinating, getting fired is so much like getting dumped. It's so much like going through a bad breakup. It it's a blow to your ego.
Andrew:Even if you knew things were not working out, there's still this feeling of, like, ah, crap. They got there first. Like, they and the other thing that, like, really has struck me in reflecting since is, like, you never ever really know what happened. You guess and you think about, like, how could I have done this differently? Or what would this have done?
Andrew:And and you just don't know. And like a breakup, you go through a grieving period and you have to it takes time to just, like, let go of that part of your life. And, like, you know, it's kinda like letting go of an ex. It's it's it's kind of funny to me now almost how much it has felt like that. It's it's been fascinating.
Andrew:I I just think that's interesting and a perspective that you don't hear people share much. I also think we should just talk about all this shit more. Like, talk about getting fired, talk about getting laid off, talk about, you know, whatever shit you're dealing with. I think talking about it sort of takes the the Sting. Sting out of it.
Andrew:Yeah. Yeah. Do you prefer Ben or Benjamin?
Ben:It doesn't matter. Okay. He he can call me Ben if you want.
Marie:Depends if he's in trouble.
Ben:That's right.
Andrew:So you mentioned, like, telling your friends who have tried to start side projects and, quote, unquote, failed and then gone back to being an employee. Hey. Don't don't look at this as a failure. Like, you learn so much, and and you can bring that to being an employee. And I think I've had kind of the opposite experience where I learned so much from being an employee for a year, and I get to bring that now to being a founder.
Andrew:And one of the most important things I learned that I'm so grateful and thankful for is that I don't wanna be an employee. That's not just because I got fired. Like, I was feeling that way before. I promise. Like but I I really did, you know, so much before I I had this experience, you know, when things got hard, when things were really stressful at crit, my agency, I was always like, would it be easier to just give up and, like, go try to get a job somewhere?
Andrew:Like, that sounds so nice. And the experience that I had was you're not like alleviating all stress. You're just trading one stress for another. Like it went from and maybe this is just my anxious brain and like my, one of the things my to bring impact to therapy, my therapist constantly reminds me is that I'm bad about catastrophizing. Uh-huh.
Andrew:If you all are
Marie:familiar with
Andrew:that term.
Marie:Ben's like, yes. Yeah.
Andrew:Yeah. For for the audience, catastrophizing is is a common cognitive bias. So it it means essentially blowing things out of proportion and kind of focusing on the negative possibility of what could happen. That's right. And I'm I am a catastrophizer, baby.
Andrew:I am and so it crit you know, the catastrophizing narrative in my head was always like, what if I can't close this next deal and I have to lay off the entire team and, like, it all goes under? And then I became an employee and, like, a lot of the stress did evaporate. Like, it it was nice not having to worry about closing deals and, like, handling sales for a little while. Like, it did feel like a weight off my shoulders. But then quickly, this new narrative crept in of, like, well, what if you just get fired?
Andrew:And this is the real irony, by the way, is that I I was afraid of this possibility happening for because of these narratives swirling in your head
Marie:Interesting.
Andrew:For, like, most of the time that I was an employee, and then it happened. And the kind of magic of that is it, again, the same way talking about it takes this thing out of it. Going through it takes some of this thing out of it.
Ben:Yeah.
Andrew:Getting fired and realizing, oh, it's not the end of the world. You move on with your life. People don't actually judge you that much. So, anyway, I I feel like I'm taking this in 10 different directions. But That's
Ben:great. That's good. It's very it's very dear to my heart because I'll I'll admit that I was diagnosed with, general anxiety disorder when I was, like, 15. So it's something I've, the cat catastrophizing is something that's really resonant for me, to the point that I have a term that I use when I think that I'm being just the right amount of catastrophic, which is adequate catastrophizing. So, like, the the correct amount good.
Ben:Of catastrophe. I I think you make a really good point about, like, noticing where the the the stress and the anxiety shows up in a different way, but it's kind of the same type of of anxiety, the root causes of these things where we're resisting something. And I find that for me at least, like, when I'm in charge, it's like I I've I'm applying that anxiety to myself and and and the worry becomes my own. And then when I go and get a job or I'm working for somebody, then it's like my catastrophizing needs to become like, the the level of upset or concern for things has to be shared by the by everyone. So it's kind of, like, filtered out to your team and your boss and things like that.
Ben:And, like, you'd like, everybody needs to understand how how challenging this is. So, like, that's the thing that I tend to do is, like, I'll bring up concerns that aren't really related to the work I'm doing because I feel like, you know, as a as a whole, we should all be really concerned about this. And I think, you know, I I can I'm sure Marie can attest to this where, like, I'll come into her office and be like, this is terrible. And, like, I mean
Marie:burst in. Like, we must deal with this planet. Like, that is not an emergency right now. Yeah.
Ben:And yeah. And and I find, like, therapy helps with this stuff too to, like, kind of understand, like, what's the, you know, what what's the actual like, you've you've you had a couple things in, in your year end review where you mentioned, like, is it true? Is it helpful? Yeah. Like and so I kind of think of those things, like, you know, how how much what is the actual impact here?
Andrew:Yeah.
Ben:But when you're in that state of of heightened anxiety, it can be really hard to look at things in in the objective way that your your coworkers and your spouse are kind of expecting of you.
Andrew:The thing you're referring to is something my therapist has been working on with me this year, which is we've been talking a lot about stories, internal stories that that build up in your head over time. We all have them. Right? I'm a founder. I got fired because of this.
Andrew:Or we we have millions of stories about us, about all of the people we have relationships with, about the world at large. So one of the things that that my therapist has been working on with me is just the simple little exercise where you sit down for a few minutes, and you write out stories. You just think of every story you can, every story that's swirling around in your head. And for each one, you ask, is this true and is it helpful? And those two questions can be pretty fucking powerful when you start to just, like, go through.
Andrew:And if it's not true or it's not helpful, then the challenge is, okay, what is the story that is true and is helpful? Like, how do I how do I reframe this? So that in the future, when I catch myself seeing this, I can label it. I can see, okay, this is a story. I know I have this story.
Andrew:I've already done the work. I know this isn't true. I know it's not helpful. And I know that the better framing is this. And I
Marie:I think it's like a practice, right, to even recognize the stories because I think it's often easy to forget that that is a story and it's not an objective fact.
Andrew:Yeah.
Marie:And I've I found this with even, like, my nieces and nephews where I I'm I'm trying to dig at at the truth and and they're like, well, you know, she's x y z fill in the story. And I'm like, it's not a fact. It's a story. So how can you, like, separate the the emotion for and that's really hard to catch yourself doing that. So I think it's like that practice.
Andrew:Your emotions Yeah. Like, really Yeah. Are you all into mindfulness at all?
Marie:Oh, yeah. Mhmm.
Andrew:Yeah. I feel like that's the best way to practice all of this stuff. It's like, you just have to sit with it and just watch and learn. Building that skill of being able to, like
Marie:Notice that.
Andrew:Observe yourself and observe your mind and, like, see things go going on and not passing judgment, but just recognizing and identifying what's happening and, like, separating yourself from it. But, man, is it hard?
Marie:It really is. Still work. Right? Yeah.
Ben:One thing for me was this past year has been really diving into, like, more somatic therapies
Andrew:Cool.
Ben:Around the work because, I find and I found in the last couple years that the thing that's been really kind of holding me back is, like, if I I'm really good at intellectualizing these types of things. And what I've noticed is that, like, if you actually sit and, like, just, like, feel what it feels like in your body when you get into that anxious anxiety mode that you can actually recognize your before your thoughts come to you and you start freaking out, you can notice that feeling in your body a little bit more soon. And then it's actually just a mess a matter of stepping back and just, like, sitting in that in that uncomfortableness for a bit, and it actually will pass, and then the thoughts kinda pass with them. So there's, like, this, you know, kind of almost, like, hijacking yourself into slowing down a little bit and pausing, before the the the thoughts start coming in and, you know, then it's like the cycle that your thoughts are causing you to feel, you know, feel terrible and that kind of thing, and I I you know, you start spinning and whatnot. But, yeah, that's been really helpful for me.
Andrew:That's awesome. My therapist has a a saying that I've thought about getting tattooed. It's you can't think your way out of a thinking problem. And, oh, man, if that's not true. Like, you were talking about intellectualizing and and somatic therapy or somatic practice.
Andrew:I'm not sure the language there is is often about, like, what your body is feeling. Right? And, like, paying attention to those feelings in your body. And so, yeah, one of his big things is, like, you know, get up and move. Like, change when you're stuck in these, like, thought spirals, you know, change something about your physical environment, intellectualizing it.
Andrew:Even though it's so often our first instinct, especially as
Marie:True.
Andrew:As nerds who work get computers all day and, like, our minds are how we make a living and how we change and shape the world around us, but it just doesn't work with when you're when you're in one of those anxious thought spirals.
Marie:And can I ask if you're if you're open to sharing about this? You know, it's like both you and Ben identifying as sort of anxious personalities, and I tend to be more on the, like, what could go really well? Like, I'm I'm way more, like, optimistic, and everything's it's probably fine. And so I'm on the opposite end of things. So I'm curious if you find yourself even through your own partnerships or with even, like, business partners.
Marie:Are you drawn to people that tend to be a little more on the optimistic side that kind of balance out that anxiety? Have you noticed?
Andrew:So one of the things that's weird is I consider myself an optimist. And this is these are these kind of dual conflicting stories that that live at the same time inside of us. Right? I personally think all entrepreneurs are optimists. Then maybe you disagree, but, like, I think you kind of have to be a little bit of a delusional optimist to try to be an entrepreneur because, like, the odds are so stacked against you that if there wasn't a part of you that thought you were gonna beat the odds, like, why are you doing this?
Andrew:And and so I I consider myself optimistic, but also anxious.
Marie:And so it's this weird grappling. Anxiety. Yeah.
Andrew:But, Marie, what I do wanna say is, like, Bin talked about, like, therapy being an important part of, like, working through these stories and, like, sort of catching yourself in these things. I think partnerships are and community relationships are an important piece of the puzzle as well. So my cofounder on Meta Monster, which, Ben, I totally never answered your actual question. Sorry.
Ben:Yeah.
Andrew:But my my cofounder now with Meta Monster is the same cofounder I worked with for eight years at Crit. I joke that he's my business soulmate. And one of the things that that makes us work very well together is we are not anxious, at least not in the same ways. Like, he I I have a lot of anxiety, and he is largely pretty chill and go with the flow. And so just like two days ago, I was talking to him and I was like, we're not moving fast enough.
Andrew:Like, we're going to get, you know, outpace. People are going to, you know, get there before us. And he's like, it's okay. Like, chill. Like, we're making a lot of progress, and things are things are really going pretty well.
Andrew:And, like, you know, three months from now, you're not gonna believe how much has changed. And so I do think I I I don't know I don't quite know how to how to wrap my head around those those kind of conflicting parts of my personality. Like, I am so optimistic. I think big picture optimistic, but I think in the, like, small day to day, I get so caught up in in my own anxieties. And and peep having people around me who at least have different anxieties.
Andrew:You know? I think my my girlfriend, my partner, I think one of the things that works well about us is we're we both can be anxious at times, but the things that she's anxious about, I'm usually not. And the things that I'm anxious about, she's usually not. And so one of us is there to level the other out and, like, provide some stability. So It
Ben:seems it seems pretty natural to me to have I don't disagree with, that it's possible to be an anxious, like, avoidant type, but also optimistic because in my mind, there's this idea that we can have this, like, larger because I like the way that you made the distinction between the big and the small because I think we can have a very sort of grandiose vision that we know we can get to. But we start sometimes get stuck in the details on, like, is this am I doing am I doing the right thing right now that's gonna get me to this thing that I kind of in my head know I can get to? But, like, you start hesitating on those smaller decisions because, you know, you're you're worried that, oh, boy. Like, tech debt or or we chose the wrong base technology or, yeah, we got, we didn't get there fast enough, and this other place got there, but, you know, maybe we're not optimizing for, like, our unique situation. So you start, you know, worrying about those smaller decisions where you still have that larger overarching, like, we're we're we're pretty good.
Ben:Like, everything's kind of, you know, and I think that's definitely how I am. Like, Marie and I, you know, we've been running Notion Mastery for five years now, and Things are pretty dialed in. Like, we have a pretty well optimized system. Like, the the scheduling system's all kind of, like, automated. And so we kinda just have to show up and do our trainings and update our course.
Ben:And now we have this kind of freedom ahead of us to be able to to create new things on top of our platform, essentially. And so I have that, like, that really nice optimism. And and in the back of my mind that, like, we're we're kind of okay right now. Like, everything's good, and I'm feeling really optimistic about what comes next. But then, yeah, those day to day, those little small details where you're like, oh, is this gonna be is this gonna be ending up like a waste of time if we build out this, like, new app or something that works with Notion and then Notion's, like, new feature that does the thing that you just spent the last six months building.
Ben:Like, I'm, like, really, really excited about what I could build with Notion and optimistic about what I might do because I know I can build all these things. But then I sit on that, like, edge and go, but what if but what if, you know, what if Notion does? And, you know and then I occasionally, I'll look back and be like, wow. If I had started that two years ago, that would be pretty awesome right now.
Marie:So easy to see in hindsight.
Ben:And that and that thing that got stuck in my head didn't actually come to pass.
Andrew:Yeah.
Ben:So what's an example of that right now with Meta Monster that you're, like, what's, like, you're you're stuck on or or or, like, thinking about too much or not enough? You should explain what Meta Monster
Marie:is to
Ben:for the audience. Yeah.
Andrew:After I got fired, I I took some time off, walked the community to Santiago, which was this incredible experience, lifelong dream, came back. And, like, as much as I love traveling and loved the experience of being on the Camino and wanting adventure, I also knew I wanted some stability. And, you know, I have a girlfriend. I have two cats. I I wanted truthfully, I want both.
Andrew:I want adventure and stability. And the only way I really see to do that is to be an entrepreneur. And I knew that my attempt at being an employee failed and I think failed in part because I really do feel like I like, being an entrepreneur is what I'm made to do. Made to do makes me sound more religious or than I am, but, like, it feels right to me. Yeah.
Andrew:Yeah. And so, you know, coming into this year, I was like, alright. I I joke that the acquisition was down payment on a house money, but not fuck you money. Like, it was
Marie:and It's a nice bump.
Andrew:What's maybe more accurate is, like, it was take a couple years off money, but not never work again money. And so I knew I had enough to, like, survive for a little while. And so I said to myself, alright. We're gonna give this another crack, and I'm gonna try to build the business I always wanted while I was running CRIT. And the stress with CRIT was always the up and the down.
Andrew:It was always the the highs and the lows of agency life where when things are good, they're really good. But the second you lose, you know, we were relatively high ticket, relatively small team. And so like that meant, you know, we were doing five to 10 deals a year. And so we had one client not renew or one client that we thought was gonna come through not come through. And all of a sudden, as the only salesperson on the team, I was scrambling to try to make ends meet and make everything work out.
Andrew:And, you know, the dream that my cofounder and I had always had was SaaS, this magical holy land. SaaS, everything works out. Numbers only go up. I know that's not true, but
Marie:Haven't you heard of the long slow SaaS ramp of death? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Andrew:Oh, yes. The dream was SaaS. And so I said, alright. I I'm gonna give myself this year. I'm I'm gonna burn through some of the savings that I built up from from the sale, and I'm gonna try to start the SaaS business that that we had always wanted.
Andrew:And so the first crack at that was a little product called Chart Juice. It was a, essentially, a chart to image API. So the idea was companies that need to send, you know, automated emails. They wanna include charts in those. It's hard to include charts in emails.
Andrew:We make it easy to design a nice looking chart and then, you know, generate a custom version of that as an image instead of with JavaScript. The idea came from a friend from the former company, from the company who acquired us, who who left after I did. We decided to work together for a little bit. He had to take a step back, and I decided to keep working on it. Worked on that for about six months.
Andrew:It just clearly wasn't going anywhere, at least not in its its current iteration. And so around that time, I reached out to my former cofounder, who is still at the company who bought us and was like, hey. You getting the itch? Like, how how are you doing? What's what's going on?
Andrew:And so we decided, alright, we wanted to to to team up again and and try to work on something. Plan was he would stay at the company. You know, no intention to, like, poach him or bring pull him away, but we knew the long slow, slow, slow ramp of death meant it was gonna be a long process, but, like, okay. He'll he'll keep his full time job. I'll do some consulting work to pay the bills.
Andrew:We'll and we'll just but we'll start working on this. We tried to follow-up Rob Walling's five PM framework and, you know, vet a bunch of ideas. And and the thing that we we sort of landed on was this idea that I'd had back in March of last year and that had been rolling around in the back of my head for a long time that we ended up calling Meta Monster. Started with I used to write a lot of content. I wanted to include internal links and things, and I was terrible about doing it.
Andrew:I never did. I knew they were important, and I just never did them. And so I started being like, I just wish there was something that would, you know, sort of do these for me and, you know, started looking at generative AI and what was, you know, the the new options that it made possible. And so did some some user research around this and and where we landed for, like, an MVP was we'll generate meta descriptions, page titles for you, you know, crawl your website, generate meta descriptions, page titles, this sort of boring metadata that's really tedious to do. It it truthfully, it's not the most important thing in the world.
Andrew:Like, having, you know, the perfect page title is not going to make or break your SEO strategy, but it's something that we heard SEO freelancers, SEO agencies telling us was a pain. It's like it was something a box they needed to check, right, to their clients' expectations. And it's boring, and it just takes a lot of time if you have a large enough site.
Ben:Meta monster sounds like to me like your your customer or ideal customer is like, almost like an agency or, like, maybe like like you in a past life where you are managing a bunch of, like, projects and sites for customers and building those things and as a research tool perhaps as well. Like yeah. Like, what what's the customer segment there?
Andrew:Yeah. You're a % accurate. So we're really trying to hone in on SEO agencies and freelancers who have to go through this kind of audit process with multiple sites a month. You know, sites could be a few hundred pages. They could be tens of thousands of pages.
Andrew:And consistently, they're going through their audit and finding this very basic thing of, you know, metadata, page titles, meta descriptions. There's a lot more we eventually wanna do. It's, you know, often entirely missing. They're working with folks who who aren't super tech savvy, aren't SEO savvy. They're, they don't have the basics covered, and they need to get them to that point of, like, just having having the basic boxes checked.
Andrew:And so, yeah, it is it is kind of working with with folks who are like us and also not. And this goes back to some of the conversation around identity. Right? I have this identity as a former agency owner, and so I can connect with people on that. I just had a great prospect call the other day where we just got to nerd out about the challenges of running an agency.
Andrew:And, like, I love that. I love talking with agency owners. And so that part's very easy. But then there's this other part of the identity of, like, SEO expert, like, that is not me. I sort of call myself an SEO enthusiast or, like, an SEO nerd.
Andrew:Like, I just picked up bits and pieces here and there as I was doing what I needed to do to drive leads for our product agency, but I'm I've never run an SEO agency. I've never been literally in their shoes. And so there's kind of these two conflicting identities of, like, one that is very natural and then one that I'm sort of trying on and trying to step into. And I Mhmm. I don't wanna mislead and pretend like that's who I am, but I wanna also explore it and try to, like, lean into it a little more.
Andrew:But then to your point about to answer your to answer your actual question about what are the things I'm struggling with? The identity piece is is maybe one, but truthfully, right now, the anxiety is largely around are we moving fast enough? Are we doing enough? We don't have any paying customers yet. We think we've got something, but you don't really know until you have people paying.
Andrew:And so it's, are we doing enough? And I know I've talked a lot about, like, anxiety. I've never been diagnosed with general anxiety disorder. I have been diagnosed with ADHD. Often, those two go kinda hand in hand.
Andrew:So there might be an some undiagnosed stuff happening there. So, like, I think part of this is just that perpetual story as someone who has lived their adult life with ADHD of, like, whole life, I guess. It was always there. It's just it was easier to cope early on. Some of that fear of, like, I'm not doing enough is is kind of clearly rooted in, like, this constant feeling of, like, I'm not doing enough.
Andrew:I'm not able to focus when I'm supposed to be able to focus. I'm not productive in the ways that other people expect me to be productive. I'm not, oh, I'm lazy. I'm I'm a piece of shit. I can't do what I'm supposed to be able to do easily.
Andrew:So there's some of that going on. And then there's also just that fear when you're in those really early stages of, like, you're supposed to be shipping fast, you're supposed to be moving faster than the incumbents. That's how you that's your edge as a small company. And and are you doing that? Are you making the right moves?
Andrew:You're constantly making guesses with imperfect data. And so, like, are we moving fast enough is is, I think, the biggest fear right now. And that's where my partner is just super helpful.
Ben:Yeah. Start asking questions like, what is fast Like, what does that look like? What who's setting the measure for fastness? Yeah. And what are the size of their teams?
Ben:What funding do they have? Like, you know, those kind of things are tend to acceleration tends to be people and, financials in in this space. So, like, yeah, like, you have to what are you comparing yourself to and that kind of thing.
Marie:So easy to compare to completely different different culture, different expectations, different background, different everything. Right?
Andrew:Yes. One thing that's been enormously helpful with that, I've always, like, been kind of allergic to San Francisco. Like, there were there were times where I, like I don't know. Did you all experience this where, like, you were getting into tech and so there's, like, some part of you that's like, oh, if I wanna take this seriously, I've gotta move to San Francisco. Did you ever
Marie:I'm Canadian, so
Marie:that that was never a thing.
Ben:But So before I before I moved to Canada, I lived in Seattle for seven years, and I had a a digital agency in Seattle.
Andrew:Okay.
Ben:Cool. And so and all my clients were based in in San Francisco. And I used to do a lot of WordPress sites. Like, I had my own WordPress theme and all that stuff. And my friends elsewhere that like, I grew up in, like, Ohio, Cleveland area.
Ben:Yeah. And they were really confused how I had the budgets I had for for projects
Andrew:Yeah.
Ben:For just WordPress builds, not even design work. And I'd be like, well, all my clients are in Seattle and San Francisco, and they all have some kind of like, the San Francisco ones are are just getting injected with the capital right away, and they're building out their initial marketing site. So it's like, they'll they'll just throw money at the problem to make it go quick. They're not, like, sitting there haggling with you. So it's that environment that when I moved to Canada, my client list dried up real fast, because I wasn't able to go to Redmond and Downtown Seattle and, like, meet up with these companies, like, day of.
Ben:And so it's a real challenge to you know, you hear this repeatedly that, you know, most of the start up people need to move somewhere like New York, Austin, you know, and and some of the companies. Like, our our favorite company, Notion, does not hire remote. So, like, if you wanna work at Notion Got some
Andrew:strong feelings about that, by the way.
Ben:I do.
Marie:I do as well. To be
Ben:honest, I'd probably be a Notion employee if I if I If
Marie:we did live.
Ben:If we lived in The States. But, yeah. So I I understand your the sort of reticence to identify with that culture.
Andrew:Yeah. I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. I built our agency mostly from Charleston, South Carolina, not tech hubs. And I remember, especially when I was young, like, right out of college, we were, you know, I was reading all the startup stuff. I was reading Paul Graham.
Andrew:I was reading everything I could get my hands on. And I remember feeling like this this conflict of, like, if I wanna take this seriously, should I move there or something like that? And I have found it tremendously valuable to live in places where you're surrounded by people who are not in tech. Mhmm. And I just can't imagine how much I would hate myself if I was surrounded by people who were in tech all the time because I think, like, I I already compare myself to people on Twitter, blue sky, you know, Reddit too much.
Andrew:Yeah. I can't imagine what it would be like if every one of my friends was also raising money, doing this, doing that.
Marie:A bubble.
Andrew:I have entrepreneur friends, and I love having entrepreneur friends, and I love talking to them. It's so valuable, but it's also so valuable to talk to my friends at GM. I live in Detroit. Detroit is like the motor city. So, like, most of my friends work in some way for, like, the automotive industry.
Andrew:And I start feeling like we're moving slow, and they're like, holy shit. You shipped a new product in three months?
Marie:That's insane. That's wild. Yeah.
Andrew:It didn't take you three years. Because
Marie:things so I think it's
Andrew:so valuable to to, like, have those relationships with people who are just in totally different walks of life. And, like, when you start feeling scared about AI taking over the world, when you start feeling scared about, like, you know, we're building an SEO tool. Is SEO gonna be around in two years? I have no idea. If you talk to my tech friends, absolutely not.
Andrew:If you talk to my friends at GM, I feel okay.
Marie:It's like we're often at the beginning of the curve and we sort of forget that, you know, sometimes those changes actually take a lot longer than than we think they do because everything is happening so fast for us.
Andrew:Yeah.
Ben:Yeah. And I think, one thing that's been really impactful for us over the years, we've been, I've been running my company since 2010, Marie, about the same time, and then we kinda joined forces when I moved up to Canada, is, involvement in in masterminds. Finding finding a group of people online that, like, are kind of at the same scale or, like, kind of, like, you know, in a in a similar scale to you and that, like, you're all running kind of different businesses, but it's all like, we are in two different maybe even three different masterminds now that are involve, bootstrap businesses.
Andrew:Cool.
Ben:So you have that, like, the sense of scale and and and push, but Yeah. It's not that extreme, like, VC backed, like, where the the the concerns are totally different and and the economics are totally different. And so there's but I think a lot of times, bootstrappers, I see this online a lot, get stuck in thinking that they should be, like, operating like Stripe at a one person company, like the you know, that kind
Andrew:of thing. And you see it so prevalently. You know, so many of my clients wanna be building 10 products at once, and they wanna be all of these companies where they are now and not where they started. It's yeah. You're absolutely right.
Ben:Yeah.
Andrew:You gotta you gotta have that perspective.
Ben:We I think we actually blew some of our students' minds. We were doing we do office hours every week, so, our students can come and ask us Notion questions. And we usually just it's totally open floor, so we have a lot of a lot of variance in what we talk about. A lot of times, it's folks that wanna start a Notion consulting biz, so we'll we're kind of acting in that way. And one of our our devoted students is now teaching Notion himself, and he was asking us, like, how do you do this?
Ben:And then, like,
Marie:he was
Andrew:that feeling.
Ben:Yeah. It's really cool.
Andrew:Some of my favorite moments from my career were when I, like, helped someone else launch something they were doing. When I had a friend who was thinking about going freelance full time, and I
Ben:Yeah. Get
Andrew:oh, it's such a good feeling.
Ben:It's one of my favorite things. And they were, like, expressing, like, oh, wow. Like, I wasn't expecting it to go this way. Like, I really have a newfound respect for the way that you you guys run these calls. And I'm like, cool.
Ben:Cool. So, like, let's talk about let's talk about what that looks like because he was asking about going from this first try that he did at it to how how could I make this like a business, and, like, what should I charge for it? And dah dah dah dah. And I think we blew a lot of the people's minds in the session because Marie was like, oh, Notion Mastery was started. And I posted a a link to Zoom on Twitter and just said anybody who wants to hang out, like, and learn about Notion.
Ben:And, like so they're like, what? Like, you forget that it's the the beginning, the impetus of these products and these programs, and the entire businesses are just, like, saying, hey. I'm doing this thing over here, and, like, you're not interested. You don't have there's no scale. There's no sign up.
Ben:There's no money. There's nothing. It's just putting yourself out there.
Andrew:Yeah.
Ben:And, you know, within a couple weeks of Marie doing that, I think it was, like, very obvious. Like, well, this isn't gonna work. Like, I can't manage this, so I guess maybe I should charge for this. And then it became a, like you know what I mean? Like, it just evolves.
Ben:And that that was, like, a year or two of of just messing around and trying to figure out what's sticking and what's not before you can actually formalize it into an application and a website and all that good stuff. I was still working full time at this point. You know? So I didn't come back to the business until Marie was, like, supporting her own salary. And then I'm like, woah.
Ben:Like, if if I came back, like, maybe we could do maybe we could double that, like, in support you know? And so it grew quickly once once we, like, had the operations in in shutdown. But Yeah. Yeah. That that initial year or two is always brutal.
Ben:Chaotic. Yeah. It's a roller coaster.
Andrew:Marie, I know you said you're the largely the level one, the optimistic one. What are you anxious about right now? What's what's weighing on your mind?
Marie:I I think one of the biggest challenges that we have in general is, like, keeping the course up to date given how quickly Notion changes. And just the scope and scale of the course is so big that's and everything's kinda interconnected. So when you make one change, you're like, oh, that might impact three or six other lessons. Now we need so there's this, like, are we up to date? And so when questions pop up, I'm like, okay.
Marie:Is that is that pointing to something in the course that's confusing and I need to edit it? So there's always that sort of keeping all that in your head that I think is
Ben:I think we often forget that we have five years worth of daily content now, and so we have probably, like, six to seven hundred, eight hundred lessons recorded Yeah. And hundreds and hundreds of office hours, hundreds of lessons, hundreds of complex formulas that, like, might get changed at any moment. And so, yeah, one of the things we're working on today even together is doing going back and reauditing the content that we have to see, like, what still makes sense, what can we archive, how can we streamline this, and stuff like that. But, yeah, that's a
Marie:And it's like the drudgery stuff. It's, like, not fun to work on that, but it's the stuff that has a huge impact for, like, you forget. Even in SaaS, you might be able to relate to this, that watching someone new come in to onboard on your product, like, when you've been working on it for a while and you're like, oh, yeah. Like, you kinda always have to go from the beginning to see what that you're like, oh, yeah. I forgot that I didn't go and update that, and a new user is completely confused.
Marie:And so just, like, always stuff there to kind of make sure that those
Andrew:As So what's the emotion there? Like, what's the
Ben:I think it's a fear it's a fear of of of being, like, sort
Andrew:of misjudged
Ben:or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shame.
Marie:Like, oh, no. The product is not what people expected.
Ben:Or Or we're gonna or we're gonna teach teach something that's out of date or something like that or or it's irrelevant to the to the customer. But we've we've actually found, like, realistically, like, when you really look at it, like, it it doesn't really have that matte. It doesn't actually like, if the interface of Notion is slightly different than the screenshot we have, like, people can still figure it out for the most part. And when somebody doesn't figure it out, they go ask. And it gives us an opportunity to educate and talk about, like, oh, that's an interesting change.
Ben:Let's see what's different now, and we can go back and refine things. Did either
Andrew:of you ever do theater as kids? Like, no.
Marie:So I did a music theater in high school, and, I signed up for acting classes, like, what, seven years ago because I was so afraid of being on stage. So I did it as, like, a way to get over my stage fright. But do you have a a bit of theater background? Or
Andrew:Not really. I mean, I I was a bit of a theater kid for, like, a few years in, like, middle school and, like, in high school until my teacher threw a shoe at me. Totally deserved, by the way. But when you're when we were talking about this feeling of, like, fear of, like, what are people going to think if they catch this little thing? And then Ben, you mentioned, like, so often, like, it's it's in our heads.
Andrew:It's we have this level of perfectionism that is not. And it's important, like, you want to hang on to that because you want quality, but you also have to like if chip, you have to keep moving. And it reminded me of like of being in place as a kid. And, you know, you mess up a line and, you know, they teach you, like, don't freeze, don't don't panic, just, like, keep Yeah. Going.
Andrew:It's like
Marie:the yes and.
Andrew:No one in the audience knows what the fuck you were supposed to say. So, like, no one cares. Like, no one knows you messed up a line. Just keep just keep moving. Just keep moving.
Ben:Marie and I both did, the ultra speaking program a couple years ago. It's kind of like a a public speaking program online, but they have all these, like, methodologies and and games and stuff that you can learn to get better at kinda just speaking naturally on camera, like, when you're just, like, given the spotlight. We I think when we started doing this, we noticed where, we would show up for somebody else's Zoom call, and it would there would be that awkward silence where people would be like, hi. And then you just sit there waiting for the event to start. And so we started thinking about, like, how do we how do you just, like, jump in and start talking and asking questions and, like, noting maybe mentioning what people are wearing and, like you know?
Ben:So Ultraseaking kinda helps you. They have this inverse mantra, which is, speak before you think.
Marie:Mhmm.
Ben:It just it's kind of like a Toastmasters, but it's a little it's a little bit more formalized, and it's really, really fun. And one of the concepts they talk about in the education is that same thing that you're talking about, which is that people don't remember what you said ever at a talk. They remember the story, and they remember they remember your energy, but it's always about story. And so, yeah, Marie and I just spoke recently at Tiago Forte's conference Oh, cool. Yeah, the second brain summit.
Ben:We did a presentation on, on permaculture, digital permaculture, which is kind of a concept that we're kicking around for one
Andrew:Tell me more about that.
Ben:Yeah. So digital permaculture is the the concept of, like, permaculture, which is, like, sustainable, like, land use practices.
Andrew:Yeah. Where you, like I I I talked to a friend once who was a permaculture nerd, and he Mhmm. Which I say affectionately. And he was talking about, like, burying logs in in his yard. Culture.
Ben:It's like a hugel culture. Okay. The the the general the general concept is that everything has a purpose and everything has, like it's it's very, like, systems thinking oriented where there's, like, inputs and outputs, and we wanna think about, like, optimizing our yields and also, like, that there's that there's these, like, at the edges of transitions are where the most, like, interesting things are happening. So, like, observing it's about observation and, like, making small iterative changes. And so we've been taking that concept from the yard to the concept of digital, digital life, like online practice.
Marie:Mean to apply this to digital environments that even
Ben:So it's about it's about your personal energy management, noticing the changes in in your mood and things like that. And then, like, you know, in between those changes, like, what there's some interesting transitions that are happening there that might be an opportunity for journaling. Or so one of our ideas is writing a book around this concept, developing some software around this concept to help people sort of organize themselves and their thinking into different zones and stuff like that. Now I don't remember why I was talking about this. Oh, yeah.
Ben:Ultra speaking.
Marie:We like the tangent
Andrew:too, Andy.
Ben:Yeah. Thank you.
Andrew:So as You're
Ben:such just me. We were about to do our talk, like, the day of our talk, and we had our slides and stuff ready and our notes for on our slides. And and they were like, oh, you prepared custom slides so you won't be able to see your notes at all on stage. And so we just had to
Andrew:Sorry. What?
Ben:We had to we had to do a full one hour talk with no notes. Mhmm. And I was, like, definitely freaking out. My heart was in my throat. But, but, yeah, that idea of, like, speaking before you think, you know the material.
Andrew:Mhmm.
Ben:You you just need those, like, bullet points at the top. So we just got used to k. Show me the slide. Because we could see what the slide looked like. We couldn't just see the notes.
Ben:So as I saw the slide, I just start telling my story. And so we were practicing talking to each other and just telling stories, and we had a one of the ultra speaking guys kind kinda came and coached us. And, like, when we started when we started trying to present to him, it didn't go very well. Mhmm. And then he just started, like, kinda riffing about what we were talking about, and and we just started, like, talking to back back and forth to each other.
Ben:And then he's like, stop. He's like, that's your talk. You know, like, this like, where we got into the comfort of talking about what we know about. Like Yeah. You just gave your talk.
Ben:That was awesome. I loved it. Like, stop trying to present and just talk, you know, like, that kind of thing. So, yeah, Ultra Speaking is amazing. Like, we kind of recommend it to anybody who does any kind of Zoom stuff or, like, you know, online speaking or even podcasting, it would be great for.
Ben:Yeah. It's a really cool program.
Andrew:It's super cool.
Ben:I wanted to ask you about your hobbies. You you talk about, sound like a really outdoorsy person, but, one thing I wanted to sort of connect you and Marie on was your love for cooking for people. And I'd I would love to hear, like, what your favorite dishes and, like, what kind of, like, like, evening would you plan for for some friends or something like that? What's what's that about?
Andrew:Food is super important to me. Going back to stories, it's, like, such a deep part of my personal stories. Marie, is it the same for you? Like
Marie:Oh, yeah. Food is love. That's my love language for sure.
Andrew:Yeah. I grew up in the South, the South Of The US, so southern hospitality food is just central to the culture. All the men in my family cook. Growing up, my mom repeatedly told me, girls love a guy who can cook. And
Marie:She's not wrong. She knew
Andrew:how to get through to me because from, like, a very young age, I wanted I wanted to be able to cook. And, truthfully, the relationship I'm in now, my my girlfriend is a better cook than I am. But we both love food, and it's one of the things that constantly connects us. You know, I have these deep visceral memories of of my grandfather growing up cooking cheese grits in the morning. And so I I love Notion.
Andrew:I am an active Notion user. I'm also an unabashed fan of just, like, Apple Notes, just like the the notes app that's on your phone already doesn't it's horrible. No bells and whistles. No markdown formatting, but it just is there. And so I have a note on my phone of my favorite meals, like the meals that just, like, have burned themselves into my head.
Andrew:And and one is the first time I ever had lobster. My mom and sister were away. My dad was was like, let's buy some lobster tails. And I was 14 or something, and we went and bought lobster tails and steaks. And he grilled everything up, and we just Wow.
Andrew:Had this this great dinner. So food is just like it is so intertwined with with who I am. One of my tattoos, Ben, I know you're a big tattoo guy. I've I wanted to ask you how yours are healing, how your most recent one is healing.
Ben:Pretty good. I'm on my third third session on Valentine's Day, so I've got a full arm sleeve started. Probably five sessions, but, yeah, it's healing up real nuts.
Andrew:So one of mine and a couple of the ones I wanna get are just gonna be about food because it's just it's just such a part of me. We have been cooking lately out of, like, I say we my girlfriend and I, out of, J. Kinji Lopez Alt's, cookbook, The Wok. Yep. My parents just gave me a wok for for Christmas and gave me his cookbook, and there is not a bad recipe in this book.
Andrew:It is
Marie:I've heard that. Yeah.
Andrew:Amazing. It's so good. We love, love, love Thai food, Chinese food, Korean, you know
Marie:Bit of everything.
Andrew:Everything. Yeah. So we've been cooking voraciously out of that. And, this is gonna sound maybe silly, but I've been trying to, like, perfect fried rice. Like, fried rice is this thing that's supposed to be stupid easy, and yet Mhmm.
Andrew:It never turns out as good as I want it. Like, I want the crispy, crunchy race. I want the, like, the beautiful kind of fluffy, molten egg. I want the, you know, I want it to be, he he has a term. I'm gonna butcher it, but it's like, walk a or like walk it's like the Woke a.
Andrew:Yeah. Yeah. The smokiness from and so I I want that. So we've been doing a lot of that, Yum. Lately, which is I
Ben:only know about wok hei because of that comedian Malaysian comedian, who does that bit, uncle Roger, and he talks about
Andrew:Oh, yeah.
Ben:Fried rice. And he says, yeah. You have to have your wok hei like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew:Yeah. Marie, what are you cooking these days? And and then, Ben, what are your what are your hobbies?
Marie:I have a few go to dishes that I've been sometimes when I get lazy, I
Marie:Mhmm. I
Ben:really on. On the, Asian side of things, I think your you make those, oyce pot ties, but, the the, gochujang fried oysters Woah. Those are really good. That's The oyster mushrooms.
Andrew:Okay. I need to hear about this.
Ben:And your, yeah, your your pot pot ties are really good.
Marie:I did a I did a culinary boot camp two years ago in the summer. It was two two full weeks. It was actually a vegan. I didn't know it was vegan.
Andrew:Cool.
Marie:I thought it was it'd be vegetarian, but, yeah, there was no no meat, no gluten, no Yeah. Not much.
Andrew:But
Marie:so it was a super creative class taught by a guy who's not vegan, but he talked about how it's so easy to make
Andrew:Are you all vegetarian?
Marie:I'm so I'm vegetarian. Ben still eats, like, fish and occasional meat and whatnot. But since I do most of the cooking, Ben just eats what I make. But he's he's welcome to, you know, make make his own, side meat dishes. But, no, that that class was I thought it was really cool that the teacher said he thinks it's like a higher skill to be able to make vegetables and non meat dishes taste exceptional and that vegetables are always treated as this sort of side dish.
Marie:And he's like, what happens when you're trying to make it the start of the show? Yeah. Like, that takes a certain level of skill. So I I really appreciated that about the class and two weeks full time. And then at the end, you get to make, like, a, what, seven course meal for, friends and family and whatnot.
Marie:So that was such a cool That was awesome. Cool experience. So those mushrooms came from that class. So happy to share the recipe with you, but that's, like, that's been a keeper. And a friend of mine who has not eaten mushrooms in twenty years was like, okay.
Marie:I have to admit that was pretty good. I'm like, yes. I won her over.
Andrew:One of the next tattoos I wanna get is a mushroom. And and the reason I grew up a really picky eater, and mushrooms were the thing that, like, broke it for me. I I was traveling. I went to Germany with my family. And, something about being in a new place, being in a new, you know, a new culture, I was like, alright.
Andrew:I'm gonna try this. And I didn't come into trying it with the all the, like, the sort of mental hang ups I normally had around food. And I was like, holy shit, mushrooms are delicious. And once I realized mushrooms were good, it was just like all of the other things that I was picky about went out the window. It was like, I must I've been wrong so deeply wrong about this.
Andrew:What else am I wrong about?
Marie:Oh, I love that.
Andrew:And from then, it was just like, I need to try everything, and I need to learn to like everything because That's cool. There's just too much that I'm missing out on. I can't handle this. Oh, I love it. Big mushroom guy over here.
Andrew:Also, if you're traveling, cooking classes are
Marie:such
Andrew:a good like, so such an incredible way to, like, connect with, like, a a place and and the culture and, like, meet a local and spend some real quality time with them and talk to them. And we've we've started doing that, and it's been, like, so just one of our favorite parts of of traveling.
Marie:I think next time we travel, we gotta do that then. Make make the effort to book with a local.
Andrew:Yeah. Sometimes it's expensive, but oftentimes it's it's really not.
Marie:It's an experience. It's such a And often with a long term benefit. Right?
Andrew:Yeah. Long term benefit. And, like, so often you get so much out of it that it's, like, when you actually look at it, you're like, wow, that was, you know, worth every penny.
Marie:It's the gift that keeps on giving. Totally. Awesome.
Andrew:I feel
Marie:like I feel like we could chat for hours and hours. There's, like, so much cool stuff in common and, like,
Andrew:we haven't talked about Notion much at all, and you all are the Notion gods. We have we
Marie:haven't not pretty. Like, there's
Andrew:barely touched on 80 oh, god. And, like, yeah, all the toxic, feelings around productivity.
Marie:Oh, man.
Andrew:Remote work, I've got lots of strong feelings about, and it sounds like you do too.
Marie:We might have to have you on for a part two or something because, you know yeah. There were definitely lots of threads that I felt like we could follow around. How do you you know, you you mentioned your struggles of, like, I should be productive, I should be working on this, and there's there's so much there that we could talk about too.
Andrew:So In part two, I also wanna shut up a little and and No.
Marie:It's snowing.
Marie:Maybe we hang out on Zoom and we we cover
Ben:Yeah.
Marie:Cover even more. It was just, yeah, super wonderful to to hear your story.
Andrew:Yeah. I'd love it anytime.
Marie:Awesome. Awesome. And thanks for hanging out with us. Yeah.
Andrew:Thanks for having me.
Marie:Joining us. Yeah. To be continued. Yeah.
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