Marketer of the Day Podcast: Craft the Perfect Launch Strategy for Software Development and SaaS with David Hirschfeld
The startup world has stories of brilliant ideas that never took off. But what if there were a way to dramatically increase your chances of success? David Hirschfeld, a seasoned software veteran with over 30 years of experience, has cracked the code. He’s discovered a common thread that separates the winners from the losers, and it’s all about flipping the traditional startup script on its head.
Key insights:
- Launch First Approach: Startups should prioritize market validation through sales and marketing before product development to avoid wasted resources.
- Product-Market Fit: Ensuring demand for a product early on is crucial for success, and pre-launch sales are a strong indicator of this.
- Data Over Positive Thinking: Successful entrepreneurs focus on data-driven decision-making rather than relying on optimistic self-belief.
- Testing Assumptions: Business ideas should be tested systematically, akin to a clinical trial, to avoid blind adherence to unproven assumptions.
- Feedback Loops: Obtaining honest, actionable feedback from potential customers is essential to refining the product and approach.
[0:07–0:19] Robert: Hey, welcome back to the podcast. David Hirschfeld is here from Tekyz. That’s T-E-K-Y-Z dot com. And David has seen some things. He’s seen some things happen in the startup world, in the software world.
[0:19–0:44] Robert: And he is going to share with us that common trait that’s shared by companies that are successful and it’s missing from the companies that have failed. He has something called the launch first method, but he also just has some guidance in general for software companies, fast companies, startups who want to have a greater chance of success to navigate all the strategic steps and moves that need to be taken.
[0:44–0:45] Robert: So, David, glad to be speaking with you.
[0:46–1:05] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, thank you, Robert, for having me on the show. And I love talking about startups, even though sometimes it’s a very sad story. But there’s hope. and that’s if you just sort of flip your perspective a little bit, then all of a sudden you can turn it into something that really makes sense and you can build a business around it.
[1:06–1:23] Robert: And that’s exciting, right? I mean, it is sad when there’s always a risk of failure, but if you can pivot, if you can adjust, if you can do things in the right way, that’s where you want to be at. And so what is your, I mean, as far as what you’ve learned and what you’re passionate about talking about, what’s currently on your mind?
[1:23–1:44] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So I’ve worked, I started Tekyz 17 years ago, and I’ve been in the software world for over 30 years. And I had my own startup in the logistics route distribution inventory management and grew that to 800 customers in 22 countries and ended up selling it to a publicly traded firm.
[1:44–1:55] David Hirschfeld: So I have that experience of having a successful exit. I understand what that whole life cycle is like. That was an eight-year journey for me and a partner.
[1:56–2:24] David Hirschfeld: And we built up a company, we sold it, and then what I realized is what I thought made it successful were not the things that made it successful. And it took me working with lots of other startups and watching them fail in the manner of Tekyz being the tech team and the software development company for these startups that made me start to realize what the common patterns are between these companies that fail versus the very few that are successful.
[2:24–2:41] David Hirschfeld: And it’s almost always the same thing. It’s that they lack product market fit. They’re building something they believe the market wants and they believe customers will buy, and then they invest hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars into this product over several years, and nobody’s buying it.
[2:42–2:53] David Hirschfeld: They either don’t know how to speak to the market, message their product in a way that people will go, ah, that’s what I need, that solves my problem, or they just don’t have product made.
[2:53–3:11] David Hirschfeld: It’s the wrong product for the market they’re trying to sell to. And the reason they don’t have product market fit and they don’t realize it until they’ve spent all this money and made this huge personal investment is because they wait way too long to try to sell their product.
[3:11–3:31] David Hirschfeld: because the only way you know you’ve got a product market fit is somebody’s writing you a check for your product or paying a monthly subscription or the fact that they download it for trials, unless you’re some massive social network, then that doesn’t mean anything related to product market fit because they may not pay for it once you decide you’re going to turn on the pricing engine.
[3:32–3:45] David Hirschfeld: So what we did was we came up with this methodology called Launch First. The idea is launch the business and launch your marketing and sales engine before you build the product, right?
[3:45–4:03] David Hirschfeld: It makes no sense, right? It sounds like it’s backwards. How do you do that? But actually, you can do that. You just need some kind of a prototype that looks like the product that you’re intending to build, and it behaves like the product you’re intending to build so that when you show somebody, they get the vision.
[4:03–4:14] David Hirschfeld: It’s not just design mock-ups that you can click through, but it’s more than that. It’s not an MVP, which is not because MVPs are too small in terms of your vision and functionality for people to buy into it.
[4:15–4:30] David Hirschfeld: It’s the vision, but it’s not real software, but it looks like it’s real software. Or in the case of like cars, Elon Musk did this with the Roadster when he came up with a prototype Roadster that didn’t go anywhere.
[4:30–4:55] David Hirschfeld: It couldn’t drive, but it looked like a real Roadster, and it was going to be this fabulous electric car. And he pre-sold lots of them. And so there was no question he had a product market fit, and he knew how to position it in front of developers, and he used that money to both fund the development of his cars and also prove to investors that he has traction and that people want this, and so he could raise money.
[4:56–5:11] David Hirschfeld: So what we do is we create that prototype. We go out. We go through this very exhaustive niche analysis process to find that, or who’s that one early adopter niche, and what’s the top maybe two or three problems that you are going to be solving for them with your product.
[5:13–5:40] David Hirschfeld: And we don’t want two niches. We want to know all the niches, but we need to figure out which of all those niches is the one that’s going to make you successful in the very early days. Then we build a marketing stack and build the messaging and go out to those individuals and do individual demos to them or we do webinars, whatever the right way to reach that particular target audience.
[5:40–6:10] David Hirschfeld: And if the value that you’re offering is high enough, it has to be pretty high value because you don’t have your product yet, then it’s — and that might be a lifetime license if they pay for 18 months of the subscription fee in advance or in the case of, like, clinical trial software, which we’ve done prelaunch sales for really expensive medical clinical trial software for $250,000 a pop for a prelaunch purchase.
[6:10–6:43] David Hirschfeld: There it was free implementation because usually the implementation cost for setting up clinical trial software is more than the cost of the software. Or whatever that high-value offer you’re making, if the value is high enough and the cost to them because of the problem you’re solving is big enough and their perception of that problem is significant enough that they really feel they need it, they need that problem solved, they will buy and they’ll buy in enough numbers before you even have a product to prove that you’ve got product market fit.
[6:43–6:54] David Hirschfeld: And we set that line at 3 to 1 ratio. 3 to 1 in terms of lifetime value of a customer over your cost of acquisition to acquire that customer.
[6:56–7:07] David Hirschfeld: And you’ve sold enough of these so you know it wasn’t a fluke one or two sales. And then we keep selling. Why not? Now we’ve got a marketing and sales engine running.
[7:08–7:21] David Hirschfeld: That’s why we call it launch first. You’ve launched your business before you actually built the product. And we start the development, tell people that the first version won’t have all these features. It’ll be there in two or three months or four months, depending on what that first version needs to look like.
[7:23–7:40] David Hirschfeld: And you just use that money to fund development And now if you want to raise money you have a very different position when you talking to investors because you showing revenue and traction and you don even have a product yet So this is what Launch First is about Very nice And I like a lot of what in
[7:40–7:50] Robert: here because you’re giving me flashbacks to all these like points in life when like I made a software like that once or twice. I sent in like the book proposal before the book was ready.
[7:51–8:04] Robert: There’s all these times when you sort of, it seems a little like risky and out of order, but then the way you laid it out, like it makes a lot of sense because it seems like the wrong, like the kind of counterintuitively wrong way of going about it, right?
[8:04–8:20] Robert: People, they make the product, they make the features, and then they go and try to figure out the people later. They try to figure out the marketing later, and then the product’s way over here and the person’s way over there. And so I like your way of doing this because you start the sales first, you talk to people first, You beat up the idea first.
[8:20–8:32] Robert: You figure out marketing messaging and you figure out the people. And like what stuck with me a lot when you said there was if your startup is failing, either your product doesn’t properly speak to the people or it’s the wrong product.
[8:32–8:44] Robert: And it’s like how will you figure any of that stuff out unless you put it out there and see what the real results are. And so this is an exciting system you figured out here. And so you’ve been at this for decades, had all these adventures.
[8:44–8:49] Robert: What do you feel like talking about as far as a fun case study success story?
[8:49–9:02] David Hirschfeld: Let me see. There are a bunch. But I can talk about when we first started Launch First because we tested this with four different products, four different clients over a couple years.
[9:03–9:17] David Hirschfeld: One of them was a real estate investment portfolio management system platform that we had designed, but we hadn’t started developing yet. And we did prelaunch sales to real estate investors in this particular ecosystem.
[9:17–9:28] David Hirschfeld: And we sold in six first 60 days. The client sold 23 licenses for generated 70,000 in sales. And that was the kickoff for the development of this product.
[9:29–9:40] David Hirschfeld: Another one was in aerospace parts distributors. This was software that was going to manage the. What’s it?
[9:40–9:59] David Hirschfeld: the parentage of products. So in aerospace, every single part has to have a certificate. And if that part’s an assembly of other parts, then you have to have all the certificates for all the parts that go into it and its own certificate and on and on and on until you have the 747 or a jumbo jet of some kind, right?
[9:59–10:11] David Hirschfeld: And there was no system in place to track these things. So this client, we built a really cool prototype, which was just very animated mock-ups.
[10:11–10:26] David Hirschfeld: It looked like a finished product. It showed the whole vision. And when we demoed it to people, and we did three demos and sold all three of them for $15,000 each in the space of like a week and a half, which is clear that product and market fit.
[10:27–10:44] David Hirschfeld: And people say lifetime license. I would never do that. Well, why not? Because you might be giving away an immeasurable fraction of a percent of your market to raise the same amount of money that you would by giving 10 or 15 or 20 or 25% equity away to an investor.
[10:45–10:57] David Hirschfeld: And when you give that customer, they’re invested in the product. So when they’re testing, when you finally have the first version of it, you’re proving product solution fit.
[10:57–11:09] David Hirschfeld: Now you’re not building an MVP for product market fit anymore. You’re doing it for product solution fit. And for those of you who don’t know the difference, product market fit means you’ve got a product and you’ve shown that you’ve got demand and people will pay for it.
[11:09–11:22] David Hirschfeld: Product solution fit is that when somebody starts to use your product, they start to engage with it and it’s solving the problem and the user experience satisfies them enough where they’ll continue to use it and build their usage around it.
[11:22–11:41] David Hirschfeld: That’s product solution fit. And sometimes you can have product market fit, but then when they get the product, they just won’t use it. So that’s what you should be building your MVP for. And since you have all these beta customers and they’ve spent this money on it, they’re invested to really test the product the way that they need it.
[11:41–11:57] David Hirschfeld: And these are buyers, not looky loser wannabes. People that do lots of free betas get lots of feedback if people are engaging with the product to some degree, but the feedback they’re getting isn’t the feedback they need for product market fit.
[11:57–12:07] David Hirschfeld: it’s not going to help them sell the product most of the time. It’s going to help them with product solution fit for the particular people that are in trial, which may or may not be buyers.
[12:07–12:21] David Hirschfeld: And you don’t know that until they’ve written you a check. So anyway, so this is — so one thing I will talk about because it requires founders — it’s a scary thing to ask people for money for a product you haven’t even built yet.
[12:21–12:35] David Hirschfeld: A lot of founders, like, they have trouble stopping the development and saying, my MVP is complete enough and it’s not going to embarrass me. I’m not going to get, you know, the wrong, give the wrong impression to the market because it doesn’t have all these features in it yet.
[12:35–12:49] David Hirschfeld: And so they keep going and going and going. I call that failure to pull the trigger syndrome. You know, they’re just not willing to, and it’s a huge mistake. So you have to face your fears that this product may fail.
[12:49–13:03] David Hirschfeld: And you face it really early and you face, And if you do it this way with like launch first kind of approach, you can find out that you’re not going to have product market fit and pivot quickly because you’re getting feedback why people aren’t buying it.
[13:03–13:15] David Hirschfeld: And you’re not having to turn a big ship. It’s not a developed software product. It’s a prototype. It’s a marketing message. And you can play with both of those and in two weeks retest again.
[13:15–13:27] David Hirschfeld: And two weeks later retest three or four times in the space of a couple months. You can pivot three or four different times. And if you’ve built your software, you cannot pivot that quickly.
[13:27–13:37] David Hirschfeld: It’s a much longer, very costly process to pivot. And your momentum is there, so you probably don’t pivot as much as you necessarily need to. But here, it’s very easy.
[13:37–13:48] David Hirschfeld: You can be very flexible, pivot very quickly. And if after three or four attempts, you’re still not product market fit, you’re not even close, people just really aren’t buying it, then you can say, fine. I failed fast and cheap.
[13:48–14:15] David Hirschfeld: this is the wrong product or the wrong market or just the wrong timing or whatever it is. I’ve learned something and I can move on. And I, my investment was really limited in my time, personal energy and personal investment was, was only this big, not, you know, my, like my whole life, you know, five, six, seven years in a marriage and, you know, bankruptcy and, you know, the things I’ve seen many, many times, which I really hate watching.
[14:15–14:47] Robert: it’s no fun for anybody involved right and it’s um i’m sure there’s some amount of regret that happens when uh say a founder like makes these too big of leaps and they’re just like it’s like there’s it’s ego driven it’s pig-headedness it’s like well i’ll show them i’ll make my idea work versus if you make like these shorter jumps and then you pivot based on what people want it’s like in hindsight or from the big picture it’s a more it’s a better recipe for success rather than just saying, hey, I’ll charge through, I’ll make it work no matter what.
[14:47–15:07] Robert: And so these are some exciting ideas you have here, especially where you can be nimble early on and be making these changes to your software and your marketing before all these other pieces are set in stone And so you have this like launch method right where now you can apply what you learned and what doesn’t work and what does work.
[15:07–15:13] Robert: Do you have anything to speak of about as far as, like, the present, like, who is using your system now?
[15:14–15:32] David Hirschfeld: Well, actually, I want to go back to what you just said before I talk about that, because one of the biggest problems, biggest things that founders do, and, you know, we’ve all been taught you have to have this aura of positive thinking, right?
[15:32–15:42] David Hirschfeld: You have to drive forward. You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe in your product. And these are all actually recipes for disaster. And I don’t remember where this came from.
[15:42–16:06] David Hirschfeld: Somewhere in the 60s there was a book that was published on the power of positive thinking, and then this took off as a mantra and it’s become a culture. But if you look, there’s been studies done on really successful CEOs, like very large numbers of CEOs, and the ones with the most success and have done the best building, they are risk-averse, they are afraid, they are anxious people.
[16:06–16:17] David Hirschfeld: They are not power of positive thinking. They are contingency planners. They think of everything that could cause them to fail, everything, right? They spend all their time thinking, oh, God, if the market shifts here, I may fail.
[16:18–16:28] David Hirschfeld: If a competitor comes in with this kind of feature, we might fail. This is what they spend all their energy on. And so they come up with risk mitigation strategies for every one of these things.
[16:28–16:43] David Hirschfeld: And when you talk to one of these CEOs, Michael Dell or any, you know, if you go back in time to the people that built these huge companies from a very simple beginning, right, and you ask them, how were you able to do it?
[16:44–17:03] David Hirschfeld: They say, well, I was in the right place at the right time, and I was lucky. But the truth is that no matter what happened, they were ready for it. No matter what came across, whatever wasn’t expected to happen by most people, they had thought about what would happen and how to deal with it if it did.
[17:03–17:14] David Hirschfeld: And so they just had a playbook on what to do no matter what the market does, what competitors do, what customers do. They were highly anxious people.
[17:15–17:30] David Hirschfeld: I’m not saying that I want everybody to start taking Xanax and, you know, and become really anxious. But what I am saying is, you know, most of us as entrepreneurs, when we want to start something, we have this vision of what we want to do.
[17:30–17:51] David Hirschfeld: We believe we understand a problem and we want to solve it and we fall in love with our product. and we put on the black robe, right, and we start preaching, you know, religion about why this product’s going to be great. And what I’m saying is if you really want to be successful, throw the black robe away, put on the white coat, and become a clinician and think of everything as a test.
[17:54–18:05] David Hirschfeld: Recognize everything you’re assuming and figure out how you can prove the assumption or or prove that it’s wrong and assume your assumptions are probably not right.
[18:05–18:27] David Hirschfeld: So don’t go into believing the assumptions are right. Anytime you’re believing in yourself, you’re setting yourselves up for potential risk and failure. Anytime you’re recognizing all the ways that you might fail and find ways of testing to see if there’s a path, then you are basically following the same path as these hugely successful CEOs have followed.
[18:27–18:57] Robert: that’s a great insight and it tells me that we need some amount of mental flexibility i mean i don’t know about you but like i’ve butted heads with people over the years when i’m like hey what about this scenario and then the response is oh don’t worry about it don’t stress out i’m like i’m not letting it guide my emotions or my actions i’m just like thinking through some different scenario and say this thing is like eight percent likely then it only deserves eight percent of my time but i’m still like considering i’m still debugging the system as it were exactly
[18:57–19:13] David Hirschfeld: That’s exactly right. Yeah. So, you know, there’s people can start companies today. There’s so many opportunities with AI and assuming that we’re talking about software companies.
[19:13–19:26] David Hirschfeld: Right. But regardless of what it is, there’s so many opportunities. You know, I remember a long time ago reading an article about who makes the most successful McDonald’s franchisers.
[19:27–19:43] David Hirschfeld: And it was farmers, farmers that left their farm and started to become franchisers. And the reason that farmers made the best franchisers is because they follow prescribed successful methods.
[19:43–20:03] David Hirschfeld: They don’t try to invent anything. They try to be really good at each step of the process. and the fact that McDonald’s documented actually every single thing, it was very easy for somebody with that kind of mindset to create a McDonald’s franchise and blow it up and be very successful and build more and more franchises.
[20:04–20:17] David Hirschfeld: So the idea being that they’re not successful because they’re risk takers, because they believe that they’re going to be successful as a franchisor, but because they follow very prescribed success methods and grow their businesses.
[20:18–20:33] David Hirschfeld: It’s not you. So you can do that. Let’s say you do have an idea. You think it’s a great idea. Now, is this an idea you have any connection with personally? And what I mean by that is, are you somebody who just thinks they know how to fix social media, right?
[20:33–20:45] David Hirschfeld: Because you know what you hate about social media and everybody’s going to love this. Or are you somebody that’s in some kind of industry and there’s something that you struggle with on a daily basis in your role in that industry?
[20:45–20:58] David Hirschfeld: And you know that you’re just like other people in this industry who are all struggling with the exact same thing. And you have some reach to that community through networking or whatever of people that are like you having the same struggle.
[20:59–21:12] David Hirschfeld: And you can easily quantify the impact that this problem has on you and the value of solving that problem. And you want to and you think I can create a product to solve this problem. That is a recipe for success.
[21:12–21:23] David Hirschfeld: You know, that your chances of being successful then are grounded. And what you may be solving may be something huge. It may not be from a market opportunity perspective.
[21:23–21:40] David Hirschfeld: It may be limited from a market opportunity perspective, but there’s still a market for it. Those are like gold to me. You know, the person who starts a business, starts a software company and turns it in after two years has got a million dollars ARR.
[21:40–21:57] David Hirschfeld: and after another two years has 5 million ARR. You know, it’s not the hockey stick. It’s not the unicorn. But they are cash-flowing really well. They’ve got an asset now worth many times what they’re cash-flowing, and they’ve built something that’s resilient and successful.
[21:58–22:13] David Hirschfeld: And, like, I want to work with those people, you know, hundreds of them, because it’s fun to watch those businesses grow. The ones that go to a billion dollars, like, overnight, Those are the flutes, and there’s 999 that tried to do that that failed.
[22:14–22:34] David Hirschfeld: But the ones that fit that other model, you’ve got a much higher chance of being successful if you’re in that model, and then you can do it again and again and again right Or just build that one company and just keep expanding it and taking advantage of bigger markets and other products and capture customers
[22:35–22:46] Robert: It’s reproducible, right? And it seems like it’s based on numbers and based on empathy and based on a step-by-step strategy. Instead of saying, hey, I know how to fix social media.
[22:46–22:56] Robert: Only I can fix it. Versus saying, like, hey, I see a real problem. I see who will use it. I see how I’ll kind of stack the deck in my favor. I’ll see the ways this could go wrong.
[22:56–23:11] Robert: I’ll see what my step-by-step is. I mean, that’s a less risky way of going about it, right? That’s a more, like, logical step-by-step sequence. And so since we’re getting near the end of our time here, tell us about what someone can do if this excites them.
[23:11–23:19] Robert: If they’re interested in the launch-first method or in Tekyz, what’s the next step after listening to our conversation, and where should they go?
[23:19–23:31] David Hirschfeld: Okay, great. I appreciate that. And even before I go there, I want to make one book recommendation. It’s called The Mom Test. It’s the best. I’ve read a lot of business books, but it’s the best business book I’ve read.
[23:31–23:42] David Hirschfeld: If you’re in any kind of startup mode at any stage, whether you’re a startup or that’s starting to scale or you’re at the idea stage, you need to read this.
[23:42–23:54] David Hirschfeld: So the idea is, and it’s philosophically very similar to the things I talked about. It’s just much deeper and better laid out than the way I describe what I do from the testing perspective.
[23:55–24:08] David Hirschfeld: And he goes a little farther in terms of the fact that you don’t, let’s say you have a good relationship with your mother. That’s sort of critical for this scenario. And you go to her and you say, I want to start this pizza software company that delivers pizza.
[24:08–24:20] David Hirschfeld: And she’s going to go, oh, that’s such a great idea. And you’re so smart. I know you’ll make it successful, right? That’s what your mother is saying you have a good relationship with her. That’s what she’s going to say. So the question is, let’s say you come up with an idea.
[24:20–24:33] David Hirschfeld: How would you ask questions from somebody like your mother and actually get honest, valuable feedback that will help you make decisions about whether this is the right product and the right approach and things like that?
[24:33–24:43] David Hirschfeld: That’s why it’s called The Mom Test. Anyway, I recommend everybody get that book. So if you want to reach me at www.tekyz.com.
[24:44–24:54] David Hirschfeld: That’s my website, TEKYZ. and [email protected] is my email. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for my name, which you have right here.
[24:54–24:57] David Hirschfeld: I’ll move so that you can see it in black, right?
[24:57–25:01] Robert: I don’t know if that’ll show up on the final recording, so let’s just tell them how to spell it.
[25:01–25:15] David Hirschfeld: Okay, all right. Last name is David. Last name is H-I-R-S-C-H-F-E-L-D. Just look me up on LinkedIn, and I should pop up.
[25:15–25:26] David Hirschfeld: And if you want to learn about the launch first method specifically, when you go to Tekyz at the very top of the page, you’ll see a logo for launch first. Click on that, and that takes you to a page that talks just about launch first.
[25:27–25:42] Robert: Very cool. So tekyz.com, T-E-K-Y-Z.com, David Hirschfeld on LinkedIn. And there’s definitely some value here, David, in the idea of software architecture and, like, falling in love with the layout of it.
[25:42–25:56] Robert: Like when I was a teenager, I would go to the bookstore and like read through some of these books. And remember like Joel on software. Sometimes it’s fun. Even when you’re mentioning about like the airline industry, it’s fun to say like, well, hey, here’s some big ideas.
[25:56–26:09] Robert: Here’s a real problem. Here’s where people are really stuck in this niche, in this space. Here’s where after all these decades of the farming industry being here, here’s the software that they don’t have that they need.
[26:09–26:21] Robert: So there’s something cool about somebody following you and just tapping into the philosophization of software and how to make it work, how to find that product market fit, how to find that solution fit.
[26:21–26:32] Robert: It’s really cool and exciting once you dig deep into it. And that’s how people should dig into David Hirschfeld on LinkedIn and T-E-K-Y-Z.com.
[26:32–26:44] Robert: And as we’re about to check out those next steps, those resources, and look into the launch first method on tekyz.com, it’s time to put you on the spot a little bit here, David, and try to stump you somewhat.
[26:44–26:52] Robert: Ask for a fun quote or lesson that has served you in life and business that you can pass on to us. So what comes to mind as far as a quote or lesson?
[26:52–26:53] : Okay.
[26:53–27:06] David Hirschfeld: So this one is tied to a story that I learned a long time ago about making assumptions. I say, don’t cut the ends off the ham.
[27:07–27:18] David Hirschfeld: And when people say, what do you mean don’t cut the ends off the ham? I say, well, okay, because then I have to tell the story about the Christmas ham. Do I have enough time?
[27:18–27:19] David Hirschfeld: It’s like a two-minute story.
[27:20–27:24] Robert: Yeah, let’s fit it in. I’ve heard it, but everyone has a unique way of saying it.
[27:24–27:37] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, let’s do it. So Sally is seven years old, and she’s helping her mom in the kitchen. And she’s just now old enough to actually participate. And so her mom’s teaching her how to, you know, prepare the ham.
[27:38–27:50] David Hirschfeld: And she cuts the ends off the ham, puts it in the pan, and sticks it in the oven. And Sally says, why do you cut the ends off the ham? He says, because it just makes it taste better. She says, why would that make it taste better? She says, well, because I’m not really sure.
[27:51–28:03] David Hirschfeld: But Grandma’s in the other room, and she taught me to cook it this way. I know her ham’s always come out great. So Sally goes into the living room and says, Grandma, why do we cut the ends off the ham? And Grandma says, because it makes the ham taste better.
[28:04–28:16] David Hirschfeld: And she says, well, why would that make it taste better? She says, well, I don’t know. I just know we make the best hams. But why don’t you call your great-grandmother? She’s at my sister’s place in New York.
[28:16–28:37] David Hirschfeld: So she gets on the phone. They all gather on the phone. And Sally says, great-grandma, why do you cut the ends off the Christmas hand? She says, because my oven’s too small. and so anytime you believe in what you’re doing or somebody says we’ve always done it this way I always say don’t cut the ends off the ham which of course starts the story and then they have to
[28:37–29:10] Robert: think about it and it’s worth rethinking these like why does my roku remote not have a power off button why does my iphone not have any buttons at all because they tried a new way of doing it and it worked and people loved it and that’s what matters and so as we’re considering that thinking about that, go to tekyz.com, that’s tekyz.com, and look up David Hirschfeld on LinkedIn. He puts out some excellent content on Medium, so go and see what he’s posting about as far as what it takes
[29:10–29:24] Robert: to get a hyper-exceptional development team figured out, running great, to be AI first, to have a startup and a SaaS business that’s a success, not one of these many failures, A lot of ways to go wrong, a few ways to go right.
[29:24–29:35] Robert: And it can be fun, exciting, and adventurous if we have that right mindset, which David can help us do. So, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. David Hirschfeld, wonderful speaking with you. Thanks.
[29:35–29:41] David Hirschfeld: And let me make one shameless plug, depending on when this gets published. I’m hosting a new podcast called Scaling Smarter.
[29:43–29:48] Robert: Very nice. So, Scaling Smarter Podcast. Give it five stars. Listen to every episode. Yeah.
[29:48–29:53] David Hirschfeld: Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you, David. And the same here for Market of the Day. Of course.
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].
Marketer of the Day Podcast: Craft the Perfect Launch Strategy for Software Development and SaaS… was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
