Tyler is our official hypeman

Justin  0:32  

All right, welcome to remote voices Episode 13. We have an awesome guest today. Got Tyler from hub staff. He's just like a bundle of energy today and so have him on. Let's go ahead and bring up our slide deck but I tell you what, Tyler Why don't you just go ahead and kick us off by saying who you are, what you do, what hub staff is where they can find it what it does all that good stuff I don't know, run for two minutes, man, the world is your oyster.

Tyler Sellhorn  1:05  

Gotcha. My name is Tyler silver and I'm the director of customer experience at hub staff. We are a time tracking project management and proof of work SAS solution. We're all remote time tracking application, you know, we're self funded all remote since 2012. You know, right now in this whole kind of work from home wave, you know, we've been posting up on, you know, remote work software keywords since, you know, the beginning. So then the world came to us all of a sudden, and we're not really excited about the way that that happens. But we're also happy to be enabling, you know, the remote work movement, you know, extending that privilege to you know, more and more people every day. You know, I used to be a technology oriented educator this time last year, I was ending the school year teaching eighth graders algebra, right and then was fortunate enough to be You know, you know, Dave and Jared at hub staff took a shot on me. And I became a really successful customer success manager and then became the director of customer experience in December. Loving the remote life. I'm a remote working advocate, especially for remote remote first, companies like Yac, like hub staff. I'm really just excited to be here. I just want to say thank you to hunter for connecting, you know, in the in the comments on LinkedIn. I just think the I'm just really grateful for the internet.

Justin  2:39  

Yeah, I think we're all very grateful for the internet, especially right now. Where are you based out of?

Tyler Sellhorn  2:45  

I'm in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But I would say that hub staff, we have, you know, people that work with us in 20 countries. We're, you know, about 65 of us now. I lead a customer experience team from Seattle to the Philippines. So, you know, I, like for example, even before I was leading this team, you know, I was working a split shift, like part of what remote working does for me is, you know, it allows me to get up in the morning before my children are awake, you know, get some work done kind of kind of, you know, quiet headspace all by myself, and then I cook breakfast for everybody, send everybody off while back when we were going back to school, right, you know, when we were in school, sending them off to school and then greeting them off the bus and then, you know, just being able to fit my work around my life. Right? You know, I'm a dad of four. You know, tonight, I'm getting ready to coach a little league game, you know, those are the things that they get to happen,

Justin  3:48  

you know, because that work enables,

Tyler Sellhorn  3:51  

you know, you know, we've been saying for a while now kill the commute, right? That's, that's, that's, you know, our mission, right is is to enable that and you You'll create the space for that to occur. For more and more people. That's what we're about. Well, awesome,

Justin  4:05  

and we're super pumped to have you. Yeah, we're Mater remote voices, we just kind of talk about current trends and topics, tweets that we found interesting. So we just queue stuff up. I read it out loud. And we're just gonna like go around, talk to the team and see who's got thoughts on each of these. So, you know, this first tweet, we've got Actually, this looks like a LinkedIn post. Yes, he uses LinkedIn. Lame. This was on Twitter. So that was mounted as being on Twitter, but I don't use LinkedIn Boomer. It's a new slack is going remote most of their 1600 plus employees can now work remotely on a permanent basis. Also, slack will begin hiring remote workers or hiring employees who are permanently remote announced Robbie Kwok, SVP of people at slack. I love those titles SVP of people, they follow the footsteps of several other unicorns offering remote work Twitter square Shopify Coinbase Welcome to permanent remote. work. You know, this is huge news for the industry, Facebook, obviously probably one of the biggest ones to make that announcement. I find this interesting because slack in particular has gotten a lot of flack Slack, slack for slack has gotten a lot of flack because they were one of the like teams that was adamantly against having like remote engineers, but then they build a tool that's supposed to enable remote work. And so people are always giving them crap about I guess not dogfooding and Tyler, you mentioned this before we got on the call, but you guys run on hub staff, obviously. And, you know, that's a huge part of building a tool. I mean, we use Yac every day. We are obviously also big hub staff users as well, which is you know, really great to finally have you guys on the show. But you know, how important do you think this is that the company uses their own app? And do you think that this will change slack as a product as a company now that all of a sudden they're actually starting to dog food?

Tyler Sellhorn  5:54  

You know, I for me, like I think you know, a key fundamental of you know, iterating your product forward is learning the edge cases learning, you know, testing out those features before they go live, right, you know, you know, the feature rollout, right, there's gonna be some stuff that doesn't come into slacks, you know, product because it gets used in a remote environment before it shows up, you know, in the thing, because I mean, that that's the piece that I think is interesting to me when you think about, you know, how do you build a product for an audience that you are not among? Right? Is, is how do you listen well, to your customers? Right? And, and, you know, one easy way to empathize with your customers is to be one, right, you know, and I think for hub staff, right, you know, you know, hub staff runs on hub stuff, we have a, you know, project management tool that, you know, our customer experience team, like we're using it, you know, with agile terminology and all the rest of that type of stuff so that like, we can actually have a conversation with the people that are using our stuff like I'm I'm not an agile software developer, right? But I'm trying to iterate on our team in an agile environment, right, using that, that those terms using that terminology trying to grow and iterate and, you know, ship it and the rest of it, you know,

Justin  7:18  

we knew we got

Unknown Speaker  7:20  

about seven minutes in, okay,

Tyler Sellhorn  7:22  

hey, all right. So, you know, all of that stuff like is gonna be the difference between you being really successful, you know, in terms of like listening well, and just just giving it a shot because like, hey, let's let's put something out there and see what happens, right? Like you're going to get, you're going to be able to catch on to the things that are frustrating customers when you are using that product yourself.

Hunter  7:44  

So Tyler, let me ask you, I know that you worked your way up into customer service at hub staff. Does hub staff require each and every single one of their customer service representatives to actually use hub staff.

Tyler Sellhorn  7:57  

Yet the entire organization runs on hub staff, so

Hunter  8:01  

So you force the company to use it.

Tyler Sellhorn  8:03  

I'm tracking time using hub staff right now. Oh my gosh, that's amazing.

Justin  8:07  

Wait, yeah. Are you billable right now? Yes.

Tyler Sellhorn  8:10  

My time. Thank you very much for letting me be here as myself and as hub staff. But yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the things that is interesting about you know, for so many teams don't once you kind of catch on to tracking your time and figuring out where your time has gone the most, our most valuable resource is our time. And if you're not keeping track of how it's being used, right, you're gonna you're gonna leak you're gonna have slippage, right and and if you really want to become you know, a next level more productive type of team, you're not gonna like like, Why are slack Twitter square Shopify? Coinbase Why are they all going remote? Well, they figured it out, right that oh my gosh, we reclaimed all that commute time, we reclaimed all that that those interruptions that happen inside of an office Now we're being much more intentional about the communication that we are having. Right now we're starting to, you know, you guys are all about the asynchronous, you know, you know, you know, you cut down on the on the meeting Bs, right, you know, at Yac. I mean, that's, that's the experience of almost everyone that is even giving it an actual shot. And once you

Unknown Speaker  9:20  

see the light, it's like this amazing, I can't believe we even did it a different way. You know, so I, it's interesting to see these companies. Jordan, do you think there's gonna be a waterfall effect here? You know, we've seen what say yeah, major companies. What do you think the threshold is going to be? I think a lot of people will follow in these footsteps. And I think I mentioned this to on our podcast a couple weeks ago with their and but it's kind of weird. How once like Twitter went remote, or Facebook went remote. everybody's like, well, they're doing it, I guess I can too, or like, hey, let me look into these products that enable asynchronous like remote work. So I think we'll see a lot of folks follow in these footsteps and I'm really excited for it because I think, Tyler to your point, lots of people will realize, Oh shoot, I've wasted a lot of time and just dumb shit to be frank. Let's figure that out and be more efficient with our time and just overall make the company better. I'm excited for it.

Hunter  10:14  

I'm wondering how much I wonder if hub staff actually has this answer. So if everybody is on a call at once, that's not just one person's time now you have 10 people's one hour. So now it's 10 hours of productivity. Because I know I remember using dubstep back in the day, you can like drag how many how much time people are spending in meetings. That'll be interesting too.

Justin  10:35  

And it's something that Jason puts in one of his books is that like when eight people show up for a meeting, that's not one hour of lost productivity. That's eight hours of lost productivity. And you know, sure, tools like hub staff show that in a very mathematical way. Very cool. Justin. Justin, even you and I have talked about this a lot is like when we like have used HubSpot in the past may go back and review ours. You don't realize how much I guess even incrementally wasted time there is just like on stupid stuff. So it's cool to see it specially products like club stuff that enable you to go, oh, wow, you know, maybe I can clean this up or maybe I can be more efficient here. So I mean yeah, we use it on so friendly side because I always go back to you, Jordan and I'm like, Why Why did our designer spend 20 hours on this task like, we build way under on that we need to be billing way higher on these tasks in the future if they're taking that long. So, you know, putting time to something is very interesting. And time is your your value at the end of the day. And I think that weirdly seamlessly segues us into this next tweet, which is, I don't know Tyler, did you have you seen this? This is the the job description for a new developer role at our favorite VC funded, backed, loved and spread about app clubhouse. One of the requirements for their job was you work really hard. You work nights and weekends with your team, not just because you feel like You have to, because you love what you're doing. I mean, we were just here with a way the suitcase company this was just talked about that shouldn't have to come in on weekends that you shouldn't be working late nights. What's the culture at hub staff? Like, Is this normal? Is this laughable? What do you guys have to say about this?

Tyler Sellhorn  12:19  

Well, our thing is that we're not just empowering business owners with our technology. Right? One of the things that we're concerned about in this remote environment is overwork. Right? So if you're tracking your time, right, you're going to know that oh my gosh, I've already worked 45 hours this week, and it's Thursday. Right? Yeah. And, and, and, you know, how do you when you're working from home, how do you separate, you know, like, maybe you've got a dedicated office like I'm very fortunate that we've got a spare bedroom that you know, my wife she works remotely as well for, for her business that she owns. Right. So we share an office, but, you know, like, I can walk out that door and Okay, shut that door. And now I'm not working anymore. But like, for other people that they might be on their kitchen table, right? Or they might be working from their sofa. How do you separate the thing? Well, you know, there's lots of little like, like tech hacks, like you can have a separate desktop that are a separate user login that says, Okay, here's all the things and then here's the other one where I'm just, you know, surfing the web and hanging out. But for us and hub staff, you turn off the timer.

Justin  13:30  

I'm not

Tyler Sellhorn  13:34  

I'm not I'm not working right now. Yeah, this is over. Right. I'm not opening up that email. Right. I'm going to use Chrome for business and Safari for for you know, you know, personal stuff.

Justin  13:46  

Yeah. Upgrading your apps.

Tyler Sellhorn  13:49  

Yes. So you know, like, you know, if you're fortunate enough to separate devices, right? Yeah. Okay, here's, here's the work laptop. You are, here's the work desktop and here's the play lap. Tom found

Justin  14:01  

Yac early on is that we thought that mobile as founders, we thought mobile Yac was going to be like the powerplay and we heard this a lot from other founders. And when we talk to actual teams, they're like, dude, I'm gonna use my personal phone for work. Like when I would have done with work, I shut my laptop off and then I got on my phone, and then I'm on Instagram and Snapchat and I'm doing my personal things I don't want work leaking into that we even heard from some people who said I think that they said they just don't even have slack on their mobile phone, like on their phone. So you know, that's totally tells you something differently about the ways that I think a founder thinks about their company and the way that just like a normal employee thinks and you can tell from this post like the founders wrote this job description they're looking for a mini me they want another founder to come work for their team somebody with that night weakened vibe and expecting that of everyone is not only ridiculous, but kind of to your point like it's it's not a healthy work life balance, like you should ask your employees to do

Tyler Sellhorn  14:59  

yeah, Well, they, this the person that wrote this job description needs to go to the school of, you know, Gary Vee now you're working for your people school, you know? Because I'm he's so he is banging that drum so hard so often, right that I think that, you know, more founders need to listen to that. Right. The economics are not supporting this type of job description. Yeah. I mean, unless unless you're offering, you know, 90% equity on the deal. Yeah,

Justin  15:32  

right. Yeah. I'm like a

Tyler Sellhorn  15:34  

founder. No, thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna, I'm gonna I'm gonna submit my timesheet through hub staff and say thank you very much for the paycheck later, right.

Hunter  15:46  

Yeah, my last job. I actually kind of have a quick story about this. My last job the first day, I should have known from day one. First day and I started leave I start packing my stuff up at seven o'clock. And everyone just kind of looks up at me and the one of the founders looks at me, he goes Where you going? Oh, no, where I just take off my backpack. And I stayed till like 910 o'clock at night. And it's it's amazing how that is part of the culture, but I do have to hand it to him because I didn't know that going in at least they're making it really clear, you have to give them that, if you can agree with me disagree that at least they're making it clear. That's what their expectation is. I think it would be worse if you like, gotten the job. And then they're like, oh, what, why aren't you here? And it's like Saturday night, and you're like, not there. Like that would be even more stressful. So you have to give it to them. At least they're honest. I

Justin  16:34  

mean, it would be interesting to Tyler's point to look at what they're offering on an equity like rate. You know, if you look at what the guys at Basecamp, you know, have said recently, like, they don't offer any of their employees equity. And there was a lot of like, debate on whether that was okay, you know, well, you guys are making rich off of their work, you know, so you should reward them for that. We're like we do we give them very high salary. Yeah, they did very well.

Tyler Sellhorn  16:56  

San Francisco rates.

Justin  16:58  

Yeah, we expect them to go home and At the end of the day and spend time with their kids, and you know, I think, I think there's a tweet that we had on the last show that was David's tweet that said, I'm on, we launch on Monday, and I'm at the beach with my kids. And, you know, even him as a founder, you know, was very overt about saying, like, I am going to cut that 5pm deadline off and say that is it. I'm done with work. I'm clocking out, you know, physically or virtually right with hub staff. It's it's a button press, but sometimes it's also a mindset thing as well, where you say, I'm going out and I'm going to go to the beach with my kids. And, you know, Jordan and I talked about this a lot, especially during lockdown. I think this has been very difficult for us as we're always in front of a laptop and I don't know Jordan, how have you found your very Yeah, I ranted. You can do this, I can't I just sit there and do nothing. I love talking about it. But I think one thing that's worked super well for me, it's just a lot of structure. So Justin and I were even talking about this last Friday. From basically from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed, I know what I'm doing. And I know what hours and time is allocated for work, if you will, and what time is allocated for personal stuff. And I think doing that is critical, especially when you work remote. Just because to your point timer, it's so easy to overwork, you're always in front of a laptop, it's super easy to just say, Oh, you know what, one more email doesn't hurt or like one more thing doesn't hurt. And I think people really need to discipline themselves and build a structured schedule and have that in place. For sure. Yeah, I think it's hard to do now that we're locked down and I don't know cases are rising. So maybe we're all going to be locked down even further in the next couple of weeks. So it's a good reminder to everyone that Yes, please. And as a founder, you need to take extra steps to do it on your own and as well. Alright, so Tyler, did you catch the Hey, launch? Do you have a invite? Did you use a email?

Tyler Sellhorn  18:54  

Yes, I was. I did not get you know, cmo creative with hype and Hey

Unknown Speaker  19:04  

listen,

Hunter  19:05  

I did I mean you had to have a four letter domain or a four letter name and I was just like i'd King that's that's what we're all about.

Justin  19:13  

Well I thought it was like a joke because I thought he was all hype. I thought you were like oh

Unknown Speaker  19:17  

no no that's great

Tyler Sellhorn  19:19  

no I'm no I'm Tyler outsell Hornet Hey calm so you know all y'all podcasters out there listen to this one you need a hype voice I got you all 12 of them right now.

Justin  19:30  

All of our all of our massive list Oh wait, it's nine now people left up to their head Tyler's email. So you know, they obviously did a great job with hype. This tweet that we have pulled up is basically say that people were buying them for like nearly $500 on eBay the invites themselves. It's a $99 a year email subscription. $1,000 a year if you get a two letter one like I found VC at hay calm was thousand dollars. I did not buy that but I typed it in. Just to See if it was available. But I mean, it proves the, I don't know we talked about this a lot like this concept of like, you can sell anything if you really know how to polish a turd. And that's not to say that hey, is a bad product, but they've clearly done an amazing job of just like, amping this thing up to this ridiculous degree that people are willing to pay 500 bucks just for an invite to the thing we're eventually I assume in like two weeks or something it's gonna be open to everybody I don't know when they're gonna open it up.

Hunter  20:30  

They're like there's like something there's something going on in Silicon Valley actually just saw that TechCrunch wrote an article about there's something going on in Silicon Valley about these like invite only building up hype almost like supreme for software but it only it only became popular during it's like it's like all those like hype kids went from like supreme over into clubhouse, you know? Hey, calm

Justin  20:55  

like Lisa here, man. Yeah, like using all these invite only. I mean, it's hubs was hubs. Ever invite only? No. Okay,

Tyler Sellhorn  21:03  

we're definitely the, you know, Come as you are and, and grow with us, you know, type of a team, you know, we're, we're co Creating this product with customers, right? You know, that that's the great thing about a SaaS company, right, is that, you know, your incentives are aligned with the vendors incentives. Right, you know, you know, when you are successful, we are successful and that, you know, there are, you know, resources dedicated to helping you accomplish what it was that you were hoping to with hub staff, right. You know, we're listening very hard for, you know, the things that are going to make you be successful. So, yeah,

Hunter  21:48  

I love before we jump in the next one, I really love that you talk about co creation, because that's something that we're really big on at Yac is we are dogfooding your own product, but like You know, I'll have a conversation with somebody. And within a day or two, we'll have that that feature in our products. I think it just makes the I think it helps build the community. But I just think overall just makes the the product so much better building

Justin  22:11  

like relationships with our customers, instead of treating them like a, like a customer. Right? Yeah, customer like us locked to them. And you say, Hey, what do you want? Like, what do you want this thing to do? And then they say, I'd love a keyboard shortcut to search easily. And we're like, sure, like, that seems easy to implement. Give me an hour, right? Like, I can get that in there. And then we push it out. And, you know, it's a silly stupid feature that maybe like three people use, but that dude's relationship with us now is like, wow, they like care. Like, there was a level of like personal care that put in went into that. And, you know, I've always said that I wanted our product to be recommended not because we're going to give you a $50 gift card, but recommended because you're like, dude, I want to share this amazing thing with people and I want you to see it. It's so cool and Want you to be a part of this community too and like, Hey, calm, like a calm, but I don't want to sell those for $500 each, I want somebody to just like want to give, you know, an invite out to something. So, you know, I think that, you know, I do you feel like you have that a hub staff I mean, obviously we recommend it all the time

Tyler Sellhorn  23:17  

with it, that's the best kind of growth right? is is is a referral, right? The very best kind of growth because someone who is successful using your product, talking to a like minded individual who already has, you know, a similar kind of like, like way that they organize their work, right. You know, we love you customers that were the hub staff badge, we you know, our biz we have heard back from from people over and over and over again, thanks to hub staff, we've been able to continue, you know, as we're, you know, before the pandemic,

Justin  23:52  

right, it's a great feeling to get to hear that right. Like that's exactly what you want to hear from your customers. Can we get some help steps stickers, I'll wear a

Tyler Sellhorn  23:59  

badge. Here what I'm taking the worn off off of my my I'll be sending in the mail. Yeah. Okay, we'll get a we'll get a sticker mule thing going for sure. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  24:11  

let's sell stickers we've got what I want. I want the one off your laptop though. I want the game used one. Okay, gotcha.

Unknown Speaker  24:19  

Gotcha

Tyler Sellhorn  24:21  

I'll get the Sharpie out

Justin  24:22  

Yeah, please do celebrity after all eight people on our stream get excited about this. Oh man. He will record some sound bites after this Tyler or record you just have them on every podcast but in the background. Yeah, an extra note here. You know this this next tweet is is related to sound.

Tyler Sellhorn  24:49  

Do you need the soundboard hit the hit the hit the hit the sounds?

Unknown Speaker  24:53  

Yeah. Oh, we've got Brooke is asking for a hub staff shirt. Oh we have Yac Yac here.

Unknown Speaker  25:01  

I've got one.

Justin  25:02  

I've got it hanging up back there. So you can you can you can have that one. Nice Morgana merge. Tyler doesn't understand how these remote sessions work like we can't be in his bedroom right now. We're going to crawl through the computer screen. But, you know, speaking of the halo launch, we've got this conversation between Rahul of superhuman and kind of this conversation surrounding DHH is a I don't know, rant, pity party. I don't know what you would call it marketing. Marketing stunt maybe is a better word for not getting the iOS app approved for the App Store. You know, they're in the app store now, but Apple has told them they'll pull it from the app store because accepting it was a mistake. You know, we, Jordan and I it's so friendly happened to own another email client. Newton mail. It is sitting in the app store right now. We're doing fine. You know, there's rules, and you follow them. And it's a process. You know, I think the funny thing about the base camp guys arguing about whether they're they should pay a 30% fee to Apple is ironic to me considering how strong they are about well, you should charge for the service if you offer a service and, you know, if hub staff were completely free, I think people would question well, how are they affording that? are they selling my data? You know, like, what, what other way if you're not paying for the product, you are the product just kind of like the way that it's usually said. So, you know, we've talked about this like, all week long and this has been my Twitter feed is Is he right? Is he wrong? Is Apple right? Is Apple wrong? You know, what do you think about creating or stirring controversy to get people to look at your product? Is that is that slimy? Is it genius? You know, what's your what's your take on this? Tyler?

Tyler Sellhorn  26:52  

Yeah, I'm, I'm not touching that.

Um, you know, you know, my question back to you all. is what's what's your Apple bill?

How much how what's what's, what's their cut? What's the cut that they

Justin  27:08  

take? Yeah, y'all pay $99 a year for Apple dev account, and nothing else runs through? No, I mean, hub staff has a mobile app, right?

Tyler Sellhorn  27:17  

Yeah, we do. And and our subscription is ran completely through our web application. So and that's because you follow the rules.

Justin  27:27  

So

Hunter  27:28  

So why don't we just why don't we just cut to the chase? What I because I actually don't fully understand what is the way that you can get around the problem that they're getting in. So

Justin  27:37  

the basic way is that you need to offer a way for someone to upgrade to the app, or you need to be a reader style app, or you need to offer full functionality in the app without requiring someone to upgrade. Now b2b apps which have staff would definitely fall under because it's like 100% of b2b app, Newton, maybe toes the line a little bit because it has kind of a consumer, you know, can use yahoo.com email addresses work in it, I'm sure there's like consumers that use Newton. The difference there is that we allow someone to sign up, and that they can use the app forever with some level of functionality. Now they can go online, and they can upgrade and they can get extended functionality. But when he launched, they didn't give any functionality you can't sign up. And even if you don't have a subscription, you can't use it. It's essentially a useless app. So Phil Shiller's entire feedback point is like, we don't want apps in the app store that just do nothing like it should do something when you sign up when you sign in. You know, so they knew what they were doing. I mean, I think that's the basic feedback and what Rahul is kind of saying here is we just dealt with it calmly and quietly, you know, they made and they made noise for the sake of making noise. Jordan, do you have strong thoughts on this? Because Tyler's bout, yeah. I

Hunter  28:55  

it's like I don't even know I get that like the marketing side of it, but it looks so bad like I love rubles comment here like we just dealt with it calmly quietly it's so classy the right way to go about it. Like there's other things to argue in life the way that I think about it like imagine you just go into someone's house and then being like, well your house or shit like I don't like it here even like, Okay my dad, like leave my house. Yeah, exactly. Well, I guess that's part of their their thing too, that I read about is like, you don't have another option. If you want to be on an iPhone, you don't have another option you can't download from anywhere else. So and that's what they want is the option to be able to say yes, I want to go away from the App Store. But the reason why I pulled this in is because the argument is like if you don't go that route, then you're not successful, but superhuman has done it's it's not only another successful company that's doing just fine. But they're literally another email. It's not an email client, but they're, you know, whatever, what they're in the same field, and they're doing just fine following the rules. And for those founders out there that are listening in the startup owners, is, you don't argue with Apple, you just calmly quietly just actually talk to them. Sometimes. We've actually gotten the advice of just resubmitting it because you'll get a different every reviewer, and now that they've dug their heels so nicely.

Unknown Speaker  30:07  

Now Apple salad is a duck they had was they made a news release about it, Apple is setting precedent. So as soon as so if Apple reverses on them, they're opening themselves up to a whole slew of law, they definitely could have done this in a calm way. And it probably would have had a very different outcome, but it's not as buzzword they no one's gonna be talking about that mean

Tyler Sellhorn  30:24  

that that's, that's not DHH his style. He's, you know, and like, you know, good on them for being trailblazers in doing something new in a brand new way that is privacy focus that I mean, if you could think of the the exact opposite of superhuman in an email client, right? It's Hey, calm. Yeah. Right. So I mean, the reason why, you know, Rahul and superhuman are dealing with it calmly and quietly is because they are the antithesis of what What you know

Justin  31:01  

are the opposite

Tyler Sellhorn  31:03  

opposite and hey yeah yeah well it's not it's not like they're each successful in in their you know

spectrum opposite you know you know

Justin  31:16  

when you're not surprised here that sounds exactly right when Rahul says we did it quietly you're like yep that's it yeah

Tyler Sellhorn  31:21  

yeah yeah yeah because because they want you know you know if you want to go deep on on DHH you know you get you get your get your your spy pixels and superhuman stuff right and like that's what he

Justin  31:33  

even called out in the app if you

Tyler Sellhorn  31:35  

tried to kill it

Justin  31:36  

yeah here's even email from superhuman it's like this email was sent with superhuman spy tracking pixel and we block it and they like call them out by name too I didn't know that oh yeah I got an email yesterday from one of the the pitch at Hey, calm emails and it like calls it out shows superhuman and says like someone sent this from superhuman. You can tell maybe a little bitter about it, but they do. Call

Tyler Sellhorn  32:00  

But I think, you know, I think, you know, I'm very grateful for, you know, DHH and Jason freed and for being, you know, their, their, you know, my little thing, you know, on my corner of the internet is learning out loud. Right? And that's what they're doing. That's what they've been doing right there. And they're, you know, activist about it, right. They're not just saying, we're going to try this remote thing. Now, we're also going to try this remote thing and say, here's how to do it. Well, this is what we learned. Right? And, you know, we, we drew the IR of DHH back, you know, when work from home was kind of flying, right, we got that, that you know, you know, attention and you know, that that's something that for us like we are we got lumped in with with some other you know, applications that are that are not our favorite.

Justin  32:54  

So what was that about? Just like the concept of time tracking or

Tyler Sellhorn  32:58  

Yeah, just just the job But yeah, the the the piece where we're saying, okay, we're also going to attach proof of work to things. But you know, our thing is to put that in the power of the user in the hands of the user as well. It's not just an owner that we're going to say, Okay, this is shared proof of work. This is you know, when when I send my timesheet to hub staff, it comes with proof of work attach saying, Yeah, I did the things that I You told me to do and pay me for it. Right. And it's not it's not a

Justin  33:25  

it's not a spying you know, I don't believe my team isn't working it's more self accountability is what you're saying is self

Tyler Sellhorn  33:33  

accountability and, and the piece where we're saying like, I'm in control of the application, right, I'm in control of you know, it's on my device. I'm in charge of the data. It's it's in a shared space. It's it's owned by, you know, all of the above.

Justin  33:47  

Yeah, I totally agree. It also generically I think it helps you just move faster because then you can like kind of self audit yourself. You go, oh, man, I spent a lot of time on task. How can I speed it up or like get more help next time. So I totally agree with you. Yeah, that self audit of recognizing what you were working on. And hey, wow, I think I could do this better next time. That self reflection pieces is really important, but I think they 100 touched on is interesting is this idea of like, arguing with the behemoth that is Apple. You know, I think, you know, we had with, with Newton Actually, we had something come up where we weren't going to buy cloud magic Inc, we were actually just going to buy the assets. And we bought cloud magic, or we weren't when we weren't going to buy cloud magic, we needed to form an entity. And so we just formed an entity called Newton app sync. That was just what the name of the company was going to be and what we were going to own it under. And when we submitted it to Apple, they actually rejected our developer account, saying that they own the trademark for Newton, which they don't they actually gave it up in 2013. And we own the trademark for Newton. But yeah, you know, we did we renamed the company because we were not going to fight that battle with Apple. It just would have been a waste of time, energy. I would not I mean, even being loud and obnoxious about it wouldn't gonna get me anywhere. I'm not gonna beat Apple's lawyers, they'll, you know, drilling into the ground with any type of fees that they can afford, and I can't. So I don't know, maybe DHH and Jason are the right guys to maybe make this change and bring something bring about change that wouldn't have happened otherwise. But I do think there's something to be said about kind of the meek and humble way that Rahul said he approached it, which is just like, you know, what, we just follow the rules. We got our app out there. We didn't need to make a big you know, squeal about it. What I what I hope doesn't happen is that as a result of this, the guys that were quiet and didn't make a stink legs, now all of a sudden get second guessed, and Apple goes oh, well, you're right. We shouldn't have approved these apps and they started getting caught up now that the app

Tyler Sellhorn  35:48  

gotta go gotta grow that services run a revenue for wall street.

Justin  35:51  

Yeah, exactly. They're, you know, they're moving to the cloud.

Hunter  35:56  

Well, they're only a trillion dollar company guys come on.

Tyler Sellhorn  35:58  

trillion and a half. Come on now. Shorter

Justin  36:00  

hit that you didn't know. Yeah, they hit trillion and a half like last week. Oh, good for them. Eric, I work in American

Hunter  36:07  

American men American made car manufacturer in the world Now

Tyler Sellhorn  36:12  

speaking of America, speaking of America, happy Juneteenth to all three of you and the United States of America

Justin  36:19  

and and all nine of our listeners all night, all nine of them, which I think three of them work for us. We're all here, baby. We're all here celebrating Juneteenth. All right, this is our last tweet. Obviously, we talked about this at the beginning, Tyler before we got on the show, but you saw the Twitter launches audio feature. This is huge for us at Yac because it's getting people used to sending audio messages. It's kind of like training everybody. This is a better way to communicate that it's fun. It's more personal. You get that emotional side of it. I got a forwarded Yak today from somebody in the beginning is just this guy saying man, I love that this was done over Yac because I wouldn't have been able to hear you laugh. How to Understand your sarcasm because I wouldn't have come across a rich text. And I'm like, Yeah, man that's like why this exists is that you can hear that emotion, you can build that relationship. So Twitter launching voice tweets, it's just super cool for us. I don't know that I'll ever use the feature because maybe I don't want my voice out there for everybody on Twitter to hear. But I do this podcast just on this podcast. You know, I'm only comfortable with 10 people at a time here that we will tweet. I don't have that big of a follower base, guys. But one of the questions actually came up after this launch is everybody asked me, hey, why did they use videos instead of like a typical like audio player? You know, when you Why does it a video of like the profile pic and like the things like kind of audio admin around it? And my answer was, Oh, well, I assume they did it because of accessibility because videos can have captions. And you can read captions for accessibility purposes. And then we have this tweet here. We're sorry about testing voice tweets without support for people who are visually impaired, deaf or hard of hearing. It was a mistake to introduce the experiment without the support accessibility should not be an afterthought. And all of a sudden, they went, Oh, well, maybe that's not why they did videos, I thought and assumed that that was the whole point. Because you can caption it videos have better accessibility, like this is something that's like a standard on the web already, you know, where audio players is probably not nearly as standard. And it's interesting that they totally missed on that now. Should they apologize? I don't know. What what's the, what's your thought on that Tyler?

Tyler Sellhorn  38:33  

You know, I think for me, you know, if you're going to introduce it as a video thing, like, Where's where is the person that that is, you know, who's the person in QA at at Twitter that that doesn't like say, um, I can't hear this or Oh, where's where's the the caption stuff? Right? Yeah, I mean, it's Seems like you know, if the if you've got a team that large and they're going remote now like, you know, hire some folks that aren't exactly like everyone else at the con.

Justin  39:11  

Yeah, right, super valid and it's funny we we lambaste Twitter for years for not launching any new features or like, What are you guys doing over there? You got this huge team, like, why aren't you building the future? They build one feature out and everybody's now upset with them because they, they did launch it right? And you know, so part of me is I agree with you 100% get better people in your team that would recognize the accessibility the lack of accessibility is it was my first thought was I was like, that has to be why they chose videos because of baked in accessibility support. But there turns out they didn't even do that. But I feel I kind of feel bad for them in a way I don't know do you can you feel bad for giant corporation but I feel bad for them in a way? I do. Because I'm glad they launched features. Yeah,

Hunter  39:50  

well, cuz because I know a little bit how Twitter works. These these features only built by people like 30

Justin  39:56  

small teams and

Hunter  39:56  

typically what happens is the product manager comes in and they have This idea they're like, I want to build like voice messaging or whatever you want to call his voice tweets into the app, and then they come in, and that's becomes their job. So I'm sure that they didn't think about this, that it probably seems counterintuitive. It's like, okay, we're going to introduce this voice thing. Why would we transcribe it? Why would we put on captions that people can read? that defeats the purpose? A lot of people actually said that, to me in the beginning of Yac was like, why would you have it transcribed? Why wouldn't you just start using slack? It's like, well, there's a lot of other things that come along with transcription and their case captions.

Tyler Sellhorn  40:30  

So they need to talk to the Yac people about getting some transcription in there. It's

Justin  40:34  

been amazing how the response to transcription in Yac has been like, I think hunter would probably say that's the number one thing he hears from customers is like, Oh, this is this is different. This is not just WhatsApp voice messages with transcription. This unlocks like a whole new level of power. Yeah.

Hunter  40:49  

Actually, I was just talking to one of your colleagues today. Tyler and I said, you know, with everything else like with loom, she said, Well, why don't we just use loom I'm like, What because you can't, there's no audio. There's no voice messages. She's All right, but I could still record stuff. I was like yeah, but no one's doing transcription you can't search for it later on. Which is actually really interesting. I actually nothing but I'm wondering why they didn't include transcription. I just can't search the tweets, nothing is searchable tweets

Unknown Speaker  41:12  

you would have that would be relevant they should have called us up we could have figured this out.

Tyler Sellhorn  41:17  

One that the the other knock on effect is, you know, Twitter's had such a big problem with you know, abuse and harassment on their platform. Like how are they going to police any of the messages that

Justin  41:28  

are coming in that way? Gosh, Constantine brought this up. This is like, the first thing that he tweeted out was like, Oh, well, if they can't, you know, nail bullying and text, how do you expect to do it in voice because ever all these companies, Facebook, Twitter, everyone's like the AI will fix bullying for us? Well, I'm sure that's like a million times more difficult over voice but I actually have a counter argument to that and my counter argument to that. Well, I think I'm maybe benching it on the humanity factor. But what we found at least with Yac, is people are much less likely to be a dick when Hear themselves out loud. And there's something about like speaking out loud and hearing your own voice that you start to like, check yourself. You're like, oh, wow, I'm yelling right now or like, I sound really angry right now. Because I'll listen to, you know, yeah. And I can even hear myself like de escalating my voice mid yak, because I can tell that I started out at like this very hyped up state. And I feel like it might actually have the reverse effect, which is that there might be less bullying and less abuse of the platform. If people relegate to start using the voice tweets more. I do agree it's much harder to police. But I also think it's less of a problem. I don't know. Do you guys agree with that?

Unknown Speaker  42:40  

Yeah, I think I could. I could agree. I think I think it'll

Unknown Speaker  42:47  

I think it'll still be really hard to monitor but I think at like a basic level, I can agree. I think people are doing really good.

Hunter  42:54  

Yeah, I don't think this is a mess by them. I think honestly, that's why they call it an experiment like you have millions of users. That's why they didn't roll it out to every single person. Like you find this stuff out, you fix it, you adjust, and then you launch it to everybody. I think they did the right thing by acknowledging it. I just don't know if

Justin  43:12  

I don't know, I feel like canceled. Or Yeah, I feel like canceled culture kind of came in here. And we have to have a corporation that apologizes to people now, like they're a private corporation. They could do what they want, if they wanted to launch a feature without Well, they're probably public money, but they're still privately privately held and not government run, right? It's their company, they can do what they want with it. They're not beholden to like a law that requires them to do something, you know. So I don't know. I feel I I feel like we're in a weird way that like corporations now have to apologize to the general public for launching something and it stifles creativity in a weird way. You know, it's not that they shouldn't have thought of accessibility they should have, but that doesn't warrant an apology. That's a bug fix. That's a patch. It's software. We can do that. Right. It does. It's not a an assault on you as a human being It's a mistake by a developer, you know, and we can just we can issue an update. That's, that's all it takes, right?

Tyler Sellhorn  44:07  

I think accessibility is, you know, you think about Apple in the way that they really center those assess accessibility features, you know, you know, as a core component of all their devices, right? And for me, like, that makes, you know, their, their products more useful to a normative person, right? Because you might need to have, you know, the text just a little bit larger. Right. But if the default is there's no adjustment. Well, okay, now, because I'm getting up in age now. And, you know, I glasses, I glasses around the corner, right? You know, I'm gonna have to deal with some of those types of things. Like, you know, the other day I skate, you know, like, I've got the two monitors set up, right. So, you know, I scaled the the, the laptop, you know, monitor So that so that I could see the text on on on slack a little bit bigger when I've got that parked over here and then my big monitor, it's you know, it's it's really easy for me to, you know, change monitor sizes and zoom in and out, zoom out, it's like, those types of things like are gonna make your product more usable by more people and even the the normative ua t people are going to be, you know, right in the sweet spot and you're going to expand that that ua t just a little bit when you have that as the background of your your development process.

Justin  45:35  

How do you how do you guys think about that at hub staff? Is this something where you take in emails and you say, hey, we'll add it to a timeline. Do you have a public feature list or a community board that everyone can look at to see where some of this stuff is at, you know, what's kind of your process like?

Tyler Sellhorn  45:50  

So, um, our, our user requests board is massive, right? Pretty much any request that comes in the door, right from customers shows up on that board. Now, it may only get the eyes of our product team that one time, right? But if we get another request in that same vein, right, or here, here's an adjacent request, and then another customer in that same adjacent request. Okay, so now it needs to show up on the product planner and say, we need to consider this more fully. Right. And, you know, I don't know that we run into a lot of accessibility type type features, because you know, our thing is not a it's a pretty purpose built, you know, b2b product right? You know, you know, you you start the timer and you stop the timer. I mean, that's, that's, you know, all but, you know, when you think about all the different use cases, like you know, we have, you know, 200 Thousand some end users? Right? You know, and inside of, you know, 10,000 some organizations, right. Okay, well, you know, all of those people are going to use it in idiosyncratic ways. Right? And so how do you how do you sort that out and try to adapt to those different use cases while you you listen hard, right? You listen hard and so often you're going to get a complaint from a noisy customer. Right? And and it's and it's usually not in a nice way it's it's, it's this is broken. This is this is, you know, when it when it's really just a user experience that that's unique to their use case. But if you listen hard, right, you can imagine, oh, okay, well, this is what they're saying. But here's how that connects to like, broader use cases. Right? And we can imagine a world in which the thing that that's that's you know, has some Friction for them is an unspoken friction for many other customers. Right. And I think that's the the key ingredient of, of a good customer experience department like, like the one that I'm trying to lead, right is is ones that are willing to sit in the discomfort of of a noisy customer that, you know, is maybe not so happy. You know, this is a two or three on that NPS score, right. You know, I'm not recommended. And in fact, I'm going to go and give you negative reviews everywhere on the internet for my job the next two weeks, you know,

Justin  48:37  

well, it sounds like what you're describing is empathy. Right?

Tyler Sellhorn  48:40  

Right. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. But But I would say, you know, like, taking that empathy and not just just making that person feel heard, but but to turn that into, you know, actionable insight from the product team and the development team, right. You're not just listening insane. Yes, I'm going to sit with your, your your complaint and hear it. But also, I'm going to listen to it and translate that into something that can be, you know, put into an endpoint on the API. Yeah. Right. Right. Because it doesn't mean that that's, that's a different deal. You know, just just having someone feel heard is one thing.

Justin  49:22  

And that goes back to what we were saying earlier, like, adding a feature that takes five seconds just to make a customer happy. But I think we were talking about it in terms of someone who we want to be friends with, and you're talking about somebody that maybe is a little upset with you. And I think you're right that, you know, you don't you don't treat those people differently. You know, you need that empathy for that guy that's angry and figure out how you can make it work for him.

Tyler Sellhorn  49:45  

I mean, I mean, we we have, you know, we we meet on an off site, you know, our remote team, right, we're getting, you know, globally distributed. The we get together at an off site retreat once a year. Well, this year is probably not going Kurt, right, just travel and all the rest of that. So, but one of the things that we do is is that we celebrate those noisy customers, the ones the ones that that they have shown up enough times in our queue that everyone knows their name. Right? Everyone, like developers on down right? We celebrate those people in a tongue in cheek way and in an actual

Justin  50:27  

way to pin yada that they beat the shit out.

Tyler Sellhorn  50:33  

No, no our job our joke is that is that customer success is the responsibility of the entire organization. Right? And that we you know, are we the our emoji for it on Slack, right is is beers right? You know, it's cheers, cheers, right? success, right? You know? Because, uh, you know, anytime anytime that like something actually good happens, right? That there's like, Oh my gosh, we just shipped That feature that like we brought, we brought the voice of the customer into the process. And then out came a product, that that that really a feature inside of the product that that met the needs of that person. Right? It feels great for the everybody that was along that path of ideation to to completion of the product. Yeah.

Justin  51:21  

And it can take that customer from being upset to being actually an advocate for your product now, because he sees that journey that you guys took and says, while these guys actually listened, implemented something, it's better for it. But also I feel really recognized right now. No, no, you go. Yeah, I love the positivity in this conversation. Empathy is always the answer. It sounds like, yeah, it's it's great to have empathy for your users. Well, we are we're running over. I want to wrap us up here. Tyler, you've been an awesome guests with lots of sounds, voices and very high energy which we need on this Friday afternoon.

Hunter  51:58  

The next Jim Cramer I love it. Man remote next week. Oh,

Justin  52:04  

yeah, that's right. We'll make some we'll do a spin off of this where it's just you're hosting it by yourself. But tell everybody where they can find you where they can find a host where they can sign up for hub staff. Give them all the deets

Tyler Sellhorn  52:19  

yeah hub staff comm is the spot to you know get all of your needs net for time tracking proof of work hub staff comm slash tasks we have an awesome agile project management tool you know it's it's kind of our flavor of that that really centers you know, stand ups epics you know you've got your Sprint's all the rest of that stuff is

Unknown Speaker  52:43  

really good we did it so it's fantastic.

Tyler Sellhorn  52:46  

Yeah and if if it if it like shows up as the way that you think about projects, it is built for that right. And then also Tyler so horn tech you can find my stuff there. I'm you know, Tyler does dash cell horn on LinkedIn the whole nine yards. T cell 89 on Twitter, on Twitter, I'm I'm like a hardcore, like anti racist public education advocate. So if you're not into that stuff like like you should stay away but for all those like like b2b, you know, customer success, you know, remote advocacy things. I'm all on board for all of those things. So,

Justin  53:28  

yeah, check me out. Awesome. Well, appreciate having you on man. Thank you, man. We'll play us out here and thanks for showing up dude.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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