#98 The Right Motivations

Hello, friends.

Happy Sunday, everyone.

What I’m Learning/Doing

There is a lot going on over here. I’m not sure where to even start.

In the last two weeks, Calm has acquired a company and started a new one.

The one we bought lives in the SMB/WordPress universe. I look forward to sharing more details soon. It just closed last Friday afternoon so we’re in the process now of transitioning everything over.

Once we were serious about the deal, we brought in a person who we thought would be a great CEO to run the day-to-day. He has a strong background as a Wordpress developer and knows how to lead people. It was important to us for him to have some equity in the business. When the person in charge has “skin in the game”, chances for success go up.

The business we started is a Shopify apps business with an emphasis on solving supply/chain challenges. It’s a joint venture with a few entrepreneurs with specific domain expertise and relationships in e-commerce. More to come on it as well.

The biggest thing I’m learning and getting better at is helping other people get what they want. In each of these deals, the key was finding out what our partners wanted to achieve from the business and aligning our goals and expectations with that.

As usual, Zig is right:

Joy comes when you inspire, encourage, and guide someone else on a path that benefits him or her.


Changelog

Honestly (honestly.co):

  • Allison is back! Woohoo!
  • Lost a few deals I thought we’d win but have a good pipeline despite everything going on in the world.
  • Gearing up to launch Fifth Letter 2.0

LOFT (poweredbyloft.com):

  • Getting good traction on our three-month quick start approach vs. leading with an annual plan
  • Revamping our partner program

CrewPay (paywithcrew.com):

  • Developing automated tax calculations for contractors
  • Working on a transition to SaaS pricing
  • Almost $675k paid to contractors via CrewPay through the first week of June

Pttrns (pttrns.com):

  • In conversations with a competitor about acquiring a stake and merging the two sites.
  • Finalizing deal to assign a “CEO” to run the day-to-day

Augusto (augusto.digital):

  • On track for considerable growth again this year.
  • Finding a lot of success leveraging partner channels

Until next time.

-David

P.S. Loving the surf style throwback look of… https://feelingswell.org/.

P.P.S. Bingeworthy podcast… https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/

P.P.P.S. Song lyrics as old print ads. This is amazing…https://www.etsy.com/market/todd_alcott

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