Cody Miles: Welcome to the podcast. This is the Ashore Podcast. My name is Cody Miles. I’m the founder of Ashore. Before we get started, I just wanted to say a brief few things being that this is our first podcast. If you don’t know what Ashore is, Ashore is an online proofing software that’s built for creatives. Its mission, its only mission is to help creatives and their approvers collaborate better together. We’re creatives at Ashore. We built software for creatives. Part of what we’re going to on this podcast moving forward is to interview some of those famous designers that you may know about to figure out just how they collaborate better with their customers and how they manage their time and how they make their lives more fun again and, being a software company, inevitably, we’ll talk about Ashore at some points, so let’s get started. Thanks again for joining us, and, if you have any questions or concerns, just email me at cody@ashoreapp.com. Talk to you soon.
Abby Nash: Hi. Cody?
Cody Miles: That’s it.
Abby Nash: Okay. Didn’t you want to complain about something?
Cody Miles: Yeah. I could complain about a lot of things. Have you ever had a startup idea?
Abby Nash: Yeah, but you’ve given them all to me.
Cody Miles: Okay, which one is the best one?
Abby Nash: Oh, no, that was a podcast idea. Dammit.
Cody Miles: Okay. All right, explain to everybody what the podcast idea was.
Abby Nash: Okay. The podcast idea was to get these two people and make them fall in love over the phone while we listen and analyze their conversations with a relationship counselor …
Cody Miles: Yeah …
Abby Nash: … to see-
Cody Miles: … so it’s like a reality show.
Abby Nash: Yeah, to see if people can … if you can manufacture love, kind of, without ever seeing the person.
Cody Miles: The idea was that we would specifically pick two people that we believed were compatible based on whatever the relationship counselor says, like, “Here’s kind of the ideal for, you know, a man and a woman for, you know, these kind of personalities. They go together really well.” They’d never met each other and they aren’t allowed to know each other’s real names, but every night for maybe a month, they call in to a number at like 9:00 p.m. and they’re allowed to talk for one hour, and the relationship counselor is supposed to give them prompts to discuss every single night, and the idea is, every night, we’re facilitating these conversations that lead to deeper and deeper intimacy.
Abby Nash: Yeah, so, in the beginning, it starts out very surface level [crosstalk 00:02:33] and they’re talking about really deep emotional things.
Cody Miles: Right. Right, so the question is is relationship compatibility, or whatever factors we consider to be compatible in a relationship, is that a self-fulfilling prophecy? Will two people fall in love if we put them under the right circumstances and the right conversations and the right factors?
Abby Nash: Yeah. It’s like a relationship in a test tube.
Cody Miles: Yeah.
Abby Nash: Can you put the right ingredients in to make people fall in love no matter what?
Cody Miles: Right. Right, and then, after a month, after all these conversations, they’re not allowed to know each other’s real names, so they’re not allowed to know what each looked like, they meet in person for the first time and will find out at that point do they hate each other, do they love each other or are they indifferent about each other. Does anything change after they meet in person? Anyway …
Abby Nash: Anyway.
Cody Miles: … how are things going?
Abby Nash: Emotionally? In like what?
Cody Miles: I mean, I don’t care about your emotions.
Abby Nash: Okay.
Cody Miles: You’re just my employee.
Abby Nash: That’s true. I mean, I’m doing great. I make money. I have a dog, and she’s cute. That’s all I need. Oh, no, you’re going to start talking about me getting married again, aren’t you?
Cody Miles: Whoa, some big assumption. I was-
Abby Nash: It’s Friday. It always happens.
Cody Miles: On Fridays, I ask you-
Abby Nash: You’re like, “Why don’t you want to get married? If you don’t, if you don’t take better care of yourself, you’re never going to find a man.”
Cody Miles: That’s true. You do treat yourself like shit.
Abby Nash: I do not. I have not gotten any questionable tattoos or piercings.
Cody Miles: You don’t have a baby.
Abby Nash: I don’t have a baby out of wedlock.
Cody Miles: Generally speaking, you’re doing pretty good.
Abby Nash: Yeah. I went to college.
Cody Miles: Yeah.
Abby Nash: I didn’t drop out of college. I know everybody knew people that dropped out of college.
Cody Miles: Has anything happened this week client-wise that’s upset you?
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: Has any client upset you?
Abby Nash: Yeah. John.
Cody Miles: Don’t name names.
Abby Nash: John is not his real name. It’s-
Cody Miles: As someone who works in a creative agency, what are the things that upset you the most?
Abby Nash: Whenever people tell you they have a problem with something, but they’re not clear what the problem is. They don’t tell you what the right fix will be that they’ll approve of, so they’re like, “We need to discuss this more.” I don’t know what that means, or they’ll be like, “This header doesn’t make any sense.”
Cody Miles: Right.
Abby Nash: I don’t-
Cody Miles: You’re mostly talking about when it comes to copywriting?
Abby Nash: Yeah. Yeah, then also, I don’t know, whenever people get really nitpicky.
Cody Miles: Yeah.
Abby Nash: You have two revision cycles. Quit emailing me about everything.
Cody Miles: Why do you think, clients in general, they seem to be on a different page than you about some things or whatever? Why does that happen?
Abby Nash: I don’t know. I think they get really caught up in small details. They don’t realize they can just put their website out there. They can just put their content out there and, if there’s a mistake, we’ll fix it. It’s fine, but they get … They’re like, “There’s a comma there. It can’t be there,” and they get really caught up in … Everything needs to be right before you can push a product out.
Cody Miles: Yeah. Yeah. I had a similar experience this week. We were doing a pitch deck, designing it for a client and, ultimately, they were very aggressive. They were wanting to meet every single day to discuss what changes had been made to that pitch deck. It was absolutely unreasonable, and so what we started doing was, because we were moving so quickly, we were keeping iterations of the same slide in the pitch deck in the file, and that was just mind-blowingly confusing for them, and so they were like, “What? Why is this earlier idea in there?” I’m like, “Well, because we don’t actually know if you want to move forward with the second idea.”
Abby Nash: Yeah. If you go through so many versions at once, you can’t keep it straight. You don’t even know whenever you’ve made a decision that has resolved an issue is in the …
Cody Miles: Yeah, that’s true.
Abby Nash: … proofing process. You just-
Cody Miles: Yeah. I think the ideal workflow for creatives is to let the creative do her thing. If you’re designing something, you’re writing something, let them complete the project, give first fruits. Don’t work iteratively. I think that’s actually a really bad idea. It takes up a lot more time. You waste time talking about the nitty-gritty. Deliver complete projects as you think it should be the ideal and then, ultimately, you meet somewhere in the middle, but you have to let the creative do the creative work.
Abby Nash: Also, if you showed them one part of the project at a time, they don’t see it in context, so they get really … It allows them to get really into the details and they get hung up on things, and it really stagnates the process.
Cody Miles: Yeah, that’s really true because, when they see part … Obviously, they’re looking at every project through different eyes, so, when they see part of it, they’re not seeing where you’re going, and, in fact, that happened with this pitch deck project. One of the iterations of one of the graphics was like, “Here’s what this solution looks like without the solution, it’s chaos, and here’s the solutions all streamlined.” The designer sent it in, and there was just, instead of people’s faces and icons, there was just circles, and they were like, “What do these circles suppose to mean?” It’s a wire frame. You know what I mean?
Abby Nash: Yeah. They can’t imagine the future very well, and they don’t … and they can’t read your mind, and we obviously can’t read their mind, and so they need to see the finished product to even begin to give you good feedback.
Cody Miles: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s it. They are looking at things through a different lens, but then also, when the feedback comes in, oftentimes, they’re not grading it with the same requirements that you are as a designer or as a copywriter. You’re saying like, “This is a good design,” or, “It’s a good piece of copy because, objectively, I have created these criteria,” which is not always communicated, and like, “This design is good because it is compliant with the brand. This design is good because it really communicates this very complicated idea in a very digestible graphic,” and that’s how we determine things are good or not good, and then we pass it off to the client, and they say, “It needs more pizzazz,” or …
Abby Nash: It’s not exciting enough.
Cody Miles: … it’s not exciting enough or, “Can you make it pop more?” That’s every designer’s favorite thing.
Abby Nash: Then you realize that their criteria is completely subjective and made up and you keep an undefined-
Cody Miles: That’s how every designer reacts, and I think, to some degree, that’s true, but at the very bottom of it, you have to … As the creative, you have to look past what they client is saying and try to get to what they mean, and what they mean is there is some unknown set of criteria that I have set, although I’m not able to articulate it and, whatever you have delivered, does not meet the criteria that I’ve set, the requirements, so the creative’s job is actually to get down to make sure what is the objective because a good design is measurable because it can either meet an objective or not. Right?
Abby Nash: Yeah. Do you realize that, getting into this line of work, you’re basically just reading people? You could be like a fake psychic.
Cody Miles: That’s the problem because if someone says, “Well, this needs to pop more,” or, “This needs to be more exciting,” that’s not something that I can definitively say is true or not true because everyone is working from a different perspective. If design can be objectively good or objectively bad, that means we have to measure what we’re designing. We have to measure it against something. Is it compliant with the brand? Does it communicate this big idea in a very simple way? If they say, “It needs to pop more,” that’s something in the criteria that it can’t measure because what might pop to you, I hate that phrase, and what might pop to me, it could be completely different. It’s subjective, and so, when someone says that, they’re actually not providing any value to a conversation because they’re not articulating anything.
Abby Nash: What objective design criteria do you try to lay out for every project to make sure that the client and the creative space are on the same page?
Cody Miles: That’s something that is going to be different for every project, isn’t it, because the purpose of any design for like … Let’s say, you’re doing a flyer or you’re doing a website or whatever. Each one has its own objective, so the most important thing is that, prior to design, we lay out what those things are. We say, “Okay, what do we want this design to accomplish?” If we can set that criteria, then, no matter what, even if the client says, “Well, it needs to pop more,” we can always go back and re-lay the ground rules and say, “Well, you know, you might think that, but here’s actually what we’re trying to accomplish. Does it accomplish this? Yes? Okay.”
Abby Nash: I think the good thing about clients is that, usually, you can talk them into your ideas. Usually, if you just have a knowledgeable, well-thought-out answer and explanation for your actions, you can usually talk them into things. Sometimes, you’ll never get through it with them.
Cody Miles: That’s true. I mean, if you’re a designer and you’re delivering work that doesn’t have an argument for it, you’re not actually doing your job because you haven’t thought through the reasoning behind. I mean, graphic design …
Abby Nash: That’s right.
Cody Miles: … is different than art. Fine art, you can do things for no reason.
Abby Nash: I mean, you’re supposed to have a reason.
Cody Miles: Can you with art?
Abby Nash: Yeah. I mean, that’s what an art statement is. That’s why people go to school and study fine arts. They’re trying to come up with a good-
Cody Miles: Okay.
Abby Nash: You’re giving me a look right now.
Cody Miles: Right. I think of like, what’s his name? He pissed on copper and he did the Campbell Soup. Andy Warhol.
Abby Nash: Andy Warhol?
Cody Miles: Yeah. I mean-
Abby Nash: I mean, Warhol was talking about mass media and materialism and the way that celebrities get commodified, so he had a point, too. You’re going to have to try better than that.
Cody Miles: Yeah. Okay, so what does pissing on copper sheets mean?
Abby Nash: I’m not familiar with that one piss, but-
Cody Miles: Right. Right, so I feel like, to some degree, while that might have been true at the jump, when you get to that point, it’s just like, “Well, now, you’re just doing things to do them.”
Abby Nash: I don’t know. I feel like he had a reason. I don’t know what-
Cody Miles: Is there a reason for cubism? You know what I’m saying? This is my point. I guess, just experimentation.
Abby Nash: Cubism is about distorting reality and imagining art, 3D dimensional reality in a different way, and you have the freedom to do that when you’re painting or when you’re working in a two-dimensional format. You can distort how things appear, so you’re allowed to imagine different ways of existence.
Cody Miles: Yeah. For those of you all who don’t know, Abby is … She’s obviously a creative at Brandcave and she works at Ashore as well, but you also have an art degree …
Abby Nash: Yeah, I do have one of those.
Cody Miles: … and a political science degree.
Abby Nash: Yes.
Cody Miles: She double majored at in Southwestern.
Abby Nash: Look, I’m using both of them. I don’t know. Let’s put the question back to you. What’s happening. How are you doing today? It is your birthday.
Cody Miles: Yeah. True, and, so far, all things are going pretty well I would say.
Abby Nash: Yeah. You got some whisky.
Cody Miles: Yeah.
Abby Nash: You tried to give me too much of it.
Cody Miles: That sounds predatorial. I gave you-
Abby Nash: That does sound … that-
Cody Miles: I gave you a shot.
Abby Nash: He gave me a little bit, and I drank it too quickly.
Cody Miles: See? That’s all on you.
Abby Nash: That’s my fault, but it’s also his fault.
Cody Miles: Thank you. This is going on the air.
Abby Nash: You can edit it out. People do that all the time.
Cody Miles: Yeah. I don’t know.
Abby Nash: Just take it out.
Cody Miles: Yeah.
Abby Nash: That’s-
Cody Miles: If you’re hearing this, a mistake was made.
Abby Nash: On his part, not mine.
Cody Miles: Yeah, so I’m really struggling right now because I’m dealing with some clients. They have too much that they’re demanding, I mean, for a very small project. I mean, we’re talking about shit that we do on a normal day-to-day basis and they’re … The thing about it is, people who work and live in Silicon Valley, there is this motto of, I’m sure you’re aware of it, it’s move fast and break things.
Abby Nash: Yeah, like Elizabeth Holmes. Listen, if you watched that Elizabeth Holmes documentary on HBO-
Cody Miles: Oh, no, no, you’re talking about Theranos.
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: Oh, okay.
Abby Nash: Take a shot every time they referenced Steve Jobs, and you will be suitably buzzed at the end of it.
Cody Miles: Suitably.
Abby Nash: They mentioned it a lot, and she does, too. She definitely was like, “I’m going to be like the female Steve Jobs.”
Cody Miles: What’s happened to her, because now there’s been this podcast where they really like denounced her, there’s an HBO documentary? Has she come out?
Abby Nash: I think she’s in hiding, but she didn’t go to-
Cody Miles: Yeah, I would be.
Abby Nash: She didn’t end up going to jail though. I think she just paid a fine.
Cody Miles: No way. She didn’t?
Abby Nash: No. She just paid a fine and went on her way …
Cody Miles: I don’t … I mean-
Abby Nash: … which is just bullshit. Are we allowed to swear in here?
Cody Miles: Yeah, we’re fine.
Abby Nash: Okay.
Cody Miles: I was thinking, if I were running a startup … and this is the culture in Silicon Valley. You fake it so make it. I mean, plenty of startups, I mean, if you watch the TV show, Silicon Valley, you see examples of it there, and they do a really good job of showing real life in a comedic way, plenty of startups, in fact, some that Brandcave works with are completely unprofitable, don’t even understand what their pricing tiers and their pricing structures look like. They’re just trying to get something off the ground and get users and then get more investment, and then they’ll figure it out later. She’s not doing anything unique in that culture.
Abby Nash: She just put people’s lives at risk. That’s all.
Cody Miles: Yeah. That’s the difference, isn’t it, because you are selling the product.
Abby Nash: Yeah, she actually put the product in Walgreens in Arizona and stuff that people used that machine to do blood test and then thought they had cancer or something.
Cody Miles: Yeah, that’s the difference, right? I mean, if you’re talking about like a pizza delivery app …
Abby Nash: Yeah, there’s no stakes.
Cody Miles: … that you’re losing money on, that’s one thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Abby Nash: If you’re going to do something serious and you’re going to … something that could really … I mean, it was a good idea. It would have been a good idea if it worked, but-
Cody Miles: In theory, it’s amazing, right?
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: Of course, everybody hates getting their blood drawn, but this is just next level.
Abby Nash: Yeah. If you’re going to do something big like that, back it up. If you’re going to make up an app to get free shoes on demand or something, if you fuck that up …
Cody Miles: That’s one thing.
Abby Nash: … it doesn’t matter.
Cody Miles: Yeah. Yeah. I’m working with these clients, and they have the same kind of Silicon Valley mentality. They’re in that area, move fast and break things. My problem with it is maybe it’s just because the agency that I run is not in Silicon Valley. We’re in Central Texas, just north of Austin. Maybe I’m coming from a slower perspective, but I don’t think moving fast and breaking things is a license for thoughtlessness.
Abby Nash: Yeah, that’s true.
Cody Miles: I think, too often, and maybe this is the case with Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, the culture there allows people to be irresponsible, and it gives them license.
Abby Nash: I think they also have a lot more money working in Silicon Valley.
Cody Miles: Yeah, but it over-inflates the ego, doesn’t it?
Abby Nash: Yeah. You get a big investment for showing really nothing and feel like, “I guess, I am great. I guess, I am doing something amazing,” but, here, getting investment in Austin …
Cody Miles: Yeah, it is a little bit more difficult.
Abby Nash: … and it … yeah, the tech world of Austin is … You have to perv yourself a little more.
Cody Miles: Yeah. Yeah. Speaking from experience, our app, Ashore, at one point we considered going after investment, so I began meeting with investors. I met with one of the biggest. I won’t say their name, but I met with one of the biggest VC companies in Austin who funded some really, really big ventures who are really successful today, and they said two things to me. They said, one, “We don’t believe in the true SaaS model. We want a traditional B2B sales because there’s more money quicker that way,” which I thought was interesting. It’s the opposite of what you get in Silicon Valley with the Dropbox direct to consumer true SaaS. People learn the model by themselves. They purchase it by themselves. There’s not really a salesperson involved, and the other thing they said was, “We don’t really want to talk to you until you have 500 million in revenue.”
Abby Nash: Which is a ton.
Cody Miles: Right, and it’s like if you’re a burgeoning startup, you don’t have any revenue. You’re pre-revenue. It’s a rock and hard place to be. I imagine that I need investment in order to get to this point where I’m making 500 million …
Abby Nash: Yeah, you need investment …
Cody Miles: … in the first place.
Abby Nash: … to get investment.
Cody Miles: Right.
Abby Nash: It’s like going out for your first job. You need experience to get experience.
Cody Miles: Right. Exactly. Yeah, it’s definitely like this weird place, and then, on top of that, they really … For whatever reason, they want to see that you’ve created convertible notes, which is basically saying, “I’m going to get into a bunch of debt to fund this for myself,” and then that debt transfers over to the investor.
Abby Nash: That’s-
Cody Miles: Right?
Abby Nash: Right. Who even qualifies in Austin to meet those criteria? That-
Cody Miles: Plenty of people do go into massive debt, but my thing is like why would an investor want to get into a situation where they’re buying into a startup with massive amounts of debt when they could be just investing into a startup that is already cash-flow positive because it’s running so lean and funding itself?
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: Right? It might not be doing 500 million, but if you see that the model works and it’s validated and if you’re not in debt, that seems like a less risky investment to me.
Abby Nash: Yeah, and it would be a smaller investment, too.
Cody Miles: Yeah, but they’re not interested in that. The thing in Silicon Valley, for example, is they don’t want slow deaths. You either succeed really, really quickly or you burn really quickly.
Abby Nash: Yeah, and isn’t that why they say like most startups fail within five years?
Cody Miles: I mean, most startups fail in general within five years.
Abby Nash: Yeah, just because they’re pushing so hard and just eating through their revenue.
Cody Miles: Right. Right, but I think what Ashore has taught me is that any product, it doesn’t even have to be the best product, any product that works, does what it’s supposed to do even to some degree with consistency will become a profitable product.
Abby Nash: Yeah, if you just push an MVP out, it’s going to get some traction that can give it more stability and, once it has stability, it can grow and you can add more on to it and really flesh it out.
Cody Miles: Yeah. Yeah.
Abby Nash: It makes a tons of sense. I don’t know why people in Austin are just so weird.
Cody Miles: I think Ashore is in a really unique situation now because we’ve never accepted investment.
Abby Nash: Yeah, that’s true.
Cody Miles: To be fair, we’ve never gotten a good offer. We’ve gotten like, “We’ll take 50% equity for, you know, $200,000.”
Abby Nash: Yeah, that’s-
Cody Miles: I think that’s total bullshit.
Abby Nash: Exactly.
Cody Miles: Today, a company generating revenue and growing 25% month-over-month with zero investment, I mean, that’s the sweet spot. Now, it’s like, before I needed investment, but now that I’ve bit the bullet and done this work, and it’s growing by itself at a healthy rate and, in fact, we’re all extremely … Now, I don’t care about investment.
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: Now, you investors, missed your chance to get on something really good.
Abby Nash: Now, the investors, they want Cody.
Cody Miles: I don’t know about that. Yeah.
Abby Nash: I mean, you just need to put yourself out there.
Cody Miles: Yeah, I think that’s true.
Abby Nash: Make them come to you.
Cody Miles: That’s the aim down …
Abby Nash: It’s like dating.
Cody Miles: … marketing methodology.
Abby Nash: Okay. You were talking about marketing. I was talking about dating.
Cody Miles: Oh.
Abby Nash: Getting an investor is like getting a good husband.
Cody Miles: Tell me about it. Okay. How?
Abby Nash: They got to pay. They got to get you a nice house and a nice car.
Cody Miles: Wait. The investor is going to give you a nice house and a car? I don’t think they want that.
Abby Nash: The house and the car represent different things in an investment relationship.
Cody Miles: Okay. When I was first starting Brandcave, really early on, I got the notion that all of our clients actually wanted to see me as ragged as possible. If they got the idea that I was taking a week of vacation, they would start-
Abby Nash: That’s true.
Cody Miles: They would start feeling like, “Well, he’s not doing the work anymore …
Abby Nash: He’s not.
Cody Miles: ” … so we should fire him.”
Abby Nash: That’s true. You need to look tired and worn out, and you did a good job of it.
Cody Miles: I’m just jaded now.
Abby Nash: Yeah. You look like three years older than you actually are.
Cody Miles: That’s true. Yeah. No, seriously, if you look at photos of me in the first year of Brandcave and you look at me now, there’s a very big difference. In fact, I met my nextdoor neighbor. Did I tell you about this?
Abby Nash: No.
Cody Miles: For first time since I moved into my new house … It’s been about a year. The guy is two years younger than me …
Abby Nash: Wow.
Cody Miles: … and he works for the city or something, and so-
Abby Nash: I’m sure he looks great.
Cody Miles: I mean, yeah, he’s-
Abby Nash: No offense to the city of Georgetown, it can’t be hard to work for them.
Cody Miles: It’s funny. Within five minutes of meeting him, he hands me a beer and he hands me weed, and that’s how I knew he was good, people. I meet him for the first time, and we’re talking, and he goes, “How old are you?” I was like, “Yeah, well, I’m about to be 28,” and he goes, “Oh, my God, I thought you were in your 40s,” and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” He was like, “Yeah, you just … You walk like an older man.”
Abby Nash: You do.
Cody Miles: He literally said that to me.
Abby Nash: You just-
Cody Miles: He was like, “You just carry yourself like you’re much older.” He was like, “I see you walking your dog every single day,” and he was like, “I just thought that you were just an older person.”
Abby Nash: Just an old hipster, an old 40-year-old, worn out …
Cody Miles: Come on.
Abby Nash: … hipster who needs a little weed.
Cody Miles: I don’t know. I was like, “Maybe, maybe he knows something I don’t, or maybe he’s just smoking a little too much.”
Abby Nash: I mean, I wouldn’t say you look like you’re in your 40s, but you do really carry years on your shoulders. I think that’s because you sit on your computer all day. Your back is like-
Cody Miles: Yeah, it sucks.
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: Yeah.
Abby Nash: That’s why you need a massage every now and then.
Cody Miles: Yeah, we’re supposed to have a message today. For anybody who doesn’t … who runs an agency or works at an agency and you don’t get a biweekly, at least a biweekly massage, you deserve it.
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: Talk to your boss into doing it. It’s worth it.
Abby Nash: Oh, my God, yeah.
Cody Miles: We had this girl that came last time, Crystal. Oh, my God.
Abby Nash: She was good.
Cody Miles: She was good. She was so painful, but in a very measured way.
Abby Nash: Yeah, she … and she asked. She didn’t just hurt me without asking first.
Cody Miles: Yeah.
Abby Nash: It felt really good.
Cody Miles: Yeah, I liked the pain, and I don’t think I would ever say that otherwise, but she … It was like, “Oh, wait, like you mean I could have been getting a massage like this the entire time?”
Abby Nash: Yeah, I mean, Caitlyn was great because she was very relaxing, but it was also …
Cody Miles: Yeah, I think she was amazing.
Abby Nash: … 10:00 in the morning and, after I finished the massage, I was like, “Oh, I can take a nap.”
Cody Miles: Is it better to have the massages in the afternoon?
Abby Nash: I was thinking that. Have an end-of-the-day relaxation. Play some nice music and a nice massage. Go home. Get out of here.
Cody Miles: Yeah. I hear what you’re saying.
Abby Nash: Although you never leave, so I don’t know when you would get … when you would have a session because you sleep here basically.
Cody Miles: I do not.
Abby Nash: Yeah, he does.
Cody Miles: I think you’re right. Sometimes, I get a massage in the morning and I’m like, “Oh, man, I feel so great,” and then I have a couple of meetings and I’m-
Abby Nash: Yeah. You get to a really blissful place and then you have to go …
Cody Miles: Back to the reality. Yeah.
Abby Nash: … yeah, talk to people about pitch decks and you’re in gray again.
Cody Miles: Yeah.
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: I feel like my tolerance for bullshit in the past six months has just gone so low.
Abby Nash: Then he’s going to have a kid.
Cody Miles: Yeah, but part of it I think comes with success because when you’re a startup, when you’re starting an agency, you say to yourself like-
Abby Nash: At least they’re paying you. At least they’re giving you money.
Cody Miles: At least they’re paying me, and you do a lot. You do a lot more for people when it’s like … They’re not paying you to do this extra thing, but you’re like, “If they leave, I’m in trouble.”
Abby Nash: Yeah, and maybe they’ll pay you for something else if you just do this extra thing for them.
Cody Miles: Right. Right, so you do a lot.
Abby Nash: You’re trying to engender a lot of loyalty that they don’t have to give you.
Cody Miles: Right. Right, but then you gain a little bit of success, you grow a little big with great people like you on board, and you spread the work a little bit and-
Abby Nash: Yeah, and now we can take on more work because you can just throw all the things you don’t want to do on to me.
Cody Miles: On to you. Yeah, that’s exactly the plan.
Abby Nash: Yeah, I notice.
Cody Miles: Now, it’s like I have options necessarily. I’m not counting on any one particular person to pay the bills, so I’m in a position where, finally, I’m like, “You know what, I can fire you as client. I’m not … I don’t need you.”
Abby Nash: I don’t want to … I’m helping you.
Cody Miles: I’m helping you. Listen, I have a meeting in about 10 minutes. I need to get ready for it. Thanks for talking with me today. It was fun.
Abby Nash: Yeah, talking in front of a microphone, it gets easier as it goes.
Cody Miles: Yeah, and the alcohol helps, too.
Abby Nash: Yeah, I’m sure.
Cody Miles: Let’s do this again and let’s see what people have to say. If you liked this podcast, I hope you join us next time. Please let us know. If you ever want to reach out to Abby or me personally, just reach out through Ashore, which is our software, it’s ashoreapp.com, or Brandcave, which is at brandcave.co.
Abby Nash: Yeah.
Cody Miles: Yeah. All right, see you guys later.
Abby Nash: Bye.
