Daily Standup 01 – Quick Life Update, Insights From An Acquisition Offer & Market Volatility

This is is part of my live-learning series! I will be updating this post as I continue through my journey. I apologize for any grammatical errors or incoherent thoughts. This is a practice to help me share things that are valuable without falling apart from the pressure of perfection. 

Speak With Tyler Bryden
Speak With Tyler Bryden
Daily Standup 01 - Quick Life Update, Insights From An Acquisition Offer & Market Volatility
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Daily Standup 01:

– Quick Life Update
– Insights From Acquisition Offer
– Market Volatility
– Supporting Each Other
– Future Content

 

 

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Automated Transcription

OK hello, I hope everything’s going well. Tyler Bryden here this is a video recording. I guess you can see that you’re listening to it. I appreciate you tuning in. I am making the practice of creating some videos here again, the theme of this I think is this idea of sort of like daily standups.

Now I looked. There’s sort of this guy who’s doing a podcast called Daily Standups. Very interesting. There is a software dev and seems like he’s keeping it pretty tight. Concise 15 minutes. And I think maybe even in that format, when I say this sort of daily standup format, I doubt knowing myself that I will be able to maintain that.

But the idea is, can I make something 15 minutes? Very repeatedly, hopefully, ideally every single day. Share that on YouTube 15 minutes. One of the reasons that because from a desktop computer you can update, you can upload a video natively to LinkedIn. Apparently 10 minutes on mobile, but 15 minutes on on desktop, so it allows me to then upload on on LinkedIn, upload to YouTube, and then we’ll pass through to a podcast.

Episode 2 been doing a long podcast for many, many years, very sporadically. They’ve called speak with Tyler Braden, but in this just trying to restore that habit, I’m settled into a new place so a little bit of a quick life update. I am sitting in port Credit while I’m actually standing. I’ve got a standing desk, so that’s one update and I’m standing in Port Credit Ontario, about 20 minutes outside of Toronto. And it’s interesting. I moved to Toronto to be part of the community there, the DMZ. Hit that in Jan sort of 2020.

A few months later pandemic comes, Toronto shuts down and so my experience of Toronto was much different than what I thought it was going to be in. You know, in some ways that that was pretty painful in other ways. That’s the way that life is meant to be, and I’m very happy to have, you know, had the privilege, especially in a difficult time to. Purchase a house. Have a wonderful partner?

How about a lovely dog who I’m sure if I do this on a daily basis while barge in here at one point to disrupt the entire thing? But that’s a a blessing in my life and I, you know, I don’t. I don’t discount that at all, so I’m I’m out here in Port credit close to the water, close to some dog parks. Really enjoying nature as much as I can and trying to. Force myself to enjoy personal life a little bit more and.

And the reason I’m doing is because I just I strictly I enjoy it more. I deriving a lot more value out of personal life than I had done previously, and maybe because for me the milestone of 30 is coming up. But I find your priorities definitely change. And and then when you meet a partner who you know sort of brings out the best in you and makes you happy, then you want to spend more time personally and so that’s definitely been. You know something I’m cherishing right now and spending a lot of time and figuring out what is this idea of work life balance what?

How do I split this? And that’s something that I haven’t really considered before because it’s just all in. Doing what I’ve been doing at 65 originally, sort of a soul, you know, sole proprietorship entrepreneurship, sort of marketing agency, and then now it’s peak AI as a as a software company. And that’s an interesting journey journey to go through and also learn from people around you. And one of those people around me is my partner Monica, who has. Standing an incredible job building her career as solutions architects.

Strictly not strictly, but you know primarily focused on sales force and marketing cloud, and some of these, you know, great technology platforms. And with that you know with that skill set really been able to gracefully climb up. Through her career in terms of positions in terms of salaries in terms of work, life, balance, and so, we’ve learned a lot from that. And you know, making subtle changes in my life too. Ohh, during the summer too, take my calendly availability from.

I think he was like 8:00 PM so people could book meetings up till 8:00 PM and they would because people are in different time zones all over the world too. Dropping that down to 5:30 PM and so with all this nature around. You know trying to enjoy that as much as I can and making. Making those things a priority as much as as as as I can, so I have a little agenda here which is also in life. That’s not true. I’m saying I’m making fun of myself, but I’m actually quite organized in in most things and.

Just wanted to sort of this is my first version of this, continuing to try to build this out in a more regular process. Generally we do team meetings. About 9:30 AM EST, which I think is a nice time, not too early, not too late, but for me to carve out some time to, you know, do this video. If it’s 15 minutes to post it, maybe takes another 10 minutes you know then. Then do I push that back or do I make it go earlier, so that’s one of the questions that I’m asking myself, because as I review and you get into these sprints and you do these things where you are just heads down focused, you’re not really self reflecting.

You’re not really saying hey what? What am I? What am I doing here? What am I doing here? Also what things? What things do I want to remove from my life?

What things do I want to add and for me, communicating with people is a big one. It’s hard, you know in this day and age too. See people in location to have conversations. One on one conversations and you know everyone valuing their time so much. So many things going on in people’s life.

I know many people won’t tune into this. They won’t watch this. They won’t be able to listen to the whole thing, but you know that opportunity is there and maybe it’s a way to connect with people that I I care about. And you know, hopefully. And I know they do care.

Care about me too. So making this intentional effort and also getting into the practice of just communicating again because throughout this pandemic. You know you can you can. You’re now people are getting back in person and they’re having this sort of experience like, wow, I forget how to communicate. And you know, sort of these unnatural things.

And for myself, I was blocking out of a lot of time to work and to flow states, too, you know, to deprioritize meetings that because I was, you know, earlier my crowd just take a meeting with anyone. Talk with everything you know, whatever, go on forever. And then as you start to prioritize things a little bit more, you say, OK, what’s the agenda for this meeting? Why are we talking? Are we moving each other forward?

How can we help each other? How can we grow together? And if that isn’t clear, going into a meeting, then is that even necessary? And for me, that’s a continued theme that I’m that I’m working on and and hope to to do a better job of and I’ll maybe share some practices in the tools that I’ve been implementing to to do that so. What does this entail? If you’ve made it this far?

If I’m doing this more regularly, you know what kind of things do I want to talk about? Some of them are tools, things I’ve learned from operations that speak AI, and you know, there’s the idea. Of course, you always want to share what you’re doing in and promote it, but it’s more like what are lessons from building a software company from. Trying to raise money from optimizing conversion rates and product to growth channels for inbound channels through search. And how do you build affiliate programs?

And all the stuff that we’ve sort of learned? And you sort of fall into learning out of necessity in those roles and other things like interesting things that come out through that journey. One of them was. Basically, I would say like, say, an acquisition offer that you know it fell, fell through and some very interesting reasons why that fell through, and you know can’t disclose too much information in that. But I think there are some good insights from that.

Some lessons that I’ve taken from at my team has taken from it, and what I would do if an opportunity like that happened again, how we would, how would we approach it? How would that process go? And if you’re ever in a situation where you were faced with that process, what do you need to do? What do you have to have? Ready in and how can you make sure that that set up for success?

And whether it’s a yes or no, you get to that as quickly as possible. So that’s another sort of thing that I’m interested in sharing and learning. And you know, as I’ve continued this journey at speak AI, you start to tap into. These companies who are in the same domain as you or interested in you know, cementing their space in the market or acquiring talent and. If you have a talented team or a product or a customers, those opportunities start to come more often and so how can you optimize for that?

How can, yeah, you know the all the stuff that comes with those experiences and those those processes? How can you? How can you best set that up for success? You know a couple other things that I’m personally, you know, very fascinated about right now are sort of the market conditions. A lot of market volatility right now, startup valuations, dropping venture capitalist X.

You know investor exits dropping 80% in Q1 of 2022. Obviously this you know horrible sort of war in in in Ukraine. The downstream effects of that apparently with large ramifications and consequences for. Food sources, ones that we’re not seeing right now, but we’ll see. And and then, how does this impact you?

How does this impact the world? How does that impact you if you’re a founder and you’re raising money or you’re a startup and you’ve raised money and what you need to do next? Other things you know continue, you know, never go away for interest from me. To you know, speech recognition and natural language processing. New innovations that are coming out in those domains.

Things that are just exciting like GT3 and Dally where we’re you know generating beautiful images from simple prompts and how people are doing that and. Sometimes I find it hard and overwhelming to share things on the screen, but you know, if I am talking about those things, having visual resources, having tactical strategies, and you know, even showing real data from what we’re dealing with as we say, you know, run Google ads and see you know what search terms are coming through and and how Google ads have changed and how Facebook ads have changed all these things that I, you know, really tried to bring this sort of honest, transparent approach to and hopefully that helps you on your journey no matter who you are or what you are. At least at the very least that you that you find interesting. You know, just in that I guess, sort of daily stand up vein, this theme or this idea is no currently, what are we? You know what am I doing on right now?

And you know, by outlaying this it also you know if you have insights into these are people to connect with or. You know perspective through your own experience. Very open to that, you know so day-to-day right now. Are always trying to increase the top level funnel of who? Who knows who speak AI is and and then bring those people.

Generally the idea is obviously first of all come to the website but then sign up for a plan 14 day free trial and how do we you know. Create enough value in that 14 day free trial that people want to subscribe and that’s a continuing journey. Continuing to optimize one of the things that we found has been really interesting is enabling people to personalize. There are plans, and we’re doing that through a very manual method, but over the next few weeks we’re adding basically this calculator to our site that will allow you to specify who sort of not who you are, but the exact way that you’re going to use the platform immediately see the impact on pricing, and then you can proceed if you want you know monthly pricing, annual plan. Et cetera, et cetera.

Possibly even if not adding too much complexity. Even allowing people to subscribe for a for 1/4 kind of kind of thing there. So that’s something that I’m doing is, like you know, obviously product optimization, but then pricing optimization a huge piece we still have so many blockers, I would say on UI UX and just the capacity to be able to focus on those experiences individually. That’s a continued challenge that that we see right now. I’m in the process of, you know, part of this was this acquisition merger piece was like.

Things got delayed and so now I am in a spot where I’m outreaching to investors. Some warm who I’ve had conversations with for some cold outreach. You know, looking for people who have gone through that journey before and also have maybe followed our journey. And you know would love to see you know, maybe have some insight or want to help, or have some intros that are that are there to think what else to add. Like there’s a lot of stuff going on right now.

It is a very exciting time. It’s interesting time. I’m definitely in the spot of hyper learning and. For some reason, I have felt compelled to. I don’t know what it was, but today woke up this morning with this mindset of I need to get back to this habit and need to get back to this routine.

Have cemented some other routines in my life that have been very healthy and I hope this is is one of them so. I’m at my 15 minutes. I have so many things I could share so many things I could talk about, but I will leave that to my next 15 minutes and I hope that if you watch this you listen to it that you found some insight or at least excited. And if you have any thoughts, any things that you’re thinking about, please feel encouraged to send me a message. Tyler had speak at dot Co.

Shoot me a message on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to chat there and thank you to everyone who has supported me along the journey. Excited to share more. Thank you.

 

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