
Lexicon by Interesting Engineering Podcast — Beyond the Pitch Deck: How Launch 1st Method Reduces Startup Risks
Summary
In this Business with the Boys episode, host David DeSalle and Landon Troyer engage with David Hirschfeld, a seasoned software development expert, to discuss the Launch 1st Method, a systematic approach to reducing startup risks. Hirschfeld shares insights from his extensive career, emphasizing the importance of solving problems rather than getting attached to products.
The conversation explores various industry applications, including logistics and healthcare, and highlights the significance of automation and efficiency in business processes. Hirschfeld’s experiences and case studies provide valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and business owners looking to navigate the complexities of startup success.
Chapters
00:00: Introduction and Poker Banter
01:40: The Role of AI in Business Efficiency
05:43: David Hirschfeld’s Background and Career Journey
10:53: Lessons from Exiting a Successful Company
16:26: The Importance of Problem-Solving in Business
21:46: Niche Focus and Cross-Domain Knowledge in Software Development
24:37: AI in Healthcare: Transforming Patient Engagement
27:14: Innovative Solutions for Urban Infrastructure
30:15: Bottlenecks and Workflow Optimization
35:54: Automating Business Processes for Efficiency
41:01: The Importance of Honest Feedback in Business
46:44: Building a Positive Team Culture
Beyond the Pitch Deck: How Launch 1st Method Reduces Startup Risks (00:00)
What’s up guys, David DeSalle here, your host of the Business with the Boys podcast joined today by your favorite co-host and my friend Landon Troyer. And this introduction is the only thing between now and you’re playing some poker tonight. Not playing, whooping some ass. Whooping some ass.
I’ve been, I’ve been dry lately. I’ve well, I haven’t been able to play all that much and I haven’t won in a couple of times. So, you know, I got to get that when you toss your shades on so that you can’t get away anything. No, you just stone cold. no, it’s mainly just a lot of shit talking. So, you know, trying to intimidate them. Standard. I mean, I let the card stays talking. yeah. Okay. Now you’re, now you getting cocky. I want to text tonight when you’re.
when you’re done either a thumbs up that you want or a thumbs down that you lost. Yeah, it’s a real big, real big $20 game, you know, so. this is serious stuff, dude. That’s if there’s five of you, that’s $100, man. Well, there’s eight of us, but you know, yeah. Whoa. Hi, Rola. Can’t afford it. Can’t afford to miss the the weekly game, you know, IRS. If you’re listening, we are talking about Monopoly money here. Absolutely. Absolutely.
All right, let’s go ahead and dive in. But before we officially do big thank you to our sponsors, as always land jet. If you haven’t heard of land jet yet, go check them out. It’s basically a bougie modded out Mercedes Sprinter van that brings you around chauffeurs you around, you can have meetings in there. Landon next time I’m in Nebraska, actually, we should
(01:40) The Role of AI in Business Efficiency
take the mics and hook up a podcast and do a drive-in podcast, that would be pretty sweet. I would like that a lot. That would be legit. be pretty fallen. But if you are going to a meeting, you’re going to an event, you wanna have a meeting, or you’re just driving from meeting to meeting, you can be way more productive, especially in this world of leveraging AI and becoming more efficient. Why not become more efficient that AI can’t necessarily solve?
and saving some of your drive time. for that, or with that being said, I should say, reach out to rachel at landjet.com, mention business with the boys for a 10 % discount for being a loyal listener of the show. But today we have David Hirschfeld. And this is a really good episode. And we got a really, a lot of really good feedback on
the AI specific episode that we put out there and a lot of people took action on it and actually David listened to that podcast and reached out proactively. So I would invite you if you think you would be a good guest or you think that there’s someone that you know that would be a good guest, just email me at David at business with the boys with a Z David at business with the boys.com and we’re more than happy to entertain a conversation and see if you or they are a fit but
There’s a pretty interesting conversation landed and it seems like what he’s able to do really, really impacts businesses. Yeah. I mean, from my standpoint, obviously being a business owner of my world and probably a very inefficient business owner, right? With all the balls I’m always trying to keep juggling. I’m envious of guys like him that see the world like, and have the know-how to, Hey, let’s just code some
software and eliminate all these steps along the way. Like, yeah, that sounds great. But I’m like Ozzy Osborne trying to turn on my computer like, Sharon, come help me turn this thing. I can’t even turn the damn thing on. pretty envious of guys like him. But I could see where the need for him and his team would be incredible.
For sure. So let me go ahead and properly introduce David and we will dive into the episode. So David Hirschfeld is a 35-year software development veteran with a unique perspective on technological innovation and business growth. He’s a former physics student from UCLA and his career spans leadership roles at tech giants like computer associates, Texas Instruments, Intel and Motorola.
before launching his first startup, which grew to 800 customers across 22 countries and was successfully sold to a public company in 2000. Since founding his new company, Techies Inc., in 2007, David has emerged as a strategic advisor specializing in AI-driven workflow transformation for scale-ups and the design and development of startups. Having collaborated with over 70 startups, he’s developed the launch
first method, which is a systematic approach that minimizes risk and accelerates software company’s success with reduced reliance on investor funding. His expertise bridges cutting-edge AI technologies, workflow optimization, and startup ecosystem dynamics. When not transforming business strategies, he enjoys woodworking, golfing, and spending time with
his four sons and their families, and he dialed in from beautiful, perfect weather in San Diego. So, with that said, let’s go ahead and dive into the episode.

(05:43) David Hirschfeld’s Background and Career Journey
So, David, I’d be doing myself and you a disservice if I didn’t compliment your name. So David, great name, and welcome to the show. Thank you. I thought you were going to say Hirschfeld was such a great name. Well, that’s great, too, but like I’m a little biased. I think David’s a great name. I think David’s a great name. The only reason I say Hirschfeld is because of the cartoonist in New York. I don’t know if you know, you know, he used to do all the art for the New Yorker, and anyway, yeah.
There you go. Well, we appreciate you hopping on and joining the show. And it’s actually pretty cool. You know, lot of the folks that we’ve had on have either been connections of Landon or mine or referrals from previous guests. And you just had the audacity to shoot us an email and say, Hey, I listened to one of your episodes and I liked it and would love to chat and be on the show and you have not because you asked not and it’s amazing what happens when you ask. So
thank you for having the audacity to touch base and, join us today. Yeah. And I figured eventually we’d be friends. So I just make it happen a little sooner. Right. We like it. We need more of that. Well, walk us through, so you have a couple of different, companies and offerings. but you are not new to the business scene. so walk us through kind of, you know, brief upbringing. How’d you get into your professional career? Like.
help us understand and set the stage as to where it all began. Okay, sure. I’m not gonna go back too far, because I don’t think people wanna hear about my high school career, but I started out in the software industry in the 80s. So I’m a bit older than most of you guys are. They had software back then? They, well, they, that’s, I don’t think they realized that’s what it was, right? Eventually somebody started to call it software and.
I think the airlines are still using the software from the 80s. Anytime I peek behind the screen and I see them tapping over. I know. I thought that was weird 20 years ago that they were still doing that. And now it’s 20 years later, they still are. Anyway, in the late 80s, I was working in enterprise and doing project management for Intel and Motorola.
Allied Signal Arizona Public Service as a consultant and started my own software company in the early 90s, which was an offshoot of, well, it doesn’t matter where it came from, but I started a software company because I saw somebody I knew had a need for logistics route distribution inventory management. And a guy that I worked with at Texas Instruments, we talked about starting our own software company. And so we thought we’ll do this.
to begin with and we’ll see if we can’t turn a business into it and it’ll be sort of practice for us. That’s kind of what we thought. It was a niche industry. We figured we’d just sell some licenses and start to build sort of an annuity and get the hang of what it was to run and maintain a software company. And despite everything, every effort on our part, we actually did grow it into 800 customers that ran in 22 countries and we sold it in 2000.
to a publicly traded firm. And I was VP of products for them for the next several years until I left and started to look for my next thing to do. And I thought I knew what made me successful, made us successful and grew the company. And I really didn’t have any idea until I started Techies. Techies is my current company and I started founded that 17 years ago. We do software development.
We try to stay on the front edge of technology, but more importantly than that, we try to continually build and improve on our exceptionalism as a team in terms of how we run projects, how we’re transparent in terms of how people work together, how we, the level of tracking, how we build automation into our systems so that everybody can follow all the procedures and protocols.
and be really disciplined without having to constantly be really disciplined. So we hire people that are really smart and they’re critical thinkers and they question everything and they don’t just take tasks and deliver them, but they look to see, is that the right way to do it? We wanna do it better, but they do that without it being the wild west, tracking their time, documenting things in a very specific way. So.
Every project is richly documented. And I’m only saying this because we look at what’s going on now and it’s almost like the wild west again with AI. Because AI has been around a while, but large language models being consumable by everybody is really new and it is evolving so incredibly fast. So I think of it as
you know, most of us were probably, you know, mediocre surfers in three and four foot waves. And here comes a rogue wave that’s a hundred feet tall and everybody’s just staring at the wave. And we’re thinking, no, can’t stare at that wave. You have to paddle out to it and get into the curl and get on the very tip of your board and as far out on that tip as you can. So you don’t get sucked so that you’re ahead of it instead of washed away with it. So everybody in my company thinks of us standing on the tip of the board. Yeah.
(10:53) Lessons from Exiting a Successful Company
So I’ll rewind real quick. They, so you successfully exited one company already, obviously. And, correct me I’m wrong, but I would assume if you caught the eye of a publicly traded company, you probably grew that business to a pretty decent sized company. Walk us through what does that look like when you, when you kind of exited, what were you guys doing in revenue? What did you have for a number of employees and all that? Well, you know, honestly,
We had thought that when we started the company, thought we were both employees at Texas Instruments at the time. We thought that we would generate a few thousand dollars a month in revenue and that was going to be success for us because we were still employed. We eventually ended up having to quit our jobs to work at our own company because it grew beyond us, right? Our ability to do it as a part-time thing.
planning that or really expecting it. But we did drive it to that once we realized that we did have a niche and we did have product market fit. And that we realized that the industry needed a lot more than what we were already offering them. And so just the natural kind of growth path. It was also very early, right? When you think of today, it was very early in the software industry. was the first Windows 3.1 when Windows 3.1 was brand new.
And so Windows was finally usable. That was the first version of Windows that people actually, it started to take off. And so we made a Windows product that eventually ended up being client server-based product and it just kept growing and we kept building. So we weren’t that big when we sold. We were in a very tight niche. The company that purchased us was consolidating all of these other software companies in the
soft in the snack food distribution and beverage distribution industry. So warehousing and logistics, route distribution, scheduling, all that stuff. That was what they were doing. so we all knew each other in the industry. And so when we got acquired, we were doing several million dollars in annual revenue with our business. had, we were not that big. We had about 20 employees, I think at the time when we sold it, which
was pretty crazy when we thought we were just gonna do some part-time thing early on and it ended up growing into that. I suppose that’s also the nice part about a software company is you don’t necessarily need a lot of bodies if you get it dialed in, right? Efficiency is key. Right, exactly. Yeah, and so they made us a really good offer in options, in cash and a lot of options. And so we…
decided, you know, it makes sense, let’s do this and we can then go on and do our next thing afterwards. You know, a lot of, and to me, that’s like the perfect business in terms of what you should be trying to shoot for if you want to start something. A lot of people think it’s got to be the unicorn. They’ve got to get millions in VC funding and it is a, a recipe for disaster. And because one,
there’ll be one in a thousand that actually is able to do that and turn it into a unicorn. But the other 999 are all going to just be miserable, fail, lose control of their companies, you know, or go bankrupt and, you know, waste five years, six, seven years of their lives. And believe me, I’ve seen it happen over 80 times in with techies with the startups that we’ve worked with. And we’re not, we don’t work exclusively as startups, but we’ve worked with a lot of startups and that’s, and they all fail.
the same reason. have this big dream, this big vision. They put on the black coat and they’re preaching the vision. And I tried, when I work with startups, I learned that that’s not how you make a successful company. So I try to rip the coat off them and say, stop believing in your product and start believing in the problem and get in front of customers and the product will just happen naturally.
If you just focus on the problem, if you love the problem, you just, and you want to mitigate the problem and you like to be in front of your potential customers, then you’re going to find a path to success. You can’t help but find a path to succeed. But so few founders do that. You you need to put on the white coat and become a clinician and test everything and don’t believe anything. those, the guys that do that naturally are just, they naturally, they build their business.
And they build it to two, three million after a couple of years. And then another couple of years, it’s five to 10 million, you know, and it’s not the hockey stick. It’s not the unicorn, but now they got an asset that’s worth a lot of money. And they’re generating a lot of income from it. And they’re also enjoying themselves, right? And they have, if they’re good at building teams, which we try to help them do that, then they have teams that are loyal, that love what they’re doing, that believe that they are on a mission to help
somebody in some respect in terms of whether it’s healthcare, law enforcement or financial or real estate, they’re doing something that makes somebody’s life easier and brings value. I really like what you said about stop believing in the product and start believing in the problem. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but as I’m thinking out loud, I would.
theorize, and perhaps you could confirm or deny this, but I would theorize that when someone so, you know, is attached to the product itself, they can put blinders on. Whereas if you’re attached to solving the problem, that’s where innovation comes into place. Because whatever the product is, when you first launch it, isn’t going to be what the product is a year from now, a decade from now. And if you’re doing a good job, you know, unpacking the problem behind the problem that
(16:26) The Importance of Problem-Solving in Business
births innovation of that product as opposed to thinking that you made it. Is that fair? That’s exactly right. And the problem may not be the same problem in a year too. So there’s, I don’t remember who coined this phrase, but successful founders are willing and happy to eat their children. I know it’s a, it’s kind of a gross thought, right? But it’s how, but.
The problem and the reason it’s phrased that way is because when you’ve come up with the product idea and you start to build it, you fall in love with it. And it’s, and it is really difficult to then let go of it. And, and the most successful founders don’t do that. They don’t fall in love with the product, but they are just looking at the market. They look at the problem. They’re constantly talking to customers and assessing their and pulling all the nuances out from and understanding how
these customers niche, right? Because they may, these niches sometimes blend together, but you really need to understand how one niche has a problem at a root level that’s specific to them. And so I spent a lot of time with founders on this whole thing of root problems and niches and, you know, because of- couldn’t agree more, Dave. mean, I don’t think it’s even industry agnostic or I think it is industry agnostic, right?
I’ve seen in my business, see unfortunately, you know, the financial planning wealth management side, I’ve tried telling advisors, you know, especially young advisors that are getting into this business, like stop trying to sell yourself and start solving problems for clients. That’s it. If you just do that, business will find you. Like it’s crazy. It is, that’s right. It is right. It will find you.
Because people, you recognize, when they hear that you understand their problem, they lean forward, right? Because they put their arm around your shoulders. Thank God somebody understands. You know, mean, metaphor. Even in David and I’s industry, right? It’s like you work with business owners. Who do entrepreneurs typically tend to have in their circles? Other business owners who have the exact same problems. So when they’re talking about, hey, you know, David Land had helped me solve this, you know, and then it’s like, hey, would you mind?
making the introduction, right? So it just happens, especially like you said, you get into a niche industry like you were in, everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows who’s solving problems, who’s trying to sell product. It’s the same thing in our world, right? Yeah, it’s exactly right. And when I say founder, I don’t mean a nascent startup founder necessarily. This might be an existing business that’s launching a new product. Somebody in the business had this great idea.
for product or maybe they’re taking something that has been, I’ll give you an example of a current client that actually it’s not quite a client yet but it’s going to be a client very soon. And they’re a really big coaching organization for e-commerce companies. And they work with lots of really big brands and they have, I think three over 3000 customers and they have algorithms for how to
attribute sales and basically to optimize sales and optimize customers coming back and buying more of the brand and building those brands through e-commerce metrics, really metrics driven. So they have 3000 very sophisticated spreadsheets that are unique in terms of their algorithms, right? So they wanna turn this, they wanna turn this into…
software so that they can manage it and also make it a SaaS product. So now they’re a founder, but they’re not a nascent founder because they have a huge business, know, tens of millions or tens of millions of dollars, maybe a month. I’m not sure what their revenue is yet. Bob know that soon, but it’s huge. They’re at large, their budgets are really big and they are launching something for the first time in terms of software. And it comes out of
this natural. So this is one of the things when I found her comes to me and they say, we work in this industry and we struggle with this problem in our industry. And we’re not different than most of the people that do what we do in our industry who also struggle with the exact same problem that we’re struggling with. And we know that because we talk to them all the time through conferences or through networking meetings or through
whatever the communities are. So we have reached to this community. We know they struggle. I can articulate to you what it’s costing me because of this problem, because I have a cellular understanding of it and I’m faced with it every single day. And I can tell you how much that problem bothers me from a perception perspective, because I feel like I’m going to lose.
the ability to be competitive or to grow my business, or it creates a huge bottleneck. losing people because this problem causes other people to be really unhappy. And I’m afraid I’m going to lose them to competitors, right? That is the, like, that somebody says that to me, their chance of being successful just went up by like 90 % because they’re going to solve this. They know how to talk about the problem. know what the cost is. They know how to reach their market and they know who the market is.
right from the very beginning. That’s not most founders, but you see a lot of really successful products that come out of things like that. As a side note, if you, not if, excuse me, when you land those folks as a client, Google neon flux Miami.
(21:46) Niche Focus and Cross-Domain Knowledge in Software Development
Maybe a good person for them to collaborate with we could talk more about that offline But just to put that on your radar Okay so with your software development company, do you focus on a particular niche or is it?
Kind of niche agnostic, like where do you, what type of companies do you hang out with outside of the startups? Because you made mention that you’re not just working with startups, you more seasoned companies as well. So, thinking about them, what industries? That was a good example. The one I just mentioned was a really good example, right? That was law enforcement. So, I mentioned a few of these areas before. We’ve worked in lots and lots of business domains. And one of the big advantages of having worked in all these, in so many business domains is we bring all that business domain knowledge to every new project, right? Even if it’s in a new domain, but there’s things that, that cross all business domains, right? And so, but our, but you, can take advantage of things that you learned in one domain and apply that to something completely different. So we end up helping, working with the client to
brainstorm different ways of approaching problems that they would not have naturally thought of because they don’t have all this other business domain experience. So like one of our clients right now is a healthcare company. They do healthcare software and they are focusing now on AI implementation. So the idea is that there are vulnerable populations in healthcare, right? Especially
low-income Medicaid, Medicare patients that are, and the problem with state, for states is that these, and the problem with hospitals is that it’s very hard for them, it’s very expensive for them to engage with these patients because they’re not acutely focused on their healthcare. They’re usually letting it go if they’re low-income, but
there’s a certain amount of responsibility that healthcare systems have to take care of these patients if they’re getting any kind of government funding for Medicaid and Medicare. So they might get prescriptions and not fill them. They may fill the prescription, but not take the medication. They may need to check in with their physician every so often and they don’t do things like this. And they may have problems that are acute that can be tracked based on wearable devices, like even a watch.
that if somebody knew something was going on, they could reach out and intervene before this turns into a big, incredibly costly thing for the healthcare system and incredibly painful for that patient and head it off. So their product is all AI driven, both in terms of triage based on wearable devices, primarily from watches, because most everybody has a watch and they’re even
(24:37) AI in Healthcare: Transforming Patient Engagement
working this out so that Medicaid in certain state that they have a contract is going to be providing watches to their Medicaid patients. Like Fitbit, that sort of thing. that when somebody has, so that they can track based on patterns that the Fitbit is tracking when there’s a potential situation developing and then an AI voice nurse calls that patient, but you wouldn’t.
It sounds just like a real person. And when you can interrupt her and she responds, sorry, what was it you were saying? And then you’re having a natural conversation with her and she is assessing whether this is something that needs to be promoted to an actual clinician or whether she needs to help you schedule an appointment or whether she needs to recall in your prescription, which is lapsed that you never filled. And she can call you then back because you haven’t been taking a prescription if it’s okay with you.
I’m gonna give you a call every morning just to remind you to take your prescription. Is that okay? And then- AI healthcare, here it comes. Yeah, and if the patient’s struggling and it says, you know, I’m just really sad because I didn’t do it because I lost my daughter. And then she goes, I’m so sorry. My condolences to you. I just started having a natural kind of conversation with the person, right? So I mean, the value here is just huge.
to the state because this reduces, this gets them in patients engaged. So it reduces a huge amount of costs. And it shows that that state is, from a political perspective, it shows how much the state cares about their population. But from a practical perspective, it’s both cost and health of the population. And these are people that really need a lot of help.
I always thought it was just natural selection for people that didn’t want to take their medications after they were prescribed or get ahead of their healthcare, but we’ll keep them string them on. You are correct. is natural selection. It’s just that unfortunately part of that natural selection is incredibly costly to taxpayers. So this helps to mitigate that, right? What are some other, I mean, I’m thinking,
Have you worked with any transportation logistics companies and if so, could you speak to what you help them with to help improve their business efficiencies or is there a different industry that may be better if you haven’t been with one of those? Well, my first company was logistics in the sense of scheduling, delivery and things like that, right? But that was a long time ago and things have changed.
(27:14) Innovative Solutions for Urban Infrastructure
dramatically since then. We’ve done some small projects, nothing that’s really worth a podcast episode about, but. It would be the most interesting or impactful engagement that you had with the company. Actually, but I can talk about one that we are potentially getting engaged with and it’s in Asia. this is a, and this would be for cities and states.
in India in particular, where they have all these potholes. And so they have drones that they’re flying over the roads to identify where potholes exist. And not only where, but the size of the pothole and assess the amount of asphalt that’s going to take to fill the pothole and then do a whole logistics, AI model logistics on all these hundreds of thousands of millions of potholes in any particular given area.
and then logistically, you know, pull that together in a logistic scheduling system for the crews that go and fix them based on priorities and location and efficiency. So that is a really, really interesting project. You can imagine how valuable something like that is, right? So David, what will you actually do or what are they engaging you and your team for on something like that? For the,
for the backend. out of the software. The build out of the whole backend, right. So they’ve been doing R &D on the recognition of the potholes that they’ve had for a while. They just recently did R &D and were able to make it work for in terms of the size and depth of the pothole, because it’s hard, you’re flying over it and you have different cloud conditions. so you can’t tell the shot if it’s just the surface thing or if it goes deeper or if it’s covered with water.
But now they’ve got some technology. This was hardware technology that they can, even if it’s covered with water, they can see the depth of the pothole. Can’t get too close in the slum. Somebody will reach up and snag that drone and pawn it for a couple of rooms. Okay. That pothole is really big, right? Cause there’s people living in it. So, and then it would be for building out the entire platform on the backend for logistics for
capturing all this information and then logistics and scheduling and everything else. That’s what we would be doing, right? You know, it’s fun to talk about things like that because these are basically, this is logistics workflows, right? But much simpler workflows. One of the most interesting thing when you’re dealing with workflows and really brilliant CEOs understood this early on like Michael Dell. I like to use his name because it was
Ford’s article I read 20 years ago about how he built this company that’s never left me. And basically he was asked by the interviewer, what’s your secret to success? And he says, I just focus on what’s the current bottleneck. And then I put through my resources at fixing that bottleneck so it opens up. Because as soon as I opened up now, everything’s flowing through the bottleneck and then comes crashing into the next bottleneck, which we didn’t know was a bottleneck.

(30:15) Bottlenecks and Workflow Optimization
And that’s all I do is I just focus on, I just go bottleneck to bottleneck and look for anything that’s slowing down the ability for us to grow and for things to move through the system faster. So, but that’s a rare person that understands how important that is. And what I mean, and there’s so many things we can do in big companies and small companies as individuals that are running things that we just get comfortable with if
where have a kind of an administrative operational kind of mindset. So the best, I always say the best programmers are the ones that are really brilliant and lazy. Because if they do something more than, if they have to do it twice, they know they should have figured out how to abstract that into something smarter. Because they don’t want to have to do the same thing. Somebody who’s really administration operational doesn’t mind doing the same thing over and over and over again, because there’s a comfort factor in it, right?
So a guy that I know who’s a really successful entrepreneur, he’s been running this huge business network for the last 11 and a half, 12 years. And he has a radio station that’s grown out of that. And he has 200,000 listeners and big podcast network. And he’s very successful, but he has that operational kind of administrative mindset. He figures out playbooks and patterns, and then he just does them, like a machine.
So, I had this idea for his business networking, for his business network, where he could make it much more consumable to the people in his network to be able to make connections. So, I came up with this app idea, and I went to him, his name’s Dave, by the way. Dave, I already like him. Right? Right, I said, about this app idea? I mean, this
your members would just love this. He’s got 1,500 or 1,600 members now. But a lot of his members are like billionaires and who’s who in, because of his radio show, it’s really pretty impressive. But he has this, I said, know, but the problem is in the networking effects of his group, people have trouble consuming these connections and making it easy to connect with other people. And I had this idea.
He says, know, and every Tuesday morning he runs a networking meeting and there’s 70 people there typically, cause he maxes it out at 70, even though he’s got 1500 members, the 70 show up every Tuesday of which 30 are usually guests. 30 are people that come in once in a while. And then the other 30 people that go every single week and everybody speaks for a minute.
talks about what they do and he announces everybody. He announces them like they’re the most important person in their industry. But so I said to him, look at what this would do for your members on your Tuesday morning meetings. And he said, forget it, David. He says, no way I’m gonna do anything that’s going to add any additional work to my Mondays. And I said, but don’t you think this wouldn’t add any extra work and he wouldn’t even hear me. I said, okay, forget about this. What, tell me about your Mondays.
And so he spends all day Monday. I mean, he could hire people to do this, but he just is like an administrative machine type of person. he just loves his whole business and all the connections with people and everything else, which is why he’s so successful getting all these people on his radio show every single week. And he said, it takes me seven to eight hours every Monday to get ready for my Tuesday meeting. We’ve got, because people buy tickets to it.
Some of them are guests that are invited by other people. Some of them are regulars that bought a whole year’s worth of Tuesday meetings, things like that. And he has to put them in a certain order so that like two people that are real estate investors don’t speak one right after the other. And then he’s got all of the other little business things that are sprinkled in throughout the meeting. And it’s really incredibly professionally orchestrated every single week.
but it takes them all day to prepare for this and pull in all the descriptions from all the different people and everything lives in different places. And I said, why don’t we automate this? This was like four years ago before AI started to like really take off. And he said, automate this, you can’t automate it. It’s just so specific to what I do. And I said, we can automate all this. And this is, don’t have to do anything sophisticated. We’ll just, you do it through Google Sheets and we’ll write some app scripts that integrate with your ticketing system and
Well, he said, really, you can do that. And anyway, tells me, gives me the requirements. This is how I run, how I do, this is what I do on Monday. So I said, okay, fine. I took this on as a hobby project because he’s a friend of mine. I like to write code once in a while. I feel it’s indulgent because everybody on my team is much better at it than me at this point, but it’s fun to do. And so every once in a while I pick a little project and I work on it. So.
when I had a little extra time, would work on this for two or three weeks. And I came back to him and I said, okay, David, let me show you how it works. He goes, that’s not gonna support my business. Cause it doesn’t do this, this and this. And I said, okay. Well, I didn’t know about this, this and this, now I do. So let me go back and give me a couple of weeks. When I get some time, I’ll do this, this and this, and then we’ll come back and we’ll y’all have it. And so I did. I, it’s just.
Well, now it does that, but it’s not handling these circumstances, these cases. And I said, okay, well, you didn’t tell me about those cases, but now I’ve got, you know, and this went on. there anything else that you haven’t told me before? he didn’t know what he didn’t know until he tried then tell, I would get it to a certain point and then it would go, I didn’t write because it was like a cellular level understanding of the process for him, but it wasn’t something he could just write out all the details because
(35:54) Automating Business Processess for Efficiency
He couldn’t even think about everything that comes up. when those things come up, they take special cases and rules around what you do with it. Anyway, it took a few months of doing this every two or three weeks. I feel like you’re talking about me, by the way, David. this is everybody. This is me to a T. OK, yeah. This is, I mean, but he did know everything he needed to do, but he just didn’t know what it was until it was in front of him, right?
We finally got it after three months and then we ran it in parallel with his process, which got the same results of what he does. And then the following week he does it and he calls me, says, David, this is amazing. I got Monday done in 15 minutes. was every single week, he spent almost eight hours on this. And now he did it in 15 minutes and he couldn’t, and he’s still, we were just talking three or four weeks ago, cause I’m starting a podcast. He’s really big in podcasting.
And so I was asking what he thought about this and asking for his advice. And he said, you know, I’m kind of hesitant to tell. And he started saying, you know, I still use that program every single Monday. He says, it works like clockwork. And anyway, it’s very fun to hear that, right? I mean, it’s just a little thing sort of, it’s a big thing for him. And then he says, you know, I’m hesitant to tell you this, but.
I’ll tell you, I’ve got seven other members in our group that do podcasting and share their podcasts every week with me. And then I push it through my network, which is this big distribution network that he has. And I said, hesitated to tell me? He says, well, it’s just a lot of work to do. And he starts telling me all these steps and things he does. And he says, I’ve even thought about maybe not doing anymore. So time consuming. said, David, this sounds really familiar.
Why don’t we automate this? says, can you automate this? It was literally the same conversation again. So in January, we’re getting together and I’m going to do the same thing for this, but now I’m going to use AI to develop this. and I’ll be able to do it in hours compared to weeks and months. whenever you’re done with Dave, if you’re looking for a friend and a next project, will fly your ass for a week.
I’ll pay for everything. just sit in my office for a week with me and say, Hey, dipshit, let’s automate XYZ. You lost them. You got to understand you lost him when you just said to someone who lives in beautiful San Diego that you fly them to Nebraska in December. We want to wait till it warms up a little bit, David. But yeah, after that, you let me know.
That’s funny. All right. That’s pretty funny. Well, what’s interesting, what I like it kind of you brought us back to one of the first things you said towards the front end of the podcast where it seems like in your role, you’re not running around parading a solution to people. You’re running around identifying problems. Yeah, that’s actually a solution. So you just came full circle.
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. had never actually put those two things together, but that’s exactly right. just, heard it. That’s what you are. You’re a problem solver. I’m a problem whisperer. It’s, you know, it’s like, I hear when somebody starts talking about something, it sounds like this sounds like a problem that they’re struggling with. mean, in all, all genuine sincerity, like David, I’m telling you, like it’s, it’s rough for me, like to sit here because I know there’s guys like you out there.
And I know I have a problem, right? I’m fortunate to be successful to do, yeah, what I’ve been able to do. But I’m like, if I could just grab somebody like this for, like I said, a week or two, they would come in and just be able to take so much off the plate. like, I’m envious of guys like you that know how to do this.
I had to my assistant come in today just to show me how to basically tag emails to make sure an email gets into the Salesforce contact. People like David and David himself are a check away. Yeah. I’m envy you don’t have. I’m really not that hard to get my attention. Well, once this end of the year tax season rolls through, I might have to, I might have to bend your ear a little bit on that.
yeah, I honestly, I really enjoy doing it too. So and you guys are so gracious to, you know, let me on your podcast, I’m happy to spend some time with you and just to understand what you’re struggling with. You need to set aside a week for just that piece of it. Careful, careful what you wish for. But one of the one of the questions that we ask all of our guests is a book that’s had an impact on them.
And this is certainly not like a verbal book report or anything like that, but like, why, why’d you pick it? and I actually haven’t come across this before. so I’m curious to know why you picked it. It’s called the mom test. yeah. Okay. You’re like, the best business book I’ve read, at least in this category of if you’re starting a software company or starting or creating a new
(41:01) The Importance of Honest Feedback in Business
product and existing company. The problem we have, right? This is all belief versus focus on the problem instead of the solution, right? We like, let’s say you have this idea for business and you go to your mother and this is assuming that you have a good relationship with your mother, right? But you go to your mother and you ask her what she thinks about this idea, right? I want to start this pizza delivery software on demand thing.
And she goes, that’s such a great idea. And you’re so smart. I know you’ll be successful. Right. And so you’re going, you’re getting all this pumped up support because you’re getting, you’re hearing what you want to hear. so the question is, how do you ask questions in such a way that you actually get truth and value about the thing that you want to do even from your mother. And that’s the basis of his whole approach is as a guy who’s exited several companies really successfully.
And he talks about a lot of the same things I do just in a smarter way. And he has systems for how to implement at anywhere along the journey, how you validate ideas with your customer with a potential prospect without ever talking about your product or any feature of your product and get real validation and real understanding of what they, and it’s really focusing on their problem.
How have they been able to solve it in the past? How have they solved it? Talk about, you know, what you’re doing today. Why don’t you use tools to solve it? Are there any available? Have you, how have you looked for them? Right. Never talking about what you’re doing or where your product anyway, it’s so well done. That’s like a book for business owner. Yeah, that’s the best book. Yeah. I think it is no matter where you are in your stage, even if you’d launch your business and you’re scaling and you’re wondering about
how to sell, right? It’s same thing. It’s like, how do you create a sales situation where the person feels like you are helping them and you understand what they’re struggling with. So instead of being a sales person, they basically switch into a consultative relationship with somebody very, very fast, which that’s something that has that has come a little more naturally to me than it has to, than it seems to with a lot of people.
is because I don’t mind telling somebody that’s a bad idea. And as soon as I tell them that, and that’s not what they wanted to hear, then I’ll find a bridge to say, but here’s another way you might want to look at it and something you could do that might work from my opinion. All of a sudden they don’t look at me like, you know, I’m trying to get anything from them anymore. They look at me like I’m somebody that might be able to help them. And I- Well, the truth in that. Yeah. And I don’t do it intentionally. It’s just how I normally talk about things with people.
because I focus on the problems. A friend of mine, Justin Goodbread wrote a book called Your Baby’s Ugly. And he takes the approach of telling people that your business is actually broken. I don’t care how good you think it looks and here’s what you can do to fix it. So I just thought that that tied in well to that book recommendation. That is interesting. I didn’t know anybody else. I just figured this out one day. realized, you know, I seem…
I seem to get people all of a sudden leaning forward and asking me for help when I tell them something they did not want to hear. Well, yeah, because they know you’re not in the business of kissing their ass, you’re in the business of being honest with them. I think people don’t always like what I have to say, but I think generally they know that if I’m saying it, I mean it. And right, wrong or indifferent, sometimes that’s a bad thing, right? I could probably sugarcoat things from time to time, but on the same thing, I just don’t have time for bullshit, right? It’s like, let’s go.
Yeah, I even say to my customers, look, I’m not gonna ever ask you to trust me because that’s just code for I’m not trustworthy. So, I expect that you’ll trust me after we’ve been working together for a while because of how I’m gonna work, but you’ll decide when that’s the case. Yep, I love that. Yeah. Well, David, I feel like, go ahead. And as a matter of fact, it kind of leans into some of our favorite projects are when we take
over a project from somebody who’s been struggling with some other development team for a period of time. Because, you know, we’re very honest. If the system that they want us to take over is really badly done, I mean, really badly done, then we’ll just tell them, we can’t work on this, we have to rebuild it. So if you want to work with us, we’ll rebuild it, but we’re not going to try to maintain this and fix it. Because I’m not, I am,
not going to do that to my team. Ask them to work on something that they hate because it’s so bad, right? And not give them the ability to do what they know they need to do with it. If it’s not that bad, but maybe the team was just really bad at estimates and they weren’t disciplined and they’re not transparent and all the things that we talk about when you’re an exceptional team, are the things that you just do naturally. Then we’ll take it over and we’ll continue to work on whatever it is they have.
We do assess it and then figure out where it does need to be improved, make improvements. But why I like those projects is because those people recognize the difference between who they were working with and us very quickly. And they become our biggest fans and they start to really kind of treasure the relationship with us because they know how much value we’re bringing. So that’s why I say those are my favorite projects. I’m gonna put myself out there.
so you can either publicly reject me or publicly accept. But I feel like you have a lot of knowledge to offer in general, but that last bit that you just shared, I think we may have to have you on for a part two on the things that you do inside your business, not just how you help the folks that you work with, but inside your business, because you hit on things such as you’re protecting your team’s time and energy and happiness, your…
(46:44) Building a Positive Team Culture
making sure that you’re not taking on projects that aren’t in your zone of genius that you want to hang out in. Like those business principles in and of itself, I’m willing to bet that that’s just scratching the surface as to the experience that you have. So I think we’re gonna have to have you on for a part two at some point. I’d love to, yeah, I would love, and I love to talk about those sorts of things. Perfect. Yeah, building the team culture and that sort of thing, Love it. Let’s do it again. Yeah, this was great.
For folks who are listening, if they have some questions for you, they just want to simply follow along with your journey. What’s the best way for them to get in touch and where can they find you? First, shameless plug for my podcast that’s coming out soon. Scaling Smarter is going to be the name of the podcast. And I’ll give you guys a link to it so you can publish it with the podcast if you do that sort of thing.
Techies.com is the website, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z. You can reach me at David at Techies.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, David Hirschfeld. H-I-R-S-E-H-F-E-L-D. I’m pretty searchable on LinkedIn. So please reach out and if you’re…
interested in looking at doing a project, whether it’s a startup or something inside your organization, we’ll do the assessment of the requirements, we’ll produce functional spec document, and then we provide you an extremely detailed estimate. It’s a methodology that we use that goes in a lot deeper in the estimates than most people will do when they’re estimating a project in advance. And that’s all on our dime.
and you can then use us to develop it or take that to somebody else. We just look at that as sort of as a way of building relationships to do that for anybody. Awesome. Well, David, we appreciate you and for everyone tuning in, we appreciate your time and attention. And David, I think this is the start of a good relationship between us three. So looking forward to continuing to build it. Well, I appreciate that. And it’s definitely a good start for me.
Thank you guys for having me on, really gracious and really fun. Absolutely, David. you. bye. Bye.

David Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.
He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.
Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.
You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.
For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at [email protected].
Lexicon by Interesting Engineering Podcast — Beyond the Pitch Deck: How Launch 1st Method Reduces… was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.