176: Productive Meetings: Leading Time Between Insight And Action With Darren Chait

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FTC 176 | Making Meetings Productive

 

Meetings tend to be the bane of every working individual in this world because, for the most part, they are unproductive and thus, causing a lot of waste in both time and money. Co-founder and COO of Hugo, Darren Chait, is all about saving time and making fast-moving teams to make meeting insights shareable and actionable. Darren grew up with a family with a small business and is all about building your own. This led to his discovery of a time-management tool that came out of his frustration from experiencing the exhausting days in meetings. He shares the story on how it led him to create his product and the critical errors that led him to improve it with his co-founder. He goes further into details on how to answer the right questions and stop wasting time.

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Productive Meetings: Leading Time Between Insight And Action With Darren Chait

If you have a business that is in need of some love, some revenues, and profits, I want you to grab my latest free give-away. It’s called Profit Stacking Secrets. It started out years ago as a new client assessment but it became more and more detailed as the years rolled forward. Hundreds of clients later, I’ve refined it to be what you need right now to grow quickly with little investment using strategy instead of cash. You get the first three lessons FREE – Does that sound good to you? Go to ProfitStackingSecrets.com and get your copy. Now, onto my guest and his incredible story.

My guest hails from down under, the wild and wooly land of the Outback. While that may sound exotic, he actually lives in a big city, Sydney. He started his career as a lawyer but frustration quickly set in when he realized he was spending most of his working day in meetings. He decided to do something about it. In a moment of entrepreneurial frustration, he and a close friend decided to build a SaaS-based application company in none other than San Francisco to fix this problem and create Hugo, now used by thousands of teams all over the world. Welcome, Darren Chait, to the show.

Thanks, Mitch. It’s great to be on the show.

It’s great to have you, Darren. You are the typical traditional startup story that I love to hear most. I love the way your company started. Why don’t you take us back to the beginning and tell us about your dreams and ambition in high school and how you managed to be doing what you’re doing now?

It’s a pretty interesting story. I grew up in a family with a small business and building your own thing. Being the master of your own destiny was important. My dad had a small business, my grandparents, everyone around me placed emphasis on some business. I always had that entrepreneurial bug. I even started a mobile DJ business street during high school. We DJed to thousands of weddings and events for a bit of extra cash and was excited at the concept of building something of value for nothing. Funnily enough, I found myself studying law in college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and thought it is important to go to college. I jumped on the bandwagon and was in law school right out of high school. What happened in that environment is very much a train, the tracks are laid. In your penultimate year of school, along come the big firms who want to wine and dine you in their fancy suits and you sign here and there. Before you know it, you’re interning and then have a graduate job lined up. I found myself working for one of those firms as a lawyer for probably the largest law firm in Australia. A few years in, the frustration of the day-to-day was getting to me. I wasn’t happy. I was intellectually challenged but not emotionally.

It’s all these little things that are normally in that industry that would drive me crazy. Number one had to be meetings. What’s interesting about meetings for lawyers, it’s a large part of their day but because lawyers build their time in six-minute increments, in many cases, you can measure the cost of ineffective meetings. Not only would I walk out of a meeting where I just wrote notes for three hours and didn’t need to be there, but you’d also literally go and see the bill where that meeting costs you $7,500. It blew my mind how much money you were spending because you’ve got a partner, an associate and a senior associate and all sitting in a room billing $1,000 an hour. The real cost of meetings was obvious. Realizing that this is something that I was most passionate about, that entrepreneurial blood that was inside me saying, “I need to go and fix this.” I teamed up with a close friend who had done some other work with before and we decided to set up Hugo and work on this problem of meetings.

Clearly, you are not alone. The whole world hates meetings and it seems as if it never ends. I remember we had a policy when I was building my software company, which by the way served lawyers. It turns out that we had a Monday morning staff meeting. That was the only meeting that I truly enjoyed because I was getting to hear what everybody did throughout the past weekend, set some direction for the following week. Beyond that, we didn’t need meetings other than maybe an occasional discussion about the product or something.

It’s difficult to engage in solving something that you are not passionate to solve.It’s difficult to engage in solving something that you are not passionate to solve. Click To Tweet

For me, meetings were miserable that I avoid them. I was running the company, so I had the gift of being able to decide whether there would be or not. Many people don’t get to decide. In a law firm, the irony is that even when you’re in a meeting, you’re not doing anything for your clients and yet the client is being billed for that. That’s terrible. You came up with the solution. Let’s get into the mechanics. We here, you and I now, are in the sweet spot of our audiences’ lives. What that means is that most of the audience of this show are either starting, growing, running or contemplating starting, growing or running a business. Take us through the thought process. You and your buddy get together and go, “Let’s start a software company.” Tell us about what those discussions were like. What decisions did you make in that first 30 days?

I’ll share what it was like and the decisions we made. I’d also love to share what it was like and the decisions we shouldn’t have made because being first-time founders, we learned a fortune but there are some pretty critical errors we made. Those errors are being made by many other people that had been written about in many books, on many podcasts. I feel like we could have known but we had access to all that information and we still made those errors. Being more specific about what I mean, we got together and we were across each other’s pain points and frustrations. We complained to each other as good buddies and we shared those pains. We said we’ve got to solve it. The interesting thing is we were very much committed to one way of solving it. We thought we knew what the answer was. We started coming up with the idea of what it would look like as a product and we thought it would be a mobile app initially. How would it solve it? Who would it be used by? We still had a bit of a business plan informally between us. That was completely wrong. We were way off the mark. In fact, it took us a couple of years to realize how wrong we were.

We built a mobile app that would help you with meeting preparation. We thought that the problem with meetings was that no one was prepared. This app would look at ten days and prepare a brief on everyone that was coming to the meeting so everyone was ready. That turned out wasn’t the solution to the problem we were solving. After a year and a half or so, as we started to realize that, we were back to the drawing board still solving the same problem but in a completely different way. The lesson there amongst many is to test the solution as much as the problem. There’s a great framework by a gentleman named Clay Christensen called the Job-To-Be-Done framework that looks at the product as what is the job that’s doing? What is your customer hiring your product to do for it? That, for us, was a real paradigm shift in how we think about finding the right solution to the problem that we were committed to solving.

One of the things that we did is when we started building TimeSlips, we were not lawyers and we knew nothing about legal time and billing. We did two things. First of all, there was no internet but there were the beginnings of the internet. I logged into CompuServe and found the lawyers’ special interest group on CompuServe. I posted in there and asked, “Are there any lawyers who are using computers themselves in their law practice?” That was step one. All these people responded, “I have one on my desk. I use it every day.” That was a revelation to us because we were told that computers were for the back office, not for the front of the room where the lawyers are at.

We went a little bit deeper at that point and we said, “What would you be looking for in keeping track of your time?” From there, we made some changes to what our project was in our software. We started requesting volunteers to beta test the software. We had sent out beta software on floppy disk via the US Mail. It can take 3 to 5 days for a new version to get to somebody or demo discs. In the first version, everything fit on a single floppy disc, which was amazing. 

That’s 1.44 megabytes. That’s incredible.

It was less than that. It was the real floppy disk, the five-inch. My genius partner programmer set it as a goal that he wanted to ship the entire product on one disc, which he did for that first version but we never could keep it beyond that low again. Here’s what ended up happening. Iteration after iteration, in fact, the lawyers sig turned into a TimeSlips beta testing forum. We were thrilled with all the suggestions we were getting. The thing is that we assumed that we were complete idiots, that they were all geniuses and we did everything they said. That was how we built our first product. That’s what you were alluding to, right?

FTC 176 | Making Meetings Productive
Making Meetings Productive: Founders win not because of the 40 hours a week. It is all the other hundreds of hours while they’re asleep, in a shower, or even dreaming that they are processing and coming up with ideas to solve problems.

 

Yes. That’s the level of research where you understand what the customer problems are and how it’s to be solved. The beta testing side of it is interesting because asking someone what the problem is only telling part of the picture. They say if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said faster horses. Asking people to describe how to fix their problem isn’t right, but showing them how you propose doing that. That’s even easier now where you don’t have to mail out floppy disks. I can build a prototype and send them a link to go and visit. I could build a wireframe of an app and show them what they think so you can get a real sense of what it would do. It’s never been easier to get that insight and feedback at a low cost in the early days of your business. That’s absolutely lesson number one.

Looking back, when you have no idea what’s coming and you’re working with the most modern technology possible, you think it’s a miracle as it is. That’s what we have, we thought it was a miracle that we can even get that far. Continue your story. Now, you’re a month in and you’re chugging away but you’re solving the wrong problem. How long did it take in? How did you figure out you were solving the wrong problem?

This is the favorite bit of the story for me. We had this app out there, a couple of thousand people were using it. We thought we were onto something. There were a few telling questions. One of my favorite questions that we ask our customers now is, “How disappointed would you be if the product no longer existed tomorrow? What would you do in that case? Would you look for a replacement? Would you go back to the way you were before?” That says a lot. Those numbers weren’t good enough from our perspective but we were doubling down and trying hard to solve it.

While we were doing that, my cofounder and I spent a lot of that day out of the office. We were talking to as many customers as we can every day as well as partners, new investors and everyone else that you need to talk to when you’re running a business. A divide slowly formed between the rest of the team and us because we were out in the field hearing all of this firsthand. We’d come back and try and relay what we had heard and what the research said and what customers wanted to the rest of the team who were engineers, designers, marketers, etc. They just couldn’t get it, as much as we tried to summarize it, they couldn’t empathize, they couldn’t appreciate or understand what customers are saying directly. It was all through us.

We built a little hack for ourselves which we’re using Slack, the chat app, and it will connect to our calendar. Every time I’d have a meeting in my calendar, it would automatically prompt me and say, “I saw you met Mitch. What happened?” I could reply to that little Slack bot and say, “Great conversation with Mitch. He said this, I said that. He said this, here are the actions, here are the insights.” It would share that with everyone in the team immediately. At the end of the day, we’d come back and everyone had access to everything we’d heard and we’d said all day as if the whole company was in every customer meeting.

Overnight, our business was transformed, the team was aligned. They were building faster and better, in response to what customers really wanted. We had lost the lag and lead time between the insight and action. We were working an incredible unit, far better than we ever had before. In talking to our customers, they were more excited about what we were doing with our meetings than the product that we were building. That became Hugo. We said, “How about we give you access to that, a wider, centralized, share your meeting notes in the same way?” That transformed these customer companies as well. We decided to pivot from the mobile app that we started with this meeting notes platform that we built for ourselves to work better as a team.

If I speak to 100 entrepreneurs, 98 of them will say that the inspiration for the product that they’ve created comes from their own frustration in another way with another product in another space. This is your story as well.

You're wasting the opportunity that you've got with having great people in the room if you don’t listen to their solutions. Click To Tweet

That’s important because if there’s a problem that I don’t understand and I’m not passionate about, it’s difficult to stay engaged and committed and work around the clock for many years to solve it. I’m solving a problem that I don’t quite understand myself in that case. There’s a real advantage. It’s not to say it can’t be done but you’re at a real advantage when you’re making your life better, provided you’re representative of the market.

What I’d like to do is go back to the process itself because the process is where the magic is. Were either one of you software developers? Was your partner a software developer?

Neither of us. He’s a product manager. He’s definitely got more of that than I do, but neither of us could write a line of code.

That poses a small problem. As a product manager, did your partner create a spec in advance? Did he take the product manager approach to product development?

Yes, we created a spec and we hired an engineer to do it. The first time around, it was a lot slower. Second time around, with this new take on Hugo, it was much faster because firstly we’d learned our lessons around testing. We quickly built a prototype version of Hugo. It’s a great time with the whole note code movement, as they call it. The ability to build basic software without using code as tools that help you build websites, apps and things, even if you’re not a software engineer. Using those technologies meant within days to weeks, we could go back to the market and say, “How about this? Does this do it? What do you think about that? Try this out.” We were able to get real insight at far cheaper than we would have been able to previously.

As the second and third months started to come upon you, were you still working at that time? Had you decided to burn the boats, leave the job and move to San Francisco? 

I decided to go all in. That’s another interesting lesson. For many of your readers, I imagine this is something that they’re grappling with. It’s tough because you’ve got the cost of living, the need for income, practical constraints and I’m aware of that. I fortunately was at a stage of life where I could take that to make that jump, take that leap. I was in my twenties and didn’t have too much of the overhead at the time. That becomes more difficult as the requirements change and I appreciate that. Having said that, you are at a disadvantage and it definitely took us longer than I would’ve liked in retrospect to make that jump. The disadvantage isn’t time because I’ve seen many founders who can work an eight-hour a day in the office and then work another eight hours on their business. You can say, “It’s still getting 40 hours a week working on their business.” The reason in my view that founders win at this game is because it’s not the 40 hours that makes them win. It’s all the other hundreds of hours while they’re asleep, while they’re in a shower, while they’re dreaming that they’re processing, coming up with ideas, thinking through what they know, being completely focused on the problem they’re solving. That’s difficult to do while you’re still splitting your time and focus between that and perhaps another job.

FTC 176 | Making Meetings Productive
Making Meetings Productive: Revenue is good because it’s a quantitative measure of fit and market opportunity.

 

You realize that it’s not a choice for some people. They simply have to keep up supporting their families. You might almost say that’s a luxury and it’s a luxury that I also had. In my case, I was a salesman working for the semiconductor industry. This is how it went. I saved up enough money to live for two years before I made the decision to start a company. Even when I started the company with my partner, we started with the wrong idea. We found out after we quit our jobs that now we’re building a product that absolutely had no need at all. We then had to pivot, we had to figure out what the heck we do next. That’s when we finally came up with TimeSlips. Where your pivot was is you realize that a certain way of building your app to get backgrounds on people was not the right application. Did I get that right?

You did. There are lots of ways to solve that problem. It’s not to say that if you don’t have that luxury, you can’t be a successful entrepreneur. It makes it easier perhaps and depends on the stage of life, overheads and other things. I’ve seen many founders come through the accelerator program. Look at venture capital earlier on in the pace to allow them to make that job. There are many investments that have parts where you can raise money early on off the back of an idea or a slide deck and a bit of research that you’ve done outside your day job. Use that to get a few hundred thousand dollars or more in the bank to get through that initial difficult stage. There’s an awareness of that challenge now and it’s accepted that people need that to get started in many cases.

The other thing that back in my era, venture capital was funding napkins. You could walk into a VC’s office, plunk down the napkin with the drawing and an idea and get $5 million. Nowadays, things have changed. You better have revenue before you show up and approach a VC. If you don’t, odds are you won’t even get into the room. Have you found that to be true for yourself as well? 

Yes and no. It’s cyclical. A few years ago, things were a little easier and you can see many more pre-revenue companies raising a fortune of money. It depends on the space you’re in. Revenue is good because it’s a quantitative measure of fit and market opportunity. It’s easy but there are many other ways to do that and some businesses can show your success and traction without revenue. I don’t think it’s a hard and fast rule but I definitely do agree that the barometer or the risk profiles, in general, have shifted. It is harder to raise capital than it was. There have been some pretty big failures and well-known examples of companies that have raised far too much money and failed. Investors are absolutely savvy about that.

Let’s continue your journey here. You now say 3 to 6 months into the journey. You shifted your direction in terms of product development. Had you at this point already moved to San Francisco?

Yes, I had. I moved to San Francisco pretty much at the beginning. Which by the way makes things daunting because I was thinking of it then when you were telling me about needing to pivot a few months into leaving your job. You’ve gone all in, everything looked okay from the outset and then you’ve realized, “We’re not solving the right problem here.” Nothing is scarier than that. You’ve committed everything. You’re all in and you realize that you could have backed the wrong horse. I definitely had that feeling having moved to San Francisco and realizing that what I thought was great, it may amount to nothing. The thing that kept me going there is reminding myself that I’d committed to the process, not to the outcome. I was passionate about the problem we’re solving and how we should solve it. We were also passionate about building a great business and developing our skills there and having an amazing time doing it. That’s what kept me grounded, remembering that, “It’s okay if things aren’t looking like they’re heading in the right way, we’ll figure it out.”

What I’d like to do is if we could pivot to a different format. I’d like for you to take the stage here and talk to our audience about maybe the top three lessons you learned when building a SaaS company from zero to X millions of dollars. Can you give us a feel for what readers would need to look out for? What could they do to expedite that process? What are the pitfalls to avoid while doing it?

If you build a good product and have a compellingly good service, people will come. Click To Tweet

I’ll think about that one as I introduce my approach to it. We haven’t been ultimately successful as far as it’s still a battle and hopefully things will work out for us but we’ve done some things right and we’ve done plenty more things wrong. The lens I look at that question through is next time around, what would I do differently? What knowledge and experience do I have personally that I think would make me double as likely to succeed the next time we do this as well? That’s what I could share. The first thing is around the way we use our team. I came from a corporate environment that is hierarchical, tenure-based and structured. What the partner says is what happens. If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you’re not willing to go through, do your time and go through the motions, then you don’t need to be there. That’s how it works regardless of who’s right or wrong or who has the best idea. That was the way I was brought up professionally. That hierarchy and experience tenure determines who’s right and who informs the decision making. That was a contributor to one of our biggest mistakes.

We spent a lot of money on hiring great people. We’re a software company. All we have are our people. We found these great people who had awesome ideas and different experiences to us, diverse perspectives. When we had problems, some of which were existential, instead of turning to the team and saying, “We have this problem. What does everyone think we should do?” I felt that it was our obligation as founders to solve the problem and go to the team with the solution every time. I never wanted to be the ones to go to the team and say, “We’ve got this problem with fear. I don’t know how we’re going to grow revenue.” I’m concerned about the performance of the app, whatever it is. I always felt that we had to go and say, “We’ve got this challenge, but don’t worry where you’ll feel as late as and here’s the solution and off we go.” That is absolutely incorrect. Firstly, you’re wasting the opportunity that you’ve got with having all these great people in the room, all these brains and different perspectives. If you’re the one that’s solving all the problems yourself, you’re missing out on that.

Secondly, team members in an early-stage company want to be able to involve in that, that’s why they joined. They want to have influence. They want the challenge. They’re looking to be a part of that decision making. By constantly not including them in that, all you’re going to do is disengage and ostracize your team. It leads to worse business outcomes because you’re making the wrong decision or no decision in many cases and worse team outcomes because you’re leaving them out of these critical, important decisions. We learned quite quickly but not quickly enough perhaps to leverage the team, to rely on the team for the challenges day-to-day, to take problems to the team and collectively agree on solutions to spot. That’s not what the conventional leadership book may say.

It’s interesting you bring that up because I have to believe that it is the same mistakes that are made many times in many companies. It’s that feeling like, “I’m the boss. I know it best so therefore I should deliver the ultimate solution.” Yet, what people have truly found is leveraging the team usually brings a far better solution over time, which is what you discovered as well.

My views on teams and how to work together are different. From day one, even if that first consultant you hire to help you build something or that first intern that you bring on board, I’m not even talking about mature teams. I see it as critical to use them as much as you can because better business outcomes, better people outcomes and even emotion that you don’t feel like a lawyer. It’s not just my cofounder and I are grappling with these problems. You have a group, you have other people who are fighting the battles with you.

I made so many of these same mistakes and it was only later, as I got more and more experienced, that I learned how to do that in a proper way. I’ve also told the story of having to learn to delegate. I didn’t know how to delegate because after all, I could do everything I needed the company to do, including sales support. That’s a very important lesson.

That’s a slippery slope which I’ve also been guilty of. I appreciate that. The next one comes down to the importance of marketing. It sounds obvious to business people. It wasn’t for me and it’s a timely insight. We subscribe to the thinking that if you build a good product, if you have a compelling good or service, people will come. One, that’s simply not true. Even if that is true or was true, it’s no longer the case nowadays. As you know, the entry barriers to building a software company have never been lower. The likes of Amazon web services, some of the no-code tools that I mentioned that are out there and other services available to young entrepreneurs or any entrepreneur for that matter, have never been greater. The differentiation and the tools you have to compete are much more limited. It’s not the case anymore that the person who builds the best, most sophisticated product or that has the best features is the one that’s going to win. In the early days, we were very focused on product and even more recent days, we’re very focused on the product.

10X Culture: The 4-hour meeting week and 25 other secrets from innovative, fast-moving teams

We wanted to have the best solution to this problem. We want to look the best, we want to do everything that everyone needed it to do. That doesn’t make you win. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have customers lining up for this product solving a problem they may have. Positioning, marketing, getting the awareness of the product and getting the product into people’s hands has never been a harder challenge. That’s something we overlooked until much later in the pace. When we had a product, that we thought did a great job.

We had some customers that got huge value out of it and couldn’t operate without it but we couldn’t work out why there weren’t customers coming in the door every day. Making small tweaks to the way we positioned the product and marketing channels we use, the way we describe it had a tremendous impact on the business. If I did this again next time, I would flip that. I would focus on that first in many of the cases because building products is often a known known. I know what’s technically possible. I can get the product out to the market, I know how it’s going to work. Knowing how I’m going to explain the parts to the market, knowing how where I’m going to put the products that people are aware of it and those things aren’t necessarily known. I would definitely emphasize that over the building stage.

These are amazing, great lessons and I’m sure our audience understands how valuable they are and hopefully a value to them directly. We are at a point in the interview where we need to answer some questions, you and I. These questions, Darren, are designed to help those reading the blog get to know you better. Darren, this question is to help us figure out a little bit more about you. Who, in all of space and time, would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch or an intense conversation with?

Based on where I’m at now, what’s keeping me up at night and what’s inspired me, that would be Marc Benioff, the CEO and Founder of Salesforce. Marc Benioff is an interesting person. He’s built an incredible company, being Salesforce, a multibillion-dollar company that’s defined cloud software and Software as a Service. I think there are two things that make him particularly interesting to me. One is not only did he build a successful company like many, but he defined a category. CRM, Customer Relationship Management software is now a huge industry. That was something that Marc dreamt up and pioneered in and paved the way for many other successful companies. There’s definitely a parallel to us with the meeting space as far as the category creation. The way he’s done that, I’ve got a million practical questions and bits of advice I would love for the challenge I’m fighting now.

The second reason, more special which is Marc, especially in the San Francisco Bay area and the US has become the face of philanthropy. It’s not often seen where you’ve seen people who have been successful financially but have placed such a focus on philanthropy. There are hospitals named after him. He built a foundation as part of Salesforce early on. He created the 1% movement where 1% of profits, revenue and time of the company and employees are given to nonprofit causes. That’s incredible. It’s easy to have your head down and be worrying about your business and growth and all the things that your shareholders pressure on you about. From early on, it’s that important to me to be philanthropic and to be supporting the community is admirable. I find that inspiring too.

I had a lucky moment to meet him when I was with Tony Robbins. He’s a dynamic character. I’m sure you’ve read his history. He’s been involved with Tony from the beginning and I’m sure Tony coaches him but I believe that Tony may even be a shareholder in the company at this point. The two of them are close for a good reason. Here we are, Darren, the grand finale and it’s the change the world question I’m about to ask you next. What is it that you are doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to literally change the world?

There’s so much about the world that is ripe for change and can make a tremendous impact on humanity. One area that’s underrated still that we are directly contributing to and I would like to increasingly contribute to relates to unemployment. If you look at the positive side of the likes of Uber and those businesses, they’ve created this gig economy where people, in the case of Uber who own a car and a cell phone. In the case of many other businesses like Mechanical Turk and Upwork and Fiverr and these other people-based businesses, all you need is a cell phone to have income. We rely on those workforces extensively at Hugo when we have work that needs to be done of varying skillsets from data entry right through to research and straight up to its design where we have recording videos, helping us review data.

There's so much about the world that is ripe for change and can make a tremendous impact on humanity. Click To Tweet

We’d go first to these marketplaces because these companies are looking to help people who don’t have stable employment or a stable income or have access to income. In return, on the other side of the marketplace, businesses that need access to this talent in a flexible way, who don’t have the infrastructure and resources to keep hiring, we can have access to these people in a scalable, elastic way. It’s a win-win situation. It’s great for the consumer but it’s equally great for people who don’t have easy access to employment. It’s an interesting area that we’re going to see dramatically changing the workforce and the economy over the next decade. They call it the gig economy. It’s something to keep an eye on.

It’s already changed the world. The gig economy by itself is responsible for more people working than any other factor. I believe as you do. I believe that it’s essential for us to support the gig economy best that we can because these folks are the entrepreneurs of the future. Even if it’s temporary for now, it potentially helps these people stay afloat while they’re on their way to their next challenge. Thanks for mentioning that. Here we are at the end of the show, Darren, and one of the things that we love to offer our readers is something juicy that’s free. What do you have for us?

Two things, one special for your readers and one special for other people that gets talked too often. Firstly, Hugo, which we’ve spoken about through the show, is connected meeting notes software. We offer a generous free plan for small businesses, for many entrepreneurs. We’re trying to get their meeting notes organized, centralized, shareable and actionable for their colleagues and their teammates. You can go to Hugo.team and sign up. If you’re a company of fewer than 40 people, you can use Hugo for free. What I want to offer to your readers is a free copy of the book that we’ve put out called 10X Culture. The story behind 10X Culture is we started collecting all the ideas and mental models and principles that were in use by us as a company that has led to our success. Also, being used by our customers, by our partners, by other companies who surrounded ourselves with who are phenomenal teams. Companies like Zoom, Atlassian, Dropbox, Airbnb, these teams they’re doing amazing things to allow them to win. We collated all those ideas in this book called 10X Culture. It’s on Amazon if you’d like to buy a copy but I’d love to offer readers a free copy. If you go to Hugo.team/10x, you’ll see the ability there to get your free copy for reading the blog. We would love your thoughts and feedback too once you read it.

Readers, do not neglect the free software offer. I have a feeling that Darren is going to be changing the pricing soon. Before he wakes up and realizes that his stuff is way too valuable to be giving away for free, go over there and lock in your 40-seat program for free forever. Go do that now. Don’t wait because, in my opinion, it’s going to go away soon. Dig into this amazing product because from what I have seen, it truly fits an important need and helps a lot of people do the one thing we all hate, which is navigate meetings. Darren, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for your generosity. I’m excited about reading your book as well. I can’t wait until we get a chance to talk again soon.

Likewise, thank you so much for having me.

 

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