Ep 12: What have you learned about working with engineers?

Stacee and Ira talk about their initial misconceptions about software development and the often overlooked immense value of an ongoing partnership with engineers beyond the launch phase. Lessons include learning the ropes of product development timelines and understanding the investment costs are critical for any entrepreneur aiming for success.

Episode Transcript

Ira (00:04):
Hello and welcome.
I am Ira Gordon and, along withStacee Santi, the host of The
Accidental Entrepreneurs podcast.
We each previously foundedsuccessful companies.
Along the way, we becamebusiness owners and eventually
sold those businesses despite ushaving no real background in
business or ever even planningto become entrepreneurs.
In other words, we did this alldespite originally having no

(00:25):
idea what we were doing orgetting ourselves into.
In each episode of this podcast, we will share stories and tips
from our journey and we'llanswer a randomly chosen
question about our experience.
Let's jump right into the show.
Stacee, how are you doing?

Stacee (00:44):
I'm doing good.
How are you today?

Ira (00:46):
I am pretty well.
I am excited to ask you aboutsomething I saw from you quite
recently, which is that you arestarting a new consulting
business to try to help startups.
You have your own startup totry to help startups.
I thought I should find out alittle bit more about how that

(01:09):
came about and what challengesyou're facing right now.

Stacee (01:13):
That's funny.
"A startup to help startupsthat should be my slogan.
Well, people would justrandomly be reaching out to me
and say hey, do you have anyadvice for me?
I'm getting started.
I've got a bunch of these andI'm like maybe I should do
something with that.
It seems like maybe there's aneed.

(01:35):
One of the things that I'vereally noticed is that many
startups in the veterinarysector don't know what it's like
to be a veterinarian.
They don't know what it's liketo work in a veterinary practice
.
They have an idea that on theoutside seems really great and
amazing.

(01:55):
Quite honestly, they usuallyare.
Then they get stuck, or theymaybe don't even know what they
don't know about how it won'twork in real life practice.
Then they have a hard timegetting in touch with
veterinarians in a way that canbe meaningful.
That seems to be my sweet spot,where I have a ton of veterinary

(02:19):
friends from my company servingveterinarians, and from just
being a dork and a nerd knowingveterinarians, I thought "you
know what?
I could probably marry thesetwo and bring veterinarians into
a virtual boardroom for acompany to come and run their
idea by them.
Or maybe they want to talkabout a specific feature and

(02:41):
then get real-life workflowfeedback from their target
customer.
I started Firefly VeterinaryConsulting.
I don't know it sounds kind ofcheesy but honestly, if I could
help a startup get into theproduct market fit zone faster,
I think that would be reallyexciting for me.

Ira (03:04):
That's really neat.
Let's jump into our questionfor the day, which is what have
you learned about working withengineers?

Stacee (03:14):
Oh yeah, the magical wizards.
I call these the Dumbledores ofyour company.
I think they're so amazing.
In fact, I probably have asecret crush on all engineers
and would like to.
If I had another life, I thinkI would be two things.

Ira (03:31):
I could get a lot of fan mails.

Stacee (03:34):
I would either be a software engineer or I would be
a crime scene investigator.
Those are my two secretpassions.

Ira (03:44):
It's funny you say that.
People ask me about things likemy regrets.
One of the things I always wishI learned to do was code my own
stuff, because I love workingwith engineers.
But my inability to actuallyjust do what I want and instead
have to explain to somebody whatI want sometimes drives me nuts
.

Stacee (04:03):
What was your experience like working with your first
engineer?

Ira (04:09):
I worked with a lot of engineers.
I was really lucky that ourfirst engineer is not your
stereotypical engineer.
He's also just sort of like abrilliant business mind and a
great outgoing person.

(04:29):
Not to say engineers are allquiet nerds like me, but a lot
of them are.
But I was lucky that our firstengineer was really everything
plus.
But we've worked with a lot ofother engineers since then and I
think a lot of them really theydon't ask for it, but they

(04:53):
really like to be included inthe thinking that goes behind
the product.
And I think that my initialinstinct was to think oh, I need
to spell out all of the thingsthat I want my product to do and
I can't miss anything, becausethen the engineer will know

(05:15):
exactly what I want and be ableto build exactly what I want.
And it never works out that way, because once something starts
to get built, you realizethere's a bunch of things that
you didn't think of or what haveyou.
But actually including them inthat design process and giving
them insights into the why youwant things to work certain ways

(05:37):
or what your goals are of theproduct that you're building
oftentimes really gets theircreativity going and helps them
to make better decisions whenthey're trying to build what you
want, and it's more fun for meto actually work with somebody
that thinks about thingsdifferently and asks really good
questions when you're havingthose conversations, and I hope

(05:58):
and think that it's more fun forthem to be engaged in those
processes too.
How about you?

Stacee (06:04):
Yeah, that's really true .
I couldn't agree more.
So the real experience I gotwas when I decided I was going
to build my own IP, I gotconnected with this firm called
OK Grow.
It was OK and then Grow, andthe founder of that was an
engineer named Paul Dowman, whois brilliant, like brilliant,

(06:28):
and he had a kind of a boutiquesoftware developing firm in
Canada.
So I flew up there and I metwith him and his team and I
showed him what I had and thenenvisioned, brainstormed about
what I wanted, and then theystarted building it.
And the first thing I learnedabout engineers is and it's not

(06:52):
a dig, it's just the way it goesis they almost never can
predict the time or the moneyspent to get you this end
product.
And that ended up happening tome.
It took twice as long and twiceas much money to get what I was
purchasing.

(07:12):
Basically and I was so naivethis is probably the biggest
area I had a learning curve onis I literally thought I'm
buying this thing, I'll getsomething delivered to me and
then we'll be done with ourrelationship.
It didn't really go that way andI learned over time.

(07:35):
That's normal, because it'skind of like you're building
something from scratch, andthere's going to be things that
you don't even know that aregoing to be hurdles, and so how
could you possibly give an exacttimeline when you don't even
know?
And so that's one key point ofadvice I would give anybody

(07:58):
working with engineers or juststarting, is they do their very
best to give you a guesstimate,but it is certainly a
guesstimate, and if you're thebuyer, you need to know that
that's how it works around here.

Ira (08:13):
That reminds me of the mistake I made over and over
again and I tell myself I won'tmake again which is having this
mental image of asking anengineer to build you something,
of it being kind of like a setof legos, like, ok, you've got
to put all these pieces together, you're going to build it, and
then you're going to have thiscool looking Millennium Falcon
or whatever it is and it's goingto sit there and it's going to

(08:34):
be beautiful for eternity.
But in reality it's going to bebeautiful.
Yeah, it's never done rightlike there's always something,
or?
that that you need to add on toit.
Or you know something changesand you always kind of need to
keep up and update it.
And, yeah, somewhat related tothat I think I've learned from

(08:56):
working with you know outsourcedgroups of engineers that you
know oftentimes when you do that, like they may build things in
the language is that they'remost comfortable in and those
might not be the one that yourin-house team really wants to
work on.
Or the rest of of your productis built on.
And then you have this problemof like deciding what.

(09:17):
Do you want to and need tocontinue to work with this group
that you hired to build yourMillennium Falcon but you didn't
necessarily expect that theywere gonna be working on it for
the rest of your business?
Or do you go through sort ofthe process of trying to
integrate what they built intothe rest of your product and
sometimes that can result in alittle bit of a Frankenstein

(09:38):
situation.

Stacee (09:39):
Oh, that this is exactly why Paul was so brilliant.
In now, I, only now and I hopehe's listening only now do I
recognize how amazing he was,because he built my platform for
growth and I didn't ask him todo that.
He, I didn't know enough to saynow I'm gonna need you to build
this in a way that could be.

(10:00):
No, he did it because he's abadass and and the thing too is
I, I the job was to build theplatform and integrate it with
the practice management software.
That was the job, which I'mlike okay, that sounds easy.
It's not easy, it's very hard,and I totally didn't understand.

(10:21):
But I remember one day like Iwas so stressed out because we
were way over budget.
We were way over time is andI'm like you know what, if
someone brings me a I said thisto him If someone brings me a
dog and it's limping, my job isto figure out why and fix it and
make it so he can run again.

(10:41):
So I just need you to make thisproduct run.
And he's like this is not thesame.
He's like you're gonna needongoing care for your little dog
here and you aren't even set upfor long-term maintenance and
I'm like why I just had thisvision that when it was done, it

(11:04):
was done and like a websiteright.
He's like "no, no, no, no,you're gonna need your own
engineers.
There's problems to be solvedevery single day.
Going on and going forward.
I'm like, holy shit, like whathave I done to myself?
And Paul wasn't the firm to dothat.
He just built the stuff andthen set, sent you on your way.

(11:27):
And he's like I normally workwith other engineer teams.
I don't work with people likeso I ended up having to find my
own engineer team.

Ira (11:39):
Yeah, yeah, we had a little bit of a different thing to
help when we first built ourtest prep software.
I'm the person that wepartnered with to build it Eric
who's this genius I alluded tobefore?
Like he finished the projectand it was kind of like, okay,
we hired him to do to build theLego set, right, and he was done
and he's.
So we're gonna need To realizewe were gonna need to work on it

(12:02):
.
He's all.
I've got a friend I let meintroduce you to my friend, Yule
and then you was a great guy,smart guy, gone on to do a lot
of really wonderful things, buthe just he wasn't Eric right and
and and when we would meetthings done like it wasn't the
same as when we asked Eric to dosomething for us and we just
realized, like this is, this isnever gonna work.

(12:23):
We're gonna be miserable ifevery time we want to, you know,
change something or need to fixsomething, it just isn't
getting done the way that it wasbefore.
And so that was when werealized that we actually need
Eric to be our partner at thisbusiness.
Like we can't have just hiredhim to build a Lego set.
We actually need him to be oneof us.

Stacee (12:45):
Yeah, if you're just starting, you have to find a
good engineer team for thereasons you said the coding
language they're using.
You wanna build on somethingversatile.
You wanna build for scale.
It's many of the decisions youmake right now are going to be
super important to you down theroad and I just wanna say I love

(13:05):
what you said about using theengineer's thinking power with
you, and especially thedesigners too, the UX, UI people
like gosh.
You cannot give them a recipelike, "Here are the directions.
This is more like I'm thinkingI would like to have you know a

(13:28):
five course meal and I wouldlike it to have some you know
steak in there for the maincourse and you figure out what
the best combination is for thedinner.
It's more like that.

Ira (13:41):
I feel like it's not the default method of working with
engineers is not to include themin that, like they oftentimes,
like they're in their ownseparate place in the org, like
they don't necessarily, you know, share space and interactions
and have meetings with the restof the team, cause they're doing
kind of their thing and it'smaybe even a little bit

(14:02):
uncomfortable to sort of dragthem into those things sometimes
.
But I think they really dobenefit from it.
I think they often like it andI think it results in, you know,
just getting a much better endproduct and it's good for team
building too.

Stacee (14:19):
Yeah, definitely when I met Mihailo, because I did get
quite a few warnings to not workwith offshore engineers because
of the time difference was one,but also because of that
silo-ing where they weren'tfeeling part of the team and
they weren't able to contributein that meaningful way.

(14:39):
And when I met Mihailo Ithought, well, okay, we'll meet
once a week or something.
He goes, "Oh no, we will meetevery day.
He goes until it gets boring.
Let's start with meeting everysingle day.
So we have our morning meetingat eight for me it was eight AM,
four PM, for him and we wouldjust get to know each other.
And it became a true friendshipreally, and it became a like

(15:03):
hey, I have an idea.
And now he jokes a lot about mesaying that I've one quick say
I've got an idea.
We laugh because I need him tobounce that idea around with me,
and then some a lot of times wedecide that idea is dumb.
But sometimes he's like I likeyour idea.

(15:23):
I think I can make it betterthough.
So super nice.

Ira (15:28):
I tell my partner, Mauricio , and my best friend, I tell the
four scariest words in theEnglish language are for me to
hear you say "I've got an idea.

Stacee (15:41):
So funny.
Well, now it's time in ourprogram where we will share a
fun or helpful trick,q uoteperson, of influence.
Ira, what do you have for ustoday?

Ira (15:54):
So a book that we read at my last business that really
helped us was a book called BlueOcean Strategy and the sort of
central theme or concept of thebook is that the red ocean is
sort of the competitive ocean,where there's lots of other
products and you're going to becompeting for a slice of that

(16:15):
pie.
But if you can imagine a blueocean sort of an area beyond
where there is currently notcompetition, there may not be a
market yet, but you can create aproduct and create a market for
that product, that then youhave a business that is poised
for much greater growth and muchgreater potential than sort of

(16:36):
building something to competewith the existing market.
And the sort of thoughtexercises that go along with
with that line of strategy orthinking is really helpful and
you really enjoyed kind of thatperspective on thinking about
how you might want to build orthink about your startup.

Stacee (16:56):
Kind of pushing yourself to get past that typical basic
idea into something bigger.

Ira (17:03):
Yeah, I mean, it requires a level of sort of creativity and
potentially sort of leap offaith to start to think more
outside of that box of what abusiness can be.
But I often find myselfencouraging entrepreneurs to
sort of just try to be morecreative.
You know, I gave a talk recentlyabout artificial intelligence

(17:25):
and imaging and I was like youknow, yes, like there is cool
potential for artificialintelligence to be able to read
a diagnostic image you know aswell as a veterinarian or
radiologist can, but actuallylike if you can think outside
that box about the really reallycool things that artificial
intelligence could do to imagesand for images that aren't just
kind of doing things that peoplecan do now without requiring a

(17:47):
person to do them, but actually,like do much more and help the
people by doing cool things forthem.
That is where I think there isa lot more interesting
opportunity.

Stacee (17:57):
Love it.

Ira (17:59):
What about you?
What is your helpful tricktool, person, quote.

Stacee (18:06):
So today I'm gonna share this is probably not kosher if
you're a big company, but youcan totally get away with it if
you're a little company.
And this is using a credit cardthat you can get points on and
you can convert those pointsinto presents.

(18:27):
So I used a card by Chase and Iused it for everything in my
business, so my day to dayexpenses.
I put it all on that creditcard and then I you know, of
course pay it off every monthand I ended up racking up a lot
of points and I use those pointsto convert them to $100 Amazon

(18:50):
gift cards and then you havekind of a under the wire way to
reward your employees where theydon't have to pay taxes on it.
It's sort of a little loopholebecause if you just give a
person cash, then you know firstyou can't just remove cash from
your bank account without thatbeing suspicious and you can't

(19:11):
put it on their paycheck withoutthem having to pay taxes on it.
So I found this to be a reallygreat way to give Christmas
presents to my team and to justgive people like hey, you're
awesome, here's an Amazon giftcard, and I know that's probably
illegal in some ways, so I takeno.

Ira (19:31):
I just like to remind our listeners that we are not tax
professionals and we do not giveout tax advice on the show.
But that's a great story,Stacee.

Stacee (19:43):
All right.
Well, let's spin the wheel andsee what our question will be
next time.
When did you know?

Ira (19:57):
Know" his in quotation marks.

Stacee (19:59):
Yeah, when did you know you were on the right path or
that your company was going tobe a hit?

Ira (20:08):
I can't wait to talk about it.

Stacee (20:10):
Okay, we'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening to theshow today.
If you want to learn more aboutmy story or I restore it be
sure to check out episodes twoand three.
And if you are an accidentalentrepreneur and would like to
be a guest cohost on the showand spin the wheel, just message
"be a cohost, no spaces, to1-833-463-9727 and tell us your

(20:37):
story.
See you next time.