power of engaging on social and how to interview with a startup w/ founder, rae lambert

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Alrighty. Gonna do this. Gonna do this. Good morning, everybody. When I mean everybody, I mean nobody because no one's here yet. Um I I have seen people go live on LinkedIn and there's this like awkward pause for the first like minute or something like that. Um so, uh we won't have that here. But for those of you tuning in, welcome. Good morning. I'm excited for this episode. Um I'm excited for every People probably like Taylor, you're excited for every episode. I am because I feel like I get some pretty cool people on the show. Um, but really excited about this. The power of Twitter X, whatever you want to call it.

Um, I had a chance. Uh, Ray, I don't know how something popped up about your platform or something, the algorithm. I was replying to something. I you were on I mean, your response rate was tremendous. And so, literally, it was like 4 I think it was like 4:30 my time, 5:30 your time. And you were like, "Hey, let's hop on a And I was like, "What? Okay, great." So, uh, shout out to you. You're wonderful. Um, and that's my job is to just be on Twitter. Ain't that wild? That's my job. Isn't that wild? People ask me, they're like, "Taylor, what do you do?" And I was like, "Well, it's a lot." But I live on Twitter.

And they're like, and especially too, like my wife is like freelance commercial videographer, photographer. So, like she just she doesn't play in the X world. Her Instagram's her platform. She's like like what are you doing? I was like trust me it worked. I don't I don't understand it but I just live on X. It's interesting. I mean I think we're live streaming on LinkedIn but I have way more followers on LinkedIn but I just feel like Twitter is just like heavier hitting connections and just like somehow there's a barrier that's lower in like Twitter DMs. I don't know. It's just there's something the best way the be the best thing I heard um and we got some people trickling in this morning um now which is good.

We did start a few minutes early but um yeah the way the way I describe it is like X is like is like you catch somebody at a bar or if you're not a drink or a coffee shop, right? And and like you like grab like a moment of their time. I feel like that's what X is. I feel like LinkedIn is is still um a little bit more like I'm going to a conference. Yeah. Planned more like planned meeting times. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The number of like Oh, I have I keep a list of like when someone create like some juicy account fall starts following me.

I have this list and it's just like crazy list. And then we had Tim Ferrris use River to get his fans together for the 10th anniversary. Homo brag. And we're We're gonna dive into the platform too in a second. But yeah. No, but everyone's like, "How'd you get Tim Ferris?" I'm like, "Twitter." He tweeted and I tweeted about that. Crazy. I replied to his tweet. Like literally, that's all. It's nuts. And Okay. All right. Real quick, I'm going to do the intro. We got people tuning in. Ricardo, good to see you. Chris, Devon, it's great to see you as well. Good morning from Amazon Warehouse in Dallas.

I love Thank you for tuning in. All right. So, first off, uh, housekeeping stuff as always. First off, say hey. We'd love to hear from you. This is a networking show platform, right? Um, we're going to talk about networking today. We're talking about community. Uh, listen, we're not in the metaverse yet. I don't know if you're tuning in unless you comment, right? So, connect with other people in the chat. Um, uh, again, we're going to talk about networking. Prime example, Ray streaming with me today because I just reached out on on on Twitter, right? I eat my own dog food or whatever that saying is.

I'm terrible with saying. So, uh, again, please say, "Hey, would love to hear from you." Uh, next thing, um, I tell people is like literally with the networking thing, like network with every guest, right? Shoot Ray Connection. Um, you know, follow her on Twitter. Um, and she's a great follow and um, just just tell her you obviously saw her from the show. Um, so I first off want to give a shout out to AppRight. I'm one of probably the only non-technical heroes on a technical program. Um, love the crew at Apprite. Uh, great product. Um, basically just help you deploy an app faster. Um, I don't really know all that entails, but it's a great product and I love the team.

So go check them out. Um, another thing too, listen, we have a lot going on within the Torque community. Um, we have, uh, five to seven streams a week, not to mention some small streams. If you want to be kept up to date on all the things we got going on our community, check out our site, torque.com community. Um, and then if you do want to be kept up to date when I go live with amazing guests like Ray, shoot me a text. It's actually my number. Um, it's not some AI chatbot or something like that. Um, so just text live to 6615. That's insane.

What? What? Giving your phone number. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so text me. Text me. Actually, actually, this is an app called Community uh that I use. So, I heard this. Yeah. So, it's actually it's actually me. It's my number. It's like my second business. It's like my second number. Um and uh and think think of community like um it's basically like texting meets like email and like like if I throw if I go to a conference in a city, I can like see all the people. I can like drill down into the city and then text those people to like come to a meetup.

So, it's pretty cool. Yeah. How much is it? I don't I don't know how much it is now. I I I got grandfathered into like the intro pricing. Okay, good work. Yeah, but but if you create a community number, right, I will sign up. Trust me. Um uh let's see if we got some more people tuning in. Jason, my colleague from Torx, good to see you, brother. Tea, uh Michael, Richard, Chris, it's great to see you. Andre, it's great to see you as well. All right, so enough enough with me yapping. Ray, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do?

And then we'll dive in. I don't know. You live on Twitter. You are a professional Twitterer. Uh maybe. Although I would have more followers if I was professional at it. I'm just on there a lot. Um yeah, I'm Ray. My original originally my background is in finance. Hated it. Hated it. Um read the 4hour work week when I was living in Boston working at like custodial finance at State Street Bank. And my husband and I decided we wanted to work in startups. Okay. After learning we're like what's angel investing? What's Silicon Valley? Uh, moved out to San Francisco, sight unseen in 2012. Got a bartending job really quickly and then just started looking for tech jobs.

Yep. Ended up getting this like finance operations office managery role at an early stage startup called Sauce Labs. I was like the 19th there. Okay. Yeah. You saw Yeah. A lot of engineers know what sauce is. Yep. Um, helped with rounds of funding. moved them, you know, from Excel sheet invoicing into Zora, found the new office, helped plan the Selenium meetups, which is like open source, browser testing, I don't even know what it is. Uh, a lot of meetups for them and then ended up pivoting into product marketing at Intercom back when Intercom was like it was still pretty early there. Yeah. Yeah. We joined uh pre- series B, helped them launch a couple of products, had incredible work experience, learned a ton.

Um, and then after seven years in San Francisco, was trying to move back to New York to be back on the East Coast. assumed I would get a like marketing job at some like consumer tech like Spotify or something, but just started freelancing in the meantime and ended up making like 200 grand my first year freelancing even though I was undercharging and didn't know what I was doing and I was like maybe I'm an outdoor cat now and I will stay outdoors cat stuff. I'm an outdoor cat. Um ended up forming an agency with my co-founder Ashley. We grew to two million a year in revenue.

Wow. Um, and I was just like cooking on that. Like no meetings on Fridays, like didn't work with companies that use SharePoint because I was like, uh, um, but then this kind of like weird I started this like Meetup group by accident and then realized there was no tools to like do what I was trying to do and ended up making starting a company and then that company is River. Um, River I put up uh Yeah. So, what happened was I was a big fan of the All-In podcast. Yeah. Um, which is kind of rare because it's mostly men that listen to it, but Sure.

I went to the first summit. Um, I don't really care that much about women's events, but I noticed that women were nervous about attending the summit because it was like most women. So, I was like, "Oh, put together a brunch reservation for like 12 women." And then I invited Jason Calicanin as the host, like the moderator of the pod, thinking like I'm like obviously you can't come, but don't even bother saying no because I'm not going to tell anyone I've invited you, but if you want to stop by and like take a selfie, we'd love to meet you. Yeah, we joined for the entire brunch.

Were taken and then I was like unfortunately known as brunch girl at the summit, which is like very unserious. I was like, "Oh, great. Love that t-shirt." Yeah. Um but then ended up moving to Miami um after the summit and was like really struggling to meet the types of people in tech I wanted to meet. Um all the tech events were like parties with full of crypto boys who like can't read a P&L. Yep. And a lot of loud music and yeah loud music was like very sexy but like not productive. Right. and episode 100 was coming up from for the pod and I was like my friend Melissa was like I'm going to host a listening party.

I was like that is such a good idea. I'm going to do that too and I'm going to meet like six people. So I DM' Jal again and was like you should live stream episode 100 and tell me what time it is for my party. And he was like, "Oh man, we're not going to live stream it." And that's like the power of Twitter. Like yeah, whenever someone asks me for an intro to Jason, I'm like, "Have you tried DMing him?" the man replies. It's not that hard to get him to pay attention. Um, and uh, yeah. So, he's like, I we're not going to live stream it, but make a sign up form and I'll retweet it.

And I was like, oh [ __ ] Jake's going to retweet it. I better think like really big. Sure. So, I made my sign up form on Air Table for San Francisco for my friend Melissa, Miami for me. And then like I had just spent six weeks in Austin, so I was like, "Okay, Austin." And then I used to live in New York, so I was like, "Maybe someone else." I wrote other right in your city. Check this box if you want to host. Thinking like we'd have two. Yeah. And that would be it. Sign form goes viral. We end up hosting meetups in 24 cities which was insane.

There was no tech. It was an Air Table, a BCC email to each city list people who chose a city and a Google calendar invite like no no tool. And I had used all the event tools. I you know I used Luma like I know like Posh I know all of them. But I was just trying to like keep it really simple. And um so yeah, like a thousand people got together in 24 cities. It was insane. And my husband was like I was staying up really late to like get it done. He's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "I don't know. We're just doing our best.

We're just doing our best. I'm too tired to even ask myself that. Like I'm just gonna like get this done." And then I was like, "That was weird." And I ran all the emails to Apollo and I was like, "Jesus, there's some juicy people in here." Yeah. Okay. But I still like I'm so dumb. I was like, "Oh, now when I go to Zurich, I can like email people and meet for coffee." Like that was my big outcome of it. And I had started a Slack channel so I could talk to all the hosts at once because I was just like got overwhelmed with DMing people like one-on-one emails and stuff.

So yeah, I know. Anyway, the Slack grew. Yes. Aim higher, Eugene. I'm rooting for you. Um the Slack group grew to like two or three thousand people and that was and then you know six months later everyone's like hey it's episode 125 we're doing it again. Right. And I was like god no that's terrible. I like why did I do that? Why did I pull all nighters to like plan meetups that I'm not going to. Right. Right. But enough people asked. I was like okay there's apps for this. Let me let me put my big boy pants on. So I got a Luma Pro account.

Okay. I like hooked into the like API and got it like the data talking to Air Table and I like set up some automations and I was like we'll be golden. Yeah. We ended up hosting it in 50 cities with like 2,000 people. But no time for me was spared. Not one moment of energy was like automated because all these other event platforms they all assume that the host is initiating the event, right? And so I had to duplicate the event 49 times and change the image, change the title, change the time zone. Then I had to like find a host like somewhere, you know, offline like using other tools and then I would add them to the event and they'd be like, "No, no, I just meant like sometime." I was like, "Well, these are worldwide like simultaneous.

I need it like today." Or hosts would like download the attendee email list and like subscribe them to their [ __ ] newsletter and then ghost the event. I had like no dashboard to see like which events had locations and like if the host was like definitely paying attention and like what was happening. Um so we you know we did in 50 cities but it was just like just even harder actually than doing the other way because now there's kind of like now you need assets and like it has to be more organized. Yeah. And it like looked more official so people had higher expectations.

I was like ah [ __ ] Um, but yeah, so JL DM'd me after the we did the 50 cities and he was like, "What the hell?" Like I hire full-time event people and they don't do 50 events in a year, let alone little. Yeah. People don't realize. I mean, like like we we have a very small lean team at Torque and it's it takes all of us to to even do what we do and it's mainly online, let alone in person. I mean, I people just don't understand how much work that is. Yes. Yes. So much work. Um, and then yeah, like try try planning like a dinner for 12 of your friends.

Oh, it's impossible. Let me know. Yeah. So, he he tried to hire me and I was like very honored, but I was like, I'm not going to leave the marketing agency I'm running to like be your event [ __ ] basically like basically. And I So, I was like, "No, thank you." Also, like probably like the only person that would turn him down too if we're just being honest. like like like if if Jace Calcanis is in your DMs asking to hire you and you're like no I'm good. No, it was a Yeah, but I'm just like also I know he's like a lunatic and like probably like works like a dog and I was like oh no.

Oh yeah. So I turned him down and then three weeks later he's like what if I invest 100 grand and you start a software company. So now I work even harder and make even less money building River. But River is all about like letting the community host and basically like letting other people host events in your under your brand with some brand control and like data control um but without you having to do like any logistics. So, for example, Tim Ferrris tweeted um that he wanted to do something wild and crazy for the 10th anniversary of his podcast. Since I'm chronically on Twitter, I just replied to his tweet.

Someone tagged me in and I dropped everything was just like, "Let me type like let me write the best guy like right now." Um anyway, like two days later, I got like an email from his team. So, we spin up the events. you know, you just create one event and then you duplicate it across every city in our database in one click. So you don't have to like, you know, duplicate every individual event. Yep. And then they're fake saved the date events. They're not real. But what happens is the community page is geoloccated. So Tim is just like, "Hey everybody, go to, you know, river." Yeah.

And if you're in Nashville, you see Nashville. If you're in Boston, you see Boston. Like you can also propose a new city, but our database is like of the cities is pretty big. Sure. You can either register to attend and then it's a normal event app. Although like kind of crappier until recently because we just like were so early stage it was like out the door. Yeah. But now now it's like a lot smoother. But um you can register to attend and then it's a normal experience or you apply to host and the event only happens if a host steps up and then once you apply to host you get dropped into like an applicant tracking system kind of like when you apply for a job.

Sure. But it's light is much lighter than that. Um We kind of vibe check you some maybe maybe the community asks questions, you fill them out. Sure. Um once you're approved, you take over limited edit access of that event. So if the community let settings let you have emails, then you can have emails, but some communities don't. Um certain things you can change, some things you can't. We have like show notes that are just like instructions for once the host is approved that they just see right in the event. And it's just the result is instead of waiting for people to propose events, it's just orders of magnitude higher conversion on events.

So Tim announced and then three weeks later he had 154 meetups with like 5,000 people. Jeez. And it's just simultaneous. And then while everyone's at the event, we text you and say, "Hey, snap a pick." And a video and upload it to the event page. We curate all of those for the community. And then Tim gets like tagged and inundated with like tons of user generated content. So, it's just like really fun way to let your let your community get together without you. And then you're just instead of promoting oneoff events, you're just promoting the community page in general. And then people can propose events whenever they want, but we kind of do like campaigns and like activations.

Yep. That's so cool. And there's so much. Let me ask you this. Do you have a hard stop in 15 minutes? No. Okay. All right. Good. Because there's so much I want to unpack. I'm not going to keep you too long, but like there's so much to unpack. So talk let's let's talk about I know we were yapping about it before about people were joining in, but talk about the power of literally just liking and commenting. I mean you've built a product essentially based off liking and Twitter the liking and commenting and engaging. I mean talk about why this is so I want to talk about from the individual side and then I want to talk about from like like community first companies moving forward.

Um but talk about from the individual why it's so important just to put yourself out there and start engaging. Yeah. And I know you have a lot of engineers in your like audience and your community too. Yeah. So like the engineers on my team I'm like they'll say something like that's a banger tweet tweet that and they're like ah nah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like they they're very like riskaverse and like people are afraid of being judged, but it's like listen, no one's listening to you at the beginning. Nobody. No one gives a single [ __ ] about it. And you can also just like I delete tweets all the time if they just like didn't really pop and like get maybe it was actually a good concept, but like I posted at 1:00 a.m.

and like no one's online or you know, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. You can always delete tweets, but I just think it's like thinking out loud, sharing my thoughts, like sharing what I care about, and then eventually like the right people start to notice. And I don't really have a strategy. I'm not like investing any like time or money. Like the people who follow me are like insanely juicy. And yeah, you just it's just like an amazing way to like get connected and let people know what you care about. But the thing is is like every individual post is like worthless. It's the It's the history. It's the sum of the parts.

And it's like, you know, there's been a few times with my engineers and my co-founders where I'm like, "Okay, please please post this." And they're like, "It doesn't matter." I'm like, "Okay, but that's why you have 147 followers and I have 4500." Like you got to it's like one grain of rice like every every few days and then it just it compounds and then pretty soon like you know Tim Ferrris sees my reply and then it's like oh Jason Calakanis follows me all these like other you know people from the all-in podcast follow me like a bunch of people follow and it gives you some credibility.

Yep. And then now they're in your DMs or they're like giving you a phone call you know. Yeah. Yeah. I I I tell people all the time that I think the the world has kind of preached this whole virality thing and that like if you don't go viral, it's not a good post. And what I've realized is that and I've started I I've I've been listening to more marketing podcasts as of late and they they're all starting to say the same thing and that going viral now doesn't really move the needle in terms of buying power. It doesn't. Yeah. And what I say it's more of the smaller post over time that actually make a difference.

Yeah. Yeah, it's all flash and pan. I mean, when I worked at Sauce, so it's like heavy engineering, you know, culture for devs, by devs. Yes. And like my biggest my biggest like advice now to engineers is to like start caring about marketing. I felt like when I worked in kind of sales and marketing roles, the engineers kind of look down on us like yeah, you know, they they just think that like, oh, I can speak English, therefore I can do marketing and or I can talk to people, therefore I can do sales. It's actually way [ __ ] harder than it looks to get people to care about your idea and to give you money for your idea.

Yeah. And like, you know, the thing is is like go to market people know that engineering is hard. We know that. We know that it is hard to write code. We completely recognize it and respect it. But it is not the other way around. Engineers do not understand or respect how hard go to market stuff is. So they end up uh I Um, engineers just don't understand how hard go to marketing is, go to market stuff is until they start building their own product and then they're like, wait, I built all this time. And I see so many engineers post like new thing coming out.

We spent this many hours on it. Like, no one [ __ ] cares how much time you spent on it. They want to know what have you done for me lately? What is this going to solve for me? And I just find it such a shame that there's so many smart engineers who just like didn't give me as a go to market person the time of day. They could have learned from me. I was busy learning from them. Let me tell you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now they're like wondering why no one cares. Or it's like, "Oh, you couldn't be bothered to like tweet or write a comment." Or, you know, my team sometimes they will like just share something on LinkedIn, but they won't like say something about it.

I'm like, "Don't you dare just like repost it without saying something about it." Yeah. And they're just like, "Oh, it's not it's just this one." I'm like, "That's these are the reps, man." Like, it's like saying, you know, one line of code doesn't matter. Yeah. Well, and I think too I I so I was in a um uh so Ronstead bought Torque. Ronstead's like like the world's largest staffing company technically on paper, not tech staffing, but just overall staffing. And I was in I was I was presenting one of their leadership meetings last week and it was really interesting like their COO of Americas was like like there was like an arbitrary number on a slide and he was like what's the importance of this number?

I need a story like like where where is this number coming from? Is this more than usual? And I think like I really like that because that's how that's what I preach to my team. That's what I preach in my content. I think and listen, we don't have to get into the age of AI. But I think I I think what I'm seeing is sales and marketing is everything. And and the way that can be applied to even a developer who's not an entrepreneur who is sitting behind their desk coding when you get into the job search and we can talk about this as a founder and hiring people like you have to know how to tell your story.

And I think that's incredibly incredibly important. I don't know if you had thoughts on that. I do. Yeah. I mean, everyone needs to be a good communicator certainly like, you know, as a as like the CEO and a founder and I'm a non-technical founder. I mean, I'm like pretty hacky on like getting all these things to talk to each other. Um Yeah. Yeah. But um I'm looking for Yeah. I'm looking for engineers who like understand the business goal and like um because tons of engineers don't and like I'll give you a couple of examples. So I was asking one of my I've I've worked you know with my product marketing agency built a ton of websites and stuff and the number of times we've like hired an agency and it has all these fancy animations and all these gradients and the [ __ ] sign up button doesn't work and I'm just like you're fired.

I don't care about all these animations and like this like the button needs to work and you didn't even test it. You didn't make sure that the button works or like I was asking one of my we started our website on Squarespace for River. It's on Web Flow now, but just Squarespace is like what I was comfortable with and I knew I could just get something up really fast. And I was asking one of my engineers help me with like one little custom code snippet and he's just like really young and like doesn't has never like run a business, right? He kind of like condescendingly was like, "Oh, you should just like let me build this for you." And I was like, "If you say that ever again, you're fired." Yeah.

We are not hand chiseling toilets here. Yeah. I'm renovating a bathroom and I'm choosing the toilet that I like. We are not hand chiseling toilets. We are getting these things to talk to each other. And so many engineers have never been involved with anything go to market that they don't even know how marketing work. Talk about go to market. I hear that term a lot. I'm sure. Hey, I feel like that's becoming more of a thing. Can you talk about what go to market is? Yeah. So, bringing your product to market and bringing your market to your product. So, you can build, you know, satellites in space that top picture or whatever, but if no one knows about it and no one cares about it, you don't have a business.

Y So, you know, it's kind of getting people to know about, care about, and spend money on your product. Yeah. Yeah. And there's tons of ways to do that. You know, there's whole different strategies. If you're in B2B or selling to businesses, there's a whole different strategy. If you're targeting individual consumers, you know, if you're trying to build a two-sided marketplace, that's a whole other strategy. Like there's there's so many things that go like into it. But like a lot of engineers don't know what a UTM is, which is just like very basic URL tracking of like where do people come from? Like where do leads come from?

I mean, I was talking about like an affiliate um like kind of like an affiliate marketing idea with River and um I was just showing the engineers like my personal blog that has some affiliate links in it and it had like one of my favorite books which is um by Neil deGrasse Tyson uh and it was I can't remember what it's called. It's like astrophysics for people who are in a hurry actually and one of my engineers who's like a [ __ ] brilliant engineer. Yeah. Like he's like, "Oh my god, how'd you get Neil Degrass Tyson to like agree to let you promote your book?" And I was like, "What?" Yeah.

Oh god. And like so many times, you know, an engineer will be like, "I'll build this thing." I'm like, "Yeah, intercom does that." Like we're not we're not doing that. Like they just don't know. Like there's there's a whole world of like go to market tools and how the marketing tech stack works that they just like they don't even know that they don't know. Yeah. And it's just a huge problem because they end up building things from scratch. Their pip their funnel is like completely disjointed. You know, a funnel is like a relay race of like getting people to find out about you and go through the whole journey of becoming a delighted paying customer, right?

Like if you've never tried to get anyone to care about and give you money for what you're building, you're just not familiar with these things. How how can somebody so if somebody's interviewing for a job with you or with any other founder, how how can they how can they position themselves as fast as they feasibly can during the interview? Because I think a lot of I think the hard part of interviewing is definitely like thinking on your feet. Um it's it's framing the conversation in real time. How can people understand the problem that the founder is trying to solve as fast as possible? Yeah. I think um the jobs to be done framework is pretty interesting.

It's a good way for engineers and marketing like business people to kind of try to get on the same page and jobs to be done is like a well-known framework and um it's like uh as this type of person I want to do XYZ so I can. Sure. And I find that if we're like talking past each other sometimes I just kind of write that sentence so that I can understand. I also just think like being a user of what you're building um a ton of you know what this is hard with what we're building because we're an event platform. Yeah. And a lot of engineer, some of the best engineers are like cheeto like cave coders who just like, you know, they just want to like be in their cave and they don't want to ever talk to anyone.

And like I love that about them. But you know, they just like you got to be out in the field like using your product or like caring about the people. I think it also helps to like like your customers, like like the types of people you're building for. Sure. Yeah. I think with like trying to use the product yourself instead of just saying like, "Hey, it works." You know, do you what do let me ask you this. I I one of the things I've always said is like if you want to get in front of somebody, use their product like lot like like in public like hey like I'm passionate about this idea or Yeah.

Yeah. Like like do you like that? Like like if somebody was out here and they're passionate about helping people and they're passionate about community, they're out here trying to leverage River in a certain way. Well, I'm assuming that will catch your eye in a very good way. Okay. Yeah. By the way, Emry, I do not I do not threaten to fire people very often. Pro probably just that one time, but um I love it. I love it. It was mostly a joke, but like just kind of it's just like re me reacting to the like condescending nature of engineers who like don't always they think that they like they think because I'm not technical, they just like know way more than I'm like well there's sure there's a big ocean out here.

Um yeah. So, I really like when people like use a product, give feedback or give ideas, you know, and I will say like it's hard to give me an idea I haven't thought about because I have been like crying, sleeping, breathing, eating river for like over two years straight. So, like don't expect that you're going to have an idea that I've never thought of or like, oh, have you heard of this tool? Like, yes, of course, I've heard of this tool. I'm like, I do nothing else but but River. But if someone comes at me with like a pretty good idea, even if it's not a new idea, and I'm like, "Wow, this person has clearly only been thinking about this problem for 15 minutes, and they're on the right track." Yeah.

Very impressed. I love that. I love that. And I love when people like use the product and give like actionable feedback. That's fantastic. Although, like I was chitchatting with my neighbor and they were like introducing me to their son who just graduated from college this year with a degree in entrepreneurship and he's like not really a target user of River. and he's like, "I'll take a look and give you feedback." And I was like, "Go [ __ ] yourself." Like, yeah, like what even how do you even study entrepreneurship? Like, right, what? Well, and that that's a whole another conversation. Going to school for entrepreneurship is kind of like a is kind of an oxymoron, but neither here nor there.

Let me ask you this. Let's let's let's talk about, you know, I I I keep harping on community. I know people roll their eyes. I talk about it so much. In my opinion, I think it's really the new way of marketing. I I I I I think there's a huge shift in in marketing right now and what is marketing? What is traditional marketing? What is what is kind of the newer way? Why do you think companies need to be community first moving forward? I I gave a whole talk on this. So studies show that people are really lonely. Yeah. um the time we spend alone has like skyrocketed since co it has not really dropped down and when I first like double clicked into this data I was thinking oh we're just working from home but that's not even true um the percentage of 12th graders going out with friends two times a week has just been on a like steady decline since the '9s interesting okay like kids aren't hanging out and then we actually don't I was like okay maybe we're just all home body we prefer it this way we don't Like if you look at Google search trends for terms like where to make friends, how to meet people, social groups near me, all Do you have your talk up right now?

Are you reading it? I'm reading it. Yeah. I love it. All these this data is just like skyrocketing. Yeah. So there's just like a a clear like need. We're like more connected and more disconnected than ever. Yeah. Um and then there's just with like content has become a commodity. So you know, it used to be okay, you got to do your SEO. Okay, now you got to start a podcast. Now you got to be tweeting every day. The problem is like with all these this generative AI like so right now there's four million blog posts published per day, 95 million Instagram posts and 500 million Twitter posts.

With generative AI this content is going to double by 20 to 30. So like you can't just like post content, you have to engage. I call these people cold creators. People who just like turn out content and then they never chitchat or they're never like they never answer questions. They're never like held accountable. um to like their ideas or anything like that. And so people just really want more connection and you know also people are just going to share their ideas more in a smaller group like vetted setting. Um you know for example like the all-in Slack has like 3,000 people. It's not really that juicy.

But then like the little LA like the city channels like the WhatsApp LA WhatsApp Boston it's just like constant and so so people are just want to be more with like-minded people. They want to feel like safer space to exchange ideas and like give each other feedback. Um so yeah I just think like figuring out community is going to be super important because like you know when you know when the internet came online it's like okay now everyone needs a website. Okay shoot now everyone has a website. How are you going to stand out? Okay. SEO like as all these new tactics come into play, you just have to like the the goal post keeps shifting and the tactics change and you know that tactics exploited and then you need to move on.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I think people and you know I pull a lot of my inspiration. I talk about this all the time from like run clubs. I don't run but I think I think run clubs are fascinating. I think like CrossFit was you know kind of the original OG community, right? You have high rocks now. You have all these and I think I think people I think well I think people I think community is built off shared suffering. Um I think the shared suffering for what we're trying to build is the job search, right? Everybody everybody goes through it. Everybody knows suffering. So that's what that's what kind of I'm building our community around is the job search.

But I think too I think people you know it's just like Barrett you know you know my kids never go out. I it's one of these things where if you know and and this is what I'm so pa passionate about is like starting super small right and I mean you kind of went for it with allin and and shout props to you for that but like I think too I think people see a you a me online and and and these communities of thousands of people I started my career inviting 10 people out to lunch that's it and then you slowly build on that and I feel like you know when age of AI and and just everything everything's a commodity now like staffing companies Torque Ronstat we're a staffing company there's a gazillion us out there you go to to the northeast there's probably more staffing companies than there are churches in the northeast right and so it's like what's going to make you want to use that staffing company over another staffing company it's it's how that how that staffing company's loving on people and I think that goes for every organization every skill set everything um from a business perspective.

Yeah. Yeah. You just then the trick is to like keep it curated enough that it's has that touchstone and you can develop that group lore. And I agree with you like that shared trauma. I mean I always say the best the fastest way to grow your network is go work at like some [ __ ] hole company that's like completely toxic and you'll all bond over shared trauma. I have texting I have personal texting groups that are literally called company trauma bonded. Literally the company and trauma bonded. Uh, and I have I have group text because it's a bad company, everyone leaves. So now your your network just like exploded.

Whereas if if it's a great company, everyone stays. Like you don't know any any company. So it's so funny. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think this community stuff is really important. I think hosting is such like I host a kind of different types of events like pretty regularly and it's just such a great way to build relationships and meet people. And for example, once a month I host this month fancy toast and walk on the rail trail. We just literally um make toast and like a lot of coffee and then I'm coming. Make our own toast and then we live like near a rail trail. So we go for a walk and it's kind of our catchall event.

Like if we meet someone interesting like out and about or at a coffee shop, we just invite them to it and then they come and it's kind of the top of funnel for like a little bit of an interview, you know? And if we like then we start inviting them to more intimate Yeah. Yeah. kind of stuff. But I think, you know, it's really interesting as as me myself, I'm still me. When I attend a normal event, as a normal like attendee, I've still like raised a preede round. I've still like built an event platform. I still like lead a team of eight, you know, I'm still me, but when I host the event, everyone wants to talk to me.

When I attend an event, no one wants to talk to me. And so it's just like such an interesting dichotomy. And hosting is actually not that much more work. Once you once you get a couple reps in, it's really easy. You're just like, "Oh, I know this place is good for groups. This is the time that works for me." You know, you just like it gets much easier every time you do it. And so then I'm like, "Okay, well, it takes me 20 more minutes to host an event than it does to attend an event, but now everyone wants to talk to me." Quite the ROI there.

Yep. Yep. I love it. I love it. All right. So, as we wrap up here, again, I don't want to monopolize too much of your time. Um, I I I want to go back to any other thoughts, encouragement to folks who are on the job search right now. Um, a anything that maybe we didn't cover, anything that kind of pops the top of your brain? Yeah, I mean, I think being so like we hired pretty much everyone in the T3 Discord, which is like run by Theo um Theo Theo. Um, yeah. Yeah. So, I think like being active in a community like in the tech stack that you care about and we were just kind of like poking around.

We're like, okay, well, who's been answering questions like, well, hire them. Um, so that's kind of an interesting, you know, piece of advice. Um, this is like a hot I get like a lot of flack sometimes for this, but I require a Loom video for people who apply. It's just like I love that video. I love that. Yeah. Some people will tell me that's like a big L because then you're just only attracting people who like like talking about themselves or they're comfortable. And I'm like listen, I'm not dumb. I'm smart enough to realize that like I'm not hiring you to be a public speaker, right?

But if you can't like introduce you gota presenting yourself now is starting to be like that's like Yeah. Like if you can't present yourself in one minute or something. Yeah. And say like hey this is what I'm interested in. This is why I think River's cool. you know, it just like weeds out the noise so much more and just shows me that you're interested. And so, and like we have some pretty quiet personalities on the team. It's it it isn't like like I said, I know that this not not everybody's like you. I'm not expecting you to host, you know, Wheel of Fortune or whatever.

Like, but I just want to know that you care enough to like record me a Loom video. And then I actually don't read resumes anymore. I just think they're kind of [ __ ] Like, people just have Chad GBT write them or they hire a resume writer. I'm just like, let's, you know, work on something together. So, I always start with a paid test project. Oh, you do pay? At their market rate. Oh, at their market rate. You tell me how much you want to be paid and I will judge you accordingly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's awesome, though. I love that. Yeah. So, we do a Loom video.

If I think you're cool, I'll meet with you for 30 minutes. And if that works, then we'll go straight to a paid test project and I'll give you some. Yeah. Yeah. I just like to see how people work. Um, let me let me ask you this. I do want to highlight this real quick. I feel people are hiring. I feel like the general notion right now is tech hiring's dead. Well, so here's the thing. I'm never going to post a job posting on LinkedIn because I'm going to get inundated with 100,000 applications and then then people will like apply and 16 hours later they'll be like, um, how how come you haven't responded?

And I want to kill myself because I want to give everyone a good experience, but I'm like I do not have the bandwidth to like run a proper process, which is why you should use torque.dev. Sorry, I had to say that. Go ahead. Yeah. I don't I don't have the time. I do not have the bandwidth to like look at 500 resumes. I do not. I get it. And so I never post that I'm hiring publicly on LinkedIn or Twitter. Never. I'm just like going into these smaller places. I'm going to the T3 Discord and being like, "Hey, we're we're in the T3 tech stack.

Who's looking to work? Let's work together." Yeah. If I need a designer, I'm going to like a design community. I just I can't deal with the I can't deal with the flow. And then it gives people a bad experience and then they get their hopes up and like that's not what they get frustrated with your brand, which is a whole another conversation to have. I think interviewing and the way you market yourself from a job search perspective and job postings and the candid experience is is is a huge part of marketing. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just the reality. And if hey, if you're a really big company and you have like an HR team, you can process that kind of flow, but you know, I can't.

And then some people will like kind of accuse me of light racism or whatever because it's like, oh, it's just in-group stuff. And I'm like, well, no, I have employees in South Paulo, Brazil, Kenya, Poland, Costa Rica. Like, yeah, this this is not that's not like what's happening. It's not all inroup stuff. It's just like this is the skill I need. I want someone who's great at Figma. Let me go to where all the Figma people are hanging out and find that makes sense. That makes sense. Yep. Yep. Again, like I said, being community, it's pretty simple. Pretty simple. All right. So, anything else? Anything else?

No, no. I mean, I'm I'm rooting for everyone. I think, you know, it's a brave new world out there with all these AI tools. Um, sometimes I've judged like hackathons or like demo days and um, especially young engineers, they'll be like, "Hey, like I rebuilt YouTube from scratch." And I'm like, "Does it work? Can I play a video?" And they're like, "Well, no." And so I would say like think of yourself as like remodeling a bathroom. You don't have to like hand design like the sink and the toilet and the shower, but we do want to like put things together and Yeah. I want to be able to go to the bathroom.

Um, and I want these things to like work. And so just, you know, I saw some commenting like build verse buy you usually buy. Um I I think like especially as an MVP um just getting things to work or like I would love to see a Figma prototype where you know I just click through to like understand your idea. Yeah. I just think this like oh let me go write you know 5,000 lines of code is the first thing. I just think we're like we're less and less interested in that. We're really we got to get down to breast tacks and just focus on like what is the experience for the users like does it work and I'm just less I'm less into this like purist stuff.

What do you mean up here pure stuff? Like um the integrity of like having built something from scratch or like you know sometimes my designer like she kind of like sticks her nose up at Canva and I'm like well listen like curve text works in Canva and it doesn't in Figma. I don't care which tool we're using. I just need this [ __ ] done, you know? Shots fired. Shots fired. Yeah. Just like focus on like really understanding exactly what the job to be done is and the exact problem and then just like do whatever you can to do that as quickly and just test test test, you know?

Yes. I just think this like, oh, I built this from scratch. Like, you know, here's the analogy. My husband loves road cycling. I love road cycling with him. I'm never going to be in the kind of shape just because of my body weight. I'm never going to be able to keep up with him. So, I for a little while I hemmed and hot, but I ended up getting an ebike because the reality is I want to keep up with him and I want to carry snacks. Girl, that'd be me, too. That me, too. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just here for vibes. I'm I'm not here for actual workout.

Be ebike engineers. Yes. Yeah. Well, and I think that's I think that's so All right. So, I this just popped my head and I want to confirm this with you. So, I love the way you broke down how you interview and for people for the job search. So, what I'm hearing is, hey, maybe have a Loom video going over something you built and and talk through the steps on why you did it. Maybe have a Loom video to introduce yourself and and tell about yourself. Yeah. Just on deck like just right. Yeah. I literally created a Loom video yesterday for torque. Like, hey, and I'm going to put it out like just like here's how to get involved.

Like I I just want to have something for people that have questions. Is there anything else like that's kind of non normal for somebody to kind of have in their portfolio like that that that we're missing? So, a Loom video about themselves, maybe a Loom video going over a product they developed. Is there anything else you'd like to see maybe just off the rip? I mean, it depends like if you're an engineer, you know, I think like contributing to stuff or like making little tiny like personal projects is super cool. Like I don't need it to be necessarily in this tech stack, but if I see that you're interested in something, you're building something, like one of my friends kind of like hijacked Air Table to make this um protein like whey like like pe protein whey comparison tool for like costs.

There you go. And I'm like super nerdy and I'm trying to up my protein intakes. I'm like looking through it and it's like I love it. just building stuff that you care about and showing me that you are a creator and you're a creative person is so much more interesting to me than like whatever certifications like [ __ ] certifications you signed up for. I don't care. I just want to see what you're building. What's interesting to you, even if it's not my taste, even it's like this like totally like weird rando game. Like I don't care. I just want people who are like hungry and creating stuff and have like opinions about what to make in the world.

Yeah. I love it. I love it. Um, all right. I I wrap up kind of rapid fire. I'm kind of coming these uh off top of my head. Are you a coffee or tea person? Oh, coffee. Hot or cold? Hot. Always hot. Even in the summer, even though I live in New England, just it's like just hot liquid. It's just I think I think my hot take is cold coffee actually embodies the actual taste of coffee. You're just drinking hot liquid. I believe you. I believe you. But I'm like I'm from New England and these lunatics people drink iced coffee in February and I'm like I get it.

I dude I dude it was like it's been like 15 degrees in Nashville and I'm like pulling up to the coffee shop asking for cold brew. Um next question. I do I always ask people to give a shout out to somebody else, a founder, somebody in the community who's doing good work. Do you have anybody off the rip that you want to uh I love Brooke Bowman. She's so freaking cool. Well, she's the creator of Vibe Camp, which is like kind of like a a baby Burning Man for like tech nerds or something. I don't know. She does like super interesting things. I mean, not that Steph Smith needs a shout out, but I just think she's super cool.

She's like she is the Internet Pipes community. She just does like really nerdy like data research work and then publishes it. Um, okay. She's super cool. I really like Jordan Mix from Late Checkout. He's like Greg Eisenberg's like right-hand man and he's just been like a great connector for me and I know for other people and he's in Nashville. You should know I don't Yeah, I would. Yeah, I some Bolt people in Nashville. They're doing worlds hackathon right now which is pretty fun. We're doing that on a river. Yeah, those are my off the top of my head shout out. That's awesome. Um all right, last question.

The show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and kind of college. But now as adults, we don't really have necessarily somebody to turn to. If you could go back and tell young Ry one piece of career advice, what would it be? Oh man, I was actually just thinking about this because my 20th high school reunion is coming up. Please do not do any math. Thank you. Uh, and we were doing like a paid event because we rented a venue and we're using River for it and I like barely got imagine that. I barely got the paid events working.

Barely. Um, but if someone had like told me back like in high school that like you're going to build like an event platform and like you're going to have an app and everyone's going to like use it to buy tickets for your high screen. I would have said what is an app? Um because it was a long time ago, but I really like I wasn't a great student. I was like really struggled and like B minus B student. Yeah. Yeah. I like I was very dabbling. I was dabbling in lots of things. Like I wasn't fully committed. I was kind of like checking a lot of stuff out.

Yeah. And high school is just so rigid that it just like I really thought like I was going to be a loser and that I just wasn't like gonna be successful because I just wasn't doing particularly well in school and I wasn't doing particularly well in sports and I like I just didn't like you know and part of me wishes like a guidance counselor or a teacher would have been like that's okay like this isn't real life but then maybe I wouldn't have tried as hard anyway. Yeah. I would say like a like following your curiosity, you you have no [ __ ] idea how great it can be.

You you do not have the imagination to predict the upside of like doing the things that you care about with people you care about. You have you you do not you lack the capacity to imagine how great it can be. Yeah. You're very good at imagining how bad it could be and it's like never that bad, right? Well, I would just say like following your curiosity, like working hard and like creating something only you can create. And that takes years to find. Like I just feel like I was circling it for like such a long time. But if you just yes to the stuff that excites you and no to the stuff that just doesn't feel right, eventually you will be in your own bowling lane and no one else competing with you because you'll be doing your own [ __ ] Yep.

Yeah. My my brother was the same way. He and I very different. Um my brother definitely bounced around a lot. Uh, and some people would would have called him like non-committal or not motivated. I know that was kind of told to him, but he's a fantastic product owner. Um, and he's very passionate about it and he's he's kind of wedged himself in the ticketing space. And so, um, so yeah, he's he's fantastic. So, yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. And then the last thing is if you have if you're someone who has new ideas, just used to being treated like you're just going to be exhausted all the time because everyone's going to think you're a lunatic.

And like that's just the cost of being like right on the edge like right in front of kind of like mainstream ideas and thinking. And like it's happened to my husband so many times. We're co-founders. He you know he's a data scientist in the AI space. Like there's just so many people with PhDs telling him like no no. And it's like just know that like if you are thinking of things early and new, it will be exhausting and you'll just you'll get to the point where you'll stop telling people cuz they'll just like think you're an idiot and you're like, "Okay, well I think you're an idiot, but you know, you can't say that." Right.

Right. But just know that if you're doing like innovative stuff like you're gonna, you know, it's going to be table for one, table for two. It's going to be kind of small. Yep. Yep. Agreed. Agreed. Well, awesome. Well, Ray, where where can people find you? Twitter. What's your Twitter handle? Twitter, Rachel Lambert, but it's spelled funny. It's R A C H E L. Um, Rachel Lambert. Yeah, same on LinkedIn, I think. Awesome. Cool. Fantastic. Well, y'all, thank you for tuning in. A lot of comments today. Rachel, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Um, but tomorrow going live 9:30 a.m. Central with my dear friend and MC co-host from Epic WebDev, Brie Hall.

She's a senior Devro at HubSpot. We're going to talk about how uh how she pivoted after three years of not finding her first job in tech and just how to stay positive. It's going to be great conversation tomorrow. You have a good one. Connect with Rachel. She's obviously fantastic. And we'll see you all tomorrow morning.