Great cultures help you kill bad decisions

“I wanna go fast. I wanna go fast.” — Ricky Bobby

This week’s newsletter is about speed. And we’re going a bit more behind-the-scenes with our actual workload at my company than normal. 

We are rapidly evolving at GoWild. We built our core social commerce technology for our app over the last three years. I never get into the weeds, but the tech is doing so much more than what it seems on the surface. We’ve built a proprietary product that has rewards, social content tied to products, proprietary trending gear scoring, logistics waterfalls to maximize margins, and the shop tech spans across all of the major shopping platforms (Shopify, WooComm, BigComm, EDI, etc.). 

We’ve spent the last five months spinning it out into a new product called Holler (I wrote about this six months ago, so I’ll spare you a full blown catch up on what it is—just read that post).

The journey has been fast paced:

• April - Begin work on a new brand 

• May - Launch brand 

• June - Land first contract for a shop 

• July - Conceive Phase II of Holler, a product for creators

• Summer- Build first product for first client

• August - Testing begins on client product

• September - Launch first Holler shop for Outdoors.com

• October - Begin building Holler creator product 

• Early November - Launch Holler creator product 

• Mid November - Land our biggest creator yet, Macy Watkins

The stretch goal for November was to get 30 creators onboarded. We’re pretty close as of right now, having just broken into the 20s. Obviously part of our goal is not just onboarding creators to use the platform, but to help them start getting sales. 

Part of helping them sell better is of course onboarding them on how to use the product. They’re influencers—they know how to promote links. We may not need to explain sharing a link, per se, but our product has some nuances and advantages when compared to normal affiliate marketing that provides some additional opportunities. 

We’re working on product onboarding, and we’re doing a lot of human onboarding right now. By that I mean we’re meeting with our creators to show them how it works and help setup their shops. That part will naturally get smoother as we go, and this week, we made a huge decision on the product in order to move even faster. 

We killed a month’s worth of work, all on a whim in an all hands meeting.

I mean dead dead. 

The why? 

S-P-E-E-D.

Let’s discuss. 

What died

Over the summer I was reading “Play Bigger” when I realized we had a monster opportunity to take our vision for Enterprise Holler Shops (shops like the one we did for outdoors.com). We needed to make this work for individuals, not just corporate entities. I went into work at 5:30 am one morning and mapped it all out. 

The plan was simple—we’re going to build a product that allowed creators to launch their own shop in minutes. With these shops, they’d earn payouts based on a flat cut of the gross profits. By paying out based on gross profits, we put the creators in control of how much revenue they can make, vs. traditional affiliates that just pay you one flat (and usually lousy) commission. 

I felt strongly we needed to charge for the service for a few reasons. The first reason was if you pay for something, you’re more likely to use it. I don’t really care if a creator starts a shop and never comes back to it. By charging, we ensure you’re going to invest in it. The second reason was that charging tells the creator that there is inherent value in the product itself. And the third was I think there is an opportunity to build a model for referral commissions that come from these monthly fees (similar to what beehiiv is doing for its creators).

However, subscriptions are totally new to our team. We were going to be able to tackle this fairly quickly, as much of that function is built into our payment processor. But we were still talking about at least two sprints to get it all done and tested. 

That may not sound bad to a big corporation, but startups work in dog years. A month of work is a quarter’s worth of time to us. We could feel the pain of this time, but knew we needed subscriptions. Therefore, what options did we really have?

In October we had decided to launch a beta without subscriptions. Creators just use a unique referral code to get access, and for beta they’re bypassing the need for payments. But we wanted to come out of beta by January so we could get this rolling. We were discussing the challenges coming up with payments this week in Kindling, our company wide all-hands meeting. It wasn’t that subscriptions were complicated—it was just that we had a new product we also wanted to launch in December and we couldn’t get both done. It seemed subscriptions was going to have to take priority.

Then my cofounder Donovan said something bold.

“Why don’t we just kill subscriptions?”

I was sitting next to him. I sharply looked over at him as he said it, paused and thought for a long minute.

He was right. 

I had made the wrong decision.

I had locked onto the fact that we needed subscriptions to formally launch. Donovan went on to explain that if we can just keep running in an invite only beta, it isn’t a bad thing. People want what they can’t have, so this could actually help with creating excitement. More than that, this decision lets us actually build on the product instead of spending an entire month of runway working on something that isn’t going to really contribute that much revenue in itself, and it’s not going to make the product better. 

Culture made this possible

This was the right call—and it can only happen in a culture of candor.

Now, Donovan is a cofounder, so you could argue you’d expect him to be able to speak up. But our entire team operates with this attitude and will often speak up to say they disagree with decisions. People speak their mind, call out problems, and will tell you when you’re asking them to do something in a way that doesn’t make sense. 

By killing subscriptions, we were able to dive into two new features that are going to make the product 30% better—each. Meanwhile, subscriptions were not going to help us earn a single creator, nor were subscriptions going to help us get more customers shopping on creators’ shops—and these are the No. 1 and No. 2 goals for the entire company right now. 

We onboard our team on day one to speak their minds. It’s baked into our core values—Bold, Restless, Agile, Visionary and Empowered, with the most important one being the last. People have to feel empowered to be able to hold the line and say “this doesn’t make sense.”

After Donovan spoke up, I asked everyone what they thought, from my cofounders to the engineers to our Director of Member Experience to our Project Coordinator. I wanted everyone’s take. Everyone agreed with Donovan, and we ended the meeting scrapping the entire previous day’s sprint planning, moving forward with a new plan. Within hours, new tickets were logged, and work had begun on the new projects. 

The team could have complained about the fact we’d just kicked off this sprint, spent time planning, mapped out the work or whatever. They didn’t. They all agreed, knowing we’d found a way to move faster. 

Too often leadership clings to a previous decision because work, time and money was already invested. This sunk cost fallacy can eat you alive though—just because you already started investing in the wrong decision doesn’t mean you should keep going in that direction. That wrong decision’s impacts will compound and grow, whereas if you change direction to the right decision, you can move quickly. The previous planning isn’t wasted—it helped understand the problem better. And for us, with subscriptions, we’ll circle back to that when we’re ready. 

I hope you’ve had a great Turkey week break. When you get back to work on Monday, keep an eye out for your own opportunities to stay lean and move fast. In building something new, speed wins every time. 

Who I’m listening to: Ben Folds

What I’m reading: “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville (srsly)

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