JE003: listener feedback episode

Eric Hornung: 00:29

Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome. The upside podcast, the first podcast finding upside outside of Silicon Valley. I’m Eric Hornung, and I’m accompanied by my cohost, Mr. Perfect. Robert himself Jay Clouse. Jay, how’s it going man?

Jay Clouse: 00:45

Good, man. I’m glad you actually listened to that song. Do you listen to it?

Eric Hornung: 00:48

No, I didn’t. I, I, I just give you nicknames based on things that you send me randomly. What is what is perfect Robert?

Jay Clouse: 00:56

Went to a concert of one of my favorite bands recently in a cave and Tennessee Cumberland caverns. Tennessee band is called murder by death. They are not a metal band, not as intense as it sounds, and a good example of that is the fact that they have an entire EP for their band that they put on their kickstarter that is dedicated to their dog robocop, and so I was listening to that EP this morning, the sixth song EP about their dog robocop. One of the songs is perfect Robert.

Eric Hornung: 01:24

Now you didn’t just go to a concert that you didn’t just go to a concert and it gave you put an extensive amount of effort to going to this concert. Is that right?

Jay Clouse: 01:32

I put about 14 hours of driving in a day to go to this concert. Yes, it was silly and logistically illogical

Eric Hornung: 01:41

and the outcome of going to that concert was me getting a new headshot because you recruited Susie to pressure me into getting a new headshot and putting it on my twitter. So you know, full circle. We’re back here at upside. I have a new headshot. Jay is listening to songs about someone’s dog.

Jay Clouse: 01:57

Our online identities have net gotten better because of this concert that I went to.

Eric Hornung: 02:04

All right, well, Jay, what are. What are we doing here? Well, this isn’t a traditional upside episode, is it?

Jay Clouse: 02:09

That’s right. Usually we’re here talking with a founder because Eric and I, one, love talking to founders, but to think that it’s a special time to be starting a company outside of Silicon Valley and we talked to the founders who are doing just that, but today we’re taking a little bit of a different format because we are 14 interviews in to the upside podcast. Actually 16, if you count the two interviews that we did that we’ll never see the light of day because we did not do a good job of them and we said, you know, 14 episodes in. We’ve been collecting feedback all along the way and we’re at a point where we want to start making some tweaks, maybe not some major overhauls. We’ll see how the conversation flows, but we want to take that feedback seriously from you guys and see how it can and should impact the show. So today Eric and I are going to be talking pretty candidly about the feedback we’ve received. We have not discussed this beforehand. A lot of this is going to evolve in real time as to how we’re both listening to the feedback that we receive and how we are choosing to operate because of it.

Eric Hornung: 03:14

To give the audience a little bit of background, Jay and I have been aggressive about finding and getting feedback. I think I counted through our internal slack and we had something like 70 or 80 different people who gave feedback, solicited or unsolicited. The unsolicited kind is the best kind, just Fyi, and all of it was extremely helpful. So thank you. To anyone who sent feedback, who had comments, who helped us make this podcast better.

Jay Clouse: 03:45

and that’s just the piece of feedback we’re counting, right? Like we, we get anecdotal feedback on twitter via text from people that have our number email, most of it. We do a good job of tracking in that slack, but you know, I, I’d say we’re probably pressing close to 100 different data points.
Eric Hornung: 04:01

So to give you guys a little structure for how this episode is going to go, I told Jay come up with a list of three things that you took out of this feedback, three trends, three specific pieces of feedback, however you want to go about it and I’ll do the same and we will go through our lists, we’ll look at that feedback and then we’ll go into the takeaways and suggestions for either how we have incorporated it, how we’re not going to incorporate it or how we might incorporate it going forward.

Jay Clouse: 04:29

That’s right. And I told Eric I’m going to pick seven things

Eric Hornung: 04:32

because Jay is great with instructions

Jay Clouse: 04:35

or because you know, all themes are useful and I figured out our top three may be the exact same top three. So we’ll cover a different cross section. We will have six different data points no matter what.

Eric Hornung: 04:49

Okay, so Jay, let’s start with my third trend. This piece of feedback came across a number of different people, but it came very explicitly from a venture capital friend who I was having lunch with. He said you need to do a much better job of asking about numbers and Jay, and I think this was right around episode six

Jay Clouse: 05:13

Thats what I was going to ask, as I say what, what time of our evolution here?

Eric Hornung: 05:17

Yeah, so Jay and I sat down and we said, or I think I told him this feedback and he said, what’d you tell me?

Jay Clouse: 05:25

And I said, well, you’re the numbers guy, and so that’s your job.

Eric Hornung: 05:31

So I’m taking full blame for that. And I think that if you listen to anything before probably about episode eight, you’ll notice that we are definitely a little lighter on the numbers since then. I have a scratch sheet of 12 key kpis that I try to ask about depending on which company we’re talking to, what I think is the KPI should be, um, you’ll even notice that sometimes we get a response, which is we can’t talk about that on here, which is great because that means we’re asking the right questions.

Jay Clouse: 06:01

Yeah, totally. I think if you listen to our earlier episodes, we were dancing around the numbers a little bit more and I think you’ve done an awesome job even to the point where sometimes I’m trying to ask questions and you’re, I can see on you, you’re like, nope, I’ve got three more rapid fire numbers questions I’m going to get through right now because the time is right and I’m sitting here just like almost trying to speak over the microphone and not quite getting it. I think you’ve been doing a great job on that. So,

Eric Hornung: 06:23

and we’ve, we’ve talked about making that a segment, some sort of like rapid fire numbers question to make it a segment in the show. We haven’t incorporated that yet. We’re not sure if we’re going to, but just so the audience is clear that that was another suggestion that was kind of thrown out there and we’re thinking about.

Jay Clouse: 06:38

Yeah. And this idea of segments is something we’ll probably touch on here later in the, uh, the pieces of feedback and how we think about that. You know, we’re gonna talk about a lot because you and I have talked about segments before and that comes down to one sort of key issue or point that I think we’re going to touch on with some more of these pieces of feedback. So let me jump into my third piece that is sort of related to the numbers. I’ve got a piece of feedback from a few people that they want to hear more assertions from us in terms of a stance on like an evaluation of the company or a definitive would you invest in this company or not? If you are an investor and you had money

Eric Hornung: 07:23

and that one is something that we have had a tough time with since episode one and I think

Jay Clouse: 07:31

it’s a sticky wicket.

Eric Hornung: 07:36

I have not heard that phrase in a long time. Patrick O’shaughnessy, who we both think is a great podcast or he runs invest like the best recently had a back and forth thread with a couple other investors about this topic. How you both want people to come on your podcast, but you want to also kind of grill them, but it’s, it’s this delicate balance and I think Patrick’s been doing this for 120 / 150 episodes and he’s still having that problem of balance and trying to find the right balance. Um, I think the younger you are the heart or the balance is. And that’s not an excuse as to why we’re not taking assertions. It’s just maybe why we haven’t been as bold about it.

Jay Clouse: 08:17

And when you say younger you are, you don’t mean our respective ages. You mean the age of our show?

Eric Hornung: 08:22

Yeah, you correct the age of our show.

Jay Clouse: 08:25

Totally. To give a little bit of behind the curtain. I mean think about it from our perspective here. We want to showcase really great companies and we want to talk to them and ultimately we want them to be proud of this episode since we are not right now an investor who can ultimately say, here’s some money, yes or no, they’re coming on the show for a little bit of a pr opportunity. So we want this to be something that they enjoy coming on, that they are happy to tell other founders that this is a resource available to them. Eric and I are here to learn, but if we went on here and we’re just tearing companies apart, it would not be a friendly show that founders are excited about going on or sharing the episode or telling other people to go on in the episode as well. So it’s a difficult balance. We’re not here to mislead at all or give you guys not are honest thoughts. It’s just hard to take that next step in what ultimately may or may not actually benefit the show.

Eric Hornung: 09:25

So two things on this point. One, the idea of like grilling founders and kind of almost in not embarrassing them but attacking almost. Um, I think that’s done on things like shark tank. I haven’t actually listened to much of a pitch, but I’ve heard that that’s like the podcast version of shark tank. So I’m sure that the questions are a little bit more aggressive on there. And the idea is to say yes or no at the end of an episode, we explicitly didn’t want to be another shark tank kind of feel. So that’s one thing. The second thing is Jay and I are very selective about who comes on the podcast, which is maybe a reason why a lot of our debriefs are generally positive. I do think we have, we’re pretty good about pushing out the cautions that we do have, but the companies that come on generally come either recommended or we found them or we’re excited about them. Um, so it’s, it’s not like we’re just getting a blank slate of companies walking into our door and we’re putting them on the podcast. There is a kind of pre selection process.

Jay Clouse: 10:34

I would agree. And I would say to your point about the age of the podcast, as we do get longer in the tooth as a show, I think the leverage starts to shift a little bit and we have a little bit more flexibility and leverage to push a little bit harder. I mean, frankly, let me, let me be a little bit more candid too. We’re doing this show to learn and I’m not there yet.

Eric Hornung: 10:56

Me Either. So you will notice if you listened to the earlier episodes, maybe the first five and the most recent five. We are definitely more open about the downsides in debrief. I’ve noticed that at least.

Jay Clouse: 11:08

Yep. Yep. Ultimately we want it to be a good
show so we, you know, we want to voice the concerns that we do have.

Eric Hornung: 11:14

My second point is the most by far the most consistent piece of feedback we get and it is length everyone who. Not everyone, I shouldn’t say that. It feels like everyone comments on the length of, if not the entire podcast, one of the sections of it. I know that the upfront was a big piece of contention for how long it was when it was originally 20 to 30 minutes. The length of the entire show being at 90 minutes seems to be a point of contention for a lot of people, but overall that has I think 70 percent of the feedback that we have gotten has mentioned length in one form or another. Would you agree jay?

Jay Clouse: 12:00

Yes, and this is why I came up with seven points because I knew we would overlap on this consistently we are told 90 minutes is on the long side is a lot of the way people put it. Ninety minutes is on the long side and I think it manifests in more hesitation to start listening than people saying I’m not enjoying the length of the show, so that’s why we haven’t changed it to this point. We have cut down the intro as you just said, Eric. Originally we had probably 15 to 20 minutes of intro and we realized a lot of it was a little bit redundant with the questions we asked themselves or in the interview itself. So the interview has gotten much shorter sometimes as short as five minutes, definitely less than 10 minutes.

Eric Hornung: 12:42

The intro, not the interview.

Jay Clouse: 12:43

Yes, the intro. Right, and it focuses more on facts and the research that we found that can guide the questions and less of us sort of hypothecating on what will come out of the interview.

Eric Hornung: 12:57

So one thing that I think is funny about this length is there’s this fun dichotomy because the two longest episodes we’ve had, we’re Swannies and 10XTS. They were both 101 minutes. They were the only two podcasts which went over 100 minute mark and for their respective to times they, Actually, you know what I think in general they might be two of the most downloaded podcast we have. I know that the 10XTS broke all the records for us. I think Swannies when it was released, broke all the records for us. There’s the complaining principle of having aonother person on there and expert, but length in itself doesn’t seem to be a deterrent for new downloads in those contexts.

Jay Clouse: 13:40

Yeah, and I do want to get. I think we should talk about how we think we want to approach this, but I have gotten the opposite feedback too, where people will say it can be whatever length that it needs to be. I’ve had at least one individual telling me he’d be fine with the being longer. I listened personally to two and three hour podcasts, which is probably why we had a little bit of a bias in the first place in the format of this of it coming in long because I love that. I love when things go in depth. I love when you get a little bit more into the weeds, a impersonal with an individual through the interview, so the length has never scared me, but we’ve gotten that feedback frequently enough. I think we need to address it in some way and to me, I’m just going to not put you on the spot and I’ll say where I think this should go. If we address this. I think to shorten the show, it’s going to have to come out of the interview predominantly and maybe a little bit out of the deal memo, but I don’t think we can shorten our process is the problem for us to get through the numbers questions that we have to get to and for us to make the guests comfortable to share with us and for us to get all the information that we would want from a founder to decide if we wouldn’t invest in this person. I think we need at least an hour interviewing them so whether we share that full hour as the final version of the show or not, I don’t think we can shorten our process on that.

Eric Hornung: 15:00

I think, and this might be a little controversial, but just because we get so much of this feedback doesn’t mean that we need to accept it and I think that there are other ways to get people who prefer shorter podcasts and Jay and I are kind of thinking through some ways and alternate series that might be interesting for people like that. Here on upside. I am a fan of the long episode. I like it. I think it lets us kind of fully bore out and talk to a founder in the three part structure that I think makes upside very unique.

Jay Clouse: 15:32

Something that I think we could do a better job of that might help on this is creating the understanding and people that if there’s a certain part of the show they don’t want to listen to you since it says three distinct segments, they can focus on that segment or not focused on a segment because they’re all about at the same point in each episode. About 10 minutes in. We’re done with the intro and with about 25 minutes left. We’re done with the interview.

Eric Hornung: 15:55

That’s correct. Alright, so the takeaway there is we are aware of the length feedback as of right now, there’s nothing that we see that we are probably going to cut. There may be additional pieces of content in the future which address the issue for different types of audiences, but right now I think we’re going to stay with our length.

Jay Clouse: 16:17

The other option is kind of just heavier postproduction, which as podcast producers involves either time or money and we would have to make the cost benefit analysis call of whether or not that’s worth it for this sect of our audience.

Eric Hornung: 16:34

True. Jay, what is your second point?

Jay Clouse: 16:37

Second Point. This is actually positive feedback.

Eric Hornung: 16:37

Whoa. What?

Jay Clouse: 16:45

Yeah, yeah. I know it’s common that we would focus on the negatives and say what can we fix, but this is a very frequent piece of feedback that I think is worth noting because even though it is positive, it’s one of the things we hear the most and that is interest and a lot of validation over the format of the show itself. We get a lot of people coming and saying, I really love the three segment format of research interview and then the deal memo and that was something that you and I talked about super early on as crucial for us in doing this. As someone who’s wanting to do a podcast for a long time, I always thought, I love talking to people. I want to do an interview. How do I not just have another interview show which we think the market is already kind of saturated with? Is this just one on one interview style show? And so I think, um, that validation that people like that unique format is a good thing.

Eric Hornung: 17:37

It’s really funny because this is probably the format itself is probably what kicked off us actually doing this podcast. And I remember I was sitting in a hotel room in Fort Lauderdale working and I was texting Jay and I said, what’s the, why can’t we do a podcast? He said, I don’t know, I’d want to be unique though. I don’t want to do another interview podcast. Everyone does interview podcasts. There’s nothing exciting about that. I said, fair. I happened to be reading the book angel at the time by Calacanis. He laid out the structure for how to evaluate deals. And we literally just stole that outline and said, what if we just make this into a podcast structure

Jay Clouse: 18:19

borrowed. Yeah. I remember this. Well. I was, uh, I, my coworking space when we’re having this conversation, my only goal for the day was I had to record an audition tape for linkedin learning and I was going to do that. I was going to get on the road and go home because I think it was literally, it was gonna go to my parents’ place because it was literally before Christmas and, uh, it was starting to snow a lot and I was running really behind on getting this one very small thing done because I was just on fire about this idea and thinking this, this could work. This is unique. This is good. This is smart. I love hearing that feedback because we think that’s one of the most unique aspects and important aspects of our show. I’ve said this in a recent episode, the third part of our show, obviously I love talking to founders and the interview. The third part of my show, my show, my show.

Eric Hornung: 19:05

It’s your show now. All right, fine. I’m out.

Jay Clouse: 19:08

The third part of our show is probably my favorite part because that’s where we learned the most and where we get to create a conscious in articulated understanding of the thing that we just heard, which is what will make us smarter and more able to do this

Eric Hornung: 19:22

and it’s where we say, dumb things. Seriously. Sometimes I go back and I listen to myself. I’m like, well, that wasn’t the smartest thing I could have said I probably should do to do better. Like when I define consortia on the Tedx ts podcast, I completely messed it up and you know what we are and now I’m going to get better at that.

Jay Clouse: 19:43

There’s something in the 10XTS episode that even when I was giving the editing notes to our audio engineer, Nathan, who was amazing by the way, shout out to Nathan who makes this show much more liberal than it would be if I was doing this in garage band. When I was giving him the notes. I almost cut out one of my questions because I thought that was a stupid thing to say, but then I also thought, you know, I’ll leave it in just because that’s like a sign of me learning and I’m not an expert yet and I don’t want people to think that I am yet.

Eric Hornung: 20:12 That’s Kinda the point of the show is we’re always learning. So my third piece of feedback is kind of related to the length issue. It’s kind of related to the numbers issue. It’s kind of related to everything and it’s a question that I get a lot that I don’t have a great answer to, which is who is your audience?

Jay Clouse: 20:36

whoahh, This is a very personal question.

Eric Hornung: 20:38

Is it personal or is it. Oh, it’s personal because the audience is ourselves. That’s why we started the podcast completely selfishly. We started the podcast for ourselves

Jay Clouse: 20:47

and so it stands to reason that our audience are individuals who are a little bit like us in terms of interests and a stage of their, I wouldn’t say career, but stage of their journey in learning about this space, which I think is at the intersection of entrepreneurship and finance,

Eric Hornung: 21:04

so our audience is people who are interested in entrepreneurship and finance and that intersection and thinking about it from a very early stage.

Jay Clouse: 21:15

Interestingly, you know in the format itself is this intersection of entrepreneurship and finance because your finance, Im not finance. I am entrepreneurship work with entrepreneurs and an entrepreneur. That’s a space I feel much more comfortable. I’m trying to learn about the finance space and I don’t know if I’m projecting here. I think you have the opposite sort of problem.

Eric Hornung: 21:36

I think so as well. I think it’s interesting because we look at us as the example. That’s true. We also have on twitter a bunch of lists of people who we are interested in and I’m unsure if they are our audience. If there’s reciprocity there, those are accelerators, the press and the media. Obviously we have one for our podcast guests who are obviously interested founders and companies, community builders and vcs and I’m not sure which of those and how strongly of those, each of those are our audience.

Jay Clouse: 22:10

I definitely get a lot more individuals who are sort of in the startup space and are trying to learn and understand how the investment space works a little bit more. I also talked to a handful of guys like you who are background in finance and are trying to understand more about what the startup space looks like and how their skillsets sort of applies to that.

Eric Hornung: 22:30

Alright. So it seems like you have a much better answer to this question than I do.

Jay Clouse: 22:33

Well, I think about the marketing of this a lot and when I talk with our intern, Jacie, and I asked her to find places where this type of person is hanging out. So that’s what’s on my mind a lot, but it is a question that’s still, you know, I haven’t perfectly articulated at the best way I say is people who have the interest at the intersection of startups and finance.

Eric Hornung: 22:54

Very cool. Alright. Jay, what’s your third point? Third Point. I don’t. I don’t know. Are we going three, two, one or one to three? I think we kind of like loved it.

Jay Clouse: 23:02

Yeah. You went three, two, one. I think I went one, two, three. So the last point that I’ll make is.. Nope. I’m going to cheat. I’m going to give you two and you can choose which one.

Eric Hornung: 23:14

Let’s do a bonus one. You gave me three and then we’ll do a bonus one. Okay.

Jay Clouse: 23:18

Okay. Third piece, and this is nuts and bolts. People talking about your audio. The people want to hear your crispy, clean voice. Eric.

Eric Hornung: 23:29

Apparently my voice sucks. So the initial feedback by almost everybody was, wow, Jay’s voice sounds so great. Eric, are you using a different microphone? And I said, nope. We have the exact same setup

Jay Clouse: 23:29

same setup,

Eric Hornung: 23:44

same exact setup. The only difference is that Jay records locally and I record via a connection into his device. So I think that’s something we are going to change. You’re in the future and you should hear my voice a little crisper. Yeah, but my voice still might just suck. And then here we are,

Jay Clouse: 24:04

I get your voice straight into my ear buds and it’s great. It’s. But yeah, it is a. it’s a function of how we produced the show. We use skype, we use a tool called ECAM, which honestly is a great tool for what it is and I can export a single wave file of Eric and I’s conversation, same with the guest, but it filters his voice through the Internet connection, so it’s not straight from his microphone. If we both recorded locally, we could, in theory, and I know this is how a lot of people operate, but the, the put two separate local files together in sync so that you hear both of our voices from our local machines at our microphone setups, which we can do. It’s again a thing and a point of resources on the production side. But Eric, so then you said recently in terms of a producing something, is it better to put a dollar into marketing or a dollar into the product itself? And this falls into the product itself?

Eric Hornung: 25:03

Yeah, and every dollar we can put into the product I think is is to pay dividends down the road because you want this. The product has to be amazing and we can worry about marketing when marketing time comes, but I like putting money into the product.

Jay Clouse: 25:03

Bonus time

Eric Hornung: 25:21

Yeah, you hear those sound effects. That’s Nathan, right There. Our audio engineer. Just kidding Nathan, thats Jay.

Jay Clouse: 25:31

That is me. Cool. So last piece of feedback, another positive piece of feedback. Eric want to end on a high note. I’ve gotten several points of feedback of people saying I really like when you guys spend some time talking to the guests about what it’s like starting in the midwest

Eric Hornung: 25:43

and that’s great feedback because that’s the entire premise of the podcast.

Jay Clouse: 25:49

It is, but sometimes we spend more time actually explicitly talking to that point than other times. You know, Jeremiah talked about being in Louisville is great for him because it can be the franchise capital of the world for food, Sky of Lawn Guru. Does it make sense for him to be on the west coast where there are no lawns? Some of these founders. Very intentionally chose where we are because of where they are because of a geographic advantages, some of them by happenstance who have seen that there are still advantages there, summer of tilr, but yeah, this is a good point of feedback to also receive.

Eric Hornung: 26:24

Yeah, well I am excited that people are excited about hearing about the different ecosystems because we’re going to be exploring a lot more of them in the coming episodes. We’re going to get outside of just the Midwest. We’re going to find companies that are in the south. We’re going to find companies that are in Salt Lake City and Denver and Albuquerque and maybe we’d do some international ones, but all of those are going to have that, that section. And we need to make sure that we ask about it, about what starting a company outside of Silicon Valley is like specific to their ecosystem.

Jay Clouse: 26:57

All right, so let’s summarize what we’ve talked about here in terms of the points of feedback we’ve gotten and uh, if you even want to touch on how we’re going to move forward on those pieces. Let’s make it happen. I know you’ve been taking notes, Eric. Let’s hear it.

Eric Hornung: 27:12

Alright, so the three pieces of feedback that I gave or that I summarized, one, we need to do a better job of asking about the numbers. I think that’s something that we’ve kind of started to do and will continue to do. Asking about Kpis, numbers. I think one thing we can look at better is projected numbers. Two, the length issue. We decided that we are not going to sacrifice quality for length and the idea is going to be still about a 90 minute episode going forward, but we’ll look at some alternatives going forward as well. Three, who’s your audience? Jay answered it succinctly. I floundered around. The idea is that we are looking at the intersection of finance and startups. Jay’s Three points. I’ll let you do the. Wait, we’re not at the bonus yet man. Alright. Js. Three points. I’ll let you do what we’re going to do about them. Number one more assertions.

Jay Clouse: 28:13

Yes. And Got Improv on the brain. I agree. We don’t have an elegant answer for this yet. We, we want this to be a good experience for our guests. We want it to be something that they’re happy to share and happy to recommend. That being said, we are not going to mislead or not touch on something that we think is important to address. So Eric and I do a pretty good job of bringing guests on the show who have already shown some signs of viability, I think is a good way to put it. I think we’ll get there as the show gets older, but as of now it’s a, it’s a tough line to toe and will continue to do our best to tow that line.

Eric Hornung: 28:57

Two, format of the show. This is a positive piece of feedback.

Jay Clouse: 29:00

Keeping it done.

Eric Hornung: 29:00

Three Eric’s voice.

Jay Clouse: 29:09

Yeah, we’ll fix it. And I say that from the standpoint of Oh boy, no more post production, but it is something that is important and so we will probably in the coming, I don’t know, I don’t want to say next episode because we’re about to record that interview and we are not equipped to do that. So in the next five episodes you will hear sometime in the next five episodes a crispy clean Eric Hornung

Eric Hornung: 29:32

and the bonus. Bonus! I didn’t write down what the bonus was I forgot.

Jay Clouse: 29:41

talking to founders about the Midwest. Want to make sure we get some time on each interview to do that. We usually do it towards the end of the show anyway. It’s a good sort of wind down so we’ll make sure that we continue to ask those questions and get that perspective.

Eric Hornung: 29:57

So Jay, transparency is really important to us here at upside. That’s why we do this episode. That’s why we’re trying to interact with all of our listeners. How do listeners, if they have feedback, if they have questions that are either specific to an episode or more general about upside and the way that we do things, how do they interact with us either publicly or privately?

Jay Clouse: 30:19

Well, Eric, I’m glad you asked. Not hard to do a. We are both on twitter. Upside is on twitter. Preferred is to tweet at us @upsideFM also fine. We both have our individual twitter’s which are tagged and the upside bio. Eric has a new headshot, a new bio. It looks great. We’ll both be listening for you there and on the website account we also interact with our listeners on breaker, which is our preferred podcasting APP. If you use breaker to listen to podcasts, you can comment on our episodes. You can also like our episodes, which is great. Helps us in the discoverability and the ranking system, but you can comment on our episodes and we will talk with you right there on the episode itself, which were really enjoying doing. If you don’t listen on breaker, I would recommend giving it a shot. We, Eric and I both use that as our personal podcasting platform of choice. I successfully swung my behavior into sort of habitually going into breaker instead of apple podcasts at this point and, uh, we think you’d like it to.

Eric Hornung: 31:23

And what if people like emailing better, they got something long form, they want to right out.

Jay Clouse: 31:27

They can email us. Hello@upside.FM. We would love that as well. We categorize all this feedback. We put it into slack. We’ll probably do another one that shows someday if we make, if we make substantial edits to the show or if we continue to get feedback towards a certain directions. We’ll revisit this again. At some point we will send out a listener survey, so be on the lookout for that. If you want to receive that listener survey, obviously we’ll shout it out in the podcast itself, but you can also sign up for our very infrequent mailing list @upside.fm and you’ll get a notification every time we release a new episode and that’s also the first place we will go with special news, special offers, things like the listener survey.

Eric Hornung: 32:06

So thank you very much. If you’d given feedback to this point, if you were one of the 70 or 80 people we had, plus all the other anecdotes I got to give a special shout out to John Barilaro, Eric Welder,

Jay Clouse: 32:06

Mike Albert, Brett Buchanan, Arnob Nandi

Eric Hornung: 32:25

Ben Kelly and colleen Houston who have all provided a ton of really specific, relevant, well thought out feedback. Um, we really appreciate all you guys and if we miss someone specific, we’ll get you in the next feedback episode.

Jay Clouse: 32:25

Alright, Eric, talk to you next time.

Jay Clouse: 32:43 That’s all for this week. Thanks for listening. We’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s guest. So shoot us an email at hello@upside.FM, or find us on twitter @upsideFM. Will be back here next week at the same time talking to another founder and our quest to find upside outside of Silicon Valley. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please email us or find us on twitter and let us know. And if you love our show, please leave us a review on itunes. That goes a long way in helping us spread the word and continue to help bring high quality guests to the show. Eric and I decided there were a couple of things we wanted to share with you at the end of the podcast. And so here we go, Eric Hornung and Jay Clouse or the founding parties of the upside podcast. At the time of this recording, we do not own equity or other financial interest in the companies which appear on this show. All opinions expressed by podcasts. Participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Duff and Phelps Llc and its affiliates on your collective llc and its affiliates or any entity which employ us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. We have not considered your specific financial situation nor provided any investment advice on this show. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next week.

Eric Hornung: 34:09

Oh, we’re back. Little Easter egg

Jay Clouse: 34:13

bonus part two Bu, Bu Bu, bu bu realized that I mentioned seven pieces of feedback and I gave five or recovered five. My piece of feedback, so rapid fire last two pieces of feedback. One, given that we have a consistent format that people are excited about and enjoy, we’ve gotten the pieces of feedback that some of our intro to the show itself, both in the intro segment and in the deal memo where we talk about what are we doing here? It sounds a little scripted and they’re tired of hearing it, so that’s a hard one to address because we want people who are coming to the show for the first time to have a feel for what we’re doing. We also don’t want to alienate our listeners, so eric, what do we do with that?

Eric Hornung: 34:51

I think we’re going to start doing it less and less, but it’s still going to be part of the show because we are getting so many new listeners every single episode. We’re still in that kind of high growth phase, so I think it’s important for setting the structure. We might be able to do it less going forward. What do you think?

Jay Clouse: 35:09

I would agree. We’ve talked about this a little bit. I think we shorten it. I think we, instead of doing every episode, we might reintroduce segments every third episode, but also shorter. I think it’s important for people to understand the format and honestly, again, given that some people have length concerns, I really want to get people in the third segment because I think that’s where a lot of the magic happens, so I want to make sure that in the intro we are sufficiently getting them excited about that.

Eric Hornung: 35:34

Awesome. And what’s your second piece?

Jay Clouse: 35:36

Last piece? Feedback. Here we go. One of my favorite things and also most frustrating things about our pod, Eric, is the capitalization of the messaging we use for the podcast.

Eric Hornung: 35:51

I love the lowercase. I love it so much.

Jay Clouse: 35:55

This began as a clever little nod to the Midwest. We started everything. Lower case to say that there’s not enough capital here outside of Silicon Valley. I love that as a concept. Love it. What’s really difficult is to consistently write everything, lower case and not look like a couple of idiots.

Eric Hornung: 36:19

Yeah, but it also just brings a little bit of attention when you see everything in lowercase. Even if you just take a second take, you know, maybe that annoys some people sure, but so does, writing everything in uppercase and that seems to work well on twitter for some people,

Jay Clouse: 36:35

ahh Kanye. What’s hard for me is I don’t like to lowercase proper nouns that are brand standards for our guests, so it’s hard for me to justify lower casing. Maybe I could get away with their names, but to take their company name and lowercase, that feels a little disrespectful to me, so I started not doing that and now we have this weird mixed bag that’s hard for me to draw the line.

Eric Hornung: 36:59

Yeah, I think proper nouns can still have uppercase unless they are our possession of proper nouns, like my name, your name, upside, things like that, but other people’s stuff. Yeah, you’ve got to be respectful of that. I agree. I think that we’ve done a good job of that, especially lately. We might’ve been a little bit aggressive with the lower casing earlier on, but we’ve kind of changed that, so I think

Jay Clouse: 37:20

aggressively undercapitalized

Eric Hornung: 37:22

we are aggressive. We capitalize. Yeah. All right Jay, so you had. You went through all your pieces of feedback. I think it’s time for a little song. For the listeners, if they stuck around this long, what do you think?

Jay Clouse: 37:35

Ah, yes… Hes a Perfect. Robert. How’d he get so good? Yes he’s a perfect Robert. He does everything that a good boy should. He’s perfect Robert.

Eric Hornung: 37:46

All right. Later guys.